President
Barack Obama speaks to reporters about possible U.S. action against
Syria during a meeting with the leaders of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania
at the White House in Washington, Aug. 30, 2013. (Photo: Christopher
Gregory / The New York Times) Chris Hedges and Paul
Jay discuss President Obama's statement that he has decided to attack
Syria and seek authorization from Congress ... Even though he says he
doesn't need it.
TRANSCRIPT:
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay.
On Saturday afternoon, President Obama issued a statement from the
White House. He said he had decided to authorize a military attack on
Syria to, in his words, punish the Syrian administration and regime for
its use of chemical weapons. He also said he was going to give American
Congress a voice.
Here is a segment from his statement.
~~~
JAY: Now joining us to analyze the significance of
President Obama's statement is Chris Hedges. Chris is a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist and senior fellow at the Nation Institute. His
latest book is
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. He was
The New York Times' Middle East Bureau chief.
Thanks for joining us again, Chris.
CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST AND WRITER: Sure.
JAY: So what do you make of President Obama's
statement? He's authorizing the attack, except he's kind of not
authorizing the attack, 'cause he's kind of going to give Congress a
vote, except he made it clear in a statement he was only doing that sort
of because he thought it would be a more effective message to Syria,
not because he actually thinks he's actually bound by such a vote.
HEDGES: Well, I mean, that's the first disturbing
point of the rise of our imperial presidency, where the executive branch
abrogates to itself the right to declare war, which is, of course,
traditionally the role of Congress.
But more importantly, we're talking about a military strike which
will have consequences that will ripple outside of the boundaries of
Syria itself.
These explosive devices--cruise missiles--are never used surgically.
I've been around them on the receiving ends when they are fired. So
we're talking about inevitable what they will euphemistically call
collateral damage. We're talking about civilian dead. That's without
question.
I believe that, you know, one of the primary lessons of the Holocaust
is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you
are culpable. But there has to be an active campaign of genocide. So we
are culpable by not intervening during the genocide in Rwanda, in
Cambodia, when Saddam Hussein was wiping out the Kurds in northern Iraq.
But to respond after that genocide is complete as a kind of punishment
is for me very shortsighted, because it essentially involves the United
States not in an act of preventing an ongoing or current act of
genocide, but in essence taking sides in this civil war.
The consequences of that: empowering Hezbollah to go after Israel. It
of course will anger Iran. Syria is an Iranian ally, and I think much
of this decision to attack Syria is a kind of backdoor attempt to punish
Iran within the region.
And let's not forget that we may not be aware of this as Americans,
but within the Middle East there is a widespread remembrance that, for
instance, Israel used over 200 white phosphorus rockets when they did
their 22-day aerial bombardment of Gaza, that we as a country used
chemical agents--Agent Orange in Vietnam, and we have littered the
Middle East--Afghanistan, Iraq--with depleted uranium.
So the notion that we have a right to act as the world's policeman,
that we have a right to use these kinds of weapons to shift a balance of
power, you would think we would have learned our lesson in Iraq or we
would have learned our lesson in Afghanistan, but apparently we have
not.
And let me finally say that in the end, you know, there are weapons
contractors for whom, once again, this is about profit. They don't
really care what the consequences are. For them it's about how to swell
their bank account.
JAY: Now, the so-called evidence that these chemical
weapons were used by the Assad regime seems to be paper-thin. In fact,
there really hasn't been any evidence shown to the public. It certainly
didn't persuade British parliamentarians.
I mean, this smells so much of a pre-Iraq situation. You would think
they must have something. I mean, it seems so stupid that Obama and
Biden, who both were fairly clear on the Iraq situation--certainly Obama
was--that they wouldn't proceed.
On the other hand, he seemed to have painted himself in the corner.
He so stuck his neck out on this so quickly, he seemed to have nowhere
to go. So it almost seems like this now letting Congress have a vote is
really a way to buy himself some time because he was in such an isolated
position. I mean, it's really rather crazy. Instead of all the world's
attention being on, in theory, if this was Assad, on Assad for using
chemical weapons, the attention of the world is now on Obama for
violating international law.
HEDGES: Right. And, you know, in the past it's kind
of selective enforcement. If the Israelis are using white phosphorus,
which is incinerating--white phosphorus--I've been around white
phosphorus attacks. The Salvadoran military used them when I covered the
war. And when bits of white phosphorus fall on your body, they burn
right through your body. There's no way to stop it, in essence. It'll
literally burn a swath right through the core of your body.
The fact that we were complicit, in essence, with the use of chemical
weapons by Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War--we gave them satellite
imagery so that they knew where to drop it--that we stood by and did
nothing when Saddam Hussein was dropping poison gas on places like
Halabja, this is not lost to people in the Middle East. So there's no
kind of uniformity at all to our response. When those who are our
purported allies (and in the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq was tacitly our ally)
do these kinds of things, we ignore it. When the Israelis do it, we
ignore it. And when it happens in Syria, you know, supposedly we
respond.
I think morally the United States has no case to make unless they
were actively stopping a delivery system of these chemical agents, i.e.
intercepting the planes that were dropping them or, if they used
artillery shells, which is what Saddam Hussein had, you know, the 155
howitzers or the units that were delivering those shells.
But we have no legal, moral, as you pointed out, right to intervene
at this point as an act of punishment. Nor do we have the moral
credibility to do it.
JAY: In President Obama's statement today, he
specifically says, I'm comfortable about going ahead with this without a
UN resolution, which is more or less to say, I'm comfortable doing this
violating international law.
HEDGES: Sure. Well, I mean, the whole invasion of
Iraq, which Obama--you know, he wasn't very clear. He made one speech
that nobody could ever find opposing the Iraq War. A figure like Dennis
Kucinich made literally hundreds. He was pretty silent in the buildup to
Iraq, because, of course, it wasn't politically astute at that point to
challenge it.
Sure. I mean, this is just a continuation of the Bush shredding of
both international and domestic law. And, you know, this capacity by the
executive branch not only to wage war but draw up kill lists--and we
haven't even gotten into the shredding of privacy, and both at home and
abroad. I mean, it's a kind of terrifying development.
And I think that the response that we're seeing--and, again, as you
point out, we don't have at this point credible evidence, although it
would not, as somebody who covered Syria, it would not surprise me if
they used it. But you're right. We don't know. And even if they did, at
this point I don't think we have a right to intervene.
JAY: Right. And there's an interesting story out on
Saturday as well by a Dale Gavlak, who's been covering the Middle East
for AP, apparently for quite a few years. He's reporting in MintPress
News--and it's making its way around the internet--that he interviewed
people in the area where the alleged chemical attack took place,
although I don't think it's so alleged anymore there was a chemical
attack. That seems to be--even Iran seems to acknowledge that there was
one. But Gavlak apparently interviewed some people, and they say these
weapons came from the Saudis. They actually mention Prince Bandar. And
he interviewed, apparently, the parents of a young jihadist fighter who
was handling the weapons, was killed when they went off. And they're
blaming the Saudis for handing these weapons over to people that didn't
know how to use them.
Who knows whether this is true or not true. But it does lead to the
issue that there's no clear line here who was responsible. And when you
look at it on the face of it, the Saudis, who to my mind get away with
murder in the American media, in the sense that no one ever talks about
the Saudi role in any death in the American media, nor does the White
House ever speak of it, and certainly they've been driving and fueling
much of this war, but the Saudis and certainly the opposition on the
face of it had way more to gain with some kind of use of chemical
weapons than Assad did. I mean, I don't agree with Mr. Putin on a lot of
things, but I do on this one. This just makes no sense for the Assad
regime to have done this.
HEDGES: Yeah, although, I mean, let's be clear. I've
covered lots of stories where it doesn't make much sense for regimes to
carry out acts of atrocity. It didn't make much sense for the Bosnian
Serbs to start massacring people at Srebrenica.
But I think, you know, the point that you're making is that at this
point we don't really know definitively what happened, and (having been a
reporter in those situations) we may not know for a few weeks. That's
number one.
And number two, after it's over, I don't think we have either a legal
or a moral right to start dropping cruise missiles in Syria.
JAY: Now, one of the ideas I've heard proposed about
why President Obama is doing this--because the way he's acting so
quickly, how far out ahead the was on this, has a lot more to do with
the tide of the war shifting to Assad's favor. There's been this sort of
prevailing view amongst many analysts that what was in the interest of
Israel, and to a large extent in the interest of the United States, is a
long-term low-level civil war where neither side gains the upper hand.
And there was some thinking Assad was gaining the upper hand. And so
what this is really about is trying to hammer Assad to, you know, equal
the playing field again, as it were.
HEDGES: Well, and that is what I meant when I spoke
about changing the balance of power, because clearly at this moment the
Assad regime does have the upper hand. The rebel movement, which, you
know, is fractious and spends a lot of time fighting each other, is
reeling backwards. And what we are doing once again is using military
force to insert ourselves into a conflict without understanding the
repercussions or the consequences of that insertion.
JAY: And it's a way to weaken Assad without putting
more arms into opposition hands when they're afraid, you know, al-Qaeda
types are getting hold of these guns. So instead of arming the
opposition at a higher level, they just directly hit Assad.
HEDGES: Right. And you can be sure that the Saudis
and the Qataris and others are making sure that al-Qaeda types are
getting these weapons. This goes all the way back to the war in
Afghanistan. This has been the modus operandi of the Saudis for a very
long time. [incompr.] you know, their intervention throughout the region
has been so disastrous. We didn't have to end up with the Taliban
running Afghanistan after the war with the Soviets, but because we let
the Saudis essentially direct our money that was provided to the
opposition in Afghanistan, or funnel it through the ISI, the Pakistani
intelligence service, we starved those movements. And there were
movements and figures that were not wedded to this radical Islamist
ideology.
So once again we see the utter ineptitude on the part of the Saudis
and the promotion of this jihadist movement throughout the region fueled
by Saudi money and Saudi weapons.
JAY: And Saudi weapons purchased from the United States, on the whole.
HEDGES: There you go. Again, it gets back to the
whole arms trade. You know, they'll--and, of course, we are the largest
seller of weapons and munitions on the planet, and these people don't
care as long as they make money. And I think that is a lot of what is
fueling these conflicts in places like Afghanistan, that companies like
Halliburton and Raytheon, Boeing, they don't want to get out. They don't
ever want to get out. They don't care how many Americans die, how many
Afghans die. They don't care what happens in Afghanistan. They don't
care what happens within the region. Look at their stock prices, like
Halliburton. They've all quadrupled since 9/11. And that is sort of the
unseen engine behind a lot of this. So there's a lot of pressure.
JAY: I was at a conference a couple of months ago. I
was invited as the press. And it was a lobbying agency that lobbies
Middle Eastern governments more or less on behalf of arms manufacturers.
I found myself a rather strange table fellow there. But the talk there
was all about how much Saudi Arabia wanted the United States to not just
deal with Assad, but wants an attack on Iran, and that the Saudis were
going to find some way to make this happen.
HEDGES: And, you know, the Saudis have created more
havoc and damage within the Middle East, arguably, in the last two
decades than any other country or any other group, including, of course,
al-Qaeda.
JAY: Yeah. I mean, Israel is a story all of its own, of course, but I take your point.
Thanks very much, Chris.
HEDGES: Thank you.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
