02/26/15 – Musa al-Gharbi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest is Musa Algarbi.
He's a senior fellow with the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts.
That is S-I-S-M-E-C dot org.
S-I-S-M-E-C dot org.
And he's got this great new piece we ran as the spotlight at Antiwar.com, I guess, two or three days ago.
Maybe over the weekend, Monday, I don't know.
Anyway, the other day at Antiwar.com, it's at America.
Aljazeera.com.
It's called, and I think I mentioned it to you on the show the other day.
It's called ISIL's Barbaric Acts are Highly Effective Propaganda.
Welcome back to the show, Musa.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
Thank you for having me.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Very happy to read you talking sense to these people.
I hope they were all paying attention.
I hope they will.
So tell us, as it says in the byline here, you're addressing the reasoning behind ISIS's torture and murder of this Jordanian pilot by fire, for one example.
Anyway, are these guys just a bunch of madmen?
Or did they have some kind of purpose that it's worthwhile to try to understand and why they would do such a thing?
Yeah, absolutely.
So it's important to understand if you're trying to combat a group like ISIS, it's important to understand their strategic logic.
And unfortunately, because if you don't understand their strategic logic, then you run the risk of having your own plans and actions play into their hands rather than effectively weakening them.
And ISIS has demonstrated itself to be an extremely strategic opponent.
But what's striking is that their strategic logic is clear, and they're pretty upfront about it.
And that's what I was talking to you about the last time I was on the show.
I wrote an article for Al Jazeera America called Obama is playing into al-Baghdadi's hands, or he's falling into al-Baghdadi's trap.
And it was at the beginning of this campaign, and I was pointing out that U.S. actions might be playing into ISIL's strategic logic.
And unfortunately, over the past six months of the campaign, that has proven pretty prescient.
So, and this, we could go back all the way to the first World Trade Center bombing or the second one or what have you.
But it all seems to me it's the same double-edged kind of strategy that Michael Shoyer, the former chief of the CIA, has been lauding and explained on the show way back when.
That it's, they're kind of not even really bothering with this, but it sort of is there that just leave us alone.
This is a warning to stop or we'll keep fighting you.
But really, they don't, they know better than that.
They know that it's not really going to make people stop intervening.
And so what it's really about is plan B, which is to provoke an overreaction in order to get the strong to stumble and fall and hurt himself against the weak in an asymmetric kind of a thing.
And that was why it was so silly from the beginning after September 11th for them to pretend that this was just the cutting edge of the oncoming Islamofascist juggernaut.
When in fact it was just a Hail Mary pass to try to get us to go and screw ourselves, which is exactly what we've done.
Yeah, I mean what's striking about terrorism statistics is up until the overwhelmingly terror incidents occur in the Middle East.
There's very few of them that have occurred in Europe post 9-11 in Europe or America or any Western capital until Charlie Hebdo.
I mean that was the most recent one.
But for Islamic terrorism, the biggest one in Europe since 9-11 was actually Anders Breivik, the white Christian anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant that went on the shooting spree.
That was actually the biggest terror incident in Europe since 9-11.
So they don't have a lot of ability to get over and attack America or Europe despite the fear-mongering in the media.
They just don't have that capacity, especially not in an organized way.
So their goal, to the extent that they want to kill Americans or weaken America or anything like that, is to try to get us to go over there.
So that's one aspect of it.
But another aspect, which I tried to tease out in the article, is that what's critical for ISIS' sort of long-term viability is they need a constant influx of foreign fighters to come over to Iraq and Syria.
And that's another aspect of when unpopular actors like dictators like al-Sisi or the Jordanian monarch or the United States who are viewed as being tyrannical or imperial or something like that, when they do these kind of interventions in the Middle East, what you see is a lot of people who might not agree with ISIS' ideology or know a lot about it, but they want to resist those powers, and so they tend to flood the market.
And that's what we've actually seen since the U.S. bombing campaign began.
Foreign fighters in Syria have skyrocketed, now more than 20,000 of them, over the course of the campaign.
And so what we've been seeing is ISIS' manpower actually hasn't been reduced.
We've killed thousands of ISIS fighters, but they've got thousands of more, and their rate of recruitment has gone up as a result of the airstrikes.
And that's exactly what they want.
Yeah, I mean – and, you know, the idea – I mean, you can see how, from the point of view – you can imagine the highest level ISIS military council of Baathists and lunatics and whatever saying, OK, now, how bad of a fight with Jordan do we want to provoke?
Because it makes sense they want to provoke a conflict with them, but they don't want to get annihilated.
They just want to trip Jordan up the same way that they've gotten America to trip ourselves up.
I don't know enough about Jordan, but it seems pretty obvious that, you know, over the long haul, even though people are rallying around the king now to avenge the captive murdered pilot and all that kind of thing, over the long haul, the more the Jordanian, Hashemite, British and American sock puppet king intervenes against ISIS, the less popular he makes himself at home, and the more credibility he gives to them in a way maybe far beyond what you describe in terms of American airstrikes driving up their recruitment.
This could be huge for them, right?
And especially because they can portray the king of Jordan now as a sock puppet of the Iranians.
So here's what's mind-boggling.
The new Egyptian dictator, Fatah el-Sisi, has recently proposed that Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan form an Arab coalition to more forcefully intervene against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
And again, they could hardly ask for a better gift.
When you look at where ISIS recruits are coming from, the foreign fighters, they're overwhelmingly...
Jordan is one of the top providers of jihadists, both to the al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate, and ISIS.
Both.
Jordan is one of the top providers.
Egypt has been providing increasing numbers of people since the coup, and the terrorism problem has gone in Egypt since the coup.
Saudi Arabia continues to be the number one, one of the top providers of fighters to Iraq and Syria.
Even in the 2003 invasion occupation, the Center for Combating Terrorism found that Saudi Arabia was the number one country providing fighters.
So these dictatorial regimes, when they take part in the strike against ISIS, that's going to dramatically bolster the amount of their own citizens who hate these governments and view them as tyrannical.
They're going to flood the region to fight those governments.
What ISIL really wants, what would be sort of ideal for them, is to lure these fighters, and especially lure America or Europeans, into committing ground forces to the conflict.
Because the problem right now...
Well, hold it right there.
I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break, Moussa.
But when we get back from this break, we will in fact talk about those ground forces and the entire PR stunt of dressing up the American occupation.
Now look, we've got all these Sunni kings fighting with us, so it's legit.
More about that right after this break with Moussa Algarbi from aljazeera, america.aljazeera.com.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Moussa Algarbi, Senior Fellow at the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts.
That's s-i-s-m-e-c dot org.
And here he is at america.aljazeera.com.
ISIL's burning death of Jordanian pilot, strategic.
Done quite deliberately.
It's horrible as it is.
It's savage, but that doesn't mean it's thoughtless.
That's the point.
And you were saying before the break there that if ISIL gets exactly what they want, it'll be an American joint invasion with our allies in the region, and a real war again in the so-called Sunni triangle of Iraq and now in eastern Syria.
Is that right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Because the thing with the airstrikes is they do have a propaganda value in helping to drive foreign fighters.
But to the extent that they want to actually- But a bigger propaganda victory would be if they were able to sort of create a lot of casualties, if they were able to kill and capture a lot of Americans, to hold a lot of American soldiers hostage, to execute them very publicly.
Same thing with Jordanians and Saudi Arabians and soldiers, supporters of these oppressive groups as they see them.
So what they would love, because with the airstrikes, again, it's good propaganda, but it's very difficult for them to say shoot down a plane or shoot down a helicopter and seize a pilot.
They were able to with the Jordanian guy, but that's despite all of these strikes by U.S. and coalition forces where they were not able to do that.
So ground forces, it's much, much easier to capture and kill, to drive up the casualty count.
And that's what they're really after.
That's what they would really love.
That would not only drive up their foreign recruitment, but it would incur a great cost.
That would undermine the legitimacy of these actors.
It would undermine the legitimacy, for instance, of Barack Obama or whoever that's in the White House.
If you started seeing large amounts of casualties in Iraq with no end in sight, or Syria, it would undermine the King of Jordan.
For the same way, it would undermine Fatah al-Sisti.
It would undermine the monarch of Saudi Arabia.
So that's what they would really love, is to drive up casualty rates.
And that requires a ground invasion.
That's what they're really angling for.
Now, on the other hand, though, the Marines can kill the hell out of you, and that means Baghdadi and his best friends up at the top of this thing, too.
Are they really willing to risk dying themselves in this?
I mean, we're talking about politicians, after all.
Yeah, well, you know, what's interesting about these groups, so the CIA actually released a, well, they didn't release, it was released on WikiLeaks, a CIA report evaluating the high-value targeting in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2008.
It was released last month on BBC.
What that report found is that groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda have sort of designed themselves to survive if their leaders are killed.
And in fact, what happens a lot of times when the leaders are killed is, if a leader has been in charge of an organization for a long time, they tend to actually exert a moderating and conservative force on the group.
And so when you remove the head, the surviving members actually usually become more extreme.
It can make room for people with new visionary ideas that make the group more effective or more popular.
And we've seen that with the Pakistani Taliban.
Actually, that's sort of the al-Qaeda story as well.
In a world where al-Qaeda's leadership still exerted the sort of influence that it did or the sort of competition that it posed the authority of people like Anwar al-Awlaki and Osama bin Laden, if they were still alive, it would make it more difficult for someone like al-Baghdadi to really kind of rise to prominence in the way he has.
And ISIS has structured itself similarly to survive that kind of attrition.
What's more effective when you're trying to combat these groups, and this is true of organized crime and also terror organizations, isn't to focus at the top or the bottom.
Either one of those is going to be usually ineffective, but instead to target the sort of middle managers who work out the logistics of things rather than the symbolic heads and the sort of grand strategy people, but the people in the middle who work out the logistics.
The problem is those people are less visible.
It requires a lot of intelligence to find out who they are, where they are.
It's a lot harder to kill those people even than the people at the top.
But if you were going to do sort of targeted killing, those sort of middle people are who you'd want to go for.
Someone like Baghdadi, they would just make a martyr out of him, and they would sort of appoint a new caliph and move on.
They might even get more recruitment if you killed the caliph and made him a martyr.
But here's the thing, though, and I'm trying to play devil's advocate here, and so I can just skip it and just sum up as I'll be first in line to accuse the Americans, first the Bush administration one way, then Obama the other, in creating this crisis and getting the whole region into this mess.
So with an eye toward non-intervention or hopefully the least amount of intervention possible by the Americans in this, how do you see this ending?
Because it seems like, you know, the way Patrick Coburn explains it, these guys really have carved themselves out of state, and they may be surrounded by enemies, but none of their enemies can really take them.
The lines may be more or less where they're going to end up as far as Kurdistan and Shiastan and Assadistan in Western Syria and that kind of thing, but no one seems really ready and willing, able to invade, except maybe the Americans could try to drop the whole damn Marine Corps in there to sack Mosul, but even then that would be an absolute disaster that Obama clearly doesn't want to do.
And so I'm not saying I accept the premise that something must be done about this regime, but for sake of argument, accepting the premise, what is to be done?
It seems like a pretty bad conundrum here.
What are we going to do?
Lie with the Kurds for us or, you know, try to get the Turks, who seem to not mind ISIS that much, to invade for us or something like that?
Or what's going to happen here?
So the best way to fight a group like ISIS actually is to starve it to death.
So what you would want to do, because at the end of the day, so the awakening in Iraq that drove the ISI to obscurity, that happened before the surge.
It started happening before the surge.
And you don't actually, and it probably would have, I'm going to be releasing a piece soon that demonstrates that the surge might have actually had sort of a dampening effect on that.
And Baghdadi, as I point out in the piece, is well aware that the Iraqi and Syrian people at some point are going to rise up against him.
So what you want to do is make them weaker at that point.
So you want to cut off the flow of funds.
You want to cut off the flow of arms especially.
And so a lot of the money and arms and resources that, for instance, America has been sending to the Syrian rebels and the rebels in Libya, etc., have been ending up in the hands of ISIS.
So you want to cut that.
You want to try to restrict the flow of people.
So you're talking about border security in places like Saudi Arabia and Jordan to prevent people from joining the fight.
So you do those kinds of things, it will dramatically weaken ISIS.
This is because the whole reason they're able to sustain themselves is because they have a viable economy doing things like selling oil, etc.
So if you cut that sort of stuff, they won't be able to provide a functional government domestically.
The people will eventually rise up against them, and they're going to be in a weakened state to resist them.
So you try to contain them, and then you starve them off.
That's the best way.
If you do big ground forces, invasions, it's only going to make them stronger.
And the cost of definitively and decisively defeating them is more than I think anyone is willing to pay.
Over the last 60 years, only 7% of insurgencies have been won by military means.
And that's because usually counterinsurgency and counterterrorist methods tend to empower the groups that you're trying to fight.
If you're talking about a kinetic approach.
But most of that is so problematic itself, too.
I mean, another regime with sanctions.
I mean, it is, you can't help but know that, hey, they're surrounded by enemies, they're landlocked, they'll never have any open trade relations with any neighboring state.
So that's good.
But, you know, we think the price is worth it to starve a bunch of men, women and children into somehow overthrowing their regime in a new awakening.
That sounds just like the Clintonian policy that got us into this mess in the first place back in the 1990s.
I was referring to not starving the people, but starving the group.
So, for instance, preventing them from getting access to weapons, preventing them from getting foreign funding from places like Saudi Arabia, clamping down on bank money laundering, for instance, HSBC.
But open trade as far as food resources then?
No, I mean, that doesn't work.
That kind of scarcity, imposing scarcity, can actually empower the people that you're trying to fight also.
And we saw that, for instance, with imposing sanctions on Iran, imposing sanctions on Iraq.
They usually empower Russia even.
The leader becomes more popular.
The people become more dependent on that person usually.
Thanks for clarifying that.
I want to make sure we got that right.
Thank you very much, Musa.
Great article, and I appreciate your time on the show again today.
Thank you.
Thank you again for having me.
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