09/28/07 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95-9 in Austin, Texas, welcoming back to the show the independent historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter.
He comes on just about every week to keep us updated on the infighting in the administration between the Cheney Cabal and everybody else and also keep us updated on why the things that the Cheney Cabal says about Iran in order to justify the war they want are not true.
So we're always happy to have him here.
You can find all the rights at IPSNews, at AntiWar.com, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Glad to be here as always, Scott.
It's great to have you here and got a great couple of articles this week.
Local news in the Imperial Senate and in the House of Representatives, anti-Iran resolutions of all different descriptions flying around, the most important of which was this Lieberman-Kyle resolution in the United States Senate.
Can you briefly describe for us what exactly this resolution said?
Well, the actual resolution in the amendment was primarily an endorsement by the Senate of the announced intention of the Bush administration to designate the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
That's one of the points in the resolution.
From my point of view, and I think that's serious enough, but I actually believe even more serious were the endorsement of the findings, the assumptions on which the resolution was based, which essentially recapitulated in a series of statements by administration officials or military officials in Baghdad the case that the administration's been making, that there's a proxy war being fought by Iran in Iraq against U.S. troops.
Essentially, it's the theme that Lieberman has put forward in a previous resolution, which was passed 97 to nothing in July, that Iran has already declared war on the United States.
And so when I read in the news that Senator James Webb from Virginia gave a triumphant speech on the floor where he said, Dick Cheney is going to take paragraph here and paragraph here and he's going to try to say that this is a declaration of war, that it's authorization for war, and that they took it out, that he was successful, the Democrats were successful in taking the most militaristic language out of this bill.
You're telling me that that may be great, but it's really besides the point because what's really happening here is all the accusations are being confirmed by the opposition, so now it no longer matters whether they're true or not or whether there's actual authorization.
It's the premise upon which the eventual authorization will be based is already set in stone here.
Well, Scott, it's clear by now.
We have a pattern of behavior here on the part of Lieberman on one hand and the U.S.
Senate on the other.
That is, Lieberman comes in with the most extreme, the most egregious kind of amendment, which clearly is intended to be used as a vehicle that the administration could cite as sort of a backdoor authorization.
They wouldn't call it a backdoor authorization, an authorization for the use of force against Iran, and then the Democrats in the Senate say, no, that's not acceptable, so the most egregious language is taken out, and what remains is essentially a propaganda diatribe taking the administration's propaganda line against Iran, which then the Senate passes overwhelmingly and associates itself with, and that, of course, is another link in the chain that is being formed to bind the Senate to a policy of at least a presumption of guilt against Iran, which the administration either can use eventually when and if it decides to make a formal case, or, as I think is more likely at this point, or at least equally likely, the administration may feel that the Senate has simply disarmed itself, basically taken itself out of the issue and said, go ahead and do it, we're not going to do anything about it.
Right, which they've already had pretty strong indications of that when they first tried to pass the bogus timetable loophole withdrawal bill.
There was supposed to be a part of that that just simply reminded the president that Congress decides whether this country starts a war or not, not you, and that Nancy Pelosi, it was reported in the New York Sun by Eli Lake, under direct pressure from the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, took the language out.
I mean, this is something that Bush vetoed anyway, but it was simply a reminder, and they removed that.
I mean, talk about signaling to the White House that they can basically do what they want.
It seems like at least the House of Representatives isn't going to stop them.
Yeah, I think we now have a series of case studies in which the House and Senate have rolled over, in a way that the administration can certainly easily interpret, sending the signal that there will not be any resistance by the Senate or the House to military action against Iran.
Well, today, Gareth Porter, in the Viewpoint section on AntiWar.com, is your recent Huffington Post entry, Lieberman Kyle Warmongering on Iran vs. the Evidence, is how we have it titled, on AntiWar.com.
This also ran after Downing Street and Alternet.org.
On Alternet.org, I'm looking at their version now, it's called Debunking the Neocons, Iran-War Measure.
And what you do in this article is you just go through and refute all these premises that the opposition and the Senate are now accepting to be absolutely true.
Well, that's right.
You know, what I would highlight about the language of what I call Lieberman Kyle, it's officially Kyle Lieberman, the most problematic thing about it is its quote from General David Petraeus on September 11th, in which Petraeus basically repeats this canard of the administration that Iran is using its Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps inside Iraq to transform the Shiite militias into a kind of Iraqi Hezbollah to serve the interests of Iran.
So, I mean, this is sort of the most extreme version, if you will, of the proxy war argument, which again depends on the Quds Force being inside the country, helping, assisting the Shiite militias through military assistance, through providing them with EFPs, providing them with training, and otherwise supporting their operations against the United States.
It's a very specific argument, it has these dimensions that the Quds Force is involved directly in the country, that they are involved directly in providing military assistance, including the EFPs and training, and that all this is essentially an effort to mold an Iranian cat's paw within Iraq to serve Iranian interests.
And what I've done is to lay out in six basic points the case against this propaganda argument, which is endorsed, as I say, by the Lieberman-Kahl amendment.
All right, now let's go through them one at a time.
Let's start with just the involvement of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards with these Shiite militias.
And pardon me if I make us a little parenthesis in this question.
Can you tell me what Shiite militias we're even talking about here?
Well, yeah, I've been using that sort of shorthand in my articles, and it is not always clear, and that is a problem that needs to be addressed.
I mean, basically, we are talking here about the Mahdi Army.
The Mahdi Army is overwhelmingly, you know, I mean, it's like 98-99 percent, it appears, of the military action, military activity going on against the coalition forces, except for the al-Qaeda Sunni resistance.
You know, there are other Shiite militias.
There's the Badr Brigade, but so far, Badr Brigade has not been known to carry out military activities against the United States forces in Iraq.
So really, this is Mahdi Army units, essentially.
These are the forces associated, loyal to Muqtad al-Sadr, at least ostensibly they associate themselves with Muqtad al-Sadr.
Now, what is the evidence that the reason that, again, aside from the violence from the Sunni insurgency, so-called, who are working on becoming our friends again or something at this point, but aside from them, what is the evidence that Iranian influence is behind or associated with Sadr's group fighting American soldiers?
Well, I'm not sure if you want me to go into the Iranian relationship with Sadr, which we've talked about in this program before, I know, and we could go into that angle of it, but I do want to make sure that we focus on the points that the key points of the administration's argument having to do with military assistance, particularly.
Let me just focus on that for a moment, and we'll come back to the broader issue of the relationship between Iran and Sadr.
Well, I mean, that's really what I meant, too, was training and weapons and so forth.
I'm sorry, I wasn't very specific in the way I phrased it.
This really begins with the EFP issue, which I know you as well as I have been fixated on for months for the simple reason that it just won't go away.
And here, we start with this February 11th briefing by three anonymous briefers in Baghdad, a very and very unusual briefing indeed, and what I've done is to point out in this article that despite that briefing, the administration still has not come forward with a single piece of solid or concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government, through the Quds Force or anybody else, has been directly involved in the arming training or advising of the Shiite militias, and specifically to go back to that initial briefing on February 11th, I point out at least three anomalies concerning that briefing.
In the first place, the briefers did not claim that they had any forensic evidence.
It was all inference, and the inference was based on the idea that these EFPs must come from Iran.
Physically, they must originate in Iran, and therefore the assumption is made that the Quds Force, which deals with Shiites in foreign countries, must be the ones who are taking them into Iraq.
It's all a matter of inference.
It's all a matter of logic from the point of view of the propagandist.
And so, the beginning point is the lack of any physical evidence that actually links Iran to bringing them into the country, or even for that matter, the evidence that they were actually made in Iran, and I go on to that point later on to show that, in fact, we find out that they didn't have to be made in Iran.
But one of the points that I make in the piece is that one of the briefers actually admitted in the briefing that he stated that there were only Iraqis who were smuggling arms into Iraq from Iran, and that therefore they would never be able to catch any Iranian involved in this.
So, I mean, this is a rather ingenious way of avoiding the problem that they have, that they simply have no evidence that Iranian officials are involved in any way.
Yeah, it's like they're building a RICO case or something.
That's right.
The third point, just related again to that briefing, is that the explosive expert for the briefing, whose name is Major Marty Weber, and he's appeared in several press articles about this issue.
In an interview some days after the briefing, he said that the use of what he called passive infrared sensors in the deployment of these EFPs, that is, the explosively formed penetrators that penetrate U.S. armor in Iraq, was, quote, one of the strongest markers of Iranian involvement in the traffic, unquote.
And then he admitted, under questioning, that those electronic components that are used to make the sensors are actually found on the shelf of any hardware store, any electronics store, I should say, a radio shack or anything else.
These are found anywhere in any city in the world.
You can find these kinds of electronic components.
So in fact, he was admitting that the argument that this is a marker of Iranian involvement was completely false.
Then, you know, just one other point about that briefing is that the spokesman for the U.S. command, who was one of the three briefers that basically admitted as such in a later briefing with the press, three days later, on February 14th, backed away from the implication that the Iranian government was involved in any traffic in arms from Iran to Iraq, and said that all we're saying here is that here are these arms that we believe are manufactured in Iran, and they end up in Iraq, and that we want to ask the Iranian government, quote unquote, to assist in stopping that from happening.
And he finishes up by saying, there's no intent to do anything other than that.
It's a little bit like one of the briefers intentionally, obviously, makes statements saying that the Iranian government knows all about this and they're behind it, and then three days later, this guy says, well, we didn't really mean to say that at all.
All we're saying is that these weapons are appearing in Iraq, and we want Iran to help us stop it.
So as you go back and review this long list of assertions from the government in this campaign in the last nine months, you find that the long list of assertions, actually, most of them are kind of pretty half-assed assertions.
They are.
They don't really add up to much at all, do they?
There's a two-level game going on here.
This is a very insidious propaganda methodology, I must say.
On one hand, the administration plants stories which clearly quote anonymous sources or quote somebody by name saying that they know Iran is involved, and then at the same time, they position themselves to defend against someone really challenging them, if one ever has the spine to do so, by saying, well, we're not really saying that.
All we're saying is that we have these weapons, and they come from Iran, and we want Iran to help stop them.
So they're basically on both sides of the issue.
It's a way of sort of covering themselves, because they know that they can't defend it.
One of the things you bring up in your article here is a British commander quoted last summer saying, and I remember this story too, I think, saying, oh, come on, we're doing a great job of securing the border with Iran.
We don't see anybody bringing weapons across here, and I thought that's really interesting that you bring that up, because what was he debunking?
If I remember right, this whole campaign of lies about Iran's behind the bombs that are killing our troops in Iraq actually got off to a false start in the beginning of 2006, and George Bush debuted this propaganda line back then, and then it kind of petered out, and they really started again with the rejection of the Baker report at the beginning of this year.
That's correct.
It was a halfhearted effort to raise this in early 2006, and then there was not really a decision made to have a committed propaganda campaign over it, and it didn't continue to develop.
What really happened here, and this is really the important point, and we can come back to the details of the campaign in a moment, but it's worthwhile to just pause and really understand the origin specifically of this whole campaign.
It was in September of 2006 that a few of the remaining neoconservatives in the administration, also aligned with Dick Cheney, put forward this idea within the administration that it's time to nail Iran.
The Quds Force in Iran is a dangerous outfit that they are endangering U.S. troops by bringing in EFPs, by bringing in other weapons, by basically associating themselves with the Shiite militias who are against the U.S. presence.
And of course, they also tied this in with the broader accusation that Iran was getting bolder in the Middle East, they were supporting Hamas, they were supporting Hezbollah, which had just fought a war against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
So there was an effort to tie together all three of these issues alongside the nuclear weapons, the alleged nuclear program for weapons purposes in Iran.
And what they wanted was to essentially, their objective ultimately was to get a determination that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was a terrorist organization and to ratchet the pressure for military action against Iran.
And so this was the origin of the policy of kill or capture of Iranians in Iraq, essentially, on the ground that they were associated with the Quds Force and with this alleged effort to kill Americans.
Now, as I've pointed out in previous articles, this was not a Bush administration-wide notion, this was carried forward by a very small group of people who represented the most extreme viewpoint, the most extreme policy position the administration associated with Cheney and Elliott Abrams, particularly.
And they won their point, they got Bush to agree to the kill or capture order against the desire of the State Department, the Defense Department, once Rumsfeld was gone, and perhaps even when Rumsfeld was still there, it might well be, as well as the intelligence community.
And they were all very concerned that this was simply a vehicle for the extremists in the administration to pave the way for war against Iran.
And there's a wonderful quote by a senior intelligence analyst who told a Washington Post reporter, Dafna Linzer, really the best reporter covering this issue in the press today, that this had very little to do with Iraq, in fact, it was all political, it was a way of pushing Iran's buttons, it was a way of hoping to provoke Iran.
A nice little recap there, that we've known that this is all BS from the get-go, and it's been nothing but BS all along, and in fact, you even quote here the national intelligence estimate put out by the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community leaders all come together and write these national intelligence estimates, and you quote this thing came out February 2nd, saying, oh, come on, Iran, yeah, they have some influence, but they're not the determining factor in anything that's going on there.
The CIA and the rest of them debunking these lies in real time, basically.
Well, absolutely, I think the right-wingers, the extreme right in the administration were, of course, they know the intelligence community is a problem for them.
What they wanted was to get some kind of endorsement of the line that the Quds Force was pushing EFPs to the Shiite militias, to the Mahdi army, and that they were directly involved in these other ways of assisting the Shiite militias.
The intelligence community, of course, rebuffed the overall line that there was a proxy war going on.
They basically denied that very explicitly in their statement, saying that essentially the outside actors, quote, are not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq's internal sectarian dynamics.
And then there was a formula with the term lethal assistance by Iran, which I've talked to more than one former intelligence analyst who was involved in the writing of national intelligence estimates, which inevitably involved some negotiations, and they said this is undoubtedly a formula that covered differences among intelligence agencies, some of whom wanted to support the right-wing line within the administration, but others who were skeptical of it and refused to go along with it.
There are a number of issues which are conflated here, whether the aid is direct or indirect, whether it's in the form of finance or not.
When it comes right down to it, the administration is really arguing, this is another fundamental point that I address in my piece, the administration is really saying that even if all of this is being done by Hezbollah, then it's really Iran.
This is obviously one of the issues that was being argued about within the intelligence community.
Can you really say that this is Iranian if it's being done by Hezbollah?
Right.
Well, I guess that's the question.
Most people don't know too much about Hezbollah.
Is it the case that Hezbollah is simply a proxy army of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps?
Well, we know enough about Hezbollah to know that they have their own base of support within Lebanon, that they have received aid from Iran, but that they don't necessarily check with Iran in terms of everything that they do.
If you go back to last year's conflict with Israel, despite the fact that Israel insisted that the war began because of the seizure of two Israeli troops in the border zone between Israel and Lebanon, and that this was really ordered by Iran, there's plenty of evidence that Hezbollah did that on their own without any prompting from Iran.
In fact, Iran probably did not want that to happen for the simple reason that a war between Israel and Hezbollah, in which Israel would obviously target all those Katyusha rockets and other long-range mortars and rockets that Hezbollah had, would weaken the overall Hezbollah rocket force and therefore weaken the Iranian deterrent against Israel and the United States.
I mean, this to me is prima facie evidence that Hezbollah takes actions independently without being either forced to do so or asked to do so by Iran, or even necessarily consulting with Iran.
And now, speaking of rockets, this is the new one.
Here on Antiwar Radio, we don't debunk these lies in real time, we debunk them ahead of time.
This is the next propaganda line coming down the pipe, is forget about the EFPs, okay, you caught us, there's been four dozen reports of EFP factories found in Iraq, and no evidence really linking Iran to any of them.
But nope, next, they got these new fancy rockets, Gareth Porter, and those must be coming from Iran.
Well, of course, you know, I wish we were able to anticipate these things, but in fact, this has already taken shape in the propaganda line of the administration.
They've been talking about this now for months, in fact.
It has not been pinpointed by the antiwar community sufficiently.
Or really by the war party, it's not something that they really emphasized, I don't think, as much as the roadside bombs.
That's probably still true, that it hasn't achieved the prominence that the EFPs always had since the beginning of the year.
But in any case, they have in fact begun to talk about 240 millimeter rockets as the new evidence of a proxy war by Iran in Iraq.
And the argument is that when the Mahdi Army units began to use these larger, longer range rockets, they have a range of about 25 miles, and they're much more accurate than the rockets that had been used previously against coalition or U.S. forces in Iraq, many of which, most of which simply fell short or were just very far from the target.
Now they're getting to the point where they can actually have a fairly high rate of success in hitting targets right in the green zone, and so the Americans now are quite upset about this.
And of course, they are saying that this is all happening because Iran made the decision to escalate the war in Iraq and to put more pressure on the United States.
This obviously, again, represents a series of suppositions, and I won't go through every one of those suppositions that makes it up.
But clearly, they are making assumptions that the Mahdi Army militias cannot have their own strategy and their own reasons for doing things, and that everything is checked with the Iranians.
And that, in my view, is sheer stupidity.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all.
All the evidence that I have seen, some of which I cite in this article, indicates that no Iranian officials have any direct contact with the Shiite militias.
They have stayed clear of any direct contact.
There are undoubtedly some Iranians who have been remaining in Iraq.
I think that they're there for intelligence purposes.
I mean, Iran needs intelligence, and they've undoubtedly got lots and lots of people there who are spying for them.
But they are not assisting, advising, helping the Mahdi Army or other Shiite militias on a day-to-day basis, or even keeping in touch with them from time to time.
Their closest allies are the United Iraqi Alliance, the majority in the government, right?
Again, that's a point that you've made before, and I completely agree.
It's interesting, but one of the ironies of this is that the Iranian anti-government Iranian resistance organization, the NCRI, associated with the MEK, has put out a press release in which they claim that they have a Quds Force document, which lists something like 11,000-some names of Badr Brigade personnel whose salaries or whose wages are paid by the Iranians, by the Quds Force.
Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but it rings true, because they have been so close to Iran.
They came into Iraq in 2003, along with Iranian helpers originally, and they definitely have been on the payroll.
There's no question about it.
The point being that the one case we do know about, we have reason to believe is accurate, that the Quds Force has had direct relationships with a Shiite militia organization.
It's the one that's been cooperating with the United States.
What's the name of that group again, the Front for the MEK?
The NCRI, the National Committee for Resistance in Iran, I believe it is.
In Scott Ritter's book, Target Iran, he describes their close relationship with the Israeli Mossad when they came out, and they uncovered some secret things about Iran's nuclear program, not that it was illegal under the IAEA statutes or safeguards agreements that they had it secret, but this group did actually uncover or reveal some secret things about Iran's nuclear program, and Scott Ritter reports that that information really came from the Mossad.
I believe that is absolutely correct, and this point is confirmed in a recently published book called The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran by two Israelis, one a journalist and one a consultant, in which they essentially cite an anonymous Israeli intelligence source as confirming that the NCRI did get the information from Israeli intelligence, and it was basically a way of laundering the story so that it wouldn't be attributed to Israel, and also boost the credibility of this Iranian anti-government organization, which it has done.
They've been very successful in that.
It's been getting the full credit for that ever since, and it has received undeserved credibility because of that.
It makes me curious as to whether this leak of this information that you're talking about bringing up today here, about the list of members of the Badr brigades in Iraq who are still on the payroll of the Iranians, makes me wonder whether that's part of this larger redirection against Iranian influence.
That story is a very old story, which is why I think it's probably got some truth to it.
It was originally put out in 2005 as part of a broader story about Iranian influence in Iraq, which was by Michael Ware, then writing for Time magazine.
It was based on a series of documents that somehow or other U.S. military intelligence had allegedly gotten their hands on.
It had a little bit more credibility than the stuff that we're talking about right now, where they have absolutely nothing of that sort to suggest that they can base their propaganda line on.
Right.
Really, we need to move on to the evolution of the jargon, and I hope that people's eyes don't glaze over because it's so important you have this other article about the infighting within the administration and the different steps on the ladder, the different rungs on the ladder, and the different political newspeak terms that define them.
But really quickly, I want to again recommend to everyone, if you just go to the viewpoint section today at antiwar.com, you can find Gareth Porter's article in the Huffington Post.
It's on After Downing Street and on Alternet, and it just absolutely debunks the Lieberman-Kyle bill one by one by one by one.
If you were to go to talk to your congressman about your concerns about war with Iran, you might bring this with you.
This is the ultimate crib sheet for what the Cheney cabal says about Iran's influence currently in Iraq.
It just doesn't hold water.
The one problem I have, Scott, and I just want to briefly insert this, with that document is that originally I had all the hyperlinks, the links to the original sources for each one of these points where they were online, there were a couple of exceptions, and somehow or other those hyperlinks got dropped by the Huffington Post.
I was told that they would be restored, but as far as I know, they still have not been restored to the piece, and I guess that means that you don't have the hyperlinks in yours either.
No.
In fact, the antiwar.com link today is to the Alternet version.
But I do have the hyperlinks, and I'm still looking for a way to get those out, so stand by.
Maybe we can work something out through antiwar.com.
Yeah, that's what I was just saying.
If you have the original file, maybe we can figure out a way to change the link for the rest of the day today or something like that.
I can't promise.
We'll work on that.
We'll definitely work on that if possible.
And of course, you can always read all of Gareth Porter's IPS stuff at antiwar.com.
And that includes this next article, Have the Hawks Won a Round on Iraq Escalation.
And you've got to say this in an interesting way, because the topic is a change of terminology about who's seeking what sort of dominance in the Middle East and what this means in terms of technicalities for pushing us toward a war with Iran.
Gareth Porter, what?
Right.
This is a very strange, very unusual, and very difficult story to get across for the following reasons.
I had an interview, which I have to tell you, this is the first time since I've begun writing on Iraq and Iran that I have had an interview with someone in a position to speak as a quote senior government official, unquote.
I mean, it is somebody in a position to know the inside dope on what the policy makers are thinking.
And I will say it was a he.
I mean, I've tried to use gender neutral terminology in my article, but I will try to take the shorthand here.
He basically told me that the administration policy makers had concluded that these 240 millimeter rocket attacks represented a decisive change, a new stage of the war.
It was a new dynamic, as he called it, in the Iraq war, and that it represented an effort by Iran to basically change the rules, to escalate the war, and as he put it, to achieve escalation dominance in Iraq, in the Iraq war.
Now this is a very politically charged thing to suggest, to use that term escalation dominance, and to attribute that aim to Iran in the Iraq war is a very provocative thing to suggest.
Sounds a little bit like Freudian projection.
Well it does, and of course that's because escalation dominance is an Air Force term essentially, which has been used military-wide by the United States for many years now.
It means that the United States can use its strategic superiority in air power, essentially to threaten overwhelming destruction against any other state entity that is in a position otherwise to escalate in a conflict with the United States, to take an escalatory action.
So it's basically a way of saying the United States can always have escalation dominance because we can always threaten total destruction of the other side.
Now they're saying Iran is trying to achieve escalation dominance, but then they redefine it to say that escalation dominance means that you can set the pace, control the pace, of escalation.
I mean that's a very interesting observation.
I mean if we're to take this seriously, and I must say I struggled over this for days before I decided to go with the article, to try to figure out, is this really serious?
Is this really a conclusion that U.S. policymakers have made, or am I being fed a line for propaganda purposes?
I finally decided to go with the story because I decided that it probably does represent the viewpoint of the dominant strain of thinking in the administration right now.
And so what they're suggesting here is that really the Shiite militias kind of have us over a barrel.
They can in fact control the pace of escalation simply by hitting a few targets in the green zone.
We're at their mercy.
That is to say the folks in the green zone, the people who are controlling the war on the American side, are at the mercy of these Shiite militiamen.
And what that suggests in turn of course to me is that this is a signal that there is a lot of discussion right now about what we're going to do to respond to this alleged bid by Iran, but of course it's not Iran, it's the Shiites inside Iraq that are doing it, to achieve this escalation dominance.
Okay, so let me understand here.
Part of the Cheney-Kabal's escalation of the attempt, basically, the end run to force this country into a war one way or another, part of this is now redefining what America perceives as Iran's posture in Iraq so that they can justify ratcheting up our so-called response to that.
That is my interpretation of this very arcane use of jargon, as you rightly put it.
That this is a signal that there is discussion within the administration of further escalation, and that escalation really can only take the form of geographical broadening of the war into Iran, because really there's not much else militarily that the United States military can do inside Iraq.
They're very limited in what they can do.
These rockets can be set up in a few minutes, and they're fired, and then they're gone.
It's not easy to stop them at all.
And that's why I think they say that the Shiites can control the pace of escalation.
They have an instrument here, an escalation that's very difficult for the United States to respond to.
Now, I make the point that this reinforces or really strengthens the case that there is a discussion going on with the administration about widening the war into Iran, which was represented by Petraeus' interview with Brit Hume on September 9th, I believe it was, in which Brit Hume, who seemed to have been tipped off to ask this question of Petraeus, essentially fished for Petraeus to say that he was unable to deal with the problem of the Shiite militias inside Iraq, that his forces inside Iraq could not do it.
And Petraeus sort of fended him off once, and then when he pressed him again, Petraeus made a statement that hinted that there was discussion of widening the war to Iran, saying that if he felt that he couldn't handle it inside Iraq, he would go to his boss, meaning Bush, and that in fact there had been a lot of hard look at the situation in that regard.
So this is another signal of the discussion of options for widening the war by going into Iran.
Well, and it brings up the question, too, of basically having to start the Iraq war all over again in the event of war with Iran.
We see somewhat of a redirection and alliance with the former Baathist terrorist dead-ender Sunni insurgency, who are now the good guys.
Do you think that we're stepping towards a recognition that, look, if we're going to have a war with Iran, we have to get all our guys up in Kurdistan and in the Anbar province away from the Shiite militias, whose leadership at least have already vowed publicly to rise up and fight the American occupation of Iraq in the event of an American war against Iran?
Well, that certainly has to be one of the fears, one of the possible threats that U.S. military has to consider in attacking Iran, in any way, shape, or form.
Do you think that that's part of the consideration into these new charges of Iran's attempt to dominate the region and so forth, as they're going to now paint the purple finger Iraqi government as all a bunch of Iranian agents in recognition that they're going to have basically another full-scale war on their hands in the south of Iraq if they bomb Iran?
Is that part of this whole picture?
Well, it's very difficult to project how they're going to handle, how they would handle, politically, the problem of widening the war into Iran.
There's no doubt that it would cause very severe problems, not just in terms of the Mahdi army in southern Iraq, but also with the Maliki government itself.
I mean, let's face it, the Maliki is closer to Iran than it is to the United States.
And there's no doubt that that would be a factor in the politics of the Iranian government in its relationship to the United States and to all of the factions inside Iraq.
But exactly how that plays out, who knows?
I mean, you know, there's of course the factor of dependence as well in the part of Maliki, dependence on the United States.
And so all of these things are highly, you know, very difficult to predict how it plays out.
All right, now we're already really up against the time wall, but I don't think there's another show up next.
So we'll see how long we can get away with staying over time.
But I wanted to try to end this interview today on somewhat of a positive note.
I spoke with Steve Clemons and also with Joe Cirincione, and both of them seem to think that Bush is not completely won over on starting this war yet and that there's still a possibility to stop it.
And I read a little something about Admiral Fallon attempting to, he's the head of CENTCOM, attempting to make an agreement with the Iranians, an incidents at sea agreement.
Is this the professional military attempting to head off the Cheney crew?
Well, of course, I wrote a story, as I know you recall, last May in which I quoted Fallon as saying that there wouldn't be war against Iran on his watch.
And I think that he is definitely, as a Navy man, acutely aware of the insanity of any attack on Iran, any provocation of war with Iran.
The U.S. Navy would be the first military victim of such a war, at least arguably they stand the most to lose because their ships are so vulnerable there in the Persian Gulf to Iranian retaliation.
Iran does in fact have the weapons that can very easily reach U.S. ships, and Fallon is unquestionably aware of that.
This is apart from his other reasons for being opposed to the policy of provocation against Iran.
So I have no doubt that Fallon and the U.S. Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are all very much opposed to this.
In fact, Joe Klein has reported that Bush put the question to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a few months ago, and that they unanimously opposed any military action against Iran.
I think that is a fairly well-established fact, and that is a cause for some hope, although admittedly a slender one.
It is not sufficient in itself that the military leadership opposes the policy.
We know that Bush simply got rid of the military leaders when he wanted to escalate U.S. involvement in Iraq.
And so that by itself is not a sufficient basis for being assured that the war can't take place.
It seems like the American politicians, they just don't care what kind of supermajority is opposed to this war of the policy.
The Democrats don't seem to understand or don't care that the reason that their poll numbers in Congress are so low is because they refuse to stand up to the President on anything.
And it really doesn't seem to matter that the American people by substantial majorities turned out a year ago to throw the Republicans out of the House and the Senate and turn the Congress over to the Democrats to try to perform some sort of check on these people.
You and I talk about this on the show every week, Gareth Porter, but what's an American to do to try to stop the war with Iran?
Well, that is the question of the hour, and I think we need to focus on that every time we talk.
I've been on four different radio shows, this is the fifth in the last 24 hours.
And each time the question has come up, you know, is this war inevitable with Iran?
I mean, there is a mood that's creeping across the country that's gone very far already, I'm afraid, that represents a feeling.
A deep feeling that war is inevitable.
A large part of this, I'm sorry to say, is created by the extreme rights grip on news media, particularly Fox News, which deliberately broadcast that message that war with Iran is inevitable.
There's nothing to be done.
It's going to happen.
And so that accounts for at least part of this mood.
But it also, you know, has penetrated the activist community to a certain degree, or at least the community of those people who are very much opposed to war with Iran.
And therefore, it represents a very serious danger, because it can be disabling, it can shut down what would otherwise be the energy that's required at this very moment in history to take action.
And I've said this before, I think the action that needs to be taken is to take the facts in hand about the lies that are being told by the administration, and take them to members of Congress, along with the message that that senator or congressman will not get the vote of the person making the contact, that they will vote against that person, the next opportunity will not be forgotten, and that they will organize to defeat that person next time around, if that person does not act now, to anticipate, to oppose in anticipation, the threat of war against Iran.
It's no good to wait until the declaration of war or the effective equivalent of that is carried out by the administration, then it's too late.
It has to be done now.
And that's the message that I will continue to repeat.
Well, and this is why I keep bringing you on this show, too, is because, as you've so accurately and eloquently illustrated, unlike myself, today, the premise of all the arguments about Iran, the premises of all the arguments about Iran are false, all of them.
And if you have a congressman who's as informed as the average Fox News viewer, and accepts all the government's assertions, all the executive branch's assertions about what's going on in Iraq and how much of it Iran's responsible for and to what degree and in which direction, et cetera, then they're going to support this.
And I wonder if, I doubt it would do any good, and I think probably my congressman Lloyd Doggett's on the right side of this issue anyway, but I wonder if people can just, one at a time even, if they can't even organize and bring someone with them, I wonder if just one at a time, if people could just make appointments to meet with their local member of the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, and go in there and say, look, I've got these five or ten articles here that really seem to undercut what the administration's saying here, and try to educate these congressmen.
I'm getting the idea more and more that these congressmen know less about what's going on around here than I do.
Oh, absolutely.
They know nothing.
They're blank slates, with very, very few exceptions.
They're blank slates.
They have no knowledge whatsoever, and you have to begin with that as the premise.
So, education is good, but then it has to be linked with some consequences.
It has to be linked with the threat that there will be consequences for this member, unless the member takes a proactive action now on this issue, which is arguably the most serious issue facing the United States in the next several years.
This is how the system is supposed to work under the U.S. Constitution.
That's why there are 435 tiny little house districts across these 50 states, and why their election is every two years, so that the people can go to their congressman and say, look, pal, you're going to do it this way, not that way, and win, and get it their way.
I'd like to point out that in the Constitution, all bills of revenue generation and appropriation must originate in the House of Representatives.
So, if you have a Ron Paul for House Speaker, then that's it, and it can be done.
That is really the only way that the American people can affect their governments through the House of Representatives.
I guess the people out there can just form Alabamians for peace with Iran, or a deal with Iran, and form a little group, and go meet with your congressman, educate him and threaten him.
I don't know what else to do except to interview you all the time.
Educate him and threaten him.
I think that's exactly the right formula.
Well, I'm here to tell all you folks in the audience, if you mean to go educate and threaten your congressman's career, educate his head and threaten his career, you could not do better than to go through the archives of Gareth Porter at antiwar.com/porter at the Huffington Post, at the American Prospect, and cram your head full of facts, bring down as a crib sheet his most recent blog entry at the Huffington Post, debunking detail by detail the recent Lieberman resolution passed in the Senate, making all these false accusations against Iran.
You could not have a better source for doing that job than the work of Gareth Porter, investigative journalist, independent historian, and contributor to antiwar.com.
Thank you again very much for your time today, Gareth.
Thanks so much, Scott.
I'm glad to be here.