Alright y'all, welcome back to Hands On War Radio, Chaos Radio in Austin.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks for tuning into the show today and introducing Robert Dreyfuss.
His website is robertdreyfuss.com.
He's an investigative journalist.
He's written for, well, everything.
The Prospect, Rolling Stone.
Right now, he's currently at The Nation Magazine.
He's the author of the book, Devil's Game.
How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
My pleasure, Scott, always.
Good to have you here.
And did I get that right, The Prospect?
The American Prospect.
Yeah, yeah, that's in there too.
Oh yeah, that's, boy.
Yeah, you wrote a bunch of great stuff for them.
Okay, I'm just trying to keep all my great liberal-leaning reporter guys straight here in my head.
It's not always that easy.
There's so many of you guys.
Okay, so we have a lot of stuff to cover here.
First of all, if it's okay with you, I want to know what you think about the Status of Forces Agreement.
Exactly where this stands, it looks like it's been ratified by the Parliament, the Cabinet, the Presidential Council, and now they say they're going to have a referendum in July.
They're going to let the Iraqi people vote in a popular election whether they want to ratify the Status of Forces Agreement.
What do you think that really means?
What situation exactly is Bush leaving Obama with, and what effect do you think that might have on Obama's promise to get our combat forces out of Iraq by 2011?
Well, I think the Status of Forces Agreement with the United States is very, very important in the sense that it's a symbolic rejection by Iraq of the continued American presence there.
It does allow for the United States to maintain troops for three full years, but at a declining rate.
I would imagine that it's very much in tune with the kind of 16-month combat troop withdrawal program that President-elect Obama has talked about.
And I think it certainly signals the beginning of the end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
I think you're right to point out the importance of this referendum for next summer, because I think that's something that could turn out to be a real wild card if the Iraqi population, which is a lot more nationalist-minded than many of the Parliament leaders, if the population votes the agreement down next summer, that would lead to a kind of helter-skelter situation in which the United States would have to carry out a much quicker withdrawal and would have to stop all of its operations.
And I would expect you'll see a pretty significant ratcheting up of populist and nationalist and other kinds of hyperbolic rhetoric from all parts of the Iraqi political spectrum in advance of that.
So that could be kind of a wild card in the future.
But I feel fairly confident that Obama is going to start, when he takes office, to draw down U.S. forces.
Now, the question is, how quick will he move, especially if violence starts to increase?
You raised the question about what Bush is leaving Obama.
I think he's leaving him a mess in Iraq, because the underlying political problems that have plagued that country haven't been resolved.
And therefore, it's possible, even likely, that Iraq could return to the kind of violence that preceded the last year or year and a half of calm, or relative calm.
And if that happens, I think Obama would be under a lot of pressure to halt or reverse the withdrawal of troops.
And so he's going to have to be pretty tough-minded to stand up to a lot of the advice he'll get from the military, from Secretary of Defense Gates, who's staying on, from conservatives all across the spectrum, and from people like Brent Scowcroft, who he pays a lot of attention to.
All of these people are now arguing that we need to adjust the withdrawal from Iraq based on conditions on the ground, and that's something that could be problematic for carrying out his pledge to get out.
Well, but the thing is, it seems like whatever the conditions are on the ground, whether we're at the tail end of the so-called working of the surge, or whether we're in the height of mass slaughter like in 2006, 2007, we can never leave.
It's never the right time to leave, according to the American politicians.
Well, yes and no.
I mean, I think there's been a consensus for the last two to three years that it is time to get out of Iraq.
And before the surge happened two years ago, there was that consensus not only among General Casey and General Abizaid, who were in charge of the war at the time, reportedly even Don Rumsfeld was starting to come around to that point of view.
You had the Baker-Hamilton bipartisan task force that recommended something almost identical to Obama's campaign program of withdrawing combat forces over the course of a year, I think they recommended.
You had a broad consensus among the establishment that the Iraq war should be ended.
And so I don't think there's some consensus to stay.
I think there are, however, a number of people who do believe it's important to stay, even to have permanent military bases, and they tend to cluster around the people who think we're going to have a military confrontation with Iran, and people who think that it's sort of the American imperial mission to control the Middle East.
And I don't think they're in charge anymore, but I think they're a significant and important force that's going to have an effect on the decisions that Obama makes.
Well, and I want to spend actually a lot more time on that later in the show, a little bit later in the show, your article with Tom Englehart about the neocons and the positioning of the different war hawks on the Iran issue and the upcoming Obama administration.
But I want to focus on this phrase, combat forces.
This has always seemed to me to be some kind of giant loophole that these politicians use when they talk about getting troops out of Iraq, and am I wrong to assume that even Obama means to keep bases, to keep anti-terrorism forces there, and all the force protection needed to protect them, to staff that giant embassy in Baghdad?
Well, you know, he hasn't been specific about that.
That's been one of the things that he deliberately left vague during the campaign, and he is continuing to do so.
The number of residual forces could be anywhere from just a couple of thousand Marines to protect the embassy, and to advise the Iraqi army, perhaps, if that is deemed important, all the way up to keeping 60 or 70,000 American soldiers there for five years or more.
He hasn't said what he thinks is the right option.
In fact, he's letting it float out there, maybe to see how conditions develop, but among his advisers, there were sharp divisions on this.
There was a group of advisers, especially around the Center for American Progress, who were on Obama's Iraq task force, and they proposed withdrawing really all of the troops, including the residual forces, minus a very tiny force for the embassy.
On the other hand, you had people at another think tank, a more conservative one, called the Center for New American Security, Madeleine Albright's home, and they proposed a much bolder kind of residual force of 50,000 to 70,000 troops that would last for several years, and be heavily involved in all aspects of building and training and equipping the Iraqi military and the police, and border protection and a whole bunch of other things.
So Obama hasn't showed his cards on that yet, and I don't think we're going to see them for a while.
Yeah, and you know me, I'm extra cynical, and I'm just going by the process of elimination, because it seems to me if he's saying, get all combat forces out, what he's really saying is leave everybody else that he can rename anything but combat forces there.
Well, that may be true, but there's no indication that that's what he thinks.
We don't know yet, so I think it's too early to say what his plan is.
I'm not necessarily going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he's planning to get all the troops out.
I think it's a 50-50 call, and of course there's a big broad middle ground there between 60,000 and 1,000.
It could be 10 or 15 or 20 or 30,000 or something like that.
On the other hand, a lot of this depends on the Iraqis.
I mean, the Iraqis don't want, and I'm talking about the population of Iraq, they don't want American troops hanging around in their country.
In one way, once the combat forces start to leave, you can't leave too many troops around there, because they're going to be vulnerable.
They're going to be targets.
They're going to be hostage to events.
And so it's almost like once you start pulling the combat troops out, you've pretty much got to get all of them out eventually.
It's risky to leave them there for a long time.
Let me ask you to try to analyze Maliki's position for me.
Do you think he feels, or I'm sorry to try to ask you to read his mind or whatever, I'm going to think of a better way to phrase it, but do the Dawa Party guys figure they're in the position that they have enough support from Iran and that their position is solidified in power enough in the green zone there that they really don't need America anymore?
No, I think Maliki got just what he wants.
He got an agreement to stick around for two to three years, which means that Americans will be there to prop up his government against any and all comers.
On the other hand, he gets the claim that he is a nationalist who's negotiated the end of the American occupation in three years, which, according to the Iraqi document at least, includes all American forces.
Now, we all know that can be adjusted and amended, but that's how he is selling it to the Iraqis, that this includes a full withdrawal over the next three years.
He's also engaged in a political struggle, a three-cornered one, first of all against the Sunnis, second of all against the Kurds, and third against rivals within his own Shiite coalition, including some factions that are much more pro-Iran than he is.
So, in fact, what he's doing is building up the army and the police as kind of his own militia, because his party, the Dawa Party, doesn't have a militia.
It's really an intellectual elite party of Islamist scholars, and it's never had a real armed wing.
He's also building up, province by province, what he calls support councils, which are like little provincial private militias with government support that are also pro-Maliki.
So he's building up a fairly significant military and paramilitary force around the country to be his enforcement arm, and I think he's trying to centralize as much power as he can in his own personal hands, while aware of the fact that he's got to keep both the United States and Iran happy.
It was my thesis about the SOFA, about the Status of Forces Agreement, that after saying no, no, no, no for many months, Maliki and the government of Iraq suddenly said yes, right after Obama was elected, because the Iranians gave them the green light.
The Iranians said, OK, we're not going to oppose this anymore.
So that was a gesture by Iran toward Obama, saying, look, we're willing to deal on Iraq.
We can help fix this mess for you.
So what can you give us?
And I think the Iranians are signaling in many, many ways that they want to talk Turkey with the United States.
You'll remember that President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to Obama, a surprising letter of fairly warm sentiment, saying we'd like to talk with you.
And there have been a lot of other similar signals, including some support inside Iran for the Status of Forces Agreement itself.
So all in all, I think the Iranians and the United States are beginning to look like they're on the same page when it comes to Iraq.
Boy, and the realization comes with all that, that whatever issues we have to work out with the Iranians, there's a good starting point of common interests that can be formed.
Hell, we've been installing their friends in power this whole time anyway.
We might as well be outright negotiating with them about it.
Yeah, that's true.
And the problem is that I'm afraid that if the withdrawal starts and Iraq is starting to get wobbly again, that the Iranians could very well overplay their hand.
In other words, they could say to Obama, look, we're not going to help you fix Iraq anymore if you don't give us what we want.
In fact, we may make it worse.
And at that point, I think they risk a confrontation with Iran.
And that's why I'm concerned that the talks that Obama starts with Iran may not go so smoothly.
It's not like he's going to sit down with Iran's government and they're going to patch up all the differences and it's going to be sweetness and light in six months.
These talks might go on for a year, two years, three years, who knows, and they're going to have a lot of ups and downs.
And as they go on, as they start to falter at certain times, I think there's going to be pressure on Obama from various hawks to finally get up, walk away from the table and say, okay, we gave the Iranians a chance, now it's back to confrontation.
All right, now, a big part of that whole riddle is Muqtada al-Sadr, and he apparently is in Iran now, I guess, trying to get a higher religious rank, right?
Yeah, I mean, I guess he's doing some kind of religious study, but I think that's more just an attempt to burnish his own credentials.
In fact, nobody really knows what he's doing.
He's kind of been under the radar for two years now.
There's been a little bit of media here and there.
I wouldn't say too much, but I've noticed a few articles talking about how he's, and I think even in the New York Times, that he's much more marginal now, that the Iraqi army has full reign inside Sadr City, and that his days are numbered.
At the same time, in fact, I think it was the same New York Times article, before the very end of it, got to the point where they talked about how the factions in power are basically leaning closer to Iran, and they talk about Abdulaziz al-Hakim and the Supreme Islamic Council and how they're for a strong federal-type system, where the Shiites basically keep everything from Baghdad to Iran, and in alliance with Iran, whereas Sadr is a nationalist.
As you've pointed out earlier in this very interview, the people of Iraq are much more nationalist than the parties that America has put in power there, and it seems like in terms of popular support, even if Sadr may be in exile now, am I wrong to assume that he could march right back in and ask people to pick up their rifles and start chaos all over again, whether it was just his own decision or whether the Iranians asked him to do it or any of those type things?
You know, we don't know how powerful Sadr is on the ground.
It's a question that I don't think anybody's been able to answer.
We'll get one indication maybe next month, because there's supposed to be provincial elections, and that means that in all of those Shiite-dominated provinces in the south, people are going to go to the polls and vote either for the Sadrists, or for Maliki, or for the Supreme Council, or one of the other parties, and we'll get some sense of who's got muscle.
It doesn't necessarily reflect straight-on democracy, it may reflect who's got the guns and who's got the power and who's controlling the ballot boxes and all of that, but it'll tell us something about the relative strengths of these parties.
In the last round, for instance in Basra, the Sadrists were quite powerful.
Now, they may have suffered some defeats, we don't know, it's hard to tell.
It's certainly clear that Sadr strongly opposed the Status of Forces Agreement with the United States, and he lost, he lost big.
His people got up in Parliament, and they pounded on the tables, and they had physical altercations on the floor of the Parliament, and fistfights broke out, and they got creamed in that vote.
So, after they got creamed, Sadr said something like, well, we reserve the right to conduct military operations in opposition to this, but so far, nothing's happened.
And it may be that he's holding his powder dry, it may be that he has no powder left, we just don't know.
Well, his faction was able to call some numbers of, I think, tens of thousands of people out into the street a couple of weeks back.
Yeah, that's not too much, though.
He used to be able to do a lot more than that.
And so, as I say, he's been saying for two years that he's been supporting, almost two years, that he's been supporting a ceasefire, certainly since the summer of 2007.
He's asked his militia, his Madi army, to dissolve or stand down.
He's said, we're going to become a cultural and social and political force, rather than a military one.
They fought several battles with the Iraqi army, and seem to have suffered, although the ceasefires that ended those battles were brokered by Iran.
So, as I say, I think there's a lot of questions about who's got the most clout among the Shiites, and we may not be able to figure that out until we start to see the election returns next month.
All right.
Now, I want to get to this great article that you wrote for Tom Dispatch.
It ran at lourockwell.com and at antiwar.com and at tomdispatch.com.
And I guess this is in relation to your entry this morning, or yesterday, I guess.
Oh, no, I guess a few days ago here.
At your blog, the Dreyfus Report at thenation.com, John Bolton reads them and weeps.
And then your article for Tom Dispatch is called, Is Iran Policy Still Up for Grabs?
Still Preparing to Attack Iran, the Neoconservatives in the Obama Era.
And you have such a good handle on who all these different wonks and policy factions are, and all these different think tanks.
And I guess greatly appreciate if you could help further my own and my audience's understanding of just who all are the people surrounding the Obama administration, and who are the dangerous ones in terms of continuing still, even after the Bush-Cheney era, to push for war with Iran.
Well, the first thing to say is, in the last three years, I think the threat of attacking Iran has declined sharply because the Bush administration changed its policy, started talking to Iran, started talking also parallel to North Korea.
It kind of abandoned a lot of the neocons and pushed most of them into exile.
And so you had people like John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith either forced out or left the administration.
Second, I think the coming to power of the Obama administration makes it even less likely that we will attack Iran, because Obama has talked about intensifying talks with Iran, you know, opening up a dialogue and so forth.
And even though he's talked that I'm not going to take military action off the table, he clearly wants to strike some sort of diplomatic deal.
Now, that said, what happens if those talks don't work?
The neocons, for the most part, have not abandoned the idea of a confrontation with Iran, whether it's through, you know, extremely tight war-like sanctions and blockades of Iranian oil exports and imports and so forth, or a direct military assault itself, a kind of a strategic bombing campaign.
But to get from here to there is not so easy.
So what they've been doing is kind of courting some of the more hawkish and anti-Iran officials within the Obama camp.
What I tried to identify in the piece that you talked about is some of these studies that have come from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a new group that's called United Against Nuclear Iran, and several others, a task force that was set up to issue a report on Iran called Meeting the Challenge.
All of these, to one degree or another, included some Obama officials, as well as other hawkish Democrats like Richard Holbrooke.
Dennis Ross plays an important role in this, because he is headquartered at the Washington Institute and took part in a number of these panels.
He's part of this United Against Nuclear Iran group.
And I think with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, it's possible that people like Ross and Holbrooke will get important jobs related to the Middle East and South Asia that could put them in a position, if the talks start to falter, to then come to the Secretary of State and to the White House and say, now we need to ratchet up the pressure again and start building toward a confrontation.
So that's a concern, and I don't think it's one that we should treat as impossible, because Iran itself could play into that scenario.
Its leaders are not among the more mentally stable ones around the world.
They certainly don't understand the United States, and they certainly have their own hawkish tendencies and millennial attitudes about Islam that contribute to them making mistakes as well.
So I think it's a very dangerous situation, even though Obama says he wants to talk about it.
Yeah, the thing is, it's almost like, well, this actually worked out well, but I was so worried when the Supreme Court was ruling on the Hamdan case that they were going to say it was okay.
And it's sort of the same kind of thing where if we have the talks and the talks consist of America saying to them, cease enriching uranium, you may not enrich uranium, nonproliferation treaty notwithstanding, any uranium enrichment is tantamount to a nuclear weapons program, and you may not do it, then that means that if they refuse, then that was the last option.
We tried to talk to them.
It's the same script as the attack with Iraq.
We tried to get them to go our way by talking with them, and they haven't bowed to our every wish.
And so now what other option do we have except the force that we had threatened?
Yeah, and that's why I say it's a dangerous situation.
The fact is, when you go into negotiations, you need to be prepared for them to stall.
It's very likely, I believe.
I'm not one of these Pollyannas who thinks that Iran is trying to do nuclear research so it can have peaceful nuclear power.
I think they want a bomb.
I think there's no question about it, at least in my mind.
And I think they're going to get one.
And that was the whole point of Bolton, saying it's too late to stop them.
He's come around to the notion that military attacks are unlikely and may not work, that it's too late for sanctions to have an effect.
This is what he said.
It's too late for us to do some kind of regime change.
So they may get over the next couple years or so.
I don't know what the timetable is.
If they want it, they may decide to go nuclear or something close to it, a pre-nuclear situation or something.
So we may have to simply live with that.
And just the way we live with a nuclear India and Pakistan and Israel, we may have to live with a nuclear Iran.
If that happens, I think it's going to be important to really tackle this issue of proliferation in a serious way.
And that may mean ultimately asking Israel to put its nuclear deterrent on the table and exchange it in a disarmament way for the nuclear program in Iran and other ones that might start to develop in response to Iran, among certain Arab countries as well, and to create a kind of negotiations or a movement toward a nuclear-free Middle East.
Yeah, now who's Pollyanna now, Bob?
Come on.
Well, you know, it's not inconceivable once Iran gets a bomb that the Israelis would say we can't afford to have mutually assured destruction because we're a tiny country.
So I don't know.
You never know.
I agree it would certainly be a stretch.
Well, let me ask you this about the Iranian bomb, because my understanding is that the International Atomic Energy Agency is standing right there watching all their uranium enrichment and that the worst-case scenario for Iran coming up with a bomb, other than, you know, if the Russians decide to sell them a ready-made plutonium core or something, what they would have to do is withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty and kick the IAEA inspectors out of the country and then begin to enrich weapons-grade uranium.
And it would still, from that point, take them quite a while, right?
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, they could do that, and big deal.
I don't know how...
You know, I'm not an expert on the technology.
Some people say it would take them only a matter of a few months to take the uranium they have and run it through these centrifuges, you know, enough to get it to weapons-grade.
Supposedly the amount they have is the equivalent of one bomb's worth.
A lot of experts say one bomb isn't any good at all.
You need at least a few, so I don't know.
I mean, I think it would probably take them another, you know...
My estimate is, you know, another three to five years to get there.
So I think we have lots of time to worry about this, and that's my point about the negotiations.
It isn't some sort of emergency that if they don't, you know, give us what we want in the first six months, that we need to start, you know, confronting them in some way.
We've got lots of time on this.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
I think it's pretty clear, it seems pretty clear to me, I guess, that they're trying to get their enrichment ability up to the point where if they decided, then they could embark on a nuclear weapons program, that they don't have one now, and that, frankly, their technology really isn't in any position to go ahead and make that change now, withdraw from the NPT and kick the inspectors out and go ahead and try to enrich the good stuff, because they're still working on getting the industrial-grade stuff churned out, you know, regularly and without their centrifuges exploding on them and so forth.
Right, exactly.
So, yeah, the lack of emergency there, I think, is really important.
And even when Bolton is saying, it's funny, because even when he's saying, all right, well, there's nothing we can do about it, he's still kind of pretending that this is inevitable any day now kind of a thing, you know?
Yeah, I mean, he may be being more alarmist than he needs to be about how soon this is.
That's kind of his nature, and so I'm not trying to match my views to Bolton's.
Oh, no, clearly not.
There are people besides Bolton who think that Iran is closer rather than further from being able to develop a nuclear capability, but I'm sure he's exaggerating it to the maximum he can for his own purposes.
Still, it's possible, but as I say, it's not exactly some four-alarm emergency, and we have time to deal with this.
Well, and it seems like these various think tanks and study groups and people who are putting out these reports, they don't seem to be too in touch with this reality that you and I are describing.
They seem to think there's going to be a bomb any day now or any year now or something.
Who thinks that?
Well, these various reports, the Chuck Robb and Dan Coats report.
The standard line from all of the hawks is that this is close to imminent, and when you point out that the intelligence community thinks it's not so imminent, they make fun of the CIA for its mistakes on Iraq, which, of course, was their own doing.
They were the ones sounding the alarm bell and trying to twist the intelligence and pressure the CIA to come to those conclusions.
And everybody can read The Lie Factory and Mother Jones all about that.
Yeah, so the point is, I think the pressure from Iran is just not as great as these hawks are trying to maintain.
Well, now, of all the people that have been hired so far to be part of the national security team in the incoming Obama administration, do you know of any of these people who have said anything reasonable about their understanding of what Iran's nuclear capacity is and what the danger level is and what needs to be done about it other than let's talk?
Because, again, let's talk just means sit down and insist face-to-face instead of through the Germans or the British that they must cease enriching uranium.
That's been the standard, that there can be no enrichment, right?
Is there any chance that that's going to change?
Any indication?
Well, I don't know.
I think we have to make something other than the nuclear program the center of our relationship to Iran.
We have to try to get better relations with Iran on a whole broad range of issues.
They can help us in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They can help us with Hamas and Hezbollah.
They can help us on energy and counter-terrorism.
There's a lot of things that we could work out with Iran where we may have common interests and then fold the nuclear stuff into that.
But that's really what the negotiations are supposed to be about.
All right, everybody, that's Robert Dreyfuss.
The book is Devil's Game.
The blog is the Dreyfuss Report at thenation.com.
His own personal website is robertdreyfuss.com.
Thanks very much for coming back on the show, Bob.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Antiwar Radio.
We'll be back here tomorrow.
Stay tuned for the light launch.
Here's, I don't know, ten seconds or so of fear.
