How The West Talks About Repression In Syria; Abu Mohammad al-Jolani: Terrorist Or Noble Rebel?; Aaron Maté On U.S. Actions In Syria
The West celebrates Assad's ouster while embracing dictators from countries friendly to the U.S. (like Egypt). Then: Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was once a wanted terrorist; is he now a noble rebel? Plus: Aaron Maté discusses U.S. actions in Syria.
---
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Bashar al-Assad, who has ruled Syria for the last 24 years, was forced out of the country over the weekend by anti-government rebels who, with remarkable speed, advanced from their stronghold in the northwest all the way to the capital in Damascus.
Assad fled the Middle Eastern capital for Russia He and his family have been given safe refuge and thus the long time goal of major powers including the US, Israel and Turkey has finally come to fruition.
As both Tehran and Moscow have lost a key ally in the region leaving a power vacuum in Syria.
For those other countries and all sorts of other factions in the country itself.
Now the situation on the ground, meaning who exactly these factions are, who is supporting them and arming them, what their real goals are, all that is complex and unclear.
But what is not complex And most definitely not unclear is American and Western discourse about the events in Syria.
We all are rejoicing this narrative holds because we hate tyranny and we hate repression.
We love freedom.
Because Assad was a brutal and violent dictator, we in the West celebrate for the Syrian people that they are finally free and joyous.
We fought to oust Assad precisely because we really dislike repressive leaders and because we yearn for the liberation of Syrians everywhere.
This is always the highly self-serving and self-flattering narrative to which we are subjected in the face of any major geopolitical events.
And there is undoubtedly a compelling emotional appeal to it, just as there was for similar scripts about how devoted we were to liberating the Vietnamese or the Iraqis or the Afghans or the Libyans and even the Ukrainians.
But anyone paying even minimal attention to political reality knows that this script is pure fairy tale.
The U.S. and its Western allies are not remotely opposed to tyranny and oppression.
In fact, we love tyranny, which is why we spend so much time and money installing tyrants all over the world and then doing everything possible to prop them up.
Even when opposed to and trying to crush a pro-democratic citizen movement, as we are doing right this very minute for states at least as brutal and autocratic as Assad ever was, including the butchers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our close allies and partners.
Now, there's a lot to say about U.S. policy towards Syria and Western discourse about it, the most valuable of which is devoted to deconstructing the propaganda and attempt to understand the real geo-strategy involved.
administration, Mohammed al-Jolani, has long been wanted by the United States, in fact, still is wanted by the United States government as an al-Qaeda terrorist.
And his group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is still classified as a terrorist group by the U.S. government, the U.K. government, and other U.S. countries as well.
All of that has changed this week for reasons worth examining.
And finally, in just a bit, we will speak to the independent journalist, Aaron Maté, who has reported intensively on the U.S. and Western policy in Syria for many years.
This is undoubtedly, no doubt about it, a historic and transformative event in that region.
But it really remains to be seen what consequences there will be and who ultimately will benefit most.
And it's hard to put your money, if you're being realistic, on the Syrian people.
Before we get to all that, a few programming notes.
First of all, we are encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it will work on your smart TV, on your telephone, and various other apparatuses, including...
Your Xbox.
And if you do that, it means that you can follow the programs you most like to watch here on the platform.
And once you do that, if you activate notifications, which we hope you will, it means the minute any of those programs that you like and follow begin broadcasting live on this platform, you'll be immediately notified by email.
You can just click on the link and start watching the show as soon as it begins.
No waiting around.
No having to guess.
It really helps you navigate the shows most.
It helps the live viewing numbers of every program on Rumble and therefore the free speech cause of Rumble itself.
As another reminder, system update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all the major podcasting platforms.
So if you rate, review, and follow the show, it really helps spread the visibility of the program.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals where we have our live interactive after show.
Those after shows are available only for members of our Locals community.
So if you'd like to join, it gives you access not just to those after shows, but to multiple interactive features.
We have a lot of exclusive original content we publish there.
And most of all, it's the platform, the community, on which we most rely to support and enable the independent journalism that we do here every night.
Simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right after this message.
It really is time to make mornings great again.
If your coffee isn't fueling your fight for health and freedom, it's time for an upgrade.
1775 Vitality Coffee isn't just coffee.
It helps Rumble defend free speech because it supports Rumble as well.
With Lion's Mane, Reishi, Cordyceps, Shaga, and Turkey Tail Mushrooms, it's coffee that doesn't just wake you up, it keeps you sharp.
Lion's Mane and Reishi supercharge your focus.
Cordyceps delivers energy without the crash.
And their hand-picked Bolivian beans deliver bold flavor that corporate coffee can't touch.
No fillers, no hidden agendas, just coffee that works as hard as you do.
It's proudly backed by Rumble.
This isn't coffee for the conformists.
It's coffee for the bold, the free, and the rebellious.
You can head to 7075coffee.com.
Use the promo code GLEN. For 15% off to make mornings great again with coffee that stands for bold flavor, uncompromising quality, and the Freedom Rumble fights for every day.
That's 1775coffee.com/Glenn.
The reason propaganda works is because it's effective.
And the reason it's effective is because it is a science that has been developed over many decades using all sorts of different fields of discipline but focused most on the ways in which our thought processes work, our emotions can be triggered, how our brains are organized to accept and prioritize certain kinds of information.
I remember very well, and if you go back and look at the shows we did in the first couple of weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was very obvious that the attempt to make Americans want to support this war was not just going to succeed, but to succeed easily.
If you inundate Americans who largely are wanting to do good things, wanting to believe that they're supporting good policies, benevolent policies that are noble and moral— And you drown them in images of old Ukrainian women, grandmothers who are being bombed, who are weeping, who are crying, as happened.
If you constantly tell the public over and over in every medium you can find through every messaging outlet that you have, That this is a completely unprovoked war.
That Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler.
That he's trying to exterminate Ukraine the way Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews.
And that it's our moral duty to defend democracy and stand up against autocracy.
And you combine that with very emotional images of people dying and Ukrainians crying out for their freedom.
Of course it's going to manipulate a lot of people to believe that there's an element of truth to it.
Ukrainians really were and still are angry about and suffering from the invasion of their country.
And so if you only focus on that small part of it, if you only use the emotional triggers that really do work on our brains, if you exclude most of the story, it'll be almost impossible for Americans drowning in these emotional images, these narratives, And they just don't have time to take four hours, five hours every day and kind of deconstruct the propaganda they're being fed.
It's very, very difficult for them to do anything but go along with it.
And that's why the history in the United States over the last seven or eight decades is that every time there's a new war, 60 or 70 percent of Americans support it at the beginning.
And then after some amount of time, could be months, could be a couple of years, could be five years or 10 years, they come to view the war as not just unjust, but as destructive and come to regret or even deny their original support.
And so you would think, well, at some point, Americans are going to start to realize that, oh, every time there's a new war, I'm tricked into supporting it.
I'm told, oh, Saddam Hussein is this evil, uniquely heinous dictator, and we need to go free and liberate the Iraqi people from him.
And then I'm told the same thing about Gaddafi and the Taliban.
And Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin or the North Vietnamese.
And then every time I realize, even if that might be true, the war wasn't about that.
Or the war didn't do any good.
You would think at some point they would say, I'm not going to be tricked by this anymore.
I remember that every time I'm tricked into supporting a war at the beginning through emotional appeals, I end up regretting it.
The problem is that emotional appeals are just that.
They're emotional.
They override our rational faculties.
That is what Propaganda is designed to do.
And the fact that it's propaganda doesn't mean there's not an element of truth to it.
In fact, the best propaganda will take an element of truth from it and use it.
It'll just force you to look at it in a way that's out of context or ignore any other information that would give you the real picture of what has happened and what is likely to come.
And that's exactly what is now happening when it comes to the toppling of the government in Syria led by Bashar al-Assad since 2000. The only thing we're being told in the West over and over and over again is that Assad was a brutal dictator.
He was repressive and violent towards Syrians.
Syrians are thrilled in large part that their dictator is gone.
And you can't say that's untrue.
You can go and talk to Syrians in Syria, in every region in Syria, other than perhaps Assad strongholds where there are religious minorities who are petrified and who always felt protected by him.
But other than that, you can go to pretty much any region in Syria, any part of the region in the Middle East, Syrian immigrants throughout the West.
And they're all going to tell you roughly the same thing, that it's true that Bashar al-Assad and his father before him was a heinous dictator.
And we feel happy to see him go.
We feel happy to watch the people in those prisons being liberated.
And when you only focus on that emotion, which is very strong and very genuine, it will, by design, prevent you from asking, how did we get to this point?
Who drove us to this point?
With what motives?
It wasn't just the Syrian people organically rising up against a very well-armed and well-funded government and toppling them.
Obviously, they were backed by a lot of foreign influences, a lot of great powers with money and arms who have motives quite different than we want to bring freedom to the Syrian people.
Even if driving Assad out makes them feel as though that's what they've acquired.
But it also can blind you to what's coming.
What are the real consequences of this?
Not just for the region or for our strategic interests, but for the Syrian people whose freedom we're celebrating.
Is this freedom likely to remain?
Are they likely to feel joyous?
Will Syrian refugees who have come to Europe and the United States and other places in the world over the past 10 years be eager to return because they trust that what's coming is actually something that will enable their society to flourish?
All of that is extremely doubtful when you remove yourself from the understandable emotion of Syrians in particular about the toppling of Assad.
And yet that's all the Western narrative in mainstream media outlets and other discourse centers are trying to push.
Just that single emotion, similar to if you go back to the first month or two in 2022, February and March, that's all you heard about when it came to Russia.
No nuance whatsoever.
Nothing like what we hear now.
It was all, we have to go and defend the feisty Ukrainians and protect their democracy from this vicious dictator.
And there was no attempt to rationally analyze it.
And that's true of every other war that I just referenced.
So just to give you a taste, here from the New York Times today, this is how they're describing it.
Title in the headline, Al-Assad toppled by Syrian rebels after a 13-year war.
Citizens erupt in joy, tempered by loss.
Quote, for nearly all the years that the al-Assad family ruled Syria, silence reigned.
No one spoke freely, fearful of who might hear.
Everyone knew the consequences of dissent, disappearance into government prisons, from which few ever returned.
But as Saturday turned to Sunday, the first day in more than five decades that dawn broke without an al-Assad in the presidential palace, the streets were allowed with joy.
Nonstop celebratory gunfire crackled around Damascus.
The capital, like so many firework displays, crowds shouted in the squares.
Rebel fighters celebrated from atop their trucks.
It had been 13 years since those opposed to President Bashar al-Assad first hoped to follow revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
By overthrowing their autocratic leader.
Let's remember those three examples that the New York Times is telling you to think about.
Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, because we're about to cover those where they say they too were able to overthrow their autocratic leader.
13 years of bloodshed and death, of homes and loved ones lost, of lives abandoned and ruptured.
Mr. al-Assad's opponents had to wait until Sunday, years after most Syrians had given up on ever witnessing such moments at home.
Scenes familiar from past Arab-strang revolts were playing out with unthinkable suddenness in Damascus.
State television went from trumpeting Mr. Assad's strong defenses on Saturday to broadcasting an announcement by a group of nine rebels on Sunday.
Quote, If you're hearing that,
if you're reading that message, if you're hearing that on television, as you undoubtedly are if you live in the West, as you're hearing actual real Assyrians expressing their genuine joy at Assad leaving, of course you're going to be inclined to connect to that emotion.
Those are real emotions.
And all the questions that obviously linger, why was the U.S. so eager to drive out Assad?
It probably wasn't because he's dictatorial, given how much the U.S. loves other dictators, worse dictators, and places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, or the U.K. arms them.
What other countries like Israel were involved?
Are they actually interested in freeing and liberating the Syrian people and bringing them democracy and opportunities of plurality?
Or is that what Turkey's aims are?
And then who are these rebel leaders who are so triumphantly marching Damascus?
What are their views about how Syria should be run?
And what does that mean for the freedom and the prosperity and the dissent of the Syrian people?
Joe Biden stood up this weekend somehow and he also read a teleprompter message prepared about the ouster of Bashar al-Assad and spoke very self-praisingly and was very aggressive in disseminating this prepared speech as well.
Listen to this.
What happened in the Middle East?
After 13 years of civil war in Syria, More than half a century of brutal authoritarian rule by Bashar Assad and his father before him.
Rebel forces have forced Assad to resign his office and flee the country.
We're not sure where he is, but there's word that he's in Moscow.
At long last, the Assad regime has fallen.
This regime brutalized and tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians.
The fall of the regime is a fundamental act of justice.
It's a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for the proud country.
It's also a moment of risk and uncertainty.
As we all turn to the question of what comes next, the United States will work with our partners and the stakeholders in Syria to help them seize an opportunity to manage the risks.
I mean, if that sounds familiar, it's because it should.
It's the exact sort of same thing that we heard after we were told that we had vanquished the Taliban from Afghanistan, the Viet Cong from South Vietnam, Saddam Hussein from Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi from Libya.
It's exactly the same script.
Whoever the president was at the time said all of this.
We vanquish the tyrant.
We're so grateful to have brought freedom to the people of that country.
We stand with them.
This is what the United States is for.
And we will help them manage the aftermath to ensure that their society remains stable and free.
I guess this is happening in places like Iraq and Libya and Egypt.
Here was the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who, as coincidence would have it, bad luck would have it, was forced to give a speech about the glories of freedom and battling autocracy while he was on a trip to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Before he went to Riyadh today, he spoke yesterday from Dubai, where he was meeting with the close U.S. and British allies, the dictators and autocrats of the United Arab Emirates.
And here's what he had to say while speaking from the bastion of freedom known as the UAE. Well, it's very early days at the moment.
We do need a political solution to this, and that's what we're talking to regional allies about.
It is a good thing that Assad has gone, a very good thing for the Syrian people.
What we must also ensure as we go through this, the rejection of terrorism and violence, and that civilians are protected, minorities are protected, and that can only be through a political process.
That's what we're talking to allies in the region about at the moment.
So just to be clear, when he says we're talking to allies in the region about the importance of protecting the rights of religious minorities and pluralities, among the allies in the region that he's talking to about this are people like Mohammed bin Salman, the dictator of Saudi Arabia.
There you see Keir Starmer with him today, because if you want to Make sure that a country guarantees dissent and plurality and the rights of religious minorities and doesn't face autocracy and repression.
I know personally, the first thing I would want to do is I would want to fly to Dubai, as we just showed you Keir Starmer doing there, speaking about the evils of the Assad regime while standing in front of an Emirati flag.
And then I would immediately fly to Riyadh.
I'd say, I need to meet with the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
I need to ensure his efforts And what I know he's as dedicated to as I am, which is ensuring that plurality reigns, that people have freedom to dissent, that religious minorities are protected.
He's a very long history, very long and noble history of devoting himself to all these values.
Saudi Arabia is known around the world as the beacon of plurality and dissent and freedom.
And so if you're Keir Starmer and...
You know it's a little bit uncomfortable that you have to stand up in the United Arab Emirates as you're there to sell weapons to the Emiratis and pledge full cooperation and support to extend the British Emirati Alliance where you have to give a speech denouncing autocracy and tyranny.
Yeah, at least get out of there and fly to Riyadh as soon as possible, meet with Mohammed bin Salman and the rest of the Saudis, because there at least it's a little bit more comfortable to do so.
Now, as I said, in the event that this sounds familiar, it's because it really should.
Here was a I want to show you what was the news report that was said after the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi, which I believe we have.
Let me just see here.
Let's show this first.
This is a Euronews report.
This is your new video report right after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, which under President Obama, as he told us, we were also doing because we wanted to protect the Libyan people from violent repression and autocracy.
And here is the kind of narrative that we were subjected to after we so proudly went to Libya to save the Libyans from their dictator.
NTC forces insert...
After many weeks of fighting, the former rebels celebrate their victory.
But after a constant bombardment by land and air, the city lays in ruins.
This ordinary drainage pipe has now taken on a greater significance as people come from miles around to see the final resting place of Colonel Gaddafi.
Meanwhile, people in Tripoli are also happy to see the back of the dictator.
If we caught him alive and hanged him like Saddam Hussein, we would have had another just like him.
But since we killed him, just like a corpse, this is a glorious day.
With people celebrating and singing in the streets of Tripoli, people are happy in the knowledge that after 42 years they're finally free from tyranny.
The Libyan people are hoping for a quick recovery and see a bright future ahead of them.
*Pain* - Yay!
Yeah, as it turned out, the Libyan people did not have a quick road of recovery and a bright future ahead of them.
They live in a country now torn by all sorts of strife, sectarian conflict, a return of slavery and anarchy in many places, created a crisis so severe that it produced a migrant outflow from Libya, people dying across the Mediterranean Sea, trying to get to Europe, dying in Europe, or ending up in Europe, creating an immigration crisis there as well.
It destroyed Libya.
But it's the same exact images, the same exact narrative read over it.
Look at these people.
They're out celebrating.
They're so grateful for us for what we've done.
They're so glad to be free of their dictator.
Here was how the quote-unquote liberation of Baghdad by the United States and the UK was depicted barely a month after that war began here on April 9th of 2003 from TRT World, just to give you a sense, a little bit taste for how that war was presented as well.
You see a big toppling of a Saddam statue in the middle of Baghdad became very iconic.
Who knows how many people were there, who knows who they were, but we were told that this represented the fact that Iraqis were so grateful for our invasion, for our commitment to their freedom, because it showed how they were so happy to be rid of their dictator, just like the people of Libya were, and now just like the people of Syria are.
And in each of these instances, the same exact thing happens.
We'll get to what happened in Egypt as well.
In some ways it was a lot worse.
So it doesn't mean that the joy of the Syrians who were repressed by Assad is illegitimate or that you should, I don't know, scorn it or lack empathy for it.
It's just that if that's what you focus on, if that's what you're shown, and that's all you decide that you are going to use to understand these events, you're going to end up with an extremely Incomplete and probably misguided view of how to understand these events is historical event after historical event very similar to this one proves there's probably not a country in the world literally where you would be unable to find a faction of people both inside
that country and outside of the country people who came from that country and now live elsewhere who would celebrate if the leader of the country were deposed Some countries might have fewer of those people, other countries might have a lot, but you can always, in any country, you can go to Ukraine right now and find people saying how they wish they were ruled by Moscow and not by Kiev.
And if the media wanted to, they could just show people all day in Ukraine saying we were repressed by the Zelensky government, our fundamental rights were violated, we were told we couldn't even speak our language or practice our culture.
We were in prison for it.
He's a tyrant.
And we're so grateful to Moscow for having entered Ukraine and protected us and are trying to fight for our rights.
You could show that every single day and get Americans to think exactly the opposite if you wanted based on those kinds of emotional pictures.
But, of course, we never hear from the Russian-speaking ethnic Russians in the eastern part of Ukraine who believe that or in Crimea because that's not the narrative the media wants to present.
But you could.
And do so with equal efficacy.
Donald Trump responded to the events over the weekend right as the rebels were basically essentially headed toward Baghdad.
By this point, this is December 7th, so this is Saturday.
So it was clear essentially that they had totally taken over most of the country and were on their way to Baghdad.
And here's how Trump responded.
He said, quote, This is where former President Obama refused to honor his commitment
of protecting the red line in the sand and all hell broke out with Russia stepping in.
But now they are like possibly Assad himself being forced out and it may actually be the best thing that could happen to them.
There was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia other than to make Obama look really stupid.
In any event, Syria is a mess but is not our friend and the United States should have nothing to do with it.
This is not our fight.
Let it play out.
Do not get involved.
Now, it is odd to hear Trump criticizing Obama for having declared a red line in Syria, which he did.
He said the use of chemical weapons by Assad against the anti-government fighters would be a red line that would force the United States to get involved.
There's controversy about whether that actually happened.
Our guest, who you're about to hear from, Aaron Maté, insists that it didn't, but certainly most of the West insisted that it did.
Obama insisted that it did.
That was the official position of the U.S. government, and yet Obama did nothing in response to this red line.
But in 2016, Trump ran on a platform somewhat congruent to what he said here.
Which was being critical of both Republicans and Democrats for wanting to be involved in Syria.
Remember the Obama administration is who unleashed a dirty war by the CIA to spend a billion dollars a year sending weapons and operatives fighting alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS in order to remove Assad and it failed.
It created utter chaos and violence and misery for that country.
You know, Trump's critique in 2016 is, why are we involved in Syria?
How is it our business who governs Syria?
In fact, we can work with Assad and the Russians, as we've been doing, to bomb what we consider to be terrorist targets in Syria.
That's our only interest in Syria, to bomb terrorist targets there.
And in that case, Assad and the Russians are our allies.
So what interest do we have?
In removing Bashar al-Assad.
That was Trump's critique.
Not just about Syria, but about regime change wars like it, including in Libya.
So, when Trump says, this is not our involvement, we're not going to get involved, in some ways it is consistent with everything that he had been saying for a long time because his view is, whoever ends up ruling Syria, that's not up to us.
We don't have any interest in Syria that would force it to do that.
Now, there are about 900 US troops stationed in Syria, and Trump tried to remove those, was kind of sabotaged by his own military from doing so.
It'll be clear whether he wants to remove those.
But this position, what role do we have to play in Syria, is very consistent with what he's been saying for eight years.
It's a reason why the foreign policy community hates him, because they believe we have a lot of interest in countries like Syria in determining who controls them.
But it's a bit like shutting the barn door.
Because the fact is that the U.S. has been heavily involved in Syria, including arming and funding these rebels, many of whom are considered to be, and are in fact, loyalists of al-Qaeda and other groups in the United States seems to be terrorist organizations.
Now, it's very clear that we have no idea what really is likely to come next in Syria.
Who is going to govern Syria?
Under what principles?
Will there actually be a centralized power governing Syria from Damascus?
Will it break out into factional wars, civil wars, the kind we saw in Libya?
Here from the Wall Street Journal today.
Assad's rule collapses and Syria raising concerns of a vacuum.
Quote, Abu Muhammad al-Jawwali, who is the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, one of the largest rebel groups that mounted the offensive against Assad, arrived in Damascus.
The campaign that led to the Assad regime's downfall was kicked off by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a U.S.-designated terrorist group led by Jawani that previously had links to the Islamic State, to ISIS, and al-Qaeda.
Jawani has cut those ties and pledged to protect Syria's religious and ethnic diversity, but it is unclear to what extent his transformation is genuine.
So, this former ISIS leader, ISIS militant al-Qaeda leader, who spent years in a U.S. prison in Iraq, in Abu Ghraib, You can go on the U.S. government's site right now, as we're going to show you, and they still offer a $10 million reward for any information leading to the detection of where he is.
There's still a $10 million reward.
The U.S. government still considers his group a terrorist organization, nonetheless, stood up.
The media spent a full week rehabilitating him as this moderate, moderate Al-Qaeda militant, moderate ISIS militant with whom he can do business.
He loves diversity now.
He believes in the rights of minorities, of religious minorities.
He's almost kind of woke, in fact.
Kind of like Ukraine, we were told, like, oh, they love LGBT. They love their LGBT troops.
Ukraine loves LGBT troops.
Like Israel, too, loves their LGBT troops.
It's the way in which we can take anybody, including the Azov Battalion, who we were told for 10 years is an actual neo-Nazi group that poses the biggest threat to Ukraine, and now they're our heroes, our war heroes.
The way these people can be rehabilitated on a dime instantly, no matter what was said previously to them, is really a testament to the power of propaganda.
Now, speaking of propaganda, Maybe instinctively one might think, well, why would Israel be happy with this?
Why would Israel be happy that they are now bordering a country that is about to be governed by Al-Qaeda and ISIS adherents or Islamic radicals?
Isn't that who Israel hates?
But of course, Israel hated Assad even more since he was allied with the Iranians.
Syria became the way in which the Iranians got missiles and other weapons to Hezbollah.
And the Israelis have wanted Assad gone for a long time, as have the Americans.
And not only did Netanyahu stand up and applaud this and take credit for it, The Israelis are already taking full advantage of the situation in Syria.
From the Washington Post earlier today, Israeli troops move swiftly into Syrian territory after a rebel takeover.
Quote, Arab countries criticized the incursion as an illegal occupation and warned that it could further destabilize Syria as a patchwork of rebel groups tried to reimpose civic order after the overthrow of Assad.
HDS, which is Tawani's group, the Islamist rebel group that led the shock offensive, has yet to publicly comment on the situation.
Isn't that kind of odd?
You have these Islamic radicals who...
Actually pledged allegiance to ISIS and Al-Qaeda and related groups that the United States considers to be terrorist organizations.
And they're now in control of Syria, and they don't seem to mind at all that the IDF is just marching through the southern part of their country, taking crucial outposts that had never belonged to the Israelis, even with the occupation of the Golan Heights.
They don't really seem to have a word to say about it.
Here's the cradle reporting on the beginning of the rally incursions yesterday, and there were even more today.
So let's remember about this question that we'll see right now.
It's a picture of the Israeli army that entered the area of Syria to enter some areas of the region where the Israeli army was also in the area of the region of the Ufania, Khunaitra, Hamedia, and Qahitania in the region.
I don't know why they didn't have the English translation, but essentially it was documenting how the IDF had entered Syrian territory that they had never previously occupied, and earlier today they did so even more by seizing the largest mountain, the highest point in all of Syria, and it's about 40 kilometers from the capital in Damascus, and yet it does seem very odd how The new rulers of Syria have very little to say about this.
Now, one question that is an obvious one to ask is if the United States really believes that Bashar al-Assad is this war criminal, he used chemical weapons against his own people, he did all these horrible, repressive things.
This is something that the International Criminal Court is supposed to prosecute, supposed to prosecute war criminals.
The problem for the U.S. government, of course, is that the ICC just issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Secretary Yoel Gallant, who's in New York right now, obviously not being arrested, because the U.S. has announced that it doesn't regard the ICC warrant as valid.
So reporters today asked Matthew Miller about whether Assad should be similarly prosecuted by the ICC, and this is the hilarity that ensued.
The President said yesterday that the Assad regime or Assad himself should be held accountable.
Will you support his application to stand in front of the ICC as a war criminal who committed crimes against humanity?
So we support the work of the ICC. I know that obviously we have disagreed with their...
Hold on.
Hold on.
Let me address that.
You support the work of the ICC until they do something about it.
Let me just answer the question.
You know, Matt, let me answer the question.
I mean, obviously, when the United States government stands up and says, we support the work of the ICC, we absolutely want them to investigate war criminals like Assad, even these reporters, and Matt Lee is a great reporter from AP. He's in that room every day, and he doesn't let anything go.
In terms of this endless, obvious double standard and sanctimony from the State Department.
But, I mean, even these journalists, not just Matt Lee, but all of them just couldn't contain themselves listening to that because they had spent the last month hearing why the ICC was an invalid body, why they're...
Arrest warrants for Hamas leaders and also for Israeli leaders like Golan and Netanyahu was invalid.
And of course, now that it's a U.S. enemy, the U.S. is all behind the ICC again, just like they were when the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin.
Now, I just want to remind you of something that...
General Wesley Clark said—maybe some of you don't remember him, but he was—he ran for president in 2008 as a Democrat.
He was considered to be one of those enlightened generals of the kind that Obama loved.
And in 2007, he gave a speech at a think tank in which he made a remarkable— Disclosure about what he saw inside the Pentagon immediately following September 11th.
Here's how he described it.
About 10 days after 9-11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me.
And one of the generals called me and he said, sir, you got to come in and talk to me a second.
I said, well, you're too busy.
He said, no, no.
He says, We've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq.
This was on or about the 20th of September.
I said, we're going to war with Iraq.
Why?
He said, I don't know.
He said, I guess they don't know what else to do.
So, I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to Al-Qaeda?
He said, no, no.
He says, there's nothing new that way.
They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
He said, I guess it's like, we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.
And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
So, I came back to see him a few weeks later.
And by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meaning the Secretary of Defense's office today, and he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
I mean, this was the defining doctrine in Washington.
And Professor Jeffrey Sachs went on with Piers Morgan, described a book Netanyahu had written in 1995 in which he laid out the need for the United States, not Israel, of course, but the United States, to change those governments, the governments in those seven countries, including Iraq and Libya and Syria and Sudan and Somalia and Lebanon.
And the United States has now gone right down the list, exactly the list of those seven countries that Wesley Clark laid out.
It was neocon doctrine in the late 1990s, Bill Kristol and Victoria Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, and then Paul Wolfowitz, who ended up in the Bush-Cheney administration and the Don Rumsfeld Pentagon, who Wesley Clark mentioned this was their plan for their broader vision.
It was called Project for a New American Century, and the idea was we're going to go and radically transform the Middle East by changing the governments of these seven countries.
And the only one left on the list whose government we have not changed is Iran.
And the number one goal by far of Miriam Adelson, who donated $100 million to the Trump campaign, of Benjamin Netanyahu, of all the neocons who surround Donald Trump.
People like Mark Rubio and many others, the number one goal is to, now that they took out Assad, is to go to Iran, the big prize, and change the government of Iran.
This is the long-standing neoconservative doctrine that has been in the United States for 20, 25 years, as Wesley Clark laid out, and 9-11 was immediately seized upon as the way in which they could do that.
Now, I mentioned earlier this incredible transformation of how Al-Ghalani has talked about and how his group has talked about, and it just shows you how flexible and empty this phrase terrorist is.
I mean, the United States, of course, famously or notoriously supported the predecessor of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen, in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan because we wanted to arm them, bring them from Saudi Arabia to fight against the Russian invaders, and we did.
And we brought them to the U.S. We brought them to the Oval Office.
We heralded them as freedom fighters.
The same people who became Al-Qaeda shortly thereafter.
And then when they turned against the United States, they suddenly became terrorists.
Now that's happening in reverse.
Now that we need these Al-Qaeda and ISIS militants.
This terrorist who's leading the rebellion against Assad, we need to turn him into a glamorous or at least a acceptable figure, even though he's on the terrorist list as well.
Here from CNN, doing its job as always in helping the government from December 6th on Friday, quote, how Syria's rebel leader went from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing revolutionary.
Ahmed al-Shara, an Islamist militant in his late 20s, moved back to Syria from Iraq in 2011 with six men and a monthly stipend of $50,000 from Abu al-Baghdadi, who would go on to become the world's most wanted terrorist as the head of ISIS. His mission was to establish al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.
He's better known by his nom de guerre, the war name Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.
Born in the Saudi capital of Riyadh to Syrian parents from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and raised in Damascus, Jolani said in an interview with PBS in 2021, That he was galvanized by the Second Palestinian Intifada against Israel in the early 2000s and went on to become a jihadist in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion.
His deep knowledge of Syria caught the attention of his commanders in Iraq as they were looking to expand their foothold in Syria during the country's uprising.
Over the years, his influence grew despite his identity being kept under wraps.
During television interviews, he never faced the camera directly and always covered his face in public appearances.
His public debut was in a 2016 video where he announced a split from al-Qaeda to create what he said was a Syria-focused anti-regime front and other local factions.
Which later, it was originally the Front for the Conquest of the Levant and then changed its name to HTS, or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.
Quote, this new formation has no relation to any external party, he said at the time.
In the years that followed, Jelani replaced his Islamist camouflage attire for a Western-style blazer and shirt, established a semi-technocratic government, which his group held control over and promoted himself as a viable partner in regional and Western efforts to curb Iran's influence in which his group held control over and promoted himself as a viable partner He concluded operations against ISIS, including the 2023 high-profile killing of an ISIS leader.
But I believe that everyone in life goes through phases and experiences.
As you grow, you learn, and you continue to learn until the very last day of your life.
He said when CNN asked about his transformation, transformation from an al-Qaeda and ISIS militant, the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria, to a blazer-wearing moderate who loves plurality and the right of dissent, and who has been obviously trained to appeal to a Western and who has been obviously trained to appeal to a Western audience speaking to Western He said when CNN asked about his transformation, transformation from an al-Qaeda and ISIS militant, the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria, to a blazer-wearing moderate who loves plurality and the right of dissent and who has been obviously trained to appeal to a Western audience to a blazer-wearing moderate who loves plurality and the right of dissent and who And already the wheels are in motion to transform him officially from Sky News.
This is how they said it earlier today.
The Syrian rebel group, HTS, could be removed from the UK's banned terrorist organization list.
It is currently considered an alternative name for al-Qaeda under the UK's list of prescribed terrorist organizations, but its leader has sought to distance itself from the Islamist militants.
And right on the State Department page, you can go and look right now, they have a page, a section of their website for rewards for wanted terrorists.
Where they say, if you give us any non-public information that leads to his discovery, we will give you, in this case, up to a $10 million reward.
And there you see it, Mohammed al-Jawani.
In the Near East.
Who knows where he is?
North Africa and the Middle East.
You can call the US government if you know where he is and get a $10 million reward.
I think everyone now knows where he is because he's now going to be the key Western partner governing Syria.
And that's why he's been transformed from a camouflage wearing ISIS militant into a blazer wearing militant who promises to moderate, who promises to love Israel, who doesn't speak up when Israel invades Syrian territory.
We were told for 15 years that al-Qaeda and an ISIS were the greatest threats in our history, greatest existential threats that we had to fundamentally re-transform our government, our foreign policy, dismantle our shival liberties in the name of combating them.
And yet there we are in Syria for a decade or longer fighting alongside those very groups in an effort to achieve our shared goal of removing Bashar al-Assad and now we're about to embrace And formally validate one of those people who we were told was the greatest threat to our country because now he's useful to us just like the neo-Nazis in Ukraine were and now they're the Azov heroes and you can go through the list.
All of this is crucial to understanding the discourse in the United States about how propaganda works, About how the term terrorist is such a manipulated, empty term of propaganda that can mean or apply to any one person one day and not to the next, not depending on whether they've changed, but based simply on who is useful to the United States and who isn't.
And most of all, it is vital when talking about U.S. policy at least, Western policy at least, and how we understand foreign countries, to resist What very well may be propaganda based in truth, but is nonetheless propaganda that constantly tries to stir our better emotions by showing us things that they know we will respond to emotionally and keeping everything else away from us that prevents us from thinking clearly, but instead thinking or reacting emotionally in exactly the way that they want.
And then once we start realizing that we've been misled again and deceived again into another war, into another conflict, by then when our rational faculties return, As happened for most people with Ukraine and Russia or with Iraq, it's too late.
The war is already underway.
There's no reversing it.
They don't need your public support anymore.
The narrative, the videos, everything that we're being shown in the wake of what happened in Syria is identical to what we were shown in the wake of Iraq and Syria and Libya and Afghanistan and Ukraine.
And people who now understand what was done then should have no problem applying those lessons to what's taking place now.
Before we get to Aaron, which we will in just a second, I want to share with you a longtime sponsor of our now, Hillsdale College.
Because the basis of this project is that lots of times people think about learning when you're in your college years or shortly thereafter in your mid-20s.
and then by the time you're done with college or graduate school or high school, your learning time is over.
It's now time to go work, take care of a family, and there's really no time for learning anymore.
And the reality is that Your entire life, no matter how old you are, continues to be an opportunity to learn.
Your brain continues to grow.
We continue to crave knowledge.
And the more knowledge we obtain about history and culture and theology and our current government, the more empowered we are in order to do anything.
It also prevents brain stagnation, which can happen if you cease to learn.
That's how you get the phrase, it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks.
It's actually not.
Your brain is capable of expanding and learning For as long as you live.
And that's why I'm so excited that Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses in the most important and enduring subjects.
You can learn about the works of Shakespeare, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, theological debates throughout history, all with Hillsdale College online courses, all available for free.
That's right, for free.
I personally recommend, probably doesn't come as a surprise, that you sign up for Constitution 101, the meaning and history of the U.S. Constitution.
It's a 12-lecture course.
Where you'll explore the design and purpose of the Constitution, the challenges it faced during Civil War, and how it has been undermined by more than a century of authoritarian sentiment.
All the courses are self-paced so that you can start whenever and wherever you want.
If you enroll now in Constitution 101, it means that you will be helping us achieve our goal, which is that our country needs more Americans to understand the Constitution and can defend the fundamental freedoms it provides against the encroachment of an Always large and increasingly unaccountable government.
You can go right now to empower yourself, arm yourself at hillsdale.edu slash glenn to enroll.
There's no cost to get started and it's easy to get started.
That's hillsdale.edu slash glen to register.
Aaron Maté is a friend of our show, and one of the reasons for that is that he is a truly intrepid and fearless independent journalist.
One of the topics on which he has reported most over the last decade or longer is the U.S. and Western involvement in and policy towards Syria.
He has been following every detail of it in the way that he follows whatever he covers with almost an obsessiveness that makes him an encyclopedia to help learn about it.
And when we knew we were going to talk about Syria tonight, there were very few people that we thought of to have on the show who we thought would be better than Aaron.
He is an independent journalist with Grayzone, does a lot of reporting and a lot of appearances on podcasts, including ours.
And we are thrilled to have him.
Aaron, it was great to see you as always.
Thanks for joining us tonight.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
All right, so let me start with this question.
And a lot of these questions, you know, sometimes when we have guests on, I'll ask questions that I think the audience wants to know the answer to, and I think I already know the answer.
But most of these questions are ones to which I really don't know the answer.
I'm still kind of trying to grapple with a lot of these questions and figure out what happened.
So...
Let's begin with the issue of timing.
The United States government, as you know, with partners both in Europe and in the region, have been attempting to remove Assad since the Obama years, since 2011. In the Obama administration there were fights with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry who wanted even more involvement but Obama kind of gave just enough to keep things in chaos but clearly the goal of the CIA and other countries was to remove Assad and it seemed to kind of be at a stalemate, the war.
There just seemed to be a frozen conflict with the anti-government rebels just sitting in the northwest part of their country.
Governing and ruling, but no expansion, no real fighting.
And then all of a sudden, in the last couple of weeks, everything just changed radically.
And the rebels were able to go on this massive expansion toward Damascus and arrive there within a week or 10 days, something people for the last 10 or 15 years thought was extremely unlikely.
Why did this happen now?
So many factors.
Within Syria itself, the country was destroyed.
It was targeted with one of the most well-armed insurgencies in history, the U.S. and their friends, Gulf monarchies, Turkey, NATO states, Israel.
Spent billions of dollars arming an insurgency that, you know, Joe Biden once blurted out when he was vice president, was dominated by Al-Qaeda.
And that's why Jake Sullivan privately wrote to Hillary Clinton in that infamous email, Al-Qaeda is on our side.
So you have that angle.
You have, you know, a devastating war that kills hundreds of thousands of people.
Then you also have the U.S. sanctions.
And the reason why I'm focusing on the U.S. role at first is because, you know, as Westerners, as people in the U.S., that's what we're responsible for.
That's what we pay for.
So that's what we should focus on first.
And also, to be clear, it's what I asked you about and what I said we wanted to focus on, which was, you know, not the emotions of the Syrians, what they want to talk about, but what is the role of our government?
What did they do there?
What did their allies do there and why?
So that's also what I invited you to talk about.
So you have, you know, many years of a dirty war, which caused a whole lot of carnage.
And then, you know, Russia and Iran and Hezbollah came in on Syria's side.
And, you know, that defeated the insurgency, but it destroyed a lot of the country.
I went to Syria a few years ago, and I saw what the Russians did in just bombing Syria.
Entire neighborhoods where insurgents had occupied and were using their perch to send rockets into Damascus.
And so basically that insurgency was destroyed, but at great cost to the country.
So then now it's time to rebuild.
But then the U.S. proceeded to impose some of the most crippling sanctions in history that were explicitly designed, if you read the bill, they're explicitly designed to prevent Syria's reconstruction.
And as U.S. officials bragged, I'm quoting them, these sanctions, quote, exacerbated food and fuel shortages for everyday Syrians and crushed Syria's economy.
That was the point of these sanctions.
If we couldn't overthrow Assad through a dirty war, we could at least make the population suffer, and then maybe they'll get so exhausted that finally his government collapses.
Then you had also U.S. military occupation, which we never talk about.
Most Americans, I don't even know about it, but the U.S. has maintained troops in Syria.
And when Trump tried to pull them out when he was in office in his first term, he was undermined by his subordinates who basically ignored his order and lied to him.
And then Trump caved when he realized that he wasn't going to get his order.
He said, okay, fine, we're there to take the oil.
So we're not there to fight terrorism, which is the official pretext.
We're there to take the oil.
And he was right, because we're there to take the oil to further deprive Syria of its own resources.
And not just the oil, actually, but it's also in the region where Syria has a lot of its wheat, where it grows its wheat.
So we depleted Syria that way.
So you have those three factors.
Then you have regular Israeli bombings of Syria against Syria's allies that remain in the country, Iranian militias and Hezbollah.
And then meanwhile, also, you have October 7th, which depletes Hezbollah.
There's no doubt about that.
And you also have the proxy war in Ukraine, where another strong Syrian ally, Russia, was also depleted.
And Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu, in their comments since Assad fell, have both taken credit for this.
They said that, you know, our roles in, you know, Netanyahu was talking about it in Lebanon, and Biden was talking about it in supporting Netanyahu and also in leading Russia and Ukraine, This played a major role in bleeding Syria's allies.
And finally, also, you had a government in Syria that I think was in denial.
You had a lot of people in this country suffering under these sanctions.
And from my friends in Syria, the sense was they weren't Acknowledging reality.
And, you know, there was a lot of corruption.
The state was hollowed out.
And finally, you know, at a moment of opportunity, the insurgency led by Jelani took advantage.
So you mentioned both Russia and Iran, and I want to focus on them for a second, because as you say, when it looked possible under the Obama, during the Obama years, that the Obama administration might succeed in funding an insurgency that removed Assad, the entry of Russia into the war, Is what changed everything.
There was a leaked audio from John Kerry basically saying that, that once the Russians entered, there was no way to win any longer.
The Russians used a lot of force indiscriminately, as you said.
But the reason they did that was because Syria is a very long and old ally going back to the days of the Soviet Union, similar to how Cuba and Venezuela are and have continued, even with the fall of the Soviet Union, to continue to have an alliance with Russia.
And Syria is a crucial outpost of Russian power in the Middle East.
Which is why they were so willing to intervene.
And then of course you have Iran, who has viewed the Assad government as a crucial ally as well.
They used Syria to transmit and transport missiles to Hezbollah and to sort of spread their influence throughout the region.
Now, I understand your point, which is that the Russians are engaged in a quite bloody and exhausting war in Ukraine going into its fourth full year now.
And the Iranians have obviously been spread pretty thin as well by all the things going on in the Middle East against Hezbollah, against the Houthis in Yemen, who are their allies, against Iran itself.
But nonetheless, you're talking here about pretty major powers, Russia and Iran.
And I understand they may have been constrained and limited in what they can do more so than they would have been, say, six or seven years ago.
But it really seemed like they just kind of washed their hands of it.
They said, look, it looks like this is going to happen.
And they didn't lift a finger.
They didn't even...
You know, send some token support, really.
I get why Hezbollah didn't during an active war with Israel, but why did Iran and Russia, why were they so blasé about giving up this crucial ally in that region?
Before I answer, just one point about John Kerry's leaked audio.
He talked about actually the reasons why Russia went into Syria.
And he says in this leaked audio, he says, the reason Russia came in is because they didn't want an ISIS government.
ISIS, he calls Daesh in the audio.
He's referring to ISIS. And so he was saying, and then he goes on to say that we were actually, and meanwhile, by contrast, we were sitting back and watching as ISIS was growing and encroaching on Damascus.
And we thought we could manage that.
We thought actually we could use that to force Assad to negotiate his way out of power.
So what Kerry was admitted there in that leaked audio was that the U.S. was using the spread of ISIS as leverage.
Which we thought we could manage, in Kerry's words, to force regime change in Moscow.
That's just one more aspect of how cynical this policy was.
Not just arming an uncertainty that they knew was dominated by al-Qaeda, but also using ISIS as leverage and sitting back and letting them grow inside Syria, despite claiming we were fighting them there.
In terms of your question, why did Iran and Russia walk away from Assad at this point?
You know, that is something that we can only speculate about.
I can give you my guesses, but these are just guesses, and I suspect we'll know more in the coming days and weeks.
The Syrian army in some areas was fighting, but in many areas it just crumbled.
And it doesn't seem...
There's also many reports that Assad was not taking the warning seriously from his allies, that this offensive from the insurgents was coming.
So my speculation would be there that if you have in Assad someone who's not taking this threat seriously, if you have a Syrian army that is just too depleted and exhausted, has lost its morale, which makes sense because people were not...
Even though they defeated the insurgency, the sanctions and the U.S. military occupation, plus the regular Israeli strikes, made it very difficult to recover.
And average people continue to suffer in the years after the war.
For some people, the years after the war were even worse than the years in the war because the economy has gotten even worse.
So I think those factors, you have Assad, who did not take these threats seriously.
For whatever reason, he was cocky.
He was out of touch.
He maybe wanted to just leave anyway.
He realized he had no chance of staying in.
And a military that didn't want to fight.
I would guess that those are the main reasons why finally Russia and Assad just said, forget it.
And maybe also Russia just felt that it's so focused on Ukraine, which is its top priority, that it just couldn't commit the resources that it would need to commit to Syria in order to defeat the offensive.
It was so striking, as you say, when you listen to that John Kerry audio, because this was at a time when we were told that ISIS was infinitely worse than Al-Qaeda, who we were told for a decade was the worst threat the United States has ever faced, including the Soviet Union, and that we had to radically restructure our government.
And then there's John Kerry saying the reason Russia entered that war was because they were worried about ISIS taking over Syria and ruling Syria from Damascus.
Meaning we, the United States, weren't, even though we were telling everybody that the rise of ISIS was the worst thing to ever happen.
It was just so striking.
He said Russia was worried that ISIS would take over and rule Syria.
And Kerry's reasons for differing was not that he didn't worry about that.
It's that he figured that would also happen, but that, as you say, they could manage that.
Which I guess is their calculus now.
Let me just focus on sanctions for a minute because I'm a very harsh and longtime critic of U.S. sanctions, as I know you are.
Usually the argument against sanctions, against U.S. sanctions, is that what they end up doing is immiserating the population who we claim we care so much about But they don't ever actually achieve the goal of weakening the regime or changing the government because the government can immunize itself because they always ensure that they're taken care of.
So the people that you're actually making miserable, whose lives you're making terrible and whose suffering you're causing, aren't the government leaders who you say are your enemies, but the people who you say you want to support.
Just, you know, a couple months ago, there was all this celebration about how Cubans were facing a blackout, an island-wide blackout.
And it was like, oh, you keep saying that you're on the side of the Cuban people.
You want to free the Cuban people.
Why would you be celebrating the fact that they're suffering even more?
Same in Iran, where people can't get medicine.
In Syria, where people can't get medicine.
In Venezuela, where they're impoverished because of sanctions as well, which we then use as kind of proof that those countries can't govern themselves while we suffocate them.
But as I said, the argument usually is we immiserate the population while not actually ever achieving the goal of weakening the government.
It sounds to me like you're saying, at least in this case, that sanctions did ultimately achieve the goal of making the Assad government weaker and therefore less capable of resisting this insurgency.
Yes, I do think that.
I do want to make a political point, which is that I don't accept the right we have to impose sanctions, even if it did achieve our goals.
Like, what right do we have to destroy a country's economy because we don't like their leaders?
If we don't like a government's leaders, that's for the people of that country It's not our business to destroy their country.
So I don't grant the US the right to do it.
But yes, in terms of the impact, I do think ultimately it did help lead to Assad's overthrow.
But again, at the expense of the Syrian people.
I quoted this before.
Andrew Tabler, a senior U.S. official working on Syria under Trump, he wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine a few years ago that U.S. sanctions have, quote, exacerbated food and fuel shortages for everyday Syrians.
So our policy entailed hurting everyday Syrians in the hopes that they would become so exhausted and the state would collapse.
And I do think that this is a case where that has been achieved.
In Cuba, we're still trying with the embargo, which has been going on for, what, 60 years?
And that's just a case where we can do that because the brilliance of sanctions, if you're a sadist who wants to make people suffer, is that we can't see the impact of sanctions here.
And they accomplish a lot of what ascending troops accomplishes and hurting a country without having to commit any of our troops.
So it's all done on paper and because of our control of the financial system.
So they work really well and almost nobody knows about them.
And also, meanwhile, governments like in Syria, which are authoritarian and repressive and want to put on a brave face, they don't want to acknowledge the impact of these sanctions.
So when I went to Syria a few years ago, I wanted to report on, you know, what I was hearing about shortages in hospitals, other places.
I wasn't allowed to do any of that.
They wouldn't give me access because I think stubbornly they didn't want to show the world that they were really suffering.
But that suffering is undeniable.
You know, I remember people had to line up for gas for hours and hours and hours.
You know, a friend of mine who could afford it would pay someone to go wait in line for him to get fuel that he needed for his car.
But he was lucky because he could afford it.
Most people can't do that.
So these sanctions just make life impossible.
And that contributes to a general lack of morale, lack of necessities for life.
And yeah, inevitably, that fuels the conditions in which people get so tired that they're, yes, there are a lot of people who are proud that Syria stood up to this foreign-backed insurgency, and they certainly fear to take over by al-Qaeda.
But eventually, you get worn down.
And I think that was the case here in Syria.
Yeah, well, so, I mean, again, and of course, there's the question of rights and all of that.
But leaving those aside, I mean, a lot of times what happens with sanctions is that by weakening the population, you actually make It's less likely that the population can revolt against the government because they're so depleted, so deprived of basic necessities that it's actually harder for them to organize against an armed faction of the state.
I know, here you are saying, and I'm glad you're acknowledging it, because I also do think it's true that the whole state ended up degrading as a result of sanctions, causing all this misery and suffering that you're talking about.
But if there are a lot of Syrians, and I've heard them saying this, certainly in Syria, but especially the kind of self-anointed spokespeople of Syrians in the West, that They think it's worth it.
That they think it's worth having endured that suffering because all that mattered was getting rid of Assad.
And that it's easy for you to say the sanctions made the Syrian people miserable when in reality what made the Syrian people miserable was the repression and autocracy of the Assad family.
First his father and then his son.
Is that...
Do you think that's representative of Syrians generally?
And regardless of that, do you think that's a legitimate way of looking at things?
Well, you know, I can't say it was representative Syrians generally.
Anybody on any side can look at polls and articles to advance their position.
Jonathan Steele, who's a veteran correspondent for The Guardian, had an article a few years ago saying that Assad was popular.
I can say that when I went to Syria, I was only in a, you know, I was in Damascus and the surrounding areas.
I did see a lot of people who supported their government.
And, you know, someone could argue that if that was all coerced, people were living in fear.
That wasn't my impression.
But certainly, listen, I know, I mean, Syria is a very well-organized opposition outside the country.
And yeah, they've been clamoring for regime change.
And they're Just like the Iraqi diaspora and exiles really did want Assad gone, and they were saying the same thing.
This is a brutal dictator, and we want the United States to invade, and we're speaking on behalf of Iraqis.
Yeah.
I mean, I have friends who took part in the protests in 2011 against the government that broke out in early 2011. And they wanted, and Syria is very corrupt.
And by the way, one thing to mention with the sanctions, sanctions encourage corruption.
The moment you impose crippling sanctions on a country, you are guaranteeing there's going to be a large black market.
And there's going to be people taking cuts on top of already like the kleptocracy that already exists.
It's going to exacerbate that.
So if all this talk about Syria's corruption, sanctions exacerbate that.
If you care about corruption in Syria, and if you think that's the problem Syria has, the worst thing you can do is impose sanctions that encourage corruption.
Everybody with any limited grasp of how sanctions work knows that.
I mean, that's not controversial.
Speaking for friends of mine in Syria, they took part in the protests in 2011. They wanted an end to corruption, and they wanted freedom of expression because they didn't have that.
In Syria, before the war, you had a country that had relatively, for the region, high levels of education, of healthcare, and food self-sufficiency.
What you didn't have, though, was freedom of expression.
And if you said anything about the government, you were going to be in trouble.
You could face...
Persecution and even torture.
So that's what they were protesting against.
They were not protesting to have an insurgency that turned the country into a war zone in which the insurgency was dominated by Al-Qaeda.
And they certainly, no one I met there supported sanctions, which only hurt them and made their lives totally miserable.
So I can say the Syrians outside the country Who advocated sanctions?
I don't think speak for the majority of Syrians.
And let me give you an example of why.
The biggest advocate for sanctions on Syria from a Syrian group is from a group called the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
And it's led by a guy named Muaz Mustafa, who's accompanied John McCain when he went to Syria to visit the insurgent-controlled territory.
And there was an embarrassing incident because Muaz Mustafa and John McCain posed with a Syrian insurgent who was implicated in kidnapping Shia pilgrims.
So that was sort of an embarrassment for John McCain.
So Muaz Mustafa had this thing called the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
That's the main group pushing for sanctions.
They take credit openly for the Caesar sanctions, which have destroyed Syria's economy, prevented reconstruction.
Muaz Mustafa's group is funded by almost entirely funded by the U.S. government.
And on their board, literally, is someone from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is an Israel lobby group.
Do you think the will of most Syrians is reflected by a group that has an Israel lobbyist on its board?
You know, Israel, which has been bombing Syria for a long time, and Netanyahu is openly taking credit today for Assad's ouster?
I don't think so.
So no one should claim to speak for all Syrians, particularly those who work with Israel lobbyists to impose sanctions on their own country that hurt everyday Syrians.
Yeah, I mean, I absolutely remember like it was yesterday.
I wasn't in journalism at the time, so I was just paying like the sort of attention you pay to politics when you're just an ordinary citizen doing your other work.
That a big part of why Americans believe that Iraqis wanted us to invade was because they had this huge network of Western exiles that were very close to pro-Israel groups and neocons like Ahmed Shalmadi and others like him.
Who we were told were speaking for the Iraqi people because they were in the West and they were there for free to speak openly, whereas people in Iraq weren't.
And these were the people we were told were representatives of Iraqis who were urging the United States to come in.
And this has been a tactic.
Going on for a long time, you hear from these Ukrainians all the time who are grateful for U.S. involvement.
You never hear from the Ukrainians who are closer to Russia and who are opposed.
It's very easy to manipulate public opinion using these kind of samples, but it does seem like, obviously, a lot of people in Syria are happy that Assad is gone, and that's very genuine.
Let me ask you about just a couple more questions, the U.S. objective here, because obviously the U.S. objective is not to rid the region of tyrants and autocrats and brutal dictators because some of our best friends in that region that we have installed and prop up are because obviously the U.S. objective is not to rid the region of tyrants and autocrats and brutal dictators because some of our best friends in If you criticize the government, that's certainly true in Egypt.
It's true in the United Arab Emirates.
It's true in even places like Jordan and Kuwait.
It's certainly true in Saudi Arabia.
And we love those governments.
We support those governments.
We want those kind of governments to exist.
So that's obviously not the motive, even though we say it is, to free the Syrian people, to eliminate and vanquish dictatorship.
What then is the reason why so many people in the United States government over several administrations were so devoted to this goal of removing Assad?
Why was that important to the U.S.? Well, as far as I know, I mean, this dates back decades, long before Bashar al-Assad took power.
It goes back to when his father, Hafez al-Assad, was in power.
And the reason is clear.
I mean, this was a nationalist, an Arab nationalist government that was always hostile to Israel.
Israel stole the Golan Heights from Syria, and Syria has always provided at least rhetorical support and some material support, although it's been inconsistent, to Palestinian resistance.
And so there's been this obsession with taking out the acts of resistance, of which Syria is a member.
And that's why if you look at the WikiLeaks emails from Hillary Clinton and other people, they talk about how overthrowing Assad would be so great for Israel.
It's, you know, because the US and Israel rule the Middle East by force, by having a monopoly on violence.
And so their obsession with Hezbollah and Syria and Iran comes down to taking out a deterrent to their aggression.
I think that's ultimately what it comes down to.
One point about the scenes from Syria, there is, of course, jubilation from many Syrians that Assad is gone, a repressive leader.
He's part of a dynasty that's ruled over them for 50 years.
They wanted something new.
What we're not seeing, though, are the people who are scared for their lives because, you know, just going back to Jelani, When he was leading al-Nusra, they were carrying out massacres in places like Latakia against Alawites.
An investigation by Human Rights Watch of one such massacre in 2013 found that forces under Jelani's command, Nusra and other insurgent forces, committed systematic destruction of entire families.
And people in minority groups in Syria, Christians, Druze, Shia, Alawite, many of them are living in fear.
I mean, I've heard from some people that I know.
And they're not joining these scenes of celebration.
They're not joining the scenes.
We're already seeing some horrific videos coming out of Syria.
I'm hoping after all this carnage, maybe everyone is just exhausted of war.
And maybe Jelani will really realize that it's in his own interest, if not his own ideology, it's in his interest to actually stop the sectarianism that has destroyed Syria for so long.
But given how it's gone so far in Syria and also in Iraq and Libya, other successful, quote-unquote, regime change wars, I'm not feeling very optimistic about that.
The Israelis have achieved a lot of their longtime goals in about three days since all of this happened, including making incursions into other parts of the Golan Heights and even parts of what the Western media generally calls the buffer zone, meaning Syrian territory, which they have now seized, planted Israeli meaning Syrian territory, which they have now seized, planted Israeli flags in, promise that they intend to keep that indefinitely.
What do you think...
Is the Israeli view of what's taking place in Syria, because I think instinctively people might say, well, the Israelis have to at least recognize it as a risk that if you have al-Qaeda and ISIS elements and other hardcore Islamic radicals, Sunni Islamic radicals who are governing Syria on the other side of the Israeli border, that that can pose some risk to them.
But certainly they've benefited already.
What do you think has been the Israeli posture toward these events?
Well, Netanyahu seemed pretty happy about it when he went to the Golan Heights and basically took partial credit for Assad's ouster.
He talked about what a great thing this was and how this will further weaken Hezbollah and Iran.
So he's pleased.
But yeah, at the same time, when you have a group led by the founding leader, Of Al-Qaeda taking power on your border, you're going to be worried.
And also the problem with Syria is also, even if Jelani is somehow magically reformed as a moderate now, if he's undergone some transformation, which by the way, he's never apologized for the atrocities committed under his watch.
So that's not the reason to be skeptical.
But let's say he's a reformer now, he's moderate.
You still have a lot of groups in Syria that are outside of his control.
So there is a lot of danger there.
There was an Israeli official who spoke to the New York Times years ago, but during the height of the Dirty War, who said for us, like, the best case scenario is that they just bleed each other to death.
They hemorrhage each other to death.
I think that's what Israel wanted the most, is that you have this constant conflict inside Syria.
Everybody destroys themselves.
Hezbollah gets bled.
Syria gets weakened.
I do think they're happy that Assad is gone, but they now are trying to grapple with, you know, what next?
And just to make sure that Syria can never, ever, ever even think about retaking the Golan Heights, Israel's gone on a bombing spree, bombing areas across the country, destroying Syrian military positions, the port of Atakia, they've attacked that.
Although I'm sure they're not, you know, convinced that Jelani will be their ally, I think they're also pretty happy with how things have turned out so far.
And by the way, they were a part of the dirty war.
They armed anti-government insurgents on the border, and they even treated wounded members of al-Qaeda and ISIS in their hospitals, which, you know, shows you, I think, how they might be feeling right now overall about the ouster of Assad.
Yeah, I mean, I just think it's such a good lesson to be very guarded against anything that we're being convinced of and told about who bad guys are and good guys are, because that can change on a dime so quickly.
And, you know, as you say, whatever else is true, the Israelis seem overtly celebrating the events in Syria, however worried they might be.
All right, last question, Aaron.
Donald Trump came out with this statement, at which point it was—they weren't quite at Damascus, the anti-government rebels, but they were in the suburbs.
They were clearly headed there.
It was clear by that point that everything—the fall of Assad was a fait accompli.
And Trump basically came out and said, look, these are not our friends here, neither the government that was deposed nor the people coming in.
We don't have any interest in Syria.
We need to just stay out and let it all work out.
Let them work it out.
It's not really our business.
What do you make of that statement by Trump?
Well, the part he's missing is his own role.
He did try to get out, but when he was undermined by his own generals and subordinates, he caved.
He could have insisted on the U.S. implementing his order to withdraw troops from Syria, but he didn't.
As soon as he faced some resistance, he backed down.
And then he announced that we're there to take the oil.
So he played a role in this by keeping U.S. troops in Syria to loot Syria's oil.
He also played a role by signing into law the Caesar sanctions that have been devastating for Syria, that have We're good to go.
Showing that he was aware that we were arming an Al-Qaeda-dominated insurgency.
And in 2016, I mean, you know this more than anyone, that when he campaigned, he talked about how disastrous the wars in Syria and Libya were under the Obama administration.
So I agree with his message.
I think it's too late.
We are in Syria.
We do have these sanctions.
The damage has been done now.
The insurgency we helped arm, the sanctions, the military occupation, that has led to the chaos of today.
He does play a small role in it.
Although, of course, the primary responsibility on the U.S. side lies with the current occupants of the White House.
Anthony Blinken, Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, Samantha Power, all these people who decided back in 2011 that it was a good idea to have a dirty war in Syria after they had destroyed Libya.
So we'll see what Trump does.
J.D. Vance has been saying some comments that I think also show that he understands the situation.
He made fun of Washington Post columnists.
Josh Rogan.
Yeah.
I'm saying that the last time this guy was excited about Syria, it got a bunch of Christians killed.
And he's right.
In Idlib province, which was the stronghold of Jelani and his forces, which he captured, which Jelani captured in 2015 with the help of the CIA tacitly, after Jelani took power in Idlib, the Christian population went from about 1,200 to three people because Jelani's forces drove them out and also massacred Druze.
J.D. Vance seems to recognize that.
So will that reflect a change in policy once Trump takes office?
If we're going by the history of the Trump administration, no, because for all the awareness Trump had, he didn't do much different policy-wise.
But maybe things now are so bad with a literal al-Qaeda veteran being the de facto leader of Syria, that will force the Trump administration to rethink things.
Yeah, and if you talk to a lot of people very close to Trump and Trump world, as I've done both off the show but also on the show, they'll acknowledge that the worst part of the first administration was that there were lots of things that Trump believed in, thought should be done, and he either lacked the discipline and or the competence to prevent these kind of permanent forces in Washington from sabotaging him.
To the point where he ordered troops to leave and generals undermined him and they were celebrated, even though there's few things more dangerous to our democracy than undermining the civilian elected commander in chief by unelected generals.
That's military rule.
And yet all the people who say they love democracy were cheering them for constantly thwarting Trump.
And they swear that this time Trump is aware of that.
He's more aware of how things work in Washington, how they've been preparing for at least a year to prevent these sorts of people from worming their way into the administration who want to work against Trump's policies rather than in favor of them.
I remain skeptical given a lot of the people that he's chosen.
But to me, that's the number one question that remains to be seen is you have these instincts that Trump has that are so clearly right opposed to the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, but you have a lot of people around him who he's just still empowering who seem committed to that.
And whether they're really going to be loyal to Trump this time, whether he's going to be more attentive and concerned about preventing them, I think that's the big question for Trump too.
All right, Aaron, it's always great to see you, always great to hear from you.
I think you really helped us work through a lot of these issues, and obviously this is not the end of the serious story, so we'd love to have you back on, and we appreciate your coming on tonight.
