07/01/14 – Conn Hallinan – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, thanks for bearing with me there, I had to get Khan on the line, and I did.
It's Khan Halonen from Foreign Policy in Focus, and he's got a brand new essay that's up there at Foreign Policy in Focus right now, fpif.org.
And it's also going to be running tomorrow on Antiwar.com, why?
Because I say so.
ISIS, the spoils of the great loot in the Middle East.
Ooh, I guess that's ironic-type spoils, not like piles of gold and harems of young girls.
Welcome to the show, Khan, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott, how about you?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us tonight, and great piece of work you put together here, explains a lot, and well, I guess so, let's just get right to the root of what you're talking about in the title.
What is the great loot in the Middle East?
Well, I think one of the things that people don't do in the Middle East is that they treat it as a, rather ahistorically, and if you go back to what the roots are of the current crisis in the Middle East, they really go back to the designs that were drawn up during the First World War, mainly by the British and the French, the Russians were involved at that point, but once the Bolshevik Revolution happened, the Russians sort of dropped out of it.
It was two mid-level diplomats, Mark Sykes for the British, and Francois-Georges Picot for the French, that essentially drew up a map of what would happen when the Ottoman Empire fell, and what it is, is it's today's Middle East.
They drew a line, there was never a country called Iraq, but they created it, and they gave the northern part to France, and they gave Syria to France, and Lebanon to France, and they gave the rest of Iraq to Britain, and they also gave them Palestine, and ensured that they had full control of Egypt, etc.
And then, what they did was that the Arab armies that were taking part in the revolt against the Ottoman Empire, they were just double-crossed.
They were told that if they fought on the side of the British and the French in the First World War, that they would get the Middle East, that they would essentially be free, and instead what they did was that they relegated them to the Arabian Peninsula, to vast quantities of desert, and the colonial powers, Britain and France, took all of the rich part of the Middle East for themselves.
What you have right now is kind of a collapse of that system, because suddenly there's this group that you mentioned, the Islamic State of Syria, of Iraq and the Levant, or Syria sometimes it's called, and they've sort of overthrown this agreement that was made 98 years ago.
And Iraq is now three countries, it's ISIL in the north, it's the Kurds in the north east, and it's the Shiites in the south, in the center.
And it's a mess, and we're responsible for it, I mean, we're responsible for it because we set it up back in 1915, and then we are materially responsible for it because of the invasion of Iraq, and all of the fallout that that incredible disaster visited on the region.
You know, I'd always argued this, and then I had no idea until I read this Doug Bandow column the other day, that, and you know, why be surprised, right, he's the eminently Winston Churchill even explained it perfect, and you know, he leaves out what happened in the Middle East here, because of course he was the recipient of that part of it, and the horror that ensued, but still he gets it completely right, he says, check it out, it's not too long, America should have minded her, he says, its own business, and stayed out of the World War, oh this is in 36, before the second one, and stayed out of the World War, if you hadn't entered the war, the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the spring of 1917, had we made peace then, there would have been no collapse in Russia, followed by communism, no breakdown in Italy, followed by fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany, which is one of the greatest quotes about the direct consequence of, you know, Versailles being the rise of the Nazi party, and he could have of course, and you handed the British Empire a million square miles full of people to kill and steal from, and create Israel, and all the rest of your headaches for the next hundred years too.
Well they certainly did that, and one of the things that both the French and the British did, was that they looked at the Middle East, and they saw an opportunity to sort of transplant a lot of their colonial strategies of divide and conquer using religion, using tribes, using ethnicity, nationalism, etc., and they essentially divided up the Middle East in such a way, and favored certain groups, and disfavored other groups, so that, you know, you'd have these groups fighting one another, and not paying any attention to the fact that the British and the French were now running everything.
I mean, I know the Irish tend to think we are the center of the universe, I mean, it's a sort of a problem with the Irish, but it is true that basically modern colonialism, that is in the 19th century and 20th century colonialism, is a straight adaptation to what the British tried, and various different kinds of strategies in Ireland.
And at one point, in fact, the governor general of Palestine, the Palestine Mandate, said that the Jews will be my little Protestants in a sea of Arabism.
Now, every Irishman understood exactly what that meant, that you could use Zionism, plant it down in the middle of here, you'd have Muslims, and Christians, and Jews, all kind of competing with one another, while the British kept everybody apart, and of course, ran everything.
And the French did the same thing.
In Lebanon, they favored the Christians, in Syria, they favored the Alawites or the Shiites.
The British favored the Hashemite Sunnis in Iraq, and suppressed the Shiites.
I mean, it all was this divide and conquer strategy, and it worked like a charm.
It's worked for, well, at this point, certainly 98 years.
Well, and it makes sense, for example, then, for the British, well, the Russians for a little while, and then the Americans, I guess, once, and then again, to back Saddam Hussein and prop up the minority Sunni dictatorship of Iraq.
It doesn't make sense to put the majority in power.
They fought, what, an eight-year, nine-year war to put the majority Shiites, a 60% majority, in power, and to cleanse Baghdad, as they call it, of all the Sunni Arabs, so it's now an 85% Shiite city.
And then the majority, led by the Dawah party leader Maliki, said, now, thanks a lot, and get the hell out.
We don't need you.
And the truth is, they really don't, right?
They need us to rule Mosul, but they don't really want to rule Mosul.
That was the project all along, was, as the Supreme Islamic Council always called it, strong federalism, meaning take Baghdad with the help of the Americans, and then run off toward Iran with it, and let the rest of Iraq go, because why would the Ayatollah of Iran want to mess with trying to rule all of Sunnistan forever?
That was the Iranian plan ever since Chalabi started telling Richard Perle how easy it was going to be.
Sure, and the same thing goes for the Kurds.
I mean, they recognize that at some point in the future, some variety of a Kurdistan was going to be a reality.
I mean, the Turks have accepted it now.
And it's very interesting.
In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, there was an amazing statement by a Turkish foreign minister in which he said, well, Kurdistan is a reality.
Now, 10, 5 years ago, the Turks were threatening to invade northern Iraq.
And by the way, does that represent some very deliberate diplomacy on the part of the Kurds that they have been preparing the ground for this by saying, hey, listen, Turkey, we have to put aside all differences, because this is coming, and they've been working on it, or what's going on here?
Oh, yeah, they certainly have.
And one of the things that they have done is that they set up commercial relations with Turkey.
Turkey is very, Turkey's vulnerability, their main vulnerability is energy.
They don't really have any oil of their own.
They don't really have any natural gas of their own.
They get most of it from the Russians and the Iranians.
And so one of the things that the Kurds did right away was that they linked their gas and oil pipelines around Kirkuk to pipelines that went into Turkey, and they gave them a deal on the gas and the oil.
So if you're the Turks, you're saying, I can live with this.
And there also was a loosening up, although that's still a delicate situation inside Turkey, but there was a loosening up, and is a loosening up, of the Turkish state via its own Kurdish populations.
They have allowed language to be taught.
They basically put in a certain element of independence for the Turkish Kurds, although, as I say, that's a kind of a mixed, that's sort of a mixed bag right now.
But at this point, the Kurds moved very carefully and diplomatically really set themselves up so that they're really an independent entity.
Are they threatened by the ISIA?
I tend to think not.
I think that there's, this is getting a bit overblown, you know.
The Islamic State organization didn't on its own take over northern Iraq and southern Syria.
They had a lot of help from Ba'athist nationalist organizations inside Iraq.
And those organizations have already said they're not going to be part of this, you know, caliphate thing.
And what they're interested in is not establishing an Islamic state, but actually establishing a secular state, a nationalist state.
So at this point, I don't see the Islamic State as a particular threat to a place like Baghdad.
But I think you're also correct in saying that essentially what you have now is that you have this country here, and it's in the northwestern part of Iraq.
And I think Mosul is gone.
I mean, I can't imagine the central government in Iraq, the Maliki government, going north and trying to root the Islamic State out of Mosul.
It's just not going to happen.
Yeah, or I mean, even if they have the Iranians and the Americans to help them and they can dislodge them for a while, they can't really occupy the place.
No.
That was why they fled.
The Sunnis in the army, well, they were more loyal to their towns than the central government anyway.
And the Shia in the army said, well, we're falling back to territory that's actually ours to defend.
This is like American troops in Canada, man.
What are we doing here?
Let's back up, guys.
So yeah, it seems to me like, I mean, I'm sure there's going to be a hell of a lot of blood spilled between now and the time everybody else agrees with me over there.
But it seems like the lines are pretty much already drawn.
But now, so what about this?
And it's always controversial, and I'm of multiple minds about it, and I like asking different experts what they think about it.
I believe you addressed this in your article, too.
I've been reading so much lately, it all kind of runs together, Khan, but of course, either way, whether this is in your article or not, I know you're well aware that the neocons have talked a lot about just reducing the Middle East to warring tribes, from the Yanan plan to the Clean Break strategy and other things I'm not thinking of right off the top of my head.
I mean, of course, saying let's turn the whole region into a boiling cauldron and all that.
And so some people, especially when they're looking at, here's Obama putting more money into the FSA, which the assumption, I think, is pretty safe, right?
That whatever money and weapons, not whatever, but much of the money and weapons we give to the FSA is going to end up in ISIS's hands anyway, or certainly it's going to hamper Assad's efforts to fight ISIS, who are supposedly our big enemy over there.
So people are saying, well, listen, this isn't stupidity.
Come on, they're accidentally giving $500 million to their enemy?
No, they're doing this because they'd rather just, yeah, let's get everybody fighting.
Let's get Iran to have to intervene to save the shrines in Iraq and rally that many more people to ISIS's cause.
And let's have another big one.
As the Israeli ambassador put it, well, as many different Israeli officials have put it in regards to Syria, let them fight.
Let's not let anybody win.
Let's have Assad and al-Qaeda just fight and fight and fight and weaken each other.
And basically, you know, hey, if we're talking, you and I are talking about Iraq splitting three, maybe that was really the plan, was just to never let there be an Iraq again.
And maybe all of the horrors of the bad decisions made in the war were all on purpose just to bring them all down to their lowest knees.
What do you think of all that?
Well, if you recall, it was Joe Biden's proposal in 2006 that they divide Iraq into three areas.
You've got that done right now.
I think you're correct.
That is, I think that the strategy of the imperial powers, and that meant mainly France and Britain until the end of the Second World War, and then increasingly the United States, and certainly Israel, has always been that you rule from chaos.
I mean, if you recall, the Israelis were pressing the Bush administration to invade Iraq.
And their line was, and this was the line they said, that they said, peace with the Palestinians goes through Baghdad.
In other words, if the United States invaded Iraq and knocked Iraq off the board, then the Israelis would be more willing to make peace with the Palestinians.
Well, of course, not only didn't they not mean that, they knew by knocking Iraq off the board that that would create wider and wider chaos, and they wouldn't have to come to any agreement with the Palestinians at all, which is exactly what they have done.
So, what about the competing theory, though, Con, that these guys are really, really stupid?
Douglas Fyfe, Paul Wolfowitz, all these guys, they believed every word that Chalabi told them, that this is going to be easy, that the Shiites of Iraq, they won't try to lord their majority over anybody, they'll just be good Democrats, we'll put all this pressure on Iran, we'll have 70 bases forever and ever and ever, it'll be like Korea and all of that, and it just didn't turn out that way, because Sistani said he wanted a democracy with one man, one vote, majority rule, and because the Sunnis said, oh no, we're losing Baghdad, let's fight about it, and Zarqawi set off some suicide bombs, and Rumsfeld thought it would be a good idea to hire the Bata Brigade to hunt down the leaders of the insurgency, and maybe these guys are just really bad at doing really easy, quote, doable wars.
What about that?
Well, you know, there's no contradiction, in my mind, certainly, and it's true of Americans.
Americans are, of any people I know, they're capable of holding two absolutely contradictory positions at the same moment.
And I think that Wolfowitz and the neocons and everything like that, I mean, I think they manipulated the democracy stuff for their own ends, but I also think they believed it.
And are they stupid?
Well, they may not be personally stupid, but they're strategically stupid.
I mean, if you take a look right now, I mean, the perfect person to read right now is Robert Kagan.
I mean, he's the guy who was that sort of author of the Iraq invasion, he's the great neocon thinker.
When you read his stuff, it's very interesting.
I suppose he may be personally intelligent, I really don't have any idea, but his view of the world is so distorted that essentially none of it makes any sense.
His argument is, this is what imperial powers have to do, and they will build democracy and, you know, worldwide markets and all this kind of stuff, all reality to the contrary.
So the question is, is he just being, you know, is he being sneaky or is he being stupid?
Well, I think he's being both.
I think that, you know, there's no question if you take a look at what's going on in the Ukraine right now, and these things are all related, if you take a look at what's going on in the Ukraine right now, they, you know, the U.S. got together and basically overthrew the government of the Ukraine.
Well, Victoria Nuland, who's the undersecretary of state for the Ukraine and who engineered basically the coup against the Ukrainian government, is married to Robert Kagan.
Now you take a look at the situation in Ukraine right now, I mean, it's a total mess.
Did they want it to be a total mess?
I think they had some illusions that the Russians were going to kind of roll over and play dead and allow NATO to march up to the border.
How they came to that conclusion, I have no idea.
The Georgia war showed that the Russians had no intention of doing that.
So the question is, are these people stupid?
Are they dumb?
I think they're both.
I mean, I think what it is is that they have a view that the United States should run the world.
I mean, that's their view, the United States should run the world.
And that a particular brand of capitalism should run the world.
They believe that that's the right thing.
I mean, I don't think they believe, well, I believe that because it pads my bank account.
I mean, I think they think that's the right thing.
And yet to see that, to look at that plan, and to see what is real, you'd have to say, these people are incredibly stupid.
I mean, are you- Well, you know, one of the first books I read when I was in high school about politics was, I think it was called The Perils of Groupthink.
And it was about the Cuban Missile Crisis, or no, about the Bay of Pigs, and just a bunch of geniuses sitting around the table telling each other how smart they are.
You know, like a bunch of truthers or whatever.
Yeah, we know the real secret to the thermite or whatever crap.
And then, but they, the more that they agree with each other, the more sure they are, and the less relevant actual, you know, information or facts or contrary narratives become to the way that they look at things.
And when you look at the neoconcept, Jim Loeb says, these guys all have Thanksgiving together.
The crystals and the very small number of people involved here.
It's really all one big family.
Yeah, I mean, there's no question.
There's a huge amount of groupthink going.
And when you see, you know, there was like this, Robert Kagan comes out with a piece in Foreign Affairs, where he basically argues, you know, superpowers cannot retire.
You know, they have to continue to be superpowers.
And suddenly, it's, it's the, everybody's talking about it.
And Obama gives a speech in which he kind of implicitly argues with it.
And people, you know, and so suddenly, it's, it's sort of the chattering classes are going on and on about this article.
It's very interesting to read.
It's a dumb article.
I mean, it really is.
I mean, you're reading and you're going, okay, maybe this guy is smart, but boy, talk about ignoring history.
Yeah, no, I mean, if you go back to the big one from 1996, toward a Neo Reaganite foreign policy that was one of these, you know, like, Mr. X has written a foreign affairs article in importance and in everyone else's thinking afterwards, or that's a bunch of idiocy, too.
It's all just, you know, completely myopic.
And I agree with you that this question of groupthink is an important part of it.
But I also think that there is a deep well of, I don't know, a deep well of imperial ambition, American exceptionalism.
America is the greatest country in the world.
We know what's right for everybody else.
And that's a very strong current, and not just in the American diplomatic class and things.
I mean, it's an American tradition.
And in spite of the fact that it has been a disaster, like, you know, people say, well, they planned this stuff, you know, to begin with.
They didn't really plan to spend $3 trillion.
They didn't plan to do that.
And they didn't, they aren't looking, they didn't plan to look at economy, and this is all coded up, you know, when you bring in, when you deal with all the medical problems that Afghanistan and Iraq has created, that we're going to be looking at something closer to $6 trillion, according to Stiglitz.
And I don't think they planned that.
I mean, I think they actually believed that they went in there, that they could, that the Iraqi gas and oil would pay for it.
I think Wolfowitz probably believed that.
Was that stupid?
Oh, absolutely beyond stupid, but he probably believed it.
However, the way it's turned out, this utter chaos and disaster, for them to turn around and say, well, what we need is more of it.
To me, it's, you know, it's amazing.
And I tend to think that, you know, if you take a look at the polls right now, people are not going to put up with the Americans going into any major way to the Middle East.
I mean, it just, they're just not going to do it.
And if the Republicans want to attach themselves to that chariot, I'll end them the reins and tie the horses on there.
Well, you know, they're up to 800 troops now, and Apache helicopters and armed drones and everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's already started in not very slow motion, really.
I just, I don't know how it can be avoided.
I certainly am a thousand percent against it.
But just looking at it from what I'm trying to hold as an objective point of view, I just, I can't imagine them having Osama bin Laden in a stand and not carpet bombing the hell out of it within some short amount of time.
Well, all you have to do is think about this.
Here you have the Obama administration defending the Maliki government, which is a Shiite government, right?
Shiites represent about 15% of the world's Muslim population.
The United States is now defending 15% of the Muslim population against 85% of the world's Muslims.
Yeah, last time we were fighting for them, they were the majority we were putting in power in Iraq.
But in the larger sense, you're right.
But those World War I borders faded away.
All of a sudden, they're the minority again, which you can see why that's why ISIS thinks they're so tough, too, is, wait a minute, we're the majority in the region, not these guys.
Yeah.
Overwhelming majority.
Overwhelming majority.
I mean, the only place that Shiites constitute a majority is, is Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain.
That's it.
Those are the only four countries in the world in which they make up a majority.
So in other words, major consequences when America backs Iran and the Shiites in this one.
Oh, yeah.
And you have to have a sense of irony, too, Scott.
Gotta have a sense of irony.
Here the United States is.
We went into Iraq in order to, to, to get Iran.
That was a major part of it, you know.
And here we are having to rely on the Iranians to keep our guys in power.
The wills of God grind slowly, Scott, but they grind most exceedingly fine.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and our guy is actually their guy, Maliki, from the Dawa Party, anyway.
And now they're talking about Chalabi, the guy that they used to rise in the war.
I love it.
I love it.
I just love it.
And the other candidate they're talking about is al-Mahdi from the Supreme Islamic Council, the guy voted most likely to split Iraq into three back in 03.
That's right.
That's right.
I don't know how this is going to turn out, Scott, but boy, is it a mess.
Well, you know, on my other shows, Con, I've been talking with reporters who are there, Patrick Coburn and Mitchell Prothero, and they're saying that, oh, everybody's just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Everything, you know, the Mahdi army, they haven't even moved yet, but they're gonna.
You know?
So.
Well, I'll tell you one thing.
You know, the old Chinese curse may live in interesting times.
We live in interesting times, Scott.
Yeah.
You got that right for sure.
Hey, thank you for your time on the show.
Certainly, Scott.
Anytime.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That's Con Hallinan, everybody.
Writes at Foreign Policy and Focus.
That's fpif.org, the Institute for Policy Studies.
John Pfeffer and the crew.
Good stuff over there.
And this one is running on antiwar.com starting tonight and all day tomorrow.
The Spoils of the Great Loot in the Middle East by Con Hallinan.
We're a little over time, so I'll just, I guess, cut the show off here.
Thank you, everybody, very much for showing up for the Liberty Chat and tuning in.
And we'll see you back here next Tuesday.
And I promise, I'm sorry I missed last week, but I will be here next Tuesday and from now on on Tuesdays, 8 o'clock Eastern Time here at libertychat.com.
Thanks again, everybody.