The Pinky Show introduces Raed Jarrar, who is a Middle East political consultant to AFSC (the American Friends Service Committee.)

We've been told that if we leave Iraq, the citizens will be vulnerable to attack from fighting factions. We also need to stay so they don't bring the fight to us. Politicians also justify staying in order to train Iraqi forces. According to Jarrar, the Sunnis and Shiites have never engaged in civil wars with each other, contrary to what msm has told us. Jarrar also claims that those forces trained by the U.S. are the ones mostly committing gross human rights violations. He compares it to The School of the Americas.

When Paul Bremmer created the Governing Council in 2003, he chose new leaders in the council based on their tribal ethnicity which has never happened before. The former Iraqi government was secular and wasn't predominantly Sunni. Jarrar says it is wrong to say that the current civil war taking place is a religious war. The U.S. has aligned itself with a small faction of people who want to partition Iraq into three separate units---Sunni, Shiite, and Kurds. They are a minority. The other faction, which is much larger, wants the occupation to end and have a unified Iraq. Each of these factions is made up of Sunni's, Shiites, and Kurds. This is what the fighting is about.

The elected governing council is made up of all three tribes and they want the occupation over. The U.S. however, keeps them excluded from the executive branch of the government who want the occupation to stay.

The U.S. media are a part of this apparatus, which is why they don't question dignitaries that come over from Iraq and tell how good things are going there.

Ending U.S. occupation would be the first step to ending the violence.

Raed Jarrar Decodes the Misinformation