09/02/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Oh no.
It says here guys that ISIS has just released a video claiming to show the beheading of another American journalist, this time Stephen Sotloff, the guy who was threatened at the end of the last video.
All right.
Well, we got Gareth Porter on the line.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes primarily for Interpress Service, IPSnews.net, IPSnews.net, and he's the author of the book Manufactured Crisis, debunking all the crap you've ever heard about Iran's nuclear program.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
I'm fine.
Thanks for having me back again.
Very happy to have you here.
Sorry that I can't talk right, don't know anything, but I'm trying.
Listen, so I don't even know where to begin.
I got my ISIS section over here in Mozilla Firefox.
It's about 25 stories long.
We got airstrikes all over the place.
We got a war on the line between Kurdistan and the Islamic State, between Shiastan and the Islamic State.
We've got ISIS winning, it seems like, some pretty major victories over there in Western Islamic State land and what was formerly called Eastern Syria.
And we got the Peshmerga and the PKK commies, and we got another beheading.
And I just wonder what you make of all of this.
What do you think is really happening?
Where do you think it's all going?
What the hell, man?
Well, first of all, Scott, I have not been primarily following the saga of ISIS and the US sort of segue into war again over the issue of its rise.
The last month and more, I've been focusing almost entirely day to day on the issue of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon and then in Gaza.
And so I've just barely caught up in the last maybe two weeks with this story.
But still, I don't feel like I'm by any means well read on the subject.
But you're absolutely right to focus on this.
This is clearly an issue that is going to be at the center of the whole debate on US military involvement in the world for the next few years.
I'm sorry to say, I'm afraid to say.
Well, let me interrupt you for just a moment to say I can't wait to read your new long form piece about Israel, Palestine, and I'm very grateful that that's been your focus.
It needs to be.
On the other hand, I also want to defend you from your own disclaimer, because as people may or may not be aware, you know a hell of a lot about what's been going on in Iraq over the last decade and what's led up to the rise of the Islamic State.
And in fact, you know, you haven't been writing all about the Syrian civil war and what's been going on in western Iraq for the last couple of years.
And yet at the same time, I know that you really know a lot about it and have a lot to say about it anyway.
So you don't have to be, you know, Coburn or Prothero actually reporting from Iraq to say something useful about it.
Certainly not you.
Well, you're you're being more than kind, Scott.
But but, you know, the fact is that, you know, I'm speaking here, you know, not as an expert, but as somebody who has thought a lot about the broader subject of US militarism and the problem of rationales for war, as well as the problems that, you know, any policy involving use of force, from my point of view, is going to pose for the interest of the American people.
So that's really the fundamental frame that I just want to put this conversation in.
All right, we'll go ahead.
Yeah.
So so having said that, you know, it it strikes me that that the issue of the rise of ISIS with such terrific ambitions and and with such momentum that they have achieved over the last few months is, in some ways, almost the perfect storm.
As far as those of us who are attempting to argue that the United States should pull back from activist military involvement in the world.
You know, one can conjure up very easily a scenario in which the ISIS phenomenon continues to grow, you know, like a sort of proverbial row of dominoes falling or a bandwagon effect, I think even more perhaps is in order in describing the possibilities here.
One can imagine that that in Lebanon and Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, you will have a lot of people saying, well, this is the future and we should align with it, if only for sort of our own safety.
And so in that sense, you know, one can view this as perhaps the most persuasive argument for the need for the use of military force by the United States, compared with anything else that we've seen.
I mean, you know, there's simply from my point of view, there's no comparison between the argument in favor of war against ISIS, compared with, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, whatever other use of force you want to cite over the last decade and more.
So, you know, if you look at it from that point of view, and I think that that is the right way to pose the issue of ISIS in U.S. policy, then I think we have to start asking, you know, really fundamental questions.
I mean, one of them that I would start with, not perhaps the most important, I mean, these are not in order of importance by any means, but the first question that I would mention is, you know, will the overall effect of U.S. military force, starting in Iraq, but certainly, potentially, you know, in Syria and elsewhere, will it in fact have the effect of stopping the ISIS phenomenon?
Without, of course, doing such horrible damage that, you know, the overall effect from the point of view of U.S. interests would be clearly worse.
And my answer to that is it's not clear.
I mean, you know, I think we have to be very cautious about the idea that U.S. military force, basically the use of air power, is an instrument that is going to halt the progress and somehow cause the withdrawal or diminishment of ISIS power regionally, that that's going to work.
I mean, the entire history of the use of U.S. air power in wars that involve insurgents or wars that involve, you know, limited local conflicts is one that is not at all encouraging.
Hey, how about the history of them using air power in the Sunni triangle, which did nothing but drive average Joe nationalist Sunni Iraqi into the arms of Zarqawi and the Islamist lunatic suicide bomber brigades in the first place and created ISIS 1.0 back in 2004?
Well, absolutely right.
And that, of course, is the first, the very first piece of evidence that I think needs to be brought forward.
Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at where, OK, let's say they just drop the entire damn Marine Corps into Mosul and Raqqa and just say, that's it.
We're not letting you have an Islamic state.
We're sacking your capital cities and we're driving you out of power.
Well, still, all they've done is turn them back into an insurgency.
They haven't gotten rid of them.
Now they're just back in the same old IED war or, you know, fighting the same old IED war they were fighting in 2006.
Well, and more to the point, I think it would not simply be that they would be set back, but not defeated.
It would create, obviously, I mean, you know, this is this is a no-brainer.
It would create more political support for ISIS than they would have otherwise.
Right.
All right.
Well, now there's a whole bunch of different directions to take this interview, and we're going to do as much as we can when we get back.
It's Gareth Porter from Interpress Service talking about the rise of the Islamic state and what we would have D.C. not do about it.
One minute.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the phone with Gareth Porter here.
Independent historian and journalist from IPS News Dotnet Interpress Service talking about the rise of the Islamic state and what we fear the Americans are going to do about it kind of thing, it seems like to me.
And I guess my my basic bottom line, Gareth, is that it seems like they can't really do anything other than make sure that American citizens stay at the top of the list for bin Laden nights around the Middle East to want to kill.
Otherwise, they got their hands full.
They got plenty of problems are surrounded by enemies on all sides.
Not that anybody's really invading to dislodge them, but still, they're pretty damn hemmed in.
And and yet Obama seems to want to make it a priority that they stay focused on those of us who live between Atlanta and Portland.
What the hell?
Well, let me come to to this broader point that you just made about the regional context in a moment.
But I want to go back to to the first point for just just a second.
Sure.
You mentioned the the scenario of sending in the Marines.
I think it's much more likely, of course, that what will happen is at least in the initial phase is that they'll send in the Special Operations Forces.
Sure.
Now, that's already happening.
Yeah.
Those are always the guys who are going to be called on to deal with this kind of problem.
Now, you know, I don't have to tell you, but just to remind everybody listening, you know, the Special Operations Forces have a record which is very well documented.
And I'm proud to say that I played a role in documenting this of having a a modus operandi that involves not hard intelligence, not vetted intelligence, but rather relying on essentially, you know, picking up phone contacts and and stringing them together and finding out who talks to whom and using that as the basis for targeting people for detention or killing.
Now, you know, that is a an approach that clearly is going to be very, very valuable in turning back the challenge of ISIS.
I'm being obviously ironic there.
This this would obviously lead to disaster.
And so I think we can be very confident that any ground presence of the United States, which is going to be sent into places like Iraq and Syria or would be sent to Iraq or Syria is going to lead to the kind of results that we've seen, particularly in Afghanistan, which has caused I think it's really very accurate to say the entire population, certainly of those regions where the Special Operations Forces have been active, to become much more active and united in their hatred of the United States.
Well, I mean, that was what they said as soon as Obama started bombing them.
They said, you know, on one hand, excellent.
This is perfect.
Thanks a lot, because look, everyone, we're fighting the Americans, which is great PR for them and helps rally more people of their cause.
And then they said, oh, by the way, we're coming to kill you.
Thanks for reminding us how much we hate you and how much we blame you for everything going on around here, which is just it's perfect from their point of view.
If they can provoke America into invading, it's the same thing bin Laden was trying to do back in 2001.
And let's look at the other instruments that the United States has available to try to deal militarily with the situation.
You've got drone strikes and you've got airstrikes.
And, you know, I don't have to tell most people listening to this to this discussion that that drone strikes, as well as airstrikes, are not just blunt instruments, but instruments that simply cannot discriminate at all.
They simply do not do it.
And certainly what would be required to be successful in this effort is precisely discrimination.
That is to be able to target the to separate out the ISIS activists, the ISIS militants from the rest of the population.
That is the part of it that we have the greatest difficulty with wherever we go to war and in the Middle East.
And, you know, the reason is that we simply do not know what's going on.
We do not have the intelligence.
We have not had the intelligence anywhere that the United States has intervened militarily.
And that's why you get special forces going off half cocked and basically killing a lot of people who shouldn't have been killed and, you know, entering their houses, doing what no sane person who understands Afghanistan would have ever done to violate the sanctity of the Afghan home, and doing it hundreds of times every night.
So I'll stop that little sermon.
But I think the point I want to make in general about this is that the tools that we have at our disposal are so indiscriminate by not just by their nature, but by the historical evidence that we've already seen over the last decade in particular.
So that's why, you know, I think that the first point that I want to make is that this is really not going to work very successfully.
But the second point I want to make does have to do with the regional context.
And that is that the more the United States makes it clear that we're committed to using military force to stop ISIS, the less you're going to get the rest of the region actively involved in cooperating with one another to do something about ISIS.
And I mean, that's a very serious problem.
I mean, someone, I've forgotten now who the author of this recent commentary was, used the term learned dependence to characterize the habit that or the pattern of behavior that has developed over time in the Middle East, among those states which have been allied with or have allowed the United States to have bases and in other ways have worked with the United States militarily.
And so the more we contribute to that by basically saying, yeah, we'll take care of this, the less these countries are going to take seriously the necessity for making a lot of adjustments in their own policies, both regionally and in their own countries.
Right.
I think that's a point that bears equal emphasis to, you know, equal to the to the point that U.S. military instruments do not work very well.
In other words, whatever decisions they might make to take care of this, we're just putting off them finally getting to it and instead make it matters worse for the for the medium term, at least.
And then waiting till maybe someday when we're finally out of there, the local power balances will finally work and work themselves out.
That's really what what the Declaration of Independence of the West means in the first place.
Kind of right.
Right.
And and Saudi, I'm talking about you here.
I mean, this is the main the main issue that I that I want to raise in regard to this whole problem of learned dependence and the necessity to to get regional countries to to take more responsibility themselves for doing things differently.
Look, listen, we're out of time for this segment.
Let me keep you one more segment, can I?
Oh, come on.
OK.
All right.
I'll give you one more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because we still got a lot to talk about here, because there's a huge question about what the U.S. is not making Saudi Arabia do and stop doing here, Garrett, that I want to ask you about.
And we'll get to it on the other side of this break.
It's the great Garrett Porter.
And you want to read his award winning work on how the Special Forces kills innocents based on cell phone data.
It's at truth out.
Dot org won the Martha Gellhorn Award for it back in 2011.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Hey, those of you listen to the interview podcast, you do know that all these interviews come from the live show noon to three Eastern time at the Liberty Radio Network.
You can find the whole show archives as well at Scott Horton dot org.
All right.
I'm talking with my good friend, Gareth Porter, the best reporter in the world.
My favorite.
And he writes for Interpret Service and for Truthout.
And he wrote the book Manufactured Crisis, which is the ultimate debunking of every lie, every innuendo, every piece of propaganda anybody ever put out about Iran's nuclear program.
It's just great.
He completely tells the whole story and gets it straight.
And, you know, and anyway, so I think that's part of the reason that we have not had you to talk to about what all has been going on in Syria since 2011.
Garrett, this you have not made this your beat to my terrible regret.
It's been such a mess.
And it's it's the kind of mess that you just rule at, you know, parsing and and diving into.
And and so but basically, in a nutshell, I guess I think it's fair to say, as Obama put it to Corporal Goldberg in the Atlantic back in 2012, we're doing this to help take Iran down a peg.
If we can weaken Assad, that hurts Iran.
And that's why we're doing it, because that's what Israel wants.
Blah, blah, blah.
Oh, yeah.
And by the way, you know, humanitarian concerns and blah, blah, blah.
And so, you know, even David Sanger, I think, as we could put it, has written for at least two years that all the arms and money were going to the jihadists all along.
The moderates don't lead the fight.
There are some sort of secularist type a little bits, but they're not the ones fighting.
It's been Al Nusra's war all this time until ISIS split off from them.
And it's been the American CIA, Barack Obama policy.
I think you correct me when you think I'm wrong here.
Anything you want to, you know, disagree with their policy has been to work with and or, you know, not very plausible deniability kind of turned a blind eye to Qatar and Saudi and Turkey.
And they've even had, of course, you know, CIA intervention in Jordan, training up guys to wage this jihad.
And they've had every reason to know that all along they are backing those sworn loyal to bin Laden and to Zawahiri.
And then after April 2013 to the Islamic State, which is just as freaking bad or worse.
And so, you know, that's really what's led to this crisis.
You know, they have their own problems in in Western Iraq anyway.
And yet now it's led to this where basically Al Qaeda in Iraq all grown up is declaring itself a state there.
And you mentioned Saudi Arabia and their role in this.
But isn't it isn't Saudi Arabia's policy just whatever America's had them do this whole time?
And and, you know, I don't even know what other questions I have other than, I guess, you know, anything you disagree with what I said, but I do it.
Is it treason?
I do have some degree of of disagreement with the overall line that the United States deliberately channeled funds and guns to jihadists of the of the Al Qaeda and ISIS school.
And I think that it's more complicated than that.
I mean, you know, without trying to get into the weeds on this, you know, I think what what happened was that, you know, the administration wanted to get involved in bringing down Assad.
No question about that.
They chose as their instrument initially the the FSA, the people who were, you know, certainly not the jihadists.
But but very quickly, you know, it became apparent that they were not cutting it.
And and I think what you what you see happening in 2012, 2013, particularly, is the administration pulling back from, you know, the the they were under pressure to to, you know, really put a lot more money and guns into Syria.
And they they did have this program on the border.
There's no question about that with the Turks permission and and collaboration that was aimed at at supporting opposition forces.
But but I think that by that time, they were they were already aware of the danger that these arms were, in fact, going to fall into the hands of precisely the people who were even more dangerous than Assad.
And I mean, there's a lot of information about that.
So I think, well, I guess, you know, I wasn't trying to say exactly what their motive was, but I got a clip of Hillary Clinton from 2012, from March 2012, saying, well, you know, Zawahiri supported the rebellion there.
So are we supporting al Qaeda in Syria?
We got to be really careful because there's just a lot of bad guys.
And yet we know she continued to push and push and push after that to continue to send arms there, knowing that, as she put it, there are no real people that we can work with to come together.
We don't see these reasonable moderates that we can create a new government with.
That's what she told CBS News in the beginning of 2012.
And then they kept on, Gareth.
Well, I mean, you know, I think anything that Hillary Clinton says is political, and I would hesitate to try to make sense out of it in terms of actual policy.
I mean, in context, she was defending herself from the accusation that the administration wasn't doing enough to support the rebels.
And she was saying, well, you know, it's kind of hard to support a bunch of people who are sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York.
Right.
So I mean, I just wouldn't I wouldn't want to try to make that evidence that the administration intended to actually, you know, support pro-al Qaeda or, you know, ISIS type jihadists.
But intended is such a kind of weird word.
What about they kept doing it, knowing all along that's what they were doing?
I mean, I don't know.
Who cares about exactly what they thought at the time.
They kept doing what they knew was wrong.
I mean, I think that they were doing something very limited that my understanding is that they really were no longer running, running guns, except to very, you know, a very, very selected group of of oppositionists.
And I think the real question that I would pose is is related, but it's distinctly different.
And that is, why did it take so long for the Treasury Department to identify the sources of funding for ISIS, which were well known by 2012, 2013?
It was not until early last month, August 8th, that the Treasury Department finally put out a release that identified the individuals in the UAE who had been clearly funding ISIS for a couple of years.
Right.
Well, that's what I mean by not very plausible deniability.
It's just like when Ronald Reagan sold missiles to the Ayatollah.
Sure, he had the Israelis give him the missiles, but people don't even really mention that because it's besides the point.
Everybody knows that they were just the cutout.
Well, I'm not sure that's you mean you're talking about the people who are funding ISIS were cutouts for the American empire.
What does Qatar and Saudi do that the Americans don't want them to do?
Well, I mean, I mean, couldn't Obama have told the king of Saudi Arabia to knock this off back in 2011?
No, he encouraged it this whole time and just shut it down last month, as you're saying.
Well, you have to make you have to make some distinctions here.
First of all, I mean, the people who are doing this, we're not in the UAE government.
They were prominent sheiks.
They were prominent political figures.
No question about that.
And, you know, my view, let me just answer my own question about why this you know, why, in fact, Treasury Department didn't do anything about it.
I mean, again, I think it has to do with the atmospherics during a period in which the United States, as you know, very well, was putting all the emphasis on, you know, making sure the United States was doing appearing to do enough to oppose Iran and its ally in Syria.
And so in terms of the atmospherics, the United States didn't think the timing was right.
I'm guessing, OK, that they didn't think the timing was right to come out with a statement that was blaming prominent figures in the UAE for their for their funding.
But but I think, first of all, it's clear that they were aware of it.
I mean, Elizabeth Dickinson was writing about this and interviewing people in 2013 in the UAE and was putting out detailed analysis of this.
And she herself, she's a journalist who wrote a very well informed, very well documented paper for the Brookings Institution on the funding for ISIS.
And she said she was getting a shrug of the shoulders from diplomats, as she put it.
So.
So I agree with you that.
So that's that's an indication that something was not right.
But but I do think that it's more the problem is more complicated than simply saying that that we were using cutouts there.
I think that these are people who I mean, first of all, UAE government is extremely weak and these people were clearly operating independently of the government itself.
You know, this is pretty well documented that that the government does not have control over prominent figures who were doing the funding.
So so it's more complicated.
But nevertheless, I think that there's a real beef here with the Obama administration for not having made this an issue much earlier.
Public.
Yeah.
And, you know, they didn't ever get rid of Assad.
And I doubt that they were trying to take him down or Iran down this many pegs by creating an entire Islamic caliphate type state between Syria and Iraq.
But, you know, I wrote an article for the Future Freedom Foundation a year ago this spring, more than a year ago, saying, hey, look, I mean, lawless Western Iraq and lawless Eastern Syria seem to be pretty, you know, it's becoming that Islamo fascist caliphate that George Bush and bin Laden always had as their fantasy, that they're really making this come true.
So and, you know, on this show, since I mean, hell, the Libya war was before the Syria war.
And we all know the Libya war was on behalf of militias that were mostly made up of veterans of the Iraq war who had fought the Americans.
It was that clear back in 2011.
We've been watching this like the slowest motion train wreck in the world leading up to the fall of Mosul and the rise of the actual Islamic state that here where Bush did the greatest thing for bin Laden ever by turning all the lands north and east of Baghdad into lawless jihadi stand for all this time.
Obama outright backed them and their Sunni based insurgencies in Libya and Syria.
And so it's not just, you know, they love to blame Nouri al-Maliki.
And, of course, you know, he's been horrible to the Sunnis of Iraq.
But the reason that they had the Islamic state to turn to is because Obama has been helping this all along.
And and I don't know the degrees of wittingness or how one exactly qualifies or quantifies that.
But since the dawn, since the dawn of the Arab Spring in Syria, it was so obvious that spring.
I mean, we reported antiwar dot com that Prince Bandar and Eric Margulies had sources in French intelligence and whatever this was being reported was in The Guardian that there is a Saudi American CIA plot to support a Mujahideen war against Assad.
We've seen this this whole time.
We've known that this was true, you know, since 2011.
They've done this.
Let me let me address the wittingness question.
I think that's that's a good term to sort of frame the discussion.
In my view, we have to come back to the basics here.
The idea that U.S. foreign policy is is is generally speaking based on sort of grand strategic theories or, you know, grand strategy fails to take into account the more much more fundamental reality that every decision that's made by the national security state is made with the interests of the national security institutions themselves in mind.
It doesn't have anything to do with sort of the desire to create a caliphate or, you know, a state somewhere in between, you know, Iraq and Syria.
These are grand strategy notions that are the results of but not the cause of the decisions that are made.
I mean, if you look one by one at all the decisions that were made in Iraq and in Syria, I mean, you know, these were these were motivated by a combination of the bureaucratic interests of the military and the intelligence agencies on one hand and the political interests of the White House on the other.
I mean, you know, these are all short term responses to situations where, you know, they don't even have to stop and think.
They don't even have to calculate.
They know automatically what decisions are going to advance the interests of the institution.
And, you know, it's worth pointing out that the military, you know, understood from its point of view, its interests would not be served by going to war against Iran.
We've talked about this many times.
They were against going to war in Syria.
The the it was political interests of the White House that were involved in Libya that were involved in Syria, not the interests of the military.
But all those things were short term responses to situations, not grand strategy.
That that's my analysis for what it's worth.
Yeah, no, it's worth a lot.
And it's it's sort of a read them and weep kind of a thing where I'm afraid to agree with you.
But I think I do that really.
And this has kind of been one of the sub themes on this show all along, Gareth, is that we really talk about what might happen and that kind of thing on this show to a degree a lot more than really takes place at the National Security Council, where everybody is just a suck up to their boss.
And that's it.
Exactly.
It's terrible.
It's scary because because, you know, other than the great guests, there's not that much now, you know, high level talent or education on this end of the microphone, that's for sure.
I don't speak one word of Arabic.
You know what I mean?
This is all very kindergarten stuff.
And yet we seem to put a lot more thought into what's going on than they do.
I think that's right.
And I just would add that, you know, these these decisions have a bureaucratic political momentum to them.
And so what happens is that decisions that are initially made to enhance the budget, to enhance the power of the institution, to give it more momentum, then have consequences which, you know, grow and grow over time.
And they're committed, then, to policies that they cannot easily reverse and that they don't have any incentive to recognize they've been making a mistake about.
So all of these things play into, you know, what one sees now on the ground and in the air, if you will.
And I think, you know, I mean, I can't explain, you know, the reports that you're referring to, which said, you know, there's no doubt the U.S. and Saudi, you know, have made a deal to support jihadi, you know, jihadists.
I mean, you know, my suspicion is that this was an obvious confusion between the people that they wanted to support and the people who took advantage of that support, at least in the initial period.
I mean, I think that would be a logical consequence of the situation.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's been kind of a mantra on this show, Garrett, that moderates don't fight.
Moderates are a bunch of big fat expats at the hotel.
And the guys who fight are the ones who don't mind dying.
And when we're talking about a volunteer rebellion, Sunni based insurgency like this, the guys who fight are the guys who are sworn to al-Nusra, the local bin Laden night franchise.
And then came ISIS was the break off from that.
Do you get John Kerry swearing publicly that, oh, you know, our guys are getting stronger and stronger?
Remember that one?
Yeah, yeah.
He and Kerry, McCain and Kerry agreed that, no, the rebels are mostly secular.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, sworn testimony.
This was absurd.
But but from my point of view, you know, and I'm quite confident this is correct.
I mean, what's really going on here is that they got you know, they got committed to intervention in Syria.
And, you know, they they had to defend it.
And as a result, they continued to tell lies.
And, you know, it got worse and worse.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, so I've already kept you way over time and through a commercial break and all these things.
And I know you have more important things to do.
But let me ask one more thing, which is what's going to happen.
Garrett, predict the best or worst for me here, please.
I have no idea.
I really I mean, this is just too big and too complex to for me to to really have any notion.
All right.
Tell me this.
Do you think that the army and the Marines want that land back?
I mean, we talked in twenty nine two thousand nine about how the Pentagon was saying, screw Obama.
We're staying for 50 years.
Iraq belongs to us.
And is this their chance to go back?
Are they over it now or what?
You know, as far as the Marines are concerned, I have no idea what their view would be.
I mean, it's very possible that they would see this as an opportunity to come back from the dead.
I mean, you know, the Marines are an endangered species.
There's talk about getting rid of them.
I mean, they're going to lose their their mission completely.
So, you know, maybe, yeah, they could see this as a way of avoiding that.
I can see that possibility for sure.
But but let me just make one final point, if I may, which is really, in a sense, the most important point of all that I intended to make here.
I was going to leave it to last because it was more important.
And that is that to me, the the single biggest issue that we need to put up front in regard to the whole problem of military intervention to stop ISIS is the effect that this decision has on the future of the United States, of U.S. society.
I mean, if we don't say no now, if we don't come up with the the necessary argument as to why this is bad for the United States society now, for all the reasons that I I know you and and your your listeners understand, then the situation becomes worse.
It becomes more difficult in the future to reverse the momentum to to cut the national security state down to size.
And so from my point of view, that is the single biggest problem.
The single biggest issue is to say no to an intervention that is perhaps the most persuasive argument of any that we've seen so far, not primarily because it won't work, not primarily because it's going to cause the regional states to be, you know, to be more dependent on the United States, but because if we don't say no to this, we will lose for more and more years any possibility of reversing the the the power that has been centralized in the national security state, the resources that have been captured by the national security state to the detriment of American society.
And I think it's really a matter of the the survival of of this society, not nothing less.
Right now, I absolutely agree with you.
And, you know, Tom Englehart as a new one today, he says this is just the greatest saving grace in the world.
I mean, you've got to be a little suspicious that, you know, no matter what happens here, no matter how bad it gets, great further excuse to do worse, because here, this guy Baghdadi might as well be bin Laden reincarnate only now sitting on top of something like an actual state coming together again.
And it's, you know, like you said at the beginning, all the hype about Saddam, the terrorist state and whatever is actually true about these guys.
They crucify their enemies.
They've got they crucify.
They've beheaded another American journalist today.
They've got an atrocity a day for the propaganda mill to try to, you know, just say based on how bad they are, is why we have to stop them, even though there are a lot of reasons to think that that's why we don't have to stop them, maybe.
And I can tell you, Scott, that the people who are most freaked out today in the Middle East and in the world about ISIS are located in Saudi Arabia.
There's no question in my mind about that.
That's where the greatest turbulence is happening and will happen with regard to this issue.
Because don't forget that ISIS is a product of Wahhabism.
It is it is the purest expression of Wahhabism, which is the underlying ideology of this of the Saudi regime and has been for many decades.
Yeah, yeah, the ultimate Frankenstein blowback.
It's not even blowback.
I'm coining a new phrase, Gareth.
It's taken me a while to get it off the ground.
I call it backdraft, like that Ron Howard movie with the firemen where you open the door and it's so hot in there.
But once you provide oxygen, it explodes right in your face because blowback that implies, as as Chalmers Johnson said, consequences from covert action.
So it's all kind of a mystery and people don't understand.
This is just straight up, you know, lighting a firecracker and it blows up in your hand kind of behavior right here.
That's a good point.
That's a good point.
There you go.
I finally got something right.
Hey, thanks so much for coming on my show again.
I sure appreciate it, Gareth.
You're the best man.
Glad to be there.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right.
So that is the heroic Gareth Porter.
He won the Gellhorn Award, Martha Gellhorn, over there in England for his work at Truthout.org, where he wrote up all about the SIM card, cell phone data and how Petraeus and McChrystal used that to fight their Navy Seal Delta Force War of KGB style night raids on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq before that.
Great work that he's done there for Truthout.org.
And then, of course, he writes for interpress service, IPSnews.net and the book by the book, even if you can't read because you're going to hurt your eyes, give it to the local library by the book.
It's called Manufactured Crisis, the true story behind Iran's nuclear program, some manufactured crisis by the great Gareth Porter.
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