03/02/09 – Robert Dreyfuss – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Robert Dreyfuss.
He is the author of Devil's Game, How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, and writer for The Nation.
You can find his blog at thenation.com slash blogs slash Dreyfuss.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
Thanks.
Pleasure to be here.
It's good to have you again.
How are you doing?
I am all right.
I'm all right.
We got snow down today out here on the East Coast, but otherwise I'm fine.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.
Well, I'm from Texas, so snow is a special treat for me.
I actually get to look at it out my window.
There are mountains with snow on them, but they're far away.
All right, so thanks very much for joining me on the show today.
Lots to cover, not too much time.
Let's start with the most important thing, which is Obama's speech about his plan to get us out of Iraq, get the U.S. military out of Iraq.
What do you make of it, Bob?
Well, there's some good parts to it and some bad parts to it.
I think it really is pretty much what he told us he was going to do during the campaign.
He said for the two years before the election that he was going to get all the troops out in 16 months, and this comes pretty close.
I think it's 18 months in total for getting out the combat troops.
And he always said that he was going to leave some residual forces in place after these combat troops leave, and now he puts a number on it, which is pretty much, I guess, what we should have come to expect, something like 35,000 to 50,000.
I guess the ambiguity is both he and Secretary Gates have said that the rest of those troops, the other 35,000 to 50,000, would be out by the end of 2011, and that kind of follows the U.S.
-Iraq framework that was signed last year.
So if we believe that, then all of the troops will be gone from Iraq by the end of 2011, which is, I think all things being equal, a pretty good outcome and probably the best that we could expect from Obama.
The question, though, is there's room to renegotiate that.
In other words, sometime next year, there's room for the United States and Iraq to sit down and work out an agreement that would allow the American troops to stay a lot longer than 2011.
Now, that would run up against a growing sense of nationalism in Iraq, and I'm not sure that most or even many Iraqis would accept the continuing presence of American forces in their country beyond the end of 2011.
So it may not be entirely up to the United States, even if the Obama administration wants to keep the troops there longer.
On the other hand, it's not exactly an equal relationship, the United States and Iraq, so we could bring a lot of pressure on Baghdad to go along with an extension of the troop presence there, especially if violence starts to emerge.
And I think it's a pretty safe bet that there's going to be some more violence in Iraq sometime in the next couple of years, simply because the political agreements in that country have not yet been reached.
There's still a lot of tension in many different respects all across the political divides in Iraq, and so I expect that some of those differences at least are going to be settled with guns.
And I guess one concern left over is if some of those disagreements do begin to be settled with guns, will Obama slow or halt the withdrawal, saying that we're needed now to stay longer and keep a lid on these conflicts?
So those are my two concerns.
One is about how firm the 2011 date is, and second, what's going to happen if violence breaks out sometime between now and then?
It does seem to be probably the most obvious educated guess that 50,000 troops in two years is a pretty big loophole for Petraeus or Obama himself, depending on what your view of what he really wants is, to find a way to stay.
Well, that's true.
It's not been addressed yet in any concrete way by the administration.
There were a lot of people over the past couple of years who were arguing that we're going to have to stay in Iraq for five years or longer from now, another five to seven years at least.
Well, that's what Odierno told the Post, right?
Yeah.
Many of the generals, the commanders on the ground, and of course you can't blame them.
Generals on the ground always want more troops and so forth, but when you're above that and you see the big picture, we don't know to what extent Obama and his team are going to go along with this.
So it's a concern, and it certainly means that we can't ignore Iraq, because a lot of things can still happen there that we don't expect.
It's a war that's far from being done.
Well, now, Gareth Porter and Patrick Coburn both have said on this show that they see the evolution of the situation on the ground in Iraq as such that really even I think right now they would argue that if the American troops were gone, that the Maliki government is strong enough to maintain its hold on power.
And I guess it seems like at this point, since all the polls show that the people of Iraq are opposed to the occupation by super majorities, whatever legitimacy he does have is gained from being perceived as standing up to the Americans and insisting on withdrawal rather than being our loyal little puppet.
Well, I don't think that Maliki is strong enough to stay on as prime minister if we weren't there to keep him in power.
Well, what about the government as a whole, and the parliamentary system and the constitution as created under the occupation and so forth?
Well, I think it's mostly a fiction.
I think it's extremely shaky.
Now, that doesn't mean that we need to stay there, but I think that the Iraq that will exist five years from now is not going to look very much like the one that we see today because the constitution really needs to be ripped up and rewritten to accommodate the Sunnis, to keep the Kurds under control.
There needs to be a new oil law which is related to that.
There needs to be some kind of solution over Kirkuk.
There's a lot of problems that need to be solved, and the situation, I think, is extremely unstable.
And I'm not using this as an argument for us to stay in Iraq, but I think it's somewhat foolish to think that we can walk away and Iraq will become Switzerland or Norway or something.
It's not going to happen.
Well, I don't know if anybody ever really argued that.
Well, I think it's very unstable.
Maliki does not have a great deal of legitimacy, I don't believe.
His political party has become close to non-existence.
The Dawa party that he comes out of has split and split again.
I think he's got about six members of parliament now who are members of his party.
And there's a huge opposition to him from the people who were on the outs last time, the Sunnis and the seculars and those people.
All of the Sadr people are still lined up against him.
And now he's alienated the Kurds and the Supreme Council, who are his key coalition partners.
He's acted in a very high-handed manner toward them over the provincial elections.
So I think Maliki has really isolated himself.
And the only reason he's staying in power is because nobody can figure out a parliamentary coalition that could replace him.
Once the new national elections happen, I think Maliki will be over with, because I don't think he's going to do very well in those elections.
But that's a year from now and there's no telling what can happen.
All I'm saying is I think that Iraq is a very unstable and violent place, and it's going to remain that way for a significant period looking ahead.
So I guess the real question is, has the policy really changed?
Because I guess the Bush policy would say that all these issues have to be resolved before we go.
And Obama is at least claiming that, no, we're going to stick with the deal, which says by New Year's 2012 and that's it, we're out.
Is that a real change in policy, do you think, or this all just still remains to be seen?
Well, I mean, I think there has been a change in policy, but it's been evolving even under the Bush administration.
There wasn't just one Bush policy.
There was a clear Bush policy in the first term, let's call it the Rumsfeld years, when Rumsfeld and Cheney and their friends seemed to look at Iraq as the 51st state, and not only are we going to use it as the beacon of democracy in the region, but as kind of an aircraft carrier to attack, force regime change on neighboring countries, Syria, Iran, and so forth.
I think in the second Bush term after 2005, under Gates, by the way, I think you saw a significant evolution, and it was a gradual one, toward something that began to look more and more like what Obama is now proposing.
And so now Obama is carrying that a little bit further by putting an end date on all of the U.S. troops, that is, by the end of 2011.
That isn't a policy change, because certainly nobody in the Bush years was willing to set any dates.
And then finally they agreed late in the Bush second term, under Iraqi pressure and other pressure, to agree to the U.S.
-Iraq agreement, and now Obama is simply taking that and saying, okay, here's what I think that means.
It means we get all of our combat troops out by next August, and then a year and four months later we get everybody out, and that's where we're going.
So I think it's not some radical change, but there's certainly been a dramatic evolution in U.S. policy, and we're seeing that happen now.
All right, let's talk about Iran's nuclear weapons program.
I've got to tell you, Robert Dreyfuss here, I thought I understood that Iran had been more or less exonerated from having an active weapons program by the CIA and the National Intelligence Council back in November of 2007, and yet I'm getting a lot of mixed signals from the Obama administration as to whether they agree with that.
I think you'd have to be a cockeyed optimist to think that Iran doesn't want nuclear weapons.
There's simply no other way to explain what Iran is doing.
They don't really need, in some urgent way, to have a civilian nuclear power program at the expense of world isolation and horrible economic sanctions that are crippling their economy.
If that's what it was all about, they'd say, okay, we're going to give up on that for a couple of years, dammit, and now let's talk.
Well, of course they did that.
They signed the additional protocol to their safeguards agreement.
That's a bunch of baloney.
The Iranians clearly have designed a program to move themselves toward a nuclear weapon, or if not a weapon, then the capability of achieving that weapon.
Pardon me, Bob, didn't they sign an additional protocol under which for over two years they put a freeze on any enrichment at all while they were negotiating with the E3?
Look, there's been all kinds of agreements signed, but you can see the direction, the movement that's happening.
And I think the important point is that we can't be alarmist about it.
Even though they're moving in that direction, they're not there yet.
They have a bunch of low-enriched uranium, which doesn't explode if you wrap it all up in a bomb.
So they need to further enrich that uranium, and that would take a significant amount of effort and time, and we'd know about it if they were doing it.
They'd have to either kick the inspectors out, or they'd have to do it right in front of the inspectors.
As far as we know, they don't have any secret facility to do that.
So therefore, they don't have, contrary to what Admiral Mullen said over the weekend, they don't have enough uranium to make a bomb, because the kind of uranium they have is not bomb material.
Furthermore, we don't know if they know how to make a bomb.
And we don't know, but we can doubt that they have the ability to deliver a bomb.
So where I differ with some of the right-wing is that I don't think there's any emergency about Iran's nuclear efforts.
We have time to deal with that.
We have time to talk with Iran.
We have time to pursue diplomacy to get them to back off, to offer them a deal that would include some sort of resolution of this nuclear issue.
Personally, I think this is not going to work.
I think we're going to end up three or four years down the road with a nuclear Iran.
I think it's something we're going to have to live with.
And so I think it would be best in Washington if the best and the brightest people started thinking about how we live with a nuclear Iran, how we would contain them, and how we would then perhaps move toward putting Israeli nuclear weapons on the table for a nuclear-free zone in the region, and maybe get both countries to disarm or give up their nuclear programs or something along those lines.
Now who's the cockeyed optimist?
Well, I mean, that may not work, but I don't think there's any way of stopping the Iranians.
I think they're determined to do this.
Well, here's the thing.
Here's where I would differ.
I think that it's pretty clear that what they're trying to do is have the ability, technically, so that the whole world knows that they could withdraw from the NPT, kick out the inspectors, and begin making a nuclear weapon, the so-called breakout capability or what have you.
But it doesn't seem that a decision has been made to actually pursue a nuclear weapon, only the perfection of enrichment capability thus far.
And so I don't see why it's so inevitable that they'll have a nuclear weapon.
It seems like there's a point that, I mean, after all, they offered a deal before that said, hey, we'll internationalize our whole nuclear program.
We'll bring in European companies to run it and everything.
It'll be great.
Well, I don't know.
I guess we have to agree to differ on this.
The CIA estimate, the national intelligence estimate that you referred to before, did say that in 2003 that Iran halted its research on the military aspects of nuclear power.
But that doesn't mean that they halted their research on missile development.
It doesn't mean that they halted their nuclear energy program, including enrichment.
And so, I mean, I've talked to enough intelligence people since that NIE came out to know that it was really worded that way, I think, by the people who wrote it, in order to take the wind out of the sails of people who were starting to push for a preemptive attack on Iran.
And yet the people who wrote it weren't exactly naive about what direction Iran is moving in.
And they were simply trying to write a political statement that would short-circuit some of the hawks who were pushing for a confrontation with Iran.
And it worked.
It took that pretty much off the table for the past two years.
What I'm afraid about now is that if Obama starts talking to Iran, I don't think it's going to be all sweetness and light.
I think these talks are going to take years to be productive, if they ever are productive.
And so we can't say, after six months, OK, we've been talking to the Iranians, and darn it, they haven't caved in yet, so now we've got to start moving aircraft carriers into the region.
I mean, we've got to be patient.
And like I said before, it's not like it's some big emergency.
Right.
And see, this is what I wanted to get to.
Despite any disagreement between any side, never mind between you and I, over at Commentary Magazine or anywhere else about what the Iranians' intentions are, where we are likely to be five years down the road, or those kinds of questions, it seems like the technical situation, as you described it, is abundantly clear.
And yet it seems like the headlines all read, Iran has enough uranium for a bomb, and yet you have to get to paragraph 17 before it mentions all the things that you said about what they have is industrial-grade, low-enriched uranium, not high-enriched uranium.
They would have to withdraw from the NPT.
Well, that's all bad for the media, and I wish the media was more careful about their headline writing.
Well, the politicians talk that way, too.
No, no, no, no.
We're not going to go to war with Iran because Gates and Mullen and Petraeus read some headline in the New York Post.
I mean, the current leadership of this country, from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, does not want war with Iran.
These are all people, uniformly, every one of them, who was against the notion put forward by the neoconservatives that we need to start confronting Iran militarily.
So I'm not worried about this team reading the headlines wrong and then suddenly deciding, oh, we need to go to war.
I mean, the public may have the wrong idea, and we need to do what we can do, as I guess we're doing right now, to correct that.
But there's no hawk in power who wants to attack Iran at present.
So I think we can relax on that score.
Well, yeah, that's certainly good to hear.
I guess, was I mistaken in thinking that there was any kind of real conflict going on between Obama's kind of overstatement, which he attempted to correct about the degree to which they're pursuing a bomb or making one or something?
And then Admiral Blair, last Thursday, testified before the Senate, basically what you said about the actual state of Iran's nuclear program, such as it exists.
But then it seemed to me that Admiral Mullen was contradicting Admiral Blair on Fox News Sunday.
Am I reading too much into that?
Yeah, I think you are.
I mean, I think some of this gets short-circuited.
I think Obama misspoke that one time when he said something about Iran developing a nuclear weapon, and I believe he corrected himself.
But if he didn't, I think the White House did.
I mean, these guys, they don't want war.
They've got enough problems.
They're trying to get out of Iraq, and they certainly don't want to escalate things with Iran.
So, I mean, I think the bigger concern is what Israel might do, because you have an extremely conservative turn in Israeli politics, with the likelihood that the next Israeli government, under Netanyahu, is going to be very anti-Iranian, and might start talking about an Israeli strike on Iran, which, even though Israel does not have the capability to destroy Iran's nuclear program, because it's beyond Israel's military capacity, they could certainly conduct enough raids to do some damage, and to create a crisis that would be, I think, devastating for the region.
So, I would be more worried about Israeli actions, but that's the case where Obama's administration has got to sit down with the Israelis, and believe, by the way, that the Bush administration did over the last year and a half, and simply say, do you have permission to attack Iran?
No, you do not.
We do not want you to attack Iran.
Do you understand?
We do not want you to attack Iran.
And make it clear to the Israelis that this is forbidden.
Do you think that there's even a chance at all, or what chance do you think there might be, that Netanyahu would go ahead and say, I don't care what you say, and do it anyway?
No.
No way?
No.
Not if he believes the United States when it says, we are totally opposed to this.
If there's any kind of ambiguity, or winking, or something, we have to make this absolutely crystal clear, that if he attacks Iran, he's on his own.
And the result of that attack would be not only to rile up Iran against him, but to create an incredible international isolation of Israel that would shatter its relationships with a lot of countries.
I mean, they sell huge quantities of weapons to India and China, for instance.
It would destroy Israel's economy if the Indians and Chinese simply said, we don't want to buy your weapons anymore.
They have enormous economic relations with all kinds of countries that could retaliate.
And most of all, it could turn public opinion in the United States against Israel, especially if the administration is willing to stand back.
Israel's invasion of Gaza was dangerous for them because of the public opinion issue.
They were losing the public relations battle over Gaza, and that's minor compared to what would happen if they attacked Iran.
So they need American support, and if they don't get it, I think they won't do it.
Well, I'm sure you're familiar with the theme on the American right, that there's basically what amounts to an Iranian, sometimes including Syrian, but especially Hamas-Hezbollah axis of evil that threatens to destroy Israel if they don't act preemptively to protect themselves.
Can you address the truth or lack thereof on that?
Well, I think the basic truth is that Israel is the superpower in the region.
So any destroying of Israel would be kind of like us claiming that Grenada or Nicaragua was going to destroy the United States.
It's just not going to happen.
They're overwhelmingly superior militarily to any combination of enemies.
So I think there's no real existential threat to the Israeli state.
Now, there can be bad guys who shoot up pizza parlors or something and send rockets into Israel, but those are relatively low level and something that Israel has been living with for 40 years.
So that's not the same thing as some dire threat to Israel's existence.
Are you pleased that Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell and some of these more so-called realist Democrats are in charge of this policy rather than George Bush and Stephen Hadley and Condi Rice?
What do you think?
Well, you've got to be somewhat pleased, but I'm interested in the degree.
I mean, I think there's been a major shift.
There's no getting away from it.
We've left the land of fantasy and we've come back to the land of reality, and within that land of reality there's a lot of political disagreements that need to be fought out.
What to do about all of these wars and anti-terrorism efforts and policy toward Russia and China and NATO and everything else, but at least we're debating it on the terms that we used to debate it back in the 80s or the 90s and not on the terms of the Bush administration's doctrine of preventive and preemptive wars and everything else.
I mean, that's been, thankfully, dead and buried now.
All right, everybody, that's Robert Dreyfuss from The Nation magazine, thenation.com slash blogs slash Dreyfuss for his excellent blog, and I always highly recommend Devil's Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Thank you very much.