07/02/07 – Robert Dreyfuss – The Scott Horton Show

This is Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And introducing, welcoming back to the show, the great investigative reporter Robert Dreyfus.
He writes occasionally Fort Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Nation.
He's the author of, I would have to say, for people interested in what's going on in the Middle East, the most important book of the new millennium.
In terms of American, the history of American policy in the Middle East, Devil's Game, how the United States helped unleashed fundamentalist Islam.
Robert Dreyfus, welcome back to the show, sir.
My pleasure, thank you.
It's great to have you here.
And, well, I was going to start with a joke, but I realize now it's not that funny.
So I'll start with this terrible headline.
US says Iran using Hezbollah fighters in Iraq.
And this is the Associated Press.
In the International Herald Tribune today, Baghdad, a US general said Monday that Iran was using the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah as a proxy to armed Shiite militants in Iraq.
And that elite Iranian's Quds forces helped militants carry out a January attack in Karbala that killed five Americans.
The claims were an escalation in US accusations that Iran was fueling violence in Iraq, which Tehran has denied.
It was the first time the US military said that Hezbollah had a direct role.
Tell me, award-winning investigative reporter Robert Dreyfus, do you have any indication that this is true, that Hezbollah is now getting involved in the war in Iraq?
Well, you know, I mean, I think it's possible because pretty much everybody is involved in the war in Iraq now.
We've created a sinkhole, and there's no power within a thousand miles of Iraq that can avoid paying attention, because all of their national security interests could go right down that sinkhole.
It's a sinkhole if Iraq falls apart.
So not only the United States and the British and others, but Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Jordan and all the rest of the Arabs and other big powers, and everybody's got to start paying attention because we've created such a mess there.
So look, Hezbollah, I mean, they may be involved in creating some mischief there, but the fact is that Iran and the United States are pretty much the only countries left that are supporting the current Iraqi government.
Prime Minister Maliki has put together a Shiite regime in Baghdad, which is heavily pro-Iran, which has the full support of the Iranian government.
A top Iranian official just gave an interview to Newsweek over the weekend in which he said that, that we're fully supporting Maliki and so on, so if the Iranians are meddling in Iraq, it's mostly to keep this current government in power, which is also what the Bush administration is trying to do.
I think it's highly misleading to blame Iran for the trouble in Iraq.
In fact, almost all of the people who are fighting us are either Sunni insurgents who have been the backbone of the resistance for the last four and a half years, but also, to some degree, kind of some scattered Shiite resistance groups, some of them which are tied to Sudders, some which may get a limited amount of support from Iran, just so Iran can play all sides.
This is very complicated.
I don't think blaming, if the US military is trying to blame the mess in Iraq on Iran, then I would say that's pretty much ridiculous.
Yeah, they'd have to just take the blame themselves.
You know, it's funny, you look back to the lead-up to the war and you see that Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, their headquarters was in Tehran, and there are at least some in the CIA and the DIA.
Of course, everyone agrees that Chalabi works for himself first, but people in the DIA and the CIA say that he was actually helping lie us into war on behalf of Iran, and we can see that makes a lot of sense, I guess, that the Iranians would want to get the United States to help overthrow their old enemy, the Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists for them.
But I don't understand why it is that the United States of America insists on backing the Iran factions over every other faction in Iraq.
Is it simply because they're the only ones who need us and will ask us to stay?
No, I think that might be part of it, but I think it's more just pragmatic in the sense that we went into Iraq with a certain, well obviously no real plan, but with a dream or a hope that we could put in power these little exile proxies that we had, and that completely fell apart.
So we're now back on plan B or C or D, and since the Shia in Iraq make up about 60% of the population, I think that there's a lot of people in Washington who figure, well, so we're stuck with them because they're the ones who are running the country, so we've got to deal with their big players.
And so if they happen to be pro-Iran, we're stuck with that, because we can't bring the Sunnis back, and of course the Kurds can't rule the country.
So it's not like there's some grand design anymore operating, I think that the United States is just flailing about, reaching this way and that way, trying to find partners in Iraq, trying to fight whatever bad guys pop their heads up, we shoot at them.
And mostly just, I would imagine, keep the status quo until they can solve the dilemma here in Washington about whether to pull out or not, which is going to really become a serious debate starting in the fall.
Well, in your newest article for the nation, Saving Iraq, you talk about how the Iran parties are losing whatever support they had, that they're really just backed by America and Iran now, and that the masses of Shia Arabs in Iraq support the Muqtada al-Sadr faction over them any day, right?
Yeah, I think that's true.
Is this just a decision they made back in early 2004 sometime, and now they're stuck with it and they don't want to change their mind?
Well, the problem is that anybody in Iraq who has any political credibility among Iraqis starts with the premise that they want the United States to pull out of Iraq, and so it's hard for the United States to find allies in the country since any of them that have any political credibility want us to leave.
And so if you're the U.S. military, I guess you figure, well, we can't support them, we can't align ourselves with people like Sadr and with the Sunni resistance and all this kind of stuff, because they want us to get out of the country.
So who's left?
And who's left are these guys that we continually find ourselves in bed with, and I don't think there's a – it's not necessarily, even from the standpoint of the Bush administration, the best solution.
I'm sure that they would rather find some other friends, and as you know, the military recently has been arming and training some of the Sunni tribes and others to fight al-Qaeda, and so maybe they figure, well, we can build up that side of the equation in Iraq, but it's like now they're being accused, and I think rightly so, of arming both sides in the civil war.
And I guess there's some truth to that that's pretty much exactly what we're doing when we go into these Sunni neighborhoods and we find tribal leaders and we start arming their militias.
However, we spend all this time building up what's now essentially a Shiite army in Iraq, and now we're building up a Sunni army, so does that increase or decrease the possibility that when we leave there'll be a civil war?
I think it increases it.
And it just goes to prove the argument of those of us who've been saying this whole time that the sooner we get out the better, those of us who were saying that in 2003 and saying that all through 2004 and 2005, here we created the El Salvador option, they called it, let's hire local Shiites to create death squads to go around killing the leaders of the Sunni insurgency, that'll stop them.
And all the Sunnis did was say, well, fine, I guess we have to lie ourselves with Al-Qaeda then, and joined up with Al-Qaeda, they start blowing up mosques and everything.
The whole sectarian war gets worse and worse, and now we're going to try to undo the Salvador option by backing the local Sunni resistance that we supported the El Salvador option against in the first place?
Well, see, that's what I'm trying to say, that there's not some big master plan going on.
I mean, this is just, you know, I don't know, they're attacking.
It's like, you know, if you're on a car, the analogy I used, if you're riding in a car and you hit a patch of ice and you start steering wildly this way and that way every time your wheels spin in a different direction, that's kind of what we're doing in Iraq.
We're not operating according to some grand design of here's step one, and then comes step two, and then comes three, four, and five, and everything will be good.
It's more like, woo, we're driving like nuts.
And so one day, you know, you have the ambassador in Iraq saying that the big problem is the Sunni resistance, and we've got to knock them out first.
And then the next thing they say is, no, the big problem is the Shiite death squads and militias.
And then they go, no, no, no, I meant that the big problem is the Sunnis, and we're back fighting them again.
And now we're arming them.
I mean, if you look at the statements of these, you know, various officials over the last few months, you just see that pattern over and over again.
They don't even know who the enemy is.
It sure, I tell you who it isn't.
It sure isn't this little rag-tag thing called al-Qaeda.
I mean, that's where they're trying to now put all the emphasis, as if, you know, this group called al-Qaeda is the, you know, the main enemy when, in fact, a very tiny percent of both the fighters in Iraq and the population as a whole.
So I guess, you know, I continue to be amazed at the utter lack of anything that resembles a plan.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with the great investigative reporter, Robert Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game.
And now, well, to that point, the generals have said over and over again that al-Qaeda is simply the smallest part of the insurgency, that they give it, what, two or three percent or something out of a couple, a few tens of thousands of Sunni insurgents.
The tiniest proportion of them, according to the American generals on the ground, are al-Qaeda.
And yet, as you point out, we see, especially just in the last couple of few weeks, this propaganda push, I don't know what else to call it, to accuse everybody in Iraq who fights or resists the occupation of being al-Qaeda.
Chris Floyd wrote a great article called Smearing the Dead from, I think it was Bakuba or something, where American helicopters came in and blew up the local Shiite militia men, just the local neighborhood security force, who were working with the Iraqi police in a joint operation with the Americans.
The Iraqi police said, hey, the Americans are coming and disappeared.
Boom.
And the local militia guys went, huh, and looked up and here comes some Cobras and Apaches and blew them all to hell.
And then all the press releases all over the world say, oh, yeah, well, they were al-Qaeda fighters and our guys are heroes for saving the world from them.
Yeah, well, that's why I say I don't think, you know, there's no more coherent plan to this surge and what, you know, what they're trying to accomplish and Who's making this policy?
Is this Stephen Hadley and George Bush and Dick Cheney sitting around hashing this out?
Does anybody have, do they even think they have any idea what they're doing?
I think, you know, if you asked individually in the Bush administration, you know, what, you know, what should we be doing in Iraq?
You might get different answers from all those people.
But the problem is the administration is so utterly divided that, you know, what you see coming out of their decision making process is, as always, a ridiculous compromise among people who want to approach everything in a different way.
And so I think you're getting contradictory, you know, strategies from all of the chief cooks in this mess, you know, and again, I don't think that's what, you can't look at it and say, okay, well, here's the plan because literally there is no plan.
Never did have one this whole time.
All right, well, somebody has a plan though, right?
And this is something you've been writing about since at least last December.
In fact, you were the first interview on anti-war radio discussing your article Bush's meeting with a murderer about, again, the plan such as it is basically being back the Iran factions against everybody else.
And how back then there was arising this new kind of popular front within the Iraqi parliament to create a new nationalist government to basically overthrow Maliki and create a new nationalist government that would insist on American departure.
So can you fill us in on what's been going on these last few months in terms of that national front?
Well, the first thing you have to say is that the population of Iraq, the massive majority of at least the Arab part, the Shia and the Sunni Arabs, want the United States to leave.
And to accomplish that end, there are at least five or six different political parties within the Iraqi framework, plus the armed fighters who are not necessarily part of the political process but also want the United States to leave.
Now, the problem is for this force that wants the United States to leave Iraq, which is also, by the way, anti-Iran and anti-Al-Qaeda, so they've got, you know, these sort of nationalist Iraqis have three separate opponents, the United States, al-Qaeda, and Iran.
For them to coalesce into a ruling majority is going to take some real doing because the United States is opposing it.
We're putting all the pressure we can on all of these Iraqi politicians to hold the current government together or perhaps to, you know, purge a few more people we don't like from the current government.
So we'd be left with just the two Shia parties, the Skiri and Dawa, and the two Kurdish parties as the core of something called the Iraqi government.
But that government would have no zero support outside of Baghdad.
Right, this is the one we've really been supporting all along, the Iran-slash-Kurdish compromise.
Right, now, on the other side, the nationalists that you mentioned before, those people include more and more Shia.
And I think you have to put Muqtada al-Sadr in that camp, this kind of wild-eyed cleric who, whatever else he is, he's not a stooge of either Iran or the United States.
There's also a party called the Virtue Party or Fadila Party.
Can I stop you right there on Sadr?
And don't let me forget what we're talking about here, the overall umbrella view of the nationalist grouping.
But all the propaganda is that Sadr is a tool of Iran.
Tell me that's not so.
Well, that's not true at all.
I mean, it's possible that some of Sadr's army, his militia, has been infiltrated by or taken over by Iran.
But that's different than saying that he himself is somehow a stooge of Iran.
In fact, after the American ambassador, Ryan Crocker, held a meeting, as you may remember, in Baghdad with the Iranian ambassador, looking to come up with some kind of U.S.
-Iranian accord on how to stabilize the Iraqi mess.
Mokhadeh Sadr issued a statement after that meeting saying, I guess the Iranians somehow forgot to demand that the United States leave Iraq, because from what the Iranian ambassador said, that didn't even figure into it.
Now, that's not a very good way for him to talk about his bosses.
No, and that's because these are simply not his bosses.
I mean, anybody who has any role in Iraq has got to have some respect for Iranian influence.
It's not like you can just dismiss them.
They're a huge power and they're right next door.
But, again, that's not the same thing as saying that Mokhadeh Sadr is an Iranian stooge.
It comes out that way sometimes in American propaganda because we have to tar anybody who is not an American stooge, and certainly he isn't that.
So, you know, when this so-called surge first started, a lot of the talk was the main target of this surgeification that was going to be going on was going to be Sadr and his forces.
Right.
But he was smart enough to stay out of the fight and to not challenge the United States militarily.
And so, you know, it's almost like we've been trying to pick a fight with him, provoke – he says, you know, they're trying to provoke my people into, you know, some, you know, outburst that then they could use to, you know, justify a crackdown.
Again, not because they're pro-Iranian, but because Sadr is a nationalist who's not playing the game of let's see who can be most pro-American.
And, yeah.
Well, I just think that's so important because it's not just that it's a lie, but it's the exact opposite of the truth.
You know what I mean?
We're calling this guy a stooge of Iran and going after him because he's not a stooge of Iran, and we're doing all this in favor of Iran's stooges.
Well, you may remember that last December the American troops in Iraq and the CIA, apparently, raided the headquarters of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
They have a huge compound in downtown Baghdad.
And, lo and behold, they managed to find in this compound several top officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who were consorting and consulting on providing weapons and other kinds of support to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is the main religious Shiite party that's part of the government.
And there's a long pattern.
I just wrote a big piece for the American Prospect last month about the Shia.
This Supreme Council group was founded in Iran in 1982 by Ayatollah Khomeini and the Revolutionary Guard.
And its entire existence for the next 20 years until the American invasion of Iraq was as an adjunct of Iran's intelligence and military.
And all of its leaders were in Tehran.
All of its troops and its brigades, the Badr Brigade, were maintained and armed and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
So this party is intimately connected to Iran.
So they turn around and say, yeah, we support them and to invite the Hakim family to the White House, when they're the main Iranian allies in Iraq, and then say, and we're going after Sadr because he's pro-Iranian.
That just makes no sense.
Right.
Okay, now, I'm sorry, because there's another tangent I could go off from there, but I'll try to get back to it.
Tell me about this Fadila party.
Well, Fadila party is also a Sadrist party in that there's a cleric that is kind of their spiritual leader who is a follower of Muqaddas Sadr's father and uncle, who are long-time respected, you know, fundamentalists, of course, clerics in the Shia community.
But they're separate from Muqaddas Sadr's force, so they have a separate party.
I think they have 15 seats in the parliament, and Sadr's group has about 30 seats.
So right there, you've got 45 members of the Iraqi parliament who are Shia and probably another 10 who are independent Shia.
So that's like 55 who are not really supportive anymore of the Maliki government.
Fadila pulled out of the government a few months ago.
And now you say in your most recent article, Saving Iraq and the Nation, that these groups are making an alliance with Sunni Arabs, with Kurds, with Christians, Turkmen, whoever they can find to form this nationalist front.
That's right.
They've been reaching out to two groups, really, especially.
One is the Sunnis, who have another 55 seats in the parliament.
So combined with the Shia, that makes 110.
And then to the secular party of Iyad Allawi, who's an old former Baathist who had a lot of ties to British intelligence, and then the CIA, who's got, I think, about 25 seats in the parliament.
He was the interim prime minister for a year or so there.
He was.
That's right.
So that brings you up to around 135 seats.
So you're getting close to a majority in the parliament, which would be 138.
And so the question is, could these groups come to an agreement with a handful of other parties and so forth to have a parliamentary vote of no confidence in the government?
But they call it the national salvation government, and it's been almost a year since this idea first came up.
And of course, every time it starts to come to fruition, the American commander in Iraq or the American ambassador start to knock heads together and threaten people and say, you know, we're not allowing this to happen.
Right.
And then we see the leaks in the media, too, that say Maliki's worried about a coup d'etat.
Yeah.
Well, and the odd thing is, you know, the whole point of the surge, if you remember, was to create political space in Baghdad for a national reconciliation.
And at this point, this national reconciliation between the Sunnis and Shia is happening outside of the people we're supporting.
The people who are blocking this reconciliation are the Shia parties that we're supporting who won't make any deal over how to divide up Iraq's oil, who won't make any deal about reintegrating the former Ba'athists into the bureaucracy again, who won't make any deal about amending the Constitution, who keep blocking every effort to come up with a unified plan to rebuild the Iraqi military and intelligence service.
So all of these things, the so-called 18 benchmarks that are, you know, put into law now in the United States, none of them are being met by the Maliki government.
The future of Kirkuk and the battle over the Kurds, all these things need to be dealt with.
They're immensely complicated.
And Maliki and his friends are, like, sitting there, you know, squatting in the road, blocking any effort to reach a deal over these things.
And we keep saying, oh, well, we're putting, you know, pressure on Maliki to do it.
Maybe we are, but it's impossible for him to do it because he has no political support.
He has no constituency.
Yeah, I think the most important lesson here for everyone is the, well, it's some kind of lesson about the American media.
Bob, we don't hear this discussion anywhere in the American media.
Well, you know that there's a ton of people just waiting to form a nationalist government to end the war, to work everything out, if only we would get out of their way.
Talk about a lie by omission.
Here we're having this entire debate that you describe, but without the facts that you're bringing to the table today.
Well, I mean, once in a while it gets into the media, the small bits and pieces, but, you know, I don't think that most Americans, fortunately, unfortunately, whatever, are paying attention to the details of what's happening in Iraq.
I think they get the paper and they see that, you know, like yesterday there were five more Americans killed, and right now, you know, they've become sick of the war, and they've expressed that through their votes and everything else.
But I blame the media less than the population in that I think the media, as they usually do, is, you know, giving the public what they want.
And unfortunately, the public is not interested enough in the details of Iraqi politics for it to become a focus of media attention.
And it's an accomplishment, I would say, so far that we've gotten the public to even, you know, deal, grapple with the fact that this war has gotten out of control.
If you remember, it wasn't too long ago that this war had, you know, quite a bit of public support, including at the beginning of the war in 2003, despite all the, you know, informed comments saying that it was going to be a disaster if we pursued it.
The president had at that point still a great deal of public support, and now that public support has eroded.
So I don't know, I have trouble saying that the media is the problem.
The two big problems, the ones we need to focus on, are the fact that the Bush administration is still running the show, and badly, and that the American public hasn't shown the appetite for demanding, you know, the kind of news that they would get.
They'd rather hear about Paris Hilton, and that's what they get from the media.
They don't have a conspiracy by the media to, you know, divert people's attention with Paris Hilton, but they look at their rating numbers and they say, yeah, this is what these people want.
They want to see the stuff of a Paris Hilton, and so, you know, even Paris Hilton says it's dumb.
Yeah, I saw that quote.
She said, I think they should talk about the war in Iraq instead.
Yeah, well, I think she knows where Iraq is, but, you know, the media aren't crusaders who are out to grab Americans by the lapels and shake them until they respond.
The media is a profit-oriented system, for the most part, that goes where the money is.
And right now, the money is not on, you know, intricate reporting about Iraq.
Now, that said, I mean, I'm not defending the media completely because they ought to be, you know, raising all of these questions that I'm raising repeatedly with the president, with, you know, elected officials, in Congress, and so forth, and, you know, hammering away.
But, again, if you know a lot of these reporters, they themselves don't understand the situation.
The ignorance of Iraq is not only deep, but it's broad, and so it isn't just our elected officials who have trouble knowing the difference between a Sunni and a Shia in Iraq or knowing whether Al Qaeda is a Sunni or Shiite group and so forth.
But even reporters, you know, the ones in Washington, they're clueless about the intricacies of Iraqi politics.
You know, they're much more interested in what's Hillary saying about the war, what's Obama saying, you know, what is Congress going to do, are the Democrats going to cut off funding?
And so it's all that kind of, you know, fairly simplistic looking at, you know, who's saying what among the politicians and much less people willing to get down in the weeds and say, I want to tell you about, you know, what's happening in Iraq today, besides the fact that five Americans got blown up.
They want to know what's happening with Iraqi politicians and, you know, what's happening with Iraq's neighbors.
That stuff starts to get really complicated.
Unfortunately, Americans just tune out.
Yeah, it oftentimes seems to me like the reporters get the job based on how ignorant they are.
Like, you don't know anything about Iraq, do you?
OK, you got the job.
Kind of like Doug Fyfe interviewing, who was it that was some CIA guy or something where Doug Fyfe said, do you speak Arabic?
And he said, yeah, fluent in Arabic.
And he said, oh, that's too bad.
You don't get the job.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I want to see you on hardball, damn it.
Why?
I got Bob Dreyfus on the phone here.
He's one of the best investigative reporters that I can find to explain what the hell's going on in Iraq for years now.
I've turned to this guy.
All I have to do is say, Bob, what the hell's going on here?
And he tells me what's going on here.
What's so difficult that Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson can't call up Bob Dreyfus and get him on the freaking show, man?
Well, I can't help you there.
Sorry.
But yeah, it is frustrating, though, because honestly, I don't think it really is all that complicated.
You know, you just picture a map of Iraq in your head and you put labels on a few different factions and you understand, OK, Dawah and Skiri, that means they're the Iran factions, the Mahdi army, that's Sadr and his nationalist guys.
We know who the Baathists are.
We know who the Kurds are.
We don't have to know the name of every individual in Iraq to understand what's going on here.
I think you can get the point across to me and my audience in 45 minutes just fine.
And if we were really pressed for time, you could probably get your point across in 15.
Well, I mean, I will agree with that.
And as far as the media not grasping these things, that isn't true just in Iraq.
I mean, most media people, unfortunately, are not specialists.
And so they get an assignment.
You know, I once did a story about the National Rifle Association.
And it turns out I had been writing about that organization for a while and I went down to their convention.
I think it was when they were in Dallas, Texas.
And I found that the reporters who'd been told to go cover the National Rifle Association didn't know anything about it at all.
And they're flying into Dallas to go to their annual convention.
And they didn't know who the board of directors was and they didn't know who the staff and the political leaders were.
And, you know, maybe they knew something about, oh, this is Guy Wayne LaPierre, who I guess is important.
And so they were all coming to me saying, can you explain, like, what's happening here and who are these people?
And I was not exactly an expert, but I'd spent a few months off and on writing about it.
And so these were people parachuting in.
And that happens time and time again with the media, where, you know, people go and they listen to speeches and they get the press release and they interview a couple of experts who they've Googled or something, and then that's their story.
And it's not, you know, the media doesn't come at this, unfortunately, with a great, you know, wealth of stored-up expertise.
All right, let me try to get back to this tangent here real quick that I wanted to follow up on from the Hezbollah story and the Associated Press today.
Apparently, this general is claiming that, was it, Brigadier General Kevin Burgner, a U.S. military spokesman, claimed that the Iranian Quds Force was behind the January attack in Karbala, the kidnapping and execution of those American soldiers, and it was suspected at the time by some that it was Iran behind it, that because Bush was ratcheting up the pressure and making threats on TV, sending more ships to the Persian Gulf, that the Iranians had done this as an example of how easily they can get to our guys in Iraq, even driving our Suburbans wearing our uniforms, kidnap our guys and murder them.
Do you know anything about that?
Can you confirm that or deny it or anything?
You know, I remember the incident, of course, very well, and in terms of being able to know whether Iran was behind it or not, I just don't have information that would tell me either way, but I guess I'm skeptical only because now they're coming to this late and saying, oh yeah, we've looked into this and we've decided that Iran is responsible.
I don't know.
Yeah, it sounds like they want to try to use it as an extra piece for their case, an excuse for war, where to me, if I've got to spin it, I'll spin it the way I just did.
This was a warning, and this is to me a big clue why we ought to not get into a war with Iran.
Yeah, I mean, look, Iran is by far now the biggest power in Iraq.
We've come pretty close to just handing Iran control of this country and putting their people in power, and it isn't that they have to then fight us in military terms.
They can just afford to sit back and let things develop as they would otherwise develop, and it'll end up falling into their hands.
So I think if we're going to get out of Iraq, unfortunately, it's going to start with us going to the Iranians, but also other Iraqi neighbors, and working out some sort of regional arrangement, and that means giving Iran something.
It means making a deal with Iran where they're willing to give up some influence in Iraq and rein in some of these Shia forces that are out of our control.
And we're going to do that instead of just turning it over to the nationalists who are waiting in the wings right now.
Well, we can't destroy these pro-Iranian forces.
They're powerful.
There's got to be a compromise.
But what I'm saying is that you can take into account the Iraqi nationalists, you can take into account the Shia pro-Iran parties, you can take into account what Iran's interests are and Saudi Arabia's and Turkey's and everybody else's, and try to come up with something that makes everybody happy enough that the war stops.
And I think that's doable.
I think you can achieve that if it's carried out under United Nations auspices and internationalizing the crisis and everything else.
But it's not something that we can solve ourselves as the United States, and it's certainly not something that we can solve militarily.
So you think we need to get the United Nations in on it?
In what way?
Well, I mean, at least in a hundred ways, in coming up with perhaps peacekeeping forces, but more importantly, getting the United Nations in to negotiate this national compact that we seem unable to negotiate, providing a forum for all of Iraq's neighbors to then exert a certain influence over their proxies inside Iraq.
And so if we can work through the United Nations, then perhaps the United Nations could come up with an internal forum for a national reconciliation and an external one involving all of Iraq's neighbors.
I'm not saying this is easily done, but it's the only way of preventing this war from spiraling out of control.
I mean, it could fail now that things have gotten so bad.
There's no more guarantees that any of this is going to work, because we've made such a mess of it.
Well, everybody, you see why when I want to know, I turn to Robert Dreyfus to explain.
He's a freelance investigative reporter, writes for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Nation magazine.
He's the author of Devil's Game, how the United States helped unleash fundamentalist Islam.
His latest one in The Nation is called Saving Iraq, and you can find all he writes and his blog and everything at robertdreyfus.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
I appreciate it.
Pleasure, Scott.