07/17/14 – Kelley Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Hey, brand new Gareth Porter just came out.
Zarif and Kerry signal momentum on nuclear pact.
So, hey, very good.
Anything optimistic sounding on this issue out of Gareth Porter right now, I take very seriously because he is by definition skeptical that a deal can be reached here.
So, if he's seeing positive signs, that's quite meaningful.
Zarif and Kerry signal momentum on nuclear pact.
It's at IPSnews.net.
It will be very soon at antiwar.com.
All right.
Another subject that Gareth is good on is Iraq, and so is Kelly Vlahos, and here she is at UNS review, the UNS review, UNS.com, UNZ, UNS.com, blowback in Iraq.
The Petraeus legacy comes home.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Kelly?
Good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
Oh, I didn't really give you a very good introduction.
You write for the American Conservative Magazine and for antiwar.com.
Anything else I should mention?
I'm on Twitter.
And you're on Twitter.
Kelly B Vlahos, right?
Yes, with an E-Y in the Kelly.
Right, E-Y in the Kelly.
Very important there.
Well, if you don't know, it's V-L-A-H-O-S, Vlahos.
Okay.
So, Petraeus's legacy in Iraq comes home.
In other words, everything is going really great then, you're trying to say.
Well, you know, I don't even know where to start.
All right.
Well, no, that's a good point.
I should do better.
I've only been doing this for 15 years or so.
What the hell do I know about interviewing anybody?
So, well, let me ask you, Kelly, there's an entire narrative about Petraeus.
That is that, you know, he's, you know, as I think you mentioned this in your article, when the current crisis in Iraq broke back out, John McCain, said we ought to send Petraeus back in there.
He knows what to do.
He really has a legacy of, you know, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in the once horrible Iraq war that he came in and fixed and saved the day.
And when we left, everything was great.
And it's only because Obama wouldn't leave a few thousand troops there that everything fell back apart.
That's the narrative.
So, what's your problem with that?
Well, you know, I think one of the biggest failures of the war, and it's the most obvious one, is the failure of truth.
And after the Vietnam War, there was a huge amount of blowback against, within the military, against journalists and reporters in the media, because they felt like the media had lost the war for them, because the media had been so ubiquitous on the front lines and had actually covered the war the way it was supposed to be covered.
The way it should have been and had brought home many of the of the images of what was going on the ground.
So that had sparked and inflamed widespread protests throughout the country.
And so after Vietnam, there had been this momentum or feeling that the military should control the message more and limit the amount of media and the access of the media to the war zone.
And this happened in the Persian Gulf War, but it really came to fruition in the Iraq and Afghanistan war, so that we had the embeds, we had the severely restricted access of these embeds, the, you know, the sort of vetting of journalists for their for their point of view and their flexibility and their their, you know, sort of adherence to the military's point of view and what, you know, their perception of the war.
So what you had was this media machine that I call it, this communications, strategic communications management, and David Petraeus was the master at this.
And everybody knows that he was able to carefully craft his own image and the image of his own command and his operations.
And this included, you know, the careful crafting of, you know, King, I want to say King Petraeus is what, you know, he's pejoratively called now.
So that when he came on the scene during the surge in 2007, he was hailed as the hero who was going to save the war.
And I believe that that machine has, was so well positioned and was so well oiled that it's still working for him today.
So that now, like you said, you're seeing all of these terrible policies in Iraq that he helped to roll out there, including the awakening in the sons of Iraq and the torture of Sunni prisoners and the purging of the Sunnis from Baghdad and other mixed areas.
Nobody turns to blame David Petraeus when it is so obvious that he played a role.
He's not to blame for the entire failure of the war.
But still, like I say, he's like a bizarro Scarlet Pimpernel.
He is hiding in plain sight when we are sitting here reaching, not you and I, but, you know, the American public is reaching for answers as to what went wrong there.
You know, he's being he's being, you know, asked by journalists, you know, for his sage opinion.
So what I'm thinking is that, you know, here's a guy who for all of the failures of the war has been very successful at maintaining you know, this perfect, you know, characterization as a savior general.
And he, I'm sure, hopes that that will continue so that his place in history is maintained as a hero and not as the guy who lost the war or at least helped to lose the war for the United States and Iraq.
Yeah, well, and you know, the thing of it too is there actually has been, I'm surprised Kelly, honestly, you know, pleasantly surprised how much revisionism there has been on the surge.
I mean, it's terribly unfortunate the way the slogan, the surge is working, and then the surge worked were able to just win over everything because they were just so simple and easy to repeat and and didn't ask for details and nobody asked for details and that kind of thing.
Now people kind of look back and not just since the recent crisis, but even in the meantime, I mean, it's kind of been a crisis all along anyway, if you count truck bombings going off all the time and people being murdered all the time.
But, you know, in the meantime, in the so-called in-between period at least here, people have gone back to to sort of look at it, but there's not just that, really his, I mean, and there are a lot of different generals who did a lot of terrible things, as you're saying, it's not all on him, but the whole war long, Petraeus was doing completely wrong, horrible, terrible things.
In the first year, in 04, when he got there, he armed up awakening movement of Sunnis, basically, but without any coordination or larger plan or larger strategy or agreement with the rest of the generals to do so.
So he ended up simply just handing a ton of guns.
I mean tons of guns to the insurgency, the same Sunni-based insurgency that he and the rest of the generals continued to fight for years after that.
And then in 05, he went from Mosul, where he'd been arming the Sunnis, he came down to Baghdad and took charge of training up the Bata Brigade for the El Salvador option to go out there and kill all the leaders of the Sunni insurgency that he just armed up.
And then, so that was what really led to the civil war there.
And, you know, let the average Sunni think, well, hell, maybe we'll tolerate Zarqawi and his gang of crazies if they'll help us fight these, you know, horrible Shia and the Americans who are running them.
And so, his giant, massive, and complete and total failure of the surge came much later.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, let's let's focus on the Sunni awakening and of the Shia death squads.
I mean, just, you know, take, you know, and I realized that I, you know, went on the meta level here with the David Petraeus, you know, messaging machine.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
No, that's important.
I mean, that's, that was what he actually won was DC and New York.
Oh, crap.
Now, there's the music playing.
I'm sorry.
I talk way too much in these things, but I kind of can't help.
We'll be right back, everybody.
It's the great Kelly Blahos.
She's at the American Conservative Magazine, UNZ.com and Antiwar.com.
This one is at UNZ.
It's called Blowback in Iraq, all about David Petraeus and the surge, etc.
And we'll be right back after this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Kelly B. Blahos from the American Conservative, Unz.com and Antiwar.com.
This one is at Unz.com.
Blowback in Iraq.
And it's all about David Petraeus.
And as she said, he was great at conquering the American media and the American political class.
But when it came to conquering Iraq, all he ever did was make things worse.
Though he's credited with solving all the problems that he helped to create in the first place there, Kelly.
So let's get to that.
The specifics of the surge.
In the beginning of 2007, when Bush announced the surge, what was the form of it?
And what were the goals?
And how well did it work?
Because after all, it gets a lot of credit from a lot of smart people.
Must have done something, right?
Well, the goals of the surge was to create, to stabilize the country to the point where a space could be made for political reconciliation between the Sunni and Shia and an effective, you know, central government in Baghdad.
That didn't happen.
So, while Petraeus is credited for stabilizing the country to the point where the violence had dissipated lower than the levels, you know, hadn't been seen since 2003, the political reconciliation never happened.
But the U.S. left Iraq and pretty much dropped its, you know, diplomatic efforts there.
They were a total failure after the withdrawal of the military.
The U.S. diplomatic machinery there was a failure.
So not only was that the political reconciliation was a dead end, things got worse after we left.
So what you're seeing now is the out, you know, the outgrowth of the Maliki government turning completely authoritarian in that country and failing to bring the Sunnis into the government so that they had been not only disenfranchised, but abused and had been protesting, you know, within the government and on the streets since the Arab Spring.
Maliki, you know, cracked down on them with force, making it even worse.
This became a wonderful opportunity for extremists like ISIS to exploit.
So they, it was easy for them to go into these Sunni cities like Mosul because the Shia government and its military, which is mostly Shia, had been so hated by the Sunni people by that point that they practically welcomed ISIS in.
I mean, we're, that's an oversimplification.
But just, you know, in a broad view, that's what happened.
Now going back to Petraeus, what he used was, you know, one of his big accomplishments, quote-unquote, was the Sunni awakening, which we can debate of whether that had already been in the works before Petraeus came on the scene or not.
But what he did, in a sense, was help to pay these Sunni fighters to fight for the United States and for Maliki against Al-Qaeda.
And they paid them $300 a month.
They armed them.
But part of the deal was that they would go through extensive background checks and retinal scans and fingerprinting so that all of these Sunni fighters became part of what later became a hit list for Maliki.
So while the US was fighting and they were helping, everything was copacetic.
You know, they were getting paid.
They were armed.
They were defending their communities.
But then when the US began to withdraw, you know, and they stopped paying these Sunni fighters, they were left without jobs.
And Maliki's promises to bring them into the government as part of either the police forces or the military or civil service were broken.
He did exactly what they thought he was going to do.
He turned around and he started targeting these Sunnis.
They started being snatched off the streets, hounded, their families chased around, arrested.
Those who were arrested, you know, had complained bitterly of being tortured in prison.
Women were being arrested and tortured in prison.
Nobody was given any jobs.
So what you have left behind is a large, you know, part of the population being disenfranchised armed, angry, and ready to fight.
So that is what I describe as part of David Petraeus's legacy.
He abandoned the sons of Iraq, you know, as though they were just an expedient way of getting the surge, you know, to get the surge, you know, done successfully.
And then he left and we don't really know how hard he fought, you know, with Maliki to make sure that he kept his promises.
We don't know.
So only, you know, insiders know at this point.
Hopefully the truth will come out.
Well, I mean the major benchmarks were supposed to have been met by the fall, by really the end of the summer of 2007.
And so they had pushed back the testimony a month and then when they finally did do the testimony, I guess in October, he just kind of left out all the benchmarks and all that stuff about the integration.
They had, you know, elected some Sunni members of Parliament.
There was the, I guess it was, I forget which year it was, that the Sunnis did not boycott the election.
So they had some members of Parliament.
But when it came to integrating the sons of Iraq into the military and into the police force, that never did happen at all in 07 and 08 when Petraeus was still there overseeing things.
He kept paying them to be the concerned local citizens in their own neighborhood, which they had been offering that compromise with the Americans every year since the invasion in 2003, which he had finally taken him up on it.
But still, they never did integrate him in the first place to then later kick him out, right?
Right.
And you know, the sad thing is, is that because there was never an acknowledgement that the sons were betrayed and left behind and became part of, eventually became part of a resistance movement, you know, Petraeus and his, and the military went back over to Afghanistan and started creating local police forces, community policing forces over there claiming, well, we, you know, we had this successful program over in Iraq with our sons, you know, let's, let's transfer that over to Afghanistan and, you know, I've written extensively about how those community police forces have not worked.
So it's, it's one of these great examples of this denial of truth, you know, this, this disillusionment, which is fueled by this, this, this need to manage the message and perception, you know, to, to show Washington that, you know, you, you're winning when it, when in fact, it's a much more complicated picture and then transferring those lies over to Afghanistan and screwing things up there because we could have a whole other show on the community policing.
Well, I mean, the good news is, as you've really done more than anyone, I think, to document that the counterinsurgency doctrine and the counterinsurgency, you know, little crew of friends over there in DC selling all this stuff, that's all discredited now widely, even inside DC.
In the political and military classes that they all recognize, especially after the failure of Afghanistan, all this stuff about, we'll give them a government in a box and change their entire society and clear hold and build them a brand new Western European democracy over there, where that was so ridiculous.
And it fell so hard in Afghanistan that at least for now, they're, I think, going to try to avoid invoking those excuses for further interventions, the, the pacification and the going over there and, and being nice cops and whatever.
Making themselves, trying to make themselves welcomed in other people's societies.
You know, and I agree with you.
I mean, most people that I talked to within the military, you know, acknowledge that the surge, you know, wasn't the panacea that had, had been made out to be, you know, back in 2007, 2008, and that had failed miserably when they tried to transfer it to Afghanistan.
The problem is, for some reason, that truth, that debate at least, has not penetrated, you know, the elite corporate media.
So when you, when, when things like, you know, what's happening in Iraq happen, they run to Petraeus to get his opinion.
And instead of asking him, well, you know, did the surge really work?
And where are those sons of Iraq today?
Are they part of ISIS?
Are they helping, you know, to kill, you know, Shia today?
You know, they don't ask those questions.
So whatever debate and acknowledgement we're having at this level, you know, the mainstream media still doesn't get it.
And I think that that's attributed to his wonderful ability to, you know, craft this, this persona, this, this image of himself as King David, the savior general.
And it's still...
He lost two wars.
Yeah.
It really is unprecedented, maybe in world history, right?
To have a general do so poorly and yet come out, you know, unscathed this way.
Unscathed, you know, and, you know, just reading up and I saw that, you know, that comment from one of our, our Twitter followers saying, I hope Kelly talks about, you know, his appointment to these university, you know, positions and it's, it's incredible.
He, he is riding high, you know, as a, an instructor of global leadership, you know, at, at, at New York university, you know, as well as university of California, he's faded by these academics and these programs.
I mean, again, that's a, probably a whole other show, but these universities see him as sort of a you know, to bring to their universities to sort of draw in students and draw in don't, you know, big donors, you know, they don't see him as a liability.
They see him as an asset.
Right.
Yeah.
He's just like Bill Clinton.
As far as the media is concerned, he's perfectly golden.
The only thing he ever did wrong was a sex scandal, which only Hicks care about anyway.
So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is amazing.
You know, a lot of these, you know, same with Stanley McChrystal also has a nice perch over at Yale.
Nobody ever asked him about the torture chambers that he oversaw in Iraq, which have been, you know, wonderfully documented by much better reporters than myself at the Guardian, Jeremy Scahill, you know, all of this great work, which, you know, can't be, you know, discredited, but somehow gets swept under the rug when it comes to these universities and the mainstream media chasing down these generals, you know, because they feel like you said they are golden and they will do something for their own enterprises.
It's a real cynical and corrupt system.
And I think universities are, you know, right there with the corruption, because really, they're all about, you know, their own bottom line.
And they see Petraeus not as a person who might have brought a black stain on history, but as somebody who can make them money.
Yeah.
Well, and which is true, even though it doesn't contradict the truth of the first part.
It certainly probably is in the interest of their bottom line, especially when it comes to sucking up to the federal government for their share of that kind of kickdown.
Absolutely.
You know, and I think what, you know, and I said this on our Liberty Chat show yesterday, that I think that it is up to us to keep bringing these issues to light, because, like, I really do think it's a battle over how history tells the story of the Iraq war.
And you do have a lot of neoconservatives out there now who, you know, are pumping Petraeus up because he is their key to making their own, you know, decisions in their own role in that war, you know, unstained, you know, making sure that the war is told from their point of view, their perspective.
And from their perspective, General Petraeus won the war and President Obama lost it.
And so, you know, I think, you know, there's got to be, you know, some counter, our own counterinsurgency here.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Make sure that doesn't happen, that they don't win the war over the history of Iraq.
Right, yeah, exactly.
That's the one thing, you know, maybe they'll get away with all kind of murder, but they're not going to be able to get away with writing their own history of it, dammit.
Not on my watch or yours, Kelly.
No, and I do think because I do have, I have some, you know, some sources and friends within the military community, and they are just as angry as we are.
You know, we're, you know, just because we might have a different perspective on war doesn't mean that they are totally blind to what Petraeus did.
And they are not totally blind to the fact that the surge was a lot more complicated and a lot more conflated in terms of its, you know, role in, quote unquote, winning the war.
And so there are a lot of people inside the military that don't want that to be the final word, because they actually don't, they actually want to learn the lessons, and they don't want to go into war for frivolous reasons or reasons for politics or money or oil or whatever.
So I think, I'm hoping that there'll be more of a broader movement in terms of fighting any revisionism that's going to occur.
It's just, we got, you know, it's hard.
You do have a lot of neoconservatives and warhawks and places of power, people in, you know, Congress like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and a lot of those Republicans, as well as the people who are running these grand strategy programs and who will hold the purse strings at the Pentagon that, you know, basically create, you know, the basis for how we see things.
So yeah, we're up against a big wall here, but I don't think we should, you know, not be, you know, taking our pokes at it.
Yeah.
No, you're definitely right.
Well, and people should know that if they want to know more about this, that they can certainly read years and years worth of your coverage of these distortions and you're straightening them out.
So it's really important work that you do there.
I really appreciate it, Kelly, as always.
Well, thank you, Scott.
And there's years and years of your shows that have been covering, you know, these issues and interviewing me and all sorts of people who have been, you know, fighting against this.
So that's appreciated too.
Well, thanks.
And thanks for your time on it today.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That's Kelly Vlahos.
She's at unz.com, unz.com, u-n-z.com, with this one, blow back in Iraq.
And then also she's at the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com.
And we'll be back with Jim Bovard in just a sec.
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