For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And we're going to go ahead and get started with our next interview.
Ray Ed, in the middle, Ray Ed Girard, joining us on the show.
He is Senior Fellow on the Middle East for Peace Action and the Peace Action Education Fund.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thanks a lot for having me.
I figured I'd go ahead and get started here talking about what's going on in Iraq.
Big election over the weekend.
Do we know anything so far about who's winning or what it might portend?
Yeah, there was one exit poll announced a couple of days ago.
And today the Iraqi government started announcing the preliminary results.
They announced the preliminary results of some of the provinces, mostly southern provinces.
But we still have many of the northern and middle and western provinces not announced.
The exit polls indicate that, as expected, there are just three coalitions that are competing for the number one position in the parliament, which is the coalition that will get the most numbers.
This is very important in Iraq because that coalition will get the power to assign the prime minister and try to create a cabinet by gathering enough votes through building coalitions and alliances with other parties.
They have to get to 50% plus one minimum to be eligible for building the government.
So today or tomorrow we will find out through the preliminary results whether the number one coalition is the former prime minister's coalition, Dr. Eyad Allawi's coalition, or the current prime minister's coalition, Mr. Nouri al-Maliki's coalition.
These seem to be the only serious candidates for the position.
So let's talk about Eyad Allawi.
I'm kind of amazed to see at least, well, never mind the New York Times version of events, it seems like even real newspapers have articles saying that it looks like Allawi's coalition might actually do some good.
Can you tell us a bit of the history of this guy?
And of course I think hopefully everybody remembers he was the American installed prime minister for a little while here.
Yeah, that is true.
I think it's another example of how amazing and complicated the internal politics in Iraq are.
Mr. Allawi is heading the coalition that includes most of the Iraqi nationalists, mostly from the opposition.
So he created the coalition with other opposition leaders like Dr. Saleh al-Mutlaq or Dr. al-Hashemi, the vice president, or other leaders from the opposition.
And he is running on a platform that is similar to the platform of the current prime minister.
It's a nationalist platform against sectarianism, against dividing Iraq into ethnic and sectarian cantons or divisions or federations, and apparently against any type of foreign intervention, whether this intervention came from Iran or the U.S. or others.
So he is surprisingly getting so much support from Iraqi nationalists, regardless of their background.
I was looking at the exit poll from Al Anbar, for example, which is the province that has Talluja, the city of Talluja, that was attacked during the time that Allawi was the prime minister.
And the initial exit polls indicate that 75% of people who live in Al Anbar have voted for Allawi's coalition, not because he attacked them, obviously, and not because he is a Sunni or a Shiite, not because of his ethnicity, but because people ended up seeing him, in comparison to other candidates, as someone who will bring back the Iraqi identity rather than a sectarian or ethnic identity.
So, yeah, believe it or not, he is getting some support inside Iraq and some regional support, despite the fact that he is an ex-CIA operative and ex-backed party member and ex-prime minister who failed miserably while he was a puppet of the U.S. and committed a lot of immoral and political crimes.
It seems like he is ending up the number one choice for many Iraqis.
So does that reflect forgiveness or a short memory or Iraq in a hard place, where really they are scraping the bottom of the barrel that he is among the best they got, and that ain't saying much, sort of like us getting stuck with a George Bush or a Barack Obama?
Yeah, I think it reflects pragmatism and lack of choices.
Mr. Allawi has, to give him some credit, he has played a very smart role in the last five years since he stopped being the prime minister.
He has not taken any part in any sectarian politics in Iraq.
He refused to have militias, he refused to participate in any political debate that had sectarian or ethnic implications, and always refused to introduce himself as a Shiite.
He always insisted that he is an Iraqi.
So he did gain some trust, and we shouldn't forget that because he has not been a member of the ruling party, he was not in the executive branch in the five years, most of his criticism and rhetoric against the Tehran government sounds very fair and right.
I think, of course, the problem is we can't make 100% sure that what he will do to fix these mistakes is clear enough.
He seems to be running on a platform that would end sectarianism and corruption, and try to bring Iraqi capacity from abroad by bringing back refugees and others who are excluded from the political process.
But, of course, there are many doubts and questions about how much legitimacy he has and how much he is actually serious and promises.
Now, you mentioned there that Maliki as well has a nationalist coalition, and yet his coalition is still the United Iraqi Alliance from years past, which I guess, would it be the case, I guess it used to be dominated more by the Bata Brigades and the Supreme Islamic Council of the Hakeem clan, and it seemed like they pushed for more of a federalist structure and were more sectarian.
So, is it Sauder's alliance with Maliki that makes him take the more nationalist position?
No, actually, there is a misunderstanding.
Mr. al-Maliki has refused to stay in the United Iraqi Alliance, and that is the reason why we are having this debate over who will get number one, because al-Maliki has run on a different coalition, and he split from the original sectarian Shiite-based coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, or as it's renamed since this time, the Iraqi National Alliance.
The Iraqi National Alliance still has the federalists and al-Hakeem, or the Supreme Council, with Bata Brigades as their co-leaders, and they have a few other token Sunni and Kurdish and Christian figures.
Just to say, we are not sectarian anymore, we are different.
But Mr. al-Maliki refused to run with them on the same coalition, and he ended up running in a different coalition, the Rule of Law coalition, with other Sunni and Kurdish and Christian partners in the coalition.
And that is the reason why we are having now the possibility for Dr. Allawi to get number one in the polls, because if al-Maliki has run in the same coalition with al-Hakeem and the federalists, they would have gotten 45% very easily.
And we would not have been having the current debate, I think, over who will win.
So if I understand you right, I had it completely wrong.
What you're saying is that al-Maliki has broken from the al-Hakeem clan, the Supreme Islamic Council, and formed a different alliance, and has left the Saudarists in alliance with the Supreme Islamic Council.
So does that mean that the Supreme Islamic Council has really come around completely to the Saudarists' point of view, that the Americans must go?
Absolutely.
Because they were the last holdouts on the Shiite side, right?
Yeah, yeah, not really.
I think the Supreme Islamic Council were made to...they did not have other options other than realigning with the Saudarists, because they... actually, this is the second election in a year, because last year there were provincial elections in Iraq, where the Supreme Islamic Council ran on a separate list than the Saudarists, and a separate list than Mr. al-Maliki.
And Mr. al-Maliki's coalition won most of the provincial council, and the Saudarists came second, and the Supreme Council lost miserably.
The Supreme Council used to control 10 of Iraq's... of the 14 provincial councils that had elections, and they lost all 10 in last year's provincial elections.
So that's why they ended up changing their rhetoric, saying, you know, we are actually against sectarianism and against partitioning, and we would end up aligning with the Saudarists.
So they changed their rhetoric in the last few months, but I don't think many Iraqis believe them, because it just seems like they are afraid of saying what they really believe in, because they feel afraid that they might get defeated again.
But anyway, the results of the election now, last week's election, shows that both al-Hakim and the Saudarists in their coalition had lost miserably.
They came second or third in their stronghold.
For example, the city of Amara, which is considered the capital of the Saudarists, they came second there.
No one was anticipating that to happen.
All right, well now, so let's talk about the Iranian influence then, because of all people, the Kagan family are the ones leading the war party charge that, oh my God, did you realize that Iran is interfering in Iraq?
Even though it's been American policy to support, it seems like, at least for years and years there, the policy was to support the Hakim faction, the ones who were closest to the Iranians, this whole time, and now they're saying, uh-oh, we might have to stay forever, if the Iranians have influence in Iraq.
I agree.
You're completely correct.
This has been a new drumbeat.
It's a new rhetoric coming from some parts of the Pentagon, and some U.S. lobbyists who are interested in prolonging the occupation.
The new rhetoric is that we should extend and prolong our intervention to protect Iraq from other interventions like the Iranian one, which I think is laughable, because the U.S., on the one hand, has no moral authority to claim that the U.S. intervention is better than other interventions.
Those Iraqis who are against the Iranian intervention are exactly the same as Iraqis who are against the U.S. intervention.
It doesn't make sense to say, let's prolong the occupation to protect you from your neighbor.
This is the first point.
The second point is what you said, which is, from an Iraqi point of view, the Iranian intervention, that is viewed very negatively, has been happening in coordination with the U.S., not despite the U.S. or against the U.S. will.
It's actually in coordination with the U.S.
Parties like the Supreme Islamic Council of Al-Hakim have been very close to the U.S. government and the Iranian government.
In fact, as we just discussed with Larissa Alexandrovna on the show, Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were working with the Iranians and the Americans to lie us into war against Saddam Hussein in the first place.
Yeah, that is correct.
And now Al-Chalabi ended up in the same party as Mr. Al-Hakim, and both of them are obviously trying to exercise more influence to try to legitimize the Iranian role in Iraq.
Like, for example, I don't know whether you've been following this or not, but Al-Chalabi linked the commission, the diversification, ended up banning 500 Iraqi politicians from participating in the elections last month, and just two days ago they announced their intention to ban another 55 Iraqi politicians who are members of the coalition of Dr. Allawi under the same excuses.
So many people think that these political persecutions that are happening have to do a lot with the fact that Dr. Allawi has been taking a very anti-Iranian stance inside Iraq, and these parties like Al-Hakim and Al-Chalabi are fighting back to try to prevent him and his allies from taking government.
So there are a lot of domestic disputes and fights over the Iranian role in Iraq, but the bottom line there is that from our point of view as Americans, we don't have anything to do to solve this dispute because the U.S. is not a neutral player there.
The U.S. is yet another interventionist that has actually caused the Iranian intervention to start, and does not have any role in trying to solve that problem.
I think Iraqis think about the U.S. withdrawal as a positive first step in ending the Iranian intervention as well.
Yeah, it sounds like the people of Iraq are fixing the problem that America has caused them, which is the extent of Iranian influence in their country, and they're resolving this despite us, and even forcing Maliki to move away from former positions.
So let me ask you this, how much effect on the Hakeem faction has the death of the father had?
I guess I read a couple of articles that said that the son was not quite up to the task over there.
Yeah, he's not very strong, but we shouldn't forget that most of the political power and legitimacy of the Hakeem faction comes from the Iranian government's support.
So even though I agree that Ammar al-Hakeem, the son of Abdelaziz al-Hakeem, is not as influential as his dad, I still think that they will continue to play the same role.
Alright, now, so what about this new party in Kurdistan that supposedly is challenging the dominance of Talibani and Barzani up there?
Yeah, that's a very interesting party.
I was actually in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, a few weeks ago, and I learned a lot of more information, very interesting information about this new party.
It's called the Change Party, Taghir or Goran in Kurdish.
It's a party that has split from the PUK, the Talibani party.
So it existed all along.
They were one branch of Mr. Talibani's party, and they decided to split and create their own party in the last year or so.
They have done very well in last week's election.
It seems like they are the biggest winners in Sulaymaniyah.
Some of the exit polls are expecting that they will get up to 10 seats in the central government's parliament and leave around 30 seats, 30 to 40 seats for the other two Kurdish ruling parties.
So they are changing the situation on the ground.
They are another example of how the divisions inside Iraq are not ethnic and sectarian based.
Now we see there are Shiites against Shiites, Sunnis against Sunnis, seculars against seculars, and even Kurds against Kurds, with very different political platforms.
Sure, well, most of what was ever called the sectarian violence was maybe political factions that were defined in a sense by religious narratives and whatever, but we're of course talking about human beings on earth doing things for real political reasons.
It was never a fight about religion, no matter what the American media was trying to push there.
Yeah, I agree with that, and moreover, the situation in Iraq is even more complicated because most of the cases we have Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds who agree on one platform against other Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds who agree on another platform.
So it's way more complicated than claiming it's a religious or sectarian war based on ancient hatred.
It's way more relevant to modern politics and disputes over territorial integrity and national sovereignty.
Yeah, well, in a sense it's almost like economics and the distortions caused by, say, central banking dumping a bunch of money into the economy.
You dump a bunch of American troops into a country and they choose alliances with different factions.
It raises their stock and creates distortions and real prices of the real value of political leadership and what the people of Iraq really want.
Now it's a matter of working all those distortions out, the long way, the hard way it was for most of the time there.
I completely agree with you.
This is exactly what I have been hearing from the Iraqi political leaders and even from the Iraqi public.
It's not about which faction or side the US takes, but it's about the US taking sides.
I think what the Iraqi public and politicians want to see is they want to see the US out and they want to see the US stopping to take any side.
It's not about who is a good guy that we will take their side, but rather than us pulling out and stopping any form of support or attack that is aggravating the domestic dispute further.
Tell me this, the former, I guess it's fair to say predominantly Sunni insurgency, the Anbar province resistance that lasted for years, that eventually was bought off in the form of the so-called awakening movement of concerned local citizens and so forth.
Now all those militias have been dissolved now, but do those people, have they been marginalized to the point where they don't really matter?
Are they the ones setting off the bombs that are still going off?
Do they have the opportunity to exercise political power in the context of all these purges from the voting rolls, or from the candidate rolls, etc.?
Yeah, you know, once again, I don't think there is one group called the Sunnis in Anbar.
What you mentioned is a good example.
There were many people who happened to be Sunnis who belonged to the armed opposition or armed resistance group that attacked the U.S. and the central government, and there are many other people who happened to be Sunnis who formed militias that worked with the U.S. and with the U.S. government.
They are not the same people.
It's the same situation with Shiites.
There are some Shiites who were members of the central government and fought on the side of the U.S. troops, and there are other Shiites who were guerrillas and participated in armed resistance attacks against the central government and the U.S. forces.
You're saying that the so-called awakening movement of the militias, that Petraeus made a deal, here's some money and guns if you'll stop fighting us, that that wasn't the same people who'd been fighting?
No, they were not the same people.
It's not something that I'm saying because it's my personal analysis, but because I know the names and Iraqis in general know the names of the groups that were fighting against the U.S. militarily.
For example, the Islamic Army of Iraq or the 1920 Brigade group, or there are four or five other affiliated groups to them.
They were never affiliated with the awakening group.
The awakening groups are different types of groups, militias, very close to the Peshmerga or Badr Brigade, the Kurdish and Shiite militias that worked with the U.S.
They were Sunni militias that worked with the U.S.
It's not like Al-Ambar has a group of 50 people calling themselves Sunnis that in one week attack the U.S. and then the next week they take salaries from the U.S. and attack someone else.
That's such a caricature, like a cartoon type of analysis drawn by the mainstream media.
It's way more complicated.
There are way more divisions.
Believe it or not, people have principle that they will not just flip sides because we give them a couple hundred dollars a month.
When people are attacking the U.S. because they believe the U.S. is occupying their nation, they will not just change their mind because we give them a hundred dollars a month to become mercenaries fighting on the side of this side or that side.
It's way more complicated.
Actually, I'm going to be talking with Patrick Coburn tomorrow.
I think the way he said it was that they lost the Civil War and they had to reorder their priorities.
They decided that fighting each other, I guess, or having the awakening groups fighting the resistance and more or less shutting them down was a better way to survive than continuing the war against the central government and the Americans that they had lost already.
Because the violence did fall from the height of the 3,000 bodies a month laying around, which is how it was in the summer of 2007, for example.
Yeah, there are different reasons for why the violence dropped other than the U.S. creating yet another group of Iraqi mercenaries.
As I mentioned earlier, there are many people on the right and left in the U.S. who still believe in this sectarian narrative and that a civil war happened between the Sunnis and the Shiites and someone won and someone lost.
I still disagree with the entire narrative.
And I think what happened this week is another proof that people like myself who have been saying this is not about sex, it's about politics, what happened this weekend was another proof that my analysis is closer to the reality.
Because if it was for real about Sunnis fighting against Shiites, I don't think that 75% of Al-Anbar would have voted for a Shiite like Dr. Allawi.
Now, they did not vote for him because he's a Shiite or a Sunni, but rather because of his politics.
I completely disagree with the current, you know, rewriting of history that says there was a war between Sunnis and Shiites and the Sunnis won or lost and that's why this happened or that happened.
What happened all along was an occupation that did take the side of some Sunnis and Shiites against other Sunnis and Shiites.
There was no such a thing as one sectarian group winning against another sectarian group inside Iraq.
Yeah, well, I mean, let me try to break it down a little bit more because, I mean, what you're refuting is just the simplistic kind of ridiculous New York Times or Newsweek narrative, but I kind of want to be a little bit more specific here.
I mean, it is the case, as we've discussed, right, that the power being installed in Iraq was basically, you know, years back.
If we go back to 2003, well, at least 2004, 5, 6, the Americans were fighting to install the Hakeem faction, which led to, and of course the war, the bombings of Anbar and the creation of all the refugees that displaced a bunch of people and the rise of all different kinds of militias and resistance and it also led to partisan militias fighting on the side of the government.
I mean, the Bata Brigade was out there with the Iraqi Army expelling in, I guess, it's not ethnic cleansing, but religious cleansing or whatever, basically, as people were being displaced, the Shiites won, the Shiite partisan political factions that were allied with the United States won and kicked the Sunnis the hell out of Baghdad, no?
No, that's not an accurate description.
The Iraqi government has been all along Sunni and Shiite and Kurd.
For example, the Islamic, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Party in Iraq never left the government, the executive branch, and they have controlled big factions of Sunni mercenaries and big factions of the Iraqi Army, and they have conducted ethnic cleansing against Shiites as well.
It's not about Shiites or Sunnis fighting against each other and winning the war.
It's more about what the ruling parties, whether they were Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds, have conducted on the ground.
So I think the difference is not about it being simplistic.
I'm being simplistic as well.
I'm putting the entire conflict in small words.
We're talking about different types of conflict.
For example, if we talked about the American Civil War, and if I told you that the American Civil War was between white people and black people, you would disagree, not because it's simplistic, but because that's a different type of conflict that is racial-based.
If I said the American Civil War was more political about the authority of the central government, those who wanted confederations did not want a strong central government, those who wanted the union wanted a strong central government, you might agree with me more.
Now, this is not simplistic.
It's not about it being simplistic.
It's about it being a different form of conflict.
Now, what I'm saying is that in Iraq, the form of conflict that we have been hearing about in the U.S. mainstream media is a religious and sectarian conflict based on ancient hatred.
I disagree with that completely.
I think that what happened in Iraq has less to do with people's sects and ethnicities and more to do with the role of the central government, with Iraq's territorial integrity, and with Iraq's national sovereignty, and has nothing to do with Sunnis winning over Shiites.
What does it mean to say that?
Which Sunnis won or lost?
The Sunnis in the government or outside?
Which Shiites won or lost?
The Shiites of al-Hakim, or the Shiites of al-Sadr, or the secular Shiites of al-Lawi, or the Shiites of al-Fatihah party.
You know what I'm saying?
It's way more complicated than saying.
So that's why I think this analysis that we're hearing now, the dogmatic analysis about how the sectarian civil war has happened and ended, it does not make any sense.
I mean, ask your guests tomorrow, how come 75% of what he would call, quote-unquote, the Sunnis, ended up voting for a Shiite?
Did they have a problem with identity?
Did they have an identity crisis?
Did they turn into Shiites?
Let me stop you for a second, because it's too many different things at once.
First of all, Patrick Cockburn never has pushed the myth that this is all about some ancient religious hatreds or anything else.
Patrick Cockburn is not the New York Times.
He's Patrick Cockburn, man.
And his thing is about sectarian politics by human beings in Iraq.
I mean, that was your term that you first introduced in this interview in the first place, you know, 40 minutes ago or what have you, in the sense of, I mean, hey, the Hakims ain't Sunnis, man, right?
There's not going to be a question of whether they are or not.
And when you talked about which Sunnis lost the civil war, I believe Patrick Cockburn's answer to that is the Sunni population of Baghdad.
That was pushed violently out.
Millions of them fled to Syria and Jordan, because they had nowhere else to go.
And a lot of the sectarian war was based on, as Dar Jamal has spoken about on this show in the past, he was supposed to join us in this interview, I don't know what happened, but he's spoken, we've talked about before, how the bombings of Fallujah in 2004, in the spring and the autumn of 2004, led to massive refugees, many of whom went to Baghdad, and many of them being Sunnis, and went to live with Sunni relatives in Baghdad, ended up displacing Shiites that lived in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, and then they had to flee to the other side of town, which displaced other people, and more and more people are killing each other and fighting over these things.
Nobody's saying that they're fighting over whose Mahdi is correct, or whatever.
Nobody's saying that any of this takes away from the responsibility of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
But, you know, the reason I'm going on and on about it, Red, is because I don't want to oversimplify anything.
I want to understand the details, just so I understand the details.
But, I mean, is it not the case that the Sunni population of Baghdad was basically forced out?
Yeah, there are some neighborhoods, that is correct.
Some neighborhoods in Baghdad were ethnically cleansed, sectarianly cleansed.
Many of the neighborhoods that were mixed ended up being either a Sunni neighborhood or a Shiite neighborhood.
My uncles, you know that I am half Sunni and half Shiite.
My uncles, who happen to be Shiite, who are living in a neighborhood that is supposed to become a Sunni neighborhood now, were kicked out of their house.
And my uncles, who are Sunnis, who ended up in the wrong neighborhood, ended up being kicked out as well.
Now, there were many, many Shiite families who were kicked out of their homes in other segments of Iraq.
This is not, as you were saying, I agree with you, this is not because of people's sex, but rather because of the ruling parties had a plan to divide Iraq into three different confederations.
And the plan was, you know, ethnic and sectarian based.
So, in accordance to that plan, they tried to move all non-Shiites from the south and big segments of Baghdad.
They tried to move all non-Sunnis from the west and other segments of Baghdad.
And they tried to move all non-Kurds from the north and some segments in Kirkuk.
Now, these ethnic cleansing and sectarian cleansing attacks happened because of the major political goal of creating a different type of state of Iraq that is a confederacy rather than one united country with one central government.
And these attacks did not happen between, you know, the grassroot Shiites and grassroot Sunnis, but rather by ruling parties and their militias.
Now, that is why I think there is no such a thing as the Sunnis winning or losing.
You know, from a Sunni separatist point of view, they won because they kicked out all the Shiites from Anbar and Najaf.
From a Shiite separatist point of view, they won because they kicked out all Sunnis from Najaf and Karbala.
So, you see, the point is not how many people you kill.
It's about how to create a new demographic reality where partitioning Iraq is possible.
Now, all of these plans have failed.
The Iraqi public, Sunnis and Shiites, have fought so strongly against the attempt for creating new demographic reality that would facilitate a partitioning plan of Iraq and the creation of confederations that are loosely connected to a center.
And that's why we saw the complete collapse of the ruling parties' control over provincial councils last year.
Whether the ruling parties were Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds, they lost miserably in the 14 provincial councils that had the elections.
They lost all provincial councils, all 14.
The four ruling parties that used to control all 14 lost all 14 provinces.
Not because they were Sunnis, not because they were Shiites, but because all of the Iraqi public, regarding their background or ethnicity, did have a very strong backlash against these attempts to create divisions.
And people voted for nonsectarian parties like Mr. Maliki's party or Mr. Allawi's coalition, because these are coalitions that run on a platform that says, we are not Sunnis or Shiites, we are Iraqis who believe in a strong central government.
So that's why, you know, I understand that these are very detailed issues about the past, but I think it's important to deal with it, because without understanding the past, we will not understand the present and future of the conflict in Iraq.
It is not a sectarian conflict where the U.S. is taking sectarian sides.
Rather, it is a political and economic conflict where the U.S. is taking, you know, the side of some Sunnis and Shiites politically against other Sunnis and Shiites politically.
And that's why the U.S. withdrawal will not cause, for example, a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.
The U.S. withdrawal will not cause many other things that have been claimed by some pro-occupation analysts in the last few weeks.
Well, that's one thing you can give America credit for.
We do things so terribly that everybody wants to get together in order to kick our asses out.
Right.
I mean, basically, that's where all Iraqis can see eye to eye.
The Americans got to go.
The majority of Iraqis, I would say, yes.
And it has been like that all along.
Three-fourths of the Iraqi public, regardless of their sect or ethnicity, wanted the U.S. and Iran and al-Qaeda and others to stop interfering in Iraq completely.
So it's not something new.
And I think the pro-occupation ruling parties still wish that the U.S. stays longer in Iraq, whether they were Sunnis or Shiites or Turks.
So the things have not shifted a lot when it comes to political positions.
But I think the rhetoric has shifted because there was a realization that if they continue to have a pro-occupation, pro-partitioning language, they will be even defeated harder in the current election.
I want to make sure I understood you right.
You say that the people who are the ruling parties now actually probably would prefer that we stay longer, but they know that that's not a tenable position for them to take.
They'll lose all of their coalition authority if they choose to do that.
When I say the ruling parties, I mean the four ruling parties in the presidential council, which are the two Kurdish ruling parties, the TUK and KDP, and one Shiite ruling party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution led by al-Hakim, and one Sunni ruling party, the Islamic party in Iraq, which is the continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq.
These four parties have been behind the scenes trying to lobby for a longer U.S. occupation.
But Mr. al-Maliki has split from their position to a more nationalist position just last year, before the provincial election.
And he started talking about signing an agreement that will end the U.S. occupation, and he started becoming critical to the Iranian role in Iraq.
And that's why he won a lot of votes in the last election, and in this election as well, because of this new platform that he's running on that is against the intervention that actually appeals to what the Iraqi public wants to hear.
So, is it the case, do you think there's even a chance, really, that the political pressure on the inside in Iraq will be such that, you know, from here through 2012, the insistence on the Status of Forces Agreement deadline for kicking America out by December 31st, 2011, will stick?
Yes.
I think what we have now between the U.S. and Iraq is a binding bilateral agreement recognized by the United Nations and by the Security Council.
And actually, for the first time in the last, you know, eight years or seven years, the U.S. does not have any other legal options to stay in Iraq other than renegotiating the bilateral agreement.
I personally think it is impossible to get a longer U.S. presence in Iraq through renegotiating the agreement, because no one in the Iraqi parliament would dare to say that they would like to see the U.S. longer there.
That would be a political suicide.
And I think it would be even harmful for the Obama administration even to bring the issue up, because he has repeated that so many times internally in the U.S. and internationally in the U.N. and in the entire speech to the Muslim world.
And he repeats it over and over that he is committed to implementing the upcoming two deadlines of withdrawal.
The first one is the August 31st deadline of this year.
It's a self-imposed deadline not included in the bilateral agreement.
President Obama imposed the deadline on himself, and he has announced repeatedly that he is committed to withdrawing all combat forces, bringing the number of forces to less than 50 by August 31st, and ending all combat operations and shifting the mission to a non-combat mission that would bring home the rest of the troops.
The second deadline, which is the bilateral deadline, bilateral binding deadline, which is the end of next year, we have President Obama confirming this over and over and over.
The last time he confirmed it was this weekend through a speech to the Iraqi people where he promised that the deadline will be followed.
And we have two sections, two policy sections that support that.
One of them is in the defense appropriation of this year, and one is in the defense authorization of this year.
That requires both of these deadlines to be met and all money appropriated to Iraq to be linked to that.
So there are many indicators that the U.S. government is taking its commitment seriously.
I think there is a lot of work to make sure that there is enough congressional oversight and grassroots oversight to make sure that these deadlines will become reality.
But I think that we are on the right path generally.
There are two threats, I think.
There are two dangerous positions regarding the deadline.
There is the position that is too skeptical, that says the U.S. will never withdraw.
You're so naive that you believe that the U.S. will withdraw.
We can't do anything to make the U.S. government abide by its commitment.
And then there is another position that says, you know, Obama will just solve it.
We don't even have to contact him anymore.
Let's just go home and wait for him and this war.
And I think my position is somewhere in the middle.
I recognize that we have very strong commitments that are recognized by the Iraqi government, the U.S. government, and the United Nations.
We have very strong oversight commitments by the U.S. Congress, and we have strong promises by the president, but we still have to do a lot of work to ensure that the U.S. takes its commitment seriously and ends up withdrawing all the U.S. troops and all the U.S. contractors by the deadline of the end of next year.
Well, do you think that a parliamentary system will last?
I mean, believe me, I'm not sitting here trying to give any credit to the Republicans or anything.
But I guess the conventional wisdom will be, nah, you'll end up with another Saddam Hussein rule in that place if they kick America out.
Well, it's the Iraqi's option, you know.
If the Iraqis end up having another Saddam Hussein, it's their option.
I hope they will not.
I hope that all of the work that has been taking place in the last six years, despite the occupation, despite all of the destruction, that the Iraqis are pushing to a functional democratic process.
It's still very dysfunctional and weak and primitive, but it seems like there is a consensus that people want to let this system work.
We saw that 62% of the Iraqi public participated in this week's election, and all Iraq's different political factions ended up participating, even though some of them were banned by the ruling parties, they still participated with the rest of their parties.
So there is political will.
But I don't think that is none of our business to say, we will give you your country back and stop occupying you, only if you had a nice and democratic government.
I mean, who are we to say this to the Iraqi public?
So the U.S. withdrawal should not be conditional to that, and the U.S. intervention is not justified by that either.
There are many other dictatorships in the region and in the world that are very strong allies to the U.S. government.
I don't think we are invading Saudi Arabia anytime soon to liberate them from their dictatorship.
As America proves, democracy is no guarantee of liberty anyway.
And I certainly don't want to concede some point about, Newsweek has to be correct about, wow, America really did right after all, look at them all voting and their purple fingers, and that unless we can declare victory based on the 15 different bogus excuses they've given us, that we have to check off the list, only then can we go, or anything like that.
But I do hope for the best of the Iraqi people, and it is a country that has natural resources that can be a wealthy society, and Lord knows they're going to need to spend a lot of wealth rebuilding what America has destroyed there.
And there are still millions of refugees waiting in Syria and Jordan, because there's nothing for them to come home to, even after all this time, right?
That is correct.
There are 4.5 million displaced Iraqis, half of them outside the country and the other inside the country.
All Iraqi sects are represented in these 4.5 million displaced Iraqis, whether they were in Syria or Jordan or inside Iraq or in the U.S.
And that is a major problem that has not been solved.
Actually, just yesterday I met with the representative of the Refugees International, the U.S. international organization, actually, that works on refugees.
She just came back from Baghdad and other cities, and she showed me pictures of 10 cities that displaced Iraqis internally live in.
There are still 450,000 Iraqis living in 10 cities until this day.
So it's a very miserable situation, whether they lived in tents or in houses or apartments in Amman or Damascus.
It is a massive, massive problem, because many of them have capacity to rebuild the country.
Many of them can actually.
These are the human resources that Iraq will need to rebuild itself.
So I agree with you.
Iraq will need long years and hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the destruction that happened in the country in the last 19 or 20 years since the beginning of the war between the U.S. and Iraq.
And I think the U.S. withdrawal is an extremely important first step towards the success of that process.
It's not the last step, but it's a very important first step that would allow Iraqis to work together, have their fights together, and then work to rebuild the country and have reconstruction and reach to one point maybe in five years or ten years that they can put the country on the path of development, start developing the country and have a stable and prosperous society.
Everybody, that's Ray Jarrar.
The website is redinthemiddle.blogspot.com.
He's Senior Fellow on the Middle East for Peace Action and Peace Action Education Fund.
Thanks very much for your time, and cheers to independence.
Thank you so much for having me.
