12/18/14 – Susannah George – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by ScottHorton.org first.
And just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
And it's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
Okay, next up is Susanna George writing for the Global Post.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey there, I'm doing well.
Thanks so much for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
A very important article that you've written.
Very interested to hear you tell the story.
It's called America is building a Sunni army in Iraq to take on the Islamic State.
Somewhat of an attempt to redo the awakening movement of 2006 and 7.
I presume only as you describe here without much cooperation from the government in Baghdad.
I guess first of all, let me ask you this.
You say the base is just outside of Mosul.
And that made me wonder, well, how far outside of Mosul on the Kurdish side of the line or really just outside of Mosul or how's that work?
Well, it was just a few kilometers from the front lines and you did have to pass through a Kurdish checkpoint to get to this base.
And it was in this kind of no man's land that exists all around Mosul now between the Kurdish controlled parts of northern Iraq and then the actual front lines where there's fighting going on with the Islamic State.
OK, and then so you have here General Khaled al-Hamdani.
Now, who's he?
What's his background?
Well, al-Hamdani was the chief of all of the police in Nineveh province before Mosul fell.
He worked very closely with the Americans when when U.S. forces were in Iraq during the U.S.-led occupation.
And he wants the U.S. to come back in a similar fashion to help his men out yet again, fight the Islamic State.
He says that he speaks very highly of the Americans.
He called the United States serious and he expects that his men would get the kind of help that he says they need if they're going to take on the Islamic State from the United States before they get it from their own government in Baghdad.
OK, and then so I know it's complicated.
I don't even know how to ask the question right, really.
What exactly could you how could you describe the relationship between him and his collection of police officers or former police officers and the tribes from that area?
Is he a member or a kind of a high ranking member of a local tribe or he's allied with local Sunni tribes?
How many people is he counting as his ranks here?
Well, he says that he has, you know, 6,000 men under his command.
I saw a few hundred at the base.
So there's definitely a discrepancy there in figures.
Where you actually see Sunni tribes playing an important role would be a little bit further south in the west of Iraq in Anbar province.
In Mosul, it really is these kind of former security officials like Hamdani and his men who the U.S. believes will be the backbone of this force that will eventually try to take back territory from the Islamic State.
Well, and boy, the way you describe it, I don't know.
It's almost like a Mel Brooks kind of thing.
The American, the CIA guys drive away and everybody relaxes and starts smoking Lucky Strikes and joking around.
They've got nothing to fight with.
And they're talking about taking a city of, what, a couple of million people with I don't know how many Islamic State fighters in it.
But it seems like the Islamic State has Mosul pretty locked down.
Did you, did it seem to you like, yeah, okay, these guys might be able to, you know, launch a major assault on Mosul in X many months?
Or is this just ridiculous or what are we looking at here?
Well, I mean, it's really hard to assess their capabilities.
But I think I quoted in the piece that Hamdani said that, yeah, no worries.
As long as we get the weapons that we need, we'll have Mosul back in a month.
I find that very hard to believe.
Remember, these are the same people who fled their posts in June when the Islamic State first attacked Mosul.
So we're dealing with the people who are operating at that level of command and control and dedication to what they're fighting for.
So that's kind of like your base starting point.
What they say, what Iraqi officials say is give us the weapons and we'll be able to do the fighting.
But the problem right now is that no one is willing to arm these men.
Because as I mentioned earlier, these are the same people that not only did they flee in the face of combat with the Islamic State, but many of them left their weapons behind, which is why the Islamic State is so well armed now.
They confiscated, they were able to pick up a lot of weaponry when they took Mosul that the Iraqi army and security forces left behind.
And also there's just this deep distrust between Baghdad, which is dominated by a Shia government, which seems very, very powerful right now, especially with all of the influence that Iran has gained.
They've helped Baghdad in the fight against the Islamic State.
And the country's Sunni community that's been alienated by years of increasingly, work increasingly sectarian policies by the country's former prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Abadi has made some improvements in that arena, but he has a long way to go.
And you can tell that the distrust remains because the weapons just aren't getting there to these Sunni fighters from Baghdad.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, man, there's so much to go over here.
I wonder if, does it look to you, I mean, obviously Abadi is also just a member of the Dawah party, like Maliki and Jafari before him, Jafari now the foreign minister.
Does it seem like he's even interested in doing this?
Because it sounds like what we're talking about is replicating the failed attempt to meet the benchmarks of 2007.
Everybody said the surge worked, but they never measured it by the benchmarks that were set out in the first place, because one of the primary points of the whole exercise was to get the Shiite run Baghdad government to go ahead and pay these guys to be the army and the local security forces in their own areas anyway.
And yet they had no interest in doing that whatsoever.
People pin it all on Maliki, but it seemed like America gave them Baghdad.
They didn't care.
They said, you guys can take the worst part of Iraq and beat it.
And so now they're supposed to want to arm these guys and pay these guys and integrate them in the way that Petraeus could never get them to when he had 150,000 people in the country.
Exactly.
I mean, it's important to remember that the Iraqi military that you see now in Iraq is the product of years of U.S. training efforts.
When the U.S. was in Iraq in full force, when it was occupying the country.
And it's also the product of billions of dollars in training and arms.
So to think that the U.S. can kind of sweep in and even in a few months, a few years, kind of build up an army that can take on the Islamic State is, I mean, it's not something that inspires a lot of confidence at the moment.
And I'm sorry because I always go on and on and ask too many questions or allude to too many topics in one thing there.
But back to the question of whether you think Abadi is even interested in trying to make this kind of a deal.
What do you think of that?
Well, yeah, no, I think that we have seen signs that Abadi is trying to do something.
That he is trying to improve upon the legacy that Maliki left him with.
The latest instance where we saw some real kind of change in policy from Abadi was actually getting this budget passed through Iraq's parliament.
And that showed that he was able to really kind of reach out to the Kurds in a way that Maliki really was unable to do in last year.
There wasn't a budget for the entire year.
And that meant that a lot of government employees in Iraq's north and Kurdistan weren't receiving government salaries.
And that created a lot of animosity between the Kurdish north and Baghdad.
But with regards to the Sunnis and building trust with Iraq's Sunni community, I think it's really important not to forget that Abadi did appoint a member of the Badr organization.
And this is a Shia militia who has been accused of horrific human rights violations against Sunnis to head the Ministry of Interior.
And that's a big move, an important move.
And it's one that Human Rights Watch has called a handsome amount of institutionalized militia rule.
Alright, now we're going to have to hold it right there.
Sorry to interrupt.
It's the break.
We'll be right back with Susanna George writing at the Global Post.
You can also find it at theweek.com.
America building a Sunni army in Iraq to take on the Islamic State.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Since 1989, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty, and free markets.
Sign up now for the Future of Freedom, featuring founder and president Jacob Horenberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and many more.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show.
And hey, look.
I actually did the slightest bit of work and found a better bio.
Susanna George does radio and print journalism for NPR, PRI, Global Post, and Foreign Policy.
A little bit better introduction than the first one there.
This article, I will direct your attention to theweek.com.
It's also at the Global Post.
Iran is building a Sunni army in Iraq to take on the Islamic State.
And now where we left off, you're talking about how Abadi from the Dawa Party, the new prime minister, has appointed a leader of the Bata Brigade to be the new interior minister.
And I think we're both kind of just sort of shrugging at what that portends pretty much unescapably, right?
Yeah, I think by Iraq's Sunni community, that was seen as a real slap in the face.
Because this is a ministry that is very powerful and controls a budget which it uses to buy arms that is comparable to that of the Ministry of Defense.
So it's a power ministry and for it to be led up by a member of an organization that so many Sunnis associate with wrongs committed against their people, sectarian wrongs.
I think it was definitely seen as a step back for Abadi in terms of his efforts to reach out to the Sunni community and kind of rebuild trust.
Right.
And I forget, I'm sorry, before the break, if you mentioned the Human Rights Watch or the Amnesty Statement there.
But Amnesty just did a report, of course, about how this is still ongoing right now.
It really has been going on all along, the sectarian cleansing of the Sunnis.
But now it's all kicked back up again since the declaration of the caliphate.
So the Bata Brigade, no one's even arguing that they're reformed and their days of power drilling people to death are long gone.
Well, I don't know about the continued use of power drills.
But I do know that they are one of the most effective fighting forces on the ground right now against the Islamic State.
They've had a string of victories in Diyala province.
Some of those have been with the help of the Kurdish Peshmerga.
Those are the Peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq.
And they're winning, where in other parts of Iraq, in Anbar, around Mosul, the front lines are pretty stagnant.
So the Bata organization is getting a lot of support from Baghdad.
They're getting a lot of weapons from Baghdad and from Iran.
Although the Bata organization does claim that all of their support from Iran goes through Baghdad first.
None of it comes directly from Iran.
That's what the organization's leaders claim.
Alright, now one of my favorite questions for reporters on this war is to try to gauge, and I know it's kind of silly to try to put a quantity on a quality, but if you could, on a scale of one to ten, could you compare what you think is the power of the Islamic State over Iraqi Sunnistan now compared to the power of Al-Qaeda in Iraq at its height back in 2006?
Because there's a lot of hope there, right?
People look back and say, hey, the local Sunnis got sick of Zarqawi's guys after he was killed and stabbed them in the back and got rid of them relatively easily within the space of a year.
So maybe we could replicate that.
I just wonder how it is that you gauge their relative strength.
I think it's a really interesting question, but I think it's very difficult to answer numerically.
These are two very different organizations with two very different end goals.
While there is a lot of hope that Iraq's Sunnis, after seeing the brutality of the Islamic State and seeing that life under the Islamic State has gotten a lot worse for them than life even under repressive, sectarian, Maliki policy.
From Mosul, we just hear horror stories of what life is like in Mosul now.
There's just zero society, zero government services.
Tikrit, the other major city that the Islamic State controls, has, I believe the last estimate I heard was that only 1% of the civilian population remain in the city.
So there's a lot of hope that Sunnis will see these poor living conditions and then turn against the Islamic State.
But what you're still missing in that is someone that will then back them and give them the weapons necessary to fight back against this very heavily armed group that's now managed to gain really important footholds in urban areas where U.S. coalition airstrikes aren't as effective as when the group was out moving around in these big convoys in big open areas of the country.
We'll see all this brings us back to the question of what the Americans are doing with even to the degree that they're backing this army of, well, even to the degree they're backing the Kurds and backing the Iraqi government as well as this Sunni army that they're building here.
What their policy is and whether it coincides with reality at all.
And the biggest question, of course, being whether Iraq is a place anymore, whether such a thing exists.
We've created George W. Bush's stand and a Shia stand in the south from Baghdad down to Kuwait and they don't seem to have much interest in attempting to rule Sunni stand.
That was why they never incorporated their forces because they said you guys can go to hell basically.
Those days are over.
It seems like the declaration of the caliphate, if nothing else, even if Baghdadi and the whole thing dies and the whole thing falls apart tomorrow, it seems like this is still the final declaration of independence of Anbar and I'm sorry all the, I don't know the names of all the provinces up toward Mosul and in the predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq.
It seems like, and you talk about this in the article, how if the policy really is holding Iraq together and this works, this could undermine that because we're talking again about creating a separate Sunni army outside of the jurisdiction of Baghdad.
So what Iraq are we even referring to anymore at this point?
Yeah, I'll try to back up a little bit and answer kind of the first part of your question and get to the policy part.
Sure.
So what I saw at this base that I visited was a pretty routine visit by a small group of U.S. officials who are meeting with Iraqi personnel and they're just assessing what their needs and wants are for this eventual fight to retake Mosul, retake territory that the Islamic State holds.
And initially, originally, this plan to rearm Sunni fighters was going to fall under this big piece of legislation called the National Guard.
And at the time that it was first introduced, this was a time when Baghdad was really asking the U.S. to up its involvement in Iraq, you know, to increase airstrikes, to increase support of Iraqi military.
And so Baghdad kind of warmly, or maybe lukewarmly, responded to the U.S. proposal of creating a National Guard that would create a unified military for Iraq that would include Sunnis and Shia and Kurds and would help to heal some of the sectarian rifts that allowed the Islamic State to come into Iraq in the first place.
At the time, the U.S. referred to it as a cornerstone of U.S.-Iraq policy because it was a way to kind of rebuild this trust.
But since then, it completely just languished in parliament in Baghdad.
And to be fair, Iraq's parliament does not pass very much legislation at all.
And the Iraqi parliament members who I've spoken to said that even though Baghdad sounded as though they were open to this plan to begin with, they never thought that this National Guard plan was ever going to go anywhere.
So the problem with arming these disparate groups without kind of a legislation, without a big piece of legislation kind of holding everything together is that you have these Shia militias, you're going to have these kind of armed Sunni groups at one point, you have the armed Kurdish fighters.
But the problem is that Baghdad can then turn off that supply of weapons whenever it wants.
And so there isn't any kind of long-term trust building that will go along with arming these disparate groups.
And then, even further down the road, is that once this fight with the Islamic State is over, if it ever is over, you're left with a military that's really just a bunch of militias who then will lack a common enemy.
And I think that that's what analysts and a lot of Iraqis, Iraqi civilians, are really worried about in terms of their country's long-term future.
Right.
And, of course, we don't even have a chance to talk about the western half of this war in what used to be eastern Syria now, but maybe another time.
I sure appreciate your time on the show, Susannah.
Thank you so much for having me.
That's Susannah George, y'all.
She's at the Global Post and also at Public Radio International and National Public Radio.
And I'm late.
We'll be right back with Jason Ditz right after this.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts & Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts & Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
What was the only interest group in D.C. pushing war with Syria last summer?
AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.
What's the only interest group in D.C. pushing to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran right now?
AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.
Why doesn't the President force an end to the occupation of Palestine, a leading cause of terrorist attacks against the United States?
AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.
The Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first and educating the people about what's really at stake in the Middle East.
Help support their important work at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey y'all, Scott here for Liberty.me, the brand new social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place, and features nightly classes, guides, events, publishing, and so much more.
Sign up now and you get the first 30 days free.
And if you click through the link in the right margin at scotthorton.org, or use the promo code SCOTT when you sign up, you'll save $5 per month for life.
That's more than a third off the regular price.
And hey, once you sign up, add me as a friend on there at scotthorton.liberty.me.
Fee free.
Liberty.me.