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And now I'd like to introduce Stephen Zunis.
He's got this article, Remembering Those Responsible, on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.
It's at Common Dreams right now, and he is professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Stephen?
Great to be on.
Thank you.
So one of the clips that we just played of Bradley Manning was him explaining how one of the things that really pushed him to do this, to liberate these documents and upload them to WikiLeaks so that the people of the world and especially the United States could have them, was being made, being ordered by his commanding officers in Iraq to help the Maliki government and Maliki's police, I don't know, secret police or above board ones, disappear.
Some people, one of them specifically for writing an article critical of the Iraqi government's fiscal policy, basically.
Where did the money go?
Somehow you're making all this money and somehow we all see so little of it, was basically what was going on in the essay, the kind of thing that you could read in any newspaper in America.
And Bradley Manning went to his commanding officer and said, hey, you sure you want me to help these cops disappear this guy off to torture and God knows what for writing this article?
And his commanding officers told him, yeah, do that.
Keep it up.
Drop it.
We don't want to hear any more complaints about it.
Get back to work, basically.
And that was one of the things that we already knew from the chat logs, but now we hear it straight from Bradley Manning.
That was one of the things that really motivated him to go and do this.
So I thought, hey, what a great segue, even though it's taken me a long time to get to the point, to ask you about Nouri al-Maliki and his police and his torture squads.
And who is it that America installed in power in Iraq as we celebrate 10 years of victory and accomplishment there in Mesopotamia?
Well, you know, it's really striking.
I keep trying to emphasize to people that saying that the invasion of Iraq was about promoting democracy was as big a lie as that Iraq had these vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction.
Democracy never really was the issue, except for PR.
I mean, the original plan was to have Ahmed Chalabi or some compliant exile installed as the new dictator.
When it was clear that wasn't going to happen, the idea was to have the U.S. rule it pretty directly, as a viceroyalty, as a quasi-colony for a better part of a decade.
It was clear we couldn't get away with that.
So then they had this idea of what they called caucuses.
And we're not talking about the Iowa caucuses or anything remotely democratic.
We're talking about appointees, American appointees, drawing up the Constitution and forming the new government.
And it was only after hundreds of thousands of Iraqis took to the streets in peaceful demonstrations, demanding direct elections, that the United States agreed to have them.
But then we put it off and put it off and put it off.
Meanwhile, you had an insurgency, primarily in the Sunni community, rising up.
The U.S. came down, as many counterinsurgency operations are, in a pretty bloody, heavy-handed manner.
And so when they finally had the elections, the Sunnis boycotted.
And meanwhile, the exiled Shiite parties, including the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Dawa, which spent their exile years in Iran, had close ties with Hezbollah and some other hardline Shiite groups.
And they were able to organize better than the more moderate and more nationalistic kinds of groups.
And they ended up winning the election.
Now, this was not the first choice of the United States.
But it was hard to say no, and they were pretty darn dependent on the United States, given that there were about 40-something armed factions fighting them in the U.S. at that time.
And then Maliki eventually came as the strongman.
And basically, you had these extremist Sunni groups, some tied to Al-Qaeda, which ended up killing random Shiites, because it's all the Shiite population is the people responsible for having their two greatest enemies, the United States and Iran, end up in a disproportionate amount of power in the country.
And then Maliki's government ended up bringing in these death squads, Central America-style, to go after real and imagined dissidents, primarily within the Sunni community.
So it was not really a sectarian...
The media often calls it all these ancient sectarian hatreds, and once Saddam was gone, they came out of the woodwork.
But no, that had not been the case.
You had Sunnis and Shiites intermarrying.
If there was a village in one mosque, Sunnis and Shiites would worship together.
I mean, there's less difference between the Sunni and Shiite traditions than there is between Catholicism and Protestantism.
But what happened was, as in Northern Ireland, the identification ended up paralleling the larger political issues, and it ended up being kind of a sectarian war.
And the U.S. has basically gone back and forth, seeing who's the bigger enemy.
We've armed and worked with various sides, basically trying to hold on to some tiny bit of influence.
But the problem was, because the United States ended up totally eliminating the civil service, because they said any Ba'ath Party member could be for our government, but since you're required to be a member of the Ba'ath Party to be even a minor bureaucrat, that got rid of the secular, national, identified, experienced civil service.
All the cabinet posts ended up being fiefdoms of the sectarian groups.
And then, by abolishing the entire army, again, not just the bad guys at the top, the war criminals, but everybody, these guys took their guns home and joined these various sectarian militias.
And then the U.S. has been, as you mentioned at the outset, and as Bradley Manning talked about, and as Shane Bauer and other journalists have written about, the U.S. has been part and parcel of the training and organizing and facilitating of these death squad activities.
Again, very reminiscent of what we saw in El Salvador in the 80s, and other examples of the so-called national security state during the Cold War in Latin America.
Right.
Yeah, and now we even know James Steele from the El Salvador War was brought in by Donald Rumsfeld to carry all that out.
And as you were saying, I guess it's the combination of those death squads and then also the elections of 05 that really solidified the fact, the inescapable truth that the United Iraqi Alliance, which was, I guess, a combination of the Hakeem faction, the Dawah party, Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they were going to win the so-called democratic elections.
They had the majority by far, and they were going to take Baghdad.
And so that meant all the Sunni factions in Baghdad, they fought like hell to try to keep it.
And that was the Civil War of 2006 and 2007 was basically begun by the American, what amounted to the democratic policy.
Because, I mean, in a way, right, when those demonstrations you mentioned, when Sistani said, hey, if you're a Shiite and you believe in God, go outside and demand one man, one vote, and they all did.
At that point, the Bush administration was forced to live up to their rhetoric of having a majority rule kind of state, where, like you're saying, they didn't want that before, but they had to give in to Sistani on that.
And then from that point on, I don't know whether they really understood.
Some of them did anyway.
Khalilzad wanted to switch back to the Sunnis in 2005.
But they basically just stuck to it.
We have to continue to fight this war on behalf of the Dawah Party, United Iraqi Alliance group, because that's what we started doing.
And it's a government program, you can't cancel it.
It didn't get canceled until it was successful.
And the people that we finished installing in power kicked our asses right out.
And the amazing thing is that there's so much ignorance about Iraq.
In fact, Rumsfeld and others deliberately kept out anybody who knew anything about Iraqi culture, because they had this idea of starting from scratch.
I mean, they wanted to make Iraq their model state, the way the Soviet Union wanted to make Afghanistan their model state.
But guess what, folks?
That doesn't work.
And during the height of the violence, I think it was around 2006, I saw an interesting statistic of the more than 1,000 American employees at the U.S. Embassy.
The number that spoke fluent Arabic totaled eight.
They did not want people in there who actually knew what they were doing, deliberately.
And this is the result that we see.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they were basically just making money in the green zone.
That's all that was.
That's why they called it the green zone.
Yeah, really.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that, in many ways, the biggest division in Iraq is not between Sunni and Shia, but between – and I'm talking about Arab Iraq.
I'm not even talking about the Kurdish situation, which is a whole other can of worms.
But within Arab Iraq, the biggest division is not between Sunni and Shia, but between nationalists and sectarians within both communities.
And the United States, in many ways, has been more afraid of the nationalists because they can unite.
You know, they can basically say, you know, Iraq for Iraqis.
We don't want the United States and we don't want the Iranian.
We don't want anybody.
You know, they're the ones who want to – but scared about Saddam and scared about the Baathists and others, reasons the U.S. has supported these radical Islamist groups, Sunni and Shia, in various countries over the years because this kind of more secular nationalism, ultimately, is more threatening to U.S. interests than the divide-and-rule kinds of things we can do with people who put their religious identities first.
And the real tragedy, you know, with Iraq is that, you know, the sectarians have come to dominate, but the good part is that they are growing.
They are – the more secular elements did better in the parliamentary elections than they had before.
And so it's interesting that these death squads now are not just going after Sunnis on sectarian grounds.
They're going after these pro-democracy activists.
They had a whole series of demonstrations several months ago and they had another series of demonstrations two years before that during the Arab Spring protests.
These people were just wanting democracy, ending corruption, you know, having more representative, accountable government.
And these are the real Democrats, you know.
And they're now the ones who are the primary targets of the death squads.
Right, yeah, we don't see nothing on CNN about all the pro-democracy activists in Iraq now, do we?
Hardly.
Because Iraq is supposedly a democracy, right?
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, because it's not quite as – I mean, if I'm covering, you know, the civil war in Syria, for example, protests in Iraq don't really come up.
And so it ends up sounding like in the Sunni parts of Iraq the only people with a will doing anything are the al-Qaeda guys.
But they were always the very smallest percentage of the Iraqi insurgency back in the heaviest days.
Well, they did a sufficient amount of damage.
They're just the ones who set up the loud bombs, you know, and get all the attention.
But now the Maliki government doesn't really control the Sunni triangle, the Anbar province, et cetera, right?
They basically have autonomy now, don't they?
They did give them a fair amount of political space.
But the big thing is they didn't really go along with the deal of more fully incorporating them into the armed forces and to the national government.
So there's still a bunch of tension there.
It was the decision by these tribal groups who saw al-Qaeda as actually a bigger threat to stop fighting the U.S. and the government and work with them.
That was a major factor, much more so than the so-called surge and calming things down, you know, around late 2007, 2008.
But the country is still very, very divided.
And, you know, it's going to...
I'm a lot more...
We hear about all the crazy stuff going on in Egypt and the like.
But let me tell you, Egypt is going to calm down and democratize and move forward a lot quicker than Iraq is.
It may take Egypt a while, but it's going to take Iraq a whole hell of a lot longer because we've created a much, much bigger mess there.
Yeah, well, I mean, just the number of buildings that have been blown up, the number of industries that have fallen into complete disrepair and need, you know, total overhauls to get up and going again.
It's, you know, we've basically raised that entire country to the ground.
There was a great article, I think it was in The Nation, about the level of corruption and all the...
And the way that even Saddam Hussein, as god-awful as he was on so many levels, actually...
And despite having the most draconian sanctions in world history, was able to get basic things like water and electricity and manufacturing going better than the United States has with all the hundreds of billions of dollars we've poured into that country.
Yeah, the trains didn't run on time, but they did run.
Now they don't do nothing.
Exactly.
All right, so now, a few different things here.
First of all, in the WikiLeaks that Bradley Manning heroically liberated and put out to the people, there's one from Saudi Arabia where the ambassador's reporting that the king, or at least, maybe it's Prince Turkey or somebody is saying, what the hell are you doing overthrowing Saddam Hussein?
The way it works is, it's you guys, Saddam, and us in alliance against Iran and containing Iran.
And if you do this, you're going to hand Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
And I've been informed that in the Middle East, the expression is, they do have the same expression, but they use golden instead of silver platter over there.
And anyway, so you would think that that would have been obvious enough 10 years ago before Bush gave his 48-hour speech or something like that.
But that's the huge result of this.
Never mind for the lives of the people in Iraq, but as far as politics goes in the world, this is the major effect, is they've empowered Iran immeasurably.
I mean, they've created a humongous new ally, all the land from Baghdad to Basra.
Basra is under control of, not necessarily Iranian sock puppets, but certainly Iranian-leaning Shiite Arabs and have joined their alliance along with Syria or what's left of the government of Syria.
Yeah, yeah, we keep hearing these things.
Syria is Iran's only Arab ally, Iraq is much, much closer to Iran and Syria than the current government.
Right.
And Saddam also, for all of his faults, like Gaddafi, he was good at keeping al-Qaeda down.
There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq or not in any other part of Iraq that he controlled, right?
Zarqawi was hiding up in Kurdistan, but he wasn't really friends with Osama either.
The al-Qaeda connection was one of the more bizarre charges by the Bush administration as well as by Hillary Clinton and some of his Democratic supporters, which had absolutely no basis in reality and virtually everybody who knew anything about the region, about al-Qaeda, about Iraq, you know, told people that, but the lies kept on coming.
And now, isn't it the case that America and Saudi Arabia are backing al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria against Iran's and Iraq's ally, Bashar al-Assad?
There's definitely money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others to some Salafi-Sunni factions, which include some way out groups that are al-Qaeda affiliates.
The U.S. has been trying to steer its aid towards the so-called moderate forces, but, you know, it's not like it's that well organized and centralized and not always that obvious who is who.
The al-Qaeda people are getting a lot of their support from private sources in the Gulf.
By private, I mean, you know, the Saudi royal family, for example, the kings and other people have the maximum four wives, but some of them end up divorcing one of them every couple of weeks and getting another.
The upshot is that, you know, there are many, many, many thousands of princes and at least a few of them are, and most of them are more status quo oriented, but you do have a few that have sympathy for al-Qaeda and like-minded groups.
And since the Saudi national treasury and the Saudi family trust is basically the same thing, you know, these guys have a fair amount of money they can give to their favorite so-called charities, including, and for some of them, that would be al-Qaeda and other extremists.
And so, you know, there's not, I've not seen evidence of any deliberate U.S. policy to support al-Qaeda, but certainly our allies, at least indirectly, are supporting those kinds of, those elements, which are pretty scary.
All right, now, it seems to me that one big effect of the Iraq war is the radicalization of the Middle East and the so-called Arab Spring.
And for the most part, I think that's good and it's kind of a secondary effect of it that, first of all, the American government had to debase the currency in order to pay for the war without raising taxes, and then everybody else in the world has to debase their currency to keep up with us.
Otherwise, it'll throw off their trade balances and that kind of thing.
And so, all across the Middle East, especially, people living on a dollar a day found it was only worth 50 cents and there were a lot of bread riots and, you know, people on empty stomachs, before they get completely starving, they can be quite violent and never even mind violent, quite determined.
And I think that was a big part of what happened there.
But also, I think, wasn't it that the people of the Middle East, as much as they resented their American-backed tortured dictators, they resented them twice as much after watching the American-waged Iraq war in their neighborhood all that time?
That was a huge factor.
We have radicalized an entire generation and it is going to haunt us for years.
I mean, remember, it was well over 20 years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we had 9-11 and that generation had been radicalized by the Soviet invasion of a Muslim nation.
And so, you know, for years to come we're going to be threatened by this new generation that has been radicalized.
And these guys are even more ruthless than the first generation.
And while the war in Afghanistan was largely waged in the countryside, the Iraq war was urban guerrilla warfare, urban terrorism, which is more applicable if you want to engage in international terrorism.
So we're going to be paying this on a whole lot of levels, not just economically, since all the money for this war is borrowed.
We're going to be spending it on veterans' benefits and the interest in the national debt and everything else for quite a few years.
But we're going to be paying a price politically as well.
And indeed, it would not surprise me if we found some mega-terrorist attack in the coming years or decades.
And if you looked at the people who did it, you'd find the roots of them individually or the movement they're part of was in direct reaction of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Yeah, I remember in 2005 the Israelis and the Jordanians, I think, did a study, no, the Israelis and the Saudis did separate studies at the same time, that both concluded that virtually 100% of the young jihadists who were the kind of guys that were you and even I would concede that, yeah, those guys were al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The guys who traveled to Iraq to fight from these other countries and joined up the suicide bomber brigades and that kind of thing.
All of them were brand new at this.
None of them were veterans of the Afghan war against the Russians.
They were all radicalized by the invasion of Iraq.
And yes, in fact, they were sent by veterans of the Afghan war but they were all old.
And so they played the role of making the phone calls and the travel plans and arranging the jihad.
But it was really the American it was a supply side kind of thing.
You give al-Qaeda a training ground and they will come to it.
Yeah, exactly.
I remember one of the great rationalizations that some people were saying uses a fly paper effect.
Yeah, Andrew Sullivan.
You talk to Iraq and then we can kill them.
Like you say, these are new people.
These were people who were radicalized for that very reason because you had this sovereign nation invaded by the United States and given that the invasion was a direct contravention of the United Nations Charter and so many other basic principles of international law.
Given that the United States and Iraq and its allies in Iraq were engaged in basic violations of international and humanitarian law Fourth Geneva Convention and other things.
You could see how the jihadist thing look, if the United States with all its resources and all its power doesn't play by the rules why the hell should we?
Right.
Alright, well last word real quick before we go.
You list some Democrats involved in this thing just so people don't misremember how this went down.
Basically the people who run our government right now are the same people who got us into the war in Iraq.
Barack Obama, to his credit was an outspoken opponent of the war but despite him saying that I will not just end the Iraq war, I will end the mindset that led to the Iraq war the vast majority of his appointments to key foreign policy and national security positions were among the right wing minority of Democrats on Capitol Hill who did vote to authorize the invasion and continue to support the war for quite a long time.
That includes Hillary Clinton, John Kerry Joe Biden not to mention Republicans like Robert Gates and the new Secretary of Defense so he turned against the war fairly soon afterwards he also was a supporter of the war and many of the sub-cabinet positions his Chief of Staff Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel Jan Napolitano at Homeland Security all these people were supporters of the Iraq war they said the lies about Al-Qaeda connections about weapons of mass destruction and it is still very disturbing that so many Democrats so conveniently forget this and Hillary Clinton is now leading in the polls overwhelmingly for the next election and it's amazing how many Hillary supporters are totally oblivious and are totally in denial that she was one of the very very worst on the Democratic side of the aisle when it came to Iraq and just spewing the lies that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were putting out and even during the campaign she refused to take it back that's why she lost to Obama really she was the inevitable front-runner factor for many she never apologized never really acknowledged her role alright I know you gotta go thanks so much for your time Stephen we'll talk again soon alright everybody that is Stephen Zunis he is professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and he's the co-author of Western Sahara not the region, the actual country Western Sahara, War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution 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 US Army, die for Israel 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 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 scotthorton.org we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show Liberty Classroom the history and economics they didn't teach you hey y'all, Scott here like I told you before the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org represents the best of the libertarian movement led by the fearless Jacob Hornberger FFF writers James Bovard, Sheldon Richman Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory and many more write the op-eds and the books host the events and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better help support the Future Freedom Foundation subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom or to contribute, just look for the big red donate button at the top of fff.org peace and freedom, thank you hey y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org CNI stands against America's negative role in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict the war party's relentless push to bomb Iran and the roles played by twisted Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in justifying it all the Council for the National Interest works tirelessly to expose and oppose our government's most destructive policies but they can't do it without you support CNI's push to straighten out America's crooked course check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and click donate under about us at the top of the page that's councilforthenationalinterest.org
