All Episodes
Previous Next
April 3, 2025 - Viva & Barnes
02:52:24
Moderating Debate on Syria - Roy Gutman vs. Scott Horton - Regime Change Good or Bad?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Okay We are live currently as we speak looking for the thumbs up internally good evening everybody I'll start this by saying I don't know how I got myself involved in this I'm gonna moderate on a subject not that I know nothing about but a subject that I know Enough about to ask some relevant questions and hear the respective positions,
but this is about regime change in Syria I have my opinions on this and full disclosure I know Scott Horton from an interview on my channel, which was lively, entertaining, and full disclosure, as you might see from my tweets on the subject, I think I'm more likely going to agree with Scott's position tonight, who's taking the anti-regime change position on Syria, as opposed to Roy Gutman.
But it's going to be an interesting discussion, and it's not about winning or losing, it's about actually just educating people so that you can understand a little bit more about the history, present, in order, hopefully, to understand a bit of the future.
of what's going on in Syria and its impact on geopolitics.
I'll do a brief introduction of both Roy Gutman and Scott, um, who, Scott, Scott, Scott Horton, I just gotta say, who has been on my channel.
Go check out the interview, guys, it was great.
Roy Gutman, born March 5th, 1944 in New York City, is an award-winning American journalist known for his foreign affairs reporting, educated at Haverford College and the London School of Economics.
He worked at Reuters and Newsday, where his coverage of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina During the Yugoslav Wars earned him a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
Gutman later served as foreign editor at McClatchy Newspapers, authored books like A Witness to Genocide, and co-founded the Crimes of War Project.
Scott Horton, on his side, is born in 1976.
I don't know why everyone needs to know when you're born, guys.
Is an American libertarian radio host, author, activist known for critiquing US foreign policy.
He hosts the Scott Horton Show, has over 6,000 interviews, He is the Director of the Libertarian Institute and Editorial Director at Antiwar.com.
I hope I got that right.
Written books such as The Fool's Errand, Enough Already, based in Austin, Texas.
He's well-known and both, I say can't, both debaters tonight are going to be amazingly well-spoken and informational.
Now, I don't know exactly what the format's going to be.
I think you guys have agreed upon, what, six or minutes or so for an introductory statement.
If I may frame the discussion, Scott, your position for the evening is going to be fill-in-the-blank?
Well, I believe Liam told me in the email the question was, should America intervene in Syria now?
So, but that's I guess to just start off a broad discussion about, you know, all the intervention there.
But yeah, I'm decidedly against all intervention past, present and future there.
And Roy, is it Gutman or Gutman if I'm pronouncing it properly?
Gutman. Okay, government.
All right, awesome.
Your respective position is, I don't want to miss, I don't want to strawman it.
What's your position for the evening?
Well, on the question of an armed intervention, I would say that's a crazy idea.
I think the United States should be looking at the upside of getting rid of Bashar al-Assad and try to figure out, is there a way to work with this new government that I think?
create a democratic order in Syria.
Certainly that's what the people went out on the streets for in 2011 and fought and lost like a half a million altogether during the war against the Assad regime.
And it's one of those rare moments in history where you have a revolution actually succeeding, but it's fragile and it's, And things could go wrong, and things are not going well at the moment, and the United States could play a positive role in trying to stabilize the place.
That's where I come in.
So the question I guess then is, the regime change has already taken place last December.
The question is, should we support the new regime in power or not?
And I say no.
And let me just preface this by saying if I'm not looking at you guys and I'm looking at chat and looking at things, I'm going to be, in as much as humanly possible, fact-checking in real time to make sure that nothing slips under the radar of my lack of knowledge on the subject.
So it's not that I'm not paying attention, I'll be listening the entire time, but I guess we'll start off with five, six, opening statements from each of you, respectively, that will be a little bit longer and more fleshed out.
I don't know, do we do heads or tails, or Scott, do you want to go first and lay out a bit of the history?
Well, I'll be happy to go first, and I'll try not to go over time, but I promise to be respectful and grant plenty of equal time to Roy.
But I'll just say that America's Syria policy begins in Tel Aviv, or at least it was created for them.
It's all in my previous book, Enough Already, Timed and the War on Terrorism.
Now, Americans might think that al-Qaeda is the enemy, but it's just ours.
But Tel Aviv and Riyadh, and therefore Washington, hate the Shiites more.
And this goes back to at least 1996, when a neoconservative apparatchik named David Wormser, in alliance with Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, wrote a document called A Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm, for then incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Now, this is in the aftermath of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister by Netanyahu fan, determined to stop the peace process, the Oslo peace process, and the creation of a sort of pseudo, not exactly, but sort of a pseudo-Palestinian state, which is what Rabin was working for at the time.
And Wormser recommended that what we should do is have a clean break with Oslo.
And that means forget the peace process.
Let's just keep taking all of the rest of Palestine for a greater Israel.
The problem with that is we still got to deal with Hezbollah on our northern flank, and they are supported by Syria and Iran.
And so what we want to do is we want to neutralize Hezbollah's power in southern Lebanon so that we can get away with stealing the rest of Palestine.
And everybody can read it themselves.
That's essentially what he wrote.
There's a companion piece called Coping with Crumbling States, and then he actually wrote a book with the foreword by Richard Perle called Tyranny's Ally, America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein.
And their completely crackpot theory was...
And then America could use the Shiites of Iraq to pressure Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and Syria and leave Israel alone so they could keep stealing the rest of Palestine.
Well, that's not how Iraq War II worked out.
In fact, they ended up empowering the Shiites in Iraq and then Oh, and by the way, I should say, David Wormser wrote in Coping with Crumbling States that after the regime change in Iraq, then we need to expedite the chaotic collapse, he said, expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria.
And he said, yes, there is a danger of spreading Islamist terrorism through the region if we do this, but we'll just have to find better allies than the Ba'athists for dealing with that.
Now, maybe you could have convinced yourself of that in 1996, but after September 11th, that was a completely insane doctrine for them to support.
Abolishing a secular, basically fascist dictatorship in Iraq and Syria and replacing them with Islamists in all cases.
So what happened is though, W. Bush and the neocons realized their mistake by 2005-2006, and they launched a policy called the Redirection.
And speaking of the Islamic State, which is the Islamic State of Iraq, ISI, which is just another name for al-Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said Daesh is our response to your support for the Dawa.
And it's the same thing, which means the Shiite parties that America helped take over Iraq.
So the policy was if we put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad, then we got to take them down a peg in Damascus.
And that was why Obama launched and went along with our allies launching the dirty war in Syria back 15 years ago, 14 years ago, at the dawn of the Arab Spring.
And it was clear, and I document this thoroughly in my book, it was clear at the time.
This was mostly about Israel and secondarily about Saudi Arabia, had nothing to do with protecting the interests of the American people at all.
And people like Michael Oren, the American born but Israeli ambassador to the United States, Jamie Rubin, the former State Department spokesman, Max Boot, the A prominent neoconservative, Lindsey Graham, the American senator loyal first to Israel, and according to the New York Times, Netanyahu and Ehud Barak as well, they all said that what this is about is weakening Iran's position in the Middle East.
Iran, the enemies of al-Qaeda.
Iran and Hezbollah that did not knock our towers down, but our side prefers al-Qaeda Because that's Israel and Saudi Arabia's enemies are the Shiites.
And so that was why America supported al-Qaeda in Syria in the first revolution, so-called revolution, back in the Obama years, which you'll all remember led to the creation of the caliphate in the Islamic State.
Because, again, ISIS is just al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And what they did was the Syrian-dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq stayed in Western Syria fighting Assad, while the Iraqi-dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq seized first Eastern Syria and then secondly went into Western Iraq and seized all of that in 2014 and created the Caliphate, an area the size of Great Britain, which led to America launching Iraq War III for the Shiites again to destroy the Bin Ladenite Caliphate that they had built.
Now, even after Obama started bombing the caliphate in 2014, and continued to do so through the rest of his presidency, he still was supporting al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Al-Nusra, that is, that had broken off from ISIS in Syria.
And he kept doing so through the rest of his presidency.
Some might remember that when Donald Trump finally ended CIA support for al-Qaeda in Syria in July of 2017, the Washington Post announced him for treason and said that this was a move sure to please Putin to stop backing al-Qaeda in Syria.
And so then what happened was the Russians came, And they helped Assad, Iran, and Hezbollah stop al-Qaeda from taking over the capital city.
And they were essentially rounded up and held up in the Idlib province in northwestern Syria, where they were under the protection of Turkey from essentially the beginning of Trump all the way through the Joe Biden administration until just at the very end of Biden, after the election, at the end of November.
They broke out of their pen.
It's sort of like an October 7th type thing.
They broke out of their pen, obviously with Turkish support, direct Turkish support, and they seized Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus in 10 days.
And Hezbollah had been beaten up badly by Israel, so they weren't there to help.
The Iranians were nowhere nearby and had no ability to help.
Of course, Russia's bogged down with the war in Ukraine and so weren't there to help.
And so the brutal but secular people And now I presume that Roy is going to make a lot of arguments about how Abu Mohammed al-Jalani is a reformed bin Ladenite.
And even though he was he celebrated the September 11th attacks, and even though he fought against America in Mosul and Ramadi, and even though he proudly admits to beheadings and suicide bombings, that now he's a changed man.
And now he hangs around with Martin Smith at frontline and wears a three piece monkey suit and trimmed his beard a little bit shorter and is, after all, anyone I think would admit, slightly less psychotic than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was the leader of the Islamic State, throwing gays off roofs and all of that stuff.
Look at what happened.
Al Qaeda is as Al Qaeda does.
And just in the last few weeks, we've seen Absolute horrific massacres of Alawites and Christians in the west of the country who dare to resist the new rule of the Bin Ladenites.
Absolute just mass executions on the spot.
People dragged through the street to death and all kinds of exactly the kind of horrors that ISIS inflicted in Syria and Iraq back, you know, 15 years ago through 10 years ago.
And so no, to support these guys in power is treason.
It is absolutely treason against the American people on behalf of guys who have sworn blood oath loyalty to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
And now, you know, their allies in the Western media say
Roy, I mean,
that's, that's Under 10 minutes, Scott, so you did stick to what we discussed earlier, but that is a mouthful, and I'm taking notes, and I think Roy is as well.
Roy, you can choose to go with an opening statement and respond to whatever you can.
Look, it's a lot to process, what Scott has said.
There are some facts among the assertions, but there's a lot of assumptions and a lot of deduction Drawing that, to my understanding, just doesn't fit the facts.
I should just tell you about myself.
I've been a reporter in different parts of the world, including covering national security and diplomacy in Washington.
I went to the Middle East in 2011 while the Americans were still in Iraq.
When the Americans pulled out, I moved to Istanbul because I thought the war in Syria, the events in Syria, were of such gravity and such shocking content that somebody should be reporting it.
And most of my colleagues were in Beirut reporting from a distance.
You could get into Syria illegally from there.
But I thought Beirut, because it's dominated by Hezbollah, Because Hezbollah really has a direct line to the mullahs in Iran, that everybody in Beirut was under some kind of intimidation, whether it was admitted or not.
Whereas in Turkey, Turkey had an open border with Syria.
A lot of people left Syria.
for Turkey.
There's still 3.5 million, I think, Syrians there.
A lot of the people who came over had been working for the Syrian government.
They were in the security sector.
They were in the intelligence sector, which is known as the Muqabarat.
I didn't actually start interviewing them for a good year or so, but I discovered after a couple of years that these people were a gold mine of information about what's going on in Syria.
They had been loyal officials working for 20 or 30 years in many cases for the Assad regime.
Now they gave it all up.
They gave up all their property, they gave up their connections, and sometimes they even gave the parts of their family to escape because they wanted to form some kind of a new Syria.
So my witnesses are witnesses, are real people.
who told me what they told me over long conversations, and I compared one with another and I came up with...
So the picture I'm about to offer you, just a couple of simple points I want to make, is based on reporting.
Reporting on the ground from people who were fleeing a dictatorship.
So the most important thing, it seems to me, is that the Arab Spring, which occurred in 2011, or the end of 2010, was the real thing.
This was people who were taking a life risk, you know, populations, whole populations in Syria, a huge part of the population, and were revolting.
What were they revolting against?
Well, there was like a A 50-year dictatorship of the Assad family, or it was 50 years when he was finally ousted a few months ago.
And this is not just any old dictatorship.
This is a dictatorship that could compare with North Korea, where the mukhabarat, the police and the intelligence agencies basically ran the country.
They held everybody in fear.
They They did all sorts of things.
One of the interesting things they did, and I'm not sure, Scott, if you're really aware of this, is that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was something of a disaster.
Not only because it was under false pretenses, but because the Americans didn't have a plan.
They didn't have a plan for the day after ousting Saddam Hussein.
And in the region, everybody, friend and foe alike, was opposed to the American intervention.
And obviously the Syrian regime was also afraid, because once you get rid of Saddam Hussein, you know, a Baathist dictator, a secularist, but a truly awful man, But still, who's going to follow it?
And the Americans made a huge mistake by getting rid of the security apparatus in Iraq.
It took them years to restore things to any kind of stability.
In the meantime, Bashar al-Assad would see, and Assad, in fairness, inherited his job from his father, Hafez, I think it was 1999.
For a few years, he liberalized the country.
He opened up the gates.
He allowed free discussion.
He allowed people to organize, in fact.
And it looked like there was going to be a period of moderation.
But that ended after about three years when he started jailing people again.
And people got angrier and angrier.
And so he was looking for an escape valve.
Well, the Americans actually gave him an escape valve.
By invading Iraq for no really good reason.
Bashar al-Assad, in his regime, basically organized and supported and oversaw an apparatus that was actually collecting volunteers to go in and fight in Iraq against the Americans.
I mean, he had good reasons, and Scott has pointed this out, namely because he feared he might be next.
But the fact is these people were organized and recruited, in fact, by the Syrian regime and put into al-Qaeda.
He set up a network, and this is what I heard from defectors who had actually worked this system.
He had set up safe houses.
He set up hospital care.
He provided arms, he provided money, and he provided the infiltration for thousands upon thousands of al-Qaeda volunteers to go into Iraq.
Now, they actually came in also from Iran, and he, Saddam, or rather Bashar, worked with the Iranians to give the Americans the hardest possible time.
And when they discovered it and they had some rage, they got some information, but they only got a kind of sliver of what was really going on.
But this was a major, major operation by the Assad regime.
The Americans didn't know a lot about it because they didn't know a lot about Syria.
Syria has always been relegated to be a Russian domination.
area. And the Americans almost never, and it might be because the Israelis were content with it, but for whatever reason, the Americans did not focus hard and deep on Syria.
How do I know this?
Because when I went out and started interviewing defectors who crossed from Syria into Turkey, I discovered that they had a goldmine of information about how the Assad regime had dealt with the Americans.
And I found that when I went to American officials, they didn't know anything about it, because for some odd reason the CIA did not interview most of these defectors.
They basically turned off their monitors, or they turned off their information gathering.
So far from being a really crackerjack force, which they are in so many places, in Syria they were deficient.
So if you go to the uprising in 2011, The Arab Spring.
You know, you cannot say that Obama had anything to do with the uprising.
He didn't sponsor it.
He didn't encourage it.
He was baffled like everybody else was, where this was coming from.
And he certainly didn't launch it in any way, shape, or form.
Where did Al-Qaeda come from?
Well, here's the interesting thing that I discovered in my research, and I did a lot of research, I can tell you.
Al-Qaeda, first of all, you had the returning Al-Qaeda fighters who were Syrians and who were from other nationalities who went into Iraq to fight the Americans and did not kill themselves in suicide bombings.
They returned to Syria And Syrians did one of two things, or three things.
Some of them they killed if they thought that they were a threat to the Syrian state.
Others of them they allowed to roam in their hometowns, but they had to report to the Mukhabarat for the rest of their lives, practically.
And then others were thrown into Sednaya prison.
Sednaya prison is north of Damascus, and it's one of the, it's famous now, especially after the liberation of Damascus.
But anyway, that became a school for jihad because the Syrian regime allowed all of these jihadists, returning al-Qaeda people to mix with political prisoners, and they oversaw as many of them were being converted or being trained by these al-Qaeda.
So that was one source of al-Qaeda into Syria.
Actually, the government fostered it.
The second one was in the middle of 2011, about July, I think it was.
Jolani and four or five other of his colleagues who had been in an American prison in Iraq came across the border from Iraq.
They were part of the Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda, and they came across.
I talked to a member of the Muqabirat who had been serving in Ras Al Ain, which is a town on the Turkish border.
He said that he was, in other words, he's in the intelligence services.
He said the Syrian intelligence service knew that these people were crossing.
It sent out a bulletin to all Muqabirat offices around Syria, giving the names, the details, the ages and so on, and the implication was to go out there and kill them.
And then what it did, I guess some days later, was it sent an individual courier out to the different offices and told them, ignore that memo, ignore that message.
So in other words, the Syrian government basically opened the doors to al-Qaeda coming in from Iraq, and it was practically training people at Sednaya prison.
You cannot say, Scott, with all due respect, you cannot say that The Obama administration or Obama himself fostered Al-Qaeda in Syria.
I don't think there's any evidence at all, but if you have it, let me know because I may be able to give you some insights into it.
I really doubt your basic premise.
Let me just finish up here.
Jolani was one of the first people to come in from Iraq.
Jolani He was free to organize, and he did organize jihadis, but the core of them came from Sednaya Prison or from Iraq.
Jelani fought the Assad regime.
When he split with ISIS, the ISIS, who were the really, truly hardliners, were fighting against the rebel forces, against the population.
Jelani was fighting in parallel with the population.
This was a really popular revolt.
This was a revolution.
It was something, it was a phenomenon.
It is not something that Obama created or fostered.
He didn't know what to do with it.
And it was his fumbling that is what led to Jelani rather than a secular group taking over the country or taking the charge and taking, literally taking over the country and eventually toppling Assad.
So let me stop there.
Let me, I'm going to ask a question and I'll ask it to Scott so that he can reply, you know, not to infuse too much into this.
My understanding is that the Arab Spring was something of a, if it wasn't intelligence influenced, it was something of a US influence, much like the Maidan revolution.
And then the question would be whether or not the scope and scale of it was far beyond what intelligence had initially anticipated.
Scott, are you able to just flesh that out?
I mean, is there not some truth to the allegation that the CIA was involved in this revolution of the Arab Springs?
Wait, Scott, you seem to be on mute now.
Sorry, and that'll go back to some of my answers to some of the points that Roy raised as well.
So, First of all for context you know for people to go back what had happened was that bradley manning aka chelsea manning had leaked the state department cables in the iraq and afghan war logs and the guantanamo files to wiki leaks and they all and they were posted throughout twenty ten the state department cables went up toward the end of twenty ten.
There's a huge controversy in tunisia.
Because everybody already knew what a corrupt dictatorship it was.
But there had been a big controversy about the revelations about corruption and particularly of the dictator's wife's family.
Ben Ali was his name.
And there was a guy who burned himself to death in protest of having his vegetable cart seized.
And this broke out into a riot and turned into a real revolution in Tunisia.
And Ben Ali had to flee.
So then in Egypt, virtually everybody said, wow, you can do that?
And the truth is, the NED, the USAID and NED, they had been trying to prepare for who's going to replace our sock puppet dictator Hosni Mubarak there, because his son was sort of an ineffectual guy, not fit to take over for him, and they wanted to make sure they had a loyal team there.
And so they were trying to figure out what to do, and they had been training up young liberal-type protesters.
My opinion is that the Arab Spring, as it played out in Egypt, was not America's plan.
And in fact, they wore on their sleeve pretty badly that they were terrified about what was happening there.
And they tried to make Omar Suleiman, who was the head of the secret torture police, to be the Pharaoh runner-up, but it just wouldn't work.
And they ended up having popular elections and the Muslim Brotherhood won.
And you might remember there was a military coup d'etat a year and a half later in the summer of 2013.
They canceled that.
But that was really how it broke out.
So then once it all started there, then it spread.
They had what was called the Day of Rage protests throughout the Middle East, because essentially every regime in the Middle East, whether they're America's clients or not, they're all a bunch of lousy dictatorships in one form or another.
Emirs and Sultans and Kings and El Presidentes and Israeli occupations and just everybody is completely tyrannized there.
And so there were these day of rage protests all across the region.
And I give credit to Roy.
I don't know if he remembers me, but I interviewed him on my show back then about what was going on in Bahrain, where some of the You're right.
You're right.
Yeah. Saudi Arabia helped the Sunni king crush his supermajority Shiite protesting population.
And they weren't even trying to overthrow and kill the guy.
They only wanted a constitutional monarchy, some semblance of a rule of law.
And he ruthlessly persecuted them.
And Roy went there and did great journalism on that subject at that time.
But see, in Syria, when the regime, when the protests broke out, and this goes to his point about the agency of the protesters and just how popular this revolution was.
Sure, there were tons of protesters all over the place.
But the thing is, when Prince Bandar bin Sultan starts emptying his prisons of jihadi suicide bombers and shipping them off to Syria, and when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, sends Abu Muhammad al-Julani across to take over the thing, then all those protesters are basically a moot point.
What do we have here?
We have NATO and the GCC.
Led by the United States of America, the World Empire, and our Central Intelligence Agency, working with especially Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel to back a bunch of Bin Ladenites.
And so, from the very beginning, as I cite in the book, all through 2011, for us peace hawks, we were looking and there was all kinds of evidence from the beginning of 2011 That America's not just intervening on the side of the revolution in Libya, where they were also veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and Ansar al-Sharia, the guys that ended up doing the Benghazi attack in 2012.
These were the people that Obama took their side in Libya while at the same time taking their side in Syria.
Again, why?
Because more than anything, this is what Israel and what Saudi Arabia wanted to make up for the fact that America listened to Israel and not Saudi Arabia and overthrew Saddam Hussein and empowered Iran's best friends in the Dawah Party and Supreme Islamic Council in Baghdad.
So now they had to try to make up for that for their friends.
And as I said, John Hannah, We're good.
Our intelligence agencies were working and helping to coordinate all of this foreign support for these jihadists to essentially invade Syria and take over the revolution.
Maybe there would have been a popular revolution made up of liberals and leftists of every sect, but instead what do we have?
We had no Christians, no Shiites, no Alawites, and there are three or four different kinds of Christians there, none of them, very few of the Kurds, And not even the majority of the Sunnis.
It's a majority Sunni country, and the majority of the army was Sunni Arabs.
And they were fighting for that secular state.
The Sunni population of Aleppo, for example, was sort of an upper-middle class, bougie, sort of not-bin Ladenite type of population.
And they did not support this.
And so it was not a broad-based popular revolution, even though there may very well, especially at the beginning, there were people who went out to protest.
Didn't mean that they were necessarily trying to overthrow the government just because they were protesting it.
And certainly it didn't mean that they supported what unfolded through 2011 and into 12, 13, 14 as a truly bin Ladenite revolution led by suicide bombing, head-chopping lunatics.
And this much was clear.
In fact, Victoria Nuland, who is rightfully a villain of anti-war forces everywhere, who is Robert Kagan's wife, the famous neoconservative theoretician, she at that time was the spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton's State Department.
And in December of 2012, she put out a press release.
You can pull this up right now.
It's really easy to find because it's got a great key word, alias.
Al-Nusra, Jabhat al-Nusra is just an alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Well, Viva Free, that's all you need to know, my man, that we don't support the bin Ladenites.
We prefer the guy with the clean shaven chin and the three-piece suit.
These guys were...
America was still in Iraq and still fighting what was left of al-Qaeda in Iraq through the year 2011.
But we're already taking their side on the Syrian side of the line.
It makes no sense.
Barack Obama should have given a speech to every one of his allies in the region called, sorry Charlie, we don't care about what you want.
We only care about keeping Bin Ladenites down.
And we're not going to allow you, and we're surely not going to help you, to help Bin Ladenites to fight against this secular regime.
And then I'm sorry, because I'll try to go through this quick, because he made a bunch of different statements.
I hope I'll try to address these in some kind of order here.
But again, This isn't to deny, as they say, the agency of the people on the ground.
It's just to narrow the question to what really counts here.
We're backing the Bin Ladenites.
Now, when he says that Syria helps support the Bin Ladenites going to fight Americans in Iraq War II, that's probably true to some degree.
But we know that Saudi Arabia did too.
Our allies, the Saudis, did too.
Why? Because America was fighting for the Shiites, and as Roy said, to keep America bogged down and busy in Syria so we can't come for him next.
So that was a sin, but that was not going on by the time of the intervention.
John Kerry, as I cite in my book, John Kerry had already said he had gone and worked out a 10-step action plan with Bashar al-Assad.
And Assad was working with the United States on all those issues, including corralling al-Qaeda and border security with Iraq.
He'd gotten a thumbs up, smiley face, seal of approval from John Kerry at that time for that.
Also, he said that America just didn't pay much attention to Syria.
But that's not true either.
Elizabeth Cheney, you know, Liz Cheney.
She worked for the State Department during W. Bush, during the second W. Bush term especially, and she ran something called ISOG, the Iraq-Syria Operations Group, and you can read about this in the New York Times.
Here's your keyword, Muslim Brotherhood.
Elizabeth Cheney was creating a Syrian National Council and essentially a Syrian government-in-exile to prepare to replace the Assad regime that included members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which, you know, in some places like Qatar maybe are not that radical.
In Egypt, they're kind of old men-owned property.
In Syria, they were Arar al-Sham, the suicide bombers.
They were indistinguishable from the Bin Ladenites.
In fact, Roy, I don't know if you're aware of this, but there's a great clip, an important clip of Hillary Clinton being interviewed by a guy named Wyatt something on CBS News.
It's going to be February the 28th of 2012.
And of course, this is her last year as Secretary of State.
And Wyatt, the CBS reporter, is coming from the point of view of why is America not doing more to help accomplish regime change there?
And Hillary Clinton says, well, geez, Wyatt, we know that al-Qaeda is supporting the revolution in Syria.
This is one year into the thing, okay?
February of 12. We know al-Qaeda is supporting the revolution in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
We know Hamas supports the revolution in Syria.
Are we supporting Hamas?
Now she was not saying, I'm being charitable here and I don't think that you misunderstand me misunderstanding her either, she's not saying Am I directly having my Deputy Assistant Secretary of State put a rifle right in the hands of a guy who I know is a suicide bomber or some kind of thing?
You don't have to exaggerate the claim.
What is she talking about?
She's talking about, are we taking the same side in a civil war that Al-Qaeda wants to win?
And why might that be a very bad idea?
And she's referring, and we know this because it was just two weeks before, we know from, again, Bradley Manning and the WikiLeaks, that Jake Sullivan, our recent national security advisor working for Joe Biden, then was Hillary Clinton's man, and he had emailed to her two weeks before in early February of 12, he said, hey, look, AQ is on our side in Syria.
And it was a news story by Reuters about how Ayman al-Zawahiri, you know, the butcher of New York City?
That guy was endorsing the revolution and saying all good bin Laden night suicide bomber Jihadists ought to support the revolution in Syria And so Hillary Clinton is clearly referring directly to that Reuters piece and that memo from her guy Being cheeky saying a queue is on our side.
And now by the way, she was more hawkish than Obama.
She's just defending Obama's I'll stop right after this.
She says to Wyatt from CBS News, and so we look at who can we help to become, who's prepared to inherit the power there and become the next government of Syria, Wyatt.
We don't see that.
We don't see anyone prepared to be the new government there.
And now look at what we got, Roy.
Look at who took over.
It's literally Jelani.
The leader of the suicide bomber brigades is the new leader of the country.
So she was 100% right about that.
And Obama himself said it was a fantasy that there was an army of moderate rebels that could inherit the power here.
The revolution was led by the Bin Ladenites, and that's who won.
Scott, in fact, even before you start, Roy, I'll ask you a simpler intro question from a broader perspective.
Please, just one question.
One question at a time, because I can't handle a hundred.
By the way, first of all, I forgot to mention that this is a Zero Hedge debate coming into it, so Zero Hedge, thank you.
I didn't realize that they're pulling up the documents as we're watching this live, so fantastic stuff.
Roy, what is the U.S. doing in Syria right now?
To begin with, I want to get back to Scott and whether how Israel is responsible or involved in all this.
But first things first, what is America involved in Syria for?
And what is the long term goal of any intervention?
Well, first of all, if you go back to the period before the Arab Spring, the American goal was to bring normal relations between Israel and Syria.
Maybe that was even the top goal.
It was a far higher goal than trying to replace Assad.
Fred Hof, who some of you might know, former State Department official, Syria expert, spent two years shuttling back and forth between Israel and Tel Aviv and Damascus, talking to Assad constantly.
And trying to reach some kind of agreement.
The talks ran until March of 2011, just as the Arab Spring broke out, and then they broke off.
So that seemed to be the principal goal, was settling this aspect of the Middle East conflict, and not a bad idea.
But it was done through diplomacy.
The Arab Spring threw it completely off kilter.
Anyway, let me just mention one response to Scott, because he said it multiple times, that this was an al-Qaeda revolution, and al-Qaeda has won.
You know, that may be the appearance, but as a matter of fact, Jolani himself is from a middle-class family in Damascus.
And went to Syria, to Iraq, as a volunteer, as did many Arabs from all over the place.
Just as you, Scott, and I, in my capacity as a journalist, were writing critical things about the American intervention in Syria.
In Iraq, Assad was doing something much more pernicious, which was setting up al-Qaeda in Iraq, and supporting it, and feeding it, and training it, and supplying it.
When al-Qaeda people crossed into Syria in 2011, at the beginning of the Syrian revolution, they were trying to take advantage of something that was already going on.
They didn't create the popular uprising.
They were trying to ride it.
The Americans didn't spot it right away, but it was only about six months in that Jelani actually declared that he was there.
He called himself al-Nusra.
And then it was about maybe even a year later before he identified it as part of al-Qaeda.
But al-Qaeda was not a real presence at that time.
It was people gathering, it was organizing, they weren't taking territory.
And who were the rebel forces?
Basically, defectors from the Syrian army who didn't want to shoot their fellow, in this case, Sunni Arabs, as being directed by the Assad regime.
They were reacting.
They did not actually start an armed revolution.
The revolution was a popular uprising of people who were protesting.
Peacefully. And then the Assad regime turned on them.
So this is a this is a perfect situation for al Qaeda to try to exploit, or any group to try to exploit.
But the essence of it was still May I ask you this one thing?
What would Assad's interest be in supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq?
Look, Assad and the Assad family are the oldest, were the original inhabitants of the State Department's list of terror leaders and terror groups and terrorism in the Middle East.
They were the first country on that list.
They've used terror groups mostly against Israel in the 90s, but this was their major And so they turned to terrorism, and they got good at it.
They knew how to manage it.
They created forces that could go into Lebanon as they saw fit.
They didn't always have to send the army.
They could work really in multiple places, but it was primarily against Israel.
Why would Assad be using these people against the Americans in Iraq?
It's because they were there.
They were available.
Because he already had the apparatus set up.
You know this slogan in the military, that when the balloon goes up, you have to go with what you've got.
And this is what he had.
He had this apparatus set up, and especially an intelligence apparatus that could run it.
So he organized that.
I mean, they even had, I think in Aleppo, there was a famous preacher named, a Kurdish Muslim preacher, imam named Abu al-Qaqa, and he would hold rallies at the university in Damascus, rather in Aleppo, and gather and collect I urge people to go out and fight Israel and fight the United States.
And then the regime took these people, as I say, trained them, equipped them, and then sent them in.
But once you have that kind of a force, you are going to be tempted to use it whenever you feel a threat.
Especially if it's effective and especially if the Americans never really quite figured out what to do about it.
Well, that force became a tool for Assad.
Now, I don't know what his exact motive was.
All I know is that when Al-Qaeda people, and especially ISIS, started capturing town after town in Syria, starting with Raqqa, But, you know, in a place like Palmyra as well, what happened was that the Assad regime, even if it had a lot of forces there ready to defend the town, they fired into the air and then they fled.
They turned over a third of Syria, basically, to ISIS.
Why did they turn it over?
Why did Assad want that?
Well, the best way I can figure it out is that the thing that the Americans were most worried about and would be most worried about in the years after 9-11, was the resurgence of Al-Qaeda and the takeover of another country.
Assad is a pretty smart character, and he knew the American phobia for ISIS, or rather for Al-Qaeda, and he played on it.
You know, there was a whole series of explosions, of mysterious bombings in 2011, Some of them in Damascus.
They started in December of 2011 and they went on for about a year.
They were always attacking security business authorities.
Places that were impenetrable to the general public.
And suddenly there's an explosion.
The television cameras are at the scene immediately.
They reported that the Syrian official news broadcasters reported it was al-Qaeda.
And in fact, there was never even an investigation of them.
But I talked to defectors, including one who was a police general in the police.
He said, we didn't think that it was al-Qaeda doing this.
In fact, I talked to dozens of witnesses who said, no, it was the regime doing it to itself.
These were false flag operations run by the Assad regime.
Now, why would they do it?
Because early in, I think, January, February of 2012, you had senior American officials telling Congress that they saw events and destruction in Syria that were al-Qaeda-like attacks.
But they never pinned it down.
And I talked to enough people, and these are people who gave me their names and allowed me to use their names in writing, who were Syrian tops, defectors, who said these were all Well, self-attacks, you know, false flag attacks on themselves, which they publicize as Al-Qaeda.
And the Americans picked up on it.
But it was Assad's people, because he knew that the boogeyman for the Americans was Al-Qaeda.
And he did everything conceivably possible to make them basically more successful and to raise their credibility far, far higher than the reality was.
Assad was an operator.
Assad not only ran Al-Qaeda into Iraq, but he ran them when they came back.
And he put them into a prison and then he let them free.
You know, this whole thing is a manipulation by Assad.
The Americans didn't see it.
I'll stop there.
I think Scott's going to have some retorts there.
I'm just checking a few facts.
But we should actually work with just one statement at a time, Scott, so that I can actually respond because I can't take 100.
Well, or one topic at a time here, at least.
I mean, first of all, what Roy said here is almost entirely wrong.
I already conceded the part about the Assad government may have helped to funnel jihadists out of Syria primarily and into Iraq during Iraq war two.
But as I said, that had already stopped long before any of this and it's working.
If I can ask you a question on that, is he funneling them out for any strategic purpose in Iraq or because he doesn't want the terrorists within Syria to get rid of criminals?
Well, both, yeah.
I think the second thing you said there is first and foremost, but then secondly, as Roy said, to help make Iraq War II more difficult for the United States so that we stay there and don't move on to Syria next.
But it is totally incorrect to say he was running al-Qaeda there.
He was in charge of al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq was somehow a Syrian front or whatever.
That's complete hyperbole.
No, can I stop you there?
If I said that, that's not what I meant.
What I meant was that he was running them into Iraq.
How they were running them in Iraq was something else.
But he was organizing it.
He was recruiting them.
He was training them.
He was giving them sanctuary.
You know, that part is...
I've never seen any evidence that he was training al-Qaeda guys to send to Iraq at all.
And you know, you said, Roy, too, that when he put them in prison, you have a bunch of guys in prison together.
And you said he's practically...
Training them!
But practically, he's doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
What you're saying is he put Bin Ladenites in prison when they came home.
Now, any result of them getting more and better organized as a result of that is somehow deliberate by him, but I don't think he would say the same thing about all the al-Qaeda guys in the Bukha prison in Iraq, where they were kept there by the United States.
They weren't kept there because America was trying to turn them into the next generation of Bin Ladenites, but that's what happened.
Same thing here.
Okay, let me respond to that.
I've talked to at least 15 people who were at, and maybe 20, who were at Sednaya Prison in the period I'm describing, from 2006 to 2011, and this is the picture that they draw.
It's not something that I'm inventing because I could never have even imagined it, but it's what they say, it's what witnesses say, witnesses who were there.
Here's an example.
If you had civilian prisoners who are accused of some civil law violation or even criminal law violation, and you're put into the same cell as Al-Qaeda prisoners, and you plead or other prisoners plead for you to get out of there because you don't want the jihadists to take over, the prison The prison director demanded that they'd stay there.
He said, you know, I'm not running a Meridian Hotel here.
You don't pick your rooms.
So I'm just saying that's the practice.
I'm giving witness accounts.
Okay, but that's a real stretch from, yeah, therefore Al-Qaeda's war against him was a false flag by him, when we've already established in this interview that Al-Qaeda guys were coming, that first of all, there was a whole mess of Syrian Al-Qaeda guys in the first place who are now coming home from Iraq War II, plus all the Iraqi and Egyptian and other Arabs who were coming from from Iraq and from being emptied from Saudi Arabia's prisons and so forth to come.
And we've already established, everybody, that the ruler of Damascus and Syria right now is Abu Muhammad al-Jalani, the leader of al-Nusra, which is nothing but al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Well this, so this is, that's exactly who, one more thing there because you said you're you're kind of trying to create a false dichotomy between whether there was a popular series of protests and whether the overall war was a popular revolution.
There are plenty of people who protest it and I agree with you because you're just right that Assad quite clumsily clamped down even when it was terrorist sniping police to get the whole thing started off he clamped down brutally and that is bad No, Bin Ladenite with a sniper rifle blowing cops'heads off.
And that was from early 2011 all the way through.
It was a Bin Ladenite-led.
It doesn't mean that they were the majority.
It means they're the guys who don't mind dying, no, no, no.
Scott, they were not leading the revolution.
They were trying to ride on its coattails, and they were trying to take it over.
Who's the president of Syria right now, Roy?
Let me finish the thought.
The second thing is that the Americans We're afraid of Al-Qaeda and they allowed that fear to separate themselves from the genuine secular rebels who wanted a secular new order.
That is the mistake that Hillary Clinton did not make a mistake, but Barack Obama did.
Barack Obama had Iraq He feared nothing more than having to send in American forces into Syria.
Well, he never had to send American forces into Syria, but he might have, and this is certainly the collected wisdom of senior military officials at the time.
I don't know.
First with just regular artillery and then later with barrel bombs.
You know, that is what the Americans could have done if they had done this.
And then here's the interesting thing that I learned, and this is from reporting on the ground.
It was the rebels who spotted al-Qaeda Not just Al-Qaeda, but when it split into ISIS and the Nusra Front, as two different groups, in April of 2013.
It was the rebel forces who spotted ISIS for the really dangerous force it was and it became, that was taking over vast amounts of territory.
They went to the Americans and they pleaded with support for support to fight out to fight ISIS.
The Americans wouldn't give Okay, well...
The Americans missed the boat, and that's why Jelani is now the head of the series.
This is going to be a question for both of you at some point, but if I may, Scott, let me start with Roy.
If we're tracing this all the way back, it's the U.S. involvement in the area at large that even trains and arms al-Qaeda to begin with, which then becomes the problem.
I guess the question is, A, what the heck is the U.S. even doing in there?
And B, To the extent whatever they're doing there only seems to make matters worse decade over decade.
What do they continue to be doing in there?
But how can you say that the Americans were training Al-Qaeda?
Who says?
Where? Well, if I'm going back in terms of providing funding them during the war back in the 70s, 80s to oppose the Soviet Union.
Oh, wait a minute.
No, it was not Al-Qaeda then, first of all.
No, it wasn't then.
Secondly, it was it was this the Russians had invaded Afghanistan.
And there was a.
Well, you know, I'm trying to figure out when when.
The Americans did not train Al-Qaeda there.
What the Americans did was they provided weapons to Afghans so that they could fight the Russians.
You might disagree with that, but the Russians had changed the whole equation in the Middle East as a result.
Let's not do Afghanistan in the 80s right now, guys.
The answer to your real question here, Viva Free, is it's the clean break strategy for Israel.
That's what we're doing here.
That's why the war on terrorism That's why the war on terrorism was not against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
It was against Saddam Hussein, secular Saddam, in Baghdad, because that's what Benjamin Netanyahu and his buddies wanted, as I said, because they thought they would have dominance over the Iraqi Shiites, and then they would then lord it over Iran and Hezbollah and break the Iranian arc of power in the region.
But that didn't work.
They put Iran's best friends in power in Iraq War II, so then they moved on to Damascus to take Iran's other friend, Asad down a peg there and get rid of him there.
That is the explanation.
And as I show in my book enough already, I have all the sources in the world from the pro-Israel position saying this is why we have to do this.
And the Saudis, of course, as well.
We're angry.
You can find this again in the WikiLeaks where Zalmay Khalilzad, the card-carrying neoconservative, goes and apologizes to Saudi King Abdullah.
And King Abdullah says, it used to be us and you and Saddam Hussein against Iran.
Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
So what are you going to do about it?
And Khalilzad says, yes, your highness, you're right, your majesty, we're so sorry.
So now we're working on turning the policy around and working on Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
That's the answer to your question there.
America put their regional rivals, the Iranian Shiites and their friends, up two pegs in Iraq war two.
So now we're working on taking them down a peg again.
Now I have to address a few things that Roya said here.
First of all, the release of all those jihadists from prison was a No!
Come on!
Assad does this.
Oh, I'm going to sabotage the protesters by releasing al-Qaeda guys.
They demanded...
The prison releases, in specific, I mean I got names and dates of the demands and him acquiescing in the book, so it's not like just a general statement.
It's a specific compliance with their demands to release these kids.
You think that Assad was complying with their demands?
Now listen, I sat there and listened to you make a bunch of claims, so you're going to have to listen to me refute them now, okay?
We should do it one at a time, okay?
Well, I was just trying to respond to your Okay, well, that's how it works.
So the point is that all through the Dirty War, the Hawks said that every time there's a suicide attack, that this is somehow Assad running the very worst part of the forces arrayed against him just to discredit the rest of them, which is just completely laughable.
Can I just interject one thing?
Roy, Roy, I'm going to finish here, man.
You can't talk over me.
I'm the talk overer of all.
Okay. I don't know who someone's got a mute button here, but no, but let Roy answer after this, but I'm double checking for the release.
That was the reason that he let all the prisoners out.
It wasn't just a sabotage thing.
There's no evidence of this ridiculous conspiracy theory that the leaders of Al-Qaeda were always secretly working for Assad, suicide bombing his guys to death, taking over his military bases and all these things just to discredit their moderate allies.
It's completely ridiculous.
And as Barack Obama himself said, He said, correctly, to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, he said the idea that we were ever going to train up this moderate army full of doctors and lawyers and pharmacists and teachers,
and that they were going to be powerful enough to, one, take on Assad and his Syrian Arab army, two, their Iranian friends, three, Hezbollah, and four, Iran, I mean Russia, on one side, plus Isolate and eliminate the Islamic State, and Jabhat al-Nusra, and all of Jaysh al-Islam, and Arar al-Sham, and all the other Bin Ladenite groups that were fighting there, Barack Obama said, and obviously correctly.
was a pure fantasy.
This argument of Roy's that if only Obama had, what, sextupled down and invaded the country of this mythical army of moderates that never existed, then they would have marginalized Al-Qaeda and then we wouldn't have Al-Qaeda in power today.
You know what?
If we had just not backed the suicide bombers against Assad at all, then Assad and the Baathis would be in power today instead of Jelani and his suicide bomber.
Oh, I think this is This is not even revisionist history.
This is invention, Scott.
That doesn't make sense.
When I said that these were false flag operations, I'm not inventing that.
I learned it in the field the hard way, one tip after another, checking everything I got.
Oh, I'm just saying that, you know.
Before you dispute and throw out an assertion, you can challenge it.
You can say, what are your sources?
You already said your source was former Syrian government officials, but here's what we already know from the wide open press at the time was that the revolution was led by bin Ladenites.
There was a story from mid-2012 This is Tunisia!
You're talking about Tunisia!
Bam! And he shot the 13-year-old boy right in the face and killed him.
Because these were the kind of guys who were leading the revolution from the very beginning.
When the suicide bombings were going off, there were beheadings going on at the same time.
There were suicide bombings, not just in Damascus, but all over the place.
And they were done by a bunch of Chechens, and a bunch of Egyptians, and Saudis, and Bin Ladenite terrorists who had come from all over, including from Kosovo.
You're telescoping events from different years and the presence of jihadi fighters who came in.
I don't know how anybody can follow this because I can barely follow it because I know the general subject.
But to respond, I've got to deal with it one issue, one claim at a time.
I can't do more than that.
Remind me, Roy, I'm confused.
Remind me, when did Jelani and his friends come across the border from Iraq?
Well, I told you it's about July of 2011.
Uh-huh, right.
Okay, so go ahead, whatever's the next question.
Well, you know, make an assertion if you want to.
Please feel free to, but let me respond to it one assertion at a time.
I can't do a hundred.
We're agreed that al-Qaeda came to lead the revolution just, what, four or five months after the dawn of the Arab Spring.
What they found when they got here, and as I mentioned this earlier, is that the Syrian intelligence knew that they were coming in, knew their names, knew their ages, knew their backgrounds, sent out the word to the Muqabirat offices around the country,
I didn't make this up.
and it's bizarre, it's strange.
And it took me a long time to...
No, he didn't have the document, no.
This is a guy who...
The source told you that, that's okay.
No, but this is a source who gave me his name, who gave me where he had worked, and whose every other statement proved credible.
And maybe it'll answer two questions at once, because Scott says, you know, Assad released the al-Qaeda terrorists at the demand of the protesters, and you say, no, I'm just asking this, why did he release them?
Well, you have to ask Assad that.
And it's true that the protesters demanded it, but I don't think they knew what was going on in Sednaya Prison.
How could they?
Nobody could know what was going on in Sednaya Prison, unless you were in the prison.
He released them, and I would say probably knowingly, because he knew that they, you know, these are all al-Qaeda.
Let me give you an example of one of them.
His name is Abu Luqman.
It has a more complicated Syrian name, but that was his nickname.
He was one of the people, a Syrian from Raqqa, or a town near Raqqa, who had taken part in recruiting Syrians to go into Iraq and join Al-Qaeda and fight Al-Qaeda.
He was jailed in Sydney with others.
When he was released, he was released to Raqqa jail, where he tried to proselytize non-jihadis into jihad.
He later joined al-Qaeda as a fighter, and in fact he helped actually take over Raqqa.
Abu Luqman then became the ISIS What do you call it?
The security chief in Raqqa.
Abu Luqman had an intimate relationship with the Syrian Muhammarat because he was out there trying to recruit young Syrians to fight in Iraq.
So what the hell is a...
And this is the interesting case.
In the town of Deir ez-Zor, there was one of the top leaders of the ISIS gang running the town.
It came straight out of the Mughabarat.
In fact, that happened multiple times.
So it's not that everybody, it's not that Assad was running ISIS, but he was seeding it with people who he knew and who had worked for the Mughabarat in the past.
Abu Luqman is an example.
Listen, if the CIA had really done its job, I wouldn't have had to do my job.
But my job was to try to piece together, when I picked up tips like this out of the blue, things I wasn't expecting, and then double-check them, and I discovered that they did double-check.
I decided this is really a story.
Something is going on.
There's a pattern here of Assad manipulating jihadists and al-Qaeda in a royal way.
And so this is a true conspiracy, but it's the kind of conspiracy that's possible only in a police state, where the Americans are really not watching too closely.
Let me ask you this, because I'm not trying to be glib.
It sounds like you're making...
Deliberately or not, a compelling case for not overthrowing Assad, given the way he could upend foreign countries through the release of prisoners from terrorist-laden prisons.
If we're getting back to the basics here, what was the rationale to have Assad overthrown, and what was the plan B for something that had not worked in Iraq, it had not worked in Libya, and you'd have to be sort of foolish to think it was going to work in Syria?
I don't think the Americans had a plan.
I think that if you look at Obama's statements, and then you try to look behind them and see what was going on in the discussions in the National Security Council, Obama's whole operation was based on rhetoric.
You know, declaring support for the rebellion, and then doing de minimis, doing the absolute minimum.
You know what Obama had his ambassador to Syria tell the rebel, let's say the rebellion at the very beginning?
He told them, if you want to get rid of Assad, go and see the Russians.
Ask them, because implying the United States is not going to take a lead role.
I found this astonishing, but Robert Ford confirmed it to me.
So, Obama was basically not the ogre that he's being described as the man who tried to overthrow Assad.
No, he was trying to avoid it.
Repeatedly. Anyway, let me stop there.
No, Scott, I think you may want to address that.
That's a great place to start.
No, that's partially correct.
I mean, Obama did back this whole thing from 2011 on, but I think it's absolutely clear that he was afraid to See Al Qaeda and or Isis actually sacked Damascus and what that would look like And so he had gone with a policy that one Israeli official had described to the New York Times as let both sides Continue to hemorrhage to death.
We don't want either side to win.
Not that we want peace.
We want to keep the thing going as long as possible just to weaken everyone involved was what they said they wanted to see.
I think that's quite credible.
If I may ask this, and Scott, let me ask that.
If letting them fight to the death between the two of them is Israel's plan, I mean, it seems that there's nothing they can do right then.
Because if they get involved for whatever reason, they're getting involved.
And if they let them fight among each other, they're to blame for letting them fight among each other?
Yeah, very liberal use of the word let here.
Israel was backing al-Qaeda terrorists this whole time, as they admitted.
Their heads of intelligence, military intelligence, civilian intelligence, have all admitted.
I have the quotes in the book enough already, where they came out and said, yes, absolutely, we were arming these guys, giving them medical care.
And someone said, well, geez, would you give medical care to Hezbollah too?
Because they said, oh, it's just a compassionate, good Samaritan thing to do, you know?
And they said, well, would you give medical care to Hezbollah fighters too?
Well, no.
Hezbollah's our enemy.
Even though Al-Qaeda knocked the towers down of their greatest patron and closest ally in the whole wide world, the United States.
They didn't care about that, but that's okay, because the White House didn't really either.
But Roy is right that Obama didn't want to see the war completed, that he was afraid, essentially, to commit.
But he's absolutely wrong to say, oh, that he did the absolute minimum there, when, in fact, they spent billions of dollars.
And the CIA, of course, America is the world's superpower.
The CIA is is the intelligence leader and America's the dominant power in the Middle East.
It was the CIA, and this is the New York Times and Washington Post have all described this in detail, it was the CIA who ran the operation from the beginning.
And, and first it was coordinating the allies and, okay, Saudi, you put up the money first and whatever.
But then by one year into the thing, America was pouring in money, buying up old Soviet weapons from Bulgaria and God knows where, and shipping them all in there for the war.
And the whole thing, you know, I talked with Eric Margulies, the experienced war reporter who's covered 14 wars.
And he told me in the summer of 2011, he just got back from France, where all of his intelligence and diplomatic connections there were telling him France is on the ground, helping coordinate the war, planning the war, arming up the different teams.
And back to the question of the moderates, who were we backing there?
I have the whole list of the thing.
I don't have all their names memorized.
I know, but you're bringing in extraneous things that really don't...
No, they're not extraneous things.
Wait, wait, wait.
They're not extraneous things.
As I show in the book, I go down the list of Jaysh al-Islam and Rawr al-Sham and Noor al-Zinki and all of these groups and they were all bin Ladenite, head chopping, heart eating, suicide bombing kooks.
Well, that's really, this is oversimplification.
Roy, let me ask you one question first.
I'd like to find where we can agree upon.
Roy, do you concede or agree, is there truth to the statement that Israel is supporting Al-Qaeda because they're antagonistic to Hezbollah and that there is no strategic interest to do so?
I've never seen any evidence that Israel was supporting Al-Qaeda, no.
What I was going to say was that Israel, let it be known, and I heard this from the commander of the Central Command, let it be known that they would prefer that Assad stay in power.
Better the devil we know than the devil we don't know is the Israeli attitude.
That's not what Michael Oren, the ambassador, said.
He said we always preferred the Sunni power to the Shiite power.
In fact, I'll urge you, maybe just flash it up on the screen, people can look this up later.
Or hell, you can play the clip if you want.
It's Michael Oren.
All you got to do is type in Oren, O-R-E-N, Sunnis.
And what'll come up immediately is he and Jeffrey Goldberg, the infamous Jeffrey Goldberg, at the Aspen Security Summit.
And Oren at that time is the very recently retired Israeli ambassador to the United States, and this is in June, the end of June, 2014.
So this is just two weeks, Viva Free and audience, just two weeks after ISIS has sacked Mosul, conquered Western Iraq, and we're machine gunning People in the field and Michael Oren makes direct reference to them.
So there's no mistaking that we're talking about mythical moderates here There are no moderates here.
He says no, you're right.
These guys just masquered 1700 men in the field.
What was he talking about?
He's talking about Shiite Air Force cadets at Camp Speicher in Iraq, and I've seen the footage.
They made them all lay down on their stomach on a basketball court and then they machine gunned them all.
Michael Oren, even after making it clear that he's not talking about moderates, he's talking about the worst of the worst of them, the Islamic State Caliphate.
He says, still, we prefer the Sunni evil to the Shiite evil.
And why?
Because, he says, Because look at all the casualties in the war.
They all get blamed on Assad, which is nonsense.
And then he says, and because Iran has military nuclear technology that they could give to Assad to give to Hezbollah, which of course is a ridiculous hoax.
The Iranians do not have nuclear weapons whatsoever.
But these were his cheap excuses for why Israel outright, and he said it in the Jerusalem Post too.
You can read it in the Jerusalem Post.
Israel always wanted Assad gone.
That's the Israeli ambassador.
Well, I'm telling you what I heard from the commander of the Central Command, which was not a public statement, it was not to the New York Times.
But this was Netanyahu's guy.
Yeah, but I'm telling you, and this was actually the policy, I'm convinced.
That they preferred the devil they know to the devil they don't know in Syria.
Now, I found it very interesting.
I spent a week in Israel in about 2014 going around to the think tanks, to the intelligence, and to the government, and tried to get a view on what do they really think of The Syrian revolution.
And I'll tell you, it was very fascinating that in the intelligence and in the foreign ministry, everybody said, you know, the rebel forces are not perfect, but we think they've got their heart in the right place and they, You know, they would not be they would they would be an improvement on Assad.
But what he was telling, but what what.
Bibi was telling the Central Command, or having his people tell the Central Command at the same time, was, we want Assad to stay.
So there was a division in the Israeli government.
But I thought that the people who really were looking at the politics on the ground...
Listen, the most important discovery I made, if you want, in reporting out of Syria, reporting Afghanistan in a book, and also Iraq, is that the Americans don't Pay enough attention to the views of the people in the countries where they're involved.
We didn't listen to the Afghans after 9-11.
We didn't listen to the Iraqis after 2003.
We didn't listen to the Syrian population.
We were not keeping our ear to the ground.
We as reporters have an obligation to do that very thing, and then to compare what we're getting from the ground with what our government is doing.
And I swear that the view from the ground that I got from Malachi doesn't stay in there for another couple more weeks.
What do you think your country is doing in order to protect your interests?
was doing was basically either listening to Israel or just cowering in a place where they are in fact and still despite everything are dominant outside power.
The U.S. government was not even listening to the other states in the area who also wanted to get rid of Assad.
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and certainly Turkey.
What the Americans were doing instead was avoidance.
And then when ISIS comes out of nowhere, do you realize that in about a year they captured 30% of Syrian territory?
And that's because they didn't have to fight for it, because the government basically gave it to them.
Oh, come on.
Let me tell you a story out of Raqqa.
When al-Qaeda took Raqqa in 2013, the Syrian National Bank, or the Central Bank, had sent in a truckload of cash beforehand,
which was then promptly robbed by the It's
We're going to have to hunker down for a while.
The government gave ISIS a sanctuary, a state within a state in Syria.
When they bombed towns like Raqqa, they bombed civilians.
They never bombed the ISIS authorities.
So the regime again and again and again gave ISIS a license, and they were so happy when the Americans decided to fight, when Obama decided to fight ISIS rather than the Syrian regime.
This is all going on in Israel.
There's this fabulous food in Tel Aviv.
People are on the beaches.
Everyone's like, you've got to stop and think that if Sally got into a car at Zadah and drove four hours northward, she'd be in downtown Damascus.
You got in a car and drove six hours southward, you'd be in Tahrir Square.
But if you're choosing to believe UN reports as to that as being your definitive, maybe it's not your definitive evidence.
Oh no.
Well, I mean, you're just checking on the fly here.
I got all citations and quotations in the book.
In fact, I might have a couple quotations for you right here, buddy.
I am.
I am.
Why do you get that?
Roy, how is what you're describing not the argument to stay out of countries where you shouldn't be in?
It would be an extraordinary country if it was happening in Colorado.
And is it, in my understanding, or at least the Spielman argument, that the only reason America is there is to prevent Russia from taking over or getting its claws into whatever interests exist in those countries?
Our tower is a chief.
I'm sounding like an ambassador again.
I'm sorry.
Well, you make an argument which is now widespread in both political parties, in fact.
the idea of forever wars in the Middle East.
I say that you don't have to fight a forever war.
You don't have to be in a forever war.
You can still make a difference.
The United States is still these days.
What do you think your country is doing in order to protect your interests?
It is the country that has the power to actually change things.
It is looked to in almost every region as the make-believe power.
But the thing is, what we've done...
And what I'm going to say is that this party is absolutely wrong.
But if we have to choose the lesser evil here, the lesser evil is the people.
And if you're not speaking for America, it's the lesser evil.
It's the people who blame us terribly.
Again, they've just taken out Sengden, Yandere, former Iraqi soldiers, shot him in the face.
Who are they fighting against?
The problem is when the Iraqis in Iran, that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
We have allowed the use of force without political direction, without political goals.
That's the lesson we should learn, and we could get better at it.
In other words, often, for example, in Syria, I don't think it was either a binary choice.
I think we're having tech issues.
People are saying that there's an audio playing over an audio, and I hear it on Rumble, but I don't know if it's Rumble.
It wasn't a binary choice in Syria of sending in—this is the way Obama portrayed it, sending in the 82nd Airborne or doing nothing.
No, there were many, many steps in between.
The thing I would care about, as somebody who cares about humanitarian law, is that some way was found to stop Assad and the Russians from bombing civilians and civilian targets.
I mean, there were a dozen ways to do it.
From cruise missiles to Stinger missiles.
Lots of ways to stop the bombing of innocent civilians.
We did nothing.
We watched.
The American government didn't even talk about it.
We hardly condemned it when the Russians did it.
That, I think, is egregious.
That's a bad use of power.
But it's not to say that power cannot be used intelligently.
I'm just saying it has not been.
Scott, let me ask you a question.
I do want to get back to...
Do I hear a double audio now?
No, I don't.
The Israel Israel Israel Israel's interest in this, I want to understand, is it Israel's or is it Western Israel being a US proxy in the Middle East interest?
No, I mean, really, I hate to say it, it's more the other way around.
This is what America can do for Israel.
And again, I urge you to take a careful look at A Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm by David Wormser.
And the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States.
That's where he says, you know, we want to expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria so that we can remake it in a way that's more beneficial for Israel.
And that was what it was all about.
The proposal, it was written for Benjamin Netanyahu for him to accomplish, but these are the very same men who lied us into war with Iraq when they worked for Dick Cheney and W. Bush in 2003.
Wormser was Middle East advisor in the Vice President's office.
Richard Perl was the head of the Defense Policy Board.
Douglas Feith was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, and they were clearly part of what Colin Powell called a separate government.
What they called the neocon, they call themselves a cabal of the neoconservatives working for Dick Cheney to lie us into a war, mostly for Israel's interests in Iraq.
So that is the basis of it.
Now, when it comes to, in the Obama years, the dirty war, I'll recommend you to a great British journalist named Asa Winstanley.
And I don't have the quotes for you here, but I do have footnotes, including Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yolan and Major General Hirzi Halevi, who talked about this.
And General Gadi Eisenkot as well.
And in fact, the extremely annoying Mehdi Hassan, that journalist, I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.
Oh, I know.
I know Mehdi.
He interviewed Israeli officials who admitted this to him as well.
So this is no like conspiracy and it's not just gave them medical treatment.
It's also gave them wealth, you know, gave them money and gave them weapons to fight in the war.
And just recently here, when the regime change finally was successful in December, Benjamin Netanyahu went to the front and gave a big press conference or a big speech announcing that he takes responsibility and takes credit for the fall of Assad.
And he rightly said it was partially because he had beaten the hell out of Hezbollah so much lately that they were not available to help shore up the Assad government.
He might have added that This is probably the only, maybe South Africa in the 80s.
Otherwise, this is the only example I can think of where sanctions actually worked to help to accomplish a regime change because America had declared such an economic war against rump state Syria there and occupying their wheat and oil fields and keeping their government from being able to pay their soldiers and the rest of that, you know, was a big part of it.
And then, I'm sorry, because he made so many points.
There's a couple that I wanted to try to remember and not forget here.
Oh, and the east of the country.
You know, if anyone's familiar with the map of Syria, if you're not familiar with the map of Syria, pull it up and you'll see all of the major cities, or virtually all of the cities, are in the west of the country.
You know, they call Raqqa the east, but Raqqa is actually kind of in the north center of the country.
Much of the east is barren desert out there.
When Roy claims that every time that Assad withdrew the Syrian Arab Army from any territory, it was just because he wanted ISIS to have it instead to benefit them, that's completely false.
He was withdrawing his troops to try to shore up defenses in the places where he could hold on.
During this same period, you had Chechen suicide bombers taking out military bases in the west of the country.
So no, holding on to the desert area in the far east became We're good to
go. What did he do in Syria?
Vanguard of the Tunis insurgency that fought Americans in Iraq War II. Roy says you're just not allowed to recognize these men as villains because somewhere there was just somebody less extreme than them that also was a part of this uprising somewhere.
But look at who led it the whole time, including right up until today.
Who was dragging a guy to death in the street yesterday?
Jolani's men.
That's who.
Let me ask this, I mean, Roy, and I don't know how much time we go on for, I'll look to our producer up there to see, but Roy, what is the endgame?
So they've overthrown, whether or not Assad's out, it's chaos, Christians are being slaughtered, and the sectarian violence is out of control.
I don't think anybody would say it's better now than it was before Assad fell.
I think they'd say the opposite.
What the hell is the long game?
I wanted to agree with Scott on one point.
He was quoting Bibi.
Taking credit for the fall of Assad.
And to a certain extent that's true.
It was the war in Gaza and Israel's assault, sometimes very clever, sometimes brutal, on Hezbollah that Definitely changed the equation in the entire Middle East.
It was the attacks on Iran, both the Iranian forces and Iranian convoys transiting Syria, and then fighting Iran on the ground, or at least bombing Iranian positions on the ground.
It was that, and then the other factors were the Russians losing interest in supporting Assad, Because Assad had been obstinate and refusing to make peace with Turkey, and it was Turkey giving the green light to the Jelani people.
So it was a combination of international, you know, change in the constellation of forces in the region.
But it was an unintended consequence of the Israeli attacks on Gaza.
I don't think that for a moment the Israelis intended to have the overthrow.
of Assad.
But it happened that way.
What was your other question again?
About the current situation and where it's going?
Let me just finish the question, Dave's question of where this is going.
um I haven't been there lately, but I'm hoping to go shortly to Syria to see not just what's going on in Damascus, but also to go back to Idlib, where Jolani basically was in control, was the chief, the major power broker, and literally controlled the region with assistance from Turkey.
What I've heard, though, is that this was not, you know, for the five or seven years that he was in control there, this was not a ruthless, brutal dictatorship.
It was actually laissez-faire in an awful lot of ways, including women's dress and men's beards and other things.
And today, if you visit a town like Sarmata or Idlib or other places, you'll find that if the rest of Syria has no electricity, or very, very limited electricity, operating on the fumes practically,
way below the poverty line for most of the population, the situation in Idlib is very different, where you have 3.5 million people, more than half of them who fled other parts of Syria because they were forced out by Assad's barrel bombing, that this is actually a prosperous, thriving region, and that is where Jelani had been in dominance for all those years.
Now, is he going to bring that to Damascus?
Is he trying to, or does he have a different Oh, sorry. I didn't know if you were finished.
Well, just that I don't think we know.
This is a work in progress.
The killings in Latakia are something that I don't quite understand fully, but it looks to me like it was provoked by Assad loyalists, and maybe with support from the outside, either from Assad himself, or from the Iranians, or somebody, or maybe even Hezbollah indirectly.
It was a bloodbath.
Yes. And who fought?
And what was really going on in towns like Banias, which was the scene of a bloodbath during the uprising?
We don't know the answer to that one yet.
It was a nasty and a terrible thing.
I'm not sure that I would conclude that the country is finished based on that.
And secondly, on the handling of the Christian minority in Syria, certainly everything that We're good to go!
Take a brief pause, go for it, because I think you look ready to go.
I mean, anybody listening to this has got to be kind of bewildered, right?
Bashar al-Assad, the secular Ba'athist with the clean-shaven chin and the three-piece suit.
Beyond the Pale.
The Bin Ladenite suicide bomber headchoppers who proudly fought against America in Iraq War II, hey, they're a work in progress, man.
You know, we might be able to figure out, we can work with them.
Yes, they're murdering Alawites and Christians by the thousands right now, but we'll see, you know, how it goes.
At least they're not using barrel bombs to do it.
I mean, this is completely crazy.
And again, this guy, he sat down with Frontline, Jelani, and said, yes, he was happy.
He admits he was happy on September 11th.
That was when he decided to join.
Oh, he was a middle-class guy, huh?
Yeah, so was Mohammed Atta, that crash flight 11 into the North Tower, dude.
He was so happy on September 11th that he decided to make his life's work, joining the Mujahideen.
Then he went to fight Americans in Iraq War II, where he fought against them proudly in Mosul and Ramadi.
This is the enemy.
This is treason.
I don't know if they did or not, but they said they were going to send them money.
Roy says we ought to be helping them now.
It's completely crazy.
Um, I don't know how, how anybody, I, okay, for example, Viva Free, think back to 2003 when America invaded Iraq.
Well, that was, that was after Afghanistan.
So the timeframe is they did Afghanistan use 9-11.
That was the reason.
I don't remember them using the pretext of 9-11 as much with Iraq.
was sort of the weapons of mass.
Well, they wanted people very much to believe that Saddam was involved in 9-11 and certainly with Al Qaeda and was going to give nuclear and chemical weapons.
He did not have to Al Qaeda to use against Americans.
That was essentially the excuse for the war.
But now look, W. Bush, in effect, He gave all of Western Iraq to the Bin Ladenites.
Fallujah and Mosul and Ramadi and Samarra and all these lands in predominantly Sunni Iraq became Jihadistan.
But that was a big stupid accident.
That was because he listened to David Wormser and Scooter Libby and Richard Perle and Douglas Fye.
He didn't mean to do that, but I'm making an analogy here, Roy.
Imagine, guys, if Saddam Hussein had been right in the middle of putting down a Bin Laden-ite insurgency already when W. Bush intervened to overthrow him.
How absolutely crazy that would have been.
That was the Obama policy in Syria, where you already have suicide bombers and headchoppers running around.
And Obama, not just Obama, but he's helping all of his allies.
Again, Saudi, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, too, helping, and Israel.
In fact, American Rangers just Training terrorists for the CIA in Jordan were shot in the back and murdered, three of them.
People can look this up.
There's a guy named Jack Murphy, not that Jack Murphy, another Jack Murphy, who was a special forces veteran who turned into a great journalist, who did a story about this for SoftRep.
These guys were training, they were army rangers, or maybe Green Berets, patriots, Who were being made by the CIA to train terrorists and then one of the terrorists shot them in the back and killed them.
Imagine that's how you sign your boy up for the army and that's how he dies in the middle of being made to commit an act of treason for the enemy.
And anybody can find that article by Jack Murphy there.
And that's the nature of this war.
It's fighting for the guys who swore loyalty to the guys who knocked down our towers.
And that ought to be all anyone needs to know.
About how dangerous they are and if by the way as I said already I stipulated Jolani is clearly trying to be less overtly psychotic than his predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi the leader of the ISIS We're good to
go! This is Well,
those guys, they're not so bad.
They're not as bad as ISIS.
Hey, they're probably more moderate, maybe, you know, equivalent to, say, I don't know, Hamas.
But that's why we should support them in Syria, they say.
And in fact, the Trump administration has even said maybe we should force all the Palestinians to go to Syria and live under al-Qaeda rule there.
Let me interrupt you for one second with one question.
Here's my question for you.
The day after, what do you want to see in Syria?
Do you want to see a stable place or do you want to see a place that's broken up?
If you want a stable country, you've got to go with the authorities who are there now and try to moderate them.
If you want a country to be broken up, That's a whole different ballgame.
Show me, Roy.
Let me ask you, where did America bring stability in any country in this century?
I'm sorry, bring stability?
Yeah, where did America bring stability?
Relative stability in the Balkans.
You gotta go back to 1995.
That's a pretty bad track record.
When they ruined the peace deal, the Lisbon peace deal that could have prevented the war in the first place.
When Warren Zimmerman told Izabegovich to unsign the peace deal he'd already signed and prolong the war for three years.
Why do you think the Turks backed Jelani and let him be?
You know, it was Turkish...
Oh, I'm sure it was out of the goodness of Erdogan's heart, right?
It was for humanitarian reasons, you know what I'm going to say?
It was a calculation that there's nobody else out there.
No, he's sticking one in the eye of the eye and told us why.
And that maybe we can, and maybe that we, or they, the Turks, can work with him.
That was a calculation, and it turned out to be a pretty good calculation, at least so far, because Jolani managed, with Turkish advice, to use, to choose the exact moment to go after Aleppo and then to head down toward Damascus.
And they're taking his advice, and they're listening to him, and the Turks are providing protection for them, or hoping to provide protection against Israel.
The Turks have a very complicated understanding, but they have an understanding of the region.
At least they listen to the ground.
They listen to the population.
Listen, I've got to go because I've got to make a phone call for work.
But I've enjoyed this conversation a lot.
I have two disagreements still to go with Scott.
Well, I've got a few more questions.
There will be less argumentation.
But before we do that, producer in the back there, Liam, do we need to run an advertisement?
A sponsor for Zero Hedge, which is going to be a pre-recorded video now?
At JM Bullion, excellent service and competitive pricing aren't just goals.
They're our standard.
Our commitment to customer discretion and privacy with secure and confidential transactions has earned us an unparalleled reputation as an online retailer of precious metals, backed by over 375,000 reviews, averaging 4.8 out of 5 stars.
Only at JM Bullion.
Okay, yeah, my final question to both of you, I think Scott's gonna have an easier time answering it, is What has U.S. intervention in the regime change in Syria brought, if nothing else, than death and destruction?
Yeah, well, I think that's right.
And I think we ought to absolutely back off.
And, you know, I'm sorry to say all this.
People get me wrong a lot of the times, but I'm a Texan.
I'm a patriot.
I don't care about any of these other stupid countries or factions.
I'm not here to support Ba'athism any more than any other foreign nation's ism or any of that.
This whole thing is a horror show.
It always has been.
But it should never have been able to get to this point.
And one thing I meant to say before I went off on a tangent the other direction was that If Jelani truly tries hard to take on board American and Turkish advice here and moderate his positions more, try to compromise more with Shiites and Christians and get along, then one of his own guys is going to murder him and overthrow him.
Because these guys are Bin Ladenites.
That's who they are.
When ISIS took over Iraq, Patrick Coburn called them the Islamist Khmer Rouge.
So for the young people, that means Pol Pot and the communists who took over Cambodia and were probably the most insane psychopaths ever to rule a nation state, killed three million of their own people on just Absolutely.
Berserker, psychotic kind of levels.
That's how ISIS was in Western Iraq, especially.
And that's how they fought their war in Syria.
And that's a lot of how al-Nusra fought their war in Syria as well.
Now, as I said, he's trying to take mostly American PR advice to not be so ruthless so that somehow they can characterize him as more like the Saudis or, you know, just the Taliban or something moderate like that.
So that somehow we're supposed to be able to tolerate this.
Yeah. Have total dominance
over the new Bin Laden forces there.
Israel, by the way, as soon as Al-Qaeda took over and they cheered it, they immediately bombed what was left of Assad's military forces, sank his navy, bombed all his weapon stores, because they are rightfully worried about what a bunch of heavily armed Bin Ladenites on their northern border, what a danger they might be.
Even though they're the ones who wanted this, they're already immediately, you know, with no sense of humor whatsoever, second guessing that policy.
And I think Probably what's left of Syria is going to be what?
It's going to be some kind of compromise, you know, Kurdish mini-state in the far east, and on some kind, over the long term, some kind of compromise between Israel and Turkey.
And the poor Syrians aren't going to have a say in this thing.
Their nation-states are completely obliterated now.
And so, I'm sorry, so my final statement is, so America should screw off and bring all our troops home from everywhere in the world and never intervene in another nation-state on the planet ever again in any way ever.
Roy, it's on me.
Okay, look, what's missing from the equation that you've described on the ground in Syria is the Syrian people.
The Syrian people have been through a hell of a lot.
They staged a national rebellion.
They got barrel bombed and forced out.
Half the population of the country fled, either to the north or out of the country.
They have a say, they have agency, and they should be listened to.
And they should be listened to by us, by the United States, and by other countries, because they deserve the respect for what they've been through.
They've been through a revolution.
It's actually been a successful revolution.
But it needs to be stabilized now.
And the way to stabilize it is to try to let the economy start to grow.
And to try to influence Jelani or Shiraz, as he's now known, to keep it stable and to keep it a, you know, a hodgepodge, a mixture, a mosaic of so many different religions and beliefs.
This is something that the United States can do.
Your call for the American forces to withdraw from everywhere on Earth, I think, is a huge mistake.
Whether we like it or not, and there's been a history of errors and mistakes by the United States, nevertheless, there has been overall stability in the world since, you know, for 80 years.
We shouldn't, like Donald Trump is doing, we shouldn't just dismiss that as irrelevant.
That's actually the way We're all here and able to prosper and able to live and able to travel and able to trade until yesterday at least.
You know, really, the United States is the indispensable power, whether we like it or not.
It's just fate.
It's the way things have come out, and with all of the mistakes and all the errors, my point is that we should learn from the mistakes.
We should not pick up our marbles and go home.
We should learn from the errors that have been made.
And one of the biggest errors, especially in the Middle East, is not listening to the voice from the ground, to the real people, and not mastering Let's go!
communicated to the military who are actually you know in charge of the instruments of power we need to integrate our policy and make it more, you know, human-centered and always think of the human factor here.
I mean, I don't, I don't think that you, for one moment, Scott, would welcome seeing this, you know, the slaughter of any nation on earth, including Syrians, including the Gazans, including Israelis, anybody.
And this is something that the United States can help prevent, but it's got to prevent it.
And by observing the rules of war, for one thing, and by insisting that other people observe them.
And when a country goes hog-wild crazy against its own people, the way Assad did, you know, half a million people die in that conflict.
The United States has an obligation to say, hey, there are actually rules of the game, and if you're going to violate them, we're going to help people try to stop you.
It doesn't mean you have to sit in the 82nd, but you just have to sometimes arm people to defend themselves.
But we should start with the human factor.
We should focus on the human factor.
We should try to learn the lessons and carry out policies that Fantastic.
do that.
We should critique it when it, when we don't do it.
Uh, but we should always hold, hold that goal high because if we don't, I'm not sure quite if anybody will.
So I'll, I'll end there.
Producer, do you want to run the ad at the end of this?
You have a sponsor?
Okay, awesome.
This was fantastic.
I won't interject my own personal opinion, although I think it's obvious.
Anyhow, this has been very enlightening.
I'm going to go fact-check a few things after this is over.
Roy, thank you very much.
Where can people find you, by the way?
Let's start with Roy.
How do people find you, support you, follow your work?
Well, I'm working on a book, so I have a low profile, but I'm the president of the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs.
And we have monthly programs on major issues in foreign affairs.
And that's all at the Baltimore Council's website.
All of our events are recorded and are presented.
It's not a bad way to look at foreign affairs, in fact, because we're about to deal with the issue of the closing of AID.
We've had programs on Sudan We've had programs on NATO.
We try to do things in a really nonpartisan realistic way So so I'm doing that's that's where I am right now at the Baltimore Council of Foreign Affairs Fantastic Scott, where can people find you?
Okay. Well, I'm at Scott Horton org.
I got 6,000 interviews for you there I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute org and I wrote Fool's errand about Afghanistan, enough already about the war on terrorism, which is the basis of a lot of what we talked about here tonight.
And then my latest is called Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine.
And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton Show.
Oh, and I'm now putting the audio book out of Provoked in sections.
If you subscribe at my sub stack, it's scotthortonshow.com.
Fantastic. So that's it.
I'm going to wind this up at least on Rumble side, by the way.
You'll go raid Tim Pool if you want to go watch something and, you know, continue to fill your minds with knowledge and information for the rest of the night.
On our end, thank you very much, ZeroHedge.
Thank you for inviting me.
I had a very easy job tonight, but it's been enlightening.
So with that, everybody, you know where to find me.
Viva Frye on Rumble, locals, etc.
Now is the time to take advantage of the power of gold and silver to grow your wealth, whether you're an experienced investor or new to the game.
These precious metals have a long history of being a safe haven for your savings, but they also offer growth potential, making them a wise investment choice.
So where does the average investor go to buy gold and silver?
That's easy.
JM Bullion.
J.M. Bullion is one of the most popular and most trusted precious metals retailers in the nation.
We offer a huge selection of gold, silver, platinum and palladium products that can be delivered to your door in safe, discreet, fully insured packaging.
From one gram of gold to an entire mint box of silver, J.M. Bullion offers precious metals to suit every financial goal and budget.
No matter your budget, now is the time to start investing in precious metals and start protecting yourself and your savings against these volatile markets.
▲
Export Selection