10/02/14 – Musa al-Gharbi – The Scott Horton Show

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Musa Al-Gharibi has this article in America.aljazeera.com.
By hyping ISIL threat, U.S. is falling into group's trap.
I would say by participating at all.
I think it makes the same point here.
Y'all ready?
Welcome to the show.
Musa, how are you doing?
Yes, I'm doing good.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show, and it's almost a magical thing that you've done here.
Try to analyze the situation and explain it to Americans in a way where it takes in other points of view than just American ones about what kind of consequences just might come from this war.
If the American people learned anything, if they didn't learn to stay out of the Middle East, at least they have learned that to fight anyone is to, at least in effect, fight for someone else over there.
And they're never quite sure who's who and what kind of consequences might come from their various interventions.
But then people like yourself who know a lot about the region don't seem to have too much of a hard time seeing from the point of view of different factions and being able to predict the absolutely horrible negative consequences that are sure to flow from the intervention.
So, you know, I think kind of like you in this article, I hardly know where to begin, but might as well start with the headline about the hype and about just the way that the U.S. government characterizes the Islamic State as they begin this war against them.
Yeah, so a big part that the administration has been arguing is that the Islamic State is in some way an existential threat to Americans and to the American homeland.
As I pointed out in my article, Senator Lindsey Graham famously said, we have to go fight them before they, quote, kill us all here at home, which The Daily Show did a good job of making fun of, as if ISIS has the capacity to kill 300 million Americans or even really any Americans here at home at this point.
So one, yeah, absolutely.
So ISIS is not a huge threat to America.
They're very focused right now on seizing and holding the territory they own, and part of the problem they're having in sort of holding that territory that they've seized is they have this legitimacy crisis where most of the people who they're overseeing don't see them as legitimate.
They don't see al-Baghdadi as the new caliph, and they don't see the ISIS group as representing Islam as they understand it.
In fact, the interpretation of Islam that ISIS relies on is this very specific interpretation of the Salafi strain of Islam, and Salafism is sort of a fringe interpretation of Islam in the first place.
It's mostly popular in the Gulf, a little bit in North Africa, but roughly 4% maybe of the region's total Muslim population subscribes to this belief system.
So even though a lot of the territories that ISIS has seized have been, quote, Sunni areas, most of the Sunnis who live in those areas don't think that ISIS's interpretation of Islam or of Sunnism speaks for them.
So what ISIS is trying to do right now to bolster their legitimacy is unite the public around some kind of other external threat that can help give them legitimacy as fighting against some kind of bad invader, which can distract the public from a lot of their failings and from some of these theological qualms that the locals might have.
Yeah, it's such an important point, and there's just no question about it from the American point of view that unless you lose, and there's a big caveat, unless you're completely crushed and conquered somehow, war is the health of the state.
Everybody rallies around the flag against the foreign threat.
And so like you're saying, these guys have a ton of problems.
They've made themselves absolutely hated everywhere they've been since they were created back in 2004.
And yet what this does is it helps strengthen their position and rally more people to their cause.
And we'll get to the war part, but like you're saying, just even characterizing them as some gigantic threat, never mind attacking them, it still builds them up as if not an actual aggressive threat, but as capable defenders in the minds of the locals.
And so whether they agree that Baghdadi ought to be the spiritual caliph or not, they'll take him as the head of state over Abadi or Barack Obama.
Yeah, absolutely.
Right now the reason why ISIS was able to seize as much area as they have been in Iraq and Syria isn't because the people there accept Baghdadi's theological views, but primarily because they have grievances with their own government, the government of Syria, the government of Iraq, and they feel like ISIS right now is successfully resisting those political forces.
But the problem is, the sort of government that they've set up while resisting Bashar al-Assad or al-Maliki previously in Iraq is in some ways worse than the situation they were in before.
And so if you leave ISIS to govern in that way, they're arguably stretched too thin, and with pressure from these other governments and then just building pressure from the territories they're already holding, from people who grow increasingly discontented with ISIS's rule, over time they would probably just collapse under their own weight.
All right, now I'm sorry to interrupt.
We've got to take this break, but hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Musa al-Gharibi writing at america.aljazeera.com.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
By a hyping ISIL threat, the U.S. is falling into groups trap.
And this has been going on since September 12th, since the night of September 11th.
Oh, it's the giant Islamo-fascist caliphate.
They're like the Soviet Union, only don't look for them on a map because they actually don't hold any territory anywhere.
But when they let bin Laden go, there were only a couple of dozen of these guys.
Now it's a mass movement, as our guest says, across North Africa.
It's small in number but still pretty widespread and very influential across even West Africa, from Mali to India now, all because of American foreign policy.
But they just love it, and they just love pretending that even this crappy little caliphate with an army of maybe 20,000 guys in the worst part of Iraq is somehow the new Nazi German Reich taking over the planet and only Superman, a.k.a. your neighbor's kid, can go stop them.
And it helps them.
It makes them look great to people who might be considering challenging them.
Especially the part about, and we're coming for them too, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, so one thing to bear in mind, so these groups have had a long history of luring America over into the Middle East, and then having America basically leave while these groups remain, because it's impossible to really purge them, in part because they're non-state actors.
So when you ask a question like, where is Al-Qaeda, or where is the Islamic State, they're kind of everywhere and they're kind of nowhere.
So you can't ever really purge them, and so when they survive, and they just keep sort of whittling America's will down over time, and then America withdraws, they consider that a victory.
They consider it a victory when they drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.
They consider it a victory when the U.S. drew down in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Now they consider it a victory.
They're going to consider this a victory as well.
They'll consider them having defeated both of the world's great superpowers.
And that's really what they're trying to do, is to get us to go over there, to offer us one more crushing defeat, which will reduce our will to go over there in the future, and simultaneously it'll give them more legitimacy there at home.
Yep.
And the whole thing is so cynical too, when, you know, exploiting the fear of this tiny group was used to get the American people to overthrow Iraq, invade it in 2003, and destroy it, and stay, for that matter, and give the Shia no reason to compromise with the Sunni, because Bush helped them take the capital city.
So just strand them in no man's land and forget them kind of thing, which helped lead to this current crisis.
And then Obama's so cynical in his approach to Al Qaeda, that after all, we're talking about some suicide bomber losers, you know, outlaws, wherever they go, who, you know, be realistic compared to the superpower, they're nothing at all.
But so then what does he do?
He backs them, at least indirectly, for three years straight in Syria, and helps their war and works with the satellite states.
Even David Sanger in the New York Times as early as spring of 2012 said, all the guns and money are going to the al-Nusra jihadist suicide bombers, because, hey, guess what?
Moderates don't fight.
It's guys who don't mind dying who are fighting in this thing in Syria right now.
Everybody knew it all along, and Obama took the threat so not seriously at all.
He went along with the McCain in the Israel lobby and the Saudi lobby on saying that Bashar al-Assad, ISIS and Nusra's only real, you know, counterweight in Syria at all, is the enemy, and that he ought to be the one who's weakened in this thing.
And they've kept that policy up for three years.
So, you know, it's true, like you say, hey, these guys are kind of scattered, and you can't ever really completely get rid of them or anything like that, but boy, were they down and out after 2007.
Boy, were they nowhere until they were re-energized, as Patrick Coburn puts it, by the Western-backed rebellion in Syria.
Oh, and I shouldn't lead the French and the British off the hook, because they've been intervening over there with us this whole time, too.
Yeah, I wrote a piece about that a few years ago, too, called The Arab Spring and the New Mujahideen, but it's basically the U.S. response to the Arab uprisings, not just in Syria, but also before that in Libya as well.
Basically, in Libya they overstepped their U.N. mandate to protect civilians and decided to overthrow the government.
And they did that partly by just dumping a whole bunch of weapons into Libya, which were not very well secured.
And most of those weapons ended up in the hands of Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, and a lot of them made their way to Syria.
We know that for a fact.
I mean, even that was in the New York Times, that, you know, America is moving guns, not just Fox News on the Benghazi case or anything, but even the New York Times before the Benghazi scandal ever broke out in 2012 were saying, yeah, here's the CIA effort to ship these guns and fighters off to Syria for the next one.
No secret at all.
Yeah, that's another layer.
So a lot of these weapons that were not secured ended up in the hands of Al-Qaeda-related groups, and they used them to carry out operations in Algeria and Mali.
And then in Syria they made attempts in Jordan with these weapons.
So that would have been bad enough, and you would think that the U.S. would have learned its lesson.
But what they did is they tried to go in there and secure these weapons eventually through the CIA program.
But rather than trying to secure those weapons and take them out of the region, they decided to try to funnel them into different opposition groups in Syria.
And again, most of those weapons that even from the CIA program to ostensibly arm the, quote, moderates, a lot of those same assets ended up in the hands of Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups.
And then later, one of the decisive moves that ISIS made was they eventually attacked the, quote, moderate rebels and seized the storehouses that held all the aid that we were providing to the rebels.
They basically just seized all that stuff ISIS did.
And that was one of the big things that they gave them a good base of resources and things to fight with in Syria in the first place.
And then when they rolled in with all these weapons, America gave the FSA and Arar al-Sham and whatever, and then they roll into Iraq with those and take everything we gave the Iraqi army that was left in Sunnistan there, whatever you want to call it.
And by the way, you know, I have a source from Public Radio International, one from foreignpolicy.com from before the fall of Mosul, where they talked about supplying the Toyota pickup trucks to the FSA.
And I was wondering whether you know for a fact or have a good source, and I'm not saying you wrote about this or anything, sorry it's kind of out of the blue question, but about whether those in fact were the same Toyotas that ISIS drove into Iraq when they sacked Mosul in June.
Do you know about that?
I can't speak for sure on the Toyotas to say if those were the same ones, but again, a lot of the assets and resources, both lethal and non-lethal, that were provided to the moderate opposition have ended up in the hands of al-Nusra and also in the hands of ISIS.
So we know that for a fact.
I can't speak to the Toyotas specifically, but as a general trend, that's true.
And this problem of not securing weapons that they did in Libya was a lesson that they should have learned after the 2003 war in Iraq.
The U.S. disbanded the Iraqi army and didn't secure the arms depots and things like this, and that was one of the main mistakes that gave rise to the Iraqi insurgency in the first place in Iraq.
So you would think after having fought for 10 years in Iraq as a result of this error, that they would have learned from it, but instead they repeat the same mistake in Libya, and then they funnel weapons into the hands of non-state actors, repeating the mistakes they made with the mujahideen during the Cold War.
So it's unfortunate that the U.S. administration seems bound and determined not to learn at all from its own history.
Or maybe they have learned, and this is just work, as they call it, creating jobs to do.
It's certainly not lost on them that they can only fail up.
I wonder, is there any chance I could keep you one more segment after the top of the hour?
Because I really wanted to ask you, and I'm sorry I kind of wasted time with other stuff.
I really want to ask you more about the so-called religious legitimacy of this caliph, Baghdadi, according to the other Sunni imams in the region, which you seem to know quite a bit about, and about the percentages of people who you could rank as Salafists, Bin Ladenites, et cetera.
But we're just about out of time for this segment.
Is there any way that you could stay one more with us here?
Yeah, sure.
It would be my pleasure.
Okay, great.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
I'm on the Liberty Radio network here from noon to 3 Eastern weekdays, KPFK on Sunday mornings.
All right, I'm talking with Musa Algarbi.
Oh, Jesus, I've been saying your name wrong this whole time.
It's all right.
You got it.
Garbi, right?
I had some extra syllables in there.
I apologize about that.
I should have asked you.
Don't worry.
My ignorance shining through again.
This happens.
By hyping ISIL threat, U.S. is falling into group's trap.
That's the article at America.
AlJazeera.com.
I think we ran it yesterday or the day before at AntiWar.com.
A very important piece.
And so one of the things that you mentioned there is at the start, what we're talking about is how America and allied response to the Islamic State just makes them stronger, helps them accomplish their PR goals and that kind of thing.
But one of the things that you were saying at the beginning is about how they desperately need this help because the legitimacy of this guy, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as the caliph and leader of all Sunni Muslims on earth is quite in dispute.
He's got, in other words, that's just one of his own problems that he already has to deal with, that we're in effect helping him paper over with this policy.
But so please explain about that and just how much consensus this guy has because he must have some.
Everybody likes a winner.
And he's carved out a state that is not run by a corrupt king with a solid gold jet like over in the UAE.
I mean people got to be looking at this like, you know, sort of like they looked at the Taliban.
Well, at least they're not Hekmatyar.
You know what I mean?
Yes.
So there's actually a couple of important points that you just mentioned there.
So I'll start with the idea that you mentioned about how the Saudis and a lot of the Gulf monarchs are considered highly corrupt.
And that's important to note because when President Obama formed this coalition to carry out these attacks in Syria, he's selected almost entirely from the Gulf monarchies.
In fact, all the surviving monarchies in the region, with the exception of Morocco and Oman, are taking part in these strikes.
And they're widely perceived across the Sunni world as being corrupt, autocratic.
So the idea that these people carrying out the strikes are going to be welcomed as legitimate by the people of Iraq or Syria is ludicrous, despite the fact that they're all Sunnis.
The sort of Sunnism that is practiced in the South, in Saudi Arabia, is definitely not the sort that's practiced in Iraq.
And more than that, there's these political differences.
So under Saddam Hussein, which was an ostensibly Sunni regime, Saddam wanted to go to war with Saudi Arabia, which is what provoked Operation Desert Shield, and later Storm, when he was trying to invade Kuwait, another ostensibly Sunni country.
And there's this long-standing enmity between the people of Iraq and the Gulf monarchs.
So the idea that we're having the Gulf monarchs drop bombs on the people of Iraq and Syria, and they'll be okay with it because they're Sunnis, is just crazy.
And it speaks more of the administration's ignorance about Islam and about the dynamics in the region than anything.
I mean, it's insane.
But regarding al-Baghdadi's legitimacy, as I mentioned at the top of the hour, most of the world's Muslims are Sunni, but in the Middle East it's about 50-50 Sunni-Shia.
And that's because most of the world's Muslims are in Asia and other places outside of the Middle East.
But in the Middle East it's about 50-50 Sunni-Shia, but only about 4% of the total Muslim population subscribes to what we call Salafism, which is the interpretation that al-Baghdadi, that ISIS and Al-Qaeda and related groups draw from.
Although even the Salafi strain of Islam has different strains, and a lot of Salafi leaders have also rejected the legitimacy of al-Baghdadi's caliphate.
And just real quick, could you recommend a good footnote for me about that 4%?
Sure.
In one of my articles recently, if you go to the website for the Think Tank I work with, www.sysmec.org, I have two recent pieces that I wrote about the airstrikes that are full of references.
One of them is called Al-Qaeda Contra the Caliphate, A Guide for the Perplexed, which explains the differences theological and ideological between Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and it goes into Salafism a lot more, so there's a lot of good references there.
And then another one is, the title eludes me, but it's something about providing context about the airstrikes in Syria.
It was syndicated later on Truthout, that's also available on the Sysmec website, and it has some more information about this point.
Okay, great.
I always wonder about that, but anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt though, please continue.
So regarding al-Baghdadi's legitimacy, most of the religious leaders in the Middle East and around the world, most of the Muslim religious establishment has denounced al-Baghdadi's caliphate as illegitimate, and that includes, again, most Salafi theologians.
So the U.S. was trying to get these Sunni religious leaders in Saudi Arabia to denounce the caliphate as illegitimate, but the flaw in this logic is thinking that most of the people who work with ISIS or join ISIS or allow ISIS in are motivated primarily by religion, which is not the case.
We know that a lot of the people who welcomed ISIS in, again, it was because of grievances they had against their governments, which were not religious, they were political and sociological grievances they had against their governments.
A lot of the people who join ISIS do it for money, especially in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has recruited a large mercenary force.
A lot of the people there are desperate, and they don't have a lot of ways to earn money, and ISIS pays them a lot, so they're basically mercenaries.
And then even a lot of the people who join from abroad are not really well-educated on Islam, and aren't really listening to these religious leaders who are condemning ISIS.
There was this great story just recently, which Mefti Hassan covered in the Huffington Post, about how the FBI arrested these people who were going from the U.S. to go fight in Syria on behalf of ISIS, and one of the last things they bought before they left was Islam for dummies, because this is how ill-informed they were about Islam, they wanted some kind of a handbook so they knew something about Islam when they went over there to go fight with ISIS.
They were of Arab descent, but they weren't particularly devout.
And from what we can see, a lot of the people who are going over there to fight from abroad, from France, from Britain, from America, these are not people who are raised Muslim, who have a long, deep sort of religious reverence or deep religious background, and they're not the sort of people who are going to be listening to different jurists of the Arab world and going, oh, okay, well I guess I should stay home or something like that.
And they're not going to live very long over there either, these guys you're talking about.
Absolutely.
I mean, a lot of them are, of course, not well-trained in combat, but they're not going to survive very long, so the threat of them coming back is probably not super high, and if they do come back, a lot of them will be totally disabused of whatever weird fantasy they had about what they were going to be doing over there.
So, and I don't just mean like the kept sock puppet imams of the Saudi kingdom or whatever, but is there a consensus of more or less free-willed Sunni imams out there that basically this guy Baghdadi is a joke and they don't bestow any legitimacy on him at all?
Or does he have too much real power for them to be able to categorize him that way?
I know I'm being overly simplistic, but I got a tiny brain and I'm trying to understand, and I assume that it's something like what I'm guessing there, but I don't know.
And, of course, it's a great talking point for peace.
It's a great talking point, and it has to be true for me to want to use it, really, but like the 4% Salafis and that kind of thing, so that people who buy into propaganda can be helped to see through it.
Yeah, I mean, the overwhelming majority of theologians around the world, especially in the region, think that Baghdadi is a joke theologically.
Now, ISIS is not a joke militarily.
They've been able to seize a lot of land and things like that, but the fact that they're able to seize this land, and especially the fact that they're able to resist these governments, the government of Iraq and the government of Syria, is what the source of the appeal is.
Because a lot of the people who are, again, on the ground, who are legitimately joining ISIS from the indigenous population, not because they're desperate and they need money, but because they agree with the movement.
And what they agree with is not Baghdadi and his religious goals or whatever.
Most of them are not super-educated on a lot of that.
It's that they have a grievance against their government, and right now ISIS is the biggest force capable of resisting their government.
And resistance has turned primarily violent, and largely as a result, in the case of Syria, largely of outside powers fomenting this rebellion and escalating and propagating it over the last three years, which is regrettable.
But yeah, so Baghdadi, there's almost probably no one in the Middle East, except for this very small sliver of people, look to Baghdadi as a legitimate religious leader.
But he does have a lot of appeal as someone resisting the power, as someone resisting the, you know...
And this is the problem, is Washington's actions in putting U.S. planes and later maybe boots on the ground in the region, and then having these corrupt Gulf monarchies also participating in the bombing campaign, that just reinforces Baghdadi's legitimacy as someone fighting the system, fighting the power, resisting these corrupt forces.
So it's giving Baghdadi more legitimacy where his strength lies, which is in fighting these corrupt powers.
It's not that they agree with his vision of Islam or anything, it's that they agree with his desire to purge the region of dictators and monarchs.
All right, and with that, I've kept you way over time here now, even into this commercial break, so I better let you go.
But I sure do appreciate your time on the show.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for having me.
All right, that is Musa Al-Gharbi.
And apologies again about messing up your name there.
Here he is.
He's at Truthout, as well as Al Jazeera.
America.aljazeera.com.
By hyping ISIL threat, U.S. is falling into group's trap.
We'll be right back.
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