Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Peter Van Buren.
He's a former State Department weenie.
He was in Iraq War II and he wrote the book, We Meant Well.
And he also has a new book out called Hooper's War and it's a novel of World War II Japan.
But you know what?
It's about you and me in the 21st century too.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's a pleasure to be back with you.
How's your book doing?
I've sold like three or four this year so far, I think.
Well, you know, I was worried when you were working on it and I had a chance to read a copy, a pre-publication copy.
Scott's book's about the Afghan war, of course.
I thought, well, man, he's taking a risk here.
What if the war ends before you get this book published?
Young fool.
I know you must have sweated it right till the very last minute hoping that, you know, Trump didn't pull the rug out from under you and pull the troops out before you got the book in print.
So congratulations on gutting that out.
Yeah, no, actually, I went back and found in my emails where I had emailed Mark Perry in February, or yeah, like very early February, maybe even late January after Trump was sworn in.
Hey, Mark, what's the deal on the new Afghanistan review?
When are they going?
When are they coming back?
When do they announce the troop numbers?
Hook me up.
You know, he's the best Pentagon guy I know, you know.
And he's great.
And so I found in my email, he's like, yeah, they're going.
They're going to do a short review and they're going to be back by the end of February or early March and they're going to announce the escalation then.
That was the initial kind of thing.
And Trump did kick the can down the road, but I never did believe he was going to back out.
No, no, of course not.
I don't think anyone will.
I think, you know, the Scott Horton, your children are going to when they, you know, when they take over the show to avenge you, you know, are going to be still talking about this.
I think we've got ourselves a real live forever war in Afghanistan.
But I'm not so sure Iraq is going to rise to the challenge.
That's what I came on the show to talk with you about today.
Yeah, man.
So you wrote an article for the American Conservative about this.
And you also wrote one at your own blog.
WeMeantWell.com.
It's called Iraq War 3.0.
The war to end all wars is over.
And wow, what a great headline.
You know, so Tom Woods just interviewed me and he was asking me about this Patrick Coburn article that was sort of along those same lines that, well, at least the caliphate's dead and can't really see too much room for further conflict as things stand now in Iraq at the end of Iraq War 3.0.
And so I'm not entirely certain I agree for a few different reasons, but I really like your article about it.
And especially, I mean, hell, I don't know.
Let's start at the beginning.
You want to?
I really like your write-up of you have Iraq War 1, Iraq War 1.5, Iraq War 2.
And you do a great short history of this stuff.
Well, for those listeners who want to follow up on this, the article at the American Conservative now is essentially a highly distilled version of the much more detailed piece that's on my own blog at WeMeantWell.com.
And so if you're looking for the shorter version, the American Conservative has that.
If you want to drill down a little deeper into the background of this and get some of the links and details, my blog has a more detailed version.
So choose your poison there.
By the way, I'll remind you that a lot of this audience is very young.
I mean, to them, Iraq War 1 is like what the Korean War is to me.
It's some ancient history.
It's funny that you mention that because the genesis of the article that we're talking about here and the thinking behind it is I'll be going to Penn State at the end of this month to give a lecture on Iraq.
And it's a class that I addressed the last couple of years.
And one of the problems I've always had is that the audience, the students, are in fact young enough that the majority of events that we're going to talk about today are historical events.
They're not events that occurred during their lifetime or at least their adult lifetimes.
And the professor is always very kind to remind me that I have to remember to explain these things.
I can't just kind of casually mention Fallujah and expect that the audience has any idea what it is I'm talking about.
The same way I can't mention Kaysan or Chosin from other favorite wars and expect that everyone out there has that knowledge shared.
So the article and the attempt to sort of say how briefly can I summarize 25-some years of warfare in American war in Iraq really grew out of the problem of these things going on so long and covering so many generations that you really have to start treating them as history.
Not to continue to plug your book for you, but I mean would you weigh in at 500 pages?
No, I mean my book is 270.
Oh, it felt like 500.
The idea is that it still took 270 pages, which is kind of outside the realm of a one-hour lecture or a 30-minute interview or a 2,000-word article.
I'm going to try to give a presentation on it tonight, and I already know I've bitten off more than I can chew.
So we're going to see how that goes.
It's a new skill to figure out how to compress these things in a way that leaves them both factually accurate and meaningful and interesting at the same time.
But the idea of declaring the war over in Iraq, which is what I guess I haven't read Coburn's article yet, but it sounds like he and I are doing basically the same thing, which is saying, you know, what we're calling the American war in Iraq has kind of ended.
And first of all, it does involve a certain sleight of hand with words.
Wars used to end with parades.
It used to end with the soldiers kissing German girls in the streets of Berlin.
It used to end with declarations and announcements.
And then it used to end with the troops coming home.
That was always kind of one of the big things when a war ended.
And even in places like Vietnam, which dragged on for its own interminable years, at some point, the last American soldier left.
And we almost had that experience in 2011 in Iraq.
But we went back, of course, in 2014.
So when I say the Iraq war has more or less ended, I'm using those words very, very specifically and vaguely at the same time, specifically in the sense that I'm speaking only of the major combat involvement of the United States military on the ground.
And I'm speaking specifically of the U.S. parts of the conflict that goes on in Iraq.
I mean, certainly in no sense suggesting that violence is finished, that the issues of independence and religious animosities and who's in charge and oil revenues and that whole other basket from hell of problems are resolved in no way.
What I am saying is that the U.S. bombing of Iraq, which initiated in 1991 with Desert Storm under the first president, George Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, and continued through the Clinton administration where we were bombing Iraq on a basis around three times a week on average, give or take.
And following through into that, we call that Iraq War I and Iraq War 1.5, following into the George W. Bush post-911 era, which was our biggest involvement, we'll call that Iraq War II, where the United States full-on invaded the country, World War II style, and attempted to rebuild the nation into a different format, the reconstruction process, which I had a hand in and I wrote my own book, We Meant Well, about now, gosh, six years ago.
And then finally, the third phase, Iraq War III, which was started by Barack Obama in 2014 as a way of driving ISIS out of the geographical area that we call Iraq.
And that basically is ending.
And it's ending in the sense that the American strategy begun by Barack Obama and continued with great lust and vim and vigor by President Trump was basically one of we are just going to simply kill everyone who might be ISIS until we run out of people to kill.
In some cases, in the case of cities like Mosul and Fallujah and Ramadi, almost literally kill everyone there.
And at some point, there's just simply nothing left to bomb.
You can only bomb, shake up the rubble an additional time so many times, and there's just simply nothing left to shoot at, nothing left to bomb.
And at that point, you reach where we are today.
There is still ISIS elements.
And again, these words become so slippery.
I mean, any guy with an AK-47 can stand up and announce he's a soldier of ISIS.
And there's always going to be.
And there's always going to be some form of low-grade fever in the things here.
But basically, the idea of ISIS as an organization, as an entity that can hold territory, control territory, that can do things that governments can do, is simply over with.
We killed them all, or we chased them away, or we gave them the reason to throw down their guns and go home to their wives and their goats.
And there's nothing left to shoot.
The difference between Iraq War II and Iraq War III is the follow-on, the aftermath, what the military calls stage four, what happens after the shooting is over.
And this is the critical difference.
And I think the marker for the Trump administration, the Trump administration has been very recalcitrant about announcing policies or strategies.
They sort of just do stuff and leave it to us to put the pieces together and say, aha, this adds up to the following thing.
Previous administrations liked to issue doctrines, the Obama doctrine, or make speeches.
But nonetheless, essentially what we have said in Iraq, as best I can figure out, is we're going to use the vast power of the American military to kill everything that moves, to kill everyone that is associated with ISIS, to literally destroy the cities so that ISIS cannot hold them and control them.
And then we're just going to walk away from it, and we don't really care what happens next.
The United States has explicitly stated that it has no plans to actively participate in the rebuilding of anything in Iraq.
It has no plans to shift massive amounts of foreign aid or send lots of people over there, as we did at the end of Iraq War II, where we essentially took responsibility for recreating a new country out of the ruins we made of the previous one.
And we're just leaving it to the Iraqis, who are run out of Baghdad under the control of the Iranians.
So we're basically leaving it to the Iraqis and the Iranians to do whatever it is they want to do with the rubble and dust that's left.
We don't really care, as long as something doesn't reemerge that appears to threaten us.
It is, in one sense, an extremely cruel and medieval process.
It's at the same time, in a way, a very practical one.
It's essentially saying, the only thing we really, really care about anymore is things that might threaten American interests.
And if you want to have a little mini-genocide of Sunnis in Iraq, it doesn't threaten American interests.
If the Iranians want to have some power to play in Baghdad, it doesn't really threaten American interests.
The thing that we were most interested in starting in 1991 was Iraqi oil.
Middle Eastern oil is no longer a centerpiece of American foreign policy.
Isn't it?
Is it?
I mean, the idea is that we don't really need it anymore.
Certainly not in the way that we needed it in 1991, when we launched Desert Storm, essentially to protect the Saudis from Saddam Hussein.
We like the oil, and we've got our ways to get it, but we have shown a remarkable sort of boredom with worrying too much about the oil.
Take a look at that.
Look, you certainly speak for me, but isn't the Pentagon's game the ability to turn off those oil supplies in the event of a crisis with China, this kind of thing?
Well, maybe.
I mean, maybe.
Turning things off is pretty easy.
I mean, you can turn things off from space if you want to use the big enough tool.
Yeah, but I mean, are you saying really that the Pentagon is withdrawing their doctrine of dominance in the Middle East?
I think we're shifting the point of it.
I think the point, you know, dominance, the presence, those things are still there.
No, I'm not in any way implying people are packing up, you know, the naval base in Bahrain or all the secret squirrel stuff in Qatar and everything.
No, of course not.
But the focus is different.
The point of it is different.
Keeping the Gulf open because we want to be the biggest kid on the block seems more the point now than keeping the Gulf open because without that oil, New York is not going to be able to turn the lights on at night.
You know, if you go back and look at the rhetoric in the 90s and even at the turn of the century there, you know, it was all about the desperate need for oil out of the Middle East.
We literally couldn't survive without it.
And we needed to debase ourselves in the most obscene ways with the Saudis, for example, in order to keep that oil flowing.
Less and less necessary.
The United States has found new sources of oil.
We, for better or worse, we're pulling a lot of oil out of our own country.
We are doing things differently.
And we've also, I think, come to the conclusion that the Iraqi oil, which we so desperately have wanted for 20-some years, is just not very accessible.
We failed at the end of Iraq War II to create the infrastructure that's necessary to get oil out of the ground, refine it, and get it into market.
We never really squeezed a whole lot of oil out of Iraq, even though the country remains literally floating on it.
It's just not available to us.
And we don't need it as much.
It's hard to get.
The cost was really high.
And the price of oil is so low that we can buy it where we need it.
I'm saying that the oil has moved out of the center of American foreign policy in the Middle East and what you're seeing playing out in Iraq.
And I'm going to suggest that it's probably going to be similar to what you see playing out on – it's going to take a little longer in Syria, which is basically we're just going to blow the hell out of everybody that's in our way, kill them, destroy them, and walk away without much concern over what happens next.
It really has to do with the fact that it's going to be more about a little bit of muscle-tussle power struggle than it is about control of oil.
I don't know.
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All right.
So now what is next for Iraqi Sunni-stan?
Genocide?
Yeah.
So what I'm going to guess is, first of all, I don't think any troops are coming home.
I mean, Trump may or may not reduce the troop levels.
No one actually knows anymore what the troop levels are in Iraq.
That's become a big secret.
It's somewhere right around 10,000 or so, right?
I mean, pick a number.
Sure.
Because even during the Obama administration, when they were supposedly announcing the troop levels, we found out that there were all sorts of games being played.
For example, during the Obama administration and continuing now, Marines who are officially deployed to assault ships that are floating in the Persian Gulf are not counted as being in Iraq, even when they are on the ground in Iraq fighting.
They are officially deployed to their ships floating in the ocean.
They just happen to commute to work on the ground in Iraq.
So the numbers have always been fuzzy.
You've got contractors.
You've got CIA.
You've got paramilitary.
I mean, the idea of saying what is the headcount of people with guns that are Americans in Iraq has always been a very slippery number.
So if you want to say 10,000, I can't possibly begin to argue with you.
If you said 8,000 or 20,000 or whatever number you like is perfectly fine.
I think there's going to be fewer of them because there's less killing that needs to be done.
There's simply less people to kill, so we don't need as many killers.
Trump will never pull the troops out anywhere close to totally the way Obama did in 2011 simply because of how badly politically that went in 2011 for Obama.
He got blamed for quote-unquote losing the war and all sorts of other things.
It's a very complicated issue, but Trump isn't going to take any kind of political risk on that.
The troops will stay there, and they will stay mostly in the western parts of Iraq.
First of all, they will be there to kind of act as a crumple zone between the Shias and the Iranians who would love to unleash genocide on the Sunnis and the Sunnis.
The more Sunnis that die, the more people are going to ask questions and things.
It's just easier if the Americans are there to kind of keep a lid on it.
Kill as many as you like, but keep it kind of under a certain threshold.
Number two, we have unleashed, distributed an extraordinary amount of weapons across that area.
They're in the hands of every possible group that you can imagine, and the American soldiers are there to kind of play traffic cop, to keep these things under control.
Way off the record, I spoke with a guy I knew from Iraq who's still in Special Forces, who's back from Syria.
He's explaining that a large part of his job was acting as traffic cop between various U.S. allied groups, air quotes on all, to make sure that they spent more of their time shooting at the so-called ISIS bad guys than they did shooting at each other, either purposefully or accidentally.
So there's going to be a big role to play in that.
Any time enough ISIS guys get together to make a target, an American is going to need to be on the ground to call in an airstrike.
So there's plenty of reasons there.
I think the Israelis are demanding the United States remain in Iraq as a buffer against the Iranians.
You know, the Iranians have just done magnificently.
As I mentioned in the article, if Iran was a stock, you would want to be buying it right now.
You'd want to be selling those bitcoins and purchasing Iran.
Well, let me ask you about this because, so I'm going to oversimplify here, and you were there, man, so I know that you can clarify this, but I'm channeling my best Bob Dreyfuss now, I guess, from back in Iraq War II, that the Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Council, a.k.a.
Ayatollah Khamenei, their job basically was getting the army and the Marine Corps to kill all the Sunnis and help them kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad so they could take Shiastan for themselves.
And, of course, the army and the Marine Corps' job was using the Bata Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council in order to kill all those Sunnis and force them out of Baghdad too.
So that was like a complementary thing between the Ayatollah and Donald Rumsfeld there.
And so they did that, but I guess my understanding was, and I think this kind of played out, right, as Dreyfuss said, they don't really, they're not dumb enough to want to rule Fallujah, I guess maybe Ramadi because that was more like a half-and-half kind of city or something, but certainly not Mosul.
Why would Iran and the Dawa Party, based out of Baghdad, want to rule Mosul when it's just too much work and it's basically foreign territory?
So their idea was what they called strong federalism, and that was America's goal too.
And that was why they all were mad at Sadr because he wanted an alliance with the Sunni Arabs against Iran and America both, and to save Iraq from being split apart this way.
But so now, it's after Iraq War III, and now, because Obama's war for the jihad in Syria blew up into a whole Islamic State, he had to turn around and take Iran's side again, and the Dawa Party and the Baata Brigade and these guys' side again in Iraq War III in order to rouse the Islamic State out of Mosul, Fallujah, etc.
But so it sounds like what you're telling me, sorry for the really long question, it sounds like you're telling me that maybe they want to go ahead and keep Mosul and Fallujah now and kill any Sunnis who try to come back to those predominantly Sunni cities and just keep them and expand the borders of Iraqi Shiastan that much further.
Is that what you're saying?
Not quite.
It needs to play out.
But I'm going to guess that the plan is somewhere in between the two here.
In other words, when you talk about ruling, you're talking about what the United States tried to do in Iraq War II.
You take responsibility for picking up the garbage, for running the schools, for making sure that the buses show up on time.
I mean, that's what being a government in its full capacity really, really means.
And it's a hell of a thing to do.
It's very difficult.
And the United States failed in Iraq War II to do that.
And I don't think Baghdad, and we just use that as a shorthand for all those entities you described, I don't think Baghdad has any interest or ability to do that with Sunnistan, the cities Ramadi and Mosul and Fallujah and things.
I think what we're looking at is a kind of stasis as the goal.
The United States would like to maintain the fiction that Iraq is a single country.
It makes our foreign policy look like it's succeeded in a historical sense.
It also avoids any problems of having to redefine relationships.
At the same time, so the idea of saying, well, Mosul is still part of Iraq.
At the same time, Iran and Baghdad have no interest in seeing the Sunnis reemerge in any power form at all.
And so the United States is there to kind of, like I said, keep the lid on it.
You don't want Mosul to become the thing that J.K. Rowling is tweeting about.
You want everyone to sort of just forget about this.
You want it to be just good enough and the killings and the retaliations to be just below the level of national international attention.
So not necessarily a continued sort of Iraq war four here, three and a half against the Sunnis, a genocide against Sunnis, but basically go back to 2013 and hope it doesn't turn back into 2014 again.
Well, and put the pieces in place to make sure it doesn't.
I mean, I don't want to stretch this analogy too far, but it's kind of like in the United States.
After the American army had essentially decimated the Native Americans and eliminated them as any kind of organized, large scale threat, we still kind of kept killing them on the margins to make sure that they never really reconstituted.
So the idea would be that that's kind of what I expect.
I don't think you're going to ever see people let the problem get as big as it did in 2014, where ISIS metastasized so quickly because the United States allowed the fiction to exist that Iraq was a singular country and the Iraqi National Army was in Baghdad, was in control of the country and all those other fantasies that we still wanted to believe so badly were true.
This time around, as I said, it's both a very medieval and a very realistic based approach Too many Sunnis raise their heads up too high.
Somebody's going to whack them down, whether it's a Shia militia, Iranian special forces, or a U.S. airstrike.
We now have permission.
Americans have been fully conditioned that whenever the president says ISIS, debark.
And all the president has to do, and it doesn't matter if it's President Trump or President whoever, has points at a bunch of guys with AKs and says, they're ISIS, then we're allowed to kill them.
Congress doesn't care.
The American people don't care.
As long as the American casualties remain at the statistical error level that they are, nobody cares.
And I think that's what you're going to see.
People have looked very carefully at the mistakes of Iraq War II and said, the biggest mistake is we tried to take responsibility for phase four, for the cleanup, for the reconstruction.
Not making that mistake again.
They're on their own.
Second mistake was we let the Iraqis, we trusted these systems to hold when we knew they were too weak to do that.
We're not going to make that mistake again.
They deliberately abolished all their systems, right?
Elliott Cohen and those guys that came in, they abolished every law, fired every government employee.
I was talking about the systems that should have prevented ISIS from taking over the western half of the country.
Yeah, you're correct on that.
But I'm saying the idea is that in 2011, when we pulled most of the troops out, the idea was that the Iraqis got this, Baghdad is in charge of the country, the Iraqi National Army and police are going to keep a lid on things.
We're no longer making that same mistake.
That was the big mistake there was to believe those things were going to work.
You're speaking now from the point of view of the military and the occupation.
You're not saying...
That's correct.
These are not my personal opinions.
Yeah, I'm just making sure that that's clear to the audience.
Yeah, sorry.
Sorry, I get away from myself.
But no, I'm trying to explain in the Pentagon, if I could be a fly on the wall, I suspect we'd hear a discussion somewhere along these same lines.
What did we do wrong in Iraq War II?
We tried to take responsibility for fixing the country, this time to hell with them, let them fix their own country or don't fix it.
What did we do wrong in 2011?
We pulled all the troops out and we trusted the Iraqis to police themselves and keep ISIS from getting too big a problem.
We blew it.
I'm seeing a real big flaw in their theory here, dude, which is that we've seen the Sunni insurgency in Iraq fight before, whether led by AQI, ISIS types or local whoever's.
And 4,000 out of the 4,500 dead Americans from Iraq War II were at the hands of the Sunni insurgency.
And just because the Islamic State's been defeated does not mean these men are just going to sit there and take it.
As you said, they're still armed to the teeth.
So now they're just, and hell, I've been saying this for years, they're going to be, with Saudi money, they're going to be flinging suicide bombers at Baghdad from now into eternity because George Bush gave Baghdad to the Shia.
Sure.
But you've got a new, I think, a new sense on the American side of what I've been referring to as medieval.
There's no sense, as there was in 2008 when the Sunnis rose, that we've got to figure out a way to bring them into the fold, to make them part of government.
I mean, it just sounds like you're saying that the U.S. thinks that this is going to work.
We're just going to dominate them, but we're not going to try too hard or something.
And I just think, yeah, they're in trouble, right?
I think the process, the next experiment will be basically just to kill them all and to not goof around with trying to reconcile anybody or bring them into government or worry about power sharing or anything like that.
It's going to be simply a medieval process of destroying anyone who threatens us and allowing the Shia Iraqis to do the same.
And you can, in fact, kill them all.
Attrition is, in fact, a fairly workable thing.
And the idea of saying that it's just basically saying, well, look, if a car bomb goes off every once in a while in Baghdad, that's just the cost of all this and it's not really anything we care about.
You're right.
I mean, that is what they make B-52s for, right?
Dropping bombs.
It is exactly why we keep paying the rent on those things.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Alright, so tell me, and I know this is hard to tell, but what do you think, how do you describe the degree of control that Iran has over the Abadi government?
Again, the Dawa party, same as the one that George Bush put in power there.
It's just he's the third or fourth.
Let's see, there was Jafari, then Maliki.
He's the third Dawa party guy in a row here.
A lot, not very much simultaneously.
The a lot part comes from the fact that the Iraqis have very little money of their own.
Oil is at low, low prices, as we talked about earlier.
They can't get the oil they have out of the country.
They have no sources of revenue.
They depend on money from Iran and from the United States to exist.
And that gives Iran, to a lesser extent, the United States elements of control.
Baghdad government depends on the Iranians in various ways for its physical survival.
Iranian special forces, Iranian leadership, Iranian training and weapons.
They need all those things.
So Iran has an awful lot to say about how things work.
At the same time, while it's easy for us to sit here and say Baghdad or the Dawa party, we know, in fact, that those are just kind of catchphrases, code words, to describe an extremely complex organism that has guys like Sadr, who seems to be trying to play off the Saudis against the Iranians and splinter groups.
And every subreddit in imagination there.
And the Iranians, I think, are very aware that this is a very volatile mix on the Iraqi side.
And their ability to control that volatile mix has very real limits.
Countering that is the question of, well, what is Iran's goal?
What are they trying to do?
And once again, Iran is not trying to rule Iraq.
They are not trying to make sure the buses run on time and the schools are open.
They are just trying to have Iraq exist as a massive buffer zone so that they will never face an enemy on their western front again, whether it's Iraqi or otherwise.
They're trying to eliminate a Sunni threat from the Iraqi desert with that buffer zone and with the ability to move Iranian troops in and out.
They wouldn't mind picking up some money here and there, and they love the idea of having a corridor west into Lebanon and Syria.
But the Iranian goals, I think, are relatively modest on a geopolitical scale and don't require this iron grip on the country that we normally associate with classic 19th century European politics where, ooh, the Nazis control Poland now or things like that.
I think this is a very new way of looking at controlling territory or controlling government.
It's a very limited set of goals, specific but limited set of goals, and I think the Iranians have shown themselves fairly skillful at it.
Again, they're still there, and we're gone for the most part.
That says something all by itself.
Yeah, and boy, wasn't that obvious all along too.
Well, actually, I say that from my very privileged position of sitting around reading Bob Dreyfuss back when.
So you were in Iraq War II from what year to what year?
2009 to 2010.
Oh, okay.
So that's pretty late in the game there after the surge and the so-called victory and all that.
So when you were there, or even I guess I'll ask you before you even went there, but then also when you were there, was it obvious that you guys were just basically the Hakeem family's errand boys?
No, no, no, no, of course not.
The United States had its head— And I'm sorry, Hakeem, that's the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution was Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem was their leader and Iran's sock puppet.
No, no, we had—and here you go, wait for it, kids.
We had our head in the sand.
I came back from Iraq, and one of the first things—I was still working for the State Department at that time, and so the question of me speaking and writing publicly was a major, major issue.
But one of the things I wanted to write was an article saying that Iran won the U.S.-Iraq War.
And I had impossible time finding any outlet that would publish it.
I was not well-connected then into the non-mainstream press.
I was trying to shop it around to New York Times and Foreign Policy and all those places, and no one would entertain the concept at all that the Iranians were the big winners when it was very, very obvious to me.
Certainly the U.S. government did not have that position.
It ended up being published as sort of a, hey, kids, here's a guy you can throw pies at by Tom Ricks, the columnist then for Foreign Policy magazine, who published it as a guest contribution so that his readers could basically laugh at me and say, ha, ha, ha, what an idiot.
Well, we sort of got it right early on.
And a lot of smarter people—and I don't mean to blow my own horn, but I mean there were people that understood this inside of U.S. government, but they were not people who were in positions of authority and their voices were not given much credence.
We just didn't want to believe that the outcome of 4,500 dead American soldiers and trillions of dollars and all these years of effort was to hand over virtual control of Iraq to Iran.
That was a very, very tough thing for people to accept, and I think there's—officially the U.S. government still sort of doesn't like to talk about it, even though we've obviously on a practical level long ago given up and realized that is what happened.
I tell the story that when I was in Iraq in 2010, I was out in the east of Baghdad, and we had frequent—I was with an American—embedded with the American military, and we had frequent contact with Iranians, officially not any of them soldiers.
They were business people and tourists, folks who were looking for opportunities.
I'm sure a large number of them were also Iranian intelligence people or soldiers, whatever.
But, I mean, they were just all over the place.
It was just not that big a deal to encounter them as we were cruising around the territories east of Baghdad.
We had an interpreter with us who spoke some Farsi, and so we were able to communicate with these people.
And my attempts to report this information to the embassy were constantly rebuffed as essentially saying, well, you're just exaggerating.
Good for you that you ran into a stray Iranian businessman in Salampak.
But, I mean, it doesn't mean anything.
But, of course, it did mean something, and I don't think it was surprising to any of the soldiers and the people who were with me later to find the ascension of Iranian influence being so clear.
And certainly in our private briefings with the military, there were regular mentions of Iranian special forces.
And, I mean, those were the guys everybody was really scared of.
The idea that some goat farmer was going to take us out was essentially saying, well, that's going to be your unlucky day, right?
That guy's going to fire off a whole magazine full of rounds from his AK, and if one of them hits you, it's just bad luck, dude.
But the Iranian special forces, those were real live professional soldiers.
Those were the ones everybody was scared of, and they were the ones who knew how to make bombs that went off in the time and the place they were supposed to, and exploded in a way that was, in fact, extremely dangerous to us, given the armor technologies that we had.
So, it was out there.
I got to tell you, man, I interviewed this lady.
She was a CIA officer, or an analyst, and I mentioned something about Patrick Coburn.
I forget if it was in the interview or off the air or something.
I mentioned something about Patrick Coburn, and she was like, who?
And I was like, man, you know, you don't read Patrick Coburn?
Seriously?
Like, you're an intelligence analyst on Middle Eastern affairs, this, that, the other thing, and that's not part of your regular diet?
Is that you read this guy?
You don't?
The name sounds kind of familiar.
And so, I'm sorry, I'm just so goddamn annoyed listening to you talk about this, because the first episode of Anti-War Radio was Robert Dreyfuss and Ron Paul.
And Robert Dreyfuss had written an article called, this is 06, in fact, I've been talking to him for years about this, but this is just off the top of my head.
Bush's meeting with a murderer.
That time Abdulaziz al-Hakim came to Washington, D.C., and I remember asking Bob, hey, man, if Sadr keeps bad mouth in Iran, and the Iranians just want to break off all of south and eastern Iraq and keep it for themselves, basically, or put their guys in power there and all of that, then how come the Bush government doesn't make some kind of deal with Sadr instead of making their deal with Hakim, who clearly has been living in Iran for 30 years, since Jimmy Carter hired Saddam Hussein to invade them, and is a quote-unquote Iraqi traitor who is clearly in the service of the Iranian regime in this strong federalism program here, right?
Why does this make sense?
Why would we think, if we go along with the Iranian plan for strong federalism, that we would be the dominant force at the end of the day instead of them?
And Bob Dreyfuss says, yeah, exactly.
You know?
So this is all figured out, and never mind 06.
You could go back to when I first probably started interviewing him in 04 or 05.
This is what we're talking about.
Who are the Shiites?
Well, there's Dawa, there's Skiri, and there's Sadr.
And here's what they want, and here's who they serve, and here's what they're doing.
And why is this calculus that's so difficult for the State Department to understand when you're on the ground serving them going, oh, geez, these guys might set off a bomb?
Well, only because you guys are racing to have the most influence over the same regime that you have together installed in power.
And you can't even see that?
You know, in defense of analysts everywhere who are sitting at home and pounding their heads against the table as they listen to this, there are a lot of – and I spent 24 years inside the State Department and interacted with my colleagues at all the other three-letter agencies and the military.
There are a lot of smart people out there.
There are a lot of very informed people out there.
There are a lot of people who read Patrick Coburn out there.
The problem is that when you start to take information at some point in the government process, it stops being information per se, which is neutral.
Information is neutral.
And it becomes justification for political acts.
And, you know, in different organizations and at different times and places, that location changes.
But at some point when it reaches a White House who's trying to decide, for example, what to do about al-Sadr, it's no longer objective information, neutral information.
It's the information that Condi Rice wants to use to justify her plan about what to do about Sadr versus the information that Donald Rumsfeld wants to use to justify what he wants to do.
Sometimes it's cherry picking where you simply isolate a fact and say and ignore the others.
And sometimes it will be as generous as possible here, a legitimate difference of interpretation.
But it doesn't matter.
The end result is all the same.
The information ceases to become neutral, and it becomes a piece of a political negotiation process.
And at that point, the analysts bang their heads against the desk.
Because a good analyst, and there are a lot of smart, good analysts, you know, try to stay as neutral as they can as long as they can, knowing that it never lasts.
It's not how the process actually works.
There are, of course, other analysts, and maybe the person who said, I don't know who Patrick Coburn even is, is among these things, who kind of short-circuit the process and say, look, I know what my boss wants.
And that's what's going to get me promoted or patted on the head or whatever it is I'm seeking out of this job.
So, you know, hey, I'm not even going to bother to create something neutral now knowing it will disappear.
Its neutrality will be shed as it goes up the line.
I'm just going to, you know, short-circuit the process.
I know my boss wants to hear that X, Y, and Z are true.
So I'm not going to bother to look at alternate sources because I'm never going to cite them.
It's a waste of my time.
So you've got both of those things going on at the same time.
It's different.
I mean, if you, for example, if you look at tactical military intelligence, the idea is, hey, we're going to go through that town tomorrow.
Are we in danger there?
There's no politics involved in that analysis.
The question is, are we going to get shot over there or not?
And it's very practical and it's very neutral.
And it's like, well, this is where solder's guys are and this is where the guys we paid off last week are.
And if we drive this way and then turn this way, we probably won't get shot, without any discussion of whether we should have paid those guys off or not or whether we should have dealt with solder in a different way.
So that's an example of purely neutral information.
But it's hard to keep it.
It never survives the process because at the end of the day, government is a political process.
And these are political decisions.
We can pretend the goal is to liberate Iraq.
But, of course, I don't think even Bush could have kept a straight face for very long saying that.
We all know that in the end, these are political goals.
And so the information gets politicized.
And it's sad when an analyst says as overtly as apparently one did to you of saying, I don't even bother with alternative sources because nobody wants to hear them and I'm not going to waste my time on that.
Yeah, I mean, I remember, hell, it was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Sylvester Reyes, I guess.
And they asked him, hey, where does Hezbollah live?
I have no idea.
They, Sunni or Shia?
Oh, who, me?
I don't know.
Ask somebody else.
And then they did the same thing to the head of the FBI Counterterrorism Division.
Oh, hell, you know, I don't have my note cards with me, kind of answer.
Jesus Christ, you guys don't even know.
I'm just sitting around reading TomDispatch.com.
It's not like people are always giving me credit.
Wow, you know so much.
Dude, I read the paper.
I mean, for many years in a row, and I have my favorite journalists, and I do get to ask them follow-up questions, so that's kind of a cheat.
But still, yeah, I mean, Patrick Coburn, if you want to know about what's going on in the world, you read Patrick Coburn.
That's kind of the deal.
You know, you don't have to agree with him on everything and all of his analysis of everything, whatever.
I don't, but god dang, where would we be without him?
You know what I mean?
I will mention to the Patrick Coburn fanboys out there, you know, I mean, this has been a big day for him, but we're using Patrick here, I think, as a stand-in for all alternate sources here, though I do enjoy his work, of course, and at TomDispatch as well.
The information's out there.
Again, it's a question of whether you're willing to work with it or whether, you know, if it's your job and you know nobody's going to pay attention to it anyway, at some point I think a lot of people just roll their eyes and say, why should I waste my time reading alternative information when I know my boss is just going to redline it out of the report anyway?
So I understand where that attitude comes from, and some of it is just people who have reached a practical limit on their mind bandwidth.
I mean, some of them are idealists.
Yeah, it's just a job, right?
Starting wars, flipping burgers, whatever.
At some point you kind of lose interest.
At some point that is what it is.
I'm afraid, my friend.
Because, you know, how many people are in the U.S. government bureaucracy involved in so-called defense?
I mean, it's a lot of people.
They get up in the morning, they go to work, they do their little piece of it.
I mean, there's very few people who are playing risk out there with the big pieces on the board.
I mean, there's a whole bunch of people.
Well, you know, there was that famous clip from there was going to be a defense department briefing and everyone was waiting for the admiral to march up there or whatever it was, and a guy in the audience says, boy, we better hope Ron Paul doesn't win or we'll all have to get jobs.
And it was obviously meant to be a joke, right?
Everybody knows that they're going to screw Ron Paul out of Iowa and whatever.
He's not going to go anywhere.
But it was just a joke about, hey, let's admit for one moment that we're all a bunch of welfare queens here.
But all the laughter was nervous, guilty laughter.
It wasn't light and funny to them.
It was like, oh my God, that's true.
We better stop him.
Because they know they're guilty.
So that's the reaction is one of fear.
Anyway.
Hey, so I want to talk more about Iraq.
We're three and a half.
That has already begun.
Have you seen this thing by Michael Makovsky and Fox News?
One way to counter Iran's aggression.
Change the map of the Middle East where he talks about breaking up Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
You know, that's great.
It sounds, I mean, if you told me that you were reading an article from 2003 and it was Dick Cheney and the neocons laying out their grand strategy, I would believe you.
The fact that somebody is trying to say that in 2018 is somewhere between pathetic and hilarious.
I mean, the most basic bit of hilarity in there is it presumes the United States has any chance and any ability to cause these things to happen.
We are no longer this giant dominant force that overlays the Middle East.
We are no longer in a position where we can dramatically shape large-scale events.
We are simply in a position where we can muck things up.
We can break things.
We can drop bombs anywhere they need to be dropped.
But in terms of actually causing changes to happen, splintering a country into many countries so that it's less threatening or something like that, I mean, that's simply beyond our abilities.
We burned that bridge in 2003 when we invaded Iraq and got stuck there.
So, I mean, people are welcome to say whatever silly things gets them a spot on Fox or anywhere else.
And I understand everybody's got to earn a living out there.
And in the current media environment, the best way to get on TV is to say something more outrageous than the last outrageous thing.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
I mean, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, they played a huge role in lying us into Iraq War II.
As I, you know, I'm not sure if you know, but Mikovsky himself was a member of the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon under Feith.
And I know that I did say was, and it is past tense.
It isn't 02 or 03 anymore.
But these neocons, they're not gone, it doesn't seem like.
They're not gone.
Especially on, especially in, when it comes to forming Trump's ideas about what should be done about Iran and their role in the Middle East, the world's greatest leaders of terrorism and all of that.
They're not gone.
And hope, hope sprigs eternal.
And like I said, everybody's got to earn a living out there.
But the days when the United States could in fact cause these, these large scale events to happen when we had the mojo to do it, when we had the military that wasn't crippled after years and years and years of this playing on repeat, this is all over with.
The ability of the U.S. government to kind of get all the resources lined up to do these things really was squandered.
And it just simply doesn't exist anymore.
If all we want is chaos, we can probably find a way to keep chaos alive in places like Lebanon and Syria.
And that's kind of what we were speaking about in terms of Iraq is a, is a kind of a low level of chaos that eliminates the threat.
But after that I'm sorry, Neal Kahn's your, your time has passed.
Yeah, boy, I sure hope you're right about that.
Yeah.
It just seems like that narrative that, Oh my God, Iran, nobody ever debunks that, you know?
No.
Oh my God.
What are you an apologist for the Ayatollah or what have you?
And in fact, of course, because of America's we've been discussing their power has increased to such a great degree in Iraq and in Syria.
Maybe their influence has increased a little in Yemen.
I don't even know if that's true, but at least mythologically speaking it has.
And so, I mean, that's a pretty powerful narrative to be overthrown by nobody trying to stop it.
You know what I mean?
Makes sense.
All right, my friend, I am out to further the goals of the revolution and I'm going to look forward to talking with you again.
I've got some new work coming out on North Korea, which I think we're going to need to hash over and a piece on fear and fear itself that I'm working on for American conservative that I think will be of interest to you and your listeners.
And so I'm looking forward to coming back soon.
Great.
Talk to you then.
Take care.
All right.
Thanks.
Peter Van Buren, he wrote a bunch of books.
The Ghosts of Tom Joad, We Meant Well, and Hooper's War.
That one's a novel of World War II Japan, but it's really about you and me right now in the terror wars.
I'm Scott.
Check out all this stuff at scotthorton.org for the show, Libertarian Institute for things to read, antiwar.com for more things to read, and foolserend.us for my book, Fools Erend, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
And you can follow me on Twitter.
I mean, I'll probably insult you, but I'm on there at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
