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March 26, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
19:10
Trump's Syria Envoy: 'War Will Continue'

President Trump's point man for Syria has said that the defeat of ISIS will not result in a US withdrawal from its illegal occupation of Syrian territory. In fact, he said, the US would continue to support the anti-Assad "vetted Syrian opposition" fighters.

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Time Text
Syria's Unstable Policy 00:15:20
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 morning, Dr. Paul?
Doing well, doing well.
Ready to take on all the problems of the world.
We'll solve them.
And just relieve myself of a little bit of anxiety.
At least I said it, not that I think that I'm going to change the world very quickly.
Some people say, don't you get very frustrated?
Well, if you don't think you can change the world in a day or two or three, you know, you can just try to speak the truth and see where it goes.
Long game.
And of course, this week we think truth won out to some degree with the Mueller report.
And that's good.
So in the long run, I think truth does win out.
But some days it's pretty aggravating.
But that result was pretty amazing.
It's ongoing.
I mean, Democrats are scrambling now to keep it going.
So they have to create new problems.
But you know, there's a lot about the finances going on right now.
The State Department is asking for more money for Syria, and they want to actually build up troop support in Syria.
And yet the Pentagon did something that Trump probably would like.
It was just announced that the Pentagon said, oh, we'll give up $1 billion and let you build the wall.
So you didn't even need the Congress to do that.
There'll be a couple congressmen that are going to complain about it.
And for me, that's a mixed bag because first off, you know, I'm not excited about the wall, but I'm not excited about that money being spent.
So here they want more money for Syria.
I'd like to have less money for Syria and do something more domestically.
But anyway, that battle is going to continue.
But Jim Jeffries, who's a special envoy from Syria, had a briefing yesterday at the State Department.
And he more or less tokenly supported Trump.
ISIS has been pretty beat up, but not really defeated.
So don't you think we have to quit?
And he was making the justification for staying more and adding more troops and spending more money.
Which contradicts totally and completely Trump's announcement a couple of months ago.
We're going out.
We're taking all our troops out.
We've defeated them and we don't have to do that.
And yet Trump's tone has changed.
And it looks like we're going to be here.
But one thing that Jeffries said was we have to, you know, the war is going to continue.
We're not stopping the war.
And the principle is they have to maintain an enduring defeat.
So they've defeated it.
But another time, there's the announcement that there are, to keep people on their toes and keep the military-industrial complex happy, there are potentially 20,000 ISIS people can all of a sudden arise, you know, back in back in eastern Syria.
So don't let your guard down.
Keep the money going.
And it looks like it will.
So right now, the question, when I was looking at all this material, I say, who is the president?
Who makes these decisions?
Bolton.
So we're back to that again.
But the policy is probably a little worse than we had hoped for.
We're always hoping for a better policy.
But it looks like we're going to be there for a long, long time.
And they admit that.
We have to stay there for a long time.
They won't give a date.
They won't even give you the date.
The numbers of troops that we're maintaining.
Oh, 200, oh, plus 200.
Oh, we'll take it up to 1,000.
But my guess is that When the dust settles, maybe in a year, we're going to realize that we have a lot more troops there.
And if there is any extra fighting going on, or they decide that the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, we'll have a lot more troops there and a mess.
But let's hope I'm wrong on that.
Well, I think there are two big things to remember on this.
The first is that ISIS was never a direct threat to the United States, despite the rhetoric that's used to justify ongoing U.S. military operations in the Middle East.
ISIS, they wanted to create a caliphate in the Middle East and stay there and rule it from there.
They were not like Al-Qaeda looking for a global, Al-Qaeda is more the Trotskyists and ISIS is more the Stalinists wanted to just build it in one country.
So that's one thing.
But the other fatally flawed assumption in the whole Jeffrey briefing, the whole Syria policy, is the assumption that somehow Assad will sit back and watch ISIS come back.
He's been fighting them tooth and nail since 2011, since 2014, despite U.S. efforts to bring extremists in.
So the assumption is that if we leave, Assad's going to make some kind of peace or something with ISIS.
It's insane.
You know, rightfully so.
The Republicans and a lot of Americans were disgusted with the disinformation, the lies told over the Mueller thing, you know, and the way they treated Trump.
And we joined in and say, you know, this is so distorted and it's so unfair.
At the same time, when disinformation comes out on foreign policy, nobody really cares.
Nobody's skeptical.
Nobody's skeptical.
Oh, yeah, we have to do that.
But there was one report here.
I'm going to read a short paragraph about trying to summarize this, but what it does, it summarizes for me why it's complex.
You know, because I'm trying to figure out who the factions are right now.
We're still helping the Syrian defense forces, the people who are pro-Kurds, but they don't particularly like Assad, but we help them.
But this demonstrates that there's still a mixed bag over there in the country.
It's not settled.
Syria is not Syria yet, and who knows, it may never.
I imagine Syria will be Syria.
It's been Syria for a long, long time.
So someday Syria will get back to being Syria, but not this month.
The Pentagon is hoping to use this money.
They want to raise the money to nearly double the number of SDF fighters, defense fighters, Syrian defense fighters, receiving stipends on their way to the growing force.
They want to build up that force now.
The war's over, but now they're rebuilding.
They wanted to get it up to 61,000 troops.
Of course, we're going to limit how many troops we have, but guess who's going to pay for this?
This newly planned defense force, 61,000.
The fiscal year 20,000 budget requests says that setting conditions to prevent an ISIS insurgent and deny it.
Safe haven following the U.S. withdrawal from Syria will be heavily reliant on going on ongoing U.S. support for VSO.
VSO don't have to, you know, remember some more letters again.
And so the VSO stands for Vetted Syrian Opposition.
Oh, we vetted them, so they have to be good guys.
You know, they're going to be on our side.
We'll be able to fully trust them.
And even if they switch sides, they're not going to take our money or our weapons with them.
They've been vetted.
And the vetted Syrian opposition, the Pentagon's term for American-backed forces opposing Syrian President Bashad Assad.
So we fought this war, of course, at the beginning and give Obama his due.
He didn't go in there to be friends with Assad.
But it took a few years for our side to realize that we lost the war.
But anyway, they're still at it.
And when they talk about an enduring defeat, I think the consequence is, what they'd like you to visualize, we did it, we beat them, there's a problem, they might come back, but they're defeated, and we want to keep the defeat enduring forever and ever.
Not peace, but they change it a little bit.
But I kept thinking, you know what they're talking about is enduring war.
Enduring war.
No, perpetual war.
They have no intention on stopping the war or stopping this spending.
It's all over and they're wanting more money.
So it's such a shame that this happens.
But nobody seems to be worried, you know, with this modern monetary theory.
If they need money, they just print it.
So as if that's something new.
Yeah, it's, you know, the U.S. Syria policy is insane and it can't work.
And I think everyone knows, and unfortunately, as you point out, you know, fake news doesn't get a lot of scrutiny when it comes to things like our insane Syria policy.
But $300 million the Pentagon wants for the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Well, that's just a fancy name for the Kurds.
You know, they didn't want to call them the Kurds, so they called them the Syrian Democratic Forces.
And as you point out, they want to double the Kurdish troops to 61,000.
Well, that's absolutely impossible.
It's untenable because at the same time, and someone even used the word juggling in one of the articles I read, they have to juggle these Kurds and the relationship with NATO ally Turkey.
And Turkey is not going to sit by and watch the U.S. pump a bunch of money into building up a Kurdish army on Turkey's border.
It's not going to happen.
So these two, there's no way these two can reconcile with each other.
You know, and as we talk here, we talk about spending more and more money.
Nobody talks about the deficit.
And I keep thinking, boy, what if the liberals were in charge?
How they would spend.
But, you know, now, the only people that gives a token concern about the deficit, other than our handful of good friends, will be the Democrats.
The Democrats throw that out.
And it's a joke.
It's sort of like it's turned into be a joke about the conspiracy of Trump with the Russians.
So it's ongoing.
Policies stay the same.
And the momentum is powerful.
It's just amazing that people are assuming this is going to last forever.
But I can tell you for sure that there are certain things that we do know, even though we might not know when or what, but there are certain things.
If you burn a house down, the house burns down.
If we're burning our country down with paper money, believe me, you cannot prevent the problem.
Matter of fact, I think people claim, well, you Austrian economists, how do you know there's going to be a recession?
Well, if you understood economics and malinvestment and interest rates and all, the stage has been set.
It's not so much you have to be smart to know a recession is coming.
Almost every financial station today said, always, when it comes, when they come, we have this, we'll have our recession, it comes.
But they never quite understand the problem.
But here it is.
It's this perpetual spending for perpetual war, and they're always doing good for the whole world.
Yeah, and this is just an example of the U.S. desperately holding on to an already failed Syria strategy.
What they're desperately trying to do is to keep the idea alive that we're going to overthrow Assad.
And so that's why they're grasping at this Syrian Democratic Forces.
But we were both looking at an Almonitor article that quoted the head of the SDF.
So our guy, he was quoted saying, negotiations with Assad are inevitable.
They realize they have to live there.
They have to live in the country.
They're going to have to make some kind of deal, some kind of peace with Assad.
And the U.S. is kicking and screaming, don't you dare do that.
We need to keep this illusion alive that we have a policy in Syria that makes sense.
Well, that would be welcomed by the military-industrial complex because the money will continue to be spent.
And I think the control of the policy is, obviously, it must be, I have to be careful, out of the hands of Trump.
But that seems a stretch because when he wants to grab hold of things, he does.
But anyway, we haven't figured out.
At least he says things and does things, and it's not a reflection.
And somebody else is really the ultimate president.
And it might be just the momentum of the times, and there's enough pressure, and people yell and scream at him.
Well, if you do this, we can't, you're going to be known as you let Syria fail.
Who let Syria go?
Syria.
Two other things that stood out on the Jeffrey briefing really quickly, I think.
First of all, he said the State Department was focused on getting governments to take back foreign fighters.
And that's kind of funny if you think about it because that's actually admitting that this was not an uprising within Syria.
This was not people rising up to demand their freedom.
These were foreign jihadists coming into the country and trying to turn it into sort of a nightmare theocratic state.
And the other thing that was interesting is that if you remember back during the Munich Security Conference a couple of months ago, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dunford, his big idea at the time was, yeah, we're going to pull out.
Trump wants us to get out.
But our NATO allies are going to go in there and they're going to take up all those spots that we're leaving.
NATO allies said, are you out of your mind?
We're not going in there.
So yesterday, Jeffrey probably sheepishly ruled out the whole idea.
No, no, no, we're not going to replace them with NATO troops.
They had to kind of turn and run with their tails in defeat.
Nobody wants this tar baby.
Nobody wants to inherit this insane policy.
Nobody knows how many prisoners there are.
It's estimated to be minimum of 7,000.
But there might be 2,000 family members, too.
So you know it's just taking over villages and different things.
But they don't know what to do with them.
But, you know, half of them are Syrians.
Why don't you just let them go home or something like that?
But there's a lot from Iraq and from Iran, and they come.
And the other question that they don't worry about the finances, because that's how they make money, but they don't ever really ask the question that we've been asking for more than a decade, and that is what motivates people to do this?
Why are they so much willing to go to war and die and commit suicide terrorism?
And so many of them die when it's really not doing it well.
And it turns out they don't ask the question that maybe this is a reflection, and you hinted to that, a reflection of our policy.
Nobody recognizes that our policy continues to fail.
But our policies are what drives people to do this.
And you take, and they're not all the same, but I think what unifies them is an anti-American position.
But if you take the Taliban, I don't think anybody's predicting there's going to be a boatload of Taliban arriving on our shores because they're just trying, they're trying to do what they've tried for thousands of years, you know, in Afghanistan, just keep foreigners out.
And they have gone by different names and all.
But it's the occupation, the foreign invasion.
Policies Driving The Drug War 00:03:40
And prior to 2011, and our reaction to that, these organizations didn't exist.
Of course, it was hinted that the 9-11 reflected what we had already been involved in in Iraq, as a motivation.
Yeah, exactly.
And you know, the final thing on that is that our staying there, our having our proxy forces there, it really is a self-looking ice cream cone because it'll ensure that ISIS continues there wherever we are, as you just got done saying.
So it's an insurance policy for the military-industrial complex.
But I would just close the show, but it's been a couple of days.
I want to remind everyone again that we will be in Houston.
We're taking the show on the road.
Dr. Paul, it's not too far long of a road trip for us, but we're taking the show on the road a little bit, talk about the drug war.
We've got some very exciting speakers.
It's going to be a very, very fun time to get together, learn something, meet interesting people.
RonPaulInstitute.org/slash conference.
It's on May 18th.
There's still time to get your tickets, but they're going fast.
Very good.
And I hope we have a good turnout.
I believe we will.
And we will be talking about war, but it's a war, it's the drug war.
In many ways, it's very similar.
They're perpetuated, whether it's the drug war or wars overseas, perpetuated for reasons that are understood and these wars could be prevented.
And it deals with the principles of liberty and non-intervention.
In foreign policy, if we had non-intervention, we wouldn't have so many deaths and destruction and money being spent.
You know, in the drug war, that has been used for the attack on civil liberties.
And I'm still keeping my fingers crossed because we're moving in the directions because I always made a prediction.
I said, someday, the American people are going to wake up and repeal prohibition.
And that was because I had read, and so many people know, the history of prohibition against alcohol.
It was a total disaster.
And it made problems much, much worse and caused so much criminality.
And that is what's happened with the drugs.
It has not solved any problems, made things worse.
And when you think about the biggest business that benefited by the drug war have been the prison system, building prisons and privatizing a lot of this.
So there's a lot of consequences, but it's just the fact that even though we live in a free country, we do not have the confidence of understanding how freedom really works.
And being for freedom doesn't mean that you don't care about people and there will be no prosperity.
Matter of fact, I happen to believe exactly the opposite.
You know, everybody's doing good for the people and having safety nets for everybody and making peace around the world.
And it's up to us to spread American exceptionalism.
It does exactly the opposite.
And that's why people need, and I wish they at a younger age might be exposed to it.
But unfortunately, if you look at what our young people are being exposed to, our universities and cultural Marxism and things going on here, we have a lot of wars to fight.
But the one is the war against liberty.
And that's the one we need to win.
We can hone in on that, know what liberty is, and know why it's so important, why it is the human right that is the most important, and it's a natural right for everybody, that we could solve these problems.
But we have a ways to go.
So we will have our conference here soon.
We will be talking about a domestic war, but ultimately we have to deal with the big picture of trying to preserve liberty in this country and throughout the world.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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