Alright, everybody, introducing the man who could not be lied into war, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist for IPS News.
He also writes at the Huffington Post and for the American Prospect Magazine.
You can read all his IPS stuff at antiwar.com slash porter.
And his article today, right there at the top of the headlines at antiwar.com, where are those Iranian weapons in Iraq?
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks for having me, as always, Scott.
It's great to have you here.
Alright, set us straight.
Government says over and over and over again that the reason the Iraqis don't like us is because the Iranians are giving them weapons and money to not like us.
Is that right?
Well, you know, that is sort of the line that the U.S. government has been taking.
And you know, what I've done in this story is to set aside for the moment our obsession with the explosively formed penetrators, the EFPs that have been for many months kind of the headline, were for many months the headline story about Iranian weapons, but have kind of faded from the scene.
And the reason is essentially that the U.S. government knows perfectly well now that they are being manufactured in Iraq, so they've de-emphasized that.
Don't tell John McCain.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
He needs to tell him, but we'll have to wait on that one.
But what they've been doing is emphasizing rockets and mortars and RPGs, the grenade launchers.
That issue is the one that they've been pushing forward the last several months, really beginning last summer when the Green Zone was under increased attack from mortars and rockets.
And that's really sort of where I pick up the story, that the U.S. was really arguing that this was all because of Iran's doing, that they were using Iranian weapons, and that this was essentially an Iranian-inspired development in the war, which they regarded as a key turning point.
Okay, now in the article, which again is found at antiwar.com slash porter today, you talk about 60 and 120mm mortars, 170, 107mm rockets, 57mm anti-tank missiles, 240mm RPG-29s, maybe those are two different things.
What's all this about?
What's the significance?
Well, the point I'm making here is that the U.S. military was really trying to play up the idea that Iran has these new sort of mighty standoff weapons, the 240mm rockets, which they argue were used against the Green Zone and to attack U.S. military targets.
My point here is that if you look at the contents of the weapons caches that have been discovered over the past 15 months, and I did this by going mainly to the website of the multinational force Iraq, MNFI, and looking at each of the descriptions, the news items on weapons caches that were found, which had some connection with the Shiites or with the Mahdi army or the special groups or with the EFPs, those were the markers that I used to figure out which ones to look at.
I completely eliminated from my search all those that did not have those markers.
What I found was that there were roughly 700 mortars, rockets, longer range weapons that are mentioned by caliber specifically in these stories so that you can determine whether, with reasonable certainty, whether they were Iranian or not.
Now, bear in mind that only in four cases were any weapons identified in these press releases from the U.S. military as Iranian weapons.
There were 15 other weapons that were identified as possibly Iranian, which of course is quite dubious given the penchant of the U.S. military for finding Iranian weapons.
So there were four weapons that they claimed with some certainty were Iranian weapons out of about 700, and I think that gives us some kind of indication of the importance of whatever Iranian weapons might be in the hands of the Mahdi army or Shiite militias.
Well, isn't that interesting?
And what I found, Scott, is that basically the Mahdi army relies on four basic kinds of weapons, and these are the ones that you mentioned, the 60mm and 120mm mortars, the 107mm rockets, and the 57mm anti-tank missiles.
So if you look at what's being reported in the Multinational Force Iraq website itself and any other stories that I could come across from Iraqi sources, from the Iraqi military claiming weapons caches, these are the ones that they find in the caches, not 240mm rockets.
And in fact, so far I have found only one report of not an actual 240mm rocket, but a warhead of a 240mm rocket being found in one of the caches.
And so I remain dubious that the 240mm rocket or warhead for the rocket is in fact an Iranian-made weapon, simply because so many other countries, as has been admitted by the U.S. spokesman, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, are manufacturing the 240mm rocket, and because it's very clear from the entire body of evidence that the Mahdi army has been getting its arms on the international market, not through some special channel to the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran.
Wow, so it's not that they're taking sort of a quarter truth and making a mountain out of a molehill.
You're telling me that they are outright lying, that they basically have, never even mind the distinction between, well, some arms may come from Iran, but not necessarily from the Iranian government.
You're saying they basically have nothing.
I'm saying they basically have nothing.
They have not come up with the concrete evidence to show that there is a channel of arms from the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to the Shiite militias in Iraq.
Nor, in fact, have they proven that there is any Iranian standoff weapon that is being used by the Shiite forces in opposing the U.S. in Iraq.
And I mentioned in my article a press conference in which the U.S. spokesman was supposedly going to present the red-handed evidence, the smoking gun evidence, of the U.S. for the Iranians sending 240mm rockets to the Shiites, which was supposed to be a fragment of one of these 240mm rockets, which had Farsi markings on it.
This was what the press had been told.
There was an ABC story two days earlier saying that the U.S. spokesman would do that.
When he appeared two days later, he had to say that he had no fragment with Farsi markings on it.
All he could say was that the explosive expert had told him that the fragments that they found were consistent with an Iranian-made weapon.
Well, you know, that and a dollar won't get you a cup of coffee anymore, I'm sorry, or happy to say, depending on how you want to look at it, that in fact that does not constitute any evidence of an Iranian weapon at all.
Because the basic structure of 240mm rockets, obviously, regardless of who manufactures the weapon, are very similar.
And finding a fragment which is consistent with does not give you any indication at all that it's an Iranian rocket.
And so that language was a dead giveaway, that they really did not find evidence that it was Iranian.
Well, now, this is the spokesman you're talking about is General Berger, who came straight from the White House to Iraq to do this job, right?
Exactly.
He was handpicked because he had been working precisely with the folks who had been deciding on the propaganda line, that is to say Dick Cheney and his minions in the White House and throughout the administration.
All right, well, now, the Wall Street Journal today has an article about how the U.S. is delaying a report on Iran arms.
Perhaps they're having trouble coming up with the evidence necessary.
But the thing that jumped out at me here is something that we've discussed in the past, which was they claim written accounts of interrogation sessions with captured Shiite militants who contend that Iraqi fighters are being trained at a facility near Tehran run by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
Right, and this, of course, if you think about it very carefully, you see that the subtext of this story, the real story behind the story, is that they do not have any, any interrogation reports that show that the Shiites are getting weapons directly from Iran, nothing.
If they had it, they would have mentioned it.
Now, the best they have is some kind of connection to Hezbollah, but they're trying to say that the connection to Hezbollah is inside Iran.
Well, it's training, and as I've said in the past, I do not doubt that Shiite fighters of the Mahdi army are being trained in both Lebanon and in Iran by the Hezbollah.
You know, there's no doubt that Sadr has a special connection with Hezbollah.
He has for years.
I think even before the Shiite regime came to power and the Saddam Hussein regime was overthrown, I think there was a connection between Hezbollah and the Shiite in Iraq, and particularly with Sadr and his martyred father.
So I think that there's every reason to believe that, in fact, the Shiite forces of Muqtada al-Sadr have been trained by Hezbollah, both in Iran and in Lebanon.
But that's very different from, of course, feeding them weapons that are to be used to attack either Iraqis or Americans.
I think the Iranians, as I've argued in the past, know perfectly well that, A, it would not be in their interest to have such weapons discovered.
They would give the United States convenient reason for attacking Iran.
And secondly, they know that the Iraqi Shiites have ways of obtaining whatever weapons they need on the international market.
And I'm close to 100 percent certain now that that is exactly what has happened.
You talked about put the EFPs aside for the moment, because that story has already been so roundly debunked, including in your last essay, that they displayed 570 EFPs and then didn't try to claim that they came from Iran, which is basically an admission that they came from Iraq.
Well, yes, exactly.
I mean, this was the largest cache of EFPs that I know of, which has been at least mentioned in the media, which has come to light in the media, which we know anything at all about the provenance of the EFP.
And in this case, it's very clear that they were identified as not being Iranian, which means one of two things.
Either they were manufactured in Iraq, which is the most likely outcome, the most likely case, or they were obtained from perhaps Hamas or one of the other groups outside of Iraq that has been manufacturing them.
But in my view, it's very nearly certain that they were manufactured by the Shiite Iraqis themselves.
When you've gone through and cataloged before all the different reports of EFP factories being found in Iraq, I think the first one that I know of was Patrick Coburn in November of 2006.
Well, he is the first journalist, you're correct, he's the first journalist to bring out a specific find of EFPs that were manufactured in Iraq.
But I had interviewed earlier and had read an article by a British specialist on EFPs, a private security company specialist who had been working on the subject for something like three to four years.
And he had pointed out that the British had found abundant evidence that they were being manufactured in Iraq, and the evidence was that when you looked at the photographs of the way in which these EFPs exploded or penetrated or did not penetrate armored vehicles, what you saw was, in many cases, a pattern in which you had both clear penetration and spattering marks where it didn't penetrate.
And what that showed was that some of the EFPs had more advanced design, and others had a more primitive design, which did not work as well.
And that was a dead certain giveaway that they were not manufactured in Iran, which should, you know, according to the U.S. military, had only the more advanced design of EFPs, and therefore, you know, that would not be an evidence that they were Iranian-made.
So the British were quite convinced, and in fact they did find a number of cells of bomb makers making EFPs as early as 2005.
So the evidence was there for a long time that they were being made in Iraq.
That evidence was available to the U.S. military, to U.S. intelligence, and it was simply deliberately ignored in the propaganda that they put out.
Well, we've discussed before how George Bush first started these lies that Iran is responsible for the roadside bombs in March of 2006, and then basically called it off, and they basically dropped that propaganda line shortly afterward, only to re-debut it in January of 2007.
Right, and I think what you've stumbled onto there, Scott, is good evidence that some people, i.e.
Dick Cheney and his minions, and Bush was going along with them at that point, wanted very badly to start attacking Iran on that EFP issue, but that the U.S. intelligence community said, absolutely no, there's no evidence of that.
And again, in early 2007, when this issue came up again, there was no doubt that the intelligence community said that they could not support that charge.
And if you go back to the NIE that was issued in February 2007, which was supposed to be on the situation in Iraq, and which of course covered the Iranian role in Iraq, the language that was used at that point strongly suggests that the most that they were, the intelligence community was willing to support was a language indicating that Iran was helping to train, was providing the venue for training of Shiite militiamen in Iran.
Not weapons being provided, certainly not EFPs.
Well, I'm sorry to ask you this, Gareth, but does it matter that all this is not true?
I mean, this is no different, it doesn't seem, than the run-up to the Iraq war, where they say lies, and the media repeats them, and you and I sit here and debunk them, and then they go on as though nothing ever happened, everything, you know, John McCain will give a speech today where he announces that the Iranians are behind the killing of all our guys in Iraq, and they'll go on like this.
Well, you know, you're absolutely right in your overall analysis, Scott, I agree with what you've said.
I think the important thing is to understand the mechanism by which these lies are created, to understand the politics behind them, to understand the mechanism by which the media goes along with it, and incidentally, it's interesting, you know, I've just gone back recently and looked at some of the media coverage in February of 2007, and there were some very good reporting, there was some very good reporting on this, which cast doubt on the initial story.
But what we find is that the administration and the U.S. military command in Iraq is so persistent, they're so totally without any conscience about this, they simply repeat the lie over and over again, but what happens is the media is simply worn down.
They are intimidated, and they feel, well, we can't continue to simply report that this is doubtful or dubious, and eventually they simply sort of become passive spectators, or passive stenographers, if you will, of the line that's being taken.
Yeah, it really is too bad, and you're absolutely right that when they first re-debuted this propaganda at the beginning of 2007, there really were a lot of good reports from all over the place.
I mean, in fact, I've gone back and researched this topic a few times since then, and been really surprised, pleasantly surprised, to see how much debunking was going on then, but like you said, where are all those debunkers gone?
Right, even the New York Times was doing it.
Yeah, it's down to you and me again.
All right, now, I wanted to ask you about this.
Andrew Coburn had an article recently in Counterpunch about George Bush signing a new finding and Congress allocating the money for more covert support for anti-Iranian terrorist groups, and we could get into that for a sec if you want, but the thing I wanted to ask you about is toward the end of that article, he says that his sources say that well over two-thirds of the attacks against Americans in Iraq are still coming from the Sunni insurgency.
Not from Muqtada al-Sadr or the special groups, but the same people that America's been fighting there all along.
You know, I don't know the exact relationship between the percentage of attacks that come from Sunnis and the percentage that come from Shiites.
It varies from one month to the next.
So he might be right one month and wrong the next month.
The last time I saw a report on that question a few months ago, the news report suggested, and of course this is based on official U.S. sources in Baghdad, that it had been running about 50-50, and that early in 2008 it shifted to more than 50 percent coming from Shiites.
Now I think that it was probably below 50 percent during the period of the Sadr ceasefire, the sort of unilateral ceasefire called by Sadr, sorry, August 27th of 2007, when that ceasefire was apparently working fairly well.
But later on, of course, it began to break down, and from my point of view, I mean my interpretation is that the Sadrist forces began to fight back because they were continually being attacked by the U.S., their officers and fighters were being rounded up by the hundreds, and they began to fight back.
So as that happened, then the needle began to move, obviously, much more toward the Shiite side.
So it really varies depending on the precise tactical strategic situation, particularly I would say in terms of U.S. policy.
The more the U.S. is attacking the Sadrists, the more the needle then points toward Sadrist counterattacks.
Right.
I guess they've been trying to do this all along, although there was always some sort of caveat somewhere in there, if you look close enough anyway, but at this point now, they're trying to make us believe that the entire Sunni insurgency has been completely bought off, they're all now the sons of Iraq, the concerned local citizens, and any Sunni who remains fighting the United States is al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Yeah, this is of course one of the most successful propaganda lines that the administration has put forward.
It has sort of completely captivated the media, almost completely captivated the media, and completely captivated the political elite in this country, with the result that, you know, as far as the Sunnis, the Sunni part of the war is concerned, the war is over.
That's the message that has been integrated into the political discourse of this country on the Iraq war.
And as I have said, and I think Patrick Colburn and others have also warned, that simply is not the case, that this war, by the Sunni resistance forces, the basic mainline nationalist Sunnis, not the pro-al-Qaeda Sunnis, Sunni resistance, but the mainline nationalist Ba'athist resistance forces, have not given up.
They have to some extent taken advantage of the U.S. ceasefire with the non-al-Qaeda, a relative ceasefire I should say, with the non-al-Qaeda Sunnis, to put their people into the sons of Iraq.
They are now resting comfortably, being retrained, not retrained, but finding, getting intelligence.
They certainly continue to maintain relations with the original organization to a great extent and many military observers in Iraq believe that they have not laid down their arms and they have not given up their fight by any means.
It's a matter of waiting for the proper moment, just as I might add, the North Vietnamese waited for the proper moment before striking in 2000 and 2002.
Well and the reason that they're waiting for the proper moment to strike rather than joining the government is because they can't join the government, they don't want to join the government and the government doesn't want them to join it because the government is who, Gareth?
Well the government is a Shiite government which is run by the United States and it's loyal to the United States and to Iran.
And to Iran, and so let me ask you this, besides all the particulars about 240mm mortars and this that and the other thing, do you have any indication as an expert historian and journalist, in the big picture here, that events on the ground have changed so that the Iranians would abandon their policy of being the Iraqi government's second best friend in the world?
Sorry, would you repeat that?
Do you see anything, events on the ground or anything that would indicate that the Iranians have changed their foreign policy that's been in place over the last few years which is to back the government of Iraq?
Oh I'm sorry, absolutely not.
I mean there's no question that the Iranian primary interest, the interest that they hold in highest priority in Iraq is to ensure the survival and the continuing strengthening of the al-Maliki regime and the Shiite parties that are closest to it, that is to say the al-Hakim forces, what used to be the Siri, and that they will always choose the al-Maliki regime over the Sadrist forces when they are in conflict, if they have to choose.
I would also add, however, that I believe that the al-Maliki regime is working closely with the Iranians to try to avoid U.S. forces being deployed in large numbers in the Shiite south and that I think what's going on with the ceasefire between al-Maliki and the Sadrists in the south today and in Sadr City are in large part an effort to get the United States military out of those areas so that the Iran can have it both ways.
They can have a Shiite regime that is stable and they can have the Sadr forces who are much more powerful and who constitute their best deterrent to U.S. attack against Iran because Sadr has publicly said that he would defend Iran if the U.S. attacked.
So they get to use him as a buffer basically to keep America back.
I think that they clearly do have that interest.
They want to avoid a U.S. all-out assault on Sadr if they can possibly avoid it.
But the basic premise that they are attempting to destabilize Iraq is false.
Absolutely false.
I mean, there's simply no reason to believe that.
And I can tell you that there's plenty of evidence that the Bush administration understands that, has known that all along, and that this whole destabilization line is complete fabrication for a strategic political purpose.
Alright folks, that's Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from IPS News, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect.
You can find all his IPS stuff, including today's article is called, Where Are Those Iranian Weapons in Iraq?
Those are at antiwar.com slash Porter.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thanks again, Scott.
