Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Next up is Jason Ditz, News Editor at AntiWar.com.
That's News.
AntiWar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How's things?
Uh, they're doing, going pretty good, Scott.
How are things with you?
That's good.
I'm doing fine.
Okay, now, my second question is, how's things in Iraq?
Uh, not so well.
Not so well at all.
Not so well at all.
Even CNN today is saying, bombings everywhere.
That must be to reinforce the narrative that, see, we should have stayed and given them more peace, you know?
But, still, it looked like, what, 60 dead so far today?
Is that right?
Right.
So far today, and that's just around the capital city.
Uh, but, this is really just part of, uh, what seems to be a general collapse of this, uh, current government.
Uh, Prime Minister Maliki has really been delaying, uh, following through with any of the promises he made for a coalition government, all the power-sharing deals that the U.S. and Iran kind of pushed on him.
He, he'd been delaying them for, well, since, since the government was formed a year ago.
And, uh, it's starting to fall apart completely now.
He's trying to arrest his vice president as a terrorist.
And, and, uh, several top parties have pulled out of the coalition now.
Well, I'm looking at this piece, uh, Maliki moves to cut Sunni Kurds out of Iraqi politics at news.antiwar.com.
And I gotta tell ya, um, hmm, I was surprised.
And, you know, what the hell?
I'm, I live in Texas, man.
What the hell do I really know about it?
But the Shiites and the Kurds, at least the Taliban-y and, uh, Barzani factions, have more or less had an alliance this whole time from 2003 on.
And now, um, do I have it right that Maliki is just trying to completely freeze them out of the central state?
It's, it's starting to look that way, yes.
Uh, we, we've seen, uh, the Kurdish blocs have withdrawn from the coalition government as well.
And, uh, Vice President Hashemi's gone into hiding in the Kurdistan Regional Government's territory because that's really the only place Maliki's forces can't get at him.
It's, it's odd because, uh, when this war started, the Kurds were kind of at odds with the Sunni Arabs.
But it seems like, uh, increasingly, they're, uh, allied against what they see as, uh, centralization of power under Maliki's control.
Uh, you've been writing for a long time about how Maliki has made sure to, uh, keep all of the major cabinet departments, like head of secret police and, uh, head of the military and that kind of thing, empty, so that really he's just, uh, nobody's higher than a deputy anything anywhere, everybody's answerable just to him, uh, kind of a situation.
But, it seems like pretty drastic.
And is he going to, uh, you know, I don't know.
I always kind of thought that the way the math worked out was that, yeah, the Sunni Arabs, uh, pretty much were kicked out of Baghdad.
Um, and they can't, at this point anyway, take it back.
Uh, not for any time in the near or medium term future.
But, then again, does the Iraqi, uh, so-called just Iraqi army, do they really have the power to rule over that part of Iraq without the Karawa operation?
I mean, if all these different provinces are talking about secession and the whole parliament's falling apart and whatever, I mean, has he picked a fight that he's made sure he's losing right now?
Or is he just looking to have a southern Shia stand in alliance with Iran?
Or what the hell's he doing, man?
Do you know?
I'm not sure what he's thinking at this point, because, like you say, it seems like he's picked a fight he can't really win.
He's got all the national government's forces under his direct control, but they don't really have tremendous influence in most of the Sunni regions to begin with.
And they have virtually no presence in Kurdistan itself.
So it seems like, short of him trying to launch invasions of these regions, which would be just a complete disaster, because the U.S. had a hard enough time trying to subdue the Sunni provinces with their massive occupation force, let alone this poorly trained Iraqi military that's just been created in the last few years trying to do it themselves.
And of course the Kurdish regional government's got their own military that's under their control.
Maybe that really is why the Bush government sided with the Supreme Islamic Council all along, because they were so pro-Iranian that they were really kind of anti-Iraqi.
I mean, back in the day, Muqtada al-Sadr used to denounce Iran and the Supreme Islamic Council in alliance with Iran for trying to create this strong federal regionalist system that divides Iraq in a way to weaken it, he thought.
And that sure is the battle we fought, and now look at it.
Right, it seems like that was the only thing keeping the system together, really, was the fact that it was so federalist, and there was so little central control over these various provinces.
Now that Maliki's trying to centralize all the control, and now that he's saying openly, well, if Iraqi or Kurdistan alliance parties want to withdraw from the government, that means they're also withdrawing permanently from the entire political system.
It seems like he's picking an awful big fight here.
He wants to be Abraham Lincoln.
He does, but I'm not sure he does.
Which is funny, because he already served a few years as Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War.
Maybe he wants to do it again?
I don't know.
Right, and I'm not sure he's got the firepower to get it done here, because who's allying with him at this point?
I think both the United States and Iran were a big part of how he got his second term as prime minister to begin with, because of course his party didn't win the last election.
They came in second.
And it was only after months and months of having no coalition government at all, and him being an interim prime minister that they just sort of got together and said, well, fine, he can stay for now, but under this sort of restrictive power sharing deal that he never followed through with.
Right.
Yeah, that was the whole thing about the surge working, was we were going to achieve all these benchmarks, where a surge in the capital city created enough peace for everyone to sit down at tables and shake hands and get along, and it's going to work out.
But that part didn't happen, just the troop surge, and I guess the end of the Civil War against the Sunnis, or a temporary lull, as it now looks anyway, after they were pretty much driven out of Baghdad.
Right.
The so-called awakening, and concerned local citizens and all that.
Right.
Well, that's really the only reason violence ever quieted down in Iraq in the first place.
And quieted down is kind of a relative term, because the death toll there among civilians is still in the ballpark of what it is in Afghanistan.
And there's similarly populated nations, although Iraq is, of course, more densely populated in parts, and just empty in a lot of parts, too.
That's the thing, everybody always wants to compare it to the absolute worst days of the spring of 2007, and that kind of thing, where there's just bodies by the thousands left all over the side of the road every day.
Right, and the only reason we don't have that now...
Hey, they're way better off now than they were, you know, in the worst of our...in the days of the worst of our war against them.
Right, and the only reason they don't have that anymore is because they already had it, and they killed everybody or chased them out.
And there aren't any neighborhoods where there's a bunch of Sunnis and a bunch of Shiites living in close proximity to each other.
So I don't know, yeah, I'm just...
It looks to me like Maliki's messing up here, you know?
Now would be the time to consolidate his gains.
Although, what the hell do I know?
I don't know.
I think he might lose them.
I think he's making a big gamble.
All right, it's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
He's our managing news editor, and we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
And we're talking about the latest from Iraq, where Maliki seems to be dissolving the government and provoking people who already had the least influence in the government to go ahead and announce that they want autonomy from it.
And it looks like a major crisis brewing.
And of course, 75, 60, 75, oh, now 81 Iraqis killed today.
The vice president arrested.
And Jason, is this right?
Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
Is this correct?
Maliki confirms 700 U.S. troops still in Iraq as trainers?
Right, right.
He had a press conference yesterday where he mostly ignored questions about the collapse of his government.
Refused to address what's supposed to happen in a parliamentary system is, of course, when you lose your majority government, you're supposed to become an interim prime minister, and there's supposed to be an effort for someone else to either form a new government or they'll have early elections.
He pretty much dodged all the questions on that and instead focused on this, well, there's going to be 700 U.S. troops here after all at the end of the year.
And then, but come on, I mean, what do they need troops for other than to weasel through a loophole, is that it?
Well, it's not really clear what they're going to be doing.
Maliki says they're going to be strictly doing training operations and confined to base, but there's been some hints at him having backed off the demand for immunity, which, of course, everyone else in his government had been rejecting, the idea that the U.S. troops in the country would have complete immunity from prosecution for war crimes, saying that, well, if they're only here to train, what do they need this immunity for?
But we don't really know if he's backed off on it or not, but that's been the rumor at least.
Yeah, and then, well, has anybody addressed with a clear answer what about immunity for the mercenaries?
They just supposedly get whatever diplomatic immunity Hillary Clinton has, rubs off on them, you know, local Blackwater guys or whatever they are?
I mean, right, because that wouldn't be under the military status of anything or it would be under the typical ambassador-to-ambassador agreements and that kind of thing, am I right?
Right, and the Iraqi government is insisting that's not the case.
They're saying that the only people who will have diplomatic immunity are the 1,500 or so U.S. citizens that'll be operating as diplomats out of the massive city-sized embassy.
And the 15,000 or so mercenaries, since they're by and large not U.S. citizens, wouldn't have any sort of immunity.
Well, I wonder if they have really any purpose here at face-saving or what, because I guess it should sort of go without saying, but maybe it don't, that they were counting on having a whole lot of bases full of American Army and Marine Corps types from now on to go along with this embassy, to complement it.
But now they don't have any of that.
They've just got this big white elephant in the middle of Baghdad, this one great artillery target for everyone 360 degrees around.
So they know they're going to have to fight at some point, but now they're not going to have the immunity.
It seems like, I don't know what the hell they're doing.
I don't know what the hell they're doing.
Jason, what in the hell are they doing?
Well, I wish I knew.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to have this massive embassy there.
She finally got an army, and you're trying to take it from her.
In fact, I just caught a story on the History Channel before the interview, where they were talking about the construction of the Great Pyramids at Giza, and how there were thousands of workers at the pyramids, and it made it the largest labor site on the planet at the time.
And I was thinking there was this massive works project to create these pyramids, and yet it's dwarfed by the number of people employed at this one embassy.
Right.
Yeah.
Embassy.
I don't get it.
And what kind of 15,000 diplomats?
Are we supposed to believe they're all school teachers, and they're certainly not electrical engineers, or we'd have heard of some progress on that front.
Well, they might be listed as electrical engineers or computer techs like...
Assassins.
That's basically what we're talking about.
Right.
Right.
Like, his name escapes me, but the guy in Pakistan...
Ray Davis, right?
He was listed as a technological repair person, basically a computer repair man working out of the consulate, and he was the top CIA operative in the country at the time.
All right.
So, what else is going on?
Pick your war.
Fill me in.
Oh, well, the other thing that's going on today is in Pakistan.
The Pentagon has announced that they've released their report on last month's attack on a pair of Pakistani military bases after promising the fully transparent and detailed report on what happened on November 26th when U.S. warplanes attacked a pair of Pakistani military bases, killing 24 soldiers.
And the conclusion is that the troops were acting appropriately in attacking the military bases and that the attacks were justified.
That's what the Pakistani report says?
No, the Pentagon report.
Oh, I was going to say.
No, the Pakistani report says NATO was already apologizing while the attack was going on and saying, well, we'll stop.
And that it lasted for two hours after the first calls for a ceasefire.
The U.S. says, well, it was justified, and we had no idea it was a Pakistani base even though they were in direct contact with the Pakistanis about the attack for two hours before it stopped.
Well, how come it takes two hours for warplanes to blow up a couple of buildings?
I don't get it.
Well, it seems like they really...
The U.S. is just claiming communication breakdown, man.
Yeah, they were talking to Tampa on the telephone saying, please stop bombing us.
We were saying we're trying to stop bombing you, but we just couldn't get a hold of the guys dropping the bombs at the time.
It took us two hours.
Is that basically the story?
That's basically it.
And they're blaming the Pakistanis mostly for the communications breakdown, saying that the Pakistani government hadn't been on good communicating terms with the U.S. military for a while.
Yeah, I made up the part about Tampa.
That was just a hypothetical thing.
Right.
That's basically the size of it, though.
Yeah.
Well, does that sound about right?
Like, that's really what's happening is you've got a couple of guys in...
I thought it was helicopters.
No, it was warplanes.
Well, there were both.
There were two helicopters and at least two, in some reports, four warplanes that were bombing and firing.
Yeah, anyway, the real point is, what does this mean for American-Pakistani relations?
They closed the base, kicked us out, and all kinds of harsh words back and forth.
What's going on with that?
Well, only yesterday Pentagon officials were saying they expected the border crossings to be reopened very soon to allow supplies back into Afghanistan through the Pakistani route.
That's extremely unlikely considering the wording of the statement on this report.
We don't have the actual report yet, but we do have the Defense Department statement on what the report's going to say.
I would say it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that with the Pakistanis asking for a direct apology and accountability and the military saying, nobody's really at fault here, that relations are just going to get worse.
And now, Zardari is back from the Gulf area, somewhere over there, yeah, where he was in the hospital for, what, a mini-stroke, they're saying?
Right.
And so far it looks like he's still the prime minister for whatever that counts?
Well, he's the president.
Oh, the president, I'm sorry.
Right, and there's considerable tension there between the military and the government.
Yeah, because you have this whole thing where supposedly Zardari asked his ambassador to the United States to write a letter to the United States asking for help in doing a kind of push against the military and empowering him more.
Was that all a CIA plot to make him look bad, or that really happened, or what do you know about that?
Well, the U.S. military confirmed that they got the letter.
The letter was directed to Admiral Mullen.
They confirmed getting a letter from a Pakistani-American businessman who was an analyst on Fox News for years, for whatever that means.
And Pakistan's military says they believe the memo to be authentic.
They had a talk with Prime Minister Jilani and former ambassador to the United States, Hussein Haqqani, who had to resign earlier this month over allegations regarding the memo because they said he's the one that dictated it to the businessman on behalf of Zardari.
And now does it look like, you know, with all the blowback from the bin Laden hit and all the drone strikes and whatever, is Kiani's position at the head of the military actually threatened by Zardari or anyone else, or people inside the military?
He looks like he's pretty solidly in charge.
It looks like he is.
Nobody wants to make a prediction like that, right?
Right, nobody wants to make that prediction, but it looks like he's in a pretty secure position right now and if anything, it's the civilian government that's in danger here, especially with this report of a coup.
That government was hanging on by a thread as it was.
They've alienated most of their coalition partners.
They were just barely a majority anymore.
And there have been a lot of calls for early elections.
Seems like there's a lot of compelling reasons to stop bombing that country, at least for now.
You know, take those little breakers.
Well, and Pakistan seems to think that that's happening.
They believe the U.S. drone war against North and South Waziristan has stopped for the time being.
The U.S. hasn't commented on it one way or another, but of course they never do, and we haven't had any reports of any drone strikes for a few weeks now, so it seems like they may well have stopped.
Well, I don't know.
I guess that whole thing is such a nebulous set of problems over there.
I don't know how to put them in order to talk about, you know, which factions up in the lands that the Pakistani government doesn't really control there in the northwest are a problem for the Americans in Afghanistan or not, whether they're just an excuse for the continued occupation.
I guess that's where we should end this, would be on all these statements lately that when we tell you 2014, we don't really mean that.
We mean never.
Something about the withdrawal.
Is that about right?
Right.
And there's kind of been two trains of conversation on this.
On the one hand, in public, officials are saying, oh yeah, 2014 will be done by then.
The war will be over and everything will be great in Afghanistan by the end of that year.
But privately, well, and publicly in Afghanistan, President Karzai has confirmed repeated conversations with the Obama administration trying to negotiate terms for keeping the troops there through 2024.
One of the top German generals in NATO has confirmed that they have every intention of keeping 15,000 NATO troops in the country beyond 2014.
And General Allen, the head of the U.S. occupation forces, says that there will probably be some U.S. troops in the country past 2014.
Well, I guess as long as they're propping up the losers there, the losers need them.
And so their job will never quite be done, which maybe is a lesson learned from their disaster in Iraq where all that killing was done.
They got nothing out of it in the end anyway.
Well, that could be.
It certainly seems like despite their claims of progress, the Karzai government isn't in any stronger position now than they were seven or eight years ago.
And according to the most recent U.N. report, violence is actually getting worse in the country, if that's even possible.
All right, well, we've got to leave it here.
All out of time.
But thank you very much for your time.
I don't know what I'd do without you as a source of information, man.
News.antiwar.com.
Everything that's not good in the world going on there.
News.antiwar.com.
The great Jason Ditz.
Thanks very much, Jason.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
