09/17/07 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 92.7, 95.9 here in Austin, Texas every weekday, 11 to 1.
And welcoming back to the show the great historian, independent historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter.
He writes for IPS News.
You can find all his IPS articles at antiwar.com/porter.
He also writes for the Huffington Post, the American Prospect, and who knows what else.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks very much, Scott.
It's good to talk to you again, my friend, and you've written three great articles since we've last spoken, which is no surprise to me.
And I can't figure out why I ought to let you go by with writing anything that I don't end up interviewing you about it.
Particularly, I love this brand new one.
Let's start with this brand new one, which hopefully should be up on antiwar.com tomorrow, looks like, if IPS is running it this afternoon.
Yes, it should come up this afternoon, Scott.
And it's the proxy war.
General Petraeus told the U.S. Congress repeatedly in his testimony last week, basically, that the problem is Iran.
The reason everything is going wrong is because of Iran and that they are waging a proxy war against our guys in Iraq.
Well, this is the latest version of a political line that really began, people may recall, in January, when President Bush announced the surge policy.
He also announced that we were targeting, the U.S. military was going to be targeting Iranian agents, by which he meant the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Quds Force, in Iraq, and the rationale for that was that these Iranian agents were supposedly threatening American troops, that they were involved in traffic in the explosively formed penetrators, other arms, and were directly working with the militias that were attacking coalition forces.
So that was the rationale for seizing.
In fact, the order was to kill or capture, although so far, as far as we know, no Iranians have been killed.
There were two cases of Iranian officials who were seized, once in Baghdad in December, and once in Erbil in Kurdistan in January.
And so at the time of the Bush speech on January 10th, the second operation to seize Iranian diplomats or Iranian officials was actually just to take place momentarily or had already taken place, and was then discussed as soon as the speech was over, was announced by the U.S. military.
Now, my point here is that the hardliners in the administration, Dick Cheney and his followers in the administration, wanted very badly to get this policy underway of targeting Iranians in Iraq.
And Dafna Linzer, the excellent reporter for The Washington Post, who has been covering U.S. relations with Iran for the last couple of years, did an in-depth report, which came out in February of this year, which pointed out the origins of that policy was, in fact, the Cheney faction of the administration, although she didn't use that term, pushing this line of attacking Iranian representatives in Iraq, meaning the Quds Force representatives, because of their supposedly threatened U.S. troops.
Now, what she said at the time is very interesting, that the intelligence community, the State Department, the Defense Department were all skeptical of this line because they feared that it was a way of getting the United States into an escalating conflict with Iran.
And, of course, that is precisely the case.
And now we see General Petraeus embracing this line of a proxy war, which he says specifically is being waged in Iraq by the Quds Force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iraq.
And what I've done in this story is really to round up the evidence that we have available now to evaluate the case that has been made officially, now by Petraeus, that Iranian agents on the ground in Iraq have been working with Shiite militias and providing them with arms, including the EFPs, to kill American troops, among others.
And what I found was that there really is no evidence that they have been able to come up with since the announcement of targeting of the Quds Force agent in Iraq.
But in fact, the opposite is the case, that new information has now emerged to make it clear that, in fact, there was no Quds Force role in Iraq of directly engaging with Shiite militias.
They neither trained them nor consorted with them, advised them, had any operational role in regard to Shiite militias in Iraq, nor did they have a role in actually being part of a network to provide explosively formed penetrators or any other weapon.
So, in fact, what we find is that the Quds Force in Iraq essentially has been an intelligence gathering outfit.
That's what they're there for.
And there's such small numbers, perhaps a few dozen, according to the estimate that has come out most recently from the U.S. command, that, you know, there's not much that they could have done in any case had they even had the role of being operational in Iraq.
But I think the evidence now is reasonably clear that the Quds Force does not have an operational role.
It's merely they're going in and out, essentially reporting on what's going on and reporting back to Tehran.
And in fact, what I point out in this article is that the biggest, the most important briefing provided on the Quds Force so far was July 2 by Brigadier General Kevin Burgener, which I've mentioned before on your show.
And in that briefing, he actually acknowledges that it was Hezbollah which was doing the training of the Shiite militias in Iraq, not Iranian, not the Quds Force.
And he essentially admits that, under questioning, that the Quds Force is avoiding direct relations with the Shiite militias, because they're obviously afraid that it will give the Bush administration a pretext for attacking Iran and Iran.
So this is the kind of evidence that we're beginning to see emerging on the question.
Right.
I really like that.
The proof that Iran is behind it is that they're not behind it.
It's Hezbollah.
But we all know Hezbollah only does what Iran says.
Well, that is part of the political line, of course.
But it's the second level.
It's when you get to the point of asking, well, isn't this really Hezbollah?
Then the answer is, but of course Hezbollah is a proxy of the Iranians.
So it is, in effect, Iranian.
Well, what about that?
I mean, Iran does give Hezbollah a lot of money, don't they?
Absolutely.
There's no doubt that Hezbollah is heavily supported by Iran.
But one of the things that I try to document in the article that's coming out today is that the Shiite militias, the Mahdi Army specifically, has had a long history of contact with the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon.
And that, however that started, and it may indeed, you know, Iran may have played some role in helping to facilitate it at some point, but clearly the Mahdi Army was capable of having their own relationship with Hezbollah independent of Iran.
And Hezbollah, for its own reasons, because of the fellow, the Shiite fellowship with the Mahdi Army, you know, was perfectly, you know, had its own individual reasons for entering into a relationship of training and providing a technical assistance to the Mahdi Army.
So it does not require the Iranian orders or the Iranian OK for Hezbollah to enter into a relationship separately with the Mahdi Army.
And there is a lot of information, a lot of indication that the Mahdi Army has in fact had a separate relationship with Hezbollah, which was not being monitored by or fostered by Iran for some time, going back probably to 2004, and that that is the key relationship for training, probably for EFPs, probably for a sort of technical assistance relationship, not the relationship with Iran.
All right, now let me see here if I can try to recap some of this.
First of all, the President, as you've recounted for us here, announced in January the policy that he's ordering the military to capture or kill any Iranians interfering, and yet they've got nothing.
Maybe they had already arrested or kidnapped, I guess is really the more accurate phrase, some Iranian diplomat types in December, and then again in January, but these guys in no way were identifiable as Quds Force or as people who were training any Shiite militias to fight Americans.
Is that...
Well, absolutely.
I mean, that's a point that I do cover in my article, actually, which I haven't had a chance to talk about.
The Iranians who were detained in Baghdad in December of 2006 were actually captured in the home of the head of the Badr Corps, Hadi al-Amiri, who is also the chief of the parliamentary committee on national security.
Wait, hold it right there.
I'm sorry.
I interrupted you.
What did you say the guy's name was?
Hadi al-Amiri.
Now, this is an associate of Hakeem's?
That's right.
He works with al-Hakeem, the head of the Supreme Council, what used to be called the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which, of course, is the main Shiite party now in Iraq, which remains reasonably well-disposed toward the occupation.
Right.
And now, this is really important here, too, is the split between the Sadr family and the Hakeem family.
It's sort of a Hatfield and La Croix shirts and skins kind of thing.
Right.
And we've talked about that before.
Exactly.
And this is so important that the Iranians, as you're saying, the ones who've been caught, you know, so-called caught for interfering in Iraq, they're friends with the same guys as us.
Well, that's exactly right.
In fact, you know, this raises a broader question, which I think we have touched on before, but it's worth repeating.
The Iranian policy toward Iraq is, you know, the element of that policy which has been neglected just very badly by the U.S. media is that they are even more supportive of the al-Maliki government than the United States.
Right.
The United States is, let's say, of two minds toward the Maliki government.
You know, there's no doubt that they are heavily dissatisfied with it.
They would love to have a different government in power, but, you know, unless they're going to do a military coup, which is fraught with all kinds of risks, and it's very doubtful that's going to happen, they're kind of stuck with al-Maliki.
On the other hand, Iran, I think it's safe to say, is very much more supportive of Maliki.
And in the latest meeting between Iran and the United States, the Iranian ambassador who participated in the meeting has revealed publicly that in that meeting he made it very clear that it would be totally unacceptable to Iran for the United States to do anything to destabilize or upset the Maliki government, and that there was fear on both the Iraqi government part and the Iranian part that that was indeed in the wind, that all this stuff about, you know, a possible coup and the former Prime Minister Allawi, the acting Prime Minister Allawi trying to make a comeback and having a public relations firm representing him in Washington, all that stuff was causing the Iranians and Maliki, Prime Minister Maliki, to fear that the United States might try to do something to overthrow the government.
And now, on that note, do you think that that's blown over, that Allawi could?
Well, I think it has, I think it has, because that's really not a live option for the U.S. government, certainly.
That does not mean that Maliki is a stable, you know, has a stable government from it.
I think that there's a possibility that there could be still a change of government.
Now, this has happened before, and to what degree I'm not apparently able to measure very well, but there's news reports that Sadr has withdrawn his members from the parliament again.
That's right, yes.
And so this really cements the split between the Sadrs and the Hakims in the sense that the United Iraqi Alliance came together basically with a compromise whereby instead of putting in a guy from Skiri, they put in a guy from the Dawah party, and that was basically a good enough compromise for Mu'tad al-Sadr.
But if he's now breaking out of the United Iraqi Alliance, what does that mean for the future of the Maliki government?
Well, it's hard for me to try to analyze all the forces that are at work and to make a prediction about that.
But in general, I mean, I think that Sadr is continuing to hold a very strong hand in terms of bargaining for the possibility of a future government.
And I must say that the United States has a much more nuanced position toward Sadr than they let on.
I mean, they are, on one hand, going all out to suppress anybody in the Mahdi army who is using force to resist the occupation, but on the other hand, there's no doubt that they have tried to cozy up to Sadr as much as they can.
But Sadr so far has refused to meet with any American official, certainly to meet with the ambassador.
I'm not sure if he has ever met with an American official or not, but he's refused publicly to meet with the ambassador.
And the United States has really had difficulty trying to get a handle on Sadr.
I think that's still one of the missing pieces in the puzzle for this administration, that they would like to figure out a way to tame him, but they haven't been able to.
Now, you know, I wonder sometimes whether the people in the audience just go cross-eyed trying to keep track of, you know, this group of Shiites and that group of Shiites and this battle in Iran, funding this group or that group.
But to me, it's so important that we focus on not just the complete and total lack of evidence that Iran is supplying guys who are killing our guys in Iraq, but that it doesn't even make sense, you know, the Iranians have always, as you just said, they favor the Maliki government even more than we do.
And it doesn't make any sense to think that the Iranians, who America has been their best allies in Iraq and still are really this whole time, that they would be the ones behind killing our guys.
Well, I am, you know, I am in general, as you well know, I'm in general sympathy with that whole point.
I am, however, going to take one footnote, which is an important one, a caveat, if you will.
And that is that I said earlier that the fear of the intelligence community, the State Department and Defense Department last fall, when it was first proposed that we target Iranian officials in Iraq, was that this would lead to an escalating conflict between the United States and Iran focused on Iraq.
And I think that that is happening.
And I'll tell you why.
I'm going to reveal, again, something which I've not published yet, but I'll be working on this week.
I had a meeting last week with a senior government official.
I could not name him under the rules of my interview, although, you know, I must say that what he said was by no means confidential.
It was the official line, carefully cooked.
But that official line was very chilling.
What he said was that the United States and Iran effectively are, I mean, these are not his words, but I'm reconstructing the sense of what he was saying, the United States and Iran are in the process of struggling over the future of dominance in the Middle East.
And he characterized Iranian policy as one of escalation dominance inside Iraq, that what is going on right now is an Iranian policy to respond essentially to the policy the United States followed of attacking Iranians within Iraq, that eventually the Iranians came around to getting new or damaging weapons of these rockets, 240-millimeter rockets, which were actually targeting the Green Zone, and quite effectively so, fired by, of course, the Shiite militias into the Green Zone and raising the cost effectively of U.S. policy.
Now, you know, again, I don't know the actual facts on the ground.
I don't know where the 240-millimeter rockets came from, but it is certainly plausible to me that there is now a new dynamic, which we're going to have to take account of, which is that Iran has felt the need to make some kind of response to what has happened earlier in the year in Iraq in December of 2006, January 2007, and the rhetoric that was being put forward by the Bush administration, and that there is now a greater risk of this escalation on both sides.
So that is why, you know, I would, while continuing to pursue the debunking of the accusations by the administration about EFPs and about weapons going into Iraq, I think all that is still true, there may also now be a new dynamic, which is much more dangerous, of both sides escalating their activity in some way to raise the cost to the other.
Well, you know, Dick Cheney's got to be grinning from ear to ear.
I mean, here you have, Iran has been America's best friend in Iraq this whole time, and now, curses, it's time for our sudden but inevitable betrayal, and so they begin preparing for the stab in the back, and then that's the excuse for the stab in the back, is that they're starting to prepare for the next fight.
Yes, I mean, there's always the self-fulfilling prophecy and the, you know, essentially self-defeating, you know, in the sense of the interest of the American people, at least, the self-defeating character of U.S. initiatives toward the countries, the states that it chooses to treat as enemies, and that is exactly what is going on here, no question about it.
I mean, what the Cheney group wanted all along was to provoke the Iranians to do something that would then allow them to take the next step up, and I think you're right, that's exactly where we are at the moment.
And I must say that this official, you know, surprised me in the degree to which the language of sort of escalation of the conflict has now become so explicit in a presentation to a reporter.
Well, you know, I think that the flavor of the kind of media line and the propaganda has changed in the sense, I guess as the Sunday Telegraph article over the weekend, which talked about the plan for a war, I think they even pointed out in that article that normally we only hear this kind of talk from critics who say, you know, look out, they're planning a war.
But no, this is the people who are for it, these are the people in the administration, and they're saying, look, this is the deal, we're headed toward war, and you know, probably from their point of view, they'd rather wait till after the primaries or whatever, but if they can get a pretext before then, then they'll do it before then.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, you know, it's always difficult for those of us who are trying to sort out propaganda from the truth, to know exactly when they are really this time talking about absolutely going to war, as opposed to feigning for the purpose of putting pressure on Iran.
And I'm always cognizant of that, and I must say that it does plague me constantly.
Well, you know, this is one of the reasons I became such a big fan of yours actually back when I first started this show at the beginning of the year, was a lot of people were really worried that the war was going to happen in February or March, it was going to get started sometime this spring, and you came out and said, no, no, no, because look at this press conference where Condoleezza Rice made it clear that that's just for the rubes, that they're still giving talks a chance and what have you.
And so I really appreciate the fact that you didn't fall for it last time.
Well, you know, I'm glad you mentioned that, because to me it's very important now to, and I keep going back to what happened in the early weeks of this year, because it is so important to try to understand it, I now see that the line that was being taken in early 2007, which was, you know, we will go after the Iranians in Iraq, but we will not cross the border.
So that was the bottom line, although there were faints initially in the first couple of days about the possibility of crossing the border, then they reaffirmed, no, we're not going to cross the border into Iran.
I mean, I think that that was clearly a compromise between those people who were looking for some sort of opportunity to say, well, if the Iranians do such and such a thing, we should be ready to cross the border.
And the position of the intelligence community, state and defense, which was, no, you know, we will not do that, we will confine this to Iraq.
So I think that, you know, in some sense, the state and defense people, you know, basically Condi Rice and Gates went along with that line because they felt that it was a way to confine the conflict to Iraq, rather than having, you know, giving the Cheney folks the opportunity to have a way of going across the border into Iran.
So I mean, those are the sorts of games that I think were being played then and are still being played today, although, you know, again, I'm concerned that there may be a growing unity within the administration now between the so-called realists, not sure how realistic they are, and the real Warhawks, the hardline Cheney folks.
Yeah, well, that's what the Sunday Telegraph was reporting, that Condoleezza Rice is now on board.
I'm inclined to think that that may be correct now.
I'm very concerned that that may be correct.
And you know, when the story came back up, because, you know, we've been talking about this for years, really, but when this really came back up in January, Hillary Mann, who was a member of the National Security Council, told Newsweek, oh, look, they're looking for an excuse.
They're trying to find a way to provoke Iran into hitting us so that we can hit them back and escalate it from there.
Right.
And I mean, she was on the National Security Council.
Yes, I think that's a very telling point, that someone who had worked day to day with the vice president's office and others, who was actually convinced that that was what they had in mind, that that's a very interesting piece of data.
Yeah, well, and was worried about, worried enough about it that she talked to Newsweek about it.
Yeah.
And gave them a quote like that.
I mean, that's a pretty astounding thing that, hey, they're looking for a Gulf of Tonkin type incident.
That wasn't her exact words, but that was basically what she was saying.
Exactly.
No, it is the same, it's the same strategy of provocation that was explicitly put forward by virtually everyone in the Johnson administration in 1964.
It's absolutely fascinating parallel there.
All right, well, I really like this one.
Tell me what you make of this.
This is from yesterday, Sunday, September 16th.
NATO commander confirms more weapons from Iran seized.
A convoy of explosives seized by NATO troops in Afghanistan definitely came from Iran, but not necessarily from the government in Tehran, a top NATO general here said Sunday.
And I really like this quote.
It's from General Dan McNeil, head of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
He says, the geographic origin of that convoy was clearly Iran, but take note that I did not say it's the Iranian government, the general told AFP in an interview.
Right.
He, of course, as you well know, has repeated that point over the last few months because he knows that Cheney's office has been pushing to try to get the government officials to say that publicly that, in fact, Iran is assisting the Taliban with weapons now.
And I think this is the third time now that he has come out publicly and said no.
He does not accept that.
He does not believe that's true.
And isn't that important?
For the people in the audience, what does that mean to them that a general is coming out and giving a quote like that to the AFP?
Well, I think that it shows that there are, that the relationship between the military command from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the central command, which is headed by William Fallon, Admiral William Fallon, and includes the command in Afghanistan.
All of those military leadership elements have a degree of independence from the White House line on the war in the Middle East, talking about Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, which is independent from the vice president's office in the White House.
But on the other hand, you have the U.S. command in Iraq, which has a special relationship with the White House, which has essentially stripped any independence that it has had politically from the White House line.
And therefore, I think what you have here is, on one hand, Petraeus and Odierno, his number two commander in Iraq, have taken a line politically that comes straight from the vice president's office, the National Security Council, and the White House, whereas the rest of the command, including Fallon and McNeil in Afghanistan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are not enamored by that policy line at all, and have in various ways over the past few months managed to convey the disagreement that they have with the policy both of the surge in Iraq, to some extent, and even to a greater extent, the aggressive policy toward Iran, which they fear could in fact lead to a conflagration, which they do not support.
Yeah, and the implications of that are pretty vast, I would think, that the brass, at least the ones who are in a position to be able to resist at all, are debunking the Cheney line every chance they get.
They're basically thwarting his will, or attempting to, it sounds like.
I think that's right.
This goes back to a story that I did in May, in which I quoted Admiral Fallon as saying that there would not be a war against Iran on his watch, and implying that he would quit rather than carry out an order to carry on a war against Iran, and saying that he and others were committed to trying to put the crazies back in the box, as he put it, to a source that I quoted.
And this brings us to your big scoop from last week about Admiral Fallon and his relationship with General Petraeus.
Before you recount for us your great scoop here, I'm going to have to ask you to defend yourself, Gareth Porter, because I read a few different places on the internet that whatever Gareth Porter might say about Admiral Fallon and General Petraeus, we shouldn't listen to that, because he's some kind of brand of left-winger or another.
That's right.
I'm qualified from being able to report on that, because I am anti-war, you are correct.
There are certain websites who will remain unnamed, I'm happy to not name them, which have made that point.
And I have had an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of that, which I assume is that you have no right to report on certain questions involving national security.
If you are anti-war, that it's only acceptable if you support the administration's position or have no notion whatsoever about it, if you've never thought about it.
Either of those would be presumably acceptable.
Well, and of course, that's the way it is on TV, right, is, well, now you used to be for this war, but now you're not.
What happened?
That's what gives you credibility.
No one who opposed the war all along is allowed on to say, yeah, I told you so, and this is what I told you.
Right.
Well, you know, it has occurred to me that, you know, if I had an opportunity to confront the people who make that kind of argument, I would like to ask them, well, do you regard it as unacceptable for Michael R. Gordon, who has publicly declared on the Charlie Rose show that the United States has not tried to win in Iraq and should try to win and can win in Iraq, has a very clear, precise, publicly declared point of view about the war.
Do you regard that as disqualifying him from reporting on these very sensitive political issues?
No, that, of course, means that he's the only real objective reporter out there.
Right.
So this is, you know, I mean, I think I have a very clear conscience on this because it is my considered position that everyone who reports on these issues has a position, whether it is pro, con, or I don't care.
Those are all positions.
And therefore, you know, I am essentially no different in having my own convictions about this issue or this complex of issues than anybody else who reports.
And I have nothing to hide.
I do not hide the analysis that I have of it.
I do both reporting and analysis.
I do the full spectrum, if you will, of writing about these issues.
Sure.
Yeah, you come on the show every week to explain what you mean.
Exactly.
And so, you know, I feel that I'm totally transparent.
Everybody who wants to can disagree with me or pick my reporting or my analysis apart.
But it's kind of laughable for someone to say that, well, you know, he shouldn't be listened to because he has that position on the war.
Yeah.
Okay, now let's get to it.
So what did you find out about Admiral Fallon and General Petraeus?
Well, this is a story that, just as an introduction to the story, I actually got the original story back in May about the first meeting of Admiral Fallon as CENTCOM commander and General Petraeus as the new commander of multinational forces in Iraq.
And what I was told was that Admiral Fallon really was ticked off at Petraeus's manner, which he found to be, shall we say, a suck-up, as some people would define it.
Others would say he was ingratiating himself with his superior.
And of course, at that point, Fallon had just become CENTCOM commander and was technically General Petraeus's superior in the chain of command.
And so what Fallon did was to say, you know, you are...
Can I say this on your show?
Yeah, you can say anything you want on this show.
You are nothing but an ass-kissing little chicken shit.
And I hate people like that.
And this was apparently a deeply felt response to not just Petraeus's personal manner in that specific encounter, but more generally, his perception of the way Petraeus operated.
And the background of it, of course, was that Petraeus had just not only agreed to take on the surge policy, which was handed to him by the administration, you know, in a kind of passive way, but then had lent himself, as I point out in the article that was published last week, he lent himself to the political effort by the administration to sell the surge policy the first and second week in February in the Senate when there was a vote, which the administration badly needed to pick up, you know, make sure it had Republican support in particular.
And so what happened was that Petraeus was installed in the office of minority leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican from Kentucky.
And he was there throughout the debate, and the Republican operatives, the administration operatives went down on the floor and asked people to go talk to Petraeus to get his argument in favor of the surge.
So you know, this was a very, very unusual, I would say, absolutely unprecedented political role for a commander who would have been nominated to be sent out to become the top commander in a war but had not yet taken command.
And does that just completely give the truth to the lie that somehow, you know, this is the Petraeus doctrine and he's a great general and he came up with this, when, you know, we all know that this was a project of the American Enterprise Institute and a bunch of soft-handed civilians in the vice president's office, they passed it down to him?
Yeah, there's no doubt that this was a very important part of the reaction to Petraeus on the part of Admiral Fallon.
Now, you know, what you have to know about Admiral Fallon is that he is, there are two things, really.
One is that he comes from an institution, the Navy, in which I understand from military folks who are very much more involved and much more knowledgeable about institutional cultures, is an institutional culture in which you're expected to piss people off in your rise to an admiral's position.
If you don't, then you're not doing your job.
And Fallon is about as crusty, about as abrasive as they come as a naval officer.
And so he brought to this issue and to that personal encounter an attitude that anybody who ingratiates themselves with a superior is really not much of an officer.
And then, you know, that's one part of it.
And then the second part that you have to know about Fallon is that he has not only sort of been willing to take on enemies within the Navy, but he also was ready to anger a lot of neoconservatives and, you know, high-ranking military brass in the Pentagon when he was the commander of the Pacific Command, the sink-pack, so-called, in the mid-2005 to 2007 period.
And the main issue, of course, that he had as sink-pack was the relationship with China.
And the brass and the powers that be in the Pentagon wanted China as the enemy.
They wanted to finger China as the future enemy of the United States and as the great peril to the U.S. position of dominance in the world.
And Fallon wasn't having it.
I mean, he favored a policy of rapprochement with China and military cooperation with China.
And it's well known that he made some more enemies, made a lot of enemies during that period.
So, A, he's somebody who's ready to cross the people who have the power, and B, he has been known to favor diplomatic rapprochement rather than confrontation.
And that appears to be his attitude towards the situation in the Middle East today in regard to Iran specifically.
Wow, yeah, I hate to be distracted by it, but I have to go down this tangent.
What does that reveal about the mindset of the people in charge of American foreign policy, the brass, as you say, the belligerent brass in the Navy and the guys in the vice president's office that they think that they want to pick a fight with China?
I mean, don't we owe them bazillions of dollars?
Wouldn't that be the breakdown of the entire world's economy, a Great Depression, possibly full scale nuclear war?
I mean, these guys, who wants to pick a fight with China?
You'd have to be absolutely insane.
Well, honestly, to be quite frank, I don't think any of the neoconservatives or the military brass who favored the hard line towards China ever imagined, or imagined, I should say, that the United States would actually fight a war with China.
That's simply not imagined.
Okay, we're not talking about going that far.
We're not talking about going that far.
In fact, what we're talking about is simply a declaratory policy of saying, oh, China is the big threat, because that is, of course, the necessary premise for all of the military services to get the kind of hardware, big weapons systems, and big budgets that they need to maintain themselves in the manner to which they're accustomed.
Yeah, there you go.
It seems like in almost every one of these things, there's a gigantic welfare check for some guy who's already a billionaire that has a lot to do with it.
Well, that's exactly right.
You could characterize the people who are taking that position as the equivalent of those billionaires who really keep getting the gravy.
Yeah.
Wow.
So, really, we're all out of time, but we can go on, because we've still got a few minutes before the next guest.
Let's talk about kind of the overall kind of broad policy and the formulation going on here.
You and I have talked quite a few times about the role of the Israel lobby, the role of the military industrial complex, the role of ideology in American policy in the Middle East, and now particularly that it seems like we're on the eve of war with Iran.
I guess to my eyes, it seems like the majority of the establishment was brought on board for Iraq and said, okay, if you guys really want to do this, we'll go along with it.
It doesn't seem like that's really the case with Iran.
It doesn't seem like there's many people left in the war party in the United States.
So I wonder, who really do you think is pushing this strategy to escalate conflict in the Middle East at this point?
And if I may, let me preface my answer to that specific question by answering a closely related question, which is who is really opposed actively or clearly, let me put it that way, who is clearly opposed to going to war with Iran at this point?
And I think it is very important to understand that because it does shed light on the other side of the equation.
And I raise that issue because last week, I thought I would begin to try to work on an eventual story about the reaction, particularly in the Senate, to the indications that the war party in the administration is gaining ground and that they are, in fact, making more and more sounds like they are determined that there is going to be a military solution to the problem before the end of the Bush administration, for sure.
And so I began to call some of the Senate offices, which you would expect to be particularly vocal on this issue, to find out, well, has your senator said anything about this?
If they have, I haven't seen it.
And I have to tell you, of course, it was in the middle of the Petraeus-Crocker testimony, so there is a reasonable explanation for this, but I really was unable to get any information of any kind that any of the usual suspects, the logical suspects, who you might expect to have made a comment about Iran and about the danger of war, given the aggressive administration policy, that any of those senators have said anything about it.
And I think I am correct in saying that really there is no senator who has yet made a clear statement that war with Iran is absolutely unacceptable and we should definitely oppose it.
Now, partly this is, of course, because the issue is not front and center.
It is still in the background, it hovers in the background rather than being in the foreground.
And senators, as political beings, are reluctant to get out in front.
And so I'm sure that's a major part of the storyline.
But I do think that's significant, that there is not yet even the beginning of even the most elementary kind of position against going to war against Iran.
It has thus far passed under the radar as though it were acceptable.
Yeah.
Well, now, we see people like Zbigniew Brzezinski and even James Baker, I remember, went on a Sunday morning news show and said, we don't talk to Iran.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
Well, that's true.
I mean, there's no doubt that there's very widespread criticism of the administration for its failure to use diplomacy.
And I think that is significant.
That's important.
That's hopeful.
But what I'm missing here is a little bit of spine behind that position, which is that if you don't use diplomacy and you do go to war, we will oppose you and we will make it known ahead of time.
Now, what I'm concerned about and the reason I raise this is that I'm afraid that the Senate, that Democrats in the Senate and in the House, the leadership of the Democratic Party in both houses, has disarmed itself by its failure to take any position.
Now, of course, that could change and I hope it does change.
But I think it's very important that the leadership of the Democratic Party, you know, take seriously the fact that they have to be out in front.
They can't wait until the last minute and say, you know, well, you know, now that you're in the process of going to war, now we don't like it.
Well, do you think that the Democrats would prefer to just go ahead and have a war, let it all be George Bush's fault?
Well, I think this is a very complicated problem for the Democrats.
You just mentioned the Israel lobby, AIPAC specifically, as obviously has great influence over all of the major Democratic figures, all of whom have clearly gotten AIPAC money for their campaigns in the past, all of whom have either spoken at AIPAC functions or have avoided criticism of positions AIPAC has taken.
And therefore, you know, there is the element of fear of offending AIPAC unless the stakes are extremely high, unless it's a very urgent issue.
And I think that does play a role in this passivity on the issue.
So that's part of the mix.
And so, you know, I think that, you know, we have a structural problem, is what I'm trying to say, that we should be very concerned about and which require activists to really, you know, get their act together and understand that they have to be proactive.
They can't wait until it's too late.
All right.
Well, let's wrap this up real quick here, Gareth Porter, with for the third time now, it's being reported in just the last, what, two or three weeks, I think, for the third time, a major Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader, commander.
I think the first one, it was a retired commander.
And then since then, there have been two more open statements by the Iranians that, look, you think you have us around it.
We have you surrounded.
We know where all your guys are in Afghanistan.
We know where all your guys are in Iraq.
And you want to bomb us?
We're going to bomb you.
And here it is again.
It's on my blog, thestressblog.com right now.
My friend Vineyard Saker posted it up.
A top general in the Revolutionary Guard said that Iran's missiles could hit a range of targets belonging to U.S. troops operating in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today, the Americans are around our country, but this does not mean they are encircling us.
They are encircling themselves and are within our range, General Mohammed Hassan Kosechi told IRNA.
Well, this is this is the deterrent posture of a weaker state.
I mean, the weaker state confronted with a much more powerful state has to exaggerate as much as possible, as much as it can, its ability to retaliate.
So you think that that is quite exaggerated?
I don't know how exaggerated it is.
All I'm saying is that it is in the interest of Iran to maximize its deterrent threat.
And you know, I go back to the case of U.S. and China.
That's what the Chinese did.
They used every possible, you know, means of threatening the United States in retaliation, which was not nearly as much as Iran has.
But there's no doubt that they're doing everything possible to remind Americans, Israelis and America's allies of the ability of Iran to retaliate.
And there's no doubt that they have that ability.
I'm not an intelligence expert.
I'm not an expert enough to know precisely, you know, what their capabilities are in each of these cases.
For example, you know, how much they could deliver against Israel, how much they could do damage to U.S. ships in the Gulf.
But there's no doubt that some damage can be done, and it would be significant.
Now, I hate to, you know, kind of play up too much, you know, Iran's propaganda along those lines, or for that matter, the propaganda of the war party that would like to make the Iranian propaganda seem true, that, for example, there are Hamas and Hezbollah all over America ready to strike.
On one hand, I think, well, there's probably some Hamas and Hezbollah who would strike, who are in the United States if there were a war with Iran.
But then, on the other hand, I kind of think, well, you know, this is a talking point of the war party and trying to tell me this is why we ought to bomb them.
Yeah, I must say, personally, I am skeptical about the idea of Hezbollah operatives in North America who would be striking as terrorists against the United States.
I simply don't believe that that's the case, and I'll tell you why.
I mean, you know, it is theoretically possible, but I do know, because I have done research on the case of the tri-border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, that the United States has vastly exaggerated and even manufactured the threat of Hezbollah terrorism in that area.
It just didn't exist, but they claimed that it did.
They stated it as a fact.
So there is that background, and I tend to think that to the extent that you have reports from government, you know, anonymous sources or even public sources, let alone neoconservative or right-wing sources, that that is a vast exaggeration and should not be taken at face value.
And in fact, you know, when I talked with Philip Giraldi, the former CIA officer, he said, oh, yeah, I think I read about some Hamas guys who were selling cigarettes out of their trunk, tax-free.
Right, yeah, that's the case that's always cited.
Yeah, yeah, these guys are a real danger.
But on the other hand, I mean, if America does bomb Iran, the possibility of Hamas or Hezbollah types blowing up stuff in Europe, is that a threat, do you think?
Hezbollah in Europe?
You know, I tend to think that that is much less likely than Hezbollah in countries where there is a very significant Shiite population.
And in Europe, there's not?
Well, I mean, there are obviously individuals, and, you know, that's again a theoretical possibility, but, you know, I'm not sure that that would make the statement, the message that Iran wants to send at this point.
Yeah.
Well, geez, I wish, I guess I'll try to ask you, do you have any idea how we can stop this war from happening other than, you know, continuing to be a great investigative reporter and debunking everybody's lies?
My view is that the most important thing is to organize delegations to go see particularly members of the Senate, to get appointments with the member and with their aides who deal with these issues, with the Middle East, and to take in the relevant facts, get your facts lined up, make sure you know what it is that you need to convey to the member, and challenge them.
Make sure you know what they've said and what they haven't said, and challenge them directly.
Make sure that you know exactly what their position is on this war, and if they're unwilling to come out against it, then you make it clear that there will be a cost to them politically, that people will organize against them, but this will not be forgotten.
I think all those things need to happen.
That's great advice.
All right, everybody.
The independent historian and investigative reporter from IPS News, Gareth Porter.
Thanks again for your time, sir.
Thanks so much for having me, Scott.