11/08/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, November 9th, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
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And now introducing this morning's guest, it's Mitchell Prothero, reporting from Irbil, Iraq, up in Kurdistan there, for McClatchy Newspapers.
Welcome back to the show, Mitchell.
How are you doing?
I'm doing alright.
Thanks for having me.
It's cold.
Surprisingly very, very cold in Iraq in the winter.
I always forget this each year.
As hot as it gets in the summer, it's probably like 38 degrees outside right now.
Really?
Now, that's because of the Kurdish hills, or that's down all in the desert, too?
Even Baghdad gets cold.
It's one of these desert things.
Everything is designed to, like, release heat.
So, like, my apartment's always 5 or 10 degrees colder than outside.
And now it gets cold.
Like, there's a cliché about the desert getting cold at night.
Well, that doesn't happen in the summer.
But in the winter, yeah, it sure does.
It'll be pretty nice during the day, but at night the temperatures will drop down to, like, in Celsius, 5 or 6, which I guess is like 45, 50 degrees.
And when you don't have any insulation or heat, 45, 50 outside is really cold.
Yeah.
Sleep in your sweatshirt.
Pretty much, yeah.
It's funny.
Other than that, we've got a whole mess of, I guess, five or six different front war going on at this stage.
It's hard for me to keep track of.
And there's so many different points to talk about, other than just the fronts, too, the narrower points.
Like, the breaking news right now is that Baghdadi and the other leaders of the Islamic State have been targeted.
And according to at least one Baghdad TV station, Baghdadi himself has been wounded.
What do you know about that?
Anything?
Well, we know that there's a report out right now that they're, which has not come from the Pentagon.
And I'd feel a lot better hearing it from them.
Because Iraqi television can be, shall we say, biased.
And some of the Al Arabiya stuff, you know, I consider it sometimes aspiring journalism, in the sense that they report on things that they wish would happen.
But it does sound like there was a strike on something that they believed was a meeting of the leadership.
That hasn't been confirmed by the U.S. yet, which I think they would end up confirming if they at least thought these guys might be there.
Well, The Guardian is saying that they're targeting them, but nothing about the hit.
And I should say, by the way, that this is being recorded early in the afternoon of the 8th, Saturday the 8th, Texas time.
So this might be obsolete by the time it's heard Sunday morning.
Right.
And this is the one thing that you should keep in mind, is people talk a lot about disinformation.
In my experience, and I've been covering guys like this, I mean, besides I've been covering the Islamic State since its inception, but even the predecessor jihadi groups, one thing they don't do is really lie about casualties.
Generally, they tell the truth when their leaders get whacked, because at the end of the day, they don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.
It's martyrdom, and they kind of like to show off a little bit that it doesn't bother them.
So if Baghdadi has been killed, I would expect them to admit it, and that there to be a fairly public sort of display involving that.
If he's been wounded, they're not going to admit it, and we're not going to hear about it, and it'll probably never be confirmed unless he shows back up on television like with one arm or something.
Well, now, what difference would it really make, do you think?
Would he just be replaced in a minute, or his charisma as a leader and all that is really important for holding the organization together, you think?
Well, these are what Rumsfeld so brilliantly described as, you know, the known unknowns.
We know we don't know.
The simple fact is you don't know what's behind him.
In terms of an organization, I'd say that the Islamic State has proven itself to be fairly deep in terms of leadership ability, but just even making the joke about him missing one arm, if he is, let's say he is badly hurt and has lost a limb or an eye or something like that, he's no longer eligible to be the caliph.
They'd have to replace him.
Well, I'd have to check with a Sharia guy on that, but my understanding is that the caliph has to be a male of a certain age with a certain amount of religious training from the proper Quraysh tribe and also be completely intact, which is one of the reasons why they've argued that Mullah Omar of the Taliban who declared himself the prince of the faithful and the emir of a caliphate in Afghanistan was not actually the proper emir because he had lost an eye fighting against the Soviets in the jihad.
So I don't know what the ruling is if you become caliph and then lose an arm or leg or an eye, but that might change things around.
But the simple fact is we don't know.
They're a very secretive organization at the top.
Roughly it's known to be about 12 guys.
I'm told that there are virtually maybe six of them consistently meet with Baghdadi and then another six sort of run different sections of the organization, that he has a handful of close advisors.
They're all Iraqi and almost never meet with anybody who isn't Iraqi.
CBS News' Clarissa Ward did a great story on this a couple of days ago, I think.
I see stuff on the web, so I don't know when it actually ran, but I'm sure you all can find it, about the leadership.
And essentially she found that it's run by 12 guys who were all in prison together in the American jail in Bukha who'd been arrested in the early days of the insurgency.
So these are all guys who know each other very well and trust one another and have sort of been through 10 years of war.
So as a result, they don't really like to meet with other people.
It's a cellular structure for such a big organization.
So we don't know a ton about those guys underneath him, but there might very well be a replacement that's maybe even better.
It could be worse.
We just don't know.
The Israelis really screwed up in this regard.
In 1994, they assassinated the head of Hezbollah, who's a guy named Abbas Moussaoui.
They thought that if they took this guy out, he was what was holding Hezbollah together, that the group would splinter between pro and anti-Iranian factions and the whole thing would fall apart.
And a 31-year-old guy nobody had ever heard of named Hassan Nasrallah ended up replacing him, who's turned out to basically be the best tactical, political, military leader of the modern Arab world.
So I bet they'd like to have that hellfire missile back, because Moussaoui is revered in Hezbollah circles, but I don't think anybody with a straight face would tell you that he was better at it than Nasrallah is.
Nasrallah is literally the best, most competent leader the Arab world's produced, at least in the modern era.
So killing these guys, it's a die roll.
You just don't know what's going to come next.
Well, what we're talking about here really is al-Qaeda in Iraq.
It used to be Zarqawi, and then he was killed in early 2006.
And then there's been, I guess, two or three leaders since then, and now Baghdadi.
He was killed in June 2006.
Then he was replaced by Abu Omar Baghdadi, because they always wanted to attack the Baghdadi on the end of it to remind everybody that the leader was Iraqi.
Abu Omar, not much was known about him, but he ended up being killed in about 2010 and replaced by Abu Bakr Baghdadi, who has turned out to be a much more impressive leader than either of his two predecessors.
So you never do know what you're doing with them.
But the thing is, they're not after one guy.
If they can take out a leadership meeting, like what happened to Ahrar al-Sham a few months ago in Syria under incredibly mysterious circumstances, to this day nobody's given me the same story twice about what happened to them.
You're talking about 50 to 70 of the top leaders of the largest Syrian insurgent rebel group all died in a meeting, which effectively gutted the organization.
If they were able to do something like that, then it doesn't matter if you've killed Baghdadi.
What you're really looking for is trying to take out the bureaucrats and operators and military strategists underneath him.
Which would still just turn the whole thing back into an insurgency rather than somehow wipe it off the face of the earth.
Well, you're never going to wipe anything off the face of the earth with one airstrike.
Killing bin Laden didn't really do anything except make everybody feel better in the United States.
But sometimes there are people that you do want to get rid of.
For instance, there's been a lot that's been said about this guy that Americans strongly believe but have yet to confirm that they killed in Syria, who's somebody that I've spent a lot of time reporting on lately, David Dijon, this French kid.
He's an example of somebody that you do want to kill, that he's got a specific skill set that you want him gone, whether it's in the American government or a Western coalition or in somebody that you really want to protect if you're a jihadi.
So everything breaks down into strategic and tactical moves.
Tactical moves are only tactical, but they're also beneficial.
You can degrade an organization over time, which is something that Stanley McChrystal, when he was running JSOC, turned out to be very effective at from about 2007 to 2008, is when they gutted al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to the Islamic State.
They didn't do it by killing the leader.
They did it by killing all of the middle management, leaving guys in these cells not knowing who they reported to anymore or how to contact the leadership, their supply and logistics.
All of this stuff was screwed up, and as a result, the group had to go dormant until the Americans left and then were able to very impressively reconstitute themselves.
So you've got to look at it as a long, slow grind where you're degrading an organization's capabilities.
As much as the Obama administration has floundered in the public relations and what they're explaining they're trying to do, at least in terms of the Islamic State, they are kind of speaking a grown-up language when they say that the goal is to, over time, degrade and destroy the capabilities of the group, because that's basically all you can do.
There's just no silver bullet to something like this.
Well, I'm only looking through it from the point of view of opposing any further escalation and supporting any end to any part of this I possibly can see.
And so I'm actually kind of hopeful, and I could see it as a definite game-changer if Baghdadi and most of the leadership are blasted with an airstrike, with a lucky airstrike or two.
That could serve as a major argument for we don't need to send in the Marines to sack Mosul.
The New York Times says that the plan is to drive these guys out of Mosul.
They didn't say the Marines, but there's nobody else really who could do it.
But they say that their plan is to do that by the end of next year.
But if they can break any kind of pretension of a real state here and turn it back into just an insurgency for the locals to deal with, that might be a very powerful argument for no further escalation, even as Obama announced last night he's doubling the number of troops that he admits are there now.
Right, and that's what you're looking for.
In terms of the Mosul strategy, that was an interesting leak to the New York Times.
I was surprised the way they hyped it.
But it's something that we've been consistently told is it's going to take, but I don't think anybody's talking about U.S. troops seriously en masse going into combat.
And when I say that, I'm not counting JSOC.
As we call them, the secret squirrels.
Guys from Delta, you know, DEVGRU, which is SEAL Team 6.
You know, guys like that.
These guys, you know, they get sent to where the president needs something done, and they do not count as boots on the ground, and they're always denied.
That's just the rules of the game.
We all know it.
You know, if one of them gets caught, you don't get to go, oh, but you said we weren't sending troops, because he's going to go, yeah, well, I sent Delta.
You know, like those guys operate in countries we have no idea about sometimes.
Let's hope they have proper oversight somewhere.
I don't think it's a good idea that they're running around doing whatever they want, but one assumes on some level, post Dick Cheney, that there's some command and control regulation of what they do.
But in terms of U.S. conventional forces, nobody wants to do that, because, one, nobody wants to fight in a city, particularly a city as big as Mosul.
Look at how difficult it is right now for the Islamic State to take over a small town like Kobani.
Even with the airstrikes, even before that, it was taking them forever to grind their way through street by street against people fairly dedicated to fighting against them, as poorly equipped as they were.
But the plan that we've had explained to us is they think it's going to take a year for them to reconstitute a few brigades of Iraqi army guys, some special forces guys, and a couple of brigades of Peshmerga into a competent enough fighting force to go and try to retake Mosul.
Is that plausible?
I mean, yeah, it's plausible, but I point out that the U.S. spent 10 years and tens of billions of dollars trying to train up, with 150,000 troops, trying to train up a competent Iraqi army and didn't really get very far, as we learned this summer.
So maybe if they're being very mission-specific about it all and everybody's panicking, and the Baghdad government starts taking it a lot more seriously than they have in the past, that could be a conceivable time frame.
But even if they do that, rest assured, there will be Apache helicopters from the U.S. helping them, there will be air support, there will be special forces guys very close to combat, if not actually in it, and there will definitely be Delta and JSOC and the Secret Squirrels running around killing people and blowing stuff up, because that's what they do.
So that's the type of mission that they're anticipating for Mosul in about a year, which is just crazy if you think about it.
It's crazy that they think it's going to take a year to rebuild Iraqi capabilities to take over one city in Iraq.
Right, and of course they have...
Now, what are all the biggest cities under the control of the Islamic State in Iraq?
Fallujah, Tikrit, Mosul, Bakuba, what else?
Bakuba they don't quite hold.
Fallujah they have most of.
No, the biggest cities that they hold right now are Raqqa and Mosul.
In eastern Syria, former eastern Syria.
Yeah, well, you know, again, they got rid of Sykes-Picot so we can too.
Right.
You know, they control Raqqa, which is a pretty big city.
I think it's peacetime, I should probably Google it, but I think it's peacetime if you include the villages around it, it's over half a million.
It's not one of the biggest cities in Syria, but it's substantial.
Mosul goes close to two million.
Then after that you've got Tikrit, which is in the hundreds of thousands, although it looks like the government might be pretty close to retaking Tikrit at this stage.
The question is they've blasted up the highway, they're doing a pretty good job so far of clearing the highway and getting into the population centers.
The question is are they going to be able to hold what's inherently hostile territory because the Sunni tribes that control those areas have not been reconciled with the Iraqi government.
They seem to be able to drive up and down that highway in a capability that they weren't able to three or four months ago.
Right.
Somebody just said to me the other day, for the first time in five months, you can drive a military truck from Erbil to Baghdad, which actually blew my mind.
I wasn't aware that that had changed.
So much garbage comes out of the Iraqi defense ministry that they're constantly touting these victories.
Sometimes when they actually do have a victory or two, it takes a week or two to settle in and for us to believe it.
One thing is they're also right now trying to break the siege of the largest oil refinery in Iraq, which would be a huge boon to them economically because right now Iraq subsidizes gasoline very cheaply and gives it out to basically their population to keep them happy.
As a result, I think they're buying tons from Turkey and Kuwait in terms of capability, which must be costing them millions a month, if not a billion.
That would also be denying the Islamic State a major victory because they never have been able to seize that entire refinery, right?
They were never able to take over the control room.
I mean, a lot of people have made fun of the Iraqi army for good reason since June, but I will say there's like 50 or 60 guys who really deserve medals, the special forces team that they put in early on in the siege, who basically held the command and control compound in the center of the refinery and have held it for now five or six months with just occasional supplies being dumped to them by helicopters.
Now, having covered Libya and covered the Middle East for some time, I know a little bit about fighting in refineries and boy, it's something you really don't want to do.
It's a joke because you've got to take over a building without shooting Everything's flammable.
Well, it's two things.
One, you're fighting in the middle of a giant bomb, like literally a nuclear-sized bomb.
And then on the other hand, everybody wants that refinery.
And if you damage one small thing, it's not even the amount of money it would cost to repair, it's the technological expertise.
I had to look into this in June when the thing was under siege.
If they substantially damage that refinery, the only people who can put it back to work are Japanese engineers who built it.
And those guys aren't coming to Beijing.
So if you break it, it's going to be offline for a long time.
So not only do they have to drive the Islamic State guys away, they have to do it in such a way that they can't be sore losers and set off a few charges on the way out of there, right?
Well, that's the thing people always wonder.
To me, the Islamic State has been really patient and very infrastructure-oriented.
They really want that refinery, even if they've got to come back in a couple of years, you mean.
Exactly.
That refinery is too valuable to blow up on your way out.
That's at least my assessment based on their behavior.
They did not damage the Mosul Dam when they were driven out.
All right, now let me change the subject on you, because there's so much here we've got to talk about.
Do you ever read The War Nerd at Pando?
I don't think so.
Well, you might like him.
I love reading The War Nerd.
He's a terrible bastard, but he's really bright.
And so he was going through some numbers at Kobani, and he was talking about how the estimates of the casualties on the part of the Islamic State there, fighting in that border town there in northern Syria at the Turkish border, that they've had something like 800 killed.
And so then he extrapolates that that probably means, and let's lowball it, 3,000 total casualties if you count all the wounded, that kind of thing.
That's 10% of their fighting force.
That is a huge catastrophe for them.
Never mind that, if they're driven out of Kobani without taking it by the Kurds with the help of American airstrikes, that they just did all of this absolutely for nothing, only to achieve a massive PR loss.
And that in this game, as The War Nerd explains it, this whole thing is a TV show.
There's nothing important about Kobani other than winning it on YouTube.
And so if they lose it on YouTube, that is absolutely huge and a major strike against the Islamic State.
I just wonder what you think of that interpretation.
And of course, we're in the middle of the fight here, so I don't mean to ask you to predict too much about what's happening there, although you are reporting that Iraqi professional Peshmerga are coming as reinforcements finally now.
Well, yeah, and the funny thing is, I don't know if the Peshmerga that showed up are any better fighters than the guys from the YPG that are there.
The YPG guys have a tendency to be very professional.
They're trained by the PKK, and let's face it, they've been fighting for their lives for years, whereas the Peshmerga just got in this fight in the last few months to an extent.
But what I would say is that what they were able to do is, the Peshmerga are there because essentially Turkey is more afraid of the PKK than they are of the Islamic State.
A less charitable view would be they cooperate with the Islamic State to kill off the PKK.
They would dispute that strongly, but there's ample evidence to the people who believe it to be true, at least that Turkey's played somewhat of a dirty game when it comes to the Islamic State.
So what happened was basically the Turks wouldn't let the PKK in, and the PKK fighters are very, very good guerrilla fighters.
I've met them.
They're very tough.
To a certain extent, they help save Erbil, some of the guys here.
They have a lot of experience fighting in urban areas against the Turks, and they're just very disciplined, hard-ass guys.
And girls, actually.
They're the ones that are known for having women fighters who it's not like some little cliche or cutesy PR trick.
The PKK women I've seen are straight-up soldiers.
Very, very serious people.
The Turks do not like that and wouldn't let them in.
And they wouldn't let any weapons in to help.
So if you were a resident of Kobani and could show an ID card at the border, the Turks would let you in but without a weapon.
So as a result, they were extremely understaffed and didn't have anything more than personal light AKs, RPGs, stuff they could buy on the black market or stuff that they probably looted from Syrian regime stocks, the police station and stuff like that when they took over.
The Peshmerga were allowed to go in with heavy weapons because Barzani, the president of the KRG, what we call the Kurdistan Regional Government here in Iraq, has a very good relationship with the Turks and has a tense relationship with the PKK.
As a result, the Turks then took his assurance that his guys would go in with Katyusha rockets, artillery, heavy machine guns, and tons of ammunition and then would make sure that it came back out after the fight.
The Turks finally were, you know, were basically, I think, bullied by the U.S. into agreeing to this.
So that is what has helped them besides the airstrikes that they now have anti-tank weapons, they now have some artillery, some rocket launchers, stuff like that that the Turks would never let in.
In terms of this being symbolic, I don't think it started as symbolic.
I think the people of Kobani were fighting for their lives and I think the Islamic State wanted it because if you look on a map, it basically allows them to control an entire swath of the border.
Kobani sort of sticks out like a little sore thumb in the middle of a completely Islamic State-held territory and I think they just wanted to clean up their area.
But then it did quickly become a symbolic fight that neither side seems willing to back down from.
Their casualties, 800.
I have a tendency to feel like casualty estimates are usually overrated.
They tend to roll high in the Middle East.
They tend to be after-action reports from soldiers who say they killed six dudes and they killed one and wounded two, stuff like that.
Or they shot at eight or whatever.
If they did lose 800, that's a lot of people.
And if they've had 3,000 wounded, let's say, that's substantial.
I wouldn't say it's 10% of their fighting force, though.
Last we heard, they were getting 1,000 foreigners a month pouring in since they took over Mosul.
And then when you build in the tribes, the group has really grown exponentially.
The question is what the center core of the Islamic State fighters, Baghdadi, as opposed to, let's say, Sunni tribesmen from Fallujah who would just as soon change sides if they got a better deal.
There's a lot of that going on as well.
So that makes it really hard to estimate the size of the Islamic State right now.
But suffice to say, nobody wants to lose 800 guys and definitely nobody wants to lose in a fight on YouTube.
What we're seeing already is basically the Islamic State guys saying, yeah, but it took you guys 50 or 60 airstrikes and the full weight of America to keep us from taking it.
And the Kurdish response is, you know, you were backed by M1A1 tanks that you stole from Iraqi stockpiles and we fought you off with, like, kitchen knives and AK-47s.
So, you know, it's a constant YouTube battle.
But you're right.
Ultimately, it's not a very strategic or important one.
What's going on in Aleppo is much more important is the regime crushing basically what's left of the rebels, which is going to set up, in my opinion, and I could be wrong about this, but I think the Islamic State wants Aleppo.
I think at that stage they can really call themselves a caliphate.
It's an important historical Arab city.
It's an important Islamic city.
And it's the biggest city in Syria, even if it's empty today and a sort of desiccated husk.
And the other rebel groups grind on each other until they're ready to then sweep in and take over the whole city or at least try.
And that's the fight that's probably coming, you know, I'd say over the course of the next year.
Right.
Which, of course, brings up the very important political question of which side America takes when they're finally forced to choose a side between the Sunni-based insurgency I was going to say, and there's so many different things that we're not going to have a chance to cover today, but this is the crazy part of the interview, Mitchell, where I agree with Lindsey Graham.
What he said was that it's crazy for Obama to propose to work with the Iranians on this war because, and he even correctly said it, took the words right out of my mouth, that's combining the American crusader Christian apostates in a combined force, which is the worst public relations ever, will only blow up in our face and cause more recruitment for the Islamic State, etc., etc.
Now, of course, what he didn't say and what Greta Van Susteren didn't ask him about is doesn't the very exact same math apply to backing the Iraqi government at all?
Because the Iraqi government, after all, is nothing but a combination of Shiite militias led by Iran and led by Qassam Soleimani from the Revolutionary Guards.
And so how are we supposed to back the Iraqis against the Islamic State when Lindsey Graham had the exact same thing right when he's saying it about Iran, and the exact same thing applies, only he can admit it because this is Iraq War II that he got us into and championed staying in and championed fighting to put these guys in power in Baghdad in the first place all along.
I think Lindsey Graham should probably just shut up about the Middle East for a while because he's consistently been wrong on everything every time he's said anything, even if his last few comments made sense.
Look, at the end of the day, there's a couple different ways you can look at this.
One, don't you want to be on the side of the competent guys?
That's always a good thing.
There's nothing in the Arab world even remotely as competent as the Iranian government.
I'm not saying they're like a perfectly functioning democracy.
Yes, they're not our friends the United States friends to any extent but they are a 5,000 year old culture with a strong sense of nationalism, a fairly efficient and reasonable foreign policy.
They've made their intentions clear and they tend to pursue those goals pretty straightforwardly.
They consider themselves the superpower in the region and are irritated that they're not treated like it.
On the other hand, they also have a cultural set of values.
I'm not being a big time pro-Iran booster here because I do think they're ruthless.
I think that a lot of the problem with the Iraqi government was them trying to force us out of the region.
I think that they've played a duplicitous, double-sided game with Al-Qaeda at certain times but at the end of the day America's values and goals as a culture and society are so much closer to Iran's than they are to Saudi Arabia's.
It baffles me.
I find it inexplicable except for the part about the giant pile of oil.
Saudi Arabia, have some fun sometime.
Look at the laws of Saudi Arabia and look at the laws of the Islamic State.
I read you loud and clear there.
No doubt about it.
What about the part about the blowback?
See, here's my thing about it.
What Obama's doing is he is picking up exactly where Bush left off in 2008 which is fighting for basically putting the US Army and the US Marine Corps and your secret squirrels and the CIA at the beck and call of the Ayatollah Khamenei and his Bata Brigade.
How is that even an effective?
Never mind the morality there.
How is that even an effective you know, looking forward, how could it be an effective way to fight the Islamic State when as Lindsey Graham correctly says, it's lining up all of their, it's basically doing Baghdadi's PR job for him about who their enemies are?
Well, first off, you know, the fact is they get to pick their own enemies and everybody's their enemy.
I mean, at this stage, but if you're talking about like if you've got to pick sides in a Sunni-Shia conflict, obviously you don't want to pick sides.
You want them to not have a conflict.
You want everybody to work things out like a bunch of grown-ups.
And that would be a wonderful place and I hope to visit it sometime.
But I live in the Middle East where people don't do it that way.
Well, and where America is on both sides of this thing.
Opposing Assad in Syria and backing his friends in Iraq.
And here's where I, you know, this is one of the things I was joking about this the other day.
Look, America right now has no real discernible policy towards Syria.
They'd like Assad to go, I guess.
They've said that and they want to kill guys with beards because they think they're terrorists and figure they're going to attack America at some point.
Other than that, there is no discernible American policy towards Syria.
And it took me the longest time and I figured it out.
It was because all of the choices stunk.
Essentially, I think that this administration's looking at Syria and going, well, there's really not much you can do.
It's a complete hellhole.
All of the choices here are terrible.
Either ethically, strategically, morally, whatever.
Do you back Assad who's killed just as many if not more people than the Islamic State, but he just doesn't plan on ever attacking America?
That's a morally reprehensible and cynical choice that so far I haven't seen any indication the Americans are willing to pursue.
Do you ignore the Islamic State and let Turkey and Iran and Assad try to deal with it themselves, knowing that they're at least in the case of the Turks, unwilling and in the case of Assad, not able.
In the case of the Iraqi government, completely venal and incompetent and unable to do it themselves.
Iran has some ability to handle it, but they're not going to be able to invade, which would spark a regional war.
All of these choices, just to be flat out, they suck.
It's sitting there looking at them.
They have horrible choices.
What I see the administration's having done is saying, all right, so we're looking at Afghanistan in 1994.
Everybody's a bastard.
They're all killing each other.
There are no good guys and in the middle of this, jihadis are going to start forming groups and plotting attacks on the West.
They're just getting a head start on killing the jihadis.
They know all the other choices suck, but they do know that the guys with the beards, you know, Ahrar al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic State, these groups have extreme anti-American, anti-Western ideologies.
They tend to be magnets for foreign fighters and a lot of these foreign fighters are already starting to return home and conduct what we call lone wolf attacks.
In the States it's been somewhat less dramatic.
I don't believe in the sudden jihad syndrome.
I think some guys go on the internet and it sparks their Dylan Klebold type school shooter mentality.
In the case of Europe, in both Belgium and France, we've seen guys that had been fighting in Syria have gone home and shot up synagogues and started shooting people.
It's going to happen.
How can we avoid this?
I just had a European intelligence officer last month tell me flat out, we can't avoid it.
You could argue, and I would argue, that a Canadian wants a visa or wants to leave the country to go fight in Syria.
Let him go get killed in Syria.
Don't keep him in Canada where he's going to do something stupid in Canada for God's sake.
But still, don't pretend that it's smart though.
Listen, Mitchell, if they had laid off Assad in 2011, Assad would have finished killing off the Sunni jihadists back in 2011.
But America worked with our allies and said Assad must step aside and held the meetings where we recognize these governments in exile and their demands that Assad had to leave before they would negotiate with the rest of the government.
I'm not saying counter-factual, hands down, he would have annihilated them back then, but it seems like No, he was losing.
In 2011 and 12, the only reason why Assad was able to stay in power was Iran poured Hezbollah and billions of dollars of weapons and thousands of troops in to save his ass.
But America and America's allies the Turks and the Saudis are pouring in money and fighters on the other side.
If we had just stayed out If we'd stayed out, I mean, we didn't do anything.
We recognized a bunch of clowns in hotels in Istanbul called the Free Syrian Army who never had any relevance on the ground anyway.
Salim Idris was our guy and nobody in Syria has ever heard of the dude.
Yes, Saudi and Turkey and Qatar were pouring in weapons.
It's a regional war, but we've had this conversation before you're just not going to convince me that after 30 years of doing whatever the hell they want, promoting Al-Qaeda feeding jihadis and wahabis all around the world pouring in weapons to every conflict in the Islamic world to get to their agenda despite us asking them not to suddenly the Saudis are going to listen to America?
They weren't.
They were going to do whatever the hell they wanted because we didn't have a policy.
They wanted us to remove Assad and we refused to do it.
So they said, fine, we'll arm our guys.
This is what the Turks have done as well.
We'll arm our guys then.
If you guys aren't going to handle this we want Assad out, we'll do it.
And they've done it over basically, from what I can tell But what does America do?
You can't go to war with a NATO partner in Turkey over getting rid of Assad who you'd like to see go anyway.
So all I'd say is just in 2011 the only reason why Assad survived that initial uprising was a combination of absolute brutality on the part of the regime and the Iranians poured in and the minute the Iranians poured in it's like a chicken and an egg thing.
The Saudis are going to pour in too.
You can't stop either side.
Both consider themselves conducting proxy wars in a million different places.
Saudi Arabia and Iran are in a war in Lebanon right now.
They're in a flat out shooting war that the Iranians, I might add, are winning in Yemen.
They're in constant conflict in Bahrain.
They're economically competing with Qatar and with the United Arab Emirates.
And they're in a shooting war in Iraq and in Syria.
These guys are two countries that consider themselves regional powers who will be happy to use the United States to their ends but at the end of the day aren't going to listen to them because it's their part of the world.
It's their policies.
Their influence as a state in an area that they believe truly belongs to them.
So you've got three hegemonic powers that the US can affect their behavior to a certain extent but they can't control them.
They don't have as much influence over Iran, in my opinion, as we do Saudi Arabia because Iran wants the sanctions lifted over the nuclear program.
These are grown up countries that are very big to a certain extent very rich, at least in the case of Saudi Arabia and in the case of Turkey and Iran, very old, very smart with large militaries and very clear ideas for how their region should look 20 to 50 years from now.
The United States is part of that equation but it is not the dominant power in that relationship at all.
It certainly has less influence than it has in a long time too.
Everybody wanted the United States to get the hell out of the Middle East.
This is why Barack Obama was elected.
Bush went in and made America a lot more influential in the Middle East than it probably should have been and mixed it with an astounding lack of strategic planning and complete incompetence.
Basically the United States went into Afghanistan knocked everything around, changed things around and I promise in about three years Afghanistan is not going to look tremendously different than it did before 2001.
Iraq, they upset the power structure, tried to build a system that literally took about three days for the Islamic State to topple.
So basically Obama gets elected to get us out of these situations and that is what he's done.
One of the side effects to that is people are not going to take America as seriously and they're not going to listen to them.
So the simple fact is the Turks when America says quit helping the Islamic State the Turks go quit letting Assad fly planes and America goes well we're not going to do that.
We're not going to put it in no-fly zone.
The Turks go well screw you we're going to fund Nusra.
Now the Saudis are willing to go along with some of the bombing of the Islamic State because they're scared of those guys too.
But when it comes to policy towards Assad America has been absent from this debate from the very beginning except for a couple of statements and the minute they didn't bomb over the chemical weapons attack in August 2013 was the signal to everybody in the Middle East game on America doesn't care.
What do you make of Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton and the entire narrative that if only America had put in the money and manpower necessary to train up the moderates then there never would have been an al-Nusra and an ISIS.
It would have been the moderate army that would rule everything.
Raqqa, Damascus, Aleppo and the rest.
And the Syrian war would have been over and won by the good guys in alliance with America a long time ago obviously.
Except Obama was too much of a coward to go through with it.
Anytime somebody lays out a plan for the Middle East in two sentences about what should have been done I'm sure it would have worked perfectly.
I don't know.
What's the old expression?
If ifs were nuts and buts were candies every day be Christmas?
Sure, maybe.
But what basically you're saying is a couple of people say we should have done this and that and then everything would have been hunky dory.
This is the Middle East, man.
It's worse than that, isn't it?
Isn't it completely ridiculous on the face of it?
That they would have been able to create...
How many hundreds of thousands of men in this new army would they have had to recruit to be able to fight Nusra, ISIS and Assad and Hezbollah all at the same time?
You could send in the entire U.S. Army could do it maybe But other than that, what in the world are they talking about?
It sounds like to me.
That's kind of my point.
My point is, boy, that sure just sounds neat and tidy which is something I've yet to come across in 12 years in the region.
But what I would say is this.
I can see a scenario in which early on in 2011, 2012 if America had been very aggressive got European backing, got the Turks on board the Saudis on board met privately with Iran and cut some kind of deal because the Iranians are not going to let you do something without them getting something.
I hate that racist Persian bizarre mentality because I think it just plays to these orientalist stereotypes but it's like every country does this.
Japan's not going to give you something unless Japan gets something out of it.
It's just the way life is.
It's what politics and international relations are.
Same for the Canadians and the Brits too.
Nothing racist about it.
Nothing racist about it.
And the Iranians have a tendency to drive extremely hard bargains and like I said are very focused and very disciplined about what their end goals are.
They have a 50-year plan.
Not me.
As far as I can tell, the U.S. does not have a 50-year plan for the Middle East.
What I would say is that I could see a scenario which if in 2011, early 2012 the U.S. backed by a large number of allies spying off the Russians and buying off the Iranians to a certain extent had put in a no-fly zone which I will say patently is ridiculous when the Pentagon says that that's not that easy to do.
I mean, yes, it's expensive but the Israelis can fly planes over Damascus whenever they feel like it.
Breaking the Syrian air defense system is like a day-long affair.
We probably wouldn't even lose a jet.
Maybe they'd lose one or two.
But even that I find extremely unlikely.
I think the U.S. Air Force would shred the Syrian air defenses.
All they pretty much had to do was announce that they were going to do it and the Syrians would shut down.
The Syrians don't even shoot at Israeli planes that fly over Damascus because they don't want to get their anti-aircraft missiles bombed to hell.
So I think they could have told Assad, you fly anything, we shoot it down.
At that point bolstered some of the less gangstery less religious seeming rebels with some money to spread around on the ground because a lot of guys did go to Nusra and the Islamic State and Ahrar al-Sham simply because they had the money and the guns.
It wasn't an ideology call.
These guys are usually indoctrinated later.
If you're a rebel, you want to be with the group that's not going to get you massacred who's going to pay a salary and take care of your family if you get killed.
Again, this is what every soldier wants in the world.
Three hot meals, a working gun, some idea of command and control and if they've been able to throw some more money at it allow a little bit more lethal aid I could see them having bolstered what we call the Free Syrian Army to the point that then Assad pushed by Iran would have entered into more serious negotiations for a transition of power.
Having said that, I think there's like a 15% chance of what I just described working but it's not a laughable scenario.
We saw what happened with the Iraqi Army that they trained up.
Right, but I'm not talking about training.
The training stuff is out the window.
Giving them enough money so that people take their phone calls.
Part of the problem with everybody talking about Selim Idris being the head of the Free Syrian Army was he never had any money.
So if you were a commander fighting in Latakia and Idris called you up and told you you had to do something you'd be like, alright man, where are my bullets and where's my money?
Your colleague Roy Gutman is saying now that CIA is directly running Free Syrian Army brigades in the north and in the south and cut out all the middlemen in Turkey and in their hotels in Qatar and whatever about that.
Is that still going on or are those the guys who have recently been routed by al-Nusra?
Those are the guys that were recently routed by al-Nusra.
Definitely.
This is going back to what I was trying to describe and again the administration probably doesn't appreciate me extrapolating what I think they're trying to do but this is in my view what they're trying to do.
They are training up small groups of guys but these guys aren't there to attack the regime.
The US is preparing, again I think they're finally getting a long term strategy for Syria which is that the place is going to be a failed state hell hole.
Inside that failed state hell hole there's going to be a lot of groups that wish to do Europe and the United States harm.
The sooner you get to work putting in assets and people working for you who can help you identify and kill those people the better.
It's not a great strategy for saving Syria but honestly I think just about everybody in the US foreign policy world and the people that cover it as much as it breaks my heart because I love Syria and I love Syrians.
They're my favorite people in the Middle East.
It's literally a place that I really like and I'm not all that crazy about the Arab world to be perfectly honest for somebody who lives here for so long but I love Syria and it's so depressing to see it destroyed.
It's not salvageable.
There's no fixing this.
This country is gone.
It's not going to be resembling anything remotely before what came before for a decade if they're lucky.
Lebanon took a decade to get to a shambling incoherent sort of dysfunctional sick man of the Middle East that never quite dies and that took 10 years.
Syria is not even at the point where they can start that process yet.
There is no saving Syria.
What everybody pretty much feels is going to happen is that there's going to be a completely destroyed central infrastructure.
There's going to be a rump state controlled by Hezbollah, Iran and the Alawi along the coast in Damascus that will function on some level but their economy is going to be a complete mess.
They're going to be living off of Iranian handouts and Russian handouts probably indefinitely and in the middle is going to be a barren Afghanistan wasteland hell hole where armed militias and groups are going to be able to operate shaking each other down, fighting over territory fighting over oil resources and guys like what we saw with the strikes against Nusra kind of guys plotting attacks on the West.
The US to a certain extent strikes me as being fairly I don't want to say cynical but maybe realistic in the sense that they know they can't do anything to fix the tragedy and they're killing the bad guys that are going to come out of the tragedy like we saw in 1994 to 2001 in Afghanistan.
I mean ground troops is worse but even with the drone war we've seen how in a lot of ways it just makes matters worse so I don't know if any of this is really that much progress but I'll say real quick I talked with Robert Pape from the University of Chicago the author of Dying to Win about suicide terrorism, I'm sure you're familiar he was talking like he's got people finally really listening to him up there in the foreign policy establishment that ground troops is what will really bring the terrorism to you but it sounds to me sort of like they think they have an out there that good we'll just kill them with spies and robots and it'll be okay to do it that way and I'm not so sure it's much better.
I don't think it's that easy.
I think everybody recognizes US ground troops at least in Syria would be an absolute disaster.
The problem with having you know right now the Iraqi government and the Kurds I mean certainly the Kurds would be thrilled if JSOC would openly show its head and start operating I mean special forces teams are already working in a typical special forces mission which isn't quite what people think from the movies.
SF teams work alongside let's say a battalion or a brigade of let's say Peshmerga or Iraqi soldiers, train them up give them skills, sort of mentor them and give them an organizational structure to go out and do the fighting we joke they're civil affairs guys who are very strong and can run very far and fight if they have to that's what your typical Green Beret is as opposed to Delta or DevGroove who are like the kick in the door and shoot everybody in the face guys a combination of those guys would be very well received in Iraq.
There is a vomit in the back of my throat a little bit when I say a legitimate Iraqi government that is sort of asking for that help but that's not happening in Syria so it would be an epic disaster and you don't want to put a bunch of Marines on the ground anywhere where you're right, more people would flood in but in terms of the drone war and stuff like that people are uncomfortable with it from an ethical standpoint one thing I would say is I've yet to see the data that drones make things worse.
I'm not saying I'm in favor of them, the flying killer robot thing bothers me like it bothers a lot of people.
Well hasn't it metastasized the Al Qaeda movement in Yemen over the past few years?
Yeah, have you heard much from them lately though?
Well only because the Iranians, well I don't know the Iranians, the Houthis are whooping their ass there locally but that's not the Americans Right, well not right now but I mean even so but when was the last time those guys pulled off an attack?
Well no, they only ever tried and failed a couple of times but they've been a problem for the people of Yemen whereas before they weren't Yeah, I mean but what I'm saying is the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula guys are pretty well gutted and partially it's because every time they have a meeting a killer robot zaps them.
I mean I'm not saying it's a good thing I'm saying that it's been, to a certain extent, the data that I've seen has shown it to be reasonably effective and yes, local people do tend to resent it but I've yet to see much blowback from it.
The simple fact is Obama gutted core Al Qaeda in Waziristan by droning the living hell out of them and everybody did raise complaints about it and said this was going to cause a lot more terrorism except I've yet to, and I'm willing to be corrected on this I've yet to see a major blowback from that except for the fact that Al Qaeda guys can't meet two to a room or else a killer robot will take them out I'm not saying I'm in favor of the drone program, I have a serious ethical problem Well I got one, although it's really, I admit only half of an example, but still I think pretty serious and that's Faisal Shahzad, who's an American citizen and a winner, with a wife and a house and a professional job and a university degree, and he went home and he saw the damage, and then when he joined up the war on their side, he came back and he tried to blow up Times Square He failed, but that could have been That guy could have also been radical, ok, so that's one guy I mean, you're talking about radicalization here I mean, look at the number of people who were radicalized by the Israeli attacks There's Israeli control over the Haram al-Sharif right now I mean, you've got thousands of people I mean, in the grand scheme of things I don't know, I mean I have an ethical problem with the idea that the President of the United States sends out killer robots and I also really like to know the exact operational way that they decide who to hit and how One of the things that disturbed me was when they started doing hits based off of patterns of behavior as opposed to knowing who they were shooting at In my opinion, that might have crossed an ethical boundary I'd like to hear more about that program I know, it's a narrower point that you're making about the effectiveness But my narrow point is those programs have pretty much destroyed Al-Qaeda I mean, they're not completely gone There's been new things, but the Islamic State did not rise because of outrage over the drones It rose over a whole host of other issues I'm not downplaying any of them I'm just saying, killing It's always struck me, until they come up with a better idea this is the one that they've got and so far it's worked on some level reasonably well Guys who run up and shoot a single Canadian soldier or a Hassan Nadal guy shooting up at Fort Hood these lone wolf style attacks I consider this to be in the field of the school shooters These are individuals that have somehow worked themselves up into a frenzy Some of them might be very legitimately radicalized with an ideology and a plan Others are just crackpots who are seeking out a trigger and this particular trigger hit for them Mark Sageman's got a great book on why people become jihadists and there's a whole range of motivations Usually it's their FBI informant best friend tricks them into it That's a whole other show and that drives me absolutely insane I'm by no means defending the drone program but the counter surveillance stuff to a certain extent, I have to admit it seems at least fairly effective but in terms of the domestic stuff with the infiltrators in the mosques let's not even get into that, but it's been lunacy I was just cracking a joke I didn't mean to put you on the outside of that argument It's not my beat, there's better guys to talk to about it J.M. Berger would be a perfect example He does a lot of stuff on that stuff Trevor Aronson wrote the book on it, The Terror Factory which is of course the FBI itself They're the terror factory, the guys who come up with the plots to bust Yeah, absolutely, and what it goes back to is they're using the same tactics they used to take down organized crime which didn't really bother us, where you're like hey, you want to buy 100 kilos of cocaine and it turns out it's baking soda and you're in jail but when it's like, a guy's going to go to jail for life because somebody talked him into buying a missile that never existed, and the guy was never going to seek out buying a missile in the first place and we've seen this case over and over and over again A couple of federal judges have been courageous enough to toss out some of these convictions but for the most part, you're putting away guys who are just basically talking trash after work over coffee Anyway, the drug stuff bugs me morally but I gotta tell you, it's hard to argue with its effectiveness Alright, well I think we better stop the interview now before it's too long for anybody to download their phone but I sure appreciate talking with you again No problem man, it's always a pleasure Alright y'all, that's Mitchell Prothero writing for McClatchy Newspapers from Iribal, in Kurdistan