10/02/15 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, kiddos, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Joined again on the phone by John Pfeffer.
He is from Foreign Policy in Focus.
And he wrote this very important piece, fpif.org.
It'll be running on antiwar.com over the weekend here.
The Middle East's New Nakba.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, John?
Good, good.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Very, very happy to have you back on.
Really great piece that you did here.
I like how you're so good on history that you can make all the proper comparisons and parallels and draw the right lessons and stuff.
It's the difference between data and knowledge going on here.
So I like that.
The Middle East's New Nakba.
Well, first of all, what's a nakba?
Nakba is a catastrophe.
And it refers to the displacement of millions of Palestinians in 1948 when Israel was created.
And obviously for Israelis, 1948 is a date to be celebrated, creation of Israel.
But for Palestinians, it's a tragedy.
And many ended up in refugee camps far from their original villages.
Many would like to return to the villages that they left more than 50 years ago.
All right.
Now, so you bring up India and Pakistan and the split after the British left or the split that the British made as they were leaving, I guess, however you want to characterize that, the breakup of the Balkans and what it means when people are stuck on the so-called wrong side of the ethnic and religious lines and the different kinds of ethnic cleansing.
So what's the point of bringing up those examples in context of what's happening in the Middle East now?
Well, I think there's a belief somehow that, you know, if people end up in the right place, in other words, with their religious or ethnic brothers and sisters, then suddenly life will be fine.
That the problem lies in the mixture of people in the heterogeneity of countries.
That causes conflict.
And what people often forget in their attempts to create more homogeneous nation states is the tremendous tragedy not only of the partition itself, and I bring up India, Pakistan, Greece, and Turkey, because of the huge number of people who died during these ethnic cleansing campaigns, but the tragedy of the end of these multicultural societies.
Now, of course, there are still Muslims in India and there are still some Hindus in Pakistan, but previously these were much richer multicultural countries, and the partitions, in fact, didn't end the conflicts between peoples.
In many cases, it just pushed these conflicts up to international rather than internal conflicts.
We're facing something very similar in the Middle East today.
We're seeing millions and millions of people being expelled from Syria, leaving either voluntarily because of the horrific civil war that's taking place, or actually being expelled by, in many cases, the Islamic State because they're the wrong religion, or they might even be the right religion, but they don't practice it the way the Islamic State would like them to practice it.
In other words, the same kind of ethnic cleansing campaign is sweeping through the Middle East, again, toward a goal, ultimately, of creating homogeneous states.
But, in fact, all this is doing is creating tremendous misery and also pushing these conflicts to a different level.
And, of course, we've seen, really since the invasion in 2003, where the parties, I'm not trying to accuse the entire Shiite civilian population of Iraq or anything like that, but the parties with the power, and especially the ones chosen by Bush to accentuate the power of, like the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party, Skiri's Bata Brigade Army, they were on a policy from, really, the very beginning after the war of basically conscripting the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in their service to help kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad.
And they kind of have been, you know, it's kind of wax and wane just how hard they were pushing at any given time.
And I guess they sort of backed off for a little while, but now it looks like, you know, like in the Sunni neighborhoods in the southwest of Baghdad and other places in, was it Nasiriyah Province?
It's kind of between Baghdad and Kurdistan, but a little bit to the east there, where there were Sunnis, the Shiite militias are now finishing kicking them out and into Islamic State territory.
So this is, you know, something that we should never let it go unmentioned, no matter how obvious it should be to people, that George W. Bush kicked this all off with his invasion from Kuwait in 2003.
Absolutely.
And you're right, first, in terms of what the Shiite militias are doing in Iraq.
They're basically using the Islamic State as an excuse to go after any and all Sunnis, that they wanted to kick out of territories and claim those territories for themselves, a process of ethnic cleansing on the ground, mirrored, of course, by what the Islamic State is doing.
And number two, you're absolutely correct that, you know, this process, this kind of larger decomposition of multi-ethnic states in the region was kicked off by the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration and the earlier conflict, the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.
The Bush administration, you know, had this conception that it could recreate the Middle East according to the U.S. template, and that would be to create these new states, essentially, that would be allies to the United States, much as, say, Saudi Arabia or Israel is an ally of the United States.
But, of course, they didn't really think through this very carefully because they weren't really thinking so much in terms of what would happen to the people on the ground.
They were only thinking in terms of very narrow policy goals, i.e. getting rid of Saddam Hussein or securing U.S. access to natural resources.
They didn't realize that, of course, what they were doing was going to trigger an enormous kind of Nakba, an enormous catastrophe in the region.
Subsequently, of course, the United States aligned itself with one faction or another in order to continue to achieve these narrow goals and only further accentuated the decentralization process, further accentuated the ethnic cleansing that took place, and, of course, continued these conflicts that have claimed huge numbers of lives, hundreds of thousands, upwards of half a million in Iraq, around a third of a million in Syria, and, of course, the expulsion of enormous numbers of people.
We're talking about half the population of Syria is currently displaced.
About four million people have left the country.
This is a catastrophe of huge dimensions.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you look back to, say, 2003 and 2004.
We can't leave now.
The violence will get worse.
And so we have to stay in order to prevent the thing.
When, in fact, all the incentive that the Shia majority could have possibly had to negotiate with the Sunni minority, we were relieving them of those pressures by allowing them to use our army and Marine Corps to accomplish their goals.
And now maybe there would have been a massive civil war, which I guess the Shia would have been bound to win eventually anyway, even if we had left.
But if the Shiite parties had ever had any incentive to hold Iraq together and negotiate with the Sunni, it would have been if the Americans had left, not staying there and basically acting as, you know, Sadr and al-Hakim's special forces brigades.
Yeah.
I mean, in Korea, you know, the divided Korean peninsula, people would often tell me that U.S. military presence was like a knife stuck into the peninsula.
And they were worried that if they took the knife out, the peninsula would bleed to death.
And so that was a justification for the continued presence of the U.S. military in the Korean peninsula.
But what they didn't realize, of course, that the knife was not just in place, that the knife was actually twisting as well.
And this is clearly the case in the Middle East as well.
The presence of the U.S. military was no longer simply holding internal organs in place and preventing a bleed out.
It was actually continuing to do damage.
All right.
Wait, stop right there, John.
We got to stop.
It's John Pfeffer, everybody, from FPIF, Foreign Policy and Focus, fpif.org.
We'll be right back.
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Scott here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org for all the stuff.
Follow me on Twitter, scotthortonshow, although I warn you, I might be mean to you.
I'm kind of mean on there.
I'm talking with John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org and antiwar.com or original.antiwar.com slash Pfeffer.
This one will be running over the weekend, The Middle East's New Nakba.
The complete upturning of the Middle East and the creation of this massive sectarian war, if you want to call it that, a regional war between the Saudis and the Iranians with America on our enemy's side as the Saudis use al-Qaeda shock troops to get their dirty work done in Iraq and Syria.
America is trying to stand in the way of all those who would fight our enemies for us and help our enemies win instead.
This has helped, well, you know, they're redirecting from back when they accidentally took Iran's side in Iraq War II, which they didn't mean to do.
So now they're trying to fix that by making everything 10 times worse.
And you know, honestly, John, when I heard the recent refugee numbers, I didn't believe them because I was going, wait a minute, how can it possibly add?
They're saying, I'm sorry, worldwide, I think they were saying 60 million or something like that or 50 million people or something.
And I went adding it up and got some help from Dan Sanchez and then yeah, no, that really panned out.
And about what, somewhere approximately 10 million of these are from America's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, maybe more than that.
That's correct.
It's just a little under 60 million.
And this is the largest since World War II.
It is a, it's unbelievable, frankly, the numbers.
Iran was the leading kind of source of refugees up until Syria overtook it.
And it's the last year or two, Syrian war has really pushed millions of people out of the country.
And, you know, it only registered on the radar of the world community when these folks start showing up in Europe.
Because, of course, you know, there were almost 2 million Syrians in Turkey.
There are a million or so in Lebanon and Jordan in refugee camps that in those latter two countries that no longer have sufficient funds to cover their their food and basic health services.
It's a it's a unbelievable slow motion tragedy taking place in those refugee camps because the international community has not put sufficient funds toward that.
But it only became an issue when these folks decided that it was impossible to live in Jordan and Lebanon and continued to on in an attempt to get into Europe, either by boat across the Mediterranean or the land route through Turkey up through the Balkans.
And now, of course, we're looking at more than a million people flooding into Europe.
And suddenly this has become an issue.
And it's only when people show up at the door of the rich countries that the rich countries really take notice.
Yeah.
Well, and even then they don't.
They just keep on bombing Yemen and keep on bombing Iraq.
And even when the Russians finally call their bluff, they want to keep on supporting al-Qaeda in Syria.
And they must be crazy.
Yeah, it's I mean, I think the Europeans.
Some of the Europeans have taken a step back to to examine the kind of effect of these aerial attacks in Syria and Iraq on the not only the flow of refugees, but on the kind of centrifugal violence that is spinning these countries apart, namely Iraq and Syria.
The United States.
Well, the United States hasn't really taken a step back.
I mean, of course, at the U.N., President Obama did say, and this is good that, you know, diplomacy is is really the only answer here, that military solution is not the solution.
But that doesn't really register so much in terms of U.S. policy.
We continue to conduct enormous number of aerial sorties up around 7000.
And you know, Russia, too, has said that there should be a political solution, but that hasn't prevented Russia from entering the fray as well.
They conducted their first aerial attacks this last week.
So unfortunately, you know, the principal countries, United States, Russia and the European Union have not sat down to push for a political solution.
I think Iran has consistently pushed for a political solution, but it's been frozen out of these discussions for the most part.
So it's finally, I think, time for all of these concerned countries to say, hey, look, it's obvious what the the effects are of this strategy.
They've failed these aerial attacks.
We have to obviously push for a political solution.
OK, now, this is crazy, but I'm going to ask you what you think about it.
And I'm sure you'll say, no, that's crazy.
But Eric Margulies says that he's a damn liar and he's just trying to take extra credit for himself.
And it's not true.
And Eric Margulies might well know that for a fact.
But Zbigniew Brzezinski claims that he started he had Jimmy Carter start backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan before the Russians invaded in order to provoke them into invading, that it was his brilliant idea all along, not just he took advantage of their invasion, but that he helped to provoke it to give them their own Vietnam, which, of course, you and I probably have laughed over the years about here's America giving ourselves our own Vietnam in Afghanistan again, with all the harm that comes from doing that to yourself, that kind of thing.
But so it's not that difficult to discern.
And for all the talk about how smart our brilliant commander in chief is with this third dimensional chess and this, that and the other thing, somewhat devotee of Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Is it possible that Obama's half-assed failed, as you called it, campaign of backing the Mujahideen against Assad for the last four years has actually been the exact same program again, trying to lure the Russians into invading and bogging themselves down against the Mujahideen, just like in the 1980s, and that it's all this is Putin basically falling for the same scam again?
Well, it's a it's an interesting idea.
But no, I mean, I think the the one of the primary goals of the Obama administration has been to contain Russia and to push it as far out of the Middle East as possible to deny it its its one base in Syria, Tartus, to to essentially freeze it out of any kind of geopolitical role.
It would prefer it not to be involved even in the near abroad.
In other words, the former members of the Soviet Union, the republics.
But it obviously has been unable to do that.
I do, however, think and this is an argument I made, you know, back in 2002, that it that Osama bin Laden had very much this strategy on his mind, very much the Zbigniew Brzezinski strategy of luring the United States into conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, that it was only when the United States would be battling far from its strength and battling against non-state actors for the most part, that it would potentially face the same kind of crisis that the Soviet Union faced in Afghanistan.
And of course, Osama bin Laden knew very well what happened to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
And so he didn't he doesn't have a lot of he didn't have a lot of models from which to choose.
And I do think that that that motivated him.
And that was the kind of strategy lurking behind his his attacks on on U.S. targets.
Oh, yeah.
No question about it.
He said it from 1996 on exactly what he was up to.
No question there.
So I mean, it seems like Brzezinski is still around and they must have learned the lesson that actually the failure of containment after Vietnam, when the American people didn't want to contain the Soviet Union anymore, and it expanded its commitments into Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan, especially that that's what finally broke the Soviet Union.
So I totally would.
I'm just pretending that Brzezinski is smart for just a second and that he's talking with Obama and that he's trying to even think in terms of a couple of moves ahead on the chess board here.
And hell, yeah, they want to keep them out of Ukraine.
They want Ukraine and NATO if they can, because they're that loony.
But maybe if we could squeeze them here and squeeze them here, but push them into a no win quagmire, Osama bin Laden, Zbigniew Brzezinski style plot to to bog them down fighting the Mujahideen in Syria, that would be a perfect way to finally, you know, bankrupt the the Kremlin government and get their regime change in Russia, which is what they're really all about here.
Right.
Well, you know, if you wanted to be Brzezinski about all this and I would have to say that Brzezinski for all of the craziness that he promoted during the 1970s and 1980s, in comparison to the neocons, he's proven, you know, quite a a realist, you know, and they're all he's been good on Iran.
I mean, that's for sure.
There's definitely a line between his view and there is on Iran, but on on who controls the World Island and all of that.
I think.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, pretty much in the lead.
Right.
From that point of view.
I mean, really, the the key here, if you wanted to pin down Russia, it would not so much be to bring them into Syria, but to really accelerate and encourage the the centrifugal trends within Russia itself.
I mean, we're looking at North Caucasus, Dagestan, areas that Russia has had great difficulty controlling.
And, you know, if if if you wanted to be Zbigniew about this, you know, you wouldn't you wouldn't really push so much for the Syria scenario.
You would look for encouraging those the Islamic State affiliates in that area, as well as the Chechens to to basically push against federal control in Moscow.
I mean, that that hits much harder at Putin and the Russian kind of project than anything that would take place in Syria.
Yeah.
Although, I mean, that's they're just getting started.
Right.
So.
And they're in a real tough spot.
I mean, even if America and the allies backed off supporting the Mujahideen now, which I don't think is really likely, they're probably more likely to double down the Saudis and Turks, especially for supporting these guys.
It doesn't seem, you know, I'm sure the Russian Petraeus is asking, tell me how this ends now that they're there and have this task of supporting, you know, Hezbollah and what's left of the Syrian army against these.
I mean, they're they are just Al-Qaeda loonies with suicide bombers in a case, but there are apparently legions of them.
Yeah.
I mean, they're still around a fighting strength of 20 to 30 thousand.
But, you know, I do think that Putin is really looking to to elevate his kind of geopolitical stature in this and, you know, no one's going to take him seriously if he's just going to be saying, look, we're friends of Bashar al-Assad.
People will take him seriously when they're actually launching airstrikes.
And I think that ultimately is what Putin wants.
He wants a place at the table.
He wants to be able to help determine whatever outcome is around the corner in Syria.
I don't, you know, I don't see him really committing more troops.
And there's only a small contingent of Russians there.
There's very little popularity inside Russia for the presence of Russian troops in Syria.
I think Putin is very, very smart about about the fragility not only of Russian position in Syria, but even to a certain extent, the fragility of his own political support within Russia.
I don't think he wants to do anything that could jeopardize that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess there actually has been in the last week and I'm sorry I'm keeping you over time here.
Let me just ask you this one more thing here.
Kerry and Obama and a couple of others have started using language like, well, maybe Assad could go at the end of the negotiations instead of the beginning.
And that kind of thing is are those little trial balloons?
Is that just propaganda?
Or that's actually a signal that they've realized they have to back down from this policy, that they cannot debauchify this government and abolish this army without turning Damascus over to al-Qaida.
At best, ISIS, you know, supposedly even worse than that.
Oh, absolutely.
I think there is a dose of realism within the State Department and within the Pentagon as well about the inability of the United States to determine the outcome on the ground militarily.
You know, they dug themselves into a difficult position by insisting that Assad had to leave.
And they're kind of walking their way back from that that position.
The real question is not so much, you know, what kind of political solution, because that's it's it's too premature to talk about that.
But really, the question is, who will sit down at the table to talk about it?
And that I think they're still kind of working out.
And, you know, I think Iran has to play a major role here.
And that's something that hitherto the Obama administration has been very uncomfortable with.
And it knows that it's going to get serious congressional pushback from such a proposal.
But ultimately, Iran has to be at the table.
And that that is really the bigger question than the disposition of Assad when he goes, if he goes, et cetera.
Right.
OK, well, listen, man, I really appreciate you coming back on the show, John.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you.
All right.
So that is the great John Pfeffer.
He's at Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org.
And you can also find him at original.antiwar.com slash Pfeffer.
And over this weekend, we'll be running the Middle East's new Nakba.
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