06/17/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Hey everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out youtube.com slash scotthortonshow for some examples, and email scott at scotthorton.org for more details.
See you there.
Man, I need to watch that clock a little closer.
I just barely made it by the nickel of the dime.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is Jason Ditz, news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, how's it going?
I'm doing good, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing real good, appreciate you joining us today.
And so, I don't know, man, I guess go ahead and take us through it.
What's going on in Iraq?
Well, nothing good.
Of course, ISIS, which is the Islamic State for Iraq and Syria, and which also used to be Al-Qaeda in Iraq, has taken over a good chunk of Iraq at this point.
And they're moving on Bakuba today.
The interesting side note to the Bakuba story is, after all the reports we've had of ISIS forces executing people they captured, there's a report in the New York Times today that the Bakuba police, before they fled from their police station, executed a bunch of Sunni prisoners.
Yeah, I saw that.
I saw a tweet along those lines.
I guess that's a confirmed report now?
Yeah, as close as anything as to a confirmed report in Iraq these days.
Alright, and now, so remind me where Bakuba is compared to Baghdad, for example.
It's 35, 40 miles north, so it's very close.
Yeah.
Alright, and so, now what of, well, so there's a few things.
I guess there's the American politicians posturing.
I guess I'm more interested, first of all, in what Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army are doing.
What the Bata Brigade is doing.
Is there still a Bata Brigade outside of the Iraqi Army?
Does it look like they're ready to fight for Baghdad?
Or is the Maliki government falling apart here?
Is it going to be left just to the Sadrists, or what?
Well, it's not really clear what's happening with Baghdad.
As far as I can tell, there's not a Bata Brigade anymore.
The Mahdi Army is still a thing, although not nearly to the extent that it once was.
And Ayatollah Sistani, of course, issued a call to arms last week for Shiite volunteers, and got quite a few of them.
But exactly how many, the first day we reported 4,000 or 5,000 volunteers, and where it stands now, I just don't know.
But for right now, the defense of Baghdad is still being managed by an Iranian general.
And Iran has 100 to 150 Quds Force fighters on the ground.
Man, remember Bush in 2005 saying, Hey, as they stand up, we'll stand down.
We're going to build them this army.
First time they get into trouble, they withdraw from all the areas where the trouble is, and then they call in the Iranians to run the whole damn battle for them.
Sorry, I can't help but point that out.
All that, oh, we can't cut and run now, we've got to finish standing up this army.
Oh, man.
Years went on under that excuse.
Now we have the report that ISIS has got U.S. Stinger missiles, which officials are saying they looted from one of the many Iraqi military bases that they took over, which is entirely possible.
But I can't help but wonder, with the U.S. still shipping Stinger missiles into Syria, and ISIS being the major rebel faction in Syria who controls most of the border crossing, how many of those missiles they might have gotten directly from the United States.
Are they giving them Stingers, too?
Oh, yeah.
I knew they were giving them anti-tank missiles, but they always say, anyway, that they're afraid to give these guys surface-to-air, shoulder-fired missiles because they're afraid of what will happen to the jetliners.
Well, the Saudis started sending sort of the Chinese equivalent of a Stinger missile earlier this year, and more recently the reports have been that they were sending some U.S.-made ones as well.
I mean, I know that they have shot down some helicopters and have had surface-to-air missiles, but I guess, at least from my Discovery Channel knowledge, the actual Stingers are radar-guided and very accurate and are the kind of thing that...
I mean, they were terrified of even lesser shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles getting in the hands of the Libyan rebels and getting out to the market, even as they were, you know, collecting arms to send to Syria for the war.
They were, I think, weren't they trying to weed out the surface-to-air missiles and keep those off the market?
Right, the SA-7 missiles that Libya had such a huge number of.
I mean, and it makes sense for them to be paranoid about that, you know what I mean?
Yeah, because even the moderates in Syria, the Free Syrian Army, which is the carefully vetted good guys of the U.S., have openly said they will attack civilian airliners in Syrian airspace because they consider them legitimate targets.
I mean, ISIS hasn't said as much, but one could only assume ISIS is willing to shoot about anything if it is to their benefit.
Yeah, well, you know, it seems like the fact that we had a French veteran of ISIS kill two Jews in cold blood at a museum in Brussels a few weeks ago, to me, that's just the very first one of a long line of blowback coming.
You know, I hate to sound like a hawk on this because I'm certainly not for the U.S. government's existence at all, much less doing anything in this case, but I do think that there is a danger.
I just think not doing something is the best way to decrease the danger, but it seems like there's going to be a long line of blowback from the intervention, as you point out, on both sides and all around in this thing.
Well, right, and the interventionist argument is always, well, we can't just sit by and do nothing now, but if we sat back and did nothing 10 years ago, 12 years ago, how much better would this situation have been?
And even if U.S. involvement might forestall the fall of Baghdad, or allow the Iraqi government to retake some portion of the territory it's lost, how many other unforeseen consequences is it going to generate?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the headlines on the page today, I think it's a McClatchy story about this Qatari, whoever, some expert, somebody saying, hey, you know, if you team up with the Iranians on this, that's going to be a whole other thing, too.
I mean, the fact is, of course, as I know you are well aware, as we've been writing about at AntiWar.com all along, the whole war basically was fought on behalf of Iran, while the Saudis were financing the Americans' enemies in the Sunni-based insurgency in that whole damn war.
Mostly, I think, because of the stupidity of the neocons in believing Chalabi's line of crap about how they were going to get a water and oil pipeline to Haifa, and a Hashemite king, or at worst, Ahmed Chalabi and the gang, to run the place for them and whatever, and how that didn't work out.
But they haven't really emphasized that, right?
I mean, they even denied it and tried to blame the Iranians for all their problems the whole time, and I guess nobody was really buying it in the Middle East.
But if they were outright, I don't know, flying drones as air cover for Iranian Quds Force guys on the ground, the blowback from that, from the rest of the Sunni parts of Arabian lands, another decade worth of consequences there, too.
Oh, at least!
Yeah, so if you're Bush fighting against them, or you're Obama fighting for them, or now against them again, or whatever it is, it seems like either way you intervene, you only make matters worse.
The only answer is to back off.
Right, and the danger of ISIS, as real as it is at this point, seems like it might potentially be softened a little bit just by the fact that they have this Islamic state of their own now.
I mean, this really is a state at this point.
Right, so in other words, they became conservatives.
They changed from radicals to conservatives three days ago.
We should look for them to consolidate these gains.
Good point.
That's Palpatine's first lesson when I got to Coruscant, was people with power don't want to lose it.
We'll be right back in just a moment with more from Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
Admit it, our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
Scott Warren here for libertystickers.com.
I made up most of them, and most of those when I was mad as hell about something.
So if you hate war, empire, central banking, cops, Republicans, Democrats, gun grabbers, and the status of all stripes, go to libertystickers.com, and there's a good chance you'll find just what you need for the back of your truck.
Own a bookstore?
Sell guns at the show?
Get the wholesaler's deal.
Buy any hundred stickers, and they drop down in price to a dollar apiece.
You can spread the contempt and make a little money, too.
That's libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
I'm on the line with Jason Ditz from news.antiwar.com.
And, yeah, the hard break kind of interrupted us there, but you were saying that there's a chance that these ISIS guys might want to slow down a little bit and consolidate their gains, Jason.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, most of the sort of low-hanging fruit, especially in Iraq, is sort of already taken at this point.
They seem to be reluctant to get into any fighting with the Kurds.
Baghdad is an eventual goal, but I don't think it's going to be an easy fight.
And I more envision ISIS launching just continuous terrorist attacks against it for the foreseeable future, rather than trying to sweep into it with military forces.
And at this point, I think ISIS as an Islamic state is no longer sort of a speculative thing.
It's just kind of the reality of the situation.
Yeah, it went from the name of a group who I think it was Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy even was saying the other day that when they named themselves that, that was part of what helped turn the Sunni population of Iraq against them back in 2006.
It was like, you guys are a bunch of Saudis and Libyans and Syrians and foreigners, Jordanians, coming here and bossing us around, declaring that you're the government of the Anbar province.
Screw you, you are not.
We are, and they proved it.
And then Petraeus wrote in and pretended it was his parade and all that crap, as we all well know.
Maybe that's oversimplifying a bit.
Obviously, there was a lot more to it than just that.
But it always seemed very presumptuous of them to call themselves the Islamic state of anything when they were a militia that never really held any ground at all.
And yet, now it's the name of a place.
And halfway through 2014, they actually have done it.
At least for a time.
But now, well, you know, I don't know.
I guess some reports, there's this thing, Middle East Monitor, are you reading that?
Where they're saying that, come on, this is the, and I think Patrick Coburn wrote a little of this too, this is mostly the Ba'athists and the Sunni tribal leaders and whatever, just like during the Iraq war.
The al-Qaeda guys are really a smaller percentage.
They may be out front, but they're not the real power behind what's going on here.
This is the completely fed up Sunni population of Iraq declaring independence from Maliki's army, right?
There's going to be a ton of Ba'athists left.
And certainly there are some tribal leaders that see ISIS as the lesser of two evils here.
And certainly they're shoring up the ISIS force.
But I think all the foreign recruitment they managed to do in Syria is also playing a big role in this.
ISIS is a lot larger than anyone really wants to give them credit for.
Now, do you have any kind of ballpark estimate of how many people we're talking about?
I've heard estimates of 10,000 fighters that are directly ISIS.
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's significant.
That sounds like a lot to me, yeah.
That sounds like, I guess, more than I would have thought.
I would have guessed less, but I know you know a lot more about it than I do too, so I'm not arguing with you about it.
And that covers both Syria and Iraq territory, although since they tore down the border, the distinction is really pretty minor.
Yeah, and they've been clashing with the Iraqi government over Kirkuk for quite some time.
They made it clear they wanted to annex Kirkuk into Kurdistan years ago.
And there have been military standoffs there off and on over the past several years.
But at this point, with the Iraqi military in full retreat, the Peshmerga just marched in and said, well, we're taking it and we're not leaving.
Yeah, I mean, it wasn't that slow motion, but I guess it was a relatively kind of slower motion sectarian cleansing of Kirkuk.
The whole time that the Sunni Arabs were being kicked out of Baghdad, the Sunni and Shia Arabs were being kicked out of Kirkuk, where I guess Saddam had forced relocated a bunch of Arabs to make it a majority Arab city.
And they already took care of that over the last decade, kind of slowly.
So this was, I guess, the final coup d'etat on that.
Yeah, Kirkuk has historically been a Kurdish majority city, although it's always had a fairly substantial Arab and Turkmen minority as well.
And I'm sure it will continue to.
Yeah, and I know that if you go back, it was actually a majority Arab city before a lot of Kurds had been relocated there, before a lot of Kurds had been relocated, before a lot of Arabs had been relocated back.
And it's been a fight back and forth like that.
But I guess it was Barzani, or maybe it was Talabani, I forgot, who said that Kirkuk is our Jerusalem.
In other words, we're taking it and we're not taking no for an answer whatsoever.
I think that was Barzani.
So that brings up the question of Turkey, because this has been a wild card ever since we've been talking about doing this war back in 2002.
What are the Turks going to do when Kurdistan in northern Iraq is no longer de facto independent, but is actually independent from Iraq?
And it seems like we're getting closer and closer to that point.
And I don't know, I guess the Turks and the Americans have been working together to back these coups in Syria.
Do you think the Turks would rather side with Maliki and the Shia or with the ISIS suicide bomber types against the Kurds in northern Iraq?
Well, it's a tough call.
Independent Kurdistan has always been Turkey's biggest fear in the region.
And a big part of Turkey's decision to back the Sunni rebels in Syria was this notion that Sunni nationalists would be much more harsh towards any Kurdish independence in Syria than the perception was that Assad was somewhat too soft on the Kurds for Turkey's case.
But at this point I'm not clear where Turkey's ultimate decision is going to be, because it seems like substantial amounts of oil are being exported out of Kurdistan.
It's really the only stable part of Iraq that's exporting any large amounts anymore.
They're building a pipeline through Kurdistan, through Turkey, to a Turkish oil port in the Mediterranean.
It seems like the business interests are very much in favor of an independent Kurdistan from Turkey's perspective.
It seems like there's a lot of money to be made in having Kurdistan continue to export this oil without having an Iraqi central government constantly bickering with them over who owns it.
All right, and now that we're out of time, tell me very quickly how bad is the American intervention going to be so far?
Just a few hundred guys and some drones?
Well, we've got 275 more troops going to the embassy.
There's news of some drones being planned.
We've got 550 more Marines in the Persian Gulf on board a warship.
All right, that's it.
Thanks, Jason!
Okay, thank you.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Help support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Head to the page at scotthorton.org or go to scotthorton.org slash Amazon.
It's scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
So you made a little bit of money in this horrid economy only to find that the Fed is more or less outlawed saving.
So into the treacherous waters of the stock market bubble you go.
But how to make a little money without too much risk of losing it all?
Check out wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager who opens a very real window into his main account, updating his subscribers on the facts of and the reasoning behind all his market moves.
Follow along on paper or with real money and see what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.