11/17/09 – Michael Hastings – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show is Michael Hastings.
He's the author of I Lost My Love in Baghdad, a Modern War Story.
And he covered the presidential election in 2008 for Newsweek.
He's now writing for GQ, and you can find him at True Slant, which I think that's Matt Taibbi's blog, right?
And anyway, you can find him also, or you have in the past been able to find him at Slate, Salon Foreign Policy, the LA Times.
And we did an interview with him a few months back.
You might remember about his article in GQ magazine about his time spent with fighters of different descriptions in Afghanistan.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
And congrats on your show tonight, too.
That sounds like a great lineup.
Well, thanks very much.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it.
Believe me.
Okay, so it's an interesting question, isn't it?
If Dick Cheney and George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz and John Hanna and Scooter Libby and Stephen Hadley and Elliot Abrams and Abram Shulsky and all those guys are chicken hawk warmongers.
Oh, did I leave out Richard Pearl and Douglas Fyfe?
If they are all chicken hawk warmongers, if all their accomplices at the National Review and the Weekly Standard are all a bunch of chicken hawks, then what does that make the Democrats who act just like them when they're in power?
What does that make Barack Obama, Michael?
Well, I think you've got Karl Rove, you could add to that list, David Brook.
Please, please feel free to embellish the list as far as you like.
I kind of went the direction of the Vice President's Office and the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, but there are many, many more.
You can call out congressmen, whoever you like, please.
We've got plenty of time.
Sure, you can go down that list.
It's the question that has sort of been nagging at me, this idea that Obama, for a while now, has been fairly hawkish on Afghanistan, and usually in the past, especially from the left, if you have a politician who's been very hawkish about a war, but who has not yet served in the military or hasn't had their kids serve in the military, they get sort of smeared or described accurately, depending on your point of view, with this label of chicken hawk.
And when word came out that the President was going to put probably about 40,000 more soldiers there on the ground, which would bring our total up to about 100,000, which, by the way, I've been hearing about this for about a year now, and I think when I was on your show, we talked about that, even in April or May, when that was.
So it's not a big surprise that we're going to hit that 100,000 mark.
But it gets back to this point.
Should we call Obama a chicken hawk?
And my conclusion was I ended up, I think, saying he's a chicken dove in the sense that because of his lack of military experience, he is too afraid to actually stand up for a more peaceful solution or not kind of cave to the real pro-war crowd.
Well, now, that's an interesting conclusion, and I'm afraid I agree with it.
I don't think it diminishes his responsibility at all or anything, but I have to believe, I just have to, maybe only so I can continue living here, that he knows better than what he's doing.
He just doesn't think he has a choice because he's an evil, stupid politician, and that's what they do.
But he's not George Bush, the fumbling idiot who doesn't even understand the basic structure of the government he's the chief executive of.
He's a lawyer.
He's read books before.
Well, I think, and this is why we give him a pass, right?
And it's also why we've given or used to give a lot of sort of liberal hawks a pass because they seem so much more thoughtful about their war ideas.
There's not this sort of cavalier-type attitude.
For some reason, it doesn't seem as hypocritical as when you have a guy like Karl Rover or Six Deferment Cheney.
I'm just throwing out the red meat here.
It just doesn't seem as bad because of the fact that Obama is portraying this as a very serious decision, and he's thinking about it, and he's not questioning anyone's patriotism, and you go down the line.
But at the end of the day, he's quite hawkish.
My criticism here, after I wrote this sort of post, mini-essay about this, I realized I was really criticizing the mainstream left, what you might call the anti-war left in fact, who's been very silent, I think at moveon.org in particular, about Afghanistan.
It's only recently that moveon.org came out with this milk-toast recommendation that Obama should find a way out of Afghanistan.
But I think it was really at the same people.
Here's the question.
If John McCain had won the White House, and John McCain was sending 100,000 troops to Afghanistan, doubling the size of our force there, everyone in the Democratic Party, or most of them, and most of the people who were given money to moveon.org for years, would say, this guy's a warmonger, this guy's escalating, this guy and his chicken-hawk advisors are sending more Americans to die.
But yet Obama has not yet been tarred with that same brush, and my question is, why is that?
Right, well, it is.
It's that great dynamic.
And again, maybe for the first time here, it's called Afghanistan.
Does this make Obama a chicken-hawk?
It's at trueslant.com.
And the chicken-dove explanation is very interesting.
It's sort of the inverse of, only Nixon can go to China, only Reagan can not nuke the USSR, or whatever.
Obama, being a guy who has no military experience, who comes from, as Chris Matthews calls it, probably correctly, the mommy party, he can't be weak.
He has to be a tough guy, and if he doesn't want to slaughter Iraqis, he's got to slaughter somebody, or else he'll be ridiculed right out of power.
And so, we think he's smart enough that he could know what's the right thing to do, and yet, apparently, I guess he thinks he and his own power is more important than just doing the right thing.
I don't understand it, honestly.
It seems to me like anybody with that much power would think, well, screw me, man, the point here is to do the right thing, right?
I don't know.
Ron Paul would have said, everybody get in your truck and head to Kuwait and get on a ship and get the hell out of there and come home.
Same thing for Afghanistan.
Everybody find a route to the port of Karachi and get out, right now.
And I think he's putting himself in a difficult political position, because, as the most recent ABC poll showed, a majority of Americans are against the war in Afghanistan.
A lot of his base, remember, this was a guy who was elected for being the anti-war candidate, in a sense.
I mean, that's what gave his anti-war stance on Iraq, gave him the initial spark that he ended up riding to the presidency.
So, there's going to be a situation if Afghanistan goes badly, which we're pretty sure that it is going to go badly, or it's going to be some kind of unsatisfactory stalemate, who is going to be left supporting Obama?
Does he really think it's going to be McCain and Sarah Palin?
And these are the people who are for the war, and this small cadre of advisors around him.
So, my question is, he's following this policy that his base doesn't really support.
They haven't been too vocal about it yet, but they're getting there.
And a lot of Democrats also are sort of questioning this policy, yet he's going ahead with it anyway, because he feels this intense political pressure from the military.
Well, you know, it's just so silly to me that politicians, particularly Democrats, are so scared to do the right thing.
You know, if Barack Obama came out now and said, you know, I've been really thinking it over, and I've decided not only am I not escalating, forget Afghanistan, this is not worth it, the whole thing's crazy, we'll have the Pakistanis hunt down Ayman al-Zawahiri for us or something, don't worry, it'll work out, we're leaving right now.
Then I would become his biggest defender, and I would say nothing else matters but that he's ended this war.
And, you know what, do your stupid stimulus and whatever bribery you've got to do to get Democrats to go along with it, get those troops out of there.
If he would just do the right thing, people would rally to his support.
You know, it's the same as John Kerry and his whole milquetoast approach, where if he had just came out and said, look, maybe this isn't what the polls reflect, but I'm here to tell you, this war is wrong, we're killing innocent people, we never should have done this, now's our chance to at least fire the guy who did everything wrong and try to get it back right again, he would have won.
If he had just told the people the truth and run on the platform of ending the war, it would have benefited him.
Instead he was all scared and he hired all these military people to stand around him and talk about what a warmonger he was.
Well, you know, why do we need a worse Democrat warmonger than the Republicans?
You know, if that's his strong point, we know Republicans can kill people.
Right, well, it's a sort of catch-22.
The minute you start wondering about, well, am I going to look weak if I do this, you automatically look weak.
If the perception is Obama's gut is not really into the Afghan strategy and he's just doing it for political expediency, that actually makes him look much worse than if he would just say, you know, let's figure out another way out of this, let's lower our footprint there, as they like to say, let's bring the troops home.
I remember attending rallies, covering rallies, you know, in 2005 and 2006 where the sentiment was bring the troops home.
By home, I did not get the sense that the people, and these people went on to vote for Barack Obama, home did not mean from Baghdad to Kabul, home meant from Baghdad to Kabul, you know, back to the U.S.
And just to put this in a little, I think, to give it some sort of context in what's been going on and how Obama got into this situation.
As you mentioned, last year I was, in my trip to Afghanistan, about a year ago I interviewed General McKiernan, and your listeners might know General McKiernan was fired earlier this year and replaced by General Stanley McChrystal.
Now the interesting thing about that is that McKiernan is one of the only high-ranking officers, and I ended up spending quite a bit of time with military folks, and this is a generalization note, but McKiernan actually liked Obama.
McKiernan was happy that Obama became president.
And what does he do to the one guy who actually likes him there?
He fires him because, you know, Petraeus said so, essentially.
And then Petraeus puts his guy in, and then his guy goes and asks for more troops and more troops.
So I think, in one sense, what we're seeing here is Obama, sort of the civil-military relationship that Obama is developing, and how that is going to be much different from the Bush-Petraeus partnership.
And that's why there's so much friction here, and unfortunately Obama might have been caught in the trap.
Well, and not to be too melodramatic about it, but Daniel Ellsberg said that, you know, at least in his opinion, he imagines or believes that Obama must be frightened of the Pentagon.
I mean, let's not downplay it.
The Pentagon is the empire.
It has the world carved up into these little pieces.
It has a thousand bases in other countries, in every sea, in every ocean.
It dominates every economy and political government.
If the State Department cuts off Uzbekistan torturers, the Pentagon just comes up with the money instead.
The generals replace the ambassadors all around the world.
I mean, this is a big thing for a president, a measly individual, one man in the Oval Office, to tell the Pentagon, all those admirals and all those generals know about the mission that they've created for themselves, this long war of American domination of Muslim South Asia and what have you.
I mean, they have a big plan here.
He can't tell them, no, he's up against, might as well be the whole world.
Well, exactly.
I think there is a, you know, choose your battles kind of mentality going on here.
You know, if Obama wants to pass the big domestic program, right, that's his sort of thing.
He's withdrawing from Iraq, he's talking to Iran, he's going to China and he's saying, you know, all these very intelligent things.
He's, you know, thinking of talking to Venezuela.
So, to where, but, you know, if he withdraws from Afghanistan, well, that's sort of a red line and maybe he can't do that politically.
Maybe he feels he can't do that politically because he has this mentality of, well, you know, I'm doing all these other things, so to sacrifice that I'm going to send, you know, 40,000 American troops and then have, sadly, hundreds of them die and then all of a sudden the untold damage that, you know.
Well, you know, just keep the bubble top on the limo is all.
No, I know, and, you know, and the thing is I'm not, I've been fairly critical of Obama on his Afghanistan policy.
I think his other foreign policy, at least, is something you can get behind.
Certainly traveling overseas, the anti-Americanism is much lower than it's been in the last eight years, which isn't saying too much.
But it is saying that in many other fronts he's making, you know, the right moves.
I think, unfortunately, with Afghanistan, which might be the most critical of all his decisions, he seems to be getting sucked down the rabbit hole.
All right, now, everybody, you're listening to Michael Hastings.
He writes for GQ magazine.
And, well, teach us about Afghanistan.
You spent some time there, I believe, especially in the east along the Durand Line, the Afghan-Pakistan border there.
And I guess I'd like to throw in here as part of my overly vague, sloppy question here something that I read a couple of weeks ago.
Or maybe a week ago.
Happy birthday, Pat Tillman, from his brother Kevin.
And it was actually a replay on Truthdig from, I think, 2006.
But one of the things that he talked about in there was being blown up by an IED and have your skin melt to the seat.
And how bad it hurts to have your arms and legs blown off, to be thrown 50 feet in the air by a landmine.
And I was just thinking, you know, so much of this discussion takes place in kind of secondary qualities and talking about metaphysical things and ideas and arguments and pressures and different things.
But, you know, what we're actually talking about is the neighbor's kid, at least, if not our own kids, being blown up over there.
I mean, it might be far away, but it's just as real every day.
These headlines aren't just numbers and letters on pages.
These are real people who are crying for their mom as they die, you know?
It is real.
And I think, you know, I just got back.
I spent the last six weeks in Iraq.
So I just got back from there two days ago.
And I'll transition to Afghanistan quickly.
But just to say, Baghdad right now is still a city that's recovering from a horrible, horrible trauma.
And you see it in the faces of the people.
You see it in the American soldiers who are there.
You see it in the Iraqi soldiers, you know, who've had horrible things happen to their lives.
They're, like, totally upended by this war.
So it's not just – and it is true.
So much of this policy discussion takes place on this kind of theoretical level.
It takes place back here in, you know, relative safety, which is a great thing.
But it also – you're detached from the sort of brutal emotion and consequences of what these decisions actually do.
Now, in Afghanistan, when I was there, I was right on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
And it was at a time, a year ago, nobody really was paying much attention to Afghanistan.
You know, it was this – it was the Forgotten War.
In fact, the reason I went there was because this war was, you know, quote, unquote, forgotten.
Yeah, now you see Iraq War is the forgotten one.
Right, right, exactly.
No more than one war at a time in my brain, please.
Never – don't bring up Somalia, whatever you do.
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm telling you, it's amazing how – we still have 130,000 troops in Iraq.
I mean, it's amazing how that's just fallen off the radar.
And Iraqis are still dying at a fairly steady clip.
But anyway, back to sort of this idea of the consequences of war and the human cost and how that gets so detached from our policy discussions.
When I was in Afghanistan, about 75 feet away from me, a suicide bomber blew up, killing himself and also injuring a number of Afghan police officers.
And the American soldiers that day then had to go around the yard and pick up all the pieces of the suicide bomber's body.
I mean, how many times can that happen before it leaves lasting scars on these guys?
And again, what is the point of them going through this?
They're fighting and dying so Hamid Karzai's brother can protect his poppy fields.
I mean, so Hamid Karzai can get into a stronger position so he can then negotiate with the Taliban.
I mean, these are pretty serious questions.
And to see the soldiers who've lost limbs, who have serious PTSD, to meet Iraqis or Afghans who've lost family members, it really changes one's perspective.
And I think that's what gets back to the whole chicken-hawk debate.
It's that if you've never heard a shot fired in anger and you've never had to witness some of these horrors, how is it then that you can be so cavalier about sending other people to do this?
And I don't know if it's – I think it's sort of a slippery slope because I think on the one hand, one shouldn't have to experience war to have an opinion on it.
But at the same time, one would hope that if one had the misfortune to experience war, one would be much more judicious in how they would use force.
Well, and again, that's an abstract thing and it comes to shades of gray.
And somewhere in there is Jonah Goldberg who says, hey, look, I have a wife and kid and more important things to do.
And that is a chicken-hawk, right?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I think that – and look, not everybody – the argument they always make is, look, Abraham Lincoln and FDR were great war, quote-unquote, war presidents and they never really served.
That might be true.
But also we know from John F. Kennedy's writings that, in fact, it was his service in the Navy that made him distrust the Pentagon so much.
Now, we don't know would he have escalated or not in Vietnam.
That's one of the histories unknown.
What we do know is that he didn't trust the Pentagon.
He didn't trust the generals because he knew how the military sort of operated and what this kind of dynamics looked like from up close.
And not having this blind respect just because a guy has a lot of shiny medals doesn't mean he's a smart guy and doesn't mean you should trust him.
Yeah.
Well, and he certainly did come into conflict with the Pentagon over and over again while he was president.
Well, now, I talked to Malalai Joia the other day.
As I'm sure you're aware, she was the youngest member of the new Afghan parliament elected – I don't know if you want to call it a quizzling parliament or not or to what degree you can even really call it a parliament, or maybe you can.
I don't know.
But anyway, she was part of it, and they kicked her out of it because she liked to denounce warlords all the time.
And she was on this show saying, hey, look, I don't want you to make a deal with the Taliban.
I don't want you to make a deal with anybody.
What you need to do is get out and let the people of Afghanistan work out their own problems, secure their own lives first, and then liberties.
But it's none of our damn business.
Get out of my country, she said.
Right.
Well, I think it's interesting to see – when I was – in my reporting, almost every Afghan official I talked to didn't think more troops was the answer.
So yet now, all of a sudden, we're told more troops is the answer.
So I don't know what to tell you except that a lot of the Afghans that I know don't think that sending more troops is the answer.
And they don't – no one really wants to be occupied or have a foreign presence there.
But that sort of simple lesson often seems to be lost.
Yeah.
Well, tell me more about your experience in eastern Afghanistan and the shape of Afghanistan as you see it, whether – let's say that forget morality and hellfire missiles on drones and things like this, but just if we had a, say, Richard Holbrook view of morality where you can do whatever you want with people, is it actually possible that someday the West, NATO forces could build an allied state there and landlock Central Asia?
Could this possibly work out at whatever cost?
No, I don't think so.
I think that's highly unlikely.
Obviously, no one has a crystal ball.
But if you look at – there's nothing in Afghanistan's history that would make me think that sort of a nation-state is possible there.
Like I said, I just got back from Iraq, and in Iraq there was always sort of a modern society, or at least there had been.
So the sort of destruction that the war brought, there was still a significant amount of Iraqis who said, let's get back to this sort of relative stability that we knew, this sort of civilization, this sort of modern society.
There was always this modern society trying to, in many sort of ways, return after the trauma of the invasion.
But you don't have that in Afghanistan.
Look, Afghanistan was screwed up before we got there, and it's still screwed up after we got there, and it has been for a long time.
And that's not to be colonial or mean or to put down Afghanistan.
It's just it's not a country that has a long tradition of democracy or a civil society that's a robust civil society.
So there was absolutely nothing there that would convince me that, oh, if we spend a trillion dollars, which is what they're estimating, if we spend a trillion dollars and put 200,000 Americans or 300,000 Americans, that in the long run there will be anything close to resembling what we would consider a nation-state.
Because what is our goal?
Is our goal to make Afghanistan as stable as Pakistan?
I mean, that's our goal.
Well, this gets back to the Iraq War, too.
It's the same thing.
That's a big lie anyway, right?
This doesn't have anything to do with that.
That's just what they're telling us.
Which brings me to the question, what is it really about?
There are people who quite credibly say, I think, I just haven't done enough of my own homework about this, that it's really about making sure to keep the place destabilized so that Iran can't build a pipeline to China through there.
That's the same reason they want to stir up the Turkic Uyghurs in western China, to keep this is all about a great game, not about stealing the oil at cheap prices for Americans, but about controlling the oil, controlling the oil flows out of the Caspian Basin, that kind of thing.
Do you have an opinion about this?
I mean, I think it's kind of funny in a way that people still wonder, what is it even about?
We kind of know it's silly, don't we, when we talk about, oh, we're there to modernize them and save them and whatever.
No, it's true, and that's the problem with the humanitarian argument whenever it gets used in a place for Afghanistan or Iraq, is that you know it's never really about humanitarian reasons, and the humanitarian argument just sort of sucks in the kind of liberal, interventionist U.N. crowd to go along with whatever idea.
Yeah, well said.
Yeah, but I think exactly, is it about, is Iraq about oil?
Yes and no.
Obviously the only reason we really care about the Middle East is because when they use this word strategic interest, it's because oil is there.
Is Afghanistan about energy interest?
You'll find pundits who will say that, and I think that you can make a case that there is a sort of great game going on, and being able to run a pipeline through Afghanistan will help X, Y, and Z's country for whatever financial reasons.
But I think it's all often, it's many reasons.
Energy is always one of them.
I don't, look, the reason we went to Afghanistan was because of September 11th, and it was a way to, it was really, I think that's a pretty fair, and indisputable claim, is we went there to get Osama Bin Laden.
And the reason we went into Iraq, I think as well, was also in a sort of revenge capacity to make an example of Iraq to the Arab world.
Now, there's all sorts of other reasons that happened to sort of act, and it's sort of a synergy of dumb ideas, you could say, that got us to these places.
But certainly, you know, there's very credible journalists who've made the case about Western interest in Afghanistan and running a pipeline through Afghanistan.
But I think those can't be discounted.
I don't think they're the driving motive.
I really think folks like General McChrystal, they're not really, you know, energy interests, that's not what they're thinking when they're running their counter-insurgency program.
Well, yeah, you know, Gareth Porter says that the Pentagon itself, those generals and their new bases, that is a major incentive itself, that just, hey, I got a base in Tajikistan, I'm never giving it up.
This is my spot.
I'm in charge.
Big fish, small pond, you know.
Well, it's, you know, retired Colonel Douglas McGregor, who's a very provocative thinker, makes this point that the military's learned, the Army in particular, they know how to do these counter-insurgency campaigns.
And for them, they're sort of low risk, and they know eventually, if they spend enough life and money, they'll have some sort of result that they can claim as, you know, a victory.
So, yeah, sure, you know, you get your base, you get your command.
You know, you're fighting sort of enemies that you're always going to have sort of an overwhelming, you know, advantage of.
They're not, you know, this is not the Russian Army that you're fighting.
So there's an incentive to, it's a big army.
It's an incentive to keep doing what you're doing.
And in this case, once sort of the whole counter-insurgency doctrine has taken hold, you know, around 2005, 2006 in Iraq, but now it's being carried over into Afghanistan, I think there's the sort of status quo gains momentum, in a way.
And they know how to do it.
They're going to continue to do it.
And they're not going to change their sort of strategic thinking that quickly.
Right.
Well, I think it's sort of a news story itself that we're still left to speculate about this after all these years, that it's still sort of debatable about who all's interest is in it anyway.
I mean, I guess Northrop Grumman probably has lobbyists, and they like selling weapons and so, but what percentage of the responsibility belongs to them or something, who even knows?
Well, you know, you're an expert on this, for real, and have been there.
And I talk to people as credentialed as yourself every day on this show, and still everybody's got their own kind of opinion, and some people lean toward Pepe Escobar's theory, and some people lean toward Gareth Porter's explanation, and however you like to characterize them.
That's my shorthand, obviously.
But, you know, nobody even knows.
I asked Greg Palast the other day, who's a great investigative reporter, and, of course, his whole specialty is oil men and what they think and what they're up to.
And I asked him, and he said, well, it's not because the Taliban did 9-11.
I can tell you that, because they didn't.
Well, I think part of the problem with both, you know, this especially comes through with Iraq, and sort of somewhat with Afghanistan, is that there was never a clear idea.
The clear idea behind both these things, allegedly, is, oh, we have to go after the terrorists.
But you look at that idea, and that certainly doesn't really make sense with Iraq.
And in Afghanistan, it makes sense to a limited degree.
Yeah, okay, if the Taliban are harboring al-Qaeda, then you go after them and try to get them when they're there.
You know, some are going to escape, you kill some, whatever.
So that makes sense.
But once you step past that point of that limited objective of killing terrorists X, Y, and Z in Iraq or Afghanistan, then what are you really there for?
And so I think there's a reason why everyone has a different answer.
And I think that, from the top, in the Bush administration, there was never a credible, clear picture of what our long-term interests and goals were in these countries.
And because of that sort of hazy, you know, original idea, sort of an intellectually lazy idea, or at least sort of an intellectually unsound idea, that you can project all these different things.
But, like, look at Iraq.
You know, the first oil contracts are going out right now, and guess what?
American companies aren't getting them.
You know, British Petroleum, Chinese companies.
So if the Iraq War was about oil, well, then that was another mistake we made, because, look, we didn't get it.
Well, and it's because the origin of this policy is a massive convergence of different interests.
And so you can focus on whichever part of it you want.
I mean, ultimately, they're Likudniks who want, eventually, for America to be forced, quote-unquote, to cease Pakistani nuclear weapons, because they think that's the greatest threat, or maybe get into a conflict with Iran.
And then, of course, there are Navy admirals who want their boats to sail over there off the eastern coast of Africa all day.
And there are radio show hosts who love selling Islamofascism and mattresses to their audiences and making millions of dollars.
And it's, you know, you can blame whoever you like when it's that many different people from all over the place who have their own interests in seeking out the same terrible policies.
Sure, you know, or you look at, you know, politicians who've used, you know, the war and 9-11 to their great advantage over the last eight years.
But as you said, that's exactly it.
It's this convergence of multiple interests that go into making these policies.
And fortunately, one could argue that the interests of, actually, the American people are often the ones that get left out.
Well, and I think this goes along with what you said about the American companies are not getting the oil contracts.
Patrick Coburn, who I always consider to be the most intelligent, most informed, most experienced Western journalist who, you know, speaks in language that I can quite easily comprehend, you know, I consider him to be the expert's expert on the real what's going on in Iraq.
And if I can attempt to summarize this narrative correctly, I believe what he says is that Nouri al-Maliki has worked himself into this position.
He got to be America's puppet by promising Bush certain things and what have you.
But that when it came to the spring of 2008 and the empire's demand that they get 58 permanent bases, Maliki found that in order to get the power he got, he had to make a deal with Muqtada al-Sadr and with also, I guess, former Ba'athist and so-called Awakening Council Sunni religious leaders and so forth, who were all very nationalist and very anti-occupation, unlike the Dawa party has been, Maliki's party.
But that he had to make alliances with them in order to stay in power.
And that ultimately, at the end of the day, Iraq is Iraq and America is America.
And he had to choose to basically stick it to Bush.
And he stuck by his guns and he refused to negotiate 58 permanent bases.
And he negotiated a status of forces agreement that Patrick Coburn says, actually, ultimately, we're going to find is the law.
And that Bush lost.
America did lose.
And we will be leaving by the end of 2011 because Maliki and his government can be the government if they stick with the policy of kicking our asses out.
But they cannot be the government if they back down on that.
And America won't be able to protect them anymore if they back down on that by then.
So I wonder.
And then, in fact, let me say I just talked with Dalia Wasfy and she seemed to think that, no, you know, the government of the green zone is the government of the green zone.
Because they're completely the quizlings, the Vichy puppet dictatorship under the Americans.
And that without the Americans, they would be out of power completely.
And that the sofa is nothing but full of Swiss cheese.
And it ain't the law at all.
And the troops will be there forever.
And Maliki's in on it.
And the whole puppet parliament's in on it.
And she was, she's a half Iraqi lady and has a very interesting perspective.
But that was the way she looked at it.
So now that was my long, giant setup to the question of how you interpret these different factors in play and what you think I should understand about it.
From my reporting, it matches up close to what Patrick Coburn is saying.
I think for whatever one's opinion on the war, Maliki now runs what could, it's a real government.
It's a, how legitimate it is depends on, you know, what side of the line you fall on.
But Maliki, Maliki's sort of genius is the wrong word.
But he got the equation.
He figured out the political equation.
And in the end, he has consolidated power.
He has now a power base.
He has sort of a military arm.
I mean, he's in control of a pretty massive army.
So I would say that, yes, I think definitely Maliki won.
You know, Maliki won the war.
One could argue that a lot of Iraqis won the war.
But is it a win for America?
I think that's a stretch.
Very good.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show and especially staying over with me to help answer those extra questions about Iraq.
And people can find you regularly at True Slant.
That's Matt Taibbi's blog, right?
Yeah.
He's on there as well as a bunch of other journalists.
So definitely check it out if you have a chance.
Okay.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
Thank you.
Everybody, Michael Hastings from GQ Magazine.