Welcome back to Anti-War Radio and Chaos Radio 95-9927 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
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Next up, Mark Danner.
He is a writer for the New York Review of Books and is the author of the book The Secret Way to War, the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq Wars Buried History.
And Bush's Faith Run Over by History is the title it got on antiwar.com.
And I think in the New York Review of Books, it's called The President at Peace with Himself.
Oh, how nice.
Mark Danner, are you there, sir?
Yes, I am.
All right.
Welcome to show.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
Well, very interesting.
Interesting article.
And so glad you picked up on what seemed like a breaking news story for a day and then disappeared.
The transcript of George Bush's conversation with the prime minister of Spain about a month before the war started in 2003.
It looked as if this would cause a bit of news and be picked up by major news outlets.
But as it turned out, it was pretty much ignored.
The New York Review of Books, where it's being published in full, the Crawford memorandum, because it is a verbatim transcript of a conversation between Prime Minister Aznar of Spain and George W. Bush, took place, as you say, about a month before the Iraq War began at the end of February 2003.
There was an interesting window into where the president was in thinking about the coming war at that time and where the Europeans were, represented by then prime minister Aznar.
He since, of course, has been defeated in large part as a consequence of his support for the Iraq War.
And now, you know, we were just talking about on the show before I brought you on the headline.
It was not on the front page of the Austin American Statesman today, but it is at the top of the page at antiwar.com.
Bush's threat that if Iran gains nuclear weapons, which apparently he's trying to make us believe is something that's going to happen any day now, that it could cause World War Three.
And I was reminded of that when I first got to the, I guess it's in the first paragraph of your article there, where you talk about there's two different narratives about American foreign policy.
One of them is about what's going on in the world, and the other one is this land of make believe where the president lives and where apparently the 24% who still approve of his job performance, where they are.
It's an unreality, it seems like, a made-up comic book world where, you know, belief makes things true after the fact and stuff.
Well, there's an interesting aspect of authority in the United States, which is that if the president says it, it will get reported.
So that even as assertions over the years become more and more threadbare, it becomes clear that the facts are on the other side.
The assertions continue and continue to be reported just by the nature of how our journalism works.
A good example is we do not torture, as the president says again and again.
As the information has grown, beginning with Abu Ghraib, which is now more than three years ago, that the United States indeed does use torture, does use techniques in interrogation that by any reasonable measure and any reasonable use of the word do constitute torture.
We have this gathering of facts on one side where we know exactly what's going on, and on the other side you have this continual assertion by people in power led by the president that we don't do it.
And it continues to be reported in the press because it is the official word.
Similarly, with what's reported and said about the Iraq war and its beginnings, we see a gathering pile of evidence, not least the Downing Street memo about which I wrote a book a couple of years ago, The Secret Way to War, and now the Crawford memo, which will be in the current New York Review of Books, which show that at least a month before the war, in the case of Downing Street, eight months before the war, it was absolutely clear on the part of leaders of the administration that war was inevitable, that this whole UN process that they put in place was simply a way to help out the Europeans with their public opinion, because in Europe the war was very unpopular.
So the Bush administration acceded to Tony Blair, then prime minister of the United Kingdom, and acceded to Prime Minister Aznar in Spain and went to the UN for a blessing of the war.
But they really didn't want to do that.
And we see in the Crawford memo, a month before the war, prime minister Aznar pleading for the president to have a little patience, quote, unquote, and Bush essentially saying, hey, we're ready to go, my patience has run out, he says literally, the DOM has to go.
This is a month earlier, and he's completely essentially saying, you know, these inspections don't matter a damn, you know, it would be good if we could get a resolution, if we don't, that's okay, too.
Where as soon as the soldiers are in place, as soon as everything is ready militarily, we are going in.
And it's a fascinating look inside what was actually going on, at the same time as all of the news stories were saying, will we or will we not get a resolution, will there or will there not be war.
In the Council of Power, there was simply nothing ambiguous about what was about to happen.
The transcript shows this very, very clearly.
It also shows Bush's personality, I think, very, very clearly.
Blustery, threatening, it's fascinating just to see him operating in private.
Right.
I want to play for you a clip to coincide with what you're saying there about the UN resolution and all that was basically cover for the Europeans for an inevitable war.
I don't know if you've ever heard this clip, but it's from a movie, a new movie called World War IV, a letter to the president by Don Craven, Jr.
And this guy got the best sound bites of Michael Ledeen that a libertarian could ever hope for.
Take a listen to this, Mark.
It was the diplomatic fig leaf.
Basically what happened was that foreign leaders, above all, Blair, were told by their lawyers that if they went to war alongside us in Iraq without a United Nations resolution, they could later be prosecuted as war criminals.
So that's why we went to the UN, and that's why the WMDs became the central issue in the diplomatic run-up to the war.
So there you go.
It was...
Yeah, I think that's, but, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, we don't need Mr. Ledeen to tell us that.
We've got Bush telling us that, you know, in this particular transcript and elsewhere, and in Downing Street where you have Prime Minister Blair saying it in the Downing Street memo.
So the idea that this is still debatable, of course, is not supported by the facts at all.
Well, it goes to that other narrative.
The other narrative, which, as you say, and I agree 100 percent, has no relationship to reality.
The narrative is, well, the CIA gave George Bush bad intelligence.
He operated on good faith, and the CIA blew it.
And everybody knows that.
How dare you accuse the president of being a liar, Mr. Danner?
Yeah, well, that's the...
Of course, the strategy when the weapons refused to show up was essentially to blame the CIA.
And there's a long story associated with that in which the administration began to blame Tennant in the already in the early summer of 2003.
You have a lot of leaks from the CIA in answer to that during the campaign of 2004.
I mean, there's a long story of tensions between the administration and the CIA that partly results from the fact that essentially the administration forced the agency, or strongly encouraged the agency, to come up with intelligence that would support the war.
And then when the weapons were not found, essentially blamed the agency for supplying them with bad intelligence.
So they essentially blamed the war on intelligence.
They insisted be politicized in the first place.
And, you know, not surprisingly, the agency wasn't too happy being put in that position.
In the run-up to the war, it was, look, we have secret intelligence.
We have the CIA.
We have the greatest intelligence capability in the whole world.
Trust us.
We have secret information that you don't know about.
And they made it out to where American intelligence, these guys are a bunch of Nietzschean supermen, and then they turn right around and say, oh, it's all their fault.
They blew it.
Yes, exactly.
And then they used that to further screw the CIA and create the national intelligence director and take the director of the CIA's authority over the other intelligence agencies away.
Well, you know, to be fair, that whole idea came from the 9-11 Commission.
The administration was somewhat ambivalent about doing that.
And, you know, I think that was a kind of dumb idea.
Many of the administration agreed.
But politically speaking, they were forced into it when it came to the 9-11 Commission and the other recommendations they made.
And that was a major one to essentially create yet another layer of bureaucracy above the CIA, which they have done.
And now in your Article II, you go back to George Bush, the man before he was the president of America.
And you bring up a case of when he was at the Texas Rangers where the Hicks brothers from Clear Channel basically just gave him ownership of the Texas Rangers, part ownership of the Texas Rangers.
It was him versus everybody, and he was wrong, and yet insisted in the same language we hear from him today, history will prove that I was right.
I think the quote is, I went down in flames, but history will prove that I was right.
Yes, actually, that quotation is used in the introduction to my piece as it appeared on tomdispatch.com, which is one of the blogs or the blog that distributed it before its publication in the New York Review of Books.
So that is a quotation used by Tom Englehart.
But I think it does point out an interesting aspect to what George W. Bush conceived of as effective leadership, which is really one of the subjects treated in my essay.
You know, the most interesting exchange, I think, in his discussion with Prime Minister Aznar, is near the end of the transcript.
Aznar says to him, you know, the only thing that worries me about you is your optimism, which is an amusing observation, some sort of European irony there.
Yeah, that was my favorite quote out of the whole thing, actually.
And Bush responds, I'm optimistic because I'm sure that I'm right.
I'm at peace with myself.
Yeah, this is the guy that traded away Sammy Sosa, right?
Well, exactly.
I don't know if I'd compare it to trading Sammy Sosa, but I suppose one could.
But the interesting aspect of this to me is that his response is, I'm optimistic because I'm sure.
But it doesn't really have to do with facts at all.
I mean, they're talking, the immediate topic at this point that Aznar is referring to is the chance of getting a second UN resolution, a resolution from the Security Council that would essentially say, you, the United States, and the coalition are empowered to use all necessary means to get rid of Saddam, which would constitute an international blessing on the Iraq War, giving it international legitimacy and essentially making the war legal, which is what Aznar, Tony Blair, and the other allies of the United States were desperate to get because it would turn the war from an American, quote, aggression to an internationally blessed multilateral, legitimate undertaking.
For the record, it would still be illegal.
Only Congress can declare war.
But I understand what you're saying.
International law.
Well, obviously one could debate this.
But what Aznar and Tony Blair and others wanted was an international blessing.
And it was very important to them because of their public opinion, as Aznar says in the discussion.
And Bush says, you know, I'm optimistic because I'm sure I'm right and I'm sure that we're going to get the second resolution.
And, of course, they don't get the second resolution because it's not enough to be sure you're right.
You have to actually know things.
You have to know what the state of public opinion is in the particular countries.
You have to know how much leverage you have with those particular countries given another fascinating passage.
That Bush sort of blusters about how, you know, Chile has to know that the free trade agreement is on the table and that could be delayed.
Angola has to know that the millennium account from which they draw money, that could be blocked.
Russia has to know that the relations with the United States are at stake.
I mean, he blusters and makes all these threats that that is going to change votes.
And he's certain that the United States is so powerful that it can actually, by threatening countries, make the vote go a different way.
And in the event, of course, no one changed their vote.
The United States and its allies did not get the second resolution.
The war was prosecuted without U.N. blessing.
And one of the consequences of that was the United States and its allies were very much isolated because the war had no international legitimacy.
So even though he was optimistic, he was sure he was right.
In fact, he was wrong.
And it's an interesting, it sheds interesting light on the other things he says during this discussion among them.
You know, things are going to go very well.
The occupation is very well planned.
We have this great plan in place, et cetera, et cetera.
And when you look at what's actually going on, as he's saying that, the planning for the occupation is a complete shamble.
It's essentially paralyzed because of the inter-nesting warfare between the Pentagon and the State Department.
They never, the administration never makes up its mind what kind of post-war governance to install in Iraq.
The whole thing was an incredible bureaucratic mess.
I mean, almost unbelievable.
And, you know, this is going on even as the president is saying everything's going well, which he apparently believes.
The real thing here is that, okay, you know, we all understand that the president's got a pretty low IQ and that he goes with his gut and he's sure he's right and that kind of thing.
Well, I don't agree with that, I should say.
I don't think he does have a pretty low IQ.
Really?
I think he's a fairly intelligent man.
Oh, wow.
You might be the first person I've ever spoken with who thought that.
Well, you know, it depends what kind of intelligence we're talking about.
I mean, I think he's perfectly able to analyze things.
Well, he's unable to learn a lesson, is my point.
Here he is, sure about everything, and everything he's ever sure about doesn't come true, and yet he's still sure about the next thing.
And he never seems to be able to learn the lesson that, wow, just because I'm sure about something, don't necessarily make it right.
That's very true.
That sounds pretty known to me, Mark.
Yeah, and he remains, you know, when you look at his current attitude toward the war, and he remains confident and sure.
It is clear that he thinks leadership really is the question of, as he put it at some other point, putting calcium in the backbone of the government, that his job is really to set out a clear, strong position and convince the rest of the government and convince the country that that position is right.
Well, didn't he tell his biographer, Draper, I can never have any question about my decision because if I do, I might reveal that, I might actually, you know, accidentally betray myself to others around me that I have doubts, and then if they see that I have doubts, then they'll begin to have doubts.
And as though it is simply the matter of how positive he is about everything is what makes the world go round, not actual things.
Yeah, I think that's true.
It's interesting.
I think when you look at his biography in the broad sense, I think the most interesting item on it is the fact that he was a cheerleader at Andover because it's clear that one of the things that's absolutely essential to his view of what his job is and what his function is is that of a cheerleader, is that of rallying the troops, rallying support, and as you say, never showing any doubt about what course should be taken and what the result will be.
And the problem is that on, you know, the less public side of his job when it comes to actually knowing what's going on within the government, gathering and analyzing information, making decisions based on a clear knowledge of everything the government knows, he seems completely unable to do that.
In fact, the tendency in this administration seems to be to limit rather severely what information is available rather than to gather everything they need.
And the Iraq War is a very good example of that.
There was plenty of information about, you know, the situation within Iraq from within the government and from the UN, from other places.
But the ruling group within the government, led by Bush, essentially closed themselves off from much of it, you know, made a real decision not to rely on the State Department, for example, because they felt that they, that, you know, the State Department as an agency was hostile to the idea of war with Iraq, which of course is true.
But nonetheless, it was the part of the government with the CIA that knew the most about what was going on within the country.
And they made a conscious decision when setting up the occupation authority not to use those people, which is to say, you know, it's almost as if you want to make a decision, but you think, oh, no, it's too complicated to take all these other things into account.
I just won't think about them.
And of course, it might make it easier to make a decision, but it also makes it more likely that your decision is not going to be the right one because you've closed off sources of information.
Now I wanted to finish this quote here.
You mentioned where the Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, said to George Bush, the only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.
And Bush responds, I'm an optimist because I believe that I'm right.
I'm at peace with myself.
It's up to us to face a serious threat to peace.
And now this is to me just the kicker, maybe the killer.
It annoys me to no end, George Bush said, to contemplate the insensitivity of the Europeans toward the suffering Saddam Hussein inflicts on the Iraqis, perhaps because he's dark, far away and a Muslim.
Many Europeans think that everything is fine with him, as though it's racism on the part of the Europeans that is delaying their effort to get on board for his war, their intransigence to obey him.
And he's the one who is the Mr. Enlightenment principles over here, who loves the Iraqi people so much he's going to bomb them.
This isn't just the kind of crap he tells us on TV, this is the kind of stuff he says to other politicians behind closed doors.
Wow.
Yeah, it is remarkable.
There is a sense in which those lines are very much kind of neo-conservative boilerplate that essentially the willingness of Europeans to leave Saddam in power, or to put it another way, the unwillingness to go to war against him, to remove him, really results from a kind of entrenched racism in Europe.
And I think one of the amusing parts about that sentence, which seems to have been taken whole cloth from the American enterprise and Peter, but probably Paul Wolfowitz, one of the amusing things about it is, you know, Saddam is far away, you know, there's a basic geographical problem there in that the Europeans happen to be 3,000 odd or 4,000 odd miles closer to Saddam than the United States is.
And he's very much within their range, and he's far away from us, so reading it the first time I kind of laughed that, oh, he's far away, it doesn't matter, you know, the United States is far away.
And to the point, though, that's why it's okay for Americans to slaughter Arabs, is because they're dark and because they're far away.
I mean, that's really what he's doing.
This is like a Freudian slip.
That's why it's okay for him to mass murder them, is what he's really saying.
Well, I don't know that I would interpret it that way.
I think, you know, one of the things that this transcript reveals is that some of the things that sound like propaganda, like that statement you just read, he seemed to take on board as his own, you know, this moral righteousness about saving the Iraqis from themselves and looking at the Europeans as these kind of old-line racists, you know, the corrupt old world.
I mean, this way of thinking about Europe is very entrenched in the history of American foreign policy.
I mean, Bush isn't the first one to talk this way.
And as I say, part of it is that this is a bit of boilerplate concerning Iraq and the Europeans that the neoconservatives used throughout.
You know, another variation of this is saying, well, you know, if you express any doubt that Iraq is going to immediately, after an American attack, become a flourishing democracy, because I had got in these arguments, many of them publicly, before the war, when I debated the war, if you expressed any doubt that that miraculous transformation was going to happen overnight, if you were debating with a neoconservative, they would immediately essentially accuse you of being a racist and say, well, why can't Arabs become Democrats?
You just think that because they're Arabs, they can't become Democrats, which, of course, you know, Jim Woolsey, among other people, said this to me in a public setting in New York, and, of course, I had said nothing of the kind.
I, you know, think it's quite possible for Arabs to have been a democratic regime.
There's nothing stopping them.
The question is, you know, what place and what organization of political power is most likely to quickly become a democracy, and Iraq would not have been my first choice because of that Saddam was essentially an expression of a political dysfunction, not the cause of it.
The idea of simply removing him, that everything would be fine, struck me as ridiculous.
Didn't Condoleezza Rice even invoke Rosa Parks?
Like, you're the kind of people who want to keep Rosa Parks at the back of the bus if you're not for this war?
I don't remember her saying that.
She may have, but I don't remember that quote.
Well, I'll have to find my footnote.
Listen, I want to move on here to the exile.
There was an opportunity for Saddam Hussein to go into exile, and this is the thing that is just making my blood boil today, Mark Danner, is because we see, well, for example, there was that great article in McLean's about how Bush became the new Saddam, and the redirection against the Iranian backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and Dahua Party government, the Maliki government we've been backing, and, again, toward the Baathist, the redirection toward the Baathist, and as he pointed out in his interview with Charles Goya, this is the Baathist strategy.
This is the Saddam Hussein strategy, oppress the Kurds in cooperation with the Turks, limit the influence of Iran with the Shia in the south, and fight religious radical Sunnis.
That's what we're doing now, redirecting toward the Baathists, and here it turns out that they had the opportunity to let Saddam Hussein leave the country and to do, basically, an orderly coup d'etat and keep the Baathists in power, were they to save a million lives.
Yeah, well, this is, of course, what the Americans wanted to do in the first George Bush administration.
You know, Brent Scowcroft, who was George H.W. Bush's national security adviser, has been quoted in an interview during the 90s, I believe, essentially saying that what they were hoping, what that administration was hoping was that there would be a coup d'etat against Saddam that would remove him, but would leave the essential power structure, which was, as you say, Sunni Baathists, in place.
And that had been the preference of the United States, that the thing would stay stable, but you would get rid of Saddam himself and hope that he was replaced by a more palatable, if you want to put it that way, government.
In the end, George H.W. Bush's son adopted a kind of revolutionary approach, let's just kick the whole thing down, let's dissolve the army, let's kick the Baathists out of the ministries, et cetera, and put in train what Ryan Crocker, the current ambassador in Baghdad, U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, called a revolution.
And I think that is indeed what was begun there.
And I think you're quite right in what you say, that now another policy has been adopted, you can call it a redirection or whatever, in which the U.S. has now gravitated much more toward the Sunni side, supporting, as always, our old allies in the Gulf, from the Saudis to the Jordanians and others, who are these old Sunni regimes, and cozying up much more to the so-called tribesmen in Anbar province and elsewhere, who up until very recently were known as the insurgents, and now known as the tribesmen.
So there is this attempt to balance the result of the invasion, which was to put a Shia regime that is, in effect, close to Iran, to balance that out with a counterbalance within the country supporting Sunnis, and that is indeed what has happened, partly as a result of the strangeness of American policy, which was, you know, someone in Iraq said to me, a fairly prominent Iraqi politician, that the American tragedy in Iraq is that the American friends in Iraq are allied with your enemies in the region, the American enemies in Iraq are allied with your friends in the region.
And that is true, that, you know, the U.S. was supporting the Shia government, which is allied with Iran, and opposing the Sunni insurgents, who are allied, of course, with the Saudis and the Jordanians and other Sunni regimes that are our friends.
So there's an essential contradiction there, that the United States, in its policy, has begun to try to mitigate or try to soften with what you call the redirection, and that's quite true.
And, you know, Greg Palast and, I believe, the Wall Street Journal also reported that the Council on Foreign Relations with James Baker and the guys in Rice University, and I think that Colin Powell, I think Colin Powell is actually even there, but the Colin Powell wing of the State Department, anyway, that they, I'm trying to remember, they met at George Shultz's house out in California or something, and they had their own plan for a regime change in Iraq, but they called it an invasion disguised as a coup d'etat or something like that, replaced, as Greg Palast said, replaced Saddam with the next mustache in line.
So this is not just the Scowcroft plan from back in the 90s, but apparently this is what James Baker and Colin Powell in them wanted to do upon the inauguration of the George Bush Jr. administration, it's just they lost out, apparently, to Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.
Yeah, well, you know, this idea of a coup had really been fairly discredited by the time George W. Bush came to office, not least because there had been, you know, several really prominent attempts at so-called regime change by using covert action, supporting the efforts of Iraqi exiles, not least Dr. Mechelavi and others, and these plans had failed because, you know, the one thing that Saddam had, the one thing that the government did very effectively was support the regime in power, keep it in power, you know, with the national security regime, which is to say its one function is to keep in power the regime itself.
That's what it did well, so these efforts had repeatedly failed, and I think by the time that George W. was inaugurated, it had become a fairly accepted principle that if Saddam was going to be removed, it would have to be through large-scale military force, that there's not going to be a way to do it using covert means.
And that's the conclusion that they drew after a decade or so of failure to remove them.
Well, and also there's no way to do a massive invasion without empowering Iran and the Shia majority.
Well, no, I don't know that that's true.
You know, certainly if you're doing a massive invasion whose raison d'etre is to put in place the democratic regime that will then cause a democratic tsunami throughout the Middle East, which was the ideological canopy that was put over the invasion, then it doesn't take a genius to realize that you're going to end up with a Shia regime in Baghdad.
The country is 60-odd percent Shia, so a democratic regime is almost certainly going to be Shia.
I think members of the administration convinced themselves that in fact it would be a secular Shia regime.
You know, particularly the people in the Defense Department had listened to many exiles, Ahmed Shalabi among them, although by no means the only one, who essentially said, hey, you know, this is a highly modern country, people are highly educated, it's secular.
They had given them this whole picture of what would happen in Iraq, parts of which they believed.
You know, if you look at Kanan Makiya, for example, another prominent exile, look at his writings about Iraq, these people hadn't been back in their country for 30, 40, 50 years.
Shalabi hadn't been there for 50 years.
And they really did believe in this kind of Iraq of their dreams that was secular, industrialized, you know, and when it came down to a vote, the numbers were in the Shia south, which was and remains highly religious, not secular, and, you know, nationalistic and religious.
But Mark, how it came to the one man, one vote was the Ayatollah Sistani said, hey, if you're Shia and you believe in Allah, I need you to go outside and demand one man, one vote.
And the implication was clear that America was going to have to start the war all over again against the Shiite south if they didn't immediately do what he said.
I mean, that's why they disbanded the Iraqi army and fired all the Baathists, too, is that the insistence of Sistani, they'd have had to, what, nuke the south or something?
Well, I don't think the dissolution of the army had anything to do with Sistani, actually, but no, I think it had to do with decisions made in the Pentagon.
I mean, it happened very quickly in May, early May, as soon as Al-Paul Bremer arrived.
And I think that this was an idea cooked up among the civilians at the head of the Pentagon, because I mean, I actually talked about this in the New York Review piece, that the policy that had been arrived at by the administration in meetings of the National Security Council, which is supposed to be the decision-making body of the American government, had been to retain the army and keep it as a force for stability in the country, which is, when the U.S. invades and occupies countries, I mean, there's a long history of this, and in the Caribbean, in South America, in Asia, you know, part of U.S. doctrine is to keep the army in place as, you know, the force for national stability, it's happened again and again, if you look at the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, you name it.
And that was policy this time around as well, but that policy was short-circuited, if you want to put it that way, by civilians at the top of the Pentagon, who essentially gave Bremer his marching orders that said, you will de-bathify the government in a radical way, and you will dissolve the army, and Bremer, in fact, in the first couple of days he was in the country, issued both of those, both of those orders, so I don't think the army dissolution had anything to do with Sistani, actually, myself, anyway.
And you're referring to Doug Fyfe and the guys in the policy department?
That's right.
Okay.
And now, but as far as the one-man-one-vote part, that was Sistani called them all out into the street, right?
Yes, he did.
And the amazing thing is, I wrote about this before in the New York Review in a piece called The War of the Imagination, a long piece about the occupation, which just pointed out the amazing fact that because of these disagreements within the American government, notably between the Pentagon and the State Department, the United States really invaded Iraq without a clear notion, as a government, of what sort of governance it was going to install there and how it was going to install it.
So there really wasn't, you know, you had an initial occupation authority run by Jay Garner, the retired general, who had previously been in charge of Kurdistan in the early 90s.
He was very quickly fired, and Al Paul Bremer was installed, a man who had no background in the Middle East, no Arabic, had never run anything like an operation on this scale.
And he was given these orders to dissolve the army, to de-bathify the government.
But what had originally been a notion to switch to Iraqi control very quickly, the Pentagon essentially wanted to hand over power to Chalabi and the other exiles, became a prolonged occupation that lasted under American control for a year.
And you're quite right that Sistani pushed hard for an election that would be one man, one vote.
The American occupation authority wanted a very different kind of evolution of a changeover of political power that would allow them to have much more control.
But as I say, you're completely right that Sistani was able to, you know, essentially get people out in the street and say, you know, we're not going to accept anything less than one man, one vote.
And they prevailed.
You know, they prevailed, and eventually there is an election in which the Shiite coalition won control, and they've had control ever since.
I don't know how well George Bush understood all these issues on the way in, but when we talk about people like Douglas Fyfe and the guys in the policy department, I noticed in the transcript of this meeting between George Bush and the prime minister of Spain, republished in the New York Review of Books with your article, The President at Peace with Himself, he has a talking point.
The president has a talking point that he uses on the prime minister of Spain.
It's actually the part where he's talking about the post-war period and the reconstruction.
He brings up a federation.
Maybe we'll make a federation.
And it occurs to me that that is exactly what the Hakim family, the power behind the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq or the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council or whatever it's called now, that is loyal to Iran.
That's what they want, is federalism and to basically have an independent Shia stand in alliance with Iran.
And I wonder whether that was actually really the plan all along, was to have to split Iraq into three.
That's a really interesting question.
The policy about federalism, it's a rather complicated issue, I think.
As you probably know, the Constitution does have provisions in it for federalism.
It has provisions by which provinces of Iraq, two or more of its 18 governments, can join together and create subregions of the kind that Kurdistan is now, the three governments of the north, are now the Kurdish regional government.
And as you say, Hakim and his colleagues, which comprise arguably the most powerful Shia party, certainly along with Muqtada al-Sadr's people, they are the most powerful.
The two of them comprise the two most powerful Shia groups.
Hakim's people have wanted from the beginning to create a federation in the south, to join several states together and make, as you say, a Shia stand.
It's worth pointing out that there are a lot of Shia who do not support that, not least Muqtada al-Sadr.
He's a nationalist, he doesn't believe in that, so this is by no means a universal desire among Shia at all.
Right, the guy who's trying to create a multi-ethnic coalition government with the Kurds and the Sunni religious leaders in Baathist, Muqtada al-Sadr, is our enemy.
And we're supporting the Hakims who want to spin the south off and give it to the Ayatollahs in Iran.
What the hell is going on?
Well, that's a good question.
I think that's a very good question.
I mean, it's one of the interesting things about American policy in Iraq, that from the beginning Muqtada has been the arch enemy of the United States, even though he is a nationalist and a strong believer in integral Iraq.
And Hakeem and his family has been in one form or another an American ally, even though increasingly he is pushing for the creation in the south of a Shia state, a state which you would think would be much more under the tutelage of Iran.
As you know, you and your listeners know, in the last couple of weeks, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware has pushed in the Senate a bill to essentially support a federalized solution to Iraq, whereby the country would, in effect, be softly partitioned, that's the phrase, into three states.
And that was, I think it got 70 votes in the Senate.
So it got a huge amount of support and it caused a great deal of controversy within Iraq, where it was immediately denounced by the government.
There's a lot of suspicion within Iraq that the United States, as you say, has intended from the beginning to divide Iraq into three states.
And as you know, it's a preoccupation throughout the Arab world, really, because it comes from the whole history of imperial power there, that it's really the secret intention at the end of the day of the West to weaken the power of the Arabs by dividing them and dividing them again, you know, that the imperial sort of arc of power in the Middle East has been to take this enormous area that was originally governed as a caliphate, caliphate ended, of course, in the early 1920s, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and to divide it and divide it again, so to make of this enormous, strong force of Muslims into many small, squabbling states with very little power.
So this fits into a longtime narrative of Western and now American intentions in the Middle East, you know, divide and conquer.
And the idea is quite unpopular in a lot of parts of Iraq.
I mean, it depends, you know, the Kurds clearly want their own state.
On the other hand, the idea of dividing Iraq is almost universally condemned by Sunnis who think of things in a very pan-Arab way.
And of course, to be mentioned, they don't have oil in their territory.
So the idea of dividing it up that way would leave them the poorest party, the loser in the game, as it were.
And it is, as I said, very controversial among among Shia.
Some parts of the Shia political spectrum, like the Hakims, support it strongly.
Other parts, like Muqtad al-Sadr, condemn it.
Okay.
Now, Mark Danner, we're already over time here, but I'm getting away with it.
So let's keep going for just a minute.
Okay.
Two things.
One, I'm afraid that the policy which, though, as you say, divides Arabs from each other, Lawrence of Arabia style and all that, could be beneficial from an American imperialist point of view.
This only makes sense in the long term if there's plans for regime change in Iran.
It's not okay for America to empower Iran to the extent of basically handing them the south of Iraq unless their plan is further to get rid of the Ayatollahs in Iran one way or another.
And now we collide back into our original question of just how far from reality the President is and just how willing he is to use violent force against people on the other side of the world.
And I wonder, kind of a follow-up to the first about whether you fear war with Iran, whether you think that it is time for the American people to demand that this man is removed from power before he starts World War III.
Well, those are two very, very large and inflammatory questions.
As to the question of war with Iran, you know, it's clear that there is a great struggle going on within the administration right now over this question.
It's pretty clear that there are some people in influential positions who favor a very strong policy with regard to Iran, even to the extent of attacking it, probably using Navy and Air Force planes and bombing it, whether extensively or not so extensively trying to destroy sites that are involved in Iran's nuclear program, possibly, if you go for the more extensive option, trying to destroy its armed forces.
It's clear that there are people in the administration, you know, certainly people in the Vice President's office, people on the National Security Council, some people in the Pentagon at the top levels, although I think relatively few now, who support this very aggressive option with respect to Iran, who believe essentially that, to paraphrase a phrase that was used at the beginning of the Iraq War, the road to Baghdad leads through Tehran.
That is, that the only way you're going to secure a positive outcome in Iraq is by going to the source of some of the problems there, which is Tehran and Iran.
That's their way of thinking in any event.
I think, though, it's important to point out that there are a lot of people now in the administration, this is 2007, not 2003, and there are a lot of people, I think, at this point on the other side.
I think the Secretary of Defense Gates is among those who seems to oppose this.
I think there's significant opposition within the military itself, not least because one of the consequences of an attack on Iran that one could predict would probably be, and this relates to our last discussion about the Shia south, would probably be an uprising in the south of Iraq.
And, you know, if you are Secretary of Defense or if you are the general on the ground in Iraq, General Petraeus, you know and are painfully aware that all of your lines of communication you know, all of your supplies, all of your ammunition, all of the food, not least, it comes from coup aid in convoys, truck convoys, up through the Shia south.
Yeah, but you know what, all great presidents have gotten hundreds of thousands of people killed.
We're talking about Bush here.
We're talking about the guy who makes all his decisions from his gut, a man who is determined to be judged as a hero by history.
Isn't he a rat in a corner?
Isn't this his last chance to be great, to go ahead and why not mount a full-scale invasion?
That's what Woodrow Wilson would have done.
Well, you know, I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm simply saying that there is a lot of, I think, opposition to it within the government, within the military, and also, and not least, within the country.
I mean, you pointed out earlier that Bush had been talking yesterday about World War III, about a consequence of Iran getting nuclear weapons, that this could set off World War III.
And I think that the country, you know, the people who are listening to our discussion, the people around the country who are tuned into this sort of thing, are much less likely to accept and be motivated by this kind of fear-mongering now.
You know, fool me once, shame on me, shame on you, fool you twice, shame on me, or whatever the phrase is.
You know, you can't, once you, he's used this technique before the country, I think, has learned from it.
And that doesn't mean that there won't be lots of journalists and lots of programs.
You know, Fox will be there cheering away as they are now.
The question is whether he is really able to move public opinion to support this kind of thing.
And I'm very skeptical that he will.
One other thing I should mention here, the consequences on the oil market, oil is now in the $80 a barrel range.
The consequences of an attack on Iran for the price of oil will be very large because it's quite likely that shipping will, through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iraq partly controls, will be cut off.
And so the economic consequences of such an attack could be very, very grave.
And the business community in this country knows that as well.
So my feeling on balance is that though officials in the administration might well want it, I think it's unlikely to happen.
That's my judgment anyway.
And unlikely enough that you don't think a push to remove Bush and Cheney from power now would be worth it.
Well, you know, the only way to do that under our system, as you know, is impeachment.
And impeachment is a long process that- Oh, come on.
I could indict both of these guys in 10 minutes.
Give me a grand jury.
Well, unfortunately, for me and for your listeners, you're not the one who gets to do it, I'm sorry to say.
It has to go- Right, it's Danny Hoyer.
It has to go through the Congress.
Right.
Okay.
I'm sorry, Mark.
I really appreciate your time today.
We're all out of it and way over it, in fact.
Everyone, Mark Danner, the website is markdanner.com.
He's a foreign policy expert, has written about it for two decades.
He's the author of The Secret Way to War, Torture and Truth and the Massacre at El Mazote, among other books.
He's a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and the James Clark Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and Humanities at Bard College.
His writing on Iraq and other subjects appear regularly in the New York Review of Books, where you can find his newest, The President at Peace with Himself.
It's running on the page today at antiwar.com under the title Bush's Faith Run Over by History by Mark Danner and Tom Anglehart.
Thank you so much for your time today, sir.
Really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thank you very much, and have a great rest of your day.
