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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All right, you guys on the line, I have got antiwar.com columnist and retired US Army Major, veteran of the Iraq War II and Afghan surges, and author of the book Ghost Riders of Baghdad.
And that's a bit of what we're going to be talking about today here in regards to not his latest article because he writes like 10 articles a week or something.
I don't know.
I can't keep track and neither can anyone.
And I'm the editor at antiwar.com and I still can't keep up.
What was it all for Iranian Intel leaks and the US folly in Iraq?
Welcome back to the show.
Danny, how you doing, man?
I'm good.
Glad to be back.
And man, this topic is just so broad.
I'm sure we have more than enough material to fill, you know, a half hour, probably more than enough to fill three or four shows.
So we'll see what we can do.
Well, I think a good way to set it up would be for me to say that, listen, everybody knows that Iraq War Two shouldn't have done that.
A lot of guys got killed.
A lot of bad things happened.
ISIS ended up taking over the place.
We hear Iran has influence there.
But what happened?
What's the story of the war?
How did it not not how do they lie us into it and all that?
That's a different show.
But what happened in the war other than just a lot of bad stuff?
And why does it matter to Americans now?
Why do they need to understand who's who in Iraq War Two?
Yeah, I think you bring up a good point.
So we're going to table for the moment the lies that got us into the war, you know, especially the anti war left to the extent that exists is obsessed with that.
But then they sort of ignore what happened afterwards.
And I think it's really important to talk about that.
So the only way I could start my little sequence of failure, the litany of American tragic comic failures is to say, like, let us remember for a moment, you know, February of 2003.
Okay, that that moment a month before the war.
What was the geopolitical or the regional situation at that point?
Okay.
Iran, foolishly, of course, but Iran had purportedly been part of the axis of evil.
Where was Iran at that point?
Okay.
They had the Taliban before 9-11 to their east, which was an unfriendly group.
Now they had portions of the American Army and the Northern Alliance.
To their north was Russia and the Russian republics.
And of course, Russia and Iran had this like really combative, problematic relationship.
I mean, they seem like natural allies now, but they are not natural allies historically.
And we're going to see them split apart again someday soon if we stop pushing them together.
To their west was a crippled by sanctions and war, but still relatively formidable, you know, Sunni dominated Iraqi state and meaning that the power brokers in the state were Sunni, even though the majority of the population was Shia, but they still had a decent army and they were kind of checking Iran to the west as they always had.
And who was to the south?
Well, to the south and west was, of course, Saudi Arabia, U.S.-backed ally, nemesis of Iran.
And then the Fifth Fleet was just to the east of that in Bahrain, the American Fifth Fleet, right, one of the most powerful in the world.
So Iran was in a box, okay, on February of 2003.
And all that changed in March of 2003.
So the brief version, and then we can dig into individual instances that you want to, Scott, but just for the sake of the readers or the listeners, the brief version is this.
We allow a group of exiles fronted by Ahmad Chalabi from the SCIRI, I think now it's ICRI, it's changed so many times, but it's this, you know, Islamist Shia organization that had essentially sided with Iran during the existential Iran-Iraq war.
Also the Dawa Party, which had done much of the same thing.
So these Shia Islamists, you know, front men, stooges, who had almost no popular support in Iraq and were considered traitors by many average Iraqis, even Iraqi Shia, because they had sided with the Sunnis, I mean, with the Iranian state during this existential war from 1980 to 1988 that kills almost a million people.
So they get us into Iraq.
They're supposed to lead the new government.
Of course, they have no legitimacy.
Well things start going bad.
There's a guerrilla war.
Bush needs to show progress.
We supposedly went there for democracy, or at least that was like the third reason after the other ones turned out to be false.
So we have to have an election, right?
So we have 2005.
We force an election, even though all the Sunnis, even the moderate Sunni parties had basically raised their hand ahead of time and said, listen, we're boycotting this election.
Because if the election is held as it is with the candidates that are in the lead and on the Shia side, we're going to have a Shia chauvinist state.
We're going to invert the Sunni dominance and create a Shia dominance, and we're not going to accept that.
Well, instead of delaying the election or working out a compromise, we needed purple fingertips, right?
We needed purple fingertips on the news showing how that Iraqis had voted.
And we had brought democracy, of course.
So what that means is we have indeed a Shia chauvinist government led by Dawah party types.
Eventually, we end up by the time of the surge with Maliki, right, Nouriel Maliki, who turns out to be a Shia strongman.
Violence briefly goes down because of the surge.
Of course, really, it's just paying off Sunni insurgents, and then Sadr calls a ceasefire.
And there's a lot of factors to create this brief pause in violence, but it really wasn't a stop.
It was a pause, and it never really stopped.
And then, of course, it flew right back into our faces.
But in 2010, there's another election.
This one held in a much more peaceful Iraq, or relatively peaceful Iraq, and Maliki loses, right?
He loses to Alawi, which is more of a broad-based, bisectional, if that's such a thing, more secular wing, okay, of Iraqi politics.
But they're, you know, they're sort of a standoff.
Maliki doesn't want to stand down.close, and he manages to cobble together a, you know, a minority-ruling government by pulling in other parties.
Obama at the time doesn't step in, doesn't want to really deal with Iraq any longer.
Biden's the front man on that, and he's bumbling his way through it, as always.
And, of course, we allow Iran to broker the deal that keeps Maliki in power, and of course, so now it's 2011-12-13.
The Sunnis are again protesting for their rights, mostly peacefully.
You know, they want to know why they're not being paid for the work that they had done fighting al-Qaeda and Anbar.
They want to know why, you know, Sunnis are being taken out of their positions with very little evidence and called Ba'ath Party members, and they just don't like the whole corruption of the regime and the lack of basic services to the people.
So Maliki, instead of negotiating, shoots them down in the streets, literally has his security forces murder protesting Sunnis.
They weren't all Sunnis, but many of them were.
And so when a new group that starts styling themselves the Islamic State, really just a spinoff from the old al-Qaeda and Iraq organization that had formed in response to the American invasion and had largely been gestated in our prisons like Kambuka, when they sort of explode onto the scene in 2013-14-15, wouldn't you know that the alienated Sunni population, at this point there's no Americans there to pay them to fight against the al-Qaeda type, so they throw their lot in largely with ISIS, and of course the rest is sort of history.
And we can talk later about how, you know, Maliki's out, but Dawah Shias are still in, and we may just be seeing a replay of the way Maliki helped grow and helped fuel ISIS.
And so, you know, I think that the long-term truth here is, yes, the Iraq war was folly.
Yes, we shouldn't have gone in the first place.
But we did go, and in the process of our 15, now 16th year of this occupation, our policies on the ground have not only empowered our purported enemy, Iran, to an incredible level.
I mean, Iran won the Iraq war, not the Americans.
But we may see the seeds for a new ISIS or whatever they decide to call themselves next time being born in Iraq.
So that's a long version, that's a short version of an extraordinary long, complex story, and I think we could probably build from there, Scott.
Yeah, well, so the collateral murder video.
WikiLeaks have been around for a little while, but this is where they made their big splash, was with the Manning leak, the collateral murder video in the Iraq and Afghan war logs, and in the State Department cables, of course.
But in that video, we see an Apache helicopter crew, a masker, a Reuters reporter, and a bunch of other civilians on the ground.
I think they may have mistaken that long photo lens for some kind of weapon or something, but it's still an absolutely brutal massacre to see.
And they attacked a civilian man and his family, who stopped to try to help.
But anyway, so Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, at the time, who had been brought in to oversee the launch of the surge in 2007, end of 2006, beginning of 2007, he said, you know, the problem with that is that you're just looking at war through a soda straw when you see this video, and you can't understand the broader context.
And I always thought that was a riot, Danny, because the context was they were fighting in East Baghdad.
Robert Gates explained that.
I thought the whole war was being fought for the democracy, which Danny, as you just described, had elected the United Iraqi Alliance to power, which was made up of Skiri, Dawa, and Muqtada al-Sadr's group.
And here this Apache helicopter is in the middle of fighting a war against the Shia, who were part of one third of the alliance that the whole war was for.
And now come to find out, my buddy Danny, you were there.
And I don't know if you, you weren't under Colonel Kozlars, right?
You were under Lieutenant Colonel Kozlars.
You had a different command, didn't you?
I had a different command, but I did have a run in with Colonel Kozlars, who lived right across the street from me.
And with whom's unit, I had done what's called a left seat, right seat ride, which means we handed a sector of Baghdad over to them, which takes about two weeks of working together.
And then we moved on to an area in more central Baghdad or east central Baghdad.
So I know some things about him and his unit.
And I had a bit of a run in with the guy that didn't end so well.
Well, you know what?
Let's stay on that tangent for a moment, because I talked with Josh Stieber and Ethan McCord, and I swear in the back of my neurons here somewhere, I think there was even one more guy from their group, all of whom who had testified that Lieutenant Colonel Kozlars had given them all a standing order that anytime they were attacked with a roadside bomb, that they were to open up with their weapons and kill anyone who happened to be around as collective punishment to show them.
And that this did happen.
And that I think both of them said that they fired either into the ground or up into the air and, you know, or just pretended to fire, didn't fire any shots at all, and refused to kind of go along with this order.
But that the rest of their guys did, and that civilians were massacred in that way.
And that that was an obvious and clear war crime with multiple witnesses to it, ordered by Lieutenant Colonel Kozlars.
And I'm trying to remember, I know, you know, the book, The Good Soldiers by David Finkel is all about him and his group.
And I'm trying to remember if there was any actual corroboration in that book about that or not.
But certainly Stieber and McCord both are on the record about that.
And I swear there was a third guy too.
And so but now I turn it over to you.
And I ask you, do you know about that?
Could you confirm that?
Or do you have anything else about him that we really need to know?
You know, I can't confirm the order.
You know, I feel like it's it's it behooves me to be very careful about these things.
But what I will tell you is, I heard secondhand stuff just like you did.
And we used to call that just shooting in all directions after an explosion.
We used to call that a death blossom.
And soldiers loved it, you know, because they're so frustrated about losing their friends and getting bombed and almost never seeing the enemy.
So they just love the idea.
They could fly under 50 cal in all directions out of frustration.
And I understand that.
What I can say for sure are a few things about Colonel Kozlowich and his unit.
They suffered very high casualties.
And that doesn't always mean the commander did something wrong.
And it doesn't always mean that they completely alienated the population and thereby made themselves bigger targets.
But in this instance, I would submit that I think it was partly that.
So background.
They took over our sector, which we had only babysat for like two months, like we had moved three times.
And the sector was called Al-Amin neighborhood and Baghdad Jadidah, which means New Baghdad.
It's in southeast Baghdad throughout the war up until 2007 when we swapped with them.
That had been one of the safest parts of Baghdad, almost completely Shia, not rich, but not total impoverished like Sadr City.
There were some mixed groups.
There was a group of Palestinian Sunni refugees who lived in the Bel-Adiyat section of Al-Amin.
This was a relatively safe area.
And when we first got there, we were pretty pleased because we had just come out of Salman Pak, where we were in the middle of a legitimate shooting war every day.
So admittedly, before they got there, we had started getting hit in that area because of a number of decisions made at the top that had started to alienate the Shia and caused a war with Sadr's army as early as April of 2004.
But at first, it was kind of kept to the Sadr City area.
But by early 2007, late 2006, it was spreading all over the Shia areas.
But even still, Al-Amin and Baghdad, Jadidah were considered fairly safe.
What do we know?
The things that I know are this one vignette, for example.
My job was to not train, but to guide a new lieutenant into our area, which means that for about a week and a half, he would ride in the back of my Humvee right behind me, and we would talk, and we would do our normal patrol.
My soldiers would be in the trucks, but there would be an officer and then a sergeant in the back of each of our trucks, learning about our area so we could hand it off to them seamlessly, standard thing that we do.
The lieutenant I was with, I cannot remember his name, and I guess I wouldn't use it anyway, or maybe I would.
But he was a douche.
I mean, he was a knuckle-dragger, just a lieutenant who acted like a corporal, just totally immature, wanted to kick ass.
So did all his soldiers.
Anyway, we did that for a while.
I didn't like the kid's attitude, but I kept it to myself.
I tried to convince him otherwise.
I tried to convince him that the best thing we can do is try to keep this place from exploding.
It's not that bad yet.
We have had some fatalities here.
We're not happy about this area, but it's way better than we've seen, and it's way better than the rest of East Baghdad.
Let's keep it that way.
Well, he disagreed.
I said, you know what?
Agree to disagree.
But then the second part of taking over a sector from somebody else is that for another week, his guys are in the front seat.
His guys are manning the trucks and manning the crews, and me and a couple of my sergeants sit behind them.
OK, and we still continue to give advice, but they're running it.
Well, one of the first things that I noticed was the minute we would get out of our trucks, that they decided to get out of their trucks and do foot patrols, they must have been under a certain standing order, at least in this platoon, because every one of their soldiers would get out, take a knee, and point their rifles, aim their rifles at every civilian in all directions.
I mean, no one had been hit.
This isn't after an explosion.
This was just standard operating procedure.
And I asked the lieutenant, I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you guys are scaring the people.
Like, this is a market.
What are we doing here?
What's the deal?
Do you see a threat?
And he was like, no, we, you know, we've been told the way we were trained as a battalion, meaning from Colonel Coast Larch.
The culture in our battalion is we're always ready for a fight.
Everything is lethal until, you know, everyone is considered a lethal threat until we're told otherwise and yada, yada, yada.
I couldn't take that.
I go back and I tell my company commander about it.
I said, listen, sir, I'm not trying to rat anybody out.
I guess that's what I'm doing.
But I'm just really concerned, not just for the Iraqi people, but for the blowback that could hit this unit.
I don't want to see Americans die needlessly because we alienate a population.
Well, somehow that gets out to my colonel, which I was glad about, but it somehow gets over to Colonel Coast Larch, who sends word through my chain of command that he wants to see me.
Young First Lieutenant Danny Shorzen, right?
I was pretty grizzled at this point.
I had suffered a bunch of casualties in my platoon.
I've been in a lot of firefights.
I was a dirty half First Lieutenant, just frustrated with everybody.
And I walk into his office and he makes sure I stand at attention and salute him.
And he stands behind his desk and he gives me a lecture for about five minutes.
And the basic gist of it was, Danny, he was very patronizing.
You know, he was actually kind of nice, but he was extremely paternalistic and patronizing.
You don't get it.
You and your unit don't get it, Danny.
You know, the reason you're having so much problems is you're not lethal enough.
You know, you're not aggressive enough.
We are here to defeat a guerrilla insurgency.
Well, I tried to cut him off and say, sir, you're misunderstanding the Shia.
What's going on in these two neighborhoods is nothing approaching an outright guerrilla insurgency.
If you were down in the Triangle of Death, down in the Sunni Triangle southwest of here, OK, maybe.
If you were out in Anbar, OK, maybe.
If you're in West Baghdad, OK, maybe.
Even if you were in Shia's outer city, maybe.
But that's not the situation here.
And sir, if you try to make it—and I kept getting cut off.
So I shut my mouth.
It was clear that I wasn't the one supposed to talk.
This was a one-way conversation, and I walked out after I got just berated about how I don't know a thing about guerrilla war.
Well, I'd been there six months, and he just got there.
And he misunderstood the area.
And I'll tell you, by the time his unit was leaving, that once quiet sector of East Baghdad was in, you know, just almost completely rebellion.
And the number of civilians that were killed in his sector was worrying.
I can't prove he gave an order to kill civilians, but I can tell you that I know the data, because I used to follow it very closely while I was in Iraq.
I used to follow the civilian and American deaths very closely in each sector.
And very suddenly, his once quiet sector had some of the highest civilian casualties.
That's problematic.
And he also had some of the highest casualties for his own guys, because wouldn't you know, the place just rose up against him.
And I saw it coming.
That day when I was trying to argue with the lieutenant, one of the shop owners, who used to be like an informant for me, walked over to me, and he said, you know, he said, Mr.
Mr. LT, LT, if these guys do this, if they act this way, like he warned me.
He's like, this place is going to go crazy.
And that's what I had essentially told my colonel, or my captain who told my colonel.
And it's a perfect, you know, Gates said it's soda straw to look at that footage from the Apache killing, you know, the journalists.
And he might say that my knowledge as a lieutenant in Iraq was soda straw.
And I agree with that.
And I don't think just because someone was in the military, especially if they were a low level enlisted guy or a low level officer, that doesn't mean that they understand the strategy of the war.
I will tell you this, though.
Number one, what makes me unique is that, or somewhat unique, is that in addition to my soda straw knowledge, I've read hundreds of books on the Middle East and Iraq.
My research is intense.
That's why I wrote a book.
OK, that's not just a memoir.
So I've got a little bit of both sides.
But also some vignettes, not all vignettes, some vignettes, just like any good history, some narrative vignettes are actually extraordinarily important and illustrate at the micro level the flaws of the macro policy.
And I would argue that my experience and Colonel Koslar's experience in once docile Southeast Baghdad is one of those examples.
And so I would challenge Gates on his very premise.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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Well, and you know, in the book, The Good Soldiers, at one point, Finkel, and at one point, Kuzlarich kind of mused that it is kind of ironic, isn't it, that we're even fighting against Soder at all when he's part of the United Iraqi Alliance and our whole war is for him?
Oh, well, get back out there, boys.
And essentially, like, at some point, the information is kind of undeniable, but it doesn't really get integrated into wisdom at all, you know, into knowledge about the way you're talking about who's who on the ground here and why are we going to fight the guys that we're fighting for if we don't have cause to other than just we like to fight and nobody told us we can't or some ridiculous thing.
And it doesn't make sense how even, you know, Kuzlarich, the commanding officer, especially as you say, brand new on the scene, that he wouldn't have any idea about who's on whose side.
What's the United Iraqi Alliance?
He doesn't know.
This is two years after the election.
What's the difference between Soder and Hakeem and whatever?
He doesn't know or care.
And so how could he possibly, you know, do what's right in that circumstance, essentially?
He just has a base and is supposed to go out there and do something.
So get in a fight.
Sounds right.
He made he nicknamed his he changed the nickname of his battalion to the Rangers.
He had been in the Ranger battalion when he was a young guy and he decided he's going to make this very conventional infantry battalion into like a new Ranger regiment.
He even made them wear shirts that said Rangers.
He made his own flag, which I didn't even know you were supposed to do as a battalion commander.
He would like just below the American flag.
He would like fly this Ranger black and yellow flag.
His whole attitude was kick ass, take names, which was totally inappropriate to counter insurgency as Petraeus had written it in the book, even though I'm not a Petraeus guy.
And it was also totally count totally counter to the area he was in.
The context of where he was didn't make sense.
It wasn't Kandahar in 2011.
You know, it wasn't kick ass guerrilla war.
And even the little things like nomenclature, like nicknames, culture of these units can cause an enormous amount of damage.
And I'll tell you, the Colonel Kozlarskis of the world were way more prevalent in the army than the rare intellectual types.
I promise you then and now I'd like to debate him on it publicly because large could never describe to you, not one tenth as well as me, and I'm not an expert, not one tenth as well as me, the intricacies of intra-Shia politics and society in East Baghdad.
He had no understanding of the difference between Sistani, right?
The Sadr, who was Sadr's uncle, who was Sadr's father, who was Sadr's grandfather.
He didn't understand Khoi.
He didn't understand Hakeem.
He didn't know a thing about all that.
And so he treated his neighborhood like occupied territory.
And when you do that, whether it's in Harlem or in East Baghdad, wouldn't you know when you call it a war, your soldiers start acting like warriors.
And when you call the enemy the enemy, when you call the civilian populace the enemy, they start acting like the enemy.
And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So his actions, no matter how he sold them, which I'm sure is very positive, and no matter how glowing his evaluation into that 15 months was, and I'm sure it was, the reality is he created the monsters that he had to destroy.
And in the process, a lot of people on both sides died.
And in some ways, that soda straw, OK, maybe it's a little wider than a soda straw when you look at a whole battalion, but, you know, that thick straw, right, that big pixie stick of a straw is actually very, very indicative of the very failure of the American war as it's specifically regarded to the Shia, who it was, of course, absurd and paradoxical that we ended up fighting.
OK, but now, so a lot of this did come from the top down far above his chain.
And the reality is, as you talk about in your article here, that Sauter was the least compliant of the Shiite majority leaders that we were putting in power and that he wanted to limit Iran's influence and America's influence.
And this is another major irony, was that America deliberately backed Dawa and Skiri knowing that they were the most Iranian tied of the Shiite groups, but betting that they'll be more dependent on our money and guns than on Iran's friendship and location next door, which was a terrible bet, I guess, you know, Wolfowitz and them had decided, whoever thought that this was smart.
But so but all along, really, I think even, you know, beginning with the Battle of Najaf, that was coinciding maybe before then, even I think even in 2003, but certainly in the spring of 2004, during the first Battle of Fallujah and Najaf at the same time, Sauter was sending men and pickup trucks to go help the battle in Fallujah to take the Sunni side in order to emphasize he later was very guilty of sectarian cleansing, don't get me wrong.
But at that time, he was really trying to emphasize Iraqi Arab nationalism at the expense of Iran.
And he explicitly denounced Iran, because Iran supported a plan of strong federalism, meaning take the capital city and leave the Sunnis out west with no access to the oil wealth, and, and then just essentially run off with southeastern Shiastan.
And, and Sauter was against that.
But then America said that he was the Iranian puppet, and he was the one that needed to be destroyed, and went to try to marginalize him in favor of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, which was run by a guy who was essentially a pure Iranian asset, or, you know, intelligence agent, not officer, Abdulaziz al-Hakim and his whole clan there.
Well, absolutely.
And one of the things I understand about Sauter, I'm a big believer, what I used to say in my classroom at West Point, when I would put up my slides, I would say, you know, a picture, a painting or a picture is worth often 1000 words.
And obviously, that's a platitude, but it's true.
It's more important, and it's more valuable than any bullet notes I could put.
Well, I found a poster one day in East Baghdad.
And it turns out, I found the same poster 1000s more times.
But I remember the first day I saw it.
I asked my interpreter to interpret it for me.
You know, I thought I knew what I was looking at.
But I wanted some more background.
And I think it tells us everything we need to know about Sauter, how we misread him, how we misread the entire situation and Iran's influence.
It was a big poster, and it was beautifully done.
And there were three flags on the floor, from left to right, a British Union Jack, an Israeli blue and white flag, and an American flag.
Blue and white flag and an American flag.
Okay, walking on top, right, trampling on top gloriously of the British flag was Sauter's grandfather or great grandfather, who had as a nationalist opposed British imperial occupation.
Next was either his father or his grandfather, I can't remember which, trampling on the Israeli flag for having pan Arab nationalist sort of ideals against Israel as a state.
And then, of course, who?
Muki, Muqtada al-Sauter, the new populist leader who had immense loyalty in East Baghdad, especially Sauter City, trampling on the American flag.
Now, what does that tell us?
It tells us that ultimately, yes, when the civil war broke out, okay, Sauter was a war criminal.
Okay, his people did conduct ethnic cleansing, along with the other side, which did the same.
But his real bona fides, right, his real credentials were always nationalist, which shows that he was Iraqi more than he was Shia.
And you saw that in his actions during the first battle of Fallujah.
But it also shows us what America's real role is.
You know, it illustrates what we really were about.
We were anti-nationalist.
We said we wanted, you know, a strong, new, democratic Iraqi state.
We wanted them to be more Iraqi than sectarian.
But in reality, when someone picked up an AK-47 from the Shia side and started to shoot at American troops in Sauter City during the first uprising in April of 04, we found out immediately America will turn on a genuine nationalist and make him as much of the enemy as the former Ba'athists and the Sunni Islamists.
And I think that poster should be pasted on every article about this portion of the Iraq War, because it's incredibly illuminating.
Well, and, you know, it's funny, because I remember at the time asking Robert Dreyfus, you know, I see the bet that they're making here, but it just seems like such a bad bet.
And it seems like anybody in the CIA who, you know, a real, you know, supposedly, you know, dispassionate analyst here would be advising the president that you can't trust Skerry, that they don't care about us.
In fact, al-Mahdi, the guy who's the prime minister now, he's the guy that Bush tried to fix the election for in 04 and 05.
The Seymour Hersh piece was all about it.
This is the same guy from the, they've all been Dawah party up until now.
It's actually a Skerry guy.
But it was always on a compromise with Skerry anyway.
But I remember, because there was, Robert Dreyfus did this article, Bush's meeting with a murderer, and it was al-Hakim had come to DC and had met with Bush in the Oval Office.
And part of Dreyfus's explanation for this was that Muqtada al-Sadr is a working class scumbag who rules a slum, essentially, whereas Abdulaziz al-Hakim wears fancy robes and talks like he has an education and things like that.
And so for the Bush people, I mean, it's just, it really is kind of, you know, rich people can understand each other a little bit better.
And looking at a schlub like Sadr, it was automatic rejection.
Didn't really matter what his politics were.
It was who he was on the face of it meant that he was beyond the pale and not worth working with.
And the fact that he immediately denounced the Americans sure didn't help, but they essentially had no kind of feeling that they needed to appease him or deal with him or work with him in any honest way at all because of just what a redneck he was essentially to them.
And you bring up an amazingly important point.
I mean, that there was a class aspect to this.
Look, the Shia who supported Skiri and Dawah wore Rolex watches, as you mentioned, the leaders, they made sense to the Americans.
They were articulate.
And their supporters used to make fun of Sadr, the slumlord, right?
And they would say, he's uncouth, he's nasty.
By the way, he's not really educated.
He's not super educated in Islamic law.
He's not a scholar, even though he tried to pretend to be.
Therefore, he can't have legitimacy.
Meanwhile, most Shia aren't scholars.
And so they actually sort of like a populist guy, you know, just like Americans.
But the thing is, you know what they used to call him?
They used to call him as a pejorative, the Skiri types.
They would say, oh, we call him Mullah Atari because there was a rumor that when he was a spoiled kid under his father, the cleric, that he would like to play Atari, Western video games.
And somehow that was some sort of major sense.
They would call him Mullah Atari.
Well, here's the thing.
The people of Sadr City, two to three million of them, by most estimates, living in poverty.
Guess who they gave their loyalty to?
Not to Skiri, which had its own militia called what?
The Badr Corps.
And what was the Badr Corps most known for?
Fighting on the Iranian side against Iraqis in the Iran-Iraq war.
Traitors.
When America backed Saddam against Iran and Badr.
Exactly.
So this is like all really important.
Look, Sadr's unsophisticated yet resonating platform was, you know, bread and subsidies, right?
Bread and fuel subsidies for the poor.
Well, guess what?
You know, for the Bush team that was trying to create like a, you know, a sort of some sort of like, you know, capitalist utopia in Iraq, and maybe that's a good thing and maybe it's not, but I think it was premature.
They don't like Sadr's platform.
And whether you think they should or shouldn't have, it's just a misunderstanding of where Iraq was in 2004.
Yeah.
I mean, hey, he always put independence first.
That's rule number one, you know.
Can't do that.
All right, y'all.
Well, unfortunately, I had to go and Danny had to go.
We had to go.
And so this interview ended abruptly.
But that's the great Danny Shurst.
And of course, you can find him at Truthdig and at Antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
