01/07/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Just in the nickel of the dime, I got Gareth Porter on the show, lined up on the line, I mean to say.
Hey, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm right here, Scott.
Very happy to have you back on the show, sir.
Happy New Year.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
Good to be back.
So first of all, I just have to say this.
You don't have to comment if you don't want, but it's just incredible to me that the national police in Paris have not tracked down the shooters at this attack this morning yet, and they're just out there somewhere.
What an insane thing.
They got no leads or what?
It's already nighttime over there right now.
Anyway.
Yes.
This is a bit of a shock for sure, yes.
Something else.
All right.
Well, so listen, I want to talk about your article.
I got it here somewhere, don't I?
Where's my Iraq War section?
Here we go.
Real politics behind the U.S. war on ISIS, which reminds me, and I had forgotten this until just this moment.
We got to settle this bet, but I'm not sure how to settle it.
We made a $10 bet that we'd have ground forces in Iraq by New Year's, and yet what we have are a lot of advisors and uncounted numbers of special forces and spies and mercs.
Now, one supporter of the show already sent me your $10 to cover your side of the bet when Obama announced he was going up to $3,000 now.
I don't want to be a hard ass on this, but I don't remember exactly what the terms were.
Did we say combat troops or did we just say ground troops?
I think we might have left that too vague in the first place to make the bet.
That's my impression.
Because, of course, Obama's scheme from the time he became president was to call combat troops something other than combat troops so that he can keep them in Iraq longer.
We saw that from 2009 through 11.
Right, and it's a reasonable suspicion that that's going to happen.
I don't think we said it has to be a battalion or it has to be whatever strength, but we do have guys fighting in Anbar.
We got guys flying helicopters and we've got guys on the ground pulling triggers fighting the Islamic State in Anbar province, right?
Well, I actually have not seen the stories about that.
The only thing that I've seen is a story, and maybe you're referring to the same thing, about special forces who were sighted coming down a mountain in one of those white Toyotas or whatever it is that they always use, the special operations forces units.
And that leads to a suspicion that they're somehow more directly involved than simply helping to target for the Iraqi or Kurdish forces, but so far I haven't seen anything more than that.
Are you referring to something more different from that?
Yeah, and I think I may have overstated it a little bit.
It's the headline from two days ago on CNN was about American soldiers under regular fire.
Oh, it's on antiwar.com still today here, or was that from a couple of days ago?
U.S. troops in Iraq under fire from ISIS on a regular basis, and I guess I was just conflating it with an earlier report about them shooting back, I think, but yeah, I don't know.
Then there was also the report, Boots in the Air, about the Apache helicopters flying out from the airport and hitting targets on the ground there in Anbar, but yeah, I may have overstated the CNN story.
Well, I think we both agree that the big question mark here is whether there will be continued mission creep that does involve open combat by U.S. troops, and I mean, that's still...
And there certainly are JSOC guys lazing targets for the Air Force.
That was in the Daily Beast.
They've got German special forces with them.
They're definitely there.
The special forces are definitely there.
They're trigger happy.
They want to get into the fight.
We know that, as I mentioned in my article, and whether they will do that or actually are already doing it, I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, now, so let's get to the politics of the thing, because, well, let me talk to you about this Patrick Coburn article.
I don't know if you saw his latest, but this is basically his theme for a long time now, and that is that the Americans have really underestimated the Islamic State, or at least they act like it.
They have stated these expansive goals that we're not ever going to allow Iraqi Sunni stand to be a safe haven for terrorists, which is what Obama's been saying from his very first press conference after the fall of Mosul.
But then on the other hand, eh, they got some airstrikes here and some special forces there, and it sure doesn't amount to really sending in the Marines to sack Mosul.
There's some tough talk by some Kurdish Peshmerga that they're going to go into Mosul sometime later this year, but that doesn't seem too believable to me, and I don't think to Coburn either it doesn't seem like, so there seems to be a real gap between what they say they're doing and what's actually going to be required to remove these guys from, at least to turn them back into an insurgency from the pseudo state that they've declared themselves to be now.
Well, that's exactly the premise of my piece, which is that there is this contradiction between the stated goal of defeating, dismantling ultimately the Islamic State, and the reality which is that it can't be done with the means that have been chosen or have been actually put into operation.
And that's a, I mean, there's a consensus about that by virtually everyone who speaks independently rather than officially on this question.
And even, you know, certainly off the record, I'm sure you've seen statements being made by people in the military, you know, questioning whether that's going to work, so, I mean, that's really the starting point for my analysis of the real politics here.
Right.
Now, regular listeners to the show, they understand, but it bears repeating, you have a pretty specific point of view, and I think it's quite in common with a lot of libertarian view about the nature of bureaucracy and how it works and the role it plays, especially in American foreign policy.
Really, what you say is exactly what Justin Raimondo calls his libertarian realism, which is it's all about domestic politics, and I think you may emphasize more than him the political role that the generals and the admirals themselves play and how much weight that they have in the decision making here.
Exactly.
And I, you know, see, I see this new war on the Islamic State as a yet another case study which lines up, I think, with a whole host of previous historical cases, and I include there, of course, Vietnam as well as Afghanistan as the two primary, the clearest cases where the president was not the primary force behind the impetus for war, and indeed, the president was not at all eager or was actually resisting the pressure to escalate U.S. involvement militarily and wanted to avoid the kind of military commitment that the national security state was pushing for very, very strongly, and my analysis of what has happened in this case is that something along those lines, although we don't have the details that we have on both the Afghanistan and Vietnam cases, it seems clear that something along those lines did, in fact, take place with regard to Obama's decision making on the way in which to present what the United States was doing as well as, you know, the actual commitment of forces.
So, I mean, I think it begins with the fact that there was a, you know, a key turning point here with the beheading of the two Americans held by the Islamic State.
Before that, there was much more explicit, limited language attached to the U.S. use of air power in Iraq, and after those beheadings, there was a sudden lurch in the direction of a much more expansive role militarily articulated by the White House.
Right.
Not much change in the actual role, but in their statements about what it entailed.
All right.
Well, anyway, dang music's playing and we're interrupted.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Gareth Porter from IPS News right after this.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
It's my show.
I got the great Gareth Porter on the line.
I neglected to mention at the top of the show that he's the author of the book Manufactured Crisis.
Get it.
In fact, get two, and then drop one off at your local library.
Manufactured Crisis.
How Everything You Ever Heard About Iran's Nuclear Program Being a Threat Isn't True by Gareth Porter.
That's not the actual subtitle.
That's just mine, because I don't have it in front of me.
All right, so we're talking about the politics behind the Iraq War and Iraq War 3 now it is, three and a half, whatever.
And you're saying it's all domestic politics, and after the beheadings last summer, obviously the pressure was ratcheted up for, okay, now we got to start calling it a war.
Although, honestly, I think Obama's first statement out in front of the helicopter on the lawn was, back in early June, was we will not allow for there to be a safe haven for terrorists in Iraq.
And that's about as expansive as a mandate as you could possibly get, bigger than Lyndon Johnson, the one he got from the Congress, and Obama just declared it for himself right there on the spot on the lawn.
But I guess they did ratchet the rhetoric down a little bit after that, and then it did ratchet back up.
So the question is, and I'm not trying to shame them in invading the damn place.
I don't want anything to do with it, of course.
But the question is, what in the hell are they doing?
They're talking real tough, but they're not really waging a war.
Is that a hopeful sign that Obama just, in a good way, isn't man enough to do the horrible thing they want him to do?
No, that's not very good news.
But we have to do, you know, we should back up and just note that, you know, look, Obama was obviously, based on the public record that we have now, interested in, in terms of his own political interests, sitting there in the White House, in basically dialing down the war on, the global war on terrorism.
I don't want to go into detail on that, but there's a lot of evidence that, some evidence, but crucial evidence, that he was hoping to be able to get out of, to basically reduce the footprint of the United States in terms of drone strikes and special operations forces, and really begin to say, look, we're getting out of this business.
It's time to come back and focus on problems at home.
And so, I mean, this is part of the deal, I think, that one has to understand as far as his response to the ISIS problem.
And you know, he did underestimate them, and I think that he was motivated to underestimate them by this desire, both to claim victory, of course, in counter-terrorism, I mean, that's part of the political appeal of this position, but also, you know, actually to be able to focus more on domestic politics, domestic political issues, and this is one of the ways in which the interests of the White House do, in fact, differ from the interests of the national security state, and I put a lot of emphasis on that.
So, I mean, that's the starting point, and, you know, clearly, you know, he was strongly influenced by the beheadings, he did change his rhetoric after that, and even then, I make the point in my piece that on August 25th, Ben Rhodes, his young, very ambitious deputy national security advisor, was telling reporters that, you know, the ISIS is still a deeply rooted organization, and not to expect that the U.S. military forces were going to be able to evict them from the communities where they operate.
Now, that's a very interesting bit of rhetoric, because it looks to me like they were very consciously trying to set up a firewall between, you know, the use of force there and what they believed the military at that point was interested in doing, which was getting deeper into this and justifying more types of military force.
So that's essentially, I think, the analysis that I would make about the tensions between the White House and the military over this, and then it comes out more explicitly in the use of the term war, that is, the White House reluctance to use the term war for this, and the Pentagon apparently saying, well, no, of course this is a war, what are you talking about, and the White House then caving in.
And I think that's just an interesting little insight into the maneuvering that was taking place over the potential future of this military engagement.
Yeah, no, you're right.
I mean, I got to admit that it's surprising the degree to which he's been reluctant to do this, the degree to which at least the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the rest of them were openly gaming him.
It was just like in the fall of 2009 when they were saying, oh, he's dithering, he's dithering, we've got to have a surge in Afghanistan.
It's that same kind of thing where the Pentagon is saying they're not satisfied with their commander-in-chief, like the NYPD saying, we don't like the mayor.
Yeah, well, who asked you?
And the reason that I said it's not such good news that he's simply, that he would like to do less is that he has shown over and over again that he does compromise under pressure, and that's the, I mean, that is of the essence, it seems to me, historically of the relationship between presidents and the national security state, even when the presidents feel very strongly about the idea that the United States should not be going to war or should limit strictly the degree to which it is involved in a war.
And that was certainly the case with Lyndon Johnson, as I've shown in my book on Vietnam.
So I think we're, you know, faced here with this primordial problem in the United States that the national security state has acquired such political power that the White House is inevitably, invariably intimidated by it in various ways.
It feels the heat from the military when military forces and the Secretary of Defense plus the CIA and NSA now as part of this team.
And that's what I think we're facing in this case of the war against the Islamic State.
Yeah.
Well, you know, so what about Libya?
You think they made him do that?
Because he was kind of reluctant for a little while.
It was obviously the dumbest thing in the world to do.
Well I, you know, I have to be honest and say that I have not...
He came out and said Assad has to go too, and has...
I've not carefully evaluated or, you know, investigated, I should say, the Libya case.
I don't know enough to give a very good informed answer on that.
I mean, my suspicion is that there was, you know, a degree of active pressure from some parts of the military.
Well, and here's the thing, and this has to be said, Gareth, before we're completely out of time here, which is that anybody else could just, you know, could try a lot harder.
That the buck stops with him.
It's his responsibility.
I know he's just a figurehead for Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon and Lockheed and whatever, but he's still the guy in the chair, and he's still the guy with the bully pulpit.
I agree with you.
I think that it's an indication of grave personal weakness that we're looking at here, and I think that that is, in some sense, the case with all the post-Eisenhower presidencies.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it'd be so simple for any of us to say, like, well, whatever, everybody's got to die sometime.
I don't care what you say.
It's just like Ron Paul.
They would ask Ron Paul, well, what are you going to do when you become president, your first day in office?
He said, the first thing I'm going to do is call the admirals and tell them to pull their boats back away from Iran.
You know, and the truth is that that's exactly what he would have done.
That's exactly what he would have done.
And if they refused, he would have relieved them all their command.
As simple as that.
And and it would have been implicit that you better have a bubble top on your limo.
And he would have been brave enough to go ahead and do the right thing anyway.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's that's why he was never very ambitious politically.
And maybe, you know, you could also look at it exactly the other way around, you know, because he wasn't ambitious politically.
He was able to he was able to take those positions.
Yeah, sure.
But anyway, it is it is disgraceful.
And I just don't want it to sound too much like this is some apology for poor Obama when, you know, came down to it.
Truman fired MacArthur.
He said, oh, yeah, you don't like it.
You're fired.
And the American people, the way I learned it anyway, they took the president's side on that, even if they didn't necessarily agree with him on the decision to not get into a nuclear war with China.
Yeah.
You know, I think that that that episode does, in fact, illustrate the the degree to which the political system, the nature of this political system has changed so profoundly because I don't I really have a hard time imagining that this would happen in any of the post Truman, any of the post Eisenhower presidencies.
Of course, we did have Eisenhower for those eight years, even even as the system, the national security state was building up its power.
But he was, in effect, you know, holding them back to a significant degree.
But since then, none of the presidents have been willing to stand up to the military over issues that really involved the fundamental interests of the national security state.
Right.
All right.
And with that, we got to go.
We're over time here.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, as always, Gareth.
I appreciate talking to you.
Thanks again, Scott.
All right.
So that's the great Gareth Porter.
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