President Obama admitted this week that he has no strategy for Iraq and Syria -- but he wants to escalate US presence anyway. More troops, more weapons, a new US base.
President Obama admitted this week that he has no strategy for Iraq and Syria -- but he wants to escalate US presence anyway. More troops, more weapons, a new US base.
President Obama admitted this week that he has no strategy for Iraq and Syria -- but he wants to escalate US presence anyway. More troops, more weapons, a new US base.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams from the Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Daniel, welcome to the program again.
Dr. Paul, thank you.
Good.
I want to visit today a bit on Iraq.
It's an ongoing saga and we dealt with that a long time ago as far as, well, matter of fact, I started dealing with it in 1998, trying to tell people to stay out of there.
But anyway, we worked on it a lot in Washington.
But this is continuing.
The war was the literal war was started, the current war was started in 03.
So that's 12 years it's been going on and it doesn't look like it's getting any better.
The admission seems to be now that their policies didn't work.
Amazing.
And they have to admit it, they can't avoid it.
It came up in the presidential campaign when Jeb Bush was ambivalent about endorsing his brother's war.
And he said, sure, sure, I endorse it.
But then the heat came and it wasn't a good idea.
Matter of fact, it was interesting.
Today he was asked about it and he defended his father, but not his brother on something, foreign policy.
But anyway, they're recognizing that there's a problem.
And all the pundits and all the military people and all the stations, they're coming up with all the solutions.
And quite frankly, they don't even come close.
I imagine you've been watching for some of these proposals on how we all of a sudden can go glide into victory and say that we have made the world safe for democracy and no life was lost in vain.
That's true.
You know, President Obama said on Monday that, you know, I don't really have a Syria strategy yet, you know, or an Iraq strategy.
We're waiting for the Iraqis to step up.
You know, and this after how many months of us escalating and being involved, but as you point out, they recognize that what we're doing is not working.
So what is the new approach?
Every single item on the new list is an item from the wish list of the military-industrial complex.
You mean they have an influence on our policy.
Well, yeah, I'm afraid that is true.
And one big issue is the additional training.
All of a sudden they think, well, we need better training of the Iraqis.
Is that going to convince them not to drop their weapons and run and turn them over to ISIS?
I mean, that's not going to work.
And they're getting ready to build another training base over there, aren't they?
How can what we've not achieved in 12 years be achieved in a couple of months?
And by building, as you point out, when in doubt, when everything fails, build a huge new American military base.
Everyone will be happy.
Well, you know, we have a huge embassy there.
We haven't deserted there.
But, you know, really the downfall of that whole area is going to be when they have to leave the embassy in Baghdad, which would be, politically speaking, for American policy, a real disaster.
But, of course, we don't need it.
I complained about the billion dollars they were spending on that.
That'd be better spent well here at home or leave it with the taxpayers.
But to build that was just crazy.
But there's other suggestions.
They say, well, they have agreed with this wonderful government that we have created that we're not going to directly support the Kurds.
Yet the Kurds have their point.
They want their homeland.
They're good fighters, and they probably, if they had a good fight going, they're probably not going to drop them.
Some people saying, well, okay, let's give the Kurds the weapons and let's support the Kurds.
But hardly is that going to be a solution.
Well, because the Kurds have only fought for Kurdish areas.
I mean, they're fighting for something very different than from what the U.S. wants.
They're fighting to carve out a piece of Iraq for their homeland.
So it's inevitable that the Kurdish strategy and the Iraq and U.S. strategy are going to collide.
It's inevitable.
And I've heard some of the generals on TV and some of the political pundits saying, well, we need to get Turkey to act differently and be on our side more.
At the same time, you don't hear much about what Israel should be doing, but nobody really talks about Israel.
But they're very much involved.
And sometimes when they don't say a whole lot, they say a whole lot about Iran.
Sometimes if they don't say a whole lot about the tactical process, maybe they endorse everything that we're doing.
But they don't get introduced into the general debate on evening TV.
Well, certainly with regard to Syria and the goal of overthrowing Assad, Israel is firmly on the side of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, which is in favor of overthrow.
In fact, it's been shown many times that Israel treats wounded al-Nusra fighters, which is the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria.
They're treating them on Israeli soil.
So they are certainly involved in this.
You know, there was a retired general, Marine General John Allen, had some interesting things to say about what we should do.
But the one point that he made that caught my attention was it's going to last a long time, but they've all been saying that.
But he says the difficulty is we're fighting an ideology.
And we've talked about ideologies.
And we also know that ISIS is not the country of Syria or the country of Iraq.
It's amorphous.
It's all over the place.
And it is ideological.
And ideas, both good and bad, are very difficult to handle.
But when that idea becomes popular with the people, both good and bad, the ideology is very, very important.
So I think he's right that it's ideological, and yet I don't see where they come anywhere close to the solution.
Well, it's convenient that it's an ideology because it harkens back to the Cold War.
You know, when I first graduated university, it was at the end of the Cold War.
And I just started getting interested in foreign affairs, and I hadn't developed my non-interventionist philosophy fully, but I was desperate to find some sort of a job in that field.
And everyone working in foreign affairs was desolate at the time.
They were so depressed.
There were no jobs.
People were laid off.
We didn't really have the peace dividend that we hoped for, but jobs were absolutely drying up.
And it was palpable that they were longing for a new Cold War.
And now we have with this fight against the ideology of ISIS and a new Cold War against Russia.
I imagine they're popping champagne corks in Washington.
Well, I think it's safe to go along with the saying that Obama doesn't have a strategy, but some of the time he accidentally, I guess, has a good point.
I like the idea of what's happening in Cuba right now, you know, the fact that we're opening up an embassy.
Why don't we move in that direction?
And as much as he's been criticized over talking to the Iranians, that's reasonable.
Why shouldn't we doing this?
But many of the critics of Obama aren't criticizing for what they're always complaining that he's not doing enough.
He's not an aggressive enough.
So the average critic that we hear on evening news, they don't have a solution either.
Well, the solution is to do more of the same.
You mentioned General Allen.
I'm looking at this piece that we were looking at earlier today.
He says he laid out his five areas for dealing with the Islamic State.
Denying safe haven to its forces, disrupting the flow of foreign fighters, curbing access to foreign finances, providing humanitarian relief, and responding to the group's propaganda.
This is his solution in Syria and Iraq.
But nowhere is it suggested that why don't we back off of Assad?
This is the guy who's bombing ISIS regularly, despite the lies put out by the U.S. Embassy in Syria.
He's bombing ISIS regularly.
Why don't we back off of trying to overthrow the guy who's fighting the ones that we're supposedly against?
Well, it's either they're not very smart or they have an ulterior motive we don't fully understand, but nothing seems to be going well.
And this is an opportunity for us to present our position because nobody's going to be changing it, who are in charge now.
But these people who want more, you know, the neocons and the pseudo-neocons, want more troops, they say, yeah, but we're going to be sending more troops.
There's 500 on the way, you know, for this base that they're going to build and for training and all this.
But we're going to keep those troops away from the front lines.
Where are the front lines?
You know, any American establishment, any truck, any building, any embassy is a target.
We found that out, you know, in Libya.
But they say we're going to keep the troops away from harm, you know, out of harm's way.
But they reassured us that this is not just an American fight.
There are others in there.
The British just sent 125, or at least committed to 125 troops they're going to send over there.
So this is multinational.
We're not really in charge.
And I guess if anybody believes that, they're kidding themselves.
Yeah, it's a Potemkin village of an international coalition.
But, you know, you point out the issue of this, well, I was going to mention actually the UN Security Council.
They also mentioned that the White House is pursuing a range of options.
But their point is accelerate training and equipping of security forces, and we've got to find a way to get the Sunnis to fight.
Can you imagine from 6,000 miles away, we've got to try to find a way to get Sunnis to fight the war that we want them to fight?
Maybe foreign occupation is part of the problem, and maybe that's ideological.
And maybe ideologically, the people themselves, in spite of all the shortcomings of all the factions, maybe anybody who looks like they're against foreign occupation, El Sadr was very, very interesting, continues to be popular, even though he is a religious person.
He's Shia.
But if the Sunnis want to be on his side to prevent occupation, they do.
So they won't listen to.
Now, another argument against what is happening here, and we have to prevent it immediately, is it looks like we've stirred up so much trouble that there could be a big war.
I don't know how much bigger we want for us as Americans and our military and our money, because we're in like six or seven battle zones.
And they're saying that what we should watch for is a major war between the Sunnis and the Shia.
Yeah, this is, we both saw this piece on McClatchy today, which was very interesting, the idea of a 1914 of the sort of relatively insignificant, in a way, part of the world blowing up.
But you talked earlier about the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
You know, that's the sort of the center of Shia population in Iraq.
So you can imagine if the Sunnis did overrun Baghdad, you think that that could be a trigger for a real war of Iran getting involved directly, of Saudi Arabia getting involved, the U.S. getting involved.
That could be the trigger.
Well, you know, very early on when we had talked about, and I had a very strong suggestion that was self-determination, but not have, no outsider should have the goal of keeping Iraq unified.
And it all started in the Woodrow Wilson era, World War I, the Versailles Treaty, and that era.
And so the country's been artificial.
So, and even some of the individuals who are talking now about new policy, and they're not talking about allowing them to draw the lines.
They're saying that we in the West, because we're still the smartest and the richest and the most powerful, why don't we start drawing lines and divide the lines up?
But the only way that'll work, and I do think that is a solution, is just leave them alone.
And I'll bet they could come up, they get tired of killing each other, and people are going to be satisfied, you know, to have their particular area.
But the principle of self-determination is a good one.
It gets more complicated when you're trying to compensate and correct the mistakes made by people who don't belong there.
But that, as far as I'm concerned, is still a very good solution.
You know, there is one good example, and unfortunately, the well has been poisoned by intervention.
But if you look at what happened with Czechoslovakia, which you mentioned Wilson earlier, this was an artificially constructed state after the First World War.
And when the Cold War ended, they decided that they no longer wanted to be together as a unified country.
They wanted to split.
Thankfully, at the time, the U.S. was not involved in fomenting too much chaos like they did in Yugoslavia later.
These two countries were allowed to peaceably split, and now they enjoyed very close ties.
They're both in NATO.
They trade with each other.
They get along with each other.
And so that is the model of dealing with these sort of artificial economies.
Well, you know, that's interesting because I haven't traveled a lot through Europe.
I was there during the time I was in the military, but I went to Czech Republic to celebrate the translation of human action.
Decisions and Freedoms00:00:36
And there were a libertarian group there, and they got me over to Slovakia.
And then I went to Austria.
And I thought, boy, this is where the cradle of Austrian economics was born.
But it's fascinating that it was working.
Going from one country to the next was relatively easy.
And I saw the remnants of the Soviet fences and all that.
So, no, it was a big difference when people were allowed to make these decisions.
And unfortunately, we handicap them too much.
I'd like to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.