05/08/09 – Mark Manning – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I just saw this great movie earlier this week.
The Road to Fallujah.
One man's journey into the heart of war.
Directed, produced, put together by Mark Manning.
Who now joins us on the phone on the run from a wildfire in Santa Barbara.
Hi Mark, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, thanks for having me.
On the run from something usually, unfortunately.
Yeah, well I hope you have a good enough distance between your rear tires and the fire.
Yeah, it's an interesting day to be doing an interview.
Fallujah was a mass run from a city.
Here it is, we're doing an interview about Fallujah.
Santa Barbara's having to do an evacuation at the same time.
Brings back a lot of memories, actually.
Wow, yeah, well I bet it does.
I have to tell you, I'm really impressed by this movie.
And in fact, I'll tell you what most impressed me about the movie is, wow, I'm actually looking at footage from someone who stuck a camera in an Iraqi's face and said, go ahead and talk, what do you have to say?
And then did it over and over again.
And I'm getting to see footage of what it actually looked like.
And particularly the story, of course, revolves around the attack on Fallujah after the election, re-election of George Bush in November 2004.
And what strikes me more than anything is the comparison to what I see on TV, which is basically none of this.
It's just excluded.
Is that why you decided to make a movie to try to get, you know, pictures under the understanding that the American people weren't really ever going to be able to see what Iraq is really like?
Yeah, I think that's a good point.
It was really important to me to hear from the people, no matter what the issue is.
You know, if you want to know what's going on, the best thing to do is usually go talk to the people.
And that was the missing ingredient.
I thought in the whole lead-up and the conversation around the build-up to the war and then the war itself is we were not hearing from the Iraqi people.
And that's something that I had the opportunity to do was to go get their story and to get it unembedded and actually living with them.
So that voice, that missing voice, I thought was really important.
And to go in there and live with them, to be without any kind of connections with corporate media, with any security forces, we didn't have weapons, we just embedded ourselves with the Iraqi people and built a trust level with them.
They really felt that they could open up and really talk to us and they wanted to get their stories back to the American people.
So it was an honor to do that work and I think really important to get their perspective on what was going on and their thoughts and feelings.
Now, as far as I can tell, the movie was all shot right around 2004, maybe into 2005.
Why has it taken so long to get the movie out, Mark?
Well, there's a couple of reasons for that.
We actually kept shooting all the way up until 2008 and we were making a documentary about a live situation that was changing so rapidly.
It was frustrating in a way.
We'd get the story to where we thought it was time to tell it and then a situation would arise that we felt we really had to address.
And during that situation, we had the surge came about and there was all this talk about the surge is working, everything is fine, and they actually started using Fallujah and Al-Anbar Province, which is the province that Fallujah is in, as an example of actually how things are working now in Iraq.
So we had to address that.
Then the sectarian violence broke out actually before the surge.
But that's something that we had to address because the reason we wanted to address those issues is we were telling a story of the microcosm.
Fallujah ended up being a microcosm of, in my opinion, everything that went wrong in Iraq and pretty much went wrong in the lead-up to and then the Battle of Fallujah.
It seems like this is really what your documentary drives home.
Fallujah as the model for the whole rest of the disastrous occupation.
I would say what sticks out in my mind most from watching the movie is the lack of thought put into what might be the consequences of doing any particular action.
There's even one soldier in there who says, well, you've got to understand, that's where the IED bombs were being made, that's where the insurgents were being armed.
We had to go into Fallujah.
But then you show near Rosen and Dar Jamal, and they show us the chain of dominoes that falls down after George Bush is re-elected and Fallujah is smashed, and how this was a major precipitating factor in the civil war that came later.
And then I really like how you expose the media blaming the Iraqi people, those ingrates, for refusing to accept the wonderful democracy we gave them, in spite of the fact.
But that really is kind of, in my mind, as far as the microcosm of the whole war thing, that's really more than anything else.
It's whatever they want to do, I guess even the surge and the Awakening Council's movement, all these things are kind of ad hoc, step-by-step, just sort of made-up-at-the-time policies that no one ever really has a plan for what they mean to do with the situation at the end of it, or a month from now.
Yeah, it was a comedy of errors.
And having watched the film, I hope you see that one of the things that I try to do is take the blame away from pointing the finger at the U.S. military and the troops.
Because I had nothing but respect for our military when I was over there.
They're doing a fundamentally difficult job, and most people that are in the military understand they do what they're told, and they do it really well.
What we're trying to point out in this film is the mistakes were made from the civilian command authority, from the Bush administration and from Lunsfeld and from the Defense Department, not having any kind of plan for the welfare and care of the Iraqi civilians.
And that modality, not even being there, led to a series, like you said, of domino events that led up to the explosion that happened prior to Fallujah, of the anger of killing the American contractors and our response, and the whole thing just really all came from not having a plan.
Well, you could debate the whole beginning invasion, but from there, not having any kind of plan for the welfare and care of Iraqi civilians was a recipe for disaster, and we try to point that out.
And I think it's important now to look at this, because now we're talking about going into Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan, and now we're talking about how are we going to get out of Iraq.
Are we going to get out of Iraq?
And it's my opinion that if we don't look at what we did wrong and what led to all the mistakes and the violence, if we don't take an honest look at that, there's no way that we can either repair it and get out or do anything in the future that has a chance of success if we make the same mistakes.
So I think it's really important to look at why was there a resistance?
Why did it grow so violent?
Because Fallujah did not fight the American occupation when we first came in.
So why did it turn into the most violent place in Iraq?
What happened?
And by looking at the most violent place in Iraq and seeing how it got that way, hopefully we can learn from that experience.
Well, now, the first real battle of Fallujah was after the Blackwater guards being hung from the bridge and all that, as you mentioned there, which I think was in April of 2004, right?
That's correct.
Okay, so what did lead up to that?
How was it that the city that basically everybody went inside and put their gun in the closet to wait and see what America was going to do, how is it that they were at war with us within a year of the invasion?
What did precipitate the first outbreak of major violence there?
Yeah, I think looking back on it, Fallujah is a very tribal city.
It's very old and very tribal, so it has a lot of structure.
And as Neil Rosen pointed out, when we first went in there, some of the leading jihadists came into that city and tried to get the people to rise up against the Americans, and they said, no, we're going to sit back and see what they do.
Saddam was even very careful about how you dealt with Fallujah because he knew that that's going to ripple out to all the tribes.
But there was a series of events of American military clashes with some of the tribe members.
They came in and started patrolling inside the city, and an occupying army is not going to be culturally sensitive.
So there was a lot of animosity that started building up, just little things.
There was hardly any translators.
There was a lot of miscommunications.
Then we took over the main school in Fallujah and used it as a military compound because it had the highest ground and the structure that the military needed.
There were curfews that were in play, and then there was a protest against that school by the Iraqi youth, the Fallujah youth.
Something happened, and that protest was fired on.
Seventeen kids were killed.
The next day there was another protest, and they were fired on again.
The military says they were fired on.
They weren't having weapons.
But in any case, a lot of youths were killed.
That just inflamed it, and there were clashes and clashes.
By that time the hatred was so high that when those Blackwater contractors came through town, they were sitting ducks and they were pulled out of their cars and murdered and pumped from the bridge.
That's sort of the starting point that most Americans see.
But that whole lead up to those clashes, a lot of people and a lot of Iraqis say that a lot of that could have been avoided with proper cultural sensitivity.
In the media here at the time, basically the meme was revenge.
You can't do this to our contractors, and we're going to teach you a lesson.
I guess they sent in the Marine Corps with their planes and their rifles and went in there and killed, I think, 600-something people in a just kind of collective punishment sort of raid.
I'm sorry?
Well, I was going to say, I mean, you can correct my characterization all you want.
It's perfectly fine.
But that seems to have really made things worse all through the summer leading up to the election.
Then as soon as the election was over, they went in to finish making worse what they had made worse in the first place after making it worse in the first place.
Yeah, I think there's all different kinds of characterizations.
Having lived with the Iraqi people, of course, they see it one way, and a lot of the word collective punishment gets used a lot.
That's an actual technique.
That's a counterinsurgency technique that's used by counterinsurgency.
It's actually in counterinsurgency manuals that you collectively punish the population because it's known that an insurgency can only function if a population supports it, so if you punish the population.
A lot of people think that that was a motivation.
As some of the troops say that are in our film, they were being attacked consistently by that town.
The IEDs that were killing their troops were coming from the arms markets in that town.
But the bottom line is that it's urban warfare, and urban warfare is terrible.
It's terrible, it's ugly, it's inhumane, and it is violent.
So I don't think we have an understanding here.
When we decided to go into Iraq, the battles were going to be urban warfare, and we knew that going in.
I don't think the American population has any kind of comprehension of what that kind of fighting looks like.
So pick any city you have here in the United States and imagine the fighting force, the brutal fighting force of the U.S. military pouring into that and fighting with their large caliber weapons, tanks and Bradleys and air power.
It's nothing but brutal.
So that's something that we decided to do as a country.
Of course there was going to be urban battles, and I think it's just really one of the obvious consequences from a country deciding to invade Iraq, from the United States deciding to invade Iraq.
Of course there was going to be urban warfare.
One of the things we're trying to show are the consequences of those decisions.
I don't think we tend to view war here as a video game or some kind of really precise Pentagon, Rumsfeld propaganda machine.
Not Pentagon, but Rumsfeld machine was putting out about this is precision and these are smart bombs and everything is clean and we strike this building over here and this school is crying and that is not what happens.
Just take a look at the pictures of Fallujah and you see what urban warfare actually looks like.
Unfortunately, these are filled with civilians.
So that number of 600 civilians you have I think is a really low number.
The Iraqi Human Rights Organization stated at least 5,000 civilians were killed in eight days.
Well, I was just referring to the first attack in April, but my network could very well be a low ball there too.
Yeah, and that first attack, as far as the numbers go, I think it's important to point out that going into this, we stated as policy that we will not be counting Iraqi death.
It's not by chance that we don't know how many died.
It's actually by policy.
Right.
Yeah, that's an extremely important point.
Okay, now tell us about Rana al-Ayyubi, is that how you say it?
Ayyubi, yeah.
Ayyubi, and now just tell us the story and then give us a little bit, if you can, too, of the setting for people who haven't seen the movie yet, who haven't seen 2020 do a real documentary showing what life is like in Fallujah after SMASH.
What did you see?
I mean, what really did happen there?
Well, I'll start with the Rana question.
Rana is an Iraqi woman, a journalist, a human rights worker.
I met her in Jordan where she was given a presentation at a press conference trying to get humanitarian supplies raised so they could be delivered into the hospital in Fallujah, where she was working as pretty much the international human aid that was coming in for the people there.
Because at that point, all of the organizations had pulled out.
So there was no aid, humanitarian aid, getting into the Fallujah civilians and refugees.
So we met.
She was extraordinary.
She was in there actually during the battle working to get civilians out of the way The U.S. military was actually working with her.
She knew where civilians were.
The guys on the ground were actually stopping combat operations and letting her go in and grab civilians and get them out of there.
So then she needed some help getting this aid back in, and her and I joined forces and went in there.
It was striking to me when I got in there that, again, from our civilian command authority, there was no plan for the welfare of the civilians of Fallujah.
There had been no plan for the welfare of the civilians of Iraq.
And there were at least 300 Iraqi, I think it's around 500,000, civilians in the city prior to the battle.
Most of them, they think, left.
The Pentagon estimated 50,000 stayed in the city.
Of those remaining that left, there was no care for them.
There were no refugee places.
You know, like I'm evacuating today from the mountains of Santa Barbara.
You know, there's crashes everywhere.
There's all kinds of places to go.
There was nothing there.
A lot of people had like 24 hours to get out.
A lot of them couldn't drive.
They had to carry their stuff.
It was winter.
It was raining.
And there were just hundreds of thousands of people that were scattered out.
They were living in the dirt.
They were digging holes in the ground.
Some people were living in their cars.
It was a disaster just on humanitarian parameters.
And then there was, of course, a battle going on.
So Ron and I went in there with this medicine, and I was just basically following her.
She's a really courageous woman, and I was, you know, following her and helping her get this medicine in.
And then during that, the U.S. military, again, the guys on the ground, we didn't try to do this through official channels, just the Marines basically working on the ground, so I was with medicine and said, come on in, man.
It's needed.
So we did that work, and in the process of doing that work, built a reputation with the local tribal members and the people and then got their trust and shot the Scottish country.
And I forget, then the other question was what did we see.
So when we got into the city, again, it is the consequences of urban warfare, and it is just the city was destroyed.
I mean, the weapons that are used have such high firepower now that the city was decimated, and it was stunning to see.
It's hard to describe a city that's been on the receiving end of the brunt of a U.S. military assault.
You know, it looked like Katrina and a hurricane, and a hurricane and a tornado and a tsunami all came through at the same time, and maybe a fire.
It was devastating, absolutely devastating.
And anybody that would have been aware of that, you know, would have felt it.
Well, you know, Cat Williams, the comedian, has a thing where he says, tell me what the Iraqi Army uniform looks like.
Go ahead.
I'll wait.
No, you don't know what the Iraqi Army uniform looks like because we're not fighting their army.
We're fighting them.
We're fighting people in flip-flops and a tank top, you know, running around with a rifle, defending their own community.
That's what we're doing over there, fighting against civilians.
And also foreign entities that have come in and are taking advantage of a situation that we created.
But they're definitely in there.
And some of the most dangerous people in the world, check me in, jihadists, jihadists from Afghanistan, very, very dangerous, dangerous people, have come into Iraq to fight the U.S. military.
And, you know, there's some very, very dangerous people that have come in to aid the U.S. military from Chechnya and from Russia and places these contractors that are, you know, also foreign fighters, as the Iraqis point out.
And basically what the Iraqis are saying, we want all the foreign fighters out of our country.
We want the jihadists out.
They weren't here before you came here.
We want the Americans out and we want, you know, all the contractors out.
I would like to point out that those foreign fighters, as we call them, it's interesting the language, you know, there is no insurgency from the Iraqi side.
It's the resistance.
The foreign fighters they look at as us and, you know, private contractor companies.
But the foreign fighters that, as we call them, the jihadists that are coming in from places, you know, the Iraqis are scared of them.
I mean, they don't want them there.
They're very scared people and they're there for very serious reasons and it's to kill people.
Well, now, you bring this up.
This is a very important point in the movie.
John McCain, I think you show the clip of John McCain saying, well, if we leave, al-Qaeda will take over the whole country.
It will be theirs.
And the fact that al-Qaeda in Iraq never existed until the very end of December 2004 is kind of beside the point.
Well, we've created this mess.
And if we leave, al-Qaeda will run the place, these scary foreign fighters you're talking about.
Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up because, as some of our analysts point out in the film, even the Pentagon, our own foreign intelligence, I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the name right now, our intelligence estimates are saying that only 8% of the fighters in Iraq are foreign.
So that only 8% are what we would call al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is sort of a mixture of all kinds of things.
It's just lumping under al-Qaeda.
But only 8%.
So that means that 92%, maybe 90, are actual Iraqis, as you pointed out earlier.
And what you pointed out is a really good point.
So what we're actually doing then is predominantly fighting Iraqis, the people of Iraq, the people that we have been told were there to save.
So we're fighting the Iraqi people.
And then the other point that we're making right now is those 8%, the foreign fighters, al-Qaeda, whatever you want to call them, are so brutal.
They're the ones that are setting off the suicide bombs.
They're the ones that are setting off the cars that are killing Iraqis in marketplace.
The Iraqis hate these people.
There's a saying over there, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So at some point they have to decide who they hate more.
And if the occupying American forces, those that they hate more, then they will support the people that they hate to help them get rid of us.
What the analysts are pointing out in our movie is if we were to leave, they would turn their vengeance and their hatred and their arms.
They're good fighters.
Any of our military people could tell you that they've had to fight them for the last six years against al-Qaeda.
And what they're making that point is that if we leave, they won't be distracted anymore, and they'll take out al-Qaeda.
They don't believe in their philosophy, and they want them out of their country.
It seems like such an easy thing.
It's the kind of thing that on this show has been talked about just for years and years and years, that the foreign fighters are the tiniest little percentage and they're only there because we're there and the locals are going to rule Iraq, not Egyptian pilgrim crazies and not Americans.
At the end of the day, that's how it's going to be.
On the other hand, I guess it's still such an important and yet little understood point.
I think that when John McCain, who obviously doesn't know anything beyond his lines, but I think if he says something like that, most people probably don't have enough other knowledge in their head to immune themselves from that kind of propaganda as far as they know that's actually true.
That's a really serious problem and one that I think we try to address in the movie over and over again.
I did that because it was striking to me to compare what our media is reporting here and what is actually happening on the ground and how our media just parrots now what they're being told instead of doing their own actual research.
It's just really subtle things that our media just doesn't report anymore.
I mean, it's constantly using the terms that they're given and using evil and they use the words insurgency.
I mean, you leave this country, the words insurgency aren't really used.
It's just an interesting point to me.
Why does our media use that word when all the Iraqis call it the resistance?
I just would like maybe them to think about that, that they're actually using a word that's designed by our Pentagon to portray the Iraqi resistance in a way that doesn't make it seem something maybe inhuman instead of actual Iraqis that are fighting us to get their country back.
I'm not saying they're right.
I'm just saying maybe we need to start having a media that actually reports what's actually happening so the American people can start to make up their own minds about this.
After all, for there to be an insurgency, there has to be some overwhelming power for them to be attempting to insurge against.
That brings up the obvious question of whether that power is legitimate or not, it seems like.
That's actually a very brilliant point because I would suggest to your listeners to just do one homework assignment and look up in the dictionary or online the definitions of insurgency and the definitions of resistance.
When you use those two words, what comes up when you research the meanings of those two words?
Portraying something as an insurgency and portraying something as a resistance has such different meanings.
Why is it that our media just blanketly uses the terminology that is said to them by the administration?
I would like to know that.
Well, that's a whole other discussion, really.
I have some ideas what might be behind it.
Why don't you tell me this?
Again, for everybody just tuning in or recently tuning in, it's Mark Manning who's made this incredible movie called The Road to Fallujah.
It's got Tariq Ali, Darja Mail, Nia Rosen and many other experts and on-the-ground, unembedded footage from some of the worst parts of the war, the aftermath especially of the attack on Fallujah in November 2004.
It's won all these awards.
I'm looking at the website, theroadtofallujah.com right now.
How can people see this movie?
Yeah, that's a good question.
We don't have distribution yet and we're just in the initial stages of launching it through the film festival circuit and doing some screening.
We need to get distribution.
I think right now people can come to our website, theroadtofallujah.com.
Just check in with us.
If they send us a contact, we'll get it on our subscriber list and we'll be able to let people know when there's screenings or distribution.
If people want to help us get this movie out, I always mention it because you never know.
We have no money anymore.
We're looking for a marketing budget.
Hollywood's all about money.
You need to pay to play in that town.
But if they want to just keep in touch with us and find out about when the screenings are going to happen and the progress of the movie, I think just go to the website, theroadtofalljah.com, send us a contact, and they'll get on our list and we'll be able to help them out, get the information out.
Well, best of luck to you with it.
It sure deserves to be seen by everyone.
And I guess finally here to wrap up the interview, you kind of focus a lot on the reconciliation of some families with dead from September 11th and people who died in Iraq and their kind of bitter argument over what all that means but then their reconciliation at the end.
And you focus a lot on the morality.
You have some Buddhist monks, I think, and Desmond Tutu talking about, you know, when you stare into the abyss, it stares back into you and, you know, you use violent means to protect yourself, but you end up turning into your enemy and those kinds of things.
I'd like to give you an opportunity to expand on that if you like.
Yeah, I'd love to.
I mean, being over there, the process for me was going into this place that was called at the time the most dangerous place in the world and really vilified and the people there just completely dehumanized that we could do this massive military assault without the American population questioning it.
And then getting in there and finding, you know, some of the most beautiful people that I've ever met interspersed with some of the worst but mainly the large population was some of the most beautiful, real, compassionate, caring people.
And finding that and then the amount of destruction, it really set me on a path of realizing that violence can only happen when we separate from each other.
And so the work for me now is to try to connect people.
And once people start to connect, it's really difficult to hate.
It's really difficult to dehumanize once you've connected with somebody.
And so part of what we're going to do when we do launch this film, and we've done it a couple of times at Sundance and at Santa Barbara actually, is share the film.
But then we put on a live video conference for the audience and they talk directly to Iraqis.
And I set up on the Iraqi side live Iraqis from Baghdad, refugees in Syria, and live people from Fallujah using video conference gear.
And the audience members were able to see them on the screen live, come up and talk to them, ask questions everybody could hear, and to start this dialogue between the American people and the Iraqi people.
And for me that's our only hope right now.
We've got another situation coming up.
Now the violence is starting to escalate again.
The violence is starting to fight us again.
And if we can start to connect the American people and the Iraqi people, get them to start to talk, I think there's hope.
And I've seen it happen.
I've done it myself.
I've witnessed it, like you said, in a movie with these American 9-11 families.
They've met the Iraqis and started a dialogue.
It's effective.
And I think it's really the only way we can do it, is start this dialogue between the people of these two countries.
The hope I have and the reason I'm doing this work.
All right, everybody, that's Mark Manning.
I urge you to do everything you can and keep your eyes peeled for this movie if it plays at an independent theater in your neighborhood somewhere.
It's The Road to Fallujah.
The website is theroadtofallujah.com.
Thanks very much for your effort in putting together this film and for your time on the show today, Mark.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.