Alright y'all, welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Wharton, appreciate y'all tuning in.
We got the Fox News and Cannes commercials version going out at LRN.
FM, we got the little bit of Slayer and some Poison Idea and some Public Enemy type sort of mix going out to ChaosRadioAustin.org, whichever you like.
The show is three hours a day, five days a week, that's nine to noon Pacific time, and at LRN.
FM, Chaos Radio Austin replays the first, well not replays, simulcasts, whatever you call it, the first two hours of the show, Tuesday through Friday, so if you can't stand the downsized EC commercial no more, go to ChaosRadioAustin.org.
Alright our first guest today is Jason Ditz, he's the news editor at AntiWar.com, and boy oh boy is his writing useful to me, and could be to you, news.antiwar.com, welcome back to the show Jason, how are you?
I'm doing good Scott, thanks for having me.
Alright, the subject is Iraq, I guess let's start with the politics, remind us again who's in charge of which of the major parties here, and why can't they form a government again?
Well there's really three major parties, there's the Iraqiyah bloc, which is Ayatollah's bloc, they're kind of the secularist bloc, then there's current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's state of law bloc, and the Iraqi National Alliance, which is sort of a Shiite religious bloc, which was being run by the Supreme Islamic Council before the election, but since the election seems to have been taken over by Muqtada al-Sadr's faction.
And now, the election was what, the middle of March?
March 7th.
March 7th, okay, and so now here we are wrapping up June, heading into July 2010, and it's not that they haven't sat down to have the vote yet, to decide who's the Prime Minister, it's that there's no end in sight to the madness of trying to figure out who the Prime Minister's going to be, is that right?
Right, each of the three blacks has their own favorite Prime Minister, and none of them seem to be willing to budge on it.
That's a very strange thing, I gotta tell you, well, you and I have talked about this as the case has developed here, on its face it seemed like, look, Muqtada al-Sadr and Nouri al-Maliki, they might have personal hard feelings, but ultimately, they're the done deal here, right?
And then yet, here it's been months, and they haven't worked out a thing.
What is, is it simply, you know, Sadr won't forgive the attack of summer 2007?
Well, it seems like, I mean, they've announced this as a done deal twice now, and each time it's come out that it seems like it wasn't much of a done deal at all, but it seems like the disagreements are primarily over who's going to be Prime Minister, because the Sadrite faction doesn't trust Maliki, and Maliki insists he's the only possible choice.
And also, the Sadrists have insisted that a lot of their prisoners be released, members of the old Mahdi army and other Sadr supporters just be released from detention, and Maliki largely hasn't done that.
He's released a few, but not nearly as many as they've demanded.
Now, just in the overall ranking, obviously this doesn't necessarily mean a plurality or a majority or what have you, but just in the ranking of the vote in March, we know Alawi's party got the surprise win by just a little bit, but then who was in second?
Was it Maliki's party, or was it Muqtada al-Sadr's party that came in second?
Maliki's party.
So, 91 for Alawi, 89 for Maliki, and 70 for the Iraqi National Alliance.
Hmm.
See, that's very interesting to me.
I guess I'm surprised that Maliki has any real popular support at all.
Certainly that his group would have more support than the Sadrists, but I guess having a lot of working class, grassroots support doesn't necessarily translate into broad base of support across the country.
The two parties, or the two blocs, the Maliki bloc and the INA, split a lot of the vote in the Shiite-heavy part of Iraq.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, because this guy, Maliki, same difference, kind of, he was an exile.
He's not one of these, you know, Muqtada al-Sadr, he's got grassroots support from the local mosque.
Right.
All right, well, so now there was a headline a week or two ago that said that Alawi's going to go ahead and work out a deal with the Kurds, he doesn't need you Shiites anyway.
Yeah, that was the first headline of several headlines that have come up about different backdoor meetings between these different groups, and Alawi was meeting with the Kurds, and it seemed like they'd come to some sort of understanding, which was sort of surprising, because a lot of the Kurdish bloc has expressed resentment at Iraqia for taking a lot of their seats in the sort of Sunni-Arab-Kurdish split district, and shortly thereafter, they announced that Alawi's bloc was meeting with the Sadrists, even though the Sadrists were supposedly already in a done deal with Maliki.
And now, the latest meeting just yesterday, Alawi actually met with Maliki.
Personally?
Yes, the two of them sat down in pretty much the highest-profile meeting since the election.
And yet, apparently still didn't work anything out.
Yeah, they didn't announce any progress or any results from the meeting, and it sounds like they're just kind of moving on from it without having accomplished anything.
And now the Sadrists have issued an announcement today saying that they're insisting on Ibrahim al-Jafari, the other former prime minister of Iraq, as the moral choice for prime minister.
Well, and he's a Dawa party guy too, like Maliki, right?
Well, a former Dawa party guy.
He left the Dawa party and formed his own not-all-together-successful party that's part of the Iraq National Alliance now.
Oh, I see.
Well, and I think back at the time, he was sort of more the Iranian loyal branch of the Dawa party, whereas Maliki had lived in England for a while, I think, and hadn't spent all that time in exile in Iran.
Right.
Well, you know, I don't know.
In a way, it's kind of interesting sitting around here talking about Iraqi democracy, but I guess the question is whether this is going to go anywhere, or some war's going to break out.
You know, some of these headlines are that people are dropping like flies all across – politicians are dropping like flies all across Iraq as they try to figure out who's going to be the prime minister here.
Jason?
Well, yeah, and we're having increasingly violent protests in a lot of the major cities, not even related to the split election so much as just general government incompetence.
I mean, there have been blackouts, rolling blackouts, in pretty much every major city in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, and they haven't really gotten any better despite pumping billions of dollars into it, and the electricity minister just resigned last week.
Well, yeah, and you know, it's funny, because I'm actually reading this book by Joy Gordon called Invisible War, about Bill Clinton's genocide of the people of Iraq in the 1990s, and how, you know, during Operation Yellow Ribbon in 1991, Colin Powell smashed every bit of their waterworks, their sewage, their electricity, all of their bridges, as much of their civilian infrastructure as they possibly could deliberately, and then those sanctions were really total sanctions.
They never allowed Iraq to rebuild itself, the whole time.
So it's been going on a generation now, that they haven't had full electricity, full water and sewage.
Right, and they said in some parts of the capital city, you'll get maybe an hour a day of electricity.
Insane.
I'm sure they're a lot better off, a lot happier without Saddam Hussein.
Anyway, we're talking with Jason Ditz, Tantai War Radio, and we'll be back here in a few.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Tantai War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking on the line with Jason Ditz, he is the managing news editor at TantaiWar.com, the address would be News.
TantaiWar.com, and Jason, let's switch from Iraq to Iran now.
First of all, what about all these scary stories about ships in the Gulf, and the Israelis getting permission for using Saudi airspace for strikes, and all this madness over the last couple of weeks here?
Well, the Israelis using Saudi airspace story really isn't that new.
I mean, it's sort of re-emerged in the last few weeks, but we've seen it crop up a few times over the last few years, every time.
Sort of when Israel, I guess, is wanting to issue another threat, the rumors will start cropping up, and Saudi Arabia always denies them, but so far it seems to be a rumor that's got some staying power to it.
Yeah, well to be fair to the audience, they should know that the story, the latest version of the story appeared in the London Times, so that means that you can take four or five grains of salt for that one.
Those guys don't ever print anything but things that aren't true about Iran, as far as I can tell, since the Venunu revelations, anyway.
That was Israel.
Same argument.
All right, now, so let's talk about the head of the CIA and his testimony, well, it wasn't testimony before Congress, was it?
It was a press appearance on Meet the Press, where he told Jake Tapper that the Iranians are two years away from a nuclear bomb.
Right, and he said that they had enough free uranium to create two nuclear bombs, which really itself got a lot of publicity, but again, wasn't altogether a news story.
Russian officials even sort of mocked Leon Panetta for saying it, saying, where's the news here?
There's nothing new.
And really, I mean, I myself wrote an article a month ago on Iran's nuclear program, pointing out that they do have roughly enough low-enriched uranium that if they did enrich it all to a weapons grade, they would have enough for no more than two weapons.
Right, and see, that's the whole thing, too, is your article.
By the way, do you remember offhand the title of that, that people can Google it?
I'm not sure.
A detailed analysis was in it somewhere, in the title.
If you go to, you know, later on, if people go to antiwar.com slash radio and look for the archive of this interview, we'll have the hyperlink there, because it was a great piece where you went through and really broke down into detail, you know, what's the difference between uranium ore sitting in the ground, what's been converted to uranium hexafluoride gas, what's been enriched up to 3.6%, what's enriched up to 20, and how none of it's enriched up to weapons grade and couldn't be in the presence of the IAEA, etc., like that, and these are the kinds of details that are so important to this story, because as you said, if Panetta says, enough for two nuclear bombs, every headline in North America will repeat that a hundred times, and it's very rare that any journalism contains actual details about what this means and what it doesn't, as that great piece that you did does, so we'll definitely have the link to that, and really, I mean, that is the thing, right?
He says, yeah, they have enough uranium, I guess he's talking about 3.6% that has already been through the centrifuge once, it's enough to make two bombs, but then he doesn't have to get into the details, of course, Jake Tapper doesn't ask him to explain, well, what would they have to do, you know, including withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty in order to be able to turn that 3.6% into some weapons fuel.
Right, and he says two years was how long he expected it to take them if they tried to do it, which probably is a bit soon, I would say, even if Iran just today decided, okay, we're kicking everybody out and that's all we're doing is working on turning our entire civilian uranium enrichment program into making two bombs, I think two years might be a bit soon to get that done.
Yeah, it would seem like it, and especially with all the American and Israeli bombs falling on their heads, if they actually withdrew from the NPT and announced that they were going to make nuclear weapons in real life, you know, that's the part everybody forgets, right?
Once they announce, alright, IAEA inspectors, we can't have you around because we're about to start enriching up to a weapons grade.
We still got years at that point, at least two years to bomb them, you know, from the time that they're actually doing what they're accused of.
Right, and this two bomb business, the whole point of having a nuclear weapon would be for deterrence, so one of those two bombs would have to be a test explosion so that they can basically prove to the world that they have some sort of nuclear deterrent, and then they would have, at best, one weapon left.
Right, and then how are they supposed to deliver that anyway?
But again, that's not really the point.
We all know that this is just a scary issue that the Empire can use to beat them over the head, which brings us to the question of whether the Iranians can figure out a way to work out a deal to take this issue away from the United States.
It certainly seems to be a difficult one to take away, but really the third party enrichment deal that Iran has agreed to now that the US has rejected, and which the US had claimed to want for months before they rejected it, would have taken this issue away because it would have taken away enough uranium that they would have only had enough left for one bomb and that would have had to have been the test explosion.
Yeah.
Well, and here, this whole time since Obama refused to accept their acceptance of Obama's offer of a deal back in the fall, how much have they increased their uranium holdings since then?
I mean, that's actually been through the centrifuge once.
They've increased it a fair amount, but it's not an enormous difference.
And now, in the 20%, I know that they did some enrichment up to 20%, again, in the presence of the IAEA.
And in fact, I saw one story say they were storing it above ground where bombs could get to it, just to make the point that, you know, we're not doing anything secret with this stuff here, but that was to make targets for their medical isotope reactor, fuel basically for that reactor.
Are they still enriching up to 20%?
Do they already have enough of that?
Do you know the progress of that part of the story?
As of last week, they say they have 17 kilograms of that, which isn't nearly enough to fuel that reactor for any meaningful amount of time.
And I believe they're still working on it, but it seems like it's a very slow-going process.
They're not getting a lot done.
They started this in February, and here we are several months later, and they've got basically enough uranium to fit in a small box.
Well, I'm frightened.
Stop scaring me with all your scary, fear-based propaganda, Jason.
All right, well, oh, geez, I was going to ask you one more.
Well, I guess I will.
Real quick, the Russians are still involved in trying to be middlemen here?
Right.
The Russians are talking about a new deal coming up, but so far we don't have any details on what that means.
All right, everybody.
News.
AntiWar.com for Jason Ditz.
Thanks very much.
Bye.
