01/13/15 – Roy Gutman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And next up is Roy Gutman from McClatchy Newspapers, reporting from Turkey.
Hey, Roy, how are you doing?
Okay, fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us back on the show here.
And lots of news to cover with you here.
First of all, tell us about this airstrike in Syria.
You say here that at least 50 Syrian civilians were killed.
Is that correct?
That's my understanding, yes.
I mean, I wasn't there, but that's what witnesses in the town are saying.
The town is called Al-Bab.
It's not far from the Turkish border north of Aleppo.
And there was an airstrike there on the 28th of December.
It was never announced by the Central Command or by the Joint Task Force, but local people reported it out to a young fellow we have as a stringer inside of Syria.
And then I went to the Central Command and I asked them about it.
I said, you know, people are saying that there was an airstrike, that a major building in the town was leveled, and that there were a lot of people inside who— there were members of the Islamic State, you know, the extreme radical group, who were there as guards, but they had turned this building into a jail.
And they were holding civilians.
And there were, according to local people, at least 50 civilians were killed.
And mostly just people being held in the jail there, huh?
Well, you know, the Islamic State has its own idea of justice.
Their version of Sharia or Islamic religious law is an extreme one.
And so you can be arrested for wearing jeans, for smoking.
You can be arrested for arriving at the mosque too late for the afternoon prayers.
You can be arrested for insulting them in public or for talking back to them in public.
And you can be held indefinitely by them in their jail.
And this is one of the jails that they set up.
Other people were held, and I think most of those people ordinarily would be released after a period of time.
But then there's a second group who are fighters from the rebel forces that, you know, the moderate rebel forces who have been getting American backing, or from other groups fighting the regime.
And those people are held, and very often they're executed, in the public square.
So it's a really terrible regime, as everybody knows.
One of the, maybe the most dangerous and nasty regime on earth.
Yeah.
Well, and hell, even if it's a building full of real felons, that doesn't mean it's okay to bomb it and have America serving as ISIS's executioners over people arrested, you know, especially over nothing like you're describing.
But even if it was some murderers, it still doesn't make it right to bomb them like that.
I mean, I have to assume that the Central Command has not conceded that they did kill civilians.
They do not acknowledge it.
But they are investigating it, certainly after I've contacted them.
And we'll have to see what they come up with.
I don't think there was anything intentional about it.
I mean, they were hitting a building that had been commandeered by the Islamic State.
Yeah, they just probably had incomplete intelligence about what was going on there, right?
Absolutely.
And that's the rub.
Because one of the reasons they have incomplete intelligence throughout northern Syria is that they're refusing to talk to their own allies about where the Islamic State is located, you know, where they have the buildings.
And this has been going on now since September that the U.S. has been bombing, but it has been bombing without any consultation with their allied forces on the ground.
And so it's likely that they will make mistakes in that situation and that circumstance.
It's almost made it.
It's meant to happen.
And I think it's a disastrous thing when it does happen.
All right.
Now, the fact that they didn't announce it, is that interesting to you?
Because they typically do say, we dropped this many bombs on Mosul today and this many bombs on Raqqa, right?
Well, it's very troubling, and I don't know how to explain it.
That's all I can say about it, because I had to go back to them maybe four or five times and ask them, would you please check and double check and triple check?
Because I'm very confident of the information I've got.
And finally they came back to me about four or five days later and they said, you know, full of apologies.
And they said, we're really sorry.
We didn't get the answer sooner.
And we're very sorry that we didn't announce this at the time it happened.
They said it was an administrative error.
And I guess one has to accept that on face value until proven otherwise.
Now, the problem is, Scott, that I think there are other cases of bombings which have not been announced.
And, you know, the only way I can check them out as a reporter is one by one.
So I've sent them a request on a second bombing that is said to have occurred the same day as this one, which was the 28th of December.
And I said, you know, the local civic activists, even though this is under the control of the Islamic State and there's zero freedom in that circumstance, still local civic activists have reported that there was a bombing in the second town.
And I said, could you please check this one out?
Now, I don't have quite all the evidence in the second town that I did in the town of El Bab.
I don't have a photograph, for example.
I don't have a death toll.
I don't have anything like that.
The building they hit there was a headquarters of the Islamic State.
And supposedly it was not a jail.
It was just a headquarters.
So I don't think you have the civilian death toll there.
But nevertheless, it's the second case of a bombing that was not announced.
And anyway, so I got in touch with him on this, I think it was Sunday.
And here it is Tuesday.
I haven't heard back.
But I assume that they are going through the checking process.
And if it's true, I'll have to let him know the story.
But quite frankly, there are other cases beyond that.
Because, you know, we monitor the Syrian various social media very closely.
And we've heard about other cases.
So, you know, this is a story still in progress.
Well, and, you know, they told the Central Command, I think it was, or somebody at the Pentagon, told Vice Magazine just two weeks ago, maybe, yeah, a week, week and a half ago, Roy, that, oh, you know, we don't know of any civilian casualties that we've caused this whole time.
We're doing such a great job at this.
What do you say to that?
Well, I think that whoever said that really went way beyond their level of knowledge.
Because I believe it was the spokesman for the Pentagon, Admiral Kirby, last week, who said just about a week ago today that they've had reports of civilian casualties.
They're investigating them.
They truly want to avoid them, et cetera, et cetera, and so on.
Now, you know, he didn't give any numbers.
He didn't say how many cases are being investigated.
But I know myself from last September, when the very first bombings occurred in Syria by the U.S. at the time, that a number of civilians were killed in Idlib province.
I think it's about 10 or 12 on that order, on that very day.
And I reported it that day.
I don't recall anybody ever disputing the report.
Maybe they didn't notice it, but it was a very carefully written report.
And so that's at least a dozen.
And I've heard from a Syrian human rights group who monitor the war very closely, that the total number that they estimate, that they've collected from all over Syria since September 23rd, is 40.
And I believe this is a group that is very conscientious, and really, you know, they get names.
They don't just write numbers.
All right, I'm sorry.
I've got to stop you here so we can take this break.
But we'll be right back, everybody.
It's Roy Gutman from McClatchy Newspapers reporting from Turkey.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back to the show.
Talking with Roy Gutman from McClatchy Newspapers.
Out of Turkey.
And now, Roy, I want to go back a little while to, geez, maybe even a couple of months ago.
I think maybe two or three months ago.
I was trying to get you on the show, and I think it never did work out.
And it was about or maybe I just talked with Landay about it and so checked it off the list.
And it was your report about how the CIA was cutting off the Free Syrian Army in the north, or actually they were taking over control of their Free Syrian Army brigades directly in the north and the south of Syria and cutting out the entire bureaucratic establishment of the Free Syrian Army based in Turkey, who I guess, you know, they just sit in their hotels and smoke cigars or whatever all day.
But then so whatever happened with that?
Well, what happened was, first of all, it isn't quite the way you put it, but close.
The CIA started up a program, a covert aid program, although it was not a well-kept secret, at the beginning of last year.
And they, instead of going through the structure of the opposition forces, they call them some of the coalition government in exile or interim government, instead of going through them and their defense minister and the staff that they set up, the military staff, the CIA went directly to commanders and started and told them, you know, you come in with your proposal for what you're going to do in the next month and we'll give you money.
And so they circumvented an entire command structure.
I wouldn't say it was the greatest command structure in the world, but it was a command structure.
And you need that kind of thing in any kind of military, in any military.
And so they basically created a group of warlords as a process.
And they made it impossible to coordinate anything bigger, anything broader, anything strategic.
And it was a disastrous time for them to do that very thing.
But this is what the Obama administration decided to do.
And the reason it was such a huge disaster was last year was the rise, saw the rise of the Islamic State.
They really were very strong in northern Syria.
But at the beginning of the year, the opposition forces, the rebel forces, the pro-Western forces, destroyed the bases of the Islamic State and kicked them out of much of northern Syria.
So you had a success, an incredible, unexpected, unfunded, but spontaneously run operation, which led to something that was a very, very positive outcome from the Western and the American perspective.
But because the American government was supporting these commanders individually, without any staff, without any strategy, without any thinking, there was no way to build on that success.
And instead, what happened was by creating a group of warlords, they basically divided up the battlefield and micromanaged it and manipulated it.
So later in the year, when the bombing began, the U.S. started bombing the Islamic State in Syria, and the al-Qaeda, what do we call it, the al-Qaeda extension in northern Syria, namely the Nusra Front, they call themselves, they did it without consulting even the warlords that they were supporting, and they made big mistakes.
They bombed places, they killed civilians, and they alienated this group of commanders from the basic support they had in the public.
They had some big setbacks in the month of November.
The radicals gained, the moderates lost.
The outcome was a lot of territories switched hands, that had been in moderate hands and then went into radical hands.
And at that point, instead of trying to build up the forces and sort of learn the lessons of the year, the U.S. decided to punish them, basically, and cut off support, certainly to all the groups that lost territory, but in addition, they suspended aid to some of the groups that didn't lose territory.
It was a completely upside-down approach.
The life of me, I can't get anybody in the administration to explain it.
They don't even answer the phone.
They don't answer any questions.
But that's what happened.
So there was a severe cutoff in the month of December.
Some of that aid has now been restored.
I don't know quite how much.
After I wrote my story, and I was quoting individual commanders, and I was quoting officials of the coalition, the U.S. government went to them, and it looks like they threatened them in some way, that if they ever talked to a reporter again, certainly on the record, that everything would be cut off for all time.
So it's very hard to report that story.
But I do know that, in general, there was a major cutoff in the north of Syria in early December.
There was a restoration to some degree, I gather, earlier this month.
All right.
Now, so which groups are we talking about here when we talk about the so-called moderates?
Is moderation simply a function of being willing to meet with CIA officers, or how do you measure that?
You know, the battlefield is full of groups.
The whole Syrian revolution was spontaneous.
It was, you know, ground up.
It was not organized at the top.
There's still no real leader has emerged.
And so you have, at first, and then the Assad regime went after them using its army.
So this led to the creation of armed resistance throughout the country, mostly locally based.
And at the beginning, they were supported, and they originated in the towns and the cities and the valleys and the villages that they came from.
So they were locally based.
Well, but then all the veterans of the last war in Iraq of the Sunni-based insurgency, the Iraqi and the Syrian veterans, started waging holy jihad by, you know, early summer 2011, right?
Al-Nusra and then ISIS.
They saw that there was a vacuum, because while the government could not run, you know, it was at least half of the country that they had lost control of, neither could these homegrown groups.
And so al-Qaeda saw the opportunity and sent people from Iraq and then collected more people, was able to raise money, and other radical groups sprang out of all this chaos.
And so now when I say moderate groups, what I'm saying is that these are the secular groups, the groups that are not preaching a religious state, who want re-elections, who want democracy, or at least they say they do.
I mean, we don't know until they get a chance to get in power, if they ever do.
Well, but, Roy, you know, we got – They do exist.
There are plenty of stories, though, about the FSA also beheading people, even if it's al-Nusra and ISIS prisoners they're beheading.
There they are beheading them.
And, you know, we got the al-Farouk Brigade.
They had called for elections.
David Enders, your colleague, former colleague, had told this story about how, yeah, they had called for elections, the al-Farouk Brigade, but that was their commander that was on film eating the guy's heart or liver or whatever it was.
And then you had the Northern Storm Brigade that John McCain met with, but then they had told Time magazine, yeah, we're veterans of the Iraq War where we fought against the Americans.
They're right there on video saying so.
And so, you know, Patrick Coburn says when he's in Turkey and he talks with representatives of all these groups, they're all pro-9-11.
They're all pro-war with America, and they all are more or less al-Nusra guys, no matter how you slice it.
I think Patrick does some very interesting reporting, but he really doesn't discriminate very closely.
The commanders that I'm mentioning, I'm referring to specifically, are the ones who were vetted, who were approved, who were trained, and who were equipped by the CIA.
And they made it through the hurdles because the CIA determined that they were one of those, you know, that you just mentioned, that they were trustworthy and they had not joined any jihad.
So there were at least a dozen or 14 or 15 at most commanders who passed through all those hurdles.
Those are the ones that I've been writing about.
But there are others as well.
But I have to disagree with the gist of what you're saying because I think that there are many people there.
Look, Syrians, my experience, and I've met so many people in ID, you know, in displaced persons camps, as refugees in Syria, out of Syria.
I've met so many.
Look, Syrians are not crazy.
They are not jihadists in their aspirations.
They are many, many, many, probably the vast majority are normal people who want just simply a decent life.
Well, you can say the same thing about the Iraqi Sunnis, too.
I mean, they're not from Saudi Arabia either, and yet they're ruled by Baghdadi now.
Well, you know, politics.
The politics leads to these things, leads to radicals taking over.
And the problem in Syria is that the U.S. government recognized, almost all security agencies recognized more than two years ago that if the U.S. supported moderates, not everybody who's going to be a perfect moderate, but that there were moderates to be supported, that that would be the biggest card that the U.S. could play.
But the White House rejected it.
I mean, you had the CIA, you had the Department of Defense, and you had the State Department all urging Obama to take one course, and Obama went the other way.
He decided to give them the minimal backing to bring the CIA into it, and as I said, the rest of it is the history of last year.
It's a vast history.
But when you say that, you're neglecting to mention that that means Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus came up with this.
So that's not the same as, oh, it was the consensus of the whole government or anything like that.
I mean, take a counter example, for example.
We armed up the Shiite army of Iraq, the avowed enemies of the Islamic State in every way forever, and yet they turned around and ran and left all their weapons behind for the Islamic State to get after training them up and spending tens and tens of billions of dollars building that army over a decade.
But here we're supposed to train up some guys who have the exact same goals as the Al-Nusra Front, but just aren't the Al-Nusra Front because they've been vetted, and we're going to give these guys enough guns and enough bombs and enough money that they're going to be able to take on Assad and Nusra and the Islamic State?
Roy, I mean, come on.
Well, you know, you have constructed a scenario there that suggests Syria is bound, and we should do nothing about it, that it is bound to become a radical jihadist state.
You know, I happen to think that a jihadist, even a micro-state like the Islamic State now, and you're calling yourself a caliphate, is an absolute disaster for Western interest, for U.S. interest.
Oh, no, I agree with that.
I just think it's a problem more likely to resolve itself than have America come in and build up this kind of army, which they were unable to do in Iraq, even though they were building it out of the Ba'ath Brigade, which hates the Islamic State.
You know what I mean?
Are you understanding what I'm saying here?
Where you're talking about basically like doing an awakening-type movement, where you hire all friendly Sunni tribal guys to take on the jihadists and Assad in the middle of a civil war with the secular Ba'athist coalition of everybody else in the country.
Well, you have to begin by defining the problem.
The problem is it's a security vacuum.
It's the case in both Iraq and in Syria.
And the security vacuum in Iraq came about in large part because the U.S. exited Iraq at a time that was really before it should have left there.
And it's a whole different story about why that happened.
But it happened, and there was a vacuum.
And the Maliki government, instead of trying to create or sustain an army that was multiethnic, multinational, went for a Shia-only army and destroyed the army.
But when the U.S. left, I don't think it was in that condition.
It was our absence that really allowed that to happen.
Likewise, if you have a security vacuum in Syria that is the result of an uprising against a regime that everybody agrees is dictatorial and cruel and really willing to kill all of its own people, that created a vacuum.
So my point is define the problem, and then define the solution.
And I don't think you're going to get to that solution very quickly.
But the solution in both places is you have to have security, you have to have moderates running it, and you've got to find somewhere to support that.
And the one thing you should never do is walk away from it.
And that's what the U.S. government did in Iraq, and that's what it's doing now in Syria.
Then again, they didn't have to invade and regime change the country in 2003.
So let's not leave that out.
If Uday and Qusay were here, then Baghdadi would be dead.
Well, of course, that was the original sin.
But the problem is if you're the president of the United States, if you have an administration that follows the one that did this invasion, you've got to accept the world as it is, and you've got to move on.
You've got to work with what you have.
Well, but you also skip the part where the side that we fought for, that we won, and that we put in power, they were the ones who told us to leave, and George Bush had to sign.
Bush was pushing for 56 permanent bases, and Maliki told him, no, no, no, and Bush signed on the dotted line in 2008 and said, okay, the guys that we helped win the capital city and the democracy and everything else are telling us thanks a lot, now beat it.
So what were we supposed to do, reinvade and insist?
No, but I was in Iraq in 2011 when all the negotiations were going on about extending the American presence.
Put it this way, the absence of the American forces who were doing, by that point they really had learned their job terrifically, and they were doing a very solid job, and they were really necessary.
The absence of the American forces created, you know, led to the vacuum, and then you also had this stupidity of Maliki.
I mean, who filled the vacuum?
Put it this way.
It was Iran.
That's what had led to the disaster of last year, namely of ISIS taking over.
It was Iran.
Who is running the show in Syria right now?
Who has filled the vacuum in Syria?
It is Iran.
So, you know, we have to look at, you know, name things by their proper names, except there's a vacuum filled by people who have no interest in a stable, moderate state, and you have to decide if you're the president of the United States whether you want to accept that.
And if you don't, you have to then define a goal and a way of getting to the goal.
And so all of the history that you correctly cited is relevant, but it doesn't tell you what to do next.
All right, well, so let me ask you this, and I'll let you go.
I'm sorry I'm already keeping you over time, but since it was America's policy to choose Iran's favorite groups, the Dawah Party and the Supreme Islamic Council, to fight for from 2003 through 2011, first Jafari, who's now the foreign minister, first Jafari, then Maliki, and now Abadi, all three of them from the Dawah Party, and since we knew all along that it was the Iranians' interest to split Iraq up, that they just wanted a strong, quote, federal system, like Sadr was always denouncing them for, and that they didn't want to try to rule Sunnistan.
They didn't want to try to rule Anbar and Mosul and, you know, Fallujah and Bakuba because that was basically foreign territory.
They just wanted to run off with Shiastan, and that was the policy that America supported in supporting their guys, and so now we're still, now that the Islamic State has risen up, now we have America fighting as the air cover.
In one specific case, actually, that town of Amirli, where you had Quds Force fighting on the ground, an American air cover, which is a great metaphor for the entire war that's now going on, still for the last 12 years running now, America fighting for Iran in Iraq.
Well, at the same time, as you were implying there, America is against Assad, who is working for Iran and on the Shiite side of this civil war in Syria.
So, you know, if ISIS is really the enemy and we have to do something, wouldn't it make more sense for America to be consistent with George Bush and Barack Obama's Iraq policy and go ahead and back the Shiite government in alliance with Iran in Syria against the Islamic State and the al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State, which is the new holy terror, and the Nusra Front, which is sworn loyal to Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City?
And what has Assad ever done to America other than torture these guys for George W. Bush when he asked him to, even if they were innocent men?
Well, you know, to give you a one-word answer to a very complex question, the answer is no, hell no.
Listen, you have to remember, the Syrian uprising was a national uprising.
It came from the ground up.
It was not led from outside.
It was an attempt to bring, you know, people wanted, the slogan was, we want our dignity, we want our own government, we want elections.
Now, of course, a lot of water has flowed down the Orontes River since then, but the fact is, that was the goal, and you cannot go, if you're wise at least, your policy should never be to fight the people when they are in a national uprising for a more modern state.
I mean, that's a crazy thing to do, and Assad has demonized that group, and he did everything he could, in fact, to encourage and to allow the Islamic extremists to come in.
You know, all of last year, when the Islamic State, then they called themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, was running a little state within a state in the town of Raqqa, Assad never bombed them.
He never did anything to them.
He was quite happy to have them there, it seems, judging from...
Instead, he was out there bombing civilians, and you have to understand that, Scott, that civilians have been decimated by this regime.
He has destroyed half of Aleppo, he has destroyed city after city and village after village, and I talked yesterday to some children who had been victims of...
I was in the town of Kilis, near the border with Syria, and they had been victims of barrel bombs.
You know, he's dropping these indiscriminate weapons on civilians and killing children and parents, and there's no military purpose for it, no military objective to be hit there.
You have to understand, this is the guy who says he's against terrorism, but as a matter of fact, did a hell of a lot to let it grow in his country, and maybe even encouraged it.
In fact, I have a series of articles that I hope come out soon that will give that history.
So, I don't think it's such a suitable...
I mean, you know, I'm not in power, I'm just a journalist, but looking at it from the outside, I think that is hardly a suitable ally.
Yeah, well, of course, I'm for complete non-intervention here.
It just seems kind of crazy that this whole time we've been supporting a revolution which includes Friends of Osama.
You know, I have the clip here, I won't bore you with it.
I'm sure you've probably seen it.
It's Hillary Clinton, and it is, in a sense, a figure of speech.
I'll concede that.
But it's Hillary in March of 2012, and the question is being put to her by CBS News, why aren't we doing more to help the rebels there?
And she, in explaining, you know, obviously she wanted to do more, as we already discussed, but Obama's reluctance, and she's toeing his line because he's the president, and so defending the policy of not doing more but doing some, she says, listen, Ayman al-Zawahiri has endorsed this revolution.
Are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?
We have to be very careful about this.
And when we look at opposition figures that we can really rely on, we don't really see that.
And, in fact, she tried in 2012 two different times to put together coalition governments that all both turned around immediately and endorsed the al-Nusra Front, as covered in McClatchy newspapers.
In their desperate bids at street credibility, they had to endorse al-Qaeda in Syria to even try to pretend to be the new government there.
And so, no, I'm not saying we should support the Ba'athists there, but it sounds like what you're saying is we should basically do what everyone agrees is the worst mistake of the Iraq war other than starting it, which was de-Ba'athifying the government and abolishing the Iraqi army.
You're saying that that's what we should do in Syria, de-Ba'athify the government, get rid of its evil totalitarian army, no disputing, just like Saddam Hussein's government, no disputing it's a fascist military dictatorship that murders innocent people.
No one ever argued otherwise.
But you're saying that we should de-Ba'athify the government and abolish the army when not leading up to and oops causes bin Laden night jihad, but in the middle one.
And that to me sounds a little bit insane, right?
No?
I hope I'm not being taken as advocating one course or another because it's not my job to advocate a course of action.
But I can tell you courses of action that are going to lead to disaster.
And one of them is making an alliance with Assad.
And the reason it would lead to a disaster, I don't think there are good choices here.
And in life there are often bad choices, worse choices, and still worse choices.
And I agree with you, by the way, on this.
No, you've got to pick the least worst because you have to be pragmatic.
Oh, I don't agree with that.
But I do.
I'm sorry.
I just meant to be clear.
I just wanted to be clear that I agree with your part about we should not ally with Assad.
I think that's just as bad as allying with Iran and the Battle Brigade in Iraq, which is horrible.
I'm totally against it.
I'm against intervening on any side of this.
Well, on the other hand, if you look at the world and you see an immense vacuum and you see that terrorists are filling that vacuum, you know they're going to come after you at some point.
So whether you want to intervene or not, there's really not a lot of choices there.
Because we've seen this in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Do you really want to have a repeat of 9-11, which is what that led to?
Well, but it wasn't non-intervention that caused 9-11.
It was support for Israel and the occupation of the Saudi Arabian desert to wage the blockade and the no-fly zone bombings over Iraq that whole time.
You've read the fatwa, you know.
Well, listen, I've written a book about Afghanistan in the 1990s.
And the basic fact is that bin Laden created a state within a state.
And in fact, my argument is that he hijacked the state in so doing.
And the U.S. response was to throw some cruise missiles at him.
And I think the lesson of Afghanistan, the major lesson should be that you cannot allow this kind of an enormous security vacuum to develop, as it did in Afghanistan, and to have it filled by a terrorist state within a state.
That's what's happened right now.
What happened in Afghanistan in the 1990s is what's happening now in Syria and what's just happened as well as in Iraq.
And it seems to me that whatever course of action we want to take or would prefer to take if we had a choice, and non-intervention is obviously a preferred way than intervention.
But the fact is we should have learned our lesson from Afghanistan, and I don't think we have.
All right.
Well, this has been a very interesting discussion.
And even though we disagree on some of this stuff, I really like you, Roy, and I think you do good reporting, and I really appreciate your time on the show.
Well, Scott, I must say you are so well informed.
It's delightful to chat with you and to have a discussion with you any time.
Okay.
Well, appreciate it.
Talk to you again.
Okay.
Take care.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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