All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest on the show is Jason Ditz, news editor of Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good, man.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So, I have this thing where the less the media, especially TV and them, want to talk about Iraq, the more I want to know about it, because I figure whatever pain and grief people are suffering there is still within clear lines of cause and effect from the American people's responsibility for cheerleading that massacre.
And so, you know, for lessons learned's sake, even though it's obviously not up to the USA anymore, please, can you tell us what you know about what's been going on in Iraq lately?
Well, certainly nothing good is going on in Iraq.
We haven't really had much change over the last few weeks.
It's very much been sort of the status quo for Prime Minister Maliki.
He's still trying to arrest his vice president, who's still in Kurdistan, as far as we know, although there were some reports that he had crossed over into Turkey in an effort to escape capture.
And now this vice president, he is part of Iyad Alawi's separate party from the Iraqi National Alliance and from Maliki's party, too, right?
Right, right.
It's the Iraqi party, and they were the ones that actually won the largest number of seats in the last election, but after several rounds of unsuccessful negotiations to form a government, and one of the longest periods without a government in the history of parliamentary systems, although I think Belgium's past it now, because they had quite a long one this year as well, the U.S. ended up sort of getting everyone together and sort of imposing the idea that Maliki, even though his party came in second and was not particularly supported by anybody else, that he should continue to rule.
Have you heard from Ahmed Chalabi lately?
Is he still the minister of something or other?
Kicking people off the ballot, whatever they call it?
Well, they got him out of that position.
I'm not sure what he's doing at this point.
He's still in Parliament.
Part of the power-sharing deal was that he be removed from that position.
Debathification commission or whatever they called it, which was basically just an excuse to throw Sunnis off the ballot.
And that was about the only part of the power-sharing deal which actually Maliki went along with, which was the removal of Chalabi from that position.
All right, well, same as always, going on years now, even the big red headlines start to become invisible.
Bombs going off, people killed every day.
Is there any indication of who's bombing who?
Did these bombs have copper cores?
Are they coming from Iran?
What is going on?
That was sarcasm for all the haters later in the comments.
Those allegations sort of dried up the minute the American troops left.
Of course, there are still massive numbers of mercenaries on the ground working for the State Department and whatnot, but since the bombs aren't targeting them, I guess they don't feel a need to blame Iran for it anymore.
It would be sort of nonsensical to blame Iran for it since the bombs are against Maliki, who's very much their choice for dictator of Iraq as well.
Of course, as Gareth Porter reported, and on this show too, and on Antiwar.com, it was the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who brokered all the deals for the Constitution, for the Iraqi National Alliance, and ultimately for Jafari, and then for Maliki's prime ministership.
Right, it's sort of an interesting case because both the U.S. and Iran have been very much backing the same people in a lot of these cases while blaming one another for how bad the situation is.
Of course, the U.S. was constantly saying that Iran was interfering in Iraq, but if you watch the Iranian press, they of course were saying much the same thing about the U.S., even though in reality the U.S. occupation forces and whatever interference Iran was providing with negotiations and whatnot were both aimed at backing the exact same people.
Sure, and we see who won out on that.
We backed their best ally at our own expense, assuming our can be used to describe the government of this country.
But is that really true?
Maybe that's just conventional wisdom.
To what degree does Maliki have any independence, really, is what I'm trying to get to?
Or is he simply an Iranian sock puppet?
Well, it's hard to say, but there have been some indications, at least from Iraqia, which of course since they're the opposition you can take it with a grain of salt that Iran isn't too happy with the way he's been acting either, that they sort of wanted him to keep things more or less status quo, because even though there was some nominal power for the Sunni Arabs and for the Kurds, it was still pretty clear that the Shiites were the overwhelming power bloc in Iraq, where now with Maliki trying to cut everybody else out it's threatening another civil war.
And while Maliki seems to think he can win it, I don't think anyone else in the world thinks it's going to benefit anybody.
And you can see why, I don't know about Iraqia, but Sunni factions that are powerless inside the government might calculate that now with the Americans gone, and them not having to worry about American army retribution for anything that they do to the Shiite side, that maybe their equation has changed and maybe it would be okay to go back to full-scale insurgency against what was the alliance of the Americans and the Shiite government there.
Oh, absolutely, and the fact that the power-sharing deal, which was supposed to give the Sunnis not necessarily a lot of very influential positions, but at least some influential positions, never really got followed through on.
And then the couple of people who did get positions, Vice President Hashemi and the Deputy Prime Minister Salih al-Mutlaq, are both on the outs with the Maliki government.
Maliki's actually signed out an arrest warrant for Hashemi and is trying to get Parliament to kick al-Mutlaq out as well for criticizing him in public.
They feel they don't really have much to lose.
Hmm.
Well, I don't know, it's too hard to tell from here, I guess, but it never seems like Maliki is overplaying his hand to me.
Well, it remains to be seen.
Certainly he's lost the Kurds in doing this.
Kurdistan's government was more or less content to let him do what he wanted with the rest of the country and just sort of the two sides would bicker every now and then on oil revenues, but other than that, they more or less went along with whatever the Shiite-dominated government wanted.
And now it seems like he's gone well over the line for them and he's lost them as allies.
How long he's able to hold the Sadrist bloc is, I guess, the real question now, because even that seems tenuous at best.
Well, he did play hardball on that last round of so-called elections in order to make this alliance with Maliki, so I don't know if that really put the fear into him or not, but he really does need Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army, which, I mean, to some degree, the Iraqi army is the Mahdi army, right?
I mean, that alliance can't break or he's done.
Well, it's sort of hard to say, but certainly, if he wants any sort of political legitimacy, he needs Sadr, and without Sadr, it would be interesting to see how well he's able to hold control over the interior ministry and all the security forces.
What a strange world Iraqis live in where Eyad Alawi, who's blatantly on his Wikipedia page a CIA guy, is actually one of the party leaders and best they got shrugged or something.
I don't know.
We'll be right back.
It's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I got Jason Ditz on the line.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
What's going on?
All right, so there was some Iraq news.
If you had anything else important you wanted to address about Iraq, please do, maybe even as far as their intervention or non-intervention and whose side they're taking and how in Syria, something like that, if it's interesting to you.
Otherwise, I wanted to know about the latest news of the NGO, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, whoever those guys are, arrested in Egypt, the employees arrested in Egypt and held.
What's the latest news with that, Jason?
Well, the latest news with that is, of course, over the past couple of weeks we've had a lot of really hysterical calls from Congress to cut off all aid to Egypt, punish them over this attempt to charge 19 American citizens with various crimes related to their roles in this scandal.
And there's been a poll out recently that shows overwhelmingly Egyptians don't want that aid in the first place.
And the party that won the parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood Freedom and Justice Party, is also saying, hey, we don't want this money, but not giving it to us means you're in violation of the 1979 peace deal.
And how's that?
They have an actual argument there, or that's just their...
Well, they do.
Interestingly enough, that was part of the Camp David Accord that, of course, ever since, we've been giving Egypt just massive amounts of military and social aid.
And it actually is in the accord that that was part of the conditions of the peace deal, is that the U.S. would just keep sending them tons of money every year.
But I don't understand.
I guess you could call it hedging their bets, but it doesn't seem a very plausible bet for the State Department, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, whoever, to put a bunch of money into bankrolling a bunch of young revolutionary types when all the money is on the military, and isn't that what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are emphasizing, is continuing to keep the military in a position to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups from actually using their parliament to control their country at all?
Oh, absolutely, and I think this effort to send the NDI and the IRI in to advise all these so-called liberal parties was more an attempt to buy them off into being, at least nominally, accepting of continuing the military's huge dominance over Egypt's foreign policy.
So, I guess the military, what incentive did they have to stop it?
They just figured it made them look bad?
Well, it's not really clear why they did it.
I mean, if we compare it to Operation Ajax against Mossadegh in 1953 or something, this is pretty kind of keystone coup, if that's what they're trying to push there, using the National Democratic Institute to do it, or whatever it's called, international.
Right, it's a very bizarre thing.
The real $10,000 question here is, why did the junta care in the first place?
Because, of course, the U.S. has been very open in backing them, and I don't think we have a good answer for that, but once they did it, for whatever reason they did it, the blowback just got so big and so high-profile so quick that they really couldn't back down.
There was never any time to sort of quietly say, yeah, okay, we're going to release all these guys and drop all the charges.
It got so big in the international press that there was no way the junta could say, well, we're going to look the other way, without making it look like they're totally knuckling under.
Now, I've got to ask, because I know there's history here, and I couldn't connect the dots myself by a long shot or anything, but I know there's quite a history of the CIA backing the Muslim Brotherhood when it came to having a right-wing religious alternative to socialists and nationalists in the history of post-Cold War American foreign policy over there in the Middle East, and I wonder whether you have any indications coming in that those ties still bind and that American intelligence can hedge their bets with the Muslim Brothers, too.
It's not clear.
Certainly there have been some official talks between the State Department and the Muslim Brotherhood since the election, but I think the overwhelming victory in those parliamentary votes took everybody by surprise, and the U.S. probably didn't have near the influence over them that they would have liked to have had.
Well, and you know what, too?
I mean, assuming anybody in the State Department really believes in...
I guess it does make sense that they would just use the youth to make it all seem...or try to support the youth in deposing Mubarak if he had to go anyway.
It just seems, from the point of view of the State Department, that their overreaching here is already causing it.
The reason that people who aren't Muslim Brotherhood types would support the Muslim Brotherhood in the polls is because they trust them to be more nationalist and independence-minded, right?
Right.
Especially when you have the Democrats and the Republicans and the CIA lurking around, supporting the so-called liberals everywhere.
Right, and if anything, the fairly open role the U.S. was taking in backing these liberal parties probably did cost them quite a bit in those parliamentary elections.
Ultimately, it's very difficult to predict what's going to happen in Egypt right now, because the junta is still on the U.S. payroll to a fairly significant amount.
Even if the population would prefer not to be getting billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. every year, I doubt the military sees it that way, and they would very much like to have free money.
Well, you know, I think regular Americans ought to ask themselves, at least occasionally, what if America didn't support any regimes of any description in the Middle East?
Might everybody, including us and them, all be better off for it?
I mean, who could really come up, or who could trust Hillary Clinton and her, you know, whatchacallthem, Smithersons, her assistants and aides, to come up with the right way to master plan an entire region like this, and pick the right winners in all these different countries to run things, and even be able to accomplish putting them in power the way they want to do it?
It just seems like such a waste.
Such a violent one, too.
Well, and I think it's interesting that it seems like the U.S. can only be threatening to revoke the aid of one country at any given time, I guess, to prevent people from asking, why are we giving aid in general?
Because the minute all this question of, are we going to revoke Egypt's aid, started cropping up, we hear that President Obama is approving this massive aid package to Pakistan, which was supposed to be the nation that we were threatening to revoke aid from.
But I think there's some fear there that if they revoke massive amounts of aid from more than one country at any given time, then people are going to start saying, well, wait a minute, why are we giving aid to anybody over there?
Yeah, indeed.
Hey, I got an idea.
How about I remember what I was supposed to do a long time ago and completely forgot, and luckily just remembered while I got you on the line.
How about aid to Antiwar.com?
It's our Fund Drive time at Antiwar.com.
How about I turn over attempting to pitch our donate page to our good listeners today, Jason?
Well, certainly.
The Fund Drive started this week.
It's slow going, as it so often is.
We're probably going to be looking at a few weeks of fundraising, I would imagine.
Hopefully our donors will eventually come through, as they always have so far.
It does lead to a few sleepless nights, though, sometimes, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does sometimes get really hectic, and I guess I'm lucky that I never get the details day by day of how it goes, but I register stress levels in my ears when I hear them.
I know that.
I know it gets really difficult sometimes.
We've had Fund Drives that last way, way too long, where we're really not sure if we're going to make it or not, but it's Antiwar.com/donate.
We humbly ask for you to help us out.
Do whatever you can to support our work.
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All of it in the whole world.
Thanks, Jason.
Antiwar.com/donate for Jason Ditz.
Appreciate it.
See you all tomorrow.
