03/31/08 – Michael Schwartz – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, so welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos, Radio 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest today is Michael Schwartz.
He's a professor of sociology at SUNY, and he's written for Tom Dispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, Z-Net, Against the Current Context, ISR, and Socialist Workers Magazine.
He's the author of Radical Politics and Social Structure, and The Power Structure of American Business.
I often read what he writes for Tom Dispatch, Tom Englehart's articles, which all run at antiwar.com slash Englehart.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
I'm very happy to be here.
Well, I'm glad I have the opportunity to talk with you about this last article that you wrote for Tom Dispatch, How to Disintegrate a City, and this was written before the recent outbreak of violence between warring Shiite factions, and it's basically a review of American policy in our government's various attempts to what they call pacify Baghdad since occupying this country in 2003, and the different tactics and strategies that have taken place, and the consequences of them, in terms especially of the ethnic war, or really religious war, between Sunni and Shiite Arabs.
So I guess I'd just like to ask you, I guess where do you think it really starts?
You said that at the time of the invasion, approximately half of the neighborhoods in Baghdad had a religious, you know, sect character to them, and the other half were basically all just mixed up.
When did this really start to change?
Well, you know, it was built up during the period of the U.S. occupation, and, you know, maybe, you know, these kinds of analogies don't work very well when you get down to details, but one way to think about this is Catholics and Protestants in the United States, I mean, you know, there's historic differences, and there's historic behavioral differences in their neighborhoods that were mainly Catholic in the United States, and lots of mixed neighborhoods also, right?
And this is the way it was between Shia and Sunni in Iraq.
Of course, they had the third component, the Kurds, who really were sort of geographically separated up in the north.
So you had a kind of mixture, and there was a huge amount of intermarriage, and one of the most tragic parts of reading accounts of what's going on there now is these families that are, you know, heavily intermarried, and then they can't live in either area because of the way sectarianism has developed, right?
And what's happened is that in the course of the occupation, the United States has triggered, exacerbated, amplified, exploited all sorts of different ways that the United States has sort of made these divisions really important.
You know, one of the things that a lot of accounts point to is the simple way that they organized the election, in which the elections were bound to end up having a sectarian character, because there would be these long lists of national elections, instead of having, you know, constituencies, they actually had these national elections, and these long lists all had a sectarian character to them, so then the government was going to have a sectarian character to it, and on down the road.
But what we see, for example, in Baghdad, the real trigger for these ethnic divisions in Baghdad began with the Battle of Fallujah, ironically, which Fallujah is virtually a 100% Sunni city outside of Baghdad, but it produced somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 refugees.
The Battle of Fallujah, because the United States wiped out the city, and even though most people did return, many tens of thousands of people didn't return.
Most of the people who didn't return went to Baghdad, and what happened was that they were crowding into various neighborhoods, and because of the way in which the Fallujah war was fought, there was a lot of sectarian division around the Fallujah battle, because the United States had recruited Shia troops to fight in Fallujah, so the Sunnis saw the Shias joining with the United States to destroy their city, so there was a huge amount of bitterness derived from that.
And over a period of time, it turned into an effort by local Sunni militias in Baghdad to displace Shia, so that the refugees could be moved into them.
So there was a very kind of systematic, you know, okay, you did this to us, so we're going to do that to you kind of logic that was being applied, not by everybody, but by a substantial enough number of people who were angry and bitter, so that this set in motion this kind of sense of ethnic displacement as a way of expressing this anger, and as a way of resolving this problem.
As the United States went through Anbar province, attacking one city after another, attempting to pacify it, it created a flood of refugees, more and more Sunni refugees, and that in turn created this dynamic of ethnic displacement within Baghdad.
Then, with the bombing of the Golden Dome, which is one of the most precious and important of the Shia religious sites, the Shia began retaliating against what they saw were these sectarian attacks, not just the Golden Dome, but also all this ethnic displacement.
And so then those mixed neighborhoods really kind of turned into ethnic battlegrounds.
Mostly it's interesting that, you know, from the Shia side of things, it wasn't so much the Shia in those neighborhoods who wanted to expel the Sunni, but the various militias coming in from other parts of Baghdad, and saying, well, now, in order to protect ourselves from further displacement, we're going to have to do the reverse, and we'll drive out the Shia, and we'll drive out the Sunnis.
Now, because they could enlist, the Shia could basically enlist the United States as part of the effort, through a whole set of circumstances.
So they had the United States military on their side, to a very considerable degree.
So the Shia won that battle, and now most of Baghdad is Shia, about 75-25, and of the 200 or so neighborhoods that were mixed neighborhoods, maybe 25 or 30 of them are still mixed, and all the rest have been homogenized one way or the other, depending on who got there the firstest with the mostest.
The Sunnis have been basically driven to the west and the south, and so the Sunni neighborhoods that still exist are in one corner, kind of, of Baghdad, and Baghdad is really basically a Shia city now.
And then, because there's just so much anger and bitterness, and besides that, there's still, in each of these neighborhoods, there's a powerful, powerful militia that has won, right?
Either a Shia or a Sunni won, right?
What the U.S. has done in the meantime is build these huge concrete walls around the neighborhood that created a kind of a sort of feudal-like war of the all against the all in which people can't even move around the city very well because they have to go into hostile neighborhoods and through numerous, numerous checkpoints.
So on top of it all, the entire possibility of an integrated economy in the city has been eliminated by this process, and we now have these embattled little places that are sinking slowly into economic and social disaster, you know, because the sewage system is dead, the electrical system is dead.
It's not as though they're making progress and it's slow, it's that they're making regress and it's quite quick, so that people's conditions are constantly degrading, and I think that what we see that right now, and the moment that the fighting started in Basra, there was this kind of explosion of fighting in Baghdad also because people are very, very angry and they're waiting for something to happen and the something that's going to happen apparently is going to be more fighting.
So I think this low in the fighting may be over soon or maybe already over now.
Now you make the point in the article that when they launched Operation Together Forward and basically targeting the different militias, that this destroyed the security in the neighborhoods that they controlled and then opened them up to attacks in ways that they had never been.
Yeah, because while there was a lot of violence, I mean, in 2006, starting in early 2006, there was a huge amount of violence in Baghdad, but it was basically located in these mixed neighborhoods, because the unmixed neighborhoods were defended very well by the local militias.
I mean, for example, the Mahdi's army in Sadr City had managed to prevent any car bomb from going off in that area for two years.
There hadn't been any car bombs because they just had it so locked down that any car bomber who came in was immediately recognized as a stranger and they just stayed away from it.
And then there were Sunni areas, much the same, very well organized by their local militias, and so the death squads that were the usual vehicle through which the Shia worked would have a lot of trouble getting in there because the death squads usually made their move as local police personnel, and the Sunni militias would just not let any police people into their neighborhoods, so that they were really, the homogeneous neighborhoods were really invulnerable.
But when the U.S. decides, and in most cases during Operation Together Forward and even during the surge, the U.S. decided to uproot Sunni militias, so they would go into a Sunni neighborhood that had been pretty well locked down by the insurgents, and they'd drive the insurgents either underground or out, or there would be a big battle in which they would have to fight their way street by street, but then they would drive the insurgents either underground or out, and what would follow along with them are Shia military personnel, who also have organized within them these death squads, and these guys would go around and start expelling the Sunnis from the neighborhood.
So one of the cases I write about is Haifa Street, which was a Sunni stronghold, and is now mainly, many parts of the Haifa Street area are now homogeneously Shia as a result of an American attack that took out the Sunni militias, left the area vulnerable, and then the Shia moved in and knocked them out, knocked all the residents out.
So those residents have now become part of this huge refugee flood that has reached, either has reached or is going to reach very quickly about 5 million refugees inside and outside the country, so these displacements create this tremendous problem with homelessness and refugees.
Well, you know, it doesn't get much press, but there's been a little bit here and there about the Shia Arabs who've been cleansed from predominantly Sunni areas like Anbar Province and so forth as well, and giant parades of refugees arriving in Sadr City.
Right.
Well, the first set of, you know, the first set of Shia refugees were produced in Baghdad themselves by this early ethnic dislocations that were triggered by Fallujah, you know, and so at first, the main Baghdad refugees that you saw were Shia who were either going to Sadr City or moving south back towards their ancestral homelands, because, you know, the Baghdad Shia community is relatively recent, last 40 or 50 years, so a lot of people say went back down to Karbala or even to Basra where their families were.
So you got this first wave of Shia displaced refugees, right, you know, in late 2004 all through 2005, it's mainly Shia that are being produced.
Then when you start having the battles over these communities, you get Sunni refugees, and they become more and more and more in a larger and larger proportion of the Baghdad refugees.
But in the meantime, the small minorities of Shia in the Anbar Province towns, which are a vast, overwhelming majority are Sunni, in those towns they start attacking the Shia there, and so you get Shia refugees coming out of Anbar Province and going either to Baghdad to the Shia areas or to the south.
So the thing multiplies itself, right, and it's not, it isn't as though the only place where you find refugees is where the United States has sort of stimulated it, right, it's taken on this tremendous life of its own.
Well now, is all of this just complete incompetence?
I mean, believe me, I can see a bunch of generals saying, yeah, you know, we'll send our Marines into Fallujah and we'll kick butt and we'll break the back of the insurgency and there won't be any consequences from it.
I mean, believe me, I can see that.
On the other hand, you know, Richard Haass and the guys at the Council on Foreign Relations came up with a plan years ago that said let's divide Iraq in thirds.
You know, keep them from fighting, and I guess, you know, the major question is who gets Baghdad, and the policy seems to have been let the Shia take Baghdad.
Well, you know, I think that you would have gotten an insurgency with that policy also, because most, except for the Kurds, who are divided, but I think the majority of Kurds would like to be an independent country, you know.
The public opinion in Iraq, on both the Shia and the Sunni side, are that they don't want these, they don't want separate countries.
Right, it's only, it's only Abdulaziz al-Hakim from the Supreme Islamic Council who says he wants a very strong federal system.
Everybody else is a nationalist, it seems like.
Yeah, so if the United States tried to make that division, there would be a tremendous opposition to that, and they would still have to go conquer these centers of opposition, and you'd still have a war, you know.
You know, the U.S. plan, the fundaments of the U.S. plan are that we're going to go into this country and revolutionize it, right?
And all the different plans that, the alternate plans, they all include that element, right?
We're going to change the economy completely, we've got this bullshit socialist economy, and we're going to come in here and privatize everything, and we're going to change the way the oil is extracted, we're going to bring in the international companies and extract the oil that way.
We're going to revise the politics of the country, you know, for example, the very open policy of the neocons was that they were going to reside the power of the government in the Shia, and a particular element in the Shia, they wanted a Shia government that was also anti-Iranian, right?
It is a very hard sort of political middle ground to find in Iraq.
Well, and if they really wanted to do that, they'd have to side with Saudi Arabia and say, he's so strong, he doesn't need us.
So they back the Iranians instead.
And he's a nationalist, and he opposes the entire American economic plan for Iraq, right?
So the whole thing is that we're going to go in there and we're going to try to do something that is not spontaneously anybody in Iraq would do, so we're going to have to revolutionize this government, we're going to have to force this economic change, we're going to have to force this political change, so the whole thing has as its fundamental quality that the United States is going to go in there and revolutionize this society against its will.
As soon as you have a policy like that, even if you disagree about the details of it, you're asking for a war, you're asking for every kind of resistance these people can put up, and so they have put up pretty much any resistance they could think of putting up.
Well, we just need to send Karen Hughes over there to explain to them that it's their best interest that we're looking out for.
And once they understand, see, they just don't understand how good America is, they just need to explain to them better, is all.
Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a tendency, and especially located in the Democratic Party, actually, right, that seems to have that attitude, which is that if only the Iraqis didn't have this misunderstanding of what we're up to, right, caused by the incompetence of the Bush administration, you know, you put that in, that they would, you know, happily accept what the United States is trying to do.
I think, though, that those people who take this position are the ones that don't have an understanding of what the U.S. is trying to do, and the Iraqis, in a sense, do.
I mean, for example, you know, in Iraq, their oil resource is like a precious national resource.
They don't just see it as just something that they buy or sell.
They see this as something really, really important, and they're wholeheartedly committed to having a government that makes the fundamental decisions about the disposition of that oil, and that that oil be used as a sort of sacred trust to build up the country, right?
And the plan that the U.S. constantly puts forward and is resisted at every level, all the way up to the Minister of Oil, is one in which it says, you know, you don't want the government of the country to have control over oil production decisions.
You want these big multinational firms that are highly efficient and can really get that oil out of there, and then they'll share the profits.
That's the American proposal.
That's one of the benchmarks.
You have to have this thing that's going to bring...
I was just reading in the Wall Street Journal, they have wonderful language, they say, the United States is pressing the Iraqis to have an oil-developed plan that will utilize and exploit the efficiency that only multinational oil corporations can bring to the project, right?
The efficient exploitation of their oil, right?
Well, you know what?
Let me ask you about this, because Greg Palast has made the case that the neocons wanted to just... it was Elliott Cohen and the guys at the Heritage Foundation, I think, that came up with a plan where, we'll just privatize every last little bit of Iraq's oil, and in as small of parcels as possible, and we don't even care who gets to do it.
We'll invite in European companies, Russians, whoever, just to drop the price of oil down to ten bucks, bankrupt the Saudis, and put America slash Iraq at the head of OPEC, that kind of thing.
Whereas then, James Baker, he says, and the actual oil men and oil lawyers and the guys in Houston said, no, our policy is to keep that oil off the market.
Our policy is to keep those prices artificially high, and keep our friends the Saudis driving OPEC policy, because they do what Houston wants.
Well, I'm sure that you can find people who express both of those points of view, but you know, we know enough from the Cheney Energy Task Force in 2001, enough of what they did leaked out, and they did publish a set of proposals, which are very, very clear on what those guys decided we should be doing.
And I think that gives us a window into what the larger logic of the policy is.
And it's neither of those.
It basically was summarized by Greenspan when he was asked to explain what he meant when he said that the war was about oil.
He said, well, you know, we can't have a guy like Saddam Hussein have control over sufficient amounts of oil production that he can choke off production and cause a crisis and a recession.
We can't have somebody like him doing that.
We have to be able to assure ourselves that if we need an increase in production, it will exist and any decrease somewhere else will be offset by those who have increased capacity.
And what happened in the 1990s is they discovered that the Saudis were no longer able to cover all shortages or were no longer willing to cover all shortages.
And then what the Cheney Commission decided was that the solution to this problem in general is basically twofold.
One of them is that there should be a tremendous increase in production in the Middle East, a doubling of Middle East production, which they believed, based on their understanding of what the reserves looked like, was possible by a tremendous investment that would develop the undeveloped oil fields and a tremendous investment that would allow them to pump the oil out of the existing fields at a much rapider rate.
OK, so you needed that.
And secondly, what you needed was you needed to take control over the amount of oil produced away from these governments, which had shown themselves to be very nationalist, at least on that point, that the Saudi government included was now saying, no, we're not going to increase the rate at which we suck the oil out of our land, because we don't have a percentage in doing that.
Why do we want more money when all we can do with the money that we've got so far, they're certainly not going to use it on social welfare in their own country, is to invest it in an American economy that we don't have faith in.
We should leave the oil in the ground, let the price of oil go up in a nice, steady way.
We'll get more money out of it than pumping it all at once right now.
And if you guys are having a problem, you need more oil, the U.S. and China, for example, if you guys need a lot more oil, then you're going to have to pay us a pretty penny to do this, and you're going to have to politically acknowledge the power we can wield by deciding not to do that, and make all sorts of confessions.
And the Cheney Commission's answer to this was, well, we're the preeminent, we're the unipolar power in the world, and what we can do is, is we can use that military power to offset this economic leverage that is now developing, and we will force them to double their oil production.
And the linchpin of this is to go after Iraq, which has a leader who is our adversary, and therefore likely to wield this kind of power most considerably.
Secondly, they have the largest untapped reserves in the world, because it's 25 years now that they haven't been looking for oil there.
And they also have the most decrepit production system, which means that it's easiest to multiply production there much more quickly, and once we get control of that oil system, we'll use that control to put pressure on everybody else.
This is basically, you know, I'm telling you things that have been published in places like the New Yorker, in the report of the Cheney Commission, you know.
Now the fact that they had a combined military-economic strategy is what makes this so extraordinary, and this was all developed before 9-11.
The whole idea of a military program to overthrow Saddam so that we could open up the Iraqi oil production, and create a power center for the United States to pressure the rest of the Middle East, you know, originates in the 1990s, and was actually contained in a letter from the, you know, these conservatives, these neoconservatives, wrote to President Clinton, and told him he should knock off Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, they passed the Iraq Liberation Act.
Yeah, right.
And then they passed that law.
Well, so wait a minute, though.
How's it working out?
Is that what's going on here, is that they're getting what they want?
Well, they didn't get what they wanted, because they didn't take into account the fact that the Iraqi people were not going to accept it.
You know, that's essentially what happened, that they came in, and they can't increase production.
In fact, production dropped by 40 percent, rather than increasing, right?
And they've been unable to pacify the country, and get it to accept this very dramatic economic transformation.
I mean, they shut down 192 government-owned factories, and induced a major depression in Iraq the day that Bremer took office.
That was his first wave of laws, was a complete transformation of the Iraqi economy.
Well, and all they did was, they quote-unquote privatized all the government-owned property, and just basically liquidated it, and left the husks, and just took the money and ran.
Well, yeah, well, they took whatever money was in the bank and ran.
But they also created somewhere between 30 and 70 percent unemployment in the various cities of Iraq, which is probably more than any other single thing the reason for the insurgency itself.
You know, because people began protesting the fact that they had no lives, you know, had no economic sustenance, and those protests were treated as a military challenge to the United States rule.
And that's when, you know, all these rules of engagement that we hear about, let's say at the Winter Soldier, are all developed to say, okay, well, we're going to really put the iron fist on these, any protest, you know, we can't let this, you know, going into people's homes and looking for suspected insurgents and so on, right?
And that, instead of suppressing the insurgency, multiplied the insurgency.
So pretty soon, you had this tremendous fight, right?
But the underlying thing about the tremendous fight has been all along is that people were, you know, as soon as the fighting stops, you hear this, like in Anbar province, right, there's no fighting anymore, because of this whole thing with the Anbar Awakening.
But then the next thing you know is that all these same insurgents who used to be fighting the U.S. and now are enforcing the law in their own communities are saying, well, where's our sewage system?
Where's our electrical system?
Where are the jobs that disappeared with this war?
We want them now.
You know, so they get a new round of protest, right, because the U.S. has gone in there and just wrecked the economy.
So the protest is still there.
The anger is still there.
And, you know, unless something is done, it will then become violent again.
Well, the excuse for staying now is that the civil war will break back out full scale.
We have the battles going on between Shiite factions, but we have the Sunnis who've been almost entirely cleansed from Baghdad, except for just a couple of places.
And they're not going to put up with that.
They're going to want to take Baghdad back.
There's another war going.
And right now, at least in the common narrative, it's George Bush slash John McCain standing between them and keeping the bloodbath at bay somehow.
That's our excuse for staying.
So what's the next step?
Well, I think that, you know, that always represented by an image of the American soldiers that is not accurate.
I mean, it's not that the soldiers are bad hearted or anything.
It's just that what they get ordered to do is not to stand between the opposing factions.
They get ordered to do military operations that support one or another of the factions, which is one reason why I wrote that Battle of Baghdad article, right?
With the American soldiers go into a Sunni neighborhood, all they're really doing in the end is supporting the Shia in that battle.
In fact, they're creating that battle.
The stability that existed before, it may have been an uncomfortable and angry one, but at least it existed that there were no Shia invasions of the Sunni areas and vice versa.
And the reason is, is that they could deter each other.
And in Basra, the reason there's a battle in Basra, if you read the articles all the way through, even the New York Times or the Washington Post, you know, let alone, let's say the British, the British papers, it's very clear what's happening in Basra is that the bodies are on the, is winning and they're winning peacefully.
They're just organizing more and more and more of the neighborhood.
Yeah.
And actually Sauder was calling for just civil disobedience and for people to come out and protest and that kind of thing.
Right.
So, you know, Basra is the most important city in the country outside of Baghdad because at this moment, a hundred percent of all the oil goes through Basra, right?
And so pretty soon what you were going to have when the October elections arrived, what you were going to have was that Basra would be organized by the body's army, a nationalist group that wants to expel the United States from the country altogether, that advocates friendly relationships with Iran, advocates nationalization of the oil and the use of the oil, you know, as a, as an instrument of international politics, right?
All the things the United States doesn't want for Iraq to do and invaded in order to prevent it.
Right.
Okay.
And they would control the port.
They would control the Basra port.
The barters are their, are their enemy, right?
The barters have the national government on their side.
So now the national government decides, well, what we're going to do is if we let this go on peacefully, they will take over the city.
So we have to stop it.
So we're going to violently stop them from doing it.
Now the barters are not doing anything without the United States approval.
As a matter of fact, the New York times article yesterday, you know, I've forgotten who the reporter was, but it was a good reporter dug into this and said, well, you know, got statements from us officials say, oh yeah, we've known about this attack for a long time.
We're in on the planning.
We're doing all the logistics.
We're doing the air support.
We've got people at the front lines of this battle calling in the air, the air attacks when they're needed.
Right.
The United States is completely behind this operation and, you know, Garrett Porter on Friday speculated that Cheney arranged it during his recent visit.
Yeah.
Right.
For example, it might well have been that what we know Cheney did do is urge them to clean up the bodies, right?
We know he urged them to clean up the body, do something besides whether this was a specific thing he told them to do.
We might not find out, but the point of it is that that operation cannot exist without the United States military deciding that it should happen and providing the Iraqi military with all the things that they don't have themselves like the artillery, like the air power, like the forward control, like the command system.
The command system is an American command system.
The planning system is an American planning system.
That fight would not occur if the United States was not there.
The Mahdi's would run that city.
That's what would happen.
Right.
So the idea that we're standing between these fights is wrong.
We're the ones that are facilitating the fights at every point.
Without us there, the war, these differences would get settled.
They might not get settled in a very good way, especially as far as they've come now.
I mean, whether the Shia could go back into Anbar province, I don't know.
I'm not sure many Shia would even want to risk it.
Whether the Sunni could get back these mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad that they've lost, I'm pretty certain that that's not going to happen anymore.
That's history now.
But going forward, would they continue to fight?
Probably the first thing for sure would be that there would be a dramatic drop in the amount of fighting, because so much of the fighting is just plain ordinary part of what the Americans are bringing with them.
And since it's still, even in this moment in time, 60% of all the battles in Iraq are between American troops and somebody else, Shia or Sunni militias, right?
Those 60% of the battles would disappear right away.
Well, and do you think that the Baader Corps would stand a chance if America withdrew?
They just have to go back to Iran, huh?
I think the Baaders, they've suffered from two handicaps that I think are irredeemable.
One of them is that they never really did the kind of local organizing that the Mahdi's did.
So that groups like the Mahdi's or Fadila, which is strong also in Basra, and other local groups are much more popular with the people than the Baaders ever were.
Well, and they're supposed to have some local elections coming up pretty soon, too.
Yeah.
And it's clear every informed source says that the Baaders are just going to lose everything in those elections.
That's one problem they have.
The other problem they have is they're associated with the Iraqi national government, which is absolutely detested all around the country, not just in the Sunni areas, but in the Shia areas.
I mean, in Basra, the people hate the national government because they're having a war with the national government over electricity.
They're having a war with the national government over reconstruction funds for their sewage system.
They're having a war with the national government over the disposition of the oil, right?
Local people hate the national government, right?
They see it as just an instrument of American occupation, and the Baaders are associated with them.
So it's very hard for them to have a base among ordinary people in the country.
And any time there was any way for people to express that, and that doesn't just mean elections, it means, for example, in this battle that's going on in Basra, nobody is on the side of this invading army that's coming in to, you know, quote, re-establish control of the government.
There's a lot of people who don't like the Mahdis, but they all hate the Baaders.
Well, and a lot of the Baader guys, the lower-level guys, were just taking off their police uniforms and going switching sides over to the Mahdi army where all their friends were.
Right.
Well, they've had a, there's a great video, I guess The Guardian had it the other day in which they actually reported on the number of people in Baghdad who are members of the Iraqi army who have not only gone over to the, they actually sort of symbolically delivered their weapons to the Mahdis, you know, and said, we'll give you the weapons in exchange for a Koran.
We're going to be peaceful now.
So, in some big public ceremony that the Mahdis organized, yeah, well, the military, the military is a mercenary military.
Why do you think Sauder called off, they had six days of fighting and now Sauder's called for a truce?
Well, the New York Times coverage today says that there were three days of intense negotiations between representatives of the government and the Mahdis over this truce, and I'm waiting to see more coverage and hoping that maybe Patrick Colburn goes down there and finds out the truth, because he often is willing to dig deep enough to find it out, but it sounds like that this is basically, the deal is that they'll call off this offensive, and what the Mahdis have done during this offensive is extend their control in Basra to new neighborhoods.
So they've actually won the sort of battle of Basra, and that this is being presented in such a way that it looks like it's the Mahdis that are doing a unilateral ceasefire, but in fact what it is, is it's the withdrawal of the Iraqi national troops.
And then they get to consolidate their gains to the Saudis, too.
Without having to endure a full-scale American assault, either from the air or the ground, I don't think the Americans would do a ground assault, they don't have the troops, but they could really wreck a large part of the city with an air assault.
And so I think that this is a way for the Saudis to get a victory and not have to sacrifice too much of the city.
Yeah.
All right, so the article is How to Disintegrate a City, by Michael Schwartz and Tom Englehart.
You can find it at antiwar.com slash Englehart.
It's just a few articles ago.
And I really appreciate the way this is written in kind of reminding us, taking us back through step-by-step how we got to where we are.
And I know your new book, I haven't read it yet or gotten a hold of it yet, but the new book is War Without End, The Iraq War in Context.
So is this the kind of context that if I read your book it's a lot like this?
Well, the book is not yet out, but the war, that's the penultimate chapter of the book is that Battle of Baghdad chapter.
So yeah, the book is about all the stuff we've been talking about.
It's an attempt to really get at the underlying dynamics of the war and what the U.S. is not on the ground so much, but in Washington is trying to accomplish.
Because clearly what happens is that every time they try to execute one of these things, it goes wildly bad.
And the unfortunate part of it is that as evil-hearted as this policy is, when it goes wildly bad, it doesn't turn out good for the Iraqis or for the Americans.
It turns out even worse than what they were trying to do.
So we're talking now about, I think, it's a safe bet that over a million Iraqis have died in this war, and five million are rendered homeless.
Well, I'll tell you, I don't think the five million homeless is in dispute.
About half of those have been able to make it to Jordan or Syria.
And in terms of the million dead, I did an interview with Alan Hyde from Opinion Business Research in Great Britain, and he sure seemed credible to me.
Yeah, well, and it's not just his research, right?
But it's also the two Lancet articles by the Columbia, Hopkins, and Iraqi academics that report that.
Right.
They had 655,000 back in 2006.
Right.
So, but, you know, there has been at least one article with a degree of credibility that suggested it's only 250,000.
But of course, if it was 250,000, it would still be mind-bogglingly horrible, you know.
And for nothing.
And for not even accomplishing Dick Cheney and his energy task forces or Israel's goals or anybody else's, really.
Just destruction and creating the possibility for even more and more destruction.
Well, at least the Iranians benefited, I'm sure.
I'm sure Ahmad Chalabi got a raise from the Iranian spy service.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm sure that Ahmadinejad has sent Bush several, you know, several thank you notes.
Right.
All right, everybody.
That's Michael Schwartz.
He's a professor of sociology at the State University of New York.
He writes for Time Dispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, Zenet, Against the Current Context, International Socialist Review, and Socialist Workers Magazine.
He's the author of the books Radical Politics and Social Structure and the Power Structure of American Business.
His new one coming out soon is War Without End, The Iraq War in Context.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Oh, thank you for having me.