Kevin Barrett: Assad concern about truce reasonable

Press TV conducts an interview with Kevin Barrett, author and Middle East expert from Madison, on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s remarks on his government’s readiness for ceasefire if terrorists do not exploit the cessation of hostilities.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: President Assad has pointed out several times that his main problem with the idea of truce or having a ceasefire is that he worries that these militant groups and terrorists being backed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia just might happen to take advantage of this vacuum and opening to regroup and to energize and fortify their positions. What’s your opinion there?

Barrett: That’s a very reasonable concern. We’ve seen all kinds of devious activity from the Saudi and Turkish, [Persian] Gulf states’ side backing these rebels and terrorists including the Wahhabi extremists or the Takfiris who are wreaking such havoc in Syria.

So, I think under the circumstances with the Syrian army making tremendous progress of late to the point that it looked like they might be able to reassert control of their territory in the relatively near future, it’s understandable that President Assad would be a bit reluctant to a ceasefire that would conceivably allow the Turkish government and these supply lines running through Turkey to just go back to what they were doing before the combination of the Syrian army advances and the Russian bombing campaign actually cut off the lifeline of Daesh and these other terrorist groups.

So, I think his position is reasonable, his concern is reasonable, and the question would be whether the other side is willing to find a verifiable way to make sure that they don’t go right back to supplying these groups in Syria, because if that happens, then the deal will be off.

Press TV: Given these circumstances, which you highlighted, how do you see the prospects that if the ceasefire is actually implemented it will last? And how do you see the future of Syria given such a possibility?

Barrett: It’s very much up in the air right now. It’s not clear where all this is going and part of the reason for that is that the American policy isn’t clear.

Frankly, I prefer the Obama foreign policy overall to the Bush foreign policy, but that’s not saying much, because under Bush at least we know what we had, which was a completely out-of-control rouge regime that was lying to us at every turn and could not be trusted one inch. Whereas with the Obama regime we have many different foreign policies as Robert David Steele, the former CIA officer, puts it in this new book Another French False Flag, which I edited. He says there when he was in the CIA running false flags for the CIA that was his job, he noticed that there were as many as seven foreign policies being run by various wings and individuals within the US government.

Right now, we have people in and associated with the government especially the military, who are not thrilled with this policy of building up and supporting Daesh or ISIS. And others, neo-conservatives primarily but some of their allies like possibly certain members of the Democratic Party, are very much enthusiastic about supporting Daesh.

So, it’s very confusing and if the Americans will get their act together, if President Obama were to make his position absolutely clear, we need peace in Syria, we need to stop supplying these people. And President Erdogan needs to stop what he’s been doing. And the Saudis have to stop dreaming of invading Syria. If the Americans make this clear, then we could have peace, but I’m just concerned that all of the splits and fissures within the US government make that unlikely.

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