Muslims Americans can be kingmakers in US election: Fmr Amb Silliman

Former US Ambassador to Iraq Douglas Silliman told Rudaw’s Namo Abdulla on Tuesday during an interview in Washington, DC, ahead of the US elections that in some tight races like in Georgia, Muslim Americans “can be a kingmaker.”

Silliman suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris may not share as strong of views on Iraq policy as President Joe Biden which have been long-standing and strong. However, he noted she would likely apply more pressure on Israel and increase humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza

Regarding former President Donald Trump’s stance, Silliman said: “Former President Trump has essentially said, ‘The United States must support Israel and let Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu do whatever he needs to take care of Hamas.’ ”

On US relations with the Kurdistan Region, Silliman said he expects that Harris’ policies would be close to Biden’s approach, including working closely with Baghdad to enable ongoing military support to the Peshmerga and maintaining a limited US military presence in the country.

Silliman, reflecting on conversations with minority communities in Iraq, noted that they view the US military presence as important for protecting their autonomy and influence within the broader Iraqi political framework. He said: “All of the smaller communities in Iraq would like to see a continued American presence.”

Below is the full transcript of the interview.

Rudaw: Thank you so much, Mr. Ambassador, for joining us, for talking to Rudaw.

It's a pleasure to be back with you. It's been a while, and I'm glad I could come back.

You've been on Rudaw before. I know that, yeah. So today is a really important day, and for the first time we might have a female president. And President Donald Trump might come back to the White House. The world is watching all the time when America holds elections, because there are potential implications for the world. If we start with the Middle East, where you've served for many years, what would a Trump/Harris presidency mean for the broader region?

I think if you look at, first, Vice President Harris, if you're looking at likely policies in the Middle East, I would say they would be mostly a continuation of what you have seen under President Biden. She does not have strong independent foreign policy views, with the possible exception of Israel and Palestine, where I think that she will be more willing to put more pressure on Israel, try to provide more humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza. President Trump, I think if you look back to his time in office and how he dealt with the Middle East, it was a very personalized, almost mercantilist approach. He wanted to do a series of deals with countries, with national leaders that would benefit the United States and potentially benefit the other country as well.

With regard to Iraq, for both candidates, I don't think that Vice President Harris has a strong view on Iraq policy, whereas President Biden has had a strong view on Iraq policy for a long time. He was, as Vice President, the most senior person in government who dealt on a day-to-day basis with Iraq starting in 2009 during the Obama administration. Vice President Harris has not dealt with Iraq quite as much, but she has visited Iraq so that she could learn more about it. That goes back a few years.

Former Ambassador Silliman: Like my colleagues have talked to a lot of Muslim Americans here, including Kurdish Americans. One of the things that actually stood out to me in our reporting was that a lot of Muslim Americans appear to be, or they say they support President Trump. Because of a few reasons, one of them, like what they say has been, well, they label as the Biden administration's indifference toward the Palestinians. Or I think one of them said that, the Biden administration has been weak. And Netanyahu didn't listen to him. Isn't that a legitimate concern that if, let's say, Harris comes back to the White House, we might see a president who is not listened to or who is not respected, a weak president, in other words, in the Middle East?

 That's one of the issues that many Republicans say when they want to support Donald Trump. And in the Middle East, you can argue both sides of that argument. For example, I would say if you're looking at Israel-Palestine conditions in Gaza, the aftermath of the October 7th attacks in Israel and all of the Israeli response, Former President Trump has essentially said ‘the United States must support Israel and let Prime Minister Netanyahu do whatever he needs to to take care of Hamas.’ I think that policy would not be particularly supportive of a ceasefire.

But he's also said that if he were in power, the war wouldn't have happened in the first place.

But that's a fantasy. You can't say that if something were happened, it would have happened differently. It's just simply not...

But when he was in power, no major wars broke out.

When he was in power, he laid the minefield for a difficult withdrawal from Afghanistan because he negotiated with the Taliban… his Secretary of State, without negotiating through the Afghan government. He laid on the doorstep of President Biden a withdrawal date from Afghanistan that he had negotiated with the Taliban, but with no plan to actually accomplish it. So I think that Donald Trump is mostly concerned about making decisions that are to the benefit of the United States in some sort of a trade or that make him appear to be a strong leader.

What I would say is if anybody is concerned about Israeli actions, support for Palestinians or for Lebanese now to some extent, I think that Kamala Harris is going to have more political pressure on her to do something about Palestine and Palestinians. There was a poll that was done last week by the national newspaper in Abu Dhabi, which asked a lot of Middle East related questions to American voters. And when they asked about how many people supported Israel or supported Palestinians, the vast majority of people who said they were voting for Trump or were Republican, more than 70 percent said they supported Israel.

When they asked that same question to supporters of Kamala Harris and Democrats, it was a very different result. It was a little bit less than half supported Israel, a bit less than half supported Palestinians, which means that, one, it's been very difficult for Kamala Harris during her election campaign to take a firm stand. If you say, I completely support Israel, she might lose the support of some of the Arab Americans. I think you're absolutely right. Some of the Muslim Americans I've talked to, they say they know that Trump is 100 percent pro-Israel, but they say that our vote…Like them not voting for Harris is a vote of opposition rather than a vote of support for Trump.

The reality is in some places, probably in the state of Michigan, potentially in the state of Pennsylvania, if Arab Americans who would normally vote Democratic choose not to vote or choose to vote for a candidate other than Kamala Harris. It could swing the election if it is very close. And if you look at the difference in numbers from the 2000 elections, for example, I think the smallest gap was in the state of Georgia where just about 11,000 votes out of several million was the difference between President Biden being elected and President Trump being reelected.

So Muslim Americans for the first time can be a kingmaker.

They can be a kingmaker, but they may inadvertently get Donald Trump as the president if they have decided that they want to punish Kamala Harris because she was a part of the Biden administration. The other question is, by and large, vice presidents don't have the major input on foreign policies, and it is the president who makes the final decision, not the vice president. And she is likely to have different policies because the support within the Democratic Party, the balance of support between people who are pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian has changed over the course of the past year and a half after Hamas attacks into Israel and the Israeli reaction.

What about the Kurds, the US support for the Kurds? The Kurds don't have a country of their own. They live in a few countries in the Middle East. To preserve their autonomy, for example, in Iraq and the autonomy in Syria, the Kurds rely on the United States. Otherwise, they could lose it. They say that the U.S. presence is indispensable for the preservation of their autonomy. What's going to happen? Who will be a more reliable ally for the Kurds?

I think that… the Vice President Harris, if elected president, is likely to continue the policies that President Biden has followed over the past four years in Iraq and with regard to Kurdistan. I think that, she will try to find an understanding with Baghdad which permits continued American military support to the Peshmerga, which also assures that there is some American military presence in the country, that it doesn't disappear entirely. And it's not only Kurds who are interested. I know that I've talked to over the years a number of Yazidis, a number of Christians, a number of Shabak, a number of the smaller communities in Iraq who also believe that an American military presence strengthens their ability to act independently, to hold their own opinions, and to influence what happens in Baghdad. And I think all of the smaller communities in Iraq would like to see a continued American presence. So I think that the Kurds are not alone.

I remember actually in 2010, I was a journalist for Reuters in Baghdad. At the time, I talked to the Kurdish leaders from different political parties, including the Islamist ones. The Islamist ones also wanted Americans to stay in Iraq, the Kurdish Islamist parties.

And I think that, as you've already seen with some of the outlines of the negotiations between the United States and the government of Iraq and Baghdad, they have already carved out a longer presence of American forces in Kurdistan. There are much more serious discussions about continued independent support for the Peshmerga. So I think that the policy that President Biden has followed recognizing the political pressure in Iraq, recognizing perhaps that there is no longer as great a need for a large number of American forces to battle Daesh [Islamic State] or to help with other counterterrorism missions, there is a degree of stabilizing influence in having some American forces in Iraq. If President Trump becomes president again, I simply don't know what he's going to do. President Trump...

And you know what he did, right, when he was in power in Syria, right?

Well, three times he actually ordered that forces be pulled out of Syria. I will note that there are still American forces in Syria, but a much, much smaller number than there were when Trump was president, when there was really a fight against Daesh in eastern Syria.

Let me be the devil's advocate here. One could argue that the Republicans have historically been more pro-Kurdish than the Democrats, starting from the no-fly zone that the United States helped establish or led, established in northern Iraq, today's Kurdistan Regional Government. That was George H.W. Bush. And then George W. Bush invaded Iraq. That was very good in the eyes of a lot of Kurds. Basically, they say that because the Trump administration is more likely to have more Republicans in his administration, we might see a more pro-Kurdish foreign policy. Let's say more foreign policy advisors in the White House who are Republicans.

I think your original statement that in the past, Republicans have been more supportive of Kurdistan than of Iraq in general is probably true, but it is also the same Republicans who held onto the idea of a unified Iraq. It was the George W. Bush administration, Dick Cheney, and the people who invaded Iraq to bring down Saddam, who did that on the premise that there needed to be a unified Iraq, where Iraq was not broken up into pieces. If you remember a famous misunderstood article by then-Senator Joe Biden contemplating the breakup of... Partition of Iraq. Partition of Iraq into at least three different countries, a Shia country, a Sunni country, and a Kurdish country. That was never really embraced by either Democrats or Republicans.I think that in the American Congress... Even Joe Biden himself felt he was misunderstood in what he said. But I think in the American Congress, the few strong supporters of Kurdistan who remain, and there are far fewer now than when I was there or 10 years ago, are Republican, but I don't believe that Iraq is the mainstream issue for either political party that it has been in the past.

What concerns me a bit is that Donald Trump, in many ways, sees Iraq increasingly as an extension of Iran. And if that is the position that a Donald Trump administration takes... The question is, is he correct? Is he… The answer is there is a lot of Iranian influence in Iraq, there's no question. The Fasa’il [factions] and the Hashd al-Shaabi [Popular Mobilization Forces], and I'll sort of separate them a bit, as well as the associated political parties have certainly gained a lot of political support at the expense of secular Iraqis, Sunnis, Kurds, and others.

The real question is how will the United States react to that? I think it is more likely that President Trump would simply say we must wash our hands of Iraq. We've been there long enough. Iran can have them or they're on their own. And that is what would worry me about. As somebody who spent five years of my life living in Iraq, traveling all around the country, I think that that is, would be a mistaken policy.

Yeah, Iran will definitely be an interesting actor to see what they're going to do in the next four years given the increased tensions between Iran and Israel. So we know that – we remember Donald Trump pursued a policy called maximum pressure campaign against Iran that included killing Iran's top general, Qasem Soleimani. That included like raising sanctions on Iran, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Yet Iran didn't really retaliate in a major way against the United States, despite all that the Trump administration did to Iran.

 I think that Iran did in some ways retaliate. For example, I go back to 2019, and it was not necessarily against the United States. It was sending a message through some of our Gulf-era partners. It was the Revolutionary Guards, the Quds Force, who put mines on some ships in Fujairah Port in 2019. It was the Revolutionary Guards who fired drones and cruise missiles at Abqaiq and Quraish, Saudi oil processing facilities, and took 40 percent of Saudi Arabia's oil capacity offline for about a week and a half. It was the Iranians who shot down an American drone in international airspace over the Gulf, and there was no real reaction to any of that. Again, I see this more as messaging from Iran to the United States.

What worries me now is the… seemingly now endless tit-for-tat attacks between Israel and Iran. Thus far, each side has fairly carefully calibrated what they have done, and it has been possible for each side to absorb the attacks from the other without significant political damage or military damage, what I'm afraid of is that one of the two sides will miscalculate, do something that is too big, and cause a wider war. If Israel were to attack Iran, if Israel were to attack American forces deployed in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or Qatar or Oman or the United Arab Emirates, any of the countries in the Gulf, they would likely get an American response that is far larger than Israel can deliver. So I think Iran, the power between the United States and Iran is significantly mismatched. And I think that the Iranians need to be careful and not overreact to what Israel has to do.

Again, the one thing that Trump could potentially do, and I will give him the possibility. He traveled to North Korea. He spoke to Kim Jong-un. He tried to create a personal relationship and a personal deal between the United States and North Korea. If Masoud Pazashkian, the new Iranian president, is willing to do something like that, Trump might be convinced to do it, and it would be easier for Trump because no one on the Republican side would criticize him. It would be a little bit harder, I think, for Kamala Harris to do that, but again, we don't know yet, who's going to win or what the circumstances will be at the time that one of the two of those people become president in January.

Some people argue that what Iran has been doing under the Biden administration and what he did under the Trump administration are not really comparable, like firing those missiles into Israel and encouraging a lot of its proxy groups in the Middle East to attack Israel and what happened in Hamas. That attack was just unprecedented, really, in that region. They see that as lack of… resolve on the part of the United States in supporting its allies in the Middle East and being equivocal in its support for the allies.

I think that's a clear misunderstanding and reading of the situation. While Iran supported Hamas, Hamas is not one of the closest tools that Iran uses. It is a Sunni organization that has used the support that it has gotten from Iran and from the Revolutionary Guard Corps to pursue its own Palestinian agenda to eliminate the State of Israel. I think if Hamas had not attacked Israel on October 7th of 2023, the situation would probably not have escalated much. Iran has also learned that Israel has got the capacity.

But Hamas attack Israel after the United States declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel under Trump, and they did it now? I mean, that's the question.

Because an operation like the one conducted on October 7th takes months, probably years of planning. It's not something that you simply have been waiting and you put out again as somebody who has… been through quite a bit of military gaming and experience in Iraq and Kuwait and Turkey and other places where we have very close military relations. These things take a lot of time to plan, particularly if you are a group that is quite literally underground in Gaza, a group that has not free ability to move around and plan and train. It takes a long, long time.

I am not going to blame just either Joe Biden or Donald Trump for what Hamas did on October 7. That was a decision by Yahya Sinwar. Even if it wasn't a decision of Ismail Haniyeh, I just simply don't know. It's not the result of Donald Trump's decision to give the Golan Heights to Israel or to make Jerusalem the capital or recognize the capital or move the American embassy. It's a specific decision to exercise the power that Hamas has gotten to try to bring the Palestinian issue back to the forefront and to try to strike a blow at Israel because that was the sole purpose of Hamas.

One last question. I know you've not served in Ukraine, but we also had a war in Ukraine under the Biden-Harris administration. Is Trump going to end this war, as he says he would, if he becomes president? Can he do that?

 I can't see how Trump could actually end this war. He believes he can make a deal and help negotiate between President Putin and President Zelenskyy. I would be very surprised if he can do that. Negotiated deals happen only when both sides in a conflict are willing to enter into negotiations. I don't think that there's anything that Donald Trump can offer either side that would be...that would be enough to get them to negotiate a deal, except possibly cutting off all American military support for Ukraine. Even if that happened, Europe is likely to continue military support to Ukraine, which is at least as large as American support in terms of value and equipment.

I think that it is not as Trump tends to simplify issues into things that he can solve personally. Most of these big issues require planning, a bureaucracy, and a lot more time than simply sitting down and having a conversation. I'll go back to the agreement, or the attempt that he made to reconcile relations with North Korea during his time, nothing came of it. Despite all the effort, it simply accelerated the North Korean nuclear program. You've seen more missile tests very close to Japan and South Korea.

We can talk about these issues for hours, for sure. Thank you so much, Mr. Ambassador Douglas Silliman for coming on Rudaw. Thank you so much again, and it was really a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you very much.