11/16/15 – Conn Hallinan – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Yeah, again, sorry for all the technical difficulties.
The ones at my site are pretty much almost all the way ironed out, I think.
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They're working on it.
Anyway, on to our next guest.
It's our friend Con Hallinan from Dispatches from the Edge blog.wordpress.com and foreign policy in focus, fpif.org, foreign policy in focus, where his most recent piece is the Saudis are stumbling and they may take the Middle East with them.
Welcome back, Con.
How are you?
Good to be with you, Scott.
Fine.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, obviously, this article was hammered out before the Paris attack, and I'm sure you'll probably would appreciate a chance to address that first, so I'll just ask you what you think is most important for people to understand from your point of view about the Paris attack, what it means, what it ought to mean to them.
Well, I think the key thing here is to see that the current approach to suppressing terrorism, which is really just a military response, it's just not working.
I feel like it's not what terrorism is.
You can't treat terrorism as if you're fighting a foreign army, because terrorism is a tactic.
It's not an entity.
It's not a specific body, although the Islamic State probably comes closest to being a state than anything else out there.
But I think the conclusion that people need to draw is that there are consequences when you do things like invade Iraq or get involved in the Syrian civil war.
What you do is that you create conditions that encourage the growth of terrorist organizations.
The Islamic State, which is the group that pulled off the attacks in Paris, is a direct result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The Islamic State sort of transformed itself from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, first to a subsection of Al-Qaeda, and then they broke loose from Al-Qaeda and became the Islamic State.
And now they're sort of locked horns with Al-Qaeda in Syria.
And it was a direct result of the invasion.
The overthrow of Gaddafi, without something in place to take over much of the armament, as Seymour Hersh's has demonstrated in his article in the London Literary Review, much of the weaponry and everything was shipped from the massive arms depots in Libya to fund the people fighting the Assad government, and a lot of those people are Islamic fundamentalists.
And the same thing goes for, we're talking about Saudi Arabia, I mean Saudi Arabia is funding all of these extremist, Wahhabist, Salafist Islamic groups, and those are the conditions in which terrorism gets bred.
It's not like the Saudis are funding the Islamic State, they're not.
As a matter of fact, the Islamic State is after them.
But what they do is they pour that money and they pour those armaments in, and people get it and they switch sides and they change politics and everything like that, and they create this horrible civil war situation, and that's where terrorism grows up.
So I hope that the conclusion that's going to be drawn from here is that it's really important for the major powers in France and Britain and the United States and Russia to step back a little bit and recognize that a sort of a military response to what is essentially a political question is sort of doomed to fail, it's never worked.
I completely understand the French bombing the IS in Syria, I mean, you know, of course, you know, it's a horrible massacre and a terrible thing inflicted on the French people, and you can understand the anger and things like that, but in the long run, you know, those bombs end up killing civilians, and then the Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, whatever group, you know, comes along and says, see, you know, it's the crusaders are once again killing Muslims, and people say, yeah, they really don't like that, and suddenly you've got recruits.
Well, the French have been bombing the Islamic State for a year and a half, along with the Americans, right?
Yeah, not very much, and they've been bombing it mainly in Iraq.
And in the last month they have.
Yeah, but there is no Iraq, it's the Islamic State, that's the thing.
It is, I mean, you're right, the border that was established in 1916 by the great colonial powers has essentially been forcibly dissolved.
And certainly from the point of view of the leaders of the Islamic State, bombing them in Mosul is not different from bombing them in Raqqa.
No.
No.
No, no, it's, I mean, and I'm not saying, in case right-wingers are listening, I'm not saying the French deserve it or whatever, I'm just saying, you put in French airstrikes in Google News and they'll be pulling up article after article after article that all were written long before the recent massacre in Paris.
No question.
I mean, the fact is, look, the French have been deeply involved in the effort to overthrow the Assad government in Syria.
France was their former colonial masters, and they've kind of never forgiven the Syrians for breaking loose.
And they've been doing this, and this vacuum which has now been created in Syria and northern Iraq, you know, the French bear some responsibility for that.
And as horrible, for instance, as the bombing was in Paris, at the same time, there was a terrible bombing carried out by the Islamic State in Lebanon, in Beirut.
Its targets were the Shiites, mostly Hezbollah supporters.
Well, you know, that didn't get any press.
There were no flags lowered for half-mast for that.
And people pay attention to that.
In fact, that's all over the internet.
I mean, a lot of people in Lebanon are saying, well, you know, where are the demonstrations for us?
Where were the lowered flags for us?
Our lives are not as important as the people in Paris.
Now, I don't entirely agree with that, but if people draw that conclusion, you can't blame them.
And this approach, that the way you deal with political difficulties or political disagreements is that you resort to military force, is just simply out of date.
It doesn't work.
I mean, take a look at it.
Ever since the first interventions, going back to Afghanistan, you know, then Iraq, then Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, you know, you just go through this whole string of things, and they've all been a disaster.
I mean, it's true.
The best victory they ever got against the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was when Petraeus negotiated with them.
And if he won a victory over anyone, it was George Bush.
He told Bush, we're not going to win against these guys.
We're going to sit at a table with them or I quit.
And Bush said, OK, go ahead and deal with them then.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
And then here's the thing, though, the worst own goal imaginable, as you mentioned, Libya and then the rat line, Hirsch, as he calls it, the rat line from Libya to Syria.
And what if what Bush did for Osama bin Laden's movement was take him from zero to 10 million miles an hour by giving them all of Western Iraq, which he did, at least for a time.
Then Obama took him far past the speed of light by outright taking their side in Libya and Syria.
And the only reason he got away with what is technically high treason in backing the al-Nusra Front the way he has and with our allies is that all the Republicans are even worse and demand even worse treason on behalf of al-Qaeda out of him.
And so there's no threat of punishment against him.
But it's the same thing with the French.
You know, Eric Margulies first reported that French special forces were helping the jihadists in Syria in the summer of 2011.
We've known they're the ones just like America reaping this whirlwind, pretending they're on the side fighting against the terrorists when they've been backing the terrorists a whole damn time.
But now we're out of time.
We'll be right back in three minutes with Con Hallinan.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Con Hallinan from Foreign Policy in Focus.
The Saudis are stumbling, is his most recent piece.
We're running it also at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com slash Hallinan.
We got a deal with the FPIF.
Very interesting article.
But before we get back to the Saudis here, well, and this is a great segue into the subject of the Saudis, but we were at the hard break.
So I will now give you an opportunity, Con, to rein in my hyperbole, if you wish.
That's all right.
It doesn't matter what your hyperbole.
It's fine.
Well, I mean, am I wrong?
What we're saying is that, you know, that this is a case in which essentially a lot of Western powers, including France, have been deeply involved in destabilizing countries in the Middle East.
And there are consequences for that.
And this is one of the consequences for that.
It doesn't forgive what it is.
You know, you have no right to go around and kill a bunch of innocent people.
That's the outrageous.
But the thing is that it's a hard argument to make in the Middle East, because they turn around and say, what are you talking about?
You know, there would have been hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Syrians and Libyans and Somalians and Yemenis and things like that killed by Western coalition.
And you get terribly upset when this happens in Paris.
Well, you know, this is what happens.
It's why you don't do these kinds of things, why you don't take this sort of military approach to resolving what is, in essence, a political problem.
Hey, did you see in the German papers yesterday where it was, I guess, DW.com or where I think it is, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah all came out and condemned the Paris attacks.
So it's not just the moderates.
It's even, you know, the names that are the definitions of Islamic extremist terrorism all came out and condemned it.
You know, those who are coming from Hezbollah, Hezbollah is an organization with deep roots in Lebanon.
It represents the Shiite population, which makes up a plurality of Lebanon, but has been for the last several hundred years has been completely marginalized politically and economically and Hezbollah was an effort to organize that community to resist the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.
So, you know, we treat, we talk about Hezbollah as an extremist organization, it's not an extremist organization.
I mean, it represents, you know, huge numbers of Shiites and in Lebanon, does it have an armed wing?
Yeah, just like we do.
You know, we call it the U.S. Armed Forces, Hezbollah calls it their militia.
Hamas is the same way.
I don't like their politics, I don't like their, I don't like that kind of a mixture of civil policy with religious policy, but frankly, Hamas is not an extremist organization.
It's nothing like Al-Qaeda, it's nothing like the Islamic State and right now, we're working very closely.
In fact, we are condemning the Russians for bombing the Conquest Army in Syria.
The Conquest Army is run by Al-Qaeda, these are the same people that took down the Twin Towers.
Well, and it's funded by, it's the alliance between them and Arar al-Sham, which is the Saudis.
Exactly.
And, you know, when you look at it, when you take a look at the Saudis, what they have done is to essentially finance extremist and terrorist organizations all the way across the world, into Indonesia, into, excuse me, Afghanistan, Central Asia, etc.
They also underwrote Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, which began the bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites.
I mean, that was started by the Saudis.
You know, they funded the extremists in Syria.
They helped the government of the military in Egypt overthrow the elected government in Egypt.
You know, they have used their money to push a particularly reactionary brand of Islam and their politics, which are by definition, their monarchy, the opposite of democracy, to push those politics all over the world.
And there are major allies.
I mean, we're supporting them in the war in Yemen, and the war in Yemen is an absolute criminal operation.
I mean, it's just, you know, nobody's talking about Yemen, but there are right now.
80% of the people in Yemen are stressed with hunger and lack of medicine.
Yemen imports 70% of its foodstuff.
They can't import anything, because the Saudis, along with the United States, have the entire country blockaded by sea.
They're carrying out massive bombings, the Saudis, also a number of other Gulf monarchies as well.
Those bombings are directed by the United States.
We're giving them the intelligence.
We're supplying them in-air refueling.
We're supplying them weaponry, etc., for what is essentially a civil war between a group of people called the Houthis, who make up a third of the country, and a whole melange of people, including the Islamic Front.
In fact, the Houthis are the most effective force fighting the Islamic Front, and we're bombing.
We're helping the Saudis bomb the Houthis.
So you want to say we have an incoherent foreign policy, that would be a compliment.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Mark Perry said on the show that the generals at the Pentagon have said to him that, you know, John McCain wants to complain about flying as Iran's air force in Iraq.
Fair enough, but they've got us flying as al-Qaeda's air force in Yemen, and of course they're doing it.
They're clicking their heels and dropping the bombs instead of resigning en masse over it.
But still, as you say, and by the way, the CIA is still doing drone strikes against AQAP targets at the same time they're flying as their air force.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Now, the craziest thing is here in the case of Syria, our allies, our big allies, are the Kurds, Syrian Kurds.
Okay.
We have put 50 special forces, we admit to 50 special forces, amongst those Kurds to help them coordinate air activity to bomb, to fight the Islamic Front, okay?
And we're flying airplanes out of Turkey to bomb the Islamic Front that the Kurds are fighting.
And the Turks are using those same airports to fly their planes to bomb the Kurds.
So if you want, I mean, if it wasn't that people are getting killed, this would be something that Lewis Carroll could not have dreamed up.
I mean, this is straight out of the looking glass.
Yep.
That's pretty sick.
And then, okay, so now obviously everyone is saying, next we just got to bomb them more.
And maybe even put in ground troops.
And you know what I got to say?
Maybe I said this to you back a year and a half ago, I said to everybody before the fall of Mosul that, look, everybody knows that all of Western Iraq is completely lawless and outside of the control of Baghdad.
It's only a matter of time before the Islamic State goes from a group to a place, you know?
And then next stage of dominoes to fall down, obviously they're going to have to roust them out of Mosul.
Are they really going to let Osama bin Laden incarnate, call himself the caliph, and stay in power in Raqqa or in Mosul, whichever is their, you know, more their capital supposedly of their caliphate?
And not just have an Islamic State, but a declared caliphate?
It's got to be just a matter of time before they send in the Marines.
And I'm happy to say it's been a lot longer than I thought it would take.
But as you say, the Turks ain't going to do it.
Turks like ISIS just fine, hate their enemies much more.
They're not going to do it.
The Iranians, it would take their entire army to invade, and then that'd be counterproductive in all of its own ways, and they don't seem to be willing to do that.
They can hold the line at Shiastan.
They don't need, they never wanted, the Iranians or their puppets in Iraq, never wanted to rule Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi, right?
So who's going to do it other than the entire American US Army, 3rd Infantry Division, 2003 all over again?
Or tell me what's going to happen.
Well, you know, I don't know what's going to happen, Scott, but I do think it was something interesting yesterday, during the weekend, there were these meetings that involved the nations to talk about the situation in Syria.
And what was interesting is that there is a peace proposal beginning to come out, that's beginning to form.
The sort of catching point is that the Saudis and the Turks still insist on the fact that Assad has to resign first before there's any peace agreement.
And everybody else is saying, no, that's crazy, that's not going to happen, and so the war is going to continue.
And for the first time, the European Union has kind of stepped in here, and they've just said, look, we've got a million people headed our direction, we're going to have 11 million people if we don't watch out.
We have to get a resolution of this thing.
The question of whether Assad stays or Assad goes is really not that important.
Let's get this settled, let's see if we can't get a unity government, let's see if we can get a constitution, elections, ceasefire, etc.
Now, I don't know whether that's going to happen, Scott, but this is the furthest along this has come, and largely it's because when the Russians intervened, the Russians intervened because the Iranians told them that they thought Damascus was going to fall, and that the Assad government was going to collapse, and that then the IS or Al-Qaeda was going to take over.
And so the Russians came in and they essentially stabilized the situation.
They made it, they firmed up Damascus, they firmed up the Assad government, they did some military stuff in the north, made some gains, and they absolutely prevented the formation of a no-flight zone, which would have been an enormous plus for Al-Qaeda and the like, because it would have given them a safe haven.
Well, now you can't do it, because you're going to be fighting Russian airplanes, and nobody wants to do that except if you're running for president of the United States.
And so what you've got is, you've got a stabilized situation here now, it's really fully a stalemate.
And I think that the role that the Europeans are playing in this, or can play in this anyhow, is very, very important.
And there's very much a feeling in Europe that the situation around the Ukraine, the hostility to the Russians, has really gone too far.
The president of the European Union, actually the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said a couple of weeks ago, he said, quote, we must make efforts toward a practical relationship with Russia.
We can't go on like this.
We cannot have our relationship toward Russia dictated by Washington.
It's simply not on.
Well, that's really a break.
And that break, the attack on Paris, just might get people to say, okay, wait a minute, we need a ceasefire.
We need to see if we can't settle this situation in Syria.
I hope that happens, Scott.
Could the opposite happen?
Yes, it absolutely could happen.
I mean, you're right, there will be pressure to send troops now into Syria.
You can't send troops into Syria.
It's a violation of international law.
You can only go in if the Syrians invited them.
So we're going to violate international law.
Who's going to do it?
No, I mean, what they would do, I think more likely they'd send troops into Iraq at the forced invitation of the Shia-stan government in Baghdad.
And then they just back the Assad government, help the Russians with air power in backing Assad.
But that's a big ship of state to try to turn around.
And they haven't been able to turn the whole thing around in a year and a half from overthrowing Assad to backing him against his enemies.
So it's sort of like the Yemen policy, again, only in a little bit bigger geographical area.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it is.
And the situation in Yemen has to be resolved, too.
And I don't know what, I don't know, you know, that's dropped off the radar screen.
I mean, we've just, you know, we're, the United States likes to talk about these great humanitarian crises and the necessity to intervene in order to protect in the case of a great humanitarian crisis.
So the second greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet right now is in Yemen.
And we're aiding, we're part of the problem in Yemen, we're not part of the solution.
I don't know, I don't know how that's going to end.
I do know that one of the reasons I wrote the piece about Saudi Arabia is that Saudi Arabia's got itself in a pickle.
They're overextended.
They thought that the Yemen war would be a quickie.
It's not.
And why they ever thought it would be, I mean, they're, you know, they're sort of three countries in the world that you cannot invade Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.
And the reason is, is because there's no one single player in any of those countries that can dominate the other ones.
There has to be a kind of agreement between everybody.
It's shared power.
That's the only way it can work.
Hey, that's a great argument for the Articles of Confederation here, if you ask me, Conan.
Anyhow, so there you are.
And so they're in Yemen, they're in Quagmire in Yemen.
They're in a stalemate in Syria.
Oil is now $44 a barrel.
Last year in June, it was $115 a barrel.
For the first time, the Saudis are actually borrowing money in order to deal with their budget deficit.
They can't afford to spend less money internally because they're keeping a lid on things internally.
And they're stuck.
I mean, this is a very fragile situation.
And this new leadership is crazy.
I would say that it is not at all unlikely that sometime in the next few years, we're going to see a major upheaval in Saudi Arabia.
And when that happens, boy, that's going to have international repercussions.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, in fact, as long as I'm keeping you over time, if you give me one more minute.
Sure.
So I'm saying to Robert A. Pape half an hour ago or so, an hour ago, hey, Bob, what if we just quit?
I said, man, this is stupid.
We're going to hire the Bushes and Obamas and Clintons and other Bushes who got us into this mess in order to fix it with one last real good intervention.
You know, we just can't.
How about just quit the opposite of that?
And he said, no, man, we got to walk this tightrope line and engage in the least way possible in order to ultimately protect that supply of oil.
And he said he's not talking about for cheap prices for Americans, and he's not even necessarily talking about so that connected Houston companies can make extra profits and that kind of, you know, hanky panky sort of thing.
He's saying the world's economy needs that oil to go to market every day, all of it.
And I didn't really debate it too much with him because we moved on.
But I think he was, you know, implicitly sort of acknowledging that, you know, yeah, the Americans, we don't we're not wholly dependent on Gulf oil.
We mostly rely on West African and Venezuelan and Canadian oil plus our own and that kind of thing.
But everybody else does.
And it's a global oil price and that kind of thing.
And he's basically saying there must not be chaos in the Gulf.
There must not be the chaos you just implied, a revolution in Saudi and an end of, you know, stable oil production and export from that regime.
And he said the consequences get real.
The consequences are we would suffer the kind of economic catastrophe that, you know, on the level of the Great Depression, which would lead to the kind of radical politics in this country that we haven't seen since the 1930s, when people really were signing up with the fascists and the communists, not just calling each other those names, but really joining up in large numbers with those kinds of movements.
And so what about that, Con?
Is he wrong?
Well, you know, I mean, and that's my my paraphrase of him.
So I'm sorry.
Do you think that's right?
What he's talking about, what he's talking about, he's talking about the Carter Doctrine in 1979, which essentially says the United States has the right to use military force if its supply of energy or the supply of energy for its allies is threatened by anything in the Middle East.
That's the Carter Doctrine.
OK.
It actually was made up over Yemen, by the way.
Well, the point about it is, is, is that we're not we're making things worse.
I mean, you can say we have to walk this line, but look at where this line has got us.
This line has got us to overthrow the Qaddafi regime, to overthrow, to invade Iraq, to get involved in the Syrian civil war.
This is the line.
I mean, that's working without a net.
You know, I don't think people say, well, you know, it's it's if you Middle East oil, you know, the world economy would collapse.
There can be upheaval in the Middle East without a reduction of oil.
All of those countries need oil revenues in order to to continue.
Even if there was a massive change in Saudi Arabia, they still have to sell that oil.
They don't have any other income.
They can't sell sand.
So what are they going to do?
They're going to sell oil.
You know what?
Honestly, Michael Shoyer has quoted bin Laden himself saying, what am I going to do?
Drink it.
Like he was saying, our worst case scenario where he actually becomes the new leader of Saudi or where what am I going to do?
Drink the oil.
It's still going to be for sale anyway.
He's arguing that you can leave me alone, really.
We don't even have to be friends, but the oil is still going to be on the market.
Come on.
One thing you can't do is you can't intervene and tell another country what their politics ought to be and who should rule them.
You can't do that.
You might be able to forcibly do that for a while.
But in the long run, that comes to pieces.
And that's the choice we have to make here.
Are we going to continue to basically say, look, we will do whatever we can to make sure that our people are in charge?
We are not that big a country.
We no longer have those resources.
There are a lot of other poles of power out there that are developing.
We simply can't run the world anymore.
And so we're going to have to figure out how do you make everybody get along together?
And the first place you start is you stop punching them.
If you punch someone, they punch you back.
And even if they can't punch you back, they're going to remember it.
You know, in that sense, the whole world is Irish and we never forget a slight.
That's a good way to put it.
All right.
So that is Colin Hallinan.
He writes at Foreign Policy in Focus.
You can see why it's a good idea to read him.
He's also republished at antiwar.com original dot antiwar dot com slash Hallinan.
And the latest is the Saudis are stumbling.
Thanks again, Colin.
OK.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
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