Tim Anderson - The Dirty War on Syria (2015, 2016)

Tim Anderson: I don't want to cover a lot of the same ground that Jay covered politically, but I do want to say some things politically and mix it in with a little bit of everyday life because I think sometimes some of the things that Dave was saying I think are interesting about... The idea that you have, and it's a funny way to express it because it's true that people in Syria say, look, this is normal life. And I think, yeah, actually it's not normal life. But it's sort of everyday life. You know what I mean? Everyday life goes on. But it's not normal, of course. Children go to school. I remember the first trip I had to Syria in 2013. At New Year, there was a headline saying, great victory against terrorism. Four million children go to school. And I thought, that's interesting. What are they saying there? Because the campaigns by the NATO and Gulf Arab-backed Islamists has been precisely to destroy the hospitals. By 2013, they'd attacked 3 quarters of all hospitals. Why? To get the confidence of the people? No. Destroyed the state, more likely. They were attacking the schools, the universities. They had pamphlets in Aleppo in 2013, a joint pamphlet from Jalal al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army saying, don't send your children to the university until the regime falls. And then they rocketed the university, killed 80 people and blamed it on the government. And that's been a pattern I've been following as a researcher for the last four years. Now here's the two stories you've got. The one on the right you'll be familiar with. There is a debate going on there, whether it was Q&A the other night or any other article you've been reading for the last four years, that we have to fix the problems of Iraq or of Syria, the imperial prerogatives I call it, which of course has no basis in international law. It has no basis in international human rights. But it's sort of become a part of the furniture and we're used to hearing that sort of thing. And then from that we get this heroic Western mission to save oppressed people from their brutal dictators. Whether it's genuine brutal dictators, Saddam Hussein, or the false stories they told about Mama Gaddafi in Libya, which they then retracted after Gaddafi had been assassinated. The shifting pretext initially, there was the idea there was a secular revolution which the West was going to support. Then when it was clear that most of the pre-Syrian army, they said we are all Jabhat al-Nusra, then it was clear that they were Islamists, then they said well these are the pious Sunnis, the moderate rebels. And now with the creation of the super Islamist, the ISIS or whatever you want to call it, there's this renewal of what Bush regime started in 2001, which was the war on terror to protect the world or the United States from terror. So a series of shifting pretexts really for people who are put in that region. The violence, as it's reported, you'll only really see the violence from the Syrian government as being indiscriminate or targeted attacks on civilians. That's really all you'll read of the operations of the Syrian Arab Army, as it's called, from this side. And occasionally the atrocities of some of the extremist groups. The endgame, and there's a paper out by one of the big think tanks in the US at the moment, The end game, which is really, to me, a plan B, because they haven't really succeeded. They lost a couple of years ago the idea of changing the regime in Damascus, is to look forward to some sort of dismemberment of the state. Israel's talking about annexing the Druze region in the south, and they're talking about cutting out the coast and some sort of Sunni region where ISIS is at the moment in the northwest of Syria. So that's the B story, which you're familiar with. I want to put that to one side and stay with the A story, which is that The one which I introduced, that there are proxy armies of sectarian fighters who have been trying to destroy non-compliant regimes across the region in the last four years. They succeeded in Libya. They thought they could succeed in Syria. They haven't succeeded in Syria for a couple of reasons. One, because Syria has some strong allies. Iran and Russia for one thing. And another thing is the Syrian army and the Syrian people has got behind their army. And that's the most popular. Father Dave said Bashar al-Assad is very popular. It's true he's popular. It's true there's a personality cult. It's also true that he's genuinely popular. But the one thing more popular than Bashar al-Assad is the Syrian army at the moment there. And the displaced people in Syria will always go to the army areas, including the families of the jihadists. So in Soweto, for example, our friends have overheard some of them saying, look, we've got everything we need here and so on, but there's all these kupa, you know, these unbelievers around us here, basically. But they go to the army areas to get protection there. You know that the disarmament and regime change operations in the region have been going on for 14 years now. Every last one of them has had serious lies about them. You recall there was a mass destruction in Iraq. You may or may not have looked at the Libyan situation there. Jay mentioned the attempt by Israel in 2006 to disarm Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon that failed basically. The 14-year attempt to disarm Iran or to impose sanctions on it has just recently failed. That's very interesting because it means that the voice of Iran, the second biggest country in the region after Egypt, is now going to be very important in regional politics. In my view, the aim has been, first of all, to get regime change for a compliant regime, and failing that, to dismember the state or disarm it, and really there's something very similar happening in Iraq, it's happening in Syria, along those sorts of lines. In the background of the slide is one of several that's been drawn up in the US of the idea to dismantle the country, a second Sykes-Picot plan, they call it. And the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and in the region has a similar idea to the North Americans along those sorts of lines. To further break down the states, but to break them into small sectarian states. In that sort of context, of course, Israel as a sectarian state would have much more legitimacy too. The violence is really daily. Father Dave mentioned you didn't hear too many bombings when we were there. It's true, actually. When I was there two years ago, every morning I heard mortar and artillery exchange on the eastern part of Damascus. This time, it was occasionally, not so much. They pushed them back somewhat. They hadn't got rid of them. And the interesting thing for me was, although I'd been studying for four years, in 2013, we did travel to the north of the country, to Latakia, And then we went and we flew up there. And the, they call them Taqiris, the sectarian groups there were in Malula, the old Christian town at the time. They were still in the Kalamon Mountains on the Lebanese border. They were in parts of Homs. They hadn't been completely driven out of Homs by then. And the road to south, to Soweto, was too dangerous for us to go there. I had to abandon the trip because of that. This time, I went to Soweto from Damascus. We drove up through Homs to Tartus, to the Taqir, and on the way back, we did one detour around an area that was north of Damascus where there was fighting. So something strange was going on because what we were hearing here was there were these advances by the Islamic State in the last two years. Certainly that's true in they occupied Raqqa for some time. They moved into Palmyra. There was an invasion of groups from Turkey. But the actual security situation in the major cities was better than it was two years ago. And I wasn't expecting that. This is the evening of Eid in Damascus in the Hamidiyya market. Just to say that in summer, it's extremely hot in Damascus in summer, people stay at home in the afternoon, they come out in the evening. This is about midnight in the evening. And I was surprised to see, for example, in the Old City, and then we went back to the Mezzah area up on the hill there, two o'clock in the morning, tens of thousands of people in the streets going out to eat. Amazing. sort of slice of everyday life, but in the middle of this wall. The character of the conflict, I would say, to simplify it, is you've got... They tried to hide it at the beginning, but basically all of the groups fighting against the government are sectarianist movements. They want some sort of caliphate. They squabble amongst each other from time to time. But ideologically, the Syrian army, the Syrian Arab army, comes from all the different communities in Syria, and Syria's an extremely pluralist place. One thing that impressed me a lot on the first trip to Syria two years ago was that The old mosque in the centre of Damascus. In stone it has a whole lot of multicultural aspects. It's 1300 years old. It's got the minaret of Jesus Christ. It's got stars of David. It's got the remains of John the Baptist. It's got all the different groups within Islam there. And it's got the Temple of Jupiter out the front from the Romans. So all of this stuff has survived a very long period of time to say that while there's been sectarianism in the region, particularly from the Gulf monarchies, there's been pluralism in the region as well. That pluralism is very deep. And the army represents that sort of pluralism because one thing that Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father, instilled in people was to say, you are Syrian, and they resent you if you say, you are Syrian, you are Shia, you are Druze. They actually resent people doing that. It's been instilled in them that everyone is Syrian and everyone is a part of this state. And that's what people see in the army there. Are they grippled with the armed groups? Yes. Do they kill prisoners? Yes. Do they target civilians? No. I've investigated that. I've investigated a lot of the major issues. I'm not going to go into it now. I've just about to complete a book on this. And none of those claims about targeting civilians have had a substance to them. This is an area called Yushan, just north of Damascus, which is a safe area. Of course, there's a lot of security. There's checkpoints. There's checkpoints all around Syria. There's security as you go into these areas. There was a controversy when it was built last year because some people were saying, how come the government spends so much money opening a centre like this when people are suffering during the war? And the other side was, the war's been going on for four years. Family life goes on. And the interesting thing about this centre is, here we call it a commercial centre, but there, The centre of it is children's activities, rides and sports and things like that, and restaurants, and the commercial stuff you can see there at the top is sort of on the side. Very, very big. So this is midnight. Midnight, and there are tens of thousands of people using it. They're using it. Life goes on, even though the war goes on. This area's not getting more done. There's a lot of maps being put out about who controls what in Syria, and I've been reading them for a few years, and in my mind there's a big... methodological mistake in them. One is that they confuse control of territory with the presence in a territory. I think it's fair to say that most of Syria has a presence of terrorist armed groups fighting the army and attacking cities. But actual control of territory, it's relatively small. There's a northern part of Aleppo, perhaps 15-20% of Aleppo. Most of Raqqa and Palmyra recently was taken over. And there's some intense fighting going on in the east part of the desert and in inland next to Turkey because the Turkish government is allowing groups to keep flooding in from there. In the south around Dara, because Israel and Jordan are resupplying, giving refuge to them. And you saw the photo of Netanyahu with wounded Al-Qaeda groups there. Israel calls it humanitarian program. So despite all of that, the government seems to control the great majority of the populated areas. You know, all this part to the east is desert, basically. They're the major cities there. Damascus is said to have swollen to 8.5 million from about 5 million. So the displaced people, most of them, most of the refugees have moved within the country. There's 130,000 families that have gone from Dara to Sueda. Sueda was a mainly cruise area. Now it has another half a million Sunni families basically living in Sueda. So that's over a million. Latakia, which was about 1.3 million people four years ago, is now the second biggest city in Syria because it has more than 3 million people that have come there. Tartus has also grown enormously. So the coast has swollen, populations have swollen because they've come in from the areas along the Turkish border and from Aleppo where that fighting's been going on. But the government does control most of the populated areas. This is the independent Christian MP Maria Saleh in the Opera House. There's a photographic exhibition of the victims of terrorism in the Opera House and there was a conference we went along to on the victims of terrorism there. She's in the Parliament. There's been a slow move away from the one-party state in Syria since 2005. I suppose the most iconic... Symbol of that was a competitive presidential election last year in which everyone believed that Bashar al-Assad was going to win. But all of the enemy polls on the support for the president were pretty much the same. Whether you were talking to the Islamist fighters in Aleppo, the NATO consultants, anyone else, they said he had about 70% of the support in the country. And indeed, that's what the election showed. Tony there said it was 88% of the 73% turnout, which is about 64%, 65% of the whole eligible voting population. And as Father Dave said, there were huge traffic jams in Beirut. They clogged up central Beirut. And the Syrian embassy ran out of papers there for that participation. You don't have that sort of participation in the US. We do. We've got a compulsory system. In the US they don't, they had 50% turning out. There they had 73% in a war turning out. But the Western media ignores the opposition parties that decided to reject foreign military support and a military tax on the government basically. There was a thing called the Damascus Declaration of the Civil Opposition in 2005 which almost all the opposition groups were involved in. The Muslim Brotherhood pulled out of it fairly quickly But two of the principles in there was that we don't want a violent reform process, we want to keep the stability of the state to see the reforms go through. The president of the Syrian Social National Party, which is now in a coalition with the Ba'athist government, said the same thing from the beginning. They wanted a lot of those reforms, they supported the reform movement in 2011, but they didn't want the state to be destabilised there. So what ended up happening was, with the exception of the Kurds who had some of their own agenda in their part of Syria, all of the parts of the opposition that went into the armed insurrection were Muslim Brotherhood allied Salafi groups. And that's why you see the character of them all, the old pre-Syrian army groups which barely exist these days, but they all declared allegiance to the Al-Qaeda groups. This is part of old Damascus, Bab Shaki, which was a Jewish quarter. And in the eastern part of the city, this one does get mortared. In Bab Tuma, the Christian area in Bab Shaki, they get mortared. It used to be almost every day. It's not quite so much now because they've pushed the nuclear assault fighters from maybe the Islamic Front in Jabhat al-Nusra back towards Douma out of Joba but they haven't cleared it. Maybe there was 20 or 30,000 armed fighters in that area around Douma at the moment where they were saying civilians were being barrel bombed. There are no civilians in Douma except those that want to be there or the families of the fighters that are there basically because it's been occupied for at least three years. Similar with the far northern part of Aleppo basically. They pushed them back somewhat from that area. There are still mortars that come in from the Jobar area into this part of Damascus. This, by the way, is Straight Street, via Rector in the Bible, that one there. And off to one side, you've got the oldest Christian church in the world where St. Paul was baptised. So this sort of... The antiquities are everywhere, basically, in Syria. And you can see the two women on the top balcony looking out there. People don't want to leave old Damascus. I asked a friend about the rents there. They haven't gone down despite the war, despite the fact that they get shelled there. This is something that Father Dave talked about, the outskirts of Yarmouk, the Palestinian camp. They call it a camp, really. It's a suburb of Damascus. It's been established there for a very long time, I think around 60 years. There were 150,000 people living there. It's almost a ghost town now. There's less than 10,000 people in there now. Most of them have gone out to other parts of Damascus, basically. And this little family was only about 40 people in a school on the outskirts of Yarmouk. Now, the checkpoint, you see there, you're not meant to take pictures of the checkpoint, but I snuck one in, basically. The checkpoints are heavier around Yarmouk because they've got a cordon around there basically. The army has a cordon around there and the army doesn't go in but there are Palestinian militia that are loyal to the army that work with the army that go in and try and resolve the issue there. What happened in April this year was that there was a militia that Hamas had in there and they kept inviting Jabhat al-Nusra in to make it work with them. and there was a few agreements, they went out again and they came and you have a few snipers and all the traffic basically grinds to a halt. They can't get aid in there if there's snipers in there. So what that Hamas armed group, I've forgotten its name, did was they invited Jabhat al-Nusra. Jabhat al-Nusra invited in ISIS coming from the south, from Jordan, and basically they attacked the Hamas armed group. The Hamas armed group split three ways. Some of them were killed, some of them joined ISIS, and some of them went and sought refuge with the army. They effectively destroyed, the Hamas armed group effectively destroyed or joined one side or the other, basically. So it is an ISIS-occupied area. There may be something between 8,000 and 10,000 people there. So we went to the outskirts just to see a family, and Father Dave was doing that, doing some therapy for the kids, basically. Actually, the girls were one of the box as much as the boys. This is the aquatic centre we mentioned, the Fishery and Aquatic Centre. We were just waiting for something else to win in there. I think there was 2,000 kids in there learning to swim. Part of this idea that life isn't normal, but there's everyday sort of things going on in that context. The university is interesting to me because I, of course I work in a university, but I was surprised the first time I went a few years ago to find that the Fishery University, the second one we went to, the number of students is 150,000 in one campus. And we walked around the campus. This university has 60,000. This is one of the biggest universities in the country that's got 60,000. Tishtrain had 150,000. Damascus University, which we saw the Al-Qaeda groups had mortared it. They'd mortared the cafeteria and part of the architecture faculty. They killed, I think, 13, 14 students. two and a half years ago. But basically, and there's a memorial to those students here, but basically like what's going on, almost 200,000 students in Damascus University. Why? Because it's virtually free. Higher education is free there. We used to have it there. They're very poor there. But the higher education minister, and this is so different from someone who's in the university system, the higher education minister said to us two years ago that, yes, they did charge fees. There was about $10 a student had to pay a year. And they were very proud of that and they're going to keep doing that. So that level of participation then is extremely high. And the level of education is very high. I have to say, in Arabic, I think that because Arabic is so strong, maybe it squeezes out the other languages, but their commitment to culture and education is extraordinary. So large groups of young people are very well educated. This is in the south of Syrian Square, which is a big volcanic mountain and quite distinct in an agricultural sense and geographically. Since life is going on, in fact, strangely enough, the economy is booming in these areas where large numbers of displaced people have gone to, like Latakia and Tartus. There's a huge building boom going on there. And Sweden also. There are shortages around the country. Those shortages apply to these areas too. But in terms of the traffic and the economic activity, the hotels are full in Latakia. Hotels are full. and the merchants coming from other parts are going there twice a week instead of once every two weeks because there's this huge population. There's unemployment, there's shortages, there's poverty, but somehow there are these shared services and infrastructure. Jay mentioned the loan GDP per capita, but the roads, the traffic, Bayard's full of garbage now, they won't collect the garbage. In Damascus things function somehow. People are short of things but somehow they're surviving. The salaries aren't enough for them to survive. Somehow they're getting social support there basically. So those safe areas have had this huge influx and I think the economic situation is significantly worse than it was two years ago. But somehow, because there are these very strong social bonds and social systems, people are not fracturing. The bottom one is, by the way, Roman columns of basalt there next to the corner store, more or less. So once again, you've got these antiquities that sort of go in and houses get built out of 2,000-year-old parts of old buildings. The good news from the point of view of the resistance, or the axis of resistance, as Jay pointed out, is that within the region, what Washington's been trying to do with Afghanistan, with Iraq, with Libya, is really fracturing. One, because of the Iran deal. The Iran deal, of course, lists the voice of the senior partner in that regional axis, and Iran's the second biggest country in the region. The Egypt went back to the status quo more or less after the Muslim, the briefly lived Muslim Brotherhood government because there was no other opposition organised basically but the army couldn't stand that sort of sectarianism. The Salafi sheikhs basically declared war on Syria from there. So they went back to the status quo of a military regime more or less but because they've got some similar problems to Syria they're slowly despite their involvement in Yemen at the moment, they're slowly warming up their diplomatic relationship. It was ever-growing, but that relationship is improving. They now support, Egypt now supports, for example, the integrity of Syria, not to break it up, they support the Syrian government's struggle against terrorism in the region there against the Muslim Brotherhood, of course. And in Turkey things are changing too because Turkey is not necessarily naturally an enemy of Syria, but the Erdogan government has seen itself as a leading figure in a Muslim Brotherhood-led region. That's now, the wheels are falling off that because he now has a majority in the Turkish parliament, they're going to another election. It seems like the measures that the Turkish government did in closing down some of the refugee camps in Turkey has contributed to that huge outgoing of refugees, which was largely going from Turkey, about half of it was going from Turkey to Greece, basically. That's where the big traffic was. But some of them have been in Turkey for a long period of time. And a lot of the fighters that had refuge in Turkey also were going across with them. United Arab Emirates, which Vice President Joe Biden said were one of the groups funding, admitted were one of the groups funding ISIS about a year ago, they're now improving their status because there's a group now that's arrested a few dozen sectarian groups that wanted to overthrow the despotic monarchy with a despotic sectarian state. So they're shifting a little bit there. And Lebanon, of course, there's a strong ally there in Hezbollah which has helped Syria in recent times shut down the secure Lebanese border in the Colombo Mountains. The last element of that was Zabadani, which the last of the fighting was going on there as we were there. Basically, they surrounded the town, they were letting people get out, screening them as they went out, and then as they've been finishing off that operation now, the Islamist groups are saying, oh, they're barrel bombing civilians there, basically, because that's their last... We visited soldiers in hospital who were wounded in that operation. In other words, they didn't go in and carpet-bomb Sabadani. They haven't gone in and carpet-bomb Duma, who's been occupied for three years. They haven't gone in and carpet-bomb the north of Aleppo. A lot of Syrians wish they would. They've said it to us. Why don't they just go in and do that? But they've really done it at a street level of fighting, which it would... which their training is mainly coming from Iran, by the way. A lot of Syrian soldiers have gone to Iran to be trained in that sort of house-to-house fighting style. So things are turning in the region, and I think that looks good. I want to end up here just with... And then we'll take questions for any of the speakers except Wren. This last thing, we went to... We went to do an interview in Syrian television. On the way up there was a vigil for a journalist, Ali al-Ashlani, who was killed the previous day. He was with the army and there was a mortar which killed several soldiers and that journalist there. But there's a memorial out front of Syrian TV of all of the Syrian journalists that have been killed by Western-backed terrorists basically. This is something that doesn't get mentioned in the Western media. I've found, as someone writing a lot on the Syrian crisis in the last four years, that there's an incredible exclusion of anything that's really favourable to, it used to be Iran, now things have turned around a bit with Iran, with Syria, with Hezbollah. Criticism of Washington, yes. Criticism of Tel Aviv, yes. Anything that seems like it's, in a war circumstance, that seems like it's favouring an enemy, an absolute exclusion there. That's all for now. Thanks very much.

Speaker 2: Welcome to another edition of Missing Link. And my guest today is Dr. Tim Anderson, Senior Lecturer from the University of Sydney in Australia.

Tim Anderson: Thank you.

Speaker 2: You're an expert on the Middle East, especially in Syria.

Tim Anderson: I'm not really an expert on the Middle East. Really, my field of study is in independent states in the Pacific and in Latin America. But in the course of doing that, I've studied imperial interventions. So the interventions of the big powers into independent states was my area. And then when the wars of the last few years came along, I became very interested in Syria.

Speaker 2: I noticed from your university courses that you gave that you're rather from a different angle, but now you are one of the foremost experts on the Syrian situation. You also drew a lot of criticism for that, from your point of view.

Tim Anderson: Yes, I think that the criticism is really because academics are not meant to get involved in serious conflicts when they're happening. To rake over the coals when they're over, that's permissible. In fact, you see now, for example, in a very conservative journal, Foreign Affairs in the US, there's some quite critical material on the intervention in Libya. and the falsehoods that were told about former President Gaddafi, because Libya no longer matters in a sense politically to Washington. So it seems like the permission that is open for people to go and rake over the coals of Libya is there, whereas Syria is still an ongoing conflict. And so there's a lot of second guessing and constraints of debates and borders and a great fear of how a controversy, an academic controversy might reflect on those institutions, on those universities and affect their reputation. So it is, as they say, a hot potato still in academia.

Speaker 2: We noticed we have contact with several people who touched hot potatoes and got into a lot of trouble. So it seems that the freedom of science in academia is in the same situation really as the freedom of the press and the media. Would you agree that we are under more pressure than let's say 30 years ago?

Tim Anderson: It's hard for me to make that exact link with 30 years ago, but because in a sense, during the Cold War, for example, there were indeed heavy constraints. I think perhaps it's correct to say that the sophistication of propaganda today is greater than it's ever been. And one of the concerns for me as an educator I'm a teacher as well as a researcher in academia, is that we have the most highly formally educated populations in the world these days in human history, and yet the levels of propaganda are more powerful than they've ever been. The techniques, the comprehensiveness, even though we have, for example, access to the internet and to other sources, but the average person doesn't access a wide range of sources. So there are huge constraints on public debate, and I agree with what you said, that the the types of pressures and the censorship and the manipulation of debate that happens in the media, in the corporate media and in what they sometimes call the mainstream media, is replicated in academia to a fair degree while those big conflicts are underway.

Speaker 2: Let's get into Syria first. I have several questions on that later on. But where should we start? In your book, which I highly recommend, by the way, it's a shockful with facts on things that you rarely have heard, and it's a good overview about the whole situation. although it's depressing in a way to read it. One thing that I noticed was that in 2003, you said there was in the Bush government, Condoleezza Rice, there was talk about creative disaster. Now that the invasion of Iraq had happened, they were thinking for the next country to become a victim, really, for what I would call a new colonial policy in Northern Africa. But please expand on that and explain to our viewers the core situation.

Tim Anderson: I think you're right to say it's a new colonial policy. I believe it was around 2005, a little while after the invasion of Iraq and when it seemed that the US had made its mark on and was dominating the new Iraqi state that was beginning to emerge, that the fears of collaboration between Baghdad and Iran became a cause of alarm for Washington and so they were rather determined to set about a policy which would allow them to continue their what I really call a spree through the Middle East, through the entire Middle East. It was spoken of as in the Pentagon earlier than that, even after around the time of the invasion of Afghanistan, that they intended to overthrow seven governments in five years. Iraq, of course, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were the first two steps there. Iran was on the list, Syria was on the list, Libya was on the list, some of the countries in northern Africa were on the list. But it was around 2005-2006 that al-Qaeda makes its entrance into Iraq, initially through what was supposedly an Iraqi staffed al-Qaeda, which didn't exist under Saddam Hussein. But within a very short space of time, had Saudi finance, had Saudi membership, there was a find of documents by the US Army on the Sinjar, on an Iraqi border, they call them the Sinjar documents, which showed that about half of the members of al-Qaeda in Iraq were from Saudi Arabia directly. And the aim of that overall project, what I believe was called creative destruction or creative chaos, the construction of a, quote, new Middle East, unquote, as you said, put forward by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, that idea was to have states compliant with the US, not a separate bloc that was against Israel, for example, and wasn't... any sort of independent force in the Middle East, basically. Really, it's a pattern of past empires that they wanted to dominate entire regions. They didn't just want access to resources. They wanted to control the terms that everyone else had access to resources. They wanted to exclude potential competitors, in this case, Russia, China, perhaps a reconfigured Europe on a different basis that wasn't completely transatlantic, as they call it over here. So in that sense, Syria, Libya were another step along the way, which the opportunity of 2011 opened up that possibility.

Speaker 2: In operational terms, it seems that the way it was done in Libya is similar to what happened in Syria. It seems to follow a pattern. Maybe you can explain about that.

Tim Anderson: Indeed, that's true, that really these were not direct invasions as were Afghanistan and Iraq. Each of those of course had their own particular pretexts. In the case of Afghanistan it was supposedly the failure of negotiations over extraditing suspects for the atrocity in New York in 2001. the pretext we all know about in Iraq was some attempt at unilateral disarmament with a number of lies told about that. When the events in Egypt and Tunisia of late 2010, early 2011 took place, there was indeed an upheaval, a political upheaval or a political process in a number of other states, but they were all quite different states. So, for example, Syria was entirely different to Egypt, entirely different to Tunisia, for example. But there was indeed political foment in all of those sorts of countries. But what happened in Libya and Syria, if you look at the evidence and after this many years now, we have a good deal of independent evidence and evidence by way of admissions by the warring parties, for example, which is, I think, The way that Western audience should try and come and understand this is not through the partisan stories, the partisan narratives, but through the independent evidence and through the admissions of the warring parties. There were Islamist uprisings in both of those countries coordinated through a couple of networks, one being the Muslim Brotherhood Network, which extends between Egypt and Syria in particular, and to some extent in Palestine. And the other one, a network through the Wahhabist agents, or let's say through the financial networks of Saudi Arabia in particular, some of the other Gulf states too, which armed the, what were they called, peaceful protesters around the Al-Amari Mosque in Syria in March 2011, which armed the peaceful protesters in Benghazi, which were really Salafi snipers, which targeted civilians and police alike, then blamed on the government. That was similar in Libya and Syria. Indeed, after the overthrow of the Libyan government, the arms from Libya were shipped across to the Salafis, that is to say the extremist Islamists, financed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar for example, later on Turkey in the case of Syria. There was direct coordination between those two sets of events. And we know now that the Islamic State set up its operatives in Libya as it did in Syria later on. But that was the idea of an Islamic State, the idea of a Salafi caliphate was spoken of in Iraq before that. And we now know from US intelligence that in the early days of the Syrian conflict, for example, US intelligence was saying, this is from a DIA document in August 2012, that a Salafist state in eastern Syria was, quote, exactly, unquote, what the Western powers supporting the Syrian opposition wanted in order to weaken Damascus. So whatever was said publicly by the Western powers, by Washington over all that time about popular uprisings and the moderate rebels and all these sorts of things, we know that from the beginning in Syria, as with Libya, that the Western powers wanted to create sectarian divisions to weaken the states there, to destroy those states.

Speaker 2: Which, especially in Syria, as far as I know that from people who've been there or even lived there, Syria was considered a very peaceful model because of the minority government from Assad, who was an Alawite, and Christians and Jews. That was the first incident, aside maybe from Lebanon a long time ago, that people were living in the same street, peaceful. And it could have been a model of what it had been. Also, Syria is a quite secular state. It's a strange occurrence that Iran and Syria on friendly terms being a Shiite and a Sunni state, but they have something in common and they have some dividing things. But one thing that I think is very important is that both have had no American basis and that seems to be one of the governing factors. Would you agree or what is your take on that?

Tim Anderson: Yes, broadly speaking, yes. I mean, Syria was and still is the only real pluralist state in the region. Israel, you have a sectarian religious state. The Gulf monarchies are not really nations in any respect. Iran is a type of theocracy with democratic elements. You're right. The relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria have always been very strong, interestingly, always, from the very beginning. The Muslim Brotherhood appealed to the Iranian leadership after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 for help against Hafez al-Assad in Syria, and the Iranians didn't even reply to them. didn't even reply to them. So yes, secularism is also the term that they use, the Arabic equivalent of it. But my reading of it is that I think even in the West, we have different ideas of what secularism is. But I believe in the Arab countries, secularism really means pluralism. That is to say, not anti-religious, but really contemplating a mixture of religions, whether majority or minority. and Syria was famous for a long time indeed for centuries for being a pluralist state a melting pot at the crossroads more or less and a number of minorities like the Druze for example are said to have wanted to be there precisely in a place where there was broad acceptance of minorities so there's a huge number of minorities, some of them very small, in Syria and that's been notable for a long period of time. Of course with the presence of Israel, the Jewish community in most of the Arab states has sort of been diminishing because that's been induced to go and strengthen Israel. But it's true to say that Syria was and constitutionally still is the one genuinely pluralist state in the region. There were some things that people didn't like about Syria, of course. This is why there was indeed political foment, for example. Of course, it was an authoritarian state. Remember, it's been at war with Israel formally for many decades. It's had Islamist insurrections, the last one about 30 years before the one in 2011, and sharing a lot of common ground. That is to say, snipers begin an insurrection from the roofs of a city, killing police and civilians, blaming it on the government, bringing in the army and so on. So the Islamist insurrection in Hama in 1982 really was a good place to begin with studying what really happened in Daraa in March 2011, which is where I began my serious study of the Syrian conflict, really. Syria has always had a very important central role there and from the other side, from the western side, or let's say from the US side at least, from the US side the relationship between Iran, Syria and the southern Lebanese led by Hezbollah has been seen as a threat to Israel basically and Syria being the conduit between Iran, the big power in the region, and southern Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance there. So you're right to say that Syria and Iran are the only nations without U.S. bases basically there. That's an indication that the U.S. influence is much weaker in those countries and Syria being the central country is in many respects I think as the Hillary Clinton emails recently revealed the war on Syria has been an attempt to knock out the central link there between Palestine the Hezbollah and Iran, for example, to weaken that link, what they themselves call the axis of resistance in the region.

Speaker 2: So if we look at the players there, then we have Saudi Arabia, who once was in struggle with Iran as the major power.

Tim Anderson: Yes, but remember also that Saudi Arabia was passed over by the British to the North Americans in the 1950s as a sectarian force which could be used to divide the Arabs and create conflicts between, say, the Persians and the Arabs or between different sects, Muslim sects basically. So the Saudis had been effectively in the employ of the British since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the US in the 50s, President Eisenhower in particular, took over effectively the management of Saudi specifically at that time to create a counter force to Arab nationalism because back in the 1950s, Nasser in Egypt was the big inspiring force in the region.

Speaker 2: That's, again, something where NASA at that time, it was Ba'ath Party, which is there in all these countries in Iraq and Syria and Egypt. It had existed. That was something very different. It was kind of Arab socialism, which was the danger and the connection with the Soviets at that time. But if we go to that, so there seems to be an interest from several sides to dismantle Syria because Syria is a problem. And after Syria, you're probably, they want to go to Iran, do the same thing. And there are forces trying to do that. And then, so if that's the rough outline, what are the methods that have been applied? Because strangely enough, as we said, Libya was top ranking in terms of living standards, so to speak, in Africa. how many people went to university, how many women went to university.

Tim Anderson: That is, women was the highest in Africa.

Speaker 2: Yeah, highest in Africa and stillbirth. So death was very low with that. You could get loans from the government without interest rates. So it was very high and now it's very low. So the humanitarian intervention created a disaster. I think everybody agrees on that meanwhile. And now the same humanitarian intervention is applied to Syria. And that seems to be based on lies and, like in Iraq, on false pretext. And maybe, how did that come? I mean, first, the idea is strange that you are allowed to go into a country and turn the government over. That is something that is immediately accepted nowadays.

Tim Anderson: There has to be some pretext. Of course, it's against international law to intervene in that sort of way. So really, if we think of it from a principle point of view, the onus has to be on the intervening power to demonstrate some exceptional circumstance. And so this doctrine of humanitarian intervention or what's been called the responsibility to protect, which hasn't changed international law, but it's trying to bend international law, created this idea that you could create some sort of pretext that here was a mad dictator killing his own people. That myth had to be created. It didn't exist before 2011 in relation to Syria. In fact, every serious opinion poll or estimate, including from the enemies of Syria, before and during the conflict in Syria, have maintained that Bashar al-Assad is a very popular leader, basically. Al Jazeera, run by Qatar, one of the major financiers of terrorist groups in Syria, Their paper ran articles in January 2011 saying there was not likely to be any revolution in Syria because despite all the problems and the fact that people didn't like the secret police and so on, Bashar al-Assad was very popular. He was seen as an agent of change, an agent of political change and reform.

Speaker 2: Reform, really.

Tim Anderson: Before the presidential elections in 2014, The NATO consultants were telling NATO that 70% of the population supported Bashar al-Assad. That's really effectively what the presidential elections in mid-2014 showed too, even though the Western powers tried to write it off. But Western media agencies at the time had to admit, had to show the physical reality of the enthusiasm to participate in those elections. Behind the scenes they were admitting that this was the case basically. The fighters, the Islamist fighters themselves in Aleppo were reported in 2012 as saying that all of the population or most of the population was informing on them to the army. So this is a sort of hidden reality. There's been two stories. I describe it in the book which is now by the way in a German version as well as an English version. that there's always been an A and a B story here. The A story are the myths that have been created to try and justify or legitimise a broad NATO Gulf monarchy intervention in Syria. And the B story, which is what we should be able to ascertain from independent evidence and the admissions of the powers themselves, what has really been going on.

Speaker 2: One of the biggest points, really, that we heard a lot about the gassing of people, that President Assad is using barrel bombs on his population and using gas, and there are a lot of stories. Where these stories come from would be, or who transmits them, rather. That is another point that is interesting. But first, how true are these stories? What do you know in evidence?

Tim Anderson: Once again, I try and say in my book, because some of these myths are what I call existential myths. They're things that are very hard for Western audiences to accept if they have been following the narrative from the normal media sources they read. So I say, let's as Western people try and reflect on our colonial history that makes us try and legitimise these myths about the current enemy. Bashar al-Assad is the new Adolf Hitler in the world, basically. We never heard this before 2011. We never heard it. Ever since then, it's been, here's the creation of a monster, basically. If you examine closely, and this was really part of my motivation for writing this book, the East Gouda chemical weapons incident of August 2013, and the Hula massacre of May 2012, and a number of other massacres, we'll see that the evidence there simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. We'll see there's been a series of fabrications around those sorts of incidents. Now, taking the chemical weapons incident of August 2013, it fell apart almost immediately. There was evidence from Syria, from Jordan, from Turkey and from the United States of America. Some of the most devastating evidence against that accusation against the government was from scientists in MIT, from Seymour Hersh, the journalist who interviewed intelligence agencies saying it was fabrication. It didn't really... And there was, for example, the telemetry evidence that was relied on by the US government and by the New York Times and by Human Rights Watch to say that these rockets must have come from the Syrian army. The MIT scientist says that was impossible. They didn't have the range to reach the government controlled areas at that time, for example. But ever since that time, in the last three years, most of the Western media, the corporate media, has maintained this myth. They haven't really... Evidence hasn't been important. This is disappointing for people like myself who think that rationality, reason and evidence is important. Actually, the context for that was that the Islamist groups, which the Western media still calls rebels, had been using chemical weapons since the year before. They'd been exposed in the Western media and by one of the UN inspectors back in earlier in 2013 as using that sarin in particular, the nerve agent. And the chemical weapons inspectors who were in Damascus at that time were there at the invitation of the Syrian government to investigate a chemical weapons use by one of the banned international terrorist groups, Jabhat al-Nusra, in a part of Aleppo several months before when that provocation took place. It was a provocation. Many chemical weapons were used, but many circumstances of the incident were quite false. I dedicate a whole chapter of the book to the detail of that so people can look at the evidence.

Speaker 2: One of the details that I think was very interesting and never heard before that the Syrian government called in the UN to investigate these things. They did it.

Tim Anderson: They were in Damascus at the time that that incident took place in East Ghouta, which is countryside Damascus, just a few kilometers away, basically, maybe 10 kilometers away. So the Syrian government, even though they had some reasons to distrust the UN inspectors, because the Western powers dominate the UN and many of those agencies, and they'd really done a very bad biased report against the Syrians the year before. With an American leadership in that. That's right. With a co-chair North American leader. There was two UN investigations into a massacre of over 100 civilians earlier in 2012. The first one couldn't determine anything. The second one co-chaired by a North American diplomat. Without visiting Syria, without having any really much new evidence, they decided it was some unnamed supporters of the government there. So despite that history, the Syrian government invited UN chemical weapons inspectors to investigate the chemical weapons incident in a part of Aleppo. And at that time, that more notorious chemical weapons incident took place in an area where, by the way, the Syrian government is just taking back at this moment in the Greenbelt around the eastern part of Damascus.

Speaker 2: That leads to the point that what you describe is that there are several massacres which have been reported about in the media, but our media, according to you, have a very distorted way of depicting what's really going on. The facts are not right. And for example, with gassing, where it's clear that Mr. Kerry has repeated that numerous times, it's repeated, although it has been falsified. Then the question is, what role do the media play? And I think what is really interesting in the book, which we can relate to in this program very much is that the left-wing newspapers like Guardian, the guardians of democracy in Great Britain or here like Tuts, from the Green Party alternative movement originating newspaper, they are very much pro-interventionist and they buy into this. Amnesty International buys into this. You have some Facts that you quote that, for example, they say NATO go on in Afghanistan in 2011 or 12 where they were placating that in the streets in Western countries. So what is going on there? That is interesting that we don't have – the left wing is not – is pro-intervention, is pro-humanitarian intervention. How do you explain that?

Tim Anderson: It deserves reflection because, really, that's why I made the point about the colonial mentality. We have a right wing in the West which effectively supports intervention in Middle Eastern countries because they believe that it's a Western destiny as exceptional countries to control and dominate those regions and create order in the world, you know, to be the world's policeman. We have a liberal centre... which concerns itself with humanitarian issues and refugees and so on, and is urging humanitarian intervention as though it were some sort of civilizing mission of the 19th century, which particularly the British and the French spoke of this idea of a civilising mission. If you go back to the famous British liberal John Stuart Mill, who wrote that famous book on liberty about individual freedoms and so on, he was a firm supporter of British intervention in the colonies and didn't believe that the colonies had the right to self-governance because they were barbarous. So there's a long tradition in Western liberalism, particularly Anglo-liberalism, let's say, but also French, of intervention if there's some pretext. And then on the other side of things, we have a Western left which is very happy with the idea of colour revolutions from Ukraine to Libya to Syria. And still to this day, some of them are cheering on that. So what's the common link between all of those factors of the Western? There's something about Western culture and intervention. which does link back to the colonial era and which has some deeper roots, basically. But so, you know, the pretext that the Western coalition led by Washington and effectively it's a NATO coalition, an expansionist NATO coalition, backed and financed by Gulf monarchies, which are the worst of all in terms of democratic deficits in the world, basically, financing these sorts of operations. They needed pretexts. I would say there's two phases to the conflict in Syria, for example. The first one is, as you've said, one of humanitarian intervention. But the second one is one of protective intervention, a resurgence of the war on terrorism. That's how, for example, it's said that German special forces and French special forces and British special forces and U.S. special forces have a presence on the ground in Syria now.

Speaker 2: In Germany, we don't hear about that. From two sources, it has been said that 50 special forces from Kommando Spezialkräfte are working there, and nobody is reporting on that here.

Tim Anderson: I read it had been denied also, apparently denied, but that's the nature of special forces, isn't it, that they're denied?

Speaker 2: Correct.

Tim Anderson: But there is a presence, there has been an air presence there for at least, for around two years now, almost two years, on the part of certainly my country's involvement. Australia has been involved. There was an invitation, you recall, from the government of Iraq to assist with the operations against ISIS in Iraq, not from the government of Syria. It hasn't stopped the Western powers, in particular the US, from bombing Syria, supposedly. So I would say that there's two pretexts there. One is a humanitarian intervention pretext, and the other one is this protective intervention pretext, which allows... Western military forces into countries, even when they're not invited. So there's really two parts to the pretext that have been driven.

Speaker 2: From the last things that I've researched, I have a perspective on non-aligned movements, really from Sweden. And that is something that's 130 countries or so, and they're never taken into account. Nobody's interested what they have to say about all these things, because the It's astonishing. There's no basis in international law for these interventions. There's really not a good background except for this colonial attitude. But what we have is a military strategy which is called full spectrum dominance. which also includes superiority in all areas, also propaganda and media. So do you think this is really part of other people used? Do they know what they're doing? Because they become useful idiots in a strategy to dismantle a state. And this is probably not really, if I look into Tuts or Guardian, it's hard for me to believe that these people have this agenda, but they are helpful in a way. So What's behind that?

Tim Anderson: It suits their purposes. I mean, it's quite shocking really to accept that people, after five and a half years of war, fail to look for themselves, fail to really make some... There are people who do make some honest investigation. I mean, that's where I... I wrote the book I did. It's probably very confronting because it's really for an honest, curious person who says, just a minute, that doesn't add up. Where can I find some more information? But it's true to say, as you've suggested, a lot of people are very committed. Once people are very committed, they don't listen very well. Why are they so committed? Well, they've been told the same message many, many times. And there's some emotional commitment there too. I think we in Western countries have to understand, those of us who are communicators and educators particularly, how is this very deep commitment to this, the supposed moral basis of this war? How is it, what are its foundations? Can't we look at its foundations a bit more? And what is it in the mentality of Western peoples that prevents them from understanding that we have the Internet now, we have potentially a much greater variety of sources of information? I would say now, after so many years, particularly in relation to Syria, because remember, the war on Libya was much quicker and it was over relatively quickly. In relation to Syria, you can tell the entire story counter to the Western narrative, counter the NATO narrative from admissions. on the parts of the Western agents themselves. And that's important because part of this propaganda war or campaign of misinformation has been to disqualify the other voices there. Don't listen to the Russian media because they're Russian. Don't listen to the Iranian media because they're Iranian. Don't listen to the Syrian media. Don't read the Latin American media, for example. It's true what you said. Most of the countries, the BRICS countries, most of the world really has a more principled position on this. The Western countries, the core of which is the NATO countries and the Gulf monarchies, their narrative persists despite all that evidence. And that's a rather shocking thing for us, I think, in Western cultures. How is it that maybe when this is all over one way or the other in years to come, people will admit these sorts of things as they're admitting it about Libya now. For example, there's this... journalist I mentioned in Foreign Affairs Journal who says all of the claims against Gaddafi were false. He did massacre civilians. Amnesty International said the claims about them using black mercenaries, that was all false. The crimes about him getting his army to rape women, they were all false. The number of people killed after the NATO intervention was at least 10 times more than were killed in the war before. In the war before the NATO intervention, only 3% were women and children. They were combatants and soldiers and so on. But the problem is here we are years into the conflict in Syria, and there's a great reluctance to even hear any sort of dissenting voice or critical voice on that narrative, on that war narrative.

Speaker 2: I would like to come to ISIS, but something I read, I saw recently a poll from refugees from Syria, a poll that was done here in Germany. And from your book, I know there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that the population is really largely pro-Assad, as a protector, so to speak, because they fear the disassemblement. The data that we got from this survey are very different. It's like 900 people or so and 60-70% say they're fleeing because of Assad. They're fleeing because of the government bombings and so on. What is your take on that?

Tim Anderson: I think 70% to 75% say that they're in fear of the government. That poll was done in Germany. I think it was 890 people. It was of refugees. Remember, almost half the Syrian population has been displaced. 10 million people have been displaced at one time or another. Most of them inside Syria. Most of them go and shelter with the army. I've seen areas where there are... hundreds of thousands of civilians that have moved into those major cities. This poll, if you look at the breakdown on the face of it, there's a problem with the sampling method. Let's assume that a lot of the Syrian, a lot of the refugees in Germany are anti-government. There, for a start, about 3% of the displaced people. But there's a sampling problem in that poll because over 80% of them were males, young males. Right. And if you look at the refugee population in Europe, which is fairly large but still a relatively small population of the displaced people, it's around 50%. And the age profile is not at all of that poll. So that poll on age and gender is highly skewed. And that's to do with the sampling process there. As I say, if you look in Syria at the displaced people, and the people are displaced because of the war, that's clear. One thing, by the way, that poll reinforces what the Syrians say is that most of them want to come home. that if the war stopped, if people didn't fuel the war, most of those would come home. Only 8% wanted to stay, if I get that right. Even by that poll. Even by that poll, that's true. They admit that. That was a poll, by the way, commissioned by the Syria campaign. Correct. I looked at it.

Speaker 2: That's, of course, always the question. I was paying for that. And then you see there's a problem there. But still the numbers are very high.

Tim Anderson: It's a Wall Street organization. It was created in Wall Street. It has even an Australian former student of my university involved in it. They created it. They got some other people to do the poll here in Germany. But as I say, the sample is highly skewed and it looks like they are, you know, although they've got some people that are pro-government in there, it looks like they've got a lot of people who are former fighters to be involved in that poll. So the sampling process is critical in any poll. It doesn't matter if there was 100 or 10,000, basically. If your sampling process is out, the whole thing is skewed.

Speaker 2: And all you have to do... What about the other polls that you quote? Would you say the sampling process there is better? Is it a better median?

Tim Anderson: There's a number of polls. I do, in a chapter, I spend a bit of time on polls, mainly in relation to the support for the government and the elections and so on. But most of the Western polls in recent years have been trying to look for some level of support for Western intervention. That's been the aim of them. You can see with that poll, the Syria campaign poll that was done here in Germany, it's that the British orb polls are the same. They've looked and, for example, the orb polls from the British agency show that as many as a third of the Syrians think that the banned terrorist organisation Jabhat al-Nusra is a positive force in the region. But they're really looking for... They admit that more people support the government than Jabhat al-Nusra, but a third of the Syrian population support a banned terrorist organisation that is overtly genocidal. It carries out atrocities in the streets. It's not convincing, particularly when you look at the fact that there are independent polls. There's a Turkish agency in late 2011, 2012, showed that less than 5% of people supported armed attacks on the government. Less than 5%.

Speaker 2: I wanted to quote something which I got from your book, which I found really interesting. That was FSA leader Lamia Nahas, I don't know how you, maybe you tell me, who said, the more arrogant serious minorities become, I become more certain that there should be a Holocaust to exterminate them from the existence. And I request God's mercy upon Hitler, who burned the Jews at his time, and Sultan Abdulhamid, who exterminate the Armenians. So that is outrageous. That would be something, if somebody would say something like this here, that would be the end of any kind of career. But this is what these moderate... That's right.

Tim Anderson: She's not the only one. There's another one who said that the extermination of Alawi Christian people was more important than taking over Syrian cities. These are what they call moderates, basically. But again, if you look at the detail of this conflict, we'll know that those groups, the Free Syrian Army, which was never an army, but really a conduit for arms and finance, basically, still to this day, they had always collaborated with Jabhat al-Nusra. Jabhat al-Nusra means the support front of the Salafis in Syria. That's what it meant from the beginning. When it came into Syria, into the Homs area in early 2011 and was shouting genocidal slogans like Christians to Beirut, Alawis to the grave, that was reported in the Western media as early as April 2011. This is a time when Human Rights Watch, that NGO which is embedded with Washington to a large degree, said there was no real serious armed resistance on the part of peaceful protesters in the first nine months. We know that the Syrian Salafis in the second month of the conflict were using genocidal slogans in Homs and were indeed driving Christians to Beirut at that time. So yeah, this distinction between moderate and extreme rebels is another one of these doublespeak maneuvers that's been carried out to try and legitimize one of the heads for intervention in Syria, the humanitarian intervention, the protective intervention, because we are somehow or other supporting moderates against extremists. They've all been extremists because they've been allied. For example, that's what's happening with the conflict now in Aleppo. that the Western media has said, oh, the Russians are bombing the moderate rebels and so on. Well, yes, what they call the moderate rebels, they've always been an alliance forged in Turkey with the help of Mr. Erdogan between Jabhat al-Nusra, the banned international terrorist group, banned by the UN Security Council, and some of the other major factions of the old Free Syrian Army, the Arar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam. They've always worked together and Jabhat al-Nusra has always been a a foreign agency to support those local Syrian Salafis, although the local Syrian Salafis are these days hugely internationalized, in particular from Europe, also from my country, from Australia.

Speaker 2: I read also that regarding ISIS, there was a lot of accusations in our mainstream media here that Russia is really bombing the moderates, which we heard about earlier. from you right now, and is not bombing ISIS. And then what I read in your book is that the Americans only bomb ISIS. They don't bomb ISIS if ISIS is fighting against Assad. So it seems to be kind of a mercenary war where you have groups that you can use to topple the government. The aim and goal is to topple Assad and everything really in that line is okay. So what about ISIS? How did that come and how did it grow? How did that happen? Is it a monster that they created themselves, a Frankenstein that went berserk?

Tim Anderson: It is a Frankenstein's monster. it's come back to bite the Turkish people too, hasn't it, just in the last day or two? Yes. With the bombing in Istanbul.

Speaker 2: And I would like to, just because that might be interesting for German viewers, we had this instance where two parliamentarians from Turkey were talking about the gas, the poison gas handed over, and we had reports on that here in Germany, but that was omitted, that this was... poisonous gas that they were talking about they were talking about weapons and these people had been politicians from the sister party of the social democracy in germany nobody cared about that that was absent from the from the from the media discourse so that is a good example again for what you described that it's a very biased way of reporting on it go back to your point although they're turkish parliamentarians they're treated in the same way i am as an australian academic that if i'm breaching the war narrative either of us breached the war narrative

Tim Anderson: we become excluded from.

Speaker 2: They are in danger of going to jail for decades. That is a problem. Like the journalists. That's like the journalists. But ISIS, you said Frankenstein was.

Tim Anderson: So we said before, didn't we, that the al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq was created largely by the Saudis at the direction of the strategy of Washington. as announced by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to create a force that was going to prevent Baghdad getting close to Tehran. It failed, but that was his intention at the time. That was also, by the way, why they forced out the former Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki, claiming he was a Shia sectarian. But really, they were worried that he was close to Iran. Since then, of course, the Iraqi government has been fighting ISIS rather effectively sidelining the US help and using Iranian support in most of those operations. For example, in the recent liberation of Fallujah, which is the second last big city. Mosul is the last big city to go to in the fight against ISIS in Iraq. So ISIS was indeed a Frankenstein's monster, created to divide Iraq at first, to help with the type of balkanization of Iraq that is partially in place, but it hasn't moved to where You know, the plan was, you can look at plans seven or eight years ago about Iraq to have a Shia state in the south and a Kurdish state in the north and then, you know, a Sunni part of Iraq. The same sort of thing with Syria, basically. ISIS was perfect for doing that. And how do we know that now? Is it just that it's being said by the Iraqis? Well, Western people don't pay attention to the Iraqi media. They don't pay attention to the Syrian media. But look, we can look at the US intelligence reports that have been leaked out. I mentioned one before which said that the creation of a Salafist state in eastern Syria was exactly what the Western powers want to weaken Damascus. We can look at the Hillary Clinton emails and say that the removal of Assad was precisely to protect Israel from Iran. that israel what was israel's offense it was helping the palestinian resistance against uh the type of ethnic cleansing and and massacres that the israelis were doing against uh against the palestinians so we can see it almost entirely from western sources that narrative about isis there we've also got the admissions two years ago from three senior u.s officials including the vice president joe beadon that their regional allies particularly turkey qatar and saudi arabia were funding every type of group to get rid of Assad. That was repeated by the head of the US Armed Forces, Martin Dempsey. It was repeated by the head of the US Congressional Committee on the Military, Senator Lindsey Graham, that they would fund any type of group from the Free Syrian Army to ISIS to get rid of Assad. And if you look at even the Israeli media, when they asked the Israeli government representatives which of the fighters, Syria, the anti-Syrian government fighters, were they treating in Israeli hospitals, which they've been doing for a couple of years? How did they know which factions they came from? The Israeli government's response was, we don't make any distinction between the factions fighting the Syrian government. We'll treat them all. They specifically refused to deny that they were treating any of the band groups as opposed to the... what they call the moderate groups. Now, since then, you mentioned the chemical weapons issue raised by Turkish parliamentarians. We know that one of their so-called moderate groups, Arash Sham, admitted to using gas against the Kurdish area in Aleppo. And of course, the Turkish sources are saying that that's been provided by the Turkish government to those people.

Speaker 2: That leads to a question. I wonder, Israel is completely absent in our discourse here. They are bordering to Syria. They have been in war with Syria many times. They are the nuclear power in this area. They're the big strategic superior power. They have a quarrel with Iran. So Israel must be a major player in this game. But still, we don't hear about it.

Tim Anderson: Well, not much is reported about it. It's fair to say that Israel has played a low profile in this conflict. They've been involved, of course. They've made missile attacks in Syria. In the Syrian media, if you read the Syrian media, the Syrian media is always reporting on Israeli weapons and assistance to those groups, all of those groups, in southern Syria, on the southern front. around Daraa and other parts of southern Syria. I myself was in Palmyra in April this year after it was liberated, and we had went out and had a look around and had a briefing by a general there. Many Syrian soldiers were killed when it was taken over by ISIS. Many were killed when they took it back from ISIS there. It was almost entirely American weapons that they'd used, but there was also Israeli ammunition there. And I was picking up shells that were still on the ground there and asking the soldiers, is this one of your shells or one of theirs? And all of the weapons were American there. There was also Israeli ammunition and some special types of ammunition. Syrian soldiers have told me, for example, they found the higher tech... what do you call it, armoured vests that some of the fighters used that were much lighter than the Syrians. The Syrians had very old stuff that was too heavy to wear. They didn't wear it. So some of the technology, night vision equipment, some special types of weapons, projectiles and so on, they've, in many cases, those groups, including ISIS, have had higher tech weapons than the Syrians themselves. And when they left Palmyra in March this year, They went away in American Hummers and they'd looted the hospital and took hospital supplies, a lot of other supplies from Syria, back towards the eastern part of Syria and towards Iraq. So the Israelis have been involved, but because everyone in the Middle East hates the Israelis for what they've done to the Palestinians, they played a low profile. I think it's fair to add there that the diplomacy of the Russians in the Syrian conflict has been quite important. They tried to... limit the fight to the terms which had been set by Washington. So that still to this day, Russia does not have a different set of objectives supposedly to Washington to minimize the conflict with Washington. And they've done a fair amount, pretty much a large amount to prevent any conflict between Russia and Washington, which both have a foot in Syria these days. The Russians invited, the Americans non-invited. But one thing that the Russians did was to more or less quarantine Israel. So, in other words, to say we are fighting the terrorist groups in Syria and we are not going to confront Israel's legitimate interests, that may be a different way of putting it to the way the Syrians put it, because Israel still occupies a part of Syria, remember, in the Jolan Heights. But so there has been a concerted effort, I believe, on the part of President Putin to try and quarantine, to try and exclude so far as possible. Whatever you read the Syrian media, Israel has been involved in, and they've openly admitted it. They're treating in Syrian hospitals, fighters patching them up, sending them back into Syria. And the rebels themselves, the Free Syrian Army, have been publicly thanking the Israelis for their support.

Speaker 2: I was astonished about that when I read that, yeah. That is, leads me, one of the criticisms towards you was that you're too close to the Syrian government. There's this photo with you in Assad where you sit on chairs and then you are there. And do you also have contact with, let's say, what about the opposition? Let's put it that way. What about the opposition in Syria?

Tim Anderson: Well, the opposition in Syria have members in parliament. They have people on the streets. I have friends who were involved in the protest movement in Syria. And when they saw that it was driven by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist groups, they went back to the state, if not the government. That is to say, there is a political opposition in Syria like every other opposition in every other Western country. It doesn't take up grenades and arms and rockets and attack schools, hospitals and soldiers and so on. That's not considered an opposition anywhere else in the world. So really, the answer to your question is no, I haven't gone and spoken to the Al-Qaeda groups because probably they'd kidnap me at least and more than likely murder me as well. But people who've been against the government, sure, there were people who were against the government. I've got friends who were held by the secret police and were in fear of the secret police and... people who want to change in the government. And I was there during a congressional election in April, too. And there were a number of outside people who stood for parliament and some of them won. And there was a higher degree of women before. So there is a political opposition there. But if you're talking about the people that get arms from the Western countries to destroy the state and overthrow the government, Really, I'd already formed my conclusions about that before I went to visit Syria. I went to visit Syria and I will always say that I'm not a Syrian. I don't have a voice in Syrian politics. I don't support anyone in Syrian politics. I support the right of the Syrian people to determine their own political future. But it's very clear to me after the first two years of studying that the Syrian people support their state overwhelmingly and a majority of them support the government. And so I have no hesitation in talking to government members in Syria, and I don't ask anyone's permission to do that.

Speaker 2: Okay. You were mentioning Russia, and Russia has a very interesting part in the Syrian war. It's very rational, very cold-blooded, I think. Cold-blooded means not that they're doing something evil, but it's very thoughtful what they do, and it's very diplomatic also. Putin is depicted here in Germany as rampant. somebody on a rage, a dangerous person, what you can see there with the negotiations about the chemical weapons, he defused the situation. It seems that, let's put it that way, that the regime change in Syria did not really happen, and now it looks worse for a regime change than ever. Because with the military intervention of the Russians, there's a stabilization for the Assad government. And I thought, is this what we have in Europe right now, this dangerous situation with all these anaconda maneuvers in the Baltic? It seems that the focus shifted a little bit to Europe, but Syria was always their Tartus, the bases there. They were Russian bases, the last Russian bases, and the Mediterranean, really. Do you think there's a connection to that, to put pressure on Russia, Baltic states, to have more freedom of operation in Syria? Is there a connection?

Tim Anderson: There's a connection in the sense that the same agency is involved in an expansionist process. There is undoubtedly an expansion of NATO. I'm not sure why Germany is particularly happy about that because it doesn't seem to... I'm not. It's not Germany. Well, I'm sorry. The German government, of course, I'm referring to the German government... Why Germany would not have a more normal relationship with Russia is beyond me, frankly. Or France, for that matter. I mean, who gets the backlash from these proxy wars of terrorism? It's not the North Americans. It's the Europeans that get the backlash and the Turkish people, as we've seen just recently. That's going on. In relation to Syria, remember when... The Russians had always supported Syria in many respects, but of course there was a serious upgrading of their involvement in the conflict in the end of September last year. Remember that was after four years of conflict. It wasn't like in the Ukraine, the president went within days and there was never any attempt by the Russians to support a president who fled his country. The Syrians had resisted themselves against the biggest military powers on earth through their proxy armies for four years before that Russian air power came into Syria. And it's hard to imagine how a relatively small country could resist that sort of... I was shocked when I first went to Syria in 2013 to hear that there were at least 40,000 jihadists sitting in Douma in northeast countryside Damascus. And I could hear the explosions every morning in that city, which used to be four or five million, now seven or eight million people in Damascus. I didn't understand until I went there how many that there were, and they'd come from over 80 countries, including my own, and a couple of hundred from my own country. The biggest number, I think, from Europe, from France, but more of them from Saudi Arabia, from North Africa, from the region, basically. So there was an extraordinary war, and only after four years of resistance on the part of the Syrian people, it's the Syrian army that's had the most casualties from this. There's something approaching 100,000 people army casualties in Syria now. That's not spoken of in the Western media either, when they claim that the Syrian government was supporting ISIS or something or other. The Syrian government was giving its priority, fighting on a large number of fronts, the biggest problem coming from the open borders in Turkey allowing thousands of these jihadists into Syria. But they were giving their priority to the major populated areas, the big Syrian cities, the western cities. And even before the Russian air power intervention in September, I was there in July last year, And all of the major Western cities were under Syrian army control. But there have been major advances last year because of this new coalition created by Mr Erdogan in Turkey. called the Army of Conquest, which involved Jabhat al-Nusra and those two other big groups that took over most of Idlib and part of Hama and reinforced the jihadist control of Aleppo in early 2015. At the same time, ISIS came from the east and from Iraq and went hundreds of kilometers across desert without a single bomb being dropped by US airplanes on them and took over Palmyra, you recall, last year. famously at the geographical centre and the historic icon of Syria itself last year. So the Syrian army was under serious pressure at that time. And there was significant planning between the Syrian government and the Russians, but also Iran. Iran has played an important part in training and logistics and a range of areas in support of Syria. And so when that air power intervention took place in September, it was in recognition that there'd been four years of resistance and that there was this concerted renewal of the offensives. Syria had beaten it back several times, but renewal of offensives on the part of the NATO and the Gulf states and particularly using Turkey as the main conduit for all these fighters into Syria. In those circumstances, Russia made a careful intervention. I agree it was careful. There was diplomacy involved that President Putin had spoken to Mr Erdogan in Turkey. He'd spoken to Israel. He'd spoken to all of the others. He tried to isolate the conflict to the internationally accepted terrorist groups or those fighting with him. By the way, notice the U.S. security UN Security Council resolution of December last year says that the banned terrorist groups and those associated with them have to be suppressed and shall have no part in a truce or the political future of the country. Now, all of those major groups have been fighting with Jabhat al-Nusra and, to a lesser extent, ISIS. So the Russian intervention, of course, I think that the Russian president, I don't know these things, but it seems clear to me that he would have measured his movements against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and tried to distinguish as far as possible that intervention. And, of course, one of the major distinguishing forces of all the ground forces are either Syria or its close neighbours. There are very few Russian troops on the ground, intelligence, communications, those sorts of things, but mainly air power. I saw them doing mine clearing in Palmyra, for example, after a second or a third round of mine clearing at that time. So it was a careful intervention, and as I said before, it was... measured in the same terms as the US intervention in Syria, which, however, was illegal and uninvited. So, in other words, serious attempts were made to minimize the type of conflict with what the Russian president keeps calling our Western partners in this operation. Sorry, I think that the Russian intervention was a rather careful intervention. And one final thing to note there is that there was a... relatively tokenistic we might say withdrawal of Russian forces after six months just in time for the liberation of Palmyra by the Syrian forces so that the world would know and I think I believe the Western media paid attention at the time that it was indeed the Syrian armed forces and their allies on the ground that paid the sacrifice and did the hard work of getting ISIS out of that historic part of Syria, out of Palmyra. So I think it's been a careful intervention on the part of the Russians and Mr. Putin, bearing in mind that there is a domestic constituency for the Russian president, of which only about half really supports the idea of the Russians fighting to protect Syria, but about three quarters of which support the Russian presence in Syria in the name of defending Russia from future terrorist attacks in Russia, because they have their own jihadists seeded by the same Gulf monarchies into parts of Russia and the Caucasus.

Speaker 2: And the soft belly of the former Soviet Union, which was always a big goal also for the Americans at that time. What is your take, because we come to the end of the interview now, what is your take on the future? What should be done in Syria? What is the outlook? And then afterwards, I have a question regarding getting good information on the Syrian situation. Who would you recommend to watch or listen to or read? Future of Syria.

Tim Anderson: The future, I mean, I address it to an extent in the last chapter of the book without trying to make predictions. I don't really believe in making specific predictions because a lot of forces are at work in the war on Syria. But I believe strategically the NATO plan to, the NATO Gulf monarchy plan to subjugate Syria has failed. The sad fact is that the terrorism in Syria and its backlash in Europe in particular has and Turkey, for that matter, can continue for a long time, unless the powers, largely Western powers, particularly Washington, decide to engage in some strategic retreat, as they did with Iran. Really, I consider that the pressure on Iran is more on the back burner than eliminated. But in the case of Syria, What makes me sad is I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War and I know that the US understood it was losing the Vietnam War in 1968 but it was another seven years before that war ended and that makes me sad to think about how wars end. and how big powers in their arrogance don't want to accept that they've lost, or the others that have invested in it. The Saudis are relatively less significant politically, but they are dangerous. Turkey is extremely important. I think if the situation changed in Turkey, that 800 kilometre body that Turkey has with Syria is really a key to security for the Syrians themselves. So, one of the other things that's worth mentioning here is that what this conflict really was rooted in an attempt by the Western powers to destroy what the people in the region call the axis of resistance between Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, the Palestinian resistance, for example, to Israel's operations. So what's happened is rather the reverse. I believe that although the Syrian army has lost almost 100,000 people there, that it's a stronger, more experienced army than it was five years ago. The other consequence is that Iraq, which many of us I think assumed had become a puppet of the United States, has showed significant political will. The intelligence headquarters for the operations against ISIS for Russia, for Iran, for Syria, are based in Baghdad.

Speaker 2: I was very astonished. I never heard about that. That's a good remark about how interesting your book is because there are lots of things like that in there.

Tim Anderson: So in that bigger picture of things, we've got an enhanced axis of resistance. This makes it a bitter pill for Washington to swallow, doesn't it? That whatever degree of sacrifice they believe they made in the invasion of Iraq, whatever, horrendous human destruction that went on with the invasion of Iraq that and it's not an easy process I'm not saying that Iraq has immediately realigned itself in any sort of way because it's compromised by the US in many ways not least arms contracts and commercial commitments and so on but there are several ways in which Iraq has expressed some political independence the new Iraq let's say the post Saddam Iraq has expressed some political independence particularly as regards to security and its cooperation with Iran and Syria. And remember, Iraq's cooperation with Iran is precisely why al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISI, which became ISIS, was created in the first place 10 years ago. So in terms of the future, and I always think being a Latin Americanist, and that's been my area of studies, the strong regional organisations that were built by the late Hugo Chavez in Latin America are an important precedent for the Middle East, that a fragmented Middle East would always be walked over by the big powers. And some degree of regional unity is really their major longer-term defence against that. And I believe that's beginning, including by the participation of Iraq and the cooperation between Iraq and Iran. Remember, it was also the US that fomented the Iran-Iraq war back in the 1980s to weaken both countries at that time. So there's been conflict between Iran and Iraq for decades. And the cooperation between Iran and Iraq now is shown by the advances that the Iraqi army has made against ISIS in Iraq. they've been significant too. So that's, I think, in the bigger picture. It doesn't mean to say that those same forces can keep killing people in the region, and that's the sad part about it, I think.

Speaker 2: What about the media? What would you say regarding from your position? Who is giving a better overview about the situation than our mainstream media?

Tim Anderson: I don't think there's any real good news story on the part of the Western liberal media because while the Western liberal media, for example, who we expected to be playing some sort of watchdog role, as indeed perhaps they did to some degree when the invasion of Iraq was coming up, for example, that's been replaced by a huge enthusiasm for humanitarian intervention. And this is something of our colonial history and all of the big European powers were colonial powers in some way. Even my country on the other side of the world was a colonial power in its own way. And we still have this type of colonial mentality that we think we have to be part of the solution for other people. that we have to manage the process, the political process for other people. That's the problem with the peace talks, really, that in most respects the UN Security Council resolutions are quite reasonable and based on international law. The Western interpretation of them, and this is also a reason for the presence of the special forces, what other possible reason could the French have for having special forces in Syria other than they want to have a say in the political resolution in Syria? The Western countries have to get over this idea that they are really able to deliver democracy or to respect the rights of other people by that type of intervention.

Speaker 2: And we first should talk to the people there and let them decide and get to know what their take on it is.

Tim Anderson: There are Europeans doing that now. I mean, I believe the little Czech Republic is indeed engaged in some productive talks with Syria at the moment. some of that breaking the ice. Remember at the moment the European Union and the US are locked together in economic sanctions against Syria. Remember what happened with the economic sanctions against Iraq throughout the 90s. There were terrible consequences of that. We know it was admitted widely that hundreds of thousands of children had died because of all of the degradation of services and water and so on that happened in Iraq in the 90s. You describe something similar in your book for the health system in Syria, which is going on. The health system in Syria is under serious pressure. There's still a public health system there. They are supported by people like the Cubans and by the Russians, for example, in that area, and to some extent by the Chinese now too. Let's remember Syria has some significant friends there. That's been important to the process there. I think we have to look a little bit wider than the Western media because the Western liberal media has some serious, serious failures in what it's done in the last five years in trying to present a gloss of respectability to this sort of intervention. They haven't pledged their watchdog role. an attack dog role involved in this war and we really have to think as western people to look more widely to look to the russian media to look to the iranian media look to the latin american media the cuban media the lebanese media some of the pan-arab media that's still there there isn't a good easy quick solution any particular source in western terms we have to get used to the idea of thinking to listen to other people and which would be a good good advice sir

Speaker 2: Yeah. So thank you for this talk, Mr. Dr. Anderson. Yeah. And I think what we do is in your book, you have a list of these various sources and we just put a link list onto this interview so people can have their foreign views invested into their head. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Doug. And for those who want to read the book, it's in English and also in German now, and I highly recommend it. This is not advertising. It's my honest opinion. Thank you very much.