For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Patrick Cockburn.
He's been quite credibly called the best Western reporter in Iraq.
He's the Middle East correspondent for the Independent.co.uk.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
Thank you for having me.
It's good to have you back here.
And you've written a couple of articles about the Iraqi elections.
Have you been there, or you're talking with your stringers that you have back there in Iraq, or how's that work?
Well, I've been there quite recently, and I follow it pretty closely.
And I've done the previous Iraqi elections.
And it's also turned out to be much more interesting and significant than I think most people have imagined.
Well, and you know, the overall coverage of the Iraq war has really fallen off around here anyway.
So, you know, I don't think people know really too much, other than apparently it was a pretty peaceful election.
As far as results, I guess they say Prime Minister Maliki and his Dawah party did well.
Other than that, we don't really know.
Yeah, I think it's pretty extraordinary the way Iraq has fallen off the media radar.
You know, this is a country still with 142,000 American troops in it.
One American news network I was talking to last time I was there said that they had an annual budget of $20 million for Baghdad, and they hadn't been on air for 50 straight days.
So it's amazing how the story has gone from dominating the headlines to not being covered at all.
Yeah, well, I guess, you know, they decided that the surge worked and the war's over, basically.
Everything's fine now.
There's nothing left to cover except the great success.
Yeah, and I think it almost became unpatriotic to say that maybe the surge didn't have much to do with it.
And sort of doubting the success of the surge, I noticed during the presidential election that Obama hardly, I think, reversed himself from saying at first that the surge hadn't worked too well to eventually praising it.
I guess he'd been told that you can't say anything against the surge.
It'll sound unpatriotic.
Well, and I guess it would be too complicated to say, well, the surge worked if by work you mean help the Shiite religious parties and their militias finish purging the Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad.
You know, you can call that working, but if that's success, it's kind of difficult when you actually define it that way.
You know, it's better to just stick with the slogan.
Yeah, I think so.
What's rather surprising is that now they've decided that the surge, whatever it was, worked in Iraq, and we can do the same thing in Afghanistan without, frankly, having much idea what the surge was in Iraq.
But it's become a sort of symbol of success.
But I think it was all generally propagandistic.
And, you know, there have been real changes in Iraq.
The violence is right down.
But this is the most important thing was really that we had a very vicious civil war in 2005-2007 between the Sunni and the Shia, and the Shia essentially won it.
That's really why the violence is going down now.
Well, and as far as the election yesterday, let's stick with the Shia Arab side of the thing there.
As far as I know, there are three real major power factions among the Shiite side, and I'm sure there are many smaller ones as well.
But there's the Dawah Party of Prime Minister Maliki.
There's the Supreme Islamic Council of Abdulaziz al-Hakim.
And then there's the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr and his group there in Sadr City.
So do we know yet, do you know yet, how well these various groups did versus each other?
I guess I think I read in one of your articles that Dawah and the Supreme Islamic Council, where they used to cooperate, are now fiercely competitive with each other for power there.
Yeah, I mean, there was the last election four years ago at the beginning of 2005, which was meant to introduce peace.
In fact, it was a sort of prologue to this very vicious war.
You had a Shia coalition, a coalition of Shia parties, Shia are the majority in Iraq, who held together and won the election.
The coalition was called the United Iraqi Alliance.
Now that split up entirely.
You have the government party, Dawah, which was a small party of Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister.
Probably only had about 500 members when Saddam fell.
And it has a long history of opposing Saddam.
It started as a religious party.
It's become more secular.
Now, what's really surprising about the election, this party has done really well.
And seems to, particularly in Baghdad and Basra, which are the two largest Iraqi cities, it's done well among the Shia.
I think because Maliki himself is quite popular, what Iraqis really yearn for is some sort of personal security.
Yes, people are always saying to me, are things in Iraq better?
Asking me, are things in Iraq better?
And I always say, yes, but they're better than the bloodbath we had a couple of years ago.
People are still frightened when their children go to school.
Are they going to be hit by a bomb?
They're frightened of assassinations.
It's still a very violent place.
So there's a yearning for security.
And Maliki is seen as having improved that over the last year.
I think it's a sign that Iraqis want a strong centralized state back.
They want some sort of order in their lives.
After security, they want jobs.
And the state is the government's main provider of jobs.
The government's got all the money.
The only money in Iraq really comes from oil.
And after jobs, they want simple things like electricity, clean water, and sewage disposal.
There are parts of Iraq where you can see lakes of sewage on Google.
It's Google Earth.
It's that bad.
So they back a government that's going to provide this, unless they have some feeling.
Only about half the people voted, so there are many of them cynical.
But a lot of them think that maybe they're going to get this from Maliki.
So basically they're just voting for all things being equal, just kind of keep everything the way it is, no major changes.
They think the only thing that can introduce change is the government.
Maliki's had quite a good year.
He's seen as having fought the Sadrach militias in April.
He's seen as having demanded and got the U.S. leaving Iraq.
He's seen that he stood out against Bush originally, wanting to simply continue the occupation under a new status of forces agreement, a defense agreement with the U.S.
And Maliki and the government demanded a timetable for U.S. withdrawal and eventually got that.
U.S. troops pulled out of the cities and towns and villages in the middle of the year.
They pulled out of Iraq entirely at the end of two and three years' time.
So he's seen to have been more of a nationalist leader, less of a religious leader, sectarian leader.
And his party has done pretty well.
So the Supreme Islamic Council, which they're the most powerful of the Iranian-backed forces, with their Badr Corps and all that, how did they do in the election?
They did pretty badly.
They weren't expected to do that well, but they seem to have done worse.
The final results aren't in yet.
The intermediate results aren't in yet.
But we have pretty strong hints from lots of sources.
And they themselves said, for instance, in Basra, they only got 20 percent of the vote.
Maliki's party got half the vote.
I think the reason is simple enough.
They were in charge of most of the nine out of the 11 Shia provinces.
And they did pretty badly.
There were people who saw them as crooked, as racketeers, running as Termini Hall systems for their friends and relatives and people who paid them money.
So come the election, they did badly.
I thought they'd be able to use their control of patronage of jobs to get more people to the polls.
But so far it seems that they haven't been able to do that.
And the New York Times even ran an article saying that the election coinciding with the religious holiday there would benefit the Supreme Islamic Council at the expense of less organized groups and so many pilgrims would be gone and that kind of thing.
I guess it didn't really work out that way.
It just doesn't seem to have happened.
I mean, the government also has a big advantage in Iraq, which they seem to have been able to use, which is, as I said, they control jobs.
They control money.
Maliki, the prime minister, has been setting up tribal councils, which is meant to increase security.
But the real reason is that he funnels government money to these councils and they support his party.
And these councils distribute money and they distribute jobs.
And that really was probably pretty important in him being able to get so many voters to the polls.
On top of that, he's popular, but the two things go together.
Right.
Well, so what about Muqtada al-Sadr?
He's been the wild card in this thing all along on the Shiite side.
His party seems to have done quite well.
They kept a low profile.
They said they wouldn't run nine candidates.
They'd support two lists of independent candidates.
They seem to have done well.
Now, in a lot of these provinces, people have got a plurality, but the prime minister's party has got a plurality, but they don't have a majority.
So there's going to be coalitions.
So most of these coalitions are going to have supporters of Muqtada in them.
They're going to be a sort of important brokers.
I mean, Muqtada originally broke with the prime minister over the issue of an American withdrawal.
He wanted, a couple of years ago, Maliki to tell Bush, demand from Bush that American troops withdraw.
Maliki didn't do it.
Muqtada pulled out of the coalition.
Now, of course, Maliki has got a U.S. withdrawal, so there's less reason for the Sadrists.
There's no reason for them not to have a coalition with the government.
Now, he's still in Iran studying religious stuff, then?
Yeah, he's in Qom, the religious city in northern Iran.
I think there are different ways of interpreting this.
One is that he just wanted to pull out of politics for a time.
The other is that he never, for quite a long time, wanted to fight the government supported by the U.S. Army.
In fact, he never wanted to have a direct conflict with the U.S. Army, because he thought his men would lose.
So his policy was really of denying anybody a target.
So when his men were fighting pretty well last year against the government, he stood them down and decided not to fight it out.
Then he decided not to run his own candidates in the election, but to support independents.
He didn't keep a low profile, probably until the U.S. pulled out its troops.
He's sort of come second or third in most of these provinces, so he's done quite well.
In your book, which is called Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shiite Revival in Iraq, that's a common theme throughout the book, really, is strategic retreat.
So he wants to fight, but then when it looks like his guys will actually be endangered, he tells everybody to go home, put the rifles away and wait it out.
Yeah, I think he sees himself as a religious leader, secondly as a politician, and only thirdly as a military leader.
Generally, he's been pretty astute in that.
There have been times when his guys wanted to fight to the end, which he's made every effort to make sure they didn't.
But he's stayed in business.
So yeah, the government gets stronger, but his main Shiite rivals, the Supreme Council, have got weaker.
So he probably comes out stronger from the election.
All right, now, let's put off the Kurds for a minute, although it'll tie right in to the next one, which is the Sunni side, the former insurgency, is now called the Awakening Councils, or the Concerned Local Citizens, whatever the euphemism is, bought off former insurgents.
And I believe in one of your recent articles, it was the last one or the one before that, I think you talked about how there was a group called the Islamic Group or something.
They, by default, won most of the votes last time, because pretty much everyone else on the Sunni side boycotted the election.
Yeah, that's the Iraqi Islamic Party.
Last time around, most of the Sunni, or 20 percent of the Iraqi population, they're strong in the sort of north and west of Iraq, who are the heart of the rebellion against the U.S. occupation.
Most of the Sunni boycotted the last election or were too frightened to go to the polls.
So this one party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, did stood and got elected, though on a very small turnout in Anbar province, which is practically a third of Iraq, or a third of Iraq in western Iraq.
There was only a one percent turnout in 2005, but these guys sort of won the election and formed the council ever since.
Now, they seem to have done pretty badly in the Sunni bastions, which are Anbar and Mosul, the northern capital, where either the tribal awakening councils have done well.
In Anbar or in the north, in Mosul, there's a sort of nationalist group that seems to have got about 60 percent of the vote there.
So there is a trend in both among the Shia and the Sunni in Iraq, that the religious parties have done badly, the more secular and nationalist parties have done better.
I think there's a simple reason for this.
When Saddam fell, the only opposition under Saddam which really survived were the religious parties, and Saddam had kind of discredited nationalism in Iraq and secularism, so the religious parties could come in.
But after they'd been in business for four years, they kind of discredited themselves as well.
So there's a backlash against that, and a shift back towards secularism.
Well, it's interesting, you know, you talk about Prime Minister Maliki basically representing a more and more nationalist kind of position, rather than just the kind of strict Dawa party position from earlier days.
And also, of course, you talk about the nationalism, well, relative at least to the old religious parties among the Sunni awakening.
Is there any chance that the Sunni awakening types, the bought-off former insurgency among the Sunnis, can really be integrated?
I know there have been stories about them trying to, the national government beginning to pay them instead of the Americans, that kind of thing.
Is there a chance that there really will be a single Iraqi army and a single state when America goes?
I think, you know, you have two things in Iraq.
One, you do have an increase in sort of nationalism, but at the same time, when Saddam fell, the Shia replaced, 60% of the population replaced the Sunni with 20% as the sort of dominant force in Iraq.
And I don't think that's going to be rolled back.
The government was always nervous that these awakening councils, who were all Sunni, who were all former insurgents, would be a sort of thin end of the wedge to bring the Sunni back into power, maybe with, they'd get a lot of American backing.
That's why they were so nervous of paying them.
But above all, they didn't want to give them good jobs in the Iraqi security forces.
They didn't want to give them, they might give them money, but they wouldn't give them power.
And I think that that's still true.
At the same time, there isn't, and one of the things that is quite hopeful about these elections is that there is sort of a revulsion against the sectarianism of the past of purely sectarian parties.
I mean, the Supreme Council, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the main Shia party, you know, had Shia slogans on its website.
There was no doubt where they were coming from.
Now, the governing party is also Shia, but it's sort of, it's more secular.
It doesn't, it goes out of its way to try and be more inclusive.
So this is kind of a step in the right direction.
And you can see it, both Sunni and Shia, it's the religious parties that have done badly.
Well, so it's interesting, you know, I think you've said it more clearly than anyone else, that the Purple Finger election of 2005 really helped cause the civil war.
I mean, obviously, Don Rumsfeld was already using the Shiite death squads in order to try to hunt down the leadership of the insurgency, cut the head off the snake or decapitation strike or whatever they call it over there.
And that really helped precipitate it.
But I guess if I could ask you to go back to that election, and I guess it was the Sunni boycott, and then the fact that the Supreme Islamic Council types ended up winning the most, you know, the biggest proportion of the power in that election.
Did that really help precipitate the civil war that killed so many people over the next three years?
Well, first of all, remember this took place, the last election.
Although it was sort of presented as a big turning point in favor of democracy, the people who held power, almost all power in Iraq at that time, was the U.S. and the U.S. Army.
You know, the Iraqi Prime Minister of the day said he couldn't move a soldier or a machine gun without American permission.
So it was really very misleading to ever suggest that this was a sort of proper democratic election in which power was distributed, that the Iraqis held power and power was to be distributed between Iraqis.
A lot of Iraqis said whatever happens, you know, this is the U.S. control of the country.
Also, you know, it was won by the Sunni who said, you know, we don't accept the rules of the game.
You know, this is imposed by an occupation.
We're not going to take part.
So in a way, this election sort of showed, in the last time around, showed that the Shia were in charge.
The Sunni didn't accept this.
It really drew the sort of lines on the battlefield for the horrific sectarian slaughter we had, which started later that year.
I think, you know, one of the problems about Iraq is that, you know, the simplest facts about what happened in Iraq were sort of not really established in people's minds because George Bush and Tony Blair never admitted there was a civil war in Iraq.
You know, one of the nastiest civil wars that, you know, that anyone has seen for years, you know, with tens of thousands of people being dragged out of their cars and tortured and killed, you know, after a glance at their ID.
Now, the last election sort of, as I said, drew the lines on the battlefield.
This election, you know, nobody has boycotted it.
There have been disagreements about it.
And also, there's no doubt that the Iraqi government holds real power now.
The U.S. is pulling out.
You know, the Green Zone comes under Iraqi authority now.
There are Iraqi soldiers at the entrances to the Green Zone.
So it's much more real in terms of being a democratic way of deciding who holds power in Iraq.
Well, so if the last one really didn't decide anything, or what did it decide then?
Well, as you say, the Americans held, you know, 90 percent of the power at the time.
So how was it exactly that that last election in 2005 helped make the civil war worse or helped get it started?
Well, it sort of showed that the Sunni were taking over in alliance with the Americans.
The Shia, you mean?
The Kurds.
The Shia, you mean?
I'm sorry, I meant to say Shia.
Yeah.
So it sort of showed that, okay, they don't have the power yet, but this is the way it's going to be.
The Sunnis had lost out big time.
And, you know, the Sunni can drop dead.
I think also, you know, the atmosphere in Iraq has changed.
You know, the things that made Iraq such a sort of battlefield the last few years was, you know, the battles, obviously, between the different Sunni, Shia, and Kurds, the battle against the U.S. occupation.
And also, you know, just as soon as the U.S. army took over Iraq, it really started threatening the Iranian, Syrian, and other regimes.
You know, that meant that all the regimes around Iraq had a reason to intervene, to keep the pot boiling.
I remember the present Iraqi foreign minister, Hosheh Zobari, saying to me at that time, he said, Look, Patrick, none of the regimes, none of our neighbors want the U.S. occupation to succeed.
They all felt threatened by it to a greater or lesser degree, whatever they said in public.
Now that the U.S. is going, there's much less reason for the Iranians or the Syrians or anybody else to intervene in Iraq.
And also, there'd be more resentment within Iraq against foreign intervention.
So that helped stabilize the place as well.
Oh, yeah, because the Iraqis were, they resented the foreign intervention, not just by us, but by the Syrians, the Iranians, and everybody else.
Sure, yeah, I mean, the, you know, the Iraqis never believed a kind of cynical people.
I mean, they'd be occupied by an awful lot of different countries, Britain and Turkey and Iran in the past, as well as the U.S.
They never believed any of what the Americans or the Iranians said about having the interests of the Iraqi people at heart.
They always thought they were in Iraq for self-interested reasons.
Now, if I can ask you one more question about the civil war as it was.
And I think I've asked you this before, and I believe, if I remember right, you said that you knew.
So forgive me for being repetitive, but I just wanted to get this clear in my head.
It seemed like there's a lot of mystery, depending on who you ask, about who was actually responsible for the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samara in early 2006, which was defined as a major turning point on the way to hell there.
Yeah, I think it may be a little exaggerated.
Yeah, there was a tremendous explosion of rage, but the killings were pretty horrific before that.
I mean, it was going in that direction even before the Samara bomb.
I think that that was, you know, it was definitely done by extreme sort of Sunni insurgents, I think.
I think that they sort of planned to precipitate a civil war, which they thought they might win.
I think they also thought the other Sunni states would come in and help them, you know, Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and so forth.
And that never happened.
Do you know of any reason to be suspicious that it was really just the Americans were doing it, trying to foment a crisis?
No, I don't think so.
I think America was always at sea.
I think that's over-conspiratorial.
I think that, you know, what happened was the end of it.
It may be in the early days somebody had the really stupid idea, I mean, I'm sure somebody did have the really stupid idea, that the Shia sort of death squads would act against the anti-American resistance, and that was to a degree true.
But, of course, as soon as they started doing that, the whole Sunni community became terrified and started giving their support to the resistance.
So if that was the plan, it certainly didn't work.
Yeah, the El Salvador option, they called it, in Newsweek.
Yeah, I think there were those who thought things would work out that way.
You know, but it just worked out the opposite.
You know, that one of the reasons that the insurgency, and also the extreme sort of Sunni, Salafi, Jihadi militants got support was just their own community was terrified of Shia retaliation.
So what they would do would be let off a bomb in a Shia marketplace, and the people there would come and retaliate against the Sunni.
Then the people in that Sunni neighborhood would look to anybody to come and help them.
Ah, the action is in the reaction.
The reaction.
So if any sort of U.S. special ops officers thought this was a bright idea, the El Salvador option, you know, they were absolutely dead wrong.
All right, well now let's talk about Kurdistan.
I forget the name of the province up there where the oil is, and it's always in flux and dispute between Arabs, Sunni and Shia, Turkmen, and Kurds, too.
In Kirkuk, there wasn't an election this time around in Kirkuk, but that was one of the things that kept delaying the election, was that the Kurds didn't, you know, the differences over the elections, that the Kurds wanted a straight vote, the others wanted each community to be allocated so much.
So that was put to one side.
There was no vote in the three Kurdish provinces in sort of autonomous Kurdistan.
There was no vote in Kirkuk, but in the other 14 provinces there was a vote.
So that's undecided.
But there are important changes because these elections are in relation between Arabs and Kurds.
In Mosul, which the Kurds have kind of run in association with the Americans over the last four years, four or five years, the Sunni have taken over the local council.
I think they'll be much tougher.
I mean, this province around Mosul is called the Lebanon of Iraq.
It sort of is very divided between Kurds and Arabs, but also various Christians and believers in strange religious minorities.
But there's certainly a setback for the Kurds there.
So I think that overall the Kurds will be worried because the central government has been strengthened, that the Sunni Arabs look somewhat stronger, and the Kurdish, the big Kurdish ally among the Shia, the Iraqi Supreme Council of Iraq, has suffered serious losses.
So their alliance with the...
I think the Kurds will worry about that.
Their alliance with the Dawa party is much less strong than the...
It's very strong, and Maliki has been presented himself as the guy who's going to keep order with the Kurds, which both Sunni and Shia like.
It's a popular nationalist line to take.
On the other hand, you know, the people who run Iraq are really an alliance between the Shia Arabs and the Kurds.
I don't think either side really wants to abandon that.
All right, well, so then let's really cut to the chase here.
You've said it a few times.
They have a withdrawal agreement, and they're going to get it.
Is that right?
Oh, yeah, I think so.
I think that Iraq is becoming an independent state again.
American influence is going down.
One of the reasons, you know, in 2005, nothing worked because you had these elections.
But the government, we know, is delegitimized by the fact that it was regarded as a pawn of the Americans.
And although these elections are quite successful, you know, half the people didn't vote.
A lot of people are still very cynical.
They see the government as kind of a racket run by a bunch of kleptomaniacs who basically want to get all the oil revenues for themselves.
Not everybody believes that, but an awful lot do.
So, you know, they're not out of the woods yet.
But, you know, I think certain quite positive things have happened that the U.S. is going.
I think that was essential for a legitimate government in Iraq.
And also the more sort of secular nationalist parties are doing well, which means that, you know, the one thing that people were against with the withdrawal always said, and they said it from the beginning, was if the American troops pull out, there'll be a bloodbath.
People started saying this in 2003.
Well, the Americans stayed, and there was a bloodbath.
Now the Americans are departing, and it looks, hopefully, as if there will be no bloodbath.
Well, you know, we talked with Gareth Porter yesterday, and he's reporting about how General Petraeus and General Adirno are already working to establish a narrative that if there is any kind of increase in violence, that it's all Obama's fault for getting the troops out rather than the fault of their brilliant plan or whatever their service is.
Yeah, I mean, you know, and generals are like that.
They want somebody else to carry the can for that.
But I think that there was, you know, Iraq's such a complicated place, but there's a very simple thing and a pretty obvious thing, which is when you had an Iraqi government, which only survived because of U.S. military support, it didn't have any legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, whether it was elected or not.
Now once the troops are withdrawing, then the government has much more legitimacy.
And it also has to do what it says it'll do, which is, you know, guarantee personal security.
It has to make sure, you know, that people get the basics of life.
And if it can do that, then, you know, things may be okay.
I mean, it's – but overall, you know, I think that, you know, we used to have all these, as I said, spurious turning points that Bush and his sort of British spear carrier, Tony Blair, used to produce about 2004 Iraq.
Bush said, you know – The transfer of sovereignty to Alawi and all that.
Yeah, and of course Alawi said afterwards he had no power whatsoever because it was all completely mendacious.
It was all a complete lie.
But now, you know, over the last year Maliki has faced down the Sadrist militias.
He's faced down the Kurds.
He's refused to make an agreement to the U.S.
– with the U.S. until there was a timetable for withdrawal.
So he's – and now he seems to have inflicted defeat on the Islamic Supreme Council.
So, I mean, there is a sort of – I think a really – an independent Iraqi government there in a way that wasn't true before.
Well, and so then when you hear in the Western press where they talk about, well, we're just going to rename the combat troops support troops or counterterrorism troops or embassy protection troops or whatever and we're going to still leave 30,000 and 100,000 contractors in country, you think fat chance it's just not going to work that way?
I'm very doubtful about that.
The government felt really nervous.
You know, but then a lot of these things they were pushed into, you know, by Muqtada al-Sadr last year.
They didn't want to be outflanked as nationalists.
You know, they – Muqtada monitored a total U.S. withdrawal.
Eventually they monitored a total U.S. withdrawal.
Right.
I mean, when you broke the story on the sofa last spring, it had 58 bases forever and ever.
Yeah, it was a continuation of the occupation.
That's one of the things that strengthened the government was it refused to go along with this.
So I think that the idea that somehow, you know, all this is an accomplishment of the surge that the U.S. should keep troops on and just give them a different name, I'm very dubious about this.
I think the government maybe might want – might get nervous.
But overall, Iraqis want to be independent.
They don't want the U.S. troops there.
Well, and – but so, I mean, I guess to me still the sticking point is does their will really matter in it?
I mean, if the Americans want to stay, are the Iraqis really going to be able to make them leave?
Sure, yeah.
They've got a great big army, you know.
Do they have a great big army?
How great big?
I mean, you know, they've got a couple hundred thousand men.
But, I mean, also it's just very difficult for the U.S. to stay, you know, if the Iraqi government wants them to leave.
And also they've signed an agreement to leave.
And Obama has said he'll leave, you know.
So I don't think, you know, and the government which signed it, I mean, if it doesn't – if they don't leave, if somehow they dress up in different uniforms and so forth, can you imagine how these sort of Sadrists and others will react to this?
Yes, I think I can.
I mean, they'll be real angry, you know.
People get real angry in Iraq, they shoot, you know.
Yeah, homemade landmines on the south road.
But what's kind of depressing in a way is, you know, I read this stuff from the U.S. saying somehow, well, you know, Iraqis won't mind if we keep 30,000 troops there under uniforms and so forth.
You know, you would have thought that one thing they would have learned over the last five years is you've really got to take the views of Iraqis into account, you know.
You can't mess with them.
At the beginning, after the fall of Saddam, certainly, when, you know, the U.S. occupying Baghdad, they thought Bremer and Company, the first U.S. envoy, you know, the key thing was they thought, well, it doesn't matter what Iraqis think, you know.
We defeated them in three weeks, you know.
They're nothing.
That's why they made all these mistakes about dissolving the army.
You know, subsequently they produced reasons they did it and so forth.
The main thing was that they just really didn't care, thought it didn't matter.
Now, the one thing that people ought to have left in the U.S. and elsewhere over the last five years is it really matters what Iraqis think.
Yeah.
Well, clearly, I mean, they proved that men with AK-47s and homemade explosives can, you know, maybe in slow motion but eventually drive out the most powerful army in the world.
Yeah.
I mean, this was, you know, this was so, you know, we've seen that before.
In other countries, you know, but the one thing that I didn't notice is that because, you know, the history of Iraq was sort of the Bush administration, I think it was much cleaner always to win victories in the, you know, political victories back home in the U.S. than it was to do anything in Iraq.
I mean, that was always its priority.
Well, sure, that's why they put off the elections until January of 2005 in the first place because they had to wait until Bush got re-elected first.
Yeah, sure, yeah.
But, you know, I think that was always their priority.
That's one of the reasons why they, you know, for the real ill planning in Iraq, what really mattered to them was what they could present in the U.S., you know.
Why did we have Ied al-Awi suddenly appointed the independent Iraqi prime minister in the middle of 2004?
Now, you know, it's been reported since that what Bush wanted was somebody who he could say was an Iraqi leader could get up in front of Congress and in front of American television cameras and say, thank you, Mr. Bush, you have freed my country.
Other than that, he didn't really care.
And so I think that, you know, the picture was happening in Iraq was always distorted outside, you know, Iraq, and actually never more than today, I think, because at least in the past there used to be fairly extensive television coverage.
There still is, you know, pretty good print coverage in, you know, a lot of the U.S. papers, a lot of correspondence, print correspondence in Baghdad do a pretty heroic job.
But I think that it's somehow it's become part of the sort of myth of Iraq that the surge worked, that the, you know, and it was all the U.S. doing.
Yeah, well, and now what about the refugees?
Because you've always said on this show that that's the real measure of, you know, whether it's the surge or not, but the surge of whether anything's worked and whether this place is really returning to normal.
It's almost coming back.
I mean, that's a key thing.
You know, life is still pretty miserable in Iraq for people.
And it's not going to get much better, particularly as the price of oil is down.
Earlier last year, they sort of doubled a lot of state salaries.
You know, primary school teacher, you're getting a couple hundred dollars, you've got $300 in total.
But they're kind of regretting that now.
But, you know, other than the state, there aren't many jobs around, you know.
Can you imagine what it's like at the height of the Iraqi summer with no electricity to run the air conditioners or air coolers?
Was there any kind of economy at all?
I mean, how much of a private economy is there?
Well, it's a pretty low level.
It's difficult to run a modern city or any kind of economy if you don't have enough electricity, you know.
You can't really run industrial plants, you know.
That's puzzling to me, too, though.
It's been years.
He had some medical condition, not that bad.
But he had to go to Jordan to get a decent doctor to diagnose it.
Oh, even to diagnose it, much less take care of it.
Yeah, and he went to various other doctors.
But he was telling me, you know, just the doctors he went to were the ones who just really couldn't get a job anywhere else.
Or they were just out of medical school and they hadn't been taught by proficient people.
Right, because the regular Iraqi doctors were the kind of people who had the resources to be able to flee to Syria or Jordan a couple of years ago.
Yeah, and get a job in a hospital in, you know, in Cairo or Damascus or something like that.
Well, why is there...
The government's been trying to get some of them back, and a few come back.
But people are telling me the ones that come back are not very good ones.
Well, why is there still no electricity?
It seems like, you know, this is a technology that was pretty much perfected quite a few generations ago.
The main shock and awe war against the Iraqi state itself was over years ago.
It seems like basic electricity.
Well, I think initially, you know, because I think it was more the mismanagement, you know, that when they came in, you know, and the fact that they didn't, you know, year after year passed and there was no... they couldn't get the electricity right, I think must be just the result of absolutely massive corruption.
I mean, the money was there.
You could have got, you know, power stations cost a lot, but there was a lot of U.S. money there.
There was Iraqi money there.
I think mismanagement and sort of massive corruption on the scale of the Congo.
Yeah.
You know, there's just a recent U.S. report out on this as to what happened to this $51 billion.
You know, I think there was some stolen that make even sort of Bernie Madoff look quite modest.
Yeah, well, I think that's pretty much right.
We're talking about, you know, over a trillion dollars spent by now, and nobody really knows where most of that went.
And I think it just, you know, I think it sort of becomes a systemic corruption.
You know, you can have corruption where everybody gets 15%, you know, and you can have corruption where everything gets stolen.
Yeah, nothing gets built.
And we can have corruption where everything got stolen.
So nothing gets built, you know.
Yeah.
And that seems to be what happened.
It doesn't seem to be getting much attention, you know, just those thinking about, you know, the Madoff scandal compared to the almost exactly equivalent sum, which, according to a report out in the last few days, was spent by the U.S.
And nothing was, you know, it seems to have just disappeared into a black hole.
Right.
You know, one case it's $50 billion went, and the other case it's $51 billion.
But the Madoff scandal gets billions of words.
The other one is hardly reported.
Yeah, well, one has a yellow ribbon and an American flag, and the other doesn't.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today and all your effort in reporting the real situation, what's going on there in Iraq, and hope we can continue to catch up every, you know, month or two or so on this show and stay informed.
Sure, yeah.
I'd be delighted.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time today on the show.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye.
All right, everybody.
We're going to hear from the Independent in London.
That's independent.co.uk.
And he's the author of the book Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shiite Revival in Iraq.
