07/12/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, July 13th, 2014, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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Today's guest is Mitchell Prothero, reporting from Erbil, Iraq, for McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
Welcome back to the show, Mitchell, how are you doing?
I'm doing pretty good, again, it's sunny and the sun's about to go down here, and everybody's getting ready to eat, because it is Ramadan, so things have really slowed down during these long hot days.
And you're in Erbil, in Kurdistan, I was going to say Erbil, Iraq, but maybe it's just Erbil, Kurdistan now, huh?
Well, we're going to be holding a referendum, I guess, in the coming months to decide that, but yeah, for all practical purposes, you know, this might be the equivalent of Richmond back in the 1860s.
They've decided to break away, the name calling between Massoud Barzani, who's the president slash warlord of this part of at least what we call the KRG, the Kurdish regional government, and Prime Minister Maliki, the rhetoric between the two is irreconcilable.
I guess there's a chance that if Maliki were to somehow be forced out or step aside, and a new leader came in, he might be able to get these guys at least to come to an agreement on how to divorce.
But as long as Maliki's in there, I think there's going to be a no-fault divorce unilaterally on the side of the Kurds.
And then I guess Maliki's really not in a position to do anything about it but curse and spit, huh?
Well, that's exactly it.
I mean, honestly, if there was an Iraqi government and an Iraqi army that was functioning on any level, there would be a war.
But he's got to fight another war first, basically, and he's got the Islamic State more or less between them and the Kurds.
And they're obviously a much bigger threat.
The Kurds have taken what they want at this point, which is Kirkuk.
And just a couple of days ago, they occupied the biggest oil field in Iraq, as they said that security was in a terrible situation, that the central government had completely collapsed.
So they were going to, you know, secure that for everybody.
And that's pretty much all the Kurds want.
So at this stage, if Maliki wants to militarily handle this, it's laughable.
It would be, you know, he'd have to accomplish four impossible tasks before taking on a fifth one.
Well, he's really a lousy politician, isn't he, this Nouri al-Maliki, because it seems like the Shia Kurdish alliance is the only thing that he's got going for him.
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, he's I mean, he's not even a politician.
What he is, is he's somebody who did get elected basically off of originally, at least off of very sectarian vote.
The Shia voted for their guy after parliamentary and backroom dealings.
He was picked as sort of the most neutral, palatable candidate to everybody and promptly spent eight years trying to turn himself into a version of Saddam.
The problem is he has no democratic tendencies whatsoever.
He's alienated the Kurds.
He's alienated the Sunni tribes, which, as we've seen, they've basically gone with the Islamic State and taken over a third of the country.
He's, you know, completely isolated himself from even the smaller minorities, the Christians to a certain extent, the Turkmen, you know, the I guess detritus of old empires, you might call it, because there are a ton of, you know, small groups of minorities throughout particularly northern Iraq that people rarely hear about, Yazidis, Turkmen, stuff like that.
Everybody pretty much hates him.
And I'd even say a large percentage of the Shia can't stand him, but he's got his fingers on the levers of power.
He spent the last couple of years purging the security forces of anybody competent that wasn't loyal to him.
And this is where we're at right now.
I mean, short of Iran actually deciding to militarily remove him from power, which they've shown no sign of being willing to do, I feel as though he's just going to continue to stay in power and not even maybe even try to form a proper government.
Well, it seems like maybe that is a reason why, other than just frustration, why he might want to pick this fight with the Kurds, is to encourage them to just not show up in the parliament anymore.
And then he doesn't have to deal with them anymore.
Right.
Well, they've walked out and he fired their foreign minister.
It shows that there's just a complete, you know, complete collapse of relations between the Kurds and the Baghdad government.
The Kurds don't care anymore.
And Maliki has accused them flat out of treason.
But what it's even crazier, if you think about it, is at this stage right now, Iraq is not a viable country without international assistance.
At the very least, they need the Iranians and they need the Americans, if not even Turkey, Saudi, Kuwait.
I mean, just it's a regional, you know, complete, complete regional disaster.
And in the middle of it, he decides to replace the one person who's competent and very well respected by all sides.
The Kurds have great relations, for the most part, with the Iranians.
They have very good relationship with the United States.
This Kurdish government here in Erbil even goes against 500 years of tension with the Turks and has a great relationship with Ankara.
So, you know, it's just that that just shows, one, is just complete lack of political incompetence and two, that he's ready to really go it alone Saddam style.
And it's just it's it's an incredibly dangerous situation.
Saddam style over southern Shiastan, not over the rest of the country, which he apparently can't touch.
Well, that's the that's the funny thing is that I bet he's broken out these blueprints because he was on the receiving end of this once before.
People forget Saddam in the wake of the Gulf War lost.
I think it was 17 of 19 provinces and only was able to battle back eventually and to retake almost all of them, with the exception of the Kurdish areas, which the Americans finally got around to protecting with a no fly zone and sort of negotiated an autonomous Kurdish region that was stuck up here.
For you know, until 2003.
But Saddam did battle back and retake it.
Conditions are very different today.
But I bet Maliki looks around and thinks, all right, Saddam was able to pull this off.
I can, too.
The difference is, I mean, and I hate to say it because Saddam was an evil, evil man and a total dictator.
But he also truly understood how Iraq worked and knew how to work the level levels of power.
It's something that Maliki would never have been, you know, would not be in this position if he had any sort of competence on that level.
Well, if he really had support among the Shia, he would be probably more able to do it.
All things being equal, just because now you're talking 60 percent versus 20 percent rather than, you know, the 20 percent minority able to crush the majority rebellions back in 1991.
Well, right.
But there was also actually I mean, even even as they were crushed by the Americans and I wouldn't say that, you know, at that time, Iraq had I mean, no Arab army, in my opinion, with the exception of maybe the Jordanians, has a particularly competent military force compared to the West.
But they did have a competent organized military at that point, at least in terms of internal security that could move around and retake these areas.
The Maliki purge that happened over the last couple of years had removed virtually every professional soldier that they had in a command position.
I mean, the litany of things that I'm working on for a follow up story is we're one month now into this.
What we see from the Iraqi army is they look at here's a perfect example.
A brigade in the Iraqi army is supposed to have two thousand two hundred guys in it.
What we found on June 9th and 10th, when the fighting started in Mosul, at best, they had eight hundred men in each unit and the other fourteen hundred guys did not exist.
And their salaries were being pocketed by the brigade commanders each day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Patrick Coburn had a great story to tell all about that, how the military there is really just an investment.
It's like a pyramid scheme kind of thing where you just keep pretending to bring in new salesmen on the lower level and keep getting your kickback from the top and all of that.
But there's just a hollow force.
It never even really was an army at all.
You know, I mean, there's units that were and, you know, when the Americans left, there was because the Americans were paying for it.
And while there's been, you know, there's still, you know, honestly, ongoing investigations and even criminal cases that have been slowly plodding through the American courts trying to track down a lot of the corruption and contractors that stole billions from the reconstruction effort.
Billions did get into the Iraqi army.
And by the time they left, the American military was doing a fairly decent job of training up an army.
But if nobody believes in the government and if your leadership abandons you, the second something bad happens, guys, not only, even if they're brave, they can't fight.
You know, I've talked to guys who, you know, 25 guys are on a checkpoint.
They're told by their officers at 5 p.m., hey, look, don't worry, I'm going to get you reinforcements.
Hold tight.
We can take these guys as they come down the road.
You know, Mosul will not fall.
And they said, great, we're going to bring you water.
We're going to bring you ammo.
And we're going to take these terrorists out.
And then, you know, an hour and a half later, they called back to see how that was coming along.
And the cell phones were turned off.
Yeah.
Like, what do you do?
Even if you're a brave guy, you're going to run.
I mean, at that stage, you don't know who's behind you.
You don't know who's in front of you.
You know, the military collapsed.
And it collapsed from the top down.
So even while people talk a lot about how the individual soldiers didn't want to fight for Maliki or for the government, you know, most individual soldiers, in my experience, yeah, they tend to, you know, they'll fight for their country.
But anybody who's been in real combat tells you, you fight for the guy next to you.
You fight for the unit next to you.
You fight because you don't want to be the one who screwed up and got everybody killed.
If you suddenly realize you've been abandoned by your leaders, you're not going to fight.
It's, you know, human nature takes over.
And you think, all right, I'm out of here.
And that's why these guys fled back to Baghdad.
And they're having a really difficult time reconstituting them as a viable fighting force.
Because what they were finding out is a lot of the truly competent guys were Sunni and Kurdish.
All right.
It's Mitchell Prothero reporting from Erbil in Kurdistan for McClatchy Newspapers.
And his latest article, which we're about to get to here in just a sec, is called Expansion of Secret, quote unquote, secret facility in Iraq, in Kurdistan, suggests closer U.S.-Kurd ties.
Before we get to that, there's one point I wanted to follow up about Maliki there, Mitchell, which was about the Ayatollah Sistani and the various things that he had said about, well, I'd like to see a new government.
But he was kind of vague.
Has he in fact said he would like to see a new prime minister specifically?
And if he and if not, what's he waiting for?
And if he did, wouldn't he get his way by snapping his fingers or what's the deal with that?
Look, you know, you can almost do an entire show on how these guys we call them.
We call them the Marja in Arabic.
They're sources of emulation.
You wouldn't address the guy directly as Ayatollah, although that word, you know, works.
That's what we call them in the West.
These guys, it really depends.
It's oddly democratic.
People choose their Marja.
They choose who they're going to follow.
And Sistani is the most influential Marja in Iraq.
Having said that, he's from a school of thought that really, unlike the Iranians per se, really truly believes that his job is to tend to the spiritual matters of the people and that the religious guys are best left out of politics.
It's not to say that he's for an American democracy style democracy with like booze and bars and porn on TV is a conservative guy.
But he does believe that it's not the role of the clergy to get involved in stuff like this.
Most of the time.
I mean, before he said, we want one man, one vote, no caucus system.
And you want to start the war over again?
President Bush said no.
Right.
Well, except it was more gentle than that.
What he actually said was, you know, like, look, we're going to have a democracy.
I support that.
Everybody should have one man, one vote.
And that's what, you know, people are going to demand.
And that is what is fair.
And that was an extraordinary statement at the time, you know, for him to get involved on that level.
And then he quietly, you know, basically was sending a signal to a culture that has no history of democratic representation and said, OK, this sort of thing is going to be Islamically permissible if it's done fairly, you know.
And so that that's what that thought at the time really was.
And the warning to Bush was that if you try to screw around and come in with some kind of quota system here, everybody's going to see through it and think it's just another B.S. version of democracy like we get here, you know, all throughout the Arab world.
So again, with with Sistani saying even this, I don't know if he would ever come out and directly say, Nouri, you have to go.
But it's already clear that's what he thinks.
It's just at this stage, it would be an extraordinary change in direction for almost a thousand years of the jurisprudence Islamically that he comes from to really go down that route.
Whereas an Iranian Marjah or Ayatollah Khamenei would have already shot this guy and replaced him with the guy he liked better.
They had no qualms.
So, you know, like it's just it's it's it's just one of these things that we have to wait and see in a very narrow field of Islamic history.
The things that are coming out of Sistani's office are literally unprecedented.
And so, you know, I'm barely you know, I'm knowledgeable as a layman on how that stuff works.
But like, you know, you'd have to be an expert and an expert would tell you, I'm not going to predict.
Yeah, because we've never seen anything like this in history.
But that's a narrow thing.
You know, the question is, what is Ayatollah Khamenei saying?
Well, that's where they're being real quiet right now.
Khamenei is going to stay pretty quiet.
He's got his Republican Revolutionary Guard.
I'm sorry, we call them the Pasteran in Farsi, the Quds Force guys.
There's a legendary figure throughout the Middle East named Qasem Soleimani, who's probably single handedly responsible for saving the Syrian regime.
Yeah.
You know, Spencer Ackerman wrote in The Guardian yesterday that Soleimani's man is Chalabi.
That's what he wants.
Well, that's entirely possible.
I just again, the Iranians, man, they really, really run their own game.
It's it's an incredibly complex 5000 year old culture.
And they have a tendency more than almost any other group inside, you know, any other culture, at least in the Middle East, to really run their stuff very quietly and internally.
And then when they come out with policies, you know, they might be an enemy of the West, as we'd say, but they tend to be extremely competent and very consistent in the policies that they pursue.
Right now, we've got the impression that, you know, Qasem Soleimani, or as they call him, Hajj Qasem, he can't let Baghdad fall apart.
He can't let Iran have to come in.
That's the worst case scenario for them, is that they've got to send troops over the border and turn southern Iraq into a into a protectorate state.
So he at this stage is going to avoid, I think, and this is again, this is a man, they're inscrutable, you know, very competent, but very inscrutable, is trying to play within that framework.
But I wouldn't be surprised if Chalabi would be an acceptable candidate to the Iranians to replace Maliki.
You know, you can do an entire show on that.
I still can't get my mind around it, because the more I go through a checklist, here we are 12 years later.
And to be perfectly honest, Ahmed Chalabi might be the guy who could save Iran, which just as somebody in 2003, who covered the invasion, and was livid at the scam job that Chalabi pulled on the Americans to get that to happen.
I mean, it's unbelievable, but you've got to have some modicum of respect for the game.
You know what, Coburn said the same thing last week, that you know what, if anybody actually can get work done, it's Chalabi, man.
I mean, it blows, like, I don't even want to talk any more about it, because I can't get my mind around it.
But I could be coming around to thinking that's the way to go at this stage.
What was hilarious to me, though, was in Bloomberg News, Paul Wolfowitz saying, it may have been a mistake to do the Iraq War, which was got the headline.
But then he says in there that, you know, he thinks that Chalabi really is the guy.
And then it's, what, two, three days later that Spencer Ackerman is reporting that, yeah, that's what Soleimani thinks.
And I'm just shaking my head, man.
Well, the big burn on Wolfowitz and all those guys, if you go back and look at it, is they got played by Chalabi and the Iranians, because they thought that Chalabi was their guy.
Chalabi was pulling down, and don't kill me if it's wrong, but I think it was $300,000 a month from the CIA.
Finally, the CIA turned around and said, the Iraqi National Congress, which was Chalabi's group, is corrupt.
They're feeding us bogus information.
We think they might work for the Iranians.
And they cut that funding, because the CIA actually has some pretty competent people in it.
And it was Chalabi and Wolfowitz who went around them and came up with their own plan to put those guys back into power over the CIA's objections.
And then what they found a year into the Iraq War was basically Chalabi had been an Iranian intelligence asset the whole time.
He wasn't their guy.
He was Tehran's guy.
You know, there's this great article that I just went back to reread from 2004, 10 years ago, in Salon.com, by a guy, I forget his name, he writes for the Financial Times.
It's called, How Chalabi Conned the Neocons.
And it is so good.
It's like 10,000 words long or something.
And it has all the quotes from the neocons crying about how he betrayed them, and has quotes from his cousin saying, oh yeah, no, he told me, I said to him, I'm worried about you piling around with these Zionists and promising them an oil pipeline to Haifa and all this.
And Chalabi told me, oh no, I'm just telling those Jews what they want to hear for now until we can get the war done.
And then don't worry, we're with Iran on this.
Yeah.
And 11 years later, I'm looking around going, hey man, that seems like the skill set you might need to run this place after all.
It just but again, you know, I'm not an expert on the Chalabi stuff.
I was really covering the war at that time and not the blowback from how the war developed.
So, you know, and by 2004, he'd been sort of marginalized on the American side of things.
But I will say this is going forward, he's about one of the most serious politicians in the proper sense in Iraq.
And he is a guy who has a good relationship with just about everybody that needs to work together right now.
All right.
So I'm Scott Horton.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're talking with Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
The new piece is and really talk about Barry in the lead in this interview here, Mitchell.
The article is expansion of, quote, secret facility in Iraq suggests closer U.S.-Kurd ties.
In other words, America's re-invading Iraq.
They're building a new base in Kurdistan or rebuilding an old one.
Yeah.
OK.
Let's put it into perspective.
You know, you've got two different missions here that the U.S. has to deal with.
And one is the collapse of the Iraqi army.
And they've sent these advisers down there that they're going to try to help put it under control.
But right now what we're seeing is a very small group of guys who really seem like they're there to protect the airport and the U.S. embassy so far.
Now, I mean, I don't know what's going on on that end.
This is this is what we call super secret special operations stuff.
And they've yet to really show themselves being involved.
Maybe they're in a command center.
But with this, the American officials on background offer no optimism that Maliki can retake the Sunni areas with the army in the current political situation.
So they are definitely setting up for a situation in which you've got this giant Sunni stand run by the new caliph Ibrahim, a.k.a.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a group that has said that it plans to attack the West at some point.
So when you say re-invading Iraq, you've got to look at it in a different way.
The Kurds love America.
The Kurds love working with the U.S. special forces.
This is what they did all throughout the, you know, the American occupation.
These guys are tight and they are happy to have that kind of support here because they feel like it makes their be a little bit more secure.
My guess is what they're doing up here is setting this base up from what I could tell from my reporting is this is going to be what they call the counterterrorism operation base.
This is where they're going to set up intelligence and probably fly armed drones.
They're certainly flying unarmed ones right now to look for top end ISIS guys to zap, to try to keep them from, you know, to help whoever does eventually try to take this group on because Maliki is not really trying to at this stage.
Syria is literally collapsing.
That's a whole nother story I've got to work on down the road.
And so what you're seeing is U.S. intelligence and what we call JSOC.
I can't get into the exact units because I don't know them.
They're designed to be that secret.
But as the guy jokingly called them in my story, the secret squirrels.
This would be guys from Delta Force, the intelligence support activity unit, stuff like that.
And these guys are on the ground, although I don't think they're going out with Kurdish Peshmerga guys.
I think what they're doing is setting up an infrastructure so that they can start droning guys if they, one, try to take Erbil, and two, if they get a beat on some of these leaders of this group that has said that they're threatening to get America.
So I don't see it as nefarious yet.
But this might be where nefarious starts, if you follow me on that.
By the way, when we talk about the Islamic State, how many men in their army now?
Just guess.
I know you don't know for sure.
Oh, well, OK, I'll give them I'll give them between 10 and 15000 now because there's been a lot of defections in Syria of guys that I would say are cadre, Islamic State fighters who are trained directly and equipped through the bureaucracy set up by Baghdadi.
And this is what we call the vanguard.
They're the ones who are the fast-moving, well-trained dudes.
They go around almost wherever they want at will and hit things really hard and really fast with excellent tactics, excellent training, and excellent weapons.
Behind them as they take territory, what we've seen in now we're seeing this in Syria quite a bit as well, is the tribes rise up and then take control of that area for them, allowing them to move on.
So they don't get bogged down.
So while you look, how did 10, you know, even if it's 10 or 15000 guys, it's not that much.
But they're able to move around and they don't really have to hold territory.
They have allies that are doing that for them right now.
And we're already seeing in Iraq groups, or I'm sorry, in Syria, groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, Arar al-Sham, which were previously anti-ISIS type groups, but very conservative.
Nusra is the Qaeda franchise.
They are decimated.
They're losing all of their guys who are defecting over to ISIS and taking their equipment with them.
So you've seen them grow even as they take over more and more territory.
Quite the contrary to stretching themselves thin.
They really are developing.
I mean, I hate to say it, but it's a country.
It's a state.
All right.
And in a previous article, what, five days ago or something like that, Mitchell, you wrote about how Baghdadi had made an alliance with some Baathist generals.
And we've read about some purges of some Baathist generals, too.
But I think your article was more recent than the purges I'd read about.
And apparently this had a lot to do with them getting their act together here, because we're talking about an insurgent army that's becoming a state army, which is quite a different thing, right?
Well, yeah, exactly.
They're both.
I mean, they have a conventional army that's pretty big right now that they can deploy.
I mean, if they got to put five or six thousand guys backed by artillery with vehicles on something, they can.
But they also have, you know, people call them sleeper cells.
That might be a little melodramatic, but I think what they've got are old school Qaeda and Ba'athi guys, Sunnis, who are in areas currently occupied by the government, who then rise up alongside them.
And that's been the tactic.
Guys will bog down the police a little bit by taking shots at it.
Suddenly the pickup trucks, and a shout out to Toyota, the Toyota Helix double cab pickup truck is the insurgent's dream vehicle.
They're fast, reliable, and there are ten guys in the back and, you know, six in the front and zoom all over the place.
And so then those guys zoom in.
Usually what then happens is they'll nail a couple of the static positions with big car bombs, scare the living hell out of everybody, and swoop in in these trucks that have, you know, large guns mounted on the back, terrify everybody, scatter the defenses of the Iraqi army, and then the tribes move in behind them to take control.
I was talking to a guy today from, I probably shouldn't say the town, but an occupied town that's in the center of Iraq, and I asked him, like, who's on the corners?
Is it, you know, Ba'athists?
Is it tribal fighters?
Is it, as the Arabic slang term is, is it Daesh?
That's what the Arabs call ISIS.
It's a derogatory term that their enemies use.
And he says, I don't know, man.
They're all Daesh now.
Everybody's wearing the same outfit.
Everybody's got black scarves around their face.
And everybody says they're doing things in the name of the Islamic State and that somebody's in charge.
He goes, so I don't know what the difference is anymore.
That's what we're seeing them form together.
The big question that I would say is the Ba'athist guys I was writing about turned out to be deeply religious and radicalized.
They might not have been under Saddam, but after all those years of fighting the Americans alongside Zarqawi, some of them apparently came around to the Islamic traditions and became full on committed members of what we call an Al Qaeda style group.
You know, I forgot whether it was something you had written or something else I had read, Mitchell, about Al Dory, who was this Ba'athist general.
And I think the thing I read said he was always an Islamist anyway.
Right.
He's an Islamist, but he runs his own group that is currently aligned with ISIS called the Nashbandi.
And they're like the men of the free state or I forget the exact.
It's an Iraqi colloquial term and my Arabic is not terribly good.
And anyway, the Nashbandi guys are supposedly run by him.
He was the highest ranking guy in the deck of cards that nobody ever caught.
So yeah, you see a huge mix of these groups all working together.
And there were always insurgents groups that were still fighting against Maliki.
You've got the General Military Command in English, which is a group of fighters.
I mean, I bet they've got 10,000.
There are experts on this that you might even be able to bring on the show to talk just about this stuff, like specific details.
I know the groups pretty well, but the Islamic Army of Iraq is still out there, although I think probably a lot of their talent has gone over completely to the Islamic State.
And out in Al Anbar province, between the tribes, there's still a ton of insurgent groups.
The Revolutionary 1920 Brigades, all of these groups that were fighting the United States had established their command and control structures and sort of quietly kept fighting Maliki after we left.
Now they're all together and they're all more aligned, more or less aligned with Baghdadi.
Although we do hear reports of internal tensions.
The question is, I mean, once something gets this much momentum, you might not like 20% of what Baghdadi is doing, but if he scares the living hell out of you, you're going to go along with him.
Well, very interesting.
I mean, you know, he really timed his move back into Iraq from Syria real well.
If we've gone from where the Awakening tribes say, oh, to hell with you, Al-Qaeda and Iraq guys and marginalize them at will in 2006 and 2007, to where he can now come in and he's the one in the catbird seat and they better line up and kiss his ass.
That's a real big deal, I think.
Back then we used to say, well, you know, Al-Qaeda in Iraq is still only 5% of the insurgency of the Sunni-based insurgency at most.
They just get the headlines because Zarqawi makes a great stand-in bin Laden for the TV, but it's still a general Sunni-based insurgency.
But if I hear you right, the tide has really turned on that.
Well, what we've seen is, I mean, Maliki, essentially, I mean, and I hate to pin it all on one person, but when the Americans left, they said, you need to bring these guys into the government.
We've paid them off.
We've marginalized Al-Qaeda for you.
There's been a lot of BS out there about the surge and all that stuff, but I will give Petraeus credit, and Odi Aronow after him, and a lot of the smart officers that had been in Iraq for a long time, they finally figured it out.
And they said, we've co-opted these guys.
We've handed you a relatively smart way to control an angry Sunni population and bring these guys around.
You've got to bring them in the government.
You've got to make sure that they get a cut of the oil money.
You have to make sure that, you know, you don't have to love them, but you do, you got to respect them or they'll turn on you.
And Maliki said, yeah, yeah, let me worry about that, and promptly spent the four years since the Americans left completely dismantling all of that process and leaving those guys thinking, well, screw it.
Let's go with the jihadis again.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
One more thing.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Sure.
No.
Well, the one thing I was going to say is, can they do it again?
Can the right guy do it again?
Yeah.
I was talking with a friend of mine who's Iraqi, who's one of the smartest analysts of this stuff.
His name's Gaith Abdul-Ahad.
He's a writer for the Guardian.
You should try to get him on the show sometime if he's got time.
And he, he and I were talking about this and as we witnessed the original, you know, version of this.
And the one thing we can't get over is these guys are so arrogant that they think, well, we got rid of Qaeda once because we got what we wanted from the Americans.
We'll get rid of them again because when we get what we want from Maliki, I'm not so sure it's going to be easy this time.
Yeah.
You know, I saw a guy in the Telegraph saying, you know, Mr. Big Shot, Sunni tribal chief saying, yeah, yeah, ISIS, they're useful to us now.
We'll get rid of them, but not until Maliki goes.
But boy, he seemed to be pretty brave.
And Coburn said about that, you know, the world's cemeteries are full of guys who talk like that about people who could just as easily end their life.
Well, he also liked to claim, I know that guy and he claimed he had his, he used to command a hundred thousand fighters and has 50,000 now and that they're with ISIS and that he's all in it and that he can turn the tide any moment.
He's got maybe a few thousand guys that are loyal to him.
And he, you got to ask yourself if he's so powerful, how come he's sitting in a five star hotel in Erbil about three miles from where I am right now.
And I'll tell you what he's doing.
He's sitting in a hotel suite waiting for his old CIA buddy to show up with a duffel bag of money.
Yeah.
And he can put it where?
Well, so he can put half of it in his Swiss bank account and he can spread the other around to try to buy his tribe back.
But the simple fact is, if he had any kind of level of that juice and I mean, you know, a colleague of mine who I really like and respect wrote that story.
I got to be honest.
I felt like he was talking complete nonsense.
He's thinking he's he's basically hoping somebody shows up with a bag of money to make him Saddam.
And I got to tell you, nobody's coming with that money yet, man.
I mean, eventually it might come to that if a structure in Baghdad gets put into place that the Americans and the Iranians and the Turks and the Saudis have all agreed can competently get this thing under control.
But you know, from what I can tell at this stage, with the exception of the Iranians somewhat militarily, nobody's willing to step into this mess until there's a clear path on how you're going to get out of it.
And nobody can see that.
And so, you know, I had dinner with some oil executives the other night or a little bit to the right of Attila the Hun.
And they were whining and complaining about the lack of American power.
I just told them, what do you expect them to do?
I mean, the short of it, Dick Cheney was back.
What would your brilliant Dick Cheney do for you right now?
Would he send five hundred thousand U.S. troops into this place, which is more or less what it would take?
I mean, OK, maybe we can go back to the rum spell doctrine and use shock and awe and only one hundred and fifty thousand.
But unless you're willing to do a repeat of 2003 and all of the nightmare that followed after it, America does not have the power right now to fix the situation or even help fix it until the Iraqis figure out a way forward.
And that's what places like this always come down to.
I think I've said it before.
Locals have a tendency to overstate the West's responsibility for these screw ups.
And conservatives have a very strong tendency to overstate the West's ability to manage and fix them.
Locals are the ones responsible for Iraq.
Locals are going to be the ones who figure out how to get this done.
And there are things that the international community, the U.N., the Americans, the Iranians can do to support that effort.
But until that effort materializes, I mean, we got killer robots, I guess.
I mean, it's that sad.
Well, here's my thing is I'm looking at the region and everyone around the Islamic state is their enemy.
Right.
You already listed them and you all listed them in the context of what they're not going to do about it because they can't.
The Iranians, they don't want to go and try to sack Mosul or anything like that.
Nightmare.
Neither the Turks, the Syrians, the Jordanians, even, of course, the Egyptians and the Saudis are scared to death of these guys.
But they're not going to invade.
They're not going to do anything about it.
And so, you know, never mind my opinion about any of this stuff.
It just seems to me when I play out the thought experiment, it seems to me that here, probably sooner than later, the narrative is going to be clear in Washington, D.C., that there is now like you're saying, they're building a real country here.
There is now an Osama bin Laden, a stand and that it is going to be absolutely impossible, given all the assumptions of American foreign policy, even as they are now, is going to be impossible to not send in the Marines.
If there's no one else willing to feel the army, America does have the men and the ability to laze targets and drop daisy cutters on them.
And like you're saying, at least shock and awe, right, half of a full invasion, something like that.
But I just don't see any other way around it, given the assumptions.
And I don't think it's going to wait for Hillary or Jeb or Rand Paul, either.
I think it's going to be Barack Obama and I think it's going to be within a matter of a year or so or something, because no one else can do it.
And otherwise, I mean, they're basically it's really not much different symbolically than them letting Osama himself be the new caliph.
They're not going to do it.
They can't do it.
Well, on some level, you're I mean, you're absolutely right is I mean, but the one thing is OK, yeah, forget Egypt and Saudi.
I mean, they're they're completely useless.
The Jordanians have a professional army.
It's very smart security forces.
And it's a very tiny country.
And they are probably next on deck.
So they need to worry about their border.
They cannot come in and take care of anything.
They've got to protect their own butt.
And the second they start fighting, if it doesn't look like it's going well for them, then you get the worst nightmare scenario of all, which is the Israeli actual invasion of the Arab world, because they're not going to let Jordan fall to ISIS.
They've already said it flat out.
You got to give Netanyahu credit.
He does say what he's going to do.
And he's already said, we'll invade Jordan before we'll let ISIS take it over.
But if you look around the horn, what you do see is that they can this situation can be contained in something of a worst case scenario.
You've got the Turks who aren't going to allow it to come over their border too much, although they might want to look in their souls a little bit about how responsible, quietly they've been for this mess.
And I think that's an untold story is how Turkey might have played with a tiger here to get rid of Bashar and caused a lot of this.
So then you've got the Kurds who've got this huge 1,500 kilometer front line that they've got to deal with that stretches from northern Syria all the way down to Diyala province in Iraq.
They don't have quite enough guys to cover that.
Nobody does.
But they are a professional force, and they can hold their population centers, and definitely they can fight in these hills.
They're just not going to be able to invade to take Tikrit.
So the Americans seem to want to bolster that line, and these are guys they're happy to work with.
The Iranians' terror is that the whole thing falls apart and that they're forced to come into southern Iraq and turn that Arab-Shia area into an Iranian protectorate state.
So then there's a very possible outcome of what we're looking at right now.
So if you imagine it that way, then you've got basically Baghdad as a sectarian bloodbath ghetto controlled by almost nobody but packs of gangs, basically.
You've got Sunniistan in the middle.
You've got Jordan holding its border.
You've got Hezbollah and what's left of the Syrian regime holding its line to keep them off the coast and hopefully out of Damascus.
Then you've got Turkey hammering them in from the north, and then you've got this giant black spot with the flag of the prophet Muhammad flying in the middle of it in the center of all of that.
I wouldn't be surprised if these guys go after Aleppo next.
That's honestly what I think they're going to do.
They want Aleppo way more than they want Baghdad.
So then what does America do?
I think that would be so far down the list of break glass in case of absolute nightmare emergency.
It would probably take something like an attack from ISIS along the lines of 9-11 in America for that.
But what they can and will do, and I think they're going to have to, and this is this base in Erbil, and you'll probably start seeing more of them pop up in other places, maybe we just won't hear about them, is this is where they're going to have to run a secret dirty war against ISIS' capabilities to expand its influence beyond that arena I just described.
And that's when you start getting drones zapping Toyota Heluxes full of specific guys, Delta Force going and kidnapping dudes or killing them, or shining lasers on specific buildings where things are happening, and it'll be a dirty secret war.
It is why we have JSOC for all of its shortcomings over the years, the lack of transparency in their operations around the world, a lot of the stuff that we call the Cheney Doctrine where they were allowed to operate freely.
These guys have become very good at hunting down and killing people that they think are going to be a threat to the United States.
And I think they've got a giant mess on their hands, and I think Erbil is just the beginning of it.
I'd say for now it's going to be drones and special operations forces, dudes who only have first names and no unit patches.
It's going to be their war for now.
I think the Marines would only really, that type of thing would only have to come in if you saw something along the lines of 9-11.
Well I think there ain't no better way to make sure we get attacks along the lines of 9-11 than sending in the drones and sending in the Delta Force to murder some people and make sure that they don't forget about us as one of their prime enemies for even a minute.
Well hey man, look at it this way though, I mean, this is a platter of poop.
I mean this is a buffet in which every single choice is absolutely terrifying.
And I mean I'm not a historian, I get to write the first draft and hope I don't screw it up too bad, but historically people are going to have to go back and look at how in God's name did they get in this situation.
And I'm not saying it can't be brought under some semblance of control, I mean there are Iraqi political solutions that still are viable even if they look less and less likely with each passing day.
And if they don't get there, it's going to turn into something that's a nightmare because I can't tell you with a straight face that they shouldn't be droning these dudes.
I can't.
It's really that dangerous.
But at the same time you're absolutely right, that's a disastrous policy.
So imagine, I mean, this is why you do not want to be President of the United States under any circumstances.
You have to choose between this, and Obama once made a really good point, I thought about the job of the President of the United States, he said every leadership issue gets resolved before it gets to him if there's a reasonably obvious thing you're supposed to do.
By the time it gets to his desk, it's the nightmare situation where all of the experts and everybody's come together and nobody can agree.
And that's why he's got the jet, and I don't envy him man.
The game is rigged.
Anything he does is going to turn out to be a problem, and I really don't necessarily think it's his fault, but that's the buffet you get to pick from sometimes when you're the President.
I just, I wouldn't know what to tell him if I had to give him advice.
All right y'all, that's Mitchell Prothero, he's reporting from Erbil in Kurdistan for McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com, again the latest is expansion of secret facility in Iraq suggests closer U.S.-Kurd ties.
Thanks very much for your time, especially for staying over time with me here, Mitchell.
No problem at all.
Can I just throw in one thing about the reason why that was put as secret?
It's pretty funny.
That facility, the Kurds are so pro-U.S. and have such close ties over the years with interpreters and Peshmerga guys who fought alongside Special Operations and CIA guys that I had heard about it as a rumor and I was trying to find it.
And I knew roughly where it was, I found a blacked out area on Google Earth and I'm driving around up there and my Syrian taxi driver's like getting a little confused over where we're going because I'm just giving him these vague directions in the middle of nowhere.
And finally he looks at me and goes, oh, you want to see the CIA base?
So everybody knew that thing was here and they don't have a problem with it.
But the fact is now I think it's going to become a hub for a very, very serious situation for the United States and it's getting a lot bigger.
You can just see it, like there's Earth movers in there, guys are flying in the airport.
That's why the quote was secret base.
My taxi driver from Syria knew exactly where it was.
Yeah, I like, you have a quote in the article here where the guy says, hey listen, the Peshmerga can't get Google Earth to black out something on a map.
Yeah, because he wouldn't tell me where it was and he's an intelligence professional and I really like that guy.
And honestly, he wasn't talking out of turn and he really didn't tell me nearly anything I didn't already know and he was trying to get me out of his office.
But when I showed that to him on my phone, he just died laughing and was like, dude, what do you want me to say?
You think I can call up Google?
And then he gave me some history and basically gave me the nudge and the wink.
I mean, even he knows.
My driver knew where it was.
He knew what we were in there to ask about, but he can't talk about it and they shouldn't.
I mean, I do think that, you know, as a journalist, it's my job to tell people what's going on to the best of my ability.
But there are some things that, you know, you don't want to do something that just gratuitously puts people at risk just for doing their job.
And I tried to do that in the case of this.
I do think the American people need to know that this base is there and this is how the strategy looks like.
It's going to go forward.
But, you know, I mean, you don't need to give ISIS targeting information to tell that story.
You know what I'm saying?
Certainly.
All right.
Thank you so much again for your time, Mitchell.
No problem at all, Scott.
It's always a pleasure.
Bye bye.
I sure appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
That's Mitchell Prothero again.
McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
And that's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm here every Sunday from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
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