04/22/15 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
We've got Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And so what I want to ask you about is all this great stuff that you've written lately about America's insane foreign policy in the Middle East, and especially as it pertains to these Republican candidates, what they have had to say about it and what they do have to say about it and that kind of thing.
But first of all, I wonder, I'd like to ask you an overly broad question.
What do you make of this intervention in Yemen?
Right.
Well, so it's been going on for about a month now since the Saudis and their allies, mostly the Saudis, but they have some support from other Gulf states and Egypt, started bombing Yemen, ostensibly with the goal of defeating the Houthi rebel group militarily, and according to their official statements, to restore the deposed Yemeni president back to power.
Of course, they're no closer to either of those goals today than they were when they started the campaign.
They have managed to kill hundreds of people and injure thousands more, and they've been driving the country into an even deeper humanitarian crisis.
Our role in all of this, I'm sorry to say, has been one of an enabler.
Our government has been giving them intelligence and logistical support, refueling their planes, expediting weapons deliveries, and it's all driven by this, frankly, paranoid and exaggerated fear of Iranian influence, which is identified with their connections to the Houthis.
The Houthis are Shiites, but they come from a different branch of Shi'ism than the Iranians do.
Iranian involvement in Yemen up to this point has been, as many experts acknowledge, has been trivial, and so the fantasy that is driving all of this, mostly in Erbil, but also in Washington, is that all of this is necessary to stop Yemen from falling into Iranian hands, which is nonsense.
Even the Houthis don't want the Iranians to control them, and there's really no chance that Iran is going to have this greatly expanded influence in the country.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's really something, isn't it?
It kind of brings up the question, raises it, whether they can ever do anything based on something that's true.
They have to, even if they, I think, mean what they say, they never even know what they're talking about, right?
I mean, there are those who craft the narrative and those who fall for it, Daniel, It seems pretty strange, doesn't it, that, as you say, all actual experts completely diminish the role of Iran in this thing at all, and yet, that's a good enough reason to have a war, apparently.
Yes, well, and then the perverse thing about it is that in the process of making it into an international war, the Saudis have been practically inviting the Iranians to take a more active interest in the conflict than they've had, and, of course, by targeting the Houthis and calling them Iranian proxies, which they have not been, they run the risk of actually turning them into that very thing.
In the middle of all this, while government-aligned forces and the intervening forces have been fighting the Houthis, no one's been fighting al-Qaeda in the Iranian peninsula.
The local affiliate of the jihadist group, which has been making great gains in terms of seizing territory, seizing installations and weapons, and so, in terms of, to the extent that we have any real security concerns in Yemen, the one that we have the greatest concern about has been made worse by all of this, which has been helped along by our support, our government support for the intervention.
So, really, on every score, whether humanitarian or strategic or otherwise, it's been a complete mess.
You know, I was just talking with Mark Perry, as I was mentioning, about his article in Al Jazeera, about how the generals, whether they're really against it, I don't know, but at least for PR's sake, they're throwing the president under the bus on this one, and, you know, whatever the politics are, from a military point of view, they can't figure out, and they put it very simply, why are we flying as al-Qaeda's air force?
That's right, and there was a lot of resistance, as I understand it, both from Central Command and from SOCOM, to doing this, because, from our perspective, the Houthis are very useful as a counterweight to the local al-Qaeda affiliate.
They may not like us at all.
Indeed, the Houthis are very sparsely against U.S. involvement in their country, which we can understand, but they are also very fiercely opposed to al-Qaeda and what it represents.
In fact, they come out of a revival movement within Shi'ism that was spurred on initially by a reaction to the promotion of Wahhabism by the Saudis.
And so al-Qaeda represents to them the same kind of sectarian enemy that they have been against from decades back.
Yeah, it's funny, you know, I saw a clip, well, it wasn't a clip, it was this kind of mini-documentary that was made about Yemen, where they're interviewing some fighters, and the guy says, you know, everybody says that I'm al-Qaeda this, I'm al-Qaeda that, why don't you ask me who I support?
I support Hugo Chavez!
Viva la revolution!
And I was just thinking, wow, you know, these are probably the guys who, if you ask the generals, would be closest to the American view, right?
Would be the socialists rather than the Shi'ite or Sunni fundamentalists fighting the rest of the war.
If you had to pick a side here, it just goes to show how ridiculous it is that we're intervening in this thing where nobody really knows who's who.
Well, and certainly the US doesn't understand the goals of the intervention, and doesn't seem to understand the dynamics in the country at all well.
The really, to me, baffling thing about US support for this is that it's a war that we can't control, and yet by lending our support to it, we will still get the negative reputation and the bad consequences coming back on us when things go wrong.
There's really no upside for the US any way you look at it here.
And most recently, they sent in Theodore Roosevelt, the aircraft carrier, in this area supposedly to maintain free shipping lanes, but more likely it was sent there to monitor this Iranian flotilla that had been coming into the area.
And that raises the real possibility of a clash that I think would be disastrous, not only in the immediate consequences involving Yemen, but could even possibly throw off the negotiations over the nuclear issue with the Iranians.
So there's absolutely nothing to be gained for us here, and only more trouble.
Now, so Daniel, you know, Mark Perry, he mentioned, as you said, Central Command and the Special Operations Command were against it.
He also mentioned the chiefs at the very top level of military power opposed this thing, and as you just outlined, the very obvious and important reasons why they would.
But then, so we have this massive standing army, and they are the saucer and the civilians are the hot tea overflowing, and they're unable to restrain the civilians from their adventurism.
But so what's behind it?
Why would these, you know, supposed weak Democrats go ahead and do, you know, engage in these military operations that the generals are telling them not to do?
Well, I'm not sure that we know what the real reason is.
There's been a lot of speculation that this is essentially the tradeoff that we make to reassure all of the Gulf states and the other authoritarian clients that we have in the region that are becoming nervous because of the Iranian nuclear deal, or the possible nuclear deal.
This is a way to essentially pay them off and to show that we're still behind them on other issues, even if we disagree with them about diplomacy with the Iranians.
I'm not sure that that's actually any better of an excuse than anything else I've heard.
That's the most comprehensible one that I've heard.
All right, now hold it right there, Danny.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Daniel Larrison from TheAmericanConservative.com in just one sec.
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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.
I'm on the line with Daniel Larrison, writer for The American Conservative magazine.
And he's been writing a lot about Yemen and Iran and politics.
Let me get back to the politics in a minute.
Well, it's all politics.
Now, in terms of the Middle East politics, you were saying one of the more plausible excuses, not that it's good enough morally or anything, but one of the more plausible excuses for the American policymakers deciding to do what they're doing here is sort of as a sop to the GCC, the Saudis and the other emirs and kings and sultans and rulers of the region, that just because we're doing a nuclear deal with Iran doesn't mean we're not friends with you anymore kind of thing.
And so we'll help you bomb Yemen.
We'll bomb Yemen together.
Do you think that they have any real reason to fear?
In fact, let me put it a better way, Daniel.
Pat Buchanan wrote an article where he said he thinks Obama is making a strategic turn here.
Guess what?
All of our allies are no good to us.
Israel, Turkey, Saudi, they're all backing the jihadists against us.
If anybody's fighting against our enemies, it's the Iranians and their allies in Syria and Hezbollah, etc.
And so here's Obama making that turn.
Do you think that that's right or is the whole thing just a damn mess or what?
Well, I think he's being accused by some hawks in the U.S. of doing just that.
They see some sort of larger detente with Iran as driving all of his foreign policy decisions in the region.
I don't see that happening at all, really.
Aside from some tacit cooperation with the Iranians against ISIS, there really hasn't been anything in the way of accommodation with Iran.
And it seems to me that the support for this war in Yemen is a prime example of how the Obama people aren't approaching the issue that way at all.
Because they wouldn't dare, basically, because of the politics in America, right?
Well, I think they have no incentive to pursue a broader accommodation with the Iranians at this time.
It would make it even harder to make the nuclear deal politically acceptable to the people in Congress.
And they're already running into plenty of opposition as it is.
So if it was seen as being part of a larger outreach to Iran, I think that would intensify opposition to the nuclear deal, which is exactly what they don't want to do.
So I suppose they must think they're helping to refute those criticisms by cozying up even closer to all of these authoritarian governments.
I remember just a few weeks ago, they also lifted the freeze on the remaining aid to Egypt.
And Egypt is a major partner in this attack on Yemen.
So my guess is that they're thinking, if we indulge them in all of these other ways, that will tamp down the criticism of the nuclear deal and will make them more willing to accept the results of that diplomacy.
The bizarre thing about it is that most of these states that are so fiercely anti-Iranian stand to benefit from the terms of the nuclear deal.
They're against the deal, sort of in the same way that the Israelis are, because it's not optimal or it's not total capitulation by the Iranians.
But in fact, the Iranians have given up quite a lot.
And so you would think that they would be satisfied already with that.
But we apparently have to keep buying them off.
Right.
Yeah, it seems pretty strange when people say, oh, no, this is going to start a nuclear arms race and all this, when they're going from a safeguarded program to a very, very, very safeguarded program.
I don't know why, even if it's not their nuclear program isn't being abolished.
I don't know why this should be the beginning of a crisis when the whole thing is being completely tamped down.
But now, so I'm not saying I'm for this, Dan, but Daniel, but it does make sense the way Pat Buchanan says that America would go ahead and tell the Turks and the Qataris and the Saudis and the Israelis, well, forget you, our enemies are those who have sworn loyalty to Ayman al-Zawahiri, including in Yemen and in Syria and and in Iraq.
And and those who have broken from him.
But then again, the caliph still invokes bin Laden, just not Zawahiri.
Right.
They call themselves bin Laden.
It's basically in the Islamic State.
So it it would make sense, even though, again, I'm for total non-intervention this personally, but it would make sense for America to say, yeah, we're allied with these Shiite groups, the Shiite crescent that our kings hate so much.
We're allied with them because they're fighting on the front line.
The the Syrian army and the Iraqi army and Shiite militias, they're on the front line fighting against the bin Laden nights who are the one and the Houthis, for that matter.
They're the ones that we actually care about.
And yet we're we're bending so far over backwards to please our allies.
We're helping them back our enemies, or at least it's making us oppose those who oppose our enemies.
So it does seem pretty far out of whack for just, you know, reassurance.
Oh, sure.
I think the.
The calculation.
Policymakers are making in Washington is that if we were to actually realign and side with the Iranians and their allies and proxies, that would put us.
On the side that is outnumbered and surrounded in the region, and they would also probably say that if we turn against the various authoritarian clients that have been supposedly cooperating with us in counterterrorism, that cooperation would go away and then.
The terrorism problem from these countries would get worse.
I'm not.
I'm not persuaded by that, but I can imagine that would be the.
The rebuttal to the idea that we should align with Iran, like you, I think the best course of action would be to distance ourselves.
From both blocks that are forming in this region.
It's it's long past time that we began to realize that the region is not as vitally important or essential to our security as we're constantly being told that it is that we could afford to stand off and stay out of these.
Conflicts and regional rivalries, we don't the beauty of our position is we don't have to pick a side.
And and we we keep feeling compelled to try to pick sides in these conflicts when we obviously have a very bad record of knowing which one is actually best for us.
So I would I would counsel against either that realignment or continuing with what we have.
Yeah, and especially when if there's a domino theory here, we're the one who knocked them all over.
They already got knocked over.
So now would be the time to go ahead and quit it.
All right.
So tell me about Jeb Bush.
He is, to me, the obvious shoe in by far front runner first here and everybody else's fourth tier really compared to Bush family connections in this society.
So if it ain't him, I don't know who it's going to be.
But but so tell me, what do we know so far about him other than that?
He signed all the PNAC letters in the 90s.
Well, as far as we are able to gather, based on the advisers that he's brought on his potential campaign, essentially under his campaign, he has a large number of holdovers from his brother's administration.
There are a handful of people that also served in his father's administration, but they're mostly older.
And I think they were included mostly as a nod of respect to his father.
He's not really listening to them on policy.
And I think you can see that in some of his past remarks.
For instance, in recent days, he was asked what his position was on supporting regime change in Iran.
And he pretended that he hadn't thought about it before and hadn't had a position.
And then I went and found that he had given an interview in which he pretty explicitly said in the wake of the Green Movement protests that we need to be forcefully supporting the opposition in Iran.
And I assume that that's not just a euphemism.
I think he actually means we should be trying to subvert the government through covert means.
I encourage in that interpretation the fact that one of the people on his advisory board is a former aide to Dick Cheney, John Hanna, who has written in just the last few months that now is the time for regime change.
So the idea that he doesn't have a firm position on this or he hasn't thought about it is not credible.
And I think he's trying to avoid talking about it because he probably does suspect that it is politically radioactive to talk about yet another regime change in another country.
And then, of course, it just reinforces all the toxic associations between him and his brother that are already causing problems, I think.
Well, and I guess there's really nothing but neocons to be his assistant secretaries of everything, right?
I mean, it's not like there are a bunch of James Bakers running around now.
I mean, God, think of the world we're living in where that would be so much more preferable to George Bush's staff, you know, W's staff.
I think that's one of the big problems that we have with all the Republican candidates, that whoever ends up with the nomination, they're going to end up being advised by the same kinds of people with all of the discredited ideas from the last decade, simply because they're the ones that are there and that have the nominal credentials to be in those positions.
So it's a real problem.
It's made worse by the fact that as far as we can tell, Jeb Bush, for instance, doesn't seem capable of expressing real disagreement with anything his brother did.
He doesn't want to criticize him in public.
He can't seem to think of anything that his brother did wrong.
And so in that case, I think it would be fair for voters to assume the worst and think that he would do many of the same things that his brother did.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Daniel.
I'm sorry we're over time, but I really appreciate you coming back on the show very much.
Thanks, Scott.
It's good to be here.
Okay, take it easy.
That's the great Daniel Larrison, everybody, at TheAmericanConservative.com.
He's got a great blog there.
I hope you read it all the time.
We'll be right back in just a sec.
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