06/27/14 – Mitchell Prothero – 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.
And next up is Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers, reporting live from Baghdad.
Welcome back to the show, Mitchell, how are you?
I'm doing okay.
I'm here in sunny Erbil, Iraq, northern Kurdistan, where it's hot and relatively stable here, but about 20 miles away, not so much.
Okay, well, start with that, I guess.
Well, what we're looking at is basically, at least as it stands right now, it just really feels like Iraq as a modern state, as we know it, has completely collapsed into what I'm calling, you know, the War of the Three Kings.
Essentially, the Sunni, Shia and the Kurds are all fighting to go their own way.
The Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki is desperately trying to cling to power and bring about what I'd call almost half the country that they've lost control over into their grasp again.
And then so now one thing was that you had reported, I guess, a couple of days ago that ISIS had seized at least some checkpoints, some positions on a highway to the southeast of Baghdad, attempting to cut them off from Basra.
Did that pan out?
I think the way you reported it was, you know, somebody said that kind of thing.
Was that verified?
And does that indicate a real attempt to try to lay siege to Baghdad, do you think?
Well, what we're looking at, they're certainly trying to surround and cut off Baghdad.
And one of the things that we've seen from ISIS is that they're a fast moving group of pretty dedicated and well-trained jihadis who've been fighting and besides probably Afghanistan, Chechnya, some other places have had a lot of experience fighting in Syria.
What their method has been in Iraq is they've been working with Sunnis throughout Sunni neighborhoods, Sunni triangle, as we're calling it, in order to sort of rise up and grab the Sunni sections of Iraq itself in a surrounding arc around Baghdad.
They can't take the Shia areas.
So we've seen them do is cut off the western desert, which is cities like Ramadi and Fallujah.
We've seen them come down from Mosul to Tikrit from the north.
And earlier this week, I think what we were reporting was that the local tribes to the south of Baghdad had started taking potshots and sort of doing testing attacks to check the defenses in these mixed neighborhoods.
And my assumption is that they're testing the defenses in order to see whether or not they can take those.
And if they do take those areas, Baghdad will be more or less completely surrounded and cut off from the government's Shiite population power base in the south.
All right, so now I guess could you rank for me the relative strength of the different Shiite armies, the actual so-called Iraqi army, the Bata Brigade, if it is coming back into existence, I guess I read a couple of places, the Mahdi army, of course, I guess.
And Sauter hasn't.
He said, well, he'll protect the shrines, but he doesn't sound like he even wants to fight for Baghdad, although I don't know what's he going to do, let it take Baghdad?
No, he's not going to let them take Baghdad.
Basically, what we saw is about over the course of a week and a half, Iraq's roughly 700,000, a million man army, about half of it disappeared and has been, you know, has been described as combat inoperable to use a U.S. military term.
They dumped their equipment, they dumped their uniforms and they went home or they're so completely disorganized that they're not really combat effective.
What's been left now are elite units that were fairly well trained by the American special forces who are directly loyal to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has pretty much bypassed the defense ministry here and is running things himself.
He's starting to act a lot like what you might have expected from Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi, a guy who doesn't trust any of his aides, only a very small number of people close by him.
And so he's cutting out the normal command and control and operating these special forces that one's called the Wolf Brigade, the other is called the actually SWAT team himself.
These have been bolstered by what we've seen from the Shia community, where they're reconstituting their militias from the sectarian war that happened while America was occupying.
From roughly 2005 to early 2009, Sunni and Shia were fighting each other for control of Baghdad, with America kind of as the referees.
These groups include the Mehdi army.
Sadr has said that he will not reactivate his Mehdi army again in a broad sense, but rather they will only fight to protect shrines and their neighborhoods.
But the big supporters have been, yes, you're right, the Badr Brigade, which is originally an Iranian trained outfit that had generally had pretty close ties with the Americans, even when they were here.
And Asib al-Haq, which is an Iranian highly trained special group, as we used to call them.
They've got very close ties to Hezbollah and they actually had fought the Americans.
They're considered very good fighters.
They fought in Syria, you know, after they fought the Americans and they probably take close to their commands from the Iranian Quds Force.
You know, the commander of that is a guy named Qasem Soleimani, who we're told is sort of directing the defense of Baghdad as an Iranian special forces guy.
So it's a mess, to put it mildly.
Yeah, sounds like it.
All right.
Now, so your latest piece here is all about Kurdistan, and I want to let you cover that in depth, but I want to start it now with the break kind of coming up here anyway.
But I'll direct everybody to it.
It's hanging on to oil rich Kirkuk may prove a challenge for Iraq's Kurds by Mitchell Prothero at McClatchy News Service now.
But before the break here, let me just ask you real quick to predict the future.
It seemed to me like what Zarqawi would do now is he would bomb a bunch of Shiite marketplaces and deliberately try to provoke the Shiites into going out toward them to fight rather than getting bogged down in Baghdad and, you know, do some suicide bombings, but not try to really fight for neighborhoods.
I mean, it's a lot easier to do when you're the bottom brigade and you have the Marine Corps helping you, right?
Right.
Well, you know, honestly, that's what they've been doing.
It wasn't very well reported until about the last month because nobody was paying much attention to Iraq.
But ISIS has been doing suicide bombings for for months now, if not years.
And there definitely was an escalation of them.
Every day we've got a bomb going off in a Shia neighborhood.
It just seems like right now they're doing probing attacks and trying to figure out exactly what they can hold.
They're trying to build the state, whether they say they want Baghdad, but we haven't seen the move on it.
We've seen the move to isolate it.
But are they trying to provoke?
I mean, because you talk about Iraq splitting in three.
I mean, it's it's pretty obvious it's de facto partition has been for a while.
And this sort of seems like the final declaration of independence in a way and all that.
But I wonder if you think that their strategy is to go ahead and to really pick a fight to do these suicide bombings, not necessarily to find their frontier, but in order to provoke a reaction and a worse war, which, after all, would rally more people to their side, although it could ultimately be counterproductive.
Well, that's what they're doing.
No, they're absolutely doing that, is what I'm saying, is that, yes, they are doing these suicide bombings.
They've been aggravating the Shia who are now doing military parades.
And going on television, basically threatening to fight the Sunnis, which is further terrifying Sunnis that are on the fence.
They think now the Shia are going to come kill them, which we've got some evidence is starting to happen.
So, yeah, each side is basically preparing for a continuation of the 2005 2009 war.
But instead of for control of Baghdad, it's going to be for control of the entire country.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, even for, you know, Shiastan, it seems like Maliki's goose is cooked if Sistani is saying that he ought to step down.
Right.
I mean, it's obviously too late for any real compromise with the Sunnis.
But he did not say that he should step down.
No, this is this has been a common common misconception.
What Ayatollah Sistani said was that there should be a national unity government, which keep in mind, as a prime minister and parliament system here, Iraq doesn't currently have a cabinet, which is what people frequently refer to as the government.
They hadn't agreed on that after the elections that Maliki more or less won who would be in charge of which ministries he has to bring in people as a coalition.
And they had just gotten to start to work on that when this war broke out.
So what Sistani is saying is Maliki needs to start bringing Sunnis into this, that they need to reach out and do broad consensus in order to try to get some of the guys fighting alongside ISIS, which are probably more than ISIS itself, into the government to sort of co-opt them and make the Iraqis feel like they're all part of a government.
He did not say Maliki should step aside.
But what we are seeing is Maliki is ignoring that strong advice from Sistani.
He's ignoring the advice from just about everybody from John Kerry to the Iranians.
Everybody's telling him you need to reach out to your political enemies and get some of these tribes to put down their guns and become part of the political process.
And he's just not hearing any of it so far.
I guess I thought and maybe it was just misreported, but I thought it was sort of two things that he had at first said that he should step aside and then maybe he had backtracked a little bit.
And that was sort of his backpedal was, well, bring more Sunnis in.
And then.
But anyway, I guess I got that wrong.
But but anyway, isn't it way too late?
I mean, we're talking about the benchmark that never was achieved back in 2007.
Now, all of a sudden, he's going to reach out to who among the Sunnis.
That's what Patrick Coburn was saying on the show yesterday was who is there among the Sunnis for him to deal with now that they've let ISIS come to the lead?
Because whatever political representation that they had actually in Baghdad left them far behind long ago.
Well, you know, that's an interesting question.
It's there.
There is a strong Iraqi centered tribal and former Baathist official tradition and infrastructure in these places.
And these guys are currently fighting the government right now.
But they are not fighting to establish an Islamic caliphate like their allies, their current allies in ISIS.
They're fighting to get under, you know, to get out from under the yoke of what they see as an oppressive Shiite government.
So I do think that there would be tens of thousands of guys that you can co-op, you can bribe them, you can offer the ministry jobs.
The Americans figured this out in 2006 to 2008 at the height of the Sunni insurgency.
Suddenly it dawned on them, the guys that were fighting them were fighting for position.
They weren't fighting completely to drive America out.
And that once the Americans started working with these guys, paying them off with suitcases of cash on the tribal levels and trying to bring them into the fold, we saw the insurgency basically evaporate and they hunted down the foreign Qaeda fighters that were doing all the suicide bombings.
And things got fairly peaceful very quickly.
That gain, however, was lost when Maliki didn't bring those guys that had been co-opted into his government.
And that's what the Americans, to their credit, have been telling him for four years.
The American government is no fan of Nouriel Maliki.
They've made that clear.
He wasn't their puppet.
They put in.
He won an election, got in there through the political system that the Iraqis had agreed on.
And the American advice to him has been consistently, do not screw these Sunni guys over.
They're going to come back.
And they have.
So now I don't know if it's too late.
I don't.
But I do think there are tribal guys.
I've talked to them.
They're ready to deal, but they're also ready to fight.
The question is, is it too late?
And has ISIS become so powerful that people will be too afraid within the Sunni community to confront them?
And that, I think, is what Donald Rumsfeld would call a known unknown.
We know that's a problem, but we don't know how it's going to get fixed.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so to your reporting here in McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchy DC dot com, hanging on to oil rich Kirkuk may prove a challenge for Iraq's Kurds.
And so I guess when ISIS came in and seized Mosul, the Peshmerga surrounded and locked down Kirkuk.
And but you're saying that I guess it's been too mixed of a city and under Saddam's control was not in autonomous protected Kurdistan.
It was south of there during the 1990s era.
And it's been kind of a somewhat slow motion sectarian cleansing by the Kurds of the Arabs since then.
But it's basically I think you're saying here it's a little bit outside their territory as it's been up until recently, or at least you'd have to go way back to when it was really a predominantly Kurdish city.
So so and then I think this is where you're saying, yeah, the the, you know, hot stuff is going down 20 miles from here.
I think that's what you're talking about, right, is this new borderland between Kurdistan and the Islamic State.
Right, it's it's a long, sprawling, you know, sort of front line that there's been activity along it, but nobody's made a big push in either direction.
The Kurds did go into Kirkuk.
In all fairness, they had been there.
Half of Kirkuk is Kurdish.
The commanders in that area were Kurdish of the Iraqi army, and even the governor was Kurdish.
But it was a place that they'd all been putting off deciding its final status.
They were thinking about even holding a vote.
It just never seemed to happen on whether or not Kirkuk should be fully administered by the Kurds or whether it should stay in with, you know, under the auspices of Baghdad.
But of course, besides the symbolism, it sits on a whole pile of money.
It's a very rich oilfield area.
And so nobody really wanted to resolve the issue too quickly because the losing side was going to freak out.
They just kept kicking it down the road.
What the Kurds did was change the fact on the ground when the Iraqi army started to evaporate, they moved in to secure it.
And they do get defensive if you say they took Kirkuk.
They'd say, no, we'd always been there.
We just further stepped into the security void to make sure it didn't fall apart, which is fair.
But then you also know they really have no intention of giving it back.
The question is, this would be the only area that the Kurds are administering that has a significant Arab and Turkmen population that doesn't trust them.
The rest of Kurdistan is stable because it's full of Kurds who like the Peshmerga, who like Barzani and Talabani and are comfortable with them.
They've served them well, even if they're somewhat slightly gangster.
So, you know, it'll be a tougher sell to keep Kirkuk steady for the Kurds.
But that does seem to be what they think they're going to do.
And the other question is, how well do the Peshmerga fight on the flat desert ground around Kirkuk instead of those hills that they've been hiding in for centuries, repelling all invaders?
So it's a challenge for them.
I don't know that they won't be able to do it.
I just think it's going to be dicier than people have led to, you know, have been led to believe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The reputation precedes them.
But a reputation is still just a reputation.
And you quote a couple of experts here who I'm not exactly sure who they are.
I guess you'll clear that up for me, saying, well, you know, I don't know if these guys are really ready to deal with ISIS because they move a lot faster.
They have a lot of different tactics.
As you mentioned, they're out on flat ground where they're not used to fighting.
And really, they're I think one of them says here that you quote talks about how the Peshmerga really operate in these very small groups of best friends since childhood kind of thing, rather than in any kind of real, you know, division level, disciplined and ordered kind of a way.
And that could lead to some real problems if they're up against superior numbers and they can't coordinate in higher numbers themselves.
Well, that's exactly it.
They've got a good reputation as fighters.
I'd say they're one of the best military organizations in the Middle East that I've seen.
I put them comparable to Hezbollah or to Jordanian special forces, which are by far the best Arab fighters in the region.
But, you know, they've also been trained to play to their own strengths.
And the situation in Kirkuk does not play to their strengths.
So will they be able to adapt?
Again, we're going to have to wait and see.
But I couldn't see ISIS storming in and taking Sulaymaniyah.
Saddam, you couldn't do that with tank divisions.
But I could see them rushing up on Kirkuk and kind of overwhelming those defenses, which is sort of what they do is they use their speed, mobility and ferocity and the fact that everybody's just terrified of ISIS to sort of, you know, come in like we joke from the game from Game of Thrones.
They're like the Dothraki or something.
They just come riding in at a million miles an hour and scare the hell out of everybody.
So now the Kurds might be prepared for that.
They are tough guys and they are well trained.
But again, Kirkuk does not play to their strengths as a militia.
You know, they really do like things a little bit further up in the hills, closer to their homeland, closer to their own populations.
They simply just seem to fight better there.
They're untested in a place like Kirkuk.
So I do wonder how that's going to go.
Yeah.
Now, as far as ISIS themselves and their relative power compared to the rest of the, I guess, basically general Sunni uprising going on here, Coburn yesterday called these guys the Sunni Khmer Rouge, you know, basically just madmen.
You quote these guys talking about them that way, too, that they are just madmen.
And your friend, the reporter, Rania, that I interviewed yesterday, talked about how Nusra has gotten getting along with the local population down a lot better than these ISIS guys who really are not much more sophisticated.
I don't know.
I've seen some things about them fill the potholes and turn the electricity and the water back on in some places, but mostly they seem like they're the they'll crucify you to death.
And and would you agree that that's actually probably the best thing that Iraq has going for him in the long term?
Is that these guys are going to burn themselves out and and destroy any any welcome that they have from the local population quickly?
I don't know how quick it'll be.
It's it's already starting to show.
Yeah.
The thing is, they're nihilists.
They claim to be total protectors of this idealized version of Islam that's virtually unrecognizable to any Muslim I know.
And as a result, everybody who doesn't completely adhere to that can be killed.
So it really doesn't integrate that well with other populations.
And so you're absolutely right.
What we've seen in the past, guys like this, we've seen it actually all over.
The Taliban were initially welcomed for bringing security and peace in Afghanistan and immediately irritated the living hell out of everybody because they banned kite flying and, you know, all this other stuff, smoking and music.
You've seen it in Somalia with the Shabab.
They were also initially welcomed as, you know, guys that would bring law and order to Mogadishu.
And eventually everybody got sick of them and threw them out and pushed them out into the desert.
I fully expect the Sunni tribes to turn on ISIS at some point.
It's just what sort of bloodbath that's going to lead to is really pretty scary because you're also going to be looking at a fight then with the Shia.
And again, you know, it's just now suddenly you have four balls in the air instead of Kurds, Shia and Sunni.
You have Kurds, Shia, Sunni and school shooters running around in pickup trucks in the middle of all of it.
It's just really a recipe for disaster.
And that's why the Kurds, they don't know who they're going to fight.
They they probably won't end up fighting the Baathists.
They could come to an agreement with those guys, I think they might very well be planning to fight the Maliki government for control of Kirkuk and their own independence if the government can ever reform itself and start pushing out.
And they're definitely concerned that at some point ISIS is going to want to make a left turn and come into their areas.
So, you know, it's a tough one.
And but I would say, yes, at some point being such nihilists and being so harsh and inflexible, it's going to be very difficult for ISIS to not wear out its welcome.
It's just what that's going to look like is kind of terrifying.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, Obama announced that he's going to send five hundred million dollars now and military aid to back the moderate, very carefully vetted rebels in Syria.
And, you know, I take your good word that there are some moderates out there, although it seemed like the Al-Farouk brigade that wanted elections and to protect minority rights also were cannibals.
And then the Northern Storm Brigade that John McCain posed with, they were some FSA moderates.
And then, yeah, they told Time magazine on camera that, yeah, we're veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq where we fought against the Americans.
And so I don't know how carefully any of these people are being vetted, if that's who John McCain wants to have a sleepover with.
But it seemed like even the the Obama administration had been saying kind of as their excuse, because all the pressure has been to do more all this time, that, you know, come on, if we give too much weapons to this FSA, these weapons end up in the hands of the other rebels, too.
It's kind of an open arms bazaar there in Syria.
And how much are we even inadvertently, although how many years in a row can you inadvertently accidentally arm people, I guess might be a question.
But do you think it's possible?
Are they going to really be able to create some kind of third force?
I mean, a real FSA that can kick ass, that can marginalize or even destroy the Al-Nusra Front and ISIS and and Assad, or at least resist Assad.
Or is this some kind of pipe dream?
Are they really just going to end up handing all these arms to the guys that we're now talking about or the Khmer Rouge over in Iraq right now?
Well, I mean, right now, ISIS doesn't need our weapons.
They've already taken all the ones we gave to the Iraqis.
Oh, yeah.
I think I think that gets that that gets pretty overrated if you're talking about, you know, small arms, RPGs, ammunition, things like that.
You know, right now, the arms embargo is killing groups within the FSA.
And you're right.
A lot of them are gangsters and kind of criminals, but a lot of them are pretty sincere and just simply do not have the resources, you know, of some of the more radical groups.
But, you know, if you give those guys AKs and RPGs, that stuff's really not going to have an effect on anybody else.
You know, ISIS and Nusra have those things.
So it's not as huge a deal.
The biggest question people come down to is they need these manpad systems, you know, so, you know, anti-aircraft missiles that a single guy can launch like the Stinger.
That is what people have been clamoring for forever.
And for the most part, advanced stuff like that is what ISIS and Nusra do not have.
But the rebels don't either.
That would be a game changing weapon.
But it would also be for the for the, quote, good rebels.
But it would also be a very dangerous game to start handing those things out so close to Europe.
But if you're talking about AKs and RPGs, even some tow missiles and stuff like that, it's not that big of a deal at this stage.
I mean, they, you know, ISIS could possibly have a hundred million dollars in cash and billions of dollars in U.S. equipment, including armored Humvees, MRAPs, Soviet era tanks that they've already taken from the Iraqis.
So at this stage, I don't know whether it's a great idea to try to beef up the FSA and try to reconstitute something.
But I don't know if the whole scene can get all that much worse.
And the Obama administration's made it completely clear they're not going to really get involved in Syria.
I think it's been a notion that we've been arming rebels or the U.S. has been arming rebels, which I've studied that pretty exhaustively.
There's been a handful of tow missile launchers that were given to a couple of groups.
But other than that, the Americans haven't given weapons except to a handful of guys.
It's been negligible on the ground.
We did give radios, some food, some night vision, some body armor, stuff like that.
And some other groups did steal that.
But in terms of like stuff you can kill with, America has been very careful not to give any of that out to the Syrians.
And it's quite possible the reason why ISIS and Nusra are as powerful as they are today is because of all the help that was denied to the, quote, good guys early on.
You know, this is the this is what you balance.
But from the Obama administration's perspective, I don't think there's much good stuff that can go on here.
And he did kind of get elected on the idea that he was going to get America out of these Middle East entanglements.
And, you know, a perspective that you see a lot around here is, well, this is Iran's problem.
If ISIS takes over Mexico, America will have to deal with it.
But ISIS is next to Iran and they hate the Iranians as much as they hate the West.
I think it's time Iran stepped up and dealt with it.
They're part of the reason why America didn't leave any trainers in Iraq.
They wanted us out so they could exercise power over the Baghdad government.
And, well, if you want to exercise power, you know, you got to clean up messes.
So I really don't envy the Obama national security team as they sit there and hash through this stuff.
And I really don't understand when I hear Lindsey Graham and John McCain, as much as I know both men, you know, I covered them in the Senate.
I think they're smart guys, but I think they're playing a bit of a cynical political game here, because if the administration helps Maliki, then what they're really doing is doing close air support for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard while they fight Al Qaeda.
If they don't do anything, you can claim you let Al Qaeda took over.
They're going to be able to hit the administration no matter what they do.
You empowered Iran.
You empowered the terrorists.
There are no good choices for Obama.
It reminds me of that line from The Wire where the police lieutenant concludes you cannot lose if you do not play.
It's all the game is rigged.
And from the Obama administration perspective, I think they get it.
The game here is rigged.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, a couple of things on that real quick, and I know I'm keeping you over time here, Mitchell, but I was reading at the Long War Journal that the TOW missiles are ending up in the hands of the al-Nusra Front.
And those are the guys who have pledged their loyalty to Ayman al-Zawahiri, which if the American people, never mind Iran, the American people have an actual enemy in the world.
It's the Al Qaeda guys that are the butchers of New York.
And so it seems like kind of it is a big deal, even if just symbolically that a single TOW missile would end up in the hands of the al-Nusra Front.
And that when George Bush was paying Assad to torture these guys to death for us, now we're backing in effect these guys.
And when you say, well, show me the weapons and all that, you know, you're reporting from there.
And I don't question what you're saying, but it seems like from here it sounds like you're ignoring the fact that Obama and the CIA, and this is the New York Times version, too, right, is that the CIA has been coordinating with the Saudis and the Qataris this whole time with the and with the Turks for safe haven.
And and that the Saudis have spent, I don't know how many millions or billions of dollars under Bandar and apparently whoever came after Bandar to the same position.
And Obama could stop that with just a stern look.
I mean, to me, that doesn't sound like plausible deniability.
It sounds like Obama has hired the Saudis to bankroll these guys for us.
The same way when Ronald Reagan had the Israelis sell missiles to the Iranians, that wasn't plausible deniability.
We saw right through it.
And it was the Israelis almost got dropped from the story because of how irrelevant it was that we paid them back for the missiles they sold to Iran for us, if you know what I mean.
Well, there's a couple of things here.
One, people have a tendency, I think, to overstate American power.
Saudi Arabia considers itself in a do or die regional power struggle with Iran, and they've got tons of money.
And honestly, I don't think they care.
The Turks have been yelled at forever to stop letting Nusra and ISIS guys come through.
And I don't think they care.
They played a cynical game.
And unless America is willing to bomb Istanbul or Riyadh, there's only there's a limit to what they can do.
But I would say this.
So did Obama try to tell him to stop, though, the Saudis?
How do you know they have it?
Well, no, I don't know they haven't.
But it hadn't seemed like there was a thing there.
Well, it hasn't.
See, what I would argue is I haven't seen America particularly involved in this one way or another.
But what I would say is that when you look at groups like Arar Al-Sham and the Nusra front, Ahrar is the one that actually gets the Saudi money.
Nusra gets donations for the most part from from from the Gulf and frankly is falling apart.
Most of their guys are going over to ISIS.
Yeah, they are sworn to bin Laden.
But at this stage, I mean, even from Rania's article, which you guys discussed at length yesterday, at this stage, who really thinks Nusra is that bad compared to ISIS?
They're fighting ISIS.
They've already said that they will not conduct terrorist attacks outside of Syria.
Their only role is to take down the regime.
Yes, they have an ideology that we find distasteful and some friendships with people that have been our enemies, you know, in the West, not even as Americans.
But the simple fact is Nusra, everybody gave a very hard time.
But they've never materialized as anything more than deeply religious guys committed to taking out the Assad regime.
The second thing I'd argue is the tow missiles.
Yes, symbolically, that probably isn't that great, although I have yet to see evidence that Nusra has them.
I don't doubt it's possible they got a hold of a couple.
That's really not that big of a deal.
It is symbolic.
I'll give you that.
But it's just an anti-tank missile.
You can buy one that's the Russian equivalent on any black market in the Middle East.
It just doesn't have a name that every high school kid knows from, you know, playing a Call of Duty or something like that.
Sure.
But it goes back to what you're talking about, about Iran and how this is their problem and all of that.
America is, in effect, siding with the American people's actual enemies against a regional strategic rival.
Right.
Iran is not really America's enemy.
And Obama even has said that, yeah, we're doing this to help take Iran down a peg by taking Assad down a peg.
Well, I mean, their goal was to support the Syrians and, you know, in a revolution, everybody kind of thought it would be quick and easy in the along the lines of the Arab Spring and replace Bashar with a, you know, with a somewhat democratically elected government.
You know, everybody was maybe a little naive back in that time.
You know, there was a lot of excitement about Tunisia and Egypt.
And to a lesser extent, there were more concerns about Libya, but some enthusiasm.
But at this stage, what you're really looking at is, all right, how do you go forward?
I would say right now America and Iran can't admit publicly to their people, but their strategic interests now overlap.
The Americans and the Iranians are not necessarily going to be going at each other in public quite like they have.
They're going to have to cooperate unless they want to see an Islamic state in a third of Syria and a quarter of Iraq.
And neither side particularly wants that.
As far as Bashar getting overthrown, that ship has sailed.
I do not think he can regain the territory in the far east that he's lost.
But with the help of Hezbollah, he's already pretty much taken the population centers in the west.
I'd expect Aleppo to fall completely back into government hands in the next month or so.
And essentially, once Mosul fell, the Syrian civil war was over.
Nusra is starting to evaporate.
Its guys are losing their funding.
The new recruits want to go with the cool kids who are, you know, making a lot of noise and getting a lot of play over with ISIS right now.
Everybody likes a winner.
And I'm just I'm starting to see the Nusra Fronts having defections, some of their more radical guys who you're absolutely right, do subscribe to a Qaeda ideology.
They're going to go with a winner.
They're going to go with the guys with the giant pile of money and ammunition.
It's just human nature.
So I think, you know, in the next six months, you're going to see less and less talk about fighting in Syria as the government rolls up the, you know, the rebellion.
They've already taken just about all of the population centers back.
Damascus is more or less stable.
Holmes is destroyed.
But in government hands, Hama never quite fell to the rebels and more or less remains in government hands.
The coastal area is completely in government hands.
And I think you're about to see Aleppo turn into a six month version of Stalingrad where the rebels that are inside there that are fighting get completely cut off.
So, you know, and I'm just not sure that the stage Bashar, who's fighting for his life, really cares that much about Raqqa or Deir ez-Zor, which probably if it wasn't for the British would be part of Iraq anyway.
So, you know, what we're seeing is just an end of that story.
We're on to a much bigger one, which is right now there's an Islamic caliphate run by, you know, and I agree with Patrick on this, the Khmer Rouge of Islam that probably has 12 million people and hundreds of millions of dollars.
So that's a way bigger concern than a couple of Farouk brigade guys selling some tow missiles to some guys whose ideology we don't like.
This is something that could possibly reshape the Middle East forever.
It's going to probably drag Iran into their version of Vietnam because they cannot allow this to stand.
And it could very well be that the Saudis might start funding ISIS and some of these tribes in order to really bleed Iran out of revenge for all the times that Iran's gotten a leg up on them.
It's really dangerous stuff, but it's all very big picture.
And that doesn't even include Turkey, who right now are greatly regretting the fact they let all these Islamists in and it's gotten out of their control.
They thought they could play a school game where they let these guys in, let them go kill Bashar and then maybe deal with them later.
And the thing's gotten completely out of hand for them.
And I know firsthand from intelligence officials in the West, they have been complaining to Turkey.
You need to know who these guys are.
You've got to stop letting them come in through the airport.
We got kids flying in from Birmingham and Newcastle and London's south side are coming in to become jihadis, Pakistani kids, you know, British kids of Pakistani descent, guys from all over the Arab world.
It was a free for all.
The Turks just let them come and they were warned and warned.
And now we've seen the result of this, which is there's this huge force running around and also not playing nice with Turkey.
They're holding about 50 Turks in a consulate right now in Mosul, threatening to execute those guys if they don't get 100 million dollars.
So it's it's it's just an epic mess.
The guys like the Farouk and Nusra, I hate to say it because, you know, they did fight for a long time, but they're yesterday's news and they're going to really disappear, I think.
All right.
Now, one last thing I've captured criminally over time here, and I'm sorry, but I can't let you go with that without asking you, what about the king of Jordan?
I saw there's already border disputes going on on that line.
Yeah, man, he can't be feeling very good right now.
Jordan is what we call a friendly police state.
They have a very aggressive and very professional intelligence services that will not necessarily mess with your life so long as you don't try to overthrow the king.
You try to overthrow the king.
You're in for you're in for a bad week.
They are really tough guys, but it's a small country.
It's got a small population.
There are a lot of people within those Hashemite and Bedouin tribes that are pretty dissatisfied with the leadership.
And they do have a little bit of a jihadi problem in certain towns.
They've managed to keep a handle on it historically.
But yeah, if Iraq falls, this is when you do start to see America going, OK, we can't just leave this to Iran.
That would require probably automatic airstrikes.
I think we America would probably put special forces on the ground alongside the Jordanians in a hot second, because simply put, you cannot let ISIS come up to the Israeli border is then you're literally going to be lighting the whole, you know, the whole region on fire.
And the Israelis are going to get involved.
And if they start getting involved in this stuff, nobody knows how it will turn out.
They're sort of the wild card.
They've been quiet.
They've done a little bit of attacks here or there to try to ding Hezbollah to keep them from getting high end weapons.
But otherwise, if you notice, the Israelis are staying very quiet on all of this because simply nobody knows what their involvement might how it might change the dynamic.
It could rally more people to ISIS's side.
It could cause internal fighting, overthrowing of governments.
So they're just trying their best to stay out of it for now.
But if Jordan starts to look like it'll fall, the Israelis will not be able to continue to stay out of it.
They're going to take aggressive actions.
And then Lord knows, I don't even know what that'll look like.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time and especially for bearing with me and going over time here on the show today, Mitchell.
Oh, no problem at all.
Sorry, I couldn't be more cheerful.
But I got to tell you, I've been in the region for 12 years and I keep saying I don't know a lot because this is so bad.
I really have no idea where it's going.
In the American occupation, an invasion of Iraq, we sort of had a paradigm of what really bad stuff could happen and that stuff did come true.
But in this case, I don't even know what the upper end for disaster is.
It's it's it's really a mess.
And I don't even know who's responsible at this point.
It's that it's that complex.
There's so many balls moving in the air, so many different people with so many different agendas.
And with the Americans and the Iranians, strange bedfellows who I think are really going to have to work together to get a handle on this.
Yeah, it sounds like the only thing that's certain is that they're not going to get a handle on anything and that everything is just going to get that much worse.
I mean, every every every fact you cite points towards worst disaster.
Right.
Iran cannot stand for this.
Well, that just means they're going to rally every Sunni could be jihadi in the entire region when the Iranians get directly involved in Iraq.
I mean, well, they also might just decide to kill every Sunni in central Iraq.
I I hate to be cynical about it, but one of the reasons why the car bombs stopped in 2008 was they had, you know, the Iranian backed militias and the Shia militias had basically driven all the Sunnis out of Baghdad.
If you kill them all, they no more car bombs.
They did learn that lesson.
And I'm afraid they're going to take that lesson to the industrial scale.
And you could conceivably be looking at a Rwanda type situation where these guys come in and just decide to clean all those villages out.
And, you know, at that stage, then America, what do you do?
You're you know, these are you want these this ISIS defeated.
But your allies are literally slaughtering millions of Syrians are civilians in order to get it done.
It's it's it's a debacle.
Yeah, absolutely crazy.
I mean, the headlines this morning are Maliki says, you know, you guys take too long with your F-16s.
I'm going to buy some fighter jets from the Russians.
So now it's Russia, Iraq, Iran and Syria against ISIS.
And whose side's America on again?
I guess everybody's side a little bit.
Again, it's just can you imagine?
I mean, you know, I'm not a huge fan of the Obama foreign policy in this region, but I would like to express my sympathy to American policymakers.
I really don't know what they're supposed to do.
We're always really clever and think, well, if I was in charge, I would do this.
I wouldn't have invaded Iraq in the first place.
That's all well and good.
But going forward, I see a whole bunch of terrible options.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it seems to me, I mean, they're saying the armed drones are there today and it seems to me that the logic is inescapable that they're going to end up invading.
I mean, having the Islamic Republic of Iraq from Baghdad to Basra is one thing.
But having the Islamic State bin Laden stand between Raqqa and Fallujah like this and all that.
No, they cannot let that stand.
If it takes it, they'll send the Marine Corps back in there.
Well, I think the Iranians will beat you to it.
But again, it'll be surreal because America will be bombing by that stage.
You're absolutely right.
And can you just imagine a year ago if I told you America is going to be providing close air support to the Iranian invasion of Iraq, you would have laughed me out of the room as a crazy person.
I would have laughed me out of the room as a crazy person.
Yet that's where this seems like it could be headed.
Yeah.
No, actually, I would have said no.
That sounds exactly right.
America's been fighting for the Supreme Islamic Council and the Bata Brigade and what Iran wanted since March 2003.
This whole time they've been fighting for the Hakeem faction first and foremost among all Shiites.
And that's exactly what the army and Marines were doing the whole time was fighting for Iran.
That's why Iran sent Chalabi to tell the neocons all those lies in the first place.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, but he might come back.
So don't worry.
We can talk about that some other time.
But Chalabi's been cited and people keep mentioning him as a possible consensus candidate.
The cynical view is how bad could he be at this stage?
Oh, no, I just can't imagine it could be him.
Although I guess I read that his family had paid for the maintenance of a shrine in Najaf for generations or something.
So he does have some kind of real street credibility and grassroots power there that probably his patrons in America didn't even know about.
So there's a little something there, but that can't be enough to get him the chair just because somebody in D.C. wants it.
Not at this point.
And although I guess if that's what Khamenei wants.
Well, here's the problem, though, is the one thing nobody realized about Chalabi was he wasn't our guy.
He wasn't America's guy.
He'd been Iran's intelligence asset the entire time.
Right.
And so that's when he finally went on the outs with the Bush administration was when they realized he'd been turning over classified American intelligence documents to Iran.
So, you know, but again, that's that's for a whole nother show.
I got to get going.
It's always a pleasure, Scott.
Yeah.
Thanks very much for staying on and be safe over there.
No problem.
I'll do my best.
Take it easy, sir.
All right.
That is Mitchell Prothero at McClatchy DC dot com reporting from Erbil, Iraq on, well, the whole damn situation over there.
Boy, what a mess.
A poor guy was trying to overstate it and he couldn't come up with a way to overstate what a mess it is over there.
Iraq hanging on to oil rich Kirkuk may prove a challenge for Iraq's Kurds.
That's just one small bit of his great reporting there at McClatchy DC dot com.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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