08/27/14 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Jonathan S. Landay.
National Security Correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
Welcome back, Jonathan.
How are you?
I am well, thank you very much.
I'm a little bit tired.
Been grinding away on this Syria-Iraq story for a couple months now.
I need a vacation.
Well, now, in Iraq, we could say Kurdistan, Shiastan, and we got the Islamic State, but we need a new name for the rump of what's left of Syria there in the west.
Do you have one?
Assadistan?
Oh, there you go.
Assadistan.
And then bordering on caliphate land.
So, yeah, let's talk about what's going on in Syria, and especially what's going on in the White House and on the National Security Council about what they're going to do in Syria, Jonathan.
Go ahead, go.
Well, I wish I could tell you, Scott.
That's the big question.
You know, after that horrendous videotape of the execution of American freelance journalist James Foley was posted last week by the Islamic State, we got all of these belligerent statements coming out of very senior people in the administration, beginning with the Secretary of State, John Kerry, who said that the Islamic State had to be destroyed.
You had the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, saying that the Islamic State is a threat to every interest the United States has.
And you had the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, saying that the only way to destroy them, this group, would be to hit them on the Syrian side of the border, which, of course, is what they used to organize and then used as a springboard for their offensive into neighboring Iraq.
Then you had, the day after that, you had the Deputy White House National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, saying that the death of James Foley was represented by a terrorist attack on the United States, and he wasn't ruling out any kind of response.
And so you take all of that, throw it together, and given the horrific atmosphere that pertained after Mr. Foley's execution, you know, there were a lot of these expectations that were raised, that some kind of U.S. military action against the Islamic State inside Syria was imminent.
And then, come Monday, all that starts getting rolled back by the administration, who are saying, you know, we're hearing no, there are no imminent airstrikes.
And, quite frankly, we're not sure what the administration's approach to the Islamic State is going to be.
There's a lot they discuss about how they're going to try and approach the problem in Iraq, but Syria remains a black hole.
Well, now, so there have been reports that America's been passing intelligence through the Germans to Assad, maybe even through the Iraqi government to Assad.
Can you talk about that?
Well, you know, that was brought up to administration spokespeople, who vehemently deny it.
And, you know, I find it a little hard to believe myself, because although that kind of thing has happened in the past, we all remember the picture of Donald Rumsfeld meeting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, to give him American intelligence.
But, at that time, Saddam Hussein's ouster was not official American policy.
The official policy of the Obama administration is that President Bashar Assad of Syria has to go.
And so it's very hard for me to believe that the administration is secretly passing intelligence to Assad on the Islamic State.
On the other hand, though, I mean, it's almost impossible to believe that it's the official policy of America to overthrow every last dictator over there who has a clean-shaven chin, Gaddafi and Assad and the secular European-style fascist Ba'athists, and replace them with these lunatics.
Absolutely true.
Absolutely true.
But, let's think about it.
If the United States is in fact...
First of all, I suspect that the Assad regime knows a hell of a lot more about the Islamic State and its order of battle, and where it is, and what it controls in the United States of America does.
So you've got to ask the question, why would Assad need our intelligence?
Second of all, by helping him, we're not just helping someone who today is being cited by the United Nations, whose regime is being cited by the United Nations, as committing just unbelievable war crimes.
But by helping him, or by at least going against, helping him against the Islamic State, we're helping, inadvertently, another entity, and that would be Jabhat al-Nusra, the Nusra Front, which is the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.
And I don't think that is American policy.
So I really do have a bit of a problem believing that the United States is passing intelligence.
Is the United States maintaining some kind of communications channel through another intelligence service, like the Germans or the Russians, to the Assad regime?
I have no problem believing that.
But the idea that we're actually trying to help Assad deal with an enemy that he knows better than we do, is hard for me to understand.
All right, now, I'm sorry, could you go over that again, how it is that if he was helping Assad target ISIS, oh, you're saying that that would just, in effect, help Nusra, since they're fighting ISIS too, and we wouldn't want to do that?
But that would be kind of a minor side effect compared to helping...
Well, I don't know, because look...
I mean, if there's one force in the country that is the anti-ISIS force that could be, it would be the Assad government, not Nusra.
Well, but both are fighting the Islamic State, and in particular Nusra is fighting the Islamic State and trying to prevent it from taking over Aleppo, the country's largest city and commercial center.
There are some pretty fierce battles going on.
So, you know, I don't find it...
I just said it would be an inadvertent advantage that we would be giving, but I don't think it would be the number one consideration for the Obama administration.
Now, okay, we're real short on time here, so let me ask you this real quick.
There's a story at McClatchy here by your colleague Leslie Clark, and the quote from Obama is, let me say it again, American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, will not allow the United States to be dragged back into another ground war.
And it sounds like a little bit of wisdom there, that he understands that ISIS wants us to invade the Sunni triangle, and he's saying he knows better.
Do you think he'll really stay out?
You know, Prothero says JSOC, SOCOM, and CIA have been running around Kurdistan for months.
Yeah, but they're not American combat boots.
Well, sort of, kind of.
I mean, Delta Force and...
But every administration, every government in the world plays funny with words, right?
And so, and don't forget, we've been told that there would be no American boots on the ground in Syria, and yet there were in July in this failed rescue attempt to try and get James Foley.
So, you know, their words can be played with, and they are all the time.
And let's not also forget that there are nearly 1,000 American military in Iraq already as a result of the offensive that was launched by the Islamic State and the request that was made by what will be soon, I guess, the former Maliki government for American military advisors, and they've got them, and they've got their additional American security contingent over there at the request of the State Department, which wants to make sure that there's no threat to Baghdad Airport because that's the way that the Americans would get out.
And so the American troops are helping to provide security there for the embassy, for the consulate in Erbil.
I believe there's also a consulate down in Basra where there's been increased security.
And so there are American troops in Iraq.
The question is whether or not those are going to increase, and I think a lot of that has to do with I think a lot of people are looking forward to next month and this 30-day deadline that the Iraqi prime minister designated al-Bahdi has to form a new government, a quote-unquote inclusive government with the Kurds and the Sunnis that I think the administration sees as being the key to solving the Islamic State problem in Iraq, and a lot of people have major questions about that.
Yeah, that's completely ridiculous.
You can just place your shorts on it right now on the markets there.
Thanks, Jonathan.
Appreciate your time.
Anytime, Scott.
All right, Shaul.
That is Jonathan Landay, McClatchyDC.com.
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