All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest today on the show is the great Jason Ditz.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com, keeping track of all of the bad news on the face of the earth all day, every day.
I don't know how he does it, but he does.
News.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Now, you know who's not doing great?
Iraq.
What in the hell is going on over there?
I got, what, almost a dozen stories about really, really bad news coming out of that poor land.
I thought the crisis was over.
At least the Americans left finally, right?
Well, that crisis is over, at least.
But it seems like another crisis is brewing, which has sort of been there for a while.
And it seems like Prime Minister Maliki has been just waiting for this opportunity to sort of take his already consolidated power one step further and make himself the de facto dictator.
Well, now, okay, so let's take it back a couple of years.
You and I, boy, we covered the hell out of this.
At the time, it was, if I remember it right, it was the early part of 2009.
They held this election.
It took them a year and a half or something to finally work things out.
And what they worked out was, well, I guess, go back and remind me, which were the three major parties and which ones allied with each other against the others and how this is seeming to come apart now, I think.
Well, Iraqia was the largest of the three in the election.
And now that was the Alawi's party, the guy that was the American CIA truck bomber guy and who, even though he was a Shiite, he was a Baathist and was trying to, he had basically an alliance going on with some of the Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar and that kind of thing, right?
Right.
It's a mostly Sunni party, but it's sort of a secular party.
There's not a lot of emphasis on which religion you're in.
And then they won the election.
Well, they won the largest plurality in the election.
Second place was Maliki State of Law Party.
Third place was the Iraqi National Alliance, which of course had a major change in that election because they went from being dominated by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which just got destroyed in that election, to being run by Muqtada al-Sadr's Sadrist trend.
Mm-hmm.
And then, I guess as you and I predicted, it took a long time to finally happen, but it was, what eventually what it came down to was Maliki made that alliance with Sadr.
His own party basically reunited with the Iraqi National Alliance, correct?
Right.
And now they're just calling themselves the National Alliance, although exactly how solid that alliance is, and if it's possible that it's going to split back off into two separate parties, it isn't really all that clear right now.
Well, I hate to say this, but it seems like, I'm seeing some of these reports saying this could lead to, I think it was even Alawi saying this could lead to further bloodshed and civil war and that kind of thing.
And the only reason that that really is incredible is because his side already lost the damn civil war.
They can't take back Baghdad.
They really can't do anything but complain.
And that's the only thing keeping another million people from dying in this thing, am I right?
Well, that's pretty much right.
Although, to say they can't do anything, I think might be overstating it.
They certainly could make things difficult.
And it seems like the attempts at the attempts at centralization have convinced a lot of the Sunni areas that they need to form sort of a Kurdistan-style regional government that's mostly autonomous, which Maliki is insisting he will never allow to happen.
He gave a big speech last week talking about rivers of blood if the Sunni Arabs attempt to form an autonomous region.
But I think that's probably something that's going to continue to be pushed, especially as more and more of the Sunni leadership gets cut out of the current coalition government.
Well, yeah, it's sort of the flip side of the same question, I guess.
Does Maliki and the quote-unquote Iraqi army, do they have the ability to prevent Sunni provinces from declaring autonomy?
Well, legally, no.
But as a practical matter, they do have the entire military and police force under Maliki's direct control.
So I think he seems to believe he does have the power to do that.
Whether he could actually successfully invade those areas and force them back into under the control of the central government if they really decided to break off into an autonomous region is very much a question, though.
The US didn't have an easy time rolling over Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq.
They had to destroy Fallujah pretty much twice.
Mm hmm.
These parts of Iraq are more than willing to fight.
And it seems like exactly how strong the Iraqi military is really remains to be seen.
Well, you know, I don't know exactly what it is that he could do otherwise or something, you know, but just in a general sense, it seems like this is suicidal for Maliki.
He's only finally just got rid of the Americans.
He's consolidating his power.
Sure.
But would it not be easier and more productive from his own would be Saddam Hussein dictator point of view to try to make some kind of compromise rather than just push, push, push until fighting breaks out again?
It certainly would seem like it, but I think he he tried to reach a little too far.
Of course, the basically the moment the Americans left, he was looking to cut out some of the major Sunni politicians.
He put Vice Premier Saleh al-Mutlaq on temporary leave pending some sort of investigation and then demanded his resignation after Mutlaq condemned him in a speech.
He ordered the arrest of the vice vice president just a few days after the Americans have left.
And he's also calling for the ouster of the finance minister.
So that's basically all the major Sunnis in the government.
He's already moved again.
And now Muqtada al-Sadr is calling for new elections.
Right.
And that could be a very, very major step because Maliki might really believe he can rule the country without the Kurds and without the Sunnis.
But there's no way he's going to be able to rule the country without Sadr as well.
Yeah, I wonder.
Well, maybe he's just got a made a deal with the Iranians that they'll back him up even against Sadr.
Maybe, but I think the Iranians are going to.
Well, it's hard to predict what the Iranians would would prefer here, but it seems like their preference for Iraq has always been sort of a calm, not necessarily stable country, but at least not openly fighting itself because who wants civil war on their border?
Right.
Well, and particularly when we just fought a eight and a half, nine year war to put their friends in power.
Why would they want chaos?
In fact, CNN, we were playing the clip.
I played the clip on the show two days ago.
We're on CNN.
They were just beside themselves.
They had no idea.
And they really, honestly, did not have any idea how this could be.
But isn't it strange how now that we're gone, the Iranians are saying they think Maliki is great and they want to do everything they can to help him stabilize the country and arm up his military and all the rest of it.
Oh, my.
All right.
Hold it right there, buddy.
It's the heroic Jason C. Ditts from news dot antiwar dot com.
He's our news editor.
And good reason why, too.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, it's antiwar radio because war is mass murder.
That's why I'm Scott Horton and my guest is Jason C. Ditts, our news editor at antiwar dot com.
That's news dot antiwar dot com.
And we're talking about Iraq here.
And let me ask you to to count for me if you can, if you know the number of American military personnel inside Iraq right now.
The best I think I know, Jason, is that there's a small detachment of Marines at the embassy in Baghdad there.
And then but I keep hearing tell here and there of, yeah, there are some trainers left.
There are a hundred here or three hundred there or some kind of thing.
And I keep hearing three hundred there or some kind of thing.
And I was wondering if you could please help straighten me out on that.
Well, we don't have any good indications from the Obama administration how many are there.
So we sort of have to guess based on comments from Iraqi officials.
Prime Minister Maliki said there were seven hundred U.S. military trainers still in the country that are going to be there through the new year and beyond.
And the military forces at the embassy, again, we don't have really good figures on, but it's somewhere in the realm of 2000, somewhere in the realm of 2000 still.
I mean, I know they lied about everything they said about the Iraq war this whole time and everything, but all soldiers gone and two thousand still there.
Why?
Those two things don't go together at all.
Huh.
Are they just?
God dang.
Did I really get it right that this is all just loopholes?
They can start the war over again.
They still got their foot in the door.
They can just escalate right back up to occupation again.
Are they that crazy?
They're not that crazy.
Well, they certainly could.
Hopefully they won't.
But the authorization to use military force in Iraq is still on the books.
That's true.
Rand Paul tried to get it repealed in the Senate and they told him no.
Right.
He tried to get it repealed and he failed miserably.
There was a very strong majority of senators who think that there should still be a law in the books saying that the president has the authority to invade Iraq for whatever reason, whenever he feels like it.
Well, you know, I saw the Republicans saying that, yeah, you know, you're selling us out, Obama.
He's weak and he's an appeaser and he's Neville Chamberlain and we should not be leaving Iraq right now and whatever.
And I was thinking that just like the people on CNN.
I mean, it's pretty transparent and I ain't the world expert.
You know, hell, I've never left North America, you know, other than to go a few miles off the coast or something a couple of times.
What the hell do I know about it?
But I can tell that these Republicans, as well as these CNN people, they really don't have any idea that what they're saying is start the war all over again against the people who did not fight us the whole time.
And they really still don't understand who is who there, even in the most junior high school sense, do they?
Oh, no.
To the average congressman, I think the the Iraq war was about fighting al Qaeda and to this day, you know, maybe fighting al Qaeda and and and Iran.
And to this day, they're pretty sure those were the only enemies and that if it wasn't for for them, the occupation would have gone just perfectly and the troops would have been greeted with flowers and welcomed as liberators.
Well, and, you know, this goes right to the importance of antiwar.com and specifically news.antiwar.com that I mean, we really have almost a Soviet style system of propaganda in this country where I mean, I guess it's really because of the national government's claimed ownership of all of the radio waves over America that and then their ability to divvy that stuff out themselves with their little licenses and whatever.
It really gives them a lot of sway over the media.
And and I guess, you know, maybe there's not even really much of a market incentive for the news organizations to have real experts on these countries in these wars to explain it because people don't want to think about those things anyway.
And so really, I mean, in in large numbers.
So really, you know, thank God for the Internet.
We have like this niche thing.
If you're one of the one tenth of one percent of the population of America who's interested at all in whose side we've been on for the last nine years over there or something, you have to have somewhere to go.
And, you know, thank goodness it's news.antiwar.com.
There it is.
You can read about what's going on in Iraq, who's who and why they do what they do or, you know, best Jason can tell, which is a hell of a lot better than anybody else around here on a daily basis, man.
And it's you know, there's you and then there's Patrick Coburn in the independent.
And then what?
So congratulations.
And thank you.
I mean, just for my own.
Never mind on behalf of my audience and your audience and everything else.
I mean, I don't know what I'd do without you, Jason.
Well, thank you.
Another story that's happening in Iraq today.
Well, there were some airstrikes in Iraq today in the far north by the U.S. No, by the Turkish military bombing the PKK.
That's what they thought.
But it turns out that they bombed 35 Turkish citizens who were in Iraq, smuggling diesel fuel into Turkey and killed 35 of their own citizens.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I don't mean to laugh at the deaths just at the, you know, military intelligence, as they call it.
Yeah.
The military is already defending it by saying, well, we had no way of knowing who those people were, which to them means no culpability instead of maybe we shouldn't bomb people until we know who they are.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, kill them all and let Allah sort them out.
Right.
Well, it's not the American way.
It's the NATO-ian way, I guess.
Right.
It was a very U.S. style operation for Turkey.
They used surveillance drones to spot a bunch of people there.
They didn't really have any idea who they were, but they saw that they were approaching the Kurdish border, which the border between Iraqi Kurdistan and the Kurdish part of Turkey.
And apparently the smuggling has been going on for some time and has been fairly well covered in the Turkish media.
But it never dawned on them that these people might be smugglers.
So they just bombed them.
Well, you know, that whole situation up there in Kurdistan is still just a box full of matches waiting to waiting for a spark.
It seems like to me you got, you know, America in the 1990s supported the Turkish war against their own Kurdish population.
At the same time, they're supporting autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq.
And then now we got this situation where really since 1991, we've been backing Barzani and Talabani to different degrees, especially since 2003.
They're, I believe, right, still close friends with the Pentagon.
But then we wink and nod and I guess they wink and nod, too, for the Turks to launch airstrikes across the border.
Apparently, they've even allowed the Iranians to launch strikes across the PJAC across the border into Iraq there.
And, you know, I wonder if, you know, this tinderbox actually goes up at some point.
Does anybody even have a good guess as to whose side anybody's going to be on here?
Are we going to pick Kurdistan over our 60 year NATO partner?
Well, we certainly don't know.
But I would highly doubt it.
It seems like the U.S. is bound to back Turkey in almost any sort of clash in that region.
Then again, Turkey ain't got oil.
That's true.
And then again, there's also still, well, I don't know about then again, but there's also still the matter of the status of Kirkuk and whether that will be part of Kurdistan or whether it will be part of, I guess, Arab Iraq.
Right.
And that was sort of an interesting thing, too, because for a long time, there was this strong tension between the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds over cities like Kirkuk and which side they're going to end up being on.
But now that the Sunni Arabs have sort of been cut out of the government and are looking at Kurdish-style autonomy, it seems like they're really getting close with the Kurdistan government.
And there's even the vice president, who Maliki has ordered arrested, is hiding in Kurdistan now.
So it seems like there's sort of a rapprochement there between those two sides, with Maliki as sort of the uniting force.
Very interesting.
I mean, that's the possible end of the Shia-Kurd alliance that's been in place since 03, since maybe, I guess, before that.
Very interesting development.
Of course, I guess the Kurds by super majorities are Sunnis, just not Arabs.
It's a different ethnicity, same religion kind of thing.
But anyway, yeah, very interesting stuff.
Thank you so much for helping us keep track, Jason.
JasonDitzNews.
AntiWar.com.
