09/23/14 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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Uh, alright, on the line we got Peter Van Buren.
Next, in alphabetical order on my Skype list.
From Patrick.
Uh, he is the author of The Ghosts of Tom Joad.
Not the, sorry, just Ghosts of Tom Joad.
A story of the 99%, as well as, we meant well.
How I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
And he blogs at his website, wemeantwell.com.
Unfortunately, we're back.
We're talking about war in the Middle East once again.
And we're talking about an expanded war.
The president has made war now on a new country, Syria, which is either the 7th or the 9th country he has attacked, depending on how you count these things.
Alright, well, uh, Peter Van Buren.
Back to the Future in Iraq is the brand new piece at tomdispatch.com.
Of course, we'll be running it tomorrow at antiwar.com.
And, uh, boy, it is the same thing all over again.
Apocalypse Now Iraq Edition.
That's the subtitle here.
Um, and we went over quite a bit of this on the show last week.
But that's alright.
You've got it together as good as anybody as we just get going in what I think you correctly say, unfortunately, is just the very beginning of the same damn thing again that we've already been through here.
Years of horrible bloody war in Iraq.
It really does get under my skin.
You know, I felt when I left Iraq in 2010 and when my book about Iraq, We Meant Well, came out in 2011, that that was largely it.
I expected Iraq to devolve into some form of chaos that would eventually sort itself out into three statelets.
A Sunni, a Shia, and a Kurd statelet.
And though they'd fuss with each other, that was kind of where it was supposed to end.
Unfortunately, it hasn't ended there.
And even more unfortunately, the United States has blindly plunged right back into the swamp in an attempt to accomplish with fewer resources what we failed to already accomplish with many more resources.
And that is to create a united, single Iraq.
It's metastasized into Syria now, and America is again at war in the Middle East.
You know, I wonder, of course, a lot of people are cynical and think that the American plan was always to break them up.
Like, there were two parallel plans.
One, you know, in the name of holding Iraq together, but the other that was quite deliberately siding with the secessionists among the Shiites and those who would kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad.
And, I mean, I guess Barzani and Talabani, there's nobody to pick from among the Kurds who aren't secessionists to one degree or another there.
It's pretty much consensus in their system.
But, you know, Joe Biden has been very upfront about this since before the war, that he always thought Iraq should be broken in three, and he thought America should do the breaking.
And so, you know, I wonder if, because after all, we just talked about this with Patrick Coburn, yeah, I guess they're going to try, but like you just said, they're going to accomplish the, you know, the cooling off or the warming up or whichever temperature metaphor you're supposed to use, the rapprochement between the Sunnis and, you know, the Sunni, you know, power holders, I guess, the religious leaders, the tribal chiefs and whatever, with Baghdad, you know, based on, without, as you said, without the resources that they had the last time they tried it, and it didn't work back seven years ago.
Now, the thing that caused me to title the article out today, Back to the Future, is that we are trying the same plan.
The plan back in 2007 was that the surge, which is just a more marketable term for an escalation, of course, was going to create the political space.
The U.S. Army was going to sit on everybody and create the political space that would allow the Sunnis and the Shias to sort out their issues and unite into a government in Iraq.
We hadn't really figured out what to do with the Kurds at that time, so let's leave them aside as well.
And to help along with this, the United States was going to buy off the Sunnis, and we did that through, by identifying the so-called moderate Sunnis of the time and paying them lots of money to break with Al-Qaeda and either come to our side or at least stay kind of neutral.
And this is how the foreign fighters were going to be ejected from Iraq and unity was going to be achieved.
Well, I think we can tell from today's headlines, if nothing else, that that didn't really work out.
Once again, however, that's the plan.
United States air power and whatever sneaky stuff we're doing on the ground is designed to create political space that will allow the so-called new government of Iraq to achieve unity.
We're still looking for these moderate Sunnis in Iraq and in hopes of, if we do stumble upon them, that we can talk them into breaking with ISIS and thus that whole problem is solved.
Obviously the difficulties are fairly straightforward and were laid out in 2007.
I mean, what's new in the picture is that the Sunnis are unlikely to go along.
I mean, once bitten, twice shy.
And after trusting the Americans in 2007 and getting the dirty end of the stick, it seems unlikely that they would make the same mistake twice, even though apparently we are.
If you're talking about conspiracy theories or secret plans or something like that, I think the one that might be worth focusing on, and it's not even very, very secret, is how reentering the Iraq war really was just the way of lubricating the system, if you'll forgive the analogy, to get us into Syria.
Over the last, what, five weeks, we've gone from no presence at all in either country to a humanitarian mission in Iraq, to a larger mission in Iraq, to airstrikes, and then as of last night, we're bombing in Syria with or without some kind of coalition, whatever.
The road to Damascus runs through Baghdad the hard way, huh?
We're going the long way around it, but the connection between the slippery slope in Iraq that seems to have led us down the hill into Syria is one that's very, very hard to ignore.
And so I'll throw out there for the audience to chew over how much of the reinsertion into Iraq really was nothing more than sort of setting up what the U.S. government really wanted to do, which is find a media-palatable way to engage in Syria.
And by that you mean bomb ISIS targets there, or you mean a backdoor to still regime change against Assad in Damascus?
I suspect that the goal is both, or all, or whichever we might actually accomplish.
I think the United States recognizes two groups that it would like to get rid of in Syria.
One of them, of course, is the quote-unquote terrorists, whatever coalition, and the other is Assad.
I don't think the United States wants to see either of them there a year from now.
Oh, man.
Yeah, boy, what Syria's going to look like after the debothification there.
Talk about a bloodbath.
Holy crap.
All right, hold it right there.
It's Peter Van Buren, everybody.
We'll be right back after this.
WeMeantWell.com.
TomDispatch.com.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Peter Van Buren, former State Department official, author of We Meant Well, about his time in Iraq.
That's also his website, WeMeantWell.com.
He's got this new one, AtTomDispatch, Back to the Future, Same Dang, Failed Policy Again.
I wanted to go back real quick before we, oh, let me mention real quick two footnotes real quick.
If anybody wants to read A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, and or Coping with Crumbling States, I forgot the subtitle of that one, both by David Wilmser.
Those are both available at my website, ScottHorton.org.
And you can find that's the road to Damascus, runs through Baghdad and all that, the neocons, Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor, David Wilmser is the primary author there.
All right, so anyway, and then I wanted to say one thing quickly about the awakening thing, about the deliberate plan, whether they're trying really hard to hold the Iraqi state together, and they really wanted to integrate these sons of Iraq into the army and all that, it sounded on its face like a plan, not necessarily one that was going to work very well, but that it was something that was really worth a try.
It really does seem, now that I think about it and listen to you talk about it, Peter, like it really just backfired, right?
This was an attempt to take advantage of the end of the war for Baghdad to try to get a cooling off in the civil war altogether and try to figure out a way to integrate the Sunnis under the Baghdad government in the city they'd lost, enough to, as you say, more or less get by kind of in somewhat crisis, but for the long term, less than the full scale problem.
But what really happened, in effect, by paying them and arming them and calling that truce was they really solidified a state at the same time that they had given the Shiites, the Shiite parties, I mean, not the people, but the Shiite leaders, no reason to compromise with the Sunnis anymore since they had Baghdad and so screw them.
They had also then given the Sunnis less and less incentive to want to try to reach out with and work with, reach out to, and work with the Baghdad government because, after all, Petraeus was paying them handsome sums of money and paying their forces to walk around with machine guns, rule in the place, etc.
And so, in effect, it sounds like it really just backfired and what they ended up doing was securing the de facto independence of the west and northwest of the country and Shiistan from Baghdad to Basra.
And now the irony is that America's actions, the plans we discussed before the break and those will fail, but America's actual actions are going to create exactly the situation that the president says we don't want to create.
We have acknowledged Kurdistan as an independent entity.
We have allowed the Kurdish forces, the Peshmerga, to fight fully independently of the Iraqi state army.
We are arming them separately, supporting them separately.
We're allowing the Iraqi state army, the Shia forces, to use their militias in combat because the Iraqi army itself, of course, fell apart.
And we are acknowledging those differences.
The Kurds are being allowed to sell oil independently again.
A Kurdish tanker that had been held off the coast of Texas was allowed to offload.
The Kurds have been selling oil directly to Israel and that will further separate the Kurds from what you call Shia-stan.
Meanwhile, the persecution of the Sunnis by the same Shia militias that hunted them down during the American occupation can't do anything but make it clear that there is no place for them in so-called unified Iraq.
So America's actions have really set the stage for exactly the thing that America said we don't want.
As for Syria, what you're finding there is another recipe for another chaotic state.
As we saw in Libya, Yemen is unraveling before our eyes.
Ironically, the president cited that as a success about a week ago or so.
In Syria, you are going to be removing one, if not both, of the centers of power.
ISIS and its various subgroups, which is one center of power, and the Assad government, which is the other center of power.
Once one or both of those groups are gone, what's left is chaos.
A bunch of smaller players struggling for bits and pieces of the body that they can pick over.
We've seen this happen in Libya.
We certainly saw it happen in Baghdad in 2003.
And we're watching it happen in Yemen and other places, South Sudan, etc.
We're back to that standard old joke that mental illness is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
But my goodness, if there was a phrase that described American policy and strategy in the Middle East right now, that's the one that I'd pull out.
Man, you know, here's the thing, though.
I mean, okay, insanity is insanity and all of that.
But continuing to support the Mujahideen against Assad after all of this, that's not just insanity.
That's absolutely crazy.
That's so crazy that it's treasonous.
They are siding, in effect, still, with the guys who have out loud, in public, in the Sunday Times, sworn their allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri.
I mean, what in the world are we...
And I'm not at all on the side of those who would say that George Bush, for example, should have ever worked with Assad to torture and kill these guys or anything like that.
We shouldn't have a pro or anti-Assad position.
But to keep supporting the rebellion, at least, even though I think it would backfire horribly and be a bad policy, at least on its face, Peter, switching back to Assad makes some sense.
But this whole thing about we're going to create a brand new Mujahideen to fight all the rest of the Mujahideen and Assad at the same time is just...
I don't know what they're doing.
Just now I was talking with Patrick Coburn and he was saying, basically, by just logical default, they must be, in effect, switching back to Assad and calling off the regime change.
Right?
Or, I mean, is it really that crazy where Richard Perle's darkest dreams are actually still to be implemented in the face of all these results?
You know, the fact that no one seems to know and the fact that any path...
I mean, if you were to sit down and say, let's dispassionately make the argument that the United States is trying to get back towards supporting Assad, again, to sketch that path out, it's very, very difficult.
Looking at the airstrikes that took place last night, the United States had to blow a hole in Assad's air defenses to get to the locations where supposedly ISIS was located.
The attack came out of the Mediterranean and the Tomahawk missiles were used to blast their way past Assad's air defenses over the coast and get to the interior of the country.
It seems difficult, if not impossible, to wage war in a place as small as Syria and not end up killing people on every side of the conflict.
It beggars the imagination to try to see the logic behind any of this, regardless of which position you think the United States is taking or that you want to argue for.
None of them add up.
It seems as if the only goal is to, quote, do something, even with the knowledge and certainly the historical precedent that doing something will result in both counter to American stated goals and, of course, the chaos.
Well, you know, another thing that Patrick said was we're going to see the test here real quick when ISIS makes a move again on Aleppo.
And then when it's the battle for Aleppo, whose side is America going to be on in that?
The rebels or the state?
It's going to be one or the other at this point because now we're up to our neck in it.
That's a big thing to watch.
The other thing that could happen is sort of the opposite.
In other words, ISIS will go right for the classic insurgent move, which is to pull out of the cities, fade into the population, and try to draw the United States deeper into the conflict.
That's what happened in Iraq.
It's what happened in Vietnam.
It is insurgency 101.
You don't stand and fight the Western powers.
They've got tanks and airplanes and Tomahawk missiles, and you don't.
What you do is you disappear and you draw them in, and then once they're on your territory, you do what you need to do.
That's certainly how a bunch of people with second-grade educations and rusty AK-47s have fought the United States to at least to draw, if not a defeat, in Afghanistan.
Also Vietnam.
And speaking of which, I mean, their plan is, their stated goal is now that, oh yeah, no, they're leaving.
They're going to have maybe 10 or at the most 20,000 troops after the end of this year, and they're going to call it a victory.
But meanwhile, it's completely agreed all the way around that the Taliban's ready to walk right back into Kabul.
They're kind of already there in a huge way.
That's the same kind of situation they're facing here, where they've sworn to destroy al-Qaeda in Iraq, the same one they destroyed over and over already.
That's now grown into this.
It's a shame, and I'm terribly afraid, Scott, we're going to have to talk about this many, many more times before we're anywhere close to the end.
Yeah, I know, it is.
We're in 2003 right now, and just getting started again.
Bad news.
All right, read all about it at TomDispatch.com, everybody.
Thanks very much, Peter.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Bye-bye.
Peter Van Buren, y'all.
See you tomorrow.
Thanks very much for listening.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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