02/09/09 – Steve Clemons – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm proud to welcome back to the show, Stephen Clemens, from the New America Foundation and the author of the influential blog, The Washington Note.
Welcome back to the show, Steve.
How are you?
Great to be with you, Scott.
It's been too long since we've spoken.
Well, there's a lot going on, and you've got many better guests than I am.
Yeah, well, whatever.
That's very nice and self-effacing of you.
But no, I'm very glad to have you back on the show to discuss, in particular, Israeli politics.
Sure.
It's a difficult subject matter.
I was actually just speaking with Jason Ditz, who writes up the news summaries at Antiwar.com, and he's made himself a real expert in all these different parties and all the different politicians and how the coalition is.
The president gets first pick at the coalition, no matter who wins the election, and all these interesting things.
It's few and far between that I can find people who really know the ins and outs of these things and who all these people are and what they represent and what it means to us.
I guess, from what I know in broad strokes, they're saying it's pretty clear that Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be the winner.
Is that right?
Well, he's in the lead right now, and anything can happen.
You've got Tzipi Livni, the person running from the Kadima party, closing in a bit on Netanyahu and the Likud party, but we just don't know how it'll turn out.
But right now, it's looking as if Netanyahu is running strong, and it also looks like all of the primary leaders in the race, which are Ehud Barak of the Labour Party, Livni of Kadima, and Netanyahu of Likud, are all chasing a kind of warmongering platform, if you will, and it's running rather strong with Israeli citizens right now, regrettably.
Yeah, one thing that Jason told me was that Ehud Barak's party, Labour, has done a bit better, that they were doing really bad until the war, and now they've doubled their percentage from 7 to 14 or something like that in the polls.
Right.
I mean, Barak is someone who is credited in the past with having gotten pretty close to a peace deal and arrangement with the Palestinians.
I think it is unusual and interesting that Barak, since then, hasn't really been on the sort of peace negotiations agenda.
There was one person, and this is not too politic to say, I suppose, who has been responsible for helping to gin up greater stress with the Palestinians.
It's Barak.
You know, these cabinet decisions are cabinet decisions.
Omer Livni certainly participated in what we saw in Gaza.
But before that, Ehud Barak had a lot to do, as Minister of Defense, with setting the temperature of relations with the Palestinians in general, particularly on the West Bank, where he increased the number of barriers to transportation and barriers to movement with the Palestinians by about 20 percent higher since the Annapolis process began by Bush and Condi Rice.
And so he ratcheted up that tension.
And also, when you had this kind of tit-for-tat game going on on who really broke the so-called ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, it was Ehud Barak's orders at various times to go in and engage in some killings of Hamas leaders when he had a chance to do so, even though there had been a prevailing ceasefire arrangement at that time.
So Barak has been trying to, to some degree, break the back of both Livni and Omer, and by trying to move his party close to being a pro-war party, which is very, very odd to see in Israeli politics.
Well, he's just copying the American Democrats, right?
Try to outflank the Republicans on the Iran issue, for example, if you're Hillary Clinton, or on the Pakistan-Afghanistan issue if you're Barack Obama, and then that way they can't call you a weakling, even though you're a liberal panty-waist and on other issues.
Yeah, regrettably, I agree completely with that take.
Yeah, it is regrettable.
And to see, to see the, if the Labor Party, because as you said, I mean, I remember Barak was the guy that was preferable back in the 1990s.
And it certainly is a bummer to see the, if the Labor Party were the only ones who really had any intention of actually finally giving the West Bank and the Gaza Strip up to the Palestinians, it would be them.
And if they want to outflank everybody on the right in order to be tough guys and get power, then there's really nobody that's trying to actually have peace here.
Yeah, you know, one of the things I should say to balance this out a bit is one of my real mentors on Israeli politics, the guy who's been a lead negotiator for the Israeli government before on some of these deals, and that is Daniel Levy.
He works with me at the New America Foundation and leads with another fellow named Amjad Atala, our Middle East Task Force.
And I've talked with Daniel a few times, too, on the show.
Yeah, he's over in Israel now.
He votes in every election.
And he's taken me to meet people from the Likud Party, the Kadima Party, the Shas Party, Labor, Moretz.
I've met people from across the political spectrum there.
And I should say that even though we're making, and probably further in this discussion we'll be making, sort of broad-stroke generalizations about what Netanyahu might do or what Livni or what Barack might do, there are people within these parties, even Likud, believe it or not, who think that the current trajectory that Israel is on is crazy, that will produce a state that can't continue to be democratic or continue its Jewish character if they don't do something with the Palestinian situation in the Palestinian state.
So I find that interesting, that even this fellow who's one of the principal, very, very well-known advisors to the rabbi who is the head of the Shas Party, a very conservative party, but nonetheless, this guy is very progressive and was able to get his support for some rather pro-peace posture, if you will.
Now, they're going to have trouble discussing things on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, but to some degree, you've got greater flexibility within the Israeli political order than we're typically seeing from these gladiators at the top who right now are trying to ratchet themselves up in citizen approval by being the one to say the most vilifying things about Hamas.
It's really funny, you know, I've never been over there, so I don't know, but it's almost, it seems like the population over there must be a bunch of American rednecks and their government is run by a bunch of George Bushes and Stephen Adleys and incompetents like that.
It's really not like that.
It seems as short, the policies seem as short sighted, like you're saying, this trajectory that they're on to not really being able to maintain, you know, one or two or more of the major characteristics that make Israel Israel over the long term.
I mean, this is really, you might as well have had George Bush running the government over there.
It's been a disaster.
Israel is a complex place.
I find it fascinating.
I've been there now a number of times.
It's a collage of cultures that have come together.
You know, religion is a major part of the national identity of the state, but there are a lot of secular Jews over there who see the world differently.
And there's a collage of these folks.
And there are some things that might surprise you that I find very progressive about Israel system.
For instance, any Palestinian grievance, you know, whether it's related to the wall or some taking of property, et cetera, can be adjudicated to the Supreme Court in Israel.
And often they vote in favor of the Palestinian claimant.
So there are things like that, that, you know, balance out some of the more horrible things that we've seen when any, when any government and army occupies another state and people.
And I should also say that I've seen a very, very bad side.
I mean, I mean, this wasn't, I haven't seen the worst.
I went through to Ramallah through the VIP checkpoint, in fact, where Mahmoud Abbas goes through and various UN agency folks go in and out of.
And I was nonetheless having even a memo signed by the Ministry of Defense approving my, you know, transport into Ramallah.
The Israeli Defense Force guards there held us up for 45, 50 minutes, pretty much harassed us a little bit.
But, and this is at the VIP border.
So, you know, one, you know, can't imagine what goes on in other places.
And I eventually went in and the two other folks I was with who were significant, you know, Israelis, we just all said, shoot us if you want, we're walking into Ramallah.
And we went in.
And, you know, there's that kind of constant tension that I think to some degree is promulgated and created by the IDF.
And it's a sad thing.
And it's just time that there's a broader spotlight.
When I say that Israel is very complex, Scott, the other thing is, it is very intriguing.
If you read the Israeli press, Ma'arif and Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, there's a much wider debate, even in the right wing paper, the Jerusalem Post, than there is usually in the U.S. press.
And that's something that I've been committed to, to try to widen at least our own debate in the United States to have the same character and content that the Israelis are able to do, which is quite impressive.
So I wouldn't agree with your characterization of Israel that it's full of rednecks.
It's full of sophisticated people.
But, you know, as in any case, there's a lot of politics and sometimes they're hijacked.
There's a hijacking of a political system by minority groups, particularly that want to intimidate, you know, the harder course of a more peaceful or at least a more negotiated course with the Palestinians who will one day be across the border.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, I was basically trying to make the equivalency.
I wasn't saying that they are rednecks, but it seems like, you know, hey, Gaza is attacking us.
Let's defend ourselves from the terrorist enemy and bomb them all.
And and having everybody rally around that is what I would expect of Americans, I guess.
The knee jerk emotionalism was hard to watch this time.
And the bravado that came from Tzipi Livni and others saying that any rockets would be met with disproportionate force.
This is this is a way this is if you gave if you tried to speculate what Hamas was trying to achieve, then the Israeli government was giving Hamas exactly what it wanted, which was outrageous, flamboyant behavior and the and the effort of the overlord of the of the occupier to crush many innocents and others, because this can create a transformative dynamic that radicalizes even more Arabs in the region and helps fuel Hamas, Hamas legitimacy in their eyes.
And so it's sort of perverse.
But, you know, if I were running the Israeli state and you had a sounder crowd there, you try not to give Hamas what it wanted.
Try not to radicalize more Arabs in the region.
Try to give them the opposite of what they wanted.
And there is a problem with the terror that's created by these rockets.
But they rarely kill anyone.
And and it's not the question they should just turn a blind eye.
They need to be dealt with.
But the kind of massive deployment of of killing force that Israel did is probably undermined Israel's objectives and long term security in the region.
And it has probably built up Hamas and its legitimacy to a level that that means that down the road, you know, we're going to have to find a way to deal with Hamas.
And and that's just the product of of this encounter.
So, you know, I think that when you've got what you call them terrorists, you call them insurgent organizations, you call them anti colonizers, whatever, when you are a state, you should be able to try to explain to your people what kinds of moves you would make that do not automatically give your rival, the non state actor who's trying to provoke you the actions they want.
And Israel gave Hamas exactly what it wanted.
Well, I think that's, of course, the most important thing to understand about terrorism is that the action is in the reaction.
Patrick Coburn on the show the other day explained why would Sunni jihadists in Iraq a few years back in the civil war?
Why would they attack a Shiite marketplace is to get the Shiite death squads to come and in reaction, kill a bunch of Sunni civilians.
Then the terrorists can say, see, you need us to protect you.
We're the only ones who can protect you from the Shiite death squad that we just provoked into coming and killing people around you and whatever.
And so that's how it works.
Same thing with September 11th to smack us in the face and dare us to come and dig in and fight wars in the Middle East, bleed us to bankruptcy is the stated objective, right?
I think there's something to that.
And I think it's very important to realize that, you know, actors like, you know, groups that are trying to knock off a, you know, what they would see as sort of an occupation or, you know, a 21st century colonizer, as many Iraqis saw American activities in Iraq, that they're trying to operate in an asymmetric way with all the resources they can and trying to provoke actions and use our power almost in a jujitsu way against ourselves.
And I think that one of the things that I find fascinating right now is that despite this having, you know, now passed, you know, essentially an eight-year mark nearly, you've got a period of introspection where we're beginning to realize to some degree in this country, I think, that you just can't continue to give the rivals that are trying to provoke us the actions they want because it ends up in these slippery slopes to real disasters for the United States, real over-commitments of the military and a failure to achieve objectives and to get back to some sort of stable order.
So that is why, you know, I wrote in a piece on my blog recently about Netanyahu.
I wrote it saying, you know, please give us Netanyahu because to some degree it removes the veneer.
It gives us exactly what we think.
The right-wing side of Israel, the, you know, rejectionist side of Palestine are completely unable to come to terms on their own with a long-term equilibrium or, you know, not to say even a peace that would allow a two-state solution to be created between Israel and Palestine.
I still believe that solution does exist and is possible, but you cannot anymore play the game of thinking that the Israelis and the Palestinians can act strategically mature enough to try and achieve an outcome that is good for either of them or good for the region or good for the world.
And it is about time that the United States, Europe, the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the UN, Russia, realize that working with Netanyahu is probably a good thing to impose on him and his government, as well as the Palestinians, what kind of solution we stakeholders around it can accept and can't accept, and create costs and incentives for not moving forward, because we've just reached a level where the continued failure to solve this problem is undermining American security, and that's just an unacceptable status quo that has to be changed.
Well, except then what if we get Netanyahu and it doesn't create that kind of external pressure and we just end up having a Likud government and more wars in Gaza and in the West Bank?
It's hard for me to imagine that.
I mean, if Netanyahu does any of the things that he's promised in his campaign, and we've all seen Barack Obama go through a metamorphosis after he won.
He's certainly not the same guy as president as he was when running for office.
We all go through changes, and Netanyahu has been intimating to people that he's matured since the last time he was prime minister and would do things differently.
But we do know that he's dead set against dealing with Hamas and would probably deliver more force there, and that we know that he is pro-settler and favors the further expansion of existing settlements, and I think turns a blind eye to the expansion of non-official settlements.
Those settlements are incredibly toxic to the entire process, and so they basically deliver at least what I think will be ongoing radicalization of this problem.
And I think that we should not be blind to the fact that that's probably where this was going.
And as I said in this piece I wrote, I'm about finished with the earnest approach.
Let's get the balanced person.
Let's make Mahmoud Abbas a winner.
This is what the White House National Security Council is considering doing right now, and I'm calling it too much too late.
They're going to try and shower Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, with all sorts of goodies that he can now shower onto other Palestinians to try and show in their mind that he can deliver, whereas Hamas can't.
And I just find that to be effective late, and even Mahmoud Abbas's mandate expired in January.
So to a certain degree we've got back into legitimacy problems with Palestinian leadership, and we're going to try to tilt the optics on the Palestinian side towards Fatah, and as we do that I think we're going to delegitimize them even further.
But it's better to see all of that, and better to get out of the weeds on these issues, and better to say, what can we do?
The consequences of failing here are so enormous.
What can we really do in a more forceful way to push a government that has someone like Netanyahu at its helm towards a more constructive stance?
And I think we can do that.
I think the crazier he is, I think the better it is for actually getting out of the weeds on this stuff and imposing a solution that might work.
Well, as far as dealing with Hamas, I mean, there's nobody else to deal with in Gaza except Hamas.
You're not going to be able to put Fatah back in there.
They already tried that, right?
Well, I mean, I think that what will eventually happen is you'll have a synthesized unity government again, as we once did.
And we're the ones who broke that government apart.
It made the Saudis furious because they had worked hard to get Fatah and Hamas together, and worked hard to get Hamas to agree to accept the instruments of state that had been previously negotiated, and to come to terms with that order.
And so they weren't going to be on the front end of dealing with Israel.
Although, by the way, there are many Hamas mayors on the West Bank that already deal with the IDF.
And for all the kind of baloney that Israel doesn't talk to Hamas, it's just simply not true.
There's enormous levels of back-channel communication between Hamas and Israel.
Well, this gets back to what you're saying, or actually something else that I'm going to say about what Hamas wants.
Because you were talking about what Hamas wants in the context of firing the rockets in the time after the ceasefire ended.
I saw an interview with Norman Finkelstein where he said that what Hamas wanted was to continue the ceasefire.
Gareth Porter, of course, wrote an article about how Hamas tried to extend it or get back to it in December and were rebuffed.
What Finkelstein was saying was that the Israeli strategy was to not let Hamas be a responsible ceasefire-keeping government for any period of time.
That they want peace, but only on their terms.
It's not that simple.
Because while there's been a ceasefire, Hamas, cordoned off in Gaza, has at the same time been using the fact that Israel was choking off access, food supplies, humanitarian support, and other material to Gaza.
They were letting in maybe 100, 150 trucks a day, when what's needed for that size population is upwards of 750 to 800 trucks a day, that the only way for this population to survive are these so-called smuggling tunnels.
So food and materials have been smuggled in with guns and ammunition and rockets and material from Iran and other sources.
So you had Hamas able to deliver to its people the goods and services through these tunnels, but then also to basically arm itself for ongoing harassment of Israel.
Hamas is not a superpower.
Israel is the only regional superpower with incredible military capacity in that region.
So it is using the ceasefires, and Israel's right on this, to help load up its munitions and to help give it the wherewithal to continue to harass Israelis in its mission.
But it's something that after Fatah and Hamas had split, the United States helped create this civil war.
Israel just sat with Gaza cordoned off in a stranglehold and did nothing, and just let this thing fester.
So you can't let a million and a half people just sit there and fester in a strip of really what is truly hell on earth, and not provide them supplies, humanitarian support, economic wherewithal, and not expect that the one powerful authority down there, which is Hamas, isn't going to both look good in the eyes of Palestinian citizens, and two, isn't going to do things to continue to harass as Hamas wants to continue to grow in the eyes and eventually knock out its political rivals, Fatah, in having the stewardship of Palestine and its interests down the road.
So I think that what is missing on the Israeli side is any sense of strategy, any sense of strategy, that to some degree, they created this situation in Gaza, and they allowed it to fester, they knew what was going on, and so the ceasefires, the way they exist in the ecosystem which Israel has put together, is yes, Hamas arms itself and then continues to harass Israel.
So you've got something that right now is set up to be a chronic ulcer which will never ever go away, and the consequences of which are now beginning to involve American security and frankly American credibility more and more in ways that have very far-reaching consequences potentially for the United States throughout the Arab world.
Well, the book Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, the Los Angeles Times reporter, he makes pretty clear in there what Mohamed Atta's motive was, and it was Israel in Lebanon and in Palestine.
It wasn't American bases in Saudi Arabia, that was Osama Bin Laden's problem.
Mohamed Atta's problem was Israel.
Well, I mean, you may have different grievances driving different people.
I think that you have in the Arab peace deal, which King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia offered first in 2002 and which still is on the table, you had a normalization offer of 22 Arab states normalizing relations with Israel, and that offer has festered too long without enough attention, and it's got to somehow be made a reality, because for Israel to walk away from a deal that would solve essentially its relations with most of its neighbors, I think is the best way to confront Iran without bombing and confronting Iran's pretensions in the region than anything else.
And if Israel can't move in that direction, then it's achieved a level of fundamental strategic irresponsibility that the United States needs to take matters into its own hands as far as that relationship and about the character and conduct of Israel's strategy.
You know, it's very interesting.
Hang on, stop right there.
I want to hear interesting and Bill Clinton in a second.
But what you're saying is Israel has got to get their act together as far as a permanent solution in Palestine and peace with the Arab states, because otherwise they won't be able to have any leverage for a united front with the Arab states against Iran, which has benefited so greatly, of course, from our war in Iraq.
That's right.
The best thing that Israel can do to move regional stability, its own security and American interests forward is normalizing relations with these 22 Arab states.
It then robs Iran of the legitimacy that Iran is trying to has been trying to do with regard to Israel.
And I think that it helps get us back into some sort of equilibrium in the region.
Well, what about normalizing relations with Iran?
Completely negligent in this.
And I think Netanyahu has been among the worst.
But oftentimes, you know, and I keep I'll be on, you know, National Public Radio later on today, I'll say sometimes it takes the worst to pull off the most credible deals.
And and I don't want to be naive and I don't even, you know, project that Netanyahu might be the guy to be able to do this.
But, you know, it is a Nixon goes to China model that sometimes is most compelling when you take, you know, America's top, most ferocious anti-communist cold warrior and you turn him into the guy who goes to China.
Now, you know, that would be nice with Netanyahu.
I find myself unable to believe it will be there.
But what I do know is that his recklessness, his reckless rhetoric, his reckless behavior and his support of settler associations and whatnot that have done so much damage to the Palestinian Israeli possibilities, essentially, is that.
That that can can finally show the country while we're paying attention to these issues is no longer a boutique issue controlled by, you know, a small minority of interest in the United States.
There's a huge amount of attention in the Middle East right now.
That kind of behavior won't be tolerated.
There's a huge spotlight and Americans and strategists are paying attention.
So I think for the first time in a long time, we'll see U.S.
Israel relations move out from being a domestic policy problem in the U.S. to what is really finally a geostrategic challenge.
Well, and as you've documented so well, your your friends, I guess, or your colleagues, associates formerly with the National Security Council.
I'm sorry, Leverett, Leverett, Flint, Leverett and Hillary, man, they were on the receiving end of what seemed to be a pretty reasonable peace offer by the Iranians themselves back in 2003.
And I wonder whether you think that there's a reasonable chance that peace could be made with all these different factions and why not?
Well, you know, I'm I'm not naive about how difficult it is to achieve peace.
In fact, I joke with people that I don't believe in peace.
I just believe in equilibrium, you know, stable, stable equilibrium could become peace over time.
But when when Flint and Hillary Mann Leverett were involved with this, you know, Iranian normalization offer in the spring of 2003, the Iranians saw the United States on a roll.
They saw us and perceived us to be standing high in our saddle and is globally strong and is ascending.
And this is right after the Iraq invasion.
Our position vis a vis Iran and the rest of the world right now has slipped dramatically.
And while Iran also has some problems, oil prices have fallen and, you know, they have their elections coming up in June and certainly have domestic difficulties there.
We we don't know, as we used to talk about in the Cold War, whether the correlation of forces as perceived by the Iranians have changed anything to change their calculus as to why they might be willing to to work with us again.
I happen to think and I know Flint Leverett agrees that there's nothing harmed by putting forward a credible proposal and by trying to marshal forward the convergence of interest with Russia, with China, with Europe, and move us to sort of a more sophisticated strategy that is less geared towards beating Iran up and more geared towards helping Iran to see that it would have credible benefits, be treated with respect, be able to allow its security paranoias to subside, to get the United States out of the regime change business.
These kinds of things may change the calculus for the supreme leader, Khamenei, and even President Ahmadinejad, if we were to move in that direction.
But there are no guarantees.
But I have to tell you, we should do something along those lines.
And if Iran and the supreme leader, as he's often known to be and decisive as he is, decides not to go that way, then at least the rest of the world sees it.
And America reacquires some of the mystique that it used to have as a global balancer and as a more benign force.
So that's what I hope my friends on the National Security Council staff are thinking and hearing about today.
I still think we've got a lot of work to do on the Obama team, but I know they read you, Scott, and listen to your show.
Oh, really?
On the National Security Council staff?
Well, Anti-War has transcripts and great tapes, and they'll listen.
All right, if you say so.
Well, I'd like them to listen to this, overhear this part of the conversation especially.
Steve, I'm so puzzled.
The entire intelligence establishment of George Bush's administration under Thomas Fingar, the head of the National Intelligence Council in November of 2007, after Dick Cheney, we know because Phil Duraldi and them had reported it a year before, they had suppressed it for a year and it finally came out and it said Iran is not making nuclear weapons.
And Joe Biden's on TV talking about Iran's illicit weapons program, quote unquote.
And Robert Gates, of course, the still Secretary of Defense, says they're hellbent on acquiring a nuclear weapon.
And I'm quite shocked.
It's actually even further than the way that the Bush team mischaracterized the Iraq NIE of 2002.
I think you're onto something.
And I think that, you know, when I had Tom Fingar speak at the New America Foundation, I asked him then if he thought that any of the core criteria of that 2007 Iran NIE had been changed.
And he intimated that there had not, but that it might be appropriate for someone in Congress or one of the customers of the National Intelligence Council to ask for an update.
Essentially, what is an update?
So that they can go back to a sophisticated process and bring forward anything that would continue.
One of, you know, that would help change the assessment of the intelligence community.
I think that what's happening is that in Joe Biden's comments and Gates's comments and others, they're using a slippery slope form of language of talking about Iran's nuclear energy activity.
It's reprocessing activity with these centrifuges and presuming that this is all giving Iran dual use capabilities with regard to eventual production of a potential nuclear weapon.
So we need to have, you know, some sophisticated folks who understand these things go back, because I agree with you that, you know, we're being misled.
That's quite a slippery slope.
The difference between, well, there's an IAEA inspector in a white lab coat with a clipboard and an electronic do-wacky in his hand measuring radiation outputs and making sure that everything is OK.
Like they've said, it is this entire time with no exceptions as far as, you know, the centrifuges spinning at Natanz and everything else.
It's quote unquote, capital S safeguarded.
That's a legal term.
You know, it is a safeguarded facility.
It's not a nuclear weapons program.
It can't be both.
Well, I think that, you know, the Iran program, to put some blame on the Iran side, continues to frustrate the IAEA a bit in its reporting and the confessions of past deeds and, you know, some issues.
But, you know, Mohamed ElBaradei sees progress.
He is optimistic.
I like ElBaradei and the approach that he's taken.
He's proved to be far more right than he has proved to be wrong over these issues.
And I wish the U.S. would get out of the fear mongering game, which I find to be disconcerting when you're trying to show a different face to the world and try to see what is possible.
But at least thus far, they're maintaining the tough rhetoric because they think they need to do that in fear of being called appeasers.
All right.
Now, I talked with if I can get one more line of questioning out of here.
I talked with Patrick Coburn, as I mentioned, and he is of the view that America has lost the Iraq war.
There are not going to be 58 bases.
There are not going to be 14 bases.
There are not going to be any bases.
And the Iraqis are kicking us out.
And it's going to be 16 months, whether the Americans believe it or not, whether they like it or not.
The war is over.
And the Dawa party and the people of Iraq won.
And that's it.
Do you think that that's do you agree with that?
And do you think that the if you if you agree that that's basically the reality of the situation, do you think that, well, for example, your friends on the National Security Council staff understand that as well?
We're not going to know for a while.
I don't want to participate too much in these characterizations of who won and who lost.
In my view, who won was Iran.
You know, we fought the Iraq war and Iran won because we removed their chief regional rival and threat and didn't anticipate that.
And it opened up a whole new set of issues in the region which we're now struggling with and that we were very poorly prepared for inside Iraq.
It's going to be interesting to see whether the stability, you know, the structures we put in place and the deals between, you know, the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shia will hold or whether the moment that we're gone, whether they'll be crumbled down and whether you actually do have some sort of devolution downwards to some, you know, regional scramble for resources in the assets of the state between these contending groups and and whether or not you went to the United States is gone, whether you if you do get a return to violence, which is not too hard to imagine, whether you get Iraq becoming, you know, a proxy battleground between Saudi and other Sunni Arab interests and Iran.
So we just don't know.
I think it's kind of like, you know, Vietnam, you know, you don't know what happens until you leave.
And to a certain degree in Iraq, I don't think our departure is necessarily a loss.
If the place remains rather stable, then that's what we're going to see in war is not decisive victories or decisive losses.
But what would be a decisive loss is if, you know, we're we we depart the place and, you know, everything comes undone and and the power relationships between other key stakeholders in the region just just really go out of balance and drawing in other regional players to fight it out in Iraq.
That would be miserable and would add on to the complexities and and real lousy situation in Afghanistan.
Well, so does that mean that if it looks like things are going to get, you know, much more imbalanced in the region, so to speak, if we leave that, then we won't the 16 months in the in the sofa, which is the law.
I mean, the UN mandate is gone.
The only law that governs American presence in Iraq right now is the status of forces agreement.
Barack Obama has left himself an escape hatch.
He's been pushing the 16 month departure.
Military officials I hear behind the scenes are trying to dissuade him from that.
And thus far, Obama sticking to his guns.
Military commanders are worried.
We live in a world where we're given too much deference to military commanders, in my view.
But but if wants to be realistic about the equation is, you know, there's a there's a perfectly understandable scenario out there where at the end, these commanders fearing the the world and the narrative I just shared with you convince Obama not to draw down quite as much.
And I think that would be really regrettable because I do think we need to.
I think I think we have Iraq as a ball of chain around our neck.
And I think it limits the perception that America can matter elsewhere in the world because of the bleeding, the way this is bleeding our military and financial capacity.
Well, it seems like the Washington Post put out a piece helping Odierno try to undercut his commander in chief just the other day.
What, Saturday, right?
Exactly.
I mean, and that goes along with Gareth Porter's reporting about.
And in fact, it verified a lot of or at least parts of it about the role of this guy, Jack Keane.
You're kind of plugged in in Washington, D.C.
They say in that post piece that this retired General Jack Keane is more influential than most actual four star generals active duty, that he kind of helped Odierno go around the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his commanders in Iraq and everything and go straight to the White House in order to get an increased number of troops there.
Yeah, it's very interesting for those people who don't know what we're talking about.
There's a series of articles and videos as part of the release of Tom Rick's new book, Tom Rick's is the military correspondent for the Washington Post that I recommend people take a look at.
It is disconcerting because on one hand, you look at these military guys as they're trying to depict them as heroes and as straight shooters and as smart strategists who are able to get around the anachronistic and stifling bureaucracy of the military to affect the president's decisions.
So I can see that story.
It makes a great movie.
On the other hand, when it comes to dealing with complex challenges, it's a very scary scenario that you're going to have freelancers and folks essentially coming clearly around with authorities that don't really exist and turning a national security decision making process into an ad hoc one.
And maybe that's what we needed.
I don't want to wrestle over that right now.
It's not my issue.
But I do think that there is a national security decision making is something that ought not to be a function of some, you know, general gets a bright idea one day and says, OK, let's let's traipse off and do it this way.
If I can only and run all my my colleagues and rivals and get to, you know, get to Bush or Obama, that's that's a very scary kind of of decision making formula.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, it really does seem like the the way it's supposed to be is pretty obvious, right?
Which is, you know, general, I want out in 16 months.
Well, sir, may I please state the 15 reasons why I disagree?
Yes, you may.
Here they are.
OK, I still want out in 16 months.
Now his choice is either to salute smartly and say yes, sir, or resign.
Not to say, oh, yeah, well, I'm going to talk to my buddies at the Post and we're going to see if we can fix your wagon, Mr. President, when he's how many ranks down the chain from this guy.
And this is crazy.
Yeah, well, a lot of them want to have agents and movies and blockbuster bestsellers down the road.
Yeah, well, I guess we could look forward to that at least.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate talking to you and I apologize for my hyperbole, but I hope it helped to get the best out of you.
I think anytime, Scott.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Take care.