06/01/07 – Jim Lobe – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And introducing our next guest, he's the Washington Bureau Chief for Interpress Service.
And we post everything he writes pretty much at antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Jim Loeb.
Hi, thanks.
It's good to talk to you again.
It's been a couple of years.
I guess so.
But I always read your articles and I always learn a lot and really appreciate them.
You have a new one up today called The Surge Dirge about the infighting in the administration about the troop surge in Iraq.
And I believe your point is that Bush has decided to abandon the neoconservative strategy and move toward the Baker-Hamilton plan, is that right?
Well, I would say that I think he's pretty much decided that the surge, insofar as it involves the deployment of current levels of troops up to 160,000 or 170,000, is not politically sustainable much beyond September at all.
And that next year, there will have to be a substantial reduction of combat troops, which is what the Baker-Hamilton recommendations urged.
And in that respect, I think he's more or less signed on to Baker-Hamilton.
Now, that doesn't mean a total troop withdrawal by any means.
And it doesn't even preclude the establishment of permanent bases, a la Korea, although I think that's pretty much of a fantasy myself.
But I think in terms of sustaining the high levels that have been wrought by the surge, I think the White House has pretty much given up on that idea.
And simply because they don't have the troops.
Well, that's certainly a contributing factor.
But I think above all, it's about the political reality where I think senior Republicans, including quite loyal Republicans like Mitch McConnell, have informed the White House that it's just not going to work, that the Republicans cannot go into an election year in 2008 without any reductions in prospects of further reductions.
So no chance we'll be anywhere near out of there by election time.
But in the summer before the election, the Republicans want to say, see, we won, and now we're in the process of withdrawing our guys.
Well, I think they want to say that, look, the trajectory is withdrawal, so you don't have to worry so much about Iraq.
And then I think their aim is to make Iraq less of an issue in the 2008 campaign.
Now what exactly is the Baker-Hamilton plan?
I know that there was a lot of hype about, well, it's a pullout plan, but my understanding was really it was a let's leave half our troops there plan.
Well, let's leave half our troops and reorient the mission so that it's more training and embedding, as they say, that a residual combat force consisting mainly, I think, of special forces would be either on the ground in Iraq or very close to Iraq, presumably in Kuwait, that would target virtually exclusively al-Qaeda or alleged al-Qaeda activity in Iraq.
And then you'd also have troops there to protect U.S. installations and personnel.
So all together, I think ultimately you might have, I think what Baker-Hamilton had in mind was you probably have about 60,000 troops for an indefinite period.
Right.
Yeah, it sounds like as long as they can say that there's holy warriors in the Sunni provinces, then that's a loophole you can drive a whole war through and keep this thing going forever.
Well, if it's only special forces who are supposed to carry out those missions, it's a fairly small group.
I mean, that's the recommendation.
Now, they also recommended that the United States forswear any intention of having permanent bases in Iraq.
And in the past week, Bush himself and then subsequently Tony Snow and even Secretary Gates have raised this possibility of permanent bases, although they didn't use those words exactly.
That would go against the Baker-Hamilton report.
But I don't know yet whether people take this idea as something that the administration seriously intends or whether this is some effort to divert or to kind of change the goalposts so that people don't talk about Iraq as being Vietnam all over again, but instead something else that in this case, as they call Korea.
Now, this idea of embedding soldiers with the Iraqi army sounds extremely dangerous to me, right?
We're talking, what, a handful of Americans surrounded by battalions of Iraqis?
Well, I'm not a military specialist, but that's more or less the idea and a number of former military people have attacked this idea as impractical, particularly when the military and security forces, the police and so on, in Iraq are highly sectarianized and in some cases are really arms of various militias or political faction leaders, that it really does make or could potentially make U.S. troops who are embedded with them potential targets, make them highly vulnerable.
And now, you know, the whole idea about leaving troops in there to fight Al-Qaeda, the only reason Al-Qaeda is there is because we invaded the place.
Our guys, even with troop numbers, there have been various times over the last few years that we have had approximately this number of troops in country and America hasn't had any ability to get rid of Al-Qaeda so far.
It seems like if anybody's going to be able to, it's the local Sunnis who have thus far tolerated them because they're helping fight us.
Yeah, and I think, you know, we've seen some change in that over the last six months where nationalist Sunnis are taking on Al-Qaeda.
It's not clear who's prevailing in this fight.
Washington has, or the administration, the military have tried to take advantage of this and have tried to create an alliance, essentially, with Sunni insurgents against Al-Qaeda forces.
And now they're saying that this is really going well.
I think it's really difficult for us to assess that from here.
And according to a lot of Iraq specialists, this was kind of an inevitable fight that is one between Sunni nationalists whose main concern was to expel foreign occupiers and defeat what they call the Persians, that is the Shia, and internationalist jihadis whose main ideas were inspired by Al-Qaeda and bin Laden.
Frictions have definitely grown up between the two of them over the last 18 months and now in some places in Al-Anbar and even in Baghdad itself, or in its surrounding area, they appear to have now been fighting each other.
This really does put the lie to the administration's propaganda that we just can't leave because Al-Qaeda will have this safe haven and we have to stay, according even to the Pelosi-Reed timetable bill that failed, said, you know, had this giant loophole, well, we can still keep troops in there enough to fight Al-Qaeda and force protection for them and that kind of thing.
It's all ridiculous.
We're the ones who give Al-Qaeda a chance to have a presence there and the people who've been tolerating them are now over it.
Right.
Now, I think there's a legitimate question as to whether the people who were working with Al-Qaeda and have now turned against it can prevail against Al-Qaeda.
And I think the U.S. military effort in Al-Anbar is probably correctly trying to forge some kind of alliance so that Al-Qaeda can be, or the Al-Qaeda-like forces in Al-Anbar and elsewhere can actually be defeated.
But yeah, in terms of origin, I mean, we drew them to Iraq, we created them in many ways by our invasion, and for the first three years of our occupation, we were essentially encouraging an alliance between Al-Qaeda and Sunni or Ba'athist groups who now have turned against them but probably would have even prevented their introduction if the U.S. hadn't invaded in the first place.
Well, I don't know of any reason to believe that the local Iraqi Sunnis wouldn't be able to take care of the jihadist types.
America hasn't been able to occupy Sunni lands successfully.
If we were gone, then the only foreign occupiers would be the Saudi and Egyptian holy warriors who've come to fight, and it seems like the local Sunnis would be able to handle them just fine.
Well, yeah, but at the same time, I think they've made a number of converts.
It's not just foreign fighters.
I think there are many Iraqis who now identify with Al-Qaeda.
I mean, I don't know whether it's predominantly a foreign-led force or whether it's predominantly an indigenous force.
I don't think U.S. intelligence is entirely satisfied with that, with an answer to that question.
I think it's pretty murky.
I'm pretty confident that it's not entirely a foreign phenomenon.
I think they have local supporters, but again, I think it's very difficult to assess what the balance of power is in Anbar and elsewhere between the Sunni nationalists and the jihadis.
Now, to the larger balance of power between the Shia Arabs in the south and the Sunnis and so forth, a part of this surge strategy supposedly is to allow for reconciliation and I guess basically, for lack of a better term, re-bothification, to allow some of the Sunnis back into the government and into the executive agencies, not just the parliament, and actually give them a bit of a say in what's going on here.
And yet my understanding is that the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has absolutely refused any efforts to allow the Baathists back into the government.
Is there any sign or signal that that's going to change?
Well, obviously the administration is pressing the Shia leadership in the Maliki government and even outside to do this because they don't see a solution to the sectarian conflict without it.
As I understand it, Sistani has not been helpful to the American side on this.
But it's difficult to know because Sistani himself always speaks indirectly.
That is, he's always speaking through someone else and so we don't know precisely what he himself believes, but the tea leaves indicate that he's been hostile to reversing de-Baathification.
And I think it's a big issue around Maktad al-Sadr because al-Sadr has showed increasingly that he, on the one hand, wants a strong federal government and wants to establish links with Sunni insurgency, the nationalist insurgency, but on the other hand, he and his base are very much opposed to any reversal of de-Baathification.
And I think that remains for him to sort out, for him and his followers to sort out and I think that's very much up in the air.
I should stress, it's not necessarily a good thing for the United States that, one, nationalist Sunnis are now at war with Al Qaeda-type forces or that Maktad al-Sadr wants to reach out his hand to the nationalist Sunnis because the nationalist Sunnis, while their first priority may now be to defeat Al Qaeda, their next priority will be to get the United States out of Iraq.
And that's the same order of priorities for Maktad al-Sadr.
Now if the nationalists succeed on the Sunni side, and if you do see an alliance between some kind of political alliance between Maktad al-Sadr and the nationalist Sunnis, then the administration's talk of permanent bases or maintaining a presence in Iraq, I mean, moves just very, very dramatically into the realm of fantasy.
Right, and this is why we're supporting the Iran parties, because they need us, whereas everybody else is trying to get together, form a coalition government and make us leave.
Yeah, I think that's right.
But it is very complicated.
I mean, there are a lot of different games that are being played all at the same time.
I don't pretend to understand.
I'm not an Iraq specialist.
Do you know about the oil law?
What exactly, this oil law that the Americans keep trying to force the Iraqis to pass, what the details of that are or its purpose?
I'm not that knowledgeable.
I mean, there are other people who know much more about it.
I know that it permits a great deal of privatization.
It's fairly favorable to foreign companies who want to come in and get larger than previous shares of production, get larger than previous stakes in oil enterprises around Iraq.
My understanding is that it's very vague still about how revenues are to be distributed among federal and local governments, regional and local governments, and in fact, it's so vague that a number of people who have looked at this carefully say that for all of its hype, it's very unlikely to help the process of national reconciliation, even if it is passed.
And yeah, I guess the theory is it's supposed to nationalize all the oil resources so that the revenues are shared basically equally around the country.
Well, that's been how it's been depicted, but my understanding is that the specifics of it are much more vague, and that's why even if it passes, it's not likely to address the main concerns, for example, of the Sunni regions, predominantly Sunni regions, which are oil poor and resource poor.
I know that also that the Kurds, for example, are very unhappy with it and are against it at this point, and they are resource oil rich.
It's been billed as something that is supposed to advance the cause of national reconciliation and stem the tide towards civil war, but I understand it's been kind of overbilled in that way.
In any event, I think the latest I've heard is that it's unlikely, while it's the most likely of all the pending kind of proposals for national reconciliation to pass between now and September, its passage is still considered a long shot by September.
You mentioned there the Kurds and their dissatisfaction with it.
This is actually a worry of mine, really, from the very beginning of this war in 2002.
I remember thinking about, well, what happens when the Kurds try to create Kurdistan?
They're going to have problems with all the bordering states there that have Kurdish populations, and particularly Turkey.
There's been bombings here and there, and there have been border skirmishes here and there.
But the latest reports are that in response to some bombings in Ankara, that the Turkish army is moving rapidly toward the Iraqi border and are preparing to do something to quote unquote deal with the PKK and that kind of thing.
I wonder if you have any insight about prospects for further war in Kurdistan.
Turkish troops have been there in force now for about three months.
It preceded the bombing in Ankara, and tensions have been building steadily, and the Turks are increasingly angry, and that includes the Turkish military, with the United States for not deploying its own troops into areas where the PKK, which is the Turkish group, are based in northern Kurdistan.
I think stakes are being raised.
I think it's a bit of a poker game.
The more Turkey indicates that it's on the verge of crossing the border, the more it hopes that the U.S. will put pressure on the Kurds, and particularly Barzani, who's the governor of Kurdistan, or the president of Kurdistan, to do something.
But so far, nothing has been done.
I still think a major invasion is still relatively unlikely.
A cross-border raid or a series of cross-border raids is more likely, but they may also be preceded by efforts to close off certain frontier areas, certain border passageways, in order to exert economic pressure on Barzani and the Kurds to clamp down on the PKK or to try to get them under their control.
But it's clearly a looming problem, and it's increasing in intensity.
The worst nightmare is if the Turks do invade, if they decide that they'll go all the way to Kirkuk, because they want to prevent Kirkuk from being incorporated into Kurdistan, as the Kurds themselves had hoped to do through a referendum before the end of this year.
That would be the real nightmare scenario for the Americans and for the whole region, actually.
Because the Kurds will not want to give up Kirkuk.
They will fight.
Well, technically, they don't own Kirkuk at the moment, but they're trying desperately to increase their percentage of the population so that if and when a referendum occurs—and under the Constitution that the U.S. backed, there is supposed to be a referendum before the end of this year—the Kurds hope to prevail.
But they are under a lot of pressure from Washington to put off that referendum so as to help defuse this tension.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the Turks do come across the border initially with raids within a relatively short period, starting in a month or so.
Remember, there's also an election campaign in Turkey, too, which also raises the stakes.
Now America supported Turkey's suppression of the Kurds all through the 1990s.
Now we're allies with both sides.
It seems like—I don't know the proportions, but there's a substantial Kurdish population in Turkey.
It seems like this is a problem that's going to persist.
Yeah, I think that's a fair guess.
Some people argue that if the Kurds in Iraq are willing to contain or to control, exert control over the PKK, the benefits to them will be very great because Turkey can provide them and has provided them with enormous investment, and the Turks are involved in construction projects in Kurdistan, and the economic payoff could be very great.
And I think the Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq who is Kurdish, is rather sympathetic to this idea.
Remember, the Turks are divided between two major clans, although there are other factions as well, the Talabani clan and the Barzani clan, and they've been working together pretty well considering a history of mutual enmity, and both are quite strong militarily and on the ground.
Talabani seems much, much more willing to appease the Turks than Barzani.
So a lot of this is going to be dealt with in internal Iraqi-Kurdish politics as well as the external situation with the U.S. and Turkey.
Can you really look to trade ties between the two countries to calm down heated sentiment?
Well, between Turkey and Kurds, no, the Turks have been investing in Kurdistan.
Right, yeah, that's what I mean, that the more business ties between the two countries, the less likely that these little conflicts will turn into big ones.
Or that over time, they'll find their relationship to be mutually beneficial, and then the sense of crisis will gradually diminish, and they'll have good relations, that's the theory.
And now, also, I read on your blog that the neocons are having their own little Bilderberg meeting in the Bahamas.
What's going on there?
I don't know, because I'm not there, and the meeting is closed, and nobody's told me anything about it.
There is a meeting this week, or there was to be a meeting, and I have no reason to think that it was canceled, sponsored by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which is a neoconservative group very closely tied to the Likud party.
And they've invited a number of Iranian specialists who generally sympathize with their views to try to plot strategy for influencing U.S. policy toward Iran, presumably over the rest of the Bush administration.
Ambassador Khalilzad, I understand, from the U.N., was expected to attend, but I frankly don't think he went.
But there were a number of people, particularly from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the top Iran advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a number of prominent neoconservative journalists, or opinion shapers like Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal, were invited essentially for this off-the-record session this week, well, even today, would have ended I think yesterday.
No, I guess it would continue today, in a very nice resort on the Grand Bahama Island.
And now, in the larger sense, do you think these neocons are fairly marginalized?
Are they under pressure down there in the Bahamas, or do they think that they're in the catbird seat?
No, I don't think they think they're in the catbird seat.
I think they think that they've lost influence within the administration, and indeed they have, but I wouldn't take them out of the game.
One of their major bases of operations through last year was the Pentagon, and under Bob Gates, they essentially lost that base, and they're really confined to the Vice President's office, and to a couple of slots in the State Department, and a few positions at the National Security Council, of which the most important is one of the deputy national security advisors who handles the Middle East, and Global Democracy Affairs, who's Elliott Abrams, who's probably the most powerful neocon in the administration at this point.
But they have a much smaller base to work with from within the administration.
Now, I refer your listeners to the Washington note, which is a blog by Steve Clemons, who I just interviewed.
Oh, okay.
And I mean, he says that someone from the Vice President's office has been going around to various think tanks here, mainly neoconservative, telling people that Cheney really has lost confidence in Bush's ability to stand up to pressure from Republicans and from realists, and therefore is trying to look for a way, eventually, presumably, to precipitate or otherwise confront a precipitated war or an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
And Benjamin Netanyahu, who's in the United States right now touring around talking mainly about Iran, has a shot at becoming Prime Minister of Israel if there are new elections.
And so instead of using kind of the Pentagon as the base, I suspect Cheney or his aides are hoping that maybe they can somehow get Israeli cooperation in creating a confrontation that will eventually force Bush's hand vis-a-vis Iran.
For now, though, the neoconservatives are most focused on putting economic pressure on Iran, and they are behind the divestment movement in Iran, which has gotten quite a lot of support in state legislatures around the country.
And I think they see that as a way of making engagement with Iran, which is what realists in the administration want, much more difficult to achieve politically.
And yeah, I think you're right that we should not count these guys out.
I found an article from 1995 in Foreign Affairs called, From Trotskyism to Anachronism, Why the Neoconservatives No Longer Matter.
Who's that by?
I'm sorry, I can't forget the name, Judas, something, John Judas, something like that.
Oh, John Judas, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
From Trotskyism to Anachronism in Foreign Affairs, 1995.
Well, at that time they were, but they had a comeback.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry, we are up against the time wall here, and I got to cut you loose, but I sure appreciate this half hour.
Sure, my pleasure.
Everybody, Jim Loeb, he's the Washington correspondent for Interpress Service, so you can read everything he writes at antiwar.com/Loeb.
Thanks again, Jim.
Sure.