08/11/14 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Our first, no, our second guest, our next guest up is the great Doug Bandow.
He's at the Cato Institute, and he writes regularly for Forbes Magazine.
That's at forbes.com.
And this one is great.
U.S. should stay out of Iraq and leave the fight to others.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show.
How are you doing, Doug?
Doing okay.
How about yourself?
I'm doing real good.
And especially now, I'm very happy to have you on the show here to state this case, because not only are you really libertarian on the issue, you actually know what you're talking about when it comes to who's who and what's what and when in the Iraq war.
And so that's always very important when it comes to addressing these things and really making a bulletproof case like you do.
So, well, how about it?
Don't we have to go save the Yazidis or something?
Well, this is the fourth president in a row who's come up with a reason to go to war there.
None of the others have ended up well.
There's no reason to believe this one will.
I mean, the Yazidis already are getting away.
So if that was the answer, you know, then presumably we solved the problem.
Instead, the president has said, basically, he's got to protect anywhere in Iraq where there are American personnel, which means anywhere, you know, which sounds to me like it's a real war as opposed to anything he's suggested so far.
Right.
And, you know, this is the thing, actually.
And I said this for a week or something on the show, and then I just forgot it as my best talking point, which was he three or four weeks ago or five weeks ago.
Right.
Not long after the fall of Mosul at all.
He went out and gave a talk on the White House lawn in front of the helicopter there before going to a fundraising trip or something.
And one of the things that he ticked off on his fingers was we will not let there be a safe haven for terrorists in Iraq, which means as long as there's an angry Sunni with a rifle, as long as there's a Sunni insurgency of any kind, then that counts as terrorism.
And he's got a blank check to bomb him.
He's been saying that all along here.
Yeah.
The irony is that he's calling them terrorists.
I mean, these are nasty folks.
I certainly don't like them, but they're acting like a government, frankly, not a terrorist group.
They want to control territory.
That means there's a return address and they haven't been attacking us because they know there's no way they can survive if the U.S. would come after them.
So what he's trying to do, actually, is turn them into a terrorist group, because what he will do is make us their enemies, in which case they've got to strike at us.
I mean, it's completely counterproductive policy.
Right.
And, you know, this is the thing, too, and predictable, predicted by you and me and everybody else who cared to, that this is going to guarantee that ISIS keeps their target on us.
And the first day, even the Washington Post and papers like that on the very first day of the bombings were reporting jihadists all across the Middle East and, you know, known ISIS supporters, one, celebrating American entry into the war, which makes them fighters against the Americans, which is about the best thing that they could be for their own PR needs.
And two, swearing revenge against American civilians for what our government is doing in our name.
That's right.
Talk about officials who admit it.
They didn't actually know if doing this would increase or decrease the number of volunteers to ISIS.
And now that's pretty stupid.
I mean, if you're going to do this, you should at least have an idea of what's going to do.
Is it going to make your problem worse?
And they just kind of like, well, whatever, I guess we'll find out.
You know, and yes, we will find out.
And the answer is probably not going to be a good one.
Well, I mean, you look back at what we already know from when we went through this before.
It was that the way that David Petraeus neutralized the Sunni insurgency was he defeated George Bush and he told him, Mr. President, you're not going to have that victory over the Sunni insurgency you've been bragging about all these years.
What we're going to do instead is we're going to bribe them to stop shooting at us and to turn on the what was then al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Same thing.
Only that was seven years ago now, Doug.
And they never did achieve those surge benchmarks about incorporating the Sunni tribes into the government really at all or onto the oil dividend payroll or any of that stuff.
And now the Islamic State, al-Qaeda in Iraq is 10 times as powerful as it ever was.
That's right.
I mean, what they were trying to do then is going to be much harder to do now, especially if we go in bombing and start killing Sunnis.
I mean, that's the real danger is that the moment you start getting closer to the Sunni heartland and bombing, you're going to be killing people who actually once worked with the U.S.
I mean, that's the way to really make enemies.
You know, we're jumping into a sectarian war here.
This is certainly not in our interest.
The only interest is in terrorist interest, not in our interest.
Yeah, I saw it the same time, like in the same quarter hour that Obama announced on last Friday that, oh, yeah, when we say there's a red line around Erbil, we also mean there's a red line around Baghdad, too.
At the very same time, Muqtada al-Sadr put out a statement saying that he and his forces are ready to draw a red line around Baghdad and protect it.
And, you know, here we go.
You know, America and Muqtada al-Sadr and the Bata Brigade back together again, you know.
Yeah, that's right.
Talk about strange bedfellows.
And I mean, what's extraordinary, not only did the president say Baghdad, but he also in a statement said anywhere in Iraq where there are U.S. personnel.
I mean, this really is an excuse to go anywhere.
And he's talking, it appears to be months worth of, you know, limited strikes.
Well, this is really crazy.
I mean, you're going to do this for months and then you might do something else.
I mean, you just you can't conduct a war that way.
Well, you know, the sixth grader, I mean, watching cable news can really, you know, get with the idea of wouldn't it be fun to fly an F-16 and drop bombs on these convoys of ISIS suicide bomber prisoner crucifiers when they're in their Toyotas out in the flat open desert.
But those are just images.
And that's just nothing.
Even if you wasted all those guys, they're just the privates.
They're completely replaceable.
And by wasting them, you replace them and double their numbers, right?
No, that's right.
These guys are not nice folks.
I don't you know, I don't have a lot of worries here.
If you kill some of them, are you killing bad people?
The answer is pretty clearly, yes.
I mean, the stuff they've done is pretty hideous.
But the point is, they're recruits.
And what we are what recruits them is the image of fighting some evil out there.
Now they've been fighting, you know, kind of the evil Shia or, you know, the evil Kurds or something.
You know, Obama's going to have them fighting the evil Americans.
And we've already gone through this with Al Qaeda.
We don't need to have yet another transnational group out to get us.
You know, and if we're ramping up, you know, and at the same time, of course, we're fighting on the other side in Syria.
I mean, this is a policy that makes absolutely no sense.
Got that right.
Well, well, I'm not sure.
There's so many different things to cover here, Doug.
Let's stick with that for a minute.
Hillary Clinton and every idiot on Twitter says, well, if only we had backed the moderates more, then everything would be fine.
They never have to explain it.
But, you know, I don't know.
So I should be self-critical here.
Is it is there a policy there that Obama could have embraced where he could have built up a third force in Syria to overthrow Assad and to destroy ISIS before they ever sacked Mosul?
Well, my reaction is you'll look at U.S. government policy and ask yourself, could the folks in charge have gotten just the right weapons to the right people at the right time to come up with the right result?
I mean, it's a fantasy.
I mean, the U.S. has been at this for decades.
Basically, the entire policy in the Middle East and almost every country is in wreckage.
I mean, Egypt's supposed to be our great ally.
We're supposed to be making peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
The Saudis are a great ally.
You know, Iraq's going to be this great.
I mean, all this stuff is a wreck.
The idea that, oh, we could have manipulated Syria just a little bit differently and what democracy would have emerged, kind of like Afghanistan, you know, where we've been in complete charge.
And look at how that democracy is working.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny that, you know, Obama and I don't know if he was preempting Hillary or if this was a reaction to what she had said or just a coincidence, because that narrative is really out there a lot.
But he told Thomas Friedman, come on, this is a fantasy that we could ever built up an army of regular Joe's in Syria who would have been able to defeat a state army that's backed by Hezbollah and Iran and Russia.
And then he didn't say, oh, and also defeat ISIS at the same time, too.
But he even used the word fantasy.
And yet that's been his policy.
He and the CIA and the Saudis and the Qataris and the Turks have been working to back the rebels there and send money and guns there all along.
And he must have known because it was even in The New York Times, Doug, David Sanger, that, oh, all the guns and money end up in the hands of the jihadists no matter what, because, you know, guess what?
Moderates don't fight.
The guns goes to the guy who are going to use the guys who are going to use them.
I think the president is kind of a somewhat reluctant hawk.
That is, he has these urges.
He's managed to make all these horrible appointments of people who want to do all this kind of crap around the world.
You know, he's got an ideology that says you're supposed to do stuff, but he's not stupid.
So he kind of looks at the consequences and realizes it doesn't work out very well.
And then he gets politically antsy.
So he comes up with stuff like this with Iraq.
Now I've got to do something, but I shouldn't do too much.
I don't know if it'll work.
You know, so you come up with this weird policy that makes absolutely no sense.
It has no chance of working.
You know, it's too bad because, of course, the neocons attack him as if he, you know, is some peacenik, which he isn't.
Our Nobel Peace Prize winner here has been in more wars than George W. Bush.
So, I mean, you know, where's the peace?
We'll be right back, everybody, with Doug Van Dow in just a second.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the great Doug Van Dow from Cato and from Forbes.
Barack Obama is fourth president to put Americans at risk in Iraq.
U.S. should stay out and leave the fight to others, is the piece at Forbes.com.
And we're running it in the viewpoints today at antiwar.com as well.
You can find the link right there.
And Doug, I'd like to continue this part of the conversation about what's going on in Western Caliphate land, formerly known as Eastern Syria.
On TV here, they have this whole list of all the different rebel groups in Syria that we can pick and choose to back or whatever.
And then, you know, they have the Islamic Front right there next to the Al-Nusra Front, when the Islamic Front is just the procurement arm of the Al-Nusra Front.
And every time America gives even tow missiles to the Islamic Front, they end up in the hands of Al-Nusra in a day and a half anyway.
And it's been that way.
And, I mean, I don't know if this is, you know, has to be a question about the power of the Israel lobby in America or if there you have some other answer here.
But how in the world can they exclude the Syrian army as the most powerful anti-ISIS force in Syria and the one that George Bush used to pay to kill these guys?
Well, the problem, of course, after Hillary Clinton declared that Assad was a reformer, she suddenly decided he wasn't a reformer.
And since he wasn't a reformer, he had to go.
So once he had to go, then it didn't really matter what the other side was.
I mean, it's a policy that really makes no sense.
It has an inability to set any priorities.
That is, Assad's a nasty guy.
This would not be my friend.
However, what replaces him matters.
And what you're going to do is get yourself something worse.
You know, the question of what happens to minorities there and others, you know, if he falls.
But then we now have ISIS.
We've seen what happens if he fails, which is a really awful alternative.
And that's the problem is they're not willing to rethink that.
They've committed to getting rid of him.
They can't say they were wrong.
So you don't talk about him.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know if you've seen.
Well, there's this news article in the Jerusalem Post last October, but then just recently there was a clip from the Aspen something or other where Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to America, is explaining to Jeffrey Goldberg that, hey, out of all these bad actors, I prefer the Sunnis.
And Goldberg is going, hey, I don't know, man.
And he says, listen, no, I know that there's suicide bomber bin Laden nights, but I don't care because Hezbollah and Assad are backed by Iran.
And that makes them the he left Maliki and the Baghdad government.
America put in power there out of his list.
But that was what he meant, too.
And he said, so therefore, I don't care if it's, you know, the Al Qaeda guys.
I still like them better than Hezbollah or whatever.
And he kept saying, I'm always speaking for myself.
And then he kept saying from the Israeli government's point of view.
And so there was really no confusing who he was representing there.
That's Netanyahu's policy is they would rat.
And that was what he said last October, is the Israeli policy has always been get rid of Assad.
No, that's right.
The irony is that Assad kept the peace with Israel.
I mean, after he lost the 67 war, I mean, at some point he basically accepted the fact he wasn't going to be taking back the goal on heights by force.
And the other question is, what's the complaint?
I mean, they don't want him building nuclear weapons.
I got that.
But beyond that, how is this guy worse than any of these factions that could replace him?
I mean, I have trouble imagining why they believe, you know, Syria run by Al Nusra or ISIS would be better for Israel.
That looks to me pretty crazy.
I mean, these are all bad folks.
They're bad in very different ways.
None of them is going to be favorably inclined towards Israel.
And the U.S. can make clear distinctions.
Are they ready to attack us?
Are they going to leave us alone?
That's a pretty clear issue for the U.S. to make policy on.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and to that, you know, I think all the propaganda about how everybody the U.S. government ever wants to kill is Hitler is probably most apt in this case.
I mean, these guys are as fanatical as real life Nazis, but luckily they don't have a Germany to conquer here.
Just crappy Western Iraq with barely developed oil resources and stuff.
So they're starting from way, way back compared to even post World War One Germany.
And they're surrounded on all sides.
But I mean, I see all the propaganda is, hey, these guys kill kids.
These guys are they crucify people to death.
And so we got to stop them.
How can you say how can you be Superman and not go and save this cat from a tree in this horrible of a situation?
And I think, you know, to call Noriega or even Saddam or Milosevic or any of those guys, Hitler, that's ridiculous.
But this guy, Bin Laden incarnate here right now who massacres people all day for fun.
You know, I don't know.
I sure can't argue that part of the war parties case, Doug.
Well, the other good news is that what really set Hitler apart was the fact that he ran the most industrialized, most populous and most militarized state in the center of Europe.
So he actually could make good on all of his crazy ideas.
You know, these guys, as you said, you know, if you want to have, you know, kind of a bit of northern Iraq, a bit of western Syria, try to grab yourself some pieces of other stuff here or there where you're opposed to by Turkey, by Syria, by Lebanon, by Israel, by the Iraqi government.
You know, good luck.
I mean, it's one thing to launch a blitzkrieg and take stuff.
Not at all clear that over the longer term they can hold any of this.
And to me, that's the very different thing.
They're evil, but their evilness is they kill a few hundred people here, which is awful, but they're not killing millions.
They simply don't have that capability.
Yeah.
Well, and I wonder if you think that they just burned themselves out because it seems like the lines are already pretty solid.
Maybe they could, you know, fight for Aleppo.
They surely can't take Baghdad.
Maybe they can move a little bit further into Lebanon, but it seems like they're pretty well hemmed in by the states you just mentioned there.
I wonder whether you think they'll, you know, right now they got the power over the tribes, but would you expect that to last, assuming Ron Paul was in power and could just, you know, make them stop intervening now?
I mean, I think what's critical is that at some point I suspect the Sunnis who've worked with them will grow tired of living in the 7th century.
You know, the moment they lose support from other Sunnis, it's all over.
And that's where we have to be so careful.
We don't want to start bombing Sunnis and push them closer to ISIL.
But, you know, my question here is where are the Turks?
They have a big military.
They have an air force.
How about, you know, Jordan?
I mean, they feel threatened.
They have a nice air force.
Why aren't they dropping bombs?
I mean, they have a lot at stake.
The U.S. always rushes in as opposed to suggesting to others in the neighborhood, by the way, this is your problem.
Maybe you guys should do something.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know if you have a very good read on this or if anyone does, but it seems like compared, like we were talking about, compared to the so-called awakening movement of 07 and all that, that the relative power between al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni tribes has shifted dramatically, where they used to be a small percentage of the insurgency and never the bosses of it, really.
It seems like now, you know, there was a tribe that crossed them the other day, and so they just killed all the leaders of it and were able to.
Well, what's different now is ISIL has a battle-tested force coming out of Syria.
So they're actually, in a sense, they're small, but they're a real military.
And I mean, it matters having training.
That's one reason why the U.S. military does well.
You've got guys who are trained, they take out a lot of people who aren't trained.
So ISIL shows up, they know how to play military, and they're kind of, you know, up against guys who know how to hold guns.
It's a very uneven struggle.
But over time, it's very hard to maintain that if you're trying to do this all over.
I mean, if in the main Sunni areas of Iraq everybody hates you, you know, and you have major opposition in Syria, and then if you're kind of offending the Turks, you know, the Jordanians are worried about you, and if, you know, ever the Iraqi, you know, kind of military gets its act in gear, you know, the parliament there has just voted to have a new prime minister, but it's not clear if Aliki will give up.
So who knows what's going to happen there?
But I just have trouble seeing over the long term how ISIL can make this work.
Well, and so back to the American intervention there, I have trouble seeing a way for this to end, pretty much ever at this point, if, you know, just protecting the civilians, Libya-style R2P, whatever amounts to the cost of Spelly, to go back and intervene over there.
As long as there are jihadists of any kind in the Sunni triangle, they will be going after, you know, either Shia or Christians or Yazidis or Kurds or somebody, and when the marines and the army were there, Doug, all they did was make more and more of these guys, and eventually, as we just talked about, had to compromise with them, basically, rather than defeat them.
So, obviously, air power sure as hell isn't going to annihilate them, might drive them back underground, possibly, but it seems like even if you sent the marines, you know, all of them, you still, you could turn them back into an IED insurgency, but you could not eradicate the problem.
The only people who could eradicate it are the locals, and so then they need to be in a state of peace to not need warriors anymore.
No, that's right.
I mean, ultimately, this is a political issue, you know, within the Sunni territories and with Baghdad.
We can't solve that.
But the Americans are just going to keep escalating, right?
Because they don't have any other thing to do except keep escalating.
Well, we tried bombing them with drones.
That wasn't enough.
Call out the B-52s.
That wasn't enough.
Call out the marines.
If Obama won't do it, Hillary or Jeb will.
Now, that's the problem, is that if what you manage to do, you know, you say you want to start small and it doesn't work, then you've committed yourself, and we will hear all of the arguments about, oh, my, you know, we're committed, credibility, I mean, all those kind of things, which, of course, means the pressure will be on to do more, do more, and do more.
You know, once they're in, I don't see how they get out, because to, you know, get out without winning, whatever that is, means they failed, and they don't want to do that.
They don't want the Republicans running against them on that.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not what all this boils down to.
It's just domestic politics, too.
All right.
I've already kept you over time.
Thanks so much, Doug.
I appreciate it.
Hey, happy to be on.
Take care now.
Keep writing great stuff.
That's the great Doug Bandow, everybody.
He's at CATO and at Forbes online, holding down the anti-interventionist platform for you there.
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