All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is the great Aaron Glantz, author of How America Lost Iraq and The War Comes Home, Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans.
Welcome back, Aaron.
How have you been?
I've been good.
I've been good.
You know, I'm writing less on the war and more on the economy, which is unfortunately equally depressing.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, and, you know, I think the title of those two books tell a bit of your story.
Well, right there, you were an unembedded real reporter in the early years of the Iraq war, then you came home and you did just about the best coverage that I've ever seen anyway, about the plight of American soldiers at the hands of the VA and the American government, once they're done using them over there in the war zone, which I don't know exactly what kind, but you deserve a big gold medal.
I'm not sure whose face should be emblazoned on it or something, but you've done such great work on, you know, the war coming home, as you call it in this book, which you're the editor of this book, right?
No, no.
I wrote that book.
And then in addition, I helped the Iraq Veterans Against the War with a book called the Winter Soldier, where they were talking about some of the experiences that they had over there and some of the war crimes they perpetrated or witnessed.
Right.
All right.
And so, and now I'm sorry, because I gave a pretty incomplete bio there.
I'm pretty sure, where are you writing?
Are you still doing a Pacifica radio?
What's your name?
No, I'm now over at the Bay Citizen, which is one of these new nonprofit journalism outlets, which is going to save journalism from, you know, all the layoffs.
And I'm sure your listeners are very familiar with, and you know, it's been a great pleasure to kind of get back home to San Francisco, which is the city that I'm from and, and start to cover it, you know, and hopefully turn the page a little bit on the war.
You know, especially now that, you know, thankfully it's over in Iraq, at least.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
And that's BayCitizen.org.
That's right.
All right.
Okay.
So yeah, let's talk about, I guess, you know, I want to do some kind of retrospective sort of thing about this Iraq war.
We got a pretty muted, but still somewhat mission accomplished kind of thing on TV this week about how everything's, you know, worked out in the end anyway, or something like that.
So I thought, you know, I'd do a retrospective with somebody who actually knew what he was talking about.
And so, you know, I guess we don't really have time to talk all about the PNAC and who lied us into war and all those things.
I guess maybe if you want to give a little bit of a word about how we got into the war, that'd be all right.
But my first real question for you would be about the title of your first book there, How America Lost Iraq, which implies that it was won at least for a time there.
And, you know, the early, really the first year, I think the first couple of years of the war there are at issue.
And maybe you could get started down that direction as well.
Yeah.
You know, for me, you know, my experience being in Iraq in the early days right after the fall of Saddam Hussein, what I saw was a lot of people who were really happy to see the dictator go.
And, you know, I met a lot of Iraqi civilians who, even if they may be, you know, lost somebody who was important to them, that they still had lost people during the rule of Saddam and were therefore kind of willing to cut the US a little bit of a break, you know.
And then over the first year of the war, as it turned from invasion to occupation, it became clear that the United States was not going to leave anytime soon.
I saw, you know, Iraqi people become increasingly upset and frustrated at the, you know, at the occupiers.
And what was exactly that window of opportunity to still say, hey, we're the good guys.
We just came to liberate you kind of a thing.
When did that window slam shut?
I think the window really slammed shut in the spring of 2004, but it was starting to close even in the winter of 2003 into 2004.
You know, when I was there in the month or two after the fall of Saddam, I saw a lot of people who were really happy, you know, happy, joyous that this dictator had been toppled.
Then, and you fast forward kind of towards the winter of 2003 into the, you know, January, February, March 2004, and that's much March, even just January, February 2004, frustration, right?
Frustration that these American occupiers are still here, a frustration that electricity isn't on, a frustration that people have begun to disappear into American prisons, frustration that, you know, a second or third family member has been killed by the American military in addition to the one that was killed during the invasion, frustration at the American patrols that are going through their neighborhoods and keeping them from going about their business, frustration at the American helicopter that's constantly buzzing their house, you know, and then in the spring of 2004, you saw the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the U.S. assault on Fallujah and the attack on Muqtada al-Sadr, and that really pushed people over the edge.
It brought a lot more support to the resistance or insurgency, whatever you want to call it.
And the Iraqi people just en masse turned their back on the Americans.
You know, then just to kind of like recap everything that's happened during this broad sweep of the war, the situation degenerated.
You know, first it was this very clear insurgency against the occupiers.
But then we started to see a lot more sectarian violence, different Iraqi factions fighting each other, lawlessness, you know, the police, Iraqi police were all tied up with the occupation, which is unpopular.
So people target the Iraqi police, which makes it difficult for you to report like a regular, ordinary crime to the police.
And then somehow, you know, kind of in the last few years, we've seen that everyone has just kind of got exhausted from the killing.
You know, the American military has gotten exhausted from the killing, has started to pull back, stopped patrolling neighborhoods, started to kind of retrench into bases and training activities.
The different factions and the sectarian violence have calmed down.
The insurgency has calmed down because the American troops are not out there.
And now the American troops are gone and maybe we have peace.
Peace would be nice.
I would like peace.
Well, that certainly is probably the best thing that the Iraqi people have going for them is that they all are just sick and tired of the violence and, you know, how bad it got.
But now, so I want to kind of trace through, you know, if we can a little bit of step by step.
Obviously, we have to skip a lot of things.
But when you talk about the spring of 2004 and the battles of Fallujah, the first battles of Fallujah and Najaf there, you know, it's worth pointing out probably that that battle of Fallujah was in was a revenge attack over the death of a few with two or three Blackwater contractors.
And the battle in Najaf at the same time was simply because they had closed down Sodder's newspaper thinking, oh, yeah, that'll shut him up.
When, of course, all it did was provoke a violent reaction out of his people.
And this is the battle where Casey Sheehan was sent to his death for no good reason, sent in the back of a flatbed truck to go rescue some other guys who'd been ambushed from just this.
You know, it's a small detail, but a very, you know, obviously counterproductive policy to go around, you know, America, land of the free here to shut down your newspaper.
And it just drove Najaf mad and got us in all that trouble.
And then right around that same time, and I don't know how much importance you put on this, but it seemed to me like really the biggest deal of all was Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani said something.
I don't know the exact translation, but it was something like, if you believe in God, I want you to go outside and insist on one man, one vote, which meant the entire Shia South went outside and basically told Paul Bremer, unless you want to start this war all over again, you're going to let us take over Baghdad and this country.
And so that was what all that sectarian war was, was it was America's war for the Bata Brigade and the Mahdi army against the Sunni population and the former Sunni government of Baghdad.
Well, I mean, another way to look at that same thing, and without disputing any of your facts which are accurate, is to say that the American military, when it invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein, you know, was talking about democracy.
You know, when you talk about democracy, that means one man, one vote, right?
And so there are a lot of these people who are part of the Shiite movements, like the Muqtada al-Sadr movement, like the Bata Brigade, like the, you know, many millions of followers of Ayatollah Sistani, who initially supported the invasion because democracy meant one man, one vote.
They had been sat on by the Ba'athists for years and they, you know, they were promised democracy.
When that didn't come after a year or so, they started to insist on it and they eventually got it.
Yeah.
All right.
Now we're going to have to hold it there and take this break, unfortunately, but we'll be back.
We're doing a little bit of revising the wonderful history of the Iraq war that we've been seeing on TV all week with Aaron Glantz, author of How America Lost Iraq and the War Comes Home.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm very happy to be talking with Aaron Glantz again, it's been way too long.
He's the author of How America Lost Iraq, a book about his time as an unembedded real reporter there in the early years of that war.
And of course, The War Comes Home, Washington's battle against America's veterans.
He's now writing for BayCitizen.org.
So let's see, we were talking about the Civil War and how, as you were saying, basically it was a foregone conclusion as soon as America toppled the minority, Sunni, Ba'athist dictatorship and trumpeting all these horns about democracy that what became the Iraqi National Alliance, the combination between the Supreme Islamic Council, the Dawah Party and Maqtada al-Sadr would be the dominant force in Iraq.
And then, as you said, eventually they got not just the government, they got Baghdad, too.
Yeah, they got everything.
Right.
So what happened?
Right.
We fought them.
We killed a lot of people and a lot of our guys killed for a number of years to prevent the outcome that we ended up with.
You know, Obama can call it a victory.
He can call it a defeat.
You know, there is a certain victory that Saddam Hussein is gone, you know, but it rings a little bit hollow after eight years of killing.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, and I don't know what you think of this.
I guess I'll ask you, what do you think of this opinion?
Business research said at the end of 2007 and then they double checked and again at the beginning of 2008, that a million Iraqis had died, excess deaths, comparing the death rate from before the war to during it, more than would have died.
Yeah, I think that that's.
I think that's probably right.
I wonder how many Olympic sized swimming pools full of blood that is.
Well, I mean, that's that's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is, you know, as this war is wound down, you know, I've just thought of the different people that I've personally touched who are dead, you know, a reporter that I used to work with, an Iraqi journalist who was driving home by an American military checkpoint to see his wife, who was pregnant with their first child and was just lit up at random by people who were attacking the checkpoint.
They didn't get the American soldiers who were manning it, but they they killed him.
You know, the some of the people that I've known who have come back or who have been written about in one of my books, Jonathan Melance, he came back, he became addicted to heroin.
He was having trouble getting care for the V.A.
I was writing about a struggle in my book as well as his ultimate success in getting care from the V.A.
And when I called him when the book came out, I found out that he had hung himself.
The member of the Kirkuk Governing Council, who is a Sunni Arab, who was trying to broker peace between the Arabs and the Kurds in Kirkuk, who was killed in his garden by motorcycle gunmen who didn't want peace.
You know, all these people are gone now.
They're all gone.
Every single one of them is not coming back.
And it's all because of this war.
Yeah, this war for nothing.
Yeah, this war for nothing, as you said, they were fighting, particularly the surge years and especially in 2007, they fought really an entire mini war there in East Baghdad against Muqtada al-Sadr while the entire rest of the army was fighting for Muqtada al-Sadr in finishing off the Sunni insurgency and driving the last of them out of Baghdad.
Yeah, I mean, I was getting blown up over this.
There's a book by David Finkel from The Post called The Good Soldiers, where he just sort of barely alludes to the idea that maybe one or two of these soldiers was beginning to figure out that they were fighting against the guys they were fighting for and was a little bit concerned about it.
But that's about all you can find in the entire book on the subject.
Well, I mean, I think there's a lot written, frankly, about the fact that the Iraqi army and the individuals who joined the Iraqi army had fundamentally different goals.
Then the generals and the administration officials who are masterminding this occupation.
I mean, I don't think that there's, you know, there's any doubt that this this is something that that many people understand and believe, including many people, you know, in the U.S. military apparatus.
You know, I don't I think that this is fundamentally something that they fought very hard against for many years.
They wanted to get an Iraqi army, an Iraqi government that would fulfill the U.S. policy objectives in the region.
And I think that what happened was when President Obama got elected, he finally said enough is enough.
You know, we're we're not going to do an immediate withdrawal for whatever reason.
However, we are going to stop trying to get the Iraqi government to be the government we want.
And if it's going to be al-Maliki, it's going to be al-Maliki.
Well, but they did try this whole year to twist as many arms as they could to get the immunity to keep up to, what, 20,000 troops indefinitely.
Right.
They just didn't get it.
Same as Bush didn't get the 56 bases he wanted back in 2008 because Maliki doesn't need Bush or Obama anymore.
They already won their war.
They won the war.
We lost.
You know, when people talk to me, it's funny, you know, people have all of these you know, kind of explanations for what ended the Vietnam War.
You know, like, was it protests?
Was it politics with this?
Was it that, you know, around the world, people think that we left Vietnam because we lost.
You know, we are leaving Iraq because we lost.
But if Obama wants to say that we're leaving Iraq because we won.
I don't care.
Yeah, you take it now.
But what about the biggest embassy one empire has ever built in a satellite in the history of mankind, 15,000 employees, 5,000 mercenaries.
And Hillary Clinton finally has her own army to be the commander in chief of.
She's not going to give that up without a fight.
What's the future there?
Well, you know, first of all, anyone who is a mercenary who goes to Iraq is signing up to go to Iraq as a mercenary.
That's different than the American soldier who joins the military for money for college or to get ahead or at a patriotic duty because they want to protect the country and is sold a bill of goods.
You know, so I feel I feel just personally differently about that.
And also, you know.
Five thousand mercenaries in a country is nothing compared to one hundred fifty thousand American soldiers, which is what we've had for most of the past decade.
And it will at this point, it will work itself out.
You know, five thousand mercenaries cannot control a country, you know.
And so this signifies that we are giving up on trying to control this country and we are scaling back our, you know, violent imperial ambition.
And that will mean that less people will die.
You know, and frankly, that's what concerns me.
Well, now, as we're withdrawing, you say, you know, if it's Maliki, it's Maliki.
Well, right now it certainly is.
But I wonder if you think that the length of the withdrawal has meant, you know, sort of in a drug sense that the kick isn't going to be that hard.
I mean, are the power factions as they stand in Iraq now, does their power represent about how much power they would really have if it hadn't been for America propping them up?
You understand what I mean?
Is Maliki's power distorted with American troops and and much less without, for example?
Yeah, I think I agree.
You know, I think that, you know, President Obama's safe withdrawal strategy from Iraq was ultimately smart.
Well, it was Bush and Maliki's agreement back in 2008.
Yeah, but you know that if John McCain had been elected, we'd be looking at a different situation.
That much is true, although I think he would have got us in a nuclear war with Russia by now.
And so this argument would be moot.
But anyway, but I mean, the point is that this is something I mean, like I'll tell you, when Obama came into office and he said that I'm going to get us out of Iraq by the end of 2012, I mean, sorry, 2011 and 2011 is three years away.
You know, I'm not believing him.
Right.
Who thinks that far in advance in American politics?
Right.
Who who puts out a goal like that and actually sticks to it?
But I got to give the man some credit in that he all along the way was was continuing this withdrawal.
Right.
And meeting the target that was set.
And and all along the way, there are different events that come up that he could have used to reassert the military in Iraq.
But he didn't.
Well, but so, for example, what's going to happen to the sons of Iraq, the so-called Sunni awakening that put down their own insurgency and decided to call cease fire with the American troops?
They're high and dry now, right?
Well, I don't know, but that's life, right?
You know, we we can't know what's going to happen in a year from now in Iraq, but we can say a few things.
The first is that, like the worst fears of the people on the right, that it would just descend are wrong.
And the other is that, you know, the people of Iraq will get what they want or what they deserve on their own.
It's their country.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for joining us on the show, Aaron.
It's been great to talk with you again.
All right.
Take care.
Everybody, that's the great Aaron Glantz.
The books are The War Comes Home and How America Lost Iraq.
He writes for the Bay Citizen, BayCitizen.org.
