Alright guys, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
This is Chaos Radio, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Introducing first guest today, the great investigative reporter, Robert Dreyfus.
He's a freelancer, writes for Rolling Stone, The Nation, Mother Jones.
Tom Paine, other places that I'm forgetting off the top of my head.
He's the author of the excellent book, the most important, one of the most important books that I've ever read, honestly.
It's called Devil's Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
Thanks, always great to be here.
It's good to talk to you, and hopefully we can go back into some of this history that you have in Devil's Game in this interview at some point.
But at the beginning here, I just really want to focus on what's going on on the ground in Iraq right now.
It just seems like the death toll balance is tipping one way or another or something.
The Bush administration is calling it progress.
I noted reading your blog, although I can't say I read this in the New York Times, that the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani just got back from Iran where he met with Khamenei.
I don't know, can you give us just like, not necessarily anything really long, but just in a couple of sentences, or maybe even one catchphrase, what's the state of things in that country right now?
Just hell or progress?
They're trying to lie low for the most part, although they're still carrying out a low level of violence and death squad activity, maybe a half of what they were doing before this so-called surge started.
Meanwhile, the United States is trying to mop up the Sunni resistance.
So what we're doing is we're taking sides in a two-sided or even three-sided civil war, siding with the Shiites against the Sunnis, and hoping that some miracle will happen to bring about political reconciliation.
But of course, you can't have political reconciliation in Iraq without the Sunnis and Shia sitting down together and working out a deal.
And that's never going to happen when the Shia think that they have the unlimited backing of both Iran and the United States, and the Sunnis feel like they're being shoved into a corner.
And yet that's the situation.
Everybody knows that there has to be a political solution in Iraq, not a military one.
But that political solution has to come on the basis of the Shiites making significant concessions to share power with the Sunnis who have been pushed out of power, to the point where even the moderate Sunnis who are in the Iraqi government are now talking about quitting that government and going over into the overt opposition, maybe even joining the resistance.
I mean, we could talk for hours about how bad the situation is, but it's clearly beyond the level of the crisis, to the point where the United States really has no viable options left.
Yeah, I think that was a really good nutshell of the situation.
Let's break it down on the Shia side here, the majority that America and, as you say, Iran are backing, the new government, basically.
I spoke with an Iraqi-American who's gone back to Iraq named Sami Rasouli, he's been living in Najaf, and he told me that if America left, that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and the Dawa Party, which are the two parties most backed by Iran, to my understanding, would basically be out of power instantly, and would be forced to flee back to Iran from whence they came.
And that they're the ones on the Shia side who are really pushing for civil war, who could give or take having a single state with the Sunnis, but would really prefer autonomy and alliance with Iran.
Really, the only reason that they're in power at all is because America's backing them, that if we would just leave, they would be gone, and Mu'tad al-Sadr would probably lead the most powerful Shiite faction, and that he would indeed strike a deal with the Sunnis.
Well, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
At the beginning of this political process in Iraq, there was a seeming unity among the Shiites, with five or six different factions all joining together to create this United Iraqi Alliance, which is the big, most powerful political party in the parliament.
Since those elections, that UIA, the alliance, has begun to dissolve.
You had this Fadila party, which is a big chunk of it, has already split off and is now negotiating with the Sunnis about making some sort of Sunni-Shiite deal.
You have the Sadr people, who've pulled out of the government, also hinting that they might consider that kind of deal.
And so what you're left with is, as you pointed out, the two main pro-Iranian parties, especially the Supreme Council, which is the party of the Iraqi clergy, the Turbans and Robes people, they're the closest to Iran, and they're the ones who are kind of left holding the bag of this disintegrating Shiite alliance.
You saw recently that a majority of the Iraqi parliament has signed on to a bill requesting that the United States set a timetable for leaving Iraq.
In other words, they're doing exactly what the Democrats in our Congress are doing, which is supporting the notion of a timetable, so you have majorities, both in the American Congress and in the Iraqi parliament, calling for the setting of a timetable.
And I think that's something that the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq could agree on.
They don't agree on a lot, but I think they would agree on the notion of, first of all, that Iraq needs to remain a centralized state, not break up into parts.
And also that it should be free of the American occupation so they can settle their political differences themselves.
Those are not exactly shocking radical demands.
And the fact that a majority of the Iraqi parliament now supports that is an indication that the Maliki government, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is becoming increasingly isolated, yet inexplicably the United States seems to insist that everyone continue to prop up Maliki's government.
That's why Dick Cheney is now running around the Middle East, from the Gulf to Saudi Arabia to Iraq, asking for everyone to get behind Maliki.
Saudi Arabia, which is emerging as a big power broker in the region, seems to have totally abandoned Maliki at this point.
And I've been talking to a lot of people in Washington who say that neither Maliki nor Hakim are willing to make any sort of deal or concessions because they think they're in the driver's seat.
The one place I might disagree with your analyst, your friend in Najaf, is Iran does have a lot of cards to play in Iraq.
And so if the United States left, Iran could exercise a great deal of influence inside Iraq through various connections it has to Shiite parties and clergy and so forth.
And I don't think it's guaranteed that all of these pro-Iranian parties would simply flee back to Iran.
In any case, the fact is that for the United States, which has been pressuring Maliki to make these benchmark concessions and deals and a whole list of reforms that he has to make to try to end the civil war, well, so far he's resisted us at every turn.
And I think really the people holding the cards are the Iranians.
That's why it's so important to talk to Iran, to try to make a deal with Iran so that Iran could pressure the Shiite leaders into making a deal with the Sunnis.
The Sunnis, Iran would have to give up something in Iraq and we would have to give Iran something in return.
And that's the basic diplomatic roadblock that Bush is facing because he doesn't want to give Iran anything in order to get what Iran could give us in Iraq.
And now the Sunnis, they won't settle for less than major concessions from the Shiites because they don't live on the oil land, isn't that right?
Back in the day under Saddam, they got to steal everybody else's oil wealth and now they can't.
Well, I'm not sure steal is the right word.
Iraq's central government was dominated by the Sunnis for several centuries.
It wasn't just under Saddam.
And the oil revenue, sure, to a large degree perhaps was disproportionately benefiting the ruling class, which happened to have been heavily Sunni.
But the fact is that throughout the 1970s, Iraq became a rapidly developing, very prosperous country, urbanized with a large middle class and a large professional class, all of whom, both Shia and Sunnis, were tremendously benefiting from the oil wealth in Iraq.
And that began to fall apart when the Khomeini revolutionaries took over Iran and started fomenting trouble inside Iraq and that led to the Iran-Iraq war.
And since 1979, Iraq has been basically in a permanent state of war against the United States, against Iran, against Kuwait.
And so the collapse of Iraq, both politically and economically, is a very complex phenomenon that goes back to the late 70s and early 80s.
But, yes, the Sunnis don't want to be shoved back into the desert province of Anbar in the west of Iraq and allow the Shiites and the Kurds to control most of Iraq's oil, which is located first of all in the south, where the Shiites are predominant, and second of all around the city of Kirkuk, which is theoretically at least Sunni territory now, but which the Kurds claim as part of Kurdistan, and if they get their way in a referendum that's scheduled for December, Kirkuk will be incorporated into Kurdistan.
So the Sunnis will be left isolated and alone.
The oil issue is only one, however, of five or six issues that need to be dealt with.
The disarming of the Shiite militias is a big one.
The allowing former Ba'ath party members, not the top ones on the level of Saddam and his cronies, but mid- and lower-level Baathists, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, to get back into government jobs and the army and so forth.
Making a deal over the changing of the constitution.
I mean, there's a whole series of steps that the White House says at least that it wants Maliki to take, oil being one.
But so far, none of these steps have even come close to being enacted, and it's been about two years now that we've been hearing that they're supposed to do this.
So it doesn't look like any of these reforms is going anywhere.
I'm under the impression that the Sunni-Shia split in Iraq is, well, really for the most part, on the level of the people with the political power fighting.
But that the average Iraqi, that their society is mostly divvied up by tribe, not necessarily by religion.
That there's all kinds of intermarriage, that at the end of the day, if you really go back and count, the majority of the Saddam government were actually Shiites, technically, even though they weren't necessarily the guys running it at the very top.
And that this really was a pretty mixed society, as far as that goes.
That American policy has really fomented all this ethnic division.
Well, there's a lot of truth to that.
It's a complicated one, and I'll say that certainly, under the present circumstance, with every passing day, I think that the bitterness and potential for even hatred among, between the Sunnis and Shiites is growing.
So whatever was true in the past, it's becoming less and less true with every passing day.
And certainly, at the beginning of U.S. occupation, in April, March, April of 2003, there was no bitter communal hatred.
There were tensions, there were divisions, there were disagreements.
But the possibility of Sunnis and Shiites working together at that point was not something that could be ruled out.
And in fact, what the United States has done in the past four years, every step of the way, has been to institutionalize these sectarian differences.
It began even before the war, when they began apportioning the divisions among the Iraqi exiles, and creating the exile committee that was going to be the political elite after the fall of Saddam in meetings in London and elsewhere.
You're talking about the Iraqi National Congress?
And broader than that, the Iraqi National Congress was kind of the umbrella group, but most people knew that it was really just Shalabi and his friends who ran that.
But the Iraqi National Congress was part of a 65-member little executive council that was put together at a series of meetings before the war with full encouragement of the United States.
And this included the Kurdish parties, it included the Shiite religious parties, including Skiri, the Supreme Council, and others.
And they all insisted on a sectarian formula, and the United States went along.
And that's how we set up all of the subsequent bodies in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam.
We created institutions based on kind of a Lebanon-style sectarian apportioning of who gets power based on who they were.
Now, is this just incompetence?
I mean, I remember, you're right, the Iraqi election, the security situation at least was so bad that nobody could even say their name as an individual that they were running for office.
It was just the Shiite slate or the Sunni slate, and you pick.
Yeah, well, it was partly incompetence and ignorance, and partly I think there was a deliberate effort to encourage the religious Shia to take a leading or more important role, because there were a lot of illusions about the Shia and who they were.
Part of that was encouraged by Chalabi, who told the American war planners, oh, don't worry, sure these guys are connected to Iran, but they'll be our friends after the invasion.
And there was a belief that the Shia would be less Arab than the Sunnis, and that they would welcome us with flowers, and in part that goes back to the experience that the Israelis had the first time they invaded Lebanon back in 1982.
This was even before the creation of Hezbollah, when the Shiites in south Lebanon welcomed the Israeli troops because they were coming in to fight the PLO.
And then there were a lot of neoconservatives who had this weird theory that the way to get at Iran was to encourage the rise of the Shiites in Iraq.
That the Shiites in Iraq were moderate, less political, they called them quietist, and they saw that Najaf, the holy city in Iraq, could emerge as kind of a counter-power to Qom, the city in Iran, which is where the clergy is based.
And so they felt, well, we can bring these quietist Shia leaders to power in Iraq, and they will influence Iran in a direction that will get Iran to go where we want it to go, maybe even regime change.
Well, what they didn't realize is that that works both ways, and that the Iranians had tremendous influence over the Shia in Iraq, and in fact they worked night and day, the Iranians did, to make sure that their influence would predominate in the Shia community.
Even with Ayatollah Sistani himself, who a lot of people felt was, you know, the neocons and others felt, well, he's a Democrat, he'll be, you know, pro-American, and in fact he's never said a word critical of the Shiite dictatorship in Iraq.
He's never said a word critical of Iran, and he's part of a little Ayatollah's old boys club that includes both the Iranian leaders and Iraqi Shiite religious leaders.
So the Iranians end up coming out on top, and from the fall of Saddam until now, there's been almost a tacit U.S.
-Iran alliance in support of this current Iraqi government.
It's paradoxical, because, you know, you'd think, hey, this is a government here in the United States that considers Iran to be, you know, a charter member of the Axis of Evil.
Yet, in terms of practicality in Iraq, we and Iran have agreed every step of the way with the elections and the constitution and the way the Iraqi government has developed.
And so far, the president seems unwilling to break with that, and he's sticking with Maliki, even though a lot of other people are trying to put together an alternate government.
And as you mentioned earlier, that alternate government would be a Sunni-Shiite, you know, sort of coalition government with nationalist Shiites, maybe even including Muqtada Sader, working with various Sunnis.
And so that's the one possible way out of the civil war, is for forces on either side, the Sunnis and Shias, to work out a deal.
The problem is, from the White House standpoint, that that deal would include ousting American troops, because all of the people who want to make that deal oppose the U.S. occupation.
Wow.
How's that for a bottom line, ladies and gentlemen?
It is possible to create a coalition government.
In fact, I believe the last time I interviewed you, Robert Dreyfuss, was on occasion of your article, Bush's meeting with a murderer, when at that exact time, Muqtada Sader was trying to work out a deal for a coalition government with Sunnis and Kurds.
And at the very moment he was doing so, Bush was meeting with Abdulaziz al-Aqim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, and telling him, don't worry, we're going with the 80% solution.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
I mean, you can't underestimate the difficulties in having the Sunnis and Sader work out a deal.
They have a lot of things that keep them apart.
But the fact is that the United States is doing everything to prevent that deal.
I even asked the question to David Satterfield, who is the main point person at the State Department, about this when he was speaking in Washington a couple of weeks ago.
He made an appearance at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is one of the hangouts for a lot of neoconservatives.
And I asked him about the possibility of Maliki's government being replaced by perhaps Allawi or some other more unifying figure who could bring these other parties to the table.
And he absolutely rejected the idea.
He said, we are 100% behind Maliki, and everything that our ambassador in Baghdad is doing is aimed at propping up and building support for Maliki.
So they're wedded to Maliki, like to the tar baby, even against all the evidence that says that he is an ineffectual Shiite sectarian.
And that notion is astonishing to me, that they're continuing to support this guy who is working against everything that the White House supposedly says it's trying to get done in Iraq.
Which, I guess, is back to the question of whether they're really trying to accomplish what they say they're trying to accomplish, or whether they're telling us one thing while they're actually succeeding at doing what it is they want.
And I don't mean to just be conspiracy theorist about it.
I guess I can refer to Andrew Coburn's new book about Donald Rumsfeld, where he quotes Anthony Zinni saying that he thinks, he believes, not that he had direct proof, but he believed that the neocons decided when they couldn't get Hashemite King or Ahmed Chalabi to rule the place like they wanted, that their plan B was to go ahead and destroy the place.
And Coburn also cites, and I'm sorry, I bet you can probably help me with the name, the Shiite exile who was living in London, who, shortly after the war, he went back to Iraq and was beaten to death by Mactan al-Sadr's guys.
Yeah, Abdul Mahid Hawi was his name.
Right, and that he had also told, I don't know if it was directly to Coburn, I think it was, that he had told Coburn that he had talked to some of the neoconservatives in America, and that they said holding Iraq together was no longer one of their priorities, and that was even before the war, presumably after Bush had said that Chalabi's not his man.
Well, you know, there's a lot of questions about what the ultimate motivations were for the war and the ultimate plans, but whatever they were four years ago, I think it's way past the point of being able to say now that they have any kind of coherent plan.
They don't.
I think Bush is simply trying to get through his presidency without being slapped with a label that, you know, he lost the war, so he can pass it on to whoever comes after him.
And I don't think they have a clue about which direction to go in.
I mean, they're, you know, on the one hand, they say we'll never talk to Iran.
Then they say, yeah, we're going to talk to Syria and Iran, and Rice starts opening up a dialogue there.
And then on the one hand, Bush vetoes all these Democratic bills, but on the other hand, he says, well, we do have to consider benchmarks, and so maybe we ought to take a look at that.
And the Republican Party is falling apart on this issue.
There's a panic setting in among Republicans on Capitol Hill because they know that they're getting close to the turning point where they'll never be able to salvage next year's election.
You know, if we're going to get out of Iraq and take Iraq off the table as an electoral issue for 2008, it's got to start right away.
Otherwise, we'll still be seeing these kind of ugly headlines as people go to the polls the next November.
So it's a total utter mess, and I don't think they have any strategy left.
The surge was designed basically to postpone a decision.
You know, they had an opportunity when the Iraq Study Group, the Baker-Hamilton report came out last fall, and there were leading Republicans in the Senate like John Warner who were willing to run interference for the White House if they decided to go with what Baker and Hamilton had proposed, which if you remember was beginning the withdrawal in March of this year and completing the withdrawal of all combat troops at least by next March.
Well, instead of doing that, Bush rejected it.
He went with the surge.
He went with an escalation, and it was all designed to avoid having to make the fundamental decision about do we get out or not.
Now we're hearing that September is going to be a turning point.
But maybe it will, maybe the White House will go along with pressure from moderate Republicans and try to make a deal with the Democrats on getting out of Iraq, but maybe not.
Maybe they'll do another surge.
Maybe they'll expand the war for another six months so they don't have to deal with making that decision.
Oh, yeah, well, that was the New York Times headline yesterday or the day before, wasn't it, that the surge is going to go until next spring now, not September.
Next spring is when we measure whether it worked or not.
Well, yes, they're making that statement, but also, you know, conditionally.
There's going to be a big review over the summer by Petraeus, the General David Petraeus, who's our commander on the ground, and he's going to report back by the fall.
And at that point in September, a lot of Republicans are saying, if we don't see progress by then, then we're going to join the Democrats in, you know, starting to talk about a deadline, a timeline, a withdrawal.
So, you know, it may not be up to Bush in terms of domestic politics, and then it may not be up to Bush in terms of Iraqi politics, because, as I was saying at the beginning, you're seeing more and more signs that Iraqi politicians, the majority of the parliament, certainly the Iraqi resistance, which is not even part of the parliament, they want the United States to leave.
And the average Shia Arab does, too.
Yeah, I think, you know, nobody wants to see, in Iraq, nobody wants to see their country occupied by American troops.
And I think they're all aware, in Iraq, that they're facing a pretty dangerous, ugly situation.
They're not thinking that if the United States leaves Iraq, it'll be, you know, instant harmony.
But I think more and more Iraqis are coming to the conclusion that, and certainly a majority, that the United States can't solve the problem, that it's making things worse, not better.
And so we've got to work this out ourselves, but the United States has got to get out.
And part of that worse is helping the Shia ethnically cleanse Baghdad and take it entirely from the Sunnis, almost.
There's just one or two neighborhoods left that are Sunni, right?
Yeah, I think, I mean, it's hard to tell, you know, without being on the ground.
From what I've read, almost all of Baghdad, east of the river, that is east of the Tigris, which was majority Shiite, has now been cleaned out.
So it's almost entirely Shiite.
And under the surge, the Americans say they've stopped that Shiite cleansing at the river, and that on the western side, which was not necessarily majority Sunni, but heavily Sunni, the ethnic cleansing has slowed down.
But that's in part because the militias, the Shiite militias, have decided to hold back a little bit rather than, you know, try to be confronted by the American extra troops there.
Right.
And so the people who haven't held back are the Sunni resistance.
So we find ourselves fighting the Sunni militias while leaving the Shiite militias alone.
So maybe now we're reversing the process a little bit back the other way.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, well, it sure sounds like, as you say, they don't know what they're doing rather than some kind of deliberate policy here.
The numbers, I forget which news agency this was, but they said, oh yeah, the numbers of murdered Sunnis is way down.
Well, yes, obviously, because McTawdall-Sodders said everybody lay low, you know, put your rifle under the bed and wait it out, don't fight them in Sadr City, etc.
But the number of truck bombings has gone way up because now the Sunni insurgencies basically unleashed because they don't have Iraqis fighting them, who presumably have a little bit better idea of what they're doing than the Americans.
And so the number of truck bombing deaths went way up, but then they decided they were going to count the number of deaths from truck bombs.
And so that it was actually a success after all.
Yeah, no, it's a horrible situation and, you know, you've got Sunnis fighting Sunnis, tribes and resistance groups fighting Al Qaeda and vice versa, you've got attacks on the Kurds and battle looming over Kirkuk, you've got Shia fighting Shia, the Sadr people and the Supreme Council people are always at each other's throats all over the south.
I mean, it's a very, very complex situation.
It's ugly, it's brutal, there's a tremendous amount of violence in every part of Iraq.
And so the idea that there's some magic solution in this battle that we're trying to wage over Baghdad is just silly.
We've increased our presence there, and so the people fighting us have simply withdrawn to fight elsewhere, and we're seeing evidence of that in provinces surrounding Baghdad, in cities even farther afield than the areas around Baghdad.
There's no long-term strategy at all here.
It's almost like they thought, well, if we can somehow put enough cops on every corner in Baghdad, we'll stop the violence there.
And I don't know, maybe that'll work a little bit, although certainly a lot of Americans are going to get killed because we're more exposed.
But then where do you go from there?
What's the next step?
It has to be a Sunni-Shiite deal, and there's zero indication that anything like that is in the works.
Yeah, and you know, McClatchy Newspapers reported two weeks ago that training up the Iraqi army, you know, they'll stand up, we'll stand down, but that's not even one of the priorities anymore.
They've decided to call that off, and the Americans are going to defeat the insurgency now in the fifth year.
Yeah, well.
Yeah, so there you go, basically.
Everybody, I'm talking with Robert Dreyfuss, he's a great investigative reporter and author of Devil's Game, how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam.
And now I'd like to give you seven minutes or so to talk about this excellent 300-something page book about the history of how Great Britain and the United States are the ones who propped up all these right-wing religious crazies across the Middle East over the last 60 years or so, 50 years or so, and that all this mess that we're dealing with now is simply reaping the world with.
Well, there's a lot of truth to that.
I don't say in my book that we created these Islamic movements.
Right, yeah, I oversimplified there.
But we were looking for allies during the Cold War, and it turns out that a lot of these groups, from the Saudi Wahhabis to the Muslim Brotherhood, to many other conservative Islamic groups in areas from Indonesia to Pakistan to Turkey, that they looked like they were allies of ours because they were anti-communist.
They considered communism to be an atheistic force, and so in the Cold War they were on our side, and maybe in a way, even more importantly, they were anti-nationalists.
So that meant that nationalist leaders, whether it was the PLO in the Palestinian areas, or President Nasser in Egypt, or Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran, who was the guy that we overthrew to bring the Shah back in 1953, or the Ba'ath Party in Lebanon and Syria and Iraq in the early days, that all of these nationalist forces were seen as atheistic by these religious leaders.
And so, on both of these counts, because they were anti-nationalist and because they were anti-communist, we made common cause.
And that was really the big miscalculation.
We should have made friends with the nationalists, because they wouldn't have been with the communists.
They were our more natural fit, weren't they?
Absolutely.
I think that one of the big fundamental mistakes we made in the 1950s is when Nasser came to power in Egypt, and he came to the United States, and he asked us for money to build the Aswan Dam, this big development project that he wanted to build on the Nile River.
And he came to the United States and asked for military help and weapons.
And on both cases, the United States refused, said, no, zero, we're not giving it to you.
And so, he went in turn to his second choice, which was to the Russians.
And he didn't go there because he was a communist.
Far from it.
He banned the communist party in Egypt, but he went there because he needed help and he couldn't get it from the West.
He couldn't get it from the British and French, who had teamed up with Israel to invade Egypt in 1956 when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.
So, he had to go to the Russians, and we made a choice at that point to support Saudi Arabia and the conservative monarchies against the up-and-coming nationalists.
And we supported the religious groups associated with Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi conservatives and the Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser.
And, of course, Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought a war in Yemen in the 1960s.
And partly because we were so increasingly allied to Israel that we couldn't make friends with any of the Arab nationalists.
And so, we continually chose to support the most reactionary Arabs and the most religiously conservative ones throughout this entire period through the 60s and 70s.
And, of course, by the 1980s in Afghanistan, we were overtly supporting the jihad.
We were supporting a worldwide effort to mobilize radical Islam to go fight in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
And all of that, the entire effort from the 1950s through the 1990s, was what I cover in this book.
It's basically a story of the enemy of my enemy, in this case the enemy being the Soviet Union, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And there were a lot of people who said, no, that's not true.
Once they defeat the Soviet Union, they'll turn on us.
And that's exactly what happened.
As the Soviet Union collapsed, all of a sudden we found out that these radical Muslim groups had an agenda of their own.
And now we've been confronting that for the past 15 years.
Didn't America even back the jihadists in the Balkans in 1999, during the Kosovo war?
Oh, sure.
Well, we supported the Taliban in the 1990s, when it seemed like they were good guys who were willing to make pipeline deals with us.
In a way, we're doing that now in Iraq.
We're supporting Islamic fundamentalist Shiites.
And empowering Islamic fundamentalist Sunnis to fight against us as well.
Yeah, well, we're not in league with them necessarily, but we're certainly helping to boost the appeal.
Now, Seymour Hersh reports that America is backing Al-Qaeda against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Yeah, I read his piece about that.
I don't know to what extent that that's true.
But certainly, the Saudis, who were afraid of Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have a lot of nasty friends in Lebanon, including, I'm sure, many Sunni fundamentalist groups.
And so, the Saudis might have some ugly allies that we found ourselves in bed with in Lebanon.
And I think that's what Hersh was reporting on, that there are some Sunni fundamentalist groups, especially in Tripoli, in the northern part of Lebanon, which is a Sunni-dominated city, who are, if not directly part of Al-Qaeda, I don't think that's true, but are certainly sympathetic to bin Laden and to his kind of messianic belief in the resurgence of the Islamic caliphate.
Makes perfect sense, I guess.
If you want to view all of America's Middle East policy, since we've had one, as an absolute disaster, then that makes perfect sense.
Well, it's a disaster in part because we don't know enough about the area and the people and its culture, so we think we can play these Machiavellian games.
And just the way we thought we could, you know, get rid of Saddam and it would be a simple matter to create a government in its place, we're vastly ignorant, and yet we go into this thinking that we can move these people around like chess pieces, and it just doesn't work that way.
Absolutely, all right.
Well, everybody, now you know why Bob Dreyfuss is one of my favorite reporters.
You can read what he writes in Rolling Stone, at TomPaine.com, in The Nation.
Where else do you write nowadays?
Well, all my work is on my website.
If people just go to RobertDreyfuss.com, it's D-R-E-Y-F-U-S-S, RobertDreyfuss.com, you can read my blog and also pretty much all of my articles in the different publications I write for.
And I'm really sorry for giving you so little time to discuss Devil's Game, although I think that was a really good summary.
If possible, I'd like to go ahead and, if I can get a chance, take some time to reread this thing and get you back on the air to do a whole hour about the history of how we got where we are.
This book, everybody, is one of the most important books I recommend at the very, very top of the list.
Devil's Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalism in Islam.
Thanks very much for your time today, Bob.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
This is Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
