08/12/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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Mitchell Prothero is next on the show, reporting for McClatchy Newspapers out of Kurdistan, and has a brand new piece just hit the wire three minutes ago, according to Google News.
Maliki signals he will step aside peacefully, easing tensions in Baghdad.
You don't say.
Welcome back to the show, Mitchell.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Do tell about Maliki, please.
Well, I got to credit my colleague.
You know, we wrote a bureau here, and Adam Ashton is a reporter for McClatchy as well.
He's based down in Baghdad.
We worked on this together today.
He gets the credit because Baghdad's hotter than Erbil, which I didn't think would be possible.
But what we actually found is that, you know, basically Maliki was forced out.
He was going to stay in.
He was probably willing to resort to violence to do so.
But unlike a lot of these Middle Eastern dictators, and unlike, you know, let's say Saddam Hussein, he had what we'd call a political tribe behind him.
He had the Dawa Party, and he had control over the armed forces.
But a lot of the armed forces also were beholden to Iran because of training and weaponry and basically just concerns over the situation with ISIS.
So as he kind of tried to gather steam to maybe do a self-coup, I don't know what it is when the president decides not to leave, or the prime minister decides not to leave, his support just quickly evaporated.
I wouldn't exactly call it a rule of law situation.
It was just that essentially the people that would have had to go with him had decided that he was no longer competent and decided to play by the rules of the game as set by the Iraqi constitution, which, you know, for a couple days there was pretty tense.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really something.
And so now the guy that's up to replace him, is it already settled?
They haven't had the vote yet on the next guy, have they?
Well, no, what they do is this is a parliamentarian system.
And so what you end up doing is you get tasked to form a government is basically what we're looking at right here.
And so al-Abidi, his name's Haider Jawad al-Abidi, has been asked by the president of Iraq, which is a fairly ceremonial position in these cases.
But one of the things the president does do is once there's been an election and the party that has the most votes, he basically takes their representative and says, okay, you're going to be the prime minister.
Now form a government, build a coalition, name people to a cabinet.
You've got one month to do that.
Maliki had tried to claim that because they hadn't already done that in the month since the election, all of it was invalid.
And because of national security interests, he should remain.
But basically it's been overruled, although there is some sense that Maliki might try to go to the courts.
At this point, people are pretty much dismissing him.
So we've got a new guy.
Haider al-Abidi is tasked with seeing if he can bring this incredibly fractious Iraqi parliament together around the idea of, hey, let's not all die at the hands of the Islamic State and put together a functioning government to try to get this thing back on track.
And now this new guy, he's Dawah Party too, right?
Of course.
Dawah did win the election.
Again, this is how for listeners in the United States, they'll be less familiar with how this goes.
But in a parliamentary system like this, usually the head of the party becomes prime minister, the party that won the most seats in parliament.
And so Dawah did win the most seats.
It's just that they basically had lost confidence in their prime minister, the guy, and decided to put up a different person, which was well within their rights, despite the protests by Prime Minister Maliki, who does remain in office as what they call a caretaker prime minister until the government is able to be formed, if one is able to be formed.
That will be no easy task.
Abidi and, you know, the president and a bunch of these guys, they've got a lot of hard choices to make.
They're going to have to come up with a coalition that's bigger than just the Dawah Party and, you know, assign cabinet posts and sort of divvy up that big pile of oil money among different groups of people.
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess it's a fair bet, though, that America is putting pressure on the Kurds to go ahead and go along with this new guy for now, at least.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, and the Sunnis boycotted the election this year, unlike 2010, when they did pretty good but lost anyway.
Right.
Right.
Well, the Sunnis are always going to lose their 20 percent.
You know, they keep saying they're 60, but I mean, yes, they're delusional on this front.
You know, I guess they just ran Iraq for so long they thought they could change math.
But yeah, the Kurds, look, at this stage, I don't even know that necessarily.
I know that there's a strong sense that Kurdistan would like to be as independent as possible.
The president of Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, is an extremely shrewd operator, and I'm not positive that he wants total independence for Kurdistan at this point.
What he wants is to be able to run his own shop how he sees fit.
He's got about 90 percent of that, and the Americans have pressured him somewhat to not go completely off the rails.
But, you know, and the way that they can do that is by not supporting him buying weapons, essentially, on the black market, which is what he would have to legally do, according to international law, instead of buying them through Baghdad, and by selling oil on his own.
What everybody, and I'm pretty sure even President Barzani, at least at this stage, would like to see is a competent government come together in Baghdad, start paying the Kurds the money that they're supposed to be getting each month, which is about 17 percent of the Iraqi revenue.
Maliki's been withholding that from them for the entire year, which is one of the reasons why they've been trying to sell oil on the black market.
I think it's up to six or seven billion dollars right now that they're owed, and somebody who could come up with that money for them that they've been, you know, operating under good faith, allow them to continue to keep their autonomy, and maybe kick the can that's known as the oil-rich city of Kirkuk down the road a little bit for a final status agreement, while accepting that, you know, the Iraqi government is not in any position right now to secure it.
The Kurds control Kirkuk.
There are no Iraqi units to push up to connect to it.
There's only the Islamic State between the two.
So, for all practical purposes, Kirkuk will be in the hands of the Kurds for now, but they can worry about that legal status designation, you know, after they've solved the part where a third of the country's in the hands of the Islamic caliphate.
Yeah, well, and I guess I need to pull up a map.
I don't have one right in front of me here, but isn't Kirkuk even, you know, right on the border of the frontier with the Islamic State at this point?
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, no, it's absolutely.
It's basically the last thing controlled by the government, in a sense, if you consider the Kurds part of Iraq still, which they are on paper.
It's pretty much the last thing in government hands before you get down to Diyala province on the outskirts of Baghdad.
So, yeah, that is one of the Kurdish front lines.
The northern lines have been what's been in the news for the last 10 days or so.
It's been very hot up here.
I have a question about that, too.
Just a point of confusion, you could help straighten me out.
I looked at the map and it seems like Mount Sinjar, where these Yezidis were holed up there, is on the far side of Mosul from Erbil, controlled by the Kurds.
And I was just wondering how the hell the Kurds are able to secure any kind of transit zone for those Yezidis to get out of there.
Well, that's been a humanitarian disaster of possibly biblical proportions.
What had happened was Kurds had held a border crossing and Sinjar when most of the western desert fell.
You can think of it more as an arc going over the top of that mountain above Sinjar that everybody can see the refugees coming out of.
And that area is controlled by the Kurds to the south of that mountain is now controlled by the Islamic State.
But there's a lot of fighting coming from the Syrian side towards Sinjar to try to retake it.
But you can't drive in a straight line between Sinjar and Erbil or else you'll run into the Islamic State.
I got you.
Yeah.
Wow.
What a crisis.
So can you give us an update then on especially the American part of the war there in Kurdistan or on its borders?
Sure.
It's been very, very restrained.
President Obama's made it clear to all parties that he is not going to be the Iraqi Air Force.
And I think he's been pretty legit on that point.
He also made it clear that he just you know, and I wrote this last week, it was one part humane, one part real politic and two parts logistics that they simply couldn't allow Erbil to fall if it was if it was going to to the Islamic State for just a host of reasons.
Economic interests, large expatriate community, you know, evacuating an embassy.
One guy told me a landlocked embassy, like a consulate section and a pretty large military CIA installation would have to be evacuated.
And, you know, you're so far from the coast, you basically have to truck everybody out through Turkey, which would be incredibly dangerous.
And it just you know, on five or six different levels, it just wasn't going to be acceptable for Erbil to get overrun.
So they authorized airstrikes.
There's been a handful a day.
This is not an extensive bombing campaign.
It's actually, you know, the term precision bombing gets tossed around a lot when people don't mean it.
But from what we can tell, it's extremely precision.
CENTCOM even tells us exactly what they hit.
Like they see three guys setting up a mortar that had previously been fired at Kurdish positions and a drone zaps it, waits 15 minutes for the guys to come back to see the damage and then zaps them again.
That type of thing.
They're being very specific about the targets they're hitting.
One release yesterday explained that an armored personnel carrier was shooting at Yezidis as they were trying to flee the mountains.
So an F-18 came by and blew it up.
It's not like a shock and awe type situation.
They're doing just enough to keep the Pesh in charge of the controls of the border of Kurdistan and waiting for the Iraqis to get their act together as a full government before they make any more decisions on, you know, further military support.
All right.
Well, so what about if the Islamic State marches on Kirkuk?
Is America going to protect Kirkuk?
I would expect that at this stage it's going to be very hard for the Islamic State to march on anybody in the north.
And I think they're smart enough to know that they can't.
It's kind of all the same battle zone when you're from an F-18.
And there have been a couple of strikes down there, although not fully down in Kirkuk.
There hasn't been much fighting.
I do believe, and this is strictly my own opinion and intuition or gut or call it whatever, that the Islamic State would be much more interested in Kirkuk than they would be Erbil.
From what we can tell so far, with the exception of a handful of Christian villages, they have no interest in trying to take over areas that they can't hold, meaning they want large, somewhat sympathetic or easily cowed Sunni populations.
They don't want a hold of, you know, one and a half million Kurds who will all literally run out into the street with AKs and butcher knives, if that's what it takes, to fight them off.
I mean, it would be a massacre.
I think on Thursday there was some danger of the Islamic State hitting the city, but trying to control one and a half million Kurds who really don't want you there would have been incredibly difficult for the Islamic State.
And if I figured that out, they probably know it as well.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, we've talked about for all these weeks that, well, they could, you know, go headlong into Baghdad and get themselves all killed trying, but they're not stupid.
They haven't done that.
There's, you know, it seems right to me that what they want to do is expand as far out as makes sense to and then consolidate that.
That's what we've seen.
That's what they've more or less done.
When they were pushing on Erbil, there was a couple of reasons why.
And this is last week and I'll tell you, it really came down to a 12 hour decision or less.
They were 20, 30 minutes outside of the city.
And on Thursday, I went up and saw the front lines and it was my professional and personal opinion that the Kurds could not hold without airstrikes.
And at that stage, I had to start reviewing plans, figuring the airport was going to be down.
Did we, did I try for Turkey, try for maybe the city of Sulaymaniyah, which is further up in the mountains and easier to defend.
And in this case, the Americans at that point did start airstrikes and the Islamic State decided not to come in.
It would be very hard for them to mount an offensive because it's just a big flat open desert plain.
And, you know, drones and F-18s wouldn't even have to work very hard to decimate an attack from them.
But what we've seen now is they're bunkering down along a front line.
So I would expect that it will be very hard for even limited, even more than limited air power to dislodge them alone.
Again, as everybody's always said, this is going to require a long drawn out and patient political solution where over time, the Sunni tribes of Iraq are going to be brought back into the fold by the government, convinced that it's okay and that they won't be mistreated like they were under Maliki, and then get them, equip them to turn on the Islamic State and drive out these guys that, you know, have basically tried to form their own caliphate.
That's the only strategy that doesn't come off insane.
Whether or not it's a practical one, I don't know.
But I do know the other ones are not practical.
So, you know, this right now what we're seeing is a lot of front lines developing where I think it's going to be pretty static unless the Islamic State does do something like try to take Kirkuk.
I would not rule out a spectacular attack on Baghdad, if only just to show the Iraqi people that their government is finished and cannot protect them.
But I don't think they would try to hold it.
And, you know, we always forget we've been obsessed with Iraq now for the last couple of weeks.
Syria is still going on, and the Islamic State considers that just as important and as much a part of their country that they've tried to form their caliphate as Iraq.
So you could also see a broad offensive push into other areas of Syria.
I think in the last month, Syria's Syrian army has lost more soldiers than they lost in any other previous month of the three years civil war.
Really?
Yeah, I think it was this month.
I've got to be careful on that.
But I do know there was about a two week period where they lost nearly twelve hundred men in fighting against the Islamic State, including having their heads put up on pikes.
All kinds of stuff.
Yeah.
You really do not want to be a Syrian soldier and captured by the Islamic State.
All right.
Now, let me get back to Syria or Western Caliphate in a sec.
But I wanted to ask you about what difference it makes.
This political solution that you're talking about, to me, sounds just as crazy as anything that anybody else is saying about what to do here.
I mean, we're talking about it's seven years since the surge was supposed to accomplish what you just said.
And it did accomplish the part about getting the Sunni tribes to turn on Al Qaeda.
But it didn't accomplish the part about the political reconciliation necessary enough to put Humpty Dumpty back together again here.
And now it's seven years later.
And as you've reported, Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS, as it's now called, is however many times as powerful as it was back then.
And so, you know, you might as well be saying, let the Belgians sort it out.
This whole thing is just I mean, who's going to do what here?
Well, that's the whole thing is, you know, first off, to be fair, you know, America didn't blow it with the with the post with the Sunni reconciliation.
They you know, they left like President Obama basically got elected to do.
He was elected to get America out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
He got America out of Afghanistan, out of Iraq.
And, you know, as they were on their way out, they warned.
I've had so many guys tell me this, even on the Kurdish side, they were screaming about it to, you know, warning Maliki as the Americans left.
Do not below this.
Yeah.
But what I'm saying is I'm not talking about Obama.
I'm talking about Petraeus and Bush in 2007.
They never met the benchmarks in the first place.
They never met the benchmark.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
But meaning that the failure, you know, that was a failure of 2007.
But it bought them enough breathing room for Obama to pull them out.
Right.
What I'm talking about is when you when you look at the strategy of co-opting the Sunni tribes, they were properly co-opted.
They did go along with it.
And then after we left, Maliki engaged on a three year campaign to infuriate them in every possible way he could, which has led to this.
Right.
But now.
So how likely is it that they could that that the very best technocrat in charge of Baghdad could recreate that situation in a successful way, only do it better than Maliki did in 07 and really integrate the Sunnis back in and become friends again?
I mean, come on, it seems thin, man.
I got to tell you.
But the every other option I see looks even worse.
What about doing nothing?
What about just waiting until the Sunnis of the caliphate decide that they don't like these guys and don't want to live in their police state anymore?
After all, there's not that much oil wealth and stuff.
It's not like they're taking over Germany here.
They're taking over the desert.
Well, yeah, no, I guess, you know, that's actually this is the flip side of the same thing.
And frankly, that's what I would describe the American strategy as right now, is at some point, everybody's going to have a turnaround on this.
They're going to get sick of it.
And then you support them.
But I mean, I don't think anybody's talking about suddenly dropping in 5000 American advisers, although I could be wrong.
I mean, wars do have a tendency to, you know, creep along and escalate.
So we've certainly seen that historically in the past.
But the strategy and everything that I hear when I talk to U.S. officials, you know, for the first time in 12 years as a war correspondent covering America's wars, I have these realistic conversations with American diplomats and military officials, where for the first time, they actually seem to know the limits of their power and seem to have a realistic assessment of what's going on on the ground.
And what they say is like, I mean, I've had guys tell me flat out the reason why we're not helping the Iraqi army anymore is because it wouldn't matter.
They would still lose.
So why should we throw bad money after good?
Right now, when they want to get their act together, there are things that we can do to help them.
But they are going to have to be the ones to solve this, you know, and, you know, simply put, we're not going to want to leave bomb all over Iraq, trying to kill guys in pickup trucks, because Maliki's, you know, an incompetent leader.
And so, you know, but you're right, when you look at the choices, again, I mean, I think I've said this on the show, you know, Obama standing in front of a buffet of extremely unappetizing entrees, he's going to end up having to pick one of them, and they all suck.
So, you know, what we've seen from them is a maximum amount of restraint in the sense that they're going to do the very narrowest thing they can.
It's very realistic and very smart to not let Erbil fall.
I mean, people talked about the oil.
And yes, that's totally legitimate.
America has an economic interest in the Kurdish region.
But they also have an emotional interest.
And these are the only guys who got their act together while America was spending a trillion dollars and 4000 lives.
These are the only people who actually ran with that opportunity.
And they deserve some support for that.
Then you throw in the practical, which is, if you're going to end up having to deal with, you know, these guys out here in the desert, this is a perfectly good strategic place with allies who like you.
You don't really just let allies fall like that, because you don't feel like getting involved.
So on multiple levels, and then you throw in the part where it would have been a complete nightmare to evacuate the embassy, you know, it turned into a no brainer.
But that's certainly different than B-52s doing like arc light giant strikes across central Iraq, trying to kill off all these guys and support a massive Iraqi, you know, offensive to retake the creed in Kirkuk.
You know, these places are push up to Kirkuk.
You know, we're just not seeing that.
And I'm telling you, when I talk to U.S. officials, none of them see that on the table right now.
They just say there's a few things we can do to help these guys, and we'll do it when they get their act together.
Yeah.
Well, it seems like in some of Obama's statements, he is basically waiting for Maliki's replacement, at least to see how much he do.
But, you know, last week they said, well, we're going to protect the Yazidis on the mountain on Thursday.
And then on Friday, they said, yes, we're also drawing a red line around Baghdad.
And then on Saturday, they said we will not let there be a safe haven for terrorists in Iraq.
So you could drive the Vietnam War through a Gulf of Tonkin loophole like that, if that's what they want to call it.
Yeah, no, I mean, look, the precedent there.
But look, at this stage, you've got an Islamic caliphate that's openly hostile to the United States, whose predecessors have killed thousands of Americans and would love to kill thousands more.
So in terms of an excuse to get militarily involved, you don't really need one at this stage.
These people are America's enemies, and they do plan on killing Americans at some point.
It's just realistically how you go about that without doing it the most effectively.
And, you know, this is the question.
And so I'm not defending anybody's policies, but I do not see airstrikes on the outskirts of Baghdad.
I think when they say Baghdad's a red line, I think they mean the Baghdad airport's a red line, so they can evacuate the embassy.
You know, in terms of the Yezidis, yes, they've done a very small number of strikes to make it easier for the Yezidis to get out of there.
And they've dropped some food and supplies to varying degrees of success.
Yeah.
One of the problems they've had is, you know what, though, Mitchell, what about all of us in flyover country who don't want to be the target of more terrorist attacks by these guys?
And we're looking at the Post and it says in there that they on one hand, the Islamic State is celebrating American intervention because it means that they're the ones opposing the Americans, which is the best PR that they could hope for for their purposes, and at the same time vowing revenge upon American citizens for what our government is doing.
Well, I know these guys already.
I mean, and the simple fact is they've been fighting you already.
They just changed their name and expanded the franchise.
So I don't think that you're going to find it any more antagonistic.
It's not like suddenly Americans became fair game to the Islamic State.
Well, I mean, yeah, but wasn't there a near enemy, far enemy debate here going on between those who are pro caliphate and those who would rather fight Americans?
And we're turning the pro caliphate ones into internationalists, into the Zawahiri again.
I think they're going in the direction.
I don't think they I don't think they care much what we do, except I think they would like some American soldiers to shoot at.
Look, these guys are really smart.
They're they're they're on their own program.
And, you know, we're not going to get them to change up simply.
They're not going to suddenly become more hostile to the United States.
They're not going to decide that because now it's justified to plan a suicide bombing in New York because, you know, Obama saved Erbil.
You know, it's just it's just it doesn't seem realistic.
These guys are on their own agenda.
They definitely believe that they need to clash with the West in order to pursue, you know, basically a clash of civilizations.
And they want to blow the horn so that all Muslims around the world flock to them.
There has been some flocking, but not in the millions you're talking about in the dozens or the hundreds, you know, and at this stage they should be treated like what they are, which is an extremely uncomfortable regional presence in a strategic part of the world.
But it's also one that's becoming less and less strategic to the American government over time.
If you've noticed, we're a lot less interested in intervening in the Middle East than we have been in the last 30 or 40 years.
You know, you can do a whole show on fracking and the problems with it, but one of the upsides to fracking is we care a lot less about what the Saudis think.
Yeah, I was just mentioning that there's already an ISIS veteran who's gone and done a terrorist attack in Brussels and killed, I forget if it was three or four people, died in an attack on a Jewish museum.
So I agree with you that they're already coming this way anyway.
It wasn't the Islamic State.
That was a guy who had experience fighting what we call a lone wolf attack.
And those are going to happen all over Europe, and they have been happening all over Europe, you know, off and on for the last 10 years.
These individual psychopaths are just now doing it in the name of the Islamic State.
This stuff isn't going to go away.
I mean, this is a long-term chronic thing that, you know, the next generation is going to have to deal with certain forms of Islamic radicalism.
There are certainly things that you can do to offset that and not make it worse, but I don't think defending Erbil was one of them.
Now, sending in 150,000 American troops to fight the Islamic State, that would probably do something to polarize people.
But right now, I've yet to run across even Muslims who can't stand America for the most part, you know, people who are incredibly anti-Israel.
The only thing they're complaining about right now is, why didn't you do more sooner?
These psychopaths are coming for us now, too.
You know, I mean, these guys are really polarizing in the Muslim world.
It's just, they turn out to be extremely effective at combat inside failed states.
Yeah.
Yeah, gee, if only Saddam with his clean-shaven chin was here, you know?
Well, you know, that's just a running joke among the press corps that covered the first invasion is, what would you give to see, you know, to hear from Saddam right now?
Like, I mean, what would you give to be able to call Saddam Hussein and ask him what to do about this?
He's the guy that had the all-points bulletin out for Zarqawi.
He was a guy who understood how the levers of power in Iraq worked.
I mean, he was completely evil and completely incompetent in dealing with the outside world.
But in terms of his ability to understand the Iraqis, he clearly was very good at it and used extremely ruthless and brutal methods.
But again, he also made sure people got paid.
Maliki really didn't know how to use the carrot and the stick.
He just basically kept the carrot and beat the Sunnis with the stick until they'd had enough.
And it's literally, you know, it could literally destabilize the entire region.
If people are not careful, I can easily see Saudi Arabia falling.
I can easily see Jordan, you know, falling into a situation in which the Israelis feel like they're forced to intervene and talk about polarizing in the Muslim world at that stage.
I mean, I can't see these guys getting up through Turkey.
I think that the Kurds can be bolstered and held.
But talking about running the table on the rest of the Sunni Arab world, I don't think it's likely this year, but I can't scratch it off the chalkboard as things I'm worried about right now.
Because, you know, I didn't think we'd be here six months ago.
And here we are.
I'm in Erbil.
I called it a year ago.
FFF.org.
Thanks very much, Mitchell.
I've already kept you over time.
Appreciate it.
No problem.
It's always a pleasure, Scott.
Take it easy.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Mitchell Prothero.
He's reporting out of Erbil, Kurdistan for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
The latest is Maliki signals he'll step aside peacefully, easing tensions in Baghdad.
We'll be right back.
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