02/26/08 – Aaron Glantz – The Scott Horton Show

Alright folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today is Aaron Glantz from KPFA Radio, writer for AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Aaron.
Oh, my pleasure, as always.
And I'm sorry, I did not get prepared for this interview at all.
What all are your credentials again?
That was a horrible introduction.
Well, let me just say that I'm happy to be with you, Scott, and of course always writing for AntiWar.com.
I want to call attention, in addition to my work as an unembedded journalist in Iraq in my first book, How America Lost Iraq, also to the new website that KPFA has helped me set up called The War Comes Home at warcomeshome.org, where we look at the disaster that greets most of the returning veterans from this war and the inability of the Bush administration to manage the home front of the war, even as the war itself is continuing in disaster.
Well, support the troops in war, betray them when it's over.
You know, these guys are heroes.
Well, you don't need to wait until it's over.
I mean, that's the incredible thing.
That's the incredible thing, is that it's not like the Vietnam era, where, of course, the war ended very badly for the U.S. government, and so the government had an interest in trying to sweep the veterans under the rug.
Here we have a war that's still going on, where everyone says that they learned from that experience of Vietnam, where supporting the troops and supporting the president are not necessarily the same thing.
But we have a president right now who is overtly hostile to American veterans.
I mean, you have 1.6 million veterans, 1.6 million people who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush administration has said that it opposes increasing funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs and, you know, periodically has to be dragged kicking and screaming by Congress to do that.
And it's really a tragedy.
And, you know, we had just today, and we have a link to this on warcomeshome.org, that one of the top Army officials, General George Casey, appeared before Congress today saying that the cumulative effects of the six years of war have left the entire Army out of balance and calling on Congress to cut the amount and the length of troop deployments to keep the Army itself from disintegrating.
And, of course, this sounds like a very sensible idea, and the only reason it's not the case now is because George Bush and his Republican allies in the U.S. Senate kept the Democratic Congress from passing a bill to do just that a year ago.
Yeah, well, not that the Democrats tried that hard or anything, but...
Well, they tried pretty hard.
You know, the Democrats, they try harder about some things than others.
And I'd say they haven't tried very hard to defund the war, to cut the purse strings of the war.
That's something that they could try harder to do, but they have actually tried quite hard to deliver for America's veterans.
And I think that they are surprised at the resistance that they're getting greeted by the Bush administration.
Well, let me ask you about that.
The Bush administration has no problem creating a bazillion dollars out of thin air to spend on whatever they want.
Why would they do this?
It's such bad public relations to stab your soldiers in the back like this, Aaron.
No, it's incredible, isn't it?
I mean, especially considering we spend two or three billion dollars every week on this war.
And, you know, the amount of money that we're talking about for vets, as you mentioned, it's just a tiny fraction of that.
But, I mean, the way I look at it is, President Bush doesn't think that the American people should get health care from the government, and he seems to extend that to veterans.
You're not realizing that veterans have gotten injured or wounded fighting for this government.
Yeah, you know, I actually asked Ron Paul about that specific point.
I mean, I knew what he was going to say, but here's a guy who's a doctor and a libertarian and completely opposed to government health care for the American people, and yet says the government's obligation to the soldiers is their paramount obligation.
You can't send these guys to war and then abandon them.
There's nothing more important than the government, well, very few things higher on the list that this national government has as a responsibility, besides taking care of the veterans of their wars.
But you know what, Scott, and this is very important, I think there's a deeper reason, you know, why the president doesn't want to take care of these veterans.
They don't want to admit the consequences of their actions.
Yeah, exactly.
They don't want to admit that they sent 1.6 million people to Iraq and Afghanistan, and, you know, 500,000 of them are coming back with post-traumatic stress disorder.
If they took care of them, they would need to admit that the problem existed.
They would need to admit that this war that they said was going to be a cakewalk at the beginning is a war that's causing, you know, 300,000, 500,000 American soldiers to come back with physical brain damage, traumatic brain injury, according to the Pentagon's estimates.
Now, the generals understand that this is a problem, because they're dealing with a problem of having to continue to fight this war, and they don't want to keep sending out soldiers who have physical brain damage or who are constantly having flashbacks or drinking themselves silly because they want to forget what they experienced on the previous tour and aren't getting any mental health care.
So, even now, you're seeing some cracks in the system.
People like General George Casey going before Congress and saying, you know what, we need those things that the president is not delivering to us.
And he doesn't mention President Bush, because, you know, it would be bad form for a general to go to Capitol Hill and directly criticize the president.
But if you read between the lines, you have a breakdown between the executive branch and the military elite.
Yeah, I guess the officers, at least to some degree, have to care about the enlisted guys under them.
The civilians apparently just don't even consider them people at all when they're dealing with them.
Well, I mean, the officers are trying to, I mean, even the crassest officer wants to win the war.
Right.
Wants to hold his division together.
Yeah, well, it's hard.
It's hard, and it's getting increasingly hard.
Absolutely, and that's what we saw today.
And we also have out here in California Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, of course, is a good friend of President Bush and has endorsed John McCain, but he's calling attention to the fact that the National Guard out here doesn't have any equipment anymore because it's all been sent to Iraq, and so if we actually had an emergency, we'd be in big trouble.
Yeah, well, and we've seen this over the past few years in New Orleans and the wildfires out there in California pretty much every year of the Bush administration.
We've had, boy, where are our guard guys?
Oh, they're over in Iraq.
And we have increasing resistance to that.
I mean, another story that we've linked to from warcomeshome.org is this effort by a number of states, including Vermont, which has had the highest percentage of casualties in any state in this country in the Iraq War, saying, you know what, it's time for us to bring the National Guard home.
Yeah.
Hey, now, listen, when you mentioned the brain injuries, the trauma, this is something, actually, that John McCain pointed out when he said, I promise you there's going to be a lot more wars.
He said there's going to be a lot more post-traumatic stress and there's going to be a lot more brain injuries.
And this reminded me of an article that Charles Goyette covered this and the follow-up, actually, interviewing the author Joshua Kors from The Nation magazine, who wrote an article and a follow-up called How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits.
And it was about a soldier who did not have PTSD, who had physical brain trauma from multiple concussions from roadside bombs and so forth, artillery shells going off nearby and like that.
And the government's loophole, Aaron, was that, oh, we're sorry, we just realized that you have a personality disorder and you must have had it before you joined the Army.
According to loophole section 703 paragraph 4, that means we don't have to give you any health care whatsoever.
Go kill yourself.
You have personality disorder, right?
And the question is, then, if you're so crazy, how come they sent you over to Iraq to begin with?
And how come they didn't notice when you were risking your butt in Iraq and they gave you a Purple Heart, how come all that time they didn't notice that you had some kind of personality disorder?
I don't understand it.
I try to put myself in the position of an American imperialist and I think, you know, what we really need for our propaganda effort is to show the American people how much we care about the soldiers.
We'll try to minimize the number of wounded that they know about, but at least the American people know that some guys are coming home wounded.
Wouldn't it make sense to try to at least pretend that the American government cares about them at all?
We have published at warcomeshome.org, Scott, an investigative report that I really hope your listeners have the opportunity to check out, how Washington cheats veterans out of the benefits they earn.
And it goes type by type.
You know, you mentioned this type of a specialist town who was cheated out of his benefits because of the personality disorder issue.
We have a number of other cases up here which show the different important types of ways that the Bush administration has been cheating veterans out of the benefits they earn.
The worst case, at least to me the most frightening case, is about this guy named Sergeant G.J.
Cassidy, a member of the Indiana National Guard who went to Iraq and suffered one of these traumatic brain injuries, came back and was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky, which is one of the official places where you go if you're wounded in this war, and he died in Fort Knox in his room.
And according to the coroner's report, he had so much blood pooled in the lower half of his body that he had actually been dead for three days before anybody found him.
I mean, and that is some high-level neglect.
And why is this?
Why did this happen?
Well, here we are a year after the Walter Reed scandal, and the General Government Accountability Office, the GAO, is reporting that 50% of these wounded warrior transition units are 50% short, doctors and other key medical staff.
So, I mean, this is a key issue.
The Bush administration just does not want to hire doctors.
They don't want to hire claims processors.
They don't want to hire any of these people because then they'll have to admit that there's a problem.
And I think what they don't realize is that, you know, stories like these, if they can get the light of day, will just embarrass the crap out of them.
Yeah, it just makes matters worse.
But, you know, another more typical case is that of Specialist James Eggemeyer, who we also have profiled in this investigative report on warcomeshome.org.
When he came back from Iraq, he was running convoys up from Basra up to Baghdad, driving a truck, and he was part of a convoy that hit an oncoming car filled with Iraqi civilians, and he loaded those dead Iraqis into a Blackhawk helicopter.
And so he came back with a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder, kept having flashbacks of that incident, and also, you know, had some back pain and shoulder pain that made it difficult for him to work because of the accident for at least a little while.
And he came back, he filed a claim for disability with the VA, and he had to wait eight months for that claim to be processed.
Well, in the meantime, he ran out of money, and so he ended up living in his car.
And that's how, in this war, we're already seeing so many homeless veterans who have just got out of the military and served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And the reason for that is that, under President Bush, the average wait time for a veteran's disability claim to be decided is 183 days, six months, and more than 600,000 disabled vets are waiting.
And this is a death by a thousand cuts, and it's a key way in which the Bush administration is trying to make people feel like there isn't a problem.
You know, if people come back and they only have a few people on disability, they can say, sure, you know, like, there are some wounded people, but not that many.
But even with all of this crisis, you have over 200,000 American servicemen and women who have come back from the war zone and have filed a claim for disability with the federal government.
Wow, 200,000, huh?
And, you know, it shouldn't be that surprising.
I think if the process wasn't so cumbersome, we'd be seeing even more, because the Pentagon's own studies show that between one-fifth and one-half of everyone who served in Iraq are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
So that could be as many as 800,000 people suffering from PTSD.
The Pentagon's own studies show that 20% are suffering from traumatic brain injury.
Well, you know, 1.6 million, that's like 300,000, 400,000 people suffering from traumatic brain injury.
And so if all those people were greeted with a friendlier bureaucratic system that allowed them to get the benefits they earned, we might be looking at an extremely high number of people getting at least partial disability checks from the federal government based on their service injuries.
But because the process is so disastrously complex and bureaucratic, we only have 200,000 people.
And it's just incredible when you think back to 2003 and people in the Bush administration said this was going to be a cakewalk, that it would only go on for a few months, that there would be very few American casualties, and that here we are now with hundreds of thousands of wounded people and the Bush administration refusing to care for them.
Yeah, well, and I don't mean to sound crass about it because, you know, human lives are priceless and money is just money, but, you know, there's the recent report by Joseph Stiglitz, the article written in the London Times, that raised his estimate that this war, he says, cannot be finished for less than $3 trillion.
And so I guess the Republicans will just try to claim this as they're, you know, tightening their belt trying to save us a little money.
Imagine how much that $3 trillion would be, because that includes, you know, disability payments and so forth, if they actually took care of all the guys who really needed it.
Well, you know, Joe Stiglitz's co-author on this program, on this report, is a woman named Linda Billman who used to be in the Clinton administration, and she's made a very sensible recommendation in terms of veterans' disability claims, in terms of veterans coming back wounded from Iraq and asking for disability compensation and health care, which is that instead of making them wait six months while the government bureaucracy goes and checks and makes sure that they're telling the truth and makes them go through so many hoops and ladders, and then maybe gives them their claim, why not do what we do with our tax returns?
Just immediately accept everyone's disability claim, send them checks so that they can get on with their lives and, you know, get back to normal and make that difficult transition between being a warrior to being a civilian again, and then in the meantime audit them to make sure that they're not lying.
And this is good enough for the IRS, and, you know, we all know the IRS is hard to trick the IRS without getting screwed.
Why can't we have a system for veterans that is at least as easy to use as the IRS?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I just have this article here from MSNBC, this Reuters article.
U.S. soldiers' suicide rate in Iraq.
Oh, actually this is from December 2006, so this is old, but there have been reports about this just in the last couple of months about the suicide rates among soldiers at all-time highs.
We actually reported on this on warcomeshome.org as well, which is the fact that the VA refuses to count, so the Bush administration refuses to count how many veterans commit suicide.
So who's doing the counting then, the GAO?
Well, this is, no, this is the Army.
The Army is counting how many members of the Army are committing suicide.
So they count about 100, 150 members of the U.S. Army committing suicide.
But, of course, most of the, and we have some of those stories actually up at warcomeshome.org, among them Sergeant Brian Rand, who came back from two tours in Iraq with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, tried to get help from the Pentagon medical system, and was told to go back to Iraq again for a third tour, and then blew his brains out on the Cumberland River Bridge near Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and died.
We have his story up at warcomeshome.org.
But the important thing is that this is just a small fraction of the problem, 150 or so people, members of the Army who kill themselves every year, because you have, in addition to that, all the people who get chaptered out of the military, some of whom have been cheated out of their benefits, like Specialist Town was that you mentioned, many of whom are waiting in long lines to get their disability checks, like Specialist Agamire that I mentioned, and they can't deal with it, and they end up killing themselves.
And CBS News did an investigation, and they found that every week, 120 veterans of this country's military war, so Iraq, Vietnam, Persian Gulf War, all the way back to World War II, every week, 120 veterans kill themselves in this country, 6,000 a year.
Say that again.
Every week, 120 veterans kill themselves in this country, 6,000 a year.
All right, well, you can't get any more clear than that, Aaron Glantz.
Supporting the war is betraying the troops.
The Bush administration refuses to count this.
They refuse to have their auditors at the VA or the GAO or anywhere else count this, and the only reason we know this is because CBS News did an investigative report, and they checked the death records in every state in this country, and it's incredible to me that the government doesn't bother to track the state itself.
Yeah, well, it's incredible to me that the argument that, well, you don't support the troops if you don't support the war is arguably the winning argument still to so many people in this country when clearly supporting the war is betraying the soldiers.
Well, if you have experience war, as I have, and I was an unembedded journalist over three years in Iraq walking the streets of Baghdad, then you know that war is an incredibly brutal, harmful, destructive thing, and any soldier who's been there, regardless of whether they're for it or against it, knows that it's something that shouldn't be entered into lightly and that is very, very difficult to transition from and get back to normal life, to be able to hear that helicopter that's really a news chopper and know that it's just a news chopper, that you're not back in the war zone, to have somebody stop you on the street like a regular cop and not see the enemy.
I mean, these are hard things to get over, and I think that people like President Bush, they want us to think that war is like a Nintendo game and that we can win if we just press the buttons fast enough.
And this is where even the pro-war soldiers, even these generals, are getting extremely frustrated with the Bush administration's refusal to think about what this war is really costing.
Everybody, it's Aaron Glantz, warcomeshome.org, and right there at the top of the page, new investigative report, How Washington Cheats Veterans Out of the Benefits They've Earned, and the links to the report and the veteran's testimonials is right there at the top of the page, at warcomeshome.org.
And now, by the way, if you go to scotthortonshow.com, you can listen to my interview of Aaron from, I guess, three, four years ago now, when his book, How America Lost Iraq, came out.
Isn't it incredible, Scott, that you and I have been talking about this war for that long?
It's 2008 right now.
It's still going on.
And all the news reports I have, what, the Stars and Stripes here?
Permanent U.S. Army Command taking shape in Kuwait.
Of course, John McCain, the frontrunner on the Republican side, is saying that the United States is going to occupy Iraq for 10,000 years.
You know, and the incredible thing about that is, John McCain, anyone should know that sometimes you just lose a war.
It should be John McCain.
I mean, this is a guy who was shot down bombing Hanoi and was held in a prisoner of war camp for six years.
And the only reason that he got out of that prisoner of war camp was because Richard Nixon sat down and talked to the other side and negotiated an American withdrawal.
And when the American troops left, and the Vietnamese people got to govern themselves by whatever system they chose, that was when John McCain and his fellow prisoners of war were released.
And John McCain should know from his own experience that continuing a war forever does not necessarily mean anything positive will come of it.
Sure, and we can also look at Vietnam and say, what do we lose by not having a permanent occupation of southern Vietnam?
I can't think of anything.
You know, Ike Eisenhower actually complained that if the communists take Vietnam, that might restrict our access to Tungsten or whatever the hell.
But that's ridiculous.
You know, Tungsten's for sale on the world market just like everything else.
It's the same thing for the Middle East.
We don't need to occupy the Middle East forever.
We get along with the government of Vietnam just fine now.
And you know who made that happen was John McCain.
I mean, this is the ultimate irony.
This is the ultimate irony.
Because in the 1980s, you know, that was when Vietnam and America didn't believe that the other country existed, kind of like Iran and the United States today.
We refuse to talk to Iran.
We say Iran doesn't exist.
They say we're the great Satan.
And it was exactly like that in the 1980s with Vietnam.
But John McCain and John Kerry, two Vietnam War veterans, understood.
They had been to Vietnam.
They had experienced the war.
And I'm sure they didn't think anything nice about the North Vietnamese government, especially McCain, who had been held in a prisoner of war camp and tortured by that government.
But they understood that there was a need to move on, to get past that, to make peace, to be friends, and to trade.
And in his own memoir, John McCain talks about the importance of trade as a way to build a relationship and lasting peace with a country that the two governments don't necessarily get along, like Vietnam and the United States today.
And he helped make that happen.
That's my favorite thing about John McCain, is he understands and actually agrees with everything Ron Paul says, and then he does the exact opposite anyway.
And the thing that I find so disappointing about him is that George Bush, God bless him, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
He doesn't know anything.
He's just listening to his advisors.
And whatever his ideas are, I believe that he really does think this war is like a Nintendo game.
I really believe that maybe he even has a Nintendo game that he plays, or one of these online games where he simulates going through Fallujah and killing the enemy, and he gets eight lives, just like you do in these games.
But John McCain, he sees this.
He knows that it's different.
He's even, after his horrible POW experience in Vietnam, been able to get over it and make peace with the Vietnamese and build this relationship based on trade and mutual respect.
And if anyone in the Republican field should know the folly of the Bush surge and the Bush policy, it should be McCain, but I guess the man has just lost his mind.
Yeah, well, power's the most important thing.
The truth is a far distant fifth or sixth on the list after total power, I think.
Well, you know, it's just too bad, because John McCain could be somebody that we could all respect.
The only good thing I would say about John McCain is, like you said, he does admit that we are going to see more people with PTSD.
He does admit that we will see more people with traumatic brain injury.
He talks about the physical wounds of war.
He's a living embodiment that war isn't something that's over when the peace treaty is signed, that there are lasting costs both to the economy and to the human body and the human soul.
And so I would hope that if for some reason he is elected president that he does something to take care of the veterans, unlike George Bush who didn't go AWOL back in the Vietnam era.
Yeah.
You know, well, I guess I'll make this quote an anonymous one, because I'd hate to embarrass him, but there's a friend of mine, someone that you know as well, who says that he thinks there's at least a chance that John McCain will actually be a very good president, that he is such an independent-minded person, that even surrounded by a bunch of William Crystals telling him he's Theodore Roosevelt and so forth, that if anybody could tell the war party to go to hell, it would be John McCain probably, and that maybe he's an independent enough person to do that once he uses all their talking points to achieve total power.
I can't say I have faith in that, but I guess it's a possibility.
Well, I do have to say that just as a person, I fear Hillary more than I fear John McCain.
I just have to say it because, you know, Hillary also has no plan to withdraw American troops from Iraq.
You know, she doesn't talk about keeping America in Iraq for 100 years like John McCain does, but she also doesn't talk about pulling us out.
You know, she says she'll talk to the generals and decide what to do and see if there's progress on the ground and all these things that we've come to hear so much from Bush, and I feel like a Clinton presidency would be a recipe for more of the same, whereas with McCain, I would think that we are going to get a new policy, but unfortunately, you know, his new policy includes extending the American empire to Iraq forever and keeping American forces there for 50 to 100 years, and that's really not good news.
Yeah, I have to say, you know, this is off the wall, I guess, but when I think of a McCain presidency, I just picture hydrogen bombs going off.
I think of someone who's not in control of his own mind, really.
Well, I mean, I don't know about that, Scott.
I mean, I think this guy knows what he's talking about.
He has been consistent on the war.
He thought we should go in with, you know, double the amount of troops that we went in with in 2003.
Now he still wants us to double the amount of troops in Iraq, but the thing I think John McCain doesn't really understand is that the reason that American troops are under fire in Iraq is not because there are not enough of them.
The problem is that there are too many of them, and the Iraqi people don't like being occupied by a foreign power, and I think that this is something that John McCain doesn't understand, that if you were to double the number of American soldiers in Iraq to 500,000 or 300,000, that you wouldn't, quote-unquote, secure the country.
What you would actually do is inflame the Iraqi people to fight in greater numbers against you.
Yeah, well, and you know, when he explains the war to people, it sounds to me like he's not very in touch with what's going on on the ground there.
Now, I know not everybody reads Robert Dreyfuss and Gareth Porter and so forth, but when John McCain has given statements, in fact, there are articles in the Frontline section on antiwar.com today where he's trying to backpedal from the 100 years and say, well, the war's going to be over soon, we're going to peacefully occupy the place for 100 years.
What he said is the Iraqi people are going to be fighting the war for us, and he says the insurgency isn't going to end, but the Iraqi people are going to go fight it.
Well, again, if anybody should know the folly of that statement, it should be John McCain, because while he was in a POW camp in North Vietnam, Richard Nixon was Vietnamizing the Vietnam War.
Sure.
And that didn't work very well.
And the other thing is, does he not know that the so-called insurgency has been renamed the Concerned Local Citizens for the time being, and that the bad guys now are...
Well, because they're all getting paychecks from the U.S. government.
Yeah, I mean, you know, and then he also invokes, you know, Obama and Clinton, which as you just detailed is not really true, especially at least about Hillary Clinton, but they want to turn tail and run and surrender and wave the white flag to al-Qaeda, as though al-Qaeda somehow is forcing America out if there's a withdrawal, when they were never more than a marginal, tiny little percentage of the local Sunni insurgency, and now have become even more marginalized than that.
Well, you know, it was weird.
I just think about when, I don't know if you remember this, when John McCain went with that heavy military escort about, I don't know, a few months ago to Baghdad.
Yeah.
He pronounced that he thought that the surge was working because he could do that.
The thing that I found really incredible about that was that he was walking through this area called Mutanabbi Street, which is the book market in Baghdad, and I remember going to that book market in 2003, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein, before everything got to be quite so bad, and I just walked down the street with no military protection, you know, just me, and in fact not even with a translator, just like walking down the street, just saying hello to people, checking out the books in bookstores just like you do in any other city in America.
The booksellers were really happy because for the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, they could actually sell the books they wanted, unlike under Saddam when they had to sell books that featured Saddam Hussein, and there was a real vibrancy.
And then John McCain, if you watch that video footage, he walks down the street.
First of all, there's not a single customer in any of those shops.
Second of all, those shops don't have any electricity.
Third of all, he's got like a billion, trillion people guarding him who are ready to shoot anyone that shoots at him.
Yeah, including helicopters and snipers on every rooftop.
It's just insanity, but let him live in the dream world, and hopefully it won't matter in terms of the future of our country and the future of Iraq.
Well, let me ask you this, this is something that hardly anybody, I don't really know any experts, but maybe you can recommend me some more experts besides yourself about Kurdistan.
I know that when you were in Iraq, you wrote quite a few articles about Kurdistan and prospects for future violence.
Looks like this week we have an actual land invasion of northern Iraq by the Turkish military, seeking a war against the PKK.
Tell me this, Aaron, five years from now, in the full-scale Kurdish-Turkish war, which side is America going to stab in the back?
Well, you know, it's a little more complicated than that, because here's the thing.
Turkey is attacking the PKK, as you mentioned.
The PKK is a small guerrilla army made up of Turkish Kurds that are fighting for freedom and autonomy for Kurds in Turkey.
And Kurds in Turkey are horribly oppressed by the Turkish government.
They aren't allowed to teach their language in school, they aren't allowed to have television or radio programming most of the time in their language.
People in their part of the country, the southeastern Turkey, are often just like rounded up without any charge by the Turkish military.
Turkish military airstrikes in villages against suspected PKK rebel sites usually kill a lot of civilians.
And as a result of this catastrophe, the PKK has made its base of operations on the other side of the border in northern Iraq.
But they are way up in the mountains.
And as somebody who's spent a lot of time in northern Iraq, you don't interact with the PKK folks because the Iraqi Kurdish authorities, Barzani and Talabani, don't want to get in the middle of this.
So they make the Turkish Kurds stay up in the mountains, and meanwhile they go about their business and pretend that the Turkish Kurds rebels in the mountains don't exist.
And so right now you have this Turkish forces crossing the border, going into Iraq, attacking PKK fighters in the mountains.
So far, the vast majority of Kurds living in northern Iraq are not affected in any way by this.
So you think that the Kurdish Peshmergas under the control of Talabani and Barzani, that they will stay out?
They want to stay friends with America.
And you have to remember the PKK is on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations.
And Barzani and Talabani, the Iraqi Kurds, are probably on the CIA's payroll.
So the Bush administration has picked a side.
They have picked the side of the Iraqi Kurds and the Turkish military.
And they have picked against the PKK.
And I think that this is a bargain that the Iraqi Kurds are willing to go with.
You may hear some complaining from them, but you know that you don't see any Kurdish Peshmerga attacking the Turkish military.
Yeah, not that I've heard of anyway, yeah.
So, I mean, I think that's very important for people to understand.
Now, what I would be very concerned if I saw, Scott, is if I saw the Turkish military in any cities in northern Iraq.
That would scare the living daylights out of me.
You know, Zaho is right across the border.
It's just like, if there was no border there, you could walk from Sevopi, which is the city on the Turkish side, to Zaho on the Iraqi side.
And, you know, if I saw any Turkish troops, you know, marching in formation across that border, that would scare the living daylights out of me.
But I don't think that we're likely to see that.
Unless, and here would be the unless, and if American troops leave, because the American troops in Iraq, the only purpose they serve that's a little bit positive is they do serve as a deterrent to keep, like, Turkey from invading Iraq, or to keep, you know, Iran from, you know, making a larger incursion, or Syria, or whatever, to protect their own strategic interests.
None of them wants to get into a showdown with the U.S. military.
But eventually, I think that is not going to be the case.
Yeah, well, there's a couple of things there.
Well, elaborate on that.
You think that there is a way for America to leave without the various states in the region thinking they need to intervene more forcefully than they have been?
I mean, they have more right to be involved than we do, coming from halfway around the world, you know.
But, I mean, I do think that when America leaves, that Kurdistan, that the threat of a Turkish military situation in northern Iraq will become a more real issue for the people who live in northern Iraq, which is why most Kurds want America to stay, unlike the Arabs who live in the center and south of the country.
And I think that's a real issue, and I think it's worth thinking about.
This is the nature of this war from the very beginning, is, well, you let us get away with invading the place.
Now we've screwed up everything in the region so bad that we have to stay forever and ever 10,000 years, or else things will get worse.
Yeah, I mean, there's not really a reason to stay, just to keep Turkey from invading Iraq.
But the Henry Kissingers of this world, you know, I think a lot of them imagine the United States getting out of the Arab part of Iraq and setting up some permanent bases in northern Iraq.
And if I was Henry Kissinger, that's what I would be advising the Bush administration to do.
But I'm not Henry Kissinger.
I'm somebody who's concerned about the health and well-being of American soldiers and the Iraqi people, and therefore I want the U.S. military to get out of there entirely.
Yeah, and you know, the fact of the matter is, we need, as anti-war activists, we need to be able to say outright that, hey, listen, the fact that there are consequences from invading this country is not the fault of the anti-war forces who finally put an end to this madness.
If you don't like the fact that the Iranians have greater influence in southern Iraq, or that the Turks and the Kurds are coming into conflict to this degree or that in the north, etc., well, then you shouldn't have invaded that country.
It's the fault of the people who supported the war and who carried out this war, not the fault of those of us who opposed it, that there are consequences.
And in fact, the Turkish government at the time of the invasion, you remember the Turkish parliament voted against allowing the U.S. government to launch a northern front in this war from Turkish soil.
Right.
And the people of Turkey marched overwhelmingly in the hundreds of thousands against this war and calling on their parliament not to do that.
I remember I was in the streets of Ankara for that march, and it was a very interesting coalition of people, because of course you had your peace activists, but you also had your very extreme right-wing Turkish nationalists.
And they were saying, no war, because it will unleash something that you cannot put back in the bottle.
And if you go to war, then maybe eventually we'll go to war.
Yeah, and I remember, I wasn't in Ankara, I was here in Austin, Texas, and I remember that the American War Party, I think particularly Paul Wolfowitz, had nothing but disdainful words for Turkish democracy on the eve of a war to go and stall democracy supposedly in Iraq.
How dare the Turkish people, through their parliament, refuse to allow us to invade Iraq from their territory?
No, it was pretty incredible, and he even made overtures to the Turkish military about a possible coup.
Wolfowitz did, where can I read about that?
Oh, I don't remember.
I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to find out, though.
I'll find it.
I will find it.
I mean, it was public record.
It was all over the media in Turkey at that time.
Yeah, I think I remember something vaguely.
Now, tell me this, I believe it was Eric Margolis and Patrick Coburn both told me that the idea that anybody's military is going to be able to successfully fight anyone in the mountains of northern Kurdistan is ridiculous.
You might as well try to fight a guerrilla army in the Wolverines and the Colorado Rockies.
It isn't going to work out for you.
Well, I mean, it's true.
Basically, Turkey is in a similar situation to the one that America is in.
America is occupying Iraq, and the Iraqi people don't like it, and there's no way that the U.S. military can hunt down and kill all the Iraqi people who want America to leave.
And the more America attacks the people in Iraq, the more Iraqi people have family members who have been killed and wounded and injured by the American military, and so the more people attack the U.S. military, and you have a cycle of violence.
And there's no way to solve it with the military.
You have to solve it with a peace deal.
And Turkey is in the same situation.
I mean, yeah, they can go send their army into Iraq, and they can kill a bunch of people.
However, it's not going to solve their problem.
And in fact, the more they do it, the more they're going to start seeing an uprising on their own soil of Kurds who want peace but are outraged at the actions of the Turkish military.
I mean, when I was in Turkey in 2002, 2003, I guess back in 2004 and 2005, every time I went there I heard the same thing from the Kurds, which is, if the Turkish military will just leave us alone, we'll leave them alone.
But they keep coming in here with their tanks and their Humvees and their F-16s flying over us, buzzing us, reminding us that they're there, and it makes us uneasy.
Well, now you have a whole other state.
You have the Turkish military actively engaged in fighting Turkish Kurds.
And this is going to create a blowback for the Turks.
And that's just the nature of occupation.
All right, everybody, that's Aaron Glantz from IPS News, author of How America Lost Iraq.
He does free speech radio news for Pacifica Radio, and they have this special project highly worthy of your attention, The War Comes Home.
It's at warcomeshome.org.
Thanks very much for your time today, Aaron.
Oh, my pleasure.
All right, folks, that's anti-war radio.
We'll be back here tomorrow, 11 to 1.