09/11/07 – Andrew Tilghman – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today is Andrew Tildman, who's a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes, and has a great new article in Washington Monthly, The Myth of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Welcome to the show, Andrew.
Thanks for having me.
Oh, it's good to have you on here, and I really thought you did a great job on this article.
It's a topic that I guess a lot of people have tried to cover from one angle or another, but you seem to have covered pretty much all of them here, so congratulations for that.
And this doesn't really mean anything, but I just thought it was interesting.
You used to write for Stars and Stripes.
My grandfather used to write for Stars and Stripes back in the World War and stuff, is what I hear.
So I thought that was pretty cool, not that it's relevant or anything, but I wanted to mention it.
A lot of famous Stars and Stripes alums, Al Gore wrote for Stars and Stripes, and the poet Shel Silverstein used to write for Stars and Stripes as well.
Oh, really?
I didn't know that.
I always loved Shel Silverstein when I was a kid.
All right, sorry, I almost started reciting my favorite poem.
So yeah, your article begins here with the bombing in Tal Afar in March that was blamed on Al Qaeda.
It turned out to be a local dispute, and I basically did the intro the first few minutes of the show here explaining how there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before 9-11, how Zarqawi was in Al Qaeda until the end of 2004, and he wasn't tied to Saddam Hussein, and Powell lied in his speech, or at least told something he might have believed to be true that wasn't true in his speech, that Zarqawi represented the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and that's why we had to invade.
And now here our country has invaded that country, and now it's got Al Qaeda in Iraq.
And not only are they violent and do they go around killing people, even without their former leader Zarqawi, but they also, it seems, take the blame, or the credit, I guess, depending on the point of view, for pretty much every violent attack in the country.
And then I guess what you're saying about this bomb and this introduction here to your article where you bring up this bombing in Tal Afar is that that's really just not the case, that Al Qaeda in Iraq, so-called, is responsible for all these attacks.
Well, I mean, I think one of the things we certainly know about Al Qaeda, you know, both Al Qaeda senior leadership, I guess is the new term to describe bin Laden's organization in Pakistan, and the various franchises elsewhere, is they're very politically savvy.
And there's some real evidence to suggest that Al Qaeda takes credit for operations that they may have had really very little to do with in an effort to sort of broaden their international profile and encourage recruitment and ultimately make themselves as relevant as they possibly can on the international stage.
Yeah, well, you know, that's something interesting in your article, as you point out, that the people who've gone and done the surveys of the websites where the jihadists take so-called credit for their various attacks have much lower numbers even than the Americans give them credit for, and they would have every reason to try to brag and try to take credit for attacks that they didn't even do.
Well, there's a couple of dynamics going on there.
There's one that Al Qaeda in Iraq may want to take credit for various attacks just to sort of bolster their own profile.
And I think there's also some suggestions that there's a little bit of bait and switch going on in the sense that you have maybe some local organizations, some maybe former regime elements, some native Iraqi insurgents that are mounting attacks, perhaps some really heinous attacks in an effort to achieve some sort of tactical or strategic results, but they don't want to be saddled with the blame for that attack if and when they decide to come back and negotiate politically.
So you've got some...you know, as several intelligence analysts suggested to me, you've got former regime elements that may be mounting a whole range of attacks because they want to put the Shiite government on its heels or whatever the reason, yet they like the idea that Al Qaeda in Iraq is there as this sort of more detached, you know, foreign element that can take credit for some of these.
And then when the time comes, these native insurgents, these foreign Baptists can come forward and say, oh, well, we were fighting the Americans this whole time as a resistance movement, of course, but, you know, those horrific bombings at the Shiite mosque or the car bomb in the Shiite marketplace, that wasn't us, of course.
That was the foreigners.
That was Al Qaeda.
And they can all, you know, rally around our nationalistic Iraqi government and fight Al Qaeda.
So I can see already the convergence of interest here is growing.
We have the real Al Qaeda in Pakistan likes the public relations, the local Al Qaeda guys obviously do.
Then you have the Baathist core of the insurgency that likes to let Al Qaeda take the blame really for the worst ones.
We have the Americans who, I guess, are still trying to reinforce their conspiracy theory from 2003 that Al Qaeda is the reason that we went there in the first place.
What about Maliki and Mahtad al-Sadr?
What's their interest in helping it look like Al Qaeda is behind every major attack by the Sunnis there?
Well, the Maliki government has a couple of reasons to instinctively blame Al Qaeda and inflate their role in the country.
And I guess the first is that it's kind of politically correct for Maliki to get up and accuse Al Qaeda of these various incidents because it allows him to speak about the Sunni violence without blaming the local Sunni Iraqis.
And he's at least ostensibly charged with putting together a unified coalition government that includes Sunnis.
And you know, if there's a car bomb that goes off in a Shiite marketplace, Maliki and his ministers can get up and denounce that violence and accuse Al Qaeda of committing this.
And it doesn't make the Sunnis that are involved in the government or playing the fence, it doesn't make them feel uncomfortable.
They don't feel like they're being accused of being complicit in this insurgency.
And I think that when you look at it from an international perspective, the Maliki government really does not have a lot of popular support.
There's not much evidence to think that Maliki would be winning any democratic elections at this point.
And if the U.S. troops were to draw down or withdraw entirely, most people agree that that government would probably crumble.
And Maliki and his Islamic Dawa party know that the key to them staying in power and the key to them solidifying whatever position they have, they need to be propped up by these American troops.
So in their international statement, they really want to cast this situation as though they're fighting the good global war on terror as well, because they're the ones that benefit first and foremost from the presence of the U.S. and the coalition troops in the country.
Very interesting.
I want to play this very short clip.
I won't abuse your interview time here, but this is the President of the United States about a month ago here.
In this speech, it's reported that he used the phrase al-Qaeda 95 times.
Here's five of them.
They know they're al-Qaeda.
The Iraqi people know they are al-Qaeda.
People across the Muslim world know they are al-Qaeda.
And there's a good reason they are called al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They are al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
This is the President of the United States.
I'm sorry the laugh track came with it, but it's fitting enough, I suppose, because now they're trying to take credit for the local Sunnis, at least to a degree, some of the local Sunni insurgent types turning on al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That does seem to be one of the recent pieces of evidence of quote unquote success rendered up.
And I think that there's, like everything in Iraq, the more you look at it and the closer you get, the more complex it, in fact, appears.
And I think that you do have significant reductions in violence in places like Ramadi.
I mean, when I was in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, I didn't go to Ramadi, and a lot of reporters didn't go to Ramadi just because it was absolutely an hour-by-hour war zone.
And it was just, you know, simply intimidating because of its violence.
That's not the case anymore.
And that's certainly a positive development.
But I think what you're looking at, to some degree, is the fact that these tribal sheikhs who were pretty much driving that violence through, you know, local militias and who saw it, you know, in their interest as these tribes that had been very much empowered under Saddam's regime, they saw it very much in their interest to oppose the U.S. occupation.
Well, they've, you know, time has ticked by and they've changed their mind to some degree.
And they have found this al-Qaeda line, they find it as useful as the administration does in the sense that they can now say, you know, hey, we're not capitulating to these Americans.
We're not just going to stand down and let these guys come patrol the streets of our city.
You know, we're going to fight al-Qaeda.
And there's not a whole lot of evidence of actual armed clashes going on in a place like Ramadi.
I mean, basically, the attacks just kind of waned off and the news was presented as though these tribes were fighting al-Qaeda.
But, you know, I don't think anybody was really standing on rooftops looking at muzzle flashes and firefights on the other side of town between local insurgents and al-Qaeda.
So is it just that the local foreign fighter leadership has decided, hey, we better play it cool for a little while here?
I think there's a very much element of that.
I think that the U.S., under Petraeus, has launched a real initiative to bring those local tribal elements into the fold, and that has lots to do with duffel bags of cash, which is, there's nothing wrong with that, but it is what it is.
And I think that also, since 2006 and the bombing of the Samar'e Mosque, when the conflict in Iraq went from being sort of inherently a Sunni insurgency and sort of morphed into a sectarian civil war situation, Anbar's not really the front line anymore.
I mean, Anbar is and always has been Sunni.
There are no Shiites that live there, so there's no territory to fight over between Sunnis and Shias.
So I think that, to some degree, the whole tactical dynamics of the fight in Iraq have shifted to places like Baghdad and Diyala province, where there's a real question over who's going to live here.
Is this going to be a Shiite village, or is this going to be a Sunni village?
Whereas in Anbar province, there's no question that that's Sunni territory, and there's no oil there, and it's a patchy desert, and it's largely poor, and the Sunnis are going to live there for many years to come.
And it just doesn't make quite as much sense for these various insurgent elements to expend so much energy fighting over Anbar province when the outcome of Anbar, in the sectarian terms, is already a given.
Now this is a little bit off topic, but I guess it's worth fitting in here somewhere that by arming and financing the Sunni insurgency, they may be temporarily buying some friends, but really they're only helping the people who've been fighting this whole time to resist domination by the Dawa party's U.S. installed government.
So like William S. Lin said, at best, this is one step forward and two steps back.
Yeah, I spoke to Bill Lin during the course of my reporting, and he's very thoughtful about these things.
And I think that he's right, I mean, none of us have a crystal ball, and none of us know how things are going to unfold in Iraq, but it does seem somewhat counterintuitive on a gut level that in the past few months we have begun to support and train the people that were our enemies in such a way that is undermining the regime that we have installed.
And it was my understanding some months ago that the relationship between al-Maliki and General Petraeus was very strained to the point where they weren't speaking very much, and I think one of Maliki's ministers made some remark about how they were going to demand that Washington remove Petraeus, which is a little bit ludicrous, but certainly that has been a very strained relationship, primarily because of the fact that we are now backing people that very much see Maliki's government as illegitimate.
I can only draw one conclusion from that, I'm sorry I'm supposed to be interviewing you, but the only answer that makes sense there is that our government doesn't care.
All they're trying to do is put us off, you and me, put us off till September, we just got to wait till September, we just got to get through the summer without anybody contradicting us, we just got to wait just a few more months and everything will turn around.
And they don't care whether their strategy or their tactics or however you break that down is counterproductive.
They're just trying to Buffalo us into giving them a little bit more time, a little bit more time, a little bit more time, they'll call it whatever they want, so long as they can stay in Iraq.
Well, you know, I think the domestic political opinion is a significant factor in everybody's and everybody's equation, but I also think that just looking at, you know, I believe that General Petraeus is making some good faith efforts to choose the best among a lot of bad options.
And I think that to some degree, this situation that has unfolded in the past few months of trying to co-opt and support these very Sunni elements, it's just the best among a lot of really bad options.
You know, I mean, what else are they going to do?
I mean, the whole range of choices as to where the U.S. strategy ought to go are all really grim.
And this may be, you know, tragic as it is to say, this may actually be the best approach, even though it certainly appears to have a lot of flaws and logic.
All right.
Well, I don't want to go too far down that road.
Let's get back to the Samarra bombing that you mentioned there.
There was already a lot of sectarian fighting, really a lot of Shiite death squads and Sunni-Shia violence before that.
But that seems to always be marked as the real turning point in the war where it really became outwardly and obviously sectarian fight rather than simply the Sunnis fighting against the American occupiers.
And you even mentioned in your article that despite all the blame being placed on al-Qaeda for the first and second bombing at the Samarra mosque, that in both cases, it seems to be a pretty iffy case that the foreign fighter types were responsible at all.
Well, there's certainly a lot of questions.
And as I looked into it, and I think this is very typical of a lot of the sort of haziness of the insurgency is that you've got some people that were blamed for the initial February 2006 Samarra bombing, and a lot of people in the Iraqi government and the U.S. military said, okay, well, these are al-Qaeda operatives.
Well, that may be true, and that's interesting.
But if you look at these names and sort of trace back their own resume, I guess, they were also high-ranking officials in Saddam's regime.
And they were also from that local area.
So it becomes a question of, you know, were they al-Qaeda?
I suppose they could have been, but they are also former Ba'athists fighting a war for their own little patch of dirt in the Sunni triangle.
And I think it's interesting that people want to focus on this, suppose, al-Qaeda connection when the other is equally true.
And may actually have just as much, if not more, logic behind it in terms of explaining a motivation for it.
Now, you remember the Samarra Moss bombing in February 2006 was just a few months after the elections of 2005, when the Shiites really secured their, you know, democratic legitimacy, and that government was very much about to be put in place.
So these former Ba'athists, who would very much be on a, you know, the very high-ranking Saddam officials had no future in a Shiite-controlled Iraq.
I mean, they would be sort of, you know, hunted down and jailed for war crimes and, you know, brought up before some sort of truth and reconciliation committee.
I mean, these guys couldn't just go back to selling vegetables at the marketplace.
I mean, they would be, you know, prosecuted for the crimes they committed under Saddam's regime.
So they had a lot to lose.
And there's some analysis to say that the Samarra Moss bombing may have been their last-ditch attempt to derail this Shiite government.
And perhaps make it more difficult for any other Sunnis who might want to go ahead and join the parliament and try to get on with it.
Right.
I mean, to derail the process entirely, because you've got a certain faction of Sunnis that you were just very, you know, low-ranking Ba'athist officials who would be allowed to get on with their lives in a new Iraq.
And then you have the real inner circle core of secret police and military intelligence and high-ranking army officials from Saddam's regime who would be...any future Iraq, any future stable Iraqi government would want to track down and punish in some way for crimes committed by the previous regime.
And those guys have a real vested interest in derailing this new Iraq in any way they can.
So now, you talk about the motivation, it seems more clearly local motivation, but you also said, I think, that you actually...the individuals who have been fingered in that attack, have actually been traced back, and they are former Ba'athists, there's no evidence linking them to the religious jihadist movement at all.
Well, there's no evidence linking them to al-Qaeda, other than the fact that the military and the Iraqi government say they're al-Qaeda.
And you know, the nature of...
That's no evidence.
Well, the nature of al-Qaeda, in all fairness, it does not have as much of a written documentation, documented record.
You know, I mean, it's a much more nebulous type of organization, which makes it kind of ripe for inflating, for overestimating, because it's, you know, who is al-Qaeda?
Well, you know, it's the kind of anybody who says they're al-Qaeda is al-Qaeda.
Anybody who we say is al-Qaeda is al-Qaeda.
I mean, it's a very...you know, the Ba'athists had...that's, you know, a government that existed for 30-plus years, and there was, you know, voluminous documentation of who was involved in doing what in that government.
Al-Qaeda is not really the same.
So it's sort of this much more nebulous movement that's sprung up over the past few years.
So, you know, it's hard to say, and I think it's important to recognize when you're talking about the insurgency is that these, you know, people can be multiple things at once, and, you know, if a guy can be running a cell of 50 Ba'athist insurgents in his hometown, yet he makes one satellite phone call to a guy in Syria for money, and all of a sudden maybe intelligence operatives pin him as al-Qaeda.
So it's just, you know, bottom line is one of the things I learned when I was reporting the story is that intelligence, the U.S. intelligence, about what's going on in Iraq is just really very limited, and it's very open to a lot of alternative and conflicting assessments, just because, you know, as one guy said, you can't connect the dots if you don't have enough dots.
And the truth is, I think that a lot of the, we really just don't have much of an idea at all of what's going on in the Sunni insurgency.
Well, and you know, you also write in your article, too, about how the corruption of the information starts at the top, and I like the way you explain this, because it's not a nefarious conspiracy, it's just sort of the structure of bureaucracy, right?
The boss says, I want to know what's going on with al-Qaeda in Iraq, report back to me, and then what does he get?
Absolutely.
I mean, that really resonated with me as, you know, I worked for newspapers for about ten years, and you know, when your goal is to get on the front page of the newspaper, it doesn't take you very long to sort of internalize what the upper-level editors like and what they don't, and you know, if, I mean, if they think that stories about the death penalty are more compelling than stories about the family court, then you're going to spend your energy investigating and developing stories about the death penalty.
It's not an nefarious conspiracy where anybody's, you know, legally liable for any kind of misconduct, it's just that when you're talking about a big bureaucracy that is, you know, structured by its leadership, this is the way things pan out.
And that is just as true for the reporters, I guess you're making the analogy there between reporters and actual government bureaucrats in the military, but it's the same either way.
Well, I mean, I think it has a lot in common with intelligence structures.
You know, you're talking about compiling information, and the amount of resources and time you allocate towards a given topic is, you know, reflects the end result of what you're going to have.
I mean, when the New York Times decides to pull 12 great reporters off their beat to investigate, you know, train accidents or, you know, mining safety or something like that, well, then obviously, the New York Times is going to come up with a lot of evidence suggesting that there's, you know, something interesting or problematic about that topic.
And I think that the intelligence apparatus is very much the same, and probably significantly more so because of the inherent political nature of all the stuff we're talking about.
Now, tell me about this guy, Malcolm Nance, who you quote in your article.
Malcolm Nance is a 20-year naval intelligence officer, and he speaks Arabic, and he's been working on al-Qaeda issues since way back in the 1990s.
And he's now retired from the Navy, and he works as a security consultant, mostly in Baghdad.
He basically gets paid a lot of money by various Iraqis these days to pretty much know what's going on and help them, you know, various companies and government agencies operate safely in Iraq.
I mean, he's a real muddy boots, nuts and bolts kind of guy.
And he wrote a book recently, which is called The Terrorists of Iraq, and it's about 400 pages of a very, very detailed analysis of all the tactics and all the intelligence and looking at the various factions.
And it's, I mean, it's a little bit dry for the average reader, but I think it's going to be kind of a cult classic in intelligence circles because he really, you know, he really delves deeper into these issues than I had seen anyone do.
And I felt that his analysis was very compelling in terms of his breakdown of who's who and what's what.
Well, this just blew me away.
Are you ready for this, everybody in the audience?
Listen up.
You ready?
There's 850 guys.
That is Malcolm Nance's conclusion.
You say in your article, 850 guys are actual foreign fighter, jihadists, maybe not even all those are foreign, right?
Even some of those are the locals who joined Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Well, there's, there's, there's locals and Malcolm Nance made an interesting distinction, which I thought was was pretty important.
You're talking about Al Qaeda in Iraq.
He said that those 850 are paramilitary jihadists.
Those are guys that are are in Iraq, whether they're Iraqis or foreigners, and they're they're operatives, you know, they have an AK and they move around and they stage attacks.
And they didn't come there to blow themselves up, they came there to operate the infrastructure of the organization.
And in addition to that, he says that there's probably a steady flow of several hundred at any given time, suicide bombers.
But those are basically, you know, sort of radical teenagers from Saudi Arabia who have come to, you know, to get martyrdom or whatever.
And they're basically just kind of, you know, sitting around eating kebabs and waiting for somebody to give them weaponry and a target.
I mean, they're not operating on a day to day basis, they're not looking at maps, they're not strategizing about what's what.
So you've basically got the power of the organization is very much enhanced by that flow of suicide bombers.
But in his assessment, you know, the number of guys who are operating over there is probably in the hundreds, not the thousands.
Yeah.
Now, if you take the 850 and you add a few hundred at any given time of these recruits, the suicide bomber recruits, we're still talking less than fifteen hundred guys.
And now I'm sorry, but, you know, you bring this up in the article.
So I guess it's OK.
This is the only excuse they have at this point or getting near the bottom of the barrel of excuses to stay in Iraq and even the Democrats when they pass their doomed to fail timetable bills and so forth.
This is the massive loophole that they build right in says, yeah, we need to get our troops out, except as many as we need to keep there for an indefinite period of time to fight al-Qaeda.
And it's for fifteen hundred guys?
At the most?
Well, I think if you if you look at the testimony, you know, the past couple of days from Petraeus and Crocker, there are other reasons to be there.
But I think those are really tough sells politically to the vast majority of of Americans.
I don't think that most Americans buy into the idea that that we should be sending, you know, like young, healthy, well-intentioned soldiers over to Iraq for the sake of sorting out some sort of Sunni Shia squabble over neighborhoods in Baghdad.
That's a real tough sell.
And I think that there's continued emphasis on al-Qaeda because it's, you know, just because of the it evokes something that we that many people seem to understand.
But but yeah, I mean, that's if you look at some of the if you take a step back and look at the rhetoric broadly, al-Qaeda does play a huge role, certainly with the president.
As I said, you know, almost my story, I wanted to sort of acknowledge the fact that we all think what the president says is just really dubious and I'm not even going to not even going to spend a whole lot of time in this story debunking that, because I think that out of respect to my readers, I'm going to I'm going to assume that we're moving forward from that that proposition, right?
That is a pretty good premise to start any article with is never mind what the president says here.
Let's deal with at least people who are somewhat reasonable that make an argument that's even worth debunking.
And it's funny, too, because, you know, he went with that overdose, that speech with the ninety five mentions of al-Qaeda right on the eve of completely switching targets on us.
I mean, everybody knows al-Qaeda in Iraq isn't the problem.
The problem is Shiite militias backed by Iran.
That's the real enemy in Iraq.
Well, I think there's from what I understand from talking to people in the intelligence community, there's kind of a tension in in the.
In the intelligence community, in the military community, and I think that goes all the way up to the top, and that's that the leadership can't quite decide who the boogeyman is.
You know, it's either al-Qaeda or it's Iran.
And and if you read the New York Sun, it's both working together.
Well, I don't even know what to say about that, actually, if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, although there are some people, some pretty intelligent military officers over there that suggested when I was over there a year or so ago that suggested that, you know, perhaps there was a strategy on the part of Iran to fund some Sunni insurgents, even though, of course, Iran being a government, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but maybe to to keep us off guard, you know, to keep us off balance.
But I mean, back to my other point, I think there's that there's some tension as to who the boogeyman is, whether it's it's al-Qaeda or whether it's Iran.
And both of them don't really hold nearly as much water as the elephant in the living room in Iraq, which is the fact that you've got a whole lot of Sunnis and Shias who are Iraqis, you know, fighting over the power vacuum that resulted from our invasion.
And that's something that it's very bizarre.
It doesn't get nearly as much focus from anybody, from the rhetoric in public, from a lot of the coverage from the intelligence communities.
Well, that really is key, too.
It's it seems to me and well, let's not let's not include the president here.
Let's talk about the vice president, someone who, you know, presumably can understand facts and analyze them and such like that.
They have to know that this isn't all about al-Qaeda.
I mean, when when you're on my show talking about a couple of percentage points worth of the Sunni insurgency, which is just, you know, a percentage of all the violence that's taking place there, they have to know that that's a lie.
And it seems to me like they don't want you and I to to really debate what it is that you just said, why the Iraqis are fighting.
What is it that they're really fighting about?
They want to say, oh, everything's Iran's fault or Syria's fault or al-Qaeda's fault, rather than saying, now, wait a minute, the people of Iraq are killing Americans.
It seems every chance they get, they're killing each other in mass.
Why are they fighting?
And they don't want us to have that conversation, I don't think.
Well, I think that as I was talking to one guy, I think there's some there's a there's a strain of good faith there, just like in the sense that what's the alternative?
The alternative is just to say that this was an ill-conceived invasion and the power vacuum that that we created has caused these problems and I don't have a problem saying that.
Well, I mean, you know, I think there's a bit that, you know, as much as I like to sort of personally and when I when I write to try and look forward and not dwell too much on the past, I mean, really, you have a tough time getting past the fact that no matter what you thought about this invasion, what happened the past five years have have really borne it out to be pretty big strategic blunder.
And that's that's I think that's the reluctance to admit that is still very much affecting everybody's analysis of what's going on today.
Well, and I'm afraid it's just putting off the inevitable and making things worse.
You know, Michael Scheuer told me yesterday, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, that Al Qaeda wins this war no matter what.
If we leave now, if we leave years from now, Al Qaeda will still exist there.
They only the local Sunnis really only tolerate their existence because they're helping fight us and we're never going to be able to kill them all because they'll all just be replaced.
That if if we didn't want to hand a victory to Osama bin Laden here, we just shouldn't have invaded.
But whether we leave now or later, the jihadists are going to be able to say, see, we drove the Americans away.
So he was basically saying, you might as well cut our losses now because it's not going to be any different.
You know, 40 years from now, if we leave that.
Well, that that I think is a very strong case to make for exactly that.
I guess the one sort of big asterisk that I find on that is that, you know, I spent a fair amount of time in Iraq.
And I think what a lot of people don't understand is that, you know, in Iraq today, you've got these bases where they are like, you know, 20 miles by 20 mile squares where there's bus lines to get from one end of the base to the other.
There's Burger Kings, there's Pizza Hut.
There's big flat screen televisions for sale for the soldiers to have in their trailers.
You know, there's a profound American footprint, as the military guys say over there right now.
And dismantling that is going to take an extraordinary amount of time.
And you know, I think that if you look back, it took the Soviets when they were in Afghanistan, which was a much smaller, I believe that was a smaller occupation, it took them 10 months.
And they were and they were high tailing it out of there.
So I think that one of the things we really have to recognize in this discussion is that even if we were to say, let's get out of there, it's going to take, just logistically, getting these troops and our stuff out of there is going to take maybe years.
And I think that's kind of the disheartening final note on the whole situation as you look at it from here on out.
Yeah, that's pretty disheartening.
And I guess all I have to say to that is, start packing your stuff, sooner the better.
And you know, we had no good reason to invade, Saddam was going to give nuclear weapons to Al Qaeda to use against us, come on.
And now we have no good excuse to stay here.
The last excuse is that Al Qaeda will take over the place and create a new Sunni caliphate from Spain to Indonesia and whatever.
But no, I'm sorry.
The facts are there's less than a thousand Al Qaeda guys in Iraq and they're not taking over anything.
And whereas the Americans have completely and totally failed to defeat these guys in four and a half years, the Sunni population can handle them when and if they choose to.
And we see that the way to make them choose to is to take away their incentive to fight us.
That's as simple as that.
Sunni caliphate from Spain to Indonesia, you know?
Yeah, it's pretty dubious.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate your insight on this today, everybody.
Andrew Tildman, former correspondent for Stars and Stripes there in Iraq and has this great new article in the Washington Monthly, The Myth of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thanks a lot.