06/23/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys.
Welcome back.
Hey, check it out.
I got Gareth Porter on the line.
Hey, Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
Apparently, we couldn't get the Skype connection.
Yeah, I think I could hear you a little bit, but I think you couldn't hear me, but that's all right.
Don't worry about it.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, these things happen.
I hate Skype so much.
The technology is so much better, and yet the technical difficulties that come with it are ridiculous.
But the point being is that you wrote some things, and so I want to talk with you about them, of course, because I always want to talk with you about the things you write, because things you write are always right on topic for what's most important to me, and along the lines of telling the truth about what they're lying about, they being the war party, obviously.
I got it.
And so, first of all, I really do owe you 10 bucks, and someone was joking around.
Actually, somebody paid me your 10 bucks and said, here's Gare's 10 bucks that he owes you for that bet, because Obama sent another couple of hundred guys, another couple of hundred guys.
But you wrote this piece, and you persuaded me.
It's based on this Washington Post story that, no, really, they're not coming.
As Mitchell Prothero put it from Earable, the Americans are not coming, and when they told you they're not coming, really, they're not coming.
So you better go ahead and do your own thing, whatever.
You say in your article that the leaders of the Army and the Marine Corps and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all those guys are adamantly opposed to invading and taking Islamic State territory.
That's correct.
I mean, that's clearly the military leadership's position on this.
It seems to be pretty deeply embedded in their view of the conflict in the Middle East now that the fight against Islamic State is not the American fight.
It's something that the Arabs should take care of.
The U.S. can't do it.
I think that's fair to say.
Or shouldn't do it.
And, you know, as I say in my article, the one that you just cited, I think the key to that position is really the knowledge that has come from a combination of Iraq and Afghanistan, that they're going to get in deeper than they want to be if they start having roots on the ground against Islamic State.
They cannot foresee the full consequences that would occur from starting that kind of war on the ground.
And they're a bit intimidated by it, quite frankly.
I think that's the that's the bottom line.
Awesome.
Well, that's great.
But I guess so here's the part that, well, there's two things that I was wrong about, really.
One is what you just described, the military's willingness to commit to this.
I know that you'll remember you reported it.
And I still have the clip here somewhere of Jim Michalczewski on NBC News right as Obama's being inaugurated, telling NBC that, hey, I'm here at the Pentagon.
And the generals say they don't care what the president says.
They're going to stay in Iraq for at least 20 more years.
And they stole it fair and square and they're keeping it.
And I just assume that, yeah, that's speaking for the Pentagon right there.
And if they had a way back into Iraq, especially in a full scale kind of a way, give me my 56 bases or else kind of a thing that they'd be happy to take that.
And so I was wrong about that.
But I was also wrong.
I guess very wrong about that.
But I was also wrong about the political pressure, because here we have not Saddam Hussein with the clean shaven chin and the beret.
What is he, French with his little beret and his olive green?
You know, when he's not wearing, you know, an American style suit with lapels.
It's not him.
It's the caliph.
It's Ibrahim, who's basically Osama himself up there.
And they're going to let that slide.
And I just thought politically that, man, they'll they'll drop an atom bomb on Mosul before they just let there really be a caliphate and let that go.
Not that I'm promoting that, but I'm just saying it seemed to me that Washington, D.C. would have one consensus, which is bomb Mosul.
Yes, yes.
Well, I mean, I think what you what you were responding to in assuming that was the case was this kind of hysteria that did develop, obviously, through the news media and Republican commenters within and outside Congress, both on, you know, blaming the Obama administration for not being more muscular in its response.
So, you know, what we're starting with here is this dynamic that that has long existed in American domestic politics of, you know, the out party in particular, using the lack of use of force by the president as a whip to attack them politically, to try to take advantage of it.
And, you know, that was clearly very much the dynamic that was at work last year when the war against the Islamic State began with the bombing.
And I think that, you know, there's a big distinction here and that this has become clearer, obviously, a big distinction between that dynamic on one hand and the interest of the military services and the Pentagon on the other.
Because as I point out in my in my article, what the service chiefs, the military leadership, and I think it's true as well of the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense and its staff, what they're doing is calculating very carefully, in some cases carefully, in other cases, perhaps less carefully, the profit and loss, the gains and risks of committing U.S. forces.
And I think it's the calculus is more complex, has more moving parts to it or more possible elements to it than than people generally realize.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know how much of this really plays into it.
I wonder what you think of my old joke now, a year old, that it's really because of the music already playing.
These things happen.
Well, on the other side of the break, I'm going to ask you about how much of this you think has to do with the fact that because of Israel and I guess to a lesser extent Saudi politics in the capital, that we can't really go to war against the Mujahideen because that's who our allies want to win over there.
But hold it right there.
We'll be right back in just a sec.
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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis on the Iranian nuclear program, which we're going to get to those talks here in just a sec.
We're talking about the lack of a full-scale war against the Islamic State.
Thank goodness, because the Pentagon agrees with us on this.
Don't do it.
I mean, yes, they have advisors and they're bombing the hell out of them from the air all the time.
I guess not on Vietnam, you know, carpet bombing type levels, but still.
So it's not like they're non-interventionists now or anything necessarily.
But it does seem, Gareth, like if, and never mind morality or libertarianism or non-intervention or anything like that, but just the empire's prerogatives, it seems like what they might do would be to make a deal with Iran and Assad that will give you money and a little bit of AWACS support or whatever you need to crush these guys for us, because they are the obvious most natural enemies of the Islamic State and go ahead and throw in the Al-Nusra Front too.
Obviously, the Turks don't really mind them at all, would be happy to have the Islamic State on their southern border, apparently, or an Al-Nusra One or whatever.
But they just can't do that because of the politics of Iran and Iran's relationship with Syria.
And so they'll just muddle on like this and let the Islamic State continue to exist under a low-scale bombing campaign from now on.
Is that basically it?
Well, I think there is, and I've said this many times on your show, but I think that you've sort of zeroed in on the problem a bit more concretely, and I think it's worth discussing it in more concrete terms now than we have before.
And that is the point that is most relevant here, that the White House is indeed subject to some conflicting political forces at work, political pressures coming from different directions.
We've already talked about the domestic politics of using the lack of adequate use of force against the White House by Republicans.
And at the same time, you're absolutely right that the Middle East allies of the United States are not at all eager to prioritize the sort of destruction or even the significant weakening of the Islamic State over the problem of either getting rid of Assad or weakening Iran.
Both of those are part of the same package.
So it's true of all of the Middle East allies of the United States, Israel, Turkey, for various reasons, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states where the United States has military bases.
They're all in the same boat here of wanting to do whatever is possible to weaken Iran, if not, you know, in the case of Israel, I mean, they're more or less openly saying, we want regime change.
That's still our objective.
So yes, there are conflicting pressures on the White House with regard to the policy towards the Islamic State.
And so it's very clear that when the military takes this position, that they do not want to have boots on the ground against the Islamic State, that this is extremely compatible with the interests of the White House at this point, that this is a position that the White House is perfectly happy with.
For one thing, it gives the White House cover with regard to their policies, right?
I mean, this is a perfect solution from the White House point of view.
Right.
So in other words, let me do this nuclear deal, and I promise to still be absolutely horrible on Syria and Yemen.
Right.
Right.
And to look the other way at your connivance with the Islamic State, in the case of Turkey, and to some extent, the Gulf States, and with regard to al-Nusra, the open, you know, political and financial support of the Gulf States with regard to the al-Nusra Front, which is, I would argue, and I think it's fair to say that this is becoming the dominant view of specialists looking at Syria, they have become the primary force that endangers the Assad regime.
All right.
Assume for me for a minute, for the sake of argument, that they do get the Iran nuclear deal through.
Is that going to make the crisis with the Saudis and their anti-Iranian position that much worse?
Or are they going to, like I would say they should, breathe a sigh of relief that, oh, good, their nuclear program is more safeguarded than ever before.
So no problem?
No, they're not going to take that position because I think it's very clear that the nuclear program was never really the issue for the enemies of Iran in the region.
That was a proxy for the much broader issue, the much deeper issue of basically Iran as a threat to their legitimacy, a threat to their power, and of course it varies in the case of Israel versus Saudi what the precise characteristics of the concern is or has been.
But in both cases, the fear and or desire to weaken Iran has roots that have little to do with nuclear program.
We know that the Israelis were threatening to attack Iran, but primarily using that threat to get the United States to attack Iran, not so much for the nuclear program itself, but simply to basically deal a serious blow to the overall power position of Iran in the region, to make Iran a much less powerful entity in the Middle East.
So I think that's what this is really all about.
And of course the Saudi element adds to the Sunni-Shia conflict, and also the Saudi fear of being overthrown from within Saudi Arabia, there's just a terribly irrational fear and trembling in the Saudi government that adds another dimension to this, that has really increased enormously since the Arab Spring in 2011.
So that is definitely a big part of the picture, and again I just think that the nuclear program is the excuse more than it is the real reason for the policies that are really, in the case of Israel, trying to bring about regime change, or at the very least weaken Iran, and in the case of the Saudis, basically from their point of view, to defeat any force in the region that is allied with or associated with the Iranians, from their point of view.
You have this new piece about the PMD, we've talked about the possible military dimensions and whether Iran has to quote-unquote, fess up to all the things that they've been accused of in a bunch of Israeli forgeries and so forth, as you've reported so well in your book and in all your articles, but do you think that ultimately this is going to break the deal?
Can you give us your odds on the final nuclear deal being reached by the end of the month?
It's very difficult for me to make that call.
I guess if somebody put a gun to my head and said, what's the odds, is it better than 50-50 or less than 50-50, I would say slightly better than 50-50, but only slightly and very low confidence.
I have very low confidence, as the CIA would say, in that estimate.
But so Kerry came out and said, hey, I'm climbing down from my ridiculous demand, don't worry about it everybody, whatever happened to that?
When Kerry said he was climbing down from the demand, I think what he was doing was saying that we're going to try to find a way to handle this so that there's not going to be a meltdown of the negotiations.
I think that what that means is that they're still trying to find a formula that would satisfy both the Israeli lobby in Congress, specifically, on one hand, and would be acceptable to the Iranians.
I have my doubts about whether they can do that.
And so I think that in the end they will have a choice between accepting a climb-down that is going to be obvious on one hand, and walking away from the talks.
And I don't know how they're going to handle it, I really don't.
All right, that's it.
We're out of time.
Thanks so much, Gareth.
Appreciate it, man.
Thanks, as always, Scott.
Good to be back.
That's the great Gareth Porter, y'all.
Manufactured Crisis is the book.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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