Democracy Now/J.Scahill: US "Created the Very Threat We Claim to be Fighting"

[99th_Monkey]

To talk more about the crisis in the Middle East, we’re joined by Jeremy Scahill, who first reported from inside Iraq before the 2003 U.S. invasion. He’s co-founder of the TheIntercept.org and author of the book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. The paperback version of the book has just been published.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: And congratulations on the book being published as a paperback. Talk about the war in Syria and Iraq now.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, first of all, it’s sort of like the terrorist flavor of the month that we’re dealing with here. You know, first we had al-Qaeda as this huge global threat. Then it was ISIS. And then the Khorasan group was produced. And the thing is, almost no one in Syria had ever heard of the Khorasan group. In fact, my understanding is that it was a term that was sort of used in the U.S. intelligence community and actually isn’t the name of the people that they claim to be attacking.

And what the entire policy boils down to is that the Obama administration has, in a very Orwellian way, changed the definition of commonly understood terms—primarily, the term "imminent." They were saying that the Khorasan group represented an imminent threat to the United States. But we know from a leaked white paper, that was put out in advance of John Brennan’s confirmation to be the CIA director, that the Justice Department actually has officially changed the definition of the word "imminent" so that it does not need to involve an immediate threat against the United States, that it could be a perception that maybe one day these individuals could possibly attempt to plot—not even carry out—a terrorist attack against the United States. That flimsy justification has been used now to expand this war from Iraq to Syria, potentially beyond.

You know, the Obama administration, in engaging in this policy, is continuing a Bush administration outcome of the decision to invade Iraq. And that is, they’re empowering the very threat that they claim to be fighting. Who is ISIS? What is this group made up of? Is it just people that are radical Islamists that want to behead American journalists? No. One of the top—and this almost is never mentioned in corporate media coverage of this—one of the top military commanders of ISIS is a man named Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri al-Takriti. Who is Izzat Ibrahim? Izzat Ibrahim is the leading Baathist, who was on the deck of cards, that the United States has not captured. He was one of Saddam Hussein’s top military commanders. He was not just some ragamuffin Baathist. He actually was a hardcore general in the Iraqi military during the Iran-Iraq War, and he was a secular Baathist.

Why is he fighting with ISIS? Well, when Bush decided to invade Iraq, and then he put Paul Bremer, who was a radical neocon ideologue who had cut his teeth working for Henry Kissinger—when Paul Bremer was put in charge of the occupation of Iraq, one of the first things he did was to fire 250,000 Iraqi soldiers simply because they were members of the Baath Party. As one senior U.S. official at the time said, it was the day we made a quarter of a million enemies in Iraq. All of these Baathists have been jerked around by the United States, and the Sunnis in western Iraq, jerked around by the United States for a very long time. There was the period of the so-called surge, where the U.S. actually paid Sunnis not to kill the United States, you know, U.S. soldiers. And so, but then the U.S. turned around and put in power a Shiite-led government under Nouri al-Maliki that effectively operated a network of death squads that systematically attacked Sunnis.

So the point I’m making here is, yes, there’s an element of ISIS—I don’t know how dominant it is within the group—that is, you know, trying to establish the caliphate. And they are beheading people. And they are imposing a very strict interpretation of sharia law. But there are also—and I would suspect that they’re best military figures—there is also a large contingent of people that are fighting the same battle that they were fighting when the United States originally invaded. The fact is, there was no al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before George W. Bush took—made the decision to invade it, except in the Kurdish region in the north of Iraq, which was not under Saddam Hussein’s control. In fact, it was under the control of U.S.-backed entities. And that was Ansar al-Islam. Saddam Hussein’s forces were fighting that group.

~snip~

Yeah, I mean, this is a clown show with these guys. .... The fact that the Obama administration adopted what was effectively the U.S. policy in Iraq when Bush left office says a tremendous amount about how little the Obama administration understood the disaster in Iraq. Had the United States kept in this sort of strike force, which would have been CIA paramilitaries, special operations forces, it would have exacerbated the problem. The problem here isn’t whether or not the U.S. forces would have been there to stabilize Iraq. The issue is how much worse are we going to make Iraq with these policies. And I think it’s almost impossible to imagine that this could have been handled in a worse way. Having more troops there, I mean, that’s—all of these guys, when they write their memoirs, have this brilliant 20-20 vision looking backwards, that they were the one that knew, they would have done this differently. The U.S., basically, since 9/11—and you could make an argument that this has been U.S. policy for many, many decades—you know, U.S. policy has been its own worst enemy, in one sense: We’ve created the very threats we claim to be fighting.

Full Transcript & Video Here: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/3/jeremy_scahill_on_obamas_orwellian_war

[Electric Monk]

1. I'm a little surprised that this thread hasn't been swarmed by "Fuck Jeremy Scahill" nonsense

He has boxes in his garage! He knows a pole dancer! ...totally missing the point, probably on purpose...

K&R

[ucrdem]

3. Well, if you really want to hear it . . .

my take is a) we've heard his song and dance many times already so what's the point of kicking a dead horse, and b) what a coink that he gets his book republished just in time for a pre-midterm round of stale interviews. Hmm.

[PDJane]

2. That's a restatement of the painfully apparent..........

Well, to everyone but the US and Harper.