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More from @scotthortonshow

Scott Horton

@scotthortonshow

Dec 1

Of potential interest: The Syria and Iraq War III chapters from my 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism:

Syria

Expediting the Chaotic Collapse

Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser, neoconservative strategist David Wurmser, wrote in his 1996 article “Coping with Crumbling States” that the U.S. should seek to “expedite the chaotic collapse” of Syria as soon as they were done overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Unfortunately for Wurmser, the opportunity to destroy Syria did not come until after he was out of power. Americans concerned about bin Ladenite terrorism might have wondered why in the world they should want to spread any more chaos in the region after the catastrophe of Iraq War II.

In an age of international terrorism waged by radical Islamists, Bashar al-Assad was a secularist who shaved his chin every morning, wore a three-piece suit and was an old acquaintance of Secretary of State John Kerry. His father’s government had joined George H.W. Bush’s coalition against Iraq in 1991 and cooperated with America and Israel at the Madrid and Oslo meetings. Bashar al-Assad had voted for America’s UN Security Council Resolution 1441 mandating the return of the weapons inspectors to Iraq. He had also been willing to negotiate with Israel over the Golan Heights in the George W. Bush years, before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice intervened and forced the Israelis to halt the talks.

Assad was a “reformer,” Hillary Clinton had said. Assad’s regime had been torturing people for the CIA as part of the “extraordinary rendition” program since her husband’s administration in the 1990s. Former CIA officer Robert Baer seemed to be honest about his own role in the program when he told the New Statesman that, “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt.” The George W. Bush administration, in a case of mistaken identity, handed an innocent Canadian named Maher Arar over to the Syrians to be tortured.

As revealed in leaked State Department cables, in 2010 Assad’s government invited the U.S. to join their efforts against bin Ladenites crossing the border from Syria into Iraq.

Assad was not a full-fledged American sock-puppet dictator like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, but he had been mostly cooperative in the War on Terrorism and certainly had no love for al Qaeda. Syria had been accused of helping to facilitate the entry of foreign fighters into Iraq earlier during Iraq War II, though it was never proven that his government was behind the jihadists’ border crossings. If it were true that Assad had done so, his motives would have been defensive in nature, and understandable, if not justifiable: to get those dangerous terrorists out of his country and help keep the United States bogged down in Iraq before they could move on to the next stage of their publicly stated plan: overthrowing him.

In 2007, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to Syria. There she visited the Omayyad mosque in Old Damascus and met with President Assad for three hours, insisting despite the Bush administration’s objections that diplomacy with Syria was vital. “We came in friendship, hope and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace,” she said. In 2011, John Kerry told the Carnegie Endowment that “President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had. And when I last went to — the last several trips to Syria — I asked President Assad to do certain things to build the relationship with the United States.” According to the AP, Kerry listed six requests for Assad, including working together on Iraqi border security and said the Syrians fulfilled them all.

In any case, the Syrian government certainly never attacked or threatened the United States. Intervening in that country did not serve to protect the American people in any way. The hawks would agree and claim this shows that selfless humanitarian concerns were at the core of their policy. The American Superman had to go and save the nice people. But that is not what the U.S. role in Syria was about. The policy was regime change. But after the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq in the aftermath of Iraq War II, the obvious question was if the U.S. did succeed in overthrowing the Ba’athist regime in Syria, what organized force in the country could possibly replace it? The obvious answer was the Muslim Brotherhood if you’re lucky. The Brotherhood had posed a major problem for the Syrian government in the past. In 1982, Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, had massacred thousands of members of the Brotherhood, their supporters and nearby civilians in the town of Hama to successfully repress a four-year armed Islamist uprising. Though the group remained mostly underground, it was obvious years before the war began that any attempt to overthrow the Ba’athists would benefit the Brotherhood first. The U.S. government knew it too. They did it anyway.

The Redirection

As discussed previously, in direct contravention of its designers’ intentions, the second Iraq war (2003–2011) resulted in the installation of Iran’s closest allies, the Shi’ite Da’wa Party and Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), in the new Iraqi parliament. Crucially, it also included the creation of the new Iraqi army which drew primarily from the ranks of ISCI’s murderous Badr Brigade and other allied Shi’ite militias. The failure of the United States, by increasing of the influence of its major regional competitor, was apparent to neoconservative policy advisers such as Zalmay Khalilzad and Elliot Abrams by 2006, not to mention the outraged Saudi royals. Even before Hussein’s trial was over, some administration hawks were already telling the media it was time to tilt back toward the Sunnis. Khalilzad even pushed for a deal with Sunni tribal leaders and a new effort to turn around and use them against sectarian Shi’ite militias, but was overruled. It was too late for that. But by the end of 2006, the administration did adopt major aspects of Khalilzad’s argument for the “Sunni turn.”

This policy was the reason for the massive propaganda campaign of early 2007, coinciding with President Bush and Gen. Petraeus’s “surge” of reinforcements to Iraq, which blamed all their failures on Iranian intervention and intransigent Shi’ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. At the same time, Petraeus began bribing the local Sunni tribal leaders with money and weapons to turn against al Qaeda in Iraq, marginalize the most radical and destructive forces in their insurgency against the new Shi’ite regime and promise to cease their attacks against U.S. forces. Petraeus attempted to use this support for some Sunni tribal leaders during the “surge” of 2007 — the so-called “Awakening” movement — as leverage against his own Shi’ite allies, futilely trying to separate the latter from their primary Iranian patrons.

But the policy went much further than that. As journalist Seymour Hersh showed in his articles “The Next Act,” “The Redirection” and “Preparing the Battlefield” for The New Yorker in 2007, beginning in 2006 the Bush government began backing the bin Ladenite-type groups against the Shi’ites across the region. They began with supporting Fatah al-Islam and Asbat al-Ansar against Hezbollah in Lebanon, a policy which was seen as more urgent after Hezbollah defeated the Israelis when they invaded Lebanon in the summer of 2006. They also backed Muslim Brotherhood groups in Syria; the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), a leftist Kurdish group in Iranian Kurdistan tied to the Turkish sometimes-terrorist organization, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK); as well as Jundallah, an incredibly dangerous group of al Qaeda-connected terrorists in the eastern Iranian Sistan and Baluchistan region. Pentagon reporter Mark Perry wrote in his 2012 piece, “False Flag,” for Foreign Policy that it was actually the Israeli Mossad posing as CIA that recruited Jundallah to wage attacks against the Iranian military — which they did, including multiple deadly attacks against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a failed assassination attempt against then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as numerous attacks against civilian targets such as Shi’ite mosques.

Hersh wrote in “The Redirection” back in March 2007:

"To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shi’ite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shi’ite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to al Qaeda.

"One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shi’ites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound — and unintended — strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. …

"The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. …

"The new strategy “is a major shift in American policy — it’s a sea change,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The Sunni states “were petrified of a Shi’ite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shi’ites in Iraq,” he said. “We cannot reverse the Shi’ite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it.” …

"[T]he U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at — Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.” …

"[T]he Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah."

There it is. This is why the following unbelievable things in this chapter are true. Bush had brought Iran’s power in the region up two pegs by installing their best friends in power in Baghdad. So now, realizing his error, he would try to take them down a peg by weakening or overthrowing Iran’s ally Assad in Damascus. Remember, al Qaeda hated the U.S. for being too closely allied with their local governments. They did not serve Iran, but radical dissident factions within Saudi Arabia and Egypt, primarily. So overall, many of al Qaeda’s regional enemies were the same as those of America and its Sunni alliance system.

To be clear, when President Barack Obama chose the side of al Qaeda terrorists in Libya and Syria, this was not because he was a Muslim terrorist sleeper agent from Kenya, as much of the political right believed. The policy was a reflection of the generations-long Roosevelt-Eisenhower-Carter-Bush Doctrine of support for and deference to the Saudi and other Arabian kings’ wishes, and more specifically the continuation of George W. Bush “redirection” in his second term. The primary concern of America’s post-Iraq War II Middle Eastern strategy is centered on the question of how to make up for the fact that the U.S. handed Baghdad over to the closest Iraqi allies of our government’s main strategic rival, Iran. It was too late to start the Iraq war all over again, turn around and march east to give Baghdad back to the Sunnis, and it was too dangerous to launch another full-scale regime-change war against Iran. So Obama decided that he could instead get a consolation prize by targeting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus.

That was why in 2011, the first year of the Arab Spring, when the U.S. still had thousands of troops in Iraq chasing down the last of the bin Ladenites, it was already siding with them on the other side of the line in Syria. It had been going on for years. As Hersh reported and State Department cables leaked by Spc. Chelsea Manning later proved, the U.S. had been financing the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s “Movement for Justice and Development” since the redirection began in 2006.

In a spring 2012 interview, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg suggested to President Obama that, “it would seem to me that one way to weaken and further isolate Iran is to remove or help remove Iran’s only Arab ally, [Syria].” The president responded, “Absolutely.”

“What else can this administration be doing?” Goldberg pressed.

"Obama: [The Arab Spring is] now engulfing Syria, and Syria is basically [Iran’s] only true ally in the region. And it is our estimation that [Assad’s] days are numbered. It’s a matter not of if, but when. Now, can we accelerate that? We’re working with the world community to try to do that. … [W]hat we’re trying to do — and the secretary of state just came back from helping to lead the Friends of Syria group in Tunisia — is to try to come up with a series of strategies that can provide humanitarian relief. But they can also accelerate a transition to a peaceful and stable and representative Syrian government. If that happens, that will be a profound loss for Iran.

"Goldberg: Is there anything you could do to move it faster?

"Obama: Well, nothing that I can tell you, because your classified clearance isn’t good enough. (Laughter.)"

Obama’s national security adviser Tom Donilon agreed that the “end of the Assad regime would constitute Iran’s greatest setback in the region yet — a strategic blow that will further shift the balance of power in the region against Iran.” As Reuters reported that August, Obama had signed a new finding — an order to the CIA — to increase support for the insurgents. For more than a year, Americans had helped coordinate the war at a “secret command center” in the Turkish city of Adana, though he could not admit it.

The president’s main political opposition in the U.S. Senate could not agree more with the motive for the policy. As Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told the New York Times just a few weeks before,

"Breaking Syria apart from Iran could be as important to containing a nuclear Iran as sanctions. If the Syrian regime is replaced with another form of government that doesn’t tie its future to the Iranians, the world is a better place."

Though Assad is a member of the Ba’ath Party, unlike Sunni Saddam Hussein he is an Alawite, which is Syria’s ruling minority sect and closely associated with the Shi’ites. They also have an alliance with Iran. The primary concern of the neoconservatives had always been Syria’s role in helping Iran support Lebanese Hezbollah, and they had been pushing for war with Assad’s government since after the 2003 invasion. Bush had balked, but Obama gave them half of what they wanted. Not full regime change, but an Israeli-approved policy of prolonging the war for as long as possible.

Neoconservative Max Boot also wrote in 2012 that the “first” reason the United States should attack Assad’s government in Syria was to “diminish Iran’s influence in the Arab world. … Iran knows that if his regime fell, it would lose its most important base in the Arab world and a supply line to pro-Iranian Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.” Oh, and regime change against the Ba’athists will somehow help to diminish, rather than enhance al Qaeda’s influence.

It was not just the neocons. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long-time associate, former Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Jamie Rubin, wrote an important memo to Secretary Clinton in April 2012. It outlined why he also thought the U.S. must take the opportunity to hurt Iran and Hezbollah on behalf of Israel by attacking the Ayatollah’s Ba’athist allies in Damascus. He later ran a version of the memo as an article in Foreign Policy in June 2012, calling it “The Real Reason to Intervene in Syria.” It had nothing to do with protecting the safety and liberty of the American people.

"It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel’s security — not through a direct attack, which in the thirty years of hostility between Iran and Israel has never occurred, but through its proxies in Lebanon, like Hezbollah, that are sustained, armed and trained by Iran via Syria. The end of the Assad regime would end this dangerous alliance. Israel’s leadership understands well why defeating Assad is now in its interests. …

"With Assad gone, and Iran no longer able to threaten Israel through its proxies, it is possible that the United States and Israel can agree on red lines for when Iran’s program has crossed an unacceptable threshold. In short, the White House can ease the tension that has developed with Israel over Iran by doing the right thing in Syria."

In the memo, Rubin expressed support for the current operation to help Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey arm and train Syria’s Sunni-based insurgency. He also insisted that the U.S. needed to go around the UN Security Council and even its own NATO alliance to team up with Persian Gulf states to launch a major air campaign to quickly oust the Assad government and its forces.

And do not worry, Rubin promised:

"Some argue that U.S. involvement risks a wider war with Russia. But the Kosovo example shows otherwise. In that case, Russia had genuine ethnic and political ties to the Serbs, which don’t exist between Russia and Syria, and even then, Russia did little more than complain. Arming the Syrian rebels and using western airpower to ground Syrian helicopters and airplanes is a low-cost high payoff approach."

Rubin then broke fully into his neoconservative routine, mixing Wurmser’s crazy Clean Break policy with Paul Wolfowitz’s pipe dreams of being greeted with flowers and candy.

"As long as Washington’s political leaders stay firm that no U.S. ground troops will be deployed, as they did in both Kosovo and Libya, the costs to the United States will be limited. Victory may not come quickly or easily, but it will come. And the payoff will be substantial. Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will see the United States as a friend, not an enemy. Washington would gain substantial recognition as fighting for the people in the Arab world, not the corrupt regimes.
For Israel, the rationale for a bolt from the blue attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be eased. And a new Syrian regime might well be open to early action on the frozen peace talks with Israel [over the Golan Heights]. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsor since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles."

What, no pipeline to Haifa?

Al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria

Syria is a 70 percent super-majority Sunni country ruled by a minority Alawite elite’s Ba’ath Party government. However, the regime is also supported by virtually all the rest of the country’s ethnic and religious minorities: Orthodox, Melkite, Armenian, Assyrian and Syriac Christians; Circassians, Jews; Ismailis; Bedouins; (most) Kurds; Druze; Shi’ite Arabs and also a substantial plurality if not majority of the Sunni Arabs, particularly the wealthy business class in the city of Aleppo. The majority of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) was and is Sunni. But there were major economic problems in the country, including effects of mass immigration to the cities from the countryside after the Turks dammed up the Euphrates River in the 2000s. Syria is also a secular police state and hereditary autocracy, so there was much popular discontent and even room for a significant insurgency to break out. As in Libya, America and Saudi Arabia quickly moved to hijack the Syrian Arab Spring protest movement and turn it into a real civil war.

A National Security Agency (NSA) document from 2013 showed that Saudi prince and then-intelligence director Salman bin Sultan supported and gave direct orders to the so-called moderate Free Syrian Army in this case to “light up Damascus” and “flatten” the airport with rockets in March 2013. Had this document come to light earlier, what it revealed about Saudi control and documented war crimes by America’s supposedly moderate rebels may have made a difference in the domestic debate over support for the insurgency. Unfortunately, the Guardian and then the Intercept, which received the Edward Snowden leak almost immediately after this event, chose not to publish it for four more years.

It was not just America and their Saudi friends. At the same time that Obama was killing Osama and was running for reelection on his final victory in the War on Terrorism — and still not quite ten years since the September 11th attacks on New York and Virginia — he was taking the enemy’s side in Libya and in Syria. His own administration called their tacit support for al Qaeda in Syria “a deal with the devil,” according to the Washington Post.

Unlike in Iraq War II, where the jihadists were a small subset of the broader Sunni-based insurgency, there was no question from 2011 onwards that the bin Ladenites led the insurgency in Syria. The actual “moderates” wanted to live. They were mostly sitting at hotels in Qatar and Turkey doing just that. In this type of guerrilla war, the fighters are not professional soldiers but terrorists, mercenaries and volunteers who do not mind dying. Hundreds of veterans of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq started coming across the border to take over as soon as the first protests broke out. This was clear to critics from the very beginning of the war, and so was the fact that the U.S. government and its allies were involved in supporting the worst side of it. Just as the Saudis had helped bankroll the Sunni insurgency against the U.S. and Shi’ites in Iraq War II, they began financing the same forces in Syria. Where George W. Bush had turned a blind eye to their treachery, Barack Obama was all in.

Pro-regime change lobbyists in the U.S. tend to accentuate reports of a broader, more peaceful protest movement seeking democratic reforms that took to the Syrian streets in 2011. They also point to the fact that some leftist and other more secular groups did make up a substantial segment of the early armed insurgency. The hawks also claim that much of that insurgency broke out as the result of a heavily armed overreaction on the part of the government to some of the initial demonstrations. There were harsh crackdowns against protesters in some places and reportedly torture of some of those arrested. In the summer of 2011, reporter Reese Erlich met with a group of protesters who said they wanted a parliamentary democracy, though they quickly turned to violence, as Erlich said, with no real political or military strategy.

As Christopher Phillips writes in The Battle for Syria, for the first year Assad was hesitant to use force to put down the uprising. The British characterized his actions as “calculated escalations of violence.” They were poorly calculated. He did not play nice enough to placate his opposition or crack down severely enough to win. His security forces escalated just enough to be counterproductive. But not all the violence at the early protests was caused by government forces or in reaction to it.

As has been shown by journalists Sharmine Narwani, William Van Wagenen and others, from the very beginning of the uprising that spring, the Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham and other extremists killed cops and soldiers. As Aaron Lund has written, while somehow trying to play it down, Ahrar al-Sham had been founded by first generation al Qaeda members from the 1980s Afghan war or soon after, including Mohammed al-Bahaiyah (a.k.a. Abu Khalid al-Suri). He was accused by a Spanish court of being al Qaeda’s paymaster for the 2004 Madrid bombings which killed 193 people. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) had been established in the summer of 2011 and included Iraq War II-era terrorists at the start. Urban liberals may have wanted democratic reforms, but the Western and Persian Gulf powers and fanatical bin Ladenites were determined to have their way. This rendered the concerns, beliefs and motivations of any small, truly moderate groups of protesters and fighters essentially irrelevant. The Syrian people certainly had the right to protest against or even overthrow their government to better secure their safety and happiness. But this was not that. They were caught between their government and a group of interventionist foreign powers and Islamist terrorists, and that was what really mattered.

It was clear from the very first months of the Arab Spring, in early 2011, that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were already making their move against Assad in Syria. As early as April 2011, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser John Hannah reported the pertinent facts in Foreign Policy. The notorious Prince Bandar bin Sultan had returned to the top rank of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency, determined to crush the Arab Spring wherever it threatened Saudi interests, such as in Bahrain, and exploit it against their enemies in Libya, and especially in Syria, “Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world.” As a Saudi official told Hannah, “The king knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.” The hawkish Hannah portrayed a hostage situation in which Bandar could start backing terrorists against Iran or even making nuclear weapons due to his lack of confidence in Obama’s dedication to Saudi priorities. The “superpower” had better give in to its client state right away and begin a minor war before they declare independence and start a major one. Syria was at the top of the list. The U.S. and the other Western states fell right in line with the Saudi agenda.

That June, syndicated war correspondent Eric Margolis reported that the French were helping to coordinate the uprising in their former colony in cooperation with the U.S., UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, as well as some factions in Lebanon. In October, Foreign Affairspublished a piece by John R. Bradley explaining that Saudi Arabia was making a massive bet on the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow and replace the Assad regime. In November 2011, Alastair Crooke reported in The Observer that Bandar was sending jihadist fighters from Saudi Arabia to Syria to oppose Assad. For critics, this showed from the very beginning that the war had nothing to do with protecting Syrians’ rights or spreading democracy. It also showed that the insurgents were no “moderates” at all, but bin Ladenite extremists and terrorists in the mold of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al Qaeda in Iraq during Iraq War II.

On December 7, 2011, Reva Bhalla Goujon, vice-president for global analysis for the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), sent a memo about a meeting she had that day at the Pentagon with strategic planners for the Air Force. It also included one British and one French officer. The memo was later leaked to Wikileaks. She wrote, “After a couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF [special operations forces] teams (presumably from U.S., UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” They then told her the plan was to support insurgent attacks and assassinations to try to destroy “the Alawite forces,” thus “causing the fall of the state.”

Just two weeks later, on December 23, massive suicide truck bombings rocked Damascus, killing dozens.

It has been said a million times over that Obama refused to intervene in the Syrian civil war, leading it to be such a bloody catastrophe. This is wrong. All through 2011, the first year of the Arab Spring uprisings, America and its allies were pouring weapons, cash and “foreign fighter” bin Ladenite terrorists into Syria. They caused the war.

Beginning in 2012, even the New York Times would repeatedly admit that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan and the U.S. were all working together to bring weapons to so-called vetted Syrian moderates, but that the extremists were getting the guns and the money every time. Not only that, but they would also admit the truth that al Qaeda’s local affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, was the dominant force and consistently took control of other groups, their resources and weapons, and directed them on the battlefield. The term “admit” is appropriate since the Times still repeatedly spun the dominance of al-Nusra fighters as at-least tolerable in the short term, such as when they warned that

"blacklisting the Nusra Front could backfire. It would pit the United States against some of the best fighters in the insurgency that it aims to support. While some Syrian rebels fear the group’s growing power, others work closely with it and admire it — or, at least, its military achievements — and are loath to end their cooperation."

In late February 2012, CBS News interviewed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Though she was a hardliner and would spend her last year as secretary pushing Obama to escalate, in this interview she was forced to defend the president’s position that he would aid the rebels, but without committing enough resources to ensure their success. Clinton told the CBS reporter:

We know al Qaeda — Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria. Are we supporting al Qaeda in Syria? Hamas is now supporting the opposition. Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?

Clinton was almost certainly referring to the Reuters article, “Al-Zawahiri Urges Muslim Support for Opposition,” which her staffer, and later President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had emailed to her two weeks before, noting, “AQ is on our side in Syria.” She clearly understood that “supporting” an insurgency of which al Qaeda is a significant part is essentially supporting them too. Secretary Clinton continued:

"So, I think … despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad … if you’re a military planner or if you’re a secretary of state and you’re trying to figure out do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable, we don’t see that."

That should have been the end of the argument for intervention. This was only three days after the first “Friends of Syria” meeting. Apparently, the secretary was not inspired. Yet Clinton still insisted on spending the rest of 2012 obstructing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s efforts at real diplomacy. Her State Department continued to set up “Friends of Syria” conferences in Tunisia and Qatar to organize foreign efforts to create new governments in exile to take over the country, which she had already conceded, when defending Obama’s hesitancy, was really an impossible task. As former CIA and National Security Council official Flynt Leverett told the author in the summer of 2012, the U.S. was coordinating the entire international effort against Assad and bore primary responsibility, while Secretary Clinton was refusing to engage in any negotiations that did not include Assad’s removal as a poison-pill precondition. They would not settle for a deal. Their forces were already at work on the ground.

The Syrian National Council (SNC) was initially created by Dick Cheney’s daughter and now-Congresswoman Liz Cheney when she ran the Iran-Syria Operations Group (ISOG) at the State Department under George W. Bush. The SNC included exiled members of the Muslim Brotherhood and was also the Obama administration’s planned government-in-exile, at first. The idea was to install them at the end of an international agreement to be achieved at Geneva in 2012, which never succeeded. In April 2012, State Department spokesmen, when questioned by reporter Reese Erlich, could not name a democratic group within the SNC. “The SNC is faction-ridden. We’re trying to find a horse we can ride, but we’re not having much luck,” a State official admitted.

By October, Clinton officially admitted that the SNC was no longer considered to be credible leaders of the opposition. Its successor, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, fared no better.

As soon as she left office in early 2013, Clinton placed a story in the New York Times which criticized Obama for not following through and giving her, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and CIA Director David Petraeus the authority they needed to push a real regime change. She made the same complaint in her memoir Hard Choices.

However, the month before, in December 2012, even Hillary’s State Department declared that Jabhat al-Nusra was an “alias” for al Qaeda in Iraq and added them to the terrorist list. This provoked dozens of other rebel groups to protest that “We are all Jabhat al-Nusra.”

Before his death, Osama bin Laden had insisted on a name change in order to make al Qaeda seem more palatable. The same group, after a failed “rebranding” as Jaish al-Fatah and then Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, is now known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. They have primarily been financed by the Saudis, Qataris and Turks. Many of them are veterans of Iraq War II, where they fought against U.S. forces. Though terrorist advocates such as the Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister sometimes insist it is not so, they are still sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri and al Qaeda. They publicly insisted so a few days after their leader al-Jolani tried to subtly distance the group from al Qaeda in a TV interview.

“This is just a simple way of returning the favor to our Syrian brothers that fought with us on the lands of Iraq,” a Nusra fighter in Syria told the New York Times. That April, two months after Clinton acknowledged Zawahiri’s interest in Assad’s overthrow, the Wall Street Journal reported on massive new shipments of communications gear and training for the “rebels” to eavesdrop on government forces. This gave a huge boost to the insurgency.

Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, ran numerous articles supporting the policy of backing the jihadists, without bothering to couch it as support for the Free Syrian Army. These included “The Moderate Face of Al Qaeda” and “The Good and Bad of Ahrar Al-Sham: An Al Qaeda-Linked Group Worth Befriending.” One article was blatantly titled “Accepting al Qaeda.” It even featured an old picture of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri sitting together at the top of the piece to make sure the irony was not lost. “The right Salafis can make all the difference,” added the Atlantic Council. The U.S.A. must fight for al Qaeda and those who are sworn loyal to them because we prefer them to Assad. And why? Because Assad is friends with Iran. Not that Iran, Syria or Hezbollah knocked our towers down. But that was their order of priorities. Not only the neoconservatives, but virtually the entire American foreign policy establishment supported this line.

To help illustrate the absurdity of all this, in 2012 the U.S. was still fighting a CIA drone war in Iraq against the last of the Iraqi Sunni-based insurgency, chasing them across the border into Syria where they suddenly became useful “moderate rebels” in the fight against Assad. At the same time, thousands of fighters from Iraqi Shi’ite militias, such as Donald Rumsfeld’s old friends in ISCI’s Badr Brigade, members of Iraq’s ruling coalition, also came to Syria to fight — for the regime, alongside the Iranian Quds Force and Lebanese Hezbollah. The New York Timescondemned Iraqi PM Maliki for his intervention against al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria.

It was the same thing with the Afghans. Many Taliban fighters fleeing the violence of Obama’s Afghan “surge” at the beginning of the decade fled to Syria, where the U.S. was on their side, supporting their fight against the Shi’ite-aligned regime. After ISIS took over western Iraq and the Iraqi Shi’ite militias went home to fight them there. Iran then recruited hundreds of Afghan Hazaras — Shi’ites who largely support the Afghan government in Kabul and in turn have been supported by the U.S. since 2001 — to travel to Syria, to fight for the state in alliance with Lebanese Hezbollah, Shi’ite Iraqis and Iran against the American-Saudi-al Qaeda coalition.

Ahrar al-Sham, the Muslim Brotherhood-associated group mentioned above, was cofounded by Hassan Aboud, whose brother was a leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, according to Michael Jonsson at the Swedish Defense Research Agency. He had been released from prison in a general amnesty granted by Assad under direct pressure from the U.S., its NATO allies and NGOs like Amnesty International. When many of these men, including Aboud, turned out to be terrorist butchers, the hawks then blamed Assad for releasing them, claiming he only did so to make the rest of the insurgency look bad. Though American hawks widely parroted this narrative, it was soundly refuted by scholars and experts such as Joshua Landis and Aymenn Al-Tamimi. It was the “rebels” and the Arab League who had insisted on the opening of the prisons. Assad’s May 2011 amnesty was a “key demand of the opposition,” even according to the Washington Post. Just as with his repeal of the law banning female teachers from wearing headscarves, Assad’s release of Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist figures from prison was an obvious attempt to appease the religious right. It was not some wily scheme to make the protesters seem like extremists by polluting their democratic purity with otherwise-unwelcome terrorists. The protesters never claimed they were being entrapped at the time, only that the early releases were not enough.

In fact, Saudi Arabia was emptying its prisons of both criminals and political prisoners and sending them off to fight in Syria for al-Nusra, which itself had grown out of the American prisons of Iraq War II. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which since 2006 had called itself the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), was then led by a man named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He and his group of leaders of al-Zarqawi’s old terrorist movement had forged their cadre inside the American prison at Camp Bucca in Iraq’s south during the war, and had been released in an amnesty by the United States. In the summer of 2011, Baghdadi sent still-current al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who had fought U.S. marines in Fallujah in Iraq War II, across the border into Syria to relaunch their war. During the chaos of the Iraqi civil war, Assad had allowed more than a million refugees into Syria. Many of them later joined in the uprising against him.

As Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes later admitted,

"There was a slight absurdity to the fact that we were debating options to provide military support to the opposition at the same time that we were deciding to designate al-Nusra, a big chunk of that opposition, as a terrorist organization. So there was a kind of a schizophrenia that’s inherent in a lot of U.S. foreign policy that came to a head in Syria."

But the problem was not that they were supporting terrorists. It was that labeling them as such would make it more difficult to support them:

"Al-Nusra was probably the strongest fighting force within the opposition, and while there were extremist elements in the group, it was also clear that the more moderate opposition was fighting side by side with al-Nusra. I argued that labeling al-Nusra as terrorists would alienate the same people we want to help, while giving al-Nusra less incentive to avoid extremist affiliations."

The administration increased support for the “rebels” in late 2012. After National Security Agency contractor-whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked his cache of documents to the Washington Post in 2013, they reported that the CIA was spending a billion dollars per year on the new “Timber Sycamore” program, coordinating this support for the so-called Free Syrian Army with their Middle Eastern allies. This included the Northern Storm Brigade, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, Harakat Hazm, Harakat Shabaab al-Mujahideen, Jaysh al-Islam, the al Hamza Group and others who were fighting essentially as auxiliaries under the al-Nusra Front. A former senior administration official told the New York Times it had to be secret because they knew it was illegal, and “We needed plausible deniability in case the arms got into the hands of al-Nusra.” America’s allies were spending even more.

For years, the media cited this expanded CIA program as though U.S. support for the insurgency began in 2013 even though, as shown above, it started in 2011. Many of the very same outlets had been reporting on covert intervention there since at least early 2012. Four years later, in 2015, after the Pentagon began a short-lived program of backing a small group of so-called moderate fighters, these same media organizations completely ignored all prior knowledge of the CIA programs and pretended to believe this was the beginning of Obama’s “minor” intervention in Syria.That military program failed almost immediately because the “moderate” fighters all wanted to fight against the Assad government, not against ISIS.

It is true that the hawks mostly insisted that they supported only supposedly moderate Free Syrian Army forces, but this was only so much deniability and obfuscation. Fighters, money and weapons are all fungible, and as sometimes-Nusra-sympathetic reporter Mitchell Prothero told the author, this new version of al Qaeda had learned the lesson of the local Iraqi Sunnis’ “Awakening” betrayal of 2006 and 2007. They had decided instead to “play well” with other insurgent groups. This, combined with their superior financial and military power, meant that from the beginning of 2012 Nusra was the dominant force inside the insurgency. Later, their front Jaish al-Fatah (the Army of Conquest) eventually became the official umbrella organization behind the entire uprising.

More than 10,000 men from dozens of different groups were recruited and trained by the CIA in Jordan and Turkey. Thousands of these went on to join the ranks of the al-Nusra Front, bringing their American TOW anti-tank missiles with them.

A former Obama administration official involved with this policy admitted to journalist Andrew Cockburn, “I would not say that Al Qaeda is our ally, but a turnover of weapons is probably unavoidable. I’m fatalistic about that. It’s going to happen.” A Free Syrian Army leader told the New York Times in 2014, “No FSA faction in the north can operate without Nusra’s approval.” The reporter explained that “Nusra lets groups vetted by the United States keep the appearance of independence, so that they will continue to receive American supplies.”

In 2014 and 2015, two FSA groups armed by the CIA, the Hazm Movement and Syrian Revolutionary Front, were both overrun by their al-Nusra allies who stole all their supplies, including TOW anti-tank missiles. This was revenge for the Obama administration’s limited strikes against a small segment of al-Nusra that was accused of targeting the West.

Among the so-called moderate militias was the Northern Storm Brigade. These were the men that Senator John McCain snuck into Syria to meet and pose in a now-infamous photo opportunity with their fighters on the meeting house’s front porch. This Syrian militia had fought against U.S. forces as part of the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq War II and happily admitted it to Time magazine in April 2013, a month before John McCain went over to meet with them. It is unknown whether they fought directly for Zarqawi’s group, but they certainly would have been considered “foreign fighter” AQI terrorists by the United States military during the second Iraq war.

The Northern Storm Brigade was the same group that three months later kidnapped Israeli-American journalist Steven Sotloff and sold him to ISIS, who then beheaded him. They were already known to be guilty of kidnapping and murdering Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims before McCain met with them, while insisting that U.S. intelligence could easily “vet” these fighters for the proper amount of “moderation.” Inaccurate internet claims that the Northern Storm members pictured with McCain were the leaders of ISIS were widely “fact-checked” and denounced by all good parroting puppets in the media, but they never conceded that McCain’s friends really were just one degree of separation away from the worst of the worst, and complicit in their most heinous crimes.

Liwa al Tawheed, Liwa al Islam and Suqor al-Sham were considered good, moderate fighters, backed for two years by the American CIA. They all went over to al-Nusra in the fall of 2013.

The al-Farouq Brigade were also considered liberal moderates worth supporting by the United States. They said they wanted to hold elections and respect minority rights. But then, in 2013, al-Farouq’s military commander, Abu Sakkar, was shown on video eating the heart or liver of a dead Syrian army soldier while his men cheered him on. He told the BBC, “If we don’t get help, a no-fly zone, heavy weapons, we will do worse. You’ve seen nothing yet.” In truth, they never supported any freedom but the right to install an Islamist dictatorship.

Jaysh al-Islam (the Army of Islam), backed by Saudis, was founded in September 2013. It was led by Zahran Alloush, son of Sheikh Abdullah Mohammed Alloush, a Saudi religious scholar and prominent anti-Shi’ite zealot. According to journalist Reese Erlich, they said they would “wash the filth of the Rashida [an anti-Shi’ite slur] from Greater Syria.” They ended up joining the “Islamic Front” that December with Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra. Later that month, they massacred dozens of Druze and Alawite civilians in the town of Adra.

The Turkish and Qatari-backed Faylaq al-Rahman was another supposedly moderate rebel group. But it turns out that they, too, were murderers. Authors of a United Nations report credibly accused them of indiscriminately shelling civilian neighborhoods in Damascus.
For years, the U.S. supported the group Nour al-Din al-Zenki as part of the Free Syrian Army with massive amounts of money and weapons, including TOW missiles. This continued even after a group of them were caught on camera beheading a 19-year-old Palestinian refugee they accused of fighting with the regime. They held his head up for the camera, laughing, and proudly posted the video of their savagery on the internet. Former Ambassador Robert Ford then warned that “Zenki needs to fairly, publicly hold accountable the killer and his commander. If they lack discipline, they are useless.” His line still had not been crossed.

Nobody seems to know of any, but even if there were powerful militias composed of very decent democratic citizens taking part in this war on the insurgents’ side, at the end of the day they would still be nothing but a battalion in Abu Mohammed al-Jolani’s al-Nusra army. Any victory they accomplished would have ultimately been for Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Over the years, thousands of jihadists, both Syrians and foreign fighters from around the Middle East, fought for different subgroups at different times, mostly depending on who was paying best. The pro-intervention hawk Charles Lister is from the Saudi-, UAE- and Qatari-funded Middle East Institute, and the Qatari-funded Brookings Institute Doha Center. He admitted in 2013 that the American and Saudi “joint operations rooms” in Jordan and Turkey, where they were coordinating the insurrection, could not prevent al-Nusra from vacuuming up all the so-called moderate fighters the allies had been training and deploying in Syria. The New York Times also admitted that the CIA could not prevent their weapons and trained fighters from going to al-Nusra. Instead, they saw it as a shame that, “Although the Nusra Front was widely seen as an effective fighting force against Mr. Assad’s troops, its al Qaeda affiliation made it impossible for the Obama administration to provide direct support for the group.”

But that was not true. In the spring of 2015, Lister admitted that the U.S.-led operations room in Turkey was “instrumental in facilitating” al-Nusra’s alliance with the FSA as they launched their successful attempt to seize the Idlib Province with U.S.-provided TOW missiles and suicide truck bombs. As Lister told Congress, “[T]here still remains no better alternative to cooperating with al Qaeda, and thus facilitating its prominence.” Jamal Khashoggi, an adviser to the Saudi government who was later murdered and dismembered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, gave credit to Saudi Arabia and Turkey for the terrorists’ capture of Idlib Province. He told the New York Times that, “coordination between Turkish and Saudi intelligence has never been as good as now.” The extent of Lister’s support for Syrian terrorists is detailed in Max Blumenthal’s book, The Management of Savagery.

As crazy as it was to attack Iraq in 2003, imagine if Saddam Hussein had been right in the middle of trying to put down an al Qaeda-led insurrection at the time, and that instead of helping Hussein, or at least giving him the space to win that fight within his own borders, George W. Bush had instead armed Zarqawi to help AQI defeat the Ba’athists. That was essentially what Barack Obama was doing in Syria. Meanwhile, the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress was egging him on all along to double down and finish the job.

During Iraq War II, the entire Sunni-based insurgency had been labeled terrorists due to the small number of them fighting under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group. Now the Zarqawiites were by far the dominant force in the Syrian uprising, but no matter what they did, it seemed there was nothing they could do to discredit the fight against Assad.

In addition to killing or wounding approximately 100,000 Syrian Arab Army soldiers, the various insurgent groups committed war crimes from the very beginning. They murdered children, used suicide car and truck bombs against civilian and military targets, blindly shelled civilian neighborhoods, used torture, carried out mass-executions of captured army soldiers, executed people with crucifixions and beheadings. They also targeted religious minorities, massacring Druze and Christians who refused to convert. They occupied the last ancient towns and villages in the world whose Christian sects still speak ancient Aramaic, killing or displacing the local populations. Bin Ladenites are as they do.

The Mythical Moderates

Barack Obama later admitted that he knew all along that backing the “moderate” rebels could never work, telling the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman that Hillary Clinton’s preferred policy of arming “moderate” rebels to take over Syria has

"always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards. There’s not as much capacity as you would hope."

Of course, this army of mythical moderates would also be expected to fight the worst part of their own side, al-Nusra, ISIS, Ahrar al-Sham and the rest of the extremists among the rebels. Not that this reality deterred him from funneling in billions of dollars in money and weapons, which virtually all ended up in the hands of the jihadists who tore Syrian society to shreds with them before eventually being defeated anyway.

Senator John McCain of Arizona and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, could only attack Obama for not doing enough to pursue this disastrous and already-failed policy.

But Obama essentially shared John McCain’s doctrine, even if he was afraid to send the B-52s to Damascus. This was the same foreign policy program of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and second term-George W. Bush: the U.S.A. backs Saudi terrorists at war with our enemies; the Soviets in Afghanistan, Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, Gaddafi in Libya, Shi’ites in Iran, the Alawites and Shi’ite Ba’athists in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon or wherever it is deemed necessary. The American people simply must tolerate the blowback. Obama governed as a conservative Democrat, and a centrist on foreign policy, indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton. Though his actions in Syria were an outright betrayal of the American people, it was not out of disloyalty to the American national security state. That is how Washington, D.C. does business. The government serves its clients. These include arms dealers, spies, foreign princes and prime ministers, but not the American people.

George W. Bush’s Iraq War II turned western Iraq into a boiling cauldron of radical Sunni-based insurgency. This was a terrible error. But with the “redirection” policy, he and later Obama decided to double that disaster by going right back to supporting these bin Ladenite mercenaries in Syria to weaken Iran. That was no accident.

The truth is that the Free Syrian Army of so-called moderate rebels was always a sham. Some insurgents had to deal with the Americans to get their money and weapons. But the fight always belonged to al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and other terrorist groups, most of whom got their money and weapons directly from America’s Persian Gulf allies. They fought “side by side,” as people say, for years all across Syria against Assad with U.S. and allied support. As one “activist” who worked with the insurgents in Deraa explained to The National out of the UAE,

"The FSA and al-Nusra join together for operations, but they have an agreement to let the FSA lead for public reasons, because they don’t want to frighten Jordan or the West. Operations that were really carried out by Al-Nusra are publicly presented by the FSA as their own."

A “leading FSA commander” gave great thanks to al-Nusra for the help and explained that, “The face of al-Nusra cannot be to the front. It must be behind the FSA, for the sake of Jordan and the international community.” As William Van Wagenen noted, the American media long went along with this scam, referring to “rebel offensives” and describing al-Nusra and FSA territory as “opposition-held” to obscure the fact that the “opposition” was the enemy from the last war, and they were still head-chopping crazies. Charles Lister conceded to the New York Times that “It’s inevitable that any weapons supplied by a regional state like Qatar will be used at least in joint operations with Jabhat al-Nusra — if not shared with the group.”

The worst of al Qaeda’s shills in the American and British media and think tanks, including Lister, the Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss and Roy Gutman, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, the Intercept’s Murtaza Hussein, CNN’s Bilal Abdul Kareem, Clarissa Ward and S.E. Cupp, Bloomberg News’s Eli Lake, Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins, The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Elizabeth Tsurkov, WINEP’s Aaron Zelin, Amnesty International’s Kristyan Benedict, Ambassador Robert Ford, the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran, former FBI agent Clint Watts, Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth and their “emergencies director” Peter Bouckaert, along with all the usual neoconservative suspects such as Max Boot, Bill Kristol and the Kagans, will never live down their disgrace and dishonor. They cry all day about Assad’s atrocities in putting down the insurrection, but they will never admit that the war would never have lasted beyond the first year if it had not been for U.S. and allied intervention, which they had no right to do. They only prolonged the conflict that their side inevitably lost, costing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians’ lives. Instead, they continue to insist that the Obama administration had not done enough to win. But they cannot describe what victory would look like beyond vague allusions to “democracy” the terrorists they support would never have delivered.

On the contrary, heroic journalists such as Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, Robert Parry and Joe Lauria of Consortium News, Daniel McAdams at the Ron Paul Institute, Bernard from the blog Moon of Alabama, Mark Perry of the American Conservative, Sharmine Narwani of Mideast Shuffle, Gareth Porter of Truthout.org, authors Christopher Phillips, Reese Erlich, Christopher Davidson, Charles Glass and Mark Curtis, Brad Hoff of LevantReport.com, Professor Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma, Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com, David Stockman of the Contra Corner, Matt Lee from the Associated Press, David Enders of the McClatchey newspaper chain, syndicated columnist Eric Margolis, economist Jeffrey Sachs, Peter Hitchens from the Daily Mail, former British ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, Alastair Crooke of the Observer and independent journalist Elijah Magnier saw through the lies and told the truth about this treason in real time. Honorable mention goes to Max Blumenthal of the Gray Zone Project, who admittedly fell for the false narrative for the first couple of years, but later turned around and accomplished important journalism on the war.

Anyone who has told the truth about America’s war in Syria has been smeared as an “Assad apologist.” This is nonsense. The country is a dictatorship. No one disputes that. Nor does anyone deny the regime and its allies have killed thousands of civilians in its attempt to crush the uprising. But if you listened to the American government and media during this time, they talked about this war as though it began when Assad just decided one morning that he was going to commit genocide against the entire civilian population of his country. And he was doing so just for the fun of it, or perhaps for their daring to show up at a peaceful protest against him. That is why the U.S. and its friends were backing very moderate militia fighters to help defend the country from their leader’s aggression. This has been a level of dishonesty that makes the lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent nuclear bomb project seem believable in comparison.

Former Congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat of Hawaii, served as a major in the National Guard in Iraq War II, stationed at the Balad air base north of Baghdad. This fact alone explains her “controversial” position on Syria. Gabbard had learned the difference between the shirts and the skins in this game. To this day, she supports the permanent drone and special operations wars against the bin Ladenites, broadly defined. But to support those same groups against a secular dictator — especially after the catastrophe of Iraq War II? Why, that would be crazy. This is a woman whose time in the war was spent in a medical support unit, attending to U.S. casualties killed and wounded by al Qaeda in Iraq and their allied groups. Was she supposed to forget their blood for someone else’s agenda?

This was the same position as that of Gen. Mike Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser. He had been the director for intelligence for the top-tier Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) under Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Iraq War II, as well as McChrystal’s right-hand man during the Afghanistan “surge.” Flynn is far more of an anti-Iran hawk than Gabbard. He even co-wrote a book with the neoconservative fanatic Michael Ledeen claiming they are the greatest threat in the world. But to support al Qaeda and associated groups against Assad in Syria, just to weaken Iran? No. Flynn did not only oppose the policy in principle. He was the commander of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. Flynn’s analysts warned in the summer of 2012 that “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” They said al Qaeda could create their own “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria, which was “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).” Flynn’s analysts further warned that ISIS even posed a “danger” to western Iraq:

"This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi [in western Iraq], and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters. ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory."

As Seymour Hersh reported, Gen. Flynn, insubordinate to Obama, started passing intelligence to Assad through Germany to be used to target al-Nusra fighters there. He was fired.

Bill Roggio and Thomas Joscelyn at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy’s Long War Journal are two more anti-Iran hawks who could never bring themselves to support groups who were working directly with and shared the goals of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s men just to spite Ayatollah Khamenei.

The CIA and Saudi Arabia’s “rebels” would often chant, “Massihiyeh ala Beirut, Allawiyeh ala Taboot!” (Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave!) Do those sound like moderate, democratic allies or psychopathic, genocidal bin Ladenites? One could follow a path of headless corpses to the answer.

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Scott Horton

@scotthortonshow

Dec 29, 2023

The Year is 2004.
-It is a year before PM Ariel Sharon "disengages" from Gaza
-Two years before Hamas wins a plurality in the election W. Bush forced them to hold
- Three years before Elliot Abrams' failed coup which led to Hamas kicking the PA out of Gaza and seizing "control" of the strip [under Israeli overlordship of course] and the institution of the full-scale siege and the beginning of the "mowing the grass" campaigns which began in 2008.

Sharon's advisor Arnon Soffer explained to the Jerusalem Post that the problem is the Palestinian Muslims and Christians are having too many babies. The Israelis don't want to let them have a state, but they want to kick them "out" of Israel, at least virtually by "disengaging" with them so as to reduce the number of Palestinians officially occupied by Israel by a couple million.

But Soffer recognized that

"when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. ...

The Jerusalem Post May 20, 2004

One on One:
It's the Demography, Stupid
An interview with geographer/demographer Arnon Soffer by Ruthie Blum

"I thought I'd never hear myself say this," says Haifa University geographer Arnon Soffer, without a trace of self-doubt, "but Israel will have to relinquish the Jordan Valley."

Soffer, a geostrategist widely seen as the originator of Ariel Sharon's separation plan, has never been one to pull proverbial punches. A prominent figure in the public debate on disengagement, Soffer has been a leading purveyor of apocalyptic predictions about Israel's demographic problem vis-a-vis the Arabs for more than three decades.

At 68, his stature and super-confident demeanor make him seem almost too large for his tiny office, which, he says, has become the venue for meetings with everyone from military brass to Knesset members.

"Many people said I was crazy," says Soffer, a glint of self-satisfaction in his eye. "But since then, they have come to realize I was right."

As the cabinet prepares to vote on the latest proposal next week, Soffer discussed with us the rationale behind the plan he conceived, the prospects for its execution, and challenges ahead of Israel in what he believes is an inherently hostile neighborhood.

Was the disengagement idea yours?

The day he was elected prime minister Sharon asked me to bring him a [disengagement] map I published in 2001. I have been a leading figure on this issue for years.

When did he first summon you?

We had met throughout the years many times. He knows me well, and requested the meeting.

You're considered a demographic prophet of doom. How did that happen?

In 1970, as a young geographer, I decided to focus on military geography - or geopolitics. Then, while working on the national masterplan for the north, I became obsessed with the problem of the Israeli Arabs that I saw developing in the Galilee. In retrospect, this had an effect on where the Jewish hilltop communities were later established. Many people said I was crazy. But since then, they have come to realize I was right.

In 1975, I began researching the problem more seriously. That's when I grasped that the issue is about demography. I began taking members of the defense establishment to the Galilee to show them what was happening. Slowly, I created awareness.

After that, I started bringing the same people to the Seamline. For the past 15 years, every week, once or twice a week, I accompany the highest-ranking defense officials there.

In 1988, I published a pamphlet in which I raised the question of whether Zionism is a dream or not.

The 1,000 copies of the pamphlet disappeared immediately. Arafat received a copy of it, and then, for the first time, said that the Palestinian womb is a biological weapon.

It was around that time that I began to say publicly that Israel's days were numbered. After researching the subject I concluded there was no way Oslo would work, and I told Bibi Netanyahu that Oslo had to be stopped immediately. Bibi read my material, and quoted it in his book, A Place Under the Sun, in a chapter on demography.

Speaking of Bibi, his attitude toward the plan has been ambiguous.

Bibi understands that we have to disengage - he has said so on more than one occasion. But Bibi is also a political animal, and he considers Sharon a rival. Unfortunately, politicians are often willing to sell out the country for their own personal considerations. This is true of the whole Knesset. Take the mass rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday night. Each party came there in order to get rid of someone else. That whole thing was ridiculous.

Didn't the rally express widespread support for disengagement?

Had it been a protest against the Likud's rejection of disengagement, even I would have participated. But there was Yossi Beilin who came to sell his wares. And Ami Ayalon. And Shimon Peres, who only cares about Shimon Peres.

What do you make of the Likud's rejection of its own leader's plan?

The Likud is filled with ignoramuses. A day doesn't go by without me running into a Likud member who can't tell you where Kalkilya is, or, for that matter, where the Green Line is.

I keep a map of the country from 1966 in my office, because it shows where the Green Line really is. I also have a map that shows how the Palestinians view the country. In it, the entire State of Israel is theirs. That's something the Israeli Left would like to forget.

How does the current fighting in Rafah relate to the disengagement plan?

Disengagement is one thing and the Philadelphi Route [the narrow road separating the Gaza Strip from Egypt] is another. Even after disengagement - which I have no doubt Prime Minister Sharon will pass within the next two or three weeks - Philadelphi will have to be guarded heavily, to keep Egyptian forces from deploying in Gaza.

The operation in Rafah is a welcome necessity. The terrorist gangs who rule there must be wiped out, and the tunnels blocked. The proposed moat is also a good idea, though technically and physically complicated.

Some oppose disengagement because they think that until the Palestinians accept Israel's existence, no solution can be viable.

They say something worse than that. People like Effi Eitam and Benny Elon say the Palestinians should set up their homeland in the Sinai. I asked Eitam at the Herzliya Conference whether he spoke to Hosni Mubarak about this plan and he said "not yet." I'm telling you, these people are out of their minds. The Right is insane for believing in transfer, because they're not reading the international map - I mean, look what happened in Kosovo - and the Left is insane for believing in plans like the Geneva Accord, which begins by saying "There will be mutual faith" between us and the Palestinians.

Is that why you opposed Oslo? Because it wasn't unilateral?

Yes. In 2001, I told a gathering of the country's economists that the country's demographic clock is ticking, and that unless we made courageous decisions, Israel's countdown would begin. I caused an earthquake.

Faisal Husseini said in response: "Israel will end up begging us to leave them one tiny strip of land."

I've been screaming this from the rooftops to anyone who will listen. Had you hung around the corridor outside my office during the last two months, you would have thought it was the Knesset, since so many politicians have been through here to listen to my demographic predictions.

Dan Meridor said I convinced him.

Six months ago, Ehud Olmert said "Professor Soffer convinced me; we can't escape this any more."

Sharon, as you see, also understands it.

What about your former Haifa University colleague Yuval Steinitz? He hasn't been won over.

Before he became a Knesset Member, we used to travel together to Tel Aviv every week for meetings on the subject. He understands it very well - who is he trying to kid that he doesn't understand it? He is familiar with every number and statistic that appears in my research.

In 1987, at a meeting organized by [former ambassador to the US] Zalman Shoval between myself, Shoval, [nuclear physicist and right-wing leader] Yuval Ne'eman and Ghandi [the late Rehavam Ze'evi], I began by presenting the demographic statistics. Ne'eman got up and said: "Don't believe a word of what Arnon Soffer is telling you: The Central Bureau of Statistics also belongs to the Left." At that moment, Ghandi got up and said: "I've known Arnon for many years. I accept every word of what he is saying. This country is not something we can forfeit, but people can be transferred." That's when he decided to found the Moledet Party.

Shulamit Aloni phoned, and my wife said to her: "You see, Arnon talks too much." Two months later, prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was introduced to me and said: "Oh, that's you who's bothering everybody with your statistics." So, I told him [that] he and Shulamit Aloni had something in common: my statistics bothered both of them.

So you ignored your critics and continued to "bother" them with your statistics.

As an academic, it's my job to publish my research. Look, these demographics are facts. The world is going insane. Islam is going wild. There is going to be a clash of civilizations. In the Middle East, there is going to be the highest Arab birth rate in the world. There cannot be peace. Let's view it from a Palestinian perspective. Let's pretend you and I are Arafat and Yasser Abed Rabbo looking at the map. Look at what the Jews are going to leave us for a state. They're going to leave us the Gaza Strip - which is no more than a crowded "prison." Then there's another "prison" called Hebron, and another, larger one called Samaria. Here there are 1.6 million, here 1 million, and here 1.5 million (soon to be 3 million). Each of these "prisons" is cut off from the rest. The Jews won't permit us to have an army, while their own powerful army will surround us. They won't permit us to have an air force, while their own air force will fly over us. They won't allow us the Right of Return.

Why should we make a deal with them? Why should we accept a state from them? Let's wait patiently for another 10 years, when the Jews will comprise a mere 40 percent of the country, while we will be 60 percent. The world won't allow a minority to rule over a majority, so Palestine will be ours. The fact that in the meantime Palestinian kids are being killed doesn't matter; what matters is that Palestine will be ours.

Isn't it logical for the Palestinians to see it this way?

So, while Abed Rabbo is off talking to Yossi Beilin, and Sari Nusseibeh is off talking to Ami Ayalon, time is passing and Palestinian women are getting pregnant. This, coupled with the flood of Arabs from other countries - 300,000 since 1948 - means they're going to finish us off.

This is why I keep saying that in order to save the State of Israel, we have to separate unilaterally, and as quickly as possible.

Sharon clearly agrees with you. Why, then, did he bring his plan to the Likud for a vote?

He and his two sons are about to be indicted. There is no other logical explanation. Then again, he's clearly going to pass the plan - in two to three weeks.

How will the region look the day after unilateral separation?

The Palestinians will bombard us with artillery fire - and we will have to retaliate. But at least the war will be at the fence - not in kindergartens in Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Will Israel be prepared to fight this war?

First of all, the fence is not built like the Berlin Wall. It's a fence that we will be guarding on either side. Instead of entering Gaza, the way we did last week, we will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won't allow their husbands to shoot Kassams, because they will know what's waiting for them.

Second of all, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.

While CNN has its cameras at the wall?

If we don't kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.

What will the end result of all this killing be?

The Palestinians will be forced to realize that demography is no longer significant, because we're here and they're there. And then they will begin to ask for "conflict management" talks - not that dirty word "peace." Peace is a word for believers, and I have no tolerance for believers - neither those who wear yarmulkes nor those who pray to the God of peace. There are those who make pilgrimages to the Baba Sali and the tombs in Hebron, and those who make pilgrimages to Kikar Rabin in Tel Aviv. Both are dangerous.

Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee "peace" - it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews; it guarantees the kind of safety that will return tourists to the country; and it guarantees one other important thing. Between 1948 and 1967, the fence was a fence, and 400,000 people left the West Bank voluntarily. This is what will happen after separation. If a Palestinian cannot come into Tel Aviv for work, he will look in Iraq, or Kuwait, or London. I believe that there will be movement out of the area.

Voluntary transfer?

Yes. And Gaza is going to be such a disaster that it will be beyond our capacity to help. There will have to be large-scale international aid. The US will have to pressure Egypt to cede land. And - though I never thought I'd hear myself say this - Israel will have to relinquish the Jordan Valley.

What about the Israeli Arabs? If they, too, cause a demographic problem, how will unilateral separation help?

The population increase of Israeli Arabs is going to present a major problem. But, if we no longer include the Palestinians, and we begin embracing immigrants, foreign workers, Druse, and Christians - who are now on our side, because they see what crazy radical Islam is - then there won't be an Israeli Arab problem.

While we're on the subject, you tell me what you need east Jerusalem for. Why do you need 300,000 Arabs as Israeli citizens? What's holy there? Anything that is holy we should annex. But all the area of Shuafat, Zur Baher... I just subtracted 200,000 - and suddenly there's no Arab problem. And, if that's not enough for you, one day we'll tell Umm el-Fahm that we'll take Ariel, and they'll take Umm el-Fahm and everybody will live in his own culture.

In other words, we have to act wisely, and this sometimes means using both a carrot and a stick. The greatest tragedy today is with the Beduin. And who's to blame for that? You and I are. Why do we have to give child allowances to a man who has tons of kids?

You were also a big alarmist on water. Wouldn't ceding the territories deprive us of crucial aquifers?

In any case, there's not enough fresh water for the two populations, so it makes no difference. We understand now that we have no choice but to increase desalination. Look, you probably drink coffee. How much does your cup of coffee cost you at your local cafe'? NIS 10. That's $2. Do you know how much water you can purify for $2? The Palestinians cannot afford this, but we can.

Why isn't Israel implementing large-scale water purification then?

Why? Because the country has gone nuts. Why aren't we purifying water? Because we have to. Why don't we deal with our garbage? Because we have to. Why aren't we taking care of education? Because we have to. But that's another type of problem altogether. You're asking me about geopolitics. Why we're turning into a Third World country is another question entirely.

Aren't you getting carried away? Israel is only 56, and has a pretty amazing track record.

We belong to the smartest and most talented nation in the world, with the most Nobel prize-winners. As such, we are capable of doing everything, and whatever we don't accomplish has to do with the system, not with the brainpower. If you knew how many Knesset members I've had in my office... I'm telling you, they're illiterate morons.

Some say that the aftermath of a post-separation war will be occupation all over again.

We won't occupy them again. We will enter on punishment missions. As I've said, the minute a missile flies, we will destroy the area.

You see no problem in relocating settlers?

I do see problems. That's why I'm not in favor of returning to the Green Line. Because we are not only faced with a Palestinian problem. We are also faced with a civil war. So I tread carefully and believe in making compromises.

Your attitude leaves no room for the unpredictable, like the massive immigration from the former Soviet Union. If you had made such predictions in 1917, Israel would never have been established.

If I had used my predictions in 1930, I would have been wrong, because I didn't anticipate the Holocaust. If I had done the same in 1950, I would have been wrong, because I didn't anticipate the Six Day War. If I had done it in 1970, I would have been wrong, because I didn't know the Soviet Union would fall. A mensch tracht, unt Got lacht (Men make plans and God laughs). Having said that, it is nevertheless irresponsible not to make plans, to ignore realities. As I told the chief rabbi: "In 1939, you waited for God and he didn't show up."

Ruthie Blum
@RamzyBaroud @AliAbunimah @martyrmade @MaxBlumenthal @aaronjmate @GarethPorter @DecampDave @KimIversenShow @esaagar @krystalball @WVanwagenen @KelleyBVlahos

The original seems to have gone down the memory hole, even on the wayback machine, but Soffer returned to discuss the issue and previous article with the author, including the worst quotes from the time before, here: jpost.com/features/i-did…

@caitoz

Read 4 tweets

Scott Horton

@scotthortonshow

Nov 10, 2023

Here's me explaining the terror wars. Directed by @gcantavero
Part 1: Carter

Part 2: Reagan

Part 3: George Bush Sr.

Read 14 tweets

Scott Horton

@scotthortonshow

Oct 10, 2023

The Israeli Regime Likes It This Way Starter Pack:

Wall Street Journal:

How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas By Andrew Higgins
archive.ph/iPO3z

UPI:

Israel gave major to aid to Hamas by Richard Sale
upi.com/Archives/2001/…

https://twitter.com/scotthortonshow/status/1711695318746595359

https://twitter.com/scotthortonshow/status/1711695318746595359

Read 11 tweets

Scott Horton

@scotthortonshow

Jul 28, 2023

twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

After @RobertKennedyJr attacked @rogerwaters I attempted to send him this memo through his campaign manager @Dennis_Kucinich:

Sir,
I hope this isn't too presumptuous of me, but I only mean to assist you in dealing with the issue of Israel-Palestine.

I think you are in desperate… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

If I had anticipated he would get caught on a phone cam speculating about Jewish immunity to the germ and would then go on this crazy bender against Iran and renewed bullshit about the Palestinians to try to make up for it like this, I guess I would have just dropped it.

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1684851741844525056

Once someone has revealed they have no dignity, it's pretty hard to go back to pretending otherwise.

https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1684851741844525056

Read 4 tweets

Scott Horton

@scotthortonshow

Mar 23, 2023

@JosephHickman0

***Ron DeSantis took credit for the idea to force-feed hunger striking Guantanamo prisoners; was in on the cover-up when CIA _murdered_ three men at Camp No, aka Penny Lane, which the hero @JosephHickman0 exposed.*** archive.is/36IaS

https://twitter.com/DeFede/status/1030569121916899328?s=20

Here he is on video bragging about suggesting they force-feed hunger striking Guantanamo prisoners.

https://twitter.com/DeFede/status/1030569121916899328?s=20

He denies he ordered it, but that was not the accusation. thehill.com/blogs/blog-bri…

Read 21 tweets

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