For Pacifica Radio, July 14th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, this 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 I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
Introducing our guest, Gareth Porter.
He is an investigative historian and journalist.
He wrote Perils of Dominance about Vietnam and Manufactured Crisis about the Iran Nuclear Program.
He has a very important piece here at antiwar.com, Lies About Iran Killing U.S.
Troops in Iraq, or a Ploy to Justify War.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
I'm fine.
Thanks.
Glad to be back on Anti-War Radio as always.
Great.
Happy to have you here.
And such an important story and one that you've been covering and we've been covering together for a low a dozen years now, I think.
Ever since Bush announced the beginning of the surge in January 2007, there's this very powerful narrative there about the EFP bomb, and you've been debunking it all this time.
So first of all, let's start with what is an EFP, Gareth?
Yes.
An EFP is an explosively formed penetrator, meaning that it's a roadside bomb that was developed to essentially penetrate armored vehicles.
And it was actually first designed and used by Hezbollah against the Israelis.
And Hezbollah actually introduced it to the Palestinians who used it during the 1999-2000 intifada.
So there's a long history of this weapon, if you will, before it found its way into Iraq, or not a long history, but a fairly substantial history anyway.
And now, so people, I think, remember from the war, probably more than EFP, they are familiar with the phrase IED, an improvised explosive device, usually be an old landmine or an old mortar shell, then rigged to explode.
And out of the 4,500 guys that died in Iraq, there were whatever, you know, huge numbers of them, at least hundreds, if not thousands of those were killed by these IEDs.
But then this EFP is such a more powerful or more advanced device that it gets a whole different set of initials and a whole different designation.
Why exactly is that?
Well, it's because it was so successful against US armor in Iraq.
And it was, then it was also used, of course, in Afghanistan as well.
But in Iraq, it became the weapon of choice and really was, it became an obsession with the Pentagon, because of the success of some of the armed opposition in Iraq, both Sunni and Shia, but primarily Shia during the Iraq war.
Hmm.
And then so why are we talking about this now, a dozen years later, the EFP bomb, Gareth?
Well, the reason is because the war party, if you will, in the US government, which really is meaning Bolton and Pompeo and their minions, decided to raise this as an additional sort of salient, if you will, in their effort to stir up as much pro-war sentiment, meaning pro-war against Iran sentiment in the United States.
And so last April, just a few months ago, the State Department's Brian Hook, who of course is one of the people one of those minions of the Pompeo-Bolton axis, came out with a statement, essentially announcing that now they had information that Iran had been responsible for the killing of exactly 608 American troops during the Iraq war.
And they were pushing that to try to get the media, news media, to write stories about this.
They were not that successful, actually, but some media, in fact, did do stories.
And so I followed up with the Pentagon guy who had put out a message to apparently all mass media outlets.
He didn't send it to me, but I found out about it because of a story in something called Task and Purpose, a military website that actually quoted from his email.
And I contacted this guy, Sean Robertson, who was the one who put out the email.
And I said, well, what information can you give me that supports this claim?
What documentation do you have to support the claim?
And he admitted that there was no documentation.
There was nothing that they had to offer.
There was nothing that they could actually allow a journalist to see that would support this idea.
So I thought that was a fairly interesting angle.
And that's one of the reasons why I decided to do a story about this whole, this whole claim.
And of course, if he had attempted to provide evidence, you would have completely debunked and destroyed that, because as I know, you already know the truth about these bombs, the narrative here.
And, you know, this is a pretty slippery slope, sort of a syllogism, the way that they set this up, that these bombs, they never prove this, but they claim all came from Iran and therefore the Iranian government.
And therefore, then any American who was killed by those bombs then was killed by the Iranian government.
And the current president of hyperbole, Donald Trump, has now taken this number 600, which was apparently plucked out of thin air.
I mean, the last time I heard it was approximately 500 Americans who had died fighting the Shia in the war.
Even if you wanted to accept the, the construct there that anyone killed fighting a Shia was essentially killed by the Iranians.
But anyway, Donald Trump has now inflated that number to 2000.
And he's saying Iran killed 2000 American soldiers in Iraq war two, which is almost half of the Americans who died when in fact, no, about 4000 of those Americans died fighting the Sunni based insurgency in Western Iraq.
And Donald Trump knows what he's talking about, about as well as John McCain, it sounds like.
But I guess it makes a great talking point.
What once you've once you've created this kind of, you know, fiction, fictional number, and, you know, cannot support it, you know, why not just go all the rest of the way and say, you know, 2000?
I mean, that's, that's, you're exactly right.
I mean, this is based this is this is thin air.
And I think that it's, it's simply an indication of how desperate the war party is to, to stir up some support.
And of course, you know, the usual suspects, the people in the Senate who are openly calling for war against Iran, are the ones who are the only ones who are really coming out publicly supporting this.
And, and it is indicative, indeed, of a, of a, of an effort to, to lie the American people in the direction of war against Iran once again, now, why, why Trump decided to come out with that figure is a more interesting question, because he's not, he's obviously not interested in going to war against Iran.
And that is a huge mistake on his part, which people should call his attention to clearly.
Well, I mean, he always overestimates the length of the war by a year or two, or overestimates his own wealth by a billion or two, or whatever it is all the time.
That's, I think it's just not even Donald Trump.
But that's just kind of a New Yorker way of talking, right, or just exaggerate everything.
600 just doesn't sound big enough.
Make it bigger.
That's all.
Bolton may have said something to him that he picked up.
Who knows?
I can't figure it could be.
Yeah, I'm not going to try to figure that out.
But still, the American people need to know that it's not true.
And so we need to go through each part of this for a second here.
I want to go ahead and just mention that back in 2007, and in 2008, that you had done so much great work on this.
And if people will just search Gareth Porter, EFP, then they'll find all kinds of articles from In a Press Service, Truthout, Truthdig, Antiwar.com, and who knows where, where you debunk this stuff.
Phil Giraldi, the former CIA officer had also written a really long 3,000 word analysis or 5,000 word analysis of this.
Yeah, I saw that at the time.
And that's on my website at scotthorton.org as well.
And then I just want to mention, you know, I have these, I'll just go ahead and open them up here.
I have the LA Times.
And this is the great Andrew Coburn exploding the myth of Iranian bombs from February 16, 2007.
Then in Wired from February 26, 2007.
Iraq's super bombs, homemade?
Answer, yes.
And then here's a piece in the New York Times, chlorine gas attack by truck bomber kills up to 30 in Iraq.
But in there, they explain how they had found EFP factory inside Iraq, of course, where they were being made by Iraqis.
And here's one Wall Street Journal.
I think what you're one more one more February 27 2007, us find us find Stokes fears of Iraqis bomb making ability care.
So in other words, no, these were not all churned out in Tehran.
There was some good, there was some good reporting during 2007 on this question.
And it was crucial for me, obviously, to be able to do the story of the stories that I did.
And the problem was that, that the press was not really sort of continuing to cover the story.
There was no continuity in the press coverage.
And of course, a lot of coverage was simply repeating without critical analysis or even commentary.
You know, any effort to sort of check on the, the accuracy or the truthfulness of the military claim, right?
That's such a good way to put it.
And we see that over and over again, where very important parts of the story are reported, sometimes even on the front page of the Washington Post or the New York Times.
But then they don't make the cut to be included in the narrative.
And the overall narrative that we all know Iran is sending these bombs to kill the Americans in Iraq.
It's still true, no matter how many times it's contradicted by the facts, no matter how many times the Americans raid a warehouse and find Iraqi Shia making these bombs.
Yep.
Yep.
That's the key point here that I hope everyone will be able to pick up on and use for the future in following the media coverage.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, now, so let me ask you this Gareth Porter speaking narratives that don't make sense.
How come if America was fighting the entire Iraq War Two on behalf of the United Iraqi Alliance of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the Dawah Party and Muqtada al-Sadr and his army faction, then how come Muqtada al-Sadr was attacking the United States?
Right.
Well, I mean, in fact, the reason that that happened was primarily, of course, Sadr was always against the US occupation.
He made no bones about it from the very beginning.
He was, you know, in fact, the leader of a movement that did resist the initial stage of the US occupation of Iraq.
So that was the background of this 2003, 2012, it was 2004 when he was most actively resisting.
But in 2007, you know, he was fighting the Americans primarily overwhelmingly because General Petraeus, David Petraeus, who was the commander of all coalition forces in Iraq beginning in January 2007 or February 2007, had ordered an offensive against the Sadrist troops because he decided that they were the largest force that was still not in the US camp, was not ready to accept the US occupation.
And he wanted to whittle them down to size and force them to make a decision to side with the United States, to accept the occupation.
And his strategy was, in short, to try to divide the Mahdi army, the Sadrist military force, so that they would have to choose between being attacked by the United States or siding with the United States, accepting the occupation.
And so in the process, he attacked during the period from particularly about April, May, June of 2007.
He attacked many times.
He launched many offensive actions against the Sadrist troops.
And ultimately, the Sadrists then decided they were going to strike back.
And so that's what really this is all about.
There were a lot of casualties, particularly because the Sadrists resumed the counteroffensive, if you will, or took the counteroffensive against the US military.
And that's what really caused a lot of casualties during that period.
And those are undoubtedly the reason that they're making these claims about the Iranians being responsible for so many US deaths.
But the fact is that Sadr was independent of Iran, he was making his own decisions.
The Iranians weren't making the decisions to attack the United States.
It was the Sadrists for obvious reasons, because they were responding to a Petraeus offensive.
Now, there's a book by Washington Post reporter named David Finkel, called The Good Soldiers, which is about US troops fighting in Sadr City in 2007.
And this reporter is deeply embedded with their group.
And only twice in the entire book, once in some kind of random sort of ultimately meaningless mumblings by the commanding officer, Colonel Kozlarec, and once by the author himself, that there seems to be some kind of irony in the fact that we've fought the whole war for the Shia, and yet here we're off on this kind of diversion fighting against one faction of them, when it's clear the whole thing is essentially a fool's errand, and that this group is going to remain a major part of the Shiite alliance, and they're going to continue to have their say in a way that is much more meaningful than what America has to say in the questions of power there, and that the whole thing was a waste.
But anyway, get back out there, boys.
And so they just kept sending them out anyway.
They knew better anyway.
It was all in the name of counterinsurgency.
We're going to somehow pacify Sadr City and make them love us, starting in 2007, and we're going to do that by sending heavily armed army soldiers in there to kill them.
And the whole thing was absolutely crazy.
And Americans and Iraqis were blown to pieces in these fights, in the worst kind of violence.
This was one of the stupidest things in the war, absolutely.
And the larger context here is that this happened after the Shia had basically taken control over areas of Baghdad, which had been contested previously by the Sunnis, and had done so in a very violent way, obviously.
They had used some torture.
They had basically done ethnic cleansing of parts of Baghdad, but they had asserted control there.
And that was part of the basis for Petraeus sort of claiming that his policy had helped to basically end the violence in Baghdad, whereas in fact, it was in fact, the Shia who had done it.
But at that point, he needed to have an excuse for the United States to continue its occupation.
And this was part of that excuse, that he was going after the Shia militias in Baghdad, as well as elsewhere.
Which is so funny, because it wasn't just the US Army.
It was Petraeus himself, who was in charge of training up the Iraqi army, which he essentially created out of the Supreme Islamic Council's Bata Brigade.
He was one of the primary instruments in Donald Rumsfeld's El Salvador option, using the Shiite death squads, which included the Mahdi army too, to hunt down and kill the leaders of the Sunni insurgency and complete that sectarian cleansing campaign that you were just talking about.
Absolutely right.
And of course, that began much earlier, when he was put in charge of creating an Iraqi army, an Iraqi military force.
And he said, well, we're not in a position to do that right now.
We're just going to have to use what we've got.
And what they had was precisely the forces that you're talking about, the Shia militias that were loyal to Iran.
These were the ones that the Iranians had trained all along and had fed into Iraq.
So that was the basis of the initial counterinsurgency strategy that Petraeus was responsible for.
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I'm Scott Horton, it's anti-war radio and I'm talking with Gareth Porter, of course.
And now just to kind of wrap up this minor point before we fast forward back to the future here is that there's this army study that I guess was ordered by McMaster, who was partially responsible for some of this stuff too, in terms of abuse and war crimes perpetrated against Sunni Arabs under his authority, you know, captives under his authority in Tal Afar, as we've covered on the show in the past.
But anyway, this army study, the official army history, and it's no Pentagon Papers, real deep dive, but they essentially titled it, Gareth Porter was right all along.
All we did was fight a war for the Iranians.
And now we're really mad about that.
And I guess they don't focus too much on the fact that they also fought the war for Iran's enemies in Al-Qaeda too.
And that in the place of the secular Ba'athist tyranny of Saddam Hussein and his sons, that they now have a sectarian Shiite Iraqi pseudo state tied extremely closely to Iran in the East and South.
And they have still essentially stateless, no man's land, Jihadistan in the West, where, you know, Al-Qaeda in Iraq eventually ended up growing even into the Islamic State of Iraq, with a little help from Obama and John Brennan in Syria, of course.
Well, right.
Of course, you know, the way I would characterize this, this army study, from my reading of it, is that it's a cover up for Petraeus completely.
I mean, you know, obviously they have to do that.
It's a way of justifying the entire war and saying, yeah, it was a decent idea.
It was a good use of American military power.
That's what the army had to do.
I mean, they can't come out and say this was a total mistake, folks, and the army should be castigated for it.
Obviously, they're going to cover up.
That was the only purpose of this study.
Except at the end of the day, they admitted the essential truth.
I mean, of course, they ignore the Al-Qaeda part, but they admit that Iran is the greatest beneficiary of the war.
There's no way to deny it now.
They do admit that.
There's hardly any way they can avoid that because they want to justify the idea the United States must still oppose Iran.
You know, so they have some problems reconciling different parts of their narrative, obviously.
Right.
Well, and this is why on this show, we continually cover Iraq War II, because everyone knows that it was bad.
It was unprovoked.
George Bush was Tojo in this with his day of infamy, invading a country for no reason whatsoever, and in doing so led to this crisis.
But it's not just that all these people died for nothing, which they did, but they died, or well, certainly not for what they were told it was about.
But what they really died for was this massive strategic mistake from the point of view of the U.S. government, that they empowered the Shia and the Iranians so much that ever since about 2006 and seven, they've gone with the redirection policy as covered by Seymour Hersh.
Of course, Elliott Abrams was right at the core of this in the Bush years, that oops, we've done so much to empower the Shia that now we have to tilt back toward the Saudi king, and that means al-Qaeda, because they don't really have any other forces than al-Qaeda.
And so, when Barack Obama was supporting al-Qaeda forces in Syria against the Iranian-allied Ba'athist government there, the Assad government there, he was only continuing the policy that he had inherited from George W. Bush, that we are now tilting back toward the jihadists against Iran and their friends.
And since Bush had given Iran and their friends Baghdad, Obama thought, well, and he explained this in plain English to Jeffrey Goldberg, that yes, if we get rid of Assad, this will be a great way to take Iran down a peg.
We can't invade Iran and we can't take back Iraq War II, but maybe we can support a bunch of suicide bombers against Assad, and things will work out for us that way, which that led to the rise of the Islamic State.
I would put much more emphasis, of course, on the idea that the Obama administration felt that it had to tilt toward the Saudis and was supporting the Saudis, as well as the Qataris and the Turks, let's face it.
It was the trio of Sunni kingdoms or other Sunni governments that were together pushing for the United States to support the overthrow of the Assad government by forces that would inevitably involve some Al-Qaeda forces.
And that's exactly what the Obama administration did.
And it did so knowingly.
There's no question that it understood that it was sending arms that were falling into the hands of Al-Qaeda, as I documented in my long piece in The American Conservative on this.
But I think that it was much more a tilt toward our allies, the Saudis, than it was sort of deciding to use Al-Qaeda as the policy itself.
I mean, that's where I would put the emphasis, but I don't disagree with your fundamental statement.
I mean, I think that's what I said, right?
Tilt back toward the Saudi king, but he doesn't have an army.
He only has Al-Qaeda shock troops.
So that's who we back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in fact, it's even in the WikiLeaks, right?
That Dick Cheney went to the Saudi king and said, sorry, and got castigated.
You said you were going to put the next Baathist general in line, and instead you put the Iranians guys in line in power here.
So now what are you going to do about it, Cheney?
And Cheney said, I'm sorry, your Royal Highness, we'll tilt back toward your suicide bombers post haste.
And they started back in Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Jandala in Iran.
And that was in 2006.
So that was the policy that Obama was simply continuing when he committed his high treason in Syria.
Yeah.
Well, this is a counter narrative that does need to be discussed.
And I should be doing more on this than I have.
And you're the one who's done it.
Hey, it's the Seymour Hersh series is from 2007, you know, preparing the battlefield, the redirection.
And I forgot, there's another couple ones there about the way their ideas about taking on Iran.
And of course, it's Elliott Abrams at the core of the redirection too, which just makes it fun.
Right.
But what I've done is to handle this as a, you know, a fundamental problem that the United States government over a period of, you know, many years now has basically betrayed the fundamental interests of the American people in counter terrorism in favor of other interests that have caused them to say, well, really, counterterrorism is not our most important interest.
I mean, I think that's the that's the effect of what they've done.
And I have written about that more than once.
Right.
Absolutely.
It is the biggest bait and switch in the world.
And as far as the American people are concerned, it's them Muslims over there somewhere.
And, you know, Dick Cheney once said about Iraq, well, it's, you know, sort of the center of the geographical region where this stuff is kind of going on.
Yeah.
Vague enough to be true to an American, but clearly has nothing to do with protecting us from terrorism at all.
Simply exploiting Americans fear for their other agendas.
And speaking of which, we're almost out of time.
So real quick, let's get to the reason that we have to talk about this again, is John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, as you said, are trying, it seems, maybe making some very good headway in getting America into a war with Iran, even though the entire establishment pretty much is against this at the most right wing hawks and, you know, the Likud tied neocons.
But virtually nobody else supports this thing.
And yet they really seem to have set us up real well.
Well, they've done a good job of working with material that's not very favorable from the point of view of public opinion in the United States.
I agree.
And what strikes me, and I'm going to be writing about this, I have already written something that will be out this coming week, is, you know, that Trump basically said no to carrying out a war based on the premise that the Iranians are threatening us in the Middle East.
And so, you know, now the scene shifts back to the Iranian nuclear program.
And that's going to be, it seems to me, the primary set of challenges politically that we'll see in the coming weeks and months.
That is, we'll now be seeing a repeat of the whole drama of the Pompeo, Bolton or Bolton-Pompeo forces trying to emphasize how dangerous the Iranian nuclear program is, that they want to get, they want to go for a nuclear weapon.
And the New York Times seems to be all in for that.
So I think we're in for a big, a very bumpy ride in the coming weeks.
Hey, and bad news, too, if this is true, and maybe just Bolton put this leak out as a trial balloon, but they're talking about getting rid of the director of national intelligence and replacing him with Fred Flights.
I know that's a horrible, horrible headline.
And very, very scary, indeed.
Very scary, indeed.
Yeah, that's where we're going to have to watch from now on.
All right, you guys, that's the great Gareth Porter.
This one's at antiwar.com.
Lies about Iran killing U.S. troops in Iraq are a ploy to justify war.
And that one ran originally over at truthout.org.
Thanks again, Gareth.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott, as always.
All right, you guys.
And that is Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 interviews now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
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.
