I wish I was a little bit taller.
I wish I was a baller.
I wish I had a girl with a pen.
I would call her.
I wish I had a rabbit in a hat.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And our guest today is Spencer Ackerman.
He's a former reporter for the New Republic, the American Prospect and Talking Points Memo, now at the Washington Independent.
He's got a great new article called Fast and Loose with the Facts.
How two leading journalists played the public to help Bush sell his war.
Welcome to the show, Spencer.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
It's very good to have you on here.
First of all, before we get into this so-called connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda and all this, tell me about the Washington Independent.
Oh sure, thanks for asking.
So there's this problem with the press around the country, which is that due to financial circumstances, due to the decline of things like classified advertising with the rise of Craigslist and so forth, newspapers and magazines for the last 15 years or so have been steadily contracting their investigative staff.
So you get real reporters kind of squeezed out of their jobs, and rather superficial reporting on a very fast pace tends to take its place.
And on the other side, you've got the rise of blogs and new media that do a great job of aggregating news and having a kind of symbiotic function with the major newspapers in the hope of sort of bringing stories a step closer to fruition in the public consciousness, but don't really do so much of their original reporting.
And what we're trying to do is create a sustainable model by which solid, hardcore investigative reporters can come up with new and sustainable ways of telling these sort of substantive stories that the press in general tends to do a bad job with these days.
And we're a non-profit.
It is complete checkbook journalism.
We do pay to play.
And so what we're hoping is that as more and more reporters get frustrated with the way our profession has been cheapened by the corporate media, they'll come over and see that the sort of thing that we're doing might very well be the future of how real reporting survives in the United States.
That's the ambition, at least.
And so how long has this been around?
We launched on, I believe, January 28th, so we're pretty brand new.
Well, you know, I guess we all complain about The New York Times and The Washington Post and how we pretty much all have to go with what they say or something like that, and I guess it really just comes down to money, right?
The New York Times has some kind of incredible budget that they can employ reporters all over the world, and so therefore they get to set the agenda for the rest of us, and that's what we really have to do is come up with a way that independent reporters who don't want to have to answer to the agenda setters at The New York Times but just want to do their reporting can actually make a living doing so, and that we can have an independent place that doesn't push an agenda on them that's paying their way.
And that's what we're trying to do.
It's just so important that if the press is going to survive in American democracy, that we create some kind of sustainable model for showing how real news can be reported in thorough, diligent, substantive, illuminating, penetrative ways in this country.
Well, here's a good example, and I really like this.
This is sort of a pet project of mine, is casting shame on the people who deserve it, the people who've lied us into this war and lied us into this occupation and made it perpetual with their lies.
I don't think there's nearly enough public shaming of people in government or in the media, and so I really like this article because you just go right after them, and the targets are Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly from The New Yorker magazine, and Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard, who have done so much to push the meme somehow.
It's not really a story with any real concrete facts to back it up or anything, but it's just this idea, this myth, that Saddam and Osama are buddies and that somehow that justifies America's aggressive war against Iraq.
What these guys have done for the last several years is nothing short of the betrayal of a profession I feel very strongly about.
You have, in two somewhat different cases, Steve is a partisan journalist and Jeff Fashions himself an investigative reporter, two media figures who relentlessly, in Steve's case certainly, push something that a moment's worth of scrutiny knows to be untrue.
Certainly by 2004, when the 9-11 Commission says that there's no collaborative operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, this story has to die.
I mean, it's been disproven.
The thing is, and what's so interesting about it, is that in 2002, any diligent reporter could and did, in many cases, figure out from his or her contacts within the CIA, within the intelligence community, that American intelligence, for years, entertained the hypothesis, they were open to it in other words, like good intelligence analysts would be, that Saddam and al-Qaeda might have collaborated.
Then they found there simply wasn't the evidence there.
That there are certain statements one can make about the world that are either true or false.
And this was a false statement.
And that did not stop either Goldberg nor Hayes from pushing this forward to the public with really significant consequences.
And you say, rather rightly, Scott, in your introduction, that there hasn't been enough calling out of particular media figures who've done this.
These things happen in systemic ways.
There are reasons why.
It's not just some kind of crazy story that a lunatic vice president tells you.
It filters down so that it's on your nightly news.
And among the ways that happens is when, let's take Jeff Goldberg's case.
People whom other reporters respect, working and publishing in magazines, that important people in the media trust, like the New Yorker, publish something so wild and nuts, as Goldberg did with the story that some people, that Kurdish intelligence gave Goldberg in their prisons, as examples of connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.
When that gets published, then you've got junior producers who are putting together quick briefings about what to have for their on-camera anchors or reporters read on the air.
And they go to things like that.
They go to places with credibility.
They go to people who they are told, because of their affiliation with certain organizations, they ought to trust.
And Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker betrayed that trust.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Antiwar.com kind of serves that purpose, for those of us on the other side.
I still remember quite vividly, in September of 2002, reading the Washington Post's page 30 story or something, which was the top headline on Antiwar.com, which was all the experts in the government, at the Energy Department, at the State Department, etc., are saying that these aluminum tubes are for rockets, not nukes.
And that was in September 2002.
And, well, this was one of my, it remained one of my talking points all the way through.
And I guess, basically, what you're saying is that's what The New Yorker is for the people who put together a newscast for NBC or CNN or even Fox News, what have you.
And it just becomes one of the premises upon which the rest of the arguments are based.
It's this kind of unproven and yet unchallenged premise to the rest of the discussion.
And this goes back to what we were saying at the beginning, with creating better and more sustainable structures to challenge the ones that currently exist.
Because, you know, to someone who's not in the press, the idea that the country can be brought ever closer to war, because of something in the middle of a 10,000-word story in March of 2002, in an important, glossy, Tony and Elite magazine, getting read by, like, 500 important people in the press who basically set the agenda for what you will see on your nightly news.
And that, in turn, creates political dynamics.
It leads people who don't consider themselves nuts or fanatical in politics to then view the idea of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection as something with an element of truth, something to be taken seriously, something, in other words, not to be dismissed off the bat, as it should have been.
If you were to tell someone like, you know, someone who has nothing to do with the media except, you know, typical consumption, as an informed citizen, that these kinds of arbitrary contingencies are what help shape the course of America in terms of war and peace, that citizen would rightly be outraged.
That citizen would rightly believe that something has gone dangerously and disastrously wrong in this country.
And that's kind of what drove me, you know, on the 5th anniversary of the war, which, you know, hold me accountable, I didn't do this from the start, to just say, you know, looking at 4,000 dead Americans, tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, an occupation that will not end.
By August of this year, the Bush administration will commit, through a long-term security agreement, the United States military to an open-ended military occupation of Iraq.
None of this is ending, and both of these reporters, in spite of, now, the fifth straight government study to look into the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship, rejecting it.
Both reporters, over the last two weeks, have decided to argue once again that they were right all along.
Well, now, when you talk about this media echo chamber, this is part of why nobody's been canned.
Everybody who got everything wrong has been promoted.
It's because they all only read the same few things to back themselves up, so they really think up there in D.C. and the Washington Press Corps and the elite journalistic circles, they really think that anybody who had any credibility that, quote-unquote, we all believe the same thing, that there really were, you know, no credible voices, that if you were on the outside of what we all thought in 2002, 2003, then you just hated Bush, and there was something flawed in your thinking, or else you would not be on the other side of this at all, so why go to you?
And the fact that we all got it wrong, well, you know, that's okay, because we all got it wrong.
And let's take it a step further.
You know, you start off by saying that not enough people in the press are held accountable here.
Well, think about it.
Just think about what the objective series of considerations are for a reporter.
You might want someday to publish in a prestigious magazine like The New Yorker or The Atlantic.
Is it then in the interest of your career to write that reporters for The New Yorker and The Atlantic got this disastrously wrong, wrote stories that could have been refuted through a moment's hesitation about whether the basis for them was credible, and caught the magazine for not only publishing it but then not apologizing for it or investigating further and, in essence, standing by these demonstrable untruths?
Or are you going to go along?
Or are you going to say, it's not worth it to me to get in the way of where I might want to be in my career ten years in the future?
Or are you going to stand up and say that what they did is part of why we're in this situation, that everyone in the press, at least, is now feeling free enough to write is a complete disaster?
What are you going to do as a reporter?
This is a systemic problem.
It's not just Jeff Goldberg.
It's not just Steve Hayes.
It's not just The New Yorker.
It's not just The Weekly Standard.
It's not just The Atlantic Monthly.
This is something that I think people in their own lives understand and have to deal with.
To what degree will you potentially create an obstacle for yourself or to what degree will you stand up and say, this has gone on long enough.
I'm never going to publish in The New Yorker.
I'm never going to publish in The Atlantic.
Fine.
Screw it.
But see, the thing is, the market ought to demand that The New Yorker hire you now.
That's the whole thing about it.
If you prove that you're willing to take them on, that ought to be to your credit, and that ought to be worth it to them to look credible that they would hire a critic.
I hope this doesn't sound self-serving.
I didn't mean it like that, but I just meant to say that.
Well, no, and I just picked you, you know, as a reporter who's criticizing them, you know, out of a hat.
There's many others, you know.
But I just mean that, you know, the people who are the ones calling them out ought to be the ones getting the job.
I mean, you would want to see at the very least people not fail upward, and that's what's happening.
In Goldberg's case, Hayes, you know, wrote this insane and idiotic book filled with untruths.
And as a result, he got a book deal to write, Hey, Geography, Dick Cheney, and in order to promote that book, he got on Meet the Press the first day the book came out, or like a couple days before the book came out.
So, like, at the very least, you would expect, you know, people not fail upward.
Like, how many, you know, what would happen, you know, to someone flipping burgers if all of a sudden it came out that through this person's incompetence, maliciousness, and idiocy, the burger was filled with, you know, ground-up fingers.
And, you know, that person would be fired, would probably be thrown in jail, possibly.
You know, something like that, you know.
That person would not then become the manager of the McDonald's.
And yet this is what happens in the media.
All right, now, so let's get into some of these specifics here.
It's been reported that Bush was briefed just within a couple of days, I think, of September 11th, on September 13th or 14th, that there's really nothing to this myth of a tie between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and that basically the order came down from the White House, find me some proof.
I think what you're talking about is almost immediately after 9-11 happened, in his memoir, Richard Clark, who was then the White House counterterrorism czar, who had been in this job longer than anyone else in government, who wasn't in CIA, has this moment with the president in which Bush tells him, what's the connection with Iraq?
And Clark is kind of taken aback, because he spent the last eight months trying to convince the Bush administration in this uphill battle that he'd have to pay really serious attention to this growing threat from al-Qaeda, and yet Bush, in Clark's telling, sort of jams his finger in Clark's face and says, Iraq, find the connection.
And then finally, after, I don't remember how many days it is, but after a certain not particularly long period of time, Clark just says, there's nothing here.
This is not the fault of Iraq.
This is something that al-Qaeda did to us.
And then later on, I think maybe within the month, because of a psychotic named Lori Milroy at the American Enterprise Institute having a crackpot theory about Saddam being behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, her acolyte, Paul Wolfowitz, tasks his old friend, Jim Woolsey, who was Clinton's CIA director in 1993, and since he became a rather rabid neoconservative, to go to London and find evidence in support of the Milroy theory.
That effort, in turn, became the first iteration of what would become the Office of Special Plans, this kind of alternative intelligence gathering and intelligence analysis unit, more intelligence analysis than gathering, within the policy directorate of the Pentagon under a guy named Douglas Feith.
Two guys, one named Michael Maloof, the other named David Wormser, who has since become an aide to Dick Cheney, sort of go through existing CIA evidence on Iraq and al-Qaeda and sort of take what they like.
It seems to support the thesis that first, in a broader sense, terrorist groups and states can collaborate, and that's a pretty banal statement.
They can.
They have in the past.
But specifically, the question of al-Qaeda having state sponsorship is not demonstrated by the facts or by the record.
And yet, they sort of go through what the CIA has collected and analyzed, get rid of the conclusion, take these pieces of decontextualized evidence, and sort of knit together a tapestry, which shows something that isn't, in fact, happening.
And this happened throughout 2002 into 2003.
And it's something that various degrees of resistance are offered to within the CIA.
And, you know, the thing is, too, when you bring up Laurie Milroy, this has been coming on for a long, long time, almost, well, maybe even more than ten years.
I remember radio interviews of Laurie Milroy.
I didn't understand at the time that she was being pushed by the American Enterprise Institute and so forth.
But this whole theory that Ramzi Youssef was actually not Ramzi Youssef but an Iraqi intelligence agent pretending to be, and all these things that the First World Trade Center bombing and even the Oklahoma bombing were Saddam Hussein's unfinished war against the United States and all this, this is a meme that these neocons at the AEI had been pushing for a long time before 9-11 ever even happened.
Now, let's also notice something else there with Milroy and bring it back to Steve Hayes.
All good conspiracy theorists have a command of esoteric facts.
Like that, I mean, you ever talk with someone about the De Bruyne tape and the JFK assassination?
People who are nuts about it know all of these little details that you or I or the average person just doesn't have command of.
And oftentimes confuse quantity with quality as well.
Exactly.
The idea is to bludgeon you into sort of believing that this person must know what he or she is talking about.
And that's how someone like Hayes plies his trade.
It's like he's got yet another piece today saying, look at such and such and such and such piece of decontextualized information from this latest study done by the military's Joint Forces Command, which rejects the idea that there's an operational link ever between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.
Instead, what it shows is that at various points, mostly in the early 90s, Saddam would collaborate with terrorist groups that aren't Al-Qaeda, or in some cases explored potential connections in the early 90s between terrorists who would eventually either be inspired by the bin Ladenist movement or join it.
Now, look at how far afield, and they're claiming like that's the indication.
Look at how far afield that is from the claim.
It's on the cover of Steve Hayes' first book, The Connection.
How Saddam's collaboration with Al-Qaeda threatens America or something like that.
Now, look, this takes a moment to disprove.
Is Al-Qaeda stronger or weaker since the fall of Saddam Hussein?
Well, according to every intelligence agency in the world, and I think every former intelligence agent in the world who speaks on the record, they're all much, much better off.
And every semi-conscious human being who has read a newspaper, I mean, the whole thing is nuts.
And Steve will ensure that he goes to his grave trying to con his readers.
Well, now, there's a guy named Sheikh Al-Libi who got the truth, quote-unquote, beaten out of him, who indicated that Saddam Hussein had trained Al-Qaeda how to hijack planes, how to make chemical and biological weapons, and use them.
And this guy's so-called tortured confession, well, the torture was real, the confession was so-called, was cited by Bush repeatedly to justify this war.
How many of these claims, tortured out of this guy Al-Libi, all of which have been proven false since then, were trumpeted by Goldberg and Hayes?
Goldberg is an interesting case.
We'll come back to the torture thing in a second.
Hayes, in, I think, 2005, before it came out that eventually, even Sheikh Al-Libi, this Al-Qaeda terrorist who's tortured, as you said, before it comes out that the guy recants his testimony, which he does, when he's no longer tortured, he says, Oh my God, I only said that because I was tortured, what do you expect?
Steve suckers himself, and actually cites it in print, and saying like, Well, if my critics, or if critics of this ironclad connection were right, as they condescendingly and impetuously tell you, then what do they make of it?
Sheikh Al-Libi's confession is something that, I think his recusation was something like, his confession was one of the strongest that the government possesses, something like that.
Ah yes, you know, so much the worse for our Mr. Hayes, the guy was tortured into saying what he said, and then recanted it, and then that came out.
So he just played himself there.
Goldberg, the substance, let's back up a second, the substance of what Goldberg reports in 2002, is that he gets taken to Iraqi Kurdistan, which at that point is an autonomous, U.S. protected region, sort of in Iraq, but not of it, you might say.
It has its own intelligence and security services, and the intelligence apparatus in Kurdistan shows Goldberg this gaggle of prisoners that it has, and they say, and I'm sure they provided the translation for Goldberg and so forth, oh yeah, this guy, we captured him, he was a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
And Goldberg just puts that in print.
And you just want to say, if you're an editor, well, what might be the incentive among the Kurds for telling you this?
Why might they not be telling you the truth?
Oh, I can't think of a possible reason.
Right, I mean, simply enough, the Kurds hate Saddam, they want to be out of Iraq, and they recognize the only way this will actually happen is if the United States invades, what does the United States need in order to get into Iraq cost-free?
It needs to show some kind of connection between this war and 9-11.
And so this is what you get.
And Goldberg just put that in print.
Now, I have no doubt that the guys in these prints, first of all, that Goldberg really was introduced to these people, second, I have no doubt that these people actually did say what the Kurds told Goldberg they were saying, and what Goldberg printed.
However, it's widely known, and I've been to Kurdistan, that what happens in Kurdish prisons is torture.
I mean, they torture people.
And anyone will say anything when they are being tortured to stop the torture.
So it's mind-boggling to me how, if Goldberg was acting in good faith, he could have not stopped for a moment and said, why are these people telling me what they're telling me?
Like, you don't have to be a great reporter, you have to be halfway awake in order to have that come to you.
Well, and then the alternative is that it did cross his mind that he did stop and think that, and then decided to just go ahead.
Right, that's why I said I'm assuming the guy is acting in good faith, and I don't understand it, but perhaps we shouldn't assume that Jeff Goldberg is operating in good faith.
So I don't know.
The interesting thing is, Goldberg gets petulant when you ask him to explain this.
A couple years ago, when a book of his got published, he was doing a Q&A with New York Magazine, and the magazine reporter asked Goldberg, well, you've been criticized for what you wrote about phenomenal Qaeda, and the guy just says, and it's printed verbatim, Jesus, you want to talk about this now?
And then he says, fine, if you really want to go into it, none of the specific things I talked about have been addressed by the 9-11 Commission definitively.
All right, so therefore it's unknown unknown, might be right, still.
Now look, no reporter wants to retract what he or she writes.
No reporter embraces the idea of looking foolish.
My challenge to the rest of the media is, would you rather be known?
Is it better for you, if that's your consideration, a consideration of your reputation, is it better for you to be known as a liar, as a charlatan, as a fraud, as someone who puts forward false information that gets actual people killed?
Or is it better to say, you know what, I didn't do my job this day, and I regret it, and this is how I'm going to make up for it, and this is how I'm not going to do this again.
What's better, just from a self-interested perspective?
Obviously the latter.
So, you know, it's nuts to me, but these patterns of behavior would not occur if there wasn't this perverse series of disincentives to the truth that exists inside the major media.
Right.
Now, you had a change of heart on the war.
From what I've read, you initially supported this thing.
I did, it's true.
And at what point did you decide that that was a mistake?
Well, what happened was, so I was in college in 2002, and I was hugely influenced by an Iraqi dissident exile named Qanon Mikia, who just wrote so eloquently about the evils of Saddam Hussein.
And so that was something that I could not get out of my head.
And then I came to The New Republic, which was a pro-war magazine, or perhaps more aptly an anti-anti-war magazine.
But what really animated it, as Jim Henley recently wrote rather brilliantly on his blog, was not so much that there's this grand transcendent wisdom to the war, even though the magazine would ultimately endorse that, but that not going to war would make some hippie happy somewhere.
Right.
So I go there, and it's this echo chamber, and I buy into it 100%, just absolutely 100%.
I have all these grandiose and rather idiotic beliefs that what we're doing is fighting a war for human rights, and I want to get on board with that, so I do.
And I expect everything to go well.
And then all of a sudden, by the summer of 2003, it's clear that things are going very, very badly.
And I start saying at editorial meetings, we were one of the magazines that pushed for the war.
We were the most important magazine on the so-called liberal side of the spectrum to do so.
And we bludgeoned our critics on the left, basically everyone to our left, by saying, you guys were wrong not to support the war, and yet things are going so badly, we have an obligation to face up to this, really head on.
And so I start, not in my opinion writing, but in my investigative work, I do this piece that exposes, or seeks to, you guys tell me how successful it was, how the lies about the nuclear weapons case and the al-Qaeda case come to be.
And that gets published in mid-June of 2003.
I write it with a friend of mine named John Judas, who's a great reporter, and one of the people we quote in the piece is this then-anonymous ambassador, former ambassador to Africa, who goes on this trip to Niger to find out about Yellow Cake.
And this is a couple weeks before Joe Wilson would eventually unveil himself in the New York Times.
So it becomes pretty clear, among many things that I thought were true were not true, and this starts getting to me.
And I start trying to think about just why did I get this wrong?
What was wrong with my thinking?
How did I get this so wrong?
And that weighs on me, and I sort of just keep on asking for more assignments on Iraq.
And then at the beginning of 2004, my boss at the time, Peter Beinert, asked if I would write a kind of daily blog about Iraq, so that, as he would eventually put it in the New York Observer, people who favored the war would have to face up to what the war actually is.
And a couple months of doing that just lead me to believe that everything about this war is a disaster, is a fraud, is based on not just outright lies, but real intellectual sloppiness.
And by, I guess, I think probably like the summer of 2004, although I'm not like coming out, you know, bludgeoning my readers with it every day, I've, in my mind, sort of made the crossover.
And that's late.
You know, among the things that I didn't do, and should have done, is just say to my readers outright, like, I should not be writing this.
You know, until and unless I write to you in detail about how I got this wrong, and why I got this wrong, and what were the specific mistakes I made, both, well, in my thought process, you know, you should read someone who got it right.
And at the magazine, you kind of couldn't write something like that, because we had this long, long, long editorial meeting in June of 2004 to try and come up with some kind of recalibrated stance on Iraq.
And so I was asked to argue the case internally for why we were wrong.
And one of my pro-war colleagues who wrote at Foreign Policy argued the case for why we were right.
And ultimately the magazine publishes this kind of mishmash that says, we were wrong about the superficial things, but ultimately we were right.
And so that was the beginning of a long period of frustration.
But that's probably way, way more than you were interested in, but that's as honest as I can answer the question.
Yeah, well, no, I appreciate the honesty.
I mean, I'm one of those Bush-hating crazies who got it right all along.
And it's nice to, well, here you've come full circle.
Not only have you done a real mea culpa, but you're helping me point the finger of shame at people who still deserve it for propping up these lies.
And so, you know, that's pretty good redemption.
Well, I mean, what I want to do is not let myself off the hook, you know.
So, like, it shouldn't be, I mean, I never wrote lies.
Hazen Goldberg did.
So that's, like, a different category.
But I don't want to suggest that I have clean hands here.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, well, and there certainly is a difference between pushing lies and falling for them, too.
Yeah.
But, yeah, no, I take your point.
I take your point.
I think that's, well, obviously, you know, you're one in a million out of people who got it wrong.
Everybody else, you know, the best I can get out of the National Review is, well, it was a worthy mistake.
Yeah, that's unfortunate.
I mean, I'd love to know how someone could argue that it's a worthy mistake, given the objective cost to the United States and to the Iraqi people.
I'm just, I'm stunned by that.
Well, and speaking of those costs, I want to point to this blog entry that you have at the Washington Independent today about the breakdown of the ceasefire.
Now, apparently we don't have yet renewed fighting between the concerned local citizens, formerly known as the Sunni insurgency, and the Shiite militias.
It looks like we're having some pretty serious fighting between the different Shiite militias, one of them on the outside of the government, the Mahdi Army, and the other, the Badr Corps, inside the government.
We call it the Iraqi Army, right?
Right.
The Badr Corps.
And I was really interested, this is something that I noticed in reading the MSNBC article this morning, and it's something that you find in the New York Times article, that Maliki himself, the Prime Minister, has gone to Baghdad in order to oversee the operation and so forth, and you're saying that this looks to you like a move to begin preparation for throwing Maliki under the bus and replacing him with somebody else.
It's just kind of a blunt item, and I didn't want to read too much into it, but it just sort of stood at me in this New York Times piece.
I didn't see the MSNBC piece you're talking about, Scott.
Well, they basically say the very same thing there.
And not much more.
And it's not even clear to me in that piece whether these were American officials or Iraqi officials, or both, telling this in the New York Times, but it just seems so much like this would be a perfect opportunity if you were trying to say that the failure here is a failure not of the occupation, not of the system, but of the leadership of one man, to make him permanently defined in both the American and the Iraqi imagination as responsible for this breakdown in between Shiite factions.
And that just sets him up really, really well for coming up with some way parliamentarily to just put forward a different candidate for PM and force Maliki out.
And the United States has done this in Iraq at least twice already.
First, when Ibrahim Jafari was elected, you heard for so long the idea in early 2005 that Jafari was a strong leader, he was Western in orientation, he was not an extremist, he was not a sectarian, he was not beholden to bad people, and so on and so forth.
And then as the situation deteriorates, you start hearing in the press in the United States about how Jafari is incompetent, Jafari is weak, Jafari is beholden to all of these sectarian interests, Jafari wants to see the murders of Sunnis go on and so forth, and then the idea is you just finally figure out some way to bump him off, you lose confidence in your client, and you work with the other big Shiite factions to just come up with someone else, and someone else was Nouri al-Maliki, and when Maliki comes into power in spring of 06, you hear exactly the same thing from exactly the same people that you heard about Jafari, and I imagine that if ultimately Maliki falls as a result of this crisis with Sadr, whoever steps up in his place, you will hear exactly the same thing.
He's not a sectarian, he's competent, he's Western in his orientation, he's not an extremist, he's a technocrat, he's focused on real solutions to real problems, and blah, blah, blah.
You can't focus on people here, you have to focus on institutions and systems.
Right, well, and see, that's my point, is that Maliki was basically Jafari's right-hand man at the Dawa Party, which was created by the Ayatollah Khomeini back in the 80s, these are the guys who spent the Iran-Iraq war in exile in Iran, and...
I think actually Dawa goes further back than that.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it starts in the 60s with an ancestor of...
I guess it was just the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council that was created by the Ayatollah.
Yes, that was.
Yeah.
Oh, did I misunderstand you?
Now, this is something, Ashley, that has gone back and forth since the time that they picked Jafari, was the possibility that they would, rather than going with the Dawa Party guy, that they would go with the Skiri guy, and that was a guy named al-Mahdi.
Now, I think the reason that they went with the Dawa Party guy is because the Dawa Party doesn't have an army, and so it was kind of a compromise between the Saudis, who have an army, and the Barakor, who have an army, they decided to go with the Dawa Party guy.
But it seems like, unless they have another compromise candidate to be the new Shiite prime minister in getting rid of Maliki, then they're just going to make matters worse if they put in a Skiri guy or a Saudi guy, right?
I mean, as I tried to write in the post, there's this real danger of getting into the business of picking and choosing foreign leaders.
You will inevitably be responsible for their mistakes.
Those people will be viewed as quislings by their population, beholden to the interests of a foreign power rather than to those of their own people.
Adel Abdel-Mahdi, the person you're talking about from what used to be Skiri and is now the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, is someone who's known to be very close to a Bush aide named Megan O'Sullivan.
It's possible that he's now lost twice, first in the internal politicking to become PM, first to Jafari, and now to Maliki.
And the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq has tried several times in the last two years to just get some kind of modus vivendi going, whereby it's both the client of the United States and of the Iranians.
Who knows?
This is just so fluid and unpredictable.
It could well be that this finally is their turn.
The options seem to be exhausted.
From the United States' perspective, you just can't have a Sadrist in power, or at least from Bush's perspective, you can't have a Sadrist in power, because a Sadrist will just say, okay, you're out in six months.
Right, so we instead back the Iranian loyal factions instead.
Exactly.
Yeah, well, and this is the way it's been.
This is the way that we've been playing out for years now.
I mean, and add to that, we do that while we threaten Iran.
Right.
While we say that Iran is a major threat to Iraqi stability, while we say Iran is a major threat to American interests, while we say Iran is a threat to the prospects for democracy in the Middle East and so forth, what we're doing is empowering Iran's clients.
Right, well, and we also blame them every time something blows up and kills an American now.
So the incoherence is really rather staggering.
Yeah, and see, this is where we go back to the ignorance in the echo chamber of the media, where I've seen, oh, I don't know, at least a half dozen times, the Shiite insurgency.
And they just replaced the Sunni insurgency with the Shiite insurgency, and I'm just not supposed to notice that the insurgency, whoever that is, just changed who it is.
Right.
And the thing is, I think probably most of the reporters who write that, they probably forgot what it was like nine months ago.
What do they know?
I mean, the amount of wishful thinking, the amount of willful blindness, the amount of almost like devoted ignorance, and the lack of ability to kind of learn the lessons of what's just happened is really kind of tragic here.
I mean, a lot of the things that I kind of wonder about, just looking at it in a bit of a systemic way, is does this lack of institutional memory happen as soon as the bureau chiefs and the major reporters just get so burnt out from Iraq that they've got to go home for a while, and then the newbies come in and replace them?
Who knows?
Right.
That's pure speculation on my part, but that would at least make sense as opposed to just sort of looking out and seeing, unfortunately, not just the U.S. make the same mistakes over again, but the press that's supposed to hold the U.S. accountable make the same mistakes over and over again.
Yeah.
Now, well, we're a little bit over time here, but if I can keep you just a couple more minutes, what about all this concern, local citizens, sons of Iraq, the American army of the former Sunni insurgency?
It seems like we're just setting it up for a much worse civil war, or at least setting it up so that we can never leave, because look at the civil war that'll break out.
We accidentally, I guess, let the Shiites kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad, and they're not going to put up with that.
So what are we going to do here?
We're either going to babysit this thing and try to keep this escalation overwhelming force, try to keep the cease-fires called and keep arming all the various factions.
Is this thing going to break out?
It's going to break out, because the idea that we can keep a lid on it, we can't keep a lid on it with the number of troops we have now.
I think if next week the final surge brigade leaves Baghdad, we're not going to be in a position militarily where we can even match this current level, let alone increase it.
The concerned local citizens, first of all, beware of any policy that needs to cloak itself in euphemism.
These are killers.
They're not old ladies who run bake sales in order to finance the resodding of the park.
Those are concerned local citizens.
These are militiamen and insurgents and former terrorists.
Many of them were members of what they call al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They now work for us.
That's how we're defeating them is hiring them.
Look, when you think about it, if that's how you defeat them, all to the better.
Everyone, they get paid, we no longer have to fight them, we no longer have to get killed by them and so forth.
That doesn't seem like the worst deal.
But here's the thing about it.
It starts off from this rather understandable set of circumstances, whereby in late 06, the U.S. recognizes that there's this shift in Sunni public opinion.
It's happening primarily in Anbar province, whereby al-Qaeda has overstayed its welcome, overplayed its hand, and now the locals are turning against them.
If you're a smart American commander, you're going to want to encourage that as much as possible.
That's everything you want.
That's fewer people fighting you, and it's people fighting the enemy that you believe is the most intractable and the worst.
You know, the one that you believe is connected in some circuitous fashion, the people who hit us on 9-11.
Right, makes perfect sense.
This escalates to such a dramatic degree so that all of a sudden, within six months, we're paying nearly 80,000 former insurgents.
And what do they do?
They do what basically warlords everywhere do.
They manipulate their clients.
They tell things that are untrue.
I once did this interview with one of the spokesmen for General Petraeus, this admiral named Greg Smith, who's an impressive and honorable guy.
And I was just like, well, how do we know that the people that the concerned local citizens are really going after are in fact al-Qaeda?
And his answer was, trust.
We trust them.
We trust people who were shooting at us five minutes ago.
To tell us that the people they're shooting now are the people we want them to be shooting at.
Does that make any sense?
Later on, there was a more sophisticated answer given to me.
It's like, yeah, well, they show us these caches of IEDs, and then there are no more IEDs on the strip.
Well, yeah, that's because they were the ones who were planting them.
Right, yeah.
So of course they're going to have caches of IEDs.
So the whole thing is basically this kind of confidence game.
Now, again, it's based on understandable reason.
You'd rather pay someone than either have to kill them or see them keep killing your people.
So that makes sense.
And actually, the money isn't a lot of money.
I think as of at least February when I last did this, it was like $123 million.
So far, that's what the United States spends in the time this call has gone on in Iraq.
So that's not a whole lot of money.
That'll buy a lot of AKs, though.
But, yeah, that's the thing.
What they're doing is they're strengthening themselves.
They're biding time for the day that they'll eventually march back on Baghdad.
And the Shiites are freaked out about this, understandably so.
80,000 people under arms.
You know, the Iraqi security forces are neither large nor competent.
These guys in the CLC, what used to be called the Concerned Local Citizens and now the Sons of Iraq, really are both well-motivated.
I can't speak to their competence, but a friend of mine was just over there, and he embedded with a unit that was partnering with some Concerned Local Citizens, the Sons of Iraq.
And he asked the commander, you know, what do you all be doing?
He's like, well, we're getting ready.
We're getting ready.
We're going to kill Maliki, and we're going to kill the Iranian occupiers.
And by Iranian occupiers, you mean Shiites.
Right.
So this is, you know, the weight of this.
We've actually, it's just, it's kind of amazing the way, like, not only have we seen this movie before, we just literally saw it in a theater.
It's called Charlie Wilson's War.
Well, actually, I didn't see that.
I read the book, though.
Yeah, it's a good book.
But, you know, the point being, it's not funny.
I shouldn't have laughed.
You know, we can't leave behind and call it, you know, in any way acceptable, a situation in which we've just actually made different competing factions in the Civil War stronger, and yet we have no way of alleviating that.
And this wasn't an issue a year ago.
This came about, again, for understandable reasons, based on the admirable idea among General Petraeus and others that it's better to pay people than have them kill you.
Yeah, but I mean, look, we're talking about.
And it happens at the time when things appear to be going at least marginally better, and yet this is the long-term underlying series of circumstances.
The longer you stay, and this will be the last thing I say, and thank you so much for having me on, the longer you stay, the more stuff like this keeps on happening, and it will keep on happening until the United States finally gets out of Iraq.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, but this just seems like Petraeus is playing checkers and not chess, you know?
It's pretty easy to see what's going to happen if you let the Shia cleanse all the Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad, and then you, whichever Sunni Arabs haven't been driven all the way to Jordan or Syria, whoever's left, you arm and pay them.
It's pretty easy to see that you're only setting up for a worse crisis in a year or two or whatever.
I mean, not to apologize for Petraeus, but, like, the ethnic cleansing thing happened before he was there, and on the CLC's thing, like, what's the guy going to do?
Ultimately, he can only implement a military strategy, not a national strategy.
He's only going to be commander until, I believe, the fall, and so I have a lot of criticisms of Kim on particularly this question, but, like, I don't want to make it out like it was an easy call.
Yeah.
Because the longer you stay in Iraq, the more these are the only choices that you're presented with, and that's why the solution is to get out of Iraq.
Sure, and that is the way it's been this whole time, and I agree with you.
That is the only easy answer, is to just call it off.
It's not going to get better this way.
All right.
Yeah.
Everybody, that's Spencer Ackerman from the Washington Independent.
His blog is toohotfortnr.blogspot.com.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thanks very much, Scott.
You take care.
