All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com slash radio.
And our first guest today is Dar Jamal from IPS News.
You'll find what he writes at, I guess it's AntiWar.com slash Jamal, I think so.
That's J-A-M-A-L.
Yeah.
AntiWar.com slash Jamal.
Welcome back to the show, Dar.
Hey, great to be with you, Scott.
That's good to have you on here.
And listen, you know, this article that you have up here today, it's called a new book lets winter soldiers be heard.
It's a review of Aaron Glantz's new book written, I guess, with Iraq veterans against the war.
And here's where I want to start here, just because I already was ranting and raving about it at the beginning of the of the show here.
It's something that I guess is always kind of jumped out at me.
And that is the racism that goes along with fighting a war in somebody else's country.
This is kind of cool, too, because you've got a Middle Eastern background, but you're from Alaska, white boy.
So you're an American like us.
But anyway, here's where I want to start this New York Times quote, a U.S. Army soldier from the 337th Company.
We were pretty much told that they were nobodies, that they were just enemy combatants.
I think that giving them the distinction of soldier would have changed our attitudes toward them.
A lot of it was based on racism, really.
We called them hajis.
And that psychologically was really important.
So I was wondering if you can help explain to the people, Dar, because I know that you understand.
Why is it so important to smear people, to use racism?
We hear this.
We know from the history of all of our wars, even the Germans were the Huns.
Why the racism in war, Dar?
Well, it's an integral part of the dehumanization process, because basically what's happened in the military, previous studies showed that, for example, back in World War I, only 10 percent of soldiers in combat would actually fire their weapons, because people generally, human beings, tend to not want to kill other human beings.
It's against their nature.
And so the military realized, after a dismal 10 percent rate of people actually being willing to kill other people in combat, that they revamped their training.
And part of the military training today, and any veteran will tell you this, if they're willing to tell the truth, is about dehumanizing the quote-unquote enemy.
So there's these chants of kill, kill, kill, and that's where things like haji and ragheads and sand nigger and these dehumanizing, degrading terms come into play, so that by the time troops are actually deployed in a combat theater like Iraq, they're not going up against human beings.
They're going up against people that are subhuman, kind of untermenschen, the term used by the Hitler regime to carry out a genocide against Jews and homosexuals and communists and other people during World War II.
Well, it's the same thinking.
And so by the time soldiers show up there, they don't see Iraqis, they don't see human beings, they see hajis, they see cowheads, they see camel jockeys.
And so when they kill civilians, as is happening on a daily basis there, it's easier for them to do and to integrate and to kind of walk away from and say, well, it wasn't even really a human being.
And so this type of programming, when you send these soldiers to Iraq, and I touch on this in the story about this book, this very important book, which is basically a historical chronicle of the winter soldier testimonies that were held this last March in Silver Spring, Maryland, nearby Washington, D.C., where we had over 200 veterans there, and a little bit over 50 of them got up and gave testimony.
People like Brian Kassler, a corporal in the Marine Corps, who talked about on stage during his testimony, saying that when he went into Iraq during the invasion, he watched Marines with him defecating into MRE bags and urinating in water bottles and throwing Iraqi children on the side of the road.
So these are not children, they are subhuman cowheads, et cetera, et cetera, and that's where this type of programming basically leads to soldiers being able to kill civilians, to shit in MRE bags and give them to Iraqi children, to kill women, to torture people, to degrade them, to raid their homes, to loot from them, all of these things that soldiers are admitting firsthand in this book.
Well, you know, one of the things that bothers me on a kind of different level, it's the same thing, really, but it's not even racism, but just newspeak, military acronyms.
I remember a corporal, or maybe I have his rank wrong, but the guy's name was Fishback, and he came and testified about the torture of Iraqis in his custody, I think in Anbar province or something like that, and he said, well, they're called a person under control, so we call them P.U.
C. for short, and then we call them a puck for short.
And so all of a sudden these humans have become pucks, and so they would say things like, I'm going to go smoke a puck, I'm going to go wail on a puck, and whatever, and they just go out and use these guys for punching bags, burn them with cigarettes, do whatever they want, and it's pure ministry of truth, newspeak acronyms, you know?
21st century bullshit.
Well, and that is a perfect example of how this plays out on the ground, when you've got these soldiers programmed to where, again, they're not dealing with humans, they're dealing with acronyms, they're dealing with pucks, they're dealing with terrorists, they're dealing with stand niggers, all of this horrible slang that's used in Iraq, and it enables this kind of behavior.
So just as you said, so then you're not even torturing a human being, you're not putting your cigarette out on a human being, it's this subhuman form, they're less than us.
And another important factor that people read about in this book, and it's very prevalent in the military, part of the dehumanization process, it starts actually within the military itself.
I've been interviewing a lot of veterans, I'm working on a book about resistance within the U.S. military against the occupation, and what I'm learning is that this dehumanization process actually starts against other soldiers, and then it's transferred to an enemy, quote unquote, an enemy out there.
So that's why we have rampant sexism in the military, rampant racism, where soldiers are brought in and they're basically told, okay, there's a couple of people in every unit that are basically singled out, usually because they're overweight, or there's some distinguishing factor, and they're made the other, and so they constantly take the wrath of other people in the unit, and they do that to gel other people in the unit as a whole, because you have to have someone outside that you can pose as an enemy or a threat or someone different that you can degrade to assist this process along.
And so that happens within the military, and then when these units are sent to Iraq, guess what the attitude is of the people to Iraqis?
Well, it's even worse than it is to other soldiers, you know, and this is against the backdrop just for context, and it's really important that people understand how horrible this situation really is in the military and the ramifications of it, that, for example, one out of three women in the military are raped or sexually harassed, I mean, or sexually assaulted.
I mean, you know, and if that's what's going on within the military, do the math and use your imagination a little bit and imagine how that's going to translate into reality on the ground in places like Iraq.
Well, and you know, the other thing here, too, is that, you know, what we have here is not a bunch of journalism students and people, you know, completely immersed in all this.
We're talking about 19-year-old soldiers, and I know just over the years hearing, you know, bits and pieces on the news here and there.
This is all one big state of confusion, Dar.
These people invaded this country to get a bunch of terrorists, and so anybody got anywhere near them, they thought, you know, according to their commanding officers or the civilians back home, these are terrorists out to get us.
At the same time, we're here to help these poor people and give them a wonderful democracy and help them into the future, and, you know, soldiers telling each other, explaining to each other, why are we here?
Well, we're here to protect the new Iraqi government and give them a chance to thrive after all those years of Saddam Hussein.
And so, on one hand, you have all this is, you know, wonderful, completely over-the-top in terms of all the highfalutin rhetoric about the humanitarian mission that they're on.
At the same time, they're a war against anybody who dares resist their occupation, no different than any other colonial power.
And so, here, I'm here to help these hajis.
I mean, how credible is that, really, when it all, you know, it's a wash at the end of the day?
This is another very important point of the dehumanization process that's happening, because when soldiers are fed the lies and the propaganda that, of course, mainstream America has been by a very complicit corporate media, and I want to interject that, you know, this Winter Soldier event, there was no mainstream media there in the U.S. that covered it.
There was no CNN, NBC, New York Times, CBS, ABC, none of them were there, and that's another reason why this book is so important, and that people understand and read themselves the testimonies of these veterans.
But back to the point that you made, which is really critically important, on top of all the dehumanization we're talking about, we have soldiers going in, fed the propaganda, look, you're going in to bring democracy, you're liberating these people, you're helping the Iraqi people.
And so, when a resistance starts, and, you know, the majority, even today, the majority of Iraqi opinion, over 70% now, want full, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel, soldiers feel betrayed, and they feel, by the Iraqi people, because they've believed the propaganda, hey, we came in to help these people, and they don't want us here, and they're attacking us, and they're giving us nasty looks, and that adds just more fuel to the fire of the dehumanization.
Well, these people, they don't want democracy, they don't want what we've brought to them, they don't appreciate the fact that over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died bringing this to them, so screw it.
I have license to do whatever I'm going to do, and, you know, another case in point would be, you know, of a culmination example of this type of brainwashing from the propaganda and the dehumanization, is one of the people I cite in the story is another corporal in the Marines, Jason Washburn, who testified at the winter soldier hearings, talking about watching a woman walk up to his unit carrying a huge bag, and they were all full of fear and propaganda, and they assumed she was carrying a bomb or something, and they used Mark 19s, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and they blasted her to pieces.
He literally said, quote, she had been trying to bring us food, and we blew her to pieces.
Well, you know, in Chris Hedges' book, Collateral Damage, with Leila Al-Aryan, they talk about some things like that.
There was one story that, I guess, this one really stuck out among some of the soldiers, was here they'd been fighting ghosts for, you know, a couple of tours at least, roadside bombs, sniper bullets, and never, this one squad, I guess, had never had an opportunity to shoot back at anyone who was actually shooting at them.
But they had lost some guys, you know, to roadside bombs, that kind of thing.
And one day, somebody jumped up out of the garbage pile and started shooting at them with an AK-47, just wildly.
And they turned around and grabbed the heaviest guns, everything they could, out of the truck, and they blew this guy absolutely to hell, and loved it.
And then they walked over, and they realized it was probably a 14-year-old kid.
And how, you know, half the guys didn't care, you know, that was fine, and half the guys were absolutely sick about it, that they had just taken so much pleasure in ripping this body apart, and didn't realize it was the child, basically, that they had been pitted up against here.
Right.
And this is why we have, you know, well, before I get to what's happening to these people, the soldiers, when they come home, which was also discussed at length during the winter soldier event, you know, we have another situation where soldiers, I mean, this is a top-down situation, when the whole war is based on a lie, the whole invasion and occupation, sorry, it's not a war, it's an invasion and occupation.
Then that goes all the way down to where you have commanders of units, literally, and a lot of the veterans talked about this at winter soldier, literally carrying stacks of what they called drop weapons, and drop shovels, so they would have old AK-47s that they'd gotten in raids, or they'd found in caches, or what have you, or shovels, and they literally, and pictures of this were shown at winter soldier, literally carrying them around in their Humvees, or inside Bradley fighting vehicles, and if they killed someone like this 14-year-old boy that you're talking about, they would go up there, drop an AK by him, or shovel, and take a photo, and say, okay, now he was an enemy combatant, and maybe that 14-year-old that actually was shooting them is not the best example, because the soldiers that talked about the drop weapons talked about using them for what they knew were civilians.
If someone came near them, like the woman I was talking about, and they shot them, and then they realized it was a mistake, and it was an unarmed civilian, they would just throw a shovel or an AK down by them, take a photo, and now they're a militant, or a fighter, or a terrorist, or whatever you want to call them.
So what happens when, this is happening across Iraq daily, and has been going on for over five years now, we have over a million dead Iraqis, so what happens to these soldiers when they realize they've killed a young kid, even if it was someone that's shooting at them, and then they go realize, oh, this kid, you know, he hadn't even gone through puberty yet, or this woman that was trying to bring them a bag of groceries, and welcome them to her country, and then this is happening, and then you hit a point where, despite the propaganda and the rhetoric and the dehumanization, your humanism comes out, and I'm talking about this from a veteran perspective, and you are destroyed psychologically.
You cannot reconcile this.
You cannot reconcile, look, I've done this, I'm a party to war crimes, I've killed innocent people, and so these people are coming back home from Iraq, and there's been over a million American soldiers now serve in Iraq, and they come back home to a VA whose budget is cut, it's underfunded, it's understaffed, they're not getting treatment they need, the average wait for a veteran requesting help is six months, and we have one-third, according to the VA, one-third of all veterans coming home have PTSD, one-fifth of all veterans coming home have TBI, traumatic brain injury, and they're not getting the help they need, so now we have an epidemic of suicide, even soldiers serving in Iraq.
The Army just admitted a few weeks ago that, and this story was on your website as well, that we're on record to have a record year of suicides of soldiers serving in Iraq, and this is another trend that we're seeing escalate the longer the occupation continues, and of course that's happening back here at home, where literally soldiers are basically being given the finger from the Bush administration, and they're left to rot while trying to scrabble around and get help from the VA, they believe those promises as well, that you will be taken care of when you come home, and many of them are now literally killing themselves while waiting to try to get help for their treatment of their PTSD.
Hey Dar, I saw a headline not too long ago that said that the suicides from Iraq veterans are going to outnumber the casualties from the war at this rate, is that right?
Actually they already have.
We've had more suicides of Iraq veterans, both those serving inside the country, but the brunt of the suicides happen, just like what I was mentioning, when they come back home, and we've actually had more veterans kill themselves already, most of them stateside, than have been killed on the ground in Iraq, and that number now is over 4,100.
Oh my God, well I guess this is why the media doesn't pay any attention to this, because they don't want people to have to consider that this is the position that they're putting the soldiers in, when they say, yeah, get them, you know I say we go in there and get Saddam and get out, that's what this really means, their blind support for this policy means more suicides than killed in action, in a brutal war of occupation.
The PTSD thing, I think, is the most important thing, because, you know, and I don't know exactly how it was in World War II, but I guess I'm under the impression that most of the millions and millions of Americans who were conscripted to fight in World War II believed ultimately that they were doing the right thing, they were fighting the evil Nazis and the imperialist Japanese, and a lot of them saw some pretty terrible things, but they had some kind of context to justify it within, or something, and yet, what we're doing here, this is what war is, is mass killing, we're taking people who are not murderers, people who are not serial killers, people who are not even really criminal types at all, we're taking, you know, the kids from the high school football team, and we're putting them over there with machine guns in their hand, and we're having them kill people, and then when they come back, they haven't been fighting the Nazis or the imperial Japanese, they've been fighting civilians, they've been fighting Iraqis resisting occupation of their own country.
I don't know how I'd be able to deal with that, I guess I probably wouldn't either.
Well, it's the ultimate betrayal, and, you know, the military and these people coming in, and I know this from talking with dozens and dozens of both active-duty military personnel and veterans for this book that I'm working on, that most of them joined because they need money for college, or they wanted to serve their country, or it's been a family tradition, and they wanted to do the right thing, and they believed the rhetoric and the propaganda.
But the reality is that the situation in the military today is so bad, and the military is in a state of breakdown, and it's way beyond being stretched thin.
I would even argue that it's basically in a state of collapse, where the military, all they have is the propaganda, because if they were going to tell the truth while they're recruiting people, they would have to say up front, okay, look, we want you to join the military because we are desperately short of soldiers, we couldn't be continuing this occupation if it weren't for mercenaries, so please join, but we need to tell you up front this is an invasion and occupation based completely on lies, it contravenes international law and thereby contravenes the U.S. Constitution itself, but we want you to join, and when you come in, we're going to send you over there ill-equipped, you're not going to have maybe body armor, you're probably going to be driving around in a Humvee that doesn't have sufficient armor, you're going to be fighting a guerrilla war, that means you're not going to know who your enemy is, they're going to be dressed just like civilians, you're going to be engaged in detaining people, 90% of the people you detain are going to be innocent, most of the people that you kill are going to be innocent, we're going to send you over there for one tour, three tours, four tours, as long as we can, we're going to extend all those tours, and then when you're completely burnt out and somehow you manage to actually get out of the military and you come back home, you're not going to be able to get help at the VA because it's underfunded and understaffed, you're going to have severe PTSD, you're going to have other problems if your body is at least intact, and we're not going to do anything to take care of you, but please join.
Well, you know, all this is in the past though, right?
I mean, the surge worked, and what you're talking about is ancient history, the battle days of the Iraq War from 2007 and 2006 and long ago times like that.
Right, and you know, this is another thing, and actually several of the veterans talked about this at Winter Soldier, and many of the people I've been interviewing more recently have said the same thing, even people who have come home after the so-called surge.
Well, saying after is a bit misleading because we have more soldiers now in Iraq today after the so-called success of the surge than we did before the surge was even launched back in February 2007, and you know, one of the two main goals stated by the Bush administration of the surge was to promote reconciliation within the Iraqi government, and today in Iraq, as I know you're acutely aware of this, Scott, we have a more dangerous and fragmented political situation on the ground in Iraq than ever before.
Kirkuk is starting to explode, the situation with the SAWA forces the U.S. created, backed, and funded, 99,000 strong Sunni militia, now they're disbanding them because they just don't want them, they don't want to pay them anymore, and they're not being incorporated into the Iraqi government, they're not being incorporated into Iraqi security forces, and now you're going to have tens of thousands of armed, trained, unemployed, very angry Sunni militiamen, and where is that going to go?
So we have an extremely volatile political situation on the ground, we have a Baghdad government that is now, today as we speak, more loyal to Tehran than it is to Washington, D.C., and all of these militias running around, and we have, theoretically, elections slated for January, where, you know, this is a total recipe for disaster, because whatever groups that don't get what they want in these elections, the stage is set for massive civil war.
Alright, well, I want to be more specific about massive civil war, and in fact, you know, there's this guy, and here you go, Koos Koos, this one's for you, pal, I really make this guy mad, he used to hang out at my blog, now, the only time I ever hear from him is when he writes about what a lousy radio interviewer I am on the antiwar.com blog, including on yesterday's interview, because I just refuse to admit that there is no sectarian violence in Iraq, that there never has been, which, you know, I never said that they were fighting about whose imam is the greatest, you know, religious figure, but the political divisions are very complicated in Iraq, between nationalist, you know, former Ba'athist, mostly Sunni types, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which may or may not continue to exist at this point, I don't really know, the Supreme Islamic Council and their Ba'ath core, and the Mahdi army on the Shiite side.
Now, I agree with little Koos Koos, that mostly what we've had here this whole time is a battle between nationalists and separatists, and America has backed the separatists all along, because the separatists need our help, basically, and don't want us to go, like the Supreme Islamic Council, for example, and yet, at the same time, the Mahdi army was as guilty as hell during the civil war and the worst of the ethnic cleansing and the fighting for Baghdad in 2006 and 2007.
It's not as though the Saudi-ist slash former Ba'athist Sunni insurgency camaraderie that existed in April 2004 has survived this whole time, as far as I understand.
Why don't you go ahead and just elaborate, tell me what you think about, you know, the origins and the history of the civil war in Iraq under American occupation, and I guess we could start with the El Salvador option, right?
Hiring the Shiite death squads, this was Rumsfeld's brilliant plan, they're locals, they know the lay of the land, we'll hire the Badr Corps, especially, to hunt down and murder the leaders of the Sunni insurgency force, that was back in, what, 05?
Right, actually, that started in mid-to-late 2004, and you're right, Scott, calling it a civil war is a bit misleading, because then it kind of predisposes people to buy into the sectarian rhetoric, which is absolutely not the case.
There's never been civil war between Shia and Sunni before the occupation, we had massive, massive mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Turkmen, Christian, what have you, everyone living together.
Much of the time when I talk to Iraqis about this, they would say, I never knew if my neighbor was a Sunni or a Shia, I mean, a lot of the time it just doesn't even come up, just like over here, I don't know if one of my friends is Catholic or Protestant or Baptist or whatever, it just doesn't come up in everyday rhetoric, that's not how we introduce ourselves, and it's the same in Iraq.
So we need to be really clear also that prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, in Baghdad, half of all registered marriages were between Sunni and Shia.
I could go on a long litany of facts and figures to back up the fact that, look, we basically did not have sectarian violence or sectarian conflicts in Iraq prior to the occupation.
And the point that you bring up, which is, I think, the perfect one to really elaborate on U.S. facilitating the classic divide to rule strategy, and this is not new, I mean, empires through history do this, but how the U.S. did it in Iraq on really a more advanced, broader, more violent level, I mean, they started it from the very beginning by forming the Iraqi Governing Council, this bogus U.S. plan that is called the IGC, to basically appoint 25 people chosen strictly by sectarian and ethnic lines to basically be the first puppet government in Iraq, to basically get people to start thinking along sectarian and ethnic lines.
Well, then fast forward to November 2004, we have the second siege of Fallujah that destroys approximately 75% of the city, kills about 5,000 people, total failure, according to the U.S. military, because what it effectively did was spread the resistance all around the country.
So while this siege is going on in November 2004, this becomes clear to military planners and they realize, oh, okay, we need a different strategy here, and so that's when they start deciding, okay, we need to start really, really upgrading the sectarianism here that we've been playing, we need to really harp on that, and we need to find a way to start taking out leadership of the Sunni resistance, and what better way to do that than death squad?
Well, now, at the same time, though, Ayatollah Sistani said, well, actually, you can correct me on my time frame, I think it was right around the same time, Sistani said, we want one man, one vote, and gave every indication, and is stuck by this, that he's going to completely refuse to cooperate with the Sunnis, allow former Baathists into the government, or anything like that.
Well, right, that was going on simultaneously as well.
So we definitely had U.S. backing of the SIIC, it was, you know, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.
Yeah, this is Iran's divide and conquer strategy, and we're helping them.
It is, it is, and the U.S. is backing this group completely politically, and this is the most powerful group in the government of Baghdad today as we speak.
But with the death squads, let's be really clear, for context, back in the early 1980s, it is all extremely well documented, actually, in Senate Intelligence hearing documents, anyone can find this stuff online as we speak, where Negroponte was implicated heavily in being instrumental in setting up the death squad down during the Reagan administration down in Central America that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands, while he was the Reagan's ambassador to Honduras from 81 to 85, and he did it with the help of a man named Colonel James Steele, who trained and armed and backed the paramilitaries.
So fast forward to Baghdad, it's November 04, they're going to implement this strategy.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq in Baghdad at the time is the same John Negroponte, and he had help from retired Colonel James Steele, whose title was Counselor for Iraqi Security Affairs, and together they basically set up the death squads, pulling people from Shia, the Badr Organization, as you mentioned, some from the Mahdi Army, and some Kurdish Peshmerga, and started sending them out to take out the leadership and key supporters of what was a primarily Sunni resistance, and hence the sectarian fighting began and really was thrown into high gear, with the full backing and goal of having this come to be by, of course, the U.S. government.
Right.
So, ultimately, and I'm sorry because I'm being selfish here, I just hate being hated, and ultimately my argument is that I agree with Couscous almost entirely, other than I think that he oversimplifies it.
I never said that they're fighting over religion.
It's always been over politics.
I've always maintained that America was backing the Iranian factions because the Iranian factions, the Dawah Party and the Supreme Islamic Council, they need us desperately, whereas if it was Muqtada Sadr or the Sunni Ba'athist remnants or whatever, they would tell us just to go to hell.
They're just fine without us.
And so, you know, I don't really know what it is.
I got wrong so much.
I guess it's, he sees it that I played down the degree to which the place was intermarried and whatever, but that's always been my argument about Iraq was, as far as Arab nations go, this was as westernized as a society as you could get.
There were, as you said, all the religious minorities were brutally protected by Saddam Hussein.
You know, if a Muslim attacked a Christian place of worship or something like that, the Ba'athists dealt with them extremely harshly.
The widespread intermarriage, as you said, women could be professors and doctors and own property, at least to some degree.
And this is the society we smash.
I never said they were fighting about religion.
They're fighting over political control.
And all the smartest people like you and Patrick Coburn and Robert Dreyfuss and Juan Cole and all these people I've talked to over the years have explained how, you know, you got to get real.
It's been a thousand years that the Shiites have been ruled, more or less, by Sunnis in that land.
They are the majority.
And they're not going to be kicked around anymore.
And it wasn't, you know, the fact that that was good for America's imperial policy or whatever is one thing.
But when the Shiites, who were fighting among the insurgents, were saying, where's the Stani?
Where's the fatwa?
Saying everybody rise up and throw the Americans out.
That was years ago, and they're still waiting, and he's not giving one because the Americans are putting his guys in power there.
And Stani, again, is the highest-ranking Shiite cleric on earth, right?
Help steer me straight here.
Well, he is at least in Iraq.
I don't think he's the most powerful that there is, but certainly he's the most powerful in Iraq.
And I would just add to what you've been talking about that, you know, it is just purely political.
I mean, let's just look at just a brief, very oversimplified history of Iraq.
You know, the U.S. helped Saddam Hussein come into power, helped him and the people in his regime remain in power while it was convenient, while business deals were being made with Iraq, while, you know, under Reagan, Don Rumsfeld is the envoy sent to Iraq.
The photos of him, famous photos, I think from 1982 and 1983, he goes over and is shaking hands with Saddam.
They're opening up economic relations again.
Business is being done.
Halliburton was making money.
Companies like Caterpillar, companies like Chevron, I mean, business was happening.
So things were working with Saddam.
Deals were being cut.
But then when Saddam started basically trying to establish too much of his own power and break away from some of the U.S. control, then he clearly fell out of favor with the U.S. government, hence the 1991 war, hence 12 1⁄2 years of genocidal sanctions.
And then, of course, when the Bush administration came in, you know, the first thing after September 11, 2001 that Don Rumsfeld talked about was we need as much intel as we can get on Iraq.
Go big.
Scoop it all up, was what he wrote in the memo.
We're going to go after Iraq.
So that was the agenda even before Afghanistan came on the radar.
And then right in the immediate aftermath of September 11, and so the stage is set to go into Iraq.
So, OK, you know, Saddam and just the fact that he's Sunni, therefore much of his regime is Sunni, just because that's how it works politically.
And those are the people that he trusted.
It was more that than the fact that they were Sunni.
I hope that that's clear.
I mean, we're talking about what works, trust, what is political, what is viable, and that's what they go with.
Right.
Tribal relationships.
Whether it's Sunni or whether it's being a religion.
And so now the U.S. invades Iraq and OK, it's basically out with that regime that just so happens to be Sunni.
And now we're going to be supporting who's going to play ball with us is definitely not going to be Muqtada al-Sadr, even though he's Shia.
But there's these other Shia, S.I.
I.C., and they will play ball.
And in fact, we've already been doing business with some of them, like Abdel-Mahdi.
And so that's who we're going to back.
And that's basically what's going on here.
Going back to the original point, supporting this policy is betraying the soldiers, that these are our neighbors.
And, you know, this is the thing.
There's such kind of duality sort of thing going on there, contradiction from the war party, where on one hand, come on, we lost 10,000 guys in one day at the famous Battle of whatever in World War Two.
And so, oh, all your crocodile tears over these, you know, few thousand soldiers.
On the other hand, boy, you sure can't say anything bad about these guys, can't even quote them talking bad about themselves.
There are idols in our society that we're meant to worship, and yet if we value their lives so much, it seems quite unfair to basically trick them, to tell them, listen, your job is to follow orders and trust us that we're doing the right thing here, and then do the wrong thing over and over again, and make them do the wrong thing over and over again.
I mean, just that quick retelling of, yeah, this guy used to be Ronald Reagan's henchman, and now, you know, he's the excuse for our invasion and occupation in that country, the excuse for a million dead, two million dead on America's watch in the time since the Gulf War.
This is a betrayal of these mostly naive young Americans who, like you said, want money for college, want to live up to their dad's expectations, et cetera, like that.
It absolutely is, you know, and the thing is, with these soldiers, and there's more and more of them by the day coming back home and basically ejecting themselves from the machinery that is the U.S. military led by this bogus so-called government into this catastrophic situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're standing up and they're speaking out and they are telling the truth about what is happening, and that is why the corporate media opted not to cover the winter soldier event, and that is why you don't see these people being interviewed on the big networks.
Instead, you see these other right-wing soldier groups that are very, very well-funded.
Be interesting to see where that money's coming from, getting time on major networks.
But these guys that are talking about what they did over there and what's happened to them and what is their experience, they are really the true patriots.
Those who understand the Constitution and those who understand the Uniform Code of Military Justice that every single soldier has to take an oath to, which states, and I'll paraphrase, that it is my duty as a soldier not to follow illegal orders.
And anyone that has two brain cells to rub together at this point, and hopefully that is literate, understands that this was an illegal invasion.
It violates international law, thereby violating the Constitution, since we're signatories to international law.
And as a soldier, taking that oath, if your word's worth anything, then you have to stand up and fight against that.
And that's what these people are doing, and more people are doing it, and more soldiers are doing it as time, because they take their oath seriously, and they're doing what they feel is right by international law, and also simply because it's the moral thing to do, and they're sleeping better at night.
All right, now, that was really a good place to leave it, but I want to ask you to relay one more anecdote, one more story.
And this one, I guess, really just personally bothers me.
A standing order, at least for one period of time, I don't know how long, during this occupation, was that any cab on the streets of Baghdad is to be fired on, that's it?
Dot, dot, dot?
Because they could be terrorists?
There was nothing more specific to that order than that?
If they're on the street, a taxi cab, that's a target to be shot at by American occupying forces?
Tell me that that isn't really a story, a chapter out of the history of the American invasion of that country.
Well, it wasn't Baghdad.
There is testimony at the Winter Soldier Hearings by a man named Hart Vigas, he's a former member of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army, he served a year in Iraq, and I believe it was Samarra.
I'd have to look it up or double-check, but I'm pretty sure it was either Samarra or Ramadi.
I definitely know it was not the entire city of Baghdad.
Nevertheless, these are big cities.
I mean, Ramadi is the capital city of Al Anbar province, Samarra is a very big city as well.
We're talking several hundred thousand people in each of these cities.
And he talks about that there was a point where he was on the radio and they received an order from a lieutenant colonel that basically said, we want you to fire on all taxi cabs because the enemy is using them for transportation.
And one of the snipers that Vigas was with replied back on the radio, he said, excuse me, did I hear you right?
You want us to fire on all taxi cabs in the entire city?
And the lieutenant colonel told him, he said, you heard me, trooper, fire on all taxi cabs.
And after this, Vigas, as part of his testimony, said after that, we lit the town up.
We had every unit firing on every car that was moving.
And that was my first experience with the war.
And that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.
All right, everybody, that's Sergeant Jamelle from IPS News.
Man, you bummed me out, dude.
I'm sorry.
I'm supposed to be lively.
I guess I should have had more coffee today so I can sound like I'm not as bummed out as I am when I hear that.
I mean, think of that.
Isn't that the kind of story that Americans would tell their kids about something some other terrible regime had done somewhere in history?
Yeah, one time these guys, they were getting shot at from taxi cabs.
So they gave a standing order.
Shoot all taxi cabs.
I mean, what, how many innocent people died in that weekend before, I mean, hopefully they called it off before too long.
Well, it's horrible and it's difficult to hear.
That's why most reaction that we get across the country is, well, that's a lie.
Let's try to discredit the person conveying this information somehow.
Let's want some personal attacks because nobody wants to think that the government of their country and the military of their country would do such things.
But we have the veterans themselves saying this, and it's horrible, and it's disturbing, and it's depressing.
And me doing this as my job, I have to find consistently new ways to keep taking care of myself while I'm sifting through this bile on a daily basis.
It's horrible, horrible stuff.
But the old thing goes, and everyone knows that until you really know what the problem is specifically and how deep the problem is, you can't do anything about it.
And people have to understand this is happening today.
Me lie is now.
Me lie is happening in Iraq to one degree or another on a daily basis.
Soldiers are telling the stories there.
The ones who are carrying this out much of the time are coming back and telling the truth in detail, as these winter soldiers hearings did and as is outlined in this book.
This is what I did.
This is what's happening.
This is what's going on over there.
And people need to listen and be outraged, be sickened, and then hopefully those feelings will turn into outrage, and people will understand we are in a deep, deep crisis.
And if anyone really does want to support the troops, for example, then they need to get really serious about what it's going to take to either change this government or bring it down.
Do you have any plans to go back to Iraq?
I do, actually.
I am making some plans to go back probably before the end of the year.
Wear one of those dragon skin vests.
I like having you around, bro.
Okay, if you buy me one.
Oh, well, yeah, I don't know.
Maybe if we throw a punk rock show or something, we can have a benefit.
All right, hey, listen, great.
We found a way to laugh at the end of the show.
That's Dar Jamal, everybody.
He's the author of Beyond the Green Zone Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq.
He writes for IPS News.
You can find all that he writes for them at antiwar.com slash Jamal.
That's J-A-M-A-I-L.
And his own personal website is DarJamalIraq.com.
That's D-A-H-R-J-A-M-A-I-L.
Thanks very much for your time today on the show, Dar.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
