So, I am Scott, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show is John Glazer.
He's our new assistant editor at Antiwar.com.
You can find him at news.antiwar.com and at antiwar.com/blog.
How's it going, John?
Very good.
Nice to talk to you.
Yeah, well, I'm happy to have you here, and I think tremendous congratulations are due for ending the Iraq war.
Congratulations, John, you did it.
Let's not speak too soon.
All right, well, it sure looks to me like you've done more than people may know to undo, to at least damage the Obama administration's efforts to keep American troops in that country after the end of this year, like in the deal.
What happened was the WikiLeaks came out, and you broke the story, or went back, broke the story that the WikiLeaks contained a State Department document describing a horrible war crime in Iraq, and one that now has the Iraqi government threatening to shut down negotiations on staying.
That's right.
It's caused...
I mean, it was actually written up by a lot of people.
I suppose I was one of the first.
I didn't do it secondhand.
I found it within the WikiLeaks cache.
But yeah, the document described a house raid in Iraq in 2006 in which American soldiers surrounded a house, were subject to some fire from inside the house, and proceeded to summarily execute everyone in the house, which included four women, three children, two children and three infants, and an older man, put their hands behind their back, and shot them in the head.
They killed their pets, and then they called in airstrikes to hide the evidence.
That, of course, is a major war crime.
And recently the Iraqi government has been talking about, you know, about opening up the investigations into that incident, following up on the ones that had been dropped so many years ago.
And that's causing a bit of friction in Iraqi politics, especially since right around now they are supposed to be in negotiations with U.S. officials over whether or not we'll be able to stay there in a military and diplomatic fashion after the December deadline for full withdrawal.
So, you know, maybe it actually will have the effect of sort of preventing the Obama administration and the Washington sort of national security consensus from imposing what they've always wanted to impose in Iraq, which is a long-term client state with a sizable contingent of American forces and diplomats.
Maybe it'll get stuck in its tracks.
I don't know.
Well, you know, McClatchy's Roy Gutman was on the show, say, two months ago or something, and he'd just gotten back from Iraq.
And he was saying that the consensus among people with power there anyway was that the Iraqi government had the power to put down any rebellion, that their martial law was effective nationwide, basically, and that that wasn't the problem, but that they needed us to keep the Saudis out, to keep the Iranians out, to keep the whoever out, depending on who you ask.
But so that really gives me hope.
And maybe it's just silly, and I'm just kidding myself because I want it so bad.
But I want to believe, John, that Nouri al-Maliki is just BSing the Americans and going, telling them, oh, you know, I'm really trying to convince everybody to go along with your great plan to stay, which Lord knows I sure want you to.
I'm doing my best.
And he's just running out the clock the same way he did with George W. Bush in 2008 on the bases issue, when Bush wanted 56 bases and Maliki whittled them down to zero by just pretending to try to go along but completely failing to actually do anything to accomplish it.
I think it's possible.
I mean, someone like Maliki, who rose to power in a post-war Iraq and is sort of jostling a bunch of different sectarian factions, I mean, he must be shrewd in a political sort of way.
And so I don't necessarily doubt any of that.
And he has been holding out.
The U.S. has been heavily, heavily pressuring the Iraqi government for months now to stick around with a large enough force after that SOFA agreement, which was signed in 2008, says that they have to leave in total.
Now, just the other day, the Obama administration endorsed a plan that would keep 3,000 to 4,000 American troops in Iraq past the December deadline to withdraw.
He made this announcement without the permission of Maliki or Iraqi parliament.
There's been no sort of deal that has been hatched and agreed upon by anyone.
He just said it, probably because, as you say, Maliki has been riding him out this whole time, sort of saying, oh, you know, I'll talk to people, you know, just wait, I'll make it happen, and then, you know, postponing and postponing, which perhaps is a beneficial strategy for not, you know, getting troops out.
So on the one hand, it's sort of encouraging that, number one, Maliki is waiting him out, and number two, that the number that Obama, you know, proposed is only 3,000 to 4,000.
Now, yes, that's 3,000 to 4,000 too many, because it's supposed to be exactly zero.
But, you know, some people in his administration were saying 10,000 to 18,000, some were saying 25,000 at minimum.
Some hawks just today and yesterday have been coming out publicly and saying that within Congress.
But, you know, he went with 3,000 to 4,000.
Of course, that's not an actual, you know, accurate number of the sort of contingent that will remain there under this plan.
But it is a sign that there's this pressure to get the heck out and that we don't belong there.
On the other hand, so that's the encouraging part.
On the other hand, you know, I'm concerned that these are just signs that sort of we've done our job in Iraq as the, you know, war party sees it.
They have ousted the dictator.
They've somewhat stabilized things, although it's still a very dangerous country.
And they've, you know, bolstered this puppet government that they can, you know, have some large amount of influence over.
Now, the few thousand troops that would reportedly be left behind would be to train and support Iraqi security forces and, you know, use for national defense where Iraq can't actually handle it on its own.
But in addition to that, the government has been talking about keeping anyone from 5,000 to 7,000 private security contractors, so mercenaries, to protect diplomats, people in the State Department, non-uniformed people of the Defense Department, contractors, so on and so forth.
So on the high end, at least we're up to approximately 11,000.
In addition to that, there's supposed to be State Department employees and contractors up to maybe 17,000, probably a little more.
So now, you know, we're approaching something like 30,000.
That's not really a low force.
But, I mean, as the New York Times said the other day, you know, the administration has already drawn up plans for extensive expansion of the American embassy, its operations, it's bolstered by thousands of paramilitary security contractors, and it's sort of set up to be another Egypt.
We've got troops in Egypt.
They're gone, but we've still sort of got a bit of a puppet government with the transition right there.
We're still giving them $1.7-some-odd billion a year.
We're still weaponizing them.
They're still essentially a client state, and they have been for, you know, 30 or 40 years.
And I think that we're seeing signs that this low force, quote-unquote low amount of force, it's actually just a sign that, you know, they think they have enough control over Iraq now that they can make it a client state as opposed to a war zone.
Yeah, well, you know, I guess the one thing we have going for us is the stupidity of the strategy, overthrowing the minority dictatorship and installing the majority.
You're right, there's a lot of loose ends here.
But at the end of the day, hopefully they don't need us.
And, you know, God help those people being turned over to Muqtada al-Sadr and whoever he can make friends with over there in their horrible future they have coming, but I just want to see an end to the American part of it a long time ago.
Yeah, I just don't think it's happening.
I mean, it's lower than we would want in terms of it's not a war zone anymore, but it's just going to be another sort of not special client state, the same that we have in Jordan, the same that we had in Yemen before it started to get chaotic, the same that we have in Oman and Qatar.
You know, we have client states that are paid for and weaponized by us that generally are subservient to U.S. power all throughout that region.
And I think that we're seeing the beginning now of a drawdown of Iraq being a war zone and a war front, and the beginning of it being just another client state the way Kuwait and Jordan and the rest of them are.
Yeah, well, hey, that's an improvement, I guess.
It's sort of like the gas prices, right?
We sigh in relief when it goes down to three and a quarter, forgetting how much higher it has just been a few years back, right?
A ratchet effect for you there.
All right, well, listen now, you brought up Yemen, and I think that's a good opportunity for me to ask you about Yemen.
And for that matter, what's been happening in Bahrain and the rest of the Arab summer over on the Arabian Peninsula?
You know, it's interesting.
Bahrain is still one of the most interesting aspects of the Arab spring, summer, whatever you call it.
You know, there's still almost daily protests there.
The American press doesn't talk about it at all.
They don't mention it.
There's no detail.
Once in a while, maybe you hop onto Al Jazeera and you'll find it.
But there's daily protests there of the thousands of people.
And there's also daily repression by the government, which we continue to support and weaponize.
You know, just recently it was in the news a bit that a 14-year-old boy was shot in the head with a tear gas canister from close range.
So it killed him.
It didn't make him cry, the tear gas.
It killed him.
It punctured his brain.
And, you know, the Bahraini government has been firing people by the tens of thousands because they participated in the demonstrations.
They've been colluding with businesses and stuff like that to get people fired.
And there's still ongoing an investigation of the medical professionals who wanted to, you know, treat protesters as patients who got injured by the government.
And they were prosecuted for that.
So Bahrain is still sort of the thorn in the Obama administration's side because it's one of the clearest examples of supporting repression and tyranny over democracy.
Given the ideological system and all the propaganda, it's harder to see that in, say, Libya or, you know, in many of the other popular revolutions like Egypt.
We were not on the side of democracy in either of those two places.
But Bahrain is – you know, it's hard for the administration to really escape how obviously horrible U.S. policy has been for the prospect of democracy.
Yeah, indeed.
In fact, I think it was Dennis Blair, they asked him on one of the Sunday morning news shows, I think on Meet the Press, well, what's the difference between Egypt and Bahrain, where at that point they had finally given in and given rhetorical support to the removal of Mubarak.
And he replied that, well, we have – no, he didn't say we have a base there.
He said they're our allies.
Bahrain are our allies.
Although maybe it wasn't Egypt because that wasn't the comparison.
Libya?
Maybe it was Libya.
What's the difference between Libya and Bahrain?
Bahrain's our ally.
So we'll support a 20% or 25% minority dictatorship there as long as we can have our base, basically is what he meant.
Simple as that.
Right.
Right.
It's very important that the base stays there.
Egypt, actually, people think of it as sort of an outlier, but it follows a very historically consistent principle that the U.S. supports tyranny for decades upon decades.
And then when a few people get fed up with it, we support – we continue to support the tyranny up until the very last moment, and then we rhetorically withdraw support.
But, you know, rhetorically withdrawing support includes people – includes doing things like lending support to Soleiman, who was the torture officer under Mubarak, and we wanted him to succeed Mubarak, which would have been disastrous for the prospect of Egyptian democracy.
And fortunately, they didn't accept that.
But, you know, kudos to the Egyptian people for that.
Yeah.
Well, and poor guys, you know, CIA and probably every other intelligence agency in the world are running around crazy over there trying to scavenge what they can of their power and influence, I bet, right?
I guess we don't really know, but they must be.
That's right.
And these are sort of – They still have a big uphill battle to fight there.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Things are much worse, though, say, in Somalia or in Afghanistan.
Jeremy Scahill of The Nation came up with another wonderful report exposing U.S. policy in Somalia.
It's just – it's bad.
It's getting very bad.
The basic point, basic thrust of this new piece is how prone to blowback we are in Somalia.
We're supporting a military force known as the African Union Force.
It's U.S.
-sponsored.
It's basically a bunch of murderous warlords and thugs, some of whom used to be members of al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab, but have switched sides because of probably money and weapons and power.
And it has a membership that's more prone to blowback than perhaps any other group in the American empire – any other proxy group, that is.
They're doing it – the U.S. is trying to build a central government in Somalia with the idea of it being, you know, we can root out terrorism if we do that.
But the mayor of Mogadishu says – I'm quoting – that the warlords aren't supporting the government, but they are waiting.
He says it's time – it's a time bomb.
They're waiting.
They want to weaken the government, and they're waiting any time that the government falls so that each one will grab an area.
And probably wreak all sorts of terror.
So that's sort of another unfortunate front in the American policy towards Middle East and North Africa.
It's just as bad there as anyplace else.
Afghanistan today, actually, is in the news because the UN published a report that said many of the Afghan jails are torturing their prisoners.
They're being beaten with rubber hoses.
They are being electrocuted with shocks.
They're being sexually assaulted.
And the UN said this, and our U.S.
-supported proxy-slash-puppet government in Afghanistan denied it.
They said that the report was politically motivated in order to disrupt the transition from NATO forces of security to Afghanistan, which is just absurd.
The notion that the UN would start lying about torture in Afghanistan is if they have some motivation to do that.
But also, it's just not very hard to believe.
They mentioned that in Iraq – And it's absurd, too, that the Iraqi government and what it wants has any political influence as far as determining how quickly any power is turned over to them from NATO.
It's completely beside the point, you know?
But nevertheless, they have blatantly denied that any of this torture is going on.
And it's just another example of how little the Obama administration's policy towards detention and torture has changed from Bush's.
Some of the worst torture of the Bush administration happened right in the cells in Afghanistan, and they're still going on.
Right, and you know, it's funny that you mention that.
There's this piece that ran at the Daily Kos and somewhere else about how – if you – I don't know.
I think it was kind of out of context anyway, but supposedly that the Obama team feared a coup if they pursued torture charges against Dick Cheney and those guys.
Even though that's ridiculous on the face of it that they would have ever faced anything like that.
It's doubtful they ever believed it, but really it's just the excuse for the real reason they didn't prosecute the war criminals is because they wanted to be war criminals too, the Obama administration.
They've set about doing it.
You mentioned Scahill and Rowley's work on Somalia there.
Obama's got his own CIA JSOC torture dungeon underneath Mogadishu somewhere.
That's right.
The Obama administration came in saying, no, we're not looking back.
We're looking forward.
Yeah, forward to more of the same is what he meant.
And now that you mention it, the fact that Cheney, that horrible, rabid fiend of a war criminal, is on national television promoting his book, which should be burned.
It's just horrible.
He should be in jail and not beating his chest on Fox about how effective the torture regime was, which it wasn't.
He keeps touting this line that enhanced interrogation helped in getting Osama bin Laden, which it didn't.
No reports have claimed so.
No U.S. officials have claimed that.
They've described how they tracked Osama's courier back and forth, back and forth.
It was intelligence gathering from afar and through different levels of people.
It had nothing to do with torturing people and getting information out of them.
There was a lot written about how Cheney, he's allowed, because of his stature and his position, to waltz around the country and get all this wonderful deference and attention.
But he's one of the leading criminals in the United States of America.
It's an amazing precedent set, too.
The American government always tortured people, but I don't think they ever this blatantly broke their own law and bragged about it and just claimed that, you know, whatever.
What are you going to do about it, basically, like a schoolyard bully?
Cheney doesn't really have anything to say.
He can't really argue that it wasn't against the law.
You know, he just says, yeah, but you're not going to prosecute me, so what?
And that means from now on, anybody else who's a member of the principal's committee or they're lawyers or they're soldiers or anybody can continue to do the very same thing as we're seeing with Obama and as we'll probably see in the Rick Perry administration to come.
That's right.
And you know what?
There's an ideological sort of propaganda that sort of props this sort of thinking up.
And it's being – it's on high right now.
It's like turned up to 11 like the movie.
It goes past 10 to 11.
And now we're seeing because of the anniversary of 9-11, 10th anniversary, all of these people are coming out, you know, BSing about how – I just watched Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning.
Chuck Schumer, which is another horrible person who voted for the Iraq War, voted for the Patriot Act and all this stuff.
He came out and said, look, we need to find the unity that we found right after the attacks happened.
You know, we've lost our way.
Congress is sort of just bitterly partisan now.
We can't get anything done.
We need unity and togetherness and brotherhood, which is belowing.
What he means by that is – He's lying around Chuck Schumer.
Oh, my god.
Yeah.
What he means is that we want conformity.
We want enough of a level of fear within the Congress and with the American people that those in power get to do whatever they want.
That's exactly what he's describing.
I saw another segment on CNN about elementary school teachers teaching 9-11 to little kids, you know, 6, 7, 8 years old, 10 years old.
And what it made me realize is that this is going to be taught in history books and it's going to be totally spat on.
And the lessons that were supposed to have been learned that day are going to be absent.
And instead, they're going to wave the flag.
They're going to put their hand over their heart and pledge allegiance to the flag, which is precisely what too many Americans did right after 9-11.
And the memory that we're supposed to have had, you know, those days affected me a lot.
It made me, you know, interested in foreign policy, which is why I'm here today.
Yeah.
Having the opposite effect on little kids all around America now and whoever is listening to Chuck Schumer.
Yeah.
Well, there's the silver lining is, you know, they made a good rider out of you.
We're very glad to have you at AntiWar.com.
And we're all out of time.
I've got to cut it off here.
But thank you very much for your time, John, as always.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's John Glaser.
He's our new assistant editor at AntiWar.com.
This has been AntiWar Radio.
Thanks for listening.
We'll be back tomorrow on LRN and Chaos Radio to talk bad about the government and the horrible things that they do to people all the time.
