For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes regularly for IPS News.
You can find all his archives for them at Antiwar.com slash Porter, and that will definitely include, if it doesn't already, by the time anybody hears this, U.S.
-Iraq Generals Seek to Reverse Obama Withdrawal Decision.
So, welcome to the show, Gareth.
Good to talk to you.
Thanks, as always, Scott.
Good to have you here.
And now, I guess you have it from two anonymous sources in this article.
They have it from sources who were actually inside the meeting, that there was a meeting the day after Obama was inaugurated, on January 21st, and this meeting was between Obama, the, I don't know if the Joint Chiefs were there, but the head of CENTCOM, General Petraeus, was there, peace be upon him, and then the guy under him, who's in charge of Iraq, General Adirno, were there.
And you say in this article, they were trying to sell Obama on, let's stay longer, and he said no.
Is that right?
That is absolutely right.
I mean, this is quite clear that both of my sources, one of whom was, you know, I can tell you, somebody who has been associated with the Obama campaign, and still, you know, is in close touch with the folks, high-level people, advisors to Obama.
And the other one is the military source, who has very good contacts with people within the Pentagon, and maintains a lot of good sources there, surrounding the people in the meeting.
Wow, so you really have both ends of the meeting, the military side and the civilian side.
They both said the same thing, that Obama was very clear that he heard them out, but he disagreed, he wanted them to enact, to implement a 16-month withdrawal plan, and he asked them to come back with such a plan within the very near future.
A 16-month withdrawal plan, like in the deal.
Pardon?
Just like in the deal, like he promised all along.
Well, that's right, exactly.
I mean, this was his pledge during the campaign.
Sorry, that's an inside joke for people who are fans of Army of Darkness, but maybe it's too inside of a joke.
That was too inside for me.
In any case, that is what he had been saying during the campaign, and he explained why he took that position, which is that he believed that Iraq was not the strategically important point in the Middle East, in terms of the security problems the United States has, but Afghanistan is.
And so he believed that troops were going to be needed, not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan.
Equally important, he was listening to what he was being told by the senior officials in the Army and the Marine Corps, that Iraq was really destructive of both of those services.
And he told Petraeus that he was still insistent on his 16-month plan, even after he heard his arguments in Baghdad last July, according to Joe Klein of Time magazine.
So what I'm saying is that this was a position that was carefully thought through, that he believed in strongly, and that he's not inclined to compromise on.
And you're saying he's discussed this with these same men, General Petraeus, and then back last July, and now here he is, he's the president, and he's still sticking by this.
And now, I'm sorry, because I must have missed it if it came out at all, that he ordered them to go back and come up with a 16-month withdrawal plan.
Was that a big headline somewhere?
This has not been reported at all, except for an obscure UPI story, which no one ever picked up, and which actually, interestingly enough, it was two days after the meeting, UPI published a story that quoted Pentagon sources.
So that would be January 23rd?
January 23rd, yes.
But nobody ever picked that up, and it's really unknown.
But none of the mainstream news media has ever reported this.
They did report on the meeting, but what they reported was that Obama had simply said, please bring me a responsible withdrawal plan.
Now, you know, let's be honest here.
I mean, part of the reason this hasn't been reported, of course, is that Obama had decided not to make an announcement that he had made this order and this decision.
And I think the reason is quite clear that he wants to be able to say, when he does announce his plan, his decision on Iraq withdrawal in 16 months, that he has consulted with Odierno, Petraeus, and Gates, and that he heard their advice and this is what he decided on.
So in other words, he wants to be able to… Well, that's already happened, though, right?
He's heard their advice, and now he can announce.
I don't understand.
Well, I mean, I think that, in other words, he wants to have a little bit more space there in which to be able to say that he talked to them, he considered it, and then he could come out with this decision, rather than having it be a decision at the same meeting.
I mean, that's my reading of why he chose to do that.
But in any case, I think we can expect a public announcement by the White House very soon, within certainly a very few weeks, if not one week.
Well, how long do they have before they're supposed to bring back this plan for getting out?
Well, I mean, I did hear from one source that it was to be this coming week, but I'm not sure about that.
I don't think that's written in stone.
Well, now, you say in the article that it seems to you that Petraeus and Odierno are teaming up with this kind of cabal of generals to make it much harder for… well, basically to set the stage to make it all Obama's fault in case things get more violent in Iraq upon withdrawal.
That's really what the headline is for this story.
I mean, even though I had to begin with the actual decision at that meeting, which he essentially telegraphed to Petraeus and Odierno from Baghdad as well as Gates, the real storyline here is that Petraeus and Odierno apparently are not going to be passive and passively accept this decision.
And by the way, what I was told by my sources, and I reported the story, at least by one source, is that when Petraeus left the Oval Office, he was visibly upset.
He was visibly shaken by the fact that he had lost, indicating that he was really shocked by this decision because he had believed that he could rule the president and that he would come out with a willingness to compromise on this issue.
So Petraeus is not happy, was not happy.
Odierno has already indicated in an interview with the New York Times last week that he believes that we cannot really make a decision on withdrawal from Iraq any time this year.
In other words, we should wait for another year before making a decision about withdrawal.
Which, as far as I'm concerned, and I think by any objective reckoning, is really undermining Obama's policy.
Well, see, this is my thing.
I don't really mind if the generals disagree with the president and make their opinion known, but if the president gives them an order and then they go trying to fight him through the pages of the newspapers, then they should resign or be fired immediately, right?
I mean, what's the question here?
I think that's absolutely right.
And in fact, if you think back to what happened last year, we all know that Admiral Fallon was asked to resign, was clearly expected to resign, after he had voiced views which were at odds with the White House, and then did a series of interviews which were published, which again appeared to be at odds with White House policy.
I mean, as much as we were happy with what Fallon was saying, it's certainly no shock that Fallon was asked to resign.
And in fact, he was clearly, his career at that point was near an end.
And then the same thing should be true for O'Donnell.
I mean, he really should be fired.
That seems very clear.
And I would hope that there will be, at least as part of the result of this story, that there will be some pressure coming from the blogosphere and from opponents of the Petraeus-O'Donnell line for Obama to fire O'Donnell.
Well, and here's the other thing, too.
America brought all the violence to Iraq.
I mean, never mind backing Saddam Hussein, the fascist dictator, in the first place and everything, but even just since 2003, it's been the American occupation that's caused all the violence.
And if withdrawal, if there's an outbreak of fighting between this group or that inside Iraq as Americans leave, I don't know of any particular reason to believe that that would be the case at this point.
But if it is the case, then that would only reveal the artificial construct that, you know, America had intervened on behalf of groups that didn't have enough real support in Iraq to maintain their stature.
And so they will have to be brought down a peg or two or whatever by the situation in Iraq.
But that wouldn't be Obama's fault for leaving, because that's going to be the same thing whether we leave in ten years or whether we leave the day after tomorrow.
As always, Scott, you cut to the core of the issue, and you have just simply nailed it.
I mean, you know, this is precisely the point that one would like to see President Obama make publicly in regard to his decisions about withdrawal from Iraq.
Because you know what, I mean, the fact is, if Obama does say, oh, forget 16 months, now you made me mad, make it ten or something, right, whatever.
If he does that, we don't know, right?
Muqtada al-Sadr could say, well, now's my chance to fight against the Bata Brigade or whatever.
But at that point, again, the factions in Iraq are only in the positions they're in, because that's where this government has put them.
Well, and that's absolutely true.
And beyond that, I would simply add that, you know, the argument that's being used against the 16-month withdrawal, which is that, well, it's going to threaten the stability, quote-unquote, that we have achieved, is an argument for staying indefinitely.
For the simple reason that, you know, if indeed, you know, the Sunnis, for example, are waiting for the withdrawal of the American troops to start their own insurgency again, or the Shiites, for their part, are waiting for the U.S. withdrawal to start their effort to suppress the armed Sunnis, which we've been paying, then, you know, that's simply the decision that is inevitable in any case, on one side or the other.
And that simply means that the U.S. troop presence is not really preventing anything.
It's not really changing anything.
It's simply putting it off.
So there is really no sound argument that the troops are going to actually change the fundamental political realities of Iraq.
Quite the contrary, that they haven't changed anything.
So I think that really is the fundamental point that has to be conveyed.
And unfortunately, in a 1,200-word story on this, I couldn't really make that point, although I very much wanted to somehow convey an analytical point such as the one that you were trying to make.
Well, and now, you also said that it was a bunch of generals, presumably, you know, all of green and stars and medals all over their shirts and everything, who told Obama that they want out of there, because their army and their Marine Corps are being broken on the backs of the Iraqi people.
Sorry about that.
Well, that's absolutely correct, that in 2006, 2007, even 2008, you had very important military leaders who were saying that we have to get out of Iraq, because it is indeed threatening the health of the army and the Marine Corps.
And there really isn't very much argument against that.
I mean, the evidence is overwhelming that that's the case.
Now, the problem is that there is another faction in the army specifically, and that's the faction which is led at least ostensibly by General Petraeus.
And that is a faction that says, well, basically, screw the future of the army and the Marine Corps in terms of having a healthy force.
The only thing that really counts is that we prevail and that we dominate the narrative of what happened in Iraq.
And for that reason, we have to keep our troops there as a symbol of how powerful the United States is and how successful General Petraeus and his policy have been and how effective the army is in counterinsurgency.
So, you know, that's really the struggle for the soul of the army that's been going on now for the last couple of years, and which clearly is going to dominate the politics of the military for the next few years.
Well, and this is a guy who's already told the media on two or three different occasions that he would very much like to be president of the United States one day.
I don't know if he's actually said that.
I haven't.
I don't remember recalling anything from him.
Here, I'll Google it while you're talking.
But he certainly has been speculated about, and I think there is some reason to speculate about that.
He's the type of person who has vaulting ambitions, and he has become the darling of the Republican right.
He has cultivated them.
He's cultivated them on the way up to his position as commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq.
He specifically cultivated Paul Wolfowitz, and he is somebody who quite possibly could be in the running for Republican candidacy in 2012.
The first thing I found here is Patrick Coburn, general confided White House ambitions to Iraqi official in counterpunch.
He said this to Sabah Karim, then senior advisor and spokesman at the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
They talked about this, and he said, I asked him if Petraeus was planning to run in 2008, and he said, no, that would be too soon.
But again, we're talking about, I'm sorry, because we usually race ahead into these teeny tiny details on all these policy matters and things like that, and sometimes miss the big picture.
The big picture is that we're supposed to have civilian supremacy over the military, and if the president tells a general, your orders are to do this, and he doesn't like it, his job is to then quit, and not try to manage, conspire to create some sort of end run around the elected civilian government of this country.
That is correct, and the Petraeus case and the coterie of generals surrounding him and behind him really does constitute a very serious threat to the supremacy of the civilian leadership, that is to say the president of the United States and his legal right to make policy decisions having to do with war and peace.
And I have now seen some of the many comments that have been made online in response to my article, which do basically talk about the military threat to civilian dominance, and are really calling for the firing of these generals, even for the slightest infraction in regard to opposing the president.
Now, Petraeus is a very clever guy, and so far he has not said anything publicly that could be used against him in that regard.
Odierno, as I said, has said something which I think is a firing offense.
Now, the point that I want to make then beyond that, beyond the Petraeus and Odierno cases, is that there is this network of senior military officials, army generals, four-star army generals, both retired and active, who, according to my military source, are in fact conspiring, in the sense that they're talking among themselves about what can be done to basically undermine the political position of Obama in taking that decision and trying to generate opposition to it through the media in particular.
Well, it's perfectly fine for retired generals to do, and that's why we need reporters like you to make sure to report that that's what they're doing.
That is perfectly not okay at all for officers currently serving in the military to be doing that.
That's correct.
I mean, this would be, again, something that should they be discovered.
I mean, if their names were known, that they were part of a group that had talked among themselves with the purpose of trying to blame Obama for what they regard as inevitably a kind of defeat in Iraq, in the sense that their chosen narrative will be discredited, or at least will be lost, that would be a reason for firing any senior military official who was involved in briefing the press with that thought in mind.
But the thing is, too, though, politically, the president can't fire these guys at all unless it comes way down to it, like the kind of fight between MacArthur and Truman over whether to bomb China or not, something like that.
Otherwise, it makes Obama look really weak if he says, oh, geez, these guys are undermining me, and I've only been in power for a month.
Well, I mean, you're saying politically that he has to have an adequate political reason for it, and that's true.
The question then becomes, would he have adequate reason from a political point of view, in terms of public opinion, we're talking about, to fire Odierno?
And I think the answer is yes.
I think the answer is yes, because Odierno spoke to the New York Times knowing that he had made the decision.
Of course, he would have to own up to that in order to do this.
But if he chose to do that now, there's no reason why he couldn't, that Odierno had been informed that this was the decision, this is what had been expected, that they would turn over a detailed plan for withdrawal of all combat troops in 16 months.
And Odierno is now publicly speaking out in opposition to that, in effect.
Well, what about the chances that the Obama White House is actually spinning you and saying, basically because they don't want to leave Iraq any more than the military does, but they want to make it look like it's the military's fault that they're not getting out of Iraq rather than their own?
Well, I'm not exactly clear what you mean by spinning in the sense of whether this didn't really happen versus the reasons why he made the decision, is that what you mean?
In other words, that he may be making a decision for some reason other than the ones that I have suggested?
Well, I'm not sure exactly where the evidence is that he made the decision that he really wants out, that the conversation inside the Oval Office went down the way that they're telling you it went down.
It just seems to me like I'm trying to be as cynical as I can, because Obama's nothing but a politician to me, and so it just seems like if he's trying to back out of his commitment to get us out in 16 months, he might have his guys pick a good lefty reporter to tell the story to that it's the military's fault that we're not going to do what we say we're going to do.
Well, I was very careful with this story, Scott.
I would not have written this story had I not been confident in the sources themselves.
We're talking about, I mean, the people who gave me this information are not people inside the government at all.
I mean, these are people who are out of the Obama administration.
They are not people who work for Obama.
That has to be clear.
These are independent people.
And they both told me they spoke with people who were at the meeting.
And so I have absolutely no reason to doubt the veracity of this account.
Well, and you know me.
I trust your judgment, too.
I just don't want to make it too easy on Obama, either.
And it is something that at least occurs to me that he would try to back out of his commitment and then try to make it look like he's besieged on all sides.
It is his fault.
I want to make it clear that I regard Barack Obama as a Machiavellian figure, capable of deceit, certainly.
I think he has done that already during the campaign.
He has used, no, not deceit in a way that has to be regarded as a completely negative thing, in a battle.
You may faint.
You may not have your opponents know exactly what you're up to.
This is a man who is very disciplined.
He's very determined.
I think he's perfectly capable of going through rather Machiavellian subterfuge in order to do what he thinks needs to be done.
But in this case, I don't think it applies.
All right, now let's talk to your article before last.
Is Gates undermining another opening to Iran?
This is Robert Gates, the guy who reputedly, I guess with the help of people like Admiral Fallon, faced down Dick Cheney and prevented a war with Iran in the last term.
I don't know whether you necessarily buy that or not.
He's at least reputed to have done so.
And then at the same time, he's the guy that goes out on TV and directly contradicts the entire American intelligence community and says that Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.
Right.
I mean, I think that this raises, if I may just expand a bit on your question about Gates.
I think both my previous story and this story raise very serious questions about whether Gates is in fact going to be on Obama's team or is he going to be on the Petraeus team in regard to a series of issues which we're going to see fought out in the coming months, not just on Iraq withdrawal, but on Afghanistan, on the military budget, and on issues surrounding the future of the military.
And I say that because, as I wrote in the story that you've just cited, he gave testimony which certainly appeared as a matter of interpretation without knowing the inside story of what he believed he was doing, appeared to be making it more difficult for Obama to take a forward position, a position that departs from the kind of coercive diplomacy approach of the Bush administration toward Iran.
And as you said, that is against the background of having essentially torpedoed an effort to open diplomatically, certainly to warm relations, to improve relations with Iran by George H.W. Bush in 1992.
And that one is very well documented, and I have all the details in that story.
But beyond that, we also know that Gates has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Petraeus line on Iraq, that he was clearly still taking that position after Obama was elected, that he was not changing his position suddenly and becoming a supporter of Obama's 16-month withdrawal, but rather was still suggesting that what we really need here and what Obama appears to be doing, as he put it, is to make an accommodation with his military commanders.
And my understanding is that Gates was still taking that position at this key meeting on January 21st on withdrawal from Iraq, when he was supporting the Petraeus-Odierno line.
It seems like they would have got that settled between Gates and Obama at the job interview.
That, listen, I want to keep you here, and I want to keep you here because you're the guy that's going to get me out of there in 16 months, and this I'm serious about, and they're either going to shake hands or not.
They didn't talk about this, frankly, then?
Well, I don't know the answer to that, Scott.
It's right that it should have been.
If he were a politically astute person, as we assume he is, and he understood where Gates stood on this, he should have said, look, I expect you to start supporting me on this starting right now.
Well, they would have had to.
I mean, how could they not discuss that?
On the other hand, again, I just remind you that Obama plays games within games.
Remember that the reason Gates was chosen for this position was not because Obama expected him to be in agreement with his positions, that is, Obama's positions on a number of issues, but because he felt that he needed a Republican-type figure to legitimize his foreign policy.
This was what I was told by somebody who was associated with the Obama campaign.
There's no doubt in my mind that that is the reason he was chosen.
So he was approaching this from a very political point of view, and I'm not at all sure that that would have been explicitly discussed.
Well, it really goes to show how that kind of thing can backfire right in your face, bringing on a right-winger to give you cover.
I think that that was a terrible mistake for Obama.
I think that he will regret it.
And a number of people that I'm talking to believe that Obama will, in the end, find himself saddled with a Secretary of Defense that he must either fire or who will drag him down.
He needs to have a Secretary of Defense who is strongly in his corner.
He will find that Gates is not sufficiently working on his behalf.
And a Secretary of Defense can do that in ways that are very subtle without acknowledging, rather than – I mean, it doesn't mean he has to speak out against the President's policy.
It simply means that he doesn't explicitly and enthusiastically carry out the policy in his contacts with the military.
And that's what I'm afraid Obama may be finding in the coming months.
And I think one of the issues that I've alluded to that I think we're going to be talking about in the next several months is the implications of the financial meltdown for the military budget.
I believe that Obama already understands that he must cut the military budget very severely.
And that's where he's going to need Gates' enthusiastic support.
Well, you know, Gates even mentioned the money when he was quoted in that AP article, I guess yesterday or the day before, was it?
About how there's no military solution in Afghanistan.
It seemed like he'd been reading your articles lately or somebody's and figuring out that.
Well, I'm not sure what he was doing.
Was it like a trial balloon about maybe we're not going to completely reinvade Afghanistan after all?
Or what was going on there?
I'm not sure which statement you're referring to now.
The one where Gates actually mentioned the constraints of money and how difficult it is to fix and we're not going to be able to create a Valhalla and all that stuff.
Yes, yes.
Well, I mean, you know, the problem with interpreting statements like that, of course, is that, you know, everybody who is associated with Afghanistan, in order to sell their policy, is saying, is taking this line, well, of course, there's no military solution.
This is primarily a non-military problem.
And they're going to continue to talk about that in order to suck in progressives and sort of liberals, you know, to get them to go along with the decision to escalate the war.
Right.
This is the same guy who six months ago was giving a speech to the Air Force saying, you guys have got to get with, you know, bombing, counterinsurgency, operations from the air.
Exactly.
I mean, he's made a very decisive decision, a very decisive choice, to join with the Petraeus-Odierno boys against the traditional military people who are seeing, you know, the counterinsurgency thing in Iraq and Afghanistan as undermining their ability to maintain sort of traditional, you know, programs and the health of the ground forces.
So, I mean, this is, as I say, this is a conflict we're going to see play out in the coming years.
And it is going to be one of the things that's at stake in this struggle over the military budget this year.
And again, I mean, Gates, I'm afraid, is somebody who has divided loyalties at this point.
He has a sort of interest at stake that he's already talked about in his speeches.
In seeing the Petraeus-Odierno efforts prevail and succeed, he's already kind of made this his war in a way.
And, you know, it's tough, once you've done that, to go back and say, okay, well, I was really wrong and now I'm going to sort of lay it on the line for the president and admit that, you know, I've actually sort of been on the wrong side here.
So that's why I do believe that Obama is going to face a very difficult choice in the coming months.
Well, and he, as you said before, he kind of all along has said, we need to get out of Iraq so we can double up in Afghanistan.
And, of course, you know, I don't know who they are anymore, Gareth, but the American imperialists want bases permanently in all the stands between Turkey and India.
And you know it as well as I do.
They do, and they see, you know, staying in Afghanistan certainly as a key aspect of that, just as they expected to be able to stay in Iraq as a way of guaranteeing their control over military bases.
And, you know, from their point of view, at least from their very distorted analysis, having another military ally in the Iraqi government.
But, I mean, this is all, and I'm going to be writing about this more and more in the future, this is all American dream, it's all the stuff of imagination.
I mean, the idea that they have this enormously strong position in the Middle East from which they're going to be able to dominate the region is completely false in the sense that they're about to be pushed out of Iraq and their position in Afghanistan is so tenuous.
They have no really reliable basis for supplying their troops even in the future.
Right, I mean, at this point they can't even supply them through our allied state Pakistan.
They're trying to get the Russians to help us use their old Soviet trails.
They're trying to get the Russians and the Iranians to help.
Now I submit to you that, you know, a country that is trying to dominate the Middle East and to maintain control over Afghanistan by depending on the Russians and the Iranians is just a tiny bit in trouble, you know.
They really don't have quite the position of strength that they're making out that they have.
Yeah, well, you know, the whole thing to me has been, there's the whole domino theory about creating democracies and all this stuff, and now even using the old Soviet trails and America as the evil empire and the Soviet Union.
Then yesterday, I don't know if you saw Justin Raimondo's new article, he's talking about Putin's speech at the Davos Forum, where Putin sounds like a Misesian capitalist lecturing the Americans, and at one point says, you know, we need to not retreat too far into state controls and all this kind of stuff.
And Justin says, I can't believe it.
I live to see Washington, D.C. red-baited by the Kremlin.
And that really is how far into the looking glass we are here with this ridiculous, I mean, really, the rest of the world, the old world, your Asia, as though North America's meant to dominate that indefinitely.
It doesn't seem to make sense on its face to me.
No, it doesn't.
And I can't think of any time that the United States has been, that the U.S. government has spun a tale, a narrative about the situation in the world and in the Middle East in a particular region, which is so far from the actual reality, that the gap between the official line about the situation and how strong we are and how if we just hang in there, you know, somehow we can prevail, and the reality of the situation are so starkly at odds with one another.
I mean, this is unprecedented in my view.
Well, it really goes to show what work we have cut out to us to make the case and remind people who it was that got us into this mess and set up the consequences.
You know, just because all of the consequences didn't come due while they were still in power, you know, to say that whoever inherits the mess and tries to clean it up at all is to blame for any of the consequences.
I can see them getting away with that.
You know, TV loves that kind of thing.
It will make great play on television and that kind of thing.
And by the way, I mean, one of the points that I make in my article is that this strategy that I'm told is being discussed by people in the network of retired and active duty generals to spread the word that Obama's policy threatens our success, and with the thought that if he doesn't change his mind, if he sticks with his policy, then they will try to, you know, stick the blame for the ultimate collapse in Iraq on Obama, of course.
I mean, this is the ultimate aim.
And essentially this simply reminds us that the ultimate aim in all national security policy, what it really comes down to when all is said and done, is control over the narrative.
Because in the end, you know, it's really about the personal and institutional interest of the people who make the war.
And when they fail, as they ultimately must, you know, what they have to do is make up a story to cover their failure.
Right, like we lost Vietnam because of the hippies and Walter Cronkite, that pink guy.
Right, we were stabbed in the back.
And that's what we're going to see again, another effort to argue that Obama was the one who stabbed us in the back.
And so in the end, all of national security policy, politics, will boil down to this struggle to basically control the historical narrative.
Yeah, well, okay, let me throw George W. Bush a bone.
It's really hard work.
I thought you were going to say throw him under the bus.
Yeah, no, no, that would be fun, too, I guess, if I had to choose just one or the other.
I've thrown him under the bus lots of times.
Let's try something different.
Yeah, let's try to argue, you know, the devil's position here.
There was a pretty peaceful election took place over the weekend there.
And it looks like the Americans have set up a wonderful Iraqi democracy.
And the level of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed is, at least in January, was the lowest since the invasion, at least according to some of the propaganda I read.
And so isn't that success?
And wouldn't anything more violent than that, you know, be a failure to maintain the wonderfulness?
Wouldn't that show that, for example, Obama left too soon or something like that, if things deteriorated from virtual nirvana there?
I think you've very nicely summarized the case.
And I basically have not one word but one phrase to respond to that whole way, that meme, if you will, of the way of essentially summing up the situation.
And that is U.S.
-Iraq withdrawal agreement.
That agreement, of course, is going to stick because it represents a very powerful nationalist impulse, particularly in Shia Iraq.
And that agreement, I think everybody understands, ultimately, that it is going to be carried out.
The United States is going to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.
Now, that necessarily has a powerful impact on the calculations of everyone concerned.
And I think we're going to see a kind of waiting game, inevitably, over the next couple of years as the U.S. draws down its troops.
And it's very clear that the U.S. is no longer in a position to make any difference in the internal politics of Iraq.
It will happen before 2011, before the end of that period.
At some point, presumably in 2010, you will begin to see the restoration, if you will, of sort of normal Iraqi politics between Shia and Sunni, and in terms of the Shia-dominated government's own predilections in terms of policy, both internal and external.
And so that's where I think you will see the consequences, or I shouldn't say the consequences, but that's where you will see the workings of the impact of the actual agreement which the United States was forced to sign.
And that's really the bottom line in terms of the outcome of that conflict.
The outcome of the conflict is determined by the U.S.
-Iraq withdrawal agreement.
Well, so if we just pretend, we could say that is success, that we created, our government went over there and invaded, and created a government strong enough and powerful enough and democratic enough to kick our asses out again.
Well, it's not unknown for policymakers to make that sort of claim, that the fact that we're getting kicked out is a victory, because after all, this was the government that we helped create.
I'm not sure how far that would get them politically in this country.
Well, it only took a million dead people to accomplish it, too.
Pretty great.
Especially to overthrow a government that was there because America had propped them up in power for so long in the first place.
Right.
So I'm not sure that's the way they're going to go.
I think they're headed in the opposite direction at this point.
Yeah, as in they're not going to leave that embassy they built.
They're going to try to do everything they can to keep it.
Well, I have no doubt that there are still some dreamers in Baghdad, in the U.S. military and civilian corps serving in that outfit, at Camp Victory and in the Green Zone, that still dream about maybe sort of overthrowing the al-Maliki government and setting up a government that's going to do our bidding.
But I think they only do that when they're not really seriously talking about policy, because that just does not seem to be at all in the cards.
It's just so remote from any possible outcome that it's not really worth speculating about.
Hey, I don't know if you have the proper kind of press pass to get in there.
Maybe you can ask a friend to ask a friend or something.
But I would love, I want so much to see someone ask Barack Obama, hey, you used to cite the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 as saying the Iranians weren't making nuclear weapons.
Now you walk around pretending like they are.
What gives?
Because I want a real answer to that.
I think that's an excellent plan.
Because he was quoted, he was quoted multiple times acknowledging the existence of this intelligence before he changed his tune.
This is an absolutely central issue for Obama and the Obama administration and its policy toward Iran.
It has to make a very clear decision about what it is going to say about Iran's intention regarding nuclear weapons.
And as you point out, it should be in line with the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate by Iran, which basically said, no, we don't really know what Iran's intentions are at this point.
We cannot, we're no longer confident that we can say that it is going after nuclear weapons.
And I am in the process of writing a longer piece that really delves into that issue and makes the case that there is a lot of evidence that the Iranians have never made a decision to procure nuclear weapons.
That in fact, they have had a policy all along of what professionals in the field of nuclear proliferation called a nuclear hedging strategy.
In other words, that they would master the fuel cycle, that they would have the technical knowledge that would give them the potential for making nuclear weapons if they chose to make that decision.
But that they had not made a decision to do that.
In fact, that the predominant influence in the government has been to stop with the knowledge, with the capability.
And I'm also going to make the case, based on some interviews that I'm doing right now that I've already done, that the National Intelligence Estimates of the past have been written in part, or I shouldn't say have been written by, but they have included the analysis of people in the CIA and INR and State Department who have in fact believed that that was the intention of Iran to pursue the nuclear hedging strategy, not nuclear weapons.
So I think that there's a very powerful case to be made here.
Well, I mean, this is something that's been pretty obvious all along, right?
That they wanted to be able to perfect the ability to enrich, to have a civilian nuclear program, but then if it ever really came down to it, and I guess maybe I'm just making up that part, maybe then as soon as they perfected it, they would announce they would withdraw from the Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and kick out the IAEA inspectors, and then begin to enrich to weapons-grade 90-plus percent purity of uranium-235.
But even at that point, then, that would still give the whole world a window, even if you assume their worst motives.
That would still give the whole world a window of a year or more to bomb them if they wanted to, or whatever.
Well, I mean, that argument, I think, is one that I would tend to subscribe to, but I have to tell you that people in the intelligence community are making the argument behind the scenes that they cannot locate, they cannot be sure.
Let me put it this way.
They cannot be sure that there aren't covert facilities that can be used to enrich uranium at places where the IAEA has never been, doesn't even know about.
So that is the argument that is made, that there's a possibility for a breakout to take place without our knowing it.
But my point here is that there's a huge difference between the intention to procure nuclear weapons and the intention to have a hedging strategy.
If it's a hedging strategy, it gives the United States, and indeed Israel, tremendous power over the decision to influence the decision about nuclear weapons in Iran.
Because if there is not a threat from the United States and Israel, and or Israel, to Iran, then there's very little reason for the Iranians to take the risk that would go with actually having nuclear weapons.
Right, and it should also be said there that the Rumsfeld standard is not what counts here.
The IAEA, and including the CIA and the National Intelligence Council guys, at least as far as I know, have said they don't have any evidence at all that there is a secret nuclear weapons program of any description.
So they can't prove a negative, but they don't have any evidence at all.
There's never been any evidence of any of that.
It's all simply suspicion.
And the IAEA has records of everything they bought and sold all the time, and they have everything accounted for.
But I think the key point that has not been published before is that previous NIEs have reflected work done by the specialists, the analysts on Iran's political intention toward the nuclear issue.
And both through the process of negotiation of the language and misrepresentation by policymakers, these previous NIEs have been essentially misrepresented.
That is to say, the evidence on which the NIEs were based has been misrepresented and distorted.
And the fact is that the people who understood and studied the Iranian intention the most believed that the intention was to pursue the hedging strategy, not to produce nuclear weapons.
Right, because we know even the famous November 2007 NIE, which acquitted them of having a nuclear weapons program of any description since 2003, was basing that 2003 on the bogus, phony Israeli-manufactured laptop.
Right.
And I'm just saying that there was one in 2005.
It wasn't a full-fledged NIE.
It was a note to holders, but in any case, it had the same effect of a study of Iran's nuclear program.
And it was based in part on the judgment of the specialists in the agency and in State Department INR that Iran was interested in the hedging strategy.
But in terms of the way it came out in the actual sort of negotiated language, that was lost.
And then, of course, the Bush administration simply lied about what it said.
Right.
Although, around that time, that was when Negroponte was saying it would be at least 10 years away if they were making nukes and all those things, too.
What they were saying publicly was simply talking about how long it would take for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
But that was not an accurate description of what the analysts believe in Iran's intention.
Yeah.
I guess, yeah, the question is always between the honest analysts, who are just trying to figure out what the truth is, and the people who have ax to grind because they're trying to start a war.
And it seems like the split is like 20-80 percentage-wise.
It's hard to tell most of the time whether people are even trying to be honest with the information.
I think that's a very accurate description of the politics of intelligent estimates on the Iranian nuclear program up to 2007.
That is to say that it was the technical people, the weapons analysts, who tended to be hardliners, who tended to reflect what they thought the policymakers wanted, and who were not that interested in talking about hedging strategies.
Well, you know, I figured this out just talking with you and with Gordon Prather about their cooperation with the IAEA.
And, of course, Gordon Prather in almost every article is about how, or at least mentions how, ElBaradei has verified that they haven't done anything outside of the nonproliferation regime at all, or that there's no indication that they have.
It was pretty obvious.
And then the question was, because there's always the innuendos about the secret program, and it's always hard to tell what the accusation is based on, whether they're accusing them of having a civilian IAEA-safeguarded NPT nuclear program, or they're accusing them of having a secret one.
And so it just sort of came out that, oh, I see, the point is that them having a civilian program enough is supposed to be tantamount to a nuclear weapons program, because once they get it perfected, then they could withdraw from the NPT and begin to make weapons out of it, etc., like that.
So that's your hedging strategy right there.
I figured that out just trying to figure out what accusations are even being made, because a lot of times they're so vague, they say, we all know they're making nuclear bombs.
Well, just to be clear, when I talk about the hedging strategy, this is a term that has been used, by the way, by the deputy director of political office, I think I've got it right, of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, who wrote an article a few years ago in the International Security Journal on this topic of the hedging strategy.
And he described it as a posture or a policy that is halfway between or in between essentially sort of giving up your nuclear program on one hand and pursuing nuclear weapons on the other, actually production of nuclear weapons on the other.
It's halfway between.
That was his point.
And so it's very clearly different.
It has completely different implications.
It implies the need for a very different policy from the one that the Bush administration pursued, obviously, and from the one that Obama has embraced, at least in his very early rhetoric after his election.
And I think it's very, very important to have the analysis of the difference between those two postures toward nuclear weapons be clarified and make sure that the White House is confronted with that distinction.
And so I come back to your suggestion that somebody ask that question in a news conference.
I think it's a great idea.
I will take the challenge and see if I can do it.
Yeah, do it.
That'd be so cool.
I'll play the soundbite on the show and say, hey, China.
All right.
Let's do it.
Hey, listen, I've got a ton more questions, but I don't have any more time with you here.
I've got to let you go.
But I really appreciate it, and I hope we can do it again soon.
I do, too.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist.
You can find what he writes for IPS News at antiwar.com slash Porter.
