06/30/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey y'all, how's it going?
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Hour three now.
And Dan McAdams is coming up to talk about Ukraine here at the bottom of the hour.
But first, it's Phil Giraldi, formerly a CIA and DIA officer.
He's now executive director of the Council for the National Interest, and he writes at the American Conservative Magazine, that's theamericanconservative.com, at unz.com, and at america.aljazeera.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Phil?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So what do you think about what's going on in Iraq?
To be honest, I'm mystified by all this.
I mean, there's no coherency to what the U.S. government is doing.
You know, it was a week or so ago when Obama was interviewed by CBS News, I believe it was, and said that it had been a fantasy from the beginning to think that these insurgents that we were supporting in Syria could possibly overthrow the regime.
And now we're giving $500 million to train these very same people in Jordan, apparently, with a CIA program.
So, you know, the whole strategy of what's going on in Syria and Iraq is totally incomprehensible to me.
I don't see where there's any kind of quick fix to this situation.
And I'm beginning to question whether the United States has any good intelligence information on what is going on there.
I don't know if you saw the interview with Mike Morrell, former director of operations for the agency, who admitted that CIA case officers in Iraq don't go out of the embassy very much.
So the question becomes, to what extent do we actually have a handle on what is going on in either of these countries?
Yeah.
Well, you know, on the Syria thing, this is where the interview just left off with Jonathan Landay.
Are they trying, they really are trying to, and how much, how many mercs can you buy with $500 million?
Are they trying to create an army that really can fight against, you know, al-Sham and Nusra and ISIS and all the other jihadi groups and Assad and get a regime change there?
And you can get about one millionth of a regime change for $500 million, right?
Yeah, well, I don't even understand what they're aiming to do.
The $500 million, first of all, it's a lot of money.
You can train a lot of people on the ground in Jordan for that kind of money, but who are you going to be training?
Are you going to be training like, as Obama put it, you know, shopkeepers and people like that to become hardened warriors?
I mean, that ain't going to work.
I mean, and how long is this training going to take, 12 weeks, 16 weeks?
You know, going by my own experience in the United States Army, I would say that to train somebody for combat, you're talking about a lead time of four or five, maybe six months.
And so what exactly is the intention?
If they want to go out and hire mercenaries, I don't know what kind of mercenaries are even available that would be considered to be politically reliable.
So you know, the whole thing is just, it's just so screwed up.
If you had made this up and written it in a piece of fiction, nobody would believe it.
Yeah, no, I know it is.
It's completely ridiculous.
And the obvious answer is sitting right there.
If you want to train anybody to fight ISIS in Syria, it's Bashar al-Assad's army.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, I'm not saying I'm for that, but I'm saying if you've got to train somebody in Syria, it would be the secularist, Baathist coalition of Christians and Shiites.
And yeah, and some Sunnis actually, too.
Well, yeah, that's the whole point.
If all this stuff is based on threat to the United States, then who is threatening the United States?
Well, ISIS and some of the other radicalized groups that are fighting Assad.
So, you know, if that's really what's going on, we should be, if not supporting Assad, at least stepping aside and letting him do the work.
And so that doesn't make much sense.
And it doesn't make much sense.
There's other argument that's been coming out, too, about how ISIS is intending to attack Britain, intending to attack the United States.
And they're going back to this whole argument about home, you know, native born terrorism coming back to bite us on the butt, as it were.
And but that argument is not terribly convincing either, because nobody seems to come up with any numbers or any kind of plausible explanations as to how many of these people there are.
I mean, if there are 30 of them, is that a threat to the United States?
If there are 100 of them, is that a threat to the United States?
And are these people really intending to do that anyway?
Because it's very clear that their focus is on Muslim regimes in the Middle East.
That's their focus.
They're not interested in us.
Hmm.
Well, you know, I don't know.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I disagree with you about that.
I think you look at the well, there was an American that went and did a suicide attack in Syria, which at least he did it there.
But a kid from Florida last month.
And then there was the attack by the ISIS guy in Brussels who killed two Jews at a museum with a shotgun.
And it seemed to me like, you know, the strategic logic of suicide terrorism, by all means, lure in the French, lure in the Americans and bog them down, recreate the war of 03 through 08.
Why not rally more people to their cause, bog us down and bankrupt us?
That's the whole game.
The actions and the reaction get us to overreact and blow ourselves up.
Well, that that is, you know, that's certainly a plausible theory, but I just don't see that where the numbers and and the actual narrative is there.
I sure hope you're right about that, because I don't want the Republicans and the Democrats to have to say, listen, we've got no choice but to intervene after this.
And by the way, it only takes one guy to go and do something pretty bad, as we've seen all over the place.
If any any elementary school shooter was actually some guy with an Islamic jihad, red head, red headband on or whatever, then that would be a war, right?
Yeah, well, sure, it would be a war.
But the problem is, if we if we buy into the argument that these terror, these groups overseas are all out to get us, then we're giving the Democrats and Republicans plenty of ammunition.
I just don't think.
All right.
A guy, you know, a nutcase can kill people, can blow himself up.
He can get a weapon.
He can shoot kids.
He can do anything.
But there's this threat in the United States.
Is this a threat where we should be going to war with countries in the Middle East or getting involved in wars in the Middle East?
I'm saying no.
I'm saying that's not demonstrated.
I mean, I think obviously we can only make it worse by intervening.
There's no doubt about that.
Bush gives them Western Iraq, an entire Wild West to practice and become the Islamic state in in the first place.
Obama then backs them, at least by default.
More and we can get into that maybe in the next segment, a little more detail.
But for years now, as you first report, you're the one who broke the story.
Obama signed a fine.
He's going to back the rebels in Syria.
And that doesn't necessarily mean all the rebels, but in effect, it does end up with all the guns and the money.
So anyway, you know, I don't see that there's a possible good thing that a single U.S. government employee could do about this.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that I don't worry that they would try to follow that same strategy of provoking America.
I think they're going to do the same thing to the Iranians, too.
They're going to blow up as many Iranian targets as they can to try to turn this into as much of a civil war, a Sunni Shia civil war as they can over there.
You know, so I don't know.
Yeah, but see, but he's got they're only able to do that because we're involved in the conflict.
And the only motivation they would have to do that is because we're involved in the conflict.
So that's that's the whole point.
I mean, if they go after France or they go after the French or it's because the French are big players in terms of what's going on in the Middle East right now.
And if they go out to the United States, it's because we're involved.
The whole point being that if we're if we're not looking at this in terms of it being a threat to our existence and therefore getting engaged militarily and diplomatically, then we're not a target for anybody.
Nobody's interested in it.
The problem is Obama wants to do this thing where he dips in a toe.
I'm not saying I'm arguing for any intervention ever, of course, but I'm just saying that the halfway treatment here where, yeah, we got American drones and American advisers and just America, just enough American influence here to make whatever happens to them partially our fault, but not enough to protect us from the blowback created.
Then it's the same thing as before 9-11.
They bin Laden always said that we were already at war with them, but it was just that we had hired Mubarak and Assad to murder them for us.
And so lure us in and bog us down.
The whole damn mess that they did anyway.
What a disaster.
Phil Giraldi is on the show.
We're talking about the new Islamic state of the former Syria and Iraq.
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi, as I often am on this show.
He's a former CIA counterterrorism official.
And writes for the American Conservative magazine.
And has been talking since about this terror war ever since I've been listening to him, which was about nine, 10 years ago, something like that.
And, you know, one thing I was thinking there, Phil, during the break, which might be worth saying out loud, is that I think after Zarqawi died, was bombed by the army back in 2006, that that was when his successors renamed the group from al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They started calling it the Islamic State of Iraq.
And I'm pretty sure it was right around that time that the local Sunni tribal councils and religious leaders and former Ba'athists said, yeah, right.
Screw you guys.
You're the tiniest, you know, fringe part of our insurgency and you're not the boss.
We're the boss.
And that was really the beginning of the awakening was before Petraeus ever even got back, which he didn't, you know, this whole called whole so-called surge and all that crap didn't really start until January 07.
It was really in 06 that these guys already had completely worn out their welcome in Iraq because of, well, first of all, they basically got the Sunni, the civil war good and lost for the Sunnis, the way they picked a fight with all of the Shiite society, basically, and rallied support for those who were cleansing them from Baghdad.
And and then also just conscripting people and bossing them around and declaring themselves the government of the place when many of them were foreigners, including the leadership weren't even Iraqis.
Anyway, so what I'm trying to get at to make a short story long is aren't they just going to cease to exist here pretty soon anyway with all this we rule the world crap when really they're nothing but a militia of however many few thousand guys, right?
Yeah, that's that's that's again one of the great mysteries about all this that obviously they've been they were able to seize the moment and they were they were able to step into essentially what was a power vacuum that has been kind of created over the past few years.
And certainly the the government, the regime in Baghdad has been contributing to this.
And but essentially, yeah, they don't have any they don't have any real long term viability as a nation state, which is what they're aspiring to.
And that eventually will fall apart.
In fact, it might fall apart very, very quickly.
I would say I would rather suggest so that, you know, the whole thing is if you follow the U.S. media coverage and everything on all this, it's kind of crazy.
It doesn't it doesn't take into account any of these these external factors that impact on on the narrative they're trying to create.
And to go back to what we were talking about the first half, I mean, I just I would not give these clowns in Washington any hope at all in terms of, you know, claiming that this what is happening over there is a major threat against the United States, because that is the argument they're going to use essentially to justify an intervention.
And I think you and I know and probably everybody listening to the show knows that an intervention is probably the worst possible thing that could happen.
Yeah, I mean, and, you know, politically, the people certainly are against it.
And so it does seem like, you know, Obama's not up there beating his chest about it too bad.
He's sort of playing down the threat of ISIS, at least in some circumstances he's been playing them down.
And he's saying, you know, minimal effort, send some drones and some advisers.
And of course, that could be a terrible, slippery slope.
But, you know, all the political pressure from the people of the country is against this kind of thing.
But all the political pressure against him in Washington, D.C., of course, is from the Hawks, who are always the loudest, attacking him from the right.
So, yeah, that's exactly right.
And there was an editorial, I guess, in the Washington Post yesterday, again, calling for military action to to resolve this.
But the underlying argument is that the United States is threatened because essentially the politicians know that nobody or no American is going to enter into one of these wars in the foreseeable future unless that case is made that, look, you're directly threatened, your children are threatened, this is what's going on.
And so it's basically a bogus argument.
They've never been able to make the argument that that the war on terror was justified in any way by the reality of the terrorist threat.
And that's what I'm arguing.
And that's we're seeing this kind of playing out again, where they're trying to create this this threat out of out of nothing or out of out of very little.
And they're trying to use it to justify more military action, to justify more U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there was a time where, OK, there was just a few dozen guys, you know, somehow Rumsfeld had them surrounded on three sides and they got away.
But that was about it.
Bin Laden made a great postcard from, you know, Goldstein, the permanent enemy or whatever.
But when they caught him, he was hiding in the attic, even from his own wife.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, at the same time, they really have been spread them far and wide.
I guess the numbers are still not that big, but there's there's enough stateless territory for them to rally in North Africa and and into Yemen and and in Iraq and Syria now where they they certainly make a good enough poster child of an enemy to whip up a war against, I think, if they want one.
But yeah, I think you're right.
It certainly remains to be seen how long they're going to get be able to get anybody to listen to them.
Yeah, it's like the neocons are basically praying for another terrorist attack.
You know, it's it's self-evident because they keep they keep citing the fact that another 9-11 is coming.
Lindsey Graham a few days ago said exactly that, that the situation in Syria and Iraq was another 9-11 coming.
And in fact, I think he even said it would be much bigger.
I'm not exactly sure what his sources of information are, but, you know, that's it's that kind of scaremongering that they're doing.
And that's why I think we have to push back against the scaremongering, because that's the only argument they have.
There's no there's no evident U.S. national interest in what's going on in Syria and Iraq, apart from this hypothetical threat that will be coming across the Atlantic Ocean and getting us.
Well, so we have to we have to push back against that.
Yep.
Well, I don't know.
I guess I still paranoid that if all it takes is a couple of dozen guys to hijack four planes and you have, you know, whatever, hundreds of guys who've gone to fight in Syria, maybe that some of them could get into the United States, certainly could get into the West.
And I guess I wouldn't rule out the threat completely.
But again, I think that's even more reason why not to intervene rather than a reason to intervene.
And I don't want to and I want them to say that us peaceniks sound like we're naive and that, you know, we're just singing give peace a chance.
And they're the only ones who are, you know, know what must be done and all that kind of crap, because they love to play that.
It seems like the way to diminish the threat is to stop doing what they want, which is to take their bait and react in the way in a way that empowers them at our expense and threatens us even more so.
But anyway, that may be too complicated of a point to make on Twitter, you know?
Yeah, no, but that's exactly true.
The whole point is, you know, we empower these people and then we wonder why they why they were attacking us.
And so the whole argument that, well, they're attacking us, therefore we have to attack them harder.
It just creates it creates more justification for what they're doing.
Right.
And it's totally crazy.
Yep.
All right.
Well, thanks, man.
I'm sorry I asked you to stay another segment with me, but I got to go to Dan McAdams on the Ukraine issue here.
But good to talk to you again.
Yeah, yeah.
Appreciate it.
OK, we'll say hi to Dan.
Yeah, we'll do.
That's Phil's Raleigh, everybody.
He's at the American Conservative Magazine and owns dot com and the Council for the National Interest.
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