Anthony Arnove, author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal discusses his recent TomDispatch column “Four Years Later… and Counting” about the terrible destruction America has wrought in Iraq and prospects for a new political realignment against Empire and the central state here at home.
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For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
This war is so bad it's got me in bed with the Reds.
I'm putting aside every issue that I have.
I don't even care really what your stance is anymore about immigration or abortion or government schools, the welfare state or anything else.
I'm in desperate need of a political realignment in this country on the issue of stopping this war.
And then we can move on to stopping the next one.
And as part of that I'm reaching out to the best of what I call the counter punch left, the real antiwar left.
And a good example of that is my guest today, Anthony Arnove.
He's the author of a book called Iraq, The Logic of Withdrawal.
And is the co-author with Howard Zinn of Voices of a People's History of the United States.
He's got a great article at the Tom Dispatch, Tom Engelhardt's site.
And we also ran it on Antiwar.com four years later and counting.
Welcome to the show, Anthony.
Thanks for having me on and thanks for posting my article on Antiwar.com.
Well it was a really good article and it's just the kind of thing we like at Antiwar.com.
We're all plumb line libertarians but we try to feature the very best of the left and the right and that article definitely counts.
Basically the point of the article is that we're counting the dead in Darfur but not in Iraq.
When the dead in Darfur have basically nothing to do with the United States whereas the dead in Iraq are because of the United States.
Yeah, it's a very interesting lens to view the world through.
But our media and a lot of people in this country seem to be systematically ignoring the death for which our government is the most responsible.
The deaths in Iraq and paying a lot of attention to death in Darfur which of course are a humanitarian concern.
But the claim of those who want us to pay attention to Darfur is that the U.S. is responsible by not militarily intervening.
So in effect they're calling for a more imperialist United States posture.
They're calling for more use of the military at a very time when people around the world are seeing the very direct results in Iraq of U.S. military intervention.
And it's not just the dead which the Lancet estimated last year at now 655,000 in Iraq since the invasion and occupation began in March 2003.
But the wounded, the injured, the displaced, Iraq today has the world's worst refugee crisis.
Some 2 million external refugees and 1.9 million internal refugees.
People completely uprooted, their lives shattered, unemployment skyrocketing.
Wait, let's stop right there with the refugees.
2 million who have fled to neighboring states or to Europe and another 2 million internally displaced that is expelled from Kirkuk and so they have to go back to the south, that kind of thing.
4 million people?
4 million people and then add the dead and you're talking 1 in 5 Iraqis dead or displaced, uprooted completely from their communities, their lives shattered.
And by the way, it's actually closer to 18, 19% of the population if you include the dead.
If you're looking only at the internal refugees, it's more like 15, 16% external and internal refugees.
And on top of that, 2 million have fled the country.
Ask the question, how many of those came to the United States last year?
202.
So we've created this refugee crisis and are providing absolutely no assistance to those refugees we've caused to flee Iraq and caused to flee their communities because of the terrorism of the occupation and the civil war that we've created there.
I just read something in Mother Jones yesterday about people, not only people who are Iraqi refugees who are trying to flee the violence, but people who worked for the U.S. occupation VT government and now are in trouble.
Now they're having their lives threatened, their families killed off and so even those people, even the people who were the most pro-American when the war began and risked their lives to help the United States occupying force.
Even they can't get into the U.S.
No, that's absolutely correct and translators, journalists, people who have worked at all levels of Iraqi society in any degree of cooperation with either the occupation government or contractors or media outlets that have a base in Iraq are being abandoned.
Just goes to show you that the entire project of America building a new government there is already over.
Absolutely, I mean the situation is at every level riddled with corruption, at every level is riddled with a complete contempt for the life of Iraqis.
What's so interesting is that we said we're going to bring democracy to Iraq, which is a joke, but then you look at the situation and every day what we see is the United States is working to prevent democracy in Iraq, to prevent the Iraqi people from determining their own future and running their own lives.
Because it's very clear that the Iraqi people disagree on many things, but they agree on a few things, most fundamentally that they want the United States to leave.
Pardon me if I have a little bit of cognitive dissonance here, but on one hand, Iraqis are so precious that they're worth spending an unlimited amount of American lives and dollars to give them a wonderful democracy.
But then it's just as easy apparently to turn around and consider them as completely less than human, basically cartoon characters that it doesn't matter when they're dying at rates of hundreds of thousands of people and refugees in the millions, all of a sudden their lives don't matter at all.
Absolutely, and I think that just exposes the reality that this war had nothing to do, this invasion and occupation, have nothing to do with helping Iraqis, have nothing to do with making the world safer, have nothing to do with all of the stated aims, but has to do with very crude questions of power politics, and in particular to do with crude oil.
The fact that Iraq has the world's second largest reserves of oil, sits in a region with two-thirds of world oil reserves, sits in a region with most of the world's natural gas reserves and its most important shipping routes for energy resources of the region, and that that is a global choke point for empire.
And the United States is determined to control those energy resources and to prevent the emergence of any what they call peer competitor, any country in the world that could challenge the enormous distance that exists between the United States and other countries in terms of its role as the world's sole superpower, its role as an economic superpower.
And the U.S. understands that other countries that could emerge as peer competitors are far more reliant on the energy resources of the Middle East than we are here in the United States, where we get our oil from many other sources, including Venezuela, a topic for another discussion.
Very well said.
So your point is that the policy is really keeping that oil out of the hands of others rather than just stealing it for ourselves.
Absolutely.
It's about control.
It's about using oil as a weapon.
The irony is that the United States says we won't allow any other country to use oil as a weapon, but they're quite determined to use oil as a weapon themselves.
Right.
OK.
Now, before we get too far off of the refugee crisis in Iraq here, again, two million people who have fled Iraq, almost another two million who are internally displaced.
And I just did an interview a couple of weeks ago with a woman named Preeti Taneja from the Minority Rights International Group.
I forget the exact name of it, but they had done this in-depth study of all of Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities, the Mandians and the Assyrian Christians and people, frankly, that you've probably never heard of.
Ethnicities and religions, tiny little sects that have existed there for over 2000 years who now, for intents and purposes, no longer exist as a separate little ethnicity.
It's a very important point and a reminder that we have to step back from the situation in Iraq and not look at it through the very simple black and white lens that's given to us by our government and by the establishment press.
They want to talk about Iraq as if there's a simple divide between Sunni and Shia, and that explains the violence, that explains the problems.
Perhaps you can talk about a tripartite split between Kurds and Shia and Sunni Muslims, but that's as deep as you can get.
What that obscures is a number of things.
First of all, it obscures, as you pointed out, that actually Iraq is far more diverse, that there are Syrians, there are Christians, there are a number of communities that don't fit into that very simple framework.
But moreover, it obscures that there are political and class divisions among Sunnis, among Shias, among Kurds, and that those are divided communities.
They're divided by class, they're divided by politics, they're divided by their relationship to the occupation.
So that there are all kinds of divisions among Sunni, among Shia, among Kurds.
Also, they talk about a Shia crescent in the Middle East, and in particular you hear this new belligerence about Iran and about Syria.
But of course what that ignores is that there are divisions between Shias in Iran, which is Persian, which is not Arab, and Shias in Iraq, who are Arab.
So we really have to understand that there's a much more complex mosaic in Iraq than were presented, and that the key division in Iraq today is between those who oppose occupation and those who are taking part in the occupation.
That is still the fundamental divide, and that is still why there is a resistance, that is why there is violence in Iraq.
Not because of Iran, not because of Syria, not because of Al Qaeda, or not because of something that happened in the secession of profits in the 8th century.
Well, and part of this, too, is that it's a monopoly government that we're creating here, or attempting to create, and the question is who's going to have their hands on it?
And it seems like it's going to be the Iran-backed factions, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party are the Iran-backed factions, and they're also the United States-backed factions.
Absolutely.
And so there's a lot for Sunni Arabs to be fighting about.
Absolutely, and they also face the prospect, the very real prospect, that the oil in Iraq will be cut off from them in a profound sense, that the oil of the country is concentrated in the north, predominantly Kurdish areas, and in the south, predominantly Shia areas.
And if there's an effective, or even eventual literal partition of the country, that would leave Sunnis economically dispossessed, and dispossessed of access to the oil in a landlocked western and central section of the former country.
So it's a recipe for worse civil war than we're already seeing, it's a recipe for a complete disaster that would definitely spread beyond Iraq's borders.
Yeah, now let's get back to a little bit of the more here and now, and what the situation is in Iraq at this moment in terms of, well as you talk about in your article, just runaway inflation, pretend money that's just being printed and is worth basically nothing, the so-called privatization of Iraq's industries, which were basically just looted and dumped and are now all shut down, malnutrition, unemployment, water, electricity, those kinds of things.
Well, the situation is disastrous from a humanitarian standpoint.
There's less electricity, less access to safe drinking water, higher unemployment, less job security, much greater malnutrition today than there was before the US invasion in 2003.
But recall that the baseline in 2003 was already abysmal because of more than 12 years of the United States, with the cooperation of the United Nations, subjecting Iraq to comprehensive sanctions that bled that country, didn't affect the political elite, the economic, the military elite, did not affect Saddam Hussein or the Ba'ath Party officials, but hurt the most vulnerable in Iraq society to the tune of perhaps 500,000 excess deaths of children under five.
And it wasn't just the sanctions, it was years of bombing that were carried out by the Clinton administration.
And before that, the destruction of the Gulf War, the destruction of the Iran-Iraq War, which the United States encouraged, and before that, all of the years of suffering under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, who was backed by the United States.
So that brings us to 2003, and then it's gotten drastically worse since then.
Yeah, and I just wanted to emphasize there the point that you made about the Gulf War.
The Defense Department, at the end of that war, made sure to bomb the sewage and water treatment facilities, which is in direct violation of American law and our treaty obligations.
Yeah, there was rapid deterioration and periodic bombing of Iraq's infrastructure, and through the sanctions, a deliberate effort to prevent Iraq from being able to rebuild its water supply, its electricity system, which led to a rise of waterborne diseases that were easily preventable in Iraq that had not existed in Iraq for decades.
And really, that is a form of targeting the civilian population that is a violation of every law of war, but it's certainly, regardless of what the Geneva Conventions say, or U.S. law says, completely unacceptable.
And you know, Madeleine Albright, she and the Clinton administration explained that the purpose of this is to make the people of Iraq so miserable that they'll rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Absolutely.
And they said that they wouldn't ever lift the sanctions until he was gone.
Absolutely.
And she also, when she was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, gave an interview to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, in which Lesley Stahl asked her about the more than 500,000 excess deaths of children under five in Iraq as a result of the sanctions, and asked, is the price worth it?
And Madeleine Albright said, yes, the price is worth it.
The geopolitical goals of the United States made it worth sacrificing the lives of half of a million children of Iraq.
Yeah, well, Condoleezza Rice just said the same thing the other day.
Absolutely.
And these people then claim that they're acting to liberate the people of Iraq.
Hypocrisy isn't even the right word for it.
It's abominable.
OK, now, I got this radical revolutionary fringe idea here that I know that most Americans reject, but I believe it firmly.
And that is that Iraqis are human beings.
They're individuals.
They live on a little plot of land, you know, that's not too much different than plots of land that we live on.
They have kids.
They breathe air and eat a couple of times a day, just like us.
They are human beings, no different than us.
Yet I know that my neighbors cannot can still not comprehend this, that the Middle East to the average American, they picture, you know, scenes from Disney's Aladdin or something where this whole situation is unreal to them.
It doesn't matter what happens to these people.
I can't hear the screams from here.
I can't smell the burning bodies from here.
So really, what do I care?
Well, I think you're raising a very important question and point.
I mean, the degree of anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim racism in this country is profound.
And it's been very consciously intensified in the wake of September 11, 2001.
And that has been used to sell the occupation of Iraq through a process of dehumanizing Arabs, dehumanizing Muslims.
And in the process, making it easy to ignore their suffering, making it easy for the soldiers to carry out atrocities.
For example, we know that during the Vietnam War, there was a conscious program of trying to inculcate in the minds of the troops that Vietnamese were gooks, that they were subhuman, that they were animals.
And you see a very similar thing with the treatment of Iraqis and Arabs today, that they're Hajis, that they're less than human, that they're just terrorists, that they don't value life.
All of these mythologies that are created in order to dehumanize the enemy.
But what's interesting to me is that despite that, despite a very concerted campaign of racism, of dehumanization, you do now have a clear majority in this country that think it was wrong to have invaded Iraq and who resist the government's policy and want to see a change.
But there's no political leadership that's rising to address that.
And for all the talk about bringing democracy to Iraq, which we've talked about is a complete myth and a joke, we are seeing right now how little democracy we have in this country.
Yeah, well, and the reason the American people want out of Iraq has nothing to do with Iraqis being human beings.
It has to do with we lost the war and Americans don't like losing wars and they know it's too late to try to quote unquote win it now.
So they just want out.
I don't know.
I think that, like, for example, go back to the Vietnam War.
One of the images that became a kind of galvanizing image that mobilized anti-war sentiment in this country was not an image of a U.S. soldier being killed, but was an image of a Vietnamese girl, her body napalmed, fleeing a Vietnamese village that had been bombed by the United States with the deadly, defoliant napalm.
And it exposed, in the minds of so many people, the contradiction between saying we're helping the Vietnamese people, we're fighting to free them, we're fighting to give them a future, we're liberating them, all the kind of rhetoric that we hear now about Iraq, it exposed the contradiction between what we claimed we were doing and the reality of what we were doing.
And I think that there's a significant element of anti-war sentiment in this country which is based on that recognition.
We were told that we were fighting weapons of mass destruction, eliminating weapons of mass destruction.
We were told that Iraq was somehow connected to al Qaeda in 9-11.
We were told that the Iraqis were a threat to us.
We were told that we were going to bring them democracy.
And instead, they're seeing that the picture is completely different than that.
And they're also seeing that the Iraqi people want us to go.
And I think an element of that does come out of a sense of solidarity and a recognition of the humanity of the Iraqi people.
I certainly know soldiers who are coming back and who are joining groups like Iraq Veterans Against War, which I think is one of the most important organizations right now in this country and is doing very important work exposing the lies around this war.
A lot of those soldiers, really what turned them was coming to see the Iraqis as human beings, coming to see that they had very real grievances, coming to understand that if we were subjected to occupation, if we were subjected to these kinds of policies, we would certainly be fighting back too.
Absolutely.
And you know, it really shouldn't be that hard to make the analogy, right?
To be in the other guy's shoes for a minute.
Absolutely.
I mean, when I went to high school and middle school and grade school, we learned all about how it was great to resist foreign occupation of the British, how those were, you know, heroes of our country for standing up against King George.
Right.
And then suddenly we're supposed to forget all of those ideas and all of those principles, even as we are acting as a foreign occupying power, denying democracy, denying self-determination, once again to another people.
Now, one of the points that you brought up at the beginning of the interview and also in your article is the idea that it's okay to criticize American complicity in this kind of thing, for the most part, as long as it's complicity by omission and as long as it's centered around an argument which demands more interventionism, as in the case of Darfur.
It makes me think that if America does leave Iraq and the warring doesn't stop within, I don't know, a year or so, the progressive left is going to demand that the United States reinvade to save Iraq.
Absolutely.
I think this point is so important.
The idea that we are part of the solution rather than part of the problem is behind so much misguided thinking about Iraq, about Darfur, about Afghanistan, about a whole series of other problems.
There's no understanding in our culture of the fact that as an imperial power we're actually the problem, not the solution to humanitarian crises, and that what we really need to be talking about is not intervening more, but intervening less.
The situation of Darfur really plays into this because you have a situation where people are holding up signs on demonstrations saying, out of Iraq into Darfur, as if you can somehow disconnect the situation, the mess we've created in Iraq, from the crisis that would be created if we intervened in Darfur, as if the U.S. military just exists to go around helping people.
We're like the Boy Scouts, helping people cross the street.
It's based on the fact that we don't really learn in this country the history of our empire, and we don't learn the history of other empires.
We learn a little bit very early on a kind of superficial account of the British empire in the United States, but not much beyond that.
I think that leads to this myth of American benevolence.
This myth of the United States as a benevolent, not self-interested empire.
As long as you have that idea in your head, absolutely.
You're going to support more intervention in Iraq.
You're going to support the idea of the troops staying because if we leave there will be civil war.
You'll completely miss the fact that there's a civil war now, and it's been created by the occupation.
The occupation isn't lessening civil war, it's intensifying it.
Well, and I think that this really speaks to the problem in this country, why it is that it's so hard to have an effective anti-war movement.
If we were to have one, especially in the days with Republicans in power, it would have to come from the left.
And yet, ideologically, in a basic belief system kind of sense, liberals tend to believe that government is a good tool for solving problems, pretty much whatever they are.
And the international do-gooderism is just kind of a natural extension of that, isn't it?
The Wilsonian, you know, we're the schoolmarm here to teach you to elect good men, and that kind of thing.
Well, certainly American liberalism has long supported imperialism, and the Wilsonian variety is a very clear example of that, despite all the mythology.
There's a terrific book on this, written by a guy named Sidney Lenz, called The Forging of the American Empire.
It's kind of a people's history of U.S. empire, and it was recently republished with a new foreword by Howard Zinn, kind of bringing the story a little more up to date, tying it into Iraq today.
And what you really come to understand is that U.S. imperialism has always been a bipartisan project.
It's not a question of Republicans, it's not a question of Democrats.
Both parties have been wholeheartedly supportive of U.S. imperial objectives.
This doesn't begin with George Bush, doesn't begin with his administration.
It is a long history, and it's based on values that are shared quite broadly by liberals and conservatives.
And really, the assumptions behind them are tremendously elitist, and really, I think, raise fundamental questions about the kind of society we live in, the kind of society we want to live in, because the consequences of empire have not just been horrible for people on the other end of the gun.
The people who have the boot on their neck, people in Iraq, people in Vietnam, people in Central America, and elsewhere that we've intervened.
It's also had tremendous costs here at home, in terms of our civil liberties, which are systematically curtailed in times of war, but also in terms of the economic and social costs.
We see that very clearly today in Iraq.
This war, a recent study by Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard economist Linda Blimes, is costing about $2.5 trillion, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, $2.5 trillion.
Imagine how that money could go to actually do good in the world, to actually provide health care, education, jobs, a cleaner environment.
The costs are just phenomenal when one considers not just the negative cost of the destruction that we've reaped by this intervention, but how that money could have actually constructively been put to use.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, obviously from my point of view, it would have been better just to stay in the pockets of people.
They can spend it however they want.
But I think a lot of it probably would be spent on their own education and health care and the rest of those things, as you say, the most important things in people's lives.
And I want to extend your analogy and invoke even World War II, which is, you know, I bring it up because World War II is the good war.
It's beyond reproach.
It was America versus pure evil and is therefore beyond question.
And yet that's how America inherited all the Western empires plus Japan's.
That's what moved the economic center of life in America from New York in private hands to D.C. and put it in the hands of the U.S. Congress.
That's what made America a world empire, was our involvement in World War II.
And that's frankly, you know, by the time it was over, the states were nothing but large counties and the federal government was supreme here at home.
Well, there's no question that World War II served to radically change the global balance of power and to make the United States a sole superpower in a way that it never had been before.
Of course, in the Middle East, it took over from the British and from the French colonists.
And then, of course, the takeover from the French in Vietnam was a little more delayed.
But the consequence of that was millions of lives lost in Indochina as the United States took over responsibility for suppressing democracy in Vietnam from the former French colonists.
What really I think that led to was not so much an empowering of Congress but the creation of the imperial presidency, the national security state.
And of course, that went hand in hand with the McCarthyite purging of the left from trade unions, from education, from the culture, and a real effort in this country to limit freedom of expression, to limit freedom of organization, and to especially limit the power of working class people in this country.
And that process is one that I think has really led to a long-term erosion, not just of civil liberties, but of our standard of living in this country.
And has, of course, brought us to a situation where we also have to say, in terms of the long arc of human history, we have come very close in recent history to self-annihilation.
We had a few moments in the Cold War where we came close to it.
And today, we are once again edging closer to the possibility of nuclear conflict or war as a result of these policies that we're pursuing in Iraq and globally.
And seriously, I think it raises profound questions about the need for a fundamental transformation of our priorities.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I think that there's a lot of ground here for a new realignment against empire and against the centralized Washington, D.C.
Leviathan here.
What do you think, Anthony?
Well, I think that, like I said earlier, we're in an encouraging moment in that even though people have not, for the same reasons, necessarily come to oppose the war in Iraq, a majority does now oppose the war in Iraq.
A majority also say that they care more about health care and education.
And I think there's a basis for political realignment in this country.
There's a basis for popular mobilization against empire in this country.
There's certainly a desire for change.
The question for me is, can we give people a sense that they can make a difference?
I think right now a lot of people feel like, you can't make a difference.
Look, we just voted in November.
We voted in protest against the war in Iraq.
And yet the Democrats are doing absolutely nothing to deliver on the aspirations of people who voted for them hoping for a change.
And it comes to a point where people have to realize that they themselves have to make the difference.
They themselves can make a change.
And this goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
If you don't have a sense of how change has happened in our history, of how ordinary people have been able to bring about transformation and improvement of their lives, then you don't necessarily know how you today could bring about that kind of change.
You can despair and feel like you can't make a difference.
But if you read a book like A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, if you look at the history of the civil rights movement or the struggle against slavery, I think you can learn lessons that today can be very useful as we tap into the sentiment that's growing against empire and that's growing for change, and that we could effectively channel that into a movement that really could change U.S. politics.
And I think there's a real urgency to that.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
In fact, I just read something late last night where they were talking about the America First Committee and all the different people from the left and the right, social democrats and classical liberals and Charles Lindbergh and all these, you know, wide and varied interests coming together to oppose American entry into World War II.
And he ended quoting somebody's law.
I forgot who it was now.
But somebody's law, which is that that which has happened before is possible.
And it's amazing how many people don't believe that.
But no, really, it's been done.
Yeah, absolutely.
And of course, if you don't know your history, you're much more likely to believe the president when he comes along and says, oh, we've got to go to war against Iraq, we've got to go to war against Iran, we've got to protect ourselves from this foreign threat.
But if you do know the history of how governments have lied to us in the past to start wars, if you do know the history of how governments have manipulated the public, you're likely to be more intelligent, you're likely to be more skeptical, you're likely to rely on your own intelligence and to see through those kinds of lies and not fall for those policies.
Great interview.
Anthony Arnove, he's the author of Iraq, The Logic of Withdrawal.
He's on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review.
Thanks, Anthony.
Thanks for having me on the program.
We have heard that half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, that we think the price is worth it.
