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Webster Griffin Tarpley, author and historian from Washington, has joined Press TV to discuss the crisis in Syria.

- Let me first start with you Webster Griffin Tarpley, on the matter of insurgence, Prince Bandar is unleashing the worst criminals and terrorists inside Syria, millions of dollars to arm and train this new force by the name of the Jaish al-Islam (army of Islam) or JAI; the union of 43 groups.

Tell us your reaction on this and what is going on when it comes to Saudi Arabia and this group in particular, which is a union, for what I understand, of 43 groups.

- Well, I think that we have to look at Saudi Arabia over a period of time. Saudi Arabia of course is an absolute monarchy of a type that really does not exist anywhere else in the world.

If we look at Europe, you have to go back to the continental Europe before 1789, before the French Revolution, to find anything comparable to Saudi Arabia but even there, the European feudal monarchy was nowhere near as absolute as the Saudi Monarchy today; right?

Saudi Arabia is a country with literally no rights, no rights to do anything. It is of course an oligarchy, it has a royal family of several thousand members and this makes it extremely difficult for any internal reforms to go through, because the oligarchs fight against each other, they fight among themselves; very hard to reform such a system and it is extremely backward from so many points of view.

The native population apparently does not like to work, they like to get foreigners to come in and do the work and this creates, of course, a tremendous vulnerability for them, They have got to maintain a domestic police state to prevent the domestic workers, the foreigners that they brought in, the aliens; and of course they have a large Shia minority, which is treated very badly in the eastern provinces.

So it is extremely unstable and what they have done over the years is to reach out to the most backward, the most benighted, the most violent, the most destructive groups that they can find.

And they have always done it together with the United States, right? Going back to Afghanistan in the early 1980’s when it was Saudi Arabia and the United States, jointly creating al-Qaeda. So what we know as al-Qaeda is, without any doubt, a joint Saudi-US creation.

Now this is going into crisis for a number of reasons and the big thing that we saw is Obama’s reluctance, his refusal, ultimately, to bomb Syria, at least so far; and at that point there is a kind of explosion of instability inside the Saudi oligarchy itself.

They continue to back these extremely violent groups. There is a lot of speculations here about what the Saudi... Prince Bandar in particular, the leading figure, is going to do, if the Syrian rebels, the Nusrah and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, if these groups seem to be losing, the scenario..., here, is that Prince Bandar and company will start giving them more and more modern weapons and with those modern weapons, it is quite likely that these Nusrah people will begin to shoot down Western airliners, Israeli airliners, other kinds of targets that will cause this entire thing to explode, revealing the tremendous role of Saudi Arabia in sponsoring terrorism and again I stress, not alone, with the CIA, but certainly they have had a very big role and the case that you just cited is a good case and point.

- Webster Griffin Tarpley, looking at what is going on there, Jihad Mouracadeh (other guest of the show) says that this situation is kind of extreme, or it is just that, is not it? And if you want to take a look at the US role, explain to us what is going on?

Is the US with the Saudis on this deal, of which it has been mentioned based on diplomats, that Bandar is pressing the US drop its objection to supplying these antiaircraft and antitank missiles to this group that Saudi Arabia has formed by the name of JAI, which in return Riyadh is encouraging the JAI to accept the authority of the US and now is the US with Saudi Arabia, which goes against, then, pushing for the Geneva II Conference? Or is US using a dual track strategy here?

- Maybe we just look at the US-Saudi relations over a little bit of time. This moment when Saudi Arabia threatens to dump the United States and make other arrangements, is of course melodramatic but not new. We had something like that in the summer of 2001, right before the 9/11; the king of Saudi Arabia circulated a letter about the US and Saudi Arabia at the parting of the ways.

Later in 2010 we had the famous op-ed in the Washington Post by Prince Turki al-Faisal saying that, if at the September’s UN General Assembly, the US, did not act in accordance with Saudi wishes, the parting of the ways.

Now we have just had another temper tantrum by the Saudis, by Bandar in person, in the last couple of weeks, that because of the refusal of the United States to start a regional war and perhaps a world war over Syria, that Saudi Arabia was fed up and they also had this temper tantrum over their seat on the UN Security Council.

Now the CIA has done everything possible to help those rebels on the ground in Syria. Naturally the weapons were financed by Saudi Arabia but there were plenty of them and they were sent in through Incirlik NATO base in turkey with CIA officers, directing the flow of weapons to the various groups.

However, last year when the attempt, in July of 2012 to decapitate the Assad government and have a military coup, when that failed despite the best efforts of the Obama White House, there was a certain disillusionment and now of course with the fall of Qusayr in June and the likely fall of Aleppo, the liberation I would say, of Aleppo from these terrorist groups, we now see that Obama has been forced to back off and above all the big factor here is that the American people are sick of war, they do not want to hear any stories about new wars especially on this kind of a basis.

Just on the way down to the studio today, listening to the local news radio, they developed a scenario that there are 1,500 Westerners, people from Europe and the US, who are currently fighting for the terrorist opposition in Syria and the question is, when they come back what will they do? And maybe they will come back sooner rather than later if they are disillusioned with what is going on in Syria, they may come back and attempt to start terrorist actions in Europe and the United States, which would be, according to this think-tanker, not ordered by al-Nusrah or the Islamic Emirate, but inspired by them and that of course would change the public opinion.

One gets the impression that the powers that be here, are trying to prepare the public opinion that the Syrian rebels, who were supposedly heroes of democracy, are going to get back into the category of terrorists.

The other thing we have seen in the past 24 hours, the London Independent, writes that General Idris of the Free Syrian Army, General Idris of course the CIA golden boy, General Idris is saying that he may have to join with Assad to fight Nusrah and the Islamic Emirates as part of this Geneva II Conference.

So the Geneva Conference could be very bad for the Syrian rebels and therefore very bad for the international prestige of Saudi Arabia.

- The big question and the larger picture is, what Saudi Arabia wants from Syria?

Saudi Arabia obviously is against any form of democracy as we have seen how it has crushed what is going on in Bahrain and wants a government it can control in Syria, such as what it is doing in Egypt and of course we can have the viewpoints they have of Iran in terms of not liking Iran because Iran, in a sense, poses democracy and so is not that what Saudi Arabia wants countries it can control in the region in the bigger picture of things?

- Well, I would say that in this area the CIA agenda, the Saudi Agenda and indeed the Israeli agenda go together and this the idea of destruction of the modern state...

[In response to Jihad Mouracadeh]: Well, these (Saudi Arabia, Israel and CIA) are closely joined.

Ok! We will forget the CIA but Saudi Arabia, certainly, I think shares the idea that their goal would be failed states, microstates, mini-states, in other words the busting up of the existing countries, so that the modern states would cease to exist in the Middle East and therefore Saudi Arabia would look more viable.