07/29/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show my friend Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for Interpress Service and sometimes the Nation Institute funds his extreme, multi-part investigative journalism about topics important to you and me.
And you can find all of his IPS stuff at original.antiwar.com.
Although the one I'm looking at here is at news.antiwar.com.
But anyway, we'll get to that in a minute.
First thing, welcome to the show Gareth, how are you?
I'm fine, thanks Scott.
I'm glad to hear that.
Welcome back.
The second thing is, I heard that the Iraqi military attacked, did some kind of raid on the MEK base at Camp Ashraf in Iraq.
I don't know anything about it except that there was a headline, so why don't you fill us in.
Well essentially, I think the Iraqi government waited until the U.S. military was essentially handcuffed in terms of playing a role in this issue, so that they would have a free hand to deal with an issue that has been a thorn in the side, of course, of both Iran and the al-Maliki regime in Iraq, which is the Mojahedin al-Khalq fighters, which were protected by the U.S. military on a big base not too far from Baghdad, where they basically have been given the status of protected people under international law, supposedly, by the U.S. military.
Meaning that they were immune from any move by the Iraqi government to expel them from Iraq and forcing them to go back to Iran.
And this issue really has been a matter of friction between the Shia-dominated Iraqi government and the United States ever since 2005, when the Shia were elected to dominate the Iraqi government.
And now it appears that we have at least a major step toward a resolution of the issue.
The Iraqi government is still saying that they will not force anyone to go back to Iran against their will, but at the same time, I think they don't trust the United States' relationship with the MEK.
They feel that there has been all too much collaboration between the U.S. military and intelligence and the MEK.
It was the U.S. military, after all, that made the move to protect the MEK in the first place in 2003, almost immediately after the U.S. invasion.
So that's what I know.
So basically nothing happened.
There was some kind of raid that targeted a few of them, but the situation is still at some sort of halfway point between here and resolution.
Well, to be more precise, what actually happened was, at least officially, the Iraqi government demanded that the MEK allow a police post within the camp to, I think, establish more in a formal sense the Iraqi sovereignty over the base.
And that apparently was resisted by the MEK leadership, and so the Iraqi army went in and established by physical force that Iraqi government position or police position in the camp.
There was apparently tear gas fired at demonstrators who were jeering and perhaps doing more than that.
I'm not sure.
Perhaps throwing rocks.
They were not armed, clearly.
They have been disarmed, so there was never a question of an actual military combat between the two sides.
There were reports that some MEK on the base were injured, and it's not clear exactly how the injuries were incurred.
All right.
Now, I guess we should have started here.
I don't think ahead about things like this enough, I guess.
A lot of people don't know what an MEK is or certainly why they should care at all about one.
Well, it's a very interesting political-military group originating in Iran.
They are an Iranian Islamic revolutionary Muslim, but also, at least in their origins, communist or at least Marxist in their political ideology.
They were opponents early on of the Islamic revolution in Iran and carried out terrorist attacks in the late 1970s, early 1980s, which killed a lot of civilians and apparently injured severely the present leader of Iran, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei.
So there is a special animus, obviously, between the present Iranian regime and the Mujahedini caliph.
They are regarded as primary enemies.
The second thing to know about the MEK is that they were basically collaborators with, and on Iraqi soil, collaborators with the Saddam Hussein regime against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.
Although they were Iranian, they essentially became instruments of the Iraqi state against Iran.
Of course, that added to the hostility on the part of the Iranian government toward the MEK over the years.
Finally, more recently, they established close relations with both the United States and with Israel.
They've collaborated with U.S. and Israeli intelligence.
They have provided guides, interpreters, intelligence assets to the U.S. military in Iraq, and there is a lot of evidence that the U.S. military has been led astray on more than one occasion by tips that were given them by the MEK with regard to Iranians who were in Iraq after 2003.
I think that is a large part of the story of the U.S. arrest of Iranians in Iraq as alleged IRGC, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, personnel.
Some of them, perhaps most of the Iranians arrested in Iraq were indeed IRGC, but they were not doing what the MEK claimed to U.S. intelligence they were doing, which was carrying out a proxy war against the U.S. military.
Well, and you have this article about some of this conflict with Iran in Iraq that I want to get to in a second, but can you address Camp Ashraf Minor on K Street or whatever, this National Council for Resistance in Iran?
Apparently this communist cult of weirdo terrorists for hire have a giant lobby in D.C. and plenty of friends in the Imperial Senate, stuff like that.
They do indeed.
They have carefully and I think rather effectively cultivated the extreme right in the United States, both in terms of those outside the government, but even more, I think, within the Congress.
They have sort of colonized a few members of the Congress, including Ileana Roth-Lehtinen of Florida, who has sponsored their cause on many occasions in the House of Representatives.
It's so funny that these people can on one hand support right-wing Islamic people against the godless communists and on the other hand turn right around and support a bunch of godless communists against right-wing Islamic people or whatever.
You just take their little narrative and switch it around and they go right for it, you know?
In this case, of course, you have both communists and right-wing Islamic extremists, so you can pick your pick in terms of which is the target here.
The Marxist ideology of the MEK has faded from significance, and their sort of commitment to overthrow the Islamic regime in Iran is the one that really has counted politically, which has determined their external alliances with, first of all, Saddam Hussein and then Israel and the United States.
All right, now let me ask you about the Status of Forces Agreement.
July's almost over, it's 2009, and yet they didn't have that referendum about the Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq.
What happened there, Gareth, and what's the status of the occupation?
Because I thought the law was that the SOFA didn't count unless there was a successful referendum supporting it in July of 2009.
It's the 29th today, right?
Yes, it is, and it's not going to happen, of course.
What has happened, apparently, is that the Iraqi government, for its own reasons, has decided to postpone the referendum.
I think that the plan is still to hold the referendum, but there are different calculations within the Iraqi regime and within the National Assembly of Iraq.
I think the Iraqi regime has some thought that if they delayed the referendum, they can both use it as a negotiating bargaining chip with the United States to extract more concessions by dangling the possibility of delay or even not holding it, and at the same time, delaying the referendum will give them an opportunity to let the United States demonstrate that it's violating the agreement and be able to build a case against the agreement should that be their position when it's held.
And that is a distinct possibility, that if they delay it, let's say until next year, and the United States has done enough to allow the Iraqi government to make a case that the U.S. is violating the agreement, and there have been at least two or three major accusations now by the Iraqi government about violations by the United States military since January 1st, then the vote against the agreement would be a strong negative, and that would play into the hands of the Iraqi government.
Now, that is also the position being taken by the pro-Iranian Islamic Revolution, sorry, not the Islamic Revolution, but what was once the Islamic Revolutionary Council of Iraq, now the Islamic Council of Iraq, they are now calling for a delay, reportedly for similar reasons, so that they can build a case against the United States in Iraq by citing violations by the U.S. military.
There was a famous, at least in Iraq, well-known case of a U.S. military operation in Kut, in which the Iraqi government charged that the United States had not consulted with and not coordinated with either local or national Iraqi officials before carrying out a raid, which resulted in not only an arrest, but the killing of the wife of one of the targets of the raid.
So that's an example of the kind of cases that may mount up over the month and make for a very strong case against the security treaty if and when it's held next year.
Now, there's one other calculation, and that is the Sadrists, the Muqtada al-Sadr's followers in the National Assembly.
They are agreeing to a delay, but calling for holding the referendum earlier, perhaps in September.
And of course, they are the strongest opponents of the U.S.
-Iraq security treaty.
So you have some different calculations, but apparently a consensus among the major political groups on the Shia side that it should be delayed.
Well, so you think that, well, let me put it this way.
A year ago, George Bush said, I want 58 bases, and Maliki said no.
And then he stuck by that through the end of Bush's term, where Bush had no choice but to try to get through another U.N. resolution, or go ahead and sign this thing.
He went ahead and signed this thing that says no bases at all.
And now you're telling me the game is on on all sides of political factions, basically, even though their timing may be different.
Basically, everybody wants time to make the U.S. look bad enough that the referendum, when they finally hold it, will fail, and the U.S. will have to get out sooner than even the December 31, 2011 deadline that is set in the Status Forces Agreement.
I think that's right.
That certainly applies to both the Sadrists and to the Islamic Council, the pro-Iranian Shia political party.
They certainly hope to build a case against the security treaty.
The Iranians, I think, would like to see it voted down as a way of underlining the unacceptability of U.S. troops in Iraq.
I think the Maliki regime is somewhat more nuanced in its position for the simple reason that they would like to be able to use this, as I said, to negotiate more concessions in the form of good deals for purchasing U.S. excess military stocks or certainly purchasing U.S. weapons on good terms from their point of view.
Okay, now tell me more about this article behind detainee release, the U.S.
-Iraqi conflict on Iran.
Well, this is a story that was given rather cursory treatment in the U.S. news media, for the most part, in the sense that essentially the story was treated as, you know, the U.S. State Department expresses concern that these five Iranians are being released by the United States on the insistence of the Iraqi government, which they then turned over to, and were turned over to, the Iranian government very quickly.
The State Department position being that there are still the five Iranians who were detained in 2007 or late 2006, were still regarded as a danger to U.S. troops in Iraq.
And that, of course, is a massive simplification and really misses the point of what has happened over this issue of the detention of these five Iranians by the U.S. military.
And the real story, which I recount in this article, is that despite the claims by the U.S. military and by the Bush administration that these were dangerous IRGC agents who were stirring up the Shia in Iraq and arming them and urging them to go to war against the Iraqi regime and against the Americans, what was really happening was that these were people who were in Iran, excuse me, these Iranians were in Iraq for very different reasons.
As I said, they were IRGC operatives who were operating in Kurdistan.
Three of the five were in Kurdistan.
And the fact is that they were stamping passports and working on the travel of Iraqis to Iran, because the IRGC handles the border arrangements, border security and border formalities between Iran and Iraq.
And so they were operating in Kurdistan in what was regarded by the Iraqi government as an official diplomatic center or diplomatic office being operated within Erbil, the primary city near the border of Iran.
The Iraqi government and the Kurdistan government, the Kurdish leaders, were both insistent in their context with the U.S. government, the U.S. military, saying they had it wrong, they didn't understand.
They didn't understand the fact that the IRGC is not simply to carry out covert military operations, but they also have other functions.
But, of course, the U.S. didn't listen to them and they continued on this course of arresting the Iranians, being urged on by the MEK, by the way, of course, in this endeavor.
Well, you know, I used to say this before Justin ever wrote it as a theme in his article, so I'll go ahead and continue to use it.
This is complete bizarre world nonsense.
How could they possibly have deceived themselves into not admitting that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution was just an adjunct of the IRGC in the first place, that the IRGC was the parent organization of their militia, the Badr Corps, and that these were their number one allies, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his buddies in Iraq, and it was only over their dead bodies that they had to go ahead and concede and get a compromised Allah Party guy in there in the form of Jafari and then Maliki in the first place, when they always wanted to install the Syrian power there, Gareth.
Indeed, you've again restated, of course, a theme which we've talked about on so many occasions.
I know we've both lost count, but this is a very interesting question that you've raised.
How could they possibly be so ignorant?
I think the answer is twofold.
One, you cannot overestimate the degree of ignorance that the Bush administration had toward the entire Iraqi political system and its dynamics, and the degree to which wish fulfillment governed the thinking of the White House, at the very least, and the way in which the policy toward Iraq was being driven to a significant extent by the personal wishes and fantasies of President Bush in this case.
And I know in a way I'm contradicting myself by deemphasizing, at the moment at least, the effective influence of the national security bureaucracy on U.S. policy.
But on this one, I think we do have to take a bow to the degree to which Bush was pushing the idea that al-Maliki is his buddy, he trusts him, he looked him in the eye, he thought he was a good guy, and we're going to support him.
And the degree to which the military in Iraq, and by that I'm of course talking about General David Petraeus primarily, Petraeus and Odierno, basically played along with the idea that al-Maliki was the staunch ally of the United States against Iran, which became, of course, a major theme in the public testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker before U.S. Senate and House committees.
And once that happened, once they had taken that position, of course, these public personalities in the military and in the embassy in Baghdad had to continue to play the game and pretend that that's what indeed was really going on, even though we have plenty of evidence, which I'm now putting together for a possible book, that certainly Petraeus and others in Baghdad were well aware that what was really going on was quite different from that.
I mean, this is a story of how, again, domestic politics really dominates the truth or shapes the truth.
The political needs of the Bush administration to have a narrative about the brave U.S. military resisting Iranian aggression in Iraq became the thing that trumped what a lot of people understood was the truth.
Well, and the same can be said for fighting the evil Sunni terrorists of the insurgency as well.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, and that was always the amazing thing about the Iraq war, right?
It was not just how obviously illegal and aggressive and murderous and based on lies the whole thing was, but really this whole time it's been just breathtaking how badly the whole thing has been carried out.
Of course, a lot of people think they just wanted to destroy the whole place on purpose, but I guess your argument is none of these guys has an IQ warmer than tap water, and this is just the kind of empire you get.
You go to war with the army you got.
Yeah, I mean, it's really, of course, not IQ per se.
It's really, you know, having the guts, the intellectual courage or the integrity to speak the truth, and I think that none of these personalities who rise to the top of the military and of the diplomatic corps in the Bush administration are going to have that kind of courage or integrity, and so what you get is simply systematic sort of construction of lies in order to justify what's going on.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter.
I have to have you back soon to talk about the lies about Iran's involvement in Afghanistan.
That's the whole other side of this propaganda line, but we're all out of time.
Thank you very much for yours today, Gareth.
It's my pleasure as always.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, that's Gareth Porter, Interpress Service, IPSnews.org, original.antiwar.com, slash Porter.