09/07/14 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, September 7th, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
My own website is scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 3,000 of them now, going back to 2003.
And also you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Today's guest is Jonathan S. Landay, National Security Correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
And as you may know, he has a reputation of having gotten the Iraq War right back in 2002 and three when so many others got it wrong.
Welcome back to the show.
Jonathan, how are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Nice to be back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
A very important story here in McClatchy Newspapers with Hannah Alam.
Obama's strategy to beat Islamic State likely to draw U.S. into years of conflict.
So just the other day the President said he had no strategy, but he gave a speech, did a couple of questions and answers there in Wales at the NATO Summit yesterday and had a little bit to say.
So what did we learn about what Obama's strategy for the Islamic State is now?
Well, I think the President probably seriously misspoke when he said he had no strategy.
I think that they are in the process of putting one together, and I think we heard a bit more about it for the first time, at least from the President, out of the news conference he held at the end of the NATO Summit in Wales.
And essentially what it looks to be is adjusting, we know what the strategy he laid out for Iraq is, and that's pretty much been talked about quite a bit, putting together the airstrikes in support of the Kurds, trying to put back together an Iraqi army that fell apart when the Islamic State made its offensive first on Mosul and then down towards Baghdad beginning in mid-June, trying to put together a new Iraqi government, the key word being inclusive.
We're going to hear more about that in the coming days under a new Prime Minister, and thereby trying to lay the groundwork for what, the way I put it, is a return to or a restoration of the awakening movement that so badly hurt what the Islamic State used to be, which was al-Qaeda in Iraq, beginning back in 2007 under the Bush administration.
So that's the strategy in a nutshell for Iraq, and it is full of very serious challenges, beginning with the fact that it will depend in part on getting the Kurds and the Sunnis to remain in a government that's dominated by Shia.
That has been a recipe for failure under Maliki, and the man who's going to head this new coalition government is going to be coming from the same political party as Mr. Maliki.
So that's the first part.
It will also depend on getting support from the Sunni Arab powers in the Middle East, especially the Saudis, and that means having to reconcile them with the fact that the new government's main backer in that part of the world is going to be Shia Iran.
And so that will require really intense diplomacy and nurturing through diplomacy.
It's not just going to be a one-off deal.
This thing's going to hit speed bumps all along the way.
I mean, you can imagine kind of the Saudis' reaction, what that's going to be if the Shia militia, the Iraqi Shia militia that were mobilized to oppose the Islamic State when the Iraqi army fell apart, or much of the Iraqi army fell apart.
You know, if they go on a tear and we see them going after Sunnis in Anbar province or anywhere else, you know, that's going to shake that, quote-unquote, coalition pretty hard.
So there are a lot of serious road bumps that the United States is going to have to manage in dealing with this new situation in Iraq and pushing this new strategy for dealing with the Islamic State in Iraq forward.
Now, move across the border to Syria, and it's an even harder nut to crack.
But one of the clues, there are a bunch of clues that you need to put together to see where the administration is going there.
And essentially, in a way, it's looking to try and do the same thing in Syria as it's looking to do in Iraq, in terms of going after the Islamic State.
And that is, you need people on the ground who are going to go up against the Islamic State.
You can't just do it with airstrikes, as we see in Iraq.
In Iraq, you've got American airstrikes, but you also have ground forces that are operating in cooperation with the United States' airstrikes, and those would be the Peshmerga, you know, the Kurdish militia there.
And what's left of the Iraqi army, there are still some okay units still there.
And ironically, what we saw a week ago were Iranian-backed Shia militia working with the Peshmerga in cooperation with American airstrikes to break the Islamic State siege of a town called Amirali.
And so, you know, that's also a complication for Iraq.
So you need some kind of ground force in Syria if you're going to use airstrikes against the Islamic State.
And the only force that the United States could conceivably cooperate with, and the president himself said this, are these sort of, quote-unquote, moderate Syrian opposition groups that, in the past, the United States has failed, despite its good words, to build into a viable force capable of not just taking on the Assad government, but resisting the Islamic State as well.
And so it's an even harder nut to crack.
But the fact is that if you listen to the president speaking, you know, once upon a time, not too long ago, the United States' key goal was the replacement of Bashar al-Assad as the president of Syria.
You didn't hear that at all coming out of NATO from the president of the United States.
There was no reference to the need to oust Assad, who the United States has condemned as a war criminal and a user of chemical weapons against his own people.
No, what you heard was the need for putting together some kind of ground force to go after the Islamic State.
And so the Islamic State has now, appears to have been elevated by the president as the main strategic goal in eliminating the Islamic State sanctuary in Syria appears to have been elevated above the need to get rid of Assad, above regime change, as the main American goal in Syria.
Now, that, as I said, is going to be an even harder nut to crack.
The fact is that the American-backed, quote-unquote, moderate forces, the so-called Free Syrian Army, is not exactly the strongest fighting force there.
It has been suffering defeats of late by not just the Islamic State, but also the Assad regime.
It's hanging on barely to territory controls around the city of Aleppo, the financial center of Syria where there have been serious battles going on, where it's fighting a two-front war, not just against Assad, but against the Islamic State as well.
So we begin to see hints, however, that perhaps the United States is now changing its approach, and that after more than three years of resisting the idea of building and arming a, quote, moderate Syrian opposition, that may be where the United States is slowly going to go.
But that's going to take years, and it's going to take money, and it's going to take weapons, and it's going to take a lot of deft diplomacy there as well.
But, you know, my colleague Roy Gutman last week spent some time interviewing a lot of Free Syrian Army commanders where they're based, on the Turkish side of the border.
And curiously, the man who's now sort of the top commander of the Free Syrian Army was telling Roy that the United States is no longer working with his leadership.
They're no longer working with, in terms of providing training, covert training, covert arms to the FSA through this very divided, very badly managed leadership of the Free Syrian Army.
And it's a political equivalent, the Syrian Opposition Coalition, which is riven by personality feuds and political differences.
But what Roy was told by the top guy of the FSA is that the United States is working now directly with individual commanders, both in the north of Syria, which would be around Aleppo, and in the south of Syria, in Daraa and places like that along the borders with the border of Jordan, and providing direct arms and direct assistance through the CIA.
And this is something that we were told has been going on for some months now.
And it appears from the President's comments, if they are to be believed, that that is where the focus of U.S. attention is now going to be spent in Syria.
Okay, now, there's so much to follow up on here.
Absolutely.
It's very complicated.
Yeah, it is.
It's a gigantic mess.
But first of all, this has been the policy ever since 2011, to work with the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, and the Jordanians to back the FSA.
Now, Hillary wanted and Petraeus wanted to back them more than Obama backed them.
But he has been backing them all along, despite the fact that he calls it a fantasy policy, and is now doubling down on it.
So it's only in the mythology that this is just getting started, correct?
Not well, not really.
I think, Scott, it's been a very, very limited effort.
And I was in Jordan last year meeting with FSA folks there.
And what they were telling me was, for the most part, it was very limited, very little, very few arms, nothing really that could change the direction, the dynamics of the battlefield writ large in any strategic way, but more designed, actually, to ensure the security of both the Syrian and the Israeli borders.
In other words, you had kind of FSA guys on the Syrian side, who is essentially being trained by the United States to maintain, to ensure that the civil war didn't spread across the borders into two very, very important US allies in the region.
The other problem, of course, is that while the United States is saying it's working with the Qataris and the Saudis, the Qataris and the Saudis had their own agenda.
They saw, quite rightly, that Obama was only really, you know, there were a lot of words coming out of his mouth, but not a lot of substance to them when he was talking about support for the Free Syrian Army.
So they took it upon themselves to back other Syrian opposition groups.
And I firmly believe that that doesn't include the Islamic State, at least as far as the Saudis go.
But don't forget, there's a very large Syrian opposition coalition called the Islamic Front.
And that includes a bunch of very capable Islamic, Islamist militias, including Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the official Al Qaeda syndicate in Syria, and which once upon a time was part of the Islamic Front and broke away.
Well, now, clearly, the Saudis have their agenda, but it's not like Obama told them to stop all this time.
It's been American policy to tell the rebels, don't negotiate with Assad.
You don't have to negotiate with this government until he's gone.
Keep fighting.
As the Israelis put it, we want to see no resolution to this thing.
As David Sanger put it in the New York Times two years ago, the jihadis are the ones getting all the guns and the money, because guess what?
The guys who don't mind dying are the ones who are doing the fighting.
Your colleague David Enders reported on this show for two years straight, 2012 and 2013, that the super majority, as you're saying, the FSA is nothing but the border guards.
The insurgency belonged to the al-Nusra Front.
And then ISIS, of course, broke off from al-Nusra a year and a half ago or so.
But this has been the jihadis' war all along.
And that's who the Saudis and the Qataris have been backing.
And Obama's been sitting there at least silent with his arms crossed, right?
Well, I don't think I think that was true for a couple of years, Scott.
But look, look, look, look what happened in Saudi.
The guy who was supporting their sort of the main sort of overseer of their strategy of funding and supporting these Islamist group was forced out under American pressure.
Yeah, last year.
That's right.
Under American pressure late last year.
And so I think we're starting to see sort of the worm beginning to turn.
Also, the other thing is, there was no such thing as this, at least at that time, as far as what we see today as the Islamic Fund and what it has been doing since June in overrunning this very large swath of not just Syria, but but Iraq as well, executing hundreds, I mean, mass executions.
The Islamic State you meant?
I'm sorry, you said Islamic Front, which is actually a different thing.
I mean, the Islamic State.
Right, right.
And so, as I said, we've heard a change in the rhetoric from the administration.
I don't even recall the last time I have heard the president or his chief aide talking about the need to get rid of Assad.
It's all been about the Islamic State.
And I think this has forced the president to change his his approach to Syria.
Not only that, but look, those jihadis, the Islamic State have actually done him a favor, you know, with their videos, with the beheadings of both James Foley and Steven Sotloff, have absolutely horrified Americans.
And if you look at the polling right now as a result of those, there is now a majority American support for U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State.
So you have a new dynamic.
And I think the worm has turned.
I think they've perhaps reached a tipping point now where we are starting to see a change in American strategy.
I don't disagree with anything you said about what we saw over the last several years.
But I think things began to change, especially in mid-June with the beginning of this offensive.
Right.
I mean, look.
But as you say, no, wait, wait, wait.
Hang on.
We're so short on time.
There's so much to follow up on here.
But I want to get, you know, make sure that I understand you here, because it sounds like what you're describing is a policy that is meant to break Syria apart.
If they're not trying to overthrow Damascus and debathify the whole government and all of that kind of chaos, they're at least trying to work to deny Assad sovereignty over the northeast of that country.
They don't want the Islamic State there, but they want this new FSA army there instead.
Is that right?
Because otherwise the policy would be to help Assad.
No, I don't think it's intended to break Syria.
I think, look, if you listen to what the president has been saying in terms of the strategy, his national security strategy, as outlined beginning, you know, with this last speech he made, I guess it was in May at one point, he was saying, look, I don't want to get involved in any of these regional dust-ups anymore in which, you know, the United States really doesn't have a major dog in the fight, in which there is no direct threat to Americans or American interest.
Fast forward to what we have now, and what he's got is, in fact, now, and he's acknowledged it, a threat to at least American interest and in the long term, perhaps, and I'm not as, you know, unequivocal on this as a lot of people, perhaps in the longer term, a threat to Americans and the United States itself in terms, you know, terrorist attacks here at home, or at least on American facilities, American citizens overseas.
And so that kicks in, you know, what he said back in that speech is that when I do see this, I am going to act.
And we saw it happen the other day in Somalia, where you had this strike against the head of Shabab, which killed him, and I think you see it in northern Iraq with the military support that we're now giving to the Peshmerga and the airstrikes that have been going on against the Islamic State.
And if you think, I mean, and I'm not saying this is definitely what's going to happen, but I think that's where he's going now, that he's elevated this counterterrorism rationale above, we got to get rid of Assad.
And if you play that out to its logical conclusion, it says, and it's based on what he said in Wales, where he said, you need someone on the ground.
The logical conclusion to that, and he mentioned we have these folks, these moderate folks who we've been working with.
Yes, he's paid lip service to that over the last several years.
But I think this time, we might actually see some reality put behind his words, because at least as far as I can tell, there is no one else that is capable, and no other force that the United States sees that it can work with, at least in northern Syria, against the Islamic State.
And once that's dealt with, and look, that's not going to take a short time.
That's something that's going to take a while.
Then you deal with the Assad part of it.
But right now, all they think they're focused on now is the Islamic State factor.
Well, now, and, you know, I'm actually, I think a little bit more paranoid than you about ISIS attacks here, because I'm looking at their strategy.
And I think they want America to reinvade the Sunni triangle.
I think that's why Osama bin Laden attacked the United States all through the 90s.
And on September 11, too, was to try to drag us in, bog us down, bleed us to death and force us all the way out.
So while he complained that we were leaving early, he wanted us to be completely bankrupt and bled to death before we left Iraq.
So we'd never come back to the Middle East again.
And I think that if they can get us to intervene, especially on the side of Soleimani and the Iranian Quds Force, and especially if they can trick us or, you know, provoke us into putting boots on the ground, Marine Corps boots on the ground in the Sunni triangle, something like that, you know, they're playing a long game here.
Americans want to wrap this thing up yesterday.
They want to play this out as long as they can.
And you know, their leader walks around with a suicide belt on.
He, you know, it's not about him so much.
I don't think I think these guys are really that fanatical.
And so I am worried that and you're right, a couple of videos of a couple of beheadings.
Listen, there's going to be no shortage of atrocities at the hands of these Khmer Rouge type lunatics running around out there.
And if all we need is a few atrocities on TV to provoke us into invading, then we ain't seen nothing yet.
I mean, these guys would just as soon kill every last Shia in the world.
So I don't see that as being their objective.
I think their objective is to turn American opinion, as you put it, against any kind of intensified American involvement in that part of the world.
And it's backfiring.
It's backfiring towards American public opinion.
But also, I think...
Yeah, but Jonathan, with terrorism, the action is the reaction.
That's what it's all about.
That's why they knocked our towers down, was to make us really mad and want to go over there and blow it.
They're mixing up two different ideologies.
They did two different strategies.
And this is the reason why there was a split between the Islamic State, al-Baghdadi on one side, and Zawahiri, the head of Al-Qaeda core, on the other.
Al-Qaeda core, the whole philosophy, the bin Laden strategy is to attack the far enemy, i.e. the United States and the West, first, before attacking the near enemy, i.e. the Shia and the Saudi rulers, and then declaring a caliphate.
Al-Baghdadi, whose group has made fun of Zawahiri and his approach in their online magazines, and there's one in English, you can go read it, they say the reverse.
They say, no, the strategy should be, we attack the near enemy, and then we establish the caliphate, and we defend the caliphate, and build the caliphate up, and then we attack the far enemy, which is the United States.
And they point to what has happened now, since mid-June, in Iraq, and before that, in Syria, that they see, this has worked.
Allah is with us.
Allah is with us.
He has helped us defeat the near enemy in Iraq and in Syria, and we have now established our caliphate.
Their propaganda is all designed now to say, young Muslims, if you truly support us, you must come here to help us defend our new state.
And that's what they're concentrated on now.
Look, they're in danger of overextending themselves.
They've got a very large amount of territory they need to defend.
They're not on the offensive as much anymore as they are on the defensive in places now, and they need people not just to defend this territory they've carved out of these two countries, but they've also issued appeals to administrators, scientists, doctors, people with college education, because they are different from al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda never took and held territory.
These guys have not only taken and held territory, but they're setting up this quasi-administration, this quasi-government, which includes providing electricity, trying to provide social services, running Islamic courts, and meting out this terrible, horrific, brutal punishments to people, including crucifixions and beheadings and this kind of thing.
And they need to be able to run that and maintain that.
And I think that's where their focus is.
Now, it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be, and I suspect that we're going to see this, some kinds of spectacular attacks against Americans or American facilities in that part of the world, perhaps in Baghdad, perhaps other places in that part of the world.
But I don't see them right now, and I think a lot of people would agree, as focused on hitting the United States in the homeland the way al-Qaeda did, because that was al-Qaeda's philosophy.
That is not the Islamic State's philosophy.
Yeah.
Well, and it wouldn't even take that much, though.
Like you're saying, a couple of videos, the opinion polls, four airstrikes, a few more, and they'll be for ground troops.
Exactly, exactly.
And these are smart guys, Scott.
Let's not forget, these are really smart guys.
They've learned their lessons.
They are former military guys, some of them on their military shore or their military council, who worked for Saddam Hussein.
And they don't want to lose what they've got.
All right, now let me ask you this real quick, and this will have to be, I guess, the final line of questioning here.
This new guy, Abadi, who's replaced Maliki, he's from the Dawa party.
And as you talked about at the beginning, his new job is to achieve all the benchmarks that Petraeus failed to achieve back in 2007, no matter how many times they chanted the surge worked.
It never did.
They never did incorporate the Sunni former power leaders into the government.
And now I know the Kurds have announced that they're putting off their referendum on independence for a little while.
They're going to give Baghdad one last chance here, which is good news for that policy.
But isn't it just the craziest of fantasies that somehow Abadi is going to make such a deal with all the tribal chiefs that they can make ISIS go away at this point?
I think that you've just really hit the main nail on the head when it comes to the problems in Iraq.
Absolutely.
Ordinary Sunnis see no reason, at least at this point, to give any support or any trust, I think, to Abadi.
And my colleague, Hannah Alam, who I co-wrote this most recent piece with, she spent some time on the ground in Iraq not too long ago, and she was saying the same thing.
Ordinary Sunnis see no reason, at least at this point, why they should trust this guy.
But there have been a couple of developments.
You just talked about one, and that is that the Kurds are basically saying, you know what, we'll give this one last shot.
And I think there was a lot of American pressure on them.
I could hear the backroom conversations going, you want us to help you stop the Islamic State and turn back their offensive against Kirkuk and Erbil, you know, the seat of your regional government?
We will, but you've got to put off this referendum thing.
And so I think that is one thing you've seen happen.
But the other is there are reports today that I've been seeing which talk about bringing in as the new vice president, I think it was, Iyad Allawi.
Now, Iyad Allawi, let's not forget, this is a guy who actually, you know, once upon a time worked very closely with the CIA, but was a guy who actually won the elections, I think it was in 2000, and I'll probably get this wrong, but 10, I think it was, whose party actually won, got more votes and more seats in the Iraqi parliament than Maliki did.
And yet the Americans and the Iranians put together this deal where they actually put Maliki in the prime ministership.
And Allawi, he commands a lot of respect across sectarian lines, both among Sunnis and among Shia.
And so if that's the case, and you see the Kurds now coming in, if the United States, and we got John Kerry in the region now, can work the diplomatic thing with the Sunni states, the Saudis especially, in throwing their weight as distasteful as it's going to be to them, because it means having to cooperate with Iran behind this new government, then maybe, maybe they're starting to see perhaps a little bit of progress.
And let's not forget, it's not impossible that we're going to see the Saudis and the Iranians come to some kind of modus vivendi here.
They've done it in Lebanon.
It's going on in Lebanon now.
Neither side wants to see a repetition of what we saw in Lebanon back in the 80s.
Nobody wants to see that.
When they agreed, they worked together and agreed on a body, right?
Exactly.
It was them more than the US that put them in there.
Right.
Well, yeah, there was a lot of backroom dealing going on.
And so is it impossible?
No, it's not impossible.
Is it going to be very, very difficult?
Yes, it's going to face a lot of stresses and strains.
Look, you can just imagine, you know, for instance, the Islamic State looking to put the kibosh on this by, you know, trying to blow up the Shiite mosque in Ramadi like they did to set off the civil war after the American invasion.
You could see them perhaps trying to stage some kind of attack in the holy Shiite holy cities of Najaf or Karbala, and that could unhinge the entire thing.
So there's a lot of, this is fraught, this is absolutely fraught.
And it will require, as I said, and as Hannah and I wrote, a lot of intense US diplomacy and not just putting the deal together, but nurturing it.
The United States can't, the Obama administration and whoever comes next, can't simply say, okay, well done boys, we're going to now pivot to Asia.
No, that can't happen.
I say pivot back to North America.
But anyway, I see what you mean, though.
If the Americans want to accomplish it, they're going to have to recommit to a whole new project here.
And I don't know if it's up to the American people or not.
I guess it's not.
All right.
Well, we're over time.
Let me let you go here.
But thank you so much for your time, Jonathan.
Appreciate it.
Anytime, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Jonathan S. Landay.
He does the national security beat there at McClatchyDC.com and also in your local paper.
And that's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks everybody for listening.
I'm Scott Horton here every Sunday from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You'll find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
And you follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next Sunday.