11/13/14 – Matthew Hoh – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
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First guest on the show today is Matthew Ho, formerly a Marine and then a State Department official.
He made headlines, I believe, back in 2009, resigning from the State Department, complaining about the surge plan, which was certain to not work and simply be a sacrifice of soldiers and Afghan lives for nothing and that kind of thing.
And has also done a lot of work on, well, I guess his own and helping others with their post-traumatic stress from their times in the war zones as well.
Very notable to say.
He's at ciponline.org.
That's the Center for International Policy, ciponline.org, and you can find his article archive also at matthewho.com and at the Huffington Post.
Welcome back to the show, Matthew.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
I guess I have to assume you've been watching a bit of Hagel and Dempsey this morning testifying, I believe, before the House Armed Services Committee.
All right.
Anyway, you already know what they're saying, or I'll tell you that they're denying the CNN story that there's any kind of review of their Syria policy.
But I know you've seen the CNN story that the Obama administration has decided that they can't defeat Jefferson Davis without first taking out Abraham Lincoln.
I'm not sure how that makes any sense at all, and I know Abraham Lincoln has killed far more people than Bashar al-Assad has ever killed, so it's an unfair comparison.
But anyway, what do you think about the discrepancy here in the policy in Syria where we're supposedly training up an army of 5,000 to fight every other faction on both sides of the civil war that's been raging there for three years?
Yeah, it's quite mind-boggling, isn't it, Scott?
You read these things or you hear these things or you just observe them.
I mean, as time goes on with this, it's like we've been living in this bizarre dream for the last 13 years where up is down, and forward is back, and white is black, and things just don't make any sense.
It's hard to say anything more profound or more eloquent about what's going on in Washington DC other than these guys really have no idea what they're doing, and they're just trying to keep this vestige of American empire, and they're trying to keep the trappings of American power around the world.
They're caught up in the romance of being wartime presidents and senators and policymakers, and they're enabled by a military industrial complex which we spend about a trillion dollars a year on.
So I think what we're seeing here where they don't know what they're doing is just exactly that.
They don't know what they're doing.
Well, and you know, I don't know, man.
Part of it is, well, okay, I'm sure you're at least somewhat aware of the history of the Oded Yanan plan and the clean break strategy, what David Wumser wrote about coping with crumbling states.
And there are many who say that, you know, come on, all this bumbling is the plan.
Even Greenwald, who's pretty, you know, center-left kind of an official kind of a guy, I mean, he's great on the Bill of Rights, but he's pretty conventional in most of his politics.
Come on, this is all on purpose, creating more chaos, more terrorists to fight indefinitely for the military industrial complex, just as you say.
You could point to, and I'm torn on this myself, Matthew, so I'm still really just trying to provoke a response out of you here with this.
I mean, I can point to a thousand bad decisions that they made in Iraq.
I can talk about Sanchez and Casey and the wars that they waged and whatever they're, you know, with the best of them and their stupidity, you know, in that sense.
And yet, yeah, you know, I kind of got to concede that the neocons and the Likudniks have gotten what they said they wanted, which is just unending chaos.
And if it's, maybe it's not a black and white issue, but like on the map, it's solid green versus striped green on the legend there, Sunni Shia, and America is fighting on both sides of the sectarian war.
And that's not even really oversimplifying it, right?
It's pretty easy to identify the contradictions in the American policy.
So at some point it does, doesn't it kind of start stretching credulity to think they're really so stupid that they're, they still now for 11 years straight are fighting for Iran in Iraq, but against them everywhere else.
I think a lot of this is balanced with the notion that our domestic political understanding of the world is so black and white, is so we're good, they're bad.
And I just go, you know, I go back to Lyndon Johnson's decision to escalate the Vietnam War, you know, his deliberations over it and just coming to the realization that he had to do it for, you know, because the men on Capitol Hill will come after him if he didn't do it, if he didn't stand up to communism.
And I think that's a lot of it here.
I think it's just, you know, members of Congress, the guy in the Oval Office just wanted to be tougher than the next guy.
Also too, I just go also too, in terms of what they think they're going to accomplish or what they're going to accomplish, I go just, I just see the neoconservatives and the whole, the folks who are involved with PNAC and what I saw in the government and at fairly high levels, both on the civilian side and on the military side, it actually in both administrations with this notion that, and this understanding of themselves as being on the right side of history, that they were imbued with something special, that they were better than others and that their plan was going to work for no other reason that they were the ones who were doing it.
As well then too, I think they really thought that what they were trying to accomplish was this religious pursuit of American exceptionalism.
I mean, I just recall when I was in Iraq my first time in the Coalition for Regional Authority and seeing your people there talking about our occupation of Iraq, what we were doing there in such righteous terms, and then hearing as well from them how when we're finished here we're going to go, you know, the question is, do we go right or do we go left?
Do we go to Syria or do we go to Iran?
Just the lack of humility and the lack of understanding of the reality.
So I kind of keep coming back to it that this is a plan that comes out of this notion that America is the indispensable nation, as Mal and Albright said, and that we have a duty to liberate others and to make others in our image.
That is taken pretty seriously by some policy makers and now we're at the point when after that plan has been enacted, there's no way to get out of it without giving up the appearance of America losing her empire.
And that's just where I come back.
And then, of course, that's all enabled by this trillion-dollar defense, you know, national security, homeland security, intelligence development complex that provides all the data, all the analysis, all the assessments, all the talking heads, all the guys with PhDs to make this sound like it actually can work, will work.
I mean, certainly you have political generals who want to advance their careers.
So they're not going to speak out against a policy that is going to arrive, that is not going to work.
And the same thing on a civilian side, you want to see the civilians want to climb.
All right.
Well, fine.
But I still want their lies to at least make a little bit of sense, you know, on their face.
Not on examination, of course, but just I'd like them to sound plausible at first, at least.
We'll be right back with Matthew Ho in just a second.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Before we move on, I kind of wanted to find a little bit of middle ground there where maybe instead of, you know, a grand design that works or just, you know, bumbling stupidity, maybe you have really incompetent malevolence and they didn't want chaos.
They wanted it to be easy.
They thought it would be easy and they would rule everything.
And what are a bunch of civilians going to do about it compared to the power of the American military?
They're going to.
That's why they didn't really even worry about what Iraq was going to be like after the occupation, because whatever sock puppets we choose, we'll work it out or it'll be fine, you know, kind of idea.
And yet they just really suck at being evil, aggressive imperialists.
And I think that's probably, you know, the best description of the situation.
If you think about, as you referred to their kind of their idea of how Iraq was going to be at first.
Oh, yeah, we're going to have, you know, 60 bases forever.
And the Iraqi people are all just going to kiss our feet and bow down before us and we're just going to have our way there from now on.
It just didn't work out that way because there was Ayatollah here and suicide bomber there and they didn't get along and cause some problems.
And speaking of which, this is one thing I've been meaning to ask you for a long time, Matthew, is about what you said about your experience in the rise of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and their barter corps who, you know, Landay, Jonathan Landay said on the radio show a few weeks back or a couple of months back now that he was there in Kurdistan when Skerri came across the border from Iran just after the invasion.
And there they were.
And what was going to happen to him?
George Bush put him in power.
And this is in the news now because there's an amnesty report about them torturing and killing people.
And I think there was a Reuters special report about them torturing, killing people.
The Bata Brigade and the Asaib al-Haq and the other Iranian backed militias.
I was wondering if you could educate us a little bit about the history of these groups and who these guys really are.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of these a lot of these organizations were composed of Shia exiles from Iraq that were being harbored and housed by the Iranian regime.
And, you know, in that decades long clash between those two nations.
And so certainly just just like Landay said, you know, I wasn't there in 2003 in our invasion, but certainly had a lot of friends who were both the Marines and the army as they pushed north out of Kuwait and, you know, guys, multiple guys have said, yeah, they were here before we were.
The Iranians were in these towns and cities before we got there.
Yeah, they came across the border before we did and, you know, made their presence known, solidified gains for themselves, entrenched themselves and of course they did.
Why wouldn't they?
You know, I mean, they're, you know, I mean, and but certainly, yeah, these militias then had power in Baghdad in many ways because we gave it to them, in many ways because we gave them the money, in many ways because they had political figures attached to these militias who you could kind of think of it as the difference between political wings and military wings, you know, since they made a difference in like Sinn Féin and the actual, you know, Irish Republican Army in terms of the diplomats versus the trigger pullers.
But certainly, yeah, I mean, in my case, I saw us pass money to Syria.
The thing I had direct witness of was writing over $20 million in cash.
It was money from the seized Iraqi assets program, the oil for food program, money that had been provided by the United Nations to CPA to administer and then what I saw was us just transfer it just directly over to Syria and then within Syria, as you mentioned, you had the militia, you had the Badr Brigade and, you know, these are very extreme, very Islamist but also very, very corrupt, very thuggish and they don't represent anything good in any part of society.
So what our war there did, our occupation, our quote-unquote liberation did was allow these groups that were just as bad as Saddam Hussein's people to get back into Iran and to get positions of power very quickly because this vacuum had occurred and then once they were in these positions to receive political and financial support from the United States.
Well now, correct me if I'm wrong.
Is it the case that these guys were always avowedly separatists, that they never really wanted to try and they have the 60% majority in the country but they never really wanted to try to rule and conquer all these predominantly Sunni areas?
They just wanted Bush to use the army and the Marine Corps to give them Baghdad because I remember Muqtada al-Sadr who is actually not an Iraqi trader but who stayed in Iraq the whole time, who had, you know, grassroots support at least and he would constantly denounce Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and say, hey man, you know, we should be creating an alliance with the Sunni Arabs in the name of Iraqi nationalism against the Iranians and the Americans.
What is it with you?
And of course, Skiri had the backing of the Americans and the Iranians so they were in the catbird seat, not Sadr.
But he was constantly denouncing them for basically agreeing with the Israelis, let's split up Iraq because that's what Iran wants.
Yeah, he certainly saw it, you know, so my perspective is getting there in 2004, spring of 2004 and you now have these organizations, these Shia organizations haven't taken power, haven't gotten control of the ministries and begin to put their own people into security forces and then as that starts to spread and that starts to take, as we start to, you know, quote unquote, give Iraq back to the Iraqi government, the Iraqi people, you now have these organizations, the positions of power.
So now they are now in not just the Shia areas in the south, in Baghdad, in eastern Iraq, but now they're also in western Iraq and in northern Iraq and they're filling positions that would have, if they were locally filled, would have been filled by local Sunnis.
And so now you start to see some of that exclusion, you start to see some of that disenfranchisement that, you know, is now so readily observable and is, of course, one of the major reasons for the civil war in Iraq.
Where you didn't see it occur, of course, was up in Kurdistan because the Kurds were at that point a very semi-autonomous and they were very, and also too, we favored the Kurds and so we didn't push anything on the Kurds, the Kurds did not want.
But the Sunni population, Paul Wolfowitz, who was Deputy Secretary of Defense and was a primary architect of all this and really was involved in kind of day-to-day running from Washington, D.C. of the war, you know, his comparison, of course, was that the Sunnis were the same as the Nazis and that led to the de-Baathification program, disbanding of the army, but also to you to see it in some of the things, the way he talked about and the way he described them, that carried down to that the Sunnis were a bad people and couldn't be trusted and they had to be excluded from power because of their sins when they were in power, which was just complete, you know, rubbish, really.
I mean, the Baath Party government was horrible, but to put it on one people is a very simplified, wrong-headed way to look at it.
Well, and apparently Wolfowitz and them thought that al-Qaeda terrorism was just basically a joke, a poster for them to exploit.
They didn't care if bin Laden got away or not.
They decided they would go and overthrow Saddam, who, you know, I saw this picture of him the other day.
You usually always make fun of him because he's wearing a black beret and I call him, you know, a secular atheist who worshipped only himself and might as well have lived in Paris.
But anyway, I saw a picture of him the other day where he's wearing a fedora and an ascot and like this shiny three-piece suit and not one whisker on his chin, not one.
And Paul Wolfowitz went and turned all of Sunnistan into lawless jihadistan this last decade.
Man, is there any way you could say one more segment with me here and talk about the current state of the war?
Yeah, I can, of course.
Okay, great.
It's Matthew Ho.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Sorry, I really didn't hear the bumper music until the very last second there in that last break.
I didn't mean to botch that outro that bad, but Matthew Ho was kind enough to stay on the line with us here.
Where we left off, I was talking about just how obvious it was that Saddam Hussein was not a Bin Ladenite in any way.
And the rise of all the Bin Ladenites in his former territory since he was deposed because of the hubris of Paul Wolfowitz, his simplistic thinking as Matthew described it there, of course, about, oh, the Sunnis must go, even if that means a civil war that kills a million people and creates a generation of Al Qaeda terrorists and the rest of this madness.
But on the other hand, Paul Wolfowitz would say, hey, man, the secular fascists must go.
Why is America backing secular fascists?
You know, that's the difference between the neoconservatives and the realists is the realists, they don't mind blood at all.
They don't care at all.
They're just nation state men.
But neoconservatives, we care.
We want to make sure that we're doing the right thing.
In fact, there's even a good anecdote.
I don't know if it's true or not, but they say that Paul Wolfowitz helped convince Ronald Reagan to tell Ferdinand Marcos to beat it and and end the fascist dictatorship in the Philippines and allow Corazon Aquino to come to power back in 1986 or 87 or whatever that was when I was a kid, because he really believes in this democracy stuff, Matthew.
So what about that?
You know, it's I think it's what's amazing is that now in 2014, you know, certainly 2015, you know, more than a decade after these horrible mistakes and this purposeless war was launched, these guys like Wolfowitz still cling to it.
They still won't acknowledge what a colossal failure it has been.
And so there may be some truth in this notion that they are believers in democracy, that they are believers in this this ideology, that they are that their their purpose is a grand purpose to help liberate people.
But it's you know, it's just it's absolute insanity.
It's you're saying that a million dead Iraqi Iraqis is is worth the ability to go vote in a in a corrupt and rigged election.
I mean, you know, because that's that's the reality of it.
You have millions killed and wounded and the psychological harm.
And now with the depleted uranium exposure that is causing a mass amounts of birth defects and cancer rates.
And so even if there was peace in Iraq, you know, their children will be dying from their contaminated land and water.
And the elections, I mean, this is the you know, depending upon what what study you look at, whether it's from, you know, Transparency International or by blanking on the name of the institution, the United States, it does it as well.
But this is the one of the most corrupt governments in the world.
And it's it's it's rated as a not free society.
But somehow these guys like Wolfowitz, Bush just said it the other day on Face the Nation.
He was interviewed by Bob Schieffer and Bush said he had no regrets about the Iraq war because of the connections to 9-11 and Saddam's possession of chemical weapons.
So they have in their head what occurred and they have in their head that they were righteous and that they were serving some higher purpose.
And I think what you get, Scott, beneath these gentlemen and ladies, what you get beneath them or you get the cadre of loyalists.
So what I would observe at the levels of individuals at the National Security Council and the CIA or State Department or the Pentagon, these civilian appointees who were a couple levels down from the principals who so they were a couple of levels down from the secretary of state or from the secretary of defense in terms of their position.
But they were so or National Security Council, they were so loyal, they would refuse to acknowledge anything that didn't fit the narrative.
So in the case of, say, Iraq with the Sunni insurgency in 2005, 2006, I remember it just you couldn't say that the Sunni insurgency had nationalist reasons, that the vast bulk of the Sunni insurgency was fighting against occupation, was fighting against persecution, was fighting against being disenfranchised or usurped.
They had to all be al-Qaeda terrorists.
You know, I mean, they were all Zarqawi.
Every bombing was Zarqawi.
Exactly.
And the reality was, you know, I mean, I clearly remember reading these reading the reports, the classified reports, you know, and sitting in the State Department reading our assessments of it.
And at most five percent of the Sunni insurgency was al-Qaeda.
What were these were these these terrible jihadi terrorists who were coming to take our freedom?
And if they didn't if they didn't make it, they were going to get 72 virgins.
You know, that kind of nonsense.
And so but you couldn't you couldn't bring that up.
You know, you would go to a briefing on the insurgency and it might list 10 or 15 reasons behind the insurgency.
And none of it would be none of it would say resistance to occupation because that would go against the narrative.
And that would just it was just not allowed.
It was not allowed.
And so I think that's how you get individuals who have these notions, who have these beliefs in themselves and these ideas that they are somehow they are the men who have been chosen to change history or women to change history.
And so but beneath them, all their advisors, all their all their assistants, all their workers are just these sycophants, these loyalists who won't acknowledge anything that doesn't fit what their boss's narrative is.
I think that's how you and that occurs in a Democratic administration as well.
I saw the same thing in 2009 when the Obama administration came in.
They had the same type of attitude that we're going to do this.
We can do it better because we're not the Republicans.
We know how to do it right.
And if so, in Afghanistan, if you spoke about, look, most of the insurgency, the Taliban insurgencies is a posh to a nationalist phenomenon here and they're fighting against occupation.
It's a continuation of the Civil War.
It's been going on for decades.
You just weren't acknowledged because that didn't fit the narrative that we have to be there to stop another 9-11.
We have to be there to keep ourselves safe, to defend our freedom.
And so I think that's how these policies start, but then are never adjusted or stopped or halted or even acknowledged as to be going off the rails.
I mean, even like you said earlier, when we first started talking about the CNN report that the White House is now revisiting the Syria strategy and I guarantee there are people in the White House who don't believe that Syria's strategy is going wrong, that they believe it's going right.
It just might need a few tweaks.
Yeah.
And they're vowing to make it twice as stupid.
I mean, they're absolutely incredible.
And I see what you're saying.
There could be a Ph.
D. kind of course in the public choice economics of the warfare state and how this all works, where every decision is made on every basis except what the average person would think these people's job is, the national interest, the short, medium and long term good is something the slightest bit reasonable at all.
Yeah.
To get back to your point earlier about the need for chaos and a need for war.
And I do believe that exists in Washington, D.C.
And you see it in the think tanks.
You see it among the defense industry.
You see among some in the intelligence community, in the defense community.
And I like I said, I haven't seen the hearings today, but the last time we had these hearings in the Senate on Syria, the graphics that were provided, the maps that were provided were provided by the Institute for the Study of War, not by the Department of Defense, not by the Central Intelligence Agency, not by the Department of State, but by an outside think tank that is funded completely by the defense industry.
Yeah.
And which is run by the Kagan's.
It's run by the Kagan's who got us into this mess.
Robert, who got us into Iraq and his brother Fred, who got us into the surge.
Yes.
And so you see that as well.
So then you start to see, well, OK, these people who are in power, who have these notions of the righteousness of the decisions that it's going to work out because of who we are and because of who they are.
Well, now they're emboldened and they're supported by these PhDs, these academics, these think tank policy experts who are financially driven by the war.
So it does.
It kind of comes full circle in terms of how this works.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
I'm sorry.
I wanted to ask you even more about the current situation there.
But that just leaves us open to having you back soon.
So appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
That's Matthew Ho.
He's at The Huffington Post.
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