For Pacifica Radio, January the 10th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,400 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Aren't you guys on the line?
I've got Kelly Vlahos.
She's now at the Quincy Institute.
She is the co-editor of the Responsible Statecraft blog over there.
And she wrote this really important thing that everybody should care a lot about.
Iraq today is a nightmare that Americans largely sleep through.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Great, Scott.
Thank you so much for having me.
Happy to have you here.
Happy New Year.
And good to talk to you again.
And check this out.
The old UPS man just dropped off the first proofs of my new book.
Enough already.
I'm really making progress.
Just another few days here.
I think I'm shooting for the 16th, but I don't know if I'll make it.
I'm still working hard on the copy editing and getting it all just right.
And I keep adding stuff because I'm me and I can't help it.
And things keep happening and I keep remembering things that bother me.
So it is what it is.
But anyway, I hope everybody likes it.
It's coming soon.
Enough already.
Time to end the war on terrorism.
Hooray.
And part of it is quite a bit of it is about the wars in Iraq.
One big war in Iraq.
Just about 30 years now.
And just shy of 10 days from now, it'll be what?
Eight days from now.
It'll be 30 years of bombing Iraq.
And they're still doing airstrikes.
So it's not even hyperbole.
It's like, yeah, 30 years of bombing Iraq straight.
I think they quit for like a year or two in 2012 and 13.
But even then there were a few drone strikes still chasing the last few ISIS guys or ISI guys they were then.
So I think they pretty much have, you could, you could argue they haven't really taken a break dropping bombs in 30 years over there.
So, and then, so you say it's a nightmare.
Well, that's surprising.
I mean, I thought that the bombs are going to make everything great.
Yeah.
Well, first off, I'd like to say if your book today is anything like the seminal reportage of Afghanistan that you wrote in Fool's Errand, then people are in for a real treat because out of all the books that have been written about the Afghan war, Afghanistan war, yours has to be the most thorough and most incisive and truth-telling.
Well, thank you.
And so I know what you mean about having to add things because your, your, your first book or the Afghanistan book is, is so heavy and it's so hard hitting, but it's because I know that you, you, you know, you're a thorough guy and you didn't want to leave anything out.
And it, you know, it benefited from, from that depth.
That's all I have to say.
Thank you very much, Kelly.
That's very kind, especially coming from the likes of you.
Oh, thank you very much.
But I cannot measure up to all the work that you've done to combat the narrative on these wars.
I'm not so sure about that.
There's a reason I talk to you so often from all the great work you do.
But anyway, people are going to get tired of hearing these compliments.
What they want to hear is about the nightmare of Iraq.
Yes.
Well, I mean, I wrote about it because there was a piece in the Washington Post and other press a few weeks ago, just before the holidays, about the fact that Iraq is, is, is going to be closing these refugee camps, these internally, you know, for internally displaced Iraqis that have been just filled to the gills since, you know, the ISIS wars.
You mentioned 2014, ISIS was finally kicked out of the country, I believe in 2017, but after several years of gobbling up territory in Iraq and sending a lot of people fleeing their homes, and they've just been sitting in these squalid camps for this long, now a lot of these people have no homes to go back to because, you know, when the U.S. helped the Iraqis and Iranian militias, you know, expunge the ISIS, the last ISIS remnants, they bombed a lot of places and a lot of entire city blocks are just rubble now in places like Mosul.
And so these people have no homes to go to, back home to.
A lot of them face persecution when they get back because either they were tied to ISIS or their family members were tied, or there was some connection to Sunni radicals who did, who did not denounce ISIS at the time.
So there's a lot of like social dynamics going on that prevent some of these people from going home.
And then there are people who had children at the camps and those children are not considered Iraqi citizens because either it was during the, or they had the children during the so-called caliphate.
And so Iraq is not recognizing those children as Iraqis.
And so they don't qualify for any of the assistance that the government, even if the government could be providing any livable assistance, those children wouldn't qualify.
So you have this real damaged part of the population that numbers and about a million right now of still displaced people who can't go home.
And, you know, frankly, the Iraqi government cannot afford to rebuild, to help rebuild these cities like Mosul because they just don't have the budget for it.
COVID has absolutely decimated the economy there.
The oil, everybody talks about Iraqi oil, but it's, it's, it's, it's just that the money isn't, isn't coming in and the price of oil is down.
There, there, there's corruption is still rampant.
So taking care of these people are way down on the priority list, unfortunately.
Rebuilding is, is, is moved down on the priority list.
And so I said to myself, oh my God, we've caused all of this.
I don't care how you want to put it.
We set into motion the conditions that we're seeing in Iraq today.
And yet we, we seem to not acknowledge or the responsibility that we have.
Now, you know, my sources that I spoke to for this story said, you know, yeah, we are giving aid there, but the aid isn't going directly to these people.
It's not, it's not getting to where it needs to go to help rebuild these societies.
It's going to places like, like, you know, for example, it's going to like training programs for democracy promotion.
Okay.
That's great.
But as one of my sources said, we don't need to fund people to go out and protest on the streets.
I mean, it's fine that people have a voice to protest their government, but right now they need like jobs, they need food, they need their houses rebuilt.
They need cooking oil.
I mean, they, they need their kids to get psychiatric help, you know, so, you know, but our aid is going, as you know, Scott, we shove a lot of money around and it often goes into the wrong hands or it goes to well-meaning programs that really don't address root problems, you know, or immediate problems.
And so I think if the Biden administration needs to do anything, it's to start paying attention to how we help fix what we broke over there.
That's, that's one thing that I tried to make clear in the piece.
But unfortunately, you know, we got a lot of problems going on in this country.
And I'm just, it just makes me so sad because, you know, almost 20 years in and we have nothing to show for it.
We have nothing to show for it.
And we broke an entire country.
Yeah.
Well, and there's nothing for America to do to fix it either.
I mean, they could, I guess, cut a check to each individual Iraqi citizen or something like that.
But otherwise, as you say, they're just paying off one or another warlord who's going to sit with it.
Right.
So.
Yeah, that exactly.
I mean, I, one of my sources that, you know, I spoke to is actually trying to help build bridges with, you know, other Iraqis over there who would have the influence of making sure that programs are funded or, or at least if we're going to be sending aid over there, the pipeline is clean and the pipeline is, is, is effective that I think you're right.
That's probably the best thing that we can do, but keep in mind, we still have a couple thousand or more troops there.
They, they really don't like us very much.
I just came across a headline in which apparently we've issued an arrest warrant for, they did, the Iraqis for president Trump over the assassination of their commander during that Qasem Soleimani assassination last January.
So they want us out.
And I don't blame them.
Yeah.
Um, you know, I read this thing.
I don't know if you saw it.
It's by a reporter named Ben Taub, T-A-U-B.
And he wrote this thing in, I think it was New York magazine.
It was essentially about this era, this, you know, after the war against ISIS, Iraq war three, I call it Iraq war three and a half.
As you said, our troops are still there fighting ISIS with the Iraqi army.
Um, you know, in this kind of low level, relatively low level kind of campaign, but he described in just an absolute hell on earth there with, you know, you talk about these camps that are now being closed where they're just rape camps where these, you know, ISIS widows essentially are just slaves of the Shiite army and militias, their guards and whoever, um, and just, you know, people try to go back home to their village, but whether it's true or not, and maybe it is, but even in that case, like there's no forgiveness whatsoever that you are associated with ISIS and now you can never go home again and all this kind of thing.
And then also a big part of it was the court system in Iraq as people just get lined up one by one by one.
And the judge says, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
Throw away the key.
Look, just cause my name's Mohammed, you got the wrong guy.
Guilty.
And little kids is real.
And in other words, kind of the Shia after the, you know, the, the government after their victory over ISIS, they're just taking full vengeance.
There's no good sportsmanship here.
There's no, all right, Sunnis, we whooped your ass twice in a row.
Now here's a hand and let's see if we can be country men again or anything like that.
Yeah.
I mean, it, it is bad.
And one thing that I hadn't mentioned is you're talking about going home and even if you can set foot in the city, you know, places like Mosul I read some reporting on this, they still have dead bodies under the rubble there.
And so they're like entire city blocks where people are missing and neighbors know that they're probably underneath all the rubble or human bones are exposed and people just walk by it every day.
There was one story in my piece that just, I just couldn't shake it about, you know, at the time when they were, when the US was working with Iraqi forces to clear ISIS out of Mosul, they bombed this one safe house for ISIS, but there were a bunch of families living there and there were oil drums in, in the, in the basement and it just set the entire house on fire immediately, including everybody.
And it took like two hours for the screams to stop.
And to this day, all the bodies are still there.
This was in 2017.
And so it's become this sort of neighborhood haunted house or haunted rubble site.
And the guy, the reporter was talking about how it's become like a, like sort of a nesting ground for scorpions and rats and snakes.
And I mean, it just, it sounds like, and that's why I use nightmare because it just does.
It sounds like a wide, a wide awake nightmare.
Yeah.
And as you say, too, with no end in sight, because even if the Baghdad government really cared about the people of the old city of Mosul, they don't have any money anyway.
The oil price is so low and then they steal it all.
I mean, it's one of the most corrupt governments in the world.
Patrick Coburn, I asked him, hey, you know, they put in power all these kind of Shiite Islamist types in power.
So how bad is the repression?
You know, we always talk about Saudi Arabia cutting people's hands off, but the repression under the Shiite Islamist theocracy in Iran is pretty bad, too.
So how's Iraq compared to that?
And Patrick is like, nah, they're way too busy stealing all day to bother oppressing anybody.
You know, as far as enforcing the morality police laws against, you know, women smiling or men selling alcohol or, you know, these kinds of things.
That is just a money thieving factory is the whole Iraqi government.
Right.
And you know what, what that sounds like, it also sounds like Afghanistan right now.
And that's just another place where we've been, you know, at war for the last 20 years.
And it's just it's remarkable because, I mean, the the corruption going on there on so many levels, plus you have the Taliban and their morality police on top of it.
So it's like, oh, what is this?
What is it about this U.S. project?
We go and we break countries to liberate them and make them better and more democratic.
And then we end up making them less democratic, less liberal and less functioning than they were before.
I know.
And seriously, like you can't really oversell the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, right?
Like this guy was an absolute monster.
But then, yeah, his Iraq was paradise compared to what America's turned that place into.
Well, you know, and one of the things that came up when I was interviewing people for this piece was the the sorry state of Iraq even before the war, you know, all the way going back to the Iran-Iraq war.
And yes, we were in the scenes of that, too, supporting Saddam at the time.
And then after Persian Gulf One, we deployed all these sanctions on the country, as you remember Madeleine Albright saying, you know, all the dead kids because of our sanctions was a quote unquote worth it.
You know, so it was already a decimated country economically, politically under Saddam when we invaded.
So we like invaded a sick man and then made it even worse.
It's like we've been like attacking this country for how many years?
Forty, fifty.
Well, and of course, President-elect Biden, his plan always was what we should do is we should divide the country in three.
And I don't know if he ever even answered the part about, yeah, but what about all the people stuck on the wrong side of the lines?
Right.
But that's what we've seen.
That's what got a million people killed was the parties that Iran and George W.
Bush's government both favored had the same idea as Biden.
Let's divide the country.
Right.
Because to them, it wouldn't be that makes sense to try to rule over the Sunnis against their will.
We got all the oil in the north and the south under Shia and Kurdish control.
So screw them.
And so, yeah, but this is what Biden always wanted.
And so now what is he going to do with this situation?
Who's supposed to rule the predominantly Sunni cities of the Iraqi West when the Baghdad government basically treats them as outside of their protection?
Right.
You know, and and then the only other choices are the jihadists or the Baathists.
Exactly.
And that's what happened during the war.
So there was a Sunni insurgency that somehow, with all the smarts and quote unquote wherewithal in our U.S. military and State Department, we didn't anticipate a Sunni insurgency after the invasion.
And so we spent most of the rest of the time battling that Sunni insurgency, which became al-Qaeda, which wasn't there before.
And then when we decide to leave with quote unquote face, then ISIS comes in and fills a vacuum.
Yeah, another Sunni insurgency.
So, I mean, we created ISIS in Iraq.
And that's another thing that really upset me when I was reading this piece about the IDPs, the internally displaced people.
You know, this was they were all ISIS IDPs.
I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of people who have still been drifting around since the invasion, but, you know, mostly these were ISIS related.
And that was like the second phase of the war.
And we helped to create it.
And we left and we had to come back to get rid of them.
Yada yada.
You know the story.
But the fact is that there wouldn't be those IDPs would not be there if we hadn't invaded in the first place.
Yep.
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here for Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
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Follow through from the link in the margin at Scott Horton dot org for Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
And, you know, I told this joke before, but I like it.
It's not really funny, but it's just a thing that if you went back and to 1989, right.
So when the the wall was starting to come down, the Cold War was over.
The Soviet Union wasn't quite gone yet.
Right.
It's still sort of.
And he said, look, OK, now that the Soviet Union is falling apart, America is going to go to war with Iraq for the next 30 years.
What do you thought about that?
We're going to go to war with Iraq for 30 years.
That sounds like a long time to have a war with Iraq.
I don't know.
It doesn't sound right to me.
Well, I mean, you figure if they spent that many decades waging the Cold War, you know, they had to find an enemy.
I know I'm oversimplifying things, but 30 years doesn't look that long when you consider the length of the Cold War and you have this entire U.S. military industrial complex, this whole architecture that had been mobilized for war, you know, with this entire ecosystem that was at risk of having to close up shop and find other work.
Wow.
Finding another endless war seems, I guess, a good idea.
You know, when Donald Trump was the occasion of Donald Trump saying something about, oh, our military is so hollowed out and people, the liberals were saying, how dare you insult our military that way?
And then I don't have no idea where I saw this, but some Navy airmen or what do they call them?
They're not airmen, they're aviators, right?
Aviators, yeah.
We're saying, actually, we've been flying sorties in the Gulf for 29 years and our planes could use some maintenance, frankly, and our pilots could use some time off.
Yeah, no, in fact, our airpower, our naval airpower could use a real rest and replenishment from the pace that we've been going without a break.
Right.
The Army and the Marines, they got some time off.
The carrier pilots, man, they've been bombing Iraq this whole time.
Well, what startles me when I think about it is that I remember, you know, so I remember, you know, when the Clinton administration was sending out sorties in Iraq to deflect from the impeachment in 1998.
And I was like young and fresh looking and had my whole life ahead of me.
I feel, I mean, I'm like much older, you know, I'm an old married mother.
My son is just qualified.
He's just turned 18.
So he just qualified for his what do you select service, selective service.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, they're still they're still bombing Iraq.
They're still sending sorties.
It's it's it's mind boggling.
Well, and that was eight years into it, right?
Yeah.
That long ago memory was eight years of bombing them into the whole thing.
Yeah.
No, it really is something else.
And although I hate to say this, but it does keep occurring to me that, you know, someday everybody's going to listen to you and me and they're going to say, all right, let's stop bombing the Middle East.
And then all we're going to end up really doing is freeing up all these assets to get us into a nuclear war with China.
And we're going to all die.
And we're going to wish that we just kept murdering poor, innocent Pashtuns instead.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I mean, right.
I mean, right at this very moment, you know, we're on the cusp of hopefully getting out of the Afghanistan war now.
I mean, I know that sounds Pollyannish, right?
So the U.S.-Taliban agreement that Trump helped to forge says that we have to have the remaining number of troops out of there on May 1st.
Is it going to happen?
I don't know.
But I know I'm going to fight like hell to push the Biden administration to do the right thing, because, I mean, he can go two ways.
He could postpone that.
And you know what that means in Washington.
Or, you know, he can he can keep the agreement in good faith, take the 2,500 troops that will be remaining there and then continue the diplomacy.
I mean, if you want if you want to, you know, see the political accord that they that they seek through, you know, I have no problem with that.
Get the troops out of there.
Right.
Enough is enough.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think we're going to know right away whether he's really ending the war in Yemen or not.
Yeah, we're going to know relatively soon.
We're going to know which way they're headed on Afghanistan.
He doesn't really have to fess up until May, whether he's living up to the deal or not.
But I think we'll get pretty good indications.
And then they talked about then, of course, there's the Iran deal and the new start.
These are all the things because nobody's talking about getting out of Iraq or Syria.
That's not even part of the discussion at all.
Right.
But Afghanistan, Yemen, new start and what you call the other thing I just said, those things are going to be almost we're going to know within two or three weeks.
What is he going to do about this stuff?
You know?
Oh, the Iran deal.
Yeah, I think I think with the Iran deal and Yemen, I think there's pretty good indications that there will be some movement on that.
I think everything that I've seen, they want to get back into the deal.
You know, obviously the devil's in the details.
Are they going to are they going to use the sanctions as leverage?
I hope not.
I saw Sullivan saying, yes, we'll get in as soon as they agree to further discussions toward further restrictions and all of this, which I don't think the guy told me to go for that.
No, that's completely the wrong way to go.
And I'm hoping there are plenty of people who are whipped up in Washington, including where I'm at at the Quincy Institute, that are really starting to hunker down for a fight.
They want just to get back into that deal.
No conditions, no leveraging.
You get back to where you were when Trump ripped us out of it in 2018.
You know, if you want to if you want to start negotiations on separate deals to talk about their ballistic missiles or whatever, that's fine.
But this deal should just go back to where it was when they when they when that executive order was signed.
Because I think then you're just going to clear the deal from there.
I mean, if you start layering on conditions, restrictions.
Yeah.
And I think with Yemen, I think.
I think all indications that we want to stop that, our assistance, Saudi Arabia and that war.
Now, I hope I'm not wrong.
You know, I've been wrong many times over the last four years in this Trump administration about things.
But that seems to be an all around unpopular policy.
In those circles, especially, too.
Right.
I mean, for whatever reason, I don't really understand.
It's not like everybody listens to the Quakers all of a sudden.
I don't know why it is that you have so many powerful Democrats who just hate this war.
You know?
Yeah.
And, you know, I know, ironically, because it would be, you know, we got into the war under the Obama administration.
Well, now you hush.
Let's not talk them out of it.
We know it's all Trump's fault.
Let him oppose it.
Yeah.
No, I'm not those arms deals, too, because that's another thing that Trump initiated that was like the worst possible thing was all of his, you know, sucking up to the Saudis and the UAE and promising all of these new weapons systems and, you know, all the gifts.
It's not just the sales, right?
Like Biden needs to say to Mohammed bin Salman the same thing he said to Donald Trump yesterday.
Like, hey, listen to me.
Do what I say right now.
Call it off, you know?
Exactly.
See, the problem with that, all of that is, is that, you know, everybody's, you know, everybody on the right and some establishment circles are calling these normalization deals that Kushner and Trump had forged with Israel and UAE and Morocco and Sudan as, you know, a peace, you know, victories of peace, you know, that somehow, you know, this is all about establishing security in the region.
And really, it was just a way for Israel to to sort of solidify an anti-Iranian front.
And so when Biden goes in there and he's trying to, if he's serious about cleaning house and reestablishing these relationships to be more normal and based on maybe human rights and against war, he's going to have to deal with a situation where, you know, the Trump administration spent the last four years giving Israel everything it wanted.
And there's going to be a lot of things that they're not going to want to let go.
And if they've already normalized relations with the UAE and others with some tacit agreement that they're all going to like either stand firm on opposing, say, the nuclear deal with Iran or other issues dealing with Iran and Middle East peace, it's going to make it harder for Biden.
I think they really set him up for some serious challenges in that regard.
Yeah, unfortunately so.
And then, you know, it really is it's ironic that the worst of these, the least justified of these all this time, the subject of your piece here, Iraq, a country that we're helping to keep at war there.
I mean, whatever happens there once we go, it's, you know, as bad as it is.
But they're not even talking at all about getting out of Iraq, even after 30 years here.
And I mean, where whatever missions they're on against the Islamic State fighters left there are negligible, can be handled by the Iraqi army and their friends without us.
They have no excuse to stay.
And yet they don't even discuss, they don't even think about leaving.
Well, we saw what happened last time.
Well, what happened last time was Obama backed Al-Qaeda in Syria for five years, and that grew into the Islamic State.
As long as Biden doesn't recreate that, then Western Iraq should be fine, you know?
But I agree.
Yeah.
Anyway, it's as as bad as the Trump years have been, I feel like it's already been two years or three years of Joe Biden, and it hasn't even begun yet.
I just, you know, honestly, Scott, I hope when we talk next, whenever that is, you know, where it will have this this administration firmly in the rear view and a whole set of other fights to take on, because I'm just I'm tired of this administration and I'm tired of the uncertainty of this particular moment.
So I'm looking forward to fresh fights in the in the in the Obama or I mean, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Freudian slip Biden administration.
Yep.
I hear you.
All right.
Well, I'll be there with you.
And and I'm so glad that we have you in the fight, everybody.
It's the great Kelly Vlahos.
She is at the Quincy Institute.
Responsible Statecraft is the name of their great blog.
It's not really a blog there.
I call it a website full of articles that are all extremely good and important.
It's responsible statecraft or Iraq today is a nightmare that Americans largely sleep through.
Thanks very much, Kelly.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, Sean.
That's it for anti-war radio for this morning.
Again, I'm your host, Scott Horton, author of the book Fools Errant, Time to End the War in Afghanistan and editorial director of antiwar.com here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
