Pearls and Irritations

“The first CIA effort at regime change in Syria was in 1947 at the very moment of its inception. And there were multiple efforts to overthrow governments in Syria and well before Bashar Al Assad took power. … They all failed. There were efforts of course to change the Bashar Al Assad regime, to overthrow it. Hillary Clinton and others famously advocated that the United States CIA spent about 5 billion dollars in training of various groups including this one to overthrow the regime, presumably on behalf of Israeli security interests which have been foremost in the minds of the Biden Administration … So as I said there are many foreign hands in this. Precisely what role was played by whom is a little bit murky still. But finally, the effort to engineer regime change in Syria has been achieved.”

Update on Syria and the geopolitics of West Asia with Ambassador Chas Freeman.

Ambassador Freeman served as US Assistant Secretary of Defence from 1993-94, and as U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (89–92), handling the fallout of the Gulf War. He was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the historic U.S. mediation of Namibian independence, And he was Richard Nixons principal interpreter during his 1972 visit to China, which lead to the normalisation of US–China relations.

Republished from Neutrality Studies YouTube

 

Transcript:

Pascal Lottaz (PL)

Chas Freeman (CF)

PL: Hello everybody this is Pascal from neutrality studies and today I’m coming to you with a special program about the unfolding events in Syria. It is the morning of December 9th here in Japan and we just learned that Bashar al-Assad the long-term leader of the Syrian state has arrived with his family in Russia where he has been granted humanitarian Asylum. It is now official, Damascus is completely in the hands of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) aka Al-Nusra. Iran has evacuated its embassy and the Russians are according to their own statements in talks with the rebel terrorists who are now in control of large large swathes of Syria even if not of everything.

Here with me to discuss what all of this means is Ambassador Chas Freeman. Ambassador Freeman served as US assistant Secretary of Defense and as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s among his many other postings. Ambassador Freeman is really one of the great US experts on not US policy and policy toward West Asia but also about the region itself. He has been observing it together with colleagues for decades. So it is a great honor to have you here Ambassador Freeman.

CF: Very happy to be with you Pascal.

PL: Well Ambassador Freeman can you maybe tell us a little bit.  When you heard about this rapid rapid territorial gains that this – I don’t know whether to call them Rebels like our media does or to call them terrorists – but when you heard about this rapid success, what did you think? Because it took them two weeks to go from just a stale mate to basically controlling almost everything that Assad used to control before.

CF: Well I think it’s still too early to tell exactly what the full implications of this are, particularly for Syria, but the implications geopolitically in the region are enormous. Basically the big winner from this is Israel and the Netanyahu government. They have successfully pounded Hamas into the ground in Gaza where they have not destroyed it, but it is on life support as it were.  They have decapitated Hezbollah and decimated its ranks. They have shown no regard whatsoever for the so-called ceasefire that they concluded with the Lebanese government. And now they have removed the logistical support for Hezbollah from Iran, because the bridge to Lebanon has been Syria.

This is a big loss for Iran.  It means that its forward deployed deterrent forces – meaning Hezbollah, in particular (the Houthis in Yemen are still active of course) have been basically eliminated. So now it faces Israel directly with no capacity in Israel’s immediate neighborhood to respond.

This in turn raises some really serious long-term questions.  Because if Iran no longer has a conventional deterrent to Israeli attack, or to counter Israeli efforts at Regional hegemony, it is very likely that the voices which have been ever louder in Iran calling for the development of nuclear weapons will now overcome the religious scruples of the regime and achieve that.

So this is a very dangerous moment in terms of nuclear proliferation even though I haven’t really seen that discussed publicly.

It is not clear at this point exactly what the role of various foreign forces was in this stunning conquest of Syria by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the leader of which was the Al-Qaeda representative in Syria earlier. His name is not – his actual name is Abu Muhammad Al Julani.

Al Julani means he comes from the Golan Heights which are under Israeli occupation and yet apparently this movement which must have had a lot of support from Israel in its conquest of Syria has promised to establish relations with Israel and it would be interesting to see whether that pledge is carried out.

I think the other notable aspect of this among many is that the forces that advanced against the Syrian National Army were very well trained, well-led, they had a full panoply of modern weapons including drones from Ukraine, suggesting that Ukraine saw an opening in Syria to hit back at Russian influence, since the Russians had been the prime supporters – other than the Iranians – of the Assad government.  And they had tanks – this was not a Guerilla Force so much as an organized conventional Army.  And their training and their equipment showed.

On the other side it is pretty clear that the internal divisions of the Assad government helped to bring about the rapid collapse of its resistance to this attack.

I think it’s important to note that the announcement that the regime had fallen, that the Assad family had fled the country came from the chief of the Syrian armed forces. And the background here is that both Turkey and Russia had been pressing Assad for, on numerous recent occasions, to make his peace with the jihadis – to try to bring some sense of unity to Syria, and he had refused.  And it therefore is not implausible that both Turkey and Russia basically wrote him off. And the Syrian Army basically was commanded by its officers to lay down its arms and change into civilian clothing and not resist.

So a final point is that this is a remarkable development in Syria that is remarkably free of mass bloodshed. It was relatively blood-free because the resistance was so ineffectual or non-existent and this in turn reflects bad judgments by Bashar Al Assad in recent years as he came into office in about 2003, I think, promising reform and a different regime than that of his father.

He, Assad, didn’t deliver, basically instead became increasingly ruthless in his use of the security forces to prop up his government and I think he forgot that the reason he was able to survive was not because the people of Syria loved him or favored him, but that many of them thought that he was better than all of the alternatives.

Mr Al Julani, the head of the now triumphant resistance movement to Assad,  who’s about 42 years old young, still vigorous, has apparently learned some important lessons.  He separated himself to some extent from the violent Islamist past that he represented.  He has been considerate of Christians among other things. He has been less inclined to slaughter Shia.  But he is a Salafi Muslim and we will now see whether since he is basically in charge, although he has said he will defer to the choice of the Syrian people in terms of who governs Syria, and is presenting himself as a Liberation movement which is indeed what means the organization for liberation of Syria, it is not clear at all whether he has changed colour.  Whether he has in fact become what western propaganda, which is gleeful about the fall of Assad is saying about him: namely that he’s a democratic liberal Jihadi.

This is quite a volt face, but it is hardly to be unexpected given the amazing ability of the western media to present distorted views of reality when it comes to anything that goes on in West Asia.

PL: What do you think about just this point – that now we see again how the West is actually, at least rhetorically, supporting an islamist group – even an offspring of Al Qaeda, the very group that is responsible for attacking the United States back in 2001 and one that so much US military fighting went against, and that now this is being talked about not only so positively but as you said they had modern weaponry? Now a lot of talk is that they received this support from Turkey but even if so, some of it would at least have to have come through some NATO channels from the West. Does this make sense to you in the strategic game in the region?

CF: Well you have to remember that of course Syria and Lebanon were created as separate countries by France in the colonial era.  The French have a strong interest in what happens in Syria.  I know that President Macron has expressed great delight at the overthrow of the Assad government.  One has to assume that the French were somehow involved in this.  Certainly the CIA must have been involved. The first CIA effort at regime change in Syria was in 1947 at the very moment of its inception.  And there were multiple efforts to overthrow governments in Syria and well before Bashar Al Assad took power.  I think that was in the 1960s and multiple efforts to change that regime. They all failed. There were efforts of course to change the Bashar Al Assad regime, to overthrow it. Hillary Clinton and others famously advocated that the United States CIA spent about 5 billion dollars in training of various groups including this one to overthrow the regime, presumably on behalf of Israeli security interests which have been foremost in the minds of the Biden Administration, and certainly the incoming Trump Administration promises nothing if not more of the same, maybe more –  even less nuanced.

So as I said there are many foreign hands in this.  Precisely what role was played by whom is a little bit murky still.  But finally, the effort to engineer regime change in Syria has been achieved.

Let me just make another couple of comments.

What we do not know at all is what the future Syria will look like.  The objectives of the various parties have been different.  The objective of the United States in the 1950s was to prevent the communists from taking over.  In other words, Soviet influence in Syria.  We have been against the Russian presence in Syria more recently.

The Israeli objective has been to fragment Syria into its component ethnic and linguistic parts so that it would not pose a threat. This would be a classic divide and rule technique.

The Turkish emphasis has been, well, first, varied over the years. Sometimes good relations with Syria when Turkey had a policy of no problems with its neighbors.  Sometimes violent opposition to Assad. The current Turkish interests which have been at play in this dramatic set of events include not only the elimination of the Syrian Kurdish factions that are allied with the terrorist PKK in Turkey and the removal of them from the Turkish border, but the return to Syria of the roughly 5 million Syrian refugees who are in Turkey.

And I think Mr Erdogan tried very hard to make peace with Mr Assad mostly in the interest of removing the refugees from Turkish soil, but when Assad balked he unleashed this force that his troops had been training. But, you know, I don’t know.

One thing is clear. As I said at the outset this is a major victory for the Israeli government of Netanyahu in terms of eliminating regional rivals and opening a path directly to an attack on Iran, which the Iranians must now devise a new method of deterring.

This accords with the Biden Administration objectives which have been very much supportive of Israel even in its genocide in Gaza. In its no effective reaction to the pograms and ethnic cleansing efforts in the West Bank and support for Israeli’s invasion of Lebanon.

And I can say if the biggest winner of this has been the Netanyahu government in a military sense, we should also remember that that government has done so many hateful things that it has made it the most hated society and country on the planet and it has also sacrificed international law – every last shred of it – with the cooperation of Western powers, and it has destroyed the reputation of the West in the rest of the world for any kind of principled approach to humanitarian issues.

So the costs to Israel in the long run are huge but the military advantages that it has gained are quite substantial.

PL: How is it possible that this happened? Like an ultra islamist group is taking over these parts of Syria that were actually cooperating with Iran and with Hezbollah in order to oppose the genocide that’s going on in Gaza. I mean there was an element of pan Muslim solidarity – not from all parts – and we see that right now there’s a very particular part of Islam that obviously doesn’t actually care. Not only doesn’t care but uses a strategic opportunity in order to fall into the back and I think this is what shocks the Iranians the most that at this moment it is like through Turkey, through an islamist group, that the support for Hezbollah and so on is being cut off, which were really together with Yemen the only ones who tried militarily to assist the the Palestinians.  How do you make sense of this? That it is Islam islamists who are now trying to find an accord with Israel?

CF: It is… Well, I should have mentioned when I earlier spoke of the CIA assistance to this group that it’s very ironic that there’s a $10 million bounty on the head of Mr Al Julani from the CIA. So one assumes that this is now going to be the subject of bargaining with him that the United States will offer to take this bounty off his head. In return for what?
For a removal of the Russian presence perhaps. I don’t know.

I mean the Russians are now in a bargaining as you mentioned with the new authorities about their base and particularly the Naval Base. And we don’t know what will happen but that has been important to Russia in its diplomacy in West Asia, its influence. And it is the only warm water port that Russia really possesses. So this is important to the Russians.

I think we don’t know whether, as I said, you know, we don’t know whether Syria will now be united under this Salafist regime which claims to have a kind of tolerance that it had never previously displayed.  The Alawite group, which is a group of really rather heretical Shia Muslims that Bashar Al Assad belongs to must now be very frightened about what will happen.  The Iranians have always regarded the Bashar Al Assad regime as the best regime in Syria, as secular apostate not really Shia, not really associated with Islam, and while it is true that Hezbollah, which is now withdrawn from Syria by the way, apparently withdrawn its troops which had backed the regime of Assad.

It’s true that Hezbolllah and others were backing the Palestinians in Gaza, but basically Assad did nothing on this score, and in fact he tolerated repeated Israeli air strikes on supply lines going through Syria to Hezbollah …

So I think there are a huge number of questions now and I know that Israel has reacted opportunistically to the chaos in Syria by seizing the demilitarized zone that the UN was managing between Syrian forces and its own in the Golan Heights. It has taken the opportunity to Annex more Arab land in effect.  And I don’t know, the UN you know is so sidelined that I haven’t heard anything from Secretary General Guterres about this and yet basically Israel has once again thumbed its nose at the United Nations and resolutions, the resolution that created that demilitarized zone was a Security Council resolution supposedly binding on all members.

So there are a lot of loose ends here and it will take some time for them to be untied or unraveled or whatever the proper word is.

PL: So what do you think will happen on the humanitarian side – whether the Alawites will now see mass persecution?

CF: That’s something nobody can foretell probably, because on the one hand you’re right, the regime that is taking over now is famous for not respecting human rights. On the other hand they are promising that they will do it.  So who knows whether they are actually going over and beyond themselves?

PL: But with Iran,  Iran is now properly isolated aren’t they. Like this is, they have been cut off from their major um allies, clients if you will?

CF: I mean there’s always been a great deal of nonsense spoken about Hezbollah and Hamas and so on. These are independent-minded organizations that reflect the views of the populations they represent. In the case of Hezbollah it is demonstrably independent of Iran.  Iran has actually historically been more of a restraining Force on Hezbollah than anything else. But of course now Hezbollah is on its own basically.  And so we don’t know what will happen there.

Iran now faces a Trump Administration coming into power in Washington which is the second coming of the regime that overrode the Security Council approved JCPOA or nuclear deal with Iran. Iran might well – that probably will increase the likelihood of Iran trying a nuclear breakout in the near future.

And of course we’re in an interregnum in the United States. We have a President who falls asleep at meetings with African leaders in Luanda, thus demonstrating that he is quite as senile as many people have thought, and incompetent.

And we have Donald Trump who is full of ignorant prejudices, I should say, rather than deep knowledge about Foreign Affairs, who has just threatened almost the entire world with a tariff war, and whose main interest in West Asia seems to be to have the Israelis wind up the whole thing.

So, I don’t know what happens now.  But if I were Iranian I would be rethinking everything that I have been doing.  And the irony there of course is that Pezeshkian, the new Iranian president, is a moderate who wanted to reach out to the west and was looking for compromise.  And he’s now been put in a position where compromise is utterly impossible.

PL: If you look at the people – the pics for the incoming administration of Donald Trump, despite that he promised not to put in there the same people who led him to belligerent acts in the past, it seems to me that all that the new Administration will probably do – and these people are not confirmed yet – but their names are out – most of the new cabinet are actually just as much Hawks or neocons as before, just not Hawks in relation to Ukraine. That’s actually the kind of.. the consensus seems to be that they want to wind down this war, but the other people that are coming in seem to me people who want to either have a war with Iran or a war with China. So it seems you exchange one for another. What’s your impression?

CF: I don’t think that’s a wrong analysis at all.  The people who are coming in are belligerent.  They’re proponents of the use of force except in Ukraine.  I think they have a concept of trying to turn Russia against China.  Which is something that is I don’t think going to happen.  But I don’t think they have thought through the endgame in Ukraine.

The meeting in Paris just now between president- elect Trump and Mr Zelinski apparently was accompanied by some fairly tough language about negotiating a ceasefire and so on but I don’t think the Russians want a ceasefire.  I don’t think they want a demilitarized zone in Ukraine. I think they want a peace in Europe.

And they want a peace with Ukraine and my own guess, and I have said this elsewhere, is that we are in for a Korean conflict scenario in which, as the Chinese say, you know fighting goes on while the negotiations attempt to arrange an Armistice or something further.

But I don’t think the Russians want an Armistice. I don’t think they want a DMZ which would leave Europe in a position of constant tension and potential Warfare and not provide for their security in a way that they demanded two and a half years ago when they – well it’s almost three now I guess – when they issued an ultimatum demanding negotiation of a European security architecture that would reassure them as well as the West.

So I think we’re in for something in Ukraine that probably resembles nothing so much as the peace of Westphalia, which took I think three years and was conducted in multiple forums.  And they’re different issues you know. I mean there is, the Ukrainians and Russians have to work out a border between them.  Nobody else can do that for them. We can offer advice. We can complicate the process.  But in the end Moscow and Kyiv need to work that out.  The question of minority rights in Ukraine which touches on the oecd rules and guarantees of linguistic and cultural autonomy for minorities, along the lines of the Austrian State treaty if you wish, needs to be addressed in a broader context I think the oecd, the EU, major countries in Europe, have an interest in that.  Certainly the Russians have an interest.  Hungarians, the Romanians, who have minorities in Ukraine who’ve been oppressed have an interest in that.

So that’s yet another forum and then there’s finally the issue of the United States, Russia, NATO, major European powers sitting down to try to work out some broader framework for peace in Europe.

All of this is extremely difficult and we have now just this morning it’s Sunday here in the United States still, just this morning, we had Donald Trump reiterate his willingness to withdraw from NATO if he doesn’t think the balance of payments connected with NATO is sufficiently generous.

I think he has a point.  You know we are what, 75 years, oh almost 80 years, after the end of World War II, coming up on 80 years after the end of World War II and why is it that Europeans are incapable of defending themselves?  Why is it that Europeans defer to power across the Atlantic for every important decision?

Well of course it’s easy to do that but I can understand the reason that the right-wing in the United States says why should we be carrying this burden.  Well of course from the European point of view we’ve not just been carrying the burden but we’ve been getting Europe into trouble by the leadership that we have displayed.

Anyway, I think we are at a moment in which multiple things in West Asia, the Middle East, if you will, in Eurasia, in Europe are all in flux and it would be very interesting – that’s too mild a word – to see how this all plays out.

A final note, Pascal if I may, my sense is that they – China – have cleared the decks for an operation against Taiwan. I don’t think they’ve made a decision to do that.  But I know that they’ve made peace with India in a sense where they’ve removed the danger of a diversionary attack on their southwestern border with Tibet.  They have consolidated their relationship with Russia.  They have increased the cooperation with Russia on both technology and military operations, as well as intelligence, and they have just basically answered American economic warfare with their own economic warfare.

They had previously not responded to sanctions in kind now they are.  And so it looks to me as though they’re ready politically – if not yet militarily – to take on this issue of bringing the Chinese Civil War to an end, in reuniting China.

Now I know that there is now a lot of talk by the Chinese also, and this is important, that pacific Asia – which is the term I prefer because I think Indo Pacific is a fraud as a concept – Pacific Asia is very much a Chinese sphere of economic influence.

Anyway every country in the region with the possible exception of Japan, although I think Japan is divided, every country in the region is looking for an accommodation with China, would like American backing for that, but don’t want to make a choice between China and the United States.  Japan may be an exception.

In that regard this is a very fluid moment both in Europe and in Pacific Asia and now in West Asia. And I won’t talk about Latin America, but I could make the case there too that the Outpost of Western Civilization is also in a state of flux.

PL: You took my last question and already answered it – because I wanted to ask what do you think that China is going to make out of this?  But maybe just as a last point, because China had a West Asian strategy and that was basically trying to stabilize things by brokering an accord between Iran and Saudi Arabia, that was a big deal. Do you think the current events are now going against that strategy of China basically trying to have a terrain for its trade relationships? Is this also a setback for China, or what do you think Beijing makes out of this?

CF: I don’t think it’s a setback for China, because the Chinese relationship with Syria, although it was proper, was never very cordial or intensive. There are a lot of people who have looked to China to rebuild Syria. Perhaps Chinese commercial interests will come into play and that will happen.  But the main interest that the Chinese have strategically at this point is the distraction of the United States by events in West Asia. And the United States is now thoroughly distracted.

We keep trying to Pivot away from West Asia toward Pacific Asia. And events in West Asia are mostly the product of our Israeli friends continuously frustrating our desire to redeploy.

So you mentioned, you know maybe the incoming Administration although it is determined it says to reduce involvement with Ukraine – I’m not so sure about that actually – but whether if it is indeed so determined, then it is not going to be, it is not determined to get out of the Middle East.  And we remain – I remember in one of the first encounters with Zhou Enlai when we opened our relationship with China, which I remember vividly being an old man, he talked about the Soviet Union as overextended. And he said it was like a man trying to kill 10 fleas simultaneously with 10 fingers. And I think that pretty much describes the situation of the United States as we fail to deal, fail to adjust to the reduction in our power and influence and basically implode in terms of our International relationships.

Tariffs protectionism is a – it is two things. First it is a recognition that you are not competitive and you require a tariff barrier to restore competitiveness, or to protect you from it. And second it is a means of isolating yourself from the world. It reduces interaction with the rest of the world.  It is not a positive means of competing at all and yet this is the course that we’re embarked upon.

Clearly there’s no reason to doubt Mr Trump that when he says that he equates trade imbalances with subsidies to foreign societies – you know he said we are subsidizing Canada – well because we have a trade in balance, this is a very peculiar way to look at things.  But anyway, he has strong opinions which most economists find absurd but which he doesn’t change.  So I think very clearly we’re headed toward a period of Greater conflict in our relationships with Europe, because the Tariff barriers that we put up will greatly affect Europe.

I think the Chinese see an opportunity with Europe and they have not given up on trying to enlist Europe in a non-American Global framework. And again this is very interesting. I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I don’t think anybody does at this point.  But everything is in motion everywhere, and I’ve not seen anything like this in my lifetime.

PL: Dangerous times.  Let’s hope we get out of it Ambassador Freeman .. thank you very much for your time today.