Just when it seemed the war in Syria might be winding down, it heats back up. First a Russian plane is shot down, then an Israeli plane is shot down after completing a bombing run on Syrian territory. Meanwhile the US continues occupying parts of northeast Syria with no legal basis in US or international law...
Just when it seemed the war in Syria might be winding down, it heats back up. First a Russian plane is shot down, then an Israeli plane is shot down after completing a bombing run on Syrian territory. Meanwhile the US continues occupying parts of northeast Syria with no legal basis in US or international law...
Just when it seemed the war in Syria might be winding down, it heats back up. First a Russian plane is shot down, then an Israeli plane is shot down after completing a bombing run on Syrian territory. Meanwhile the US continues occupying parts of northeast Syria with no legal basis in US or international law...
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Glad to have you back, Dr. Paul.
I had a lot of heavy weight trying to carry the show over here.
You mean that vacation I took?
We still had a bit of work, but we did have a good time after a little visit.
That was a trip Carol got to go with me, which I liked.
That's great.
But we need to talk today about foreign policy.
That's right.
Believe it or not.
Now, you know, when we talked this morning, we talked about two things.
One, should we talk about Korea?
Because there's interesting things.
As a matter of fact, we see some positive things in Korea.
Or should we talk about Syria, which is very, very serious and looks like it's getting out of control?
And so I decided that we best deal with the Syria stuff.
And maybe tomorrow, if nothing else blows up, we can talk about some of the positive things happening with Korea.
And once again, talking about our foreign policy in relationship to the North and South Koreans.
But anyway, we want to talk about the escalation that's going on.
It's been going on and this war's been going on.
And it's hard to keep track.
It's hard to know how many people are involved.
And our title, who is the aggressor in Syria.
I think I misspoke on that.
It says, who are the aggressors in Syria?
Because there's a lot of people involved.
And their main goal is not only to get rid of Assad, it's literally to destroy Syria, you know, and there's a lot of motivations.
And it's just not one or two.
Here's an article from several years ago, like three years ago.
It says, why the U.S., France, and Britain are destroying Syria.
And it goes into their analysis of it, and there's various reasons for it.
And one they listed and I found interested is because they are too financially independent.
You know, we've heard that in Iraq and we've heard that in Syria, and that probably is not the whole thing, but it's an issue as well.
But let's just go over briefly on how the ducks have lined up, who are the ones who think that Syria, as bad as they are, is still a sovereign nation.
And every nation that violated some rules of etiquette and became less than perfect, why we have tolerated them, and that's the way history has been.
But in this case, there's no tolerance at all.
But, you know, it's before 2011, and especially 2011, I see that as a date when it was escalated, when Obama came in and said Assad had to go, Hassan had to go.
But thinking for the other countries for a minute that have been involved, we know we were involved early on, and Assad had to go, so we were very much involved, and we literally participated in doing things.
You know, the violence and sending in special forces and CIA, as we always do.
But we were joined by our old allies, France and Great Britain, and they actually dropped some bombs over there, and they supported it.
How much they're involved right now, we don't know, but they have used aggression.
But there are other countries, too, that we can say we're aggressors against a sovereign nation and against Assad.
And in this day and age, should be considered unjustified.
That's true.
And I guess crime among them really was Turkey, which had Erdogan had a policy of no troubles with neighbors.
Pretty good policy to have.
We should keep that ourselves.
But then they decided to jump on the bandwagon.
You know, the Saudis were on the bandwagon, Qatar was on the bandwagon, United Arab Emirates, Israel has long been on the bandwagon of overthrow.
And I think they were maybe intoxicated by the idea of taking over some Syrian land or what have you.
So they all piled on and jumped into it.
But if I can say, actually, I was looking back, I was dumpster diving in the congressional record, trying to write an article at some point.
But this is back, I think, in 2002, if I'm not mistaken, when Congress passed the Syria-Iran Sanctions Act.
And I went because I thought, I bet Dr. Paul had a floor speech or a statement on it.
And I went and I found it, and it was great.
It was a great statement.
It basically said, look, you're going down the path to war.
These sanctions are the path to violence and the path to war.
This is even before the Iraq war.
So who was aggressing?
Well, we were aggressing with these sanctions many, many years before 2011.
I'm always looking for positive things, but I hear things like that.
You know what it does to me?
It feels just a heavy feeling.
You know, we keep working at it and no one listens.
But a few people, when I mention that, it's a little discouraging.
No one listened.
They'll write in and say that a few people do listen.
And that's what counts.
Ideas are powerful and ideas spread.
And that is the only thing that's really important.
So that's what we want to contribute to.
But, you know, essentially the Syrians and Assad were totally by themselves, nobody.
And I imagine they thought it wouldn't take much.
They got rid of other people they didn't like, whether it was Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi.
But then it didn't go so smoothly.
And then they must not have calculated how Russia would rush in.
And that made all the difference in the world.
But why wouldn't they have calculated that?
That shouldn't have been a total surprise because Russia has a military base there.
It's the only thing they have on the Mediterranean.
So it just is common sense that they might do something.
But what's the difference between Russia being involved versus Saudi Arabia and Israel and the United States?
Well, one big difference is they've been invited in, you know, to help them out, and they have a base there.
So that's not, some people will say, well, why don't you list the Russians as aggressor?
But I don't think they qualify, you know, in this day and age with the word aggressor.
We always do this, but think about it if it was the U.S. You know, there was a move afoot, a foreign-financed move afoot to overthrow the U.S. government.
And the U.S. called in its NATO allies and said, hey, we're up against the ropes.
Can you come in here and help us put down this foreign armed revolt?
That wouldn't make NATO the aggressors.
That would make them actually defending their allies, which whatever you think about Russia, this is objectively true.
And the same is true with Iran.
These are their allies.
They called in their allies when it looked like they were on the ropes in 2015.
Hey, we're about to fall.
Jihadists are about to take over this country.
We need your help.
And their allies answered the call.
Well, the people who rallied behind Assad, shorter list, we mentioned Russia, but Iran has rallied and they send help, but they have been invited.
So I don't believe they qualify as the aggressor.
Hezbollah is in there, makes people nervous at times.
But it's also a group that allied with Assad.
And it's hard to say, well, he's not a saint.
Well, he's not a saint.
But, you know, there's a lot of non-saints in the world, and there's a lot of things that we do that we criticize.
But also, there's some Shia Muslim.
That group is more sympathetic than the Sunnis.
And so that's a smaller group, but it's been ongoing.
Russian Plane Shot Down00:04:58
It's up and down.
But the big excuse, especially for us to get involved, and it's always we're going after ISIS.
I think the war on terrorism has been used for a long, long time, and there's been some serious problems with them.
But the shift in the ability of the terrorists to be successful, it's been diminished.
And that is much minimized in Syria right now.
But that's always been the excuse.
But still, they stay.
And didn't our government just not too long ago announce that we will be there for a long time?
And that's a significant event.
Because we're not invited.
We don't have any reason to be there.
There was a fig leaf, which I used the term before, a fig leaf of ISIS fighting ISIS to keep us there, but that is gone.
What you have essentially is the U.S. setting up illegal bases in northeastern Syria in support of an armed rebel group that seeks to overthrow the Syrian government.
So we are active, militarily active in Syria with a group, allied with the group that seeks to overthrow the government.
And that's why we started talking about escalation.
That's why this escalation about a week or so ago, there was a group of about 500, I guess, militia allied with the Syrian government who went to attack a base of rebels near where the U.S. has its headquarters.
And the U.S. said, well, we had to use defense, self-defense, and kill all these Syrian army.
Mattis, Secretary of Defense Mattis, said, it's perplexing why Syria decided to attack this.
Would it be perplexing if the shoe was on our foot?
Yeah, and they call it our bases.
And we're the invaders there.
So that happened, but then there was also a Russian plane was shot down.
And that is part of this cleaning up action.
But that stirred up a lot of problems too.
And that was supposed to be done by the Free Syrian Army, that they were capable of doing that.
And sometimes the event is important, but sometimes the implication of the escalation is who has which weapons.
So this is escalating in light of some of this weaponry is moving in there, serving the interests of Assad, which means that, well, they can't dwell forever on the jihadists because, you know, at one time we were actually helping them and we helped try to save them.
And of course, we've talked about that.
But now they are trying to clean up this area.
But then this weekend, another event might be the most serious of the recent events, and that has to do with the Israelis had an airplane shot down.
And that again has stirred up a conflict, which looks like what's coming from that is the much stronger rhetoric.
Not that the animosity hasn't already been there.
The rhetoric and the animosity has accelerated between Israel and Iran.
And all the blame is being placed on Iran for having this plane shot down.
But what was the plane doing?
It was bombing Syria.
Yeah, the two plane shootdowns, I think, really are the reasons why we're talking about this today.
First of all, the Russian plane was shot down by forces that were trained and armed, certainly at one point by the United States and under the watchful eye of Turkey.
So these, regardless of the origin of the missile, we still don't know if these were these man pads, these shoulder-fired missiles were U.S. or Soviet or somewhere else in origin, an old one.
Whatever the case is, these are troops that the U.S. was involved with and trained, and they shot down a Russian plane.
Of course, they paid the price for it afterward.
And then you had, as you point out, the Israelis.
They used the pretext of an Iranian drone over Israeli territory.
Of course, it was probably over the Golan Heights, which is technically Syrian territory, as a pretext to start bombing.
Then, when they started bombing and the Syrians actually shot back successfully, then they escalated even further.
But thankfully, at least for now, Putin, President Putin of Russia, called Netanyahu and said, hey, he warned him, calm it down, don't escalate.
There's a real danger here, and thus far it's worked.
Yeah, and it remains to be seen because I just sort of sense that there's a greater concern that we, our side, that's opposing Assad, the U.S. and the Allies are losing, losing there, and they're losing the battle for Syria, and that Assad may persist.
And that's why I would expect that there's going to be a lot more military attacks.
Chaos In Syria00:07:41
I don't think this is just going to quietly fade away.
I mean, I think some of the leaders on occasion try.
I mean, some of these no-fly zones have been developed by Turkey and Russia's talking together.
And we try to do that for our own benefits.
But I don't think it can be solved until we go back to what we started with.
Who are the aggressors?
Who's invading sovereign territory?
Who has the right to do this?
And I don't see how it's going to be settled until people recognize that we in the United States, our government, is participating in these wars that we shouldn't be involved in.
And this is not an exception.
This is sort of the rule.
It's just the one that's on the headline right now.
And when you think about the rhetoric directed toward Iran, this is not going to go away.
This administration, unfortunately, that's the one thing that they've been pretty consistent on.
Because as soon as Israel came in and said, you know, this is Iranians, Iranians, we've got to get them.
We said you're absolutely right.
It was Iran's fault.
They're at fault.
And yet we can't label them as an aggressor, as an invader.
And yet all these allies that we have, we stand behind.
But it's sort of like the death and destruction that is occurring in Yemen.
It's just so pervasive.
And this whole idea of causing chaos in Syria, it really comes to my mind whether it could be an ulterior motive of cultural Marxism.
This is a lot of violence, but cultural Marxism is to destroy culture.
So what happens?
They have a war, and then you have all these wars.
There's so many refugees.
And, you know, they're sweeping through Europe.
And they say, well, they're suffering from all this war.
Well, where did war come from?
And there's a lot of problems still in Europe.
And that, of course, even the United States, where we have not suffered the same degree of consequence from immigrants, it's still a big issue.
It's one of the biggest issues going.
I mean, it's always stirring the pot.
But if they're looking for destruction of culture, believe me, this is part of it.
But war seems to always destroy culture.
But it could work in this whole thing that the more chaos you have, the more likely it is that George Soros may be ringing his hands and say, hey, but hopefully we can combat his efforts to control the world.
And that's why they're so furious with Hungary, is that Hungary said, we're not going to take any refugees.
It's just not going to happen.
It would be nicer if Hungary wasn't involved at all in any of the allied, and I don't think they're directly involved with Syria.
But the other thing that we haven't mentioned that we're talking about being sucked into this war even further right now going on is Operation Juniper Cobra, in which 3,000 U.S. troops are in Israel doing joint military exercises practicing war against Lebanon.
So this is a war that we have no business being involved in.
It has nothing to do with us, but we're essentially practicing with them.
We don't even have a mutual defense treaty with them.
We're practicing war with them.
So it just gets us sucked further into these things that we don't have any business being involved in.
And I guess the last country that really wants to be involved and has tried to stay out has been Lebanon.
They're just trying to survive.
And I'm sure they don't have much effort to defend themselves either.
But I see a mess.
I think it's going to last a long time.
I think there's going to be more violence.
I think the conflict, especially between Israel and Iran and Saudi Arabia, Sunni and Shia conflict.
And for us to be involved in the middle of that, it can lead to death and destruction.
And we were talking about how many people might have died.
And I bet you a minimum could be 500,000 Syrians have been killed in this ongoing war.
So it's a real tragedy.
I think the position that I hold personally is that we as Americans have a greater moral responsibility to influence our own government.
We can have a moral responsibility to influence the world about why peace is better than war and have some rules.
But when it comes to politics, our influence has to be to try to galvanize people to influence our government to change the policy.
And that's a difficult task because the large majority of people right now aren't all that interested.
I mean, there's other things going on, all kinds of other events, and they don't have that much interest.
But I think that is what's necessary when the people wake up, the Congress will listen.
Or another thing might happen.
We just might run out of money, go bankrupt, and have just literal economic chaos where we no longer can afford it.
And if you looked at this week's plan on the spending on the budget, all of a sudden you realize, wow, what are they thinking about?
And it's all in this stuff.
$45 billion to continue the war in Afghanistan.
They say one of the frustrations our government has is they were actually thinking that maybe we could move out and not be so involved in Syria because we need more help in Afghanistan.
And when are we going to win that war?
Not soon, I can predict.
Well, you touched on my final thought, which is, aside from a small handful of members, some of them are on our board, the good ones.
But otherwise, where is Congress?
The whole rationale, the ISIS rationale, was very, very thin at best.
So where are Congress members?
I mean, I'm thinking in my mind of you could easily draft a piece, or at least their sense of Congress piece of legislation, that we should get our troops out of Syria.
We have no business being there.
But anyway, I want to also remind our viewers to subscribe to our channel.
We're trying to boost our numbers up, get the word out, get the real news out instead of the fake news.
And thanks for tuning in, Dr. Paul.
And thank you.
And I want to thank the audience for tuning in today because we are going to pursue this, especially on foreign policy, because we think it is so serious.
It's an economic issue, but it's also a peace issue and makes the big difference.
Peace and prosperity is what is our goal.
But this is an example of an extreme, complex country right now and the people involved, dozens of different groups involved.
And it was stated early on the goal was to destroy and get rid of Assad and destroy the country and cause chaos.
And they're doing a pretty good job.
But even they must be surprised that the resistance is a lot stronger.
There have been unintended consequences.
They will continue.
So they're rolling along to their perfection of accomplishing the overthrow of the government, whether it's like they did in Iraq and Libya.
And even those can't be considered victories at all.
They're failures.
So there never seems to be anybody learning a lesson.
So it's up to the American people to wake up and send a message.
They need to send a message to the members of Congress.
Quit it.
Just quit it.
Quit spending this money.
Quit the killing.
And why don't you have something that is best for America?
And that is have a policy of non-intervention which is designed to promote peace and prosperity.
I think that's a worthy goal.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.