06/24/14 – Peter van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Wrapping things up today with Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well.
I think I got the emphasis right there.
We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
He blogs at WeMeantWell.com, formerly worked for the U.S. State Department.
Welcome back to the show.
Peter, how are you doing?
Scott, it's a pleasure to be back with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Been a little while since we talked.
Remind us about your time in Iraq.
When were you there?
What exactly were you up to?
After more than 20 years at the Department of State as a diplomat overseas, Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of State, volunteered me collectively and all of the State Department to go to Iraq and complete the reconstruction.
We were going there to spend your taxpayers' money building bridges and schools and creating democracy and all the stuff that was necessary to win the war.
I was there from 2009 to 2010, and rather than seeing us win the war, what I saw was a colossal waste of money, mismanaged fraud, money being spent that actually harmed the Iraqis and harmed America's national interests.
When I came back from Iraq, I went looking for those elusive channels that whistleblowers are supposed to be using.
We've heard John Kerry and others talk about that for Ed Snowden.
When I couldn't find any of those channels, I decided to write the book that you referenced, We Meant Well, how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
My whistleblowing efforts almost got me prosecuted by the State Department.
It cost me my security clearance.
It had me thrown out of the building.
It put me on the security watch list for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, fearing that I would somehow run amok in the cafeteria or something.
And the food is quite bad.
I didn't realize that part.
Sorry.
Yeah.
The food is quite bad.
Give me no laugh out loud over your story there.
Eventually, with the help of the Government Accountability Project and the American Civil Liberties Union, including some of the lawyers who are representing Ed Snowden now, I was able to depart the government and finish my service with the State Department on my own terms.
So no SWAT raid in the middle of the night, at least.
Not specifically, no.
State Department security people were parked in my neighborhood for a while, the big black car at the end of the block.
They did make it quite clear to me that they were reading, pre-Snowden, were reading my email and my finances were looked into.
My neighbors were asked questions.
It was quite a...
Well, to be specific here, Peter, you weren't releasing classified information.
You were just being embarrassing.
Absolutely.
The book is all unclassified, take to disappoint any listeners.
And in fact, basically, if you had been able to tag along with me in Iraq, you would have seen exactly what I saw, as did probably 20,000 other Americans, none of whom felt the need to speak up, none of whom felt the need to blow the whistle.
And so it sort of became incumbent on me to write the book.
There you go.
All right.
So, well, and part of the story, of course, is that the government, like, well, if you ask me, all governments everywhere, but maybe especially this government is made up of very few men at the top who care about nothing but themselves and their own power.
And you know, I'm a libertarian economics wise on how to get things done, but these guys won't even try to fund the government institutions that are meant to, you know, turn the electricity back on, get the water flowing.
They'd rather extort you to pay extra to have just a little bit of electricity today than then build up their own power by providing a decent service, a public utility like electricity, that kind of thing.
They still it's just they're so mired in corruption.
Everybody's living completely like crap.
And especially the people in the northwest of the country who are on the outs with the state.
What kept occurring to me throughout my Iraq experience, and certainly after I returned to the United States, is why don't we have any of these reconstruction programs here in the United States?
If we can spend billions of dollars failing to repair the water and sewer systems in Iraq, why couldn't we spend some of that money here at home?
And the answers you get from politicians are, well, we don't have the money.
And the answer to that is, is it very reasonable?
Well, where'd you get it for Iraq?
And if we can help people in Iraq or Afghanistan with these things, why can't we help Americans?
Well, and of course, why so many Americans need so much help in the first place?
It's because Bush and Alan Greenspan inflated a giant bubble in order to make the war seem free.
And now we're all paying the real cost of the Iraq war with our time in the unemployment line.
So, you know, all they got to do is, they don't necessarily, from my point of view, well, whatever.
Leave the money at home in whoever's pockets is certainly better than, you know, pretending to help the Iraqis with it, or like you're saying, trying but failing miserably to help them.
Absolutely.
The other cost of the Iraq war is one where we're seeing played out right now.
And that is, since we left Iraq after nine years of war and occupation without actually resolving any of the issues that we created in Iraq, those issues are going to find their own bottom.
It's like water dripping out of a pipe.
It's going to run through your walls until it finds where it needs to settle.
It's not going to simply go away because you don't want it there.
Right.
Yeah.
Back to the Greenspan bubble.
It's a bubble of power.
Wherever we intervene, we end up propping up people who don't have that natural level of popular sovereignty, as we call it here.
And so we end up creating situations where these questions still have to be resolved and shaken out, which is what's happening right before our eyes.
Absolutely.
We kicked over an anthill in 2003 when the United States invaded Iraq.
Prior to that, certainly for better or for worse, Saddam kept that country intact.
He did it through brutality.
He did it through the use of secret police.
It was not a pretty picture, but it was a stable picture.
The United States removed Saddam, destroyed civil society, disbanded the army, the police, the teachers, the hospitals, everything, and plunged the country into chaos, which is now playing out.
Sunni, Shia, Kurd, sure, those are rough ways to define these folks, but they're very crude in the sense that within each of those categories, there are many, many subcategories of tribal alliances, religious alliances, political alliances, warlords who have their own territory to protect, people who want to grab oil.
Boy, the list could go on for as much time as we had to read it off.
The bottom line is, those forces that the United States unleashed are now going at each other.
It's a pit bull fight, and rather than staying out of it, which is about the only intelligent thing America can do, we are now plunging right back into Iraq.
Troops on the ground.
I don't care what you call them, special forces.
Troops on the ground, drones overhead, airstrikes to come, and suddenly we're at war in a Muslim country once again.
Yeah, well, and this one that we've been picking on since Jimmy Carter was in power.
Well, now, and so about that, you know, Obama, I almost called him Bush, Obama, when he gave his talking- You wouldn't have been wrong.
They're two sides of the same coin.
Yeah, two wings on the same bird of prey is my preferred expression there.
Yeah, now, he said, look, no, you're right, follow-up question, asker in the press corps, we do have to avoid mission creep, so that's why our mission is simply to make sure that Maliki wins and that this part of northwestern Iraq can never be a safe haven for terrorists.
Well, I think he just declared World War II or something, right?
He can do, based on those premises, he can stay in Mesopotamia, in the Levant forever and ever and ever, the entire Marine Corps from now on.
Let's parse that all out.
First of all, what's happening in Iraq that Americans have noticed in the last two weeks, it's kind of like how the Americans notice soccer every couple of years when the World Cup comes around.
It's like, oh, yeah, is that still a thing?
You know, Iraq has been- Oh, man, I'm sorry, you know, the bumper music's playing.
Can you wrap up this point real fast or let's just hold it until the break?
We'll hold it until the break, Scott.
I'm sorry.
I asked, or, you know, let us write it up here and I couldn't give you time.
It's Peter Van Buren.
The Huffington Post with 10 reasons airstrikes in Iraq are a terrible idea.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to this show.
Sorry.
There are hard time breaks.
What are you going to do?
It's a botch every segment.
What am I going to do?
It's a botch every segment.
All right, we're wrapping up the show today with Peter Van Buren, formerly a career diplomat at the U.S. State Department, author of We Meant Well about his role in the attempted rebuilding of Iraq.
And we talked a little bit about his whistleblower status and how they went after him, but how he ended up not having to do karaoke time, fortunately, or manning time.
Now, when we went out to break, I was asking about the president's statement where he said, well, listen, all we have to do, all we have to do is deny terrorists a safe haven.
And so we can do that with a few hundred guys and don't worry about it.
And I was saying you could drive the Vietnam War through a loophole like that.
And then you were going to say something before the music started playing.
I wanted to parse the president's statement a little bit.
First of all, he's talking about denying terrorists a safe haven in northwest Iraq.
And with respect to the president, by which I mean disrespect, you know, the Sunni forces have occupied that part of Iraq and controlled that part of Iraq for the last five to eight years and it has not become a terrorist haven.
That's not going to change this week.
That's completely disingenuous of him.
The idea of sending troops back to Iraq totally steps on, you know, whatever shred of credibility he had from his campaign promises.
And third, hey, we're getting the band back together and the United States will finally find a way to have permanent troop presence in Iraq.
Because once you start down these slopes, it's very, very hard to stop.
You send in 300 troops, but then you need air support for them.
Once you have air support, you need guys who are going to fix stuff.
Once you have all those people on the ground, then you've got to protect them.
And all of a sudden, as you pointed out, Scott, it's the Vietnam story all over.
One guy needs two guys to support him, which needs three guys to protect them.
And before you know it, you've got an American military presence in Iraq, the conservatives' wet dream that didn't happen in 2011, but seems to be being set up right now in 2014.
Well, you know, Peter, it's always seemed to me like, you know, after the invasion, it was such a stroke of just, you know, luck or fate or whatever, I guess, on America's behalf that at least the al-Qaeda guys were the worst people in the world.
Jesus, all they did, going around slaughtering civilians all the time.
They provoked a sectarian, well, the Americans helped, too, with their Bata Brigade Army and all of that, but for the Sunni side anyway, the al-Qaeda and Iraq guys helped provoke a civil war that they lost, that they all lost and ended up losing Baghdad over.
And they were such totalitarians running around, a bunch of foreigners running around Iraq telling the local Sunnis what to do, that they wore out their welcome by 2006.
And the tribal and local religious leaders in Baathists all turned on them and marginalized these guys.
Couldn't eradicate them, of course, but really marginalized them away.
And so they're really, even though for years Bush had created this kind of Wild West gladiator academy out there in the Anbar province and all of that, it had become tamped down, basically, and not by the Iraqi army, but by the local Sunnis.
But now the government that America put in power there has been so crappy to the local Sunnis and refused to allow them to participate in the government or government revenue, really.
Most importantly, in any substantive way, has led to them now welcoming Obama's fighters from Syria to come in now and help rid them, finally, of the Shiite army's presence over their territory.
So I wonder whether, you know, really, if it isn't right that this is a safe haven for terrorists.
I don't mean to give the war party talking points credibility, except when I happen to agree with them that I think that ISIS really is a threat.
And the fact that their new leaders don't get along with Zawahiri isn't really the point.
They're exactly the same, except in who's telling who what to do.
And from their point, from my imagination of their point of view, it seems like a good idea to draw in the Americans again and to create further crisis over there, to further bog us down, to further recruit new people to their cause and to take their next steps forward.
And we've seen, you know, the guy from from ISIS killed two Jews at a museum in Brussels a few weeks ago.
And there was an American suicide bomber from Florida who went and did a suicide attack in Syria for ISIS not long ago as well.
And it seems to me like maybe there really is a threat from these guys.
Not that I think that bombing them is the solution, but I kind of don't think maybe it's a good idea to play down just how dangerous these guys really are.
If they if it makes sense to them to attack the West to draw us in, why wouldn't they?
There's truth to all that.
And certainly anybody who has ambitions as a terrorist thrives on chaos.
But you want to remember a couple of things.
First of all, Al Qaeda was not a presence in Iraq before the United States invaded.
Al Qaeda found a home there as a tool to push back against the presence of the United States.
The Sunnis needed a way to fight back.
And they accepted help where they could find it, which in that case was Al Qaeda.
You want to be careful that by attempting to fight terrorism, you don't create the conditions by which more terrorism takes place.
The second thing is you want to be careful not to set the house on fire while you're trying to put out, blow out the candle.
And the idea is that there's always going to be a suicide bomber who sneaks through here and a terrible thing that happens there.
The trick is to keep that all in perspective.
If the response to a few isolated acts of terror, albeit terrible things, is to reinsert the American military into a Muslim country, in the long game, you're not going to win.
You're going to incite more people.
You have to imagine the recruiting potential for all sides to say the Americans are back.
They said they were going to leave.
Three years later, here they are again.
They're killing Muslims.
You know as well as I do that airstrikes and drone strikes are not surgical.
We will blow up a wedding party.
We will blow up the wrong house.
We will kill women and children, the collateral damage that comes with these things.
And every one of those acts is going to end up on jihadi social media.
And every one of those acts is going to haunt the United States for years and years and years.
It's sort of an irresistible logic, though, isn't it, from the Washington, D.C. point of view?
Not nothing.
Well, you know, if I'm standing in front of a burning building and the only choices available to me are throw the can of gasoline in my hand into the burning building or stand back, well, neither of those are good choices, but standing back is a better choice.
And I think that's the thing that's clogging Washington's brain right now, is this incredible desire to do something even when the only things they can do are going to end up going wrong.
It's a hard pill to swallow, but sometimes stepping back is really the only thing you can do.
Well, you know, I was just talking with John Neffel from Rolling Stone, who wrote this thing about the drone war in Pakistan and in Yemen and about just the logic of using drones and how it seems to me like in this instance.
It's almost inescapable that they're just going to send in fleets of Reaper drones.
And then so what it comes down to, although they probably wouldn't say it this way when they talk about it in the Oval Office, is if we end up getting American civilians killed in terrorist attacks later, I guess that's the price we have to pay for for, you know, winning politically now by saying we're doing something about it.
And at least we're not putting soldiers lives at risk when we're just flying Reaper drones around instead of sending in the 82nd Airborne or whatever.
Well, collateral damage, I guess, falls on both sides of the equation, the Iraqi side and the American side.
Again, the United States imagines these things as a chessboard where there's our side and their side, and it's all contained within these checkered squares.
And that's completely wrong.
When you are striking Sunnis in Iraq, you are risking retaliation by Sunnis everywhere else.
These are these are people who understand guerrilla tactics or insurgent tactics, whatever you want to call it.
They don't strike at the strong points.
They don't.
They're not going to be, you know, besieging the American embassy in Baghdad.
They probe for weak points and those weak points are not limited to inside of Iraq.
And so, yes, when you go to war with these types of forces, you have to understand that it is potentially a global war, at least a transnational war, and you can't contain it.
You're kicking over another anthill.
You're getting in the middle of a pit bull fight.
Pick whichever analogy scares you the most and bring the drones home.
Let them land.
We're done.
Yeah, we should sing a song about that, like the old Pink Floyd rendition of the World War Two song.
Bring the boys home.
Bring the drones back home.
Well, actually, we ought to be careful, Scott.
We don't necessarily want to give the government permission to start flying more drones over the United States.
Well, it's too late.
That's already on.
You give up your empire, you live under it.
And we're already living in the future now, I'm afraid.
And there's the music.
I want to ask you a bunch more things, but thanks very much for coming on the show, Peter.
I hope you keep writing about this and then I can talk to you more about it.
My pleasure.
I'll be back, Scott.
Thanks very much, Peter.
Peter Van Buren, everybody, formerly with the State Department, author of We Meant Well and Ghosts of Tom Joad, a story of the 99 percent.
Look at him at HuffingtonPost.com, 10 Reasons to Not Bomb Iraq.
See you tomorrow.
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