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Dec. 16, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
28:49
Alastair Crooke : Is Syria a war without limits?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, December 16th, 2024.
Alistair Crook will be here with us in just a minute on what happened in Syria.
Is it a war without limits?
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Alistair Crook, welcome here, my dear friend.
And thank you for all the time you've spent with us, and thank you for helping us achieve our goal of a half a million subscribers by Christmas time, which we achieved two weeks before Christmas last week.
The events in Syria have been described as a takeover of the Syrian state by a terrorist group, but is that an accurate description?
I mean, stated differently.
Does Syria still exist as a geopolitical entity?
Well, first of all, let me just say a few words about what happened, how it happened in Syria and how it happened so rapidly.
First of all, I think I've said before...
The Syrian economy was completely collapsed under the influence of the Caesar sanctions on it.
I mean, I've said to you that people were trying to get by on a few dollars a month.
It was terrible.
And Assad had felt for a long time he's got nothing to work with because the agricultural, the oil revenues were all taken by the Kurds in the Northeast under American protection.
And the industrial parts, if you like, in Aleppo was being, if you like, squeezed off by the Turks.
They'd actually taken some of the industry of Aleppo and just transferred it to Turkey at times.
So he had nothing.
He had very little.
Anyway, what happened in Syria started off quite slowly, slowly, slowly, and then very fast.
And what I mean by that was that it was apparent to Russia and to Iran that Assad was drifting away from supporting the resistance in Iran.
He was deliberately obstructing Iran in many areas of their military operations in support of the resistance.
And he was keeping his distance.
From Russia, too.
So the writing was on the wall for about three or four years that something was happening.
And what was happening was that the Gulf states were telling him very clearly, you know, if you want to get sanctions lifted, the path for that is through Israel and through Washington, the lobby in Washington.
That's the only path you can pursue.
And at the end, he decided to pursue that path.
And that was at the end of this process.
And another part of it was that Turkey was pushing and pushing for having a say in Syria, wanting to have, if you like, an Ottoman spoke in Syria's wheel.
And Assad would have nothing.
He was intransigent.
And this did annoy the Russians a lot, because he just wouldn't meet Erdogan.
Erdogan was desperate.
I mean, he regarded this as an affront to his rather large ego that, you know, this man wouldn't meet him face to face to decide what to do with Idlib.
So, in a sense, we had that.
And then the ending was rather like a Greek tragedy, in a way, just as the Idlib process started that Sunday.
Assad gave the order to the army not to fight and to prepare for transition.
And then he was in his office with his political secretary, Hussein, and said, well, meet me later to prepare a speech to give to the Syrian people.
And it never happened, because he left straight from the office, took a flight to Khomeim, the Russian base.
And a flight from there to Russia.
Not even taking his closest stuff, not taking many of his family.
Many of the, if you like, the cousins, the young cousins of his wife were duly killed in the mayhem that followed.
He just told no one, took a plane and was in Moscow, leaving everyone directionless with nothing.
Just an instruction not to fight and to help a transition.
No speech, no instruction.
That speech was never written.
So, yes, everyone had a sense that this was coming.
I think the speed of it surprised them.
But really, I mean, the army had instructions not to fight.
So it just was a walk-in.
They just walked through Lepo, Holmes, Hama.
And Damascus and came into Damascus.
And no, Syria no longer exists as a geopolitical entity.
The civil war in the Turkish part in the east and on the west, Israel is taking, has invaded, is taking more and more land.
It is intent, it says, on establishing settlements.
Israeli...
Jewish settlements in the Golan and that part of Syria.
So there's only this little rump left, which is not controlled by Jelani at all.
Is it possible to assess, blame, or credit to any one entity?
I mean, Israel, the United States, Turkey?
Or is this just a perfect storm?
That caused his summary departure in the manner in which you described it.
You know, I think it's, I mean, you know, I think I've said before, you know, Greek tragedy happens not because of one particular action.
It's inevitable.
It's going to happen because of the nature of the participants.
It's their nature.
It's their character.
And they can't help themselves.
And tragedy unfolds in this way.
So I don't think you can put the blame.
Iran was ready to help.
Russia was very willing to help.
I mean, they offered at one stage in '18 to re-equip and train the army because it had no funding.
Some of the units were non-existent.
They existed in paper, but they didn't exist elsewhere.
And the economy was really...
I mean, there was nothing there.
It had all been taken on one side or the other side.
And all that was left, and this is what you're seeing playing out partly in the streets of Damascus, was the drug economy, the Capagone, these drugs to which many in the Gulf states are addicted, were centred in Damascus and around the elites of Damascus.
What you're seeing is...
It's not just, if you like, HTS on the streets.
It's also the gangs, the drug gangs.
They're on the streets, too.
They're trying to keep their control, their power against this newcomer.
But it's complicated.
Is there a government, is there a central government to speak of in Syria?
Are streets being cleaned?
Is mail being...
Is traffic being directed, or is there no government at all?
There's no government.
I mean, this is being presented as there is a government.
But, you know, as I've mentioned before, HTS was a very small fragment of the militants of Idlib, who eventually took over.
Nearly a third of them were not even Syrian, but were Professional jihadists who'd come in from Central Asia and the Uyghurs from China and elsewhere.
I mean, they didn't even speak Arabic and people couldn't understand what they are saying.
And then it's not just HTS because the HTS is an umbrella for several other jihadist organizations who oppose Jelani, who don't like and contest the fact that he's trying to take command.
They haven't given him command, and they didn't like it in Idlib, and they don't like him taking command now, and they contest it, and there will be faction fighting flowing from this.
But I would say the other thing that is important for your viewers and listeners to understand is that Syria was a secular state.
It was the secular Arab state.
From 1949, there was a debate in Syria at that period.
Are we a Muslim nation or are we a secular?
And the debate resolved on being a secular society based on the French, if you like, legal and administrative system.
It was entirely secular.
It became more secular.
In their connection with Nasser of Egypt and with the Egyptian past party and the secularism that existed, the Arab socialist secular world.
And so there is a very strong element of secularism.
And now suddenly Jolani and the HTS have imposed Sharia law on the state.
And they've said, you know, the justices will follow.
All women judges who are about 40, I think, have been dismissed because you don't have women judges under Sharia.
It's forbidden.
And this is the government.
So it's a tiny little veneer that the Turks and the Americans have set up.
The Americans started this with HTS.
I mean, you can see.
Ambassador Jeffreys talking about it in 21, when he said, you know, we don't touch HTS, we don't hit them, we keep them, we tell them, you know, you're very important.
They've been cultivating this for years.
And the purpose was clear.
They say it, and Jeffreys put it, that Syria has been seen always in America as a strategic pivot.
For American control over the region, over the Middle East and its oil supplies.
And so it was always seen that Syria was a strategic, if you like, pivot.
And equally, it was a strategic pivot for Iran and for the Palestinians.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the former head of Hezbollah, said very clearly, and he said this bluntly, And he said, without Syria, there is no Palestine.
Full stop.
That was Hasran Nasrallah of Hezbollah.
So for both sides saw this as a strategic pivot.
But I was going to say that, you know, and it's going to be what happens is complicated.
They've tried to present this person as a sort of gentrified jihadist.
The Americans have been riding this tiger for a decade of trying to use ISIS for, if you like, strategic purposes to create the pivotal change that will pull the rug from under Syria and turn it into an opportunity to control the Middle East.
And they've used Turkey for this, but please recall that Erdogan and Turkey also is half secular.
Yes, there's a lot of it.
It is technically an Ottoman remnant.
It is an Ottoman structure.
But when you get away from Anatolia and these very rigid, narrow, rural, conservative...
Sunni Anatolians.
You go to Istanbul and you go to other cities in Turkey.
They are very contemporary.
They are very modern, if you like, in misusing that word.
And Erdogan has always had two faces.
One facing this very old-fashioned, rather...
Restrictive Muslim Brotherhood constituency of Anatolia, and then also towards presenting himself as a successor to the great leader, the founder of Turkey, which was a secular founder of Turkey.
And at the last election, he did not, he lost the last election in terms of popular majority.
He won the election, but he didn't win the popular vote.
That went against him.
If Syria effectively, as a geopolitical entity and as a central government, no longer exists, why are Turkey and Israel continuing to bomb?
And what are they bombing?
Well, they're just simply, I mean, raining down destruction.
They're determined to make it completely demilitarized, not even a state infrastructure.
They're bombing the ports.
They're bombing all of the air defenses, all of the military bases.
They're bombing all of its infrastructure of defense.
What conceivable military or moral basis, military or moral, is there?
For this wanton destruction?
It is, first of all, I think, just the Israeli urge to destruct anything that is not theirs, if you like, not in their camp.
And so it's gone beyond the bounds of just protecting Israel.
So it is, I mean, last night there was something like 60 raids.
Across cities, across Damascus, there were heavy raids going on all night.
It continues.
And, of course, on the east, Turkey continues to bomb and use artillery against the Kurds.
That's the civil war that's already raging in the east.
And so, what is the purpose of this?
I mean, firstly, the first one I would say is...
In 2015, The Economist magazine said, you know, the Israelis think they found huge deposits of oil in the Golan.
A lot of oil.
And this is a key element.
I don't know how viable it is or anything about it.
But Syria has a little oil.
It's not a huge oil in the Northeast, but it probably has oil offshore.
And more importantly for the West, this could be the corridor bringing Gatari gas through Syria, if it was stable, to Europe to replace Russian gas.
And that's what it's all about.
It's about energy and oil and corridors.
But of course, corridors are only possible.
The investment in pipelines is only viable.
When there's really not only just short-term security, but a reasonable horizon of stability and security.
And that isn't going to happen in Syria.
I mean, if there is a Syria, I mean, there isn't going to be that.
The infighting has started inside Syria against HTS, against Jelani.
Some of his men are being attacked, ambushed and killed.
And so, I mean, it's really mayhem.
I mean, this is the tiger.
And you have Fidan, Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, saying, oh, well, they're going to be nice people, and they're going to be inclusive, and they respect diversity.
Turkey is riding a tiger, and the element that is able, you know, It didn't even have control really in Idlib.
Jolani had to be very brutal in order to control Idlib.
How can it control everything in Syria?
And some of the people that are involved in it are ISIS.
They wear ISIS badges on it.
I mean, you know, be careful riding a tiger because you can end up in its stomach.
It's a message I would say to them.
Where does this leave?
Russia and China.
Russia, you know, he made the calculation that this was really irrecoverable.
I mean, when it was getting to this last stages and that Assad was refusing.
Any help from Russia or Iran, and the army was known to be in a, you know, corrupt and in a terrible state of morale.
And so Putin very wisely, I think, he decided that he's fighting wars everywhere, you know, Romania, Georgia, in Ukraine.
All around the pressure points are being increased on him.
And of course, as you know, I was in Afghanistan at the time the Soviet Union was there.
I mean, they understand the idea of the West to bleed Russia, put more pressure on it.
And if you look, they took one look at what was going to happen in Syria if Assad was just an irrecoverable.
You know, this will spread.
It may spread to Jordan.
There is going to be a war, possibly, in the Golan in the West.
There is already a civil war with the American-supported Kurds against the Turkish-supported Kurds.
Erdoganism is absolutely adamant to crush completely any Kurdish.
If you like, autonomy.
Don't forget, the Kurds are normally Sunni, like the Turks.
So, I mean, you know, it doesn't protect you just because you're Sunni.
I mean, they're still being exterminated.
And this is, I mean, you know, what people forget about ISIS and its ideology.
Is really, I mean, the original text that came out that was the text from which ISIS, I mean, I've read it and seen it, I know it, called The Management of Savatory.
Well, the title tells you a lot.
It's pure Genghis Khan, you know, absolute, you know, use of unrestrained violence to create a caliph, a new, if you like, state of the Muslim world.
Sunni Muslim world.
And anyone that was outside of that should be killed.
They were apostate.
They were heretics.
They either accepted it, took the knee and bent and accepted it, or you were killed.
So it's a very, you know, unforgiving.
Now, America and Jefferies is, you know, taking the view.
Oh, we can find a nice synthesis in this.
And, you know, they're talking about how, I mean, even in 21, in a talk then, he was talking about how one could bring them all together and that, you know, these would be diverse and they would be.
But even, you know, for Sunni Islam, they don't like the Ottomans.
They don't like the Turkish.
I mean, because to a certain extent, and this is a big question I have.
About what's happening in Syria and in the region as a whole.
This Turkish Islam from Anatolia, if I said, is not the same as Levantine Sunni Islam even, which was much more, if you like, open.
This is a very, I think it looks, to me, stale and backward and restrictive and doctrinaire.
How much will this appeal to young Arabs today?
You know, who live in the contemporary world, have their smartphones, do business, are working.
I mean, I'm not sure that Turkey will succeed in imposing a sort of Turkish model on anyone, not even the Syrians, but not further, not into Iraq,
not into Jordan.
But that's a big question.
These are some of these great fractures that have opened up.
Syria falling has changed the map.
Everything, all the frozen conflicts of the region have been reignited.
Is Netanyahu right to celebrate?
Does he really want this fanaticism on his northern border?
There are two feelings in Israel, and you're right to question.
I mean, Netanyahu and many Israelis feel they've just won.
Won everything.
Won the war.
Won clear winners in this.
They're beginning to change the region.
They've knocked out, as they see it, Hezbollah.
They've knocked out Hamas.
They've knocked out...
Now they've pulled the rug from under Syria, the main pivot in the area.
Their focus is set on Iran.
That's what some...
I'm not saying that's going to happen, but this is what, you know, at least half the Israelis...
Benny Gantz has just been saying, Benny Gantz, the former defense secretary, has just been saying, look, now that this is over in Syria, Israel...
Is going to be turning towards its own civil war.
I mean, you know, the tensions in Israel haven't been resolved.
Right.
Can the destruction of Syria be viewed as just one step in the long march for Western dominance over the assets of the Middle East?
Well, look at this.
Yeah, we're losing you there.
See if we can get you back.
I was asking, big picture, if the destruction of Syria as a state, we're not talking about taking over the government, we're talking about destroying the existence of the state, if it can be viewed as just one step in the long march for Western dominance over the Middle East in order to extract It's natural resources.
That's exactly what it is.
The United States is following in the pattern of the Great Britain in this imperial element of taking the resources.
It's now become different.
It used to be about, if you like, this was the effective fuel for the British Navy.
They wanted oil instead of coal.
But now we've moved to a new thing.
The West has got a mountain of debt, and it needs a new collateral.
I think we're losing you again, Alistair.
At least I'm losing you.
All right, Alistair, thank you very much.
You're back.
Okay.
All right, Alistair, we have lost you.
Thank you very much for your time today and, of course, for your analysis, deeply and profoundly appreciated.
Coming up later today, Ray McGovern at 10 this morning, Larry Johnson at 11 this morning, Pepe Escobar at noon, Kivork Almasian, a new guest whom I think you will enjoy listening to,
a Syrian exile, At 1 this afternoon and at 4 this afternoon, Chief Dennis Fritz, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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