09/16/14 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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Well, hi, Peter.
You're live on the radio show right now.
Scott, it's a pleasure to be back with you, though, unfortunately, we're talking about Iraq again.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really too bad.
Well, we got about three minutes to get into it here before the bottom of the hour break, but that's good enough timing for me.
I was just about saying, just about done saying what I was saying anyway.
So, let's talk first.
Is it okay with you?
And maybe we can just kind of give this short shrift before the break here.
Oh, well, now we'll have to get back to it after the break, too.
But can you talk a little bit about the authority of the president to launch the war the way he's launched it and the various and sundry excuses that have been raised for his pretended authority, or I don't know, maybe legit, if you think so, authority here.
No, I don't.
Legally, the president is citing the 2002 congressional authorization to George Bush to invade Iraq.
I mean, this is roughly the equivalent that the president is citing, you know, like the Munich Accords or the Articles of Confederation as his justification.
You know, the idea that a decision Congress made, what, 12 years ago, to a different president for a specific invasion to disable Saddam's WMDs, that that somehow is okay still, is really just political cover.
Obama is basically saying to Congress, all right, I'm going to stick my neck out on this, and if you guys don't want to join in, that's fine, I'll just cite this old thing and you'll go along with it.
If you want to chime in this year and say that what I'm doing is okay for your own benefit, sure, go ahead and do that, too.
But it's really just political cover.
It's an excuse, if you will, at the very best.
Yeah, and now this whole thing about the War Powers Act, it just, for some reason, it goes without saying, everybody seems to just, quote unquote, know that the president could start a war for 60 days.
And I guess even though that's exactly what the War Powers Act does not say, they drop that excuse, right?
That's when you say they're invoking the AUMF from 02 now, that's because everybody already, you know, got over their excuse about the War Powers Act.
You know, the War Powers Act, I'm afraid to say, has not been followed by any president ever.
You know, it was passed in the wake of the Vietnam War, and it really just has never really caught any traction.
It was, again, kind of a political dodge by Congress.
They overrode Nixon's veto to pass it, but then never enforced it.
It's only enforceable by impeachment, so, you know, it's useless.
All right, now, hold it right there.
It's Peter Van Buren.
He's formerly with the State Department, author of We Meant Well, and that's his blog, too, and we'll be right back in just a sec, y'all.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Now, Peter Van Buren, he used to work in the State Department.
He writes at tomdispatch.com all the time, and I think Huffington, right?
Yes, that's correct.
Yeah, all over the place.
Reuters, Salon, Mother Jones, on the side of walls, any place I can find.
Hell yeah, good times, and lots of good, good stuff, too.
And what's the Tom Jode book?
I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me, Peter.
I should have pulled it up.
No worries.
It's my current book.
It's called The Ghosts of Tom Jode, a story of the 99%, and it's about our economy and obviously some of the things that Occupy has been talking about.
Right.
Okay, cool.
And then before that, it's We Meant Well, about your time working for the State Department based in southern Iraq there, correct?
Yes, that's correct, and that was a lot of my background on Iraq, was going there for a full year as a State Department diplomat, leading two teams in the failure of the last war there, and that gives me a little perspective on the current war, and when I say the current war is doomed to fail as the other one did, I think I say that with a little expertise.
All right, well, you know, I have my whole kind of stock list of most outrageous things to talk about, but I'm kind of interested in what you think are the most important things that people are overlooking, because after all, you must be watching the same TV news as me and pulling what little hair you have out, same as me.
Thanks for the hair joke, Scott.
Hey, I got my own problems.
But, you know, you're right.
Some days I really have to turn away from the news for a little while and stare out the window, because you can't get away from the idea that this is just the hole being dug deeper, the hole that we thought we were out of.
You know, we left the Iraq war three years ago, not quite three years ago, with a terrible unsettled situation that we had created over the course of nine years of war.
Iraq had dissolved into a series of statelets run by the Shias, the Sunnis, the Kurds, and all sorts of variations therein.
Violence was endemic.
The Iranians were the most powerful outside power there.
And the oil wasn't flowing, ostensibly one of the justifications for the war.
And America's influence was zero, especially compared to the expenditure of 4,600 American lives, 32,000 American wounded, close to 200,000 Iraqis dead, $2 trillion.
I mean, you do the math, how it adds up.
And then we elected a president in good part based on his statement that he was going to end that war, that he was opposed to that war, that he thought it was a stupid war.
Now, a couple of years later, we're back.
And Iraq is still three divided statelets or more.
The Iranians are still the most influential force on the ground.
The Americans still have little influence except what we can buy temporarily.
Even the oil isn't flowing anymore.
And yet we're going back in.
We are back in.
We're basing aircraft in Erbil.
We've got an admitted 1,600 troops on the ground, never mind how many contractors, mercenaries, covert operators, CIA, whatever else you want, Legion of Doom members, whoever else is out there.
And we're investing again money and time and weapons and lives into a mistake.
Even Vietnam, the most obvious touchpoint in history, when we finally, finally admitted that was a mistake and left, we didn't go back.
And that makes the Iraq debacle even sadder for me, if you will.
Yeah.
Well, now they're selling Vietnam weapons, for crying out loud.
Same commie regime, but, oh, not so bad.
If you want to be our trading partner, that's what they call it.
I mean, the weapons thing is perhaps one of the real tragedies here.
Because most of the airstrikes that the United States has been carrying out for the last six weeks have been to blow up our own weapons that we left behind for the Iraqi army to abandon.
Many of the man-portable air-to-air or ground-to-air missiles that threaten American aircraft somehow made their way from Libya, where we unleashed chaos into the battlefields of Iraq and Syria.
And America's response to all this is, let's throw some more weapons into the mix, because we'll control everything this time.
You know, there's that definition of mental illness that says you repeat the same process over and over, hoping for different results.
And you're left wondering, truly, who is sane in this process here in the United States.
Yeah.
Well, all right, so the Kagan's, well, two of the four Kagan's, or whatever.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I just threw up a little in my mouth when you mentioned that.
Yeah, I know.
All right, well, hold still, because here it's going to get worse.
Now, they admit that they have no credible narrative to sell you about how this might work.
That's the premise of their entire recommendation to send 25,000 troops.
But one of the major premises of their argument is that the tribes may want to, the Sunni tribes that are actually occupied by ISIS right now, that they may want to overthrow these guys, but they just can't.
That unlike the situation in 2006 and 2007, ISIS is really in a much stronger position.
They're holding tribal leaders hostage and Ba'athist leaders hostage.
They have learned their lesson of the stab in the back from the tribes of the Awakening Movement of 2007.
And right now, basically, the Sunnis, in general, according to the Kagan's, of the so-called Sunni triangle, northwestern Iraq, Fallujah, and then up north to Mosul, et cetera, that they just don't have the ability to throw these guys off.
So whoever it is, if it's not the Iraqi army or the Iranians or the Turks, it's going to have to be the Marines, because it's the only way anybody is going to be able to dislodge these guys from Mosul.
The local population can't do it without our help, the Kagan's say, Peter.
Well, first, for your listeners who haven't lost their lunch yet, the Kagan's are a husband and wife team who never find a war they can't support.
And they were two of the most vocal proponents of the Iraq War in 2003, cheerleaders for the surge in 2007, and critics of the United States for withdrawing, retreating, if you will, in 2011.
So calling them back in for some thoughtful commentary is really quite hilarious, in a sense.
You know, the Kagan's theory is as wrong now as it was in the past.
Look, 2007, during the surge, the whole plan was to use American military power to create political space that would allow the Sunnis to disengage from Al-Qaeda, they were the boogeymen of the time, and then reunite with the Shia government, who was going to accept them as brothers.
And this plan failed.
I was there for the failure in 2009.
I was tasked with talking to the Sunni leaders in hopes of cajoling, threatening, bribing and begging them to stick with the plan just a little bit longer, in hopes that things would turn around.
I heard them express their concerns, I heard them talk about being cheated, double-crossed, and I just don't see that the same plan that failed with 160,000 troops in 2007 to 2009 has any chance of succeeding now with a tenth or a hundredth of those number of troops, with Sunnis who have already been burnt once.
Look, there's a reason why the Sunni, indigenous Sunnis in Iraq support groups like ISIS.
They need protection.
It's like gangs in prison.
You don't necessarily want to join the gang, but if you don't join the gang, then you're prey for the others.
The Sunnis have been beaten and imprisoned and prosecuted and persecuted and executed by the Shia government consistently since the American invasion, and they are not about to simply step away because the Americans have promised, well, this time, you know, we're going to stick with it until it works.
All right, it's Peter Van Buren, formerly with the State Department, and now a peacenik and a writer.
You can find him all over the place, and I'm going to pull up all of his websites during this break, and then that way I can say them all right for you, but he's easy enough to search.
You can read him at tomdispatch.com.
That's for sure.
We'll be right back in just a second.
Hey, Al.
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And now back to our interview with Peter Van Buren.
For 24 years, he worked at the State Department.
He wrote the book, We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
And of course, you know, because he was a whistleblower, the government retaliated against him.
And there's a whole story of his, you know, persecution at the hands of the state for telling the truth, just like everybody else, right?
Here he is.
He's at Huffington.
He's at dissenter.firedoglake.com, at The Nation, and at Tom Dispatch.
And of course, he's written for antiwar.com and the American Conservative and all over the frigging place.
So his website is wementwell.com.
And now, so when we left off at the break, they were talking about, well, the surge already didn't work.
So how is it supposed to work again?
And so, okay, I'll buy that.
It seems to me like because not just the overthrow of Saddam or even the debauchification and abolition of the Iraqi army and state as it previously existed, but because America stayed all the way through 2007, that was what made it an irreconcilable problem.
Because in staying, the army and the Marines ended up simply serving the will of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawah Party, who are both sock puppets of the Iranians.
And their plan was to use the Americans to steal Baghdad for them and kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad.
And then, as they talked about for years, and this is why Muqtada al-Sadr always fought with Abdulaziz al-Hakim from the Supreme Islamic Council within the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, was he wanted Arab nationalism and to hold Iraq together in alliance with the Sunnis and kick the Americans and the Iranians out.
And the Iranian stooges wanted to use the Americans to kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and then kick the Americans out.
And then they would have what they called back then strong federalism, meaning the Sunnis can go dig their own oil well somewhere.
They're not getting any Basra oil money ever again, basically.
That's a big part of what's going on here.
They don't want to rule Fallujah and Mosul and Tikrit.
They know that they can't.
So that's what happened with the sectarian cleansing, was kick all the Sunnis out, put them on that side of the line, and then let them declare independence.
I mean, what did Maliki even try to do about it other than just launch artillery at Fallujah for a few months back in January and February, right?
You know, he wasn't even trying.
That's why they turned and fled when ISIS came to Mosul.
So in other words, I guess what I'm trying to get to is it seems to me like the lines were already drawn.
Maybe the battle for Kirkuk still is awaiting, but otherwise on the Iraqi side of this thing, it seems like Sunnistan has declared independence, whether under ISIS or whether anybody else.
They'll never be part of Iraq and under the authority of the Baghdad government ever again.
That ship, like you said, had sailed back in 2007 when it didn't work then.
And thus, I guess what I'm hearing from you, Scott, is, you know, the war worked out just the way it was supposed to, and our work here is done.
Yeah, just the way it was supposed to if you're the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Well, you know, I think we need to broaden our perspective here, but, you know, all joking aside, you know, you hit the nail on the head.
The United States has been at war in one form or another with Iraq since 1991.
What is that, over 23 years?
And so far, if you'll total it all up, our accomplishment is the disillusion of the nation-state.
And as you said, the Sunnis are on their own.
The Kurds have de facto been on their own and clearly have been very clever about pushing the United States towards more and more independence through this current process.
They're fighting independently of whatever Iraqi army is left.
And the Iranians have been empowered and lost one of their most significant enemies on their western border, you know, Saddam's Iraq, and replaced it with essentially a client state of Shias.
The oil has not flowed, and chaos has been unleashed all over the Middle East as the United States essentially dissolved the Cold War status of the Middle East that Saddam somehow held together.
Now, there's a lot of toothpaste been squeezed out of the tube in the course of all that.
And the thought that first, anything can put it all back together, and second, more specifically, that some kind of goofy air campaign with a pasted-together faux coalition and some, you know, reminding of the Sunnis how useful it would be if they would just simply, you know, get back together with the Shias, you know, is just beyond what we could expect to call reality at this point.
I truly don't know what the president was thinking.
The Bush-Cheney people, for all their evil, sort of had a goal in mind at least, at least initially, which was to conquer and remake the Middle East in America's desired image.
It was an evil, stupid goal, but apparently was some kind of strategy and plan.
Obama's reinsertion of the United States into Iraq doesn't appear to even have that kind of evil genius working for it.
It seems to be sort of somewhere kind of a mix between weariness, desperation, short-term political expediency, you know, he wants to look tough with the congressional midterms coming up, and almost a sense of, I don't want to say boredom, but the sense of, you know, he's just tired of listening to people and pushing back and fighting with Congress, and he's just kind of thrown up his hands and said, you know, fudge this, if you guys want a war, go have a war.
Yeah, that is how it seems, huh?
In case you're not sure, those are all really bad reasons to have a war.
Right, yeah, of course.
Just checking in on that.
Well, now, so what about this?
What about the hawks who are still after Assad?
Did you see McCain and Dempsey this morning in the Senate on TV, where McCain is saying to Dempsey, oh yeah, well, so what if Assad keeps attacking the Free Syrian Army?
You're going to help them against ISIS, but you're not going to help them against Assad?
And Dempsey's going, no, yeah, we'll help them against Assad, too.
I mean, I'm not saying that, I mean, well, I guess we'll see what happens.
What?
Yeah, I think that the most practical thing at this point would be to issue Lindsey Graham a rifle, a helmet, and some body armor, and get him out front on the ground on these issues, and he can take McCain and some of these other chicken hawks with him.
You've just really kind of explained how there is no goal, there is no strategy, there is no real plan.
You've got parts of the American government barking about more and more, you've got a few, Rand Paul has kind of noodled around the edges of saying it's already too much, and you've got our military people kind of befuddled in the middle, if you will, not really sure what their mission is, not really sure what resources they have, and not really sure what they're sort of fighting toward, if you will.
This is something that beleaguered the invasion and occupation as well.
The military is not the answer to every problem, it's arguably not even the answer to many problems.
When you do need to use it, and I'm certainly not claiming that here, but when you do need to use it, it's a very blunt instrument, it's designed to destroy and break things and kill people.
And you really, really need to know why you're doing that, and you really, really need to understand that that's about all you can realistically expect from the military, when instead you expect them to be peacemakers, dealmakers, diplomats, coordinators, advisors, trainers, and lions and tigers and bears.
It's not going to work.
The military just isn't that kind of a machine, and I think Dempsey's stumbling to say something coherent to an incoherent question maybe is just kind of a reflection of that.
Alright, and now, so, I guess I should just start asking everybody this.
I got a $10 bet with Gareth Porter that they're going to send in the Marines before New Year's.
I really think before, oh man, well, so you think they're going to send in more troops?
Scott, I'm going to have to wrap up this interview, but I will wrap it up by saying yes, of course we're going to be sending in more troops.
They're already on their way or there if they haven't been, and man, are you going to lose that bet with Gareth.
No, I'm going to win it.
He's going to lose it.
Oh, you're going to win that bet.
Alright, in that case, you're fine.
Alright, see ya.
Hey, thanks very much, Peter.
Peter Van Buren, everybody.
WeMentWell.com.
We'll be right back.
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