I'll bet you that.
I'll bet you that.
Alright, y'all, it's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM, in Austin, Texas.
And, well, I get a whole hell of a lot of my information from the informed comment blog of Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan.
And I'm happy to say that we're featuring his article, The Real State of Iraq, as our spotlight today on AntiWar.com.
The website is JuanCole.com, the informed comment blog.
And it says at the top of the blog now that Juan is president of the Global Americana Institute.
What's that?
Oh, hi, Scott.
The Global Americana Institute is dedicated to transplating classics of American political thought into Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages.
Oh, that's great.
Give us some examples.
Well, we've got a team working on Thomas Jefferson's essays right now in Cairo.
And we hope to do a volume of Martin Luther King.
That's great.
These things haven't been done.
You can't get Jefferson's essay on religious freedom in Arabic.
It's never been translated.
Wow, that's awesome.
Well, you know me.
I'm going to recommend some Ludwig von Mises and some Murray Rothbard for you.
Thank you.
That's all right.
Hey, that's great.
That's really great.
That's how you wage a revolution in favor of liberty right there.
You pass out books, Juan.
You don't bomb people.
Well, I agree entirely.
And I think the Founding Fathers would also agree.
All right.
Now, I like the way you start this article.
And you're writing here at informedcommentjuancole.com.
You're about as fed up as I am.
This article begins, American television loves natural disasters.
The Burmese cyclones that may have carried off as many as 200,000 people offered the cameras high drama.
The floods in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri along the Mississippi River, which have wiped out thousands of homes, have been carefully detailed hour by hour.
But American television is little interested in the massive disaster blithely visited upon Iraq by Washington.
Isn't that true?
Sadly true.
CBS just admitted that they have no Baghdad Bureau.
CBS has no Baghdad Bureau at all now.
At all.
They parachute somebody in if there's a big breaking story they want to cover.
Yeah.
That's a top story in the New York Times.
They reporters say networks put war on back burner about how it's just so expensive, you know, to have people hold up in the green zone all day reporting talking points.
I don't know what's so hard about that, really.
Well, I mean, it's more expensive than not doing it.
And these are corporations that are making money.
Right.
They're only the same ones who lied us into this war in the first place.
It's not like they have any responsibility toward how it turns out.
Yeah.
Polling shows that CBS watchers were actually more misinformed about things like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, so-called, and connections to al-Qaeda than were watchers of Fox cable news.
Oh, is that really true?
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
If there ain't some guys committing hairy carry at CBS today, there must be no honor left in this society at all.
All right.
Well, so let's cover the news then.
What the people don't ever get a chance to hear one.
Tell me about Iraq.
The surge is working and everything's going great.
And John McCain is going to give us a victory by 2013.
Right.
Well, it's just a complete fantasy.
It boggles my mind as to how the American public even puts up with this sort of discourse.
In this spring, the number of people killed per month in Iraq varied between over 500 and over 1,000 every month.
I mean, this is one of the world's great disasters.
And this is after the so-called success of the surge.
And we got all upset.
It drew us into a war that 8,000 people were killed in Srebrenica in Eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.
But that's the number that are going to die this year in political violence in Iraq.
And you point out that a million.
According to a few different studies now, we don't just have to look at opinion business research.
If you look at the Lancet study, the Lancet Johns Hopkins study from 2006, and you just basically follow those numbers more or less through today, you'll end up at the same million dead Iraqis.
Excess deaths, they call it.
Yeah.
The U.S., it's not necessarily war-related deaths, but deaths that wouldn't have occurred if the U.S. hadn't invaded.
We overthrew the government, dissolved the army, threw things into chaos.
And when things are in chaos, you have people take revenge.
They know they're not going to get caught.
So there's a lot of feuding and there's criminality.
There's kidnapping.
There's a lot of sniping.
So between that and the militias and the U.S. military bombing the bejesus out of Iraqi cities, which we occupy and over which we have legal responsibility, but we're still bombing those cities, killing, inevitably, civilians.
Between all that, the number of dead, as projected by public health specialists since 2003, must be around a million by now.
Well, and you know, in Chris Hedge's new book, Collateral Damage, co-written with Leila Al-Aryan, they have such vivid descriptions by the soldiers themselves of the kinds of war crimes that they commit against the people of Iraq every day.
And the most horrifying to me was the house-to-house searches.
They just cordon off a neighborhood, search house-to-house, terrorize everybody there, kill a few people, steal a few things, terrorize some old women, and then they leave without having discovered a single insurgent or anything like that.
And people are dying like this in Iraq all the time.
Yeah.
Well, thankfully, you know, I think the incidence of that kind of procedure has declined somewhat.
I mean, I think that General Petraeus understood that it was counterproductive.
I think it's something that Ray Odierno pursued, and it's a little troubling that now he's going to be in control.
Oh, so that tactic actually has been waning over the last year, then?
Yeah.
That's one of the reasons that there's less trouble.
Now, also, I think in this article is the first time I've ever seen or heard anybody do this besides myself on this show, and that is add up the number of dead Iraqis from the American-supported war against Iran, Saddam Hussein's wars against the people of Iraq during the time of that support, the Anfal campaign and so forth, his putting down of the uprisings encouraged by George Bush at the end of the first Gulf War, I guess, I don't know if you include the casualties from the first Gulf War, and then from the blockade of the 1990s and the million dead so far in this war, America's killed roughly 3 million Iraqis at this point.
Well, actually, probably more.
We produced 3 million Iraqi widows.
I mean, that's half a Holocaust right there.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, of course, I want to be careful in saying that not all of those people were directly killed by the United States, but we participated in the process.
Yeah, close enough.
I mean, Saddam Hussein was our CIA's guy since 1958.
It was America's government's fault that he was ever the president of Iraq.
It is widely alleged.
We don't have the smoking gun documents on it, but it's widely alleged that the U.S. was interested in having the Ba'ath Party in power in Iraq because although the Ba'ath was an Arab nationalist kind of socialist party, it was virulently anti-communist.
The communists were their main rivals, and so it is alleged by journalists and retired CIA agents and so forth that the U.S. was very happy to see and maybe helped the Ba'ath get into power in order to destroy the Iraqi Communist Party, which was the strongest communist party in the Middle East.
Once that was done in the late 60s, the U.S. relations with Iraq were cool in the 70s, but then with the Iran-Iraq war, the rise of Khomeini, famously President Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld to make up with Iraq in 1983, and we backed Iraq as our guy in the 80s.
Well, I remember seeing a document, well actually it was just in a video, I forgot.
I think it may have been Why We Fight with Chalmers Johnson, and they showed a clip of a CIA document that called Saddam Hussein a presentable young man that at least supposedly went back to the 50s or 60s or something.
Oh sure.
Well, no, it's very clear that the Ba'ath made an abortive coup in 1963, and Bob Comer, who later was involved in Vietnam and got the moniker Blowtorch Bob, he was jumping up and down for joy at the National Security Council reporting to President Kennedy about how wonderful it was that the Ba'ath had made a coup and how good it was for the United States and how he knew it was coming.
So it's all very suspicious.
All right.
Now I know you have to go, and I do too, but real quick I'd like you to address the fact that the 5 million refugees aren't streaming home, so what does that tell you about how well the surge is working, Juan?
Well, you know, we just had this incident in Bafuva, unfortunately where two Shiite brothers were killed who had come back at the urging of the U.S., and it's just too dangerous a lot of places still.
You know, the reason for which there's not as much violence is that there's been a lot of ethnic cleansing, and if you try to reverse the ethnic cleansing and bring people back, you might have a spike in violence.
So those millions of Iraqi refugees who are living penniless, without work, their kids are not in school, often there's malnutrition, there's survival sex, in places like Jordan and Syria, they aren't coming back in any big numbers, and that tells you that they're still afraid.
All right, everybody, that's Juan Cole.
He's a professor of history at the University of Michigan.
He writes the great blog, Informed Comment, at juancole.com.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thank you.
