For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today is Dara Jamal, the great unembedded reporter, author of Beyond the Green Zone, and I'm sorry, I don't have the name of the other book in front of me.
His website is DaraJamalIraq.com.
You can find his stuff at Antiwar.com at original.antiwar.com slash Jamal, just like it sounds.
And you can find what he writes at Alternet.
You can hear him on Pacifica Radio.
And tell us more.
Welcome back to the show, Dara.
How are you?
Help me finish saying your bio here.
I don't have it in front of me.
Sorry.
Oh, I'd rather not.
But I will mention the title to my newer book, which is called The Will to Resist.
Ah, yes.
Which I have somewhere, but not on me.
Yes, The Will to Resist.
And in fact, tell us about that book.
That's very important.
Well, it's a book that it still might be a little ahead of its time insofar as there's not a whole lot of overt resistance happening in the military.
But with both of these occupations grinding on indefinitely, we are seeing more and more resistance in the military against both occupations, as well as against problems in the military like folks not getting their VA benefits and health care and benefits promised to them and things like this, among other rampant problems like racism and sexism in the military and military sexual assault and all of these fun things.
And so it's a book about a pretty large number of folks who are resisting all of these problems.
And it's a number that does seem to be growing, which isn't a big surprise considering when we look at what's going on in Afghanistan.
And then, of course, the machinations in Iraq, which are sure to be keeping the U.S. involved in that country for decades to come.
Well, now, I can't help but think that for anybody in the audience with young family members or maybe they're a young person who's considering joining the military, there's probably not anything more important for them to read before they make that decision than the will to resist, maybe collateral damage by Chris Hedges and Leila al-Aryan, something like that, to give people a real taste of what that stuff's about.
You know, people don't want to hear it from somebody like me or even you.
I mean, I stayed in America this whole time.
You went and covered the war in person, but still as a reporter, people, you know, they need to hear it from soldiers telling them this is how it really is.
Well, exactly.
And that's where the book and you and I both know, you know, when you give people information they don't want to hear, they'll find ways to discredit you because your hair is the wrong color or your skin is the wrong color or what have you.
But, you know, this is a book basically full of stories directly from the soldiers themselves, folks who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and talking about what it was like over there and why they decided to resist.
And so, you know, it's irrefutable information.
And I do hope that it's something that younger generations can read, folks in high school, so that they certainly can make a well-informed, educated decision before they decide to join the military, because most folks I'm talking with, even folks who were super gung-ho when they joined, after experiencing what they've experienced or basically advising everyone they know, look, until something major changes at the top, you should definitely not be joining the military today.
Well, you know, it seems like a big part of this, too, is, well, I think back to when I was 17 or whatever, and I probably had an advantage, or I know I had an advantage over a lot of other 17-year-olds at the time thinking about this kind of deal.
But for most kids who are considering joining the military, it's basically one choice of job.
I mean, these are not, you know, kids are not raised in a society to be interested in social studies and what's going on in the world and what American foreign policy is.
And I think, you know, maybe I'm speaking for people in ways that I shouldn't or something, but it seems to me like, you know, basically the common conception of a young kid deciding whether to join the military or not is that other people are going, they're in charge of deciding how the military is used, and basically it's the democracy, and they're the legitimate elected government, and we trust their judgment as to how the military is used.
That's not really part of the equation when the question is whether to join or not, what the policy is going to be.
And that's why I think it's really important, you know, a lot of this other work you do, like I'm looking at this article you did here with Abdu Rahman, which is, again, at original.antiwar.com, women miss Saddam.
And this is, you know, part of that same lesson.
Not only could you lose your legs or come back with a post-traumatic stress disorder or worse, but this is the policy that you're going to implement.
It's the kind of policy that has women missing the days of Saddam Hussein, Dar, is that right?
That's exactly right, Scott.
It's a telling story in that as we near the seven-year anniversary of when the invasion of Iraq was launched, which will be this Friday evening, that, you know, think about this, you know, the U.S. has been occupying this country now for nearly seven years, and things are so bad even right now today that women, who, of course, were one of the many bogus justifications used by the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq, they were going to help Iraqi women improve their status, you know, their rights, etc., etc.
And things are so bad there today, thanks in large part to the U.S. occupation, that women actually have fewer rights now, even according to the relatively newly implemented Iraqi constitution under the U.S. puppet government led by Nouri al-Maliki, of course, a heavily religious government that is basically curtailing the rights of Iraqi women, where things like they have less time off for maternity leave when they have a child, they have lost the ability to be able to file for divorce on their own accord, you know, which is something which has been the case in Iraq for a long time.
All these things have been changed.
It is one right after another, and these are just a couple that I mentioned of many instances where one right after another is being taken away from them through the occupation, and then, of course, all of this is underscored by the fact that Iraq is an extremely insecure place.
Security has never really been consistent or solid there, so many, many women, even who have professional lives, are literally risking their lives every day of being kidnapped, sometimes sold abroad, killed, or raped, just by leaving their houses, because that is everyday life in Iraq today.
So that is really a baseline factor for those who are still even trying to go out and live their lives and go to their jobs.
They know all too well that they are literally taking their lives in their hands in doing so, and it is a bit of a farce, Scott, as so much else with the occupation is.
You know, technically, under the new constitution, Parliament is mandated by law to be populated, at least 25% of it, with women, and yet all these women are basically powerless.
They are up against people who are politicians, kind of heads of various religious groups in Iraq, and they know very well that despite having 25% representation in the Parliament, that they are essentially powerless.
Well, but Saddam Hussein was a religious Ayatollah leader who didn't tolerate women going outside or going anywhere without their brother.
He was just like the Taliban, right?
Well, that's the people, certainly some folks in this country would like to demonize him in that way, but there are things about Saddam Hussein, not that Iraq was a bastion of women's rights under his rule, but he was very secular, in fact, brutally secular, you could say, that he would not tolerate big religious groups, and certainly not within his government, and was very, very oppressive and repressive of religious gatherings and marches and things like this.
But the upswing of this, of having a very strong secular state, is that things like women's rights and not crossing church and state and things like, or in this case, mosque and state, you know, things like this weren't as big an issue.
So, yeah, under him, the great irony is, you know, seven years later after the invasion, even women's rights in Iraq are far, far worse now than they were under Saddam.
And so several of the women we interviewed, and that's, you know, hence the title of the piece, actually said, you know, we hate to admit this, but we have to say that we actually miss Saddam when it comes to how many rights we have.
Well, you know, I hate to even really acknowledge this.
I don't mean to legitimize it or anything, but I think it probably is real just in terms of, you know, in and out groups that Arab Muslims really, you know, their lives are maybe worth this or that much.
But what about the Christians in Iraq?
What about the Christian women and their right to go to their Christian church on Sunday?
Well, again, it's another situation where, you know, under Saddam Hussein, there was a sizable amount of Christians in Iraq.
I mean, we're still not talking about much, but in smack dab in the Middle East, where basically every country is far and away predominantly Muslim, Iraq had roughly 2% of its population as Christians.
And, of course, they had no problems under Saddam Hussein.
They were well respected.
He had even high-ranking people in his government who were Christians, and, of course, they're going to church.
Women, female, male Christians, all of them going to church was certainly never an issue.
It was respected religion there, and there were never problems.
In fact, even under Saddam Hussein, there was a Jewish neighborhood in Baghdad, and they never had any problems whatsoever.
They were not oppressed, repressed, no violence against them whatsoever.
A lot of people don't know about this, but that certainly was the case.
It's kind of part of Saddam's tyranny, right, is if you mess with the Christians, I'll kill you.
That basically was it.
He would not stand for it.
That is absolutely correct.
But then again, now we fast forward to several years into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and all that's out the window.
Basically, all the Jews who were living in Baghdad, almost every single one of them has long since had to flee.
Of course, open attacks against Christians have become accepted and tolerated, and basically nothing's been done to stop it.
And so we've had tremendous violence and persecution against the Christian population of Iraq, both in central and northern Iraq, where most of them resided.
And of course, now at this point, the vast majority of that 2% have also had to flee the country.
Now, Dar, I remember an article from, jeez, probably 2005 in the Christian Science Monitor about women in, I think, Basra, perhaps Najaf, and they were saying that the Baata Brigade and the Mahdi Army militias, or combinations of both or whatever, that they were so oppressive that to them, for a woman to smile is a crime, and that they would really be literally risking imprisonment if they're seen happy out in public or something, because I guess that's attractive or something.
Is it that bad still, or was that even right in the first place?
No, that's accurate.
I actually was hearing stories like that back during my second-to-last trip to Iraq, which was back in 2005.
At that point, the Baata Brigade and many other of the religious militias, religion-backed militias, were basically in control of much of southern Iraq, and stories like that were rampant.
I had heard stories of women who did attempt to continue going to college after, of course, they had all basically been instructed.
Once those militias took power down there, basically, or I'm sorry, were used to enforce power by the religious authorities down there, they were told, you're not going to go to college anymore.
Women don't need to be doing such things.
You're going to be better off just sitting at home.
Then those who defied that order and decided, well, I'm going to go to college anyway because it's my right, and it's what I've been doing anyhow, they were kidnapped, oftentimes savagely beaten, and sometimes raped.
So these stories are not outlandish.
They're very well-grounded in truth and have been going on to this day in southern Iraq.
Certainly women are having a very, very hard go of it down there if they try to go out, have a normal life, and certainly if they try to go to college.
As far as I know, last I heard, those extremely violent and repressive means of keeping them out of the public sector, out from being seen in public, and certainly out of college, those are still in place.
Yeah, but what do you know about it?
The cover of Newsweek this week says, victory, finally, democracy in Iraq, we did it.
Does it?
Oh, yeah, it actually has a picture of George Bush on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln from the mission accomplished speech.
It all worked out, didn't you hear?
There was an election, purple fingers and all that.
Oh, gosh, I sure miss mainstream media.
What a nice world that would be to live in if all that stuff was true.
It's really amazing, unbelievable that they would print such garbage, and yet here we have this election.
So far, I was in the provincial elections in Iraq, covering those last January.
I was at the first national elections in January 2005, where the original purple finger elections, and you know, these are a farce.
These are elections under occupation.
It's an occupation government that doesn't exist without the U.S. there.
They hold their meetings inside what is formally called the Green Zone, but it's now referred to as the International Zone, another attempt to whitewash the occupation.
But these elections are essentially meaningless.
I mean, this is a government that the U.S. helps write the Constitution to set up the government, to dictate how it's going to be run.
It's a parliamentary government, basically set up to fail, just like the Lebanese government that the U.S. played a role in setting up as well, guaranteed to keep all sides at odds, no really functional method of power sharing and working together.
So, you know, no matter how this thing turns out, of course, we already see it's wrought with fraud.
No big shocker there.
And certainly, no matter how it turns out, we're going to just see a continuation of a government in Baghdad that's unable to even collect the garbage in the capital city.
That's about how effective this government is.
Well, I want to parse a little bit of that.
They have been training the Iraqi army for years and years and years, adding people to the Iraqi army.
And, I mean, would it be an overstatement, Dar, to say it's not just the Baader Brigade anymore, that Maliki actually, if he doesn't have, let's see, I talked with Patrick Coburn last Friday, and he explained that you want to really get down to it.
Even Saddam Hussein never really had a monopoly on power there because everybody's armed.
He basically was like a mob boss who cut a lot of deals with everybody to keep everything more or less in line or what have you, that there's not any real monopoly on power there.
But on the other hand, Maliki does seem to command a pretty giant army beside the American one, right?
No?
Well, he certainly is, basically.
And the police.
He's been very functional, that's right.
He's been very functional in basically consolidating power, basically through a strong-arm method.
I mean, when I talk about the government, those comments are basically, you know, if we had a real government that could nonviolently and diplomatically sort out differences and make progress and agree on policies that would benefit the majority of the Iraqi people.
We don't have that.
What we do have is basically Nouri al-Maliki is a Shia Saddam.
He has basically consolidated power.
He has a massive, massive army.
He has a massive police force.
He still has a massive facilities protection service, literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people that he can deploy onto the street on any given day.
So this is a guy who he's basically been very effectively turned himself into yet another authoritarian dictator.
I don't think it's going too far to say that.
I mean, we have some nice window dressings with these elections.
But, you know, this is a guy who's not going to relinquish power.
I'm going to have to go to the hospital with a heart attack if it turned out he didn't win the majority of votes in this election.
I think it's a given because he's controlling all the levers of power, and specifically the military and the police.
And so, again, we're getting down to a situation where we have to ask, essentially, what's the difference between a guy like Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq or Assad in Syria or King Abdullah in Jordan or the other King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia?
He's just another Arab dictator.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess if you want to compare him to the Baathists in Syria, less freedom for women would be, you know, he's not any less of an authoritarian.
But I guess the question I was getting at was, if you and I could pull the American forces out, you know, the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow, wouldn't the so-called government, such as it was, stand?
Is it not the case that it's no longer just the government of the Green Zone, as it was in years past, but that it really is basically the government of Iraq now?
Well, it's a good question.
However democratic it is, kind of, or how beneficial it is to the people there would be a separate question, I guess.
Right, but basically this is the government that has the power because they have the most guns and tanks.
And what other militia can go up against that?
And that's a really good question, and I'm not sure I can really fully answer it.
But, you know, I would point to the fact that while this government does have that security apparatus that we've just discussed, it's still a government that is reliant upon the U.S. occupation for the brunt of its power and funding.
So it still meets in the Green Zone.
It still relies on U.S. protection much of the time.
They are still using a lot of U.S. security, certainly running the Green Zone with contractors.
There still is a U.S. presence there, of course, and always will be, because we have the embassy there the size of the Vatican City.
That's pretty much all Americans.
There is a true presence there.
They're now talking about doubling the size, both geographically and personnel, of the embassy inside that Green Zone.
And this is where the Iraqi government is meeting.
So I think if the occupation were to end right now, again, so there's no Green Zone for them to meet in, that safety is gone.
These people are going to start dropping like flies.
And then what happens from there?
You know, are we going to then have a sovereign state where all these other coalitions basically decide, look, we outnumber you even though you are in power, and we're going to demand real elections without occupation?
And, you know, who knows what would happen?
I mean, this is all total theory because we look at the long-range prognosis, and this is an occupation that's going to be lasting decades short of massive unification in Iraq where people decided, well, we're going to kick you out.
So I think it's kind of a moot point discussing it.
But certainly it's a government that would have its work cut out for it as far as trying to guarantee its own security if the occupation were to leave Iraq.
And that, I would argue, would not necessarily be a bad thing.
Yeah, well, depending on whether you're a member of the government there or not, I guess.
That's right.
Well, and we can see there's bombings there all the time.
They don't guarantee security worth a darn.
Which leads to my second question, and really I kind of want to get back to something you said there, too.
So I'll make this a two-parter, and then we've got about four minutes to wrap up here.
So the first part is, and I think you kind of made reference here, too, and this is something that I believe Patrick Coburn and Raya Jarrar both agreed about when I interviewed the two of them separately at different times last week.
And that was that the various power factions, whether it's Alawi's group or Sadr and Hakeem, or whether it's various national alliances and so forth, basically all the political power in the parliament, such as it is, is dependent on everybody promising each other that they really mean it, that they're kicking us out by the end of 2011.
That if Maliki said, no, I need the American troops to keep my power, that that would be his quickest route to losing power.
That they all basically have to be as nationalists as Sadr for the political purposes.
And then the second part of that question is not really part of that question, but I just was hoping you could address the humanitarian situation as it exists.
You referenced the fact that they still can't provide electricity, and I guess that goes for sewage and clean water.
We know there are still millions of refugees displaced and so forth, and if we could just end on that note of what America has really done to that place.
Sure, I'll just touch on the first question very briefly, and that is just simply anyone who's read the Status of Forces Agreement that was signed between the Iraqi and U.S. governments can see very, very clearly, and I'll have a piece coming out on this very soon, can see very clearly the loopholes and the amount of ways in there for the Iraqi government to allow U.S. forces to maintain a presence in Iraq and certainly to come in and do what they need to do at any given point.
It gives the U.S. a lot of terrain to move around on to do the same thing.
So I'll certainly just point to the SOFA agreement, and if anyone really thinks the U.S. is truly going to completely leave Iraq by the end of 2011, you need to read your history on empires and you need to read the SOFA agreement and you need to read the National Security Strategy and the newly updated Quadrennial Defense Review Report.
It's all right there.
The second point, which is, as you said, far more important, is we're coming up on the seven-year anniversary, and we need to keep in mind that so far we have two different independent estimates of 1.3 million Iraqis that have been killed by this invasion and occupation.
We're still looking at approximately 5 million people displaced both internally and abroad from Iraq.
We are still looking at staggering unemployment and an infrastructure that's in shambles despite tens of billions of dollars being slated for reconstruction.
So the average person in Iraq has to worry about probably not having access to drinkable water, probably only having about four hours of electricity a day.
Odds are they don't have a job and, of course, ongoing security problems.
This is what's left of this country as this occupation grinds on into yet another year.
All right, everybody.
That is Dar Jamal from – well, first of all, he's the author of The Will to Resist, and Beyond the Green Zone.
His website is DarJamalIraq.com, and he also writes for Alternet, does radio for Pacifica as well.
Thank you very much for your insight on the show today, Dar.
I really appreciate it as always.
Well, thanks again, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
Hey, everybody.
Just wanted to make sure you know about the new time change for the live show.
I'm back at 11 to 1 Texas time on Chaos Radio Austin, 95.9 FM, ChaosRadioAustin.org, and you can also find the archives of the whole show there as well.
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