10/15/14 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
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Oh, and only now do I realize that Eric Gares tried to tell me over the IM that Jason would be happy to do the show right now.
So I'm going to call him right now.
And we'll talk about this piece right now.
So, yes, Jason C. Ditz.
He is the news editor of Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And he keeps track of everything, man.
You've got to read all Jason Ditz writes every day.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, man?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
So, yeah, at news.antiwar.com, Jason covers all the wars.
And so that includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, of course, and then all of what's going on in Eastern Europe, NATO expansion.
And you know what's funny, too, is aside from all of his Antiwar.com work, which is everything, he also is a financial writer.
And are you back at the mic here, Jason?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And who are you financial writing for nowadays?
Seeking Alpha lately.
Seeking Alpha.
That's cool.
I don't have any money to invest, so I'm not that interested in that kind of thing.
But congratulations.
I think that's really great that you're doing that, and a whole other avenue to write about and everything there.
So good for you.
All right.
So, hey, let's talk about what's going on.
I was just reading to the people here your article.
ISIS surrounds key Iraqi air base in Anbar.
And now I got to admit to you, I just can't keep track of them all.
This is not the one, right?
This is, what, one or two later than the one that Patrick Coburn wrote about last week, where the guys finally fled at the end and were ambushed and killed.
And the Iraqi army, such as it is, just sat there in Baghdad and didn't dare move one foot west.
Right.
This is a couple later than that, because there was another one that got taken over over the weekend, or maybe Monday morning, on top of that.
And then now this is the latest one that's the target.
All right.
And so now I'm trying to remember.
I think it was Dar Jamal yesterday was saying that, just like you here with this 80% number.
Oh, it was the day before yesterday.
This 80% number, that's how much territory in the Anbar province is held by ISIS.
And I believe it was Dar that was saying, yeah, but that other 80% is in dispute.
Virtually none of it, you could say, is actually held by the Iraqi army, other than, I guess, these bases out there where they're holed up with nobody coming to the rescue.
Right.
That's exactly it.
And a lot of the Anbar province is no man's land.
There's a lot of empty desert there.
So it's not like ISIS has troops everywhere in this huge province.
A lot of it's just empty.
But they do control all the major highways, including the one leading to Baghdad and the one leading to Mosul.
And they've held a good chunk of this province since January.
All right.
So what about the airport then?
The Baghdad airport?
Yeah.
I mean, how much of a threat is there that it's going to fall to ISIS in the near term here?
Well, I'm not sure it has to fall to ISIS so much as ISIS has to just get close enough that they can shoot down planes that are trying to fly out of there.
Right.
I mean, that's the real threat here.
That last 10 kilometers from Abu Ghraib to the Baghdad International Airport would probably be enormously difficult for them to take over because they'd probably start running into direct resistance from U.S. forces that have been sent to the airport to keep it open.
But if they can keep their artillery close enough that they can hit the landing strips, if they've got all these shoulder-fired manpads that they got from Saudi Arabia when Saudi Arabia was arming the Free Syrian Army with them, there's really no real need to take the airport itself so long as they can stop the flights coming out of it.
Right.
And now, so that was what Prother and Landay were saying, what, two weeks ago now or a week and a half ago now or so that, yeah, the helicopters are in the air and they're there for one reason.
And they represent a major escalation, too.
If you're flying Apaches, that means you're taking, you know, X percentage more risk going out there, flying low, risking getting shot down and then risking rescue missions and all these things.
They called it boots in the air because, yeah, no, this is a real escalation.
This is not JSOC maybe sneaking around with a laser pointer or mostly hiding at their base or flying a drone or something.
This is a major step.
And the only reason, as Prother explained on the show, the only reason they do that is because, yeah, they had to.
They've got to keep these guys back.
And so I don't know how many Apaches they got and what other – do you know what other, you know, roundabout, ballpark estimate of what other equipment and manpower they have at the airport to keep ISIS away?
We really don't.
I mean, a lot of times they'll say that when they're deploying troops to Baghdad, some are going to the airport, some are going to the embassy.
We don't really have good estimates on what the split is.
There are a few thousand U.S. troops in Iraq entirely.
Some of them are in Arbil.
Most are in Baghdad.
So certainly some of them are at the airport, but we really don't know how many.
Yeah, it seems to me from what I can tell, no, that they really helped the – they put up a pretty good fight for the Kurds and turned ISIS right around from Arbil back in, what, late June or mid-June.
But they haven't really devoted – doesn't seem like that much resources to trying to keep ISIS away from Baghdad.
Not that I'm saying they should or whatever, but just – am I right that it seems like there's much less effort even after Abadi replaced Maliki and everything, as per American and Iranian wishes?
But they're still not – they don't seem to be doing much to prevent this from getting worse and worse right there at the western border of Baghdad.
Right.
I mean, there are some airstrikes in the Anbar province, but the installation of the Abadi government more or less coincided with the U.S. launching its airstrikes in Syria, and that seems to be the real focus right now.
Kobani and the area around Kobani, even though Secretary Kerry insists that that's not a priority for the U.S., that seems to be where all the airstrikes are targeted.
All right.
Well, that's – we're going to pick up this conversation on the other side of this break.
It's Jason Ditz, news editor at Antiwar.com.
News.
Antiwar.com.
ISIS surrounds key Iraqi airbase in Anbar and a lot more there.
News.
Antiwar.com.
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Hey, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and it's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with my friend Jason Ditz from News.
Antiwar.com.
ISIS surrounds key Iraqi airbase in Anbar and then – oh, I should have pulled up the front page here.
I guess, anyway, we're getting to the subject of the fight for Kobani.
Now, this is a town in northern Syria, in Syrian Kurdistan on the Turkish border there, and there's been a fight going on for, what, a week and a half or two there?
And I think – is it fair to say, Jason, that people expected the Kurds to have been defeated by now, but now, with the help of American airstrikes, they're holding their own and maybe turning the tide?
Well, I think that might be overstating it.
There certainly was an expectation that they would have fallen by now, but I'm not sure that they've really turned the tide so much as just delayed the inevitable.
I guess I saw they took a flag down somewhere and I'm very easily impressed, apparently.
Right.
They did take that flag down on the hill near Kobani, but whether they actually control that hill and how much of the town they actually control, we don't really know.
Yeah.
And now, so as far as the Air Force, people were wondering what the hell was taking them so long, and apparently what was taking them so long was they needed people on the ground to direct the airstrikes.
Do you have any indication as to whether that's really what's happened, is now they do have people on the ground to direct them, and or do you know who that might be?
Is it American Special Forces, other Europeans, is it the Kurdish YPG or whichever they call it?
Well, I suspect it would be the Kurdish YPG to the extent that there's anybody, but we really don't know because the U.S. really hasn't talked about it other than in the broad terms of needing targeters on the ground.
And they've been launching airstrikes right along with or without those targeters, so whether this escalation means that they've got a better idea who's where or whether it just means they're escalating for the sake of escalating, we don't really know.
Yeah.
Well, hey, let me ask you this.
You may know the answer to this.
I don't know.
Not that I ever read anything you wrote on this subject, so I don't mean to put you on the spot, but can a drone not laze a target for a fighter bomber just as easy as a man on the ground can?
There's a tank, point a laser at it.
And then for that matter, if a drone can point a laser at it, then a drone can just shoot a hellfire missile at it.
And for that matter, why can't an F-18 just laze and hit a target on its own anyway?
Why do they need a drone or a man on the ground to point a laser at it?
Why can't they point their own laser and then shoot their bomb to follow their own laser?
Well, they can, and that's what they were doing very early in the air war.
But what happened is when this air war started, ISIS stopped leaving tanks and artillery and these major conspicuous vehicles just out in the open where they could be easily spotted from the air.
So a lot of the targeting, especially in Syria, has been stationary things like those small oil refineries around ISIS-held Syria or grain silos, things that are just stationary because the tanks aren't out in the open where they can see them anymore, so they don't really know where they're at.
Right.
And so that's really why you need the guys on the ground is for the small and more mobile targets.
But now, so can you talk a little bit about Kurdish reaction in the region?
Because, of course, there is no state of Kurdistan, but it is an ethnic region of the Middle East there, bisected by four or five states.
And it seems like there are various degrees of cooperation and integration between the different Kurdish factions in the different countries.
But so I wonder if you know much about the Kurdish reaction to the war going on there in Syrian Kurdistan and especially what seems to be the political scandal of Erdogan refusing to lift a finger to help the Kurdish YPG, I guess, armed faction of the Kurdish Workers' Party, even in the face of an onslaught by ISIS.
Right.
And from the Turkish perspective, it makes total sense to be wary about helping them too much because they've been at war with the Kurdistan Workers' Party for 30 plus years now.
There's something of a peace process going on right now, but whether it's going to amount to anything, they don't know.
And setting up this precedent for Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkish Kurdistan and Syrian Kurdistan to all cooperate and send arms and fighters back and forth could potentially come back and bite them pretty badly.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like they've thwarted their own peace process here that was paying dividends.
It seems like a really dumb policy.
It's not like the YPG posed a threat to Erdogan and the PKK inside Turkey has not been blowing up stuff lately, correct?
That's that's true.
But I think from the from the long term perspective, there's still a lot of mistrust there, especially with Erdogan's government, because they've been pretty hawkish towards the Kurds in years past.
And I don't think they wanted to place their bets on the peace process holding either way.
And they're worried that if they create this much more powerful Kurdish faction to fight ISIS sooner or later, it's going to be fighting them, too.
Yeah, well, and I guess they're just not worried about ISIS controlling that town right on their border.
Well, ISIS certainly controls a lot of towns on the Turkish border right now.
So Turkey's still got this idea that NATO is going to create a buffer zone inside Syria that's going to solve everything from their perspective.
And I think it's just it's just a pipe dream, the idea that they're going to carve out this separate state that they can hurt all the refugees into to get them out of Turkey.
I just don't see it happening.
Yeah, that was what Giraldi was saying on the show.
You know, former CIA officers stationed in Turkey that geez, look at what Erdogan's doing.
He's allowing this situation really help and create this situation where all these Kurdish refugees are being driven into Turkey.
Well, how the hell does that benefit Turkey from his point of view?
It seems like completely not just shooting himself in the foot, but blowing his own damn leg off.
Right.
And that's really been what Turkey's policy towards Syria for the last several years has done.
The going from being a comparative ally to the Assad government to one of the first countries to back regime change, backing all these rebels and allowing them access to Syria through Turkish soil.
And it's it's created just this horrible mess along their southern border.
And one that has created this huge influx of refugees that's really straining Turkey's ability to cope with it.
Yeah.
And now, is there any indication that the Americans are actually pissed off at the role the Turks are playing in this all along, that they're saying anything or doing anything about it whatsoever?
Well, it's really bizarre because publicly the U.S. is insisting that Turkey's on board with everything the U.S. is doing.
They've they've claimed deals in place with the Turks to allow them access to Turkish air bases along the Syrian border.
Turkey denies that those deals are in place at all.
It says no deals ever been made.
So there's there's a lot of question as to where U.S. Turkish relations really are right now.
Yeah.
All right, y'all.
That's Jason Ditz, News.
Antiwar.com.
Thanks very much, Jason.
Appreciate it.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
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