06/13/14 – Hillary Mann Leverett – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton, welcome to the show.
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And just a couple of headlines here real quick.
Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Ali al-Sistani, calls out the militias.
Iranian commander, quote, in charge in Baghdad fight.
Iran deploys troops to Baghdad to fight against Al-Qaeda.
U.S. readies airstrikes against Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Obama says won't send troops.
Alright, and now introducing Hillary Mann Leverett.
She is formerly of the State Department, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
She's the co-author with her husband, Flint Leverett, of the book, Going to Tehran.
Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And she writes at her website, Going to Tehran.
And their article, their brand new one, Don't Double Down in Syria, is published today at antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Hillary?
Very good.
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate you showing up today.
And so, well, can we just start with the top headline there?
Ali al-Sistani, the highest ranking Shiite religious authority in the world.
You know, I think I pay pretty close attention.
I don't know if I remember him ever directly calling men to arms during the entire time of the Iraq War.
Do you know about that?
Is that unprecedented?
It may be.
During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, there were a range of Shia militias that were very active in the south in terms to control their own territory, to defend against, in their perception, defend against the United States.
So there may not have been as much of a need as there is today.
But al-Sistani, his message is being done, I think, very much in coordination with the existing Shia militias that are also clearly mobilized and saying so publicly.
All right.
So I guess I really am, with today's headlines, I'm getting ahead of the narrative here.
We've got this, well, the rise of, it's been characterized on this show by other experts previously this week, Mitchell Prothero of McClatchy Newspapers, Patrick Coburn, Darja Maile.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or the Sham or whatever you call it, is really no longer a group with a name way bigger than their real presence, like it was all along.
I think it used to be a joke.
They called themselves the Islamic State when they were just a ragtag group of nobodies.
Seems like actually they have a state now, that this is actually the name of a place now.
Is that your take on the situation?
Is it too soon to really say that?
It may be too soon, but clearly their fortunes have risen dramatically.
If you look back to just four years ago in 2010, they were very much on the ropes.
They were an organization that had very little funding, very little arms, very little impact.
And then we have the outbreak of protest violence, however you characterize it, in Damascus, around Damascus and Syria, of course.
And a huge infusion of weapons, money, and support, particularly from our partners on the Arab side of the Gulf, from President Obama himself saying Assad has to go, and from our European partners.
And they have taken off ever since then.
There is a tendency in Washington to characterize the takeoff of ISIS in 2011 as connected to the troop withdrawal, that we shouldn't have withdrawn troops.
And this is part of, I think, the argument building to increase America's involvement.
But that really misses the on-the-ground reality.
It had nothing to do with the U.S. combat troops being taken out of Iraq.
It had very much to do with the infusion of arms cash, training support, onto the Syrian side of really what is a no-man's land between Syria and Iraq.
And thousands of these fighters going from Iraq to Syria, becoming battle-trained, battle-hardened.
And now, shock of shocks, three years later, they're back in Iraq in a much fuller, ferocious force.
Well, you know, it's just amazing to me the way, well, it's pretty clear that the TV anchors are mostly just sort of news actors.
They don't really know what to do with their confusion.
They sort of skate on past it.
Some of the more informed TV experts are having a lot of trouble ducking around the fact that they are still, to this moment, and including the president today in his statement on the White House lawn, and everyone in both parties, I guess, still on this mantra that we've got to double down our support for the rebels in Syria.
At the same time, they're freaking out about this crisis in Iraq.
And we're just supposed to take for granted that it's true, even though everyone knew it wasn't true, back when Kerry told John McCain in Senate testimony last summer that, oh, yeah, no, the supermajority of the rebels in Syria are, you know, moderate and secular.
And everybody thought that was a ridiculous joke.
Everybody knows better than that.
Everybody knows that that's not true.
And, you know, Mitchell Prothero was on the show, like I said, for McClatchy, and he said there are moderates, the FSA fighters who aren't Islamist bin Ladenites, but there's not that many of them, and they don't do that much fighting.
And, you know, basically they're just criminals and gangsters and hustlers rather than real fighters of any kind anyway.
So the war really does belong to these jihadists.
Even the New York Times, Hillary all along, and their representative, I think, of the rest of the media, they've reported from time to time that all the weapons and money are going to the kooks, if not ISIS, then al-Nusra, which I guess supposedly is less brutal but more loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri out of the two.
And yet still, you know, they just played on MSNBC this morning, Hillary Clinton saying, yes, I tried to get Obama to support the rebels even more, and Obama saying, yeah, now we've got to support the rebels even more because of this crisis.
Am I the only one whose head is exploding here?
Is this narrative ever going to work itself out?
And actually, here's the real question.
If they stop putting Israel first and their hatred of Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah and Iran first, because that's what Israel wants, and they actually get a coherent narrative here, like there's the rise of a proto-Al Qaeda state here, then won't that mean a real war?
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
I don't think you're the only one whose head is exploding.
And in fact, I think you could encapsulate what's going on now from something that Albert Einstein said decades ago when he defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again that fails, but thinking it's going to turn out differently.
We have been funding, arming, and training extreme militias for some time, whether it's the mujahideen in Afghanistan, whether it's these people in Libya.
The story that is also underreported are all of the American weapons that we sent directly and indirectly to our so-called friends, the Saudis and the Qataris, to Libya have been seized by Libyan extremist militias and are being used today to wreak havoc over Libya.
So, you know, that's exactly what former Secretary Clinton and President Obama are asking the American people to do again, is to support a strategy that has failed repeatedly, and to do so in one of the most dangerous places on Earth with one of the most dangerous organizations, an organization that is so brutal that al-Qaeda even disowned it, this Islamic State of Iraq and Syria group.
So, yes, to somehow pour more weapons in, like we did to Iraq, we poured $14 billion worth of hardware into Iraq, which today, they're not just, the ISIS is not just seizing that material, Iraqi soldiers are handing it to them.
Those are the so-called moderates.
The same thing, you know, has happened and will continue to happen in Syria.
Any weapons that go to the so-called moderates are handed over to those who can fight better, which in this, you know, in their context is Jabhat al-Nasra and the parent organization, ISIS.
Yeah, well, I mean, the Long War Journal just had a thing a couple weeks ago where the TOW missiles, the sophisticated anti-tank missiles that they're giving them, the same ones that Ronald Reagan had the Israelis sell Khomeini back in the 80s, those TOW missiles are, immediately they've gone from the so-called Islamic Front to al-Nusra, you know, in a matter of weeks.
Just the same thing over and over again this whole time, as you said, insanity continued.
All right, well, the music's playing, so we got to go, but we'll be right back in just a moment with Hilary Mann Leverett, co-author of this great new piece at Antiwar.com today, Don't Double Down in Syria.
The Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first and educating the people about what's really at stake in the Middle East.
Help support their important work at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Talking with Hilary Mann Leverett from goingtotehran.com.
That's the book, too.
Read it.
You know, as mentioned, Reagan's selling, having the Israelis sell TOW missiles to Iran in exchange for some hostages back in the 1980s.
I was thinking during the commercial break, Hilary, that, boy, things were really simple back then, arming both sides of that war against each other, Saddam and the Iranians, too.
Obviously, Saddam much more than the Iranians.
But here in this case, America's on all sides of this thing in every kind of way, and it just seems like, I can't, if there's another explanation, I sure would like to hear it, but it seems to me like this has got to just be all about Israel.
There's no other explanation for why America is not working with Iran, and especially with Syria, with the Ba'athist Shiite-majority coalition, secularist dictatorship of Syria, to kill these al-Qaeda guys.
George Bush paid Assad to kill these guys.
George Bush paid Assad to torture these guys.
I'm not saying that's good, but I'm saying at least it makes sense.
It's a coherent narrative.
If we just fought a war for the Shiites, a war which, by the way, the Saudis were funding our guys' enemies, the Sunni insurgency, the whole time, just like now we're on their side funding these guys again inside Syria right now.
Obviously, it's kind of a confusing mess, but I don't understand what's going on here.
And again, I think actually the war parties putting Israel first is actually help preventing a war here, because it's keeping the narrative confused.
If it wasn't for especially the Republicans' determination to make Assad the root bad guy of everything right now, then the narrative would be much simpler, that al-Qaeda is creating a state on both sides of the border in Syria and Iraq, and we've got to go to war against it.
In fact, at this point, their treachery is preventing the war from getting worse, I think, maybe, at least for now.
I don't know, but explain to me what else it could possibly be as preventing America from just outright backing the Quds Force in their war against ISIS this week in Iraq, for example.
Yeah, I mean, look, there are a couple of things.
One is, I think in terms of the Israelis, they certainly had an interest in the United States and others weakening Assad, militarily weakening Assad to weaken Syria and Syria's military itself vis-à-vis Israel, but also to weaken what they thought could be to weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon and to weaken Iran.
They thought this whole thing would somehow, supporting these militants in Syria would be this trifecta.
It would weaken Assad and the Syrian military would weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon and it would weaken Iran.
I think what drives U.S. policy, though, is something that we can even take a page out of the Middle East and go back to your Iran-Contra scenario, but to focus for just a second on the Contras.
So what we did was we got the Israelis to sell the Iranians tow missiles to get our hostages out of Lebanon, but then we took that cash that the Iranians gave us and against, the administration did, and against the law, against congressionally passed legislation, gave that money to this brutal death force in Nicaragua, the Contras, to try to overthrow their democratically elected government.
Now the reason for that is I don't think that the United States is just some sort of bloodthirsty, craven, crazy.
The reason, the driver there is for hegemony, whether it's hegemony as it was with Nicaragua in Latin America, in our hemisphere, or it has been this futile, catastrophically counterproductive drive for U.S. hegemony in the Middle East.
And where Israel comes in is that Israel is, and put itself forward to be, an important implementer of this American drive for hegemony.
It's so interesting, you know, there was not any support in the United States for Israel from 1948 to 1968.
When, you know, with these arguments about, well we have this common sympathy with Israel over the Holocaust, we have this common value with Israel, with their democracy.
However anybody, wherever people come out on those two issues, you cannot argue that from 1948 to 1968, Israel was less democratic than it is today, where it occupies vastly more Palestinians who have no rights, or that the Holocaust was further from people's minds in the immediate wake of it, right after World War II.
The reason why Israel then becomes important after the 1967 war, in 1968, is that they demonstrate that they can take territory from Arab states aligned with the Soviet Union, principally Egypt, which was the big independent Arab military power, but also Syria, that Israel could take those strategic territories, and that Israel was willing to, and eager to, pursue a strategy of using force whenever, wherever, and whatever degree it wanted, or could, to subordinate its neighbors.
The United States latched onto that as a good partnership, as something in the U.S. interest, and has cultivated it ever since, and of course armed it to the teeth.
So it is certainly a double-edged sword in many, many ways, but I think the big result is that it leads us to take these decisions, like arming and funding an al-Qaeda offshoot, indirectly at least, through what we've given to the Syrian opposition, makes us do these things that seem bizarre, because they're part of this really counterproductive pursuit of hegemony, and using Israel as a partner in that cause.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny, because the way that it's portrayed by Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, it's much more simple.
He says, well, you know, Hezbollah is backed by Syria, is backed by Iran, and so I prefer these bad guys to those bad guys.
If you make it that black and white of an issue, Hezbollah is not really an enemy of the United States.
Al-Qaeda is.
And so, sort of, it's treason.
Our government is on the wrong side of this fight.
There's no other way to put it.
It's the same thing happened, I mean, you characterize it how you want, back in 2003, when Iran said, hey, we arrested a bunch of al-Qaeda guys, fleeing your war in Afghanistan, let us turn them over to you, in exchange for some MEK cultists, and the Bush administration said no.
Right.
I mean, the principal problem is that Iran and Hezbollah are not going to subordinate their policies, their interests, to the United States and Israel, whereas a lot of the Sunni states, Egypt, Saudi Arabia in particular, are certainly willing to subordinate their interests, their policymaking, even their sovereignty to the United States, which means that where al-Qaeda basically comes from, most al-Qaeda foot soldiers have been Saudi and Egyptian, that we can somehow rely on our friends in the Egyptian government and the Saudi government to sit on them, whereas we can't rely on people in the Iranian government or Hezbollah leadership to sit on their compatriots.
So that's where I think the issue of who's bad guy is worse.
It's just that we think that somehow we can sit on, we can get our allies, our so-called allies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in particular, to sit on these al-Qaeda folks.
Well, and that just seems completely opposite of reality, right?
Where Nasrallah is a conservative, old, stable kind of a force there, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, compared to a bunch of suicide bomber crazies, which Hezbollah's had their suicide bombers in the past, I guess, but compared to these ISIS guys who crucify their enemies in the center of town and kill people just for being, they call Shiites polytheists.
Oh man, like that's not a declaration of permanent war right there.
How can Bandar control Omar al-Baghdadi or whoever's running ISIS right now?
How can, just because Saudi might want to do what America says there, these guys sort of seem like the cat led out of the bag to me.
Well, they may want to, and certainly I think the ruling party in Egypt and the ruling family in Saudi Arabia do want to and are very much dependent on a security relationship with the United States arming them.
They also have to deal with public opinion, public sentiment, in their very heavily Islamist societies.
So they're constantly walking this tightrope or going right over to the edge on their swords between keeping the United States, supporting them, arming them, and giving some support, certainly not just rhetorical, but at least rhetorical support to really ideologically charged Islamist militants.
So it's a constant struggle, I think, for the Egyptian and Saudi leaderships to have to make this balance.
And then we are left with the mess.
We are left with the raging resentment of people, particularly in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who are being ruled by governments that are not representative of them, and the perception is that we're backing those governments up.
So we've known this for a long time, but we keep doubling down because I think in particular the Egyptian and Saudi governments are willing to support our policies, whether they're in the realm of what we call terrorism or if they're about Israel.
Those governments are willing to go along.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
We've got to leave it right there.
But thank you very much for your time.
Good to talk to you again, Hillary.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That's Hillary Mann Leverett.
She's the author of the book, co-author of the book, Going to Tehran, Why the U.S. Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And her website is goingtotehran.com.
We'll be right back.
Hey, y'all.
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