11/09/07 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, Charles Horton back to Antiwar Radio Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest today is Dar Jamail.
His website is DarJamailIraq.
He's an independent, unimbedded investigative reporter and spent much time on the ground reporting from Iraq.
I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet.
I'll have you back on as soon as I'm done, Dar.
Welcome to the show.
Good to be here again.
Thanks for having me.
It's been quite a while since we spoke.
First of all, Dar, when was the last time you were actually on the ground in Iraq?
February 2005 and I've continued to cover the situation by basically working with several Iraqi colleagues of mine who still live in the country, people that I worked with as interpreters when I was there.
And one of them lives in Baqouba and one of them lives in Fallujah and is able to get around central Iraq from time to time.
So I've been able to monitor at least the central part of the country where, of course, most of the major military operations have been occurring since I left and then I've been back to the Middle East several times to Jordan and Syria and Lebanon during the Israeli attack on Lebanon two summers ago.
So still covering the region as well.
Okay.
Well, let's just start with the basic premise.
Is the surge, quote, unquote, working?
No, the number of displaced Iraqis has quadrupled since the so-called surge was put in place.
And let's be real clear that the surge idea has been a very effective piece of propaganda in that there really never was a surge.
They simply were escalating the troop level and they had to convince the American people that this was temporary and they were going to bring it back down.
And otherwise there would have been much more outrage across the country if they were actually sending in a significant number of new troops.
The reality is the so-called surge has translated into meaning that there are 169,000 troops in Iraq today.
It's the highest number ever during the occupation.
There is nothing set anywhere in the future that looks like they're going to be lowering that number for the foreseeable future.
I'm sure they'd like to drop the number down a little bit and have more soldiers sitting in bases and less people being killed, but as of right now that doesn't really look like that's in the cards.
And the surge really is just putting more troops in a couple of areas of Iraq and the only reason that things have de-escalated temporarily in Al Anbar province is because the U.S. military is doing on a large scale what they did in Fallujah when they lost the city during the April 2004 siege.
They basically turned it over to fighters, they put them on the payroll, they gave them guns and ammunition, and they stayed out so of course their casualties were lower, but of course that set the stage for a much more large assault in November.
And I think the same scenario is playing out right now before our eyes in Al Anbar, which is basically a ticking time bomb.
Okay, now TV keeps saying though, and I guess there were articles like this and I'm not exactly certain which numbers are being used, but I guess the overall theme is that the sectarian violence is down, the Shiite death squads have backed off and gone home, and the Sunni insurgency may be killing American soldiers but they're not killing and fighting the Shiite Arabs so much, and that the death toll, while this has been the highest death toll for American soldiers this year, they say that the death toll has gone down quite a bit among Iraqis.
Is that true, or what's the larger context we need to understand there?
Well, it's not true, and specifically because of the larger context.
The reality is that we have approximately three million Iraqis have fled the country altogether, another three million are internally displaced within their own country.
And as far as victims of death squads and militia attacks, the number is a little bit lower, but the same number of Iraqis overall appear to be being killed because the U.S. use of air power has increased in a very, very large way.
Just to give you an idea of how much, for six months of this year, there were five times more bombs dropped on Iraq than the same six month period of last year, and the issue of less sectarian deaths and less militia attacks, a lot of that is primarily due because there really has been a very deliberate sectarian cleansing plan going on in Iraq for years now where there used to be several large mixed neighborhoods between Sunni and Shia, and because of U.S.
-backed death squads and other militias with U.S. backing, those neighborhoods are essentially becoming either completely Shia or completely Sunni.
So by definition, then, of course, there are fewer deaths, fewer people being evicted from those homes simply because we're approaching the end game of the sectarian cleansing plan.
But that does not mean that violence across the rest of Iraq and these same types of policies and plans are not being followed in other cities, because they certainly are.
So some of the decrease is simply because the ethnic cleansing worked.
Exactly, where you have essentially, you know, there is the grander plan of that, which Baghdad is just, what's going on in Baghdad is a micro version of the grander plan, which is the partitioning, the so-called soft partition of Iraq.
The Bush administration has been quite clear they're openly supporting the puppet mallet government in making this happen.
And of course, the partitioning of Iraq, this is something that Henry Kissinger was talking about back in the 70s, this is the closest we've come to it happening now in a long time, with, of course, the Kurds pushing for their independence, so that takes care of the top third.
And then essentially, right now, the plan is to try to partition central Iraq from southern Iraq.
But right now, it doesn't look like it's going to happen.
But nevertheless, the sectarian cleansing and kind of setting up these lines along a sectarian basis is a very large part of that plan.
And now, when you say that Maliki is helping the Bush administration with the plan to spin off the Shiite south toward Iran, is it through his connection with Abdulaziz Hakeem that you make that conclusion?
Because I know he has announced that he is for federalism openly numerous times, but I wonder, what about Maliki makes you say that he's deliberately helping to split the country apart?
Well, that's exactly right.
And the reality is that the situation with the partition and Maliki and his ties with Hakeem is directly linked in with the fact that he's been a very strong supporter of the SIIC, of course.
Well, of course, Hakeem is the head of it, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, formerly the Supreme Islamic Council in Iraq.
And the reality is that the partitioning with Maliki behind it, I mean, I found it was about two and a half months ago on the White House website where Bush was praising Maliki for the progress he was making towards the soft partitioning of the country.
It's really pretty amazing that they're not even trying to hide the fact that this is being done and that they're really pushing for this.
Maliki is essentially the brunt of his power now, is having ties with people like Hakeem and the Supreme Islamic Council for Iraq, this type of thing.
He really just couldn't do it without that.
It's really pretty amazing to see that this man, of course, having been the head of the Dawa Party himself since several years in exile in Iran, and, of course, Bush appointing him as prime minister, it's important for people to remember that this man was in no way, shape, or form democratically elected, that it was Ibrahim Jafari that the elected government of Iraq that came into power after the January 3005 election, they chose Jafari as was one of their first tasks to complete.
They successfully did that, but he wasn't exactly towing the US-UK line, so he was out and in his place after a short visit to Condoleezza Rice and her UK counterpart Jack Straw made the bag.
Right before they left, Jafari was out and Maliki was in.
He's been a political stooge from the very beginning and continues to play this role, which is the only reason he's been allowed to remain in power.
What's the role of the so-called Redirection, the Anbar Awakening and so forth, I guess they call it?
We're now the Sunni insurgency that has resisted the Maliki government and resisted American occupation and killed almost 4,000 American soldiers.
They're now the good guys and we're arming and training them as well, or financing and arming them as well.
Well, that's exactly right and that's what I touched on a bit earlier with this US plan where they've essentially lost Al Anbar.
I mean, they had lost control of the ground in Al Anbar for a couple of years now.
Basically, the second siege of Fallujah was kind of the final nail in that coffin of them trying to control the province.
They really officially lost it.
Most military commanders to this day will admit, that's roughly the time period when we lost control of the entire province.
Like I said, it's basically a macro version of what they did after they lost control of Fallujah during the April 2004 siege.
What they did is they turned the city over, they pulled an old Iraqi general out of the closet, put his uniform back on and said he's in charge for the press, and then basically armed and funded the fighters in the city for several months before having to go back in and fight them again.
Really, we have kind of a detente, if you will, in Al Anbar now because the US has been doing the same thing in that they've armed and funded tribal leaders, their militias, resistance groups, et cetera, during the day.
It's interesting because even in some of the mainstream outlets like the Washington Post, for example, you can find reports that are very open with soldiers being quoted saying, yes, we don't trust these people, we know we fought them before, we know that we're arming them now, and we know that at night we have to put up with their mortars coming into our base, but we have to follow our orders and that's what we're doing.
The reality is that they do not have control of the situation on the ground, but for the moment it's ineffective for the military, for the Bush administration specifically, because the number of troops being killed is lower, they are running through patrols in the province because they're cutting these deals and buying off these tribal leaders who have been, some of them even just months ago, organizing attacks against the Americans, but right now they're being paid off and paid off extremely well.
So it's a situation where these people, they're not stupid, they're going to take this money, they're going to take these arms, sometimes training that they're getting, and they're basically waiting for the right time and that's why I say it's a ticking time bomb that I think it's only a matter of time before Al Anbar kicks off again.
And of course when it does it will be much worse because now the U.S. will be fighting a much more powerful enemy in that they'll be much more well armed, have much more funding, of course being American taxpayer dollars as they fight against the U.S. military.
Well, but it was David Petraeus' plan, so that means that it's perfect and you can't contradict it, I think.
That's right.
Well, tell me this now, if the Maliki government, the Abdulaziz Aqim Supreme Islamic Council government of Iraq is really more interested in federalism and spinning off of southern Shiaistan in favor of Iran, does that mean that they are not determined then to dominate and be the government over the Al Anbar province?
Are they going to accept an autonomous Sunni region and not attempt to invade and conquer it?
It's really, really impossible to say because I think another reason, and this isn't necessarily directly related with the question, but I think another spinoff of this so-called soft partition is if and when southern Iraq tries to basically sever most of the ties with Baghdad, and basically that means we have a southern Iraq that's kind of a Shiaistan because it's predominantly Shia, there's sectarian cleansing going on, what Sunni were there, have certainly been and are being driven from their home.
The other key factor, and this is when we're already looking at this occupation that's turned into a regional war, you look what's going on with Turkey and to Kurdistan in the north, that's going to continue.
So what happens if we have a Shiaistan?
How do you think Saudi Arabia is going to stand for that?
The answer is they're not going to.
I would not be surprised at all to look at an uptick in violence of fighters and arms and funding coming across the border of Saudi Arabia to sending fighters and support for them into southern Iraq to destabilize that government or what's left of it.
So that's another thing that I think we can look for, and the reality is that going for this soft partition is that, as you said accurately, while the hakim element of this government is certainly pushing for that, Maliki's pushing for that, doing his job well as a puppet, the reality is there's another huge group of Shia led by Muqaddar al-Sadr, we all know his name, who does not want that to happen.
They're very nationalist, they're not into the soft partition, and Muqaddar al-Sadr is arguably now the most powerful Shia cleric in the country, surpassing Sistani, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who really has lost his legitimacy because not once has he called for his people to stand up for the occupation.
He's basically been going along with them, staying in the background, not fighting, and so in that way he's really lost a lot of popular legitimacy while Saddar has done the opposite.
He's already had two intifadas, he's regularly speaking out against the occupation, he's speaking out for nationalism, and the reality is, if and when they continue to try to move a bit further forward with this soft partition, particularly of the south, that's why now we have ongoing battles between the Saddar al-Sadr's militia and people of the Badr organization, which is basically the armed wing of SICI, and so I would expect those to increase while certainly not be surprised to see some direct Saudi involvement if and when the south gets a little bit more closer towards the soft partition from Baghdad.
Isn't it interesting how the actual policy is exactly the opposite of what they tell us that it is?
Here the United States is backing the separatists as we basically accuse the nationalists of being the separatists, allied with Iran, and attack him.
Who's the guy who's trying to create Saddar is the guy trying to create a coalition government with the Arab Sunnis.
Well, you're exactly right, and I think it's also instructive of this very effective propaganda tool that they've used.
I mean, just think about what the U.S. is doing in Iraq.
Right along the lines of what you just said, think about what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, right?
And then look at the bellicose rhetoric towards Iran.
They're accusing Iran of meddling in Iraq.
Who has 169,000 U.S. military personnel there and another 180,000 private contractors on the U.S. payroll?
Who's meddling in Iraq?
They're accusing Iran of trying to get a nuclear weapon.
Who has 10,000 nuclear weapons?
Who's the only country on earth that's ever used them against another country?
They're accusing Iran of training fighters and sending them into Iraq.
Again, go back to the first thing I said with the U.S. military and the private contractors there.
It's really amazing.
It's the most hypocritical, outlandish type of propaganda, but it kind of goes back to really some of the type of propaganda techniques used in Nazi Germany where if you tell a big enough lie and tell it and repeat it enough, people will believe it.
And that's exactly what they're doing.
It's the same technique they used to justify and sell the invasion of Iraq to the people of the United States and attempt it to to the rest of the world.
And they're basically repeating that same program with Iran.
This is how they got one of the lines they used when they were forcing the Syrian army out of southern Lebanon.
George Bush said, A country cannot have a free election when it is occupied by foreign troops.
Dude, you're occupying a country next door holding an election.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm sorry, I was just mocking the president.
I've seen also footage on TV of soldiers saying, or maybe this was on YouTube, soldiers coming upon some Iraqis at their house and saying, Have you seen any foreign fighters around here?
And they say, Just you guys.
That's exactly right.
That's the thing that's been very effective in this country because I think, you know, so many people have been so steeped in this type of rhetoric and propaganda for so long that the majority of the population is so untrained thanks to our history books and our horrible education system that they're untrained.
They don't know to even look for it.
And the most effective type of propaganda is when people do not think that it's propaganda.
And that's exactly what the corporate media is so good at doing and keeping people dumbed down and paying attention to other completely irrelevant things as opposed to things that are really directly affecting their lives.
And they really have a long chain of this in Iraq where, Oh, don't worry, it's just a few dead-enders.
Once we get Saddam, they'll give up.
And they got his sons.
That was a turning point.
They got Saddam.
That was a turning point.
And then, well, we're going to have this purple finger election.
We're going to have the Constitution.
And the sun's going to, you know, go down and then come up on the other side of the earth and all these things are going to be new turning points.
And we're going to have this surge.
And basically what they've done is they've just given us one narrative, one propaganda line at a time to buy six or nine months at a time to just continue the occupation forever.
And I guess they have a whole menu they've already come up with of reasons why we have to stay.
And they'll just give us a new one every, you know, half a year or so.
Well, that's right.
And again, they've been doing that from the beginning, as you just outlined, really well.
And I think we should expect that to continue.
I mean, it was, you know, they've tried all these different things.
They had benchmarks.
They've turned so many corners.
I mean, we can go back from the beginning and just run through some of the low lights of, you know, the Iraqi Governing Council.
This was going to really take a step towards a free Iraq and turning things around.
And then it was the June 2804 so-called transfer of sovereignty.
And then it was the January 3005 elections.
I mean, we can just, there's a laundry list of these things.
And it's really kind of just a very effective technique of keeping a carrot out in front of people, say, six months down the road.
And that's why if you look in Thomas Friedman, one of their instrumental tools in the propaganda machine, The New York Times, fairness and accuracy in reporting, did a very nice piece on him a ways back, quoting him through the years of the occupation, showing how many times he said, yes, this is a very critical six months in Iraq.
What happens here will really determine how it's going to go.
And again, just putting out that six-month carrot very effectively as the administration continues to do it.
And now we have that, of course, the surge.
They're continuing to milk that.
They're holding up Al-Anbar and saying, yes, this is okay.
Things are going better.
While at the same time, even the bigger picture, though, there are cracks in the edifice because then you have the so-called three leading Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, who have all already taken total withdrawal off the table until the end of their first term if they're elected into the presidency in 08.
They've already taken it off the table until 2013.
Bush told people less than a year ago, we need to be thinking about Iraq as far as timetables go in terms of South Korea.
So even though these large public figures have said these outlandish things, for some reason people are still buying this six-month bit.
Maybe in six months it's going to get better.
Maybe in six months some troops are going to start being brought home.
I'm a bit flabbergasted as to how they can sit there and be so upfront with their imperial designs and including the Iraq peace into that on one hand and then on the other hand continuing to bait people and people continue to fall for it.
It's a good question.
I don't know.
It's like it just goes in two different categories of memory or something and announcements that this will take generations and sit there right next to just another few months, just one more freedman unit and everything will be fine.
Let me ask you this, Darj Mil.
There's been a lot of talk about the danger to American soldiers in the event of war with Iran.
Now, you've made it pretty clear that the political factions that are closest to Iran, Dahua and scary, the guys closest to George Bush and the American Vichy system going on over there, that they are loyal to Iran but that Muqtada al-Sadr, the guy who has much more of a grassroots following among Arab Shia in Iraq, really is not, is much more of a nationalist.
Do you think that there is a substantial risk of the United States basically having to start the war against Iraq all over again and taking on the Shia Arabs in the event of them rising up to defend Iran?
You know, at this point, I mean, I have my ideas about this, but I'm a bit reluctant to talk about it primarily because nobody knows what in the hell is going to happen when the U.S. starts to drop bombs on Iran.
And I do choose that word, when, carefully over if, because I am convinced that this administration is going to move forward.
They've already made the decision to drop the bombs and the question is when, not if.
And short of massive public uprising here at home, which I absolutely don't see happening, short of some sort of a miracle, I think that it's going to happen.
And once that does, even all the CIA, of course, runs all these possible outcome strategies, et cetera, and even they really don't know what's going to happen other than they've already, one of those reports has already said, yes, southern Iraq will light up like a candle.
Of course, there will be massive new attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq from groups that have yet to launch attacks.
And this is where Sistani might actually call for his followers to rise up, because him, of course, being Iranian-born himself, that's where his allegiances are.
He has yet to lift a finger to urge any of his followers to use violence against the occupation forces.
But when the bombs start falling on Iran, that could change.
Of course, Sadr has already pledged his solidarity with Iran from when he was in Tehran a ways back, announced that yes, any attack on Iran will be an attack on me and all of my followers, and we will behave accordingly.
So the stage is certainly set, the pieces are certainly in order, to where when the bombs start falling on Tehran, the likelihood of massive, massive violence against U.S. forces in Iraq, particularly from all angles of the Shia population there, is very, very high.
Well, I know Muhtar al-Sadr has said outright that they would go to war, they would defend Iran, I think were his words.
And William S. Lind in the American Conservative magazine has an article called How to Lose an Army, where he says a British reporter, a friend of his, asked Abdulaziz Aqeen, the head of the Supreme Islamic Council, what he would do if America bombed Iran, and Aqeen replied, we would do our duty.
So I guess that means the Badr Corps would go to war.
Yes, and that's very telling, and I think that's an important thing to take note of, and that really is in alignment with what I just said.
And the Badr Corps are one of the larger, better trained militias in Iraq.
They're probably the third largest, but probably the best trained.
It's kind of a toss-up between who's better trained, them or the Kurdish Peshmerga.
Muhtar al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, they're absolutely massive, basically an unlimited supply of people willing to fight, but they're very, very poorly trained.
So that would, of course, be coming after the U.S. military.
And then the Badr Corps, which are very, very well trained, very well armed, and very well funded, their numbers are probably around approximately 30,000 fighters.
But again, this is a group that has not been involved in a very large way, for sure, in being engaged in the attacks against the U.S.
So again, it really all supports that CIA report that I mentioned of possible outcomes, where really the south of Iraq basically lights up.
And again, this is all in the perspective of the fact that the Brits are continuing to slowly lower their troop presence there.
They've pulled out of two of their three bases in southern Iraq, and then it does increase the likelihood of a scenario of what you said, of the U.S. having to go in and try to retake different parts of southern Iraq, because certainly they would be losing control of them.
They've already turned over most of these provinces, most of these eight provinces that they've, in theory, turned back over to the Iraqis, are in southern Iraq.
And I think the likelihood of them having to go back in and take back control of those would increase significantly.
All right.
Well, I really appreciate your insight today, everybody.
Dhar Jamil, his website is dharjamilirak.com, and you can find his archives at antiwar.com/jamil.
And who else are you working for?
Say it real quick.
Interpress Service, also.
IPS.
Okay, great.
Thanks very much.
I really appreciate it today, Dhar.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you.