09/28/12 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, September 28, 2012.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest tonight is the great Gareth Porter.
Yes, I interview Gareth Porter all the time.
It's because he's the best on everything.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service.
That's ipsnews.net, and they keep all his archives at antiwar.com/porter.
Also, please check out his award-winning work for truthout.org.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm fine, thanks, Scott.
You're very kind.
You're much too kind.
Thanks.
No, you deserve it.
All right, so there's so much big news in America's horrible imperial foreign policy this week.
I almost don't know where to start, but yes, I do.
Benjamin Netanyahu's ridiculous performance before the United Nations yesterday, where he held up his Wile E. Coyote bomb and said that the Iranians are just about to wipe Israel off the map if America doesn't stop them first.
And I was hoping that maybe you'd agree with my feeling that pretty much the whole world is laughing at him now and that he really did a Fonzie jump in the shark moment there, and now he's a laughingstock.
And now I can worry about war with Iran even less.
What do you think?
I think you are absolutely right that I agree with your assessment of this event and its significance, its impact.
There's no question that Netanyahu has not advanced the cause of certainly forcing the United States into a confrontational posture, a more confrontational posture with Iran at all, quite the opposite.
He has indeed, I think, made himself a laughingstock.
And there were signs, which I have cited in my own piece of a few weeks ago, even earlier this month and late last month, that in Israeli media and politics, the welcome for Netanyahu's effort has really started to wear thin.
And I think that a lot of Israelis now have believed for a while that Netanyahu is making a laughingstock of Israel, that nobody in the rest of the world except for some mainstream news media, which keep sort of reporting in a very slack-jawed way that, you know, as though Netanyahu's war talk should be taken seriously.
I think the Israeli view has become that most people in the world don't really take Netanyahu seriously and that he is in fact basically threatening Israeli interest by essentially having this quarrel with the Obama administration in particular.
And that's why I think you've seen, even in this rather ridiculous presentation at the UN, that one thing that Netanyahu didn't do was to try to continue to have a quarrel with President Obama over Iran.
He tried to smooth that over, which I think is a result of the fact that he's been severely criticized in the media and political circles in Israel for that.
So bottom line is, yes, I think that Netanyahu has utterly failed in what I've regarded for some months, as you know well, as an effort to try to maneuver the Obama administration into confrontation with Iran, to get Obama to say something indicating that he is ready to go along with Israel's red line and that Iran only has a certain amount of time left and so forth.
And that has not happened, it's not going to happen.
And one of the things that has been speculated in the Israeli press after the Netanyahu speech is that what he's really doing now is preparing the way for an election campaign in the spring and that he intends to continue to press on the Iranian threat as his main campaign issue, so that he's not going to give up this rhetoric about Iran as an existential threat and the need for a red line.
But I think it will be clear as time goes by that it is really for domestic Israeli politics now, not because he has any hope of changing U.S. policy, much less that he's serious about attacking Iran.
I don't think that's going to fly at all in Israeli politics.
Quite the contrary, as we know, something like two-thirds majority of Israelis opposes any unilateral strike by Israel.
They want the United States to be involved and, in fact, they want the United States to do it.
So this is the coda, as far as I'm concerned, for Netanyahu's big sort of threat of attack on Iran or at least the implicit threat of attack on Iran as a way of trying to maneuver U.S. policy into confrontation.
Well, now, so he sort of has a point.
I mean, the cartoon bomb is really, you know, symbolic of the entire debate here, right?
The scaremongering is always based on a cartoon and never any real details.
When it comes down to details, he did kind of make the point that what he's worried about is Iran having enough low-enriched uranium that if it was weapons-grade, there's at least enough of it to make some bombs out of, the so-called breakout capability.
And that's where he's saying he wants America to draw the red line, as they shouldn't even be able to have enough low-enriched uranium that if they turn it into high-enriched uranium, that then it would be, you know, weapons-grade, that then it would be enough to make a nuke.
Is that actually a real worry as far as you're concerned at all?
This is indeed the argument that Netanyahu and Ehud Barak have been making.
In my view, it's not really honest.
It's not an honest argument for the simple reason that, again, you are quite familiar with, which is that the Iranians cannot enrich that 3.5 or 20% enriched uranium to weapons-grade level without reconfiguring the centrifuges, and they can't do that without kicking the IAEA out of Iran.
The idea that they have secret centrifuge factories, you know, places hidden in mountains, that they can use to secretly carry out this enrichment is simply not credible.
It has not been bought by the CIA or by other intelligence agencies.
And as far as I can see, Israeli intelligence doesn't believe that either.
They fundamentally agree with the U.S. assessment of Iran's current position.
This has been stated more than once by both Israeli intelligence and U.S. intelligence people.
And so the idea that Iran can enrich to weapons-grade without giving an overt signal just doesn't pass the laugh test.
And that's why I insist that this has been a political maneuver all along.
I really think that it represents an accurate reflection of any serious assessment of the threat from Iran's nuclear program to Israel.
But I think that this effort that he has made to really shift the policy of the United States, and indeed of the rest of the alliance, certainly he's used it to try to successfully to get much harsher sanctions against Iran, oil sanctions, which have cut very seriously into Iran's revenues, clearly.
And that would not have happened had it not been for the fact that the Obama administration was certainly intimidated by the Israel lobby in circumstances where Iran had been blown up into this issue by Netanyahu.
So I think it fulfilled that function.
But what I'm saying is that I think that's played out now.
It's been shown to be a failure.
He knows now that the Obama administration is not going to do what he wanted.
And I don't think that it serves any other purpose now except for, from now on, that it serves any other purpose except for domestic politics in Israel.
All right, now there's this piece three days ago in the New York Times, Gareth, called Syrian War's Spillover Threatens a Fragile Iraq.
And if you make it through to paragraph 15, you get to the part where America is sending special forces back to Iraq for training.
And then, I don't know, I forget now, did they explicitly say and other counterterrorism activities?
Just say it ain't so.
Yeah, I mean, this is, in my view, a reflection of two major political realities that seem to be unchanging in the way in which the United States conducts its national security business.
One is that the U.S. military always wants to be in more places, in as many places as possible.
And certainly Iraq was a place that the U.S. military wanted very badly to have a major presence.
You know, people who can remember back as far as 2007, 2008, 2009, recall very clearly that the generals were talking about a major U.S. military presence, tens of thousands of U.S. troops to remain behind, regardless of what the withdrawal agreement between the United States and Iraq actually said.
They were going to bend the agreement so that they could maintain that presence.
Well, clearly, no Shia government in Baghdad was going to be able to go along with that.
That was not in the cards.
But, you know, they were still maneuvering as late as last year to try to have a residual presence.
And Obama was kind of playing along with that.
He certainly did not want to be identified as somebody who was responsible for not having a residual U.S. military presence in Iraq.
And so, you know, he was playing a very clever game of saying, yes, he wanted to do that, but, of course, it would be necessary for the prime minister of Iraq to write a formal letter requesting it.
Well, I think he knew very well that Maliki was never going to do that.
And so all of that was playing out in a very sort of phony drama over the last 24 months.
And so that's one reality.
The other reality is that, you know, the United States and the political elite in this country, which were both parties equally implicated in the Iraq war for many years, they're really stuck with their commitment to the idea that this was an important thing for the United States to do, the right thing for the United States to do.
And, therefore, they cannot admit that this was a completely wrong-headed thing to do from the very beginning and that it continued to be wrong-headed to the very end.
And, therefore, they are still wedded to the notion that somehow or other this government in Iraq can be a friend of the United States or that the United States should be continuing to have military cooperation with it.
So I think that that's really a part of the storyline here behind the scenes of this special forces cooperation with the Iraqi special forces.
Okay.
This is Anti-War Radio here on KPFK.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
I've got all my interview archives there.
I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
And we're talking about this piece in the New York Times about America sending troops back into Iraq.
And it's just amazing to read this article, you know.
If there's a grand design to American foreign policy, I sure don't understand it.
It must be really smart and complicated because it looks a lot like Moe Curley and Larry to me.
Well, I think you can say this much without fear of being contradicted by reality, that if there's a grand design in U.S. foreign policy, it's extremely dangerous.
And that in general, what actually happens is not a grand design, but constant required having to adjust to realities that constantly surprise the policymakers because they didn't really connect with the reality on the ground in one country after another.
And it sort of looks like you're saying, here's the Democrats, Obama himself ran on, I'm against the Iraq war, but Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton sure didn't.
And, you know, it's their war too.
And their whole party is completely implicated in this thing.
And so they just wanted to pretend they didn't fight a war for Iran.
They just fought a war for Iran.
And here they are.
They got in this article, the Iraqis are saying we want these American planes so that we can have an air war with Turkey when the Turks come to bomb the Kurds in northern Iraq, the Turks who are our allies in NATO since the end of World War II and our allies, the Kurds in northern Iraq, who've been our allies since the summer in 1990.
And what in the world is going on?
These people have no idea what they're doing, do they?
Well, here, of course, you get into another major source of influence on U.S. foreign policy, which is anytime the U.S. military industry can sell planes to somebody, there's a very powerful temptation for the State Department, certainly the Pentagon, to support that.
And so, you know, don't be surprised if, in fact, the United States does end up selling war planes to Iraq because it's good profit for the industrial allies of the Pentagon.
And I think that cuts very deep into U.S. policy in the Middle East and has for decades and decades.
I don't think that's changed yet.
Well, I mean, again, I'm sorry just to beat this dead horse, but again, the article at the New York Times from three days ago, it's called, A Fragile Iraq Faces New Perils from Syria's War.
And it's about, it's just so full of ironies.
It's just incredible where, you know, the Shiite government, the Iranian-backed government that we just fought a war for is saying we need your help to fight this Sunni-based insurgency when the Sunni-based insurgency is the same one that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are backing in Syria against, yeah, they're the Baathists like Saddam, but they're the Shiite Baathists up there in Syria and allies with Iran and with the Maliki government of Iraq.
So at the same time, we're saying we want to arm them up with these Lockheed products to fight our allies, the Turks, over Kurdistan.
They're also saying, they're complaining that the Maliki government is working with the Iranians in arming the government of Syria against the American-backed Mujahedin al-Qaeda resistance.
Right, and Scott, you know, you can bet your farm on the fact that this issue will continue to bedevil the Obama administration as long as it's in office, and the next administration as well, that there will be this conflict between precisely the two sides of this dilemma that, or this irony, this ironic situation that you've described, trying to be on both sides because it serves two different kinds of interests in U.S. policy.
And then, yeah, speaking of which, did you see John McCain with a straight face on TV complaining that, you know, Obama wants to pretend that there's no al-Qaeda in the world and that he beat them all when he beat Osama, and that's why he played down reports and intelligence about al-Qaeda involvement in the killing of the ambassador in Libya.
And McCain says, on the contrary, al-Qaeda is alive and well in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, and something's got to be done about it.
And what I thought was the fun part was how the TV news hairdo anchor people who were doing the interviewing him, which included Charlie Rose, they had no idea of any of these ironies whatsoever to ask a single follow-up question.
Weren't you the one who supported regime change in all these countries in favor of, well, in a way that certainly benefited al-Qaeda in Iraq, and directly in favor of al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria?
And so shouldn't you go and prosecute yourself for material support or something, Senator?
Come on.
Well, of course, you know, anything John McCain says is almost certainly going to be wrong fundamentally.
You can almost count on that.
But in this case, there is an objective point here which I think is worth bringing out, which is that the Obama administration, because of its trying to play on the bin Laden killing as turning this particular president into the great counterterrorism figure in American history, is indeed going to automatically tend to give a more optimistic view of its success in regard to al-Qaeda, not only for that reason, but because it is justifying its drone war in Pakistan and in Yemen.
It's going to tend to underplay the reality that it's not doing a very good job of defeating al-Qaeda in the world at all.
On the contrary, al-Qaeda probably is getting stronger.
And that there are big contradictions built into this policy, and that it needs to be much more subjected to critical analysis than the news media have done.
So I think that's a valid point.
These crazy Democrats, they're fighting for al-Qaeda on one hand and Iran on the other, and they just can't tell which they prefer the most.
And here they want to chase the consequences of their war in Libya down into Mali, for crying out loud.
And I talked to Stephen Zunes about it, and he wrote a book about Mali.
And he said, they don't even have oil.
So, man, not in a million years could there be a threat to Israel, so who the hell cares about Mali?
But now they want to chase them down into Mali now.
Well, you know, I just had a thought today about the counterterrorism stance, strategy, policy of the Obama administration, which, of course, is sort of doubling down on the strategy that the George W. Bush administration started.
I think that there's a very interesting parallel here between what the Obama administration is doing, is trying to do in regard to going after al-Qaeda in so many places with military force or with military presence, and with the Israelis' approach to the problem of terrorism, quote-unquote, in the Palestinian territories.
The Israeli view is that unless you occupy those territories and have a very forward military presence and sort of tripwire a very sensitive policy that if anybody does or is suspected of doing something, that you go after them and you kill them.
That's the way you handle this so-called terrorist threat.
And this, of course, as anybody except for people who are part of the Israel lobby understand by this point, this is a complete failure.
It's never worked in the past.
It's not going to work in the future.
It seems to me that what the United States has done is unconsciously perhaps, although in some cases I think some of the military people have indeed studied what the Israelis have done and have felt that it was somehow relevant to the U.S. counterterrorism problem.
But what they should learn is that this is not the way to do it, and in fact they need to fundamentally stop what the Obama administration has tried to do on terrorism and follow a completely different strategy.
Well, you know, as we've talked about many times before, it was General Stanley McChrystal, the head of the Delta Force who was leading the surgical night raids and the counterinsurgency doctrine where you make real good friends with everybody except the real, real bad guys you hunt down and kill one at a time.
And that's at least the spin that they put on it, and I think they were at least sort of trying to implement something like that in Afghanistan, and yet it was McChrystal himself who said that he had this insurgent math which said that every time they killed a so-called bad guy, they created ten more.
And that went for every time they kill anybody, they create ten bad guys, meaning people who would dare to resist them.
That was indeed the official counterinsurgency belief system, and I do in fact believe that both Petraeus and McChrystal were true believers in that.
And then they kept doing it anyway.
They kept doing it anyway.
That's exactly the point which of course in my view underlines the fundamental reality that it's not counterinsurgency theory that prevails in the end, it's the vested interest of very powerful bureaucracies.
In this case, it was the very, very powerful special operations forces bureaucracy which prevailed in Afghanistan and which McChrystal I think as a former, not former but still active SOF officer, commander, sort of automatically went along with and violated his own, the tenets of the doctrine that he was committed to defending and carrying out.
Well, you know, I think the closest anybody ever got to asking a serious question of somebody really with the power on this issue, it was actually David Gregory on Meet the Press asked Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, about I guess there have been a few different hard to ignore reports in one week or something that made Gregory say that, you know, it seems like we keep recruiting more and more enemies in Yemen against us every time we fight our enemies in Yemen.
So do you think that is it possible that this is a counterproductive policy?
And Panetta couldn't answer that directly.
So he simply said, look, these are the tools we have to use and so we will use them.
And so then that's it, right?
Hillary Clinton said about Afghanistan back in the first place three years ago, when you find yourself in a hole, you have to grab a shovel and get digging.
I think that's a brilliant illustration of the problem.
I'm glad you pinpointed that particular exchange.
I think it's a nice illustration of what's going on.
Yeah.
Well, and then the problem is people are screaming and screaming and crying as they die.
It's all as serious as hell for people in Mali and in Libya and in Afghanistan, where these Democrats play their little global sociological games and their little fantasies.
And Samantha Power gets a little bit more attention for her job at the White House.
But that's just me, I guess.
Anyway, thank you so much for your time, Gareth.
You do such great work and I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Glad to be on.
All right, everybody.
That is the heroic Gareth Porter.
You can find everything he writes at IPSnews.net, IPSnews.net, and, of course, at Antiwar.com/Porter.
And please also check out his award-winning work on Afghanistan and the night raids, especially at Truthout.org.
That's the show for this evening.
Thank you very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
This has been Antiwar Radio.
Check out my website at ScottHorton.org.
And we'll be back here next Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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