03/26/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, our next guest, also from IPS News, is our most regular guest, expert on this show, or expert guest, I guess I should say, on this show, Gareth Porter.
Dr. Gareth Porter, that is.
Welcome.
Gareth, how are you today?
I'm fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining me.
Good.
Alright, so, I'm not too sure.
I'd be willing to put together some kind of office pool here, and maybe somebody could make some money, and we'll figure out how many times in the next four years are we going to read articles that begin, despite Obama's vow, and I'm betting on it'll be somewhere around, you know, I don't know how many vows did he make.
I'll have to look that up first, I guess.
This one finishes, combat brigades will stay in Iraq, despite Obama's vow.
Combat brigades will stay in Iraq.
It's at IPSNews.org and Antiwar.com slash Porter.
So, take us through this.
What's going on here?
Well, Scott, this is a story that I like to say was hidden in plain sight.
The administration, of course, was not being honest with the American people when President Obama stated on February 27th that he had chosen a timeline that would remove our combat brigade by the end of August 2010.
In fact, what is going to happen is that there will be some drawdown.
There will be some reduction, further reduction in the number of combat brigades or brigade combat teams, as they're technically called, over the coming year or so, year, year and a half.
But the result of this policy is going to be that several brigade combat teams will still be in Iraq when that deadline is passed.
And that has, according to, this is what I point out in my story, that a spokesperson for the Joint Staff confirmed to me that indeed there would be several of what they're calling advisory and assistance brigades.
That's the relabeled term for combat brigades in Iraq.
Advisory and assistance brigades.
Advisory and assistance brigades.
Thanks.
Okay, everybody memorize that.
That's our new speak.
That means infantry.
It means that it's exactly the same organization of combat troops plus support units as has been in Iraq for the past six years, essentially.
The only difference is that in addition to the existing companies that make up the brigade combat team, including infantry, there will also be now a few dozen, apparently, from what I've been told, officers who will be carrying out direct advice and assistance to the Iraqi military police unit.
In other words, these are people who have already been out in the field, in many cases, doing this advice right alongside the Iraqis.
They have been doing so independently.
They've been forming what are called military transition teams in Iraq.
That started a couple of years ago.
But under this new scheme, under the so-called advisory and assistance brigades, these people who have been doing this advisory role operation in Iraq will now be subsumed under the overall brigade combat team structure.
So they'll be absorbed into it.
That's really the only difference between the so-called advisory and assistance brigades and the old brigade combat teams.
So again, it's an administrative sleight of hand that has created this allegedly non-combat military organization, which will continue beyond the August 2010 deadline.
So I guess when Obama says one thing and then NBC reports from anonymous Pentagon officials that, no, we're going to stay for another 15 or 20 years, when Ryan Crocker tells the press, oh, no, this war is far closer to its beginning than its end, then we need to just assume that the president is a liar and that everything he says is a lie and everything that the anonymous sources say that indicate just how much worse it will be than what he says are the ones telling the truth.
Well, I think that, yeah, you put your finger on the problem that I think does exist in the Obama administration, which is that this president, and this is obviously something we've talked about before in your program, this president is really in the clutches of the military.
He has essentially accepted their policy prescription.
He's given them virtually everything they wanted.
They were not asking for no drawdown in combat brigades.
They were willing to have some drawdown from the beginning.
That was never an issue.
But what they wanted was at least several combat brigades to remain in Iraq for as long as possible.
Now, they would like to keep them there after 2011.
We know that.
This is clear on the record.
Certainly Odierno has said that on the record publicly in an interview with Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post.
But apart from the question of what happens beyond 2011, the military leaders, the field commanders, Petraeus and Odierno, have gotten virtually everything that they wanted.
And that is very different from the policy that was being outlined by Obama during the campaign.
I know he was elected to a significant degree on a get-out-of-Iraq platform.
There's no question about that.
That was a position that was popular.
I'm sure others will remember, as I do, during the presidential debate and vice presidential debate.
When Obama or Biden talked about the policy of withdrawal from Iraq, the indicator, if you were watching the show on a network that had this gizmo that showed the audience response, the indicator went up, the approval line went up, and the disapproval went down.
And so this is clearly a significant reason why Obama was elected.
And the fact that he was in an embarrassing position, he felt obliged for, I believe, political reasons to give the military what they wanted, but he could not admit that publicly because it would be too embarrassing and it would just simply cause a firestorm politically in this country if he were to basically admit that he had fundamentally changed his position out of deference to the military.
And therefore he indulged in, as you say, it was a lie.
I mean, he's saying, I'm pulling out the combat brigades.
Simply, flatly untrue.
There's no other word you can use except a lie.
I mean, it's a prevarication.
It's misleading.
And this, I'm afraid, could be the model for what may happen in the future to the degree that Obama wishes to present himself as somebody who's responsive to the, let's say, the better angels of American society, the more idealistic and anti-war element of American society, and at the same time really continue to go along with what the military wants.
So I think you're right.
This is not the last time that we'll see this phenomenon played out in this administration.
Well, now, listen, I know that it's your position that the most powerful force in the American empire now is the national security state itself, the generals in the Pentagon, the top spies that run all the agencies that we don't even know the names of.
These people have bureaucratic inertia.
Once they take over anything, whether it's an office building on a street in Washington, D.C., or whether it's a military base in somebody else's country, they don't want to give any ground ever.
And yet it seems like at the same time there's basically a consensus.
Is there not between everybody from the national security Democrats, the Kissinger-type realists sort of guys, the neoconservatives?
America stole Iraq fair and square, and we're going to keep it forever, right?
I mean, that's what Washington, D.C. believes.
You're right that there is a consensus among the national security elite in this country.
I think you've referred to at least some of the most prominent elements of that elite, from Democratic as well as Republican sides of the ledger.
And so, yes, it's true that the national security elite, as well as the national security state officials themselves, are ready to go along with this.
They have no doubt that the United States has to continue along the same lines.
We have to continue fighting wars, be prepared to fight more wars, use coercive diplomacy all the while with Iran, assert ourselves and promote American power wherever we have the opportunity to do so.
Don't admit that U.S. military forces really don't accomplish anything in terms of political influence.
Certainly in the medium to long term, it becomes very clear that that's the case.
That's what we now understand happened in Iraq.
The same thing is going to happen in Afghanistan.
But neither the national security state nor the national security elite, which is to say the think tank people, the intellectuals on the campuses, the pundits, the people who are hangers-on, the sort of the acolytes of the national security state, all those people are simply not prepared to admit that this doesn't work at all and that it's taking this country down more and more rapidly all the time.
Yeah, it seems like the empire is going to be the last thing to go.
We'll have America between Maine and San Diego will be in smoking rubble, but we'll still have our bases all over Central Asia.
Well, I think there is something to that.
I mean, they are first in line to get resources, and as the rest of the nation, all the other institutions of this society, are starved of resources in the coming months and years, the military and other national security programs are going to have their hands out, and Obama and Rahm Emanuel and the people in the White House surrounding Obama are going to, according to all the signs we've seen, be ready to feed them first.
And so in a sense, I think that's exactly the case, that the national security state is going to be the last one to really suffer the consequences of the horrendous policies that have been pursued in the past, and the economic policies that have clearly created this present economic crisis.
And how many years it will be before the empire has to crumble?
Anybody's guess.
It could happen a lot sooner than we think.
If the Chinese have their way and they get a mixed basket of currencies to basically replace the dollar as the basis for the global trade system, if the United States no longer has the doigt de seigneur to basically take advantage of the use of the dollar, then the end could come a lot faster than certainly most people think.
Well, you know, interestingly, Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, I guess the day before yesterday, said before Congress under oath that he categorically opposes any effort to do any such thing.
And then yesterday he went to the Council on Foreign Relations and says, yeah, maybe that would be okay.
To have the mixed basket of currencies, as the Chinese have now suggested.
Yeah, and I don't know if that's because that's what they want or because they figure they're going to have to destroy the dollar in order to pay down any of this debt.
So they might as well because they have no choice or what.
I certainly am not qualified to answer that question.
I wish I were.
But that is certainly obviously a question that deserves to be watched very, very carefully, very closely in the coming weeks and months.
Well, and the reason there is because the use of the American ability to export our dollar, because it used to be, and maybe it's really not anymore, it was the reserve currency because it was once backed by gold.
It was once the best dollar and the best unit of currency in the world.
That's what got us our advantageous position.
And I guess that's responsible for a lot of, or it's a big part of all the cushy deals between America and all the countries where we have bases, not ones that we've regime changed like Iraq, but ones where we have wink-nudge deals with the local rulers there.
It's all about exporting our inflationary dollars to them and that whole web of interconnected political and economic power there.
Correct.
That's right.
And most of it, of course, occurring during the Cold War when the United States was either at the height of its economic power in the world or still able to ride on its past success for a few decades.
Well, you know, there are at least some people who think that this was part of the motivation for invading Iraq and threatening Iran, is that Iraq had switched to denominating their limited oil sales under the oil-for-food thing into euros, and that we were making an example.
Interesting that the empire would destroy the dollar in order to pay for a war or make an example out of a country that wanted to leave the dollar.
Yeah, that doesn't pass the laugh test for me.
You know, it's so recundant and so obscure.
I ask you for a moment to contemplate the military leadership of the United States and indeed the political leadership of the United States and how many of them would have the slightest idea what the hell you're talking about.
You know, they obviously wouldn't.
That is such an obscure notion.
Cheney would, though, wouldn't he?
Cheney would probably have some understanding of it, but the idea that he would be motivated by that, if you followed Cheney's career, and particularly since he became vice president, and you know what positions he's taken, if you understand the way his mind has worked...
Yeah, deficits don't matter, Cheney said.
Right, right, but I'm referring to his explicit national security position over the past eight years and beyond.
You know, this is not a mind that is really interested in the subtleties of economic trade relations among various sectors of the world.
Well, that's what I was getting at, too, is he's kind of got a McKaniac version of economics, where he doesn't really care, he figures it doesn't matter.
I would come back to a point that I'm sure that I've made earlier, which is that the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party and of American politics is one that has absolutely no interest whatsoever in economics.
I mean, it really doesn't.
It is quite immune from the disciplines of economics.
And, I mean, the best example of that distaste, even, for economics, disdain for economics, was a remark that was made by William Kristol.
It was an interview that he gave to a professor at Brooklyn College whose name I'm sorry to say now is eluding me, but he published a very interesting article in which he...
It was on the theme of how the neocons really have a complete and utter disdain for the business interests of the United States, that their culture was one of macho power to an extent that, you know, the idea that the United States, for example, should go easy on China in order to promote U.S. trade and investment and business interests in relation to China was one that they absolutely abhorred.
And so there was that contradiction, that very sharp conflict within the Bush administration between the hardline national security people on one hand and the folks who were interested in trade and global economy who were basically pro-China as opposed to the ferociously anti-China position of the neocons and the hardliners on national security.
Right.
In fact, I just finished talking with Jim Loeb, Washington Bureau Chief at IPS News, and he was talking about Kristol and Kagan's new group and how they don't really, I guess he said they don't really focus, but they bring up in their first little report or whatever that, you know, got to keep an eye on these rising powers, meaning Russia and China.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, there's no doubt that that's what their fixation is.
And by the way, I did hear Fred Kagan speak at a hearing just this morning on Afghanistan, which was, it was fascinating because, in fact, he managed to turn the issue of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan from the issue of terrorism or al Qaeda, which is supposed to be the rationale for it, of course, into the great game.
In other words, he was turning the issue of Afghanistan into an anti-China, as well as, secondarily at least, an anti-Russia issue.
That's where he is.
That's what he cares about.
Well, of course, you know, Eric Margulies has talked about how America helped finance, I guess through the ISI, training camps in Afghanistan to train the Uyghurs in the days before September 11th.
The CIA actually, at least tacitly, supported the training of jihadist types for use against the Chinese.
That is new to me.
I had not heard that.
This is something Margulies dug up himself, huh?
Yeah, I guess so.
I'll have to double back and check on that.
But, of course, we also saw how the neocons love the Chechens because they're anti-Russia.
Well, that's another interesting angle, of course, on their very peculiar fixation on sort of wielding power, whatever it takes, to wield power against state enemies.
That is what they're all about.
So, I mean, I think it does come back to that fixation in the end when you think about Cheney.
You know, I mean, he was obviously attracted to the war of civilization, the clash of civilizations idea after 2001.
That was something that we may have talked about in the past on your show.
But that's on the basis of a very firm commitment to this idea that the purpose of the U.S. national security state is to combat and exert power in relation to state enemies, particularly state enemies that will justify big military budgets and aggressive national security policies.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter, IPSnews.org, Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Thanks very much for your time on the show as always today, Gareth.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
It's a pleasure as always.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter, and the article is Despite Obama's Vow, Combat Brigades Will Stay in Iraq, Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Antiwar Radio, and we'll be right back.