All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
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Hey guys, on the line, I've got Dave DeCamp, News Editor at antiwar.com, that is news.antiwar.com and you know, a great percentage of those top headlines on the front page every single day at the site.
And well, this one, for example, Iraqi militias defy Iran by attacking US forces.
But my narrative, welcome back to the show, Dave, how you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Happy to have you here.
So what is the deal going on?
I lost track of who's rocketing, how many bases and when and all these things.
Please catch me up, man.
Yeah, well, I mean, it is tough to know exactly who is, you know, firing rockets at US bases in Iraq, because there is a lot of factions in the country and there's a lot of people, you know, that have motive to fire on the US.
The US has been bombing the country for 30 years.
So and it's also it's tough to tell.
There's all sorts of weapons in Iraq.
But this story, this is from last month before Biden recently bombed Iraqi militias in Iraq and Syria, which he did at the end of June.
And this is a story from the Associated Press.
It seems pretty well sourced.
They cite Iraqi Shia sources who said the leader of Iran's Quds Force, the IRGC Quds Force, visited Iraq and kind of urged Iran's allies in the militias to, you know, not fire on the US.
And it says a lot of these groups, you know, rejected the call because they have their own kind of nationalist reasons to fire on the US and the sources to AP.
They said that Iran doesn't have the control that it used to have over these militias.
And this this isn't the first time we've seen reports like this towards the end of the Trump administration.
If you remember when things were things were really tense between the US and Iran, Israel was trying to provoke stuff and there was more of these rocket attacks in Iran.
There was a few reports, one from AP, I remember one from Middle East Eye that said the same thing that Iran was urging calm because they had no interest at the time for an escalation.
And these militias were kind of rejecting it.
So anyway, so Biden goes ahead and he bombs more militias in Iraq and Syria.
And since then, attacks have really stepped up.
One week there is just about every day there was a rocket fire.
There's been some drone attacks on US bases in Iraq, the US embassy in Baghdad and sites in Syria.
But, you know, it's interesting because.
But no casualties are.
There haven't been.
There's like two, two, two people wounded.
As far as I know, there haven't been many casualties, though.
But they're what foreign contractors and not American soldiers.
I believe there was actually two American contractors wounded in one of the recent attacks.
OK.
And I'm sorry, you were going to say what's interesting.
Well, what's interesting is that the Quds Force commander that visited last month.
He, Ismail Ghani is his name, and he replaced Soleimani, the Iranian general that was killed by the Trump administration in January 2020.
And Soleimani, he was killed alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who led Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces, which is like an umbrella group of these militias that started to fight ISIS that they formed in 2014.
You know, so it's the guy who replaced the Iranian commander who was killed by the U.S.
It's kind of urgent calm.
And then on the other side of it, you have these Iraqi militia leaders that, who their leader was also killed in this drone strike.
And the U.S. hasn't left in their, you know, and they want him to leave.
So they have their own motivation to do this.
Now after, this is important to mention, after Biden's recent airstrikes, there was another report from Reuters, kind of similar to this one, that said Iran, an IRGC intelligence official, visited Iraq.
And they say that they urged these militias to retaliate against the U.S.
But it also said that they didn't want a major escalation.
And it was a little less sourced, but, you know, there also is a chance that now Iran is, you know, poking these groups to fire on the U.S., but they don't need to give them the motivation.
They have the motivation.
So, yeah, and then that ties into, you know, the situation in Iraq and the troop presence and Mustafa al-Kadhimi, the prime minister, who is under pressure to get the U.S. to leave.
And the U.S., you know, doesn't want to leave.
And so he's kind of in a tricky spot, too.
And that's a whole nother element of it.
Right.
And, yeah, so what exactly is that?
Because I think this the current prime minister is the first guy who's not from Dawa or Skiri.
And I guess I really need to learn more about him.
But I guess my understanding was he had really been groomed by the Americans and was seen at least by the Americans, at least at first, to be someone that they could count on to be more pro-American than pro-Iranian.
And then there's questions about how much control he has over whichever militias.
And, of course, it doesn't go without saying that every militia is backed by Iran or controlled by Iran just because somebody says that doesn't make it true.
But, you know, I wonder, you know, how much do you know about his influence, you know, or his his position stuck between the Americans and the Iranians and all these armed groups?
I mean, I'm not I don't know too much about his background, but I remember when he came in, it was he was kind of viewed as somebody that was kind of could be like a mediator between the U.S. and Iran.
And but he's found himself in a pretty bad predicament because the U.S. has been bombing these Iraqi militias.
It started at the end of 2019 under Trump and occasion.
And that's when things really got tense over there between these groups in the U.S.
And after Soleimani and al-Muhandis were killed in Baghdad, the Iraq's parliament voted unanimously to expel the U.S. and Khomeini came into office last March, March, not last March, March 2020.
And he's been engaged in these negotiations with the U.S. to get a withdrawal.
But it doesn't seem like they're going anywhere.
The U.S. has said, yeah, yeah, we'll withdraw eventually.
We'll talk about it.
But just yesterday, so today's Friday, the 16th, yesterday on Thursday, a BBC reporter tweeted that Brett McGurk, he is Biden's top Middle East official on the National Security Council.
He was he was in Iraq and he met with Kadhimi and other Iraqi leaders.
Just so we know who we're dealing with here, Brett McGurk, he was the U.S. envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition under Trump.
And he resigned in 2018.
The first time Trump said he was pulling out of Syria.
So that's that's who we're dealing with.
So but this BBC reporter tweeted yesterday, an Iraqi source told her that McGurk, they agreed to a step by step withdrawal of combat troops.
And some of us got a little excited when we saw that.
And but just like an hour later, she tweeted again, a U.S. source said, this isn't true.
We haven't agreed to this.
We think she might have checked with them before she put it out there to see if they agreed with what she was told by the Iraqis.
But maybe she's new.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was a bummer.
Yeah, it was.
But Kadhimi's office, the office of the prime minister, they released a statement on the meeting with McGurk that said they discussed mechanisms for a troop withdrawal, which is how he put it.
And there is a Newsweek story about it.
And the U.S. denied that that was even discussed in this Newsweek story.
So I think it is a lot of Kadhimi and his, you know, trying to show that they are working towards this withdrawal.
But the U.S. is just like, just doesn't have an interest in doing it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, how hard would they have to insist to get the Americans to go?
Because in reality, they don't need us.
Right.
So.
Yeah, no, it's true.
And I mean, half our conflict there is with pro-government forces, then what the hell?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's tough.
I mean, I don't know the internal politics well enough to know like kind of what they how they are able to stay without like more like without more of an opposition to their presence.
You know, the Hillary Clinton plan was always, well, let's just stay in Kurdistan and screw the rest of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wonder that might be a possibility being explored, too.
I wouldn't be surprised.
But the anti-ISIS coalition in Iraq and Syria, you know, they've actually been pretty busy.
And Biden's airstrikes were kind of falsely reported as his first in Iraq.
And it was the same thing with his ones in Syria that he did pretty quick when he came to office back in February.
They reported that as his first military strikes.
But the U.S. has been bombing Iraq this whole time throughout his whole presidency under the umbrella of the anti-ISIS coalition.
It's not always clear if it's U.S. planes dropping the bombs, but it's the U.S.-led coalition and they do the majority of the strikes.
And, you know, ISIS in Iraq is mostly in kind of the rural, like, mountains.
And in Syria, they're mostly in the desert, rural areas, which the Syrian government is mostly fighting ISIS in Syria and the U.S. is just hanging out near the oil fields.
But yeah, it's kind of nobody really seems to notice that this conflict is still going on.
He's been bombing Iraq this whole time.
And recently, the U.K., this is just like just such an example of how they view Iraq.
The U.K., they have a new aircraft carrier and it's on its maiden voyage.
And as part of its maiden voyage, it parked in the Mediterranean and conducted airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, just kind of as like a practice, like they just use Iraq as a little practice area to bomb.
And U.S. warplanes were on there and they flew from the British aircraft carrier and bombed Iraq.
Apparently, it was the first time since World War II that the U.S. carried out airstrikes from a foreign ship.
So it's pretty significant, I think, and symbolic.
And again, like just it's just their playground, you know, the Middle East to do this stuff.
It's funny how when, you know, there's a bit of a rhyme and a reason to it when it's these, you know, against Shiite groups, but when they're constantly bombing Iraq and Syria in the name of fighting ISIS, I guess not constant, but when they're from time to time on a consistent basis, I guess, bombing Iraq and Syria, it doesn't make news.
It makes news when they switch sides for a minute, although they never frame it that way.
But it's when they attack the Shiites that it makes the news.
But then it is implied or certainly people infer that Biden hasn't been bombing Syria.
It's at this one time.
And then now this second time, you know, rather than no, this is a pretty regular occurrence.
And especially in Iraq, where the only time they really stopped in 30 years was in 2012.
Even then, they're still doing some drone strikes in 2012 and 13.
So I don't think they ever really stopped in 30 years bombing somewhere there.
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In fact, you know what a friend sent me and I haven't got the clip of the audio yet, but a friend sent me audio from the Howard Stern show on the morning of September 11th where they're talking about kill them all and turn the Middle East to glass and whatever, whatever.
But before that, earlier in the morning, there's a radio news update that an American drone has been shot down over the no fly zone over Southern Iraq launch from the bases in Saudi.
And then so, you know, 45 minutes later, somebody attacks the towers and everybody says, I wonder why they would do that.
Yeah.
Wow.
From the morning of September 11th.
From that morning.
Yeah.
There was a report about the no fly zone.
Yeah.
It's pretty amazing.
Yeah.
Which if it had been a bombing by an American jet in the no fly zone, that would have been a little bit more to the point.
But yeah, close enough.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They shot down one of our drones.
Huh?
At least no one was hurt until, you know, an hour later.
So how many soldiers we got in Iraq and in Syria right now, do you know?
So there's about 2,500 troops in Iraq.
That's how Trump left it.
In Syria, it hasn't been clear for a long time, but the estimate is about a thousand.
And it's not clear if there was some reinforcement sent when Biden came in.
There are some reports that said that, but yet like the number in Syria is kind of in between 500 and a thousand for the past like year or two.
And that's another thing.
I mean, if the U.S. does end up pulling out of Iraq, which it doesn't look like they are, they would have to pull out of Syria because the operations there are supported by a big part by bases in Iraq.
So.
And now.
So in Syria, it's been reported, but can you give us some details on what they call the American occupation of the Syrian wheat fields?
Are they preventing farmers from planting and reaping crops there or what?
That those are details that I'm not too familiar with.
I know that there's reports that say that the U.S. forces have burned wheat fields.
A lot of it, it's the Syrian state media reports.
And it's just not, they're not really, you know, confirmed by other media.
So.
You know, we know that they're there and keeping people off the land to till it or what?
I don't know.
I don't know that about the wheat fields.
I'm not sure.
Right.
I mean, I've definitely seen pictures of them on the oil fields there.
And yeah.
And they've announced that.
But I think, you know, that's a project for both of us, I think, to look a little deeper into there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's a good point, because that's something I have been meaning to look into.
But yeah, the oil fields, you know, they confirmed it.
The Biden administration said recently, like, oh, we're not there to take the oil.
We're there to keep it from ISIS.
That's why we're at the oil fields.
So they're definitely there.
How transparent is that?
So and then I guess no, unless Matt Lee is in the room, nobody says, well, yeah, but you could just turn it over to the government of the country that you're occupying.
They'll keep it out of ISIS's hands.
They would seem to have a motive to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Crazy.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Back to the good old days of the Daily Beast conspiracy theories about how Assad is in league with ISIS all along when it was the Daily Beast all along.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so, um, you know what?
I had this other thing I wanted to ask you about, which was the Iran deal and the negotiations here.
And I guess I'm glad I didn't shake hands in bed with anyone.
But I thought, Dave, that the deal was that the Americans must have told Zarif, the that's the Iranian foreign minister there, that, listen, we have to be jerks about it for a few months because of politics and everything.
But then, yeah, we're going to shake hands and do the deal again, because hell, Iran's still in the deal.
It's America that's outside the deal.
And so, yeah.
And after all, the Biden administration is made up of Obama's people who did this.
You know, I'm being redundant with other interviews, I guess, on here.
But importantly, Sullivan, Blinken and Sherman were all deeply involved in negotiating this thing in the first place.
And so but now they let the election come and go.
And now your headline says Iran won't talk anymore until the new president is sworn in.
And so, man, I was wrong.
They really sabotaged the dang deal.
They would rather have Trump's policy of no deal and back to brinksmanship.
Is that it?
Yeah, that's what it that's what it looks like.
I mean, so the talk started in April.
So it's been a long time now that they've just been kind of dragging out because the Biden administration, you know, they refused to lift all of Trump's sanctions.
So they forced Iran to negotiate kind of limited sanctions relief.
So recently, Rouhani, President Hassan Rouhani, who's on his way out, his government submitted a report to parliament on the talks that said that the U.S. has agreed to lift most major sanctions and stuff.
And they've kind of been saying that, I think, you know, it is kind of his legacy, this deal.
So they've been pretty optimistic, the Iranian comments about it.
But kind of the whole time, the U.S. has been kind of dismissing what Iran says whenever Iran says something, oh, we're close, we reached an agreement on this.
The U.S. would say, no, no, we didn't.
So it really does look like they are just trying to sabotage it, because then now you have this Ebrahim Raisi coming into office in August, and he's viewed as a hardliner.
He's close to the supreme leader.
But even he said when he was elected, he delivered a speech and he endorsed the JCPOA if the U.S. returns to it.
And to return to it, the U.S. has to lift all of Trump's sanctions.
So it's still on Biden.
He'll still have the ability to restore the deal when Raisi comes in.
But I mean, who knows if maybe there is a small chance that they are willing to accept some kind of limited sanctions relief if they're taking the major sanctions off Iran's banking and oil.
And apparently, that report said that they agreed to lift the terror designation of the IRGC, which is a huge, because that was one thing that the Biden administration was saying that they wouldn't lift.
The Trump administration designated the IRGC as a foreign terror organization.
So that opens up sanctions on all of their members and all of their former members.
So of course, the more hardline IRGC types are not going to accept that.
But apparently, according to what Rouhani submitted to Parliament, they are willing to lift that.
But it's one of those things, I mean, we're just not really going to know now, I think, until Raisi comes into office and we see what he does and what the U.S. does.
But all this pressure that Biden is under not to return to the deal, I just don't see him actually just lifting all the sanctions.
It doesn't seem like he wants to, or anybody in his administration.
I mean, Blinken has been, he sounds like, he's like a polite Mike Pompeo.
He says just all the same stuff as Pompeo, but with a smile, I guess.
But he's just, it just looks bad, yeah.
You know, on one hand, Ayatollah is being very reasonable here.
I mean, I'm sure if you live in Iran, he's terrible.
But as far as being a rational actor in these negotiations and his treatment of his entire nuclear program this whole time and everything has been very careful and reasonable.
And yet that's his problem, too, right, is evidently over at Langley, they assess that he's a big bitch and they can do whatever they want to him and they'll make him give in one way or the other and that so they can just keep pushing it and pushing it.
And if Trump gave them, you know, they got to inherit all of these sanctions from the Trump government, boy, that's just too good to give up.
I really was wrong about this.
You know, Gareth Porter said this, he goes, nah, they love these sanctions, man.
The Trump people just, they took Obama sanctions and doubled them from before.
It's totally out of control now.
And the Biden people are coming in, in what they think is such a position of strength with those sanctions that they'll just keep them.
But you know, I don't know.
And I guess I saw what I'm not sure who it was, if it was Zarif or somebody, some bureaucrat said, you know, we could produce 90 percent pure uranium 235 if that's what we were trying to do.
Weapons grade.
That's, you know, the threat.
And they could do that.
I mean, I don't think that they have any motive to make nukes, but you can only bluff so long with their civilian program.
You know what I mean?
I don't know if if the the strength of it as it was back in 2015, which was strong enough to bring Obama to the table to deal with them, then isn't enough now.
Well, how bad can they ratchet it up before Biden will come back to the table?
And, you know, in good faith, they kind of the eye tolls back themselves into a corner here kind of.
And the Americans seem to just be happy to push the advantage, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
The you know, the Biden administration, they're pretty much doing the same thing.
It's kind of the same policy as the Trump administration, although they enter talks to restore the original deal.
They did it.
They kept all the sanctions on and use them as leverage and which is what Trump was trying to do to bring Iran to the table or so.
That's what they said.
They're trying to do.
And Iran actually came to the table.
So it's a pretty major concession by Iran.
And then, you know, when the talks first started, Israel, you know, blew something up inside the Natanz nuclear facility again.
And then Iran took the step.
They're enriching some uranium.
It's never really clear how much to 60 percent, which is the highest they've ever done.
I guess that was kind of their attempt at leverage.
And yeah, I think it was Rouhani that said the other day, if we wanted to, we could do 90 percent.
So yeah, like what what steps might they take to to get the Biden administration more serious about it?
It's a good question.
But then there's always the risk of I mean, Israel is just, you know, they've been carrying out these covert attacks this whole time and they keep threatening more.
And the IDF is requesting more funding if they have to bomb Iran.
So that's also like a real threat that they have to worry about.
So yeah, I guess we'll just see what happens.
And hopefully, you know, somebody gives in here in the Biden administration and they, you know, they come to their senses.
Because if you look at the strategy that the Biden administration, their foreign policy right now, like it's all about China and Russia.
So you would think that they would kind of want to ease tensions in the Middle East.
You know, of course, like whenever anything good happens, we can't really enjoy it too much because it's usually like for a worse reason, like they want to pull troops out of Afghanistan, but they want to put them somewhere else or they because they want to, you know, mess with China more.
They want to put more military in the South China Sea.
I think it'll be a similar thing.
If we do ease tensions with Iran, it'll be because the overall foreign policy is to increase tensions with Russia and China.
So I know, I hate that, man, especially, you know, you read a pretty sound article about getting out of Afghanistan.
And in the last sentence, they'll say, yeah, that way we can focus on China.
Like, yeah, why do people got to do that all the time?
So yeah.
And you know, the Chinese, they can hit back.
So I'm not saying it's OK to bomb the Afghans.
I've been against that the whole time.
But bombing the Chinese, you know, making sure to get yourself into a standoff with them where the consequences could be losing entire cities at a time, doesn't seem like a good strategy for protecting the U.S.
Great excuse to build up the Navy and get rid of some warships if you're in the warship business.
But otherwise.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, the China stuff is really getting scary to me, the way that they're ramping up in the South China Sea and all the sanctions and stuff.
I think just today they sanctioned some more Chinese officials over Hong Kong, they're sanctioning and warning U.S. businesses not to do business in Hong Kong and Xinjiang region, which I think that like economic, I mean, it would take a serious effort to actually like fully decouple economically.
I mean, I think that's kind of impossible, but we're kind of seeing steps towards that.
And then that's when, you know, things will become really dangerous if in 10, 20 years we're way less reliant on China and we have all these warships and bases surrounding them.
I mean, something could really happen there.
So yeah, and then it's not just China, it's also Russia, the stuff in the Black Sea.
I mean, the U.S. has just led a 32 nation, you know, exercise, military exercise in the Black Sea right after the U.K. sailed that destroyer, you know, 12 miles off the coast of Crimea.
Just really reckless and dangerous stuff.
And all right, here's what you guys do.
You just read Dave and keep up with everything at news.antiwar.com, you know, the front page right there on the site, all those top headlines.
That's him and Jason Ditz, of course, and all our great writers.
But check him out there.
The great Dave DeCamp.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
