02/10/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Alright everyone, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
And introducing my favorite regular guest, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes for IPS News.
You can find all his IPS stuff at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome to the show Gareth.
Hello Scott, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Hey listen, we had this discussion last week about General Petraeus and General Odierno's insubordination.
Their attempt to pressure Barack Obama to keep American soldiers in Iraq longer.
And you have a new article that's up right now at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Following up on this story, what can you tell us here?
Well this is a fascinating twist in the story.
Really quite a surprise to me that I actually had an email from a military source close to Petraeus, who clearly was acting on Petraeus' behalf, responding to the earlier story that you just referred to, and essentially complaining about the story, saying that it was inaccurate and that Petraeus wanted to set the record straight.
He said he wanted to talk to me, so I called him.
And we had a rather long conversation, the gist of which was he insisted that Petraeus was not unhappy with the meeting that had been held on January 21st in the White House with Obama, Gates, and Mullen, as well as Odierno by videoconference.
But in fact, according to this associate of Petraeus, the general was very happy with the discussion, happy with the way it went, said that what was happening was that Obama was discussing with them options and risks.
And so that was the result of that call.
But the next day, then, I received another call from him saying that he had a story for me.
He was going to leak to me an account of that meeting from Petraeus, which would set the record straight.
And so he then dictated a statement, a sentence, a rather long sentence, which said, in essence, that we, meaning Odierno and Petraeus, were asked to provide the president three sets of studies with projections, assumptions, and risks for three drawdown options, 16 months, 19 months, and 23 months.
So that was what he was giving me and wanted me, then, to publish a story about.
Well, I asked a bunch of questions.
I asked him to go back to the general and get some more details, this being, obviously, a very partial fragment of whatever happened.
He did claim that he did that.
He came back to me and said that was all the information he could get.
So I tried to confirm this with people who I'd talked to and people at the White House who I had not talked to yet.
I spent the rest of the week trying to get some confirmation.
And finally, yesterday, I did get a denial from the White House of this story, a very explicit denial, saying, no, the president did not request the three studies, as claimed, and that this was not true.
So that's the essence of the story that I wrote.
What I was trying to do was to make sense of this, to interpret, really, what Petraeus was up to.
Why was he doing this?
What purpose did it serve?
All right, now, hold on a sec, because I just want to make sure that we're on the same page here.
Basically, what you're saying is everybody agrees there was a meeting, and as you reported it, the generals were trying to talk Obama into a longer, or at least looking into possibly longer withdrawal plans than a 16-month plan.
Right.
Then Petraeus has deliberately leaked this same story, only a completely different spin on it to McClatchy newspapers, saying that it was Obama who asked, or implying, basically, oh yeah, Obama wanted us to look into these longer withdrawal periods, when really he was just saying, you guys go ahead, and that basically this makes a big difference, because the generals are trying to basically spin what the president is up to, and, well, I don't know, go on from there.
That is exactly right.
I mean, this is an effort to spin the meaning of that meeting in a way that portrays Obama as having essentially made a major move away from his commitment to the 16-month withdrawal plan to the alternatives that have been suggested, or I should say just two alternatives that have been suggested by the military, a longer time frame.
Now, the essence of what he did, it's very interesting.
I mean, he did not, I cannot say and did not say in my story that Petraeus was providing a sentence which was false.
What I am saying, however, is that he was giving me a misleading sentence, in the sense that the implication was that this was something that was requested by Obama at that meeting.
Now, the question, of course, is, if that were the case, then why didn't he simply say, why didn't he give me a sentence saying, the president requested that we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Instead, he said we were asked, he used the passive voice.
That's a dead giveaway that the reality was different from the implication that was clearly intended here.
And as I point out, Nancy Youssef, the McClatchy reporter covering the Pentagon, was also given this story.
She was given the exact same sentence, except for one word that was missing from the sentence that I was given.
And she published this story pretty much straight, although she did add some details which cast some doubt on it.
And she said that aides to Obama had told her that the president had informed them after he took office, meaning presumably the 21st and after, that he still favored the 16-month commitment.
He still stuck by his 16-month commitment, but he would listen to the military and see what they had to say about the risks involved.
That is a very different story from the president coming into the meeting and saying, okay, I want you to give me these three plans, 16 months, 19 months, and 23 months.
Now, I have a strong suspicion that what happened here is that after the meeting, Gates requested that they provide these three specific studies.
We have no idea on whose authority, we have no idea what it means in terms of any presidential viewpoint.
But I think you have to suspect at this point that that did not happen in the meeting, that it was not said by the president.
Well, and there was an article in the Washington Post on Saturday, I think, maybe it was Sunday, that basically I think it said was based on embargoed interviews with Odierno from last December or whatever.
But basically it told a story, and this I guess was part of what you were referring to in your last article.
It told the story of how Odierno basically went around Pace and Casey, the commander, the head of CENTCOM and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, in order to basically go an end run around through this retired General Jack Keane to the White House in order to get the search done, and the increase in troops, and basically also makes clear in there that he doesn't want to leave yet.
Right.
I mean, this is really about the way in which this series of stories by Tom Ricks is building up Odierno in particular, and trying to make him into the author of the search in Iraq, contrary to what a lot of evidence suggests from Woodward and others, that in fact he was not the primary author.
But in any case, the key thing that you're pointing to is that there was an end run around the chain of command, both by Odierno and Petraeus, clearly, during 2007 and 2008, particularly 2007, because it was at that point the Joint Chiefs and William Fallon, the CENTCOM commander, were doing their best to try to draw down troops from Iraq, believing that this was the best course for the United States, for the U.S. military.
And it was Keane, who was very close to Vice President Dick Cheney, who basically intervened and got Cheney to talk to Bush, and got then Bush to agree to protect Petraeus of the effort by people who were actually his superiors, specifically Fallon, to protect Petraeus from their efforts to basically change the mission and to accelerate the pace of withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
And so that's a very interesting, important case in which there was connivance between people in Washington and the field commanders to get around the chain of command.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter, IPS News.
You can find all his archives at antiwar.com slash porter.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Gareth.
It's a pleasure, as always.