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All right, you guys.
I'm Scott Horton on the line.
I got our friend Joe Lauria.
He's in Erbil, Kurdistan.
He lives there now.
His latest book is really it's by Hillary Clinton.
It's called How I Lost.
For those of you who thought that you had to read what happened in order to find out Hillary's point of view.
Actually, it turns out that Joe beat her to the punch.
And really all he did is he curated all of her most important statements.
And it's just a book of block quotes as edited by my main man here.
And it's really great.
It'll make you laugh some of the stuff in there.
And it'll remind you of the horror that really is Hillary Clinton and and why she really lost.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
And thank you for that plug.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I actually I've read quite a few reviews of her book just because I hate her so much that I really, really enjoy her unending misery and all of her poor sportsmanship here.
It annoys other people, but I just think it's just great.
I can't watch it on TV because I can't stand her voice, but I love reading about it.
It's just hilarious to me.
Never goes away.
I hope it never goes away.
She's still hard at it, you know, blaming anyone and everything but herself for that catastrophe.
I'm actually reading the book because I'm going to review it and my publisher will send it around and I'll publish it a few places.
Cool.
Oh, yeah.
I know what I was going to say.
I just started talking about how much I enjoy her misery so much I forgot my point.
I had a point, which was one of the most insightful reviews of her book that I read, believe it or not, was actually at the World Socialist website.
And I thought that unlike what people might expect, they really refused to buy into probably what I would think would be her most appealing narrative, that all those right wing working class white people are all just bad people kind of thing.
And the World Socialist website just said, no, there's just none of that at all.
And in fact, you can tell that she keeps saying white as though to imply that they're all deplorable people.
But the truth is, the working class of all races, at least stayed home and refused to support her if they didn't outright crossover and vote for him.
And that kind of thing.
And just, you know, I like a little intellectual honesty by people who, you know, maybe it would be easier for them to just go along with more conventional narratives, at least on the things that would coincide with what you would think they would want to say or something like that, you know, but they really let her have it.
I thought it was very insightful and very good.
Yeah, well, anybody who gives it to her right now, she deserves it.
I have to tell you.
Well, and I mean, the quotes of her just, I'm not going anywhere.
I'm just reveling in it.
I just am like, yes, please continue crying.
I mean, she said one of the quotes the other day was, well, geez, yeah, depending.
I mean, it was the way they asked the question, I guess, to set it up.
But still, she said, yeah, you know, if bad news comes back about this Russia thing, then yes, I'm totally open to questioning the results of the election and whether they should be overturned.
Like, she's really still holding out hope that somehow it's still not too late for her to be the president.
You're not kidding me, are you?
Because I did not see that or hear that.
Yeah, she did say it.
And so the thing is, it's not like she's any closer to that than she was able to get the CIA to convince the Electoral College to support her or throw it to the House or anything like that.
But the point is that she supports these fantasies.
She buys into them.
She had, even in the Electoral College thing in December, she had her people like putting out feelers and seeing whether, yeah, what can we do?
Which all can we get Morell and Brennan to testify?
And what all can we do?
She thought that that was a possibility then, even though it should have been absolutely apparent that it was not.
I mean, these electors all come from the 50 states.
They're not, you know, anyway.
And so for her to still be saying that now in September of the next year, almost a full year after her defeat, to be saying, oh, yeah, no, I'm open to overturning the results of the election if we can pin this thing on Putin severely enough.
I just love it.
I mean, it doesn't pretend even anything like an attempt for that to even happen to me.
It's just an indication of how insane she is and how miserable she is.
And that's why I like it.
I think a good part of the reason for the still unproven allegations of Russiagate was the very thing you're mentioning, to try to overturn the results of the election.
I wrote an article that was on The Huffington Post three days before the election.
Anybody can go and see it, which I predicted if she would lose.
And at that point, nobody thought she would.
But if she should lose, she would blame Russia, yes, to try to get the Electoral College to change its vote.
And if that didn't work, to try to get the Congress to not endorse the election, and that didn't work.
And now she's still at it again, as you're saying, that that is just astounding that she cannot understand that people voted against her, particularly working class people of all races, as you said, because of her, not because Russia, they were watching RT.
Nobody watches RT in the U.S. I mean, it's nonsense.
Well, and as that as that World Socialist website pointed out in their review too, it ain't just her, it's that she represents the status quo.
And in her book, she argues that the status quo rules, and everybody knows that, that she was the right candidate, the most qualified, the best policies, and all these things.
And she just could not accept, as they put it, she couldn't accept that anyone would have a different opinion than that.
If you have a different opinion than that, that's fake news, that you think everything isn't perfect.
That's a lie that you think everything that that the status quo that she represents isn't just right.
And, and that and so therefore, she just she has to blame Putin, or Comey, or Lauria, or whoever's fault it is, maybe China.
I was thinking we should float that one, the Chinese hacked you too, dude, and see if we can get her to bite on that.
I wish she'd blame me, that would be great publicity for the book, but they've studiously avoided any comment.
It did get a mention in a New Yorker article about Assange, now they're not going to talk about the book.
But she's proven in what's happened, as much as I've read already, that she's incapable of caring about average people, she's just plainly incapable.
She served up bromides about them during the campaign.
And it's the same thing in the book.
Now.
The thing is, the two people running for president last time, and in general, in most elections in the US, both candidates are trying to outlaw each other about how much they care about average Americans.
Turns out Trump was a better liar than she was.
That's why he won, I think.
Right.
Of course, I mean, that was his message, even when he couldn't pronounce it, right.
Basically, his overall theme when he remembered it was that he's too rich to be corrupted by anyone else from here forward.
That basically, he was his own man, he couldn't be bought, because he already was an owner.
And so therefore, he would just do the right thing, no matter what anybody thought.
And so people thought, hey, there's an independence that goes with that.
He doesn't care about working people, and he fooled enough to think that he did.
And I don't know whether he cares about some kind of rapprochement or detente with Russia either, which is absolutely essential right now.
This has been another reason why I think Russiagate became such an issue, because he was threatening to foil the aggressive plans the US has against Russia.
And in terms of RT and any influence it had on the election, what you've got here is a situation, and I've experienced it more than once working for big corporate newspapers, where I've pitched stories that were critical of the US, and then they were never accepted.
So there's widespread suppression of critical news of US foreign policy.
But I was given a platform, as a lot of American journalists are, on Russian TV, on RT specifically, or quoted in Sputnik.
So there's where I revealed some of the things I couldn't say.
In an American, it's not for lack of trying.
Then it comes back, and they say it's propaganda now.
So they twice, first they suppress it, then they call it propaganda if it should eke out through a different platform on Russia today.
And to say that that's what influenced the electorate against Hillary Clinton is just mind-boggling.
But it doesn't die down.
This thing is not dying down.
It's really extraordinary.
I quit Facebook a couple of years ago, about three years ago now.
But I was signed in under a buddy's identity, check out the Skate group.
And I was trolling around a little bit in the feed, and just seeing what people were saying.
People I don't even know, but just seeing, you know.
And they were saying, oh my god everybody, look, Facebook has been compromised by the Russians.
And they bought some ads on Facebook to make us all vote for Trump.
Oh my god.
And then the other people are reacting and saying either, oh no, it is all true.
Or yeah, I don't know man, it's just a couple of Facebook ads.
You know, something more reasonable.
But it seemed like this was a big conversation going on.
And what nobody seemed to recognize, what I think you were hitting on there, that you know, maybe even more than half of the reason for all the Russia attacks on Trump is really about Putin and Russia.
And using Trump to beat them over the head as much as it is about using them to beat Trump over the head.
And to try to make sure to maintain the current Cold War.
It's not a new Cold War, it's been going on since George W. Bush.
Really Bill Clinton, but George W. Bush, especially, and Obama both expanded NATO and did a lot of other things and made it worse and worse and worse.
And they wanted, I totally agree with you, that to them, I mean you can see this especially right in Brennan and Morell and all the CIA guys who came out against Trump.
That they were terrified that he was going to make peace with Russia.
And you know what Joe?
Did you see this thing in BuzzFeed last week?
Where you got to love the spin on it, it was completely crazy.
But the story was about how Putin offered, explicitly offered an entire rapprochement on every issue that they could think of to become friends on.
And that heroically, the CIA and the advisors and whoever prevented this from ever getting anywhere, was the spin in BuzzFeed.
But he was offering peace and negotiations on nukes and everything, I think.
Look, from the Clinton administration on, they had Yeltsin, who was an American puppet, who opened the doors to Wall Street and other American interests to go in there, in league with local oligarchs, to rape the country and screw the population.
I was there in 1995 in Moscow.
People were living in the streets.
Policemen were asking bribes.
It was a dangerous place.
It was chaos.
Then Putin came along and ended that.
He closed the door, to great extent, to Wall Street, threw a lot of these oligarchs in jail.
And he restored Russian pride in their country and sovereignty.
And I went back to Moscow exactly 20 years of the month later, and I saw a clean, modern European city there.
And he's popular.
I'm not going to say anything about Putin's domestic policy, because I'm not familiar with that.
I've never covered Russian domestic politics.
But 80 percent of Russian people like him.
Part of it is because he has stood up and closed the door to the Americans, who want to get back in there the way they were with Yeltsin.
So they need a Yeltsin-like figure again.
And Putin is stopping them.
And here's Trump saying he's going to, you know, make a detente with Putin.
That's why they can't accept Putin's offer of agreements across the board, as you just mentioned.
They don't want him to stand there.
They want him out.
They want their own man in there somehow.
And Trump was not the guy who was going to facilitate that.
I suspect Hillary Clinton would have.
So this is a serious matter.
But, you know, someday we'd better get some evidence about actual Russian hacking and Russian influence in this election.
If, in fact, they did give the emails to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks denies, they were still true.
All the things, nothing false that came out.
The electorate benefited from hearing this inside information from the Clinton campaign.
You know, Trump was an open book.
I mean, he was saying one stupid thing after the other.
The video came out about him grabbing women.
All these things.
I mean, it didn't hurt him in the end.
But Hillary Clinton was secretive about what her real plans were.
So this was a great service, whoever provided those emails.
What is wrong with transparency?
If you're against WikiLeaks, then you're for the state against the people, in my view.
And so I don't see where nobody's ever proven that the emails were decisive in her defeat.
It may have hurt.
What it did more is to confirm what people suspected of her.
And that is what my book is based on.
The emails from WikiLeaks.
Assange wrote the forward.
I just provide the annotation and the analysis.
That's why we call it how I lost Hillary Clinton.
But I happen to be in Iraq now.
Why don't we talk about the referendum?
I know I wasn't even I wasn't even going to say a thing about Hillary.
It's at the book, but I just love this conversation so much.
It's really my fault because I was indulging in my joy as a history there so much.
But it's hey, she's the one who's continuing this whole argument.
I keep saying this on Twitter and I know I'm wearing it out, but I mean, it's actually kind of really meaningful to me, Joe, that Richard Nixon shut the hell up and went home after Jack Kennedy actually stole the election from him, stole two major states, Texas and Illinois, and I don't know what else, and stole the election from him.
And Nixon, that dirty SOB, that infamous, most resigned president of all, said, you know what?
It would be bad for the country for me to sit here and fight about this.
I'm not going to do this.
And he went home to California and he lost his run for governor and whatever, whatever.
And he may have even hinted that, yeah, I think JFK stole it, but he didn't fight about it like this.
He didn't carry on and write a book whining about it and disputing whether Jack Kennedy was the legitimate commander in chief of the armed forces at the moment or not, and these kinds of things like she's doing right now.
And there was evidence for it, as you just said.
Same with Al Gore.
Al Gore, he should have, probably should have fought it, I think, but he did not.
At least when the Supreme Court decided it, that was certainly a controversial, maybe one of the most if not the most controversial election.
It doesn't seem like it was a legitimate victory by Bush.
But Al Gore did not do it.
What Hillary Clinton is doing now is just unbelievable, because there's no evidence where in Florida if they had done a statewide recount, as newspaper investigations later showed, Gore would have won.
So he had the evidence, and he, for the good of the country, for whatever reason, did not fight it anymore.
Didn't write books complaining about it, but here she is.
She's an extraordinarily divisive and sorry figure right now.
But you know, I really don't feel sorry for her.
She says at one point in the book that one way she coped with her defeat is just to put her head in a pillow and scream.
That's what I felt like doing after five minutes of reading this book.
I mean, to me, I just love that so much.
I mean, even the pictures of her when she was in the woods, you could tell she'd been crying and crying and crying.
And of course, that means hysterical, angry, throwing things, crying, not just sobbing, but, you know, being an insane person like she is.
So, you know, I don't know.
This book was written for her fans.
They'll buy it.
She's outrageously charging money to go to her book tour to see her speak, which is just beyond belief.
Most authors cannot get their publishers to pay a dime for promotion, promotional events.
And here she's getting paid for promotional events, let alone having to pay.
So, you know, let her make her money.
And now people in the Democratic Party are speaking up, at least anonymously, that she ordered his go away and that she's hurting the party, particularly in this fight with the so-called progressive Sanders Democrats.
And the fact that she took out Sanders in this book, too, although I haven't finished reading it yet, but what I've read from the excerpts and other reviews, it's kind of, you know, ungrateful, to say the least, because the guy angered a lot of his supporters by backing her and by campaigning for her.
And then she turns around and slams him and blames him for her loss, as if he didn't have a right to actually run.
He was supposed to have just been a foil for her coronation, but the damn guy actually almost beat her.
So that, gee, that's an unforgivable act for a politician to challenge in a primary, where she had her own DNC trying to rig the thing for her as best as they could.
It's just the whole thing.
Well, and the quotes, too, where she's saying, yeah, he would always just try to one up me by saying, oh, eight minute abs.
Well, I'll do seven minute abs.
Like as though he's not a lifelong committed communist.
You know, as though we don't know that he was a radical leftist back when she was a Goldwater girl.
And we don't know that he fought in the civil rights movement back in the 60s.
We don't know that he's always referred to himself as a socialist and an independent, far to the left of the Democrats, even as he caucused with them.
No, all of a sudden, he was just plagiarizing her, but just stepping one half a step to the left just to steal her thunder.
That's the narrative of last year.
I really, I just can't try to remember that way, no matter, or I can't remember it that way, no matter how hard I try.
Exposed her as the phony progressive, she says she is.
She did not accept single payer care or a number of issues with, you know, on college debt, et cetera.
There were a number of issues that Sanders made her look weak and phony, which she is.
But without Sanders there, she wouldn't have been exposed.
And I think she's angry about that.
She ought to just go away.
I agree.
Although, you know, there was a spike in sales of the book when hers came out, because we're we're offering it as what really happened.
And when my review gets out, I hope it gets some attention.
Yeah.
But that'd be cool if you can get it where Amazon says these are often bought together.
You know, yeah, I heard they buy this, too.
And then, oh, here's the transcript of what you told those Wall Street banks.
It's finally available as an e-book on Amazon.
But anyway.
Yeah.
Let's talk about Kurdistan.
Yeah.
Hey, everybody.
So listen, there are varying degrees of age and experience on these questions listening to the show.
So I'll try to set it up here just real quick as best I can.
When you picture Iraq, don't you everybody picture kind of a real short squat, California shaped country over there, basically more or less to the north and northwest of Arabia, west of Iran, east of the Levant, Israel and all that.
OK, so in the very north of there up in the mountains is the Iraqi segment of Kurdistan.
And Kurdistan is a region of the Kurdish ethnic people that is what Penta sected.
Is that how you say it?
It's it's divided by Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, and then also a little bit up into Azerbaijan and Armenia.
I believe you could correct me if I'm wrong.
And they've never had their own state and they're constantly having problems.
And they were the Iraqi Kurds were certainly oppressed by Saddam Hussein.
And then they were part of the alliance with the Shiites and the Americans in the war to overthrow the Baathists and install the new regime in power.
And now it very importantly, I think, Joe, am I right?
They are about to finally vote.
They've been putting it off, but they're about to finally vote on full fledged independence from Iraqi Shiistan in Baghdad.
Is that correct?
That's what they're intending to do on Monday, to hold a referendum.
And now they used to put this off and they used to cancel it and they used to say, oh, well, we were going to.
But now something came up.
But this time that's not happening.
They're really going through with it, it looks like.
It does look that way.
I will correct one thing you said, by the way, there was there was the Republic of Mahabad, which was in north is in northwest Iran, which is the only Kurdish state that has ever existed, at least in modern times.
And that was it lasted 12 months in 1946.
The Iranian government crushed it and executed its leaders a few months later.
But that still didn't include any of the rest of Kurdistan.
Nothing, just a little part of northwest Iran under Soviet occupation.
Then the Soviets left and then six or seven months later, the Iranians crushed it.
That's just a footnote in history.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
There's not been a Kurdish state.
This referendum is going to be held on Monday.
There's enormous efforts being made to stop it from various quarters, which I'd like to get into each country and how they're what they're saying now and how they're likely to respond.
Go for it, please.
Key thing I think understand is the referendum will almost certainly go ahead on Monday.
People are celebrating all week here.
They're driving around in their cars with hanging out the side windows with big Kurdish flags flowing, screaming and honking horns as if they've just won the World Cup.
I saw one with an American flag.
I don't understand that, because the U.S. is officially against this referendum.
And I've seen photographs, although I've not seen in my own eyes here in the streets, an Israeli flag.
I'll get to that being also flown here.
The key thing to understand is, and I was saying this before Barzani's son, who was the prime minister, said the other day that this referendum is a referendum for independence on September 25th, Monday, but the day after they will not declare independence.
Most Kurds here believe they're already independent.
They act as though they are an independent nation.
Well, they sure do have autonomy in real life, don't they?
They have.
They're a semi-autonomous state.
What they've got really is a flag and an army, the Peshmerga, and a good army that's contributed greatly to defeating ISIS in Mosul and elsewhere.
And they have a flag.
They have parliament that had not sat and not met for two years until last week, when they met to approve this referendum.
I think they're going to meet again on Saturday.
So they don't have the modern infrastructure.
Well, let's put it this way.
You may go back.
The Montevideo Convention of the 1920s set out the rules, internationally agreed upon rules, for what constitutes a state.
And there are three requirements.
One, there should be an ethnic group that's more or less homogeneous, which is absolutely true here.
The Kurds are the vast majority.
There are Turkmen, there are Yazidi, there are Assyrian Christians who speak Aramaic, but they're in a minority.
The vast majority of people, and there are some Arabs, but the best majority are Kurds.
So they require, number one, they fulfill.
Number two, they must have a contiguous territory in which they live.
And they have that.
There is a Kurdistan region run by this Kurdistan regional government, semi-autonomous.
The third one is the key, which is it needs international recognition.
Now, the Palestinians also have those two, first two, and they've got the third.
They have 130 nations that have recognized Palestine.
Some of them have embassies in their capital.
The problem with the Palestinians, even though I think, I argue, legally they are a state, because they require, fulfilled all three.
The political situation, they don't have political recognition of the neighbors of Israel, obviously, which is more than a neighbor, it's an occupier, and the United States.
So politically it's not a feasible state.
But legally it is a state, in my opinion.
Where the Kurds, the recognition is their problem.
Right now only three nations have said they would support and recognize an independent Kurdistan.
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Israel.
And Israel has been involved here for a while.
They've been big supporters of Kurdish independence.
One could argue that that's part of Israeli general defense idea of breaking up Arab states.
Yeah.
Well, listen, specifically, remember there was this Seymour Hersh piece in 2004 or 2005 called Plan B, where this was all supposed to work out and the Shiites were going to be compliant and put all this pressure on Iran for us and all this.
Well, that didn't work out.
So Plan B will break off Kurdistan.
And that was the Israeli policy back then.
And remember, also, when Rand Paul went and kissed Sheldon Adelson's ring and begged him for money when he first started running for president, it was just a few days later, I think may have been one week later, that he came out proposing and saying that America ought to guarantee the borders and promise an independent Kurdistan.
So we know where he got that.
It was pretty obvious where he got that from.
Well, that's right.
I think so.
The problem is they don't have enough countries recognizing them.
And the countries that matter here, really matter, are totally opposed.
I'm going to go through them one by one if I can.
But the key thing to remember is that this vote will take place.
And Barzani's son, who's the prime minister, said Barzani is the longtime leader of the Iraqi Kurds.
And he said his son just the other day in an interview with a local press here that they will not declare independence on September 26.
They will use this as a negotiating tool with Baghdad.
This is what I believed all along, and now he's said it.
They are not going to become an independent country.
Although almost all Kurds that I've spoken to, and I've spoken to many, think they are already independent, but, you know, they ignore their passports, which is Iraqi, and they ignore the money here, which are Iraqi dinos.
So they are not a part, in their minds, they're not part of the Republic of Iraq.
They are an independent country.
That's psychologically.
And there they're going to feel even strong, more strongly, obviously, on Monday when they vote 90 to 95 percent is expected to approve this referendum.
Many will think that means they're independent.
But now Barzani's son has come right out and said it does not mean they're independent.
They are not going to declare independence, but they're going to use the threat of declaring independence as a way to get independence through negotiations with Baghdad.
So how have they all reacted?
The U.S., as on record said, they're absolutely opposed to this referendum, to the point where last night, on Wednesday night, the State Department issued a statement saying that the U.S., the UN, and the U.K. were willing to work on a new initiative to facilitate the dialogue between Baghdad and Iraq so that these issues, and there are many we could talk about, should be resolved, mostly the disputed areas, which is a very sticky part of this.
Right.
Not all of this.
Some of it is claimed by Baghdad, some of it is claimed by Erbil.
So the U.S. said yesterday that if the referendum is conducted, it's highly unlikely there'll be negotiations with Baghdad at all.
And that above all, the international offer of support will be foreclosed.
So they are threatening, hardball, against Erbil, saying, if you hold this referendum, we're not going to facilitate talks, and there won't be talks with Baghdad, and you're stuck.
Whereas the Kurds are going to use this in their back pocket.
We got this referendum, and now we're going to go talk to Baghdad again and say, now we want this, this, and that, which is going to amount to independence in the end.
Now, the Baghdad government first reacted with bluster, saying they could send tanks here.
Now, this is totally unrealistic, to think that the Iraqi National Army could invade and win a war against the Peshmerga, which would fight desperately, as they did against Saddam and earlier Iraqi governments.
This is a long-going battle between the Kurds and the Arabs here in Iraq.
But even if they should win this war, they don't have the resources to control or occupy this country.
There would be guerrilla warfare.
It's just absolutely unrealistic.
So, and then al-Abadi, the prime minister here, backed off that, said they won't, you know, they're not going to take military intervention.
But Baghdad, backed by the Arab League and the U.S. and the Europeans, are saying, you know, they don't, they're not going to, there's going to be trouble if you have this referendum, but they can't really do anything militarily, anyway.
Second is Turkey.
How will Turkey react?
Very interesting.
Turkish Security Council, National Security Council's meeting on Saturday to say what they're going to do about this.
At the General Assembly podium yesterday, on Wednesday, Erdogan, the president of Turkey, said that they call on Kurdish regional government to abort their referendum.
And he said this, ignoring Turkey can deprive the Kurdistan Regional Government of the opportunities they currently enjoy.
I'll interpret that.
This region, which I've been living in here, is almost totally dependent on Turkey for goods and supplies.
There's no other exit, there's no other way out or in, really, into this region.
Iran border is kind of militarized and not, you know, you could easily go, Kurds can easily visit Iran without visas.
There's kind of good relations with Iranian government.
But, and there's some Iranian goods that come here.
There's no question about that.
I see them in the shops.
But the vast majority, vast, vast majority of goods here are Turkish.
Turkish food, Turkish furniture, everything.
It's a place where the Turks are making a lot of money.
Now, one thing Erdogan could do is to shut the border.
That's what I think he's implying here, that they will deprive the opportunities they enjoy, because Kurds, Kurdistan here, this Iraqi Kurdistan is so dependent on Turkish goods.
But if he were to close the border, Turkish businessmen would be losing money and they will be very angry.
Tell me again, though, why Erdogan would be so opposed?
I know he has pretty good relations with Iraqi Kurdistan, with Barzani now, right?
Well, everyone knows about the long 30-year war between Turkish Kurds and the Turkish government.
Turkey's Kurds have been fighting for independence unsuccessfully now for 30 years.
Erdogan actually was the first leader who started to recognize them.
He allowed them to use the Kurdish language in their school.
He opened up talks with Kurdish Turks and reduced tensions.
But that reversed itself in the 2015 election in Turkey, in which 10 percent of the parliament was now won by a Kurdish party in Turkey.
So he had to make an alliance with ultranationalists to rule, and he started to crack down again on the Kurds, started the war again, horrible scenes of destruction that were missed by the media because of the horrible scenes of destruction in Syria and elsewhere.
It went on about last year, at the beginning of last year in particular.
They really cracked down and killed many civilians and devastated certain Kurdish cities in Turkey, in Turkey.
So in general, the principle, they don't want a Kurdistan free, independent state in Iraq because of the implications it could have to stir up again Turkish Kurds.
And the idea, some people here fear, Turks that I know, that the Turkish military could intervene here.
I also think that's highly unrealistic.
They will keep their troops there to put down any Turkish-Kurdish uprising that could result from the result of the election on Monday.
So I think Turkey, the worst they could do is close the border for a week or something, and they may not even do that.
They're just talking a big game as well.
So, you know, Erdogan, by the way, invited Barzani to come and speak twice now in Turkey and flew the Kurdish regional flag there in Turkey, in Ankara, where he spoke.
So this was something unusual.
But this is sort of, it's a kind of protectorate, American protectorate here, militarily supported by America, obviously.
They're the ones who stopped ISIS from taking over Erbil, where I am.
But economically it's totally dependent on Turkey.
So, and Turkey makes a lot of money here as well.
I don't think they're going to close the border.
If they do, it would be probably not more than a week.
These are all predictions.
I hope people forget it from Rome.
But this is what I'm saying now.
The other country, of course, is Iran.
And some people are worried that Iran would intervene, which is a totally, totally crazy idea.
Again, the Iranians will be very, I'm sure, alert on the border and in their Kurdish regions for the impact it might have on their Kurdish population, who might start becoming more active and agitating again for independence after seeing the Kurds vote for him neighboring Iraq.
But the idea that the Iranians would divert troops here, as I don't believe the Turks would divert troops here, as they would keep Turkey against their own Kurds, the idea that Turkey would invade, sorry, that Iran would invade Iraqi Kurdistan and hand on a silver platter, you know, an excuse for the United States and Israel to attack Iran is not going to do it.
They are very well aware of the threats coming from the U.S. and Israel, as we saw at the UN again from Netanyahu and Trump just yesterday.
They're not going to provoke the U.S. and Israel by invading here.
And they don't need to.
They have nothing to do with this.
They are not happy about the referendum, of course they're not, because of the impact it would have on their Kurdish population.
And then we have Syria, which is Barzani's Iraqi Kurds have relations with them, although, you know, the idea that they would ever join together into a state right now is a fantasy.
But the Syrian Kurds are holding their own elections for their local communes in the next couple of weeks, and they're planning in January, I believe, to hold an election to create a regional parliament, basically to set up what they've got here, semi-autonomous state within Syria with their own regional government.
A Syrian Kurdish regional government over there over the border in Syria.
Now, right now, of course, since ISIS has still not been vanquished, the Syrians and the Russians and the Iranian allies are still fighting them.
And in 2011, more autonomy was given by Assad to the Syrian Kurds.
But from all indications are you would not want to see this Kurdish Syrian government, local regional government, become established in a federation.
But remains to be seen whether Assad would have the will, the resources, the backing from Russia to go after them afterward.
So the Syrian Kurds, I don't think, will be affected so much by this, because they're already fighting a war and they already have their own military plans.
And lastly, Russia has, I think, played the wisest role here by saying nothing.
I've been thinking that Baghdad, Americans, the Brits, Iranians, the Turks, they're creating more attention on this referendum, which will not create independence, which will only be an expression of political will of the people, which is a foregone conclusion, and is only a negotiating tool for the Iraqi Kurds with Baghdad to try to eventually get independence through negotiations, which they have to have.
I think Russia has been quiet about this, and I think maybe the other governments should have not brought such attention on this, and only privately through diplomacy applied pressure and, of course, kept in close contact with Iraqi Kurdish officials, rather than making all this bombast and then really not being able to do anything to stop it.
I think this is where we are now.
I think it's very much like Brexit, in a way.
Last time I looked, Britain is still part of the EU.
That election was a year ago, wasn't it?
So it's going to be something like that.
There'll be an election, but it's not going to change anything legally or materially at first.
But the next phase will be these negotiations.
The U.S. is threatening to stop these negotiations with Baghdad if they have the vote.
So they don't want the Kurds to have this extra leverage in the talks, which the referendum will give them.
All right.
Hang on just one second for me.
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And that makes sense to me, too, that they would certainly have more leverage in the talks after that.
And yet you're saying in reaction, the Baghdad government, the Abadi government is saying, no, because we won't talk to you at all.
So how much leverage is that?
Well, that's what they're saying.
That's what they're saying.
And then, you know, they could say, OK, we're going to declare independence.
You don't talk to us.
We want to do it through negotiations.
You're the one stopping the negotiations.
We're going to declare independence.
Then you have to interview me again to see what kind of reaction did the region, the neighbors have to that.
What does Baghdad have to lose if they do declare full independence?
Because they already make their own separate oil deals without cutting Baghdad in on the share of the profits and all that.
Anyway, we've been through that a few years ago, right?
Yeah, that's really the core of the problem here.
Well, there are two problems.
One is oil.
Yes, that Kurdish oil is supposed to be sold through the Iraqi government, and they don't do that.
Where are they selling it?
To Turkey.
It's another reason why Turkey will probably not close that border, because they're getting oil from the Kurds.
And that's illegal.
But, you know, and the Iraqi government says that, by the way, the Supreme Court of Iraq ruled this week that this referendum is illegal, and the Kurds say that that's not true.
They interpret the constitution differently.
The other problem is the disputed areas, which we have to talk about, in particular is Kirkuk.
Kirkuk city and province, which is where the most oil is in this region.
And this was an Arab-majority city before the American invasion in 2003.
After the invasion, Kurdish refugees went to Kirkuk and has changed the demographic balance, where it's a slight majority Kurdish now.
So the idea of holding this referendum in Kirkuk is really incensed Baghdad and the Americans in particular, because this is the most vital issue here.
And that seems like that's the kind of thing that they would go to war over, possibly.
Possibly, yes.
With control of that city.
Yes, the oil in that city.
This is probably a mistake, from my view.
Now, there's evidence Amnesty International did a pretty interesting report a few years ago with some evidence, with satellite evidence and others, that pictures that Iraqi Kurds had taken over Arab villages that were abandoned because of ISIS, and they did not allow Arabs back again and destroyed Arab homes.
Sounding like something happens on the West Bank.
The Kurds have denied it, but there seems to be the evidence of that.
So they're not completely innocent.
They've been victims throughout their history, the Kurds, of all these governments we've been talking about and all these peoples.
So in Iraq War II, kill me if I got this wrong, I'm 99.999% sure.
Yeah, it must have been.
It was Patrick Coburn was there in Mosul at the start of the war.
And the Peshmerga basically acted as an auxiliary American force, and they took Mosul as America was invading from the south.
Because remember, the Turks wouldn't let us invade from Turkey.
But we had the Kurds come in and act as auxiliaries and attack from the north.
And he said they occupied Mosul for a few days, and then they realized that, all right, we better get the hell out of here now.
They were not welcome.
It was not their city.
And they had forced the Hussein regime, the Baathist government and army out of the country.
But they realized pretty quickly, they better turn that over to, I guess it was Petraeus got it and ruined everything after that.
But they knew that that was, they didn't even want to take it.
That was a bridge too far.
Then they turned around and left before pushing their luck.
And so I guess that I'm setting up trying to further question of, well, what about now that they've chased ISIS out of there and died trying a lot of them?
And it seems like the same question for Iraqi army and Shiite militia forces and others.
What are they going to do with Mosul now?
Are they going to let the whole population come home?
Is there anything to come home to?
Or is it going to be a change, ethnically change?
Is there going to be a change over of who rules that country from before?
That city, I mean.
Well, you know, Petraeus wasn't very welcome either, nor were the Americans.
No, he sure wasn't.
That is not a Kurdish city.
In fact, all he did was arm up the guys who then, as soon as he left, they turned around and became the insurgency there.
Well, that's right.
The thing is, this is not part of the disputed area.
They are not claiming Mosul.
So that is not part of the equation.
Except the timing of this referendum, I suspect, had to do with the victory over ISIS.
There's a great feeling of relief here and national pride that they were a big part of defeating, even though the Iraqi army did most of the fighting in the city, and the Kurds were mostly fighting in villages around Mosul, which was very important.
So that, I think, on that feeling of victory, he declared this independence, which is one of the reasons the Americans and Baghdad are so much against holding it now, is because ISIS has not been defeated even in Iraq, let alone Syria.
They're still fighting, and that this should not be a distraction.
And this could be more conflict, although I'm skeptical that there will be a conflict over this at this time.
But Mosul, but Kirkuk would be the flashpoint for that.
Again, if they vote, and they probably will vote in Kirkuk for independence, doesn't mean that they're independent.
Or if they do and they ever did declare independence, then I think we might see some real, real trouble, maybe violence over Kirkuk.
They will not, Baghdad and the Americans probably will not allow Kirkuk to become ruled by Erbil, but by Baghdad.
It's an Arab city, but the demographics change because of the American invasion.
So they were supposed to have a referendum there to let local people decide which government they wanted to belong to, to Erbil or to Baghdad.
But the Iraqis insisted that the people who had come there after 2003 would not be allowed to vote, which would mean it would be an Arab majority.
And the Kurds said, no, they have to vote.
They live there.
And that's why they've never held this referendum.
So that's a really, really tense situation there.
Now, what about in the eastern provinces at the, you know, because I guess Kirkuk is sort of out to the northwest of Baghdad, right?
And so, but what about in Nineveh province and all that?
Are there territorial flashpoints there?
Well, not with the Kurds, no.
Mosul is in Nineveh, and that is...
Oh, I guess, I'm sorry, I screwed it up.
The one that's right on the Iranian border, south of Kurdistan.
Okay, I'm not sure which one that is, but...
I forget too, sorry.
There's no, what's interesting is in the east here at Sulaymaniyah, which is the second largest city here, they're not as fanatic about independence as they are here.
They haven't held big rallies.
This political party here, Goran, which is the second largest party, which is opposed to the referendum.
So it's really an Erbil thing and a Barzani thing.
Barzani is the head of the Barzan tribe.
They come from the village of Barzan.
They've been leaders for 100 years or more, the Barzan family.
And Mr. Maliki, who was the vice president, called him, Barzani, a tribal leader, not the president of an autonomous region.
That's how Iraqi Arabs see him.
So I think that the tension really is going to be focused, if there is tension, in Kirkuk mostly, and the other disputed areas, which are mostly rural areas around Kirkuk and in the east, yes.
But the eastern part of this, which is ruled by a different party, which has fought a civil war with Barzani's party, they are not so keen on it.
But they have supported it.
This is the Talabani tribe.
Talabani's people and his party have fought a war in the 90s with Barzani here, and they fought in the streets here in Erbil.
But they have supported the referendum.
So it's going to pass.
It's going to pass, but nothing's going to happen right away.
And I don't think anyone should overreact.
And I think the statements against may have been better to be delivered privately and not to create a lot more tension.
You're going to see more stories in The New York Times now.
Western reporters are coming in here.
And it's going to be a big deal, and it's going to be a huge celebration.
But nothing will change till next day.
But down the road we're going to see whether the negotiations are stopped, which would spur them to declare independence, or whether they do have negotiations and the threat of declaration of independence becomes a way for Erbil to get what they want, which is independence.
Because they have, right now, a semi-autonomous region.
They have not a parliament that effectively meets.
Tell me more about the Iranian Kurds here.
So you talk about the history of after World War II and all of that.
But I know so little about this.
I know that in the redirection that another Seymour Hersh article there, which is the start of a lot of our current policy now, where it was, you know, CIA backing bin Ladenite types in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
That was Jandala in Iran.
But there was also sort of a parentheses there that they were backing PJAK, which was the Iranian branch of the PKK.
And that, so anyway, and then you brought up that, you know, if this does happen, the Iranians are not likely to overreact because they don't feel like they have that much to lose in the sense that their Kurdish population is going to try to immediately break away or anything like that, that they need to have a violent overreaction or anything.
So I wonder, you know, what all you can tell us about them and how inclined they might be to want to join with the Iraqi Kurds if they could and that kind of thing.
There's no talk of that at all.
But I do think there's a real chance that they will start to protest and rise up and cause trouble for the Iranians.
And I think we could, I would not be surprised to see a crackdown on Iranian Kurds following this referendum and violence there inside Iran, in northern Iran, where the Kurds live.
But like I said, they had a state for a year.
It was crushed.
Their leaders were executed.
Iran will not tolerate an independent Kurdish state.
Inside there was their country and still is.
And, yes, the Kurds dream of linking up all the Kurds from the four countries in which they are living.
But this is a wild fantasy right now, only because, and not that they don't have a, you know, legitimate argument for that.
I'm not against, on principle, the idea of the Kurds having a state.
They've been victims of all these governments.
They are a separate people.
They have a separate language and separate culture, different mentality than the Arabs.
They are a different people, and they're very proud.
But the political realities are that they are not, the only thing they might get is independence here in Iraq.
But that doesn't look likely, either.
They're going to get a referendum and not independence.
I don't think that the Iranian Kurds and the Iraqi Kurds joining together is really something that one could expect.
Well, and even where you know that you have the PKK in Turkey and the YPG in Syria and the PJAK in Iran, Barzani's faction, Talabani, those guys are basically just in Iraqi Kurdistan, and they don't have that kind of transnational pseudo commie kind of network thing going on that these other groups have.
So it's not like if the Iraqi branch of the PKK was in control and they were declaring independence, that might really make the Turks freak out, right?
Or that kind of thing.
No, in fact, Barzani has allowed continuous bombing from Turkish F-16s inside Iraqi territory here against the PKK.
Continuous?
I mean, I know from time to time, but does that really happen very often?
I think it happened last week, another one.
This doesn't get reported anymore.
They are hitting Turkish PKK who are on this side of the border, who are aiding the PKK inside Turkey.
So Barzani does not stop, and Iraq doesn't stop Turkey, it's Iraqi territory as far as Baghdad's concerned, from striking inside this country.
So yes, they have been opposed to the PKK, but in most part the Barzani Kurds.
And you're right, although he did spend time in the Soviet Union as a young man, and there is an Iraqi Communist Party here that's not very big, but I passed its headquarters very often on the road here, on the 60 meters road, and I knew the son of the leader of the Iraqi Communist Party.
It's a secular country, but it's certainly not socialist.
They like business here.
It's secular in the sense that there's no religious, women don't have to cover their heads, that kind of thing.
Although many do, but they don't have to.
Now listen, I want to ask you about Iraq War 3 and Mosul and all this stuff too, but first, one last thing on this whole Kurdish independence or half-step toward it and this kind of thing in Iraq, is what exactly is Israel's interest in breaking off Kurdistan from Baghdad's control here?
It's very strong interest.
Even Netanyahu said something about it the other day that is in favor.
I think there's two factors here.
Again, the Arab states, even though now there's a Shia government here in Baghdad, very close to Iran.
Iran has a lot of influence here.
Israel sees Iran as its biggest enemy, and it once saw Iraq as its biggest enemy with Saddam.
The idea of breaking up large, potentially powerful states like Iraq was under Saddam is something that they have sought.
Syria being broken up and devastated is good for their security.
Their number one issue is their security.
They only have, of course, a peace deal with Jordan and Egypt, not with Iraq, not with Syria, obviously.
So to break up Iraq into three pieces would be even better, I think, which Joe Biden, if you remember, was a supporter of.
Another thing is they could operate more from here if they had an embassy.
It borders with Iran, and if there are any Israeli operations inside Iranian territory, which is not a far-fetched idea.
We know, of course, about cyberattacks that took place against the Iranian nuclear program that was run by Israel and the U.S.
But if they want to run commando operations or Mossad or whatever inside Iran, they have a border here.
So I think that could be another possibility where they would want to get a foothold here.
But they've been supporting Kurdish independence for a long time, and I don't think that's because they really care about the Kurdish people too much.
I think they care about their own interests, which every government does.
And those are the two reasons, I think, that Israel is supportive of Kurdish independence.
But it won't matter if only Kurdistan and Saudis, for the same reason, with their hatred of Iran.
You know, they could also help stir up Kurdish Iranians, because that's the border here between Kurdistan and Iran.
It borders with Iraqi Kurds.
So if they want to aid the Iranian independence movement of the Kurds, which I think Israel would love, they could do that more easily too, maybe, if they didn't have to deal with a Baghdad government who claims sovereignty over this territory, if it was in Israel.
If it was a Kurdish government that would feel indebted to Israel for being one of the only countries to recognize them.
You know, they'll never be a member of the UN.
I think a lot of Kurds here fantasizing, you know, Barzani maybe speaking at the General Assembly, or Kurds winning a gold medal somewhere.
It's not going to happen.
There's not going to be recognition by enough countries, even if they do declare independence.
And that would question, then, their legality under the Ghantive Deya Convention, which I began this conversation about, that they need a certain number.
It's never been determined how many.
But they need, you know, a substantial number of countries to recognize them, and they would never become, you know, a member of the UN or anything like that.
So this Israel, it's interesting, their involvement here.
I think a lot of it is covert, but obviously, but they are now overtly calling for independence.
And the Saudis, I think, also would like to have some way to maybe to undermine Iran through the Kurdish region.
This is just my guess.
Yeah.
Well, I've actually been surprised in the past about how open the Israelis are about how badly they want to see this.
It seems like that would be counterproductive if they announced to the world that, yeah, that's what we want here in the Likud party, that that would cause a negative reaction that would make it less likely somehow.
But they have been very blatant about this for many years, I think.
A foreign ministry official here, the foreign ministry of the Kurdish regional government, made that exact statement, I think, two or three days ago.
You know, they appreciate Israel's support, but they prefer they didn't say it out loud.
He actually said that.
He did say that.
That's counterproductive.
It could hurt us.
We don't really want, you know, this to be known.
Seems pretty obvious, right?
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
So now, I guess, can you update us on the status of Mosul?
You know, we are talking about the Peshmerga here, and their war, as you say, against the Islamic State is sort of the background of this whole conversation as well, that they have successfully rousted the Islamic State out of Mosul, but not all of Iraq, you said.
How's the Battle of Tal Afar going?
Isn't that over?
I believe it is, two or three weeks ago.
That was an important battle.
That links Iran by road to Syria, and then on to Lebanon.
Tal Afar was a very strategic battle.
Look, I hope to be able to get to Mosul at some point.
I have not.
But, you know, one thing we have to keep in mind here is 40,000 people were killed there in that American attack, American-led attack on Mosul.
And, obviously, ISIS came about through the support of American regional allies and the United States as a way to put pressure on Assad.
They didn't expect it to become the Frankenstein it did, perhaps, where they had to fight it.
But the U.S. has big responsibility for this mess.
And then instead of cutting off aid to them and oil sales and whatnot and arms, you know, they did not stop ISIS until they had to kill 40,000 people.
The old city of Mosul, which looks like an absolute treasure, has been devastated.
And, you know, they're trying to rebuild.
They're putting in water systems and electricity, and they're trying to get back on their feet.
I don't know how long that's going to take, but they have suffered enormously because of this whole outrageous development of Islamic State here that started out as a project to overthrow Assad, really, in eastern Syria, and would never have happened if the Americans had not invaded Iraq and if they hadn't been trying to overthrow Assad.
Two secular guys, Saddam being, of course, much worse, not real democratic figures, but they had stability and they kept Islamic extremists at arm's length.
And that has been disturbed by American interests here.
So right now, Mosul is not in the news because there's no more fighting going on there.
And that's good news, but there is no news there.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm very happy to hear that.
As you said, the 40,000 now, I've read that, of course, in Patrick Coburn in The Independent.
Yes.
And he had gotten that from Kurdish sources that that was their military intelligence estimates.
Zabadi, who was the foreign minister of Iraq, he's a Kurd, was the foreign minister of Iraq.
I met him several times in the UN.
He's very friendly with Western Germans.
He sat down with Patrick Coburn, showed him a Kurdish intelligence report that had that figure of 40,000.
It was not widely reported.
Well, and Patrick sure believed it.
And he's the kind of guy who would know if he was necessarily full of 40,000 corpses or not.
You know, he's got that kind of experience.
When you look at the destruction of that area of tightly, very narrow streets, very densely populated, when you look at that destruction and the idea that 40,000 died is not hard to believe.
But it's also not hard to believe The New York Times is not going to publicize that because they were going off on the Russians killing 900 to 1,000 civilians in Aleppo, which was genocide, to drive out similar type of jihadists.
When I talked with Patrick about it, and he was saying, listen, it's, you know, the Islamic State held the civilian population hostage and wouldn't let them run.
And the Americans are just bombarding them from the air.
And then Iraqi forces are just bombarding them with artillery.
And then, yeah, man, what do you think's going to happen?
Equals 40,000.
This war, this happened for 10 months, right?
It was as long as the whole Libya war.
So, yeah, 40,000 people died.
What do you think's going to happen?
They're in a, it's a canned hunt, like Dick Cheney goes on.
It's a city of 2 million people.
There were a million left there.
So 40,000, it's a lot of people, but it's not hard to believe.
All right.
So now, man, I'm sorry to keep you so long here.
We're right on hour.
I'll let you go if you need to go.
Yeah, well, one more.
So, because, you know, lots of things, and people like hearing you say them, I think.
I do.
So there's a whole, a change of situation going on in eastern Syria now.
What used to be western Islamic State is now, again, eastern Syria, I guess, as Raqqa is under siege.
The YPG, with some Arab forces mixed in, work with the Americans and lay in siege there.
But then you got the Russian and Iranian backed Syrian government forces.
And they've recently, I know this much, I'll hope you'll be able to help elaborate.
They roused to the Islamic State out of Deir ez-Zor, finally.
And then, so Raqqa's all they got left.
And then, but I saw the other day that the Americans were whining and complaining, and maybe quite dangerously, that the Syrian army had crossed the deconfliction line.
And I believe the Euphrates River, where they said that they wouldn't, bringing the American backed, so-called SDF, those YPG forces, really right there within range of the Iranian and Syrian government forces there.
So anyway, I was just wondering, any corrections you can make to that, or any elaboration you can make on that and the situation in Raqqa, I sure would appreciate.
No, I do know that the Americans said afterward that they would, that the Russians or the Syrians had bombed close to where these American backed forces were, but that they were trying to work together on that, which is good.
I think the battle for Raqqa is still, you know, the race for Raqqa, as it's been called now for almost a year or more, is still going on.
And that's going to be crucial to find out who's going to gain control of that city.
And that could determine the future of eastern Syria, whether it becomes controlled by the Americans or not.
And right now it looks like the Americans are there to stay.
They've got lots of people, and they're flying their flag as they drive around.
They're not secretly there.
They're not.
More than special forces, I think.
So Syria has become so complex, the eastern Syria, what's going on right there.
And I haven't focused as much on that as I have now on Iraq.
But I would say that we're going to hopefully see within weeks a resolution of the Raqqa battle, and that could effectively end ISIS's control, although there'll be pockets of these guys, as there are here in Iraq.
And then we're going to see who's going to be in control of Raqqa and what the Kurds do with the victory that they will celebrate.
They have contributed a great deal towards the defeat of ISIS, going back a couple of years when they were fighting in Kobani, if you remember.
I think we don't know yet.
I'm not going to venture that.
I'm only going to on this show, I'm only going to predict what's going to happen after this Iraqi referendum, not what's going to happen in Syria.
I stay away from that.
Fair enough.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I'll let you go, but thank you very much for coming back on the show, Joe.
I really appreciate it.
You're quite welcome, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
All the best.
All right, you guys, that is Joe Laurier.
The book is How I Lost by Hillary Clinton.
It's all block quotes of her.
The whole thing is just her explaining what a horrible person she is and how horrible she is on every single issue.
And it's just really annotated and narrated in a sense by Joe.
It's really great.
I mean, I read the whole thing in no time.
I enjoyed it.
It's great.
And then so, yeah, he's you and Joe used to write for the London Times and the Wall Street Journal and all these things.
Now he's camping out in Erbil in Kurdistan, writing for Consortium News and coming on this show to tell you and me.
All right.
Again, the book is How I Lost by Hillary Clinton.
Parentheses Joe Laurier.
And I'm Scott Horton.
Check out scotthorton.org for all the archives.
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Thanks.
