11/19/12 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Ben Franklin said those who are willing to sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither.
Hi, Scott Horton here for the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
It's a plain card-sized steel Bill of Rights designed to set off the metal detectors anywhere the police state goes so you can remind those around you the freedoms we've lost.
And for a limited time, get free shipping when you purchase a frequent flyer pack of five Bill of Rights Security Edition cards.
Play a leading role in the security theater with a Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
The Scott Horton Show is brought to you by the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
Join the great Jacob Hornberger and some of the best writers in the libertarian movement like James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and more for a real individualist take on the most important matters of peace, liberty, and prosperity in our society.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
Hey everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out youtube.com/scotthortonshow for some examples and email scott at scotthorton.org for more details.
See you there.
Hey everybody, Scott Horton here for libertystickers dot com.
If you're like me, then you're right all the time.
Surrounded by people in desperate need of correction.
Well, we can't all have a radio show, but we can all get anti-government propaganda to stick on the back of our trucks.
Check out libertystickers.com.
Categories include anti-war, empire, police state, libertarian, Ron Paul, gun rights, founder's quotes and of course the stupid election.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives there.
More than 2,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
And you can find my blog at ScottHorton.org/stress.
And you can find me on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at slash Scott Horton Show.
And I'm afraid to say, but it's true, I've been spending more and more time on Twitter.
I've got to get away from that thing.
It's going to ruin my entire life.
But anyway, all right.
Now on to my favorite guest, my favorite reporter, Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, IPSNews.net, Truthout.org, Antiwar.com/Porter.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How the hell are you?
Hi again, Scott.
I'm fine.
Hope you're doing well, too.
Well, good.
So I'm very happy to have you here.
Now, here's my thing.
TV says, oh, and all print media, too, whatever.
It's unanimous.
Dave Petraeus is as great a general as George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower and whoever else combined.
And there is no dissent.
Everyone on earth is agreed that this guy has done the world's greatest job being the general in charge of Iraq, Afghanistan.
He's a wonderful director of the CIA.
And isn't it just too bad that he had an unfortunate sex scandal which has led to his downfall?
I forgot who I'm paraphrasing here, but they said, I think maybe in The Washington Post, they quoted one of these senators saying perhaps the loss of Petraeus was the greatest security breach of all.
And so then that made me wonder, hey, Gareth Porter, what do you know about this Petraeus guy?
Well, yes, I think you're accurately portraying the media response.
The theme here is that this is a great human tragedy and a great tragedy for the United States.
This outsized figure has fallen.
And, you know, so I guess if you're asking me what I know about Petraeus.
Well, here, I'll ask it like this.
This will help.
How about we break it down like this.
Before and after the surge in Iraq, before and after McChrystal in Afghanistan, and then CIA director.
Okay.
So, I mean, you know, this is way too much to handle in our brief time period.
Nah, you can do it.
So tell me again, what was the first phase that you wanted to cover?
I think before the surge and then after the surge, because, of course, he was part of the whole El Salvador option and all that.
And after the surge.
I mean, the question is whether you want to get into Mosul and his command of the 101st division and all that.
Yeah.
You know, that's kind of interesting, but doesn't go to the ultimate point that I think we need to talk about, Scott.
Go ahead.
And that is that David Petraeus, his significance in military history should be, in my view, that he was the first commanding general to put overarching emphasis on the control of the news media and, therefore, control of public opinion with regard to the view of how a war is faring, how the commander is faring.
And, I mean, this is his distinctive role in military history, which, you know, I'm going to be writing about.
I've just agreed to do a series of pieces for Truthout, which will be, I think the title is going to be David Petraeus and the war, quote, the war of perceptions.
And this goes back to what happened between 2005 and 2007, 2006, I should say, when he was at Fort Leavenworth and was the key figure, the major figure in the writing of a new counterinsurgency manual for the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps.
And the single biggest point that I would say emerged from that manual was the idea that there is now a new phenomenon in warfare, in counterinsurgency warfare, and that is that it is a war waged continuously through the news, using the news media between the insurgents and the counterinsurgents.
Now, that is virtually an exact quote from the manual, specifically the idea that it is continuously waged using the news media.
And that meant, quite clearly, that he intended to use the news media to create a narrative of success in any counterinsurgency war.
And he was recommending, he was saying that this should be the role of the commanding general in any U.S. counterinsurgency war.
And so when he, in fact, was being considered for the command, the top command in Iraq in late 2006, what they were looking for was not a commander who could go to his troops and rouse them to new courage and valor and so forth.
They were looking for somebody who could manipulate the news media and make sure that the message was going to be that this war is not a defeat, it's a victory for the United States.
And that is what I'm going to write in my piece.
Well, you know what?
That reminds me, actually, of something that you told me about, Petraeus, before.
That if he had one real victory in Iraq, it was in convincing George W. Bush that he could not have a victory in Iraq.
The people that we've been saying all along we're going to defeat, we're not going to defeat them.
We're going to give them rifles and money and pay them to not fight us anymore.
And we'll pick a new little fight with Muqtada al-Sadr on the way out.
And it sounds like, actually, the way you're talking now, it sounds like maybe he is the greatest general ever, and maybe I do love him, if he's able to convince Washington, D.C., that they've won long enough to lose.
Because what I want is for the wars to end.
And if he had told D.C. that this thing is going to take until 2050 before we can win, then they would have committed to that.
He had to call it a victory in order to get the hell out of there.
I don't recall exactly what I might have said in a previous show, but I think what I presumed that I was saying was that essentially Petraeus was two-faced in a whole series of ways.
First of all, he gave his assent to the idea of the surge.
Clearly, when he was being interviewed for the position in late 2006 at the White House, basically by Cheney and General Keene, Jack Keene, who was his real military advisor.
He was the de facto chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Keene was.
So in that interview, he was telling them, yeah, yeah, I'm all for the surge, and we'll make this work.
And that's why he was chosen.
That was part of why he was chosen.
But once he got the position, he testified before Congress, well, you know, we're not sure if this is going to work, and I will report back within six months, and if it's not working, then I'll recommend that we have to get out.
And when his staff was assembled in Baghdad in February of 2007, that was the first thing he said to them as well.
So he was looking for a way out.
He had an exit strategy the whole time.
And that's what I mean by being a two-faced figure in this.
And what he did, in fact, say in dispatches to Washington was, you know, he was trying to control expectations and suggesting that we're not going to be able to militarily defeat these people.
We're going to have to buy them off.
He certainly did say that, no question about it.
So once he was there, he was emphasizing the idea of accommodation, no question.
But at the same time, in his public demeanor, in his public statements, you know, he was basically saying things are going well, we're managing to reduce the violence.
And at the same time, he was doubtful that it was going to work and that he felt he might well.
In fact, I think it's fair to say he probably felt that probably he was going to have to say it wasn't working and we're going to have to get out.
So what I'm suggesting here is that it was a very complicated picture in which he was being manipulative on a whole series of different levels.
So I think that that's that's the explanation for what you're recalling from from a few years ago.
I can't remember how long ago it was.
Yeah, well, we've been talking about this for a long time now.
Here it's already the future and everything.
But now I do want to ask you or I did want to ask you a little bit about before that, though, before the surge and the Washington clock and all that stuff, because and you know what?
Maybe I'm wrong about this.
Maybe once they overthrew Saddam, it was pretty much a fait accompli.
And even if they'd withdrawn right then, more or less the same thing would have happened or something.
I don't know.
But it seems like there are quite a few points where you can say, you know, these particular choices and policies like disbanding the army, for one example, really led to the Iraq disaster, such as it was the civil war that led to, you know, somewhere right around a million people dying in that thing.
As the Shiites took Baghdad, it seemed to me like the El Salvador option where they hired the Bader brigade to lead the hunt, to do the decapitation strikes against the leaders of the Sunni based insurgency, that that whole policy that Dave Petraeus helped carry out led to the real civil war as it was fought in 2006.
And so I agree with you as far as that goes.
But but there's more to the story.
I mean, first of all, of course, that did not happen until the initial strategy of of trying to use overwhelming force to get the Sunnis to give up was tried from 2003 through, you know, mid to late 2004.
And they discovered that not only wasn't it wasn't working, it was backfiring and it was creating much more support for the insurgents, the Sunni insurgents in the Sunni community.
And that's when you're right.
They turned to the Shia, they turned to the Bader brigade and also to the Kurdish Peshmerga as their instruments for helping to suppress the Sunni insurgency.
No question about it.
And Petraeus, you're correct in saying that he was instrumental in that policy.
It started precisely at the time that he was named to head the transition command, the command that was supposed to be in charge of training and equipping the Iraqi security forces.
And so he had a huge voice in in how this was going to play out.
No question about that.
Yeah, I mean, to me, that's a big part of and, you know, we talk about that.
The other point that I want to add is that quite apart from the decision to use the Shia as our as our guys, you know, to to help suppress the Sunnis, the Shias were already doing it.
The Shias were already doing it.
They had begun a civil war with the with the Sunnis and particularly with al Qaeda in 2004.
And they were quite they were quite efficient at it.
And so this was going to happen, as was happening, regardless of Petraeus's decision to make them part of the official Iraqi security forces.
He was legitimizing what the Shia militias supported by Iran and trained by Iran were actually already doing.
So so I don't want to give him too much credit or too much agency in that reality.
I think that was happening anyway and it was going to happen anyway.
Right.
Well, yeah, they didn't really think this thing through.
They just wanted to get it started.
Well, we'll figure out what happens later, I guess, with the policy, you know, too.
But OK, so now you want to move on to Afghanistan because there's a lot to talk about there, too.
Or are we done clearing up just what a horrible part of this legacy the surge in Iraq was?
We're not going to be done with Iraq as a society for many, many, many years.
But so there's more to talk about.
But, yeah, let's let's focus on Afghanistan.
And I think the key point that I would make about his being named commander in Afghanistan is that he was no longer the same guy that he had been when he was named the commander in Iraq.
What I mean by that is that his hat size had expanded by several numbers.
He began to believe the the the incredible press coverage about him, that he was the savior of Iraq.
Yeah.
Well, I'm believing all of his fancy ribbons and medals because they'd made him the the head of Central Command.
Right.
So so I would point to a couple of three things.
One, of course, the Apollo Apollo Broadwell affair takes place after he goes to Afghanistan.
And and he soaks up this, you know, complete fawning and and, you know, everything that she throws at him instead of realizing that, you know, she's just, you know, the political equivalent equivalent of a gold digger.
You know, she's out for her own career and she's going to use him for that.
And, you know, take seriously, I think, the the adulation that that she expresses both directly to him and through her.
And I point this out in the piece that I did a week or so ago, less than a week ago.
Now, the real Paul Broadwell scandal was that she was shilling for him with regard to his use of the U.S. military to actually to destroy Afghan villages.
He gave authority to the military to destroy Afghan villages because they were the Taliban had been so successful in laying IEDs that otherwise it would be impossible to root the Taliban out from those villages.
That's what he did in 2010.
And so in early 2011, she shows up.
And so she was shilling for his policy.
And basically, this is a policy that violates the laws of war.
It was a war crime.
Well, and of course, never mind that.
That doesn't mean anything where America laws don't apply to us.
But doesn't that violate Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine?
Exactly.
I mean, he threw his counterinsurgency strategy, not a strategy, but his doctrine under the bus.
I mean, you know, he just completely abandoned it.
But it turned out to be totally worthless.
And he recognized that it wasn't going to work.
And Petraeus is out to do whatever will save his own skin and make him look good.
And that's why he completely abandoned the whole idea of counterinsurgency.
The idea that we have to win over the people and, you know, that means not killing civilians and not destroying their property.
Now, you know, this destruction of the villages, for the most part, at least, didn't involve casualties to civilians because they'd already gotten out.
But it certainly did involve, you know, the destruction of, you know, 100 million to a billion, somewhere in there, dollars worth of property of Afghan citizens in Kandahar province.
So to get back to my main point, that's one of the ways that I think we can see how his basically fixation on his image and his belief in himself was becoming the dominant factor in his approach to Afghanistan.
The other thing that happened was that he found himself taken in by this Taliban imposter, the guy who pretended to be a high-ranking Taliban negotiator who came in and, you know, he was welcomed with open arms by Petraeus because the guy was saying, you know, we'll do whatever you want, you know, we just want to surrender, basically.
And Petraeus was ready to believe him despite the fact that there was absolutely no evidence to support the idea that the Taliban were anywhere close to surrendering or that it had even been a fraud in their mind.
All right.
Now, before we get to the part where, because of that failure, he got promoted to head of CIA, I got to ask you, is there a strategy now, if the strategy isn't coined, but they keep announcing as they just announced last week that 2014 doesn't mean a thing, they're going to stay forever.
Obama already signed a thing he wants to stay to some degree until 2024.
Do they or do they not have a policy of attempting to tame or incorporate the Pashtun countryside at all or not?
Or what are they doing?
If you mean is there a theory, then yes, of course, they have a theory.
Do they believe in it?
I'm increasingly doubtful that anybody certainly below the level of John Allen himself, and even John Allen himself, I think, must have severe doubts about this at this point, given the continued flow of information showing that the Taliban are, you know, as strong as ever.
They're much stronger than they were three years ago, certainly as strong as they were two years ago and a year ago.
And I think as U.S. troops draw down, the Taliban do become stronger, their credibility grows, their ability to convince people that they're going to be the strongest force in the field continues to grow.
And therefore, you know, this theory that somehow or other they're training the Afghan security forces so that they'll be able to take over and that that's going to mean that we will have succeeded becomes less and less credible.
And of course, the insider attacks, the ability of the Taliban to carry out very impressive attacks.
You know, the first time for the first time in the war, attacking a fortified U.S. base, that is Camp Bastion, and destroying, I believe it was 13 or 14 aircraft and killing a whole bunch of U.S. and NATO personnel on the base.
That's something that they've never been able to do previously.
And I must add that that's something that the Viet Cong were never able to accomplish throughout the Vietnam War.
Wow.
And well, how is it that easy for them to infiltrate and get that far?
Well, I think it's that easy because so many people who are in the Afghan military and police are not at all supportive of the Afghan government and certainly not supportive of or tolerating the presence of foreign troops.
These are, after all, people who are Islamic and who believe that the foreigners are insulting Islam, have continued to insult Islam, as well as insulting the culture of the Afghan people by the night raids that are carried on every night, 20, 30 night raids against people's homes.
This is absolutely forbidden in Islam and in Afghan culture and Pashtun culture.
So these are people who are ready and willing, in many cases, to cooperate with the Taliban by carrying out insider attacks or, if not doing that, by continuing to communicate with the Taliban, giving them information and assuring them that they're not going to go out and go after them.
And by the way, one of Danny Davis's findings in his report was that everywhere he went in Afghanistan, he found that Afghan security forces were in touch with, there was evidence that they were in touch with the Taliban.
They were communicating with them and in many cases they had basically gotten information about that from intercepting their phone conversations with the Taliban.
That is U.S. intelligence.
So is it, I mean, obviously it's always oversimplification to go by, you know, ethnicity and tribe and whatever, but it sort of sounds like you're saying that among the Hazaras and the Uzbeks and the typical constituency of the Northern Alliance warlords, that they feel the very same way, really?
This is not just a matter of...
No, no, I'm not saying that.
I think that there's a distinction here.
I think that the vast majority of these insider attacks are carried out by Pashtuns.
I guess I'm surprised that there's that many Pashtuns actually even being brought into the military and police forces at all, then.
Well, I mean, they have brought in a lot of Pashtuns from the North and, you know, I think some of those clearly have cooperated with the Taliban.
And then at a much lower level, they've continued to bring in some people from the South, from Kandahar, Helmand, and other southern provinces.
And a much higher percentage of those clearly are cooperating with the Taliban.
So, you know, the interesting thing is that there has not been a breakdown of the, you know, who it was who did insider attacks in terms of their ethnicity.
But I'm reasonably confident that we would find, if we did get a breakdown, that the overwhelming majority were in fact Pashtun.
Well, yeah, I mean, the most important part there still is that it's not that the Taliban are these absolute Lex Luthor masterminds who can organize a conspiracy of this many people to be that successful.
The fact is, it's easy for them to get people who are not members of the Taliban to leave the door open for them and that kind of thing, because they have support around, you know, people who aren't of them.
It's basically, it's an issue of the objective realities that both the Taliban and the United States have to work with.
They favor the Taliban just so overwhelmingly that, yeah, I mean, they have a much greater margin of error than the United States does.
I mean, that's one way of putting it.
I think it's a rather weak way of putting it.
But you get the idea that they have so much more going for them than the United States does, and the Afghan security forces have going for them, that they can do a lot of things that bring them closer to their goal, no question about it.
Okay, we've got 10 seconds.
Is it a good idea to turn the CIA into a drone targeting machine?
Bad idea.
A crime.
All right, everybody, that's the show.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
See you all tomorrow.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here.
After the show, you should check out one of my sponsors, wallstreetwindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by Mike Swanson, a former hedge fund manager who's investing in commodities, mining stocks and European markets.
Mike's site, wallstreetwindow.com, is unique in that he shows people what he's really investing in, updating you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike's betting his positions are going to go up due to the Federal Reserve printing all that money to finance the deficit.
See what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.
In an empire where Congress knows nothing, the ubiquitous D.C. think tank is all.
And the Israel lobby and their neocon allies must own a dozen.
Well, Americans have a lobby in Washington, too.
It's called the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They advocate for us on Capitol Hill.
Join CNI to demand an end to the U.S.
-sponsored occupation of the Palestinians and an end to our government's destructive empire in the Middle East.
That's the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, ladies.
Scott Horton here.
If you would like truly youthful, healthy and healthy-looking skin, there is one very special company you need to visit.
Dagny and Lane at dagnyandlane.com.
Dagny and Lane has revolutionized the industry with a full line of products made from organic and all-natural ingredients that penetrate deeply with nutrient-rich ionic minerals and antioxidants for healthy and beautiful skin.
That's Dagny and Lane at dagnyandlane.com.
And for a limited time, add promo code SCOTT15 at checkout for a 15% discount.