Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/12/24 Kyle Anzalone on the Fall of Assad in Syria

Episode Date: December 15, 2024

Scott brought Kyle Anzalone on Antiwar Radio to discuss what’s happening in Syria. The two explain who just took power in Syria, outline the historical context of these developments and speculate over what this means for US policy in the region. They finish with a discussion about Gaza and the possibility of a terrorist attack on Americans. Discussed on the show: Scott’s debate with General Wesley Clark Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman. Follow him on Twitter @KyleAnzalone_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, December the 12th, 2024, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome to show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the author of the new book, Provoked. how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. You can find my full interview archive, more than 6,000 of them now,

going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and also all other podcatchers and video sites and things out there. Let's look for the Scott Horton Show interview feed there. And you can follow me on X, as I call it now, if you dare, at Scott Horton Show. all right and welcoming back to the show it's anti-war dot com's opinion editor kyle anzalone he also is the host not just of the show conflicts of interest which is great but also the new kyle anzalone show which is also available on every pod catcher in the world welcome back to the show how you doing kyle doing great scott thanks for having me back on really happy to have you here although

what a bunch of bad news to talk about i don't know if we'll get to anything else after Syria, but what in the world is going on in Syria, Kyle Anzalone of anti-war.com. Yeah, Scott, this is really unbelievable what we have seen in Syria over the past two weeds with the very rapid crumbling of the Syrian government army. It seemed that Assad had let some of his allied forces that he had had over the past decade or so, and his army did not stand up against this offensive that was conducted by this group called HTS, or Harit Thir al-Shahm. And, of course, that's just a rebranded Al-Nusra Front, which is al-Qaeda in Syria. And as has been all along, a guy named Mohamed Abu al-Jolani is the leader of the HTS-Al-Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria.

and that's now who controls Damascus. And this is absolutely infuriating, Scott. I feel like I've been listening to you on KPFK or on your show for a decade now, saying, what is the U.S. doing with this dirty war in Syria? Why are we backing all these Syrian rebel groups? Don't they know that they're going to end up with Jolani in Damascus? And now that's what's happened. It's amazing, isn't it?

This is one benefit of being an old man is that I've been doing. this this long that yeah just check the timeline i've been on kpfk since 2010 so yep covered it all right at the time the whole time on these airwaves and then yeah i mean this is really no different than if it was bin laden himself or abu bakr al baghdaddy the leader of the islamic state and you know he has had a strategy even including back then of playing nicer with the west sucking up to the west playing a strategic game to send more moderate people to meet with the Americans to accept their cash and weapons and this kind of thing. That's all it ever was was a tactic.

William Van Wagonen especially showed there is no free Syrian army. It always was Al Nusra that was dominant this whole time. And he showed that in his great journalism. We published at the Institute. And that's William Van Wagonin, everyone who writes 70,000 word essays. histories of this stuff and has a new book coming out soon and so

okay anybody driving their truck down the 405s got to be thinking that these guys don't know what they're talking about because Joe Biden might be the worst president since the last guy or the guy before that but there's no way that he would just

outright support a bunch of bin Ladenite terrorists taking over Syria would he yeah Scott that's exactly what he did and in two administrations. This all started as a dirty war under the Barack Obama administration around 2010, 2011, when after they had completed the regime change against Gaddafi, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group or the veterans from al-Qaeda in Iraq,

looted Gaddafi's stoppiles, and then the U.S. funneled them with their weapons from Libya into Syria, where they hijat the Arab Spring uprising there, which was a protest movement against the Assad government and his cruelty, but was aimed at bringing reforms to Syria and getting more freedom of speech, not being thrown into a political prison or into one of Assad's jails as soon as you speak out against the government. That's what the people were looking for, but it was ultimately hijacked by Jolani and his ban of al-Qaeda thuds. because, you know, as we see in conflict zone after conflict zone, Scott, the people who are the most ideologically committed, that are willing to go to the furthest extremes, you know, those like the Islamic State, al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban, they're willing to commit horrific ads are the ones that end up getting a lot of power in these chaotic situations. And so for years and years under the Obama administration, we directly bat al-Jolani and his men. Now, during the Trump administration, Trump canceled the timber sycamore program, what the CIA was doing, to bring arms to those groups. But at the same time, we allowed our NATO ally Turkey to act as a protectorate

of Jolani and his men. When the Syrian government bad by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah were at their absolute peak. And, you know, from 2015 to 2018 or 19 or so, they probably could have gone through the Idlib province of Syria and rooted out Jolani and his men. But they were prevented from doing so by the Terts and their status in the NATO alliance, which means war with the Americans. And so with that, on top of the U.S. controlling about a third or a quarter of Syrian territory refusing to let Syria get the food products from there, the energy, the resource money from that area, Syria that we are occupying. And then the sanctions campaign against Assad all really helped Jalani to eventually, you know,

have the momentum needed to take Syria. Damascus and run a side out of town. Yeah. Now, it's amazing that part of this story is that Donald Trump, on three different occasions, ordered the military to withdraw from Syria. And they ended up just saying, no, we're not doing that. And he ended up saying, oh, oh, all right, then. And one of the times the Secretary of Defense resigned over it, and then Trump backed down a week later anyway, James Mattis quit over it. And then, yeah, we still have them there. to this day. And it's got to be one of the things about Donald Trump that drives the rest of

Washington crazy is that he says things that they're only supposed to do, but not say, like, let's steal all their oil and wheat so that we can have it, not them, and stuff like that. You're not supposed to say that, Mr. President, for God's sake. But that is what they're doing, right? Yeah, that's been the absolute policy. And on top of that, Scott, it's also been the policy to prevent any construction material from entering Syria. They're intentionally impoverishing the people of Syria to the point where in recent years there's actually been babies freezing to death during the winter. I have to imagine that had a lot to contribute to Assad's ultimate demise. The fact that he, you know, for ruling Damascus, really wasn't in charge of Syria.

He couldn't import. He had no capability to stop the Israelis from bombing his country once or twice a week for for a decade i i mean you know this bombing campaign that has gone on and on and on not only from the americans of course but also the israeli saying syrian government targets again and again and again i mean what kind of country and what kind of ruler are you of a country if you don't even have control over your own airspace or your own economy your own ports yeah yeah it's been when they say serious i quote unquote syria what was left of it now there's nothing left of it now. So what do you think is going to happen next? Well, Sky, it looks like Israel, the U.S. and Turkey are setting in on what remains of Syria, like hungry vultures, just going to

rip off and take all the pieces that they can. Turkey, of course, our NATO ally in the U.S. are really at odds now over what we're going to do in Syria. The U.S. policy, after the rise that the Islamic State, our more overt policy has been to bat the Syrian Kurds, which we call the SDF or the Kurdish call the YPG, which is an offshoot of the Kurdish-Turkish group, the PKK, and that is labeled as a terrorist group by both the U.S. and Turkey. And so the U.S. has this very difficult situation where we've made some very big promises to the Kurds. And there's people within the U.S. government who may have a lot of influence in the Trump administration like Lindsey Graham, who's now calling for the U.S. to invade more to protect the

Kurds, I guess, mostly from Turkey. But he's also warning about the extremist threat in Damascus, seeing that as a main threat to our Kurdish allies in Syria. And so I have no idea what the Trump administration policy is going to look like. But I think at least for the next few months, the Biden administration is going to do what they can to walk the very difficult tightrope between not upsetting Turkey too much and not completely abandoning our Kurdish allies. Already this week, we demanded that the Kurds finally withdrawn to east of the Euphrates River, and we forced them out of the city of Mambidge, saying that we would no longer protect them. And in fact, in the chaos of that fighting, apparently the Kurds accidentally downed one of our

drones, believing it was a Turkish drone. And so there's, I think some fighting to come, particularly in northern Syria and the areas east of the Euphrates River, while Israel seems interested in pushing north from the Golan Heights, particularly along Syria's border with Lebanon. And I'm sure that has a lot to do with, you know, what their aspirations are in southern Lebanon as far as against Asbala and particularly even maybe taking territory. It's amazing to see, you know, the Israelis just bombing the Syrian Navy at port and bombing, you know, major. or weapons installations all across the country.

And then you have neocons, the very same ones, who are, and I mean literal ones, not figurative, but like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, for example, Damoc Adams was telling me he saw where one of their guys was saying, well, geez, you can't let these weapons fall into the hands of these terrorists. It's like, which terrorists are those? And of course, he's implying that actually these weapons

were safe in the hands of Assad. He wasn't attacking Israel with him. But these guys that we're celebrating just killed Assad and overthrew his government. And we know we're about to massacre all these minorities and everything. We can't let these weapons fall into their hands. Are you crazy? Poor world. I think Israel has carried out 500 plus airstriots in Syria now since the fall of Assad, Scott,

which, you know, we had Joe Biden and even Benjamin Netanyahu declaring what a great day was for the Syrian people and freedom and all this that Assad fell. and yet it seems the war has pitted up in intensity far higher than when Assad and the lines are frozen compared to now where the country is just being absolutely bombarded. It's amazing. It's unbelievable. Hey, y'all, let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc. Nobody trusts the U.S. dollar anymore. Foreign governments are stocking up on gold instead of $100 bills. One, they know they need to, and two, that means you need to too.

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me along with all my new pals that's tuttle twins.com slash 10 years okay it's anti-war radio i'm scott horton i'm talking with kailan from antiwar dot com let me make sure that i think i understand you here so the united states supports our nato ally turkey which in supporting al-kata terrorists so-called hyattir al-lsham which is just al-qaeda in iraq in syria uh years later now, taking over the country. Israel also supports them and all sides cheering for the overthrow of Assad and the fall of the Bathas government there. And then immediately America has a problem because we're back in the Kurds in the east who the Turks would very much like to cleanse and take all their territory and are their vowed enemies. So then we have to protect our Kurdish allies

from the Turks. But then as you're saying, America, you know, you're implying it later. going back to history, America always betrays the Kurds, these ones and those ones all over the place. And so they're saying at least you're going to have to withdraw behind the Euphrates River if we're going to even, and I doubt it's a very sincere promise. They're going to definitely protect them from the Turks. Maybe they will. While at the same time, Israel also supporting the al-Qaeda takeover of Damascus, but they're bombing the hell out of what's left of the Ukrainian government there. And you know, I did a debate. hey everybody i'm kind of proud of it i don't know look it up on the youtube if you want um it's not on my

channel i'm not selling it i debated wesley clark the four-star general the other day and at the beginning i was asked he let me go first on syria so i went off about alcatus taken over and it's a horror show and clark said well at least they're leaving the former state intact we've advised them to leave the former state intact maybe they're learning from our mistake in Iraq War II in dissolving and debaithifying the government, dissolving the army. And then the next day, Israel starts carpet bombing them. So if they don't have Douglas fight there to make Paul Bremer dissolve the Baathist regime and its Syrian Arab army, then the Israeli Air Force will just come and liquidate it that way. And so what do they

call it the mistake of a wreck or two? They're deliberately replicating it here. There'll be no state in Syria. It'll be carved up and I guess whatever's not outright seized by Israel or quote unquote protected by America will be up to the Turks and then a bunch of warring tribes of bin Ladenites and their victims, right? And then I wonder if America's going to at some point have to invade and fight the bin Ladenites. Seems almost inevitable. I don't know. Yeah, Scott, this is almost unbelievable to say, but I think maybe a better parallel for Syria isn't Iraq, but Libya, where once Gaddafi was gone, you had essentially a completely failed state. You have a couple different warlords now who have essentially consolidated power,

but at one point, ISIS held a significant swath of territory in the south of Libya. There's still no real government control or, you know, I don't even think really part of one, the two main factions in the north that are vying for power. And so I think we could see a very similar situation in Syria where, you know, there's the Mediterranean coast where the Alawites live and that's what, of course, with the religion of Assad and that's where the Russian military bases are. So maybe that ends up being a small state. And then, of course, you have a large swathed Syria that's an Arab population that may

back or at least be okay with living under the Turkish Al Jolani rule. and then you have a large area of Syria that's Kurdish dominated. And it seems like the U.S. is at least not going to let Al Jolani and the Kurds are the turds come and wipe out those Kurds. And so, I mean, it seems like there's a recipe for essentially just endless war here, Scott, and really, and maybe never again, a Syrian state. Well, I wonder how much pressure there will be in the United States on Trump to get out. and or support for him if he wants to do so. And I wonder how many liberals had leftists would be willing to cross the aisle to support the decision

that he could make to withdraw. Although remember last time what stopped him over and over again, it wasn't just the military. And in fact, the headlines here are kind of ridiculous. If you Google this up, you will find a lot of news stories. And I think particularly in 2018, when he tried to order the troops out that said this is a betrayal of Israel

and because it was Israel that needed the United States to continue to occupy Eastern Syria. They were essentially hiding behind the Kurds as a PR smokescreen. Yeah, and that is my kind of concern, Scott, where I don't think Trump would leave. I think there will be two kinds of forms of pressure.

The Lindsey Graham types will say that we can't abandon our Kurdish allies after they've helped us all this time, we had to stay there to protect them without ever really mentioning that we have to protect them from our NATO allies Turkey. And then I think the other argument, and this is probably going to be the more persuasive one, is that Syria was a massive victory for the United States. You know, forget, never talk about the fact that al-Qaeda won the war. What they're going to say is that we fractured the Shia crescent in the Middle East. Iran can no longer ship weapons to southern Lebanon and that is the biggest victory that we could

possibly imagine and we have to exploit it to the absolute furthest degree possible and never ever withdraw our presence from Syria because then one day Iran could possibly reestablish their land bridge from back to Tehran to Beirut and we cannot possibly allow that to happen and so therefore we have to stay forever. Yeah. And now look, this goes right back to the heart of the issue, and I know it's complicated, but sometimes things make it seem easier to understand like it was a controversy on the right this week where Ben Shapiro, who's somehow the self-appointed leader of the conservative movement in America, said, yeah, you know, a lot of Christians will probably be killed and stuff like that. But you've got to understand what's so crucial here is that this is a disruption in America. Iranian power. Hasbala and Iran are now weakened. And that's what really matters for Israel, of course. And it came across as very crass and a lot of people on the right really reacted against it because it's not just that a lot of Christians and Shiites and Aloites and others

are going to be killed, but by bin Ladenites, by the, you can't even say dissent. right it's not like it's their sons it's the guys from the same organization what knocked down the towers yeah and and and attacked us a lot of other times besides that too yeah and sky just want to emphasize that as you said this is a generation later jollani is a man who saw the 9-11 terrorist attack and was inspired to fight on behalf of al-Qaeda on behalf of the terrorist that's who he is. You know, he rose up through the reigns of al-Qaeda and Iraq and formed al-Qaeda in coordination with the al-Qaeda leadership and Baddadi, the leader of the Islamic State. This man is a jihadist lunatic, and that should frighten Americans. When we see his band of thuds

looting the Syrian central bank, who knows where that money is going? And we know that even del Israel is carpet bombing a lot of Syrian territory. I'm sure these, you know, guys have picked up guns and taints and all kinds of explosives and other ammunition, maybe shoulder-fired anti-aircraft systems and things like that that could pose real threats to Americans and other Westerners all over the globe. I think this is something that we should really be concerned about that, that al-Qaeda won the war in Syria. And now, Jolani has the remnants of the Syrian state.

under his control, at least for the time being. And even if he is somewhat reformed, Scott, you had to imagine that a lot of the followers who have been with him all the way through al-Qaeda and Iraq, the rise of the Islamate state and things like this, you know, these people haven't all give up their international jihad, and they're going to profit off the money and they're going to have access to the guns and the, you know, Syrian state to plot their next attack on the West. Yeah, I've been feeling like my book, Time to End the War on Terrorism, is really kind of out of date. It came out after the war on terrorism, more or less is over, right before Biden was sworn in.

And now here we are again, just starting all over again with this. And the irony that America and Israel are back on the side of the bin Ladenites and that we, maybe not Israel, so far, there's no examples of Israel being targeted, but there are plenty of examples of Europeans and Americans being killed by bin Ladenites, radicalized by these wars for the war. them and against them. Sometimes America, Britain and Saudi support them. Sometimes we stab them in the back. Sometimes they get angry about other things that we're doing. And I'm not a big false flag, you know, 9-11 guy. I think that that's the consequence of the blowback and the backdraft of America pretending like they can always control these mercenaries, these terrorists, that they train and unleash on their Russian and Shiite enemies. And what, in March or April? 2011, you had the first attack by, maybe it was in 2012, the first attack against a Jewish

synagogue in Brussels by a veteran of the bin Ladenites fighting in Syria, who was already spreading into Europe. Just as European Muslims were going there to fight, there were Muslims either there already or traveling there to attack Western targets. And we saw this with Omar Mateen in the United States and the San Bernardino attack, forget the guy's name. So the terror war ain't so simple and it ain't over. We're starting all over again. I don't know. I don't know how Trump's going to handle this, but it's going to be bad.

Yeah. And if Syria is now a huge tinderbots, Scott, the war in genocide, the Israeli genocide in Gaza is certainly just a massive flare that will light that fire. And you know what, finish up with that, finish up with that and Lebanon too and the threat posed to Lebanon possibly. Yeah, well, I mean, the situation in Gaza sky is absolutely horrific. You know, from the last update I gave you, there's probably not too much difference. They're still carrying out the Generals plan in the Northern Gaza Strip. They're destroying every building. They're not letting me.

Wait, wait, tell us. What is the Generals plan? This is an ethnic cleansing plan that Israel had a few former generals. rollout, and it basically calls for sealing off first the northern half of the Gaza Strip and either forcing all the civilians to leave or starving them out or at a certain point in time, they're going to declare that anybody who remains in northern Gaza is a terrorist, and they will all be marched for death. But, you know, day after day, you see these videos of hundreds, if not thousands of Palestinians, you could tell they're starving, they're, you know,

they're tired, they're dirty, they're barely able to carry their kids and their things on They're back, and they're being marched out in front of Israeli taints out of their home kilometer south into the rest of the Gaza Strip, where, by the way, Israel is still bombing. It's not like they're just destroying the northern Gaza Strip here. Dave DeCamp at anti-war.com documents this day in and day out. They're hitting the main areas of Gaza City and the Al-Mawesi camp where the Palestinians are with airstripes. You know, there's people living in tents or just in the open ground, and Israel is dropping

bomb after bomb after bomb on them. The war in Lebanon is scaled back from the pre, I think, October when Israel really ramped it up. It was late September, early October. They really escalate their number of strikes. But, you know, it's not too much far off of what they've been doing for the most of since October 7th, which is daily, if not a few times a day. They're conducting strikes in different areas of Lebanon, often hitting civilians, a

lot of medical personnel has been killed in part because Israel is doing the Obama era signature or double tab strides where after they bomb a target, they wait 10 or 15 minutes and then kill the first responders coming in as well. And so the situation in Lebanon is also horrific. Israel isn't abiding by the ceasefire. It seems that right now, Has Bala largely is. well um and so back to the gaza strip and the terror wars i think um obviously the argument inside the jihadist group since afghanistan has been who to target next usually it depends on where they actually are syria obviously is fertile ground and there have been times where they decided that they'd be wise not to attack the west as long as the west is supporting them but then

At the very same time, America is aiding and abetting Israel's merciless slaughter of the Palestinians. And this is one of the major motivations for the September 11th attack, not just rage against it, but a determined plan to bring the United States to the Middle East, bring them back, make them fight a war on the ground in the sand and go bankrupt there, the long way, the hard way, until the empire finally calls it quits and comes all the way home so they can have their way. That was al-Qaeda's strategy to attack us to cause a worse war. And why? Because otherwise the United States would continue to abet the Israelis in their merciless persecution and land theft from the Palestinians. And so what can we expect except for random cooks?

takes one and with three or five any team of men could cause tremendous damage in this country with even light weapons before they could be stopped and America's lousy with light weapons not that I'm against it but I'm just saying maybe everybody needs to start carrying theirs because there's dark times ahead here I'm not saying in every town in every city but there will be attacks. It's virtually a certainty. Absolutely, Scott. And if, you know, not even weapons just, you haul trots or anything like that, they're all over the place can be turned into weapons against us. And, you know, hopefully we've learned our lesson over the past few decades, but, you know, when Joe Biden's sins come home and Americans start to die from his policies,

my guess is that Trump is going to make the same mistake that George W. Bush did and just, you know, like a raging bull charged back into the Middle East and, you know, commit, commit his crimes all over again. Well, this has been another cheerful episode of anti-war radio here on 90.7, KPFK. Thank you very much, Kyle Anzlone, for your expertise today. Appreciate you. Thank you, Scott. All right, you guys.

That is the great Kyle Anzalone. He's our opinion editor at anti-war.com, the most important project on the internet, as you might, in fur and i'm scott horton this is anti-war radio i'm here for you every thursday from two 30 to three on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a see you next week