All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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Hey, guys, on the line, I've got our old friend, Stephen Zunas, this time writing for truthout.org.
Welcome back to the show, Stephen.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you again.
Well, man, I just want to talk with you about this great article about Iraq War II and who all's fault it is.
Oh, let me introduce you properly.
Stephen Zunas is a professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
That's who he is.
And this article at truthout is called Today's US-Iran Crisis is Rooted in the Decision to Invade Iraq.
And I like how you go ahead and say, and link to your article from 2002 saying, here's why not to do this.
Those of us who oppose, we told you so, and you did tell them so.
You didn't just say, hey, I don't know, guys, about, mm-hmm.
You had very specific ideas about what might happen if they launched this war.
Yeah.
I mean, so did 90% of the country's Middle East scholars.
I mean, seriously, it was so obvious what was going to happen, that even though most Iraqis didn't like Saddam Hussein, they didn't want to be occupied by a foreign Western government, that there'd be sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shias.
There'd be a rise of Salafist extremism and terrorism, which is exactly what we got with ISIS.
ISIS, of course, is a direct outgrowth of the invasion.
There would have been no ISIS without invasion.
These are the people we were torturing in the prisons and that kind of thing, who got radicalized.
We predicted years of bloody counterinsurgency war, we predicted regional instability, and we predicted a greater Iranian influence, because Saddam was fanatically anti-Iranian.
I mean, he hated the Iranians even more than he did Kurds and Jews and Westerners.
I mean, he really hated Iranians.
And so what happens is this.
We end up abolishing the two bastions of secular nationalism in that country, the armed forces and the civil service.
They become these victims of sectarian groups.
I mean, the Iraqi army, the new Iraqi army that the U.S. helped form, the biggest original base was from the Badr Corps, which was the militia, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which Iran recognized as the government of exile under Saddam.
The Badr Corps actually found it and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
They fought on Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq war.
And so the U.S. says, oh, these guys are anti-Saddam and anti-Sunni, so they can be our good allies in supporting and suppressing these rebels.
But of course, they end up, and then similar Shia militias, bring in all these Iranian Revolutionary Guard to continue their training and support.
The Sunnis get resentful that you're having people who fought for the other side in the Iran-Iraq war now running the country and collaborating with the Americans.
You get some Sunni extremists start killing random Shias, the Shias then start killing random Sunnis.
And, hey, this is not an issue of, oh, ancient hatred suddenly rises to the fore and Saddam is gone.
No.
Sunnis and Shias have lived in peace for centuries.
I mean, it's like Catholics and Protestants.
Yeah, they were killing each other in Europe like crazy several centuries ago, but with the—except for a short period in Northern Ireland, you didn't see that kind of thing going on since then.
And similarly, it was not ancient hatred that did this.
The U.S. deliberately did this divide-and-rule kind of policy, which then led to the Iranian influence.
And now we're using the Iranian influence, saying, oh, this is why we have to stay in Iraq.
We have to fight the Iranian influence.
What's wrong with the Iranian influence?
Well, they might attack U.S. soldiers who are in Iraq to fight the Iranian influence.
It becomes this kind of circular logic that keeps us in perpetual war.
Yeah, man.
See everybody?
Isn't that exactly what I told you?
I'm just kidding.
You're one of the guys who was right all along, you know, before, and all along too, and cared all along, and paid attention all along, and remembers the names and why it matters, who's Badr and who's Sadr over there.
And there's very few, you know, unfortunately, who still have the right, you know, the frame of reference, I guess, for who's who and why it matters.
So something that's been going on that, if you watch any TV during the recent Iran crisis, you could see, especially on Fox, but I'm sure on the rest of them too, I was watching Fox.
And the narrative there was, yeah, we fought the Iran-backed Shia in Iraq war too.
And then they just don't mention the Sunni insurgency at all.
They don't mention that 4,000 of our guys died fighting the Sunni insurgency for the Shiite militias and with the Shiite militias.
Right.
Exactly.
And the U.S., and just as recently as a few months ago, the U.S. is providing direct air support for the Shia militia when they're battling ISIS.
And but, you know, here's the other thing, that it was the Baathist and the Sunni tribesmen and the Salafists, hardcore Salafists, these guys, all of whom are anti-Iranian.
They were responsible for 90% of U.S. casualties during the height of the U.S. military involvement.
And we're starting to hear this line that, oh, the Iranians are responsible for hundreds of American deaths.
Well, where does that come from?
Well, actually, this is where there's hundreds of American deaths figure.
Well, I did a little research.
It came out in 2007 when the Bush administration started claiming that Iran, it was Iran that was actually behind the killing of Americans.
And how?
Well, they had these sophisticated roadside bombs that Iraq isn't technologically advanced enough to make, so they have to be Iranian.
And I thought, hey, wait a minute.
Just a couple of years ago, you were saying Iraq was so sophisticated technologically, they could build an atomic bomb, they could build these long-range missiles, and they were such a threat, we therefore had to invade.
And now you're saying they're not even advanced enough to build a roadside bomb?
And, indeed, the national security estimate that came out at the very time the Bush people were talking about this in 2007 said that Iran was not that big a player in the insurgency.
Yeah, they're trying to jockey for position influencing the government, but in terms of attacking the U.S., no.
And yet, so here comes Trump all these years later, 12 years later, and suddenly starts reviving this long-discredited claim by the Bush administration, and the mainstream media and leading Democrats, even those who oppose Trump's posturing and warmongering and get us to wrinkle war, even those who are criticizing him, have blindly accepted this idea that Iran was behind the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
And I'm really yet to see any evidence that that's actually the case.
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Hey y'all, Scott here.
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But see, there's something very important going on.
In that whole part of the surge against the Shia, who were making and using their own roadside bombs there, as was proven completely at the time, and I just talked with Matthew Ho about this.
He was sitting on top of all the intelligence behind the scenes.
He knew it for a fact too, 100%.
But at the same time, what was really going on was they were helping the Shiites, and the Sadrists are, to this day, the most important faction in the parliament of all the Shiite different alliances there.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they are.
And they were fighting for him and his alliance to help finish the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad, to kick all the Sunnis out and make it 85%, 90% Shiite city.
And this is so important because, and it's funny in the narrative too, that it was Donald Rumsfeld who was saying, man, we ought to go ahead and get out now.
And he put it, it's very patronizing and condescending, but he says, we got to take the training wheels off this democracy.
If they're going to work it out, we got to let them work it out.
And the thing is, take the cynicism out of it.
That was really exactly right.
But what Bush did was he fired Rumsfeld and brought in Gates and Petraeus and launched the surge instead.
And what that did was it helped the Shiites complete their victory.
So that now, with American assistance, of course, the whole time.
And so now they were deprived of their last incentive to negotiate and compromise with the Sunnis at all.
And now it was, well, we got all the oil up near Kirkuk and down near Basra and we got the capital city and so screw you guys.
And that was why they were so open to the takeover by the Islamic State after the Obama government helped build them up in Syria and they invaded in 2014 because the Maliki government had succeeded.
Bush had succeeded in helping Maliki complete the Iranian plan for Iraq, which was, let's just get the capital city and break off Shiastan and let the Sunnis burn in the sun, right?
Yeah.
The Sunnis were so turned off and so disgusted that they're even willing to welcome ISIS because of their oppression that was coming down from the U.S.-backed Baghdad government.
I mean, but I think it's also important to point out, though, that the biggest division in Iraq among the Iraqi Arabs is not Sunni versus Shia.
It's nationalists and sectarians within both communities.
And especially the younger people, the younger people who've been out on the street protesting the Iraqi government there, they're saying, like the young people in Lebanon, they're saying, we're tired of these sectarian divisions who are putting your narrow parochial interest above that of ordinary people.
We're tired of making it the fiefdoms of these various sectarian groups, which encourages corruption and screws the ordinary person, especially young people who are suffering from chronic unemployment and everything else.
And these are the people who have been out on the street in the U.S. and Iranian-backed government.
And here's the irony, where both of us are supporting the Iraqi regime, are gunning down these protesters in the street.
You know, and again, I really want listeners to understand that being Sunni versus being Shia in Iraq historically was not that big a deal.
It was like being Catholic and Protestant, you know, intermarriage wasn't unusual.
And certain mosques in small towns, there's only one mosque, Sunnis and Shias worship together.
It was not that big a deal.
The U.S. made it a big deal.
We encourage this division as part of divide and rule.
And yes, you have the Iranians who are encouraging this division.
You're having some Saudis are coming, encouraging this division.
But you know, the majority of Iraqis at this point are really sick and tired of this kind of thing.
They don't want Iran there.
They don't want the United States there.
In fact, the Iraqi parliament explicitly said U.S. troops get out of Iraq.
And Trump is saying, oh, no, we're not going to take our troops out.
We're not even going to talk about getting our troops out.
We're going to remain too bad.
I mean, that is an occupation.
That is illegal.
And what really upset me about the recent Democratic debate was they asked people about should we keep troops in Iraq?
And none of the journalists and virtually none of the candidates said, hey, we have no legal right to keep our troops and set up our bases in countries whether people want them there or not.
Well, and, you know, it's really important, too, that, you know, the way the situation is there, as you said, we have our, what, 5,000 or 6,000 guys there that they say are there working with these Shiites against the Islamic State, fighting Iraq War III still, Iraq War III and a half, I guess, against what's left of the Islamic State there.
And if this whole thing were to really turn around into a war against the people we put in power so far, then our guys would lose in an afternoon.
Very much so.
I mean, the, I mean, legally- I guess they could run to Kurdistan, but they'd be in danger.
Exactly.
We are, here we have a Shiite-dominated government that the U.S. has been working with for many, many years that don't want us there anymore.
I mean, ISIS, and there's still ISIS cells operating in Iraq, like there are in quite a few other countries, but they don't control territory anymore.
The government there believes they can fight them on their own, and they want the United States out.
They don't like the fact that they assassinated a foreign general who was about to visit the prime minister on their own soil.
They don't like the fact that they bombed some of the Shia militia, which are technically part of the Iraqi army, and they really want U.S. forces out of there.
And yet, by saying the no, we're saying Trump is making our soldiers vulnerable.
And you know darn well, if American soldiers get killed, and he blames the Iranian militia, he's going to use this as an excuse to start some kind of war, all-out war with Iran.
I mean, people say, people are saying, oh, this is a hair-trigger situation, this is dangerous.
You bet it's a hair-trigger situation.
In fact, that's why I think he's doing it.
He wants to create a hair-trigger situation that will create a crisis that will get us into a war.
Yeah, I don't think that's really the angle, but it certainly is a danger.
But you know, check this out.
I want to see, I wanted to ask you if you'd seen this.
It's in the Middle East Eye from yesterday, I guess.
U.S. seeking to carve out Sunni state as its influence in Iraq wanes.
And then there was another one, U.S. commander, this is at news.antiwar.com, Jason Ditz, U.S. commander, troops in Iraq face more threats from Shiites than from ISIS.
And so, you know, we were talking about how there really has been since as a result of Iraq War II, and then especially since Iraq War III, or I don't know about that, but certainly during Iraq War III, there's this major division between the predominantly Sunni areas, west and northwest of Baghdad, and the predominant Shia stand in alliance with the Kurds in the north there, in the south and east.
The younger people are challenging this.
The younger people, you're having Sunnis and Shias demonstrating together saying, we're tired of this divide and rule.
But if this article is correct that you pointed out, the United States wants divide and rule.
That's been our goal from the beginning.
Indeed, it's been a bipartisan thing.
I mean, Joe Biden, when he was senator, really pushed this effort to formally divide Iraq into three.
And those of us familiar with Iraq are saying, oh, that's going to make things even worse.
The ethnic cleansing will get even more extreme.
There are quite a few minorities.
I mean, Yazidis and Aramean Christians and Turkmen and other minority groups that are none of the above, who would be squeezed and this kind of thing.
And most Iraqis don't want that.
It was, I mean, but it just shows how ridiculous this bipartisan effort is, is to divide people.
Because Iraq, you know, was historically a real center of Arab nationalism.
It was a center of saying, hey, we don't want outsiders interfering with our country.
And you know, I mean, a third of the top people in Saddam's government were Shias.
You know, his vice president was a Christian, his foreign minister was a Christian.
I mean, it was, I mean, yeah, it was a horrible, repressive regime, but it was secular.
It was not one that was in on these kind of sectarian divisions.
And that's what was, that's what the United States didn't like, because the more unified country is, the less likely we're able to control it.
Well, and the joke here, though, is if you're going to divide and rule, you've got to back the minorities so that they need you.
Instead, Bush put the super majority in power who are allies with the country next door, who don't need us at all.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And, you know, the Iranians really are throwing their weight around.
Soleimani really was, may not have been responsible for killing hundreds of Americans, but he was a pretty, pretty nasty dude, no two ways about it.
But the point being is that it was U.S. policy that gave him any influence in Iraq in the first place.
Yeah.
By the way, you know, so I'm writing this book, this never-ending project to write this book about the terror wars, and I was looking up the hoax about the fake assassination attempt against Bush Sr. in 1993, and how then in response, Bill Clinton had fired these cruise missiles into Baghdad.
There's a great Bill Hicks joke about this and everything, by the way.
But one of the things that I didn't know was that they had killed, supposedly one of the Tomahawk missiles just went off course and hit this house.
One of the civilians that they killed, there was eight civilians died, and one of them was this famous Iraqi artist, Leila something or other.
Yeah, she was the top female artist in the country at the time.
And she was like the director of the museum.
And then they show all the pictures of her, and there she is, she's got no headscarf, she's wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt, and she's like a feminist modern artist and all of this stuff.
She's the director of the National Museum, and I'm not saying that's my highest set of values in life, but the secular and the free, do what you want part is, whatever it is you want is certainly, and this really was, I guess other than Egypt, or I don't know, I've never been to Egypt or Jordan, or I've never been to Syria or any of these, but it was right up there certainly with the most sophisticated and westernized of the Arab states.
They talk about it like it was Afghanistan, and these guys are all the Taliban living in the town of Bedrock or whatever.
Yeah, and there's a famous case of an American going in to a group of women, Iraqi women, right after Saddam was thrown out and saying, you're free now, you can do whatever you want, you can have education, and the women started looking at each other.
Half of them were PhDs, half of them were PhDs already, you know, and here's this American dude talking his real condescending kind of language, you know.
And you know, Iraq also had the best engineers and technical people in the Middle East, and yet the U.S. insisted on bringing Halliburton in to get these high-priced western consultants.
They also brought in the very super cheap labor from Bangladesh and Nepal and things like that, so you've got all these unemployed Iraqis who end up being, you know, totally upset at the United States and blaming them.
I mean, it was so clear the United States didn't know what the hell we were doing.
At the height of the U.S. presence, our embassy, the largest in the world, thousands of employees working there, there were only eight people who spoke fluent Arabic.
Only eight.
Because the Bush administration saw anybody who knows anything about Iraq might get in the way of the way we want to rebuild it, and so, you know, they might have dual loyalties or something.
So we have, you know, we've got to bring in our people here.
And the instruction, you know, when they interviewed people for these positions, I mean, there's this one kid, 23 years old, who was in charge of this multimillion-dollar budget, and he was ordering all these people around, and his one qualification was he was head of college Republicans at Virginia Commonwealth University.
I know some people who interviewed for positions in the U.S. authority there, and one of the first questions they asked them is, what is your opinion of Roe versus Wade?
I mean, you know, decent people, you know, reasonable people could disagree about abortion, but you know, what in the hell does that have to do with reconstruction work in Iraq?
I mean, it became an ideological thing, and not one for people who really actually knew about what it would take to rebuild a country.
And this, again, there are all these incredible stories like this that got us into this mess, because we arrogantly thought we could rebuild a country, and we set up these very sectarian divisions and conflicts that we're now using as an excuse to continue fighting there.
Yeah, which, by the way, you know, if they really are serious about carving out this Western Iraqi Sunni-stan, that ain't going to work.
I mean, if they want to be in Kurdistan, at least they've got the mountains, and that's sort of, you know, I don't know.
But just saying, what are they going to do?
They're going to build a bunch of bases out there west of Fallujah, and just try to hold that?
And then, what is that going to do, other than continue to generate Islamic State, Al-Qaeda in Iraq type fighter-led insurgency against them forever, just like it was before?
Who do they think they're going to ally with?
The Ba'athists, or the tribal leaders, are going to, and they're just going to, and they say in here, and of course, this is the whole thing, well, we can't have a land bridge to Beirut, a road.
And since Bush turned Baghdad over to the Shia, now there's a question of the Iranians being able to ship their missiles right to Hezbollah, you know, Amazon Prime, and, you know, too quickly, or something, I don't know.
They can just fly them there in airplanes anyway, I don't know what difference it makes.
But they say that this is the purpose of this, and you could see, you know, that's their problem is, they're mad that they fought Iraq War II and Iraq War III for the Shia, for the Iranian crescent of power, or whatever they say.
And so, you know, they're desperate to try to figure out something to do, but it seems like this is a really kind of harebrained thing to do.
This isn't going to work.
They're not going to be welcome anywhere near Mosul and Fallujah to set up some permanent bases there.
I'm not even sure if they can in Kurdistan.
I guess they can in Kurdistan, maybe, right?
Yeah, and the Kurds are the only people there who are not, who don't hate us at this point.
Did you see where Trump was talking to Barzani and said, yeah, hey, you SDF guys are doing a great job in Syria, and had no idea the difference between the Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish groups?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, they really don't know what they're doing, and that's what's really, that's what's really scary.
Yeah, man.
Yeah, it's a lot of power to have.
But, you know, again, just going back to my original article, and I really think it's important to underscore.
I mean, it's very easy to criticize Trump for the mess he's making over there, but it's also important to remember that we would not be in that mess were it not for the invasion of Iraq, that this is a direct and very predictable outgrowth of the invasion, and it's particularly important when Joe Biden, for some reason I can't possibly understand, is still a leading contender for the Democratic nomination, that someone who played such a key role as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who refused to allow me, Scott Ritter, David Cartwright, Phyllis Bennis, and other war critics from testifying, he stacked the committee hearings for pro-war people.
He only allowed for a day and a half worth of hearings on the most important foreign policy decision of a generation, who really pushed this divide and rule thing around Sunnis and Shias, who despite his claims to the contrary, supported the decision to invade even after the inspectors were back in, that the Iraq authorization of the use of military force was an authorization used to military force, it was not to get the inspectors back in like he claims, he supported the decision to invade even when the inspectors had been back for months and hadn't found a damn thing, he defended the decision to invade even after he admitted many months later- He supported the surge in 07 too, didn't he?
No weapons, I can't remember about the surge, but the fact is that he was very, he played probably more key role than any single Democrat in making the Iraq war happen, because Democrats control the Senate, they could have stopped it, but Biden played a key role in pushing it through, and it's kind of interesting, if you look at the districts in the northern tier swing states that went from Obama to Trump, that gave Trump, who got Trump elected, if you look at the counties that went from most, where they had the biggest shift of voters from voting for Obama in 2008, 2012, to voting for Trump in 2016, they parallel almost exactly the counties with the highest casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
And what you say about him as chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee is the same thing goes for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and a few of these other key Democrats, any one of them, if John Kerry had said, I'm going to stop this war, he could have, same for Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton was the wife of the previous president, she could have said, hey, I'm here to tell you, there ain't no weapons, man, I know there's not, I'm married to the guy who knows from a few weeks ago.
Trump disingenuously campaigned to Hillary's left on foreign policy, and it worked.
The biggest shifts were people, because Trump said, I'm going to get us out of these endless wars, I'm going to bring the troops home, I'm not going to get us in all these foreign wars that Hillary Clinton supported, and it worked.
And that's why if Biden gets the nomination, I mean, it's the same thing's going to happen.
I mean, if it's Hillary, I'm sorry, if it's Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or someone with a strong anti-interventionist record, they'll do a hell of a lot better than Biden will in these really key swing districts.
That's an important point.
I'm sorry, I just realized how way over time I am, but thank you so much for coming back on the show.
It's great to talk to you again, Stephen.
Appreciate it.
Great as always.
Take care.
Okay, guys, Stephen Zunis, again, right all along on this stuff and proves it in this piece at Truthdig, it's today's U.S.-Iran crisis is rooted in the decision to invade Iraq.
