10/22/15 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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I have regrets that, uh, that, my regret is that a violent group of people have risen up again.
This is al-Qaeda plus.
Hey, Joe, welcome back to the show.
I swear to God, the only editing I did of that was just cutting Bob Schaefer out.
See, he was trying to answer the question for the poor guy before he kept interrupting and trying to say something.
Anyway, I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest, our guest on the show today is Peter Van Buren, formerly a State Department guy in Iraq War II, and now he's a writer at tomdispatch.com and at his own website, which is wementwell.com, which is the name of one of his books here, We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
Always a pleasure to be here with you, Scott.
Good to have you here.
And, um, let's see, did I mention tomdispatch.com?
That's where the new one is.
The Great War in the Middle East.
What if they gave a war and everyone came?
And that'll be running at antiwar.com tomorrow, under Tom's name, of course.
Um, but so, uh, yeah, what a mess, huh?
Your premise here, you start with, what if America had not invaded Iraq?
Well, I don't know.
I have a whole answer to that.
I don't think anybody wants to hear.
But instead, what happened is, George W. Bush and his government, they did invade Iraq.
And, um, as you say, that was sort of the, what's the term you use for it?
That was the big fulcrum or whatever.
The precipitating event.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, first of all, I just have to put out there that the title of my first book in my blog, We Meant Well, is supposed to be sarcastic.
Um, I just got another email this morning from someone who had read the Tom Dispatch article who was chastising me and saying, you know, America did not mean well at all.
It's sarcastic, people.
Um, take a look at my blog.
It's not hard to figure that out.
But I do need to throw that out there.
Um, we talk about things, and it was interesting.
Bernie Sanders raised this point in the debate where he claimed that Iraq was the worst foreign policy decision in American history.
And boy, that's a broad statement.
And I started out with the question of, you know, how right was Bernie?
And obviously, if you're talking about 220 years of dumbass foreign policy moves, that's, you know, to say which one is actually the worst is a bit of a steep climb.
But I'll come to the conclusion that it is in the top handful of them if, in fact, it isn't the worst decision.
And to frame that, we talk about what you mentioned there, a precipitating event.
Causality is difficult.
That's direct.
A caused B.
I threw a brick out the window.
It hit a guy.
He's dead.
Me and the brick caused his death.
Precipitating event, however, is a term that novelists use, and it's really the thing that kicks off the story.
It may or may not cause everything that happens, but it's what starts us all in motion.
The guy in Les Miserables steals the loaf of bread, and before you know it, you've got two hours of drama that follows.
Well, now, you're a writer, so let me ask you.
In that term, in writing, is it always something that really came down to somebody's free will and a bad choice that they made?
That's the precipitating event.
Because you could pin the thing, the beginning, as you said.
You could basically start the story anywhere if you want to.
But the big deal about Iraq, World War II, that everybody seems to agree on is it was a war of choice, meaning an aggressive war that absolutely did not have to happen at all.
Sure.
I mean, as a novelist, I guess you could argue it could have been a natural event, a landslide or a hurricane.
Usually not, though, right?
Usually it's because some dumb ass.
Usually not.
No, I mean, it's a lot more interesting if it's a conscious decision.
Clearly, when we're looking at what's going on in the Middle East right now, clearly the invasion of 2003 is the event.
If we're drinking beers, we could argue that the first Gulf War was this or was that.
But, I mean, for simplicity's sake, you can't really beat the 2003 invasion.
I mean, take a look at the Mideast the afternoon prior to the invasion, if you will.
You had stable governments all across the region.
Some of them were nice guys.
Some of them were a lot less nice guys.
But stability is one of the few things you can sort of hope for in the Middle East.
If we want happy guys running every country, it isn't going to happen.
But you had stability.
And stability is what the terrorists hate.
It means it's very hard for them to operate.
And so stability is, by definition, a good thing.
In 2003, the United States kicked that all over and stood by kind of like a slack-jawed yokel and watched it fall apart around us.
The Iranians, who initially were terrified of the United States and desperate to cut some kind of a deal with us in 2003 or 2004, I mean, they were facing the American army at the peak of its power on both of their borders in Iran and Afghanistan.
And we blew that, and now we're negotiating with them from a position of far less power.
Syria was a stable country, and that got kicked over into a huge mess.
Libya, Egypt, and obviously Iraq itself.
There was no ISIS in 2003.
There was an al-Qaeda that actually had been knocked back on its heels fairly effectively in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden was hiding out in the mountains around Tora Bora, and al-Qaeda clearly was not in a position to do very much but try to hang on.
You fast forward a few years.
Iraq is in complete chaos.
Al-Qaeda has resurrected itself in Iraq amid the chaos.
The Iranians have gotten their mojo back.
By 2011, the United States had abandoned the Arab Spring.
Syria had started to slip into a chaotic state.
The United States invaded, albeit from the air, Libya and set in motion another failed state.
We had deposed the stable leader of Yemen and plugged one of our boys in there, which led on a direct path to the failed state that is Yemen today.
All of those things can be threaded back to the invasion of 2003.
For that, I'm going to have to agree with Bernie Sanders that it probably was one of, if not the worst, foreign policy decisions in America's history.
It was pretty obvious right from the beginning, too, the comparisons to Woodrow Wilson.
Oh, man, the thing you didn't have to do that set off the chain reaction that could destroy the whole station kind of thing.
It was so clear then, and especially in terms of the sectarian war, and I don't mean a religious war necessarily, but just who's fighting who is defined more than anything else by who's on the Sunni side and who's on the Shia side, who's on the Saudi side, and who's on the Iranian side.
And it was because of America's war in Iraq that really, or I don't know, you were there, but is it unfair for me to sum up that entire war as the Army and the Marine Corps serving as the loyal sock puppets of the Bata Brigade for a few years and the Mahdi Army to kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and then get kicked right out ourselves?
That's what really made the change.
And then you just look at that from the Sunni point of view.
Here's the first time the Shia have ruled an Arab capital city in a thousand years, and it's Baghdad, and they just can't let that stand.
They can't really do anything about it except fling suicide bombers at them forever, but they're not going to stop flinging suicide bombers at them forever.
Again, I wish I could say it was thought out and planned or part of a conspiracy or nefarious planning, but in fact it was just dumb assery and chaos.
You know, the United States went in with America's goals and acted almost sort of surprised to find that there were three large groups within Iraq that didn't like each other.
I mean, it was almost like, hey, did you guys know about this?
No, I didn't know about this.
And quick aside to your listeners who know a lot more about this than I do, you know, we throw out the term Sunni, Shia, Kurd, you know, in the broadest possible sense here.
I'm aware that there are many gradations inside of those terms, but for simplicity's sake we'll use it.
So, you know, the United States kind of acted like, hey, wow, who knew about this?
And sort of couldn't figure out which side we were going to take, who was looking after our interests and who wasn't.
And so we muddled around until finally we got tired and left.
Those forces were essentially, Sunni, Shia, Kurd, were essentially genies that were bottled up, if you will, mainly through Saddam's strong arm tactics.
And that by keeping them bottled up, he kept them from influencing as dramatically as we've seen post-invasion the countries in the region.
When we invaded, we set those forces loose, and we couldn't control them once they got out of the bottle, and they spilled over the borders.
Hey, let me ask you this, though.
What if, you know, I don't know, man, Bush and Cheney had retired and somehow some technocrats had come to administer the thing in as, like, an objective way as they could kind of a thing, without all the very narrow subjective views of the Republicans running that war?
And what if they had said, you know, what we ought to do here is negotiate, include the neighbors in the negotiations, figure out the most equitable power-sharing type thing that we can, and split.
Because instead what we got was we must stay the course.
We can't cut and run.
But they were never honest about what they were doing.
What they were saying was, now that we're in this, we have to help the Shiites win the civil war.
That's what they were really saying.
But what if they hadn't done that?
What if they had said, okay, Shia, you're the 60% majority, but you don't rule the whole capital city, and we're not going to fight a civil war for you, and left them with that much more incentive to negotiate with the former Ba'athists and the Sunni powers?
You think things might have ended up a little bit better in that case?
Not that I would justify overthrowing Saddam and invading in the first place, but it seems like they made it worse than even they had to.
Exactly.
And, I mean, once the invasion starts, you know, you can't imagine it could have turned out any worse.
I mean, we could have flown over the country and dropped Viagra and hoped that the Sunnis and Shias would have been so involved doing the things you do when you take Viagra, that they would have not gone after each other.
I mean, that's as viable a strategy as anything else the Americans tried.
And so, yeah, I mean, that's a possibility.
You and I had a disagreement on a previous show where I suggested that the American army should be used to assure the partition of Iraq, that basically the American army should be there as a sort of quote-unquote peacekeeping force, a blocking force, to divide the Sunnis and the Shias and Kurds and stop them from killing each other by acknowledging the reality that there is no Iraq as we once knew it that exists.
That plan obviously has some flaws in it as well.
But you're at the point where you really can't think of a worse way to have handled things than we did.
But if you stopped there, you would have, you know, with Iraq, you probably would have at least limited the damage.
But instead what happens is the United States then intrudes in another country that has internal divisions based broadly on Sunni-Shia issues, which would be Syria.
After ignoring or delaying or trying to break apart the Arab Spring in most other countries, the U.S. kind of used it as an excuse in Syria in hopes of getting rid of Assad and installing a puppet more to our desire.
So we kicked over another can in Syria.
And if that wasn't enough, then we started bombing Libya, which was going to result in Gaddafi leaving power one way or the other.
As it turns out, America's allies sodomized him on video and then stabbed him to death.
And, you know, that was a nice touch.
But, you know, again, without any plan for what was going to follow, the regime change with another strong man.
Yemen, the same thing.
There are disparate forces there that were kept in check that we lose.
So, I mean, we didn't just screw it up in Iraq.
We basically followed an identical policy of screwing up in all these other countries.
And that's where I come down with Bernie Sanders on saying this is the worst decision in American foreign policy history because it didn't just affect one country primarily, as, for example, the Vietnam War did.
I know there was bleed over into Laos and Cambodia.
But, I mean, primarily that disaster was confined to Vietnam.
This one has enveloped an entire region and has enveloped what is arguably the most volatile part of the world at present and now has sucked in the other superpower, the Russians, who have come to play in Syria and are threatening to get more involved in Iraq with them finding common cause with the Iranians.
I mean, this is, and I mentioned this in the Tom Dispatch article, this is not dissimilar to what was happening in Europe prior to World War I where the superpowers were gathering in very close proximity, waiting essentially for something to set off the spark to set it off.
All right, now I want to get back to the World War and Russia in a second.
Sure.
But as far as the Middle East policy goes, and this is something that I'm sure we've talked about before.
In fact, I remember we've talked about before.
But it's the never-ending riddle of stupidity or the plan or the stupid plan or just what is exactly the balance of what.
Because I agree with you 100% when you talk about how Iraq was supposed to be easy.
Same thing for Libya.
This is all supposed to be easy.
Robert Gates told Nancy Yousef, I'm sure you saw it the other day, Hillary's plan for Libya, we'll play it by ear.
It'll be fine.
And yet it's never fine.
It's such a disaster.
You talk about Iraq split in three permanently now.
I mean, yes, I refer to it as Iraqi Shia-stan and the Islamic State now.
I think those borders are real borders and that Iraq really is over.
I agree with you that here comes total chaos from what was supposed to be a cinch.
But then on the other hand, of course, there's mostly from the Likudnik and neocon side.
There are papers after papers and rumors after articles where these guys say what we need to do is completely obliterate Middle Eastern society and form it into some new shape.
Give them a boiling cauldron, in the words of Michael Ledeen.
You could go back to the Yanan plan.
The clean break is sort of a halfway plan between total chaos and it'll be easy.
We'll have a Hashemite king.
We'll take care of it all for us and this kind of ridiculous stuff all mixed together.
But, I mean, it does seem like Hillary Clinton, I disagree with her on everything, but she knows how to read and she's horrible, but she's not really stupid, right?
But so, I mean, the story about Obama on the Libya war, Nancy Youssef's story, Obama was 51-49 for the war in Libya and let Hillary and Samantha Power and Susan Rice convince him over the dead bodies of the chiefs and the secretary of defense.
This is crazy.
It makes more sense that they're serving the interests of people who want chaos, who want more terrorists to fight, who want to destroy Israel's enemies for them, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
So where do you come down on that gigantic mess?
You know, it's tough, but I tend to lean toward the chaos theory on these things.
Because if you wanted to kind of destroy Israel's enemies, there are probably more and better ways to do that than setting off chaos, because chaos is by definition unpredictable.
And particularly in an environment where there's terror groups that are always kind of looking around for the next failed state where they can set up camp, chaos in the Middle East is never a good thing.
I mean, America could, for example, have facilitated Israeli moves into Syria for, quote-unquote, their own protection.
And no one really could have done much about that other than make a lot of noise.
America could have, in 2003, blasted its way right across the Iranian border.
And again, nobody could have really done much about that, and the Iranians themselves were in a rough position.
So I think they may have deluded themselves at some level that they were helping Israel or helping this or that.
I don't think that was really the primary mover in their mind.
I think two things.
One was what we now know was the Bush plan, which is essentially to conquer the Middle East for America, to grab the oil, to take control of these nations, to once and for all make the Middle East no longer a problem by controlling it.
Yeah, how'd that work out kind of question.
I think the other thing goes back to the way business gets done in Washington.
Take Hillary, for example.
And as you know, I worked for the State Department for 24 years, and so I have a better sense of how business gets done there than maybe some other agencies.
These leaders live in a bubble to start with.
They have people around them who agree with them all the time.
And Hillary created sort of a bubble within a bubble in that she, A, surrounded herself with longtime people who do nothing but tell her how right and smart she is.
And that bubble functioned inside the bigger State Department bubble.
We're generally sucking up to the Secretary of State is a sport there.
It's some people's only actual thing.
I have a colleague in the State Department who actually named his child after Colin Powell, former Secretary of State, who was in charge at the time.
Now, I mean, that's major league sucking up.
I mean, that's pretty impressive stuff.
And sent Powell a message, which never was acknowledged, telling him this.
So, you know, you get Hillary who says, you know, I think we should get rid of the evil dictator Qaddafi, and this one will work where Iraq failed.
And she's got people say, yes, madam, good idea.
Then she's got the State Department people who rush around trying to find evidence to make her look good.
She finds allies inside of the White House who are willing to support her.
And there you go.
You end up blow invading Libya.
And I think that kind of thinking is underrated outside of Washington, simply because people have a natural desire to look for reasons.
I mean, this stuff these people have done, Obama, Bush.
I mean, it's insane.
You know, when you start to go through it, as you just did, or you list it up.
I mean, it's just like, you know, how can they how can they be this stupid?
How can they be this ridiculous?
And so there's this natural tendency to try to find a semi rational explanation, even if you don't like it or agree with it.
And in the end, you throw up your hands and say, holy shit, are these people dangerous?
We're letting them loose with sharp objects all around the world.
Yeah.
And, you know, the thing that really gets people, like you're saying, where people can't believe it is so many of us know better.
And in real time, I mean, 150 million Americans knew better than to do Iraq in 2002 and 2003.
And yet none of them lived in D.C.
They were unanimous in D.C.
But everybody else, well, millions, tens of millions, more than 100 million people were telling the pollsters, no, we should not do this.
We know that Iraq didn't do 9-11.
We know this is a bonus war these bastards are trying to get away with.
And look at them do it anyway.
On Libya, I mean, we had a much shorter run up to the Libya war.
But still, I had them on this show, Patrick Coburn and the best of them, saying these guys are veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and we're taking their side.
And we knew that in real time the whole time.
Never mind people who are historians who can go back and find connections through history that say these are bad ideas.
You know, you're left with this sense of America out of control, that we don't really know what else to do.
There's this sense that America must do something.
And so they sort of say, well, what can we do?
And you end up choosing the option that you can do as opposed to the option that you should do.
Sometimes the option, of course, is to do nothing, to step back from it and say this is not our problem, not our fight, or not something, even if we think it's our problem, not something that we have the ability to resolve.
But in Washington, there's this sense that the world remains America's chessboard, and that when the other side makes a move, we are required to make a move of our own.
And if we've only got certain pieces left on the board, well, that's the pieces we use.
I think in a bizarre way, Putin moving into the Middle East may, and I may come back and eat these words, but I mean may actually sort of calm things down a little bit.
Up until Putin showed up, there was no one really there to say no to the United States.
America could just do whatever the hell it wanted because the indigenous people, indigenous forces really were very weak, certainly militarily compared to the United States.
I mean, most of them had no real allies that were going to step in.
Putin at least can serve as some kind of a check on America's next dumb idea, if for no other reason than the United States doesn't want to risk open conflict with the Russians.
Right.
Well, that was what I was going to ask you now, to get back to them calling Obama's bluff here.
You can't have your regime change in Syria because now they're in the way, but that leaves their planes and our planes bombing at least some of the same targets.
And obviously America has an insane contradictory policy fighting on both sides of that civil war.
The Russians are only on one side of it.
But so we're sharing airspace with our enemies, the Russians, attacking our enemies, the Islamic State.
Not so much Al-Qaeda, our friends.
But anyway, so you think there's a real danger here that these guys could blow us all up?
I'm terrified.
I mean, you're putting an extraordinary amount of very dangerous weapons in a very small place.
I mean, it's almost inevitable that something will happen, even if it falls into the realm of pure, complete, total, 100 percent accident.
If you throw in the reality that both sides may be looking to cause a little trouble here or there and get away with it, labeling it an accident, it gets pretty serious pretty darn quickly.
Imagine a Russian shoots down an American plane, call it an accident, pretend we have 100 percent visibility and know it was 100 percent an accident.
I mean, could Obama really resist calls for no retaliation at this point?
Right now he can't even leave, right?
He has to stay, even though his bluff has been called.
And he can't get away with his regime change.
He still has to stay there.
And he can't ally with the Russians, even though, really, if this was Hollywood or if this was the 1990s, maybe they'd just invite Russia into NATO and say, yeah, let's take on the terrorists together or something like that.
They can't do that now.
They're way too deep in pushing regime change against Assad, even though the Russians have agreed to negotiate his exit beforehand.
So, yeah, if they can't withdraw now that the Russians are fighting our war for us over there, the one that they're willing to admit to, then, no, I guess if it comes down to an actual dogfight and, obviously, our crappy planes are going to lose.
I hope they're not using F-35s over there.
But, anyway, if one of our planes got shot down, yeah, and Obama's proven, Peter, over and over again, that when it comes to escalating and tripling down the war in Afghanistan, it only comes down to his politics, his own personal interests and what they're going to say about him and that kind of thing.
That's the way you put it.
Is he going to be able to resist the calls from the right to retaliate?
I don't see any real example.
I guess the Iran deal, but that's different.
That's not a fight.
They didn't just shoot down our planes or anything.
Yeah, and it's not done in any way.
But, I mean, this war is not going to be over when the next president, whoever he or she is, takes office.
Now, the Republicans can't find enough reasons that they want to go to war with somebody.
And if the election were held today, it's very likely that Hillary would be the next president.
She clearly can't wait to mix it up with Putin.
She's going to have to start her administration off by proving she's tougher than the boys.
So, yeah, I mean, even if Obama gets away with kind of a half-real, half-show type of retaliation, the next president is not.
The next president is going to be going for it.
And at that point, you really have to, again, look to World War I, where forces get set in motion that are very, very hard to stop.
Play the scenario out any way you want to.
Putin decides to retaliate to the retaliation in the Ukraine or moving through another country.
The United States decides to pressure Putin through some means.
The United States allows the Israelis to move further across the Golan Heights.
Pick your scenario.
It can turn very dangerous very, very quickly.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time, Peter.
Appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
And like I said, we're never running out of stuff to talk about here.
Yeah, no, you got that right, unfortunately, for a long, long time to come here, as long as we last.
Thanks again.
Keep up the fight, my friend.
All right, y'all, that's Peter Van Buren.
He is at TomDispatch.com and at WeMeantWell.com.
He's got a new one there as well.
America's killing of civilians is no accident.
We'll be right back.
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