09/01/10 – Jason Ditz and Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, I appreciate y'all tuning in to the show today.
We're talking about Iraq.
Your leader says it's over, it's all good.
Jason Ditz and Kelly Vlahos are on the phone.
I'm not so sure if we're going to form a consensus around the president's point of view here.
Welcome to the show, guys.
How are y'all doing?
Pretty good, thanks.
I'm doing good, too, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm really appreciative of both of y'all joining us today on the show, especially on such short notice.
Let's start with you, Jason.
On top headline, news.antiwar.com.
Obama lauds fake end to Iraq war as historic moment.
How full of it is this guy?
Well, it seems to have been a pre-calculated speech.
I think the end of the Iraq war, at least, I mean, this is the second end of the Iraq war in less than two weeks.
And the first one was sort of a made-for-TV moment with guys in the back of Jeeps filming as they crossed the border.
And this time it seemed to have been more of a political end, where he got to make a big speech and emphasize how great the war was and how important the current war in Afghanistan is and how he has a whole bunch of ideas about the economy, which seemed to have been the main focus of his speech.
Well, now, yeah, in fact, it was interesting.
He kind of talked about all of us as soldiers and him as our commander in the war against the economy.
Right, and we need to show the same grit and determination that the soldiers in Iraq showed.
Yeah, in other words, stop saving money.
We're trying to inflate.
Wow.
All right.
Anyway, let's stick with Iraq here for a second.
So, Kelly, does it look to you like people are buying this?
I mean, leaving 50,000 troops behind is a pretty big kind of hole in the theory that the troops are gone, right?
I totally agree.
I totally agree, and I think that for a lack of options, President Obama was forced to sort of take pages out of the playbooks of Bush and of, to a certain extent, Glenn Beck last night with Bush.
Oh, no.
Well, in terms of the Bush analogy, I mean, he instead of, like I said, for a lack of options, he basically continued this sort of denial approach, denying the violence on the ground, denying how hopeless the political situation is, denying that we had basically destroyed a country, displaced 5 million people, killed untold number of civilians, wasted our own blood and treasure, American blood and treasure.
So he was forced to basically talk about, well, there's been bumps along the road, but our combat soldiers are ending their mission, and a civilian so-called, he didn't say surge, but basically implied that a civilian force will take its place to help rebuild that country.
So he, in effect, said things weren't ending there, but at the same time, threw out this bone that we were bringing home combat troops to sort of assuage the fact that we aren't finished, that we lost all this, that we might not even have anything to throw for it.
And in terms of the Beck playbook, he, as you notice, if you look at the video a couple times, you'll notice how artfully he switched to talking about the troops and praising them, and in many ways, just like Beck did the other day at the rally, he spent an inordinate time talking about the glory of the troops without talking about specific policy solutions, specific remedies.
The troops became yet another prop to fill in the gaps of what we all know is a pretty unclear, unfinished mission.
So again, the troops are used as props.
Also, the talk about promoting democracy throughout the world came up.
That's both Beck and Bush.
So I see a president who, for a lack of any other options and no real resources to maybe break out on his own, is using old playbooks and scripts.
Well, you know, I started out the show by giving credit to my friend Shawna from Chaos Radio and AJ and Ed, too, and what a great job we all did in calling out this war all through the year 2002 from the South Austin Chaos Garage.
And one of the things that she said before this war ever happened, or no, maybe just as the war was really just getting started, was that if you want to be a colonial power, an empire, you have to prop up the minorities so that they need you.
And here in the Iraq War, from the very beginning, we invaded and installed at least the political powers that represent the majority Shia, and they don't need us.
I guess the surge is very helpful for helping them finish the civil war against the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad and making it an 85 percent Shia city and consolidating all their power between Baghdad and Basra, but there's no reason that the Ayatollah Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr need us to continue to prop them up.
Whereas Saddam Hussein did need the British and did need the Americans and the Soviets and whoever to help him, they have no reason to keep us around.
And she saw that from the very beginning of the war, that all we're going to do here is install the Iranians' friends in power and then get kicked the hell out, and that was now seven years ago when she was saying that.
I guess the sad truth is that President Obama couldn't talk about any of that last night.
And when I say denial, I mean that these speeches have become such pablum in terms of what they offer in regards to the truth or facts or reasons or accountability.
We hear the same old tripe about freedom, democracy, the troops, enduring.
It just seems as though I can hear televisions clicking off all over the country five minutes into this thing, because he nor Bush ever offered us or treated the American people like adults and talked to us about some of these hard truths about what kind of government we're leaving behind, what kind of military and police forces we're leaving behind.
Why, after billions of dollars, do they not have electricity all through the day or have government services or all their children going to school and all these things that we were supposedly doing for the last eight years?
So I think people just tune out.
Right, yeah, and especially when you bring up the electricity and stuff there.
I want to ask you, Jason, what life is like for the average Iraqi, best you can tell.
I know you read every newspaper in the world all day, every day.
Are they liberated?
Are they thankful like the French when we chased out the Nazis?
Well, earlier yesterday I saw a report.
I believe it was on CNN.
I'm not positive about that.
They were talking about the stats that prove that life is much better in Iraq.
They sort of ducked the question of the electricity and ducked the question of half of the Iraqis don't have clean water.
And they focused on, well, there's a lot more Iraqis that have cell phones now than they had back then.
Yeah, they like the cell phone index.
I would imagine that quite a few more Americans have cell phones now than they did seven years ago, too, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the economy is any better here.
Well, and, you know, Patrick Coburn, whenever I ask him about what it's like in Baghdad, he says, look, there's one place in the world more dangerous than Baghdad, and that's Mogadishu, also America's fault.
And that's it.
He says, look at the refugees in Jordan and in Syria.
There's two and a half million of them, and none of them are coming home.
Why aren't they coming home?
It's because all that stuff about what a great job we did helping the Iraqi people is a bunch of nonsense.
And just like you say about the politicians, Kelly, not dealing with the facts at all, not telling us the facts at all, it's the same thing for the TV news.
I mean, when have they ever said, okay, everybody, let us break down and explain who the Iraqi National Alliance is.
You know, Jason can do that in two minutes.
He does it all the time.
What's the Iraqi National Alliance?
And shouldn't we know?
Isn't that part of the story here?
But no, no, no, don't you worry about that.
There's the surgeons, and then there's us and the good guys, and just, you know, it's like a cartoon.
It's ridiculous.
All right, we'll be right back.
We got Kelly Vlahos and Jason Ditz from Antiwar.com on the line here, y'all.
It's Antiwar Radio.
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♪♪♪ All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Kelly Vlahos and Jason Ditz, both from Antiwar.com.
Antiwar.com slash Vlahos for Kelly and news.antiwar.com for Jason.
You can, of course, also read both of them in, I think, every newspaper in the world or something, especially Jason these days.
And we're talking about how America smashed and destroyed and caused more pain to the land that we now call Iraq than any foreign power since Genghis Khan came and salted and plowed over the irrigation trenches, you know, however many hundreds of years ago that was.
Wasn't that 1400s or something, 1300?
Anyway, what the hell do I know about Genghis Khan?
But I know that that was the last time anybody hurt Iraq as bad as America has hurt Iraq.
Five million people displaced from their homes.
Still no water, electricity, or sewage that anybody can count on.
And now here's the real fun part.
Hey, Jason, what is the Iraqi National Alliance?
Well, the Iraqi National Alliance is an extremely religious Shiite political party that was run by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council before the March 7th election, but after the election they didn't do particularly well and the alliance has basically been taken over by Muqtada al-Sadr.
And that's great, right?
Because democracy and purple fingers and all that?
Well, it certainly makes for an interesting news story that his party, which had always kind of been a marginal party that would make a lot of speeches and organize a lot of protests and never really had any political power, is suddenly the kingmaker.
But as far as the U.S. is concerned, it's probably not all that great a thing, because he's been an outspoken opponent of the U.S. occupation from the start.
Yeah, well, I mean, I would say, depending on what you value, if you value Iraqi independence for their sake, hell, for our sake, then it's probably a good thing how much influence he has.
But I feel bad for the people of Iraq, because, you know, well, to hear Dar Jamal tell it, this was actually a Christian Science Monitor article years ago, to them, a woman's smile is a crime.
And I asked Dar Jamal about that.
Like, is that really right, that in the whole south of Iraq, where the Mahdi army reigns, that it's really like Iran or worse in terms of the religious persecution and the oppression, especially of women?
And Dar Jamal said, oh, yeah, you better believe it, man.
That's, you know, when they say that that old Christian Science Monitor article from five years ago is about the people who rule the place right now, thanks to the U.S.A.
How do you feel about that, Kelly?
Well, I think that's the dirty little secret of this war.
And again, something that you would have never heard in Obama's speech last night is, despite all this talk about freedom and democracy, we've created an ultra-religious Shia state.
And that's, you know, far be it for me to impose my values, but that we've spent close to a trillion dollars on these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what we've gotten is completely the opposite of what we were told we were fighting for, where we do have women who are basically bought and sold like cattle, you know, and mistreated by their husbands and cloaked in burqas and whatever.
Like I said, this is diametrically opposed to the belief that we were going over there to liberate a people.
And like Jason said, and like you said and Dar said, you know, this is happening, and it's been happening for years, it's just the media has chosen not to focus on the religiosity of the movement in southern Iraq right now, and it's really a real sad state.
And I'd like to go back for a second, we were talking about the quality of life.
You know, Michael Hanlon, as you know, who is a mouthpiece for basically the pro-war faction of the Washington establishment, loves to turn to this Iraq index that the Brookings Institute puts out.
You know, in a recent op-ed, he said, well, you know, if you look at our index, it shows that things are better for Iraqis today, and Iraqis support America more than ever since the 2003 invasion.
Well, I went on that Iraq index, and a lot of these metrics have not been updated since 2009.
And I don't know where he's getting this pro-American polling results from either, because the last polling they did was in January 2010, was of maybe 1,500 Iraqis, who said 51% said that things may be better for them in 2010.
And that's the last of the polling that's on their index, so I think, you know...
Yeah, and you've got to love the way they phrase that question.
Better than when?
Better than before the Iran-Iraq war that Jimmy Carter started, or better than during the Operation Yellow Ribbon, or the sanctions that killed a million people, or the invasion that killed another million.
You know, better than last year, better than 2007 when 3,000 corpses a month were found on the sides of the roads.
Right, and so when Michael Hanlon says this in an op-ed, and I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, but forgive me if I'm wrong on that, but it was in a national, you know, newspaper, that, you know, our indexes say that things are better for Iraqis, and he's bald-faced disingenuous about it.
But people in their busy lives are reading this, and they're hearing from the president that things are better, you know, and so they say, well, okay, things were worth it.
Now, is this, are we just in an exercise of making ourselves feel better, so that when we look at these, you know, soldiers are coming back with lost limbs and brain damage, we could say somehow it was worth it?
What's going on here?
I don't know.
Yeah, no, well, that's absolutely what it is.
Same thing as George Carlin talking about euphemistic language and why we call shell shock post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now, it's all about making ourselves feel good.
Hell, we got trounced in the Olympics, and all the newspapers reported that America got the most medals of any country, even though the Chinese got the gold, and it's about the gold.
But instead, it's like we're all, you know, 11, and our mommies are, like, taking care of our feelings for us real good.
And, yeah, who wants to admit that, you know, or who wants to be the one to tell their neighbor, yeah, that war you cheered for and your other neighbor's kid that got his brain scrambled in it, it was all for nothing.
It was all so that the women who used to wear jeans to go teach college in Baghdad could be enslaved under Muqtada al-Sadr's religious dictatorship.
Good for you.
That doesn't make for very good TV, you know.
I don't know.
And you know what, too, remember how badly they attacked Michael Moore, and what was it that they hated that Michael Moore did more than anything else?
In Fahrenheit 951, I mean, he showed footage of Iraq, of what it looked like on the ground before the war.
Hey, look, businessmen going to work, women and children playing on the playground and walking down the sidewalk and whatever.
And that was footage that they never showed us in America.
Iraq was a shape on a map.
It was never a real place where real people lived, because then we'd have to take into account, like, how bad it must hurt them to get hit by a cluster bomb or something, you know?
I don't know.
Anyway, so Jason, give me some stats here, man.
Let's talk about the new State Department Army.
Hillary Clinton finally gets to be the Commander-in-Chief after all, huh?
She's got an embassy to protect there after all, doesn't she?
Well, yeah.
They're creating a...
There have been several different estimates of how big it would be, but 5,000 is the lowest I've seen of private contractors that are basically combat troops working for the State Department, and the State Department is trying to borrow, which is to say have the Defense Department give them a large number of armored personnel carriers and attack helicopters and basically all the equipment they would need to build this into a small army.
You know, I'm always curious.
I don't even know where to look, really, to find out all about the bases in Kurdistan and how permanent those are.
I mean, after all, you mentioned helicopters there.
America is going to be the Iraqi Air Force for years to come, right?
No matter what Sistani even wants.
They have no ability to field their own Air Force.
Right, to the extent that they even need an Air Force.
I mean...
Yeah, although, you know, we're talking about a European nation-state here.
It's got to be our way or, you know, the American model.
But, yeah, I don't know.
There's a real conflict in there between the Americans who want to stay and are trying to, well, like the Israelis in the West Bank, right, establish facts on the ground that make it difficult to really abide by the 2011 timeline.
They want to get down to the 50,000 now, but they want to stay past 2011.
McClatchy newspapers reported that just the other day.
New York Times had a piece full of State Department and Defense Department people talking about, oh, we're staying.
We stole Iraq fair and square.
We're going to renegotiate that sofa.
So it's a real rock-and-hard-place type thing after all this time.
Still the most powerful military in the world versus the most powerful Shiite religious authority in the world, Ayatollah Sistani, right?
That's what it comes down to.
Oh, crap, now we're all out of time.
Say, yeah, that's right, Scott, Jason.
That's right, Scott.
See, everybody, Jason says I'm right.
All right, thank you both very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Kelly B. Vlahos and Jason Vitz from antiwar.com.
And we'll be right back after this.