10/16/14 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I got Peter Van Buren on the line here.
He's got a brand new one here at tomdispatch.com.
Seven bad endings to the new war in the Middle East.
The new war.
I think that's what we'll call it.
I like it.
It's the same war, but still.
Hey, there he is.
Hey.
Just a quick update for your listeners.
My website, wementwell.com, appears to be under a denial of service attack.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
If you're not able to reach the site there, you can read my stuff, today's post, the one you're referring to on tomdispatch.com, on Huffington Post, on truthout.org, and a lot of other places around the Internet.
But if you can't get directly through to my site, keep trying, or access the content on another site.
Oh, man.
Sorry to hear that.
Whoever's out there doing the denial of service attack, yeah, we'll keep looking for you.
Yeah.
Well, good luck with that, too.
And I hope your server company's got you back on that pretty well.
Yeah, I'm using a server right in Fort Meade, Maryland.
They ought to have pretty bad security.
Yeah, I got a great deal on it.
All I had to do was write my passwords down in the margins of my last year's tax returns.
Right.
Anyway, we've got serious things to talk about, and that are the seven worst-case scenarios that I was able to come up with from Iraq.
And I'll just warn listeners that there's only seven because we ran out of space.
Yeah.
It would be easy to continue and add to that list.
But we can focus on those seven today, and then as events continue to tumble into the abyss, we can always come back and add to them.
Well, I got a hundred more, so, yeah.
So, yes, certainly, the bulk of this article, Peter, is about the relationship between the Kurds in all the different countries and where they rely there in the region of Kurdistan, and especially their relationship with the Turks in the midst of all of this.
So you can take it and run with it from there, please.
Sure.
And this is not to discount the ongoing crisis in Iraq, and we'll circle back to that.
But what I really wanted to do by talking about the Kurds and the Turks was emphasize that the conflict that the United States has kicked off now in the Middle East is very much a network, if you will, in the sense that you can't disturb or alter or shut down one node without necessarily affecting the others.
And that's what's going on here.
In a very brief summary, the United States, desperate for somebody's boots on the ground that aren't ours, has dramatically empowered Kurdish forces.
Some of these Kurdish forces are in part of Iraq that everyone knows as Kurdistan, and some of them are in Syria.
But some of them are also in a cross-border area that Turkey shares with both Iraq and Syria.
That part of the world, the borders are quite artificial and quite porous.
Turkey and the Kurds fought a bitter insurgency over the 1980s.
37,000 people died.
And even though some European diplomacy put that problem under wraps for a while, the Turks and the Kurds are no friends of each other.
Do they have a big war all the way through the 1990s, too?
It may have gone on longer, yeah.
I remember reading back then, I think Noam Chomsky was the only one who talked about it, but he was just absolutely livid about all of Bill Clinton's support for Turkey in the midst of their maskers of civilian Kurds in that insurgency, counterinsurgency.
That's an important thing, because I've already been flooded.
Apparently the Kurdish supporters have been able to get through to my website today.
Maybe they're the ones doing the denial of service, who have accused me of siding with the Turks in a genocide against Kurds and all that.
And I really have no position on who's right and who's wrong.
I'm trying to explain what's going on as best I can to an American audience unfamiliar with these things.
So that's an important difference.
My bottom line was just a point of fact.
I sure didn't mean to accuse you of nothing.
No, no, understood, but it's something that keeps coming up, as everyone can't find new things to be polarized about.
Bottom line here is that by arming the Kurds, the United States has frightened the Turks into digging in.
And that's why you don't see the Turks interceding in the war in Syria.
And that's why you do see the Turks conducting bombing operations against the Kurds.
So you've got this situation that the United States has created all by itself of basically putting two of our so-called allies into conflict with each other.
So the Kurds who are supposed to be fighting ISIS and the Turks who are supposed to be fighting ISIS instead are largely fighting each other.
And that's just one of so many of these, we'll say, unintended consequences, even though perhaps they could have been anticipated fairly easily.
Now let me stop you there for a minute and talk about that before we move on to further subjects.
It seems like not only is it kind of crazy for the Turks to be at least doing nothing about a crisis that is engendering a massive refugee crisis in their country, which is completely upending their entire relationship with the Kurds, which has been at some sort of ceasefire.
I guess the Kurdish leader, Akalan, is in prison, but he's been negotiating this whole time, but has said that if Kobani falls, that's it, negotiations are off, PKK goes back to war and all this kind of thing.
And so it seems like not only are there massive negative, immediate negative consequences for Turkey right here, but even worse, they're squandering what could be a wonderful opportunity to come in and say, you know what?
Yeah, we hate the PKK, we're mad at their friends in the YPG and whatever, but you know what?
We hate ISIS more and we're going to come into the rescue of the Syrian Kurds this time.
And it'll be, you know, a major plus in our negotiations with the Kurds that, after all, I mean, Erdogan has been trying to negotiate relative peace with them, right, this whole time.
And it's somewhat worked.
And so in what could have been a great boost to the negotiations, he's done the exact opposite and completely blown them up.
But it's not like he's going to be able to get rid of a fifth of his population.
It's just going to be another horrible war if all peace talks are off and it goes back to war.
And so what the hell is he doing?
Peter, help me understand.
You know, the short answer is I wish I knew at the level of understanding that I could say, well, here exactly is the true story, Scott.
I think it's a series of conflicting interests that Turkey is facing and they are trying to figure out which of these conflicting interests is going to be the one that we need to focus on.
And I think at the end of the day, what Turkey is mostly afraid of is a highly empowered Kurdish fighting force on its borders that will inflame the Kurdish minority inside of Turkey and essentially create either an insurgency or an open ground war that Turkey will have to deal with.
I think Turkey understood ISIS and perhaps does understand that ISIS at the present time has no great interest in Turkish territory.
And Turkey with the second largest army in NATO Europe, I mean we leave the United States out, is well in a position to secure its own borders against any kind of ISIS assault.
But that isn't even going to happen.
So I think the Turks have decided we've got to go one way or the other and what we're doing is to say we are not going to allow a powerful Kurdish army on our border.
Alright, well we've got to take this break.
When we get back, more with Peter Van Buren, formerly with the U.S. State Department for many years, author of We Met Well, and writing at TomDispatch.com.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast Peace Talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest, at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
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Alright y'all, welcome back.
It's Peter Van Buren on the show, formerly with the State Department, author of We Met Well, and the Ghosts of Tom Jode.
And here he is at TomDispatch.com.
Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East.
And he said his own website is under attack right now, but usually you can find it at wementwell.com.
And yeah, maybe you'll be able to get through, I don't know.
So we're talking about the new war, and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, and what all that has to do with it.
And here's something that's part of that, Peter, and that is that Erdogan still wants regime change against Assad far more than against Baghdadi.
Assad in Damascus far more than against Baghdadi in Raqqa.
And supposedly, at least, America's enemy is ISIS in here, and yet all of our allies, the Gulf allies, the Israelis, everyone hates Assad more.
And so these are the people that we're fighting, or they're not fighting with us, but they're our coalition against ISIS.
So what gives?
Well, there you go, Scott.
I mean, for America's plans in the Middle East now to succeed, basically all these countries have got to give up their national goals in favor of ours.
And that's not likely to happen.
America thinks it can thread the needle on this.
It thinks that it can pull out from Turkey, you know, some common ground, and use that from Israel, something else, from Saudi, something else.
And it thinks it can kind of piece this war together by managing the common elements against the disparate elements.
We'll see how that works out, but I think that it's impossible that it could ever succeed.
At the end of the day, these countries are far from stupid and are very much aware of what they're doing and what they want to accomplish.
The Turks have been at least passively supporting ISIS for a period of time against Assad.
And it's important to point out that until very recently, really two months ago, that was exactly in line with America's policies.
Our policy was to get rid of Assad.
And so what the Turks were doing, which fit their national goals to get rid of Assad, in fact dovetailed with what America wanted them to do, which was get rid of Assad.
And ISIS was the devil that you know that you're going to have to work with.
Then, since America changed its mind fairly quickly when it looked like Iraq was about to collapse two months ago, the Turks were like, yeah, good for you to be able to change your mind on a dime, but the rest of us are a little smarter and we're going to be looking at long-term goals.
Yeah.
Well, I'm sure Netanyahu, all Obama has to do is just pick up the phone and say, actually, wouldn't you rather keep Assad?
And then Netanyahu will jump, right?
Well, the Israelis are an interesting addition to this mix.
And I haven't seen a lot of mainstream commentary on the Israeli situation here.
But what's important to remember is that Israel, perhaps more than any other country in the world, does what it feels it needs to do in its own national interest.
And that national interest is primarily what it perceives as its own survival.
So right now, you can imagine the things the United States is saying behind the scenes to Israel to keep them from playing any part in all this because nothing would unite Sunni and Shia Arabs faster than the Israelis getting involved in this in some way.
I mean, the only thing the Arabs hate more than each other would be the Jews.
So Israel, I'm sure, is being begged, coerced, paid off, whatever you want to imagine, to stay out of this.
But the Israelis will only take that so far.
If this war spills across the border, the Golan Heights into their country, they will get involved.
If perhaps they see an opportunity to snip off some part of Syria that they need to bolster their defenses, they will get involved.
If any weapons of mass destruction that happen to be laying around Syria get pointed towards them, they will get involved.
And at that point, really, you might as well be throwing a match into a bucket of gasoline.
Things are going to go up.
So keep an eye on Israel.
Yeah, I mean, it's important to note, too, that whatever the Israelis' policy is, I mean, I don't know about all their domestic policies.
Well, yeah, a lot of those I do know also suck.
But their foreign policies also are always the height of stupidity and irresponsibility from the point of view of the Israeli government.
Every one of these attacks on Lebanon, every one of these attacks on the Gaza Strip, and never even mind the entire policy of the occupation, amounts to national suicide in the first place.
And for them to prefer, for the Israelis to prefer anyone to the Ba'athist regime in Damascus is insanity.
I mean, here's a guy who might as well have been an Israeli agent his whole life for all the trouble he's given them.
And they want to overthrow him in favor of the Bin Ladenites?
You know, throw your hands up, Scott, because the United States seems to believe that the Mideast is something of a chessboard, and that there's a peace labeled Saudi, and a peace labeled Israel, and a peace labeled Iran, and whatever, and that you can move these, that the United States has the ability to move these forces around, and that they will behave in an expected fashion, and according to our will.
You know, your remark just underscores the inherent complexity of all this.
Let's take Iran as another example.
The United States is somewhat bizarrely welcoming the Iranian intrusion into Iraq.
Iran was behind so many of the problems that we faced during the occupation.
And in fact, the commander of the Iraqi, the Iranian ground forces right now in Iraq, Suleiman, was one of the high-value targets that the United States searched for, but never was able to track down and kill during the occupation.
Yeah, he's also the guy who picked Nouri al-Maliki to be the prime minister.
And, you know, what a funny world.
Now the Iranians, who had to kind of play it cool and stay below the radar, now overtly have military forces on the ground in Iraq.
Their commander, who once was a wanted terrorist, is now coordinating with the United States.
And of course, that has to be happening at some level.
We got rid, the United States staged its own little mini-coup and got rid of Maliki, but installed another Shia prime minister who's from Maliki's own party, who in fact was associated with Maliki.
And the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that that new prime minister is planning to choose a Shia militia leader as his ministry of interior.
From the Bata Brigade?
From the Bata Brigade.
And as we all know, the Sunnis, as part of any kind of inclusionary government, at a minimum need to see the interior ministry and the defense ministry not given to a Shia, because those ministries have been used to suppress and oppress them for many, many years.
Not only is the new prime minister apparently giving that position to a Shia, he's giving it to a Shia with direct connection to the militias, which have been and are continuing to kill Sunnis.
Again...
Right, meaning not...
Just to clarify, meaning not fighting ISIS out on the battlefield, meaning murdering Sunni civilians.
Right, and what the militias are doing is saying, well ISIS are Sunnis and ISIS has occupied these towns with Sunnis in them, so therefore all the Sunnis there must be ISIS and we better just kill them all.
Yeah, maybe they really do work for the Israelis after all.
No, I'm just kidding.
Well, in many ways they work...
They work for the Israelis in the sense that they're working for Israeli goals, at the same time their actions benefit the Iranians, at the same time the United States is turning a blind eye to all this, believing that their actions are actually benefiting America's goals.
It just can't work, Scott, and the article that I wrote tried to break it down country by country and say worst case scenarios, but you know, every time I read the news I wonder if I really drew out the worst case scenario or whether there was a deeper pit that I didn't realize even existed.
Yeah, well, you know, I was telling everybody on the show yesterday about Ebola, that's usually never the worst case scenario, so try and relax, except, you know, with Iraq, that was worst case scenario, that still is absolutely worst case scenario and it sure does seem to be playing out and I can't predict the future either, but there are many of the hurdles here, absolutely impossible hurdles.
I mean, the one that you just mentioned is really what you're saying is Sunnistan has already declared independence and it's never coming back because Baghdad and all the land from there to Kuwait is ruled by the people who torture them to death with power drills and so that's it.
These are the people that Bush and Rumsfeld chose to run the country and this is what they did to it We're not going back in time to fix this.
Nope.
It's over.
It's done.
Peter Van Buren, everybody.
TomDispatch.com.
Talk to you soon.
Take care.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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