The herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations Whose Mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound. Org. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The kohlberg foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Welcome. Here we go again. As i as i report to you, air attacks are underway against military targets in iraq. President bill clinton on december 16, 1998 good evening. Earlier today, i ordered Americas Armed forces to strike military and security targets in iraq. My fellow citizens, at this hour, american and Coalition Forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. To stop the advance on erbil, ive directed our military to take targeted strikes against isil terrorist convoys should they move toward the city. Over 23 years, four consecutive president s have ordered the bombing of iraq by u. S. Forces. Its what one of my guests calls the nightmare of groundhog day facing the same problem, over and again. Just a year ago barack obama told the United Nations that he was determined to end americas perpetual war footing in the middle east region. But this week the president returned to the un to announce not yet and to assert that the us intends to unleash more airpower to defeat the islamic militants who have swept across large areas in iraq and syria. With a first round of drones and missiles unleashed inside syria even before he spoke at the un, the president has plunged america into the midst of a civil war that involves over one thousand different militia. You need a mighty big scorecard just to figure whos on whose side. Weve asked a couple of experienced hands to help us do just that. Jonathan landay is a Senior National security and intelligence reporter for mcclatchy newspapers. Hes also an unsung hero of washington journalism. During the buildup to the 2003 invasion of iraq, landay and his colleague Warren Stroebel dug deep to find evidence refuting the bush administrations case for going to war. You can see landay and stroebel at work in our documentary buying the war, at billmoyers. Com. Matthew hoh fought in iraq as a marine corps captain. He then joined the Foreign Service and became the widely praised senior american civilian in Afghanistans Zabul province, thats a taliban stronghold. He resigned in protest when he came to believe the war was making things worse and american soldiers should not be dying in what was a longrunning civil war. Matthew hoh is now a senior fellow at the center for International Policy in washington, dc. Welcome to both of you. Thank you. Let me read you something one of your colleagues, ryan cooper, wrote this week in theweek. Com. Whos ready to squander billions of dollars on yet another pointless, almostcertaintobackfire war in iraq . The Mainstream Media for one, he says, which for weeks has been shamelessly fearmongering the supposed threat by the Islamic State of iraq and syria and many republicans, meanwhile, insist that isis represents an imminent threat to the United States, which, strangely enough, is just how george w. Bush justified his war of aggression against iraq in 2003, lets get one thing straight isis poses no specific, credible threat to the u. S indeed, isiss slickly produced beheading videos are quite obviously designed to bait the media into stoking a panic and it has succeeded spectacularly. See, i disagree with that interpretation because i think the point of those videos was to try and undermine that turn in American Public opinion. Dont come back here. Dont get really . Involved. This is whats going to happen to your soldiers. Look what happened to your soldiers before. You have to look at some of their previous videos where they show american tanks being blown up, american soldiers being killed. Dont get involved here and i think that thats what, i dont see them being able to bait, at coming back, because he, you know, beyond special forces i dont think theres any way hes going to introduce American Forces on the ground at this point. I dont think he wants to. He may have to. At this point. At this point. He may have to. Well have to wait and see, but im not but is, go ahead. Im not sure that, again, im not sure that that was the point of the videos, to suck americans in, and in fact, in one of the videos after the Steven Sotloff beheading, the executioner turns to the camera and says, back off. Leave us alone. So what do you think the Islamic State wants . They subscribe to a form of islam where they believe theres only one authority within islam. And they want to form a caliphate and they want to have that one authority that all muslims follow. They attract, i think a wide group of followers. Some are people whove just been dispossessed, some are people who, many of whom i think have been caught up in this cycle of revenge, of killings, of retribution that have been wracking the middle east for decades now and specifically in iraq for 11 years now. You have some who are, i think, adherents to this religious philosophy. And then you have some quite like the british gentleman who murdered sotloff and foley, who are psychopaths, but you also have to remember that throughout history theres always been people who want to go fight, who like the romance of war, who are looking to fulfill something deeper, some purpose. I will say with the beheading videos, i do believe they were bait. I think this is they want to validate their narrative that the Islamic State is the protector of islam, that it is protecting the people, the faith, the culture of their lands from the quote, unquote, crusaders, for lack of a better term. I think theres a deeper problem here, and its one that i havent that the president has touched on. He touched on it in his speech to the Un General Assembly and i think its one that could really prove to be the undoing of this campaign that hes unleashing and that is the immediate threat is the Islamic State, but its a phenomenon. Its a consequence of decades, centuries of despotic rule in that part of the world by dictators, by kings who have provided no semblance of responsible governance, no accountability. If you look at whats going on in the middle east today, you have enormous poverty. You have this huge youth bulge, the enormous number of young men between the ages of 17 and 30 who are underpaid or have no jobs, you know, lack skills. You have this massive corruption that favors a very thin elite in all of these countries and now the United States, you know, i remember when the newly elected obama went to cairo for that historic speech. 2009, right. Exactly, where he delivers this speech and hes says, you know, were not no more business as usual by the United States. Were not going to align ourselves with these regional despots. We want to see reform, we want to see democratic reform. And what has he done now is hes realigned himself with these regional powers, with these regional despots, including the guy who this administration condemned for the coup that he staged in egypt, overthrowing an elected government, albeit, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood and im talking about egyptian president sisi. I mean, he is now counted as part of this coalition, so if you are one of these young men who are looking at all of this and seeing and listening to the propaganda about islam being under threat from the west, this Islamic State thing has an appeal. And if somehow obama succeeds in degrading and eventually destroying the Islamic State, something will come along to replace it because those problems that create this phenomenon are not going to go away. But meanwhile the Islamic State is a threat to saudi arabia, a threat to jordan, a threat to qatar, a threat to bahrain, those autocratic regimes you were talking about, a threat ultimately possibly to egypt. So why isnt it an option for the president to have said or to say this is your doorstep, if you dont put billions of dollars youre earning from oil and all of those young men who are available into the fighting of the Islamic State, were not going to be there. This is your fight. Because our priorities for decades have been on military first solutions, not on political solutions. We have, as jonathan said, weve embraced dictatorships. Backing ourselves out of those relationships is very hard in a washington, d. C. , where the climate of politics overwhelms everything else. So you see president obama, and im reminded of an article you wrote, bill, five years ago on Lyndon Johnsons decision to escalate the vietnam war and how johnson at that point felt that there was no good was going to come out of that escalation, that there was no purpose in it. But how could he face down these senators if he didnt stand up to and i feel that president obama has the same challenge. How does he not come across as being weakwilled or not tough on terror . The other thing, too, is that again we, for decades now this has been our policy, so how do you extricate yourself from that policy . We spend a trillion dollars a year on National Security in this country. And when you add up to the department of defense, department of state, cia, veterans affairs, interest on debt, the number that strikes me the most about how much were committed financially to these wars and to our current policies is we have spent 250 billion already just on Interest Payments on the debt weve incurred for the iraq and afghan wars. So were in this system that how do you start to break down, how do you start to dismantle, because the result has been these frankensteins like the Islamic State. Heres the dilemma. The whole world has seen what isis is doing now. When you see evil playing out in front of your eyes rape, beheadings, whole villages wiped out, dont you as a human being, as a free nation have to do something . You have to remember that this is not a singular unique event occurred this summer, that all sides have been guilty of atrocities in this conflict. Half a million iraqis have been killed in the war since 2003. To put that in perspective, in world war ii, the United States lost 400,000 people, killed. So if you look at the conflict now in iraq and understand it as this continuing cycle of violence, this continuing cycle of retribution, this continue cycle of sectarian hatred that groups like the Islamic State, which i characterize as a parasite of war, benefit from, how do you stop that cycle . Because as horrific as the killings have been this past summer, remember 10,000 civilians were killed in iraq last year. How do you stop it from 20,000 next year . When we look at the situation there and the utter horror with which, you know, were focused on two videos of two americans being killed, but there were other videos. There were videos where they killed 600 people. Six hundred young iraqi, young iraqi men. Theyve slaughtered men from a tribe in syria that tried to resist them. Hundreds of them. And you say to yourself, as a human being, can we allow this to go on . And i think, you know, were talking about the complexity of this, but its really hard to put yourself in the shoes of the president of the United States who commands the only military in the world thats capable, perhaps, of stopping this. Here you have this horrendous civil war in syria, and ive been there twice now this year and i have, you know, and ive covered a lot of war. I have never seen such urban destruction anywhere, anywhere. I dont know how theyre going to rebuild that country. Two to three million refugees, Syrian Refugees and six and a half thats just outside of the country. Million inwardly yeah. Displaced people its nine Million People displaced, but beyond that, and you see, like, street after street, town after town, just completely devastated. Infrastructure, bridges, roads, hospitals, schools, how are they going to rebuild that . How are you going to repatriate the two to three Million People who are living outside of syria . I think Something Like 20 percent of the lebanese population is syrian now. How are you going to put that all back together again . If you allow that to continue, then youre looking at something that perhaps a disaster on an even greater scale. So here you are as the president of the United States, preaching human rights, trying to repair as best you can this unbelievable damage that was done to the United States reputation and its ability to wield soft power, diplomatic power, by the invasion of iraq, by guantanamo, by abu ghraib, by the cias torture program, and you say to yourself, i may i need to do something because you got the pressure on you as the only commander of a military in the world that can do something about it. But is it conceivable that the president , looking at the situation there, thinks that air power, that you can bomb the Islamic State into submission and oblivion . I dont think he believes that and i think hes said as much when he says that theres no military solution, only a political solution to these conflicts. However, i unfortunately, i feel thats just lipservice and nfortunately, i feel that we are going to join in the violence in syria without any end state. Without any goal. Without any ability to finalize some type of agreement that is going to bring about an end to the killing. One of my favorite lines ive heard about our syria plan is that its not a strategy, its a spending plan. That we are going to we have authorized 500 million to train 5,000 syrian rebels, moderate rebels and youve been in a lot of combat zones, and have you ever seen anything moderate in combat . You know, i mean, like no, theres no i mean, like, because i dont know where this term comes from, but this moderate and now were going to train them at a cost of 100,000 for one guy, its going to cost to train, 100,000 per person. And were going to send them to saudi arabia, the people who have been training and fostering and helping a lot of these groups, like alnusra, which is the al qaeda organization, or the Islamic State that are now out of control, in response to a beheading video. Which to me makes no sense because saudi arabia beheaded 19 people in august. This past august . Yes. Yup. For one was for witchcraft or sorcery, several for drug possession. In saudi arabia, you can be beheaded for a whole list of offenses, including adultery and homosexuality and but these are our good allies in this these are new coalition. And this is where i think a lot of us say, what are we doing here . This makes no sense. All we are going to achieve is perpetuation of this conflict. Now at least i think the pentagon and the white house has been honest about that, this is going to take years, but whats going to be achieved . How are we going to achieve it . Are we just going to bomb . I think its que striking that the presint sd the modefor thesoperationsill be somlia and yemen and then almost as soon as he said that, yemen descended into utter chaos. Hundreds are dead on the streets of the capital of yemen. The Prime Minister forced to abdicate. Andhats the del. So is this really our model for the middle east that we are going to bomb countries, continuously, take part in civil wars, sometimes supporting one side, maybe supporting the other, with no means or no real desire or effort to achieve a peace . What are the options in syria . I mean, i just wrote down what seems to me to be the conundrum. The jihadists want to control syria, which is 70 percent sunni, so they should have a natural constituency there, since they are sunni. To stop isis, mustnt there be a truce between president assad and the rebels who are trying to bring him down and given the mutual hatred between assad and the rebels, between the sunnis and the shiites, how can that political solution be found . Absolutely and i think thats what kept obama out of there for so long. You know, how do you deal with this incredible tanglel of not just sectarian hatreds, but theres ideological differences between these groups, theres personal differences, thats why eventually i think the administration has all, despite what it says, all but given up on this moderate Political Leadership that it helped it crafted and has been living in on our tab in turkey, has basically given up on this Central Command of the Free Syrian Army and has bypassed i literally saw a reference in some major newspaper story the other day, said the moderately extremist militia yeah, that sounds right. Im serious. And no, and again, i really think that thats whats kept him from intervening in syria. And how hes going to be able to create these buffers between, okay, so were going to bomb the Islamic State, but were not going to help assad by doing that and were only going to help these moderates. And you know, i