01/04/15 – Reese Erlich – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, January 4th, 2015.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host Scott Horton.
Here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
My full interview archive can be found at scotthorton.org.
More than 3,500 of them now, going back to 2003.scotthorton.org and you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Our guest today is the great Reese Ehrlich.
He's the author of a ton of books on American foreign policy, most recently, Inside Syria.
Before that, Conversations with Terrorists, Target Iraq, The Iran Agenda, etc., etc.
This one, the latest, is at america.aljazeera.com, The New Iraq War is Doomed.
And you can find his website at reeseerlich.com and follow him on Twitter at reeseerlich.
And that's E-R-L-I-C-H.
Welcome back to the show.
Reese, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, thank you.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Very important article that you wrote here.
We did run it as the spotlight on antiwar.com a couple of days ago.
Very in-depth and well-rounded assessment of the situation.
But here's where I want to start with the interview today.
It's something that you don't exactly take on in the article necessarily.
And this will be me kind of oversimplifying and stating other people's positions, so I'm responsible.
But it seems like the war nerd, and I don't know if you read him, John Dolan, Gary Brecher online, his pen name, the war nerd, he's really great.
And I read him and I read Eric Margulies and speak with Eric Margulies all the time, especially on my other radio show.
And they both seem to think that the Islamic State, so-called, is really not much more than al-Qaeda in Iraq.
It's just another jihadi militia.
They can never really be a state, and it's all just a bunch of overhyped nonsense, etc.etc. along those lines.
Whereas on the other hand, Patrick Coburn and Loretta Napoleone, a couple of other obviously well-qualified experts to comment, especially Coburn seems to think, well, and Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers I talked to as well, they all think that, yeah, no, these guys are really establishing a state here, and CIA estimates of 30,000 have got to be a low ball.
They're much more likely to have on the order of 100,000 or more men.
And there's no one.
They're surrounded.
They can't really expand any further than they have, but there's no one who can really come to get them either, and they really are establishing a state there.
And so I wonder if you want to split the difference or take a side, or how would you have – and of course nothing that I say or that you say means that the USA should go over there and bomb them or anything like that.
But I just want your best realistic assessment of their strength.
Yeah, that's an important question.
I think that in the short run they're a very, very dangerous group.
In the medium and longer term they contain the seeds of their own destruction.
So what do I mean by that?
One of the main reasons they've been able to grow and hold as much territory as they have is because of the serious political mistakes by the pro-U.S. or the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad for a long time under al-Maliki.
And the Sunni insurgents and Sunni population were so angry at the central government in Baghdad that they were willing to even align with the Islamic State in Iraq.
And in Syria the opposition – the President Bashar al-Assad is weak, but the opposition is fragmented.
And again in Syria we're able to take advantage of that.
I don't think anybody has accurate figures on how many numbers they have.
It started off at 7,000 and then as you said suddenly mushroomed to 30,000 to 100,000.
I think even the CIA is just making wild guesses.
There's no question that they have increased their numbers, that they've certainly increased their firepower as a result of capturing weapons from the U.S.-supplied Iraqi army and from the Assad army in Syria.
In the medium run – so I think in the short run they're a very serious danger.
They do commit horrific human rights violations against minorities, against anyone who doesn't agree with them, against women and so on.
But in the medium run, and certainly in the long run, they can't govern with the tremendously harsh policies that they implement.
You can't govern anywhere by sheer brutality and sheer repression alone.
It won't last.
And we're already seeing signs of that with rebellions from Sunni tribal groups in Syria, other insurgent groups fighting against the Islamic State in Syria.
So I think absent the U.S. intervention, the people of that area will be able to get rid of them in their own time and in their own way.
Now on the medium term there, the tribal system turning against them, the best counter-argument to that that I know from a credible source would be from Patrick Coburn who says that they really learned the lesson of the Anbar awakening, etc. from 2006 and 2007 and that they've really made sure that they've got enough Ba'athist officers and local religious leaders and tribal leaders basically held hostage.
They've got their chest pieces lined up in such a way to, not that it's foolproof, but to protect themselves as much as they possibly can from that stab in the back because they are this religious state system trying to impose itself on top of a traditional tribal system there.
So they know the difficulty, but it just seems like, I guess he's saying, unlike Zarqawi, they've really taken this into account.
And unlike Zarqawi, the leadership are from there.
And so that makes a big difference too.
Well, I think you have to, there's some element of truth in that, but I think you have to look at the Islamic State in Iraq and the Islamic State in Syria.
And in Iraq, they've relied heavily on the Sunni tribal groups that would ally with them.
And I think that, for the moment, that's working because the previous government under al-Maliki was so awful, was so discriminatory against Sunnis, was so ignoring their rights.
In Mosul and some of the areas, it's very repressive, but there's some modicum of agreement because of how bad things were before and how corrupt they were.
In Syria, the only alternative was the Bashar al-Assad government.
Everybody agrees in Syria, many people agree in Syria that that government was corrupt and badly run.
And so the choices between various local groups, and that's where you've seen tribal rebellions against the Islamic State, which they've been able to repress so far.
But I think it's a sign that it's not going to last for very long.
All of this is a question of interpretation.
You can look at it and say, well, it seems to be working, or you can say it's so repressive that it's not going to be working.
I fall in the second category.
Well, and so there's also the question of the supposed legitimacy of the new self-declared caliph Ibrahim there, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and I know that prominent religious scholars from all across the Gulf and the university in Cairo and all over have denounced them, that the al-Qaeda guys say that this isn't our role to create a state, our role is just to fight and leave the state creation to someday, and this kind of thing.
And I wonder whether you think in the PR battle, among the hearts and minds they're trying to win, whether you think they're doing a very good job or not.
They seem to, everybody really likes a winner, and they seem to have a lot of momentum with them as of last summer.
I think that does account, particularly in Syria, that accounts for some of their successes so far.
But keep in mind, they were driven out of Aleppo.
They have no presence, at least in the moment, in Aleppo.
They're stuck in the northern parts of Syria around Raqqa, and they are suffering damage as a result of the U.S. air war against them, although that's not a justification for the attack.
And I assume at some point we're going to get around to the U.S. role in all of this.
To directly answer your question, I think they are not anywhere as strong, and I think as the military momentum slows, the people will split off and join other groups.
Remember, the Islamic State is a split off from the al-Nusra Front, which is the al-Qaeda affiliate, and these groups form and reform, and platoons and battalions leave, and they go on to other groups, depending on who's getting the funding and who seems to be winning at the moment.
And I think this momentum is not going to last.
Yeah, it seems like despite all the right-wing hype that we hear, well, I deliberately suffer through Fox News all day just for the mysticism of it.
I gotta know what it is they're trying to get me to think.
And despite all their hype about, oh, Islamic extremism, this and that, his claim to be the caliph is actually probably his greatest weakness, right?
Because if people aren't buying that, he's not just saying, hey, I'm the new Saddam around here, and you guys are going to do what I say, or I'll kill you.
He's saying, I've got the divine riot of kings going on and all this.
And so if they're not buying it, then that makes him a pretender to the authority of Allah and all this kind of thing, which makes him worse than just a despot that people don't want.
It makes him a usurper and a heretic, right?
It does.
And that's for those groups in Syria particularly who are religiously oriented.
It draws a line.
You're either with them or against them.
And so I think increasingly numbers of people are going to be against them.
It's no small thing to declare yourself a caliphate.
It's like if a right-wing extremist in Idaho or somewhere in the United States set up a white republic and declared it as a functioning government, you can imagine what the reaction to people would be.
Well, that's a similar analogy to what's going on in Syria right now.
All right, good.
But now when it comes to – well, and this is all under the umbrella of the American empire, of course.
It goes unsaid, but it should not go without saying that this is all George W. Bush's fault for overthrowing the secular Ba'athist Sunni minority dictator and then fighting an eight-year civil war on behalf of the Shiite parties to kick the Sunnis out of Baghdad and create the Maliki government, which, as you said, treated the Sunnis so bad because, hey, go rot in the sun.
We don't need you.
We got the capital city.
George Bush gave it to us.
And so bye.
They had – the benchmarks of the surge never were met as far as integrating the awakening councils into the government.
And it seems like kind of in the background of all of this caliph Ibrahim and the Islamic State and all that is really what happened in June was the final declaration of independence of Sunnistan from new Ayatollah land down there at George W. Bush's stand from Baghdad down to Kuwait, right?
Well, exactly.
I wrote in my Al Jazeera commentary that one of the reasons for this latest bombing and this latest war is the fact that the U.S. lost the war in Iraq.
Well, that caused a furor of attacks on me in the comments section and elsewhere from military people and others who say, how dare I say that we lost the war in Iraq?
But it's pretty obvious to anybody who wants to look with any scrutiny at it.
The U.S. came in with the intention of replacing Saddam Hussein with a pro-U.S. government in Baghdad.
The government that resulted was more pro-Iran than it was pro-U.S.
The U.S. was forced to withdraw all its troops and close all its military bases in an agreement signed by George W. Bush in October of 2008, a little detail that's often forgotten.
So that's a pretty good definition of having lost the war.
And proof of it is that before the U.S. would agree to start bombing again in August, it insisted that Maliki be out of power because he was no longer towing the U.S. line.
So, you know, the U.S. has this habit of fighting wars to correct the problems of previous wars.
And that's at the core of the problem, which is there was no Islamic extremism in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
It was a brutal dictatorship.
The people of Iraq had every right to overthrow it and put in a regime to their own liking and their own choosing.
But that's not what happened.
The U.S. came in and dictated to Iraq what kind of government they have.
And the extremist groups emerged out of that, not out of plan or intention by the United States, but because they were one of a number of groups that drew popular support against the U.S. occupation.
And now by bombing in Iraq and Syria, once again, the U.S. is helping the extremists by giving them legitimacy of being the so-called anti-imperialist fighters against the U.S. occupation.
And in the short run, it's actually helping strengthen the Islamic State because of the U.S. bombing.
All right.
Again, I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Rhys Ehrlich.
He wrote this great piece at aljazeeraamerica.aljazeera.com.
It's called The New Iraq War is Doomed.
And right along those lines, I meant to ask, I forgot whether we spoke about this specific point before, whether you thought that the beheadings back last summer were, well, in fall, were really bait, that they're trying to provoke the United States into invading, which sounds crazy because everybody knows that the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, they can bring firepower to you in a severe way.
And the people of Iraq have lived through extreme violence at the hands of the U.S. military.
And so it sounds counterintuitive, but then some people seem to think so.
And you're saying that American intervention strengthens the hands of the extremists.
But is that their plan?
No.
That's an important distinction.
Remember, the beheadings of the two journalists and the aid workers took place after the bombing.
The bombing was in early August, and a couple of weeks later, in response to the bombing, the Islamic State beheaded Josh.
But they weren't just daring us to send in the Army?
No.
I think the most straightforward explanation is usually the accurate one, which is the U.S. started bombing, and the Islamic State said, what do we have that we can do that would counter this bombing politically and militarily?
Well, we'll teach them a lesson by executing their own citizens, even though those citizens had absolutely nothing to do with the war.
And similarly, they made these wild calls for individuals to attack, to carry out terrorist attacks in Australia and elsewhere.
At least one guy did that.
So I think they're flailing out.
They don't have an international disciplined organization capable of threatening the United States or Europe or Australia or anybody else.
So they kind of issue these broad calls and hope that somebody responds.
So they're not sophisticated enough, nor does it make sense from their own standpoint.
They were in much better shape prior to the U.S. bombing than they are today.
So I don't think they would have intentionally encouraged the U.S. bombing in order to get in the situation they are.
But then again, hasn't it driven up popularity and recruitment and brought thousands of people from around the world to come and rally to their cause?
They're taking on the Americans.
That's true, but that's their plan B.
I don't think that was their plan A.
That's what Michael Shoyer says about September 11, too.
Plan A was wake up, snap out of it, quit killing our people, and we'll quit killing you.
Plan B was go ahead and bankrupt yourself, bog yourself down in our quicksand and radicalize the generation.
I've been doing a lot of speaking in the last three months.
I've been all over the country talking about my new book, Inside Syria.
And sometimes people say, well, look at the situation today.
It must have been a U.S. plot.
Look at Libya.
It's a failed state.
That must have been what the United States intended all along.
Look at Syria.
It's a mess.
Look, the U.S. did it.
Well, no, that's not the way it works.
The U.S. is a weakened empire.
It's not able to control all events.
It has a plan A, plan B, and so on.
In Libya, they wanted to overthrow Gaddafi, install a pro-U.S. strongman, claim it was a democracy, and let the oil flow.
Well, it didn't work, so they had to go to plan B.
And they're down to about plan M by now because it's such a disaster.
But that doesn't mean that this was all part of a plot to begin with.
Right.
Well, now, so on the Islamic State, one of the headlines is, well, the biggest headlines, I should have started with this.
Antiwar.com's great Margaret Griffiths has estimated almost 50,000, 48,590 killed in violence in Iraq this year, 76,000 estimated killed in the Syrian side of pretty much the same war there.
That's the biggest part of it.
But then one of these headlines, too, with killed in my Iraq section here is an Iranian general was sniped on the battlefield near Samara.
And so that raises the question of the Iranian role here and whether America, if they're not sending in the army, which I don't know is a big if to me, but if they're not, does that mean that the Americans are now explicitly just the air force of the Iranian Quds Force?
Well, it does make for interesting bedfellows, doesn't it?
So on the one hand, of course, the U.S. very much opposes Iran and sees Iran as a potential nuclear threat and competes with Iran for influence in Lebanon and Syria and Iraq and the Gulf region and so on.
On the other hand, right now, the U.S. has a common enemy within the Islamic State.
And the Iranians have tremendous influence in Iraq, in the military, among the Shia militias and so on.
So the U.S. is really in a difficult situation.
Does it cooperate with Iran on a limited tactical basis and then turn on them later?
Or does it just denounce them and hope that it can win the war by itself and with its allies in Iraq?
And that's exactly the debate that's going on in Washington now.
And it affects the talks that are going on with Iran on the nuclear issue.
The U.S. could solve the issue, certainly in the short run, very easily by lifting sanctions and returning, you know, admitting that Iran really doesn't have a nuclear weapons program and is not the nuclear enemy that it accuses of being.
But that's not at all clear that the U.S. is willing to do that, even though that's what would make sense.
Meanwhile, the Iranians are pursuing their own interests in trying to have a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, which so far is succeeding, while at the same time fighting the Islamic State, which is a genuine threat to Iran as well.
Well, it seems like, I don't know, there was an article in The Atlantic.
It was one of these Kaplans.
I can never keep all the Kaplans straight.
He was saying, yeah, you know, it's a smart thing, which I can see the spin on this.
It's a smart thing that America backs all sides in the sectarian civil war over there.
We're allies with Riyadh, but we take Iran, you know, Tehran's side in Iraq.
And yet we support the Sunni rebellion against the Shiites in Syria and all this.
And he's trying to spin it like this is actually a pretty smart thing to do, is we'll just keep everybody weak by, you know, being on all sides of the war.
But, you know, I wonder, I guess you're going to go back to, no, this is plan E, F, or G here.
That's pretending plan H is plan A.
Yeah.
In other words, it's a mess.
The U.S. doesn't know what it's doing or, more precisely, has flailed around trying different plans that didn't work.
And now you're going to glorify the one that is at the moment.
The problem with that theory is that nobody in the region will go for it.
Iran wants to see a lifting of the sanctions, which are hurting it economically, and would probably be willing to make some concessions to the U.S. in the immediate fight against the Islamic State and who's in power in Iraq and that sort of thing.
And, on the other hand, Saudi Arabia is far more worried about Iran than it is about the Islamic State.
There are certain things in Iranian, sorry, in Saudi ideology and politics that, remember, they were supporting these extremist groups and probably still are, clandestinely.
And they see Iran as the main enemy, and Iran sees them and their version of right-wing Sunni Islam as an enemy.
So the U.S. can't pick and choose and say, well, we'll ally with you here, but we won't ally with you over there as far as the local countries are concerned.
And that's going to blow up, and this whole idea that the U.S. is going to train Saudi Arabia, is going to train moderate rebels that are going to come back to Syria and fight on the pro-U.S. side, that's just a myth.
It ain't going to work, and it's going to be a matter of months, not even years, before much of this stuff blows up.
Well, you know, I guess, I hear tell anyway, I don't go over there like you, but I've heard that for a long time, since the last Iraq War, that the Sunni fighters oftentimes refer to all the Shia as Iranians, basically, Asafafiz or whatever they call them.
So it already looks like a sectarian war, where even though these are Iraqi Arab Shia, they're all Iranians to the Sunnis that they're fighting, kind of a thing.
It's already taken on such a sectarian tinge all this time.
The other side says they're all Sunni extremists, they're all Al-Qaeda and so on.
Right, right, exactly.
But so if America's taking Iran's side against the Islamic State, is that going to ultimately help the Islamic State by, you know, really rallying more and more people to their cause, the same way the war for Baghdad did back in 2006 and 2007, or, well, 5, 6 and 7?
Or actually the Iranians will just, with our help, will be able to go in there and get business done and get rid of these guys, or, you know what I mean?
It'll be more harm than good, or what?
Well, on that tactical question, I think it remains to be seen.
Looking at it longer from a strategic standpoint, the U.S. involvement militarily is dooming and making the situation much worse and much more likely in the short run that the Islamic State will have some more support and recruit more people.
The thing to keep in mind about the sectarian, the real battle is not over religion.
It's not over sectarian issues.
Religion is used to rally the troops by both sides.
Right, it's who's us and who's them, not who believes what and who believes what.
It's who is going to rule politically, economically, socially in these countries, and then how do they use religion to rally their troops?
It's not about the ancient divisions among Sunni and Shias, as sometimes said, nor about Islam at all.
But that's an important distinction to be made, and the U.S. and other outside powers help foment the divisions along sectarian lines and make worse the existing sectarian divisions.
Well, now, so it sounds like that was right if we were talking 2003 and 4, but then again, to the guys that run the Islamic State now, isn't it right that to them, the final solution to the Shia problem is to kill them all?
Are they not that fanatical?
Well, either kill them all or drive them out, and that holds for Yazidis and Christians and other minorities.
And indeed for Sunnis that don't agree with them.
That's where the whole religious thing breaks down, because they attack Sunnis as well as the other people that they don't agree with, and it's based on politics.
Either you support us or you don't.
And so yes, they're a horrific force, and I mentioned that before.
They engage in horrific war crimes.
They're an evil force that has to be stopped.
But the people of the region, the only way you can effectively do this in the medium and the long run, is the people there take up the arms against them.
It's not going to work with the outside intervention.
Well, and in fact, as we talked about, it was the American occupation and civil war there, taking the side of the Shia in the civil war that created this mess in the first place.
And really, if you look back on it, it was pretty easy for the Sunnis in 2006 and 2007, when they got sick of Zarqawi's guys, to just turn around and stab them in the back.
They didn't really even need Petraeus' help.
They were happy for the money and the guns.
But that was the same offer that the Sunni tribal leaders had been making to the American occupation for years on end, that if you'll just let us patrol our own neighborhoods, we'll quit attacking you.
I think that's accurate.
And that's one of the reasons that al-Qaeda in Iraq was defeated at the time.
It wasn't because of the surge.
It was because of the unpopularity of the way they were ruling.
And I think we're going to see that again now in the months and short years ahead.
All right, well now, so I'm sorry, one last question here real quick.
Do you think that – well, never mind, is there any way for the American people to have a say in this?
But I guess, do you think there's a way – oh no, that to me is too silly to mention.
I was going to skip on to, is there any chance that they won't make it too much worse before it gets better on its own?
You know, they being D.C.?
Well, you know, there's a big debate in Washington, and the pressure – once you commit militarily, there's a pressure to win the war, and you're a wuss and a God knows what if you don't pursue the war to the end, and you don't allow the generals to do what they want to do.
And I'm, in the short run, pessimistic, because I think the war is going to escalate.
They went from 1,500 troops to 3,000.
Now they're talking about 5,000 troops, while admitting the whole time that there's nobody on the ground in Iraq, in Arab Iraq, who can seize and hold territory, even if the U.S. bombing managed to dislodge the Islamic State, which it's not.
So if anything, there's going to be increased calls for more money, for more troops, for greater combat roles than they even – that they are now.
And as that happens, the American people will become much more aware of the futility of the war, and I think we're going to see a growing anti-war movement, much as we did before the Iraq war and previous times.
So actually, I'm more optimistic in the medium and the long run, because the American people, once awakened, will put a stop to this war.
I sure hope you're right about that, and I have to tell you, I mean, to me, it feels exactly like it did at the beginning of January 2003, where there's this giant war about to happen, and doesn't anybody have a good idea how we can stop these guys from going through what we know they're about to go through with, and that we know is going to be a disaster, and we know is the wrong thing to do, to start a war.
It's the exact same thing.
Well, remember, there were huge anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. and Britain and all over the world exactly in that time period.
I think we will see – certainly, maybe not on that scale, but I think we will see a growing anti-war movement.
I'm going to get my poster board right now.
Thank you, Reese.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that is the great Reese Ehrlich.
His latest book is Inside Syria, and his latest piece at america.aljazeera.com is called The New Iraq War is Doomed.
It's a really great article.
You've got to go look it up.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
This has been Anti-War Radio.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my interview archive at scotthorton.org and follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
See you next week.