09/25/14 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show.
The Scott Horton Show.
And I got Stephen Zunis on the line.
And oh, man.
Oh, here's his bio.
He is the professor of politics and program director for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
Welcome back to the show, Stephen.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Thank you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
And let's see.
The title here is the U.S. should use caution in the fight against ISIL.
That's your latest.
Hey, let's start with ISIL.
What is the damn deal with the acronym here?
I mean, I know they call them Daesh in Arabic, kind of a slang term for them there, with their actual acronym in the language they're speaking.
But over here, it seems like there was sort of a kind of a market discussion and choice in at least the media that we're going to call them ISIS.
Even after they renamed themselves the Islamic State, nobody wants to say IS is or whatever.
It's a painful way to write.
So it calls them ISIS, except Obama and you still call them the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
What's the point of that?
Or is there a point or what's the deal?
It's not not really.
In fact, I use it interchangeably.
And I think depending which article you're looking at, it may be the choice of the editors more than what I originally wrote anyway.
But yeah, basically, it's historically Syria as a geographical region, as opposed to what we think of as Syria as carved out by colonial powers 100 years ago.
Right.
Isn't is the area of the eastern end of the of the Mediterranean.
And Levant is also the common term for that region, which would include Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine.
So.
So in other words, it essentially means it means the same thing.
It's interchangeable.
Yeah.
Well, I guess.
Yeah.
Who cares?
Anyway, they've declared themselves the Islamic State and they really do have one.
Yeah.
Well, you call it Islamic.
I mean, you know, even even if you look at the whole tradition of caliphates, you know, that which is the you know, the what is supposed to be the representative of the of the faith on Earth, going back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad running through the Ottoman Empire.
You know, these guys, you know, minorities, you know, Christians, Jews, others were, you know, didn't have equal rights to Muslims, but they generally were not targeted and persecuted.
They had a fair amount of autonomy, even had their own judicial systems.
You know, there was that there's something that this group that calls itself Islamic, it's like it's a cult.
I mean, this is like ancient Riccio is a Shintoism where Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda is to Christianity.
I mean, these guys are really, really beyond the pale and they don't just consider religious minorities, the infidels, but any anybody who disagrees with them even devout Sunni Muslims.
So, you know, I think some people are just reluctant to even use the word Islamic State just because it's an insult to Muslims.
These guys would use the name, but whatever you call it.
Well, you know, let me ask you this, because I just finished reading Patrick Coburn's book.
And I mean, I just I follow everything Patrick Coburn writes anyway.
I just finished reading his new book about this.
And he was saying and I think this must be true that not just Wahhabism, but even the more so-called virulent, more nihilist strain of Salafism, Bin Ladenite ways of thinking is really on the march throughout Sunni Islam.
Certainly in the Arab world, it's growing in greater, greater proportions all the time.
And he didn't really try to put a percentage on it or anything like that.
And obviously you could hang almost all the responsibility for that around the neck of Bush and Obama for causing this kind of violent ideological reaction to their behavior in the region.
And Patrick, of course, also highlights the Saudi money behind spreading Wahhabi type educational systems around the entire Muslim world, not just in the Arab world, but obviously into Pakistan and everywhere else.
But so I wonder if you have any kind of ballpark estimate as to percentages and rate of growth of this more fundamentalist kind of Bin Ladenite way of looking at things.
I don't really.
It's very, very tiny, single digit certainly.
But the thing is that these guys are fanatics and they end up out hustling, out organizing others, especially when there's rough alternatives and there are grievances that a lot of people can identify with.
Like communist movements.
Very few peasants in these various countries consider themselves communist, but the communist movements were able to have a disproportionate amount of influence because the oppression, corruption, everything was so bad, people were so desperate, and people were able to latch on to some ideology that tended to motivate them.
And of course, just as the U.S. policy of intervention and propping up these right-wing dictatorships actually created more communists than we killed, similarly, we are creating more of these extremists by the very policies that our government has been pursuing.
The thing is, especially the sectarian business, the difference between Sunnis and Shias, theologically, is less than that between Catholics and Protestants.
For the vast majority of the history of Islam, it's not been a big deal.
But there have been a number of things, a lot of which has been a direct consequence of U.S. policy.
It has made it a big deal in some places.
For example, when the U.S. took over Iraq, we ended up systematically dismantling the two bastions of secular nationalism.
The armed forces, which were replaced by these sectarian Shiite militia, most of which had been actually trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, actually fought with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, which led to a lot of resentment among a lot of Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, that the United States essentially put in their historic enemies, the Western imperialists, U.S. and Britain, and the Persians, essentially taking over their government.
Some extremist Sunnis started killing random Shiites, just like some Irish Catholic nationalists started killing random Protestants because they assumed that they were supporting what they saw as an occupation.
And then the hardline Shiite government started murdering random Sunni men by the thousands.
And then, lo and behold, you do end up with this sectarian conflict.
But it was a direct consequence of destroying the armed forces and having it replaced by these repressive Shiite militias.
It was the fact that the United States essentially dismantled the entire civil service, which was the other bastion of secular nationalism, and it was replaced the minute government ministries became these personal fiefdoms of these, again, Shiite sectarian parties.
And it was divide and rule.
This is not an accident.
The United States expected things to get as far out of hand as it did, and get as crazy as it did.
But there was definitely a conscious policy of trying to...
We saw the nationalism that was a much bigger threat to U.S. hegemony, and was hoping that dividing people along sectarian or regional lines might enable the U.S. to have more influence.
No, I think that's such an important point.
And people ought to be reminded of that all the time.
I've seen people saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all Bush's fault, or whatever.
But, no, I mean, it's important.
The history is important, not for blaming Bush for fun, but so that people understand the situation.
It wasn't even just that they invaded and killed Saddam, overthrew Saddam.
It's that they stayed, and they picked the most Iranian-backed, the most sectarian of the Shiite leaders, and stayed for years and years and helped them kill a million people and kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and remove the last incentive that they had to ever compromise or work with the Sunnis again, all the while marginalizing Shiite leaders like Muqtada Sadr, who actually wanted to form what he called a government of national salvation, an Iraqi nationalist Arab government, and with the Kurds, too, but based on Iraqi nationalisms and seeking to marginalize Iran and America.
She sought her into Iran and called him the Iranian puppet while they worked on putting Dawah and Syrian power.
And, yeah, anyway, so, yeah, no, that's such an important point about how this is all America's fault.
It drives me crazy.
And, luckily, we have another segment so that you can talk, too.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Professor Stephen Zunis on the other side of this break about Iraq War III now.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm online with Stephen Zunis.
And so we're talking a little bit of Iraq history here and how they turned a faction fight into now it's gone so far it really has become about religion, where these...
It's, you know, ISIS is basically Zarqawi's group, Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And I don't know if you saw this thing, Stephen, by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker about a month ago or so, called the Islamic State's Strategy of Savagery and how, you know, war is the health of a militia.
That's basically what these guys are.
Very much.
There's no question that these horrific videos of people being beheaded and that kind of thing was to provoke a reaction to get the West to intervene so then they could portray themselves as defenders of the faith against the infidel imperialists.
We're falling right into their trap here.
I mean, this is like 9-11, you know.
Even to the degree of allying with Iran again against them.
Yeah, yeah, and in effect with Assad and with, you know, and then, you know, with Saudi Arabia, which has beheaded a lot more people than ISIS ever has and these other autocratic regimes.
I mean, yeah, this is pretty crazy.
I mean, they want this.
Just as bin Laden hoped that 9-11 would get the United States to do something stupid like invade Iraq, which we obliged.
You know, they're hoping that this will get people to rally around and support them.
Because here's the key thing.
The only real hope of defeating ISIS is the same way that Zarqawi's group was defeated in Iraq six years ago.
And that was when the Sunnis in the areas they controlled said, you guys are so crazy.
They're even worse than the Iraqi regime and the Americans.
We will organize and we will fight them.
And that's how they got defeated.
But the problem is that if the U.S. is bombing the cities, as they're doing, they're already killing civilians.
You know, people, instead of rebelling against ISIS, as they already have begun to do in a few areas, they're going to rally around to fight the foreign invaders.
I mean, even putting aside the important moral and legal arguments, strategically, in terms of defeating these guys, we're going about it all wrong.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I talked with Michael Shoyer about this on the show last week, I guess it was.
And that's what he was saying.
You know, these beheadings are just bait on the hook.
They're trying to get us to intervene here.
And then, like you're saying, it can't be more perfect for the Islamic State to, in effect, ally with Assad, which, of course, I think you've agreed with me about this.
I've certainly been against supporting the rebels against them this entire time, too, in any way.
But now, supporting him against them, supporting the Iranian-backed militias and Iranian-backed Iraqi government against them, and even bringing in all the corrupt kingdoms and the emirs and sheiks and self-appointed dictators of Arabia is just too perfect.
It just makes the whole thing seem like a pro-Shiite thing.
It also puts all the GCC countries in the very worst light as being the sock puppets of the Americans when their populations are sure to much more lean toward ISIS's goals than their kings when they come to America's beck and call on this.
And so, it's not just that it's what they want.
It's exactly what they want to the nth degree, better than they could have hoped for.
Exactly.
It's so bizarre when you think about it.
This time last year, the start of the semester, I was having to explain to my students why the United States might be on the verge of going to war against the Syrian regime.
Now I'm having to explain why we're going to war against Syrian rebels.
We've been bombing this part of the world on and off for nearly a quarter century now, and things have just gotten worse.
There really should be a lesson in that.
This is not working.
We're playing right into their trap.
If they can grasp onto the nationalist card, it's just going to make them stronger.
Let me ask you this.
I was laid off two years ago, but basically I'm still the editor, now I'm the editor of AntiWar.com.
I got a policy that says that if your article says their plan is still regime change against Assad, or if your article says now they're aligning with Assad against these guys, that either one of those positions is fine with me.
Neither of those is a deal breaker because I don't know what the hell they're doing.
I don't know.
It seems like the debate, maybe they haven't even decided yet, Steven.
On one hand, not that I support this, but again, I think it will horribly backfire and blow up in our face.
It's the wrong thing to do, but at least on the face of it, it makes sense to back Assad against his enemies and our enemies in the Islamic State, this new country run by sworn bin Ladenite types.
But then, on the other hand, Israel and Saudi and Qatar, they really hate Assad, and they want to see him go.
If you look at Israel's representatives in the U.S. Senate, they're not over it at all.
They are really serious about seeing the FSA defeat Assad.
It seems like it's still a higher priority even than fighting ISIS.
I wonder what you think they're going to do there.
Or what they're doing already.
I think they're pretty confused right now.
The problem is that it's not simply a three-sided civil war because the FSA itself consists of hundreds of separate militia that are not under any kind of central command that range the gamut politically.
Some are people who really do want a more democratic, inclusive Syria.
I think some people that a lot of us could actually identify with.
You also have groups that are almost hardcore Islamists as well.
You have people who have very parochial views about one thing or another.
The thing is, it's a mess.
Giving arms to a disorganized cluster of independent operating militias does not mean they're going to be able to defeat ISIS or the regime.
It just means more people are going to get killed.
Especially when you think about the fact that ISIS has gotten a lot of its arms from overrunning these FSA positions and from FSA factions that ended up getting radicalized in the course of the struggle and ended up joining ISIS.
Guess what?
They've taken their guns and military equipment, including US-manufactured equipment, with them.
In fact, most of ISIS's weapons are US-made from positions they've captured in Syria, but even more so from Iraq.
The idea that sending more arms is going to help the situation is ridiculous.
It's just going to strengthen the bad guys.
This is the thing about it.
Like I was saying, at least the Assad thing makes sense on the face of it.
The official policy, as Obama put it, is supporting this third force of rebels as a counterweight to both Assad and ISIS.
He left out Nusra and the Islamic Front Their plan is to take these guys to Saudi Arabia for a year and train them, when, as everybody knows, there's really no distinction between who's fighting with the Al-Nusra Front and who's fighting with the FSA.
How long?
You can count probably on one hand the number of minutes between the first time they give these guys live ammo to train with and the first green-on-blue attack there at the training camp in Saudi Arabia.
Continuing with the policy of backing the FSA that was defeated eight months ago.
It doesn't make much sense at all.
I think people are really scrambling.
I think it's...
It's...
These guys who are in charge, frankly, I mean, they feel, okay, there's a potential threat here and we've got to respond militarily without thinking about the implications of what they're doing and how it's going to actually be the very instability that came here in the first place.
I mean, there's this meme going around that just talked about how the United States, that we want our enemies to lose, but we're supporting other enemies to defeat them.
It was this nice little...
It was quite humorous about their circuitous logic that got us into this mess.
It's just going to get worse if we try to keep pushing for a military solution.
It's really frightening, actually, how many...
If, and this is a hypothetical, if there are ISIS-armored columns out in the desert heading towards a village of some minorities as anti-interventionist as I am, I wouldn't object if we sent in a few cruise missiles and took out those columns.
But this idea that we're actually bombing these cities now and that we are escalating this into a full-scale war of indeterminate length, that's really beyond the pale.
Yeah, but I mean, come on, man.
Saddam Hussein killed 100,000 Kurds.
You give these guys one inch, you give them 1,000 miles.
I know, but still, that was part of the whole shtick in 2003.
You could hardly argue that al-Baghdadi is more violent than Saddam Hussein was.
The truth of the matter is...
This is the thing.
The president is getting us into a war without going to Congress.
The point is, we shouldn't have any cruise missiles enforced by America.
You could argue that the bombing in Iraq is legal because the Iraqi government asked us to, but in Syria, clearly without that government permission...
Yeah, but the Islamic State declared independence from Iraq.
Abadi doesn't have jurisdiction to give permission to bomb Mosul.
But yeah, it raises questions of international law as well.
I mean, all around...
The more I look at...
I didn't like the idea of this from the beginning, but I left a little wiggle room saying, well, maybe in certain circumstances this or that or the other, but it's clear, as you say, given that Israel will take a yard, it's really already going way beyond what could possibly be possible.
And even the Yazedi thing was fake, right?
The special forces told Barbara Starr at CNN, yeah, we got there, and there were about 10,000 Yazidis there.
The rest who wanted to flee had already fled with the PKK commie Kurds, which was never 400,000, and they wanted to stay, and they weren't under threat.
Here's the crazy thing.
The PKK, United States, provided the Turks with arms, advisors, and more, that was responsible for the deaths of 30,000 Kurds and the destruction of hundreds of villages in the 1990s.
With the exception of Israel, more civilians died from the...using U.S. ordnance than any other country that the U.S. supplied.
A really terrible, horrific campaign, which in many ways was as bad or worse than what the Serbs are doing to the Kosovar Albanians, which we then use as an excuse because this can't take place on NATO's doorstep in the words of Clinton, when in fact worse things were happening within NATO that we were facilitating.
But anyway, what I'm saying is that despite all the effort and all the suffering we inflicted to fight the evil PKK, ISIS as well.
Yeah, and when the Yazidis, the ones who were under threat and wanted to get the hell out of there, the PKK provided them refuge, but that served as the Gulf of Tonkin excuse for this one.
That was the babies in the incubators for this one, Stephen, was, oh no, the Yazidis on the mountain.
The few of us who had ever even heard of them before thought, oh no, I hope ISIS doesn't kill them all, but boy, as an excuse to, as you said, look at where we are now, we already got 2,000 troops, and without the special forces that are there, they don't tell us the number of JSOC and SOCOM and CIA running around, flying drones and whatever else, lazing targets, and it's already on in the name of the Yazidis.
And everybody already forgot about the Yazidis by now, but good enough.
Right, right.
And I think we're going to see a pattern we've seen before that we're going to have, initially has a majority support because the scare tactics have worked, but gradually, as it seems to not be working, as it seems to be longer and more expensive and more involved than people intended, there's going to be more and more skepticism, and I'm sure that's not a, it probably doesn't feel that good, but still, once again, you can remind your listeners that you saw this coming, and you warned people.
I know, yeah.
Well, that's not much of a silver lining.
I could do a whole show of nothing, but I told you so.
It's for what good?
Anyway, we're way over time.
I better let you go, but thanks very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Steven.
Sure thing.
Alright, y'all, that's Steven Zunis.
He is a professor of politics and program director for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
His latest is called The U.S. Should Use Caution in the Fight Against ISIL.
We'll be right back.
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