01/23/08 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

I'm Scott Horton, and welcome back to the show DARJAMAIL, the author of the book BEYOND THE GREEN ZONE.
The website is darjamailirac.com, writes for IPS News, and you can find all his archives at antiwar.com slash jamail.
It's just J-A and then mail, M-A-I-L, like a letter you would get.
And Dar is an unembedded reporter who spent a long time in Iraq, not following the military around reporting what they wanted us to hear, but doing his own independent, unembedded reporting.
And he deserves all kinds of gold medals for it, and has probably won them too.
Welcome back to the show, Dar.
Great to be here, Scott.
Thank you.
It's good to talk with you again.
Your latest article on antiwar.com, I thought, was very insightful, and I was hoping you could give me even more of that insight here.
It's co-written with Ali al-Fadhili, is that, am I saying that right?
Correct.
Yeah.
And now, do I have it right that he's in Bakuba, Iraq, and you're here?
That's correct.
Okay.
Now, the story here is related, I think, to the larger story of the strategic, or at least, yeah, I think a strategic redirection toward the Sunni Arabs against the Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah Party types that we've had in power all this time.
Although it seems like the switch has been going rather slow, we have seen the Americans basically buy off the Sunni insurgency, right?
David Petraeus is paying the former Sunni insurgency, he's giving them guns and money and calling them the concerned local citizens, and this article here explores the relationship and the competition between the concerned local citizens, the former Sunni insurgency, and what has up until now been the Iraqi army, which is basically made up of Shia Arabs.
Is that right?
That's overall correct.
And I think, too, that this is a very important development, and I think that this is an important article.
It's, I think, the most important article that my Iraqi colleagues and I have written for Interpret Service in several months.
And basically, the article has the title, states, Iraqi police and army sidelined by Sunni fighters.
It's a critical development, because this really underscores the rift between the Maliki, the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki government in Baghdad, who has been from the very beginning opposed to this Petraeus plan of buying off Sunni resistance fighters.
I mean, for those who are familiar with it, under Petraeus, as part of the so-called surge, which is, we're coming up on the one-year anniversary next month, part of the plan has been, okay, we're going to just, we need to dramatically decrease the number of U.S. soldiers being killed, so we're going to pay off resistance fighters.
So they're paying these people $300 a month of U.S. taxpayer money to literally stand down and not attack them.
And to date, there's over 82,000 of these people, and even according to the U.S. military, 82% of them are Sunni, and it's openly acknowledged that the majority of them are former resistance fighters themselves.
And on the other side of this, the Maliki government from the very beginning has felt very threatened by this.
The Iraqi government and police forces are extremely weak and fractured, many of them belonging to their own militias, their loyalties do not, and have never been with the government itself, but to whatever militia these people come from.
And so, it's really a situation where the U.S.
-backed Sunni fighters now are standing up and posing a legitimate challenge to the Iraqi government forces.
I mean, there's less than 200,000 Iraqi army personnel, and now we're already up to at least 82,000, probably more, of these Sunni fighters.
So they're starting to even really be able to compete with them as far as even size.
And even more so, they're winning more trust with locals in the areas where they're operating, as opposed to government forces that have no trust, nobody likes them, everyone's very clear these are all militiamen operating with their own agendas.
And so now, what's developing is that these U.S.
-backed fighters are now having more trust and faith in them by the local citizens, which directly undermines the authority of the government in Baghdad.
Well, now, is this basically a geographical separation as well, where the Iraqi army would have more influence in the south and in the so-called Sunni triangle and the former insurgent areas?
Is this where the so-called concerned local citizens would be more welcome there?
To an extent, that's true, and that's an important point.
But to further complicate things, I mean, we could say, okay, Baghdad, for example.
Since the U.S. occupation has been in place, it's gone from being a predominantly Sunni city to now a predominantly Shia city.
Yet even in Baghdad now, these groups are operating in certain quarters and have more of the trust of people in those particular areas.
Baquba, where this story is datelined, where this Iraqi colleague was interviewing people and getting this information, is a very, very mixed city.
The Allah province as a whole is quite mixed.
It's roughly 50-50 Shia-Sunni, at least Baquba is.
And so even there, we have a situation where, again, some of the people aren't going to trust these forces as much, but at least half of them are.
And so we can even apply that phenomena to other places south of Baghdad.
I mean, not everything south of Baghdad is predominantly Shia.
There are many cities that remain predominantly Sunni.
So it is a bit mixed, and even in places in the south, this phenomena is starting to happen.
And it's even starting to happen, one thing that didn't go into the story, is that many of the people interviewed were Shia, who today themselves are saying, yes, look, we trust these local forces more also, because these people with the government, these different militias, predominantly Shia militiamen from either the Mahdi army or the Ba'ath organization, they're not from our city, we don't trust them, they're here with their own agendas, and they're treating other Shia bad as well, not just Sunni.
So it is starting to cross over those sectarian lines.
Wow, isn't that interesting that Petraeus has bought off the Sunni insurgency and it's replacing our occupation, it sounds like.
It really is, and by design or not, it's arguable, but that is specifically what's happening.
And again, I think the key point of this development is that it's really undermining what power the Iraqi government has in Baghdad.
I mean, they, at this point, with zero popular support, I mean, let's be really clear that this is a puppet government that nobody in Iraq trusts.
The last polls that were done on public opinion regarding this government show that less than one percent of the people in Iraq actually support this government.
So then when you have that kind of public sentiment, and then you stand up a force of over 80,000 fighters that are rapidly gaining much more trust than the government security forces, then this is a very, very direct threat to this government.
And when we start talking about the possibility of some sort of a military coup or overthrow or assassination, it's much more real today than it ever has been before.
Well, now, I wonder whether this is the point or not, whether this is deliberate.
I've read a report not too long ago that they're thinking about sidelining Maliki in favor of a guy named Ahmadi, who's basically Abdul Aziz Hakeem's right-hand man from the Supreme Islamic Council.
I guess the Da'wah party isn't close enough to Iran.
They want to go ahead and put the Supreme Islamic Council guy right in there.
But basically, jeez, it sounds like it doesn't matter.
Anybody they put in from the pro-Iran factions, from the purple-finger election factions, they're going to lose out anyway.
It sounds like this thing is spreading all throughout the place.
Let me ask you this.
What about the Mahdi army?
Are these guys preparing for war against the Mahdi army, or are they going to be able to join forces with the Mahdi army and tell the Americans to get out?
Well, that has yet to be seen.
This is, I think, an important point for all of us to keep our fingers on that pulse, because as things develop, it's really hard to say.
I mean, right now, the way things stand, I would say, no, that's not happening.
There's no evidence on the ground to support it.
And in the future, at least in the near future, I would not expect that to happen, because there's been so much damage done by these Mahdi army death squads.
It's well known around Baghdad that these were the people going around capturing Sunnis, bringing them into torture chambers, and literally using electric drills on them.
I have much photographic evidence of this.
Iraqi colleagues have been speaking of this for over two years now.
So when that has been the policy of many of these people in the Mahdi army, we have a situation where there's going to be a long time necessary before that rip is healed.
But at the same time, as we've seen, the Mahdi army overall has been on stand-down by Muqaddad al-Sadr, a stand-down that's gone on for five months.
It may well end next month, as Sadr said, one of his spokespeople said last week.
And when that, if they do resume operations against the occupation forces, it's going to be interesting to see now what that looks like with now these Sunni, primarily Sunni groups that are the so-called concerned local citizens, working alongside the U.S. military.
Because it's extremely volatile, it's a situation that could change on a dime, and it certainly would not take much at all for these so-called concerned local citizens groups to immediately turn on the people paying them.
Like for example, what happens when those paychecks stop?
What happens if the U.S. does a huge military operation in a predominantly Sunni area?
I mean, any of these things could change the situation literally overnight.
And then, of course, we would potentially be looking at a situation where not just these people that the U.S. has bought off for now turn against them, but the Mahdi army of Muqaddad al-Sadr, if they resume operations simultaneously.
You know, with a couple of quick changes, the U.S. could be looking at a unified front against occupation forces, which is something we have not seen in Iraq since early spring 2004.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, because people debate whether all this is a deliberate divide and conquer strategy, or whether it's all just bumbling.
And maybe it's a little bit of both, but I don't know, I kind of get the impression that the American policymakers in the Pentagon or on the National Security Council, whoever's dreaming this stuff up, they really don't know what the hell they're doing.
There are no permanent allies or enemies in Iraq, apparently.
It's all just this big shifting mass of, who can I buy off and who can I give guns to in order that they'll shoot them at somebody else other than me for a little while anyway.
I agree with you.
I think it's a bit of both.
I think there absolutely has been a very deliberate divide to rule strategy in Iraq from the beginning days of the occupation.
But simultaneously, alongside of that, maybe even to a greater extent, there's been just total incompetence, bumbling along, sort of a desperation of going from one thing to the next, looking at extremely short-range solutions to problems that are going to be going on in a long-term manner.
And this particular one is, I think, a case in point where the U.S., okay, we're going to arm up over 80,000 Sunni resistance fighters, because right now, we feel like we need that to counterbalance this government that's becoming more pro-Iranian by the day.
Big shocker, they're the ones that appointed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
But I think another thing to keep in mind is, with this bellicose rhetoric towards Iran, the U.S. is still looking as though they are determined to launch airstrikes on Iran.
Well, they're going to need any ally they can get in Iraq, if and when they do that.
And now, at least in their eyes, they have 80,000 Sunni fighters that are their allies.
But we would have to see if that would stick.
Aha.
You know, this is actually the advice I've been recommending for years now.
Was it 2008?
It's for three years now, or almost, I've been saying, listen, if you're going to bomb Iran, you at least got to get our guys on the Sunni, in the Sunni parts of the country.
Our supply lines, our guys' supply lines run from Baghdad to Kuwait, all through Shiite territory.
If we bomb Iran, our guys are going to get stuck.
Exactly.
And actually, that's what journalist Seymour Hersh has been saying for a long time, that the military people that he's been interviewing have been telling him that exact thing.
I mean, that's one of the first things that we would expect to see in Iraq, if and when Iran is bombed, is the main U.S. supply artery for the entire occupation goes from Kuwait to Baghdad, all through predominantly Shiite area.
I mean, Iran, large swathes of southern Iraq, that is, are already controlled by Iran.
And one of the first things that would happen is that supply line would be cut.
And so then what happens with the occupation, with fuel, with ammunition, with food, when the main ground supply line is cut?
I mean, this is a supply line that hundreds and hundreds of Halliburton KBR trucks every single day are using just to keep the occupation going.
So what happens when that is cut?
And that's certainly what would happen.
One of the first things that would happen in southern Iraq, whether the Sunnis are on board or not, that's going to happen if and when the bombs start falling on Tehran.
Now, if they did that, I'm trying to figure it from the general's point of view here.
Could they open up another supply line to, say, Jordan or something like that, or from Jordan?
They could, but it wouldn't be, absolutely they could, and I think that would be a policy, and I think that's where they would certainly be relying on these fighters and the tribes that they're loyal to, to really step up and help them defend those supply lines.
But that's where it gets quite tenuous, because there's certain, like the road, and I know this from personal experience, the road from Amman to Baghdad, certain parts of it are controlled by different tribes.
So what are the odds that they're going to have this very, very long stretch of highway and have every tribe that controls different parts of it on board protecting it?
It's quite low.
And so I think that it's tenuous at best.
And then the other thing is, they would have to literally shift their entire supply operations from going through Kuwait, which is where most of these KBR trucks are located.
Not to Kuwait's a large country, but just to give people an idea of the size of just the supply operation of keeping the occupation going, literally one-third of the geographic area of Kuwait is occupied by the U.S. military, and it's because there's these massive flocks where you can see photos of these, you can even find them online, where these just row after row after row of these KBR trucks are that are running, as I said, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these trucks every day from Kuwait up to Baghdad just to keep the occupation supplied.
So how much of that are they going to be able to shift in an extremely short period of time if and when they start bombing Iran and they lose that southern supply line and start running it through Amman?
Certainly they'd be able to shift some of it, but then it comes into, it really begs the question of, okay, well how secure really is that road from Amman to Baghdad going to be because right now it's essentially unusable.
Yeah.
You know, William S. Lynn wrote an article for the American Conservative magazine called How to Lose an Army.
He said, surge into Iraq, dig in, and then bomb Iran.
And he talked about this very same problem, and in fact he quoted, I guess Sauter has said a few times publicly, it's been quoted in numerous papers, saying if you bomb Iran you're going to war against us and you better know it now kind of thing.
But William S. Lynn said that a British journalist friend of his spoke with Abdul Aziz Hakim, the head of the Supreme Islamic Council, the Badr Brigades, and asked him as well, what would you do if America bombed Iran?
And he said, we would do our duty, which would be kill Americans.
Exactly.
And, you know, you mentioned Sauter.
Sauter announced it from Tehran.
It was well over a year ago, if I recall correctly, or perhaps it was last spring, but it was at the peak of one of these PR campaigns of the bellicose rhetoric from the Bush administration towards Iran.
And it was looking quite scary as far as, I mean, I myself was wondering, oh, maybe the bombs are going to start falling quite soon because the rhetoric had reached a bit of a fever pitch.
And Sauter, actually from Tehran, announced exactly what you said, that if, you know, any attack on Iran is going to be an attack on us because these are our brothers in Islam.
And so it is clear.
Now, Sauter is such an interesting character, whereas he certainly is an Iraqi nationalist, he is for a unified Iraq, but at the same time, he does have a certain allegiance to Iran.
And so what happens if those bombs start falling on Iran and we have a simultaneous uprising of not just the Sauter organization militia, but Sauter's militia, and at the same time, then what happens if these Sunni resistance fighters decide, well, this would be an opportune time to go ahead and take advantage of this and start our attacks against the occupation as well?
Then we have, Kurds aside, we have a unified front against the occupation on a level that has never been seen before.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it doesn't make sense, really, either the idea that they would, you know, that they're planning on, well, trying to get our guys on the safe side of Sunni lines to whatever degree they could even be drawn.
Why would they have let the Mahdi army kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and basically let the Shiites completely take Baghdad first and then turn around and stab the Shia in the back and try to hide behind the Sunni walls?
Well, it's two, there's several things going on here, and this is where it gets rather complex because there's many aspects of these, some deliberate policies, some of the muddling and the kind of fumbling forward and trying to find a quick fix situation or solution to the situation at hand.
I mean, first of all, we have the divide-to-rule strategy, where literally, as you know, large parts of Baghdad have become ghettoized.
We have Sunni neighborhoods like al-Adhamiya, which are literally completely encircled in 15-foot-high concrete blast walls.
I mean, talk about the apartheid wall in occupied Palestine.
We have smaller versions of that in different neighborhoods of Baghdad now.
Sunni neighborhoods, Shia neighborhoods, literally are becoming ghettoized, where businesses are failing, people can't travel freely, if you go out of there, no one can guarantee your security.
So if this is Baghdad today, it literally is divide-and-rule strategy, I mean, across the river, across the Tigris River, and across the bridge from al-Adhamiya.
We have Qadhamiya, which is a Shia neighborhood, same thing.
They will not open that bridge.
They are keeping them divided, keeping them afraid of each other, turned against one another, and that's the situation as we speak right now.
Simultaneously, I think it's such a short-sighted policy, where, again, as we're talking about it, doesn't, at the end of the day, if they make a couple of other bad moves, i.e. the occupiers, there's really nothing to prohibit these groups from deciding, well, it's time for an uprising, and maybe it does benefit all of us now, to unite against the occupiers and start waging attacks against them.
And that is certainly not out of the realm of possibility.
It would be a direct result of U.S. short-sightedness and this fumbling forward of literally trying to find, what's the quick fix today?
What's going to get U.S. troops' deaths down right now, as this election cycle commences for the presidency in about a year from now?
How can we get troop deaths down now?
How can we propagandize more effectively the so-called success of the surge?
And now we're starting to come out the other side of these short-sighted policies and see, oh, this is really setting it up for what really is a ticking time bomb, that when it does explode, and I think it's a matter of when, not if, it's going to be, we're going to be looking at violence and chaos across Iraq on levels we haven't seen before.
And this is what you've been talking about for a long time, I've been talking about for a long time, even as far back as almost a year ago with this so-called surge, and now we're getting much more close to seeing this actually happen.
Well, in terms of the bombing of Iran, which very well could be the trigger for that unified front that you described, Philip Giraldi reported, the former CIA officer who writes for AntiWar.com, as well, he reported in his article in the Huffington Post yesterday that from his apparently sources on the National Security Council, or maybe one level below that or something, Cheney was recently briefed on these are the probable or likely consequences of airstrikes against Iran, and he didn't list in the article what those consequences, what they said the consequences were, but we would have to assume the danger to American forces in Iraq was part of it, and according to Philip Giraldi's sources, Cheney dismissed them with a wave of his hand, I guess, and said, oh, don't worry, we can handle anything that comes up.
And that's not surprising.
I mean, this has been really the attitude of Cheney from the very beginning, where they're running on pure neocon ideology, of course all of this is exactly what the state of Israel wants.
I mean, if you really want to look at the engine of what's driving this administration and their bellicose rhetoric and possible plans of bombing Iran, we look no further than the right-wing element in the Israeli government.
And Cheney, of course, is really leading the charge in this government, and this is why we have, of course, high-ranking people in the U.S. military that are adamantly opposed to it, because these are the people that understand the full consequences of what happens if you open up the gates of hell with war against Iran, when the entire region is likely to go up.
Where Iraq, where if we think there's violence and a lot of troops that have died in Iraq so far, it's really nothing compared to what will happen, without a doubt, according to all CIA investigations and reports and forecasts, as well as military forecasts, are the same of what's going to happen in Iraq if and when Iran is attacked.
And when we have people like Cheney really driving this policy forward, and this is why there's even a split within the Bush administration of him wanting to move forward, and yet others of what have been referred to as more the realists in the administration, which of course are not in the positions of as much power as the Vice President, really battling it out, seeing whether this is going to happen or not.
And again, it's complete lunacy.
I mean, this is a man that clearly is not operating in reality, clearly does not care about the consequences of these actions, and let's be clear, I mean, this is an administration that they don't care one bit about American soldiers.
This is an administration that's waving the flag with one hand while simultaneously with the other hand cutting the VA budget $10 billion to kick into effect the second they leave power.
This is an administration that really, you know, they talk about taking care of the troops and one after another extending the troop tours, sending people back to Iraq for their third and fourth deployments.
It's really, you know, I don't know how much more clear it could be made that these are people that don't care, that they're using the military as a tool.
It's not about what is the best military strategy or what is the best diplomatic strategy to handle their concerns with Iran.
It's about really following out a neocon agenda that's basically rooted in what's going to be best for Israel in the region and what's going to be best for the U.S. empire in the region.
Well, or even what's going to be best for very few private interests who are benefiting from American empire in the region while the rest of us suffer.
Indeed.
Yeah.
Well, now, it's kind of hard to take Iran out of the conversation because, you know, the possibility of war against them is always kind of hanging overhead.
But if we can take the possibility of war with Iran off the table for a moment and just look at the situation in Iraq without that worry, do you see any kind of reasonable way or even possible within any kind of likelihood at all that what they say is the official program of bringing in all these disparate groups to create a multi-ethnic coalition government that will hold Iraq together and be able to defend their borders and get the Peshmergas and the concerned local citizens and the Bata Brigade and the Mahdi Army and everybody to join the Iraqi army and, you know, work out some sort of sustainable voting majority in parliament and these kinds of things.
There's so many different competing factions and so much violence going on.
Is there any possibility that the stated goals of the American occupation could be achieved if they were really trying, Dar?
You know, at this point, because of how much damage has been done in Iraq, the short answer is no, I don't think so.
I think that this occupation has been a complete failure for several years now.
At the very latest in the occupation, I think by spring 2004, with the simultaneous attacks on Najaf and Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, and then after that time, the Hadithas and the second siege of Fallujah, I mean, you know, it's been lost since that time at the absolute latest.
I mean, we look at a situation where Iraq's total infrastructure is in shambles.
We're looking at a situation, I've said this to you before, but I think it's important to say it again, when we just look at the total numbers in Iraq, this is a country whose total population now has fallen down to 24, 25 million at the most.
And out of that 25 million, we have 4 million that are in dire need of emergency care, according to a recent Oxfam International report, meaning if they don't get access to water, food, and medical attention as necessary, they will die.
We have, according to the most conservative UNHCR estimates, 4.5 million people who are refugees, half of those in the country, half of those outside of the country.
Probably another 3 to 4 million who are wounded.
And then on top of that, over a million dead, according to both Just Foreign Policy and another survey group in the UK.
And when we add all those numbers up, that means that literally over half the total population of the country are either refugees in need of emergency aid, wounded, or dead.
So how do you take that situation, where literally half the population of the country falls into one of those categories, and think you're going to apply some policy at this stage of the game that's going to correct things and win Iraqi favor over?
It's just not going to happen.
And besides, it's just theorizing, because this is an administration that if they were really, really concerned about rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and improving things on the ground, they would have done it a long time ago.
And why should we expect there to be any difference today in policy that would actually start operating out of a place of, okay, what's best for Iraqis first, instead of what's best for corporations or for a neocon agenda?
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you about Kirkuk.
They have a referendum that's coming up soon, right?
That's going to decide whether Kirkuk will be part of Kurdistan or whether it'll be part of Iraq, or I'm not sure exactly even what the referendum's about.
Can you fill me in?
Well, essentially it is a referendum where the Kurdish agenda is, you know, they're still going for a greater Kurdistan, an independent Kurdistan, which absolutely will not happen unless Kirkuk is part of that plan, because this is where the second largest oil reserves in the country is in the Beji area, which is where there's an oil refinery there, which is not far from Kirkuk.
And so the Kurds, of course, have long since been engaged in essentially an ethnic and to a certain extent sectarian cleansing campaign in Kirkuk.
I mean, one of the first things that they started doing after the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime is literally going around Kirkuk, the Peshmerga were, and taking down all of the signs in Arabic and putting them up in Kurdish, lowering the Iraqi flag, raising the Kurdish flag, and starting to chase Sunni, not just Sunni, because Kurds are Sunni, but Sunni, Arabs, and Shia, many of whom are Sadrists, Shia, out of different neighborhoods.
Of course, there's been a campaign against Turkmen living there, and I think some of this is tied into why Turkey has become so much more aggressive against the Kurds, in particular the PKK in northern Iraq as of late, as of the last few months, because as the Kurds get closer to incorporating Kirkuk into a greater Kurdistan, we will see a corresponding increase in the aggressiveness and violence of Turkey against the Kurds, because Turkey is certainly not going to let that happen.
They view that as a destabilizer of southeast Turkey, where there are tens of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, they don't want that to happen, Iran does not want that to happen, they do have a large Kurdish population and would see it as very destabilizing.
At the same time, and this is a big topic, we could spend a lot of time talking about this, but in general, there have been other reconciliation moves within the government of Baghdad to a certain extent of trying to reach some sort of a compromise with Kirkuk so that this referendum doesn't kick off what could be another huge round of violence in northern Iraq.
It really pales in comparison to the fact of what the Kurds have continued to do, which is making deals with the Americans, making deals with Israel, there's an American military presence of course in Kurdistan, there's some large bases there, the Israeli Mossad has a very large presence there as well, and this on top of the Kurds making their own deals with foreign oil exploration companies and western corporations while thumbing their nose at the government of Baghdad, this isn't exactly helping any reconciliation efforts either.
Well, you know, it's interesting, Robert Dreyfuss wrote a piece where he talked about the Black Water Massacre, the Kurds' deal with Hunt Oil, and one other thing I forgot, but it was actually the Kurdish oil deal actually did a lot to help unify the country, because people were so angry about it that they all said, hey, we're all Iraqis and we're all supposed to have one big oil deal, not a separate Kurdish one, and that the backlash actually, not necessarily in favor of American policy, but that it actually did kind of help reinstill a sense of Iraqi nationalism among the people, which I'm not much of a nationalist, but Iraqi nationalism is better than sectarianism and permanent war.
It is.
It is.
And you know, that's another thing we could chalk up as one of the factors that there have been some flashes of reconciliation and unity, but again, I think that as hopeful as those might be, I think they're outweighed by other things that I mentioned earlier.
Yeah, and they don't seem to come as consequences from terrible things that Americans do.
In some, yes.
I think that's it.
I think that's my point.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so if somehow you could be the special advisor to General Petraeus or Admiral Fallon or somebody and you were to set about advising them how to get out, what do you do?
Do you want to just pack everything up and go?
You want to get a conference table and bring in the Iranians and the Syrians and the Jordanians and the Saudis and everybody and try to work out a deal with them or bring in UN baby blue helmets or what do you think?
Well, being a realist, I think, yes, I think it's better to get everybody out rapidly.
I think that's, again, I always fall back to the fact that this is what over 85% of the Iraqi people want.
They want the occupation over.
Most of the American troops serving in Iraq now, that's what they want.
And that's now what the majority of the population of this country want.
And I think that just being a realist, I mean, you know, if we talk about a measured retreat or a responsible retreat, whatever, there has not been one measured or responsible thing the U.S. has done in Iraq to date.
The Iraqis don't want them there.
They see, millions of them now see this occupation as a policy of genocide.
So they just want the occupiers to get the hell out of their country right away.
And I think that's what should happen.
I think that, you know, any game of, like, if we look at some of these mainstream Democratic presidential candidates as saying, well, I'll bring a responsible into this war or we'll have a measured retreat or this kind of nonsense.
I mean, you know, this is not in the game plan at all.
We're looking at permanent bases, a permanent embassy there in the middle of Baghdad.
And anything short of full, immediate, unconditional withdrawal is really going to fall back into this longer term policy, neocon, imperialist, corporate policy of a permanent occupation of Iraq.
And that's why I think the only solution towards really bringing a sovereign Iraq in Iraq where people can legitimately work out their differences and have real reconciliation is a complete end to the occupation.
The occupation has done nothing to bring reconciliation, has done everything to bring divisions and lack of reconciliation, playing one side against the other, divide and rule.
And that is simply not going to stop until the occupation does.
All right, everybody, Dar Jamal Iraq, he's the author of Beyond the Green Zone.
His website is Dar Jamal Iraq dot com.
He writes for IPS News.
That's antiwar dot com slash Jamal.
Is there anything else really important about Iraq that I forgot to ask you or that you'd like to touch on?
I think we've pretty much covered, I think, the you know, some of the ongoing things.
I mean, there's so many other aspects we could talk about, but really the ongoing crisis of the refugee situation, how that's really not improving whatsoever and the ongoing crisis of the complete destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and how that's affecting people on the ground.
But another thing to point out is when we talk about just exactly what's happening in Iraq right now, they're having one of the coldest winters they've had in a long time, while simultaneously having less electricity in the capital city than they've had arguably ever in the entire occupation, literally one to two hours of electricity per day when temperatures are down in the low 40s every single night and entire neighborhoods going without any water whatsoever for days on end.
So just so people have an idea of what's actually happening on the ground there and what people are having to try to survive through.
That is what's happening.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting how that's not a subject of media concern in this country at all.
The surge is working.
The surge is working.
The surge is working.
Look, our numbers of roadside bombings are down or whatever.
We bought off this militia and that militia called a temporary ceasefire or whatever.
Meanwhile, five million refugees, an entire society basically obliterated, an unending list of stories to be covered by Western journalists about the consequences of our government's actions in that land.
And yet we get basically silence, particularly in regards to the presidential campaign.
Five million refugees.
I don't think that was ever a question in the debate.
It's true.
And it's another, I think, important thing to note that as this presidential, you know, the election campaign continues on, you know, these people who are placing their bids for the presidency.
Again, where is Iraq in this debate?
You know, these people, all of the mainstream candidates are very keen to have Iraq not be part of the debate.
They're very keen to instead talk about the economic crisis.
There are other domestic issues, but the reality is that Iraq is the primary concern of the majority of people in this country and it should remain on the front of the table because it is really, I think, symbolic of this policy of this government of imperialism and this neocon strategy and corporatism of what's actually running this country is plutocracy.
And until that's addressed full-on on a regular basis, then, you know, this whole so-called presidential campaign is a sham until we have legitimate debate about what's happening in Iraq and legitimate debate about what actually is the national security strategy of the United States and what is the impact of Israeli goals on that and, of course, the corporate plan in that scheme as well.
And until that's really on the forefront of debates on a regular basis, this is really just a high school popularity contest rather than a legitimate race for who's going to be the next president of the United States.
Yeah.
That must absolutely drive you crazy to have the nuanced and detailed understanding of the situation in Iraq that you have and then to turn on TV and see John McCain say, we're going to win, there's going to be a victory, and he can't even describe what that would even be.
I mean...
Well, it's absurd, and it's impossible even to take it seriously.
And, you know, aside from kind of a cursory really reading and staying up with the actual campaign, it's really hard to take any of these so-called mainstream candidates seriously because their understanding of it is so shallow, and it's so clear who's actually pulling their strings and backing them and making them say what they are saying, that, you know, these are forces that are absolutely not in the interest of the vast majority of the people of this country and certainly not in the interest of any of the Iraqi people.
All right.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate your time with us on the show today, everybody.
That's Dar Jamal.
It's DarJamalIraq.com.
Thanks very much.
Thanks again, Scott.