Pod Save the World - WTF happened in Lebanon and ISIS update

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

Tommy talks with Middle East and ISIS expert Rob Malley about the resignation of Lebanon’s Prime Minister and how it plays into a broader middle east proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Then they talk about the fight against ISIS and the major NYT magazine story about civilians casualties in Iraq.

Hello, Pod Save the World fans. How much better is it to hear my voice on Friday mornings than that Wednesday nonsense? Thank you so much for tuning in. My guest today is a guy named Rob Malley. He's an expert on ISIS. He's an expert on the Middle East. And we talked about two subjects. We talked about what the hell is happening in Lebanon.

You've probably seen the prime minister resigned on live TV in Saudi Arabia. Talked about what happened, what it means, and explained how this whole thing really revolves around Iran in a lot of ways. Interestingly, he was in Beirut just last week, was there while all this went down and talked to people in government. So he is a fascinating firsthand approach. Second, we talked about ISIS and we talked about sort of a snapshot of where they are in terms of their strength. But then it was a much more interesting conversation, in my opinion, about civilian casualties. The New York Times has a huge piece out this week in the magazine about massive numbers of civilian casualties as a result of coalition strikes in Iraq. It is heartbreaking to read.

And Rob was really processing the story in real time. He'd read it that morning. And we had a thoughtful conversation about our approach to terrorism, the way we need to tweak it to make sure we're not hurting innocent people or creating more terrorists than we are taking off the battlefield. It is the kind of candor that is hard to find in government and sometimes even for those who have left. And I greatly appreciated his perspective. So thanks for tuning in. And here's the interview. My guest today on Pod Save the World is Rob Malley.

he was a senior advisor to the president for a counter ISIS campaign in the White House, as well as the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region. He currently works as the vice president for policy at the crisis group where he shapes and oversees their policy across all the organizations work. And I'm thrilled to have him on today because I finally get to talk to someone who can help me understand what the hell is happening in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Rob, thank you again for doing the show. My pleasure. So first question for you is what in the world is going on in Lebanon? The backstory is the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri, suddenly announces resignation out of nowhere.

Even more bizarrely, he did it on live TV from Saudi Arabia. Hariri cited Iranian influence in Lebanon making him fearful that he would be assassinated. Others in the region see a different motive behind what happened and said he has basically been taken hostage from the Saudis. that includes Lebanese officials who are demanding his return. So I guess the question is, what do we actually know about what happened and why this all went down? So very coincidentally, I happened to be heading towards Lebanon on the Sunday after the Saturday that this resignation took place. So I landed in Lebanon and I had an appointment with the Prime Minister for the next day, which they had confirmed for me as recently as the Saturday that he resigned. So I think that's a pretty good clue that nobody in his office expected him to resign.

In fact, they told me the meeting would still take place even after he had resigned. So I think there was enough confusion there to show that this was not something that was pre-planned. As it turns out, and this is something I have to say, I found hard to believe. Others were telling me, and I found it so beyond the imagination that I resisted it because it sounded like one of those Middle East conspiracy theories of which we hear so many. but the Lebanese Prime Minister, who is very close to Saudi Arabia, in fact he's a dual citizen, Lebanese and Saudi, comes from a family with very close ties to the Saudi royal family.

He was called to come to Saudi Arabia without knowing why. He actually told his colleagues that he thought that it was to talk about more assistance to Lebanon. He had just been to Saudi Arabia. It had a good meeting, so he had no reason to expect anything unusual. And he lands there and he's told that he's going to meet with the crown prince, who's the son of the king, and it turns out he doesn't. He meets with somebody else, and two hours later he comes out and he reads his own resignation on Saudi TV. If this is a crime, then the criminal left the proof on the table since, by saying it in Saudi Arabia, after having been summoned to Riyadh, it was clear that the Prime Minister Saad Hariri was reading what was a maiden.

Saudi Arabia resignation letter. So this was a Saudi decision. They didn't want him to be prime minister anymore. And they basically told him you get to resign. And they obviously have means of pressuring him and his family. Some people tried to deny that he had said this against his well since he said that he was speaking freely. Some people deny that he was held in sort of home detention or under house arrest. But it turns out that when I was in Lebanon, I spoke to people close to him and they all said the same thing that he had not known that he was going there to resign, that he didn't resign of his own volition, and that when they tried to speak to him over the phone, he did not answer or when he did answer, it was yes and no answers, clearly

indicating that he didn't feel like he could speak freely. So I don't think there's any mystery anymore, even though they might have been on the first days when this happened about what actually occurred, there may be more of a question about why this happened this way, because it does seem pretty odd, but the reality of what transpired, I think now is pretty clear to all. That's fascinating. It's amazing that you were on the ground for all that. Pure coincidence. For that period of time. Yeah, right. God. I mean, enough crisis in the Middle East that whenever you land, you probably have a happy coincidence of what you're looking for is a crisis, but in this case, it was quite serendipitous.

Well put. I think a lot of people listening are probably wondering, what the hell did the Saudis have to do with Lebanon. And I think it might be helpful to talk a bit about Lebanon's government the way it's constructed because it is complicated to say the least. There are Sunnis, there are Christians, there are Shia, there is Hezbollah, which is a Shia Islamist militant or terrorist group slash political party that controls parts of the government. Can you give us sort of the one-on-one on Lebanon's political system in a bit of a sense of what Hezbollah is and how the Saudis use their influence in Lebanon? So, I mean, very quickly, Lebanon is sort of a microcosm of everything that's right and

everything that's wrong with the region. And in some ways, it's the arena in which every regional actor is playing out its interest and its competition with others. Lebanon went through a very bloody civil war in the 70s and a civil war that was devastating to the country and which only was resolved once all of Lebanon's key patrons, if that's but all the regional players agreed on an outcome that essentially divided power along the, or distributed power along to the sectarian groups that you mentioned. So the president of Lebanon is always a Christian Maronite.

The prime minister, which is the most important position, is a Sunni, and the Speaker of Parliament is a Shia. That was part of what was agreed in order to stabilize the situation, was that there would be a sectarian allocation of power. That's stabilized the country, but at a cost, in other words. They obviously exacerbated the sectarian divisions and, in a way, the paralysis of the system because you couldn't move without the consensus of all three players and therefore of all the sectarian groups that they purported to represent.

The other piece of it, as I said, is that it really was a regional consensus, and by regional one means, in particular Syria had to agree, but also Saudi Arabia and Iran, and each of those countries kept a very strong influence in where Lebanon would go and how its political system would be arranged. So if you don't have agreement among those countries, you get a political deadlock. And that's what's happened many times in the recent history of Lebanon. And they finally resolved it a few year and a half ago or so with a choice of a prime Minister who was acceptable to Saudi Arabia, a president who was acceptable to Iran.

And that was the sort of rough equilibrium. The other element of this puzzle is the presence of a very powerful militia, Hezbollah, which is a Shia militia organization, which benefits from very strong Iranian support. And that is also a, you know, it's both a stabilizing factor because that's what ensures that you're not going to get another civil war. the Hezbollah feels that as long as its interests are guarded, it's not going to resume the fight. But of course, that comes at a cost in terms of how other communities feel, when they feel that one of their communities is armed and armed quite significantly.

But it's been an uneasy balance, but at least a balance that's preserved peace and stability in Lebanon itself, of course, have been a series of wars with Israel. What has happened now, obviously, what Saudi Arabia has done is basically indicate they don't like this equilibrium anymore. They don't like this balance. And the reason is pretty straightforward, I think, which is that the new leadership in Saudi Arabia has decided that it has been too passive vis-à-vis Iran,

that it has let Iran get away with too much in the region, and that one place in which it wants to fight back is in Lebanon. And basically what the message that the prime minister was conveying, but really on behalf of the Saudis, is we don't accept the situation anymore, we have this coexistence between Shia, Sunni, and Christians, and where the Sunni Prime Minister, who is a Saudi ally, is sitting in a coalition government, in which Hezbollah, a Shia militia that is allied to Iran, also sits.

Because that kind of undermined the Saudi narrative that Iran is the mortal enemy that is at the source of all evil in the region. How could it be at the source of all evil in the region, Saudi Arabia is one of its closest allies, Sad Hariri, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, is comfortable sitting side by side with Hezbollah, which is Iran's closest ally in the region, without any problem. So that image needed to be punctured, and I think what Saudi Arabia chose to do was to say, we can't accept the situation anymore.

We're not going to give cover to a government that includes a mortal enemy, or at least the allies of a mortal enemy, and therefore it's either going to be our prime minister or Hezbollah, but we can't have both. So Sad Hariri's father, Rafiq, was seen as a, I think, a more natural and effective leader. He was assassinated in 2005. There's been a special tribunal going on for a long time, trying to figure out who did it. But isn't it generally thought that Hezbollah and possibly Assad was behind it? that assassination or am I misremembering?

I think that's a general conclusion today that initially people thought that Syria was really the culprit. I think over time the tribunal was moving and actually found that it was more Hezbollah that had been behind it. Yes. So again, I mean, when I say that the situation in Lebanon is both the best and the wars of the Middle East, yes, it wasn't the best for Rafi Kariri, who fell victim of these internal tensions and regional tensions. and if one is to believe the findings of the special tribunal, Hezbollah decided that it was better off getting rid of Hariri than having to live with somebody who was a powerful leader

and who represented interests that Hezbollah and its allies probably concluded had become too uncomfortable to live with. Almost everyone you read has a similar conclusion that, unfortunately for Lebanon, they've become a proxy war between the Saudis, a bunch of Gulf Arab states and Iran, President Trump has talked repeatedly about creating this Sunni Arab coalition to fight ISIS. But again, it seems like the Saudis who anchor that coalition are more interested in doing what they can to isolate Iran. So I don't want to blame the Trump administration for what happened in Lebanon, and I'm not.

But it does feel like they have a willingness to put their thumb on the scale that can be problematic. Trump leapt into this regional dispute between Qatar by tweeting. there were a lot of questions being asked about Jared Kushner's secret trip to Saudi Arabia shortly before Hariri resigned. What do you make of their approach? And do you think it's possible that they are exacerbating some of the sectarian challenges that already exist? I think every administration kind of overlearns the lessons of the last one and overlearns its criticism of the last one. I think in this case, the Trump administration believes that the Obama administration was much too cool towards its allies, Saudi Arabia being one of them and Israel being another, and Egypt being a third, and it was going to

compensate. And that the secret to restoring U.S. credibility, U.S. deterrence in the region, the key to pushing back against Iran in particular, but also extremist groups, was to embrace Saudi Arabia, to embrace the king and his son who was clearly in the eyes of everyone going to be the king's and will be the king's successor, and to embrace them in a way that says we're with you, we have your back, and now let's work hand in hand, and we'll actually help you in pursuit of your regional objectives because, I think in the eyes of the Trump administration, they more or less coincide with America's interest,

which is to push back against Iran and against extremist groups. The problem, of course, is that if you do that and you're emboldening and enabling leader of a country that he may turn out over the years, to be a wise and sagacious person, but right now he does seem to be rather brash and impulsive, and that's, as I say, the son of the king of Saudi Arabia. And on more than one occasion,

it appears that President Trump has given the crown prince the impression that whatever he did would be accepted. And so what he did in Lebanon, only a few days after he had met with Jared Kushner, in regional eyes, it read as if they had been a black bank check given to Muhammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince, to do what he felt he needed to do, again, to push back against Iran, which is an agenda item that the Trump administration enthusiastically espouses. And if it means changing the Prime Minister of Lebanon, why not? Now, it's not clear that's actually a message that either the President or Jared Kushner gave. It's certainly the impression that was created, and it's hard to imagine that the Crown Prince would have done any of this if he didn't feel that he would have had full U.S. support. it turns out, as often turns out. The first tweet that President Trump put out after this

happened was full confidence in the king and of the crown prince they knew exactly what they're doing. Took a few days, maybe wiser minds to prevail and now the line coming out of the White House and the State Department is roughly the same, which is let's not sacrifice

Lebanon stability. Let's not do something that is really undermining what we've built in Lebanon, which is a relatively stable entity with some kind of balance among communities, and jeopardize that with potentially very devastating consequences for Lebanon and the rest of the region. So there's been somewhat of a pullback, but there's a pattern here, and the pattern is that you have a young crown prince who on file after file fears that he feels that he can go quite far

and feels that he's been sort of enabled by the United States, by President Trump and his team, and then gets himself into situations that, frankly, are more problematic for him than for those he's trying to undermine. And in this case, really, Lebanon needs to case is a case in point. I've been to Lebanon a dozen times in my life. Every time I go, it's clear that the communities have different views, the leaders of the different communities. I think one would be wrong to say that Sunni Shia and Christians are at loggerheads. Their leaders often are. They almost never agree on anything.

This time, everyone agrees. agreed, Shia, Sunni, Christian, Drews that Saudi Arabia had treated Lebanon as a banana republic by summoning a prime minister who was the legitimately chosen prime minister of Lebanon, by forcing him to read a statement that, if you look at it, it looks like he's reading his own death sentence, and then by forbidding him from leaving the country or from communicating with his closest allies in Lebanon. So that was really an own goal. on the part of Saudi Arabia because it weakened the person who was closest to them, and it didn't really unite all Lebanese, but at least united them on one issue,

which is this is not the way to treat our prime minister. And so whether they truly believed it or not, they all came out in favor of the prime minister saying, release our prime minister from Saudi Arabia. And it's that kind of impulsive behavior that the United States needs to push back against. And if they've built all this credit with Muhammad bin Salman, the Crown, Prince, and now there's a closeness between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, again, that might not have existed under the Obama administration. Then the least you could do is use it to make sure that you, you know, prod and press and push the Crown Prince to do the right thing, not to get into

some of these adventures that end up boomeranging. You talked about this sort of fragile calm that existed in Lebanon for a while. Just underneath that is Hasbullah a very, very well-arm. armed militia group, and I think their presence make people view Lebanon as a potential Tinder box. And presumably that this situation is a five-alarm fire that we need to deal with. And I think if I were in the White House, if you were there now, I think Barack Obama would have said Hillary Clinton go to Riyadh or Beirut and don't come back until this is solved or Secretary Kerry, the same order. Do you see any efforts being made to mediate this conflict

with Rex Tillerson or, you know, anyone else in the administration to try to cool it off. Like, is that happening? And if there's not any meaningful activity, what do you think they should be doing to try to calm things down? So, I mean, I think the mistake was made in the run-up in the immediate aftermath of this forced resignation. My understanding is that right now the administration has sent the message to the Saudis saying, you may have gone too far this time because you are jeopardizing the stability of a country that not only are we, do we have good relations with, but whose stability is critical to the stability of the region, because it sits where it sits, bordering Syria, bordering Israel, as you say, with hundreds and thousands of Hezbollah rockets,

if things go wrong in Lebanon, things could go very wrong in the rest of the region. So my sense is that they have now sent that message, and, you know, you're hearing that the prime minister is going to be allowed to travel, maybe travel to Paris, let's see whether he ultimately makes it to Beirut. In some ways, the harm is done, but I do think, I want to, so I don't think that Trump administration as a whole never engages in diplomacy. I think they underplay it. But in this case, my sense is after having seen how this played out in Lebanon, quarterheads

prevailed. And those cooler heads were arguing the same thing from day one. I mean, I heard this from U.S. officials from day one, who may not have been speaking to the president, but who nonetheless know the region very well in saying this is. madness, it has to stop. And I do think that you're now seeing, not just from the U.S., but from other very close allies of Saudi Arabia like the French, saying, this is a case where you really did go too far, and where you're handing a victory to all of those who you tried to hurt. I mean, it really is a case of hoping those that you thought that you were going to undermine.

It helps Hezbollah, because Hezbollah came out saying, we stand, even though we disagree with him politically, but we stand with our prime minister and his honor needs to be respected. that doesn't make that doesn't make Saturday Arabia look particularly good. It helps Iran because Iran could just sit back and sort of enjoy the show and say if Saudi Arabia is going to make mistake after mistake in Yemen and Qatar now in Lebanon

and we're going to get the dividends, fine. We don't need to do that much. We'll just sit back and watch Saudi Arabia continue to weaken itself. And so I think that's where in this episode it does seem like at this point, the administration is giving some counsel to Saudi Arabia.

I think there's a broader theme here, which is we could debate how much and how one needs to push back against Iran. I think what is really not really an issue for debate is that the way Saudi Arabia and the U.S. has gone about it in recent times, in recent months, has been counterproductive because it is strengthened and bolstered Iran's influence at a time when the claim is that we're trying to weaken it. Yeah. One last question for you on Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis have been locked in this struggle with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen for a very long time. There has been a blockade that has prevented food, sustenance, anything from getting into Yemen. The United States has been backing the Saudis in this effort for a long time, including during the Obama administration. The human cost is unimaginably horrific. There is a famine predicted. There are civilian casualties in the tens of hundreds of thousands. Can you talk about what's happening there? And how is it acceptable for the United States to back an effort like this that seems to harm civilians so indiscriminately?

So first, I think there needs to be some degree of introspection because, of course, the war started under the Obama administration's watch. Agreed. I want to say that I'm asking the question as someone who's wondering how Barack Obama supported what's happening. It's a longer discussion. I think what happened is several things. Number one, Saudi Arabia is a very close U.S. ally. I think that's a given. Whatever discomfort, and there was discomfort,

even at the beginning of the war, when one couldn't necessarily have known how bad it would get, there was discomfort at the notion that we were going to have a rupture with Saudi Arabia. And don't forget, the war began at the height of the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran over the nuclear deal, over which the Saudis already were apoplectic. And I think the notion among most of the presidents at the cabinet level his advisors was we just can't afford not to be on Saudi Arabia's side when they're confronting

this threat on their southern border of a movement, the Houthis, or Shia, who seemed to be overrunning the whole country with some degree of Iranian support. It was debatable at the time, but some degree of Iranian support. And can we leave the Saudis without helping them? When we know they're going to go to war anyway, they told us they're going to start the war, Should we support them or abandon them? And then maybe we could cause a rupture in a relationship that goes back decades. The end result, I think, and I think it's fair to say the president was quite torn about this,

but the end result was something to please everyone, which maybe pleases no one in the end, which is, yes, we're going to stand with Saudi Arabia in terms of defending its own sovereignty, its territorial integrity, and against any instability that would come from Yemen. On the other hand, we're not going to participate in Saudi Arabia's war against the Houthis. Now, that's a very fine line. Obviously, military assistance is fungible. So you say, we're just going to help you for your self-defense. They, of course, could use that whatever assistance we give them in offensive operations.

So we tried to cabin off the assistance that was provided to Saudi Arabia so that none of it could go towards waging war against the Houthis. but let's be, I think we have to be candid, that in the end we not only failed to do that, we failed to modulate Saudi's war efforts. I mean, part of the goal was to convince them not to target civilian facilities, tried to convince them to engage in diplomacy. That's what Secretary Kerry tried to do. And so the hope was by giving them just enough to show that we are still on their side, but not enough to show that we were endorsing everything they did

and to keep the pressure on them to move towards the... diplomatic solution, that was the gambit. It failed. And I think we have to be quite honest about it. And it's one of those things that haunts me when you see where we are today and you said it, this is the worst hunger situation we have today in the world. It's the worst epidemic of cholera in the modern era. I mean, this is a war. And Syria is worse. But we're not supporting the Assad regime. We are working with the Saudi kingdom. So it does make it in some ways harder even to stomach from a U.S. perspective. I think, you know, by 2016, as we had tried repeatedly and really repeatedly to convince the sides of two things, change their targeting practices because we knew that they were not just

mistakenly targeting civilian facilities. Sometimes we told them, this is a civilian facility, don't target it, and they went ahead and did it anyway. So that was one effort we tried, and the other effort was the diplomatic trillions. track and we didn't find enough flexibility on the Saudi side. They weren't prepared to stick to the ceasefire agreements that Secretary Kerry was brokering. So by mid-2016, we decided to pull back some of our assistance to Saudi Arabia.

Again, I'll be candid, too little too late. By then the war was fully engaged. And what we were removing from the toolkit of things that we were giving to the Saudis wasn't really going to make a difference. But we did at least try to do that. we're seeing with the Trump administration, again, it's a different theory of the case. The Trump administration theory of the case is there should be no daylight between us and the Saudis. We should espouse them. We should embrace them. And then maybe we'll have some influence.

What we're seeing is we're seeing the embrace. That's clear. I mean, from the trip that President Trump took to Saudi Arabia to the constant tweets and the support that he is showering on Riyadh, What we're not seeing is that credit, that leverage that's been acquired used to stop the war in Yemen, to try to at least get a pause in the war, to try to convince them to move to the negotiating table. That's what's missing. So this is not a defense of the Obama administration, I think, Tommy, as you and I said, I think there's a lot we need to go back and think about in terms of how do you deal with an ally, like Saudi Arabia, when it's engaging in a policy that is so contrary to everything we believe in,

and that it's causing a disaster humanitarian but also political. I mean, again, in terms of counterproductive moves, everything the Saudis have done has allowed the Houthis to entrench their power in the north, has allowed them to, has made them get closer to Iran, they've acquired more missiles, they've fired them at Saudi Arabia. So this is not helping Saudi security, it's not helping push back against Iran. But the Trump administration's theory of the case just seems to me to be missing a big piece, which is, okay, you're getting closer to Saudi Arabia, you're showing, showering them with love.

Where are you using that? How are you using that to shape their policy in a way that's going to stop this war? Yeah, I mean, look, I don't mean to raise this as if this is easy. There was a horrific problem of al-Qaeda, AQAP, in Yemen. Government instability exacerbated that problem. The Saudis have been an ally for a very long time. You and I both know very well how much they support us in that fight against AQAP. We also know, that the Iranians were sending shipments of arms to the Houthi rebels. So it's, as usual, a complicated mess. But, man, the outcome in terms of civilian suffering is awful. So everything we've talked about today, Lebanon, Yemen, the Saudis seems to revolve around Iran. Often, it seems like so much of the U.S. foreign policy revolves around Iran. Like, how much of a

malign actor do you think the Iranians are in all of these places? Do we need to be tougher on them? Because I feel like sometimes we look at the Iran deal and view that as a success. And maybe are we a little too sanguine about some of the other things they do that destabilize the region or support terrorism? What's your take? I don't think we're too sanguine. I mean, there's a peculiar U.S. tendency of building up our enemies into giants. I mean, whether it's Iraq, whether it's Osama bin Laden, whether it's now Iran.

They become sort of these mammoths that we're confronting. I think we have to be clear about, yes, Iran is doing a lot of things that are, again, inimical to our interests, but they're not the 800-pound gorilla. I think the main issue with Iran is not so much, you know, should we, should we not confront it, which activities are they engaged in that are hostile to the U.S. and to our allies? It's how we do it. And this, again, this is a critique of Democratic and Republican administrations going back since the Iranian revolution. I think what we're seeing now is we tend to confront Iran on the terrain that is most favorable to them. What are the Iranians good at? They're good at exploiting chaos, exploding war, exploiting instability.

Because in those situations, three things happen. Number one, there always is a party that is going to rely on Iran for help because they're going to look to anyone. And if we are on the other side, then they're going to jump to Iran, number one. Number two, it allows Iran to play the long game. You know, countries in the region, actors in the region know that we're kind of transient passengers. We come in, we'll leave the region, we'll come back, we'll leave again. Iran is there to stay. And that leads to the third point.

Iran just knows the region better than we do. So when we play on that, you know, let's escalate in Yemen to confront them, or now the Saudi, let's escalate in Lebanon, or let's escalate in Iraq. In each case, we're actually playing to Iran's strength. The fact is, I think this is, you know, people think, oh, the nuclear deal has given more money to Iran. That's why they're stronger in the region. I say that that really is BS. First of all, there's no indication that Iran has increased its maligned activities because of the deal. The only correlation, I think, that historically has proven to be absolutely predictive is where there's chaos and instability in a vacuum, this greater Iranian influence.

It has nothing to do with how much money they have, nothing to do with sanctions. are not sanctions. Sanctions could be very high. Iranian Milan activity could be very high and vice versa. But just a few data points. The invasion of Iraq, which gets rid of Saddam Hussein, which creates chaos and instability in Iraq, that opens the door for Iranian influence. That's the correlation. Yemen, we were just talking about it. Sure, there's some relationship between the Houthis and Iran, but it really was not that great. It was a rather, you know, it was an episodic lines, they don't have much in common. The Houthis are very, feel very strongly Arab and tribal, so what do they have to do with the Persian Iranians? But there's a war. There's Saudi Arabia is

more or less indiscriminately bombing some civilian areas. The Houthis turn even more to Iran than they did before, and Iran is only too happy to oblige. So that's example number two. Syria, now this is we could have a whole discussion about Syria, but the fact is Iran was present in Syria, Prior to the war, the civil war, when the civil war explodes and it becomes a much more violent situation, the regime turns to Iran because it's the only one it could turn to other than Russia and Hezbollah for help and soccer. And that's what it does. And you can make the same case in Lebanon. It's instability and chaos and war in Lebanon that led to the creation of Hezbollah, which Iran basically promoted. So in all these cases, it's not Iran's strength that allows it to exercise, influence in the region.

It's the weakness of its opponents, and it's the chaos in the region. And if we don't address that, if we say, we're going to give more weapons aside Arabia, and we're going to confront Iran and Yemen more, and we're going to escalate in Iraq or in Lebanon, we could do that. I guarantee you that 10 years from now, we're going to look back and say, what the hell did we do? Iran is stronger, the region is weaker, and our allies are more adrift. If we don't learn that lesson, then we really don't understand anything about the region. We love to authorize and resource the military responses.

We don't do so well with the political issues, the governance problems, the infrastructure challenges. Which, by the way, where is Iran weakest? Iran doesn't have anything to offer when it comes to economic reconstruction on a large scale. It could do some in Lebanon, but it's not going to rebuild a devastated Yemen. It doesn't have, that's not what it has to offer. That's what we and our allies could offer, economic reconstruction, diplomatic muscle, trying to bring parties together. But unfortunately, as you say, those are muscles that we often don't like to exercise, and we exercise those that Iran is sometimes more comfortable dealing with.

I want to pivot to ISIS because this is a cheery episode. You are, in addition to being a Middle Eastern expert, an ISIS expert, you led a lot of these efforts at the White House. How do you think the fight against ISIS is going? We see them losing territory in Iraq and Syria, but obviously they're still able to inspire attacks in a lot of places around the world. Syria is largely ungoverned. you're seeing Islamic extremist groups becoming more prevalent in parts of Africa and have been in other parts of Africa for a long time.

What's your sort of sense of a snapshot of the strength of ISIS today as compared to two years ago and the broader sweep of extremist groups that are out there that should worry us? So what's unique about ISIS, which we diagnosed pretty early on, was that it's not just one, it's four organizations roll into one. It's a quasi-state. It conquers territory. It had this quasi or so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria and some territory in Libya. So it has the attributes of a state in being. It's an insurgency, right?

It organizes people to take over territory. It didn't simply control it. It took over. It's a terrorist organization that we know well. And it's also an organization that inspires terrorism by others who may be very, very loosely related to it. It's all those four. The one that we've defeated or on the verge of defeating, and that was always the one that I felt we had the best chance of defeating,

simply because that's a case when ISIS chose our terrain and played to our strength, which is just the military confrontation with an overwhelmingly superior force. That one is on. So the whole non-territorial, the existence of the caliphate, that's more or less in the rear-view mirror. I'm sure that it's going to take a few more weeks or months. but that was never much in doubt. Once the U.S. and its allies decided they were going to dedicate themselves to destroying the caliphate,

the caliphate was going to be destroyed. That still leaves three dimensions. The insurgency, which I suspect we're going to see more of after a while, because they'll regroup and they're going to try to attack those portions of the countries in Iraq and Syria that they once held that they no longer hold. It certainly is not going to do much to dent the terrorism, and in some ways one could think that they could devote more resources. more of their dwindling resources

as a share of those dwindling resources to terrorism because they don't have they don't need to manage territory anymore and certainly the inspiration side is going to remain as well. So I think we've basically succeeded in doing away with one of the four dimensions

but it's a four-legged stool and we still have to address the other three and the other three are much harder to address because it's not just a military confrontation it's a political one, it's one that has to do with getting to those conditions on the ground that allowed ISIS to appear in the first place. And again, let's be honest, we and our allies are not as good at that.

You know, we didn't succeed in Iraq after al-Qaeda disappeared. Obviously, ISIS emerged from its ashes. So that's where we have to focus is on issues of reconstruction, inclusive government, in some cases, greater decentralization to allow communities to govern themselves better. All that has to be taken into account. And then, of course, there's a whole counter ISIS on the ideological field to ensure that communities in Europe or in the U.S. or in the Middle East are not inspired by ISIS. And there's a policing work to go after their terrorist dimension. So we've done an important job, but I think we have to be careful not to celebrate too soon because there's much, much else that exists.

The second point or the other point I make is, you know, during the fight against ISIS, there are only a handful of countries for whom that struggle was the permanent one. That certainly was the case of the U.S. The U.S. told all our allies in the region and abroad, number one priority is to defeat ISIS. Forget about everything else. Others may have said they agreed. They may have rhetorically complied, but their minds

were on other things. For Turkey, it was how do you battle the Kurds? For Saudi Arabia's, how do you battle Iran? For different constituencies in Iraq, it was who's going to get the bigger share of the pie. So in all these cases, we may have told people the priority of ISIS, they were pretending or sort of placating us, mollifying us,

and waiting for the day where they could resume the more existential struggle for them. And I think that's what we're going to also see. It's what we're seeing now. I mean, see what happened in Iraq in the fight between Kurds and Arabs. Let's see what's happening between Turkey and Syria. Look at what's happening again between Saudi Arabia and Iran. All of those conflicts, all of those conflicts, all of those. of those struggles which for the regional players in some ways are far more important than

ISIS, which they probably suspected would be defeated at some point. So in the case of the Iraqis, in particular in the Syrians, they did devote, and I mean the Kurds in Syria and some of the Arab groups, they did fight very hard against ISIS, and they lost far more men and women than we did. But still, in the back of their minds, they're thinking about the day after. The day after is here. It's upon us. and now is a time when all those conflicts are going to reemerge as the primary ones.

And that's hard for the U.S. because the U.S. is going to have to play that diplomatic role, to which this administration doesn't seem to be accustomed, to try to figure out how do you, if not resolve, manage the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, between Turkey and the Kurdish Kurds, between Baghdad and the Kurdish regions. All of those are going to have to be managed. How do you end the Syrian civil war? Because if you don't, then people are not going to be caring about what I was talking about earlier, which needs to be the focus of efforts, which is reconstruction, reconciliation, inclusive governments, decentralization.

And if the focus is going to be on those battles that were sort of put on the back burner, but the mind was never very far from it, then it's going to be a distraction from those priorities. Right. I want to ask you a question about an issue that I have struggled with, both inside and outside of the government, which is discussion of civilian casualties. When I interviewed former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell recently, I asked him about drones and civilian casualties. And his answer was one I heard many times when I was in government and one that frankly I was, I am predisposed to believe, which is that drones are the most precise counterterrorism tool we have that strikes can be taken with near zero civilian casualties and that limiting civilian casualties generally in all of these coalition campaigns is critical and of the utmost most importance and is something that Obama certainly. prioritized. And, you know, hopefully you would think the United States would as well. But if you look at the New York Times magazine this week, there is a long piece about these horrific civilian casualties in Iraq. And the numbers are,

briefly, the Times visited 150 U.S. air strike sites in Iraq, and they found a civilian death rate that was 31 times higher than what was reported by the U.S. coalition. How do we square the circle there? You know, what do you think is the truth? How can these air campaigns be precise? but we read numbers like 31 times higher. Like what is acceptable collateral damage and what's the reality on the ground do you think? So I actually read that piece as I was driving here and it's heart-wrenching and it's a remarkable piece. I mean, I can't comment on its accuracy, although, you know, it does seem to be extremely well documented. This is a really tough question.

And I got to say, you know, this is one of those cases where now being back at the International Crisis Group where I spent a long time of my life before coming back into government and now, I'm there. You know, you do have different perspectives, and I, you know, I have to reflect upon what I was thinking when I was in government and did I do enough on issues that I care about deeply like this one. And, you know, like you, I hear what a military say. I hear what people say, this is the most, you know, precise campaign. It's problematic, and problematic is too soft a word. I mean, I think it is, it seems pretty clear that there's something there that needs to be investigated. I mean, if this New York Times story is even partially correct, and I, again,

I have no reason to doubt it. That's a big stain on our campaign, and I think we have to be honest enough to look at it. I wish that we had done more of it at the time, and there was a real effort, and people that stayed in the White House and elsewhere, I think, as you know, try to be more transparent, tried to push for investigations when they were claims that were being made by non-governmental organizations. Did we do enough? Probably not. I mean, again, just reading the story suggests that we didn't do enough, and that's human, right? I mean, if you're working in the Pentagon, there's an instinct to try to protect and probably believe that these are the most precise targeted strikes ever. But there are, we know there are civilian casualties, and it

seems that there are far more than probably we acknowledged. One lesson, again, is just far more transparency, but I also think we need to think about how we wage this war on terror, and what do drones do? On one hand, there's all the pluses that you mentioned. Maybe we could be much more precise. We could be much more targeted. We can't be that targeted as it appears. And the problem with drone strikes is that there's a,

it sort of dehumanizes the war because, you know, we don't, there's no cost on our side. So obviously what sometimes acts on a restraint on war-making machines, which is that on wars is that, you know, their casualties on both sides. Here it's a case where, you know, we wage a war on terror, remarkably, and I dislike that term war on terror, so I shouldn't use it, but we have been fighting against ISIS.

We've had great success against ISIS at very, very low cost in terms of U.S. casualties. But does that make us less sensitive to the casualties, the civilian casualties on the ground? I think it's something that at least, you know, we have to ask ourselves, and warfare is going to move more and more in that direction. I mean, with technology advancing, we're going to see war technologies that are going to be much more, that are going to require much less of a human risk and human risk taking. But that poses deep ethical questions. And again, you know, I read this piece in the New York Times magazine.

I've engaged with human rights organizations throughout my time when I was at the NSC. I'd go back to those who are investigating these cases. They always said they were investigating them, but, you know, we do have to ask the question. I don't have a good answer. I just think it's something that we need to think about. And it is, again, I'm not whitewashing the Obama administration. I think we have to be as scrupulously honest and strict and tough in looking back at what we did as we would be with any administration. But there is something about the Trump administration.

When we hear the president say that he's giving much more leeway to his commanders on the ground and that, you know, there were too many shackles in the Obama administration. What if those shackles led to the kind of civilian casualties that you just mentioned, imagine what removing them is going to do. And it's not just a matter of people tell me, well, the rules of engagement haven't really changed. Number one, I don't know that that's true. Obviously, I don't know what the rules of engagement are now. But it's a matter of what the overall climate is. As I said, there probably were far more civilian casualty is intolerable, and they probably were far more than I thought was occurring.

But there was a climate where people knew that if something went wrong, you'd have Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor, you'd have the President of the United States who'd say, what the hell went wrong? And, you know, that's why some people said, oh, there was too much micromanagement. Well, the micromanagement, also the good side of micromanagement is that it keeps people on the heels, on their toes. They know that if something goes wrong, there's going to be a sense of accountability that, you know, we're not going to simply sweep it under the rug. that doesn't seem to be the case today and I think that's even more dangerous again I don't know what the casualty figures are going to be now but we've seen since

since the Trump administration took over there's been a number of incidents that at least makes one wonder whether the shackles as they say have not been removed too much and we now have on the ground commanders who are doing what one doesn't need to blame them it's really the

the political guidance and the authority and the sense of accountability that comes from on high and I'm afraid that we're moving far too far in that direction. I always hated that micromanaging complaint. I mean, when you're the President United States, you own every success and every failure and give me a fucking break that he shouldn't be leaning on his Pentagon to implement the policy as he or she sees fit.

Look, I mean, I really appreciate your candor on that question. And I also really appreciate the fact that your response was to go to a place of questioning the ethics and morality of civilian casualties like that. Because I think that's the right and the decent. response. I also wondered though if there's not a question of effectiveness because Nick Resmussen, who's the head of NCTC, I heard an interview with him recently where he talked about how the ISIS recruiting has gone from sort of a religious tone to one of sort of adventurism and like glory. I wonder if civilian casualties like this or sort of a sense of avenging innocence

like exacerbates the problem, creating more recruits with strikes, then you could take off the battlefield, which is something I've always heard, floated as a theory, but I've never seen proven, but you see stories like this, and it certainly seems to lend some credence to it. I think there's no doubt about, I happen to be watching now the extraordinary documentary on Vietnam, which I'm sure you've seen. And, you know, there could be an overuse of Vietnam as a comparative comparison to everything that we do. But, you know, that is certainly the case where, despite everyone talking about, you know, winning hearts and minds, the civilian casualties, the degree to which people felt, people in South Vietnam felt that the war was not

really taking their interest into account. That certainly helped North Vietnamese. I think we saw that in Iraq during the war. And, you know, it's going to say something else, which is right getting me in trouble. But, you know, we Democrats in general, not to try to be partisan, but, you know, many of us were critical of the war on terror moniker, you know, that was, what does that mean? there's no war on terror, but to large extent, and I think, you know, we should have a debate about this someday in another show. Why did the Obama administration end up making the war against ISIS, in which, you know, I was, I played a part, such a central component of the administration, right?

I mean, that was, you know, the war against ISIS became critical to so much of what we did. Well, you know, do we then end up putting so much of the emphasis on the military component and neglecting other components, but also, as you said, having the effect of killing people, civilians, and others, who are then going to harbor this grievance against us and against others for very long time. And is that really the way that you're going to rebuild the country? Putting aside the destruction of entire cities, which occurred, you know, Mosul, Raq, et cetera.

So I think there's really a deeper reflection in John Feiner, who I don't know if you've had on this show, but former Chief of Staff Secretary Kerry and I wrote this piece about just an initial thinking about why this fight against terrorists, this war against terrorism, ends up really taking over so much, even of an administration. And I say this, I really believe that. I think this was an administration that was about as reluctant to go in that direction as you could think of. And I think President Obama was about the most clear-eyed person you could imagine in terms of understanding the real threat of terrorism,

and what was it and what it wasn't and how people tended to sort of blow it out of all proportion. And yet even this administration ends up sucked in by that priority, which is, you know, we got to go after the terrorists. That's the goal and we have to kill them. I think there's a broad reflection.

Unfortunately, politically, it's almost impossible to have because then you appear to be weak and you're giving into the terrorists. But as you're saying, it's not a matter of being weak or terrorists, weak or giving into them. It's a matter of being effective and sustainable. And if our fight against them is going to be effective and sustainable,

I think we have to sometimes question our methods. But it's extraordinarily hard to do. You know this as well as anyone when you're in government and when everyone is looking at the results in 24 hours or 72 hours or next week. And people don't really have as much of the luxury as they should of thinking, okay, but what's the result going to be in a year, two year, three years, five years. But that's a challenge I think that any administration has again. I don't think we're going to find the administration with people at the very top who care about these things, who think about them rationally, as much as we did with President Obama and his team.

And I think it says a lot that even with that configuration, we end up with such an emphasis defeating ISIS. They're the biggest danger that we face. And again, I think we could have three hours on this, and I'd be glad to come back. But it is something that I've been thinking about quite a bit. I would love to follow up and have that conversation another time because I think there is a politically very challenging conversation to be had about right-sizing the risk in the public consciousness from terrorism and adjusting the resources and mind share an approach from the U.S. government accordingly because, boy, is it out of whack at times as anyone who goes through TSA knows. I'm sure you remember, actually, I don't know if you were still there when President Obama once said that fewer Americans had died at the hands of a foreign. foreign terrorist than slipping in their bathtub. And that had caused, you know, scandal.

He's minimizing the risk. He's trivializing it. Maybe it wasn't the best analogy, but the data is true, and it's not just people sleeping in their bathtub. It's, you know, dying because of lightning. I mean, you go down the list of things that Americans die from and see how many die from at the hands of foreign terrorists, and it's way down that list. And yet, I mean, forget about, you know, gunshots and, you know,

other discussion we could have. So in terms of seatbelts. Exactly. But the resources that we put into this is completely disproportionate to what we would put into other issues that we actually, that are actually causing far more damage and death of Americans. Now, the good reasons for it, it's not pure irrationality. It actually, that you could, there's something to it. But I just, I remember, I just remember the backlash when it appeared like the administration was downplaying the threat, when all it was doing was being absolutely rational and logical. But being logical and irrational on an issue like terrorism,

not only does it not pay, it actually could turn out being very counterproductive because you could end up appearing to be wholly disconnected from your constituents. And no president, no administration can afford to do that. So anyway, as I say, this is a long and not necessarily painless discussion, but one I think we have to have. I agree.

Rob Malley, thank you so much for your service. the administration, all the work you did to fight ISIS and deal with these challenging issues and for helping us understand what the hell is happening in Lebanon and talking through some of these really tough, morally challenging questions about our approach to terrorism. I truly appreciate it, and I would love to have you back sometime soon and follow up on this because I think it's an important conversation. Thanks. Appreciate being on.

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