08/16/07 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

All right, folks, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Radio Chaos, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And our next guest, our regular guest, Gareth Porter, historian and journalist for IPS News, the American Prospect, and antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks, Scott.
Always glad to be here.
Yeah, well, I sure am glad I have you around.
I've been telling the people over the last week or so.
Make sure top priority to read everything you write for IPS and antiwar.com.
The American Prospect, your focus like a laser.
Well, on the very same thing as me, which is the push by Cheney and his cabal to get us into a war with Iran and the lies that they're using to try to justify that war.
And I don't know of anybody better who has been able to go through all the different aspects of the lies and debunk them one by one as you have.
And so I'm always really happy to have you around to do that for us here on Chaos Radio.
This is always bad.
And, well, let's before we get all to the anti-Iran propaganda and all this, let's go back to a couple of articles ago on antiwar.com.
AMBAR turnaround undercuts war effort.
All the propaganda in the world, Gareth Porter, is that the surge is working, but the darn media won't report it.
I don't know, I must have heard that a million times.
So is the surge working?
What's going on in AMBAR province, Gareth Porter?
Well, this is a story that really goes back many months.
And I've really been tracking what's been happening in AMBAR fairly closely for a long time.
And the story that really has been missed by the media for a long time is that not only have the Sunnis generally been not terribly attracted to the ideology of al-Qaeda, but the US anti-occupation resistance forces of the Sunni population, which was the real reason the US military was fighting for years and years, has turned against al-Qaeda.
I think the major resistance groups all have turned against al-Qaeda.
There are some segments of the resistance that still have not overtly turned against al-Qaeda, but for the most part, it appears that they have been making war against al-Qaeda now since at least early 2006.
And we keep hearing that somehow or other the US has pulled off a miracle in 2007 and has managed to turn the Sunnis against al-Qaeda as though it were something that the US managed to do itself.
When in fact, the Sunni resistance and the tribal sheikhs, who clearly are sympathetic to them and have close contacts with them, have been asking the United States to let them handle security in AMBAR for many, many months.
There are stories that have been in the media, at least going back to 2006, about the request to the United States to allow them to replace US troops, to take care of security, and to take care of al-Qaeda.
The US in the past has always turned them down, saying, oh, well, we can't do that because that would mean the resistance, the so-called insurgents, would be able to then take control of the city.
So now the United States has finally said, okay, you're right, we can't handle al-Qaeda, we need you to do it, essentially.
And in fact, Petraeus has admitted publicly that in fact the Sunni resistance people can do a much better job of dealing with al-Qaeda than American troops can, for obvious reasons.
And so I think the real story there is an admission by the United States that they cannot handle al-Qaeda as well as the Sunni resistance.
And in fact, I would even go beyond that, and I think it's very clear that one can say that US military presence there makes it more difficult for the Sunnis to take care of al-Qaeda themselves.
Because the more US military presence is there, the more intrusive it is, the more people are inclined to say, well, you know, we don't like al-Qaeda, but we'll cooperate with them as long as it's necessary to get the United States out.
And now, okay, if America was gone, and they didn't have the United States to fight, would it be, what, a matter of a couple of weeks and al-Qaeda in Iraq would cease to exist at the hands of the local Sunnis?
But, you know, I think it is on the record that Sunni resistance leaders have said to the United States, if you let us, if you give us the support, you know, give us the arms that we need, and sort of clear out of the way, we can take care of al-Qaeda very quickly, certainly in a matter of weeks to months.
Yeah, well, and now this is the biggest excuse, right?
This is why we can't stay, because we'd be turning the country over to al-Qaeda, and then they would use it as a base to take over the whole world from Spain to Indonesia, the President says.
Well, of course, that continues to be the single biggest excuse for U.S. occupation of Iraq, and it is simply a fabrication, it's simply, you know, there's no basis for talking about that, as I have been trying to argue for many, many months.
You know, the United States would be far better served in terms of its concern about al-Qaeda by clearing out of Iraq as fast as possible and letting the Sunnis take care of it.
And, you know, I mean, I don't want to go into it now, because it would take up too much of your time, but if you really look at the evolution of the U.S. war rationale, and you go back to 2005, I was just looking today at a quotation from General Abizaid, who was then CENTCOM commander, testifying before the Senate in 2005, and he was saying al-Qaeda is not the primary enemy.
It was the Sunni resistance.
So that was not really what we thought we were fighting, that is what the military thought they were fighting against primarily until very recently.
Well, now, William S. Linde wrote that this is just one step forward, two steps back.
Okay, fine, so we have, you know, al-Qaeda is being further marginalized to, you know, the point where they probably won't even exist too much longer with the Sunnis going after them.
But all this is doing is rearming and, you know, financing and backing the Sunni insurgency that still has no more intention of joining the Maliki government and, well, submitting to the Maliki government than they had before.
Now we're just making the civil war that's going to start, I guess, as soon as they're done reporting on the success of the surge in September, and let it get going again in November, where it's going to be even worse now.
Well, of course, I mean, and Petraeus knows this perfectly well.
He knows that what he's doing essentially is he's buying time for Bush to be able to claim some kind of success in September and beyond so that he can somehow ease the pressure for withdrawal, for a timetable for withdrawal and beginning the withdrawal now.
And, you know, I mean, I'm very cynical about this, but I think it's quite justified that Bush, the Bush White House and the people who are running this war know perfectly well that this is not going to succeed.
And, in fact, I can tell you that I've heard that high-ranking military people in the Pentagon, the joint people and the joint staff, are very concerned about the possibility of a complete collapse of the military effort.
They still believe that it's quite possible that the United States could actually be forced out of Iraq.
That's a distinct possibility that the military is worried about.
So, you know, they're desperately buying time by putting forward this idea that we have succeeded in getting the Sunnis to take care of al-Qaeda when, in fact, the Sunnis were willing to do that all along and had been doing it even though the United States was interfering in that effort mightily by trying to carry out their own military operations in the province.
All right.
Well, there's a few different directions we can go from there, but I want to get to this whole thing about Sadr is a secret agent of Iran rather than a nationalist.
And the Badr Corps and the Dawa, well, we're just not ever supposed to say that.
They're just not part of it.
Iran is backing the militias that are killing our guys in Iraq.
That's the line.
That is the line.
And it has been, as I point out in the most recent article this past week, this line about Iran and the Shiite militias has really been now sort of branched off in different directions and there are sort of sub-themes that have been developed.
One of the most important ones, which I think people may not be aware of, is the idea that the Sadr militia, the Mahdi army, has been broken up into two parts.
The one part being loyal to Sadr, the good guys, quote-unquote, loyal to Sadr, and those people are cooperating with the United States.
And the bad guys, the people who have become rogue units of the Mahdi army, those are the ones who are fighting Americans and those are the ones that Iran has turned into pawns of their own policy in Iraq.
That is the line in substance.
Is that because they're trying to say that Sadr's the good guy or just because they know that you and I just know better than to believe that he's the Iranian agent when we know he's not, that they have to say, well, it's parts of his militia?
Because it seems like they're trying to pick the fight with Sadr.
They're trying to pick the fight with the Mahdi army as a whole.
I would say it's the opposite.
In fact, they recognize that Sadr is so popular and so powerful in Iraq that they cannot frontally go against him, openly go against him.
So what they're doing is they're saying that, well, we're not really against Sadr per se.
Sadr is really cooperating with us, even though it's totally untrue.
He's calling on people to resist American occupation.
But they're sort of trying to insinuate that they're aligned with Sadr and the good guys in the Mahdi army, and it's only the rogue unit that they're targeting, the people who have broken away from Sadr.
It's really a very clever propaganda line, and it justifies their attacks, which have been increasing in tempo since March, particularly since Sadr returned to public view after going underground for a few months.
They have had an increasingly high tempo of attacks against Mahdi army units.
And what they're doing then is saying that these are only rogue units, and they're really the ones who have been trained by Iran and assisted by Iran.
When in fact we know that Iran has had contact with the Mahdi army generally, that it is not a matter of picking out certain units, certain sort of rogue groups or special groups, as the U.S. has taken to calling them.
So it's a way of having it both ways, essentially.
And this now has reached a new level of sophistication in terms of ways in which the U.S. is manipulating U.S. opinion on the war.
Well, see, that's the thing that bothers me.
There's nothing sophisticated about it.
It's such a load of crap.
And it's been the same one when they debuted all this new hype about Iran in January.
You and I both wrote at the time, hey, we've debunked this a year ago.
That was when Bush first started talking this nonsense, was in the very end of 2005, beginning of 2006.
George Bush started saying, oh yeah, the Iranians are the ones behind the deaths of all the Americans in Iraq.
This is so plainly, obviously, a lie, and it has been ever since, and it still is.
Right, and of course that brings us to this whole new propaganda sub-theme which was developed about a week ago by General O'Dyrano, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, who put out the story in a press briefing and then had a separate interview with the New York Times in which he made the rather interestingly crafted statement that nearly three-fourths of the battle in which Americans died or were wounded in Baghdad, not in the country as a whole, but in Baghdad, were caused by Shiite militias supported by Iran.
Now, you have to deconstruct that very carefully, and the media, of course, has not tried to do that at all.
The New York Times had a headline which was extremely incendiary, as is often the case, covering that interview with O'Dyrano.
But the point is that he was essentially, O'Dyrano and the media were essentially saying that Iran was behind the increased pace of U.S. deaths and woundings because of Shiite militias.
Well, the obvious reason for that, and you actually asked me this last time I was on the program, and I hadn't seen the interview or the briefing at that time, but now, of course, I've looked at it, and what obviously happened is that this is an artifact of the increasing tempo of U.S. attacks on the Mahdi Army in Baghdad, in Sadr City particularly.
And because of that, the U.S. is suffering more casualties.
And it's not because of these EFPs, the explosively formed penetrators.
He didn't even claim that.
In fact, a lot of this clearly is because the U.S. is attacking and is suffering more casualties in those attacks.
And also, it's because of retaliation against those attacks because of the extreme pressure that's being put on the Mahdi Army, and they're fighting back.
And now, there hasn't been real full-scale war against the Mahdi Army since the summer of 2004, right?
That's correct.
The Mahdi Army has not massed and tried to attack U.S. forces.
In effect, they're still fighting a defensive war, but it's certainly still not out of the question that there could be a counterattack by the Mahdi Army across southern Iraq as well as in Baghdad.
And now, you mentioned that before, that this is something that the generals are worried about, is that they could be forced out.
And there was a headline that ran on antiwar.com just two or three days ago.
I forget.
I think it might have been a Reuters piece or something about the generals are worried about what they're calling a Tet Offensive, the possibility that, and I guess they don't really lay it out in detail in the article, but I guess the implication was the Sunni insurgency and the Mahdi Army types all rising up at once and going for it.
Well, this is, of course, this is one of the very interesting propaganda lines that has been developed.
And, you know, I'm not sure if it's Cheney's office that's behind it or whether it's a broader DOD theme as well.
But the idea is that Iran and the Al Qaeda people are going to collaborate in sort of timing and offensive, which, you know, it's sheer, you know, ridiculous propaganda, because there's absolutely no way that Al Qaeda and Iran are going to cooperate and coordinate their efforts.
Well, yeah, but it wasn't, I don't think, or I didn't mean to say Iran and Al Qaeda.
I meant to say the Sadrists and the Sunni former Baathist types, the locals.
The Sadrists and Al Qaeda are not going to cooperate.
Sadr has made it clear that he is in solidarity with Sunnis against Al Qaeda.
Yeah, yeah, that's what I meant.
I didn't mean Al Qaeda.
I meant the local Sunni Imams and former Baathists and so forth, that the Sunni insurgency, not Al Qaeda, that the Sunni insurgency in alliance with the Shiite nationalists, the Sadrists.
Yes, and that, of course, is a possibility, that there could be a nationalist Sunni insurgents and Sadrists offensive.
That certainly is a possibility, because they have been in contact.
They have been in contact.
They do have some common interests.
They both want a timetable for withdrawal.
They want an orderly withdrawal.
And I think both are interested in some kind of a settlement, which involves the U.S. committing itself to getting out.
Right, well, they've called it the government of national salvation, right?
Right.
The nationalists, no matter what your religion or your ethnicity, let's all join together and agree on at least one thing, to end the civil war and kick the Americans out of here.
That's right, and of course, you know, if the United States, this is a point I've made before, but if the United States is really motivated by a desire to see a reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis, then one of the things that it would be doing is to say, we support Sadr's effort to build a bridge, and we will integrate that into an effort, a broader diplomatic effort.
And of course, there's been absolute silence from the U.S. government on that point.
Yeah, of course.
And now, in your misunderstanding of what I said, you brought up what is actually a propaganda point.
And I see it more and more that, yes, indeed, Iran backs al-Qaeda.
Eli Lake wrote something like this in the New York Sun just a few weeks ago, that what you scoffed at there was, oh, that's definitely the case, that those guys that knocked down the towers, that they're being given safe haven in Iran and they're planning their next attack from Iran.
Gareth Porter?
Yes, and of course, Eli Lake is an instrument of the worst kind of evil individuals within the U.S. government.
The same kind of people, and perhaps the same individuals, indeed, who were putting forward the thesis that Saddam was in bed with al-Qaeda terrorists are, in fact, the ones who were peddling that same line about Iran.
And so that's the kind of thing that I would love to be able to identify the precise sources of his stories, but I, unfortunately, am not in a position to do that.
But he is one of the leading disinformation people in the press in terms of peddling that kind of line.
Okay, well, explain to the good people out there why that is just not the case, that the Mullahs, the Ayatollahs are friends with bin Laden.
Well, I could go into greater depth on this.
The relationship between Iran and al-Qaeda is one that is, certainly since 1996, is one of absolute enmity on the Iranian side, and that's for a very simple reason.
Al-Qaeda was not only sponsored by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The al-Qaeda political military organization was an integral part of that regime.
We now know that al-Qaeda troops were an integral part of the Taliban military apparatus, and therefore, and Iran, of course, was very well informed about what was happening in Afghanistan.
They regarded the Taliban as their mortal enemy and al-Qaeda as their mortal enemy along with them.
That has not changed.
There's absolutely no reason to believe, no evidence that anything like that has changed.
Anything has changed about that.
The scraps of sort of bits of raw intelligence reporting are unanalyzed, which have been used by the extreme right, the neoconservatives and their agents, to show that there's been a link between Iran and al-Qaeda, some of which was actually picked up and used in the 9-11 Commission Report in a very unprofessional manner, all go back to the very early 1990s.
And they have to do with things like an intelligence contact, an intelligence agent of Iran having contact with somebody supposedly representing al-Qaeda.
Well, that's absolutely meaningless as an indicator of Iranian policy.
Intelligence agents constantly contact people from the other side.
In fact, the United States had like two or three dozen contacts with people in the Taliban during this period.
And so by that kind of measure, the Bush administration and indeed the Clinton administration are both supporters of al-Qaeda.
And so that's the kind of logic on which this argument has been based, the kind of false evidence or non-evidence on which it's been based.
And now from the religious point of view of the Salafists, bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers, their group of pirates, from their religious perspective, the Ayatollahs in Iran are what?
Well, absolutely.
I mean, the Sunni extremists do regard the Irani and the Shiites in Iran, as well as elsewhere, as apostates and therefore enemies.
And that has been exactly part of the al-Qaeda ideology in Iraq, that they want to bomb Shiite mosques and so forth.
So on the Sunni side, there's that part of the enmity.
But on the Iranian side, I think we need to be very clear that their hatred, their enmity toward al-Qaeda, has to do with a very, very concrete national security interest, which is that al-Qaeda is aligned with their mortal enemies in Afghanistan, and have been since 1996.
And this is what the folks who are peddling this line refuse to pay any attention to.
And I must say that the New York Times and the Washington Post have been buying that line for years and years.
They have never bothered to do the kind of analysis that they're perfectly capable of doing, if they would be serious.
What is bin Laden's group's association with Jundala in Pakistan?
Because I know, well, I guess I don't know, I've read reports that say that the United States is backing this group, Jundala, against Iran.
Well, you know, I think there is some evidence of that.
It's obviously impossible for us to prove that.
But we do have reports based on Pakistani intelligence, and some American official sources as well, that indicate that the U.S. has managed through the Afghan – excuse me – Iranian exile people in Europe to funnel money into Jundala over the last year and a half or so.
And I can tell you that one of the specialists on Jundala who has looked very carefully at the video that has been shown, which was photographed in the border area of Pakistan and Afghanistan, shows very clearly, I mean, has told me very clearly that the video shows that the beheading of a Jundala prisoner was accompanied by Sunni chants, which were very clearly the same kind of Sunni extremism that you find in Al-Qaeda.
So, although Abdul Righi, the head of Jundala, is claiming to be a kind of secular nationalist, you know, there is evidence that, in fact, his organization has the same kind of extremist Sunni ideology as Al-Qaeda.
No evidence yet that they actually know each other, work together, train together, anything like that?
Well, there have been people who have said, and there are a number of sources suggesting, that Righi, in fact, did fight with or was aligned with or was associated with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that he has continued to maintain some links with Taliban.
So, all of that does seem to be consistent in suggesting that there is a tie-in between Righi and the Taliban and the sort of extremist ideology that is associated with Al-Qaeda.
Whether he has a direct link with Al-Qaeda is something that we can't say at this point.
There sure is a strange war on terrorism where America is friends with bin Laden-like terrorists against Iran, who are nothing like bin Laden.
Well, yes, and in fact, I'm sort of thinking of developing a book in which the main theme is the counter-terrorism ploy, because we have used the notion that we're fighting terrorism as a cover to promote.
I always say we, and I have to correct myself when I say that, but what I mean is that the Bush administration, and to some extent the Clinton administration before it, have used counter-terrorism as a ploy, as a cover, to promote their own agenda in international politics, which is a dominant power agenda to expand U.S. political military power, particularly the Middle East.
And so I think that the war on terror has in fact been a cover for other interests that Bush and before him, Clinton, have tried to promote.
Well, I sure wish you would write a book like that.
I couldn't wait to read it and interview you all about it.
Yeah, I'm seriously thinking about that right now and in fact starting to write some things that will fit into that framework.
Okay, now if America is going to dominate the Middle East for the indefinite future, there's a gigantic Ayatollah-controlled Persia in the way that's got to go, am I right?
I'm sorry, I didn't hear the last part of the question.
The Ayatollahs, the Iranian regime, that they are going to have to go, they're standing in the way of American permanent military dominance in that part of the world.
Well, it's absolutely clear that that was one of the key pieces of the incoming Bush administration's policy assumption in terms of its planning for the Middle East.
The intention, we know, because of a variety of sources that have told us this, we know that the incoming neoconservative group intended to take down Saddam, to use military bases that they would acquire from that to either change the regimes in Syria and Iran, or at least to intimidate those countries so that they would be certainly much more pliable.
But I think the first preference was for regime change in both Damascus and in Tehran.
And precisely, as you say, because those regimes, particularly Tehran, was regarded as an obstacle to the U.S. ability to have its way in the region as a whole.
I'm sorry, did you say particularly Iran?
Yes, particularly Iran, right.
Because, of course, it's a regional power in the making.
It does have the physical base and the influence through its Shiite connections in Afghanistan, Iran, and elsewhere, excuse me, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, of course, in Lebanon, to wield influence far beyond Iran's borders.
So this was clearly the single biggest obstacle to the neoconservative plan for the Middle East when they came to power.
And, of course, their main strategic instrument for bringing about regional change, which was the Iraq invasion, has come to naught, and, in fact, has enmeshed them in something that really has made it very difficult to do anything at all about Iran.
And, of course, that brings us then to the Cheney plan for war against Iran.
And I've just come out today with a blog on the Huffington Post that talks about Cheney's conspiracy to try to bring about a war with Iran through an attack on the bases that are said to be in Iran, where Shiite militias have allegedly been trained over the last few years.
Right, as McClatchy newspapers reported the other day.
Right.
And, of course, this was something that, according to that story, Cheney was advocating within the administration several weeks ago, which would put it then in June.
And once we know that, we can begin to make sense of some other developments which have occurred in the June and July timeframe.
For one thing, we know that Lieberman, who came out publicly favoring an attack on those bases, was doing that at the behest of Cheney.
He never does things on his own.
This was clearly part of the war conspiracy that Cheney was cooking up.
So we know that that was one thing.
And then the other thing that happened was the famous Kevin Bergner, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, briefing for the press on July 2nd, the main theme of which was the training of Shiite militias in Iran, as well as their supposedly the Iranian role in planning an operation in Karbala in January, which killed five Americans.
So it was quite deliberately timed and shaped so that it would support the Cheney initiative within the government.
And that, of course, suggests something much more dangerous in a sense, which is that the U.S. command has become an instrument for carrying out the war conspiracy that Cheney has been cooking up, that there is a direct link between Cheney on one hand and the U.S. command on the other.
Although I didn't say that in my piece, I think that's something that we have to begin to look at.
And so the reports by Steve Clements on his blog that Cheney was working very hard to do this end run and get the war started one way or another, but that, at least for the time being, Rice and Gates and McConnell and the chiefs and Admiral Fallon, and the rest of them had basically ganged up and had won for the time being, that basically they're on the outs and Cheney is back on top.
Is that what it seems like?
Well, there are some indications that Bush may have tilted towards Cheney sometime in June.
At least he appears to have favored the Cheney view that we can't let the negotiations or the diplomatic talks with Iran, I won't call them negotiations at this stage, but diplomatic talks with Iran go on until January 2009.
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that Bush has said, yeah, we're going to go attack those bases, but it is a dangerous signal that Cheney's influence still is very great with Bush and that he still has a very good chance to carry out his conspiracy.
Have you been keeping an eye on where the various carrier strike groups are in the past week or two?
I have not.
I have not been looking at the carrier strike groups I have to admit.
Me either.
I guess last I heard there was only two.
I think that's still the case.
I haven't seen anything that indicates otherwise.
But, you know, I mean, I think that what we're talking about now is, you know, Cheney's strategy is no longer to go directly to a massive strike against Iran.
What he now wants to do is to do it sort of a limited strike against these bases and simply use that as a provocation to get Iran then to retaliate so that we could then go to the original plan, Plan A, which is a massive strategic attack on Iran, not just against nuclear sites, but against military targets and economic targets to really whittle Iran's power down so that they are not such an obstacle to U.S. aims.
And that would, of course, be the kind of realization of the neocon dreams that they had when they came to power.
So they're not even really banking on regime change here, huh?
I don't think they are.
They don't expect regime change anymore.
Too much time has passed and they've made too little progress on that.
And you see people like John Padouret, Norman Padouret, excuse me, saying, you know, we were told that we were making progress on regime change and it's not happening, and so he was calling for bombing Iran.
And I think that's an indication that the right, the extreme right, is disillusioned now with the idea of regime change.
Well, you know, something else that Norman Padouret said was that if Bush bombs Iran, and I hope and pray he will, that it will unleash a wave of anti-Americanism that will make our current situation in terms of anti-Americanism look like a picnic.
And I'm looking, and honestly, I don't watch the NBC all day and I'm not all familiar with exactly what all these numbers are, but apparently all the numbers are going down except the prices, which are all going up right now.
Right.
So what kind of consequences are we going to have if we, you know, Charles Goyette, I was interviewed on Charles Goyette's show this morning, basically telling him what you've taught me, and he introduced the show basically by saying, I try to tell you people, you can't have an empire for free.
You wanted this war and now you have to pay for it.
And, you know, if this is the cost of the invasion of Iraq, oil at 70-something per barrel and the dollar falling the way it is, China threatening to dump their holdings of U.S. debt, what the hell is going to happen to the world, to this country, if we, if Dick Cheney and his neocon cabal start another war in the Middle East, Gareth Porter?
Well, you know, I think what you've done, Scott, is to put your finger on the fundamental dynamic that goes along with empire, which is that all the illusions of achieving this power, such as the neocons had when they came into office in 2001, and which I must say were also present in the Vietnam era with the Democratic administration.
The hopes, the dreams, the fantasies of this kind of power inevitably are not only disappointed, but they cause a reversal, a loss of power.
Now, some, you know, in the past that loss of power has been only partial, it's been a setback, which ultimately the extreme right was able to, was able to compensate for and was able to, you know, bring about a restoration of the aggressive policies that we saw in the 1950s, 1960s.
But I think this time around, if we do in fact have a war with Iran, you are absolutely spot on, as the Brits would say, that it will have far-reaching economic consequences for the United States, as well as other consequences in the region, which will inevitably see a dramatic fall in U.S. ability to maintain anything like the present kind of political military presence in that part of the world.
So, I mean, I think that there is an inevitable relationship between overreaching an aggressive military policy on one hand and, in the final analysis, being forced to accept a much lower level of presence, much lower level of influence in the part of the world that we attempt to dominate.
Yeah, well, and there's also a big difference between being a grown-up and saying, you know what, forget the empire, bring in the troops home, paying down the debt, slashing the size of government, taking care of business, and maintaining and making sure that the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution will last another couple of hundred years, and being forced to lose your empire with bankruptcy and, you know, possible martial law powers being deployed against Americans here at home and economic catastrophe, which is the way we're headed now over a cliff.
Right.
I mean, you have stated the potential domestic consequences, which I didn't address, but, of course, they are, in fact, much more fundamental and much more important.
And I think you're right that a war with Iran could, in fact, have very serious consequences for domestic civil liberties, certainly for the domestic economy.
The cost of the consequences are really incalculable.
And it is just like Ron Paul says, look, we're going to lose our empire one way or another.
You think we're going to have a world empire forever?
It's just, you know, as you said, anybody who's ever hoped this has had their dreams dashed and usually in spectacular fashion.
You know, we're going to go bankrupt before we're done taking over the whole world.
We might as well admit that it's a faulty project that we shouldn't be embarked on and go ahead and give it up now and do it the right way.
Right, and that will be undoubtedly the fundamental dynamic here at home, that it's going to be the inability to continue to maintain this kind of spending on empire that will cause a fundamental shift in the U.S. policy.
And, you know, you're right, we will essentially have become a much smaller, you know, economy, unable politically as well as economically to maintain the kind of military presence and the kind of aggressive policy that we've seen in recent years.
Well, now everybody's got their favorite domino theory.
Do you think if Dick Cheney starts a war with Iran that we could see possibly the fall of the regime there, the fall of neighboring regimes, further civil wars, disaster in Iraq?
Is it possible that the war could at least stay confined to Persia?
No, it would not be confined to Persia.
It would certainly involve consequences in Lebanon, in Iraq, elsewhere in Palestine.
There would certainly be consequences, some of which we could begin to predict, others that we could not.
But we know that the Sadrists, for example, and perhaps other Shiites in Iraq would respond in some fashion to that.
They could not be indifferent to it.
And that the consequences would certainly be a much greater support for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, for one thing.
The immediate consequences would be that, there's no question about that.
And in Lebanon, it may well be that the Hezbollah would seize upon that as an opportunity, if you will, to expand their own power and to insist on basically disrupting the existing system, changing the existing system in which the Shiite majority, or at least plurality, I should say, in Lebanon is denied the kind of representation and power that it would deserve in a representative government.
Well, as to the American soldiers and the danger to them in Iraq, I know that Sadr has been quoted multiple times, of course, saying that his guys would fight if America bombed Iran.
But William S. Linde, in an article called How to Lose an Army in the American Conservative, he says in there, I guess it's second-degree hearsay or whatever, but he says a British journalist, friend of his, personally interviewed Abdulaziz Hakeem from the Supreme Islamic Council, or whatever they call it now, and that Hakeem said to his face that in the event of an American war with Iran, quote, we would do our duty, which would be, of course, to back Iran against the Americans who have been training and arming them this entire time.
Yes, I think Hakeem and the Dawa Party, those parties that are closest to al-Maliki, would be subject to some cross-pressures there because they are getting something out of their alliance, temporary as it is, with the United States military.
But if there were a U.S.
-Iran war, I think the Shiite pull towards supporting Iran and opposing the United States would be very powerful indeed.
I think you're right.
All right, everybody.
Gareth Porter, he's a historian and a journalist for IPS News.
He writes often in The American Prospect.
You can find all of his IPS News articles at antiwar.com/porter.
And he has a new one today in The Huffington Post.
Thank you very much for coming back on the show, Gareth.
Appreciate you.
Thanks as always for having me, Scott.