04/23/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Obviously one of the main reasons I'm good on everything is because I got Gareth Porter's phone number, and he's such a great journalist, god dang it.
He won the Gellhorn Award for all his work on David Petraeus' night raids in Afghanistan, the giant bogus failed surge, mass murder campaign, and he wrote the book on Iran's nuclear program, Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
He has a hell of an archive at IPSnews.net and at Antiwar.com, and is now writing for Middle East Eye.
The latest is Houthi arms bonanza came from Saleh, not Iran.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks again.
Good to have you here.
So the latest from Fox News is that the Iranian nine-ship convoy, which they acknowledge are smaller than destroyers, has decided to turn around and apparently head back to Iran, or at least that direction, because they were scared away by the USS Theodore Roosevelt, aka the Big Stick, reports Fox News.
So they're no match for us.
This is the story that is made in U.S. media heaven, isn't it, really?
Yeah, well, apparently they were up to no good or else what were they doing there?
What do you think?
Right.
I mean, this is the mega media story that everyone loves to talk about, particularly on television, that there's this naval confrontation going on.
It takes me back to 2009, January 2009, when the last time this was the headline story on Iran, a near war in the Persian Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz, between U.S. and Iranian ships.
So that's something that this caused me to bring to mind.
But I mean, this is the story that they love, but it's part of a larger media narrative that of course reflects the Obama administration's narrative, that this story about Yemen is really all about proxy war, and the Houthis are nothing more than the Iranian proxy in that war.
So I mean, that's why this story, I think, has gotten such, you know, it has been so reverberating through the media as part of a larger narrative that everyone is totally committed to.
All right.
Now, so your article here at Middle East Eye takes on a bit more narrower topic, which is about the actual arms and weapons.
But in this Fox News story, the way they put it is simply, Iran backs the Houthi rebels.
So what's the truth in that?
Because, geez, I don't know, why not?
Well, first of all, I mean, you know, if you really look at the history of the Houthi movement, you know, they have gotten to where they are today on their own.
I mean, they clearly have acquired a large army and weaponry, not because of any foreign involvement, not because of the Iranians supporting them, but because they fought a series of wars over a 10-year period with the Yemeni government, the Yemeni military.
And in the process, they continued to grow and continued to acquire more arms.
And of course, the way they acquired the arms was within Yemen itself, from the black market, on one hand.
And as I point out in my article, the Yemeni arms black market is certainly one of the largest in the world, if not the largest.
I mean, the estimate is 40 to 60 million arms floating around in Yemen, some of them, of course, more sophisticated than others.
And so that's been one of the major sources.
But they've also clearly benefited from the largesse that has been bestowed on them by various commanders over the years who were corrupt and who essentially sold their weapons to the Houthis.
This is a well-established part of the history.
But then, you know, that's the period from roughly 2004 to 2014.
And then, you know, a whole new chapter opens up, of course, as the Houthis make an alliance with former President Mohamed Saleh.
This is the part of the story that is really the spectacular change in the fortunes of the Houthis in terms of arms.
And this is the part of the story that, to my astonishment, I mean, you know, the U.S. news media, the world news media essentially is talking about the Iranian arming of the Houthis without referring to the fact that the Houthis have acquired arguably hundreds of millions of dollars of modern new American weapons over the past year from their alliance with Saleh.
Well, I never even mind that.
I mean, that's, you know, to them really inside baseball.
But what about just a couple of weeks ago, it was a major headline that the Americans had bugged out of there and left all kinds of equipment at their own base there.
Millions and millions, I don't know how many zeros on it, but millions of dollars worth of weapons and other equipment that they left behind just when they skedaddled out of there.
There were reports about the Americans having to leave behind some weaponry.
But that would be far smaller, much smaller than the $500 million worth of arms that were bestowed on the Yemeni military over the last six years or eight years, excuse me, eight years from 2006 to 2014.
And which, you know, large parts of which, most of which arguably fell into the hands of the Houthis over the past several months from September 2014 to the present.
Yeah, it's funny except for how tragic it is if you go back to Jeremy Scahill's article in The Nation about Yemen policy backfiring.
I forgot exactly what it is, but Scahill, Yemen, and backfire are the search terms for it anyway.
And in that, it's all about how the U.S. gave Saleh all this money in the name of fighting Al-Qaeda, which of course just made it in his interest to not fight Al-Qaeda or to basically allow them to grow so that he has more excuse to get more money and more weapons later, which instead he was using on his other enemies like the Houthis.
And that's the war that we're talking about, was the Americans had given him all of this stuff that he was using against them.
And then as you say, they kept winning and kept growing stronger and stronger and then ended up with all the equipment and co-opting the major parts of the army and then making a deal with Saleh after the Americans betrayed him and ran him out of, well, basically allowed the people of Yemen to run him out of office in 2011 and 12.
And so now here we are.
It's basically just like in Iraq, fighting the Islamic State, driving around in our Humvees that we gave to the Iraqi army to keep them down with.
Right.
And again, I mean, the bottom line, I mean, the fundamental point of all this is that the United States National Security State is so far, you know, they're over their head in this situation.
I mean, they have no idea what's really going on.
They've been played over and over again.
They're like kids, you know, in a very dangerous situation where they have no idea what the consequences of their actions are going to be.
And the lesson is that, you know, the United States simply is incapable of intervening in these places without making things a total mess and essentially frustrating the interests that are supposed to be served by the intervention.
Yep.
All right, well, music's playing, so hold it right there.
Amazing, timing actually worked out for once here.
I'm not going to blow this break.
We'll be right back with the great Gareth Porter in just a minute, guys.
Check him out at MiddleEastEye.com.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show, talking with Gareth Porter about all the hype about Iran backing the Houthis in Yemen, which has America backing the Saudis in their war against them.
And now I'm a bit confused because it seems like the Saudis were declaring victory, even though, of course, they hadn't changed the regime back to Hadi or anything like that.
But they seem like they're trying to quit.
And then the White House came out, criticized him and said, obviously, the job isn't done yet.
And they started bombing some more.
I don't know.
Maybe they were bombing anyway.
But at the same time, had Mark Perry on the show.
And he was saying that yesterday.
And he was saying that the military are totally against this thing.
The Americans want to see an end to this thing as quickly as they can.
The Americans are supporting it kind of as a sop to the allies, maybe.
Oh, I guess this was Daniel Larrison was saying it's kind of a sop to the allies because we're making this nuclear deal with Iran that like, well, here, we'll kind of help you kill Yemenis for a little while if that's the compromise.
I think they want this thing over.
But then so anyway, so riddle me this, huh?
I think that's absolutely right that that the essentially the US government is not enthusiastic at all about the Saudis bombing campaign.
They know that it's going to simply create more support for the Houthis.
It's going to weaken any claim that they might have for forces that will fight against them.
And so it's a losing proposition.
And you know, clearly, this is the beginning of what the Saudis intend to be a long war.
They have some former Yemeni, I shouldn't say former Yemeni military, but Yemeni military who were taken over, in theory by the new Houthi dominated government, but who've now declared their fealty to the government exile in Riyadh.
So there are some thousands, at least, of troops, perhaps tens of thousands of troops who are prepared, at least according to some reports, to fight on behalf of the Saudi-backed regime in exile.
But clearly, the vast majority of the effective troops now in Yemen are supporting the present regime, which is this odd concatenation of the Houthis plus former President Saleh and his people in the military.
And of course, Saleh supposedly was ousted in 2012, had to step down in 2012 and give up his position of power over the military, but that really never happened.
He continued to control essentially the entire Yemeni military.
And that's why the Yemeni state was never really united, never really fully under the control of this government that was being backed by the Saudis, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the United States, and why the Houthis were basically invited by Saleh to come in and take power in September 2014.
Well, and so what's his official position now?
He's back or he's in the back waiting?
Yeah, he's in the background, he's pulling the strings.
But he's not, you know, the official, they've got another guy who's their official leader at this point in the capital.
Right.
Yep.
Yep.
All right.
And then so now there was a drone strike supposedly targeting al-Qaeda in Mukalla.
But at that point, at this point, that sounds like it's just an alibi for actually flying as their air force right now.
No, I suspect they're still continuing their drone war.
And now, as you may have seen, the U.S. drone war is based essentially on obviously just satellite, not satellite, but the drones following things from the sky.
And essentially pattern of behavior strikes.
In other words, they have no more, they don't get any more intelligence from the Yemeni government, obviously.
So it's all based on patterns, pattern strikes, circumstantial evidence.
And, you know, I'm not suggesting that the intelligence that they had before was any better.
But now it's very explicit that it's all based on simply assumptions, inferences from patterns that they see from from the drones.
Yeah, they I wonder if they hired Madison Avenue to come up with signature strikes, which sounds like it implies that somebody with authority had to sit down and check very carefully before they put a signature on it.
Right.
Obama put his signature on it and one at a time.
Very, you know, like they say, a scalpel rather than a hammer and that kind of thing.
But no, it just means that they're killing random people for walking around with a rifle or driving a pickup truck twice or more than three people in one place with a rifle.
Yeah, that's the truth.
Evidence, I think.
But yeah, they're using the term signature here, obviously, to mean, you know, something not obviously only if you look at it.
Yeah, right.
Everybody else.
It sounds I mean, I don't know, maybe just to me.
It sounds like they're implying a level of a higher level of care rather than a lower one.
You know, one could one could imagine that this meant that somebody signed off on it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
But so, yeah, somebody did.
But their qualification for killing was basically nothing.
They had a SIM card, the wrong SIM card.
Anyway, I'm curious about what you think about what Mark Perry was saying about the generals that, you know, they clearly were against the war against Assad in 2013.
And here they're going along with it, obviously, because what are they going to do?
But they're supposedly grumbling and throwing Obama under the bus for for taking the side of Al-Qaeda in this one.
Do you think that even though the the, you know, political strategy and all this Middle East stuff is so muddled that actually in the Pentagon, they're looking at it and and being a little bit more rational about whose side America is fighting on or should be?
See, that's that's the interesting thing about the Pentagon in the national security state in the post 9-11 period, or shall we say the post, let's say the post Iraq war period.
The Pentagon really is not interested in in more wars.
I mean, that's that much has become clear.
I mean, yeah, I could have thrown in Libya there in my question.
They were against that too.
Syria.
The Pentagon was not in favor of war in Syria, although perhaps the Air Force was.
It's possible.
I mean, I wouldn't doubt that there are elements of the Air Force, which would be enthusiastic as they were in Iraq.
But but generally speaking, the civilian leadership and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been extremely wary of of U.S. wars in the Middle East, that is conventional wars.
Now, so so what does that mean?
What are they really all about that in the Middle East?
They are about keeping control over facilities, massive, a massive network of military facilities, both Army and Navy, as well as Air Force in the Middle East and special programs like special operations forces and and other things that involve specific operations that are that are not going to be aimed at sort of regime change specifically, but which essentially, you know, keep the money rolling in for programs that are favored by a particular interest in the Pentagon.
So so I think, you know, more and more we see here an institution or set of institutions that are operating, you know, clearly like a like a corporation, which is, you know, looking to to maintain its assets, to to preserve its assets and to invest in those programs that will bring in more money, more, more power, more prestige.
Hey, let me ask you this, is that one of those things that are going to have the opposite effect?
Does that amount to a willingness to let the Islamic State continue to exist indefinitely now?
Well, no, I don't I mean, first of all, they know they're not going to be able to succeed in preventing the Islamic State from existing.
So that's not the issue.
The issue is, are they interested in all out war against the Islamic State?
Certainly not.
Are they interested in specific airstrikes which keep, you know, keep the the idea alive that that they have a role to play militarily in the Middle East and and continue, you know, the legal apparatus that continues to pour money into the the war accounts in the Pentagon budget, which can be used then for various other purposes as well.
So all of that is very favorable to the interests of the Pentagon without their having to or, you know, without requiring that they actually become involved in a war which, you know, they recognize is going to be big trouble for them.
Yeah.
Now, OK, so but I think, OK, so I would argue that if they sent in a George Bush style invasion to the Islamic State and to rouse these guys out of Mosul, something like that, that we know that we got the firepower to do that.
We've seen it happen before and they could turn the Islamic State back into an insurgency.
And then the next step from that would be when they got to leave someday again, then we'd have something like the Islamic State probably come back, something like that.
Well, I don't think you would argue that that's what they're saying, that that they would agree with me that they have really no ability to undo what they've done here at this point.
I mean, I am quite certain that they realize that they don't have the ability to really eliminate the Islamic State.
It's too big, too broad, too widespread.
If you if if you were to go into Mosul with whatever, you know, how many thousand troops it would require and all the airpower and so forth, you're going to play whack-a-mole again.
That's your you're back to the old game.
You know, I mean, we've been there before.
It was called Iraq.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not called that anymore.
That's the thing.
But, you know, hey, I'm cool with it.
I whatever.
It's their fault for making it this way.
Bush and Obama and their administrations and whatever, too.
So it is what it is.
And I'm not favoring any more intervention, obviously.
But I'm just I guess I still am amazed at their reluctance to, you know, really do, you know, try to do more because obviously they're or it seems to me that nobody in the region can do it except maybe the Turks and they're not interested in invading and getting rid of it.
But part of the situation is is, you know, one has to view it as a repeat of some of the same phenomena that we saw after Vietnam.
I mean, you know, the the U.S. military was after Vietnam was in a period of retreat and rebuilding and rethinking because of the failure and the extreme damage to the military that was caused by the Vietnam War.
Now, no, it's not exactly the same.
Obviously, it's it's a much more complex picture today because of all of the minor wars that the military is involved in in one way or another.
But at the same time, I think you do still have a situation where they are, you know, they're snakebit by by Iraq in particular and Afghanistan as well.
And and, you know, fearful of being sent into yet another conflict where they would suffer damage to the reputation and and to the to the institution of the military.
So that's that's part of the picture for sure that goes along with, you know, the other side that is continuing to take advantage of opportunities to carry out operations, which will which will not, you know, go go into the red from their point of view in terms of damage to their to their basic infrastructure, to to the assets that they have in the Middle East and which will continue to bring in congressional appropriations that they can use.
Yeah, they are, after all, bombing the hell out of Iraq, I guess more than Syria.
Syria somewhat, too.
So, yeah, I don't mean to downplay what they are doing because they're bombing Iraq like ever last 25 years straight.
Twenty four.
Yeah.
And we I mean, I'm not suggesting that they're in retreat to the same degree as they were in the 70s and into the 1980s.
But but I guess I was just thinking, Garrett, that look, when the when when insane people like Barack Obama and John McCain are saying, let's bomb the Baathists in Syria and the generals say, no, man, look, we don't want to fight a war directly on behalf of Al-Qaeda now.
OK, come on, don't do this to us.
Same kind of thing here in Yemen.
Oh, man, we don't want to.
But I guess.
All right.
You know, there was some reluctance here now that that's one thing.
But bombing actual bin Laden night types, it seemed like would be much more up their alley.
But you're saying they're just about as reluctant to take either side in this thing, you know, much more than they're already doing.
I think in the case of Yemen, yeah, I mean, beyond the drone strikes, I think they would find that problematic for a variety of reasons.
Although, you know, I mean, again, a big difference between, you know, an air campaign, limited air campaign and I mean, limited for us, not for the Yemenis.
OK.
And and ground forces, which, you know, absolutely is outside the the comfort zone for sure.
OK, with that, I'll let you go.
Thanks very much for your time.
Sorry for keeping you over time here, Garrett.
My pleasure as always.
Thanks, Scott.
OK, that's the great Gareth Porter, everybody who the arms bonanza came from Sala, a.k.a.the United States of America, his patron, not Iran.
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