03/11/13 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

So, you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at scothorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is our old friend Dar Jamal.
Now he's writing for Al Jazeera.
Of course, you remember he reported from Iraq for years and years during the worst part of the American part of that war anyway.
Welcome back, Dar.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
It's good to be with you.
Yeah, well, it's great to talk to you again.
I hope all is well with you.
Well, good as can be expected of poor Baghdad, I suppose.
Still have all my limbs that haven't been kidnapped.
I guess it's all right.
All right, well, watch your back, jeez.
All right, well, so yeah, let's talk about that.
It's 10 years since the advent of this Iraq invasion and occupation and the civil war it caused and all the rest of it, and you've gone back now.
You say you're in Baghdad now, is that right?
That's right.
Yeah.
And so what do you see?
Well, what we're experiencing is a taste of the so-called Iraqi reconstruction, where the cell network's not extremely functional a lot of the time.
For example, my interpreter and fixer, Ali, has two different cell phones with two different networks because you never know when one's going to work and the other one's not.
That's the very small nutshell description of what's in Baghdad today.
A lot of people are just having to cobble together what they can get by because everything has increased.
There's still been really little infrastructure repair.
There's a little bit of electricity now.
That's a big laugh I might poke with you, but still daily, you don't hear about it in the United States, but daily there's assassinations, kidnappings, rapings going on all over the place.
We just got the news this day up in Kirkuk there was a giant car bomb with more than a hundred casualties if you combine the dead and the wounded.
And this kind of thing has become so normal here that Iraqis don't really even, they're not as shocked by it as they used to be.
It's just accepted that this is just part of life, you know, living basically in a low-grade chronic war zone, and that's what life in Iraq is ten years out.
You know, Patrick Coburn was there just a few weeks back, and we talked with him, and he thought the Syrian war was reinvigorating the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq and kind of encouraging them to get back to it, the ones who aren't already in Syria fighting there.
That's accurate.
Actually, we were just up in Fallujah this last Friday because, as you know, we've been through the last ten weeks straight.
We've had massive demonstrations across all of the province, specifically in Fallujah, where every Friday for several hours the main highway artery between Baghdad and Amman is cut because hundreds of thousands of people from the city, and we saw this ourselves, go up there and demonstrate and do their Friday prayers on the highway as a protest against the Maliki regime, a protest against the killing of Sunnis and the detentions and all of these dramatic measures that Maliki's regime is conducting.
The only reason that's true is because of exactly what you just described, where you have a Sunni resistance that's been infiltrated with a lot of, actually, foreign fighters as well as people from within Iraq that are going off and fighting with the Free Syrian Army against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and the Maliki regime is afraid of this, because if that resistance is going up against the government of Bashar al-Assad, who's successful in overthrowing that regime, then they're going to just turn around the other direction and come back to Baghdad instead of going against the Maliki government.
Now, if that were going to happen or not, who knows, but that is what they're afraid of.
And a lot of people here believe that's the reason why they've been cracking down more heavily than ever now against the Sunni population in Al-Ambar province, and that's why we're seeing so many demonstrations and so many problems.
And I spoke with one of the sheikhs who led the demonstrations last Friday and said, because last Friday the demonstrations were called Last Chance Friday, because they didn't want to give the government another chance after last Friday to stand up and meet the demands that the Sunni population is making, which, of course, they have not met them.
In fact, the killings continue.
Even later that day, yet another protester of Al-Ambar was killed by government forces.
And I asked the sheikh, I said, well, what happened, and this is Last Chance Friday, so if your demands aren't met, what happens next?
What do we do?
He says, I don't know.
Maybe we have a lot of possibilities, but one of them certainly is armed resistance.
Right.
Well, you know, I guess they've learned already that, I mean, after losing Baghdad, they don't have any hope of taking it back, but they really could probably fight for much more autonomy from Baghdad than they already have.
And that could be a pretty violent war right there.
That's right.
You know, there's basically attacks continuing on across much of Iraq, not including the south, but of course, the Kurdish-controlled north, the extreme north, that is.
I mean, we have to talk about Irkut being violent, seeing violence on almost a daily basis.
But everything in between those areas, we're seeing regular attacks, regular violence.
You know, as I said before, Baghdad has become a city where, you know, it's a dangerous place.
It remains one of the most dangerous cities on earth.
The attacks have become normalized.
People have gotten used to it.
And part of that is because of resistance against government.
Part of it is just an indication of the fact of how little control this government really has, even though it does control the military.
You know, this is a government, you know, you can't talk about Sunni and Shia, because even within the Shia, you have massive, massive fractures between the Dawah party, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, then you have the Sadr movement that's come out in solidarity with the Sunni brothers, and what's happening in Anbar, and they're against Maliki and the struggle on taxes for the government.
So, you know, you have basically an impotent, paralyzed government in Baghdad, and that's another reason why there's so much insecurity around the entire country.
Now, on that, are you talking to people about those politics, and do you think that there could be a future Sadr-Sunni alliance against the Dawah party?
Because, you know, the last time that they proposed that was before the real worst of the civil war, and it seems like there, maybe there's too many hard feelings now, no?
Well, it's a lot, you know, there's a lot of that, a lot of old grievances around harm done in the past, and transgressions and violence, but, you know, the political landscape is so volatile right now, and fevers are running so high, and the control of the government in so many areas is so painless that, you know, anything really goes.
I mean, it's funny where, you know, I think the biggest contrast we can point to is back in the high, the extreme high of the sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007, when you literally had the Da'at al-Sadr's Mahdi Harimi militia going around, literally hunting down and killing Sunnis, and then now, fast forward five years, six years later, and you have the Da'at al-Sadr coming out in solidarity with his Sunni brothers up in Malabar province, and, you know, making threats against Malabar government.
So, you know, things change sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but right now, you know, it's such an extreme situation that it's not going to be a surprise to really see, you know, things kind of coming back around to where, back when I was in 2004, the height of the resistance against the U.S. military occupation, when you had collusion kicking off, you had the Da'at al-Sadr militia army battling the American forces in Sadr City as well as down in Najaf in 2005, and, you know, we're seeing these forces starting to come together again, and it's a very tenuous time, and absolutely the war in Syria is having a dramatic effect already, coming over into the borders of Iraq.
We saw the Syrian soldiers killed the other week, where 40-something of them were killed in one go.
So different alliances are being made, and one thing that is for sure is the resistance in Iraq has become far more radicalized than it was when I was here in 2004, 2005, even just in 2009 when I was here, but it's become very radicalized.
Again, another big part of this is blowback, where the U.S. is once again fighting and arming and backing a resistance in Syria, going up against Assad, and these are radical extremists, and the U.S. is acutely aware of this.
They're not going to know out in the open that they know what's going on.
We're basically seeing a review of the Reagan policy in Afghanistan in the 80s, which created al-Qaeda, and we're seeing that happening, and that's what we're seeing spill back over into Iraq as well.
Yeah, well, and the Democrats, Dar, this is part of their plausible deniability, is that they're the first ones to tell you, right there in the New York Times, that the insurgency in Syria is indistinguishable from al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That's who it is, and so therefore they're on the terrorism list, and we're not helping them, while at the same time, all 7 billion people on Earth know, because it's also right there in the New York Times, that America, the CIA is leading and coordinating the Saudi, Turkish, Jordanian, Qatari help in arming and financing these exact same rebels, and you talked about that massacre, or that attack that took place across the border.
Nouri al-Maliki, the sock puppet America put in power there, came asking the Americans, hey, we want counterterrorism help against these guys that you're backing in Syria, who are now attacking, who are our old enemies, al-Qaeda in Iraq, who are now attacking on this side of the border.
It's the most ridiculous thing, it's like a Dr. Seuss book or something, it's absolutely crazy.
Well, that's absolutely right, and you know, the hypocrisy and the contradictions from the politicians in the U.S., at least they're consistent, right?
I mean, that really hasn't changed, and then of course they act surprised when the unpredictable revolts come to pass, you know, and the thing I just want to come back to is that all of this is playing out, once again, from the perspective of Baghdad, at the expense of the Iraqi people.
You know, this is a situation here where there's not a normal life, you know, they simply want peace and security and stability just like the rest of us, and that, you know, while people in the United States have decided to turn their TV sets off or switch the channel, and certainly that's been aided and abetted by the mainstream media that's, you know, ignored what's happening in Iraq and of course denied any U.S. culpability, and of course Obama is talking about bringing people in the Bush administration out in front of the ICC or enforcing any kind of international law, or certainly U.S. law and real reparations for what was done to the country here, but you know, Iraqis don't have that option.
They live here, and most of them can't leave, and they're trying to make the most of the situation, but you know, life is a challenge here on a daily basis, and I am just amazed being here at the civility of the Iraqi people.
The average person you run into here is far more humble and gracious and civil to you and to another, despite all these hardships.
Ten years of hell, basically, since the invasion, coming on the heels of 13 years of the most dramatic economic sanctions in modern history, and yet this civility is maintained, and I can only imagine if something like this were to befall people in the United States what that would look like, and I think it's imperative now that we're at this 10-year anniversary that people remember this and people remember the outrage that happened when the war started, despite the wishes of the American people, and people need to understand that Obama was simply following a page out of the Bush playbook.
We have a good old Dar back.
Man I really want to ask him, his most recent article, at least, let me talk about this for a minute, it's called IDPs, Finding Little Refuge in Iraq.
Mike thinks his positions are going to go up because of all the money the Federal Reserve is printing to finance the deficit.
See what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.
And Mike's got a great new book coming out, so also keep your eye on writermichaelswanson.com for more details.
Hey ladies, Scott Horton here.
If you would like truly youthful, healthy, and healthy-looking skin, there is one very special company you need to visit, Dagny and Lane, at dagnyandlane.com.
Dagny and Lane has revolutionized the industry with a full line of products made from organic and all-natural ingredients that penetrate deeply with nutrient-rich ionic minerals and antioxidants for healthy and beautiful skin.
That's Dagny and Lane at dagnyandlane.com.
And for a limited time, add promo code SCOTT15 at checkout for a 15% discount.
The Emergency Committee for Israel, Brookings, Heritage, APAC, WINEP, GINSA, PNAC, CNAS, the AEI, FPI, CFR, and CSP.
It sure does seem sometimes like the war party's got the foreign policy debate in DC all locked up, but not quite.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They put America first, opposing our government's world empire, and especially their Middle Eastern madness.
That's the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey everybody, Scott Horton here, inviting you to check out the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
They've got a brand new website with new and improved access to more than 20 years' worth of essays promoting the cause of liberty, and FFF's writers, including Jacob Hornberger, Jim Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and more, aren't just good, they're the best at opposing and discrediting our corrupt overlords in Washington and their warfare-welfare regulatory police state.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation's new and improved site at fff.org.
Man, you need some Liberty Stickers for the back of your truck.
At libertystickers.com, they've got great state hate, like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army, die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
At government school, why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at libertystickers.com.
And of course, they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at thebumpersticker.com.
That's libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.