01/05/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, January 5th, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome to the show and Happy New Year.
It's the first show of the new year.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
I'm very happy to welcome this week's guest, the great Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, author of Perils of Dominance and the award-winning series on the Afghan War that won the Gellhorn Prize for Truthout.org.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, thanks.
Happy New Year to you.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
I should mention that your forthcoming book is Manufactured Crisis and I think people can pre-order it at Amazon, etc., right?
That's correct, yes.
It's available for pre-ordering.
Alright, so I'm juggling too many books at once, but I've already started.
I'm on Chapter 3 or so, I think, and of course it's great and I'm the biggest fan of your Ron work, of course.
Well, thank you very much for your support over the years.
Yeah, well, I consider this book highly anticipated.
I sure hope that everyone will read it and I hope that it'll make a difference in the current negotiations with Iran as far as that goes, but we'll get to that later on in the show.
First of all, Gareth, I wanted to point out for the people here that it was right around this time, seven years ago, at the dawn of the surge and blaming Iran for all of America's problems in Iraq that you and I first spoke, that I discovered your journalism and started interviewing you on, at that time, my brand new show, Antiwar Radio, and the worry was that George Bush and Dick Cheney were going to go ahead and attack Iran right there early in 2007, but you explained how, no, they're going to wait until at least the summer and we'll see what happens, and anyway, that was the first time I ever met you right around seven years ago.
I'm very happy to always have you on the show to turn to when it comes to what's true and what's not going on over there in the Middle East.
And so, speaking of which, TV says that al-Qaeda has taken over Fallujah and Ramadi and are consolidating their gains and taking over the Sunni parts of Iraq.
Well, there's no doubt they have made a huge coup, I think it's fair to say, in the Sunni heartland of Iraq by, first of all, seizing Fallujah and then Ramadi.
I mean, these are clearly the two major political centers of the Sunni triangle and this, in effect, creates a crisis for Iraq.
I mean, this is a recapitulation of the success of the insurgents against the U.S. forces during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and, of course, the situation is quite different now, but some of the same forces are at work here in terms of the al-Qaeda-oriented state of Iraq and Levant being able to exploit the resentment on the part of the Sunni population of the advantages that the Shia have being in power.
And that goes very deep, and that was certainly part of what was happening in the latter part of the war of the U.S. occupation in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda certainly took great advantage of the fact that the United States was on the side of the Shia-dominated government, and this certainly was a major reason for many people to support al-Qaeda in Iraq and gave it far more influence within the insurgency than its sheer numbers would have merited.
Yeah, but whatever happened to the Anbar Awakening and all that, I mean, it was even before Petraeus showed up, as we've spoken about many times in the past, it was what, really even the beginning of 2006, certainly by the middle of 2006, the Sunni Arab population of Iraq had turned on all the Zarqawiist suicide bomber types.
That's right.
I mean, that started much earlier.
I mean, I was tracking that very carefully as early as late 2004.
You begin to see reports of clashes between some of the Sunni nationalist insurgents, tribal leaders and their followers, and al-Qaeda because of al-Qaeda's extreme ideology and what they were doing when they took over in some places.
So that was continuing to fester and get worse.
That is, that clash, that tension between al-Qaeda and the non-extremist, the non-jihadist forces opposing U.S. occupation was continuing to get worse.
But then, of course, you have a major development in 2007 when, I mean, two things were going on there.
I mean, the Sunnis had become convinced that the Shia really had whipped their ass, basically, in the capital, in Baghdad, and that they were on their way to winning the war.
They had virtually won the war between the Sunnis and Shia, taking place both in the capital and in the environs of the capital.
And so, I mean, they were ready to do whatever they could to try to get the United States to support the Sunnis against the Shia or to at least ease off the U.S. war against the Sunnis.
And at that point, then, you know, General Petraeus decided, yeah, we've got to do that, and he called off the war against the Sunni insurgents, or at least minimized it, and basically enabled the emergence of the Sons of Iraq, the Sunni anti-al-Qaeda forces, to work with the U.S.
And that was really a key turning point, no doubt about it.
And you continued to have a three-cornered clash there, a three-cornered war going on with the al-Qaeda forces, the U.S. and its Sunni allies fighting al-Qaeda, and then you had the remnants of the nationalist, non-jihadist Sunni insurgents continuing their resistance.
So that was continuing through 2007 and into 2008 when the U.S. then negotiated the withdrawal agreement with the government.
Well, yeah, I mean, but that was the whole point of the search, right, was to achieve all the benchmarks and to negotiate instead of all, you know, just blood in the gutters on the side of the streets.
They would create security enough that they could negotiate the rest of the political differences away, and I think I remember reading the Sons of Iraq, the bought-off Sunni Arabs.
After all, they'd lost the capital city by that point, and they're basically saying, all right, well, Petraeus is promising us that the new government will deal with us, so let's wait and see.
But now they've waited to see, and I guess they've decided that Maliki is not living up to his end of the deal at all.
Well, I think that's a very broad, certainly, perception on the part of the Sunni political strata and, you know, a large part of the population, no question about it.
But I would point out that the current surge, if you will, in al-Qaeda power in the Sunni triangle is not so much a result of increased repression of Sunnis by the Shia government of al-Maliki, but rather the opposite, that he, as an effort to reduce tensions with the Sunnis, withdrew the government forces from these places and tried to use Sunni police instead.
And, of course, that, in a sense, recapitulates what the United States tried to do.
You know, they didn't go as far as al-Maliki has in terms of withdrawing U.S. forces, but they tried to recruit Sunni police to sort of take over at least some of the duties of opposing and resisting the Sunni insurgents, and that turned out to be a complete failure, because Sunnis simply would not fight their fellow Sunnis on behalf of the United States.
So, in other words, the capital, Maliki and his government, his army, relinquished control to a great degree, I mean, to whatever degree they already had it, by withdrawing, and that just let the genie out of the bottle.
That's right.
I mean, they certainly weakened their military position within the Sunni triangle, but I think they did so in undoubtedly the correct belief that that was not going to be very successful.
So, you know, it's a kind of Hobson's choice for them, just as it was for the United States in the war against the Sunni resistance.
You know, on one hand, they could try to simply rely on U.S. troops, but that was going to create more resistance, as the U.S. military itself figured out very early in the war, actually.
Or they could try to recruit and rely on, you know, the Sunni police and security forces and withdraw their own forces, but they didn't trust those forces, and that's why they basically refused to pull U.S. troops completely out of Fallujah and Ramadi and those other cities.
And that's where you get the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, because the U.S. would not withdraw its troops from the city, and that was the basis for this major battle.
I mean, the bloodiest battle of the entire war, in fact, was Fallujah, 2004.
I think Maliki faced the same dilemma that the United States did.
I don't think he's following the footsteps of the United States in the sense that, in fact, toward trying to recognize the sensitivities of the Sunnis than the United States did.
But it wasn't enough, because the tensions are so high, I think.
Well, and of course, you know, part of this comes back to American policy, because it seems like, if you go back to Barack Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, where they talk about Syria, and they agree, no one brings up the poor, downtrodden masses of Syria in the interview at all.
The discussion is simply, hey, if we weaken and or overthrow Assad in Syria, then that would be a great way to weaken Iran.
Right, Mr. President?
Yeah, you've really got something going on, Jeffrey Goldberg.
And I can't tell you what all we're doing there, because then I'd have to kill you.
Wink, wink, ha, ha.
But we're working on it.
And so, basically, to make up for the fact that the Bush administration handed Iraq to the Shiite Arabs in alliance with Iran and increased Iran's power that much, to make up for that, they can't really reinvade Iraq and switch back to the Sunnis now.
It's a little too late to call off Saddam's trial.
So they just tried to back the bad guys, the Sunni-based insurgency from the Iraq War, back them in Syria, against the Shiite Ba'athist dictatorship there.
And then, as Patrick Coburn has explained on the show, it's really the revolution in Syria or the Sunni insurgency in Syria that has re-energized the Sunni insurgents of Iraq, too.
In fact, many of them, obviously the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, many of them are Iraqis in the first place.
And they're looking at the situation and saying, wait, why did we ever stop fighting for Baghdad?
We're the majority in the region, not the Shiites.
And look at all that we're kicking up in Syria with our suicide attacks and whatever.
And so why are we putting up with this from Maliki?
And so whether they can really take the capital city back or not, they probably can't.
But at least Patrick Coburn was saying they think they can.
They got it in their head that maybe they can.
Well, I think they feel they can continue to destabilize it and create a very high – exact a very high cost on al-Maliki for trying to maintain control elsewhere.
And I think that, in other words, it's a political leveraging of violence, essentially, that they have in mind.
Try to exact some concessions from the al-Maliki government by continuing to carry out terrorist attacks within the capital and its environs.
You know, the funny part of all this is, you know, from my point of view, when I try to figure out what the U.S. government thinks they're doing, it basically – to assume that they have any idea what they're doing means that it has to be this really elaborate conspiracy to do what they've done to the Middle East.
Otherwise, I think the default is they have no idea what they're doing, when or when they shouldn't be backing al-Qaeda's suicide bombers or why at all.
Well, I think you're absolutely right.
And you know, I think, very well that I've said many times on your show that U.S. policy in the Middle East, as elsewhere, but particularly in the Middle East, essentially is a product of domestic politics and bureaucratic politics.
In other words, it's a combination of the interests of certain key political constituencies in the United States combined with the interests of major, very powerful bureaucracies in the national security state that really shape and determine the direction of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
And that's been the case for decades now, absolutely without any question in my mind.
And this present situation is no – certainly is no exception to that generalization.
You know, I think we've seen over and over again, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration essentially making it up as they go along.
You know, making decisions which reflect the necessity to adjust previous decisions, which were in turn, you know, shaped by decisions that had been made before.
And all of which, you know, goes back to some major developments following the end of the Cold War when, you know, the military-industrial complex was facing, you know, Armageddon in the shape of a real possibility of being cut down to a shadow of its former size.
And the fix that was – that they came up with, including, of course, Dick Cheney, who was then Secretary of Defense, was the Gulf War I, was the war against Saddam Hussein's forces in Kuwait.
And, you know, sort of touting that as the shape of wars to come.
And it was a very popular war, and it helped resuscitate the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.
And as a result of that, of course, it set in motion the forces that brought about the war that followed in 2003.
So I think, you know, a lot of the decisions that have been made in the Middle East have been essentially, you know, follow-ons to what the United States did in the 1990s and in the decade that followed.
And it is not the result of any analysis, objective or otherwise, of the forces that exist in the Middle East, let alone in the countries themselves.
So, you know, yes, I mean, they have ideas about the Sunni-Shia split, the Sunni-Shia conflict, and about Iran and about Saudi Arabia and so forth.
But I think that analysis takes a backseat to sort of immediate political requirements over and over again.
And so you have, you know, the conflict with Iran sort of in the driver's seat for the Obama administration.
When it came into office, that was already the issue.
You know, it wasn't as though they started all over again and tried to figure out what sort of policy they should have in the region, let alone towards Iran.
They simply sort of continued on the line of least resistance.
And I think that is the only way you can really understand the dynamics of U.S. policy in the Middle East today and in the past.
Well, and you look at them now saying, oh my God, Hezbollah is intervening in Syria.
Maybe we're going to have to start our intervention at this point to do something about that.
At the same time that they're trying to negotiate the major sticking point with Iran, their nuclear program, away as a sticking point.
And so maybe there's not a Shiite axis that needs opposing after all.
Well, I think, you know, anyone who is in the position in the State Department or in the intelligence community of having to analyze the situation understands that, you know, it's far more complex than simply opposing Iran could possibly express in terms of policy.
I mean, the United States clearly understands that supporting, as you, I think, suggested earlier, that supporting the resistance forces in Syria, including, of course, the non-jihadist resistance forces, to the extent of overthrowing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, is naturally going to create much greater instability, not just in Syria, but in the region as a whole.
And that is something that, you know, President Obama and others clearly did not want to do.
I mean, they simply did not want to either intervene militarily on behalf of the insurgents, nor really put major arms into their hands so that they could overthrow the regime.
And, you know, this was not simply because it would create the possibility of a jihadist regime, which was certainly one possibility, but apart from that, simply the fact that, you know, it would exacerbate the whole Sunni-Shia war in the Middle East.
And therefore, you know, I think there's definitely been a great deal of uncertainty on the part of this administration about what they ought to be doing, and it's just simply not a straightforward policy.
But I think that they have leaned much farther in the direction, in their rhetoric, of saying that the problem is Iran than certainly is supported by U.S. intelligence analysis, much less by objective political analysis of the region.
And so I think that's been a highly distorting factor in U.S. policy, and it doesn't accurately reflect what the understanding is within the administration, but I think that it has definitely influenced U.S. policy because of the, again, coming back to the domestic politics of the situation.
You know, the United States is still allied with Israel in the region, and that has caused it to lean more heavily in the direction of talking about Iran as the major destabilizing force that is justified by objective reality.
Well, and now, so is there any part of this that's nefarious, divide-and-conquer kind of politics, the way, you know, in the old Yanan plan from the 1980s, or as Michael Ledeen, one of the leading neoconservatives of at least the last decade, used to like to put it, let's turn the Middle East into a boiling cauldron.
Let's just, you know, throw it all up against the wall, slam it all up against the wall, and shake the hell out of it and see what comes out of it at the end.
Well, you know, that's certainly been a theme in Israeli geopolitical approach to the Middle East.
It's a very important idea in Israeli policymaking circles.
But even there in Israel, it hasn't been a simple, straightforward approach to the region because the Israelis, as you know, have in the past had their own secret talks with Bashar al-Assad, which reflected, you know, the mixed set of interests that they have with regard to Syria.
On one hand, they would like to see a weak Syria.
They would like to, you know, detach Syria from Iran.
And they would like to have a Syria that is broken up into smaller fiefdoms.
And so, you know, they've got two different directions that they're facing in their geopolitical approach.
I think that they've gone back and forth in terms of their policy toward the Assad regime.
At some points, they have favored, you know, wanting to reach an agreement with him.
And at others, they've said there's no use in doing that.
You know, we wouldn't mind having him overthrown.
And I think that reflected the hope that maybe they could get somebody in the Syrian military to overthrow him.
And I think that now even that hope has waned to the point where that's not an option.
So, you know, now I think that the Israelis, you know, are continuing to say, you know, we support regime change.
But, you know, at the same time, I think they're wary about the consequences of that as well.
Yeah, I was going to ask you if they're starting to change their mind.
It seemed like they went from Assad must go to, well, let's let them fight and wear each other out for a while, to, all right, let's go ahead and side back with our old torture buddy Assad.
Yeah, I think that there's a great deal of ambivalence on that issue.
You know, in the IDF and the Israeli intelligence circles, just as there has been in the past, by the way, toward Iran, on the part of the IDF and intelligence people, as opposed to the political leadership under Netanyahu, who's sort of doggedly devoted to the idea of Iran as a existential threat to Israel.
That is not the view on the part of the military and intelligence leadership of Israel going back decades.
And, you know, if you follow the history of the thinking of the security establishment in Israel, there's been a very strong view in the past that it's inevitable that eventually Iran will once again become a friend of Israel because they have this fundamental conflict with the Sunni regimes, Arab regimes of the region.
And in the end, we'll find ourselves once again being able to work with Iran.
And I think that's a large part of the reason why the Israeli military has pulled its punches privately, not publicly, but to some extent publicly, on policy toward Iran.
They've never really been in favor of an attack on Iran.
And that's why, you know, I've argued on your show over and over again, that that whole notion that Netanyahu is going to attack Iran has never been accurate, it's never been true.
It's always been opposed for diplomatic, political purposes.
Yeah, no, his policy is to get America to do it, of course.
Well, yes, they'd love to have the United States do it.
Or is not Netanyahu's policy to disrupt the talks and prevent a final deal on a nuclear program here?
And I guess the second part of that, real quickly now, too, is will his members of our Congress be able to stop Obama from doing this?
And how bad does Obama want to do it?
You know, I don't have a reading on who stands where within the Senate, which is really, I think, the real issue here, the real question.
I mean, I don't trust the House of Representatives on this issue.
Yeah, Cantor has a new one in the House, too.
Yeah, you know, I think the House is kind of a lost cause.
The question is whether you could muster a majority in the Senate to block this kind of legislation.
And it's very close.
I think it's a real question mark.
I don't know the answer.
Do you think Obama will fight for it?
I mean, it seems like the Iranians really want this deal.
Why not?
Well, I mean, I think he will fight for it to oppose that legislation.
And, you know, when I look at the list of those, I understand 47, sorry, 53 senators have refused to sign on to that new sanctions legislation.
47 have done so.
But if you look at the list of 53, it includes a number of senators who are well-known to have gotten huge amounts of money, well, lots of money from AIPAC.
And so I am not at all feeling comfortable that that list of 53 can be counted on to stand firm on this issue.
I'm quite concerned about that.
All right.
Well, thanks for coming back on the show, Gareth.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on again.
I could be back.
All right, y'all.
That's it for Anti-War Radio for today.
I'm Scott Horton here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive at ScottHorton.org.
More than 3,000 of them now going back to 2003 at ScottHorton.org.
See you next week.