09/24/15 – Julian Borger – The Scott Horton Show

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Next up today is Julian Borger, writer of important journalism at The Guardian.
This one is called West Ignored Russian Offer in 2012 to Have Syria's Assad Step Aside.
And that part of the headline is in quotes, too.
Welcome to the show, Julian.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me on.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
I've been reading you for years and years.
I'm glad I finally have an opportunity to talk with you.
What a story here.
Say it ain't so, please.
Well, it's not me saying it is so.
It's Martti Ahtisaari, who is a former Finnish president and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for former efforts towards brokering peace in conflicts around the world.
So what he says does carry a certain amount of weight.
What he is saying is that back in February 2012, the Russian ambassador to the UN put to him a proposal that involved Assad stepping aside as part of a peace deal, as he described it, in an elegant manner.
And his claim, Ahtisaari's claim, is that the other members of the Security Council, the Western so-called P3, didn't seem to be interested because they thought, like many people thought at the time, that Assad's days were numbered and he was about to fall So that, in a nutshell, is what Ahtisaari is claiming.
All right, now, at least one source in your story, I think, tries to diminish it and say, nah, come on, if that had happened, I would have followed up and made sure that it was serious and I would have made sure that, you know, it wasn't just some kind of double bluff by Putin, some kind of thing like that.
So what makes you so confident that the offer was as serious as he portrays it?
Well, we don't know that.
Ahtisaari doesn't know that.
What he's saying is that the offer wasn't even explored, that they didn't even make the effort because of this certainty that there was, at the time, that Assad was on the way down.
So he's saying, you know, maybe it would have not led to anything, but it should have because it was an opportunity.
It was an opening.
Now, when we look back on it three years later, it's a missed opportunity.
And Ahtisaari, he obviously thinks it was somewhat serious.
He takes it serious on some level.
This wasn't just, you know, talk over coffee in the break room or something here.
This was a real offer on some level anyway.
No, I clearly, I take him, Ahtisaari, at his word that this conversation happened.
Churkin, when we asked him about it, said it was a private conversation and he didn't want to comment on it.
I have reason to believe, every reason to believe that the conversation did take place.
And there is no reason to believe that Churkin was freelancing.
It seems more than likely that he had authority from the top in Moscow to float this idea.
But there is a question of how, to what extent it was serious.
I mean, that part of the deal was you, you in the West and in the Gulf, cut off all support and supply of arms to the opposition.
And then the opposition will have a dialogue with the regime.
And as part of that peace deal that comes out of that, at some point in the future Assad will step down.
And it's quite easy to see how, looking from a Western perspective, that may have looked like a trap at the time.
You cut off support to the opposition.
And then later down the line, Assad might step down.
And certainly, you know, we're talking to people since writing the article, that seems to have been the view from the West that this was a trap.
And when they tried to check it with Moscow, everything seemed a bit hazy and flaky.
Atasari's argument is, yeah, maybe it was flaky, maybe it was hazy.
But as diplomats, we are supposed to explore every avenue when it comes to try and bring peace in a very bloody war.
And any opportunity, no matter how slim it seems then and now, should have been explored.
Yeah, I'm not buying the whole probably a trap or could have been a trap thing.
Anyway, it doesn't sound like it to me.
It sounds like a pretty good faith offer.
Again, like you said, not freelancing.
I mean, this is a pretty serious thing for a Russian ambassador to bring up.
It must have been at Putin's behest.
And he's not one to clown around and bluff too much.
It doesn't seem like whatever you think of him.
And you know, it's funny, because when we talk about this now, I'm looking at this article.
I've been talking about this article for a week straight here on the show.
It's driving me crazy how we're not just talking about 2012 here.
We're talking February 2012.
We're talking the very beginning of 2012, which is so long ago and so early on into this horrible conflict that's raged ever since then, with just countless people killed and maimed and displaced and just the horror that has taken place since then.
But on the other hand, this is a full six months after Obama said Assad must step aside.
And he didn't.
And it didn't work.
And I'm sure if we check the archives, you can find conversations of me speaking with Patrick Coburn and Pepe Escobar and others at the time pointing out that Assad's not going anywhere.
Assad has every ethnic and religious minority plus a good chunk, if not the majority of the Sunnis on his side.
And so it would take a real war by the West to get rid of him.
It's not going to be like Libya.
It's not a simple east to west march with NATO air support like in Libya.
It's a whole different thing, much more complicated, not that easy.
And yet, but Obama and them were so confident, even six months after saying he must leave and he hadn't left yet, that he's still going to fall any day now.
I mean, this is just I don't I sound like a Republican accusing Obama of this level of incompetence.
Yeah, there's another element to this, and that is by February 2012, Assad's forces had already been responsible for many massacres and for crimes against humanity.
Since then, they've been responsible for a whole lot more the kind of blanket barrel bombing of cities.
And by comparison, the death toll back then was over 7000.
But it didn't, you know, look, you know, he was clearly his regime was clearly responsible for terrible war crimes.
And so the kind of the dilemma to some extent is, do you make peace with someone like this?
Or do you try?
Do you refuse to have anything to do with them?
And because of what they're responsible for.
And this issue came up before with Slobodan Milosevic.
And in the Balkans, the solution was make peace with them, and then go after him for for war crimes, crimes against humanity.
Sometimes you have to hold your nose and do and do business.
All right.
Now hold it right there, please.
We'll be right back, everybody.
After this break with more with Julian Borger from The Guardian on his important piece West ignored Russian offered 2012 to have Syria's Assad step aside.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Julian Borger, a reporter for The Guardian here.
Writes a lot of important stuff.
This one is called West ignored Russian offer in 2012 to have Syria's Assad step aside.
The source being the former president of Finland, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adesari.
The Russians had floated the idea.
Borger reports here back at the beginning of 2012 that it could that Assad stepping aside could be negotiated.
Quite possibly this war could have been averted.
And then, as you say in the piece here, Julian, at the time that this happened, the death toll was estimated to be around 7500 dead.
And that death toll is now believed to be almost 220,000, you say.
So yeah, a lot of time has passed.
A lot of blood has been spilt since this, you know, possible.
There's no real counterfactual here, but sounds like a real good opportunity that they could have taken up.
And right around that same time, they kept trying to put together these governments in exile in Qatar and that kind of thing.
Hillary Clinton was doing that.
And yet they kept all declaring their allegiance to the Al Nusra Front right away because it was their only stab at credibility was to try to associate themselves with the guys who were actually doing the fighting on the ground.
So that just kept falling apart because there was kind of nobody to negotiate with other than, I guess, the foreign patrons and sponsors of these Islamist groups.
Is that basically the deal?
Yeah, I mean, the the long history of Western and US and allied attempts to build this long hope for so-called moderate opposition has been a bit of a fiasco.
There have been all sorts of problems, you know, just trying to define who is moderate, who is Islam, Islamist and the nervousness about giving weapons for that reason, because they weren't sure who they were dealing with and they were nervous about the ending up in the hands of of terrorist groups.
They were nervous about giving guns.
So the people they were backing didn't really have much to show for Western support.
They didn't have any guns.
The people with the guns were getting that support from the Gulf, from the people in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and so on.
They are the ones with the guns.
They were the ones winning the battle and then they were the ones drawing the recruits.
So, you know, in a way, by being half-hearted about it because of the uncertainties about the project, it meant that the people they were backing were weakened against the competition, the Al-Nusra and eventually ISIL Islamic State.
So the whole venture was flawed from the very beginning and has been a disaster in the last few weeks.
A general, American general head of the Central Command, General Austin, saying that actually there were only four or five U.S.-backed fighters in the fight inside Syria, which is incredible.
Well, the DoD trained ones, right?
He was omitting the CIA and their separate project.
You know, by all accounts, whether CIA, whether DoD, whether Western backed at all, it doesn't add up to a whole lot in terms of force on the ground.
Yeah, the CIA guys, they defected to Al-Nusra years ago.
Anyway.
You know, part of the kind of the fact that I think that the CIA could see, you know, in their future headlines about CIA trained rebels ending up fighting with terrorist groups meant that the whole effort was very, very tepid, very cautious, and ultimately partly for that reason, completely unsuccessful.
Well, yeah, or at least compared to how bad it could have been, and it could have just been much worse and not necessarily successful at all, or succeeding in overthrowing the Ba'ath government and its army could have succeeded in getting, you know, creating that many million more refugees, that many more people killed for refusing to convert, and this kind of thing, crucified at the hands of the Bin Laden Knights.
So it depends on who's definition of worse, you know?
Yes, I mean, absolutely, you know, I think a strong kind of stronger Western involvement, you know, maybe, you know, if they were able to stop barrel bombing, which is, you know, one of the possibly the leading cause of death amongst civilians is being barrel bombed by the regime.
But if you step in, try and stop that, you know, what are all the unintended consequences?
One thing is for sure that the killing will go on, and it'll be seen much more as your fault if you if you get involved.
So you know, these are the dilemmas facing the Obama administration, ultimately, they chosen to deal with it, you know, at one stepping back, and not dealing with not getting involved like Libya, obviously not like Iraq.
But either way, you know, there's a heavy price to pay.
Yeah.
All right now.
So it seems possibly that the same kind of thing is happening again here with a couple of Russian trial balloons lately, this one in Reuters, Russia says serious Assad ready to share power.
I think there was one that was, I don't know the exact Russian translation, but something along the lines of, you know, with him stepping down at the end of negotiations, and the and I guess the American position is no, he has to step down before any negotiations start.
But do you do you think that these Russian trial balloons are serious?
And do you think the Americans are likely to soften their position at all and actually maybe try to begin to negotiate an end to this thing short of regime change?
I mean, the Russians are there now.
So they got to give up on regime change now, because what are they going to do?
The Russians got army on the ground, right?
Right.
It threatens to be a quagmire for the Russians.
You know, you start going in, putting in an airfield, you've got to defend that airfield.
And then what if your people are attacked, you're gonna you're gonna double down send people in.
So, you know, the Russians are looking, you know, some significant risks here in Syria.
It seems to me that the West US allies are now we would definitely gratefully take that deal.
And UK Foreign Secretary sort of Hammond put forward a proposal that the Assad could stay on the head of a transitional government.
That was completely rejected in Damascus.
And the question now, of course, is, and maybe the question always has been, you know, that the Assad regime in Damascus has two protectors, it has Russia, but it also has Iran.
What is now Iran is kind of more at the table since the nuclear deal.
It's definitely a factor that definitely has a big say.
Its military presence is much stronger than the Russians.
So it is a player.
And so far, we've seen not much give from the Iranians, certainly not from the Revolutionary Guard, in terms of, you know, being able to sort of putting Assad's future on the table.
So there are a lot of moving parts.
Maybe they'll get somewhere in this coming General Assembly high-level meeting next week.
Putin will be in town in New York.
Rouhani will be in town.
There will be a meeting on Syria.
There'll be bilaterals between Obama and Putin.
Rouhani may meet Obama.
We don't know yet.
But there is at least, you know, room for some of the big power brokers behind the scenes in Syria to get together next week in New York.
And you've got to hope that they take that opportunity.
Yeah, definitely.
And now, so as far as the situation on the ground right now, you mentioned the presence of the Iranians, and obviously Hezbollah is helping out a little bit.
But this current Russian intervention, it's, I guess, sort of being taken at face value that the Russians are intervening as much as they are needed to intervene.
In other words, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing if Assad wasn't really, you know, with his back up against the wall now.
And I guess Patrick Coburn was reporting about the last major highway was under threat now, this kind of thing.
I wonder if you think it's just as simple as that Russia's doing what they're doing now, because otherwise Assad could be toast.
I think so.
I think, you know, they are protecting their investment, their investment in certain regime is to have a foothold in the Mediterranean at Tartus, Latakia, and Tartus.
And if Assad is looking shaky again, as he was back in 2012, they have to think about protecting that investment.
If he falls, they would at least have facts on the ground.
They would have their enclave and they'd be ready to defend it in the, you know, the horse trading and probably the combat that would follow.
So that is definitely one perspective, which you can see the Russian intervention.
All right.
So that is Julian Borger reporting for The Guardian.
Thanks very much for your time.
I sure appreciate it.
Pleasure.
Pleasure.
Thank you.
West ignored Russian offer in 2012 to have Syria's Assad step aside.
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