03/23/10 – Michael Hastings – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is Michael Hastings.
He writes the Hastings Report at TrueSlant.com.
He's the author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad, A Modern War Story.
He's a regular contributor to GQ and used to be Baghdad correspondent for Newsweek.
His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, Slate, Salon, Foreign Policy, the LA Times, and other publications of repute.
And again, you can find the Hastings Report at TrueSlant.com.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
All right, so, big deal going on in Iraq.
What do we know about the results of the elections there?
We know it's close between Prime Minister Maliki, whose party State of Law is in about a neck-and-neck tie with former Prime Minister Ayatollah Ali's party, Iraqiya, which is a secular party.
And it's interesting, I guess, I've been over this with some other guests on the show recently, but if you could just explain your best understanding of how it is that this guy, Alawi, has a chance at all.
I mean, when they did the election in 2005, despite the CIA's best efforts, he got, what, 1% or less.
He did as well as Chalabi before.
Sure.
I think what happened was that during Alawi's term as Prime Minister, he did two things that were very controversial.
He ordered an attack on Fallujah and ordered an attack on Najaf.
So, when the first elections happened in 2005, he wasn't very popular.
But then you have – after 2005, you have three years of horrific violence, and then you have this sort of groundswell of public opinion in Iraq, which says, look, we don't want Islamists.
We don't want religious parties running these things.
Our best bet is to go back to someone secular, someone who people sort of view as a Saddam-like, and that's the picture of Ayatollah Ali.
So, even though, really, to a great degree, the war – well, a giant part of the war of Iraq was his fault by ordering the attacks on Najaf and Fallujah, and got all that ball rolling with the El Salvador option and the civil war, he wasn't there.
And he wasn't in charge during the worst of the Shiite death squads running around and so forth, and so now his hands are relatively clean.
Certainly, and I think the main thing is the sort of dissatisfaction by secular Iraqis with these religious parties.
And the party that suffered the most in the last two elections, the provincial elections, this election, has been a party basically called the Iraqi National Alliance, which has been a largely Shiite, very religious political bloc that's backed by Iran.
So Iraqis view Alawi as, well, he's a strong man, he's a secular, he drinks whiskey, he sort of understands how Iraqi politics work, so his reputation has sort of rebounded.
I mean, one of the funny anecdotes I heard when someone – sort of the exact question you just posed – someone asked a voter in Anbar province and said, why are you voting – and Anbars were Fallujah, and Fallujah was what Alawi attacked – he said, why are you voting for Alawi?
Aren't you upset that he attacked Fallujah?
The guy says, yeah, but he also attacked Najaf, so he hit both the Sunnis and the Shiites, so he's not playing favorites.
And I think that's a legitimate – I mean, I think that's really a popular opinion.
Well, and it was – wasn't it General Sanchez or Casey or whoever that attacked Fallujah and Najaf, not him anyway?
Yeah, I mean, he went down there, and I think he was – I think in the end they feel that it was a mistake.
People feel that they did what they could, they tried to lessen the damage.
I mean, I actually just interviewed his daughter recently who's helping him on the campaign, and her basic take on it is, look, in 2004 things were not as bad as what happened in 2006, 2007.
So her argument is that actually, under her father's tenure, things were not – things actually were okay, and obviously they were still pretty significant level of violence.
Well, so much for the Arabs' long memory.
I'm glad of that.
Here I thought America was going to be suffering revenge attacks for the next 500 years or something.
But apparently they get over violence pretty quickly.
Well, we probably will be suffering revenge attacks the next 500 years.
But I think – but what it shows is not – what it shows is just how traumatized Iraq was by the horrible sectarian violence of basically 2005 to mid-2008, that it caused such horrible trauma that they look back to the days of Fallujah and Najaf in 2004 with rose-cutter glasses.
They say, wow, you know, we want the guy who did that.
And I think also, more importantly, I think that the larger trend and why both Maliki and Alawi are in this dogfight for the lead is because they represent a strong man.
They represent stability.
They represent, as I said before, Saddam's light.
And that's what a large portion of Iraqis want right now.
They just – you know, democracy, sure, yeah, they'll go vote.
But what they really want is someone who can bring order to their country.
Yeah.
Well, they're like Americans.
I mean, that's how the people in this country still act after September 11th, which was almost a decade ago now.
No, it's true.
It's funny, because I was just having a discussion with a friend the other day, and my friend said the same thing.
You know, how much – we're willing to give up a lot of our own freedom, you know, in the name of security.
And in Iraq, it's no different.
In fact, I was interviewing an official in the Iraqi Election Commission.
And this official was actually in charge of the election, who you would think would be, you know, a Western liberal secularist.
And she told me, she said, look, you know, if Saddam Hussein was on the ballot today, 99% of the people in this office would vote for him.
You know, and this was a Kurdish woman who said this to me as well.
But I think, you know, it's somewhat of a cliché to say, oh, Iraqis want a strong man.
But, you know, these election results bear that out.
All right, now tell us about all these demands for recounts, because it seems like, you know, even in the worst of the Bush versus Gore thing, there was never a threat.
If you think back to 2000, no one thought for one minute that this was going to turn into violence in the streets or anything like that.
It will be worked out in the courts, no big deal.
But, I don't know, is that a safe bet in Iraq?
I don't think anyone knows.
I think it's power politics.
I think Maliki's people, you know, Maliki's party, the Dawah party, was essentially in exile for 30 years until the U.S. brought them back into power.
And once you have power, you want to hold on to it.
You know, and that's what this is about.
This is about Maliki trying to hold on to power and using whatever sort of brinkmanship, in this case, you know, calling for a recount, whatever tactic he's going to use to hold on to power.
So, will it result in violence?
I think it's hard to say.
I think what we're seeing, and this is sort of the argument I've been making, is that Iraq is sort of flipping back to its more familiar authoritarianism and sort of this experiment in democracy that the Americans tried to enact over there is essentially failing.
And when Maliki, you know, whoever this next government is, the question is, look, if they're not willing to give up power when there's 90,000 Americans there and heavy American pressure on them, what's the chances of four years from now of the next government willing to give up power peacefully?
But I think these parties have shown a willingness to play chicken with the security of Iraq, so they will continue to make these threats, they will continue to go as close to the edge as possible, and are willing to accept a pretty high level of violence to maintain power.
All right, now what's changed in the Iraqi National Alliance?
My best understanding is that the Supreme Islamic Council has been marginalized and that it's all about Muqtada al-Sadr in the Iraqi National Alliance now, is that right?
That's right, I think there's still important players, I mean, Hakeem, they still have Hakeem Talista, who's one of the more important players in the Iraqi National Alliance, who's the ISKI guy.
They have their own militia, they have backing from Iran, they're still important players, but yes, certainly Sadr could play the role of kingmaker in terms of choosing who the next prime minister is.
So essentially, someone is going to have to make a deal with the Sadrists and the Shiite Islamists, they're going to play a major role in who forms the government, which would indicate that whoever is going to be prime minister would probably have to have the blessing of Iran.
And that's why it's sort of difficult to imagine either Alawi or Maliki becoming prime minister again, though it's entirely possible, but they have such poor relations with Iran.
Well now, help me break down some of these numbers here, because I guess the best I understand it, well, as you said, it's a parliamentary system, so whether Maliki or Alawi's slate comes out ahead, that still doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be prime minister.
And I'm sorry, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think if I remember right, it was basically the Alawi's group got approximately 70 seats in the parliament, Maliki's group got approximately 70 seats, and then the others have somewhere near 40 or something like that, which means that there are very few combinations of alliances and coalitions that can be put together to guarantee who's in charge.
Basically, Alawi or Maliki, either one of them is going to have to ally with Muqtada al-Sadr in order to become prime minister, is that right?
I think that's right.
I mean, literally, this is not a dodge of the question, but you ask the most knowledgeable experts on what's going to happen in terms of the Iraqi government formation process over the next few months.
Right, that's what I'm doing right now.
Right.
And I'm telling you, no one really has a clue.
And I say that not to dodge the question, but because the amount of – look what happened last time.
Last time, how did Maliki get his job?
Maliki got his job after six months of protracted negotiations.
He was not even – this guy wasn't even on the political map, but he became this compromised candidate who no one had heard of before.
Now, this time around, from my reporting, I've talked to Alawi's people.
They have said that they're most likely – they've already started to reach out to Sadrists.
So you could see that as a powerful alliance, the Sadrists joining with Alawi, possibly the Hakeem's people also supporting Alawi.
But you never know if they're going to – the question is, is Alawi acceptable?
Because he has this sort of Baathist baggage, will he be an acceptable pick for prime minister?
Maliki has been politically isolated.
He's alienated a lot of his friends.
He really doesn't have that many – too many friends left, which is why I think he's so adamant about a recount and trying to make the case that he's the legitimate leader of the country.
So no matter what the results are, he's going to stay in power.
But yeah, I think – and then you have the Kurds come in, and who are they going to support?
They don't like Maliki right now, and they could probably live with Alawi.
So really there's all sorts of combinations.
We might – the next prime minister could be someone we've never heard of.
That's a possibility.
But I would think that right now, going into the sort of horse-trading season, Maliki seems to be in a fairly strong position.
And even though many people want Alawi to be prime minister, I think the sort of baggage of his Baathist past, or alleged Baathist past, could weigh him down.
Well, and he's a former CIA agent and truck bomber and has a really nasty reputation.
Right, which is why people like him.
Not the CIA part, but it's actually – that's what his sort of appeal is.
I read something like that, but I read it in the New York Times.
I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to take it seriously or not, and it was a quote of an Iraqi saying that – yeah, those reports from the Australian papers back in the day where Alawi lined up four alleged criminals up against a fence and shot them all in the head.
Yeah, that's why I like that guy.
He can really get things done.
And I just thought, well, is that a quote from somebody inside the Green Zone, or is that an actual person?
That's why people like Alawi.
It's funny.
I talked to his daughter, as I mentioned, who was working on his campaign, and I asked her, I said, you know, what do you think about that story of your father lining up these alleged criminals and executing himself?
And she said, well, I asked him about it, and he laughed when I did.
And then she said, I don't think he'd do something like that, but – and I'm not saying he did it – it seems to me that Iraqis actually think that that's a good thing, because you need people to take these terrorists head-on and seriously.
And I don't think she's – so this is his daughter who's saying that even if he did do this, it's not the worst thing for Iraqi politics.
And I think that's a popular – that it really is a legitimate popular sentiment.
And I think the best analogy sort of to compare different countries, it's the Putin analogy, right?
It's the fact that after a sort of failed adoption of Western economic reforms in the 90s, Russia turns back to a sort of czarist, Stalinist-like figure in Putin to choose him, and he's very popular.
So again, we're getting into cliches and cultural stereotypes, but I think in this case that there's actually truth to it.
Yeah.
Well, and it's really too bad too, because, I mean, if there was ever going to be a chance for so-called self-government or whatever over there, it's all the violence that America has brought to that society that's made it possible.
I mean, even if you take – well, like if you just go back to – I mean, hell, I don't know, maybe you were there even this early on, but I remember there being – as much as I opposed the war in the first place, there was clearly a window of about two or three months before the window closed, where the average Iraqi attitude seemed to be, all right, well, thanks for getting rid of Saddam Hussein for us, now get the hell out of here.
And if only that had happened, maybe things could be better, but we're, what, 15,000 truck bombings away from there now, and how could there possibly be a real democratic system take hold there, especially in a place that didn't have one before?
It was always run by mob bosses.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's clear that – I'm not very optimistic about Iraq's democratic future.
I think that there are people in Iraq who would like to have a democracy, but I think the overwhelming sentiment is really they'll take stability over democracy, you know, and that's represented in how they voted this time, it's represented in what everyone tells you when you do reporting.
So this idea that there's going to be some Western liberal democracy is a complete fantasy, probably always was a complete fantasy.
I just don't – I think if you wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East, there are probably better ways to do it than launch a preemptive war against a sovereign nation.
That's just my opinion.
But Iraq is still a country that's dominated by personalities and not institutions.
You know, the institutions of Iraq are not strong.
What's strong are the personalities.
The rule of law is not strong.
What's strong is what can be done in the back rooms and how people actually pursue their own personal agendas.
That's what motivates the politics there.
It's not – you know, there's not the executive branch, you know, legislative branch.
Let me ask you this, because, you know, this whole government over there has been created by the United States, basically.
Or at least, you know, under occupation.
As George Bush said about Lebanon, you can't possibly have a free election with an occupation army there when he was talking about the Syrians.
And I just wonder whether – you know, it was always said for years and years that, yeah, right, well, they're the government of the green zone.
And whoever it is, whether it's Jafari or whether it's Maliki or whether it's Alawi or whether it's the next guy or the Ayatollah Sistani himself, nobody's going to run this government that the U.S. created without the U.S. Army and Marine Corps there to enforce it.
Is it – do you think it's really the case that the government so-called of Iraq actually is the government enough that it could remain so without America there propping it up forever?
Yes, I think it will remain – I think so.
I think the government is powerful enough now.
So the institution of its parliament, for example.
Right, right.
Well, who knows?
I mean, it could just become a sham parliament.
I mean, it basically almost is a sham parliament.
But essentially, I think that Maliki, under Maliki, whoever takes the reins of the next government is going to have this massive security apparatus, literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers and police to back up their power.
So regardless of whether the U.S. is there or not, the groundwork has been laid for what I've been calling kind of a democratic police state, meaning there are these – Like we have.
Right.
Something like that, but it's a lot more armed guys industry where every sort of neighborhood has its own checkpoints and everyone – people have their own little kingdom.
But there is this sort of somewhat of a unifying force above from Baghdad.
I think what's interesting is, in fact, how little influence the United States has left in Iraq.
I mean, what leverage do we really have?
The question is – and I think we look at what happened in Afghanistan with the Karzai election.
Look, it was clear Karzai stole the election.
U.S. officials said, hey, Karzai stole the election.
But then it was like, oh, wait, Karzai's our guy.
Yeah, and it's too late for us to try to steal it for Abdullah Abdullah, so we might as well just let him have it.
Yeah, exactly.
And the Iraqi politicians are pretty savvy and they're pretty good at manipulating the Americans to get what they want.
So I think they realize they have all the cards.
Well, my argument used to always be that the reason the British, the Americans, whoever else always propped up Saddam Hussein and people like him was because – like in Rwanda or whatever, take your textbook imperial colonization plan.
You prop up the minority to rule over the majority because they need you.
But in Iraq, what George Bush did was he overthrew the minority dictatorship and he empowered the majority.
Ayatollah Sistani said, hey, if you believe in God, go outside and demand one man, one vote.
And the Shiite majority won.
But then as you're saying now, the people of Iraq, after going through all the civil war and everything else, are so sick and tired of the sectarian violence that was really foisted on them, they're now voting for the nationalists who's trying to say he's colorblind between Sunni and Shia and so forth.
And so I'm not sure if my argument that they are going to kick us out, because ultimately Maliki and his Shiite alliance doesn't need us, maybe no longer sticks.
But then again, I guess if Alawi has a real majority or a real majority support, then he could kick us out just as easy, huh?
Well, I think the United States is going to have a relationship with Iraq for years to come.
Meaning bases.
Meaning bases, meaning money, training, selling military contracts to them, giving them F-16s, tanks, these kinds of things.
The question is, but Iraq, they're always going to be able to play the Iran threat off the U.S.
So that's why the U.S. is always...
So my prediction is actually, you know, they'll use America as they want to use America.
They'll be playing Americans rather than the other way around.
I don't see Iraq as sort of a puppet regime at all.
I think, in fact, that they've asserted, you know, they're going to try to assert their sovereignty.
They're not really going to follow the U.S. direction.
And the U.S. won't have much recourse.
I mean, what are we going to do?
Are we going to withdraw?
I mean, are we going to give up our bases?
Are we going to not give them military aid and support?
No, we're going to give them military aid and support regardless of what their government looks like.
And they know that.
They have all, you know, so how are we really going to influence their behavior?
And I think the answer is we're not going to be able to influence their behavior, especially when we have even less troops there.
So I think it's a little, it's not a one way or another.
I think what we're going to see is just Iraq sort of manipulating the U.S. to continue to get sort of, to have them basically support them while at the same time they'll be getting support from the Iranians and the Saudis and everywhere else.
Well, you know, Hillary Clinton during the campaign said, well, you know, maybe we could just keep some air bases up in Kurdistan, something like that.
That seemed to basically be an admission of defeat, at least for, you know, keeping bases anywhere near the majority part of Arab Iraq.
Well, it's interesting.
I asked Ordierno at a press conference about two weeks ago.
That's the general in charge of the place there.
Yeah, yeah, General Ordierno.
Yeah, General Ordierno is the top U.S. commander in Iraq and he's been there a number of years.
I got him on record for the first time.
I said, OK, how many Americans are going to be here in Iraq after 2011?
2011 is the deadline when all combat troops are supposed to be out of Iraq.
He said, well, if the Iraqi government asked us to have troops here, we'll leave some troops here.
I said, well, how many?
He said, well, you know, I don't, he said, maybe we'll leave a major troop presence.
I said, major?
What does that mean?
And he said, no, in his mind, a major troop presence would be only 2,000 or 3,000 soldiers left in Iraq.
That, to me, was a surprising statement on his part, because I would assume, and just from my other reporting, suggest that, you know, there will be a heavier presence than 2,000 or 3,000 Americans.
But, you know, Ordierno is saying 2,000 or 3,000, which I would be surprised if that happened.
But I think it's interesting the fact that, you know, right now the top guy in Iraq is saying, no, there's not going to be a heavy U.S. presence in Iraq.
Well, was he shining you on?
I mean, right before Barack Obama gave his Camp Lejeune speech a year ago, Jim Michalczewski at NBC News went on and said, well, I don't know what this president guy is saying.
Over here at the Pentagon, they're saying we're never leaving, ever.
It's ours.
And we're never giving it up, no matter who we've got to kill to keep.
Yeah, and I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I think from the White House's perspective is that, you know, they want to at least keep up the fiction that there's going to be not zero, but a very low number of troops in Iraq, because they don't want Obama to be accused of, you know, going back on his promise to end the war.
Or do you know, I don't know if he's, I mean, that might very well be the plan right now, to only have 2,000 or 3,000 troops.
But then there's a huge caveat there, right?
The caveat is, well, if the Iraqi government asks us to stay, then we could have more troops there.
And so I think, I've talked to top officials in the Iraqi government, and they are planning to ask us to stay.
And all the different sort of activities that they'll want us to be doing, by my sort of rough calculations, would be over 3,000 troops.
So I just think it's interesting that they put out a number saying 2,000, 3,000, so we'll have something to judge that against when the end of 2011 comes to see how many troops are actually really there.
All right, now I'm sorry, because I'm out of time, and I'm going to ask you a question that demands a really long answer.
But maybe you can try to shorten it a little bit, but whatever.
I want to know whether you think that there's a chance over the long term that Kurdistan would break away from the rest of Iraq, and then you'd have the whole problem of the dominoes of all the Kurds that live in Turkey, Syria, and Iran, and whether they would be separatists.
Because I know there at least used to be a pretty strong independent Kurdistan kind of movement.
I mean, hell, it was one of Woodrow Wilson's 14 points, right, going way back to the day, that there ought to be an independent Kurdistan.
I think there's a 99% chance that Kurdistan is going to break away from Iraq.
What?
Yeah, eventually.
I mean, is it going to be 20 years from now?
Maybe.
But I think there's a very high chance that Iraqi Kurdistan will essentially become its own country.
Well, we need to have a whole other interview on that, Michael, I think.
Well, I mean, I haven't been up in Kurdistan in a while, but the last time I was up there they had maps.
I was in the Kurdistan Minister of Defense office and he had a map of Kurdistan.
It wasn't Iraq, it was Kurdistan on his wall, and I asked him that question.
He said, you know, 20 years, we'll have our own country.
All right, everybody, that's Michael Hastings, True Slant.
You can also find him sometimes in the Washington Post.
And where else can you most often be read there?
True Slant, GQ, and if you have a chance, the paperback just came out of my book, I would be honored for your listeners to read it.
Oh, okay, right on, and that is I Lost My Heart in Baghdad.
I'd like to read that.
Great, excellent.
See if I can get Angela to order me a copy.
All right, thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
No problem, thank you.