07/24/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

The military-industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power...
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Alright, good.
Next up is Mitchell Prothero, war reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.
He's in Erbil, Iraq.
Or at least that was his last byline I saw.
Welcome back to the show, Mitchell.
How are you doing?
I'm doing okay.
How are you guys doing?
I'm actually in the middle of fixing an embarrassing tweet you retweeted.
I meant to say Jonah survived being in the hole in a whale.
That was going to be one of my questions.
I just wrote it down here.
Noah, was there a tomb for Noah?
I'd never heard of any such thing.
I never found Noah, but supposedly Jonah Yunus, as he's known in Arabic, his tomb was in Mosul until earlier today.
Oh, wow.
That's amazing.
Do they really claim that it goes back that far?
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of tombs all over the place.
It's hard to know, obviously.
You don't have access to Jonah's current family to do DNA testing.
Right, yeah, unfortunately.
In fact, there's a lot of cool stuff about the tombs all over the world.
For instance, Jesus Christ actually has a tomb.
He didn't die, as Christians believe, but later wandered the earth and ended up dying in Kashmir, where there's a mosque and a tomb dedicated to him where he's said to be buried.
There's a lot of its local superstition, local religious history that melds between all the monotheistic religions.
It's really interesting stuff.
I've been to the Imam Ali shrine in two different places.
Oh, that's cool.
I don't know who was in that tomb, but it was widely considered to be the tomb of Jonah, survivor of the whale.
Wow, and ISIS came and bombed it, huh?
Well, they've got a really big thing about shrines.
Basically what it breaks down to is the Prophet Muhammad did say that you weren't to pray at people's graves and shrines because that's a form of idolatry, that you're really only supposed to pray to God.
This was kind of how Islam, I don't want to bore people with a big history lesson, but Islam sort of came about to being as a reaction to merchants who'd set up sort of these shyster religions all over Mecca to get travelers to come and pay taxes to gods of all kinds of different things.
Basically he had decided that this was nonsense, and Islam is a reaction to sort of that.
That's why it became the most modern of the invented monotheistic religions.
There is one God, but God.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe this.
So they really take that seriously at the higher levels of what we call Salafi jihadism, sort of the ideology that the Qaeda guys, the Taliban, for instance, the Deobandis, and ISIS, they take that sort of thing very seriously and take it upon themselves to basically destroy shrines and tombs that people might pray at whenever they get the opportunity.
I mean, my personal feeling is, even if the Prophet intended for that, he'd probably say, why don't you feed the poor and heal the sick before you get around to blowing up historical places.
But they seem to like to do that first.
I guess it's a little easier.
Yeah.
Well, sure, there are biblical restrictions on Christians, Jews, and Muslims on all kinds of things which are taken with varying degrees of seriousness by various populations all around the world, of course.
Yes, exactly.
And this is one of their things that ideologically, Qaeda wasn't quite as rough on it.
The Taliban were particularly huge about it, and ISIS is definitely really big about it.
And that's got a lot of people very concerned, because a lot of the areas that they're in control of now are literally the cradle of civilization, and the cradle of both, to a certain extent, Judaism, but definitely the earliest sites of all of Christianity.
And many early sites of even Islam.
And to them, you know, they want to take out shrines to famous Islamic religious scholars and things like that.
That's one of their big problems with the Shia.
They believe that the Shia put the imams whose shrines are very big in places like Qadamia in Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Samarra.
You know, there's a bunch everywhere.
The Shia do like to go pray at these shrines.
To ISIS, this is heresy and idolatry, because you're praying to a man and not to God.
Whereas the Shia would say, no, I'm praying to God, I'm just doing it through a saint.
I mean, I come from an Irish Catholic background.
Catholics love them some saints, you know?
They don't think of it as ignoring God, they think of it as a way to speak to God, and ISIS just takes a very hardline view on that.
So you can see why the Shia take a very hardline on ISIS, and ISIS is hardline.
It's a hell of a thing.
Before we move on to the power factions on the ground there and who's doing what when there's so much to cover, we won't be able to touch much of it, but can we talk about the rumor going around this morning from a UN report about how ISIS has decreed that all females, what, under the age of 40 or 45 or something like that, must have their parts removed?
Look, you know, there's nothing behind this, but one supposed statement from a couple of dodgy sources that claim a UN official said that.
I have yet to meet a serious person who studies this who has heard that.
I have yet to hear an indication that it's going on, and I have from firsthand accounts among my jihadi sources that they're denying it.
You might say, okay, well, you know, why would they deny it?
My argument would be you can't really make a big policy that affects every woman of childbearing age, essentially, and then deny it because you've got to implement the policy.
So either you're going to do it or you aren't going to do it.
So why would they deny it if they planned on rounding up all the women and doing this barbaric practice to them?
Historically, and I'm not letting anybody off the hook here for anything, that's not really these guys' thing.
It's never been really part of the dogma or ideology.
I am unaware of what we call the main strains of Salafi jihadism that ISIS comes from, which is very similar to al-Qaeda, even if they currently have what I call a political difference, not an ideological one.
Those guys have never been big on the genital mutilation front.
It's never really come up.
That's typically something that you see in a lot of the North African tribes.
A lot of them will ascribe it to Islam, but it's probably something they were doing long before Islam.
You'll see it a lot in Sudan, Somalia, even Egypt to a certain extent, places like that where it's more of a tribal custom and tradition and a barbaric and horrible one.
But I've probably never even heard of a serious Islamic scholar try to justify it and say what you will about guys like the Islamic State or al-Qaeda or whatever.
Their arguments are always backed by a certain level of scholarship, and there's just no scholarship on this genital mutilation thing.
So I would be very surprised if it turned out to be true.
All right.
And now speaking of scholarship, I read this thing purporting to be a sermon of Baghdadi that he gave at the start of Ramadan, and it starts off all very religious but then talks all about the current politics and all that.
I guess first of all I should ask you if you've seen this thing and you know what I'm talking about and whether you think it's credible.
You're talking about the sermon that he gave in the Nuri Mosque?
Well, maybe it is.
Was that at the very start of Ramadan?
There was three things that happened in fairly rapid succession.
Okay.
Well, let me say this.
This one talks about the United States as the two biggest enemies of the United States and Russia and, of course, the Israelis too.
Did he say that in that original speech or is this something different?
Well, there's three things that we've got.
We've got the first statement that announced the caliphate that came from a spokesman named Adnani, or at least that's his nom de guerre.
Then on the first day of Ramadan, there was an audio and written statement, basically celebrating the start of Ramadan, that came from Baghdadi as, you know, welcome to the first Ramadan of the new caliph.
And then the next Friday after that, he apparently, and I do believe it was him, led prayer in Mosul.
But, yeah, I'm more or less aware of it.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry, Mitchell.
We've got to take this break.
When we get back, I'm going to ask you a little bit about this.
Maybe I'll copy and paste this paragraph for you.
We'll be right back with Mitchell Prothero of McClatchyDC.com.
Reporting from Iraq.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
One of the things I like about Russia being back in the international game full swing is that I get to write it out as Russ all the time, just like the old Cold War era newspaper headlines.
That's a lot of fun for me.
Sorry.
Anyway, I got Mitchell Brothrow on the line.
He's reporting from Erbil, Iraq on Iraq War III as it's developing out there.
And so I was asking about this sermon.
I sent him the link over the Skype here.
And it's the new caliph, de facto de jure.
I don't know how well it's working out.
We'll let Mitchell elaborate.
But here he's saying, basically, don't you forget it, that our enemies here are the Jews, the crusaders, and their allies, America and Russia, and, of course, the Israelis here, as he puts it.
So my question, of course, is how seriously you take that as far as whether it really foreshadows attacks against the United States.
Would that be a smart strategy on their part or a likely strategy on their part that they would like to attack us and try to drag us back in over there?
Well, I mean, they certainly consider America to be their enemy, and they do consider this as part of a plan to confront the United States and its global hegemony, its backing of corrupt regimes in their eyes, a lot of people's eyes, and Egypt, Sudan.
Even to a certain extent, people would claim Syria.
They've got a huge problem with the Iranians based off of religion and Persian and Arab rivalries.
Russia, you know, the vodka-drinking communists are not popular with the jihadis, and they've got a fight over Kashmir, or not Kashmir, I'm sorry, Chechnya, as well as a bunch of other smaller, less well-known but certainly rest of Muslim populations.
So what he's setting up here is, you know, it's the clash of civilizations that, you know, we heard about from a lot of George Bush's advisers and a lot of the rhetoric that people were throwing around early after 9-11 that, you know, wasn't particularly legitimate.
9-11 was something that was done to help bring that around, and now we're sort of seeing the fruit of that, you know, coming off the tree and how George Bush and Osama bin Laden, you know, both together their policies, did manage to create a clash of civilizations that probably wasn't there prior to that.
But at the same time, you can't underestimate your average Muslim's, you know, complete distaste for this Islamic State project.
ISIS is considered far too radical and intolerant for, you know, I'd say 90% of Sunni Muslims, and even the methods that they use probably wouldn't appeal to much of the other 10%.
It still is very much a fringe group in terms of broad ideological acceptance.
So they've got a ways to go that they've got to convince the Muslim, you know, community, in Arabic they call it the ummah, that this is the time that this is really a war, that these aren't just, you know, colonial, you know, growing pains, normal interactions in life where cultures come together and sort of clash and debate, you know, immigration, things like that.
There's a way to see it in a prism like, frankly, I would, where all of these things sort of come together, or there's a way to see it, all right, fine, it's all of us as Muslims against all of you who aren't Muslims, and that's what, you know, God intended.
And they've got a long way to go to convince even very pious Muslims that this is the right time and the right way to do it.
But they do have some traction and they've got some military skill that's getting them some, you know, some momentum on that front.
Well, and speaking of which, you reported recently that they succeeded in forcing Maliki's men out of Tikrit, correct?
And that's the militias and the army.
Well, let's, okay, that gets complicated.
This is the problem with covering a war is they have battles and they go back and forth.
Yeah, a week ago, roughly, there was a major attack by ISIS on an outpost where, you know, they'd set up, that the Iraqi government had set up inside Tikrit in order to try to retake the town.
They'd made a very big deal about it, and that got really attacked and overwhelmed and to a certain extent lost over the course of Thursday night and Friday.
But the Iraqi army, as one does in a war, pushed reinforcements in there, and they seem to have managed to have taken back at least a large portion of that former American military base I was talking about at this stage.
And apparently that front's been kind of quiet for a couple of days.
But in no way is the Iraqi government in any kind of control of that area.
How long have they been working on taking Tikrit?
Ever since this really first started, that was one of the first things that Maliki did in reaction, right?
Well, there was a problematic story that came out in the first days that said that Iranian Revolutionary Guards were leading a counterattack up the highway and that they'd gotten as far as Tikrit and had retaken most of it.
Unfortunately, there were no Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and ISIS was still pushing their way down.
And, you know, it ended up, I think, getting pulled from the website.
I think an Iranian intelligence source really screwed over a reporter on that.
And so that was quickly scrubbed.
The campaign's been going on now about a month, I think.
I'd have to go back and check my notes.
But they dropped about 400 Special Forces guys into this camp by helicopter, and then what they planned to do was run heavy armor and reinforcements up the highway.
It's just like they kind of didn't see the movie A Bridge Too Far, which is a very similar move the Allies did in World War II, which is if you don't get to the guys that you dropped way ahead of the armored column coming up the highway, they have a tendency to get completely surrounded and eventually wiped out.
And so there's been a little bit of that going on.
So I would say right now there are Iraqi troops.
The biggest concentration is, from what I can tell, and really you've got to hedge your bets here, because the amount of information that comes in from the actual field on specifics sometimes is a day late, and the sourcing can be really crappy.
But my impression is there's a significant number of Iraqi Army troops about five kilometers south of Tikrit, and then there's some Special Forces units holding part of an airport and sort of holding on inside Tikrit.
What by no means is the situation like an ongoing operation to retake control.
I think the guys that they do have in Tikrit basically are fighting for their lives.
All right, and can you give us a quick what the hell about the Iraqi parliament right now?
Okay, well, my colleague Roy Goodman is in Baghdad, and he's handling that stuff.
Can we just basically say it's very ineffectual as they work their way around to selecting the leaders that will then bring parliament together to decide who the prime minister should be?
By every metric of logic, competence, and performance, that will not be Nouri al-Maliki, the current prime minister.
Having said that, he has a lot of control over the military, the security services, and the high levels of the economy.
I don't know.
It seems like some of his support within the Shia community has been dwindling.
Sistani is definitely not happy with his performance and probably would like to see somebody else in there.
But I think Sistani would be reluctant to come out and flat out say, Maliki must go, and I want to see so-and-so replace him.
As we talked about, I think, on the last show, that would be fairly unusual.
But the hints out of Sistani's camp are that he is not happy with this.
So the question is, what happens next?
And you've got a scenario where a dysfunctional parliament could come together and put somebody in there, or Maliki could decide that this is all just a big plot against him and go the full Saddam.
Well, and now do you think that there's much of a risk of the form of the government as it exists now falling apart and just being replaced by some whole new Shia-Stan government rather than this parliament that America set up?
Well, you know, the Iraqis set it up with help from the Americans.
I mean, this was kind of the plan, and on paper, it's a perfectly functioning government.
Yeah, that proportional representation will get you every time, though, with the sectarianism there.
Well, it can and it can't.
I mean, basically, anything you did, anything they did was doomed to fail on some level if the Iraqis were not going to attempt in good faith to work out their sectarian difference and build a country.
And that's where they've just epically failed.
And Nouri al-Maliki is the poster child for the complete refusal to work with the Kurds and the Sunnis to try to stabilize Iraq and move it forward out of the horror show that was the American occupation.
So, you know, there was a great, I think it was London Review of Books or New York Review of Books, a story from a couple weeks ago where an expert on Iraq made this great point, which it doesn't matter how long you left troops here.
It doesn't really matter how much money you spent, and it didn't matter how much of a system you put in.
So long as the Iraqis hate each other, don't trust each other, and refuse to work together, the place is going to go to hell.
And that's what we're seeing now.
So until basically the Iraqi people start getting leaders that are willing to make tough choices, compromise and talk to their opponents and their enemies, and then follow through on bringing people together like in a real country, this is not going to happen.
It's just not.
It doesn't matter what they do.
I'm sorry we're out of time.
Man, these segments are short, but we'll catch up again soon.
I sure appreciate it.
No problem at all, man.
I'll be around next week.
Okay, great.
That's Mitchell Prother, everybody.
McClatchyDC.com.
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