04/13/09 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Dar Jamal.
He writes for Interpress Service, for Truthout, for Foreign Policy and Focus.
He's the author of the book Beyond the Green Zone, and his website is DarJamalIraq.com.
Welcome back to the show, Dar, how are you?
Good to be with you, thanks for having me.
You're back in the States now, is that it?
I am.
And how long have you been gone?
You've been in Iraq for how many?
Well, I just got back relatively recently from spending another month over in Iraq.
I got back at the end of February, so I've been back home about six weeks now.
Okay, but you'd gone in the previous months before that back and forth a couple of times then, is that it?
Actually, no.
This was the first time I had been back in Iraq in several years.
My previous trip prior to this recent trip was back in February 2005, so it was quite a stretch of time in between those trips.
But it was interesting in that it gave me kind of a fresh perspective on how radically things had changed politically and on the ground, and yet at the same time to really see that over so many years of occupation for the Iraqi people, things had actually continued to get worse rather than better.
Well, and your reporting is sure refreshing.
It fills a giant silence where reporting on the way things in Iraq should be.
Your recent article, Iraq in Fragments, that you wrote for Foreign Policy and Focus is, I think, basically a broad review of what life is like for the average resident of Baghdad, or at least a realistic assessment of the actual level of destruction that's been brought to that country.
And frankly, at this point it seems like it's a secret or something, because it surely is never the topic of discussion on TV news, for example.
It's true, and it's why I was really grateful to get to go back over to Iraq again recently and try to do what I can to bring more attention to the situation, because it's just amazing to me, as I know it is to you as well, that here we are in the U.S. with the occupation now well into its seventh year, which still seems almost unbelievable to me.
And there's almost no media coverage of what's happening over there, and especially right now at this time when things are really starting to heat back up over in Iraq.
I mean, already this month, already in this month alone, ten soldiers have been killed.
Attacks are really starting to kick off again on a regular basis across the country.
Massive car bombs on almost a daily basis now somewhere in Baghdad.
Things are really, really heating up, and yet even with that, again, where's the coverage?
Right.
Well, let's talk about that specifically.
I really do want to go over the statistics, basically, and what all has been done, but it seems like a cause of a lot of the killing has been the status of the so-called Awakening Councils.
As it's been called into question, their long-term status, it seems like that's kind of what's behind a lot of the violence.
And you covered the raid, what, two weekends ago, where the Iraqi army under Nouri al-Maliki went and picked a fight with these Awakening Councils.
Can you kind of fill us in some details of who these different factions are a bit and what they're fighting about now after all this time of basic ceasefire?
Sure.
Basically, we need to go back a little bit just for some broader context.
For those who aren't as familiar with the Awakening Councils, they're known as the al-Sahwa, or the Sons of Iraq now, in Iraq.
But this was basically a 100,000-strong Sunni militia that was started by the U.S. military as a means of stopping attacks against occupation forces.
So several months ago, actually several years ago, back in the middle of 2006, the RAND Corporation, the think tank for the U.S. Army, came up with the idea, hey, we're going to basically start this Sunni militia.
That's going to be our solution to the resistance, basically by paying off resistance fighters to have them not attack Americans.
And it worked, essentially, in that it did dramatically decrease the level of attacks against occupation forces.
But then it was what to do with this giant Sunni militia.
And so the U.S. military decided last October they would hand control over to the Iraqi government with promises from the Maliki government that they would incorporate these 100,000 men into the government security apparatus.
Well, so far to date, less than one-third of those 100,000 have actually been incorporated into the government forces.
And of those who have been incorporated, they're receiving substantially less pay than other members of the Iraqi security forces.
So morale is very low.
These people are very angry.
And the primary root of the problem that we're watching unfold right now is that the Maliki government has deep distrust for these awakening groups because most of these people are former resistance fighters.
Some of them are even al-Qaeda, according to the U.S. military.
And so the Maliki government, being basically a Shia-dominated government, doesn't trust these people.
Also, they're going after them to try to charge them for attacks they were carrying out against the government and against American forces back when they were still active resistance fighters.
So now it puts these awakening council groups in a place where, look, we're in a position now where we're literally being attacked and detained and assassinated by the government, which had promised to bring us into the security forces, so we're not safe.
And so this is causing a very big problem because the raid you mentioned just a couple of weekends ago, carried out by the Maliki government, they went into a neighborhood controlled by the awakening groups and detained the leader and 32 of his fighters.
And still to date, about half a week later, they released the leader and some of the fighters, but still to date not all of those fighters have been released.
And there's been other raids going on and other assassinations of awakening members.
In fact, last week alone, over 30 awakening members around the country have been killed.
And this is a growing problem.
And so these awakening groups are starting to fight back.
And, I mean, let's not forget, these are basically resistance fighters and some of them are al Qaeda.
And what we're seeing now as a result from the point of that raid about a week and a half ago until now, almost every single day there's been a massive car bomb attack, most of them in Baghdad.
And we're also seeing an uptick in the number of attacks against U.S. soldiers.
And many awakening fighters that I spoke with personally when I was in Iraq on this recent trip said, look, this is coming, we're not being paid, we're not being given the jobs we were promised, and now on top of that the government is starting to come after us.
So what are we going to do?
Are we going to just sit here and take it or are we going to fight back?
Well, of course they're going to start fighting back, and that's what we're seeing right now.
Well, and it seems like they're getting it from both sides too because there have been car bombs and I guess things that have been reported as suicide attacks against the leaders of the awakening councils by the Sunni militia guys who never were bought off.
And they're attacking the people for being sellouts to the occupation, basically, it looks like.
Exactly.
That's a very important factor.
I'm glad you brought that up because that has been ongoing.
In fact, I spent time with the awakening council leader in Fallujah during this last trip, and he had already had two different assassination attempts on him by either al-Qaeda or by active resistance fighters because they are widely perceived not just by resistance groups in Iraq but by many, many Iraqis.
In fact, by most Iraqis as being brutal criminal thugs that are sellouts to the occupiers for taking their money and siding with them and ceasing their resistance activities against them.
So they're not very well liked and they also do not have a very positive reputation amongst a very, very large number of Iraqis because these guys came in, all of a sudden they had some positions of authority, putting on police uniforms, putting on army uniforms in certain instances, even though they're still basically just militiamen and they're not actually part of the government.
But they're donning this kind of official type of perspective, if you will, and yet they're basically then abusing this authority.
There are ongoing claims that these people are running extortion rings, they're very brutal, they're kidnapping people, they're just criminal thugs, and many of them absolutely are.
So that has left them open to ongoing attacks by active resistance fighters as well as now, and we also just saw last weekend, there was a massive car bomb attack believed to be carried out by al-Qaeda against awakening forces just south of Baghdad who were waiting outside a building to collect their paychecks.
And so this shows yet another angle that they're in danger from, not just the government, not just American forces even sometimes, and not just from active Iraqi resistance fighters, but also from al-Qaeda, which is the group that they were formed actually to eradicate, that the Americans were paying them off, look we want you to just get al-Qaeda out of your areas also, and they were actually quite effective in doing that in most places, but now as we see, al-Qaeda is once again starting to show, look we can still launch attacks against you, and now it's time for a little payback.
What's the presence of the so-called Iraqi army, which I guess it is the Iraqi army, the Maliki government's army, what is their presence like in the predominantly Sunni areas where these Sunni militia, Concerned Local Citizen, Awakening Council guys are?
Are these separate territorial jurisdictions pretty much entirely, or the Iraqi army is there too?
In most cases they're separated.
This is where we've really seen, actually I've seen some really good articles on this on Anti-War's website, where we've really seen the balkanization of Iraq, where literally you drive around Baghdad, and I just did this a couple of months ago, and different neighborhoods are completely walled off by literally just giant walls, like the wall in Palestine, just 10, 12, 15 foot high concrete walls stacked next to each other, completely sealed off neighborhoods, segregated into Sunni or Shia, and different neighborhoods are controlled by different forces, like for example you might have an area like Qatamiya, a Shia neighborhood, that's actually controlled by government forces, because most of the government forces are actually various members of Shia militias.
And then you go over to, for example, Al Dora, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood, that's completely walled off also, and that's completely controlled by Awakening group fighters.
So you really don't see many instances of one group crossing into another group's territory.
It does happen from time to time, usually when it does, there's a very high likelihood of some trouble or some violence breaking out, but in most instances they're totally segregated.
Well, it sounds sort of like the irresistible force and the unmovable object going on here, because basically, like you said, I guess just kind of to sum up, the Iraqi government is never going to hire these guys, at least to any real officer positions or in large numbers, because they do not trust them at all.
They're likely to be led by former Ba'athists and whoever they would see as a threat to their power.
And at the same time, the Iraqi government doesn't really occupy the land of these groups, and they have their own separate little mini-state going on there.
I guess I wonder whether you think that this can ever be worked out politically.
I can guess that it's your opinion that it would be a lot easier for them to work it out if the U.S. was gone, and I certainly agree with that, but I kind of wonder whether there will ever be an Iraq again, Dar.
You know, the way it looks right now, especially considering the fact that you just brought up, that there is no signs of any U.S. withdrawal anywhere in the short or mid-term future.
I mean, we have the permanent bases, we have the embassy, we have an Obama administration that at the very least is keen to keep a minimum of 50,000 troops there through the end of their first term.
So that's just, you know, any talk of real U.S. withdrawal is really not even on the table right now when we're being frank and honest, if we're going to assess the situation clearly.
But you're right in that it's a very untenable situation.
It's all a direct result of U.S. policy, which was specifically designed in propping up and supporting these different groups, maybe giving a little bit more support to one group rather than the other, and then basically letting them turn against one another and actively pursuing policies that would make that happen, from the death squads under Negroponte back in 2004, 2005, to supporting the Shia government at the exclusion of the Sunnis while they were boycotting.
I mean, we can go on down the years and point to many, many instances of this, but now that's exactly what we're looking at as an end result, where we literally have either overtly violent sectarianism being played out on the ground, or not necessarily violent, but one that certainly threatens to become much more so in the future.
But right now we are literally seeing on a daily basis many, many examples of violent instances of sectarianism between a predominantly Shia government and then various Sunni splinter groups that were at one time also supported by the United States.
Well, another thing that you say in here about Baghdad, and I want to ask you about Mosul up in the north and Basra down in the south as well, but you say in your recent article that the Green Zone is still mortared every day, like it's 2005 over there.
It's true.
I was staying in a hotel probably about four or five blocks outside one of the perimeters of the Green Zone, and literally daily we could hear bombs going off somewhere in the Green Zone.
I think of the 30 days that I was there, maybe there were two or three that I didn't hear mortars exploding somewhere in the Green Zone.
Also, almost every day there was somewhere there was some kind of bombing in Baghdad, whether it was a car bomb or a bomb placed somewhere and then detonated remotely.
Also, many, many days we could hear clashes, gun battles somewhere across the capital city.
So my point is in that article, and I try to talk about it every chance I can now, is that there's just no normal life in Baghdad.
We talk about, yes, violence is down, but this is compared to apocalyptic levels of violence in 2006 and halfway through 2007, when literally we had two and three hundred dead Iraqis showing up on the street, bodies showing up on the street every day.
So yeah, compared to that, it's not as bad.
Now we're looking at anywhere between six and maybe 150 bodies a day being churned out by the occupation.
But again, that's still a disaster.
I mean, who wants to live or try to raise a family in an environment like that?
And that's my point, is that there's not a normal life.
The economy is in complete shambles.
There's no way that Iraqis can really travel around and know that they're going to be safe on a daily basis.
And that's what it looks like today in Iraq.
All right, now tell me about Mosul.
Do you know much about what's going on up there?
It seems like of all the places in Iraq where it's just a free-for-all, that seems like probably the worst.
And I don't mean free-for-all in a libertarian kind of way.
No, it is.
It's basically a free-for-all for who's actually in control of it.
There's massive violence.
And when we talk about Mosul, I always like to preface it.
This is the city that General David Petraeus, when he was in charge of Iraq, had declared victory there and said, now Mosul, like Fallujah, is a model city for the rest of Iraq.
I mean, we need to remember, this is the guy who keeps falling forward into these higher positions of power.
One day he'll be our emperor.
He's certainly heading in that direction, and with the track record to back it up, like the others.
But it's a disaster.
Mosul is an area that the U.S. has never had total control of the area, not even close, through the entire occupation.
And right now it's one of the few areas where there's actually ongoing large U.S. military operations.
And the evidence of this, when you see violence and when you see U.S. troops being killed, and this last, there was a giant truck bomb that struck a base up in Mosul last weekend and killed five American troops and two Iraqi troops.
And that number, five American troops killed in a single attack, that was the deadliest single attack on American troops in over a year's time.
And that was up in Mosul.
Many, many attacks daily up there against American forces, roadside bombs, gun battles, mortars, Katyusha rockets being fired into American bases up in that area.
It's extremely volatile, and this is a huge city.
This is the second most populated city in the country.
It's well over two million people.
It's a sprawling city.
It's very, very volatile.
And the U.S. absolutely does not have control of it, and nor does the Iraqi government.
What about Basra?
I read something about a massive operation to start rounding people up that started, what, I guess two or three weeks ago down there.
Do you know?
It's true.
It's a very complex situation in Basra.
The operation you're talking about, again, is targeting various militiamen.
Some of them are Sunni.
Some of them are actually Shia.
And on the Shia side is what I'll really speak to, because we have a situation down there where there's been three main Shia groups vying for control of Basra.
One is SIIC, which has a lot of representation in the government.
The second is the Sadr movement of the cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, and then the third is the Al-Fadila party.
And all three of these different groups are vying for control of Basra.
In fact, to show you how complex and volatile the situation is, just a few days ago, actually, the governor of Basra narrowly escaped a bomb attack on him, and that type of thing has been going on down there for a couple of years.
In fact, Patrick Coburn, I think it was about six or nine months ago, had an article come out about Basra talking about how literally in the year before the article, every single day there had been an assassination of some type of official somewhere in Basra.
So that gives you an idea of the situation.
And right now we look at it and see, again, it's very volatile.
No one Shia group has total control of the area, certainly not the Iraqi government, while these different militias are still vying for control.
You wrote a really important article, I thought, a few weeks back, about your time in a Baghdad hospital and writing about the plight of the doctors.
I think you said that most of them, they just live there because the security situation is so bad that there's no point in trying to go home somewhere else.
They just make little apartments out of the rooms in the hospital and stay there for their whole lives.
I just wonder if you can kind of tell us about your experience going around.
How many hospitals did you go to?
I just went to a couple during this last trip because it's very difficult to get access into hospitals.
The government, as a result of information getting out about how many civilians were being killed by American occupation forces, back in late 2004 and early 2005, the government of Iraq, under U.S. pressure, of course, because basically the government doesn't do much of anything in their own country there without approval from the U.S. occupation forces.
And under the direction of the occupation forces, the government said, okay, no more journalists are allowed into these hospitals.
You have to come only talk to our press officers.
Somehow they started to try to put a lid on the number of civilians being killed and put a lid on, more accurately, put a lid on how many of those were actually being reported in the media.
So it's very difficult to get access.
So this last trip I managed to get into a couple of different hospitals and basically found that it was two very interesting things happening.
One, and I think most important, is that the doctors there, for example, I was going to one hospital called St. Raphael Hospital in the Karada District of Baghdad.
It's a private hospital.
And in this hospital there were 13 doctors and medical professionals who literally lived in the hospital.
They literally lived and worked there.
They wouldn't leave because they had received death threats or their families had received death threats.
So you would ask, well, why keep working there at all?
I mean, if I received a death threat, I would probably leave.
These are people, again, there's a disastrous economic situation.
They need the money.
They're doctors for a reason.
They love their work.
They want to help people.
And so they go in there and work for two months at a time.
And then most of them, their families, they had already sent them out to Jordan.
And so they would then take two weeks off and go visit their families and then come back to work in the hospital.
But my point is the security situation is so bad that doctors and other professionals are still regularly getting killed or getting death threats, to where it's so bad that in this one instance we had 13 doctors literally living in the hospital where they worked.
Another thing that's happening that also shows the devastation of the Iraqi medical, the health care system, is that there really hasn't been any recovery for it.
I mean, this is the health system that was completely strangled nearly to death during the economic sanctions that killed over a million Iraqis.
The 12 1⁄2 years of genocidal sanctions.
And there's been basically little to no recovery from that.
And so as a result of that, government hospitals, which are basically the main places that people can go because they're free, are in a state of disrepair.
There's not enough doctors.
They don't have the supplies and the medicines they need to actually do their jobs.
And so Iraqis who can afford it, which is a big minority, because money is short in Iraq today.
It's a devastated economy.
But for those who can't afford it, they're all going to these private hospitals.
That means they have to pay for their care.
It puts them more in a situation of most Americans over here who, for example, the 50-something million now that don't have any kind of insurance because they can't afford it, you have to go in and just pay.
And so that's what these people are doing.
And so as a result, the private hospitals, you can go in there and get a little bit better care, but then it's actually speeding up the deconstruction of the government health services where fewer doctors there want to work there if they can go to the private hospitals and work in a better climate and make more money.
So this is actually a situation where we're seeing it actually benefit a select minority in the population who can afford it, while the vast majority of people then it's actually increasing their suffering.
What is it that's responsible, do you think, for the complete breakdown of the government-run hospitals?
Is it just the complete ineffectual administration and corruption in the Maliki government?
I mean, I have my own libertarian theories about why prices and markets work better than rationing, but there are government hospitals around the world that do actually cure people's sickness and send them on their way sometimes, but that doesn't seem to be happening here.
It sounds like it's mostly a larger effect of the entire breakdown of the economy and fear and all that.
Well, it is that, but then we have to remember the 100 Bremer Orders that were instituted at the very, very beginning of the occupation where it literally sent Iraq into an immediate Great Depression, whereas Iraq had roughly 30% unemployment during the sanctions, which is horrific.
I mean, real figures right now in our country show about 15% unemployment.
This 8.5, I think you're aware, that's a bogus statistic.
I mean, that doesn't include the real figure is basically twice that.
Well, in Iraq under the sanctions, it was 30% and now under the occupation, depending on the month, it vacillates between 25 and 70%.
Usually it's around 50, which is just absolutely staggering when you compare that to, for example, our situation, but the 100 Bremer Orders were basically when they attempted this, basically neoliberal shock therapy of the economy opened everything up and the system basically just couldn't handle it and collapsed.
And as a result, the government health system, of course, didn't benefit at all from this coupled with violence and chaos of well over 350 doctors have been assassinated.
So many others have been kidnapped over half of Iraq's medical professional population, which was 36,000 in total.
When the invasion was launched over half of those people have fled the country or been killed.
So, so immediately if we erase half the medical professionals, what does that do to the healthcare sector?
On top of, then we have, for example, Bechtel was awarded a billion dollars to do so-called construction contracts on the healthcare system.
And we all know what they did.
They basically took the money and ran in November, 2006.
They threw some paint on the outside of some of the hospitals called it good enough and basically took off after subcontracting, subcontracting out all their work and just reaping the profits.
And then finally, we do have massive, massive corruption within the ministry of health of Iraq itself, where the government was basically divided up strictly along sectarian and ethnic lines.
For a long time, the solder movement was in control of the health ministry.
They had the minister of health.
So whoever's in charge of it because of the corruption and sectarianism encouraged in the government by the occupation forces, to be exact, we see, for example, the siphoning off of the benefits of that particular ministry to the people who are in charge of it.
So massive corruption, a Sunni neighborhoods, not getting treated those hospitals located in those neighborhoods, not getting supplies because it's a Shia controlled ministry of health.
So this kind of problem as well.
Well, I just saw recently where Robert Perry at consortium news dug up Alexander Hague's notes from when he went around touring the middle East at the beginning of the Reagan administration and his notes and his report back to Ronald Reagan say that, yeah, I just talked with King Fahd and he confirmed that Jimmy Carter gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980.
And we, we already thought that boss, but here's our confirmation from King Fahd about it.
And that sort of brings to mind something that you mentioned in, in your most recent article there for foreign policy and focus and something I've heard you speak to eloquently in the past, which is kind of the longterm view of the history of America's relationship with Iraq, which I think that just, you know, all things being equal and reasonable, America has no, no reason whatsoever to be messing around with the people in this country and continually bombing them and getting them into wars and putting sanctions on them and what have you.
But I think most Americans are just don't really know the history of how America has used the Iraqi people as whipping boy for our Imperial policy for 30 years now.
And you know, when you talk about you, you keep bringing up that was during the sanctions that was during the sanctions.
When we hear a million dead Iraqis, excess deaths because of this war, they're comparing it to the sanctions.
They're comparing it to the era of blockade that happened for eight years in a row.
And they're saying it was a million excess deaths beyond which we're already being strangled to death by this blockade.
There's a real gigantic pile of war crimes here that people just have no ability to see.
It's like their vision just bends around these truths, Dar.
So let them have it, man.
Tell them what happened here.
Well, it is, I completely agree.
It's really stupefying when you look at the decades of us policy in Iraq and the cost it's had to the Iraqi people.
Let's be very, very clear.
We can go all the way back to say around the late sixties, like 1968, to be specific and look at CIA being involved in helping put Saddam Hussein in a position where he could have a coup and start to take power of the government supporting us, supportive him through his worst excesses, U.S. support of him invading Iran, and then supporting Iran during the same war, a war that killed well over a million people and basically bankrupted Iraq's economy.
We can look at U.S. support, giving him the green light again with George Bush's father's Iraqi envoy, April Glaspie, having a meeting with Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein asking her, look, if we invade Kuwait, is the U.S. going to get involved?
And her saying on three different occasions, no, that's not of our interest.
We don't have an interest in Arab relations in the Middle East.
And so Saddam Hussein carried out the invasion.
And then we have George Bush's father's war launched on Iraq.
But again, that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
And then of course we had the sanctions that were supported by both Republican and Democratic U.S. regimes.
Of course, eight years of the sanctions, some of the harshest times of the sanctions and the heaviest bombing campaigns carried out against Iraq during the sanctions were under Bill Clinton, a so-called Democrat.
And then of course we have the current situation where, as you said, it's generated well over a million deaths and displaced one out of every six Iraqis.
And when we add these figures up, just the casualties that U.S. policy has generated in Iraq from 1968 to this date, just roughly off the top of my head, we're looking at well over 3 million.
And who is to be responsible for that?
I mean, imagine if there was some other European country running around invading other sovereign countries and generating that kind of catastrophe, what would the world outcry be?
What would the outcry be from a government of the United States?
Certainly war criminals would be brought to trial, hopefully brought in front of the international criminal court.
But the problem is, and this is what we all have to remember is the U.S. even under this Obama administration refuses to be a signatory of the international criminal court because if they did so, it means literally every former U.S. president that is still alive would be tried for war crimes.
Republican or Democrat doesn't make any difference.
And that would include President Obama because he is now overseeing two ongoing occupations.
He is escalating, severely escalating the occupation of Afghanistan.
And not only is he not ending the occupation of Iraq, but he's basically transforming it from a military occupation to more of a contractor occupation.
We're not seeing any troops being pulled out so far.
So my point is that the implications run deep in this current administration, and certainly for the previous Bush administration, and certainly for administrations prior to that, where we can look at the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State in all of these administrations, and they would all absolutely be tried for war crimes, and I'm certain would be found guilty.
All right, everybody.
That's Dar Jamal.
He writes for Interpress Service, Truth Out, and Foreign Policy and Focus.
You can find his website at DarJamalIraq.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.