07/03/12 – Phyllis Bennis – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
That's me.
Our next guest on the show today is Phyllis Bennis.
She is a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam and of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
Her books include Calling the Shots, How Washington Dominates Today's UN.
Welcome back to the show, Phyllis.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So a very important article here.
I urge everybody to go and check it out.
It ran all over the place last week.
Here it is at stopwar.org.uk.
Syria is not Libya.
It will not implode.
It will explode beyond its borders.
So I guess, first of all, let's talk a little bit about the implosion of Libya.
TV doesn't have a word to say about Libya other than I guess Barack Obama had a great triumph there.
We came, we saw he died, ha ha ha, that kind of thing.
But what has been happening in Libya and does it matter?
It matters a lot, Scott.
The situation in Libya is a disaster, as you say.
We're not hearing very much about it.
The country is facing the possibility of a real divide into east and western sectors.
There is still a huge level of violence.
There is still completely unaccountable militias roaming the place, many of them holding prisoners, many of them committing torture, other kinds of horrific acts.
Sub-Saharan Africans who were caught in Libya, many of them are still in these prisons that no one knows where they are, how to get them out, no accountability to the government.
The government itself has far more credibility and support from Washington and Europe and the western countries and NATO than it does with its people at home.
So we have left Libya a mess and yet because Gaddafi is gone, despite the fact that he was our guy for the last several years before this recent crisis, that's seen as all that it needs to be victorious.
The dictator is gone and so everything must be better.
The problem is not everything is better when a dictator happens to be overthrown, when a system remains in place.
Sectarianism is on the rise, sectarian militias that have never been an issue before in Libya are on the rise alongside the kind of tribal divide that historically plagued the country.
And you have a huge influx and outputting, I'm not sure if that's even the right word, of weapons that are now flooding into Libya from all over the place with borders that are not protected by anyone, and weapons that are flooding out of Libya.
So we see the crisis that's going on right now in Mali, for example, is very much a reflection of the crisis in Libya because of the weapons that were suddenly available that had been kept under tight control under the Gaddafi years and now are just floating around the region and were enough to spark a new upheaval and new crisis in Mali, potentially other places in the region as well.
So it's a mess and the notion that anybody is seeing it as a model is another mess.
Yeah, well, you know, if I can take any silver lining in there, I'm going to try to latch on to the part you said about we left it a mess and I just hope that they stay gone because it seems to me like all they need is a suicide bombing in the wrong part of town and they can say, oh, no, look, everyone, suicide bombings.
Now we now we have a problem in Libya.
We didn't really have one with Gaddafi, but now we have suicide bomber types running around.
So now we have to invade and conquer the place and do an Iraq and train up an army and elect a democracy and a bunch of madness.
So I'm I hope that you can tell me you don't think that's going to happen.
Well, I don't think that's going to happen again in Libya.
We had enough with the military assault by by NATO and the U.S. with political cover from Qatar in particular, Saudi Arabia secondarily.
But this I think for the moment, the West is is pulling back and leaving Libya to sort out its own U.S. and NATO imposed mess, as it were.
I don't anticipate greater military involvement from the West in Libya.
Again, I think the question now is about Syria and Iran as the potential threats of direct military intervention.
We're already seeing indirect intervention in both countries.
But whether we see an escalation of that to direct attack is, I think, unlikely in both cases, but not impossible.
And when you're looking at situations where the stakes are as high as they currently are, in terms of what might be the result if there were to be a Western direct assault on either Libya or I'm sorry, on either Syria or Iran, saying that 90 percent it won't happen is not good enough, because a 10 percent chance is way too dangerous when we're talking about that kind of of high stakes, high stakes poker that we're that we're seeing here.
Well, yeah, I mean, as you describe the situation in Libya, it's not even really imploding like, yes, there are warring militias running around everywhere trying to figure out who's going to be the big boss at the end.
But it's already exploded to down into Mali and weapons for sale all over who knows which black markets, you know, around North Africa and the Middle East.
So even the Libya thing is only relatively contained compared to what we could expect to see from Syria.
And, you know, a friend of mine.
It is relative.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
A friend of mine is antiwar Republican and went to some kind of, you know, Republican Party function where I guess some exiles were saying, yeah, we need to have a war in Syria.
And the madness of the crowd, he said he was, you know, he tried to be the antiwar voice there.
And the crowd almost turned into a mob at that point.
It was it was madness saying, you know, we hear a bunch of people who don't know the first thing, a Republican Party meeting.
They don't know where Syria is.
They don't know the first thing about Syria, but they know that.
Yeah, we have to have a war.
And that's what they are.
They're they're a mob.
They're crazy.
And they don't have any idea what they're messing with.
What are they messing with?
Tell us about Syria and how it's going to explode when the regime changes there.
Well, first of all, I don't think that there will necessarily be an explosion.
When a regime changes, I think there will be an explosion.
And I think the reference of that quote, which was originally said by the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, who is currently the joint envoy of both the UN and the Arab League in the Syria crisis.
He said that Syria is not Libya.
It will not implode.
It will explode if he was referencing if there were to be foreign intervention in a direct sense.
What we're looking at in Syria right now is either already in the midst of or certainly teetering on the brink of civil war.
This was a brutal dictatorship that had for many, many years been known for torture, for suppression of opposition voices.
Bashar al-Assad's father, of course, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled in Syria since 1970, was perhaps best known for the massacre at Hama, when there was a military uprising that did threaten his rule in 1982.
And he essentially leveled the city.
It was led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
And he essentially leveled the entire city with somewhere over 20,000, mostly civilian casualties.
What we're seeing now is a scenario that started in a certain way similar to Libya in the sense that the Arab Spring that that jumped up in so many countries last year, took shape in Syria in very similar ways as it had in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Bahrain originally, all of these countries, it was quite similar.
It was a nonviolent citizens movement, demanding rights.
They differed from the beginning.
Some from the beginning wanted an overthrow of the regime, wanted a different kind of government altogether.
Others thought they could deal with the regime, there could be negotiations, but there needed to be massive level of reform of the government and a stripping away of the legacy of torture and such.
So there were wide differences from the beginning.
But very early on, a component of the opposition decided that the best way to respond to the regime's repression, which was fierce from the beginning, and particularly an attack on a group of children, 13 and 14 year olds in Daraa, a Libyan, I mean, a Syrian city not far from the Jordanian border, where young kids had written some graffiti against Assad, a very bold move in a country where that sort of thing can lead to, you know, years in prison.
But they were young, they were children, and they were beaten severely and several killed.
And it was in response to that, that we're seeing the current crisis.
Well, yeah, speaking of which, well, I'm sorry, we have to go out to this break.
As you mentioned, there are lots of massacres, apparently from both sides at this point.
But we'll be back with Phyllis Bennis after this.
Syria is not Libya, it will not implode, it will explode beyond its borders.
It's at stopwar.org.uk.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the Scott Horton Show.
And boy, I got it wrong.
It was a town hall for a Democrat member of Congress.
It was a Democrat meeting, where the howling mob was crying for the blood of all Syrians in order to save them or whatever they were told to want to have a war for.
I'm not too surprised.
I just had the details wrong.
That's all.
So we're talking with Phyllis Bennis.
Syria is not Libya, it will not implode, it will explode beyond its borders is this article stopwar.org.uk.
And I was reading what back I guess a month ago or so Benjamin Netanyahu was saying all the massacres, I guess ignoring the both sides issue and just putting pinning all the massacres on the regime and saying that Syria, along with Hezbollah and Iran is the real axis of evil.
And that's something must be done.
How much do you think Israeli politics have to do with American policy in Syria right now?
Well, ironically, I don't think that Israel is playing nearly the role vis-a-vis Syria that it is on Iran.
You know, aside from the rhetoric, the same war in it.
Well, there's relations, but it's quite different.
The Israeli goal is to stop Iran, because Israel has there's a risk to Israel from Iran.
It's not the risk we hear about.
It's not the existential threat.
It is the risk that Israel will lose its nuclear weapons monopoly in the region.
That's the threat that if Iran became nuclear capable, which is the so called Israeli red line, that it would no longer be the only nuclear weapons state in the region, which is the position it holds today.
It doesn't want to lose that monopoly power.
That's the basis of its opposition vis-a-vis Iran.
If you look at the actual mobilization of the sort of war fever we're seeing right now on within a humanitarian framework, but this drive towards escalating rhetoric around Syria, Israel has actually played very little role in it.
The reason is that despite all the rhetorical opposition between the two countries, Syria has been a very good neighbor for Israel.
They have been an ally of the U.S. in important key ways.
And I'm talking here about the Syrian regime.
I'm talking about Bashar al-Assad, who, among other things, was willing to cooperate with the U.S. in torturing prisoners that the U.S. sent to be interrogated and tortured, people like Maher Arar, a Canadian, who was honored by my organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, five years ago as one of the recipients of our annual Human Rights Awards, who was arrested by U.S. officials at Kennedy Airport, interrogated for three weeks, and then sent off to be tortured and interrogated for almost a year in a Syrian prison at the request of the United States to the Syrian regime, which was only too happy to comply.
Syria, of course, fought on the U.S. side, sent planes, war planes, to bomb Iraq in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm.
And Syria has kept its own border with Israel, as well as the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, very quiet for most of the last 45 years of occupation.
Despite a few upsurges of violence on a small scale, the Golan has been largely without serious challenge to the Israelis.
And the Israelis are very worried.
The Israeli government is very worried about what might come after the dictatorship in Syria.
So they are looking also at the model of Libya and saying, why would we want this on our border?
Why would we want borders that are not protected, unlike what they have now?
Why would we want weapons that are floating around with no accountability, unlike what they have now?
So I think it would be a huge mistake to say that it is Israel that is pushing the U.S. towards war in Syria.
This is much more a political drive that has to do with U.S. elections, that has to do with the role of certain Gulf Arab governments.
The Saudis and the Qataris are very involved in this.
And it has to do, unfortunately, with Turkey, which is playing a very different role than it did in the Libya case.
And it's quite an unfortunate one.
Turkey and Syria may be pulling back from their brink slightly at the moment.
But no, I don't think that this is primarily about Israel.
If we want to talk about Iran, and certainly the Syria threat is linked to Iran, but it's not quite the same.
And the role of Israel is not the same.
In that situation, the Israeli government, as has been the case for the last 20 years, has been pushing for threats of war against Iran.
And let me just say here, I think you make a very good case for why, you know, if you were running Israeli foreign policy, you would recommend not messing around in Syria.
Obviously, for years, ever since the Iraq war, and you know, the rise of Richard Perle and all these guys in the first place, the argument has been regime change in Syria.
What are you insane?
But what do you think you're going to get something easier to deal with in the Baathist regime there?
No way, right?
Of course not.
But I'm just not sure that that's a convincing enough case for why Netanyahu therefore is also against it too.
Is he as smart as you or even me?
And isn't he 15 times meaner and crazier than the two of us?
I don't think it's about being mean and crazy.
I think it's about his definition of his right wing view of what Israeli security looks like.
But I don't think that despite the quote that you just had, of course, similar to the situation with the Iraq war, where Israel cheered when when Saddam Hussein was overthrown, but it had not been their, their pressure that made that happen.
So no, I don't think that they, I think that what I was saying about the vantage point of Syria from Israel's vantage point, I don't think that's so different.
I think they understand that I don't think they have any great desire to see that, that government overthrown with a very unknown, very scary scenario coming to replace it.
That doesn't mean that Netanyahu's overall right wing tendencies won't lead him to cheer when the US goes after any Arab regime.
Maybe Netanyahu never met an Arab leader that he didn't want to overthrow.
So that's not anything new and different.
My point was in answer to your question of whether Israel is driving this in the US.
And the answer to that is no.
We have to be a little bit more nuanced here and how we look at the Israeli role.
It's not the same in every issue.
Yeah, well, but of course, it's the Israel lobby that Obama's working so hard to please in Washington when you mentioned electoral politics here, right?
Well, that's part of it.
There are many lobbies.
The arms manufacturers are the only ones who are really making a killing in both senses of the word, as the escalation goes forward in Syria.
The pro-Israel lobbies, yes, they are supporting it as well.
But that's not what is driving it.
You know, this is an international crisis that is, right now, people will see if they read my article, they will see I don't think that the US, either the administration, and certainly not the Pentagon, want to go to war in Syria.
I don't think they want to go to war in Iran.
That doesn't mean it won't happen.
There are political pressures at stake that can lead to these kinds of decisions being made that are devastatingly dangerous.
Well, it seems like they do know better, but they're kind of doing it anyway.
I mean, Philip Giraldi has been reporting since December that there's a new finding on Syria that authorizes covert action that we found even now in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
They say the CIA is coordinating the Qatari and Saudi and Turkish intervention there.
And the Turks are, you know, keeping the Free Syrian Army safe on their side of the border.
We're already at war in Syria.
There's no question that the US is participating.
It is doing so out of a sense of control.
It wants to make sure that they are the ones who choose who gets the weapons, make sure that they are in touch with those people, and make sure that if they take power, that they will be Washington's folks.
Washington has made clear through Hillary Clinton, in particular, that the so-called the Syrian National Council, the SNC, will, quote, have a seat at the table in this diplomacy, which is a very dangerous thing to pick and choose the opposition forces, particularly to pick and choose the opposition that is committed to a military overthrow.
One of the effects of that, of course, has been to marginalize and really isolate and disempower the still-existing democratic revolutionary forces who first took up the struggle against the repression of the Assad regime, and who are still trying to build a nonviolent movement, whether it will include negotiations or not, but that will be based on a Syrian decision about what kind of a regime they will have, rather than a regime that is imposed by the US or NATO or Turkey or Qatar or Saudi Arabia, or Russia or Iran, for that matter.
Russia's interests are no more about the Syrian people.
Their interest is about their base at Tartus on the Syrian coast in the Mediterranean.
That's their interest, just like the US interest in Bahrain is not about the human rights of the Bahraini people, it's about the Fifth Fleet.
So we can't have any illusions here about who's on what side.
The armed forces on all sides here are devastating the rights and the lives of the unarmed people of Syria.
I'm sorry, we got to leave it here.
I could talk with you for another hour if you'd let me, but I got to interview Gareth Porter and we're already over time, but I hope we can do this again soon.
I look forward to it.
Okay, great.
Everybody, that is Phyllis Bennis, and she is a fellow at the Transnational Institute and the Institute for Policy Studies.
And her article we're talking about here is, Syria is not Libya, it will not implode, it will explode beyond its borders.
Please go read it.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter in a sec.