For Pacifica Radio, September 26th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm editorial director of Anti-War.com and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Find my full interview archive, more than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
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Introducing Barbara Slavin.
She is director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
And I know what you're saying, but no, she's cool.
It's all right.
Welcome back to the show, Barbara.
How are you?
I'm fine, thank you.
Interesting introduction.
Yes, I should have said and I meant to say just 10 seconds ago, I thought to myself, make sure I mention that for many years you were a journalist for UPI, correct?
I started with UPI.
Very few people know that, but I've worked at a bunch of other places since then.
Okay.
All right.
So the Atlantic Council, they don't have the best reputation around here, but I've always liked your work, and especially on Iran.
Unlike everyone in Washington, D.C. who talks about Iran, you actually know a thing or two about it, which is interesting and gives you a real leg up compared to your competition there.
So you have this really important piece with a guy named Abbas Karim at the Atlantic Council called Iran Won the War with Iraq, but at a heavy price.
And you make so many interesting and important points in this thing.
Can you please just tell us first and foremost, in what way did Iran win the Iraq war?
Well, we actually won it for them.
You know, a lot of people don't know that during the 1980s, there was a terrible conventional war between Iran and Iraq.
Iraq attacked Iran in 1980.
War went on for eight years.
It killed or wounded a million people, caused immense economic devastation.
But during that period, the United States actually tilted toward Iraq.
Iran was considered the bigger threat.
And of course, at the beginning of the war, Iran was holding Americans hostage.
Some of your listeners may remember that.
So that was how the U.S. felt in the 1980s.
But then, of course, Saddam Hussein, in his infinite stupidity, turned around and invaded Kuwait shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
And so we turned against Iraq.
We turned against Saddam.
Took us a while, but eventually in 2003, George W. Bush decided that invading Iraq would be a great way to respond to 9-11.
It wasn't enough that we invaded Afghanistan.
And so the U.S., in a matter of weeks, went in to Iraq and got rid of the regime of Saddam Hussein.
And then, guess who walked in?
The people next door.
The Iranians, who had been trying to get rid of Saddam for eight years and who wanted to see the Shia majority in that country empowered.
But then, weren't there a bunch of brilliant egghead geniuses who had gamed all this out, who knew that it wasn't just going to be great, like, okay, flowers and chocolates and cliches, but that this is going to give us preeminence, dominance over Iran.
So we won't have to attack Iran.
We'll just use our new dominance in Iraq and friendship with the Shiites to make the Iranians want to have a pro-American regime themselves and overthrow their own government for us and all this kind of stuff, right?
I think you're attributing much too much logic.
I mean, I heard him claim that, you know, in various ways, right?
But, you know, the Paul Wolfowitzes of this world wanted to get rid of Saddam because they had wanted to do that back in 1991 during the war to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.
And to them, it was unfinished business.
They felt that the United States could plant a democratic pro-American government in Iraq and that this would be a great use of massive American military might and also, frankly, the anti-Muslim hysteria that swept this country after 9-11.
And so, you know, there's fascinating new information that's come out.
An old friend of mine, Bruce Riedel, who used to work for many administrations on the Middle East, revealed recently that he was on the NSC and listening to a call between George W.
Bush and Tony Blair.
This was two days after September 11th, 2001.
So, September 13th.
And George W. Bush told Tony Blair, you know we're going to invade Iraq too, don't you?
Or words to that effect.
I mean, stunning.
Two days after 9-11.
And, of course, you remember the famous Axis of Evil speech, the State of the Union address in 2002, where Bush listed Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the most dangerous countries, the Axis of Evil.
Of course, none of these three had had anything to do with 9-11.
The way in which we reacted to 9-11 was madness.
It was overreach.
It squandered all the goodwill that the international community showed toward the United States after 9-11.
It let us down the rat hole of Iraq, helped ruin the nuclear agreement with North Korea, and it put us on a path of even more hostility with Iran that was only briefly interrupted, I'm afraid, by the Obama administration.
So, it's just, you know, the mistakes, the miscalculations.
Didn't the Bush administration know that Iran had been cultivating Shia militias in Iraq or outside Iraq since the Iran-Iraq war?
There were a number of Shia who fled the country, went to Iran, were given sanctuary, one of them is called the Badr Corps, Badr Organization, given sanctuary in Iran, and then as soon as it was safe for them to come back, i.e. the U.S. military invaded, they were back in Iraq organizing, and then there were many other groups as well.
There are a whole, you know, panoply of Shia militias now, and even the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, that very well-known Iranian general back in 2020, all it's done is kind of incentivize the creation of more militias, and there's less coherence.
But the bottom line is that Iran calls the shots in Iraq, not the United States.
We are on our way out of that country, and, you know, for that to be the legacy of the U.S. invasion, it's just, it's so sad, because yes, some Iraqi Shia may have some more rights, but Iraq is not exactly a thriving country, and it's full of violence, and it's full of corruption.
Yeah, well, and when you say, didn't they know, and things like that, I mean, I remember reading at antiwar.com in the year 2000, I'm pretty sure, that, hey, beware of SCIRI, you know, Justin Raimondo.
There's this group SCIRI, and the CIA tried to give them a bunch of money.
In Iraq.
No, I mean, all these groups were found favor in Washington.
I remember how bizarre it was in the late 90s, early 2000s, to be going and meeting all these Shia clerics in Washington, who were members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was also supported by Iran.
And, you know, even the name Islamic Revolution in Iraq, I mean, Ayatollah Khomeini was trying to export his system to Iraq.
Now, you know, the Iranians haven't succeeded in doing that.
They do have a quasi-democratic system, but these militias are so powerful.
And the clergy, actually, I mean, the clergy are not in control in Iraq.
Iranian clergy are much more in control because of their support for these militia groups.
All right.
Well, so, I mean, you still got the Ayatollah Sistani.
Do you know what his relationship is with Khomeini?
Ayatollah Sistani does not believe in the system of velayat-e faqih, the rule by the jurisprudence, the rule by a Shia cleric.
He is opposed to that, but he is very elderly.
And there's a lot of concern that when he dies, Iran will try to engineer the succession to him.
And if you're interested, Abbas Khadim and I, Abbas heads our Iraq initiative, and he is a brilliant, brilliant man, a brilliant scholar who knows Shiaism and Iraqi Shiaism very, very well.
He and I wrote a paper together a few years back on the succession to Sistani and Khomeini, and pointing out that it was very important which one died first.
Khomeini is still in power in Iran when Sistani dies, and Khomeini is a little bit younger.
The chances, and if the political situation in Iraq is the way it is now, the chances are good that Iran will try to engineer the succession to Sistani, and that would just further increase their power.
I mean, we do have to acknowledge on the other side that there is a lot of Iraqi nationalism and a lot of resistance to this Iranian takeover.
But so far, too little effect.
I mean, when people protest, they get crushed.
And there have been a number of prominent Iraqis who opposed Iranian influence in the country who've been assassinated by these militias in recent years.
So it's very dangerous to take a stand against Iran.
Also, the two economies have become increasingly intertwined.
So it is certainly, you know, I don't know that Paul Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney would be honest enough to acknowledge, but what they pushed for so hard in 2001, 2002, 2003, has led to this result.
I'm interested in this.
You know, you're so familiar with all these topics.
Had you read A Clean Break back in the 1990s?
Yes.
And the David Wormser, you know, because this is where all of these guys.
Yeah, I've left out Pearl.
I've left out, you know, all of these.
So if you if you go back and look at that, Wormser wrote them all.
He brings up the name Ahmed Chalabi.
It's Ahmed Chalabi.
He assures us that if we overthrow Saddam, that the Jordanians will be dominant in Iraq and they'll tell the Shiite clergy in Najaf to tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran.
And Chalabi assures us that this is going to work great.
And then, of course.
Well, you know, Chalabi has has passed away.
I will say this in his favor, that he he went back to Iraq.
He stayed there.
I mean, he wanted to run the country.
That was his original goal.
But he did go back there.
He didn't run away.
And he actually did die in Iraq a few years back.
That's about the only good thing I can say about him.
The guy was a double crosser.
The Iranians didn't trust him.
I remember Iranian officials telling me that he was he was a con artist.
He conned the United States.
He gave information to Iran.
He was the principal individual behind a lot of the fake intelligence that pointed to to WMD still being in Iraq, which was, of course, the the excuse, the pretext that was used for going in there.
He was the one who presented this guy called Curveball.
You may remember this source.
And and, you know, people ate it, ate it up, ate it up.
I remember going to the so-called Black Coffee briefings at the American Enterprise Institute, another great champion of this invasion, where Chalabi would be presented like royalty, you know, with people like Richard Pearl hanging on his every word.
A guy named Harold Road was another one.
There were all these neocons, Doug Fife, who all thought that that getting rid of Saddam would be just the ticket.
And, of course, Israel supported this as well at the time.
Let's not forget.
And and these neocons were all big supporters of Israel and thought they were doing the Israelis a favor by getting rid of Saddam.
Of course, the implication was, yes, that Assad in Syria and then the Iranians would be next, that regime change, you know, would sweep the region and and and all of these members of the resistance front, all these anti-Israel groups would would would be destroyed and and democratic pro-American, pro-Israel groups would be put in their place.
It's just astonishing.
I mean, we all knew this was crap.
We know some of us knew this was crap.
But of course, you know, who listens to to a bunch of journalists who've actually lived in the Middle East or visited some of these countries?
I wrote a piece for the for USA Today in I think it was November of 2002 that basically said that Iraq was the last place in the Middle East where you could put a democracy because, you know, country had no tradition of democracy.
The strongest opposition party to Saddam Hussein was the Communist Party of Iraq.
Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends, too, that say Libertarian Institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to LibertasBella.com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right hand margin at LibertarianInstitute.org.
LibertasBella.com.
You guys check it out.
This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years.
And I admit I haven't read it yet.
I'm going to get to it as soon as I can.
But I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it.
It's called Why the Vietnam War, Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61.
And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974.
But how did we get there?
Why is this all Harry Truman's fault?
Find out in Why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson, available now.
You know, as long as we're going down memory lane here with all this Iraq War II stuff, Barbara, let me ask you about two important reports, I think, as far as I know, one by Risen in the New York Times and another by Hirsch in The New Yorker about two different Iraqi middlemen.
I think one was a Lebanese businessman and the other was a Saudi businessman or Emirates businessman or something who were acting as middlemen for Saddam Hussein, both of whom tried to surrender to Richard Pearl, both of whom made these.
I don't know why they picked him to be the guy to bring the message to.
But they met with Pearl in London was the rise in story.
And the other I forgot the her story.
But in both cases, it was Saddam Hussein essentially offering unconditional surrender before the war and saying, any concession you want, I'll make it.
Oil, Israel, weapons, inspections and whatever you got, even promise to hold elections under international supervision if we would just promise to please not invade and was told to go to hell.
And I think the quote in the rise in pieces, tell them we'll see them in Baghdad.
But then so much.
No, I'm not I'm not familiar with those those stories say.
I mean, look, let's remember where we were in late 2002.
You know, there were UN inspectors back in the country, right?
They had found no evidence of WMD whatsoever.
But but the Bush administration, you know, was determined to go forward, because if they waited beyond March, it would be too hot.
And then they would have to scrap it for another, you know, until the fall or something like that.
And they were just so gung ho to go to war in another country.
It's, it's, I think, you know, all of this really accounts for the enormous change that we've seen in American public sentiment about about Middle East wars, I think, over the last few years, because people just, you know, it is, it's not much of a silver lining if you're Iraqi.
But, but it, it, I think people do finally understand that these wars are, are don't solve anything that they create more problems than they solve.
You know, Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS, all of this came out of our invasion, not to mention the perversion of our own civil liberties, torture, Guantanamo Bay renditions, Abu Ghraib, all of that could have been avoided if we had not gone down that path.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's interesting, too, because there's that famous footage, or it was famous for a time anyway, of Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute in 1994, being interviewed on C-SPAN, where they ask him, why didn't we go all the way to Baghdad in 91?
He seems to be honestly stating his own point of view, not just defending Bush Senior's decision there, when he says, well, look, the problem was, one, we'd be bogged down in urban warfare, trying to hunt the guy down and catch him and all that, which would be a real problem.
Two, you'd have pieces of Iraq fly off, he said, and he'd have, you know, the south or the east would go to Iran and the west would go to Syria, which that's not really right, that the Ba'athists would want to seize the west.
But he was right, ultimately, that you could get a Sunni Islamist state there.
And then he says, you know, the Kurds could that could end up getting into a fight with Turkey, which, you know, hasn't played out in the worst way there.
But, you know, that was his argument.
That was the argument that the Bush government, one of the arguments for not going all the way to Baghdad in 1991, during Iraq war one was that this would be the consequence.
And then so he had been convinced somehow otherwise, that no, pieces won't go flying off, the US Army will have no problem taking care of this, right?
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I doubt he can be honest now.
I, you know, I think he will still, he will still say there was a chance he had WMD, he was too dangerous.
And this environment after 911.
And, you know, we couldn't countenance it.
But, but there were people, Maybe if we just drowned him a few times, like almost to death, and then brought him back to life and then asked him.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
But there were, there were, you know, people sent, there was Woolsey, the former CIA director who was sent to try to prove that there was some connection between Al Qaeda and and Iraq when there was none.
You know, they tried to prove that Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers had been in Baghdad, that he, you know, I remember Woolsey went to to Prague, on the on the trail of Mohammed Atta, supposedly he had been in Prague.
It was, they were trying so hard to prove this connection.
So I, you know, I think they just convinced themselves that that, that A, it was a good idea, and B, it would be easy.
And, you know, it would be nice to see some humility from some of these people.
But we haven't seen it.
And I think it's, it's, it's really a great shame.
Yeah, I think that's really a big part of the key there, right, is they thought it would be easy.
They thought, yeah, look, I mean, the, the Iraqi people, whoever they are, they're just kind of extras in our movie, and they'll just stay in the background.
And there's, you know, we'd be greeted as liberators, don't you remember?
Yeah, there was an anecdote, I forgot where I learned this now, it was years ago, but it was Paul Bremer, the viceroy says to his aide, who's some daughter of a Republican donor or something, has no expertise whatsoever.
She just got a political appointment there.
And he says to her, who's this Muqtada al-Sadr guy?
And she says, oh, he's just some minor cleric.
Don't worry about it.
Oh, my God, the scion of a famous clerical family.
I mean, on the day of the invasion, they renamed Saddam's city Sadr City in his family's honor, that might have been a clue.
Also were assassinated by Saddam.
I mean, they were, you know, even to this day, I mean, he's not he's not very bright compared to some other members of his family.
But you know, he's he's still got an important position, just because of his family name.
Yeah, I remember going to Baghdad with Colin Powell, you know, shortly after Saddam fell, and going to, you know, Saddam's palace and seeing all these wet behind the ears Republican, you know, coffee goers.
I mean, no, they were they were they were children, they were literally kids, who had worked on the campaign or something like that, who knew nothing about where they were, what they were doing.
And they're lounging around the pool and bikinis and drinking and, you know, making a great impression, I'm sure on the Iraqis.
And and they're there to to reorganize the the finances and the political system and the security system of this country, you know, the hubris.
And, and, again, you know, something like Bremer, I mean, where's his humility?
You know, where, where is he admitting that maybe dissolving the Iraqi army was not the most brilliant decision?
Saddam was an SOB, but he hated Sunni fundamentalists.
And he hated Iranians.
So, you know, we got rid of him.
And there went the buffer against Iranian influence.
And and there opened the Shia Crescent, you know, from Iraq to Syria into Lebanon, and we just just sort of handed it to them.
I mean, they they knew how to profit from the opportunity.
Let's, you know, give them give the Iranians that.
But if Saddam had remained, if the army Iraqi army had remained, Iran would would not have been the influence that it became in in Iraq and probably would have had less influence in both Syria and Lebanon.
Well, and then isn't this the key to the war in Syria was they were trying to make up for the fact they'd given Baghdad to Iran.
So now they wanted to take Damascus away from him.
That's what Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg.
That's why we're doing this is to weaken Iran.
Yeah, that was that that was one of the goals.
Absolutely.
Because, you know, the Assad family had been allied with Iran since the Iran Iraq war, the original Iran Iraq war, because Syria, of course, was ruled by a rival branch of the Ba'ath party.
And so Hafez al-Assad hated Saddam Hussein and vice versa.
And, you know, the the Assads are from a kind of an obscure offshoot of the Shia faith called the Alawites.
And so when the quote, unquote, revolution began in Syria in 2011, yeah, there were a lot of people who thought this is our revenge.
Absolutely.
Our revenge for Iraq.
You know, the U.S. handed Iraq to the Iranians.
So we're going to we're going to take Syria back.
After all, it is a majority Sunni country, which Iraq is not.
And so logically, it should want to come back to the Sunni Arab fold.
But we've seen what's happened.
And, you know, Assad Bashar al-Assad is being rehabilitated in the Arab world now.
And because he's still there, he's not going anywhere.
And I think many Arab countries feel they have no choice but to restore a relationship with him if they're going to have any influence in Damascus and compete with the Iranians and, you know, the Russians in any way.
So it's very sad 10 years later that that, you know, that after all the killing and all the human grotesque human rights abuses, he's still there and Iran is still there and more powerful Syria than before.
Yeah.
And when you say and we saw what happened, I mean, that means we saw the rise of the Islamic State and their conquering of Western Iraq and the launching of Iraq were three to destroy the al-Qaeda state that the U.S. and its allies had created with their war in Syria.
Right.
Well, the idea was not to create an al-Qaeda state, but needless to say, that was just the result of it.
The U.S. was never in control of the, quote, unquote, Syrian opposition.
And and realize that I think I think Obama realized that pretty soon.
Right.
He was clearly afraid to carpet bomb him and really force a regime change in Damascus the way he'd done in Tripoli.
But he still did support the revolution for five years, even after the rise of the Islamic State.
He kept supporting him through.
It was Trump that canceled the program in twenty seventeen, July.
Yeah, we still have some you know, we still have a couple thousand troops.
Yeah.
Right.
Between Iraq and.
But I mean, just the CIA program supporting the al-Qaeda guys there.
No, the the I mean, we're now supporting the Kurds against ISIS.
Yeah.
No, it's the Turks who are supporting the guys.
It's complicated.
It's the Middle East.
I think I think what all of this shows is that particularly in a part of the world like that, which we don't understand, most people in America don't understand very well.
You have to be very careful with what you do.
You have to be particularly careful when you send in tens of thousands of troops and try to rearrange the chessboard because the the consequences are often not what you wanted can often be much, much worse than than the status quo.
And, you know, we can't take it back.
We are where we are.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, I'm sorry because we're almost out of time, but I quote you all the time and including in my book, this most important story.
There's one in The Wall Street Journal just like it to from January 2015.
Lloyd Austin and the CENTCOM is passing intelligence to the Houthis to use to kill Al-Qaeda guys just two months before Obama stabs them in the back and takes Al-Qaeda side against them.
Can you please tell us about that?
Michael Vickers came in the Atlantic Council and told you about this.
Oh, yeah.
Well, look, the Saudis were freaking out because the Houthis were taking over more and more territory in Yemen.
And so it was really this was a decision of Mohammed bin Salman, you know, the boy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, that he was going to show how macho he was by bombing Yemen and defeating the Houthis.
And because the U.S. had just was about to reach the JCPOA with Iran, it felt that it had to give a green light to it and give support to this Yemen campaign.
Yeah.
But before that, to placate the Saudis.
Yeah.
But before that, no, we absolutely the CIA and and and, you know, I wormed this out of out of Vickers.
They tried to deny it afterwards, but I had my quote, you know, that that that the Houthis had been giving us intelligence because, of course, the Houthis were opposed to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
So we you know, we had been working with them when it was in our interest and we lost that when we supported the Saudis in in attacking Yemen.
So, again, you know, sometimes the status quo, as imperfect as it is, is preferable to to taking military action.
And I think we certainly learned that in Yemen.
Yeah.
Well, in the late great Mark Perry had written at the time that that the generals at Central Command, meaning Lloyd Austin and his men, were absolutely beside themselves being made by Obama to change sides in the war and help Al-Qaeda and Saudi attack the Houthis when they, you know, their enemy is AQAP.
Well, right.
They allege they, you know, apparently I mean, we still do go after Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
So I mean, the idea was to support Al-Qaeda.
The idea was to prevent the Houthis from taking over the whole country.
I mean, it wasn't that Al-Qaeda benefited.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not saying like they were directly fighting the war for Al-Qaeda, but yeah, they took over like six towns and they've now been integrated into the U.S. militia.
And they are essentially a protected ally in this war.
Even The New York Times said, geez, this kind of ironically puts us on the side of AQAP.
Yeah, it does.
And in fact, that was what Michael Horton, no relation, the Yemen expert from Jamestown Foundation, told Mark Perry then March of 15.
He said, John McCain complains that we're Iran's air force in Iraq.
Yeah.
Whose fault is that?
But anyway, well, we're Al-Qaeda's air force now in Yemen.
Oh, my.
And that was then.
I mean, that was right at the start of it.
And that was six and a half years ago.
Yeah.
Mark Perry was a wonderful journalist.
Yeah.
Wasn't he great?
One of the best.
One of the best.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm so sorry that we're out of time here, but thank you so much.
It's great to talk to you again, Barbara.
It's always fun.
All right.
You all.
And again, that article is Iran won the war with Iraq, but at a heavy price.
And that's at the Atlantic Council.
And that has been anti-war radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director at Antiwar.com and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
