12/04/15 – Chris Woods – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Hey, guess what?
We got Chris Woods back on the show here, formerly with the Bureau for Investigative Journalism and now at Airwars, that's Airwars.org.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you, man?
I'm good.
How are you, Scott?
Good.
Good to be back here.
But, yeah, lots going on and very busy for everyone at Airwars, but getting lots of traction for once on civilian casualties, so people paying attention where often that's a subject they don't want to talk about, as you know.
Yeah.
Well, talk about the traction.
What traction are you getting?
Well, the big story over here in the UK after Paris has been, first of all, obviously the French have really shifted up their activities against so-called Islamic State, Daesh.
They've sent an aircraft carrier group into the Mediterranean and seem to have increased their tempo quite a bit and so have some of the other partners, actually.
The Australians have just put some data out saying they've doubled the number of airstrikes they carried out last month, so I suspect we've seen quite a few partners responding to those French calls for more action against Islamic State.
And then here in Britain, the big story this week is we've had a parliamentary vote on whether to extend our airstrikes from Iraq into Syria.
That's been a really contentious issue here in the UK.
Two years ago, Prime Minister David Cameron tried to get Parliament to enable airstrikes, not against the Islamic State at that time, but actually against the Assad regime.
And that was blocked two years ago.
This time around, he won with a very comfortable majority.
The majority of MPs here have voted for airstrikes and within hours, the British were bombing in Syria.
So a big shift here and in Europe more generally, much more aggressive stance towards Daesh since Paris.
Yeah, and then so, well now here's the thing.
A lot of idiocy broke out all over the place after Paris in Europe and in the United States of America and people are so frustrated, Chris, as you know, with this thing just dragging on and on.
The French have clamped down and started doing, you know, door-to-door searches or closing down mosques and all this horrible stuff, but at the same time, I've been very pleased to see, I think, I would expect that you've been probably pretty pleased to see as well that there have been a lot of writers, particularly on the left, but even some conservatives and of course the libertarians, who haven't forgotten that the history of the 21st century up until now actually exists or, you know, did and that it has some bearing on what's going on now and there have been, you know, surprisingly, especially with kind of the demonic nature of the Islamic State where they're the perfect boogeyman that they always pretended Saddam was, kind of thing, you know.
There's a lot of people who are really reluctant to go back to war over there who seem to really be learning the lesson that, you know, our intervention has caused this up until now and even with an enemy this bad, we're not buying into the idea that more intervention is going to get rid of them, at least not without creating somebody worse in their wake, so do you think there's a bit of progress along those lines?
You're usually the one who accuses me of being the optimistic one.
I have to say I see it quite a bit more pessimistically than that at the moment, mainly because we are at war in both Syria and Iraq and for all the talk, we've been bombing an awful lot there for the last 60 months.
We're just waiting for the latest figures from CENTCOM, but I'm absolutely sure that we are going to pass the 30,000 bombs and missiles mark by the end of November, and in fact, our own numbers show there were more airstrikes carried out in November across Iraq and Syria than in any month so far in this war, so it's amplifying.
It's getting heavier.
The number of civilian casualties continues to climb, although the coalition will barely talk about them.
You probably saw that it's only a couple of weeks ago that they've just admitted that they've killed four civilians in Iraq.
Those were the first admissions of civilian deaths in Iraq in 15 months of bombing, so there is a very intense war going on right now, and I know that the question is, should we be more or less involved in that war?
Should there be ground troops or whatever?
The reality is this is a heavy war, and it's getting heavier.
Yeah.
I guess all I was saying is the people aren't all quite as terrorized and whooped up as they were in, say, 2002 or something like that, but they've gone to being for bloodthirsty revenge to just not caring either way, really, and just sort of indifferent, I guess.
That's not much of an improvement, really.
The one thing that is interesting, though, there's a sort of cold fury to what we're seeing from these increased airstrikes.
Interestingly, we're not tracking a significant rise in civilian casualties to go along with this greater number of airstrikes, and there is something to what they're saying that they're taking a huge amount of care not to kill civilians, particularly when you compare it to the Russians.
The Russians are killing a heck of a lot of civilians relative to the coalition, but of course we're still killing the civilians in both Iraq and Syria, and our militaries are still telling us they're not, so same old, same old on that score.
Is it really the case, do you think, that the rules of engagement are designed just to protect the administration from the PR problems of killing civilians, kind of Uber Alice here, because their bombing campaign has been so restricted, in a sense, that they're being accused of, you know, it's playing into the idea that they want the Islamic State to continue to thrive.
They're still not crying oops, even after the fall of Mosul, even after two attacks on Paris.
They still prefer the Islamic State checking Iranian power in the region, and so they're kind of pussyfooting around the edges, and especially when compared to the Russians who are getting in there and taking out the convoys of oil to Turkey and seem to actually be pursuing their stated goal, rather than just bombing for no good reason at all, which is more like what the American coalition seems like they're up to.
I mean, it is always a political decision how many civilians you're prepared to kill.
It's something I write about in the book quite a lot.
There's a chapter there in my book which is called The Inconstant Value of a Civilian Life, and you would think in war that, you know, the value of a civilian life is absolute, but of course it changes all the time.
There was a story in Stars and Stripes just a couple of days ago saying the administration has decided that in the airstrikes on high value targets in Iraq and Syria, they're going to risk killing more civilians.
So that's a decision they're taking.
They will take the chance of killing more civilians by being more aggressive in those strikes.
And this is one of the problems for civilians, of course, depending on who's bombing you and at what stage in the cycle you are at greater or lesser risk.
So yes, it's a political decision.
Yes, it's Obama responding to politics, but that's worked in the past, you know.
The biggest thing that brought down civilian casualties from CIA strikes in Pakistan was the political and media pressure that Obama came under.
And if that pressure hadn't come, they'd have kept on killing those civilians.
So I think it's always going to be a political choice, but it starts to get a little bit ugly when you have politicians debating the value of a civilian life.
And then at the extreme end of that spectrum, and I do mean extreme end, you've got Donald Trump at the moment advocating the deliberate bombing of the families of Islamic State leaders.
Now let's be absolutely clear what Trump is talking about here.
He's talking about committing war crimes.
You cannot lawfully, deliberately target civilians in war.
That is a war crime.
And here's Donald Trump advocating we kill, you know, the wives and children of militant and terrorist leaders.
This is shocking stuff.
I'm sorry, Chris, but let me interrupt you here just for a second to prove it.
Because that might sound like something that you had made up if people hadn't heard that before.
It's so ridiculous that that couldn't possibly be true.
And yet, no, really, here it is.
He said it on Fox and Friends.
You can watch the video and read all about it at the hill dot com.
The headline is Trump on terrorists.
You have to take out their families.
And you know how he likes to repeat himself.
He kind of says it over and over again there.
The last little bit makes it very clear what he's talking about.
And I just think he doesn't even have the slightest bit of cognitive dissonance about that either.
You know, you do what you want to do.
Whoever heard of a law that would prevent a government from doing what they want to do to prevent him from doing what he wanted to do?
I'm sorry.
We got to take this break.
Hold tight, everybody.
We'll be right back with the great Chris.
Chris Woods.
I have to say, Chris, for Christ's sake, I got a cold.
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But we're fighting a very politically correct war, but we see the other thing is with the terrorists.
You have to take out their families when you get these terrorists.
You have to take out their families.
That's Donald Trump front runner.
In the lead, not just over the Republicans, but in all the head to head polls against Hillary Clinton as well.
Front runner for president United States right now.
Oh, we'll just kill their.
Can you do it with any kickback, Scott, in the U.S. media and did people use that term war crime?
I mean, did it come up at all or oh, I don't know.
No, I don't think they paid much attention to it.
I mean, honestly, I think that probably I hate to give them credit or like spin in their favor or anything, but I bet maybe they're afraid that they're just going to help advertise the idea.
It'll only backfire.
You know, the worse this guy is, the more the American right loves him.
And, you know, I think Hillary is such a poor candidate that he she's probably the only one he could beat in the general to actually win the election.
But we could have a President Trump, man.
And when he says stuff like, yeah, just round them up and put them up against the pole and shoot them.
That's what they like.
You know, a solution they can understand, you know, kill them all and then they'll all be dead.
Right.
And then end of argument.
OK, great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Really cheering me up for my weekend.
Yeah.
Hashtag conservatism.
That's what it is, man.
And you know, I can understand, again, people are frustrated that this is still going on and they cannot possibly associate the government, that's the governments that are responsible for getting us into this mess that they associate with themselves, with the cause of the problem.
So it's got to be the other guy's fault.
And no matter how many of them we kill, they keep attacking us.
So I guess we just got to kill way more of them.
And they don't have a bunch of other alternative explanations to weigh against.
You know what I mean?
That's basically all they have.
Social Islam is coming to get us and Obama won't even stop them.
What is he doing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we're seeing quite a lot of that reflected over here.
But yeah.
All right.
Well, and I know that when I read the British press, they're a lot more honest about, well, actually, the Guardian withheld opinions like this for three days.
Did you see that?
They made an official editorial decision and admitted it, that they wouldn't let anyone say that French foreign policy had anything to do with the Paris attack until at least three days had passed, which is incredible to me.
I missed that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a blog about it.
And so we're very sensitive here as well.
The former mayor of London, Ken Livingston, I mean, he was mayor when the suicide bombers hit the London underground on the bus, if you remember, about 10, 11 years ago now.
And he said that there was a direct link between the suicide attack and Iraq.
And the media here went crazy about that and really been shouting him down.
And that's been very interesting.
You know, whether you like it or not, there is often a causal connection between these terror attacks and foreign policy activities.
It doesn't mean it's valid.
It doesn't mean what they do is legitimate.
But to sort of say that, you know, to pretend that there aren't these connections is quite dangerous.
It sort of disconnects our foreign policy completely from ordinary life.
It implies that everything we do in the foreign sphere has no implications or repercussions in our ordinary lives, which is a very strange way of looking at the world, to say the least.
Right.
Yeah.
As Ron Paul put it in his great fight with Rudy Giuliani, that if we think we can just go around the world doing whatever we want to whoever we want with no consequences, then we do that at our own peril.
And we're putting the American people in danger if we think that people won't resent and fight back against the things we do to them.
Right.
As he was pointing out that this all goes back to long before September 11th.
We're bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia from 1991 all the way through.
And that was what brought on the attack in the first place.
So what's funny is I see a lot of times people make the argument that you just made and say, you know, it's been counterproductive the way we fight the war, but they never want to go back and say this has all been since 1990 and the occupation of Saudi Arabia, not since the bad reaction in invading Iraq in response to 9-11, et cetera, like that, which is the shorter and easier version of the same story, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, the interesting I mean, it was a really interesting debate here in the UK.
I mean, the debate in parliament was 10 hours long, and I haven't seen something like that for quite a while.
Hundreds of MPs spoke from both sides, and they had some really interesting things to say.
And there was a really interesting and strong narrative there around, you know, Islamic state Daesh, you know, being fascists, being these ultra extremists who, you know, kill far more Muslims than they ever kill Westerners who, you know, their attacks on apostates, on gays, on women that they believe behave unacceptably, in fact, frankly, anyone who they think behaves unacceptably.
And that was interesting to sort of hear that and to hear, you know, the sort of focus around that it's and from the left as well, quite a few on the left here were framing the fight against Daesh Islamic State in in similar language about the you know, the kind of British French American fight against the Nazis back in the 1940s.
It was interesting to hear those speeches, you know, you don't have to agree with them, but it was interesting to hear that rhetoric.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, hey, man, they're trying to rationalize what it is they're doing.
And of course, just like in World War Two, it's really easy to demonize the other side because they really suck.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
But then that's supposed to kind of retroactively justify anything their opponents want to do about it.
And you know, that's where emotions take over and reason subsides and we end up doing the same dumb things again, same counter, you know, horrible things.
I don't want to say dumb because that makes it sound like innocent mistakes when, you know, some of these guys at least know better.
But anyway, so talk to me about the Russians, if you would.
You mentioned that the Russians are killing a lot more civilians than the Americans are, at least in Syria.
Is that right?
That's as far as we know.
So, you know, we've spoken about air wars before.
We began by just tracking the coalition.
But obviously, as more and more countries have been drawn into Syria and Iraq, to a lesser extent, we felt more and more that we really needed to be looking at all international airstrikes going on there and alleged civilian casualties from all of them.
So we took the decision to extend.
So we're looking at the Turks and they're bombing the Kurds, the PKK in northern Iraq.
And we're also looking at the Russians.
There are mornings I wake up and regret that decision, I have to say, mainly because there have been so many allegations about civilians killed in Russian airstrikes.
So just to the end of October, we're not even talking about November yet.
We have had more than 100 individual incidents in which Russia has allegedly killed civilians.
In theory, killing as many as 1,300 civilians in just that short time.
We don't think the number is that high.
You can discount quite a lot of those strikes that they're being overreported for sure.
So quite a lot of these strikes turn out to be the Syrian Air Force or they're contested or they're simply not Russia, you know, you can show that fairly easily.
But enough of them are Russia, we think, to be very worrying indeed.
So we think at least 300 civilians or more were killed by the Russians just in their first month of bombing in Syria.
And a very high number of injuries as well.
And that's a good indicator of the problems with the munitions that the Russians are using.
And it's our view that we think the biggest reason Russia's killing so many civilians, it's not just where and when Russia's bombing, but it's what Russia's bombing with.
And you know, there is a lot of hype about it, but these precision munitions that the West tends to use these days, relatively speaking, make life a lot safer for civilians on the ground.
And what we're seeing is the Russians using the kind of munitions that we in the West haven't really used for the last 20 years or so.
And we're seeing a heck of a lot of deaths and injuries because of those.
So it's a very troubling picture that's emerging.
There's a very good story in The Guardian tonight worth everybody having a look at.
They've just focused in on one story.
It was a Syrian family who went home.
They thought it was safe to go home for a short period.
And a little girl called Raghad, who was killed along with her uncle and grandfather in almost certainly a Russian airstrike at the very beginning of the Russian air campaign, heartbreaking story actually.
And you know, for once putting a very human face on these civilian casualties.
And unfortunately, everything we're seeing coming out of Syria tells us that these Russian casualties are high.
Now, there is a kind of weird silver lining to that cloud in that we are hearing and there does seem to be some circumstantial evidence to back this up, that the Russians have convinced Assad to stop the barrel bombing.
I mean, you'll know, Scott, you've been covering this for so long, but the barrel bombing in Syria by the Assad regime has killed so many civilians.
They basically, these indiscriminate bombs, they chuck out of helicopters onto civilian neighborhoods and kill just vast numbers of ordinary people.
As far as we can tell, this is true.
We haven't seen reports quite a while now that Russia seems to have convinced Assad to stop the barrel bombing.
So in effect, the Russians have become the proxy air force of the Assad regime now.
So the Russians are still killing a lot of civilians.
They're just killing a heck of a lot less civilians than the Syrians would be if it were them carrying out these airstrikes.
So it's a kind of weird sort of accounting of war, if you like.
But there does seem to be this payoff to the Russians carrying out the strikes.
The worst single risk to civilians being the Assad regime that seems to have slacked off somewhat recently.
Yeah.
And that's for now.
If his regime were to fall, then obviously the worst threat to the civilians would be the al-Qaeda guys in the Islamic State and their head chopping swords for everybody who isn't part of their in-group.
We've seen that.
Yeah.
But now, so let me ask you this.
And just like with what you were just saying and what we were talking about with the motivation of terrorism, none of this is meant to be a rationalization of any of this.
Just trying to get an understanding here.
There was a Syrian military base that had been under siege by the Islamic State that the Islamic State were forced to back away from because of Russian air support, I guess, for the Syrian state's military on the ground.
But typically, I don't expect, Chris, for air power to be able to accomplish much other than kill civilians.
You wipe out a group of armed men here or there, it usually doesn't make a difference at all other than maybe driving up recruitment.
Anybody that you can get in an airstrike isn't really going to make the difference.
Even the decapitation strikes are oftentimes counterproductive.
When they get the so-called high-value target, they get somebody even worse to replace them.
And this kind of thing.
So I tend to think of air war is just, it's the coward's way of killing people and looking tough for politics, but not having to risk anybody actually getting hurt since we're fighting against people who don't have an air force and that kind of thing.
But then I wonder if maybe a big part of that in this case is because America's policy is so completely ridiculous and schizophrenic fighting for and against all sides at all times.
And what I'm trying to get to here, sorry, is I wonder if you think that since the Russian policy is at least coherent, that they're on the side of the Syrian Ba'athist government, Hezbollah and Iran against all comers, that in coordinating with the Syrian army on the ground, unlike America has been willing to do against the Islamic state, for example, do you think that they at least will be able to make some progress and push the Islamic state out of Syria or does it look plausible that they might, or is this all still just a fool's errand, killing for nothing?
Yeah.
The problem with that is it assumes that the primary Russian target is Islamic state.
And it's clearly, clearly not everything we're seeing from these Russian airstrikes shows that the bulk of them, and I would say about 80% of them are aimed at non-Islamic state groupings.
Well, they're hitting at whoever's closest to their lines first, right?
They got to get further east to get to the Islamic state.
They're hitting way beyond their lines, way beyond their lines.
And they're targeting a lot of these so-called moderate groups, you know, the FSA, the sort of allies that the U.S. and others have been cultivating.
And it looks like around 80% of those Russian strikes are aimed not at IS.
Well, I mean, I'm just saying those are the most immediate threat to Assad's regime, whereas you're saying they're far away, but they're not on the other side of the Islamic state from there.
Yeah.
So the IS will be, you know, next on the list, you know, assuming that the catastrophe and it would be a catastrophe, would be if Assad wins militarily and reconquers Syria.
Because this is my own view.
This has nothing to do with air wars.
You know, air wars doesn't have an opinion on this.
But my own view is, you know, a quarter of a million dead Syrians for nothing and 100,000 men at arms fighting him at the moment, thrown out of that country, routed, you know, whatever.
What on earth do we think will happen to the region if Assad wins?
You know, there is a there is a there is a line I hear here, and it makes an awful lot of sense that the West's priority or even the international priority right now should not be destroying ISIL, contain ISIL for the moment, get peace in Syria and replace Assad.
Because if Assad wins, I really would worry for the region at that point.
But that's my own view, you know, of course, and everybody has a view and I'm, I'm sitting here in the safety of London, I can have I can have any view I want, you know, it's, it's what Syrians need and want that we often hear the least of.
And you know, there's this talk that the Vienna talks, maybe getting some traction, there might be some movement there.
I really hope so.
I really hope so.
Because, you know, after so many years of this war, you know, so many dead, you know, for God's sake, Syrians need it.
Yeah, no, it is absolutely horrible.
And thing is, I guess I look at it from the point of view of subtracting America out of every equation.
And if it wasn't for the Americans having their backs, then the Israelis, the Turks, the Saudis, the Qataris are going to be way out on a limb here and might have to recalculate and figure out whether they want to negotiate or not.
Whereas now, as long as they have America to do all their dirty work for them, they have this terrible moral hazard to continue fighting in on the jihadist side of the Civil War, which frankly, you know, I'm just guessing but it seems to me like without all their help all this time, including the Americans, Assad would have won this war a long time ago.
And there would have been a hell of a lot less dead.
And you're right.
You're right about basically the great Bay of Pigs of Syria, you know, leaving the guys getting them in there fighting and then leaving them high and dry, same as Bush senior did to the Shia in the desert in 1991 and the Kurds to in 1991, when he encouraged them to rise up against Saddam and then left them high and dry.
Certainly facing that.
But then again, the only alternative to that seems to be helping them create an Islamic state.
Yeah.
But I don't think you can pin that much on America here.
You know, Syria is its own nightmare.
And everybody else projects their own stuff onto Syria.
That's absolutely true.
We've got two superpowers and entire regional power blocks acting out their own stuff on Syria right now.
But Syria is its own nightmare.
And I don't think you can kind of hang the catastrophe of Syria on the US or on Russia or whatever.
That catastrophe is still playing out because it's not burnt out yet.
We may add fuel here to the fire or fuel there to the fire.
We may help things here.
We may help things there.
But the nightmare is a Syrian nightmare at its heart.
And I, you know, what I often do look at the whole Syria thing and it is an issue of you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
You say, you know, if we hadn't helped Assad, if we hadn't, you know, if various parties hadn't intervened, Assad may have triumphed right now.
But maybe Islamic State would have triumphed right now, you know, if there hadn't been these interventions.
It's so complicated, this country, and there are so many factions and so many elements to it that are almost impossible to understand and navigate that I, you know, I don't know.
I don't even know where to go with the end of that sentence, Scott, other than to say, I don't think we should be that guilty about this.
I'm not sure we're getting it right in what we're doing, but I don't think we can.
You know, the nightmare of Syria can be hung on us.
I think we bear some of that responsibility, but as a as an international community, we bear that responsibility.
All right.
We're way over time.
We're about to start the next segment, actually.
Thanks so much, Chris.
This is Airwars.org, y'all.
Chris Woods.
Thanks, man.
Hey, y'all.
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