10/02/08 – Robert Dreyfuss – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's Chaos Radio 92.7 FM in Austin.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show Robert Dreyfuss.
He's a reporter for The Nation and author of The Absolutely Indispensable Devil's Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Thanks.
It's a pleasure to be on, as always.
Well, it's very good to have you here, and you have a very interesting new article here in The Nation about the so-called Sons of Iraq, the concerned local citizens, end of Iraq's awakening?
Question mark.
I guess I didn't pronounce that quite correctly.
End of Iraq's awakening is the title.
So here we are.
It's October 2nd.
Yesterday was the deadline, right?
There's this transfer of power where the Sons of Iraq, which we used to call the Sunni insurgency, the dead-enders and terrorists and Saddamists is what Donald Rumsfeld called them, the people who were the Iraqi resistance who killed about 4,000 of our guys resisting occupation over the years.
They were bribed, basically, after losing Baghdad to the Shiite militias with the help of the American government.
They basically had a ceasefire with the Americans and with the Iraqi government, accepted our government's money, and went to war against the more radical elements, and have more or less been going along with the occupation for about the last year, year and a half or so, I guess.
Is that about right?
Well, yes, except I think it might be wrong to say that they were bribed.
In fact, for two years or so, they were kind of begging us to help them, because they were sick and tired of Al-Qaeda, and also because they were growing more and more fearful of Iran's influence in Iraq.
And finally, around the summer of 2006, the United States decided, oh, well, maybe we ought to try these guys.
And it all started to come together.
We've been paying them, but of course, that's because the Iraqi government won't pay them, and they do need money if they're going to be a militia.
But otherwise, I agree with you, they've been the stabilizing force in much of northern and western Iraq, below the Kurdish areas, and above the capital, and out into Anbar province, and they've pretty much eliminated most of the bad guys, I'm sure, without respecting their civil rights, they've pretty much eliminated Al-Qaeda from the scene in Iraq.
So now, they're in the process of being marginalized again, because we handed over the contract for these paramilitary forces, the Awakening Movement, to the Iraqi government.
And it looks like it might be the end for them, because the Shiite government is fairly sectarian, and although they're talking to the United States, and saying, oh yeah, we're going to integrate them into our security forces, in fact, they're probably just going to go exterminate them.
Now, if we rewind, the Americans hired, in what they called the El Salvador Option, they hired the Shiite militias, the Badr Corps, and the Mahdi Army, to go after the leaders of the Sunni insurgents, and so-called Al-Qaeda in Iraq, back in 2004, and that's really what led to the civil war in the first place, right?
It didn't work, as you just said, it was the Sunnis themselves who finally got sick of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and got rid of them.
Yeah, I mean, we didn't know what we were doing, when we first went into Iraq.
We didn't understand the complex rivalries between ethnic and sectarian groups there, we certainly didn't understand clearly enough the connections that many of the Shiite religious parties had to Iran.
We were willing to go in and cooperate with anybody who cooperated with us, and so when the Sunnis, most of whom were in favored positions in the previous regime, started fighting back, and the Shiites offered to help, we were thankful and said, go to it.
There was really two levels of the civil war.
There was first a more targeted kind of assassination effort that the Shiite death squads launched, that was targeting prominent Sunni leaders, former military officers and air force pilots and intellectuals and former Ba'athists and others, and thousands of them were assassinated.
It didn't become a civil war, really, until the ethnic cleansing element started to take shape, and that was a little bit later.
That was kind of, oh, probably starting in late 2005 and early 2006, with the bombing of that big mosque up in Samarra, and that's when the Sadr crowd kind of jumped in, and they were fairly bloodthirsty and fanatical, and that's when the Sunnis and Shia began to really go to war on a personal sort of mass scale basis, and that's when these neighborhoods started getting cleaned out.
Well now, as we've talked over the years, Bob, you've described how the Sadrists really are Arab nationalists, even though it's obviously a religious group of Shiites, that they basically, if we go back, well, if we go all the way back to, say, the original battle of Fallujah and Najaf in April of 2004, I remember reports of Mahdi army fighters all hopping in the back of the pickup truck to go help fight in Fallujah, that kind of thing, and then, actually my first interview for Anti-War Radio was December 2006, it was you, and the topic was the National Salvation Front, which I'm not sure if that's the same thing you're referring to, I don't believe so, in this recent article, but the government of national salvation, where the Sadrists nationalists were trying to make a deal with the Sunni resistance nationalist types in order to marginalize the Dawah Party, Supreme Islamic Council types, and basically come together with a new government on agreement on basically two things, limiting the influence of Iran and of the United States.
Yeah, that current has always been there, it's been, you know, more or less likely or possible depending on conditions in Iraq, and as the civil war worsened, it became more difficult to try to unite across those sectarian divides to come up with a nationalist coalition, you might have noticed, we're now into 2008, there still isn't one, the country is still run by the same kind of Kurdish-Shiite alliance that has been running the place since the elections of 2005, so as yet, at least, the nationalists, the people who are more secular minded and more concerned about retaking Iraq back from the American occupation, and as you point out, reducing Iran's influence, they've been unable, at this point, to unite either to form a parliamentary majority, which conceivably they could do if they put the right, you know, package together, or to form a kind of a majority block on the streets.
The elections that are coming up in a few months are provincial elections, so they won't affect the makeup of the parliament, but they will probably strengthen on all sides on the provincial level, these nationalist forces, especially on the Sunni side, because the Sunnis boycotted the last round.
But the important point to make here is that the idea that the 2007-2008 surge has been some dramatic accomplishment that has led to victory in Iraq is really quite foolhardy.
We put a lot more troops in, and they managed to sit on the pressure cooker lid, especially in Baghdad, quite well, but the fundamental problems remain, and one of the points of my writing this week is that now that we're handing the responsibility for the Sunnis over to the Shiite government, things could very well explode.
I interviewed a commander, one of the founders of the Awakening Movement, or Sons of Iraq, in the Baghdad area, which covers this big sweep of suburbs west of the city, and they're under tremendous pressure, both overt and covert.
There have been a wave of assassinations.
He told me, his name is Abu Azam, he told me that hundreds of his people have been assassinated just in the last few months, and that it's clear that the Sons of Iraq leaders are expecting certainly nothing positive, and in fact, quite fearful of what's going to happen now that the Iraqi government is taking over the responsibility for those groups.
And there's a very great chance that many of them will go back underground on the Sunni side and become a resistance movement again.
If anything, this time they'll be better organized and better armed.
It is a little bit worrying that in assembling these Sons of Iraq groups, we have fingerprinted and retina scanned and otherwise ID'd all of these people.
So presumably, if we wanted to, we could hand over that information to the Iraqi government, and I think there would be something approaching a genocidal response from their side.
Still, I think it's very likely that there'll be some sort of increased level of violence if the Maliki government decides to go after these guys, as they expect will happen.
Alright, now, just to make sure everybody's on the same page here, because this is complicated stuff, and it's really a shame.
I think probably a lot of what's going on in Iraq is the result of how complicated it is and how oversimplified Americans have to put it to each other, not just you and I talking on the radio, but the people in the Pentagon and State Department, too, when they deal with this kind of thing.
But basically, there are two main factions among the Shiites.
The Sadrists on one side, and then the Badr Corps, an alliance, really, between the Dawah Party and the Supreme Islamic Council.
They're the owners of the Badr Corps on the other side.
And then the Sunnis now, it seems like as long as they've hired these guys, the former Sunni insurgency, and called them the sons of Iraq, if they go back to war, it's going to be a lot more difficult to get away with calling them all Al-Qaeda in Iraq, when these are all the same people we've been paying to fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and who've basically had a ceasefire this whole time.
But we've been able to see this coming.
I mean, the whole time that they've done this concerned local citizens, sons of Iraq thing, it's been in the papers.
The quotes from guys in the government saying, we're never going to accept these people, and the sons of Iraq saying, they're never going to accept us.
This isn't any kind of long-term solution.
And they've been saying this for a year and a half now, all over the place.
Well, that's all true.
I think it was tactical on the Americans' part, you know, we didn't have too much choice if we wanted to stabilize the country to support these Sunnis, but I don't think we had any clear plan on the American side about what to do.
We were kind of hoping and wishing and praying that the Iraqi government would come to some sort of political deal with the Sunnis that would allow them a much greater share of power in the central government.
And Maliki, I'm sure, was telling us all along, oh, don't worry, don't worry, I've got this reconciliation thing in hand, and it's coming, and we're going to make a deal with those Sunnis, and it's your bottom dollar that, you know, everything's going to be okay.
And in fact, it wasn't okay.
And they haven't made deals yet.
And so now, you know, now we're stuck with the fact that we've supported these Sunnis.
We'd certainly like to get a reconciliation in place, but I can't believe that the United States will put its troops on the line to defend them, because the Shiites are the majority, and we've created a government of that majority.
And so we have to decide if we're going to take sides in the civil war or not.
And I think the Sunnis are probably right that ultimately the United States will abandon them to their own devices.
Well now, here we get back into the question of the split on the Shiite side between the Saudis, who, best I can tell, really have broad-based support inside Iraq, versus the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party, who seem to have much less, although they have the Badr Corps.
And yet at the same time, it seems like over the years, as Saudi has been resisting the American occupation and the Maliki government, which he dropped out of fairly quickly after joining the coalition there, it seems like the more he ever resisted us, the more we blamed Iran for all of his resistance, even though Iran was really backing the Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Council, the same guys as us.
And now we've literally driven him into the arms of Iran with all those false accusations.
He's in Iran right now studying for his next religious degree and all that.
So what role do you think that he and the Iranian government are going to play in this?
Well, I agree with most of what you said, but I think, you know, as we've watched this develop, it's clear that Iran was playing all sides in this.
And we may have driven Sadr into Iran's arms, but on the other hand, it was, on both sides, it was probably a fairly willing embrace, because ultimately, you know, Sadr wasn't getting American support, and the Iranians were willing to offer money and weapons.
So I think he was quite happy to embrace them when it came to that.
But the Iranians have kept all of their irons in the fire, as far as the Shiites go.
They have connections to virtually all of the political and religious forces in Iraq among the Shiites, plus a huge economic presence there in terms of banks and electricity and investments of all kinds.
Well, but what about the split in policy between a strong central Arab nationalist government versus a strong federal system and a Shia-Stan in alliance with Iran, which seems to be what the Supreme Council guys want?
Right.
What's sort of happening now is there's a new wrinkle on that, in the way that Maliki, who's, as you mentioned, he's from the Dawa party, which is a kind of a small party of intellectuals that's about 50 years old.
It was founded in the late 1950s in Iraq.
Maliki didn't have a militia attached to his party.
So initially, he came to power with support of Sadr, and used that to kind of elbow out the candidate from the Supreme Council.
Then when he was in power, he kind of double-crossed Sadr, and he formed this alliance with the Supreme Council.
And now what he's doing is he's using the Iraqi army kind of as his own militia.
And he's built up these ties to the United States, and he's tried to carve out for himself this centrist role, you know, I'm the commander of the army, and he's working with Americans to build up the Iraqi army and police.
And he's now kind of in his own little political struggle with the Supreme Council.
There was one report today, in fact, that he's trying to reach out to Sadr again.
But what happened over the last year and a half is when Sadr almost came to blows with the Iraqi government, with Maliki and the Badr group and all those forces, the Iranians stepped in, and they basically brokered a series of ceasefires.
They first told Sadr to calm down and declare a ceasefire last August, over a year ago, which he did.
And it was one of the main reasons why the violence ebbed in Iraq over the last year.
Well, you know, I think Gareth Porter showed that when Maliki launched the assault on the Sadrists in Basra in March, that that was actually a short circuit of Dick Cheney and David Petraeus' plan to wage some sort of full-scale war against the Mahdi army this summer, and that Maliki sort of beat them to the punch, but then kind of half-assed it and botched it, and then got the Iranians to work out a peace deal there, too, which was actually, I guess, in a sense, him covering for Sadr, protecting him.
Well, I'm not sure we know enough about the relationship between all those parties.
I think that Maliki launched an offensive against Sadr.
I don't quite understand how he was covering for him.
In fact, he launched two offensives.
One was in Basra, and one was in Sadr City, and many thousands of Sadrists were killed in those offensives, both by the Iraqi army and by American airpower.
But certainly, the Iranians did step in, and they brought all of the Shiite powers to meet with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and they kind of brokered a ceasefire in which Sadr has almost now been removed from the scene.
I mean, he's disappeared.
His forces have disappeared.
As far as we know, they've all gone completely to ground.
I think that that's eerie and worrisome, in a way, because I think that what the Iranians are doing is they're saying, okay, we can stabilize Iraq, saying to the United States, we can help quiet things down in Iraq.
Now, you know, we want you guys to deal with us.
And there has been something of a U.S.
-Iran, I wouldn't call it rapprochement, but certainly a dialogue since the Bush administration reversed course a couple years ago.
And we've started talking to Iran, and we've, you know, kind of backed off on the threats that we're going to, you know, blame Iran for everything.
And as a result, you know, things have improved between Washington and Tehran quite a bit.
But if something hasn't worked out, if the U.S.
-Iran relationship, you know, were to take a wrong turn again, I think that Iran could make life pretty miserable inside Iraq for the United States.
And that's when you might see the Sadrist movement begin to come back, or to come back in another form.
Some of these so-called special groups could start to launch their IED attacks again.
There's a lot of cards that Iran can play in Iraq, and very few cards that we can play if we're not willing to go to war against Iran.
I think we're not only not willing to do that, but we don't have the capability for that, the capacity.
So I think Iran is, to a large degree, in the driver's seat.
And Maliki, maybe with a somewhat inflated sense of his own strategic genius, is now starting to flex his muscles.
And he's, you know, playing a somewhat contradictory game.
He's saying, we want, to the United States, I want you to keep building up my army and my police, I want you to train and equip them, I want you to finance all that, but I want you to also get out of my country, and here's the timetable.
And so, you know, I think he's calculating that the United States can't afford to abandon him, and yet can't afford to completely challenge or confront him.
So that's the struggle that's underway now, is kind of a test of will between the Iraqis, who are somewhat, you know, behind the scenes, more than somewhat, supported by Iran, and the United States, which is kind of stuck with this sectarian Shiite government that we put in place, and we're negotiating, you know, the future of the American occupation there.
It's got to be worked out over the next three months, or there is no basis, and we have to leave.
So we need to work out this status of forces agreement, and that's where Maliki is, you know, trying to sort of play it both ways, you know.
He's standing up, trying to build up his credibility as an Iraqi leader, as a nationalist, defending Iraqi sovereignty.
On the other hand, he's doing everything he can to get the United States to stick around, because he's worried that if we leave too fast, that his forces aren't ready to stand up to the Sunnis.
They're not ready to stand up, you know, in a civil war situation.
Then I think he'd be required to call on Iran directly, to come in and help, and that would be, you know, a very destabilizing and dangerous move.
So this whole thing is very dangerous and explosive.
It's kind of poised to blow up in the face of the next president.
Do you think that Maliki really thinks that he can do without us, or is he just playing politics because he's got to look like he's standing up to us to have any kind of support from the Iraqi people at all?
I mean, the Iraqi population, Shia or Sunni, they don't want to be dominated by Iranian-backed parties any more than I want to be dominated by Canadians.
Yeah, well, the fact, however, is that the Egyptian people may not want to be dominated by Mubarak, but they are.
It's not so easy for the people's voice to be expressed in countries where power and money and guns are in concentrated hands.
So whatever the Iraqi people want, you know, Maliki thinks that if he can get the United States to stick around for another two or three years, and if we're willing, stupidly, to support him in building up his army and his police force and his intelligence apparatus, then in, you know, another two or three years, he'll be fine, and he'll be able to run the place on his own, thank you, and we can leave.
And I'm not sure that the United States has figured out an alternative strategy to that.
You know, whether you take Obama's view that we're going to start drawing down our forces, or whether you take McCain's view that we're going to stick around until the, you know, victory is in our back pocket, either way, you know, we seem to be counting on the Iraqi government to continue to get stronger and to build up its army, and both candidates seem to be willing to talk about training and arming and equipping Maliki's forces.
And as I said at the beginning, we seem to be prepared to abandon the Sunnis to their fate.
That's sort of the Maliki calculation.
Now, the problem is, if the Sunnis really do go into an insurgency mode again, if 160,000 American troops couldn't shut them up, I don't think Maliki's Iraqi forces are going to be able to do it, although they'll be quite more brutal than the Americans were.
You know, we certainly had our share of civil liberties violations and, you know, Abu Ghraib scandals and everything else, but the Iraqis can, you know, take that to a new order of magnitude.
So it'll be a pretty ugly fight, and, you know, chances are this is going to be resolved after we leave, not before.
Hmm.
Well, you know, this all cuts back to the so-called success of the surge.
McCain's vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, has gone so far as to say we have victory.
We've already won the war.
Of course, nobody ever has to define what that is.
At least they don't have to refer back to the definitions that they laid down, saying, for example, in the spring of 2007, that the goal of the surge is to meet these benchmarks and, of course, there was the give us your oil and all that, but at least ostensibly the goal was to create a calm in a security situation so that there could be a political reconciliation so that the political representatives of the sons of Iraq could get prominent places in the parliament and in the government and feel like they were part of it and it would be, you know, a multi-ethnic, somewhat democratic state, just like in the deal.
And that hasn't happened at all as we started the show.
These guys are fixing to go back to war because the Maliki government is not about to hire the sons of Iraq.
He certainly isn't about to put them in the officer corps or, you know, give them ministries to run.
No, that's right.
Well, so that's why I say we're, you know, possibly facing another insurgency and another civil war, and it's kind of all time to blow up in the face of the next the next president.
I mean, as far as the victory talk goes, I mean, I think you have to just see that as election talk.
I mean, they're not really serious McCain and Palin about that.
We have victory.
They're just for election purposes between now and November.
They want to say, you know, see, we were right, we won a victory.
The reality is that long before this idea about benchmarks came up, I mean, that wasn't part of the initial idea in the surge.
The initial idea of the surge in December of 2006, January of 2007, basically had two parts.
One was we're going to send a lot of army guys over there, a lot of Marines in order to stop this killing and create political space for a deal between the Sunnis and Shia.
And two, we're going to send a lot of army and Marines over there to stop the Iranian infiltration and support and supply lines and all that kind of stuff.
That was the that was the basis for the surge.
And the Iranians, maybe, you know, on their own analysis of the situation, basically, okay, they pulled back.
And the political reconciliation, however, never happened.
It just didn't happen.
And so while the violence is down, there's literally zero political reconciliation in the country.
And so that's just, you know, putting a, as I said, a lid on the pressure cooker and, you know, tightening it down.
But the pressure is still there for the fight.
What about Kirkuk, speaking of pressure cookers?
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a whole other problem.
And, you know, there's other problems as well.
But yes, the Kurdish, I call it expansionism, is going to be opposed by both the Sunnis and the Shia, by the Shia somewhat less, because they have a political alliance with the Kurds.
But that could, you know, that could all blow up.
And there have been some battles, not just around Kirkuk, but in other areas along the the fringes of the Kurdish provinces.
And they just have three, which, you know, indicate that there's a lot of tension across that whole fault line as well.
And the Kurds, in a way, have less cards to play, because they're landlocked.
Without Kirkuk, they don't have any oil, and they don't have any real economic strength.
They're not supported by any of their neighbors.
The Iranians don't like them, and the Kurds, the Turks hate them, and the Syrians don't like them.
And of course, the Iraqi Arabs aren't too happy either.
So the problem for the Kurdish leadership is, you know, what do we do with this?
We can't have an independent nation hated by all of its neighbors, landlocked, with no resources.
But on the other hand, you know, our political constituents are sort of all clamoring for us to push this autonomy further.
So I think the Kurds have some really hard choices to make about how far they can push this expansionist drive that they seem to be engaged in.
And now, you know, I'm certainly not taking sides in this, just pointing out the difficulty of the situation.
In the 1990s, America spent I don't know how much money helping the Turkish government wage war against the Kurdish population of Turkey.
The Kurds are our closest allies, or well, other than the Iranian parties, our closest allies in Iraq.
And yet, you have Kurdish terrorists, bombers, you know, people who bomb civilians.
They are terrorists fighting against the Turks, and the Turks fighting back by bombing Kurdistan.
I can't imagine that they're actually hitting the targets they're seeking in the mountains there, but they're at least killing somebody up there in Kurdistan.
So we have our allies at war with each other up there in the north at the same time that you have all this tension over who's going to control Kirkuk.
Well, when was it true that American allies don't go to war against each other?
That's happened many times.
There was wars between Greece and Turkey.
There could be a war between India and Pakistan.
A lot of times American allies go to war.
So I don't find that particularly unusual or surprising.
Well, it's just that we're occupying the place while all this is happening, I guess, is the difference.
I mean, we have bases in Turkey, but we don't occupy Turkey like we occupy Iraq, you know?
No, that's true.
Although, I don't think we have many troops in Kurdistan, by the way.
I think, I would say, you know, 98 percent of the American forces are in the Arab part of Iraq, and the Kurds have been semi-autonomous since the first Gulf War 17 years ago.
And they've been protected by an American no-fly zone during all that period.
We actually, the United States, launched a Kurdish rebellion in the early 1970s.
We and the CIA and the Shah of Iran supported a Kurdish revolt against Saddam Hussein nearly 40 years ago, starting almost exactly 40 years ago.
And when Iraq and Iran made a deal in 1975, we abandoned the Kurds then, too.
So the Kurds are, you know, probably not exactly counting on the United States to go to the mat for them.
Well, at least as far as their somewhat permanent autonomy goes, I guess it makes sense that they prefer to ally themselves with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution as far as their agreement on a strong federal system and more or less keeping that autonomy without actually declaring independence for the long term.
Yeah, but I mean, they'll make a deal with anybody to, you know, none of their alliances are permanent.
I mean, it's, even the two, there's two big Kurdish parties and they don't like each other.
And they've double-crossed each other many, many times over the last several decades.
The forces around Talibani, who is the president of Iraq now, and the forces around Barzani, who's the leader of the Kurdish regional area.
And he's the more powerful of the two Kurdish leaders, Barzani.
So there's a lot of double-crossing that can go on in this, and it's not impossible to see the Kurdish bloc breaking into two parts that start to battle with each other.
And in that case, Talibani would probably end up siding more with the pro-Iranian Shiites and Barzani more with the anti-Iranian Sunnis.
But that's a subject for another show, I guess.
Right.
Okay.
Well, here's one more for this show before I let you go.
This gets back to the Sunni insurgency, Sons of Iraq, what's going to happen with them.
And this is, I think, the most alarming thing in your article, and in the worst part of my imagination, I can see them on Fox News saying, see, even in the nation they admit it, which is that the Russians are messing around, making contacts with the Sunni insurgency for when America abandons them.
Yeah, well, you know, when the Russians moved into Georgia, there was a lot of excitement all over that part of the world, the Middle East, I mean, saying, well, wait a minute, we've been getting tromped on by the United States for the last, you know, seven years since 9-11.
And we're not too happy about America's Israel policy either, since 1948.
So maybe the Russians are back.
And to the extent that Russia wants to reassert itself in that part of the world, you know, they've certainly been strengthening their ties to both Syria and Iran.
President Assad was just up in Moscow right after the Russian move into Georgia.
And now what I've heard from Iraqis is that the Russians are all over the Middle East, but especially in Damascus and in Amman as well, and other places, talking to former and current resistance leaders and Baathists and others, saying, look, if the Americans abandon you, you know, maybe we can help.
So you might find a new entree point for Russian influence, you know, if Iraq starts to deteriorate further.
May I say, let them have it.
All right, well, I don't know, I guess in some kind of objective sense or whatever, Dick Cheney's got to be the most incompetent imperialist in the history of all of Western civilization, at least.
I mean, this is just ridiculous.
This is how they're leaving this.
Yeah, well, he's made a mess all over the region, and the next president is going to need a big, big supply of, you know, those little doggy bag things that you have to clean up messes with.
Oh, geez.
Well, you know, they renamed body bags transfer tubes.
So I don't know what the new term for the doggy bag will be, but I'm sure they're drawing it up right now.
Probably spending a million dollars putting together a study group to figure out what the new catchphrase should be there.
All right.
Anyway, hey, Bob, you're the best.
I really appreciate you coming on the show today.
OK, thanks.
My pleasure.
All right, folks, that's Robert Dreyfuss from The Nation magazine.
The new article is End of Iraq's Awakening.
And listen to me.
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Read this book, Devil's Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
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