07/28/15 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got Peter Van Buren writing at tomdispatch.com.
He'll be on antiwar.com tomorrow.
Washington and Tehran come in from the cold.
He's the author of the book, We Meant Well.
Before that, he worked for the State Department.
Was a whistleblower there.
We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
That's his book, and that's also his blog at wemeantwell.com.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's a pleasure to talk with you again.
Yeah, well, I had a good time reading this article this morning.
Very important.
First of all, well, I don't know, first of all.
Overall, what you're saying here is that Iran is rising in power and influence in the region, and Washington has decided to, to some degree, I guess, get out of the way or decide to go ahead and cooperate with them rather than continually sticking with the fake nuclear threat as an excuse to contain them forever.
The reality of Iran as a power in the Middle East, in fact, I argue alongside the United States, it is the co-dominant power in the Middle East right now, is simply a reality.
Whether the United States wants to acknowledge it or not is irrelevant.
However, what we are seeing is moves by America finally to do this thing we used to call diplomacy to try to reach some kind of new relationship with the Iranians.
We have seen in the last two weeks that the Obama administration, and may lightning not strike me for praising them and John Kerry, the Secretary of State, pull off an agreement with the Iranians to reduce the likelihood that Iran will become a nuclear state.
This opens the door to a fuller relationship that does acknowledge the new balance of power in the Middle East, and that's all an important and a good thing.
All right.
Now, so what's so new about the balance of power other than America going and getting rid of Saddam and empowering the Shiite majority in Iraq?
Well, those are very important things, and it's useful to trace this back to the, we'll call it the triggering event, which was 2003 when the United States invaded Iran, and to a certain extent, the invasion of Afghanistan.
Don't forget that prior to September 11th, the Iranians had hostile forces on both borders.
The Taliban and the Iranians were never friends, and the Iranians were having trouble on that eastern border, and obviously, Saddam and the Iranians had been at literal war for many years in the past, and were in kind of a on and off again semi-hot war, if you will.
The United States in the span of a couple of years eliminated both external threats to the Iranians, which was something they should really send us a gift card or a fruit basket for doing for them.
Meanwhile, the Iranians had gotten very good and very smart about using their special forces, their financial influence to send people and create zones of influence, I guess would be the best word, in Syria, in Yemen, in Lebanon, and maybe some other places in the Middle East.
The U.S. kicking over the can in Iraq changed Iraq from a Sunni country to a Shia country, which quickly became essentially a client state of the Iranians.
All of those things, some of them America's doing, some of them Iran's doing, all shifted the balance of power dramatically in the Middle East.
We're just kind of catching up to it now with this new accord.
All right, now, so Syria and Iran already had a relationship going back, but when Obama announced, well, at the beginning, I guess, of the Arab Spring in America and Saudis attempted hijacking of it, counter-revolution of it in some places, I guess, and hijacking of it in others.
What they did in Syria, Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic, that's right, Jeffrey, getting rid of Assad would be a great way to bring Iran down a peg.
And so that's what we're trying to do.
And so, you know, see, I'm working on this nuclear deal, but it's not like I love Iran or anything.
I agree with you that this is what we need to be doing in Syria in order to weaken their power there.
But then I wonder whether you think after these years of war and Assad still holding on to all the cities, I mean, Idlib is a small town basically, right?
And then has America been basically pushing Assad further into Iran's camp?
Has Iranian support for the Assad government, the Syrian military, for Hezbollah fighting alongside them?
Has the increase that's gone on in this war helped entrench Iranian power in Syria even more than before?
Or, you know, relatively the same?
Or it's helped erode it?
Because after all the Islamic State and al-Nusra rule, most of Syria now in terms of just sheer land territory, so.
Well, the Iranians have a number of goals in the Middle East, and it differs from place to place and country to country.
I think one of their primary goals is to oppose American power.
And that means making deals and supporting people where they need to be supported against the efforts of the United States.
And so if America says we're going to depose Assad, that sort of opens the door for the Iranians to step in and take over, take on the other side.
An exception, an odd exception, but still consistent with this is temporarily in Iraq, where both the United States and Iran are fighting ISIS.
And ISIS, of course, is a Sunni organization.
The difference there is while it looks on the surface like we're on the same side with the Iranians, and that certainly seems to be what Washington is playing this as, the goals are very different.
The U.S. wants to eliminate ISIS because we imagine them to be a global terror threat or whatever, even though they've never really acted outside of the area.
The Iranians want to get rid of ISIS so that they can secure their hold over Iran and the Iranian government.
So Iran is playing the big game quite well.
They are interceding as they wish to.
Some places, it's money.
Some places, it's special forces.
Some places, it's weapons.
Some places, like Iran, or Iraq, I should say, it's actual tanks and infantry.
So they're doing the game.
They're playing the game well, and they're playing it much more subtly than the United States.
I think they also have a better sense of scale, if you will.
America tries to connect everything to this global struggle against whatever the hell terrorism actually is.
The Iranians, I think, understand that these, in many cases, are local struggles, Yemen, for example, that are treated as local struggles.
Right.
So what do you think about the power and strength of Hezbollah as a consequence of fighting for all these years now against the American-supported jihadists in Syria?
Because I guess the last time they really fought anybody was in 2006.
So I guess that's battle experience for their officers.
But now they're, I don't know if they really have officers or how exactly they rank them in Hezbollah, but you know what I mean.
The older guys had some experience, but now the young fighters do too, right?
Yeah.
I'm not an expert on Hezbollah.
I can only point out that they seem to still be there, and that in itself is something of an accomplishment.
These organizations are much more amorphous than we like to play them as.
I mean, America often sees this all as a chessboard, and there's Hezbollah, and they're playing their chess game, and we're playing our chess game and things.
But I mean, these organizations are loose.
They kind of get stronger, they get weaker, they pair up with somebody for a while, and then they break off and do something else.
Despite all the talk of caliphates and all this other stuff, I really don't know that these organizations are interested in governing in the traditional nation-state sense.
ISIS does want to hold territory, but exactly towards what ends, I'm not sure.
Whether they really want it as probably more of a sanctuary, if you will, than an attempt to create a nation-state, and someday be in the Olympics and have a flag and issue stamps and currency and stuff like that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now hold it right there.
We got to go out to this break.
When we get back, we'll talk about the Islamic State and their goals, and America and Iran's relationship regarding all of that, etc.
More with Peter Van Buren in just a minute, y'all.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line, I got Peter Van Buren, formerly of the U.S. State Department in the Iraq Occupation.
Now a peacenik, writer-type.
Here he is at Tom Dispatch.
Washington and Tehran come in from the cold.
So we're talking about the Islamic State, and of course, America, there's been kind of a funny thing going on there where Iran and the U.S. have both been backing the same factions in Iraq since 2003, specifically the Supreme Islamic Council and the Bata Brigade and the Dawa Party, above all others, in their taking of Baghdad and the sectarian cleansing and all the rest of it, and refuse to talk to each other about this and coordinate this at all, really, even as they both basically had the exact same policy the whole time.
And I guess maybe they took a break for a minute, but now they're back, and they're doing the same thing, only they're pretending to not get along, or maybe they really aren't getting along, so you have the Quds Force on the ground helping the Iraqi militias, the Shiite militias, into Crete, but then America at least supposedly refusing to back them up with air power, as long as they're working with the Iranians.
But now I guess there's a new order of battle where the U.S., the Shiite, the U.S. in the air, the Shiite militias on the ground commanded by Iranian special forces types are attempting to attack Fallujah, and so now you have kind of, you know, maybe grudging outright coordination there against the Islamic State, although I don't know.
How confident are you that they can take Fallujah, by the way?
Sorry, that's kind of a digression, but I wonder if you think that's a fool's errand or what?
Sure.
First of all, the idea that the U.S. is not coordinating with the Iranians is something that even the U.S. has kind of winked at publicly.
There's been statements out of the Pentagon that while the U.S. doesn't interact directly with the Iranians on the ground in Iraq, we use the Iraqis as a pass-through, if you will.
I mean, you could almost imagine this goofy setup where there's an American and an Iranian sitting at a table with an Iraqi guy in between them, and they're passing notes or something silly like that.
Right, like the Simpsons at dinner or something.
The idea would be that if the Iraqis say, please drop a bomb on this location, and the U.S. does it, and that location happens to benefit the Shia militias or the Iranian ground forces, well, so be it.
So I think we can all say we're all working together.
Taking Fallujah and then its neighbor, Ramadi, is an interesting task, and we'll see how this plays out.
Both of those are solidly Sunni cities.
They're both large cities, and famously, of course, the United States basically destroyed a huge portion of Fallujah with untold civilian casualties in order to take it, if you will.
Fallujah was never really pacified.
The United States was dealing with a low-grade insurgency there right up until the time we pulled out.
So in terms of driving ISIS out of that city, there's serious questions about whether anybody can do it, and if it can be done at all, it will probably involve destroying much of the city in order to save it, if you will.
All right, now, so in the larger strategic sense in this and that, you think Obama's really realigning things much more in favor of the Iranians?
I mean, it's clear that the Iranian nuclear deal or the nuclear issue has been the gigantic, outstanding issue, as fake as it's been, as you well document in your article.
All they are doing under this deal is still not making nukes.
Great.
Yeah.
Thank you.
We eliminate weapons that don't exist.
Right, right.
But so we're lifting the sanctions, but that doesn't mean that politically Obama can't just go over there and shake hands with the Ayatollah, I guess, and this kind of thing.
So how much of a redirection toward Iran do you think this really implies?
Well, I think that remains to be seen and will probably rest more with the next president than Obama.
As you said, this is just, and if you'll pardon the pun, an opening shot.
It was necessary for Obama to conclude this deal as a first step.
He never could have taken any other steps without being able to have the political cover of claiming that he's dealt with the nuclear issue.
I'm leaving aside right now the whole arguments about whether the Iranians will play along and all that other stuff.
But politically speaking, Obama had to say, check this box, if you will, before the next step.
I suspect that the next steps will be small ones, academic exchanges, a sports team, some cultural stuff.
I mean, that's how these things are done.
Testing the waters.
The Iranians are going to be expected to turn over the four Americans they have in their prison system right now.
Obama won't be able to go too much further without something like that to show that there's some successes.
And then after that, a lot depends on both the politics in the United States and also the way the Iranians want to play this.
The Iranians know that if they want to move the ball forward with relations with the United States, they're going to have to give some stuff up.
And it's going to have to be a public symbolic type thing that allows Obama or maybe the next president, you know, to say, look, this is working.
This is happening.
And let public opinion tap down the usual Republican outcries and demands, you know, that we start a new war every three weeks.
We'll see what happens.
Take a look back in the history books at the way Nixon and China played out.
Everybody seen Forrest Gump knows that one of the earliest steps that was taken was to send ping pong teams over there and take their team over here as signs of goodwill and just kind of get the machinery moving.
We'll see what happens.
But overall, it's I think a hopeful sign.
It's a first step and you got to take a first step and we'll see how committed the Iranians are and how much politically Obama thinks he can he can push on this.
All right.
Now, the Saudi king announced the other day that he loves the nuclear deal.
Good job, America.
But it seems like actually they don't really think that.
Just how upset are they?
I mean, I guess this means a lot more Iranian oil.
Can you give us any kind of ballpark numbers?
Do you know how much Iranian oil is now going to be hit in the market and and just how much that jeopardizes Saudi dominance in OPEC, et cetera?
The Iranians have the fourth largest proven reserves of oil in the world, and they have been prevented by sanctions from getting very much oil into the global markets.
However, as we know with Iraq, who has the largest proven reserves of oil in the world, oil in the ground is not the same as oil for sale on the market.
For Iran to really affect the global market for oil, it's going to have to do a number of things and how long these things take will be where the magic is.
First, its infrastructure has suffered greatly under sanctions.
They are going to require literally billions of dollars of investment in order to bring their infrastructure up to modern standards and really be able to pump out oil.
Whether they'll get that investment from Western oil companies or not is a question.
Whether they'll be able to borrow the money from the Chinese is a question.
The other thing would be that enough American sanctions have to be lifted to allow Iran to play in the global markets.
Oil is sold in a global exchange.
Obviously, side deals are made, but basically, if you've got a barrel of oil, you put it on a market, it's bid, and the deal is usually settled in American dollars.
When you're talking about those amounts, you have to transfer those through the international banking system.
Iran is cut off from all that right now by sanctions.
Unless and until America removes those sanctions, they won't be a player.
It'll be a little while before they have any serious effect on the oil market.
Obviously, the Saudis and others see where this could go and are going to be tracking that progress very, very carefully.
Israel, of course, is not apologetic, if you will, or not conciliatory in any way whatsoever.
They have basically predicted the apocalypse starting anytime this afternoon.
It's interesting to see the Saudis trying to take a little calmer play on all this.
The apocalypse being, oh no, without the Iranian nuclear fake threat distraction, we might have to start talking about what's going on in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
We don't want that.
As well as losing a whole reason to keep their society 100% militarized forever.
Yeah, exactly, and on America's dole forever.
On America's dole, and by the way, maintaining the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal.
According to Daniel Ellsberg on this show, Mordecai Venunu, the whistleblower, told him they have 600 nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs, and we know they have submarines, second strike, and all that.
Wouldn't surprise me.
All right, hey, thanks very much for your time, Peter.
Good to talk to you again.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Thank you.
Peter Van Buren, everybody.
TomDispatch.com.
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