Angry Planet - Will the recapture of Mosul lead to peace or a bloodbath?

Episode Date: October 18, 2016

Mosul is as the Iraqi capital of the militant group Islamic State. Out of a population of between 1.5 million and 2 million, 4,000 to 8,000 are armed extremists. They now face a combined military force in the tens of thousands, backed up by some of the world's great military powers, including the United States.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. The idea that all these disparate organizations who might have some common ground will actually continue to act in a common way after that unique interest is resolved is, of course, where all this falls apart.

A coalition of the Iraqi army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and Shiite militias, has launched an attack on Masul, Iraq's second largest city. The United States and other nations are providing support on the ground and in the air. There are as few as 4,000 Islamic State militants holding Massul against them. So what's going to happen to the people of Missoule as they're crushed between these two forces? And what's the plan for governing once the Islamic State is defeated? You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with Wars Boring. Today we're joined by Peter Van Buren. He is a State Department veteran with more than 24 years of experience. His book about a year he spent in Iraq, We Met Well, was published in 2011 and it got him into a lot of trouble with Hillary Clinton's State Department. after a legal battle about whether he had the right to publish the book, Peter retired with his full pension. He is now a full-time writer. So, Peter, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So we're going to be talking about Mosul and the assault on Missoull today,

but can you just give us a little bit of a background about what kind of shape Iraq is in as a whole at this point? I think Iraq is in a very difficult position, both physically, if you will, and especially politically. Physically, I use that term very broadly, to mean that the economy there is very poor. Depressed oil prices, as well as some concerns about output, have made Iraq a very difficult position

in order to meet its needs. It still receives a lot of foreign aid, particularly from the United States, and a lot of that money is going just to provide the minimal amount of basic services. Many of the cities where the fighting has taken, place, and this is certainly something that's relevant to our discussion about Mosul, are in shambles. They look like Stalingrad when you see pictures from the air, even from the ground, places like

Fallujah and Ramadi. Politically, Iraq is probably even in worse shape than it's been for really a decade. You've got a very divided body politic. The Sunni-Shiah rifts have never been mended, and in fact have only gotten more. complex and wider since the arrival of ISIS and since the response of the largely Shia government against the largely Sunni forces of ISIS and then the local Sunnis who may support ISIS. Throw into that mix the omnipresence of Iran now in Iraq and you have a very volatile political situation. Meanwhile, on the sidelines, northern Iraq is essentially,

the Confederacy of Kurdistan at this point in time, and an independent state in nearly every sense of that word, absent perhaps a flag currency and stamps. I think they actually do have some of their own currency circulating. And just to keep things interesting, you have the Turks who have a military presence in Iraq and have made some very warlike noises about their plans to expand that presence further, and that also will play into the situation in Mosul. So you've got a volatile situation. You've got a situation there that is as difficult as any Iraq has experienced since the American invasion of 2003, and that in a way sets the stage for this so-called battle of Mosul. Looking at all of that, how's the war against Islamic State going? How are they holding?

Well, Islamic State, I find an interesting entity because it's very commonly referred to in our media and certainly by our government and our military, you know, as if it was like Germany or Japan in World War II or something as if it was this sort of single thing with, you know, uniforms and flags that we're fighting over territory for. There's certainly an element of that. And I think in our conversation today we'll refer to it as Islamic State. mostly as a convenience. But I think in reality, Islamic State is much more loosely organized than we give it credit for. And so in that sense, any war against it is much more complicated than the traditional blue lines and red lines on a map. There's an element of whack-a-mole to it, very much as there is in the fight against Al-Qaeda and other elements. Islamic State does have the ability to kind of morph into a traditional counterinsurgency slash terror organization

slash partisan organization, and then sort of assemble itself organically into a more conventional military force. And again, referring back to Mosul, which version of Islamic State we're going to be fighting there is going to have a lot to do with the outcome of this battle. Do you know anything about the city itself and how important it's been historically? It has an extraordinary importance today. Historically speaking, it sits on trade routes and has always been a large urban area in that regard. But I think its real importance lies in its geography today, it's political geography today. It is contested ground.

The Kurds have always felt that this is their territory. There's always been a Sunni presence there, and there has always been a desire by the Shiite government and Baghdad to assert its control. The Turks have been moving around in that area and will be participating one way or the other in the attack on Mosul and have their own designs on territory, not necessarily the city itself, but certainly territory surrounding it and a specific interest in making sure the Kurds do not capture the city and claim it as their own. So we can think of it as a historic crossroads, but I think especially poignant is to think of it as a current crossroads of the many political threads that are moving through Iraq.

And that will be playing out as an undercurrent, I think, in what is often being portrayed, as I said, is kind of a blue-line, red-line battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil here at Mordor. And in what does the, in that metaphor, what does that make the United States? I could get really complex here about orcs and stuff like that, but I think we want to keep it at a fairly high level. The United States is in this case sort of, at the most positive, the organizer of this collection of organizations that all have an interest in seeing ISIL out of this area. At the same time, the United States is also providing some of the heavy muscle that's going to be necessary to do this, particularly air. strikes, artillery, and probably a lot more troops on the ground than we're all willing to

recognize or even are aware of. So that's the very practical sense. That's what we'll see on the news and what we'll see on the ground. The problem is that this is the same level of wishful bungling that has characterized far too much of America's actions in Iraq, in the specific over the last decade or so, and the Middle East in general. The idea that, all these disparate organizations who might have some common ground or some common interest will actually continue to act in a common way after that unique interest is resolved is of course where all this falls apart, where it's fallen apart in Iraq several times. Just looking back quickly, historically, this is part of the problem with the so-called

surge and Anbar Awakening. The idea that the Sunnis and the United States, state's interest in scaring al-Qaeda out of Anbar province would somehow translate into a broader political engagement by the Sunnis with the American-sponsored government in Baghdad. Well, that didn't really happen. It's a complicated thing, but I mean, speaking broadly. The idea, too, that the Kurds are willing to continue to engage Islamic State on behalf of America when their own goals are satisfied, once again, that's just malicious logic. and America's bumbling attempts to make it something otherwise.

Maybe not even attempts, I'll call it wishful thinking at this point, maybe delving into fantasy. Fantasy brings us, I guess, back to the Lord of the Rings analogies just to kind of tie that up. But, I mean, the idea would be that the United States may not really know what its actual role here is and is clearly looking for short-term gains and once again willfully ignoring long-term consequences. Well, so let's take an example, something that happened recently, and I'm interested to get your view in it. You mentioned Fallujah, which was an Islamic State stronghold for a little while, and relatively close to Baghdad, and that's one of the reasons why it was so important to the United States, and I'm guessing the government in Baghdad, to actually root them out. Also, of course, some Americans had died in Fallujah previously capturing it.

So there's just a lot going on their emotional baggage, too. So with Fallujah, there were both Shiite militias and also Iraqi regular forces. So how did it go in the aftermath? You know, not well. Though I have to stress that there's been very little intense or responsible Western reporting on this. Fallujah was a always has been a predominantly Sunni city and has always been sort of a gateway into Western Anbar and the kind of Sunni heartland, if you will. So strategically, it's always been very important.

Baghdad at the time of the Fallujah battle, if you will, was really being plagued by car bombs. And most of those were believed to be originating out of Fallujah by Sunni forces of some type. I want to be careful with the words because I don't want to fall into the same trap. I've accused others of doing, of talking of, about Islamic State as a single broad entity. But we'll say Islamic State for convenience was sending car bombs into the heart of Baghdad out of Fallujah,

and shutting it down was just absolutely an important strategic thing. And it was done. It's not hard to do that when you've got the full power of the United States military, laser-guided bombs and artillery and the best of our best special forces. I mean, this is overwhelming against a group of people who are ad hoc armed with stuff they've beg, borrowed, or stolen off the battlefield, and who are led by people of limited professional capacity. You know, it's not a fair fight. What happened is we saved Fallujah by destroying it. And the humanitarian crisis that was triggered there is, to a lesser extent in Ramadi, because it was more mixed in what we suspect is going to happen in Mosul,

has never been really addressed. In addition, the incursions that the Iranians made, and of course most people believe the Iranians were participants in the siege of Fallujah as well, though the United States was very careful to pretty much not talk about that and allegedly not coordinate with the Iranian forces, has opened up this basic idea that the Shia forces have that doorway to Sunni Anbar now open to them. We also know that the so-called Shia militias, many of which were probably at least commanded or, quote-unquote, advised by Iranians, exacted a terrible toll on the Sunni population.

All you had to do was kind of point at a guy and say, oh, he was an ISIS collaborator, and boom, a bullet in the back of the head. That, by the way, does have its own historical parallels in the Anbar Awakening, the surge. when the Anbar Sheikhs figured out that whenever they needed a rival knocked off, whatever his religious or affiliation was, all they had to do was tell the Americans, oh, he's al-Qaeda, and that guy would not wake up the next morning. So actually, Reuters actually had some very interesting reporting a couple of weeks ago talking about how Sunni casualties were underreported. And so, I mean, at least there's some follow-up there.

You said the best U.S. Special Forces. I mean, is there actual evidence that, are you saying U.S. soldiers were in the fight, actually at the front lines, firing weapons? Yeah, well, the United States government has long acknowledged that there's special forces in Iraq conducting training and advising. And they've walked that line forward on a number of occasions. Obviously, you know, I was busy that week and was not in Fallujah for the assault itself. Much as I really did want it to be there. The idea of this training and advising, I mean, if indeed what the United States has been doing is simply training and advising, then the Iraqi forces have to be the best trained people in the world.

They've been being trained and advised for years now, never mind the training and advising that took place during the occupation itself. We do know that Americans have been killed in this training and advising capacity. We do know that special forces have been empowered. publicly to quote unquote conduct raids to defend themselves things like that in northern Iraq in Mosul we've got artillery on the ground which is clearly outside of anything consisting of advising or training and we're now up to I think close to 6,000 troops in Iraq plus a lot of contractors plus a lot of Marines who are not considered quote unquote interact because they're temporarily there flown in off their ships at sea.

You've got an awful lot of people there and they are in combatant roles. We'll play the same Orwellian word games that the government likes to play. A point I'd like to just go back to because I do enjoy these ironies of history. Preparing for this discussion today, I googled the term rebuilding Fallujah and Google, bless them, came up with some articles from 2016 talking about how Fallujah was going to be rebuilt after the most recent assault. But then you scroll down the page and here's one from 2008. A little further down the page. Here's another one from 2004.

U.S. military works towards rebuilding Fallujah. And we can kind of walk this thing page by page through history. to suggest that, you know, Fallujah was not simply destroyed again in this summer when the assault took place, but it's kind of been redestroyed any number of times and never quite rebuilt. These are not long-term. It's not bode well in the long term. I mean, if your policy is something along the lines of slash and burn, I guess it's quite effective. But even I'm not cynical enough to think that's quite what the United States is.

States is intending to do here. The point is, however, that if you don't do something for the long term, figure out a form of government that allows the Sunnis to be inclusive enough that they abandon any defensive military-type stance, you're going to be rebuilding Fallujah and you're going to be fighting there indefinitely. And the same for the other cities. And certainly, I think we'll see that in Mosul, which is even worse because you've got all these other third-party players. All right. Well, on that note, do we have any idea how bad the fighting is going to get in Mosul? You said you were just looking at all that stuff about Fallujah. Did that give you any kind of sense? I think the real answers in Mosul depend again on which version of Islamic State

we're going to face there. The UN has issued warnings saying that there are up to a million people are going to be displaced in the battle to retake Mulsul. Supposedly, the low end is 200,000 displaced people who are going to be trying to find a way out of the city. Once you start talking about those numbers, you have a humanitarian crisis independent of any active attempts to kill them. Just providing food, water, shelter, medical care for that many people is a task that is beyond even large nation states.

And I don't think the United States has any plans to engage at that level as in quote unquote humanitarian work. And I don't think the UN has the resources either. So independent of those who may get killed in the actual fighting or caught up in an artillery barrage, you've got a humanitarian crisis that's going to take an extraordinary number of lives. Once you start talking now on the so-called kinetic side of things, the death toll is so open that it's hard to predict. Once you, you know, if we look at what's happened, for example, when the Israelis have

waged urban, indiscriminate urban warfare, this whole business about, well, we're going to do surgical strikes, we're going to do targeted artillery and all that's all well and good. But when you're firing heavy artillery from a distance into urban areas that are populated, when you're dropping bombs, however precise you believe them to be in urban areas, you know, you just don't have second by second intelligence. You just can't say who's on the third floor of a building that you believe Islamic State has occupied the fifth floor of and things like that. You're also going to be destroying inadvertently or purposely the lifelines of whatever water, sewer electricity there. We have also seen a terrible trend from all sides involved throughout the

Middle East recently of specifically targeting hospitals, aid stations, doctors, and medical facilities. And so you add all that up, and it's extremely difficult to see this as anything but a humanitarian disaster. The potential saving factor to some extent will be whether or not ISIS takes a stand in Mosul. parentheses i don't think they will close parentheses um the quicker isis gets out of malsall the less of all that has to happen um and the quicker some form of of semblance of life can be restored and more

importantly this the the actual killing can actually come to a halt fairly quickly i suspect isis isle i've used every possible term for them so far i apologize for not being consistent you know i suspect they're going to cut and run. They're just facing such overwhelming firepower. I can't imagine any but a core group of people are going to fight a rear guard action to let the others escape. That said, it's interesting. Some of the press that I've been reading, the kind of edgy press out of the Middle East that I've read in translation has suggested that in fact this is part of the master plan of the United States is to chase ISIL out of Mosul. and let them go back into Syria, blend back into Syria because the U.S. wants to manipulate them to take out Assad in Syria.

And so you can get kind of tangled up in what all this means. Bottom line, I hope that Mosul is not the humanitarian crisis that it has the great potential to be. It's a really strange circumstance in that if Islamic State tried to hold it, estimates I've seen of the number of fighters there, the highest estimate I've seen is 8,000. Reuters number is between 4,000 and 4,500. It seems like that would actually offer two problems. One, as you said, they would be overwhelmed, but two, picking out 4,000 people out of 1.4 million is also pretty tough. That's absolutely right. And particularly if those 4,000 have no interest in living through the battle and are more than willing to fight rearguard actions, wait for troops,

Iraqi or whatever troops to pass through, if they're willing to use civilians in a martial way, either as shields or as dupes or as lures to try to trick the Iraqi or the Americans into killing more civilians, those small number, relatively small numbers of troops can do an awful lot of damage if they have no interest in living through it and if they have no interest in actually holding territory but simply causing as much harm and destruction as they possibly can. That version of ISIL will sort of fall, I guess, in the middle of this humanitarian crisis versus people who want to dig in and drag this out as long as possible versus the ISIL that wants to run away and fight someplace else another time.

It's very hard to come up with a scenario that borders on good news here. An article that you wrote for Reuters talked about how the Iraqi military, the actual regular army, is structured, and essentially how much it cost to buy the generalship of a battalion or other forces, an enormous level of corruption. That corruption is part of what has been blamed for Mosul's fall. in, I think it was June or July of 2014, and it just fell within a few short days. Do you think that any of that's been corrected? I mean, is Iraq's military a little bit stronger or a little less corrupt? I think what's happened in large part is that it's been sort of supplemented. You know, I see the term Iraqi special forces used all the time in these urban assault situations.

and what that seems to be is a sort of separate independent Iraqi military, organized Iraqi military that the United States has put together post-occupation since the United States has returned to Iraq in 2014. Calling them special forces kind of separates them from the Iraqi National Army, which is floundering someplace between incompetent, completely missing and destroyed by corruption. So by saying we're going to have a much smaller Iraqi military force that's under American command and control for the most part. You call it special forces because it sounds better and it gives a better impression. But essentially you push aside the part that doesn't work and build a new little part on top of it. In addition, we no longer are expecting in any way the Iraqi National Army to fight as the most significant force on the ground.

We are instead putting together what euphemistically is called a coalition, basically plucking the best out of the Iraqi National Army, recruiting the Kurds who have proved to be good fighters, particularly when they're fighting for their own territory, what they call their own territory. And then you have the Shia militias, which vary from very professional Iranian-trained and probably directed forces to shock troops, basically cannon fodder, guys with AKs who go in and spray and play, hopes of hitting something or at least kind of drawing things out. So you've kind of assembled the equivalent of an army there, and I think the United States hopes to kind of hold it together. and kind of push these pieces in the right directions so that one element is the sort of basic infantry, one element is the maneuver force, one element is the highly professionalized force that can take on the tough jobs. And whenever is needed, you've got the Americans directly to kind of pop in, fill in gaps. We've got combat teams on the ground now, infantry, parachute, division. These are not trainers and advisors.

and the Marines that are coming in off the ships are primarily doing artillery support now. But again, these are people who fight wars, and they're there to fill gaps as needed. So the Iraqi army is pretty much, you know, it's probably still there. It's probably still as corrupt as it used to be, but it also probably doesn't really matter. So to just sort of wrap up, once the battle for Mosul is over, and I take it that you, like everybody else, are banking on a successful military campaign. Defined as ISIS leaving Mosul, yes. Right, exactly.

Do you think that Iraq will come away stronger or about the same? Weaker in a different way. Clearly having ISIL holding its second largest city and holding territory has not made Iraq a stronger place by any definition. But once, you know, ISIL is a second largest city, and holding territory, has not made Iraq a stronger place by any definition. But once, you know,

ISIL is gone, you now have a vacuum. And vacuums don't last very long, particularly when an awful lot of people actually want to control this area. There's a very good question out there of what the Kurds are going to do. The Kurds have always wanted to expand their territory west. Erbil and Mosul have been in, you know, those are places they want to control. They want to push their own zones of control all the way to the Turkish and Syria borders. Whether they can be restrained by the United States is a good question. The Turks are lurking because they certainly don't want the Kurds to do that. Whether they will move into that vacuum in a substantial way is unclear. What the remaining Sunnis happens to them, what the Shias do in terms of militias,

whether the Iranians want a piece of it, probably not. It's kind of far away. But that vacuum will be filled by something, and it's very difficult to see a scenario that filling that vacuum makes the Iraqi national state a stronger and more coherent place. I'm not sure what scenario actually makes the Iraqi state a stronger and more coherent place, but this is certainly not going to be a big contribution to that. All right. Well, Peter, let's just give you a minute. You've got a new book coming out that actually once again is related to the situation in Iraq and the soldiers coming home from it. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Absolutely. I've been able to maintain contact with a limited number of the soldiers that I was with in Iraq. And then I've come to know

a number of others since talking about it, making speeches and the book and everything. And I've been struck by the effect of war on these folks. And I've also been struck by the effect of war on these folks. And I've also been struck by the subtlety of these effects on them and sort of the way that a lot of the media has in fact hit this with a big ugly heavy hammer oh it's PTSD and that's become sort of a code word for anything from a drinking problem to barricading yourself into into a building and hoping the police you know commit suicide for you in fact the effects of war on these men and women are varied, they're subtle, many times they're carried very much internally and very much kept in check by the soldier, which doesn't mean the damage isn't being done.

In addition, the effect of war on civilians has rarely been looked at carefully. And so I have taken all of these stories that I've heard, the literature that I've read, and I've put them into an unusual fictional setting, which is the end of World War II, in Japan, and the book is going to be called Hooper's War. By pulling this out of contemporary history and putting it into history that's basically old enough that very few of the readers have any personal experiences there, I'm hoping to open it to a broader audience. I've also quite interestingly spent some time in Japan interviewing people who were children

at the time during World War II, now quite elderly, about their experiences as civilians at the fighting end of war. Combining all these elements, I'm hoping to give people a much clearer picture of what happens when you send people into these situations. It's called Hooper's War. It's coming out in May. Hopefully, people will take a look at it and let me know if I accomplished my goals. Peter, thank you very much for joining us. And it's a pleasure to speak with you again. Thank you so much for being here. As always, thank you. to this week's episode. If you enjoyed it, rate us on iTunes. There's no better way to help new people find the show. You can also follow us on Twitter. We're at War underscore College. And this week, we were very gratified to hear from Oliver Hegeland, who told us via Twitter that a professor at the Graduate Institute of Geneva actually referenced one of our episodes in class. We're honored. We're thrilled. War College was created by me, Jason Fields, and Craig Hedek.

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