08/08/14 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so now back to Iraq.
On the line, we've got Peter Van Buren.
He used to work for the U.S. State Department.
He wrote a book called We Meant Well.
And that's also the title of his website.
He writes often for tomdispatch.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's a pleasure to be back with you.
You know, personally, I'm doing fine, but the news from Iraq is very upsetting to me.
And not a good Friday afternoon.
Yeah, I got to tell you, man, I've been doing this a long time, but I ain't figured out a way yet to get my way.
It's just everything happens no matter what I say or no matter what I do anyway.
But anyway, here we are.
Well, you know what?
I don't know, man.
I spent all morning arguing with a libertarian from Reason Magazine about whether we ought to go save the Yazidis or not.
What do you think, Peter?
Should we go save the Yazidis?
You know, I'm as sad as anyone about the fate of anyone who's suffering.
I mean, nobody wants to say suffering is a good thing.
But at the very same time, to save the Yazidis and to save the Kurds and the Christians and the people in Iraq, blowing more stuff up is simply not the answer.
We had nine years of blowing stuff up in Iraq during the American occupation.
And in fact, we've been at war in Iraq and bombing Iraq continuously since 1991.
And unfortunately, we're here where we are today.
At some point, it's time to realize that just simply going to war is not the answer.
All right.
Well, so the president last night, what he announced was, well, we're going to protect the capital of Kurdistan in Erbil up there.
We're just going to use our air power to keep the Islamic State from threatening the capital.
We have too many interests there, he said.
And also, we're going to protect this minority.
But, you know, there are a lot of different minorities in Iraq.
And it seems like if we got to protect the Yazidis, then we got to protect the Chaldean and Assyrian Christians, what's left of them anyway.
The Druze and really even the Kurds and perhaps even the Shia.
The Shia might be the majority in Iraq, but really they're the minority in the region.
And these ISIS guys are as fanatically anti-Shia as anything in the world.
So as long as we must protect people who are being persecuted for their religion from these guys, then it seems like that's a Gulf of Tonkin blank check for forever war going back to Iraq.
And that's it.
I mean, we're back to that very basic question.
Tell me how this ends.
Because once you decide that America is going to be the Iraqi Air Force, and once you make commitments that America is going to, quote unquote, protect people in Iraq, that is as open-ended as it can be.
But I want to circle back real quick and talk about the Christians.
And again, with the caveat that no one wants to see anyone suffer, I think it's very important to remind listeners that approximately half of Iraq's Christians were either killed, run out of their homes, or fled Iraq during the American occupation.
And you want to make sure that whatever we're saying today about Christians is viewed in that context.
Because that tells you, in fact, whether America's goals right now are truly to protect Christians, or in fact, are simply there to drum up more bloodlust among our citizens.
Because, hey, you know, if Muslims die, whatever.
But once you talk about protecting Christians, all sorts of factions in the United States perk up their little ears and say, well, that sounds like a good idea.
We better do that.
Well, a little late.
Yeah, got to come up with a consensus somewhere.
Yeah, it's funny, you know, they're, just personally speaking, but I can speak for all anti-war.com and a lot of other anti-war people, all these years have been complaining that the more we fight war there, the worse these little minority groups are.
And it's not even just the cost of their individual human lives, which are each priceless, but it's the erasure of civilizations that have existed there for 2,000 years, who survived Genghis Khan, but not George W. Bush.
And it's America that's done this to them.
And, you know, the argument I got in this morning was, well, but that's why we have to go and help them now.
Well, I mean, this is the classic definition of mental illness.
Continue to pound a hammer against your head, figuring at some point something different will occur, other than pounding your own head.
Look, it's time.
There has to be a time where you say, look, this is not working, it never has worked, and we need to do something different.
And people say, well, my goodness, we can't stand back, we can't just do nothing.
And I agree.
What we need to do is, step one, stop digging the hole deeper.
When the United States goes in, as we have now, so clearly on the side of one, if not two, of the struggling groups in Iraq, this is a Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Iranian, Syrian, Saudi, Turkish, etc., etc., problem.
And when you pick a side, as today the United States has done quite kinetically, you run into problems with the other side.
This is an insurgency.
It always has been an insurgency.
And you do not end insurgencies by driving the people closer to the insurgents.
The idea would be that once the Sunnis see this as a fight against the Americans, which is what it is evolving to as of these airstrikes, then the Sunni insurgents and the Sunni population bond with one another in a way that will prevent any kind of long-term solution.
In addition, the last time the United States went to war against the Sunnis during our 2003 invasion, when the Sunnis got desperate, they reached out for help wherever they could find it, and that was al-Qaeda.
And so the United States' airstrikes will very likely result in an even stronger al-Qaeda position in Iraq.
So the first thing you do is stop digging the hole deeper.
Second, the United States now has some measure of, I don't want to say control, but authority over the Shia government.
They're desperate.
They need help badly.
And so it's time now to demand that the Shia government stop persecuting and alienating the Sunni populations, which is the root of all of this.
It's time.
Step number three is for the United States to demand, quite publicly and embarrassingly, that the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and the others stop funding ISIS and the other Sunni insurgent groups.
We simply have to get that out on the table and start choking back their support if we want a long-term solution in Iraq.
The same thing goes on with the Shia, back to the Shia government.
The United States must demand that the Iraqi central government launch airstrikes, however effective or ineffective they might be, in support of the Kurds.
It is not lost on the Kurds that their alleged own government, and we understand the Kurds and the Shias are not particularly considering themselves part of the same country anymore, but the idea would be it would send a very powerful message if the central government were to support the Kurds, and it sends a very clear message when they don't.
The last thing is the whole idea of this humanitarian aid.
Humanitarian aid is a good thing, but by the United States delivering it unilaterally, it once again sets up these dynamics, Sunni-Shia dynamics.
It also exposes American military to risks.
The United States should supply the humanitarian aid through the United Nations, through the Red Crescent, and clearly separate the good things that we do from the bad things that we do.
During the Vietnam War, this was referred to as fuck them and feed them.
During the day, during the night, we drop bombs.
During the day, we drop food.
And eventually it didn't work out at all.
It's time for a long-term solution, and for the people who say we should do something, well, I just threw out five talking points.
Let's hear a response from the other side.
Sounds good.
I got a few follow-ups on the other side of this break.
We'll have to settle for that for now.
We met, well, about his time working for the U.S. State Department in Iraq.
He's got a blog by that same name and writes for TomDispatch.com, and we'll be right back after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm sorry, they're bombing Iraq.
I couldn't stop them.
I didn't know how to stop them.
Talking about it with Peter Van Buren, formerly of the U.S. State Department for 24 years.
He wrote We Meant Well about the Iraq War and his time there for the U.S. State Department.
He's also the author of Ghosts of Tom Jode, a story of the 99%, I believe, published by Tom Editor, Tom Dispatch over there, as well as We Meant Well, and WeMeantWell.com is his great blog.
All right, so, Peter, a few things there to go back over here.
First of all, I want to talk about the, hey, Maliki, it's time for you to stop being so lousy at being prime minister point there.
There's a lot of talk, I don't know how true it all is, but there's a lot of talk about a lot of ayatollahs around the world saying that Sistani's right, pal, that you need to step aside and let somebody better come in and what have you.
Only here's my thing about that, and I know that you know all about this subject like the back of your hand, is that the benchmarks from the surge of 2007 were supposed to be met by September or August even, and they were supposed to be that by creating a security situation of stability, at least in the capital city, for the first time the entire war long, that they would provide the political environment for the Sunnis and the Shia to finally shake hands, for Maliki to adopt Petraeus' same bribe the Sunnis to not shoot you policy of the awakening, and that then we could leave and everything would be more or less okay.
The Shia would have their majority, but they wouldn't be lording it over the Sunnis so bad that they would end up going back to war, and yet they never met those benchmarks in the first place, never met them in the first place, and I know that times were you know better than they are now between the Sunni and the Shia over the last couple years, it's gotten really really bad, the political factions I mean, but it sort of sounds like if you had the very best Iraqi that you could possibly have in there, the most talented bureaucrat of all bureaucrats on the planet to come in and try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, there are no Sunni tribes now who are powerful enough to take on ISIS and defeat them.
The best that they could hope for would be what?
Bring in the Iranians or something?
But anyway, I'm sorry, that was a separate question, I'll stick to the domestic thing.
How in the hell is anyone supposed to get the Sunnis in general, never mind ISIS, but the Sunnis who are tolerating ISIS now, to come back toward Baghdad at halfway through 2014?
Well, you've very succinctly explained why there's probably no good solution here, and chaos will continue in Iraq for some time.
But the points that I threw out before the break are really more to kind of make clear the actual issues here and the problems, that this goes far beyond the black and white meme that the American media is promoting, that these are the bad ISIS devils versus the loyal Kurds and the devout Christians.
I mean, it's nowhere close to that.
That said, if you want to talk about what is needed to start resolving this, then you've got to talk about these issues.
Maliki, of course, is a symptom, he's not the cause.
If Maliki were to disappear today, and Lord knows that guy is worried about the bullet in the back of the head, I'm certain whether the United States fires the gun or somebody else.
If Maliki were to disappear today, other than some pretty words, it's doubtful anything would change.
The difference between 2003, 2006, 2007, with the surge in 2011, when the United States left Iraq for the most recent time, the difference is that the Shias are desperate now.
They've never been this frightened of it all collapsing around them, and they've never needed a rescuer this badly.
Up until this time, they've had it pretty good.
They've been able to basically do what they wanted to the Sunnis and the Kurds in the United States, vaguely supported them, but mostly just stayed out of the way and let them do whatever they wanted.
They're desperate now, and when people are desperate, they're going to have to figure out ways to make deals.
The mistake America is, well, one of the mistakes America is making is not exploiting that, is not pushing on it.
We threw in the airstrikes, and we don't seem to have asked for anything in return.
This is not how diplomacy is done.
It's not even how buying a used car is done.
The United States should have held back anything it's going to do, other than perhaps some immediate short-term humanitarian aid, and said to the Shia government, if you want us to pull your privates out of the fire this time, here's what you need to give us.
And at that point, if those deals were made and the Shias were right now going on every media outlet, explaining what they're going to be doing and how they're going to be helping, you might even get me to say limited airstrikes are not the worst idea on earth.
But simply saying, here's everything, and we want nothing in return, but please be nice, well, I think we can guess where that's going to end, Scott.
Yeah, well, and as far as intervening at all here, isn't that just the number one sure-fire way to turn these guys against the United States?
I mean, nothing including sending the entire Marine Corps over there is going to eliminate them.
We already have the entire Marine Corps over there, and it didn't eliminate them.
And so airstrikes are going to do nothing except paint a target on my family's head here.
Exactly.
Look, the way to fight an insurgency, counterinsurgency theory 101, it is very clear.
It says that you've got to separate the insurgents from the people who support them.
Even Mao, way back when he defeated the people running China, he said the people are the water that the fish swims in.
If the Americans, an outsider, an infidel, a crusader, bombs Sunni targets, then that will do nothing but drive the Sunni population of Iraq closer to ISIS and potentially bring al-Qaeda into the fight in a much bigger and more profound way.
Very simple.
You have got to find a way to get on, to separate the Sunni people from the insurgents.
And one of the ways not to do that is to get involved militarily again.
And I'm just pretending, but I'm putting myself in Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's shoes, and I'm saying priority one is to attack the United States and get them involved in this thing.
And he must be laughing his ass off that Barack Obama has already sent the F-18s without even an attack against the United States as a pretext this time.
Oh, just a little humanitarian rescue mission, huh?
Send in the A-team and blam, there you go.
America is already up to our eyeballs in the Iraq war again.
Great.
They must be laughing their asses off at us right now.
Zawahiri too.
Precisely.
Bin Laden was quoted after 9-11 as saying he never could have imagined how successful one terror act was in terms of crippling the United States.
And now we've handed that to ISIS and whoever else is there, and we use the term ISIS loosely here.
It's a collection of people and organizations.
Hey, let me give you one more segment here, Peter.
Would that be all right?
I can only stay a couple of minutes, Scott.
I'm so sorry.
Well, I'll let you go.
I'll let you go.
Thanks so much, though, for the great interview.
I appreciate it.
My apologies, and there's going to be an upper Iraq crisis, so we can come back next week.
Okay, great.
That's Peter Van Buren, everybody.
WeMentWell.com.
Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, X-Key Score, Boundless Informant.
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