09/10/14 – Roy Gutman – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest is Roy Gutman, he's a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers, of course.
And right now reporting out of Baghdad, Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Roy.
How are you doing?
Hey.
Nice to be here, Scott.
Well, it's a hot day in Baghdad, it's about 108 degrees today.
Wow, that's even hotter than Texas, believe that.
Goodness.
And we had John Kerry coming through, the Secretary of State, unannounced, suddenly popped up, and otherwise the government's being formed, so it's an interesting day.
Yeah.
Alright, well, so let's talk about what's going on in the parliament here.
I guess you just start with whatever you think is most notable first.
They've elected a new prime minister and a new cabinet.
Nouri Maliki is gone.
Haider Abadi is the new guy.
He is from the same party as Maliki, but he is not a, he's a man really of the middle.
He is not such a fighter as Maliki was, and Maliki was such a sectarian fighter, in fact, that he really upset the rest of the country.
Abadi is more of a conciliator, good relations with all sides, and the country is in an absolute mess because of the Islamic extremists who have taken at least a third of the territory since June, and it's really an existential crisis for Iraq.
And this new government is intending and saying the right things, that they want to eliminate the frictions between Sunnis and Shiites, that's going to be, that's a historic task that's going to be doable, but at least they can eliminate or reduce many of the frictions that have developed in the last eight years.
And likewise, that they want to patch up relations with the Kurds, who are a different ethnic group and have their own semi-autonomous territory.
And in order to fight this Islamic state, as they call themselves, a bunch of extremists who go out and cut off people's heads and stage crucifixions in the marketplace, and basically are destroying not only Iraq, but also Syria.
Yeah, now, so a lot to go over already right there.
First of all, when you say Maliki's gone, is he not one of the vice presidents?
Is he really all the way out now?
No, you're right, he's gone, but he's not gone.
And it's not only that he's got this title of vice president, but he's got his people, he made a lot of appointments in his last weeks in office that were kind of outrageous, to the army, you know, officers, the central bank, lots of other places.
And he's got his people planted all around the government, and clearly they're going to resist the new order, he's probably going to fight like anything.
But still, you know, he's no longer in a top position, and it was in the top position that he grasped all the reins of power and basically shut out everybody else.
So it's a change, we really don't know how it's going to look and develop, but it is definitely a new look in the government.
All right, now, so I know you've been around, you've seen Jafari and you've seen Maliki and the way they do business, and they're both from the Dawa party, and as you said, this new guy, Haider al-Abadi, is also from the Dawa party.
Have you talked with him, do you have any experience with him in the past, do you know what he's about?
Do you think that he really wants to try to work things out with the Sunnis?
Because it seemed like the Dawa party's policy this whole time has been, let those predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq rot in the sun, they don't care, they got Baghdad, and all the land between there and Basra, and so forget him.
I'm not sure that it's really the Dawa party that has this very sectarian attitude that you're describing, so much as Maliki, who, in fairness, nationalism, sectarianism, all these things usually are tools in the hands of politicians who are trying basically to cement their base, get elected, stay in power, get more power.
So it's a tool, and this time, it's really the wrong tool, and al-Abadi, who is much more a man, I think, of the center, is not likely to pursue that method of politics.
I do know al-Abadi, I actually talked to him a few years ago when I was writing a story about the flawed economic system, especially the lack of banks here anywhere, almost anywhere in Iraq, other than in Kurdistan, or the Kurdish region.
And I had done a lot of research on this, and I came to the conclusion that this country just cannot function economically, except as an oil exporter, because you cannot develop an economy, you cannot get employment, you cannot thrive and develop, because the people at the very top had no understanding of free enterprise, and a banking system, and all of the things that go along with these.
Al-Abadi struck me as a guy who was really very open-minded about change, and very eager to change.
At the time, he was the head of the Finance Committee in Parliament, and I thought that every question I asked got a very sensible answer.
I do recall him saying, and as I quoted in the story that I wrote, that he's looking for ideas, he's open to ideas, and he's collecting ideas, and he's going to make some proposals.
But he also said he didn't know how fast or how high these proposals were going to get, or going to go, because, implying that his boss, you know, the Prime Minister, was just not open to discussion.
But he made it clear that he was.
So this is such a fundamental thing about a country, and if it weren't for oil, there would really be not much of an economy at all here.
But can you imagine a country where there's just a few, maybe a thousand banks and bank branches for thirty-something million people?
And anyway, Abadi seemed to have a grasp of things.
Now, one of the big differences between him and Maliki is that, is where they spent their years in exile during the Saddam Hussein period.
Maliki was in Iran, and if I recall correctly, in Syria, you know, two countries, different kinds of dictatorships, different kinds of, in the case of Syria, really a tyranny, and in Iraq, Iran, rather, you know, religious, run by religious elites.
And you know, he has a nature about himself that he himself is assuming that there are conspiracies against him, he's paranoid, and really doesn't relate that well to other people, doesn't work with other people.
Abadi studied, he went to exile in Britain, he got his doctorate, I think he did his undergraduate work in electrical engineering here in Baghdad, but he studied for a Ph.
D. at, I think it was the University of Manchester in the UK.
So and he lived there for years, for much of his exile he lived in the UK.
So he has, you know, experience of, he grew up in a way, or he spent many years in a Western country, and knows how they work.
So that's really also quite a difference.
All right, and now, what of Eyad Alawi?
Well, Alawi, I think he's got a position, if I'm not mistaken, as Deputy Prime Minister.
He's in the mix.
I mean, frankly, Scott, if you look at the list of people in the new government, you'll recognize many of them, because they are the same people who were in either the last government or the government before that, they're sort of the political elite, and they just sort of, you know, switch chairs every four years.
Well, yeah, they're the same ones that America and Iran have agreed upon this whole time, right?
Well, in a sense, but they're also the people who are the heads of their parties, and their parties are very, you know, they're organized by sect, rather than by ideology or by social grouping.
Right.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, I got to interrupt you.
We got to take this break right here, Roy, but if you'll please hold on, we'll come back and finish this conversation.
It's Roy Gutman reporting for McClatchy Newspapers from Baghdad on the formation of the new parliament, the election of the new prime minister, and the strategy from here, and et cetera.
So hang tight.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
You thought Washington, D.C. was complicated.
I'm talking about Baghdad politics with Roy Gutman of McClatchy Newspapers here.
Discord greets Iraq's unity government, Kurds boycott is one headline.
New Iraqi government named, but parliament delays vote on two ministers, the other.
And now, Roy, about that boycott, I think you report here that the Kurds have agreed to go along, but only for 90 days because they didn't get any of what they wanted when it came to electing the new government.
Is that right?
Well, the, you know, it's rather hard to put together a government when it's a unity government, you know, when it's sort of power sharing involving nearly every party.
And it's a lot of bickering.
And they only really had one month from the time that they named the president of the company named Abadi, the prime minister.
So they didn't really negotiate out all the contents of the government program.
And the Kurds, while willing to join the government and support it and saying that they really want to make it a success, have some really deep and biting and serious grievances.
And so they didn't get them.
They didn't get them resolved.
Now, they and they were themselves debating, you know, should they join at this moment?
Should they join later?
They decided to join now, and they were under a lot of U.S. pressure.
But they were going to get a number of seats in the cabinet, you know, major posts, including the finance ministry.
And but they didn't actually formally name the individuals for the posts.
And so a lot of other people got sworn in, but the Kurds didn't.
And a lot of people in the rest of parliament voted, and the Kurds did not.
And they're sort of holding out for the government program.
It's a kind of a peculiar situation that can only occur when you've got the kind of dickering that's going on with so many parties and everybody.
Every party has the right, by virtue of being in the government, to several of the cabinet posts.
But the latest on this, and I don't know specifically what's happened to the boycott.
I think it's still going on.
But the latest was that today in Baghdad, John Kerry, the secretary of state, came through, spent a day talking to the top officials.
And then he held a press briefing later at the American embassy, and he said that everybody at the top of the government is really concerned about the Kurdish demands, and that they want to resolve them.
And he sort of made this statement publicly, maybe even a couple of times in the course of his prepared remarks.
So in a way, maybe the Kurds' concerns will be assuaged, and then they will join the government.
You have to stay tuned on this one.
All right.
Well, now, so that just brings up the much more important question of how the hell are they going to incorporate the Sunnis into the government?
And I know there have been Sunni politicians in the parliament this whole time.
But I mean, ones that have any power or authority to represent any of the rest of the Sunni population of the majority Sunni parts of Iraq.
It seems like if they weren't able to do this in 2007, with all the chanting of the surge worked and all of that, how the hell are they going to do it now?
Well, it's with great difficulty.
The real problem is there are Sunnis in the government.
They're very high positions, in fact.
And they will get the kind of programs, I think a lot of the specific goals they have.
The problem is the Sunnis who are elected are, some people describe them as green zone Sunnis.
You know, in the international zone used to be, you know, the American, the government zone.
And they haven't, many of them have not been back to their home districts.
They have lost touch with their voters, and their voters are, you know, are so curious about the Maliki government and the way it treated them that they're completely alienated.
And so it's not clear whether these Sunnis really represent the Sunni population.
And this is not a minor thing, because it is the Sunni population who have, whose anger over the Maliki government has led to the opening and the opening of the doors to this crazy, extremist, brutal, it's called the Islamic State.
And so these Sunnis have to be persuaded to change sides, to go against the Islamic State and to give up any support.
It's not clear whether this government with the Sunni cabinet members it's got is really in a position to convince them.
But all that said and done, the government's program, and the program hasn't formally come out, by the way, is, however, to make major concessions to the Sunnis.
Now one of the really biggest things is who is responsible for law and order and for security in the Sunni zones.
It had been the army, the federal army, under, and Maliki controlled it directly.
I mean, some people say that he was just, he ran the army by cell phone.
He was not just the commander in chief, but he was also acting as the chief of staff, defense minister, the interior minister, the head of intelligence, and God knows everything else.
That'll go.
You know, that, even though they have not yet succeeded in appointing a defense and interior minister, you know, a police minister, they, Abadi has promised it within a week, and we'll have to see what he delivers.
But in any case, the idea now is to have a different kind of security force.
Instead of a largely Shiite federal army running security and, you know, fighting the Islamic State and protecting the regions, the predominantly Sunni regions, they're talking about creating a national guard in the Sunni areas, similar to what you have in the Kurdish areas, in the Kashmir area.
Yeah, the sons of Iraq.
Yeah.
And so, the question is, you know, and there is an experience with Sunni tribes organizing themselves against al-Qaeda in the period 2007 to 2009, when the American military was there.
And, you know, first they tolerated al-Qaeda, then they could see that al-Qaeda was a bunch of crazies who were going to change their lives all for the worse, and they decided to fight al-Qaeda.
And this is called the Saqwa, or the Awakening, and the Sunnis really did protect themselves.
The problem is that when Maliki came along in 2009 and 10, he stopped paying the Saqwa, he stopped working with them, he basically just dropped them.
And so they started to wander over to the other side.
Yeah.
And so, you know, this is one of the kinds of concessions, a rather major one, that may bring the Sunnis back, and ought to bring the Sunnis back, it's maybe the Sunnis are the ones who are going to have to fight the Islamic State, who are themselves Sunnis.
Right.
Yeah, they're the ones who are dominated by it.
It's their rebellion, for sure.
But now, so, it sure seems like, and I'm getting conflicting reports here, and I know, you know, one of these is yours, but from yesterday, and things change, but he talked about this guy Amiri coming in, and he's the head of the Bata Brigade, and then you say al-Mahdi got the position of oil minister, well he's from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, so this is, like you're saying, just the same old musical chairs, the same old United Iraqi Alliance types from 2005 on, who are basically acting as Iran's proxies, and have never meant to compromise with the Sunnis at all.
So I don't know, man, how this is supposed to happen.
It sounds very wishful thinking to me.
Well, you know, I jokingly talk about the new faces, or I should say, the old faces of 2014.
You know, there are just a lot of people being recycled who have been there before, and who are responsible, in a sense, for the current state of affairs, or certainly were, you know, along for the ride.
And I guess, you know, it's a question of wait and see, it's a question of, let's hold our judgment for at least a little bit.
As I said, John Kerry came through today unannounced, met with everybody at the top, came out really, I wouldn't say gushing, but he was really enthusiastic about them, and he said they all understand what they've done before, that it was wrong, and they don't want to go down that road again.
And, you know, hope springs eternal.
There are very few people I can think of who actually think that Iraq can hold together.
But if it does hold together, it'll be because politicians have decided to pull up their socks and get serious, and to deal with all the grievances, to deal with all of the unsettled problems, to bury the hatchet, which is hard because it goes back hundreds of years, on the confessional side, you know, on the victorian side, between Sunnis and Shiites.
You know, you have to watch the state.
I'll tell you one thing, the Kurds are giving this government 90 days to resolve the major issues that are with the Kurds, and the 90 days implies that if you guys don't get serious, we will leave Iraq, and when the Kurds leave Iraq, there's no Iraq.
Right.
Yeah, that'll be the end of that.
I mean, there's hardly an Iraq now.
The fact that the Kurds decided to put off their referendum for a little while and give this one last chance is a miracle.
Obviously, it worked at the hands of American pressure there to force them to keep trying, but boy, yeah, you're right.
I mean, all bets are off, never mind the Sunnis, if they can't make an alliance, a real, the same alliance we've had since 2003 between the Kurds and the Shiites here.
Scott, here's the most interesting irony of all.
I was here when the Americans left in 2011.
We had a, McCarty had a bureau here, and I had to close it down, and you could see at that point that things were going to go to hell, because for one thing, the American power and American military and the American diplomacy really made a difference here.
It helped keep the place together.
They were able to lean on Maliki at that point, but when they left, they lost all clout.
Now, ironically, the arrival of the Islamic State, these crazy jihadists, and the conquest of a third of the country, and the fact that President Obama has decided basically to send in advisers to start using airstrikes against the Islamic State, and the American presence is now, you know, serious, and it will be growing, I don't think it's ground forces at this moment.
But in any case, it has given the Americans much more clout than we've had for years.
And so it is possible for the Americans to influence each one of those major players in ways that they couldn't influence them before, because previously, when I was here in 2011, everybody was sort of criticizing the Americans, but also secretly welcoming them.
Now, the return of the Americans here is actually the most stabilizing thing that's happened.
It's sort of like the only hope for this country.
So the Americans have clout, and they are able probably to get the courage to give up the referendum for the time being, to get the Shiites to make concessions, to get the Sunnis to get, you know, to change their views.
In other words, in many ways, the issue that Barack Obama wanted to avoid, namely the future of Iraq, is now in his hands.
Yeah.
Well, now, some of that's true, but let's not neglect to mention that it was America that broke Iraq apart, and not just by overthrowing Saddam, but by staying for years and years and years, and fighting a civil war on the side of the Shia, and kicking all the Sunnis out of Baghdad, and giving the Dawah party that much less reason to keep paying the Sawa, because what are you going to do about it, etc., like that.
So this is 1,000 times America's fault first, before any pressure on the Kurds or the Shia to compromise on anything counts in our favor, I think.
Well, and you're right, and this is the reason that the Americans got to be so unpopular.
Everybody had something against the Americans by the time they were leaving in 2011.
But don't forget, the real problem with the conquest of Iraq by, in the Bush administration, and I'm just trying to be, you know, give you a neutral technicalist judgment in a way.
That's fair, that's your job.
Is that the Bush administration overthrew what was an effective system of government.
It was an awful system of government, it was tyrannical, but it was effective in the sense that it kept the peace, it kept everybody, you know, from each other's throats.
And instead of that system under Saddam Hussein, they had really no system.
They disbanded the army, they disbanded the police, they decided everybody who was a Ba'athist, you know, which was Saddam's party, had to go.
And they didn't have a replacement.
And you simply cannot-and it is that vacuum, that security vacuum, that led to the civil war, that led to the sectarian battling, and led, you know, the Kurds to start going their own way.
So, you know, one should look at this country in terms of whether it has security and whether there's a vacuum.
And what happened since June, when these Islamic State crazies took over Mosul and then other cities, Tikrit and so on, is that they saw that the army as constructed by Muriel Maliki was sectarian, unpopular, incompetent, corrupted, and so on, and that even though they'd been trained originally by the Americans and to some degree, you know, a reasonable standard, Maliki had basically, in three or four years, just turned it into an absolutely weak army.
And for some reason, I don't know if the Islamic State people realized just how weak it was, but they conquered Mosul, a city of two million, in about three hours.
And they did this because basically the army turned and ran.
It collapsed.
So this is really-and so there is now a security vacuum here.
There has been one for some years.
There was one early in the Bush administration's conquest.
And the question is, how do you fill it?
You know what, Roy?
And that's the real challenge here.
Yeah.
Now, so let me ask you something here, because on the question of the solution to this problem, the security vacuum, as you call it, that's certainly one way to put it.
It seems to me like the more local the solution, as you talked about with something like a repetition of the awakening movement, that kind of thing, where the Sunni tribal system rises up and gets rid of the Islamist Zarqawiite system that has now taken them over.
It seems to me like, well, just like we just talked about, all the distortions in power caused by the American occupation are exactly what's most likely to happen again, with intervention from those far away, with much less information or ability to really decide what's best to do.
For example, you know, we talked about they don't want to put in ground troops.
They just want to bomb the hell out of them from the air for a while.
Well, I remember it.
I'm sure you were there and reporting it at the time.
And I knew it because I was reading you about it, that the American Army and Marine Corps went toe to toe with al-Qaeda in Iraq for years in the Sunni triangle there in Anbar province and in up near Mosul.
And they never did defeat them.
The closest that they ever got to defeat was when Petraeus, again, like we talked about, allied with the tribes to marginalize the jihadists and had them do all the heavy lifting.
And even then they didn't eradicate them.
They just basically, you know, sent them home for a little while until the war in Syria could break out and they could, you know, had some more fighting to do and they could come back to life in that way.
And so it seems like all that America can possibly do here is disrupt things, distort power and the way these decisions are made in such a way as to guarantee further, you know, unintended and but very disruptive consequences down the line.
And so maybe the best thing to do would be since the Islamic State and, you know, Patrick Coburn says that these guys have gone around telling the Sunnis that they've conquered, you know, doing a census.
Tell us about your daughters because some of our guys need wives.
I mean, these are guys who make themselves very unwelcome immediately upon arrival into town.
They're surrounded by enemies from the I'm sorry I'm going on so long.
The Iraqi army, the militias, the Iranians, the Turks eventually, you know, they want to protect their borders.
Assad, the king of Jordan and the rest of them, too, and the Sunnis that they're ruling, the Sunni tribal leaders that they're marginalizing.
Isn't it possible that maybe the best thing is for America?
Just in this one case, never mind my libertarian foreign policy altogether, but just in this one case, maybe it's the best thing to stop intervening here and go ahead.
And as horrible as it is to sit back and watch and not be part of the slaughter, to just let things even out the best they can, since all signs all sides seem to agree in this, that the Islamic State is not the natural order of things around there at all.
This is the aberration.
And we have every reason to believe that they'll marginalize themselves right out of existence without America's intervention.
And so I'm sorry I can't say anything in less than 10,000 words or whatever.
But what do you think about all that?
Well, the problem with that thesis of sort of do nothing and watch, be the spectator, is that this is not a spectator sport.
This is, in fact, a deadly game by the extremist Islamists to take territory, to seize an oil power.
Don't forget, one of the original places for the caliphate was Baghdad.
And I think they would love to have Baghdad.
And in the course of which they're willing to commit mass slaughter, immense crimes, crimes against humanity, and probably genocide if they have the opportunity, against anybody who is not a Sunni extremist.
And so you have the potential here of upsetting the entire Arabian Peninsula, because as Iraq goes, so go some other countries here.
And, you know, whether, you know, we've got oil in the United States ourselves, but the rest of the world relies to a good extent on oil from the Gulf.
And, you know, it's not just the price of oil, it's the availability of oil that can be greatly affected by these guys.
And I think that they really are the most dangerous group on the planet right now.
And their power is not, has not yet really been controlled or controlled by the United States.
They are controlled or tamped down.
Secondly, you have people who seek and clearly do not have democracy.
This is not a place that has a culture of democracy, but it also has, you know, real people, moral people who'd like to live in a democracy if they could, you know, who are saying to the United States, would you please save us?
Because otherwise this bunch of crazies are going to take over and God knows what they do next.
And Scott, if you think about it also, the problem with the Islamic State is not just that it is capturing territory here in the Levant, you know, and in Mesopotamia, ancient Mesopotamia, you know, these areas that were the cradle of civilization.
It's not just that they're capturing territories, it's the way they're doing it.
They are attracting young Muslims from around the world and probably people with very twisted lives and asking them to go for training.
And the training consists of putting on a suicide belt and then preparing to commit suicide and then giving and then swearing their lives to a man whom they never met.
Yeah, no, that's Baghdadi.
Yeah, but once you get those people doing that, they can they can go anywhere and they will.
You know, it's like Al-Qaeda.
I wouldn't I wouldn't this group makes Al-Qaeda actually look like it's, you know, I wouldn't say civilized, but it was certainly nothing as bad.
They're nothing as bad as this bunch.
Yeah, but see, now here's the thing.
I agree with a lot of what you said as far as how fanatical these guys are.
I mean, there's just no doubt about it.
Your colleague Mitchell Prothero calls them school shooters.
Patrick Coburn compares them to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as far as their brutality and all of that.
But it's still only 15000 fighters and they still only own the crappiest part of Iraq with the least developed oil sales in the, you know, single digits of millions of dollars worth of oil sales per day.
And again, they're surrounded by enemies.
And so they're horrible as, you know, down to the individual.
They're absolutely fanatical lunatics.
However, they don't seem to have that much power.
It seems like and if you're worried about them, you know, taking that fanaticism back here to North America, as I am, it seems like making us the reason that everything's going wrong for them is the worst way to go about protecting Americans, since there are, in fact, approximately 15000 or so of these guys.
It just seems like we shouldn't conflate different things together about just how mean they are with just how powerful they are.
You know what I mean?
And what kind of threat they pose, what kind of threat they could pose if we do the wrong thing.
And remember my argument, and you might not agree with the way I construct it, but my argument wasn't sit back and do nothing and be spectators.
It was withdraw from the field because perhaps our intervention is what's making long term stability least likely.
And maybe stability would be more likely to come about if it was settled by the local parties involved.
I mean, you could disagree with that, but I just want to be clear about what I'm arguing.
Now, that's a great idea, and you need a security force that can actually tackle the is on the front.
And the problem is the security force in Iraq, which was US trained to a good extent and equipped, you know, and educated, collapsed because of what Maliki did to it.
So you've got an immense vacuum and you've got really a terror group that's filled it.
And while it's only 15,000 supposedly, because we don't really know the numbers, remember Al-Qaeda in all of its training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s apparently trained only about 20,000.
So we're in the same ballpark of numbers.
And I think the numbers probably are closer to 20,000 even right now.
But the thing is, it's growing right now.
And if you allow a terror group to take over a state and become a state and have territory, which Al-Qaeda never did, you know, and to have it-look, and secondly, what you said about oil is technically correct, that they don't run real valuable oil fields.
But it's only a question of they nearly did, because they were going after Kirkuk, which is one of the biggest and richest oil fields in the world.
And it was only the intervention of the Kurds that stopped it.
And so, you know, have no doubt about it.
These guys actually also have a head on their shoulders in terms of economics.
They know that they need a stream of money, and they're not getting it from donations.
They're getting it by extorting, by stealing, and by, you know, grabbing.
So I wouldn't-I think this is-you've got to take this one seriously.
You've got to look at it as a threat, not maybe at this very moment, but that we ought to have learned something from Al-Qaeda in the 1990s, that if you see these trends developing and growing, you know, in the Clinton administration, they really did nothing.
And then we had 9-11.
I don't know if we want another 9-11.
Well, but you know what Bush did when he came to power after 9-11?
He finally got the bases out of Saudi Arabia, which he knew, as Paul Wolfowitz said, were what caused it in the first place.
It was Bush Sr.'s and Bill Clinton's intervention, not just occupying Saudi Arabia, but using those bases to bomb and blockade Iraq that helped provoke those attacks against us all through the 90s and leading up to 9-11.
So it seems like at some point you could always-we could trace this all the way back to Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt if you want to, but it seems like at some point we could just maybe call it off.
Because otherwise, what-we're going to have the same conversation in three years, Roy, you and me about.
Now that Baghdadi's third replacement is so much worse and he's taken over Armenia or whatever the hell, what are we going to do now?
You know what I mean?
I don't know.
Anyway, that just seems to be the path we're headed down.
I hope you're wrong, but I think the key to this terrible thing not repeating itself is that the U.S. should not be the ground force here.
It should be locals.
But the U.S. should be supporting people who ask for support in order to have a stable, let's say, fledgling democracy.
And so I don't think that inaction-the history is that inaction and just watching something develop and finding excuses is-we know what it leads to.
And as I say, start your analysis with the very simple fact, is security possible in a place?
Can a government defend itself against marauders, in this case really barbarians at the gate?
And if they can't, then you've got a security vacuum.
And that's what you've got.
And you have to find some way to fill it, and fill it quickly, because we know what happens with a security vacuum.
Terrible things happen.
And also, we also know what happens when you allow wars to go on interminably.
They spawn monsters.
They spawn genocide.
They spawn all sorts of terrible things.
And that's what's happened with Syria, which we haven't discussed, that the Obama administration, by sitting back and just watching for the most part, in a sense, has been a facilitator for the growth of the Islamic State.
I think, again, what- I think you decide, Roy, should we have a giant argument about Syria, or should we go ahead and let it go here?
Because we're way over time, and really, I've got to go anyway.
But great work, and we can talk about Syria some other time.
Thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Good to talk to you again.
Okay.
Good talking to you.
Take care, Roy.
Okay.
See ya.
All right, everybody, that's Roy Gutman, McClatchy Newspapers, overtime.
See you tomorrow.
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