Exploring the complexities of US military engagements in Iraq and Syria, from destroying ISIS to the challenges posed by Iran and Israel.
Imagine discovering that the US still operates bases in the heart of the Middle East’s most volatile regions. For insights into this surprising revelation, following recent events in Jordan where three American soldiers were killed in a drone attack by an Iran-backed insurgent group, we turn to Joshua Landis, a preeminent Middle East scholar.
In this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Landis takes us beyond the headlines, offering a critical examination of the US military’s enduring footprint in the oil-rich Middle East.
He delves into the tangled roots of American involvement, from the campaign against ISIS to current geopolitical chess moves. Alongside, Landis unravels the complexities of Iran’s role, deciphers the Abraham Accords, and confronts the enduring Palestinian dilemma.
With a sharp blend of historical acumen and breaking-news analysis, Landis sheds light on the intricate dance of US foreign policy in the Middle East, navigating the thin line between military actions and the pursuit of diplomatic reconciliation for regional stability.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman:
Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. The loss of three American soldiers in Jordan in an attack by the Islamic resistance in Iraq served as a grim reminder of the costs associated with our ongoing presence in Syria and Iraq. The tragic events in Jordan drew the spotlight once again on the complex and often perilous nature of US military engagements in the Middle East. To help us understand and navigate through this delicate and deeply important topic, I’m joined by Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute. Landis is a well-known expert whose profound insights into Middle Eastern Dynamics are sought after by policymakers and scholars alike. He’s written extensively of late, urging a reevaluation of US troops continued presence in Syria and Iraq, and provides a timely and critical perspective on an issue that touches on national security, international relations, and the underlying and moral imperatives guiding US foreign policy. Landis argues that the mission that initially justified the deployment of US forces to the region to destroy ISIS has been fulfilled, and that the continued military footprint only exacerbates tensions and hostilities in a regional already on the brink. Today, events continue to escalate, including the targeted killings of Iranian and Iraqi military leaders and the broader political maneuvers that the US is undertaking in the Middle East. Joshua Landis’s work aims to shed light on the intricate web of regional politics, the aspirations and grievances of the local populations, and the potential pathways, if they even still exist, to a more stable and peaceful Middle East. As far back as the early 1970s, Nixon and Kissinger spoke of the Middle East as the tinderbox that could spark a third World War. Today, 50 years later, it’s not less but more true. It is my pleasure to welcome Joshua Landis here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Joshua, thanks so much for joining us.
Joshua Landis:
Jeff, thank you very much for such a kind introduction and for this great layout that you have written in your intro.
Jeff Schechtman:
Well, it is great to have you here. First of all, talk a little bit about what the troop levels are in the Middle East right now in terms of US troops. I think that it’s fair to say that that many Americans thought that we were long since out of Iraq and Syria at this point.
Joshua Landis:
Well, we’ve got we’ve got about 2,500 troops in Iraq. We have another 1,000 in Syria and about 3,000 in Jordan. Of course, those are just the troop, the official troops. There are tons of contractors, diplomats, and others that are supporting these bases. So it’s a fairly big operation. Of course, once you go to the gulf, in Qatar and Saudi Arabia and so forth, there are many more troops, and that’s where we have our real power based. So, you know we have a very big presence in the Middle East and some people are saying it’s actually has grown over the last few years.
Jeff Schechtman:
And talk about the initial mission that these troops had, particularly in Iraq and Syria, and even in Yemen. And what has transpired to in fact create a situation now where arguably those troops probably shouldn’t be there?
Joshua Landis:
Well, you know it depends on which date you start at. Of course, America’s mission in Iraq began in 2003 when we invaded and overthrew Saddam Hussein. And President Bush his rationale for this changed rather rapidly once we got into Iraq and discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction. And Saddam Hussein didn’t have connections to al Qaeda, but we overthrew the government and President Bush said we were going to build a democracy in the heart of the Arab world. And that by transforming this nasty dictatorship into a power sharing democratic, capitalist country it would create a domino theory in which the rest of the Middle East would become democratic and see a shining example on the hill. Now of course that that didn’t work out, that was that was a daydream of the US imagination. And what it did instead is it kindled and launched a very bloody civil war because Saddam Hussein was perched on top of really an empire with a number of different peoples under his — he had imposed a very dictatorial truce between these different groups — and it wasn’t even a truce. It was a bloody truce. But once the top lid was taken off this pressure cooker, terrible civil war broke out between the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites as we know. And America tried to stanch the bloodletting, and it did so by helping the Shiites, the top of Iraqi society, and casting the Sunnis, who are the minority but had been in power under Saddam, down to the bottom of society. And that just brought up tons of ill will. And we first got Al Qaeda under Zarqawi, and then we got ISIS, which were Sunni Arab. Really, efforts to return the Sunni Arabs to the top of Iraqi society and to recapture this state under Islamic guise. So this was a form of Sunni Arab revanchism and America had to destroy the Sunni Arab community in Iraq. Which is really what it did by bombing first al Qaeda and then once we withdrew, ISIS grew up. And Isis was really a reformed al Qaeda and it got its second wind in Syria, because of the civil war that broke out in Syria after Arab Spring 2011. And President Assad had to abandon Eastern Syria, which is largely desert, the area near Iraq, and he pulled his troops out of this forlorn region to concentrate on the cities, which are all in the West of Syria. And that meant that you had this big playground in which Al Qaeda could sweep in and begin to conquer territory up and down the Euphrates river, and it recasts itself as ISIS under Caliph Baghdadi, and you’ve got a state. An ISIS state the size of Great Britain and that forced the United States to reoccupy and to send in lots of troops in order to destroy ISIS. Now I’m going to give you a brief hiatus here because, we had, you know, the Syrian context is very important to this. Initially, President Obama jumped in on the side of this Syrian rebels, who were mostly Sunni Arabs, during the Arab Spring. And we supported them with arms and with money and most importantly with diplomatic support. Because it was Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, who are spending the big sums of money in Syria and arming these Syrian militias, opposition militias, that were retreating into Turkey and to Jordan and getting arms and training from America in order to kill the Alawites, a religious minority, of which Bashar al-Assad is the leader and had dominated Syrian politics, imposing a very harsh dictatorship. And so America was trying to reengineer Syria, to make a pro-American Syria, by arming Sunni Arabs against the Shiites. Just the opposite of what it had done in Iraq, where it armed the Shiites in order to kill the Sunnis. The Sunnis who are aggrieved in Iraq under the Shiites fled into Syria, formed ISIS, which could draw off all the arms that were flowing into the Sunni groups, and became very big. And that meant America had to go in. It abandoned the Syrian opposition in midstream, the Sunni Arabs, and jumped in on the side of the Kurds. And about 10 percent of Syria are Kurds. They live in the northeast of the country, and they had been getting their ears pinned back by ISIS and just beaten the hell out of by ISIS. Their cities were being bombed. They were being driven out. So America jumped in on the side of the Kurds, arm them up, and renamed their militia the Syrian Democratic forces, and occupied 30 percent of Syria, grabbing most of the good oil wells and agricultural land for this Kurdish proxy army, and has been there in Syria ever since. And the Kurds did the heavy lifting in destroying ISIS. America gave them arms, training, air support, you name it. But they were the ones on the ground. And over 11,000 of them were killed in this fight against ISIS. So America owes them a great deal. The trouble is, we’re stuck, in a Syria which is deeply divided supporting the Kurds in this anti-ISIS campaign. Now ISIS as a state has been completely destroyed. Iraq as a state, is back on its feet, but very weak and corrupt. And Syria, the government in Syria was never overthrown. So we’re stuck, supporting these Kurds in a quasi -independent state, which we built for them in northeast Syria. And also trying to manage the situation in Iraq and helping the Iraqi army. The problem is that none of the governments in the neighborhood want us there. The Turks want us out because we’re supporting the Kurds. And there’s an important Kurdish party, the PKK, the Turkish Workers Party Turkey, which is seeking, it was seeking independence in eastern Turkey. So the Turks view these, this Kurdish party as terrorist, has named it terrorist, has gotten America to name it terrorist, and the trouble is, the Kurds that we’re supporting in northeastern Syria are connected ideologically and spiritually and through leadership to the PKK. So we’ve made enemies of Turkey. Iraqi Government is in betwixt, in between, and very divided. But much the Shiites of Iraq are largely pro-Iranian, and the Iranians want us out. As do the Turks. And of course, Bashar al-Assad, who has reestablished his authority in 60 percent of Syria, wants us out and is an ally of Iran. So all of the local governments that we should be depending on want us out. And they see us of supporting these Kurds, creating divisions within their societies, stealing their oil. They see us as playing a very inimical role of keeping Syria weak and keeping Iran out. So our mission, which began as a mission to destroy ISIS, has as ended up as a mission to — really against Iran and supporting Israel. And just in the last month, Israel has bombed Syria 10 times, killed a lot of Iranian leaders in Syria, IRGC. And so this infuriates Damascus. It infuriates Iran. And Iran is going to encourage its allies in the region to send more rockets, more drones to bomb American bases. And to kill the Kurdish proxies which Turkey is doing and Assad is helping out in. And so they’re undermining America’s position. By killing the Kurdish leadership that allied with America and by sending these missiles and drones into American bases, most of which get shot down and don’t do much damage, but as we saw in Jordan, one got through and killed three Americans. And that leaves us in this very awkward position where we’ve lost our original mandate, I guess, which was to kill ISIS. And it’s metastasized. And now we’re just defending ourselves in a very hostile territory.
Jeff Schechtman:
In many ways, we’re the classic case of the firemen who’s also the arsonist who started the fire and then comes in to want to put it out.
Joshua Landis:
Yes. And we call ourselves maintaining stability in the region, which of course it is. You know, it makes one scratch their head because we originally wanted to overturn regimes and create instability in the Middle East. And rebuild the Middle East was the idea we were going to create stability and a beautiful democracy. But of course we’ve done nothing of the like. We’ve killed a ton of people and we’ve destabilized the region. And uh, and now the local powers want us out. And I think you know and what I’ve said in this article that you quoted is that the best thing for us to do is to get out and let the local leaders figure out how to police their own countries to reunify their countries and try to get back on their legs.
Jeff Schechtman:
Talk a little bit about the impact of the current situation in Israel, in Gaza, and the statements that have actually come from the administration with respect to the fact that one thing has nothing to do with the other, that one is not exacerbating the other problem when it’s pretty obvious that it is.
Joshua Landis:
Yeah, it is. You look at Gaza; you know everybody was preparing to turn the page on the Palestinians. The Arab countries were; the Abraham Accords were all about this. The Saudis, the Gulf Arabs who had kept Israel at arm’s length for decades since its creation 1948, said you know, the policies have lost, we we’ve got to move on. And boom, the Gaza attack, October 7th, the Palestinians said no, you can’t do that. Hamas went on this crazy raid that killed so many Israelis, and it was a it was a Geronimo moment, I guess for the Palestinians. In many ways, I guess you know Bernie Haykel of Princeton, the head of their Middle East Department just wrote a big op-ed, in which the last lines are, you know, the Hamas has won a victory by putting the Palestinians back on the map for countries like Saudi Arabia and so forth. Of course it’s lost for itself because it’s being destroyed. But the Palestinian issue is front and center again in the Middle East. And in putting it front and center, it has given a tremendous amount of legitimacy to what’s called the resistance front or the access of resistance that Iran has cobbled together over the decades. And which had lost most of its legitimacy after the Iraq and Syrian civil wars. But now it’s regaining its popularity in the Middle East because so many Arabs and Muslims are fired up over this Gaza issue and see an injustice being done to their fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims, and sees the West as being extremely hypocritical. That the United States is not standing up for rules based order is siding with its ally Israel. And so this has blown wind back into the sails of an Iranian resistance movement. Which is very damaging to the United States in the region.
Jeff Schechtman:
Is there any mission left with respect to ISIS? Is there anything that still needs to be carried out by the US with respect to either monitoring or managing ISIS?
Joshua Landis:
Yes, I think there is. ISIS is not dead. There’s tons of — there are still ISIS —there’s still an ISIS leadership and infrastructure. They’re hit and run operations that are carried out by ISIS in the region. And the United States can do that, though from places like Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, where it has bases by working with local governments and using intelligence and rebuilding intelligence because the only way to really destroy ISIS and to keep it destroyed is for local states, Iraq, Syria, Turkey to cooperate, build up their police forces and to impose order in their lands. And so long as the United States is keeping Syria divided those governments are very weak. And we have to remember the United States imposes crushing sanctions on Syria, which keep it extremely poor. The US has taken 30 percent of the most valuable part of its country, with all of its oil, which used to fund most of the government expenses. And it’s giving those to its Kurdish allies. And so it keeps Syria on its knees and Turkey is occupying a hunk of Syria too. But this this division of Syria leaves three bitter inimical groups in Syria that are fighting each other and that allows ISIS to run between the legs of these three warring parties and these divisions where there is unpoliced lands. And no coordination between the various opposing governments. So that creates the territory in which ISIS can still operate as a terrorist organization. And so I think in the long run, America needs to withdraw. And can assist these local governments in, you know, with intelligence and building up security and perhaps with some air power if it wants to. But it needs to be the local police and armies that police their own territory and that’s the ultimate objective.
Jeff Schechtman:
And talk about the role of Iran in all of this, and particularly the very hawkish rhetoric that we hear from Washington and of course from Israel.
Joshua Landis:
Right. You know, since the Iranian Revolution, Iran has put out this very revolutionary rhetoric. I mean, it’s going to be a leader in the region. And it sees America as the great Satan, as it calls it, as a competitor who has armed up the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs, who are Sunni Arabs, against the Shiite, against Iran. And we have to remember that if you take Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq as a unified area, as one area of the Levant there are more Shiite Arabs in that stretch of territory, the three countries put together, then there are Sunni Arabs. Now the Sunnis have always ruled in that region, because the Ottoman Empire, which ruled until 1918, was a Sunni empire. And the Sunnis where it’s the top of society. The Shiites were at the bottom. They were aggrieved. They were discriminated against. Iran has played on those grievances and that social unhappiness. And it has catapulted Shiites. It’s helped catapult Shiites to the top of each of those three countries. Today, Hezbollah is the major force in Lebanon. The Assad regime has clung to power and dominates Syrian politics, their Alawites, which are not exactly Shiites, but they’re heterodox offshoot from Shiites. And they definitely look at the Sunni Arabs as their competitors and people who would push them to the margins of society if they took power. And then there’s the Shiites of Iraq, which America catapulted to the top, but Iran was a major beneficiary of that. So Iran has managed to extend its power over this northern part of the Middle East, by helping these beleaguered, discriminated against Shiites who had been dispossessed and helping them gain power. So the Shiites are extremely indebted to Iran and they’re dependent on Iran militarily. So Iran is sees this as a way to push America out. It uses the Arab Israeli conflict as a whipping post in order to gain ideological legitimacy in the region and stand up against Israel as the defender of the Arabs and try to make it more than just the Shiites into a bigger Islamic Arab thing. And Gaza plays right into that. Now America has fallen into the trap of becoming the defender of the Sunnis, if you will. Most recently with its alliance with Saudi Arabia with Qatar, with the Gulf, Bahrain, against Iran and Israel, against Iran. And this puts America right in the middle of this very sectarian and ethnic struggle that’s going on in the Middle East. And it’s not a place that America, you know, America, can’t solve those problems. Those are regional. Ethnic Wars. And America by siding on one side is making enemies on the other side, enemies that it can’t defeat. It can’t defeat it. It can push its finger delicately on the on the scales, but it can’t remake the Middle East. All those illusions of bringing democracy and recasting the Middle East have led us into one battle after the next and their bankrupting our country, quite frankly. I mean, it’s estimated that we spent about $8 trillion on Afghanistan and Iraq and on this War on Terror and trying to, you know, bring the freedom agenda to the Middle East. And as you know, we’re $34 trillion in debt and 7 or 8 or 9 trillion of that comes from these crazy wars. And we’re throwing lots of good money after bad in this region. So you know, there’s an economic element to this as well as just one of sort of imperial overreach.
Jeff Schechtman:
What are the military and geopolitical consequences if we were to just up and leave?
Joshua Landis:
Well, we’re not going to up and leave. Look at we have allies in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arabs, our allies. And we’re going to stay in the region. Oil is very important. And ultimately I think our geostrategic planners, you know, think of this as the great gas station. Now, of course, America has all the gas it needs and is now self-sufficient and gas in fact is exporting. But controlling the supply of gas and oil has been a center plank of America’s strategic thinking. And that’s where this relationship with Saudi Arabia has been so important because Saudi Arabia is head of OPEC, in many ways, sets prices. You know we defeated Hitler in World War II in large part by denying Hitler oil and gas. You know in the hinge of fate, as Churchill called it in 1941-42. The two battles that changed the direction of the war, the balance of the war, Stalingrad and El Alamein, El Alameins in Egypt. And Rommel’s forces were coming across trying to get to the Suez Canal, choke off oil supplies to Britain and get them for itself. And of course, Stalingrad instead of going to Moscow, he was going down to the Caspian Sea and trying to get Russian oil. Ultimately, he failed in both of those battles. He didn’t get gas and oil for his Panzer units in his Luftwaffe, and he choked. So controlling oil and gas, which is makes the world run, became a central peg of American strategic thinking for World War III. And we still think that way. And our fleets and troops and support in that Gulf area is about controlling oil and gas. Today, you know China and Asia consumed about close to 90 percent. In about another five years, we’re expecting to be about 90 percent of that oil and gas goes to Asia. And here we are big competitors with China. But in any war with China over Taiwan or whatever, it’s going to be. Restricting that oil flow out of the Persian Gulf to China would be our major leverage against China — choking off its industries and its energy. So America is very loath to leave the Persian Gulf and to abandon our allies because it would open that up for China to move right in and to secure its energy supply. So America is not going to do that. We’re stuck in the Middle East, for better or for worse. But we have to manage ourselves much better and I think solving this Arab Israeli conflict, solving the Palestinian question, and that’s why I think President Biden and his advisers have said, you know, there’s got to be a two state solution. Ultimately, there’s 7 million Palestinians in the historic area of Palestine, Israel, Palestine, and there’s 7 million Jews there. The Jews cannot stamp out — they can’t resolve this Palestinian problem without giving them some kind of self-determination. A state and some fair shake on their desire to have a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Now, how do you do that? I just don’t know? That’s the biggest question and whether America can play a constructive role in that, I don’t know? But if we don’t, that problem is going to be boiling on the front burner and it’s going to alienate our position in the Middle East. It’s going to undermine our position in the Middle East.
Jeff Schechtman:
Talk a little bit about what, if anything, we have learned from this current situation in Israel. And what we hope that the Abraham Accords would do. And in fact, how it has backfired. And what lesson can we take away from that in terms of perhaps what we have to do with regard to Palestinians going forward?
Joshua Landis:
Well, it blew up in our hands. We were, you know, the Abraham Accords came out of Trump’s idea that you could jump over — that the Palestinian issue was dead. The Palestinians were no longer a force. Israel had defeated them largely, and we could turn and look in the other direction. And that our allies, the Saudis and the Israelis who had, they kept each other at arm’s length, even though there was a lot of cooperation underneath the table, there was still enmity, particularly amongst, between the peoples. That if we could just fix that and get Israel and Saudi Arabia to cooperate we could begin to shut Iran out of the region. It would help defend Saudi Arabia, our allies, and bring Saudi Arabia into more firmly into our orbit and away from China and so forth. This, you know this, was an idea that many, obviously our leadership thought was going to work. The Palestinian issue has blown that up. And today, America looks very weak. Our allies are questioning our moral integrity on this. The Islamic world is very angry. And so America, America needs to grapple with this issue in a way that I don’t think it’s really prepared to. It’s certainly not politically. And that leaves the big question mark over the region, because how do you solve this Arab Israeli problem? Netanyahu and his government seem dead set against, and most Israelis are dead set against, supporting the idea of a two state solution. Because after October 7th they’re terrified that giving a Palestinian state is going to mean warfare and strengthening their enemies. But how do you defeat these 7 million Palestinians and keep them from doing desperate acts like this Hamas act and embracing radical ideologies like Hamas? If they don’t, if they’re going to be aggrieved. That’s the you know, that’s the $1,000,000 question. And I don’t have a good answer for it.
Jeff Schechtman:
And finally Joshua, what is the biggest mistake we could make at this point? Looking at it on the other side, what would be the most disastrous thing that we could do?
Joshua Landis:
Well, I think going back to the status quo. I think abandoning a day after program in for Gaza. And you know, sort of setting up tent cities but not coming up with a political solution. And I think there’ll be tons of pressure to do exactly that. Because over the last 20 years, if you look at both political parties, Republican and Democrat in America, they have shooed trying to continue peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians because it’s just too difficult. Presidents got bloody noses is doing it. President Obama tried in his first, you know, at the beginning of his presidency to push Netanyahu to stop settlements and so forth. And Netanyahu was able to run right around him, do an end run around him to Congress and got over 100 congressmen and women to go to the West Bank and say that, you know, settlers are not the not the enemy of America. Iran is the enemy of America. And I think Netanyahu managed to thumb his nose at Obama and subsequent presidents. Because he’s — Israel and America attached to the hip. And this makes it extremely hard for Biden, I think, to find his way out of this towards some kind of political solution, which will require putting serious pressure on Israel. Which is of course very dependent on the United States. It could be, you know, America could put pressure, but politically it’s very difficult for American presence to do that. Because the American establishment doesn’t want to do that. And that’s what makes us in such a bind here, and which makes this Gaza situation, so which the whole world is looking at, of course, with social media and so forth. And I think their hearts, the world’s hearts have gone out to the Gazans, and are waiting to see if there is, if America is capable of giving them a fair shake. And it’s not clear whether America is or whether Israel is in a mood to do that after October 7th.
Jeff Schechtman:
Joshua Landis, thank you so much for spending time with us.
Joshua Landis:
Well, it’s a pleasure talking with you, Jeff. I wish I had better answers for your questions. It leaves us in a very, you know, in a very difficult situation, but I think that is that I think it is a difficult situation and I don’t see, you know, I see the momentum and the inertia is moving towards returning to some kind of status quo and not really getting a two state solution off the ground. And just leaving Gaza as a smoking, a terrible ghetto where anger and hatred is going to be rerevived once again without finding a constructive outlet for the 2 million people trapped there.
Jeff Schechtman:
Well, the one thing that becomes abundantly clear as you go through this history and we bring it right to the present is that the US is constantly boxed in at every step of the way. And that now we’re in boxes, inside boxes, inside boxes.
Joshua Landis:
Well, I think that’s a very good description of it. That is our situation in Syria and Iraq are like that. We’ve lost our directions. And we’re just trying to defend our troops in these distant desert outposts, which are scattered upon, scattered along this big stretch of territory where all the governments are hostile to us. We have a few little allies in the Kurds and others, but mostly the powers that be want us out. And we’re digging in our heels because we don’t want to look weak. Biden doesn’t want another Afghan moment. And he’s kicking the can down the road and it’s going to go to the next president, and that’s what’s probably going to happen on Gaza and other things.
Jeff Schechtman:
Joshua Landis, thank you so much for joining us on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Appreciate it. Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
