For Pacifica Radio, September the 6th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com, and I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, introducing our guest again.
It's the great Gareth Porter, author of The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, From the CIA Coup to the Brink of War, and that's actually co-authored with John Kiriakou, the CIA insider.
Gareth is just the greatest reporter in the world.
He also wrote Manufactured Crisis, about Iran's nuclear program and of course, Perils of Dominance, the Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Great to have you here.
Listen, so Donald Trump has been in power for about three and a half years here, and the election is coming up in just a couple of months.
It seems like a pretty good time to go ahead and recap, well, I guess the thing that everyone has paid the least attention to, Donald Trump's foreign policy.
He inherited a hell of a one, and he's done a lot of things with it on his own, in almost every way, to make things worse.
And yet, domestic politics have sucked up virtually all the oxygen and attention.
And so I thought it'd be a really good time here to recap and take a little tour around the world and check up on the American empire and how it's doing under Commander-in-Chief Trump.
So where should we start?
Well, Afghanistan is probably the most positive news, so let's start there.
He hired Zalmay Khalilzad, a very important and powerful neoconservative, to really see through, not just posturing, but to really see through the negotiation of a withdrawal deal with the Taliban.
So can you describe that deal to us and tell us how you think the deal's holding up so far?
Well, the deal is, in simplest terms, a trade-off between the United States and Taliban, with the United States pledging to withdraw and the Taliban pledging that they would cut their ties with terrorists, meaning specifically al-Qaeda, obviously, and, of course, ISIS.
But that's not much of a problem since they've been fighting ISIS for years now.
So that's the basic deal.
There's a lot of misinformation being spread by the Trump administration, specifically by Mike Pompeo, suggesting that somehow or other the Taliban are committed legally under the agreement to stop their war or to have a ceasefire with or to negotiate a ceasefire with the Afghan government.
But in fact, there's nothing in that agreement that says that at all.
So it's essentially a withdrawal agreement.
But it does basically give the United States a bit of an out by allowing U.S. officials, if they choose to go that direction, to say that, well, the Taliban have not proven that they've cut their ties with al-Qaeda or with terrorism.
And I think that's one of the things that one has to watch out for in the future, whether it's Trump or a Democratic or Biden as president in the next year.
Well, and there have been reports and they're always extremely sketchy with never really any detail at all.
But they'll say five people were killed, three militants, two Taliban and an al-Qaeda fighter.
But they don't ever say.
We know he was al-Qaeda because he was an Egyptian and he had I love Ayman al-Zawahiri tattooed on his arm or something, anything.
They never say.
But we're just supposed to believe them.
Well, geez, I guess the military says he was al-Qaeda.
We're supposed to infer that he's an Arab and a friend of Osama's from back in the day or what?
Are they just lying?
Well, essentially, they're lying.
Yes.
I mean, the problem is that the reports that are coming in, particularly from the Afghan government, are simply fabricated or at least let's put it this way, they are tweaked so as to implicate al-Qaeda people in having relations with the Taliban.
This has happened over and over again over the last couple of years.
And they should simply be not believed.
They should be disbelieved because of the obvious vested interest that the Afghan government has in creating that narrative, that argument that they can then use publicly to continue to propagandize that the Taliban continue to have these close relations with al-Qaeda, which are simply not documented in any way that I have seen that has to be regarded as credible.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, if there were a thousand al-Qaeda guys there, that's not a good enough excuse to stay anyway.
And they've tried to invoke this safe haven myth all this time as though Afghanistan has some magic portal to Boston Logan Airport or something like that, when in fact Afghanistan is exile.
This is as far as anyone could ever get from anywhere without being headed back the other way again.
But the attack was waged by a bunch of Egyptian engineering students who'd been studying in Germany and had access to the United States that way.
And geez, I don't know, 15 hijackers magically got access from Saudi Arabia straight to the US, even though that's run by a very friendly monarchy to the United States.
And there's nothing magical about Afghanistan that really had anything to do with threatening the United States and staying there certainly doesn't have anything to do with protecting it.
And beyond that, Scott, I would just point out that everything that has been documented about the relationship between the Taliban and bin Laden indicates that it was very clearly laid out by Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, to bin Laden in the year before the 9-11 attack, that he was not to carry out any operations against a foreign country from Afghan territory.
Which is well documented.
It's simply been ignored by the US government for obvious reasons, because they need to have the excuse to continue a war against the Taliban.
And that's obviously the best excuse they have.
But the fact is that the Taliban were never complicit in any terrorist attack by bin Laden.
On the contrary, it's very well known that Mullah Omar was extremely angry at bin Laden and let him know that and that if it hadn't been for the pressure from the United States done in a very public way, he would have been glad to have turned over bin Laden to someone outside Afghanistan to have him tried by an Islamic court.
In fact, he did propose that.
Yeah.
They said so repeatedly.
So I think, yeah, people need to understand that that the Taliban were not merely not responsible for the 9-11 attack.
They were opposed to it.
And, you know, they told bin Laden in no uncertain terms, don't do that.
Well, they even tried to warn the United States about it and were turned away.
And the only reason they knew about it was because they had been warned by a spy.
They had an Uzbek spy inside the bin Ladenite group.
So in other words, they were not in the loop from bin Laden.
They found out from their own sources that something was going to happen and tried to warn us.
And there's a case about all that in my book on specifically on the case of September 11th and the willingness of Omar to negotiate over bin Laden over his extradition after the attack.
But the single best book on the overall relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban is called An Enemy We Created by Shouk and Van Linshoten, something very close to that.
Anyway, excellent book documenting that.
But now so, you know, the deal is we're supposed to leave by next May.
And as you say, al-Qaeda lies.
And the time between now and then is enough to screw that up under Trump or Biden.
So I guess we'll see.
Although at least we know that Trump wants out of Afghanistan.
Biden has said, no, I won't get out of Afghanistan.
I'll stay and keep a 20,000 man counterterrorism mission.
And I'll send the drones back to Pakistan as though it's still 2009.
He's just replaying 2009 and the whole Obama AfPak strategy all over again.
Well, here's the here's the point that I want to make about Trump and Afghanistan, which applies more generally to all of the wars that he inherited when he became president.
And that is that it seems pretty clear that Trump, despite his, you know, manifest lack of moral fiber in virtually every way and his inability to to think clearly about virtually every issue that he has to deal with, that he had an urge to get out of or to stop intervening militarily around the world.
I mean, there's plenty of evidence about that, which I've written about that and others have as well.
He just sees it as a waste of money, which, of course, it is right.
The whole thing is counterproductive in any any idiot could tell you that.
And he's one of them.
So, yeah.
And he knows that it's very unpopular in this country.
So, you know, even a fool and a moral imbecile as as much as he is, is capable of divining that it's something that's unpopular.
It's not really a wise political move.
OK, the problem is this, that Trump, like every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, has been the subject of a powerful set of pressures from the national security complex, the national security state, the national security bureaucracy, whatever you want to call it.
Essentially, the Pentagon, the military services, the chiefs of staff and the intelligence community, they have simply ganged up on him and refused to carry out any policy or to help him do anything that would end the war in Afghanistan.
On the contrary, they have essentially said we can't do that and in many ways blocked it.
Now, I just want to point out that I've done a great deal of research on both the Cold War era and the post-Cold War period in terms of the relationship between this national security complex and the president.
And in virtually every case since Eisenhower, and even under Eisenhower, there was pressure, there was a great deal of pressure from that complex.
And he had to make some compromises, but he held up better than any other president.
And since Eisenhower, every president has in some way or another been heavily influenced in regard to some issues, whether it's arms, strategic arms, or a military strategy or military involvement abroad, or the stationing of troops abroad.
They have been under great pressure to compromise or to give in to the complex on one or more of these issues.
And so it's simply not unusual to find that Trump could not stand up or did not stand up to this pressure.
Certainly, we know that Obama did it on Afghanistan.
And I've written about this a great deal, that, you know, he wanted to minimize the additional troops that were sent to Afghanistan under his administration.
But he went along ultimately with essentially what the military wanted, the commander, McChrystal wanted in Afghanistan, despite the fact that he knew it was a terrible idea and argued that privately in the Oval Office or in the meetings in the White House.
And so this is just an example of the pattern that I see over and over again, a very, very serious issue that has never really been addressed in the media, in the corporate media, or in academic literature about the history of the Cold War, the post-Cold War period.
Right.
And look, I mean, if Obama didn't have the moral courage to stand up to them when he knew what they were doing was wrong, then Donald Trump sure doesn't.
And he doesn't have the intellect either.
So if he wants to argue about the safe haven myth in Afghanistan and they say, yeah, but we're certain that America would be at risk, he doesn't have a rejoinder.
The issue dies.
The ball stays in their court.
And that's the way it stays.
I think you've made very you just made a very powerful point that that Obama, despite his moral shortcomings, did, in fact, have the mental capacity.
Oh, yeah.
He certainly knew what he was selling out.
He understood perfectly well what was going on, whereas Trump does not have that capacity.
Well, and this is the this is the war that gets the least attention, Gareth, but it's among the very worst of them.
I don't think it's, you know, any less worse than Iraq, war two or Yemen.
And that is the war in Somalia.
There's a great anecdote.
I mean, if you can believe a word in The Washington Post, there's an anecdote in there where he told James Mattis when he was the secretary of defense that why do we have troops in Somalia?
I don't want to be in Somalia.
Let's pull out of Somalia.
And Mattis says, no, we're there because we're preventing another Times Square attack, which, of course, the Times Square attack was provoked by the drone war in Pakistan, not prevented by it.
So but anyway, cause and effect, who knows what that means?
Military intelligence and all that.
But right.
So Trump says, but I don't want to.
And Mattis says, you have no choice.
And Trump then orders.
Oh, and we almost left this out of our Afghan coverage here, just like in Afghanistan.
He ordered an escalation, not just the status quo, but he devolved battlefield authority down to the colonel level or lieutenant colonel level in all the battlefields.
He basically loosened up the rules of warfare as loose as they can go and stay legal in the theaters of all the theaters and massively increased airstrikes in Afghanistan, tens of thousands of people in a war that we know he didn't believe in and tried to resist the escalation for half a year anyway.
And then same thing with Somalia.
They're killing people in Somalia in hundreds of people every year, killed in airstrikes in that war.
And they have just had a huge increase in the in the size of the drone strikes annually or monthly in in Somalia.
This is this is one of the major developments.
And not just special operations forces, but there's infantry fighting against Al-Shabaab there, too, on the ground.
Well, that's right, of course, and special operations forces is is not going to give up easily their foothold in Somalia and elsewhere in Africa, because that's the that's the field where they have the greatest scope for for continuing a long term presence.
Middle East, they're going to have to get out pretty much.
And Africa is the is the future for them.
So that's going to be a big part of the problem that we're going to face.to the Scott Horton show.
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All right.
Now I think we're going to end up having to neglect Libya and Mali and Niger and the special operations were there for the most part because we have two major theaters of war still to discuss and that is Iraq and Syria as one and Yemen as the other.
And so Iraq and Syria, that's probably the most important for the strategy and the regional civil war and all these things going on.
Whereas Yemen is the most important because it's absolutely the very worst thing happening in the world right now and is literally a deliberate war against the civilian population of the country.
A deliberate genocide.
They say it's the Saudi led coalition, but really America is the world empire and Saudi Arabia is our client state.
They came to Barack Obama for permission to start this war in the first place.
And he and Trump have given them all the support they need to wage it this whole time.
So no one should be fooled by that.
But let's talk about that.
Let's do Yemen next, because that one is most important for people to understand, really.
That's right.
And I think it's important to understand that Yemen is a case where Trump is, in fact, more culpable, more complicit than the other cases because of his cozying up to the Saudi dictatorship.
But he did this.
He cozied up to them because he had a deal that would involve tens of millions of dollars of arms sales to the Saudis over a period of years.
And Trump is a sucker for this idea that arms sales are such a wonderful thing because it's going to create jobs and profits for American companies.
And so he doesn't care about the Yemenis.
And that's the problem that we have on that one.
I mean, his will to end that war was minimal, nonexistent.
Yeah, I know.
And it's really just it'll go down in the book of amazing things that people uttered to where the quotes of him talking about, yeah, but the money, you know how much money we're making off the arms sales to them?
It's like a four hundred billion dollars, which is, of course, a ridiculous fantasy and which, if it was true, would be a drop in the bucket.
I mean, the national government spends that much killing people in a couple of weeks or less.
Right.
What are we talking about?
Yeah.
By the way, I said billions instead of billions.
I'm sorry.
I apologize.
Of course, it's a typo.
But yeah, I mean, he's living in a fantasy world where the American economy runs on four hundred billion completely imaginary dollars spent on arms by the Saudis.
You know, what would our economy do without Raytheon?
We'd all just starve, I guess, he thinks, even though all they do is make things that explode.
They don't grow food and distribute it to hungry people or provide goods and services that anyone needs at all.
But he is, of course, has a special fondness for Raytheon and all the rest of them because they make arms and arms make America great again.
Right.
I mean, that's the symbolism that he's he's interested in.
And in a true Trumpian fashion, you know, he has to take all sides of every issue.
So he has said in an interview that, look, we do have a very powerful military industrial complex in this town.
They love war and they never stop, you know, something like that.
It was a better quote than Ike Eisenhower's even.
And you know, at the same time that he's saying, oh, guys, hey, contribute to my campaign.
But meanwhile, we should stipulate to make sure that people understand that more than a year ago, the U.N. said and they're way behind the curve on this, I think almost certainly.
But more than a year ago, the U.N. said that a quarter million people had died in the war.
It was two hundred and thirty three thousand, they said, so almost a quarter of a million.
And that included, I think, a year before that, save the children had counted eighty five thousand children under the age of five years old who have died.
We're talking the worst cholera outbreaks in recorded history, at least since World War Two or something.
And that includes the cholera outbreaks that George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton deliberately inflicted on the people of Iraq during Iraq War one and a half in the 1990s.
And thousands of people have died of cholera.
They now have, of course, a covid outbreak and no clean water.
And I want to mention this Martha Mundy, M-U-N-D-Y, everybody Google her, Martha Mundy in Yemen.
She's an economist from the London School of Economics who documented how they bomb the, which we all know this anyway, but she's got it all in one big study for you, how they bomb the waterworks, the sewage, the electricity, the hospitals, and they bomb the farms.
They bomb the grain silos.
They bomb the flocks of sheep in the fields.
They bomb all the irrigation ditches for all of the crops.
It's a genocide.
It's absolutely clear in this case that the Saudis are doing this deliberately.
This is not an accident.
It's not that they're just poor at it, as some people in the U.S. government has tried to suggest in the past.
But it is the case that they absolutely know perfectly well what they're targeting and they believe that it's legitimate or at least it's what they want to do.
It's what they think they have to do.
And so this is a special case in this regard.
Now, you know, I think we should also just point out that it's not only Trump that has been complicit in this, you know, virtually genocidal war crime in Yemen, but the Obama administration as well.
They knew perfectly well what was going on.
They knew that that they were culpable.
They knew that they had to do something to absolutely prevent it by cutting off arms to the Saudis.
And they didn't do it.
They chose to use.
And the reason was.
Yeah.
For two years.
And the reason was because they believed that it was necessary to have the Saudis, OK, for what they were doing in the Middle East, which was doing the JCPOA.
Right.
The nuclear deal with Iran.
That was the worst.
It was this.
This is what the Obama team told The New York Times.
Everyone can search it up.
We had to placate the Saudis.
They knew that the war would be long, bloody and indecisive, indecisive.
That means we don't even know what victory would look like, but we're going to start it anyway.
They continue this, even though many I shouldn't say many.
There were some legal advisers to the State Department who pointed out that the U.S. government could be held legally liable for those crimes because of the assistance that they were giving to the Saudis to carry out this policy.
All right.
Now, so Trump is trying to make a big deal about pulling some troops out of Iraq.
But I don't know what it matters unless they're all out.
But there are still, of course, some troops on the other side of the line in southeast Syria as well.
I guess the mission in Iraq supposedly still is to embed with the Iraqi army to fight what's left of ISIS there in the west of the country.
Is that right?
Officially, that's the case.
Yes.
And I want to just point out the kind of very complex game that appears to be going on between Trump and Pompeo on this issue, where on the same day, if I'm not mistaken, Trump said, well, we're getting out, although he was very imprecise about when, how and so forth.
And Pompeo refused to comment on the question of getting the troops out of Iraq because he obviously, and he made statements suggesting that they're not coming out any time soon because they will withdraw as we finish our mission there, is the way he put it.
So clearly, that is the policy and Trump for whatever combination of lack of moral fiber and not having the ability to make the arguments against what Pompeo is saying and what the military is saying is going along with that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, here's the thing.
I mean, it's just certainly no excuse because there are enough, not a whole lot, but there are enough people who fit the bill as pro-Trump and anti-war.
Like he could have, he could fire Pompeo and make Rand Paul his secretary of state.
And he could have a policy where he says, oh no, really, I mean what I say.
And I got guys around me who are going to implement my orders.
There's the writers at the National Interest.
That's enough guys right there to run the national security departments.
Scott, I'm sure that he understands this point and that if he's reelected, he will replace the people like Pompeo and O'Brien who are really on a different wavelength on intervention and throughout the Middle East and replace them with people who are more in line with his thinking.
But he doesn't feel he has a choice because he has to keep on the Zionist, the Christian Zionist as secretary of state, because that's the ticket for getting money from Sheldon Adelson and other big money donors.
And turning out the Republican vote too, for sure, you know, and you know, I actually don't give him the benefit of the doubt that he would hire Rand Paul if he could or anything like that.
I think he just, he doesn't care enough.
He doesn't believe in the empire, but he doesn't oppose it enough to do anything about it, even if he did have four more years.
Maybe right.
You know, what I'm saying is what I've picked up from people who have been hearing from within the White House, within the White House, that that's that's what his thinking is.
But who knows what would actually happen?
No, I mean, that makes sense.
It's been clear all along that he doesn't believe in this stuff.
I mean, he sort of kind of supported the Iraq War, too, for like a week.
There's audio of him a week after the war saying, oh, this is going to be a disaster.
They shouldn't have done it.
So it's again, not that he's got moral fiber or whatever, just he kind of have to be at pool or in on it to be with this foreign policy after 20 years of failing to defeat 400 guys or whatever they're calling this war on terrorism now.
So.
But on Syria, just one point there.
He ends up after twice saying he's going to bring all U.S. troops home saying, oh, well, we're going to hold on to the oil there.
So we're going to keep troops there to guard the oil and make sure that these free booters who, you know, American citizens who gone to Syria and set up fit to to exploit the oil apparently in conjunction with U.S. governments and, you know, giving them the OK.
That is perhaps the worst excuse for keeping U.S. troops anywhere that I've ever heard in my life.
Yeah, it is.
It's completely crazy.
Although if you go back to Vietnam, there's that great clip of Dwight Eisenhower saying that, jeez, if we lose Vietnam to the Reds, then we'll have to pay the market price for Tungsten.
And so, yeah, but, you know, to give him his due, you know, he had no intention of intervening.
That's he said that when he really didn't intend to intervene.
Oh, well, that's in my book for the anybody who's interested in the origin of that quote.
He never intended to use it to justify getting into into Vietnam.
It was a way of trying to frighten the Chinese and the and the Russians and the North Vietnamese where they were the Vietnamese, I should say.
I see.
Well, see, I need to catch up on my Dwight Eisenhower anecdotes.
We're over time anyway.
So it's a shame that we weren't able to talk about Russia and China, because despite all of the hype about Donald Trump being Vladimir Putin's secret agent, he's actually been an absolutely horrible hawk on Russia, as bad as George W. Bush, at least maybe worse and heightened tensions to great degree there.
But maybe we'll do that interview next week and catch up on OK, on Donald Trump's foreign policies, because, you know, there's a lot to say about North Korea as well.
So thanks very much for your time, Gareth, and talk to you again next week.
All right, John, that is, of course, the great Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis and co-author with former CIA officer John Kiriakou of the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, From CIA Coup to the Brink of War.
And this has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM with Melody.
See you next week.
