Alright, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and celebrating our first anniversary show, the Antiwar Radio here on Chaos, we're going to bring back our first guest from last year.
It's the great investigative reporter, Robert Dreyfuss.
He covers national security for Rolling Stone, he's a contributing editor at The Nation, contributing writer at Mother Jones, and senior correspondent for The American Prospect.
Welcome to the show, Bob.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
11 months ago, they started off with these stories about Iran being behind the landmines that are killing our guys in Iraq, backing rogue factions of the Mahdi army, and so forth killing our guys, and that the excuse for war was going to be their interference in Iraq rather than the nuclear program.
Well, that may be true, and I agree that when Bush announced the surge, he spent a lot of time emphasizing that the U.S. commanders in Iraq would now have free reign to operate against Iran's influence in Iraq, including supply lines and so forth.
But I have to point out that whatever was happening over the spring and summer, the Americans have pretty much stopped dying in Iraq over the past few weeks, at least in anything compared to what was happening before.
And you have U.S. commanders and even the Secretary of Defense saying it looks like Iran is cooperating by halting the supply of weapons coming across the border.
Ambassador Crocker has said he's going to open up talks with the Iranian ambassador again, resuming those talks that started in the summer.
And there's an increased chance of a dialogue between the United States and Iran, so all the signs point to the fact that the U.S. military in Iraq and the leadership at the Pentagon are trying to downplay the Iranian threat in Iraq as well.
So I see both things happening.
In other words, the intelligence community is saying Iran isn't as dangerous as some people in the Bush administration were trying to make out.
And then the military in Iraq is saying, well, maybe Iran is behaving itself there, too.
So I think both of these things are happening at the same time.
Well, that's very interesting.
You know, the NIE didn't even mention their interference, at least the declassified portions, didn't even mention their so-called interference in Iraq at all.
It was only about the nuclear program, right?
Yeah, that's absolutely true, and I think that's because that was its job, although we don't know what else it said.
Certainly Iran has tremendous influence in Iraq, both political, economic, and military.
And so you'd have to be naive to think that Iran wasn't involved in some of the violence as well as supporting some of the Shia political factions, or perhaps all of the Shia political factions, in that country to one degree or another.
And it's all about the degrees and who, right?
Because it seemed like all the accusations against the Iranians and what they were doing in Iraq were all the exact inverse of what was really happening, right?
They blame all the violence from the Mahdi army on the Iranians, when the Iranians, if there's one faction they're backing stronger than the others, it's the Hakim faction at the Supreme Islamic Council.
And like when you brought up Bush authorizing American soldiers to go after Iranian special forces types in Iraq, who they arrested, Abdulaziz Hakim's son, and then said, oops, and let him go.
Well, yes, that's true, but clearly Hakim's forces in Iraq, even though Hakim is the closest ally of Iran, politically, it isn't Hakim's forces that are shooting at Americans, quite the opposite.
Those are the ones that we're training.
We're building up the Iranian armed forces, which by and large, and the police, which are heavily infiltrated and controlled by the Iraqi forces of the Badr Brigade and of Hakim's political party, so they're not the ones killing Americans.
And if you look at the statements of the American commanders in Iraq, they're not blaming Sadr himself either.
They're saying that it was rogue elements or criminal elements within Sadr's militia that were doing the attacks against Americans.
So they've been very careful to make a distinction between the Mahdi army command and some of its elements, and they've implied, and this is a murky question, that some of these more radical elements in the Mahdi army are perhaps tied to Iran.
They made that specific charge in regard to a recent bomb attack.
Are you buying that at all, that rogue elements of the Mahdi army working with the Iranians are behind the violence against the Americans?
Well, I don't know if I'm buying all of it.
We know that at the end of August, Sadr declared a stand-down, basically a ceasefire, and he said that he would no longer attack either the American forces or the forces of the other Shia parties that he had been clashing with.
And interestingly, when he declared that ceasefire, really the violence on the Shia side of defense in Iraq fell off precipitously.
So that would make you think that maybe these so-called rogue elements are not so rogue, after all, that they do follow Sadr's orders.
But exactly who is doing and continuing to do some of the fighting going on, because there's certainly a limited amount of fighting, is unclear.
We know that Sadr is spending a huge amount of time right now building up his army.
Certainly he has the biggest militia in Iraq, estimated to be as many as 60,000 fighters.
And, you know, quite disciplined in many of these neighborhoods and so on.
So if he ever decided to launch an insurrection, I think it would be a devastating one.
So I don't doubt that Iran is more than happy to make mischief with anybody in Iraq who will take its support.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they have control.
But I do think that there is something of a proxy war between the United States and Iran inside Iraq, and it isn't all on one side.
The Iranians are pitching, you know, rolling up their sleeves and pitching in as well.
Well, and the faction that we're supporting the most, again, is the Hakim faction, who are the closest to the Iranians.
Yeah, well, that's definitely true.
And it's one of the paradoxes.
I mean, Hakim was just in Washington last week.
I went to see him.
He met with Bush as well and other top American officials.
You got an interview with him?
No, but I went to see him when he spoke at the U.S. Institute for Peace.
And he was very careful in his appearance to say nice things about Iran, to call for a U.S.
-Iran dialogue, to say that he's trying to broker a dialogue between the United States and Iran so that there isn't a clash and so forth.
It was actually a different message, quite different from the message of Prime Minister Maliki's security adviser, who was in town a few weeks ago before this and lambasted Iran for meddling and causing trouble and so forth.
So it's clear that Hakim was not only representing Iraq, but, you know, clearly to some degree representing Iran in his remarks.
Well, his group was created by the Ayatollah Khomeini, right?
Yeah, the group used to be called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
They changed their name last spring to drop a revolution from their name.
Because they already had it.
Well, yeah, they were created in 1982 when the Hakim and some other Iraqis fled to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and they built up the Badr Brigade as a force out of captured Iraqi POWs and other refugees and put directly under the command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
And they actually fought, to some degree, against Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.
So they were kind of seen in Iraq as almost a group of traitors, people who fought for the enemy during the war in the 1980s.
And even many Shia who comprised the bulk of the Iraqi army during that war were unhappy, even angry, at the Hakims for siding with the Iranians during the war.
And you told me a year ago that the reason we, our government, is backing this group of the Supreme Islamic Council from Iran, the traitors of the Iran-Iraq War, is because they're the only ones who need us.
In fact, I think in a recent article you quote Zbigniew Brzezinski even saying that, we're backing the only people who need us there.
The people who are actually trying to create the multi-ethnic coalition government that our government claims to want are the people who want us out.
And so we marginalize them and we support the freaking Iranians.
Yeah, the odd thing about Iraq is that if there were new elections today, I don't think that Hakim would have any political power.
I think that he would be swamped in an election by support for Sadr as well as increased support for some of the secular and other forces on the Shia side.
So he's in power because of basically a rigged election two years ago which has created the current Iraqi parliament and the current Iraqi government.
At the same time, his armed forces, which gives him his muscle, is being armed and trained by the United States.
I guess the reason we're doing that, the United States, is because there aren't too many options on the Shia side.
We find it difficult to support Sadr because Sadr is such a strong nationalist that his central demand is that the United States gets out of Iraq, and Hakim so far has been willing to endorse a long-term presence for the United States in Iraq.
So perhaps even though he's allied to Iran, he's kind of the moderate face of Iranian policy in Iraq in the sense that the Iranians have a double game in Iraq.
They're supporting the government and the political parties that make it up in order to bolster their influence.
But they're also then creating some military problems for the United States, and it's partly defensive on Iran's part.
In other words, if the United States were to attack Iran, then the Iranians could no doubt cause tremendous problems for the United States and for the military in Iraq.
That's one of the reasons why the Pentagon and the Secretary of Defense and Admiral Mullen and Admiral Fallon, who runs CENTCOM, are all unilaterally opposed to attacking Iran because they feel like American troops in Iraq would be exposed to Iranian and Shia retaliation.
Well, you know, Muqtada al-Sadr and Abdulaziz Hakeem both have publicly sworn that they would fight, that they would rise up against the Americans in the event of war with Iran.
Yes, that's true.
And to varying degrees, they both have connections to Iran.
I think that most observers, including myself, see Sadr as more of a nationalist and as someone who is more willing to work to keep Iraq unified and as a single state, whereas Hakeem has proposed basically partitioning Iraq, creating a huge Shia southern region in the south of Iraq that would be kind of a separatist entity along the way Senator Biden has proposed.
So Hakeem is less of a nationalist in Iraqi terms and more of a Shia nationalist or separatist.
That separates them in terms of their political approaches.
But as I said, Sadr is much more opposed to the occupation, and as long as we're continuing to support Hakeem, he's willing to go along with it.
Well, now, part of Sadr's rising popularity and apparently the fall of the power of the Hakeem faction, as you said, they had an election today.
Sadr would come out on top of the Hakeems by quite a bit.
Well, a year ago, I guess it's been a whole year, right, since they began talking about the government of national salvation, where Sadr was trying to work a deal with the former Sunni insurgency.
Since then, we've had this so-called Sunni awakening, where the Sunni insurgency has quit fighting the Americans and instead decided to fight the Al Qaeda types.
Do you think that at this point, the Sadr factions and the Sunni insurgency are just taking a breather to prepare to go back to war, or do you think that they could actually work out some sort of power sharing?
Well, there's a lot of effort to create a nationalist Sunni-Shia alliance in Iraq.
The problem, as I see it so far, is that Sadr has been unwilling to explicitly commit himself to that.
And perhaps that's because he feels that the longer he holds out, the stronger he can get, and the more he'll be able to take a primary role in that.
So what you're seeing is that the momentum for this nationalist government of national salvation that you talked about is coming from the Sunnis, it's coming from the secular forces like former Prime Minister Ayad El-Lawi, who is a Shia, but who is really quite secular and also quite close to some of the Sunnis in Iraq.
And so they've appealed across the divide to some of the Shia parties, including the Fadila party, which is very strong in Basra and in the oil areas of southern Iraq, and they've expressed a willingness to join this nationalist front.
Sadr, though, has so far only kind of played with the idea, and as I say, I think that's because he's trying to hold out for more of a primacy rather than just being a coalition partner in something that would let, let's say, Alawi become prime minister again.
Right.
Now, in your article for The Nation from October 29th, The Other Surge, you also mentioned – this really raised my eyebrows – that the former prime minister before Maliki, also from the Dawa party, Ibrahim Jafari, is actually throwing in with Sadr now, is that right?
It's very unclear.
You know, a lot of this is shifting alliances, but the Dawa party, which is the party that Maliki comes from, has long had two different wings.
One was just called Dawa, and the other wing was called Dawa-Iraq, and the Dawa-Iraq faction has been less close to Iran and more nationalist than the main body of Dawa.
And so, although it's almost split 50-50, if you look at the numbers in parliament, I think they have about 30 deputies, and about 15 each are in these two Dawa factions.
And so Jafari, the former prime minister, comes from the Dawa-Iraq faction, and there's some people that I've talked to on the Sunni side who have been having a dialogue with him, and trying to get him to come into a new government that would replace Maliki.
So I mean, a lot of this is just power politics, because everyone is jockeying around to anticipate what might happen if the U.S. begins to radically reduce its presence in Iraq, and we see kind of a microcosm of that in the south, where the British have pretty much now picked up their tents and gone home.
And the city of Basra, which happens to control 90% of Iraq's economy, because that's where the oil is, is really torn among three or even four different militia factions of Shia.
But the three big ones are Hakim's faction, Sadr's faction, and Fadila, and they all control different parts of the apparatus down there.
It's unclear whether they can work out an agreement among themselves, or whether that will come to some sort of armed conflict, but really there's no more British presence and virtually no Americans there.
So maybe what happens in Basra will give us a tip-off about which way politics goes in Baghdad later on.
Well, you also wrote in that article that nationalism in Iraq, across Iraq, really got a big boost by the Blackwater Massacre, the vote in the Senate on Biden's plan to divide Iraq in three, and Ray Hunt's oil deal with the Kurds, that all those things happened basically real close to each other, and it just sort of reinforced this wave of Iraqi nationalism across the country.
That ought to make things easier for the people trying to form a coalition, no?
That is true, and that's happening, and now it's being intensified by another development that's happened since, which is really two developments combined.
One is the Iraqi government's announcement on Monday that they're going to seek a renewal of the U.N. mandate to allow the United States to have U.N. approval for another 12-month occupation of Iraq.
The Iraqi government did that without asking the parliament, and many of the members in the parliament were saying, and are still saying, that that's invalid unless it gets voted on in parliament, which might vote it down.
So that's kind of got a lot of people angry in a nationalist sense.
Second was the announcement that Bush made a couple of weeks ago when he talked to Maliki and surprised everybody by saying that by July of 2008, the United States would work out a bilateral treaty between the United States and Iraq for long-term American presence there.
Again, the parliament and many of the nationalists outside the parliament said, wait a minute, what is our prime minister doing negotiating long-term presence of American forces in Iraq?
We don't accept that.
So all of these things are, I think, contributing to and leading to a stronger nationalist sentiment in Iraq, and it's making it harder and harder for the Iraqi government to sustain itself.
I think that, you know, with each passing day, they're losing more and more political support, and really the only thing that's propping up this alliance now, which includes Maliki, Hakim, and the Kurdish parties, is American military support, plain and simple.
Without that, I think the government would completely crumble, and for instance, if we were to withdraw, I think this government would fall apart immediately and be replaced by a much more nationalist government that would not only cheer the end of the occupation, but would have a somewhat more anti-American characteristic.
Well, it also seems like there's a window of opportunity here, that eventually the government is going to shift, at some point it's going to have to, from the American backed Hakim Kurdish alliance to something like this government of national salvation, this shadow government that they're creating and waiting there, and it seems like if the US doesn't turn the government over from one alliance to another, within a certain window of opportunity, that basically what we are doing is setting up for further full-scale bloodshed between the Mahdi army and the Sunni insurgency.
Yeah, that's right, and it goes back to the beginning of our conversation in a way, that in order for the United States to get out of Iraq, leaving behind some sense of order there, I think we have to accommodate Iran, because Iran has made it clear that it has enough influence among the Shia to cause problems if Iran isn't accommodated.
So if the United States' goal is to create an Iraq which is an extension of American power in the Gulf, that's clearly not going to be acceptable to the Iranians.
What they want, what Iran wants, is an Iraqi government that would be at least neutral, if not pro-Iranian, but certainly not an Iraqi government that would represent a long-lasting American presence in the Gulf, which would not only be threatening to Iran, but would reduce Iranian power and influence in the region.
So the kind of U.S.
-Iranian accord that many people are talking about as something that might emerge now in the wake of this new national intelligence estimate, that maybe, if not this president, the next one, could negotiate some sort of U.S.
-Iranian bargain, that would possibly create much greater potential for a stable Iraq as well, since the United States and Iran would agree on what the Iraqi government might look like.
So we're really going to have to be careful in how we negotiate on our way out of there, assuming we can get that done any time soon, because I guess what you're saying is if we turn this over to the Sauder-Sunni alliance, then Iran is not going to want to accept that any more than they accept our presence there over the long term, and they could, for example, increase their support for the Hakim factions by a thousand-fold or something, and try to take the government back?
Well, they do have some influence with Sauder as well, and I think really what they want is an Iraqi government that would be not a threat to Iran.
So they'll settle for Sauder, you think the Iranians will settle for Sauder if they can't get Hakim?
They'll settle for an Iran in which the Shia have most of the votes, and in which the Shia are a predominant force that would then in turn seek good relations with Iran.
And the problem that the American occupation has had over the past four and a half years is that we've been unable to square the opposite circle.
We've been unable to come up with an Iraqi government that was both pro-American and anti-Iranian that would reduce Iran's influence.
We went in there, in part, trying to create Iraq as the base against the next member of the Axis of Evil, which was Iran, and we suddenly found out that a majority of Iraqis were Shia who weren't necessarily willing to play that game.
They weren't willing to become American proxies in this global struggle.
And so we've been sort of packing back and forth, trying to come up with some formula to create an Iraqi government that's pro-American, and it seems less and less likely that that's going to develop.
Well, we need to dig up Saddam's corpse and put him back in power.
He was the one who fought the Sunni religious extremists and fought the influence of Iran and held the country together.
Yeah, but Saddam was not exactly pro-American.
I mean, Saddam was also pretty much of a nationalist who was anti-American himself for all those 30-some years that he was in power, so I don't think we want the Ba'athists to come back.
I think the idea of going into Iraq was to create, if not a puppet government, a government of people like Chalabi and so forth who would be willing and docile and supportive of the United States.
That certainly wasn't true of Saddam.
Right.
All right, well, I sure appreciate your insight today, coming back for the first anniversary recap on Anti-War Radio.
Well, congratulations on the year, Scott.
That's terrific.
Ah, thanks.
Thank you.
Everybody, please check out the website.
It's robertdreyfus.com, and he's got a great blog there as well.
It's Robert Dreyfus from Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The Nation, The American Prospect, and tompane.com.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thank you.
