December 3, 2024
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, having become a staple of the disruptive discourse that is so valued on Uncensored, joins Piers Morgan yet again for a one-to-one interview on the state of the world. The most shocking development over recent days has been the rapid advance of Syrian rebel troops and their capture of the City of Aleppo. Sachs tries to explain that the conflict is extremely complicated, but that the main culprit is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He argues that Netanyahu has managed to drag the US military into wars against Israel’s adversaries, and that the fighting in Syria is just one part of his ongoing strategy. In Sachs’ mind, the world would be a better place if America just didn’t get involved.
00:00 – Introduction
02:20 – Sachs on Syria
06:14 – US doing ‘Netanyahu’s bidding’
12:55 – CIA’s role in Syria
17:18 – Putin and Obama
19:05 – Is Sachs selective about ‘war crimes’?
22:22 – Ukraine peace prospects
27:05 – How do the wars end?
* * *
Piers Morgan: President Trump campaigned in part on ending Putin’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Hamas. An escalating crisis in Syria may now join that bulging intro of foreign policy headaches. Rebel groups have seized control of most of Aleppo, shattering the stalemate of a brutal war that never formally ended. The attack is being led by Islamist militant group HTS, which is designated as a terror organization by the United States and the UK among others. It appears to have caught President Bashar al-Assad and his allies by surprise. Putin’s Russia has now launched air strikes on rebel command centers in defense of al-Assad, but suddenly the conflict is red hot. More than 300,000 people have been killed since the Syrian Civil War erupted in 2011. The resulting exodus of millions of Syrian refugees has had profound consequences for Western politics. The US has heavy fingerprints on many of the key junctions in this conflict and could play a decisive role in what happens next. Here to make sense of it is Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
Jeffrey Sachs: Great to be with you. Thank you.
Piers Morgan: I always get a tremendous amount of feedback when you come on — not all of it entirely positive for me, but that’s fine, that’s what a democracy is all about. Let me just start with your overview of what is happening in Syria and how significant you think it is.
Jeffrey Sachs: I think it’s interesting, as you pointed out, the US calls HTS a terrorist group, but obviously the US is part of what’s happening. These days, Jake Sullivan said, “Well, yes, it’s a terrorist group, but it is giving Assad a run for his money. Wink, wink.” This is a US-Israel-Turkey operation. It is part of Netanyahu’s long-term game plan that goes on for 30 years — to overthrow governments throughout the Middle East that back the Palestinians. They did apparently catch both the Russians and the Iranians and the Syrians off guard with this maneuver in recent days, at least that’s what seems to be the case. But I’m sure that this is an Israel-US-Turkish operation. Turkey has its own issues in this with the Kurds in Syria. For Israel, this is standard fare: overthrow governments in the neighborhood, expand the war, draw the United States in. And the US is always available at Israel’s behest to play games and expand wars. That’s what we’re seeing right now from what we can gather of sporadic and, of course, very incomplete reports. I don’t think that is going to topple Assad. There are reinforcements pouring in from Iraq, probably from Iran. Probably the Syrian forces as well internally are regrouping after having been caught by surprise. But this is essentially at the core of Netanyahu’s operation.
Piers Morgan: What is wrong with theorizing that it might just be that Syrian rebels represent a large body of Syrians who actually do want to overthrow a dictator that they believe has had a malevolent effect on their lives? And they’ve chosen the moment to do it when Assad’s big backer, Putin, is being massively stretched in the war in Ukraine, and they probably felt now’s as good a time as ever.
Jeffrey Sachs: Yeah, whatever may be true or not about that, wars cost a lot of money. They require a lot of armaments. They require a lot of logistics. They require a lot of intelligence — I don’t mean mental intelligence; I mean information gathering and so forth. And wars are not fought out of sentiment. Wars are fought with money and armaments. And therefore, you can always find major powers behind these wars. And in the case of Syria, it was Obama in 2011 who tasked the CIA to work with the Saudis at the time and with Turkey at the time to overthrow Assad. This was at Israel’s behest, in my understanding and interpretation. But it required billions of dollars from the US, from Saudi Arabia, from Turkey — havens in Turkey and so forth. And this is the normal point: these are not sentiments against Assad. These are organized wars. And wars are expensive. And that always means turn the attention back to the major powers, whether it’s the regional powers or the United States standing behind them.
Piers Morgan: What is really interesting about the sort of modern history of all this is — I was at CNN when the Arab Spring erupted soon after I joined, actually, in 2011, and a lot of those leaders-stroke-dictators in that region toppled. But Assad managed to avoid it. And I found a quote. This is Barack Obama, president at the time of course, August the 20th, 2012, talking about his red line for Assad:
“We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus; that would change my equation.”
Now what happened is that shortly after that, that’s exactly what happened. Assad used chemical weapons, and as a result, Obama was by his own words obligated to do something about it, but didn’t. He ducked his own red line. And it was at that moment that Vladimir Putin — who I remember, I’m sure you do as well — suddenly wrote an extraordinary op-ed piece in The New York Times of all places. And then he moved in to support Assad and effectively took control as Assad’s main supporter in Syria. And many people think that that was the catalyst for a lot of the problems that then followed. Is that an accurate assessment of what happened, you think?
Jeffrey Sachs: Not really, although I did witness some of that close up, even at the G20 in St. Petersburg around the time of these events. What– this starts — and it’s really fascinating to go back — it starts in 1996 with Netanyahu, who wrote a book called Fighting Terrorism. And the thesis of the book is quite straightforward and very dangerous. He says, you know, there’s Hamas, there’s Hezbollah, they oppose Israel. It’s not good for us to fight them directly — that won’t work. What we need to do is topple the governments that back them. So what we need is regime change throughout the Middle East. And he actually gave a long list of seven countries that included Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Lebanon. And systematically, the United States has done Netanyahu’s bidding for almost 30 years now, going to war with every one of them — except for the big one that Netanyahu so much longs for, which is the war directly between the United States and Iran.
But the US went to war with Syria in 2011, secretly of course. This was what’s called Operation Timber Sycamore. It was Obama assigning the CIA to overthrow Assad. Overtly, the United States overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. It’s interesting, Piers, to go back to 2002, this is after 9/11 of course, to watch Netanyahu being the lead cheerleader for the US to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Now we have a treasure trove of documents coming out that this was really a war on Israel’s behalf. Everything about the weapons of mass destruction was phony — known to be phony inside the US government. But this was the argument that was given, and Netanyahu was there in Washington telling them, “It’ll be just great if you take out Saddam Hussein. It’s going to topple all the rest of the governments.”
The idea was, incidentally, that Saddam would be toppled and then the US military would go right into Syria right away. But then an insurgency trapped the United States inside Iraq, so that the Syrian war was actually delayed eight years. But what we’re watching is this crazy Netanyahu idea of regional war so that Israel can have its “greater Israel,” as they call it. In other words, everything is to stop the Palestinian cause. And the US keeps being involved in these wars. And there was Jake Sullivan again today explaining, “Yeah, terrorists, terrorists, who cares about terrorists? We’re toppling Assad.” And this is again for the Israel lobby, basically.
Piers Morgan: You blame, you’re blaming Israel for all of it. I’m fine, that’s your view. Many people would say no, it’s…
Jeffrey Sachs: I am. I’m, I’m blaming Netanyahu in particular.
Piers Morgan: Right, and that’s very clear. But America, they would say, look, we’ve been actively engaged in a lot of regime change and attempted regime change in that region for a specific reason. These countries are being run by malevolent dictators who have a hatred of the United States, and we… it’s in our self-interest, never mind anybody else’s. I mean, could the two things be true at the same time? Yes, it suits Netanyahu and his bigger view of the region, I’m sure that’s true, but it could also be absolutely in America’s — in their belief — in America’s interests to do this. I mean, I don’t agree with them, but could it be that that is a genuine belief on their part?
Jeffrey Sachs: I agree with you that it’s absurd because what has it gotten us? Seven trillion dollars of war spending, massive debts, and chaos throughout the Middle East — from Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon. It’s a complete bloodbath for more than 25 years now. And so, it doesn’t accomplish anything. I think it’s extremely naive, and I think it’s extremely wrongheaded. And I, yes, I blame Netanyahu for it. He spelled it out; it’s his strategy. We’ve tried it. We’ve done what he said. We’re doing it today again in Syria. It’s a disaster. It’s time to say: run your own country, we’ll run our country. That’s my view.
Piers Morgan: In 2018, we both wrote pieces about the situation in Syria. I wrote mine for the Daily Mail after a suspected chemical weapons attack in Douma, in Syria, left dozens killed, including many young children. I said that the use of chemical weapons by Assad was on Obama’s conscience and it would ultimately embolden only one man: Vladimir Putin. You said on your website at the same time:
“The US and its allies should face reality and accept the persistence of Assad’s regime, despicable as it may be.”
Jeffrey Sachs: One thing, by the way, Piers — and honestly, you don’t know, and I don’t know — there’s a very significant argument among very knowledgeable people that the chemical weapons were a false flag. And if you know American foreign policy, false flags are the essence of that.
Piers Morgan: That hasn’t been proven, as you know. I mean, that’s just a theory.
Jeffrey Sachs: No, it absolutely has not been proven either way. But I know experts that are real experts who say… well, they say at a minimum it’s absolutely not proven. But some of them say this is absolutely all of the signature of a false flag operation. And some say this is why Obama didn’t go further, because it was laid out to him this was not even Assad doing this. This was the “rebels” under CIA authority. And if you study the CIA as I have for a lifetime, you know that false flags are actually their MO.
Piers Morgan: Are you seriously suggesting that Barack Obama and his government and the CIA under his tenure launched a chemical weapons attack on Syrian people, killing a lot of civilians? Do you seriously think that’s what happened?
Jeffrey Sachs: Oh, I’m not saying that Obama did it. Most of the time when the CIA does things, the presidents have no idea what the CIA is doing.
Piers Morgan: But you think the CIA would launch a chemical weapons attack simply to smear Assad?
Jeffrey Sachs: Of course it would. Are you kidding? It’s done much worse than that. It launches coups, assassinations, wars. The whole history of the United States after 1947 is bringing down governments.
Piers Morgan: Here’s my point. Why are you… you’re always very keen to take views, even if they’re unproven, that are very anti-America. You’re never quite so keen to take a view that is anti-dictators. I mean, Assad is a pretty vile dictator. Vladimir Putin is a vile dictator. Do you accept that your views are… I wouldn’t say twisted, but perhaps they’re slightly biased by the fact that your instinct is always: America’s probably to blame unless they can prove otherwise?
Jeffrey Sachs: No, it’s not whether they’re dictators or not. It’s what the United States’ role is. I don’t believe that any country can arrogate this task of bringing down other countries’ governments. The CIA has been involved in probably 90 or 100 covert regime change operations since it was founded in 1947. My whole life has been the United States at war. It’s sickening. I’m… it’s tiring because these wars are disasters. So it’s just not our business to say that one’s despicable, that one has to go.
But literally, by the way, this is what Obama did. It’s a shame that he did this. He said, “Assad must go.” Well, come on. When he said that, by the way, in 2011 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton said that, I said, “Oh my God, here we go again.” And literally, Piers, it’s been 13 years of mass killing since then. No resolution at all. Completely predictable. This is what I’m against.
Piers Morgan: On a point of principle, when Obama said, “If Assad uses chemical weapons, we will act,” and then didn’t act. From a purely political perspective, did that open the door for Putin to then just come in and have significantly higher influence in Syria and the region than he would otherwise have had?
Jeffrey Sachs: Remember just on this one fact, because it’s really important. It is said in our newspapers all the time, “Russia intervened in Syria. Russia intervened in Syria.” Russia came into Syria in 2015. The United States’ plan to overthrow Assad dates to 2011. Russia came in four years afterward. We should never have done that. This was Netanyahu’s provocation. He wanted wars in all those countries that I listed. Why are we doing Netanyahu’s work when it is a failure anyway? So Russia didn’t jump in, and we had to react. Russia came in four years after we started this.
We started this because Syria was on Netanyahu’s list — and it was literally a list, by the way. We know from this remarkable story of the former NATO Commander Wesley Clark. The supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, went into the Pentagon after 9/11, and he was given the list of the seven countries that we were going to take out in five years. This was Netanyahu’s list.
Piers Morgan: The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu. Do you support that?
Jeffrey Sachs: Of course. I wish that some American presidents were on that list.
Piers Morgan: Right, many would agree with you, but I was then going to ask that in June this year France’s top appeals court ruled in June this year that there should be an arrest warrant for Assad, alleging his complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes. Would you support that?
Jeffrey Sachs: I support the ICC and the ICJ, and I believe that we should try to make international law work because we’re very close to global self-destruction. So I would like international law to work. Putin is under an ICC warrant. I would like Russia to defend its proposition that Putin’s innocent or that Russia’s innocent, or Israel to defend the proposition that they’re innocent. This is what a legal process should be about. I don’t like it when countries say, “No, we don’t support this” or “We don’t support that.” We should try to make these international institutions work but have full accountability.
When the ICC threatened that it would indict Netanyahu, we had half the Senate up in arms. “We’re going to sanction these judges, we’re going to end the court, we’re going to penalize them.” No, we should have international law working properly. This would make for a much more peaceful world.
I don’t believe, by the way, Piers, it’s not one country doing it. For me, what is important is that this should be international. I’m a believer in the United Nations, maybe one of the few right now.
I hope that’s not true. I mean, the UN actually has broad public support, but it can’t function when great powers are flagrantly ignoring its rule of law. I believe that all the great powers should submit to the UN Charter, without their veto power, basically.
Piers Morgan: But just in relation to my specific question about the France top appeals court ruling, an arrest warrant for Assad over very similar allegations.
Jeffrey Sachs: France’s top appeals court?
Piers Morgan: Yeah. France’s top appeals court in June 2024…
Jeffrey Sachs: Look, I mean, a national court is not very interesting in this regard. France is one of the imperial powers of the Middle East. It is hardly in a position to adjudicate about a leader in the Middle East. It would be interesting to have a good historical adjudication of France’s role, which has been disastrous. But I believe what we should be focusing on is international courts. We have two of them: the ICJ and the ICC, and we should be helping to make those two UN-based courts work.
Piers Morgan: Let me ask you briefly about Ukraine. Very interestingly, President Zelensky at the weekend, in an interview with Stuart Ramsey at Sky News, said:
“One alternative, perhaps, again, this is reported from the United States, and it’s fairly simple really, is that Ukraine joins NATO, but Russia takes control and keeps the land that it has to date. Would that be a possibility?”
Zelensky continued:
“No one has offered us to be in NATO with just one part or another part of Ukraine. That’s for once the fact. It is a solution to stop the hot stage of the war because we can just give the NATO membership to the part of Ukraine that is under our control. Yes, it could be possible, but no one offered.”
What struck me as most interesting about that is when I interviewed Zelensky two years ago in Kyiv, he was never prepared to even concede an inch of territory to Russia. It seemed there was a real change in tone in his response to that question at the weekend. Did you detect that? And what does it all mean?
Jeffrey Sachs: It doesn’t mean very much because it puts everything upside down in terms of the real understanding of Ukraine and the war. The war is because of NATO enlargement. Again, we’ve talked about this, but this goes back 30 years. It goes back to a very bad idea of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote and described all of this in detail in a book in 1997 called The Grand Chessboard. That we will expand NATO and Russia will have no alternative but to accede to that.
All the top diplomats said, “No, this is a provocation. This will be war.” Brzezinski analyzes — of course wrongly — but he analyzes in detail in one of the chapters of the book that Russia has no choice. It will never side with China, it will never side with Iran, and blah, blah, blah. He gets everything wrong. But in any event, this has been a war of NATO enlargement. Russia does not want NATO on its border, especially with the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which it unilaterally abandoned in 2002; out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, which the United States unilaterally abandoned in 2019.
Russia does not want NATO on its border. It does not want US missile systems on its border. This is the basic point. The same reason why the United States invaded Cuba in 1961 and why we had the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962: they didn’t want the Soviet Union anywhere close to the United States. And if we just had a little bit of sense, Piers, we would understand this, and this war never would have taken place. This territory never would even be in question because Russia wasn’t claiming the Donbas. It was claiming, “Keep NATO away.”
Under the Minsk Agreement, it was, “Well, give them autonomy. Yes, it’s Ukrainian, but let the Russian ethnic speakers be safe and have their own language.” This is not about territory. And we continue to believe it because Boris Johnson and Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan know what this is about. And as Boris Johnson keeps saying, “This is about the preservation of Western hegemony.” For God’s sake. Well, yeah, if you’re going to have that, we’re going to have perpetual war. This is what this is about.
This is about: Does the United States have the right to put its military bases and its missile systems right up against Russia’s border? Russia says no. The United States says yes. Article 10 of NATO says yes, it’s none of Russia’s business. And therefore, we’re at war. Zelensky either is… I don’t know what. But this is completely irrelevant, this discussion. But what is being floated is the US plan. The US plan is, “Yeah, we get NATO, okay, you keep the Donbas, but we get NATO.” It’s not going to work. It is absolutely not going to work. It’s just the US and UK talking to themselves, not really admitting what this war is about fundamentally.
Piers Morgan: So how does it end?
Jeffrey Sachs: It ends the day that Trump picks up the phone and says, “President Putin, that whole idea of NATO enlargement was a terrible idea. Let’s make Ukraine neutral. It will keep the space between us, and the rest is details, frankly.” That’s how it ends. And if Trump is clever enough to understand that — half his aides know it; the other half say exactly the opposite — but if Trump is clever enough to know that, the war is going to end right away.
Piers Morgan: And how do you think the Israel-Hamas war ends?
Jeffrey Sachs: I hope that the whole world finally says to Israel, “You have no right to veto a Palestinian state,” and the US drops its veto in the UN Security Council, because it’s the last holdout. And we vote that a state of Palestine exists on the borders of the 4th of June 1967. And I have met with leaders all across the Middle East and all throughout the Islamic world, and they’re ready to have normal, peaceful relations with Israel, to stop the belligerency, with a capital in East Jerusalem. And that’s what I wholeheartedly support.
Piers Morgan: Professor Jeffrey Sachs, we’ve run out of time. I could talk to you for hours. I hope you come back again. I’ve got to say, even though I don’t always agree with your interpretation of things, I always learn a lot of stuff when I talk to you. I find it fascinating. So thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Jeffrey Sachs: Great to be with you. Thanks a lot, Piers.
Piers Morgan: Appreciate it.
