07/21/09 – Raed Jarrar – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Red Jarrar, he's the author of the great blog Red in the Middle.
You can find it at redinthemiddle.blogspot.com.
He is a RAC consultant to the American Friends Service Committee, that's the famous Quaker peace group.
Welcome to the show, sir, how are you doing?
I'm fine, thanks a lot for having me.
Oh, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I'm also very interested in what's been going on in Iraq, especially because I've been as out of touch with the news as I could possibly be, or trying to be as far away from the news as I could for the last couple of weeks, so I was wondering if you could really kind of, you know, just take us through, give us an update about the current situation in Iraq.
And I guess we'll start with the question, what do you think about the December 31, 2011 withdrawal date?
Is that thing written in stone?
And is this occupation actually going to come to an end, even if it's two and a half years from now?
There have been some serious steps towards that direction, so some good steps towards making sure that the last U.S. soldier will be out of Iraq before the end of 2011, and the last U.S. military base is shut down and handed over to the Iraqi side before the end of 2011 as well.
Now the date is not written in stone because there is a possibility that it might become earlier.
I think the date is the worst case scenario so far.
It's the longest and the farthest date that we should anticipate.
But in case the Iraqi referendum took place within the next few months and the Iraqis voted no on the agreement, there is a big possibility that the date might be shifted to earlier, maybe earlier 2011 rather than later 2011.
Now the agreement lacks guarantees, unfortunately.
It has not been submitted to the Senate for ratification so far.
So there are some concerns with the guarantees that the agreement will be implemented in the right time, and that because of the lack of congressional oversight and because of some other smaller problems.
But I think many groups, including my group, the American Front Service Committee, have been pushing for more congressional oversight.
So we managed, for example, with the help of many congressional leaders, to insert some good language in the defense authorization bill that passed the House earlier in the month, requiring more congressional oversight over the agreement.
And we hope that this language will be added in the Senate version as well, or at least agreed upon in the conference.
So there are some good steps towards ensuring that the agreement will be implemented.
And as we saw, the first major step in the agreement, which is the withdrawal from cities and towns and villages, was implemented within the limitations of the agreement.
It was implemented in a correct way before the deadline agreed upon, which is June 30th of this year.
Well, and it's also seemed that in the news there's been some pushback and some frustration expressed by the American generals, I guess, running the thing over there that, you know, hey, we didn't expect that we would have to actually abide by this thing.
We still want to do what we want, and these Iraqis are being stubborn.
Yeah, well, I agree with you.
I think from what I've been reading in a series of articles in the Washington Post and other U.S. mainstream media publications, it seems that there are many high officials in the Pentagon who are not happy with the agreement and not happy with the implementation of the agreement.
So far, we did not have any signs of a clash of implementation or interpretation of the agreement between the Iraqi and U.S. side, between the Iraqi and U.S. officials.
So far, the clash has been between American generals and army officials and Pentagon officials who are not very much happy about the idea.
They have been clashing with both American and Iraqi politicians.
So I think so far there hasn't been really a clash between the Iraqi administration and the American administration.
It seems like both al-Maliki and Obama are going ahead with the agreement, and it seems that there is some resistance from the military conflicts here in the U.S.
Some people in the military side of the government are not very happy about the implementation, but of course, they don't have the final say because the commander-in-chief happens to be the president, and he is for implementing the agreement and for withdrawing all the U.S. troops from Iraq.
Well, I think a big part of, it sort of goes without saying in that discussion, that the generals want to stay forever.
They have a new set of bases in a land in the Middle East where they'd like to go ahead and stay forever.
We heard so much, I guess, in the early days of the war about the neocons and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney's strategy of just covering that entire part of the old world with bases all the way from Jordan to India, I guess, and up to Russia.
So there's obviously a lot of Pentagon inertia there, but is it really the case that they have succeeded in creating an army powerful enough and consolidated in control under Nouri al-Maliki enough that if Maliki, or that Maliki actually doesn't feel like he needs them anymore, he's not just the prime minister of the Green Zone anymore, he really is the most powerful faction there and will remain so for a long enough time that he has the confidence to go ahead and kick the Americans out perhaps even earlier than in the sofa there?
Yeah, well, what you just described, I think this is the question that has been framed in the U.S. media and among mainstream U.S. politicians.
The question has been framed in a way that makes it feel like whenever the Iraqis stand up, the U.S. will stand down.
Whenever the Iraqis are ready, the U.S. will be out.
Now, in Iraq, the question has been framed differently.
I don't think many Iraqis believe that the current Iraqi armed forces are perfect or functional.
I don't think many Iraqis think the current political process is perfect or functional.
But in Iraq, these are the reasons why people want the Americans to leave.
So you see it the other way around.
For al-Maliki and for many people in the Iraqi government and the public, they think the reason why there isn't a functioning Iraqi armed force is that Iraq is under the U.S. occupation.
The reason why Iraq does not have a functioning and efficient political process until now is that Iraq is under foreign occupation.
This is not just an Iraqi thing.
For example, the French population did not think their government was legitimate under the Nazi occupation.
Regardless of how good or bad the government was, the general understanding, the perception of this government was that it's a puppet government that was installed by a foreign occupation.
I'm sure we'll have the same feelings in the U.S.
Well, so in that case, though, isn't it, I mean, I think the way it's been set up, obviously when Bush says, you know, they'll stand up and we'll stand down and all that, that that was disingenuous.
But I guess the way I've been looking at it is that Maliki would put his own power first, being an individual and all that kind of stuff and a politician, that he would not want that legitimate, unoccupied process to go forward if he didn't think it would guarantee that he got to keep the power he already has.
And so I guess that was the basis of my question.
Does Maliki think he's strong enough to throw us out?
That's true.
Now, what Maliki has concluded in the last six months is that he actually can depend on this open-ended U.S. support for him, because that was the only reason why he was the prime minister.
Maliki was the prime minister of an executive branch that was extremely, and continues to be, extremely weak and not representative of the Iraqi public.
There are just four parties of the executive branch that Maliki heads.
Two of them are Kurds and one Sunni and one Shiite, in addition to his party, which is a very small party.
Now, these parties cannot rule the country by themselves without the U.S. support, without the U.S. political support and army support.
So you are correct in that.
Now, what Maliki has done in the last six months is that he did indeed jump to the other side.
He jumped to the side of his own opposition, people who used to oppose him.
He jumped to their side, Iran, with them in the provincial councils, and that's why he won in the provincial councils.
So the way that he's trying to survive as a politician is to go to the other side, to the majority of the Iraqis, and tell them, I want you to help me build a legitimate government.
I want you to help me build a legitimate armed force.
And that's why I think we are going through this transitional period now, where the Iraqi political process and armed forces are actually transitioning in a very dramatic way.
But we're not seeing that very obviously, because Maliki continues to be the head of the process.
But the process used to stand for exactly the opposite principles that it stands for now.
Maliki used to have a government that is for partitioning Iraq, for keeping the U.S. forces indefinitely, and for privatizing Iraq's natural resources.
And now he personally stands for a political process that is against partitioning Iraq, against keeping the U.S. indefinitely, and against privatizing Iraq's petrol and gas.
So things have shifted dramatically in that regard.
All right.
Now, pardon me for oversimplifying and defining this in such a kind of simplistic way, but I guess the way I would sort of interpret what you're saying would be, at least for example, not necessarily entirely, but for example, his tacit agreement with Muqtada al-Sadr right now is that Sadr will basically have his group support Maliki as long as Maliki remains serious about ending the occupation, opposing federalism in favor of a single, powerful nation-state, run out of Baghdad, and the oil thing.
These are Sadr's conditions, for at least one example, for supporting Maliki.
If he turned around and started acting the puppet the way Jafari did or whatever right now, then he would lose all that support and we would go back to major faction fighting inside, or I guess on the Shiite divisions of the lines there.
Yeah, that is correct.
Okay, let me add one more thing to that.
Whatever happened to the Badr court then?
That is actually a part of the split that is taking place now.
Now, it's not just about Sadr being a Shiite, it's about Sadr being an Iraqi nationalist.
And there are many other people, including, for example, other Sunni nationalists and secular nationalists, and even Kurdish nationalists and Christian nationalists that have been putting the same type of conditions on Maliki to support him.
And he went to that side, the side of Sadr, of the National Dialogue Council, of Saleh al-Mutlaq, of Allawi, of other people on the other side of the alley that have been asking him for these conditions.
Now, you're right.
If he changes his mind and goes back to the old politics, all of his current supporters will leave him.
Now, al-Maliki did take a position, did take an extremely important position a few months ago, when he decided to stop his alliance with the Badr Brigade and with the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution, and ally himself with the other Shiites, the Sadrists and al-Qadira.
He stopped his alliance with the Islamic Party and allied himself to the other Sunnis, the Khalaf al-Ulayyan and Saleh al-Mutlaq.
He stopped his alliance with the, you know, separatist, secular forces like the Chalabi and others, and he allied himself to the other seculars, like Allawi and others.
So you see, he did shift his alliances strategically.
I personally, you know, have a lot of doubt of why, other than the fact that he's a politician who's trying to survive and trying to, you know, find a survival way for his future.
Other than that, he did shift his position hugely.
So regarding your question, Badr Brigade and the Supreme Council and the Islamic Party and the two Kurdish parties and other separatist powers that have been running the executive branch are now freaking out, because they lost their prime minister.
They don't have a majority of seats in the parliament.
They don't have a majority of seats in the provincial council.
They are going through a crisis.
Their only power, which is the U.S. backing them up, is leaving the country very soon.
So there is a crisis going through.
I mean, these parties are going through the major crisis during the last six years.
And that's why many people think that they will try their best to change the situation.
They will try their best to defend their politics, their standing.
So we are heading towards a political conflict that is way less sectarian.
It's not a Sunni-Shiite conflict.
It's way more political, where Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds who have the same type of politics will be colliding with other Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds who have the opposite type of politics.
Well, I guess I have to hand it to Maliki, because he's really handled this brilliantly as far as being a politician and getting Hakeem and the more pro-Iranian factions, the Supreme Islamic Council and the more Iranian sides of the Dawah Party and the United States military to support him and build him up in power like this.
But then, of course, the only legitimacy, as you said, if we're talking about France and the Vichy government of France, the only time you could ever have a real legitimate state would be after the occupation is over.
There is no gray area there.
And so he's now positioned himself more on the side of the Nationalists, as you say, Aloui and Sader and these others who are intent on holding the state together.
And after all, the Shia are the majority in the country, so when it comes just to raw numbers, they don't really need the American occupation to, say, for example, hold on to Baghdad, right?
It would be very difficult for the former Sunni factions that ruled in the Baathist years or the guys that fought as the Sunni insurgency all those years for them to take back Baghdad.
I mean, they have the majority and they can hold on to this power.
So he really is in the position to tell Barack Obama and his generals that no matter what you want, you do have to leave.
But there are two points that I want to make.
The first one is that it's true that the majority of Iraqis, maybe 50 percent or more, are Shiites, but this doesn't mean anything on the ground because they are not one group that is united.
The Shiites, people who have a Shiite background, are completely split.
There are some Shiites who are for the occupation and other Shiites who are against it, some Shiites for an Iranian influence and others against it.
So we have a very huge split in the Shiites, people who are Shiites, between those who are nationalists and those who are, you know, separatists and pro-occupation.
Well, we do also have a very large difference in the population of Baghdad from how it used to be.
I don't know if it was exactly a 50-50 split, but last I read it's almost 85 percent Shiite city now after all the cleansing, so-called, of 2005, 2006 and 2007.
Well, yeah, I mean, these numbers are very much, you know, not very much accurate.
The point that I'm trying to make is that there is no such a thing as a Shiite majority when it comes to running the country.
There is a nationalist majority which will lead the country.
There is a political majority or an economic majority, but there is no such a thing as Shiites living together or running the country together against them.
That's a misperception that was created during the last few years that doesn't really exist on the ground.
The other hand here, the other point that I want to make is that the Obama administration so far has been extremely clear about its intention to implement the withdrawal agreement.
Now, we know that the withdrawal agreement was actually signed under the Bush administration during the transitional period between Bush and Obama, but the Obama administration is very much interested and sincere so far about implementing it.
President Obama has been extremely clear that all the U.S. troops will withdraw from Iraq before the end of 2011 and all the U.S. bases will be shut down and handed over to the Iraqi side before the end of 2011.
And so far we haven't had any major breaches of the agreement that was signed.
So there is a will from the U.S. side, and it seems that there is enough interest to implement the agreement of ending the U.S. occupation completely, and that is extremely positive.
So we will not need, we will not see a conflict between Obama and Maliki.
Maliki telling Obama, I want you to get all of your people outside my country whether you want it or not.
This is not the case.
The case is that both Obama and Maliki seem to be on the same page of planning a withdrawal agreement that will end the occupation completely.
Now, this agreement is being opposed by some people in the U.S. Pentagon, some people in the Iraqi executive branch.
As we said, the Federal Brigade, the Supreme Council, the Islamic Party, some of the Kurdish parties, some people are trying to oppose it and sabotage it.
But so far this has not been the mainstream line of both the Iraqi and American governments.
So far, Iraqi and American top officials in the executive branches have been in agreement in implementing this agreement that it will end the occupation.
It will close all of the U.S. bases.
Well, that's, I have to say, to my ears, very optimistic.
I mean, I believe, well, you've certainly explained how Maliki, even if he wanted otherwise, which doesn't look like he does, he's now thrown in with the nationalists.
All of his legitimacy comes from him being serious about ending the occupation.
And so that's, you know, certainly that's his position.
I don't know if I could ever believe Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and General Petraeus aren't doing everything, I mean, it seems to me they must be doing everything they can to think of excuses to stay, you know, even if it takes, you know, trying to foment more violence in order to have an excuse to quell it or something.
I can't imagine the empire ever willingly giving up anything.
I guess that's why I question, you know, so pointedly about how much power Maliki really thinks he has to be able to force that kind of solution on America.
Because I don't think that, well, I don't have faith yet in Barack Obama on this issue, I guess.
I agree with you.
I mean, I don't think the Obama administration or any other administration in the U.S. will give Iraq back to the Iraqis willingly because they are nice or they are just being charitable to Iraq.
Iraq has been a disaster.
If the original plans of staying in Iraq have worked, I assure you that neither Obama nor Bush would have ever thought about leaving Iraq.
But so far, Iraq has been extremely expensive.
It has been a disaster for the U.S. foreign policy.
It's costed U.S. taxpayers up to $3 trillion, you know, with the future expenses.
And it's costed the U.S. reputation a lot.
So it's not like the U.S. is being nice about it.
I think the U.S. has been put in a situation where it has to leave Iraq.
There is an extreme Iraqi political pressure for the entire U.S. Army to leave.
And this Iraqi resistance, political and other types of resistance, and American resistance to the occupation has paid off.
So this thing that happened now happened after 19 years of wars and occupation and sanctions.
We're not talking about a walk in the park that the U.S. is just donating Iraq back to the Iraqis.
One million Iraqis were killed in the last five years alone, and five million Iraqis saved.
So a huge price was paid to reach to what we are talking about.
Now, me personally, I never doubted that the U.S. would leave Iraq, not because I thought the U.S. was nice, but because I always believed that Iraqis will never stop resisting, politically and in other means, until the last U.S. soldier leaves.
And now I see this is possible.
It is possible that the U.S. will leave.
Now, we do have a binding agreement that requires the U.S. to leave completely, but this agreement needs a lot of work.
And that's why I'm spending all of my time in Washington, D.C. now with my organization, trying to make sure that we do have enough congressional oversight, we do have enough guarantees from the U.S. side, that this agreement that we just have on paper now will become reality.
But to tell you the truth, I never had a doubt that the last U.S. soldier will leave Iraq, and I will never do.
This is the only thing that keeps me on going, that I do believe that Iraq will become a sovereign state again, the last U.S. soldier will leave, and this occupation will go down the street as just yet another occupation of Iraq.
Iraq was occupied in the past, I think it will be occupied in the future, but Iraqis never resisted until the last occupier leaves.
Well, I have to tell you, Red, I think that that has been clear from the beginning, too.
It's really shown how, no matter, even with an arsenal full of hydrogen bombs, the age of colonialism is over.
As long as the average guy can make a bomb out of things under his kitchen sink, and can tote around an AK-47, it's impossible to colonize people anymore.
It just isn't going to work, and particularly in that land.
I think the case has been shown since, you know, the summer of 2003.
That's true, and I mean, you know, what's even more important than a bomb put in the street is the will in people's brains that Iraqis never accepted the occupation, they will never live under a foreign occupation or under a government that is supported by a foreign occupation.
And this will was not broken in Iraq, despite the billions of dollars that were spent to break this will, despite all of the bombs that were thrown to break that will.
The Iraqi people's will and political resistance never ended.
And I think that's extremely important to understand, that Iraq is not just a black hole of violence.
What has been happening in Iraq is a huge spectrum of resistance to the occupation that starts with people demonstrating in the streets and signing on petitions, and goes through political resistance that did lead to this agreement to be signed.
This is not the agreement that the Bush administration proposed in the beginning, you know.
Oh no, it was about 58 bases short of the original proposal.
Exactly, and the original agreement, that by the way I did leak and translate, is completely different than the final agreement.
And this doesn't happen because of some, you know, charitable action on behalf of the Bush administration.
It happened because the majority of Iraqi parliamentarians who were elected by the Iraqi public said no is no.
They said our bottom line is that this agreement must have a provision requiring all U.S. troops to leave, must have a provision that requires all U.S. bases to be shut down, must have a provision that requires all Iraqi prisoners to be released, and so on.
And because they stuck to their bottom line and they requested these things to happen, we did see them happening in the agreement.
So what I'm saying is that we're not seeing now some childish trick on behalf of some administration or some privileged solution that some nice politician ended up putting on a piece of paper.
We're seeing a result of two decades of resistance to the U.S. intervention in Iraq on behalf of Iraqis and Americans.
There was a huge pressure on the Bush administration and now on the Obama administration by Americans and U.S. taxpayers against the occupation of Iraq and other occupations.
And, of course, a huge pressure is on Iraq.
So, I mean, that's why I'm saying this is the result of years and years and years of work and political resistance and other types of resistance that made us reach here.
But it's not time to take a rest yet, you know.
Like, I haven't gone on a vacation yet.
Well, I think I didn't stop doing radio for about three years in a row there, and I was either going to never be able to crack a joke again or take a break.
Yeah, but, I mean, I'm just saying that I'm not celebrating the end of the occupation yet.
Oh, no, definitely not.
I'm just feeling defensive because I felt guilty for not doing a radio show every day I was gone.
All right, wait.
Now, I want to get to something early because I interrupted you in the middle at one point, and so we didn't get to really get into this.
But one thing you mentioned was the million dead, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to cite your sources for people who have never heard that before.
I know the polls say the average American thinks that about 10,000 Iraqis have died this whole time.
And so if you'd like to discuss that, opinion business research and Lancet and all those things, then I'd like to give you an opportunity for that.
But also I wanted you to address my wild assertion about the amount of so-called ethnic cleansing or religious cleansing or what have you in Baghdad.
My understanding was that during the worst of the, even before the surge, but including during the surge, when basically the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps, and the U.S. Army and Marine Corps teamed up to kick the Sunnis out of Baghdad, apparently, I had thought, succeeded up to 80, 85 percent.
And I think you said that those numbers weren't really right and really minimized the difference there.
I mean, clearly, you know, there are a lot of nationalist factions and they're coming to the fore.
But I also read that Maliki is not really following the principle of a single Iraqi state in the sense that he continues to marginalize the so-called awakening groups of Sunni insurgents who stopped insurging.
Then he was supposed to hire them and put them in the army and make a sort of coalition government with those guys.
And apparently they're not getting paid and more of them are going back to blowing stuff up again, things like that.
So if you could please address those numbers and the current divide between the Maliki government and the so-called sons of Iraq.
Yeah, let me start by addressing that, actually.
Because this is another misperception that I see all the time in U.S. analysis and mainstream media.
Now, the understanding of the Iraqi conflict in the U.S. mainstream media has been all along wrong.
Just, you know, straight wrong.
Like, from an Iraqi point of view, the conflict was not a conflict between one group called the Sunnis and another group called the Shiites and another group called the Kurds.
Iraq is all along so multilayered of that.
And they thought that the sectarian and ethnic layer is actually a secondary one.
And the political one has been all along been the major reason for the conflict.
Right.
Well, let me stop you right there, because I don't mean to imply that they're fighting over whose version of Islam is better.
We're talking about people with political factions, the Mahdi Army, the Supreme Islamic Council's militia, the Badr Brigade, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the insurgency that, I guess, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe was primarily run by former Ba'athists and local Sunni religious leaders, and was basically, you know, for intents and purposes, at least after the first year or two, it was a Sunni insurgency against the American installation of the Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah Party factions in power.
Okay, let me correct this, and then I will continue my thought.
The insurgency was mixed.
In fact, actually, the biggest two uprisings that happened in the first couple of years were led by Sadr and Sadr militias, more than people who tend to come from a Sunni background.
So it was mixed all along.
There were Sunnis and Shiites who were not happy with the occupation, and there were Sunnis and Shiites who were participating in the Iraqi executive branch, but never left it, actually.
Let me finish my point now.
My point is that sometimes the media tries to say that al-Maliki's tensions with the Awakening group is a sign of him oppressing Sunnis or Shiites, you know, domination of the government.
Now, this is actually not accurate, because al-Maliki's crackdown on the Awakening group was seen as a positive sign, not a negative sign, by the majority of Iraqis, because Iraqis in general don't like these militias and warlords that were created under the Rassi sphere, whether these warlords were Shiites or Sunnis or Kurds or others, even if they were secular.
They are not popular, and Iraqis do prefer to have a central government with a strong central armed force.
Now, al-Maliki, at the same time that he did have a legitimate crackdown on some Shiite militias, whether they were with the Sadrists or with the Badr Brigade and their control over the Minister of Interior, or his crackdown on some of the Kurdish militias, the Peshmerga and their intervention in the political process in the central government and elsewhere, or his crackdown on the Sunni militias, the Awakening group, was seen widely as a positive step.
So I don't see that as an alarming step or an indicator of sectarian tension.
I see it actually as a positive step towards neutralizing all non-central armed forces, all of the militias and warlords that have been functioning, and a step towards creating one central government forces that are mixed and non-sectarian.
So overall it wasn't seen as a negative thing.
Now let me address the issue of the one million Iraqis killed very fast.
The number actually is not controversial at all.
It's been agreed upon by different sources.
There are at least three sources that have mentioned the number one million so far.
One of them is the projection of the two studies that were conducted in Iraq and published in the Lancet Journal.
The projection of those two studies as of today takes Iraq to more than one million casualties.
The other one is the ORB, a British firm that conducted a similar study in Iraq based on sampling and found that more than one million Iraqis were killed in the last five years.
And the third one is a projection and estimate based on the Iraq Body Count, which is a documented number of Iraqis who were killed.
And then there is a projection of the full number, the full estimated number.
The documented number is around 100,000.
The full estimated number is about one million because this has been the discrepancy between the documented and full estimate.
So there are a number of indicators that are there.
Of course, many people have been doubting them for political reasons, but the same way that these numbers were reached to were actually used, for example, to estimate the number of people who were killed under the Nazi Holocaust or people who died because of major diseases that hit countries or something, or even in Darfur and Afghanistan.
So it's the same methodology to find the full number of cases.
I personally actually don't doubt that the number is correct.
One million Iraqis killed is unfortunately a reasonable number compared to the size of destruction that happened in Iraq during the last few years.
Yeah, well, and it's consistent in the sense also of the Lancet and Johns Hopkins studies that came out in 2004 and then in 2006.
It seemed to be a pretty reasonable conclusion by the time that Opinion Business Research did their study and some of these other studies came out that it was that many.
But I think that rather than the numbers being disputed, very often at least, for political reasons, they are just completely and totally ignored.
That's the deal.
The American people never get to hear a discussion about whether it was 100,000 or whether it was a million or what would cause a discrepancy and who are the sources for the different things.
And here they are debating with their heads in squares on the TV news.
Never happened, never will happen.
We'll just go on pretending that it was probably just a few and we don't really want to think about that number.
Because as you say, once you get to the M word, million there, all of a sudden comparisons of World War II come springing up all over the place.
And Americans don't want to even consider that kind of reality.
That's true.
In fact, even when sometimes I see people faced with the reality that one million Iraqis have been killed and another five million displaced, I think there is a safe space that was created by the mainstream politicians in the U.S. to blame the Iraqi murders on Iraqis themselves, to say these are just crazy Muslims who have been killing each other for thousands of years.
We have nothing to do with that.
And they just kill each other.
In fact, we have to be there to make sure that they will not kill more of their cousins and neighbors or whatever.
So there has been a safe space to not make U.S. taxpayers feel responsible for what their money has been doing, not make us feel responsible that it's indeed our tax dollars' money that has been killing people who are in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere.
So unfortunately it is a big fight.
It's a big battle to fight.
I think it's easier now, and this is what I always focus on, it's easier to talk about ending the occupation, the need to end the occupation, and to end the killings and murders.
And then after that we have to, it's very important for the sake of our future and our children's future, to look back at what happened in Iraq and learn lessons from the U.S. intervention there.
What did the U.S. cause?
And how can we fix what our tax money did in Iraq?
All right, everybody, that's Ray Jarrar.
He's an Iraq consultant to the American Friends Service Committee and writes the blog Raed in the Middle, which you can find at raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot for having me.
Yeah, I hope we can do it again soon.
Yeah, I hope.