All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott, and now it's time once again to talk to Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, writes for IPSnews.net and antiwar.com, that's original.antiwar.com/porter.
I think if you just do antiwar.com/porter, it'll forward you right on.
And now I've been interviewing Gareth since January 2007, the introduction of the surge, the replacement of Rumsfeld by Gates, and the beginning of a massive new propaganda push against Iran, not based on their nuclear weapons, but at that time, based on their involvement in Iraq, supporting our enemies in Iraq responsible for everything wrong in Iraq.
And from the very first time I talked to Gareth, he set me straight about a number of things.
And that's why I've interviewed him more than any other guest on this show almost 100 times now, probably maybe more than that.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks, Scott.
Good morning to you.
Yes.
Thank you very much, sir.
Good morning.
Good to talk to you.
So this is the subject of the interview today is 2007.
And what really happened in this Iraq war.
It's a complicated article.
Today leaked report new Iraqi alignment, reveal us war failure.
And that's at the top of antiwar.com right now our top headline.
So go ahead, give us your thesis and then back it up.
And I'll get back to my follow up questions when I can.
Sure.
Well, this is a story I originally intended to write a response to Michael Gordon's piece in New York Times, his coverage of that aspect of the WikiLeaks documents on Iraq, which of course, he was interested in, which is the Iran, the Iranian role in Iraq.
Now, just a very quick reminder of for those who have not followed Michael Gordon in the past or forgotten about Michael Gordon, he more than anyone else, the New York Times was pushing the idea that Iran was behind all the violence by the Shia militias, that it's not just Shia militias, it's special groups, manipulated, organized and manipulated, armed, trained by Iran, who have broken away from the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr, and have become sort of independent, but Iranian manipulated actors in the Iraq war.
This was the idea that that he was pushing.
And of course, it coincided with the line taken by General Petraeus.
But Michael Gordon was particularly aggressive in pushing that.
And I have a little story about that, which if we have time, we can get back to it.
So I was interested in Michael Gordon's story about the WikiLeaks documents in which he basically suggests that these documents reinforce the line that he and General Petraeus had been putting forward in 2007-2008, that this was a proxy war that Iran was waging through these special groups of rogue Shia militias.
And that that was what Petraeus was up against, and that he had to use US military force to basically beat down these rogue militias.
Now, and of course, I have been trying to document the case that this was essentially a massive lie to justify US military force in Iraq during that period.
And then when I got deeply into this story, as I really looked at the documents closely, the WikiLeaks documents, what I found was that in fact, there was a bigger story here.
And that is that this particular key document that he leads with, that is Michael Gordon leads with, actually proves precisely the opposite.
It proves that in fact, the commander of the Karbala operation of January 2007, which Michael Gordon, you know, suggests in his article, was in fact, an Iranian job, using these special groups, he doesn't use the term, but that's clearly implication, was in fact, it was a Mahdi army operation, all the way from the beginning.
And this commander who Michael Gordon does not identify as a Mahdi army commander, is identified very clearly in the WikiLeaks document, the December 2006 document as a subordinate of a senior Mahdi army commander.
So I took that new piece of information, and fitted it together with other information that I have accumulated over the last two or three years, and showed in my new article that what actually happened in January 2007, in this operation in Karbala of January 20th, 2007, in which five American soldiers were kidnapped and ultimately killed, is that there was a tripartite alignment of cooperation going on here.
This is a reflection of a covert level of cooperation between the al-Maliki regime, the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Iranians.
And I say this, because the US military did their own independent investigation of what happened in Karbala.
And contrary to the official line that this was just an Iranian job manipulating special groups, they found that the two leading officials of the government in Karbala, that is the province chief and the chief of police, were both in on the job.
They were both well aware of what was happening, and were clearly cooperating with it.
Now, the province chief is a member of the Dawah party, which of course, is Nouri al-Maliki's party, and he was nominated by Nouri al-Maliki himself, clearly somebody who was taking orders from the center in terms of his treatment of the Mahdi army, and what to do about their operation.
So what we see here is revealed the real situation that existed in early 2007, where al-Maliki and the Mahdi army were still very, very closely cooperating to try to prevent the US military from suppressing the Mahdi army, which is what they had clearly telegraphed their intention as being in early 2007.
One of the major purposes of the surge was not to crush the Sunnis, because they already had the idea, I think, that they were going to try to come to some sort of that is the US military had had the idea to come to some sort of agreement with the Sunnis, but to crush the Mahdi army, to use force to try to weaken it as much as possible, and to see if they couldn't break it up.
And of course, the al-Maliki regime didn't want that to happen, because Sader was one of the most important, he was the most, single most important ally of al-Maliki in the government.
He had 30 members of the parliament, he had provided the votes to get al-Maliki elected prime minister in April 2006, in a meeting, by the way, that was presided over by General Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of Iran.
So there you have, in 2007, the perfect illustration of the real covert cooperation among Iran, the Mahdi army and Nouri al-Maliki.
And now, of course, we see in 2010, the same alignment reappearing with al-Maliki asking Iran to help get Sader to become part of his alignment, aiming at getting enough votes to elect to reelect Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister of Iraq.
Of course, al-Maliki was just visited Iran, gone to Qom, where he met with Sader.
And during that trip thanked the Iranian government for its help in restoring, I believe the word was brotherhood.
And of course, in helping to move him a step closer to getting reelected as Prime Minister.
So that's that's the story in a nutshell.
A big nutshell, I'm sorry, sorry to say.
Yeah, well, no, that's okay.
So there's a few things to go over there.
First of all, it sounds like really, you're in a way you're saying that Michael Gordon is not that far off.
If the deal was, we'll make a deal with the Sunnis, and our enemy is only the Saders.
And the Saders, the entire Mahdi army is working with the Iranians under Sader.
And it's not the special groups.
It sounds almost like you're quibbling.
And I guess music's playing.
So we'll have to get back to that on the other side of this break.
Hold it there, Gareth.
All right, everybody, Gareth Porter's on the line.
Anti-war radio.
The article is leaked report.
New Iraqi alignment reveal US war failure.
Now, just to focus on one part of this, Gareth, you say that, you know, in that whole thing, Michael Gordon's entire schtick, which, by the way, one of the thing about him, he co authored every lie that Judith Miller ever wrote in the New York Times to get us into this war with maybe one or two articles accepted.
He was a co author of almost all right.
He has a dual role there.
You're correct.
Yeah.
And he also was pushing as part of this, which I don't want to divert off into this.
But part of this story was the only way that an Arab could make a bomb with a copper core in it is if Iran was supplying them all, because I guess Persians are smarter or something, even though it was a proven fact 10 million times that those EFP new improved landmines, basically homemade landmines were being made at home.
They were homemade in Iraq.
And as as you and Phil Giraldi and so many others documented, they got the technology really by way of Hezbollah.
And it was Iraqis that were doing it.
Patrick Coburn was the first one to write about a factory that was making these kind of bombs.
So, you know, Michael Gordon has earned his disrespect.
But now it seems to me like your equivalent with him on this little point, which I never really understood the whole point here anyway.
David Petraeus says, yes, we're fighting parts of the Mahdi army, which are pro Iranian.
Well, America had driven Muqtada al-Sadr into Iran's arms.
He was much more of a nationalist, much more willing to work with the Sunnis and the Kurds before and opposed Iran and the Supreme Islamic Council's plan to create a southern Shia stand in alliance with Iran.
And I guess after years of being targeted and having his people killed, he finally went and moved to Iran, I guess, to get his higher religious rank as as part of that.
And so you're saying, yeah, and and the Mahdi army that Petraeus was trying to crack down on, which was such an important part of Muqtada al-Sadr, Nouri al-Maliki's coalition, keeping him prime minister, they wanted to crack down.
So they tried to say that the ones that they were fighting against were the special groups.
But so what?
I mean, they were just they didn't want to say we're taking on the whole Mahdi army because then they would have had to take on more of it, maybe.
And the thing would have escalated more.
And one other thing.
Wait, wait.
One other thing here, too.
I know you're smart enough to remember all this stuff.
One other thing, too, is that you wrote then and we talked then about how Maliki's surprise attack against Sadr at the end of the spring, I think maybe the beginning of summer, May, June or so of 2007, was actually an attempt to preempt what Dick Cheney's plan was and Petraeus' plan was, which was to have a major, real offensive against the Mahdi army that summer.
And that by starting that fight.
That's 2008.
OK, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, that's what happened in 2008.
And of course, it is it is an important part of this of this story.
That was the summer 2008, is that what you said?
Not 2007?
It was spring.
It was March.
It was March of 2008.
I'm sorry, I don't know why.
Why do I think that was in 2007 in the lead up to Sadr's declaring the ceasefire in August?
Well, yeah, the ceasefire in August was preliminary.
That was before that was before the next round.
All right.
I'm sorry for getting your screwed up there.
So so the point that you're raising about whether this is a quibble or not, the difference is this, you know, you're right.
But from the American point of view, it really didn't make any difference because Sadr was the enemy, the Mahdi army, the Jaisal Mahdi was the enemy.
And so, you know, from that point of view, it didn't matter.
But from the point of view of standing from outside and understanding the situation, of course, it makes all the difference whether the conflict here was one in which the Iranians were splitting off or taking split off groups and forming them into their own instrument for influence in Iraq, or whether, in fact, what was happening was that the, as you put it correctly, the main political military force that was helping to keep the Nouri al-Maliki government in power was, in fact, the the real problem for the United States, and that both al-Maliki and Sadr were at one level, at least cooperating with Iran to the extent that the Iranians were fostering were favoring that close relationship, continued close relationship between them, and of course, did not want the United States to be able to suppress the Mahdi army as part of its strategy for maintaining a long term presence.
And so it's the difference, if I could just try to summarize it in just a few words, is between the special groups line, which is that this is an intervention by Iran, to work with sort of criminal elements, if you will, or sort of independent element, versus an alignment of three independent Shia forces, that is, Iran, the Nouri al-Maliki government, Nouri al-Maliki himself, and the Sadrists, all of whom had the same interest with regard to making sure that the United States could not suppress the Sadrists, suppress the Mahdi army, even though they had other interests that may have been in conflict, and I'm sure there were many ways in which those three actors had interests that were divergent.
And of course, the alignment has gone out of focus, and then come back into focus, because of various events that have taken place.
But I think it's important to understand that, you know, it was the commonality of the Shia, of the three different Shia actors here, which brought about this situation in early 2007.
And then, as you correctly pointed out, again, in 2008, the alignment was very, very relevant, because Nouri al-Maliki was interested in preventing the United States from carrying out a major operation in Basra, and then again, in Sadr City in May, and called upon the Iranians to help to settle the fighting, to end the fighting in both places, in a way that would allow the Sadrists then to retreat militarily, but to still remain a major political factor.
And that's exactly what we see in 2010 to be the case.
Yeah, but okay, so how old is this old news?
I mean, it was 2004, when the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest ranking Shia religious figure in the world, said, hey, if you believe in God, go outside and demand one man, one vote.
And so what, 500,000 people or something in the south of Iraq said, one man, one vote, you got to start this war all over again, suckers.
And they said, oh, and that was the end of Paul Bremer's caucus system plan, and with a confessional government, they call it, right, like they have in Lebanon.
And now, Sistani and Sadr are simply giving up the spoils.
That's how it's been this whole time, that the Iraqi National Alliance took over the entire government in the election in 2005.
Got to love those purple fingers, precipitating this civil war.
And it's been years since the, you know, it's not the majority of the population of the Shia people, mostly in southern Iraq, it's the political leadership.
What do they have?
They have the Supreme Islamic Council, they have the Dawa Party, and they have the Mahdi Army.
Those are the only real powers, right?
There are some lesser Ayatollahs down there in Basra or whatever.
These are the men who were fighting to install in power and have been this whole time.
Well, the United States was not, they were interested, of course, with the United States, we mean the neocons, who brought us into the war.
They were not interested in the Shia more generally, but specifically interested in those Shia that they viewed as amenable to the new order that the United States was imposing in the Middle East.
And of course, they are now, you know, uh, because, because Amit Chalabi, their hero, is, in fact, part of this alignment of Amaleki, Sadrith, and Iran.
Oh, so not al-Hakim.
Al-Hakim is their second choice, because at least he wasn't a working class guy like Sader.
Exactly.
I mean, al-Hakim has dropped out of the picture.
Well, yeah, he's dead.
Well, I mean, his son.
Yeah, well, yeah, apparently his son doesn't have the power and influence his father had at all.
And now, Sader, I was talking with Pepe Escobar last week, was saying that Sader doesn't just dominate the Iraqi National Alliance now.
He dominates the Supreme Islamic Council now.
Well, I think that it is split.
There's no question about it.
The Badr folks, who are, you know, the armed wing of the al-Hakim faction, has, in fact, thrown in its lot with Sader and al-Maliki.
So this is a hidden instrument of power, which I think helps to ensure that we can be pretty sure that al-Maliki is going to become the next prime minister.
Well, why has it taken this long for Sader and Maliki?
Maliki had to go to Iran to meet with Sader, and now maybe they'll be able to keep their government?
Well, they're trying to deal with, they're trying to get the Kurds to come in and supply, and be part of the government, and supply the rest of the votes so that they have an overwhelming majority.
They would like to keep the Kurds in the government, and that's...
All right, hold it right there, Garrett.
I'm sorry.
We'll be back after the Fox News lies on the LRN network.
If you're listening to Chaos, the third hour is over at lrn.fm.
Otherwise, coming up next is Texas Music on Chaos.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Top headline on antiwar.com today is, Leaked Report.
New Iraqi alignment reveal U.S. war failure.
Indeed.
Gareth Porter, the author of this here news analysis piece, is on the line.
Still there, Gareth?
Yep, still here.
All right, good deal.
Now, where were we when the heartbreak Fox News propaganda lies?
Everyone agrees.
We just need more cops and more guns for those more cops.
At the top of the hour there, I would...
Go ahead.
Well, let's see now.
I'm trying to remember exactly what the question was before you were interrupted by the news.
Yeah, me too.
That's why I was putting it on you.
All right.
Well, anyway, what we're talking about is...
I got a question for you, don't worry.
This will be a change of subject.
We'll go back and hit ourselves in the head later.
In 2007, at the beginning of this Petraeus AEI, General McEaren and whatever the hell, surge plan that they did here, with Tom Ricks at the Washington Post, run a cover for the whole thing.
They decided, all right, we're going to go ahead and accept the Sunnis offer that they've been offering to us since the beginning of this war, which is, we're going to go ahead and accept the Sunnis offer that they've been offering to us since the beginning of this war, which is, we won't fight you if you'll just let us patrol our own neighborhoods.
And so they said, we'll stop fighting our enemies, as I think you put it on this show, Petraeus and Foreign Bush.
We're going to go ahead and surrender.
We're not going to win that fight against the bad guys that you've been saying all these years.
We're going to go ahead and cut a deal with them.
And now we're going to take on one part of the government we've been I don't think.
And I read David Finkel's book, The Good Soldiers, about a crew of American troops as part of that surge in East Baghdad, controlling Muqtada al-Sadr-held territory there.
And it seemed to me, from David Finkel's reporting anyway, that Lieutenant Colonel Kozlarich had no idea that he was fighting the very people that he was installing in power.
The irony was completely lost on the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the operation.
And really, that's the bottom line here, right?
Do I have this narrative straight here?
You have put your finger on precisely the key issue that needs to be discussed much more than it has been about that phase of the war, which is, once the surge was decided, and once it became clear that the Sunnis were ready to make a deal, you had in Iraq a U.S. military command which was in search of a rationale for a war.
And this is really a nice irony, because if you read the history of the Petraeus command, the takeover by Petraeus in his first month, he had one of his staff members write a memo.
I mean, the staff member wrote the memo on his own.
I don't think he was ordered to do it by Petraeus.
But one of his key strategists wrote a memo in which he recommended that they try to make a deal with Muqtada al-Sadr as well, with the same thought in mind, that there was really no need to carry on a full-scale war in Iraq, because it was perfectly feasible to reach an accommodation with Sadr and the Mahdi army.
And the deal would be that the United States would negotiate on a withdrawal timetable.
You know, they noted that this was, of course, what Sadr really wanted.
His aim was to get U.S. troops out of Iraq, and that a deal could be made if the United States was willing to put a withdrawal timetable on the table.
And we don't know exactly what was discussed in response to that proposal, but it's clear that at least some people in Petraeus' staff saw very clearly that it was not necessary, there was no need, there's no reason for the United States to carry on a war against the Jaish-al-Mahdi.
Nevertheless, that, of course, is exactly what happened.
And a part of this, undoubtedly, is the fact that the White House and Jack Keane, who was Petraeus' sponsor in the military, the guy who got him the job, and Jack Keane at that time, just to remind people, was in fact the de facto- Yeah, I said McKeon when I meant Keane, I apologize for that.
Who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was Jack Keane.
He was a retired military officer who, in fact, was running the show.
He was the guy who the Vice President and the Office of the Vice President were relying on to give them military advice on Iraq.
So he was the guy who was really calling the shots, and Jack Keane obviously wanted a war, as did the Office of the Vice President, and that's really good enough in that government of 2007 to make it happen.
And Petraeus is really, more than anything else, somebody who is willing to do whatever the political power in being wants him to do, as long as it's convenient, as long as it's consistent with the interests of his own personal reputation, his own political future, and the future of his particular bureaucracy, that is to say, the U.S. Army.
So in that case, those things were aligned, and he carried out what I think were pretty clear, strong pressures from them to carry out a war against Jaysh al-Mahdi, in the belief that this was going to be a way of fighting Iranian influence in Iraq.
Now, the fact that it bore little resemblance to the reality in terms of a way of fighting Iranian influence, of course, is beside the point.
That is, I'm sure, what Jack Keane and the Office of the Vice President believed at that point.
I mean, their grasp of the realities in Iraq obviously was, shall we say, shaky, at least.
Okay, but I mean, come on, it's not that hard to comprehend that during the time between the Iraqi invasion of Iran and the invasion by the United States in 2003, 20 years later, or well, 23 years later, that the Supreme Islamic Council guys fled to Iran, the Dawa Party, basically half of them went to Iran, half of them went to Europe, and the Saudis stayed there, you know, and weren't traitors to Iraq during that time.
You know, it's pretty easy to see that Hakeem and Chalabi and even Dawa Party leaders like Maliki and Jafari, that they had no influence other than they had the consent and assent of Muqtada al-Saudi this whole time.
As you just said, this is why there is a real deadline to get the hell out at the end of December 2011.
It's because that was Saudis' choice.
That was how Maliki stayed Prime Minister, became Prime Minister even two, three years ago.
Right.
I mean, but my point is this, that the people in Washington who had the power at that point, you know, their notion about international politics and US power was obviously so extremely simplistic that they simply equated the idea of, you know, crushing Jaish-e-Ahmadi with crushing Iranian influence, and therefore, you know, sort of being able to claim another great victory in Iraq.
So I mean, that's the kind of logic that prevailed at that point.
And for Petraeus, I mean, this was obviously okay, because it was in the interest of the US military, as well as Petraeus' own interest, to have a reason for continuing the war, rather than have it end.
And, you know, this was a perfectly fine rationale, which he embraced with great gusto.
And as a result, you have, you know, this whole special groups meme narrative, if you will, raised to a high art.
The manipulation of the US media, just, you know, very, very successful.
I mean, I can't think of a single individual in the corporate media that really resisted that.
That notion that that's what was really going on, and that Petraeus was doing a bang up job in, in fighting off this proxy war.
Yeah, and I guess we should just thank our lucky stars that they didn't get away with strikes inside Iran.
Was it George Bush himself that just said absolutely not to that?
Or it was the Joint Chiefs?
Or what?
It was, it was Gates, as well as the Joint Chiefs, who said no to that.
They, they understood that it would, it would lead very quickly to an escalation of violence throughout, which would affect the entire, the entire region.
Yes, and Fallon, of course, played a key role in that as well.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and it's worth pointing out, as we have verified in so many new WikiLeaks supplied documents, that the people we've been talking about this whole time that we installed in power, there are the torturers, the men who put drills through people's skulls.
That's right.
And that's another part of the story we didn't talk about.
But very, very important to understand that the U.S. policy was based on doing everything possible to support the Shia government, which meant, of course, averting your eyes when they torture and abuse prisoners.
Yeah, it's an amazing thing, the history of this war.
You know, you should maybe wait 10 years or something, and then write the full-on history of this war, Gary.
You know, beginning to end as much as you can.
This is just, it's an amazing thing for as horrible as it all is, too, you know?
10 years is too far in the future for me to even think about.
I have to be thinking about what I'm going to do this coming weekend and next week and next month.
I was just thinking, you know, from having a perspective to be able to look back on it, you know, after the, after the final withdrawal and the rise to power of Ayatollah Sadr, you know?
Right.
But, of course, in 10 years, there will be so much else that will have happened that's more important that, you know, it'll look different.
So, who knows?
Yeah, that's true.
But anyway, I'll tell you what, though, anybody who went back and decided to listen to 100 interviews of you on this show throughout this time, really from the beginning of the surge on, will get themselves an education.
And that goes for future historians.
There's an archive somewhere at, you know, the MP3s are at dissentradio.com/radio/something.
But one thing, the one thing that I want to underline that I think that I was shakiest on was the belief that the SOFA, the agreement that was reached in November of 2008, was something that could be expected, could be counted on to stick.
I'm no longer confident that that's the case.
Oh, well, now talk about opening a can of worms up.
I mean, what you're saying is that the war will start again, because Muqtada al-Sadr isn't backing down on that.
You're just saying the Pentagon is going to insist on staying.
I'm saying that I'm not at all confident the U.S. troops are going to get out.
That's right.
I think that there's a grave danger that we're going to get stuck there.
Which means fighting against the government we just spent all this time installing.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, maybe we're going to be fighting Kurds.
Maybe we're going to be fighting Turks.
You know, who knows?
Who knows who we'll be fighting?
But I do think I have very good reason to believe that this is a serious danger at this point, that the Obama administration is going to try to pull another, oh yeah, we're pulling all our combat troops out.
See?
These are not combat troops.
Nothing to see here.
Move on.
Yeah, well, Lord knows that was a lie.
But then again, we saw that come in this whole time.
It seems to me like, I mean, really, they're going to start this war because Sadr is going to insist we leave.
If there's bases anywhere, I guess they'd be up in Kurdistan.
Maybe we could start a new war with Turkey there on behalf of the PKK or something.
Well, I hesitate to say this to you and your loyal audience, but I'm no longer even sure that we can count on Sadr to continue to be the nationalist that he has been up to now.
You know, I hope that's the case, and I think that if he does, in fact, continue to take that position, it would provide the needed assurance against Obama being able to reverse course on this.
But I mean, that is one of the question marks that I have at this point, whether once there's a new government formed, and with Sadr as the kingmaker and in a new, very, very powerful position, as you rightly pointed out, I'm suggesting that there is some reason to believe that he may allow his allies to suggest that we have no choice but to ask Americans to stay on.
He would continue to say publicly, I disagree with this, but I'm going to go pray, because he's now, you know, he will be a religious leader, and he'll play that role.
Why would he compromise with the U.S. when he already won?
We fought a whole war for him, and now it's over.
They took Baghdad, and why would he need us?
I can see why Maliki would need us if he wanted an alternative to relying on Sadr, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
It would be a matter of the people in the government in Baghdad, convincing Sadr that without U.S. troops, their government would be in danger.
That would be the argument that would be made.
I can tell you that.
And again, I mean, I'm not saying that I know that this is the case.
I'm saying that there's enough here that is very worrisome to make me think, you know, we cannot be assured of it at this moment.
Yeah, well, as far as the American people are concerned, that war's been over for years since the surge worked.
Yeah, and that's why we have a sort of a new degree of deception of the American people on the part of the Obama administration with regard to the issue of troop presence.
You know, the fact that he has told the American people that U.S., I mean, he told them they would be, that the U.S. combat brigades would be removed.
Now he's no longer saying anything about that.
He's simply not addressing it.
But he's saying, yes, these are no longer combat troops, when of course we know that the reality is that they are combat troops.
They're fully constructed, organized and equipped for combat.
And indeed, they're expected to continue combat as though nothing had changed.
Well, yeah.
And they're reported in AP as saying, hey, I'm going out there risking my ass every day and I'm sick and tired of being told I'm not a combat troop when that's all I do is kill people.
Right.
And I can tell you, and your audience, that there is an option being discovered, being discussed, excuse me, that would do the same thing after 2011.
That is to say, you know, the personnel would be there, but they would be disguised, relabeled.
Yeah, there'll be mercenaries working for Hillary Clinton at the State Department.
She'll be commander in chief after all.
Exactly.
Exactly.
They would be put under, technically under the authority of the State Department and therefore they would no longer be troops.
All right.
Well, look, as long as I'm keeping you over, what about the Sunni radicals, especially after getting the shaft on always winning the plurality of the election last March, but now being frozen out from power?
That war is definitely not over.
No question about it.
Well, but one thing is, as Patrick Coburn has said that, you know, the civil war is really over because the civil war was a fight over territory.
It was who controls Baghdad and Baghdad is now 85% Shia city.
And I don't see how, you know, I can definitely see the people who bought into the awakening thing and collecting paychecks and being allowed to patrol their own neighborhoods for a little while and getting a ceasefire from the Americans and all that at the end of the civil war there.
I could see why they would be angry, but I can't see how they could imagine that now they're going to relaunch a war for Baghdad.
Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you why I think that the greater danger is a war involving Kurdistan or the Kurds and the Arabs than a greater danger than a war between the Shia and the Sunnis.
And that is because from what I understand, the Maliki government is seriously contemplating the likelihood that there will be a war with the Kurds within 18 months after a new government is formed.
And that's because Nuri al-Maliki knows that he has no intention of backing down or accommodating the Kurds with regard to Kirkuk.
That is going to be the flashpoint, and they all know it, and they are preparing for that eventuality.
And so what al-Maliki hopes to do is to sort of re-segment, re-divide the political conflict in Iraq from one between Shia and Sunni to one between Kurds and Arabs.
In other words, he's going to make an appeal to all Arabs, Sunni and Shia against the Kurds to make sure that the Kurds don't take control of our valuable resources in the north.
And that's why they are desperate to get American troops to stay on, to ensure against any possible loss of that territory, because they are preparing to take a very strong hardline position on the issue, which is, I mean, that's really not a new development.
I mean, there's nothing terribly shocking about this.
Well, there's been a referendum that's kind of been indefinitely postponed, where the people of Kirkuk are supposed to vote on whether they want to be part of Kurdistan or not.
Of course, the history back here in forced relocations and mass kidnappings and Saddam Hussein reversing a previous policy of adding Kurds to Kirkuk, then moved a bunch of Arabs there, and now those Arabs...
And what I'm telling you is that Nouriel Maliki is reverting to the Saddam Hussein policy on Kirkuk, essentially.
He has no intention of allowing...
Well, but what about Barzani and Talabani and the Kurdish parties and the Peshmergas?
I mean, are they interested in pushing this thing to a head right now?
Or can they continue to indefinitely postpone the thing?
Well, I think the assumption is that they probably won't accept the strong position that Maliki is going to take on Kirkuk.
So they're insisting absolutely on assurance that the census will take place, that the vote will take place, and it's not going to happen.
I mean, the Shia government is not going to agree to do that.
And that's why, you know, I think the question you ask now that you've reminded me, the question you asked just before the break was, why is it taking so long?
And the reason it's taking so long is the Kurdish problem.
Well, but so now whose side can we expect the U.S. to take in a war between Kurdistan and an alliance of Arabs in the southern part of the country?
Well, I mean, you know, we should not have any favorites at all in that, of course.
It's not our business.
Well, I didn't say should.
I said which one.
Well, I think, in fact, the calculus that may be discussed in the White House at this point is less which side we're going to take in that than, oh, you know, play the role of preventing any future war.
I mean, that's the way it's going to be justified.
That's the way it's going to be understood.
Plus, you know, the Iraqis are appealing to the Obama administration on the basis that, well, you know, we have to have friends here.
We have to have allies.
If the United States is not going to be our ally, we're going to go to the Iranians, the Turks, and the Russians, some combination of those people.
And if you want the Iranians, therefore, to have the whip hand here, then you should say no to our request.
But otherwise, you know, you should be responsive.
And from what I understand, there has been below the surface, covertly, a positive response to that argument.
Well, great.
And the result, of course, would be that the United States will be in a position in Iraq of stationing troops permanently, just as they have in Germany and Japan.
The Korean model, George Bush said about John McCain that, you know, 100 years, that might be a little much, at least 50.
That's right.
I mean, we're talking about a semi permanent US military presence in Iraq, which, you know, is the cockpit of conflict in a region, which is full of conflict, and which therefore almost ensures that the United States will be involved in more fighting in the future.
Yeah, we know in that movie, V for Vendetta takes place in the not too distant future.
And there's one scene where the basically Sky News in the background or whatever is reporting that the American war in Kurdistan rages on today, as they're bogged down in their perpetual Middle Eastern conflict.
Well, that's that's riots breaking out in Michigan, for some reason.
That's not a bad futuristic prediction.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much, Gareth.
As always, I appreciate your time on this show.
Thanks for having me as always, Scott.
Antiwar.com/Porter.
