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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio, which is why I'm Scott Wharton, or wait, strike that, reverse it.
Alright, our next guest is Jason Dentz, he's news editor at Antiwar.com, thank God for that.
News.
Antiwar.com, our top headline today, U.S. announces second fake end to Iraq war.
I don't know, Jason, are you sure this isn't the third fake end to the Iraq war?
Well, it may well be.
I mean, it's tough to quantify, but it's certainly the second time that everybody heard it and believed it.
Yeah.
Well, I'm thinking maybe this is even the fourth or the fifth, I mean, if you count the handover of sovereignty to Alawi back in 04, and then you just think, really when they changed the slogan from the surge is working to the surge worked, that was a real turning point.
I mean, in the narrative, not really in what's happening in Iraq, but anyway.
So I missed it yesterday, but apparently all the TV news, you know, everybody wrote on my Facebook page that, Scott, is it really true that the war's over?
TV's saying the war's over.
Well, so Jason, is it true that the war's over?
Well, it's true that the TV media said the war's over.
And is that the same thing as it actually being over or not?
That's different, right?
That's a little different.
Okay.
Yeah, there absolutely were embedded journalists from MSNBC riding in the back of jeep filming as the last brigade crosses the border into Kuwait and everybody's cheering and half crying.
Oh, the war is finally over.
And we won.
Someone wrote me and said that Maddow, I think was there, or maybe not Maddow was maybe in the studio watching it over the satellite feed there or something.
But anyway, she was explaining that, yeah, the war's over.
This is great.
All the combat troops are leaving.
But in the scene, there were some of the troops that were staying and some that were going and apparently she kind of mumbled under breath, huh, I can't really tell the difference between the combat troops and the other kind.
But yeah, but we're leaving though.
Yeah, all the combat troops are leaving.
So what are the combat troops called now?
These infantry, U.S. Army infantry soldiers who are being left behind.
Are they anti-terrorist forces or they're transitional police helpers or what do we call them?
Transitional forces was the most recent thing they've called them, but they've called them a few other things, too.
I mean, they're not all trainers, certainly.
The Iraqi Army doesn't need 50,000 heavily armed U.S. troops training them.
They've called them trainers, facilitators.
They've called them a lot of things.
Facilitators.
I like that.
That's a good Democrat term, you know, nation building thing to get the middle of the road liberals on board.
Oh, facilitators.
Facilitators.
Yeah, we like that.
See, we just think that the Army should be used to facilitate instead of just smash stuff.
What's the good of having a giant military like this if you can't use it, you know?
Right.
And a month ago, there really was zero difference between the troops that left and the troops that are still there.
Basically, what they did is they picked the brigade that was scheduled to leave right about now, and they renamed every other brigade to this new transitional forces title.
And this group got to keep the title combat brigade so that when they left, they could say that was the last one.
Wow.
And now, on TV yesterday, did anybody point this out?
They're like, well, there's a little bit of a semantical thing.
Like, I could even imagine somebody like Isikoff or something saying, well, you know, we're kind of withdrawn.
If there was, I certainly didn't see it.
We seem to be in the euphoric, the war is over, victory mode.
And I certainly didn't hear anybody even mention the 50,000 troops except beyond, there are some troops still there training, but I didn't even hear them give the number from what I heard.
Amazing.
All right.
Well, so let's break down a little bit about these 50,000 troops.
Are they all just infantry?
I guess there's got to be special forces and stuff like that, probably contractors in charge of most of the training.
But I'm also curious about air power.
There's no Iraqi Air Force, not yet.
We still got to build one, and that's going to take a long, long time and a lot of American taxpayer dollars.
Right.
And I'm not really sure what the split is as far as how many Air Force people versus how many Army people are there.
But there are air bases still, right?
Absolutely.
And, you know, there's no mention in most of this coverage that I've seen this morning about the or of the embassy in downtown Baghdad, which is, I think, the biggest thing that one nation ever built in another and called it an embassy.
It's really more like a crusader castle or something that looks like.
And it's going to be run by the State Department, but then they need force protection for that thing.
And how many employees are going to be occupying that embassy and for how long, Jason, do you know?
Well, as far as the embassy goes, I think that's pretty much going to be occupied forever.
But the State Department's also looking at throwing together their own second army that's going to be doing combat missions around Iraq after the rest of the 50,000 official military people leave.
You're saying after the 2011 deadline.
Right.
Assuming that deadline even happens, because there's been quite a bit of talk of Iraqi generals saying that, well, we need the military to stay till 2020 and things like that.
So it it isn't written in stone that that's even going to happen.
Well, now you're referring, I think you're right to the McClatchy story from two or three weeks ago about Hillary Clinton's going to finally have her own army.
And, you know, there was a New York Times article that I spent two days going over this thing on the show because of just how frank the language was, where they just basically said, really, I think pretty much what I had already out loud on this show guessed is going through the minds of the guys in the Pentagon, which is that they gave up the lives of forty three hundred American GIs basically for nothing.
And the way they look at it is that that's the price they pay for taking a country.
And now it belongs to them and they're never going to give it back.
And they quote Christopher Hill, the viceroy, is saying, oh, come on, we all knew everybody knew Jason, just like it's all old news when WikiLeaks puts out a bunch of classified documents.
Everybody knew that the status of forces agreement was bogus and that we're going to end up renegotiating it and keeping our troops longer than the end of 2011 anyway.
And they just went on and on like that.
Well, certainly that wasn't how it was presented to the American people.
It was constantly being sold as a firm deadline written in stone.
But yeah, a lot of people did say, even when it was first being signed, that they're probably not going to obey this thing.
It's I mean, it's just paper.
And they did include language in there reserving the right to negotiate a continued presence beyond that date.
Right.
And so I guess really the the question comes down a lot of the question comes down, you know, in terms of the end of 2011 withdrawal to the party politics.
I want to cover a bit more of what's going on with the form of the so-called Iraqi government, I guess, in the next segment.
But, you know, for now, on the question of the troops, you know, sort of two different questions, right?
Leaving the troops now and calling it not leaving troops and then leaving troops after 2011 and calling that not leaving troops.
But for this one, I mean, this is the big lie of the week.
And apparently, you know, other than antiwar dot com and a few other places around the web, the narrative has gone out that Obama has, you know, lived up to his election promise and got us out of Iraq.
Huh?
Oh, it was 18 months, not 16.
But, gee, what a great leader.
Well, yeah.
And I'm not sure if you heard, but right before your show started on Liberty Radio Network, the Fox the Fox radio news beat at the top of the hour was saying the exact same thing.
And they had a soldier screaming, we won.
We won.
Oh, my God.
No, I didn't hear it.
And thank goodness.
But, oh, man.
All right.
Well, we'll get back with Jason Ditz news dot antiwar dot com about the fake non withdrawal from Iraq right after this show.
You can watch the LRN studio cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam dot LRN dot FM. That's cam dot LRN dot FM.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the top one rating.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz about the non withdrawal from Iraq.
It doesn't matter, does it, that everything they've ever told you about Iraq was a lie.
This time it's true.
Oh, TV said it's all over.
Well, as Michael was pointing out in the chat room, the war was over after three weeks.
It's been an occupation, a bloody, murderous occupation since then, and that continues.
In a way, Bush's May Day 2003 speech was accurate.
There was no more Iraqi army to fight.
Then he fired them and said, all right, now I dare you to use those guns that you kept to challenge me.
I bet you can.
And then a million people died.
And now Barack Obama says it's all over, even though he's leaving 50,000 infantrymen in the country, even though no mention airpower.
We don't even know what they're going to do with the airpower.
They don't even discuss that at all.
Well, what about Kurdistan?
How many bases are there in Kurdistan?
How many actual bases are there still open for business right now?
And what about the embassy, the size of the Vatican in the heart of Baghdad and all the force protection for that?
And anyway, they're just lying.
And there are giant holes in it like Swiss cheese that anybody ought to be able to see from a mile away.
And now here's the biggest hole in the whole thing.
They don't have a government worth a darn there.
They have an army, apparently, that is able to stand up for a while.
And Jason, let's tell me what you think about this.
My eyes were just counting the days till the general does a coup d'etat against Nouriel Maliki and the parliament and takes over the country.
Well, that's certainly certainly a possibility, but hopefully the the little bit nicer thing to have happen would be that they're going to eventually just admit that this election didn't solve anything and none of these parties have enough enough feet to try to form a government and hold a new election.
I mean, it's been since March, we're wrapping up August now, there's this is problematic.
Right.
And and that happens in.
Parliamentary republics, when you have a whole bunch of small parties and none of the parties manage to get enough seats to form a government by themselves, sometimes you end up with just an election that doesn't end with forming of a government and you have to hold a new election.
But doing it in the middle of a war zone is a little less than ideal.
Yeah, well, and boy, you know, there really was a lull for a while there, only from the height, as Patrick Coburn likes to say, you know, people compare what it's like in Iraq now to what it was like in the very worst days of 2007, when 3000 people a month were being left on the side of the road to rot.
And so, yeah, it's better than that, but it's still the most dangerous place in the world.
And it's you know, he compares it only to Mogadishu, Baghdad, and there's bombings of people look at updates or antiwar dot com slash updates.
Right.
For Margaret Griffiths and and her cataloging of all the people killed in Iraq on a daily basis.
It's dozens and dozens of people killed in massive violence and bombings on a daily basis.
And then, you know, I saw a thing, too, about how the sons of Iraq are given up.
Petraeus, who won the war, Mr.
Hero made a deal with them and said, here, now that you've lost the civil war, we'll finally accept your proposal to stop fighting us if we will just leave you alone and pay you some money.
And they took that deal and fought against the Islamic State of Iraq wannabes for a while.
And I was reading, I think, in the Telegraph the other day that the Islamic State of Iraq guys are saying, well, you never did get hired into the Iraqi government like David Petraeus promised, did you never got those jobs as soldiers that they said you were going to get, you know, in the political reconciliation that never happened.
So we'll pay you to come back and fight with us again against the government, if not against the American soldiers who, after all, are no longer patrolling everywhere.
So, you know, it looks to me like as long as the political factions in the parliament can't work out a compromise government among themselves and figure out how to deal among themselves within the form of the government that America gave them, then, you know, when it comes to fighters on the ground, things are just going to get worse and worse.
We're looking at a I hate predicting the worst like that, but I got a bad feeling about this, Jason, for the people of Iraq.
This isn't over yet at all.
Well, and it's been getting worse and worse.
When people talk about the lull in the violence in Iraq, it's really been over for quite a few months.
I mean, there was a time when the death toll was hugely down from the worst period in the middle of the Civil War.
But last month we had well over 500 civilians get killed and that was the deadliest month in over two years.
And it keeps getting worse every month, it seems like.
Yeah, I mean, people forget, you know, when they say the surge work, they forget that in 2007, the standard was this will we're going to secure Baghdad and make Baghdad peaceful, which they never did do.
And by doing so, we're going to make it possible for political reconciliation where people will stop fighting with their militias and start fighting in the parliament like a good democracy and whatever.
And that really hasn't worked.
In fact, you know, I talked with John Utley the other day and he's got a new article somewhere.
I haven't seen it yet, but he mentioned that he's got a new article about how it's, you know, Paul Bremer's fault.
It's the American occupation's fault because the the way that the Constitution is set up, it's not just a parliament, but you don't even get to vote for your local leader by name at all.
It's still all religious based slates and party slates.
And then the party bosses pick all the parliamentarians and whatever.
And that basically the way it's set up, the arguments can't be worked out.
I mean, here you can't even get the obvious natural alliance.
Right.
It would be between Sotiris group and Sotiris group and Maliki's group, and they can't work it out.
Right.
None of these groups seem to be able to work it out.
The U.S. has constantly been trying to impose a coalition government on them by setting down two of the leaders and demanding that they talk it out and work out a deal.
But these talks always just end with them madder than ever and condemning each other publicly.
And President Obama's even approached Ayatollah Sistani to try to have him impose this obvious alliance between Maliki and Sotiris.
But so far, it doesn't seem like he's going to.
Well, and that really tells you something, too, doesn't it?
That that's what the administration wants.
They are not even pretending to to want to make an alliance between it's I mean, I don't know.
I guess if I was Obama, I would think they would want Alawi and Maliki to form an alliance and would prefer to marginalize Sotiris if they could.
But I guess they figure Sotiris rules everything from Baghdad to Basra anyway, and you just got to live with it.
Well, they've tried that, too.
I mean, they did set up some meetings between Alawi and Maliki, but those didn't really go anywhere.
And there's just so much resentment among both factions over that election.
I mean, it would be amazing if Sistani just became the Ayatollah of the country in a political fashion, the way Khamenei rules Iran.
Well, the the preliminary deal between Maliki and Sotiris would have basically made that happen and everything but name.
I mean, they would have given Sistani and the Najaf Marjiya the ability to just basically make laws out of religious dictates, and it would have obliged the civilian government to go along with whatever Sistani said.
Man, we're just spreading democracy all over the world, I guess.
Well, you know, Sistani has, as of the last few years, has stayed more out of politics.
I mean, at first he intervened to make sure that they got one man, one vote, and that the Supreme Islamic Council and then came out in the lead.
But he's pretty much stayed out of things for a while now, at least apparently.
And I guess they say he's of a different tradition, a quietest on domestic politics type tradition of being Ayatollah, which is different than the way they do it in Iran.
But then again, that only goes so far.
And I, you know, but who knows?
I have no idea what that guy's motivations are.
I mean, I guess he could, by usurping the power, he could bring order to the country one way or another there.
And he's probably the only guy who could.
It really comes down to it.
In fact, am I right that they kicked Maliki out of the Dawah party?
So now Dawah is completely down in the Saudis camp, huh?
Well, that's I've seen reports to that effect, but I'm not sure exactly how that worked.
There were there were reports that they voted him out as leader.
There were reports that they kicked him out entirely.
Exactly what happened there.
I'm not sure.
Well, I mean, geez, yeah, I don't know.
That's it's all very confusing.
But, you know, it seems like what it all equals out to is that this story is not over yet at all.
It's, you know, the beginning of Act two, hopefully Act three.
But I don't know.
I do know that I understand the situation a lot better thanks to you and your coverage.
And I appreciate your time on the show as well today.
Everybody, that's Jason Vitz, he's news editor at Antiwar.com, News.
Antiwar.com.
And we'll be back.
