Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/13/21 Aaron Maté on the Seemingly Forgotten American Occupation of Syria

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Scott talks with journalist Aaron Maté about his recent piece bringing attention to the U.S. occupation of Syria. The U.S. military currently controls about a third of Syria with an official troop count of 900. But considering officials were willing to lie to the former president about the real troop numbers, Scott and Maté are skeptical of the official figures. Maté observes that even with bipartisan opposition to these “forever wars” the occupation of Syria remains a subject that’s not to be talked about. Maté has little hope it will come to an end anytime soon. While the official reason given for the military presence is the fight against ISIS, Maté shows that this claim falls apart after a small amount of digging. And that the real reason is to hold economic leverage against the Syrian regime as a way to support Israel in its not-so-cold war with Iran.  Discussed on the show: “To keep troops in Syria, US leaders are lying like in Afghanistan” (substack) Joe Kent on Tucker Dana Stroul giving the official reason for staying in Syria  Pentagon Report admitting that the U.S. is not fighting ISIS in Syria, contradicting the official narrative “US military ‘owns’ 1/3rd of Syria, boasted top Biden Pentagon official, vowing to block reconstruction of ‘rubble’” (Grayzone)  Aaron Maté is an NYC-based journalist and producer. He hosts the news show Pushback for The Grayzone, and writes regularly for The Nation. Follow him on Twitter @AaronJMate. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hQNyvrgUr4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antivore.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys introducing erin mate he is the host of pushback over at the gray zone project and he writes a lot you can find him at real clear investigations oftentimes and uh Here he is on his own substack, matte.substack.com. To keep troops in Syria, U.S. leaders are lying like in Afghanistan. Whoa, that's bad.

Welcome back. How you doing, Aaron? I'm good, Scott. How are you? I'm doing great, man. I really appreciate you joining us today. And this is one that's flying under way too many radars. And obviously is still a problem or we'd have heard that it wasn't no more. U.S. troops still occupying just how much of Syria at this point, Er? Officially, it's about one-third.

That's what the U.S. says that it's occupying. It's probably, I'd imagine, a little bit less than that, but still, no matter how much it is, it's too much. And so, now, the last time I looked at a map of the area there, I saw that the Kurds were still dominant in Raka, which is not a Kurdish city. the population is still, you know, must be still a super majority Arab city, but is under their control. Is that where American, you know, essentially the U.S. is keeping the Kurds in power in Raqa? And then when you say the one-third, does that include northern Kurdistan there? Or the troops aren't really in Kurdistan? They're south of there and west of there. Well, they're in two spots. One is at Al-Temf, and one is in the northeast. So,

Whether that includes Raqa officially is a good question. I don't know. And it's funny that, you know, they call Raqa the east, even though it's kind of north central, but it's the eastern most big city, I guess, other than Derizor. So they kind of refer to it as the east just because, you know, Homs and Hama and Damascus and Aleppo and all them are so much further west. But anyway, it's a big country, but a lot of it is just desert and countryside out there and stuff, So it's kind of hard to know. But when you say the Al-Tomf base, that's down at the very southeastern corner of Syria, right, at the Iraqi border there.

That's right. Near Jordan, yeah. Because that's where the land bridge, aka road, runs from Iran through Iraq, through Syria, and on to Lebanon, right? Exactly. Yeah. All right. And so if they lie to Donald Trump about this, I know they must be lying to us, but at least supposedly, how many troops are there?

Do you know? The official count, I believe, is 900 or so. But for all we know, it could be way more than that. They certainly lied to Trump and told them it was about half that amount. And then bragged about that, told us the truth that they've been lying to the president. Yeah, James Jeffrey. bragged about lying to Trump to, after he ordered the full withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria, he bragged about how State Department officials and military leaders lied to Trump to deceive him

on the true number of U.S. troops there, just as he also brags about how U.S. sanctions have crushed Syria's economy. That's a point of pride for people like him. Yeah. You know, I saw this interview of a guy named Joe Kent, right-wing America First, Trump guy, running for Congress in Washington State. And he's been interviewed by Tucker Carlson. You might have seen it saying it. I did see that. Yeah.

So he was in the perfect position to just say, oh, Biden screwed up the withdrawal and leave it at that. This is a great right wing talking point, and Lord knows it's true. But he didn't just say that. He was really mad that they lied to us, as he put it, I'm paraphrasing, all along, in insisting that Americans continue to die in that war

when just look at the results when the government just evaporates overnight as soon as we pull out of there like that and then he told the story and they must have talked about this beforehand touchy subject his wife was killed in combat over there and overware not in Afghanistan but in Syria

and then he goes off and he tells Tucker it was after Trump ordered the troops out of Syria and the Pentagon dug in their heels and refused essentially counterman his orders and he eventually gave in and let them stay and then she was killed and oh man was this guy angry and and said you know once he gets to congress he wants to investigate the entire war on terrorism because as he put it they lied us into iraq too and and uh boy is that something else huh

you know it's um same thing i interviewed matthew akins earlier about the children who died in the drone strike there in Kabul on the way out the door as part of that disaster withdrawal. And it really is important to get all individualistic on the casualties here. You know, it's not just some GIs get shot over there. It was Joe Kent's wife got killed over there, meant everything to him, you know? And, uh, and as he put it, after essentially the Pentagon, these loser generals refused to obey the president's order to withdraw. That's exactly right. And, It's interesting for me as a leftist because that guy can't, he said things that I really agree with.

He talked about the influence of the military industrial complex, about how our leaders lie to us constantly about wars like Afghanistan and Syria. Now, then he channeled that into, you know, support for Republicans and also into an anti-immigrant message, which I'm not down with at all. But I just, I watched that just being fascinated that here's a guy who can really recognize the truth about. things that I agree with, like the, you know, the lies that I use to sustain a war and how damaging they are. And it's fascinating to me that the people right now who are most vocally expressing that politically are Republicans like him who, even though I abhor some of their views, also are speaking the truth about war. And they're leading, it's leading him to conclusions that I don't lead to. Like, I don't, I think Republicans are the answer to

endless war. I think they perpetuate them just as much as Democrats do, if not more. But it's just to me, it speaks to the absence of a voice like that on the left who can, you know, recognize what we're doing in places like Syria. But the reality is that, as you said at the beginning, nobody wants to talk about Syria. It just gets completely overlooked. Even though right now, you know, for people who want to defend Biden, it's fashionable politically to claim that you're against these forever wars and endless military deployments and sacrificing U.S. troops. I mean, that was the language that Biden deployed when he was justifying his withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But yet nobody from Biden on down is applying that to Syria, where you have hundreds of troops deployed for just a, I mean, completely illegally. Obviously, no one, you know, the Syrian government does not want the U.S. there. U.S. Congress did not authorize U.S. troops to go there. And the objective is very, very clear. They're not actually fighting ISIS, as the U.S. claims. They're just there to keep Syria divided and impoverished and unable to rebuild after the 10-year dirty war failed, after the U.S. failed to overthrow Assad. And it's just fascinating that despite it being sort of in style now to talk about forever wars, the one place where that's very much applicable,

this deployment of hundreds of troops in Syria for no legitimate reasons is still completely ignored. Yeah. And you know, the Iraqi parliament may have voted to kick us out and all that, but the America-friendly current prime minister has given some kind of tacit permission for the Americans to stay there. But that is just not the case in Syria, where they have no legal authority to be there whatsoever. They don't even really pretend one. I guess they kind of pretend that AUMF covered their fight against the Islamic State, but it hasn't existed since 2017. Right. And in Iraq, I mean, wasn't the prime minister bullied by Pompeo who threatened to basically steal Iraqi reserves if he went through with the forced expulsion of U.S. troops? Didn't that happen after the Iraqi parliament voted for that? Yep. That's true.

Yeah. And the same way. I mean, the U.S. is strangling Syria. with, you know, what is openly admitted as coercion. I mean, my article basically talks about the official rationale for staying in Syria by the U.S. They, you know, they claim that they're there to fight ISIS. That's what Dana Struyl said in early August when she announced that the Biden administration is committed to staying in Syria. This was happening just as the U.S. was withdrawing from Afghanistan, so there was all this attention on that.

And so Struill went before a Senate committee and said that the U.S. is committed to staying in Syria. And she said that we're there to fight ISIS. But what's interesting is my article shows on substack, matte.substack.com. A, the official rationale is completely contradicted by the Pentagon's own inspector general who released a report saying that the U.S. is not fighting ISIS at all. And that there hasn't even been any, ISIS hasn't attacked the U.S. for nearly three years. And this year, the amount of U.S. air strikes on ISIS and Syria. is at most three per month. So it's basically not even happening.

And meanwhile, nothing on the ground. There's no ground forces operating against ISIS. And Struel, in great detail, has previously admitted the real reason for the U.S. staying in Syria. Back when she was the co-chair of the Syria study group, which is this congressional panel, she went before a think tank, the Center for New American Security, this interventionist, you know, liberal interventionist think tank. and explained that the U.S. is there for, oh, sorry, it was the Center for Strategic and International Studies, not the Center for the American Security, but a similar kind of think tank in D.C. So in October 2019, she went before them, and she actually explained the real reasons for the U.S. staying. And she explained that one-third of Syria of Syria is, quote, owned by the U.S. military, which gives the U.S., quote, leverage, unquote, to impose a political solution.

on Syria that's in line with, you know, the U.S. designs, which is essentially a regime change. And she bragged about how this northeastern part of Syria that the U.S. is occupying is its economic powerhouse, and it also contains the vast majority of its oil reserves. And owning that territory gives the U.S. leverage, as Struill put it, to basically impose a solution on Syria. It changes the behavior of the Assad regime, which is basically a way of saying forced regime change. And if they can't achieve regime change, at least make Syria suffer enough so that it can't rebuild because, you know, like we have to show the world that if you resist a U.S. dirty war,

then you're going to suffer forever. That's basically the message. I'm sorry, but let me stop you there for just a second because this is so important that they fought a dirty war already from 2011 through 2017 and it failed. And it, of course, included an economic war all along as well. Now it's just an economic war without the legions of suicide bombers. And so now, clearly just on the basic arithmetic on the page, it's impossible that the current policy is going to lead to a regime change in Damascus. You quote in your article, Kerry, saying, yeah, we saw the rise of ISIS, but we thought we could manage. We thought it would put pressure on Assad to negotiate his own leaving office, however he's saying.

say that, I didn't say that right. His own, you know, exit from power. Well, that didn't work, right? ISIS went east and conquered Western Iraq instead of going to Damascus. Well, I sort of did both, but, you know, the Russians intervened and prevented them from overthrowing the government in Damascus. So so much for that, but that Russian intervention was back in 2015. And that ship has sailed six years ago now. And so just like in Iraq in the 90s, where we already had the uprising, and the uprising was already crushed, now you're keeping the sanctions in the name of, well, the people better rise up and overthrow the government for us, or Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assah, they ought to just step down under this economic pressure when on the very

face of it, it's absolutely absurd. It cannot work there for them. The only thing left is what you said. Revenge, sore loserdom, and punishing the civilian population of this country for refusing to go along with America and its allies designs there yeah i mean it's first of all it's it's economic terrorism and it imposes major suffering i was in syria in june for six days and i just i was just in damascus in the surrounding areas but i caught a glimpse of just the impact of sanctions the price of fuel is out of reach for most people now because it's so expensive so everyone gets a a ration of fuel per month you have one day we can go you can go collect it If you miss your day, it's hard to find an alternative.

And people who can afford it are paying like 10 times the price for fuel. But everybody else, which is the vast majority of the population, has to rely on the government ration, which is just not enough for people's needs. That's just one example of what the sanctions are doing. And then, you know, when Iran tries to send in tankers carrying fuel to break the blockade, Israel then bombs them, you know, acting as the, as the U.S. is basically, you know, a policeman to try to prevent Iran from breaking the blockade. So it's sadistic. And yeah, it's, there's no, uh, you cannot claim to be doing this to help the Syrian people because it's Syrian people who are the only

victims of this that, you know, whenever these sanctions happen, the, the government doesn't suffer. I mean, even if you forget for a second that the U.S. has no right to impose sanctions on anybody if you look at the stated goal which is to you know punish the government and and all this stuff the government's fine i mean they're they're living fine it's the people who suffer because that's the point the point is to make the people suffer because the u.s strategy if they can't overthrow you by force will try to make your society collapse and your government hopefully crumbled by economic subjugation the same strategy in cuba Venezuela, Nicaragua, I mean, everywhere, everywhere that's in the U.S. firing line.

And what you said about Kerry is correct. He admitted privately to Syrian opposition activists that the U.S. sat back and watched as ISIS was approaching on Damascus, and he says that we thought Assad was threatened, and we thought we could manage that, and in the hopes that Assad would basically feel threatened enough to negotiate his way out of power. So what Kerry was saying was that the U.S. was leveraging ISIS to impose regime change on Damascus. And he says that that was stopped because Russia came in. And Kerry says that Russia came in, quote, because they didn't want a Daesh government, unquote. So unlike the U.S.,

which was presumably, if you believe Kerry's account, willing to risk a Daesh government if it could mean overthrowing the sovereign Syrian government led by Assad. It's so cynical. And it speaks to how absurd it is now for the U.S. to be claiming to care about fighting ISIS in Syria, when not only is it not fighting ISIS, as my article shows, in the past it was willing to leverage ISIS's advance and even risk a ISIS government if it could mean attacking the Syrian government. So it's, and then you have that, so you have that plus now, as Dana Struill bragged about in 2019, she also, in this talk at that think tank, she talked about, she said that via U.S. sanctions, the U.S. can, quote, hold a line.

on preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria, unquote. And she's talked about how most of Syria, quote, is rubble. So Struel is also not just bragging about using the U.S. occupation to, you know, steal Syria's agricultural resources and its oil, but also using sanctions to leave most of Syria in rubble to prevent it from rebuilding. It's just so absurdly cynical, and what's amazing is that you have it right from the horse's mouth. All these admissions about what the U.S. is actually doing about Syria come from the same people who are publicly telling us that they're really there to fight ISIS and help the Syrian people and bring democracy.

It's just that our media, with the exception of only a small group of outlets like yours, like the gray zone, are willing to report on it because the propaganda around Syria has just been so overwhelmingly successful. Successful. It's just, it's manufactured consent across the spectrum. Yeah. Hey, y'all, check out my new book, Enough Already. Time to end the war on terrorism at enough alreadybook.net. Early reviews are that people either think it's hilarious or they get so angry that they

put it down. But it's the Iranian Revolution, the 80s Afghan War, the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq War I, Iraq War one, Iraq War one and a half, and then Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq War III, Yemen, and all the special operations wars throughout Africa in the aftermath of the war in Libya. It's all there for you. It might change your friend's mind. Enough already.

Time to end the war on terrorism at enough already book.net. Hey guys, Scott Horton here for Expanddesigns.com. Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing, building, and maintaining my sites, and they'll do great work for you. You need a new website? Go to expanddesigns.com slash Scott and say 500 bucks. Hey guys, check out listen and think audio books.

They're at listen and think.com and of course on audible.com. And they feature my book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as brand new out inside Syria by our friend Reese Erlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.

Reese might be one, exception but essentially they're all libertarian audio books and here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audio books just donate a hundred dollars to the scott horton show at scott horton.org slash donate it's just amazing you know i had seen that before probably from your journalism uh in the past uh this dana struly's quotes but you know in reading at this time i couldn't help but think of her father like what if he saw that on c span is he proud of that? They're like, there's my little girl. It's talking about, yeah, we occupy their wheat fields so that they can't have them.

Really? That sounds like something some British pro-consul will be talking about in India. Here's how we subjugate the Indians. We take their grain. I mean, this is madness. This is, on the face of it, is absolutely criminal, you know, kind of in every way. And I just wanted to add to that, uh, I think this is in the world. book from back in the Trump year still, where there's this irony that, you know, the reason that they went after Assad was because he's friends with Iran and helps them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon. You know, he's the keystone in that arch, you know, they called it and all that kind of thing. But then, so after their whole regime change failed and led to the rise of the Islamic State

and Iraq War III and all these things, now we got these leftover troops, guarding the oil and the wheat fields. And then there were quotes from Trump administration people saying, yes, see, no, it's good now that Syria is dependent on Iran. And we like that. We want, as part of why we're impoverishing Syria is to make them even more dependent on Iran, because that's part of our maximum pressure on Iran, is to try to break their bank in every way we can. They're the ones we hate the most. And if driving, if making Syria not just friends with Iran, but even more dependent on Iran than ever before is part of the consequence of the war? Well, good.

Then, yeah, that's what we meant to say anyway. And so more like that. And it's all about sticking it to the Ayatollah. And these poor people that you saw going Hungary on your trip there are just collateral damage. They have almost nothing to do with it. First of all, let me credit my colleague Ben Norton at the Gray Zone. He first reported on Dan Estrell's comments.

and wrote a whole article added at the gray zone.com, which you should link to Scott in the show notes for this. So I'll send it to you. It's, you read it and it's just so chilling. It shows just how the U.S. acts as a global dictator. It claims to be concerned about dictatorship in Syria. Well, there's nothing in Syria as dictatorial, as the U.S. regime dictating the Syrians that the U.S. has the right to steal their oil and their world. wheat and make them go hungry because the U.S. doesn't like its government. I mean, it's the U.S. dictatorship that we should be concerned about in Syria, especially if you're in the U.S.

Because it's a dictatorship not even within its, within its own borders, but within borders that are thousands of miles away. And there are no Syrians who voted for Dana Struill or any of these other Washington bureaucrats to decide whether they can eat or not, or whether they can drive their car or have electricity. It's sadistic. But Aaron, you don't understand. We're such great success in keeping Reconstruction Aid out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's literally what she brags about. And it doesn't surprise me at all that Trump officials bragged about bleeding Hezbollah and Iran.

It's always made sense to me that that was the goal, just like that was the U.S. goal in Afghanistan and drawing the Soviet Union into Afghanistan. The same thing. It did bleed Iran and Hezbollah a lot by fighting in Syria and still is. And I mean, that's why, I mean, recently, the Israeli prime minister went to the White House and he asked Biden not to withdraw from Iraq and Syria. And he said, because he wanted to administer a death by a thousand cuts against Iran. And he compared Iran to the Soviet Union. So a similar kind of strategy.

They want to bleed these countries and use countries like Syria as a proxy for that, even if it means, you know, imposing even more suffering on a people that have already been through a horrific. 10-year dirty war yeah hey look it's not a coincidence that during the worst times of that dirty war that it was the israel lobby and the neo-conservative movement as were the vanguard in america of pushing for that policy and it should be shocking not surprising but should be shocking to people that the Israeli prime minister instructed Biden he's got to stay in iraq and syria yeah well geez who's the satellite and who's the empire you know my friend adam says it's the flea wagging the dog here it's crazy it's become completely normalized to the point where it doesn't even get reported that israel just bombs Syria regularly

really almost weekly at this point there's bomb Syria hundreds of times yeah throughout the dirty war and they're still doing it and it's become just so accepted that when it happens the u.s. media doesn't even report it a you know Israel bombing Syria as if that's as natural is breathing air. That's how imperial we've become, where, you know, our client states just have the right to just bomb the targets of our regime change war is the point where we don't even have to acknowledge it. And if you, you know, there's been so much reporting on this.

Max Blumenthal, the Grazell, my colleague, he wrote about how Israel was key in manufacturing this so-called red line that Obama laid down, where if Syria used chemical weapons, then Obama was going to bomb. Israel was instrumental in that, and Israel was instrumental in providing aid to the so-called rebels near the Golan Heights. Israel treated wounded fighters, I believe even from al-Qaeda. When ISIS accidentally bombed Syria from Syria, ISIS apologized. It's just the involvement of all these countries from Israel to Washington to all the other, you know, Turkey, Saudi Arabia. It's just been massive. And it's ongoing. And yet, again, just to hammer this

point home, it just look how many times it gets, all these facts get discussed in the media, it's barely existing. And by the way, I really encourage people to just type in Israeli official, Israeli general, Israeli intelligence officer, et cetera, admits support for rebels in Syria. And you'll see not just medical treatment, which they say, oh, we're being humanitarians, but weapons and salaries. And salaries, that's right. The top of Mossad, top generals at the IDF admit it. And anybody can find it.

And it's all in Israeli media and even right-leaning Israeli media. So, you know, to fulfill the skeptics, skepticism there. And now, so here, let me ask you a little bit more about the oil thing. You mentioned Trump saying, take the oil, take the oil. But Trump says a lot of things. And, but I do know that, I mean, I guess we were talking about it before, obviously the troops are there keeping it out of the hands of the Syrians. But there are American companies there who are sucking some amount of oil out of the ground and doing what with it, do you know? Yeah, Trump gave a contract to Delta Energy, I think it was called, in Syria.

And apparently there was some talk that the Biden administration was going to, Delta, Delta, Delta Crescent. And there was some talk the Biden administration was going to roll that back, but that's unclear. I think there just remains a review inside the Biden administration of what they're going to do about Syria. They've still kept up the Trump policy. It sounds like there's some possible, it sounds like there's possibly some discussion about undoing it. But the problem is there's just so much bipartisan support for the dirty war that just like Afghanistan, if Biden tries to roll, it back they're going to come up come against hostility that's assuming that they'd want to do that i'm you know i don't pretend to know what they actually want so far it's business as usual so yeah but yeah

a trump gave an american company a sanctions waiver to basically uh take that oil and um what they've done with it i i haven't followed so i can't speak to that but regardless it's theft it's i mean who who is trump or biden to have any say over what syria does with its oil And, in fact, it's so cynical that Syria has had to buy its own oil from the Kurds who control that territory. And, I mean, assuming that the U.S. lets them do that. So basically, Syria has to have U.S. permission to access its own oil. It's just the most imperial arrangement you can think of. Yeah.

Well, we see in the case of Afghanistan, all the howling, as you said, assuming that Biden wanted to get out of here, we know what they're going to say. The last time we left anywhere, ISIS took over, and it's true that we didn't have troops in Iraq anymore when ISIS took over. But, of course, they always leave out the part where Obama had been back in al-Qaeda, which ISIS was just al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, come back again. That's all it was, was Zarqawi's group. We've been backing them on the Syrian side of the line since 2011. So without that, there's no reason to think that ISIS would be the dominant force in predominantly Sunni-Western Iraq or any kind of, anywhere in Syria at all. They always say, in both cases, in this case, we're on Syria here. Well, we can't leave Syria because of ISIS. Maybe we're not doing that many strikes against

them, but if we leave, they'll take over. No, if we leave, Damascus will take over. The Syrian Arab army will take over. And now, their relationship with the Kurds is going to have to be negotiated or fought, but I think they could probably negotiate a degree of autonomy that's satisfactory to both sides. They've been in talks like that off and on. But the Americans won't let it happen. The Americans stand in the way. But there's no further threat of ISIS taken over that place if the U.S. withdraws. It was American and its allies, especially the Turks and the Saudis, supported that group in its fight before it, you know, really split off from Al Nostra, especially, and created that mess in the first place. But they can never admit that, Aaron. You know what I

mean? It's got to be withdrawal that caused it, because you're telling me, what, we're going to explain that the moderate rebel. weren't so moderate that it was just Sarkawi's suicide bombers. That's not the narrative that they've been pushing on TV for the last decade straight. I mean, look, you have even, you know, declassified documents confirming that the U.S. knew as early as 2012 that what the U.S. was supporting in Syria was going to lead to a Salafi Caliphate. The Defense Intelligence Agency had that. report from August 2012, predicting everything that happened, that, you know, that the side that the U.S. was on, which was, as it said, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Iraq, that that

was going to lead to, you know, their goal was the declaration of a caliphate, and that's exactly what happened. So the U.S. knew what it was supporting, but it continued the policy because regime change in Damascus was more important than directly enabling the rise of a, you know, caliphate for al-Qaeda and and what became ISIS. It's um so they knew all this all along and now they even they also know now as my article shows that there's no way ISIS will come back. I mean, let me quote from the article that I wrote where I quote from a the most recent Pentagon inspector general report on the U.S. mission in Syria. This is what I write. U.S. Central Command, the report states, has quote, identified several ways in which the desert environment,

limits the capacity of ISIS to grow or strengthen its insurgency there, unquote, including decreased capacity to collect revenue and territory confined mostly, quote, to caves and abandoned structures, unquote. Ultimately, quote, ISIS remains unable to capitalize on its destabilizing activities, unquote, in the desert area, and will not be able to, quote, sustain a high operational tempo or expand the scope complexity or lethality of its operations, unquote. So right there is from the horse's mouth. The Pentagon saying that ISIS has no capacity to expand beyond its dwellings in caves and

abandoned structures. So the Pentagon knows it. And that's why the Pentagon is not doing any fighting because there's not really much of an ISIS to fight. And to the extent that ISIS is being fought, the report also points out the Pentagon that it's a Syrian government and Russia and Iran that are fighting ISIS right now. Whereas the U.S. is, you know, conducting no more than three air strikes on ISIS per month in Syria. The report says that Russia and Syria are conducting hundreds of air strikes against ISIS.

And that's been the case for a long time. There was a, you know, a famous study in 2017 by IHS, Jains, terrorism, and insurgency center, a very influential group, which found that the vast majority of ISIS's engagements in battle in Syria were with the Syrian government, Which makes sense. I mean, it's Syria that's fighting ISIS. That's, you know, that's, it's a mortal, it's a mortal enemy to Syria. Whereas the U.S. is alternated between initially enabling ISIS's rise to then occasionally fighting it like in Raqa or in Kobani when it backed the Kurds. But the U.S. has basically been indifferent. Or it's been, it's been, it's been, it's both supported its rise back when they knew it was rising and they sat back and did nothing until finally when it came and it did something, you know, at the very end. but even after Russia, or at the same time as Russia intervened to stop ISIS as well. So the U.S. policy is completely cynical, and it's stated pretext is undermined by its own admissions in overlooked documents like the kind that I report on in my article. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, the thing of it is, too, you may have seen this back a few months ago.

It's Michael Hirsch, old Newsweek reporter who has written important things in the past, at least, has connections, I guess. He said that, you know, Biden had a huddle with Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, and blinking the Secretary of State when he first came into power. And he said, listen, I really want to end the terror wars. We should declare victory against al-Qaeda.

Core al-Qaeda is dead. We're going to say, and it is true, ISIS is a regional problem. Let the Peshmerga kill him. You know, whatever the problem is, it's somebody else's problem. we can now back off out of everything now the question is whether joe biden especially at this point in his life has the courage to do well he might have just spent every last bit of it on afghanistan and the pentagon

and the whole plan for getting out of there was such a disaster the politics of getting out of anywhere else are going to be that much more difficult but i think he also must know that he's a one-term president here and sort of you know they can all go to hell in a grandpa simpson kind of way seems there's it seems like there's room there if and this is what i'm really getting at folks not faith in biden if there's massive public pressure that says we like getting out of afghanistan let tv news cry about it all they want and it was bad the way they did it but still um we want out of everywhere else too yemen first really that's the worst one where we're helping this ongoing, very hot war with the Saudis there.

But Iraq and Syria and all our special operations forces in North Africa, we ought to be able to grow a movement around that demand and let it be known that there really is public support for calling this whole thing off now. What are we going to do? Another terror war for another 20 years. We're half the time we're on the side of Al-Qaeda when we hate the Shiites more. Enough of this, right?

I personally don't see much political courage and I see zero principle animating Biden's policy. I mean, with Afghanistan, it was entirely, entirely, I think, just imperial calculations and imperial imperatives and also politics. So he saw first of all, he came in, Trump already had a deal with the Taliban, right, to withdraw. And so for him, for Biden to go back on that would mean basically sending in more Trump. troops. Right. And it would be useless. So it, and anyone looking at, if you're an imperial manager of the U.S. and you're looking at Afghanistan, you know you're not going to win. You know that it's actually bleeding your resources. Like, you have other priorities, especially, you know, trying to collapse China and, uh, and Russia. So you look at Afghanistan. And so

Afghanistan is bleeding that effort. So why would you stay? Especially when you already have this out that, that Trump gave you of having negotiated the deal. So I think, and they knew that politically they would have the support of most of the population who was tired of these wars. So I think for Biden, you know, they had to keep into account that they're going to anger the national security state and the media that's aligned with it because the national security state can only see the short term profit that the Afghan war provides for weapons contractors. And also they're driven by this sort of stubborn imperial bravado where they just don't want to admit defeat anywhere. but I think I don't see I don't expect that to extend to places like Syria where there's no kind of there's no internal right now there's no large constituency calling for a withdrawal from Syria whereas in Afghanistan you had some people who who wanted to get out because it just was too costly I don't see the same thing happened in Syria so I don't expect Biden to change course unless as you say there is massive popular pressure but it's very hard for the popular pressure to happen if the the media is concealing, you know, the truth entirely from the general public. I mean, it's just, it's like, it's the occupation we can't talk about.

We don't, if you were to ask people, if you, if you were to ask the population, have you, if you heard of the Caesar sanctions on Syria that basically are designed to prevent this war-torn country from rebuilding, have you heard of Timber Sycamore, this like, one of the most expensive programs in CIA history that funneled tens of thousands of fighters and, and thousands of tons of weapons into Syria. Have you heard even that we're occupying Syria right now? I mean, I think it would be well under half of the population that has even heard of any of these things.

So the media has done a great job of keeping the public uninformed in those conditions. How are people going to hear about it? Sadly, the national security state is putting the U.S. in a position where the only way the public will hear about it is if the U.S. soldiers start being killed. You know, that's just the position that they're putting themselves in. And I don't think that will happen because, you know, soldiers don't really leave their base. They're just kind of, and the bases are pretty well protected as far as I understand. So it's just kind of this thing where short of some real political courage by Biden, which I don't see happening.

I just think this thing will go on for as long as they can. Yep. I'm afraid you're right about that. What a state of affairs, I'll tell you. All right. I guess we'll stop right there. Thank you so much for your time, man. I really appreciate you coming back on the show, Aaron.

A pleasure, Scott. Thanks for having me. All right, you guys, that's Aaron Mote. And this one is at his substack. Mate. Spell it like mate. mate.com. To keep troops in Syria,

U.S. leaders are lying like in Afghanistan. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com. anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.