05/30/13 – Josh Rogin – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is the Scott Horton Show.
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As well.
And our next guest on the show today is Josh Rogan.
He is now, oh jeez I forgot, they got him a new title and everything.
He is Senior Correspondent for National Security and Politics now at Newsweek and the Daily Beast.
Welcome back to the show.
Josh, how are you doing?
Great, how are you?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us today.
Of course.
So, you've been breaking stories, which is I guess as per your usual here.
Now over here at the Daily Beast.
So, let's talk about Obama orders Syria no-fly zone plan.
I guess, first of all, we've heard a lot about, we're thinking about ratcheting things up here for the last couple of years here.
And they don't seem to ratchet up very much.
And after you publish this, it seems like the story is updated with the Pentagon basically denying and saying that, nah, we're not really doing anything new here.
Is that about right?
What's going on?
Yeah, so what happened was the White House said to the Pentagon, listen, dust off your no-fly zone plans, we want to take a look at them.
We want to discuss them at the White House amongst the top officials, amongst the principals.
And yeah, the Pentagon, their denial was sort of like a half denial.
They're saying, no, we didn't come up with new no-fly zone plans.
But what's new here is that the White House is asking the Pentagon for them for the first time.
Of course, they're planning for everything all the time.
But now the White House is saying, okay, we really want to have a good think about this.
Now, like you pointed out, that doesn't really mean that they're actually going to do it.
And most people are skeptical that they would ever do it.
But they are thinking about it seriously for the first time.
So, take that for what it's worth.
Yeah.
Well, now, I'm sorry.
I bet both of us probably don't want to go too far down this diversionary point.
But it's sort of kind of got to be made that this was classified information that somebody leaked to you, right?
But it's not espionage.
No, it's not classified.
It's not classified, but it's not public.
Most of what we do is in between classified and public.
It's the unclassified but sensitive stuff.
So it's not a crime for someone to give me this information.
But it's definitely against the rules of their job.
So hopefully I won't be getting wiretapped anytime soon.
But the bottom line here is that, yeah, they don't want people to know that they're doing this, right?
Because they don't want people to know that they're thinking about possibly doing what amounts to going to war in Syria.
But they are thinking about it, and I think the people have the right to know.
Well, you know, I wonder about that.
That's actually, I guess my assumption was that this was sort of an official leak, that the White House wanted you to know this and gave it to you.
No?
I assure you that's not the case.
They did not want me to know this.
So this was somebody blowing the whistle on what they were up to to you.
Exactly.
People inside the system who want people outside the system to know what's going on, and you don't agree with the White House's decision to keep all this stuff secret.
I see.
So it wasn't just part of a bluff for the talks coming up in Geneva?
No, no, that wasn't it.
Although, you know, I could see why some people might think that.
You know, the authorized leaks are really few and far between.
Almost all the leaks are unauthorized leaks, and this is one of those.
Okay.
And now, well, so what all has changed?
It's hard to tell what's going on in Washington, D.C. from way out here in Texas, and this thing has been going on in Syria since, well, right around this time two years ago is when the war really got up and going, right?
Yeah, I mean, what's changed is that it's spiraling out of control.
No, no, not what's changed in Syria, but what's changed in Washington, D.C. as far as the politics of this thing?
Yeah, the pressure just keeps bouncing.
I mean, you know, the whole idea of the policy of not doing much or not doing a lot was based on the theory that, you know, we don't want to get ourselves involved in this.
Let's let them work it out.
But after two and a half years, they're not working it out, and all of a sudden it's starting to affect us in a lot of different ways.
So now we have, like, the Israelis attacking things inside of Syria.
We have the war spilling over to Lebanon.
We have the Russians involved.
We have the Iranians involved.
You know, so it's getting more and more impossible for this White House to ignore this problem and not to say that they haven't done anything.
They've done some things, but they've really resisted doing the things that would really make a difference.
So they've sort of held that position as long as they could, and now they're looking around and they're getting calls from Congress, calls from allies, calls from other people in the region.
You know, all sorts of different pressures are finally coming to bear, and they're feeling that pressure, and that has an effect on their decision-making.
That's what they're trying to grapple with right now.
Well, I mean, part of it is that they're rightfully scared of making a difference because there doesn't seem to be any good differences to make here, or are you thinking of something that I don't know about?
Yeah, well, that's their calculation is that, you know, would the risks of action be greater than the risks of inaction?
Because every time you do something, that has its own risks.
So if we arm the rebels, guess what?
That risks the fact that those arms might get into the wrong hands, and 10 years from now some of those guys might use those arms against us.
If you go into a no-fly zone, what, we might be putting American pilots in harm's way, right?
We might kill a lot of innocent people.
You know, everything that you do has risks.
So what they're trying to do is they're trying to balance the risks of doing things against the risks of not doing things.
And they have calculated rightly or wrongly up until now that the risks of not doing things were less.
But now it's hard to make that argument because, you know, the risks of not doing things are getting bigger, and the risks of doing things are becoming more in line with what's already happening.
In other words, the rebels are going to get their arms, right?
They're going to get weapons somehow.
And, you know, there's going to be bloodshed no matter what you do, and there's going to be instability.
So the question is, do we get in there?
Do we try to manage it as best we can?
Do we try to have it affect as much as we can, knowing that it's not going to solve the problem, knowing that we're not going to be able to save the day?
Are there things we can do in the short term that will help us, you know, come out of this the best way possible?
And it's not an easy decision.
I don't think they're, you know, I don't envy them having made these decisions, but they've got to make them sooner or later.
We're hoping sooner so that we know what the heck's going on.
Well, it seems like Senator McCain's made up his mind, and I think this is a direct quote from him to you in this piece about his trip there at the Daily Beast where he's basically saying, yes, the military complains, and they can always think of a lot of reasons why not to do something, but if the president tells them to do a no-fly zone, they can do a no-fly zone.
This is the USA, and they're the USAF, and it'll be fine.
Yeah, I mean, that's his view.
Unfortunately, it's not the view of the Pentagon or the military, who actually have to do it.
You know, they're the ones who have to make this happen with as many ships and missiles and planes and put all of their pilots in harm's way and figure out how to coordinate with the rest of the world, and then the State Department has to figure out how to explain this to everyone and how to, you know, it's basically an invasion of another country, and we've been down that route before, and a lot of people don't like that.
So, yes, McCain is right.
We could do it, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
I mean, the recent example is Libya, and we did it, and it took a while, and it worked, but it didn't work exactly the way we thought it would.
Right.
Well, and, you know, we could even see, and I'm sure this counts for you too, back two years ago when it came to Libya and looking at Libya and Syria at the same time then, that at least in Libya it was pretty much an east versus west thing, and we took the side of the east toward the west, and sooner or later, it took nine months, it could have taken longer, it could have taken a little bit less time, but sooner or later they were going to be able to sack Tripoli with their local forces and the special forces on the ground and NATO in the air.
It was just a matter of time.
In Syria, there's nothing cookie-cutter simple to explain like that at all about this situation and who's who and who to fight for and who to bomb and their anti-aircraft systems and all of that kind of thing.
Yeah, and you got it exactly right.
It's much more difficult, and that's what they say.
It's much more difficult, right?
But much more difficult doesn't mean that it's not still a good idea.
The bottom line here is that, yeah, sooner or later, just like in Libya, in Syria, eventually the current structure will collapse.
Now, whether it will break into two pieces or five pieces or a thousand pieces, that's what we're trying to affect here.
But it is like Libya in the sense that whatever the government is right now, that will not survive.
And whether it takes a month or a year or ten years, change is coming in Syria.
The question is do we want to be a part of it.
Yeah, boy, I sure don't.
But anyway, you're the reporter here, so I'll try to stick to reporter questions.
Ford, you say, Robert Ford from John Kerry's office is over there trying to encourage the rebels, although that's a pretty broad phrase I'll ask you to specify, trying to encourage the rebels to show up in Geneva, what, next week for talks?
Yeah, I mean, it's going to be mid-June.
The rebels don't want to go.
They don't think it's going to be useful to them.
Ford is, this is, America is so invested in the political opposition here, and the political opposition is a mess.
And they fight amongst themselves.
They don't know what they want.
They definitely don't want to go to these negotiations.
And this is Ford and Secretary Kerry, John Kerry's idea is that we've got to have negotiations.
And the rebels, their attitude is, well, we're getting slaughtered, so what is there really to negotiate about?
And the regime is more than happy to go to the negotiations, of course, because it makes them look like they're playing nice and trying to find a political solution.
But meanwhile, on the ground, they're doing all sorts of atrocious things.
So Ford and Kerry, they're really invested in this political negotiation thing.
Nobody really believes it's going to work.
But I guess that's something that they've got to try.
Well, and it really does look like Obama backing down, right, because he has said the president, whatever he calls himself, Assad, must step aside.
And now he's saying, well, let's negotiate.
Yeah.
And, you know, the idea here is that Assad would negotiate his own departure.
But I can't remember any leader, much less like a tyrant, who ever negotiated his own exit from power ever.
Right.
So that's a flaw in the theory.
And they never really explained how they really want to square that circle.
Well, and if there's a member of the Syrian opposition they can find anywhere who's willing to say, we're dropping our demand that he must leave power first before we negotiate with what's left of his government, that person would have had to have been living in Virginia for the last 20 years and have no say whatsoever over the al-Nusra Front and the al-Faruq brigades and their position in this.
Right.
I think you got it exactly right.
Well, and speaking of the al-Faruq brigades, I've been talking with David Enders for years and years now.
He used to cover the Iraq War for a long, long time.
And I'm sure you're familiar, a reporter with McClatchy Newspapers.
And he was saying that the guy that was eating the soldier's heart and lungs, that wasn't from the Jabhat al-Nusra We Love Zawahiri Brigade.
That was the al-Faruq Brigade.
Those are the moderates who want to hold elections as compared to the extremists that were trying to marginalize.
Yeah.
It's hard to tell one group from another.
War is hell, and bad things happen, and even the best armies have bad actors.
So I wouldn't take one event and use it to characterize an entire segment of the opposition.
But, yeah, it's really becoming hard to distinguish the good rebels from the bad rebels.
And the problem here, again, is it ties back to the U.S., that if the good rebels don't think that they have the support of the U.S. and they're not getting the things they need from the U.S., then they're more than happy to work with the bad rebels, and they're more than happy to sort of join forces with them.
So that's the dilemma.
You know, there's a lot of bad options, and helping the rebels that are slightly more secular and slightly more moderate, that's not a great option.
But, you know, either you work with these guys or you lose all influence.
I mean, that's the choice facing the Obama White House today.
Well, now, so when it came to McCain going over there and at least hearing their demands for strikes on Lebanon and a no-fly zone and whatever else they want, millions of dollars and tanks and bombers and whatever, that must have been at least approved by the White House, if not arranged by the White House in the first place, right?
Or is McCain out there really making his own foreign policy, even though he lost two elections ago?
Yeah, I mean, they knew about it.
They helped him.
They weren't thrilled about it.
They basically said, if you want to do this, you can do this, but don't make a big deal out of it.
Of course, it became a big deal.
And, you know, it showed what they don't want is for every senator and congressman, 535 of them all over Congress, to show up and demand to go inside Syria because that's a nightmare for them.
So they're not happy with McCain's visit, but they were sort of aware of it.
They did sort of help him behind the scenes.
Yeah, Rand Paul is pointing out in his CNN piece today that, you know, McCain said that the Mujahideen that we fought for and he arranged the fighting for in Libya, that these guys are not al-Qaeda, they're fine.
And it turned out that, no, they're just Ansar al-Sharia and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and whatever other groups of Mujahideen, the same ones that, of course, blew back right in our face.
We stationed our ambassador right in the center of a hornet's nest.
And then it's, of course, John McCain is the one bellowing the loudest that he got stung.
Right, right, right, right.
You know, Libya is a whole other ball of wax.
Well, like we were saying before, Libya is the simple and clean and easy one compared to Syria.
Right, right.
And then, of course, you have Iran looming in the background.
And the idea here is if we go to war in Syria, that could really ramp up tensions with Iran and that could lead to a war that we can't even contemplate.
Now, isn't Iran the whole point of this in the first place, that if we weaken Syria, we weaken Iran's position in Lebanon, which is of Israel's primary concern, but also we weaken Iran's position in the greater Middle East, which is good for the U.S., good for the Saudi kings?
That's McCain's point.
That's McCain's point.
Listen, I've got to run.
It's been great to be with you, but I've got to go continue reporting.
I hope to be on again pretty soon.
Okay, great.
Thanks, Josh.
I really appreciate it.
Anytime.
Good stuff.
All right, everybody, that is Josh Rogin.
He is LeftForeignPolicy.com and is now at The Daily Beast, TheDailyBeast.com, exclusive Obama Asks Pentagon for Syria no-fly zone plan.
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