Transcribed by Joe Delaplaine
The following is a rush transcript of the third segment from the Aug. 31 episode of Loud & Clear with Brian Becker on Radio Sputnik. Click here to listen to the entire episode.
Brian Becker: You’re listening to “Loud & Clear”, I’m Brian Becker. Today marks the six years since the United States combat mission in Iraq officially ended. Or that’s when it was announced to have ended. Today the U.S. continues its presence in the country with bombing missions against the so-called Islamic State, or “Daesh”. The same group the US. occupation of Iraq created in the first place. We are joined from London by George Galloway. A legendary parliamentarian in the UK and a strong opponent of the war in in Iraq. Welcome back, George Galloway.
George Galloway: Thank you, Brian.
BB: August 31, 2010 was the date of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. On that day, President Obama said,”The American combat mission in Iraq has ended. ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”
I mean, that sentence includes a lot of different pieces and components. But here we are six years later, the U.S. is bombing Iraq…talk about it.
GG: Well, not just bombing of course. But the sectarian political system that the U.S. and Britain imposed on Iraq on the point of their bayonets and atop their tanks in 2003 of course persists and fuels the very war that the U.S. has been in the luck to be drawn back into not just by air power but also boots on the ground. There are many special forces, from Western countries having to fight alongside these sectarian forces that they impose are against Iraqi. The people –the very same countries— are assisting just across the border in Syria! Confused?!? You must be. Especially the people of the United States because our taxes are now funding al Qaeda with a different name, wearing a different badge. The very same al Qaeda that destroyed your Twin Towers and killed all our people on 9/11.
You really couldn’t make this labyrinthine pattern of double standards up! We’re fighting terrorism in the West and assisting terrorists in Syria, whilst fighting the same terrorists in Iraq! You really have to be a professor to keep up with all of this. So President Obama’s boast six years ago is just that: a hollow and meaningless boast.
BB: George Galloway, you in the UK and certainly myself and millions of others in the U.S. were in the streets trying to stop the Iraq invasion in 2003. The one that started in March 19, 2003. But in fact Iraq has been bombed almost every day at least staring in December 1998 until the “Shock and Awe” invasion in March 2003. Before that the country had been bombed frequently. Economic sanctions have been imposed on the country. A million Iraqis, according to the United Nation’s own statistics. Most were young kids and their grandparents. The most vulnerable, died as a result of the lack of medicine and food, or that which is need to sustain life. And now you have President Obama –not George Bush, not a Republican, but a Democrat– the fourth U.S. President in a row to be bombing Iraq, or at war with Iraq. When you look back on the past quarter century, what do you make of it? Was it purposeful? Was it all designed to destroy Iraq? Is it a consequence of hubris? In other words, unintended consequences? Who do you summarize it
GG: If I were forced to choose, I’d go for the last. I don’t believe there could a master plan in all of this. This is not “James Bond” or “Austin Powers”… this is “Mr. Bean”. A million people died as a result of the sanctions before the bombing started. Or , rather, between the two shooting wars of 1991 and 2003. Almost six hundred thousand of those were children. And your Secretary of State, a Democrat, Madeleine Albright said, “This was a price worth paying.” She said so on television on ABC to Lesley Stahl. “A price worth paying.” Almost six hundred thousand dead children. Well, it’s hard to summon up the words to describe such a demonic mindset as one that would actually say that. Bad enough thinking it. We know that our rulers think horrific things all the time, but they rarely say such things that would be milestones in the history of the descent into madness that the Western governments have been on for, at least, twenty-five years.
And when I think of it now and as you’ve summarized it so brilliantly, it breaks my heart. Because I’d never been to Iraq before 1993 and I would have been arrested if I showed up there because I was a known opponent of the Saddam regime throughout the late 70’s and 80’s. But the Iraq I got to know from 1993 was incomparably the better to the situation we now have. Where there is no “one” Iraq. There’s not even “three” Iraqs. There’s an “Iraq Zone” with a million people dead. There’s millions more whose lives are destroyed either their physical or mental health, or their well-being. Insecurity completely stalked the land. Maniacal terrorism can explode in your face, or your children’s faces at any moment. Warlords, most of them touting now Western-supplied weapons roam freely everywhere. Iraq has been smashed to smithereens and the reverberations continue to course right across the world. Most obviously in Syria. But as far away as Libya on the North African Mediterranean coast where much of the same miserable picture exists. And all the way to Northern Nigeria and now spreading into South and Southeast Asia.
What a disaster our political leaders have delivered for the next generation of our people. And yet they seem bent upon doing the same thing over and over. Which I think Einstein defined as madness. Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. You get exact same result. A result of instability and human misery.
BB: George Galloway, I’m glad you went through some of that history. We’re commemorating the sixth anniversary of when the U.S. said they were ending the combat mission in Iraq. It was under President Obama. That history is important. You said during the 1980’s when you were an opponent of Saddam Hussein. Here in Washington, D.C. we were organizing demonstrations in support of the Kurds who had been gassed by the Iraqi government. It was under those circumstances that Ronald Reagan and Donald Rumsfeld, who was a Special Envoy to the Middle East. They were supporting Saddam Hussein. As a matter of fact, Rumsfeld met with and embraced –literally– Saddam Hussein [on] the day after the first revelations that Saddam/the Iraq government had used chemical weapons during the Iran/Iraq war.
They were “pro-Iraq”! But not really. They were manipulating Iraq because they wanted to create a conflict between Iran and Iraq. Then they urned against the Iraqi government and used the process of demonetization so that anyone who was against the war in Iraq –their war in Iraq– was suddenly an “apologist” for Saddam Hussein.
All roles were reversed on the basis Saddam Hussein was the “worst thing since Hitler”, the U.S. and UK governments dragged their countries into another protracted war. And today we have ISIS. Saddam Hussein is long gone…executed [by the U.S.]. But ISIS, according to the Associated Press yesterday, fifteen thousand people were massacred by the so-called “Islamic State”. Mass graves that are being dug up in Iraq and Syria. There was no ISIS under Saddam Hussein , like him or loathe him there was no ISIS. That country [Iraq] was unitary, not fragmented, it was not like this at all.
GG: Well of the four big figures around at that time: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the only one of the four who wasn’t a religious maniac was Saddam Hussein. The others were one variant or another of crusader or “anti-crusader”.
They were religious maniacs. And it’s exactly as you said, Rumsfeld met Saddam Hussein twice. The U.S. government claimed for more than six months after Halabja that the gas attack on the Kurdish people there had been carried out, not by Iraq but by Iran! We sent the Iraqis into the invasion of Iran and a long and bloody war ensued because we wanted to destroy what we thought was the greater threat. That of Khomeini’s Iranian revolution. Then when that was over, and the Iraqis had a million man army, largely armed by us “all dressed up and no where to go”, we helped to provoke a conflict between Iraq and Kuwait. And the rest is history: the first Iraq war; the long attrition of sanctions killing a million people; the second Iraq war; the spawning of al Qaeda in Iraq, which mutated into ISIS and which has cascaded, with its hate and its extremism, all over the world.
That’s why I called for this audit. An audit of the blunders and crimes of our ruling class that have lead our people into all of this: a world of instability and danger. And yet that same ruling class is still in power as we look at things now, with just a couple of months to go?, it looks as if one of these creatures of that era, Hillary Clinton, is going to be your next president. I know that she’s still got Trump to beat…it’s a pity that both can’t lose.
But it’s quite likely that she’ll be the next President and no one in their right mind would expect any better from her than we had from: Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama. We’ll have more of the same, the world getting evermore bitterly divided and evermore dangerously unstable.
Now I don’t blame the People. The People are kept from the truth to a very significant extent. I blame the political class and most of all to be perfectly frank, I blame those who call themselves “journalists”, those that call themselves part of the “Fourth Estate”, which holds power to account. Because the very same journalists that talked us into the invasion of Iraq have talked us into the invasion and occupation of at least part of Syrian and will talk us into any madcap adventure that the Rulers have in mind for us over the next few years!
BB: George Galloway, Henry Kissinger is one of Hillary Clinton’s advisers. She likes Kissinger Kissinger of course was the Secretary of State and National Security Adviser during the Vietnam war. In his memoirs, which, sadly, I read, when talking about the 1980’s, the Iran/Iraq war, he wanted both sides to kill each other. The U.S. gave arms and intelligence to Iraq and also Iran. Eventually that was the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986, when it was revealed.
Again, the height of cynicism, “let’s have the people of the Middle East kill each other”, because if Iraq –a regional power– or Iran –a regional power– are so weak and exhausted. So at each other’s throats, that the U.S. can exercise hegemony over this oil-rich, resource-rich and geostrategically important region of the world.
I mean it really is the height of cynicism. And as you said there’s no accountability. So President Obama is about to leave office. He said, “Well, it’s going to be a long war, an ‘endless’ war.” You have George W. Bush and Cheney running around making $50 thousand dollars giving speeches. I mean, just no accountability.
GG: Well it’s the height of depravity a well as cynicism. the ocean of blood in which Henry Kissinger swims, stretches back to the 1970’s and stretches almost literally around the world. And yet, Hillary Clinton embraces this monster. And welcomes his support. I see that Wolfowitz has now declared that he’s backing Hillary Clinton too. So it’s really the depths…or heights of depravity. That these people have presided over. And they have the nerve… you know the famous story of St. Augustine’s “City of God”, when Alexander the Great pulls over a pirate ship and demand the of pirate, “Captain, how dare you terrorize these waters as a thief!” And the pirate answers, “You, with your great navy, you can call yourself ’emperor’ and can call other men as you please.” And that’s what these depraved monsters who rule us do.
They have the nerve to call Bashar Al-Assad or Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gadhafi or [Egypt’s] Gamal Abdel Nasser –we can go way way back– they have the nerve to call these people “tyrants” and “dictators” when they themselves are responsible for an ocean of blood and suffering the world.
And one day our people will wake up. And they will…as Bob Dylan put it, “when the ship comes in”, they will account alright. Unfortunately it won’t be anytime soon.
BB: I like that song, [“When the Ship Comes In”].
GG: It’s a fabulous song.
BB: It may not be imminent, but obviously the “arc of justice” is long, so, talk, George Galloway, as we wrap up here, what’s the future of Iraq? Obviously, as you said the country’s fragmented. Syria’s fragmented. Libya’s fragmented. The governments, that in the past, were influenced by communists or nationalists or Ba’athists, those governments are long gone. I mean, it’s pretty bleak right now and yet the people in the Middle East have a strong, proud, anti-Colonial tradition. There has to be some sort of resurgence. Some sort of political realignment that tires to unite rather than continue the fragmentation of the region.
GG: Well, Libya’s a small country of six million people and it has three governments and four “pretenders” as Prime Minister. Four Prime Ministers. Three governments. Three Parliaments. No army. And is a complete basket case. It is the “Balkans” [a region with politically-disputed borders] in one country.
Syria’s got half the territory, a little more now getting sixty-per-cent controlled by the Central government in Damascus, but only with the assistance of Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and other allies. The other forty-per-cent is probably now occupied by Erdogan’s Turkey and a variety of Uzbek, British and French, and all kinds of militias who have come from all over the world, who don’t speak Arabic, but who cut the heads off of Arab people whilst they’re kneeling in jumpsuits.
There’s a picture in the paper here yesterday of a young British boy, eleven years old, executing a captured Syrian-Kurdish soldier. This situation cannot go on. An absolute precondition is national unity. It’s too late, or maybe too soon to be thinking of communism, socialism, nationalism, Islamism. We have to put these labels behind us and we have to recognize that an absolute precondition for any route out of this mess is a sense of national unity.
So the factions, militias and armies are going to have to come together as Syrians, as Iraqis, Libyans or all will be lost.
BB: Okay. That is the eloquent voice of British Parliamentarian and anti-war fighter, George Galloway. We are out of time.
