01/30/17 – Patrick Cockburn on Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ and the fight against terrorism – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
Introducing Patrick Coburn.
He's the author of, well, quite a few recent books.
And I actually have here, I'm sorry, Patrick, I meant to have this ready.
There's a brand new one out.
There's a compilation, apparently, brand new out, The Independent History as it Happened, ISIS Battling the Menace.
Is that not the latest?
Yeah, that's produced by the newspaper.
That is my thesis.
The biggest one is The Age of Jihad.
The Age of Jihad, okay.
And boy, yeah, is that a good one.
That's really 15 years of, a compilation of 15 years worth of the best reporting from the dawn of the terror war.
It's really incredible.
So I hope people check that out.
All right.
Now, this one is, of course, at the independent, independent.co.uk and reprinted at unz.com.
Trump's Muslim ban will only lead to more terrorist attacks.
And well, I don't know, what do you mean by that?
They're saying that this is to protect us, Patrick, that this will keep the terrorists away from us.
Well, of course it won't.
I mean, you know, it's, first of all, it's pretty bizarre, something which is meant to have been learning the lessons of 9-11.
But the collection of the seven states they mentioned, two of them are the big Shia states, Iran and Iraq.
Very unlikely that ISIS has anybody in Iran, because it's always trying to kill Shia Muslims and the Iranians are all Shia.
The U.S. is closely allied to Iraq at the moment and is heavily, in the last 5,000 troops involved in the assault by the Iraqi army on Mosul, which is held by ISIS.
So this is not a good moment for the Iraqi government, which is allied to the U.S. and suddenly it has to explain to its people why they can't go to the U.S.
So this is kind of all good news for ISIS.
Then, you know, what people are saying in the region is, you know, there are some notable omissions.
You know, obviously Saudi Arabia, although Saudi Arabia's 15 out of 19 hijackers were Saudis, so was Osama bin Laden, so was the money for the operation, according to the congressional inquiry.
And then, you know, what countries have produced the most ISIS Daesh fighters, you know, is Tunisia.
That's not there.
That's produced a very large number.
In Europe, you know, it's Morocco.
So it's a very bizarre list, you know, some Shia thinks it's directed at them.
And, you know, from the point of view of ISIS, you know, they see, they always mean one of the purposes of these terrorist attacks and these atrocities is to provoke an overreaction by the U.S. or whoever is targeted, an overreaction which is a communal punishment of Muslims in general.
And this is much in the interests of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda because then they can say, look, you know, these Americans, you know, they really hate you.
They always have.
And so it very much plays to the picture they want to present in the world.
And also, you know, if my ISIS knowledge will think, well, if Trump will do that sort of thing when we haven't made attacks, if we've made a few attacks, if we killed a few Americans by bombs or bullet inside, outside America, you know, maybe he'll do even more.
Maybe he'll follow in the footsteps of George W. Bush and invade some Muslim countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, which, of course, did al-Qaeda nothing but good.
You know, it's the ultimate frustration, I think, Patrick.
It seems like what you just said is the key to undoing this whole thing.
The understanding that they're trying to get us to overreact and do these stupid things that they want and desperately need a clash of civilizations and that they need for our side to make it real for them since they don't have any real power to do it.
They have to steal our planes in order to crash them into something.
And yet, how can people ever understand this?
This is a level of wisdom beyond politicians, media or the masses to ever really pick up, it seems like.
You know, it's pretty obvious when you think of it, you know, al-Qaeda before 9-11, you know, was a few hundred guys, you know, in the boondocks in northwest Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan.
They really didn't amount to much.
They had this one operation, which was to run out of Germany.
But otherwise, you know, it barely existed as an organization.
Then we have a massive overreaction.
We have billions and billions of dollars invested in new counter-terror organizations, you know, wars are launched costing trillions of dollars.
At the end of it, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, you know, are much stronger than they were in 2001 because, you know, they provoke this overreaction.
This is what they feed on, you know, but there's a peculiar lack of popular reaction to this failure.
Well, you know, and the new president, his point of view here is apparently just, you know, the cranky right-wing uncle who forwards the email of the day.
When propagandists say the problem is radical Islam, radical Islam, in other words, conflate ISIS with their enemies, the Iranians, that works on him, apparently, like he doesn't even have, I mean, if he knew he was lying, that'd be one thing.
But apparently he's just really bought this hook, line, and sinker that the problem is wherever people believe in Islam too hard, they commit evil.
And so that's where we've got to fight them.
Well, you know, sort of, this will play into a fundamentalist Shia, but also fundamentalist Sunni, you know, so it's, they will say, you know, they kind of want a clash of civilizations.
They want to say, you know, these Americans, you know, these crusaders, they really only care about Christians, they really don't care about Muslims, suddenly they have some evidence of that.
And so, you know, so it's very, this is very much in their interest.
The U.S. is pretty intimately involved with the Iraqi army and the Iraqi government in fighting ISIS in Mosul.
So I don't think, I don't think various Iraqi generals are going to be sort of too pleased that suddenly they can't visit their brother in the U.S. or, you know, and, you know, this will play into, you know, the Iranians will see it as an opportunity because they're kind of rivals, although they have common interests with the U.S. in defeating ISIS in Iraq, they're kind of obviously rivals of the U.S. as well in Iraq, so this is kind of an opportunity for them as well.
So I don't know, it's sort of, it's kind of crazy, it's self-defeating, but how far is it Trump, wanting to meet his campaign pledges, are these things sort of thought about at all?
Where does this weird list come from, you know, without any of the main countries where supporters of Al-Qaeda are living?
So, you know, it's, the thing is kind of, it's very weird.
Yeah, well, it's more like a list of countries we've been bombing, not that they ever did anything to us, like Libya, Sudan, Syria, as opposed to, as you say, you know, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, countries that were actually involved somewhat in these attacks, at least on some level or another.
But Yemen's on the list.
We have had attacks out of the Arabian Peninsula there, out of Yemen, but really only after we started bombing them first.
Yeah, I'm not a consequence of this, you know, but just the events of the last 10 weeks, a lot of foreign governments, you know, sort of thought, well, you know, Trump, you know, you have the campaign and then sort of Trump will sort of sober up, but you know, but things have actually got worse than they were.
So all these governments, you know, around the world, whether it's in Britain or Europe or in the Middle East, are all thinking, you know, just, how crazy is this guy, you know?
Well, now part of his shtick is that he doesn't want to overthrow any more secular dictators, and he did support the Iraq war and the Libya war, but apparently he learned his lesson after Libya, that we got to stop overthrowing these guys that shave their chin in the morning in favor of these crazies.
So that makes sense.
But then as you say, as we're talking about, he conflates the Shiite side of this whole sectarian conflict with Al-Qaeda and ISIS too, and so that might be just as bad if he wants to, he wants to say back off secular dictators, but go after the Ayatollah, well, that's no improvement.
Sure, yeah.
And you know, if he actually wants to do anything to Islamic State, you know, you need to be allied to those who are actually fighting Islamic State, which in Iraq is the Iraqi army and government, but they're all Shia, you know, and they feel targeted by this.
In Syria, it's the Damascus government and the Iranians, and again, they're going to feel targeted, and they probably felt that way already.
But certainly, you know, this will have been good news for Daesh, for ISIS.
It gives a sense of, it's very much give, you know, as I said earlier, will persuade Muslims from a Muslim's arena, somewhere between 20 and 35% of the world's population, feel they've got a person who is, you know, viscerally Islamophobic, but that's kind of good news for ISIS as well.
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Yeah.
Alright, now this is a real long shot, I guess, Patrick, because I just can't see it playing out this way no matter what, but he has said a few times that, you know, his daydream at least about how this is supposed to work is he wants to send in Mad Dog Mattis, the Marine Corps General, new Secretary of Defense, to go in there and knock the hell out of ISIS, quote, quickly, and then he wants to have the rest of his presidency without this state of permanent war that he has correctly described as a useless trillion dollar catastrophe, you know?
So I wonder if you think that really, maybe that is even possible in a kind of perverted sort of way that the Marines could be sent to Raqqa, to Mosul to finish off the Islamic State and then pull back out again and call the whole thing off.
No, it sort of can't be done, you know.
I mean, the Islamic State, these are quite a few effective guys, they're kind of monsters, you know, but they're military experts, you know, in Mosul, the government, the Iraqi government thought, you know, that they'd capture the whole city by the end of 2016.
They've only managed to capture the east of the city, which is the smaller part of it.
They haven't approached the west, which yet, which has 3,000 million people in it.
ISIS is actually attacking in Syria, fighting the Turks pretty effectively.
If you go online, look, you know, you see ISIS has posted videos of them blowing up 10 Turkish tanks.
They're attacking in other places.
So these guys are very much in business, you know, if the Marines turn up.
You know, this will not go down well, you know, first of all, there'll be a terrific battle.
Secondly, these guys will be a counter reaction to this.
You know, could it be done in theory, you know, if there was an agreement with the Russians and so forth?
It sort of could, but it's not really happening.
And you certainly can't begin by sort of producing this list that is going to offend your present allies or your potential allies.
Yeah.
Now, I'm trying to see it from Trump's point of view as best I can.
It seems like maybe he imagines that they could just drop a bunch of paratroopers in there or do, you know, some kind of really big bombing campaign to soften them up, send the Marines in there.
I don't know about that.
You know, they have a new sort of tactical system, which the reason they've been able to hold out in Mosul, you know, they dig a lot of tunnels, holes in walls through houses, you know, then they send in, you know, quite small squads, you know, that move quickly in the house, hold it for a couple of days, you know, snipe, open fire, open fire on the other side, then they quickly move.
So the Iraqi army or the US airstrikes can't really find a target.
Yeah.
Because they've already moved.
And so they really thought about this pretty carefully.
Well, and as you say, the civilians are all trapped there, right?
Yeah, they're all trapped there.
And, you know, they're also kind of frightened of what the Iraqi army might do to them.
Uh, anyway, I don't think they can get out.
Um, so although, you know, in theory, Trump's ideas might work, they sort of what he's actually done gives the impression that, you know, that actually there isn't going to be any new, any new policy.
Yeah.
You know, I wonder about that.
I mean, it seems like even the army and the Marines, they don't want to put their infantry back in there, right?
Special forces with laser designators for the Air Force.
That's one thing, but they don't want another battle.
And most of them do that.
Really?
I mean, that's, you know, so in other words, then, but the, the long-term bombing campaign against them, against the Islamic state, and then probably, I don't know, I guess against the Al-Nusra Front too, is going to go on for years and years and years.
So much, but it doesn't actually win the war.
And also the other side begins to get more astute, you know, and become skillful in avoiding bombs.
You know, you see all these video buildings being blown up.
But I doubt if anybody from ISIS is inside these buildings, because they've got more sense, you know, they're underground somewhere.
So, you know, that isn't going to help.
What I wonder is if, you know, if any of these jihadi organizations did, if Trump behaves like this without being provoked, what happens if there is a provocation, if there is a terrorist attack?
What's he going to do?
And of course, it's much in the interest of ISIS that they should provoke him.
You know, the great success of 9-11 was not the destruction of the Twin Towers.
It was when they provoked George W. Bush to intervene militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That was their great success.
Yeah.
Well, and Trump seems to be surrounded by all hawks who get all this stuff wrong.
Yeah, they were just a lot of experience, too.
Well, I mean, Mike Flynn, the National Security Advisor, was Stanley McChrystal's right-hand man during the surge, and yet he talks as though he can't tell the difference between the Bata Brigade and the Sunni insurgency, when he was fighting for and against them both at the same time back then.
Yeah, it's funny how these guys, I've noticed that, but their generals come to Iraq, and for a time they seem to understand what's going on.
Then they get back to the States, you know, but they get it all the following Monday.
Yeah.
By the way, someone, I had given an answer and someone interviewed me on a show, and someone had emailed and said that I was wrong to say that the Shiites had successfully cleansed Baghdad of Sunni Arabs back in 2007 and 8 during the surge, because even though that did happen, really they came back almost immediately.
Not really, you know, they're much more confined.
There used to be more mixed areas, there used to be more Sunni areas.
They're much more confined to certain areas now.
Yeah, I think you had told me before that you could really only find them in the very southwestern part of the city.
Well, there are bits in the west, and there's one big area, Al-Adami, on the east, but otherwise it's, you know, they're far less than they used to be, and it's quite dangerous for them.
Less dangerous, you know, it's not as lethal as it once was, but they're very much the minority.
Um, I wondered if maybe the guy that wrote me, his sources were Shiites, and I wondered whether maybe their statements there were driven by their anxiety by all of the Sunnis who had come after the Islamic State had declared sovereignty over Fallujah and Ramadi and Mosul, that some of those refugees had come to Baghdad, and so maybe they were overestimating those numbers.
People are very sectarian, and secondly, they're very paranoid, you know, so wherever you go in Syria and Iraq, you know, particularly sort of Sunni Arabs, they're often rather pathetic people, trying to, you know, supposedly being destroyed and living in tents, and then, you know, the Shia or the Kurds, they are, you know, it's full of sleeper cells, that's the phrase you hear a lot, sleeper cells that are going to attack us.
There may be a few, but most of us are just straight paranoia.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of paranoia, on the other side, the view is that everything is an Iranian plot.
I know that Omar Soleimani of the Iranian Quds Force was really in the news a lot back a couple of years ago for their intervention in Iraq, but did the Iraqi government trade U.S. power for Iranian power there, or is the Quds Force still part of this?
Well, you know, the U.S. is still quite powerful in Iraq at the moment, you know, so is Iran.
You know, there's rivalry, but there's also some common enemies.
But, I mean, are the Iranians fighting in Mosul right now, for example?
No, there wouldn't be.
In Syria, you tend to have, you know, Syrian units, Syrian fighters, but in Iraq, there may have been a couple of years ago, but there were very few.
There tend to be Iraqis who, you know, are sympathetic to Iran, but the actual Iranian Revolutionary Guard units and soldiers, you don't have them in Iraq in the way you have them in Syria.
And now, if, I don't know, Danny Davis, the Lieutenant Colonel, Army Lieutenant Colonel, who was the whistleblower from the Afghan surge, he wrote a thing about, because he'd been to Erbil and was, you know, studying the attack on Mosul as best he could, and he was saying that they were putting up, the Islamic State was putting up such a fight in Mosul that it was far from a sure thing that the coalition fighting against them would even hold together, since it's the Peshmerga, the Iraqi army, and the Russians.
You know, they didn't really expect this to happen.
They've lost three or four thousand dead and wounded from the counter-terrorism force, the so-called Golden Division, and the government won't say exactly what the casualties are, but they're very high.
And they don't have that number of really experienced, committed soldiers, and they're losing a lot of them.
Perhaps they will win in the end, you know, but it's not at all clear how much of Mosul is going to be left at that time.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you very much, Patrick.
I'm sorry.
I know you're in a rush here.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Patrick Coburn.
The Age of Jihad is his latest, and Chaos and Caliphate, and then The Independent has put out this one, Syria, Descent into the Abyss.
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