All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm pleased to introduce Dar Jamal.
He's the author of Beyond the Green Zone, and he's live on the telephone right now from Fallujah or Baghdad.
Which is it?
Welcome back to the show, Dar.
From Baghdad, Scott.
I'm talking to you from Baghdad.
From Baghdad.
All right.
Well, good to talk to you again.
I'm glad to hear that, so far, you're safe and sound.
Me too.
All right.
So let's start out.
How long have you been back there?
I've been here almost three weeks now.
I've spent most of the time in Baghdad, although I have been out to Fallujah two different times now, one of which I spent the night out there.
But mostly we've been working around Baghdad.
I see.
So let's start out with Baghdad itself and what you've observed.
When was the last time you were there?
Not since 2005 or 2006, right?
Yeah, since 2005.
It's been quite a long time, four years for me, so it's been a very, very interesting experience for me to come back here after four years and see what has changed, and see with my own eyes all of these claims being made about how things are so much better here.
And what I've experienced is that things are very, very different, but I think calling it better is a bit of a stretch.
And what I mean by that is, first of all, when we talk about security, it's certainly true to say that violence is way, way, way down.
I mean, we've been going around Baghdad fairly free, of course, still being careful, but security here is unbelievable.
I mean, when you look at the fact that there's concrete blast walls all over the place, it's hard to go more than a couple of blocks anywhere and not see some sort of concrete and razor wire barricade.
There are patrols everywhere.
There's still enormous amounts of American patrols.
Let's keep in mind there's still 144,000 American soldiers here.
There's mercenaries all over the place, and especially Iraqi army and Iraqi police.
They are very, very thick in the streets.
It's hard to go more than about four or five blocks anywhere and not see some kind of security someplace.
But that said, it makes it rather unsettling because you can imagine living in a place where people are saying, well, yes, there's better security there, but the reality is that it's kind of like living in a police state in that everything's being watched.
There's men with guns everywhere.
There's barriers all over the place.
And for Iraqis, it's particularly difficult because so many of the neighborhoods in Baghdad have had fierce resistance, places like Ghazaliya, Amariya, and other places like this, like Al-Dora.
In Al-Amiya, they are all completely, literally encircled with 15-foot-high concrete blast walls back-to-back with strictly controlled checkpoints.
So people living in these areas, one camp would say, yes, they have security, but on the other hand, you could say, really, they're like living in an open-air prison akin to Gaza.
So it's a very, very intense experience.
Well, and I guess most of the fighting over Baghdad has ceased.
The neighborhoods that were going to change hands from one, I guess, you know, it's defined by religious sect, but I guess the divisions are more complicated than that.
But for the most part, the Sunnis have been basically driven out of Baghdad.
And so the war for those neighborhoods is over.
That took place in 06, 07.
Well, that's true.
Most of the Sunnis have fled.
The majority of the people displaced in Baghdad, and let's keep in mind, out of 6 million people who lived here at one time, 1 million of the displaced are Sunni.
So their population percentage-wise in the capital city has been dramatically decreased.
And then those who have stayed, and mainly the neighborhoods I named before, because they are primarily Sunni neighborhoods and therefore had more fierce resistance, as I said, those that are remaining here are basically not living their neighborhoods for a period of their life.
As I said, their neighborhoods are completely blocked off, very tightly controlled.
Access in and out is extremely limited and very, very cumbersome for the people living there.
So in that way, Baghdad has been effectively balkanized.
It's extremely fragmented.
And in that way, it's kind of, to an extent anyway, I don't want to draw the analogy too far, but it is actually reminiscent of the country as a whole.
We have the Kurds in the north still pushing for their own state.
It's almost already like its own country.
You almost have to have a visa just to go into Kurdistan if it's going to be that tightly controlled.
And then the south is the south, where it's pushing for federalism.
Again, if you go down there and don't have someone with you who is from that area, then you're going to be detained by the police and interrogated.
That happened to a couple of colleagues of mine a ways back.
So in that way, even the country as a whole is extremely fragmented.
So when people say, yes, security is better, the reality is we're basically looking at the aftermath of what, in my opinion, has been a very effective policy of turning sides against each other, classic divide and conquer from the U.S. military here.
They've been quite effective at that, buying off the awakening groups up in Al Anbar to have them on their side, at least for the moment, and then groups they can't control just effectively doing instigations and turning them against one another.
And what's left now is we have a country where one out of six people are displaced from their home, we have over a million people dead, and we have a situation where people, daily life here, people are very, very paranoid, even though security is, there is a big lull right now.
People are still, on average, about a car bomb a day somewhere in Baghdad, but for here that's considered good security.
But people are still going around afraid.
You don't know about kidnappings.
You don't know about car bombs.
You don't know if you're going to be pulled over by police and if they'll actually be police or if they're a member of some kind of militia.
So that is daily life here.
It still is stressful.
People are tired.
I think that's one of the most common things I've been hearing from Iraqis, whether I'm talking with them about the economic situation or the security situation or any of these things, consistently I just keep hearing people say, look, you know, yes, violence is down, we appreciate this lull, but the reality is we're just all very, very tired and we just want something like a normal life.
Well, what about the refugees who are in Jordan and Syria and other countries?
Are they coming home?
They are not, overall.
Some are.
We can say that there are some people slowly trickling back in.
But consistently, you know, I think one of the most staggering things I've seen in the last month is relatively recently there was a UNHCR poll conducted of Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan, but between those two countries there's over 2 million Iraqi refugees alone.
And in this poll they asked people, you know, do you ever intend to go back to your homes in Iraq?
And over 90% of the people that they surveyed for this poll said they had no intention ever for the rest of their lives of going back to their homes.
Now, in the article that you wrote for Tom Dispatch, you go through the history of the awakening movement, and as you, I think, pretty accurately characterize it, the buying off of what we used to call the evildoers, the Sunni insurgency.
Well, I don't think you and I called them that.
George Bush called them that.
This is a story that I think kind of went under-reported.
The turnaround of the main Sunni insurgency against al-Qaeda in Iraq began really in early 2006, and then the Americans finally started paying them to do what they were already doing by late 2006, and this is before fat-neck Fred Kagan and the rest of these guys came up with the surge plan, right?
That's correct.
This was already well, well underway.
Well before the surge started, and that's one thing I wanted to make very, very clear in this article, and I spent a lot of time researching this, that the United States, in the aftermath of the very, very fierce resistance that they'd been facing from late 2003 until early 2006, decided, okay, we need a different strategy here, and they essentially implemented not their own tactic, but one that was used very effectively by Saddam Hussein to keep control of volatile areas, particularly around Al Anbar province.
Tribal sheikhs are essentially the gods of those areas.
They call all the shots.
They have tens of thousands of men under each one of their commands, and what Saddam Hussein did, and this was told by me directly.
He told my colleagues, and then he told me later, a sheikh of Fon, a man that I highlight in the article I just published today for Tom Dispatch, and he is the awakening group leader for Fallujah, and I went around with him in the city, and I stayed at his house for one night and two days, and then for a day again on another occasion, and he told me that what Saddam Hussein did was he found these tribal sheikhs, and he said, look, I'm going to give you a lot of money in the form of construction contracts, and in that way, I want you to basically keep things under wrap and keep control of your areas so that I don't have to, and that is exactly the strategy that the U.S. pulled out of the closet and has implemented with these awakening groups.
They have stood up all of these former resistance fighters.
They paid them $300 a month.
At one point, the groups totaled approximately 100,000 members across Al Anbar and Baghdad and parts of Diyala province, and that's the primary reason why violence is down right now, because these men, while the U.S. has stopped paying them off directly, they've, instead of funding directly the awakening groups, they've started doing it in the form of so-called construction contracts.
So, for example, if we talk about our friend Sheikh Afan that is the main character in Naitis, this is a man who grew up in Saudi Arabia, didn't even come to Iraq until 2001, and then happened to be at the right place at the right time when the U.S. was setting up all of these awakening groups.
He got in with them, he started collaborating, he started giving out names of people in Fallujah, earned the trust of the Americans, and then they started funneling money his way.
And so when the awakening groups were officially disbanded by the United States military in last October on the promise from the Maliki government that they would roll them into the government security forces, the U.S., instead of stopping paying them, changed the rubric under which they were being paid.
So instead of paying awakening groups, they started saying, okay, these tribal sheikhs are going to be managing construction projects, so we'll be paying them to do reconstruction in their city.
And so every tribal sheikh who's a member of the awakening group now is now in the construction business.
I've got cards from a few of these individuals, and on the bottom of every one of their cards it says construction, literally, right there on the card.
And so we're seeing tens of millions of dollars funneled into the pockets of these sheikhs.
Each one of them have their own private militia.
Sheikh Afan himself has 900 men at his discretion, he's paying all of them well over $300 a month because his wife attends on it.
But basically that's what's happened with U.S. policy here.
So the big questions, the open-ended questions here that we're going to see answered over time, I don't know when this is going to start happening, but at some point these questions will have to be answered.
And that is what happens with these people and the fact that this game is keeping violence in check for the moment, what are they going to do when all of a sudden that money stops coming?
What happens when the U.S. stops funding their so-called construction projects?
So is this really an effective policy to improve security, or is it simply a delay tactic that the U.S. is doing to keep a damper on things, at least for the time being?
And what's going to happen when that money stops coming?
Well, and especially when they're getting all this money and there is no real reconstruction going on.
You talk in your article about how Fallujah looks like November of 2004 was the day before yesterday.
It's still completely destroyed.
There is no reconstruction going on.
All that money is being funneled around.
And thanks, by the way, because I was wondering, from the articles I'd read, it seemed like the Maliki government wasn't really willing to pay these men, or some of the guys, you know, average foot soldiers in the Awakening Council were showing up and getting paid some money.
But certainly they're not, or as far as I can tell, they are not being integrated into the Iraqi military in any real way, and certainly not being put in any kind of leadership position.
So it seems like there remains a division of security force power, where in the Sunni provinces, it's basically the Awakening Councils are the government there, and I guess it's kind of fuzzy to the degree to which they really are part of the Maliki government, or simply exist beside it.
Well, that's true.
And, you know, talking about the situation that you're lining out there in Anbar and in Baghdad are two very, very different things.
In Anbar, we can say they're really not part of the government, but after these provincial elections, they are starting to get some political power.
So that is shifting there, whereas before they were completely outside the government, now they actually do have some inroads in the government, and these people's intention is to get power in Baghdad, and they're pushing as hard as they can to get that.
So that leaves another open-ended question, is what happens a little further down the road, for example, in about a year from now when we have national elections in Iraq, if they're pushing for that power and it doesn't come through?
Because I was with Sheikh Afan, as I outlined in the article, where he considered the biggest threat to him in the upcoming election to be the Iraqi Islamic Party, who was already in power in the province, and he was already going after them, accusing them of fraud, and saying that they would literally take up guns against them if they found out the IAP stole the election.
Of course, prefacing that was saying, well, we already have proof that they are.
But when we talk about the awakening groups in Baghdad, that's a really different story, because we've been going around and talking with some of these men here as well, and what's happening is, so far, the Maliki government promised to take in at least, well, 100 percent of them in Baghdad who are already here, and so far, they've only incorporated 25 percent of them into the security forces, and we don't see hardly any more being incorporated at this point.
And then those that are being incorporated, they're being paid 20, 30, sometimes 50 percent less than normal Iraqi police and Iraqi army.
So there's a very deliberate policy to disenfranchise these people, to anger them, to leave them out in the cold, to really not incorporate them fully into the security forces.
And then I can't tell you how many people I've run into who have also, rather than even being paid a significant amount of money less than they ought to be paid for their security positions, instead, they're in a situation where they're not being paid at all, but they keep waiting because the government says, look, we're having problems, we're just getting paperwork straight, we are going to pay you.
And so these people, with hopes of no other job, keep in mind there's about 50 percent unemployment in Iraq right now, that these people keep going into their job month after month, and we're talking since October.
So we're talking about four months now.
A lot of these guys are going in and haven't been paid once since the U.S. stopped paying them.
So, again, when does their patience run out?
And I can tell you it's already running out.
They're angry, they're bitter, they're saying, look, we've been doing what the government asked us to do, we've been doing what the Americans asked us to do, now we're not even getting paid.
What are we going to do?
There's no other job, and they're starting to get very, very angry.
And so when we talk about the fact that in Baghdad alone, only 25 percent of all the awakening members have been incorporated in the government job, we're talking about tens of thousands of armed, militarily trained men, most of whom used to be resistance fighters, who are getting very, very angry and very, very impatient.
So, again, that's why I just want to keep underscoring how volatile this situation is.
And when people say, well, yes, security is better in Iraq, and Iraq is stabilized, and it looks like it's on its way now after this relatively bloodless election the other week, again, there's so many different trends happening here right now that we can point to that really just underscore the fact that this is an extremely volatile situation, this is a phase of the occupation, it will pass, and a new phase will come.
And, you know, there's so many sparks, basically, or really dry areas waiting for a spark.
So that's why it's very volatile and very dangerous, and this situation is anything but resolved.
All right.
Well, let me ask you this.
When I talk with Patrick Coburn, he basically is saying that America has to leave in 16 months, that the Status of Forces Agreement actually is going to be enforced, and that as cynical as we might be about thinking, you know, yeah, right, as though the Americans intend to abide by it, he's saying it's not up to the Americans anymore.
As Maliki said the other day, the era of American dominance in Iraq is over.
He can do business with whoever he wants and do whatever he wants, and by the way, you have to leave in 16 months.
The Saudis are, of course, you know, willing to fight for that.
I guess they're, for now, seem to be willing to wait out the 16 months, but if the 16 months doesn't happen then, as you say, we're on top of our soldiers are sitting there surrounded by heavily armed men of all different descriptions all over that country.
I wonder whether you agree that basically the game is up and America has to go in 16 months, that they just have to no matter what they want to do.
I completely disagree.
I mean, let's look at the hard facts on the ground and start there.
There's 144,000 American soldiers here.
There's over 185,000 private contractors here.
There's over 50 American bases here.
At least four of them and possibly more are called enduring bases.
These are absolutely some of the biggest American military bases anywhere on the planet.
I was just on the Tigris River interviewing a fisherman a few days ago, and we went by the green zone because that's where his boat launched from, right across from the green zone, and I got to see the U.S. Embassy, and so I put some pictures of it up on my website.
This embassy is absolutely unbelievable, Scott.
When you look at this thing, any thinking person who would look at this thing would say, you know what?
There is no way the Americans plan on leaving.
This is an absolutely massive compound.
It's five stories high, one of the most beautiful buildings in Baghdad, and a heavily entrenched fortress.
There's two hillopads.
I mean, the thing is massive.
It's the size of the Vatican City.
I'm not exaggerating one bit, and when you couple all of this together and then look at the fact, how many troops are being withdrawn right now from Iraq?
Zero.
They're talking about an escalation in Afghanistan.
They are not talking about hard physical plans to start drawing troops out of Iraq.
We already see the legwork in progress of delay tactics.
No, maybe the 16-month plan needs to be 19 months.
Maybe it needs to be 23 months.
All of the generals that are still in charge that were under Bush are still here now.
They're the ones pushing for the delayed timeframe, and again, Scott, and I know that we've talked about this before throughout this occupation, but we have to watch what they're doing.
We cannot watch what they're saying, and this is classic politics, and when I talk to Iraqis about this, they say, look, even a school kid here knows this, especially when it comes to politics.
You watch what people do.
You do not watch what they say, and when you look at what's happening on the ground here, there is irrefutable evidence that there is nothing happening in Iraq today that supports the idea that the Americans are going to withdraw in 16 months.
The fact that Maliki can sit up there and beat his chest in response to Joe Biden's remarks and saying we're not going to be pushed around, Maliki knows more than anyone else that his government does not exist without the full backing of the U.S. occupation, so if the U.S. occupation were to pull out immediately, that government would collapse, and that is the reality on the ground here, but again, I want to just keep coming back to the fact that the U.S. military is showing us here on the ground, and the Obama administration, and that is that there is no evidence to support that there's going to be a withdrawal of all U.S. forces in 16 months.
I just don't see it happening here in Baghdad at all.
There's patrols all over the place.
The bases are not being taken down.
Instead, they're being augmented and expanded.
This is what we're seeing here on the ground right now.
Well, to the degree that, I mean, you described the martial law situation upon arrival in Baghdad, and walls everywhere, and soldiers and security forces there.
It seems like there's a line in there somewhere.
I don't know how far we are from it.
Maybe it's a million miles away, but it seems at some point, at least, there would be a possibility that the Maliki government could be strong enough and have enough bought-off loyalty within the new Iraqi army and that kind of thing that they really don't need us to prop them up anymore.
After all, the Dawa party, they have their close alliance with the Iranian government next door, and it seems like this was always kind of a mistake from an imperialist perspective in holding elections and installing the majority in power rather than the minority, because if you prop up the minority, then they need you forever.
At some point, though, Maliki will be able to say, get out, I don't need you, right?
Well, that is a possibility, and everything you said is correct.
It's certainly possible, given time, the way certain trends are going right now, but in two, three, four years, that may become a reality.
But again, we can only speculate.
We're talking about a time that's quite far off in the future.
There is no way anytime soon, though, that the Maliki government is going to have enough power to do this.
Just using one example, what we kind of covered earlier, look at these Dawa forces.
We have tens of thousands of armed, well-trained fighters now that are not being incorporated into the government.
So what happens all of a sudden if they decide they need to turn their allegiances against the government and start fighting for themselves and reignite the resistance?
So that right there is going to be a massive, massive problem.
So the Maliki government really is in no way, shape, or form right now, anyway, really equipped to handle properly.
We're talking two, three years down the line before they could really be in a position where they could say, look, we're demanding the U.S. leave, we want the U.N. to come in, or, you know, we really want true sovereignty.
You know, he can talk tough all he wants between now and then, but until he really has the roots on the ground and doesn't have to rely on the U.S. military or U.S. money anymore to keep his government in place, until that point is reached, there's just really, I don't see how the basic structure of the occupation is going to be changed.
Well, that's really unfortunate.
Well, doesn't Maliki's support depend, especially now with the seeming, as far as I can tell anyway, you know, you're there and not me, but it seems like as Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Council split apart, the Dawa party, since they don't have their own army like the Supreme Islamic Council does with the Badr Corps, that they're basically being pushed closer and closer to the Mahdi army, or what's left of it at this point, and are more and more dependent on Iraqi nationalists who reject the pro-federalism, if you call it that, position of the SCIRI, or whatever the initials are now, the Supreme Islamic Council.
And so, and Sader, Maqtada al-Sadr has always really been a hard liner on the nationalist position and on the anti-occupation position.
It seems like when you talk about this is just one time period within the occupation and to not, you know, read too far into it, that's the first thing I think of is, well, right now Sader is in Iran getting a higher religious rank and authority, or supposedly studying for one there, but his group hasn't gone away, and now the Maliki government is dependent on him.
I don't know to what degree compared to dependent on us, but there's certainly a conflict there, don't you think?
Yeah, it really, you just underscore how complex the situation is.
If we talk about SCIRI, we talk about Badr al-Sadr and his militia, and we talk about Awaqari, we talk about Al-Fadila, all of these groups are completely willing to take up arms against one another.
It's a very unstable situation.
We look at what's happening with them, and it's really a situation where, at any given moment, if one group steps over a line with another group, we're going to have very big problems.
So, again, there's that situation, and then when we talk about even within the awakening groups, just to give you another example, when I was up in Al-Ambar province, there were two sheikhs that were very vehemently opposed to one another, basically rivals that have an old blood feud, and one of them was talking, actually the leader of the entire awakening movement, Sheikh Abu Risha, was talking that if this other sheikh, Haith, was playing funny games and committing fraud in the elections, then he was going to turn Al-Ambar into the next Darfur.
And this is within the awakening groups.
So, again, it's very, very volatile, it's very unstable, and it's a very complex situation.
We can't talk about just one group being against another group.
We have to look, even within those groups, we're going to see all of these fault lines, and so we're going to have to wait and see.
And that's basically what I've got right now.
There is a political jockeying position being sorted out after the last elections.
So this period between now and the national election scheduled for almost a year from now is going to be a very, very interesting time, and then I think what will be a very telling moment is in that next national election when we're going to see who comes into power, and then those who do not come into power, how will they be reacting to that?
Walden in the chat room is wondering whether the embassy is mentioned in the Status of Forces Agreement.
It's pretty clear, you know, when Patrick Coburn broke the story last spring, it had 58 bases in it forever, and all this kind of victorious George Bush's wildest dreams, and apparently by the time they were done getting everybody to agree to it, they even have to submit it to a referendum this July, and all the 58 bases were taken out.
Does it address the situation of the embassy, which, again, is like the size of Vatican City, the size of Liechtenstein or something?
The Status of Forces Agreement, I have not read all of the fine print of that entire document, but from what I've seen, all I've seen regarding the embassy is that certain guard positions within the Green Zone, which was renamed the International Zone, that was part of the time period leading up to this so-called SOPA agreement, but one thing I've seen firsthand is that rather than having U.S. soldiers guarding it up front, they have now contractors and or Iraqi forces, and theoretically, U.S. soldiers have to ask permission from Iraqi forces, which, you know, is kind of a bit of a joke, because most of the time it doesn't happen, or it comes in the form of a letter saying, okay, we're going to ask you permission for the next year to be able to do this, this, and this, and then the Iraqis say, okay, and everything carries on business as usual.
So really what's happened is we have seen the Americans, through this SOPA agreement, do a really good job of putting either a contractor face on the occupation or an Iraqi face on the occupation.
So aside from the U.S. patrols you see going around Baghdad, and there are quite a few of them, aside from those, when you go through checkpoints, there are no more U.S. checkpoints in Baghdad.
I have not gone through one American military checkpoint, and they're all Iraqi checkpoints or they're all foreign mercenary checkpoints, and the same thing in the so-called international zone.
When you go through the six, seven checkpoints you have to go through to get in there, you will only see American soldiers at the very, very last checkpoint, and even at that, they're off to the side.
But that said, I don't know, there may be some information in the SOPA about the embassy, but again, that's why they call it an embassy, so this is technically not a U.S. base, granted it's a massive compound with room for 1,000 employees and has its own full security force, but technically, I wonder if that would even fall under the status of forces agreement, because status of forces agreements, as I understand them, apply specifically to U.S. military bases across the globe, and they have status of forces agreements for all of these bases, so I really do not think that the embassy would fall under that jurisdiction, mainly because it's not technically a U.S. base.
Well, and you know, this goes back to my question about whether America has to stay or go, and you know, there's always the possibility, I mean, you could argue, I'm sure people did argue, they're not ever going to leave Vietnam, they are determined to have a beachhead in South Vietnam forever, but in fact, they had to leave Vietnam, and with the disgrace on the, with the helicopters on the roof of the Saigon embassy, you know, saved photographically for all time and that kind of thing, and I guess I wonder if, you know, if my girlfriend had, I dream of genie powers, and I could just, you know, zap all the American forces, State Department employees, mercenaries, and everybody else out of Iraq and to, I don't know, Georgia or something, you know, American Georgia, and just in a day, and could make them all go, would the structure, never mind Maliki as prime minister, but would the structure of the government of Iraq as created by the so-called constitution, the elections held there so far under the occupation, would it hold the parliament and the position of president and all that?
Well, right now, especially after these last elections, it is clear that Maliki and his group did win quite big around Baghdad and most of the southern provinces, so as it is right now, they have fairly solidified the power, the grasp on power that they do have, so at least for the moment, and we'll have to wait and see what happens between now and the international elections, if something big happens that people lose, suddenly would lose faith in the government, you know, but that might change things on how the dynamic would play out for the national elections.
However, for right now, they have done a fairly good job at consolidating power, getting more popular opinion on their side, so it's, at least for the moment, it looks like it's going to be holding until the national elections.
Well, now, Tom Editor there at Tom Dispatch, Tom Englehart, he wrote in the introduction to your essay there at TomDispatch.com today, he talked about Gareth Porter's pieces and what's been coming out from Thomas Riggs from the Washington Post about Petraeus and Odierno and their plan to try to stay forever, but then also to set up the spin for the stab in the back myth, like in Vietnam, so that if anything, if for any reason, any amount of combat forces are moved out of Iraq, and anything bad happens after that, it'll be the fault of all the anti-war people, because Petraeus had it won, Petraeus had everything set perfect until Obama or, you know, Darja Mail and Scott Horton and the anti-war movement or whoever came and screwed it up.
Well, you know, Scott, you caught me on that one.
I don't really know even how to respond to that.
You know, what can we say?
As journalists, we do our job.
We report on what's happening on the ground.
When asked our opinion about things, we give our opinion, but otherwise, we simply report on what we see happening.
And, you know, as journalists, that's all that we can do.
And, you know, people can take that or leave it, and if they don't like that information, then I guess I don't know what to tell them.
But, you know, the reality is the reality here on the ground in Iraq.
We can look at U.S. policy.
That speaks for itself.
We can look at how that's playing out on the ground here with the bases and how many troops are here and the over 600 Western contractor companies, corporate companies that operate on the ground here today.
We look at how this is affecting the Iraqi people.
And all of this is hard fact, hard reality.
There's no opinion in this whatsoever.
So we report on that.
That's our job.
And people then have to just deal with that information however they feel that they need to deal with it.
Well, I'm sorry, but the problem here is that you're dealing in far too great of detail.
And what matters in the conflict over policy in America is broad narratives.
And either we're winning or we're losing, or we could have won, but we didn't, or we're winning now, but if we leave, then we'll lose.
Or, you know, if we leave now, then we'll win or whatever.
These are the only things that count in determining whether we stay or leave.
And as you know, it's been this paradox where the worse things get, the more they say, well, we can't leave now because think how bad it'll be then.
And then when the security situation improves at all and violence is down, then they say we can't leave now because it'll get worse again.
So somehow there's got to be a concrete refutation of that paradox.
Well, absolutely there is.
And I think you just kind of wind out the paradox.
And, you know, at the end of the day, we can come down to the fact that Iraq is not a state of the United States.
The United States, theoretically, under international law, cannot have a say in whatever happens in Iraq.
And the reality is that over 71% of Iraqis are in favor of a total withdrawal.
And when we look at the Maliki administration now here, who is saying, yes, we are going to stick to the 16-month timetable, we're not going to be pushed around, et cetera, that's what's happening here on the ground.
And, you know, all of the rhetoric about, well, the U.S. has done so much damage, they have to stay there and try to repair it because it's the moral thing.
I mean, I can understand the well-meaning intentions behind that.
But the reality is this has been an absolute catastrophe for the Iraqi people.
And that's why over 71% favor total withdrawal.
Damn the consequences.
And if that's what the Iraqi people want, and if Iraq is theoretically a sovereign nation under international law, then that's what should be happening.
It's technically nobody's business in the United States, whether it's you, me, or the president, or congresspeople, or different lobby groups.
No matter what we think should happen in Iraq, it's none of our business because this is not our country.
It's the Iraqi people's country.
And what they want to have happen is what should happen.
And we've already been very clear about what the vast majority of people in this country want to see.
And that is a full total withdrawal of all occupation forces in less than a year's time.
And that was from a poll taken last September.
Who's the 30%, Dar?
Well, the remaining 29%, interestingly, 15% of those still favored total withdrawal also, but only until security improved and then held.
And then the remaining percent, what does that leave?
About 14%, I believe, if my math is correct.
The remaining percent were predominantly the Kurds up in the north, which make up about 20% of the population.
So it's not even all of the Kurds, but the brunt of the Kurds, of course, are in full favor of ongoing U.S. occupation because, frankly, their survival depends on it.
Well, what will happen to them if America leaves and the country is again dominated by Arabs?
There's going to be a total bloodbath and war over the oil land up there or what?
What are they afraid of?
No, I think it's a question.
I think it's a question of greed, because when you look at the two Kurdish leaders, Jawal Pahlavani and Barzani, we have a situation where these guys are getting filthy rich off of the occupation.
They're signing contracts.
They want the U.S. bases there because they feel that that's going to help them progress towards a more independent Kurdistan.
I think things would stay the same for the Kurds if the U.S. were to withdraw, and that's not what the Kurds want.
The Kurds want independence.
They want to expand their territory.
They are pushing for a greater Kurdistan, which extends even beyond the borders of the area they control now in northern Iraq, and they feel that the U.S. bases in their area safeguard at least what they have.
So things would stay the same for them, and that's not what they want.
They're leaders, that is.
They want more money.
They want more contracts.
They want to expand their borders, and they're heavily, heavily dependent on the U.S. military remaining there in order for them to further that agenda.
All right, everybody.
That's Dar Jamal, Unembedded Reporter, live on the phone from Baghdad.
He's the author of the book Beyond the Green Zone.
His website is DarJamalIraq.com, and you can find his anti-war archives at antiwar.com slash Jamal.
It's J-A-M-A-I-L.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
