07/11/14 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

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Thank you.
All right, well, yeah, so Dar Jamal, oh yeah, it's working, I don't know.
Everybody, introducing Dar Jamal.
He is formerly an unembedded Iraq war reporter, author of Beyond the Green Zone and the Will to Resist, and now he writes primarily about environmental stuff for america.aljazeera.com.
Is there anything important I left out there, Dar?
Yeah, actually no, I don't work for Al Jazeera anymore, I'm writing for truthout.org.
Oh, you know what?
I knew that and forgot it.
Thank you for correcting me on that, truthout.org.
Yeah, and I do have actually a big article I've been working on about the situation in Iraq that we're going to publish both with Truthout and Tom Englehart this coming Tuesday.
Oh, great.
Well, good, that means we can run it as an original on antiwar.com as a Tom article.
Yeah.
Perfect.
Okay, good.
So, yeah, listen, well, tell me all about it.
I don't know where to begin.
There's so much news to cover.
There's larger context to cover.
You can rewind as far back as you want.
You can talk about Dick Cheney's new article in the Weekly Standard.
Say whatever you want about Iraq, Dar.
Go ahead.
I know, throw a dart, right?
Well, clearly the big news today is really the Kurds, the opportunistic Kurds taking full advantage of the situation, taking control of two more of Iraq's oil fields, and of course the assault against them in Baghdad by Maliki continues, which is of course worsening the situation and I'm sure spurring the Kurds to even just take it further.
The Maliki regime, this just came out, that they are replacing Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Sabari, because he's Kurdish.
I mean, apparently that's the most likely reason.
So he's being removed and of course we saw Maliki recently accused the Kurds of working in tandem with ISIS and collaborating with them.
So it's a full-on war.
On that last point, Dar, is that just a talking point or do you think there's something to that?
I mean, they certainly took advantage of the situation to go ahead and lock down Kirkuk finally, right?
Yeah, they certainly took advantage of the situation.
I don't think there's anything behind it.
I think it's Maliki just basically being embattled and behaving accordingly and making threats that of course he can't back up because he basically doesn't have a functional military.
So it's just part and parcel of the internal political disaster that is Iraq.
I mean, people wondering, well, why is the Iraqi government dithering while the country's literally in a state of full-on disintegration?
Less than a week ago, they had announced they were going to take a five-week break in parliament before they met again and then probably under intense U.S. pressure, among other sources of pressure, decided, okay, we're going to meet again in just a few more days from today.
And so it's in a state of total meltdown.
But as I think we've talked about this years ago, Scott, is when the U.S. set up this government and this parliamentary system, they set it up so that it really couldn't be truly united and really have an Iraq that would stand on its own.
Because the first thing that would happen if we had a real democratic government reflective of the will of the majority of the Iraqi people, all ties with the U.S. would be immediately cut for the disaster they created.
So they set up a quizzling government that is doing exactly what it can do today, which is just fight amongst itself and disintegrate.
And the more pressure you apply internally and externally to what's going on in the country, the less effective that government becomes.
And that's why we see them being completely ineffective.
And then one of the offshoots of that is who in the military is going to fight for a government that can't even meet in the same room together, let alone pretend to reflect the will of the Iraqi people?
It's just not going to happen.
Yeah.
Well, and so is Maliki just lashing out at this point?
I mean, it seems like I'm trying to pretend I'm him for a minute.
Go ahead and deal with ISIS first.
It's been the Shia Kurdish coalition against the Sunnis all along.
You would think that it would be even more so now that the enemy is this Baghdadi guy rather than their local tribal chiefs they're used to dealing with, right?
Why would he be so insistent on picking a fight with the Kurds now?
I guess they're insistent that he leaves, so that could be part of it.
Yeah, it's all of the above.
I mean, it's certainly the Kurds are coming after him because they've been at odds for years.
You talked a little bit last week on your show about how it was just a few years ago that Maliki rolled a lot of the Iraqi army up to the border of Kurdistan and threatened to invade when the Kurds were starting to make some of their initial moves, making their oil deals independent of Baghdad.
And so they make their moves, Maliki responds with threats and other overt gestures, and then that makes things worse.
And so it goes, chicken or the egg, who started it, whatever, it doesn't even matter at this point.
So you've got basically an internal war politically between Maliki and the Kurds, and at this point basically between Maliki and everyone else, and he's under intense pressure to step aside.
Sistani has basically called for him to step aside, which basically in Iraq, if you're a Shia, is an edict from God.
Not even to talk about the intense pressure he's under now, even from D.C.
So he's embattled and he's in a corner, he's like a wolverine in a corner, and he's lashing out at anybody and anything that he perceives as a threat, which is just about everybody at this point.
Well, and you know, I guess it took a while for me to really get this through my head, Dar, but from what I understand from talking with Patrick Coburn and Mitchell Prothero, there really is no Iraqi army.
I mean, he has his special forces, wolf brigade, SWAT teams, special forces teams that America made for him there that are directly answerable to him.
But I guess I just kind of imagined in my mind's eye that, of course, they fell back from Mosul into Crete and the predominantly Sunni cities where they didn't really have any support.
You know, they fell back to Shia controlled territory, but no, they kept falling back and falling back until they didn't exist anymore.
There is no Iraqi army anymore.
It's just the Shiite militias.
Is that your understanding of this?
Yeah, that's what I'm seeing, too, which is a huge problem.
I mean, as Iraq, I mean, we could say it's in a descent into sectarianism, but we're so far down into that descent already that makes it sound as though it's in the future when it's not.
Yeah, but it does make it that much harder to compromise later when it's the Saudi and Baatar doing the fighting for the Shia makes it, you know, they are sectarian militias by definition.
And so, you know, it makes the war a sectarian war.
But at least if it's the Iraqi army, you could pretend that someday this could be, you know, we'll finally meet those benchmarks of 2007 and integrate the Sunnis into it.
There ain't no integrating the Sunnis into the Baatar Brigade.
That's exactly right.
No, all that is spot on.
I totally agree with it.
And that's that's what I'm seeing.
And that's what I'm hearing from my sources in Baghdad, Fallujah, etc.
And of course, all of that is only making the situation worse because it's all these same militias that were the U.S. brought into Fallujah during to doing the mopping up after the 2004 sieges and left these guys in control of Fallujah to go in and do home raids and carry out other horrible things for the so-called government.
And so it's it's just more fuel on the fire.
And at the end of the day, you know, I mean, I one of the one of the voices I include in this article I have coming out next week is a contact of mine in Baghdad who is a guy who is he and his wife and their small children live in a predominantly Sunni area of Baghdad.
And he's like, look, we're terrified.
This is worse than we've seen ever, even worse than the 2006 2007 sectarian bloodletting.
And we just don't know what to do.
You know, we're going to pick it up right there on the other side of this break.
It's the heroic Darja Mail, everybody talking about the sad situation in Iraq.
Give us four minutes.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Darja Mail.
He's got a new one coming out for Truthout.org about Iraq.
I'm looking at one from Hannah Alam in McClatchy Newspapers today, Sunnis sending their sons abroad as fear of sectarian killings escalates in Baghdad.
We say 85% Shiite city now, thanks to George W. Bush and the U.S. Army, Marine Corps and Air Force and Navy and CIA and Blackwater.
But that still means there's 15% Sunnis here, there and in isolated neighborhoods in and around Baghdad.
And that was where we ended at the break.
You're saying that some of your sources are telling you the level of the climate of fear is worse than 2006.
How could that even be?
That's right.
Because he said what he's seeing there on the ground right now is, quote unquote, government forces, you know, in the quotes, because of how we defined them earlier in the program, the quote unquote government slash Shia militia forces are going around into Sunni neighborhoods now and carrying out large amounts of home raids, as they did back in 06 and 07.
And then in the days following these home raids, the people that go missing are turning up in various Baghdad morgues or not turning up at all.
So this is this is part and parcel to what we saw in 06 and 07 minus.
Maybe they're not piling the heads or body parts in the streets as terrorism, but they're just either being disappeared or just straight out killed and the bodies are being dumped off at the morgue.
So that's happening.
And he said, what's what we're also seeing is people are in a panic and people just want out of Baghdad.
Obviously, seeing this going on, you know, you don't know when your house is going to be next.
So they just want to get the hell out.
So but they don't know where to go because there's fighting literally all to the east, west and north of Baghdad.
And of course, if you go south, you're going straight down into where the Shia militias are in in total control of everything.
So he said, we don't know where to go.
And even if we did to try to get even a bus ticket, there's a month long waits now to get bus tickets that are now so expensive that half the people can't afford them anyway.
And he said, that's that's the situation.
They're literally living in these various enclaves of Baghdad, terrified.
Man.
Well, and I guess the same is probably true for the Shia up in Mosul and and wherever else, too.
And again, the legacy of Bush's invasion.
One thing about ISIS, according to Patrick Coburn, the way he puts it, I don't see anybody else really emphasizing this that much, although maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.
But Coburn says that to ISIS, the Shia occupy the same place that Jews did to the fascists of Europe in the 30s.
They are the ultimate scapegoat, blasphemer, enemy, internal enemy, external whatever.
Kill them all.
All of them.
America versus the red Indian style.
They're the only good.
She is a dead Shia, the worst, absolute worst sort of chauvinism against the Shia.
And that there's basically just no stopping their willingness to wage that eternal civil war.
And after all, the Shia are the majority in Iraq.
But what Iraq?
There is no Iraq.
They're the minority in the Arab lands of Mesopotamia, the Levant, Arabia, where Arabs live.
That's right.
And I think on that note, I'm glad you bring that up, because it isn't just the Sunni that are suffering in this whole disaster, that the Shia in the cities that have been taken over are being killed, disappeared, mosques are being destroyed, shrines are being destroyed.
This is happening every day now.
And meanwhile, ISIS is consolidating control of many of the areas where it has taken over.
So this is setting in.
And it's looking like nothing, you know, drones, as we know, air power isn't going to get the job done.
Apache attack helicopters, drones, Hellfire missiles.
This only makes things worse and gives them more power on the ground.
We saw that all through the occupation of Iraq with the U.S. and the Iraqi resistance.
Meanwhile, ISIS is now in control of at least 60 percent of Syrian oil.
This just came out, published in Asharq al-Assad today, that they're consolidating control big time in Syria.
So we're looking at funding that is increasing, and they're literally being able to set up the way things are looking, this caliphate.
And I bring up the air power farce, because what's going to destabilize them?
What's going to push them back from wherever they came from?
Meanwhile, it's certainly looking like nothing short of a full-scale ground war is going to get the job done.
And who's going to do that?
You know, literally, that's an open-ended question.
Who's going to do that?
Clearly, it's not going to be the so-called Iraqi army.
Clearly, politically, the U.S., would they be able to send in tens of thousands of troops to go do this?
Politically, I can't see that happening, just as the 2016 presidential campaign is going to start cranking up this fall.
Or maybe it will.
I don't know, Scott.
I mean, what would you think about that?
Well, I mean, go down the list, you know, Margulies was ticking off all the enemies, all the Sunni states, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi, they're scared to death of ISIS, right?
The people, you know, may have some sympathy for them, but the government sure as hell don't.
Turkey's, you know, Nusra is one thing, ISIS is, you know, too much for the Turks to handle.
Obviously, Assad hates them.
Maliki hates them.
Iran hates them.
Out of all of those, who can field an army against them?
You said it, USA.
And you know, I'm a thousand percent against it, and I think if you just think ahead for a second, you know that anything bad happens to the caliphate that they can blame on America, that just diverts all of their attention from their failed attempt at creating a state into coming here to attack the civilians, as bin Laden put it, that pay the taxes that support the government that did it to them.
It's like got us all in this trouble in the first place, but I mean, I don't know if the American people through their Congress can stop this president or the next one from going in there full scale again to go to war against bin Laden, Stan or whatever there, I guess I would be amazed.
I mean, to me, and this is what I've been saying for months now, is that just play the thought experiment out, pretend what you said, we don't know for sure yet, right?
But pretend what you said is absolute fact that like, yeah, man, they're pumping oil.
They're going to build a bigger and bigger army.
They're going to hire more and more bureaucrats to deliver electricity and water to the people and provide security.
And they're going to concentrate so hard on building their state.
It's going to be successful unless somebody stops them.
Who's got the Marines to stop them other than America that's got an unlimited supply of Marines for just such a thing and try to do the Anbar awakening again or whatever it is.
And I just don't see a way around it.
And in fact, I don't think it's going to wait for Hillary or Jeb or Rand.
I think it'll be Obama that does it.
I just can't imagine they can wait this long with an actual bin Laden stand there.
And boy, I hope I'm wrong about that.
I don't want it to be.
I'll do anything I can to try to change it.
But that's why you're here on the show right now, Dar.
But that's what we're headed toward.
Right.
I mean, otherwise, like you said, who else is going to feel the army to stop them?
And how can they politically?
I mean, is it really worse politically to send troops there than to just let it be over the long term?
I don't know.
I just can't see it that way.
Yeah, I don't see it is it's it's of course, you know, all of this is with the caveat of how dynamic the situation is, how quickly it's changing on a daily basis.
Like I was saying, assuming that this is the beginning of their success, you know, something's got to be done according to all conventional wisdom.
Anyway, let me keep you another segment here because I talked way too much and I want to ask you more.
Is that all right?
Yeah, sure thing, Scott.
OK, great.
Hey, it's the heroic Dar Jamal, author beyond the green zone and the will to resist.
He's at truthout.org.
Hang tight.
Hey, all.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
OK, I'm on the line with the heroic Dar Jamal, former unembedded reporter from the Iraq war.
Now back on the beat for truthout.org.
So I was just going off about how, man, I don't know what in the world can possibly stop America from invading ISIS land over here.
And yet, actually, I have the best argument against what I just said, Dar, that I want to play for you real quick.
The whole clip is three minutes and 45 seconds.
We're not going to play that much of it, but I want you to hear this.
It's Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States up through last October, I believe.
And Jeffrey Goldberg, former prison guard in the occupied territories and writer for the Atlantic who helped lie into war at the New Yorker back in 02.
And anyway, so here they are talking about the current Sunni Shia civil war split.
And then I will finally shut up and let Dar Jamal have your ear for a second here.
It's Michael Oren and Jeffrey Goldberg.
If Maliki doesn't stay in there for another couple more weeks, what do you think your country is doing in order to protect your interests?
And how are you working to align with other partners?
All right, remember, keep in mind, I don't speak for the government anymore.
I'm speaking for me and Jeff.
No, you're not.
And what I'm going to say is harsh, perhaps a little edgy.
But if we have to choose the lesser of evils here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shias.
You're not speaking for me.
Okay.
It's a lesser evil.
It's an evil, believe me.
It's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 700, 700 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against the proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just, you know, do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets, the other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, you know, if someone's got to, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, you know, let the Sunni evil prevail.
And again, I'm speaking entirely for myself.
But from the Israeli perspective, I mean, my own view, there you have it.
Between Al Qaeda, you know, the butchers of New York and Iran and or Iraq and or Syria and or Hezbollah, all of whom are friends with Iran, which is Israel's nuisance, I guess not really enemy, but problem that they've made for themselves, at least the West ought to prioritize the war against Iran, not against Al Qaeda.
And you see Goldberg saying, hey, don't put those words in my mouth.
But it sure seems to me like if there's one thing that is keeping us from going to full scale war against the Islamic State, it's that three quarters of D.C. are all traitors who put Israel first and Israel still prefers war for the Bin Laden nights against the likes of Assad and Hezbollah.
What do you think, Dar?
It's an interest.
It's an interesting point.
I mean, it could possibly explain as to why the U.S. hasn't rushed in there and started sending a lot more troops and preparing for the ground war that would be necessary to destabilize ISIS in both Iraq and Syria.
But it's I don't know.
I mean, at the same time, I just saw that Israel has accused ISIS of being in Gaza and firing rockets into Israel from there.
So, you know, the demonization continues.
But it's you know, the thing is, what makes this so interesting to me now is the total incoherence of really most governments will namely the U.S. about how to deal with it and where they stand.
They have literally created the nightmare that was fabricated by the Bush administration.
One of them, one of the nightmares used to justify the the invasion and occupation.
And now, hey, here it is.
This exists.
I mean, Bush, I'm sure, and his cronies would have been praying for this to exist in reality before the invasion took place.
And now here it is in the U.S. because of the failure, the abject failure of the invasion and occupation are really over the barrel when it comes to how are they going to deal with this?
What are they going to do?really among the vast majority of the American public for going back in there?
And what are but but at the same time, something does have to be done.
Are they going to just let this exist?
I mean, it's I can't see that as a viable option anywhere.
So something is going to have to be done.
But what is it?
Because I certainly wouldn't support U.S. troops going back in to do this.
And but what is what is going to happen?
That really is the question.
And the reality is for the Iraqi people attacking ISIS and going in there is going to make them strong if that was the course the U.S. was going to choose.
It's going to feed them.
It's going to draw in more recruits just like because, you know, one could, I think, even possibly argue ISIS exists as a result of U.S. presence in Iraq over all those years and the brutality that was meted out throughout the occupation.
So it is a world class conundrum.
And I don't know that I have any answers really to date beyond the U.S.
The first step should be is stop fueling the fire of dumping money and arms into rebels in Syria, because, of course, ISIS is getting strength from that.
And certainly Maliki, who never should have been brought into power in the first place, has to go.
So those are the two the two steps, I think, that at least could be done not to necessarily solve the problem, but at least to mitigate it somewhat.
Yeah, although.
All right, so now on the question of replacing Maliki, we got all of we we got Chalabi and, you know, I don't know if you saw the thing by Spencer Ackerman yesterday, who said Chalabi's primary sponsor in Baghdad.
This is no surprise, but I don't know if you saw is General Soleimani of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
He's backing Chalabi, I guess supposedly even more than he's backing Ahmadi from the Supreme Islamic Council.
But anyway, any of these guys, Mahdi, Alawi, this, that, he and the others, which of any of them all combined together could ever reach the benchmarks of 07 that they never could reach back then and say to the Sunni tribes, listen, we're going to share with you so much power that you'll be happy to turn on ISIS and get rid of them and reconstitute the state formerly known as Iraq.
I mean, we're way off into fantasy land here thinking that they can that anybody could reunite Iraq at this point.
Am I crazy?
Maybe I'm the one who don't know.
No.
Yeah.
All of that is, you know, I'm just thinking of a multiple choice test question.
You know, is there F none of the above?
I mean, it's there are no good replacements.
I mean, certainly it's a positive gesture to get rid of Maliki.
That would certainly not hurt.
This guy is is a despot.
He's been out of control from day one.
And certainly the all the Sunnis want him gone.
But but, you know, what is the replacement?
I mean, again, I don't I don't have an answer to this.
I mean, he has to go.
But what are you going to replace him with?
Any of the people you just mentioned?
Resounding hell, no.
I mean, all of them would be different kinds of just basically different flavor for disasters.
I mean, it seems like there was a time where, you know, regardless of all the horror that had taken place or whatever, where maybe putting all of we back in could have led to enough reconciliation, sharing a power, something as crazy as that sounds, a Shiite Baathist who used to work for Saddam and then for the CIA and was the sock puppet dictator for a year under Bremer and all of that or after Bremer, supposedly all that.
But it did seem like he sort of was able to form some kind of consensus, but he wasn't able to form enough consensus to actually get the chair.
So he never got a chance to try.
But when they say maybe Chalabi could get it done.
I love this.
Paul Wolfowitz is in Bloomberg News saying, you know, after everything and I disapprove of his ties with Iran, but I think Chalabi still might be the best option we have.
And then it comes out the next day.
Yeah, it's General Soleimani of the Quds Force who's backing Chalabi.
This guy, Wolfowitz, man, he can't stop getting it wrong about this guy.
Well, of course, of course, the neocons are going to back Chalabi.
I mean, he was their man from the beginning and he's still the one guy in there, I'm sure, willing to play ball with him where where everyone else wouldn't.
So, of course, they're going to stick with him.
But another point about Alawi and I absolutely in no way support this guy whatsoever.
He is nothing more than a sock puppet.
But it is also important to note that in the first election against Maliki, Alawi actually beat him.
Actually, he actually had more votes, but it was because of the U.S. insistence that Maliki stayed in.
All right.
Well, listen, I've already kept you over time.
Thanks so much.
And I'll look forward.
Make sure I'm on your mailing list or whatever it is, and then I get your new article when it hits Truthout.org, would you, Dar?
Will do, Scott.
Thanks for having me, man.
I sure appreciate it.
Everybody, that's the heroic Dar Jamalius at Truthout.org.
He wrote Beyond the Green Zone and the Will to Resist.
And we'll be right back.
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