All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist at IPS News Service.
That's IPSNews.net.
And we rerun every single bit of it at Original.
AntiWar.com/Porter.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How's things?
Things are fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me back again.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And especially at this time, right now, you know, just the other day, President Obama gave his, this is the end of the Iraq war, just like I promised speech and said it was nothing but the greatest of accomplishment.
I don't even know if he bothered saying the Iraqi people are way better off now than they were before, that kind of thing.
But he still just, I guess, without describing an argument in any way, just asserted that this was the greatest thing ever.
And now mission accomplished.
We did it.
So now we can leave because of how great we are.
Well, I'm sure you've talked about this with more than one guest already.
So I'm going to be simply repeating points that I'm sure have already been made.
Well, you know, I interviewed Aaron Glantz and we sort of did a kind of history from 2003 on, sort of a thing.
But your story that you tell in your most recent article is much more specific.
Well, yeah, I want to get onto that very quickly.
But just to comment on Obama's speech, I mean, the point that he made, of course, was that it was all worth it because we've given Iraq a democratic system.
And, you know, that's all well and good.
But, you know, democracy is only as good as the social, political underpinnings of it, the cultural, social and political underpinnings.
And the underpinnings in Iraq, unfortunately, are very weak for a variety of reasons, but not the least of which is that the United States' war unleashed, exacerbated already existing tensions between Sunnis and Shiites and between Arabs and Kurds, which are now, of course, very much at the surface of Iraqi politics.
And it is not at all clear that you have the formula here for a functioning democratic system.
Well, the headlines right now, Gareth, are that Maliki has arrested the vice president, who is from one of the Sunni factions, the same guy that complained that Maliki was making himself the dictator in America and Iran would be sorry last week.
And he has refused to fill the positions of head of the secret police and head of the military, making sure that those organizations are still directly answerable to him.
And sure doesn't look like democracy to me.
Although I don't know anyone who even read the Iraqi constitution thought it looked like democracy.
Yeah, I mean, this is really very much an authoritarian system, an authoritarian system which is presiding over an extremely divided society and political system.
So, you know, you have the formula here for continued violence and not for the kind of compromise that is necessary in a democratic system.
So, in effect, I think what the president was doing was trying to reassure Americans that everything's OK, when in fact, you know, the reality is that the United States has just ended a chapter in its history that is shameful and which, you know, the other side of the picture, perhaps even more relevant to most Americans, is that it really contributed to the continued weakening of the basis of the health of American society and economy.
So, I mean, it's very, very interesting that this political figure, Barack Obama, who entered into presidential politics, opposing the Iraq war, now has become the apologist for it, apologist-in-chief, if you will.
And, of course, I think this is really yet another sign of the way in which the national security state has such complete control over the White House as well as Congress, and that this political system no longer has the ability, and has not for a long time, but I think it's more true today than ever before, no longer has the capability to reflect anything like popular interest in U.S. policy in the world.
So, I mean, that's kind of my reading of the president.
Well, you know, I was happy to see, Gareth, that at least a few writers have been mentioning that, man, it's just not fair that the American people don't care at all about Iraq now.
Like, this thing happened in 1952 as the Forgotten War, like against North Korea back then, and just forget it, and screw the million dead people, the five million people who were driven out of their homes, the complete decimation of the Druze and Yazidis and Chaldean and Assyrian Christian communities, and all the people dying in refugee camps in Syria right now.
Like, Americans don't care at all.
This might as well happen to an anthill over there somewhere.
I think you're right, that the United States of America does not have the capacity as a society to really care about the human beings who are the victims of U.S. wars, and therefore, you know, no lesson is going to be learned by the population at large from the utter failure and, you know, basically the humiliation of the United States in Iraq, which I know is the subject of the article you were just referring to.
All right.
Now, one of the things I cover with Aaron Glantz was that, really, the deal was done as soon as they toppled the Sunni Baathist dictatorship over there.
You know, my friend, the Beer Princess on Chaos Radio back in 2002 said, you know, if you want to run an empire, the way you do it is like you prop up the Tutsi minority over the Hutus, that kind of thing, because then they need you.
But what are we going to do?
We're going to overthrow the Baathists and call it democracy.
If we empower the Shiite majority, then they're not going to need us for the long term, and I don't think they're going to get all those bases they want.
And this is in the fall of 2002.
We're sitting in the chaos garage, man.
She had it nailed.
She certainly did, yes.
And, of course, you know, if you understood the mind of the neocon elite who engineered this war, you know that their calculation was, oh, well, the Shia clerics in Iraq are at odds with the Shia clerics in Iran, and therefore we can use them for our own purposes.
It was the usual sort of grandiose notion of sort of nutjob militarists who believe that they control everything and aren't worried about the reality on the ground.
So obviously, things turned out exactly the opposite of what they planned in terms of Shia majority in Iraq.
And just quick thumbnail here, because we're headed up toward the break, and I want to give you a chance to really explain the step-by-step of the last few years of the war here.
It's how Maliki and Iran outsmarted the U.S. on troop withdrawal.
But, you know, a couple of important landmarks in this thing was the demand by Ali al-Sistani, the highest-ranking Shiite religious cleric in the world, that if you believe in God, I want you to insist on one man, one vote.
And then so Bremer's caucus system was thrown out, and they had to let what became the Iraqi National Alliance, the Supreme Islamic Council, the Dawah Party, and the Saudis write the constitution.
And then, of course, they won the thing in, what, January of 2005, and thus started the civil war and the sectarian cleansing, as they like to call it, of Baghdad, which is now an 85% Shiite city.
And then, I guess, the surge worked, right?
Because America helped them win that civil war.
And once it finally came to an end, and the Sunni insurgency, Sunni-based insurgency, you know, cried uncle, because they obviously weren't going to be able to keep Baghdad.
They're going to try to stay alive in the Sunni triangle, what they had left, right?
Well, of course, you have to understand that the U.S. government, as usual, alongside relatively realistic people, and I say relatively realistic, by that I mean people who had some inkling that, hey, wait a minute, there's something wrong here.
You still had the mentality of the neocon elite represented throughout the Defense Department and even the State Department.
And somebody like Megan O'Sullivan, who had become the sort of case officer for maintaining U.S. support for the Shia government in Iraq, was certain that things would turn out well and that, you know, we could back the winners, as they put it in those days, in 2005, 2006.
And that's right when Zalmay Khalilzad wanted to switch sides back to the Sunnis, but it was too late.
I guess she won that fight.
And there was a big fight and he lost.
All right.
Now, hold it right there, everybody.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're talking with the great Gareth Porter.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
He's got one coming soon debunking this ridiculous garbage about some federal judge bought some lie that Iran was really behind 9-11 all along.
Yeah, right.
Like Cheney wouldn't have dropped hydrogen bombs on them back then, if that was true.
Anyway, I think that could be your whole article.
Yeah, right.
Dude, what am I, an idiot?
Anyway, I think there'll be a lot of interesting details in that one.
Oh, yeah, good.
Yeah, I like details too.
Well, that's what I want to hear is details on how Maliki and Iran outsmarted the US on troop withdrawal.
Everything did not go according to the neocons plan over there after all.
Yeah, I enjoyed writing this one, because in a way, it kind of is like a three act play.
You begin in the first act with the sort of preliminary skirmish where Nouriel Maliki, having just become the new Prime Minister in May 2006, tries to put into a national reconciliation plan between Sunnis and Shia, primarily, a plank that would call for the negotiation of a timetable for withdrawal of US troops, in the firm belief and quite accurate belief that that would really help a reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites, because the Sunnis were the ones who were getting, taking the brunt, of course, of US troop presence.
And the Shia, although trying to milk the Americans for whatever they could, also wanted to make sure that the Americans actually left.
So it was a very interesting idea.
But let me just wedge in here real quick that, of course, this is all just shorthand for the political leaders of these factions.
You're not talking about all Shia and all Sunni people in Iraq, just so that's clear.
Well, that's right.
But of course, I think it reflected, you know, in this case, in the case of talking about US troop presence, it did reflect a very broad consensus, certainly among Sunnis.
And I think among, you know, most Shia as well, that, you know, a timetable for troop withdrawal would have been worth discussing and having on the table.
Oh, yeah, sure.
I didn't mean to play that down.
Yeah.
So anyway, the point here is that Bush put the kibosh on it very quickly, made it clear that he wouldn't allow that to be discussed.
And guess what?
It disappeared from the final draft of the reconciliation plan that actually circulated to political players, the various parties and so forth in Iraq in late June of 2006.
So it sort of disappeared from the screen.
But of course, we know that Nouri al-Maliki had not given up the idea.
He was simply waiting for the right moment to reintroduce it.
And the right moment came in mid 2007.
And here's, you know, the second act of the drama, when George Bush and his cronies, Dick Cheney and others in the administration began seriously thinking about the post war situation and how they could play this into having the kind of permanent military presence in Iraq that they had dreamed of when they invaded in the first place.
And of course, they'd had to put it off because it turned out that there was a lot more resistance than they'd counted on.
And so you know, there were stories in the New York Times and elsewhere about George Bush telling visitors to the White House about how he believed now that the United States would in fact have a kind of near permanent military presence, something like they had continued to have in South Korea after decades, decades after the war.
And so very quickly, of course, the al-Maliki government saw this as a great opportunity.
And Maliki sent his foreign minister Hoshar Zabari, who is a Kurd, but by the way, a Kurd who is part of the Kurdish group of political figures who are close to Iran rather than ones who are anti Iran.
So very much in line with the thinking that went into this strategy.
He was sent to dangle what I call a dangle debate of an agreement, a SOFA, a state of forces agreement between the United States and Iraq, on the argument that it would make it impossible for either an Iraqi or an American political figure to get American troops out too fast, which the Iranians would take advantage of.
And of course, that was exactly what Cheney wanted to hear.
And very quickly, the idea apparently began to get some traction.
And the Iraqi government was able to get a commitment from the Bush administration to start working on this to put some staff people to work on what it would look like.
So that brings us then to the third act.
This is early 2008, when clearly Maliki and the Iranians had done some more discussion about how to play this.
And they knew that Petraeus and the U.S. military in Iraq were planning to really carry out a series of major operations against the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Muqtada al-Sadr, of course, is a critical player in this whole thing, because, first of all, it was his support that was keeping al-Maliki as prime minister.
Without his support, his position would be very shaky, would have been very shaky, to say the least.
Secondly, it was, of course, Sadr's forces that were instrumental in pushing the Sunnis out of Baghdad, out of the whole Baghdad metropolitan area, and basically creating a situation that you described where it became an overwhelmingly predominantly Shia capital.
And the third thing was that the Mahdi army was useful to Nouri al-Maliki to put pressure on the United States to just add a little bit of extra oomph to a move to get a withdrawal of U.S. troops.
And in fact, that's where the conflict between the United States military and Nouri al-Maliki and the Iranians, as well as Sadr, came to a head, because the U.S. wanted the major operation to take place in the spring or summer of 2007 in Basra against dug-in Mahdi army forces.
And instead of going along with it, as Cheney had tried to put pressure on Maliki to do in March of 2008, the prime minister turned around and said, no U.S. operation.
I'm going to do this myself.
We're going to have an entirely Iraqi operation.
And he did, in fact, then very quickly organize an Iraqi military assault on Basra, which predictably then went badly.
And he had to turn to the Iranians to get them to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Sadr.
By the way, you and I talked about all this on the radio at the time.
You wrote about all of this at the time.
If people just check the date and go back to the archives at antiwar.com.
That's right.
This was quite open and above board.
Everything about this was reported in the news media.
But what was not reported, that is in the corporate news media, was that what was happening here was that Maliki and the Iranians were in the process of working out a deal with Sadr that would involve Sadr pulling back from his military role in return for Maliki supporting the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.
And that was a deal that clearly went down in the months that followed, because you had a second round of the same thing happening.
The United States military wanted to do a major operation in Sadr to really take the Sadrist forces down a peg.
And instead Maliki said no, he would not allow that.
And instead, even before there was any military operation of any kind, he got the same Iranian Quds Force commander to negotiate with Sadr again.
And this time there was a deal worked out that allowed Iraqi troops to patrol in Sadr City and prevented the major U.S. operation there.
And again, this was in the context clearly of the intention of Maliki to then move to the next step, which was to spring on the United States a demand for complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2010.
He finally compromised on 2011.
So that in a nutshell is...
One, Bush was out of time is the point, right?
It was the end of his presidency, he had to sign the damn thing.
Well, exactly.
I mean, what happened was the Bush administration was totally clueless.
I'm not sure Petraeus was.
I think he understood what was going down here.
He had enough intelligence on the players there to understand that this was clearly way beyond his control.
I'm not sure, however, that this was clearly discussed between Petraeus and the Bush administration.
But I think the Bush administration was completely taken by surprise.
And as I put it in a piece, they were in a state of shock.
They tried to put pressure on Maliki for months to reverse his position because this was exactly the opposite of what they had planned for and what they desperately wanted.
And in the end, they realized that in the presidential race, Obama was clearly going to win.
And he was in favor of this general line of policy of signing an agreement on at least those terms, if not even a faster withdrawal.
So they really didn't have any choice.
All right, Sheldon Santel, War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter about his latest piece, How Maliki and Iran Outsmarted the US on Troop Withdrawal.
And we're talking about the negotiations and the wrangling of 2008 over how many permanent bases are going to be in that status of forces agreement.
It turned out none.
And for some reason, I thought of this thing that turns out I wrote in October of 2006 on the antiwar.com blog, Bush's sunk cost fallacy.
He couldn't come up with a single reason for anyone to fight and kill and die in this war anymore, other than a bunch of people already did.
And if we just lose now as losers and leave, well, then it'll all be for nothing.
So more people got to kill and die.
So that says something that we can call victory at the end comes out at the end and whatever.
And then look, he lost anyway, didn't he?
Yeah.
And I think you're really pointing to a very key thing to understand about the national security state and the interests of the military and its allies, which is precisely that they have to cite something as stupid as, you know, the sacrifices that have already been made as a reason for continuing wars that go badly and which otherwise don't seem to have any rationale for them.
This is exactly what happened in Vietnam, of course, as well.
And what they cannot explain is that the real interests that propel the military to continue these wars are things that are institutional, bureaucratic, vested interests, which are of no value, of no interest to the rest of the American people, such as having permanent bases in Iraq.
I mean, you know, not one person in 10,000 cares about having permanent bases in Iraq.
But of course, the military, you know, really depends on that.
That's their bread and butter.
That's what keeps them going.
Well, the thing is, too, is that if they had gone ahead and withdrawn all the troops right around time of the big mission accomplished speech, we'd ended up with the same Iraq at the end anyway, probably.
You know, maybe the war wouldn't, maybe they'd have come to some kind of compromise that they didn't.
The outcome that we saw is the best evidence that having 130,000 troops didn't give us any real influence over the outcome.
So now what about this Vatican-sized embassy, the 5,000 mercenaries, the 17,000 State Department employees, supposedly, is this that was the whole idea of that was dependent on there's going to they're going to be ringed by bases full of army troops forever.
I do not believe that this this phantasm of a of a contractor army is going to come to fruition.
And the reason, of course, is that it depends on having and giving these people of immunity from prosecution in Iraq.
I mean, you know, I don't think you're going to get very many volunteers to go out there and basically put your body in harm's way, knowing that you could end up pulling a trigger and killing an Iraqi without having immunity from prosecution.
Now, I may be wrong about this, but I just don't think that's going to work.
I mean, the Iraqis are not going to give it to them, clearly.
And so so I just think that the future of that whole idea is very, very cloudy and unlikely to come to fruition.
Yeah, I think Raimondo, Jess Raimondo at Antiwar.com predicted years ago that it'll eventually just be a museum of American atrocities, and no doubt they'll be able to fill the whole thing.
I think, you know, room by room by room with exhibits.
But well, OK, so obviously there's some kind of small detachment of Marines there at the embassy, right?
What other troops are there?
Any more troops in Iraq right now at all?
Some kind of training mission in the green zone of anything or anything?
What's the point?
No, no training mission.
I'm not suggesting that nothing could take place in terms of of training, that there's no possibility of a small training mission finally coming to pass, but they're not going to be endowed with troop carriers and airplanes and all the rest of the trappings of American military power.
That's simply not going to happen.
Well, by the way, I mean, I remember very, very, very clearly how people on both the right and the left in this country pooh-poohed the idea that U.S. power could actually be booted out of Iraq by an Iraqi government that we put into power.
And this, I think, represented both on the part of the militarists and, you know, many in the antiwar movement as well, a misunderstanding of just how, you know, U.S. military power works or rather doesn't work.
I mean, I think that there was almost a mystique around the fact that the U.S. troops were continuing to occupy Iraq, a belief that somehow that endowed the Bush administration or the U.S. government generally with the ability to order the Iraqis around.
And then I think that the story that I've told here is really important because it does underline the reality that it doesn't work that way when you don't have legitimacy in a country and when you have a government like the Shia-majority government that is not totally dependent on the United States for its existence.
Once it got an army of its own, despite its weaknesses and despite everything else about the Iraqi military, the fact that the Sunnis are not strong enough, I think everybody agrees the Sunnis are not strong enough to overthrow it, that in itself is enough to endow that government with the ability to resist pressure from the United States to allow U.S. military presence to continue.
So the lesson here is that it's a lot more difficult to translate the power of an occupying army into real political power or even over a government that was conceived of as being a client.
All right, well, but now if there's one thing that the Americans can offer, it's all the fanciest technology for killing people.
They can give them F-16s and all kinds of things, but those all come with training missions.
That's true, and there will be some training, even if it's sending Iraqi Air Force officers to the United States to be trained.
I mean, I have no doubt that there will be some kind of military-to-military relationship between the two countries.
I simply don't think that that's going to have any real significance in terms of the overall orientation of Iraq in regional politics.
I think that it's very clear that Iraq is for many years going to be sharing the vast majority of the positions of Iran on regional politics for the simple reason that they are both Shia governments and share an interest in resisting the pressure from Saudi Arabia and other Sunni regimes supported by the United States to push back the influence of Shia throughout the region, and if possible, of course, to overthrow that government in Iraq, because that is very clearly the ultimate aim of the Saudis and others who follow in the Saudi position in the region, because the Saudis absolutely cannot accept that Iraq should be or can be a Shia-governed country.
I mean, that is unacceptable to them.
So I think that the structure of regional politics, the Sunni-Shia divide, almost certainly will keep Iraq very firmly in the Iranian camp in regional politics for the foreseeable future.
Is Maliki as dependent as he was before on the support of Muqtada al-Sadr?
No, I don't think he is as much as he was.
I mean, I think that he clearly now has control over a lot of levers of power that are independent of Sadr, and I think Sadr's role politically is less influential than it was in 2006-2007.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that he's ready to completely part ways with Sadr by any means.
I think that relationship still exists.
He's not going to necessarily kick it away.
And so do we just have years of proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia inside Iraq to look forward to?
I think we do, and I think that, by the same token, the Iraqis, as I've reported, are very firmly committed to causing problems for Saudi Arabia, both in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia itself, to the extent that they're capable of doing so.
Well, and Maliki's been sending aid to al-Assad in Syria.
Well, that's right, of course.
And just a thumb's nose at us on the way out the door, huh?
That much is clear.
I mean, they're committed to continuing to have the Syrian regime remain in power if at all possible.
All right.
Well, thanks again very much for your time, Gareth.
Sure, appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
