Jeffrey Sachs

It's all spelled out, by the way, in very clear ways, but you have to dig for them. You have to find them. You have to understand that this is longstanding. You have to understand that each president has played differently. So when we come back to Obama, he started the war with Syria in 2011. I can remember actually vividly the call that Assad must go. And, yeah, I did scratch my head.

I was actually—I think it was on Morning Joe when it was said, and I was asked by Joe Scarborough, what do you think? And I said, well, that's pretty odd. How's he going to do that? It turned out it was going to be 13 years of mass war, 300,000 dead, and destroying a country. That's what it turned out to be. But Obama signed an order. called Operation Timber Sycamore. People should look it up.

You can find it online, but you can't find it in the mainstream media because it's not discussed. But it was a so-called presidential finding that the CIA should work with Turkey, with Saudi Arabia, with others to overthrow the government of Syria. So that was the plan. We went to war. We had... This is what led to Benghazi, correct? Benghazi is Libya. So, Libya... I understand.

Yes, but it was the same time in 2011.

If you say it that way, one of the first things was to establish a rat line, so-called, from Libya to Syria. Absolutely. And Seymour Hersh wrote a terrific piece explaining all of that.

No, none of this is explained, of course. It's none of the public's business. This is our business. We're the war machine. You stay out of this. So none of this is explained. Interestingly, the whole Syrian operation... I think I counted right that the New York Times mentioned Operation Timber Sycamore, I think three times in the 2010s.

So a war that cost billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, CIA operation, covert action, links with Libya, never explained, never discussed. And even when the government falls last week, no background given, you know, we're supposed to have amnesia. We're not supposed to understand that what happens is the result of long-term plans that have been pretty disastrous.

And by the way, as I've said, Israel has driven so many American wars, and we say, absolutely, yes, that's our greatest ally. These have been at huge cost to the United States, cost of trillions of dollars, cost geopolitically, but somehow... We gave away our foreign policy to Israel years and years ago, and it's been absolutely devastating.

And it's interesting to go back and watch Netanyahu speak to the American people. Go look at a video clip of 2001, 2002. In 2002, in October, he comes and testifies in the Senate. And there's a nice clip of him promising how wonderful the war in Iraq is going to be because Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He says 100 percent certain complete lies, by the way.

And they knew that they were lies at the time. And it's going to be wonderful. We're going to topple that dictator and then dictators are going to be toppled everywhere. And the young people of Iran are going to rise up. This is his idea, together with his U.S. political consultants, together with.

Neocons in the US government for the last 25 years, they have never apologized for dragging the United States into countless wars in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars running up US debt. And doing what? Creating chaos. So just to go back to the seven countries, because it's worth remembering, Lebanon, it barely exists as a functioning country right now.

Syria, it's going to be picked to pieces. Don't believe... Well, it's obvious in what we're seeing every day. Territorial integrity, yeah. Israel's just invaded from the southwest into deeper Syria. Turkey from the north. Russia has its area. The United States and the Kurds have their area. This place is just going to be a battlefield for years to come. Iraq. We know what happened with Iraq.

Trillions of dollars, a complete destabilization of the country. Look at the other three wars. The United States broke apart Sudan. Why? Well, Sudan was an enemy of Israel, so we have to break apart Sudan. So we supported the South Sudanese. Now we have the real trifecta, massive civil war in Sudan and massive civil war in South Sudan.

In other words, we broke apart the country, and now there's civil war in both halves of the country. Somalia. basically doesn't exist as a country. Libya, it doesn't exist. It's a battlefield. It's a war zone. So that's six out of six. And Netanyahu's crowing, now we go on to Iran.

You have. I have. Of course. This is, where does $28 trillion of debt come from? We've paid probably $7 trillion, if you add it up according to Brown University studies, for example. Something like $7 trillion has gone into this. Israel couldn't do this for one day. Israel, Netanyahu, we are lions. Yeah, right. You are liars. But we are the ones funding you, arming you, paying for all of this.

That's the United States. And this is weird to me because we say yes to defend our ally. No, no, no. We're doing their foreign policy, which makes no sense, which doesn't lead to any peace, which leads to. Basically, a war zone across the Middle East, and we say this is good for us? Why is this good for us? What's the United States getting out of any of this?

We haven't gotten anything out of any of this except massive geopolitical isolation. The most recent votes in the UN, for example, put the United States alone, alone with Israel and Israel. I shouldn't exaggerate. We have Micronesia on our side. We have Nauru on our side with its 12,000 people, maybe a couple of other countries. The whole rest of the world is saying, what is going on?

Endless war in the Middle East. Well, this is because we're defending someone with some 7th century B.C. vision of what they want their country to be.

Of course they were, because this has been an ongoing operation. Whether they were involved in the final days, I don't know. They were involved in the 13 years nonstop. I don't understand how— Actually, let me tell you an interesting story, by the way. The war started in 2011. It was portrayed as always, as the CIA does, as a local uprising and the freedom fighters.

It was said this was Syrians protesting against Syria. That's always how any CIA regime change operation works. There may also be local opposition, but the CIA provides the armaments, it provides the flow of heavy weapons, it provides the financing, it provides the training, it provides the camps, it provides the political organization. So this started in 2011.