Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM, in Austin, Texas.
Our first guest today is our regular guest, Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes for IPS News.
You can find all his IPS stories at antiwar.com slash porter, you can always find him at the Huffington Post and, well, all over the web.
In fact, if you look, welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
Well, it's good to have you here and I always look forward to talking with you and getting your insight as to recent developments between, well, basically the relationship between America and Iran with the poor Iraqis stuck in the middle of the various policies at play here.
But I guess I want to start here with the battle for Basra, the offensive begun by Maliki and the U.S. government, which the Mahdi army basically, well, was winning until the Americans got involved, at least, and they called it off.
But right now the headlines are that Sadr is threatening total war if the Americans and the Iraqi army don't stop going after his Mahdi army militia and it looks like we have a real breaking point in this war one way or another, like this thing may really blow up into a war against the Shiite south that's basically supported the American occupation or tacitly accepted the American occupation, at least this whole time.
Your last article discusses the politics behind who ordered the Iraqi army raids on the Mahdi army in Basra, who got the battle going.
There have been various reports, whether Cheney was behind it, perhaps during his visit that he ordered it, the various generals and media people have at alternate times said it was either their idea or it was all the Iraqis' idea and they didn't even know until after the fact and what have you, and I just want to, to start this interview off, maybe help clarify, who ordered Maliki to do what he did?
Was it Dick Cheney?
How in or out of the loop was the U.S. military and what does this really reveal about the relationship between the American government and the Iraqi government, Gareth?
Well, that's a very good question and one that I know many people, you know, have been puzzling over for some weeks now, trying to figure out exactly what did in fact happen, because the way in which the story came out bit by bit has been extremely confusing and has left, I know, most of your listeners and the readers of mainstream media certainly very much in the dark about what this does in fact reveal about the U.S. policy, about Maliki's policy, and about the relationship between the two, and my piece basically begins with the key point that the U.S. command, the Petraeus military command in Baghdad, hooked up its own war plan against the Mahdi army in Basra, and we don't know the exact point at which that plan began to be formulated, but it's very clear that by the time that Dick Cheney visited Iraq on March 17th to 19th, he arrived I believe on the 17th, there's no question that that plan had already reached an advanced stage, that is to say it was really ready for the Maliki administration to sign off on and to begin the process of actually putting in place the pieces.
Now, the point about this plan was that it was to be actually executed during the summer, at least according to the Iraqi commander for the Basra area.
He gave an interview with The Independent, the British newspaper, just a few days later in which he basically said that there would be what he called the final battle with what he referred to, of course, as the criminals and the people who were standing in the way.
He didn't refer to the Mahdi army or to Sadrists, but that's obviously who he was referring to.
And that final battle was clearly going to be fought with foreign troops.
It was going to have American and British troops, but he was hoping that British troops would be particularly prominent in that.
The Brits, of course, had a plan to draw down their troops from more than 4,000 to more like 2,500 by the end of the year, less than 2,500 by the end of the year.
The Brits had, in response to this plan, had agreed that they would postpone that.
In other words, that they would have the full 4,000 troops available to participate in this campaign.
And it was going to be a long campaign, it was going to be several months in duration, certainly up to, you know, close to the time of the election.
And obviously there's a relationship there.
There's no doubt that they were going to clean up quote-unquote Basra of the Sadrist influence so that the pro-American, pro-occupation forces could win the provincial elections, because under no account did they want the Sadrists to have power in Basra, the second largest city in Iraq.
So that's the background here.
There was this Petraeus plan.
I call it the Petraeus plan because it was his command who cooked it up in conjunction with the Iraqi commander for the region.
But obviously it was the Americans' ideas which was primary in the formulation of the plan.
And that's what Vice President Cheney clearly took with him to Iraq.
That's what he discussed with al-Maliki on the 17th of March.
And also what he discussed with Abu Aziz al-Aqim, the head of the Supreme Council, the major Shiite rival of al-Sadr in the Mahdi army.
So this was what the U.S. side was promoting and apparently expected fully that al-Maliki would sign off on, or at least hoped he would sign off on.
Instead what happened was that al-Maliki, four days later, he meets with Petraeus, sorry, his national security advisor meets with Petraeus and tells Petraeus that al-Maliki is not going to go along with this plan, that he wants to do it his way and it's going to be without American troops, without British troops.
And al-Maliki explained later on in an interview that he didn't want American or British troops because that would give what he called the militant a great argument against his regime because they would argue that it was foreigners who were carrying out aggression against them.
And it would, on balance, it would be a net negative and it would discredit his regime politically.
And that's a pretty fair statement, I would think, of the situation, that calling in foreign troops to attack the Mahdi army is going to redound against, it's going to cut against the existing regime in Baghdad.
It's going to delegitimize them even more.
So he had his own plan to go into Basra with Iraqi forces, obviously with American air power and logistical support, but not with ground troops.
And that was what we saw taking place beginning on the 24th of March, two days after he spoke with Petraeus.
And we now know, and this is something that I was unable to report on in my piece, but the Washington Post right-wing columnist Jim Hoagland wrote yesterday that apparently the al-Maliki offensive not only just stalled out and was in serious trouble, but al-Maliki himself was in physical danger because of being surrounded by the Mahdi army forces.
And he sent an SOS to the CIA and the CIA told the Washington, the administration in Washington, that there had to be something, an emergency situation existed and something had to be done to save al-Maliki and his offensive.
And U.S. troops were sent in immediately to rescue al-Maliki and to prevent the complete integration of the force.
Wow, so it sounds like George Bush was right when he says this is a defining moment in Iraqi history.
Well, it certainly defined something.
It defined the fact that al-Maliki was incapable of doing anything on his own against the Mahdi army.
And it also defined his degree of dependence on U.S. troops, even though he had already stated that he did not want them.
And obviously after the fact, tried to portray himself as somebody who was the nationalist and who did keep U.S. troops out.
And of course this was kept secret.
It was not reported in the mainstream media, certainly.
Although the U.S. briefer, the Petraeus briefer of the press, did admit under questioning that U.S. special forces had in fact been part of the force that went into Basra.
But the fact that U.S. troops went in, we still don't know how many went in and what kinds of troops and what they did in the battle.
That is still an untold story.
And that's really where the mainstream media still has failed to do its job.
Okay, so let me make sure I understand you here.
Basically what you're saying is Cheney went down there and gave Maliki his marching orders.
You're going to take the British and you're going to take the U.S. army and you're going to go in there and retake Basra.
And Maliki decided, well, I'm going to retake Basra but I'm not going to do it with American and British troops because that will make it even harder for me, really.
Even though they have the technology, they don't have the legitimacy.
They'll undermine my authority in trying to do that.
So I'm just going to go ahead and do my best and try to launch this offensive myself and see what happens.
I think that is certainly part of the story.
Now there's one other part of the story, Scott, that we haven't talked about.
And that is, of course, the way in which the Basra battle ended was through the mediation of the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran.
And that was after the pro-government legislators, pro-government representatives of parties, went to come in Iran to beseech his intervention.
And then, of course, there was some kind of negotiation, some kind of contact between the IRGC commander and the Sadrists, presumably through Sadr himself, who was apparently in Qom at that point.
And that, of course, resulted in a temporary and very shaky and apparently not very effective truce or ceasefire in the fighting.
Now the question that arises here, and this is why I think that the Americans still are very, very suspicious of al-Maliki's motives in sort of turning, refusing to go along with the U.S. plan, which was a later, longer, slower, bigger, and U.S. and British-dominated plan to go after the Sadrists.
I think they believe, and perhaps with some reason, that in going in there he had a backup, which was that whether or not things went well, he would try to end the fighting through some kind of negotiated agreement with the Iranians' help.
And that that would perhaps set up a situation where there would be some kind of peace, and not stability quite, but peace that the United States would have difficulty justifying a major operation to disrupt.
In that, of course, al-Maliki, if he believed that, was utterly wrong.
Because the United States now is clearly pushing ahead with pressure against the Sadrists all around the South, particularly in Basra, and we now see all signs pointing to a major war between the U.S. military and the Sadrists.
Well, the thing is this, the American military in pitch battle will win.
That's not really the question.
The question is whether the Iraqi army would stand a chance versus the Mahdi army without U.S. air power, and without American infantry and so forth backing them up.
I guess the last few weeks have proved that if Sadr wants, he could just take the Iraqi government with his militia in a few days.
Well, I think that the outcome of a war between the United States and Sadr is very much dependent on a number of things, what tactics both sides take, of course, and the internal politics of Iraq.
Now, the Americans apparently are heartened by the fact that they now have a Sunni party which backs the U.S. fighting and the Amaleki regime fighting the Sadrists, and they've made a huge argument about that, saying that that proves now that we've reached a turning point politically in Iraq and that everybody is in favor of cleaning up the militias.
And they've pointed to that as a major argument for going ahead with a military operation, which apparently is regarded now as the final curtain on the Sadrist role in the South.
But what I want to get at here is that this is not the Sadrist force that the United States fought in 2004, nor the one that created difficulties in 2005 and 2006 and 2007.
This is an army that has been regrouping, retraining, reorganizing, and which is far more capable of fighting against U.S. troops than was the case in previous years.
They are apparently capable of much better coordination than ever before, and much more capable of being able to carry out a set of operations that copes with the tactics used by the United States.
Well, you know that the war party would say that's because of Iran.
Well, there's no doubt that they have gotten training both in Lebanon and in Iran over the past three or four years, and this is a cumulative thing.
More and more units have been trained over the past three or four years of the Mahdi army.
Of course, the U.S. line is that, oh, that's special groups.
This is not the Mahdi army.
This is special groups.
These are breakaway factions that Iran has been training.
Well, that's simply not true.
I think the evidence is very, very clear that Sader himself gave the go-ahead for a systematic process of having as many of his units trained as possible.
Now, if Sader is in Iran right now and if there really is no such thing as special groups, simply the Mahdi army itself, why would the American government attempt to differentiate and attempt to paint Sader, who they hate, as somehow being not completely responsible for the special groups?
What's that about?
Well, first of all, I think that line is now in the process of breaking down.
You heard this morning General Lynch saying that his command in the south of Baghdad is prepared to use force against the Sadrists.
He did not use the term special groups, as far as I could tell.
I think that line is in the process of being put behind the command.
I'm not sure that it's useful anymore.
I think they need to make it clear that they're going to target Sader and his forces, which is what they've been after all along.
But over the past year or so, until very recently at least, and really until just this week, I would say that the Bush administration and the Petraeus command have tried to distinguish between the Mahdi army and Sader himself on one hand, and the people who they've been fighting on the other.
They're trying to say, oh, all the people that we've been targeting are not Sadrists, they're not the Mahdi army, they're the breakaway faction.
And that was useful because they still hope to win over some parts of the Sadrist movement as, quote, moderates, unquote, people who will cooperate.
And I think that over time it became clear that if there were any of those people, there were very few and far between, and that in fact that strategy was a complete and utter failure.
So that in fact what they had to do was to fight the Mahdi army itself, which is indeed unified under Sader's leadership, and there's a full-time committee which runs the day-to-day affairs of the Mahdi army and of the political forces that are arrayed behind it.
So they are extremely capable of carrying out a campaign.
They prefer not to.
I think it's very clear that Sader has been wanting to avoid this at this point, that this is not the best time for it.
He's still in the process of getting more training and more arms, and that he would have preferred to wait until later.
But the issue is being forced on him, and I think that there will probably now be a fight.
There will be a major fight.
I don't know what the outcome is going to be.
I don't think anybody knows what it's going to be.
It sounds like Cheney, during his visit a month ago, was trying to arrange this war.
He was trying to make it a much bigger situation than Maliki has made it.
He was trying to, I guess you said he had a plan for basically a long-term battle, including American and British troops.
What were they talking about, a full-scale invasion of Sadr City, or what?
Part of the calculation there was that the United States still has a major campaign on in the north, in Mosul, in Nineveh province, and they wanted to wait until that.
This was against, of course, al-Qaeda, and they wanted to wait until they were finished with that campaign so that they could shift a large number of troops from Nineveh province down to the south.
That was, I think, the major reason for the desire to have the campaign begin in the summer, rather than in the spring.
Now, apparently, they may be shifting some people from the north.
I'm not sure, but they're going ahead with a different campaign plan for reasons which may reflect the felt need to take advantage of what they're citing as this favorable political opportunity with all of the major pro-government or pro-regime parties standing together calling for such an operation, and perhaps the fear that al-Maliki has something up his sleeve, and if they wait too long, he will pull something to surprise them.
But the other thing that I think we need to look at in this regard about the timing is that the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad has given his blessing to operations against the Sadr army, and this should come as no surprise because Iran has repeatedly, whenever there has been a choice between the al-Maliki regime on one hand and Sadr on the other, has clearly said we're coming down on the side of the al-Maliki regime.
That's their first priority.
And they wanted to stay on good terms with al-Sadr and would prefer not to have a fight between the two, but since it's coming, they want to make it clear that they're on al-Maliki's side.
And so the United States has one other thing going for them, which is that Iran is not going to make an issue of this, and the Americans can make an argument that they've succeeded in using the Iranian influence here to back their strategy.
It, of course, is not in line with their propaganda over the past year, which is that Iran is behind all the problems that they're having in Iraq.
But there's a second propaganda line which is waiting in the wings, and that is that we've succeeded by clever diplomacy and by a show of force in getting Iran to go along with our occupation and to basically approve what we're doing.
I guess the New York Times today has this headline, US and Iran find common ground in Iraq's Shiite conflict.
Now they're only three and a half years too late in explaining this to people.
Right, right.
But I guess that's why this is okay to say now.
They want to highlight the common ground shared between the US and Iran at this point?
Well, I think that is because it is a defining moment in a sense.
There's a major shift underway which is in light of the coming battle in the south that the old political line about Iran is perhaps at least temporarily less important than the desire to be able to show that they're being successful.
And I would say, you know, if you go back and look at the origin of the tying together of the problems in Iraq with Iran, it goes back to April 2006, and this is a point that was once again brought out in the 10,000-word story on the front page of yesterday's New York Times about the Pentagon sock puppet military analyst.
The quote from Rumsfeld in a meeting with those analysts in April of 2006, in his notes he says, tie Iraq to Iran as a propaganda theme.
That's where the idea really began.
And it was for domestic political purposes.
It was because of the need to have a way of explaining why things were not going well in Iraq.
Right, it's always everybody else's fault.
That's right.
Well, this is funny because I think it becomes clearer as we look at the present situation and we look back on the whole history of the propaganda line about Iran and Iraq that there are different interests that are being served, different policy interests and strategies that are being served by that line.
But the mother of all of those interests was to have a way of explaining to the American people why things were not going well.
Well, you know, this week Ayman al-Zawahiri accuses basically Dick Cheney and Ahmadi Najjar of being in cahoots, the American-Iranian conspiracy to take over the south of Iraq.
He sounded almost like John McCain talking about the Persian ambition.
They want to take at least the northeastern portions of Saudi Arabia and somehow all the land between Iran and Lebanon to make sure that they have open trade and travel there.
And that this is the evil American-Iranian plot that must be stopped at all costs, according to Bin Laden's number two guy.
Well, this of course raises a very interesting, broader pattern here over the past year and a half or so in which there is this interesting alignment against Iran that involves the Bush administration, the Sunni Arab regimes in the Middle East who are pursuing an anti-Iran policy in a broad strategic sense of talking about the threat of the Shiite crescent in the Middle East and supporting the Sunnis in Iraq and opposing the al-Maliki regime.
Of course the al-Qaeda leadership which sees that as one of their best themes to try to garner international support particularly in the Sunni Middle East.
And of course Israel which is also looking for a way to beat up on Iran and looking for allies.
So, you know, there was this kind of a general orientation towards that explanation of the situation which a lot of strange bedfellows were getting together on, if you will.
Well, and it also points out that, you know, once you do all this enemy of my enemy is my friend and will temporarily work against, even if you don't even ally with one group or another, you simply choose to work against this group and or then work against that group, you're always helping their opposite whether that's your purpose or not.
Well, and this ties in with Sai Hersh's great story about what happened in Lebanon where the United States was in fact supporting a Sunni organization that was anti-Hezbollah and anti-Iranian, of course, which was very much in line with al-Qaeda.
It was a pro-al-Qaeda group.
This is what happens when you have that kind of broad strategy of finding allies from wherever you can get them.
You end up supporting people who are not only unsavory but who are in fact allied with your real enemy, the people who really are capable of and have the desire of attacking the United States, which is al-Qaeda.
Has anything happened in the past couple of months or anything to make you believe that it's more or less likely that America will go to war with Iran?
I guess basically your view, as you've expressed on this show since the NIE came out, was that no, it's just really not likely.
There's been a lot of propaganda since then.
I agree, Scott, and I'm fully prepared to modulate my analysis and my estimate from week to week and day to day and I think one has to do that.
I agree that there have been signs from the White House, from Dick Cheney specifically, indicating that he's not giving up, that he wants to keep this issue in play, and at the very least he wants that threat to be out there.
I have a story that I'm still working on which has to do with Dick Cheney's trip, which I'm not going to go into detail at this moment, but which supports that thesis very strongly, that during his trip he was still talking about the military option against Iran.
Whether that means that there is in fact in place a policy decision to go ahead with such a strike before the end of the Bush administration is a separate issue.
I certainly don't know the answer and I would simply say that we have to remain uncertain and we have to remain vigilant at this point for every new indicator that might be the case.
But at the very least I think we can say that this administration wants to keep the threat in play, and has not by any means let up on the threat to carry out an attack against Iran before the end of its term.
Wow.
Yeah, it's amazing how these guys' story can just change from day to day.
Well, what do you do when your best allies in Iraq are the Iranians who are your worst enemies in the region?
You know, you have to be full of shit one way or another every day, don't you?
Yeah, I think these people have gotten themselves into a situation where they refuse to give up either their desire to dominate Iraq, which means that they must fight both Sunnis and Shiites, and therefore they are going to constantly be involved in contradiction both within Iraq and internationally.
And I think that that's not going to end until the United States withdraws from Iraq and comes to term with Iran.
Yeah.
I look back to 2004 and there were two major battles against the forces of the Mahdi army and they were called off.
And as you pointed out, Sader, every time he's really gotten his group into it with the U.S. or the other way around, he's basically always tried to back off and never let any of these battles run on too long and so forth.
Patrick Coburn, though, has an article today on Counterpunch where he's indicating, it looks to him, and this is what he told me on the show last week, that it's looking more and more to him that we're on the eve of basically starting the war all over again against, you know, the 60% of the population who've stood by this whole time, that you look at the majority of Shiites, who are the majority, the majority of them support Sader.
I think that's correct.
At least, I would say, if not a majority, then clearly Sader has the support of more southern Shiites and Baghdad Shiites than any other figure and any other political movement.
It's, of course, very hard to calculate more precisely than that.
What one can say, however, is that Sader does give voice to and reflect the interest of the vast majority of Shiites in the south and in Baghdad who want the American troops to leave Iraq.
I mean, this seems to be a position that transcends even whether, you know, the Shiite question supports Sader as an individual, as a leader, or supports the Mahdi army as the political movement of choice.
You know, this is shown by a British public opinion firm's most recent survey in March, this was before the battle in Basra, in which they found that 69% of Shiite respondents in the south believed that their security, not their security, but security, which translates into security for themselves and their family, would improve if the United States and British troops were completely withdrawn from Iraq, and that only 10% of the Shiite respondents believed that it would get worse, that security would get worse if foreign troops were withdrawn.
That's an astonishing set of figures.
Right.
That said, though, all along, though, it's been more or less the Sunni-based insurgency that's been setting off the roadside bombs and so forth.
The Shiites, the average Shiite Iraqi, clearly wants us out of there, but they haven't been resorting to throwing us out, because basically our government has installed their majority in power, at least, people related to them.
That's right, and I think that it's true that most Shiites were tolerant, certainly of the regime, and did not feel the personal need to participate in resistance to the Americans.
But bear in mind, of course, that Sauder, since 2005, while voicing the ultimate goal of liberation of Iraq from foreign occupation, has been talking about being patient and waiting, and it's not time to fight now.
Right.
So it's not easy to gauge what the views of most Shiites have been towards the occupation, except, I mean, I think that there have been some opinion polls, which showed very clearly the majority of Shiites, as well as the majority of Sunnis, were certainly not in favor of the occupation.
Right.
And that has grown over time.
Well, and it's way too late to switch sides anyway.
I mean, they talked about Khalilzad and Guy Biddle at the Council on Foreign Relations, who I guess now is advising Petraeus.
These guys talked in 2005 about, well, it's time to clean our hands of this purple-finger election nonsense and go ahead and overthrow the majority we've installed in power and turn back to the Baathists.
There was even a quote in Time magazine of one of the former Baathist generals saying, we used to get along so well with you guys.
I don't know what happened.
We can work together.
Let's do this.
But it's too late for that.
I'm reading Patrick Cockburn again in The Independent the other day, talking about the effort to buy up the Sunni insurgency and call them concerned local citizens.
That's already falling apart into warring factions.
And hell, he told me the Friday before that on the show that he saw with his own eyes guys who used to be members of Al-Qaeda in Iraq who themselves were the concerned local citizens.
So it seems to me, I guess I'm asking your opinion, it's way too late to just turn around and try to reinstall the Baathists now.
No, no, I don't think that anybody really believes that that is a viable strategy at this point.
So just kill them all or what?
Basically, as I think I've said before, I think the policy is and has to be one of divide and conquer both in the large sense of dividing Sunnis and Shiites and using the degree of power competition between them to help stabilize or to keep the occupation going and at the same time to keep both Sunni and Shiite communities divided.
Or at least to play off on the internal differences within the Sunni and Shiite communities to the advantage of the occupation.
So it's a double divide and conquer strategy that the United States has been pursuing and must pursue in order to be able to have any hope of maintaining its military presence in Iraq.
Well, at the same time though, if it's just completely a war of all against all, then our guys are penny-packeted, as William Lynn says, at all these little bases all around the place.
They have to have somebody whose lines they can get behind, if only the Green Zone, on their base walls.
I think it's safe to say that at this point there is really no place where Americans can regard themselves as safe from resistance activities.
I mean, the Green Zone clearly is vulnerable to attack.
That has been shown dramatically in recent weeks.
In this sense, it's very much different from the Vietnam War, which was in fact a war in which there were front lines and rear areas.
There were safe rear areas for American troops.
Saigon remained a safe rear area, as did some other cities during the entire war.
This is not the case in Iraq, and that's why the United States, I've always argued, the United States is in a much weaker position, always has been, but today it's clearer than ever before, a much weaker position in Iraq than it ever was in Vietnam.
And, you know, the plans for all these permanent bases, it seems like they would, I can understand how they would rely on dividing and conquering and keeping people fighting against each other, but if they just turn the entire country against the Americans, then that's no way to have permanent bases.
They're going to have to get out of there.
Well, I do believe, in fact, that it is going to happen.
I don't believe that the United States can maintain a long-term military presence in Iraq.
There is going to be a time limit on it, and it's going to be a time limit that will be determined by the interaction between American public opinion, American politics, and the internal political-military situation in Iraq.
Those are not two separate things.
And it will be the interaction of those two things that will establish the real time limit in the United States, as it did in Vietnam.
All right, everybody, that's Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from IPS News.
You can find all his IPS News articles at antiwar.com slash porter.
You can also find them at the Huffington Post and the American Prospect and other places.
Thank you very much for coming back on the show today, Gareth.
Thanks for having me, as always.
