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They hate our freedoms.
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Could we swing, go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
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That action has now begun when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
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My own government.
All right, you guys introducing our old friend Reese Ehrlich, the foreign correspondent, he's got a syndicated column now nationwide foreign correspondent.
He's the author of inside Syria and the Iran agenda.
And he's one of these guys who really does the work and, and goes to the places that he writes about.
For example, this article we're running at antiwar.com today or sorry, tomorrow.
Wait, today?
Yeah.
No, tomorrow is called U.S. sells out the Kurds again.
And it begins with.
Yeah.
So there I was at the beginning of Iraq war three, watching the Islamic State advance toward Erbil until the Americans started pounding them with B1 bombers or something like that.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Reese?
I'm doing fine.
Thank you.
For that very colorful introduction.
Yeah.
Well, no, I appreciate the very good work that you do, sir.
And now that the audio book is almost done, my last excuse that until the book is done, until the book is done, we'll be out of the way.
And then inside Syria is definitely on my list, even though it's too late now, but anyway.
Yeah.
I love your articles.
We run them all at antiwar.com.
Of course.
This one is called U.S. sells out the Kurds again.
And well, go ahead.
You want to take us back to the beginning of Iraq war three there, the protecting the Kurds and the Yazidis from the rise of Islamic State.
Sure.
I was in northern Iraq in 2014.
Your listeners may well remember what was called the Yazidi crisis, although there were lots of other religious and minority groups who were affected as well.
Basically, the Islamic State had taken Mosul in Iraq and was advancing north and basically kidnapped the women and killed or forced the men to flee.
It was a horrific human rights violations.
And this was the excuse that the U.S. then used to start bombing.
And August of 2014, U.S. sent troops back into Iraq and started bombing.
And then in September, they started bombing in Syria.
And the official reason, you know, it's really interesting.
The mainstream media and everybody else never goes back and looks at the justifications that were given at the time.
A convenient lapse of memory, because if you go back and you actually look at what Obama said, this was a temporary bombing.
We were just trying to stop the Islamic State from attacking Erbil and stopping the attacks on the Yazidis.
And lo and behold, that all stopped within a couple of weeks.
The situation had stabilized.
I was there.
I witnessed it firsthand.
But of course, the bombing continued.
The U.S. was the Syrian Kurds that rescued the Yazidis.
And when the Americans got there, even Barbara Starr on CNN said that special operations troops helicoptered into the mountain at Mount Sinjar.
And everybody who was left said, no, we want to stay.
Go ahead.
Yeah, that's right.
Basically, the goal, the official goals have been accomplished.
But of course, the U.S. never invades or bombs someplace for the official reasons given.
There's always a lot of other motivations, oil and military bases and geopolitics and so on.
And so basically, the U.S. started, as you said, Iraq War Three, put 5,000 troops more back into Iraq and they remain there to this day.
So now what are the Kurds have to do with all this?
Now, the Kurds are a nationality that live in four neighboring countries in the region in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
They had a very high degree of autonomy within northern Iraq, basically an almost independent country in terms of control of their oil and control of their borders and so on and their own financing and their own army.
So in almost every regard, they were an independent country.
However, the Kurds have long wanted independence from Iraq and some of the other countries as well.
And they.
Held a referendum in September calling for independence, and 92 percent of the people who voted in northern Iraq voted for independence.
But it was a huge miscalculation by the Kurdish leadership because an independent Kurdistan right now would not serve the interests of the U.S., Turkey, Russia or Iran.
And they all objected to the referendum and the Iraqi government took advantage of the fact that all the outside powers opposed it and sent in their troops to take back some territory in the Kurdish region.
And it's just blown up in the face of the Kurdish leadership.
Massoud Barzani, the president of Kurdistan, has resigned.
There's tremendous infighting going on and it's a real serious mess.
Basically, the U.S. said it wasn't the first time the U.S. has sold out the Kurds and they did it once again.
And the message of my column is you can't trust the U.S.
They've sold out the Kurds in previous situations.
They will do so again and they've done so now.
And the Kurds are much worse off now than they were prior to the referendum.
Yeah.
Well, now, so go ahead and tell us that previous story of.
Well, I'm sure there are probably other examples, but you talk about what happened with Henry Kissinger and the foreign policy under Nixon and Ford in the 1970s.
Well, as I said, the Kurds have been fighting for either autonomy or independence going back all the way to the post-World War I period for over 100 years now.
And in the 1970s, there was a guerrilla movement fighting the Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Kurdish guerrilla movement.
And at that time, the Shah and Saddam were had a big dispute over the shot.
Our our waterway, our shot, our waterway in the river that divides the two countries.
And they each had claims to it.
And Kissinger was using the Kurds to attack Saddam to put pressure on him because the U.S. favored the Iranians in that situation.
In 1975, Kissinger managed to reach an agreement between the Iraq and Iran governments, and the Kurds were told they have just a matter of a couple hours to get out of Iraq because the Shah was no longer going to be backing them.
Now, remind me again, Saddam's role, because he was what, the vice president at the time?
No, no, I think he was president at that time.
Oh, I thought he did his coup in 1979.
You're right, I'm sorry, he was he was the vice president who was in charge of the negotiations on this issue, and he basically was repressing the Kurds, the U.S. and the Shah backed the Shah's position.
And ultimately, they ended up just dividing the waterway down the middle as a compromise.
So the immediate issue was not as important for the Kurds as the fact that they were no longer protected by the U.S. and the Shah.
And the U.S. basically gave the word, the okie doke to the Iraqi government to attack the Kurds.
And they did.
And 40,000 Kurds had to flee Iraq and go into Iran, many of whom were then repatriated back into Iraq forcibly.
So it was a real horrible and well-remembered incident in Kurdish history where basically they had relied on the U.S. and then got sold out by Kissinger.
All right now, so then in the aftermath of the first Iraq war, George Bush, Sr., encouraged the Shia Arabs and the Kurds, who I think you note in this article are Sunnis, but they're not Arabs.
So there's a separation there.
Yeah, the Kurds are mostly Sunnis, but there are some Shia Kurds in Iran.
In Iraq or Iran, you say?
No, in Iran.
There's some Shia Kurds in Iran because Iran is a Shia country.
And so understandably, some ethnic groups adopt the Shia religion.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Now, ever since the end of Iraq War One, so I said Bush encouraged Bush Sr.encouraged them to rise up and overthrow Saddam, but then he changed his mind.
Joel Wing, the great Iraq analyst, has written about this where they realize, uh oh, the Bata Brigade is coming across from Iran.
These are the Iraqis who were the, quote, at least traitors who had sided with Iran in the Iran-Iraq War when America backed Saddam against Iran.
And because because there had been a coup in Iran in 79 too.
You're on the same page with us, everybody here.
Keep it straight.
So keep listening.
Don't change that dial yet.
We have more exciting stuff coming.
Yeah, this is where America was looking the other way when Saddam was committing all his worst war crimes against the Kurds, the Anfal campaign, which was what in 1982 or 83 when he killed 100,000 Kurds, including with chemical weapons and all.
Oh, now, so sorry.
Ninety one, the Bata Brigade came across from Iran, and that was what made Bush Sr. realize he was just reversing Reagan's policy of supporting Saddam to contain the Iranian revolution.
He was.
Yeah, I mean, the bottom line was, if you overthrow Saddam, the Iranians are going to have a lot more influence because they had been cultivating Shia political parties for years.
Right.
But the whole time in the 1990s, I don't know.
I mean, I know the the Kurdish region was almost completely autonomous under American protection, no fly and no drive zone.
Right.
Basically, independent in the south.
Not so much.
But ever since Bush Jr.invaded in 2003 to go ahead and import that Iranian revolution into Iraq, like his dad chickened out on doing, as he would have put it, then ever since then, the Shia Arabs and the Kurds have been allies.
Well, certainly they were allies in the first half of this war anyway.
Well, against the Sunni Arabs, right?
They were.
Yes.
Let's go back to 2003.
The U.S. invades Iraq, overthrows Saddam.
I remember that we're going to be greeted with flowers and candy and we're going to remake Iraq in the model of the conservative Republican administration of power in the U.S. Well, it didn't work out that way.
There was a great deal of anger, particularly among the Sunnis, but also among the Shia militias and population.
The Kurds were the one sector, the one ethnic group that backed the U.S. because they had been, had a virtually autonomous region in northern Iraq since the first Gulf War in the 1990s.
And they were able to expand their power in 2003.
So the U.S., the only really solid allies that the U.S. had for its aggression were the Kurdish leadership in northern Iraq.
They were temporarily allied with the Sunnis and the Shias who opposed Saddam.
But they wrote a new constitution and supposedly the rights of the Kurds were protected, but the tensions were always there.
So the Iraqi Arabs, both Sunni and Shia, never wanted to see an independent Kurdistan.
They always wanted to see less power for the Kurds in the areas they controlled.
And that came to a head then with the independence vote last month when they said, that's it, we're not taking this anymore and we're going to go back and take back some of the territory.
And then, and yeah, and they sure did that.
And then, as you were saying, this was really surprising to me that Barzani resigned.
Yeah.
He blamed on Talibani's faction's failure to hold Kirkuk in the face of the Iraqi Shia army assault.
Right.
OK, again, by way of background, because I know this is really complicated if you've never heard any of this before, Massoud Barzani is the president of the Iraqi Kurdistan.
And he had extended his time in power undemocratically for years.
He was supposed to be out of office in 2013, and he kept extending his time in office.
And there was a great deal of anger at the corruption and the lack of democracy in northern Iraq and the Kurdish region by the Kurds themselves.
And there were several different parties in northern Kurdistan, sorry, northern Iraq or Kurdistan.
And the one of the reasons that the Iraqi army succeeded in taking back some of this territory was that the anger of Barzani was such from some of the other factions that they basically pulled out of Kirkuk.
Kirkuk is an area that is a mixed Kurdish, Sunni, Shia and other ethnic minorities.
But it's not a predominantly Kurdish city.
The Kurds had taken it in 2014 as part of that crisis that took place around the Yazidis and all that.
But there was always a good deal of dispute as to who actually should control Kirkuk long term.
But mainly it's about oil.
It's not about ethnicity.
It's one of the major oil fields and has been in Iraq for many, many years.
So the central government came in, retook Kirkuk because basically the Kurdish faction in charge of it, as you mentioned, a faction of the PUK or the Talabani families party.
And they gave up without a fight in a very, what was a very controversial move.
And now the federal government, central government controls Kirkuk, a number of other big cities and is trying to take back control of the border areas as well.
And then so ultimately they're going to deal or they're going to have a whole new war, you think?
Well, it's up for grabs because the Kurds are definitely on the defensive right now.
They don't have any international support and they're weak, except for Israel is the one country in the world that strongly continues to strongly back them.
And it's not clear what the Kurdish, the central government in Baghdad says that they're going to put central Iraqi troops at the borders right now.
Only the Kurdish Peshmerga, their army controls the borders with Turkey or Iran and even with Iraq.
And they've put a lot of, the central government in Baghdad has put a lot of pressure that they've closed the airports in the Kurdish region to international flights.
So if you want to get to Kurdistan, now you have to fly through Baghdad.
They've put a lot of pressure on the Kurds.
And it's not clear whether fighting will continue or the Kurds will be forced to concede.
Yeah.
Well, it sounds like fighting won't be necessary because after all, this is the major problem.
Well, one of the major problems with the idea of a one day independent Kurdish state there is besides the fact that all the other countries in the neighborhood have a big chunk of territory to lose if such independence was to occur.
And the takeaway from all of this is in terms of U.S. policy is when the U.S. meddles in the affairs of other countries, supposedly we can easily define the good guys and the bad guys.
We always back the good guys and democracy triumphs.
Well, it don't work out that way in practice, folks.
By invading Iraq, we've set the basis for all of this fighting that is taking place down to today.
Yeah.
Well, and but so on this particular point, they really are because they're handlocked because obviously the Kurdish region is divided.
But even Iraqi Kurdistan, if they really wanted to be independent, they can't.
They're completely at the mercy.
It's extremely difficult.
They would have to live up in the mountains in the first place because everybody attacks them all the time.
Right.
Basically, for there to be an independent Kurdistan in Iraq, you would have to have the cooperation of either Iran or Turkey, mostly Turkey, because they've got to ship their oil out of the country somehow.
They need goods to consumer goods.
They need trade and you need access to the oceans or ports or other countries or do that.
And if Turkey, the Kurds in Iraq had relied on Turkey and then they got stabbed in the back by them as well.
So you're absolutely right.
It's a landlocked country.
They would be extremely difficult for them to be independent without the cooperation of neighboring countries.
Yeah.
So and that's the thing you have.
U.S. sells out the Kurds again.
It's the only way it ever could have ended.
Same things happening or I guess about to happen in Syria.
Right.
Well, and I'm about to interview Elijah Magnier about all that.
So I guess I shouldn't steal too much of his time.
Well, that's going to be quite fascinating as to what happens because the Syrian Kurds are a different political faction.
They've got a different political ideology.
And what they're doing is very different from Barzani in Iraq.
But the danger is very real that the U.S. is going to sell them out as well after having used them to retake Raqqa and defeat the Islamic State.
I think if I was a Syrian Kurd, I'd watch my back.
So, Reese, why does Israel want an independent Kurdistan so much?
Well, the Israelis government has had a policy for a long time of using.
Non-Arab peoples in the region to divide the Arab world.
So they back the Shah in Iran.
You know, the Iranians are Persians.
They're not Arabs.
They had alliances with Turkey under previous governments, and they've been backing the Kurds for the same reason, which is the Kurds are not Arabs.
And there are existing antagonisms between Kurds and Arabs going back for various historic reasons.
And the Israelis want to exploit that, exacerbate it, make it worse and have a pro-Israeli, pro-U.S. enclave in the region.
Now, at the moment, the U.S. and Israel disagree.
Israel wants an independent Kurdistan.
The U.S. does not.
But that could shift at some point in the future.
But that lies at the heart of it, which is it's a part of a divide and conquer strategy that the Israelis have had for a long time.
All right.
Well, so is it in Iraqi Kurdistan now?
Is it Talabani is going to become the new president?
Well, it would be the Talabani president, you know, the family, you know, the original Talabani died just recently.
But probably, probably not.
That is the KDP, the party of Massoud Barzani.
His son is head of the intelligence agency.
His nephew is the prime minister.
And the KDP still rules, has dominant power.
So Massoud Barzani himself may play a behind the scenes role.
But his family and his party are going to, I think, continue to to rule in Kurdistan.
All right.
Well, listen, man, there's been a lot of arrests of a lot of really powerful people, including one of the richest of all the Saudi princes.
Yeah.
Hillary's big benefactor at the Clinton Foundation.
I forget how to say his name.
But I was reading this great thing at Moon of Alabama blog where he boiled it down and said, well, what's happening is the Salman family is taking on the Abdulaziz and the Nayefs and marginalizing all of them out of power.
I may be saying Nayef wrong.
I don't know.
And it's this the new crown prince, Salman, the guy that started the war, Obama and Trump's war against Yemen is he's the one consolidating his power here because his senile old man is about to keel over and then he'll be the new king.
I think that's a pretty good summary.
I remember this is a close U.S. ally in emerging democracy.
I had an interesting conversation with a State Department official once in researching my book.
And I said, why is it that the U.S. denounces countries like Syria and Assad, for example, as a horrible dictatorship?
And the U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia or others are somehow emerging democracies.
You know, you've got bad regimes on the one hand and pro U.S. regimes are always good guys.
And he said, well, because if they're pro U.S., there's a greater chance that they're going to become a democracy.
And of course, the example I raised with Saudi Arabia, it's never been a democracy since 1932.
The family, the ruling family has been in power there.
They export terrorism around the world through a very conservative interpretation of Islam.
And now we have basically a massive coup by the head of the new 32 year old crown prince.
And he is there's no court system.
There's no freedom of the press.
There's no right to demonstrate, to form political parties, all the things the U.S. claims it wants to see in the Middle East.
And the basically he's just like any Game of Thrones kind of dictator.
He's consolidating his power and in order to continue the war in Yemen and the attempt to isolate Qatar.
And what does Trump do?
He had Jared come just to give the okie doke last week.
So in case anybody thought had any illusions that U.S. was actually trying to back democracy in the Middle East, take another look at Saudi Arabia.
Well, man, I mean, Trump put on Twitter, he says, hey, he put this on Twitter.
Reese's goes, hey, you know what, Saudi Arabia?
What we'd really like for you to do is put a Ramco on the New York Stock Exchange.
It's very important to America's interests.
Yes, indeed, the banks and the oil companies who get to buy a chunk of a Ramco, that's the number one concern at the moment of the of the U.S. because there's going to be a lot of money to be made.
Man, that's really something else to see him doing business in that blatant kind of a way, you know?
Yep, it's pretty obvious.
Same thing about Kirkuk, the oil fields.
And, you know, in case anybody thought that there was other issues going on, I mean, this Saudi Arabia is the largest producer of oil in the world.
Iran and Iraq are numbers two and three, and they're all right there in the Middle East.
And by sheer coincidence, the U.S. has its troops and military bases all over the place.
Must be coincidence, huh?
Yeah, I guess so.
Well, you know, it's pretty obvious.
I think, I don't know, I already knew this, but when I was a kid, I guess I heard Noam Chomsky say, well, why do you think America's enemies with Cuba?
It's not like they're a threat to us.
It's that they serve as an example that anyone ever got away with defying the USA.
And so enemy, threat, danger.
Same thing going on with North Korea and Iran right now, of course.
Yeah.
Same thing with all the demonization of Russia.
Like, seriously, the American imperialists, they can't even accept just that.
Hey, the facts of life include that sometimes Russia is going to be independent from you.
It's not a major power anymore, but it's a pretty solid medium sized one.
And they've got seven thousand H-bombs.
And so, you know what?
How about just deal with that instead of never get over it?
You know what I mean?
It's crazy.
Yeah.
And, you know, Russia has its own imperialist interests around the world.
And it's a lesser imperialist power as far as I'm concerned.
And, you know, the U.S. always tries to create an enemy du jour.
It's China, Iran, Russia.
Because these evil powers, if we don't do something in the Middle East, for example, it creates a vacuum.
You know, I'm sure you've heard that theory, which is we've got to be in there.
Otherwise, these other folks are going to come in.
And it's just horse bucky.
You know, the people of the region can handle their own affairs without foreign interference from anyone.
By the way, as we're talking here, this I love this guy, Joel Wing.
He's a great Iraq war researcher.
And he always does like these tweets that are this day in Iraq war history kind of stuff.
And so today is the anniversary of the James Risen report in The New York Times about how Saddam Hussein had sent an emissary to London to meet with Richard Perle.
In order to offer to allow the army, the FBI, the CIA, whoever you want to come on in, look for whatever weapons you want.
You don't have to invade.
You can come on in.
And they said and Richard Perle told the guy, tell Saddam we'll see you in Baghdad.
But he didn't mean they were accepting the invitation.
They're going to roll in from Kuwait.
Yeah.
This is a total surrender.
The facts be damned.
Yeah.
I mean, in fact, as long as we're talking about that story, he said, you know what, if this is about democracy, I'll hold elections.
If this is about weapons, you can search for the weapons.
Is this about mineral rights?
Fine.
You can have the oil.
If this is about Palestine, we'll switch sides against Hamas.
Just don't kill me.
Not good enough.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Exactly.
The attitude towards Gaddafi and Libya at a certain point.
Was the attitude towards Assad until it turned out it didn't work.
Yeah.
The U.S. just throws its muscle around in the region.
That's amazing.
You think about all that didn't have to be.
And we're trying to do it now with Iran and the supposed threat of a nuclear bomb.
You know, Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
But it's the fear of that serves the same function as the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
All right.
Now, so one more question.
Speaking of Twitter, someone was asking about Saudi and I was answering on Twitter and another guy just chimed in.
Well, it's a consolidation of power by the young crown prince.
He is a moderate.
And in fact, there's been some reporting that he wants to, you know, tone down the extreme Wahhabist Islam.
Maybe that's part of the new deal with the United States that they're saying, look, we're going to make our economic and political military ties closer.
But you're going to go ahead and start cracking down on this stuff that we're sick and tired of.
Is that possible?
Well, the New York Times is full of that stuff this morning.
The I think we've got we've got to wait and see because the crown.
I mean, I know the guy's swimming in Olympic sized swimming pools of blood over Yemen.
There ain't nothing moderate about that, but I'm only talking about a narrow or the attacks on Qatar, you know, the attempt to isolate economically and militarily isolate Qatar.
You know, the war in Yemen is very unpopular in Saudi Arabia.
It's cost billions of dollars a week.
And I think part of what he's doing is consolidating, arresting and repressing people that don't have that don't agree with his policies.
Now, they claim that he's going after the ultra right wing clerics in Saudi Arabia and he's calling for the right for women to be able to drive, which is a relatively minor concession.
I mean, it's long overdue, but it's relatively minor given the overall oppression of women in Saudi Arabia.
So I think my assessment at this point is that any moves against the clerics have to do with him consolidating his overall overall power rather than any commitment to real reform internally on the issues of religious control.
But we'll see what happens in the days and weeks ahead.
All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming back on the show, Reese.
Anytime.
Happy to do it.
Very happy to have you here.
All right, you guys, that is Reese Ehrlich.
He's the author of Inside Syria.
And there's a brand new one's coming out.
It's not out yet, but it's coming out.
It's called the Iran Agenda and it's got a syndicated column nationwide.
We run it at antiwar.com foreign correspondent.
The latest is the U.S. sells out the Kurds again.
And I'm Scott Horton, check out my book, which Reese endorsed.
Fool's errand time to end the war in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot U.S. check out all the interview archives.
Forty five hundred of them at Scott Horton.org and check out my institute at Libertarian Institute.org.
All the antiwar articles I want you to read at antiwar.com and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
