06/14/10 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

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We're going to start, go ahead and start right now, with our managing news editor at antiwar.com where I'm an assistant editor.
His name is Jason Ditz.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's great to have you back here, Kit.
And it's, everyone, look at news.antiwar.com, and you can find all of Jason's great work.
It's just, it's such good stuff.
You know, it's almost like a Raimondo column with all the links to all the proof, only it's kind of more news summaries, a little bit of opinion in there, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
But basically, if the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune are all covering a story and they have the different aspects, you'll just go to news.antiwar.com.
You find the one big story and then the three different aspects all put together in one place for you with links to the original sources.
And, well, it's just antiwar.com in a nutshell.
It's awesome.
News.antiwar.com.
And one of the things that Jason has been following in depth since the elections a couple of months ago is the struggle for political power in Iraq and whether Nouri al-Maliki will stay the prime minister there or whether other coalitions will be able to replace him.
Very interesting stuff.
And I think the last headline I read from you, Jason, said that the parliament is coming together next week, but we still don't know who's got the votes, who the prime minister might be.
Well, yeah, the parliament actually met this morning for the first time.
They administered the oath of office to everybody and pretty much immediately went into recess.
So the whole process took about 18 minutes and they're in recess now.
So was there anything happen at all or they had just enough of a quorum to vote to recess the thing?
What happened there?
Well, there seems to have been some frustration among the Iraqi National Alliance, particularly the Saudis in that alliance, because the U.S. ambassador was allowed to attend the first session of parliament.
So they originally threatened to walk out and finally they stayed for the oath of office and then it was just recessed immediately thereafter.
So nobody was allowed to give talks or anything.
That's interesting.
Do you have any indication of what the American was doing there?
I'm not really sure if he was just invited to be there or what.
They said he was there and it seems to have been an issue for them.
Maybe trying to influence the vote one way or the other or get somebody angry on one side or the other?
Maybe.
Or maybe just for a public relations thing or a photo op or something.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so now help us break this down.
It's hard to remember the names of all these different parties.
Hopefully people can remember the INA.
That's the Iraqi National Alliance, right?
Right.
And now that's Muqtada al-Sadr and what's left of the Supreme Islamic Council?
Yes.
And then the Iraqi party, that's Alawi's party, right?
Right.
And they're more secularist and they have a lot of Sunni members of parliament now.
Okay.
Now those are the two main parties that we're dealing with.
We can bring the Kurds into discussion here in a minute, but that's basically the big split between who almost has enough members for a majority in the parliament, right?
Well, there's also the State of Law bloc, Nouri al-Maliki's bloc.
And then, of course, that's the big question is who's going to ally with him or not.
So help us break this down.
First of all, I think pretty much people are familiar with Nouri al-Maliki.
He's been the prime minister there for a while.
But why don't you refresh our memory a little bit about who Muqtada al-Sadr is and then a little bit about who this Alawi is.
There are a lot of people, as you well know, there are a lot of people reading antiwar.com who were kids back when Alawi was the prime minister of Iraq and don't know anything about him.
Well, Muqtada al-Sadr is an enormously influential cleric among his followers.
He's a Shiite cleric.
He's actually been in Iran almost exclusively over the last few years getting additional education.
And it sounds like his eventual goal is to become an ayatollah.
Well, and his father and his uncle were both martyred by Saddam Hussein, which means, and they were very prominent Shiite clerics.
I think his father, one of the founders of the Dawah party, which means he's got gravitas, right?
He snaps his fingers and tens of thousands of people salute, click heels and ask their orders, huh?
Right, and his cousin Jafar al-Sadr, who's in Maliki's block, is another one that pretty much on the basis of his family name alone has considerable influence now.
Well, go ahead and tell us about Alawi, and then I want to ask you about the relationship between Maliki and Sadr here.
But remind us who this Iyad Alawi is, Jason.
He's the first of a few prime ministers that Iraq has had, but he seems to have undergone kind of a major shift, because he was sort of a typical Shiite semi-religious leader in his term in office, and now he's sort of abandoned that in favor of a more secular approach and trying to bring the religions together into a single block.
Yeah, I think we talked with Patrick Coburn a bit about how, even though really a lot of it was Alawi's fault, or a lot of the worst of the setup for the worst of the Civil War took place during Alawi's time, he was out.
That was the big handover of sovereignty in the end of June of 2004, and so the real worst of the Civil War in 2005-2006-2007, he wasn't there, and is not tarred with the guilt from that, even though it was really partially his fault.
Right, and he's sort of seen as a fresh candidate, even though he's been there before, because he seems to have changed quite a bit over the last several years.
And so he's really much more of a nationalist, trying to...even though, as you say, personally he's a Shia, he's much more trying to work with the Sunni parties out of power and the Kurds, and try to make more of a nationalist group, huh?
Right, and he's had quite a bit of problems, but when his Iraqi bloc was first getting off the ground, the Maliki government was trying to get a lot of his Sunni allies disqualified, claiming that they were former Ba'athists, and actually succeeded in a few cases.
Well, a lot of this is personal, huh?
Sort of like the split in the Libertarian movement, you find out it's not ideology, these people all hate each other from 25 years ago.
Muqtada al-Sadr and Nuri al-Maliki, they're natural allies, as you just said.
Sadr's nephew is in Maliki's bloc, and yet these guys have been at war before.
You go back to the summer of 2007, or well, I guess summer of 2006, was it?
I forget now, when was the big offensive against the Sadrists.
But is that basically the problem here?
Even though these guys are the natural alliance, they just can't seem to get along?
Right, there's a lot of bad feelings about what's gone on over the last several years, and Sadr's bloc is insisting that one of the terms for supporting Maliki would be that they release a lot of the prisoners that they have that are members of his bloc, from the previous military crackdown.
Plus, immediately before the election, the Associated Press had an arrest warrant that they were given that was signed by Maliki, calling for the arrest of Sadr himself.
The warrant was signed just a couple of days before the election.
So he was apparently worried that Sadr would return to the country right ahead of the election and kind of sway the results in his bloc's favor.
Hilarious.
You know, all this fighting between the Dawa party and Sadr and the Supreme Islamic Council guys and stuff, it's almost comedy to me.
It seems like the Ayatollah Khamenei or Sistani could just say, all right, look, it's going to be like this.
Because really, they all work for the Iranians anyway, don't they?
Pretty much, yeah.
In fact, in the coalition talks between State of Law and the INA, they've formally agreed to give the Shiite clergy basically veto power over everything that a government that would be formed by the two of them would do.
Yeah, the Islamic Republic of Iraq, that's what they call it, from the George Bush Constitution of 2005, right?
Right.
Well, I keep seeing the headlines about violence in Iraq, and I don't know if TV will even say the word Iraq at all.
I don't know if it's banned or what.
But if the top of the hour news or anybody ever says anything about Iraq, it would be, well, there was a bombing here, a bombing there.
But I read the news a little bit more closely, as I know you do, and it looks to me like American military forces are still going on search and destroy missions and killing people all the time there.
Well, yeah, they're definitely still going out on patrol, and there's still over 90,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq.
With more than how many contractors, do you know?
That I'm not sure, but I think it's about as many.
Well, not all of those are mercenaries, but some of them are.
Right.
Some of them would be civilian contractors that are just building bases or what have you.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's 2010, seven-plus years of this.
People are sick and tired of this story.
People got sick and tired of this story as soon as they realized that they lost.
What, we lost the Iraq War?
Ah, rats.
And then they just turned it off.
And, you know, I think it's important just to say the word Iraq.
Like, hey, everybody driving around in your truck, that war's not over.
Occupation's not over, particularly for those people driving around listening to this right now who actually cheered for the war.
This is your responsibility.
How dare you just turn it off?
People are dying over there.
Right, and the death toll has risen over the last few months from the relative quiet of last year.
Right, because we keep insisting on democracy there, which just makes everybody want to kill each other when they lose the vote.
Same as it ever was.
This is one of the main reasons that the Civil War broke out in the first place, was the big purple-finger election in 2005 that even Jon Stewart went, wow, they got purple on their fingers, so I guess democracy is an end in itself and everything's great now, except that, no, all it meant was the people who were kicked completely out of power felt like they had no recourse whatsoever but to pick up their rifles.
Right, and the Sunnis seem to have been more or less resigned to being a, the Sunni Arabs at least, sort of a disenfranchised minority until this election, and when Iraqi ended up winning a plurality, which nobody really expected...
Iraqi, again, that's always blocked, the alliance with the Sunnis there.
Right, and he ends up winning the largest number of seats of any bloc, and suddenly the Sunni Arabs believe, oh wow, we have a chance at having influence again.
But now it seems like, you know, Maliki had some members of the Iraqi bloc arrested, and one of them got assassinated, and now there's talk that State of Law is going to form an alliance with the other Shiite religious party, the INA, and Iraqi might be cut entirely out of the picture and end up in the opposition.
Well now, the Iraqi bloc, they've kind of put out rumors, just like the INA has, saying that, oh, we've made an alliance with the State of Law party, and I guess they also said we've made an alliance with the Kurds, and that's going to give us enough seats in the parliament that all of us will be able to get that chair.
The rumor was that they made an alliance with the INA, not State of Law.
Oh, pardon me, yeah, strike that reverse.
But yeah, they said that they were putting the finishing touches on a deal with the INA and the Kurds, which would give them a considerable majority in the government, and put State of Law as sort of an irrelevant minority party.
But since then, State of Law has continued to insist that they've already got a deal with the INA, and that it's a done deal for them.
So, I mean, which of these two ends up with it still remains to be seen, and the INA basically has final say over who ends up forming a government, because neither of those blocs has enough seats to form it without them.
Yeah, well, and you know, it's all a matter of timing and circumstance, I guess, because in one sense it would seem like the natural alliance would be between Maliki's party and Sadr's party.
But then again, Muqtada al-Sadr, at least over the years, if we go back quite a few years anyway, his big split from the Iraqi National Alliance, and particularly the Supreme Islamic Council guys, was that he was an Iraqi nationalist.
And like during the battles of 2004 in Najaf and Fallujah, and certainly in the spring, the first battle of Fallujah and Najaf there, as soon as the battle of Najaf was over, Sadr sent men in pickup trucks to go help in Fallujah, and was trying to, in fact as late as December 2005, they were trying to do a government of national salvation, they called it, where the Shia and Sunni Iraqi nationalists would join an alliance, insisting on one and only thing, that the Americans get the hell out.
And in fact, that's how Maliki got the job in the first place, was that was his promise to Sadr, that he would never back down the timetable for kicking America out by the end of 2011.
So I suppose it really is possible, isn't it, that rather than having a too-easy-to-guess-at Shia alliance, that you could really have a nationalist Iraqi alliance with one overriding goal, the expulsion of the American occupation.
Right, and it seems like Sadr could make that happen pretty much at a moment's notice, just by saying that's what's going to happen.
But so far it seems like the bloc is sort of feeling out both sides, and seeing how much they can get out of them politically, and how many key ministries they could control, and it seems like they're not necessarily big on making that a key demand.
Well, we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks for your coverage, and I'll have you back as soon as we know something.
I really appreciate it, Jason.
Sure, thanks for having me.
Everybody, the heroic Jason Ditson, news.antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.