07/25/14 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Next up is Jonathan S. Landay from McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
The latest is Obama administration knew Islamic State was growing, but did little to counter it.
Welcome back to the show, Jonathan.
How are you doing?
Good to be here, as usual.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
All right, so it's a very complicated, very thoroughly reported story here, and we only have one short 10-minute segment, so go right ahead, sir, and explain, please.
So what I did was go back and look at everything that's kind of in the open about what the United States knew about what's now known or what now calls itself the Islamic State, previously the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, previously Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And I discovered that there was a great deal that, in fact, in open testimony, both U.S. diplomats and U.S. intelligence officials basically have said that the United States has been closely tracking this group at least since 2012, that it was watching this group as it enlarged its operations from Iraq to Syria, watched as this group seized the oil-rich province of Raqqa, was getting this massive influx of thousands of foreign fighters who were coming into Syria from Turkey, and were also well aware that it was using this area in Syria as a springboard from which it began sending men and material back into Iraq with plans to seize the so-called emirate that they have.
And yet they also knew that the government, the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, was unable to handle this problem, and yet continued to follow a policy which was essentially, Maliki has to deal with this, but we'll help him do it.
And as you say, this whole thing was complicated by the Syria policy, where America was continually condemning Maliki for letting Iran ship supplies to Assad for his exact same fight that Maliki had on his hands.
Well, that's right.
One of the things that they were saying to Maliki was, you want our help?
You're going to have to do something about the fact that you're allowing Iran to fly through your airspace with weapons bound for Assad.
Which is absolutely crazy.
And this is where you get into, in the article, the one alternative policy has been proposed over the past three years is America should really support the so-called moderate rebels in Syria to a strong enough degree that they can overthrow Assad and resist the jihadis.
But it seems like if your priority is the jihadis, I'm not saying we should pay Assad to torture and kill these guys the way George W. Bush did, but at least it doesn't seem to make sense at all to pick anyone on the Sunni jihadis side against the secular Alawite dictatorship in Damascus, Jonathan.
Well, in fact, that's exactly what happened.
They really didn't pick anyone.
Yes, they picked a group, a sort of quote-unquote, moderate group, mostly run mostly by Iraqis who had lived outside of Iraq for decades, some of whom are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but they didn't pick anyone.
Some of whom are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, but it didn't give them anything but nonlethal assistance and political assistance.
Every time they looked at the groups who were actually fighting on the ground, apparently they saw jihadi connections or, if not outright, al-Qaeda connections, or groups who were al-Qaeda affiliates.
And so that kind of tied them up in knots.
And quite frankly, they had a point, and the point being that there were no so-called moderate groups who were capable of doing the kind of fighting that jihadis were doing or are doing.
And that's why you only recently saw the administration, I think three days before the declaration of the so-called caliphate, come out and say, okay, we've decided we're going to spend 500 million dollars on arming and training vetted moderate groups.
That proposal seems not to have gone anywhere either, at least at this point, because those groups really don't seem to exist.
Not with any strength, anyway.
Now, I'm sorry to suggest a coherence to this policy at all, and I don't mean to say it in the most kind of like conspiracy theory sort of sounding terms or anything, but I just wonder if in context this actually makes sense.
Like Hirsch reported in 07 or 08 about the redirection, that they realized that going along with Chalabi and fighting a war for Iran in Iraq basically for the Shia was their gigantic strategic mistake, and now it was time to redirect back toward the Saudis and the Sunnis.
And as Michael Oren recently put it, Israel certainly prefers the Sunni jihadists to Hezbollah or Syria because they're backed by Iran, and that's the ultimate evil in the whole wide world.
And so, maybe this is a policy of just America and Saudi deliberately backing the Mujahideen.
Not that they control them all, but they're doing this all on purpose rather than they're just the dumbest foreign policy people ever.
I'm not quite sure that's correct, Scott, because what they've known for a very long time is that the Islamic state has had its sights set on American targets.
And so, what you essentially do is you're suggesting that they were helping a jihadi group that eventually intends to attack American targets?
Well, I mean, that's where this whole approach falls down, because yes, you're tied in knots over the idea that if we back the Islamists, that means we're backing Al-Qaeda, and if we don't, we're helping the Syrians.
But what it doesn't track with is the fact that in being tied up in knots, you're allowing a threat, a terrorist threat against American targets to proliferate.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't mean to say that that's their point or whatever, but they could be criminally negligent in that sense.
If you look at Hirsch's report back then, it was that they're supporting Fatah al-Islam, which was an Al-Qaeda-ite group in Lebanon, and that they were talking with the Muslim Brotherhood and some other Sunni jihadi-type dissidents inside Syria, and they're working with Jandala in Iran, and they were turning back toward the Saudis, and the Mujahideen are a useful tool when they're not attacking us, right?
Well, in theory, but you know, I think in the end, as I write in the story, a lot of people believe that they just kind of got tied up in knots and ended up sort of leaving this void into which the Saudis stepped, and they kind of turned a blind eye to that for a while.
But don't forget, President Obama went to Saudi Arabia earlier this year, and following that, you saw the Saudis dismiss their intelligence chief and a lot of his people, because those were the guys who believed in supporting some of these jihadi groups.
Yeah, it seems like maybe they called off this project last spring when ISIS split from Nusra, Sorry?
It seemed to me like they maybe changed the policy back last spring and summer when ISIS split from Nusra, and that seemed to be the time that Bandar got canned.
It could very well be.
Like it got way out of control at that point, you know?
Right, but the fact is that the Americans were watching it get way out of control since 2012.
Right.
Actually, I have a clip of Hillary saying this is why not to intervene back in the spring of 2012, saying the Saudis endorsed this thing.
Yeah, but the same year, don't forget, a little later on, you had Hillary supporting the army along with Leon Panetta and the former head of the CIA, David Petraeus, in trying to build moderate rebel groups in Syria.
Right.
So you had this, the incoherence seems to, and the paralysis seems to be above their levels, and that would put it in the White House.
Right.
Yeah, a little bit of them believing their own talking points.
Like when Kerry testified before McCain, he got caught up and just sort of said out loud what he would have liked us to believe that, oh yeah, most of the rebels are, you know, secular moderates, and the whole place kind of laughed.
That was what they would have liked us to believe, but he almost convinced himself that it sounded like.
But that's what they wanted to believe themselves.
Absolutely, because that would have made policy a little easier.
Yeah, because even the Northern Storm Brigade that McCain was palling around with over there, they told Time Magazine on video, yeah, we're veterans of the Iraq war, but they fought against our guys.
That's right.
We fought Fallujah.
Yeah.
I mean, but that's the point.
And so, but here's the other point.
If you've run for president, right, it's about accepting leadership and accepting, basically telling you, I can deal with these hard problems.
And that's not what's happened here.
Or at least it was dealt in a way that didn't deal with it.
And meanwhile, the United States intelligence community and the diplomats are watching the growth of a group that has declared openly its intention to attack Americans.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I've been speaking weekly with Mitchell Prothero, your colleague reporting from from Erbil there.
And he certainly seems to think this seems to be a consensus, Patrick Coburn, Eric Margulies and everyone that, you know, they're surrounded by enemies, but none of whom are really capable of fielding an army against them.
So they really kind of they have their state.
They're making it.
Oh, more than that.
You and I had this conversation two or three weeks before they sacked Mosul.
I mean, they are on a tear, not just in Iraq, but in Syria as well.
Now, they have been on an offensive where they have now secured basically all of oil and gas rich Raqqa province.
They are pursuing an offensive next door in Haraska.
They are also on a tear in Deir ez-Zor.
And the regime is unable to handle them.
They have been some of the fiercest fighting over the three years in Syria within the last several weeks.
And given what's going on on the other side of the border, where you've had the Iraqi army unable to deal with these people as well, raises in my mind the question of how long will Iran, which don't forget is, you know, the chief supporter of both of these governments, how long will Iran, a regional supporter, how long will Iran allow this to continue before it gets even more involved than it already is?
Right.
All right.
And we'll leave it there because I know you got to go.
But thank you so much for your time, Jonathan.
Always a pleasure.
Great stuff here.
That's Jonathan Landay, everybody.
McClatchy DC dot com.
And the headline is Obama administration.
New Islamic State was growing but did little to counter it.
We'll be right back.
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