09/14/14 – Matthew Hoh – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, September 14th, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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I'm Scott Horton.
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Today's guest is Matthew Ho.
And he famously resigned from the State Department in 2009 in protest over the surge policy.
Was a Marine in Iraq before that and has become an anti-war activist and a writer and also a PTSD activist as well, I should mention, very importantly since then.
He's written for every major paper in the world.
And he's got a couple of very important ones here at huffingtonpost.com.
The beheadings are bait.
And then the most recent one is perpetual war and shame is our policy.
He is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Matthew?
Good, Scott.
Thank you for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
And it was great to read this article.
We're spotlighting it all weekend long at antiwar.com.
And it's a great one.
If it's all right, though, I'd like to start with the previous article.
Most important to me, the beheadings are bait.
And I have to tell you, I was reminded when I read this of a column written back in 2011 by Jeff Huber titled Bin Laden dead and loving it.
And it was about how this is the most powerful general in the history of the world.
Hiding in an attic, he can command armies to move by the millions across the face of the globe.
Even from his watery grave, he continues to accomplish his goals because he's enlisted American foreign policy as his tool.
And it's certainly a theme that you've picked up on here.
And it's just so funny how everyone seems to accept that if the man with the knife says, America, you better not come back, that that's what he really means, as though he can't anticipate that that's the best way to get us to come back.
Yeah, it really is.
It's really quite astounding that we seem to continue to play right into the hands of these terror groups, which are mainly composed of these ultra religious psychopaths.
You think they wouldn't be so quite so capable of manipulating us so easily, but they are.
I mean, we've seen it time and again.
You know, of course, as I mentioned, and other people have mentioned as well, too, you know, Bin Laden's strategy for quite some time before he passed away, or before he was killed, I should say, was to draw the United States into a conflict so that he could weaken us, not just militarily, but, you know, economically and morally.
And you see that pattern throughout since the September 11 attacks, but most especially with our, you know, God awful invasion of Iraq in 2003.
You know, I mean, the biggest recruitment boom for al Qaeda and other groups, you know, was our invasion of Iraq.
And it was the photographs from Abu Ghraib.
It's been the detainment of Muslim prisoners at Qatamino Bay.
And it's been the torture of Muslim prisoners and many innocent Muslim prisoners.
And that's been the biggest boon for these terror groups.
So please clarify that point a little bit there, Matthew, about why these guys would want to lure us into war with them.
I mean, us, after all, could include the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, which is an extremely lethal couple of organizations there.
And how does it benefit these guys?
As John McCain said, I don't see how.
What could they have to gain from getting America to declare a full scale war against them?
Well, there's a couple of reasons why.
And actually, I should say a few reasons why.
I think one that goes to bin Laden's own strategy and his own understandings from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan was that this is such an asymmetrical fight.
It's such an uneven fight.
They can utilize certain advantages because they're fighting on their home turf.
They can fight a guerrilla war.
They're tied in with the local population.
That they feel that this is a good way for them, women, that they can get a superpower like the U.S. in a protracted conflict.
And now, in particular, with the way media is, and this is something I don't know if bin Laden was able to consider as much, but with the way the media is, with instantaneous video and audio shooting around the world now on cell phones and the internet and everything else, it's very easy to paint a story of a dragged out protracted conflict that America is losing.
So I think it is a path and a strategy that they feel they can actually defeat us.
They also, to the other part, is they want to fight us.
I mean, if you look at the Islamic State, you're now talking about the third generation of these al-Qaeda, uber-Islamist, jihadist warriors.
For lack of a better description, their grandfathers fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and then the Russians in Chechnya and won, or at least fought it to a stalemate.
Their fathers then fought against the Americans in Iraq 10 years ago.
And now this is their turn.
So a lot of them want to fight.
They feel it's their turn.
It's part of their lineage.
It's who they are as these warriors who are defending their faith.
And that plays into the other rationale.
The other part of this is that they need to fight us in order to give their narrative credence.
Their narrative is that they are defending their faith.
They are defending their peoples.
They are defending their lands in this historical battle between the forces of good and evil, between the forces of God, which they represent, and the forces of Satan, which the West represents.
That this is a continuation of the Crusades, for lack of a more complex way to describe it.
So they need it to fall into their narrative.
And then finally, they also want and require our intervention and our participation in these conflicts, because what they've latched themselves onto, they're parasites.
They're parasites of war.
What they've latched themselves onto are these civil wars that are occurring.
So take in Iraq.
You've got this multilayered, multidimensional civil war that's been occurring since 2003 between the Sunnis, the Shia, the Kurds, and then unfortunately you have a lot of smaller minorities who are persecuted by whoever's in control at that time.
What these groups are able to do are able to enter into the conflict on behalf of one side, in this case with the Islamic State, with the Sunni Muslims.
And they're able to conflate their own agenda with the political causes and the political situation of the civil war.
So in the case of Iraq, you had al-Qaeda in Iraq align itself, or I'm sorry, the Sunni population of Iraq align itself with al-Qaeda in Iraq, because they were fighting against the Shia and the Americans.
Once that stopped occurring, once we made political concessions to the Sunni Iraqis in 2006, 2007, the Sunnis divorced themselves from al-Qaeda because they no longer needed them.
So now you see this again here with the Islamic State wanting the United States to come back into the conflict in both Iraq and Syria, because that not just plays into their narrative of the United States as the villain, as the crusader, but it also, out of desperation, forces the local population to utilize the support of the Islamic State.
So there's a whole, because at that point, the Sunni population is not just fighting the other ethnicities in Iraq or Syria.
They're also fighting the world's greatest power, the United States.
So there's a number of reasons why this plays basically right into the hands of the Islamic States and why they want and need our participation in these civil wars.
In other words, like Randolph Bourne put it 100 years ago, war is the health of the state.
Just the same reason George Bush needs an enemy is the same reason that Obama and Osama and Omar Baku al-Baghdadi need enemies too.
And in fact, always with terrorism, like you're saying, it's an asymmetric battle and the action is in the reaction.
They didn't think that we were going to turn tail and run after knocking our towers down.
They knew that we would go over there and invade.
They were trying to get us to invade Afghanistan.
And then as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit put it, the invasion of Iraq and all the rest of this is just the hope for but unexpected gift to bin Laden.
And in 2010, his son gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine from a bar in Damascus, where he explained how his father was so excited that Bush and Cheney had come out on top of Gore Lieberman in the election recount because he had them perfectly pegged as a couple of pretend tough guys with these corporate connections.
You know, he's the son of the scion of the Kennedy family of Saudi Arabia after all, right?
The son of a billionaire, no Taliban caveman him.
And just like in the speech that you quote here, he was looking forward to them exploiting the opportunity to the fullest extent.
That was the bet he was making.
And that was exactly what they did.
And that was why he says in that speech.
And the only people who benefit are me and the politically connected corporations in America who are benefiting from the war.
Absolutely.
You know, I mean, to your point about bombing, not defeating an enemy and actually bringing them together, we the United States understood that, you know, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson, you know, who led the war in Vietnam, I mean, he was part of the study group that after World War Two determined, you know, for the U.S. government that bombing, the aerial bombardments of Germany and Japan did not have a negative effect, a deteriorating effect on the populations in terms of their morale.
It actually strengthened the morale of the population.
And we saw that here on our own, you know, and certainly, I mean, we dropped more tons of bombs on the North Vietnamese, you know, than we did on both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
And that didn't cause the Vietnamese to give up.
And certainly then you can see it here on our own.
I mean, if you go back a year and a half to the Boston Marathon bombing, that didn't cause the United States to break apart and splinter and leave the Middle East.
If anything, it caused an upswell in our desire to bomb them even further, you know, them being these Islamic terrorists that no one seems to really have a good handle on who they are.
Right.
But in terms of the general American public, but, you know, I mean, and it united people behind the people of Boston.
He had the whole Boston strong phenomenon carry about, you know, led the Red Sox to the World Series, you know, which is really a blow on a lot of hearts of people from New York and New Jersey like me.
So but you're right, Scott.
I mean, the notion that somehow bombing is going to achieve your objectives just doesn't seem to, you know, just doesn't seem to come about unless your objective is just like we've been talking about to get the other side to overreact and to rush into a conflict, basically to panic, to to to hurry about and to make some very, very serious strategic mistakes.
Hey, when I, you know, when I was on the ground in Iraq and fighting in Iraq, one of the hardest things we had instill in our younger Marines was the notion of tactical patience.
And what that meant was you get hit by an IED, do not go rushing after the person who laid the IED, particularly if it's so easy to see him, because there's a good chance there's another one along the way to get you.
And that's the trap, you know.
So this notion of tactical patience is something that is enshrined, you know, among those who actually fought the war, but something that our policymakers and general public don't seem to understand that, look, there may be reasons why this very small group is doing this to, you know, goad us, you know, deliberately provoke us into making very serious mistakes, very serious blunders that will only aid the terrorist group's agendas.
All right.
Well, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
And Matthew, as we're recording this on Saturday evening, the news has just broken that David Haynes, the Brit who was a journalist, has now also been beheaded.
Another one of these provocations.
This one begins, apparently, according to Twitter, with a clip of Cameron, the Prime Minister of Britain, instead of Barack Obama, trying to bait the British to come with us.
Pretty obvious, but they want to take the bait, so they'll take it, I guess.
But now, so it is Matthew Ho.
He's writing at the Huffington Post, everybody.
The beheadings are bait, he correctly says, and perpetual war and shame is our policy.
And that's the second half of this interview is, you know, what is to come from this.
And there's just no mincing words about it.
You are absolutely predicting the worst based on what's already happened and what Obama has announced is his strategy going forward, Matthew.
Yes.
Break this off into Iraq and Syrian chunks for the discussion.
The more I, you know, the more and more I think about and the more I look at and the more the events evolve, you know, my feeling is that this is just one conflict, you know, and that's the way the Islamic State views it and other groups in the area view it as one conflict, you know.
But in particular now, the events that we've chosen to partake in, the nature that we're going about it and just the outright dismissal of any serious political efforts on our part to end the conflict, I'm quite certain will bring about a situation where it certainly is just one conflict.
There is no Iraq and no Syria part.
You know, a government of Baghdad in the east and the government forces of Syria in the west, but for the most part, just one large conflict.
But certainly, you know, with the situation in Iraq, I expect the conflict to devolve to levels of violence of 2006.
To me, it appears that our government has decided to back the sectarian, criminally corrupt regime in Baghdad with American power, and that will include a renewed Shia and quite possibly Kurdish invasion of Sunni, Sunni homelands, of Sunni territory.
So non-Sunni troops backed by American fighter jets and drones pushing into Sunni villages, towns, cities.
Of course, that will further align the Sunnis with the Islamic State, again, as we're discussing exactly what the Islamic State wants.
And that type of bloodshed, you know, will just continue to cycle on itself, and we'll see more violence.
And in line with that, what motivation now, what incentive now, does the government in Baghdad have to reform?
Does the government in Baghdad have to answer grievances from the Sunni population or make political concessions?
So I think you're going to get in this spiral of violence that's just going to get deeper and deeper in Iraq with no political conclusion.
And in Syria, you know- Actually, wait, wait.
Stop for a second before we go to Syria here, because you're right.
It's one big Islamic State in between the two, but it's sort of two different policies in a sense from the Washington, D.C. end anyway.
And I wanted to ask you about what you say about- I mean, obviously, I agree with you about, you know, the horrible, predictable consequences of America flying as the air force again for basically the Bata brigades and the Quds Force and the Shiites and the Iranians behind them.
But I wonder what force, the Iraqi army, the Bata brigade, the Mahdi army, al-Haq, all of them combined, can they sack Tikrit?
Can they sack Mosul and drive ISIS out of Mosul, out of Fallujah, even with American air power?
I don't believe it.
No, I don't think they can.
And I think you're going to get this bloody stalemate that's going to occur between the sides, you know, and then, of course, what you'll get again, I think, is what we saw so prevalent in the war in 2005, 2006, 2007, this, the massacre of civilians by death squads from both sides.
So I think, I agree with Scott.
I don't think they can take Tikrit.
I don't think they can take Mosul.
But they're certainly going to lay a whole lot of punishment on them.
Right.
And both sides are going to try and cleanse their respective areas of other ethnicities.
So, again, a return to what we saw in 2000, you know, although we start seeing, I was there in 2004, we're seeing as early as 2004.
Oh, it's already started again now.
Yeah, it's on Baghdad right now.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, exactly.
So you're going to, I mean, so I think you're just going to see violence perpetrated against civilians again.
You're going to have a bloody stalemate of their forces, you know, the Iraqi army.
I think the bulk of the fighting will be by the Shia militias.
It'll be interesting to me to see what Sadr's militias do or whether, you know, and will we then see possibly, will the Shia side fragment, you know, as they're certainly capable of doing?
And will there be inter-Shia fighting again and killing again, just as we saw throughout, you know, the period of our occupation there?
So really, yeah, it could be quite a mess.
It just, and to me, it just, to me, it just looks like the image I have is just of us basically now fencing off Syria and Iraq and create, turning it into a free fire zone for us to drop bombs and shoot missiles at targets that we think are, quote unquote, bad.
You know, I mean, as it really is, and not caring about what comes out of it, you know.
So I think the president was right.
A lot of people criticize the president with his comparisons to Somalia and Yemen, but that's basically what we've done there.
We basically just let them kill each other.
We're not really going to try to fix the problem politically to bring about any level of peace or stability, and we'll just target, and we'll just open up on targets as we see them and as we see fit.
So that's my fear is what the actual policy is going to look like.
In other words, there's really no one to coordinate a real war with on the ground, and so they're just going to fly around and do pot shots, basically.
But so now I have a $10 bet with Gareth Porter.
I say they're going to send in the Marine Corps before New Year's.
I really think before Thanksgiving, probably, because of just what we're talking about.
You brought up Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi army.
They're not going to even try, especially fighting for Uncle Sam.
They're not going to go and fight and take over these Sunni cities.
And there's no reason to think that the Bata brigade, aka the Iraqi army, is going to either.
The Supreme Islamic Council's goal all along has been to break off southeastern Iraq and make it Shiastan and screw the Sunnis.
And so they know better, in other words, than to attempt to rule Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit.
It's not their territory.
It's alien land.
That's why they withdrew when ISIS came back in June.
They were occupying foreign soil, basically, already at that point.
So I don't even think they're going to try.
But here's the problem, though.
Al-Shabaab in Somalia never had a telegenic leader like Omar Baku al-Baghdadi, or whatever his real name is up there, like Mussolini on his balcony with his suicide belt, and his legions of followers, and this giant piece of territory the size of Great Britain before Scotland secedes.
And so, you know, PR-wise, that's why I'm predicting the absolute worst with, you know, them dropping the Marines back off over there, is because they're going to have to drive these guys, for domestic politics' sake, they're going to have to drive these guys out of Mosul and, you know, later than Raqqa, probably, and Syria, too.
And I just don't see how, with the assumptions of the empire, that they could possibly let this slide or wait for a different solution to present itself or anything else.
I mean, who else?
The Turks have the land army to do it, but they will not do it, obviously.
They won't even let us fly our planes from Turkey to do it.
And so, it's got to be the Marines, if it's going to be anybody at all, I think.
Which I'm not saying I'm for that.
I'm 1,000% against it, but I'm just a pessimist.
Yeah, I think, you know, my fear of how America gets further involved in this is, say, just, you know, we're doing all this, we're being provoked into it because a guy with an English accent is cutting off the heads of American and British journalists.
And so, what happens then when one lone guy here in the United States walks into a McDonald's with a handgun and shoots up the place and yells, Allah Akbar, you know, long live the Islamic State or something?
What are we going to do then?
What happens then when there is an act of terrorism?
How are we going to react then at that point?
And I think you're going to see an all-out blitz by the Americans by, you know, to kill al-Baghdadi because we need to get him off the airwaves.
Because exactly your point, as long as he's standing up there on YouTube videos, you know, and addressing crowds of supporters, we're losing.
And again, this is all for domestic US political consumption and theater.
But the problem is, al-Baghdadi will be replaced by somebody else.
I mean, and we can get the guy with the British accent who's cutting off heads, but they just need to find one other person with a British or an American accent.
You know, I think they can tolerate having a Sunni-based insurgency, even led by al-Qaeda and Iraq types, again in Iraq for a while.
What they can't stand is them really being a state.
Before, when they called themselves the Islamic State of Iraq, everybody laughed.
You're not a state, you're a group.
But for them to actually have territory and say, oh yeah, we are too a monopoly on power around here.
That is what is unacceptable in D.C.
Absolutely, you're right.
And that's why my point, you know, I feel that how it's going to look, and this is what's the shame of our policy, and what's so immoral about it, so shameful about it, is that we don't seem to care about finding a real solution here.
We don't seem to care about actually ending the war, about ending the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, you know, that we're okay with, just as you described.
That this insurgency going on, as long as the optics look good, as long as they don't control a safe haven or don't have a state, you know, that we're okay with them slaughtering one another.
And, you know, that's why I think of the worst of this, and I think of the worst of the Obama administration in this as well, because it really is quite gutless, quite cowardly.
The president says to the American public, they, the Islamic State, is not an immediate threat to the United States.
General Petraeus on Thursday said we should not overestimate the Islamic State.
They're nothing like the group we fought in Iraq in 2006, 2007, you know, up and down the chain of law enforcement and military in the U.S. government.
They're saying the Islamic State is not a threat to the United States, but we're still going to bomb them because that's the politically best thing for us to do.
You know, we're going to jump into the bloodbath that's going along on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers because it makes good political theater for us to do it, you know, and that's what's so disgusting and so abhorrent to me is that our country really doesn't seem to care about finding and finding a political end to this conflict, but rather just wants to participate in the killing for the optics and the good domestic political sense it seems to make right now.
Yeah, well, and since the policy is, you know, such a disaster on its face, it can only escalate from here.
The American involvement, I mean, they already have 1,400 ground troops, as many maybe as 2,000 Army Marines plus SOCOM, JSOC, CIA, and mercenaries, and they have a giant quote unquote secret base up there, Kurdistan, that they've been building up that Mitchell Prothero reported on back in June or early July.
And so, and then now the Kagan's have this new study out saying, well, we got to send at least 25,000 guys, and they write in here that it is impossible to articulate a direct path to an acceptable end state in Iraq and Syria, which is a complicated way of saying we admit that nothing we say here makes sense whatsoever, and we do not promise even a 1% chance that it would work in any way we could describe to you, send 25,000 troops.
Is that incredible?
It is, you know, but this is how, you know, so now you have these established authorities, the Kagan's, the Max Boots, you know, backed up by, you know, I've seen how this works, Scott, you know, I've worked on Capitol Hill quite long enough, I've seen how it works, you know, in a sense of how members of Congress are briefed and how a policy is created.
You know, I met with Senator Robert Casey from Pennsylvania, who, you know, quite an influential member of the Senate in terms of foreign policy, and I met with his primary military liaison, he was an army major, this is three or four years ago, and this major told me, he was very upset about this, he told me that seven out of 10 briefings the Senate received on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were from private outside groups, not from the Pentagon, not from the intelligence agencies, but from private groups like Kagan's group, the Institute for the Study of War, like from Heritage, like from Center for New American Security, that are funded by the defense industry, or in some cases directly by the Pentagon.
So you do, you have, so I have no doubt it's going to occur this next week as Congress comes back into session, as they have hearings, is that the defense industry and their think tank allies are already starting to give, you know, what may be the next steps.
If this doesn't work, you're going to have to start thinking about 25,000 troops on the ground.
I mean, so they're already prepping these ideas, they're already kind of softening this approach, so that people are like, well, you know, we tried that, so now we need to move on to the ground troops.
Now we need to put American soldiers and Marines back in a conflict, because this Islamic State is so bad that they outlasted our air power, we have to do this.
And, you know, we'll see.
I would like to think that the president I voted for six years ago, you know, who ran as kind of an anti-war president, would have the spine to say no, but I doubt that.
I really doubt that.
And I'm like with you, Scott, I think, I don't think it'll be as quick as Thanksgiving or Christmas as maybe you think, but I do think if it continues to unravel like this, you could see a large American force of ground troops on the ground.
All right, well, let me stop you right there, Matthew, because I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
We don't have time to even talk about the crazy Syria policy or any of the rest of this, but hopefully I can get you back on the show again soon.
Everybody, that's Matthew Ho, he's writing at the Huffington Post, perpetual war and shame is our policy and the beheadings are bait.
Don't fall for it.
Thank you so much for your time on the show, Matthew.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
I really appreciate the work you do and happy to come on again anytime.
All right, y'all, and that's Anti-War Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.