01/14/08 – Juan Cole – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio and Chaos Radio, 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Our only guest today, our guest today is a professor of history at the University of Michigan.
He runs the great blog, Informed Comment at JuanCole.com.
Welcome back to the show, Juan.
Thank you.
Good to talk to you again.
Likewise, Scott.
Well, let's start with, well, what TV says, and then it's opposite reality.
All the rage on TV is that the Ba'athists are being invited back into the Iraqi government.
Four and a half years later, Paul Bremer's order firing anyone who ever had any association with the Ba'ath Party is being reversed.
And yet you say on your blog that when you look a little deeper into what's going on here with the re-Ba'athification, that it's almost the opposite that's the case.
Yes, that law, the full text of which I have not seen, it seems to be awfully ambiguous and suspicious to me that the people who are enthusiastic about it are the hardline Shiites around Muqtada al-Sadr, and the people who didn't like it were the ex-Ba'athists.
So you would expect it to be the other way around if it were as advertised.
It appears actually to require something like 30,000 Ba'athists now working in the, ex-Ba'athists now working in the Iraqi government to retire.
And they would get a stipend.
But it seems to be a way of forcing Ba'athists out of the government.
Well, how can they call that a re-Ba'athification law?
Are the Sadrists calling it a re-Ba'athification law?
They're calling it an accountability law.
So is it only in the mind of the American government and media that this has anything to do with rehiring the Ba'athists?
Yes, it seems to be the case.
I suppose, I mean, again, we haven't seen the text of the law.
It is possible that it may allow some ex-Ba'athists to work again.
But they're specifically forbidden to work for a number of government ministries, including education, foreign affairs, finance, and the judiciary, and so forth.
So they're still excluded from the most powerful and lucrative of the government offices.
And as I said, it seems to be to require some important number of them that actually were so low-level that they kept their jobs to be forced out.
It looks to me like affirmative action for hardline Shiite.
So then maybe the spin that I'm hearing on TV and in print here in the States is just propaganda for the primary season, that the surge, everybody's complaining that the surge, okay, it seems like violence has gone down at the same time that troop levels have gone up to some degree.
So maybe we want to give them a little bit of credit.
But what about all those benchmarks?
What about all this reconciliation that was supposed to happen?
And so are they just taking advantage of this development and calling it whatever they want so it looks good?
Well, I mean, I think things are more complex.
The Maliki government was the one that proposed most of those benchmarks.
And I think that they tried to report out of the cabinet, which kind of functions as a Senate in Iraq, a law that did allow Ba'athists back into public life.
And that was presented to Parliament in November, and the Sadrists didn't allow it to be tabled properly.
They pounded their desks rhythmically and interrupted the proceeding.
So then they're in control of the committee that shapes legislation, and they rewrote the law to suit themselves and issued it on Saturday.
And then it passed, apparently, by acclimation.
I don't think there was a vote.
There was barely a quorum.
A lot of people drifted away during the day who didn't like it, including, as I said, most of the Sunnis and the expaths.
So it's not even clear by what margin it passed, if it passed at all.
But it certainly was not what Maliki had been shooting for, or what the Bush administration had been shooting for.
And as we know more about it, I think we'll find that it isn't material to Iraqi reconciliation among sectarian groups at all.
Well, now this is a little bit confusing, because I've been reading for a little bit more than a year about Muqtada al-Sadr's efforts to form this coalition government, basically to try to form a majority in parliament that can replace the Maliki government.
They were calling it a year ago the Government of National Salvation, or what have you.
And basically, my understanding was it was Iraqi nationalists, Sunni and Shia Arabs, along with other minority groups and even some Kurdish factions, to try to basically come together, create a multi-ethnic coalition government, and tell the U.S. to get the hell out.
And it seems kind of strange that Sadr is the one who's doing the most to pick the fight with the Ba'athists and keep them out of the government as it exists now, where I guess I would expect the pro-Iranian Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party types to act more that way.
Where am I confused here?
Well, nobody likes the Ba'athists, and including Muqtada al-Sadr.
And the Sadr movement that he leads really, really, really dislikes the Ba'athists.
There's a difference between being willing to work with Sunni Arabs and being willing to work with Ba'athists.
And Muqtada al-Sadr has fair relations with a lot of Sunni Arabs, ironically enough, because he's out in the street, probably.
His guys have done a lot of ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs.
But on the political realm, if they meet in a room, they're nationalists together.
Both of them want the U.S. out.
So they have some basis for cooperation.
But the Sadrists were formed by two clergymen, Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr and then later Mohammed Sadr al-Sadr.
Both were killed by Saddam Hussein.
So they'd as soon kill a Ba'athist to spit.
And so it's not, no, it's no surprise that they should have more or less spiked this effort to reconcile with the remaining Ba'athists.
Well now, in their order of priorities, in the Sadrists' order of priorities, they would rather have the American occupation continue than to form an alliance with the Ba'athists?
Because that's basically what it comes down to, right?
Oh, well, I mean, there's no question about Sadrists forming alliances with the Ba'athists.
I mean, yeah, that's a fate worse than death to them.
Well, now you do have, you've written on your blog about this opposition alliance, at least in its most current form.
And you say, I guess, that it's the Sadrists, the Iyad Alawi and his group, the Iraqi side of the Dawah party, which I guess that's Ibrahim Jafari more than Maliki there, is that right?
Well, I think it's Abdul Karim al-Nizdi.
But Jafari has certainly been involved in that kind of thinking, yes.
And then Turkmen, Yazidis, and a couple of groups I haven't heard of, the National Dialogue Council and the National Dialogue Front, are those, those are Sunni groups then?
Sunni groups.
And so now what is it that these guys, is this the same government of national salvation that I was reading about a year ago was trying to replace the Maliki government?
It contains elements that were negotiating towards such a coalition.
But I think they've come to understand that they just can't form a parliamentary coalition that would elect a prime minister and would support him every time, that there are too many disputes among them.
So what they've done is to form a coalition to exert pressure rather than to govern.
And they signed a memorandum of agreement amongst themselves about what they stand for.
And the main thrust of this memorandum is against the soft partition of Iraq.
All of these groups want a strong central government.
They want a France rather than a Switzerland.
And they object both to the creeping Kurdish autonomy and Kurdistan to the north.
They object to Kurdistan's intent to annex the oil-rich province of Kirkuk.
And they also object to the formation of a Shiite super-province of eight provinces in the south that would be a Shiite region.
They're against these regional governments.
They're against this kind of loose federalism.
They want a strong central government.
And they formed to block the Kurdistan alliance and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the Kurdish and the Shiite groups that are pushing for soft partition.
And now, well, let's focus on the Kirkuk angle there.
I remember reading, I forget if it was Barzani or Talabani, Talabani or Barzani or however you say it, who said that, oh, Kirkuk is our Jerusalem.
And yet that's not really true, is it?
Well, you know, Kurds are caught up in a kind of romantic nationalism nowadays.
And in their historical imagination, Kirkuk was a historically Kurdish city which Saddam Arabified and brought Arabs in and changed its character, kicked a lot of Kurds out, ethnically cleansed them and so forth.
And so they view the accession of Kirkuk to the Kurdistan Regional Authority, their regional confederacy, to be the writing of a historical wrong and the bringing back of a traditionally Kurdish region into the Kurdish homeland.
In fact, this narrative is disputed, the Turkmen ethnic group, which is related to the Turks of Turkey, insists that Kirkuk had in the 20th century largely been a Turkmen majority city.
And anyway, we historians don't believe in this way of thinking at all, because we don't think that nations are eternal.
We think that the whole idea of a Kurdish nation or a Turkmen nation has been invented in the 20th century.
These were people who were pastoral nomadic tribespeople and peasants, and they were part of the Ottoman Empire.
They didn't have a sense of national identity in the past, so it's kind of irrelevant who lived where.
But romantic nationalism, you know, attaches blood to soil in a very destructive way.
And that's certainly a characteristic of what's going on in northern Iraq today.
And yeah, like you're saying, a lot of it is backlash against Saddam Hussein's policy of moving a bunch of Arabs up there to dilute the majority domination of the Kurds.
This is a blowback from that.
Yes.
Now it's interesting to me that the United States seems to put all our weight behind the Hakeem faction, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or whichever order the acronym is now, rather than the Shiites, who, I mean, Sadr is certainly no angel, but I can't see that his militia is any more violent than the Badr Corps.
It seems weird that we're backing the people who, as you say, want this soft partition to kind of spin off the South and spin off Kurdistan.
We're supporting the secessionists rather than the nationalists.
Why is that?
Well, first of all, the Sadr movement and the Matthew Army has been substantially less disciplined and more violent than the Badr Corps.
And although the Badr Corps is accused of death squad activities and keeping secret prisons and torture and so forth, it's not made up of angels.the activities of the Matthew Army as much.
So I think the Americans allied with the Supreme Council and the Badr Corps in part because they are disciplined and they can deliver, they're reliable.
And they also are willing to say that they need U.S. troops to stay in Iraq.
The Sadr movement, you know, you ally with it as an American, you're basically digging your own grave if your goal is to stay in Iraq, because the Sadr movement is demanding that the U.S. leave immediately, and it has on more than one occasion come into fierce conflict with U.S. military.
So the U.S., I mean, the Bush administration is kind of caught because their rhetoric, at least, their policy is a unified Iraq.
But the allies that they have found who want them there and are willing to cooperate with them politically, both the Kurdistan Alliance and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, are in favor of this soft partition.
So there's a profound contradiction at the heart of Bush administration policy in Iraq.
They say they want a multi-ethnic coalition government, but what they really want is to stay forever, and that means backing the secessionists, because the secessionists need them, is what you're telling me.
Exactly.
Yeah, quite confusing, especially with all the larger story of all the hostility toward Iran.
It just sure seems strange that we're backing the SCIRI, which was created by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Yes, well, this has been going on now for four years, and the U.S. has very close relations with the Islamic Supreme Council, Abdullaziz al-Hakim.
He flies to Tehran and hobnobs with the Ayatollahs there, and then he flies to Washington and hobnobs with Bush.
And it all seems to work for him, and the way that Bush deals with this seeming contradiction is to come out and denounce Iran, even as he is working with Iran's client in Iraq.
So I mean, a lot of what the Bush administration does is propaganda, it's all for show, it's smoke and mirrors.
So we know that the biggest group of foreign fighters in Iraq that are killing U.S. troops and blowing things up are Saudis, but Bush demands that Iran and Syria guard their borders better and keep infiltrators from coming in.
They never publicly come out and say that Saudi Arabia should restrain its young men from doing this.
So the way that the diplomatic discourse is shaped is to put pressure on U.S. enemies in the region and to exculpate allies like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, whose populations at least are just as much implicated in the violence as the others, and in fact much more so.
Isn't that interesting, you know, the Saudis getting a free pass for not securing the people who leave Saudi Arabia to go to Iraq to kill Americans.
Do you have any indication that the White House has put any pressure on the Saudis, even kind of behind the scenes, that they need to do anything about this, never mind the kind of belligerent threats they make about Iran?
Oh, I'm sure that whenever, when Bush is meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia today, I'm quite sure that one of the things that would come up is the need for the Saudis to stop the young men from going there and killing U.S. Marines.
But the point is that that would be said behind the scenes, privately.
Yeah, certainly not on TV.
And when Bush comes out and gives this press conference, it's going to be all about Iran, which isn't proven to play nearly a sinister role.
Yeah, and you know, there's a headline today, we're linking to it on, or maybe it was from yesterday on antiwar.com, from CNN, Iranian bombs on the increase, on the upswing in Iraq.
But I had a, well, I don't think I have it sitting here anymore, but I did have an article from the Washington Times from just last week that had General Petraeus's right-hand man spokesman telling the papers that, oh, Iran's doing great, they haven't been sending any weapons in in a long time, and they're doing really good cooperating on security with us, and way to go, Iran.
And then here come the thing again, oh, all the EFPs must be coming from Iran again.
Yep.
Well, this is from a, the new tune is from a press conference that U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus gave in Kuwait after they met with Bush.
General Petraeus, in the press conference, said first that the number of explosively formed projectiles, these particularly deadly roadside bombs being deployed against U.S. troops, has doubled or tripled in January of 2008 over what had been going on in December and November of last year.
And then he did attribute that to a change in Iranian policy, but at the very end of the press conference, if you read the whole thing down to the bottom, he is much more cautious than says, if in fact this is Iranian policy and so forth.
So it doesn't, the fine print doesn't uphold the headlines, and of course there's many controversies about where these EFPs really come from, whether they're actually only from Iranian providence, how it is that, you know, most of the increase in death of U.S. troops has been at the hands of Sunni or guerrillas in places like Diyala, who are also killing Shiites.
None of us in the analyst community believe that it's likely that Iranians are giving weaponry to Sunni guerrillas to kill Shiites with.
That makes no sense.
Yeah.
Well, I think you're trying to be too specific and Cartesian in your argument, where you're supposed to just say, Iran backs whoever the bad guys are, and you're supposed to forget that the guys killing Americans are the Sunnis, and you're supposed to believe now that the enemy are rogue Shiite militias attached to Muqtada al-Sadr, and they're the ones using the EFPs.
Right.
Well, it may be that some Sadrists, some members of the Mafti army have deployed EFPs against U.S. troops.
However, that's clearly not mostly what's been going on for the past two weeks, where the deaths have been in things like booby-trapped houses in Diyala province, booby-trapped by what the U.S. calls al-Qaeda, which is to say radical Sunnis.
And meanwhile, the war party crazies like David Horowitz say, you see how evil and undermining the Iranian role in Iraq is?
They're even arming the Sunni insurgency.
That's how evil they are.
Yes.
Well, there are lots of pundits in America who say any damn thing, and some of them are probably not mentally stable, and others of them are paid by cranky old rich white people to say these things and put on networks owned by cranky old rich white people to purvey this misinformation and so on and so forth.
I mean, the American media has gone towards infotainment and uncorroborated opinion in a way that I think would genuinely make Edward R. Murrow just break down and weep and maybe commit suicide.
Oh, gosh.
Yeah, I'm afraid that's probably right.
Well, now let me ask you this.
I'm learning some things here today.
First of all, I'm learning that basically my understanding is more or less correct in terms of who the US is backing and why.
But also, it sounds like you're telling me that I've been wrong in my belief that if the US were to leave, that the nationalists, Sunni, Shia, and even Kurdish factions would be able to work something out rather than just starting the war back up again.
Basically, the Supreme Islamic Council would be run back to Iran and Saudi and Sunni Imams would work out some sort of deal.
Am I, you know, is that just way too hopeful of a view?
Well, what I would say is that these political alliances, you know, what I would urge people to do is not to read them off from essences.
You know, we could categorize the the Mafti army, certainly, and the Thedris as a form of nationalist, but they're Shiite nationalists.
They don't get along with, say, Ibrahim Duri and the remnants of the Baath party one little bit, even though both of them want the US out.
They would certainly go to war with one another, given a straight shot at one another.
So yeah, we couldn't assume that if the US wasn't there, everything would be peaceful.
On the other hand, there are lots of forces in Iraq that potentially would make peace with one another if they thought there was nothing further to be gained from war.
And so I think that the endgame is not going to be on the basis of ideology.
It's going to be more like Lebanon in 1989, where the big factions made an agreement with one another that they all could live with.
And they did that partially because the Saudis bribed them to do it, partially because they had, in the course of the previous 14 years, deployed their militias in internecine warfare and had gotten everything that they could possibly hope to have gotten out of the war, and now it was starting actually to ruin the economy and ruin their lives and to be not worth it.
And I think, you know, it is possible that a US withdrawal would reduce the hopes of some of these groups that they're going to get the whole enchilada, that their maximal gains will be realized, because they won't have that US ally there to make that happen.
But I think, on the whole and by and large, they'll make peace not because they agree with each other's ideologies or make nice with one another, but because there's just nothing more to be gained in their view from further warfare.
And the place of the US in that is complex.
I think the US does decrease the chances for compromise by its presence, because the hard-line Kurds and the hard-line butter-core Shiites don't feel a need to compromise with the Sunni Arabs because they know that, worst-case scenario, they can always have the US Air Force bomb the Sunni Arabs for them.
And so that's not helpful.
But I think that role of the US in taking strong sides is declining.
General Petraeus is more even-handed and has very bad relations with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a result.
And the likelihood is that, anyway, over the next couple of years, the US is going to draw down very substantially, if not get out altogether.
Well, so do you think that, you know, I don't know, if somehow you could get Stephen Hadley's job for the next year, that there is a way that America can broker a deal that makes it less likely for everybody to fight when we finally do go?
Or is it just a...
Yeah, of course, the United States is enormously powerful and has diplomatic weight and could play a positive role in trying to broker a deal.
I would require, I think, that the US make a bid to normalize relations with Iran and work through and get the Iranians and the Saudis on the same page, because both of them have enormous influence among their clients in Iraq.
And you know, to work towards an Iraqi version of the Taif Accord that ended the Lebanese Civil War in 1989.
But you know, what I see is Bush going out to the region and trying to stir up the Arabs against the Iranians, which, you know, if he succeeded in doing that, it's going to cause trouble in Iraq, because the Iranian clients are the Shiites and the Saudi and Georgian and other clients are the Sunnis.
So you don't get social peace in Iraq if you stir up the Arabs against the Iranians.
And so Bush's sort of wider policy in the region of divide and rule inevitably destabilizes his smaller project in Iraq of trying to stand up a stable government.
You know, McClatchy Newspapers is reporting today that the Arabs aren't really buying it, that this whole, you know, narrative that, oh, there's this accidentally somehow due to some sort of consequence of our invasion that couldn't possibly have been foreseen.
We accidentally created a new Shiite crescent from Iran and into Iraq and into Syria and Lebanon and Hezbollah and southern Lebanon.
And so this is the new target is to realign all those Sunni Arab states against the Shiite crescent.
But McClatchy has it today that everybody's basically yawning at George Bush with this.
They don't want any more trouble with Iran.
Yeah, they lived through a horrific Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 88.
Nobody is eager to repeat that experience.
They live in the region.
They know very well that Iran has not been behaving in overtly aggressive ways towards them.
And the emir of Kuwait cautioned Bush that any military action against Iran would send petroleum prices through the roof and, you know, throw the world into deep recession.
So that's not good for the oil industry.
It's not good for Kuwait.
So they are very cautious.
And I think you're right, and I think McClatchy is right, that from what I've seen, the Arab capitals find Bush's pressure on them to line up against Iran distasteful and unwise.
And they've openly said so, which in the terms of Arab diplomacy is a real slap in the face to Bush.
You know, for it to come out that the emir of Kuwait told Bush this is diplomatically, in the Arab world, an earthquake.
Because Kuwait has been a strong ally of the United States, and of course owes the U.S. its independence since Bush Sr. saved them from Saddam in the Gulf War.
And so the emir was being rude, and in a way that's almost unimaginable in the Gulf, to his guests.
And I take that as a sign of extreme alarm, that he's so alarmed and so anxious about what Bush is doing that he even took this risk to be that rude in public.
Wow.
Yeah, and I guess the unraveling of the pseudo Gulf of Tonkin incident there probably helped strengthen the hand of the Sunni Arabs who would rather check Bush's ambitions than help drive them.
Yes, I'm afraid that I have become quite cynical about the Bush propaganda machine, and I find it very suspicious that on the eve of Bush's trip to the Middle East to drum up support among the Arabs for a push against Iran, you suddenly get this videotape of Iranian gunboats, or not gunboats, but small, tiny, unarmed speedboats, supposedly harassing these huge American destroyers with this spin on it, that they're a danger to the U.S.
And I've seen some evidence in the reporting that the naval personnel on the ship itself, on the U.S. ship itself, didn't concur, that this was dangerous behavior, and I think it was intended to scare the emir of Kuwait and line him up, and I think it failed.
Yeah, and probably backfired in a way worse for the Bush policy, which I suppose is probably better for peace on Earth.
Everybody, by the way, I guess I should have said this a few times, it's Juan Cole, a history professor from the University of Michigan, author of the Informed Comment blog at juancole.com.
My publisher would want to add an author of the newly released Napoleon's Egypt, invading the Middle East.
Ah, yeah, see, I need to get that.
I heard that was really good, actually.
Yeah, sorry, I'll make sure and say that on the way out.
The surge.
I want to know, I guess it's sort of a two-part question, I want to know whether, or to what degree you give the troop increase credit for the decline in casualties, and whether you see it as something that's just delaying the inevitable and making it worse, or something that really could maybe be used to bring the factions together here at the end of the day.
And also, I want to know what you think of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
John McCain says that we have to stay there 100 years, because if we don't, Al-Qaeda will have free run of the place.
Right, well, with regard to the US troop escalation, the extra 30,000 troops that were put in, they were deployed mainly in Baghdad.
They were deployed to pacify Sunni Arab neighborhoods, primarily.
They were deployed in such a way that they went in, they found, arrested, or chased away a guerrilla element, and then they stayed, and they continued to patrol, and they attempted to develop a relationship with the remaining population.
This did work to some extent within Baghdad.
The number of bodies being found in the morning has declined precipitously, there seems to be less death squad activity, and so forth.
That's not what happened in Al-Anbar province, where we have very few troops, and where there was no escalation.
That was a case where Sunni Arab local, political, and tribal factions took matters into their own hands.
But there is a downside to the troop escalation and the success that it has had in reducing casualties, which is that we appear accidentally, and I think without intending to, to have allowed behind-the-scenes ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis of Baghdad, and to have turned Baghdad into a Shiite city.
And I think this occurred because Prime Minister al-Maliki negotiated with General Petraeus an agreement that the Americans would disarm the Sunni Arab communities first, because they were the sources of car bombings and horrific attacks on Shiite civilians, and that then Maliki could go to the Mahdi army and say, well, we don't need you anymore, because the Sunnis have been disarmed.
So what actually happened was that the Americans disarmed the Sunni Arabs, and at night the Shiite death squads went in and ethnically cleansed the Sunni Arabs.
So you have districts that were mixed, like Shab, that are completely Shiite now, and indeed most of the city of the New York Times published a map of it showing that it's 75% at least Shiite, now possibly more.
And so this was not intended, and General Petraeus has deplored it, but it is impossible, in my view, that the Sunni Arabs of Iraq or of the region would accept Baghdad being captured almost in its entirety by the Shiite, and I think it's a setup for a further civil war over Baghdad whenever the Americans get out of the way.
Wow, yeah, and right now we're taking the Ba'athists and dead-enders and terrorists and whatever, we're calling them the concerned local citizens and giving them all this money and all these weapons when there's really no indication that they're any more ready to join the government or any more invited into the government than they've ever been, right?
This is simply just a pause before the storm gets even worse.
Well, it certainly is a somewhat dangerous policy to arm these guys, but I think it has two purposes, a stated and unstated purpose.
The stated purpose is for them to fight what the Americans call Al-Qaeda, the Salafi Sunni extremists, in their neighborhoods.
But it probably is also an acknowledgment that if they didn't rearm the Sunnis, that the Shiites would just finish them off altogether.
And so, of course, that's created a very fragile status quo.
The Maliki government is not eager to incorporate these elements into the formal Iraqi security forces, does not trust them, views them as stealth, fifth-column insurgents, and many of them, as you say, also have no great love for the Dawah party, for the Mahdi army, and so forth.
There are severe costs to the policies that have been pursued.
They certainly have resulted in a decrease in casualties, not an ending to casualties, because we still have hundreds and hundreds of people being blown up, shot, and killed in various ways every month.
But it's less than it was last year this time, probably half or a third.
But then the question is, this was a military strategy.
It has to be accompanied by a political strategy in order to succeed, and that political strategy is still not apparent.
Nowhere to be found.
And now, in terms of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, my understanding is that, really, they blew it.
They directed the insurgency, instead of against the foreign occupiers, our guys, they started slaughtering Shiites en masse, and basically picked a fight that they couldn't win with the Mahdi army and the Badr Corps, and the local Sunni Arab population had to deal with all the blowback, and now they're sick and tired of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and have decided to marginalize them out of action.
Is that right?
Well, on the whole, and by and large, that is the correct description of the failures of the strategy of the Islamic State of Iraq and the other so-called Al-Qaeda groupings.
They not only attacked the Shiite Iraqis as well as the Americans, but they also attacked the Sunni Arabs that they considered collaborators.
They incurred huge disputes with tribes like the Dulaym, because they blew up Sunni Dulaym young men who were joining the police.
That process whereby they're being excluded from certain provinces like Al-Anbar is incomplete.
The Islamic State of Iraq still has substantial strength in Diyala province, the eastern province near to Iran, still in Salahuddin, in Nineveh, there's still activity in Kirkuk province.
The U.S. military is at the moment making a sweep in Diyala and Salahuddin to attempt to root these Sunni radicals out.
The strategy of forming Awakening Councils or consulting local citizens in Diyala and Salahuddin has not been as successful so far as in Al-Anbar, and in part this may be because they are mixed provinces, or at least Diyala is mixed, and so there still is a civil war going on between Sunnis and Shiites that makes it more difficult to calm things down.
Do you think that if, well I mean I guess I've read Robert A. Pape and others who basically talk about suicide bombing and the willingness of local communities to support suicide bombing and so forth, really only comes from the occupation of a foreign power.
So I wonder if the Americans left and it was just a Sunni-Shiite civil war, are the Shiite Arabs foreign enough that the local Sunni Arabs would continue to resort to suicide bombing and alliance with Al-Qaeda, or is that really just in the face of American occupation?
Well there are of course large numbers of Sunni Arabs in Iraq who consider the Shiite Iraqis to be catspaws of Iran, or actually to be Iranian, and they consider the Shiite South to be under a kind of Iranian occupation, so I fear that if what is impelling the suicide bombing is a feeling of being occupied by a foreign power, that the Sunni Arabs would go on feeling that way even after the Americans left, they would be directing their energies towards the Shiites and the Iranians.
Well it sure is in a pretty picture you paint there.
Again, I guess if I could give you Steve Hadley's job somehow, what advice do you have for George Bush, assuming that he would be honest and listen to you?
Be a uniter, not a divider.
And can he do that?
I mean if he tries to unite people, does he not just taint them with his endorsement?
Well what I mean by that is, as I said, he needs to make an opening towards Iran, he needs to try to cool down animosities between Iran and Saudi Arabia to the extent that they exist, especially over the Iraq issue, and I think he's doing the exact opposite of that.
No doubt.
Alright, thank you very much for your insight, Juan.
You're very welcome.
Everybody, Juan Cole, he's a professor of history at the University of Michigan, his blog is called Informed Comment, it's at juancole.com, and his new book is Napoleon's Egypt.
Thanks a lot.
You're very welcome.