3/28/18 Gareth Porter on the history of Iraq War 2

Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had, you've been took, you've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
But we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, introducing the great Gareth Porter, a good friend of this show and author of Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare and about 10,000 great articles on Iraq, World War II, Afghanistan, Syria and much more.
And he really is, I think, the most important reporter around.
Thank you, Gareth, for coming back on the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
Cool.
All right, so I'm going to tell you a thing.
I interviewed Jonathan Schwartz from The Intercept, formerly the blog Tiny Revolution, for two hours all about how they lied us into war.
The neocons and the PNAC and the Ariel Sharon and the Dick Cheney and all the different facets of the weapons of mass destruction and the so-called ties to al-Qaeda and all of these things.
How do they get us into this mess?
We talked a little bit about the war, just to make the point that this came with severe consequences, of course.
We talked about the clean break and coping with crumbling states and all these things.
So now I kind of want to do it again.
It doesn't have to necessarily be two hours, but the point being, I sort of want to take my time, call it lazy or just call it patient or something.
I sort of just want to plod through this a little bit and talk with you about how Iraq War II played out.
And of course, you know, there's been, well, I have, I'm sure you have, I know you have a shelf full of books about what happened in Iraq War II.
But, you know, I think also you and I both have pretty unique points of view on what are the most important parts of what happened there, the ones that we might emphasize for people to understand.
And especially, and I'm trying to keep this in mind more and more, Gareth, for the young people who in 2003 were just kids.
I gave a lecture last night to some college kids in North Carolina by way of Skype, and they were in elementary school when Bush invaded Iraq.
And so we have to do a lot of history makeup for people who are young.
Absolutely.
I agree with you.
And for people who just, you know, that wasn't their thing, or maybe they were a right winger at the time, or maybe they were liberal at the time or a leftist at the time and opposed the war, but didn't really know anything about it, but would like to.
Or the way I like to think about it, I think a lot of people do know quite a bit about it in a way.
They just usually don't have a very good narrative to explain kind of the cause and effect as you go through the time.
So I think we could probably be helpful with that.
So not to, you know, belabor too much of the Jonathan Schwartz interview, but it is important really to talk about the motive, and I think particularly not even of George Bush, but the motive of the neoconservatives for getting us into this war as really outlined in the Clean Break and Coping with Crumbling States strategy papers written by David Wormser and signed off on by Douglas Feith and Richard Perle and other of these major neocons that, Gareth, am I right?
Is this the way you read this too?
That they thought if you get rid of Saddam, that that will help weaken Iran.
And that was because that's what Chalabi told them.
Yes.
As you know well, I certainly subscribe to the view that the liquidist, if you will, viewpoint on the international politics and geography of the Middle East played a huge role in the formulation of a policy, particularly within the, you know, within the Bush administration.
But I do want to just preface our discussion of that element of the background of the Iraq War with one cautionary note, or maybe not a cautionary note, but to add one more factor that really is completely unknown in terms of the literature on the Iraq War, but which I have been able to put together from doing research for a book that I've been working on for years and years on America's wars, the permanent war state.
And that is the role that the interests of the Air Force played in essentially creating the bureaucratic political structure in which the neocon interests really fit like a glove.
And that, of course, I'm referring to the idea of an air war for regime change in Iraq.
The Air Force came up with this idea.
I'll be very brief.
Okay.
I don't want to take a lot of time on this, but I think go ahead, man.
That's the whole point.
We're going to go ahead and take our time.
Yeah.
Just to add this, this bureaucratic politics factor into the mix in terms of understanding why this war occurred.
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that the neocons did play a key role in shaping the policy.
Douglas Feith and Wolfowitz clearly were playing a role in writing those memos and so forth.
But years before you had the groundwork laid, the political bureaucratic groundwork was laid for this war because the Air Force was obviously self-interested in having a strategy for regime change that would obviously emphasize their strong suit, which is to be able to go in with heavy air power and take out the strategic targets on which the regime was most dependent.
And so the Air Force began in the early to mid 1990s, around 1993-94, to put forward, to develop this idea of regime change through what was finally essentially what people knew as shock and awe, you know, the going in with really big air power and destroying all the strategic targets in the capital.
So they, of course, came up against heavy resistance from the Army because a regime change through air power would essentially cut the Army out of the action.
And so for years, there was a heavy struggle within the Pentagon between the Army and the Air Force over this idea of regime change through air power that the Army blocked it for years.
But what happened was that when Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense under Bush, basically he came into office with a fixed idea that favored the Air Force.
Why?
Because he learned everything he knew about conventional war from being on the board of directors of the Rand Corporation.
He did it twice.
He had two different periods in which he was on the board of directors.
And when he was on the board, they would assiduously feed him information, give him briefings on the Air Force point of view about all the major policy issues.
And so he had been converted to the idea of basically regime change through air power before he even got to the Pentagon.
And it fit into his interests very neatly because what he wanted to do was to spend a lot more money on the big ticket items, like particularly missile defense.
That was his baby because he had been associated with it before he became Secretary of Defense.
He wanted to spend a lot more money on those high-tech toys and less money on the Army.
And so this idea gave him a good strategic notion to justify what he wanted to do anyway, which was to rejigger the defense budget to give much more money to the Air Force and for high-tech weaponry and much less money to the Army.
So he came up with this idea that we would go in there with a very light ground troop footprint, heavy on the air power, and that that would take care of the problem for us.
And so that's really the, I think, essential sort of political bureaucratic background to how this idea of going in to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime came about.
The road was cleared during the 1990s before the Republicans won the election, but Rumsfeld was critical to that and he had already been converted to that idea.
And in fact, people make a big deal about, well, in different contexts, they cite Rumsfeld's speech from September 10th saying that there's $3 trillion missing, and which he's talking about not like an actual amount of piles of dollars missing from the vault or whatever, but he's saying a bad accounting in the Pentagon over the last decade, which is a hell of a lot of money wherever it was embezzled to.
It absolutely was a massive difference there.
But what was the point of bringing that up?
The point of bringing that up was because he was basically trying to beat the Army over the head with it and say, and that's why I'm going to have my way and you guys are going to do as you're told.
That was part of that same thing.
And people, I'm sure, are familiar with the fight where Paul Wolfowitz said, we can do this whole thing with 50,000 troops in and out.
And then it was General Shinseki who had said, no, we're going to need like 300,000 guys.
And Wolfowitz said, no, that's way off the mark.
And everyone always criticized him for that.
But part of that was, though, like you're saying, the idea was they were going to go in there, do a regime change, put Ahmed Chalabi and his buddies in power and then leave to some degree, withdraw to their bases anyway.
But it wasn't really the neocon plan to do the full occupation and take over the country, right?
Well, it wasn't the neocon plan to fight a major war in Iraq.
You're right.
They just caught one and so had to.
To have U.S. permanent military bases in Iraq, that's absolutely crucial to this whole scheme.
So that part of it, I mean, exactly how many bases perhaps was not decided yet, how many troops would remain.
But definitely they were going to have air bases and ground force bases in Iraq.
That would be the crucial U.S. military position in the Middle East, because, of course, the Saudis had kicked us out.
And that was that made Iraq all the more important.
Yeah, well, and so we'll talk about that in just a sec.
But I want to get back to what you're saying about the Air Force here.
And, you know, I guess I'll let you tie it in the way you think is most apt.
But there's this great article.
And you know what?
I know Hartung wrote a whole book about it, but I haven't read it yet.
I'm sorry about Lockheed.
Sorry, Hartung.
But there's this great article, Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, by Richard Cummings, that was written for playboy.com.
But it's now on my website, scotthorton.org, and it's at corpwatch.org and other places.
And it's Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
And it's about how, guess what?
All of the neocons, virtually all of the ones in the first Bush Jr. administration, had a direct tie to Lockheed on their board of advisors or their board of directors, was an executive vice president for development of something or other or something.
And even Hadley was a lawyer at the firm that represented Lockheed.
And he was like the most outlier of all of them.
But virtually the whole gaggle of the guys that you would think of as Chinese neocons, you know, Libby and Wormser and Shulsky and Feith and Pearl and Wolf and all these guys, were Lockheed guys.
And as he portrays it, even that the shock and awe campaign was really sort of like a Lockheed promotional video that like, here's what we'll be able to do for you.
And we're just going to bomb this, this, this and that, like you're talking about the shock and awe campaign, which they ended up not really doing, right?
Well, I mean, it was perhaps not as much as the Air Force would have called for, I'm not sure.
They bombed the hell out of them, don't get me wrong.
But yeah, anyway, that's a side point.
The real point, though, is though, so Bruce Jackson, he had created the committee for the expansion of NATO, whatever it was called, I think that was it, and then for NATO expansion.
And then later, then he created the committee for the liberation of Iraq.
And this was just corporate welfare for Lockheed.
And then he had this alliance with these neocons and their think tanks.
And then the Air Force, as you're talking about, who they're the ones who get to implement this plan, or try to.
There was a there was a Cheney on the board of directors of Lockheed for years.
And it was his wife.
His wife was on board for like eight years, if I remember correctly.
Yeah.
Made well over $500,000.
Yeah.
So Cummings is like Likud, nothing, man.
I mean, yeah, these guys are all Likudniks, but that's almost besides the point.
I mean, what they are is airplane salesmen.
I agree with you.
I think that that is really the crucial factor here that that trumps the loyalties such as they were to the Likud party.
Well, but look, you got Bush and Rove where Bush just, you know, wanted to kill his father and have his mother, obviously, and wanted to prove how tough he was, and prove that he was smarter and his dad should have listened to him when he said go all the way to Baghdad.
Don't call the war off now back in 91, because he had sided with the Hawks on that back then and and had blamed his father's loss on the fact that he wasn't in the middle of a war at the time, obviously, which is probably true.
Right.
He won the war.
They had their big victory parade, but then the election wasn't for a year and a half.
Oops.
You know, so and then you had Karl Rove who just, you know, wanted to get the boy reelected because that was his job.
And you had the especially I learned this reading J.J. Goldberg in the forward, which I wish I'd been reading him all along.
I didn't know about this, but it seemed very credible anyway that much more than Ariel Sharon, it was Netanyahu who wanted regime change against Iraq.
And that was really his policy.
And Ariel Sharon wanted Iran first, but then was like, OK, well, whatever, I guess if we're going to do Iraq, as long as you promise we'll do Iran, too, then that was a big part of it.
But that really the neocons in America were better friends with Netanyahu and were more involved with his faction of the Likud party to whatever degree.
Absolutely.
And this this decision about whether the biggest enemy is is Iran or Iraq and that and the sort of sequencing of things was obviously a constant source of debate and struggle within Israel, within the Likud, as well as between the Likud and the Bush administration.
I mean, this is a big sort of complex story over a period of many months.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so, I mean, you could see how the Air Force is like, yeah, give us some stuff, we'll drop bombs on it.
That's all they want to do.
And yet it doesn't seem like they're going to be the best analysts of what's going to be the aftermath.
Who are you going to regime change for?
Who are you going to put in power?
Who are the relevant factions on the ground?
And what's going to be the aftermath of this?
And certainly the message in the media at the time, if it portrayed at all, I mean, it kind of the background noise narrative, if it portrayed at all, the thinking in the White House was never even mind the people of Iraq.
They're just an afterthought.
The U.S. Army will get what it wants and do whatever it wants.
And certainly once they defeat the Iraqi army, which won't take any time at all, then there will be no one there to challenge them, really.
And so they'll just do what they want and they'll worry about the Iraqi people later.
And that seems like that makes sense.
If you're an Air Force general, you don't want to get bogged down and figuring out about the history of Karbala and all of this stuff, you know.
But so then that brings us back to worms for the neocons, right?
Because they're the ones writing the policy papers saying that once we do this regime change, here's what's going to happen.
And they thought it was going to help them.
They didn't think that it was going to empower the Ayatollah.
They thought it was going to cripple the Ayatollah somehow, Gareth.
Right.
And that brings us back to Ahmad Chalabi and the people that he was aligned with and the people who ended up becoming the allies of the Bush administration neocons in Iraq, which is the Badr Brigade and the Shia militias who played such a big role in the politics of Iraq after that.
Yeah.
OK, so let's talk about that.
Jonathan Landay, who's good on some things and is a friend of mine.
He's a good guy.
He was there in Kurdistan.
I brought this up to him.
He was like, I was there.
I saw it myself when Abdulaziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Skiri, walked across the border from Iran to Kurdistan on the heels of the American invasion and how, you know, basically the deal was done at that point.
Right.
And I forget now if it was Sadr or if it was Sistani, but it doesn't matter because I know either way, the point's still the same, that the anecdote was about this little blonde daughter of a Republican voter, a donor, political appointee who was an aide to Paul Wolfowitz, who didn't know the first thing about Iraq whatsoever, that, and I'm sorry, Wolfowitz, Paul Bremer, the Kissinger Associates guy who was put in charge as the first viceroy there, that he asked, Paul Bremer asked this young lady, who is this Sadr guy?
It may have been Sistani, but I think it was Sadr.
And she says, well, he's this minor cleric.
Don't worry about him.
And of course, these were the men, Sadr and the Ayatollah Sistani and Abdulaziz al-Hakim at the Supreme Islamic Council, and then the various leaders of the Dawah party as well, Dawah and Skiri, both of whom had been in Iran for 30 years since the time when Jimmy Carter hired Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, and they fled and took Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq war back then.
They were the ones who inherited the power in Iraq after the invasion.
But so, but clearly, that wasn't the plan, Gareth, but what was the plan?
How did they not know, especially when the Bata Brigade's presence, that's the militia of the Supreme Islamic Council, their presence in the uprising of 1991 is what caused Bush Sr. to call off support for the uprising and allow Saddam to slaughter these guys and remain in power after all?
Yeah, this is a, this is a fascinating little moment, not a little moment, big moment in the history of this whole issue.
And, and, you know, what interests me so much about this is, you know, in my piece on the secret, you know, quote, unquote, Iranian diplomatic proposal to the Bush administration in 2003, which I published, I guess it was 2006.
I can't remember for sure now, 2006 or 2007.
The, the point was, was documented in that piece that basically the, the Pentagon folks, including particularly Rumsfeld, were very strongly accusing Iran of wanting to come into Iraq and warning them, don't you dare get involved in Iraq.
That was their public messaging at that point in 2003, because, you know, there was a huge fight going on within the Bush administration about what to do with this Iranian proposal.
And the neocons were absolutely, of course, opposed to any positive response, whereas Colin Powell wanted to, to respond to it.
So, so publicly, the, the Rumsfeld folks in the Pentagon were saying, and Rumsfeld himself was being quoted publicly as saying, I'm warning the Iranians, don't cross that border.
But obviously the fix was on, and it was because the Kurds that, you know, the Kurds who were allied with Iran were the ones who had the key positioning on the border and made the decision to allow the Iranians to come in.
And they were US allies as well.
So, you know, they became part of the, the new government in Iraq very quickly.
And, and they were the ones who were welcoming the Bata Brigade to, to come into Iraq and help to get rid of Saddam.
And so I think that's really the, the key to understanding this very weird, in terms of the, the background politics in the United States and the Bush administration, this weird event of, of the Bata Brigade, which was clearly known to be representing the interests of, of the Iranian regime, coming in to help get rid of Saddam.
By the way, Gareth, I have the article here, everybody.
It's burnt offering in the prospect, prospect.org, burnt offering from May 2006, burnt offering about Iran's offer in 2003 to deal with America on everything, including let's cooperate in Iraq.
All right.
So now, but now, so what was the plan?
The plan was that you're going to do this caucus system and basically the Americans were going to set up a puppet government to their liking.
I don't know if they had done much figuring out who it was they were going to put in power, but unless I'm skipping anything really big in the, the early part of 2003 that you want to talk about, then we could skip to Sistani and his call for protest and a demand of democracy, majority rule, one man, one vote as promised in January of 2004.
Right.
Of course, that's the critical turning point in the internal politics of Iraq for, for the next several years.
And, but, but the one point that needs to be added in here, of course, and perhaps this was brought up in your previous discussions of, of the anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
The, the, the neocons really expected that the Shia in Iraq would be very solid allies of the United States and that they would be not just allies of the United States, but that they would be resistant to any Iranian influence.
That was critical to their vision of how things were going to play out.
And so they counted on the Sistanis and those people, not just to, you know, support the US invasion and, and continued military presence, but to, you know, but to support a regime that would be solidly in the US court and, and anti-Iran and would not play ball with Iranians.
Right.
And, and to some extent, and of course, they did have a basis for that hope.
But at the same time, they were clearly underestimating the degree to which there were forces, very significant political forces within Iraq that were Shia, but who were not going to be overtly anti-Iranian.
They were not going to be certainly pro-American, but we're going to be Iraqi nationalist and we're going to be willing to cooperate at least on a limited basis with Iran in that regard.
And that of course was Muqtada al-Sadr in particular.
So let's go back to Sadr in a sec now, but so, but back to why the neocons believe this was because of Ahmed Chalabi, who later, and I want to know what you think of this, later he was busted telling the Iranians that the Americans had broken their codes.
But then on further examination, the CIA and the DIA put out a report saying that they thought that Chalabi worked for Iran all along and that he was on a mission to go and sell a bunch of, a bill of goods to the Likudniks of DC, that if you get rid of Saddam, this will weaken Iran rather than helping contain him as has been the policy since 1980.
Look, I mean, I don't know the answer to that.
Nobody else does either except Ahmed Chalabi and the Iranians.
Now he's dead at least.
Okay.
But so anyway, intents and purposes, you could see why the DIA would believe that.
And you could see why, if that is true, it makes total sense that Chalabi and the Ayatollah would look at Richard Perle and see mark written all over his forehead, right?
That here's a guy who believes whatever he wants to believe, let's give him some stuff to believe and then wind him up and let him go.
The circumstantial evidence has to be regarded as powerful in this case, that Chalabi was really consciously, you know, playing the Americans all along on behalf of Iran.
I mean, that's a very reasonable assumption.
And there's a great article by John Dezard in Salon.com and I know everybody's rolling their eyes right now, but a long time ago, Salon.com used to publish actual journalism and this is part of it.
It's called How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons.
And it's just hilariously sad and crazy.
I mean, it's just something else to read, seriously.
And what he told them, and we did discuss this in the show with John Schwartz, but let's talk about it more.
What he told them was that the Iraqi Shia basically just love being told what to do.
And that if we give them a Hashemite king, we'll give him a cousin of the king of Jordan.
And then they'll be so, I guess, modern and wealthy and great in every way under this new enlightened American and Hashemite leadership that they will just put Iran to shame.
And it will put all this, it will change the mind of the people of Iran where they will be, they will hate their government and be so jealous of the awesome Hashemite kingdom going on in Iraq right now.
And Wormser bought that and Perlin then bought that.
And of course, later they changed the Hashemite king to at Chalabi himself.
But if you read the Clean Break and Coping with Crumbling States, he names Chalabi in there.
Yes, Chalabi assures us this is going to be great.
We're going to build an oil and a water pipeline to Haifa.
And the new government is going to call off all support for Hamas and et cetera, et cetera.
It's going to be perfect.
And that we'll negotiate normalization of relations with Israel.
That was an absolutely central point that he sold the neocons on.
Yeah, so this is such a huge thing.
And people debate this.
People get so mad about saying how stupid these guys are, as though it acquits them, as though they meant well to coin a phrase, Peter Van Buren, but it just didn't work out.
It's more like, no, it's a horrible premeditated murder plot that went all wrong and got a lot more people killed than it was ever supposed to and ended up with results that it was never supposed to at all.
And based on some really stupid beliefs that these neocons let themselves be convinced of here.
I mean, that much is clear.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, there's no question.
I mean, and I say that I don't know the answer to that, but I am convinced that Chalabi was working on behalf of the Iranian government from the beginning.
You know, Patrick Coburn said about that, that like, well, and here's a guy who knew Chalabi, I'm sure must have met him numerous times or something.
And he says, look, I mean, this guy worked for himself more than anything else.
And if the Iranians helped him, like, yeah, that probably makes sense.
In fact, look, INC had a headquarters in Tehran.
I mean, what's the secret?
Yeah.
The logic is, the logic is very powerful.
It's difficult to, to avoid that conclusion.
All right.
So now they invade in 03 and there were already, you know, fomenting a Sunni insurgency in 2003 by debathifying the government and abolishing the army.
And that was, you know, the neocons.
There's, man, I'm trying to remember what's the best source for this, but there's some in-depth reporting about, was it, it was Wolfowitz and Feith and was it Walter Slocum who was involved in this decision too?
Slocum was, yes.
He made the formal decision, as I understand it, as I recall it.
And this is the same guy that, that coined the phrase, let's give the Soviets their own Vietnam and Afghanistan back in the, in the seventies.
It's funny, these things, got a little spreadsheet in my brain here.
I'm trying to keep track.
Uh, so now what's that mean anyway?
Um, you know, I'm, I'm too much of what we're talking about here.
We're talking like it goes without saying what's a Likud party and what's a this and what's a that.
In Iraq, the Shiites are a super majority population, 60% Shiite Arabs from all the land from Baghdad over to Iran and down to Kuwait is where they're, you know, predominant.
And then in the west of the country, in the Anbar province, uh, and then up in, it's Nineveh, right?
That goes up to Mosul.
And this is Mosul, Ramadi, Tikrit, Samara, uh, Fallujah.
These are, this is the west of the country.
That's the predominantly Sunni Arab regions.
And there were only 20% of the population because the remainder 20% are the Kurds up in the north who are Sunnis, but are Kurds, not Arabs.
And in this case were basically oppressed along with the Shiites.
Um, and so then had an alliance with the Shiites when the Americans invaded against the Sunni Arabs.
Although most, I guess they, I guess they let the Shia and the Americans do most of the fighting against the Sunnis.
But so, so this is the deal, right?
Is Saddam was a Sunni and this was a minority dominated government.
There were Shiites in the Ba'ath party, but it was a minority dominated government.
And then when the Americans came in, it wasn't just that, okay, this and that the Ba'ath Brigade, we, people lose track.
It was that the Americans decided that they were going to take the side of the super majority.
And then I guess eventually they had no choice of really taking the side of this super majority Shiite populations, political leadership, not the will of the people, but their political leaders, Dawah, Skiri, and Sadr, and that they were basically on that side against the guys who had backed the old regime.
And so, but now people always say that the problem was that they abolished the army and that just led to chaos.
And yet if they kept the army, that would have led to chaos too, right?
What do you think?
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, there's no doubt that if the army had remained in place, it would have split.
There would have been those who came across to, you know, join a new government to, to be anti-Saddam and pro-American or whatever.
But, but a large part of the army would have cohered and one way or another stuck together and, and opposed the, the, the role of the United States in, in Iraq.
And, and so we, we can't precisely say how that would have played out, but the logic of it would be that they would have had enormous problems of a slightly different or a very different nature that, that would have resulted from keeping the army in place.
Overall, I mean, you know, it seems to me that, that, you know, sort of destroying the army with one blow and having all these people out on the street with no, no source of support was obviously an immediate spur to them starting to think, okay, let's see, what do we do now?
And, and that played into the hands of Saddam's strategy for guerrilla warfare very, very nicely.
There's no doubt about that.on YouTube and for all the feeds, iTunes, Stitcher, etc.
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Thanks.
All right.
So now here's the thing, man.
I'm not sure if it was again, Saud or Sistani who was deemed the minor cleric worth ignoring, but it turned out that, you know, these people are not automatons.
They're actually people and they had their own will.
And after George Bush senior had encouraged the Shiite uprising and they betrayed it and abandoned it, there was no question they were going to make sure to take full advantage of this invasion and have their way and no longer be the oppressed super majority population anymore.
And they're going to fight like hell to make sure that.
And I still remember when this news broke that the Ayatollah Sistani who reportedly, and I guess it's not exactly one tight rank and file, but more or less, this is the highest ranking Shiite religious leader on earth.
Went outside from down in Basra or Najaf, I'm sorry, wherever he was and said, Hey, if you believe in God, go outside and tell George Bush, you want one man, one vote.
That was in January, 2004.
And I remember watching it on PBS, you know, the serious grownup TV news where they're like, the Ayatollah Sistani today pulled out a Trump card and we don't know what the hell we're going to do now because he was basically saying, Bush, if you want to start this war all over again against the majority population that just stood by and let you invade the country and get rid of Saddam for us, then go ahead.
But the gauntlet is thrown down and Bush just cried uncle that day.
That was it.
The whole game was up.
It wasn't America's war at all anymore.
It was Sistani's war and Hakeem's war now.
Yeah.
And the Americans then immediately started to shift their strategy and to try to do what they could with the tools that they had available.
And, you know, then we had David Petraeus being the guy who set up the new army, started to organize a new army and relied on Shia, mostly Shia militias who were highly sectarian, the Wolf Brigade, but also some Sunni militias as well to fight the war against the Sunni resistance.
That became the strategy almost immediately.
And that was planting the seeds of the essentially a sectarian war that came over the next few years and which resulted in much worse violence within Iraq than otherwise would have been the case.
All right now.
So, well, I want to talk about Fallujah and all that, and then we'll get back to the El Salvador option, which you're starting to describe there.
But now we got to stop and talk about torture.
Because, you know, when you mentioned the Wolf Brigade, it brings up a point that I think is really very important.
I haven't seen it, but I guess everybody else in society has seen this movie, American Sniper, about Chris Kyle and his war over there in Iraq War II.
And one of the, and it's I think Clint Eastwood, I'm disappointed, usually he could be, I would expect him to actually take care to get this right or something, but nah.
And what it is, is they portray America's enemies as using power drills to torture people to death.
When the story of the real history of Iraq War II is that it was America's allies who used power drills to torture people to death.
And they would find Sunni stack like cordwood on the side of the road with drill holes in their heads and their eyeballs and their shoulders and their chests and their everything.
And that was our guys, the Bata Brigade and the Wolf Brigade, Shiite militias that worked for America that were doing that to people, not our enemies there.
That was the people we were putting in power that was doing that.
I can't add anything to what you just said.
I mean, it's absolutely right.
All I can say is that it was Petraeus who made the key decision to make those things happen.
And he was never held accountable.
He has so many different failures in so many wars, Garrett, that it's hard to keep track, especially when you want to go all the way back to 2004 like this.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
In fact, one of the other things he did was he went up to Mosul and he built a Sunni army up there, which he armed to the teeth.
And then all those guns, quote, disappeared.
In other words, he just trained up an entire brigade of insurgents who then went on to fight the war against the Americans from there.
Well, I mean, I would I would add, you know, really, I did this five part series on Petraeus in in when was it?
I can't even remember which year it was now, 2012 or 2013, in which I point out that what what Petraeus pulled off was to convince the American press, the visiting US journalists from The Washington Post and other quality media who came in to Mosul while he was there in 2003, 2004, I guess it was, that he had basically tamed the Sunni resistance, the Sunni opposition there and that things were under control and it was not a problem.
Whereas, in fact, the opposite was happening while he was there as the guy who was manipulating everything.
The Sunnis were gradually increasing their presence, gradually increasing their operations, carrying out military operations that resulted in people being killed, bombs going off.
And it was every month it was getting worse and worse.
And he covered it up and he managed to portray the situation exactly the opposite of what was actually happening.
And this is one of the great examples of how Petraeus manipulated the media to tell a story that was completely untrue and to shed glory on himself that was totally undeserved.
So in 2004, David Petraeus getting the Shiite side of the civil war really cranking with what was called the El Salvador option of using the Bata Brigade and the Wolf Brigade.
We're going to get back to torture everybody in a second.
I'm not giving it short shrift here, but we did get distracted on the narrative.
So he's setting up the Shiite death squads to hunt down and kill the leaders of the Sunni insurgency, I guess primarily in Baghdad.
And then he goes to Mosul and he builds up the Sunni side of the insurgency basically in the name of creating a professional army to fight it there.
He's basically just arming the insurgency that's fighting against him and his men.
And then when he finally left and that was it, the whole game was up and they just took all those guns and used Well, hold on, hold on.
He was in Mosul first.
He was in Mosul first.
Okay, I'm sorry.
And then later after, you know, pulling the wool over the US press's eyes, he then was given this reward of being the guy who would essentially build a new army.
And it was the training command.
And so that's when he was, you know, basically doing what you call the Salvador option.
He was then relying on all these sectarian, well, the Wolf Brigade and sectarian Shia militias in particular.
I mean, yeah, I mean, the Bata Brigade became the core of the Iraqi army.
No question about that at that time.
So all right, I'm sorry, I had that out of order there.
Okay, that makes sense.
So yeah, what a guy.
And we'll get back to more of David Petraeus's antics here in a minute.
Never even mind that time he lost the war in Afghanistan.
Forget that you'll just have to read the book.
But so yeah, no torture.
So what happened was, on September 11, they decided this is a war.
And whatever David Addington can imagine are the limits of George Bush's power.
That's the way it is now.
And it says commander in chief.
And now those are the only words in the Constitution that mean anything.
And they override everything.
All laws, all orders, all treaties, all deals.
George Washington's orders from the Revolutionary War forbidding torture back then.
And every law since.
All null and void.
These guys, the Geneva Conventions don't apply to them.
And go ahead, by all means, conflate the Taliban with al-Qaeda.
Conflate average Iraqi militiamen fighting in their own neighborhoods with al-Qaeda terrorists and treat them all as though they don't have any rights whatsoever.
According to Colonel Wilkerson and the Associated Press separately, 108 people at least were tortured to death in military custody, mostly in Iraq, although a little bit in Afghanistan.
But people think of the torture program, Gareth, as being the CIA black sites where somebody waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, boohoo for him, right?
Something like that.
And then they go, oh yeah, now one time the night shift went a little bit crazy.
The National Guard unit that was running the Abu Ghraib prison, but that was only for some short amount of time.
And people don't really know that.
Actually, yeah, no, for years the American CIA and military especially tortured prisoners in Iraq in interrogations.
And, you know, the other Scott Horton on the show, the international human rights lawyer, had said in the past that there was no question that tens of thousands of Iraqis were tortured at one point or another during this war.
Yeah, of course, just to add to that, it wasn't only, you know, done by US military and CIA.
It was also the Shia militia and their agents, yeah, as we're talking about, put into action.
He was the one who pushed them into the fray that carried out a lot of this.
And I just want to point out a very interesting factoid that within a few weeks of the Abu Ghraib scandal breaking in the newspapers, David Petraeus was responsible for what is called FRAGO 242, an order that came from the US command to all US units on what to do when there is an instance of mistreatment of prisoner.
In other words, torture, physical, you know, mistreatment of prisoners in the hands of US allies in Iraq.
And the answer to that question was that once you file a, you are not to file any report on this until you are given notice by the command to do so.
In other words, the signal was being sent to US military commanders that they are not to interfere with the treatment of the Sunni resistance people who had been captured and who they knew were being tortured by their handpicked Shia militiamen.
And that is one of the key factoids that has never really been covered by the US press.
I did a piece on it myself in that period, but that was something that never really got covered by the US media.
Yeah.
Now, and there's no question, though, that your interpretation of that is not some minority view.
It was part of the Chelsea Manning leak, Bradley Manning leak back then in 2010 of the Iraq war logs, and it's all at the Guardian, and it was reported in the foreign press.
And there's no question that that's absolutely what it says.
And of course, you know, I remember seeing this on TV at the time when it happened, that where Donald Rumsfeld is asked what happens if, you know, the groups that we're working with there torture people, and American troops know that.
And Rumsfeld starts to say, yeah, well, then we look the other way, because that's really their problem and this and that.
And at the time, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace interrupts the Secretary of Defense and says, no, that's not the law.
The law is that if there's torture going on, that you are absolutely not to be a party to it, and you are absolutely mandated to intervene and stop it immediately.
That's it.
I mean, what are you talking about?
Everything I learned in military school ain't right anymore.
You know, all of it is wrong now.
I mean, come on, where the hell is the line here?
And he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and this was, of course, happening on his watch.
Although I guess he's not exactly in the chain of command in that way, but he certainly wasn't raising hell to make sure that this was not going on.
But certainly he contradicted Rumsfeld about it at a press conference.
That was a moment of truth for the U.S. war in Iraq.
Absolutely, absolutely clear.
That sort of was a lightning bolt that illuminated everything if you were willing to open your eyes and see it.
And look, you know, words out loud and words on pages and stuff.
We're talking about torturing people to death.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, this is as bad as it gets.
And this is a stain on the U.S. forever.
Absolutely.
All right.
Now, so, okay, so 2004, we talked about Sistani said one man, one vote, and that led to the creation of the Constitution, which was by those same Shiite supermajority groups.
And then due to that, the Sunni factions boycotted.
They didn't even participate in the election of January 2005.
And I'll never forget Jon Stewart on Comedy Central going, wowee, a Muslim Arab woman with a black thing on her head and a purple finger.
It really is like democracy come true.
Everybody believe in it for at least a minute.
And yet that was really signaling the beginning of the Civil War there, regardless of Petraeus building up this group and that group was giving them really something to fight about.
Who's going to control the national government that controls the whole country?
Is it going to be you or is it going to be them?
And those lines became absolutely stark.
And the Sunnis, they blew it by boycotting.
I mean, what did they think they were going to accomplish by boycotting it?
When the superpower occupying the place was taking the side of the supermajority, they should have just taken what they could get, but they sure blew that.
But then so.
Well, I mean, I think that that posture went with the resistance to the new government, which they knew was going to be a Shiite government that was going to be essentially charged with tracking down the the Sunni resistance and destroying it.
I mean, that was certainly understandable for them to take that position.
And I remember, you know, Juan Cole explained at the time on my show way back in 2003 and four and whatever, that a big part of this was all the oil is down in the south near Basra and up in the north near Kirkuk, which is mostly under the control of the Kurds.
And now it's under the control of the Shia.
But that if the Sunnis, again, the 20% minority Sunni Arabs, if they lost control of the national government, then they lost all that revenue.
And we've seen that really play out that they understood immediately what was at stake was the future of all patronage in Iraq, that all of this oil money is going to go to the Shiite majority and their Kurdish allies, and that they're going to be the odd man out.
And so they had everything to lose for the long term, in terms of their very survival.
We're talking about people who live out in the desert, no oil money, no food, no nothing.
And by the way, Scott, you know, since we're talking about the election 2005, which was just when I was starting to write actually about Iraq.
And my very first story was about how the Kurds manipulated the ballot, you know, stuffed the ballot boxes in Nineveh province, in the areas where they had control, to make sure that Christians were not represented, did not get a vote, and basically through, you know, that the Kurds, Kurdish candidates would be elected.
So, you know, this is just an example of how and this was done with the knowledge of the US command, because I got the story from a captain who had mustered out of the army and was in Los Angeles and told me the whole story.
After he'd left, he was not happy with it.
But that was what was going on.
And the Americans knew everything about what was happening about how the Kurds were, were manipulating the ballot box to, to make sure that this, you know, that that the new that the new constitution would be passed, that would serve their purposes serve their interests.
Well, and of course, this is one of the most underreported stories during the war was all along, there was a much quieter but still pretty violent ethnic cleansing campaign in Kirkuk as the Kurds were doing their best to kidnap and export there when not outright murdering the Arab population as much as they could.
And of course, compared to the Sunni Shia war that included the American Army Marine Corps, it paled in comparison and didn't get much headlines.
But and and for all the good it did them, right, because the city is now still ruled, or again, ruled by the Shiite government at this point.
But anyway, yeah, it's another example of how the US, you know, because it just had to use whatever tools it could to maintain its hold on Iraq, essentially use the Kurds for its purposes, which which were certainly bound to increase the ethnic tensions in Iraq far more seriously than they had been before bringing the Kurds in to to carry out counterinsurgency warfare in ways that were bound to alienate, you know, the the non Kurdish parts of the population in that part of the country.
All right, so now Fallujah, let's talk about the different wars for Fallujah in 2004.
The first one in the spring, Ray McGovern's the best on this, he's the only one who remembers this right.
And that is that it was Israel that started it.
And the Americans already the Marine Corps was having a problem in Fallujah, and they had massacred some people at a big protest.
And maybe someone had fired first, I don't know, I'm not necessarily accusing them of firing first, because I don't know exactly.
But it certainly caused a problem, objectively speaking, and heightened tensions there as a bunch of unemployed, you know, people on the outs protesting.
But then the Israelis did, I don't know if it was a plane or a drone strike, and an airstrike, and killed Sheikh Yassin, in the Gaza Strip, who was one of the founders of Hamas, who, of course, the Israelis had worked with, and helped, you know, basically eliminate all their competition to make sure to benefit them back, I guess, in the 70s, 60s, 70s, in order to create a right-wing religious alternative to the PLO, which was run by, you know, nominally, at least, secular communist leftist types.
And so it was a divide and conquer strategy, when the Israelis helped this guy create Hamas in the first place, and allowed it, and, you know, did everything they could.
People can read about Andrew Higgins, and the Wall Street Journal wrote all about it, and Richard Sale, and UPI, and others, even the Washington Post has covered that.
But anyway, so they murdered this guy, Yassin, and that caused a big riot in Fallujah, that ended with the lynching of the Blackwater mercenaries, and the hanging of their burnt corpses from the bridge.
And then the reaction to that was General James Mattis, our current Secretary of Defense, took his Marines and let them have it.
And that was in what, in March or April 2004.
Yeah, and of course, let's not forget Rumsfeld's, at least to me, famous public, or maybe it was, I guess it was not in public, he gave an interview to that right-wing Washington Post columnist, what was his name?
I've forgotten now.
This just absolutely, you know, livid, you know, crazy, war-crazy columnist for the Post.
Rumsfeld essentially said, we're going to teach the people of Fallujah a lesson.
The people of Fallujah.
That's right.
Right.
Yeah.
All right.
And now, and it was horrible.
I mean, they killed a ton of people there.
And at the same time, and I'm not exactly sure.
Oh, no, I am.
See, it was a coincidence.
I'm sure that the fighting in Fallujah helped.
But I'll never forget this, or I did just now for a second, but then I remembered it again.
And they just made a movie, a miniseries about this that played on one of these channels, the Smithsonian channel, I think it was, the Long Road Home, or the Hard Road Home, I think the Long Road Home, about the battle of Najaf in, or no, no, no, pardon me, of Sadr City and Najaf in the spring of 2004.
And this is where Thomas Young was fatally, eventually, fatally wounded in the spine.
And this is where Cindy Sheehan's son, Casey, was killed.
And what had happened was that the Americans had shut down McTotter's newspaper.
And I'll never forget that scumbag Republican Congressman Bob Dornan was on one of these cable TV news shows.
And he was saying, no, we have to do it because he's inciting against us.
And that if it saves one American life, we have to do it.
So we're shutting down his newspaper.
And so they shut down his newspaper and the reaction was war.
And then it was Casey Sheehan's group got pinned down.
And then it was Thomas Young's group, no, it's the other way around, Thomas Young's group got pinned down.
And Casey Sheehan's group was sent in as reinforcements to try to rescue them.
And they all just got slaughtered in the back of these open, or not open, but like canvas covered trucks that they were sent in.
And this whole thing was absolutely unnecessary, did not have to happen at all.
I mean, here was a guy where, you know, let's say that you somehow, by black magic, were Paul Bremer in that situation, where you would have said, whatever it is with this guy Sadr, I gotta meet with him.
And I gotta come to an accommodation with him, I've got to figure out how I'm going to deal with the power of Muqtada al-Sadr.
And instead, they just met, I mean, this is the side that they're fighting for now.
And, and they, you know, ended up leading to this horrible fight in Najaf and in Sadr City in East Baghdad, at the same time, the mirror image of what was going on in Fallujah.
Well, while we're talking about Fallujah, you know, this is perhaps a moment for me to say, you know, just to recall that it was after that battle, that I think I wrote, if I remember correctly, I wrote a piece for antiwar.com, in which I said, the United States is going to lose this war, we cannot win this war, it's going to, it's already lost, essentially, right?
Yep.
I'll never forget to Rick, my friend that owns the bumper sticker company to this day, I remember looking at antiwar.com and being like, whoa, fighting in Najaf, Muqtada al-Sadr.
Oh, man, this war is over.
Boy, you thought it was bad that they lied us into war.
But now we're just done.
You know, if you thought that, yeah, everybody, everybody voting, Sistani calling for a Shiite supermajority democracy ruled government was bad enough.
Now we're fighting for and against these same guys on the same side.
What the hell?
Yeah.
So, so, can we...
Wait, so Sadr more, because Sadr said, the men in Fallujah are our brothers, and even sent men in pickup trucks to go and fight with them, and said, you know what, screw Iran and the USA, we want to have a nationalist Arab Iraqi state, and I guess, including the Kurds, too.
And so then the Americans accused him of being the sock puppet of Iran and attacked him, right?
Yeah, yeah.
This is, this is the total lack of any understanding of the basic forces at work here that, that the Americans were, were stuck with.
All right, Gareth.
So while we're still in the year 2005 here, we need to address the Sunni based insurgency to in, you know, in the western parts of the country, primarily, and obviously the war for Baghdad.
And I seem to remember, sir, at the end of war, like in 2010, or the so called end, somewhere around there, 2009 or 10, that you and I had gone back and at one point had the list of all the different sources for the story that the Sunni leadership, the tribal leadership, and I guess some Baathists and whoever, that they'd really been suing for peace.
I think like, the clock was right around the beginning of every summer, starting in 2003, but also in 04, 05, 06, 07, they said, listen, if you'll just let us patrol our own neighborhoods and, you know, lay off of us, then we will stop targeting you.
Right?
I think my recollection, and it's, it's not perfect, that's for sure, is that they first approached the US military in 2004.
And I can't give you any more precise timing on that, with that sort of offer.
And the first time they met with a US military officer, they did make that kind of pitch.
And basically, the military was under pretty strict orders, I think, already to say no, no, we can't, we can't allow you to sort of have your own weapons and carry out your own operations.
That's, that's not on.
And so the talks didn't go anywhere.
And, and I think that was, there was a period then where nothing was happening.
But in 2005, then there was a very substantive contact between the, the Sunni insurgents, not the Saddamists, who, the people who are close to Saddam, nor the, of course, Al Qaeda people, but the people that the Americans then ended up calling rejectionists, for reasons which I'm not able to provide any explanation.
I don't know exactly what the thought was in calling them rejectionists, except that it sounds vaguely negative.
Well, and it goes with the, with the overall narrative that we're trying to create a democracy here.
And it's the Americans and the Iraqi people versus the terrorists.
So it's not a matter of this faction of Iraqis versus that faction of Iraqis.
And we're on this side, not that side.
It's just good guys versus bad guys.
And by saying they're rejectionists, it basically says, well, they're incorrigible.
They just want Saddam back or something, you know?
Well, they were trying to make a distinction here.
That's, that's where I'm going with this.
They were having a three-by.
By 2005, the U.S. government, the Bush administration, and particularly the advisers to Bush, were, had created this tripartite distinction among the parts of the anti-U.S. forces at work in Iraq.
And as I say, the Al Qaeda people, of course, were the terrorists.
The Saddam loyalists, the people who were close to him, were called the Saddamists.
And they were unacceptable.
And the rejectionists were, I think, you know, you're right in part that the rejectionist term was used as a term of opprobrium.
But at the same time, they began to talk about the rejectionists as people that they could talk to.
And that, that's what was happening in 2005.
And this coincided, very importantly, with Khalilzad becoming the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
And of course, Khalilzad is a Sunni himself.
He's very well known for his very strong aversion or antagonism toward Iran and to Shia in general.
So he was obviously trying to steer U.S. policy in the direction of beginning to talk with the Sunni insurgents who were not, you know, directly connected with Saddam or with Al Qaeda.
And there was a period there where there was some serious consideration given in late 2005.
In fact, we now know, and this is because, by the way, essentially the British press, I think the London Times was in the lead on this story.
They had an Arab correspondent who was, you know, in touch with the Sunni insurgent leadership and was reporting by late 2005 on the contacts that were taking place between the, what the Americans were calling the rejectionists, but who were really the resistance organizations that were independent of both Saddam and Al Qaeda.
And they claimed that they accounted for as much as three-fourths of the insurgents, the actual military forces available to the insurgency, and they're probably not too far off.
Yeah.
So in other words, in Iraqi Sunnistan, there's basically three power factions, the Baathists, the Zarqawiite Jihadists, and then the tribal leaders.
And it's the tribal leaders that really you're talking about.
Well, they were connected with tribal leaders.
That's right.
Of course.
Their base of power, their base of support lay in tribal loyalties that they could mobilize.
Just to rewind a little bit here, just to get the context back right again.
Remember in 2004, as we talked about, 2004, the Shia got to write the constitution.
And in 2005, the Sunnis really boycotted it, which was shooting themselves in the foot so bad.
They were going to lose anyway.
They boycotted the vote in January 2005.
And I remember the blogger Bill Mahn wrote an entry called Ayatollah Youssef.
And it was all about how now, and you know, people might even remember Jon Stewart was saying, wow, look, you know, a Muslim woman with a black thing on her head with a purple finger, like neat democracy, the 21st century, whatever.
But really, all that was happening was America was creating the circumstances for a full fledged civil war at that point, as the supermajority Shiite Arabs, and well, their political leadership, won this election hands down, but they still only controlled half the capital city.
It was a very mixed city.
And so thus really began the ethnic cleansing campaign.
And we talked about the support for the Bata Brigade in hunting down the leaders of the Sunni based insurgency, and how that helped exacerbate the insurgency.
Now, I'm sorry, because there's so many different things to talk about here.
So Khalil Zahed, who is an OG, neoconservative studied under Albert Wollstetter and Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago with Wolfowitz and them, and worked for Scoop Jackson, and worked for Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration where he helped write the defense plan and guidance with Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz in 1992.
He had all the credentials necessary to have some sway within the administration.
And so, like we always talk about, at some point, the Bush administration realized, geez, we really just fought this whole war for Iran.
It's empowering Iran, not weakening Iran.
And it was really Khalil Zahed, who crystallized that, I think, for the rest of the boys, they would listen to him when he said, like, look, we're doing the wrong thing here.
And I actually have a clip of me from 2006, joking about how well, so now they're saying they're going to tilt back toward the Sunnis.
I guess, I know, why don't we just call off the trial and put Saddam Hussein back in power, since you realize what a screw-up, you know?
But of course, they weren't willing to do that.
And this is really...
Yeah, and I think at the point where I interrupted you before, you were trying to get to the point where this never really went anywhere.
Not in 2005, it didn't, this tilt back toward the Sunnis.
That's right.
It didn't.
And in fact, what happened was after Khalil Zahed had these meetings, he had a series of meetings with the independent Sunni resistance organizations.
And as a result of that, there was actually a draft of an agreement that was submitted to Khalil Zahed by the Sunnis.
They had a very well worked out, detailed plan for how this could be negotiated out.
And obviously, Khalil Zahed submitted this to the White House with his support, because he was involved in negotiating it.
And the White House ultimately said no.
They turned it down.
And it's very clear that the reason for this was that Dick Cheney and other people in the National Security Advisor circle around Bush ultimately decided that it was not politically safe for them to go down that road.
They were still concerned with how it would look politically in this country to begin negotiations with the Sunnis.
It would look like they were admitting defeat, and that was unacceptable.
So in the final analysis, Bush said no because of domestic political reasons.
Right.
Okay, now we're going to get back to when he finally did say yes to the same thing, only not to Khalil Zahed, to Petraeus end of 2006 here in a minute.
But in the meantime, so this is really as the tilt back toward the Sunnis and the compromise with the Sunni insurgency is rejected.
This really helps to lead, and it had already begun.
But I'd like for you to address the rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his declaration of loyalty to Osama bin Laden.
Now, in my previous interview with Jonathan Schwartz, we talked about how the DoD was begging Bush for the right to kill him in Kurdistan before the war, and Bush wouldn't let him because he needed a talking point here.
But then Zarqawi became to the DoD the perfect poster boy for the Sunni insurgency, that they're all al-Qaeda terrorists.
They're not local Iraqi patriots resisting foreign occupation, or even, nevermind patriots, but Sunnis trying to protect their own faction or whatever.
No, they're all a bunch of berserker suicide bombers, like this guy.
But so what was the reality of Zarqawi there?
Because he actually did lead a small part, but a very important part of the Sunni based insurgency for a couple of years there.
Yeah, this is really a central part of the whole storyline about the Iraq war, which is that the Bush administration very quickly, as soon as they realized that there was an al-Qaeda military resistance organization there, a military outfit that was, you know, actually in the field and killing people and, you know, had military capabilities, they latched onto that, as I think you suggested already.
And they made that the new rationale for the war, essentially.
They made that the poster child, if you will, for the whole war on terrorism, that that was their excuse for saying, now, Iraq is where the war on terrorism is going to be decided.
And some people may even recall, there was this whole argument about flypaper, that the neocons, certain neoconservatives made the argument that, wow, we really got him where we want him now, because the, you know, we've got al-Qaeda lured into Iraq, and now, you know, you'll have the extremists and the terrorists coming from all over the Arab world, and they'll flock to Iraq, and we'll be able to eliminate the threat of terrorism, or a large part of it, because they'll be concentrated in Iraq.
So the flypaper strategy was this brilliant, quote unquote, idea that they came up with to essentially cover the fact that the Iraq war was such a huge strategic error, that it essentially gave al-Qaeda its first foothold, its first strategic location in the Middle East.
I mean, this is where they learned to fight a war against foreign or domestic forces.
And so it was a huge plus.
It was the key turning point, really, for al-Qaeda to become what it ultimately clearly became, that is, a major political military force in the Middle East.
Before that, it was simply a ragtag bunch of terrorists who were able to score some strategic hits in certain places against U.S. targets and explode some bombs in Riyadh and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia.
But basically, it was not a political military force until the U.S. gave them that opportunity in Iraq.
So what the Bush administration then did was to try to take advantage of that to justify a war that was beginning to become increasingly controversial politically in the United States.
It was, in a way, their main political strategy for defending the war in Iraq.
Yeah, Bush said to Katie Couric at one point, the hardest part of my job is connecting Iraq to the war on terrorism.
And there it was.
And so, yeah, now this is really important.
As you mentioned, the size of al-Qaeda and what changed with them, that this was a group of 400 guys, according to Cynthia Storer, the CIA officer on this show, and every other source I can compile and try to compare and contrast seems like it was right around 400 guys in Afghanistan at the dawn of the terror war.
And then this guy Zarqawi, he told Osama, no, I don't want to join your group.
I want to kill the King of Jordan and not focus on America.
And so he wasn't even part of al-Qaeda at the time of the war.
He didn't declare his loyalty to Osama bin Laden until the end of 2004, the fall of 2004, a year and a half into the war.
And then you talk about this flypaper thesis.
There were Israeli and Saudi studies that came out in 2005, and the CIA admitted this as well, was in the New York Times as well, and their national intelligence estimate, whatever, that this was increasing terrorism, that virtually every single foreign fighter, jihadi, who traveled to Iraq to fight against the Americans on the Sunni insurgency side, were all young guys.
They were all new.
They hadn't been the leftover mujahideen from the 80s war in Afghanistan who came home.
That was the core of al-Qaeda's leadership.
But all the guys that were going to fight under Zarqawi, they were all new guys.
I'm glad you mentioned that because it's really important that people recall, or if they didn't, you know, we're not reading about it at that time, are aware of the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency basically issued repeated warnings, repeated national intelligence assessments that said that what was happening in Iraq, and this is very, very early, from the very beginning, that what was happening in Iraq was in fact going to result in al-Qaeda having a capability for carrying out military as well as terrorist activities that would ultimately spread to the rest of the Middle East because, you know, these people came from outside Iraq and they would go back home and they would be able to use the training and the experience that they'd acquired in the war in Iraq.
Now Gareth, you're skipping ahead to the wars in Libya and Syria.
Hold on.
Because that is the story, right?
These guys come home.
Just like al-Qaeda was the Arab veterans of the Afghan Operation Cyclone in the 80s who came home and caused trouble, we have then this whole generation of guys.
In fact, we're on the third generation now.
We're looking at all the guys coming home from Syria.
And God knows what kind of crisis we're going to get from that.
But now I'm really skipping ahead.
The point is that this was not a surprise.
Everybody in the Bush administration understood this.
At least they were warned about it and they chose not to believe it or not to pay any attention to it.
But they were aware that this was the expert analysis of what was going to happen as a result of the Iraq war.
All right.
So then, you know, one thing that's you know, really worth covering here, too, is that Zarqawi, I think, against the wishes of bin Laden and Zarqawi, was much more sectarian in picking a fight with the Shia.
And this is effective terrorism, slaughtering Shia civilians in order to provoke Shia death squad reprisals in order to rally more fighters to his side.
It's a very cynical terrorist tactic.
And Zarqawi exploited it.
And it looks like he exploited it so badly that that was what really caused the local Iraqis to turn on his faction is because he just picked a fight for them that they couldn't possibly win.
They're the 20 percent minority up against the 60 percent supermajority and backed by the U.S.
No doubt about it.
I mean, this was, in fact, the strategy that Zarqawi pursued as an alternative to what the non-sectarian or less sectarian, shall we say, independent Sunni resistance organizations wanted and were, in fact, themselves pursuing, which was to focus entirely on the United States and on, of course, the Kurdish and Shia militias that the U.S. military was putting in the field and backing up, training and giving arms and giving direction to fight the Sunni resistance.
And there was a very, very deep gulf between the Sunni resistance, independent resistance and the al-Qaeda folks, which resulted in armed clashes as early as, if I remember, late 2004, sometime in 2004, they were already clashing, clearly.
And it became increasingly a major theme in the Iraq conflict, which the Americans, again, were very well aware of and which the Sunni independent resistance was telling them all the details about because they were trying to get them to take them seriously as potential partners in opposing particularly the Shia death squads by 2005, 2006.
Right.
And now, so I think it was the summer of 2006, right, that Zarqawi was killed.
And I forget, Gareth, was it right before that or right after that, that the al-Qaeda in Iraq group named itself the Islamic State of Iraq?
You know what?
I don't remember the date of that event at this point.
It was certainly in 2006.
I think it was right after Zarqawi was killed that the new leadership went ahead and made it very clear what it was that they wanted.
Although at the time it was a joke, right?
Because at that time, as we used to talk about, you know, these guys, even though they did the worst suicide attacks against civilians and so forth, and a lot of bad attacks against the Americans as well, that they were really, even according to the army, when they would admit it candidly, they were only a small part, less than 10%, maybe 5% of the Sunni-based insurgency for most of that time.
Is that right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
I think that's about right.
5% to 10% was the rough estimate that was used by people who were, you know, off the record and not trying to push the official line, which was to, you know, sort of puff up the role of al-Qaeda and diminish the role of the Sunni independent resistance.
In fact, you probably recall, I wrote more than one story that pointed out that the Bush administration was creating a narrative about what was going on in Iraq in the war that essentially, you know, wrote the Sunni independent resistance out of the story.
I mean, they simply did not mention them, despite the fact that most of the fighting that the U.S. was doing was still against precisely those independent Sunni resistance organizations.
All right, so something that, you know, underlies this whole story and we can't, you know, get too diverted off onto this, Gareth, but it's the change in the way, or I don't know the change, the way the law, so-called, was implemented in Iraq to say that these local insurgents, they're not prisoners of war, they're all terrorists and they're all to get the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed treatment, whether they're captured by the CIA or the military.
And this went on for at least a year and a half over there.
Right.
I mean, you know, this is the system of the U.S. military just, you know, showing how it really works.
You know, there's no sort of consciousness here about the consequences of what they're doing.
And it's, I'm afraid it just reveals the worst aspect of the United States when it goes to war.
I mean, you know, just as they did in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Well, and we heard from the interrogators themselves over and over again, that when, especially when it came to the foreign fighters, why would you come from Syria, from Libya, from Saudi to come to Iraq to fight?
And they would say, because when I saw the pictures of what was going on at the Abu Ghraib prison, I thought, you know what, I'm going to join up and risk my life to try to kill some of these guys, which is exactly what Americans would do.
It's sort of why Americans were over there.
They thought, you know, a bunch of poor guys.
I feel bad for these 18 year olds who on September 11th, you know, went the next day and joined the army.
Did they think we didn't already have an army, that we were helpless against this terrorist juggernaut, that they needed infantry?
And then they end up being diverted off into Iraq.
But they think they're getting vengeance for 9-11.
What do we think is going to happen when our side's torturing people and including to death?
Yeah.
And I mean, it was, it was so, so totally worthless, useless without any, you know, value whatsoever that, you know, that's why I keep coming back to the point that this is, this is a reflection of the nature of the system and its values more than anything else that you could point to in Iraq.
And you know what, one more point on that too, is that when they got busted and the Abu Ghraib story came out, they sort of blamed it on the bad apples just for, you know, actual liability sake, you know, criminal responsibility sake.
But then they said, look, it's not torture, but you're damn right, it's torture.
We have to torture.
We love torture.
It's necessary to torture.
And if you are on the right half of the American population, we demand your allegiance on this issue.
And so they made, you know, 150 million pro-torturers out of the American right who could have just as easily been spun to say, no, the essence of Western civilization is the Eighth Amendment or whatever, right?
But no, they, and you know, people's entire families were destroyed over this, right?
People fighting with their dad over, you know, him being a torture monger and they can't stand it and this kind of thing.
And the division, I mean, we could go on and on forever, just on this, the level of division in American society over people taking Bush's side, not just on the war, but even over torturing people where, you know, just for partisan reasons, people supported that.
And so it's not just a reflection of, you know, the worst of the national security state, but it's also what they did to us in demanding.
I remember listening to right-wing talk radio in San Antonio, a very military town, right-wing AM radio.
And they're like, torture?
We don't torture.
This is America, USA, bald eagle, red, white, and blue.
We're not torturers.
We're the good guys.
And then, but within a few weeks it was like, yeah, we got to brutalize these people.
That's what our leader says.
That's probably because they began to publish the pictures.
The pictures were the most damning thing that ever came out of the Iraq war.
You know, and it was not pictures of torture in the sense of, you know, waterboarding, but it was pictures of prisoners that were being degraded, were being subjected to degrading behavior on the part of the young, you know, people who were, you know, tasked with taking care of them, who appeared to be enjoying it.
And that was the most damning thing that I think ever arose in terms of actual sort of photographic evidence of what the United States was doing in Iraq.
And I had the impression that that was extremely damaging across the board, that very few people stood up and said, oh yeah, this is great stuff.
No, I think this was a case where there was a consensus in this country that, yeah, that's really bad and it can't be.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I didn't really phrase it right, because I think you're right too, but I think you're talking about the initial reaction.
I think after a little while it was, hey, if the GOP says we're torturers now, we're torturers now, and don't you call it torture because it's not torture, but you're damn right, we have to do it, you know?
I think that arose in somewhat different circumstances where it was not what would happen at Abu Ghraib, but rather, maybe I'm wrong about this, but certainly in retrospect, I thought that it was the, you know, what was happening in terms of rendition to black sites.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the whole bait and switch of the entire damn terror war, right?
They say that they're only torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, so Americans are like, okay, CIA is waterboarding some guy in Poland, I don't care, but in fact it was the military was torturing tens of thousands, and the other Scott Horton, the international human rights lawyer on this show, we talked about this numerous times, that in the Iraq war and the Afghan wars, tens of thousands of just plain old regular Afghan and Iraqi civilians and fighters rounded up have gone through this kind of abuse.
More than a hundred of them, according to Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, U.S. Army, and according to the Associated Press, 108 of them were tortured to death by the military.
That's absolutely right, and so it's not just the specific, so high value detainees that are in question here, it's much broader than that and much deeper in terms of the stain on the U.S. conscience.
And in the creation of new enemies for us, too, for us, by our government.
All right, now, I'm sorry, sir, we got to skip on from that, I'm checking the clock here.
Well, Samara Mosque, that's part of, you want to talk about that?
The Samara Mosque bombing was really important, right?
The Golden Dome?
Yeah, the Golden Dome bombing was the point at which the sectarian nature of the Qaeda aspect of the war in Iraq became very clear and became a decisive factor in terms of spurring the Shia to begin a much more aggressive policy and program toward the entire Sunni resistance.
And I think that is an explanation for what finally became then the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad by the Shia and sort of the decisive moment, if you will, a turning point in the entire politics, the sectarian politics between Sunni and Shia of the Iraq war.
So in that sense, you know, the bombing of that Golden Dome Mosque was definitely a turning point.
And, you know, it's worth recalling that at that point, the Americans were really taken by surprise.
They simply had no idea what to do about it initially.
I mean, they were scrambling around trying to figure out, okay, what do we do now?
They simply had not anticipated that this would be the next phase of the war.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, we'll just hire the battle brigade to hunt down and kill whoever they want, and we'll help them.
You know, maybe they'll hire us to hunt down and kill whoever they want, and then there won't be consequences of that.
That'll be fine.
And then instead, it ended up leading to a civil war where hundreds of thousands of people were butchered to death.
That's right.
It became far more serious.
And in fact, it became the primary theme, dominant theme of the war, as opposed to an undercurrent, as it had been previous.
And you know what, I'll tell you what, too, because just I think it's instructive.
People would write letters to the air, soldiers would write letters to the editor at antiwar.com.
That was me.
And they would say, you know, you're a traitor and you hate America.
And I'm fighting for freedom and democracy over here.
And how dare you be even be antiwar.com while I'm over here risking my life to give freedom to these people and to protect this and that.
And then I would say, no, see, you're an agent of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Bata Brigade isn't even fighting for you.
You are fighting for them.
And you don't even know the first thing about it.
And that's why you're telling me slogans about freedom is because you don't even know whose side you're on, but I do.
And then they would say to me, either, oh, wow, I actually googled Hakeem, and it seems like you're onto something there.
Or I would just not hear back after that.
But that was the thing was, you know, if you want to put your slogans down for a minute, and you know, it's also worth mentioning here, too.
I've been using this anecdote a lot lately about Judge Jim Gray of the Libertarian Party in 2004, the National Libertarian Party.
But it's also true for just the mass of the population at the time, really repeating the talking points that well, you know what, maybe they lied us into war, and maybe it's all screwed up.
But we can't leave now, or else the violence will get worse.
We can't leave now.
But in fact, what was going on was they were making the violence much, much worse.
And they were incentivizing the Shia to get away with bloody murder, because what kind of bloody murder would you not get away with if you had the US Army Marine Corps at your beck and call?
And so, you know, the Shia could have ended up taking Baghdad for themselves anyway, but they had us to help them do it.
And so, I mean, I don't want to skip over the whole awakening or whatever, but at the end of the surge, the Shia had no, the Shia factions, I don't mean the population like they truly are in power, but I mean, the Shia power factions there had been deprived by their American friends of the last incentive to compromise and deal with the Sunnis at all.
Instead, Maliki's policy was, well, we got the capital city, so you guys can just go bake in the sun.
We don't care about you at all.
And really, they sort of turned Sunnistan loose in a way.
I mean, they still had nominal government presence in Fallujah and Ramadi and so forth, I guess, especially in Ramadi, but hardly in Mosul.
And their attitude was, we got all the oil and we got the capital city.
And so, people buying into that slogan that somehow the Americans were helping there, in fact, what they were doing was not just helping accomplish the worst of the murder, but they were creating a situation, even as Donald Rumsfeld said, where the winning faction was being deprived of their last reason to compromise with their defeated opponents at all.
Good point.
Yeah, absolutely.
This is part of the storyline about how the US just lacked the ability to have a coherent strategy for getting out of the war or for having it be resolved with the least amount of loss of life for many years.
So, basically, I think it's a very important point, what you just made.
All right.
So, the awakening movement, David Petraeus, of course, took credit for the awakening, but all anybody has to do is look and they'll see that in late 2005, very early 2006, already, the local tribal forces, and I'm not sure about the Ba'athist role in this, but the tribal leadership, they were already turning on these Al-Qaeda guys and killing them and marginalizing them.
Yeah, what really happened here, I would argue, and I have argued in my writing at the time, was that the United States was so unsuccessful in being able to defeat the Sunni resistance that, finally, it had to do what it had refused to do for a couple of years, basically, which was to say yes to the offer of the Sunni resistance organizations to stop trying to completely defeat them and work with them against Al-Qaeda.
Well, as you told me then, Gareth, when we first met, you said Petraeus' victory here was over George W. Bush.
He said, look, if you want me to save your bacon, what we're going to do is we're going to not defeat the Sunni insurgency after all.
We're going to make a deal.
And that's your only option.
And Bush said, OK, shrug.
Rumsfeld, you're fired.
Gates, implement it.
And that simply refers back to the point that we talked about earlier, which was that essentially it was domestic politics and the fear that the White House had that it would be viewed as having lost the war or admitting that it couldn't win the war that caused it to refuse to go along with the program of negotiating with the Sunni insurgents that had been presented a year or two earlier, a year or two earlier.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, and so but what a stroke of luck, right?
But George Bush turns the entire western half of Iraq into Jihadi Stan University or whatever, Bin Ladenite, you know, the Phoenix University of Iraq.
And then the locals kill them all.
Hey, you know what?
We don't want to live like Saudis, and you can't tell us what to do.
And really, the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq was a bunch of Egyptians and Saudis.
So you're not from here.
You're not the boss of me.
And, you know, I think this was well reported at the time.
I guess it could have been some CIA propaganda or something, Gareth.
But there was a thing where they were, I mean, first of all, they were definitely persecuting and I think even killing people for smoking cigarettes.
But they were like banning women from buying cucumbers at the vegetable stand.
Only men are allowed to buy cucumbers and only women are allowed to buy tomatoes.
And people were just like, you know what, dude?
Bang.
Now you're dead and now you're not telling us what to do anymore.
What the hell are you talking about?
Because the Iraqis, you know, it was basically a socialist slash fascist kind of a country there.
Women could wear blue jeans to teach college.
It was other than Egypt and I guess Syria, it was the most modern and westernized countries, not like Saudi Arabia.
I'm talking about before America turned it upside down.
And so that was a big part of it.
And how lucky can the Americans be that here George Bush turned 400 al-Qaeda guys into, you know, 4,000.
And then the local Iraqis did themselves a favor and turned them back into 400 again for us.
Now Obama would end up fixing that with his war in Libya and in Syria.
But I don't think anybody really expected that to happen.
Or I guess you did.
You're saying, look, they're trying to deal with us all along.
But that still seems like a miracle almost, you know?
There's another point that we have to add to this mix as well.
And that is that what was happening in Baghdad was that the Shia were really rolling up the al-Qaeda and other Sunni resistance organizations.
And basically the Sunnis were losing big time.
I mean, they saw that they could not deal with the Shia militias by themselves.
Without the United States on their side, they couldn't do it.
And so, you know, that was a really critical element of their decision to, you know, really go all out to get the U.S. to agree to a set of arrangements in the West.
So it was a combination of these factors, I think, that brought this result about.
Yeah, that was what Coburn said at the time too, was that, you know, they just had too many enemies.
They lost the capital city.
They were fighting against al-Qaeda guys, Shiite militias, and the United States.
And they said, we got to take one of these off the table.
You know, this is too much here.
And so had made that deal, which was perfect timing for Petraeus politically to say, you know, look at how much I've reduced the violence.
I mean, they were escalating against these al-Qaeda guys, but against a much narrower Sunni insurgency at that point.
So that made him look good.
But now...
Yeah, go ahead.
No, you go ahead.
Well, I was going to make the point that at the time and later I was arguing that clearly Petraeus was, you know, magnifying his accomplishment by taking credit for a result that was largely the result, you know, was not his work.
It was the result of the internal workings of the sectarian conflict and the fact that the Shia militias had been so ruthless with US, you know, advice and support and encouragement in their death squad activity and particularly in the capital that, you know, the Sunnis were desperate to end that, as you said.
So, I mean, you know, it was partly additional US troops, but primarily it was the indigenous balance of power that determined the fact that the Sunnis were, you know, basically defeated and that the government was in a much stronger position.
All right.
Now, so the first time I ever talked to you, it was January 2007, and a lot of people, including, you know, high level government officials, were really worried that Bush and Cheney were going to attack Iran, of all people, even though it was the Saudis who were helping to finance the Sunni-based insurgency, our allies helping to finance the war against us, and the USA was on the side of the Iran-backed parties, Dawah and Skiri, this whole time, and yet they even kind of dropped the fake nuclear weapons issue for a little while in the beginning of 2007 to really switch the whole narrative to Iran is behind everything wrong in Iraq, including blaming them for backing the Sunni insurgency, as well as whatever Shiite resistance, and this is where I get to ask you about Muqtada al-Sadr and America's position in positioning him as the Iranian-backed wrecker in the war.
Yeah, I know this is a topic that we've discussed many times on your show, and one that you are much more interested in than anyone else, you know, outside the, you know, people who are specialists on Iraq and Iran, but I mean, you know, the point that we discussed many times is how the U.S. military sort of deliberately portrayed Sadr as the cat's paw of Iran and somebody who was an extremely dangerous character for that reason and had to be cut down to size, whereas, of course, the reality, as is shown by many different sources, and by essentially the historical outcome that we've seen since the end of the Iraq war, that Sadr has become, as we knew along, he was an overt critic of Iran, somebody who was against the Iranian influence, you know, overweening influence in Iraq, and has, you know, gone into not hiding, but, you know, basically has gotten out of politics, but, you know, in a way that clearly indicated that he was not interested in playing a role in any Iranian-dominated scheme there.
But, you know, basically Petraeus targeted him because Sadr was, you know, essentially one of the major forces who was opposing the U.S. occupation at a time when, you know, the watchword was mop-up, let's get rid of all the resistance and claim victory.
And so now Sadr, when in the past, when he had fought with, so I'm sorry, because as you say, it is the weeds, but it should be not too hard.
On the Shiite side, there are three major power factions, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, or now ISCI, because they won the revolution, so they had to drop that part, and the Dawah Party, and they lived in Iran.
Ever since Jimmy Carter hired Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, they took Iran's side and fled Iraq, and they've been there the whole time.
And then Sadr was the son and the son-in-law of two powerful Shiite clerics.
Sadr City's named after his father, not him, a huge part of eastern Baghdad.
So, in other words, he was born with incredible, you know, street legitimacy there in terms of grassroots power among the Shia.
So, his complaint about SCIRI and Dawah all along, going back to 2003, 4, and 5, and whatever, was not just, oh, boo-hoo, I don't like you, I want more power than you.
But on strategy, it was, these guys want, quote, strong federalism, which means steal Baghdad and just keep Iraqi Shiistan and cut the Sunnis loose.
Whereas Sadr was saying, no, we need to have an alliance with the Sunni Arabs and hold Iraq together as, you know, all patriotic nationalist Iraqis, and limit the influence of Iran and America both.
But so then, for some reason, Garrett, the Americans decided that by, I mean, obviously, it makes sense that they were worried about that because he was including America and who had to go there.
It's not like they wanted to directly empower him.
I mean, obviously, they reacted against that.
But at the same time, they chose to back the Dawah and SCIRI, who they knew and must have known were the most Iranian-backed factions.
And I guess they thought that at the end of the day, they're going to need us more than they need Iran.
But that didn't work.
And so...
This is another case where you have on one side, the problem of, you know, the actual loyalties of the different forces, which you've accurately portrayed, that is, Sader was much more of a nationalist, much more willing to work with the Sunnis than the SCIRI forces that were Iranian and much closer, clearly, to the Iranian government's position.
And on the other hand, you have the politics of the war itself, which revolved at that point around the U.S. pride in claiming that al-Maliki is our guy.
We have this government that we're working with, we're supporting, and we're going to consolidate power behind that government.
And so they did whatever was in line with that aim.
That's my analysis.
I think it's, again, a political factor that determined, that is, a factor that ultimately was derived from the idea of manipulating and controlling domestic American opinion on the war and how it would look politically in the United States.
And I think the key factor there was, you know, everybody wanted to believe and did believe that al-Maliki was their guy.
And so, because the SCIRI-Dawa people were very closely aligned with the government and were supporting the government more so than Sader, that became the rationale for, you know, the position that you're describing, as I understand it.
Yeah.
And then, you know what?
Because they really were surprised, kind of.
I remember in 2008, it was, of course, Patrick Coburn had this great series of articles, which began with, George Bush wants 56 bases, and Maliki told him, wait right there a minute, let me go ask the boys.
And then a couple of months later, it was like, Bush says, well, like what, can we have 40, please?
And then they just went through this.
And of course, it was the last year of Bush's presidency.
And so Maliki is just, you know, obviously laughing at him and cynically running out the clock.
And then, yeah, this is trying to remember, it was something happened politically.
Am I confused?
I know there's the Manning leak in when the SOFA was expiring under Obama, but there was something else that happened politically in Iraq at the end of 08, that just made it absolutely impossible for Maliki to sign the new status of forces agreement, which would have to include, and I love how they say this with no irony whatsoever, that that the SOFA would have to include immunity for American soldiers who commit war crimes.
And if you won't give us immunity to commit war crimes, then I'm afraid we can't stay.
And so, in other words, they kicked us out.
Scott, this is my favorite period, my favorite aspect of the Iraq war, because this whole story of how Maliki, with, of course, the backing of Iran and in close conjunction with the Iranian government, essentially, you know, outmaneuvered the Bush administration in such a brilliant fashion.
And Sader was part of that effect because, you know, there was this clear clash between Sader in the South, his effort to assert control over the South and Maliki's desire to have central government control over that.
There was a clash there.
And what happened, and I think this may be what you're referring to, what happened was that essentially the Iranians became the go-betweens that had to settle this between Sader and al-Maliki.
And it became, then, when there was a deal made with the Iranian backing for a compromise between them, it was folded into a plan to get the United States out of Iraq, get the U.S. troops out.
And Sader agreed to go along with this because it would involve a commitment by al-Maliki that he would negotiate the end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
And so I'm the one who wrote that story.
Nobody in the U.S. press establishment caught on to what was going on.
They played it straight, just the way the Bush administration told them to play it in terms of cover of the negotiations.
But it's very clear that that's what happened.
All you have to do is put together all the pieces and it adds up to a puzzle that, you know, if you look at the entire picture, clearly the Bush administration was totally outmaneuvered.
They did believe, when they began the negotiations with al-Maliki, that they would have, you know, dozens of bases and it would be like, as I think it was Gates who said at that point, it would be like South Korea.
It would be the United States staying there forever, essentially, with no end date.
And once they got the negotiations started, they found out, no, that's not the way it was going to be at all.
Well, and I can vouch for you, too, because I was reading everything you wrote, just like I always have ever since then, too.
And I interviewed you about it all the time.
And of course, at antiwar.com, Jason Ditz and Eric Gares, they're on top of this stuff every day.
So when you talk about putting the pieces together, yeah, that's all our top headlines every day.
Sauter says this.
I mean, most people don't know that that matters.
But for people who understand that it matters, it matters a hell of a lot.
And that was the deal.
And what did they think?
They took the guy who was the most Iraqi nationalist out of the three Shiite factions, and they continually called him the Iranian one, and continually tried to kill him, and kill all his men, and fight with him.
At the same time, they're fighting for him, anyway.
They're helping his men cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis and win the civil war overall, anyway.
But on a, not really microcosm, but on a smaller cosm, they're focusing on his guys, killing his guys, chasing him into Iran, where he got a higher religious rank while he was gone, studying, and grew closer to their regime, of course, than ever before.
And then, so what did they think that he was going to tell Maliki?
You know, that, yeah, you could go ahead and invite the Americans to stay?
Seemed obvious enough at the time, it was.
And people can check the archives.
It's all there at IPSnews.net, all of Gareth Porter's work, and all his interviews in my archives, and all of that, too.
And now, so, when you know, there's this book called The Good Soldiers by Dexter Filkins, and he's embedded with some, I'm pretty sure, U.S. Army in eastern Baghdad.
And yeah, they are army in eastern Baghdad.
And basically, they're fighting in Sadr City in 2007, during the surge.
And they're fighting against this guy who is living, breathing, walking one-third of the Shiite alliance that they're fighting for.
And it's only one point in the book where the commanding officer, Kozlarec, and one point in the book where the author himself, this, I believe, New York Times reporter, I forget, Washington Post reporter, where each of them acknowledge one time that it is kind of ironic, isn't it, that we're fighting a war against the people that we're fighting for here?
Okay, anyway, get back out there, boys.
And in fact, this is the famous footage, the so-called collateral murder video, leaked by Bradley Manning, that was, you know, part of the Chelsea Manning, part of her motivation for blowing the whistle and releasing the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables was because of this video that she knew he had.
And this same reporter who I interviewed about this, and he basically, you know, in a word admitted that, yeah, he had seen the video, or certainly he had enough information to report about the video, and he had sat on it.
And she knew that that was part of the reason she leaked that.
But then here's the point I was going to get to, was Secretary Gates at the time said, yeah, well, you're just looking at war through a soda straw.
So here you're seeing an Apache helicopter obliterating a bunch of innocent civilians, a Reuters photographer and reporter and their fixers, and then later slaughtering this father and two children when he comes to try to rescue the wounded.
But, you know, you just don't know what's going on there.
You're just looking at the war through a soda straw.
When, of course, if you zoom out, they're fighting in Sadr City.
They're fighting against the Shia factions, one of, well, one of the three power factions that they're fighting for inside what was then called the United Iraqi Alliance.
And there was almost no recognition of that.
Or, well, like I say, Lieutenant Colonel Kyles Large, who's in charge of prosecuting this strategy, doesn't even really seem to recognize what's going on with it at all.
And, you know.
Let me just add that, you know, there's a there's another aspect of the story, which is basically Petraeus making the decision that they're going to go after Sadr's forces.
And that's going to be the centerpiece of the fight in that part of of Iraq.
And so, you know, that's really where the whole idea of having the kill capture.
Well, it was really not capture.
It was the kill list that Petraeus started to put together with the help of Michael Flynn as his intelligence guy in, I guess, basically Sadr City, that that was where they began to to assemble these lists based on not knowing who individuals are and what their function was or anything like that, but sort of basically cell phone data, metadata, starting to put together long lists of people that they wiped out.
And then, of course, they moved it to Afghanistan later on.
He basically was McChrystal who moved to Afghanistan.
Thanks for mentioning that, because I wanted to jump on the point there that they also use this opportunity, then, as they're fighting against the Shias, the Sadrist militia, really, to blame everything he's doing on Iran and build up a whole new grudge about Iran killed 500 out of the 4,500 guys that died, Americans that died in Iraq War Two.
And so now we don't have to resort to going all the way back in time to 1983 when they bombed the Marines in Beirut.
Now we have something that happened in 2007 and 8, and that narrative was centered around the idea that all copper core improvised explosive devices used by Shiite forces in Iraq against the Americans must, Gareth, have all come from Iran.
Right, right.
And this is a story that I remember we talked about on your show, of course, and I guess it was the first time you interviewed me, right?
It was about that very, very story, because, you know, the evidence became very clear that in fact, although the Iranians certainly had supplied some of those early on to the Sadr militias and other Shia militias, the militias themselves began to produce them, and they were able to basically become self-sufficient in this, pretty much, if not completely, by the beginning of 2007.
And that became simply a lie that was aimed at justifying going after Iran at a time when in fact we know Dick Cheney was pushing very, very hard to prepare the ground for an attack on Iran.
And that was one of the ways that they wanted to start it was, well, we'll go ahead and hit some Revolutionary Guard bases in the name of these EFPs, and we'll put aside the nuclear issue for a minute and focus on this.
And which, of course, would have led to a full-scale war, almost certainly.
And now, well, I don't want to get too far off onto that.
So, well, and so we should mention, though, that how in your great journalism, but also from Patrick Coburn, I know he reported, this is actually, I admit, I plead guilty that I didn't start paying attention to Patrick Coburn's every single article until the fall of 2006.
And the first one that I read like that was he was with some Americans in Shiite territory, and they found a bomb factory where they make these copper core bombs.
And that was before Petraeus had even arrived for the surge and this whole new line of propaganda that he debuted a couple of months later.
I think that was in November of six.
That was when I first started reading him.
Some of your listeners might find interesting is that while the United States, while Petraeus basically was carrying out this assassination campaign on the Shia in Baghdad and elsewhere, he had this idea that he could somehow get Sadr to come over and basically give up and make a peace with the United States.
And so he began to put out feelers, and he thought he was making progress in getting the Sadrists to start talking to them about a deal.
So it was another instance where clearly Petraeus was simply being played and exercising his very, shall we say, lively imagination for how he could basically conquer everybody and come out the hero, just as he did later on in Afghanistan.
As you know, the big story about the fake Taliban who came in and he said he thought this was the big turning point that they were going to win over the Taliban.
Right.
Yeah.
What a great success that's turned out to be, huh?
Yes.
All right.
Now, so I want to talk about parliamentary politics here.
But first, I guess, as the war's winding down here in our narrative, Garrett, we need to stop and mention that what was left of, I think, if I remember it right, the story was there were 8,000 Jews left in Baghdad, and now there are eight.
There were entire groups of Maronite and Chaldean and Assyrian Christians, ethnic and other religious groups, Yazidis and others that I forget, Turkmen and there are many more who their little microcosm civilizations that some of whom have been there for 2,000 years and more have now been obliterated by Iraq War II, that the level of violence in the civil war the American caused and fought civil war there, really, it didn't just kill a million people, it really killed Iraq.
It destroyed a civilization and turned it into a whole new different thing now.
Yes, that's absolutely right.
And of course, this was, I mean, the Christian communities in large parts of Iraq began to suffer from the US war as early as 2005.
Certainly that was happening on a significant scale because of the conflict between the Kurds and the Christians in the north in Nineveh province.
In fact, the first story I ever wrote was about how the Kurds basically stuffed the ballot boxes, taking the vote away from the Christians and giving it to the Kurds so that they could assure that they could control that area.
And the Christians were very, very concerned already at that point about what was going to happen to them.
Yeah.
Well, I remember there was a story in the Christian Science Monitor about the Bata Brigade controlled parts of the south, where the young lady said to them, a woman's smile is a crime.
And so they were, you know, on whatever you hear about the Shia religious police about Iran, these guys were 10 times worse, killing barbers and, you know, killing liquor store.
I mean, I guess the liquor stores closed up pretty quick.
But killing barbers and really, you know, resorting to medieval type policy that hadn't been around in a long time.
Not probably not as bad as our Cowheys guys on the Sunni side, but pretty bad.
We're talking about orders of magnitude greater than what's happened in Iran.
Clearly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, the religious police in Iran, especially in the past, they're pretty brutal.
But yeah, no, we're talking about a lot worse.
And then so they don't take that mission nearly as seriously as people generally assume.
Well, you know, there's a lot of coverage about, you know, Zarkawi oppression of Iraqi Sunnis, but there's less coverage of the Bata Brigade's oppression of the Iraqi Shia population since, you know, again, those are the good guys, at least in Iraq, you know, they're the bad guys when in Syria, or we're on the other side of the same war, but is that it was the Bata Brigade primarily that was putting drills through people's heads.
Yeah.
And, you know, I could be I, you know, I don't have the precise information about that.
But that's a very clear recollection of mine.
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All right.
Now, so nobody cares about this, but me and I guess you, I remember you wrote about it then the election of 2010.
And of course, Jason Ditz was great on this at antiwar.com as well.
But so now you want to tell him about Iyad Alawi and his background here?
Well, Alawi was a Shia who was in the Saddam Hussein regime and who was a favorite of the CIA.
And they were backing him as the guy to really, you know, had been backing him.
And he was, of course, the one who had actually talked with the Sunni insurgents in Jordan.
So he had that connection with the previous history of politics around the role that the Sunnis were trying to play in relation to the United States.
And you're saying the CIA was backing him in 2010?
Well, I'm not sure about that.
No, I can't say that they were.
They certainly backed him in the past.
They had put him in power for a year right after the invasion, right?
Right.
And I think that they were still in touch with him and would still be sympathetic to them.
But what we know is that the Obama administration, Biden was playing the role, the lead role here in going out and talking to folks in Iraq, basically said, we're going to back Maliki and that's it.
I mean, you know, he's our man.
And they basically were not interested in any other solution.
So even though his party had won the plurality in the parliament in the elections of 2010, and he had the right to at least try to form the first government.
And so after all this war in the name, well, after they switched it from weapons to democracy, and they created this democracy, at least for the super majority Shia, for the most part, when Alawi comes out on top, they leave him high and dry.
When, as I think you're kind of implying there, or certainly you're leaving open the possibility, if anyone was going to be able to patch things up with the defeated Sunni minority, it would be this guy.
Because even though he's a Shia, as you say, he's a former Ba'athist.
And so he knows these guys.
And so maybe they could work out a deal.
But instead, Obama's sides with Iran's guy, again, just like Bush had Iran's guy Maliki, who has no interest whatsoever in compromising with the Sunnis and prefers to just watch them burn in the sun.
Exactly.
And, you know, I don't have any really good insight into precisely what the thinking was within the Obama administration.
But based on the general picture that we've gotten over years of U.S. involvement in Iraq, you know, you have to believe that it was, generally speaking, the preference for the guy who was already there, who had sort of had made himself, sort of buttered up the American officials that he dealt with and the Obama administration and promised them all sorts of things.
And they were going for the guy, you know, the devil, they already knew, you know, that that's my guess.
I mean, you know, there are probably other things as well.
But, you know, that that's the general understanding that I've gotten from it.
Well, you know, it reminds me of this quote from Michael Hastings article in Rolling Stone about the war in Libya, and how it was Samantha Power's interest to get a promotion to start a war so that she could get a better job.
And she did, she ended up being promoted to Ambassador to the United Nations.
And what it was, was she had been exiled because she called Hillary Clinton a monster in the election of 08, when she'd sided with Obama.
And so she had been banished to Deputy Assistant Secretary of nothing on the National Security Council, right, where she didn't have much influence since Hillary got the Secretary of State job, obviously, right?
Well, so then her redemption then was starting a war.
And so when the Libya thing happened, she convinced Rice, and they convinced Hillary and these were the leaders that got us into the war.
And then her complaint was, the quote was, she was sick and tired of doing do-gooder, winky dink stuff, like guess what, working on democratic reconciliation in Iraq, which was old news, and not sexy and cool and promotion worthy at all.
It's just do-gooder, rinky dink stuff.
That is stunning.
That is stunning.
And I'm not saying that Samantha Power could have stopped the rise of ISIS or whatever, because God knows, you know, she's horrible on everything.
But the fact that to her, this wasn't even a priority anymore, was what is going to be the future of Iraqi Sunnistan and these stateless, oil-less, helpless people?
Abandoned, defeated people.
Something's going to happen to them, you know?
And for Obama, like you're saying, it's hard to know what their thinking was at the time.
But what a bad choice, when they could have had Ali.
And Ali at least would have made a shot at it.
We know he said at the time he wanted to make a shot at it.
That was probably how he won the election.
Yeah, I mean, and I'm sure it was more complicated than that in terms of the internal politics of both sides and who was threatening to do what.
But I think you're right.
It seems like he would have been more likely to try to bring about some degree of reconciliation that we simply haven't seen otherwise.
But anyway, I mean, I just think it's another instance where, you know, the basic nature of the beast, the nature of the institutions that have gotten us into these wars, that have maintained us in the wars, and that even, you know, after the war was over, have to do with the continued U.S. role of basically being a military ally of the Iraqi government.
I'm sure that played a huge role in this, okay?
That he's our military ally, you know, and he's going to keep things going along the way they have been.
You know, the Obama administration was bragging about how much better the security situation was.
Well, they didn't know what was really going on.
It's clear that they were mistaken.
But, you know, they were banking on what they were being told by the folks that were, you know, working with the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military.
And that was what prevailed.
All right, now, so we're basically done with Iraq War II here.
So I just want to catch us up to our current state.
Real quickly, Gareth, and you can comment on any part of this that you want.
But, you know, the bottom line is that Khalilzad finally got his way with this redirection policy, as it was termed by Seymour Hersh in his article.
And in the Bush regime, back then, they started backing Islamist fighters in Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood, aka Arar al-Sham in Syria, and Jandala in Iran, although Mark Perry says that was Mossad pretending to be CIA that recruited him, the Jandala in Iran.
But anyway, and Obama took this policy up big time, because, you know, as we talked about, this was a mistake, in a sense, that the result was not what they wanted, that Iran would end up with the lion's share of power and influence over the Baghdad government compared to the United States.
It was supposed to be the other way around.
And so this was seen as kind of a big oops.
And so they're trying to make up for that.
And then right at the time that Obama killed Osama, in the spring of 2011, he takes Osama's side in Libya.
And then he takes Osama's side in Syria.
And in backing the rebels in both of those, and as you've done the journalism on this, I forget the title, but Gareth Porter, American conservative Syria arms, you'll find it.
In supporting the so-called mythical moderates from 2011 onward, America and its allied states helped create the rise of the Islamic State that seized power over eastern Syria and then split off from al-Qaeda and came back in and conquered western Iraq.
And they got their Islamo-fascist caliphate that was bin Laden's fever dream and George Bush's ridiculous nonsense propaganda from earlier in this century.
And they made it a reality for three years, where then Obama had to launch Iraq War III to really replay Iraq War II and take the side of the Shia, now to rouse the Islamic State out of the predominantly Sunni parts of western, northwestern Iraq there.
And now where we stand, that was finished up, that was launched in 2014, summer 2014, and ended really with the rousting of the Islamic State out of Mosul and Raqqa in western Iraq and eastern Syria last fall.
And now there's just a great new article, not great, but a new article about this in Defense News.
We're fighting Iraq War III and a half, where the war against ISIS is over really, but we're on now to the mop-up exercise against whatever Sunni insurgents with rifles can be found in any of these cities.
And we're just going to go ahead and fight on like this, indefinitely, I guess.
The idea is, you know, for political reasons, they can never leave.
And so they have to just keep fighting.
And still no one has an answer to what is supposed to happen to the people of Iraqi Sunnistan.
They're never going to have a fair shake in the government in Baghdad.
And they really don't, as Patrick Coburn told me on the show last week, they don't really have tribal leadership left that can really, you know, deliver on anything.
And it can't be the Baathists.
And so what do you got left?
Well, as you, I'm sure, know, if anybody does in this demimonde of following the Middle East policy of the United States, they got the idea of Sunnistan is now embraced by none other than John Bolton.
I wonder what he is going to bring to the table on this question.
I'm sure he, you know, he has created it.
I mean, it's already a thing, right?
I mean, there there is there is a Sunni stand in in Iraq.
And there there are obviously Sunni enclaves in in Syria.
But he's proposing that that become, you know, the state that crosses sort of basically goes across both Iraq and Syria somehow.
And I wonder who he imagines would run at the King of Jordan.
Yeah, probably.
I think I think it is the King of Jordan.
He has mine.
But anyway, just to come back to that's what Joe Biden always wanted, of course, as well.
Yeah.
I mean, is the redrawing the map was was the game that Biden was was big on, of course.
But I just want to make two two other points, bigger picture points on how the Obama administration got into the business of being, you know, supporting the Sunni extremists, if you will, in the Middle East.
One one point is that because Obama was was, you know, decided in 2012 to 2013 to to basically have that agreement with Iran on a nuclear deal.
He clearly made a decision that he was going to be even tougher on Iran in other ways.
And so, I mean, I think that there was a that one of the inclinations here was to to, you know, use the U.S. basically all the CIA assets and so forth in in Lebanon and elsewhere to continue to to support Sunnis who were anti-Shia and anti-Iran.
And and that that also extended and it was really more important point here is that it extended to the U.S. relationship to the Saudis and to to the UAE, of course, as well.
But the Saudis were the ones who the United States wanted to make sure we were on the right side of because they were so important to the Pentagon in terms of arms sales.
I mean, this this is a point I come back to over and over again.
Yeah.
And and the Saud, you know, when when the Obama administration criticized the Saudis only lightly in 2011 on the way in which they intervened to basically kill demonstrators in Bahrain, the Saudis clearly warned the Obama administration, don't you ever do that again or we're finished.
We'll go somewhere else.
And from that time on, the Obama administration has never done anything to get too far out of line with in terms of the Saudis to to do anything to piss them off.
And so so I really do believe that that a large part of the unwillingness of the Obama administration, Obama himself really to say no when he knew and said so in meetings in the White House at the time in 2011, 2012, 2013, that that, you know, we shouldn't be arming the opposition because we know what happened in Afghanistan.
And in any case, the opposition is feckless and can't get organized.
And they're going to the arms are going to fall into the hands of al Qaeda and their friends.
And so he went along with this despite the fact that he knew better, just as he did on Afghanistan, I think primarily because he did not want to cross the Saudis and for that matter, the Qataris who controlled the U.S. CENTCOM advanced base in Qatar.
And so I think that that this all all comes back ultimately to the role that, you know, the the basic U.S. military complex has in shaping everything about U.S. foreign policy.
Yeah, no question about all that.
And in fact, the same goes for the war in Yemen, too, where as I think we've talked about before, or certainly I mentioned on the show, the New York Times article, that's no scoop.
It's got 17 official White House sources for it, or whether it's a big press release by the Obama White House, when three years ago, they started the war against the Houthis in Yemen, the Yemeni population with the Saudis.
And what they said was it's right there in the third paragraph, I'm pretty sure both of these quotes that first that they would they knew that the war would be long, bloody and indeterminate.
Yeah, long, bloody and indeterminate.
But they had to do it to placate the Saudis after the Iran deal.
And even though the Iran deal, if you like, go along with their narrative for a minute that they were ever worried the Iranians were making nukes, then hooray for the Iran deal, which secures their civilian nuclear program and the civilian nature of it beyond all historical precedent.
But that was never their concern.
And in fact, now that that concern, quote unquote, is being put to bed, they were apparently worried.
I don't know if they were really worried about this.
They were just making sure, Gareth, that they weren't losing their position in the American order there, and that they weren't going to let Obama tilt back toward Iran, which was obviously never his intention anyway.
He was just taking the fake Caucasus belly off the table once and for all is all sure.
The Saudis, the Saudis were extremely paranoid about this to to a point which was totally unrealistic in terms of expectation that the Obama administration was going to have a new alliance with with Iran.
I talked about that a lot, that that was completely unrealistic.
You know, I have this this one quote here, Gareth, where Prince Saud al-Faisal told John Kerry, this was reported in the Financial Times, as though John Kerry didn't know this and wasn't in on it all along anyway.
But he said, Daesh, that is the Islamic State, Daesh is our response to your support for the Dawa.
I didn't remember that quote.
That's that's another stunner.
So there you go.
That's America on both sides of this regional sectarian war still.
And we were joking on this show back when when you were up to your eyeballs writing your book about the Iranian nuclear program.
On the show cover in Syria, we would joke about how Obama was given some drones to the Maliki government to use against al-Qaeda guys.
We're joking.
Yeah, we got to chase them across the border into Syria where they're the good guys.
And we're on the Shia.
We're on the Sunni jihadist side against the Shia, as opposed to Iraq on the other side of the border where we're still fighting for the Shia against the Sunni insurgents.
And I guess it's going to remain that way, right?
That's where we are right now still.
I guess you could say that.
I mean, you know, I think it's much more indeterminate than that.
I think that things are so much in flux now at so many different levels.
I would I would not want to make any bets on how things are playing out in in U.S. regard in regard to U.S. policy towards Syria.
I guess it was Tillerson who said we're staying in Syria because of Iran.
But now he's gone.
So I don't know.
Yeah.
And at the same time, you remember that there was a willingness on the part of the U.S. military to allow the the Syrian regime forces to to go in and pick up the pieces or, you know, take the place of Daesh in Deir ez-Zor.
So, I mean, this is a place where, you know, at that point it looked like there was a willingness to at least tolerate, if not work with partially the the Syrian government forces and at least by one remove Iran and Hezbollah against against the Islamic State.
But it's much more complicated than that, obviously.
And, you know, there are many things in play that make it very difficult to figure out where this is where this is going.
Among other things, you know, just the the fact that they're talking about, you know, confrontation with Iran and we don't know what's going to happen with North Korea.
All of this stuff is going to be ultimately interlinked in some way.
They're going to be related in terms of what policies are being followed.
And I just don't know.
I just don't know.
Bolton always said, why focus on a consolation prize, you know, getting rid of Assad or trying to limit Assad's power when we can just go ahead and do regime change in Tehran and then it doesn't matter who rules Damascus.
I don't know when he said that, but obviously during the Bush administration, it was it was not the case that they were going to go after Iran first.
They made a decision to go the other way.
Right.
Yeah, that's why it never happened.
Yeah, this is in one of the articles I read about him last week.
I think it may have been his right web profile that had that quote from, you know, he's basically saying that it's it's wasting time pussyfooting around messing with Assad when the real prize is Tehran all along anyway.
Well, that was definitely their prize, no doubt about it.
And he's still obsessed with that.
And we're going to have to pay a price of some sort in terms of the the problem of what Trump is going to do now with with this crazy guy whispering in his ear about about Iran.
Yeah.
Screaming in his face more like I hope I hope that part backfires, you know.
Anyway, listen, ladies and gentlemen, that was Gareth Porter's history of Iraq War Two.
Thank you for indulging me all this time, Gareth, and going through this war because, you know, the thing of it is, I may have mentioned this at the beginning.
There are a lot of young people listening to this war.
I give listening to this show and learning about this stuff and who want to know and who just absolutely you know, I met this kid at the speech that I gave in New Jersey last weekend who said he was 10 years old in fourth grade when 9-11 happened.
So he was in fifth grade, you know, or I guess maybe he was in in early sixth grade when they invaded Iraq.
So, you know, we forget how fast time flies and this kind of thing.
But so it's good to have a chance to catch up and to catch people up.
So thank you very much, sir.
You're the best.
You more than anybody else are the one who can do it.
Absolutely.
All right.
All right.
Thanks again, Gareth.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is investigative journalist and historian Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book Perils of Dominance about Vietnam and Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare and all through Iraq War Two and Afghanistan and Syria and the rest of these things.
He's been just great.
And you can find all the old stuff, all the old Iraq stuff is almost all at IPSnews.net.
But we reprint almost all of it at Antiwar.com.
So check his archive there, original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
And all right, you guys know me.
I'm scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, foolserend.us for my book, audio book now available foolserend.us and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai