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All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
Almost 4,500 of them now, going back to 2003 there at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Introducing our friend Joe Lauria, reporting from Erebil, Kurdistan in Iraqi Kurdistan.
He's the editor of How I Lost by Hillary Clinton, the great book.
Former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, now writing for consortiumnews.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Joe, how are you, sir?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate you making the time to talk to us today.
So Iraq War III, looks like it's wrapping up the Battle of Mosul.
It's been since October they started the attack on Mosul.
Is it really over now or how close to it?
It's not really over.
Even though the Prime Minister Abadi said on Thursday that it is over and Iraq declared victory over Islamic State, he did that because they were able to take back the ruins of the Al-Nuri Mosque in the heart of old city of Mosul.
This mosque is from the 12th century.
It had a leaning minaret, was often compared to Pisa, and there used to be a Yazidi temple right behind it.
It was a stunning place.
I've never been there, but I've seen photographs.
I've never, unfortunately, got to Mosul before the fighting.
And it is, both are gone, that Yazidi temple was destroyed months ago, and now about ten days ago the Islamic State destroyed this mosque.
This is the mosque where al-Baghdadi announced the creation of the Islamic State in June of 2014, exactly two years ago.
And it's a picture on the back of the 10,000 dinar note here in Iraq of that mosque, always a symbol of the nation.
So taking back this rubble now was a symbolic victory for the Iraqi army and Iraqi federal police that are doing the joint operation inside the old city of Mosul.
There's still about less than a square mile of territory held by ISIS inside the old city, and there's tens of thousands of people who still live in this very, very, very narrow streets and moorings of that area, and their lives are in danger.
Thousands of people have died, civilians, from this attempt to liberate Mosul.
850,000, at least, have fled just from the western part of Mosul.
Yes, it's taken from October to now, and it looks like it's all but certain that they will finally crush the Islamic State's hold on this last neighborhood or so.
But that's not the end of ISIS, of course.
They still have some pockets of control throughout Anbar province and elsewhere in Iraq, and they continue to blow bombs up in Baghdad, killing Shia.
So you said it was Iraq War III, but I see a direct line from Bush's 2003 invasion to this battle still going on in Mosul.
Without the invasion, this would not be happening.
The Islamic State's leadership was a mixture of clerical people like al-Baghdadi and former Ba'ath Party officials and generals and whatnot, and Chechens and foreigners who came in.
But these Ba'ath Party people were those Sunnis who were dedicated to taking back the country from the Shia control, which is what happened after the fall of Saddam Hussein and the invasion by Iraq, by the United States of Iraq.
So without that invasion, there would be not this attempt to try to get back control of the country, of the fallen Ba'ath Party officials.
Now it looks certain that that won't happen, because they've lost their enormously important stronghold of Mosul, the second largest city in the country, with over 2 million people having lived there at the beginning of all of this.
But they will continue to blow bombs up and cause havoc.
They're still active in Syria, of course, although Raqqa is about to fall, it seems like, or maybe.
And they will perhaps inspire still attacks in Europe and in the United States and elsewhere.
So the Islamic State as a franchise is not dead, but they're about to lose a really important part of Iraq.
All right.
So well, there's a few different things there.
But I guess right to cut to the chase, it seems like the bottom line of the argument among the terrorists in the 1990s was who to attack and target and overthrow.
Should they overthrow the Saudi king or General Mubarak or Saddam Hussein?
Where to build their caliphate?
How to get started?
And bin Laden and Zawahiri decided, well, we got to attack the Americans first and we got to trick them into invading the Middle East and bleed them to bankruptcy and force their empire out like we did the Soviets in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan's help.
And then only then can we build the caliphate.
Right.
But so now it seems to me, Joe, like all America has done is prove them exactly right about that.
That you cannot.
This was the fight even when Zawahiri told Baghdadi not to build the caliphate in 2014.
He said, keep fighting in Syria or even Iraq, but don't go ahead and make an Islamic state yet.
We're not ready.
Baghdadi jumped the gun and Obama and Trump and the Pentagon have now proven bin Laden and Zawahiri exactly right that they got to focus on attacking us until we finally butt out of the Middle East.
And only then can they have their revolutions.
So I guess I'm a reverse truther, Joe.
I think the Americans have been working for al-Qaeda all along.
Well, it seems that way sometimes, doesn't it?
And they certainly have common enemies in Syria.
But I think things got out of control in Iraq.
We know about the origins of Islamic State, on the Syrian side at least, where there was this Salafist principality that was created by the Turks and the Gulf Arabs and some European allies and the United States to put pressure on Assad.
That was in that very famous now 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document.
We heard from John Kerry last fall in talking to Syrian exiles in New York by outside the General Assembly in New York that they wanted ISIS to move forward towards Damascus, put pressure on Assad to get out.
But the Russians came in, because the Russians came in because they didn't want to see ISIS or al-Qaeda take over Damascus.
So the United States was playing with fire all through this period.
And eventually it became a menace to their interests in Iraq in particular.
And that's why they have backed this joint effort by the Peshmerga and the Iraqi military to take back Mosul, which they had to do.
But I guess if you accept what you were saying, that al-Zawahiri wanted a U.S. invasion, they got the U.S. invasion, and yes, maybe they jumped the gun.
But maybe we're glad they did.
Although it's just impossible to see anything good that has come out of any of this with ISIS.
Yeah, it really is incredible.
You know, Obama always gets the blame from the conservatives for leaving Iraq, right?
We all know that this all happened because he ever pulled out of Iraq.
And now you mentioned, of course, the covert support for the Sunni-based insurgency in Syria that is what led to the rise of al-Nusra and the Islamic State.
But also, you know what Obama did?
I know you know.
In 2010, he intervened in the election and chose Maliki, and basically in agreement with the Iranians to stick with Maliki, when really, Alawi, the former CIA agent, former Ba'athist, former sock puppet prime minister under George Bush in 2003, 2004, he was a Shia, but also a Ba'athist.
So he had the ability to try to bridge the difference and make peace.
2010, Obama's second year in office.
And Obama instead said, well, it's going to be easier to get along with the Iranians if we go ahead and stick with Maliki anyway and override the constitution that all those guys supposedly fought and killed and died for over there.
And it seemed like if they ever had a chance for achieving those benchmarks and the reconciliation from back during the surge that they supposedly were surging in order to achieve, that that was the chance that they really had, was to have Alawi come in there and be able to cut a deal and hold the country together.
And it seems like he never gets blamed for that.
He only gets blamed for pulling American troops out, of course.
Well, I don't know if it was a mistake to pull American troops out.
I don't know unless they were tens of thousands of them or even 10,000 American troops in Mosul that they would make or prevented that from happening.
I don't think the Iraqi government wanted that anymore.
I mean, you have to understand that, too.
They wanted them out.
They were having, signing a memorandum of understanding to have them stay.
I don't think they were able to achieve this.
So they had to go.
That election in 2010 is lost in myths of recent history, absolutely, and in hindsight probably was a mistake.
We don't really know what Alawi would have done as prime minister.
But certainly al-Abadi here, al-Abadi, is certainly less strident in his sectarianism in regard especially to this operation in Mosul than Maliki was.
Now, Maliki still has control of that party, and many people here in Iraq think he still runs the country.
But in the relations with the Kurds here where I am, it's certainly been better with al-Abadi.
They have actually worked together to fight to get rid of the Islamic State from Mosul.
And the fears, and we talked, we had at least one or two other interviews before this got on this very issue of Mosul, and there were fears being expressed then by myself as well that once ISIS was defeated in Mosul, what would happen?
Would there be a free-for-all there with the Shia militia, with the Peshmerga?
But in fact they have coordinated this extremely well, the Iraqis and the Kurds, and the Shia militia as well.
Of course, with al-Abadi being a Shia, he was able to steer them away from the city.
They're fighting more out to the west of Mosul, near the Syrian border.
The Peshmerga are fighting out the east and the south, mostly, of the city of Mosul.
But inside Mosul itself it's been only Iraqi military, special forces, and federal police.
They will gain control of this city.
The real big issue coming then will be this announced referendum on September 25th by Massoud Barzani, the longtime leader here in Erbil, for actually independence from Iraq.
So that will be, I think, the really big next issue coming up.
It won't be a contested struggle for the control of Mosul, it doesn't look like, but there's going to be a hell of a lot of problems.
As 95 percent of the polls show, the Kurds will vote for independence, and maybe something like Brexit.
They'll win the referendum, but will it actually happen?
So that the negotiations that will take place with the Baghdad government are going to be extremely difficult.
In the meantime, the United States, which is still, even under the Trump administration, if he knows anything about this, are still sticking with the one Iraq policy.
There's a bill in the Armed Services Committee, House Armed Services Committee the other day, that passed a committee, and it calls for the cutting off of funding to the Iraqi Kurds if they go ahead with this referendum and break away from Baghdad.
Now, they've been strongly, extremely dependent on American funding.
The Peshmerga was given something like $450 million earlier this year because the oil prices crashed here.
They couldn't pay soldiers, government workers.
So the Americans saved them, and they have played a big role coordinating this attack as well.
And it's so far, you know, my think from October until now has been a long time, and there was speculation at the beginning that the ISIS would flee, but they didn't.
They stayed and fought, and they killed a lot of people.
And the Americans have killed people with bombardments, as we know, in very densely populated areas of Mosul.
So it's been a bloodbath.
The alternative was to let ISIS stay there.
But they won't go away.
See, in many ways this will be symbolic, but they're going to revert back, as you were saying with al-Zawahiri before, that they should continue just their fighting in the U.S. and continue working asymmetrically rather than taking a city and controlling and declaring a caliphate.
That's what they're going to revert to now.
We're not really out of the woods at all, even though they've liberated the city at an enormous human cost.
All right, hang on real quick.
I got to do this.
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Well, you know, I guess it's just like Iraq, or must be the same as Vietnam, which was before my time.
That's all you ever hear about Vietnam besides the deaths is just the absolute depravity of the dishonesty.
Like how much can you lie to somebody in a row before you just melt down or something, you know?
It seems like is the real problem here is there's no real honesty about how we got into this mess at all.
As you said, George W. Bush really caused this by overthrowing the Sunni minority government in Baghdad in 2003.
And then, of course, staying and fighting the whole civil war on the side of the Shiite death squads against the Sunnis for the most part.
But then Obama comes and Joe, you know, I've been talking about this the whole time.
Certainly Pepe Escobar and Patrick Coburn and all kinds of experts this whole time.
I mean, it's just I've been doing the show that long.
But ever since 2011, 2012, Eric Margulies, all kinds of experts, David Enders.
We saw this coming in the slowest of slow motion train wrecks, almost as bad as line us into war with Iraq that you can just see that, wow, Obama's really taking the side of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria.
And it didn't have to be that way at all.
And I mean, I'm here to testify and everybody can check the archives.
Patrick Coburn was quoting the Iraqi government officials in Baghdad from at least 2012, saying that America's support for the Sunni based insurgency in Syria is re-energizing the Sunni based insurgency here in Iraq.
And the Iraqi Shiite government forces didn't really have but the most nominal control over the majority Sunni parts of the country, like Anbar province and up in the northwest near Mosul.
And so, as Patrick Coburn told me, literally at least one year before the fall of Mosul into in the spring of 2013, that, yeah, basically all of western Iraq is up for grabs.
And it's not an accident that the Islamic State calls themselves the Islamic State, right?
They don't call themselves Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They call themselves the Islamic State, meaning they want a state.
And that was literally 365 days or more, more like 370 or 80 before the fall of Mosul.
And they just kept doing it anyway.
And they had to have known what they were doing.
We know that they knew what they were doing.
They knew because that DIA document was two years before the fall of Mosul, not one year.
And it said that they would join up, the Salafists in Syria, with like-minded people on the Iraqi side of the border and could create a, quote, Islamic State.
Those words appear in this August 2012 document, two years before the Islamic State.
That was seen by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by President Obama.
It was sent to the FBI, to the CIA, to the Department of Homeland Security.
It was sent everywhere.
So everyone knew that the risk of playing around with these Salafists in eastern Syria and, as you say, energizing Sunni extremists in Iraq, and that they would join together to create this monstrosity.
And they continued to play with that fire.
As Kerry said, they wanted to use it to put pressure.
That was the original, what the document said, they were putting pressure on Assad to get out.
And that, two years later, after Islamic State formed, they were still trying to allow it to do that.
What kind of funding it got, that's a big, murky area.
Whether the U.S. was actively helping Islamic State, I've never seen convincing, complete evidence of that.
But they certainly were allowing it to thrive and use it to get Assad out, risking that it could have taken over Damascus.
And this is just absolutely reckless policy.
And they're cleaning up this enormous mess right now in Syria.
But then a whole new phase is going to begin.
This is not peace in our time, in the Middle East, in Syria or Iraq, by any means.
Syria is much more complex than Iraq, with the Kurds and the Turks getting involved, and the U.S. and the Russians backing different Kurds, and the whole battle and race for Raqqa and what's going on in the southeast of Syria, where the United States is trying to prevent Iraqi forces and the Syrian government forces to link up there so they can open up another passageway from Iran through Iraq, Shia Iraq, towards Syria and into Lebanon.
This has been one of the main interests of the United States in this whole mess in Syria, was to try to break up the so-called Shia crescent, the direct link between Iran and the Hezbollah in Lebanon, which Israel is very strongly wanting to destroy and to get rid of.
They have their biggest headache.
And this fighting going on in the southeast of Syria, where the U.S. shot down a plane because they said they were threatening some of their back forces, it's all about this problem in southeastern Syria.
So the fall of Mosul's imminent, and there will be reasons to celebrate, although a lot of reasons to mourn, all of the human lives that had to be lost to achieve this unnecessary mess that the United States had a huge role in creating, going back from Bush.
And then the Obama administration, without any question.
But it is better to get them out of Mosul at this point.
But it's not over.
And there's more conflict on the way.
And who knows what the hell the Trump administration's real policies are, you know, on the campaign trail.
He made it very clear.
I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing because I don't want the enemy to know.
Well, in many ways that's carried over into this administration.
We really don't know what their aims are.
There's lots of speculation and analysis about what the aims are in Syria.
Right now in Iraq, we know that they want to get rid of the, they want to defeat the Islamic State.
But what happens after that?
They still don't want an independent Kurdistan, but they're going to go for it anyway.
You know, this is not something really to celebrate, that a huge mistake is now maybe being erased, at least in Iraq.
Well, so getting back to, well, that's exactly the question you referred to before about the sectarian cleansing and the worry about, well, so what are the Shiite forces?
Because after all, the Iraqi army, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's basically a Shiite Arab force.
And then, of course, allied with those Shiite militias.
And so they have, quote, liberated Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit.
And I don't know if they just kind of skipped Kirkuk.
Maybe you can elaborate a little bit about that.
But now they're taking Mosul.
And so now you talk about the question of the sectarian cleansing of Mosul.
But can you also refer back to Fallujah and Ramadi?
I mean, I know Ramadi was basically, the city was obliterated.
Has anybody even been able to come home?
And I guess the real question I'm trying to get at is, have the borders of Iraqi Shiistan really expanded further to the west now into the Anbar province?
Or really, no, that's all still going to be Sunnistan and Iraqi Shiistan is from Baghdad to Kuwait?
Well, there's certainly going to be a large population of Sunnis in those areas, but it's now more firmly under the control of the Shia-led government in Baghdad.
Kirkuk is not under the control of Islamic State.
They have cells there.
And in fact, in October, when this operation began, they piped up and had some dramatic attacks.
But they were put down, and it's not a totally safe area, though I know a lot of people go there.
I have tried to go there, I get fixes who don't want to take me there, they don't want to be responsible.
I just, it cannot compare, anyway, to Kirkuk, too.
There's a dynamic, again, is a split between Arab and Kurdish.
And it's controlled by the Peshmerga, right?
Well, they have a lot of control.
They put the Kurdistan flag up, for example, the Kurdish regional flag, and the Iraqi government told them to take it down.
There's been this battle playing out on TV news over the last couple of weeks.
But that's nothing like what's going on in Mosul.
So I'm saying right now there's relative peace there in Kirkuk.
But now, so what about Fallujah and Ramadi?
Are those going to be, are they like kicking all the Sunnis out and keeping them out and kind of taking that territory, or not, really?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
Although that's feared here, and yes, it's feared in Mosul, but the UN is fearful that they're going to be kicking out people who were collaborating with ISIS, that they will evict them, they might do worse to them.
That's a fear.
I mean, it makes sense to me that the Shiite parties and the Shiite forces would be, if they were smart, they would just settle for the land from Baghdad, including all of Baghdad now thanks to George W. Bush and the sectarian cleansing from that era, and just be, settle for that, all the land from Baghdad down to Kuwait and over to Iran, and not try to push the borders of Iraqi Shiaistan further.
But you referenced that, the so-called Shiite Crescent, as the King of Jordan, King Hussein, called it back when George Bush was empowering it in Iraq War II.
And this is part of the excuse that they're saying, why they want to have American Marines occupy East Raqqa, or East Syria around Raqqa, and I guess their plan, question mark, is to try to support the Syrian Kurds to form some kind of block there on the Syrian border with Iraq as they try to reestablish it, to prevent this so-called Shiite Crescent, which as the Moon of Alabama blog was pointing out, the Shiite Crescent has existed since before the invasion of Iraq, and even when the Islamic State was the Islamic State, the size of Britain there for two years, the Shiite Crescent still just took airplanes to, you know what I mean?
It's not like Hezbollah and Syria were completely cut off from Iran, Iran just flew over the Islamic State, no big deal.
So I don't know what difference it really makes, but it seems like it makes one in the minds of the Americans and their Sunni allies a pretty big issue.
Yeah, again, we don't know what the plans are for East Syria.
There's been talk for years now, since the Obama administration, of carving up a Sunni stand, so to speak, in Eastern Syria, through which you could put this pipeline from Qatar all the way into Turkey, and that was supposedly one of the reasons why this civil war began in Syria, is because Assad refused to accept that deal.
So is that on the cards?
Will the Kurds be one more time sold out in the end when they're no longer needed?
Are they going to be backed by the U.S. to create their own state in northern Syria, bringing them in conflict with the Syrian government?
There's all guesswork right now in Syria.
It's just too complex to know, and because we don't really know what Washington's planning, but we could just see what the battles are and speculate from that.
If Raqqa falls, if it falls to the U.S.-backed Kurds, we'll see.
We will see then what the plans are.
Right now, it's really hard to say.
So I'm not sure which my footnotes are for this, but I guess I was reading that when Trump came in, he said to Mattis, yeah, let's send in the Marines into Mosul and Raqqa.
We'll send them all in there and whoop them real good and this and that, and that Mattis said, no, we really like the Obama strategy of outsourcing this to the locals and trying to save, you know, only using mostly special operations forces, if anything, spies, but mostly air power and outsourcing it to the YPG, for example, and this kind of thing.
But then there was also, you know, there have been these strikes, of course, against the Syrian regime targets, and I guess I wonder what you think is really behind that.
They kept claiming they even shot down a Syrian jet, and then I guess two or three times other than the strike on the airport over the Bogus Sarin attack, they also hit ground forces a couple of times.
They say Shiite forces aligned with the government, basically local militias or Quds Force or Hezbollah or somebody, I guess.
But they said, well, they were threatening our guys.
Well, which guys?
And were they really threatening them?
Because it doesn't sound like Assad will be sending his forces after Americans, whether they're trespassing on the ground in South Syria or not, right?
So what was really going on there?
Some of the rebels they were backing, yeah.
Some of the rebels they were backing that the Syrian planes were near them.
There was never any direct threat to U.S. special forces there that I've heard of.
You know, Mattis, you say he wisely, I suppose, kept Obama's policy in Iraq by outsourcing it to the locals.
He may have learned something in Fallujah and not wanting the Americans to get deeply involved there.
But in Syria, I wonder if he's learned his lesson, because somebody is behind Trump rather taking this more aggressive and extremely dangerous stance towards challenging the Syrian government, knowing full well that that could brush the U.S. up against Russia and the horrific consequences that that could lead to.
So why test that?
What exactly is the U.S. trying to do by attacking that Syrian plane?
You know, Stephen Cohen, who's one of the best analysts, of course, on Russia, he pointed out, as we've discussed, I think, before, when the Lavrov and Kerry agreement was signed that the U.S. and Russia would finally form some kind of military alliance to fight Islamic State and al-Nusra and other terrorist groups, the one that Putin had called for at the General Assembly of the UN back in September of 2015, that it had a one-week period of testing out, and it was in that one week that Ash Carter, the defense secretary, then, oops, you know, he had an accident and killed 60 Syrian soldiers on the ground.
That was the end of that agreement.
It was sabotaged.
And that led to the Syrian and Russian ferocious attack to Libre East in Aleppo right after that.
So they just said, screw the Americans.
This, if Cohen suggests, that the shooting down of that Syrian plane was once again a way to sabotage a rapprochement, a detente of Trump with the Russians, that they might work together, because we're getting all these mixed signals all the time.
Are they talking?
Are they going to work together in Syria?
And then this thing happens, the exact opposite.
So he's speculating that Mattis did what Ash Capullo, Ash Carter, and sabotaged.
I have no idea if that's true.
He didn't say there was any proof of that, but I think it's an interesting thing.
We're left to this kind of speculation right now.
But it's so damn dangerous.
And then we've got this ridiculous statement from the White House that took everybody else in the government by surprise, and in the Pentagon, that they were going to launch another chemical weapons attack.
And then two days later, Mattis says they didn't do it, so it worked.
This is kind of a ridiculous story.
So you've got to look at incompetence as being a possible strong factor in what's going on in Washington.
Hey, listen, it goes without saying for all of these conversations that the man in the chair, the actual president, we all know, first and foremost, that he knows nothing.
So the only question is, who is he listening to?
Who did he talk to last?
Just like George W. Bush, maybe worse, right?
You couldn't find Syria on a map.
He didn't know the first thing about it.
He'll never know the first thing about it.
So take your gamble on which of his advisers gets to choose, you know?
Yeah, it looks like in Afghanistan, Syria, it looks like that he has been letting the generals take the decisions.
But when it came to the chemical weapons attack in Idlib province, and then the subsequent bombing of the Syrian airfield, if you believe the Sy Hersh story, it looks like Trump was the guy who called the shots, that he really asserted himself.
The last person he heard there was TV.
Yeah, he was going with television, or maybe Lindsey Graham called him or something, right?
They said at the time that his daughter saw the pictures and his daughter cried to him that daddy do something.
And as we all know, the narrative at the time was that everybody knows Assad did it.
And it's funny, right?
The irony that, well, it's good that he doesn't trust Madison McMaster, but it's always on the bats.
It's always because he's worse than them on whatever it is, you know?
Yeah, but the thing is that we can't necessarily assume that he won't do something else insane somewhere else that could cause a real problem, let's say with the Russians.
If he won out in that instance where the brass was telling him, forget it, there's really no evidence.
Again, if you believe Sy Hersh, there was no evidence that Syria did this, but he didn't care.
Yeah.
And I do believe Sy Hersh because Phil Giraldi told me that story on April the 6th, the day of the tomahawk attack.
He was on this show and told me the same thing.
The de-confliction and the Russians told us everything about the bombing and the target beforehand and all this stuff.
Military and intelligence sources, he said.
And I scooped Sy Hersh on that by two and a half months or more, so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So all Hersh did was confirm it in spades, because he's Seymour Hersh, the best journalist in the world.
And all they can do is just try to marginalize him because they can't confront his arguments, you know?
Who cannot publish anywhere in the United States, basically.
It's just a horrendous statement.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry, we're out of time and I've got to fit this thing in here.
So thanks very much for coming back on the show, Joe.
I really appreciate it.
No problem.
Let's stay in touch.
All the best.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Joe Lauria, formerly with The Wall Street Journal, now writing at ConsortiumNews.com and reporting for us on the war from Erbil, Kurdistan in Iraqi Kurdistan there.
All right, Joe, that's it for the show.
Thanks very much for listening.
Find the full archives at ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
