02/08/17 – Joe Lauria on the battle for Mosul against the Islamic State in Iraq – The Scott Horton Show

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On the line, I got our friend Joe Lauria, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now an independent reporter and in Irabl, in Iraqi Kurdistan and keeping an eye on the war against the Islamic State for us there.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
How are you, man?
I'm fine.
Thank you, Scott.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
So how goes the battle for Mosul, man?
Tell me everything that you know and think.
I think that it's taken a lot longer than some people had anticipated.
There was speculation, I engaged in that, that ISIS may leave and let them take it.
But that didn't happen, of course.
They gave them a very fierce battle in East Mosul where only 350,000 people live and there's 750,000 on the other side of the Tigris River in West Mosul.
So East Mosul has finally been taken.
It took three months.
They lost at least 2,000 men.
This is the Peshmerga, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iraqi army and Shia militia.
The coalition head run by the US said in December that they would stop announcing the number of dead.
So there were 2,000 killed by December in the first October in two and a half months.
And it was only in the middle of last month that they took East Mosul.
Now the idea is to cross to West Mosul which, as I said, is the bulk of the population and the bulk of the Islamic State fighters.
They have just pulled their religious police, the ones going around fining or jailing or doing worse, people smoking cigarettes or if a woman didn't have her head properly covered.
They've been pulled off of that duty and moved to combat positions.
So they're getting ready and it's going to be ugly.
It's not clear how the coalition forces will cross the river because every one of the five bridges linking East and West Mosul have been destroyed.
They were destroyed by US bombing and also by ISIS.
They also destroyed parts of the bridges.
So none of them are operable.
It looks like they might use some floating temporary bridges or they'll have to drive several many kilometers south to get to another bridge and then drive up again.
So that's a logistical problem and it's not clear when that will start.
But when they do get to Western Mosul, we're going to see the worst of this fighting.
We may get some more Western media attention because this story has been completely forgotten.
And it's been horrible.
At least we don't know the number of civilians dead as well.
I've not seen a reliable figure on that.
I do know that there's 10,000 people in hospitals here in Mosul.
That's both civilian and military casualties and there are no more hospital beds left.
And there's over 200,000, I believe, refugees right now.
They can't take it in one point.
1.8 million internally displaced people from Mosul.
96 have come from the city of Mosul itself.
96,000 rather.
So the humanitarian crisis is absolutely at its worst.
They need more money.
They need more expansion of hospital beds.
They need a lot of help, the regional government here, to take care of the humanitarian crisis.
And of course, when that Western half of Mosul operation begins, we can expect many, many more civilian casualties.
And there's concern because the bridges are gone that people will not be able to flee very easily.
They won't be able to get to now coalition-held East Mosul.
And they can't go West necessarily because there are now Peshmerga and Arab forces that are in the West.
I don't know how much of the West they control.
West of Mosul, I mean outside the city, where there's apparently been some fighting as well.
So they may not be able to flee that way.
It's going to be quite a horrendous battle.
And I think if it took three months to take East Mosul, it will take six months or more, I think, to take the Western part of the city.
Well, Joe, all right.
So quite a bit there.
First of all, how is it that the Islamic State is so strong that it's taken four months, as you said, just to take the East?
And they haven't even started on the West side of the country yet.
And I know that the Iraqi army is not the U.S. army.
But still, this is one city, and the Islamic State is nothing but al-Qaeda in Iraq, the militia pretending to be a state.
So are they just deliberately dragging ass, or you have some Chechen supermen organizing the resistance on the other side?
What the hell is going on here?
Well, there is a Chechen.
Actually, I don't know if he's from Chechnya, but he is a guy called Kalimov.
He's 41 years old.
I think he's from Chechnya, yes.
And he is now, according to Roudow, which is the local news agency here in Iraqi Kurdistan, it's been revealed by Iraqi intelligence sources that he was trained by Blackwater.
How's that?
And he is the minister of war now.
Now, they're supposed to have only had now 3,000 militants left in Mosul.
They started out with around 5,000, because all these figures are not certain.
But what we are being told is 3,000.
So 3,000 men now left, and there's a force of 100,000 that the Americans cobbled together.
Push murder, and Iraqi army, and Shia militia.
So you're making a good point.
A force of 100,000 took three months to take east Mosul, and how long will it take for them to take the rest of the city in the west?
I think part of the reason of the tactics, the weapon that ISIS have been using mostly are suicide bombing in cars.
Driving cars into troop formations, into military vehicles, blowing up cars.
There have been, I don't know, countless numbers of them.
That has been a tactic that has taken a big toll in terms of the strategy of moving forward.
And it's a street-to-street fighting.
This is what was feared, and this is what happened in the east, and probably will happen in the west.
And if you have to go street-to-street, you know, a guy, a sniper or two could hold down a large unit of soldiers for some time.
I think that's why it's taken so long, because of the nature of the urban warfare and the fact that you don't need that many fighters to control a neighborhood.
So we're looking at a very, very tough fight here.
And, you know, will they even win, and how long will it take?
And what the cost is going to be to civilians and to the Iraqi army and their allies.
It's going to be horrendous.
Well, you know, Danny Davis was saying that he's not so sure that the coalition between the Peshmerga, the Iraqi army, and the Shiite and Sunni militias that are fighting together here can even hold together long enough to win.
As you just said, will they win?
They might not.
They might leave before they win.
They could.
I mean, for certain, if Mosul falls or is liberated and it's back and ISIS is defeated, then it's always been speculated that there will be another war after that between those forces.
And there's still the Turkish troops here, I think, waiting to move in whenever the dirty work is done.
Oh, and they're based just to the north of Mosul at this point, just waiting, biding their time?
Yeah.
And, you know, the Iraqis have been trying to get them out.
And how many are there?
It wasn't that many.
I think just a thousand.
But if the boar is over, a thousand troops, they want a peace or something.
I don't know why they're there.
Of course, in Syria, I'm sure we'll move on to Syria.
They are fighting very strongly now in this amazing alliance suddenly with Russia.
Joint airstrikes and there's ground forces now.
Al-Bab is the town that they're focusing on now, while the Americans are still focusing on Raqqa.
And, of course, you've got the new wildcard president who, you know, has done some very enormous amount of activity in his first two weeks.
But what he's going to do about Iraq, what he's going to do about Syria is still not clear at all.
But the really, really dangerous thing has emerged clearly is Iran.
And this is the most worrying thing on the horizon as far as I'm and a lot of other people are concerned.
Mike Flynn putting them on notice, these sanctions against a missile test that is not banned by the UN Security Council.
That's very clear from the language of those resolution, of the resolution they're referring to, the resolution that codified the nuclear deal back in 2015, says they call the calls on Iran not to conduct ballistic missile tests.
It does not prohibit them from doing that.
But no matter, as far as this Trump White House is concerned, Iran is the biggest purveyor of terrorism in the world.
They are the mastermind of all Islamist extremists, Sunni and Shia.
This is according to Flynn in the book that he wrote with Michael Ledeen.
Basically, the Taliban, Hezbollah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, they're all being directed from Tehran.
It is beyond ignorant, this position in terms of various extremist groups, some of whom are fighting one another right now.
And then there's Mattis as well, General Mattis, the Defense Secretary, who is claiming that there's three main enemies of the United States.
And the three biggest threats are Iran, Iran, and Iran.
And he also says that ISIS is an ally of Iran.
And, you know, anybody knows that Iran is fighting with Russia and Syria against ISIS and that they are not allies with ISIS.
But this is the kind of thinking we're faced with now in Washington when it comes to targeting Iran and these sanctions and then blaming Iran for what the Houthis did by shooting a missile at a Saudi ship in the Red Sea, linking Iran deeper into Yemen that even the Obama State Department, which admitted that Iran had no operational influence in Yemen.
So, you know, Iran is the target and Mr. Netanyahu is coming to Washington next week.
And, you know, they're going to be talking about that.
He's the only leader that really came out in favor of these sanctions and of this bellicose language and the Saudis, of course, but not as vocally as Netanyahu.
Trump was on the phone with Bin Salman, King Salman, and Netanyahu is coming.
And you know that he's rubbing his hands together.
He may get finally his war against Iran that he pushed so hard for the U.S. under Obama to do.
And we all know about the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu.
And he's now in the driver's seat.
And that is extremely frightening.
The idea of an attack on Iran, which, you know, brings up the question of Russia.
How would Russia react to that?
Russia is allied with Iran in Syria, of course.
They're a big partner and trade partner.
They've given them built this nuclear facility that that was that they had to unbuild the plutonium plant.
So how will Russia respond?
You look at history and we saw in 1953 when Alan Dulles and Roosevelt's grandson overthrew Mosaddegh.
You know, Russia did nothing to that we know of to strong enough to try to deter that from happening.
But in 1957, when the Eisenhower administration tried another coup in Syria, they hadn't successfully done one on 49.
And then military government that was leaning towards the Soviets came into power.
So they tried to overthrow that in 57.
And there were 50,000 Turkish troops poised to invade Syria.
And Khrushchev threatened nuclear war, very much the way the Americans kept threatening nuclear war in those days.
And the Americans got Ankara to back off.
And there was no invasion and no coup in 57.
How will Russia respond this time?
How important is Iran to them?
Now, Trump holds at least two or three cards here, certainly in Syria.
Russia has been calling since Putin spoke at the General Assembly in September 2014 when he asked for sorry, 15, 2015.
He asked for this grand alliance between the US and Russia, the way the Soviets and the Americans had allied against the Nazis to fight ISIS.
Obama had, of course, immediately rejected that.
And later on, Kerry, he instructed Kerry to talk along these lines.
And they had come to some preliminary deal.
And we know that Ashton Carter then attacked those Syrian forces, killed 60 Syrian Arab Army troops.
And that scotched that deal.
And that's when the Aleppo, fierce Aleppo offensive began to liberate Aleppo.
How would Russia respond now if Trump says, well, you know, I'm not going to work with you in Syria?
More importantly, in Ukraine.
He could offer to Trump, sorry, to the Russians, Putin, stay out of Iran, let us go after Iran, and we will pull the plug on Poroshenko in Kiev.
I think Ukraine is probably more important to Russia than Iran.
Although, you know, a war on Iran would unleash more madness in this region.
And the reason Russia went into Syria was to cut off and choke the spread of this extremism that was fueled by the Gulf and by the US and by their allies to overthrow Assad.
So those are two cards that he holds right there.
And I think, you know, in NATO is the other one.
We're on the eastern border and sanctions.
So there's four cards, really.
He could say, we'll lift sanctions.
We'll pull back the troops from the border, your western border, the NATO troops from the Baltics.
And we'll pull the plug on Poroshenko.
And we'll fight with you in Syria.
But you have to let us go after Iran, which, you know, will that happen?
This is really worrying, I think.
And people should be worried about this.
This was, I think, of all the madness of the first two or three weeks of the Trump administration, this is absolutely the most terrifying signals that we're getting.
We're dealing with guys like Flynn and Mattis and Pompeo who are, you know, mad about, obsessed with Iran and really think this is the source of all evil in the region.
And, of course, give Saudi Arabia a total pass in terms of they being absolutely the biggest sponsors of terrorism without question.
And it's Iran that is in the target of the Trump White House.
They want to undo this deal, of course, the nuclear deal, which is insane.
I think Netanyahu wouldn't have minded Clinton either winning, but she would have kept the Iran deal, I think.
I think.
You never know.
But Trump, for certain, is completely in alliance with Netanyahu on Iran.
And that has to give it a lot of, put a lot of chills up people's spines, I think.
Certainly mine.
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Yeah, I think you're definitely right that that's what they're thinking anyway.
They want to make this kind of trade, see what they can do to split Iran and Russia away from each other.
And again, as you said, based on Ladini and delusions about Iran being the terror masters.
Iran is mother, Ladine says.
I mean, this guy is a complete nut.
But anyway, let me ask you this.
Is the Revolutionary Guards could force fighting in Mosul with the U.S. JSOC and USAF in the sky and our allies in the Iraqi army and the Kurdish Peshmerga right now or not?
I've seen nothing to suggest that.
But there are, of course, Iraqi.
Well, I guess the better question is, when did they stop right back during Fallujah?
There are Iranian backed, I would say Iraq, Iraqis, Shia militia fighting for sure.
But whether there's Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops in Mosul fighting under American, basically American command, I do not think that that's the case.
I've not seen that.
But, you know, I wouldn't.
They're in they're in Syria, that's for sure.
Well, I mean, a couple of years ago, you had Soleimani parading around and definitely making himself seen all over Facebook and whatever.
Hi, here I am with my friends in Tikrit or, you know, this kind of thing.
So I just wonder whether any of that still happened or you're just saying, though, the Iranians have pulled back and just sent the the Bata Brigade forward instead.
I think so.
I mean, they're certainly welcome in Baghdad, as far as I know, whenever they want to show up.
Soleimani and other people from the Revolutionary Guards.
Speaking of which, you know, this bellicose language against Iran could help the president lose his next election, moderate president of Iran.
So the hard liners in Iran will be getting strength again.
And, you know, all it takes is some kind of incident in the Gulf where an American ship might be hit or the.
Hey, Bush helped Ahmadinejad win in July 2005 simply by directly addressing the Iranian people and saying, you better not elect the right winger because that's going to really make me angry.
And so they were like, yeah, right.
And they all voted directly in reaction to that.
Now, I don't know if the people who put Bush up to it knew that that was going to happen or not.
I think they probably did.
You know, the moderates are the real enemy in Iran.
They hate people that they can deal with.
Obviously, you know, the the people like their current foreign minister, Zarif, who's basically a friend of John Kerry's now and a kind of guy who can get your sailors released in 14 hours and this kind of thing.
They got a torpedo that as fast as they can so that we can generate conflict.
Yes.
Yeah.
And it's really driven by ideologues in the Trump administration.
I don't know how much of an ideologue Trump is, but he's certainly surrounded himself with them.
And that's very frightening.
And, you know, I mean, if what would it take to to attack Iran?
I mean, would it take ground troops?
What is he going to put ground troops in there?
Would he consider a nuclear option?
I mean, I'm telling you, it's something I can spiral out of control and make us forget about Syria.
Well, you know, I mean, the thing is, so let's go back a couple of few years here.
It seemed like the Air Force was gung ho about it.
Well, 10 years ago now.
Right.
When when Cheney wanted to bomb him in 2007 at the height of the surge and blaming Iran for every roadside bomb in Iraq and all that crap.
And they wanted to do airstrikes.
And at the time, I think the way Gareth Porter, you know, reported it was it was really the army and the Marines who said, hey, we're the ones who got to go in there and take out the anti aircraft, etc.
Like that.
And we don't want to because that means a lot of dead men.
You're talking about a huge mission here.
This is not something we're like, oh, we're just going to be cruise missile liberals and do it, you know, Bill Clinton style.
This is an enormous commitment.
And the Air Force might think it's easy, but that's because their guys don't have to do nearly as much dying as our guys have to do.
And we have, you know, the kooks that you mentioned here.
They're Marines.
Right.
I mean, I guess Flynn is army, but at least he's not Air Force.
And and you have Dunford and Mattis there.
And that's their Marines who have to all die invading Iran.
If it comes to that, I don't think they want to do that.
I mean, that's World War Two level huge, man.
That's huge.
An invasion of Persia.
You know, I will end by saying that hopefully there are planners in the Pentagon who will make that very clear to Trump himself and that he let's reason prevail.
Yeah.
And he doesn't engage the U.S. in a war like that.
But Netanyahu is going to be pressing him for sure.
You know, to give him backup if Israel is going to do it.
Yeah.
All right, Joe.
Now, let me change the subject back to the refugees for a minute here, because, well, I guess the way I remember it was unlike what happened in Fallujah.
They had told the people of Mosul to stay there.
Ramadi, too, I guess they had said everybody run like hell.
And if you're left behind in the city, then it's open season on you kind of thing.
But in this case, they really didn't have anywhere for the civilian population to go.
They thought it would be easy enough or for whatever combination of reasons.
They told the population to stay and they did.
And now you're saying, of course, they're they're trying to flee to get out of there.
But there's basically no one ready to receive them.
There are 1.8 million internally displaced in the Kurdish region.
But that goes back until 2014, when the Islamic State first arose and started taking over towns and villages.
Yezidis, Christians and Arabs and Kurds were being driven out of their villages and their towns.
But the 96,000 have fled Mosul just since October 17, when this operation began.
And there will be probably many more if they can get out of the western half of Mosul, particularly now that the bridges are all damaged or destroyed.
So there's no way for them to flee east, which is where they'd have to go to get to Erbil.
I don't know of any camps being set up to the west, because that's obviously where ISIS could flee if they wanted to.
And there are some small scale operations beginning there, but I don't think that's where they need to go.
So they're trapped, it looks like.
And to go back to an earlier point you made about why it's taken so long, I neglected to mention also that because it's urban fighting, the Iraqi army and the Peshmerga cannot use heavy weapons in close quarters like that.
And the Americans can't bomb a building.
They may have one or two snipers.
They can't just demolish a whole neighborhood or even a building.
So it's going to take, if it took, as I said, four months to take east, it's going to take half a year or more, maybe a whole year to take western part of Mosul, the west side of the bank of the Tigris River.
Yeah, well, you know, yeah, I wanted to ask you about that is just what the role was of the US Air Force at this point and how hard they were hitting Islamic State targets in the city.
And I guess you kind of answered that.
So this raises another question that you brought up earlier, which is, you know, Obama's gone.
And what's Trump going to do about it?
And he seems to have indicated that at least his idea would be to knock the hell out of ISIS quickly, something like that.
Now, you know, who knows the difference between his imagination and what's even possible logistically, never mind what Mattis and the rest of his war cabinet have in mind for what they would rather do instead.
But I've sort of been predicting for a couple of years now, so I still sort of am, that he's going to send in the Marine Corps and that they're not going to be willing to wait around for another half a year.
And they're going to send in Marine Corps infantry to blast the hell out of the Islamic State in Mosul and, you know, bring the fight to Raqqa quickly after that as much as possible in order to try to wrap the thing up.
Now, I'm saying I guess I think that's what Trump sort of has in mind.
I would take the bad part of that, the escalation as, you know, probably likely, but the whole wrap it up quickly and then leave thing, of course, impossible and not likely at all.
But I wonder what you think about that, whether or whether they're just going to keep up with the Obama plan, which is, you know, the status quo that you've said this, you know, more or less, I guess, slow motion victory over the last four months, but could take almost a whole year to finally finish.
Well, he used a stronger word than knock the hell out of Islamic State, if I recall.
And he also said in a debate that he'd be willing to put up to 30,000 troops.
He was talking about Syria to defeat Islamic State.
And then he floated that was in the campaign.
But since he's become president, he floated about a week and a half ago, the idea of this safe areas idea again.
The one that, you know, many critics of Hillary Clinton pointed out that this was a recipe for a war with Russia, possibly, since you would have to also have a no fly zone to police that.
And, you know, I think Trump was saying that in the context of keeping Syrian refugees out of the US.
His whole focus, of course, has been on everything else but Syria and Iraq, really, for the first three weeks, and mostly on immigration, the whole flap about banning, you know, immigrants from seven Muslim majority countries and banning indefinitely all Syrian refugees.
I don't think he's thought this out at all.
I'm not sure his people have sat down to think it out or discuss it in any great detail.
That, by the way, has left a vacuum that Russia has filled quite a lot in Syria in holding these talks in the capital of Kazakhstan, and in which the UN chief negotiator on Syria also attended.
The US was invited and sent a low level figure.
They invited even Ahrar al-Sham, which was a group that the Russians wanted not to be part of the ceasefire, but they included them.
So, again, it's only ISIS and al-Qaeda that are not part of the ceasefire.
And now they're talking about monitoring mechanisms.
And the UN will have a Geneva talk that was just postponed from February 8th until an unknown date.
February, yeah, I think we're supposed to start today.
It's been postponed.
So, we don't know what Trump's going to do about this.
And this is why it's very hard to talk about what's going to be the future of the Syrian operation.
I don't know if you might be right.
He might send ground troops into Iraq.
I don't see that, but you never know with Trump.
I do think he could do that in Syria.
That is a possibility.
Spicer, at his very first news conference, was asked about Assad and whether he's willing to work with him.
And he dodged the question, said that the U.S. would work with anybody who wanted to defeat ISIS.
That included Russia.
Then he was asked whether he would work with Assad.
And he said, let's not take that too far.
We're not going to get together with people under the guise of defeating ISIS if that's not truly their guy.
Right there, I mean, at this early stage in any administration, without instructions on every possible issue that can come up, he may have been just winging that and saying what he thought.
And I don't know if Trump is in this camp which thinks that Russia has not been fighting Islamic State.
I mean, this has become an article of faith in Washington that they're going after only rebels against ISIS.
Eli Lake from Bloomberg, a real neocon writer, wrote that the Russians and the Iranians have only been fighting rebels trying to overthrow Assad and not ISIS.
Well, what the hell has ISIS been trying to do?
They're rebels trying to overthrow Assad.
Of course they are.
So that's complete nonsense.
And Spicer was also saying nonsense there.
And Trump, I think, made clear in his campaign appearances numerous times in debates that we have to put Assad aside for the time being and concentrate with Russia on getting rid of Islamic State.
And I completely agree with that.
That's very wise.
But that is totally against the conventional wisdom in Washington, totally against the neocons, the Clinton camp.
Will he follow through?
And here we see Spicer saying the opposite of what Trump was saying.
Mattis and Flynn have not said anything that I've seen on either Iraq or Syria.
They've been concentrating all their ire on Iran, of course, which is fighting ISIS with the Russians.
So it's hard to know what's going to be the next steps of what's going forward here in Syria.
It was always hard to predict what's going to happen, of course, in Syria.
But right now with a new administration where they're not on the same page, they're not really making any strong statements one way or the other, it's really difficult.
And, of course, the U.S. is going to play a major role either way.
Whether they don't do anything and they bow out, that's one thing.
Or if they get involved somehow with Russia or without, that will have a major impact on what goes on in Syria.
The Russians, with this vacuum in Washington, may have overplayed their hands by actually drafting a new Syrian constitution.
And that really angered Syrians.
It's been rejected by Assad.
And I think one reason is because a country like Syria, Iraq and Egypt have pretty long legal traditions.
And they are very proud of that.
And they don't feel an outsider should be writing their constitution.
I recall being in Cairo.
In fact, I spoke to you in an interview from Cairo a couple of days after Mubarak fell.
I actually arrived the day after.
And there was talk then of the U.N. maybe helping to write a constitution, as they did here in Iraq after Saddam was overthrown.
And there was absolute fury by Egyptians about this idea.
And Syria reacted the same way, that the U.N. or Russia should not be writing their constitution.
And of course, they want to even change, the Russians proposed changing the name of the country from the Syrian Arab Republic to just the Syrian Republic, to try to give some succor to minority groups like the Kurds, Turkmen, etc.
And they want to remove Islam as the official religion of the country.
And they're going to take away 23 authorities they wanted to from the presidency.
I don't know how Assad felt about that, but he's rejected this proposed constitution.
He would take away his right to name judges, to name the governor of the central bank, and to appoint the prime minister and the deputies, leaving only the president in control of the army and security forces, security intelligence, etc.
So that seems to have been rejected by the Syrians.
But this is just to illustrate how Russia has stepped in and taken over this ballgame, and even has the U.N. coming to their peace conference, which included Iran and Turkey as the sponsors.
And they invited a whole bunch of armed opposition as well.
Ramashan did not go, but some other armed groups did.
And, you know, there is a ceasefire and it's somewhat holding.
But the whole thing is, what is Trump going to do on Syria?
And does that become, as we discussed earlier, one of the cards that he plays in terms of getting Russia to sell Iran out, basically, if necessary?
Well, you know, I just I'm sorry, audience, because I'm repeating myself from the other interview to the Lazar interview.
But I have a real doubt that Trump could even understand who's who and who's on whose side.
And that assumes that he even had anybody to explain it to him.
When instead, all of these guys talk about, oh, radical Islam, this and radicalism on that, which completely obscures the entire Shiite axis versus the Saudi, Israel, U.S., Turkey axis here back in the jihadis.
I mean, Obama at least understood the horrible double game he was playing.
He explained to Jeffrey Goldberg in 2012 in The Atlantic that that's right, Jeffrey.
If we get rid of Assad, then that would be a good way to take Iran down a peg.
You know, that's why basically, like to paraphrase Kerry, that's why we're allowing the rise of the Islamic State.
We think we can manage, but ultimately it's helping put pressure on our Shiite axis enemies that we hate so much.
And so that's why we're doing this in the first place.
Now, Trump wants to smash ISIS to the benefit of Assad and Hezbollah and Iran, but he doesn't want to benefit Assad and Hezbollah and Iran because he still doesn't know his ass from his elbow.
Yeah, but Netanyahu does know his ass from his elbow.
And when he arrives next week, I'm afraid he's going to lead him around by the nose and he's going to let him know that Iran is the enemy and to listen to his generals in charge in his cabinet.
And and going after ISIS would hurt, will help Iran.
And that, I mean, because Iran's enemy is ISIS, even though Mattis's supporters are saying that they're allies.
So I'm afraid that Netanyahu is going to have enormous sway over this guy.
He's already declared his fealty to Israel, as they all do.
But he seems to really mean it.
He wants to move the embassy to Jerusalem.
As you know, this is an extraordinary step that no American president has dared to try to do, just to put the pretense of of American neutrality, which is nonsense between the Palestinians and Israelis.
They would never go as far as moving the embassy.
And he's about to do that.
So the idea that.
Yeah, I think I agree with you.
The idea that Trump is going to, in the end, decide with Russia and Assad against ISIS and to help that Shia crescent, as it's called, against the Sunnis and particularly the Saudis, who, of course, are not on the list of seven countries that can't or were not allowed to send their people into this country.
That would be a bit much.
I think I don't know where that came from.
Scott, I don't know if anybody knows how he got these ideas into his head that he made very clear in all of his campaign appearances and in the debates.
And even even in his interview with O'Reilly at the Super Bowl before the Super Bowl, he, of course, said this thing, which was extraordinary for a president to say that the United States is not innocent and it has its hands covered with blood, not in those words, which has caused all this consternation in Washington.
How dare he say that the U.S. has ever killed anybody.
And but again, he held out that he could work with Russia in Syria and elsewhere.
So I don't know where he got this extraordinary, rebellious idea in terms of the conventional wisdom in Washington.
But it really encouraged a lot of people, particularly in Russia or people who defend Russia against what looked like Western neocon designs on Russia and NATO designs and NATO saber rattling and aggression.
But, you know, the first statement that Nikki Haley made as the U.N. ambassador could have been written and spoken by Samantha Power in which she, you know, the one about Ukraine.
She told about Russian invasion, Russian aggression, Russia and the sanctions are going to stay until they get out of Crimea.
I mean, where did that come from?
That really shocked a lot of people.
I wasn't all that shocked because I always took the position that and we talked about this, that Trump is a wild card.
You have no idea what to expect.
And he said all these things that sounded good.
And, yeah, you could say you supported what he said, but he had no record as a public official whatsoever.
So you couldn't judge him on that.
It was only his words and his rhetoric.
And so you couldn't really hang your head on that.
And I think now we're seeing already a big change on Ukraine in that statement.
I don't think it could be talked away as a lot of people in Russia or people who support him because of his public stance on Russia are trying to explain that away.
I think it really undermines what he said previously.
And nobody has still has a damn idea what he's going to do in these situations three weeks in.
And that's why Syria becomes even more of a confused mess about how you can even see how the future could go until the U.S. actually declares a policy.
It's going to be hard to know what we got now is Russia running the show completely, the diplomatic and the military game.
And they've got Turkey on their side because Erdogan really screwed up and he had to turn to the guy who he was, whose plane he shot down about a year earlier.
And they are working together against ISIS.
And there's the Kurds, of course, in Syria that the Turks were really after when they invaded with U.S. air cover.
You know, in August of the same day, 500 years early, when the Ottomans invaded Syria and they have created basically this safe area.
Those are NATO troops.
U.S. troops would not have to have gone in.
Whether that becomes a safe area where Turkey is carving out remains to be seen.
I mean, Erdogan spoke with Trump, I think, a day or two ago.
I don't know.
I didn't see the readout, but I don't know if they must have discussed Syria.
So I don't know where we're going with this.
I don't think Trump knows where he's going yet.
And again, his cabinet members, his generals haven't said really anything about Syria.
And the only thing we've heard was that that bit from Spicer that sounded completely convoluted.
Yeah.
Well, and Trump, you know, is all over paying attention to his daughter's designer clothing deals and all these things.
And who knows if he's even had a real meeting of the minds with his national security cabinet about this stuff at all.
I thought it was believable, Joe, in the Senate confirmation hearings when Rex Tillerson, the Exxon CEO, who's now the secretary of state, said, Well, actually, Senator, I haven't discussed Russia with Donald Trump yet.
But, you know, yeah, I'm sure I will.
It kind of reminds me of the beginning of the Obama years at the very beginning.
You had a secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the national intelligence director and everybody else all saying different things about Iran and whether we would accept peaceful level levels of enrichment or not.
And this kind of thing, like, have they not really held a meeting where Obama had said, yes, we will accept the Iraq reactor as long as they keep their, you know, whatever details.
They just hadn't even got their heads together about it.
And so who knows who even gave Nikki Haley her marching orders?
Was Trump even OK with it?
Who even knows?
You know, that's absolutely right.
In fact, I thought that maybe some holdovers in the U.S. mission to the U.N. and New York from Obama days, there are crucial service.
There were not that that could have been well been written by them.
And she just read what was put in front of her.
And Trump might not have even known that there was a meeting at the U.N. Security Council about Ukraine.
And like you just pointed out in every I mean, I'm not a student of every transition and every beginning of a new administration.
But it's understandable that there's going to be confusion, people speaking differently on different matters.
And even though you say rightly, there should have been meetings in this long transition period from the election to the inauguration on these key foreign policy issues.
But they're still learning about these things.
It looks like.
And yes, Nikki Haley may not.
That may not be Trump's position.
We just don't know.
And that makes it hard to talk about this stuff.
Yeah.
Scott, to be honest with you on a radio program, because until the U.S. again declares what they're going to do or it starts to emerge what they want to do.
And whether it's the same as what Obama was doing, which was half in and half out, kind of appeasing the neocons in his administration, but stopping them short when they wanted a bomb after the chemical attack, et cetera.
I've identified in a piece I wrote just before the election, four times when Obama has put the brakes on a more aggressive Syria policy.
So he was playing a double game there.
And rightly, you pointed out the Atlantic interview, which that's pretty much revealed.
So will this happen again with Trump?
And how does it figure in with Iran, too?
Iran is one of the combatants in Syria.
And how could they ally with Russia against ISIS when Iran is going to be an ally of theirs after what has been said about Iran already?
None of it makes sense right now.
And to say that it does, I think would be lying.
Well, you know, 10 years ago when Bush did the surge in Iraq and decided they laid off the nuclear hype for a minute and went with the roadside bombing hype at blaming Iran for all of America's problems in Iraq, even though Iran was backing the same side that the U.S. was at the time, still is.
But when they were talking about, yeah, maybe we will do some strikes against the Revolutionary Guard Corps and this and that to escalate this thing.
It was pretty obvious.
Seymour Hersh and a lot of other people pointed out, Bob Dreyfuss, a lot of others, that, hey, American forces in Iraq are right within Iranian range.
Our forces at that time down in Basra and all the way to Baghdad.
And of course, we're fighting for their guys.
The Bata Brigade, I think Hersh had a quote that said the Iranians could take Basra with one imam and a sound truck.
They could just light up the whole south like a candle.
Just Ayatollah Sistani says, fight the Americans.
Now, this is the same situation we're still in.
And in fact, our guys in Afghanistan are also within range.
And they're also fighting for the Iranian-backed Hazara faction there, among others, and could easily be backstabbed there, you know, Order 66 style.
If the U.S. starts bombing Iran without the national security staff thinking through, you know, the fact that we've got our guys embedded with their guys all over the region.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know whether the ideologues who come out of this Islamophobic tradition almost, they're almost in league with Pam Geller and this guy Schiller and Frank Gaffney.
You know about that, those groups.
I mean, when I read this stuff about Bannon, he seems like a straight up Gaffney level nutcase.
I mean, he talks about the coming Islamic states of America.
Yeah.
Huh.
When the 1% of the country takes over all the rest of us and all our 50 state governments somehow.
I mean, you got to be on PCP to believe this stuff.
You know, it's funny.
We hadn't brought up Bannon, but the name wasn't mentioned in our conversation until now.
And he's probably very key to all this.
And I can't figure the guy out completely, to be honest with you.
I mean, I didn't know that he'd said that about this.
See, I've learned all these things about him.
And that's crazy.
He's in bed with Geller and those people.
I mean, that is just extraordinary because they are absolutely nuts.
And if he's with them and I know that Flynn seems to be completely in with them.
I mean, you know, they could look what the neocons have done since they've had influence and power in Washington.
They have created absolute chaos with their regime change operations.
And there's the eternal debate of whether they want chaos or not.
And there are advantages to chaos, particularly for Israel, for the Arab countries to be tearing each other apart, to have the enemies, their so-called enemies, divided.
And also it's enormously lucrative for contractors.
So this is what seems like part of the game.
But, you know, because they keep going back for more.
Even though every regime change operation they've tried now from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya and now in Syria have been utter disaster.
Maybe that's the disasters that they want.
And is that what's going to rule the Trump administration?
There was this feeling that he was hated by the neocons.
He was hated by the neocons.
You know, they backed Hillary Clinton, some of the biggest neocons.
And he was supposedly going to change all that.
Will he?
You know, we don't know.
I mean, that's the thing is he's a right wing nationalist hawk.
So, you know, in other words, he is John Bolton and the neocons and John Bolton get along just fine.
Right.
Bolton was never a communist or a Democrat.
He's a lifelong Goldwater right.
Right wing nationalist.
But he might as well be Richard Perle, the Democrat, the Trumanite, the Scoop Jackson, you know, student of Trotskyites and all this stuff like the rest of the neocons.
So I think a lot of the neocon opposition to Trump was just them projecting their fears all over him.
That here's a guy that we haven't had our hands on all this time.
And so who knows what he might do?
And then they just made a really bad choice to attack him all the time when they could have been sucking up all along.
And after all, he's there saying Rex Tillerson wants Elliott Abrams.
The worst guy at the entire Council on Foreign Relations is the Exxon guys pick.
You believe that?
I mean, I don't know.
They haven't confirmed it yet, but.
I was about to bring up Elliott Abrams.
Absolutely.
I thought it was going to be Bolton.
You mentioned Bolton.
That's what made me think of Abrams.
Either one of them is a disaster, but Abrams may be even worse than Bolton.
The guy is completely devious.
He's been involved in all kinds of things, as we know, about convicted felon.
And, you know, Tillerson being an oil guy, he'll have a lot of influence if he's the number two guy.
He knows the politics.
He knows where the bodies are buried.
He knows how to do things covertly to working with the CIA and Pompeo and these people.
That that could develop into something very ugly, too.
I mean, we're going to see maybe different camps emerging in a Trump, in a chaotic Trump administration where, as you say, he's watching TV late at night and tweeting.
And then, you know, there's a long history of the CIA doing their own thing and not being able to be controlled by presidents.
And this one, this guy looks like would be even the easiest to do whatever they want behind his back because he doesn't know what the hell's going on, it looks like.
So if Abrams gets in, he's another one with Iran, too.
So, you know, they could go for some kind of regime change, but that is not going to be easy.
And a war would be easier, but disastrous.
So and that would shake up everything in the region completely.
And it could be very dangerous for Israel, too.
I think somebody's got to sit Trump down if they haven't already explained that.
There'll be retaliation from Iran and those missiles can hit Syria, Israel for sure.
And I don't think that the Iranians would stop, especially if you remember when the 1991 Gulf War, the Americans kept Israel out of that war completely.
And if Saddam still sends Scuds to Israel, I think the same thing might very well happen in Iran, even if the Israelis are kept out of it.
Well, and, you know, the thing is, too, is if I'm right, that the Iranians would strike back against American targets inside Iraq, then that could lead to a huge escalation.
In other words, any conflict, any military conflict between the U.S. and Iran, once it gets started, could get way out of control.
Yeah.
You know, we got to hope that the Germans and the French and the British who were part of this Iranian nuclear deal, they were still supposedly U.S. allies, could try to talk some sense into the United States into going ahead with this deal, not disrupting it, not trying to pull out of it, and not going to war against Iran to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon.
Apparently there's a bill, I don't know when this was introduced in Congress, about authorizing immediately a military action against Iran and putting an invasion if they stop them from getting a nuclear weapon.
Well, that was what that whole deal was about.
But there's been this strong Zionist lobby in the U.S. and of course from Israel that that deal was a disaster and that it has to be stopped and Iran is still a mortal enemy of Israel and they have to be overthrown.
And this is where it looks like Trump, the camp that Trump seems to be in.
Certainly he's a top advisor and that's why I keep harping on Iran.
And you're pointing out correctly that there's a lot of vulnerable targets for the U.S.
Even the bases in Qatar, the U.S. has huge bases there.
That's right across the Gulf, they could easily hit that.
So, does this make any sense at all?
We shouldn't even be talking about this.
And the fact that we are, it's really troubling.
Yeah, no, I mean, seriously, I don't think that they thought this through.
I mean, basically our only hope is that Mad Dog Mattis, Mr. Marine Corps killer who invaded Iraq, who let Osama escape before he turned around and invaded Iraq, that he's going to be the voice of reason here.
At least he's not the only adult in the room at times, particularly on torture, for example.
This is what everybody said about Dick Cheney as well.
We're stuck with George Bush Jr., the dumbass, but at least George Bush seniors men like Dick Cheney are there and he's a responsible adult.
We can count on him.
Wow, how did that work out?
Yeah, not too well.
He still wanted to go after Iran, if you recall, in the second Bush administration.
Yeah.
And Bush says in his memoir that National Intelligence estimate, that NIE that said that Iran had given up the bomb several years earlier, really, you know, scotched that for him.
And I also think it's because Iraq went so poorly that they couldn't go to the stage two, which was to get Iran.
But Cheney kept pushing for that.
So Bush saw the light and he actually stood up to Cheney, it looks like, on Iran in the second administration.
But we're in the first Trump administration and anything is possible at this point.
Man, oh man.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate you spending time with us tonight.
I know it's late in irritable Iraq right now, so I really appreciate it, Joe.
OK, I'm sorry I couldn't give anything more concrete on some of these things, but this is where I think we're at.
Yeah, no, I mean, you're exactly right.
We're just getting started.
We know the president knows nothing.
We know he's got a couple of good instincts and a lot of really bad ones and that he's under the influence of a bunch of know-nothings and maniacs.
And God knows what's going to happen, man.
He's the most powerful guy ever in the history of the world.
So let's see.
Yep.
Roll dice.
Couldn't sum it up better than that.
Couldn't sum it up any better.
All the best.
All right.
Thank you very much, Joe.
Really appreciate it.
OK.
All right, y'all.
Joe Lauria.
Man, he's great.
Check out his old archive at The Wall Street Journal.
Tons of great reporting there.
And of course, you can find him at Consortium News dot com.
A lot of times writing for Robert Perry and the boys over there.
So, yeah.
And that is, again, Joe Lauria reporting live.
Well, recorded to you live to me from Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.
That's it for the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys, for listening.
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