Aiding Al Qaida as part of the War on Terror?

That's what McCain and Graham are doing

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger on March 22, 2013 at 4:41 PM, updated March 22, 2013 at 5:05 PM

The aftermath of a car bomb in Damascus, Syria: Unbelievably the so-called "neo" conservatives who thought up the "War on Terror" want us to enter this war on the side of the terrorists.

(EPA)

Do you support the call by John McCain and Lindsey Graham for the U.S. to intervene on the side of the rebels in Syria? Congratulations! You're on the same side as the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda. And you're also really, really gullible. There are few people in America who really understand this part of the world. Thanks to my job, I get to talk to them regularly. One is Bob Baer. He spent most of the '80s and '90s running around the Mideast working for the CIA. In 2003 he came out with a book titled "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude." I was paging through it the other day when I came across this passage about Syria linking the crowd now behind the rebellion to 9/11: September 11 was almost a class reunion for the Syrian Muslim Brothers. One of the key figures in the German apparatus, Mamoun Darkazanli, fled from to Syria to Germany after Hama. Although Darkazanli denied advance knowledge of 9/11, he admitted to providing help to three of the hijackers. A former Syrian intelligence officer familiar with Darkanzanli told me he he had participated in the attack on the Aleppo artillery school in 1979. Another key Muslim Brotherhood player in 9/11, Muhammad Haydar Zammar, likely arranged for the hijackers training in Bin Ladens Afghani Abl camps. A third, Abd-al-MatinTatai, ran a Brotherhood front company in Hamburg. Tataris son was close to Mohammad Atta and the Hamburg cell members. Two Syrian brothers in Spain probably provided support to the

hijackers. The details are beyond the scope of this book, but the point is that although Washington disliked Assad as much as the Brothers did, Assad was definitely onto something when he decided the Brothers were bad news. The Muslim Brotherhood has been trying to overthrow the Assad regime since 1982, when they took the city of Hama cited in the passage above. Assad leveled the place, which shut them up for a while. Eventually, though, they joined with Al Qaeda to put together such operations as the Sept. 11 attack on New York. And now they're trying to take over Syria. Just why the hell should we help them? I saw South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham urging us to do just that during the Conservative Political Action conference last week. I also heard him say "Ive never seen our friends more afraid or our enemies more emboldened." As I noted here, Graham didn't seem to realize that he was confessing the total failure of the socalled "War on Terror." It's not hard to see why it failed. Graham wants us to support the terrorists. He and John McCain spent the past week trying to convince Americans we need to jump into the Syrian civil war - on the same side as Al Qaeda. The man is living in a fantasy world. I got the hell out of there and went down to the exhibit hall, where I ran into a man in touch with reality.

"Without objective facts, decisions are based on subjective drivel. Wars result from such drivel" - Pat Lang on the Beltway boobs.
That's Larry Johnson, another former CIA guy I talk to quite often. We had a nice chat about the abject stupidity of the Bushies in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. They had the chance to consult with such Mideast experts as Larry's mentor, Pat Lang, but instead they just jumped into the occupation with no plans for running the country they'd just occupied. That conversation with Larry was before the recent hysteria about alleged "weapons of mass destruction" in Syria. Here's Johnson on those allegations: The hysteria, especially in Washington, surrounding the alleged use of a chemical weapon in Syria is worrisome. Just as we commemorate the tenth anniversary of invading Iraq over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, we are again being prepped to support a military response to a threat that plays on our darkest fears. And then the other day the rebels apparently blew up a mosque whose imam was opposed to them, killing 60 people or so. That's pure terrorism. What makes people fall for this nonsense? I think it may be laziness. Americans are not willing to put in the effort to understand the forces at work in the Middle East.

One guy who's gotten it right from the beginning is Pat Buchanan. He was one of the few conservatives to comprehend that the first Iraq War was not in our interests. Now he argues this Syria gambit is all part of a plot to get us to go to war with Iran: It does not require Inspector Clouseau to surmise this may be a fabrication to stampede the ever-gullible Americans into plunging into Syria to win the war for the al-Qaida-saturated Syrian rebels. But sucking America into Syria's civil war is only a near-term goal for the War Party, which is after larger game greasing the skids for a U.S. war on Iran. And lest we underestimate the War Party, the likelihood is they will get their war And finally there's Pat Lang's essay from almost 10 years ago on the Beltway insiders who were busy "drinking the Kool-Aid" of the neocons: What we have now is a highly corrupted system of intelligence and policymaking, one twisted to serve specific group goals, ends and beliefs held to the point of religious faith. Is this different from the situation in previous administrations? Yes. The intelligence community (the information collection and analysis functions, not "James Bond" covert action, which should properly be in other parts of the government) is assigned the task of describing reality. The policy staffs and politicals in the government have the task of creating a new reality, more to their taste. Nevertheless, it is "understood" by the government professionals, as opposed to the zealots, that a certain restraint must be observed by the policy crowd in dealing with the intelligence people. Without objective facts, decisions are based on subjective drivel. Wars result from such drivel. We are in the midst of one at present.

And we still are, if the news coverage of the Syrian civil war is any indication. ADD: For the liberal perspective on Iraq, read this column by left-winger Jeff Jacoby: The invasion of Iraq 10 years ago ended the reign of a genocidal tyrant, and ensured that his monstrous sons could never succeed him. It struck a shaft of fear into other dictators, leading Libyas Moammar Khadafy, for example, to relinquish his WMD. It let Iraqis find out how much better their lives could be under democratic self-government. Like all wars, even wars of liberation, it took an awful toll. We genuine conservatives - a grouping that includes Pat Buchanan, me and roughly zero other pundits in the press- would never for an instant entertain the idea that getting rid of a "genocidal tyrant" is a proper conservative goal. It's liberals who want to use the U.S. military to aid foreigners. We conservatives believe the military should be used only to defend America. Similarly, Jacoby's prattling about promoting "democratic selfgovernment' at the American taxpayers' expense is the worst sort of left-wing nonsense. And then there's the nonsense about "wars of liberation." Trotsky? Don't ax! How can someone who purports to be a conservative endorse such left-wing rhetoric? In Jacoby's case, I imagine it's because he's never met an actual conservative. Source: http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2013/03/ aiding_al_qaida_as_part_of_the.html