09/25/08 – Frida Berrigan – The Scott Horton Show

Alright my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org, AntiWar.com slash radio, and also I'm cheating and getting away with staying on second hour over at Ron Paul's campaign for liberty.
Thank you everybody for listening today.
Our next guest is Freda Berrigan, she's from the New America Foundation, the Arms and Security Initiative, also writes for Mother Jones Magazine.
Welcome back to the show Freda.
Hey, it's good to be with you Scott.
It's good to talk with you, and I really like this article that you did for Mother Jones, it's called Mission Creep, How to Stay in Iraq for a Thousand Years, and of course you're being kind, really, to John McCain.
He did say on Face the Nation that 10,000 would be fine with him, so I think the Republicans will probably appreciate you spinning that to a more reasonable number, nearly a thousand years instead.
Right, yeah, we've got centuries and centuries worth of work ahead of us there in Iraq, and the sooner we get used to that, the better I think we'll all feel.
Right.
I remember still, I can't get this out of my head, meeting this lady in 2002, I guess probably December 2002, something like that, she said, I say we go get Saddam and get out.
And I said, lady, you're giving them a blank check to colonize the Middle East forever.
We go and get Saddam and get out?
What?
Yep.
That's how we got into this thing.
All right.
Mission Creep, that's what they call it.
Although, I don't know, this is probably the plan all along.
So tell me, SOFA, we hear that sometimes, while the military is working out a new SOFA with the Koreans.
What does that stand for?
What does that mean?
Sure.
Well, a SOFA stands for a Status of Forces Agreement, and they really don't get a lot of attention.
They're full of all sorts of legalese, but every time the United States military goes into a foreign country, whether it's for a week or a hundred years, there's a need to negotiate the Status of Forces Agreement.
So some of these agreements are just a page long, and they're very, very simple.
They say things like, the U.S. forces will be here for this long.
They will only wear their uniforms when they're doing military operations.
They can get their mail via this mechanism.
They don't have to pay taxes, or they do have to pay taxes.
And this is how they leave the country when they're finished with their time of staying in the country.
Which never happens.
Which never happens.
They never leave anywhere.
And then some of these SOFAs are very, very complicated and very, very long.
Germany, for example, where the United States has had military forces since World War II, when we were occupying that country, and then we've continued to have U.S. military bases there.
Germany is now part of NATO, of course, and there's a Status of Forces Agreement that applies to every nation in Europe.
And then on top of that very lengthy and detailed agreement, there's an addendum for Germany that's over 200 pages long.
So these things get very, very complicated, but in some ways we can see them as setting the ground rules for U.S. empire.
How the United States goes into a foreign country and what it does there.
Now, while a lot of this stuff is pretty basic, and in a way maybe even commonsensical, there's a key part of this that is always controversial, and is certainly controversial as the United States seeks to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq.
And that is what happens when a U.S. soldier or a U.S. Marine breaks a law, commits a crime, does something wrong while they're in another country.
And of course this happens all the time in small ways and in very large ways.
A soldier is apprehended in a car and he's drunk.
A soldier gets into a fight in a bar.
Or a soldier commits a war crime while in Iraq and kills an Iraqi civilian, or in many high-profile cases in Iraq, many civilians.
Where does that soldier stand trial?
Who finds him guilty?
Who decides what the penalty is?
All of those questions become very, very complicated.
And the United States has a formula in the Status of Forces Agreement that basically says that soldiers are immune from criminal prosecution by the host nation.
And sometimes that's said very explicitly, and sometimes there's a formulation around that soldiers have the same rights accorded to diplomatic personnel, and that's a very vague way of saying that they are immune from prosecution.
So as the United States has tried to negotiate the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, the issue of immunity both for U.S. soldiers and other military personnel, and perhaps even more critically, private military contractors that are operating in Iraq and that are armed and that are, you know, and have in some cases that have gotten a lot of attention, like the Nisour Square incident with Blackwater, where Blackwater fired on a crowd of Iraqi civilians and ended up killing 17 of them.
The United States has insisted that all U.S. personnel in-country have immunity.
And that's been the thing that has been holding these negotiations up.
They were supposed to be completed in June of this year, and here it is now, it's late September.
And we came close about a month ago, in fact, right after I finished this article for Mother Jones.
It looked like these negotiations were all completed, and I was thinking, oh, I should have waited another couple weeks to put this out, and then I would have been, you know, I would have been completely done with it, right?
But now it turns out that those early conclusions of negotiations were very preliminary, and this issue of immunity has, you know, like the jack-in-the-box, sprung up again and become a point of contention again, and threatens, you know, as we move, thankfully, into the last days of the Bush administration, threatens to continue to bedevil these negotiations as they go on.
Does it show the newfound independence of Nouri al-Maliki that he's really going to stick with this argument, and refuse to go along with this thing?
I think it can be interpreted that way, it can be interpreted that Maliki is finding his own stride, and is looking both to the Iraqi people, and then to neighboring countries for support, instead of being so dependent on the United States.
I think he thinks, I think that he thinks that the Bush presidency is, you know, is more vulnerable now than it's been earlier, that it really wants to leave office having sown Iraq up, and handing it to the next administration as more or less a, you know, with some sort of semblance and sheen of completion, and so within that, I think the Iraqi government has a pretty strong hand with which to negotiate, and to insist on, or at least to try and insist on some concessions from the United States.
But I think even more important than actually getting all of that from the United States is appearing, and again, to the Iraqi audience, appearing to stand strong, and that that, you know, a lot of this is for domestic consumption, and to make Maliki seem as though he's standing up to the United States, and whether ultimately Iraq gets what it wants or not, that posture is very important.
Right, yeah, and it seems to me, well, as far as I know, I guess the best expert on all this stuff is Patrick Cockburn, and he seems to believe that the Maliki government still needs America, that their alliance with Iran isn't quite enough to perpetuate their power there.
They need our army.
Oh, yeah, I think that the worst thing for the Maliki government would be the United States leaving.
So, you know, he and Bush probably agree on that.
Right, okay, now, there's been some controversy and criticism saying that this SOFA agreement, again, the Status of Forces Agreement, like we have with the Japanese, Germans, Koreans, etc., is actually much more than a Status of Forces Agreement.
It's the kind of thing that really ought to be a treaty, which, for some reason, they still go by this part of the Constitution, that a treaty has to be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, but I guess they're going around it by just making it not really a treaty.
But then, you point out in your article that there are actually two different agreements here that we're talking about.
The Strategic Framework Agreement is different.
Is that the one that still ought to be a treaty, and the SOFA isn't, or help clear me up on this?
Well, sure.
I mean, I think, at the end of the day, both of these agreements, both the Status of Forces and the Strategic Framework, need to go through Congress, and that, you know, President Bush, as per usual, has been seeking to avoid congressional scrutiny on this, and hoping to just ram it through and then bring it to Congress for just a sort of pro forma kind of green light.
But these are different agreements.
The Strategic Framework is the agreement that talks about the U.S. bases and the U.S. territory that the United States wants to hold on to.
That's the one that talks about a time frame for when U.S. forces, or a time horizon for when U.S. forces would leave, and that is the one that talks about how the United States and the Iraqi military forces will collaborate or cooperate in military operations, and the mechanisms by which the United States will seek permission, or at least seek to inform the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military of operations that they're going to carry out before they do.
That's also the document that talks about, and again, this is all the Strategic Framework agreement, also talks about how to deal with Iraqi prisoners and Iraqi detainees, people arrested or apprehended by the United States that have been held by them, you know, since shock and awe, since March of 2003.
And in drafts of that Strategic Framework agreement that have been leaked to the press, we see a lot of language about cooperation and mutual respect and, you know, respecting the sovereignty of Iraq, but then we also see this maintenance of the occupation.
So in the draft, when it talks about detaining Iraqi civilians, the document also proposed that U.S. forces could detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security.
Right now, there are more than 19,000 Iraqis in U.S. custody in Iraq, right, and that's you know, places like Abu Ghraib and other military prisons throughout the country.
And it's hard to jive these two notions, right, that the United States respects Iraqi sovereignty, respects the Iraqi state, is there at the invitation of the Iraqi government, and then at the same time is, you know, arresting, detaining, without trial, without due process, Iraqi civilians by the tens of thousands.
And you know, given the specter of Abu Ghraib and the abuses that have been carried out by U.S. personnel against Iraqi civilians, that certainly seems like a very, very hard pill for the Iraqis to swallow.
So all of these things are within the Strategic Framework agreement.
And then as a companion, the SOFA, the Status of Forces Agreement, you know, talks about, you know, U.S. military personnel in Iraq and how they are to conduct themselves and what the rules are for them.
So these two things need to go hand in hand.
The Strategic Framework mentions the status of forces at the end, and says that a lot of these details still need to be worked out, but they can't really be separated.
If U.S. military forces are going to be in Iraq, they need this Status of Forces Agreement.
And at the end of the day, it might be the United States that is granting some concessions to Iraq and not the other way around.
And I think at the top of the list would be at least some notion that Iraq would be involved if U.S. military personnel commit crimes, especially against Iraqi civilians while they're in Iraq.
Now, what about the 58 bases?
Is that not even a point of contention?
You know, it has been, it's come up a couple times, I think in an original draft, an earlier request was for 200 bases, which is what, and you know, some of these are quite small, right?
But right now, the United States is occupying territory in 200 different places throughout the country.
So 58, which is, you know, what we kind of negotiated or what the Iraqis negotiated the United States down to, seems like, you know, quite a great, quite a great concession on the United States' part.
But at this point, given that within the strategic framework, there's a line about the United States not seeking permanent occupation, not planning on a permanent control of Iraqi territory, that that's the number, 58 bases.
Wow, incredible.
All right.
Now, oh, one thing I like too that you pointed out in the article is that they named this thing the Time Horizon.
Yeah, we're working on a time horizon for withdrawing from Iraq.
And then you said, yeah, but everybody knows the horizon is something you can never get to.
It's like the pot of gold at the bottom of the rainbow.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You know, it's always right there, right out of reach, just 12 miles from wherever you're standing.
Exactly.
You know, and when we look at both, you know, the McCain plan and the Obama plan for Iraq in 2009, you know, this language about a time horizon becomes really, really important, right?
Because, you know, Obama has said, and many of us who are progressives and who are looking for a ray of sunshine really hold on to this kind of thing.
He's saying, well, we're going to, you know, we're going to really pull back quite a few U.S. forces from Iraq.
We're going to leave just small residual forces and then forces on the other side of the borders in case we need to go back in.
And we're going to, you know, redeploy a lot of those troops to Afghanistan.
And that's just brilliant.
I just love that.
Well, we're going to keep all our troops there.
We're just going to wait around and then start the war all over again, you know, in a couple of years or whatever.
Right.
These people make no sense at all.
Exactly.
And that's the incident that's going to bring all of those residual forces back across the border and forth.
Al Qaeda bombing.
Exactly.
And that could happen on January 21st and, or, you know, it could happen whenever.
I bet you it'll be Iran and Al Qaeda working together against us.
We can't fall for that again, Scott.
Well, I figure, you know, as long as we're making things up and believing them, you might as well, you know, somehow connect the country you want to bomb with the people who attacked us.
Right.
And if the Iranians are holding Al Qaeda guys in prison in their country, you know, that's the same thing as being in cahoots with them.
Right.
It all depends on your perspective.
Right.
I guess so.
But yeah, this language around time horizon, it's just, I mean, it's just one of those things where you're like, oh, the words that are used are so brilliant.
Right.
A residual force.
That could be, that could be tens of thousands of troops.
That could be close to a hundred thousand troops.
And we, you know, if we call it residual and it's less than what they're now, that can be read as withdrawal and that can be read as success, even, even amongst progressives.
So this issue of language is so important.
All right.
Now, is there a chance that I can get you to go over some of the recent, it looks like a renewed propaganda campaign about Iran's nuclear program?
Well, sure.
I mean, so the newspapers are saying that Iran is once again ignoring Security Council recommendations and their injunctions against Iran.
And it's interesting when this comes up, right?
It comes up when things in Iraq aren't looking so good, when the administration is kind of grasping at straws.
There's humiliation in Georgia.
There's humiliation in Georgia.
And you know, it's also coming at a time when, you know, our economy is, is in a nosedive, right?
And anybody with half a brain is saying, wait, whose fault is this?
Oh, right.
This is the Bush administration's plan of deregulation and basically giving Wall Street anything they wanted.
And isn't this the third bailout of corporate America that's happened since George Bush came into power, at least?
And so, you know, Iraq isn't quite working as a boogeyman.
Ahmadinejad was just here in the United States and doing his usual kind of, you know, down with America, down with the Zionist thing.
And he kind of played right to, you know, right from central casting.
He's a little short to be, you know, the real boogeyman we want him to be.
But we can always kind of prop him up a little bit.
And so this specter of a nuclear armed Iran rises again.
And that's not to say that, you know, should Iran arm itself with nuclear weapons, something that would still take, it would still take five years, it still is not right around the corner.
That's not to say that that wouldn't be an alarming development on the world stage, right?
But it's not happening in a vacuum.
It's not happening just because Iran is hellbent on pursuing nuclear weapons because they're, you know, they're bad and evil people.
There are, you know, geostrategic reasons that Iran would feel threatened and would feel as though a nuclear weapon is an appropriate thing for them to have.
And Israel's arsenal of more than 200 nuclear weapons is certainly like at the top of their list of concerns.
The fact that the United States is talking about selling the United Arab Emirates a seven billion dollar system, a missile defense system, and again, that's oriented completely at Iran's still non-existent, still non-existent nuclear weapons arsenal.
And that it's giving all of this military aid to the other countries within the Middle East.
And then this new heat up with Russia, which began not with Georgia, but with the United States' decision to put missile defense components both in the Czech Republic and in Poland, you know, really putting those systems right in Russia's backyard, right in countries that used to be part of the, you know, used to be part of the Soviet Union, were part of what does Putin call it?
The near beyond or something?
Yeah, near abroad, I guess.
Near abroad.
This very poetic sort of notion.
So, I mean, it would be like, you know, Russia coming in and in Mexico, putting up this defensive system that the United States would find very offensive and very much, you know, coming deep within our sphere of influence.
So all of these factors need to be taken into consideration as the rhetoric ratchets up again about Iran's nuclear program.
Well, you know, I'm glad that you brought up the point about the fact that it would take five years that, I'd like to add, they would have to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick all the inspectors who have been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of any nuclear materials to a military or other special purpose out of the country and basically announce to the world, fine, we're making nuclear weapons now, because they can't harvest any plutonium from their reactors, which I'm not even sure are running yet, without the IAEA knowing.
And they certainly can't enrich uranium to weapons grade in front of the IAEA inspectors who continue to verify that it's being processed to no more than five percent of the U-235, which has to be above 90 percent.
But also, I'm glad you sort of forgot exactly how you said it, but you brought up the issue of, well, you know, okay, look, if weapons are being spread and Iran actually does become a nuclear weapon state, that is something to be alarmed about.
And of course, I agree, I don't think anybody ought to have nuclear weapons.
But at the same time, even that isn't necessarily a causus belli.
Even that, even if they kicked out the IAEA and withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and announced they were pursuing nuclear weapons, that still, at least in my mind, is no reason to assume that that equals an imminent threat, that they're going to necessarily use those nuclear weapons at the first available opportunity, like the War Party keeps trying to tell us here.
And again, that would still be years and years and a fantastic future from now.
Right.
And I think, I mean, if we're talking about nuclear threats, I think a much more imminent and real nuclear threat, you know, I mean, as you said, there are many, many steps along the way before Iran has a nuclear weapon that it can menace the United States with.
And then, and even, again, as you say, even when that happens, we still have, we still have resources at our disposal.
We still have ways of responding to that before we, you know, obliterate their country.
But when we're looking at nuclear dangers, you know, a much more pressing one is Pakistan, which already has nuclear weapons and has a very fragile state at this particular moment, made more fragile by the United States' military aid and weapons that it's given to Pakistan and this game that we've been playing around the war on terror in and around Pakistan and across its border.
And the specter of the Pakistani government falling and falling to Taliban elements, falling to al-Qaeda elements, and then those elements having not one or two, but quite a sizable nuclear arsenal at its disposal is the kind of thing that really ought to be keeping people up at night and ought to be, you know, keeping the game players, you know, rethinking the game and rethinking the long-term implications of arming and supporting and playing both sides of these very fragile, very complicated nations that we really don't understand well enough to be manipulating or trying to manipulate.
And you know, if there's a ball that we have to be keeping our eyes on, that's the ball.
I certainly don't see a lot of creativity.
I don't see a lot of forward thinking around what's going on in Pakistan and the federally administrated areas that are, you know, technically a part of Pakistan, but really are their own non-state area that is governed by tribal leaders on that border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And these reports, recently they haven't been fully substantiated, that the Taliban shot down a U.S. drone, a military drone in Pakistan's territory, you know, if that proves to be true, that is quite a sobering development.
And even if it isn't true, you know, it's just a matter of time before something like that happens.
So the consequences of this game playing that the United States is doing there are far-reaching and are nuclear.
Well, and you know, an important point that I don't think has been emphasized very much, and I really am glad that you brought up Pakistan, because this is something that I haven't been able to cover on the show all week.
I've just been busy with so much other stuff, and it's such an important story.
But one of the things that's not getting too much play is that NATO is pushing India to send troops in to help in this war.
And, you know, boy, talk about the local information problem.
As you said, these people, they don't have good enough information to make these decisions.
It's almost like, you know, Seymour Hersh compared when he was talking about funding the Jandala group against Iran.
And he was saying this is sort of like, you know, if the roles were reversed and Iran came and started funding some Confederate flag group or something, as though those people were going to betray America and take their side.
We just have no idea who we're even dealing with over here.
We're going to bring in the Indians to fight this war against the Pashtuns?
That is not good for the stability of the newly democratically elected widower of Benazir Bhutto there.
I mean, this is just, I don't know what kind of trouble they're trying to cause, but it seems like that's their purpose.
It's got to be.
Right.
I mean, that's just this sort of desperate grasping at straws.
Anybody but the white people, anybody but our own sons and daughters, you know, we need to be fighting this war.
We started it.
We don't know what we're doing.
But these wars are unpopular at home.
The populations both in EU countries and in the United States don't want to send our young men and women into these wars.
Well, maybe India will do it.
Oh, well, the fact that, yeah, India and Pakistan have fought three wars, have threatened each other with nuclear weapons multiple times, that Indians in Afghanistan would be, right, it would be throwing gas on an already raging fire.
And I'm sure India would never commit to that, although they really are working and trying to be a first world nation, trying to be taken seriously on the world stage.
So there would be some incentive for them to at least agree to it in a hypothetical kind of way.
So these are all very dangerous games that are being played.
Well, yeah, and it's a weird situation, like you said, where Waziristan is basically no man's land or, well, it's the tribal areas, not that there aren't men there, but it's technically part of Pakistan.
Here we are, allies with Pakistan at war against this one little part of their state.
They're trying to sort of wink and nod and hope we can get something accomplished quick and ended, apparently.
But then again, like you're saying, you've got Pakistani troops firing at U.S. drones.
I'm not so sure how much carte blanche we have to be doing this.
Oh, yeah, we certainly don't.
I mean, when the United States was talking about sending in U.S. forces who are based in Afghanistan across the border to apprehend Taliban or al-Qaeda operatives, the Pakistani parliament, getting wind of this, ordered the Pakistani military to rebuff any violations of its territory with military force.
So how far away are we from a situation where Pakistani soldiers, armed and trained by the United States, and the Pakistani military, which has received $10 billion or so dollars from the United States since 2001, is directly in clashes with U.S. forces that are based in Afghanistan?
We're not far from that kind of scenario.
And the more that we violate that territory and the more that we play these games, the more dangerous that is.
It's like Kissinger said about you're better off being our enemy, at least you know where you stand with us, because if you're our friend, you're next, which I guess means Ethiopia will have a war against Ethiopia since they're doing all our butchering for us in Somalia right now.
Right.
Yeah.
Oh, Kissinger.
And he's back, Scott.
He's back.
He's rubbing knees with Sarah Palin.
He has reinvented himself once again.
God, I wish some of these people would just grow old and die.
Good men die of a heart attack at 50.
You know?
How are these men?
I'm sorry.
I shouldn't be talking like that.
No, probably not.
Okay, one more thing real quick before I let you go.
We just got a couple of minutes.
But Christopher Hill, I'm trying to take the very best spin on this that I can.
And Christopher Hill, who is Bush's State Department weenie over there negotiating with the DPRK, has said that North Korea's move to expel IAEA inspectors and to supposedly begin rebuilding their, reactivating their plant, rebuilding their cooling tower, which apparently wasn't working, is why they tore it down the first place.
But Christopher Hill, the State Department weenie, is playing this down, even though it looks like Bush's agreement with the North Koreans is falling apart.
Christopher Hill is saying, ah, this is just part of the rough and tumble negotiations that we're going through with these people.
But don't you worry about it.
What do you think about that?
Is that hopefully right?
Well, can we feel sympathy for the Bush administration right now?
Can we feel like every plank in the platform of policy successes that President Bush said at the beginning of the year he would, you know, enact before he left office at the end of this year, that they're all falling apart and that North Korea is one of them?
The destruction of the cooling tower, the symbolic gesture, these beautiful photographs of these symbols of militarism and nuclearism, you know, just crumbling.
That was great.
That was great.
I mean, I think North Korea is a strong negotiator.
They play a very, very tight game.
And they have, you know, as a very, very tiny, very marginal nation, a nation of starving people, basically.
The North Korean government has, you know, taken the six parties for a very long, very lucrative, for North Korea anyway, ride.
And I would like to think that they are strong negotiators and that this is part of the game.
But this is also the unraveling of one of the few things that I think President Bush really wanted to look back on his legacy five or ten years from now and say, I did that.
He's the one who broke the deal by lying and saying that they had admitted that they had enriched uranium, which was a lie, in order to break the deal and is the only reason they ever developed any nuclear weapons in the first place.
They made them out of plutonium from their old Soviet reactors, not enriched uranium, of course.
And it's the biggest failure and disgrace of all of American history.
Thank you very much.
I'm sorry.
We're way out of time.
So I had to sum that up real quick.
Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Hey, good to talk with you, Scott.
Take care.
Okay, everybody, that's Freda Berrigan.
She's from the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, writes for Mother Jones.