All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet, chaosradioaustin.org and antiwar.com slash radio.
And here in the Chaos Studio, in the background on the TV, is re-running the documentary Meeting Resistance.
It was made by my next two guests, Steve Connors and Molly Bingham.
And it's, if I understand right, it's based on about 10 months' worth of interviews with the Sunni resistance in Iraq in 2003, late 2003 through about mid-2004, something like that.
Welcome to the show, guys.
Thanks.
Thanks, Scott.
That's very good to have you here.
And do I have that right?
About mid-2003, what's the timeframe on this?
Yeah, we started shooting in August of 2003 through to the end of May, beginning of June of 2004.
And the timeframe that the film covers is really the first year.
And I mean, one of the things that's important to understand about what happened with the resistance movement is, you know, we hear a lot about, oh, if Bremer hadn't disbanded the army, there wouldn't have been an insurgency.
These were people who were organizing themselves within two days of the fall of Baghdad.
So that's, like, April 11th to 14th or something of 2003.
But who, I'll also just add in there, simultaneously, most of them expressed a certain amount of disdain for Saddam Hussein and how he'd run the country, so it wasn't necessarily out of some love for Saddam Hussein that they were organizing.
It was because they saw themselves as occupied as they were, and with a long history of occupation in their country, to tell you, that wasn't something that they were going to allow to stand.
Well, I've got to tell you, from here in Austin, Texas, it was pretty clear by the summer of 2003 that this is an anti-occupation resistance that's building up here.
And the more raids that our soldiers are sent on, and the more doors they kick in, the more insurgents they're going to create, the bigger a problem this is going to be.
And all the propaganda that, you know, they're all just working for Saddam Hussein, and as soon as we catch Saddam Hussein, the insurgency will end.
You guys were actually there hanging out with these Sunni so-called insurgents at the time that Saddam Hussein was captured.
How big of a difference did that make?
Just about nothing, I think.
I mean, all it did is upset and enrage a lot of Iraqis, whether they were involved in the insurgency or the resistance or not, and sort of provoke them into this, well, you know, why do the Americans have the right to come in and do this?
Why, you know, how can they shame somebody so publicly, humiliate them like that, the way he was trotted in front of the cameras and the way that the video was released of him?
So I think as far as whether they were going to fight or not, it had no impact.
As far as pissing people off, I think it had a tremendous impact.
But I think that there was another thing as well that happened.
Once Saddam was caught, and so through all that period prior to his capture, we were listening to this propaganda that these were Saddam Hussein loyalists and, you know, dead offenders, Ba'athist diehards and all this kind of stuff.
And there were a lot of people who were holding back because of that, because they didn't want to fight in support of Saddam Hussein.
So once it became clear that Saddam was actually not involved at all in this violence, then you had a recruiting surge as well.
I just think also, Scott, I mean, you mentioned the propaganda, and I think that, you know, the United States military has a mission to use information warfare, and that's in fact one of the most important aspects of the battle space for them.
And this is not to criticize them, this is to recognize that they do it and say, hey, journalists need to say, you know, recognize that the military is using information operations and figure out how to get around those and figure out what's really going on.
But if you look back at that period of time, you hear, you know, dead enders, Ba'athist diehards, common criminals, religious extremists, foreign fighters, al-Qaeda, all this terminology which was really designed to indicate ostensibly to the Iraqi public.
I think the people who ended up hearing it and buying it the most was the American public, which is illegal.
But the American public really came to understand or believe from that information operation that it was fringe elements of the Iraqi society that posed our presence there.
But it wasn't normal people.
It wasn't people with jobs and families.
These were sort of people that hang out in alleyways and weren't part of the society.
And that is exactly the opposite of what we were finding in our reporting and talking to people directly.
And interestingly enough, very different from what the October 2003 National Intelligence Council reported to the White House when they filed their report on Iraq, which was talked about publicly in 2006, where that report basically said that we were facing an indigenous resistance in Iraq and that with deep roots in the society and that if we chose to stay, if the United States chose to stay in Iraq, we'd be fighting a counterinsurgency war for years to come.
So, I mean, I think that public perception of the conflict is one of the most important aspects of this war, particularly for the Pentagon and for the administration.
And controlling and massaging and managing that is really important.
And what they were trying to spell out to the American public is, well, we can isolate these fringe elements and kill them and that will deliver the victory that we want.
And in fact, you know, that's a really nice idea.
It just had really no bearing on reality.
I think it's part of why we're where we are today.
I think with this sort of calling of names and this kind of stuff, the first example of it that I have seen is from about May of 2003, and it was an American Marine general on one of these video conference interviews or press conferences that they would set up with the media in the Pentagon.
And one of the journalists says to the general, so General, your guys are still being attacked.
Who's doing that?
And the general says to him, well, sir, you may recall that Saddam Hussein turned out all the prisons just before the war.
Those are the people who are attacking us, common criminals.
And you know, how ridiculous is that?
Criminals want to gain something by their activity.
Criminals do not attack Abraham's tanks.
And yet nobody asked a supplementary question.
All we really heard was, thank you, General.
That's very informative.
Well, and part of this goes to the whole propaganda of this invasion and occupation as a liberation.
I mean, they're selling this to the American people and to the Iraqi people, at least some of them, as, listen, we're not the British.
We're not the Ottomans or the, you know, anybody else.
We're not here to occupy you and colonize you.
We're here to give you a democracy and help you be free.
And then we're going to leave and everything's going to be fine.
So apparently you have some people who are kind of waiting around and saying, well, you know, how's this going to work?
And you have other people who never bought it for a day and went to war immediately, right?
Right.
Well, this is the, this is the whole thing.
Who is, who's buying it?
The Iraqis certainly aren't.
Ninety-three percent of the Sunni population of Iraq and 62% of the Shia believe that it's perfectly acceptable to kill American soldiers who are in Iraq.
But I was going to point out, you used, you used the word propaganda.
And I have to say, you know, when Steve and I came back from doing this reporting in June of 2004, if, if you and the listeners can kind of cast your minds back a little bit, you know, I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, is using propaganda to, you know, control or manipulate our thinking about this conflict was a really out there thing to do.
And people were like, wow, you're really fringe, man.
You're, you're, you're different.
You're, uh, you're not a mainstream journalist.
You're not normal.
And, um, I found it really interesting when Scott McClellan's book came out recently with it.
That was exactly the word he used that, you know, that Bush had, you know, based his thinking or based his selling of the war on propaganda.
And he was banking heavily on that as a way of taking the country where he wanted to go.
Well, and speaking of that, have you guys had trouble getting this movie made or what?
Cause this is more than four years ago now you were finished, right?
Yeah.
When I first came back from, uh, from Baghdad with this material, I just like to lay out, we are actually mainstream journalists.
We have spent our careers in mainstream journalism working for, uh, working primarily as photo journalists for the, uh, for some of the top publications in the world.
So when we came back, we thought we've got this great story, nobody else had this story.
And the few journalists that we'd been talking to in Baghdad who knew what we were doing were saying, you guys have really got it.
You know, this is the story.
So we come back and we cannot move this to any one of the networks, not just in the United States, but also in Britain as well.
This includes the BBC.
And we were seen, I mean, they, we, you know, we, we met with people, we showed them rushes.
I mean, it wasn't as if we couldn't get into to, to meet with people.
And the general response that we were getting was actually summed up by the executive, uh, the executive producer of one, uh, one of the American documentary slots.
He said, this is a great documentary.
I can't put this in front of my audience.
We have to, you have to understand what we were looking for at the time was a partner basically at one of the news outlets to edit the film with us.
We had this raw material and we needed to cut it into a, into something that would be shown on television or be, you know, be seen publicly.
And they basically, no one was willing to do that.
No one was willing to get out ahead of the American public.
And also, you know, they were just too uncomfortable.
I think from a, from a financial perspective, from an economic perspective about what it would mean to air the thinking, the quite reasonable thinking of, of some of the people who are attacking American troops in Iraq.
And so what we ended up doing is, uh, Steve was quicker to this decision than I was, but we basically came to the recognition that we were not going to get this on air in the United States and, and, or in Britain.
And then if we wanted to do this, we had to do it ourself.
And so we self-financed it.
And I think if we hadn't done that, this film wouldn't exist.
And it took us a while to, to figure that out and how to, you know, we've never made a film before.
So finding a producer and getting, getting some direction in how to cut a film and how to work on that with something that took a lot of time.
And, and, uh, what's been interesting is that when we've taken the finished version back to, uh, back to some of the same outlets, they now say, oh, it's out of date.
So they weren't willing to run it at the time, but now it's out of date when in fact, all the statistics and, and, uh, relevant polling data around Iraq show that the critical element of the, of the violence and the conflict in Iraq revolves around this resistance to occupation revolves around this conflict, which is about being occupied and what that provoke in the Iraqi population.
All right.
Well, now help clear some things up because it is obvious that, you know, as, as you guys talked about information warfare and all this kind of thing that, that we get at least vast oversimplified tales of what's going on here.
But I do notice that in the movie you hear denunciations or at least kind of plaintive questions of how come Ayatollah Sistani, the Shia Pope, basically not that he is, you know, magical and can talk to God kind of way in a Pope, but is, or infallible, but is the highest ranking Shia religious cleric in the world.
Where is he on this?
Why is he being silent?
How come we are being left to fight?
And I guess I'd like you to, to try to explain to what degree the resistance actually is even properly called the Sunni resistance rather than just the Iraqi Arab resistance.
We know that when they held the purple finger elections and all that, it was the Shiites who won and basically the, the Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah party.
And that seemed to at least would explain why the Sunnis were the ones resisting much more than the Shiites, at least in the way that they've explained it to us back here.
Yeah.
How much time we got?
It's a really great question.
That's the crux of a lot of this perception in the United States about the conflict.
Go on, Steve.
I think first, first of all, you know, without getting into a lot of trouble with trying to unravel all the theology of this, I think first of all, that Sistani himself, who is the grand Ayatollah, he is the senior figure in Shia Islam.
And I think he took a fairly humanist position knowing that if he, if he gave a fatwa, a religious pronouncement that the Shia should, should rise up and resist, first of all, they would have done so.
And they would have been slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands.
I do believe that that was at the basis of his thinking on this now, but what was, what was also happening and we were seeing it in particularly in April of 2004, where you had the Muqtada al-Sadr's Maqdi Army, who had been chomping at the bit, by the way, for a long, long time.
And then as read, as anybody who goes on anti-war.com's website will know, there was the, there was the Bremen's mistake of closing down his newspaper and then issuing an arrest warrant for one of Muqtada al-Sadr's aides.
Right.
This is April, April, 2004.
That's April, 2004.
So this is when Sidney Sheehan's son got shot in the battle of Sadr City there.
Yeah.
Now, one of the things that, one of the things that we were seeing there was that the Maqdi Army were joining forces with the people that we were talking to, to fight against the Americans.
Here you had this, this sort of supreme coalition, if you like.
And America's worst nightmare, really.
And the United States' worst nightmare, not so much in military terms, but for the future political project, because if they could gather together politically in the way that they had done militarily, then they would just sweep the board with an anti-occupation agenda.
That had to be resisted.
And it was, it was interesting that shortly after that, we started to see the car bombs going off, primarily in Sadrist areas.
Somebody was driving wedges in, trying to drive wedges in between these.
But even as late as October of 2006, I saw interviews with Mujahideen commanders and Maqdi Army commanders in Fallujah and Baghdad.
And one of the Mujahideen commanders said, why would we fight against the Maqdi Army?
Their, their martyrs are buried alongside ours in the cemeteries of Fallujah.
And he's saying that in October of 2006.
I think, I mean, I just like to add to that, I think it's worth backing up.
And most of your listeners probably have clued into this already, but I think it's really worth talking about the conflict in terms of two major different conflicts.
There's a resistance to occupation, which is the majority of the violence.
And then there is a civil war going on.
And the civil war is not a Sunni-Shia sectarian civil war.
It's a civil war about two disparate perspectives on what Iraq's future should look like.
You have nationalists on one side who want to keep the country together, strong central government, nationalized natural resources.
And on the partitionist side, you have people who want to divide the country up, who want no central government or a very weak central government, strong regional governments.
And they want to privatize the natural resources for their regions and for individuals in those regions.
On the other hand, though, on the other hand, though, Molly, isn't it the case that the Maqdi Army of Sadr, I mean, because I know for a fact that you're right about what, what you just said about the Maqdi Army was kind of joining in during the Battle of Fallujah.
They were kind of coming together there in 2004, that kind of thing.
But during the heat of the civil war and the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, was not the Maqdi Army with the Bata Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council cleansing the Sunnis?
I'm going to get there, which is that, and that is to say that there is sectarianism in the civil war, but sectarianism isn't the root of the problem.
It is a symptom of the civil war.
It's a symptom of the illness, and that illness is, or that the cause of the civil war is that differing perspective.
And you have Sunni and Shia on either side of that conflict.
So there is definitely sectarian consequences have come to the fore in the civil war, but that's not the cause of it.
And I think a lot of Americans understand, oh, these are ancient sectarian hatreds.
They've hated each other since the beginning, and we're just there standing behind, you know, between these two warring sects who want to kill each other, and that's not the case.
Can I, can I just, I'd like to reply directly to that, Scott, because it's a really, it's a really vexing question.
How did this supposedly nationalist movement, namely the Maqdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, how did they become sectarian separatists?
We pushed them toward Iran is what happened.
Well, I, having studied this fairly, you know, pretty closely, I actually, I actually believe Muqtada al-Sadr, when he says that his organization was heavily infiltrated by, he doesn't even name Barda, but, you know, he's kind of everybody.
I mean, if you want, if you want to talk about who has tight connections to Tehran and who's supported by Tehran, it's scary and bother, I mean, there's no, there's no question about that.
I think that the flip of painting, painting al-Sadr as affiliated with Iran is really for American public consumption, because we're, you know, making Iran into the boogeyman, so we need to tie some of our, you know, some of the people we don't like in Iraq, you know, tie them to the same chain.
We're going to, we're going to try to push Iran over the edge with.
Can I, and then, and then, of course, we get onto the whole, you know, why, why was there a reduction in violence that coincided with the, with, with an increase of, of American troop levels?
And many people point to, to the Muqtada al-Sadr ceasefire, but what he also was doing during that ceasefire was finding out which of his commanders was still loyal to him, and basically he was purging his organization, and I believe that that has also had a great, a great effect in, on, on the levels of violence.
Well, not to mention the fact that...
Just when you ask the question, too, Scott, you know, is it really fair to call it a Sunni insurgency?
I mean, I think the, the Sunni interpret the Qur'an, they have a more Protestant relationship with, with God, if you will, and they find it, they take their own individual responsibility and act of individual conscience to interpret the Qur'an and the teachings of Muhammad in the way that they think is correct, individually.
And they did come out on the streets, primarily, but it's interesting that the person that you quote in the film, who says, Tistani Wayne, where is Tistani?
Why are we, why are we waiting, you know, why are we waiting for him?
Why hasn't he become involved in this, an issue to follow up?
That's a Shia guy who's come in from Syria to fight, and that was in response, that comment was in response to a question from me, which was, well, now that you're here, and you're fighting, you know, what is it that has surprised you the most?
And he said, what surprised me the most is that the Sunni and Shia aren't rising up with one hand.
So I think, you know, the notion that it's only Sunni is, is inaccurate.
It was largely Sunni at first, but it has certainly, with the rise of Sadr, become a clearly a nationalist movement that is both Sunni and Shia.
I mean, three of the people that we spoke to for the film were Shia.
Okay.
Well, yeah, and I was going to say, you go through here, you talk to the doctor, the traveler, the professor, and all these different people, and the point of the religiosity of the Sunnis and the difference between, as you said, sort of a Protestant relationship, an individual relationship with God, rather than through the forms of the church and the higher order of here, you know, on earth, that kind of thing, the importance of that.
But I think it's really important to emphasize, apparently you've both made yourselves very clear, but I guess I'd like to give you a chance to go ahead, and contrasting with what you just said, Molly, about the religiosity, what role that actually plays.
Because throughout watching this movie, there are many, many quotes about, listen, you know, if you love Allah, you have to do this, and all these kinds of things.
And yet, the context is an occupation of their land.
And so I just, there's a whole section of the American War Party that wants us to believe that this war is about religion itself, that these people are motivated by religion itself.
And so, what is the role of religion, in your view, to the various different people that you talk to?
I mean, I think the film Meaning of Resistance is definitely about Iraq, right?
I mean, it's shaped and colored and textured by the religion, the history, the culture that's specific to Iraq.
But when you take a step back, it is really a film about the human condition under occupation.
And we've seen occupations around the world throughout history, and we've seen resistance to those occupations.
So I think, sort of, the underlying core is we have this fundamentally basic human response to occupation.
Your question is, how much of it is religious, how much of it is secular, how do those two things interplay?
And I think that when you put people in that situation, individuals will have their own sources of motivation, right?
So each individual can have a slightly different mix of motivations.
But then on top of that, you're going to have powerful people and leaders who are going to employ and engage whatever resources or belief structures are at hand to engage the public, engage the population, to bring people into their way of seeing things.
And so you see religion used in that way by individuals in the resistance, for sure.
But it's also important to note that Islam, certainly the later teachings of Islam, I'm talking about from the period of expansion after the death of Muhammad, it does mandate for resistance to occupation.
And this, I found, was operationally one of their strengths.
And I've only seen one reference to it in the mainstream media, and it was from an American special forces officer who said, these people do not need leadership.
So what he was saying was, they will just keep coming.
And he was saying, no matter how many of them we kill, there's somebody to take his place.
And that is because this is mandated.
And in many ways, some of the people who are in leadership positions are holding men in reserve.
I think what's also interesting and often misunderstood here is the notion that if you're fighting jihad or you're succumbing to the call to fight for your country, even if it's for religious reasons, that you're only rewarded or you're only really participating if you're actually fighting in the streets, if you're carrying weapons or building IEDs or something like that.
And that is absolutely not accurate.
The interpretation of Islam that a lot of Iraqis are subscribing to right now reinforces the belief that everyone should contribute in their own way to this fight.
If you're a woman and you cook meals or carry weapons or messages for fighters, you're contributing on an equal level with the fighters themselves.
If you're a businessman and you give money, you're contributing equally and you'll be rewarded equally.
If you're a doctor and you sew up fighters who are injured, you are also contributing.
So I think there's this mobilization, this profound mobilization of the society due to the religious beliefs that underpin it that really brings a vast majority of people into the game in a way that a lot of people don't understand.
Scott, I'd just like to say one last thing about this, because it's very easy to make the leap from that to, well, these people are just a bunch of crazies and their religion is full of crazies.
Let me just say right now that we have our equivalence.
Arlington Cemetery is a martyr's cemetery.
Without doubt, we honor our dead.
We elevate them.
The Gold Star families who are, for any of your listeners who don't know about the Gold Star families, are the families of soldiers who've been killed in action.
And they are supposed to have an elevated position in society, just like the families of the martyrs in Iraq or among the Palestinians.
It's the same kind of thing.
I spent nine years in the British Army.
The highest award for valor in the British Army is the Victoria Cross.
The overwhelming majority of people who have received the Victoria Cross are dead.
They were killed while they were receiving it.
It is a martyr's award.
Well, and I don't know about religion particularly, but I know that if any, I don't know, Arab Army occupied Texas, it would simply be a matter of manhood, of just being a free man at all.
That you take a rifle and you shoot at them until they're gone.
Period.
Right.
Self-determination.
Yeah.
Right.
And in fact, in this movie, they talk about independence.
He actually says, we have to protect our sovereignty and independence.
He sounded like an American revolutionary.
Uh-huh.
Right.
Right.
And you know, I don't want to give these people too much credit, because a lot of them are sickos who cut off people's heads and whatever.
And I'm not saying they're George Washington, but on the other hand, we are the Redcoats.
Right.
There's been a lot of arguments about what the British have been doing in Basra and this kind of thing.
And one of the things that I've been keeping an eye on over the last few years has been the discussion in the British officer corps.
And many of them are actually ashamed of being in Iraq.
I saw fairly recently, one of them, he was asked why wouldn't the Iraqis work with them?
And he said, well, because they'd be viewed as the Vichy, in a similar vein to the Vichy government.
And that's a really interesting phrase to use, you know, the Vichy government.
So what he's doing there, is he's saying, I feel like a Nazi.
Also, just, you know, I think, Steve and I are journalists.
We set out to understand something we didn't know that we thought was important.
I mean, the who is behind these attacks on America, you know, who has basically slowed down our ambition or our objective in the Middle East?
I think it's an important thing to understand.
We really didn't know what we were going to find.
And we were very aware of our responsibility and our own interests in not romanticizing or aggrandizing or glamorizing who these people are and what they do.
They are, you know, they kill people.
They are defending their country.
And if you can understand that, you don't have to support it or agree with it.
But I think understanding it is the first key to trying to find a real, reasonable and effective solution to the violence in Iraq.
Well, and this goes to the larger war on terrorism, too.
I mean, we hadn't invaded Saudi Arabia, but we supported the kingdom there and armed them so that they have enough force to keep the people from saying otherwise.
And then we made a quote unquote deal and stationed our troops in their country on the holy land of Mecca and Medina for 12 years, 11 years before the September 11th attack.
And that wasn't motivated by religion, either.
That was motivated by combat forces occupying land just the same.
Well, and look at look at the situation currently in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
And we we keep hearing the same thing, oh, it's the Taliban.
You know, so we've got to have this demonization process going on when, in fact, what's happening in what is happening for the most part in Afghanistan is, as they have done historically against Alexander the Great, against the British, against the Soviets.
These are the Pashtun tribes that are rising up.
And yes, some of them may be Taliban types.
And it's interesting listening to the military, you know, looking at military blogs and this kind of thing now, how there's sort of a new name for the Taliban types.
In other words, they're not Taliban at all.
Yeah, that means Pashtuns.
It means Pashtun.
And you know, I always quote this figure, and it's quite an old one.
And I know that there's far more of this going on now than there was then.
Between June and November of 2006, there were 2,600 fixed-wing airstrikes carried out by the United States Air Force in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Well, that's a war we won seven years ago.
That's a war we won, yeah.
And that's a good war, by the way.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good war.
All right.
Well, let's talk about the sons of Iraq, and they're called the Concerned Local Citizens, the Awakening Councils.
I've talked with Patrick Coburn about this.
He's really the best reporter on these matters that I can find.
In fact, he's got a new one in The Independent about the surge.
I just read it, yeah.
And what Coburn said on this show, basically, was that, well, the Sunnis lost the civil war.
Again, it wasn't a religious war.
It was a political war.
But the Americans, under the cover of the surge, really, the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army, whether under the command of Saad or otherwise, ethnically cleansed, and basically won the battle for Baghdad.
It's now something like 85% Shiite.
And Coburn said that the Sunni insurgency, quote, unquote, at that point, basically re-evaluated their position, decided they wanted to fight so-called al-Qaeda in Iraq, the most religious crazies among them, foreigners and such, who had come and tried to create the Islamic State, and that they decided, well, let's cease fire and let's stop fighting the Americans, tactically speaking.
Let's take their money and accept their ceasefire while we get rid of our enemies within the Sunni insurgency that we want to purge and call them al-Qaeda in Iraq, and then we'll prepare for the next battle for Baghdad to try to take it back.
Right.
Many of the resistance groups will not go along with this.
This has divided the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade.
Which are viewed as secular.
And there are still 1,500 attacks a month being carried out against U.S. forces right now that nobody really wants to talk about.
So that's one of the things.
But primarily what happened with some of these groups was the deal that they had with the Americans who had been essentially standing by and allowing the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad to take place, essentially by the Bardakur, by the Interior Ministry, and often provided air support and artillery support to the Interior Ministry.
And what the Sunni group said, you guys stop killing us, we'll deal with these extremists that we've got.
Who they were going to have to deal with anyway, so why not get paid $300 a month to do so?
And I think that was the deal.
But interestingly enough, so that was a deal between the American military and what have become known as the Awakening groups.
Unfortunately, the American political system doesn't approve of any of this.
So what you have at the moment is the American military is essentially fighting against its own political structure.
If you recall last year when General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker were giving their testimony to Congress, and you had these two men sitting at the same table contradicting each other, General Petraeus talking about the surges being a tool in order to create the stable conditions in which reconciliation can take place and the country can be reunified.
And you had Ambassador Crocker saying that the decentralization process is going very well indeed, and that the tribes of Anbar province are beginning to see the benefits of highly decentralized government.
So we've also seen a number of stories coming out where some people in the military are starting to talk to the press and saying, you know, we are fighting against our own policies of our own government.
Well, yeah, and this is something that Khalilzad wanted to do back in 2005.
Because you've got to admit, I mean, this policy makes no sense.
Mollie, as you pointed out before, we're supporting the separatists.
We're supporting within whichever faction, whoever has the most difference with the others.
We're supporting the partisans who don't have a constituency, really, among the Iraqi population.
Right, because the Saudis don't need us.
The Sunni so-called insurgency types, they don't need us.
In fact, we saw in 2006 that they tried to create that government of national salvation where they basically all agreed on one major thing.
The Americans must leave now.
And so instead, we back the Hakeem faction, the Supreme Islamic Council based out of Iran.
And so what have we done here?
We've basically helped the Iranians and their goons take southern Iraq and including Baghdad.
Particularly in the recent attacks on Basra and Amara by the Maliki government to weaken Sadr.
So that Skerri could have a stronger hand there.
Well, Scott, let's take this down to its basics.
You have American troops in Iraq fighting and dying for Ahmadinejad.
Right.
I mean, that's the reality.
No, that's not even right, for the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, that's what we've been...
I mean, Bill Mahan, the great blogger Bill Mahan wrote an entry back as soon as the Purple Finger elections were done.
It was called, Ayatollah, you so...
And this is what we've been...
And in fact, we could see this coming as they were writing the constitution, everything else.
It was the Supreme Islamic Council from the very beginning, because Sadr is the working class guy and Hakeem is more of a merchant class, dresses nice and can talk to George Bush and Dick Cheney.
And so...
And you have Abdul Makti, who's now the vice president, but was certainly Khalilzad's first choice for the premiership.
They ended up with Maliki because they couldn't get Abdul Makti.
And this is the guy who came and promised the great oil law in 2005.
Well, and they chose Jafari and then Maliki from the Dawah party because that was the compromise between the Sadrists and the Supreme Islamic Council.
Exactly.
Okay, but so now...
I'm sorry, I went off on my crazy train of thought.
You know, it's actually refreshing to hear you have such an incredibly good grasp of it, because that's not always the case.
We like tangents.
Oh, good.
Good.
Yeah, tangents.
I like those.
Okay.
But so Khalilzad was basically saying, hey, Scott Horton is right.
This doesn't make any freaking sense.
We're giving Baghdad to Tehran.
What are we doing?
We got to switch back to the Sunnis.
We'll call them concerned local citizens and we'll reinstall the Baathists.
And they even did a whole thing in Time Magazine about how they were going to do it, but then they never did.
Scott, I think that Khalilzad was playing a double bluff on this.
Let's just say, you know, the Sunnis are going to do it.
We're going to do it.
We're going to do it.
We're going to do it.
We're going to do it.
We're going to do it.
We're going to do it.forget that he was the one who conveyed the 2002 conference that empowered the Hakeem Faction.
He knows this.
He knows this neck of the woods.
And Khalilzad wants to have Abdul-Magdi in place in Baghdad.
This is a very interesting area.
I mean, we know that we generally speaking know what the relationship is between the United States and the government as, as exists in Iraq right now.
We know the relationship between that government in Iraq and Tehran.
What we don't really know is the relationship between the United States government and the government in Tehran.
Because there's so much of this that doesn't make sense.
And if there isn't any sort of background relationship, then these people in Washington have been incredibly foolish.
Well, and you know, maybe this does just go back to, you know, there was this fight between the realists and the neocons.
And I think the neocons really did want in and out of there pretty quick and turn things over to Chalabi and them and see what happens.
And it seems like the realist, you know, the Joe Biden, Richard Haass Council on Foreign Relations plan was, let's split this country in thirds.
And in fact, you know, that goes along with what the neocons seemed to want back in the 1990s anyway, was to just create chaos.
Like the clean break plan that they wrote for Benjamin Netanyahu is just, let's smash Arab states into little pieces, they'll be easier to deal with from Israel's point of view.
Right.
I mean, one of the main proponents of this break Iraq into three has been Peter Galbraith, who is actually a consultant for the Kurdish factions.
And he's very praising of Khalilzad in his book.
Let's just let's just I mean, there's been so much talk, particularly in the last year about the significance of partitioning the country, partitioning Iraq, that that was really a soft partition, if you recall, that was the best thing.
It's going to divide up these, you know, fighting sectarian and ethnic differences and make it easier for us.
It also conveniently would mandate a U.S. presence there for a long time.
So it's called the Korea model.
But it is completely ignoring the fact that 98 percent of Arab Iraqis polled said they want a strong central government.
They want to stay one state and that they don't want to be divided along sectarian or ethnic lines.
So, I mean, the notion that that is in any way a move that is supported by the Iraqi population is absurd.
Yeah.
I remember Robert Dreyfuss wrote an article, I guess, last fall.
It was right after the Blackwater incident.
And he said that even more than the Blackwater incident, the announcement by Joe Biden and the passage in the Senate of the Joe Biden soft partition plan had done more to heal the differences between Iraqis than anything since the invasion.
They all agreed on one thing.
Oh, no, you don't, Joe Biden.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, I agree.
And so let me ask you this, then, if America was gone, I don't know, day after tomorrow, would the Supreme Islamic Council have to flee back to Iran where they live for 30 years?
I think they would.
Yeah.
I think I think Maliki's, you know, the recent moves by Maliki, as you know yourself, Scott, from just from just looking at all the stuff that comes through on the Internet, everybody is confused about his position right now.
Yeah.
I haven't seen a single analysis where anybody can say, yeah, I think I've nailed it.
You're talking about Muqtada Sadr?
No, about Maliki.
Oh, Maliki.
And about Maliki all of a sudden standing up and saying, OK, we want a timetable for withdrawal.
What is Maliki's position?
I mean, historically, he has been he has been very anti-American.
He's his position in Dawa.
Now, let's not forget that when the American and French embassies were blown up in Kuwait in the early 1980s, it was it was the Dawa party that did it.
And he was at one point he was the head of the of the activist section of the Dawa party.
So we know where Nouri al-Maliki is coming from.
Well, he seems to be saying now, I think, obviously, he has political incentive to pretend to stand up to us, even if he doesn't really mean it.
But on the other hand, it kind of seems like and I think this is what Gareth Porter said, too.
It sort of seems like he's saying, all right, America, we got all the help from you that we need.
We've been backed by you and Iran this whole time, but we don't need you anymore.
Iran is good enough for us.
I think if we were to withdraw, if we were to, you know, wave our magic wand and be gone one day after tomorrow, I think everyone in the executive branch in particular would have to flee or die.
I just I don't I don't see them surviving in Iraq without U.S. support, without protection, without the fundamental big brother, big guns on board to keep them around.
All right.
Well, you know what?
I gave you all the worst introduction ever when we started this interview.
You did this great movie.
It's called Meeting Resistance.
And it is tell us, first of all, tell us where people can get a hold of this movie.
And then I'm sorry to do the beginning of the interview at the end, but if you could please tell us who you guys write for, where we can read what you write, your own websites, et cetera, like that, please.
Sure.
So people can find the film if they want to support independent filmmaking.
It would be great if they got it from our website directly, which is meeting resistance dot com.
It can also be found on Amazon.
You can get it on Netflix.
If they Google it, they'll probably find it in a few other places.
Our website has a lot of information on it, including a director's statement from Stephen Mee and then an updated commentary from a few months ago of which was in response to all the Q&A's we've done as we've traveled around the country, showing the film and talking to audiences and answering Q&A's.
So there's a lot more information on there.
People can sign up for our mailing list if they'd like to be kept updated.
We send out an update about once a month on where the film is showing and what's going on with it.
And I think our big update is that we're going to be showing on Capitol Hill tomorrow in the Rayburn House Office Building, B318, at 530.
And if people would like to encourage their representative or their representative staff to come see the film and discuss Iraq with us afterwards, that would be fantastic.
And tell us again the time and day there.
It's tomorrow, Tuesday afternoon at 530 in the Rayburn House Office Building in room B318.
And it's open to the public, but we are, since we're showing on the Hill, we're really keen to actually get Hill staffers and any representatives who'd like to come along to see the film and talk about Iraq with us.
All right.
Great.
And now where can we read you guys' news articles and so forth?
We haven't actually, we've been concentrating on the film and taking the film around and we've been, for the most part, we've been talking.
You know, there are a couple of items spread around, but not a great deal.
I think the thing that people can probably see most of our work is on the website, on the press page.
There's a list of interviews we've done.
They can watch like Anderson Cooper 360 and some other TV interviews and longer radio interviews.
But there's also a few pieces written by us, an op-ed I wrote for the Boston Globe in December 2004 about why the elections weren't going to change the violence and the structure in Iraq.
And then a video op-ed we did for the New York Times last year when the film was opening in theaters called Know the Inanimate, a piece that Steve wrote for the Independent newspaper, which is a small free paper in New York, which has got a lot of circulation and it's a great piece.
So there is some stuff written by us and produced by us up there that people can find down towards the bottom of that page.
All right.
Great.
Well, listen, I've got to tell you how much, first of all, I appreciate your bravery in unembedding yourselves and turning around and embedding yourselves with the Sunni insurgents in 2003 and 2004.
You guys both have courage unmeasurable.
I really couldn't believe it watching this movie, the position you guys put yourselves in here to get this story.
It's really incredible.
And you did a great job.
Again, the movie is called Meeting Resistance.
The website is meetingresistance.com.
Steve Connors and Molly Bingham.
Thank you very much for your time today.
Thank you, Doc.
Well, you guys got hit by Hurricane Ike this weekend, so I hope everybody's doing okay and starting to get recuperated from that a little bit.
Well, we're high and dry here in Austin, but thank you.
Yeah.
All right.
Take it easy.
All right.
Y'all have a good one.
Take care, bud.
