05/28/07 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

That is the most applause a republic ever got around here.
Austin, Texas.
That was Ron Paul on the Bill Maher show last Friday night.
Of course you can find that clip on YouTube, no problem.
It's also up on my blog, thestressblog.com.
Check that out.
And you know, there's one thing that you can count on by tuning in to Antiwar Radio on Radio Chaos here in Austin, Texas, and that is you're going to get to hear from the real reporters in the world.
Not the David R. Gordons of the world, but the real reporters, the people who are not embedded but risk their own skins to go and find out what the hell is really going on in the world and bring that information to you.
And one of the stellar examples of that brand of journalism is the young Dar Jamil.
Welcome to the show, Dar.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Good to be here.
It's very good to talk to you.
Of course it's been a while since we've spoken, but I've been reading your stuff all along.
I'm lucky enough to be on your email list.
Anybody can sign up for that.
It's darjamilirak.com.
Dar is D-A-H-R, Jamil, just J-A, mail, like in your mailbox. darjamilirak.com.
And what really sparked my interest this time, Dar, was your email that you forwarded it on from, I think, a former translator of yours, an email from Baghdad describing the situation on the ground in the city there.
And, well, what the hell, it's Memorial Day.
Let's do an interview in Memorial for the nearly 700,000 Iraqis who've been killed by this needless war and tell the people of Austin, Texas, Dar, what has America done to Baghdad?
Tell me about the capital city of Iraq and the state that it's in now.
Well, you're exactly right.
The email I just received from my friend, and I'm getting him daily now while he's back in Baghdad, he had to flee because the security situation is so horrible.
But he's gone back in to take care of some personal business.
You know, when you have to shift your entire life from one country that you grew up and lived in for over 50 years to another, it takes a little bit of work.
So that's what he's in there doing.
But the email that he sent, the one that you referenced, he refers to Baghdad as a smash city, that most of the roads are closed, all of the highways are closed off with concrete blocks or concertina wire.
The police are running around with black face masks on because they're either members of a death squad or members of various militias or simply too afraid to have their identities known because their families would be attacked.
Most of the shops are closed.
There's basically no employment.
Employment's well up over 50%, and so most people spend their days basically hiding out in their homes, hoping that no violence will visit them there, going out maybe once or twice during the day to just try to get basic supplies like food or clean drinking water.
And that's the situation.
It's absolute disaster.
My friend who wrote me also described when he went around seeing just garbage everywhere that even basic services like garbage collection have not been happening for apparently a very long time.
He said there's literally just piles of garbage everywhere you look.
The other thing that he wrote about was that just about everywhere he went in the city, you can smell the stench of dead bodies, the scores of dead bodies every single day turn up on the streets of Baghdad somewhere.
Oftentimes it takes people days to find them and another thing that contributes to this is people are afraid to go actually remove them because what's been happening is, he didn't write about this in the email, but another friend of mine in Baghdad has told me that when people go to collect the bodies, then it's assumed that they're a friend of that dead person, and so then they might be attacked or maybe even shot on the spot for simply removing a body.
So oftentimes these bodies that are dumped at night usually on various streets in Baghdad are left there for days on end before they're removed, and so that's another reason why the stench of decaying corpses is quite prevalent around the city.
Sounds like hell on earth.
It really is.
I think that it's impossible to really describe to people what it's like there.
I mean, here in the United States, we're comfortable, we have infrastructure, we have security, we at least have all of our basic needs met, we don't have to worry about that level of violence.
It's really, even saying, well, can we maybe even compare the situation to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans?
Well, at least as far as infrastructure, that might be an adequate comparison, but there, and even there, while there were security problems and such, it was a bit of a joke compared to what we're looking at in Baghdad today.
Yeah, Baghdad sort of sounds like Hurricane Katrina every day.
Yeah.
Over and over again.
That's right, coupled with car bombs and death squads, which of course we didn't have in New Orleans.
Yeah.
Jeez, man.
Well, you know, I guess of all the things you mentioned there, the one I want to pick up on right now is about people dare not remove the bodies from the side of the road.
There was an article I read a few months back now, and in fact, I tried looking for it and I haven't been able to find it again, but I think it was the LA Times, I don't know.
But anyway, the article was about you dare not stop.
It was a guy talking about driving, I guess he was an Iraqi, but a stringer for an American paper in Iraq or something like that.
And he was writing about how you see dead bodies on the side of the road.
Worse, you see somebody dying on the side of the road.
You see somebody, you know, with their guts torn out, lying on the side of the road, begging for someone to help them.
And you dare not stop.
Because if you do, just like you said, whoever it was that did that violence to that guy, now you've made yourself a mark for them too.
And so, you have basically, in practice, the people who are just regular human beings just trying to get by who are not part of any death squad or any militia or any partisan agenda at all, who are just human beings trying to live, they are made to practice the worst of inhumanities just to live their own life.
They have to drive by dying people on the side of the road and not even glance at them.
You're exactly right.
And that is what's happened.
I mean, everyone now in Baghdad has been dehumanized to one degree or another, simply because, as you say, the situation dictates it.
I mean, if you're driving down the street and you see a dead body, but you know that you are likely to put yourself in great danger simply by stopping to try to cover it up with a cardboard box or a sheet or remove it, or you're going to put your family in grave danger by you doing so, then you're simply not going to stop.
And so, where is the humanity in this situation, where, as a human being, you can't even do that for a corpse on the side of the road, or someone who's wounded and needs assistance, or even someone whose car has broken down and is on the side of the road?
It's extremely, extremely dangerous to do any of that.
I mean, that's the level of fear that is everyday life in Baghdad today, and that's something that I think is really difficult for people here to imagine.
I mean, for example, I talked to some of my colleagues who worked in Sarajevo during the fighting there, and where the sniping was so bad that they had to literally wobble their heads around as they walked down or tried to run across the street to get from one building to another building because they were afraid they would be sniped.
But that's basically the tension and the strain and the level of fear that people have to live with every single day now, just trying to go about everyday life in Baghdad today, where there is no normal life.
Probably most people in large parts of the country are gravely affected with high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, children most acutely.
There's just no normal life.
Most people will not send their children to school.
Even just going out to a market to try to get vegetables to cook at home is literally taking your life in your own hands.
How big is Baghdad compared to, say, I don't know, Austin or Houston or some major city in America that people are familiar with?
I think a fair comparison in Texas would be Houston, in that it's a big city.
It's a little bit over six million people.
And very spread out, right?
Exactly, and that's why I cite Houston as an example.
It's a very sprawling city.
There really isn't a particular downtown area with huge high-rises like downtown Houston, but there is a downtown area with some 20- and 30-floor buildings.
But it's a very big, very sprawling city, big, wide roads, and as I said, it's even a bit larger than Houston in that it's a bit over six million people.
And it's a bit over six million people now, or that was the number?
Yeah, that's a very good point.
That was the number, because if we look at the population of Iraq as a whole in March 2003, just before the invasion was launched, we're talking about a little over 26 million people.
Now we're talking about, I think, we could say accurately, and I'm waiting for the next Lancet report survey to come out, probably in another year's time, but that survey that you cited at the top of the show of 655,000 dead, those results were released this past October.
The legwork for that survey on the ground was conducted July of last summer, and here we are coming up on July of this summer, and this has been the most bloody year so far for civilians in Iraq.
So I think you could argue that there's probably quite close to a million civilians dead.
There's over four million people either internally displaced from their homes, or have had to flee the country altogether.
So if we include those numbers, just those numbers alone, not even talking about wounded, we're talking about over five million people that are either dead or refugees, and a large percentage of those coming from Baghdad.
So I think you could probably estimate that the population of the cities dropped by minimum half a million, probably much more than that.
Alright, well, forgive me for this, seriously, but I have to ask because it really does matter.
This city that you described, these people that you're talking about, they're not cartoon characters from Aladdin.
We're talking about real individual human lives, flesh and blood beating hearts.
They cry out when family members are blown apart, just like Americans would.
They live on Earth, and have a blue sky above them just like us.
It looks like it's flat even though they're on the side of the world just like we are.
This is not make believe, right?
We're talking about real people here, right?
No, you're exactly right.
And I actually don't take offense to the need of you or anyone else to have to do that, because with the mainstream corporate media coverage of the situation, especially during the invasion and earlier on in the occupation, where there's no humanization of Iraq at all, and even today, how often do you see in-depth interviews with people who've lost family members to where you can really hear what they're saying and experience them sharing their grief?
Very much.
When you go over there, it's a very deep, rich culture.
Needless to say, thousands and thousands of years older than our own.
People are very, very kind and warm and generous.
Even people who don't have much of anything, when you go visit their home, part of their culture is always to offer you drinks and food and even to stay the night, if that's what you feel like doing.
It's a very warm, welcoming, kind culture.
I think it's important that as much as possible, journalists continue to show that these are human beings, that it's a lot easier to hear these incredibly high numbers of dead, wounded, and displaced people.
I think it's more important and more difficult to really show these are human beings with families.
These are little children.
These are old women.
These are mothers with children.
They're not just these astronomically high numbers.
These are human beings that are having to go through this hell that has been brought upon them by the government of our country.
The butcher Joseph Stalin said it best, didn't he?
That one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic.
That's exactly right.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what we're talking about here in Iraq.
If we just simply look at the tragic events of what happened with the university shooting here more recently in West Virginia where there were over 30 people killed in one day.
It was very, very personalized by the news.
We got to know who these people were, how their families felt about it, whether they were still in intensive care or whether they died in intensive care.
This is how it was portrayed.
Imagine if that type of coverage was given to the situation in Iraq, the situation that our country is directly responsible for.
In fact, they're talking about a little over 30 people being killed in that tragedy.
Three to four to five to six times that number every single day are being killed in Iraq.
Why doesn't the coverage reflect that?
You are going to have to forgive me for this because I got to play war party.
Yeah, but that's all them killing each other because they're a bunch of crazy savages.
That's not our guy's fault.
That's right.
That's really just the classic line of not taking responsibility that comes from individuals or groups that have no fundamental understanding whatsoever of the reality on the ground over there or even statistics provided by our own U.S. military.
It's racist, it's propaganda, it's dehumanizing, and it's completely inaccurate where if we hear that statement and compare it to the reality on the ground, it just doesn't hold water because the reality on the ground is that the U.S. government has been deeply involved in a divide and conquer strategy there from the very beginning, pitting groups against one another, setting up and arming death squads from various sects and various ethnic groups to go after one another, and backing them to this day as we speak.
This is happening in Baghdad, and these are the groups that are responsible for killing the vast majority of all the civilians.
If you took that U.S. backing away from this situation, i.e. what I mean is an immediate withdrawal of troops, then I would argue that violence would de-escalate rather quickly as opposed to the rhetoric you hear in the corporate media.
Well, definitely everyone agrees that we have to stay there because if we leave, everyone's just going to kill each other.
It's absolute rubbish.
There's not a grain of truth to that whatsoever.
So you think that the sectarian war is strictly due to the American occupation and a deliberate strategy by the United States?
I do.
I wouldn't blame every bit of violence happening in Iraq on the U.S. occupation.
That's not the case.
Absolutely, there's now revenge killings.
There's foreign groups operating inside of Iraq.
There definitely are terrorist groups operating there now which are responsible for killing civilians.
But I would argue, and I would feel confident arguing, that the brunt of the violence being carried out there, including some of the car bombings, including who's backing many of the death squads on top of just massive U.S. military operations and the air war, which are still killing scores of civilians every single day, that if you did take the U.S. occupation and all of the U.S. meddling out of that picture, that violence would decrease dramatically.
Okay, well hold on to that thought about the airstrikes for a second there.
But let me ask you about the car bombings.
All the media here reports that the car bombings are the Sunni insurgency.
What role does America play in that?
Well, actually, that statement is not accurate whatsoever.
Actually, car bombs, while they are used by some resistance groups, I have yet to meet any resistance group, and I've talked with several during my time over there, that says that they would attack civilians or carry out an operation where there could be civilians under any circumstances whatsoever.
That is simply not a primary tool used by the resistance.
If we talk about who are responsible for the car bomb, we have to talk about the fact that there are terrorist groups like Al Qaeda now operating in Iraq, and their goal is to generate Sunni and Shia strife.
And being Sunni fundamentalists themselves, they're not part of the actual nationalistic Iraqi resistance.
They're more part of groups that are simply, their goal is a sort of sick, perverted purification of Islam, where they think that the solution is to kill as many Shia as possible.
And so they're the group behind many of these car bombs in the Shia markets and the Shia mosques, et cetera.
However, I think I want to point to one of the most famous examples of Western backing of this type of bombing, where we had an event over a year ago now down in Basra, where we had two undercover British SAS officers who were found in a car, caught in a car, by Iraqi police.
And the men stood out because they were clearly Westerners trying to be undercover.
They were wearing a local dress, the dishtasha, they were wearing kafias, they had grown mustaches, were in an unmarked car, and they were caught by Iraqi police.
And it turns out their car was full of unexploded bombs and remote detonating devices.
So they were thrown in jail down in Basra, and they were going to be tried for planting bombs in order to fulfillment sectarian violence.
But before that trial could take place, the British military found it necessary to go ahead and raze the jail all the way to the ground to get their two men out.
And from that point on, that's why we can say that relations between the British government and the governorate of Basra have been deeply strained to this point.
And I think you could say that probably has something to do with why the Brits have now been kicked out of two of their three bases down in the South.
But that's not the only example we can point to of this having happened.
There's been other incidents where...
Well, hang on one sec.
Hang on one sec.
Tell me about more of them in a second, because I'm interested.
But on that one, and I'm really...
I have to go back, because this keeps coming up, and I have to really go back and study this.
But the way I remember it was that the initial reports about all the bombs and so forth really weren't backed up, that they showed the pictures of what they had found on these guys, and they did have rifles and so forth, but not explosives.
And if I remember right, I talked with Juan Cole, and I may have that wrong, but if I remember right, I talked with Juan Cole basically right after it, and he explained that the best evidence was that these guys were observing the local imam who they were planning on arresting.
They had a problem with him, and they wanted to arrest this guy, and that they were basically surveilling him and got caught in the act of that and got in the gunfight, what have you, but that the whole false flag, they were going to blow up some stuff and blame it on terrorists, that kind of thing was really blown all out of proportion.
Well, that's just simply not true, because it is actually a fact that their car was full of explosives.
And then just, when was it, last March, another incident occurred in Tikrit, where not long after the explosion at the Shrine of Al-Aqsiri in Samara on February 22nd of last year, that there were two, another incident, almost identical of Western contractors caught in Tikrit with another car full of explosives and remote detonators.
But specifically, the event in Basra, no, it's quite well documented.
Even BBC World Radio and BBC World in Arabic reported that, yes, they actually had explosive detonating devices and explosives in their car, and that's exactly what they were charged for by the Iraqi police there.
Masada al-Sadr came out and spoke about it a couple of times in different speeches from Southern Iraq.
So, yeah, we have to be careful when we talk with people who may not have the deepest connections in the country and certainly haven't been there themselves.
I respect much of Professor Cole's work, and he has a very, very valuable blog, but he's also someone who claimed that there were never U.S. snipers in Fallujah targeting civilians and there were never chemical weapons used in Fallujah, which of course both have been proven true beyond any doubt whatsoever.
Right, yeah, well, I definitely don't dispute that.
And, you know, if you say so, I'll take your word for it, because I know that you have been there.
And so, do you think that then the Samara Mosque might have been an inside job, a deliberate attempt to keep the Sunni and Shia apart?
I can't say for sure.
I have a little bit of proof to that effect, but not enough that I would actually go ahead and write a hard news story to that fact.
But I would say that it's not out of the realm of possibility.
And, you know, this stuff might seem conspiracy-theory-oriented or very outlandish to many people listening, but the reality is all you have to do is go back and look through some of the declassified CIA documents where this government's been running covert operations and overthrowing governments covertly and doing false flag operations and this sort of thing since almost its very beginning.
I would advise people to go pick up a copy of Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer's recent book, who also wrote All the Shah's Men about the U.S. installing the Shah in Iran in 1953.
I mean, we can just go through history and cite example after example of the U.S. carrying out these types of operations and undercover operations and planting bombs and bringing down airplanes and assassinating people and this sort of thing.
So when you look at it through that lens, then it seems like, well, maybe that's not quite so outlandish.
Yeah, well, I definitely wouldn't put it past them.
I just, you know, I'm like you, I need more evidence to know it, but I don't doubt it.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
Look at what we're talking about here is a war that was launched on completely false pretenses from the very get go.
You know, talk about conspiracy theory.
How about there's some neo cons in the vice president's office in the Pentagon hell bent on lying us into war, you know, something that, you know, as Brian Williams on NBC News will tell you now.
So come on, you know, there's no doubt about it.
In fact, if we look back at history, they lied us into the war with Mexico, they lied us into the northern invasion of the south, they lied us into the war with Spain, they lied us into World War One, they lied us into World War Two, they lied us into Korea, they lied us into Vietnam, they lied us into Iraq the first, second and third times.
You know, I don't know if America's ever participated in a war that wasn't based on lies.
No, you're exactly right.
And that's a very, very good point.
And I think it's an important logical tool that we should use and apply directly to this situation.
If we have an administration that's proven themselves from day one to essentially be, I think you could even argue pathological liars.
I mean, they're not honest about anything that they're doing, whether it's their domestic agenda or their environmental policies, let alone their policies regarding the war in Iraq and other foreign policy in the Middle East.
It's just one lie after another.
So does it make any logical sense whatsoever to think that a group that would tell lie after lie, manufacturing documents, paying people off, this sort of thing, to justify an illegal war, invasion and occupation, then all of a sudden they're going to turn things around and use a completely straight up, legitimate, honest policy in that country.
It just simply would not add up.
Now in actual context, with the war on the ground, it does make sense from a strategic point of view, from the American military's point of view, I would gather, to mount operations like this.
I think basically it's been the case that by default, rather than deliberately, that America, as Michael Shor says, is bin Laden's indispensable ally.
Basically all of our policies are the same ones that Al Qaeda approves of.
And in this case, it's as you said, a sectarian civil war.
Al Qaeda, the foreign, religious, crazy, jihadist and whatever, they don't want a nationalist government run by a coalition of local Baafists and Muqtada al-Sadr.
They want civil war.
They want pure Islam and that kind of craziness.
And apparently this is what the Bush administration wants.
I speak with Gareth Porter just about every week now on this show and Robert Dreyfus and the rest of these guys, who are just the experts on what's going on in Iraq, and they're telling me, unconditionally, America's supporting the Iran parties rather than the Iraqi nationalists.
The Muqtada al-Sadr, who's no angel but is certainly not any more of a murderer than the guys from the Hakim clan and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, he's sitting here trying to make an alliance with the Sunnis.
The Sunnis are reaching out to him back, and these guys are working on a multi-ethnic coalition government, and America refuses to go along, refuses to support their negotiations in any way, continues to wage war on Sadr and back the Iran parties.
So it sure looks to me like, once again, America's policy is exactly in line with what Osama bin Laden wants.
Well, that's all extremely accurate, and people like Porter and Dreyfus, I very much respect their work, and they continue both to do excellent jobs, and that analysis is exactly right.
I think another thing that I would add to that information that you just put out there is that think about simply the prospect of peace in Iraq.
Who would benefit from that?
What I mean by that specifically is, how would the Bush administration or any future U.S. administration that will come into power in 2008, how would a U.S. government wanting to stay in Iraq, how could they justify a continuance of the occupation if there really was national reconciliation, if there really was peace, if Iraqis basically did come together and formed their own representative government and really did start to experience peace and reconstruction and stability in that country?
What need would there be for these mega bases?
What need would there be for a U.S. embassy in the middle of Baghdad that has a billion dollar a year operating budget and houses over a thousand people and has its own school for the Westerners that work there?
What need would there be for over 150,000 troops in Iraq?
The bottom line is they just simply wouldn't need to be there.
In my work, I always look at, okay, who benefits from this?
When I'm trying to figure out who's responsible for some particular event, I always ask myself, okay, who's responsible?
It's kind of like the follow the money thing, which is another very important question, but again, who benefits from continuing bloodshed in Iraq and mayhem and chaos and violence?
It's certainly not the Iraqi people.
It's the outside influences.
Of course, the biggest outside influence we have by far and away in Iraq is the U.S. government and the U.S. military being there.
In second and third place, Iran, who we're backing, and Al Qaeda, who the Sunnis only tolerate as long as they're helping to fight us and the Iranians.
That's exactly right.
Those are two other very, very integral players, needless to say.
I understand why Justin Raimondo calls this bizarro world, and in fact, I kind of resent it because I used to use that on my radio show long before I ever read Justin Raimondo.
I used to always say, what, Superman's a bad guy and the Sun is red?
And everything that makes sense is null and void, and instead we just follow this insanity?
But now, it's funny because, you know, really, what you just said echoes what Justin Raimondo wrote in his most recent column up there today, Why Are We In Iraq?
He quotes Ayn Rand as saying basically exactly what you just said.
Don't bother to examine a folly.
Ask yourself only what it accomplishes.
Here we sit around, and this is a debate that happens on this show all the time.
How stupid are these people that they're backing Iran at the same time they're planning to have a war with Iran?
That they're backing Al Qaeda against Hezbollah in Lebanon?
This insanity that's going on, and it's basically, even for a conspiracy nut like myself, it's basically almost impossible to believe that these people are really that sicko.
This has got to be just incompetence.
This is Cheney's refusal to operate within the bounds of reality or something.
But at the end of the day, I think, don't we really have to assume, Dar, that Dick Cheney is rational and that the things he does have purpose beyond just his own aggrandizement?
Did America invade this country in order to smash it in a million pieces?
Was that the purpose of this, this massive failure that the American people detest so much?
Is this mission accomplished?
I think, regarding Dick Cheney specifically, because, let me preface this with saying that I have consistently vacillated between the two points that you just mentioned of, is this either just gross, sheer, incredible incompetence overall by the Bush administration, or is this this deep, dark, calculated plan of global hegemony?
And I think, regarding Dick Cheney, there is no vacillation for me that it's the latter, that he is calculating, he's smart, he has had this agenda for a long time.
And if you just look back at his different energy groups and the things that he's headed and the offices that he's set up regarding Middle East policy, plus his, of course, where he came from, from more recently, at least, of being CEO of Halliburton, that no, he has a plan, he's calculating, and I don't think any of this is by accident coming from him.
I think it might be accidental and that he probably did hope that actually Iraqis might actually be a little bit more welcoming of having their country invading, invaded and occupied.
But overall, I think that Dick Cheney specifically, I think that this is just another step in the agenda.
And I think that there's more steps to come if they get their way.
Yeah, it looks like they're preparing to bomb Iran, which I guess would make it okay that we're backing the Iran parties in Iraq, as long as they're controlled by friendly Iranians.
It is, and it's really astounding.
But, you know, even with them doing that, if these people, whoever they might be, whether it's Cheney or other of the hawks in the administration, think that that's going to bring them any softening or any comfort inside of Iraq if and when bombs start falling on Tehran, well, they need to think again, because we're going to see violence on levels in Iraq that we've never even seen before.
And I say that here at the end of a month.
It's looking like it's shaping up to be one of the very bloodiest months of the entire occupation for U.S. soldiers.
And I think if and when Iran is attacked, then, you know, the planners and the military strategists and the people in the government are going to be wishing for months like this one, this very bloody month that we're passing right now in Iraq, because it'll just go off the charts.
Well, you know, Time magazine reported in response to Steve Clemons' thing on the Washington note about Cheney's plan to do it and run around Bush and get us into the war anyway.
Time magazine responded that not only can I confirm that that is a fact, what Steve Clemons says, but I'm sorry, I forget the guy's name.
It's an old Clinton guy.
I'm sorry I forget the name of the guy writing in Time magazine on their blog.
But he says not only is Steve Clemons right, but that he can add to that that Bush went and had a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the tank at the Pentagon and asked them, you know, hey, what do you guys think about bombing Iran?
And that they said, well, we can rain hell on them, no doubt about it, sir.
But we have such lousy intelligence, we're not sure we'd even hit their nuclear program, which I don't believe that.
I don't think that Iran has a nuclear program besides what the IAEA has documented thoroughly.
But anyway, they say, we don't know that we'd even get it all.
And we cannot guarantee the safety of American soldiers in Iraq.
And I guess we like to think that George Bush understands that it's not okay for him to sacrifice the army in Iraq in order to have a war in Iran.
But I'm not certain, Dar, that the Joint Chiefs explained.
Why is it that the American forces in Iraq would be so much, would be in so much danger if we were to bomb Iran?
Well, I like to go straight to CIA assessments on this situation, as well as conversations that I've had with people like Sai Hirsch on this.
Recently, we were together at the Al Jazeera Media Forum in Doha, Qatar, at the beginning of April.
And that, coupled with even CIA assessments of the situation, are very specific about why U.S. troops in Iraq would be put in even more danger if and when the U.S. decides to start bombing Iran.
First of all, the main ground supply line into Baghdad goes from Kuwait to Baghdad.
Well, southern Iraq is controlled by who?
Well, everyone who's not asleep knows that that's the Shia and that a huge percentage of those in the south are very much directly loyal to the Iranian government.
We're talking about the very well-armed and well-funded and well-trained fodder organization.
Even the Mahdi Army and Al-Sadr have expressed loyalties to Tehran.
Even though they also say that they're nationalistic, they definitely also have ties to Tehran.
Well, those are the two main groups controlling basically all of southern Iraq at this point.
And so that supply line, we could assume, would be cut overnight, according to the CIA.
The CIA also says that southern Iraq would, quote, light up like a candle, end quote.
That basically, another thing that Iran would do is torch all of the oil infrastructure of the Gulf.
Another thing that's going to happen, not just with troops in Iraq, but with the ships deployed now.
We know right now that there's a huge number of U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf.
Well, even those aircraft carriers that prior to this administration, other administrations, and certainly military commanders, have always been loathe to bring in aircraft carriers to the Gulf, because it's not easy for them to turn them around.
They just don't have free reign because of bottom terrain, because of prevailing winds.
And the winds have to be blowing a certain direction many times in order for these large ships to even be able to make a turn or do maneuvers.
And the Iranian government is acutely aware of that.
And yet here we have Bush once again playing military, even though he's absolutely clueless, sending in everything he has as the show of force.
And of course, the commanders once again having to just follow orders.
And basically, if we look at the type of missiles and other armaments that Iran has, many of these ships are basically sitting ducks.
Okay, wrap up quick.
We got one minute.
Okay.
And then finally, what this would do in Iraq also is there's all this bellicose rhetoric from the Bush administration, that we already have these targets picked out all over Iran.
Well, guess what?
Iran has all of the targets picked out in Iraq as well.
And of course, those would all be the very large U.S. bases there that would also be sitting ducks.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I wish I had much more time to continue this interview.
But I want to recommend everybody go to dharjamailirak.com.
D-A-H-R-J-A-M-A-I-L-I-R-A-K.com.
And this afternoon, you'll be able to find the link.
And actually, I think you can already find them in the blog roll at my blog, thestressblog.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, Dar.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Anytime.
All right, folks.
This has been Antiwar Radio.
Thanks for listening.
Happy Memorial Day.
Talk to you tomorrow, 11 to 1 here, Texas time.