December 11, 2024
Source: The Chris Hedges Report
The fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, ending a 55-year dynasty begun by his father, dramatically shifts the pieces on the chessboard of the Middle East. The rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is armed and backed by Turkey and was once allied with Al Qaeda. It is sanctioned as a terrorist group. Turkey’s primary goal is to prevent an independent Kurdish state in northern Syria where Kurds have formed an autonomous enclave. But it may not only be Turkey that is behind the overthrow of Assad. It may also be Israel. Israel has long sought to topple the Syrian regime which is the transit point for weapons and aid sent from Iran to the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah. The Syrian regime was backed by Russia and Iran, indeed Russian warplanes routinely bombed Syrian rebel targets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gloated about the ousting of Assad calling it an “historic day” and said it was a direct result of Israel’s actions against Hezbollah and Iran. But at the same time, Israel will soon have an Islamic state on its border.
Syria, a country of 23 million, is geopolitically important. It links Iraq’s oil to the Mediterranean, the Shia of Iraq and Iran to Lebanon, and Turkey, a NATO ally, to Jordan’s deserts.
Assad’s decision to brutally crush a pro-democracy movement triggered a 14-year-long civil war in 2011 that led to 500,000 people being killed and more than 14 million displaced.
Now What? Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham seek to renew relations with Iran? Will it impose an Islamic state, given its jihadist roots? Will Syria’s many minority groups, Alawite, Druze, Circassian, Armenian, Chechen, Assyrian, Christian and Turkoman, be persecuted, especially the Alawites, a heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam comprising around 10 percent of the population, which Assad and the ruling elites were members of? How will it affect the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which holds the Syrian oil-rich territory in north and east Syria? Why are the U.S. and Israel bombing targets in Syria following the ouster of Assad? Will the new regime be able to convince the U.S. and Europe to lift sanctions and return the occupied oil fields? What does this portend for the wider Middle East, especially in Lebanon and the Israeli occupied territories?
Joining Chris Hedges to discuss the overthrow of the Assad regime and its ramifications is former British diplomat Alastair Crooke. He served for many years in the Middle East working as a security advisor to the EU special envoy to the Middle East, as well as helping lead efforts to set up negotiations and truces between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian resistant groups with Israel. He was instrumental in establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He is also the author of Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, which analyzes the ascendancy of Islamic movements in the Middle East.
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Chris Hedges
Crew: Diego Ramos
Transcript: Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
The fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, ending a 55-year dynasty begun by his father, dramatically shifts the pieces on the chessboard of the Middle East. The rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is armed and backed by Turkey and was once allied with Al Qaeda. It is sanctioned as a terrorist group. Turkey’s primary goal is to prevent an independent Kurdish state in northern Syria where Kurds have formed an autonomous enclave. But it may not only be Turkey that is behind the overthrow of Assad. It may also be Israel. Israel has long sought to topple the Syrian regime which is the transit point for weapons and aid sent from Iran to the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah. The Syrian regime was backed by Russia and Iran, indeed Russian warplanes routinely bombed Syrian rebel targets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gloated about the ousting of Assad calling it an “historic day” and said it was a direct result of Israel’s actions against Hezbollah and Iran. But at the same time, Israel will soon have an Islamic state on its border.
Syria, a country of 23 million, is geopolitically important. It links Iraq’s oil to the Mediterranean, the Shia of Iraq and Iran to Lebanon, and Turkey, a NATO ally, to Jordan’s deserts.
Assad’s decision to brutally crush a pro-democracy movement triggered a 14-year-long civil war in 2011 that led to 500,000 people being killed and more than 14 million displaced.
Now What? Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham seek to renew relations with Iran? Will it impose an Islamic state, given its jihadist roots? Will Syria’s many minority groups, Alawite, Druze, Circassian, Armenian, Chechen, Assyrian, Christian and Turkoman, be persecuted, especially the Alawites, a heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam comprising around 10 percent of the population, which Assad and the ruling elites were members of? How will it affect the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which holds the Syrian oil-rich territory in north and east Syria? Why are the U.S. and Israel bombing targets in Syria following the ouster of Assad? Will the new regime be able to convince the U.S. and Europe to lift sanctions and return the occupied oil fields? What does this portend for the wider Middle East, especially in Lebanon and the Israeli occupied territories?
Joining me to discuss the overthrow of the Assad regime and its ramifications is former British diplomat Alastair Crooke. He served for many years in the Middle East working as a security advisor to the EU special envoy to the Middle East, as well as helping lead efforts to set up negotiations and truces between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian resistant groups with Israel. He was instrumental in establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He is also the author of Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, which analyzes the ascendancy of Islamic movements in the Middle East.
Let’s put everything in context. So let’s go back to the Arab Spring, Alastair. There were widespread demonstrations in Syria, as there were throughout the Arab world. These were crushed very, very brutally by the Assad regime, which triggered the civil war. But let’s start there.
Alastair Crooke
Okay, well, with the Arab spring, really its roots, if you want to go back to the roots of that whole process, was a meeting that took place with then Vice President Dick Cheney after the war in Lebanon, the 2006 war in Lebanon. And it entailed [Saudi] Prince Bandar [bin Sultan Al Saud], who was then head of Saudi intelligence services. And what happened at that meeting was that Cheney started moaning and saying, look, what’s going on? The invasion of Iraq was supposed to weaken Iran, and it doesn’t seem to have done that. And now we’ve got Hezbollah who has emerged victorious from this war in Lebanon. And Prince Bandar interrupted at that point, and he said, No, the king believes that the solution to this is we’ve got to take out Syria. Syria is the weak link in this whole process. And Cheney sort of backed off. He said, Well, what do you have in mind? What are you talking about? And he said, Well, there’s a solution. It is, if you like, Islamic revolutionaries, they’re the ones that can work for you. And again, Cheney sort of backed away a little, said, Well, you know, United States can’t do too much about that, you know. We wouldn’t want to go too far in that. And Bandar said, no problem. We will do it all for you. It’ll be done. You don’t have to intervene. It will follow. And so this was a sort of second round, the first round had happened in Afghanistan long before, when I was there. When, of course, Saudi Arabia, at the behest of the United States, sent Islamist movements into what was a secular society in Afghanistan in order to bring it down, to damage Russia and to weaken Russia at the point. And so this came up, at this point, but you have to grasp the big geopolitical picture of what was happening. Saudi Arabia was proposing to invert the whole paradigm of the Middle East. From the 19th century and beyond, it was Iran, the Shah. It was a big, powerful country, and it was the leader in the Middle East. And what he was saying is, let’s invert it. Let’s isolate Iran and make the Sunnis paramount in the Middle East, give them the primacy. And so it was an attempt to sort of shift the whole balance around in a different way, and to give the Sunni world, and this had been part of America’s policy from ’96 onwards. This idea of working with the Gulf states and with the monarchs and emirs of the Gulf, then it was against Baathist regimes and others. But then it was against Iran. And I remember, I mean, I was writing—you asked about the Arab awakening and what happened at that point. Well, it was, I think, really, in about 2015, or earlier, I’m not sure of ’12 or ’13 even, that Obama signed the presidential finding, which is an order. I mean, it’s an order that is given, and was given to the CIA to oust Assad and to overturn the government there. And so [inaudible] then have been a whole series of sort of ragtag of three letter groups that have received American training, Israeli training, Turkish training, in Syria, mainly for the purpose of ousting Assad and fulfilling the finding, Obama’s presidential finding. But even this started to fail in my view. I wrote, I remember in I think it was around 2012 I wrote, and I said, things are shifting, because what I see is this— we used to look at Palestine, and we used to look at the Middle East through sort of secular eyes, albeit Orientalist eyes, but through secular eyes, we used to [inaudible] it and see it in sort of instrumental fashion. Palestine, it was about institution, construction, two state solution. And I wrote, even then, that I thought this was shifting towards, if you like, symbols of religion—Al Aqsa versus Temple Mount were going to be the new war that was coming. And gradually, if you like, the Saudis, wore out their interests in Wahhabism. Wahhabism— extreme form of very narrow religion of Islamic religion based on texts and on document which was known, quite obviously, as a management of savagery. And this was the turning point, really. I think it was starting to shift in the other direction. And now Saudi Arabia has almost completely got rid of, if you like, the Wahhabi influence. Other parts of the Gulf have become, what I call, more interested in Bloomberg and their stock market ratings than they are in the geopolitics of the region. So that is the shift. Now what’s happened, essentially, with this is an extension of Obama’s finding, because gradually the most severe sanctions, the Caesar sanctions [Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019], were imposed on Syria from the beginning. And then the Kurds were empowered in the northeast of Syria, and they sat on the Syrian oil fields, and that oil was taken from them and sent to Turkey and it was entirely an illegal operation. So Syria lost its oil revenues, and then later, the Turks came down into the western part of Syria, occupied Idlib and took Aleppo. That was the industrial part, and so the agricultural, the oil industry— there was no economy, no economy left. Just to give you a practical example. Now we’ve seen that the Syrian army sort of were declined to fight. A conscript in the Syrian army is currently paid $7 a month. A general in the Syrian army receives $40 per month. The HTS and the others of the militia received $2,000 a month. That is the state in which, I mean that really—Syria just didn’t have, for one thing, the resources to seemingly be able to put together an army or fight. Russia tried to do this in 2018. It said to Assad, we’ll remake your army, re-equip it, new equipment. We’ll train them, the latest things on credit. You don’t have to put money up. Assad said no. Then more lately, the Iranians have said to them, we can support you. We can support your army. We can help but you have to invite us. I mean, we can’t come in as an occupying force. We have to be invited. Assad said no. And throughout this period, he has been warned that something was coming. The Iranians—the [Al-]Quds Brigade of the IRGC—about two months ago, went to Assad and they said to him, something is happening in Idlib. Beware, watch out! And I imagine that the Russians were equally aware of this. And the Turks have now publicly said that this was on the cards, they were operating this six months earlier. It started, from their perspective, six months earlier. I would actually put the date for the preparation of this for two years ago, probably. But anyway, they openly say six months ago it was underway, being prepared and being prepared, obviously, with America and being prepared with Israel. Now, why did he say no? Now I don’t have an answer that is definitive of this. But I remember some years ago, I remember there was a discussion, and I know the details of it, that when MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, was sort of new on the stage, and young, MBZ [Mohammed bin Zayed], the crown prince of UAE [United Arab Emirates], were talking, and he said, listen, to Mohammed bin Salman, if you want to be Crown Prince, the path to being Crown Prince is through Israel, and it’s through the Israeli lobby in Washington. That’s what you need to do. And that’s, of course, what UAE had done already with its base in Washington and presenting itself in ways to America. And I think what we’ve seen in the last three or four years is we’ve seen, actually, that Assad was distancing himself from both Iran and from Russia. And I think that he was being pulled more and more by the Gulf states, thinking that if he approximated closer to the Gulf states and away from Iran and Russia, this was his path to sort of survival, because Washington would like that. But more importantly, Tel Aviv would like that, and that would work with him in that way. Well, in the end, it just was nothing left to work with so [President of Turkey Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, who had been for months, years, trying to persuade Assad to allow his government to be, if you like—I can only describe it as a sort of controlled Ottoman structure, rather than a government of the Syrian people. And I remember he was pressing it very hard at one time when I was with Assad in Damascus. And Assad said, Look, these people like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are guests in my country, we’ve helped, funded, supported them, now tell me how to run the country and that they want the Muslim Brotherhood. And it’s a very sensitive issue, the Muslim Brotherhood, and in Syria, I’m sure, you know, because of the affairs with…
Chris Hedges
Just explain… there was an uprising, I think his father, Hafez Al-Assad, he raised the city, 10,000 dead. You can explain the context of that. And it was a Baathist, secular regime. Baathism, coming out of [Former President of Egypt Gamal Abdel] Nasser. Saddam Hussein was a Baathist, but just explain, going back that history, why they were so terrified of the Muslim Brotherhood, as of course, was other rulers like King Hussein [Former King of Jordan].
Alastair Crooke
They saw the Muslim Brotherhood as a very strict Islamist movement, whose tale, and there is some truth to this, veered off into sort of Wahhabism and Salafism. That was certainly true in Gaza and elsewhere. But Erdoğan tried to take control of the Muslim Brotherhood because he wanted to present, as I’ve just said—you know that whereas [Dick] Cheney was empowering the kings and amirs of Sunni Islam to be the masters of the world, Erdoğan wanted to go back to Ottomanism, a form of Neo-Ottomism. And everyone feared that no one liked the Ottomans, basically outside of the Ottoman wealth, and he wanted to insert that. And Assad saw this as a huge danger, and that this was going to be a militant attack on the state. But during that period after this, I mean, the state has become weaker and weaker and weaker. And so when, if you like, when Russia said, Well, we can try and build up your army and try and make you stronger, I don’t think he had the resources. Don’t think he had even— you know when you’re paying your troops $7 a month, you just don’t have many resources. The people were starving, they were losing hope. And there was a lot of corruption. You can imagine soldiers on certain dollars a month, stop big people at the checkpoints and demand money from them, and that sort of thing was what was going on. And then he was being dragged towards the Gulf states, thinking this might be a solution for him. And then Erdoğan decided to mount, if you like, this coup through Idlib, using a motley group of militias and others and those that are loosely tied to ISIS or Al Qaeda. And I think that what happened was because he went to see President [Vladimir] Putin on the day before, Friday, things started Saturday. And he spent some time with President Putin, hours. And then flew back the same day, and we have no idea what was said at that meeting. There’s no record of it from the Kremlin side, and there’s no record on the Damascus side of it. But I think that was probably the point Putin said, I’m sorry, Assad, it’s game over. There’s going to be a change, and you’re going to have to work with it. So I think from the Astana, from the meetings between Iran, Turkey and Russia, Russia had come to the conclusion on two grounds that—I mean, first of all, this was going to be a terrible mess if Assad fell. And I think he was probably being advised that this is an almost inevitable outcome. The situation was becoming irreversible. So I think in one sense, he could see that this would be a terrible mess, yes, but at the same time, he recalled Afghanistan, and the same time, he knew that one of the plays that is in hand against Russia is to reconnect, to give ways of pulling it from its focus on Ukraine and the war there, to create new fronts, new pressure points, more pressure on Assad and that he decided, you know, what was the primary interest of Russia. The primary interest is not the small wars, the big war. Not Romania, not Belarus, not Mongolia, but the big war which is against, if you like, NATO and the West which wants to, if you like, peel him away from China, peel him away from Iran, scatter the BRICS across the globe and leave Russia isolated. And so I guess he decided that that was to be the case. And Iran were very clear. They went, [inaudible] went to see Assad, well before the the actual collapse to say, look, it’s coming. It’s coming. You’re going to go, I mean, there’s no way the army is going to protect and I know that [inaudible], he wouldn’t even see him, and then he told him he was wrong. And I just think that at that point it was all over. And so Russia and Iran and Erdoğan got together and they produced this document, of course, I mean it’s all diplomatic speak. It has got no real meaning. It talks about elections and a cease fire and everyone is going to stop and get together and come and the legitimate opposition must be included and HTS excluded. I mean, all this is fiction. Of course, it’s never going to happen.
Chris Hedges
Let me ask a little bit about what this—let’s start with Turkey. I mean, I hadn’t heard that figure of $2,000 a month. That’s a lot of money in the Middle East, is that Turkish money? Is that Israeli money? Is that U.S. money? I just want to talk about the U.S., Turkey and Israel independently. And then, of course, we have to acknowledge, I think you would agree, this is quite a blow to both Russia and Iran, in particular, Hezbollah. It’s the lifeline…
Alastair Crooke
Of course, of course, of course.
Chris Hedges
Where did the arms and money come from? Was it primarily Turkey?
Alastair Crooke
Most of the training, I mean, there’s been a lot of training of these groups, even across from sort of Central Asia. Uzbeks, Turkmens and others are former jihadists, former fighters, Al-Qaeda fighters, have been taken in. And indeed, if you look at [Abu Mohammed al-]Jolani’s group, this polyglot group of militia, more than 30% actually come from Central Asia. They’re not Syrians at all. So they’ve been brought in, and Turkey is well known to have a training center for these groups. Even allegations that the famous fire at a concert hall in Moscow last year, earlier this year, that many people died in, they were trained in Turkey. So there’s been a long process of this, and yes, it’s funded by America because it’s part of the process. He sold it to America as part of the process of getting rid of Assad and getting a Western friendly government installed in Damascus. Of course, he framed it as a Western friendly government. What he meant was a sort of Neo-Ottoman-esque government in Damascus. And as I say, I know that because Assad was telling me at that earlier point how much pressure was on him to sort of bring in sort of parts of the Ottoman world into his government and he refused, and that was the cause of the breakup originally. So yes, money coming in, Turkey working closely with America, particularly in the groups in the south which were operated— it was complicated in Syria because the Pentagon was training some and CIA training others in Syria at the same time, and some of those groups were fighting each other, even though they were both on the American payroll. So America was funding a lot of this for Turkey. It was seeing Turkey as someone who could be helpful to Israel, and Turkey was very supportive of Israel, and things only started to sort of go wrong I think around 2016, when Turkey said that there’s been this plot against him, a coup and he blamed it was an American coup attempt to to get rid of him, and at that point, he’s become much more militant. His ego is huge. He made a statement yesterday. I saw it this morning, he was sitting there, and he said, There are really only two leaders in the world today, myself and Putin, but I’ve been around lot longer than Putin. So, you couldn’t judge how he sees Syria, something for him to take. But I think the great weakness and the flaw of this whole construct that has taken place and allowed to be taking place is he claims and thinks he can control Jolani and the jihadists now posing as ex-jihadists and diverse characters have embraced diversity and inclusion and whatever else. And he thinks that he can control, and even his own people say, and they’ve said it clearly in the press too, he doesn’t control these people. He controls a few of them, but he doesn’t control them, and he certainly doesn’t control Jolani, who set up a very oppressive structure in Idlib while he was the boss there, very oppressive. Strict Wahhabi, and anyone who disagreed was disappeared.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about Israel, because Netanyahu is gloated about this. In the short term, it does seem to benefit Israel in the sense that, as we said before, Syria is the transit point for weapons and aid to Hezbollah. Hezbollah troops were fighting for Assad. They withdrew just before the fall of Assad, Israel has moved forward in the buffer zone and the Golan Heights. They’ve moved tanks. This is occupied Syrian territory. So just as in Lebanon, they’ve used this moment to seize more land. Israel, like the U.S., has bombed, supposedly, weapons facilities, intelligence facilities, in Syria. But I have this question I have to ask you, I don’t see how an Islamic state, and I agree with your assessment of Jolani, of course, I don’t see how an Islamic State in Syria, in the long term is beneficial to Israel. But perhaps you can talk about all that.
Alastair Crooke
Okay, because, we have to go back a little bit and look—there’s been this huge change in Israel from just over a year ago, when the whole paradigm of Israel was overturned. And so we saw the Mizrahi [Jews] coming into the government. They were really antagonistic to the European-style Israelis, from the kibbutniks, the Ashkenazi, they were hostile to them. They had three agendas, basically. They had one agenda [which] was to establish Israel on the land of Israel, translated, no Palestinian state. The second one was to create, if you like, a really Jewish state, Jewish in spirit, and they think that they have it. And the third element was Halakhic law to come in. I mean, the secularists in Israel didn’t like this one bit, and Israel is deeply divided on this front and other fronts at the moment, almost to the point of civil war, just short of it. Netanyahu has become ever more authoritarian, controls literally everything personally. He has a coalition which is very much of the right. But the other important change that’s taken place is an epistemological change. They’re no longer secular. The Israelis that you might have known in the ’70s and ’80s were secular Europeans. These people are biblical, and there’s an eschatological element to it, which changes the epistemological. There’s no point in talking about rationality and does this make sense, or is this an interest, because they have a vision, and it’s not about just the vision, but the vision is it requires and mandates your commitment and your belief in it. You’re not supposed to reason with it, you take it, and this is the vision of the future. So there’s been this big change, and moving towards this, Israel has moved through what I call magical wars. The wars are quite magical. I mean, in Gaza, it’s a great victory. It’s huge, even though it isn’t a victory at all, it’s far from it. Hamas is still there, but it’s presented as a huge victory, and already they are organizing for settlers to come in and take the land of Northern Gaza and subsequently to repopulate that. Settlers are already putting their names down to be in the settlements of Gaza, and then they say in West Bank, it’s also a great victory, because [Bezalel] Smotrich, who’s a minister in the cabinet, minister of defense as well as administration of the West Bank, he’s actually delegitimizing the whole of the Palestinians in the West Bank. And then they claim a great victory against against Hezbollah in South of Lebanon. Even though they suffered enormous losses, had to pull all the reserves out. So they’re in a fix, because the army, it doesn’t have enough men. It’s about 20% understaffed for the commitments it’s already got, and increasingly, reservists are not showing up to duty. The army say they’re exhausted, but primarily they say there’s no plan, there’s no structure. What are our objectives? What are we actually trying to do? This is a little bit sort of rational, he isn’t there on the same page. He’s working towards the grand victory, which is something different. So we’ve had already sort of magical construct. And so the magical part of it now is Syria, another great victory for Iran on the route to the war on Iran. So this is what it’s all about, showing how it’s successful and it’s going on and now the final cherry on the cake is to persuade the United States that it has to support Israel in its war on Iran. And of course, suddenly we have the nuclear weapon being presented as the, if you like, the motive for this war. And you see Trump even now saying, Oh, well, what’s happened? It’s partly to do with Ukraine, but it’s also because of Israel’s fighting successes. Well, most Israelis would say we haven’t got any successes. This is all, you know, magical. I describe it as like, it’s like a Ponzi scheme, this is a financial scam. But in this case, it’s a geopolitical Ponzi scheme, in the sense that everything is a victory for Israel, everything is taking us closer to ultimate victory. Ultimate victory is to get rid of the head of the octopus, which is Iran. And we’re moving towards this great victory. And there are all these people trying to stop us. Biden is trying to stop us. All sorts of people are trying to stop us, but we’re on it. So it’s very important. Like a Ponzi scheme, if you stop making money, the thing crashes. If you find people as sort of withdrawing money from the fund and saying, Well, is this really going to work? Is this really a good idea? Then you’re finished. And so Netanyahu’s structure is a sort of magical thinking that he’s got to keep everything to be a victory, moving towards the direction that he’s always wanted it to go. He’s pulling in, veggling the United States through some provocation that they will do on Iran into supporting a war. Now I just add, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression, I think a war would with Iran would be disastrous for Israel might even destroy Israel, and it would be a great defeat for the for the United States. I won’t go into the reasons for that, but just to say, you know, I don’t think people have thought this through. I mean, you know, it’s based on the simple sort of understanding, absolute conviction in the West: Russia is weak, America is strong. Israel is strong, Iran is weak. And you know, there’s nothing you can say, really, against it. And then you have some four star general, Jack Keane, coming up on television in the U.S. and saying, well, the Israelis have knocked out Iran’s air defenses. The Israelis have damaged their nuclear program by the attack on Parchin. The Israelis have really reduced Iran. It lies naked before us. It is stunningly vulnerable, and this is what the talking heads on CNN are saying. Clearly laying the grounds. Parchin is held up, but it’s really no different from when [Former United States Secretary of State] Colin Powell went on television all those years ago, before 2006—you see what’s in this vial here? This is weapons of mass destruction, and this is what the war is going to be about. They didn’t strike anything at Parchin. There’s clear evidence that the Israelis were not able to even fire ballistic missiles. They never got closer than 70 kilometers to the Iranian front here. So this is a magical—it’s difficult to deal with this in a Western way, like most of the audience would like me to say, you know, on the one hand, on the other hand, because we’re talking about something that has moved into an eschatological, if you like, mindset, that this is ordained, this is the Bible. This is what the Torah says. This is what we are going for, and we do it because we have to believe in Revelation, forget rationality. It’s revelation.
Chris Hedges
I want to ask about the Turks—and I spent a lot of time in northern Iraq, actually spent time with the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party], covered all of the fighting in southeastern Turkey, including the Nehru’s rebellion—the Turks are obsessed with this U.S.-backed Kurdish militia force that controls the oil fields in the north and east of Syria. One has to assume that that’s the next move. They want to essentially push the Kurds out and seize those oil fields. That’s my hypothetical or that’s my guess. Is that correct?
Alastair Crooke
Well they started. They were already attacking Manbij. They’re attacking those Kurdish groups there, and more than that, because this is one of the big fractures taking place, because Turkey is determined to destroy the Kurdish. They see them as terrorists and a great threat to Turkey. Let’s have no doubt this is why it’s not just Erdoğan, this is a white Turkish view, not everyone in Turkey holds it. But then you have these—and now, I mean, there is real fighting going on in Manbij, and on the other side, you have Israel saying, we want to build up these Kurds. We would like a Kurdish state to be formed in the eastern part, joint to Erbil and joint to Iraq. And that’s our objective. And so the two of them are—and unfortunately, this is going to be the case, not just in the Kurdish part, but in many parts of Israel, there’s going to be a clash as things go on, between the interests of Jolani and the leadership there and the interests of others. What happens to the Alawites? What happens to Latakia? This is a stretch along the coast where the Russian bases are, but has always been, historically, an Alawite sort of state, shall we say. And some of the Syrian army have, have sort of kept their forces a little bit together. I don’t want to sound too much—they took all the armor into Iraq. A whole division took its armor into Iraq. You know, we’ve seen it before happen in other places in for example, in Egypt, how even the military that has been defeated and has been discredited, somehow bits of it come together and find popular support. So will they come in and start fighting Jolani’s groups? What will happen? No one knows. It’s going to be, I think, a really—huge mini wars, cultural wars, fighting. And I think Turkey thought it would be able to sort of manage these like the puppet master from outside in Ankara. And I think that already that’s gone. Yes, Russia’s influence is gone. Iran’s influence is gone, but I think Turkey is just evaporating now before our eyes, because they’re not being able to do what they think they were going to do in the Northeast. Erdoğan has said he wants to take the whole of the northern strip, right across Syria, through to Iran as a big, big buffer zone to protect him from any influences from outside.
Chris Hedges
I don’t see how the Syrian economy is going to function if they don’t get back the oil fields. And we should be clear, one of the things, out of many things that led to Assad’s deep unpopularity, aside from really savage repression, was also the fact that there was only electricity an hour a day. In Damascus, prices were astronomical. Unemployment was widespread. Of course, you had sanctions against Syria. But those oil fields—aren’t they vital? I mean, if they don’t recapture those oil fields, how are they going to ever… And much of the country is destroyed and has not been rebuilt. It’s one of the problems with the millions of people, Syrian refugees. There’s nothing to go back to.
Alastair Crooke
This is what I was saying. The oil has been taken. That is also the agricultural land of Syria. That is now occupied by the Kurds. So they lost the revenues from agriculture, the revenues from oil and the industrial parties around Aleppo and Idlib, and that has been under Turkish control for this period, and they have been under sanction. So, I mean, there’s absolute poverty in Syria, and people are in despair and have lost hope. And this has been a big case, and I do think what you’re saying is very important, because I think it’s fundamental also to the Russian calculations. Okay, Turkey, [inaudible] like the West, you’ve broken Syria. You broke it, you pay for it. Because it’s going to cost a huge amount of money. At the moment, Qatar is paying for the electricity in Aleppo. It’s having to pay for as a big bonus for HTS that you know, Aleppo now has electricity at night and all the day, because Qatar was given 30 million or something to pay. But that’s just one part of it. I mean, the whole state would need rebuilding and reconstructing, and I think that’s ultimately why the thing collapsed because it was just irrecoverably, financially, militarily and actually institutionally, because the institutions have become very much affected by it. I mean, the Ba’ath party has been long decrepit in Syria, and Assad has found it impossible to to reform it.
Chris Hedges
Can you draw parallels between the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq—also based, of course, on magical thinking. Is that the kind of chaos that you envision enveloping Syria?
Alastair Crooke
Well, I think there is one thing where it is very clear what happened— was the planning for this. In Iraq, the particularly the British, but the British and America, had bought off most of the army, the Revolutionary Guards, Republican Guards, I mean, had been bought off. Large amounts, even in gold. And so when it came to it, they didn’t fight. It was already sort of half ordained, but then they didn’t know what to do with it, how to take forward. And I think it was really sort of very much expressed by the governor. What was his name that came in [inaudible]? I can’t remember, but their first appointed governor of Iraq, and he arrived there and he said, Listen, I know nothing about Iraq. I don’t know about its culture. I don’t know its history. I know nothing. But I’m here because I’m an expert in neoliberal economics, and there was no empathy. There was no sense of how to bring people together to deal with it and manage it. I see zero sign that, at this stage, anyone likely to come forward and be able to have that sort of charisma and to have that understanding of how to bring humans, to lead humans towards a sort of sense of understanding, a community again. To being part of belonging, being connected again to a society. And the Syrians just feel, on all elements, so disconnected from society. I think they feel it, they just don’t see how they’re going to connect. So they just look after themselves. Someone offers them $400 for a weapon. Why not? That’s like a fortune. Take it. So I think this is partly, again, the sort of why Russia does understand it a lot better than the West, what’s happening. And I think Russia sees the big picture all the time. It sees the big picture about the building forces. I mentioned [Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey] Lavrov saying we’re moving towards a hot wall, and he is preparing and it’s all about Mackinder and the heartland, i.e. the heartland of Central Asia. And this is why he’s preparing for it, because I think, and I wrote about this just recently, in quoting some Russians who are very close to him. The West gets this entitled back to front, Putin has said this time and time again. He said it to the foreign ministry at his speech, and he said it again in the press conference at Astana the other day: I will not accept a freezing of the conflict. I will not accept that because I know what you want to do. It’s you just want to then take the rump that is Ukraine afterwards, and NATO-ize it and re-arm it and be prepared for the next war in a few years time against Russia. No, we have to go back to it and look at it. How do we solve this properly? How do we solve it in a fundamental way? And when he says, strikes me as correct, he goes back—the basic problem arose on the, if you like, the unification of Germany, when America gave the guarantees that that frontier, the border of Germany, represented the border of NATO, and not just NATO, but of Atlanticist interests, economic institution, or whatever you like, that there had to be some sort of agreement. So what he’d been saying, and what was in those treaties of December 21 was saying, we have to have an architecture. We have to have some basic understandings where the frontier now lies between Atlanticist interests and the interests of Central Asia, the heartland, the world, if you like, of the Central Asia, China, Iran, all of that right through to the coast. And you’ll have start with that, and then eventually you’ll get down to the to the to the actual issue, which is Ukraine, because once you agree a sort of overall architecture, Ukraine will naturally fit somewhere into that. We can’t say how exactly, but it will. Maybe parts of it will go to Poland and to Hungary or something, or not. But get the big picture. Don’t come here and just say ceasefire in Ukraine because you’re inverted the whole thing. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick and you don’t listen and hear what I’m saying to you. So I think it’s very important. And he even gave a big hint in his statement, from behind his desk in his office. And what he said was, I feel it was a great mistake in 2019 when you, the United States, did away with the intermediate missile treaty agreement. And that’s what he said. But if Trump’s team heard it and paid attention—so, why not send an [inaudible] where he said, you know, Mr. Putin, it was really interesting what you said in that talk, and you said that was a mistake. Would you like to sort of say what you see is a way to deal with this, and what would be the future and how we would arrive at that sort of thing? And then ultimately, we’ll get to Ukraine in the discussion. But if you come in and say, freeze, we want to freeze. Otherwise we’re going to hit you with more sanctions, or we’re going to sanction with more or do this or that, or send more attack hands, and it won’t work. So, I mean, he gave a pretty good [inaudible]—this is diplomacy. You come in and you don’t start off saying, let’s cut to the chase. What’s your bottom line? This is mine. Cut the difference. It’s not a real estate deal. It has to be done differently. And Putin said, why not? Let’s talk about that. Let’s see if there’s an agreement. If we do that, then we get into the architecture of Europe, the whole security architecture. And that matters a lot to Putin. I know it does.
Chris Hedges
I’m no fan of Trump, but in terms of Ukraine, the Trump administration appears to speak far more rationally than the Biden administration. I want to go back to Syria and just to close, how could this all go terribly wrong? Paint for us the ways this could just unravel in ways that jeopardize stability within the Middle East and perhaps even globally.
Alastair Crooke
I think the first thing would be to look at the immediate area, and the first one would be Lebanon, where there is a strong pocket in Tripoli, of those who would support Jolani strongly against the Shi’i. The Shi’i were about 45% to 55% of the population in Lebanon, but the tensions, the fractures, are very obvious in Lebanon, because of the ceasefire and because of Israel’s massive bombing of civilian areas to try and bring a ceasefire about. Then you go up to Iraq, the Kurds in Erbil—are they going to see their Kurdish colleagues wiped out by Turkey there? And what is going to happen to the [inaudible]? The [inaudible] are the militia which are part of the Iraqi army. I mean, they’re formerly part of the Iraqi army, but they’re quite autonomous in many ways. And these have been working with Iran, and these groups are now armed, and now they’ve had a whole division of Syrian forces placed inside. Are they going to go and fight the HTS, as they sort of encroach and try and cut off Iraq from Syria, as is very likely? Then you move further away. How does all this look in the sort of relationship that matters so much to the United States, between the Gulf states and Islam and the region as a whole? And I started off by talking about the sort of big shift, polar shift between Iran was at the apex, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states were at the bottom. And then it was the Americans, tried to turn it upside down. But the greatest Saudi Arabia will be very nervous, I believe, to see the Ottomans claiming to be one of the leaders of the world, as Erdoğan just did, and to treat the Saudis as just another branch of Islam that he doesn’t pay a great deal of attention to. And I think also because inevitably, although they say they won’t—I mean, already, hijab is mandatory in Syria, and women are being rounded up in some places, and I don’t know what’s happening to them. This is in part of the Kurdish areas, the Kurdish areas that are run by the Americans—I mean the women. And what happens if the Kurds are really under pressure and they release 50,000 ISIS [soldiers] from their prison in the Kurdistan? What then will Iraq do? What will the Iraqi forces do? Will they enter into Syria to deal with the with the ISIS that have been released into the people? There’ll be more ISIS released in Damascus from the prisons there by Jolani. But the point is that MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, and the Gulf states, I mean, they’ve adopted the western lifestyle, almost completely. You know, they’re like girls, not quite scantily dressedin their palaces, and on the beach and things like this. And he’s moved in many ways, you know, alcohol is pretty freely available and things like this. I don’t think he’s going to be happy seeing this sort of—because it really hurts, because he is the Wahhabi establishment. The sources Wahhabism are in the [inaudible], not in Jeddah. And this is going to make him, I think, very uneasy indeed. And so is he going to put money in to forces that are opposed to Erdoğan and the takeover? Will he support factions in—well, you see it already. Doha has already come in. Doha, which is at odds with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states on these issues of the Muslim Brotherhood or, I mean, of course, Qatar is a Wahhabi state. Is it? Are they going to go and support it? They’re already supporting within Aleppo, providing all the funding to try and support the credibility and the public appeal of it. That’s how the whole region can change. And Israel within this, it sees itself as a grand victor. But I think what has happened and what will increasingly happen, whether Jolani is the leader or not, I mean, Israel is seen disliked by much of the world, whether they’re pro-ISIS or anti-ISIS, for what’s happened to Gazans. That really has—I mean, the Middle East, the states are just seething with anger about it. There are pockets that side with Israel, in Syria, in Lebanon, but they’re impotent, they don’t count anything. The great feeling is against it. Then you come to Jordan. What happens to Jordan in these circumstances? Because Jordan has got right on the border there. Will they come across? Will they invade? Jordan also has a huge Muslim Brotherhood contingent, and it also has some quite Salafist elements in it too. It’s been very tense in this period, as it is very tense because of what’s been happening in West Bank and in Gaza and Jordan is terrified that Israel will eventually push the Palestinians out of the West Bank and describe Jordan as a new Palestinian state. And the push on Palestinians in the West Bank is intense, and they are leaving, and they are moving as the settlers, I mean, there is a big army of settlers, 10,000 strong, now armed by [Itamar] Ben-Gvir. And I believe, I can’t say for sure, but what I hear from inside in Israel is there’s going to be an attempt by Ben-Gvir, who’s in charge of the police, coordinated with Smotrich, to clear the Palestinians out of Area C. Area C is a sort of area in the West Bank, where there is joint security, supposedly joint security responsibility, between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. And I think, really, they envisage South Lebanon to be another area C that they will sort of take over in the set in the same way. So that’s where I would see these things. Meanwhile, the tensions in Israel are growing. Netanyahu goes to court, I think this week. There are big divisions. The Attorney General says that Ben-Gvir is an illegal cabinet member. She says that you cannot delay this court case, the attorney general. Ben-Gvir and the cabinet say the attorney general must be sacked. There’s deep divisions within the army who say there’s no plan, there’s no policy, there’s no blueprint. And we’re getting killed. The Orthodox don’t get killed. Why do our sons have to bear the loss of life and the Orthodox feet to study in the yeshiva? Why is all this happening? And so Israel is deeply, deeply divided, and many of those Israelis, even former national security members, feel that Israel is on the brink of a collapse, not in the sense of just a military one, but of a institutional collapse because all of the structures of law and how the army work, because it is becoming, in brief—I use this as a shorthand—but it’s becoming a war between the kingdom of Judea and the State of Israel. And Ben-Gvir has a mini army of 10,000 settlers, all armed or who obey his particular radical rabbis, very radical people who talk about the oral Talmud, and not just the Talmud. And then the rather secular, Europeanized state of Israel, who want to bring everything under a judicial process and to have the army being, if you like, a neutral element. And this clash is profound, and what will come out of it? Israelis don’t know. So, I mean, it’s not the victory that Netanyahu is proclaiming, it’s very tentative. And as I say, it’s all based on the sort of magical thinking that we’re on our path to Armageddon with Iran and then everything will be resolved. Gaza will be resolved. Lebanon will be resolved. Syria, Iraq, all done, because we will have defeated the head of the octopus.
Chris Hedges
Two last questions: What happens to the Palestinians pushed into southern Gaza? Clearly they will empty the north. They’re far down that road already. It’s a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in the south, there’s no clean water, there isn’t enough food, people living out in the open. What happens in southern Gaza? Does it just sit and fester? The Egyptians, as I was just, I’ve been in Egypt. I was actually in the West Bank this summer and in Jordan, but my understanding is the Egyptian military has been categorical, the Palestinians will not be pushed into this. What happens?
Alastair Crooke
At the moment, Netanyahu and his cabinet, it’s not just Netanyahu, but the support and the support in the population, want to just continue with the process of the slow decimation of the population in Gaza, and there’s more. I mean, they don’t have gain. There’s no plan, no solution, except to continue the squeeze and to continue with the military intervention to make life unbearable. And Smotrich says, Well, maybe in the next few years, two thirds of them will opt to leave because there’s nothing in Gaza. It’s just rubble, no schools, no hospitals, nothing. It’s all been destroyed. And clearly the aim is eventually ethnic cleansing, to clear the clear out the whole of Gaza, because they have plans. And Smotrich has plans, and Ben-Gvir has plans for about 50 settlements to be placed in the place of Gaza. And the Palestinians will hold out. They are very tough. They’re very strong minded, and they will hold out. And it will be a daily unfolding tragedy. I can’t even bring myself to watch some of the videos that come out of there, of children and people burnt alive and so on. But I see no solution to this, as long as Netanyahu and the cabinet—and I don’t see any particular immediacy to fall of the government at this stage. I mean, who knows? There’s the trial coming up. Anything can happen. The whole thing can collapse. I mean, because it’s all very precariously based on this tiny sort of fulcrum of Netanyahu’s power and his sort of vision of great victory and the support that he gets for that.
Chris Hedges
And just to close, how likely do you think a war with Iran is?
Alastair Crooke
I think it’s likely. I think it’s likely for the following reason, I think that it’s not about Iran, particularly, it’s nothing to do with Iran. Firstly, they want to disrupt Trump, to pull him into, if you like, a war on Iran. They think it’ll be an easy war. I think they’ve got this totally wrong. They think it’ll be an easy war. But they want to reassert, if you like, American power and leadership. And they feel that doing, every so often, throwing a small country against the wall and smashing it up sort of is good for this. And I think I’m not being too cynical, I think that they feel they need a war. There is a strong sense in that, if you like, ruling cadre, not for Americans as a whole, but for within that, if you like, that they have to reassert those deep layers of American policy, which are they will not tolerate any, if you like, rival power, any challenge to American leadership and American greatness, an American sense of its vision for the future to occur on their watch. And therefore this has been bedrock, bipartisan bedrock, at the sort of deeper layer of structure that no politician is allowed to challenge, and so I think they will probably do it. It’s not about is it good or bad? I don’t think Trump will be able to because they control—the other thing is, basically, the Israeli [inaudible] want it, and they control Congress, and they have the money to do this, and they probably will do it.
Chris Hedges
But is that an aerial campaign? How physically would they send troops into it?
Alastair Crooke
They can’t take troops. No, they can’t. You can’t. You can’t. Its population is 90 million, and this is as big as Europe, virtually. Couldn’t do this. No, it’s only by—and here’s where I disagree with the consensus in America. They think it’s by air assault, you know, shock and awe, a big campaign that will go in and bust it. But the technical reasons for why that won’t work are plentiful. First of all, Iran has excellent air defenses from Russia, but their own as well. And the Israelis, contrary to what the media say, were not able to penetrate into Iranian airspace when they attempted that strike 26 of—I think it was—October. They were not able to penetrate into their airspace. And when you’re talking about a nuclear program or programs that are deeply buried underground, you saw what happened in Beirut to get at the Hezbollah leadership, it took 85 heavy missiles. And if you’re going to fly F-35’s with JDAM missiles, each of those is about 14 tons. I mean, it’s not just the weight, they can carry them, but the fuel they use. So you have to refuel maybe once, refuel twice, then you’ll have to fight your aircraft to suppress their defenses. I mean, you’re talking about a huge performance. Is America going to be able to do this and against—I mean, the Iranians have got multiple air defense systems and good radars over the horizon radars as well. And we were all told that they damaged this Parchin. This was essential. There’s been nothing. I followed it. I think you mentioned it in your lead in that I was involved with Iran and this on the nuclear side for the European Union when Solana was leaving that. I mean, we’ve been dealing with Parchin for 20 years. The Israelis have been claiming it’s got a secret site there, and the IEA [International Energy Agency] have inspected it multiple times and found nothing, and it was nothing this time. They bombed two empty warehouses. It was during Khatami’s presidency that anything sensitive was taken away from Parchin and put deep into the mountain tunnels.
Chris Hedges
Great. Thank you very much. That was fascinating and brilliant. I want to thank Diego [Ramos] Max [Jones], Thomas [Hedges] and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at Chris hedges.substack.gov, that was really.
The fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, ending a 55-year dynasty begun by his father, dramatically shifts the pieces on the chessboard of the Middle East. The rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is armed and backed by Turkey and was once allied with Al Qaeda. It is sanctioned as a terrorist group. Turkey’s primary goal is to prevent an independent Kurdish state in northern Syria where Kurds have formed an autonomous enclave. But it may not only be Turkey that is behind the overthrow of Assad. It may also be Israel. Israel has long sought to topple the Syrian regime which is the transit point for weapons and aid sent from Iran to the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah. The Syrian regime was backed by Russia and Iran, indeed Russian warplanes routinely bombed Syrian rebel targets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gloated about the ousting of Assad calling it an “historic day” and said it was a direct result of Israel’s actions against Hezbollah and Iran. But at the same time, Israel will soon have an Islamic state on its border.
Syria, a country of 23 million, is geopolitically important. It links Iraq’s oil to the Mediterranean, the Shia of Iraq and Iran to Lebanon, and Turkey, a NATO ally, to Jordan’s deserts.
Assad’s decision to brutally crush a pro-democracy movement triggered a 14-year-long civil war in 2011 that led to 500,000 people being killed and more than 14 million displaced.
Now What? Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham seek to renew relations with Iran? Will it impose an Islamic state, given its jihadist roots? Will Syria’s many minority groups, Alawite, Druze, Circassian, Armenian, Chechen, Assyrian, Christian and Turkoman, be persecuted, especially the Alawites, a heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam comprising around 10 percent of the population, which Assad and the ruling elites were members of? How will it affect the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which holds the Syrian oil-rich territory in north and east Syria? Why are the U.S. and Israel bombing targets in Syria following the ouster of Assad? Will the new regime be able to convince the U.S. and Europe to lift sanctions and return the occupied oil fields? What does this portend for the wider Middle East, especially in Lebanon and the Israeli occupied territories?
Joining Chris Hedges to discuss the overthrow of the Assad regime and its ramifications is former British diplomat Alastair Crooke. He served for many years in the Middle East working as a security advisor to the EU special envoy to the Middle East, as well as helping lead efforts to set up negotiations and truces between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian resistant groups with Israel. He was instrumental in establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He is also the author of Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, which analyzes the ascendancy of Islamic movements in the Middle East.
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Chris Hedges
Crew: Diego Ramos
Transcript: Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges
The fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, ending a 55-year dynasty begun by his father, dramatically shifts the pieces on the chessboard of the Middle East. The rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is armed and backed by Turkey and was once allied with Al Qaeda. It is sanctioned as a terrorist group. Turkey’s primary goal is to prevent an independent Kurdish state in northern Syria where Kurds have formed an autonomous enclave. But it may not only be Turkey that is behind the overthrow of Assad. It may also be Israel. Israel has long sought to topple the Syrian regime which is the transit point for weapons and aid sent from Iran to the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah. The Syrian regime was backed by Russia and Iran, indeed Russian warplanes routinely bombed Syrian rebel targets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gloated about the ousting of Assad calling it an “historic day” and said it was a direct result of Israel’s actions against Hezbollah and Iran. But at the same time, Israel will soon have an Islamic state on its border.
Syria, a country of 23 million, is geopolitically important. It links Iraq’s oil to the Mediterranean, the Shia of Iraq and Iran to Lebanon, and Turkey, a NATO ally, to Jordan’s deserts.
Assad’s decision to brutally crush a pro-democracy movement triggered a 14-year-long civil war in 2011 that led to 500,000 people being killed and more than 14 million displaced.
Now What? Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham seek to renew relations with Iran? Will it impose an Islamic state, given its jihadist roots? Will Syria’s many minority groups, Alawite, Druze, Circassian, Armenian, Chechen, Assyrian, Christian and Turkoman, be persecuted, especially the Alawites, a heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam comprising around 10 percent of the population, which Assad and the ruling elites were members of? How will it affect the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which holds the Syrian oil-rich territory in north and east Syria? Why are the U.S. and Israel bombing targets in Syria following the ouster of Assad? Will the new regime be able to convince the U.S. and Europe to lift sanctions and return the occupied oil fields? What does this portend for the wider Middle East, especially in Lebanon and the Israeli occupied territories?
Joining me to discuss the overthrow of the Assad regime and its ramifications is former British diplomat Alastair Crooke. He served for many years in the Middle East working as a security advisor to the EU special envoy to the Middle East, as well as helping lead efforts to set up negotiations and truces between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian resistant groups with Israel. He was instrumental in establishing the 2002 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. He is also the author of Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, which analyzes the ascendancy of Islamic movements in the Middle East.
Let’s put everything in context. So let’s go back to the Arab Spring, Alastair. There were widespread demonstrations in Syria, as there were throughout the Arab world. These were crushed very, very brutally by the Assad regime, which triggered the civil war. But let’s start there.
Alastair Crooke
Okay, well, with the Arab spring, really its roots, if you want to go back to the roots of that whole process, was a meeting that took place with then Vice President Dick Cheney after the war in Lebanon, the 2006 war in Lebanon. And it entailed [Saudi] Prince Bandar [bin Sultan Al Saud], who was then head of Saudi intelligence services. And what happened at that meeting was that Cheney started moaning and saying, look, what’s going on? The invasion of Iraq was supposed to weaken Iran, and it doesn’t seem to have done that. And now we’ve got Hezbollah who has emerged victorious from this war in Lebanon. And Prince Bandar interrupted at that point, and he said, No, the king believes that the solution to this is we’ve got to take out Syria. Syria is the weak link in this whole process. And Cheney sort of backed off. He said, Well, what do you have in mind? What are you talking about? And he said, Well, there’s a solution. It is, if you like, Islamic revolutionaries, they’re the ones that can work for you. And again, Cheney sort of backed away a little, said, Well, you know, United States can’t do too much about that, you know. We wouldn’t want to go too far in that. And Bandar said, no problem. We will do it all for you. It’ll be done. You don’t have to intervene. It will follow. And so this was a sort of second round, the first round had happened in Afghanistan long before, when I was there. When, of course, Saudi Arabia, at the behest of the United States, sent Islamist movements into what was a secular society in Afghanistan in order to bring it down, to damage Russia and to weaken Russia at the point. And so this came up, at this point, but you have to grasp the big geopolitical picture of what was happening. Saudi Arabia was proposing to invert the whole paradigm of the Middle East. From the 19th century and beyond, it was Iran, the Shah. It was a big, powerful country, and it was the leader in the Middle East. And what he was saying is, let’s invert it. Let’s isolate Iran and make the Sunnis paramount in the Middle East, give them the primacy. And so it was an attempt to sort of shift the whole balance around in a different way, and to give the Sunni world, and this had been part of America’s policy from ’96 onwards. This idea of working with the Gulf states and with the monarchs and emirs of the Gulf, then it was against Baathist regimes and others. But then it was against Iran. And I remember, I mean, I was writing—you asked about the Arab awakening and what happened at that point. Well, it was, I think, really, in about 2015, or earlier, I’m not sure of ’12 or ’13 even, that Obama signed the presidential finding, which is an order. I mean, it’s an order that is given, and was given to the CIA to oust Assad and to overturn the government there. And so [inaudible] then have been a whole series of sort of ragtag of three letter groups that have received American training, Israeli training, Turkish training, in Syria, mainly for the purpose of ousting Assad and fulfilling the finding, Obama’s presidential finding. But even this started to fail in my view. I wrote, I remember in I think it was around 2012 I wrote, and I said, things are shifting, because what I see is this— we used to look at Palestine, and we used to look at the Middle East through sort of secular eyes, albeit Orientalist eyes, but through secular eyes, we used to [inaudible] it and see it in sort of instrumental fashion. Palestine, it was about institution, construction, two state solution. And I wrote, even then, that I thought this was shifting towards, if you like, symbols of religion—Al Aqsa versus Temple Mount were going to be the new war that was coming. And gradually, if you like, the Saudis, wore out their interests in Wahhabism. Wahhabism— extreme form of very narrow religion of Islamic religion based on texts and on document which was known, quite obviously, as a management of savagery. And this was the turning point, really. I think it was starting to shift in the other direction. And now Saudi Arabia has almost completely got rid of, if you like, the Wahhabi influence. Other parts of the Gulf have become, what I call, more interested in Bloomberg and their stock market ratings than they are in the geopolitics of the region. So that is the shift. Now what’s happened, essentially, with this is an extension of Obama’s finding, because gradually the most severe sanctions, the Caesar sanctions [Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019], were imposed on Syria from the beginning. And then the Kurds were empowered in the northeast of Syria, and they sat on the Syrian oil fields, and that oil was taken from them and sent to Turkey and it was entirely an illegal operation. So Syria lost its oil revenues, and then later, the Turks came down into the western part of Syria, occupied Idlib and took Aleppo. That was the industrial part, and so the agricultural, the oil industry— there was no economy, no economy left. Just to give you a practical example. Now we’ve seen that the Syrian army sort of were declined to fight. A conscript in the Syrian army is currently paid $7 a month. A general in the Syrian army receives $40 per month. The HTS and the others of the militia received $2,000 a month. That is the state in which, I mean that really—Syria just didn’t have, for one thing, the resources to seemingly be able to put together an army or fight. Russia tried to do this in 2018. It said to Assad, we’ll remake your army, re-equip it, new equipment. We’ll train them, the latest things on credit. You don’t have to put money up. Assad said no. Then more lately, the Iranians have said to them, we can support you. We can support your army. We can help but you have to invite us. I mean, we can’t come in as an occupying force. We have to be invited. Assad said no. And throughout this period, he has been warned that something was coming. The Iranians—the [Al-]Quds Brigade of the IRGC—about two months ago, went to Assad and they said to him, something is happening in Idlib. Beware, watch out! And I imagine that the Russians were equally aware of this. And the Turks have now publicly said that this was on the cards, they were operating this six months earlier. It started, from their perspective, six months earlier. I would actually put the date for the preparation of this for two years ago, probably. But anyway, they openly say six months ago it was underway, being prepared and being prepared, obviously, with America and being prepared with Israel. Now, why did he say no? Now I don’t have an answer that is definitive of this. But I remember some years ago, I remember there was a discussion, and I know the details of it, that when MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, was sort of new on the stage, and young, MBZ [Mohammed bin Zayed], the crown prince of UAE [United Arab Emirates], were talking, and he said, listen, to Mohammed bin Salman, if you want to be Crown Prince, the path to being Crown Prince is through Israel, and it’s through the Israeli lobby in Washington. That’s what you need to do. And that’s, of course, what UAE had done already with its base in Washington and presenting itself in ways to America. And I think what we’ve seen in the last three or four years is we’ve seen, actually, that Assad was distancing himself from both Iran and from Russia. And I think that he was being pulled more and more by the Gulf states, thinking that if he approximated closer to the Gulf states and away from Iran and Russia, this was his path to sort of survival, because Washington would like that. But more importantly, Tel Aviv would like that, and that would work with him in that way. Well, in the end, it just was nothing left to work with so [President of Turkey Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan, who had been for months, years, trying to persuade Assad to allow his government to be, if you like—I can only describe it as a sort of controlled Ottoman structure, rather than a government of the Syrian people. And I remember he was pressing it very hard at one time when I was with Assad in Damascus. And Assad said, Look, these people like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are guests in my country, we’ve helped, funded, supported them, now tell me how to run the country and that they want the Muslim Brotherhood. And it’s a very sensitive issue, the Muslim Brotherhood, and in Syria, I’m sure, you know, because of the affairs with…
Chris Hedges
Just explain… there was an uprising, I think his father, Hafez Al-Assad, he raised the city, 10,000 dead. You can explain the context of that. And it was a Baathist, secular regime. Baathism, coming out of [Former President of Egypt Gamal Abdel] Nasser. Saddam Hussein was a Baathist, but just explain, going back that history, why they were so terrified of the Muslim Brotherhood, as of course, was other rulers like King Hussein [Former King of Jordan].
Alastair Crooke
They saw the Muslim Brotherhood as a very strict Islamist movement, whose tale, and there is some truth to this, veered off into sort of Wahhabism and Salafism. That was certainly true in Gaza and elsewhere. But Erdoğan tried to take control of the Muslim Brotherhood because he wanted to present, as I’ve just said—you know that whereas [Dick] Cheney was empowering the kings and amirs of Sunni Islam to be the masters of the world, Erdoğan wanted to go back to Ottomanism, a form of Neo-Ottomism. And everyone feared that no one liked the Ottomans, basically outside of the Ottoman wealth, and he wanted to insert that. And Assad saw this as a huge danger, and that this was going to be a militant attack on the state. But during that period after this, I mean, the state has become weaker and weaker and weaker. And so when, if you like, when Russia said, Well, we can try and build up your army and try and make you stronger, I don’t think he had the resources. Don’t think he had even— you know when you’re paying your troops $7 a month, you just don’t have many resources. The people were starving, they were losing hope. And there was a lot of corruption. You can imagine soldiers on certain dollars a month, stop big people at the checkpoints and demand money from them, and that sort of thing was what was going on. And then he was being dragged towards the Gulf states, thinking this might be a solution for him. And then Erdoğan decided to mount, if you like, this coup through Idlib, using a motley group of militias and others and those that are loosely tied to ISIS or Al Qaeda. And I think that what happened was because he went to see President [Vladimir] Putin on the day before, Friday, things started Saturday. And he spent some time with President Putin, hours. And then flew back the same day, and we have no idea what was said at that meeting. There’s no record of it from the Kremlin side, and there’s no record on the Damascus side of it. But I think that was probably the point Putin said, I’m sorry, Assad, it’s game over. There’s going to be a change, and you’re going to have to work with it. So I think from the Astana, from the meetings between Iran, Turkey and Russia, Russia had come to the conclusion on two grounds that—I mean, first of all, this was going to be a terrible mess if Assad fell. And I think he was probably being advised that this is an almost inevitable outcome. The situation was becoming irreversible. So I think in one sense, he could see that this would be a terrible mess, yes, but at the same time, he recalled Afghanistan, and the same time, he knew that one of the plays that is in hand against Russia is to reconnect, to give ways of pulling it from its focus on Ukraine and the war there, to create new fronts, new pressure points, more pressure on Assad and that he decided, you know, what was the primary interest of Russia. The primary interest is not the small wars, the big war. Not Romania, not Belarus, not Mongolia, but the big war which is against, if you like, NATO and the West which wants to, if you like, peel him away from China, peel him away from Iran, scatter the BRICS across the globe and leave Russia isolated. And so I guess he decided that that was to be the case. And Iran were very clear. They went, [inaudible] went to see Assad, well before the the actual collapse to say, look, it’s coming. It’s coming. You’re going to go, I mean, there’s no way the army is going to protect and I know that [inaudible], he wouldn’t even see him, and then he told him he was wrong. And I just think that at that point it was all over. And so Russia and Iran and Erdoğan got together and they produced this document, of course, I mean it’s all diplomatic speak. It has got no real meaning. It talks about elections and a cease fire and everyone is going to stop and get together and come and the legitimate opposition must be included and HTS excluded. I mean, all this is fiction. Of course, it’s never going to happen.
Chris Hedges
Let me ask a little bit about what this—let’s start with Turkey. I mean, I hadn’t heard that figure of $2,000 a month. That’s a lot of money in the Middle East, is that Turkish money? Is that Israeli money? Is that U.S. money? I just want to talk about the U.S., Turkey and Israel independently. And then, of course, we have to acknowledge, I think you would agree, this is quite a blow to both Russia and Iran, in particular, Hezbollah. It’s the lifeline…
Alastair Crooke
Of course, of course, of course.
Chris Hedges
Where did the arms and money come from? Was it primarily Turkey?
Alastair Crooke
Most of the training, I mean, there’s been a lot of training of these groups, even across from sort of Central Asia. Uzbeks, Turkmens and others are former jihadists, former fighters, Al-Qaeda fighters, have been taken in. And indeed, if you look at [Abu Mohammed al-]Jolani’s group, this polyglot group of militia, more than 30% actually come from Central Asia. They’re not Syrians at all. So they’ve been brought in, and Turkey is well known to have a training center for these groups. Even allegations that the famous fire at a concert hall in Moscow last year, earlier this year, that many people died in, they were trained in Turkey. So there’s been a long process of this, and yes, it’s funded by America because it’s part of the process. He sold it to America as part of the process of getting rid of Assad and getting a Western friendly government installed in Damascus. Of course, he framed it as a Western friendly government. What he meant was a sort of Neo-Ottoman-esque government in Damascus. And as I say, I know that because Assad was telling me at that earlier point how much pressure was on him to sort of bring in sort of parts of the Ottoman world into his government and he refused, and that was the cause of the breakup originally. So yes, money coming in, Turkey working closely with America, particularly in the groups in the south which were operated— it was complicated in Syria because the Pentagon was training some and CIA training others in Syria at the same time, and some of those groups were fighting each other, even though they were both on the American payroll. So America was funding a lot of this for Turkey. It was seeing Turkey as someone who could be helpful to Israel, and Turkey was very supportive of Israel, and things only started to sort of go wrong I think around 2016, when Turkey said that there’s been this plot against him, a coup and he blamed it was an American coup attempt to to get rid of him, and at that point, he’s become much more militant. His ego is huge. He made a statement yesterday. I saw it this morning, he was sitting there, and he said, There are really only two leaders in the world today, myself and Putin, but I’ve been around lot longer than Putin. So, you couldn’t judge how he sees Syria, something for him to take. But I think the great weakness and the flaw of this whole construct that has taken place and allowed to be taking place is he claims and thinks he can control Jolani and the jihadists now posing as ex-jihadists and diverse characters have embraced diversity and inclusion and whatever else. And he thinks that he can control, and even his own people say, and they’ve said it clearly in the press too, he doesn’t control these people. He controls a few of them, but he doesn’t control them, and he certainly doesn’t control Jolani, who set up a very oppressive structure in Idlib while he was the boss there, very oppressive. Strict Wahhabi, and anyone who disagreed was disappeared.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk about Israel, because Netanyahu is gloated about this. In the short term, it does seem to benefit Israel in the sense that, as we said before, Syria is the transit point for weapons and aid to Hezbollah. Hezbollah troops were fighting for Assad. They withdrew just before the fall of Assad, Israel has moved forward in the buffer zone and the Golan Heights. They’ve moved tanks. This is occupied Syrian territory. So just as in Lebanon, they’ve used this moment to seize more land. Israel, like the U.S., has bombed, supposedly, weapons facilities, intelligence facilities, in Syria. But I have this question I have to ask you, I don’t see how an Islamic state, and I agree with your assessment of Jolani, of course, I don’t see how an Islamic State in Syria, in the long term is beneficial to Israel. But perhaps you can talk about all that.
Alastair Crooke
Okay, because, we have to go back a little bit and look—there’s been this huge change in Israel from just over a year ago, when the whole paradigm of Israel was overturned. And so we saw the Mizrahi [Jews] coming into the government. They were really antagonistic to the European-style Israelis, from the kibbutniks, the Ashkenazi, they were hostile to them. They had three agendas, basically. They had one agenda [which] was to establish Israel on the land of Israel, translated, no Palestinian state. The second one was to create, if you like, a really Jewish state, Jewish in spirit, and they think that they have it. And the third element was Halakhic law to come in. I mean, the secularists in Israel didn’t like this one bit, and Israel is deeply divided on this front and other fronts at the moment, almost to the point of civil war, just short of it. Netanyahu has become ever more authoritarian, controls literally everything personally. He has a coalition which is very much of the right. But the other important change that’s taken place is an epistemological change. They’re no longer secular. The Israelis that you might have known in the ’70s and ’80s were secular Europeans. These people are biblical, and there’s an eschatological element to it, which changes the epistemological. There’s no point in talking about rationality and does this make sense, or is this an interest, because they have a vision, and it’s not about just the vision, but the vision is it requires and mandates your commitment and your belief in it. You’re not supposed to reason with it, you take it, and this is the vision of the future. So there’s been this big change, and moving towards this, Israel has moved through what I call magical wars. The wars are quite magical. I mean, in Gaza, it’s a great victory. It’s huge, even though it isn’t a victory at all, it’s far from it. Hamas is still there, but it’s presented as a huge victory, and already they are organizing for settlers to come in and take the land of Northern Gaza and subsequently to repopulate that. Settlers are already putting their names down to be in the settlements of Gaza, and then they say in West Bank, it’s also a great victory, because [Bezalel] Smotrich, who’s a minister in the cabinet, minister of defense as well as administration of the West Bank, he’s actually delegitimizing the whole of the Palestinians in the West Bank. And then they claim a great victory against against Hezbollah in South of Lebanon. Even though they suffered enormous losses, had to pull all the reserves out. So they’re in a fix, because the army, it doesn’t have enough men. It’s about 20% understaffed for the commitments it’s already got, and increasingly, reservists are not showing up to duty. The army say they’re exhausted, but primarily they say there’s no plan, there’s no structure. What are our objectives? What are we actually trying to do? This is a little bit sort of rational, he isn’t there on the same page. He’s working towards the grand victory, which is something different. So we’ve had already sort of magical construct. And so the magical part of it now is Syria, another great victory for Iran on the route to the war on Iran. So this is what it’s all about, showing how it’s successful and it’s going on and now the final cherry on the cake is to persuade the United States that it has to support Israel in its war on Iran. And of course, suddenly we have the nuclear weapon being presented as the, if you like, the motive for this war. And you see Trump even now saying, Oh, well, what’s happened? It’s partly to do with Ukraine, but it’s also because of Israel’s fighting successes. Well, most Israelis would say we haven’t got any successes. This is all, you know, magical. I describe it as like, it’s like a Ponzi scheme, this is a financial scam. But in this case, it’s a geopolitical Ponzi scheme, in the sense that everything is a victory for Israel, everything is taking us closer to ultimate victory. Ultimate victory is to get rid of the head of the octopus, which is Iran. And we’re moving towards this great victory. And there are all these people trying to stop us. Biden is trying to stop us. All sorts of people are trying to stop us, but we’re on it. So it’s very important. Like a Ponzi scheme, if you stop making money, the thing crashes. If you find people as sort of withdrawing money from the fund and saying, Well, is this really going to work? Is this really a good idea? Then you’re finished. And so Netanyahu’s structure is a sort of magical thinking that he’s got to keep everything to be a victory, moving towards the direction that he’s always wanted it to go. He’s pulling in, veggling the United States through some provocation that they will do on Iran into supporting a war. Now I just add, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression, I think a war would with Iran would be disastrous for Israel might even destroy Israel, and it would be a great defeat for the for the United States. I won’t go into the reasons for that, but just to say, you know, I don’t think people have thought this through. I mean, you know, it’s based on the simple sort of understanding, absolute conviction in the West: Russia is weak, America is strong. Israel is strong, Iran is weak. And you know, there’s nothing you can say, really, against it. And then you have some four star general, Jack Keane, coming up on television in the U.S. and saying, well, the Israelis have knocked out Iran’s air defenses. The Israelis have damaged their nuclear program by the attack on Parchin. The Israelis have really reduced Iran. It lies naked before us. It is stunningly vulnerable, and this is what the talking heads on CNN are saying. Clearly laying the grounds. Parchin is held up, but it’s really no different from when [Former United States Secretary of State] Colin Powell went on television all those years ago, before 2006—you see what’s in this vial here? This is weapons of mass destruction, and this is what the war is going to be about. They didn’t strike anything at Parchin. There’s clear evidence that the Israelis were not able to even fire ballistic missiles. They never got closer than 70 kilometers to the Iranian front here. So this is a magical—it’s difficult to deal with this in a Western way, like most of the audience would like me to say, you know, on the one hand, on the other hand, because we’re talking about something that has moved into an eschatological, if you like, mindset, that this is ordained, this is the Bible. This is what the Torah says. This is what we are going for, and we do it because we have to believe in Revelation, forget rationality. It’s revelation.
Chris Hedges
I want to ask about the Turks—and I spent a lot of time in northern Iraq, actually spent time with the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party], covered all of the fighting in southeastern Turkey, including the Nehru’s rebellion—the Turks are obsessed with this U.S.-backed Kurdish militia force that controls the oil fields in the north and east of Syria. One has to assume that that’s the next move. They want to essentially push the Kurds out and seize those oil fields. That’s my hypothetical or that’s my guess. Is that correct?
Alastair Crooke
Well they started. They were already attacking Manbij. They’re attacking those Kurdish groups there, and more than that, because this is one of the big fractures taking place, because Turkey is determined to destroy the Kurdish. They see them as terrorists and a great threat to Turkey. Let’s have no doubt this is why it’s not just Erdoğan, this is a white Turkish view, not everyone in Turkey holds it. But then you have these—and now, I mean, there is real fighting going on in Manbij, and on the other side, you have Israel saying, we want to build up these Kurds. We would like a Kurdish state to be formed in the eastern part, joint to Erbil and joint to Iraq. And that’s our objective. And so the two of them are—and unfortunately, this is going to be the case, not just in the Kurdish part, but in many parts of Israel, there’s going to be a clash as things go on, between the interests of Jolani and the leadership there and the interests of others. What happens to the Alawites? What happens to Latakia? This is a stretch along the coast where the Russian bases are, but has always been, historically, an Alawite sort of state, shall we say. And some of the Syrian army have, have sort of kept their forces a little bit together. I don’t want to sound too much—they took all the armor into Iraq. A whole division took its armor into Iraq. You know, we’ve seen it before happen in other places in for example, in Egypt, how even the military that has been defeated and has been discredited, somehow bits of it come together and find popular support. So will they come in and start fighting Jolani’s groups? What will happen? No one knows. It’s going to be, I think, a really—huge mini wars, cultural wars, fighting. And I think Turkey thought it would be able to sort of manage these like the puppet master from outside in Ankara. And I think that already that’s gone. Yes, Russia’s influence is gone. Iran’s influence is gone, but I think Turkey is just evaporating now before our eyes, because they’re not being able to do what they think they were going to do in the Northeast. Erdoğan has said he wants to take the whole of the northern strip, right across Syria, through to Iran as a big, big buffer zone to protect him from any influences from outside.
Chris Hedges
I don’t see how the Syrian economy is going to function if they don’t get back the oil fields. And we should be clear, one of the things, out of many things that led to Assad’s deep unpopularity, aside from really savage repression, was also the fact that there was only electricity an hour a day. In Damascus, prices were astronomical. Unemployment was widespread. Of course, you had sanctions against Syria. But those oil fields—aren’t they vital? I mean, if they don’t recapture those oil fields, how are they going to ever… And much of the country is destroyed and has not been rebuilt. It’s one of the problems with the millions of people, Syrian refugees. There’s nothing to go back to.
Alastair Crooke
This is what I was saying. The oil has been taken. That is also the agricultural land of Syria. That is now occupied by the Kurds. So they lost the revenues from agriculture, the revenues from oil and the industrial parties around Aleppo and Idlib, and that has been under Turkish control for this period, and they have been under sanction. So, I mean, there’s absolute poverty in Syria, and people are in despair and have lost hope. And this has been a big case, and I do think what you’re saying is very important, because I think it’s fundamental also to the Russian calculations. Okay, Turkey, [inaudible] like the West, you’ve broken Syria. You broke it, you pay for it. Because it’s going to cost a huge amount of money. At the moment, Qatar is paying for the electricity in Aleppo. It’s having to pay for as a big bonus for HTS that you know, Aleppo now has electricity at night and all the day, because Qatar was given 30 million or something to pay. But that’s just one part of it. I mean, the whole state would need rebuilding and reconstructing, and I think that’s ultimately why the thing collapsed because it was just irrecoverably, financially, militarily and actually institutionally, because the institutions have become very much affected by it. I mean, the Ba’ath party has been long decrepit in Syria, and Assad has found it impossible to to reform it.
Chris Hedges
Can you draw parallels between the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq—also based, of course, on magical thinking. Is that the kind of chaos that you envision enveloping Syria?
Alastair Crooke
Well, I think there is one thing where it is very clear what happened— was the planning for this. In Iraq, the particularly the British, but the British and America, had bought off most of the army, the Revolutionary Guards, Republican Guards, I mean, had been bought off. Large amounts, even in gold. And so when it came to it, they didn’t fight. It was already sort of half ordained, but then they didn’t know what to do with it, how to take forward. And I think it was really sort of very much expressed by the governor. What was his name that came in [inaudible]? I can’t remember, but their first appointed governor of Iraq, and he arrived there and he said, Listen, I know nothing about Iraq. I don’t know about its culture. I don’t know its history. I know nothing. But I’m here because I’m an expert in neoliberal economics, and there was no empathy. There was no sense of how to bring people together to deal with it and manage it. I see zero sign that, at this stage, anyone likely to come forward and be able to have that sort of charisma and to have that understanding of how to bring humans, to lead humans towards a sort of sense of understanding, a community again. To being part of belonging, being connected again to a society. And the Syrians just feel, on all elements, so disconnected from society. I think they feel it, they just don’t see how they’re going to connect. So they just look after themselves. Someone offers them $400 for a weapon. Why not? That’s like a fortune. Take it. So I think this is partly, again, the sort of why Russia does understand it a lot better than the West, what’s happening. And I think Russia sees the big picture all the time. It sees the big picture about the building forces. I mentioned [Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey] Lavrov saying we’re moving towards a hot wall, and he is preparing and it’s all about Mackinder and the heartland, i.e. the heartland of Central Asia. And this is why he’s preparing for it, because I think, and I wrote about this just recently, in quoting some Russians who are very close to him. The West gets this entitled back to front, Putin has said this time and time again. He said it to the foreign ministry at his speech, and he said it again in the press conference at Astana the other day: I will not accept a freezing of the conflict. I will not accept that because I know what you want to do. It’s you just want to then take the rump that is Ukraine afterwards, and NATO-ize it and re-arm it and be prepared for the next war in a few years time against Russia. No, we have to go back to it and look at it. How do we solve this properly? How do we solve it in a fundamental way? And when he says, strikes me as correct, he goes back—the basic problem arose on the, if you like, the unification of Germany, when America gave the guarantees that that frontier, the border of Germany, represented the border of NATO, and not just NATO, but of Atlanticist interests, economic institution, or whatever you like, that there had to be some sort of agreement. So what he’d been saying, and what was in those treaties of December 21 was saying, we have to have an architecture. We have to have some basic understandings where the frontier now lies between Atlanticist interests and the interests of Central Asia, the heartland, the world, if you like, of the Central Asia, China, Iran, all of that right through to the coast. And you’ll have start with that, and then eventually you’ll get down to the to the to the actual issue, which is Ukraine, because once you agree a sort of overall architecture, Ukraine will naturally fit somewhere into that. We can’t say how exactly, but it will. Maybe parts of it will go to Poland and to Hungary or something, or not. But get the big picture. Don’t come here and just say ceasefire in Ukraine because you’re inverted the whole thing. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick and you don’t listen and hear what I’m saying to you. So I think it’s very important. And he even gave a big hint in his statement, from behind his desk in his office. And what he said was, I feel it was a great mistake in 2019 when you, the United States, did away with the intermediate missile treaty agreement. And that’s what he said. But if Trump’s team heard it and paid attention—so, why not send an [inaudible] where he said, you know, Mr. Putin, it was really interesting what you said in that talk, and you said that was a mistake. Would you like to sort of say what you see is a way to deal with this, and what would be the future and how we would arrive at that sort of thing? And then ultimately, we’ll get to Ukraine in the discussion. But if you come in and say, freeze, we want to freeze. Otherwise we’re going to hit you with more sanctions, or we’re going to sanction with more or do this or that, or send more attack hands, and it won’t work. So, I mean, he gave a pretty good [inaudible]—this is diplomacy. You come in and you don’t start off saying, let’s cut to the chase. What’s your bottom line? This is mine. Cut the difference. It’s not a real estate deal. It has to be done differently. And Putin said, why not? Let’s talk about that. Let’s see if there’s an agreement. If we do that, then we get into the architecture of Europe, the whole security architecture. And that matters a lot to Putin. I know it does.
Chris Hedges
I’m no fan of Trump, but in terms of Ukraine, the Trump administration appears to speak far more rationally than the Biden administration. I want to go back to Syria and just to close, how could this all go terribly wrong? Paint for us the ways this could just unravel in ways that jeopardize stability within the Middle East and perhaps even globally.
Alastair Crooke
I think the first thing would be to look at the immediate area, and the first one would be Lebanon, where there is a strong pocket in Tripoli, of those who would support Jolani strongly against the Shi’i. The Shi’i were about 45% to 55% of the population in Lebanon, but the tensions, the fractures, are very obvious in Lebanon, because of the ceasefire and because of Israel’s massive bombing of civilian areas to try and bring a ceasefire about. Then you go up to Iraq, the Kurds in Erbil—are they going to see their Kurdish colleagues wiped out by Turkey there? And what is going to happen to the [inaudible]? The [inaudible] are the militia which are part of the Iraqi army. I mean, they’re formerly part of the Iraqi army, but they’re quite autonomous in many ways. And these have been working with Iran, and these groups are now armed, and now they’ve had a whole division of Syrian forces placed inside. Are they going to go and fight the HTS, as they sort of encroach and try and cut off Iraq from Syria, as is very likely? Then you move further away. How does all this look in the sort of relationship that matters so much to the United States, between the Gulf states and Islam and the region as a whole? And I started off by talking about the sort of big shift, polar shift between Iran was at the apex, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states were at the bottom. And then it was the Americans, tried to turn it upside down. But the greatest Saudi Arabia will be very nervous, I believe, to see the Ottomans claiming to be one of the leaders of the world, as Erdoğan just did, and to treat the Saudis as just another branch of Islam that he doesn’t pay a great deal of attention to. And I think also because inevitably, although they say they won’t—I mean, already, hijab is mandatory in Syria, and women are being rounded up in some places, and I don’t know what’s happening to them. This is in part of the Kurdish areas, the Kurdish areas that are run by the Americans—I mean the women. And what happens if the Kurds are really under pressure and they release 50,000 ISIS [soldiers] from their prison in the Kurdistan? What then will Iraq do? What will the Iraqi forces do? Will they enter into Syria to deal with the with the ISIS that have been released into the people? There’ll be more ISIS released in Damascus from the prisons there by Jolani. But the point is that MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, and the Gulf states, I mean, they’ve adopted the western lifestyle, almost completely. You know, they’re like girls, not quite scantily dressedin their palaces, and on the beach and things like this. And he’s moved in many ways, you know, alcohol is pretty freely available and things like this. I don’t think he’s going to be happy seeing this sort of—because it really hurts, because he is the Wahhabi establishment. The sources Wahhabism are in the [inaudible], not in Jeddah. And this is going to make him, I think, very uneasy indeed. And so is he going to put money in to forces that are opposed to Erdoğan and the takeover? Will he support factions in—well, you see it already. Doha has already come in. Doha, which is at odds with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states on these issues of the Muslim Brotherhood or, I mean, of course, Qatar is a Wahhabi state. Is it? Are they going to go and support it? They’re already supporting within Aleppo, providing all the funding to try and support the credibility and the public appeal of it. That’s how the whole region can change. And Israel within this, it sees itself as a grand victor. But I think what has happened and what will increasingly happen, whether Jolani is the leader or not, I mean, Israel is seen disliked by much of the world, whether they’re pro-ISIS or anti-ISIS, for what’s happened to Gazans. That really has—I mean, the Middle East, the states are just seething with anger about it. There are pockets that side with Israel, in Syria, in Lebanon, but they’re impotent, they don’t count anything. The great feeling is against it. Then you come to Jordan. What happens to Jordan in these circumstances? Because Jordan has got right on the border there. Will they come across? Will they invade? Jordan also has a huge Muslim Brotherhood contingent, and it also has some quite Salafist elements in it too. It’s been very tense in this period, as it is very tense because of what’s been happening in West Bank and in Gaza and Jordan is terrified that Israel will eventually push the Palestinians out of the West Bank and describe Jordan as a new Palestinian state. And the push on Palestinians in the West Bank is intense, and they are leaving, and they are moving as the settlers, I mean, there is a big army of settlers, 10,000 strong, now armed by [Itamar] Ben-Gvir. And I believe, I can’t say for sure, but what I hear from inside in Israel is there’s going to be an attempt by Ben-Gvir, who’s in charge of the police, coordinated with Smotrich, to clear the Palestinians out of Area C. Area C is a sort of area in the West Bank, where there is joint security, supposedly joint security responsibility, between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. And I think, really, they envisage South Lebanon to be another area C that they will sort of take over in the set in the same way. So that’s where I would see these things. Meanwhile, the tensions in Israel are growing. Netanyahu goes to court, I think this week. There are big divisions. The Attorney General says that Ben-Gvir is an illegal cabinet member. She says that you cannot delay this court case, the attorney general. Ben-Gvir and the cabinet say the attorney general must be sacked. There’s deep divisions within the army who say there’s no plan, there’s no policy, there’s no blueprint. And we’re getting killed. The Orthodox don’t get killed. Why do our sons have to bear the loss of life and the Orthodox feet to study in the yeshiva? Why is all this happening? And so Israel is deeply, deeply divided, and many of those Israelis, even former national security members, feel that Israel is on the brink of a collapse, not in the sense of just a military one, but of a institutional collapse because all of the structures of law and how the army work, because it is becoming, in brief—I use this as a shorthand—but it’s becoming a war between the kingdom of Judea and the State of Israel. And Ben-Gvir has a mini army of 10,000 settlers, all armed or who obey his particular radical rabbis, very radical people who talk about the oral Talmud, and not just the Talmud. And then the rather secular, Europeanized state of Israel, who want to bring everything under a judicial process and to have the army being, if you like, a neutral element. And this clash is profound, and what will come out of it? Israelis don’t know. So, I mean, it’s not the victory that Netanyahu is proclaiming, it’s very tentative. And as I say, it’s all based on the sort of magical thinking that we’re on our path to Armageddon with Iran and then everything will be resolved. Gaza will be resolved. Lebanon will be resolved. Syria, Iraq, all done, because we will have defeated the head of the octopus.
Chris Hedges
Two last questions: What happens to the Palestinians pushed into southern Gaza? Clearly they will empty the north. They’re far down that road already. It’s a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in the south, there’s no clean water, there isn’t enough food, people living out in the open. What happens in southern Gaza? Does it just sit and fester? The Egyptians, as I was just, I’ve been in Egypt. I was actually in the West Bank this summer and in Jordan, but my understanding is the Egyptian military has been categorical, the Palestinians will not be pushed into this. What happens?
Alastair Crooke
At the moment, Netanyahu and his cabinet, it’s not just Netanyahu, but the support and the support in the population, want to just continue with the process of the slow decimation of the population in Gaza, and there’s more. I mean, they don’t have gain. There’s no plan, no solution, except to continue the squeeze and to continue with the military intervention to make life unbearable. And Smotrich says, Well, maybe in the next few years, two thirds of them will opt to leave because there’s nothing in Gaza. It’s just rubble, no schools, no hospitals, nothing. It’s all been destroyed. And clearly the aim is eventually ethnic cleansing, to clear the clear out the whole of Gaza, because they have plans. And Smotrich has plans, and Ben-Gvir has plans for about 50 settlements to be placed in the place of Gaza. And the Palestinians will hold out. They are very tough. They’re very strong minded, and they will hold out. And it will be a daily unfolding tragedy. I can’t even bring myself to watch some of the videos that come out of there, of children and people burnt alive and so on. But I see no solution to this, as long as Netanyahu and the cabinet—and I don’t see any particular immediacy to fall of the government at this stage. I mean, who knows? There’s the trial coming up. Anything can happen. The whole thing can collapse. I mean, because it’s all very precariously based on this tiny sort of fulcrum of Netanyahu’s power and his sort of vision of great victory and the support that he gets for that.
Chris Hedges
And just to close, how likely do you think a war with Iran is?
Alastair Crooke
I think it’s likely. I think it’s likely for the following reason, I think that it’s not about Iran, particularly, it’s nothing to do with Iran. Firstly, they want to disrupt Trump, to pull him into, if you like, a war on Iran. They think it’ll be an easy war. I think they’ve got this totally wrong. They think it’ll be an easy war. But they want to reassert, if you like, American power and leadership. And they feel that doing, every so often, throwing a small country against the wall and smashing it up sort of is good for this. And I think I’m not being too cynical, I think that they feel they need a war. There is a strong sense in that, if you like, ruling cadre, not for Americans as a whole, but for within that, if you like, that they have to reassert those deep layers of American policy, which are they will not tolerate any, if you like, rival power, any challenge to American leadership and American greatness, an American sense of its vision for the future to occur on their watch. And therefore this has been bedrock, bipartisan bedrock, at the sort of deeper layer of structure that no politician is allowed to challenge, and so I think they will probably do it. It’s not about is it good or bad? I don’t think Trump will be able to because they control—the other thing is, basically, the Israeli [inaudible] want it, and they control Congress, and they have the money to do this, and they probably will do it.
Chris Hedges
But is that an aerial campaign? How physically would they send troops into it?
Alastair Crooke
They can’t take troops. No, they can’t. You can’t. You can’t. Its population is 90 million, and this is as big as Europe, virtually. Couldn’t do this. No, it’s only by—and here’s where I disagree with the consensus in America. They think it’s by air assault, you know, shock and awe, a big campaign that will go in and bust it. But the technical reasons for why that won’t work are plentiful. First of all, Iran has excellent air defenses from Russia, but their own as well. And the Israelis, contrary to what the media say, were not able to penetrate into Iranian airspace when they attempted that strike 26 of—I think it was—October. They were not able to penetrate into their airspace. And when you’re talking about a nuclear program or programs that are deeply buried underground, you saw what happened in Beirut to get at the Hezbollah leadership, it took 85 heavy missiles. And if you’re going to fly F-35’s with JDAM missiles, each of those is about 14 tons. I mean, it’s not just the weight, they can carry them, but the fuel they use. So you have to refuel maybe once, refuel twice, then you’ll have to fight your aircraft to suppress their defenses. I mean, you’re talking about a huge performance. Is America going to be able to do this and against—I mean, the Iranians have got multiple air defense systems and good radars over the horizon radars as well. And we were all told that they damaged this Parchin. This was essential. There’s been nothing. I followed it. I think you mentioned it in your lead in that I was involved with Iran and this on the nuclear side for the European Union when Solana was leaving that. I mean, we’ve been dealing with Parchin for 20 years. The Israelis have been claiming it’s got a secret site there, and the IEA [International Energy Agency] have inspected it multiple times and found nothing, and it was nothing this time. They bombed two empty warehouses. It was during Khatami’s presidency that anything sensitive was taken away from Parchin and put deep into the mountain tunnels.
Chris Hedges
Great. Thank you very much. That was fascinating and brilliant. I want to thank Diego [Ramos] Max [Jones], Thomas [Hedges] and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at Chris hedges.substack.gov, that was really.
Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat, and is the founder and director of the Conflicts Forum based in Beirut. He served as advisor on Middle East issues to former European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana. He was instrumental in facilitating various ceasefires in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the withdrawal of occupying forces on 2 occasions. He is a member of the UN’s Alliance of Civilizations Global Experts.
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