“Has Jolani changed his spots?” George Galloway interviews Chris Hedges about the fall of the Assad regime in Syria on the Mother of All Talk Shows (MOATS).
By George Galloway
George Galloway: It’s the one and only, Chris Hedges up now on the Mother of All Talk Shows. Chris, it’s been a momentous week. We haven’t had the opportunity to speak you and I about it. What’s your overall takeaway? What happened, why? And what’s the where for?
Chris Hedges: Well, the project to overthrow the Assad regime [in Syria] was decades in the making. It was a slow strangulation of the Assad regime on behalf primarily of Israel. Because, of course, as you have pointed out many times, Syria was the pipeline that kept certainly Hezbollah and much of the Palestinian resistance movement, armed and funded. This was a goal, that’s why [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu rejoiced when the Assad regime was overthrown.
The seizure of the oil fields in the north and the east, as well as the agricultural rich region, plunged the Syrian economy into crippling dysfunction before Assad was overthrown. The weeks before, even Damascus was only getting about an hour of electricity every day. Food prices were staggering, high unemployment.
So, yeah, the regime was corrupt and its human rights abuses real, but at the same time, this was a Zionist project long in the making, and that’s why the Israelis have not only embraced the fall of the Assad regime, but then used it to seize sections of the Golan Heights, including Mount Hermon, this buffer zone, putting their tanks very close to Damascus, and then carried out a series of bombings to denude or destroy the military apparatus in Syria — naval bases, air bases, army bases, essentially crippling the country, not just economically, but militarily.
“The seizure of the oil fields in the north and the east, as well as the agricultural rich region, plunged the Syrian economy into crippling dysfunction before Assad was overthrown.”
I see shades, I don’t know what you feel, of what happened in Libya, and I worked in Syria under Hafez al-Assad, so I don’t want to pretend it was a flourishing democracy. At the same time, I see what’s happening as probably catastrophic for the Palestinians and for the region. It is emboldening Israel, because, of course, the next piece on the chessboard for the Zionist government is Iran.
George Galloway: Yeah, we’ll come to that. But staying with Syria for a moment, if the Syrian state was as hollowed out by sanctions and attrition as you describe, its allies must have known that. Now, some of its allies are exceedingly rich. Others are exceedingly energy rich.
It seems to me inconceivable that Syria could not have had all the oil that God could have gotten them. All the money that was needed to pay their officers properly so that they could not be suborned.
Syria is a small population. China, Russia, Iran are rich, oil and gas rich. Why was the Syrian state therefore allowed to atrophy to the point that it could be pushed over quite so easily and at such great cost to those allies who might well have realized now that a stitch in time saves nine.
Chris Hedges: Well, it’s because the Gulf states reached out to Bashar Al-Assad and told him that if he kept Russia and China and Iran at a distance, he could be reincorporated into the kind of U.S.-Israeli hegemony that dominates most of the Middle East.
And unfortunately, Bashar Al-Assad, who was not his father. For whatever you say of his father, he was very astute, although he did throw me out of the country and blacklist me for my reporting. But nevertheless, that was an Assad decision, and that was what’s frustrated his allies, in particularly Russia, which was really willing to rebuild the military.
Remember, even up until the last few days, I don’t know how extensive they were, there were Russian airstrikes, but that was — Assad, who lived in his own version of the forbidden city, surrounded by exceedingly corrupt elites, and his wife, apparently was one of the worst, amassed anywhere we don’t know, $1-2 billion in personal wealth, and that was an Assad decision, as I understand it.
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George Galloway: Now the ontology is important, and it’s easy to toss around descriptions of people, but let’s try, as far as we can. You’re the expert, former Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, author and I know a bit about the neighborhood also.
This group, $10 million bounty from the United States government. Wanted as a decapitator, a be-header, an Al-Qaeda and ISIS leader. I mean, there was once a zoo in Timbuktu where a leper changed its spots. Has [Abu Mohammad al] Jolani changed his spots? What’s the justification for believing that?
Chris Hedges: Well, there isn’t any. Of course he hasn’t changed his spots. He’s just more astute about consolidating power than some of his predecessors. But if you look at the most recent report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, they go back and look at the areas that HTS and Jolani controlled and critics were not only censored and shut down, but arrested, tortured and disappeared.
This was the method by which they retained total control in the areas they controlled outside of Aleppo and everywhere else. So, no, it hasn’t changed its spots.
This is the one thing that mystifies me, is the rejoicing by the Israeli regime. Yes, in the short term, it is very good for Israel in that of course, as I said, it shuts down that pipeline, Israel has now decimated whatever military acumen or facilities that might potentially pose some kind of a threat to Israel, but actually never posed much of a threat to Israel.
But in the long term, I don’t see how having an Islamist state on your border is going to be beneficial to the Israeli government.
And now we’ve heard all these reports that they want to be friendly with Israel. Israel, of course, helped fund the project to overthrow Assad.
Israel is also funding the Kurds, who control the oil fields and Turkey, which is the main backer of HTS, is determined to wipe out that Kurdish enclave, because they see it as allied with the PKK. So that is immediately going to create a confrontation, at the very least, between the Turks and the Israelis.
“…in the long term, I don’t see how having an Islamist state on your border is going to be beneficial to the Israeli government.”
And then there are 900 U.S. troops there, of course, and I think there’s about 50,000 ISIS in their prisons. So, I mean, it reminds me very much of the kind of brutal mechanisms by which we use to invade and occupy Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
And there’s always in that initial first few weeks, that flush of excitement and that promise of victory and all this kind of stuff, none of which pans out. I don’t see how that’s going to be any different in Syria. I think it’s catastrophic, what’s happened.
George Galloway: So these ISIS prisoners in the Kurdish dungeons will soon be out. And if we’re lucky, they’ll stay in Syria. If we’re unlucky, they might be coming to a shopping mall or a Christmas market near us. Time will tell.
Now, one of the most obvious things that you’ve drawn attention to is the interruption, at best, probably destruction, at worst, of the transmission belt for the weaponry relied on by the resistance in Lebanon and ultimately inside Palestine itself, including in the West Bank.
No one else is going to do that. No one else either can do it, or if they could do it, would do it. Does this open the possibility that the Palestinian armed struggle, now 65 years old, will have to come to an end, and other forms of struggle, the so called Gandhian mass social movement, Gandhi-type campaign of non-violence, will have to take its place? And if so, how is that likely to work with the current Israeli state?
Chris Hedges: Well, if you look back through the history of the resistance, the Zionists have always attacked the non-violent movements with more ferocity, even more ferocity than the violent movements, because that poses a threat. The Great March of Return would be the most recent example. But there are many others throughout Palestinian history.
So no, it’s the Zionist state that has determined the nature of the resistance and the radicalism of the resistance. When I first got to Israel, they were dealing with Faisal Husseini and King Hussein.
Two extremely moderate conservative figures, really, in the end. And of course, they marginalized, in the case of Husseini and Hussein, reoccupied the West Bank, etc.
“The Zionists have always attacked the non-violent movements with even more ferocity than the violent movements.”
Then they dealt with Arafat. Arafat wasn’t pliant enough for them, and so I think they probably murdered him. There’s strong evidence that he was poisoned to death. I mean, that’s a strong assumption among many of us. Certainly left under house arrest in Ramallah and et cetera. And then they essentially created Hamas.
And when I first worked in Gaza, which was in the late ’80s, Hamas was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, I knew one of the founders of Hamas, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, highly educated pediatrician, educated, first in his class at the University of Alexandria in Egypt.
Then you saw, just like you saw the rise of Hezbollah with the Israeli invasion in ’82, that Intifada and the selling out, we can never forget that, the selling out by the PLO of the Palestinians on the issue of the right of return, because 75 percent of the people in Gaza are either refugees or descendants of refugees from the Nakba in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from Israel, and thousands were, of course, murdered in massacres.
And so it’s always Israel that essentially creates the nature of the opposition. And there’s no going back now to a Gandhian peaceful —we’ve been through that, and the Zionists have made it clear.
That’s why they exerted so much energy to destroy the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement, where you can’t even now on universities in the United States, perhaps in the U.K., have just become academic gulags.
You can’t even go to a library silently and flip up your laptop with a free Palestine sticker on the back. You’re banned — from this happened at Harvard, where I went to school. It’s happened so they’ve shut down any kind of dissent, not just internally, of course, peaceful dissent, but solidarity. …. Students and faculty, two NYU professors were arrested the other day.
“You can’t even go to a library silently and flip up your laptop with a free Palestine sticker on the back. You’re banned.”
I spent a lot of time at Princeton, where I’ve taught. I’m not teaching there now, but I’m still there at the university, which is just up the street. And these kind of rules that have been imposed are not going to go away after the genocide ends, whenever that is.
And that’s very frightening, because we know that with the rise of a kind of totalitarian system, the last redoubt of free expression for — we’re not even gonna get off on what’s happened in the media — but the last redoubt of free expression is usually on the university campus.
It doesn’t exist anymore. So no, it ebbs and flows, the resistance movements. Of course, they’ve taken a hit, just like Hezbollah has taken a hit, but they’re not going away, and Israel has now traumatized, massively traumatized, an entire new generation of Palestinians.
Remember, half of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are under the age of 18 and Rantisi, his radicalization occurred in 1956, he was a 10 year old boy. The Israelis occupied Gaza for 100 days, and his uncle and neighbors and others were lined up on walls in Khan Younis and just shot in cold blood by Ariel Sharon and [inaudible] and other Israeli units.
And he watched it, and he realized that the goal of the Zionist was his eradication, the erasure and radical eradication of Palestinian people. And he’s not wrong, of course.
“Israel has now traumatized, massively traumatized, an entire new generation of Palestinians.”
And he entered in the Brotherhood, and later was one of the founders with Sheik Yassin of Hamas. And he was assassinated, by the way, by the Israelis in 2004 along with his son. And his wife, who I also knew, was targeted and killed very shortly after October 7.
George Galloway: The Iranian track that I said we’d come back to, the Israeli media says that Israel is going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran’s nuclear facilities — unless the leaders in Iran are fools — are presumably already in overdrive, turning their enriched uranium into nuclear tips for their ballistic missiles. So we’re not out of the woods yet of the wider regional war, that might turn the Syria thing into a side show?
Chris Hedges: Yeah, although I want to make it clear that the Israelis will have a very tough time breaching the air defense system— much of it Russian, which is superior, by the way, to NATO anti-aircraft facilities — they have will have a very tight hard time breaching that system. That’s why they want to pull the United States into a conflict of sustained aerial bombing of Iran.
And we saw it, and you were outspoken about it, about the sanctions in Iraq and the continuous bombing campaign in Iraq. They want a very similar kind of campaign carried out against Iran, but they don’t want to lose their planes, and so they need to entice, seduce, push whatever the United States into joining them in an aerial assault on Iran because of the formidable and there are layers of this air defense system.
The Iranian Air Force is not much of a threat, and many of the planes are outdated, dating all the way back to the shah, but the air defense system is good, and so that is why — and if they have to create an incident, whatever they have to do.
The Israelis have been trying for years and years to promulgate this. I think it would be catastrophic, and I think ultimately we wouldn’t win, and I think that it may even jeopardize the existence of Israel itself.
But you have to look at everything that’s happened in the last couple of months, the decimation of Gaza, the attempt — they’re very close to occupying northern Gaza — the crippling blows they have been able to deliver to the Hezbollah leadership, not, by the way, militarily, because in the south, they haven’t gotten in very far to Lebanon.
They’ve taken, apparently, very high casualties. People are talking in the thousands, many of them with crippling wounds, because it’s a short, everything is short. I mean, that’s the other thing is all of these distances are by car, if you could drive through the checkpoints and over the land barriers.
I think Lebanon to Damascus is only a couple hours. So they they can helicopter medevac these grievously wounded soldiers back. But there’s a limit. Israel is a small country. There’s clear signs that the IDF is exhausting its manpower and its resources.
Of course, it’s sustained completely at this point, off of U.S. munitions, they’ve depleted their own stockpiles. But yeah, that’s what they want. Yeah, and Syria could be a sideshow.
The big question for me is whether they would try and put ground troops into Iran as Iran’s about the size of Europe. I can’t believe they’re that stupid, but who knows. But yes, that’s what the Israeli government is pushing for. But they will not do it without the U.S. because of the the formidable air defense system that they have to neutralize.
George Galloway: But Donald Trump’s an easily seduced kind of guy, isn’t he?
Chris Hedges: Yeah, anything Israel wants. People ask me, what’s the difference between Trump and Biden. I said — we didn’t talk about the West Bank. When they talk about annexing the West Bank, which I think is imminent, the Biden administration would say, that’s a red line, and it violates, what is it, U.N. resolution 272, [242] I can’t remember.
I mean, and do nothing would make any difference, and Trump would embrace it, but for the Palestinians on the ground, there’d be no difference. So yeah, but Biden would too.
The Zionists effectively own the U.S. Congress. You have, of the people running, believe me, Biden is not running Middle East policy. You know, he probably has a hard time navigating from one room to another in the White House at this point, that’s being run by [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken, a staunch Zionist, by [inaudible], who’s served in the IDF, by [National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan and by McGurk, who was a disaster in Iraq.
And that’s created, by the way, a great deal of angst within the State Department and even in the U.S. intelligence community, among Arabists who actually understand the catastrophic path that these people are leading us down.
George Galloway: Wow, I wish you were in Foggy Bottom. Thanks very much. Chris Hedges, of the very famous Chris Hedges Report.
George Galloway is host of the Mother of All Talk Shows (MOATS). Scottish of Irish background, he is a a six-term parliamentarian, freedom fighter, writer, broadcaster, film-maker.
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