All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got the great Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis and the CIA Insider's Guide to America's Horrible Iran Policy.
Not that he's CIA, it's co-authored with John Kiriakou, who is the former CIA officer, but excellent book on America's Iran policy, maximum pressure under Donald Trump in the background and all that.
Of course, he writes at the Grayzone Project and Consortium News and other places like that.
We republish just about everything, yeah, everything, at antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Hello, Scott.
Glad to be back.
I'm doing great.
Very happy to be talking with you again.
There's so much going on that this almost got ignored, even though in the places where people were paying attention, it was a pretty big deal that, oh my God, is Donald Trump going to get us into a war with Iran on the way out the door here?
Sending an extra aircraft carrier, and then the Pentagon pulled it back, and then they pulled back the pullback and sent it back again.
Some people were getting pretty worried.
You say, though, that this was not Donald Trump that was behind these moves.
There was something much more interesting, in fact, going on.
Is that right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
I think this is a very good example of the inside military politics, if you will, that really continue day by day to influence U.S. policy, but rarely in such a spectacular way, as we see in this story about the commander of the Central Command, General Kenneth F.
McKenzie, manipulating politically, shall we say, in order to advance his own agenda, his own sort of personal and institutional agenda as Central Commander to get more control over military assets in a single sentence.
That's what was really going on here.
But it obviously had consequences for U.S. policy, and it did create, I think, the illusion that the U.S. was threatening here.
Fortunately, it was an illusion.
Unfortunately, it represented a degree of power that is extremely dangerous, I think.
Yeah.
So now the commander of Central Command has a lot of authority, as you say, if we go back to 2007, as you did such great journalism on this story, it was Admiral Fallon, then the head of Central Command, who announced that we would go to a war with Iran over his dead body.
Everybody belay that order.
It doesn't matter what George Bush or Dick Cheney say.
We refuse to do it.
And so great.
You know, when our standing army is insubordinate in that kind of a manner, I'll take it, Gareth, although I shouldn't have to settle for that.
But in this case, it sort of sounds like the opposite.
I don't know what Trump's role in this was at all, really, or, you know, if he even had any role in this whole thing going on.
But here it sounds like what you're saying is General McKenzie just started making Middle East policy as though he was the president's cabinet in the White House.
Well, not exactly, but I mean, he was certainly grabbing for as much influence over the policy as he could get, and there's no doubt that he could indeed have a major impact.
You know, I think he had he had the support up to a point of the acting secretary or the acting secretary, but then Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.
Esper was ready to go along with his effort to keep some assets there, particularly the Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group in the Middle East.
And I think he was also sympathetic to his effort to keep more troops, more U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq.
But when Esper was fired after the election in November, then things began to become more interesting because his replacement, Christopher Miller, was very much a partisan, very close to Trump.
And this was where, you know, he had Trump's at least he thought he had Trump's support in really reversing the positions that that McKenzie had taken.
And that's really sort of the dramatic conclusion of the story.
We sort of skip to the end, but but that's that's what happened at the very end of this.
And of course, as you suggest in your intro, then even, you know, Miller's reversal of what McKenzie had accomplished was reversed at the last minute or, you know, just within 48 hours in a up to now unexplained development, which appeared to me, as I wrote in my piece, to represent yet another case where Trump seemed to be taking a strong position opposed to the military's desire for, you know, having more stuff, more military assets on the ground in the Middle East and using them where they where they could and caving in basically to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
That's my guess is what happened.
So to play devil's advocate here, and I know accusations against Iran 99 percent of the time are just a bunch of nothing.
We all know who's the aggressor here.
But on the other hand, you know, I don't know, maybe do you have any indication that there was they were planning something or they thought that now was the time to be brave on one issue or another and that the sending the flight of B-52s over there was meant as a warning to them that no matter how distracted we are, we're never so distracted from you.
And so, you know, this kind of thing, because, of course, that's the way the Hawks would spin it, right, is that we're warning them that they better not do anything, not that we're the ones doing anything.
That was the that was the pose that McKenzie assumed in putting out this message through essentially a combination of his own of his own moves and using the the U.S. press, international and U.S. press in perhaps the most aggressive, creative and successful way that I have seen in many, many years and perhaps even more than any previous commander has ever done.
I think he's much more aggressive about this than anyone ever has been.
But but you're absolutely accurate in depicting the way it was justified as well.
You know, you know, we have indications that Iran was planning some kind of new military action, perhaps on the first anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Soleimani, General Soleimani, January 4th, 2020.
And therefore, you know, we best take actions which would put the Iranians on notice that we will not tolerate any military move by them.
In fact, there is absolutely zero evidence indication that the Iranians had any such thoughts.
Quite the contrary, the Iranians were explicit about stating that that their plan to continue or to complete the retaliation against those who were responsible for the assassination of Soleimani would, in fact, be targeting specifically those responsible.
In other words, they had no intention of carrying out attacks on U.S. troops anywhere in the Middle East and especially in Iraq in regard to the Soleimani assassination.
They were quite clear on that.
So so this was just nonsense and represents the degree of of readiness to put forward justifications that have clearly nothing to do with reality, the opposite of reality.
So is this guy bucking for a promotion to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or board of directors position at Lockheed Martin or what's the deal?
Interesting question.
You know, one would have to imagine that he thinks two or three steps ahead and would imagine himself having succeeded in spectacular fashion in managing to hold on to assets such as Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group and and manipulating the the White House in such a way that he would be in line to be part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at some point in the future.
You know, I don't know for sure that that's the case, but but it's a reasonable speculation.
That's I think that's true.
Yeah.
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here for Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War Two, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy.
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And there's so much going on now with the presidential transition from this thing to that thing and all of this, you know, not too much is going to change, but there's just so much to address in terms of recent past and near term future here.
But I got a tangent.
I got to address this.
I'm looking at your bio here at Antiwar dot com.
And it reminds me that you won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for your journalism on the American war in Afghanistan and particularly on the question of Stanley McChrystal's bogus link analysis pseudoscience, more like voodoo cult conspiracy kookery only automated through Windows 10.
So, you know, it's scientific and stuff like this and murdered all those innocent people and imprisoned all those innocent people in the Afghan war based on that.
And but so a guy tweeted to me last night who's, you know, an antiwar vet now, but who'd been deployed all over the place.
I saw in his bio he'd been all over the place in the terror wars and he was highlighting the part of the book where I talked about Bill Clinton bombing Iraqi radar stations even when they weren't locking on just what they can just bomb whatever they want based on a pretext or if they get the slightest electronic signal, that's not even a lock, but just the radar is operating.
Then we can just blow it up, whatever he highlighted that.
And he said, you know, this is just like what it was like in Syria for us.
Somebody's cell phone SIM ID would light up.
And if they were on the list, then that was it.
Confirmed.
Blam.
You kill him.
And he even he used like the little green checkmark emoji or whatever that they're checked off the list.
Their enemy to be destroyed based on their phone number is on a list that we don't know where the list came from.
Right.
Like somebody else came up with the list.
We just have a list of phone numbers.
And this phone number lights up.
We kill that person.
And, yeah, well, so I see you on that tweet.
I kind of, quote, tweeted that and CCG on that because I guess I would have guessed, but I didn't know for certain that that was how they were doing the terror war in Syria.
And so, you know, there's the first little bit of evidence there.
Yeah, I think you're you're on to a very interesting parallel here between the way in which the military created their their kill capture lists in Afghanistan, which is what you were describing a moment ago.
With regard to to the general who was in charge of it.
And of course, Petraeus used the same used the same mechanism that kill capture list, which was essentially compiled based overwhelmingly on cell phone metadata.
And and that cell phone metadata was from any cell phone they could get that they had reason to believe had some connection with the Taliban.
Right.
Direct or indirect didn't matter.
If they had a cell phone that had numbers that were somehow linked to the Taliban, then they could use that as the basis for formulating their kill capture list.
Now, it wasn't a simple matter of putting every cell phone number on the list, but they had, you know, their own methodologies for coming up with the formula that would decide who gets on and who's left out, which which, of course, as you correctly stated, meant that many innocent people were on that list.
Absolutely.
And I talked in my article for Truthout, which was the one you referred to about the kill capture lists and their use of cell phone metadata about one person who I interviewed in in Kabul, whose brother was, in fact, arrested and was told by the police that it was based on cell phone metadata because his cell phone had a number of somebody who was on it.
Who was a Taliban commander.
And and as as I pointed out in my article in that same article for Truthout, the former EU guy who was the the specialist on Taliban told me their their number one specialist on the Taliban told me that he knew of many cases where people had been arrested for basically having phone numbers, cell phone numbers that were associated with Taliban.
And this was very unfortunate, he pointed out, because, you know, millions of people, okay, hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, you know, needed some assurance that they would have somebody to help them in case they got arrested and they had the numbers of the local Taliban commander who was somebody who they could go to as a troubleshooter or have their family go to as a troubleshooter.
And so you have a whole system there that was extremely tilted in the direction of the interests of the military in having to maximize their arrests and kills because that's what Petraeus in particular used to show that he was succeeding.
Right.
Body counts.
Yeah, body counts, essentially.
Yeah, it was a corrupt.
It was a corrupt, dirty system that was, you know, never, never covered by the corporate media at all.
Of course, they never pointed out there were problems with this.
Right.
I mean, a good way to understand this, I think, is that it's essentially a conspiracy theory machine, right?
Like this is the dumbest kind of truth or ism when it's just some regular powerless person on the Internet saying, look, look, links.
This person is linked to this person who's linked to that person.
And so now I get to jump to conclusions and pretend to assume motivations and and cause and effect and all of these things.
When for all we know, you can call it that and it makes sense at some level.
But I mean, it's worse even it's worse because it's much worse.
It's just a computer program.
There's no thinking at all.
Yeah, it's much more calculated than that, I think.
And that's really the problem that that these people know exactly what they're doing.
It's very cynical.
It's very deliberate.
And it's probably even less accurate than a conspiracy kook looking at Twitter, honestly.
Well, right.
Yeah.
I don't want to start comparing accuracy.
Well, look, this isn't philosophy class or anything, but there's a difference between wisdom and knowledge and information and data.
And this is just data.
This is meaningless garbage and they kill people over it.
Oh, they call it intelligence.
Talk about begging the question.
Whenever government has a piece of information, it's called intelligence because it must be smart and it must be right.
Well, that's that's true.
But of course, this represents the ultimate corruption of intelligence.
It used to be before McChrystal and Petraeus got control over so-called intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, that they had to have actual data about individuals that showed that they were part of the Taliban.
At least they had some connection with the Taliban.
They had to have information about what they did, you know, who they were and what they did.
Well, you know, this meant that that, you know, in so-called intelligence was no longer tethered to specific information about individuals.
All they had to have was phone numbers which were put had been put on this list.
And and that is, as I say, the ultimate corruption of intelligence.
Yeah, for sure.
All right.
Now, I want to tell you a funny story.
This morning, I got into a Twitter conversation with Lee Smith, who I'm sure you must be familiar with from Tablet Magazine.
He's for people not familiar.
He's an extremely conservative Zionist writer, very, very anti-Iran, but really good on Russiagate, wrote a whole book about Russiagate.
So there's like a little bit of common ground because I hate that stuff so much.
So so we had a little kind of back and forth about the situation in Iraq.
I'm sure you saw there was a fake story going around yesterday on Twitter that Biden was sending more troops to Iraq, which he might.
But it was still just some fake tweet that was retweeted 100000 times or something yesterday all over the place about this.
And so we got into a little discussion about that.
And he was saying that Biden is going to send more troops, regardless of this fake tweet, eventually.
And I think I agree with this.
Right.
Biden will send more troops in the name of fighting ISIS.
And then, as the anti-Iran hawk Lee Smith put it, which is essentially fighting for Iran's friends and solidifying Iran's position in Iraq.
And this is a terrible thing.
And so from his point, and then I was going back and forth like, hey, yeah, but Biden's been fighting for Iran in Iraq since 2003.
So what's the difference now?
You know, like this is the same thing all along.
And then so he was taking the non-interventionist position that at this point the U.S. should leave.
He was essentially he didn't exactly, but pretty much agree, I guess by default, he was agreeing with me that that ship has sailed, man.
That George Bush made the decision to put al-Hakim's men in power back in 2004.
And there's nothing that can be done about that now.
And so then he was saying to me, well, what's wrong with withdrawal then?
And I'm saying not a thing, buddy.
I think I think we got some real agreement here because what else can we do?
In fact, I said to him, what else could we do except start the war all over again to cleanse Baghdad of Shia for the Sunni this time, which is crazy and impossible.
So it's over, pal.
And then he agreed with that.
He liked that.
The right wing anti-Iran Zionist hawk Lee Smith was me and him were like this.
Let's get out of Iraq.
I think what you're seeing there is a an interesting distinction, a rift, if you will, between the sort of sophisticated, relatively sophisticated right wing viewpoint on one hand, which is relatively rare.
Let's put it this way, if not almost unique, and the viewpoint and interests of the U.S. military system.
And, you know, I think that it's it's relatively easy if you're not tethered to some ideological bandwagon to to see what's wrong with the military system and why they go astray.
And in this case, I think, you know, it's it's one of those instances where an individual interestingly sees what's you know, that they're they're crazy.
They're they're not doing anything that's in the national interest at all.
And, you know, I don't know if he draws the correct conclusion that the military is, you know, operating on its own interests.
It's it's advancing its own interests here rather than the national interest.
But that should be the implication that he draws.
Well, I guess I mean, now his idea is all of Biden's people are all soft on Iran.
And so they just are going to help do the Ayatollah's dirty work and whatever.
But, you know, that's a that's a laugh, because, you know, my next piece, which I'm working on right now, is going to show that, you know, the Biden folks are going to replicate exactly what Obama did, which is to carry out coercive diplomacy against Iran, to force them to accept more concessions to the United States on issues which are clearly against Iran's fundamental, vital national interests.
And so including they're already saying that they're going to add conditions to get back into the JCPOA.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
So, you know, I don't know why he I don't know how he comes up with that conclusion.
The why may be that, you know, there's just animus toward the people.
Well, compared to Pompeo, fine.
Right.
I mean, that's the lens he's looking at it through, whereas Pompeo was a good, loyal right winger on this issue.
And these guys are more wishy washy.
That's sort of a meaningless metric as far as I'm concerned.
Well, me too.
But it makes sense that that would be the way that he sees it, I guess, is all I'm saying.
Sure.
Now, so here's the thing, man.
You know, both of us have spent all this time, me with your help, all this time for, you know, better than a decade now, a lot longer than a decade now.
I've been just debunking lies about Iran.
All these hawks are constantly demonizing Iran.
And most of what they say, for example, killing American soldiers in Iraq, making nuclear bombs, you know, running this project to conquer the whole Middle East.
All this stuff is all such a bunch of overblown nonsense.
But then I wonder, you know, you got to stop and check yourself sometimes that, hey, you know what?
Maybe just because they lie about the Ayatollah all the time, maybe that really doesn't mean anything.
Right.
They lied about Donald Trump all the time.
And he's also terrible.
And the Ayatollah is an Ayatollah.
So.
Do you ever wonder, like, well, wait a minute, like, let me stop and second guess and say, OK, George Bush did a huge favor for this guy in putting his friends in power in Iraq.
And he does have this tight alliance with Assad in Syria and Nasrallah in Lebanon.
And he recognizes the Houthi government in Yemen now and has some support for them.
Like, do you ever put on your hawk hat and say, like, OK, the worst case scenario, the worst case characterization of what Iran's doing in the Middle East from your point of view, like from an honest one?
Not in terms of how dare they thwart America's regional ambitions and all this, but just if you just got here and you're looking from orbit down what's going on, just how aggressive is this Ayatollah?
Not at all.
Well, you know, my my approach to this whole question is not not simply that I oppose U.S. imperialism and attempts to dominate the Middle East and to target Iran in that in that context, but also an analysis of the dynamics that have been going on now.
Within the region itself, apart from the United States policy toward Iran, that goes back to, as you know very well, back to the Reagan administration's war in supporting the Iraqi use of chemical weapons against Iran and then a whole train of of administration since then carrying out policies that are extremely hostile.
And and and coercive with regard to to Iran, but within the region itself, if you go back to the 1990s and look at the interaction between Iran and Israel at the strategic level, you you see the the historical fact is that it was not Iran that started the problem of fighting against Iran.
It was the Israelis.
They refused to allow Iran to have the normal deterrent that any sovereign state is going to have.
They knew that Iran does not have an air force because the United States would not allow them to get spare parts for their airplanes, and therefore they had to have missiles.
And the Israelis made every effort to prevent Iran from having any missile program that would serve as a deterrent.
The Iranians, of course, did not agree with that.
And the the Israelis threatened to carry out air attacks against Iran's missile program in the mid to late 1990s, 1997, 98, approximately.
And from that time on, the Iranians began to be concerned about having to deter Israel as well as the United States and ultimately, of course, the Saudis, but particularly Israelis.
And that is the beginning of the dynamic that we see play out here, where the Iranians need to have allies in Syria, in Lebanon and in Iraq as well, of course, now as in Yemen, with the capability to assist them in deterring their foes who are quite credibly, you know, ready and willing to attack them if they get a chance.
And besides that, of course, we know the Israelis have made no secret of the fact that if they have a chance, they will attack Lebanon again and destroy Hezbollah militarily.
So these are fundamental facts about the dynamics of the region that nobody else has discussed.
I guarantee you, I've looked, I've scoured the Internet for any discussion of this in the media, and there is nothing.
That means simply ignored.
These are fundamental facts that require one to be evenhanded about the Iranian use of their proxies, if you will, in these countries and their intervention, if you want to call it that, in those countries.
But they're not the ones who've destabilized them.
They've taken advantage of destabilization to be able to do that.
That's my basic take on the whole thing.
It has nothing to do with whether the mullahs, the ayatollahs in Iran, you know, have exercised power wisely or even whether they do, in fact, have power with the IRGC now becoming much more powerful than they were.
And it has nothing to do with trusting the judgment of the IRGC as far as politics are concerned, let alone the economy.
You know, I think those are the issues that one must take as most important in analyzing U.S. policy.
Right.
And it's just absolutely unavoidable that it was America under W. Bush who increased Iran's influence in Iraq by 100 million percent.
And it was Barack Obama who increased their power and influence in Syria by a couple of hundred, few hundred percent at least.
They were friends.
Now they're serious, completely dependent on Iran for support and defense from America's and our allies, terrorists there.
And then in Yemen, also, it took years before the ayatollah finally invited Houthi to come and recognize his government there.
And after the war started, I mean, and it's in all three of these cases, it's the Americans who have increased the Iranians power and influence.
And that means that they have to shut the F up about it.
It's they have no right to complain about that at all.
You're absolutely right.
In every case in the Middle East, except for Lebanon, the Americans played a role there.
But and the Israelis were the primary factor in Lebanon.
But everywhere else, it's the United States that has played the role of destabilizer.
And given the Iranians the opportunity to advance their vital interests in each case by giving arms to their allies in each in each country.
But particularly, of course, in Lebanon, the main the main deterrent of Iran has for many years resided in Lebanon, in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah has the ability to retaliate for any Israeli attack on Iran by unleashing a vast array of missiles that can now do a great deal of damage to cities in Israel.
So that's that's the essence of the balance of power in the Middle East, which has kept the peace between Iran and Lebanon on one hand and Israel on the other.
It has kept the peace.
It has worked.
And the Israelis are extremely there beside themselves because of that fact that they have been deterred by the missiles that the Hezbollah has controlled for many years.
Right.
OK, listen, I'm so sorry that we're out of time because I could keep going with this conversation all afternoon.
But everybody, that's the heroic Gareth Porter.
Read both of his great books about Iran.
Follow all of his articles at The Gray Zone and at Consortium News and at Antiwar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
Thank you so much, sir.
Thanks, as always, Scott.
