10/19/10 – Robert Dreyfuss – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all welcome to anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And if you're one of them hardcore anti-war radio fans, and you know that the first show that I ever did on anti-war radio, first interview I ever did on anti-war radio back in December of 2006 was of Robert Dreyfuss from the nation magazine.
He keeps the Dreyfuss report there.
And the reason why is because he's the best, especially when it comes to, well, a subject that I find most interesting, and that is the politics of the Iraq war, which of course is still going on.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
How are you?
I'm great.
Great.
Thanks.
And thanks for having me back.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
Now I have three articles here by you of interest worth discussing here.
The first one is Iraq.
New alliance takes shape against Maliki-Sauder bloc.
And then the second one I'll go ahead and mention now, United States-Iran, vie for influence in Iraq.
So I guess if I could try to sketch this as loosely as I can, let you fill in the details.
They had an election in March.
Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, his bloc, his party won a plurality of the votes, but not enough to form a government.
So since March, we've had this process on hold to wait and see which parties are going to be able to form an alliance and a majority in the parliament in order to form a government.
And the news was that Muqtada al-Sauder and Nouri al-Maliki finally put aside their differences and they were going to join together, only now it seems like maybe that's not going to happen.
Can you correct me if I'm wrong and fill in the gaps for me, please, sir?
Well, you're right, of course.
And it's unclear where this is going.
It's been almost eight months now, seven and a half months since the election took place.
And it isn't clear that they're really close to forming a government at all.
All of the players outside Iraq, including Iran, the Arab countries, Turkey and the United States especially, are sort of pushing and pulling their favorite players to try to get the stars to line up to form a government.
And it isn't just a question of forming a majority government.
You need, I think, 163 seats out of the 325 in the parliament in Iraq to form a government.
But it isn't as simple as that, because if you exclude somebody who doesn't want to be excluded, then there's the very real chance that Iraq could start to spiral into violence because people aren't going to accept being excluded.
So most of the people that I've talked to think that one way or another, it's going to take basically an across the board coalition of all the parties to form some sort of stable government in Iraq if one is going to actually be created.
And what I've been arguing for a long time is that that, in turn, is going to require an agreement between the United States and Iran, that only some sort of tacit understanding between Washington and Tehran can stabilize Iraq.
And I guess we could be encouraged by the fact that that seems to be happening in Afghanistan, the other war where Iran is now at the negotiating table with the United States and other world powers to figure out how to stabilize Afghanistan.
And it's been welcomed there by Richard Holbrooke and other U.S. officials saying we want to work with Iran on stabilizing Afghanistan.
So now the next step is to have to do that with Iraq as well.
Well, isn't it funny, you know, four years ago when I did that first interview of you on anti-war radio, the subject was Muqtada al-Sadr's proposal for a government of national salvation, as he called it.
He wanted to marginalize the Iranians and the Americans and make an alliance with the, I guess what we would now call the Awakening Council, the Sunni leaders of Anbar province and so forth.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, well, of course, you know, a lot has changed and there aren't really a lot of principles involved here in this Iraqi back and forth.
These are it's not like Democrats and Republicans, you know, in the United States talking about working together on something and being driven apart by ideology.
Most of these parties are, well, partly corrupt, but also, you know, willing to sacrifice principle in order for a share of power.
So any and all combinations might work.
The problem over the last several years with the Sadrists is while Muqtada al-Sadr is an Iraqi Arab, of course, and has a kind of an Arab and Iraqi nationalism about him over the last several years, especially he's been driven into the arms of Iran.
And I think it's safe to say is heavily dependent on Iran now for his political strength in Iraq.
So he's become kind of an ally of Tehran and less of a nationalist than he was back at the time that you're talking about.
Well, you know, you mentioned in your article, you say the administration is in something close to panic about Muqtada al-Sadr here.
But I wonder, what did they think was going to happen?
I mean, you say he was pushed into Iran's arms.
He's pushed into Iran's arms by the Americans.
And I mean, heck, when they lynched Saddam Hussein, the men with the machine guns in the cell phone footage there chanting Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada, I mean, who do they think they handed this country over to in the first place, you know?
Well, I don't I mean, that's a very complicated story.
Yes, he was he was rejected by the United States, but of course, he also was doing his own rejecting.
He was one of the few Iraqi leaders who utterly refused to cooperate with the American occupation, who demanded the immediate withdrawal of American forces.
And so he kind of, you know, settled into an anti-Americanism, which has characterized him all along.
The thought was in the United States that Sadr was marginalized.
And you may remember that Prime Minister Maliki went to war against Sadr in 2007, attacked him first in Basra, which is the the second city in Iraq down near the Gulf, and then went after his stronghold, Sadr City, it's called in Baghdad, and basically broke Sadr's political power, at least in terms of his militia and his his military units.
So Sadr and Maliki have been at war with each other since then.
That's why it's interesting and important that Maliki, who's trying to hold on to his job as prime minister, has been shepherded into an alliance apparently brokered by the Iranians with Sadr again.
And in fact, yesterday, I believe Maliki went, or maybe Monday, went down to meet Sadr in Qom, Iran, where he's studying, where Sadr is studying to be an ayatollah, I guess he's a cleric.
And that meeting was organized by the Shiite clergy in particular, and one ayatollah named al-Hayri, who was Sadr's mentor.
And so Maliki is now counting on Sadr as his key ally to bring him back to the job of prime minister.
And the question now is, yes, Maliki can make a deal, perhaps, with the Kurds that would give him enough votes to, you know, reclaim the job as prime minister.
But if he were to do that, and if he were to exclude the Sunnis and the secular parties that are grouped around Iyad Allawi, who you mentioned earlier, then it's likely that Iraq would start to fragment again.
All right, hold it right there, Bob.
Sorry, we got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Bob Dreyfuss from The Nation magazine.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Robert Dreyfuss from The Nation magazine.
He's the author of the book Devil's Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
And you want to know about what's going on in the Middle East.
You need some background puzzle pieces, you know, like the border.
When you're making a puzzle, get that border together first so that you understand the layout, what you're after.
Devil's Game.
You will learn so much reading that book.
I can't even tell you.
It will help you.
I promise you that.
OK, so the article in question here is Iraq.
New alliance takes shape against Maliki-Sadr bloc.
And we're talking about American and Iranian influence in Iraq and the struggle for a parliamentary majority.
I notice in here when we went out to break, Bob, you were saying that one of the risks here is that you could have something like the old civil war break back out again.
And I don't know if you can weave addressing this into that same direction you were going there.
But I noticed here that you say that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, now the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, has broken away from the Iraqi National Alliance, which is now, I guess, completely dominated by Muqtada al-Sadr.
And they're throwing in with the old prime minister, Alawi, right?
Well, they're trying to make that that deal.
They apparently there was a very raucous meeting of Alawi's party about a week or so ago.
And Alawi and his group decided to back the leader of the Supreme Council as their candidate for prime minister, since Alawi feels like he couldn't secure it for himself.
And then they were going to go ask the Kurds to come in and support them against Maliki and Sadr.
So you have a kind of bifurcation here with the Kurds in the middle, you know, having to decide whether they can pick one or the other of these coalitions, or as some of the Kurds like Barzani have suggested, you know, hold out for some sort of grand coalition involving everybody.
The problem there is, you know, who gets to be top dog and how is power shared and everything else?
But one thing that's worrying when it comes to the civil war aspect is that many of the armed Sunnis, the former insurgents who joined with the United States to form the Awakening Movement, or what the military called the Sons of Iraq, they're starting to become increasingly disillusioned about Maliki coming back to power, about the way the Sunnis are being treated, and they're drifting back in some key areas of the country into an insurgency, into possible alliance with the old Al Qaeda group in Iraq that was, you know, seemingly dismantled for the most part, but has carried out quite a few bombings over the last year or two.
So, you know, things are sort of poised on a razor's edge, I think, in Iraq.
And as I said at the beginning, if the United States and Iran can come to some sort of agreement, then maybe they can get their friends to paper over their differences and form something like an all points government.
But so far, it isn't clear like, you know, whether that can actually take place or not.
Is it just American politics that makes it where the politicians can't admit that they really imported the Iranian revolution?
And I mean, why can't they just say, look, it was George Bush's dumb policy to reverse what Reagan did and bring the Iranians into Iran.
But this is the deal and we have to deal with them.
Or it's just too much the political angle, I guess, is just that, no, they're Hitler's, they're devils and they're crazy and we can't deal with them.
Or else, if we can deal with them, then why can't we deal with them on the nuclear issue and everything else and just be, you know, regular states dealing with each other like states do instead of threats all the time?
Well, I think it's conventional wisdom now in Washington that, yes, indeed, by getting rid of Saddam, it was like, you know, tearing down the dike that had protected the Arab world from Iran for the two decades before that.
And therefore, now Iran has, you know, gained a tremendous influence in a country that it had previously fought an eight year long war with.
So sure, I think people are willing to admit that Iran has gained tremendously in Iraq.
I give Obama a lot of credit for trying to open a dialogue with Iran.
He promised that in the campaign.
He started it last year.
He sent letters back and forth to Iranian leaders and gave a whole series of speeches about how he wanted to negotiate with Iran.
And in fact, they did, you remember last fall, just about a year ago, reach an agreement over Iran's nuclear program that would have, I think, you know, paved the way for a lot of progress.
But that deal fell apart, not in the United States, but in Iran, it fell victim to radical politics inside Iran.
And unfortunately, the Obama people haven't really figured out how to pick up those pieces yet.
So they've fallen back on sanctions and on, you know, a kind of a containment strategy toward Iran, which is not going to lead, I don't think, to a lot of progress on the nuclear front.
So right now, I think what the Obama people are struggling with is how do we get the Iran negotiations back on track and have them mean something.
And there's three parts to that one is already underway in Afghanistan, where they're talking with Iran over stabilizing that there's about to be talks, I believe, in the next few weeks in Geneva, with Iran over the nuclear program, the Iranians say they're going to come back and restart those talks.
And perhaps they'll actually go somewhere this time.
And then the third part of it would be over Iraq, to sit down and have a dialogue with Iran about Iraq, which is not really, you know, unprecedented during the Bush administration, the US ambassador in Baghdad, had a series of meetings with the Iranian ambassador, who's actually a very senior Revolutionary Guard commander, over, over Iraq.
And so that could restart there, too.
So, I mean, it's possible to see negotiations developing over the next several months.
But it's also possible to see everything going to hell in a handbasket if, you know, these contacts and initial kind of moves don't bear any fruit.
And, and right now, I'd say it's about 5050.
Yeah, I wanted to go over a couple of things there.
In Iraq, we basically fought the war, in effect, to install the, the Supreme Islamic Council and Muqtada al-Sadr and these Iranian friendly people in power, but they're the majority, they don't really need us.
And, and it seems like a desperate situation that we have to deal with the Iranians, they're the ones who brokered the ceasefire before.
They're the ones who brokered Maliki as Prime Minister before and whatever, they have the influence there.
But in Afghanistan, I wonder whether America working with Iran there would just make matters worse, because I would just guess I don't really know.
But I would guess just on the history that they would be working with the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and the Hazaras and the Northern Alliance types that are working with the Americans against the Pashtun majority.
And eventually, the Pashtun majority are going to be the winners there when America leaves.
And I wonder whether bringing the Iranians in against them, if that is the case, if I'm not assuming too much there would, would be counterproductive in the same way bringing the Indians in has been counterproductive to our goal, our government's goals there?
Well, it, it may be counterproductive in one sense, but it's indispensable.
I mean, you can't have a stable Afghanistan, in which all the non Pashtun groups in in the north and the west of Afghanistan are seething with rage and anger over being pushed out of power, and are getting support from Russia and India and Iran.
So you need some kind of deal.
It's, I mean, it's self evident.
You can't have a stable Afghanistan with just these minorities in power, which is what we tried to do after 2001, when we supported what was then the Northern Alliance in pushing the Taliban out.
And you can't do it the other way either, you need a deal.
And so that means getting all of the interested parties, not just India and Russia and Iran, but also Saudi Arabia and China, and above all, Pakistan, to underwrite some kind of, you know, rebalancing of the Afghan government.
And that's the diplomatic trick here.
Simply making a deal with the Taliban is would be insane, because then you you alienate all the rest of Afghanistan and the Afghan army would break apart, and you'd have Afghan fall back into the kind of civil war that it existed in between the departure of the Soviet Union, and the takeover of the Taliban in the 1990s.
Yes, the same sort of thing going on in Iraq, where Petraeus made these promises to the Sunnis that he can't keep, it's not up to him.
The Awakening Councils and all.
I'd be careful about making parallels to, you know, analogies too strong between Afghanistan and Iraq.
They're really different situations.
But in Afghanistan, you, you have a clear history of, you know, a generation long civil war, which needs to get resolved.
And so far, it's not resolved.
And in Iraq, you have a situation where there wasn't a civil war going on in Iraq until very, very recently.
And I think a lot of the leaders there are more willing to, you know, compromise and make a deal because there's less, you know, sort of long existing bad blood.
Yeah, good point.
Good point.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Bob.
I really appreciate it.
I hope we can start doing these interviews on a more regular basis.
I really learn a lot every time we talk.
Thanks.
I appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Bob Dreyfuss, everybody from The Nation magazine.
And he's the author of the book Devil's Game.
And I know I tell you to read all kinds of things.
That's what the show is about.
Hey, guys, guess what you could read.
But Devil's Game is one that you actually go and get and get through.
You need it.