CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (SEPTEMBER 26, 2014)
The Middle East is engulfed in flames, from Libya to Iraq. There are new jihadi groups springing up all the time. The current focus is on Islamic State, or ISIS. Can you talk about ISIS and its origins?
There’s an interesting interview with Graham Fuller, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, one of the leading intelligence and mainstream analysts of the Middle East.1 It’s titled, basically, “The United States Created ISIS.” Fuller hastens to point out that he doesn’t mean the United States deliberately decided to bring ISIS into existence and funded it. His point—and I think it’s accurate—is that the United States created the conditions out of which ISIS developed.
Part of it was just the standard sledgehammer approach: smash up what you don’t like. In 2003, the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, a major crime. Iraq had already been virtually destroyed, first of all by a decade of war with Iran—in which, incidentally, Iraq was backed by the United States—and then by a decade of sanctions. The sanctions were described as “genocidal” by two respected international diplomats who administered them, and who resigned in protest for that reason.2 They demolished civilian society, strengthened the dictator, and compelled the population to rely on him for survival. Finally, in 2003, the United States decided to just attack the country outright, an attack compared by many Iraqis to the Mongol invasion of nearly a thousand years earlier. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, millions made refugees, millions of others displaced, the archaeological richness and wealth of the country destroyed.
One of the effects of the invasion was to institute sectarian divisions. If you look at a map of Baghdad in, say, 2002, it was a mixed city: Sunnis and Shiites lived in the same neighborhoods and intermarried. In fact, Iraqis sometimes didn’t even know who was Sunni and who was Shiite. It was like knowing whether your friends are in one Protestant denomination or another. There were differences, but no hostility. In fact, both sides were saying, “There will never be Sunni-Shiite conflicts. We’re too intermingled in how we live, where we live, and so on.” By 2006, however, there was a raging sectarian war in the whole region, with Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds separated from one another and set at each other’s throats.
The natural dynamic of a conflict such as this is that the most extreme elements begin to take over. Their roots are in Saudi Arabia, a major U.S. ally and the most extremist, radical Islamic state in the world. Saudi Arabia makes Iran look like a tolerant, modern country by comparison. Not only is it ruled by an extremist version of Islam, the Wahhabi/Salafi version, but it’s also a missionary state. It uses its huge oil resources to promulgate these doctrines throughout the region, funding clerics and setting up schools and mosques from Pakistan to North Africa.
ISIS comes ideologically out of the most extremist form of Islam, the Saudi version, and it’s also funded by Saudi Arabia—not the Saudi government but wealthy Saudis, along with wealthy Kuwaitis and others, who provide the money and the ideological support for the jihadi groups that are springing up all over the place. But politically, it comes out of the conflicts engendered by the U.S. smashing up Iraq, which have now spread everywhere. That’s what Fuller meant by saying the United States created ISIS.
You can be pretty confident that as conflicts develop, they will become more extremist. If the United States manages to destroy ISIS, we will have something even more extreme on our hands.
In Manufacturing Consent, you observe: “A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.”3 Then you give the example of the Kurds in Iraq and the Kurds in Turkey.
The Kurds in Iraq first became victims of U.S. power in the 1970s, when the United States essentially sold them out to Saddam Hussein. In 1974, as a favor to Iran, Washington supported a Kurdish rebellion against Iraq. But a year later, Iraq and Iran made a deal, and the United States just stepped back, leaving Iraq free to massacre the Kurds. When Henry Kissinger was asked why we did that, he made his famous statement “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”4
Through the 1980s, Saddam was a major U.S. ally, and the United States supported him in the war against Iran. He was taken off the terrorist list in 1982 so that the U.S. could start providing him with aid. As is well known, he then launched a horrendous attack against the Iraqi Kurds. The Reagan administration, including Reagan himself, blocked efforts even to criticize the attack. The Pentagon came out with a story that it was Iran that was responsible for the Halafbja massacre, the al-Anfal campaign, and the other atrocities.5
Support for Saddam continued under George Bush no. 1, the one who is called the statesman, George H. W. Bush—not the madman, George W. The first Bush just adored Saddam Hussein. He overruled Treasury Department objections to sending more agricultural aid to Saddam, badly needed in part because Saddam had devastated large Kurdish agricultural areas.6
In August 1990, Saddam made his first mistake. He disobeyed U.S. orders—or, more likely, just misunderstood them—and invaded Kuwait. The reaction was very strong. He immediately recognized his mistake and tried to find a way to withdraw. But the United States didn’t want him to withdraw. Washington basically wanted to drive him out, not have him withdraw. That led to the first Iraq war.7
Right after that war, the United States was in total control of the region. Saddam barely existed. Still, he launched a major assault against the Shiites in the south. The United States refused to block it. There was a big massacre of Shiites in the south, and the U.S. government didn’t lift a finger, not even to block military helicopters.8
After that, Saddam turned against the Kurds in the north. But this time, the U.S. decided to protect them from Saddam Hussein. And suddenly, the reporting was quite different. The reporters went to the north. If you remember the television coverage at the time, they were appalled to find that atrocities were being carried out against the people whose children were blue-eyed and blond and just like us. We couldn’t tolerate it. There was a big hue and cry. Finally, Bush established a no-fly zone. That’s how it went for the Kurds in Iraq.
At the same time, in the 1990s, Turkish repression of the Kurds was extremely severe. Tens of thousands of people were killed, about thirty-five hundred towns and villages were destroyed, probably a couple of million refugees.9 There was every imaginable form of torture. It was just a horrendous attack. And all of this was completely supported by the United States. Eighty percent of Turkey’s arms came from the United States.10 In fact, as the atrocities mounted, the arms flow increased. The atrocities actually peaked in 1997, and that same year Clinton sent more arms to Turkey than in the entire Cold War period combined.11
The press refused to report on any of this. It wasn’t a secret. There are extensive reports from Human Rights Watch—they had a very good investigator there—and Amnesty International. You could find out what was happening, just not from reading the New York Times. The Times had a bureau in Ankara, of course, but it wasn’t interested in covering this, especially the U.S. role. It wasn’t the right story.
The Iraqi Kurds switched from unworthy to worthy. They might switch back. But all of this teaches a lesson. There is a Kurdish slogan: “Our only friends are the mountains.” That’s wise. The Kurds should not be deluded into thinking that just because the U.S. government is patting them on the head today, it won’t be supporting another Halabja massacre tomorrow.
Incidentally, this worthy-unworthy distinction—I should have mentioned this—actually comes from George Orwell, who made a distinction between what he called people and unpeople.12 People are those who count. Unpeople don’t. You can do anything you like to them.
That was made vividly clear to me when I was speaking to a videoconference in London. The moderator brought up the horror in the West over the beheadings of journalists. “We are horrified,” he said. “This is so hideous. We just have to do something about it.” He was addressing a pretty liberal group. “We recognize that U.S., British, and Israeli atrocities are pretty awful, but even during the Israeli attack on Gaza, you didn’t see things like beheadings.”
Didn’t you? Take the most recent Israeli attack on Gaza. In Shuja’iyya, people were picking up pieces of bodies to try to identify who’d been killed.13 That was reported. But the moderator in London was correct: it didn’t horrify the West. When we carry out atrocities like bombing people, leaving their body parts so scattered you can’t even identify who they were, that’s not a crime. It’s perhaps a “mistake.” Just like the “mistakes” that happen in the drone assassination campaign, which undoubtedly does worse things than beheading to its victims. Maybe it’s a mistake, but it’s not a crime. On the other hand, if ISIS beheads people, that offends us to the heavens. Those murders are horrendous, undoubtedly—but they’re a tiny fraction of what we and our clients do.
The Iraqi Kurds have taken Kirkuk, a valuable center of oil, thus increasing the possibility of economic viability for an independent Kurdish state. Some Israeli and Turkish commentators have said it’s inevitable. What do you think of that possibility?
It depends on what the master of the world decides. For the moment, at least, the United States is opposed, which means that the Kurds, though they have plenty of oil, can’t sell it on the international market, because the United States won’t allow it. Some oil undoubtedly gets sold, some gets leaked into Turkey. Israel is apparently purchasing some of it. But the Kurdish tankers are wandering around the Mediterranean, trying to keep from being too visible and trying to off-load the oil that they’re carrying.14 At this point, the Kurdish quasi-state can’t even pay its officials.15 They are not getting anything like enough revenue. Incidentally, all this is happening while the capital, Erbil, is full of high-rises, skyscrapers going up all over the place, tremendous wealth—the typical features of an oil state.
The Kurds are in trouble. They’re landlocked. They have no access to the outside. Iraq refuses to provide them with the means to sell their oil through Iraq. They pretty much have to go through Turkey, and that’s going to require U.S. support. So far that hasn’t been forthcoming. So I don’t think it’s at all inevitable.
If you take a look at a map, the whole Kurdish region is sort of a unit. The biggest part is in southeast Turkey. Another part of it is in Syria. Assad has more or less been leaving that alone, so the Kurds have had a kind of semiautonomy during the Syrian disaster, but now they’re under attack by Sunni jihadi forces, ISIS, Al Nusra, and others. The question is, Can the Syrian Kurds link up to Iraqi Kurdistan and maybe ultimately to Turkish Kurdish areas? There are very complicated negotiations going on between the Iraqi Kurdish leadership and the Turkish government. But the Kurdish areas in Syria are under the control of a group that is sympathetic to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Turkish guerrilla organization, which is a bitter enemy of Turkey and of the United States.
With the rise of ISIS and Salafi theology and ideology in the region, wouldn’t this be an opportunity for rapprochement with Iran?
That’s what the Iraqi government is calling for. Iran and the United States happen to be very much on the same side here. It’s not the first time. Iran was strongly opposed to the Taliban and was very helpful to the U.S. government in its invasion of Afghanistan. In fact, in 2003, President Seyyed Mohammad Khatami made an offer to the Bush administration to put all of the contested issues on the table: Israel, nuclear weapons, everything. Let’s discuss them all. The Bush administration rejected it.16 We’ve decided Iran is an enemy. They’re too independent. We won’t tolerate that.
Incidentally, the same is true of Assad in Syria. The only major military force attacking ISIS happens to be Assad’s quasi-government at this point, which is allied closely with Iran. Iran is also apparently sending arms, advisers, and probably troops to Iraq to support the Iraqi government against the ISIS assault. But the United States has insisted that the “international coalition” must exclude Iran and exclude Assad. So the main component of the coalition is Saudi Arabia, which is the main funder of ISIS and the ideological center for ISIS. It makes absolutely no sense.
The role of Turkey is central. Vijay Prashad, an author who teaches at Trinity College in Connecticut, recently said in an interview, “All evidence suggests that Turkey has allowed ISIS fighters, when they’ve been injured, to return into Turkey and to get treated in Turkey’s hospitals.”17 The border is porous.
Yes. That’s the border with Syria, and the ISIS fighters are just pouring across it. They’re getting military support and medical aid. Turkey was under great pressure by Obama to join the great coalition. But they’re plainly not joining. Turkey has an enormous military force of its own. If they entered the fight, they could wipe ISIS out in no time, just as Iran could. But Turkey is not interested—and Iran is not permitted.
Turkey is a NATO ally, a longtime recipient of U.S. military aid. It would seem that Washington would have the kind of leverage to exact what it wants in terms of sealing the border.
You would think so, especially given the U.S. backing for Turkey’s vicious counterinsurgency operation against the Kurds. But the Turks don’t simply follow orders.
Something extremely interesting happened in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. If you take a look at the map, it was obvious that the United States wanted to invade Iraq from Turkey. Those big military bases in eastern Turkey are right there on the Iraq border. They would have been a perfect base for the U.S. forces launching their attack. But the Turkish population was strongly opposed to the idea. Polls showed that more than 90 percent of Turks opposed the U.S. attack.18 Not because they loved Iraq. They just didn’t want to be part of U.S. aggression. To everyone’s amazement, the Turkish military, which has tremendous power, permitted the Turkish government to follow the will of 90 percent of the population. That caused a furor in the United States. How dare Turkey refuse U.S. orders and pay attention instead to 90 percent of its population? The country was denounced in our press, which for the first time started reporting Turkish human rights violations. You hardly heard about these while they were going on in the 1990s, but all of a sudden we cared. Now we had to talk about how awful the Turks are.
The most striking case was Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In the media, he was called the “idealist in chief” of the Bush administration.19 He was the deeply moral person, over-the-top idealistic. He bitterly condemned the Turkish military because they didn’t force the Turkish government to accept U.S. demands. He even insisted that the military apologize to the United States and make it clear that it would never commit another crime like this.20
This was going on just as the government and the media and the intellectual community were orating about the U.S. dedication to “democracy promotion.” If you want to be a prestigious intellectual or journalist, you have to maintain completely contradictory ideas at the same time and not notice it.
Orwell’s “doublethink.”
Yes, that’s Orwell’s definition of doublethink: the ability to have contradictory ideas in your mind and accept them both without noticing. That’s practically a requirement in the intellectual world.
Since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, the military has been the dominant institution in that country. How has Erdoğan been able to sideline the military?
He instituted a big purge of the top military, and he got away with it. The military has been reduced in its power over the government. How much is not clear, but substantially. That was one of Erdoğan’s major achievements in the first half-decade of the millennium.
Minorities in the Middle East—the Yazidis in Iraq, Armenians in northern Syria, and other groups—are getting hammered. What can be done to protect them?
There is a framework of international law that, in principle, everyone accepts. It’s spelled out in the U.N. Charter, an international treaty that the United States has ratified, which, according to the U.S. Constitution, makes it the supreme law of the land.
The Charter, specifically Article 39, says that the Security Council has to determine if there is a threat to peace—for example, the massacre of the Yazidis. Furthermore, the Security Council—and the Security Council alone—can authorize the use of force in a case they determine to be a threat to peace. Aside from that, there’s an absolute ban against the threat or use of force except as direct self-defense against armed attack, which is irrelevant here. So that’s the basis for protection.
But the United States, Britain, Israel, and other clients are rogue states, states that disregard international law. The U.N. Charter doesn’t apply to them. They have a monopoly on force, or they want to have a monopoly on force, and they use it as they like. That restricts the options for how this problem can be dealt with.
In a law-abiding world, our government would ask the Security Council for a resolution declaring that there is a serious human rights situation and threat to peace in areas controlled by ISIS, and then ask the U.N. to authorize the use of force to deal with that threat. That use of force should primarily involve regional actors, including, of course, Iran.
But that’s not what happens. Indeed, there is no mention in the press that there could be a lawful way to deal with this issue. That’s beyond the consciousness of Western intellectual culture. The concept that we could act as a law-abiding state is unimaginable. If you mention it, people don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not an option. So it doesn’t arise. What’s done is what the master decides should be done.
In the September 18, 2014, referendum in Scotland, the vote was 55 percent to 45 percent to stay with the United Kingdom. What are its implications for Kashmir, the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Kurds in Iraq?
There are conflicting tendencies at work in Europe. For the last couple of hundred years, Europe was the most savage place in the world. Europeans had no higher goal than to slaughter one another. During the Thirty Years’ War, in the seventeenth century, about a third of the population of Germany was wiped out. And then you had the two monstrous wars in the twentieth century. By 1945, the Europeans had comprehended that the next time, it would all be over, because the level of destructive technology had reached a point where they couldn’t play that game anymore. And they did change their behavior. France and Germany, which had been slaughtering each other for centuries, moved toward peaceful reconciliation. Then the European Union started to integrate. Free movement in the European countries is a generally positive development, reducing the emphasis on national borders and leading to greater interactions among people who ought to be cooperating, not fighting each other.
But there are other, countervailing tendencies. Democratic participation has severely declined. Decisions over the European economy are made by bureaucrats in Brussels, mainly under the influence of the German Bundesbank. The opinions of people in Europe are mostly disregarded. There have been times when this has become almost surreal. In 2011, the prime minister of Greece, George Papandreou, made the mild suggestion that the people of Greece should be allowed to have a referendum to decide whether they would accept the harsh austerity measures decreed by the bankers in Brussels.21 The West was just outraged. The press, intellectuals, and others denounced Papandreou for daring to ask the population whether they should follow the orders of the bureaucrats and the bankers.
It’s led to a complicated reaction in Europe. Some of it is frightening. There is a right-wing reaction—in some places neo-Nazi, in other places just horribly right-wing—that is a response to the loss of democratic participation. But there is another reaction that, at least in my view, is healthier, and that’s an impulse toward regionalization in opposition to the centralization of the European Union. So in a number of parts of Europe, people are calling for autonomy. Scotland is one case. Catalonia is another. It’s happening in the Basque country, in parts of France, and elsewhere.
Europe is a complex of cultures, languages, history, a complicated tapestry. But one of the things that’s happening is the rapid destruction of local languages. They’re dying very quickly because the nation-state system imposed national languages instead. In Italy, for example, there are plenty of people who can’t talk to their grandmothers, because they speak a different language. But there’s a countertendency toward reviving regional languages and regional cultures. I think the Scottish referendum is part of this.
The same issues arise globally. In the Middle East, the state system was simply imposed by imperial power. The lines of the states have nothing to do with the people of the region. Take Iraq, for example. The British established modern Iraq in their interests, not in the interests of Iraqis. So they took the region around Mosul and added it to Iraq because Britain wanted to have the oil and keep it from Turkey. They set up the principality of Kuwait to keep Iraq from having free access to the sea, so it could be better controlled. The Sykes-Picot treaty, between France and Britain, assigned Syria and Lebanon to France, and Iraq and what was then Palestine to Britain. That was for their imperial interests. It had nothing to do with the people. The lines make no sense from the point of view of the people.
The Ottoman system, which had preceded this, was ugly and brutal, but at least it recognized local autonomy. So during the Ottoman period, you could go from Cairo to Baghdad to Istanbul without crossing a border. It was porous, sort of like the European Union today. And that fits the nature of the region much more accurately. Partly out of corruption and incompetence, the Ottoman rulers allowed considerable autonomy, even to some parts of cities. The Armenians could run the Armenian community, the Greeks could run the Greek community, and so on. They lived in a kind of harmony. That was broken up by the imposition of the state systems.
This is true all over the world. Take a look at Africa. Almost all of the conflicts there trace back to the establishment of borders by the imperial powers—England, France, Belgium, to a lesser extent Germany—which took no account of the nature of the populations, just drew the boundaries where they wanted them. Naturally, that leads to conflict. There is every reason to hope, I think, that those borders will fade away.