All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Aren't you guys on the line?
I've got the great Daniel L. Davis.
He was a lieutenant colonel in the US Army, fought in Iraq War One, Iraq War Two, and Afghanistan, and was the great whistleblower of 2012 on Petraeus's lies about the failed surge there.
And now he is a fellow at Defense Priorities and constantly writes great things, including this one in military.com that we're linking to at antiwar.com today.
It's called Regardless of How Messy Things Get in Iraq, We Must End the War and Finally Fully Withdraw.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me, Danny.
Always good to be here, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And so, yeah, your story begins 30 years ago, huh?
And by your story, I mean your story here.
Yeah, it's really quite disappointing as well as interesting, you know, that 30 years ago I fought for the first time in Iraq and there are still people, Americans fighting there today.
It's quite depressing.
Yeah.
And so, well, let's skip a few steps and, you know, forget Bill Clinton and Iraq War One and a Half and all of that, but let's start with Iraq War Two in 2003.
America in a sense won that war and lost it at the same time, it seems like, huh?
Well, it really highlights that, you know, what we tell the military to do, what we want the military to do and what it can do.
There is a vast gulf between the two right now.
So, you saw in Desert Storm, the Iraq War One, and in the early part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq War Two in 2003, that we were tactically and conventionally spectacular.
I mean, we absolutely rolled over, you know, the entire conventional military of Saddam Hussein twice, second time all the way going up to Baghdad and taking the capital, et cetera, classic, you know, conventional military win.
But the wars are not just fought to take terrain.
They have to accomplish a political outcome.
And what we have been sending them to do are to try to accomplish with military power something that can't be accomplished with military power, which is deal with political issues here.
So when it comes to fighting an army, well, a bad army, let's be clear on that, let's be honest.
You know, we did a great job and at almost no cost, I mean, really low cost.
But when it comes to trying to win these insurgent wars with conventional military power, we just have been just abjectly unwilling to acknowledge it can't be done.
And even though we have now two full decades of experience of proving that, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, we just can't let go of it and we're just still trying to win something that can't be won.
All right.
Now.
So in the war, I mean, essentially they fought for the Shiite supermajority's political factions, not necessarily for the people, obviously, but for Skiri and Dawa and Sader, what was then called the United Iraqi Alliance, and which still has taken the shape of, you know, total dominance inside the Iraqi parliament.
And even, of course, the sectarian cleansing campaign that really made Iraq something like an 85 percent Shiite city now or worse.
And so, but then the side we fought for told us, OK, now beat it.
And you reference in here how when Obama pulled the troops out in 2011, that was, you know, based on his statements in the campaign that he had promised to do that.
But also it was according to the timetable that Bush had signed on to.
Because the guys that he fought the war for told him, thanks a lot for the help.
Now, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
And so this goes right to what you're talking about in terms of like, oh yeah, our tanks can beat your tanks in a battle.
But don't ask George W. Bush whose side he's fighting the war on because he doesn't know.
Yeah.
And I guess Stephen Hadley didn't either.
I don't know.
It wasn't until 2005 that these guys, you know, finally realized that, jeez, we're kind of not really doing this right.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it just, again, just underscores that we have and look, we just got to admit this in the United States for all the intelligence and the spectacular human capital that we have in so many different capacities and categories.
We just have a horrible track record and of ability to think strategically.
We think tactically, almost exclusively, whether you're talking about politics world with, you know, nothing further than the next cycle, you know, two, maybe four years out.
That's about the extent of it.
And in the military realm, all we think about is the next tactical operation.
There is almost no thought or no comprehension of what comes next.
After you finish this, then what?
If you accomplish whatever you're sitting in, whether it's the 2003 OIF march to Baghdad, after you finish that, then what?
What are you going to do then?
And how is that going to accomplish something of value to the United States?
Most questions don't even get asked, much less answered.
Yeah.
You know, Danny Sherson talked about fighting against Saudi in East Baghdad.
And now when he first got there, he told his commanding officer that, you know, the thing is that these are the Shiites that basically were fighting the whole war for.
So we ought to take a real kind of friendly hangout sort of attitude rather than really picking on them because it's the Sunni based insurgency in the West is really the fight.
And then his commanding officer said to him, yeah, right.
You know, we're here to get some.
Let's go get some.
So they're out there picking a fight with Saudi, essentially for the interests of a, I don't know, a junior officer, but at least a mid rank officer is out there picking a fight with people who in the larger strategy are the ones we're fighting for.
And this is, I guess, before Petraeus decided to really launch the search and and focus on Saudi.
This was just kind of the self licking ice cream cone of just having men deployed anywhere.
Because they just go to fight.
They don't even know whose side they're supposed to be on and don't really care.
That's above their pay grade.
And, you know, it's funny.
In fact, could you explain this to me and say whatever you want about that, too?
But something that seems I always I've had trouble kind of putting this into words.
I think I just figured it out.
I hear military guys talk about, well, that's above my pay grade, right?
My job is putting the team together and going and winning the mission.
Who it is we're attacking.
That's somebody else's job.
And it reminds me, honestly, of like being seven.
I remember I have a good memory for when I was a little kid and how there are things that are just above my pay grade, right?
Like sometimes we're going furniture shopping and I'm just along for the ride.
These decisions are made by people with far more power and authority than me.
And frankly, I'm not interested in all the questions that go into it.
It's just somebody else's responsibility.
But I'm along for the ride.
But then but that was when I was a child.
Right now that I'm an adult, I'm supposed to figure out as best I can what it is I'm doing before I make decisions and do things.
And yet it seems like military guys really take this sort of childish attitude that essentially, you know, if I'm a major, then the colonel is the daddy and he's the one who knows what he's doing.
And I'm just supposed to go where he tells me and shoot who he tells me.
Well, it's a little bit different than that, because I saw various versions of that, especially in Afghanistan, where I saw a lot more action than I did in Iraq.
But you saw guys that were anguished about this because they were told by the parent and your analogy to go and to clear this certain area here and to set up a new outpost here.
Those guys on the ground knew that it was meaningless, that it doesn't matter if you hold this piece of, you know, dirt or not in Afghanistan, it's not going to change the balance on the ground.
And as soon as we leave and we were already scheduled to leave, then we knew that the enemy would simply walk back in.
But we don't have those those commanders at that level.
They didn't have the authority to decide whether they should or shouldn't do it.
They just had to obey the orders that they were given, you know, because that's what the guys above them were given, et cetera.
And it just keeps cascading upwards.
And you can't, unfortunately, fortunately, unfortunately, you can't get into a situation where the military guys get to decide on their own if that's a good idea or not.
That's why we need people like you to put pressure on people in Congress and inside others to tell their political people who have the authority to say, stop doing these stupid things that we need to stop doing so that we don't put troops like that, like Danny Shears and some of these other guys in these no win situations.
Right.
And yeah, it's of course, the American people are told that you shut up about this unless you're a soldier.
You don't have the right to talk about this, especially to be critical of policy or else you're stabbing the soldiers in the back.
You're spitting in their face and calling them baby killer.
Like somebody heard that somebody supposedly did that one time in 1968 or something like that.
The authority and the responsibility are completely diffused.
Everything is above everybody's pay grade.
And even our presidents have to say, well, geez, you know, I don't know.
The American people want us to keep them safe from the war.
And so they're going to call me a wimp if I end it too soon or something like that.
And so nothing is anybody's fault, even though this whole thing goes on forever.
There's a lot of that.
Nobody's willing to take any responsibility.
And the easy thing is to just let the status quo maintain.
I mean, you see, you can be really effective as a congressman by just going with the flow and just doing what the group says.
You keep getting reelected.
With the generals or the colonels, you keep doing what you're supposed to do.
You do what they tell you to do and you get promoted.
That's just how it works.
It's a lot easier to go with the flow and get rewarded than it is to stand up and do the right thing like Schuerson did.
And there's some personal price to pay in there.
But we just need more of it because otherwise we all pay the price for the go along crowd.
OK, you guys, check it out.
The new book is finally done enough already.
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All right.
So now tell us a little bit about Iraq war three here.
You have a great kind of rendition in this article.
Again, it's regardless of how messy things get in Iraq, we've got to get out of there.
It's at military.com and you talk about Barack Obama pulling the troops out and then putting them right back in again, Danny.
Right.
Yeah.
I think one of the things that just drives me crazy and the things that our commanding officers are saying right now is almost the same thing they say all the time.
So Obama took them out in 2011, as you mentioned a minute ago, that the Bush administration had had a choreographed with the Iraqi government and he just, you know, fell, followed through and they did it.
They left in whatever.
I think it was December, late December, 2011.
That would have been, that was fine if he had stayed there.
But then all of a sudden you have ISIS rise up and expose the, you know, the incapacity of the Iraqi military to, to just do basic security services in their own country.
And instead of saying, okay, we're going to, you know, protect our country by sealing that area off and making sure nobody threatens in the United States coming from original from that area.
You guys made this mess.
You guys fixed this mess.
Instead, we said, hey, we'll help you out again.
Obama should never have sent the troops back in there.
They didn't need them.
I assure you that the Iraqi government and the Syrian government would have done whatever it took to eradicate that threat from within, just like they do on any other threat from within right now, if we hadn't have gone back there.
Now it would have taken them longer, would have been more costly, but they would have handled it.
But ISIS never had a chance.
They never had the raw material or even the basic fundamentals for actually carving out a territory and keeping it.
I mean, it was never possible.
And Obama should have seen that.
He's an advisor, should have told him that he should never have gone back in.
Instead, he took the easy route, because there was all this pressure to go in, not realizing that that was also opening him up to accusations from, you know, from many Republicans that said, oh, you know, yeah, you, you lost it.
You were responsible for the rise of ISIS, because if you'd have left the troops there, not that he'd had a choice, but if you'd have left the troops there, then they would never have arisen.
That was never true.
There was so many, God rest his soul, but Senator McCain was the chief cheerleader on that, who claimed that, yeah, that ISIS would never have arisen if we had left troops there, which was never, never true.
ISIS arose because of what Maliki did, because of what happened politically and militarily and sectarianism within Iraq.
Those things contributed to the rise of ISIS, not the absence of American troops, because even if we had had the 10,000 some had said they wanted, they wouldn't have been combat troops.
So they wouldn't have changed any dynamic on the ground.
As we did see in Afghanistan, we never left there.
And yet you see the Taliban has made a significant rise because of conditions on the ground in Afghanistan, which is what it always works out to.
But here's the big thing that we just got to point out, and I try to argue in this article, it doesn't matter whether you have 2,500, 180,000 or anything in between, you are never going to solve with military power, the problems that beset Iraq.
They have to handle it.
Right.
And now, you know, part of that, it's interesting that in the campaign, Donald Trump famously said in 2016, I guess, 15 and 16, that Obama's the founder of ISIS, Hillary's the founder of ISIS.
And of course, they all freaked out.
But then when they asked him what he meant by that, he had Mike Flynn, the former head of the DIA, to advise him.
And so he had a real answer.
And in fact, the best version of this, he said this a few different times, but one of the times it was in a written speech at the National Interest Foundation, the one where he was introduced by Zalmay Khalilzad.
And he got up there and he said, look, Obama and Hillary, they created ISIS.
Here's how they did it.
First, they took the side of al-Qaeda in Libya.
Then they took the side of al-Qaeda in Syria.
And also, they had pulled the troops out of Iraq.
So there was no one there to keep them out of Western Iraq.
And so when you put it that way, pretty hard to argue about it.
And of course, as you say, they weren't allowed by the Iraqis to have troops there.
Although, you know, I still wonder a little bit about the decision making when that convoy is rolling in at a maximum of about 45 miles an hour from Raqqa to Mosul, that they must have deliberately decided to not bomb them from aircraft carriers, either in the Mediterranean or in the Persian Gulf.
The F-18s, pardon me, I'm trying to think of the right designation, F-18s have plenty of range, don't they?
To get to Western Iraq, especially with midair refueling that they could have launched out of Qatar, then they could have bombed that convoy of Toyotas easily and apparently deliberately decided not to.
I don't know.
I don't think he even needed troops there.
But more importantly, it was support for the uprising in Syria.
You say America could have left it to Iran and their allies in the government in Damascus, but America was supporting the jihadists against the government in Damascus, which was what had led to the rise of the Islamic State in the first place.
And then even after they started bombing them in Iraq, I mean, not ISIS, but once they started bombing ISIS in Iraq, they teamed up with the Kurds against ISIS in Syria.
But they were still supporting the Army of Conquest, which was al-Nusra and Arar al-Sham and the rest of these terrorist groups against Assad.
They couldn't just admit they'd been wrong and let, even to this day, they won't let Assad reassert control over the territory of the state of Syria.
Yeah.
And, you know, and you got to back up a little bit further than that is that, you know, even before what you just described here, al-Qaeda in Iraq was the immediate precursor to ISIS.
And where did that come from?
That would never have even formed had we not gone into the invasion in 2003 and then all the things we did after that.
If we had actually gone in, won the war, and withdrew the military troops like we did in 1991, like right away after the conventional war had been over, and then just left a, you know, a small group there to help the Iraqis reform and reorganize whatever that, and then left the Iraqi army intact, that was the major tactical error, you know, then it's very possible that there would never even been the rise of an insurgency, because we wouldn't have been there to stoke it, et cetera.
Now, they still could have had, I'll concede, they still could have had a, you know, a civil war or whatever, because with Saddam out of the way, the internal dynamics of the Kurds and the Shia and the Sunni, you know, still could have erupted.
That would have been a homegrown issue, and just like within Syria, that's primarily Syria's issue, the same thing would have been true there.
But it's going to be true even after we leave.
It's true with us staying there.
They still have it.
So there's no way you can justify us staying there right now.
Yeah.
And, you know, you look at the history of Iraq War II and the way that they did all that.
When Donald Rumsfeld finally said, man, let's just get out now.
If this is going to work, they're going to have to make it work now.
Of course, he was really patronizing about it and condescending.
And so we have to take the training wheels off and kick them off of welfare or whatever.
But that was when they fired him and brought in Gates to double the war, which deprived the Maliki government of their very last incentives to compromise with the Sunni Arab tribal leaders at all, because now we got the whole capital city.
Thanks, Petraeus.
And so whereas if they'd quit in the fall of 06, when Rumsfeld said so, then at least there would have been pressure on Maliki, you know, real reason for him to try to find a way to compromise.
Now, maybe he wouldn't.
As you say, maybe it would have been a total civil war anyway.
But instead what happened?
America handed the Dawa party a total victory over their enemies.
And then, as you said, Maliki just completely, you know, lorded it over the Sunnis and or just cut them loose, refused to put them on the patronage and divvy up the oil money and all that the way he was doing with the rest of the country and leaving all of Western Iraq from Fallujah up to Mosul all completely wide open for ISIS to take over by creating all that resentment while at the same time not really providing any protection.
Yeah, it's a mess all the way around.
I mean, all the way around.
There's almost nothing good that we did throughout this entire thing.
We just have to get out now.
There is no value in us staying there.
There's not even a faux mission.
There's not even a fake mission that we're there to accomplish.
We're just there.
And Trump should have gotten us out before he left.
He didn't.
But now Biden should shut this off.
He should shut off both Iraq and Syria as quickly as possible, because all they do is to continue to keep the possibility of stumbling into a war.
I mean, we've already seen a couple of times that there's been physical clashes between U.S. and Russian troops in Syria.
And of course, we're a constant target for these militia, these Iranian backed militia that want to attack the United States and pay us back for any number of ills that they claim we've done.
But by having them on the ground, stationary targets, it makes it easy.
So let's get rid of those targets.
Let's improve our security by not having people on the ground that they can attack.
And we'll be a whole lot safer as a country.
And one more time for the people in the back, too, that these Shiite militias that you're talking about, these are the guys we've been fighting for for 17 years.
Even when we fought against them, we were still fighting for them, as we were talking about with the battles in Sadr City there.
These guys are all part of essentially the United Iraqi Alliance, all allies of Badr and Sadr and Dawa, one way or the other.
And so- Well, dude, all during the whole anti-ISIS phase, we were working with all the militias.
So we were with them even then.
Right.
In fact, I quote them in the book, where especially in the Battle of Tikrit, the Americans said, you know, yeah, we can't deny it.
We're flying air cover for the Iranians on the ground.
The IRGC is helping lead these militias on the ground in the Battle of Tikrit.
And then they got quotes from the Iranians saying, we got to admit, we couldn't have done it without the Americans' help.
And then John McCain is screaming that, oh, we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq.
And it's like, yeah, because of you.
And not just because he supported the war in 2002 and 2003, but he supported staying.
He supported the surge for the Shia then, and he supported the regime change effort against Assad to try to make up for that fact by taking away one of Iran's friends since we gave them Baghdad.
And then when that blew up into the Islamic State and we take Iran's side again, there he is complaining again, when he was the one.
And so anyway, but now the reason you say we don't have a mission there, but we do.
Because special operations forces are there still going on raids with the Iraqi army against ISIS.
In fact, we had a couple of guys shot late last year, or like one guy fell down in a crevice or something, or some terrible thing.
Well, I want to distinguish.
We don't have a mission.
We have tactical objectives, actions.
We just go with and do special forces to do raids, to hit targets, whatever.
But they're divorced completely from any strategic rationale, i.e. they're not leading anywhere.
In other words, if you took the Americans out of the equation, ISIS is licked anyway, and the Shiite forces there are doing the last of the mopping up and don't even need us to do that.
It makes no difference essentially, right?
As far as that part- And look, I mean, there's still allegedly several thousand ISIS underground fighters in there, and they could deal a lot of havoc in the region.
But the threat is to Baghdad.
The threat is to Damascus.
It's not to the United States.
It's not.
Well, and especially when you look at these attacks that are supposedly launched by these Shiite militias against us, it makes perfect sense whether we're talking late 2019 or this one that took place.
Late 2019 is the one that ended up leading through a series of escalating moves there to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani and then the rocket attack on the American base, which thankfully they left it at that.
And then we've had this recent attack by the Americans against an Iraqi Shiite militia in Syria in the name of revenge for a Shiite militia attack against the Americans.
I'm not exactly certain about the attack in Erbil this year, but I know for, I got very good authority from an Iraqi journalist and even the New York Times agreed that the attack of December 27th, 2019 could have been ISIS.
Could have been anybody.
It could have been a Shiite militia that doesn't know a word of Farsi and doesn't have anything to do with the Iranians at all, but more to the point, it could be ISIS trying to create a division between their two worst enemies, America and Iran and the Iraqi government in Baghdad.
Yeah, they have a lot of motivation to do that.
So I would have been much more hesitant to launch any kind of retaliatory strike until we had that identified for sure, because otherwise, and it seems to me there's a decent chance that this is the case, we did the bidding of just some violent group that we otherwise are against.
We did things for them to their benefit.
Right.
And in fact, I mean, you kind of can't deny, right?
You're hitting the Shiite militias in Syria.
That's a blow, a modest one, but that's a blow for ISIS.
Yeah.
Who does that benefit?
Not us.
It doesn't teach any lesson.
It just makes them want to do revenge more.
So it doesn't help us.
But, you know, if anybody, it helps, you know, some of these other groups that don't like them.
Yeah.
And then, I mean, here's where it really comes down, right, is especially with fuddy-duddy old Biden up there and his staff of hawks who have been responsible for so much of this stuff over the years that another, let's say, hypothetically, we have some kind of major rocket attack where quite a few American soldiers are killed in Iraq.
Now we can't leave.
Now we have only one choice, we being the administration.
We have to make it worse.
We have to escalate.
And that really could lead to a war against the government that we've been fighting for, the groups that we've been fighting for for 17 years now, and could lead to even worse, a real war with Iran.
Yeah, because, I mean, I already mentioned there, you know, the potential for clashes against Russia and something that could really go bad.
But yeah, I mean, we got lucky that we didn't have a bunch of Americans killed in that January 2016 retaliatory strike by Iran, you know, when we got a bunch of guys who got their bails wrong.
But we were lucky that there wasn't killed, because then Trump wouldn't have had any choice.
He would have had to have heavy retaliation, and then all of a sudden, it's a game on, it's a war.
And we're still in that situation.
Every day we keep troops there, we have a run in that maybe one of these rockets hits a barracks or something, and you get 10, 15 guys killed, and no American president would ever not be able to respond to that.
He'd come under enormous pressure, and he would probably do it.
And then, you know, now you've got the chance for the cycle to just circle around and, you know, retaliation, retaliatory strikes on both sides, and now all of a sudden we're in a war.
And there's no purpose in it.
And so why take the risk?
Get them out now.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Here's the thing, though.
There's no pressure on Biden to get out of Iraq and Syria, right?
And that fake lesson of the safe haven myth that you can't leave Iraq or else ISIS will take over again, nevermind, because they can't admit that it's their fault for supporting the jihadists in Syria for five years.
And so they're just going to stay.
That's what I fear is going to happen, yeah.
You see all kinds of pressure.
We've got to get out of Yemen.
Come on, get out of Afghanistan.
We have a peace deal, or a withdrawal deal, at least, for Afghanistan.
Let's stick with that.
But get out of Iraq and Syria?
There's virtually no chorus for that at all, other than, you know, our group.
I know.
I just keep hoping that someday somebody will listen, but yeah, probably won't happen.
Reason?
Yeah.
No, they won't.
All right.
Now, here's the other thing.
Oh, what time I got?
Oh, man, I got to go.
Let me interview you about China next week.
Okay.
You got this great piece about China and Taiwan and America's options and all that.
I really want to go over, but I just got to go and interview Gareth about Afghanistan right now.
Oh, tell him I said hey.
I sure will.
Thank you so much, Danny.
Appreciate it.
You bet.
Talk to you later.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Daniel L. Davis.
He's at Defense Priorities.
In fact, speaking of Gareth, Gareth interviewed him right after he blew the whistle back in 2012 about the failed Afghan surge.
Anyway, check this one out.
It's at military.com.
Regardless of how messy things get in Iraq, we must end the war and finally fully withdraw.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, war.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
