All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is the heroic, unembedded reporter Dar Jamal.
His website is DarJamalIraq.com, and he's the author of the books Beyond the Green Zone, Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, and The Will to Resist, Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Welcome back to the show, Dar.
How are you?
Good, Scott.
Always good to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And you know, it's funny when I, or not really funny, but when I think back over the years of all the different people I've talked to on this show about Iraq, you're probably at least right up there tied with Patrick Coburn or somebody in terms of the ability to teach, really, the long-term history of American intervention in Iraq.
It didn't start in 2003, and there are a couple of things that have really kind of incentivized me, I guess, to want to do this interview.
Of course, Barack Obama's promising that we're leaving, and everything's fine, just like in The Promise.
And so I wonder whether you think that's true, and I suppose that's probably where this interview will end up.
But also, I've noticed that the American people just don't even know or care about Iraq at all anymore.
TV won't talk about it at all anymore.
Of course, the troops are back at their bases now, so there's much less violence, at least in terms of the American soldiers on the receiving end of it now.
So it's pretty much out of sight, out of mind.
And yet, I guess the more it's like that, the more I want to focus on it, because I know that it's not over yet, and I want to make sure that everybody else understands that too.
So, hell, let's just start in 1958, or wherever you want.
When did America start intervening in Iraq?
Well, 1958's a good place to start.
I think we could probably even go back sooner than that if we talk about U.S. involvement, certainly having ties to Great Britain when they occupied Iraq back in the earlier 20th century, back in the late teens and 20s on up to the 30s and 40s, because that kind of really set the stage then for much more direct U.S. involvement in 1958.
That just reminds me, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I met a guy one time who said, you know where the first battle of World War I was?
Basra.
Right.
It was all about the Germans wanting to build a railroad straight through to Basra, and the British said, no way.
Kaiser, nothing, Black Hand, and Archduke Verdon, and completely notwithstanding.
Right.
Right.
But I think it does make sense, I mean, you mentioned 1958, and I think that is a good place to start.
We have plenty of stuff to talk about from then on anyway, but yeah, the U.S. basically said, I'm working for the CIA back in 1958, basing out of Egypt, had him doing some work in Iraq, got in a little bit of trouble when his initial involvement with a coup attempt failed, so he got injured.
They took him out to Beirut, put him up in an apartment there, let him heal up, get him active again, and then getting him better situated, basically, to be part of, well, in the meantime, the U.S. working very directly with the Ba'ath Party, because they were using the Ba'ath Party to offset communism in Iraq.
There was kind of a Cold War playing out there, and Saddam, they made him a key player to go in and be heavily involved in a coup that, basically, it didn't insert him directly into the presidency, but it did put him in a position then, when he was later really well-situated, to carry out his own coup, and basically assume the presidency, and then from then on...
And that was when, in the early 70s?
That was in the early 70s.
It's been a while since I read that, I don't know the exact year, but it was right around between the late 60s, 68, and then his direct coup, it did happen in the early 70s, possibly 71, but I'd stand corrected if I'm a little bit off there, but it's right around that time frame.
Yeah, he was the number two guy in the initial coup against, I don't know, the king or somebody, and then he ended up replacing the guy that he was with, right?
Exactly, and again, forgive me for not having those names on top of my head, I've just got back from the Gulf for a month, so my head's been in other places, but...
I understand.
On the same way.
He basically then, you know, the U.S. supported him from then all the way up, I mean, back in 1982, there's Ronald Reagan's envoy to Iraq, Don Rumsfeld, the famous photos of him, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein on two different trips in that time frame, and then, you know, on up to, up, you know, through the 80s, where the U.S. gave Saddam heavy, heavy support during the Iran-Iraq war, of course, supporting Iran at the same time, but heavy, heavy support when, you know, we had the atrocities that Saddam Hussein carried out against the Kurds in Halabja, of course, the U.S. giving him all the support to make that possible, standing behind him all the way through, and then, of course, we had the, in 1991...
Well, no, no, no, let's talk about the 80s some more.
Okay.
I know you're on a roll.
You are.
But let's talk about the 80s.
Let's focus.
Because it wasn't just Halabja that came to the poison gas, it was the Anfal campaign that killed 100,000 Kurds, Dar.
That's right.
That's right.
And it's important to note these, and, of course, that this could, none of these could have happened without direct, implicit U.S. support of his regime, giving him money, giving him weapons, giving him chemical weapons to use against the Kurds, and supporting him all the way through.
Very, very direct U.S. involvement.
Well, and even, I think they let him use American military satellites to target the Iranians with chemical weapons.
They gave, they didn't let him use the satellites, but they gave him exact, specific coordinates so that he could do so.
Right.
Right.
Share the information with him.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, there was a big, part of the big scandal here was farm loans.
Oh, Saddam Hussein, yeah, we're giving him farm loans, but then this was all the money that was going into the germ weapons programs of the 1980s.
Exactly.
You know, and they used numerous other ways to justify it, as they always do.
And, of course, they're supporting various tyrants around the Middle East or other places around the globe to carry out their dirty work.
And again, you know, so when, you know, especially, it happened in 91 and then again in 2003 when Saddam Hussein was demonized, of course, this is all the back story that gets conveniently left out.
Right.
Saddam the bad guy.
Saddam is Hitler.
Saddam the evil tyrant.
Well, guess what?
He was basically a U.S.
-backed sock puppet, and he was another brutal dictator that played the role exactly as the U.S. government needed him to play, whether it meant wiping out the Kurds or starving his own people, any of these things.
Of course, he was very effectively demonized in the press because we have a mainstream press you and I know all too well that doesn't want to talk about the U.S. Empire Project or direct U.S. involvement behind these tyrants that couldn't do one-fifth of what they do without U.S. direct support.
Yeah, well, they don't want to explain the details behind anything that happens.
I mean, you look at 20 years ago this week, right, we have the controversy over Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
Well, why did Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait?
Well, I guess because he's Hitler, and I guess, you know, because he's so damn insane and whatever.
But nobody ever, nobody on TV, and I remember because I was paying attention, I was in ninth grade or something, I was paying attention, I was interested, and nobody ever asked, well, what was going on in the weeks before this, Dar?
Right, so what was going on just before that war, you know, became, got put center stage and the troop buildup started sending everybody into Saudi Arabia to get ready to push Saddam out of Kuwait.
But leading up to his decision to invade Kuwait is the deal is that he was accusing Kuwait of doing horizontal diagonal drill, rather diagonal drilling from their borders into Iraq to tap into the giant oil fields in South Iraq.
And they probably were.
There's a lot of evidence to support this.
He was upset.
He decided he was going to invade Kuwait in order to make them stop doing this.
Well, I want to add a little bit to that, too, which is that, you know, the price of oil was $10 a gallon or something.
And he had borrowed billions of dollars from the Saudis and the Kuwaitis in order to really protect them in fighting the Iran war, to contain the Iranian revolution, and to protect, you know, the oil in Saudi Arabia is in the Shiite part of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait there.
They wanted to protect them from the Iranians.
And then the Kuwaitis were basically dumping the price of a barrel of oil so low that Saddam Hussein could barely even break even, much less pay them back the debt that he owed them for protecting them.
And so they were basically keeping him in a hole and he was trying to get out of it.
That was what the whole conversation with April Glaspie was about.
And anyway, we'll get back to that at the beginning of Operation Yellow Ribbon with Darja Mail right after this, y'all.
This is the Liberty Radio Network, broadcasting the latest Liberty-oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LRN.
FM.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with unembedded reporter Darja Mail.
He's the author of The Will to Resist, Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And we're talking about the history of American intervention in Iraq.
And I guess some of you might have heard me last week going off the top of my head, trying to calculate directly and indirectly.
It's hard to quantify exactly when you talk about support for Saddam and his war against Iran that killed, I don't know, they say half a million Iraqis, whatever it was.
And we tried to add it all up and it was somewhere around three million Iraqis are dead because of the United States of America, or at least because of Saddam Hussein's hand in circumstances where he was backed or helped by the United States of America.
And I wonder if anybody will ever get that worked out, except the fans of this show.
Probably not.
So let's see.
I guess by the time we got to the point in the story we're talking here, Dar, we're at 100,000 dead Kurds, we're at half a million dead Iraqis from the Iran-Iraq war, unknown tens of thousands have disappeared.
Of course, the CIA helped the Baathists with lists of anybody who knows how to read, like it was Pol Pot or something, right?
Get all the leftists, all the professors, all the nationalists, all the basically anybody who's got a philosophical basis for how they behave in Iraqi society and have them all rounded up and killed, of course, to solidify the power of the Baathists.
There's a part of the story people like to leave out.
And then so now we're up to 1990 and basically the Kuwaitis jerking Saddam Hussein around so much.
And then he went and got permission from James Baker, didn't he, to go break their kneecaps.
He just went too far.
Well, he did.
And also I think we should mention, you briefly mentioned it before the break about his meeting with April Gillespie, the envoy to Iraq, the U.S. envoy to Iraq, and he sat in a meeting with her and said, you know, this is what I'm preparing to do, I have this problem with Kuwait, I want to go in and deal with it.
And she said, the U.S. has no opinion on Arab-to-Arab relations.
And he repeated it three times to make sure, and three different times she gave him the same answer.
So he got the green light from the U.S., of course was set up, went in, and then, of course, George Bush's pop used that as a justification to go ahead and do the massive troop buildup and then invade Iraq and bomb it back into the Stone Age and cripple it, of course, making the key decision not to go into Baghdad because he and his advisors knew that an occupation would be no win, there would be no exit strategy, and it would completely destabilize the region.
And he was at least smart enough, unlike his idiot son, to understand that, as you mentioned earlier also, Scott, that Saddam Hussein in Iraq played a key role in containing the growth and influence of Iran around the region.
And so they basically then did a lot of damage, hit key infrastructure intentionally, water plants, electrical plants, a lot of hospitals, intentionally crippling Iraq and then installing the U.N., so-called U.N.
-backed sanctions, they were really a U.S. operation, and kept everything from pencils to chlorine to basic medical supplies out of Iraq for the next twelve and a half years, conducting a silent war, of course, while flying air raid missions and still dropping bombs periodically across much of Iraq.
But really, the key was the sanctions, which then, of course, led into Clinton taking them over and happily continuing forward with them.
And they got a lot of international ire, so we found Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, on the hot seat with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, and Leslie Stahl asked her, Madam Secretary, the U.N. has just announced that the sanctions have killed probably half a million Iraqi children so far, is that price worth it to contain Saddam Hussein?
And she said, yes, we think that price is worth it.
So that, you know, of course, Clinton, you know, being just as complicit in this as either of the Bushes.
And then as we move forward, I mean, that's the situation.
By the time we get up to 2003, we have a country where the average caloric intake of an Iraqi adult is around 1,600 to 1,800 calories a day.
I think that's about what the average American eats for breakfast.
And just to give you an idea of how just staggeringly crippling these were, I really don't think it's going too far to call them genocidal sanctions when, you know, at least half a million kids, probably another half a million adults died mostly of starvation and simple diseases that could have easily been prevented had the sanctions not been in place.
Yeah, no, I don't think that's hyperbole at all to call it genocide.
And you know, in fact, I don't know if you've had a chance to read this yet, but I'm sure you will at some point, Dar.
It's Joy Gordon's new book, Invisible War, about the Iraqi sanctions.
And she makes the point so well in there about how all of Iraqi society was basically built up to first world levels on their oil wealth.
And they imported, Dar, two thirds of their food.
And then after Colin Powell destroyed all their waterworks and sewage, like you just said, they wouldn't let them rebuild any of it.
And then, oh, OK, you can have some food, but you can't have any trucks, so you can't distribute any of it.
And oh, here's some medicine, but you can't have any electricity, so you can't keep any of it cold.
And yeah, a million people died.
And yeah, that's, you know, that's genocide, man.
That's a sixth of a Holocaust.
You know, while the American people thought it was the era of Jerry Seinfeld and clear Pepsi and dot-com bubbles and peacetime.
Right, right.
And it was largely, of course, ignored by the media.
You know, every once in a while we'd have these, and I remember these reports that I'm sure you do too, Scott, where, oh, U.S. jets were fired upon by Iraqi anti-aircraft or.
Right, they didn't hit one in 12 years.
They couldn't even hit a single one.
Right.
I mean, the Iraqis are basically down there with slingshots and the U.S. is flying over them with the most sophisticated fighter jets on the planet, of course, and they're down there not wearing shoes and starving to death, sitting in these bunkers.
But the U.S. would just, you know, over, over the entire sanctions, I don't know how many hundreds, if not thousands of missions the U.S. just, you know, flew over south and north of Iraq.
I mean, it was really, really a stunning thing.
And we also need to point out that it was in, I believe it was in 1998, it was actually Bill Clinton who, throughout the sanctions, carried out the heaviest bombing campaign against Iraq during the entire sanctions, and that was, that was Clinton, and of course, he was, he was largely giving, giving a pass on that as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'll tell you what, the New York Times once in a little, you know, one column inch worth of coverage said that the average was every other day Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in his eight years in power.
But then the progressive journalist, Jeremy Scahill, he went through the paperwork and he did his own count, and he came up with the much more conservative estimate of once every three days America bombed Iraq.
So that was for eight years straight.
So somebody else do the math, how many days in a year divided by three times eight, that's how many days, and that's not like one bomb per day either, right?
That's per bombing mission, which means who knows how many killed each time.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, and these are, these are things where exactly tallying up the numbers and, you know, we may not ever know.
I mean, and we, I think we can rest assured, just like when we talk about current death tolls with the current US invasion and occupation of Iraq, or rather the most recent scene of that, that US assault on Iraq, because we're talking about 50 plus years of a US assault on Iraq at this point.
And I think that's even being a little bit conservative.
And when we tally up these numbers, I think we're always going to come down on the conservative side.
No one's going to know for sure, because just talking about overt deaths of the current situation, we have two studies that show a minimum of 1.1 million.
And I think those are, those are conservative as well.
Where are the estimates of the wounded?
How many of the wounded later on die because of this situation?
Well, now you're talking about post 2003 right there.
Yeah, right.
I'm leaping ahead just post 2003.
I mean, what we're talking about, like you said, I mean, just between the sanctions, the war with Iran, the Kurdish massacres, I mean, I think saying a million is probably really, really conservative, as though that's not just a shockingly, staggeringly high figure on its own.
Nah, it's just a statistic.
You know, one death is a tragedy.
Right.
Anyway, well, that's what Joe Stalin said.
That's apparently the ethic of the American empire.
But I wanted to, you know, make sure that the audience understands that when you use the million dead Iraqis figure there, you're referring at least in part, you say there's two different studies.
The one I'm thinking of is opinion business research out of Great Britain.
A guy named Alan Hyde is the boss of it.
He financed it himself.
It wasn't George Soros propaganda or anything.
He, in the fall of 2007, sent his team to do their study and they came back with the number approximately a million and he sent them back.
He refused to do the show and said, no, no, no, I'm not going to do the show yet.
Give me a few months.
He sent his team back.
They did the study again and then they came back and they said, yeah, a million.
And that was in the very beginning of 2008.
And and it was the excess debt over the rate of death again from before the war, which was there of the sanctions and a million dying.
So compare it to what it was before 90, 1990.
And who even knows?
Free talk live.
The DEA doesn't dabble with users.
They go after the big dogs.
Yeah, I'm certain they have dabbled with users and they would if they thought they could get something.
They would if they thought they could get somewhere with maybe a user who snorting three pounds a week, something where they could actually connect to a player.
Yeah, but most users are just buying from other users.
I mean, in the cocaine world, when you are a user, you've got to support your habits somehow.
Right.
And if you're not willing to go and knock over convenience stores and break into people's cars and hurt people to get the cash for your habit, then the only other choice for you, if you're not wealthy, is to sell cocaine to others.
And so most people will go and pick up whatever amount of coke they they do, and then they'll sell to certain specific people who are their friends.
Like he was saying, he was selling to his neighbor across the street.
The DEA is not going to mess with that.
Free talk live seven nights a week from seven to 10 Eastern, live on the Liberty Radio Network at LRN dot FM.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Tantai War Radio getting into the second hour here.
And I'm happy Garth stayed over the break with us here.
Sorry about the Fox News at the top of the hour, but I'm going to mention that that's some ridiculous nonsense.
All right.
Well, all right.
So we're talking about a million dead Iraqis now.
Obviously, that's narrowing it down to just the last seven years.
That's right.
You know, but that's that's where we're at right now.
And, you know, I really wanted to stay the extra segment to talk about this recent propaganda of the Obama promised U.S. withdrawal, which he's already contradicted himself in the speech he gave yesterday talking about, you know, combat missions are ending as of the end of this month and all this nonsense.
We're going to be down to 50000 troops about the only thing that will be true.
And what he said is that it does look as though by the end of this month we are going to be down to 50000 troops in Iraq.
Of course, he doesn't talk about the four enduring bases or the U.S. embassy, the size of Vatican City that's got recently had its double its budget doubled and resources availability doubled.
And also that there's a really good story on the interpress service today by Gareth Porter, who's been following this and really lines out the details of dissecting his speech and showing how Obama is basically full of it, that there is going to be an enduring U.S. presence there indefinitely, which is something that Obama's own security advisers were talking about before he was even elected, that there would be a minimum of 50000 troops there until at least the end of his first term, assuming he gets a second one, which is a big assumption.
But that means until at least January 2013.
And that's exactly what we're looking at.
And this comes on the heels of last month being the single deadliest month for Iraqis in two years where violence is off the charts, chaos, instability.
Still, there's no electricity.
Still, there's no drinkable water.
Still, we have staggering unemployment rates.
And this, of course, I'm sure you saw in the last couple of weeks, too, Scott.
It comes out yet again.
Oh, sorry.
There's another eight or nine billion dollars of that supposed reconstruction money that was actually Iraqi money.
We seem to have misplaced that.
Right.
Well, and of course, you know, I don't know whether this really counts for anything or not.
I think my my best understanding of the last thing I heard from you on this subject is a bit different than what Patrick Coburn, for example, thinks.
And I think what Garrett thinks as well, though I could be wrong.
It's been a while since we talked about this, but the Iraqi government, such as it is right now, it's months and months out from their last wonderfully successful purple fingered Democratic election and nobody can form a coalition.
And even the most natural, obvious alliance between Sauter and Maliki and their two parties is not coming together because both of them insist on, you know, Maliki wants to stay prime minister and Sauter insists that he not stay prime minister.
So there is no no government even.
And I guess what I what I was talking about was I think last I heard from you was, oh, please, without the American occupation, that green zone government will fall and who knows what will happen next in Iraq.
But it ain't going to be this.
Whereas it seemed to me like really they did train up a big enough Iraqi army that I mean, assuming there's not a major shift in power and actually who's sitting in the green zone commanding them, that they are pretty much the government of Iraq, whether they have real monopoly authority over all the Sunni provinces and whatever, I guess still remains to be seen.
But right now, nobody's even running it right now.
Everybody's sitting here, as you say, people are dying in these bombings.
Well, all of that means something.
That's not just a big bombing happened.
That's politics.
Exactly.
You know, violence, you know, war, whatever you want to call it, it's always politics by another means.
And and I agree with what you said, Scott.
I think that, you know, from the last time I was pretty regularly on your show talking about this and was much, much more focused on Iraq.
I think things have changed enough since then that, you know, Maliki has been able to build up a large enough security force, thanks to the Americans, that he's in a position to where even when he loses a vote, he can just sit right there in the prime minister's chair.
And because of all this power on the ground, on the street, and of course, you know, we have the solder factor, which is always the wild card.
But for now, Maliki can basically just strong arm his way into keeping the seat.
And we're seeing that despite the fact that on the ground, none of this has done any good for the Iraqi people.
It's actually only hurt them.
There's a government that basically still continues to, aside from maintaining its own power, is basically impotent in doing things like picking up all the garbage around Baghdad or bringing electricity, more electricity to people's homes or or giving better health care, all these basic things.
And all of these are direct symptoms of, of course, the occupation.
The U.S. came in, completely annihilated what was left of Saddam Hussein's regime and replaced it with what?
Another tin pot despot in Nouri al-Maliki eventually, who is basically a Shia Saddam.
And I think that's the best way to look at this guy.
And that, you know, who, once again, you know, from 1958 up until right now, who pays the highest price for all of this U.S. direct meddling in Iraq?
It's always the Iraqi people.
Yeah, it's true.
You know something I saw, Andrew Bacevich on the Rachel Maddow show last night, and he was saying that when it comes to really any part of this, the American people, for the most part, support this entire imperial policy or they just ignore it.
And and they refuse to pay the price for any of it.
They don't even pay financially for it.
They they demand tax cuts while they wage these wars and and put the price off on other grandkids, their kids and their grandkids.
And someday the American people, one way or another, what goes around comes around, man.
And and the American people have a hell of a price to pay for what we've done here.
And, you know, what really bothers me, too, about it is that, you know, at least I was brought up on the myth of World War Two and all that.
We're fighting an enemy that was a badass enemy, you know, and not not here.
We are the most powerful country, the most powerful military state ever, ever, Dar.
And all we do is pick on helpless little third world countries like Panama and Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan.
We fight civilian populations in their own neighborhoods for years on end.
And for what?
I mean, the history of how the American empire went out, broken on the rocks of Iraq, of all places, not fighting the Soviets in, you know, keeping them out of Western Europe in the folder gap or something, but but broken on the rocks of the desert of Iraq and Afghanistan.
I mean, you know, let's let's be real clear about the U.S. military.
Yes, it's very powerful and very sophisticated.
But when it comes down to conventional fighting, let's see, we can go all the way back to Vietnam as the last war it lost.
I mean, it's you know, can you say that it won in Iraq?
I don't I don't think so.
Can you it bought off the resistance?
Can you say that it's winning in Afghanistan?
It's getting its rear end handed to it in Afghanistan.
And everyone over there who understands what's going on will tell you that very thing.
And that's also what's revealed in the WikiLeaks document.
This is a military that, again, it's it's politics by another means.
And, you know, the one thing we can say that they've done successful in Iraq, you know, I've been challenged on this of, you know, did the U.S. actually succeed in Iraq?
And I think from an empire perspective, at least insofar as having established a military beachhead deep in the heart of the Middle East and having enduring bases there and getting access to Iraq's oil for Western oil interests, it has been successful in that regard.
But so so from that political perspective, it did achieve its mission, at least for now.
I think it's short lived.
I think they'll eventually be forced to leave.
And we're going to see that happen over time.
And it'll be interesting to talk about things there in another three, five years and watch how the U.S. is essentially being pushed out.
I think that will eventually happen.
Yeah.
You know, two or three words, however, you break it down with the dash there.
Muqtada al-Sadr.
I mean, that guy has been anti-occupation this entire time.
He's obviously unwilling to compromise.
He's obviously extremely shrewd when it comes to politics.
You know, he could be probably the most powerful U.S. senator if he was in the Senate as far as how smart he is in the way he picks his battles and retreats when it's the right time to retreat and then, you know, pushes dominoes over when it's time to push dominoes over.
And it seems to me like Maliki's power really came with the Saudis faction's consent.
And it was based on the idea that you are going to stick to the deal of kicking the U.S. out.
After all, Darla, let's not forget that in the spring of 08, George Bush said, yeah, give me 58 bases.
And Maliki said, no, no, no.
For a whole year.
And then Bush on his way out said, fine, whatever.
Sign the sofa that basically said, I quit.
So I don't know.
I mean, obviously, the Pentagon wants to try to stay, but I think it remains to be seen whether this war is really lost or won.
This guy, I agree.
Scott, I agree with the music playing already.
What a damn shame.
All right.
Well, man, I really appreciate your time on the show.
Darla, it's always great talking with you.
Likewise, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
Everybody go look at Darja mail Iraq dot com and look him up on Amazon, too.
