'Game Over'? US Cuts Rebels Loose in Southwest Syria
One of the final pockets of formerly US-backed rebels in Syria has been given notice by the US that they will not be rescued from a Syrian government advance. Could this be the final chapter of one of the most expensive CIA operations in history?
One of the final pockets of formerly US-backed rebels in Syria has been given notice by the US that they will not be rescued from a Syrian government advance. Could this be the final chapter of one of the most expensive CIA operations in history?
One of the final pockets of formerly US-backed rebels in Syria has been given notice by the US that they will not be rescued from a Syrian government advance. Could this be the final chapter of one of the most expensive CIA operations in history?
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.
How are you this Monday, Dr. Paul?
Well, doing very well, ready and rearing to go and looking around for some news.
There's always some news out there.
But the most important news is always hidden, so we have to go looking for the real stuff.
That's true.
Because sometimes Russia gate is the only thing in the news, and they're running out of steam on that, if you've noticed.
It looks like it didn't turn out to be much of a scandal, except it backfired.
The accusers were the ones who were doing all the collusion.
But if you have something, do you have a news item that you'd like to make a comment on?
I want to go into what's going on in Syria because there are some big changes going on in Syria.
But any other news item?
Just one thing, actually.
I mentioned in an interview that I did yesterday.
There was a piece in the Washington Post a couple of days ago, and I don't have the title in front of me.
You can easily find it.
But it's a fascinating article.
It's one of those ones that make you wonder, how did this get past the censors?
But essentially what it does, it talks about a new study in Afghanistan showing that the Taliban have successfully set up a parallel state throughout most of the country.
And they're not ruling by force.
They're not beheading.
And they've even softened some of their stance on girls going to school and this sort of thing.
So they said they're using persuasion more than anything in preparation for governing when this is all over.
Do you mean that a country might solve some of their problems if outsiders didn't go in there and try to mess it up?
Yeah, it's amazing.
If the U.S. were to pull out, they'd probably make a deal with the government in Kabul.
Well, I have one little item I want to mention before we talk about Syria, and that has to do with tariffs.
You know, it's a big issue, and it's getting bigger and bigger.
Although at the beginning, it didn't seem like anybody was paying any attention.
Trump mentioned it in the campaign, and the first year he mentioned it.
But all of a sudden, this year, this was active.
He started threatening and putting it on.
Actually, it's pretty confusing.
There's a lot of threats.
Few are put on.
Some haven't gone into effect yet.
But I think people are getting serious about it because the stock market's getting a little bit nervous.
It's been down, I think, eight out of the last nine days.
So they're concerned, and it's usually related to this issue of trade.
But I find one thing that's interesting.
Trump threatened yesterday or on the weekend, which I think is a significant reason why the markets are down today sharply, that he said that China wants to buy stock in some of our companies, and they might be related in some way to some technology.
And all they're doing is buying stock.
And of course, it's argued they may do more.
But Trump wants to put a prohibition on the Chinese not buying stock.
And I got to think it, you know, Trump makes all this big issue of trade balance.
You know, we buy all that stuff, of course, because we have free money.
We print the money.
And the Chinese have nothing to do with it.
One mistake they made was they monetized it.
So if there was dollars came over, whoever held those dollars got yung won for it.
But anyway, the trade balances was, imbalance was a natural consequence of this.
So here they go.
They finally do what they're supposed to do with their money.
They're not supposed to burn the dollars.
They've been buying our debt for years.
Maybe they're tired of buying our debt, and I think they're less enthusiastic about that.
So then they start buying some stock and Trump wants to put prohibitions on this to prevent the imbalance that has occurred.
And one comment made at AEI said, well, with this policy, everything is national security.
So everything they do, and that's the justification.
But this trade war is getting worse.
It's been around before.
Everybody knows about it.
But it's to me pretty amazing how much support the tariff situation has gained.
It's easy to demagogue.
And even on our website, we get a lot of challenge of people, well, we've got to protect the people.
But what people don't realize, if we want to put on a tariff to solve a problem with China, we put a tax on the American people.
The whole thing doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, there's a lot of...
Syria's Sovereign Territory Lost00:05:26
So we'd like to talk now about Syria.
There's a major announcement.
There's a major battle going on in southeast Syria.
Southwest Syria.
And the rebels are backed in a corner.
And we've been, of course, ironically, people don't want to believe this, but we're sort of on the side of the rebels, you know, and al-Qaeda.
But they're losing.
And there's going to be a major battle.
The Syrian government, along with their ally, Russia, said, we're going to clean this mess up.
We're going to reclaim this territory.
And this is our sovereign territory.
And it looks like they're going to do it.
So when push came to shove, we had an announcement.
We've been financing and defending them and having special protection in there and information.
And our announcement is, we're backing off.
We don't want to have anything to do with this.
You're on your own now.
So this is an important battle, but it's very symbolic, too, of what is shifting going on.
I mean, it's been many months now that the momentum has been shifted in favor of Assad.
Nobody expects Assad to be gone in six months.
He hasn't been gone in six years, so he's not going to be gone in six months.
So they've given up on this.
And it's sort of a cleanup operation now.
And it's something that I think is going to be noticed, although there's not very much talk about this in the mainstream media.
Yeah, we touched on it a little bit last week that it's been touch and go because the U.S. has issued several statements to the Syrian government.
Don't you dare go after these parts, this Dara region in southwestern Syria.
Don't you do it?
There'll be consequences.
And then at the end of the week, the tone softened a little bit.
They didn't have the implicit threat of U.S. force.
So there was a sense that there was a shift.
And so over the weekend, the U.S. sent a message to the Free Syrian Army, which is really essentially al-Qaeda forces in the region, quote, you should not base your decisions on the assumption of a military intervention by the U.S. That's a good sentence.
Right.
And, you know, Haley has a statement, and of course, the blame was all placed on Russia.
It was Russia's fault.
She didn't give a fair and balanced approach to why Russia is there and why Syria is concerned about this.
But I'm sort of interested in the fact that Haley, Haley gets a lot of attention, almost as much or more than the Secretary of State.
You know, Pompeo probably doesn't get as much press as she gets.
Yeah, I think they're eyeing her as presidential material.
She ticks a lot of boxes.
She's a hardcore neocon, woman neocon president.
I'm sure they're loving the idea of that.
But, you know, they're already, the Syrian government is already moving on this area.
And we have a map actually that might help us visualize it better, this part of the region.
But so there's southwestern Syria.
The green areas are controlled by the Free Syrian Army slash HTS, which is al-Nusra front, i.e. al-Qaeda.
The red, of course, is the Syrian government forces, and they've already actually made more advances since this picture was taken.
That black, the blue is Israel-occupied Golan Heights, and that little black part to the right of the blue is ISIS.
So it's ISIS and Al-Qaeda there.
You can see Damascus at the top.
The Syrian government is making its move.
It's going to clear out this last part.
And they dropped some pamphlets themselves and said, hey, you guys, you should surrender.
People, if you can leave, you should leave.
And so far, apparently, 11 rebel groups in the southwest region have gone over to the government side and decided to not fight.
You know, this is a mixed deal for us to declare, well, this is sad that we're losing a fight.
Some people will look at it that way.
And some will say, well, this is great.
It's not expanding the war.
But in one way, there is something to be said about the attitude has changed compared to what went on in the 60s.
Or even with the Iraq war.
The more we lost, the more troops we put in, the more people we killed, and advanced the war.
At least they're not doing that.
They're not saying, well, we're losing.
And the argument was, and it was used against me in the debates, is that, well, we can't lose face.
Yes, we lost umpteen men, and they've died, but we don't want them to look like they died in vain, so we have to go back there and win this war.
And that's the attitude was on Vietnam.
I remember Johnson said, I never want to be the first president to lose a war.
So that's the reason they want to put more troops in.
At least that isn't the attitude.
It's a tough way to say that maybe things improved a little bit.
We're a little less aggressive.
Maybe we're wising up to reality and backing off.
So I'm afraid this might be a one-time incident, but maybe not.
Maybe there will be changes because, you know, you just mentioned a little while ago that a little clip about Afghanistan.
Maybe we'd wise up there and say, hey, instead of asking for more troops like we had in Afghanistan, maybe we could just back off and see what happens.
CIA's Uncertain Global Role00:10:00
You know, Eric Zoyce has an article that I put up on the Ron Paul Institute website.
And it makes a great point because everyone, who lost Syria?
How did we, we lost it, we ceded it to the Russians.
And he said, what makes you believe that it was ours to cede or to give or to keep for ourselves in the first place?
It's this preposterous notion that the media has that somehow every other country is ours.
We either keep it or we lose it.
It's crazy.
But the thing that I think that happened in southwest Syria, and this is also something that happened in 2015 when the Russians came in, the Russians made a quick move.
The Syrian government said, we're going to go, we're going to get rid of this area, we're going to flush out Al-Qaeda, we're going to retake this territory.
The Russians said, okay, we're there with air support, sending in tons of equipment that you're going to need for it.
And I think it caught the U.S. into a situation where you're really going to go to war with Russia over Al-Qaeda in southwest Syria.
And I think that's what happened.
I think wisely, Trump blinked.
Right.
You know, all these kind of problems, I think, are pushed by and managed by our CIA in secret.
And the CIA, of course, has been very much involved, but I don't think they ever give good advice.
I think it's always going in the wrong direction.
And look at what we have now.
We have the head of the CIA who's Secretary of State, and they know the ropes.
I think the CIA is a real menace to us.
And this whole idea that it protects us is just total nonsense.
Because if you take any of the coups or election interference, we don't like the Russians interfering in ours, which I don't happen to believe if they did, it was petty.
But how many times, 80 times we've done it since World War II?
We're always involved, and nobody cares.
Nobody says, you know, but the CIA is always involved.
They do it in secret.
And, of course, the big event when the CIA got involved that we have to live with is when they participated in the coup in Iran in 1953.
So that is where the problem is.
That secrecy in government is really very, very bad.
And when I talk about secrecy and manipulation, I think CIA and Federal Reserve have the financiers and then they have the secret control of the special forces and dictating policy.
It's really a sad story because we don't have many reliable sources.
They talk about CNN and MSNBC, NBC, always presenting bad reporting.
But the other side, the Republican side has to build up the warmongering stuff.
So the American people don't have a whole lot of choices.
So I hope we can contribute to helping to sort some of this out.
And you know, this was the CIA's baby, this Free Syrian Army/slash Al-Qaeda troops, particularly down there.
This was the CIA's baby.
It's one of their most expensive operations in history.
They're paying all the salaries, sending in billions of tons of equipment and all this and that.
And boom, it just dropped like a rock as a total, complete failure.
Oh, and by the way, sorry we ruined your country.
And we have this strategic ally with the enemy, and then when we don't do so well, like in Libya and Syria, who ends up with the weapons?
They end up against us or against Assad and other people who deserve a little bit more respect.
But our weapons are so often used against us.
And of course, there's the financial anger angle.
There's a lot of waste and fraud and abuse and subsidizing and supporting the enemies.
So in one way, we can keep our fingers crossed.
This is not really bad news for us.
And some people would say, no, we can't let this stand because this looks like a failure.
And we have to, there's still people today who complain that the main problem we had in Vietnam is that we gave up too soon.
You know, we only sacrificed 60,000 people, then we didn't give up, so we needed more troops.
250,000 troops on the ground wasn't enough.
We should have had 500,000, 750,000 to prove that we own the world.
Well, I think eventually this little episode here in Syria, which you describe as a major episode with the CIA, that this may be a signal that we don't have the weight that we think we have around the world and running the world, because eventually empires do fail.
It's just a matter of time.
And of course, the people calling for all those more troops were not in uniform themselves.
Just like the neocons of today, which reminds me of Josh Rogan, the neocon who writes for the Washington Post.
He tweeted out earlier today, you know, crying all these tears about how Russia is violating the deconfliction agreement by helping Syria get rid of the al-Qaeda rebels in southwestern Syria.
This is the canard that they've been saying over and over.
Nikki Haley has repeated it too, and so has the State Department.
This is an absolute patent lie.
There has never been a deconfliction agreement that exempts Al-Qaeda and ISIS from being hit.
We talked about it earlier.
That's the whole reason they had this deconfliction agreement that the Syrian government wasn't a party of to allow a more effective attack on Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
They're just lying through their teeth.
I have a policy that I think would solve that, and that is this have deconfliction by just leaving.
We don't need the conflict because it's interesting, though, that some people say the problem today is the American people don't pay attention because there's not a draft and not enough Americans are being killed and people aren't getting excited.
But I think ultimately, though, we'll come home to Roost.
There's always a cost, and people do suffer.
There's a lot of people mentally and physically, and the killing has gone on, not only with our people, but with so many others.
But this is something that has to change, and hopefully, people will witness this and say, you know, it doesn't make any sense.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Because if you look at what happens after you get rid of Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi, what would have happened if they had gotten rid of Assad?
You know, there's no reason to think, oh, everything would have been okay.
Yeah, on the contrary.
And here's another thing that's interesting in the context of this whole thing.
John Bolton, ironically, may go down as sort of a peacemaker in a way.
He's going to Moscow on Wednesday, expected to pave the way for a Trump-Putin summit in July on the wings of this NATO summit in mid-July.
And they're expected to talk about, to discuss Syria.
They're going to talk about probably this area.
So interestingly, this is in the news, this supposed meeting that's going to be scheduled between Trump and Putin.
This might be some sort of turning the corner in foreign policy.
Let's hope so.
That's a big challenge, but that would be something to have that happen.
And I guess he shouldn't be held accountable for flip-flopping because there's a lot of forgiveness to our president because he has a couple positions.
Just look at sort of a beneficial flip-flop with North Korea.
We can't complain about that.
But, you know, it's the uncertainty, you know, whether it's the trade uncertainties or the foreign policy uncertainties that people don't like and they don't like to act on.
You know, it was so much different, say, in this horrendous war of World War II.
Everybody knew exactly who the enemy was and where it was coming from, and the people got together.
You know, even that war just lasted three and a half years or so, you know.
So it's this uncertainty that's going on that gives us these wars that last 15 and 20 years, but that's done on purpose.
It's not an accident because this is, they've warned us.
The global war on terrorism is going to last a long time.
It is.
But the global war on terrorism means nothing more than the domestic war on Americans and American civil liberties.
Absolutely.
I would just finish by saying, really, when this last pocket of al-Qaeda and ISIS is cleared out, the U.S. military presence inside Syria will make that much less sense than it does now.
And it makes very little sense at all.
So the question is: how does the U.S. extricate itself from Syria?
We're claiming we want to stay there forever, we're not going to leave, but also claiming that they're fighting ISIS, which is no longer there.
So that'll be the next domino to fall, so to speak.
And we can only hope sooner rather than later.
Finally, get your tickets to our conference in August, ronpaulinstitute.org/slash conference.
We'd like to see you.
There's a lot to discuss.
Very good.
And you know, we're talking about Assad and her ally, the Soviet or the Russians.
We did not mention today anything about other players in the game, Iran and Israel.
And it's all involved.
It's very, very complicated.
But so often, people can trace back the complexity of these issues when we get involved.
Because we do have a lot of clout.
We have a lot of money and a lot of weapons, and we stir the pot.
We stir it up economically with sanctions and trade barriers and all these kinds of things.
So it would not solve all the problems.
There would be the conflicts.
But I'll tell you what, the world would be a lot better off if we just minded our own business, come home, maybe pay more attention to our own borders rather than thinking that we can solve all the border problems throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world.
I think that would be the proper road to peace and prosperity.