10/30/14 – Matthew Hoh – The Scott Horton Show

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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.
On the line, I got Matthew Ho.
He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and is the former director of the Afghanistan Study Group, a network of foreign and public policy experts and professionals advocating for a change in US strategy in Afghanistan.
He was a Marine in Iraq and then State Department weenie in Afghanistan, and now he's writing for the Huffington Post.
Welcome back to the show, Matthew.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Well, let me make sure I got you up loud enough here.
Yeah, I should be fine.
Hey, so very interesting article here.
It seems like when you write stuff, you're writing stuff that other people, they're not really looking at what you're looking at, but I am, and you're making a very important point here, at least to start.
It's a great place to start this conversation, and that is the war crimes of the good guys in the Iraq War, the side that America is taking, once again, the side of the Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
Correct, and that's, I think, something that everyone needs to understand with this conflict in Iraq, but this pertains to many, many other conflicts, probably 99% of conflicts, that there are no good guys, that there are two sides or multiple sides who are fighting for the benefit of a few, either for financial or territorial or just strictly power reasons or maybe for ideological or religious reasons, but that there are rarely ever a good side.
Rarely ever is there a side with who are wearing white hats, and you see that very clearly in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, that what is motivating most of the people to fight, whether they're fighting on behalf of the Islamic State, whether they're fighting on behalf of Sunni tribes, whether they're fighting on behalf of the Kurdish forces or on Bashar Assad's forces, on the Iraqi government's forces, is to protect their own population, their own people from the other side, and that's what makes these civil wars so particularly nasty in that this cycle of violence is so easy to spin out of control and create Frankensteins like you see with the Islamic State because, like I said, there are no good guys, and when there are no good guys, everybody is fighting to protect themselves, and this report from Manifest International that came out earlier this month clearly shows that as bad as the Islamic State is, in many ways, the Iraqi government is just as bad.
Yeah, I think this has been part of a problem of the whole war is that they've never, well, nowadays they talk a little bit about the factions on TV, but they've got no background because in the whole second Iraq war, they never stopped and said, here's the Dawah Party, here's the Supreme Islamic Council, here's Muqtada al-Sadr, and here are the different Sunni factions, and here are the different Kurdish factions, and why are they fighting, and any of these things.
They never explained all that.
They always just, well, you know, it's us and the Iraqi people versus the terrorists and whatever crap, and they never really explained what the hell is the Bata Brigade anyway, and so now they're kind of starting fresh, but without the history, and of course, for anybody who was paying attention and you had to pay close attention then, or I guess lived through it like you did, who knows who the Bata Brigade are, they know that they don't have any more claim on moral legitimacy than ISIS, and that's in the middle of ISIS machine gunning their prisoners to death and crucifying them upside down, and enslaving and raping and killing women and children.
Bata Brigade are no better men than them.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that is what needs to be understood, what has to be understood if we're going to prevent future conflicts.
I get discouraged with these conflicts because I think once the fighting has been joined, once the cycle of violence has began, it has to peter out on its own, and of course, accelerants can occur such as outside powers or outside forces getting involved and providing money and weapons or training or encouragement or legitimacy, as we often do, or starting in the first place, as we often do.
But the key to understanding this and preventing future conflicts is understanding that there are no good guys in these situations, and that's the average people who are being hurt, who are being destroyed, who are suffering from other groups, and that it cuts across all these groups.
So it's just one broad swath of suffering with these various groups leading the fighting that have no moral legitimacy, have no reason for their actions, other for their own personal gain.
So, yeah, I was going to say, I'm not sure if you're familiar, but it's just a point of agreement with you.
Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, I mean, I talked with him all about this, but most notably, I think, was what he told Lou Dobbs on Fox News when Lou Dobbs said, well, geez, so what are you saying?
Because he was talking about the absurdity of backing the rebels in Syria.
And Lou Dobbs said, well, so should we back Assad?
And Scheuer is the type who, you know, is very much for killing the enemy.
He's not squeamish about that whatsoever, very kind of conservative nationalist on those grounds.
And so purely for pragmatic reasons, he said, no, we should not back Assad.
We should have never backed the rebels against him, which was insanity.
To back him is just as bad, basically, because then you're outright aligning with their sectarian enemies in a way that just reinforces their position better and makes them, makes their propaganda that they're the defenders of the true faith from all these different apostates aligned with the Christians from across the sea, which only makes them more powerful.
Absolutely.
You know, and you've got to put yourself, you know, I saw CNN had a photo today of a grieving Kurdish mother in northern Syria.
And the photo was of her son who looked like he was probably in his early 20s who had been killed a couple of months ago in the fighting.
And any one of us who, you know, you both you and I, Scott, if we lived in northern Syria, we'll be fighting ISIS just in the same vein.
If we were living in the Sunni parts of Iraq or the Sunni parts of Syria, we're more than likely maybe not be a part per se of the Islamic state, but we would be supportive of them to a certain extent because that's in the interest of our own survival and the survival of our families.
And that's what I think, again, that the point that people have to grasp here is this desperation that fuels this cycle of violence and how, as you just commented, and Michael Schur is a great example because, as you said, he's not squeamish about killing people.
It's not a question of being tough or being able to kill, you know.
It's a question of being smart about it and understanding what is the causes of these conflicts and why does the conflict keep growing?
Why does it keep building?
Why does it keep spiraling?
And when you understand that, it's because these are civil wars that are pitting one ethnicity or sect against the other and basically threatening each other with annihilation.
Well, then how does it not escalate?
If the Islamic state is approaching your Kurdish village, how do the Kurds not fight and how does the Sunnis not support the Islamic state when Shia troops are moving on their village?
And then you get in the retribution of it, right?
So you sacked, you burned, you raped my people.
I'm going to do the same to you.
Let me ask you this.
Now, Matthew, do you think that Obama and then believe their own hype when they talk about, well, we've got to help the Iraqis fight these guys?
I mean, I fear a lot of times they believe their own propaganda, their own oversimplifications, that they don't even want to admit the sectarian nature really of the fight in their plan, that they just sort of look at ISIS like it's this alien force that came, you know, from outer space or from over some border somewhere, never mind, and grafted itself on when they had to have the agreement of a great many Sunnis, as you're describing.
And of course, I can't let you answer now because the music's playing and we've got to go to break.
But we'll be right back with Matthew Ho in just a sec, y'all.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Matthew Ho, former Marine and State Department and critic of Iraq and Afghan war policy, a writer at HuffingtonPost.com.
The latest is, With America's Help, Iraq's Cycle of Violence Spirals.
So a couple of references now, the last war and this one, to the narrative as told by the state and for the most part the media, Matthew, about how, yeah, it's us and the people of Iraq versus the bad guy terrorists who are doing the bad things that make us have to fight them.
And I would guess that a lot of the bad decisions made in the last war were based because they at least had to pretend to believe that while they were doing some of the horrible things that they did, like hiring the Bata Brigade and the El Salvador option to create the damn civil war in the first place.
But then I hear them talking about the situation in Iraq that way now, as though the Islamic State doesn't really exist, as though Sunnistan has not really declared independence, as though Baghdad is still really the capital of all of Iraq and this is just a short-term aberration and it's still us and the Iraqis versus the terrorists and not much further identification for what they're about than that.
So anyway, what do you think about that?
And I'm sorry I'm asking you to describe what you think they think, but I really wonder what you think they think they're doing over there.
You know, I really do believe with the Bush administration in 2003 that they really thought they were going to change the Middle East, that they really thought that they were going to make these client, Western-friendly democracies that were going to follow their lead and they really thought that they really believed in themselves and their power to change history and their power to change peoples.
With this administration, I think it's much more cynical.
I think some of them do believe because when you lie continuously, ultimately you believe the lies.
Some of it I think is just naive, some of it is just straight political necessity.
It's better for a black Democrat to be tough and bomb people than to face the political suggestion that he's not tough or that he's weak and then frankly a lot of it is they just don't know what they're doing.
They're receiving bad advice.
They're taking advice from people who are either profiting from the wars in this case of say think tanks that are funded by the defense industry or from people who have been involved in these campaigns from the start and who cannot split themselves, their personal legacy and their careers from the actual policies.
So I think it's a mix of things but none of it is quite any good and I think when you speak to these people in Washington in both administrations, particularly say on the National Security Council, their lack of understanding or lack of appreciation for what life is really like in the midst of those wars, for who is actually on the different sides, for what our quote unquote allies are actually like, who actually comprises our enemies is often turned upside down.
Yeah.
Well, I mean that's a huge part of this is the anti-Assad politics of the Israel lobby and for that matter the Israeli state and the Saudi one too and all of that pressure when at least, like Sawyer was saying, at least stopping financing and supporting his opponents would make sense, you know, allow him to go ahead and fight but it's domestic politics that dictates an exactly, completely wrong-headed strategy for what's actually going on over there.
And the refusal to acknowledge a mistake.
You know, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you cannot acknowledge any mistake.
You cannot, you know, and this goes, you know, I'm a big, one of the most important books I've ever read was David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest and that describes the Kennedy and the Johnson administration's, you know, continual buildup in Vietnam and decision-making involved in that as well as Bill Moyers wrote an excellent piece about five years ago on his own personal view of Johnson making that decision to escalate the war in Vietnam and you see just as now his choices are all, his choices were binded in, were bound in by domestic political concerns.
He has to go fight the Vietnamese.
He has to go fight the Communists.
He has to fight the Reds or else how can he stare down these senators who are going to go after him?
And the same thing too, I think, with the Obama administration, you see the same thing.
We have, I mean, if we don't bomb, then we're going to have John McCain and Lindsey Graham on Sunday morning television shows coming after us and I think that has as much of a calculus and as much of a determinant in making the policy as does, as does anything else.
But again, there are a lot of things involved in these policies.
You can't, you can't not acknowledge the fact that we didn't really care too much about the Islamic State beheading people until they started to threaten the Kurdish oil fields.
I mean, so there's a lot of things that go into this as well besides just the domestic politics.
It's just that at that senior level, at the, at the level of the chief executive, the domestic politics trumps everything.
And then of course, when he's looking for an explanation or a reason to do something, there are all types of people who have purposes and desires and who are, who will benefit from such, from the war policies who we can turn to, to give him strategy and give him reasons and give him excuses.
Well it's certainly interesting to see the competing interests between something must be done here when you have more or less a bin Laden incarnate there preaching, claiming autocracy or whatever from the, from the balcony in, in Mosul like that.
And all the pressure to undo that for regime change in Mosul as fast as possible.
You can't let this guy continue to call himself Caliph Ibrahim and all this crap for any kind of long period of time.
On the other hand, they really recognize that the American people, they really don't care about that ultimately.
And they are really against sending troops back over there to undo it.
And so you know, I don't know how they're going to handle this.
I'm sure it'll get much worse after the midterm elections are over here in a little while.
But those are some pretty severe competing interests when Baghdadi is 10 times what they ever accused Saddam of being falsely.
And yet the American people's answer is, yeah, we already let you go invade Iraq to get rid of the terrorists and we're not going to let you do that again.
Send drones maybe, but not our boys.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, it is.
The government squandered whatever trust the public had in them to commit American troops by going after Saddam Hussein and then to make it even more of a tragedy.
That failure resulted in Baghdadi, right?
That failure resulted in the Islamic State.
And I think that is a lesson that we must continue to take from this, is that our meddling overseas, our intervention, our trying to play risk with real live dictators and real live countries fails.
And when it fails, you get Frankensteins like the Islamic State.
And so that is, you know, that's really what is the lesson of this.
And there may not be a lot we can do in Iraq or Syria besides making it worse.
So the thing we must look at then is how do we prevent ourselves from creating these Frankensteins again, from unleashing these types of forces, this dynamic, these cycles of violence?
Yeah.
Well, now, so my try to say it quickly.
My thumbnail assessment here is that the Islamic State is surrounded by enemies.
They're landlocked.
They only have black market trading partners.
They'll never have open diplomatic relationship with any of the neighboring states.
You know, America can surely prevent anything like that from taking place.
And of course, these guys are such horrible bastards in the way that they operate.
And we've seen how the Iraqi people treat their kind, seen them in the past.
They were driven to ally with Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of desperation back in 05 and 06 and 07.
And they turned on them and said, actually, this is our land, not yours.
And screw you.
Now, I know Baghdadi and his top people mostly are Iraqis, but still, that's not typically their system.
It hasn't been for a long time to live in an Islamist state like that.
So my theory is just do absolutely nothing is the shortest distance between here and the fall of the caliph.
But I wonder if you think that's just my kind of own confirmation bias there.
You think that may be right?
I agree.
I agree.
And I agree with your assessment.
The one thing I would say that twerks that assessment a bit is if you look at, say, the Taliban, very similar prior to 9-11 in Afghanistan and what kept them in power and what was the main cause, in my opinion, of their rapid demise was the Pakistani government.
And in 2001, after 9-11, when we invaded Afghanistan, the Pakistanis pulled their support, their over-support for the Afghan Taliban.
You saw how quickly they crumbled once they stopped receiving Pakistani rupees.
The same thing I believe in an Islamic state will occur if you get the Saudis and the Qataris and the other Gulf states to stop supporting them, because I agree with your assessment.
They're surrounded by enemies.
They have no market.
They have no economy.
And they're a terrible, horrible organization that will fail as long as they're not propped up from the outside.
So we should do nothing and we should ensure that the same way that we're not, you know, nudge, nudge, wink, wink to the Saudis and the Qataris to continue supporting them.
Yeah, the Turks.
And really, you know, I don't know exactly how much influence they have, but it seems like if the American government was really serious, no, I'm really serious.
Stop financing these guys.
I mean, they would stop.
Right.
They've had a wink and a nudge this whole time, at least, haven't they?
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that's the whole thing.
Will it?
Yeah.
But, you know, I mean, this is stuff we can get into when you start getting into the relationship between the Saudi royal family and our political leadership and the Saudi royal family and our CIA director.
You wonder about those things.
Would they actually do it?
You know, so.
Yeah.
And the Israelis have made it clear all along, too, that they prefer at least unending low-level warfare, if not outright regime change in Damascus.
So absolutely.
Yes.
State of that on the record.
And that's, you know, they were, I think, pushing a lot harder than the Saudis a year ago for the airstrikes against Assad under the chemical weapons scam there.
All right.
Well, anyway, I've kept you over time, but thanks very much for your time.
Good talk to you again, Matthew.
You bet, Scott.
You have a good one.
Appreciate you, too.
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AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.
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