12/15/15 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
All right.
Cool deal.
On with the interviews.
First up is Peter Van Buren.
This time, again, writing for Tom Dispatch and republished at Antiwar.com.
Who will fight the Islamic State?
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
How are you today?
I'm doing real good.
And I appreciate you joining us.
I should have mentioned that you worked for the State Department for how long again?
Oh, my goodness.
It was 24 long years.
24 long years, and including in Iraq in the later years of Iraq War II, correct?
Absolutely.
I was there from 2009 to 2010, embedded with U.S. military, reconstructing Iraq on behalf of the taxpayers.
We didn't do so well.
And I'd just like to throw out an apology to everyone for personally screwing up things in Iraq.
Yeah.
But what about the surge worked?
I heard that the surge worked.
And it sounded really convincing because I heard it over and over and over again.
The surge is part of the mythology that's grown up around the Iraq War, and it serves a couple of handy purposes in claiming that it worked, and I'll be happy to circle back and explain why it didn't work.
But I think it's very important to understand why this myth has been promoted around the war by the government.
The first, of course, is the generic sense that we actually didn't really lose.
Yeah, there were some bumps in the road, but overall, we also had some victories in there.
That's always a nice meme to throw out when you did get your butt kicked.
The other, I think, is to make it seem like anything really bad that happened after we left was the Iraqis' fault.
Because with the myth of the surge comes the addendum myth, if you will, that everything was in pretty good shape when the United States pulled out in 2011.
And it was Iraqi infighting that suddenly popped up the day we pulled out the last soldier that messed up all our good work.
The third reason that we promote the myth of the surge's success is because it sets up the current round in the Middle East, where we are now, the United States government now is claiming that our strategy is largely dependent on the Sunni tribes of Iraq and some others to join the equivalent of a new surge, and just like the old surge, supposedly help us defeat ISIS.
That kind of sets up three very dangerous reasons, some forward-looking, that will suggest that the myth of the surge will continue to batter away at whatever we're trying to do in the Middle East.
Okay, now, I want to get to all the surrounding states and all that, like you do in this great article.
It's a really great article, everybody.
I beg you to read it.
Seriously.
Who will fight the Islamic State?
It'll really help inform you there.
But as far as that, the new surge, the new awakening, does that have to be part and parcel of a policy that insists that Iraq will continue to exist and that the Baghdad government, so-called democratic government, will be the government of it all, and that all that needs to happen is if we can just arm up and ally with and train up and finance the moderate tribal leaders of former Iraqi Sunnistan, and then forge those compromises, achieve those benchmarks that weren't achieved back in 2007, achieve them now, that then that is the path to marginalizing and ultimately defeating the Islamic State?
Or is it, which obviously is stupid, I mean to imply, or is it possible that maybe they can do some kind of awakening, and like John Bolton said in the New York Times, we'll just create a new Sunnistan, but it won't be these bastards.
It'll be some tribal chief.
I'm going to soon agree with John Bolton on something, and I hope lightning doesn't hit me before I say that, but let me back up to your first point, and that is whether or not this attempt to get the Sunnis involved in fighting ISIS is part of an attempt to create, recreate, or maintain this idea that there is an entity that we know as Iraq that looks something like the Iraq of, you know, 20 years ago.
You know, if you'd asked me that question, whatever, six, eight months ago, I would have said, yep, that's part of the plan here, is to put the, put Iraq back together into this kind of conglomeration of Sunni, Shia, and Kurds the way it used to be.
Now I have my doubts that that's really on the American wish list for this Christmas.
I think, and this is more conjecture, I think, than anything that can be nailed down, because again, Obama doesn't return my calls when I ask these questions, but I think at this point, the American policy is so desperate that they're just grasping at anything that they think might help without even going past that.
So who's around the Middle East that might help fight ISIS?
I don't know.
How about the Sunnis?
Okay.
Let's see if we can get them on our side.
But really, at this point, it's become as simple as that, without any hopes of anything larger happening.
As far as agreeing with John Bolton, again, I'm hoping to survive the lightning strike that's going to hit me.
Bolton, as you mentioned, wrote an article in the New York Times saying that basically the game is over in Iraq.
The only thing the United States can do is create a Sunni-stan, if you will, a separate that the Sunnis can live in separate from the Shia central government in Iraq.
That is what's happening anyway.
I don't think that's something the United States can ever stop from happening.
I think if the United States wants to pour men, women, material, weapons, money into the area, we could probably forestall it, perhaps for a very long time.
At the end of the day, since it's probably what's going to happen eventually, the argument would be, why not manage that process?
Why not facilitate it in a way that brings the crisis down to more manageable levels?
If you recall, Scott, you and I had our first disagreement in our long and otherwise warm relationship here on this show a couple of months ago when I actually proposed using the American military to create what he called demilitarized zones, if you will, between the Shias and the Sunnis and the Kurds and let this process evolve naturally.
Since that would have included something of additional troops into Iraq, you and I, I think, disagreed on that one.
There's this weird marriage of, what is that, politics makes strange bedfellows.
Here I am grasping bits and pieces of the wisdom of John Bolton.
That's how sad and desperate this has all gotten.
Which everybody should go read that, just for the yucks, where he talks about all of what's happened and refuses to acknowledge in any way how it came to be this way and what his role in any of this might have been or any of that.
It's really fun to read in that way.
He probably had that in there and the editors just cut it.
Oh, I bet.
Yeah, yeah.
I want to add something just for humor's sake, because you mentioned the yucks.
I actually met Bolton once, about a year ago or so, by accident.
We had a little chat.
He presented himself as a very pleasant, very educated, we talked about Iraq, and he seemed so much more knowledgeable than the character he seems to play in public.
In a way, that made me hate him even more.
I know, if he was just an ignorant blowhard through and through, then fine, he's just an ignorant blowhard and what can you expect of them?
But the fact that he was able to discuss Iraq on a very rational, very detailed, very high level, that he knows what's really going on and he's still saying a lot of the idiotic crap that he puts out, that makes it somehow even worse.
You can't forgive someone like that.
All right, now we're about to have to go to this break, so I'm going to ask you the question before it, because we've got a lot of allies to discuss and everything in the next segment as well.
But I wonder, if al-Qaeda in Iraq was always the smallest part of the Sunni insurgency back then, they were the third wheel between the Ba'athists and the Sunni tribes during Iraq War II, and now they have allied with the Ba'athists and mostly dominating the tribes now, could it be switched the other way, or is the Islamic State so much more powerful than al-Qaeda in Iraq was then, that it's not so much dependent on their alliance with the Ba'athists and that kind of thing?
The three spokes on the Iraqi-Sunni stand wheel we're going to talk about with Peter Van Buren on the other side of this break.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Peter Van Buren.
Who will fight the Islamic State?
And we're going to go around the board here in a second for all the foreign powers in the neighborhood and what America wants and how all that ain't working.
Please read this article.
It's at tomdispatch and at antiwar.com.
Who will fight the Islamic State?
But at the break, so I was asking about the Sunnis of what used to be Iraqi Sunnistan there, basically Eastern Islamic State now.
So whether the three, as I've identified them anyway, the three major pillars of power in Iraqi Sunnistan, the former Ba'athists, the Islamists, and the tribal chiefs, whether maybe the Ba'athists and the tribal chiefs could flip the script on the Islamic State and take their power away, or whether the Islamic State is too far advanced in how much power they've got now for that to happen.
You know, it's an interesting question because the internal dynamics of these organizations are largely unknown to us.
But if you work with the basic idea that groups, perhaps excluding the U.S. government, act in their own self-interest, and that that self-interest is basically built around power control and economics, it's hard to see why the Sunnis, the indigenous Sunnis, would really back away from ISIS.
First of all, we have come to understand that ISIS is sharing oil revenues with the Sunni tribes, and paying people to be your friend is in fact a legitimate strategy, as long as you've got the money flowing.
From the Sunni side, ISIS is the army, the protectors that they need against the Shia militias, who definitely seek to drive them out of Iraq, if not actually just destroy them and kill them.
So it is a very symbiotic relationship that benefits both sides, and it's difficult to imagine why or how you could break that bond at this point in time.
In fact, if anything, America's policy now of so aggressively supporting the Shia militias in the so-called fight against ISIS, of course they're killing plenty of indigenous Sunnis a long way.
If anything, it forces the indigenous Sunnis to look for that protection from ISIS, simply for their own survival.
Parenthetically, it's important to understand that the reason the United States feels it's forced to support the Shia militias is because the Iraqi army, we spent billions of dollars creating and training, turned out to be largely smoke and mirrors.
They ran away first shots with ISIS, and they turned out to be fewer soldiers and less equipment than we ever expected them to have, because basically they were padding their budgets with American dollars.
So you can't separate the causes of these things from the outcomes, and you can't separate all that from what is very likely to happen in the future.
Short answer, no one is going to fight America's war for them.
They're going to fight bits and pieces of America's war when it benefits them, and they're going to stop when they're done being benefit.
If anything, those of us who have vague memories of our high school math classes, if we remember Venn diagrams, these are when circles kind of overlap in part, and that overlapping area gets kind of shaded in, and the outside stuff stays blank.
That's largely what you're seeing now in the Middle East, where killing ISIS benefits Turkey and the United States.
There's that little overlap.
But when killing Kurds only helps the Turks, and the Americans are seeing their own allies getting shot by the Turks, well, then that's kind of outside the shaded area, if you will.
Right.
Gotcha.
All right.
Well, still, you have six minutes, so could you go around clockwise or counterclockwise or however you want to do it, because America's allied with, we're at least de facto allied with the Iranians and the Shiite militias in Iraq, as you just described, and we're officially allies with everybody else, the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Turks, and oh, I guess you could count out Assad, but at least we're some of the time de facto allied with him a little, maybe, or someday could be, or something.
I don't know.
So what's so difficult about the damn war?
If everybody over there has an American sock, what the hell is the point of being in an empire if our satellites won't go invade somebody for us?
Peter, I don't get it.
You know, I think you're not getting it.
You're right in tune with the White House.
They don't seem to get it either.
You know, the idea, again, is that all these different entities, the Turks, the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Iranians, the Russians, everybody in Syria, I can't even begin to delineate the different groups, you know, they all have their own agendas.
And they're not America's allies, and they're not our friends, and they're not our satellites.
They're simply these very awkward, very not forward-looking marriages of convenience, if you will.
The Kurds want their own nation, and the nation that they want is primarily in what's still called Iraq.
Part of it is in Syria, and part of it is in Turkey.
If they can, well, first of all, they need to kill all the ISIS people in those areas so that they can own it.
And if they can persuade the Americans to arm them and be the Kurdistani air force in pursuit of their goals, because the Americans are saying, well, somebody's got to kill ISIS and, you know, the secondary and tertiary results be damned, well, the Kurds are happy to go along with that.
They're getting weapons and support that otherwise they would never get.
And as long as America chooses to pretend it's not more about Kurdish independence than it is about ISIS, well, America goes along with it.
And you can say the same thing about the Turks.
The United States cut a deal with the devil.
We wanted the air bases to use in Turkey to fly aircraft into Syria, particularly drones, which have a shorter range.
So we wanted those air bases, and in return for that, we've agreed to turn a blind eye to the Kurds fighting, sorry, the Turks fighting the Kurds.
We've also turned a blind eye to the fact that the Turks and the Iraqis are starting to get a little bit of a tussle there.
And we've certainly turned a blind eye to the fact that the Turks have allowed ISIS to transit, new recruits to transit their country into Syria, never mind allowing ISIS oil to transit out of the area.
So we traded an awful lot away for very little, and we still kind of think that was a good deal.
You know, with the Russians, everyone talks about Putin being a mastermind or something.
I don't agree.
I think he's the luckiest damn guy in the world.
He would have always wanted a bigger military presence in the Middle East.
He wanted to support Assad.
He has no great love for Muslim extremists, given the way things work inside of Russia.
And so he uses America's desire for someone to go fight ISIS as carte blanche to move back into the area and achieve all of his goals.
At the end of the day, this whole thing is just going to fall apart.
I mean, it is falling apart.
We're watching it happen in real time.
And America will once again come to the inevitable conclusion that the world doesn't work the way we want it to work.
It's not a chessboard.
And we are outplayed every time by our own shortsightedness.
Yeah.
Well, you know, part of the theory of how they, you know, blundered into the Syria war with Obama saying, oh, Assad must go and all this, it was supposed to be so easy.
I remember, think back to interview and all different people, not just the very best of the best, like Patrick Coburn, who, you know, obviously has perspective, you know, bar none kind of thing.
But, you know, it seemed apparent to a lot of people that, you know, if Libya was more or less easy as just simple kind of east to west battle and backed with full, you know, U.N. authorized air power, pseudo authorized air power, obviously they twisted the resolution, but still.
And that was, you know, it was cut and dry enough that even though it took nine months, it was still a foregone conclusion that eventually they're going to get Gaddafi and they'll be done destroying his state and whatever.
But at the same time, it was obvious that it's not going to be like that in Syria, that in fact, maybe even a majority of Sunnis support the Baathist government as at least compared to a bunch of head chopping Bin Laden nights.
And it's a much bigger, much more complicated place.
And you have a lot more ethnic and religious minorities with a much bigger stake in the government.
And you're sure as hell not going to get the Russians to give a U.N. resolution supporting a no fly zone again or any of that.
So it was obvious it wasn't going to be some cut and dry thing.
And speaking to Coburn, Coburn was saying, Jesus, this is going to be like Lebanon for 15 years from 75 to 90 kind of thing.
This is just an absolute nightmare.
People like him were saying stuff like that.
But even the dummies knew better than this will be simple, cut and dry like Libya.
And yet still they did it anyway.
And and so I guess what I'm asking is really the State Department and the Pentagon and the conversations on the couches in the Oval Office were really that much dumber than the ones going on in this show.
You know, I this is a question that that bothers me all and I got to let you go.
I know.
You and I are not necessarily the smartest guy in the room.
And yet the things we're talking about here are so simple and obvious that the only conclusion is you're left with two conclusions.
One is that these people are somehow mentally disabled and have been elected and appointed to these high positions.
And we really can't blame them.
It's not their fault.
It's, you know, their moms smoke and drank when they were when they were pregnant.
Or they are sort of what I as I described John Bolton earlier.
They are smart people.
They're knowledgeable people.
They know what's going on.
But in public, they play a role of folks who don't know what's going on.
You're left then and this is another show to ask the question of why do they do that?
And that gets into those dark, hairy questions about military industrial complex and shadow governments and secondary motives that are hidden behind other motives.
I'm going to go with that latter one.
I don't think these are stupid people.
And I don't think you and I and people like Cochran are the only folks who have somehow stumbled into this.
Nope.
I think there's a lot of bad things going on out there.
All right.
Well, listen, man, thanks a lot for coming back on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Always a pleasure.
I'll see you again in the New Year, Scott.
Yeah, you will.
All right, Sean.
Merry Christmas to you and all that.
Peter Van Buren, everybody.
He is writing for Tom Dispatch.
He has his own blog, Tom Joe something, I don't have it in front of me.
Wait.
Yeah, I do.
No, I don't.
But anyway, Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch.com and Antiwar.com.
Who will fight the Islamic State?
Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more wars in the Middle East or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C.
But those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby, standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
That's CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org.
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