Sensible presentation regarding US involvement in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria — Aaron Maté and Col Doug Macgregor

21 January 2022

Succinctly honing in on key geopolitical issues

Retired US Army colonel Doug Macgregor does so, in an interview with the GrayZone's Aaron Maté.

See:

Aaron Maté, US war lobby fuels conflict in Russia, Ukraine, and Syria: ex-Pentagon advisor, GrayZone (06 January 2022)

I draw your attention to this interview . . .

. . . because it so concisely focuses on the primary factors that cause the strategic mistakes that American leadership's avaricious nitwittedness brings with it.

Colonel Macgregor's personal memory goes back to the Bill Clinton presidency and its geopolitically foolish and murderous 1995 involvement in the Balkans.

He continues through Bush II to Biden.

And Macgregor explains how President Trump — who had wanted to correct some of the strategic mistakes that we have made in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria — was outfoxed by the neocons that he mistakenly appointed to advise him.

Five key points

Those concern:

Russian and Ukraine

former president Trump

Syria

withdrawal from Afghanistan

and

irrationality in American policy construction.

Russia and Ukraine

Macgregor addresses the fact that the United States and NATO both refuse to recognize the Russian Federation's legitimate national security (Great Power) interests in keeping US and NATO troops out of Ukraine.

Relentless US-sponsored containment is probably going to force a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although probably only of Russian-speaking territory there.

Furthermore, and contrary to American propaganda, Russia is not the twin sister to the former Soviet Union.

Instead, it parallels tsarist Russia in cultural orientation.

That conclusion is probably shared by The National Interest's editor, Nicholas Gvosdev.

See, for instance, his 2019 overview of Russian Orthodox influence upon the Russian military today.

Accurately perceived, Russia's implicit policy reorientation demotes the Federation's (US-alleged) territorial ambitions from — in my, not Macgregor's, words:

those that the former, ideologically based, Soviet Union might have dreamed of

the more limited buffer zone interests that History's former great powers protected.

Trump

Former president Donald Trump had wanted to correct US errors in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. What happened to that?

Macgregor says that President Trump "worried too much about being liked." It would have been politically more astute to cultivate fear in those who opposed him.

Trump essentially appointed political enemies to advise him. And then, let them walk all over him.

Syria

Macgregor's position on Syria is insightful.

Recall — during your reading of the following extracts (from the interview) — (a) Macgregor's previous statement about Russian tsarism and (b) Nicholas Gvosdev's 2019 analysis of the reemergence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russian military thinking:

Maté:

[W]hen the US chose to wage this multi-billion-dollar dirty war in Syria to overthrow Assad, it was choosing to align with al-Qaeda, and US weapons ended up going to al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-tied groups.

I’m wondering, in your experience . . . was there any debate about the fact that the US was choosing to side with the group that attacked the US on 9/11, and how much does the failure of that policy do you think still drives US policy today . . .?

Macgregor:

We’ve taken some very strident positions that were from the first . . . irrational. One of those was that Assad had to go under all circumstances . . . .

[T]he Russians . . . looked at the plight of the non-Sunni Muslims, the Shiites, they looked at the Druze, they looked at the various Christians, Armenians and others who were in the country.

They said, ‘Well, if the Sunnis take over, this radical Islamist Sunni brand of Islam, that all of these people are going to be slaughtered . . . .'

We said, ‘Nonsense. Assad has to go.’

[I]f you had to choose in that region which side you wanted to be on, you were much better off on the Shiite side, because the Shiites were not murdering Christians, they were not murdering minorities, they were actually liberating Christians from Sunni oppression and others, and these Popular Mobilization Front militias that were trained by the Iranians have actually worked very closely with us to destroy ISIS in the past, which made a lot of sense.

But you have these irrational actors [in the United States] who refuse to accept any new policy, any new change, and they turned out to be more powerful than the president of the United States.

[W]e’re still stuck with this ridiculous position in Syria.

Afghanistan withdrawal

From the transcript:

Maté:

Do I hear you right, that had the US withdrawal gone ahead in the wintertime instead of the summertime, as Biden ultimately did it, that in your opinion that would have resulted in less bloodshed?

Macgregor:

Oh, absolutely. Everybody knows that. The mountain passes fill up with snow, the weather is very unaccommodating to everybody.

It would have been a much easier process. You certainly wouldn’t have had people hanging off airplanes and all this kind of nonsense.

Anybody with experience on the ground in that country will tell you that you don’t want to come out during the fighting season, and that’s exactly what we did.

Irrationality destroys sensible foreign policy

Macgregor addresses one of my own irritations with stupidly acting American leadership:

If you wanted to get ahead under the Clinton administration, you had to join the Serbian Hate Club and argue for ‘bombs away’ over Serbia.

If you wanted to get ahead under the subsequent Bush administration in the Middle East, you had to join their Global War on Terror, which frankly was pretty unfocused and treated everyone as a potential enemy and nobody as a real friend.

Remember the speech, “you are [either] with us, or against us.”

[T]hat was the dumbest thing we could have possibly said, because on any given day 90 percent of the people that live anywhere in that part of the world are completely disinterested in fighting us.

Instead, we made everybody an interested party to destroy us.

We don’t have very many friends left, and even those who profess to be friends don’t really trust us.

So, the whole thing over the last 30 years, I would say since 1991, since Desert Storm, has been an utter disaster.

We’re just seeing it reach its bottom point with the Biden administration. But again, most of it is driven by emotion.

[T]here’s money involved, as there always is. . . . But emotion drives a lot of the thinking, which, of course, is a disaster for the United States and the conduct of our foreign and defense policy.

The moral? — Irrationality, cultural ignorance, and reflexive hostility . . .

. . . destroy sensible geopolitical policy.

Corporate greed, emotion-based propaganda, and an abysmal lack of knowledge make us blind.

Strip away any one of those elements, and a semblance of sanity might return.

PeteFree.com

Sensible presentation regarding US involvement in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria — Aaron Maté and Col Doug Macgregor