06/23/14 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
Back to it.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line, we got Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.
Now, peace, Nick.
His latest article at ConsortiumNews.com is titled, Iraqis are not abstractions.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And yeah, I was thinking, well, first of all, I like your article here about how Iraqis are human beings and it's not a right to murder them.
You know, it's just a policy if you ask the people on TV, but if you ask the people on Iraq, it means a hell of a lot more to them.
So that's real good.
But also, I just wanted to hear your take on what all is going on over there.
We've talked quite a bit about Ukraine on the show lately, but I don't think I've gotten your take on the modern incarnation of the Syria and Iraq war here.
Well, Scott, I think, as ever, the most important factor to take into account is that most of our co-citizens don't know which is up with respect to Iraq.
They're still laboring under the delusions that have been put out by the mass media.
That's why I'm always pleased to have a chance to talk on your show and other alternative media shows.
One thing completely lost is the human dimension of all this.
People are being killed, you know, little people, children.
It used to be that civilized nations cared about that.
But lately, it's been possible to keep photos and other accounts of little children being killed out of the media.
One exception that occurred way back in early 2005 was the picture of a very small five or six-year-old little girl, blood splattered all over her and on the floor in front of her.
She's crying, and in the picture you see the two long legs of a U.S. serviceman who is serving there for what?
Now, if you don't have compassion when you look at that picture, if you don't start asking yourself, well, how did this happen?
Let me just briefly recount how it did happen.
There was a curfew coming on toward the end of the day on the 18th of January 2005, and this little girl was with her four brothers and sisters and her mother and father driving in a car back to their home.
The car did not hear or did not stop when it was warned to stop, and U.S. service people shot the car up real bad, killing the mother and father in the front seat, severely wounding all the children in the back seat.
We have an account of that simply because Chris Hondrus, H-O-N-D-R-O-S, who is a photographer for Getty, you really have to go to Getty to get the photo, he took a picture of her after this account, several pictures actually, and it just points up in bas-relief, so to speak, the results of these instant decisions on the part of our soldiers and what happens when this kind of thing descends upon a nation like Iraq.
Those legs, for example, the ones that are near the pool of blood and the crying little girl, Samar Hussein is her name, and she's still alive, she made it out of this.
Those legs are attached to one of the people that we sent over there to Iraq, and I find myself wondering, wow, you know, wonder what kind of tormented body or soul or both of those legs are now attached to.
I wonder if it's still living and breathing or perhaps it's one of the poor service people who killed themselves at Fort Lewis-McChord where this unit was based.
So, there are human dimensions to this whole thing, and nobody seems to give a darn about all this, and here we have Kerry, the worst Secretary of State, well, you have to go back a ways, but if you look at his predecessors, you have to go all the way back to early Clinton days when he had a decent one.
He's arrived now in Baghdad.
He's going to fix up the whole situation, and what we have here, I'm happy to tell you, is a dispatch from a Michael R. Gordon from the New York Times who's with Kerry and will explain.
Now, why do I mention Michael Gordon?
Well, because he's one of the guys, one of the cheerleaders, one of the people with Judith Miller who with the New York Times got us into this thing in 2003 in the first place.
So, we're going to get an objective account from Michael Gordon.
Forget about it, as we say in the Bronx.
Now, the other thing here is that if you listen as I do to people on the scene, Patrick Coburn, for example, you see that things get really, really, really desperate there.
The Sunni hordes, so to speak, the ISIS, are coming down toward Baghdad.
Worse still, the Shia militias, bloodthirsty as all get out, are preparing to meet them.
Something has to happen, and something has to happen soon.
Now, I have an idea which I'm going to share first on your program, Scott, so remember where you heard it first.
800 years ago, a guy named Francis, he happened to be from Assisi, he crossed enemy lines, went to Cairo, and met with the chief Muslim ruler there during the Fifth Crusade.
He talked to them, they had a peaceful encounter, and he learned, that is Francis did, that it was possible, that you could broker peace between Christians and Muslims.
Why do I mention that now?
Because we've got a new Francis, right?
Happens to be the Pope.
Now, I'm not real big on Popes lately, but this guy seems to be a different breed.
Besides that, he bears the name Francis, and besides that, he's one of the few people that has any claim, any claim to moral authority in the world these days.
And so, why not?
Why not ask the Pope, Pope Francis, to get in his plane there, and go to Baghdad, or go somewhere in that area, Cairo, or wherever, and invite people, invite the Sunnis that his predecessor met with 800 years ago in Cairo.
You know, his predecessor was the nephew of Saladin.
Now, Saladin was no, you know, no shabby guy.
He ruled the entire Levant, plus Egypt, parts of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, parts of North Africa, and yet he was willing to deal with, and be encouraged by, this weird guy named Francis from Italy.
So, that could happen again.
Short of that, you know, I'd have to say, maybe the Russians and the Chinese can convene the UN Security Council, and hope against hope that the rest of them will not be so slavishly subservient to the U.S. that they'll come to some sensible decision here on Iraq, because time is very, very short, and people, and this is the key point in my piece over the weekend, people getting killed, and that includes little children, and we used to care about those things.
Yeah, all right.
Well, first thing there is, I don't know if you saw that Vladimir Putin actually offered his help to Maliki to fight against...
I was really interested in that.
Yeah, if you have Putin, and you have the the Shia in Iran, and you have their policy is consistent.
The Russians back the, you know, have sided with the Iranians, and the Shia, and all this for quite a while now.
Yeah, the problem, of course, is Maliki himself, who was put in by the UN, by the U.S. ambassador at the time.
Hey, were you surprised to see, Ray, were you surprised that the Ayatollah Sistani called for Maliki to be replaced?
Well, no, because they're getting pretty desperate there.
Unless Maliki is replaced, there's no hope at all for avoiding real major bloodshed.
Now, you know, that's why my article really starts with the surge way back at the end of 2006.
All right, well, we got to hold it right there.
We'll pick up with the surge.
Sure.
This is very important.
I'm very happy to give you the opportunity to talk about it after this break.
It's Ray McGovern, everybody.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, now veteran intelligence professional for sanity.
He writes at consortiumnews.com.
If you go to antiwar.com today, you'll find his article, Iraqis are not abstractions.
And so now, so we've got to talk about the surge of 06 and 07.
This is where the Republicans, according to the mythology, saved the Iraq war from the disaster that they had made it into, and came out and got their victory at the end anyway, right?
Now, what's your problem with that great story that everything was perfectly fine until Obama didn't stay forever and hasn't waged war on behalf of Maliki these last few weeks?
Well, I would defend it as myth.
It's a great myth that it permitted Cheney and Bush to ride off into the western sunset without having lost a war.
But it was totally unconscionable the way it happened.
And without beating a dead horse, if you think back, what's it now, 2006, so we're talking eight years ago, the war was already lost to the degree it could ever be won.
The internecine warfare was flourishing.
And our generals there in the scene, together with even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld at the time, realized that the last thing they needed to do was send more troops there.
Why?
Because as they testified to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, more troops will just give people like Maliki or anybody else in power in those days, the idea that the Americans would always pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
And there is no need, I repeat, no need to compromise with the Sunnis, with the Kurds, with anybody else.
And as you know, Iraq is a terribly sectarian society.
So what happened was, after the testimony of the generals, namely that the war is lost, we need to pull back.
After the testimony of James Baker, the elder Bush's secretary of state, who led the Iraq study group together with Lee Hamilton and concluded that the last thing that was needed were more troops, Bush decided to send in 30,000 more troops in the celebrated surge.
Why?
Well, because otherwise he would appear to have lost a war on his watch.
What was the result?
1,000 U.S. service people killed, tens of thousands of people in Baghdad, which was converted from a sort of a 50-50 Sunni Shia capital city of 7 million into a predominantly Shia city.
And you can watch on satellite photography, Scott, you can watch the lights go out in the Sunni neighborhoods.
That's called ethnic cleansing.
But if it allowed Bush and Cheney to claim victory or to leave without having lost, well, that was good enough.
Now, that's what we inherit now.
What did Maliki do?
He decided that he didn't really need to pay attention to anyone suggesting that he compromised, that he give the Sunni a fair shake on things.
And his oppressive policies have now, well, the chickens have come home to roost.
And what we have are the Sunnis in high dungeon coming down from the north out of Syria and the northern ports of Iraq, threatening the capital itself.
I'm wondering what's going to happen to that embassy that we built there for almost a billion dollars, where they have hundreds, if not thousands of U.S. people twiddling their thumbs, trying to figure out what to do.
What's going to happen there?
Well, you know, Justin Raimondo years ago, and I had accidentally plagiarized this and thought it was mine.
But it was his idea back when eventually it's just going to end up being the Museum of American Atrocities.
And every floor will have exhibits of all of the innocent people that were killed by American forces, I guess, starting when Jimmy Carter hired Saddam to invade Iran back in 1980 and all the way through today.
Well, yeah, you know, I've painted a portrayal of people leaving that embassy by a helicopter.
Yeah, I'll.
So, yeah, I mean, that's what they've been talking about is the first thing they're doing.
Boy, we got to reinforce that embassy.
We're not going to have another Saigon Benghazi type situation there, man.
Yeah.
So I'm doing the math here and I get 40 years ago.
Have we learned nothing in 40 years?
Nope.
Apparently we haven't.
Now, here's the thing, though.
Go back to 2006 and all that.
I mean, I guess there's no point talking about the the awakening and the turn against Saudi and all the details of the surge.
But the main point of the surge supposedly was just you wait by this fall because, you know, they started, I think, as you mentioned, the beginning of 2007.
By this fall, we're going to have met all these benchmarks.
We've got to make peace in Baghdad, that sectarian cleansing you were talking about, kick all the Sunnis out.
There'll be no one left to fight there.
And then the atmosphere will be peaceful enough that we'll be able to convene the parliament and we'll get these people to become Jeffersonian Democrats and compromise with each other and work everything out and share the oil revenue and with us, too.
And whatever, whatever.
And they never did that.
They never accomplished any of the benchmarks at all.
And so for a slogan as simple as the surge is working, the surge is working, the surge has worked, the surge has worked.
No one on TV ever, I don't think, asked, well, what about the benchmarks?
That's a pretty damn simple thing, too.
Wasn't part of your slogan that by the fall, the benchmarks will have been met?
Which of them have been met?
Which of them have not been met?
Nah, whatever.
The surge worked is just too easy of a chant for people to chant.
And so they chanted it.
And and that's how it worked.
You know, it worked on the minds of the American people, just like Petraeus said was the plan in the first place.
We've got to add time to the Washington clock.
It's just like you said, we've got to drag this thing out so it doesn't end now, not so that we can make everything just the way we want it.
Not really, because they knew they couldn't.
And the question is, Scott, well, one question is where they're so ignorant that they realized that they hoped this would not be the case.
I think they were fully cognizant of the fact that if they didn't really bear down on Maliki and his and his like, that there would eventually be a huge price to pay as we're paying this week or next in the civil war.
Well, you know, in the elections of 2010, Obama sided with Maliki, even though Alawi, which is amazing, Alawi, the former CIA agent, former Saddam henchman, even though he's a Shia, you know, was seen as the moderate and the more compromiser type.
He actually his party won the plurality.
But then Obama actually sided with Maliki and the Dawa party again.
You know, we were paying him then.
I mean, it's easy to pay Alawi and then to switch the payments and just, you know, change the email address to the account of Maliki.
In a more serious vein, we have to ask, you know, who profits from this?
Who profits from a civil war in Iraq?
Well, I keep coming back to this because it's very clear to me that there's one country that believes it profits from this, at least in the short term, and that's Israel.
And, you know, I have to point to that my favorite correspondent from Jerusalem, who happens to be The New York Times bureau chief.
Her name is Judy Ruderin.
And she, you know, she quoted Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States until last fall.
He said, you know, with respect to the he's talking about the Syrian civil war, Israel doesn't have to pick a winner.
And if it has to pick a winner, it probably prefer Assad, because the greatest danger to Israel, says Ambassador Oren, is the strategic arc that extends from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut.
Wow.
Now we see Assad, he said, as the keystone in that arc.
So right.
And in fact, you know what, a friend just sent me on Twitter, Ray, and I played the clip earlier today on the show of Netanyahu on, I think it's meet the press clips from him from yesterday, saying, let them fight, don't intervene, actually, when you have your two enemies fighting, go ahead and let them fight.
Of course, not acknowledging that Iran is not really an enemy of the United States.
It may be an enemy of Israel to him.
But Al Qaeda is the American people's enemy.
But he's saying they're equal enemies.
So let them wear each other down that exact same thing like Oren said.
Yeah, you know, another quote from from a former Israeli diplomat here in the United States.
He says, look, you know, the status quo, and he was talking about Syria again, horrific as it may be, seems preferable to either a victory by Assad or a strengthening of rebel groups.
It doesn't really matter.
Let the blood flow and we'll be safer once the Shia and Sunni have killed each other off.
Now, John Kerry is one of the neocons, pure and simple.
He's in Baghdad now.
These are the kinds of calculations that are in the back of his mind.
What I defined as a neocon is somebody who has real problems trying to distinguish between the strategic interests of Israel on the one hand, and the strategic interests of the United States of America on the other.
Again, everybody's entitled to their own view or their own opinion.
But I just don't think those people should be running our policy toward the Middle East.
And now, Ray, so yeah, well, no, that is an important part of the definition of a neocon, of course, is the the Israel first kind of point of view.
And I'm sure it won't go unnoticed over at the State Department that this is Benjamin Netanyahu's position.
In fact, he even said, well, you know, I'm not going to say everything I have to say here on Meet the Press, but I'll be communicating with the Obama administration about what I think they should do.
And he's pretty blatant about, I'll send you the link in the clip.
But so now, so what's going to happen?
Because it makes sense if this is the redirection, it makes sense for America to keep on with the Syria policy of backing the Mujahideen against Maliki.
I don't really think, Ray, and I don't know whether you do, I don't really think that they planned on ISIS blowing back into Iraq in such a big way or at this time or whatever.
I don't know.
It seems like their plan is, you know, to back Maliki or whoever replaces him, but still that same Shiite United Iraqi Alliance government that, you know, Bush put in power there.
But at the same time, you know, we've talked about how, well, like you said, from Israel's point of view, they would much rather take Iran down a peg than Al Qaeda down a peg.
And that's been, you know, obviously, therefore, the policy in Syria this whole time.
But I wonder, so, you know, when John Kerry came out and said, oh, yeah, maybe we will work with Iran on it.
I sort of thought that he did that only so that he'd have to retract it.
He came out with it in such a clumsy way or something.
It sort of seemed like he was trying to provoke because it's the obvious answer to the crisis.
But it's, you know, also something that's completely forbidden.
So why not go ahead and bring it up to get it shot down?
I don't know if you want to waste time commenting on that part.
But I mean, what are they going to do?
Are they going to really work with the Quds Force?
What if Maliki won't step down?
No matter what Sistani and Obama say?
The leader of Iran, Khamenei, said that, no, the Americans want to get rid of Maliki, which is another way of saying I'm in your court still here, pal.
You know, I got your back still, right?
So predict the future and make it quick.
Okay.
Well, you got the Russians and you got the Iranians pretty much supporting the status quo.
The status quo is civil war.
The ISIS people are coming down south.
What I predict is a pretty bloody encounter over the next couple of weeks and then a ceasefire and the pieces being sorted out and the U.S. looking really, really as ridiculous as it has been looking for many years.
Let me just finish now by saying that if the president really believes, as he said at West Point, that by most measures, America has really been stronger relative to the rest of the world, those who argue otherwise, who suggest that America is in decline, are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics.
If he believes that, he's delusional.
People are laughing at us and people are making the laughing stock of the people that we put in as ostensible puppets who can't even last more than three or four years in a place like Baghdad with a huge American embassy calling the shots.
It's the beginning of the unraveling of the empire.
If Obama and the others don't see it, well, so much the worse for them.
It's just going to involve untold human suffering.
That's what bothers me, because you never see that on any of our TV stations or even in corporate-controlled radio.
People are really suffering like that little girl at Tal Afar.
All right, you got that right.
Thanks, Ray.
I'm sorry that you got it right, but you do.
Appreciate your time.
That's the great Ray McGovern, everybody.
He's a former CIA analyst, now a peacenik, a veteran intelligence professional for sanity, and also writes at ConsortiumNews.com and at RayMcGovern.com.
You can follow him on Twitter at Raymond L. McGovern.
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My email address is Scott at ScottHorton.org.
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What was the only interest group in D.C. pushing war with Syria last summer?
APAC in the Israel lobby.
What's the only interest group in D.C. pushing to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran right now?
APAC in the Israel lobby.
Why doesn't the president force an end to the occupation of Palestine, a leading cause of terrorist attacks against the United States?
APAC in the Israel lobby.
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