good stories or not see the e.u. parliament rejects the notorious online piracy party which has severely threatened internet freedoms that will provoke major run it's hard to europe with web users here is at the prospect online to prevail and. also the most hopeful language tear gas has been used on ukraine protests as i write about a new bill that allows a wider usage of russia in the country the law was adopted with our debate bonds talked outrage with hundreds taking to pretend we're. finding the minute. that gave us all this science has claimed they finally discovered compelling evidence for the elusive goal of the corporate searchers have painted

steak takes a person with decades to explain how everything in the universe exists. and right now peter about and his guests discuss what's going on in iraq and how the country's likely to get by after the u.s. pullout that's crosstalk or not to stay with us. please. continue the story. below and welcome to crossfire i'm peter lavelle foreign occupation of iraq may have formally ended six months ago but this country's woes are countless and getting worse there's political paralysis

a surge of violence and in active al qaeda is iraq a failing state or has it already failed. to take a. stand. to cross-talk iraq's growing violence i'm joined by my guest in washington robert maginnis he is a retired army lieutenant colonel and a national security and foreign affairs analyst also we have douglas oliphant he's a senior national security fellow with the new america foundation and john glaser he's an assistant editor for antiwar dot com all right gentlemen crosstalk rosen i mean you can jump in anytime you want john if i go to you first six months ago they were dire dire predictions about what would happen to iraq and they've been borne out. well some of them certainly have a mean i think it's an embarrassment for the united states having started such a criminal misguided war to have to have been pushed out forcefully

by the iraqi government which was good we should have left but now the government we helped install headed by prime minister maliki is sinking towards to dictatorship moloch has shut down news media which is critical of his rule he's detained hundreds of people in secret torture torture prisons. he has he has consolidated power in a sectarian drive to eliminate sunis and kurds from from the government it's a disaster there june this past june was the second deadliest month since since we left in december of last year. much of the much of the country is very dangerous and the government is one of the most corrupt in the world so things aren't looking too good for. the glyphosate what do you think about that bob what would you is your assessment of the the dire predictions being borne out. you know

i tend to agree with john on a number of issues clearly maliki had a tough time forming his government without the help of solder who of course was taking direction from tehran. the bloodshed has been her ific fifteen hundred civilians have been killed in the last six months and then maliki's like saddam hussein to a certain degree in the he's consolidated power taking over the judiciary he's also consolidated six intelligence operations that in a kind of look over one another shoulder something very similar to what saddam had and then of course he controls all of the security forces as well has a special militia the effect. malaki which is something similar to what we heard under saddam as saddam so this is not. much to boast about the iraqi people deserve

a lot better and it is i think teetering on being a failed state we'll talk about that in a second douglas it looks like we traded one dictator for another. oh i hardly think that's the case. look iraq has to various serious problems it's in a political crisis largely because the two major parties in the last election. allow always and maliki's state a law party essentially tied actually we got two more seats and then maliki was able to outmaneuver him and forming the government that's a lot of inside politics i'll get into that but essentially these two parties tied and that's left the government essentially paralyzed and in a political crisis and i'm unable to really form a government and unlike say obama and hillary maliki and allawi have not been able to kiss and make up and do what's right for the country and that's a problem if we were rolling political crisis and second we have a serious terrorism problem with al qaeda and iraq and they are showing some

weaknesses in the government the fact that the security ministries are not fully formed that they have caretaker ministers that aren't able to bring in first tier technology to defeat both on the intelligence side and on the technical side detecting these explosives that's a real problem but you have a political crisis you have a terrorism problem that's a real issue but i've i've been hearing predictions of iraq's imminent collapse sense about you know the end of two thousand and seven and somehow the iraqis manage always not to collapse and i continue to have some faith in this government ok john do you think it is going to be muddle through an arc is the status quo tenable. well the status quo is ten i'm alive mean authoritarian societies exist and are stable in a lot of ways but i just want to point out one thing that what you know one of the reasons that there is this political stalemate is not just because of the election and the sort of vying between iraq and maliki's party it's also because maliki

circumvented parliament and avoided rules which would have prevented him from being able to marginalize sunis and kurds and in order to build up his own his own power so the other parties are largely defunct they're powerless because like like bob said he has control of the government but he has control of the security forces and so forth all throughout the country. so this is the real problem and i just want to say that you know given that these facts about the iraqi government and about moloch ease governance of iraq are undeniable the dig the charge towards dictatorial power the torture the clamping down on press freedoms and protests and so forth you know we bear some responsibility especially because the obama administration continues to send billions of dollars in aid to prop up

the maliki government and allow him and give him time and space and resources to do all these terrible things now that washington wants to keep that ate up because they're afraid that molecule will go right into the pockets of the iranians but he has to be and he may already be in the pocket of the iranians bob what do you think about that i mean that is that is watching have too much faith in this government or that yes the they don't like the alternatives. well maliki is very cozy with tehran you know he's met with the grand ayatollah in april he met with one of the guardian council members in april as well and someone that happens to embrace the idea that iraq too you know follow the same islamic course in terms of government and islam being mixed as has to iran so i find that problematic you know one of the issues here is under molecule we found sectarianism is just skyrocketed and the vice president of sunni is in exile right now and and he's in exile being tried in

absentia which i think you know if you're going to do that as soon as the americans pull pitching get out of that country now that's sending a very clear and disturbing message so you know the idea that he is saddam light is not something that should we easily dismissed and i think something that perhaps could have been circumvented to a certain degree had we decided in starting years ago and working with them saying look we understand your stability issues we want to help you but by pulling out you know just about everybody except for the embassy back on the fifteenth of december what is wrong headed douglas when you think about that it's still driven the politics here has not been alleviated in any way since the occupation in the end of occupation last year. it's going to take some time to work through this i think that the stubborn fact that we all like to forget is that the sunni's writ large

you know and i hate using these labels but it's it's there's really no other effective way to do it but a large sunni based insurgency group tried to overthrow this government they then reconciled with this government they came inside but maliki is quite understandably a little suspicious of people who tried to overthrow his government by force you know we've heard a lot of things thrown around the only people who talk about the fedayeen all maliki are former members of the one nine hundred twenty revolutionary brigade and they're americans simply americans that they talk to we need to get a little bit of perspective about what maliki is dealing with is he purging sunni's out of his government yes he has men did a lot of these cities help al qaeda in iraq over the past five years engineer some terrorist attacks yes they probably did. you know as we have was just pointed out by president hashmi is on trial for running death squads do we really believe that the former head of the as lawmaker recchi party isn't capable of running death

squads not saying hashmi is guilty but i'm saying it's not on the face totally ridiculous bob it looks like you want to jump in there go ahead. you know. i don't know that we know from washington whether or not hashmi it's guilty clearly the person who surrounded his home back on the fifteenth of december was maliki's son with tanks you know that seems to be a bit bizarre to me we need to recognize that yeah this is an iraqi political crisis and now you have solder who is running away from maliki primarily i think because he has his own political ambitions which you know but that's solder and he has for some time you know we also have to take into account the crisis that's going on next door with bashir assad you know i think some of that is beginning to have an in impact even in iraq which of course has never been terribly stable since the beginning of the war in zero three. john you know what if syria was brought up

here and it's very interesting i mean again this brings in the sectarian element here with the sunni's. right well syria is a precarious case we know that some fighters. possibly linked with al qaeda have been crossing the border over iraq into syria and helping the rebels fight the assad regime. now meddling on either side the u.s. and its allies in the in europe in the gulf as well as russia and iran are meddling for either side in syria and it's not helping contain the problem it's actually helping helping to deepen the conflict and perhaps i mean as kofi annan recently said the u.n. envoy to syria he said syria is not like libya libya imploded syria will explode and so yeah the iraqis are nervous about that and maliki is there us about that but again i think we have to come back to this notion that we need to be

supporting dictatorship in the middle east i mean this is been dominant policy since since at least the second world war and if we think that it's ok for taxpayer money to go to the head of a government who tortures people and and cracks down on press freedoms and consolidates power inside his own government through force and coersion i think were in trouble again it sounds like syria to me all right gentlemen i'm going to jump in we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion about iraq state. industry claims in the process this is perfectly sweet.

she says. that it brings. at the.

there hasn't been a thing yet on t.v. . it is to get the maximum political impact. the full source material is what helps keep journalism want to replace. the so we want to present. something else.

and you can. start. playing. welcome back to cross talk i'm here a little mind you were talking about the surge of violence in iraq. and you can. start playing. ok douglas i'd like to go back to you you know it's serious what do you think about the possibility of iraq still being partitioned because iran was brought up here and they know we still have the restless kurds and depending on what happens with syria and the sunni's i mean it's

still one of the biggest victims not only of the syrian people but it could be the people of iraq again. i don't think partition of i rock is in the cards in of the the sunni state that would be carved out is just not viable you know lots of people like to talk about independent kurdistan but neither iraq nor iran nor turkey is going to let that happen iraq is going to have to learn to to sink or swim together and i think they're going to and i just want to come back to one point maliki is dictator of a real problem with maliki is the duly formed prime minister of the country based on a electoral result now is he doing some things i don't approve of well well sure but to call him a dictator it's just not true he did not seize power he has a legitimate electorial claim on political power that he's going to have to defend in the two thousand and fourteen elections and if he's voted out he's voted out but what do you think about the term dictator from molecule go ahead well as

a bit rough i must admit but the reality is that he does can control the judiciary he did not appoint and go to the parliament with regard to the minister of defense and the minister of interior you know the people that control the security forces and of course he is going after his political opponents with a vengeance you know those are tentacles i think that suggest what might be called a dictator john what do you think about that i mean is it is iraq going down the right path of the wrong path because is it civil war or talk or see if that's that seems like the choice. it it's it's civil war with an insurgency that is still alive and i just want to say the term dictated that's not my term i'm quoting people in the iraqi government who have seen like he's been doing his own shiite allies like assad or has said maliki is turning the country into a dictatorship the law of the iraqi a party wrote an op ed in the new york times

a few months ago saying that maliki is driving towards an autocratic state so look this is i'm not making things up you know this is this is straight from the mouth of of iraqis who see firsthand what what's going on in iraq it was he think anybody in washington really knows any more about iraq you know as long as there's a modicum of stability we'll keep running with the security i mean this is been a headache and there's nothing much the u.s. can do now anyway. regrettably few and i think we'll probably get agreement on this point iraq has has not been paid attention to there is a i think it all sides would like to move on it's embarrassing to to lots of factions you know it was an unpopular war you know no matter how you know no other whether you really supported it or really didn't support it was still unpopular and weighed on you and it was terrible to hear the news every morning in two thousand and six two thousand and seven so everyone's happy to have this behind them which i think is a real problem is iraq is at the center of so many of the issues we're going to

deal with for the next ten years it's at the center of the sunni shia divide it's at the center of the arab kurd divide it's at the it's going to be at the center of opec politics very quickly as their oil production continues to ramp up and iraq is going to be a real player inside of opec a point that gets lost on lots of people it's at the center so many in arresting divides in the middle east that we're going to have to pay attention to iraq and i just want to come back to dictator ok other people are calling maliki a dictator you know lots of people in american politics call president obama all kinds of things too that doesn't mean responsible analysts use them you know he's not what lots of people say well and bob you know need to be counterintuitive here a lot of people have said for a long time is that the only way you can rule a country like iraq with all of its different factions and differences is there is a dictator ok that's the nature of the game you know. ok you make an interesting

point i have a good friend that is in iraq was a general under saddam hussein who came exile in this country and he's he told me many times that the only way to rule iraq given the diversity that we've just addressed is with iron fist i don't think that even my friend approves of some of the things that maliki is doing today however it is a diverse population that has had a history of warring or fighting amongst one another keep in mind it was the brits we can blame for you know drawing the lines that for modern day iraq it was a bit of an unnatural country that came together so you know some of the geo political you know realities of the future you know with iran seeking. to maintain syria to maintain its grip on southern lebanon you know route all the way to the med and of course its new alliance of allegedly with. the

new government in egypt has the sunni world a bit problematic a bit concerned yes we do face i think long term geo political challenges in that part of the world and as long as they have. control over obviously all that oil under their ground i think they're going to have a stranglehold to a certain to be degree over the economy of the world at least as it has to do with oil ok john it's changing in a moment he may be a son of a bitch but he's america's son of a bitch and that's just fine isn't it. well that's typically how things work in washington we are perfectly happy with widespread human rights abuses as long as they do our bidding i mean bob was right to point out the fact that. you know the oil is very central to iraq what we want or what washington wants is to keep the regimes in iraq largely. sort of largely weak

and dependent on the us and any that aren't like iran are targeted because they don't want someone holding power and sway in the region that is so important for the geopolitics of the oil you know you know douglas they mean george w. bush wanted to and vice president cheney envision that you know invading iraq into an democratizing it would be a beacon for the entire region but it seems now the voices in washington they don't care about this mock receiving anymore and only need is they dependent political faction or leaders there as john just pointed out. it's disappointing how little we talk about democracy in the region now but i like to people you know if you don't like politics in iraq you know just go around the horn in the region you know iraq is clearly you know it's no contest they have a much better government than their neighbors to the east and west than than iran

or syria you know kuwait is you know out in out you know monarchy you got to prefer iraq to that and even with turkey the you know it's it's pretty close you know the same abuses that are thrown at maliki a precipices you know jailing his opponents you know happen in turkey as well it's a rough neighborhood and they play hardball politics now is it as democratic as we would like no but i still think that we have now an iraq that is a standing challenge to the iranian regime that shows a different way for a clearly you know government that remain and that remains to be seen nothing that remains to be seen bob let's talk about al qaeda is all kind of getting stronger is it just because the state is weak well cut is present i think a lot of what they had to it has migrated into syria where you know they they find in the mess of the turmoil of syria you know more operational strength and of

course i think that the center a lot of them have returned either to libya or to yemen and then of course into the subsaharan so yes they have a presence but i don't think it's anywhere what it was a couple of years ago john it's really quite interesting is before the invasion there was no al qaeda presence in iraq now now it's a base for it i mean one of the great ironies of this war. there was no. in iraq at that time there was no talk of him d. i mean the war was fought on false preset pretenses every initial justification for going in has been conclusively falsified and yet no one know when pays for that there's no accountability in washington for people that wage a war with by the most conservative estimates killed one hundred fifty thousand people and then now they're not better off at all they're there they're living under another dictatorship and they're continuing insurgency i just want to mention something douglas said because there's

a difference in emphasis here that we need to we need to i think is important yes it's a bad neighborhood there's lots of bad stuff going on it's not necessarily you know a western europe but you know we need to recognize the united states as role in keeping that region full of thuggish dictators we can go around the yeah let's go to yemen again we did a yemen sort of regime change to replace our old puppet and put on our new new puppet general hadi we can go to bob crane where we continue to send arms and money to the regime that continues to clamp down on any chance for an actual democratic spring there we can saudi arabia our closest ally and one of the hugest buyers of our arms and weapons and has been as one of the worst governments in the world it's a massage honest racist religious dictatorship authoritarian dictatorship that doesn't let out any dissent or human rights or anything like this so we have

to recognize the united states is role and let's talk about iran too i mean there's a lot to talk about iran and yes we're not paying the iranian government with weapons and arms in order to prop up their dictatorship but we did put in a dictatorship in fifty three and then the seventy nine revolution is of course the class. sick blowback result of that that and so we need to recognize the u.s. role in all this and we need to start advocating a pullback of u.s. involvement we have to stop playing marionette and trying to pull the strings of this region to the detriment of the let me jump in here i want to give douglas the last word in the program do you want to react to anything that john just said. i don't i certainly don't disagree with this characterizations of many of these regimes which leads me to say you know what which means me to ask why we keep coming back to iraq i mean iraq is a parliamentary democracy now lots of issues with that are people doing things that

we wouldn't necessarily agree with is maliki you know a little forceful with some of the other institutions in that government yes but it's a parliamentary democracy and the classic example of that is when we tried to extend the u.s. presence in iraq and twenty eleven it's pretty clear maliki wanted that to happen and he couldn't get it through the parliament all right gentlemen that's a no question we'll see where the future of iraq is many thanks to my guest today in washington thanks to our viewers for watching us here already see you next time remember. if you. want to.

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