For Pacifica Radio, June 16, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the editorial director of antiwar.com.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive, all 5,000 of them now, for free at scotthorton.org.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Gareth Porter.
He is my very favorite reporter.
Also, he wrote the book, Perils of Dominance, about Vietnam and manufactured crisis about Iran's nuclear program, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of great articles over the last dozen years, which I have relied on to learn so many things.
That's why I have interviewed him 316 times.
This is number 317, and the 5,000th interview I've done since 2003.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How the hell are you, man?
Well, my ears are burning, and I am honored to be your 5,000th interviewee, to have the 5,000th interview on your show.
Congratulations on that.
It must be an incredibly unique milestone.
I can't think of anybody who could possibly have matched that.
I congratulate you on that quite amazing accomplishment.
Cool.
Well, thank you very much.
Check's in the mail for that.
Yeah, that's no lie.
I went and checked in the database on the website there.
316 interviews of you since 2007.
Well, you're a glutton for punishment, is all I can say.
Yeah.
You know what?
You're not exactly a born broadcaster talent, but neither am I, and I really don't care about that at all, do I?
It's all about the substance, and that's why I always just interview you about what you write.
You wrote a thing, we talk about that, you make your case, you make it well.
We move on to the next one, another war party lie debunked.
And I told you this before, a radio host asked me a couple of weeks ago, well, why Gareth Porter?
How come he's your favorite?
And I said, well, you know, if I was Mr. White, you're Clark Kent.
And you just knock him out every single time.
Whatever I would have had you write about, you're already on it and already done.
You know, like he tells the little saying, you should see the guy type.
It's incredible.
It really is.
And so that's why I'm your biggest fan.
And that's why I continually bludgeon my audience over the head that this is the guy that you got to read and listen to.
This is how you know what's right and what ain't.
Simple as that.
I do appreciate your appreciation for my work.
It's been a real encouragement for me.
I can tell you that over the years.
Good deal.
Well, and so that includes Iraq War II.
It includes and in many facets, but especially like on the Shiite part of the surge in 2007 and all of David Petraeus and all of his horror there.
That's where it all started.
That was our first interview.
Yeah.
And debunking all the lies about the EFPs and all that lies that are, you know, back in fashion now under Mike Pompeo.
Of course, all your great work on the Afghan war and especially the Afghan surge under Obama in 2009 through 12 there and all that great work and continuing.
And of course, Syria and Iran and their nuclear program, manufactured crisis.
It's not just the book.
It's the I don't know how many articles that you've written about that stuff.
You know, probably, you know, 100 or something just on that.
Well, I doubt if it's that many, but I can understand why you might think it's that many because there are a lot.
Yeah.
Well, that 317 interviews, that's well 316 interviews.
That's 316 articles.
And that's a hell of a lot of what we talked about over these years.
And, and it's all just the most important stuff all the time.
And you have a very sharp eye for not just what's the right question, but figuring out what's the right answer to.
And so that's why we all rely on you so much at antiwar.com and on this show and, and for that matter over there at truth out and truth dig, and the American conservative and all the places that pay to write this stuff to they all obviously recognize how important your work is as well.
So hell yeah.
A couple more notes on the 5000.
There's an Ivan Eland and a Glenn Greenwald that are both lost to the computer crashes from 2004 and I think 2007 or eight, but I'm still counting those because for whatever reason, back when I went ahead and wrote up a blog entry for them anyway, and just said, all right, sorry, suckers, no audio for this one.
So, but I'm counting those.
And I'm also counting three that were published and are now merely drafts.
One of those was a Ron Paulian activist who had to get a real job and was afraid that they were going to find that he, you know, cared about something important or something like that, which is understandable.
And then one of them was an old friend, Joe Briggs.
And there must've been a good reason why it's on draft mode.
I think he must've asked me to take it down for some reason or another that I don't remember anymore, but it's still sitting there.
And that was also about Ron Paul in the 2007 and eight era around then.
And then another was an Egyptian dissident whose name I won't mention, who, she asked me to take it down because she was afraid that Hosni Mubarak would have her killed.
And so there was a point where I was going to contact her again and say, well, now you can talk, right?
But yet, no, Mubarak is back in the form of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the new, even worse dictator than before.
So understandably, I'm keeping that one on draft mode, too.
And there were a couple in the archives that I had deleted a long time ago.
Just a couple here and there, and there were some guest host spots and some other things I cleaned out recently.
I thought I was going to get to 5,000 a few weeks ago, but we're right there right now.
I'm calling this on the count in the WordPress.
This is number 5,000 here.
So we're definitely going with that.
So that's kind of cool.
And the cool thing about it is, is I don't have to update my account for a long time, not until at least 6,000, right?
There's no point in even saying 5,500.
Once you're at 5,000, then you only have to update by the 1,000.
So that'll give me a break.
I have to relax for a while, right?
That's right, man.
Kick back and get another 1,000 done here.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter.
All right.
So now, on with the interview of you, number 5,000, number 317 here.
Where are you from, Gareth Porter?
When were you born, and what was your family like?
Where'd you grow up, and what's the deal with you anyway?
Well, I'll try to keep it short and sweet.
No, go ahead and tell me.
I'm interested.
You got any brothers or sisters?
I have three siblings, two sisters and one brother, and was born in Independence, Kansas 77 years ago, nearly 77.
It'll be later this month.
I was very early in my life.
Before I was one year old, I moved to a small farming community in Illinois.
So I have spent my youth in the Great Plains, the flyover country in northern Illinois, where the tall corn grows.
My parents were both teachers.
My dad was planning to be a coach and a teacher.
My mother was planning to be a teacher.
But things did not turn out that way.
My mother had health problems when I was born and never really got back to teaching again.
My dad did do teaching eventually after doing something else for a while, not manual labor exactly, but more clerical.
He did do some teaching and then some coaching.
When I was 14, I was baptized in the Church of the Brethren.
Both my parents were Church of the Brethren, which are like Quakers or Mennonites.
And so I went to a Brethren school in Indiana, Manchester College, for the first three years of my undergraduate study, and then went to the University of Illinois, because I thought I wanted to work on international politics and foreign policy.
And so that was the beginning of my interest.
Cool.
Well, so, but backtrack a little bit.
Tell us about who you were in high school.
You play any sports or you're on the chess club?
You date a lot of girls or just some?
Tell us what that was like.
I was a shrimp.
I was a very short, skinny kid and had no girlfriends, no dating, was not a sports star, although I did go out for basketball and was never regular.
Did do some running in my senior year in high school.
And in college, I was a runner, a distance runner.
But I was by far the, you know, or not by far the most popular.
I wasn't even close to being the most popular.
I was very far down on the list.
But in my hometown, you know, it was not a cliquey kind of a place.
I was not aware that there were such things as cliques until I got out of graduate school, basically, or was in graduate school.
It was such a small town.
So I was, I would say I was extremely innocent is probably the easiest way to describe myself in high school.
And what about your town?
It's just kind of a nice little small town.
Any troubles, anything notable about that kind of environment?
It was not very notable for anything.
It was on the Underground Railroad.
Although I didn't find out about that until much later, long after I left.
You know, in other words, it was one of the spots where some of the anti-slavery people were helping freed slaves move to through through the north to Canada, or to other locations in the United States where it would be safe to be a freedman.
Mm hmm.
All right, well, and so okay, so tell us about your time in college, then.
Well, I would, I would say that it was because of a friend of mine at Manchester College, who I admired very much, and who was, who was a very close friend of mine, who went on to become a key person in peace studies at Notre Dame University, Bob Johanson.
He was the one who influenced me to take an interest in foreign policy and national security.
He didn't call it national security, and neither did I, but, you know, the, the use of American power abroad.
And at first I was, I was a Time Magazine liberal.
I didn't know- And this is early 60s, right?
This is early 60s.
So early Kennedy, kind of.
I just didn't have any consciousness at all.
I was, I was following, you know, centrist, sort of liberal doctrines.
And it wasn't until, you know, I was a senior in college at the University of Illinois, and our involvement in Vietnam was becoming really serious, 1963, 64, that I began to realize something is really wrong here.
We have a serious problem that I'm going to need to focus on.
And that was just beginning.
That was just the very beginning.
It was really 63.
It was the fall of 63 that, and early 64, that I began to realize that there was a serious problem here that would force me to go beyond Time Magazine liberalism, if you will.
Yeah.
And then, so what year did you graduate?
64?
64, right.
And it was that year I was actually, that was the year I was at the University of Illinois, and I was writing for the Daily Illini.
And then this was, this is a significant piece of information about how I was, how I was evolving.
I was writing columns on foreign policy issues for the Daily Illini, the student newspaper there.
And they were chosen, actually, as the best writing on international affairs for a college daily newspaper by the National Student Press Association.
So I had that recognition when I was a senior at the University of Illinois.
And looking back on it, I should have been a journalist from the very start.
That was what I, that's what I seemed to have been good at.
But I had the, I got the idea very soon after that, that I should be teaching Southeast Asian studies about the Vietnam War.
And that became an idée fixe with me.
And so for the next decade and a half, I kind of thought that that was the direction I needed to go.
And so I never did become a journalist again, really, until I was doing my PhD dissertation research in Saigon in 1968.
Well, I was there first in 68 for the summer, Cornell University sent me there to become acquainted with, with the country, and of course, the war.
And then I went back to do my dissertation research in 1971, and spent the whole year there.
And during that year, I was again, a journalist filing once a week for an alternative newspaper, Dispatch News Service International, and the biggest daily newspaper in Stockholm, Dagens Nyheter, had me as their correspondent there and translated all my weekly articles into Swedish, and published them.
So again, you know, I was getting signals that I should be a journalist, but I didn't heed them.
I think I should have done that in retrospect.
And then so tell us about your reporting then from Vietnam.
Well, I was, I was not trying to cover the military fighting in Vietnam.
I only once during that summer of 68 did I actually try to cover a military operation, a US military operation, and it was in Long An province in the Mekong Delta.
And it was supposed to be a pretty important big military operation.
I went down to the Delta and had a briefing the night before this operation was going to go.
And I don't remember what the Deputy Province Senior Advisor told me.
All I remember is at the end of his briefing, he said, now, tomorrow morning, you'll be issued your combat boots, your flak vest, your helmet, and your M-16.
And I said, what?
What are you talking about?
He said, yeah, all journalists are expected to carry an M-16 who cover these operations with us.
And I said, well, no, I'm not going to do that.
And he said, well, you have to.
And so it didn't happen.
I didn't cover it.
Was that the reason that they wanted you to, was just so that to get you to balk at it?
Or that was really the rule so you could defend yourself in a situation?
I hate to say it, but to this day, I don't really know what the reasoning was there, what the reason was.
I had never heard of journalists having to carry weapons and have not actually heard of it since then.
So I don't know if they, excuse me, I don't know if they singled me out because they had some reason to believe that I was anti-war.
It's very possible.
And they wanted to pick on me or something else.
But in any case, that was the one time that I tried and I never tried again.
What I did was to cover the politics in Saigon, cover the after effects of US use of particularly bombing and mortar and rocket attacks, and particularly the Mekong Delta, but also in central Vietnam.
I did visit Hue after the Tet Offensive.
I saw the devastation and I did talk to a few people.
And so I was getting around the country.
I was able to get free military transportation, which was really good.
I had, of course, official press credentials as a student journalist at that point for National Press Association, Student Press Association.
And I did some stories that were investigative stories.
I did a story on the National Military Bank, for example.
That is the bank that the South Vietnamese military set up to go into business.
They got a few dozen piastres or a couple of hundred piastres every month from every raw recruit in the Saigon army.
And they were using that to fund businesses so that those generals would have extra money, an extra source of money.
And it was quite a scandal.
And that was the one time that I got a story in the Washington Post, by the way.
I also did a story on how the US military was violating the Geneva Accords on treatment of prisoners.
They were not giving, they were not allowing Viet Cong, North Vietnamese prisoners sufficient time outdoors.
They were mistreating them in various other ways, as some of the people who were involved in the actual treatment of prisoners told me in interviews.
So I was doing some investigative journalism at that point.
And I realized later on that that was really what I was good at.
And so how long were you there?
I was there all of 1971, as well as two and a half months in 68.
Hang on just one second.
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It's anti-war radio celebrating 5,000 interviews now talking with the best of the best, the great Gareth Porter.
All right.
Now, Gareth, you quite famously wrote this book, Perils of Dominance, that you say, and others have said too, for example, Mike Swanson, a good friend of mine who has been working for many years now on a book about Vietnam and the decision-making processes and these kinds of things.
And he certainly agrees that you advanced a new hypothesis really for the true origins and purposes of the Vietnam War.
Different from what the other historians have found before then, or in some cases, at least since then.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure.
Yeah.
This was an extremely important piece of work for me to understand the true nature of not just the Vietnam War, but the Cold War in general.
And the reason is that what I discovered in doing the research for that book, which I had not really been prepared for, although I had some inkling that there was more to the story of the Cold War than was really available in the usual sources that you might read, the usual diplomatic histories that you might read.
What I learned was that there was no balance of power, quote unquote, between the United States and the communist world, particularly, of course, with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
In fact, at least from 1952-53 on until the late 60s, mid to late 60s, that crucial period of about 13-14 years when some of the worst Cold War crises took place, particularly Cuba, of course, there was an overwhelming US military dominance, particularly in the field of strategic weapons.
Of course, that meant the number of bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles that the United States had versus the Soviet Union.
And at that point, of course, the Chinese really didn't have anything to speak of that could figure into the global military balance.
And so what I discovered was that every stage of development of the Indochina-Vietnam conflict reflected the stages of development of this imbalance of power between the United States and the communist world.
And if you go back to, for example, the Geneva Accord of 1954, what you find is that the outcome of those negotiations is perfectly predictable because both the Russians, the Soviets, and the Chinese were quite afraid of the threat by the Eisenhower administration to intervene militarily in the war.
I mean, they had reason to believe that if the United States did intervene with its air power, that that would suddenly change the outcome and, of course, would expose both the Soviet Union and China to the risk of further war with the United States.
And so they just gave in.
I mean, they forced the Viet Minh, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, to make concessions to the French command, which would never have been made but for that factor in the background of those negotiations.
And at that point, I show in my book that Dulles, John Foster Dulles, was confident that he could push the Russians to agree to turn that temporary peace, that temporary division of the country, which was supposed to end with, of course, a free election to elect a national government for all of Vietnam two years later, into a permanent division of the country.
And that's exactly what happened because both the Russians and the Chinese were afraid of U.S. military power.
And so that set the stage really for the North Vietnamese to ultimately disrupt what had been an understanding between the United States and the communists, between the United States and their communist rivals, the major communist powers, that this situation would continue for years into the future.
And what the North Vietnamese did was to defy the understanding and to undermine it from below, of course, in a way that forced the issue.
And ultimately, the United States had to respond with an intervention that started small, of course, and then quickly became a major war.
So this is the perils of dominance is that America was so strong that even Russia and China combined could not prevent us from digging this deep of a pit for ourselves.
That's a very good point.
And I would just add that the real problem of being the hegemonic power, the dominant power, is that it makes you overconfident to the point where you are reckless.
Another way of putting it being too much power makes you stupid.
And that's exactly the story of Vietnam.
Well, and to skip ahead a few chapters, I mean, it couldn't be a more perfect way to phrase the mindset of the Americans who invaded Iraq in 2003.
That essentially, wow, are you talking bad about the U.S. Army?
You think that there's a thing that the U.S. Army can't do?
Let me tell you something, pal.
And of course, hey, pound for pound, army for army, ours is a pretty well-trained and equipped one and all of that stuff.
No one's doubting that.
But there are a lot of things that are not military questions at all, or that render things like, this is how many tanks I have and how many planes I have, moot points, because they'll fight anyway.
Here's the thing about that problem, Scott.
You know, in 1964-65, the Johnson administration, Lyndon Johnson did not want to go to war, but his Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, was ready to take a risk for war in Vietnam because he was so confident, in part because he was being told this by the CIA, that again, the United States could use its preeminence in strategic weapons to scare the Chinese and the Russians into pressuring North Vietnam to back down.
That was the whole idea that they had in 1964.
They didn't believe they would have to go to war.
So the Gulf of Tonkin was part of a strategy for pressuring North Vietnam in part by pressuring the Soviet Union and China.
And they really believed that that was going to work.
And I show in my book that at one point in March of 1965, they had a meeting with Eisenhower to talk about how he had used the threat of nuclear weapons to get the Chinese to back down on Korea.
And obviously, McNamara hoped that he could duplicate that in Vietnam.
And he was just dead wrong.
I mean, he didn't understand that the Vietnamese would not be cowed and that they simply did not take seriously the idea of the United States would use nuclear weapons.
Mm hmm.
And after all, they didn't have to invade the South with the NVA.
All they had to do was give safe haven and supply and aid and comfort to the South Vietnamese resistance was all.
Well, that's the way it started, obviously, in 1963, 64.
But then, you know, the Americans, by the time of the Gulf of Tonkin, the Americans were very concerned that, you know, the South Vietnamese Viet Cong were going to be able to win with support from from the North.
And there was, in fact, a good chance that that could happen.
But the Americans were not we're not going to allow that to happen.
They were going to begin to intervene with their own troops again in the hope that the North Vietnamese would get the signal that we're not going to allow them to win.
And then they would back down.
That was the whole idea.
Well, and you told me before that, contrary to the myth that LBJ lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, that McNamara lied to him and he bought it.
That's right.
I mean, that that's what I that's what I learned from sort of almost minute by minute tracking of the communications that day between McNamara and Lyndon Johnson.
And McNamara knew by early afternoon on August 4th, 1964, that there had not been an attack on the U.S. ship or ships in the Tonkin Gulf.
And he never told LBJ that.
And I confronted McNamara on the phone.
I had two conversations by phone with McNamara in which I told him what I had discovered.
And of course, he denied it.
But I must say that it was a very weak denial.
He said, well, I could have told him that night at the NSC meeting.
Unfortunately for McNamara, there were detailed notes about what happened at that, which showed the opposite.
He didn't do that at all.
He continued to take the line that they'd been attacked that day by by the North Vietnamese.
Well, so we're out of time for this interview for the KPFK show.
So sorry to the KPFK audience here.
But I'm Scott Horton.
You'll be able to listen to the rest of this interview along with five that well, four thousand nine hundred ninety nine more in the archives at Scott Horton dot org.
But I am Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm here on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. every Sunday morning at 830.
See you next week.
All right.
So now what about the Nixon years and well, or even the later Johnson years and the escalation of the war there?
I'm sorry.
I think I probably interrupted you.
And you were on the on the narrative there about just how much the North Vietnamese government called America's bluff in the South.
Right.
I mean, you know what was going on in the in the period of 1964 around the time the Gulf of Tonkin was that the Americans were trying to convince the North Vietnamese that they would launch a major attack on the North.
They were threatening them.
And of course, the idea that they were going to use the Gulf of Tonkin to carry out the first bombing attack was related to that larger strategy of essentially convincing North Vietnam that we would we were ready to devastate the North if they did not back down.
And so, again, it was this whole idea that the United States was going to use its predominance, its predominant military power globally, which resided in its air power.
But and behind that, behind the conventional air power, of course, was the threat of nuclear weapons.
Right.
And that was still on table in 65, as I said, when when McNamara had this meeting, called a meeting bringing in former President Eisenhower to talk about how they had used the threat of nuclear weapons conveyed secretly to the Chinese, which they believed worked in getting the Chinese to agree to a truce to end the Korean War, and how that could be replicated once again in the case of of North Vietnam.
And I think as soon as it became clear that the North Vietnamese were not going to buy that, McNamara knew that there was no way the United States could win.
You know, there's plenty of evidence that he never really believed that it was a winnable war.
But he was he had already tied up his his own personal political destiny with that war.
And so he was kind of in a fix.
And, of course, he never let on until 1967, as I recall, is when he finally told LBJ we can't win this war.
And he quit and LBJ was really quite upset with him, perhaps understandably, because he had waited that long to to own up to his, his pessimism.
Yeah.
All right.
So Vietnam is very interesting.
But back to the narrative about who you were and what you were doing during this time.
And Perils of Dominance was written later, right?
So tell us about, well, first of all, when was it written?
Perils of Dominance, I was writing from 2000 to 2004.
Okay, so yeah, the revisionist work.
But so take us back then to the late 60s, early 70s, Nixon comes in and the journalism that you're doing at the time there.
Well, I mean, I wasn't a journalist then I was I was a an activist because in 1974, I was I was a graduate student getting my PhD at Cornell University.
And at that point, you know, it was impossible for me to stay out of the political fight against the Vietnam War.
And so I was the president at Cornell University of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and was the organizer of this massive anti-war protest at Cornell University on, I think it was October 10th.
I'm not sure about the exact date, but October, mid October of 1969.
It was a memorable occasion when when I was perhaps most directly involved in organizing politically and more than any time in my life.
And so from then on, of course, I was really committed to doing whatever I could to try to contribute to the end of the war.
And what I did do, it was not journalism, but it was kind of investigative scholarship, if you will, was to investigate the Nixon White House's argument that the United States must stay in South Vietnam and continue to bomb the North until we are victorious.
Because if we don't, the North Vietnamese will win and they will slaughter hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese.
And they recalled, you know, the White House, the Nixon White House recalled the case that happened after the first Indochina war, claiming that there were hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who were killed by the Viet Minh.
And they, of course, conflated the problem of post-war reprisals with the land reform and were citing the most extreme version of a very distorted history about the land reform program in the North in terms of the number of people who died as a result of the land reform, because of trials of landowners in North Vietnam during the land reform.
So I did a study of the North Vietnamese land reform and found that there were wholly exaggerated accounts that the number of people who died was in the few thousands, not in the tens of thousands, much less hundreds of thousands.
And I wrote, I published that piece.
And in fact, there was a two, not a two page, but a one page article in the Washington Post by then Pentagon correspondent George Wilson on my study, which is the most publicity I've ever gotten for anything that I've ever published.
This was in 1972.
So I was on the warpath against the argument about the bloodbath, the supposed bloodbath that would happen after the war if the United States didn't stay the course.
And then so what happened in 74 and 75?
Well, there was no bloodbath, although there was one guy who was continuing to make the argument and he published a semi scholarly, I can't call it really scholarly, but it claimed to be scholarly study, supposedly based on interviews with Vietnamese who had fled Vietnam and come to the United States or other countries.
And what I showed in my refutation, my debunking of it was that it was a complete, it was nonsense if you know anything about statistics.
And I wrote this with the head of the statistical laboratory, computer laboratory at Cornell University at that time.
And we pointed out how he was simply violating every known rule of the use of statistics in his conclusions.
So there was a scholarly piece that we wrote for a scholarly publication that refuted the last effort to try to make the argument there was a bloodbath after the war.
All right.
And then we talked about before on the show earlier this year, in fact, and people can go and look at it.
And this is supposedly the biggest black mark on your record that anybody likes to point to is that you kind of made the mistake of assuming that the same sort of scenario was playing out in Cambodia and that, yeah, yeah, we heard about the imminent bloodbath all before kind of thing.
But it turned out in this case, they got about the most insane lunatic commie dictator anybody ever came up with in Pol Pot, who set right about killing a couple of million Cambodians during that thing.
And so if anybody's interested in that part of the story, I don't want to delve too much into that because we did a whole interview about it.
And and I want to move on.
But suffice to say, I think it's important that it's not that you were such an ideological communist that you love Pol Pot so much that you were covering up for him as much as the fact that the information hadn't come out yet and you were used to lies like this.
And so in this case, you were a little bit too skeptical.
That was it.
And people try to get that twisted, but that's because they tried to.
I was a combination of of the of the fact that I knew that there wasn't going to be a bloodbath after the war in Vietnam and the belief that the communist leadership in Cambodia was in fact under the ideological tutelage of the Vietnamese communists, which had always been the case.
But in fact, it turned out that Pol Pot's group had seized control of the Cambodian Communist Party in the 1960s.
And I certainly didn't know about it.
Some people, you know, did did realize that.
But it was not certainly not public knowledge at that point.
It came out, in fact, around 1978, 77, 78, that there was a Pol Pot group and that they had this this kind of political ideology, which was somewhere to the left of Mao Tse Tung, right?
Yes.
Yeah, completely crazy.
Year zero and all of this start humanity over perfectly my way.
It sounds great.
As long as I'm the dictator, as George W. Bush said, right?
Right.
But but just one more one more thing that I would point out, which is something that I have written about and I don't know of anybody else who has the the the history of the aftermath of of the Vietnam War, the the entire the cost of of the Vietnam War that the United States waged has never been fully understood by the American public because they never take into account the fact that the United States not only destabilized South Vietnam, it destabilized an entire region, just as it has done in the Middle East with the Iraq War and then all the Middle Eastern wars that have followed.
Well, and just like they claim they were trying to stop from happening.
It was the Americans who knocked down the Cambodian domino there and caused that to happen.
You know, without without the Vietnam War, Prince Sihanouk would probably never have been overthrown, not for the for the rest of his human existence.
And there would be the Khmer Rouge, who were a minor group that had no importance, no power whatsoever under a peaceful Sihanouk rule, would never have been able to seize power.
And and in Laos, there would have been a coalition government, moderate coalition government, undoubtedly after the war.
And so and in Thailand, you wouldn't have had a long sort of Maoist left far left wing insurgency that took place during and following the the Vietnam War.
And so again, I mean, this is a whole destabilization of an entire region that has never been fully taken into account in the argument about the Vietnam War.
And it really should be really part of the entire discussion, the debate about the role that the United States plays in the world.
Because this is the second time around for destabilizing an entire region.
Yeah, man, they sure do that a lot and put out all their own fires.
And you know, American firefighters actually do start fires just to put them out.
It's not even a metaphor of like it could happen, but they do that.
So the military is just like firefighters who start their own fires, which is a tradition in some parts of America anyway.
Alright, so now tell me about Gareth Porter in the Reagan years.
I was in kindergarten watching the Empire Strikes Back.
What was your thing?
Well, I did teach at the American University briefly, 1985 to 1989.
Before that, I taught at City College in New York for a year, was unemployed for a year and a half after that year.
So the 80s, the Reagan years, I was thinking that I was still going to try to teach.
But that came to a crashing end when I realized that I was never going to get a teaching job, I was never going to get a tenure track position.
And so at the end of the 1980s, 1989, 1990, I began to look for any job I could get.
And the first thing that came along was to be the international program director for a small environmental organization, an NGO.
And so for six years from 1990 to 1996, I was the director of international program for the Environmental and Energy Study Institute up on Capitol Hill.
And so I was working on global environment and sustainable development.
I went to the global summit meeting on sustainable development and global environment in Rio in 1993, 1992, excuse me, 1992.
So that was my life for six years.
And when I got fired from that job for insubordination, not insubordination, but for raising issues that the Lenin and Stalin of the organization did not want to be raised, it sounds like a very Stalinist group there.
Sorry.
This guy was for sure.
But when I was fired, I became a consultant doing the same kind of work for the next, oh, roughly decade, decade and a half.
So I was working for World Wildlife Fund and for a U.N. development program and for U.N. environment program.
Those are my major clients doing research and writing, publishing papers.
And, you know, I was doing pretty well.
I was making enough money to support a family.
And so it was only around 2010.
I started writing, of course, after the Iraq War began.
We haven't gotten into that, but it was the Iraq War that changed all that and made me stop and realize that I had to start writing about wars rather, the current wars rather than the past wars.
Well, so famously, I think we kind of mentioned here, January 2007 was the first time that I talked to you.
But Bush had been in power for a little while before that.
So what exactly was your start?
How did you get connected with Jim Loeb and the Interpret Service and all that stuff?
Right.
It's a good story, actually.
I mean, I was looking for ways to start writing about the war in Iraq.
I somehow, I've forgotten exactly how this happened, but I stumbled onto what I thought was a potential story here.
There was a guy who was quoted, I believe in the Los Angeles Times, I could be wrong about that, on a story having to do with the politics of Nineveh province.
And this was a key province involved in the politics of national politics in Iraq.
And there was a, there had been a a national election held already.
And I was covering the question of a vote on a national constitution.
And so I thought I would locate this guy who had been quoted, who had left the army, who was a political officer there.
And that maybe he might be able to tell me something about the politics of Nineveh province.
Well, he not only told me a lot about it, he revealed that the Kurds, who were a powerful force militarily in the province, fighting our counterinsurgency war for us, because we couldn't get enough Sunnis to fight, we had to use Shiites and Kurds.
And the Kurds were really the most important fighting force there in Nineveh province.
So the Kurds were taking advantage of that.
They were stuffing the ballot boxes in Nineveh province, and taking advantage of that to basically dominate the province politically to get their people in power.
And so I was able to get the story from this guy.
He gave me the story on the record, I could quote him by name.
And I had this wonderful investigative story, and I was trying to figure out where I could get it published.
So I called up Jim Loeb.
And he said, Well, I don't know where you could get published that would take your story, but we'll publish it.
You won't get much money, but we'll at least get it published for you.
So I said, Sure, go ahead.
And that was the beginning.
You know, the interpress service, Jim Loeb's press service that he was the Washington, the bureau chief for, began to publish my pieces.
And after that, I found more pieces that came up and pretty soon I was publishing three or four times a month.
Yeah.
And by the way, the great Jim Loeb, one of the very leading, if not the leading expert on the neoconservative movement over the last 40, 50 years here, something 45 years.
He was the man.
Yeah.
Still is.
In fact, people just want to Google neoconservatism in a nutshell.
It's Jim saying, Well, let me try to sum it up real simply.
And then, man, he just kills it for like 45 minutes.
It's just the best explanation anybody ever gave about who these guys are and what's their thing.
Anyway, I just love Jim Loeb like talking about.
And so yeah, so that was how I found you.
We had a deal with interpress service where we could republish whatever we wanted at antiwar.com.
So it's my job to decide what we like or not, at least for part of that time.
And so that's how I found you.
And also famously, that first interview, the thing that I liked about you so much was I was really worried.
I'd just written a piece called Could Bush Start Another War?
And it looked like, Hey, there's only one solution to oops, we put Iran's best friends in power in Baghdad, and that is regime change in Tehran.
So now it don't matter.
And a lot of people were worried about that.
CIA guys, State Department guys, military guys were saying, man, because Bush in announcing the surge was also announcing that everything that had gone wrong in Iraq war two was all Iran's fault.
And so a lot of people thought that there were going to be strikes.
And then the thing that I interviewed you about, that first piece was about how you had read some tea leaves and listened to Condoleezza Rice closely and realized that if they do attack, it's not going to be till at least the summer.
And so I like that because I'm a bit of an alarmist at heart, but I don't like being wrong.
So I'm always trying to split that difference there, you know, paying attention to the scariest stuff, sort of like you paying attention to the scariest stuff, but not necessarily, you know, panicking about it, but just making sure to get to the truth of it all.
And so that's exactly the tone that you took in that piece and that I liked so much.
And about your explanation on the show that day was, yes, this matters.
Yes, this is important.
No, don't freak out.
It's all right for now.
Right.
And of course, that changed soon after that because, you know, we had Dick Cheney already very clearly scheming to find a way to do precisely that, to carry out a retaliatory strike against Iran.
And his scheme was to use, of course, Iraq, the alleged Iranian role of using its proxies, its Shiite militia proxies in Iraq, to hit American troops and to play on that and to use it as a casus belli to begin a war with Iran.
And of course, he had people on his staff who were absolutely committed to that idea, who were very close to the Israelis, who worked closely with the Likud people in Israel, and who were determined to find a way to get it done.
And this was, we know, and I'm sure you probably remember, I did a story, I guess it was the year after, it was 2008, based on an interview with a State Department official who was not directly involved in those meetings, but who heard about the meetings that discussed the Dick Cheney proposal, and gave me an on-the-record interview, believe it or not, in which he told about the fact that the Pentagon sat on the Cheney proposal because they knew that it was going to mean a tit-for-tat set of responses by Iran and then the United States, and they were asking Cheney, okay, what's the response by Iran?
What's going to be our response?
How does this end?
And Cheney didn't have the answers, and so they were able to just squash it.
But he was very serious about trying to use this to start a war with Iran.
And this was already in the air in early 2007.
I mean, one of his guys famously was quoted as saying 2007 is the year of Iran.
And by that he meant this was the year we're going to go to war with Iran.
So it was definitely a big issue.
The fact that it didn't happen is not because they didn't try.
Right.
Well, and again, you covered all this the whole time, too.
So it was Steve Clemens who broke the story.
But it was just one aspect of it where Cheney apparently quite deliberately sent David Wormser, his Middle East advisor, to openly talk about, I think at the American Enterprise Institute, that we might just work with the Israelis.
I'm sorry?
Yeah, that sounds right.
That we might just work with the Israelis to use them to do an end run, as they put it, an end run around George Bush, get them to start the war with Iran and force Bush into a corner where he has no choice, maybe provoke the Iranians into hitting American targets so that Bush has no choice but to then go ahead and finish the job then.
And then, of course, as you covered, there was the whole thing about Admiral Fallon, the head of CENTCOM, sticking his neck out and saying, over my dead body, and really working hard to quash that.
And then later, as you had already been saying, and many other experts like the great Gordon Prather and others, that Iran wasn't making nuclear weapons anyway, and all that was a hoax.
That came out in November 2007, that that was the official position of the National Intelligence Council and all of them.
And so, yeah, like I was saying at the beginning here, too, going through the truth about Iraq War II and how that all worked out, and America's relationship with Muqtada al-Sadr and Iran and all of these things, the coverage of the war, the surge in Afghanistan under Barack Obama, and so much great stuff, again, about the nuclear program, the Iranian nuclear program, the war in Syria.
When somebody says, what do I read about the U.S. back in the jihadists in Syria?
Well, the answer is, you just add Gareth Porter to your search terms, of course.
And there it is intact, the single best one.
And there's a lot of great pieces done by a lot of great people about this.
But the single best definitive work on this is in the American Conservative Magazine, of course, by you.
And such is the case with so many other great things, or terrible things, but important truths that you cover and discover.
So, hell yeah.
So thank you, Gareth.
This has been a really great 5000th interview and 317th interview of you.
And I really appreciate it very much.
Well, I'm very, very grateful to you, Scott, for your interest in my work, your support for my work, and for helping to get it out to a lot of people who otherwise, I'm sure, would never encounter it.
Cool.
Well, I'm happy to do so.
And I'll be seeing you around antiwar.com.
I hope we'll continue this for years to come.
Yep.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate that.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Gareth the Great.
He's at Truthout, Truthdig, the American Conservative Magazine, and antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
