10/21/16 – Daniel Davis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Daniel Davis, formerly Lieutenant Colonel.
Is it just Colonel or Lieutenant Colonel?
I forget.
Lieutenant Colonel.
Daniel L. Davis, U.S. Army and Afghan War, really a surge whistleblower there, now regular writer at The National Interest.
He's also got a new one at The American Conservative as well.
This one at The National Interest is called Why the Battle for Mosul Could Become a Total Disaster.
I guess that means for more than just the people of Mosul.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, well, those people are screwed either way.
But you're saying that this could be a total disaster for who?
Yeah, I mean really on every level, whether they certainly for the civilians that are living within Mosul, but also for the coalition and definitely for American interest in the region.
All right, so I guess is it the Battle of the Five Armies, Six?
What's the count now?
Yeah, I mean who knows what the total number is.
It seems to change by the day.
And that's really part of the core of the problem because even under the best of circumstances, a coalition fight, a tactical fight on the ground is really difficult to coordinate.
I even remember during Desert Storm how difficult we had to coordinate with different American units and then also some Egyptian troops that we had to work with together.
And we're all on the same side, definitely fighting together.
But these troops are actually antagonistic towards one another.
Some of the Shia units have actually said, some of their leaders have said, that they hate Americans as much as they hate ISIS.
And if they see us on the battlefield, they'll kill American troops.
That doesn't really augur well to start a battle.
Yeah, well, but these are our old friends from the bottom brigade, man.
The El Salvador option, old days.
High five, right?
What's the problem?
Exactly.
Well, I guess it's more Mactad all Sodders guys rather than the bottom brigade that really hate us, right?
Well, it's really hard to distinguish which ones because it's not merely the Sodder guys, but it's also some troops actually from Iran and definitely some of the leaders are from Iran.
So it's kind of a mix of lots of different Shia groups.
All right.
And then, so what's the role of the Turks so far?
I know they say they killed 200 and something Syrian Kurdish fighters in an attack yesterday.
But what are they, are they, I mean, I know they had invaded northern Iraq and were waiting kind of outside of Mosul.
Are they moving along with the Peshmerga?
So far they haven't been moving with the Peshmerga in Iraq, as you pointed out.
With Turkey's actions there, that's actually one of the compounding problems that we have because Turkey is kind of moving off as a wild card on their own.
Ever since the coup, Erdogan has kind of just turned into his own man and doesn't really seem to care how his actions impact American interests.
He's doing whatever he damn well pleases.
So even though we've asked him not to attack the YPG forces up in northern Syria, obviously he's completely ignored that and had a major massive strike against them up there.
In terms of Mosul, according to information I've found as of, I guess, yesterday afternoon is the most recent I can find, is that they're still pressing to physically take part in the assault and they're apparently still, I guess, marshalling up in an area that's just some number of kilometers outside of Mosul, but they haven't started moving yet.
That's a real key thing to watch what happens because if they move in there, again, kind of as a wild card on their own without specific and detailed coordination with other members of the coalition, that could turn into disaster.
Well, now the Turks get along with the Iraqi Kurdish leaders, right?
The Barzani and Talabani factions and the Kurdish Peshmerga.
They're not really going to pick a fight with them, probably, right?
No, they wouldn't pick a fight with them because they're kind of separate and the Barzani crew is on record as saying they want local independence but have no interest at all in joining with the larger Kurdistan.
So they seem to be against pulling all the Kurds together.
So in that regard, Turkey's like, all right, well, let's support that so we don't have our Kurds try to join with you.
Right.
Well, now, I guess, Patrick Coburn, I forget if we had talked about this before, but Patrick Coburn reported about how at the start of Iraq War II, the Peshmerga rolled into Mosul and drove the Iraqi army out.
That's a proxy force there.
But then they learned within a day or two that you guys better get the hell out of here.
You're not welcome at all.
And they turned around and left and went back to the mountains.
And I know that there at least was at that time a substantial Kurdish minority in Mosul, but it was still a minority and the Peshmerga were warned that they better get back on the other side of the line, and they did.
So that suggests to me that they probably won't try to go ahead and own Mosul now.
I think, wasn't it you that told me that they were telling you that they were worried that maybe the Shiites are going to try to stay and cleanse the city, but it didn't seem like they had designs on trying to do that.
That's exactly right.
The foreign minister from the Kurdistan Regional Government that I spoke with in August was emphatic on saying that they had no desire even to, quote, take over Mosul or go into any areas other than where there were already Kurds living or in some cases Christians because they seemed to get along well.
And I think that that's probably right because I don't think they even want to try to take over an area that would almost certainly be up against them, so they would have to constantly be doing basically counterinsurgency stuff.
So I think they want areas.
They do, though, want control of areas where their people live, and I think that that's about all that they're willing to do.
So once they get those areas, I don't think that they'll do anything further, even if we want them to.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Now I guess there's a question, too, of whether the Islamic State is even really fighting for Mosul or to what degree they are.
I saw a headline today that said, well, they're counterattacking in Kirkuk, but that's still, I think, just a handful of fighters.
The Peshmerga control Kirkuk, right?
Yeah.
Or the Iraqi army does.
The Iraqi army.
No, the Iraqi army took Kirkuk.
Right.
Okay, but so now, but the Islamic State, I mean, we read, I mean, the Russians said that they all had fled to Raqqa and that the Americans and the Saudis had made a deal.
Russian media said that, state media.
I saw somewhat cooperative reports, one in Rudow that said, well, here's 3,500 Islamic State guys arriving in Raqqa.
But I wonder what you know about that or what you think you know about whether they're even really standing and fighting or whether they're fleeing.
And then that, well, depending on your answer, I'm going to ask you about what's the American policy in terms of which direction jihadis flee.
There's so many competing reports right now.
It's really hard to know what's going on because in some other Middle East media this morning, I saw there were reports that actually the number of foreign fighters is increasing in Mosul and their defenses are shoring up.
There's one organization called Mosul Eye, which claims to be reporting from within the city.
And they say, you know, they're setting all their defenses up and they're preparing and they're going to fight to the death it appears.
And I would tend to believe it's going to be closer to that because if they just like abandoned Mosul and left, that would hand a massive, huge victory to the ISF in Baghdad and make them feel so much more confident and strong and make ISIS look all the weak if they can't even hold on to or fight, they can't even fight for their main capital there.
And I think that would cause them significant strategic damage.
So I actually think that the more likely scenario is that whatever number of fighters they have, they've been preparing defenses for months now.
I think that they want to fight to the death and make the ISF, you know, pull every one of them out individually if necessary in order to extract the most damage they can on the ISF.
And then they'll continue to fight elsewhere.
But if they put up a good fight and make it take a long time, there's, you know, they have a chance, number one, of, you know, looking good, kind of like a fight in the Alamo kind of thing.
We're going to die in place.
And even if we all die, we still have, you know, victory in some sense and can rally other people to our cause elsewhere.
And then the other thing is that if they can extend the fight and make it last, you know, many months, they also have the chance to see this coalition split and to fight it, you know, turn on itself and whatever.
And I'm sure that they would do everything in their power to exploit the differences between the Shia, the Kurds, the Sunni, the Christian fighters, and certainly to even try to stir up things with Turkey, et cetera, because if they can get the coalition to be fighting itself and to not be cooperating, then, you know, they've got a chance to even hang on a lot longer and help their own cause.
Well, and there's so many divisions, it shouldn't be too difficult for them to exploit them, that's for sure.
Right.
Okay, so now I'm going to pretend to be Emperor Obama here for a minute.
If I have a plan that, according to all their public statements, they mean to recreate the state of Iraq and hold it together with the Sunnis in cooperation with the Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad, like, you know, achieve all those benchmarks that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker completely and totally failed to achieve back in 2007 when they claimed that they had achieved them.
But, yeah, so it seems like if they're going to do that at all, then the plan now must be that when they do finally kick the last of the IS guys out of Mosul, that then they have these, I don't know how many thousand, Sunni tribal fighters and that, I don't know if they're even from Mosul or whether they're from Fallujah or what, but it seems like those are going to have to be the guys or they're going to have to try to create, kick out the Baathists, kick out the Jihadists, and have the old tribal leadership take over and hold a monopoly on power there and in alliance with Baghdad.
But is that even plausible at all at this point?
Part of that would be almost the only thing you should even shoot for because the residents by a vast majority are Sunni.
They're going to need and probably even demand to be governed and policed by their own kind, et cetera.
But at the same time, the Kurdish section and the Christian section, they want their people, so they wouldn't want the Sunnis.
So it's going to be really, really hard under the absolute best of circumstances to bring any peace to the city afterwards.
Really, that's kind of been one of my overall themes is that it almost doesn't even matter if the coalition wins in Mosul because the divisions are already there and Kurdish leaders that I talked to said that even before the battle started that they're already looking to fight Shia because they expect that they're going to have to compete for that because they don't imagine that Shia is going to go in there and take any territory and then just give it up.
And certainly the Sunnis remain very divided and antagonistic toward the Shia because prior to ISIS sweeping in there, there was massive protest against the government because they were being mistreated or whatever, and I see no evidence that that's changed or will change later on.
So those antagonisms are still going to be there.
All the pieces are in place right now, in my view, for a significant sectarian slash religious civil war to break out afterwards as everybody tries to hold on to what they have.
So for example, right now you have Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Samar.
I forget now if Samar had ever fallen to the Islamic State or not.
Anyway, you got Tikrit, Fallujah, Ramadi.
These are all super majority Sunni cities that have been, quote, liberated from the Islamic State by the Shiite Iraqi army.
So in those cities, what's the state of sectarian cleansing and all that as of right now?
Are they letting the Sunni population come home or are they going to go ahead and keep it and expand the borders of Shiastan?
As I've read in just recent days, there has been limited Sunnis going back there primarily because the infrastructure was just wiped out.
I mean, just utterly destroyed in many cases.
There's nothing to go back to.
There's still a significant number of IEDs and booby traps that have been sown and so the people can't return.
And then I believe it was either, I think it was Fallujah, although there's been several, a number of reports that the Shia militia who took part in that battle killed up to 600 Sunni men in the aftermath of that.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but it's certainly running around and the Sunnis believe that it's so.
And so that's yet more fodder to why they would not allow any Shia militia troops particularly to come in there and they would most likely fight them just as much as they would fight against ISIS if they had the chance.
I just can't see that working out good.
Yeah, I mean, all you've got to do is just go back nine years to the surge and the so-called awakening movement, the Sons of Iraq and the concerned local citizens, which were basically just al-Qaeda in Iraq only now paid and armed by Petraeus and bribed to not fight the Americans for a while.
And not just al-Qaeda in Iraq, but the rest of the broader Sunni based insurgency.
But that was all based on the promise that you're going to get jobs in the police and jobs in the army and jobs in the government.
And you're going to be reintegrated into Iraqi society under the Baathist government.
And yet that never took.
None of his promises ever came true.
And now here we are almost a decade later, and now we've had an entire Islamo-fascist caliphate, like in George Bush's old ridiculous propaganda that actually came true for at least a couple of years here.
And hard feelings are now that much harder.
And so we're pursuing a policy that we're already up against solid granite here, it looks like.
And it might get even more solid because this hasn't made much of the Western media just because they've been so focused on the combat scenes going on.
But politically, in Baghdad, there are some developments going on that do not augur well for us.
Now, many of the people I talked to on the last couple of trips that I went to Iraq, they said that, you know, I asked them, OK, well, Maliki was routinely condemned and said he did all these horrible things and caused a lot of the things you just described or led them, directed them.
I said, what about Abadi, though?
How has he been?
They said, well, it's like he's degrees not as bad, but it's not enough to change the dynamics.
And in many ways, the same thing still exists.
OK, by itself, that's still – meaning that hasn't improved much from that.
But politically within Baghdad, Maliki is still very active.
He's the head of one of the big political parties, and he succeeded a couple of months ago, I think, maybe even less than that, to get a couple of ministers of Abadi voted out of no confidence.
And he's putting pressure behind the scenes to expand his power.
And at the next elections, if his group is able to get enough votes, he could actually – this is hard to believe – he could actually once again be the prime minister of Iraq.
Now, you tell me, what do you think that's going to do for unity within Iraq, especially among the Sunni population, if he comes back to power?
Right.
And, yeah, I mean, like you say, Abadi really isn't any different in kind.
I mean, just like Jafari and Maliki before him, he's from the Dawa party, which means he's basically the sock puppet of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
That's who we've been fighting for this whole time over there.
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Yeah, and we've been strengthened in their position by just poor decisions.
I should mention this more often, I guess.
I used to say it so much that it started going without saying or whatever, but I should remind the audience in case they don't know that.
Back when Jimmy Carter told Saddam Hussein, yeah, green light, go ahead and invade Iran for us, because we hate him so much, a big part of the leadership of the Iraqi Shia religious community and the Dawah party fled to Iran.
And they were the Iraqi quote-unquote, at least, traitors, not that they really owed allegiance to Saddam, right?
But anyway, they had fled to Iran and fought on Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq war.
And so from 1980 through 2003, they lived in Iran, them and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and their Bata Brigade too.
And then Landay has told the story, Jonathan Landay from now Reuters, has told the story on the show.
He was there in Kurdistan when the Supreme Islamic Council came across the border in 2003 at the dawn of the war.
And George W. Bush handed the two-thirds of the country over to them.
And not only that, he fought then an eight-year civil war on their behalf.
That's what that El Salvador option was, helping the Shiites kick all the Sunnis out of the capital city.
Of course, depriving them of their last incentive to want to deal with the Sunnis at all, compromise with them at all, right?
We got Shiites, Dan, you guys can go burn in the sun.
And now, because of the Islamic State, which Obama even told Jeffrey Goldberg that basically all this is about checking Iran, well, what's it done?
Really, just like Donald Trump complained in the debate, just like the war in Syria has given Russia and Iran and Hezbollah a reason to expand their intervention in Syria to counterpose us, same thing in Iraq.
We just helped the Ayatollahs, Sistani, and Khamenei expand the borders, or quite possibly expand the borders of Iraqi Arab Shiistan another few hundred miles to the west, maybe even encompassing all of Fallujah, Ramadi, and depending on who wins the war with Turkey and the Kurds, maybe even Mosul.
I mean, man, it's really incredible, ain't it?
Yeah, it's just mind-boggling how much we work against our own self-interest.
Yeah, and all the people in our country who hate Iran the most are the ones who are responsible for all of this, by the way.
That's really bad.
That's disturbing on many levels.
Right.
Well, and this goes back to my question about, hey, do you think maybe that's right?
I think maybe that's right, the story that the Russian papers had, that the U.S. and the Saudis made a deal with the Islamic State guys, that you go ahead and flee to Raqqa, we'll let you run, just the same as they did when they held back and didn't bomb the Islamic State when they took Palmyra from Assad's forces back a couple of years ago, that as long as you're fighting against Assad, as long as you're effective against Iran's allies in Syria, we like you.
If you're effective against Iran's allies in Iraq, then we're your enemy.
But as long as we can chase you back into Syria, then keep up the good work there.
Suicide bombers, right?
Same policy since 2011.
Whether it's for sure true or not, who knows?
But I mean, there's certainly some logic to that.
I guess we're going to see, right, just how well Islamic State forces in the Raqqa area are now reinforced after Mosul, whether they, you know, how many of them stay and fight versus how many flee to pick up in this battle.
But on the Syrian end of this, it really doesn't look like Obama and the CIA are backing off their support for the, I mean, what can I say, Danny?
You can clarify if you want, but I'm going to go ahead and say al-Nusra forces, and they keep saying all their allies, in order to have a ceasefire, all their allies got to do is disassociate themselves from al-Qaeda, but they never do because they are al-Qaeda, and that's still who we continue to arm and finance anyway to this day, right?
I'm not certain that it's a black or a dark conscious thought to do that.
I think actually the greater thing that would concern me is the fact that we just may be just foolishly doing this stuff without even realizing how stupid and contradictory we're being out there.
But whatever the case, I mean, that is the end result, and it's just, it has no chance to achieve any kind of American objectives.
All it can do, as it has, is help, you know, make sure Russia stays involved, make sure Iran stays involved.
Everybody wins except us.
I don't get that.
Right.
Well, you know, something that I've thought a lot about, you know, I'm writing this chapter about Afghanistan.
I'm still writing it.
It's 100 pages long now, my Afghan chapter.
And part of it is about, you know, your whistleblowing about that war and all that.
But one thing that I keep thinking of in context of Syria is an answer that you gave me on the show when I asked you about the grand strategy of occupying Afghanistan and Central Asia and trying to keep those resources out of the hands of the Chinese or the Russians.
Zbigniew Brzezinski's grand chessboard designs of dominating the world island and all these things.
And you ever heard of that?
You ever heard any generals in Afghanistan talk about any of that?
And your answer was no.
As far as the people implementing the war are concerned, they never heard of any of this highfalutin think tank stuff about what we're doing there.
It's not about, you know, Pashtun tribal fighters or whatever.
It's about keeping the Russians from being dominant there instead, these kinds of ideas.
And that's the sort of thing where it seems like in Syria, too, where you have these very real situations that we're in.
But then you have the think tank paper that got written and the consensus around it that won't budge and that won't take into account the things like what we're talking about, that these guys really are al-Qaeda guys.
And, you know, Rand Paul is finally getting good on some things.
And he said this about Yemen.
He could have been talking about Syria.
I think he's said this about Syria in the past as well.
If we really do get rid of Assad, we could have al-Qaeda rule in Damascus.
We could have al-Qaeda.
If they win in Yemen, if the Saudis win in Yemen, we could have al-Qaeda rule Sana'a instead of the Houthis at this point.
But the rest of D.C., it seems like they just refuse to, you know, like they have the cognitive dissonance, but they just keep one thought on the right side of their brain and the other thought on the left.
And they just keep going on without acknowledging the crisis that they're driving us into here.
Well, you know, I could not agree with you more on that and maybe even a little bit more so.
I mean, I've been arguing this for quite a while and having a few pieces I've written over the years.
But it was kind of highlighted again during the last presidential debate on Wednesday when Secretary Clinton again voiced her support for no-fly zones and all this kind of stuff, no-go zones, whatever, even risking potential war with Russia because if we shoot down some of their jets.
And if you go back to looking at what she advocated early, like I think it was 2011, she was advocating, let's arm, let's train all these rebels and whatever.
And that was before ISIS had split off from al-Nusra and it was before they had even come into Iraq.
So imagine if she had gotten her way at that point and we did arm those people and Assad did fall.
Then exactly what you just said, I mean, you'd have an al-Nusra slash al-Qaeda slash ISIS, whatever, actually running the state, not a pseudo-state like they have right now, but an actual state.
And we would have used our military force to make it happen.
That is just mind-boggling.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to blow your mind.
I've played this for everybody a million times, but I don't know if you've ever heard it.
But now you'll know about it.
Maybe you'll even want to include it in some of your writings later.
But this is easy for anyone to find.
You just type in Hillary CBS Syria 2012 and this will come right up.
And it's February of 2012, very beginning of 2012.
And she's being interviewed on CBS.
And the premise of the question is, of course, why aren't we doing more to overthrow Assad?
So here she is basically defending the president's position against her position, which she agrees with the CBS guy, right?
But her job is to defend Obama on this.
And so and we know from her emails now what she's referring to when she says what she says here.
I'll talk about that in just a second.
But here's Hillary explaining in February of 2012 about the problem of overthrowing Assad, Danny.
We know Al-Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
So I think, Wyatt, you know, despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad, if you're a military planner or if you're a secretary of state and you're trying to figure out, do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable?
We don't see that.
Right.
And then as you're just saying, she spent the rest of time trying to put that together anyway.
All those different friends of Syria, governments in exile in Qatar and all of this stuff.
And yet, as you're saying, and so like I don't want anyone.
There's no point in in overdoing it or anything that exactly what she meant is bad enough.
So she's not talking about directly putting tow missiles in the arms of those sworn to Ayman al-Zawahiri personally.
That's not what she meant.
She's just saying if there is a broader revolution, whatever you call it, rebellion against Assad and Al-Qaeda is in on it and we help it.
Do are we not then also helping them?
Right.
That's what she's saying.
There's no there's no point in like, you know, I don't I don't want anyone to think I'm trying to spin it too far.
It was a rhetorical thing, as she put it.
But she was, of course, exactly right.
And then that's the policy that she pursued anyway.
And it was about one year after that, that the New York Times came out with the story that she put in it that said, well, me and Petraeus and Panetta, we wanted to do this and Obama wouldn't let us.
Right.
And yet it's her words as good as anyone else's about exactly why not to.
Wow.
You're right.
That blows my mind.
And I was not aware of that.
Isn't that something?
And the only other place you can find online, that was the Daily Caller and they were trying to spin it like, oh, look at how horrible and wimpy she is using this as an excuse to not get rid of Assad.
Oh, dang.
I'm telling you, man.
So what happened, man?
I mean, what what caused this?
Why would she pursue something that she herself said was foolish?
What changed?
Because that's what Israel wants.
I mean, gosh, that's what the guys want.
I want to say, too, I sort of alluded to it, but it's in the emails that I believe is Jamie Rubin sent her an email and said, hey, boss, look, AQ is on our side in this one.
And it was a link to a news story about Zawahiri endorsing the revolution.
And the date was two days or three days before this CBS interview.
So that was what she was referring to was that news story from just a couple of days before.
And, you know, the language Al-Qaeda on our side side.
Yeah.
Us on theirs.
That's what he meant.
America backing Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria.
And, you know, we've been joking about this on the show all through 2011 and 2012.
We were joking about Al-Qaeda in Iraq, bad Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria.
Good.
As long as they're, you know, helping fight.
And I don't know why, actually, that other than just the embarrassment of having an Islamic state there in in Iraqi Sunni stand.
I don't know why they don't just outright support IS, you know, or at least ignore them and let them continue to check Shiite power there.
Why do they want it?
They'll use the Bin Laden nights against Iranian interests in Syria, but they continue to back Iranian interests against them in Iraq.
I don't really know why, you know, I can't understand.
I don't know.
I mean, I'd rather not support any of them and just get out of a mess altogether and let them sort it out however they want to.
We've even seen stories with the Bata Brigade.
Our allies from Iraq are in Syria helping Hezbollah and Assad fight against our CIA-backed terrorists there.
Yeah, that's – see, and that kind of gets back to what I – my greater concern is that we're just clueless and we have no idea what we're doing.
And left hand's not talking to the right, et cetera.
We're just taking tactical actions everywhere, which are scattered throughout the strategic map, and they don't work towards anything.
And yet we do these things to our own harm.
That's my biggest concern.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Daniel Davis for secretary of defense, except I'm afraid that I don't think you're in the running, dude.
And in fact, I mean, you look at the people who are pushing for these jobs.
Michael Morell wants to be the new director of central intelligence or the national intelligence director, something like that.
And he's the guy who outright told – oh, what's his name?
Charlie Rose twice that, yeah, absolutely, we ought to be killing Russians in Syria.
Charlie Rose even had him back to say – Really?
Yeah, Charlie – oh, I'll send you these links.
Please.
Charlie Rose even had him back to say, now, people must have misunderstood you because you weren't really – didn't mean to say that, right?
And he's like, yeah, I did.
Yeah, please do send me those links.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, I'm telling you, anybody just Google Mike Morell, Charlie Rose, and you'll be picking your jaw up off the floor.
It's unbelievable.
And this is – and this guy has endorsed Hillary.
I mean he's pushing for a job in her administration.
Well, I don't know if you saw it, but there was a big report in The Washington Post, I believe it was yesterday, about how even The Washington Post – this was amazing to me – was bemoaning the fact that what they refer to typically as the foreign policy elite in this town seem to not have learned any of the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria at all over the last 15 years… … and are still arguing – this group of them are arguing that we just need to do more of it and harder or whatever.
And then they pointed out that almost all of these people are likely in a Clinton administration, whatever.
And that really blows my mind that we're doing – we're advocating things that are profoundly proven to be disastrous for our interests.
And yet we just can't learn that.
We just want to do more of it, and that's frightening.
Well, especially now that the Russians are involved in the Middle East where, as Trump again rightly put it, Obama's created the space basically with his half-regime change policy.
A full one would have been worse again, but with his policy in Syria he's created the space for Russia to now intervene there.
And as you're saying, all this talk of a no-fly zone is all real loose talk for getting American planes shot down by Russian anti-aircraft missiles, or getting Russian planes shot down by American planes.
And over Assad?
To get rid of Assad?
To take Iran down a peg?
Seriously, we're going to risk having a war with Russia?
And you mentioned all the staffers, Strobe Talbot, who's guaranteed to be Secretary of State or Assistant Secretary of State or National Security Advisor or something like that.
He put his stamp on the big – I think it was Brookings Institution proposal back in 2014 to escalate the war in Ukraine, to arm up the Ukrainian Nazi-backed government and the Nazi militias fighting against the Russians there.
And all they talk about is – just like Hillary said in the debate, well, we think this will give us leverage over Russia.
Yeah, well, what if it just – what if it doesn't?
You think it will give you leverage.
Can you imagine that Putin is going to be leveraged by any action that we do?
I mean the thought that we would do something and send a signal and he would get it and back off is as ludicrous as they come.
I mean that man is not going to fall for anybody's signal.
He's the one who's given signals and taken actions.
So the likely response to that is going to be an escalation of things.
He would never back down.
I mean he's – I don't see any way he could, especially with 80-some-odd percent approval rating among the people.
I mean he's got a free hand to do almost anything he wants, and all his actions make that the most likely scenario, not just a possibility.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, man.
In writing this Afghan thing, I had to read all of Bob Woodward's books, God help me, and especially the one about Obama's wars.
It should just be called The Debate About Whether to Have a Surge in Afghanistan because that's what the book is.
But it's a straight 400 pages about whether or not Obama is going to do a surge in Afghanistan.
It's just so overdone.
It's absolutely crazy.
But right now I'm dying to read even a Bob Woodward account of the conversation going on inside the Obama government over their Syria policy these past five years.
I mean I just – it's unbelievable the way this is going.
And like you're saying about the Russians here, again, they called our bluff a year ago.
America's – the CIA's terrorists were moving and making great progress in the Idlib province, and then Russia came in and started bombing them and said no.
Sorry, you don't get a regime change.
You're not going to cut off Damascus from Aleppo or whatever it was.
And so no, bluff called, chess piece moved, and what are you going to do about it?
And Obama said, I guess I'll sort of back down.
Basically I'm going to do nothing.
So what was the conversation there?
Were his military men and CIA men not warning him that, man, we better be careful here?
They must have been, right?
So whether he wants to talk like, oh, yeah, well, you just wait until that wimp Obama's out of the way and I'm in there.
We're going to do something about this.
We're going to make those Russians change their opinion about what they ought to be doing here.
Like you're saying, what?
I'm pretty sure that ship sailed, and you're only going to push them the other direction.
Yeah.
I mean Russia wasn't even involved with this until our extended stupidity that we've done and we drew them in.
That was all because of our actions.
If we hadn't done that, if we hadn't even supported the rebels or anybody and just let it play out, it would have played out however it plays out.
And Russia would still be out.
We wouldn't be in, and it would have almost certainly been resolved by now.
But instead the killing, the suffering of the people continues on.
Now we've got Russia.
We've got Hezbollah.
We've got Iran actively militarily on the ground, all of which works against our interests.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know what to say, man, except I'm glad you're writing.
And I guess is it okay if I announce that you might submit some articles and maybe some blog entries and write for us at the Libertarian Institute?
I do plan on doing some blogs there.
I do.
Great.
Well, we'll be very happy to have you there.
Absolutely.
So good deal.
All right.
Well, I'm looking forward to it.
Well, thanks very much again for doing this.
I always love talking to you.
Scott, always a pleasure.
We'll look forward to being on your show again someday.
All right, y'all.
That is Danny Davis, former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, whistleblower on the Afghan surge and author of this piece, In the National Interest, Why the Battle for Mosul Could Become a Total Disaster.
And I think it's today we're running it on antiwar.com as well.
And so thanks, y'all.
Again, check out the archives at libertarianinstitute.org.
And for those of you who've been listening to the show at scotthorton.org, you're going to have to, well, once we get it set up, you're going to have to come over and sign up for the podcast feed at the Institute, because I'm going to start posting everything at scotthorton.org on a delay in order to try to incentivize you guys to go and sign up at the Institute and follow all of our work there.
But anyway, for now, you can find everything in both places at the same time, scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org, scotthortonshow.
And you can follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks very much, you guys.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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