09/11/14 – Walead Farwana – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
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Our next guest today is Waleed Farwana.
He is an American researcher, writer, and amateur historian currently residing in Chicago, Illinois.
And he's written this great article for AntiWar.com.
We ran it back on, hang on, I'll tell you exactly when we ran it, on August the 24th, The History of the Islamic State.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, yeah.
Happy to have you here.
And so you wrote this, well it seems like every week and a half or so Obama declares war again.
Same thing over and over again, so this came, this was timed with the big supposed rescue of the Yazidis from the mountain kind of thing was the timing for this.
But you decided you would go ahead and catch us up on who are these guys and where do they come from?
It's a term that people aren't really familiar with, so they kind of wonder whether they really exist at all or what the hell, you know what I mean?
So go ahead and if you want, I don't know, what do you think?
Start with the war in 2003 or you want to go back before that?
Well, I think it's just, it's necessary to look at the Islamic State itself.
It's a really creation, as you said, if we go back to 2003 of imperialist policy by the United States that's been going on really since the war in Afghanistan.
If you really want to look at really like the primordial roots of something like the Islamic State, you should look at going as far back as Afghanistan, so the haven of jihadists, which was really established in the 1980s to fight Soviet occupation.
Basically it moves to the west to Iraq to fight the American occupation, which is really the great irony of the whole thing in that the United States went to Iraq to ostensibly fight against Al-Qaeda, which wasn't even there at the time, and what resulted was it got a group even worse than Al-Qaeda to settle in there.
Right now, so when it comes to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he was a veteran of the 1980s CIA-supported war against the Russians there, correct?
That's not correct.
No.
He actually got there at the tail end of the war in Afghanistan, and he never actually saw combat for it to believe the historical recounts of his biography.
Well I read a Napoleon's book, too, and it's great, but it's been, I don't know, 10 years or something since I read it, so I can't forget 8 years or something.
Small detail.
The guy was just, he was a monster, and it wasn't really until he got to Iraq that he started to coordinate strikes against the United States there.
In the article that I wrote, I really referenced him as really the guy who, with his violence and with really this sick vision that he had, he really tore a hole through the fabric of not just the Iraqi society, but really the mentality of people in the Middle East as a whole.
This sort of sectarian violence was, it was around before really this era that we live in today, but it was always one of those things that you wouldn't ever really picture everyday people getting violent over.
It was something that was seen as sort of like a dirty thing in the Middle East to make these sectarian distinctions, but now they're all out in the open, and it's largely due to these people who, these ideologues who've come into the region and essentially provoked this extreme level of violence based on this dream of conquesting fabricated glory in their own minds.
Alright, now, Zarqawi, before the war, I have to interject this here, I don't think it's in your article because it's a little bit out of context, but not really, Jim Michalczewski at NBC News and then a lot of other people, surprising number of people did a surprising amount of journalism, if I remember right about this, if people want to search, and that is about how the army had basically begged George Bush on numerous occasions to attack Zarqawi and his group up in Kurdistan, American protected autonomous Kurdistan, before the war, because they were just looking at it from the point of view of their army guys, we gotta, if we can get rid of this guy before the regime change, good deal, we don't want him running around free, this guy's dangerous, they knew it good and well.
And I guess actually Lawrence Wilkerson said that part of the reason it was turned down, he told me this, part of the reason it was turned down was because they wanted to go in with such a huge amount of force that it was almost like a deal killer kind of a thing, a poison pill in a way, but in any case, they had every reason to understand that this guy who the propaganda said Saddam was friends with, but actually Saddam had a death warrant out for, that he was really dangerous, and that overthrowing Saddam with him on the loose was going to be a real problem, and then they did it anyway.
I think that what your friend told you, Mr. Wilkerson, was probably pretty much on the dots, and I think that the reason why they didn't really go after him was they wanted somebody who they could point at and say, this is the bad guy.
He was all they had, right?
He was the only pretended link between Saddam and Osama that they could even pretend to hold up was that Saddam had given him a peg leg and was a friend of him and took care of him in the hospital and all this stuff.
And even though, as you said, he wasn't even loyal to bin Laden yet either.
Yeah, I mean, it's really just, I really don't like to pay attention to the propaganda that any wartime figure is going to give, because they have their, they have the ends that they want, and they're just trying to justify it.
And in my article, I actually write that, I think that the case of Zarqawi was that the reason why he rose to such prominence was really because of the free publicity that the United States was giving him by making him their occupation boogeyman.
He was one of many jihadists, like-minded jihadists who are operating in Iraq.
And it was really the US policy of holding this guy up on a pedestal and really lionizing him as the vanguard leader of Sunni Iraqi terrorism that really drove people to end up becoming recruits in his organization.
Right.
Yeah.
At one point, the propaganda was so thick where they blamed every single thing that exploded on him in a way where people started wondering whether he really existed at all.
It was so obvious that they were lying, but it was because they were trying to make it look like, well, no Iraqis would fight us, right?
Only these terrorists who come from elsewhere, somewhere, these foreign fighters, they come in and they resist us because they're terrorists.
But of course, all Iraqis know that we're just doing all this for them and that kind of thing.
And of course, that was a giant lie.insurgency had plenty of their own nationalistic and tribalistic reasons for fighting that the Americans refused to acknowledge.
So just like with Osama, they made Zarqawi out to be the Soviet Union or something, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
Everything he said was spot on.
The United States really wanted to manufacture its own version of Iraqi nationalism, really with no input from the actual people on the ground.
So I mean, their policy of really trying to establish this nationalism was they would find some sort of politicians or really anybody willing to accept bribes from them, put them at the seat of power in this U.S.-designed bureaucracy, and really just keep the money flowing so long as they prevented attacks on U.S. occupation troops, so long as they acquiesced to whatever the United States' mission was in Iraq.
I still don't even know what the Iraq, what the United States' mission was in Iraq to this day.
But as you can see now, I mean, Iraq unraveled as soon as the U.S. pulled out and the money stopped flowing.
So it's really a sad tale and a really cynical tale of this shows you, unfortunately, how, you know, really how Machiavellian these people are over there.
And the people who are involved in these kinds of conflicts, they really just are only really looking out for themselves.
And this whole idea of nationalism and Iraqi unity is just a fantasy.
Right.
And, you know, the worst part of this, too, is how obvious it was that they were lying to us for a year and a half straight to get us into that war.
And how many people, not just regular people like me, but people like Colleen Rowley and others warned that what this is going to do for the terrorist movement to benefit them if we do this.
And then they did it anyway.
We'll be right back with Waleed Farwana in just a moment.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here coming up this October 18th at Columbia University in New York.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Waleed Farwana.
And he wrote this article we ran back in August on the 23rd at Antiwar dot com.
The history of the Islamic State.
And that's what we're talking about.
It's really the history of Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq, 2003 through 11 there.
And so let's see where we left off.
I guess we need to talk about de-Baathification, the abolition of the army and basically the complete disintegration of the Iraqi government, as well as the call of Ayatollah Sistani to all the Shia masses to go outside at the beginning of 2004 to call for direct democracy.
Forget your caucus system.
We're going to do this thing my way, he said.
And George Bush cried uncle.
And it seemed to me like from that point on, the writing of the Constitution and the Purple Finger election in January of five, that was all just the window dressing.
The stage was set for the full scale war as soon as Sistani said, we're going to do this my way, not yours.
What do you think of that?
I think that Iran had a huge had a huge impact on what happened in Iraq.
And they're often regarded, they're often regarded as, I guess, one of the big winners, quote unquote.
I really don't think there's any winner of such a bloodbath.
But I think that in part because of, as you said, Iranian instigation, but also because of the intransigence on the side of the Sunnis, where they were essentially willing to fight to establish a border between themselves and the Shiites.
That's really what precipitated a extremely bloody civil war, the kind that we're seeing in Syria right now, and the kind that we saw in Libya a couple of years back.
And yeah, I think the Iranians, they sized up the U.S. occupation.
They thought that they could take it on.
And they did that.
They did exactly that.
They started arming the militias that they wanted to arm.
And really, those militias, particularly the one by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi army, it still stands to this day.
And the Iranians are a huge influence on what's going on in Iraq right now.
And they really can't be underestimated.
And then, yeah, it was the Mahdi army, as well as the battle brigades that really played right into Zarqawi's game in trying to provoke that sectarian civil war.
And I think you say in here that he really differed with Osama bin Laden on this, not that bin Laden could do anything about it from hiding in his attic over there in Pakistan, but that bin Laden and Zawahiri, they never really were for the Sunni-Shia civil war in the first place.
This was more Zarqawi's idea.
Right.
Like, I mentioned earlier how the entire idea of sectarianism was perceived as a rather dirty thing.
It was like as crude as playing race, like race-baiting the United States is today.
But things have spiraled out of control to such an extent where it became a possibility to realistically do that.
And Zarqawi, the reason why I consider him a unique figure is because he had a pretty radical vision for how he wanted to transform Iraq.
I compare him to essentially the communists in Russia.
It was really an Islamic revolution inside of Iraq and inside of Syria that's going on right now.
And people don't, for whatever reason, they don't really seem to see the parallels.
But it is really a restructuring of the society.
It's an erasure of the traditional borders.
And it's a reestablishment of new borders on sectarian lines.
And I don't think bin Laden had this vision.
He didn't have this radical vision.
He thought that he would establish some sort of Islamic entity, but he wasn't really on the ground to see the obstacles to the establishment of said entity.
He didn't realize that he would have competition, basically, competition with other clerics, particularly Shiite clerics.
He thought that the only real competition in the way of his goal was the U.S. occupation.
And he also didn't really view nationalism as an inherent evil or an inherent obstacle to his goals.
He thought that he could continue the existing state structures while basically forming a sort of loose federation of Islamic states, kind of centered around his leadership in Afghanistan slash Pakistan.
Yeah, well, that was part of what ISIS said.
And I'm skipping ahead in the story here, but they they mocked Zarqawi for even saying, go back to Iraq.
They said, what's Iraq?
What are you talking about, man?
There's no border here.
Just because some Frenchman drew it.
Look, everybody, Zawahiri is for French borders.
Right.
Call them out.
Right.
I mean, that's that's really what that's really what triggered the split is that between Al-Qaeda and ISIS is that one is had radically different visions.
And.
As I mentioned in the article, Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda merged in 2004, 2005, and they basically became a satellite for Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
But as the Syrian war started.
Really, this is like these protégés of Zarqawi more or less began to realize that they had a realistic opportunity of establishing his vision or the vision of these transnational jihadists.
Right.
And erasing that line between Iraq and Syria.
And if they have their way, really throughout the rest of the region and probably even beyond that.
And I don't say that to scare anybody, but these people really do have a vision of establishing a very large caliphate, like the scale of really one of the ancient caliphates.
And if you take into regard the speed with which they've taken over Iraq and large parts of Syria, it seems like it's a realistic possibility.
That's why it scares a lot of people, too.
Yeah, well, I'm not so sure about that.
They don't recognize the state boundaries.
They have their own agenda.
They have their own ideology.
And they really see this as a huge turf war with every other state, every other state in the world, really.
And that's what they see the lines as.
They see those borders as just foreign imposed turf lines.
Yeah, which is, of course, true, which is why it's been easy for them to erase those lines, in a sense, because, you know, it always was an eggshell on the wall and George Bush pushed it off, the Humpty Dumpty kind of analogy there.
And so it seems to me like they've seized about as much land as they're going to be able to.
They're really hemmed in on all sides by enemies now.
And they don't have that much money or manpower, but they certainly are as fanatical as you describe them, no doubt about that.
Always have been.
And in fact, and let's get back because I'm keeping you up for the whole hour.
I'm keeping him for the whole hour, everybody.
And we're about to have to go here in just a second anyway.
But yeah, when we get back, I want to ask you about when they declared an Islamic state back in what, 2006, something like that.
I think after Zarqawi died, they tried to declare a state and that didn't work out so well.
And we'll be talking about tribal and jihadi politics with Waleed Farwana, the author of this article, The History of the Islamic State at Antiwar.com.
It ran back on August the 23rd, The History of the Islamic State by Waleed Farwana.
And also go to my Twitter, Scott Horton or no, Twitter slash Scott Horton Show.
And you can find his Twitter handle on there, too.
Hey, all Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I'm continuing this conversation with Waleed Farwana, he wrote this article, The History of the Islamic State for Antiwar dot com back in August.
And so we're talking really about the Iraq Civil War and how Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi's group grew up then.
And so this is, I guess, where we talk about the Sunnis losing the civil war and the awakening movement and the death of Zarqawi.
And but I wanted to ask you, I guess, where exactly in that timeline, right around circa 2006, where did they declare at what point did they change the name or try the first time to change the name from Al-Qaeda in Iraq to the Islamic State of Iraq?
Because I remember it was kind of met with guffaws then.
It was a kind of delusions of grandeur for them to name their group that.
And but what was exactly the circumstance there?
I think my history is a bit off because we're getting into the minutia here.
But I think it was after one of their leaders had been killed.
And.
The the idea of the Islamic State in Iraq was really just a continuation of Zarqawi's vision and really the Al-Qaeda goal of establishing a purely Islamic state along the lines of the Salafi ideology.
And for your for your viewers who don't know what that is, what's called the Salafi ideology is really this puritanical form of Islam, which advocates for this return to the lifestyle of the Prophet Muhammad.
And this is a man who lived in seventh century Arabia, so you can only imagine.
Not how not how insane this idea is, but how insane the people who adhere to this idea must be.
And only America can make it seem like some kind of plausible solution to what their lives are like.
But anyway.
Yeah, so.
At the same time, really with this this movement into Iraq and this establishment of an Islamic state in Iraq, it really came in tandem with the with this weakness in the Iraqi society itself and this this key division that I don't think that the United States really accounted for in its pre-war invasion, they thought that they could go in and display this purely on sectarian lines.
But there is this tribal element within the Arab society and within the particularly within the Iraqi society, which is really pronounced for various historical reasons, which I won't go into.
But what the but what Zarqawi's people did after his death and with the establishment of this Islamic state is they really went after this this tribal system and as a as a method for getting recruits.
They had this problem with legitimacy in Iraq where they were viewed as foreigners, troublemakers, people who would come to Iraq basically to opportunists, people would come to Iraq basically to take advantage of this chaos and this carnage.
And they had a real big PR problem there.
They needed to make it seem like they were supported on the ground by the locals and they found people within this Iraqi tribal system who would end up supporting them.
And the reason for this is this tribal system is it's basically a pyramid structure where there is a small group of of males who really dominate the entire structure.
And this is a pretty large structure we're talking about here, which comprises millions, millions of people within Iraq.
And it's essentially like a king, like a king system, like a like a monarchy in and of itself.
So as you can imagine, the people at the bottom of this pyramid really don't get much and they don't really benefit from this tribal system at all.
It ends up creating a large incentive for the people at the bottom of the structure, particularly, particularly disaffected men to join up with organizations like Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups like that, really so that they can, in their view, really stake a claim in their existence so they can make something, they can acquire resources however they can, because within their own tribal structure, that's pretty much off limits to them.
And this policy pursuing these lower level tribal members worked for Al-Qaeda.
And that's really the substrate of the organization to this day, both in Iraq and in Syria.
But then for a time there, the tribes fought back.
I guess, you know, I remember I don't have all my footnotes in order now, but I remember having them assembled back when, say in 2008, about how the Sunnis had been offering pretty much every July in 2003 and all the way through every summer, they would offer again, please, just let us patrol our own neighborhoods, give us a little bit of money and some AKs and we'll stop fighting your guys.
And then so when Petraeus took command in the beginning of 2007, he finally took them up on that offer after they had already lost Baghdad, of course.
And then that worked pretty well, right?
With the tribal leaders cracking down and marginalizing Al-Qaeda in Iraq, almost right out of existence, you might have thought.
Right.
So the American policy of working with these Sunni tribal warlords was mutually beneficial for both sides.
So the United States had a huge PR disaster in the United States where it was simply just losing way too many troops.
Iraq was out of control.
Too many people were dying.
And, you know, I mean, even one life is too much, especially with a war like Iraq, which was founded on a pretext and a preamble of lies, really.
But the Iraqi tribal leaders really also had a problem that their lower members were attacking them now.
They were joining up with Al-Qaeda.
They were joining up with all these other groups and they started to attack these tribal leaders themselves.
And they had this huge problem on their hands where their own rule was beginning to spiral out of control.
So the United States comes along and says, we'll give you guys money.
We'll pay you guys, you know, we'll pay you and all your men X amount of dollars every month.
We'll arm you.
And really, this is this this movement, this this this movement is about the people.
This movement, this this this awakening movement is really what spelled the end for the Iraqi state, ironically.
So the United States thought that by arming the Sunnis, they would end up with a with a safer Iraq.
But that did not turn out to be the case.
So while these awakening militias were loyal to the United States, and as you said, they led to a huge reduction in violence.
What this really did by arming these militias is they undermined the central authority of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military.
So that's really why the Iraqi military has no authority over much of the Sunni areas of Iraq today.
Yeah, they never really did integrate them.
They were just being paid.
And then because America, not just because the invasion, the overthrow of Saddam, but because America stayed and helped the Bata Brigade and the Mahdi army kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad, that gave Maliki and his Dawa party buddies that much less reason to need to compromise with the Sunnis about anything.
They got the crappiest part of Iraq.
Let them bake in the sun.
And what does he care?
And so, as you said earlier, as soon as America left, Maliki quit paying them to even be the patrol in their own neighborhoods.
And yet, see, this is maybe a little bit off topic from exactly where we're going on the Islamic State.
But, you know, it always seemed to me like, well, I know this.
It's always been the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the Dawa party and Iran's position that they don't really want the Sunni areas anyway.
That's why they didn't just withdraw from Mosul this June.
They withdrew from Mosul in great measure a year ago last spring and from Fallujah last December.
It's not their territory to hold.
Let them have the crappiest part of Iraq, ISIS, tribal or otherwise, I think has been Maliki and Dawa's view.
But anyway, now we've got to go to break, but we'll be back more with Waleed Farwana in just a minute.
The military industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Hey all, Scott Horton here.
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We should take nothing for granted.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Waleed Farwana.
He wrote this article, The History of the Islamic State at Antiwar.com.
And where we left off, it was we're talking about in 2011, after America left without the Americans to pay the awakening movement, Maliki just left them high and dry, quit paying them.
And and then, you know, I guess you want to pick up from there.
That's part of what's led to the crisis here.
And you have a whole section in your article here.
2011, a lot of things happened in 2011, including America's withdrawal and stopping the payments to the Awakening Council.
Right, so as we said, like you said, the United States left the power vacuum and didn't really leave a stable government, didn't really leave really any semblance of a stable society.
There was the war in Libya, there was the war in Syria, there was instability all over the region.
And I think that everything, things that were going on in Iraq were really sort of just like white noise in the background compared to like the Egyptian revolution and the Syrian civil war and the Libyan civil war.
And really like this myriad of conflicts that were all happening at once.
So during this time, we talked about this earlier, but the arming of these Sunni militias really almost led to the eradication of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other groups like it.
But what happened was the destabilization in Syria opened the door for, gave them breathing room, essentially.
They took out, really what happened was Bashar al-Assad's regime was destabilized.
It could no longer essentially defend its eastern border.
And this is where al-Qaeda in Iraq migrated west to Syria and began to establish its bases there.
And if we look at it today, that's where their base is.
Their base is right there in Syria, right at the, really right at the heart, in the Sunni heartland between the Iraq and Syria borders.
Yeah, and you know what, I had this short clip, it's not too long, but I think this really just makes the point so well.
It's from the beginning of 2012.
Phil Giraldi reported that a new finding had been signed by Obama at the end of 2011, ramping up covert activity in Iran and Syria.
And so, but they were being criticized for not doing enough.
And so in this question, Hillary is on the defensive.
How come you're not doing enough to help the rebels overthrow Assad?
And this was her answer.
We know al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
All right.
So the Hamas thing is obviously kind of a red herring.
But the point being, and she's not saying to back any rebels at all, is to directly put arms in the hands of bin Ladenites.
She's saying to intervene on the side of a rebellion that al-Qaeda has also endorsed is a dangerous thing, just in the broadest sense.
And she, in her own words, she equates it to, are we backing them if we are intervening in this war on the same side as them?
And the answer, of course, is yes.
And then, of course, she has worked the hardest to maintain her reputation as the one who pushed for that exact same policy the hardest after saying that, after admitting that that was exactly the case.
That if there was one, just like in Libya, if there was one anti-al-Qaeda force in the country you could count on, it was the local clean shaven chin having secular dictator with the military uniform on or the pinstripe suit as opposed to the robes and the whole Osama get up here.
Yeah, I mean, but they I mean, flip flopping politician, I mean, whoa, not like we've ever heard of that before.
But the thing is, I mean, when she she announces that, listen, this policy would announce would amount to treason.
And then she I mean, that's not the average flip flop.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, it's absurd and.
It's just what I've come to really expect, and I think a lot of Americans have come to expect at this point from the Obama administration and the U.S. government as a whole, especially after the war in Iraq and economic crisis that we had in 2008.
At the same time, supporting Assad is.
I think for U.S. interests, more dangerous than for them to support the Syrian rebels, and the reason for that is Assad is really a client of the Iranians.
And at least throughout the 2000s, Iran was really looked at as the most powerful enemy of the United States in the region.
And working with Assad would mean working with Iran, which would mean alienating, you know, the greatest ally the United States has.
And I say that sarcastically, Israel and the Israelis don't want that.
And because the Israelis don't want that, neither did the Saudi Arabians.
They won't work with Assad.
They will work instead with really whoever they can get their hands on.
And they're looking for, they're out there, they're grasping for potential allies in Syria, but there really are none.
There is really just there's a free Syrian army who are clients of Qatar and Turkey to some extent, but they are pretty much a weak and almost defeated force, in my opinion.
So there's really no, there's really nobody for the United States to latch on to there.
Yeah, I agree with that.
As we were talking about earlier on the show, Michael Shoyer, who, of course, doesn't care at all about what Israel wants in Syria.
His only point of view is what's best for the American people on this.
And he says to ally with Assad now, just as you said, because they're clients of Iran.
In his case, his objection, his specific objection was it's going to rally that many more people to ISIS's cause by for America intervening that much more on the side of the Shiites.
In fact, really, I mean, to the degree they helped them take Baghdad before, that's one thing.
But right now, because the American troops aren't on the ground there, it's the Iranian Quds Force is filling in that space.
And so you would have America outright backing Iran, not just de facto doing Iran's dirty work in Iraq from the fall of Saddam on, but outright flying their air cover, being their air force and engendering that whole giant backlash that who knows what kind of further consequences could flow from that.
So, yeah, I definitely I mean, backing Assad is almost as bad as backing the rebels against him in a sense.
Yeah, and there's one other thing I should have mentioned, but which I forgot to, which was we have to look at the Saudi role.
So the Saudi Arabians are locked in this very heated regional struggle with the Iranians.
And if the United States did support Assad in Syria, they would probably end up seeing a full scale full scale schism between themselves and and the Saudi Arabians, which is something the US does not want to do, particularly because of its obvious power as an oil producing state and because they've given them so much, so many resources in the past 10 to 20 years that it would be it would be kind of insane for them to go back on their their agreements with the Saudis.
So that's another huge reason they don't want to alienate Saudi Arabia and or Israel, for that matter.
And yeah, I think it does come at the expense of American interests, the American people.
But unfortunately, I don't think that these empire empire building games are really done with the interests of the average guy on the street.
There's more about the adventurism politicians and lining the pockets of investors.
Yeah.
All right now, so we got very little time left, but we have Obama's announced strategy of continuing to back supposedly build up his third force in Syria, whatever phantoms and jihadists that he wants to arm up there and team up with the Kurds and the Shiite militias in the Iraqi army in Iraq.
Do you think that any and all of those groups combined, does anybody have the ability to actually dislodge these guys from Raqqa or Mosul without sending in the US army?
I don't know.
See, it's really difficult to say when it comes to war.
I mean, you saw that it was pretty successful in dislodging Gaddafi's army from Libya.
With their power and special forces.
Yeah, that's true.
Right.
But ISIS is not a it's not a military.
It's a it's a militia.
Right.
Yeah.
They can turn back into a into an insurgency just by snapping their fingers.
They can go from state right back again.
Exactly.
And so I really, really good, really good quote recently by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, where he compared ISIS to a to a tech startup versus a corporation.
And ISIS is like a it's like a startup and an army is like a corporation.
And really, you need a militia.
You need a startup to fight a startup.
And whether or not these these particular militias have the grit to take out ISIS, I think ISIS, I really don't know.
Send in the PKK.
All right.
We got to go.
Thanks so much for your time.
Appreciate it.
That's Waleed Farwana, everybody.
The history of the Islamic State at Antiwar dot com.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for having me on.
This is Michael Oren.
Now, he's saying this just a few weeks ago when he has no longer been the Israeli ambassador to the United States for half a year or so.
OK, so and he does say you can hear his disclaimer.
I'm not speaking for the Israeli government.
I'm just speaking for myself.
But then over and over again, he says.
So from the Israeli government's point of view, this is what we want to see.
And, you know, that's where he's actually being honest.
He's speaking for Netanyahu and their government and their policy and our government's policy because it's their government's policy these last three years.
And it sounds crazy on the face of it.
And that's why Jeffrey Goldberg kind of scoots his chair back and says, oh, geez, I don't know, pal, about this.
But you should know that he said this as he was still in transition as the outgoing ambassador last October.
The article.
Well, this is the Haaretz version, but there's no the original was in the Jerusalem Post.
Hang on, let me add the Jerusalem Post, I get it just right for you.
Um.
I like doing footnotes, man, it's important you get your footnotes right.
He told the Jerusalem Post, come on, Google, I said.
All right, well, fine, I'll settle for the Haaretz version, then.
Ambassador Orin, Israel has wanted Assad ousted since the Syria war began in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.
Israel's envoy to the United States, still currently serving at the time, says Jerusalem prefers bad guys who aren't backed by Iran, adds that Assad's overthrow could also weaken Hezbollah.
And so there you go.
That was what he said in the initial message.
This is a direct quote from Orin.
The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted Bashar Assad to go.
We always preferred the bad guys who weren't backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.
In this case, being Al-Qaeda.
In a war between Assad and Hezbollah and Iran versus Al-Qaeda.
Israel preferred Al-Qaeda, that was what he said when he was still the ambassador of the United States.
Here he is elaborating on video.
You can hear him in his own words, Ambassador Michael Orin, former Ambassador Michael Orin, with Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
I'm going to stay in there for another couple more weeks.
What do you think your country is doing in order to protect your interests and how are you working to align with other partners?
All right, keep in mind, I don't speak for the government anymore.
I'm speaking for me and Jeff.
And what I'm going to say is harsh, perhaps a little edgy, but if we have to choose the lesser of evils here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites, for the Sunnis.
You're not speaking for me.
OK, it's a lesser evil.
It's an evil, believe me, it's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 700, 800 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against the proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets, the other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.
And again, I'm speaking entirely for myself.
As the Sykes-Picot system breaks down, Israel has got to guard its borders.
We have built a high-tech fence very quickly along our Egyptian border.
We're building a high-tech fence along our Syrian border.
We have a primary interest in maintaining the stability of Jordan.
Our security border is not the Jordanian-Israeli border.
It's the Jordanian-Iraqi border.
Jordan, among other things, is what keeps that mess out of our backyards.
And we'll be working to shore up Jordan.
And I know when I was in war at Washington...
Anyway, so point being, there you have it.
He specifically identifies them, too.
Who is it he's talking about?
Is he talking about the moderate rebels?
No.
They've got the suicide bombers on that side.
And then on the other side, they've got rockets and access to nuclear capability.
Yeah, right.
Rockets, he means Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
And no, Iran is not making nuclear weapons.
They never were.
And if they ever were, they would have a hundred by now.
It's 2014 and a half plus now.
It's the future.
And the reason they don't have any is because they never were making them this whole time.
So even when he's being honest, it's not like you can't it's not like you can rely on somebody like this to actually be honest about the facts.
But at least he's being honest about Israel's policy and therefore Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's policy.
Since 2011.
And I'll say it again, I said a million times, I can't figure out for the life of me how these kooks think that even a boiling cauldron of suicide bomber chaos on their northern border is better than Assad, who uses his entire state army to keep his own people at bay for them.
Basically, he might as well be their guy.
He hasn't done a thing about the Golan Heights the entire time he's been in power.
Oh, you stole it, huh?
OK, fine, is basically his answer to that and his support for Hezbollah's nil and his assassination of Rafik Hariri never happened.
That was a frame up job.
And then when they told him, get your army the hell out of southern Lebanon, he did.
The fact that that only benefited Hezbollah.
Well, you're stupid then for blaming an assassination on Syrian forces.
Blaming an assassination on Syria and forcing their secular army out, if that's your problem.
But you see here how there's daylight between Israeli foreign policy and American foreign policy.
And American foreign policy instead goes along, there is no daylight, really, there's a there's a foreign policy, there's a daylight in our interests, there is no daylight in our foreign policy.
That's the problem I'm meaning to highlight for you here.
And, you know, the Boiling Cauldron Doctrine, there's a lot to that, I mean, Wolfgang in the chat room is saying, hey, look, man, Michael Ledeen forever called it the Boiling Cauldron, let's let's be revolutionaries.
In fact, I have a clip of Michael Ledeen saying, why do they call us conservatives?
I don't know.
We're not conservatives.
We're revolutionaries.
Yeah, we know.
They just want to overturn everything, expedite the chaotic collapses.
David Wilmser put it in about referring to Syria in his study, Coping with Crumbling States.
And there's the Yanan plan going back to the 80s.
And the clean break doesn't really say we want chaos.
They want order along their newly drawn lines and whatever.
I tend to think.
And really, if you look at the policy in the Iraq war, look at it right now.
They're doing everything they can to get the Kurds to stick with Baghdad as long as possible.
Netanyahu is saying secede and the Americans are saying, no, don't.
Well, yeah, so the Israelis, they may be pulling clothes.
I don't think the I think the boiling cauldron that exists there now is it is because of America doing what the Israelis want mostly, and that includes with the invasion of Iraq.
But the Americans, I don't think, have been trying to do like Michael Ledeen and create all this chaos.
They just can't help it.
Once you accept the premises of of Ariel Sharon foreign policy, well, then this is what happens.
Just weeks before the war, Bush said, what's a Shia?
He had no idea at all.
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