01/27/14 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And speaking of left, right, libertarian realignment, I'm happy to welcome Stephen Zunis back to the show.
Stephen, you are a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco.
Welcome back.
That's correct.
I don't know why I said that to you that way.
Everyone, Stephen is what I just said.
And this article is at the National Catholic Reporter, The U.S. Role in Iraq's Upsurge in Violence.
A great story.
Very well done piece here and very timely.
But, you know, first, before we get into the Iraq thing a little bit, I want to ask you about this left, right, libertarian realignment.
It's something that's been big in the news lately, you know, the Edward Snowden revelations and all the controversy about that.
And I know that, you know, aside from being an expert in America's horrible foreign policy, I was going to say American foreign policy, but I wanted to throw horrible in there.
You also are into activism itself and strategies for making things work.
And so, you know, my idea, it's not original whatsoever, but basically it's just that where we have, say, you know, a consensus in D.C. of a liberal Republican like John McCain and a conservative Democrat like Barack Obama in the center where, to me, they're the real extremists.
They're the ones who are for everything horrible from NSA spying and militarizing the police to the overseas empire and all the rest of that.
And then on the outside of power, we have all this room for a progressive, maybe more paleo conservative and libertarian with the libertarians in the center type of alliance against the war party and everything that it stands for.
And, you know, it seems like with the emphasis more on decentralizing power, but especially, you know, with opposition to the empire and the atrocious, you know, destruction of the Bill of Rights going on right now as the first and foremost kind of priority.
So I was wondering whether you can speak to that, whether you agree with me that that's, you know, really doable or workable, whether we maybe when we get off the topic of Iraq, you and I just have and people as we would represent just have too little in common on other issues or what it is you think about that and how we might move forward if you think that there's a way to move forward.
Well, yeah, I think every successful social movement has involved groups that have been willing to come together in areas where they agree and amicably go in different directions where they disagree.
And that I would agree on some libertarians and some economic issues and environmental issues and corporate power and things like that.
I certainly share, for example, serious concerns about government intrusion on property rights.
I certainly am concerned about the getting ourselves involved in wars around the world and the incredible waste of our resources on that.
And, you know, so I'm very, and so I think for a lot of people that it's important to, you know, work with people we may disagree with on some issues and issues where we come together.
I mean, I'm very often attacked by members of the far left because I don't take a particular correct line on something, you know, and therefore I am the enemy.
And I said, you know, no wonder the left in the United States is so marginalized and you end up attacking your central allies and getting to this kind of rigid sectarian kind of thing.
So I do think that in areas of commonalities people can come together.
And I think on the very issues that you mentioned, that is about militarization and intervention and civil liberties, the various people who are often seen as being in very different places on the ideological spectrum.
I think you put all of us together.
We are the majority and here, these are areas where I think we can, you know, we can come together and hopefully have a change of policy.
Well, you know, the thing is too, at least from my point of view, and I guess it sounds a little bit naive, but in a way, conservatism, American conservatism is about conserving at its very core, is about conserving classical liberalism.
It's about conserving the gains of the American revolution and the U.S. constitution and preventing them from being, you know, completely trampled underfoot.
And so like if you read the American conservative magazine, I'm not sure what percentage of the entire conservative movement that that magazine really speaks for.
But of course, they've got great stuff about every aspect of American foreign policy and the U.S. government's relationship to the individual.
The more accurate reflection of the American conservative tradition, even though by, you know, what the media and other people generally think of conservatives, you know, they seem like more of an outlier group.
But I think that the fact is that there's always been a contradiction between republic and empire.
And in fact, that was the big thrust that we saw over 100 years ago when the United States decided to conquer the Philippines, where you also had a mixture of people coming together.
The Anti-Imperialist League was formed that included a number of folks from across the political spectrum, including ordinary working class folks to leading intellectuals, including Mark Twain, who was their vice president, who asked this very question, you know, what kind of nation are we?
I mean, we founded a sound revolution was against empire.
And so what are we doing becoming imperial ourselves and conquering the Philippines, especially since it cost many thousands of American lives and our treasury in doing so?
Well, you know, part of this is because of partisan politics, stuff just always stays mixed up and messed up.
But it does seem like at least when it shifts back and forth, more and more people kind of wash out of the system's view of things and start to see things more independently, you know, like, hey, geez, these conservatives, whatever happened to keep big government off your back now?
So we got a unitary executive with plenary power and all of this stuff, you know what I mean?
And liberals who, wow, I really believe in Obama for about six months and then what?
This guy, he's just George W.
Bush.
And so then it comes to the consistent, you know, whether left right or libertarian, but the consistent out of power who, you know, are still good on the things that our politicians betray us on.
You know, it's how we win people over to this movement, I guess, you know, and that is I don't mean the libertarian one, but I mean the movement against empire and for the right.
And, you know, anyway, well, so now here's the thing that I think especially the right has a hard time getting over.
And that is that you told them so about why not to invade Iraq?
And, you know, to think back to 11 years ago and the swagger and the hubris at all, hey, listen, for you to disagree at all is to question the might of America's military.
And I know you're not calling America's military a sissy pants, are you?
Well, good, then you have to support this war because our guys can do anything.
And, you know, any questioning of the policy is a betrayal of each and every last soldier.
So how dare you?
And yet here we are in 2014.
And I can tell you, I walk around the house having fantasies about tying George Bush to a chair and forcing him to just watch satellite feed of the unfolding, continuing, unfolding consequences of his war in the Middle East as people are being butchered to death from, you know, Turkey to Yemen.
You know what I mean?
It's crazy.
It's out of control.
Very much so.
I mean, they're fighting in Iraq.
It feels like, oh, it's this 1400-year-old conflict between Sunni and Shia.
That's just baloney.
I mean, Sunni-Shia conflicts in the Middle East until recently were as a distant memory as the religious wars of Europe between Protestants and Catholics back in the 1600s.
What happened when the United States, I mean, in Iraq, you had intermarriage between Sunnis and Shias.
That was quite common, that there was a small town with only one mosque.
Sunnis and Shias worshipped together.
There's less theological differences between Sunnis and Shias than there is between Catholics and Protestants.
But what happened was that when the United States came in, they ended up abolishing the Iraqi army, which is not just the top officers, you know, many of whom are war criminals that obviously deserve to get sacked and punished or whatever, but, you know, literally a couple million of rank-and-file, you know, soldiers and engineer officers who were part of an institution that long predated Saddam.
We abolished that, and it was replaced by a whole bunch of sectarian militias.
Meanwhile, we went to the bureaucracy, you know, the civil service, and said, okay, if you're a member of the Ba'ath Party, you can't serve.
Well, to be in the civil service, you had to be in the Ba'ath Party, whether or not you supported Saddam.
So they basically eliminated the civil service, and government agencies were replaced by, and this essentially became fiefdoms of various sectarian groups.
And meanwhile, in the beginning of the coalition government, the United States, you know, chose people based on their ethnic sectarian identification and kind of a divide-and-rule strategy, like the French did and the colonial French did in Lebanon, with similar results.
And in a sense, and so meanwhile, because Saddam was so good at oppressing everybody, the only institutions that could survive were those related to the Shia clerics.
Now, one of the differences there are between Sunnis and Shias is that the Shias have a clear hierarchy.
Ayatollahs are sort of the equivalent of cardinals in the Catholic Church, and like cardinals and archbishops, they have a whole network of houses of worship and seminaries and hospitals and schools and things under their tutelage.
So they could mobilize their folks where other elements of civil society could not, and so, surprise, no big surprise, they end up winning the election, especially when U.S. suppression and the Sunni heartland end up having the Sunnis boycotted.
So what happens is you get- Well now, hold on, hold on.
Slow down for just a second.
We're going to have a whole other segment.
I want to let you tell the whole story here, but I want to make sure that people keep up that what happened was these Republicans came in, they abolished the entire state of Iraq, and then they had their plan to replace it, but when the Ayatollah said, hey, everybody, every Shiite Arab, if you believe in God, I want you to go outside and demand one man, one vote, they did, all of them, and the threat was you'll have to start this war all over again against the people who stood by and cheered as you overthrew Saddam.
So you don't want that, do you?
And so, in other words, these Republicans had no idea what they were doing.
They went and invaded this country, and if they had a plan, it was to let everything go to hell, and that worked, but I don't even think they were planning that well.
I mean, I've heard that George Bush didn't even know the difference between Sunni and Shiite until three weeks before the invasion.
So the crazy thing is that the two parties that are dominating the country ever since, the Dawa and the Supreme Council of the Iraqi Revolution, Islamic Revolution in Iraq, for their exile years in Iran.
Right.
Now, hold it right there.
Let everybody chew on that during this very short commercial break.
We'll be right back with Stephen Zunis.
The article is The U.S. Role in Iraq's Upsurge in Violence.
It's at ncronline.com, the National Catholic Report.
It's really good.
Go check it out.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, talking with Stephen Zunis.
This article, his latest in the National Catholic Reporter, is called The U.S.
Role in Iraq's Upsurge in Violence.
And while that's the headline, but it's, you know, the story of how the U.S. invasion of 2003 just sowed widespread chaos.
It's the story of since then, what happened, how it happened, and it's really good.
And where we left off, the American neoconservatives had no idea what the hell they were doing, and neither did their dear leader.
And they blundered into this thing.
And then by January 2005, the Dawah Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, sorry, there was supposed to be an and between those, who had been exiled in Iran for 30 years since Jimmy Carter had Saddam invade them in the first place, had Saddam invade them in the first place.
These were the Iraqi traitors.
These were the guys who came in on the heels of the invasion, and that the Americans put in power.
And so then that brings us up to 2005.
And then so, gee, what was it that got hundreds of thousands of people killed after that, Stephen?
Yeah, well, it was a number of things.
You know, one was that for many Sunni Iraqis, they saw, wow, we have a government now that's made up of our two historic enemies, the Persians and the Iranians, and the West Imperialists, the United States and Britain.
And so there's some extremists among them who then started, you know, attack, well, the Shia population elected these guys there at fault.
And so some of the extremists, the al-Qaeda types, ended up sending up bombs and attacking the Shia civilians.
And then in retaliation, the U.S.-backed government in the manner of El Salvador in the 80s sent all these death squads and started massacring random Sunni men.
And so then people who were not security-oriented ended up embracing some of these militias in self-defense because, you know, the government and the U.S. troops weren't protecting them.
And the thing just kind of spiraled out of control.
So in other words, it's not that they're fighting over their security differences.
And it's kind of like the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
They weren't fighting each other because they were about religion, per se.
It was that the Catholics, for various historical reasons, identified as Irish nationalists, and the Protestants, for various historical reasons, identified as British unionists.
But that didn't stop extremists on both sides from planting bombs in the pubs that were frequented by the other.
So this is kind of what happened in Iraq.
Well, let me stop you there just to emphasize how important that is, that, you know, this theory that it's supposed to be...
I mean, nobody ever proved it, but it's just the assumption underlying so much of the debate about what goes on in the Middle East is that, well, as long as the Shia and the Sunni believe different from each other, they're just going to always keep killing each other over the differences in their beliefs, when that's not what it is.
It's just factions defined by religious beliefs at war.
And so these things, it's always human politics, land and money and power and influence, right?
Exactly.
And it was a classic divide and rule.
And of course, you know, those of us who opposed the invasions warned this could provoke sectarian conflict.
It was a sectarian conflict that then gave the Bush administration the excuse to keep troops in and actually increase troops to troops there.
And of course, that gave even more support to their various sectarian militias.
Now, what's happened more recently is that the U.S.-backed Shia sectarian government, despite being sort of elected, is incredibly corrupt and autocratic.
I mean, they routinely massacre civilians.
In fact, interesting little back story here, what motivated Bradley Manning to release the, you know, to do his WikiLeaks things was when he was ordered to be part of, to support this operation where the U.S. would help the Iraqi police, or Iraqi death squad, basically, massacre or kill a couple journalists who were exposing corruption on the part of the government.
And he was saying, hey, this is really the thing that U.S. troops should be engaged in.
And he was told to shut up about it.
And that's what really finally motivated him to do, to upload all the material and, you know, the rest of history.
But this is the kind of thing that his government's been continuing to do when they had pro-democracy protests and anti-corruption protests.
You know, people have been shot and beaten.
You know, and in fact, the offensive by Al-Qaeda, which took over parts of Ahmadi and still controlled a good chunk of Fallujah, happened right after the Iraqi police and armed forces violently broke up a peaceful protest encampment, killing a number of people.
And this is like the fifth such nonviolent encampment that the regime has attacked and killed people in.
And so they're saying, and of course, that gave emphasis on seeing the government, they're just killed.
If you're peaceful, you have to pick up arms, da, da, da.
And now, of course, the United States is using this as an excuse to increase our military aid to the oppressive Baghdad regime.
And, you know, it is a manifest cycle.
Yeah, well, and they're even going, probably already, they're there training Iraqi soldiers in Jordan, they say, which at least in Jordan.
But man, here we go again, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, Saddam Hussein was incredibly brutal and repressive, but he was pretty much an equal opportunity oppressor, at least among the Arab population.
And, again, this sectarian thing is not something in Iraq history.
It is very much the outgrowth of U.S. policy.
Well, people, I think, you know, they might remember, and it might bother them, that they told us for a year straight, look, we want a regime change, and here's a bunch of excuses, most of them scary weapons that could poison or blow you up to death.
And so you have to let us do this.
It's an emergency.
It's the greatest threat on the face of the planet.
He could give these weapons to terrorists.
And then after two days in Iraq, they says, oh, yeah, no, the reason we're doing this is because Saddam's a torturer and we're liberating the people of Iraq.
And then they got how many hundreds of thousands?
Somewhere between 500,000 and a million people killed, somewhere right around in there, give or take the remainder, because nobody really knows or knows how to count that many dead people.
And all to what?
Give them a regime of torturers.
Great.
Very, very much so.
And also, if I was living in Fallujah and the black flag of al-Qaeda was flying in my neighborhood and those guys were enforcing these draconian laws, you know, I'd want to be liberated.
But on the other hand, we've seen how regimes like that of Iraq and have liberated cities usually by bombing the bejesus out of entire neighborhoods.
Well, that's what's going on right now.
They've made the USA on all the bomb casings and everything else, and they'll just encourage, you know, more radicalism and extremism.
Right.
I mean, at antiwar.com right now, it says news.antiwar.com, Iraq pounds Fallujah with airstrikes, artillery.
Well, yeah, that's a good way to hunt down al-Qaeda, huh?
No, it's in Fallujah, and one reason that the two U.S. assaults in that city were so tragic is that it is, in Iraqi history, it has a strong symbolic importance as a sort of a coming together of the various tribes, of the sense of national identity and the like, and to have that kind of assault on a regime that most people, at least in that part of Iraq, see as illegitimate and, again, backed by the United States.
It's just going to harden attitude.
It's going to make things worse.
Is it too soon to question whether eastern Iraq or, pardon me, western Anbar province Iraq will end up just combining with rebel parts of Syria and we'll have a new Islamo-fascist caliphate there, just like George Bush always wanted or always pretended he was defending us from?
Yeah, I mean, I think most, actually, most of the Arabs, even those who are devoutly religious and even those who are very much opposed to the regime and to U.S. policies, don't identify with al-Qaeda because these guys are just, again, too extreme, too hardcore, you know, apocalyptic in their ideology and in their methods.
But then again, I mean, the government of Baghdad isn't really the government of the Anbar province, is it?
It's just sort of sitting there looking at it.
There are a few people who identify and support it and all the deals that they made, if you lay down your arms and cooperate with us, the Americans will give you a role in government, will give you jobs, incorporate you into the army.
They have fulfilled a few of those things and most of them have not, and so the tribes there are quite bitter.
Meanwhile, you have this porous border with Syria and, in fact, you know, we're really freaked out saying, oh, we must arm the moderate opposition in Syria to counter the extremist opposition.
Well, how did that extremist come about?
There are direct outgrowths of the extremists that were not extremists in Iraq, which did not exist until the U.S. ended up invading and occupying that country.
So again, there would not be such a disproportionate amount of hardline extremists among the Syrian opposition, again, if it weren't for the training and organization and everything that grew out of the U.S. occupation.
Because for a lot of people in the Middle East, but especially these hardline Islamists, they don't recognize these artificial colonial borders that demarcate Iraq and Syria.
They were drawn by the British and French.
They had nothing to do with them or their culture or whatever.
So, you know, if they're, you know, fighting while they see an illegitimate government in Damascus or Baghdad, it doesn't matter to them.
And so, you know, it's all one struggle for them.
And again, so I think the, here's, this is, you know, most of the faults of the horrible things going on in Syria is the Assad regime itself.
Here, too, I think you make a case that the United States has contributed to the carnage and to why it's become such a magnet of the extremists.
And I got the idea that you and I are going to be talking about the consequences of the Iraq war as they play out for years to come, too, Stephen.
It's hardly over yet, but we're all out of time.
Thank you very much for your time today.
Appreciate it.
All right, that is Stephen Zunis from the University of San Francisco.
His article at the National Catholic Reporter is the U.S. role in Iraq's upsurge in violence.
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