All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest on the show is the great Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
EMPAS, U.S. says no breakthrough in Iraq talks.
What's going on there?
Well, what's been going on there for the past week or two is that the Iraqi government had finally settled on formally requesting 5,000 U.S. troops to remain in the country past December.
But at the same time, they said those troops would only be in a training capacity.
They would be confined to Iraqi military bases, and they wouldn't get any immunity at all for any crimes committed off base.
Now, after that, the U.S. condemned that offer and said that they have to have blanket immunity like they enjoy right now from local prosecution.
And there were even reports emerging over the weekend that the U.S. had decided that they were just leaving, although officials are now denying that and saying, no, we haven't decided yet.
Was that just like a trial balloon, some kind of supposed threat against the Iraqis?
Okay, well, we'll just leave then.
It does kind of feel like that.
It feels like a posturing move toward the Iraqis, although I'm not sure that it would be considered a big deal to most Iraqis if the U.S. troops did leave.
It seems like most of them would be okay with it.
Yeah, well, by the Iraqis, I meant the state there.
But even then, Maliki doesn't seem to really care, huh?
Well, right.
They've talked about replacing the trainers with private contractor trainers.
Maliki has talked about that.
Maliki's spokesman talked about that.
And Motad al-Sadr has even sent out some trial balloons to the Russians, to the European Union, to some other nations in the Middle East to see if they would be interested in sending training troops instead of the U.S.
I've got to tell you, this is the most embarrassing empire ever.
This empire is like O.J. Simpson in the Naked Gun, stepping in a bucket and slamming her hand in the window and then bumping her head on something and fall out into the water.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
Motad al-Sadr is going to the Russians to ask them if they want to train.
I kind of hope they do that just to make it even, you know, give it a little bit more of that Monty Python ethic here.
Well, it would certainly be funny, but I'm not really sure how good a job Russian troops would be able to do training Iraqis on how to use advanced weaponry that they bought pretty much entirely from the United States.
Yeah, but never mind that.
They'll have their own advantages in figuring out, training themselves on that equipment, reverse engineering it and everything else.
It'll give them access to all these weapons.
Oh, man.
Well, okay, so now here's the thing.
I found some incoming links to the anti-war blog and they're to this website called the Common Ills.
And they write all about Iraq stuff all the time and apparently listen to this show, including our interviews and Patrick Coburn's and others.
And he or she, I forget, made reference to my repeated claims that I really hope that Maliki is just shining us on and pretending that he's trying to do everything he can for us.
But really, he's not.
And he's just waiting out the clock the way he did with Bush and the bases back in 2008.
And the commentary at the Common Ills is that, no, the 56 bases back in 2008 was always a red herring.
The real point is, as long as Hillary Clinton gets her embassy and the private army there.
And as long as whatever, you know, JSOC stays as counterterrorism forces or, you know, as long as the air power issues are still there.
That basically post-surge, that's all the Americans were going for anyway.
They didn't want 56 permanent bases.
They didn't need them and they knew, I guess, they couldn't have, you know, huge bases like that there permanently.
But they have the biggest embassy one country has ever built in another anyway.
And it amounts to an occupation, you know, right there in the center of Baghdad.
What do you think of that?
Well, that's certainly true.
And, of course, they've been expanding that embassy recently because they decided that it wasn't really big enough.
Which sort of speaks to their intentions about Iraq going forward.
Because the largest embassy in the history of mankind isn't big enough to handle the job.
But, yeah, I think a lot of this is just posturing.
There's probably going to be a lot of last-minute negotiations and some sort of deal will be worked out or maybe instead of the trainers they agree to even more contractors for the State Department's private army.
Which is huge at this point.
Thousands of men, right?
Right.
It's at least five or six thousand as of the last report I saw, which was about a month ago.
And it keeps getting bigger every time.
And that's just the, well, you can't really call them military contractors either because they're working for the State Department.
But it's the security contractors, I guess you could say.
And then there are thousands of other contractors in different support missions.
So I'm sure, all told, it's more than ten thousand.
Right.
Well, and I think that probably is the most plausible thing that everybody, both sides have to, well, especially I guess the Iraqis have to posture for their own internal politics as not wanting to go along or at least being dragged kicking and screaming or whatever.
The Americans don't seem to care, though.
The Obama administration doesn't seem to have a problem at all with constructing this narrative that we're really hopeful and we're doing everything we can and we're actually very optimistic.
That was the term they were quoted as using yesterday on CNN.
We're very optimistic that a deal can be struck.
And the entire tenor of the thing is that Obama and his team want to stay in Iraq, hell or high water, one way or the other.
Call them trainers, call them counterterrorism, call them whatever you want, as long as we can stay.
And that's the part that's amazing to me, really, is, you know, never mind expanding the entire rest of the terror war.
One war was the one that he was supposed to end.
That country was the one that he was supposed to get us out of, that people believed in.
But apparently, you know, I guess Democratic internal polling or whatever says it doesn't hurt him to sit there and brag about how hard he's trying to stay in Iraq.
Well, not only does it not hurt him, I think there's a belief that it helps him, because already in just the 48 hours in between the Saturday reports that they were leaving and Monday when they finally officially had Pentagon spokesmen saying, no, that's not true, there were all sorts of Republican politicians bashing him for considering leaving, saying that this is a terrible idea and it sends a bad message to Iran and it sends a bad message to the various militant groups in the area.
Well, you know, it's funny about that.
I was reading this thing by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post where he was politely saying, why do we want to stay in Iraq anyway?
What is the American interest in Iraq?
Can anybody tell me?
And, you know, he wasn't that insistent about it, he's Walter Pincus and everything, but still he couldn't name a single American interest in staying in Iraq.
He couldn't seem to think of one and he was trying.
Do you have any idea, even from the War Party point of view, of what is the big deal, other than just admitting that they fought this whole war just to empower Iran and they don't even get to stay at all?
Well, there's really one thing that they've ever said, at least in recent comments, and that's that keeping troops in Iraq is a good way to stick it to Iran.
That it somehow really, really irks Iran to see those troops right next door.
Which is ridiculous.
Which couldn't possibly be true.
I mean, obviously they want us to leave eventually, but there was a statement from the Iranians just last week saying, yeah, we don't care if the Americans stay and train, we just want a strong, healthy, powerful, maliki government in Iraq.
That's all we care about.
And why wouldn't they?
Right?
I mean, it's their closest ally in the region and really one of the few that have left.
All right, hold it right there, Jason.
News.
AntiWar.com, we'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to This Here Thing.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at AntiWar.com.
News.
AntiWar.com.
Now, we've got to change wars here.
We've got a lot of wars to cover.
U.S. deaths in Afghanistan.
Obama doubles entire Bush era total.
Oh, Jason, say it ain't so.
Unfortunately, it is so.
During the entire Bush era, both administrations from the 2001 invasion through his leaving office, 575 American troops were killed in Afghanistan.
Now, since President Obama took office in the 33 months he's been in power, more than double that many, 1,173, I believe.
I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but they were killed in Afghanistan.
It says 1,153 here, but pretty close.
1,153.
Wow.
But they're winning, right?
Taking the fight to the enemy, and everything's working out great, and they're clear-holding and building a government in a box?
Right.
That's the message.
And even yesterday, they were again saying, well, the Taliban are really showing signs of weakness in the Helmand province, and their whole justification for that, which is one of the few times they've even tried to give a justification, is they built a hydroelectric dam in sort of the most remote part of Helmand province, which is a pretty remote province to begin with, and the Taliban haven't blown up the dam yet.
So they're taking that as a sign of weakness.
Well, sure.
That's what they call intelligence.
I wish I could do that.
All of my assertions from now on are to be called smartness.
Everyone has to just take it seriously.
Whatever conclusion I draw is intelligent.
Okay?
Good.
But that's it, huh?
That's all they got?
They haven't blown up a dam yet, a particular one.
Right.
And they figure that they would really want to blow up that dam for some reason.
I'm not really sure why.
Because it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that the Taliban usually does.
In fact, I mean, sure, they'll attack road crews that are working for NATO or things like that, but they haven't traditionally blown up the heavy equipment sort of project that NATO has constructed, the massive hospitals that end up closing six months after they build them because they can't afford to run them, or the various other public works projects that usually end in disastrous failure all on their own.
It seems like if the Taliban is still hoping to take back the country, why would they blow up this dam in the first place?
It seems like it's pretty nice.
It seems like it's something they're going to want to keep.
Now, what sort of progress are they making in the areas where they're not fighting, where it's not a majority Pashtun tribesmen and there's more or less security in at least some of these towns?
Are they successfully building an actual Afghan government in those places?
Or am I being hyperbolic about security in Afghanistan anywhere at this point?
It's a government, but whether or not it's a successful government depends on how loosely you're able to define successful, because it's the most corrupt government on the planet, and it keeps getting more corrupt year after year.
More corrupt than ours?
According to who?
Well, according to most of the lists of the most corrupt governments that they put out every year.
Well, we must be second place then.
We're usually in the upper third or so.
But for Afghanistan, the concept of government corruption just goes so deep.
It's not just the top officials are on the take from special interests.
Every bureaucrat, if you want to get electricity installed in your house and you need a permit, you're going to have to bribe half a dozen officials at your local zoning board just to get it done.
If you get pulled over by the cops, chances are they're holding you up for a bribe, not for anything you did wrong.
The level of corruption in Afghanistan is really the stuff of legends at this point.
It's hard to imagine how a society can function as corrupt as it is.
Well, and then there was a report by one congressional service or another, I think a few weeks ago, that said that the American taxpayers provide 94% of Afghanistan's gross domestic product and virtually all of their government's budget.
Well, sure, because there's not exactly industries to tax.
There is some agriculture, but most of the profitable agriculture is opium poppies and everyone else is just growing things like wheat and cucumbers.
Even then, people that are growing cucumbers are getting attacked by U.S. troops at times.
It's not really a great place to be in a legal industry.
Yeah, I guess any minerals that they have are still sitting in the ground because there's not enough security for anyone to invest the amount of capital it would take to extract them.
Right, the idea that these rare earth minerals are going to start pouring out of Afghanistan and pay for the war is just nonsense.
The security situation is nowhere near good enough that they're going to be able to build mines.
No investor is going to touch that situation.
Yeah.
All right, well, I'm sorry to just skip around so much.
We're almost out of time even, but see if you can squeeze in a little bit about what's going on in Uganda, especially, as it says in your headline here, this is the latest move in a long-standing policy of escalation and warmongering in sub-Saharan Africa.
Well, right.
Uganda sort of came out of left field for many Americans.
I don't think anyone I know saw this coming, this sudden deployment of combat forces.
But if you look at the history, since 2008, the tail end of the Bush administration, there's been funding of the combat there.
In 2009, Congress passed some acts that increased the funding and provided for training of various forces to fight this LRA.
And President Obama signed them into law last year.
So this deployment of so-called advisor troops is just the latest in a multi-year step to escalate our presence in that part of the world.
Well, you know, the most amazing part about that to me, because I guess if they just announced a war in any old country, or sending special forces or whatever to any old country, I can't really be surprised at this point.
The part that got me was that they said outright, OK, we're sending them to Uganda, but from there they're going to South Sudan and the Central African Republic and Congo, too.
What, really?
Four?
You know?
Right, and it's not even clear that these other countries have signed off on this.
The Ugandan president seemed OK with it, although he's insisting that they're not participating in combat, and exactly how much of an interest he's got in what's going on in northern Uganda is pretty questionable at this point, since his whole country is being torn apart by anti-corruption protests anyway, and his capital city is just a mob of protesters.
Amazing.
All right, I'm sorry, we're out of time.
There's too many wars to cover.
I didn't get to ask you a single thing about Libya or Boko Haram over in Nigeria or any old thing.
I'm going to have to interview you again later on, Jason.
OK.
You keep writing, man, I'll keep reading.
Thank you.
All right.
All right, everybody, that is the heroic Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
And Flint Leverett will be back on the show right after this.
