All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine, regular contributor to antiwar.com, and executive director of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
Welcome back, Phil.
How's it going?
I'm fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing all right, except I don't like this article of yours, man.
These are things that I wish weren't right.
And you're saying they are.
NATO versus Syria.
Give us the latest of the lowdown here.
Well, it's another secret war cranking up, I'm afraid.
Obviously, the CIA has been involved with assisting the dissidents or rebels or whatever you want to call them in Syria.
And the Turks have been actively involved.
Of course, the Turks are NATO members.
And there seem to be indications that NATO is helping arm the rebels and maybe providing some training.
What sort of indications are those?
Well, the weapons apparently that were seized from the arsenals in Libya from Gaddafi have been flown into Syria, not into Syria, but into Turkey, and handed out.
And also some of the activists from the Libyan revolt have made their way to Turkey to provide training.
So this seems to be what's going on.
And there have been witnesses to both of these events in the European media.
You don't see much of it in the U.S.
But clearly, there's been some support of the rebels.
And when President Assad, for example, complains that it's an orchestrated plot against him by some foreign countries, he's closer to the truth than otherwise.
All right.
Now, you reported, what, two weeks ago that after the ridiculous, bogus, pretended assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador, that Obama signed two new presidential findings authorizing stepped up covert action against Iran and Syria as well.
And I guess from what you're understanding, that finding is what covers what's going on here now?
Yeah, that would be the assumption that I don't know what the specific details in the finding were on Syria, except that it authorized stepping up operations in support of the Syrian dissidents.
So one would assume that this is all part of that.
And but, you know, the other kind of scary thing is, you know, the role of NATO in all of this.
I mean, NATO is a defensive alliance, or at least that's how it was originally construed.
And it's increasingly becoming a tool for intervention in various places where Europe has no interest because it's not threatened.
So it's it's it's rather curious how this is all turning to.
Well, now, so I mean, I guess when Hillary Clinton goes and meets with the exiles, basically that means it's on.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, basically, yeah, she meets with the exiles.
The exiles, of course, have what constitutes a an alternative government in Turkey.
And also they claim to have a free Syrian army in Turkey, which the claims have been seriously disputed about how how big or how realistic that claim is.
But anyway, yeah, she's meeting with them and she's also predicted that there will be a civil war in Syria.
I don't know if that that constitutes an endorsement of a civil war in Syria, but it's another one of these cases where why doesn't this woman keep her mouth shut?
What exactly is the U.S. motive in in promoting regime change in Syria, which can turn out very badly?
So now, I mean, is there a civil war going on there at all?
I don't know.
I mean, on one hand, there's very little media inside Syria.
I guess, you know, the city of Homs is in a state of uprising more or less or something.
Does anybody really know?
Is the whole thing just a big, you know, NATO CIA plot here or what?
Well, I think when I talk to people that actually know something about Syria, as opposed to the State Department, they seem to indicate that, like you just said, Homs is a serious center of of insurrection, if you want to call it that.
It always has been for for a number of sociological and religious reasons, been been that way.
And it apparently is also the center of what's going on right now.
And according to other people who seem to have have been there recently and observe what's going on, the major city centers that are Aleppo and Damascus are pretty much pro-government and things are pretty quiet in both places.
And then there are a lot of other areas, you know, in the countryside that kind of lean one way or lean another way.
But you never know how much of this is is is motivated by fear.
If if you get the sense that the insurgents are getting an upper hand, people will will, you know, come out as if they're supporting them.
But do they really?
So what I think I want to try the other way, too.
I mean, just be afraid of Assad.
Sure, absolutely.
I mean, it goes both ways.
So the whole point is, you know, it's really hard to say what the popular will in this is.
If there is a really well-defined popular will, we don't know it.
And and what disturbs me, of course, is that why are we getting involved with it when we don't understand the situation and we don't know what the end game is here?
We don't know if Assad goes, what the result will be.
The result could be the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the country or the result could be the country breaking up into a civil war.
These are not desirable outcomes.
Is it even a possibility at all that the form of the current state would stay just with different leadership at all?
Yeah, it could.
Sure, it could.
If if if, for example, power the parliament and change the dictator to the presidency, that kind of thing.
Sure, it's possible if if the if a group manages to coalesce quickly enough and take control of the situation, then sure, that could be the outcome, too.
I mean, and but the betting from the people that I talk to is that the only group in the country that really has a nationwide popular constituency is the Muslim Brotherhood.
Well, yeah, and I guess, you know, again, I I haven't maybe I need to do better diligence in finding reporters who've been inside Syria lately.
But when I talk with Pepe Escobar and Eric Margulies, they both seem to think that, you know, there's at least plenty of reason to believe that a great proportion of the Sunni majority are very unhappy with the Baathist dictatorship.
But that that leaves except for the middle class Sunnis and, you know, the more business class people, according to Escobar in Aleppo and in Damascus, and then, of course, all of the different minority sects that basically come together to form the coalition that supports the Baathists that protects each of the different, you know, I don't know, Druze and Christians and whatever.
Yeah, that's that's kind of what I'm hearing, too, that that essentially there is a lot of disaffection in the country of the Sunnis are disaffected because basically the government is hollow white, which is viewed by many as a heretical group.
And but but on the other side, you know, the government is basically secular.
It's not religious.
And basically it has protected minorities, has protected the Christians in particular, who now are including among their number many Iraqis who had to flee to flee Iraq when the situation went south there.
So you have the Christians fleeing from one country to another.
And now this country is in danger.
So it's a you know, we shouldn't we shouldn't be looking in terms of these issues in terms of ethnic groups.
But the fact is that once a government that's essentially secular goes under and somebody is going to be taking it over, who has either a tribal or an ethnic bias, then those other the other groups are going to be in trouble.
There's no question about it.
And, you know, these kind of situations are always hard.
I mean, it's it's kind of easier in the case of like Iraq, where, like, no, I definitely am not on the side of Saddam Hussein.
I'm just saying that all this is a bunch of lies and, you know, why we need to start a war with him, that kind of thing.
But I certainly don't want to take the side of Assad versus anybody who wants to overthrow him.
I'm on the side of secession to the very last man on earth, you know, in all cases, pretty much.
I just am against your former colleagues being the ones behind any attempted regime change in anybody else's country.
That's all.
Yeah, I think that that's the ultimate argument.
It's the same reason I want George Bush tried and convicted in a court in Virginia and sentenced to life in prison there rather than being hauled before the ICC.
It's our responsibility.
Well, I'll drink to that one.
Yeah, I know.
I don't disagree with you at all.
You know, I have I have no brief in support of Assad.
I mean, there's certainly some good things that having a secular government in that part of the world represent.
But at the same time, it's a police state and there's no question about it.
So I would like to see Assad go.
But I just don't think that we or NATO should be playing any role in easing him out.
All right.
Well, it's Phil Giraldi from the Council for the National Interest Foundation, Antiwar.com.
It's got a new piece of the American conservative NATO versus Syria.
It's linked today at Antiwar.com.
We're going to talk more about the form of how this is playing out on the other side of this break.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Phil Giraldi about NATO in Syria.
First of all, Phil, I guess I want to ask you what it is, if you can discriminate between what it is you've learned from talking with people that you know in D.C. from your days as a former CIA guy, as opposed to what it was that you're what it is you might be passing on just from reading Pepe Escobar or whatever like that.
You know, I want to know what the the people who have access are telling you.
Well, people have access are basically telling me that the CIA is involved, that we're running operations there and the operations are essentially to support the dissidents and bring down the government.
So, you know, that that that can take on all kinds of flavors.
And I'm drawing to a certain extent of my own experience to to judge what that might mean.
And and also, as I mentioned before, there are European press accounts in terms of, shall we say, European military trainers showing up there in the south of Turkey and the Turks themselves giving support to the to the dissidents and and shipments of arms and other trainers coming from Libya have also appeared in the media.
So there's a there's a hodgepodge of stuff that comes together, but it's basically, to a certain extent, I'm interpreting at least some of the stuff in terms of my own experience.
Right.
But now, is it can you say that you have multiple CIA sources like current people who are telling you that this that CIA is doing something in Syria now?
Well, I'd rather not get too specific, but I do have people who are knowledgeable of the issues currently who have who speak to me and that sort of thing.
So I do have a I do do have some insights into what is going on currently from people who are engaged in the projects.
Right.
OK, I dig that.
Oh, from people who are engaged in the projects.
I like that.
Yeah.
Well, that means that they're knowledgeable of it.
Mm hmm.
OK, I like terms and words.
They're fun.
Sometimes play games.
All right.
OK, so tell me about the form of this thing.
Who's doing what?
How big is the the army supposedly of, you know, I guess people who up until the last few months or so were supposedly, you know, Syrian army guys who have now changed sides to the other side.
Is that exactly the Free Syrian Army or the Free Syrian Army is something else?
And then you got the Libyans and what?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the Free Syrian Army is is basically in Turkey.
It's it's being supported by the Turks and being supported by the provisional government of Syria, which is the dissidents.
And it's claimed to have as many as 10,000 former soldiers who've come over to its side.
Now, people I've talked to who know a little bit more about the situation than I do have said that that those numbers are preposterous, that actually, if you trace back on all the stories in terms of soldiers going over to the other side and so on and so forth, most of this, most of this stuff ultimately is sourced to the actual rebels themselves.
And there's very little evidence of anybody independent either seeing this in action or having any evidence that it has taken place.
So the the Free Syrian Army might be twenty five people.
It might be a few hundred, but it's unlikely if it's anything more than that.
So that's been much overinflated.
And there are obviously other reports that there were pitched battles between soldiers who had deserted and soldiers who were still loyal to the government.
All of that kind of stuff, too, is rather difficult to to pin down in terms of authenticity.
So I think I think we're being fed what what is usually the case.
And as we saw in Libya, a lot of stories about what's going on, about atrocities, about about events that we have no way of checking.
And I think this is this is part of what this is.
This is a routine practice in terms of both the government and the anti-government trying to make their cases.
Right.
Well, you know, I think in Libya they just blew it when they talked about, oh, yeah, he's got armies of guys with Viagra out there committing all these mass rapes and whatever.
I mean, all over the Internet in a day, they said, yeah.
And the Belgian babies on bayonets to give me a break.
I mean, I heard one talk radio show where the guy bought it.
And it was funny to right winger saying even Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador, says it.
So it must be true if there's agreement between me and her.
But anyway, when when an NGO says these many people were killed, because that's usually the source in these stories.
Does that just mean the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA claim so or what?
Well, it could be.
Yeah, sure.
You know, NGO doesn't mean anything.
I mean, NGO is is basically just it's a non-government organization.
It doesn't have it.
It doesn't receive any annual award for credibility.
Right.
And a lot of these organizations are there because they have an agenda, because they're promoting democracy or because they have they're supporting one group or another.
So they they're they're no more credible than anyone else.
And, you know, it's even the International Red Cross and the United Nations, they have agendas, too.
Let's not forget that.
And they don't have really observers on the ground.
So they're getting reports from others that they're then extrapolating from to come up with these numbers and to come up with these theories about what's going on.
So there's not you know, there's no there's no right and wrong in this thing.
Nobody nobody has real good access to real good information except maybe the Syrian government.
But they're not talking or they're not telling us the truth either.
Right.
Yeah.
They certainly couldn't be trusted to.
Well, you know, I was talking with Jason Ditz and he was saying that, you know, when they say the the raw numbers of I forget, was it three or five or 10,000 people killed or whatever it is that if you just go by the daily reports, many of which are dubious and possibly inflated and who knows what those numbers don't nearly add up to the totals that they announce every few months.
You know, a lot of it seems to be pretty bogus.
Again, I'm not trying to take the side of this police state killer because, you know, I mean, but then again, what would Barack Obama do if Houston was an open revolt?
He'd shoot people's rifles until they quit.
That's happened before.
Yeah, well, one of one of the comments on the American conservative website to my article was that, you know, what would what would we be doing if if Mexicans were encouraging an insurrection in Houston and an army set in two great minds and were arming people and training them to overthrow the local government?
I mean, you know, this whole situation is so absurd and it seems to me every time Hillary Clinton says something, it's it's trouble for the United States.
And and during the last week, she wasn't focusing as much on Syria, but it was it was Russia's turn, you know, to to be punished.
And and now she's she's attacking the Egyptians.
So it's just when is our government going to learn that maybe we should just leave things alone?
All right.
Well, they're not.
So put that aside.
Is this does this mean open war?
We're going to end up having to invade Syria.
I mean, Obama, you look at the Libya model.
He seems reluctant to do another Iraq.
But what else are you going to do when you push regime change in Syria, but create a situation that you broke it, you bought it and all that realist stuff, you know?
Well, I think what we're going to see is that eventually the the situation will will weaken to the point where the Turks, for example, will create a buffer zone in there along their border with Syria.
You're going to have probably, you know, something akin to open fighting and are more open than it is now in more areas within Syria being aided and abetted by by NATO trainers and NATO weapons and that kind of thing.
It's just it can only be a mess.
I think you're right that Obama is not interested in U.S. troops getting in there.
But I think he's discovered now, hey, we can fight these wars using high technology and using our allies and pretending that we're not actually there.
Yeah.
And just fly the robots around, huh?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hey, by the way, you know, I talked with Gareth yesterday about how Maliki and Iran went full scale checkmate against George Bush and how they stuck by their guns and they kicked America right out of Iraq.
But I was wondering, what's your take on what's left with the State Department embassy in Baghdad, obviously CIA and at least one detachment of Marines to protect the place?
Supposedly there's going to be 5000 mercenaries.
And then it was announced that some drones are going to be allowed, that we're trying to sell them some F-16s.
And I just wonder, how over is this war, man?
Is it over yet?
Really, Phil?
Well, I, you know, I don't know.
The drones are going to be flying out of Turkey again and they're going to be monitoring the Kurdish region in the north.
So that, I think, is the agreement.
So it's somewhat limited.
But yeah, there's a huge embassy.
There's a huge CIA station.
It's the second biggest in the world after Afghanistan.
And it's just, it's, but, you know, it's clear that the markers are on the table now, that the local government wants us out.
There is not a whole lot of sympathy for American positions in that part of the world coming out of Baghdad.
And eventually this embassy will shrink down and shrink down and shrink down.
And the United States basically will have killed lots of people, both Americans and Iraqis, and spend a trillion dollars, if not more.
And all we'll have left is this huge empty embassy in Baghdad.
Yeah, well, I guess we really need to create like an office pool on like what day the last Blackhawk flees the roof of the Saigon, Baghdad embassy there.
Yeah, that's right.
Place some bets.
Place your bets now.
I'll set it up at the stress block.
All right.
Anyway, thanks very much, Phil.
Appreciate it as always.
Okay, Scott.
Phil Giraldi, everybody.
AmericanConservativeAntiWar.com.
Counsel for the National Interest Foundation.
