John Fisher Burns on the Recent Paris Attacks

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Show:

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Hugh Hewitt

 

Audio

 

(Snip)

 

HH: I’m joined from London by John Fisher Burns for over 40 years, was a correspondent for the New York Times. So, John Burns, France’s president said let’s get a grand alliance going, somewhat WW2-ish, France, America, Russia, and maybe Great Britain, but do we really want Putin involved in this? Doesn’t that mean we have to take the butcher Assad?

 

JB: That’s a very complicated issue. It seems to me our policy has been a little quixotic because we’ve been, on the one hand, trying to suppress and defeat so-called Islamic State and on the other hand pledged to the unseating of Mr. Assad and it seems to me Mr. Putin has exploited the contradictions in that policy and perhaps we’re now seeing in the wake of what happened in Paris and the shoot-down of the Russian airline in Sinai, a movement of all sides to some sort of a compromise, but having spent many years in that part of the world, seeing British, American, and other allied troops in combat, I’ve grown deeply skeptical about our ability to influence the outcome of a fair fight by military force including bombing being certain that we will, if we really want to eradicate the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is going to lead to incremental use of ground troops. Special forces are already involved and I’m pretty certain that the public in Britain, like the public in United States after our experiences over the last decade, will remain pretty firmly opposed to that.

 

HH: John Fisher Burns, you’re one of the few people in the world who was actually there when the awakening happened, when al-Qaeda moved into western Iraq the first time, and then David Petraeus arrived with the surge troops. They killed and exterminated al-Qaeda and with the assistance of the local population after they had a taste of al-Qaeda. Do you believe, given your long experience in the region that Syrian and Iraqi Sunni Arabs would welcome the West’s assistance in expelling this tyrannical, fanatical regime?

 

JB: Well, we know that some of them would. It’s difficult to say that would be the majority view, but I think that what we can say is that the ultimate outcome for this is going to depend on the Sunnis of Iraq and Syria and indeed on other Sunni powers in the Middle East including especially Saudi Arabia and I’m inclined to think myself that just as we saw in David Petraeus’s time as commander in Iraq a change of attitude and change of life in the Iraqi Sunnis who had to belie themselves the rump of Sudan’s government, they belied themselves in the effect with al-Qaeda Islamic extremists and then grew tired of that and formed a temporary alliance with United States. I have a feeling that the outcome in Iraq and Syria is going to depend on the Sunni moderates, Sunni nationalists, in time, turning against the Islamic extremists and that’s going to be much more decisive than any deployment of Western military power.

 

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