08/01/07 – Robert Parry – The Scott Horton Show

Alright everybody, welcome back to Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and now back to Iraq here.
We have on the phone a great investigative reporter responsible for breaking much of the Iran-Contra scandal back when this very same group of criminals was running our government a generation ago.
He's the author of Secrets and Privilege and the new book, which is either coming out very soon or just came out.
It's coming out called Neck Deep, the Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.
It's Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
And now, tell me real quick, Neck Deep, which was it?
Just coming out?
Yeah, it's just coming out.
It's available now through the publisher's website, which is NeckDeepBook.com.
People can get it there.
And if they buy it through the publisher, some money is rebated back to keep our website consistent.
ConsortiumNews.com going.
Oh, that's great.
And certainly worth it to go that route then, because ConsortiumNews is an invaluable resource.
That means not valuable.
But so valuable that you couldn't possibly put a price on it is, of course, what I mean by that.
ConsortiumNews.com.
And if reading your books is anything like reading your articles, then put me on a list there.
I can't wait to read it.
I was just sharing and I already know that you're coming from pretty much the same angle as me on this, although with a lot more facts.
But I was just sharing with the audience here a couple of articles from Reuters and from the Agents France Press about Admiral Mullen's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the question of whether he will be confirmed to be the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
That would be a couple of years, two or three years before we could get down to half the number of troops we have now.
And apparently, just like the same story in 2003 and 2004 and 2005, well, we're just going to stand these guys up until everything, you know, we've got to work real hard until everything's okay.
And then we're going to leave.
It's going to be great.
But this is an indefinite timeframe, apparently, that just keeps getting pushed further and further back, Bob.
Yeah, I think it's open-ended.
I remember early on in this, back in maybe the summer of 2003, I was at a dinner party with a Senator, I guess I shouldn't really use his name yet, but he was on the Armed Services Committee and he had just come back from Iraq.
And I asked him, I said, well, how long do you think this is going to go, Senator?
And he sort of under his breath sort of said something like 30 years.
And I said, you said three years?
You think it's going to go three years?
He said, no, I said 30 years.
And he said, it'll take that long for this thing to work.
And so I think very early on, the people close to this program knew that this was going to be a very long undertaking.
And in fact, the neoconservatives who kind of came up with this idea of invading Iraq and really saw it as kind of a permanent occupation.
It leads to the level that they would have used the bases in Iraq to then apply force against Iran and Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and other enemies of Israel in the region.
So this is not a, in a sense, it's not a surprise.
The game has been how do you keep stringing the American people along?
How do you keep giving them what Louis Black on the Comedy Central might call, keep false hope alive?
And there's been this endless effort to keep false hope alive, which we've seen now renewed during this current period where some silver linings are constantly being pointed to, just like they were really in 2004 and 2005 and 2006, to sort of keep the American people and their political representatives on the hook.
Right now, forgive me for this, but it has to be done.
And, you know, it's obvious I'm only playing devil's advocate.
So for war party people who want to listen to this later, they will be able to credibly say that I don't at all believe what I'm about to say to you.
But it's all your fault, Robert Perry.
It's people like you who lost us the Vietnam War, which we could have won because, don't you know, they they switched from search and destroy to clear and hold mode counterinsurgency.
And the war in Vietnam was going to work out great, except a bunch of people like you and the damn liberals in the media and the damn liberals in the Congress sold out the American soldiers and sold out the people of South Vietnam and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
And now you're trying to do the same damn thing in Iraq, right when everything's going well and the surge is just working great, here you want to come and try to fool the American people into giving up just because you hate America so much you want us to lose.
Well, I think that there's, I've heard the argument, certainly.
That's pretty good, huh?
Well, you know, it plays well on talk radio, I've got to say.
But the more serious point is that actually in Vietnam, that was not what happened.
There's been this, one of the odd things, I've been in Washington since 1977.
And when I first came here, so I can't really be blamed for the loss in Vietnam, I hope.
But when I first came here, the thinking was, and it was pretty much across the board, was that the Vietnam War had been a terrible mistake.
That very early on, the Johnson administration recognized that they could not win the war militarily, that they just kept it going because they didn't want to suffer the political consequences.
And that what really turned the American people against the Vietnam War was the steady flow of body bags back to the United States and the sense, the accurate sense, that this was essentially an endless undertaking.
And that it was finally cut off because it was not going to be won, that it was going to just continue to cost both lives and treasure.
And one has to assume that if it had not been cut off eventually, and it was cut off first of all by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, but then also ultimately by President Ford, so when the US pulled out and had this peace accord, which was meant essentially for a decent interval between the American departure and the eventual collapse of the Saigon government.
But what ended up happening is that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a counter-effort by the conservatives, by the Republicans and the right wing generally, to sort of recast that narrative.
And I would say that the real fault of the progressives and Democrats at the time, and since then, was that they didn't really contest this revised narrative.
The revised narrative was, which is not historically accurate, was that the war was going great, we were going to win this thing, and the troops were stabbed in the back by the liberals.
Now that wasn't really true.
That wasn't true at all.
But it became the false narrative during the Reagan years and was used to justify an awful lot of changes in policy in terms of how things were done during that period, in terms of the growing power of the presidency and so forth, which we now are living with in spades under Bush.
But that change in narrative from what was historically accurate, which was known by the late 70s, to this idea that Vietnam was a noble undertaking that would have worked, was a key element in setting the stage for what has come since.
And so now we're faced with the same basic problem, because in the early 2000 period, the U.S. news media was so still intimidated by being called liberal and all the rest of it, that they didn't want to ask the tough questions that should have been asked in 2002.
They went along with the pro-war propaganda.
The New York Times was as much his fault as the Washington Times.
And that has led the country into this new debacle.
But again, the conservatives on the right, with their very powerful news media, are very effectively playing those same cards again.
That anyone who says this was a mistake, is helping the enemy, etc., etc., etc., like you laid out, it just isn't historically accurate.
The real truth here is that, and we know this from the documents that have been captured from al-Qaeda that have been going to Iraq, that it's the interest of al-Qaeda to maintain the war, to continue the war.
There was a letter that was written in December of 2005 from one of Osama bin Laden's top deputies, named Atiyah.
And he told Zarqawi, who was then running the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, that, quote, prolonging the war is in our interest, unquote.
And that was the idea.
The idea has always been for al-Qaeda to keep America bogged down in Iraq.
They were surprised, I think, with their good fortune that the United States got involved like it did.
But now they want to continue it.
They have the same interest, in a sense, as these folks on the right who are arguing for, essentially, an open-ended U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Well, now, let me follow you down that tangent for a minute there.
It's been said, I guess Greg Palast put it this way in his book, Our Madhouse, that ultimately what bin Laden wants and what America wants is the same thing, a Sunni caliphate dominated by Saudi Arabia that sets the OPEC quota and stretches from Iraq up into Tajikistan and what have you.
And Iran is the big stumbling block, right?
There's a giant Shiite Persia in the way.
Now, of course, America wants the al-Saud family to rule this thing, and bin Laden wants it to be him.
But ultimately, these guys really do have the same interests, other than the part about bin Laden and his people killing our people, although maybe that's in our government's interest, too.
Well, I agree with a lot of what Greg says.
I'm not sure it was that well thought through, though, when they went into this situation.
Oh, I don't think he was saying so either.
I don't think he was saying so either.
He was just saying, look at this situation.
Look at what both sides are pushing for here.
Well, the United States has been sort of caught in this mess because the thinking was they could overthrow Saddam Hussein and put in a compliant government and that the Iraqi people would accept our imperial rule.
So that was sort of the thinking.
And that Iraq could then be used as this forward stationing area to go after other enemies of Israel and the region.
And the neo-cons were pretty open about that.
It was sort of their thinking.
There was a joke about what you do after taking Baghdad.
Do you go to Damascus or Tehran?
And the joke was real men go to Tehran.
It was always assumed that this was just an opening phase in this plan to sort of transform the Middle East, to put in compliant governments that would do what the United States wanted.
The obvious problem with the case with Iraq was that you had the majority Shiites who were oppressed under Saddam and held in check by Saddam with his minority Sunni government.
And once you unleashed that, and once you broke that sort of situation, you were going to create a default situation in which the Shiites would have much greater power and dominance.
So it was almost obvious from the very beginning, as soon as we knew that the Iraqis were going to resist, and that was known within the first few days of the invasion starting, that once it became clear that there was going to be significant resistance, President Bush, in an interview with Tom Brokaw, described his surprise and his acknowledgement that the resistance from the Iraqis was much more than they'd expected.
And they were getting resistance even in Shiite areas, places like Umm Qassar, for instance, the report town.
It took days and days to bring that under control.
So even though the war was won, in a sense, the initial invasion was successful after three weeks, what they knew was that the United States would continue to face significant resistance.
And that's what developed into the insurgency and has continued to this day.
Well, and as you say, the Shiite majority came into power.
And I guess the story is that the neoconservatives believed this myth since the Shiite Iraqis fought against Iran and the Iran-Iraq war, and because Israel was supposedly greeted as liberators by the Shiite Arabs in Lebanon, initially in 1982, that the Iraqi Shia are different, and because they have a different ethnicity than the Iranians and so forth, and a different history, that they will not be pro-Iranian.
And then I guess it was the bitter pill that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said, hey, if anybody out there believes in God, I need you to go out in the street and demand a one-man, one-vote direct election.
And so now what we've done is we've imported the Iranian revolution into Iraq, and I guess this is really the big news this week, right, is the announcement of this new package of corporate welfare for American companies in the form of weapons shipments to all our Arab potentates out there on the fringes of the empire.
And to reinforce them against Iran, this is what Seymour Hersh called the redirection, right?
Okay, it's true that we've installed an Iranian-friendly Shiite government in Iraq, but now it's time to undo that mistake by tilting back towards the Egyptians and the Saudis and our traditional Sunni allies in the area.
Well, it's a bit like that old kid's ditty about the little old lady who swallowed the fly.
They keep engorging more and more different animals to sort of get the previous animal that they swallowed to get the fly.
And it sort of defies, I think, logic that the way one would keep the Iranians from developing a nuclear bomb is to arm their neighbors to the teeth.
One could assume that that is a tremendous incentive for Iran to actually push ahead and get a nuclear bomb to deter these neighbors who are armed to the teeth.
The idea of using an arms race in a region to somehow bring peace is at best extremely risky and most likely will contribute to a disaster.
It is this continuation of these miscalculations that were made in 2002 and early 2003.
Now more, what appear to be miscalculations, are being made on top of those miscalculations.
In the middle of this, of course, you have 150,000, 160,000 American troops sitting in the midst of this cauldron.
So I don't know how these things are supposed to bring real resolution to the situation, especially when the United States government still insists that it won't make any real meaningful concessions in terms of admitting maybe error and mistakes made in terms of U.S. dealings with some of these countries.
We still don't even know the history of much of the U.S. relationship to some of these countries.
All of it has been kept highly classified.
For instance, the relationships with Iran have never been fully explained coming out of the 1980s.
I worked on the Iran-Contra scandal for quite a bit.
Frankly, many of the secret dealings that occurred during that time have never been divulged to the American people and are often misrepresented by people in the government as to what actually happened.
Same with Iraq.
As we keep killing off the former Iraqi leadership, what we're also seeing is the elimination of witnesses who might have been able to help the American people understand what had happened in the 1980s.
We seem sort of caught up in this political paralysis in Washington, anyway, incapable of actually forcing a serious review, a serious examination, a serious set of alternatives.
Well, you bring up something there in terms of when you mentioned the secret dealings of the Republicans with Iran ever since the revolution, even before Ronald Reagan took power.
I know it's a story that you've written about before.
It goes to the argument that the Ayatollahs are crazy.
They're insane.
They're trying, you know, they're worse than John Hagee.
They're trying to force the 12th Imam to come back.
And, you know, all these things that make them not human beings who can be dealt with, but instead monsters who must be destroyed.
And yet how could that be true if these people are all good friends with Dick Cheney?
Well, actually, I did spend some time in Iran.
It was in the 1990s.
And what I encountered was, I'm not sure if this is encouraging or not, but what I encountered was these mullahs in power who were essentially corrupt men.
They weren't as much religious zealots as one might think.
They were interested in their bank accounts in Europe.
They were essentially like the most political hacks in most parts of the world.
And in that sense, I suppose, they could be dealt with.
And that was sort of how the US government and the Israeli government did deal with them.
Going back really to right after the Islamic revolution in 1979, very soon after that, the Israelis tried to rebuild their intelligence system and structure inside Iran, which had been very vibrant under the Shah, but was rebuilt quite aggressively by the Israelis in the early, in the 79-80 timeframe and then on into what became Iran-Contra.
Similarly, the relationships between the Republicans and the Iranians were put back on track even as Ayatollah Khomeini was holding 52 Americans hostage during the end of the Carter presidency.
So much of this is a bit revisionist history when people look and say, well, these are people that we can't deal with.
The fact is that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush dealt with them a lot, much of it done in secret.
And the secrecy was important for both sides there.
Again, this was almost symbiotic, much like the relationship between George W. Bush and bin Laden.
They both benefit from the same series of actions.
They play off each other.
And in the case of the Republicans in Iran back in the 1980 and early 1980s period, you had the need for secrecy on both parts.
The Republicans didn't want the American people to know they were secretly dealing with the Iranians.
That's why they kept it all under wraps as best they could.
And the Iranian leadership didn't want anyone to know they were dealing with the Israelis and the Americans because their people would be outraged at that.
So you had this mutual desire for secrecy, and it continued to this day.
I remember in broad daylight in the 1990s, Dick Cheney coming out as the CEO of Halliburton, a subsidiary of Keller Brown and Root, this oil services company, coming out in favor of free markets and ending the sanctions, lobbying Bill Clinton to back off those poor Iranians.
They ain't so bad.
We're trying to do some business here.
Well, it's true.
When Cheney was running Halliburton, he was very interested in increasing both businesses with all kinds of unsavory governments around the world.
He had no sense of morality, no sense of what was even good for American foreign policy.
It was what was good for Halliburton's bottom line.
Well, in this sense, I really wish that Bill Clinton had gone along with them then and gotten the Congress to go along because if we were trading with Iran, then it would be, I guess, more difficult, hopefully, for them to demonize them this way and set them up to be bombed next the way they have.
It was one of the biggest mistakes of the Clinton years, and one thing I still have a sort of personal feeling of, not betrayal, I guess, but a great disappointment.
When he came in in 1993, there was a real chance to get to the bottom of some of these secrets, the secrets relating to the earlier Iran-Iraq activities of the Reagan-Bush years.
Clinton, for his own narrow political reasons, chose not to go there, and he chose to help sweep that under the rug because he thought he could use that to get some trade-off for some Republican support on his domestic program, which turned out never to happen anyway.
So he was wrong both in terms of principle, that is, that it was important for the American people to know the truth, and he was wrong politically because it really didn't help him when it came to getting Republicans to work with him.
So it was just one of those many failures of the Clinton era that did not strengthen American democracy, but rather left it at the mercies of the same people who came back in 2001.
Now, back to the Vietnam analogy to Iraq again here.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the war is going to get quite a bit worse if the American troops are withdrawn by the end of the fall or something like that, that the Civil War will break out in a full-scale type situation, that sort of thing.
Is there a moral argument to be made when the war party makes it?
Is there any credibility to the argument that that would be your fault and my fault for pushing for the withdrawal, that we have to stay until the situation is a little bit better, at least that we can have some confidence that a lot more innocent people aren't going to die because of the withdrawal at the time that we leave?
Well, it's always hard to predict the future, but I think most people would agree that it's going to be a messy situation, whatever the case is.
According to some estimates, more than a half million Iraqis have already died because of the American invasion.
If that keeps up, George Bush will be moving up into Khmer Rouge territory when it comes to the number of dead he has on his hands.
Of course, we do things differently.
When we're dealing with someone we don't like, like the Khmer Rouge, we tend to take the highest estimates possible and attribute anything, disease, hunger, any kind of death is attributed to their regime, which was certainly a very unpleasant regime and very brutal.
But when it comes to George Bush, we do the opposite.
Unless it's something directly attributable to American action, we don't want to take responsibility for it.
But when you provoke an unnecessary war which causes not just the killing of people by bombs and guns, but also puts people without health care or without proper nutrition or medicines, you arguably can be blamed for that, which is what that John Tompkins study argued, that the excess number of deaths caused by this war, by the American invasion, was about half a million or more.
I think they said 600,000 or so.
So you have here a horrendous death toll that would not have happened had George Bush not have invaded under false pretenses.
So I don't know.
I guess if these same people want to say that anyone who dies after the United States withdraws should be blamed on people who were opposed to the war from the beginning, it seems like a rather disingenuous argument to me.
But clearly there will be violence.
But the issue really is, is there a realistic possibility that by extending the U.S. occupation indefinitely, which is what they're really talking about, years and years, that that will actually ameliorate the situation rather than extend it.
And there's no guarantee at the end there won't still be a civil war.
At some point, the United States will probably have to leave Iraq, much as it had to leave Vietnam.
I guess the issue becomes how big a wall you're going to build with the names of the dead.
Those people that want the Vietnam War to be continuing to this day would probably have a wall that would extend from Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol if they'd had their way.
But the same ultimately may be true if the war in Iraq just goes on endlessly.
At some point, wars are supposed to stop.
But there are always arguments to keep them going.
And they're often very tough decisions made by governments when they end wars.
It's why people should not go into wars easily or for cavalier reasons or without questions being asked, which is what we saw in 2002 and 2003.
Well, do you have an idea for the proper way to withdraw other than just everybody pack up your stuff and hightail it for Kuwait?
Is there a certain we ought to try to help this group or that group or whatever on the way out the door?
I think there's a danger if you keep arming the different sides.
What we've seen, even the supposed success in Anbar province, has been that some of the Sunnis are cooperating with the Americans more.
But what they're getting in exchange is they're getting equipment, they're getting guidance, they're getting the capability.
Their assumption is when the Americans leave, that will make it easier for them not to really fight al-Qaeda as much as to fight the Shiites.
So both sides are sort of arming up with the help of the Americans.
The argument could be made that the policies the U.S. has followed will make this bloodbath that occurs whenever the U.S. leaves even worse because there has been no real political reconciliation.
If you listen to the testimony from the military commanders, it's been fairly consistent.
There's no real evidence that there is or is likely to be much conciliation from the factions in Iraq, as long as they think the Americans will stay, certainly, and made possibly after the Americans leave.
These are things that should have been talked about and thought about really in 2002 and 2003.
I know it's difficult.
People want to know what to do next, and that's a reasonable question.
But the other point is that in the future, these kinds of war fevers should not be allowed to take hold on the American people in such a way that anyone who speaks up, as people did back in 2002 and 2003, that their voices are shouted down, they're ridiculed, they're denied access to make their case on television.
People like Phil Donahue were kicked off MSNBC because MSNBC wanted to strike a more, what they considered, patriotic position, that is, pro-war position.
So you had a lot of lessons that should be learned from the past, which should be applied to the future.
But as far as the president is concerned, there's no question that whatever happens, it's going to be very messy and very bloody.
Well, I want to get back to something that you brought up there toward the beginning of the interview, Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com, which was that our policy is indirectly helping, well, I'm not saying it is directly, but not on purpose, but we're helping al-Qaeda, the actual al-Qaeda, the Osama bin Laden's and Ayman al-Zawahiri's of the world, who are the kind of guys who would put guys on planes to crash into skyscrapers full of Americans.
This is all to their benefit.
This entire reaction to September 11th from October 01 on has been apparently playing right into their hands.
How much has this increased the danger to the American people?
Well, I think substantially.
Basically, al-Qaeda was trying to get an American reaction.
And if you go back and if you even read the 9-11 Commission Report, it describes how when bin Laden did the attack on the coal, U.S.S. coal, he was expecting the Clinton people to retaliate.
He actually went into various hiding places and so forth because he was expecting this response.
The trouble was the Clinton intelligence agencies could not discern precisely that it was an al-Qaeda operation for a while.
By the time they did, it was beginning of 2001, and so they basically said they presented the information to Bush because they didn't want to engage in something which might complicate the incoming presidency.
The Bush people more or less shelved it, and so bin Laden felt that they needed to do something else to provoke the Americans because he wanted this reaction, because he knew that with that reaction, when the Americans came in in a heavy-handed, clumsy way, he could use that to build his movement in a way he couldn't otherwise.
Because basically, al-Qaeda had been chased out of almost every country in the Islamic world.
I mean, that's why all these guys are exiles.
The Zawahiri is an Egyptian, Zarqawi was a Jordanian, bin Laden is a Saudi.
They were all hiding up in caves in Afghanistan.
They'd been kicked out of all their own countries.
They even were kicked out of the Sudan.
So here they were trying to figure a way to get back in the game.
Their approach was to attack the American homeland, hoping the Americans would respond in a clumsy and effective way.
They almost miscalculated, because initially the attack in Afghanistan did corner them and cost them a good deal.
But then Bush made the error at Tora Bora, not closing the back, not bringing enough troops to seal off the area.
Bin Laden escaped, along with some of his high command.
And then the United States turned its direction, for other reasons, to one of his chief enemies, Saddam Hussein, and went into Iraq, which was a hostile, secular government.
It hated al-Qaeda, it hated what al-Qaeda stood for.
It was trying to suppress the al-Qaeda factions that it could.
It saw itself as a secular movement, not as an Islamic movement.
So that opened the door again for al-Qaeda to rebuild itself, to start raising money again, to start recruiting a lot of angry young people from the Middle East, and to harden and train zealots who were going into Iraq to fight the Americans.
So it was a huge benefit for al-Qaeda.
It allowed them to essentially begin to recover, which we now know from the U.S. intelligence reports they've done.
And they even committed this to writing.
If you really read their letters carefully, the ones that have been intercepted, they're talking about the value, the danger.
One of the great dangers they saw was a quick American withdrawal from Iraq.
That was the guts of the Zawahiri letter that's been talked about a lot.
As I said, the Atiyah letter that says, prolonging the war is in our interest.
So this is not a secret.
This is known to U.S. intelligence.
Well, you know, Ayman al-Zawahiri, just in April, came out.
In fact, we may have talked about this at the time.
He came out and said, he was asked in an interview on video, what he thought of rumors that the Democrats who control the American Congress now are going to try to end the war.
And he said, well, that would be terrible.
We don't want the Americans to leave until they've been forced to lose 200,000 to 300,000 men.
And only then, after they've been bled to death, can we kick them all the way out of the region, which is our goal.
And so, I guess, basically, as long as we keep going with George Bush's mandate here, we're going to continue to not disappoint Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Right.
And if you remember, one of the key moments in Campaign 2004 was on that Friday before the election.
Right, the October speech.
When bin Laden released his first videotape in about a year, and it was an attack on George Bush, and the polls went from almost a dead heat with Kerry to show about a five or six point lead by Bush.
And, of course, he hung on for an official victory of about two and a half percent.
And even people like Bob Shrum, who was one of Kerry's top advisors, felt that that was crucial.
And not just did Trump think it was crucial to help Bush get the second term, but the CIA internally concluded that that was exactly bin Laden's intent.
That bin Laden did this with the intent of pushing Bush over the top, because he wanted Bush to get another four years, so bin Laden could benefit from Bush's very unpopular policies in the Middle East, and use the hatred of Bush and the Americans to continue to help rebuild al-Qaeda.
So, what we're actually doing is we are playing into the hands of al-Qaeda.
And that's been a consistent problem since Bush decided to turn his direction toward Iraq.
You know, this really should be terrorism 101 for the American people.
That, hey, look at what we're dealing with.
People who have to use our planes to attack us with.
People who are a stateless terrorist group with, you know, millions of dollars, not even billions.
And the action is in the reaction.
They attack us to get us to react in the way that they want.
That's what it's all about.
As you said, they didn't knock down those towers thinking that the American people would turn tail and run away and never intervene again.
They did that because they thought we'll never stop intervening until they can slap us in the face hard enough to lure us to bring our army to their Middle East, to Arab territory, to fight, so that then they can bleed us dry and, as Zawahiri said, kick us out after we've lost a few hundred thousand guys.
Right.
Well, that's their goal anyway.
And now, it should be said too, well, tell me if I'm wrong or right, that this really isn't on the scale of, you know, recreating the Mujahideen holy warrior campaign of the 1980s in Afghanistan because at that time you had the United States and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, you know, the American empire and its client states financing the Mujahideen to the tune of billions and billions and setting up, you know, pipelines of men to send Arabs from all over to go fight in Afghanistan and that kind of thing.
And that really hasn't, that part of it has really not been recreated, right?
The foreign fighters who've come to Iraq to fight are still just the very smallest percentage of the Sunni-based insurgency.
Well, I think, you know, obviously we do go back in the history to the mistakes made in the 80s as well to help build up this extremist element and it was one of Bill Casey, the CIA director Bill Casey's visions that one of the ways to go after the Soviet Union was through the soft underbelly of its Islamic population.
And so, yes, the United States was allied with bin Laden during the 1980s and one of the consequences was to help infuse this movement with enormous amounts of talent and weaponry and eventually popular support among some of the extremist Islamic.
So, it's been a botched operation from the beginning in many ways, but it just continues.
Everybody, Robert Perry, consortiumnews.com, new book coming out, Neck Deep, the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush.
Thanks.
Thank you.