06/18/14 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our guest today is Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jonathan.
How are you doing?
I'm well, thank you very much.
Good.
Well, happy to hear it.
And you're welcome and very happy to have you here.
Appreciate it.
Now, I want to ask, well, who knew about the situation in Iraq, but not in just a kind of flippant way.
I mean, it's important to me, I think, that you get credit for being one of the few mainstream newspaper reporters who, and really, I mean few, who did not just go along with the in-crowd basically the way they did and helped to lie us into war back in 2002 and 2003.
In fact, you were reporting the truth about the agenda to push us into war with Iraq beginning in the fall of 2001.
People can find those archives there.
You and Warren Strobel, too, there at Knight Ridder News Service back then.
And so that's very important.
People can watch all about that in the PBS Bill Moyers documentary, Buying the War, which is still online and which is really great that I hope y'all will look at.
So that's important to bring up.
But I want to get to, and I haven't gone back to review what it was that you wrote back then, Jonathan, lately here.
But I wonder whether much of it had to do with what are going to be the consequences for the Iraqi people who at that point in the American debate were largely imaginary and weren't apparently going to have a say in how any of this happened once the war happened.
And then I wonder if also you could just, you know, talk about people, other people who knew.
I mean, I was just a skater, cab driver, nobody kid doing pirate radio, and I had read a stupid Tom Clancy novel where Saddam Hussein gets assassinated and the Iranians inherit the south of the country in a snap of fingers right there.
So I had that much knowledge that there's some schism going on here and some things might take place.
And I was just driving a cab in the middle of the night.
So I wonder what the best and the brightest that you were talking to in DC were really saying when they weren't lying us in war.
Indeed, one of the first pieces we wrote when we actually reported my former colleagues Warren Strobel and John Walcott reported, I believe it was in February of 2002 or January, that the administration had decided to invade Iraq.
And we started writing pieces, I wrote number one anyway, a major piece on here are the possible consequences.
And they included this, you know, taking the lid off what had been centuries of enmity between the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam that Saddam, who was a Sunni and presided over a Sunni dominated minority regime that suppressed the Shiites, the Shia in Iraq, you know, that taking the lid off that pot could be extremely dangerous in terms of igniting sectarian violence.
And indeed, you know, fast forward a couple of years and that's exactly what happened.
The fact is that what also happened during that time after the American invasion was the creation of an entity known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
This was an Al-Qaeda branch that had not existed prior to the United States invasion and that was the forerunner of the group that is now on an offensive, the Sunni terrorist group that is now on an offensive from the north of Iraq towards Baghdad.
They're about 60, I believe, about 60 kilometers north of Baghdad now.
That was the forerunner, that group.
And indeed, throughout this entire period, you know, Iraq has not known peace.
There was a period, you know, several years ago when, you know, the amount, the level of terrorist violence was low.
But nevertheless, it was never wiped out.
That group never went away.
And the idea that somehow Iraq was calm and peaceful when the Bush administration handed the tiller over to the Obama administration is just pure nonsense.
Yeah, well, it's amazing that those are the goalposts of this narrative here.
The argument being played out, especially on TV, is, you know, whether we should have stayed, you know, whether Obama should have forced Maliki to let him stay and all that kind of thing.
I mean, never mind that.
But back to the prediction.
My response to that would be, how?
When you had the fact that George Bush in 2008 signed an agreement with Maliki, by the way, a Shiite prime minister, that the United States helped put in power in a deal with Iran that pushed aside Yedolawi, who was the Iraqi politician who had actually won parliamentary elections.
We put, helped put Maliki in power.
And he, one of the last things that Bush did when he left, before he left office, was sign this agreement with Maliki that specified, mandated a U.S. withdrawal, all troops out by the end of 2011.
Obama comes into power, and he tried to negotiate an agreement with Maliki that would have at least put, kept 3,000 U.S. military trainers in Iraq.
And granted, the fact is that the U.S. military wanted to keep more troops there, wanted a bigger troop presence.
But here you had a government, a Maliki, and his parliament, and others, and Iran, that were saying, no way are we going to let, shoot any U.S. troops stay behind.
And that would have been a deal also that would have been rejected by the Congress, because it would have required U.S. troops to, what Maliki was demanding, and what Obama was refusing, was that U.S. troops who stayed would be subject to Iraqi law, whereas the Obama administration was saying, no, they need to be exempted from Iraqi law, and U.S. troops need to remain subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
That would be the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice.
So those negotiations collapsed.
So the idea that, you know, keeping American troops there might have staved off what this disaster that we've seen unfolding since last week is also revisionist nonsense, because the fact is that you had an Iraqi army that was up in the north, it was Shiite-dominated, and that was not getting along with the population there.
The population was incredibly opposed to, came to oppose the Iraqi army presence in the north.
And the fact is also that you still had this terrorist group, ISIS, or some people refer to ISIL, that was operating not just in Syria, but was still operating in Iraq.
All right, so, well, there's a lot to go over here, but I guess, first and foremost, what do you think the U.S. is going to do now?
Well, it's going to be really interesting to see, because of the, one of the ironies of this disaster is that by intervening on the side of the Iraqi government, which has now asked, formally, the United States to stage airstrikes against ISIS, the United States effectively finds itself on the same side as Iran, and effectively finds itself on the same side as Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, because Assad is fighting ISIS as well.
Don't forget, ISIS spans the border.
They control parts of northeastern Syria and a large part of Iraq.
And so, I mean, it remains to be seen what's going to happen.
But the fact is, it's quite an extraordinary situation.
The United States, I don't think, can change the facts on the ground through airstrikes.
We'll have to wait and see.
And usually, when you mount airstrikes, you need eyes on the ground to spot targets, or to lase targets, and that could mean, I don't know if that means necessarily putting U.S. special forces on the ground.
We have to wait and see.
But certainly, what the United States has been trying to do, and Iran, apparently, is trying to force Maliki, push Maliki, to reach out to politicians from the Kurds, leadership of the Kurds, leadership of Sunnis, who are opposed to this takeover by this terrorist group in association with former Ba'athists and tribal militias, to try and somehow rescue some kind of multi-secular Iraqi...
We'll be right back, Jonathan.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back.
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Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers about the continuing war in Iraq.
And so right up against the break, we were talking about the coalition they're trying to put together against ISIS now, which includes the Iranians.
And I think it's notable.
Yeah.
Hey, it's definitely notable.
It's quantifiably notable that America has been fighting for Iran in Iraq since 2003.
That was exactly what the king of Saudi Arabia said was.
Hey, it was all.
It's in the Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning WikiLeaks.
State Department cables.
It was always you and us and Saddam against Iran.
But now you're going to hand Iraq to Iran on a golden platter, he said.
And that's what happened.
And in 2003, I mean, it was, I think it was March.
It wasn't even April.
It was still March 2003 when the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and the Bata Brigades crossed the border from Iraq.
I was there.
I was there.
I watched them come across.
I was in Kurdistan when they came across.
Take it from there, Jonathan.
Sorry.
I was there.
They came across into Kurdistan.
Well, I was, it was actually, let me think.
It may have been, yeah, somewhere in March.
Yep.
And so that's the catbird seed.
That was it.
The Iranians had the opposition prepared.
Whatever Chalabi had promised Richard Perle was null and void that day.
Right.
And the fact is that the Iranians probably played a much bigger role in secretly sucking the United States into that disaster by sponsoring or at least putting up some of Chalabi's quote unquote defectors on whose garbage information and bogus intelligence the Bush administration relied in part.
Don't you remember, you know, the ice cream and yogurt trucks disguised as, sorry, the biological weapons, mobile biological weapons labs disguised as mobile milk and yogurt trucks?
Sure.
Yeah, well, Colin Powell had a very convincing cartoon of what one might look like if they had had a picture of one.
Right.
And, you know, the fact is that people have forgotten all of that or they seem to have and those people include, unfortunately, television cable news bookers.
Well, you know what it is, Jonathan?
These people on the air again have revived them and they've gone on the air to spew revisionist garbage.
Yeah, well, TV never told the truth.
TV never put up a map and said, let's talk a little bit about Sunni and Shia and who's cleansing who from Baghdad right now and this kind of thing, who's on whose side.
They never talked about that.
It was always just the democracy versus the terrorists or whatever, the whole damn war.
They would never be honest.
So, of course, they don't know anybody who knows anything about it to interview because after all these years, they never did.
That's not true.
I mean, Scott, there are a lot of people who understood what was going on, who understood the disaster that we were getting sucked into.
They were talking to us.
That's how we were able to do the reporting that we were able to do.
No, no, no, I don't mean that.
I mean the cable TV news people doing the booking.
They don't know who you are.
You know, they've never met you or heard of Knight Ritter before or anything like that.
All they know is, well, that Wolfowitz guy is the genius, right?
I don't know that they consider him the genius, but they look at the name.
They see, oh, look, he's the former Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Let's put him on.
And the most egregious is the Wall Street Journal op-ed editors who fail to police the historical trash that is being revived or being printed on their op-ed page.
Yeah, it is.
It's really out of control with what's going on in the media right now where even Judith Miller, I read, I didn't see it, but I read that even Judith Miller was featured on Fox to complain about the media coverage isn't being warlike enough on this issue.
Apparently she was on.
I saw a screen grab.
I did not bother tuning in to listen because none of these people should be on.
None of them should have any credibility at all to the extent that they should be presented the American people again after what they've put this country through.
Well, and what they've put Iraq through, and there's still so much to cover here, Jonathan.
Let me ask you this.
It looks to me just from the map like, and I'm not saying either side necessarily recognizes it the way I recognize it, but I wonder, it looks like a stalemate to me.
It looks like Maliki, you know, he's been shelling Fallujah angrily for a while.
He's not really trying to retake Fallujah after all these months.
His army turned and ran, like you said, because they're the Shiite army.
They're the army of the country from Baghdad to Basra.
They're not really the army of the eastern part of the country, and I wonder whether, you know, it doesn't, and with Baghdad being an 85% Shiite city now, the ISIS guys can't be fool enough to think that they could really take the city.
They can suicide bomb it.
They can't really take the city back after the army and the Marine Corps gave it to the Shiites.
So, it, you know, is this just the Declaration of Independence?
This is now the end of Maliki pretending to be the government of the north and the west, and this is now the end of the Sunnis pretending to go along with this awakening crap where they're going to participate and be allowed to participate in the government in Baghdad.
Well, we'll have to wait and see because I think you're, I mean, you're right.
I mean, we can't alone mitigate against any possibility that ISIS is going to be able to, to, quote-unquote, conquer Baghdad, although, you know, no one really expected them to conquer Mosul either.
But there's a couple of other considerations here, and the one I would point you to is the fact that ISIS has declared its intent to destroy the holiest shrines in Shiite Islam, which are, happen to be located in Iraq, in Samarra, in Karbala, and in Najaf.
Those are red lines for the country to, on the other side of the border, Iran.
And I don't think that there's going to be a situation, I don't think Iran is going to allow or will brook any kind of possibility that these shrines are going to be destroyed by the Sunni extremists.
And I think you would certainly see, if there was a danger of that, I think you would see active Iranian military intervention, although let's not forget there are numerous news reports for days now that the head of the Quds Force, General Soleimani, who, by the way, was the architect of saving Bashar Assad, is now doing the same for Maliki.
And now, what about the primacy of the tribes over ISIS?
The black banners get all the headlines, but isn't this the same old Sunni insurgency and aren't they still the major power of the former Baathists and the local Sunni tribal leaders, etc., rather than this Baghdadi guy?
I think so.
I haven't drilled down far enough into all of that to be able to say one way or the other, that certainly there are a lot of former Baathists involved and once this is over, if it's ever over, I think you're going to see these groups falling out with each other because ideologically, they're diametrically opposed.
You've got Baghdadi and ISIS, which are extremist Sunnis, and you have the Baathists who, let's not forget, were a secular political party that ruled Iraq with a pretense towards Islam, but in fact were secular.
And I don't see how they are possibly going to be able to coexist once, if, they ever get to the point where they conquer and secure a large area, a large piece of territory.
We'll have to wait and see.
Alright, now, when it comes to ISIS and the al-Nusra front, which I guess is still back in Syria and sitting this part of the thing out here, can you give me ballpark numbers of how many guys?
I hear different estimates all over the place and I'm curious to know which thing.
You know what, Scott, I think any information that comes out of Syria regarding numbers and that kind of thing is going to be, you know, speculation.
I don't think any of it, you know, we've seen numbers in terms of the number of foreigners who are involved in ISIS.
I've seen figure estimates of 7 to 10,000.
I don't think anybody really knows.
You know, I just got back from Syria.
I just made my second trip there.
And, you know, the fact is that the insurgency or at least the Islamists are battling each other and for the time being Bashar Assad has won.
Nusra and ISIS are fighting each other there.
Yes.
Nusra with Arar al-Sham and the FSA are battling ISIS, although there was reports the other day that ISIS has asked for and obtained a ceasefire I forget exactly where it was in order to fight the regime, push back a regime offensive, while it's also tied down in Iraq.
Alright, and now, so here's where I play Pollyanna for just a second here.
We got this Iran deal, which I don't know, I like to give 60-40 what the hell, why not, of a chance of a final nuclear deal here.
And there was talk from, I don't know, one or another Saudi prince or so-called minister of government who said, you know what, hey, if the Americans want to lead the way on warming up relations with Iran, we could be cool with that, you know, let's do that.
And obviously there's no consensus there but it just seems like it's such an obvious thing to do, not to necessarily ally outright with the Baader Brigade again or anything like that, but at least to, you know, end the Cold War with Iran, which then pulls the rug out from under this entire crisis of the Shiite Crescent by making it no longer a big deal that Iran is friends with Syria and has blood, etc., because Iran ain't so bad anymore, kind of a thing, and then it seems like maybe that could help really take the pressure off the Saudis to do so much funding of the Mujahideen in Syria, Iraq, and everywhere else.
And, you know, maybe things could be a little bit better around there, but I guess I'm way down a slippery slope argument.
Yeah, I think you're way down the road right now.
I think you're way down the road.
I think that neither side is looking to really make any kind of major deals outside of the nuclear deal, and then to say, okay, what next?
Because you still have a serious you still have, first of all, domestically in both Iran and the United States, you have domestic political opposition to any kind of, not just nuclear deal, but not just a deal on Iraq, but the nuclear deal and any kind of deal.
But then there's also, there are also other questions especially about, at least as far as the United States goes, you know, Iranian sponsorship and support of Hezbollah and Hezbollah terrorist operations that have targeted people in Europe and Latin America.
And I think we're a long ways off from sort of like this, you know, grand bargain because I don't think the United States is prepared to support any kind of continued Iran, you know, to be seen to support any kind of continued Iranian support for Hezbollah, which is the sworn enemy of Israel.
So I think we're way down the road on that right now.
Yeah, no, I'm with you.
I mean, I think that's why the Leverets always say we need to kind of make an overall peace first and then deal with the individual issues the way that Nixon and Kissinger did with Mao, rather than taking a piecemeal because it makes it so difficult to get any of them done while all the rest of the issues are still outstanding.
Right, but don't forget also that once upon a time 2000, and I'm trying to remember the I don't want to get my date wrong, but I want to say 2005 I think it was, there was an offer from the former Iranian government of Ayatollah Khatami It was an overall package deal that would have included a deal on the nuclear program That was rejected by who?
By Dick Cheney Right, and it was Dick Cheney who said no who put the kibosh on that.
Well, the reason I'm so hopeful about it, I know I get carried away, but the reason I'm so hopeful about it is it seems like the nuclear issue is the major outstanding issue.
Not that Hezbollah is no big deal or anything, but it seems like if we could get this thing out of the way, then maybe we can make that next step but without getting this thing out of the way it seems like it will always be the endless threats of options on tables and all that crap, same as always Anyway, but thank you for your time I've kept you away over time, I really appreciate it Jonathan Anytime, Scott Hey, Al, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson The War State.
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