All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Our guest today is Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
You can find most of what he writes at Interpress Service and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Hey, good afternoon, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing pretty good.
And, you know, basically what I'm wondering about today is how the Iraqi people are doing.
Any chance they're going to be able to kick the imperialist occupying force out of their country anytime soon?
Well, you know, it seems to me the chances of that have vastly improved in the last few months.
And this is this is sort of the opposite of the narrative that I think the U.S. political elite has been attempting to to continue to give the U.S. public, which is that things are going along as we planned and U.S. forces are going to be staying for a while.
And that's all we need to know.
In other words, I think the dominant narrative about the United States military presence in Iraq has been overtaken by a reality that is so unpleasant to the powers that be that it has been pretty well suppressed.
The media mainstream media coverage of this seems to me has been so bad that it's really a it's one of the great wonders of the recent history to me that they've been they've been able to really suppress what I think is the is the reality that because of a combination of circumstances, particularly the the fact that there is an election coming in Iraq, that the Iraqi parliament has to approve of this agreement, and the fact that the Shiite government of Iraq is is now leaning much more toward its Shiite ally in Iran than it is to the United States.
You have sort of a perfect storm, if you will, for the U.S. military presence and its political sponsors in Washington.
Well, now, on the media thing here, I think part of this really is just that.
Most of the people in the mass media, I guess, just assume that the Americans get whatever they want.
And if the Americans want to stay forever, that any negotiation over a status of forces agreement is just that.
Right.
And that's basically what I assume, that if they can't get the SOFA signed, then they'll just go back to the United Nations and get another mandate from them.
Well, you know, I have to say that it's not just the mainstream media that have assumed that the U.S. was more or less the U.S. military presence was more or less invulnerable, that the Iraqis in no way, shape or form could have the power, could possibly have the power to kick them out.
I mean, I think that that is an assumption that was widely shared, even among strongly anti-war people in this country.
So this is a reality that has taken Americans by surprise, broadly speaking.
So now let me get this straight then, Gareth.
So when George Bush in 2005 debuted his strategy for victory and he said, they'll stand up, we'll stand down, that's basically what's happened here is the U.S. government has trained up enough of the Iraqi army that there actually is one.
And apparently the Dawa party of the prime minister and his allies believe that they don't need us anymore, we can stand down because they're capable now of exercising monopoly power in that country.
Is that basically...
Well, that's a simplified way of expressing a much more complicated reality.
I think that...
Get complicated on me, Gareth.
Tell me.
Yeah, the situation has changed dramatically in two or three years.
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
Yeah, and the Iraqi military certainly is capable of doing a lot of things.
Can they carry on the same kind of high intensity conflict that the U.S. military does?
Of course not.
I mean, they don't have the air power, they don't have the drones flying overhead, they don't have any of that stuff.
But they don't need that.
And they, you know, arguably they don't need it.
I mean, this is part of the reality, no question about it.
The U.S. military and the Bush administration certainly are so deeply embedded with the thought that, you know, they can't get along without us, that that is certainly part of the context in which they view this.
And there's no doubt that there's a huge difference between the way the Iraqis view it and the way we view it.
Now, that does not mean that they're not going to face in the future some serious difficulties with the Sunni insurgents.
I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that that's going to flare up again.
And I think the Shiite regime now assumes that, that they're going to have to deal with Sunni insurgents.
And I think they feel more comfortable dealing with it on their own, rather than depending on the United States, because they see the United States as aligned with the Sunni insurgents, and for good reason.
Right.
Well, are we more aligned with the Sunni insurgents than we are with them now?
Well, I think it's fair to say the Bush administration was, that at least we were at least aligned with the Sunni insurgents as much as we were with the Shiite government, because there was a lot of suspicion that al-Maliki and his allies are more aligned with Iran than they are with us.
You know, I mean, you have to go back to the Woodward book revelation that the United States was spying on the Iraqi military, as well as the Iraqi government, secretly, you know, keeping tabs on what they were doing.
That's obviously a sign that they understood that the public version of reality, which was that these people are in our pocket, was not the reality that they had to deal with.
Well now, in terms of any kind of real strategy to basically switch sides to the Sunni insurgents or whatever, that's all too late.
We've created a government there, to some degree, I don't know to what degree it really is the government of that country, but the government that we've created is top to bottom Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah Party guys.
We can't just go create a separate government and call it a democracy out there in the Anbar province, can we?
Well, I mean, no, there's no way to create a government in the sense that, you know, it has certainly, the situation in Anbar is such that the Sunnis have a good possibility of maintaining a degree of Sunni local government that the Shiites are going to have difficulty going in and having a Shiite government in that area, and I'm not sure that they're even going to try to do that.
I don't think that that would make sense for them.
So when you talk about Maliki knows that he's going to have to deal with the Sunni insurgency one way or another, do you think it's going to be a battle for Baghdad, or do you think maybe they'll be able to work something out on a federalism type business?
Well, the first order of business, of course, for the Shiites is to have complete control of Baghdad.
That's always been the case.
It's always been their strategy.
I think they're less concerned about, you know, having total control in Anbar and sort of, I presume, realistic about the possibility that they may have to settle for some kind of compromise there that would give a good deal of local autonomy, as far as governance is concerned, to the Sunnis.
But definitely they want to have pretty much complete control over Baghdad, and they have shown that they're willing to use force in order to do that, even to the extent of cooperating with the enemies of the Supreme Council, the Sadrists, in Baghdad.
That was really part of the narrative in 2005-2006, and into 2007, and then they decided, okay, now is the time to take down the Sadrists, beginning in 2007.
Well, so...
I guess I'm saying, you know, there's some ambiguity about how that's going to work out in Anbar and other Western Sunni-dominated provinces, but I think they're prepared to use force if the Sunnis overtly oppose the regime, as opposed to sort of quietly working out their own deals within the Sunni provinces.
Well, and this really is the biggest unresolved problem in Iraq, whether the U.S. troops are made to leave or whether they stay, is that, mostly, I guess, during the surge, but I guess even preceding the surge, the American forces basically oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, is what they call it.
It's not really ethnic, they're all Arabs, but the cleansing, so-called, of most of the Sunni Arabs that lived in Baghdad, and the sons of Iraq, what we now call the Sunni insurgency on our payroll, ultimately, they want that back.
I mean, as determined as the Shiites have been to take Baghdad for themselves this whole time, the Sunnis got to feel the same way.
Well, I think that's right.
I mean, there's bound to be more violence at some point in the future over that ethnic cleansing that did take place, and I do think that the Iraqi government now feels that they can handle that.
Right.
That was the meaning of, basically, you know, they're saying to the Americans, thanks, but no thanks.
We don't want you involved in any military operations any further in Baghdad, in the Baghdad area.
So, but the conflict is not simply about whether the Shiite government will ever be able to extend a monopoly of power over, say, Anbar province, for example, but Baghdad itself.
You know, I'm sort of following the logic trail here, that at this point, for the Shiite to go into Anbar and other provinces and try to impose militarily a conquest on them would be more trouble than it's worth.
Well, that is not an absolute prediction that that can never happen.
But I think at this stage, they certainly see the advantage to trying to keep the focus on the Baghdad area.
Right.
Well, at the same time, from the Sunni insurgents point of view, they probably would consider that at least at some opportune time, the bloodbath that would ensue in an attempt to retake at least parts of Baghdad would be worth it.
That's right.
Exactly.
And there's another angle here, of course, and that is at some point in the future, the Sunnis and Shiites will want to cooperate against the Kurds to ensure that the Kurds don't take over oil resources that the Sunnis and Shiite Arabs both agree do not belong to the Kurds.
Yeah.
One of the most ignored conflicts in Iraq is the status of the city of Kirkuk, which I think what was it Barzani or Talabani said, it's our Jerusalem, even though really it's a historically Arab city.
That's right.
And so that's got to be in the back of the minds of both Sunnis and Shiites at this point, although not at this point necessarily the immediate issue.
But what we haven't talked about, Scott, which, of course, is really the headline, is how yesterday's event impacts on the SOFA negotiations.
And obviously, this is a big part of the story that alongside the factors that we've already talked about, which certainly incline the Iraqi government today not to go along with any further demands that the United States might want to make or even the demands that it's already made in the SOFA text, they want to wait for the Obama administration to take over.
And if Obama wouldn't be willing to sign an agreement that would be more in line with the interest of that Shiite government.
Hmm.
Well, I don't know.
And I really think that's true.
I mean, an absolute prohibition, of course, against any use of bases by the United States to go beyond the Iraqi border, which I think the Bush administration obviously does not want to sign on to because they've already shown that that's what they want to do.
Right.
The Obama administration presumably would be willing to sign on to that.
Well, what about a real withdrawal, though?
Because, Gareth, I mean, I don't know what Obama will do in negotiations with Maliki or whatever, but he's made pretty clear that what he wants to do is get rid of all the combat forces in the country over, I guess he says, about 16 months.
But he wants to leave an embassy the size of Vatican City there and all the Marines necessary to defend it.
He wants to leave counterterrorism strike forces in the country and, of course, all the troops necessary to provide force protection for them.
And et cetera, et cetera.
It seems like pretty quickly we get back up to one hundred and fifty thousand troops.
I'm not I'm not at all sure that that I think I would disagree with you.
But that is that's the game plan that Obama has in mind at this point.
So the 58 bases, he's going to give them up as he entered.
The final stretch was to differentiate himself from Bush and McCain on Iraq in the sense that we are spending ten billion dollars a month on Iraq and that has to end.
That's a pretty clear cut theme that gives him not only cover, but suggests that he is indeed going to be willing to go along with the what appears to be the demand that the United States will clear out lock, stock and barrel by the end of, you know, before the end of his first term, that there will be no U.S. military personnel, no combat troops, no support troops there.
Wow, well, that sure sounds optimistic to me.
I mean, you really think he and his eventual cabinet would be willing to give up the 58 bases and bear in mind that, you know, we've had a financial meltdown that changes the political the politics of the situation here at home, not, you know, and that further underlines the impossibility for an Obama administration of trying to maintain a longer term military presence there.
I mean, you know, it just it just doesn't add up.
This, of course, leaves open the whole question.
You know, this whole Afghan thing is another issue.
But but he has been over and over again saying the issue is not Iraq.
Iraq is not important.
That's where he's got some room for maneuver.
And I have to believe that Obama is smart enough to see this as the golden opportunity for him to end the U.S. military involvement in Iraq in a way that he can say is responsible because it will be basically signing an agreement with the Iraqi government.
And if he if he can't see that, then we're all very seriously in the soup, no doubt about that.
But, you know, I have to give him credit for at least not wanting to maintain a military presence in Iraq.
I just don't think that that, from his point of view, makes any sense.
Right.
Yeah, I'm just, you know, in the back of my mind, I got these centrist Democrat talking points playing about how, well, you know, we need to leave a strike force in the area over the horizon so we can reinvade if necessary to fight al Qaeda.
And yeah, that's not going to happen.
Scott, I mean, that's just not going to happen.
Yeah, not going to happen.
But you think it's more likely that they'll really withdraw?
I mean, because it seems to me the part that's not going to happen is that the American establishment is ever going to give up Iraq.
They stole it fair and square.
Belongs to them.
Well, I mean, I think that we're dealing here with a political figure who who was not part of that at all and has no ownership at all on Iraq.
I mean, I think that's the bottom line.
Barack Obama simply has no ownership, as does Joe Biden, by the way.
I mean, he definitely has bought into it and he does have ownership.
But Obama does not it does not have to listen to Joe Biden on this and is not going to listen to Joe Biden on Iraq.
I just don't believe it.
Well, I sure appreciate all the hope and optimism around this November.
Isn't it nice?
I mean, part of this is Barack Obama and part of it is my sense that we are dealing here with an American empire that is in retreat, that does not have the wherewithal to resist the pressure that's coming from the Iraqi people and from other parts of the Middle East.
I mean, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the the power situation is so strongly stacked against the United States empire in this present situation that I mean, this is the overall framework within which I'm looking at the situation.
Right.
And that is not by any means to say that Barack Obama is going to be able to resist the pressure for him to get in deeper in Afghanistan.
I think that's a grave danger.
No doubt about that.
Yeah, well, you're right that I mean, we are at this point now looking at four trillion dollar a year budgets and so forth.
I mean, this is how empires fall.
Yeah, and I think in the future, we should start using the term B.E. or bailout equivalent to talk about the cost of the empire, since that is at least something that Americans have become a bit politically conscious of what that means, a bailout, meaning, you know, between 700 billion and one trillion dollars yearly.
So that's the kind of small change that I think we have to begin to bring to the attention of the American people as we talk about the issues that relate to the to ending the U.S. empire in the Middle East.
All right.
Well, as I'm sure you know, the war party came out with this study, which that seemed to escape everybody's attention.
I didn't hear anything about it until two senators wrote an op ed in The Washington Post about their conclusions.
And when you go and do a little investigating, you see it's basically the Office of Special Plans alumni wrote this damn thing.
And it sort of even recommends using a surge into Afghanistan as cover for preparing to attack Iran from the east.
Yeah, I mean, this is an astonishingly stupid piece of work, which the real story here, the interesting part of it, it's not very interesting that Dan Coats and Chuck Robb, you know, ready to take this position.
I mean, these are these are two failed politicians who have no following whatever and have no credibility, whatever.
So so there's hardly any story there at all worth covering.
And, you know, certainly not a front page story in The New York Times, as far as I'm concerned.
But the fact that Dennis Ross signed on to that is worth noting.
And of course, I mean, he is sort of making a claim to being an advisor to Barack Obama.
I think the reality is, of course, that he is one of of 10 people that Barack Obama has listened to on the Middle East.
There is absolutely no evidence that Dennis Ross is the one who has Barack Obama's ear on anything having to do with the Middle East, let alone on the question of Afghanistan and Iran.
So, I mean, I would be very cautious about taking, you know, Dennis Ross is signing on to that as a sign that this is the direction that an Obama administration is going to go.
Certainly, specifically on the point that you made that they said we should be making plans for a possible attack, not just a possible attack, that we should make plans for an attack on Iran.
I don't think that the Barack Obama administration is going to go there either.
I mean, that's one of the red lines that I think we can say Barack Obama is simply not going to cross.
Well, he so far has taken the position that he agrees that for Iran to enrich uranium is tantamount to having a nuclear weapons program that must be stopped, right?
Well, I think that's true, that he has taken that the position that we can't accept an Iranian nuclear program.
However, that is a position that was shared with another administration of recent vintage, which I think we're all familiar with, which is the George W. Bush administration.
And in the end, of course, that administration decided that the military option was simply not viable.
So to take that position is at this point campaign rhetoric that does not translate into the logical position that you would expect to follow is that we're going to have to attack Iran.
And that simply doesn't follow.
I mean, that's the nature of the reality is that, you know, you have on one hand sort of a political posture that we cannot accept an Iranian nuclear program.
And on the other hand, you have the reality that we can't really do anything about it by using military force.
That's simply not on the table.
You know, it's funny, I remember in, I guess, about a year ago, Dennis Kucinich in one of the debates, Barack Obama said, well, everybody knows that Iran is making nuclear weapons.
And Dennis Kucinich said, well, that's not true.
Don't you know about Mohammed ElBaradei?
And don't you haven't you ever heard of the Central Intelligence Agency?
They say that they're not making nuclear weapons.
And I got to tell you, you know, I'm only, you know, guessing at watching people's gears turn in their head.
But I don't think that Obama knew what the hell Dennis Kucinich was talking about.
I suspect that you're you're absolutely right about that.
He has not read into that issue as he should have and has he must.
And if there is hope for an Obama administration doing the right thing on Iran, which, of course, is an absolutely central issue for any foreign policy, a central foreign policy issue for the Obama administration, it is that he will take seriously his responsibility for really getting an in-depth understanding of of the whole issue of the Iranian nuclear program and indeed the whole history of U.S.
-Iran relation.
If Barack Obama does take that seriously and begins to to read, you know, not just the NIE, but, you know, what is available in the scholarly literature, which is admittedly a long shot.
I'm not convinced that's going to happen, but there's certainly a possibility that he'll do that.
He will understand that he has been misled profoundly on that issue.
Yeah, well, let's hope he starts reading Gordon Prather.
I feel exactly, you know, Gordon Prather.
I feel that man's frustration.
I just channel it.
His every article is like taking people to kindergarten class on there's such a thing as the IAEA.
OK, and what they do is they, quote, unquote, capital S, safeguard people's nuclear facilities.
And that's what they're doing in Iran.
OK.
And this poor guy just can't seem to get his message out there.
I don't know why.
Well, we do know why, actually, but that's another story.
Furthermore, of course, there is still to come the story of the laptop document as a fraudulent enterprise, which I promise that I will publish it.
The time has not come yet, but it will come soon.
Oh, good.
I mean, this is another what we already what we already know about that is damning in its entirety.
In fact, to read the doctor's Porter and Prather at antiwar dot com slash each of those last names and read about that laptop.
And in fact, I think Dr.
Prather's article, not his most recent, but the one before that, one of the titles that he suggested, and it could have very well been because it's covered at length in the article, is that laptop finally completely debunked or something like that.
I mean, there is absolutely nothing to make a reasonable gentleman like you or Dr.
Prather believe that there's any real nefarious activity behind those documents at all, at least on the Iranian side.
And you're right.
You're right.
But and further than that, now, we we do.
In fact, we do know that there are direct contradictions between that that set of alleged documents and documents that the IAEA has now accepted as as genuine.
And that's that's the story still to come.
All right.
Well, I can't wait for that one.
I also wanted to ask you about this because, of course, you wrote the groundbreaking article on this burnt offering in the American Prospect about the Iranians offer back in 2003.
I forget if it was on the eve of the Iraq war or right after it.
Just after the invasion.
It was it was early May of 2003.
Yeah.
And so I guess maybe in Iran, they were reading antiwar dot com and about the neocons plans to turn those tanks around to the east and head right on.
And they decided they would try to preempt that by offering a grand peace deal to the Americans, put every single issue on the table, hopefully normalize relations, get security guarantees and sanctions lifted by us.
And in return, they would put pressure on Hamas and Hezbollah to act right.
They would recognize Israel.
They would cooperate on put their nuclear program on the table for negotiation, et cetera.
And I wonder whether you think there's much of a possibility of a real grand bargain along those lines with Iran where we can just end all this saber rattling nonsense once and for all.
I think that simply depends on the on the Obama administration, whether they are smart enough and honest enough to really try for that.
I think the the most interesting thing, really, in the broader context about that 2003 offer is that it that that represented simply a beating up of the of the process of trying to reach agreement with the United States.
Obviously, when you feed the United States that kind of document that lays out the issues to be negotiated and sort of a starting point from their point of view of what they're willing to talk about it by way of concession, you know, in a very general sense.
I mean, that's a that's that's obviously the most far reaching sort of diplomatic initiative that you can imagine.
But if you go back over the previous 15 years or so, starting in the late.
Well, the early 1990s and look at the Rafsanjani and Khatami administration in in Tehran and what they were trying to do, you see that there were three major initiatives that Iran took to under Rafsanjani, one of the Khatami to really engage the United States to try to to get a process of diplomatic engagement going with the United States.
The first two were making major diplomatic gestures, political diplomatic gestures to the US, one on the Lebanese hostages, which the Iranian government tried to influence and did succeed in influencing the Lebanese hostage takers to release all those as a gesture to the United States.
And the only understanding that there would be a response by the first Bush administration and there wasn't.
The second one was the Conoco deal, which was a gesture to to the Clinton administration.
And that was rebuffed because of AIPAC.
The third one was with the Bush administration in 2001, 2003, when they entered into a diplomatic dialogue with U.S. officials in Geneva to talk about Afghanistan, al Qaeda and then Iraq.
And again, of course, the Bush administration completely gave them back of their hand by calling Iran part of the axis of evil.
So the history of this is that they've tried three times before the 2003 to get something started diplomatic with the US and the US basically rebuffed them in all three cases.
And I think that's really the relevant history that Barack Obama does not know.
He does not understand that.
And one of the problems that we face potentially is that he will keep Robert Gates on as defense secretary.
Gates has been publicly stating that Iran has been rebuffing US initiatives since the beginning of the Islamic Republic.
Complete lie.
I have no idea why he's saying that, whether he's completely ignorant, whether he managed to avoid or ignore the evidence or whether this has another agenda behind it.
But in any case, that is one of the most dangerous possibilities that Gates would be taken on as secretary of defense.
One of the scariest things that I've learned being a pirate radio show host is that these politicians really understand these issues less well than myself.
A lot of the times.
Well, there's no doubt about that.
That that's absolutely correct.
And the only question is, why are they so ignorant?
Yeah, I mean, this is not I'm being serious here.
This is not about, you know, I'm smart.
I'm a freaking cab driver, man.
It's horrible that that's true at all.
Well, it is really it's really a question of whether you're committed to trying to find the truth.
And you're one of the few in this country who have that sort of commitment.
And that's what really counts.
And I think the at the same time, the the political figures that we're talking about here do not have a commitment to finding the truth.
That's not what's important to them.
Yeah.
And it's just a power.
Yeah.
Well, and see, this goes to the question of all this Obama.
You know, I'd like to believe me.
I'm so anti McCain that I part of my brain is trying to trick me into having a little bit of hope in this guy.
But when has anyone ever inherited total power and then performed better than they promised they would in the primary?
You know, one of the callers actually earlier on the show here said, well, you know, all politicians are liars.
And this guy, Obama's promised to be an insane warmonger.
So maybe he'll actually be all right.
I wrote a book about JFK and and LBJ in the Vietnam War.
I mean, it wasn't just about them, but that was a large part of it.
And if you look at specifically JFK and how he presented himself in the 1960 election, he presented himself as well to the right of of his opponent, Richard Nixon, on Cuba and in general on communists.
And Obama gap and a missile gap.
Exactly.
Precisely.
And we know that that to a considerable extent, that was a political posturing that he knew he had to assume to be elected when he was elected.
Of course, then he was subject to all these bureaucratic pressures.
But we do know that JFK was both smarter and more more pacific than the people that surrounded him.
And I think that's going to be the case with Obama as well.
So that is perhaps the only source of hope that I can offer.
I mean, it's all relative.
I definitely appreciate the fact that this guy at least is literate and we're not dealing with George Bush or John McCain, who, you know, to me is, well, the words of Charles Goyette, he's simply a dilettante.
He's he's not an expert in anything except his own narcissism.
He I could I could put it.
I think that's a perfect summation of John McCain.
So also there you go.
I mean, he really he's 72 years old when he tells The Wall Street Journal.
Yeah, I never decided I never bothered trying to learn anything about economics.
So I appreciate the fact that we're at least dealing with someone who believes that there's such a thing as reality that needs to be examined.
You know, that's actually progress from where we've been and where we could have been.
We have to we have to sort of understand the reality in that context and do our best to steer Obama in the right direction by doing whatever we can to get those facts out.
I mean, that's that's still the bottom line.
All right.
Well, you keep writing and I'll keep interviewing you about what you're right about.
We'll keep doing what we do.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Gareth Porter.
I.P.
S.
News Antiwar dot com slash Porter.
