All right y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio on Chaos Radio Austin and the Liberty Radio Network.
Our next guest on the show today is Roy Gutman, reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.
If you don't get McClatchy's morning email update, and evening one too for that matter, you're missing out.
Roy has been writing a lot of great stuff from Bahrain and from Iraq, the two issues I want to cover the most today.
Welcome to the show Roy, how are you doing?
Pretty good Scott, back in the states and glad to be here for a little break.
Yeah well glad you're safe and sound.
Sounds like it's been a rough time over there in Iraq.
You had some reports from a couple of weeks ago about the bombings there, but I think first I'd like to ask you maybe in the context of the recent violence in Iraq, if you could verify that I read it right, that they sort of have made a deal where the Americans have agreed they're not asking to keep combat troops in the country anymore, just trainers now and that basically is the loophole in the status of forces agreement that's going to keep troops in Iraq, that both sides are happy with that and the deal has been made.
Do I read that right?
I have to be honest, I'm not up with the very latest thing of the last 48 hours, it's typically because I've been traveling.
There was that possibility though, I know, to have trainers stay on.
I think it's inadequate, I think that forces are needed for other purposes and that one should not be satisfied with trainers.
That said, my visits to U.S. bases and talks with Iraqis as well as with Americans leads me to think that American training is very much prized by the Iraqis and I think the American military feels it's really doing the right thing by carrying on with training.
So if that is the deal, as I say, it's only partially what needs to be done, but it's certainly a very important component.
Well, I guess my question would be, is the parliament representative of the people of the country enough that Maliki and the current government represent the power that would rule Baghdad, would be in charge of the country if America wasn't there helping them, or not?
Because if so, then it seems like why would they need American troops, you know?
Well, you know, they've had elections.
It was in March of last year.
A government emerged from those elections, but it took all of last year for that to happen.
And it is not yet a completed government because there's a lot of wrangling at the very top between Maliki and Ayad Allawi, who's the other leading politician who actually won more seats than Maliki's coalition, but in fact not enough to actually have a majority.
So that parliament is a representative parliament.
Nobody that I know of has indicated that that election was anything but a real, genuine, fair election, and with a minimum of corruption and fraud.
So yes, that's a real parliament.
But now, here's the problem, Scott.
You get a real parliament elected with a lot of different factions involved, and it is very tough to get a bill through that parliament.
It's a—well, look at our Congress.
I mean, if you want to look at the debt debate right now.
Not an easy thing to get real things done.
Why do they need Americans to stay on?
Basically, it's because the Iraqi army—there was an Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein, and it had some very professional officers, but on the whole, the army was tainted by some of the things they did.
You know, the use of gas against the Kurds, some of the firing of missiles into Iran, a lot of things.
So the whole officer corps was really tainted by it, with some exceptions.
And the Americans basically dissolved their military.
So you have a new institution being created there, and it is not easy, it is not fast, and it takes—and their training, as I've had it explained to me, was never anything like the kind of training that Americans do.
They're in a dangerous neighborhood, and they recognize that they're not up to speed.
You would say then, if I understand you right, that it's not that the Iraqi army needs the American forces there to keep them as the Iraqi army, to prevent internal dissent from taking their power away.
Simply, they need—that power is natural enough to them.
What they need is specialized training so that they can keep other countries from messing with them.
Is that— Are you—that's right, in a nutshell.
The Iraqi army feels that it can handle, with a good police force, which is still in the making, that they can handle the internal issues, including the continuing insurgency by al-Qaeda and other ultra-conservative branches of—they claim to be Islamic movements.
But what they are not trained for, and where they have a major gap, is really protecting the country at large, the national security side of things.
And that's what the Americans are training them in right now, and I think it's probably—they probably need a good four or five more years of training and advice and coaching.
I'll give you an example.
The Iraqi military does not have an air force, and it's not that you really need a huge air force, but you do need to protect your borders, and to be able, if somebody else uses their air force against you, to protect yourself.
It is kind of ironical, though, isn't it, Roy, that we've got to build up the Iraqi army to a state much more powerful than it was when we invaded, because of what a threat that country was with the powerful army that they had.
And that's not the only challenge.
It's also to build them up just enough so that they can defend the country, but not so much that they can actually use offensive force against somebody else.
And, you know, I think one could argue against what I'm now saying that, well, who is planning to invade Iraq in the near term?
Who has any interest in doing it?
Who would be so crazy as to do it?
But the response to that is that you don't want to let a power vacuum develop in a country which has immense wealth, oil wealth, in the years to come, and where other people are going to try to interfere politically.
You don't want them also to be able to pose a security threat.
So there are multiple reasons why Iraq simply needs to be a normal country, and normal includes the ability to defend your borders.
And the continuation of the American presence there is the best way to guarantee that?
You know, right now the Americans are leaving.
I think it's down to 46,000 troops, and they're leaving now every week, and the pace is picking up right now.
So there will not be a considerable American presence.
But I think a small American presence, and what I heard from the Iraqi top government officials was on the order of 10,000 to 15,000.
It isn't so much that it provides a hair trigger, but it does provide a presence, enough of a presence that if there needed to be a buildup, there could be one.
And meanwhile, these forces are going to be training the Iraqis, and in some cases, like in Kirkuk, which I've just written about, they may also be providing mediation and a kind of a peacekeeping force.
Well, you know, I guess we'll have to save Kirkuk till after the break, because I do want to ask you all about that.
But I think what you just said, that's the big danger we're looking at from my point of view, is that we leave some guys in there, that leaves the door open to a re-escalation later on.
In fact, I predicted that in January of 2009, right after Obama's speech, where he said, we're going to be leaving people as long as we can, basically.
Well, here's the interesting thing.
The Iraqi military and many top Iraqi politicians view the American military presence as a very positive thing.
That, you know, they've gone way beyond what they felt a couple of years ago, when they were demanding a status of forces agreement and a timetable for departure.
Now, they are a free country, they are their own masters, and they recognize they need friends, and they need allies, and they see the United States as a friend and an ally.
All right, well, it's Roy Gutman from McClatchy Newspapers.
When we get back, I'll be asking him about his piece, Kirkuk could be flashpoint if Iraq splinters.
And I'll probably have a couple of Muqtada al-Sadr questions for you too, Roy.
Okay, sure.
Everybody, it's Anti-War Radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
And I'm talking with Roy Gutman from McClatchy Newspapers.
And we're talking about Iraq.
And now, Roy, I wanted to ask you about Muqtada al-Sadr.
Seems to me like the next prime minister will be simply handpicked by him.
The only reason that Sadr had to, you know, basically support Maliki was because he was the compromise between the al-Hakim faction and the Sadr faction.
And we'll take a Dawah Party guy, and we'll make him the front, first with Jafari, and then with Maliki, and make him the front for the United Iraqi Alliance.
But now Sadr dominates the Supreme Islamic Council now that al-Hakim senior has died.
And there's really no one to oppose him.
He doesn't even need the Dawah Party anymore.
And they're the most Iranian influenced in the country, as I understand it, when you talk about the danger of foreign influence or whatever.
We just fought a war for the Iranian influence in Iraq.
So I don't know how we can claim that as certainly that would be the country that our government would name as the one that we need to train the Iraqis up to protect them from.
Right?
Well, a whole bunch of questions in one there.
And frankly, you're right, your observation that the war we fought in Iraq actually made Iraq, you know, open and friendly to Iran, much friendlier than it was under Sadr Hussein.
And that certainly wasn't one of the unintended major consequences.
But all that said, I think you have to recognize that Iraqis are Arabs, for the most part, you know, and Kurds, and that domination by Iranians by Persians is not something that they exactly relish or like, that the Iranians are extremely active in trying to influence Iraq, but it is their next door neighbor.
And Iran is a major country, you know, it is the biggest single country in the Gulf.
So, you know, you have to expect Iranian influence to be effective life there and good policy for an Iraqi leader is to have the best relations possible with Iran, but not to let the Iranians in the door.
So Muqtada al-Sadr is one of these guys who's, who's playing very much between Iran and Iraq constantly.
He's not the only one, Ahmed Chalabi is another politician who's very close to the Americans, who's very close to the Iranians, and who's not very close to the government in Iraq right now.
And Muqtada al-Sadr is another one of these players.
So, you know, and Maliki is another one.
They all have to try to figure out how to both keep, you know, Iraqi sovereignty and the Iranians friendly, but not too friendly.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that Muqtada al-Sadr is about to pull out of that coalition.
He's threatened to do it.
But it benefits him also, I think, to be recognized and accepted as a player in the political game, as opposed to, you know, a militia leader who's going to try to break the country apart.
I think that he has maybe even made his choice.
He's disarmed, more or less, that Mahdi militia, and has said he's not going to reconstitute it, and that he's going to work through the political system.
Now, how long he wants to stay with Maliki?
Boy, if you can figure out Iraqi politics, you know, in the next 24 hours, and beyond, you win a big prize.
Yeah, I'll let you know as soon as I've got it all nailed down.
Well, but he has been the most nationalist force all along, not just against the United States, but against Iran as well, right?
Back in the days, we'd constantly denounce the Supreme Islamic Council for trying to create a more federal system with the South in alliance with Iran.
But don't forget, he then went to Iran to study theology, to get a higher degree.
And, you know, back when Maliki staged his major attempt to disarm militias around the country, it was Muqtada al-Sadr, and it was the Iranians influencing Muqtada al-Sadr who helped bring that whole thing to a close.
So the relationships are very complex.
They are positive, negative, neutral, and all at the same time.
And a lot has to do with the personalities and the events of the moment.
This is a very complex game.
Well, now, I guess if Sadr is basically backing down from his insistence on complete American withdrawal by the end of the year, then that's it for complete American withdrawal by the end of the year, right?
There's no one else that we have to listen to.
I didn't want to go that far to say that he's back down.
I mean, I was at a rally in Baghdad where he brought out the former militia members, and they all marched as if they were a militia, both in their chanting and their parade style.
And one had the feeling there were at least 20 or 30,000 of them, that this is a reserve force that he's holding, and he can revive if he wants to.
But what's happened in the last few weeks is that Prime Minister Maliki has somehow isolated Sadr and made it clear that Sadr is the only one who does not want to play the political game.
And Sadr's response seems to be that he's saying he will not revive the militia.
I don't think he's gone so far as to welcome the continued presence of American forces, but simply by turning it into a political issue as opposed to an internal security threat, I think that is actually removing one of the obstacles to the continued presence of American forces.
Well, I'm guessing that he could really have a lot of influence on policy far short of assembling his militia, just by withdrawing support for the Maliki government in the parliament at this point, right?
You know, that's true, but don't forget, when you withdraw support for a government that you're a part of, you will also give up all of the posts that your people now hold, you know, and so they've got a whole bunch of ministries that are run by Sadrists, and they control an awful lot of patronage, and they control an awful lot of policy as a result.
This is not a, you know, this is not without costs.
It's not a cost-free political move.
And secondly, does he, you know, if he wants to join the opposition, does he want to bring down the government?
In which case does he want to join with Alawi, who has proven himself so far to be kind of feckless and inept and not really an active player, nowhere near as impressive as Maliki has been.
Can he join forces with the basically Sunni-based group that Mr. Alawi represents?
It doesn't seem likely.
Does he then want to be on the outside looking in?
Is there advantage for that?
You know, these are not simple calculations.
So in other words, no confidence in Maliki would be no confidence in, I mean, he wouldn't have to give up his own seats in parliament and all that.
He would still have a plurality in parliament, wouldn't he?
Well, I mean, don't forget, I mean, Maliki now claims that he has a plurality.
At the time of the elections, it was Alawi who had the Iraqi group that had the plurality, but it was only by a couple of seats.
Now, in the meantime, at least 10 people supposedly have defected to Maliki's rule of law coalition.
But I was at a press conference just a couple days ago with Alawi where he was announcing that he had won the allegiance of at least four sheikhs and tribal leaders who were now coming over to his Iraqi group.
So, you know, this is a kind of a back and forth thing.
It's like temperature taking.
And it's almost impossible, even on a given day, to get a real picture of where, of who's in charge.
The dickering goes on.
You know, the number one issue really between Maliki and Alawi right now is who is going to be the next defense minister, who is going to be the next minister of the interior, which controls the police.
These are really crucial posts.
And then along with those two posts is the issue of will the Americans be invited to remain in the country.
And Alawi has made it clear that he will not tolerate a continued American presence, although I think he's in favor of it, unless he gets to nominate his own people for those two top posts.
And Maliki has said that he's already accepted Alawi's proposal for at least the Ministry of Defense, and then Alawi withdrew his support for that.
And I asked Alawi about that the other day.
And I just said, you know, are you willing in the name of letting the country go forward to allow your own nominee to be, you know, to take up the job?
And he mumbled something and evaded something, and he wouldn't take a follow-up question.
And he's basically, I think he's playing some kind of a game, and I don't know quite what it is, but it is not one of resolving the issues.
Well, now, can I ask you a favor?
Is there any way I could keep you one more segment after the top of the hour break here?
Yeah, okay, sure.
I really appreciate it.
It's been great talking with you so far, and I want to learn all about Kurdistan.
It's something that we very rarely cover, even when we're talking Iraq news on the show here.
So I really appreciate everybody.
It's Roy Gutman from McClatchy Newspapers.
Kirk Cook could be flashpoint if Iraq splinters is his latest, and we'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our guest is Roy Gutman.
And now, so let's talk a little bit about Kurdistan and the battle over Kirk Cook.
I guess, long story short, this whole time during the war, there's been sort of, I guess what we call a low-scale ethnic war going on over who's going to be the dominant force in the city of Kirk Cook, and whether it's an Iraqi city or a Kurdish city.
Could you give us the background there?
Tell me if I'm wrong, please.
It's a very wealthy, potentially very wealthy place, because it's sitting on a lake of oil.
But as a member of the Maliki government told me, it's like a landmine sitting on a lake of oil.
The Kurds, who at one point were at least the plurality people in Kirk Cook, were moved out to a good extent under Saddam Hussein, and he moved Arabs into the region in order to change the demographics.
And so the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and then he killed a lot of Kurds, gassed them in Halabja and other places, and mistreated them in a huge way.
So when Saddam Hussein fell, a lot of Kurds felt that, and they treated it as their Jerusalem, but they felt that it was their city, and it should be their city, and it should be, if not the capital of Kurdistan, and then one of the major cities of the Kurdish semi-autonomous region.
So unfortunately, the population there is not majority Kurdish.
There are also Arabs, a significant number, and there are also Turkmen, who speak a Turkish dialect.
They also feel that it's their city.
It may be the single toughest problem for Iraq at the present and in the distant future, because there is no immediate solution that's going to leave everybody peaceful and everybody happy.
Well now, it seems like this story has gotten a lot less coverage than, for example, the civil war that took place between predominantly Sunni and Shia Arab factions over the past years.
But the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militias, have been at work up there in Kirkuk from time to time, right?
It's been reported in the Washington Post, for example, about kidnappings and forced relocations going on, kind of all along, only on a much smaller scale than the kind of thing that grabs headlines usually.
Well, in addition to the Peshmerga, who are actually a legal force under the Iraqi constitution, there are forces that are Kurdish, who also operate in Kirkuk, that are not recognized by the central government.
They are called the Sayish, and they are in Kirkuk, some in uniform and many of them undercover.
They are a very effective force, maybe the most trained of all of the Kurdish forces, but they, legally speaking, are not supposed to be there.
And then there's on the other side, on the Arab side, you have the insurgents.
They mostly are located in towns that are predominantly Arab, and they include a group called the Naqshbandi, which is actually a Sufi, kind of a mystical branch of Islam.
It's hard to imagine that Islamic radicals and fundamentalists would be interested in mysticism, but that's what they call themselves.
They are a Sufi sect.
You have them.
You have Al-Qaeda of Iraq.
You have the Islamic State of Iraq.
You have branches of the Ba'ath Party of Saddam Hussein.
And they all work together to try to provoke either the Peshmerga or some other force into violence.
And then once the violence starts, you know, it could be very, very difficult to control because it could quickly turn into a sectarian battle between Kurds and Arabs.
That's why it is really a landmine sitting on a lake of oil.
Well, and you make the case in your recent piece that the United States is basically the guy that already stepped on the landmine, is holding the button down, trying to keep his weight on it, wait until the specialists can get there and disarm the thing.
Was that Full Metal Jacket?
I forgot which movie I saw like that.
Makes for a good metaphor, though, because isn't that right?
I mean, you basically say the groups that are now not killing each other wholesale are doing so because there's an American military officer's office where they can meet and argue instead of blowing each other up, you know, in a full scale kind of way for the time being.
Is that about right?
Scott, I only wish that I thought of that metaphor myself because I would have written it into the story because I used the quote, but I didn't really develop it.
No, you're exactly right.
What the American forces, especially in Kirkuk and to a lesser extent in some other locations, have taken on a role that you could call peacekeeping.
This is something that had been anathema to the American military because peacekeeping, you think of as, you know, UN forces who sort of monitor and report, who never do anything, basically, but report on violence and then watch it passively.
But the American peacekeeping is a much more active and a much more effective thing than what one thinks of as peacekeeping, usually, because when something blows up, in one case, there was a bomb at a parking lot outside the police station in the city of Kirkuk.
And a lot of people rushed to the scene after this bomb, which actually hurt nobody.
And then there was a second bomb and a lot of police were killed.
And some of the Kurdish police, especially this group called the Asayish, decided they were going to take matters into their own hands.
Enter the Americans, the American colonel at the local base in Kirkuk, who was in touch with all the political factions there, and immediately went to the Kurds and said, please, you know, hold your fire, do nothing, don't go unilateral.
Then went to the political figures, then organized get-togethers, kept on massaging everybody.
It took a week or 10 days, and finally people came down to earth.
This is the kind of mediation and peacekeeping and, you know, third-party action, as they call it, that actually keeps the peace.
But the problem is, I mean, this isn't even Northern Ireland, where it took generations to finally work out a reasonable settlement.
I mean, at what point do you see where the Americans could leave, where that wouldn't be necessary to keep the factions apart or letting them settle their own disputes based on how much power they actually have, rather than having America pick and choose sides and that kind of thing?
Well, it's not just even picking and choosing sides.
You have to wait until a political process can develop and an economy can develop so that the actual question of who has title to Kirkuk is no longer an issue.
You know, Scott, it could take a generation for that to happen.
Do we want to keep American forces there that long?
Well, of course not.
But, you know, for the next few years at least, they're helping to keep the peace in this period of transition.
And I personally, from everything I heard, felt it was, you know, a rather valuable thing.
But I didn't want to go on my own feelings or my own impressions.
I went to the Kurds, for one thing, and the governor of the province is a Kurd.
And he said, you know, the Americans have got to stay, not just here, but really everywhere, because Iraq cannot protect its borders, it cannot protect its port, it cannot protect its airspace, and its forces are not trained.
He gave a very broad-brush approach.
Then I went to a Sunni nationalist politician, one who feels that the Americans should leave, that American occupation is a very bad thing for Iraq, and that no country should be occupied and no country should be an occupier.
And, you know, you have to be sympathetic with that perspective as well.
But he said, he said, if the Americans pull out of here, they are the balance right now, they prevent things from tipping too far in one direction or the other.
If they leave, things will tip, and who knows in what direction.
So even there you have somebody who's, you know, a natural opponent to the American presence saying, please don't go.
Well, you know, I guess that's what I was trying to get at with the, how representative is the parliament of the people and how natural is the power of the people who have the power there?
Because it sort of seems to me like a matter of economics, right?
Like, if you blow up a bubble in housing, you artificially inflate the value of housing, the value of home building corporations, and of quarries that make the bricks, and all these things get distorted from a certain central cause.
It seems like that's kind of the same sort of intervention that we're talking about, where the people who have the most power, I guess, from the different factions figured they'll lose it if we go.
And if that's the case, then it doesn't seem to me like staying actually prevents that, it only delays it.
Has it delayed it for eight years now?
Well, I think that that's a pretty interesting thesis you're offering there that, that the American presence is something that's becoming a political, part of a political game.
I don't think it's actually that advanced, though, Scott.
I don't think it, I think that could well happen.
But I think at the moment, this is a country that's just recovering from not only from internal war, from invasion, from occupation, but also recovering from decades of brutal dictatorship, oppressive dictatorship, total totalitarian dictatorship.
And, you know, to find your way in with that as your history is not an easy thing.
And you really need all the help you can get.
And you need the help from those who do not really have a major agenda.
I mean, look, maybe the United States wants to buy Iraqi oil, you know, as it becomes more available on the market.
But so does everybody else.
And what I think the American interests in that region are, you know, in a down to earth way is to keep the region to keep the oil flowing, not just to us, but really to the to the world, because this is such an interdependent world we have now.
And so, you know, that is an argument for an American presence as well, if we are tolerated, if we are wanted.
And my impression is, and I'm not just saying this impressionistically, because I've actually gone to Iraqi officials in the on the political side and on the military side.
But my impression is they want in not every case, but, you know, for the most part, they want an American presence as a stabilizing force as a training force.
And in the case of Kirkuk, as a mediating force, do you have any read on on public opinion?
Well, I did not actually do man in the street interviews in Kirkuk.
So I can't go a lot beyond I think, on the whole, the American presence is less popular with the general public than it is with the political elite and with the military elite.
But a lot of that is because of the fact that the political elite in particular has been dumping, you know, for some time over the Americans and saying they've got to go.
I think what you know, what happened that surprised people so much was was not only did the US sign its status of forces agreement, but it actually observed it.
I think the Iraqis are not used to anybody treating them with that kind of respect.
So the public opinion is something that at least the the political leaders there think can be brought on board if the political leaders themselves can agree.
Hmm.
All right.
Well, I've already kept you over time.
I really appreciate your time.
I can't say I agree with you on everything.
But I certainly learned a lot.
And I really appreciate your journalism.
I read a lot of I'm sorry, we didn't get to talk about Bahrain, maybe sometime soon.
Okay, sure.
Scott, anytime.
Always happy to help.
Thanks very much, everybody.
That's Roy Gutman from Aklatchie Newspapers, and we'll be right back.
