03/19/13 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
Like I told you before, the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org represents the best of the libertarian movement.
Led by the fearless Jacob Hornberger, FFF writers James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory, and many more.
Write the op-eds and the books, host the events, and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better.
Help support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom.
Or to contribute, just look for the big red donate button at the top of FFF.org.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Next up today is Gareth Porter, our good friend, independent journalist and historian.
Writes for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
He's done award-winning work for Truthout.org.
And we, they, I'm used to saying we.
It's kind of, sort of still we.
I don't know.
Run all of it at antiwar.com/porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How's things?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks again for having me.
Good.
You're welcome.
Thank you very much for joining us.
So earlier we talked with Jonathan Landay about who lied us into war and how he and his colleagues did such a great job of explaining what was going on in real time.
It's the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War invasion today.
But what I wanted to do with you, hopefully, was get about, you know, your half-hour capsule review of how the war went, because it wasn't just that they lied us into war for nefarious motives and on completely bogus charges, but they really did a lousy job of waging this war, and they ended up not even getting to keep the damn thing, which I think they always meant you break it, you own it as like a hopefully thing, right?
And they didn't get to even keep it.
So what the hell happened in the last decade anyway?
Gareth, tell us.
Yeah, this gets to the heart of the matter.
I mean, you're really pointing to the question that I think we all need to, I mean, as a country, the United States needs to come to grips with, and that is the whole idea of waging war against a population of a country, whether it's the entire population or a large segment of that population, as in the case of Iraq.
You know, it's a fool's errand.
It's something that cannot succeed for the most obvious reasons, if you stop and think about it.
I mean, the United States goes into a country like Iraq with all of its guns blazing without having the slightest idea who these people are, you know, basically simply saying, okay, you know, we're the boss now, we're going to put things in order, and you're going to submit to our authority.
And regardless of the political affiliations, regardless of the cultural orientation of a particular population, it's going to create a strong resistance.
And that's exactly what happened in Iraq for reasons which are perfectly logical and explainable historically.
You know, the Sunnis had, you know, the Saddam Hussein regime was largely Sunni in character, not exclusively by any means, but the Sunnis definitely were a minority in the country, albeit a very large minority, and they had political power for decades under Saddam.
So, you know, when the United States comes in displacing a Sunni regime and allowing for political change to take place, it means that the Shia are going to be able to gain power.
The Sunnis are going to resist that, and particularly resisting it in a situation where it's being imposed by a foreign occupation.
So all of that is simply by way of saying that, you know, the United States could not possibly win that war.
It was incredibly obtuse to believe that was possible, and the fact that you still have people arguing, and will continue to have this argument for decades in the future, presumably, about whether we could have won the war is a tribute to that obtuseness, and political obtuseness, if you will, in this country.
Well, I think if people remember back in 2002, certainly the attitude of the White House was, first of all, we're never wrong, because we've got America's intelligence agencies, which are all way awesomer than anything you've ever seen in a Hollywood movie, and two, we can do anything we want, because we've got the U.S. Army, and I know you're not saying that you doubt the awesomeness of the U.S. Army.
So that was it.
I mean, based on that, we can do anything.
We create our own reality.
Well, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that there was a very strong belief, and of course it was particularly powerful among the neoconservatives.
That was, I think, absolutely the central tenet of the neoconservative philosophy and perspective, that the United States can and should use military power to have its way in the world, and to maintain its hegemony, its dominance, militarily and politically, in whatever part of the world we decide we are interested in.
So there's no question that that is the central problem that underlies this entire war, the belief that if we set our minds to it, if we set our foot and our flag in a particular country, then there's no reason why we can't establish our authority.
We can't bring the insurgents to heel.
And that, again, I think is just fundamentally the most outrageous kind of stupidity that one can imagine.
All right.
So now take us through a little bit here, because I think as far as, hey, listen, it was going to be trouble when we overthrew a minority-backed dictatorship and insisted on majority rule, but it wasn't the Americans that really insisted on majority rule, was it?
Well, this is an interesting question.
And I was just looking at the piece that I did for Middle East policy back in 2005, in which I talked a little bit about this question.
There was a division within the Bush administration over this question.
You know, some of the neoconservatives are known to have trusted that the Shia political leadership, including the people who were in charge of the Baader Brigade and so forth, were okay because they were ultimately going to be pro-Iraq and anti-Iran, or at least independent of Iran.
And the Shia, their political orientation, generally speaking, in the Middle East, was more acceptable to the extreme right in this country and in Israel than the Sunni elites in the Middle East.
And so the neoconservative position was, sure, we want the Shia to gain power.
On the other hand, there was definitely a lot of skepticism within the Bush administration, both among some people who have been associated with the neoconservatives, and I think here specifically of Michael Rubin, who wrote quite critically of that view and was very distrustful of the Iranian-supported groups in Iraq from the beginning, and also, of course, others in the State Department who did not share the predilections of the neoconservatives with regard to Iraq and the Middle East generally.
So there was a policy struggle over this issue, no question about it, within the Bush administration in 2003-2004, which basically, I think it was decided, as you've suggested, not so much by the Bush administration itself as by the Iraqis.
That is to say, the Shia majority spoke up.
Specifically, wasn't it the spring of 2004 when the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest-ranking Shiite cleric on Earth, said, Hey, everybody, if you believe in God, I want you to go outside and protest and demand one man, one vote?
And so virtually every household from Baghdad to Basra, everybody came out into the street and said, You want to start this thing over, Bush?
Good.
Then do what we say.
Absolutely, and that really called the hand of the Bush administration, forced the hand, I should say, of the Bush administration on this issue of elections.
There was, in fact, at that point, a plan that said, No, we're not going to have elections for a while.
We're going to operate on a different basis.
The United States will basically call the shots.
It will set up a government of its own self, you know, sort of carefully hand-selected people.
And once we get things set up and running, then we'll think about elections.
That was, in fact, the position that was being taken in 2004 until, as you say, al-Sistani called for a massive demonstration, and it was indeed the biggest political demonstration anyone had seen in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country up to that time.
The Americans got the message.
They didn't really have much of a choice but to submit to the demand for a one-man, one-vote election.
And now, I've been criticized in the past.
We've got to kind of go back years, but I've been criticized, and I think it's probably at least somewhat fair, of kind of oversimplifying about the Sunni-Shiite divide in Iraq, because, in fact, the Arab population was very intermixed, intermarried between Shia and Sunni, and they really had a pretty, you know, you could call it, I hate to use the word, a progressive kind of attitude about those sorts of things.
But it was really the American policy and the leadership, the only organized leadership on the Shiite side, that really made it that much of a divide.
And really, I mean, obviously the Sunnis were losing power, and it was maybe a somewhat predominantly Sunni-based insurgency from the beginning, but there were a lot of Shiites participating in it, too.
But it was really the American policy of writing the Constitution and holding the elections under the religious slates, and then, you know, which led to the rise of the Iraqi National Alliance, and then the turning of the Badr Corps into the Iraqi army, and using basically the Shiite political leadership as our tools.
Really, they were using the army as their tools, really, in taking Baghdad and turning the thing into a civil war over the years 2004, 5, 6.
And that's my way.
I don't know, what do you think about that?
I would just add that, you know, the sectarian relations situation in Iraq appears to have been pretty complex.
You know, it's true that there was a lot of intermarriage, that there were arrangements in which the Shia had participated in particularly the military under Saddam.
There were a lot of ways in which the Shia and Sunni had managed to live together, work together without a lot of violence.
On the other hand, we have to be clear that there were tensions within the society between Sunni and Shia communities going back a long time, that the Sunnis had taken advantage of their political power in ways that the Shia resented, at least many Shia resented.
And, you know, look, there were political leaders and people with political aspirations on both sides who were much more sensitive to the issue of whether the government was going to be Shia or Sunni.
And those are the ones who were really calling the shots.
Political leadership in both communities who had a great stake in the outcome were the ones who were organizing things.
And that's really what, you know, I think contributed to the situation that we saw arise in 2005, 2006, 2007.
But you're right that the United States contributed to that as well.
And it was not simply the elections.
I think, you know, we have to acknowledge at this point the much bigger contribution was that the United States had a serious problem.
It could not defeat the Sunni resistance to the U.S. occupation with the tools that it had at hand.
And I would just recall to everyone that in 2004, the most important thing that happened really was that, you know, the United States had set up in the Sunni zone, major Sunni centers in western Iraq, particularly Anbar province, a set of security institutions, local security institutions, particularly police, that were recruited from the Sunni population.
But in the spring and then again in the fall of 2004, the Sunni resistance organization succeeded in basically penetrating those local security institutions and basically got those Sunni police to go over to the other side.
So the whole system collapsed.
Something like 80 percent of the police that the United States had recruited for these outfits in the Sunni centers essentially moved to the other side, to the Sunni resistance.
So basically that strategy completely failed.
And in response, the person who had the most to do with trying to come up with an answer to the situation at that point was none other than David Petraeus, who was head of the Training and Transition Command in Baghdad.
And his solution was, in large part, to go to the Badr Brigade and the Shia, and the people who were available were the people who were ready to fight the Sunnis and torture them, which was the way they did things, to get confessions.
And that's exactly what happened in late 2004, early 2005.
And that, of course, was really the beginning of the kind of sectarian violence, the sectarian warfare.
And I'm not suggesting that it was the entire explanation for what happened later on by any means.
I think the other factor was the rise of al-Qaeda, which, of course, again, the U.S. military presence was the primary factor in having spawned.
So I think it was the U.S. military presence, the U.S. military strategy, the failure to be able to suppress the Sunni resistance without going to rely on the Shia, Shia militia, basically, who were already available, trained by the Iranians, and ready to fight under the auspices of the U.S. military.
So, I mean, I think that's really the fundamental problem that has not been acknowledged yet.
Yeah, well, and it's such an important point, that the Badr Brigade was the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was the Hakeem family, basically, Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem, and the Iraqi traitors who had all fled back when Jimmy Carter hired Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, they fled to Iran and took the Ayatollah's side in that one, for the entire Carter and Reagan-backed Saddam war against Iran.
And then they came into Iraq on our heels, and it's important here to make the discrepancy between Muqtada al-Sadr and the Supreme Islamic Council guys, because Muqtada al-Sadr was really a nationalist, and he was opposed to Iranian, too much at least, Iranian influence in Iraq, and wanted to make an alliance with the Sunni nationalists right off the bat, and nip any sectarian fighting in the bud, but he wanted to kick the Americans out, too.
And so he had to go, he had to be made public enemy number one, and they accused him of being an Iranian cat's paw and an agent, and they ended up chasing him into Iran, and making him more Iranian than he ever was in the first place, and supporting the Badr Brigade and the Supreme Islamic Council, who were the pro-Iranians, and who really wanted what we have now, this federated system where, ah, forget the Anbar province, who wants to try to rule that?
We'll just run off with all the land from Baghdad to Basra.
Well, you're right, and of course, what you're doing is setting the stage, if you will, for the later development in the war, in which the United States did, in fact, rely openly, ally itself openly with the Supreme Council, in large part, and this is the wonderful irony here, because the Supreme Council was, you know, whispering in our ear, now, you know, you've got to take on Sadr, he's the real enemy here, and he's our common enemy.
And so there was this interesting alignment between, at one point in 2006, the al-Maliki government, the United States, and the Supreme Council, against Sadr, who, as you say, was certainly a nationalist, not somebody who was slavishly following Iranian dictates, but who had, in fact, gotten arms and money thanks to the Iranians.
I mean, he did, in fact, have an arrangement.
I think it's clear that he had decided that the only way he could build up the Sadrist movement, the Mahdi army, was to get Iranian help.
And so, you know, I mean, this whole Sadrist movement was really caught in a kind of contradiction, a dilemma.
On one hand, they didn't really like to be dependent on the Iranians, they didn't like the Iranians, they didn't trust the Iranians, and wanted to distinguish themselves from the Iranians, but on the other hand, they accepted their help.
And that led to some very complex politics, which we won't get into now, but it had to do with Petraeus being able to believe that he was able to suborn the Sadrists against a small group, as he saw it, of Iraqis who were, in fact, working directly for the Iranians.
And I think it was much more complex than that.
And I think some of the Sadrists were telling the Americans what they wanted to hear, and saying, we're really on your side, you know, we're not really on the Iranian side.
And the Americans were ready to believe that they were on the verge of making a breakthrough, of winning over the Sadrists, when, in fact, I don't think that was ever true.
All right, and now, you mentioned Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or the Islamic State in Iraq, as it's called sometimes.
And one of the things about them that I thought was notable was that pretty much everybody hated their guts, even the Sunni-based insurgency types that they had made their alliance with.
And beginning at early 06, at the latest, the local Sunni insurgents already had had enough of these guys' suicide-bombing marketplaces, and cutting off people's hands, and outlawing the buying of sexual organ-shaped vegetables at the market, and this kind of crap, and conscripting their sons.
And so, this was a year later, David Petraeus showed up and gave them money and said, hey, will you fight Al-Qaeda, and I'll take credit for it.
But they'd been doing that already for a year, right?
And by Al-Qaeda, in this case, I'm sorry, I wanted to clarify that.
I mean, the foreigners who traveled to Iraq to fight under the Al-Qaeda banner called themselves that.
Zarqawi's friends, and whatever very small number, very small percentage of the Sunni-based insurgency of Iraq, actually joined up with them, but it was still a small percentage of the insurgency.
I would agree with you.
The only disagreement I have is that actually the Sunni war against Al-Qaeda, the war of a number of important Sunni resistance organizations against Al-Qaeda, actually began in late 04 or early 05.
Well, I did say at the latest.
That was my hedge.
But in fact, I think I remember at the end of the war, probably around 08, you and I went through, and from a bunch of different sources, I don't remember them all off the top of my head, and we pieced together how actually in the summer of 04, the summer of 05, the summer of 06, and maybe even the summer of 03, the Sunnis had been offering basically the same deal, just let us patrol our own neighborhoods and we won't fight you.
Well, certainly they were doing so in 04, and there's no doubt, and this is something I discussed in my article in Middle East Policy in the fall of 2005, the United States could have made a deal with the Sunni insurgents in 2004, 2005, or 2006, to pick any of those years, and the deal would have been slightly different depending on which year the United States chose it.
But they could have made a deal for a peace agreement under which the Sunni resistance would have ended its armed struggle against the United States in return for the United States giving them a timetable for withdrawal, not a one-year, two-year timetable, but three, four-year timetable, working with the Sunni resistance on a reformation, a revision of the government to give the Sunnis some greater role, and of course Sunni integration into the military.
And then at the same time, they were willing to fight al-Qaeda, they were willing to take on al-Qaeda.
And later on, increasingly the Sunnis who were interested in making a deal with the United States were concerned with the Shia.
They were concerned with the fact that, from their point of view, the Shia representing Iranian interest, Iranian power in Iraq, were gaining, they were essentially defeating militarily the Sunni organizations.
I mean, they were afraid of basically losing completely to the Shia, and so they wanted to align themselves with the United States in order to prevent that.
And as time went on, that was their primary concern.
And so at the end, they were actually offering, I mean, when I say the end, I mean 2005-2006, they were saying, make a deal with us and we'll help fight the Iranians for you.
We'll fight the Iranian influence.
So anyway, there were plenty of options there, but of course the people of the White House and the Pentagon, whose interests were at stake here, whose reputations were at stake, were never going to admit that they'd been wrong, which to make a deal with the Sunnis would be to admit that you'd been wrong to start the war in the first place.
Right.
Yeah, I think the way you put it one time was, if Petraeus ever had a victory, it was taking back his own position, reversing his own position, and then convincing George Bush that basically, no, we can't win, and no, we're not going to win, and what we're going to do is we're going to make a deal instead, and we're going to call that winning.
And that was his victory, really, was in getting George Bush to back down.
Yeah, I don't remember what I might have said specifically about Petraeus' view, but certainly at some point I learned that Petraeus had expressed doubt that counterinsurgency was going to work in Iraq by mid-2005.
So I think that he was an early acceptor of this idea.
But look, what we haven't talked about so far is the degree to which the U.S. military command itself under George Casey and basically his entire staff had come to the conclusion by, I'd say, certainly mid-2005 and maybe even before that, that this war was not going to work, that counterinsurgency, as they'd practiced it, was a failure.
And the best they could do was to turn the war over to the Shia government and security services and get out.
And that was their strategy.
And of course they weren't going to, I mean, I should start again.
They did, in fact, admit this publicly.
I mean, Casey was making statements in the summer of 2005 about this being a war against the Pillsbury Doughboy, where you push in one place and it pops out somewhere else.
You defeat the Sunnis in one location and they pop up in another location.
And they actually understood by that point that it couldn't succeed.
I mean, all they could do was to try to hold on long enough to train up a Shia-dominated military and hope to get out.
I mean, that was the best they could possibly do.
And that, of course, was a plan that the Shia were happy with because that would mean that they would be able to consolidate their power.
And that was the nexus on which the war continued for the next couple of years.
I'm sorry we have to leave it here.
We've got Darja Mail coming up next.
There's so much more, obviously, that we could have touched on, but this is very good stuff.
Well, we had a few big points.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, what are you going to do?
It was a gigantic, years-long war that happened.
There's a lot to go over.
But thanks again, as always, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
I'm Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for interpress service, IPSnews.net and Antiwar.com/Porter.
And, you know, the first time I ever interviewed him was January 07, the very start of the surge.
And he immediately came in and started separating wheat from chaff about what was really going on.
And I've interviewed him more than any other reporter ever since then, probably, I think, more than 150 times.
You can find that whole archive there at ScottHorton.org.
Now, I've got to go.
Hang on just one sec.
Hey, everybody.
Scott Horton here.
You ought to consider advertising on the show.
Here's how it'll work.
You give me money, and then I'll tell everybody how great your stuff is.
They'll buy it, and we'll all be rich as Republicans.
Sound pretty good?
Shoot me an email.
Scott at ScottHorton.org, and we'll work it out.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here, inviting you to check out WallStreetWindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by former hedge fund manager Mike Swanson, who's investing in commodities, mining stocks, and European markets.
WallStreetWindow is unique in that Mike shows people what he's really investing in and updates you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike thinks his positions are going to go up because of all the money the Federal Reserve is printing to finance the deficit.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
And Mike's got a great new book coming out, so also keep your eye on writermichaelswanson.com for more details.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
CNI stands against America's negative role in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war party's relentless push to bomb Iran, and the roles played by twisted Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in justifying it all.
The Council for the National Interest works tirelessly to expose and oppose our government's most destructive policies, but they can't do it without you.
Support CNI's push to straighten out America's crooked course.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
And click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Man, you need some Liberty stickers for the back of your truck.
At libertystickers.com, they've got great state hate, like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army, die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
At government school, why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at libertystickers.com.
And of course, they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at thebumpersticker.com.
That's libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.