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All right, you guys know Danny Davis from him being a famous whistleblower in Obama's Afghan surge back in 2012 and now he's at Defense Priorities and writes for the National Interest and a couple other places.
We even ran an article or two at the Libertarian Institute.
This one, his latest, is in the National Interest.
Well, I interviewed the war-weary residents of Mosul.
The fight for that city is far from over.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Danny?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Very good stuff and well, so I guess obviously you're famously a whistleblower in the Afghan war, but you did at least one tour in Iraq as well, right?
That's correct.
And can you remind us what that was or when?
Yeah, actually, I guess in a sense too, I fought in Iraq in the original, in the Gulf War in the 1991 Desert Storm.
With the 2nd U.S. Cavalry at Battle of 73 Easting and then in 2009, I was a military trainer training an Iraqi border battalion between the Iran and Iraq border.
Okay, now that's interesting.
The tank battle thing, just trivia thing, that's the big McMaster-McGregor thingamajig, right?
That is correct.
Interesting.
All right, we talked with Mark Perry all about that, the history of that.
He's actually coming up on the show later this morning.
Anyway, cool.
So you do have some experience in Iraq previously and now it looks like you're really turning to journalism here and news analysis.
And this is, I guess, the second time that you've gone to Northern Iraq to interview survivors, basically refugees of ISIS and now the loss of, ISIS's loss of the city of Mosul, huh?
Actually, third time.
Oh, third time, okay.
I missed one of them then, dang.
All right, so you were in East Mosul talking to the people, did you get that far?
No, I didn't.
Ironically, we went all the way around it, got right up to it, but the last day of my, well, actually, we were supposed to have gone earlier than that, but we finally had everything set up for the last day of the trip to get into Eastern Mosul is where we were planning.
And at midnight, the night before we were supposed to leave at six, the Iraqis changed all the rules for journalists and said, actually, now you need all this other stuff in a three-day advance.
You have to tell us what you're doing and all this kind of stuff because, I don't know if you saw it, but ABC News ran a big piece just a couple of days before that about how some of the primary Iraqi security forces that were there in the city that were originally being hailed as heroes were actually conducting torture and murder of suspected ISIS people, whether they were or not, they were just murdering people and torturing them, and they ran an expose on that.
And so now then Iraq tried to get hold of the narrative, now made new rules.
I read actually when I got to the airport last night when I got back that they're trying to, they're actually preventing journalists from going to certain parts of the city because they don't want them to know what's going on.
Oh, man.
Well, and so the reports that we do have, I guess I haven't seen it, but I heard that there was even footage of Iraqi soldiers throwing Islamic state fighters off of some tall building as- There are 12, 12 reports from various media outlets ABC News being one of them, but there were 12.
I actually saw one produced by one of the local media groups there called Kurdistan 24, K24.
And unlike ABC News, which filters the video, these guys did, and it was hard to watch just what they're doing because they're basically just happy and enjoying themselves and doing just barbaric things.
You would have thought it was ISIS doing it to their victims instead of the other way around.
It was the same.
It was horrible.
Yeah, and now, are they saying, is it clear that this is the Iraqi army or are these Shiite militias or does it make any difference at this point?
Well, it's a little, it's the Iraqi army.
That much seems to be clear.
It's a little uncertain whether they're Shia or other, even some Sunni.
Well, actually, one of the ABC News piece was explicit in that one of the soldiers was Shia and one was Sunni.
The others are less clear, but I also spent some time with a couple of local intelligence officials that were fairly high-ranking in the KRG over there, which told me that despite public claims to be contrary, there are some of the Hashd al-Shaabi members inside of Mosul.
They said up to 8,000 of them.
I think there's 120,000 all together, but the rest of them are to the west of the city, which we have read about, but he said there's at least 8,000 that are in the city, and then there's others that are actually ostensibly part of the ISF proper, but they're Hashd al-Shaabi in their uniform.
So they're in the city, which is a big problem.
Yeah, well, and so now there's still fighting going on in the west, right?
I mean, they said that it was over, but then I keep reading that it's not quite.
That's correct, yeah.
It's not quite.
There were, again, when I got back to the airport last night, I read that there's still battles going on in certain pockets, which is to be expected.
The majority of the place has been cleared, but as was expected, there's gonna be pockets here and there.
There's also many of the ISIS members, just they would shave their beards and then pretend to be escaping refugees, and so there'll be sleeper cells.
I mean, this is gonna be going on for a long time.
It's not over by any stretch.
Yeah, well, and that's the whole thing, right, is usually, and we've seen this in the Iraq War even, where rumors of sleeper cells are kind of overblown, and yet this time, probably not.
If there was ever a time where fleeing civilians of one of these battles are to be considered at least somewhat suspect for that, this would seem to be it, I guess.
What are you gonna do, let them all come to Baghdad and then hope for the best?
And it's a little bit more complicated, I guess, in that, and in a bad sense, in that when you try to define what really is ISIS, it's a little bit more difficult, especially in Mosul, because they have a history of a lot of Sunni-based, what we would call insurgents, what they sometimes locally would refer to as mujahideen, which kind of is a general catch-all for somebody who's doing nefariously bad stuff in the name of jihad, specifically what that means.
What I discovered from talking to, and this is the subject of a forthcoming article, which was just utterly, unbelievably fantastic story of two Sunni Islam sisters, Sunni Muslim sisters, one of whom left Mosul in 2007 to become a journalist in, I believe it was Norway, and her other sister who stayed all the way up until after ISIS had captured the place, and she escaped in like October of that year when they captured in June, whatever, and then she continued to be sort of a ring of other Sunni Muslim women who were reporting nefariously from within Mosul, and they had a website in their language that they continued to publish what was going on inside, and it was like this, I mean, this clandestine series of women that were reporting from various parts of Mosul through her through this, you know, they were using pseudonyms and whatever, I mean, some of the stories that they did, they were all taking their lives into their hands by reporting because it was literally a capital offense to be found with a cell phone.
If they were caught sending a message, it was execution for them, and very often for their families, and they were just, you know, big heroes in my view of how they were, you know, standing up against people and not just giving in to the terror and the fear, but as part of the story that they were telling me, it wasn't that they started in 2014 when ISIS rolled in, I actually thought I was going, you know, had come up with something interesting, said that, no, actually, this started in 2012 with a bunch of protests against the government in 2012 that the Sunnis were being upset because of, they were being upset because the Sunni government was being, you know, bad to them, they were not being inclusive, they were being fired from jobs and all that, and they were protesting, you may remember, in 2012, 2013 against the Maliki government.
Well, as it turns out, that was almost like the last phase, not the first phase.
They said, no, it goes all the way back to 2004, and I since went back and did some research and discovered that it really, at least every other year from 2004 all the way up through 2014, there were large-scale, what we would call insurgent activity by the Sunni population against the Shia, Kurd, and Christian populations at various degrees, and so this has been an ongoing part of the fabric of Mosul.
So now that when you say, are there gonna be sleeper cells left over, it's really like, well, that's just the continuation of the fabric.
So one of the key questions I asked them, as well as these intelligence officials I discussed with, is, well, has that been bombed out?
I mean, did we, with all of the many thousands of people who have been killed since ISIS came in during the war when we've leveled the city and the Iraqi security forces killed who knows how many, the question is, well, did they get rid of that segment, and now then is there a chance to go back?
And he's like, he goes, well, unless they wiped out 60% of the population, which is what Sunni is, it's not likely that they got rid of that mentality that was already there.
And then, of course, as you're probably aware, if the Shia-led government comes in and does anything close to what they did before and rules the way they did before, I mean, that angst animosity is preexisting, and it will just be brought back to the fore.
So the probability that we have a continuation of that trend that started in 2004 is pretty high.
Yeah, I mean, it sure looks like it with the aftermath.
I mean, I don't know exactly how bad it's been in Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, and all that up until now, but it seems like, especially with, Ramadi was basically just flattened, and Mosul has been largely destroyed as well, judging from the aerial photographs anyway, and it seems like there's not much of a place for the population to come back to, all the refugees, and so then it's a question of whether they're gonna really keep them out and maybe even move Shia in and expand the borders of Iraqi Shia-stan further west.
Well, we don't see any evidence of that so far, but to your specific question there, your comment, I asked that question as well, and they said like in Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, there has been virtually no rebuilding going on at all, and so that's been, in some cases, almost two years since some of that happened.
So that's a way to kind of de facto cleanse the areas, even if they're not moving Shia in, they're at least basically refusing to allow a situation for the Sunnis to come home.
Anyway, I'm trying to just look a couple of steps ahead about all the reprisals back and forth here.
ISIS is no longer a state, but it's still a group.
Well, it's a mentality, or an ideology, as many have referred to it there.
Yeah.
But we interviewed this one particular guy in one of the camps for Mosul, just outside of Erbil, and he was emphatic about saying what she just said there.
He said, he goes, yeah, he goes, Prime Minister Abadi comes in and says, yay, we won.
He said, and then, y'all should, everyone should come back now and start living.
He goes, live?
Live in what?
He goes, my house has been completely rubbled.
There's nothing left.
What are we gonna come back to?
How are we gonna live?
What job are we gonna do?
Yeah, I mean, he was really getting off.
And you could just see all the heads going up and down of the people talking around him.
And you know, once you see the pictures, anybody can see, but when is that gonna change in the near future?
I mean, where are they gonna go?
Well, and where we started this was war crimes from the Iraqi government against people that they accuse of being Islamic state fighters with probably George Bush levels of evidence, it sounds like here.
Just look at him, good enough for me.
And so if that reveals the mentality going forward here, then looks like, and you know, it sounds like the American authorities are really kind of anticipating a real change on the ground there, right?
Or I don't know if they're just using it as an excuse, but we keep hearing them say, well, we have to have a permanent Marine Corps presence in Eastern Syria because otherwise, now after the fall of Mosul, we're gonna have this, you know, actual physical on the ground Shiite Crescent without a break in it.
And so, although that never really made much of a difference before.
Clearly the Iranians can fly airplanes full of guns to Lebanon or to Syria if they want to, and they have been.
But this is now the Shiite Crescent has become a literal Shiite Crescent, they're saying, now with the Shia backlash against the Islamic State and rousing the Islamic State.
So that's the reason why we have to escalate further in Eastern Syria to prevent that reality from coming true.
So I don't know how overblown the fears are in the first place there, but it sounds like the American government is reacting, although as though it's already a fait accompli.
Well, that's a little bit more complicated.
And that was one of the other things, that's one of the biggest things actually that surprised me that I didn't expect is that there is broad agreement that that is in fact really genuinely, physically happening on the ground.
There is a, and I saw a report and I can't remember which organization did it, just after or right before I left in response to these things that I've discovered, that the Iraqis, oh, I remember it was a New York Times piece, an excellent piece.
I'll send you a link to it if you wanna post it later for your listeners, but it's just an extensive research piece by the New York Times, which talks about how Iran has been speaking to and is now actually making what, I guess you could call it a Crescent, they just called it a road, a physical road that goes from Iran through Iraq into Syria, down Syria, and then finally all the way to Lebanon, which gives them physical access to influence things all throughout the region.
So they have the Iraqi government in their hand already.
They now of course have physical combat forces in Syria.
And then now with Hashd al-Shaabi and other, they call them popular mobilization units or Shia militia, 120,000 strong, virtually all of them take their orders, not from a body, but from the Ayatollah in Tehran.
I mean, that's literal, they actually have ground troops in there.
So they actually want to extend this so that they have some level of physical military force control all throughout this area, of course, which would be close to Israel in the latter part of this, which will certainly cause them to be upset.
And so there is some truth to that, but man, that gets into a big Tom's Slippery Slope if you say it's the United States' responsibility to keep that from happening or to push it back.
Because then you're talking about the potential of an actual interstate war, and it gets really, really messy when you go down that slope.
Yeah, well, and Iraq is no push, pardon me, Iran is no pushover like Iraq was.
They got mountains, they've got three times the population, the country's four times the size.
I mean, nobody's really talking about invading the place, but once you start some kind of full-scale bombing campaign against them or once the war gets that bad, it can be pretty hard to turn off.
And they're probably not very likely to just line up and get shot in a field like a bunch of Brits or something like that, which is what the Americans will insist that they do, right?
It's not fair the way these Iraqis keep sniping at us out their windows, they said the last war around.
And yet I got to point out here, and if people want to hear me go on for an hour and break all this down a little bit better, go to scottwharton.org slash show.
And the last episode, I really went over all of this stuff.
But I just, I have to mention briefly here that this is all America's fault.
George Bush is the one who put Baghdad in the Shiite Crescent, the so-called Iranian Axis Alliance there.
It was George Bush who put Baghdad in it.
And it was Barack Obama who put Mosul in it as far as that goes, because all of this war that we're talking about right now is the backlash against Obama's policy of supporting Saudi and Qatar and Turkey and Israel and their policy of supporting jihadist Sunni Bin Ladenite terrorists in Syria since 2011.
And when that finally blew up into the Islamic State in 2014 where they conquered all of Western Iraq, well then, oops, that was, you know, blew up in their face a little bit bigger than it was supposed to.
So then they went back to backing the Shia again to kick the Islamic State out of Mosul.
And so they're on both sides of their own war and they keep scoring against themselves.
And what they really don't want is the increase of Iranian power.
And that's what they keep getting.
In fact, you know, if anybody just types in Orin, Sunnis, O-R-E-N, that's Netanyahu's former ambassador to the United States who was in there in 2011 and 12, just type in Orin Sunnis.
And there's a YouTube of him explaining to Jeffrey Goldberg that we prefer, the Israelis prefer ISIS even, not just mythical moderates, but even ISIS and Al-Qaeda to Hezbollah and Assad because they're backed by Iran.
And Israel's obsession is Iran.
So, you know, that was a huge part of this policy in the first place.
And then now they want to cry that, oh, boo-hoo, Iran has been empowered, but it's only because George Bush knocked off Saddam for them, and it's only because Obama supported Al-Qaeda, which led to this giant pro-Shiite backlash against them.
And let me add to that a little bit.
One of the other things these two intelligence officials told me when I was asking them about, of course, we're talking about Mosul, but he said, all right, well, to understand Mosul, we've got to back up even further because we've got to go all the way back to Ahmed Chalabi in the 2003.
He said, he goes, look, I just got to say it.
You guys were played bad.
He goes, Chalabi was an agent of Iran, and many of his associates were.
And so they wanted to do things that were gonna help Iran.
Iran had been trying since forever, since 1979, when the Islamists came into power to battle Iraq, and they couldn't defeat them.
You know, the Iran-Iraq War for eight years, which was a stalemate, and all these things they tried to do after that.
He said, until George Bush comes in and you guys basically do their job of taking out the Saddam regime.
And so they've been working ever since to increase their power.
And then many of the things you just mentioned and some others as well, he says, they've been succeeding just brilliantly based on our actions.
So our actions have been helping the Iranian regime to do what they want.
Instead of harming them, instead of sending more troops to stop, what we end up doing is actually making it worse.
And empowering the Bin Ladenites in reaction all along too.
Well, in Iraq War II, empowering the Bin Ladenites in reaction.
In the Syria War, empowering the Bin Ladenites.
And then empowering the Shiites in reaction.
Now the whole thing is completely crazy.
And I don't mean to pin all of that on Obama because it was George Bush who started that in 2006, according to Seymour Hersh.
And as far as Chalabi goes, that's 100% correct.
And I actually had some friends get mad at me because they thought that by playing up that angle, I was sort of helping to demonize Iran maybe, which I'm totally against demonizing Iran.
I'm just being realistic here.
You know, I'm the best at debunking lies about their nuclear program, for example, that kind of thing.
I'm just kind of reporting the truth to you here.
And I'm blaming it all on America.
I'm saying every bit of the increase of Iranian power in the Middle East, if you got a problem with it, all that blame belongs in Washington DC more than Tehran.
I mean, yes, you're right.
You could blame the Ayatollah for sending Chalabi to lie to the Zionists in DC and tell them that, yeah, if we get rid of Saddam, it's gonna be really good for Israel and that kind of thing.
But ultimately it was the Americans who decided they wanted to believe that crap.
You know what I mean?
So there's a great article called How Chalabi Conned the Neocons.
And he just told Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the ringleaders of the Neocon, you know, Israel's fifth column in Washington DC that, oh yeah, the Shia, they love taking orders.
Yeah, no, they're not gonna rule the place and a lie with Iran.
They're gonna do whatever Chalabi says.
And, you know, we'll even build the oil and a water pipeline to Haifa.
And we'll have, you know, we'll turn on the Palestinians and take your side against the Palestinians and all this nonsense.
And they bought it.
They wanted to believe.
So, I told you that, they're 100%.
Hey, INC had an office in Tehran in 2002.
They had an office, like some people call it their headquarters.
It was not in DC, it was in Tehran.
Yeah, now, of course you added that.
I gotta give credit where credit is due, even if it's negative credit.
It's not just the United States.
It's not all of our fault because you also added a major, major component of Saudi Arabia who keeps contributing to this with their support of all these Sunni places and ISIS and others in support of terrorism.
I mean, it's so ironic that they're, you know, making all these claims against Qatar, who certainly is not, doesn't have clean hands about supporting terrorism.
And yet, they're one of the strongest supporters of a lot of these things that we're working against.
And so, it just adds fuel to that fire that works to our disadvantage.
All right, hang on just one second.
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And now, you know, it is true, too, that in a clean break and really even before that, the Yanan Plan, the right-wing Likudniks, Israeli nationalists have said that they want, in fact, according to Eric Margulies, he says Jabotinsky, way back at the very foundations of Zionism, wrote that what they needed to do was smash all the Arab states and destroy Arab nationalism and replace it with, you know, basically refine all these sects down to their smallest component so that there's basically just a region full of angry guys with AKs fighting each other and leave the Israelis alone and unable to, you know, actually challenge Israeli power in any way because they'll always be less than states.
And that may have a lot to do with the policy now.
I mean, I tend to think that that was not the deliberate policy during Iraq War II as much as just the result of it.
But, you know, to hear the Israelis talk about the war in Syria over the last few years, when occasionally they can be pretty frank about this, like when they told Judy Ruder in at the New York Times, front page New York Times, that, yeah, our policy is we'd like to see both sides continue to hemorrhage to death.
We wanna see both sides continue the war and see both sides lose.
But of course, both sides is many sides, right?
And it includes Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
And not just are they continuing to lose at the same time Assad has been losing this whole time, but they've been winning too.
They've made major gains.
They've advanced bin Laden's ball forward 75 yards on the field since, you know, Americans like football analogies with this kind of stuff.
They've accomplished the American people's enemy's goals for them.
Well, and that just really serves to highlight the futility of our policy that, you know, we're gonna defeat ISIS in Mosul and then in Raqqa and then the rest of Iraq, which is wherever they are, as though that's gonna mean something.
But here's the thing, ISIS, once you get them off the battlefield, that's only one name.
It doesn't do anything to the ideology, because as you mentioned, there's still a viable ideology or Al-Qaeda itself, and then all these offshoots like Ansar al-Islam and just a number of others, and others that are not as common known here, but are all over is Sunni Muslim ideology.
It's the same, it just has a different name.
Those aren't going anywhere.
I mean, they're all over the place.
So unless you're gonna say we're gonna wipe out all the Sunni Muslim organizations, I mean, this war can never end.
And of course, you would literally have to kill tens of thousands of people, probably hundreds of thousands to actually do that, and of course, then you're no better than some of these despots we fought against in the past.
We just can't do that.
So you cannot, Scott, let me emphasize this as strong as I can, you cannot heal your way out of this situation.
And all you're gonna do is expand the very war you're trying to prevent in the attempt to do so.
Yeah, well, you know, people should remember too that the Iraqis aren't used to living like Saudis, right?
I mean, under Saddam Hussein, women could wear blue jeans and no hat to teach college.
I mean, it's not like it was literally Western Europe, but that is literally true.
I mean, it was, because Baathism was sort of a pseudo Marxist kind of a thing.
I mean, it was more of a fascist kind of right wing deal in practice, but it had a lot of kind of Marxist precepts and some of those have gender equality and that kind of thing was part of that.
Religious minorities were protected, like the Quran mandates that they be protected.
And so, I mean, this is all a result of George Bush's and Barack Obama's wars.
And, you know, it seems like, I mean, I'm not the world's greatest Iraqi anthropologist or whatever, but I think I've learned that genuine grassroots power in Iraqi Sunni stand typically is tribal power.
It's not the power of religious authorities.
It's not the power of Baathist nationalists.
It's the power of the different tribes.
And it used to be that the tribes had a deal with the Baathists.
And then during Iraq War II, the tribes had a deal with, I guess, the Baathists and the Jihadists, but eventually marginalized the Jihadists.
But then in Iraq War III, the Jihadists, you know, they basically got the dominant spot and made their alliance with the Baathists and kind of marginalized the tribal authorities.
But it seems like overall, you know, and who knows exactly who's gonna do what and what's gonna happen or anything like that, but it seems like if we didn't have all this intervention, the most likely scenario, once all this stuff sifts out, is that you would have tribal and maybe Baathist dominance and the Jihadists would tend to be more marginalized.
Because remember in 2006, when all these Saudis and Egyptians started bossing all the local Sunnis around, they started shooting them.
And it was the Iraqi Anbar Awakening, a full year before Petraeus even got there and started bribing them and taking credit for it, right?
Because they were like, you can't push us around.
We're from here, not you.
So I'm a little bit hopeful about that.
I mean, certainly as much, the more pressure they're under from the Shia, the more strength that probably gives the Bin Ladenites.
But I sort of hope that there could be a future, yeah.
Two Sunni sisters that I interviewed, when we got to the part about, well, what's next or what can be done to make things better?
I expected them to say something about, well, we need the Shia government to be more inclusive and all this kind of stuff.
But instead she says, no.
She said, the only chance Mosul has is that when the resulting government is if you ban all religious parties.
We just need secular people who come in who care about the people, who care about serving there, but you get rid of all of these religious people.
And these are religious people saying this.
They want a secular government that's not religiously, ideologically motivated because they wanna live like we described prior to Saddam.
Saddam was a brutal dictator and he killed tens of thousands of people.
That's beyond dispute.
But it wasn't as widespread by any stretch of what they have today.
And people can remember that they had a decent lifestyle prior to our invasion over there.
And they wanna go back to that, which is what you were talking about, with blue jeans and makeup.
That was a big deal for some of these women.
They can't even, they were just being brutalized by this ISIS ideology.
And they just wanna go back to living a regular life with the head before and they don't want any religious groups.
Yeah, and well, of course, the people living under the Shia religious authorities are just as oppressed too.
I remember an article about 10 years ago now, probably in the Christian Science Monitor and the headline was, to them, a woman's smile is a crime.
And this wasn't about the Bin Ladenites.
This was about the Ayatollahs down in, or the religious rule down in Basra under the Shiite groups.
And those are the people that we put in power there.
But yeah, and of course, living well.
In the 1990s, they were under blockade, right?
It was horrible.
And before that, there was a war that America backed both sides of.
So those poor people haven't had peace at all.
But for them to look back at the 1990s wistfully, or the very early 2000s as the good old days, that just goes to show you, yes, Saddam might've been the most brutal dictator around, but that's nothing compared to the, certainly more than a million people who have died in the various cleansing campaigns back and forth since then.
And then it's ironic that I also came across two Iranian, what do you call it?
I guess refugees from Iran who fled to Iraq because they had ran afoul of the Taliban, I mean, Mullah government there in Iran because they were trying to be independent.
Well, they were telling me what life was like in there for most people.
And they said, it's almost like a paradise compared to Iraq.
I mean, do we have freedoms?
Because if you're not standing up against the government, you've got plenty of freedoms.
I mean, parts of Tehran, you'd think were parts of Western Europe, even in some nice places.
He goes, there's limits you can go.
He said, and we found out because when we tried to, one of them was actually published an article that was slightly in opposition of the government and he was thrown in jail for a year and then finally escaped and left.
But they were both saying that, the regular life of just regular people, if you don't do that, it's okay.
And no one can say that in Iraq.
Yeah.
That's what I've heard of standing for.
Right.
And now, I'm sorry, I'm trying to remember, was it your piece?
I'm scanning through it here.
I read a couple lately, but one of them, no, it's you.
Yeah, it was you.
You talk about Muqtada al-Sadr, who's an extremely powerful Shiite leader, or at least was.
I'm not sure how many of his people are in the government now, but he certainly has grassroots power among the Shiite population there.
And he's always been, really, despite all the accusations, I think the least Iranian-tied of the Shiite leaders and has, even going back to 2004, has been anti-sectarian.
He did participate, him and his groups did participate in the cleansing of Baghdad in 06 and 07 and all that.
But before and after that, he's actually been less worse than a lot when it comes to trying to get along and have Iraqi nationalism rather than this kind of sectarianism.
But you quote him being a lot more afraid than any of us about what's gonna happen here.
Yeah, yeah, I was really surprised about that.
He has moderated.
But so tell us about what it was he was saying there.
Well, what he said in the particular part that I included in there was, like some of these others, he fears that there's gonna be a new round of sectarian cleansing in the wake of the so-called victory in Mosul, because it kind of unleashed a new round of ability of people to do cleansing, which they have been suppressed under the ISIS domination.
And now they're free of that.
He's afraid that some of his own Shiites will do the same, or some of the other Sunnis will attempt to do the same because they're free of the ISIS people to try to carve out a new area in the wake of that before the Shiite come in, so that they can, almost like a mini situation might develop, and he's saying might, in Mosul as happened in the 2007 Baghdad cleansing you were talking about.
Yeah.
Man, you know, I don't know.
I'm trying to imagine some scenarios going forward where things are better, not worse, but seems like, I don't know, man.
Because going back to when I first started talking with Juan Cole about who's who on the ground there back 13 years ago or whatever, the point was that the Sunnis dominated the national government, and they needed to, because all the oil's up in the north and the south.
So only by dominating the national government did they have the ability to steal that oil wealth and prop up their own part of the society at the expense of the rest.
But without control of the national government, they've got almost nothing.
And there's some, I guess some oil, but almost all of it undeveloped.
And much less oil in, you know, I guess what's now Iraqi Sunnistan, what used to be the Islamic State in Iraq.
They just have very little resources or any, they're basically would be dependent on Iraqi Shia-stan, but Iraqi Shia-stan doesn't want to share with them.
Because for understandable reasons, after all that they've been through.
But so what's the solution, right?
George Bush gave the entire capital city to the Shiites.
So they don't have any reason to compromise.
In fact, now they've done even better than that.
Now that, you know, with the rousting of IS out of the four or five cities we've been talking about here today.
Yeah, well, you can argue that they do have some motivation as to whether they'll follow, but are not a separate question.
But, you know, as long as they continue to not be inclusive, then they're gonna get situations like Mosul and the next round of ISIS.
I don't know how many times I heard over there, people say, you know, we're just looking to see what the next iteration of ISIS is.
You know, it was al-Qawi's group before, and then it was al-Baghdadi's group, you know, that's now on the way out.
And they're just wondering, you know, and what's next?
Because if the conditions don't change, it'll simply change names and a new person will come with a new flag.
Yeah, well, and that sounds almost inevitable.
I don't know.
You know, 10 years ago, 10 years ago, Petraeus failed.
The surge didn't work.
The benchmarks were not met.
And everybody just said the surge worked, but the only thing it worked at was being a great slogan.
In fact, the benchmarks were that the Iraqi government would hire all these guys and make them cops and soldiers and give them government jobs and let them in on the oil revenue tap and share.
And Petraeus promised, and then it never happened.
And the reconciliation never happened.
But if it was going to, it was going to be in the late summer, autumn of 2007.
That was Petraeus' promise.
And that's what never did come true.
So the idea that they're gonna compromise with them now, after they've won even more and have even less, I mean, you're right that if they were smart, they might rather have peace than continue to fight.
But if peace means giving up a lot when they don't feel like they have to, then maybe keep fighting.
Well, here's an interesting analogy.
That's interesting you talked about that.
This is something that is occurring to me and something that we need to watch here in the coming months.
Okay, so the whole surge was premised on, and I think the phrase was breathing space.
We have got to give the Baghdad government breathing space so that they can politically reconcile and do all this stuff.
And so we had to tamp down the violence, which we succeeded at doing.
So for all the reasons that we did, the violence legitimately did go way down.
And now they have breathing space to get things right.
Well, I don't know how many times I heard while I was there that, okay, now then with ISIS being seated in Mosul, you know, now we're gonna start rebuilding and reintegrating and all this kind of stuff.
So now then we have, they didn't use the term breathing space, but that's the thought was, now that we have the violence tamped down, now we can quote, get this right.
And, you know, and I'm like, that's exactly what you said in 2007, but there's no reason to think that anything different is gonna happen here because the players are all the same and it's just not gonna happen.
So when the impact of that is that there was numerous calls for people.
And apparently, as you mentioned at the top of the show, even some US military personnel are saying, we need to have the US basically preside over and provide security to allow them to get their reconciliation done so that they can learn to live in peace.
And I'm like, look, we've tried that once before and it failed spectacularly.
And there's absolutely no valid justification to think that this time, any of the fundamentals are gonna be different.
And so it's a fool's game to think that we need to stay there some number of more years, but then suddenly it'll get right then later when it didn't before.
Yeah.
All right, now, so among the Shia leaders, it seems like Sistani and Sadr really have the most authority as religious leaders.
I mean, Sadr's got an entire ghetto named after his father.
That's not for no reason.
When he snaps his fingers, people jump.
And as we talked about for years, he said, hey, cool it with the sectarianism, and that's enough.
We won the capital city.
We can afford to be gracious now.
Basically, I'm translating here.
Sistani all along has more or less talked the same game.
And these two men combined have almost ultimate authority.
Do they not?
Or why is it that they can't extend their influence to the government, the army, the militia forces, and restrain them?
Because I believe that Sadr is honest.
I don't think that he's playing a double game and being deceptive there or whatever.
I think he means what he says, but I don't understand him seeming to be powerless at the same time.
How could he be?
Here's the problem with it, because Sistani is even more moderate than al-Sadr.
And if they actually did have the authority, then we probably would see something, because they do want...
And it's in their own self-interest.
If they want their like-minded religious people to have a good life, they have to have a stable environment for them to live and work in in the neighborhoods they live in.
But the problem is they don't.
The real power comes from Iran, from the Ayatollah, and that comes politically into a body and several other ministries up in there.
And they have more influence than Sistani and Sadr do.
Yeah.
Yeah, that old body brigade.
If it wasn't for Iran, this probably would be able to at least turn into something stable, if not peaceful, but at least stability.
But, you know, Iran, and there was also an interesting piece, and I wish I remembered who published it, just within the last week, a great like 10-minute video that showed the nexus of conflict in the Middle East really is the cold slash warm war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
And those two keep taking all these actions based on trying to outdo the other.
And the classic, I mean, the larger Shia-Sunni split.
And as long as those two keep going at it, it's just gonna prevent anything from being peaceful unless one of them literally wipes out the other and you have a genocide, this is gonna continue on.
And anything the United States does, God, let me emphasize this, anything that we do militarily is doomed to utter failure as long as those two keep going at it.
Yeah, well, and what's really amazing here, and I know I'm just beating a dead horse, but it's inescapable, it's incredible.
It's been like this since the redirection, is that America's on the side of the jihadists.
Ever since they realized what a mistake they'd made in enhancing Iranian power in Iraq War II, it's in the redirection in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh in 2007, they said, well, geez, we gotta switch back to the Saudis.
But the Saudis, their side, their forces, their military forces are just for internal suppression.
Their external military forces are who?
Bin Ladenites.
So when we're on the Sunni side of this thing, that means we're on the Bin Ladenite side of this thing.
And I'm not saying we should ally with the Shia, but David Stockman, for example, makes a great case when he says, if we're gonna be aligned with anyone here, from an American citizen, national interest point of view, it makes sense to ally with Russia and Iran against these jihadists.
Kill al-Nusra, kill Islamic State, ally with Hezbollah.
And I'm not saying we should do that, but I'm saying, at least on the face of it, that makes sense.
On the face of it, allying with jihadists against Hezbollah does not.
No, here's a better one.
Let's don't ally with anyone.
Let them pick their own stuff out and not interfere and take one side or the other.
Let them make their own affairs.
Let's don't ally with anyone.
Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm saying, too.
But back in being on the Sunni side of this thing, and especially under Donald Trump, it seemed like Obama sort of understood and he's playing this game and he's splitting the difference and he's whatever, as horrible as it all was.
But for Donald Trump, he seems to see this just completely in black and white.
And Iran are the bad guys.
And as far as he knows, and all the nuance and details in history that we've been talking about for the last 40 minutes here, he doesn't know any of that.
And so for him, it's all about rolling back Iran.
And I don't know how much spin and line is in this or not, but what they're saying is that Trump only very reluctantly allowed the Secretary of State to recertify that Iran is within their end of the Iran deal.
Like he's just itching to figure out how to escalate this thing.
And his generals are the ones holding him back.
And I don't know if that's just posturing or what, but it seems really dangerous, the way that they're playing this, that Iran is the root of all evil here.
When as we discussed, all their gains are at America's hand anyway, you can't really blame them that much.
Yeah, I mean, there's something to say that if we actually didn't ally with anyone, that might be the best way to curtail Iranian influence is by just letting them have at it, you know, and not help them out.
Yeah, whether we, it's just like with the Bin Ladenites, whether we're fighting against them or fighting for them, we make them more powerful.
So we should really just stop.
It's the same thing with the other side too.
Yeah, there's no clean hands there.
And there's no side that we should ally with really.
All right, and you know what?
I should have asked you more at the beginning and this whole time to tell us more about these people that you met in this refugee camp.
Do you have any particular stories you wanna share that I didn't give you a chance to?
Yeah, I do.
The thing that just breaks my heart is that there are some wonderful people there.
And there are some beautiful people in the Middle East.
I've met many people.
I've got some friends that are over there and they're just good people there as are anywhere else in the world.
It's just this horrible leadership situation, this, you know, this conflict that's going on on ideological level on above that catch all these people, the vast majority of the people on all the sides, Shia Sunni, Kurdistan, you know, Kurds, Christians, Yazidis, they just wanna live like regular people, like everybody does.
They just wanna have a peaceful life.
And it's all these leaders that keep jacking the thing up.
And a couple of interesting sort of microcosms, I guess I've seen, you know, all the focus is on Mosul right now, but I was able to get into Bashika, which was the furthest that the Peshmerga cleared.
And it's just outside of Mosul.
You can almost see it from certain parts of it.
And in one of the camps, also just outside of Erbil, which had everybody in it, it was a mix of everybody, you know, Sunni, Shia, Christian, Yazidi, other smaller religions, no religions at all.
And they're all living in peace.
They've been there for like almost two and a half, almost three years in some cases.
And what you see is that when the people are governed in a way that they, it's just normal, when they're literally just administratively governed, they're all living in peace.
There's no fighting conflicts and playing for cells in Bashika.
There's no animosity in that camp that I saw in Erbil, where they've lived for years together.
And the administrators there told me that that's because they actually trained them, that we have to all get along and there's not gonna be any dominant ideological here.
We're just administering.
Everybody gets along fine.
And they're some great people.
And it's this horrible thing that we keep getting stirred up all the time about, you know, Sunni or Shia this or Islamic that or whatever, that the people are the ones who lose in all these places.
And it's just, it's heartbreaking.
Yeah.
And, you know, in fact, I'm glad that you kind of ended with that note of it, because I know that it sounds maybe like I'm, in all my talk about Sunni this and Shia that, that I'm, you know, sort of implying or saying that what they're fighting about is religion.
When, you know, at the very margin, yeah, the very worst kooks on either side, you know, get all religious about their motivations.
Well, what we're really talking about here is the names of the power factions, right?
The Shia doesn't mean all the Shiite Arabs of Iraq.
The Shia means the Iraqi army and the Dawah party and the, you know, the Muqtada al-Sadr's group and the Hashd al-Shaabi and the, we're talking about the people with the power who claim sovereignty over the rest, you know, and what they're fighting about clearly is power itself, land, territory, and influence and wealth, just like everything else.
So I don't, I hate it when, especially, I know I'm the one who sounds like I'm being reductionist and trying to say that it's all some religious war or whatever when, you know, it's really about a lot more than that, so.
But yeah, and yeah, you know, like you were saying, too, all these different people, the reason you met them all in this refugee camp is because they've all been living together all this time, even through all these wars, right?
Yes, yes, yes.
And I'm sorry I interrupted you because you were gonna say something else there, too.
It was the two Sunni women that were the most emphatic about saying we need a non-religious governor or ability to govern.
They wanted to get rid of religious parties, all of them.
And, you know, and the Sunnis were among some of the worst abused people by ISIS.
So the people are completely sick of all this, and all they wanna do is just have a chance to have a regular life.
And if we could just get any kind of, any modicum of ability to suppress the leadership, not the movements or anything else, then the people want to live in peace and given a chance, I think they would.
I just don't know how we get there from here with supporting one group or another when you've got Iran and Saudi Arabia supporting all these different stuff, and you got Turkey and you got Israel, you got the United States, everybody's got their players, and we just keep the bloody thing stirred up.
That's expensive to do, it's horrible.
Yeah, well, I think you're really onto something with the just quit it.
Start with do no harm and then see what happens, at least.
And I'm not trying to be naive.
I think there'll still be plenty of harm as you're implying there, but at least, even though it'll be America's fault for getting this round started or these last few rounds started, at least we can stop making it worse and being responsible for making it worse.
There is really something to say about the Kurds and the Kurdistan Regional Government, and they're coming on the September 25th referendum to declare independence and all that.
That's gonna be a big deal in there, but that's something that, right now, the United States is saying, no, we're asking them to reconsider.
It's gonna mess up the war with ISIS and blah, blah, blah, and nothing could be further from the truth because everywhere the Kurds are in charge, there is peace and, what's the word I'm looking for?
Coexistence in all these different Sunnis and Shias and Kurds and Yazidis and Christians and all that, they all live in peace and prosperity.
I mean, the camp that I was talking about is run by Kurds, and they have all this stuff, they're peace.
Erbil is a big metropolitan city, major city, and it's got all kinds of everything, Shia, Sunni, Christian, Yazidi, and they all live in peace.
There's no terrorism there.
There's no car bombs.
The same is true now in Bashika, where the Peshmerga are in control and the people there are now living in peace.
Everywhere they're in control, things are good.
So we ought to, instead of trying to build democracy, we should support the one democracy in the Middle East other than Israel that's actually very viable and functioning instead of saying, no, you don't do it.
Because if we would say we're not gonna fight in Mosul, we're not gonna provide security forces, we're not gonna keep doing anti-terrorism crap, we're gonna let you guys figure that out, and we're just gonna support the stability that's already there to see if we can expand that, there would be something to that because they actually are a completely secular government.
They don't have any religious, in any direction, and it's working.
And we need to expand what's working instead of always trying to force things in other areas.
Let them figure that part out and let's support the stability that's already there.
Well, except of course, then that means possible, real independence for Kurdistan means the next war will be with Iraqi Shiastan.
And maybe with Iran or with Turkey.
I mean, right now, I guess the Iraqi Kurd government gets along with the Turks pretty well, but, well, you know, the problem is Kurdistan is a region that's pente-sected.
Is it pente-sected by all these different states?
And that could be a lot of, did you ever see that movie V for Vendetta?
Yes, I did.
So there's one scene where, what's her name?
Queen Amidala, she's putting on her makeup, ready to go out for the night.
And in the background, the news is saying, the Americans war in Kurdistan continues to rage.
You know, like it's in the not distant future, you know, the near future.
Oh, I don't remember that part.
I have to go back and watch it again.
Yeah, so it just seems like chasing, chasing tracer bullets around the Middle East, you know, some more.
We'll follow them this way, we'll follow them that way, make more problems wherever we go.
And it seems like, you know, I don't know.
If the Kurds wanna make their autonomy full independence, that's good on them.
But I think we should not be helping.
And in fact, that's what Israel wants.
You mentioned them in the same breath with Israel there.
So that's what the Israelis have been saying all this time, is they want Iraqi Kurdistan to break away and be independent.
And- Well, it's gonna happen, so.
Yeah.
Whether we do anything or not, they have made the decision.
They are moving forward, so.
Yeah, actually, I meant to ask you that.
So in the past, I mean, they've talked about having this referendum for a long time, and they've always kicked the can down the road.
But you're saying that, no, they're definitely not this time.
No, they have.
I interviewed the foreign minister.
So I interviewed him exactly one year ago when they were saying that it needs to happen.
And this time, they're saying the decision is made, it's scheduled, it's 25th September.
And he kept, because I asked him, I said, well, you know, Brett McCurtain just said two days prior to our interview that, you know, they really wish that Kurdistan would reconsider.
They think it's a bad timing and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And he said, he just smiled and said, yeah.
He said, you know, we've been hearing that since, you know, forever, since like 2002, apparently, 2006, 2008, you know, all the year, we always, they say we should, it's not the right time.
And he said, but when is the, he said, the right time will never come.
He goes, so we think that the time is now, and we are going to do it.
Man, oh man.
Yeah, yeah, let me know.
I'm gonna probably write some stuff on this in the coming up, but it's something to look at, because I, you know, because one of the things that is being kicked around in some circles is that the Peshmerga, the commander of the forward unit that I talked to the general, he said, he said, look, I'm just gonna be frank with you.
If the United States does not deploy the equivalent of peacekeeping or actually peacemaking forces to govern in Mosul, and then the area around there where some of the ISIS still are, you know, once that, he goes, there's no way that this doesn't continue to just explode and fight for all the reasons that you talked about earlier, John.
And he said, but at least that way, you'd have a chance over a long time.
He said, but this is not like a, you know, three or five year deal.
This is like 20 to 40 year kind of generational thing.
He goes, but without it, there's just no hope.
And, you know, and we said, well, then later on, it's like, okay, well, what if instead of deploying military forces there, we deported Kurdistan's independence bid and said, all right, you, Shia and Sunni, y'all figure your stuff out around the edges in Sunnistan and Shiastan, and the Kurdistan in the middle is gonna be, you know, an independent and stable regime.
And we're gonna support that.
And we're not gonna support this other.
So I'm not gonna help you, Baghdad, in keeping your areas clean, because that's what we would be doing.
This is what made me angry, because basically what they're saying is, okay, these American forces that we want to come over here are basically security forces for the government in Baghdad.
And I'm saying, hell no, nobody in American uniform today, certainly not when I was there, we didn't sign up to defend the interest of another country in another country.
We just signed up to potentially lay our lives on the line to defend our country.
And so what you're asking me to do is to permanently make American personnel the security force for Baghdad.
And I'm saying, hell no.
Yeah, got that right.
You know what, there's a real problem here.
We're still in the first half of the first year, just barely past the first half of the first year of the Trump administration.
So he can't stop doing anything, because you see how the narrative goes.
Anything Obama ever stopped doing is the cause of anything that's wrong, and nevermind anything he ever did.
And so politically speaking, you got to do something, no matter what it is, keep escalating, choose, again, with the tracer bullets, following this way, following that way, it doesn't matter as long as you're making work, staying busy.
That's the U.S. Army way, right?
Finding something to do.
Well, that's true.
So, all right, well, listen, I think it's just great that you've gone from soldier to whistleblower to journalist now, covering these wars and explaining this important stuff to people.
And I really appreciate your time on the show, Danny.
Well, thanks a lot.
It's always a pleasure being your spot.
All right, you guys, that is Daniel L. Davis, formerly a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, famous whistleblower from the Afghan war.
Read all about him in my upcoming book, Something Something, which will be out here real soon.
You can read this at The National Interest.
I interviewed the war-weary residents of Mosul.
The fight for the city is far from over, and we're running it today in the viewpoints at antiwar.com as well.
Well, Wednesday, whenever you hear this.
All right, thanks, you guys.
Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org.
Follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show, thanks.
