03/21/08 – Juan Cole – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, first guest today on Anti-War Radio is Juan Cole.
He's a professor of history at the University of Michigan and writes the blog Informed Comment at JuanCole.com.
He's got a new article at Salon.com, Five Years of Iraq Lies.
Welcome back to the show, Juan.
Thanks so much, Scott.
It's good to talk to you again, Professor.
And this is a great article.
I like the way you just go through and say, all right, it's been five years and there's been at least one overarching lie for each of the years of the American occupation of Iraq, never mind the fact that they lied us into it in the first place.
They've lied to us all along in order to keep us there.
Let's start with year number one.
What was the big lie of the first year of American occupation of Iraq, Juan?
Well, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld actually denied that there was a building guerrilla war.
He even denied that there was substantial looting when the regime of Saddam Hussein first fell.
Oh, yeah, freedom is messy, he said, right?
Yeah, well, he said that CNN had film of one guy stealing a vase and they just looped it over and over again.
I mean, I think he was joking a little bit, but he did make light of it.
He did sort of suggest it wasn't as serious as the press was making it out to be.
It was very serious.
Government offices were being stripped of all of their equipment and their records.
How can you run a government that has no records?
So he denied even the social turmoil, which was apparent to all of us who could see it on television.
I don't know why he thought we were that stupid.
He at one point said, how many vases could they have?
Oh, yeah, right.
This isn't the cradle of all human civilization or anything.
Right, they like invented the vase, so I think they probably had a lot, Donald.
And this is the year that they disbanded the Iraqi army and fired every government employee?
They disbanded the Iraqi army.
They sent 400,000 men home with their guns, who knew where 600,000 tons of munitions were squirreled away in depots around the country.
And we just told them to drop dead.
Yeah, good plan.
Yeah, and then we fired 70,000 or so civil employees who were mostly Sunni Arabs who had happened to belong to the Ba'ath Party, weren't necessarily people who had done anything wrong.
Right, didn't you basically have to join the Ba'ath Party just to be part of the government at all, to be a janitor at the elementary school or anything, right?
There were a lot of occupations that you had to join for, or to get a passport, like if you ever wanted to go abroad, you had to join the party.
I mean, it wasn't that all of these people were mass murderers who were being fired.
It was Ahmed Chalabi and his corrupt circle that they wanted the jobs for their guys.
It was a patronage system.
So Rumsfeld just denied that there was the guerrilla war.
Jamie McIntyre, at one point of CNN, confronted him because we were having our troops blown up at Al Anbar already, and they were being sniped at, and we were starting to have people on the ground killed.
And then in August, late August of 2003, they blew up the leader of the Shiites, Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, outside the shrine of Imam Ali.
I mean, this was a very provocative thing, and it's amazing that there wasn't more trouble over it then.
But in summer of 2003, Jamie McIntyre quoted to Rumsfeld the Pentagon's definition of a guerrilla war, and said, doesn't that fit here?
And Rumsfeld says, it doesn't, really.
And then he said there was trouble in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, too.
Right, yeah, this is a lot like that.
Yeah, well, I can't remember any roadside bombs going off in Czechoslovakia.
I don't remember, you know, U.S.
-NATO troops being shot in Poland.
Yeah, at one point, Rice tried to say that, well, you know, there were the brigades left behind after the end of World War II, that there were some Nazis left to clean up in Germany, and tried to make that comparison.
That one didn't even hold, much less after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yeah, no, I have friends who are military historians who know that period intimately, and there was no violence against U.S. troops in post-war Germany.
All right, now, the biggest lie of year number two of the occupation was that the purpose of, or even the policy, was to create a democracy for the people of Iraq.
Well, it was more than that.
They were saying that Iraq was already becoming a shining light on the hill.
It was a model for the rest of the region, that it would transform the region, that it would solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, that it would make everybody's lives in the region better, it would abolish terrorism.
And, you know, they did have an election, but, first of all, the Bush administration hadn't planned on having an open election, one person, one vote, everybody gets to vote, universal suffrage, that sort of thing.
They had planned to kind of massage a government into being that was pro-Bush.
Yeah, when Ayatollah Sistani said, hey, pal, you're going to give us one man, one vote, or you're going to have to start this war all over again.
Exactly, and he brought 100,000 people out on the streets of Baghdad, and all of the other Shiite clerics and even the Sunnis joined in, well, not the Sunnis at that time, but all of the other Shiite clerics joined in and demanded one person, one vote election.
So Bush gave in, and he had these elections.
But, I mean, imagine this situation.
It was so dangerous in Iraq then that the candidates couldn't campaign.
So you just couldn't go out and address the crowd.
You'd be shot down, the crowd would be blown up.
Well, we even talked about this at the time, I think, that basically people were forced to vote if they were going to vote at all.
They were either going to vote for the Shiite slate or the CIA slate, which was, I guess, Alawi and Chalabi and so forth, or they were going to vote for the Sunni slate, but they didn't even know who the individual candidates were because no candidate could tell the public their name without expecting a bullet to the head.
Exactly.
A lot of the candidates' names were only revealed like three days before the election.
So it was an anonymous election, you know, and then what actually happened was that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the far-right Shiite fundamentalist party, which was very close to the Ayatollahs in Tehran and which has a paramilitary unit trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that we've now designated as the terrorist unit.
The Bader Corps is now designated as a terrorist group?
We designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as the terrorist unit.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought the Bader Corps, they're proxies.
No, they're the good guys.
Yeah, they're the good guys.
So now the Bader, which is trained by them and paid by them.
Right, I just got to keep these things straight.
Yeah, so you have to have a scorecard.
Right, right.
So anyway, it was a disaster because the most unacceptable of the Shiite parties came to power and it had 53% of seats in parliament.
And it went on to craft a constitution that was completely unacceptable to the Sunnis and they rejected it in all three of the Sunni-dominated provinces.
So these elections were not actually a beacon to the Middle East.
I mean, nobody thought that, oh, gee, let's do things that way.
Oh, that's a great outcome.
Let's strive for that.
But the big lie was model democracy.
Yep, and now another sub-lie for that year, 2004, that was the year of the battles of Najaf and the battles of Fallujah, where we were told this would break the back of the insurgency as long as we just flatten Fallujah.
Yes, well, actually, that gets into the next year because I'm doing it March to March.
Oh, okay, go ahead.
So then the third year, I'm arguing, is the year of the big Sunni insurgency, actually following on the destruction of Fallujah, which turned the Sunnis decisively against the United States.
So the third year was the year of Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Zarqawi's picture was everywhere in the U.S. press.
Every time anything happened in Iraq, it was blamed on Zarqawi.
I mean, he must have had like that thing they had on the old Star Trek show where you could just materialize yourself here and there.
Yeah, the teletransporter thing.
Yeah, because something would happen in Mosul, which is like 600 kilometers north of Baghdad, and it would be Zarqawi, and then something would happen in Diyala, and it would be Zarqawi.
I don't know how anybody swallowed all this, but he and his organization were blamed for everything.
And we know that the Sunni resistance to the U.S. was fragmented.
There were probably 50 cells.
Some of them were Baathists, which the U.S. press and U.S. government never admitted, and some of them were Salafi Sunni fundamentalists.
Some of them were just tribal folks, didn't want foreigners around.
Well, and the generals have told us all along, haven't they, that the actual al-Qaeda foreign fighter jihadist pilgrim types who have actually come to Iraq, that they've always numbered less than 5% of the Sunni insurgency.
They've only been kind of a marginal part, never in charge.
No.
I mean, they're probably mostly less than 1,000 at any one time.
Look, we have, at the moment, the United States has something like 26,000 Iraqis in custody, and the Iraqi government has another 26,000, so it's an enormous percentage of the whole population that's behind bars.
And of those, of the ones that the U.S. holds, two-thirds are Sunni Arabs, and only 126 or so are foreign fighters.
So you're talking about thousands and thousands of insurgents behind bars.
They're all Iraqi.
Hardly any foreigners amongst them.
Would the foreigners run faster?
Yeah, must be.
Or they blend in easier, I guess.
I don't know.
You point out in your article that there's a very specific reason for this, which is to attempt to justify the war after the fact.
This is the geographical center of where our terrorism problem comes from, the vice president was saying.
Yeah, it's all propaganda.
The Bush people told us before the war that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism.
Hint, hint, he's behind 9-11.
They don't come out and say that exactly, but they hint around at it very heavily, and they keep using these code words to convince the man on the street that Saddam and al-Qaeda are in bed with each other.
And then after the war, all of a sudden the Bush administration finds that the major source of problems for it and its project is al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And so Zarqawi is the poster boy of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And the amazing thing is they imagine this kind of enormous centralized command in Iraq, which is coordinating these hundreds of bombings and attacks and operations.
I mean, that's a whole government that they're talking about.
There was never any evidence that any such thing existed.
And when they killed Zarqawi in May of 2006, nothing changed.
I mean, if he was the mastermind of all this, then why wasn't there a change?
Right, and if he was the tie between Osama and Saddam, like Colin Powell said in his U.N. speech, how come he was safe up in Kurdistan, which was autonomous and controlled by the U.S.?
How come Bush refused to let the military go in there to kill him before the war started into the area we control?
And how come it is that he didn't even announce his loyalty to Osama bin Laden until the end of 2004?
Yeah, it's all propaganda.
Actually, Scott, you know, when they released some of those captured documents from Iraq, from the archives, I found one that's now in the vault.
It's still on the Internet.
That is an all-point bulletin put out by the Iraqi secret police for Zarqawi.
This is in the new Pentagon report?
It's not in the new Pentagon.
Well, it might be.
It might be somewhere in there, but I found the original document and talked about it.
Yeah, they had this whole line.
It's in the APB on Zarqawi, that this man is very dangerous, tried to capture him, he may have come into Iraq.
Right.
Now let me ask you this one.
Did it say anything in there, we gave him a wooden leg because he's friends with Saddam?
No, no.
It's very clear that they were very alarmed about him, the boss, and they would like to capture him and get rid of him.
They said he may have links to the Saudi terrorist, Osama bin Laden.
Very good stuff.
And it was, I think Jim Michalczewski broke the story at NBC News that the generals had asked permission over and over and over to go in and kill Zarqawi and Kurdistan before the invasion and were turned down because they needed a link, and this guy was all they had, even though he wasn't really a link.
Yeah, exactly.
It was all propaganda.
So that was year three, was the year of Zarqawi, until they killed him shortly after year three ended, and then they lost that bot device.
But they still, you know, everything that happens in central and northern and western Iraq is blamed on Al-Qaeda.
And you know that there's no such thing.
I mean, there are people in Iraq, a few, whom I admire, Osama bin Laden or something.
But the opinion polling that's being done on the ground shows the majority of Sunni Arabs still believe in the separation of religion and state.
What kind of Al-Qaeda is that?
Well, and in fact, Patrick Coburn explained on the show that one of the reasons, well, really the main reason that the Sunni insurgency turned on the Al-Qaeda fighters, it wasn't because, you know, St. Petraeus gave them a bunch of American tax dollars.
It was because they were pushing their luck.
They were conscripting people and they were punishing people for not being pious enough and whatever, and basically trying to create this Islamic state in Iraq and trying to be the bosses.
And hey, guess what?
There's a lesson here.
Foreigners can't take over Iraq.
The people of that land are going to rule that land.
Yeah.
Well, there are very strong sort of planned structures in the Sunni Arab rural areas, like Al Anbar province, which is dominated by the Dulaim tribe.
And when you blow up some Dulaim young men who are planning to join the police, and Al-Qaeda would consider that a form of collaboration, right?
When you blow up Dulaim youth, then you've got a feud with the Dulaim tribe.
And the Dulaim, you don't, you really don't want a feud with the Dulaim tribe.
Could it be that Al-Qaeda is proving that there's such a thing as blowback?
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, I'm sorry, I don't mean to conflate the two things.
Well, there's blowback.
When they occupy foreign land with their combat troops, who aren't welcome, they suffer consequences from that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And a lot of the attacks blamed on so-called Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which, as I said, is mostly a figment of the imagination.
Because these guys don't have Bin Laden's phone number or something.
They're just Salafis.
They're Salafi jihadis.
But a lot of the violence blamed on them was actually done by Dulaim in the old days, who were very unhappy about becoming the handmaidens of Shiite Ayatollahs and British warlords.
That's how they saw the democratic beacon on a hill.
But then in year four, they moved on to a civil war in Iraq after the bombing in February of 2006 of the Golden Dome in Samarra.
Well, let me ask you about that.
Because didn't America start the war by hiring the Shiites in what was called the El Salvador Option to hunt down the heads of the Sunni insurgency and so forth, and that really they were the ones who got the sectarian war going?
It was the Samarra Moss that just gave it a real kick in the ass, I thought.
Well, who knows?
I mean, you know, there's a fog of war there, Scott, and I was never able to find really good evidence for the El Salvador Option.
Well, didn't they have the wolf brigades and all that going around putting drills in people's heads?
They did have that, but to what extent this was U.S. active policy and to what extent, you know, we just brought them to the party because they were anti-Saddam, and then they took over, I'm not sure.
Okay.
But in any case, there certainly was a better core of them at the army were infiltrated into the Department of the Ministry of the Interior, which in Iraq, you know, that's secret police.
It's not in charge of trees like it is here.
Right.
And so they were infiltrated into that, and they did engage in death squad activities.
But as far as I can tell, you know, it was a problem.
It was horrible, but it wasn't that extensive until the shrine bombing.
And after that, it wasn't just about the army and better core anymore.
It was, you know, G.I. gangs in neighborhoods would go out at night and kill Sunnis.
And so there was, you know, you got to the summer of 2006, you had, I mean, 2,500, 2,600 people killed a month.
And, you know, the corpse patrol in Baghdad and the Sunni Arabs were being cleansed, ethnically cleansed from a lot of areas, and a lot of people were being killed and tortured, and there were chemical burns on their bodies when they were found and signs of electrocution and so forth, and drilled.
And the line from the Bush administration while all this was happening, this enormous outpouring of ethnic violence of the most horrible sort, was that there is no civil war in Iraq.
And we have called little tiny things in Africa that produced altogether 1,000 casualties civil wars.
Yeah, it's all politics and jargon.
It's not really about truth.
No, well, the Bush administration was very concerned that if the American public believed that there was a civil war in Iraq, that they would say, well, what are we doing in the middle of a civil war over there?
It would be fatal to staying there if this became known.
And these guys are just like, you know, at the end of the movie Wizard of Oz, when it's revealed that there's this guy with a machine that's making flashing lights and so forth.
These guys just create illusions.
So if you get everybody in the government to come out, the State Department, the Defense Department, the generals, the politicians, if they all come out and speak with a single voice and they all say, there is no civil war in Iraq.
And that's what the reporters write down.
That's what the cable news people report.
And it's like in Las Vegas when they make the elephant disappear on stage.
They made the civil war.
They tried to make it disappear.
Yeah, well, and it worked, too, because I know that, you know, just regular people in the neighborhood would say things like, well, you know, there's only violence in four of the 14 provinces.
Everything else is hunky-dory and that kind of thing.
And it's just a lot like a minor bird repeating what they're told on TV.
Not that they could have cited any evidence.
Not that they would have got on a plane and gone to Mosul and said, see, everything's fine here.
Well, the other thing to say is that while it is true that a lot of the violence was in four or five provinces, those four or five provinces included Baghdad, which is the capital, a city of six million, which has a fourth of the country's population.
It included other provinces around Baghdad altogether, which accounted for more than half of Iraq's population.
So when you say it was in four provinces, that's different from saying, you know, half the country is inflamed.
So these are all propaganda points.
Yeah, and now the surge.
The people of America decided en masse in 2006 that they were going to elect the opposite party to control the Congress, and they were going to do something about this war.
And I guess that was just vague enough that George Bush said, oh, I understand, what you want me to do is escalate the war.
And so now they've done what they call the surge and added all these troops.
And we've heard for a year straight, basically, or at least six or eight months straight, that the surge is working, the surge is working, the surge is working.
It's a matter of gospel.
It's the accepted premise at the beginning of a question now.
Yeah, and of course, again, these people are very good at framing issues.
So they frame them so that the answer always favors them.
So if the issue is, you know, has the number of Iraqis killed each month come down substantially?
The answer is yes.
It's come down from 2,500 a month to, oh, 700 a month.
You look at that and you say, well, that's only a third of what it used to be.
That's a great progress.
And, you know, there's the question of the tactics that were deployed and the way that the U.S. went into neighborhoods and pacified them and so forth.
So there are tactical successes, there are numerical successes.
But compared to what?
I mean, it's comparing to the apocalypse.
I mean, that was an apocalyptic period in Iraqi history.
You have 3,000 people being killed a month.
In fact, that's what I was going to say that I forgot to mention was the refugees.
It was during this time of the Civil War, really during all this time, there have been, I guess they're saying, 5 million people who have been displaced from their homes, about half of those who have been lucky enough to make it to Syria or Jordan, but the rest who are, I guess, wandering around Iraq looking for a place to hide.
Well, they've been displaced ethnically.
So, for instance, I was just talking to a Shiite Ayatollah last week, and he was saying that Najaf has doubled in population, the province of Najaf has doubled in population.
So you have all these refugees coming from Shiite communities up north.
In fact, that's the one, we don't usually hear about that.
We hear a lot about the cleansing of the Sunnis out of Baghdad.
Well, if you read the foreign press, I guess, you read a lot about that.
It's very rare that we hear about the Shiites being cleansed in the opposite pattern.
Right, exactly.
There were Shiites in Sunni areas that have had to flee.
Or Diyala is another place.
But yeah, during the troop escalation the past year, and let's call it that rather than a surge, Thank you.
During the troop escalation, Baghdad was ethnically cleansed of very large numbers of its Sunnis.
So it used to be, when Bush took Baghdad in 2003, it was about 50-50.
Maybe there were Shiites at a slight edge, Sunni and Shiite.
And during the period of the troop escalation, I think what happened was that we went to al-Maliki, and we said we want everybody to disarm.
And al-Maliki said, well, I can't get my Shiites to disarm as long as the Sunnis are blowing them up.
So we said to al-Maliki, okay, we'll disarm the Sunnis first.
And then when we've disarmed them, and you guys are not being blown up anymore, we're going to come back to you and say you guys are going to have to lay down your arms too.
So it was politically a good plan.
But on the ground, the way things actually function in Iraq, once we disarmed the Sunnis, at night the Shiites would come in and ethnically cleanse them because they would be helpless.
And they forced them north all the way to Syria, apparently.
Something like 15-20% of Baghdad was ethnically cleansed.
And the city has gone from being 50-50 Shiite when the Americans first showed up to something like 75 or 80% Shiite now.
So let me get this straight, Professor Cole.
You're telling me that when they say the surge is working, what they mean is they successfully convinced the Mahdi army to stand down, at least in the daytime, so that they could completely disarm the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad, so that at night the Mahdi army could completely drive them out of Baghdad, at least major percentages of them.
And therefore, there are less Sunni bodies turning up on the street in the morning because they've all already been killed or forced out.
And that's the surge working.
That's exactly right.
The difference between summer of 2006 when you had 2,500 deaths and now is that the people who would have been being killed are in Damascus.
And now, as soon as they accomplish this, then they turn around and say, okay Sunnis, now that you've all been kicked out of Baghdad, here's a bunch of money and weapons and we'll call you the concerned local citizens.
What the hell?
Yeah, well, the ones who were ethnically cleansed and forced abroad to Syria or to Kurdistan or wherever they went are, you know, in penury and they're running out of money and their kids aren't getting schooling and they're on the verge, you know, in the next few months, you could see a substantial hunger and so forth.
But the few that are left in Baghdad, I mean, I think that this is speculation on my part, but I think the U.S. military gradually realized what was happening.
And so to stop the rest of the Sunni Arabs from being ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, which is what would have happened, they rearmed them.
And under the big belief that now they're pro-American.
Wow.
You sound like you're questioning the wisdom of the St. David Petraeus.
How dare you?
I'm sorry.
Hey, you know, Scott, I have enormous respect for David Petraeus.
I think he's tried to do the right thing.
And I mean, he's tried to stop the bombing of innocent people in the markets.
And he's done, you know, he was given a task.
He's a general and he was given a task and he tried to do it.
I guess the upshot of what I'm saying, though, is that there are all these unintended consequences of our presence in Iraq.
And I know that Petraeus knows what happened and also feels very badly about it.
He says it's not right.
It's not legal.
But he also admitted there's nothing he can do about it.
So, you know, other people see him as a great hero, as somebody who accomplished what he was given to do and so forth.
I see him as a tragic figure.
I see him as somebody who was trying to do the right thing.
But it backfired on him in ways that he couldn't have anticipated because the Iraq situation is out of control.
Right.
I mean, he was given the task of controlling it.
Well, that's really the story of what we're talking about here as we go through all the lies that our government has been telling us to keep this thing going.
Beneath all that, the reason they're having to lie about all these things is because toppling the Ba'athist government there has just created a series of consequences and cause and effect ricocheting back and forth, violence and sectarianism and all these things that there really is nothing that can be done to fix the problem.
Humpty Dumpty is broken.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the people who planned out this troop escalation were really hoping that we could calm down the violence and then the political factions would come together and make a deal with each other.
And, you know, it's not an ignoble aspiration, but we ended up abetting the Mahdi army and ethnically cleansing the Sunnis of Baghdad, which, by the way, is not going to be accepted by the Sunnis.
I mean, Baghdad should permanently be a Shiite city.
The Saudis, the Jordanians, the Iraqi Sunnis, the Syrians, nobody's going to accept that.
So you set things up for the Battle of Baghdad, number three.
Right.
And at the same time, we have the head of the Supreme Islamic Council saying that he wants basically extreme federalism and an alliance with Iran.
So you have the conflict between the PKK and Turkey going on.
This is all the surge working for us here.
Yeah, I mean, during the period of the troop escalation, Iraq has actually been invaded by a third country, Turkey.
And ground troops from that country have been on the ground.
Hundreds of Iraqis or Kurdish Turks have been killed.
And I would see the cable news reporters actually come out and report on the Turkish incursion into Iraq and the violence and the bombing and so forth.
And then in the next sentence, as they turned away from that monitor, they would say Iraq is calm now because of the surge.
I couldn't understand how come they couldn't put two and two together, that this is not a calm picture here.
You know, even Jon Stewart actually got it right yesterday on The Daily Show.
He was interviewing a guy from U.S. News and World Report.
And he said, well, but basically we're just arming and funding both sides.
And the Sunnis, they've all been kicked out of Baghdad.
They're just licking their wounds and waiting for the battle to try to retake it, right?
And the guy from U.S. News said, wow, you understand, and you haven't even been there.
Yeah.
This is like a top secret or something.
It ought to be.
It's not that hard to examine and come up with this, especially if you read informed comment, right?
Well, it just goes to show that the big lie works, that the U.S. government is a very powerful institution for putting out a message.
And when it's taken over by unscrupulous people who have no compunction about just lying their heads off to the American people to get what they want, our system is broken.
I mean, there's something seriously wrong with our information system.
And I worry about this because this is one step towards totalitarianism if the government can lie with impunity to us and have such a big success in convincing people.
You know, 50% of Americans are now telling pollsters that the U.S. might succeed in Iraq.
And this is a big increase from like 33% a year ago.
And it's all because of this consistent message that the surge is working, the surge is working, the surge is working.
And they've convinced them.
Of course, they haven't convinced them that the whole thing was worthwhile, but they've increased optimism about the outcome.
And there isn't actually any grounds for increased optimism.
I'm sorry to say.
I mean, it is a wonderful thing that fewer people are being killed every month in Iraq, but a lot of people are still being killed.
Bombs are going off.
Dangerous things are happening, like the bombing in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, which could have been, if it had been closer to the shrine, could have been another Golden Dome kind of thing.
And that was just Monday when Cheney and McCain were doing their victory lap in Baghdad.
So the government, the National Unity government, hasn't been restored.
The Sunni Arabs withdrew from al-Maliki's government.
They haven't rejoined it.
A lot of the Shiite factions withdrew from it.
They haven't rejoined it.
There hasn't been any genuine political progress.
People point to a law changing the rules for de-Ba'athification as a sign of progress.
But as I read that law, it actually makes things worse for a lot of ex-Ba'athists, some 20,000 or 30,000 of them could get fired from their government job.
And the Sunni, the ex-Ba'athists like Yad Lawi or Saleh Mutlaq have all come out and denounced the law, whereas it was pushed by the followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
So that makes me suspicious that this law is actually not going to promote sectarian reconciliation.
And it's cited by the pundits in Washington as a big step towards success.
The whole situation is not good.
It's not, to my mind, getting significantly better where it counts.
And if you take your eye off just the narrow issue of numbers and tactics, and you ask, is this a stable country?
What kind of government capacity is there?
Are bargains being struck that might survive?
Then those questions have one answer, which is no.
Right, and that's the thing.
It's not just when you talk about the worrisome aspects of the delusions that the politicians are able to keep us under.
It's not just that they're lying.
It's that this is pure nonsense.
When they ask a question like in the opinion poll, you say, will America achieve its goal of victory?
Well, that's just saying they could have just as easily said, will we achieve our goal?
Will we achieve victory?
That's the same thing.
The question is, what does that even mean?
How could 50% say that, yes, we're going to achieve it, when they haven't even defined that?
That's right.
It's just a kind of vague American optimism.
It's like making Los Angeles in the middle of the desert and just hoping there will be water.
Yeah, it'll all work out.
All right, well, listen, I've kept you on much longer than I promised, so I want to thank you very much for your time today, Dr. Cole.
Thanks so much for having me on, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Juan Cole from Informed Comment.
That's juancole.com.
And his new one in Salon is 5 Years of Iraq Lies.
And we'll be right back.