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Dec. 3, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
28:50
20241203_jeffrey-sachs-on-syria-war-putin-israel
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Blaming Israel For Regional Chaos 00:15:02
Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon.
Systematically, the United States has done Netanyahu's bidding for almost 30 years now.
You're blaming Israel for all of it, and fine, that's your view.
Many people would say no, it's not.
I'm blaming Netanyahu in particular.
Overthrow governments in the neighborhood, expand the war, draw the United States in.
The U.S. is always available at Israel's behest.
You're never quite so keen to take a view that is anti-dictators.
I mean, Assad is a pretty vile dictator.
It's sickening.
It's tiring because these wars are disasters.
You think the CIA would launch a chemical weapons attack simply to smear Assad?
Of course it would.
Are you kidding?
It's done much worse than that.
President Trump campaigned in part on ending Putin's war on Ukraine and Israel's war on Hamas.
An escalating crisis in Syria may now join that bulging intra of foreign policy headaches.
Rebel groups have seized control of most of Aleppo, shattering the stalemate of a brutal war that never formally ended.
The attack is being led by Islamist militant group HTS, which is designated as a terror organization by the United States and the UK, among others.
It appears to have caught President Bashar al-Assad and his allies by surprise.
Putin's Russia have now launched airstrikes on rebel command centers in defense of al-Sad.
But suddenly, of al-Assad, but suddenly the conflict is red hot.
More than 300,000 people have been killed since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011.
The resulting exodus of millions of Syrian refugees has had profound consequences for Western politics.
The U.S. has heavy fingerprints on many of the key junctions in this conflict and could play a decisive role in what happens next.
Here to make sense of it is Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
Professor Sachs, great to have you back on Uncensor.
Great to be with you.
Thank you, Pierce.
I always get a tremendous amount of feedback when you come on.
Not all of it entirely positive for me, but that's fine.
That's what a democracy is all about.
Let me just start with your overview of what is happening in Syria and how significant you think it is.
I think it's interesting.
As you pointed out, the U.S. calls HTS a terrorist group, but obviously the U.S. is part of what's happening these days.
Jake Sullivan said, well, yes, it's a terrorist group, but it is giving Assad a run for his money, wink-wink.
This is a U.S.-Israel-Turkey operation.
It is part of Netanyahu's long-term game plan that goes on for 30 years to overthrow governments throughout the Middle East that back the Palestinian cause.
And they did apparently catch both the Russians and the Iranians and the Syrians off guard with this maneuver in recent days.
At least that's what seems to be the case.
But I'm sure that this is an Israel-U.S. and Turkish operation.
Turkey has its own issues in this with the Kurds in Syria.
For Israel, this is standard fair.
Overthrow governments in the neighborhood, expand the war, draw the United States in.
And the U.S. is always available at Israel's behest to play games and expand wars.
And that's what we're seeing right now.
From what we can gather of sporadic and of course very incomplete reports.
I don't think that this is going to topple Assad.
There are reinforcements pouring in from Iraq, probably from Iran, probably the Syrian forces as well internally are regrouping after having been caught by surprise.
But this is essentially at the core a Net Yahoo operation.
What is wrong with theorizing that it might just be that Syrian rebels represent a large body of Syrians who actually do want to overthrow a dictator that they believe has had the malevolent effect on their lives and they've chosen the moment to do it when Assad's big backup, Putin, is being massively stretched in the war in Ukraine.
And they probably felt now is as good a time as ever.
Yeah, whatever may be true or not about that, wars cost a lot of money.
They require a lot of armaments.
They require a lot of logistics.
They require a lot of intelligence.
I don't mean mental intelligence.
I mean information gathering and so forth.
And wars are not fought out of sentiment.
Wars are fought with money and armaments.
And therefore, you can always find major powers behind these wars.
And in the case of Syria, it was Obama in 2011 who tasked the CIA to work with the Saudis at the time and with Turkey at the time to overthrow Assad.
This was at Israel's behest in my understanding and interpretation.
But it required billions of dollars from the U.S., from Saudi Arabia, from Turkey, havens in Turkey, and so forth.
And this is the normal point.
These are not sentiments against Assad.
These are organized wars.
And wars are expensive.
And that always means turn the attention back to the major powers, whether it's the regional powers or the United States standing behind them.
What is really interesting about the sort of modern history of all this is I was a CNN when the Arab Spring erupted soon after I joined actually in 2011.
And a lot of those leaders, stroke dictators in that region, were toppled.
But Assad managed to avoid it.
And I found a quote.
This is Barack Obama, president at the time, of course, August 20th, 2012, talking about his red line for Assad.
We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.
That would change my calculus.
That would change my equation.
Now, what happened is that shortly after that, that's exactly what happened, that Assad used chemical weapons.
And that as a result, Obama was, by his own words, obligated to do something about it, but didn't.
He ducked his own red line.
And it was at that moment that Vladimir Putin, who I remember, and I'm sure you do as well, suddenly wrote extraordinarily an op-ed piece in the New York Times of all places.
And then he moved in to support Assad and effectively took control as Assad's main supporter in Syria.
And many people think that that was the catalyst for a lot of the problems that then followed.
Is that an accurate assessment of what happened, do you think?
Not really, although I did witness some of that close-up even at the G20 in St. Petersburg around the time of these events.
What this starts, and it's really fascinating to go back.
It starts in 1996 with Netanyahu, who wrote a book called Fighting Terrorism.
And the thesis of the book is quite straightforward and very dangerous.
He says, you know, there's Hamas, there's Hezbollah, they oppose Israel.
It's not good for us to fight them directly.
That won't work.
What we need to do is topple the governments that back them.
So what we need is regime change throughout the Middle East.
And he actually gave a long list of seven countries that included Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon.
And systematically, the United States has done Netanyahu's bidding for almost 30 years now, going to war with every one of them except for the big one that Netanyahu so much longs for, which is the war directly between the United States and Iran.
But the U.S. went to war with Syria in 2011.
Secretly, of course, this was what's called Operation Timber Sycamore.
It was Obama assigning the CIA to overthrow Assad.
Overtly, the United States overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
It's interesting, Piers, to go back to 2002.
This is after 9-11, of course, to watch Netanyahu as being the lead cheerleader for the U.S. to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Now we have a treasure trove of documents coming out that this was really a war on Israel's behalf.
Everything about the weapons of mass destruction was phony, known to be phony inside the U.S. government, but this was the argument that was given, and Netanyahu was there in Washington telling him it'll be just great if you take out Saddam Hussein.
It's going to topple all the rest of the governments.
The idea was, incidentally, that Saddam would be toppled and then the U.S. military would go right into Syria right away.
But then an insurgency trapped the United States inside Iraq so that the Syrian war was actually delayed eight years.
But what we're watching is this crazy Netanyahu idea of regional war so that Israel can have its greater Israel, as they call it.
In other words, everything is to stop the Palestinian cause and the U.S. keeps being involved in these wars.
And there was Jake Sullivan again today explaining, yeah, terrorists, terrorists, who cares about terrorists?
We're toppling Assad.
And this is, again, for the Israel lobby, basically.
Okay, but look, you're blaming Israel for all of it.
And fine, that's your view.
Many people would say, no, it's not.
I'm blaming Netanyahu in particular.
Right.
And that's very clear.
But America, they would say, look, we've been actively engaged in a lot of regime change and attempting regime change in that region for a specific reason.
These countries have been run by malevolent dictators who have a hatred of the United States.
And it's in our self-interest.
Never mind anybody else's.
I mean, could the two things be true at the same time?
Yes, it suits Netanyahu and his bigger view of the region.
I'm sure that's true.
But it could also be absolutely in America's in their belief in America's interests to do this.
I mean, I don't agree with them, but could it be that that is a genuine belief on their part?
I agree with you that it's absurd because what has it gotten us?
$7 trillion of war spending, massive debts and chaos throughout the Middle East from Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon.
It's complete bloodbath for more than 25 years now.
And so it doesn't accomplish anything.
I think it's extremely naive, and I think it's extremely wrongheaded.
And yes, I blame Netanyahu for it.
He spelled it out.
It's his strategy.
We've tried it.
We've done what he said.
We're doing it today again in Syria.
It's a disaster.
It's time to say, run your own country.
We'll run our country.
That's my view.
In 2018, we both wrote pieces about the situation in Syria then.
I wrote mine for the Daily Mail.
This is after a suspected chemical weapons attack in Douma in Syria left dozens killed, including many young children.
I said that the use of chemical weapons by Assad was on Obama's conscience and it would ultimately embolden only one man, Vladimir Putin.
You said on your website at the same time, the U.S. and its allies should face reality and accept the persistence of Assad's regime, despicable as it may be.
Yeah, one thing, by the way, Piers, and honestly, you don't know and I don't know, there's a very significant argument among very knowledgeable people that the chemical weapons was a false flag.
And if you know American foreign policy, false flags are the essence of the...
But that hasn't been proven, as you know.
I mean, that's just a theory.
No, it is absolutely, absolutely not proven.
Not proven either way.
But I know experts that are real experts who say, well, they say at a minimum, it's absolutely not proven, but some of them say this is absolutely all of the signature of a false flag operation.
And some say this is why Obama didn't go further because it was laid out to him.
This was not even Assad doing this.
This was the, quote, rebels under CIA authority.
And if you study the CIA, as I have for a lifetime, you know that false flags are actually their MO.
They have to be aware of the...
Are you seriously suggesting that Barack Obama and his government and the CIA under his tenure launched a chemical weapons attack on Syrian people, killing a lot of civilians?
Do you seriously think that's what happened?
Oh, I'm not saying that Obama did it.
Most of the time when the CIA does things, the presidents have no idea what the CIA is doing.
False Flags And Chemical Attacks 00:02:44
But you think the CIA would launch a chemical weapons attack simply to smear Assad?
Of course it would.
Are you kidding?
It's done much worse than that.
It launches coups, assassinations, wars.
The whole history of the United States after 1947 is bringing down the...
You don't mind me saying, Jeffrey, but here's my point.
Why are you, you're always very keen to take a view, even if they're unproven, that is very anti-America.
You're never quite so keen to take a view that is anti-dictators.
I mean, Assad is a pretty vile dictator.
Vladimir Putin is a vile dictator.
Do you accept that your views are...
I wouldn't say that they are twisted, but perhaps they're slightly jaundiced by the fact that your instinct is always that America is probably to blame unless they can prove otherwise.
No, it's not whether they're dictators or not.
It's what the United States role is.
I don't believe that any country can arrogate this task of bringing down other countries' governments.
The CIA has been involved in probably 90 or 100 covert regime change operations since it was founded in 1947.
My whole life has been the United States at war.
It's sickening.
It's tiring because these wars are disasters.
So it's just not our business to say that one's despicable, that one has to go.
But literally, by the way, this is what Obama did.
It's a shame that he did this.
He said Assad must go.
Well, come on.
When he said that, by the way, in 2011 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton said that, I said, oh my God, here we go again.
And literally, Piers, it's been 13 years of mass killing since then.
No resolution at all.
Completely predictable.
This is what I'm against.
On a point of principle, when Obama said if Assad uses chemical weapons, we will act, and then didn't act, from a purely political perspective, did that open the door for Putin to then just come in and have significantly higher influence in Syria and the region than he would otherwise have had?
Well, remember, just on this one fact, because it's really important.
International Law And ICC Warrants 00:04:35
It is said in our newspapers all the time, Russia intervened in Syria.
Russia intervened in Syria.
Russia came into Syria in 2015.
The United States plan to overthrow Assad dates to 2011.
Russia came in four years afterward.
We should never have done that.
This was Netanyahu's provocation.
He wanted wars in all those countries that I listed.
Why are we doing Netanyahu's work when it is a failure anyway?
So Russia didn't jump in and we had to react.
Russia came in four years after we started this.
We started this because Syria was on Netanyahu's list.
And it was literally a list, by the way.
We know from this remarkable story of the former NATO commander, Wesley Clark, the supreme commander of NATO.
Wesley Clark went into the Pentagon, you know, after 9-11, and he was given the list of the seven countries that we were going to take out in five years.
This was Netanyahu's list.
Yeah, I mean, I know Wesley Clark well.
I wanted to ask you, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu.
Do you support that?
Of course.
But France's top appeals court.
I wish that some American presidents were on that list.
Right.
Many would agree with you, but I was then going to ask that in June this year, France's top appeals court ruled that there should be an arrest warrant for al-Assad, alleging his alleged conspiracy or complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Would you support that?
I support the ICC and the ICJ, and I believe that we should try to make international law work, because we're very close to global self-destruction.
So I would like international law to work.
Putin is under an ICC warrant.
I would like Russia to defend its proposition that Putin's innocent or that Russia's innocent or Israel to defend the proposition that they're innocent.
This is what a legal process should be about.
I don't like it when countries say, no, we don't support this or we don't support that.
We should try to make these international institutions work, but have full accountability.
When the ICC threatened that it would indict Netanyahu, we had half the Senate up in arms.
We're going to sanction these judges.
We're going to end the court.
We're going to penalize them.
No, we should have international law working properly.
This would make a much for a much more peaceful world, actually.
I note you haven't specifically...
I don't believe, by the way, Piers, it's not one country doing it.
For me, what is important is that this should be international.
I'm a believer in the United Nations, maybe one of the few right now.
I hope that's not true.
I mean, the UN actually has broad public support, but it can't function when great powers are flagrantly ignoring its rule of law.
I believe that all the great powers should submit to the UN Charter without their veto power, basically.
But just in relation to my specific question about the France top appeals court ruling an arrest warrant for al-Assad of a very similar French court.
Yeah, it's France's French court?
France's top appeals court in June 2024.
Yeah, look, I mean, a national court is not very interesting in this regard.
France as one of the imperial powers of the Middle East is hardly in a position to adjudicate about a leader in the Middle East.
It would be interesting to have a good historical adjudication of France's role, which has been disastrous.
But I believe what we should be focusing on is international courts.
We have two of them, the ICJ and the ICC, and we should be helping to make those two UN-based courts work.
NATO Enlargement Drives The War 00:05:22
Let me ask you briefly about Ukraine.
Very interestingly, President Zelensky at the weekend, in an interview with Stuart Ramsey at Sky News, said this.
One alternative, perhaps, again, this is reported from the United States.
And it's fairly simple, really, is that Ukraine joins NATO, but Russia takes control and keeps the land that it has to date.
Would that be a possibility?
No one has offered us to be in NATO with just one part or another part of Ukraine.
That's for once.
The fact is that it is a solution to stop the hot stage of the war because we can just give the NATO membership to the part of Ukraine that is under our control.
It could be possible, but no one offers.
What struck me as most interesting about that, when I interviewed Zelensky two years ago in Kyiv, he was never, he said, prepared to even concede an inch of territory to Russia.
It seemed that there was a real change in tone in his response to that question at the weekend.
Did you just take that and what does it all mean?
Well, it doesn't mean very much because it puts everything upside down in terms of the real understanding of Ukraine and the war.
The war is because of NATO enlargement.
Again, we've talked about this, but this goes back 30 years.
It goes back to a very bad idea of Zbyg Brzezinski, who wrote and described all of this in detail in a book in 1997 called The Grand Chessboard: that we will expand NATO and Russia will have no alternative but to accede to that.
And all the top diplomats said, no, this is a provocation.
This will be war.
And Brzezinski analyzes, of course, wrongly, but he analyzes in detail in one of the chapters of the book that Russia has no choice.
It will never side with China.
It will never side with Iran and blah, It gets everything wrong.
But in any event, this has been a war of NATO enlargement.
Russia does not want NATO on its border, especially with the United States out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which it unilaterally abandoned in 2002, out of the intermediate nuclear force treaty, which the United States unilaterally abandoned in 2019.
Russia does not want NATO on its border.
It does not want U.S. missile systems on its border.
This is the basic point.
The same reason why the United States invaded Cuba in 1960 and why we had the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
They didn't want the Soviet Union anywhere close to the United States.
And if we just had a little bit of sense, Piers, we would understand this and this war never would have taken place in this territory, never would even be in question because Russia wasn't claiming the Donbass.
It was claiming keep NATO away.
And then under the Minsk Agreement, well, give them autonomy.
Yes, it's Ukrainian, but let the Russian ethnic speakers be safe and have their own language, be able to speak Russian.
So this is not about territory.
And we continue to believe it is because Boris Johnson and Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan know what this is about.
And as Boris Johnson keeps saying, this is about the preservation of Western hegemony, for God's sake.
Well, yeah, if you're going to have that, we're going to have perpetual war.
This is what this is about.
It's about does the United States have the right to put its military bases and its missile systems right up against Russia's border.
Russia says no.
The United States says yes.
Article 10 of NATO says yes.
It's none of Russia's business and therefore we're at war.
Zelensky either is, I don't know what, but this is completely irrelevant, this discussion.
But what is being floated is the U.S. plan.
The U.S. plan is, yeah, we get NATO.
Okay, you keep the Donbass, but we get NATO.
It's not going to work.
It is absolutely not going to work.
It's just the U.S. and U.K. talking to themselves, not really admitting what this war is about fundamentally.
So how does it end?
It ends the day that Trump picks up the phone and says, President Putin, that whole idea of NATO enlargement was a terrible idea.
Let's make Ukraine neutral.
We'll keep the space between us and the rest is details, frankly.
That's how it ends.
And if Trump is clever enough to understand that, because half his aides know it, the other half say exactly the opposite.
But if Trump is clever enough to know that, the war is going to end right away.
And how do you think Israel-Hamas war ends?
Ending Conflict With Palestinian State 00:01:05
I hope that the whole world finally says, Israel, you have no right to veto a Palestinian state.
And the U.S. drops its veto in the U.N. Security Council because it's the last holdout.
And we vote.
that a state of Palestine exists on the borders of the 4th of June 1967.
And I have met with leaders all across the Middle East and all throughout the Islamic world.
And they're ready to have normal, peaceful relations with Israel to stop the belligerencies, to stop arming Hezbollah and Hamas if there is a state of Palestine as a sovereign state on the borders of the 4th of June 1967 and with capital in East Jerusalem.
And that's what I wholeheartedly support.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, we've run out of time.
I could talk to you for hours.
I hope you come back again.
I've got to say, even though I don't always agree with your interpretation of things, I always learn a lot of stuff when I talk to you.
I find it fascinating.
So thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Great to be with you.
Thanks a lot, Pierce.
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