Dahr Jamail explains the Earthly Hell that the U.S. government has created for the people of Iraq.
Discussion
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Yes, the net result of war is human tragedy. It is dead friends and relatives, it is maimed and crippled bodies, it is your life as you once knew it being changed forever, it is the memories of unimaginable carnage and suffering that come back as nightmares that never go away. To expand on my last comment in another post about the pending attack on Iran I will add: It is a safe bet to say that if America does attack Iran, the survivors will not be sitting around talking about who used what kind of missile to destroy whatever target… They will be scrambling to piece together some semblance of the life that they once knew and once they become aware that the old life is never coming back this awareness will change into a blinding hatred for whoever they think were the ones who did this to them. Warped American strategists think that this hatred will somehow be directed back upon their own government but I seriously doubt that…
…So do I, these are same popular reactions that changed Ho Chi Minh, Stalin and Churchill from ruthless, calculating men men to heroic, almost mythical figures. Bigger than life in the eyes and esteem of their subjects…Why these “Warped American Strategists” want to believe the inversion of what history has proven time and time and time again? …I don’t really know…Maybe Cheney and The Decider transferred all those with an ounce of objectivity to teaching Grade School on Indian Reservations…By the same token, Hitler literally went ape shit, frothing mouth wild when his Generals told him the truth as to the predicament the Wehrmacht was in—this only 17 kilometers outside of Moscow by Dec. 1941—He frenetically refused to hear anything that interrupted the procedure and path of the megamaniacal fantasies marching in his demented mind…It’s like this whole fuckin’ business of “A Clean Break: A New Strategy to Secure The Realm” and Operation Iraqi “freedom” is predicated on some coffee fired fantasy dreamed up in an elite think tank…And anyone who disagreed was deemed insignificant…lost his position and all that accompanies it.
Scott – Dahr Jamail is one sharp and well-informed guest for your show, and I wish you had him on a weekly basis. Congrats for yet another terrific show!
VS
So Dahr Jamail, Sami Rasouli, Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersch, and many reporters at the Asia Times have said that America is behind the ‘sectarian violence’ in the region, while the American government and its privatized tabloids insist a contradictory amalgamation of every group they dislike is responsible for it. Which of those two groups is more credible?
A very good interview. While the US media gives us the sanitized version of what is happening in Iraq Dahr Jamail has consistently risked his life by going in-country and talking with the local people to find out what is really going on. An honorable mention should go to the McClatchy news service which has consistently tried to provide objective reporting on Iraq. Their recent report is definitely worth a read. I loved the line: “Government of Huge Achievements”… I wonder how long it will take Clear Channel to start putting up billboards with Bush’s mugshot and that slogan pasted under it here in the States?
And never mind the rest who have documented the Mahdi Army’s role in murdering Sunnis. Also, though backed by the US, the Badr Corps is made up of Iraqi Shia, and they’ve been slaughtering Sunni too.
The Iraqi Sunni Arabs have only now – in response to Sadr – talked about being open to a deal with the Shia.
Meanwhile, in Mosul, it’s the Sunni Arabs cleansing the Kurds, the inverse of Kirkuk.
You can blame all this on the invasion in the first place – I do – but to say that there is no ethnic/religious strife except where deliberately manufactured by the US doesn’t hold up.
Again, when I asked Dahr who’s responsible for the ethnic civil war, he blamed al Qaeda. It was only on further questioning where he implicated US policy toward the problem.
The solution is withdrawal, but it is foolish to think that the fighting will end with the occupation. There are too many people with too many competing interests.
Why do I believe that the newly arrived terrorists and death squads in Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq exist because America decided they’d be useful? That’s simply a byproduct of me being literate. Here’s Antiwar.com today!: He believes the U.S. military has taken sides between the militias and are pitting them against one another.
“This area was peaceful and the mixture of Shia and Sunni had no dispute whatsoever,” he said. “It’s the militias who started all the killing in order to divide people and rule them.” &
Others believe that the divide and conquer strategy by the U.S. military and U.S.-backed Iraqi politicians is being implemented across much of Baghdad “The western half of Baghdad that holds the name of al-Karkh is inhabited by a majority of Sunni Arabs,” Mohammad Shakir, a historian from the Dora region of Baghdad, told IPS. “But there are also a variety of Kurds and Shi’ite Arabs there, as is the case in most parts of Iraq where sects lived together in relative peace for centuries. This sectarian fighting was ignited by Iraqi politicians who came with the U.S. occupation to dominate power in Iraq.” &
“The U.S. Army and the U.S. media are full of lies concerning being impartial, and the truth is that the Americans are working together with many armed groups who conduct massive killings,” Khidir said.
Those Iraqis say the strangest things! No wonder the American media doesn’t talk to them.
Now despite all your nonsense to the contrary, Al Qaeda didn’t run around blowing up mosques and markets in Afghanistan in a desperate attempt to get the Soviets (now Americans) to stay. Hezbollah didn’t attack churches, markets, and mosques in order to restart the civil war and get Israel to stay either. Both groups were victorious because of this. Strangely enough, the strategy of “Al Qaeda in Iraq” was to attack Iraqis indiscriminately so America would stay (I guess they hadn’t heard about those permanent bases), which is guaranteed to fail and make them widely hated. Why would they want to do the exact opposite of what worked for them in Afghanistan? It’s not like America is averse to spending Iraqi lives to achieve their political ends.
No one, not even the pitiful American media, is arguing that there isn’t violence in Iraq. I’ve been trying to inform you that the ‘Sunni and Shia suddenly decided to start killing each other’ storyline is wrong. There are still Sunni living and working in Sadr City (it’s part of the city you’ve pretended to know was mixed), though I doubt there are any Baathists there. The Iranian death squads don’t kill “Sunnis”. They kill Iraqis who were Baathists, Iraqis who fought against Iran, Iraqis who fight against the puppet government, and Iraqi Shia (like the Sadrists) who don’t defer to the Iranian clerics. There are also massive amounts of crime there. Patrick Cockburn has written about how the heroin traffickers have recently decided to start growing poppies in Iraq. People involved in billion dollar crime syndicates tend to be violent. Due to their malevolent ignorance, the American media condenses all of it into “Sunni versus Shia”. You’re supposed to be better than them.
That’s why I don’t listen to your show anymore. You don’t know what you’re talking about and there’s no point in wasting 2 hours a day listening to you read the Washington Post. I don’t expect you to know anything about Iraq or Iraqis, but if you read articles from people who travel to Iraq and speak Arabic you wouldn’t be so ignorant and might understand the region better.
Mace – I got tired of hearing Scott say that if America ever stopped murdering, torturing, sanctioning, and exiling millions of Iraqis that the violence there would somehow get worse. Seeing a Dahr Jamail interview at Antiwar.com got me to post again.
…That’s Good CC, practice makes perfect…Then there’s the ironic words of Rodney King to consider: “Can’t we all just get along?”…No one can accomplish anything by themselves.
Cous: I’m glad you’re over it. My show is for critical thinkers, not sloganeers.
If you think that the Sunni Arabs have no reason to try to dominate the Shia, that the Shia don’t have an interest in driving the rest of the Sunni out of Baghdad, that the Kurds, once America leaves, will no longer want to “cleanse” Kirkuk of the Arabs Saddam sent to live there, that the Sunni Arabs in Mosul will fall in love with the Kurds in their town, that the Turkmen in Tal Afar will be A-OK, that the Kurds and Turks will have no problems on their border, that all Iranian power in the country will evaporate immediately, etc., etc. then you are a fool.
My sin here is that I refuse to confidently predict the peaceful Iraqi future that you imagine will exist – despite all the competing interests listed above and many more – once the US troops leave?
…Couscous & Scott: I’m afraid that we’ll never find out whose contentions will turn out to be correct. Why? Because the US has not the slightest intention of leaving Iraq, and for that matter The Greater Middle East. As to this Reality there are two abiding reasons. 1st: Control of World Petroleum sources and the Economic Abstractions that proceed therefrom, or Dominion, which ever you prefer. 2nd: The United States has allowed itself become an extension of Israel, a condition without which that State would eventually collapse from external pressure…Worse, the resulting 6 decade Political situation there is completely and incontrovertibly irreconcilable; and may result in the first use of Nuclear Weapons since Nagasaki…That’s about as succinct and blunt as I can get at once… In the long run just as no Army is immune to defeat. No Nation nor Body politic is immune to factional, cultural, and class confrontation, and in the worst case? Internecine bloodshed.
…I haven’t voted since Nov.1972 …The only one I’d take the time to register and vote for in ’08 would be Ron Paul…Past that Dude? It’s like you say…Voting’s for suckers.
Haha! ‘Critical thinkers’ who constantly shriek about Shia exterminating the Sunni and think the entire country consists of perpetually warring religious enclaves that are completely homogeneous? It’s been explained to you many times that the Iraqis didn’t care about religion and were intermarried and lived together peacefully before the invasion. The obvious culprit for this newfound ‘sectarian violence’ would be the occupation trying to divide and conquer, but you bizarrely insist the guerrillas want to be hated by the Iraqis and that they’d be doomed if America left. It’s asinine. I’ve pointed out to you that “al Qaeda in Afghanistan” didn’t blow up hundreds of mosques and markets during the 80’s (to get the Soviets to stay naturally) and they strangely aren’t doing that in Afghanistan today, yet “al Qaeda in Iraq” announced their intent to do the exact opposite in Iraq. I notice a glaring contradiction there, but you’re apparently content to keep believing that the colonized want the colonizers to stay. So much for that critical thinking!
Your ‘sin’ is that you hardly knew anything about Iraqi society (you didn’t understand that Iraq isn’t segregated on religious lines, that lots of Baathists were Shia, and you still haven’t grasped the concept of “tribes” or that these tribes aren’t homogeneous either) until quite recently, and have been parroting the ‘Sunni and Shia hate each others freedom’ gibberish for years now. You’ve even had a few excellent guests who have actually traveled and talked to Iraqis; Sami Rasouli explained to you that the civilian bombings are done to demonize the resistance and Dahr Jamail pointed out that the occupation is connected to it. If you want to keep believing that after the capture of Saddam failed to end the guerrilla war the Iraqis suddenly decided it would be a good time to start blowing up their own mosques and markets so America would stay, then feel free to do so. Just remember that it’s nonsense.
Yes, the net result of war is human tragedy. It is dead friends and relatives, it is maimed and crippled bodies, it is your life as you once knew it being changed forever, it is the memories of unimaginable carnage and suffering that come back as nightmares that never go away. To expand on my last comment in another post about the pending attack on Iran I will add: It is a safe bet to say that if America does attack Iran, the survivors will not be sitting around talking about who used what kind of missile to destroy whatever target… They will be scrambling to piece together some semblance of the life that they once knew and once they become aware that the old life is never coming back this awareness will change into a blinding hatred for whoever they think were the ones who did this to them. Warped American strategists think that this hatred will somehow be directed back upon their own government but I seriously doubt that…
…So do I, these are same popular reactions that changed Ho Chi Minh, Stalin and Churchill from ruthless, calculating men men to heroic, almost mythical figures. Bigger than life in the eyes and esteem of their subjects…Why these “Warped American Strategists” want to believe the inversion of what history has proven time and time and time again? …I don’t really know…Maybe Cheney and The Decider transferred all those with an ounce of objectivity to teaching Grade School on Indian Reservations…By the same token, Hitler literally went ape shit, frothing mouth wild when his Generals told him the truth as to the predicament the Wehrmacht was in—this only 17 kilometers outside of Moscow by Dec. 1941—He frenetically refused to hear anything that interrupted the procedure and path of the megamaniacal fantasies marching in his demented mind…It’s like this whole fuckin’ business of “A Clean Break: A New Strategy to Secure The Realm” and Operation Iraqi “freedom” is predicated on some coffee fired fantasy dreamed up in an elite think tank…And anyone who disagreed was deemed insignificant…lost his position and all that accompanies it.
Scott – Dahr Jamail is one sharp and well-informed guest for your show, and I wish you had him on a weekly basis. Congrats for yet another terrific show!
VS
So Dahr Jamail, Sami Rasouli, Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersch, and many reporters at the Asia Times have said that America is behind the ‘sectarian violence’ in the region, while the American government and its privatized tabloids insist a contradictory amalgamation of every group they dislike is responsible for it. Which of those two groups is more credible?
A very good interview. While the US media gives us the sanitized version of what is happening in Iraq Dahr Jamail has consistently risked his life by going in-country and talking with the local people to find out what is really going on. An honorable mention should go to the McClatchy news service which has consistently tried to provide objective reporting on Iraq. Their recent report is definitely worth a read. I loved the line: “Government of Huge Achievements”… I wonder how long it will take Clear Channel to start putting up billboards with Bush’s mugshot and that slogan pasted under it here in the States?
Wow, Cous, you just completely missed the part about al Qaeda’s role, huh? Never listen to the parts that don’t fit what you’ve already said!
And never mind the rest who have documented the Mahdi Army’s role in murdering Sunnis. Also, though backed by the US, the Badr Corps is made up of Iraqi Shia, and they’ve been slaughtering Sunni too.
The Iraqi Sunni Arabs have only now – in response to Sadr – talked about being open to a deal with the Shia.
Meanwhile, in Mosul, it’s the Sunni Arabs cleansing the Kurds, the inverse of Kirkuk.
You can blame all this on the invasion in the first place – I do – but to say that there is no ethnic/religious strife except where deliberately manufactured by the US doesn’t hold up.
Again, when I asked Dahr who’s responsible for the ethnic civil war, he blamed al Qaeda. It was only on further questioning where he implicated US policy toward the problem.
The solution is withdrawal, but it is foolish to think that the fighting will end with the occupation. There are too many people with too many competing interests.
Coors Coors—Where in the hell have you been anyway?
Why do I believe that the newly arrived terrorists and death squads in Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq exist because America decided they’d be useful? That’s simply a byproduct of me being literate. Here’s Antiwar.com today!: He believes the U.S. military has taken sides between the militias and are pitting them against one another.
“This area was peaceful and the mixture of Shia and Sunni had no dispute whatsoever,” he said. “It’s the militias who started all the killing in order to divide people and rule them.” &
Others believe that the divide and conquer strategy by the U.S. military and U.S.-backed Iraqi politicians is being implemented across much of Baghdad “The western half of Baghdad that holds the name of al-Karkh is inhabited by a majority of Sunni Arabs,” Mohammad Shakir, a historian from the Dora region of Baghdad, told IPS. “But there are also a variety of Kurds and Shi’ite Arabs there, as is the case in most parts of Iraq where sects lived together in relative peace for centuries. This sectarian fighting was ignited by Iraqi politicians who came with the U.S. occupation to dominate power in Iraq.” &
“The U.S. Army and the U.S. media are full of lies concerning being impartial, and the truth is that the Americans are working together with many armed groups who conduct massive killings,” Khidir said.
Those Iraqis say the strangest things! No wonder the American media doesn’t talk to them.
Now despite all your nonsense to the contrary, Al Qaeda didn’t run around blowing up mosques and markets in Afghanistan in a desperate attempt to get the Soviets (now Americans) to stay. Hezbollah didn’t attack churches, markets, and mosques in order to restart the civil war and get Israel to stay either. Both groups were victorious because of this. Strangely enough, the strategy of “Al Qaeda in Iraq” was to attack Iraqis indiscriminately so America would stay (I guess they hadn’t heard about those permanent bases), which is guaranteed to fail and make them widely hated. Why would they want to do the exact opposite of what worked for them in Afghanistan? It’s not like America is averse to spending Iraqi lives to achieve their political ends.
No one, not even the pitiful American media, is arguing that there isn’t violence in Iraq. I’ve been trying to inform you that the ‘Sunni and Shia suddenly decided to start killing each other’ storyline is wrong. There are still Sunni living and working in Sadr City (it’s part of the city you’ve pretended to know was mixed), though I doubt there are any Baathists there. The Iranian death squads don’t kill “Sunnis”. They kill Iraqis who were Baathists, Iraqis who fought against Iran, Iraqis who fight against the puppet government, and Iraqi Shia (like the Sadrists) who don’t defer to the Iranian clerics. There are also massive amounts of crime there. Patrick Cockburn has written about how the heroin traffickers have recently decided to start growing poppies in Iraq. People involved in billion dollar crime syndicates tend to be violent. Due to their malevolent ignorance, the American media condenses all of it into “Sunni versus Shia”. You’re supposed to be better than them.
Whatever.
That’s why I don’t listen to your show anymore. You don’t know what you’re talking about and there’s no point in wasting 2 hours a day listening to you read the Washington Post. I don’t expect you to know anything about Iraq or Iraqis, but if you read articles from people who travel to Iraq and speak Arabic you wouldn’t be so ignorant and might understand the region better.
Mace – I got tired of hearing Scott say that if America ever stopped murdering, torturing, sanctioning, and exiling millions of Iraqis that the violence there would somehow get worse. Seeing a Dahr Jamail interview at Antiwar.com got me to post again.
…That’s Good CC, practice makes perfect…Then there’s the ironic words of Rodney King to consider: “Can’t we all just get along?”…No one can accomplish anything by themselves.
Cous: I’m glad you’re over it. My show is for critical thinkers, not sloganeers.
If you think that the Sunni Arabs have no reason to try to dominate the Shia, that the Shia don’t have an interest in driving the rest of the Sunni out of Baghdad, that the Kurds, once America leaves, will no longer want to “cleanse” Kirkuk of the Arabs Saddam sent to live there, that the Sunni Arabs in Mosul will fall in love with the Kurds in their town, that the Turkmen in Tal Afar will be A-OK, that the Kurds and Turks will have no problems on their border, that all Iranian power in the country will evaporate immediately, etc., etc. then you are a fool.
My sin here is that I refuse to confidently predict the peaceful Iraqi future that you imagine will exist – despite all the competing interests listed above and many more – once the US troops leave?
Give.Me.A.Break.
…Couscous & Scott: I’m afraid that we’ll never find out whose contentions will turn out to be correct. Why? Because the US has not the slightest intention of leaving Iraq, and for that matter The Greater Middle East. As to this Reality there are two abiding reasons. 1st: Control of World Petroleum sources and the Economic Abstractions that proceed therefrom, or Dominion, which ever you prefer. 2nd: The United States has allowed itself become an extension of Israel, a condition without which that State would eventually collapse from external pressure…Worse, the resulting 6 decade Political situation there is completely and incontrovertibly irreconcilable; and may result in the first use of Nuclear Weapons since Nagasaki…That’s about as succinct and blunt as I can get at once… In the long run just as no Army is immune to defeat. No Nation nor Body politic is immune to factional, cultural, and class confrontation, and in the worst case? Internecine bloodshed.
I voted for Harry Browne in 2000.
…I haven’t voted since Nov.1972 …The only one I’d take the time to register and vote for in ’08 would be Ron Paul…Past that Dude? It’s like you say…Voting’s for suckers.
My show is for critical thinkers, not sloganeers.
Haha! ‘Critical thinkers’ who constantly shriek about Shia exterminating the Sunni and think the entire country consists of perpetually warring religious enclaves that are completely homogeneous? It’s been explained to you many times that the Iraqis didn’t care about religion and were intermarried and lived together peacefully before the invasion. The obvious culprit for this newfound ‘sectarian violence’ would be the occupation trying to divide and conquer, but you bizarrely insist the guerrillas want to be hated by the Iraqis and that they’d be doomed if America left. It’s asinine. I’ve pointed out to you that “al Qaeda in Afghanistan” didn’t blow up hundreds of mosques and markets during the 80’s (to get the Soviets to stay naturally) and they strangely aren’t doing that in Afghanistan today, yet “al Qaeda in Iraq” announced their intent to do the exact opposite in Iraq. I notice a glaring contradiction there, but you’re apparently content to keep believing that the colonized want the colonizers to stay. So much for that critical thinking!
Your ‘sin’ is that you hardly knew anything about Iraqi society (you didn’t understand that Iraq isn’t segregated on religious lines, that lots of Baathists were Shia, and you still haven’t grasped the concept of “tribes” or that these tribes aren’t homogeneous either) until quite recently, and have been parroting the ‘Sunni and Shia hate each others freedom’ gibberish for years now. You’ve even had a few excellent guests who have actually traveled and talked to Iraqis; Sami Rasouli explained to you that the civilian bombings are done to demonize the resistance and Dahr Jamail pointed out that the occupation is connected to it. If you want to keep believing that after the capture of Saddam failed to end the guerrilla war the Iraqis suddenly decided it would be a good time to start blowing up their own mosques and markets so America would stay, then feel free to do so. Just remember that it’s nonsense.