Welcome to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, we've got a great show lined up for you today.
Peter Hart from FAIR will be here.
Malalai Joya, Afghan dissident, will be here.
Will Grigg will be on this show, an interview I'm really looking forward to about the upcoming invasion of Mexico.
But first, we turn to Gareth Porter, historian and journalist for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net.
He's got a new one there, and of course also at AntiWar.com/Porter, called Maliki's Doubts Threaten Post-2011 Iraq Troop Presence.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, how's things?
I'm fine, thanks.
Hello again.
Well, I'm happy to have you here.
Tell me this, what post-2011 Iraq troop presence?
The deal says December 31, 2011.
Right, this is the requirement of the withdrawal agreement between the U.S. and Iraq in November of 2008.
That, of course, is signed by the Bush administration.
And as I think your listeners all know, the military has been campaigning, military and the Pentagon, including Secretary Gates in particular, have been campaigning ever since Obama was elected to make sure that he did not, in fact, carry out the letter of that agreement, and certainly that he would continue to station troops after the end of 2011, as the military had wanted all along.
That was the intention of the Bush administration, of course, from the beginning of the Iraq invasion.
They intended to have bases in Iraq that they could use to project power into the rest of the region.
And so this has been a continuing campaign ever since late 2008 to make sure that U.S. troops would be stationed beyond 2011.
My story documents the two stages of this policy reaching the White House and getting a tentative agreement at least by Obama in September of last year to go along with the stationing of some 15,000 to 20,000 troops, perhaps even more if you include the unaccounted or unacknowledged, I should say, special operations forces in Iraq.
The story documents the fact that Obama allowed the Iraqi government to be informed that the U.S. was ready to consider that stationing arrangement if Prime Minister Maliki was going to send a letter, an official letter requesting that to the White House.
And then, of course, the second part of the story, the second sort of update, is in February when the U.S. longtime ally in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, was ousted from power.
Then you get a second stage with the Obama administration informing the Iraqis that now the White House was willing to station 15,000 to 20,000 troops, provided again that they got an official letter from al-Maliki.
All right, so the Pentagon has made no secret of the fact that they wanted to stay.
You pointed out that great clip of Jim Michalczewski on NBC News right at the time that Barack Obama was giving his first Iraq speech at Camp Lejeune there where they said, there's no way in hell that we're leaving.
In fact, I think Michalczewski was almost laughing, saying that, well, geez, I don't know what Obama's talking about.
Here at the Pentagon, the consensus is we're staying for 20 years at least.
And so now you're telling me that Obama— From Ray Odierno to the Washington Post, Tom Ricks, in late 2008, in which he talks about needing 30,000 troops to remain in Iraq to sort of keep things stabilized.
Odierno made no secret of the objective that he and his fellow generals, including, of course, Petraeus at that point, had in mind.
I should mention again he'll be my guest exclusively on Meet the Press Sunday.
Talk about his role, a carryover obviously notably from the Bush administration, very active in the surge strategy.
What role has he played in arriving at this decision about troops for President Obama?
Well, I want to make two quick points about Secretary Gates.
Even during the campaign, if you listen to what Secretary Gates was saying about the U.S. military operations in Iraq and what Barack Obama was saying, they were not that far apart.
Secretary Gates, as early as 18 months to two years ago, was saying, look, everybody understands that we're going to have to start withdrawing from Iraq.
But at the same time, Secretary Gates adds this caveat that, in fact, he believes significant numbers of troops will remain in Iraq for years to come.
And, in fact, military commanders, despite the standard of forces agreement with the Iraqi government that all U.S. forces would be out by the end of 2011, are already making plans for a significant number of American troops to remain in Iraq beyond that 2011 deadline, assuming that that SOFA agreement would be renegotiated.
And one senior military commander told us that he expects large numbers of American troops to be in Iraq for the next 15 to 20 years, David.
All right, so that was that clip of Jim Michalczewski there.
He's NBC's longtime Pentagon reporter there, has his little office at the Pentagon.
But so now, I guess back then, Gareth, you were explaining to me that you thought that the Pentagon was really pushing Obama, that he wanted to go, but they were going to try to make him stay.
But it sounds to me like he's down for this now.
He is.
There's no question about it.
And I quote the Iraqis as saying that they were informed that Obama now, once Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power, more than ever wanted to be sure that he wasn't tagged with the, quote, loss, unquote, of Iraq.
So it appears that the loss of Mubarak made the White House more willing than before to entertain the idea of substantial U.S. troops' true presence in Iraq after 2011.
But, of course, the second part of the story I think is really more important, Scott, and that is that there is abundant evidence now that the al-Maliki regime and Premier al-Maliki himself is simply not ready to make that request.
And I think it's a multilayered reality here that militates against the Iraqis requesting a continued U.S. troop presence.
On one hand, you've got the fact that the Sadrists are now back after being really much weakened, I mean, really losing their power in southern, that is, the Shiite region of Iraq.
They are really back, and they are not just kingmakers.
They are the strongest political military force in the country at this moment.
And al-Maliki really depends, again, on the Sadrists to maintain his position, to keep his government in power.
The Iraqi senior intelligence officer who told me about this made no bones about the fact that if al-Maliki were to request officially the stationing of U.S. troops beyond this year, the Sadrists would unseat him.
So that's one level of political reality in Iraq.
But I think now there's another level which is at least as important, and that is that you've got a new, not just Cold War, but really something approaching a hot war here between Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East region as a whole.
And, of course, now it revolves around the Bahrain events where the Saudis sent troops into Bahrain to back up that government and to allow them to repress the Shiite majority.
And the Iraqis are very upset about that.
They are very much committed to the Shiite side in that conflict, and that is affecting, without any question, this issue of relations with the United States.
All right, well, we'll have to hold it right there due to this heartbreak.
Sorry.
We'll be right back, everybody.
It's Gareth Porter, Antiwar.com/Porter.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from Interpress Service.
And we're talking about his new piece at IPSnews.net and at Antiwar.com/Porter, Molokai's Doubts Threaten Post-2011 Iraq Troop Presence.
Now, part one was about how, of course, the American empire wants to stay past the December 31, 2011 deadline for the complete withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq.
And we pretty much established that.
And now part two here is about all the different restraints on Molokai where even if we assume that he wanted to please his American clients or the other way around, he's restrained from doing so.
So go ahead and continue to elaborate there.
I think there is some restraint in the sense that the Sadrists would unseat him, as I said, and he knows that.
So he really doesn't have that option.
But on the other side of the picture, I think there's really a compulsion or a push on Molokai to go much closer to Iranian foreign policy than ever before because of this Sunni-Shiite really violent confrontation now in the Middle East, now focused on Bahrain.
But I should also mention that there's also a kind of subterranean confrontation here as well in Iraq itself because the Saudis have been supporting, of course, Sunni insurgents for years in Iraq.
It's well documented.
They really have not made much secret of it.
Certainly it has been published very widely.
And that has continued despite the fact the United States has complained to the Saudis about that.
And the Iraqi government is now more upset than ever before about this, about the Saudi role within Iraq, and they're claiming that the Saudis have actually sort of taken over what appears to be on the surface, at least, the al-Qaeda in Iraq franchise, but in fact it's kind of a false flag operation run by a former Ba'athist Saddamist general, a leader in the intelligence services from Jordan, but supported, again, by the Saudis.
So there's a sense here that there's a big confrontation building between Iran and Iraq on one side and the Saudis and their Sunni allies on the other.
And I think this is really a building story.
It's a story that we're going to hear more about, and I intend to write some more about it as well.
Well, it sounds like we're going to have to invade Iraq and regime change them from this religious fundamentalist Iran-aligned Shiite dictatorship they've built there.
Well, I think the real question is whether there's going to be – I was being given some broad hints that the Iraqis are going to become much more involved in Bahrain.
I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I think that we can look forward to more tensions and a real conflict around Bahrain here in the near future.
Well, you mean – well, I don't know.
You've got the Fifth Fleet is stationed there.
There's one other part of the story, Scott, that I want to make sure people know about.
I mentioned that both an American official and the Iraqi intelligence source that I got this story from agree that there's no guarantee that the Maliki regime is going to survive this summer.
He is under a lot of political pressure there from a protest movement that the Sunnis are mounting.
And one of the big questions is whether the Saudis will join that protest movement.
And should that happen, then the short-term outlook for the Maliki regime is very dark indeed.
But there's another factor even beyond that, and that is that the Iraqi military is quite upset that Maliki is dawdling over, refusing to go ahead with signing this letter, sending a letter to the White House requesting the stationing of American troops.
The Iraqi military, which is very close to the U.S. military, wants that very badly.
And I had a hint, even more than a hint, that it could be the case that the Iraqi military would try to carry out its own move against the Maliki regime.
In order so that they can keep the American troops there, which just means that they're going to have to fight another civil war against bin Tadal Sadr.
Yep, and I think that that is certainly something to watch for very closely.
Well now, so, I mean, it's been a long time, and I know the Supreme Islamic Council ain't what it used to be and whatever, but is it fair to say that the Iraqi army right now, I guess it's the leadership roles that are most important, but that's mostly made up of old Badr Corps types rather than Mahdi army guys?
Because I know there was a lot of Mahdi army that went to volunteer for the Iraqi army as well, right?
That's right.
Yep, although there are some, you know, in key positions there are some former Ba'athists as well.
Well, look, if Maliki's biggest threat is from, you know, Sunni protesters, then he's going to really need bin Tadal Sadr, which means that he's not going to sign Obama's document.
That's right.
I mean, I'm absolutely convinced that this is not going to happen.
I think it's very, very unlikely, let's put it that way.
I would be very surprised if he were to move in that direction at this point.
It just seems to me the factors are all lined up in the same direction.
Well now, in what way can America intervene in Bahrain without just immediately leading to a war with Iran?
Well, I don't think it's an American intervention there.
I think the Saudis are the ones that are the active force in Bahrain against the Shiites.
And so this is really shaping up as a Middle East Sunni Shiite cold war verging on hot war, or a cold war with covert operations, obviously, as a key element in the conflict.
And the question is just how far the Iraqis will go to combat the Saudi position in Bahrain.
And it's not clear to me what they have in mind.
That's something that I'm going to continue to follow.
Well, so, I mean, I hate to say it, but really we're stuck with the same good news that we've had all this time, which is that this evil torturer, murderer, Muqtada al-Sadr, the amount of power in his hands there is such that he's basically our best hope for not occupying Iraq forever, for really forcing us out of that country on the deadline, you know, whichever way the rest of these politics go.
Well, I think that's true, that Saudis' influence, Muqtada al-Sadr's influence, is a strong barrier to continued U.S. military presence.
I think that one should not, at least for 2011-2012, I think for the foreseeable future, the conflict that we're seeing emerge with greater ferocity with each passing week and month between Sunnis and Shiites has become a factor that I think is even more important in terms of the policies that the Iraqi government, the Shiite government of Iraq, as long as it's in power, is going to follow on the question of U.S. troops.
Oh, man, I wish we weren't out of time, because there's so much more to talk about.
We'll have to do this again next week.
I haven't had good Iraq coverage like this from you in a little while, Gareth.
Well, there's going to be more to come, I think.
But this is a story that's going to continue to develop, and I'll be trying at least to do my best to follow it.
Right on.
Well, you know my eyes will be on what you write.
It's antiwar.com/porter, everybody, the great Gareth Porter.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
