All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Trita Parsi.
He is one of the founders of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
That's responsiblestatecraft.org.
And yeah, previously founder of the National Iranian American Council, and of course, infamous on the show because he comes up in conversation all the time because he wrote the book Treacherous Alliance about the grand strategies of the Israelis, the Americans, and the Iranians, with the poor Iraqis and Palestinians stuck in the middle, of course.
And we were just talking about that book with Ted Snyder on the show a little bit earlier.
But anyway, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Trita?
Doing well.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
I like taking every opportunity to mention that book if I can, because I learned so much from it.
I appreciate it.
I think others probably will, too.
But so now, listen, here's everything, US troops in Iraq, again and still, leftover from Iraq War III, call it Iraq War III and a half, embedded with the Shia, fighting what's left, that is the government and the Iraqi army, fighting against what's left of what they now call ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq.
They called it that starting 2006 or so, I guess.
Zarkawi's old group, okay?
In Iraq, basically.
And now Trump is withdrawing some of the troops, but what does that really mean, do you think?
Well, it all depends.
I mean, look, if there actually is a real troop withdrawal, I think that would be a very good thing.
The problem in the manner in which he does this is that he is, on the one hand, reducing troop levels, but not a full withdrawal.
And then he is escalating tensions elsewhere, which then means that the troop withdrawal ends up becoming a very tactical move, not a permanent move, because the escalation elsewhere will most likely cause Trump to increase troop levels elsewhere, because he's increasing the likelihood of war.
So he wants to get maximum praise for what most likely will end up becoming just a tactical temporary move.
That's why any kind of effort here to actually be able to end these endless wars and bring the troops home needs to be put in within a larger strategic policy, rather than these one-offs.
And I think he's doing a lot of these one-offs right now, lots of them, because of the elections, because he knows.
You settle for some one-offs, though, right?
I mean, you're not...
Well, no.
It depends on if the one-offs are nevertheless compatible with a strategy, then that's not a bad thing.
But this one is hardly even that.
Again, on its own, yes, reduce the troop levels, totally fine, bring them home, absolutely.
But if you're doing at the same time, as you are escalating tension in the region as a whole, then it will end up most likely being more of moving troops around, as he did in Europe.
People were happy that he's going to bring some troops home from Germany, because it doesn't make a lot of sense for the US to have troops there.
But it turns out that he's just going to move them from Germany to Poland.
So what good was that?
Well, you're certainly right.
But I just hate to hear it sound like you said, well, don't even pull them out then.
And the point is, no, add the good strategy along with the pullout.
That's the point.
But, you know, listen, I think this is such a huge thing, and I need to get my footnotes together on this, my names and dates memorized on this.
But it was just earlier this spring, earlier this year, 2020, that the general in Iraq, I believe it was General White, right?
Wrote a letter to Pompeo and Trump that essentially said, dear sir, let me explain to you who's on whose side over here and why it is that we can't fight the Shia.
We're fighting with the Shia right now.
And we're not in any position to change sides in the war right now, which is sort of what you're getting at, too, which is you pull out half the troops and then pick a fight.
Now you've just lost your force protection for the guys you left behind in essentially a trap.
Now they got to pick a fight with Iran and our last few infantry got to hightail it to Kurdistan and hope they're safe there.
Something like that.
Right.
And at the same time, you know, this entire concept of force protection ends up becoming a loophole in order to be able to just constantly increase the troop level.
Right.
Because now we have troops there to protect the troops.
Well, if we don't have troops there, we wouldn't have to protect the troops because there would be no danger to them.
And also when it comes to, you know, the idea, you know, the fact that they have to point out to Pompeo them on who is on whose side here, reality is at the end of the day, something we should really remember, the Iraqis voted to have the United States leave Iraq.
The second deployment to Iraq came after ISIS, in which the Iraqi government asked and gave it a legal permit for the United States to come and help fight ISIS.
Now they're saying that invitation has expired because the U.S. troop presence there actually destabilizes the country because it increases tensions with Iran and Shia militias and others.
And moreover, they've also made it clear that even when it comes to fighting ISIS, they don't need U.S. troops.
They will welcome training and things of that nature, but not that type of a heavy troop presence that actually ends up becoming points of contention inside of Iraq.
So I don't know how many obvious strategic compelling reasons need to be put out there for the broader media narrative to pick that up and explain to the readers that a troop withdrawal is in the strategic interest of the United States, according to a lot of people, and as well as something that the Iraqis are requesting.
Instead, so much of the media reporting is only that Trump is doing this because of domestic political reasons.
Now, you know, from what I just said earlier on, I do believe that he's doing this, particularly the one-off style of it, because domestic political reasons, but that is different from saying he's only doing it for domestic political reasons and there are no strategic reasons to do so at all.
So the only way to explain it is because of this.
That is not the current situation.
Well, of course, it's honorable and right, no matter what you think about him and his personality, for him to end a war because the American people want him to.
This is supposed to be the people's country, not we are the servants of our overlords like some old world hellhole.
Yeah, no.
And I just get so astonished that one can still write these pieces as Admiral Stavridis wrote that ending the Iraq war would be a gift to Iran.
I mean, how many more decades does that war have to continue before you think that we can do something that is in the strategic interest of the United States, regardless of whether the Iranians would think it's a good or a bad thing?
How can that be the driving force of our decision making rather than our own interest?
Of course.
And especially when, as we've beaten this dead horse a million times, but not enough people understand yet, it was Iraq war two that put specifically the Dawah party and the Supreme Islamic Council.
Those are the two most Iranian government tied Iraqi factions that you could find in the world in power there and turned their militia, the Bata Brigade, into the Iraqi army.
So that means that everyone except the United States of America can complain about the increase of Iranian influence in Iraq, period.
Oh, and then sorry, because part of this story too is we can't leave because then ISIS will come back and take over the west of the country in the predominantly Sunni parts of the country.
But that was only possible because of American support for the bin Laden side of the uprising in Syria, which re-energized the Iraqi insurgency in the words of the Iraqi generals at the time warning against it and allowed for that to happen.
And of course, when that did happen and that, in other words, that policy in Syria blew up so horribly in the loss of all of Western Iraq, then Obama and later Trump fought Iraq war three, also for, again, essentially the Daba party and Supreme Islamic Council alliance in Baghdad.
So now they double extra super can't say anything about how much they resent Iranian power in Iraq.
Exactly.
And again, the Iraqis have now said, and, you know, the latest prime minister that the U.S. is very happy with has said there's no need for U.S. troops there.
When it comes to fighting ISIS, Iraq is capable of fighting it on its own, but it does appreciate some help and training troops, but not have the United States actually do any of the fighting or having a strong troop presence there.
So it raises the question, you know, from how many different directions does the request have to come before Washington accepts that, you know, we're just going to have to bite the bullet and end this war.
I know how hard that is, but we're just going to have to end it.
And it's quite depressing, particularly now when you see, when you tie it to the situation between Israel and UAE and the decision of the Bahrainis, you know, to normalize relations with Israel.
On the surface, it does appear as being some form of a major progress towards peace, even though, of course, these are countries that were not at war with Israel, have never been at war with Israel.
They're just normalizing relations.
But when you start to see what it's actually emerging to become, it's emerging to become some form of an alliance, which they say is going to be against Iran.
I still am skeptical about Iran really being the driving force, but what it really does achieve is this additional rationale now for the United States to remain militarily in the region, because now we're part of this coalition.
This is a new manifestation of this idea of an Arab NATO, as if NATO itself has not, in some ways, expired its own utility.
Now we need to have an Arab NATO.
So all of these moves seems to, in my interpretation, be tied to an idea of making sure that the United States cannot leave the region militarily.
A new glue for the alliance, you might say.
A new glue for the alliance, exactly.
And it's highly problematic, because it means that the endless wars are going to continue to be endless for quite some time.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, so a couple of things there.
First of all, we get back to that periphery doctrine stuff in just a second, but second or the anti, whatever you call it, but first I wanted to bring this up and make sure that you had seen it and get your reaction from it.
It's from a piece by Spencer Ackerman in the Daily Beast.
It says, while Trump has repeatedly voiced his desire to bring troops home before election day, various defense officials and confidants on the Hill and in GOP circles have repeatedly insisted to Trump that such large scale withdrawals would risk creating an election year mess that would dwarf the fallout that came after Obama's troop withdrawal from Iraq.
It's a strategy of, quote, scaring the shit out of the president, end quote, as one former senior Trump administration official characterized it.
In other words, one of the people who were using this strategy, explaining himself.
It plays on his fears of possibly getting tagged as, quote, weak like Obama was.
And then that's it.
It says the Republican hawks have used this strategy to great success in earlier years of this administration.
The tactic helped convince Trump to embrace the Afghan surge in the summer of 2016.
He cited it himself, the fall of Iraq to ISIS after Obama withdrew in his announcement of that surge, by the way.
And then it says, and it got him to quickly back off withdrawals from Syria in both 2018 and 2019.
That was all they had to do was say, look at what happened when Obama pulled out of Iraq.
Nevermind back in Al-Qaeda in Syria, but look at what happened when he pulled out of Iraq.
That created ISIS and that would happen to you.
And that would make you look even weaker and dumber than Obama.
And we can't have that.
And it makes the president of the United States falls into line every single time they tell him this.
Yeah, it's I not read that piece.
It's very interesting and it does jive with what we're talking about and it shows that if anything, you know, these type of domestic political concerns are the ones that are being used to keep the United States engaged out of this fear mongering that it will be election mayhem if he actually does the right thing and pursues U.S. national interest.
If there is a Trump to administration, it will be really fascinating to see exactly how he will operate if those concerns are no longer going to be the ones that will be on top of his mind.
It might be an opportunity to test the proposition is Trump's real instincts really towards restraint or is he is it just one of many impulses that are competing in his mind?
Yeah.
You know, I think this is something that I know I neglect a lot of times.
I think a lot of other analysts neglect.
It's something that Grant F. Smith, for example, emphasizes as being very important that these individual actors, the actual elected politicians, but also all of their appointed staff and all these people, they're all terrified of being called soft on communism or terrorism or whatever the enemy is that Chinese.
And that's the worst thing that you could be.
That's why Hillary Clinton goes around talking about how muscular she is and how much she wants to bomb everything, because the worst thing about a person could be that you're soft on the enemy and that that terror on an individual level in terms of, you know, the incentives facing these government actors serves to amount to a massive conspiracy to keep the war going just as much as, you know, military profits and and fancy ribbons and, you know, promotions from House to Senate and from deputy director to director and all the things, all the reasons that they all go along with these things.
It's their own fear of being called weak because, in fact, they are weak and they're afraid.
And in my assessment, you know, all of these other factors, you know, you have pressure from the defense industry.
All of those things can still end up leading to an indecisive situation.
And then at that moment, that's when this fear, this fear of coming across as weak, the fear of what the consequences of such a move will be.
The way those consequences tend to be assessed is that if this ends up leading to eight year more wars, you're not going to get blamed for it.
It's not going to be a disaster for your record.
But if it ends up in a scenario, even though it's a much less likely scenario that there's going to be another terrorist organization that may kill a few people, then that is going to be blown out of proportion and you are going to be blamed for everything.
And it's a psychological grip.
You sense it when you come to Washington, that that is definitely something that is helping structure the situation here, because the risk politicians tend to be willing to accept when it comes to doing something in the direction of war is far greater than the risk that they're willing to accept when it comes to doing something in the direction of peace.
Yeah.
And you know what?
I got to blame Bannon because Trump was never going to be able to do any of this.
The three pillars of the supposed Trump doctrine were going to be immigration, trade and in these wars.
And instead of saying, no, this is our priority, we're going to cut it all off right now while we can still blame everything on Bush and Obama and say, look, we didn't lose the Afghan war.
These idiots did.
And all of that.
They had 100 days or, you know, maybe the first year to wash their hands of the thing.
And instead they vote.
And this was the one thing that he could have done to politically completely jam the Democrats by ending all the wars would have been brilliant politically for his own, you know, selfish political political interests there.
But also, it's the one thing that he can do as commander in chief and nobody can tell him no.
Admiral, I said sail home and that is it.
And if you don't like it, you're fired and your your captain is now the admiral and he's going to sail home and and he could have done it.
And it would have been absolutely correct that, hey, he's not married to Bill Clinton or a brother or a cousin of the Bush's.
He's not a senator who voted for this stuff.
It was absolutely not his fault.
It absolutely was theirs.
And they had the perfect chance to cut it all off.
And they knew that that's what they wanted to do.
But they just didn't care enough and they didn't bother to follow through.
Yeah.
Instead, Bannon helped make sure that the first trip would be to Saudi Arabia.
What do you think the Saudis told them?
Got to keep bombing them Yemenis, first and foremost.
And here's a check, by the way, so you feel fine about it, I guess.
Yeah.
I don't know how to say that in Arabic, but I'm sure it's not a lot like that.
Yeah.
And, you know, ultimately, this is Trump is the president.
He makes those decisions.
Yep.
And he's ultimately the one who has to bear the blame for the decisions that he's making instead of constantly blaming it on advisers who he hired.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
And I didn't mean to absolve him, but I just meant that he's so he's so paper thin.
He was never going to get out, you know, get it done without one buddy to help him see it through.
You know what I mean?
He didn't have one because he I think he did sort of kind of mean it, but just, of course, just doesn't have the wherewithal to to get that.
And so now let's end here, then, with where your article ends at ResponsibleStatecraft.org here, the Quincy Institute website.
You talk about how the attacks, a little publicized, thank goodness, I guess, rocket attacks from supposedly Khatib al-Hezbollah and these other Iranian-tied Shiite militia groups, of course, who are also tied directly to the Iraqi army paramilitaries of the same Iraqi army are forces are allied with there, but that they keep shooting rockets at our bases.
And so I'm not, you know, the question isn't really a political one, I guess, regardless of whether it's Trump or Biden or whoever else, we got a real problem here with our allies shooting rockets at our guys over there in a situation where, as we're talking about, for domestic political reasons, have nothing to do with strategy or tactics on the line between the Sunni and the Shia in Western Iraq, insist on leaving our troops in this harm's way and as possible triggers to worse conflict.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, they keep on shooting and at the same time, the U.S. actually has abandoned several of these different bases.
And it's fascinating that Trump seems to have sought not to bring attention to that, even though I think he could win a lot of points with his own base if they knew.
But it goes back to what you just mentioned, that perhaps he's afraid that if something goes wrong, he will be blamed for and he will look weak and all of those different things.
But again, good moves, but not if you're at the same time building some sort of a NATO in the Persian Gulf that is going to completely fall apart if the U.S. is not there fully to constantly back it up and increase its troops levels there.
So this constant contradiction in what he's doing makes it very difficult to look positively at some of the steps that he's taken that in isolation are good, but in the broader context are quite confused.
And I'm sorry, because I just remembered, thanks to something you just said, the one more thing I wanted to ask you besides that.
Very importantly, I'll try my best to represent the way Ted Snyder talked about this on the show earlier in the context of the Israeli doctrine of the periphery, where they did have their alliance with Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia against the Arabs to divide and conquer, as you so well document in your book.
And then the change in the 1990s to, I forget what they call it when they abandoned that, but the doctrine of trying to get along with the Arabs more at the expense of the guys on the outside, as long as they're keeping their enemies divided.
Would you call that again?
So they had, there were some people in Israel who call it periphery plus, which essentially meant that the new vicinity was Iran and the new periphery was countries such as India and others who the Israelis already back in the early 1990s started developing strong relations with.
And we see that very clearly now when it comes to what the Modi government in India and Israel is doing.
But that's somewhat included the policy of negotiating with the Palestinians and cooling off relations with the closer Arab states too.
It still did.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's still assumed that, you know, now Israel would make peace with the vicinity and the real threat would come from the periphery.
So you know, these were ideas that were coming from Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, people that obviously Netanyahu completely opposed.
Right.
So now this is the point.
So Ted says, here's the point about the so-called peace deal here with the UAE, is this is Netanyahu's true contribution to the evolution of Israeli strategic doctrine in the region.
And that is, I forgot the lingo that he used, but essentially focusing on separating not the Arabs from the Persians and that kind of thing, but separating the Palestinians from the rest of the Arabs first, and then making alliances and friendships and bribing them all off and separating them away from the Palestinians so that then when they come for the clampdown to steal the rest of the West Bank and so forth, they don't have anything left to, you know, they have no chip.
Because so the game up until a few weeks ago was that the rest of these Arab states are not going to officially normalize relations with Israel until they let the West Bank go.
And that this is the first step of making that separation, you know, strategically, so that that is not an issue later when they finally, I don't know, kick them all into the Sinai Desert or whatever the plan is.
Well, yeah.
So two points on that.
If you play this out as you were doing right now, even if the entire Arab world were to agree to normalize relations, and regardless of what was happening on the Israeli-Palestinian front, what would the end result of that be?
Well, it doesn't resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It's not going to force the Palestinians to agree to whatever Israel wants.
Instead, it's just going to increase the likelihood that the Palestinians are going to have to be absolved into Israel, but not as full citizens, which is exactly what a lot of the supporters of the two-state solution already 30 years ago warned about.
So it is, Netanyahu's calculation seems to be that he thinks that he may actually be able to forcibly remove all of these Palestinians and push them into other Arab countries or some other solution, which, you know, otherwise would be called ethnic cleansing.
I don't know if that is what he's thinking or not, but it's bizarre to me to think that this is actually going to work unless the plan is, okay, the status quo in the Palestinian terrorist is perfectly fine.
You know, they're just going to let them barely live there and no one's going to make a fuss about it because the other Arabs, as you said, have been, or as Ted Snyder said, have been bribed off.
But we should keep in mind, the bribe did not come from Israel.
The bribe came from the United States.
Israelis are taking advantage of the fact that we are bribing them with F-35s, et cetera, in order for them to give concessions, not to us, but to Israel.
Right.
And hey, it's no mystery to the people of the Middle East.
It's like Nasser Arabi, the reporter from Yemen, says they call it the U.S.-Saudi war.
They're not fooled that Saudi's the superpower and we're their client state.
They know that an F-15 is not made in Saudi Arabia.
And you know, and it's the same thing.
The world is not blind.
The Palestinians sure aren't blind to the fact that those IDF soldiers carry American weapons and fly American planes, drop American bombs.
This is why I'm very worried that this ultimately is going to be really bad for U.S. national interest, because I don't see this bringing more peace or stability to the region.
Yes, perhaps there can be fights between UAE and Israel, but reality is that the Israelis and the UAE have been working together closely on the intelligence field for already several years.
All this does is just bring it out in the open.
But bringing it out in the open means a massive American approval not only for that, but for everything that will follow from it.
And a lot of the things that will follow from it is going to end up being pretty bad, potential warfare, the U.S. is going to be more stuck in the region militarily, and all of those things are really bad for U.S. interests.
Yep.
All right, you guys, that is Trita Parsi.
The book is Treacherous Alliance and a bunch of other ones, too, but that's the masterpiece you got to all read.
And he helps run the Quincy Institute, and the website is ResponsibleStatecraft.org.
And the article is What Trump's Troop Withdrawal from Iraq Means for Ending America's Endless Wars.
Thanks, Trita.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me.
Talk to you soon.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
