Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Very happy to welcome Gareth Porter back to the show.
This will be our 135th interview, something like that.
He writes for Interpress Service, IPSnews.net, and we keep his archive also at antiwar.com.
Well, it'll forward you on there anyway.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks again for having me on, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
Last Friday, Barack Obama announced again, somehow, the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, just like in his campaign promise.
What do you know?
Well, I know that this marks the end of the fiction that the United States could actually have a long-term presence in Iraq, which was, of course, the aspiration of the Bush administration.
And then, despite the campaign promise by Barack Obama, the national security state again prevailed on Obama to try to maintain a significant U.S. military presence.
They put a lot of pressure on him to do that.
And in the middle of last year, 2010, it appeared that they had gotten the White House to go along with a scheme to try to prevail on the government of Iraq to keep as many as 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops there.
And presumably with a great emphasis on special operations forces and air power, which is the preferred combination of forces that the U.S. military wants to keep in these situations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
So we've seen this play out over the last year or so, more than a year now, between U.S. pressure on the Iraqi government, on al-Maliki, and his cabinet to request U.S. troops to stay in Iraq, and the politics within Iraq, very complicated politics around this.
I think the Iraqi military very badly wanted a continued U.S. military presence of some sort and was exerting its pressure within the administration there.
But on the other hand, I think the Shia component of the Iraqi government, and particularly those aligned with Muqtada al-Sadr, of course, were against this.
And in the end, it was simply not possible for any Iraqi government, I think, to say yes to the pressure from the United States to keep troops there.
I mean, it would have been political suicide in the end, and al-Maliki knew that.
He was, I think, trying to find some formula by which he could go along with the Americans but be protected somehow politically from the consequences.
But he would never have to say that it was him doing it.
In the end, I don't think that was possible.
Too many Iraqis, the vast majority of Iraqis, are dead set against a U.S. military presence there for obvious reasons.
Well, it seems to me like if their fate wasn't sealed the moment that the Baathist regime fell, it certainly was sealed on the day that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani came out and said, hey, if you believe in God, I'd like you to go outside and demand one man, one vote.
That's right, exactly.
I mean, it was in 2004, or late 2003, I guess it was actually, late 2003, right?
I think it was spring of 4.
Spring of 4.
That the Shia took to the streets, a huge demonstration, and really made it seem impossible for the United States to do what it wanted to do, which was essentially to avoid having any elections in Iraq for some years.
Yeah, they were going to do this caucus system where Paul Bremer handpicked everybody.
Exactly, yeah.
So they could basically have a government that would be handpicked and would fulfill U.S. requirements in terms of strategic interests, meaning, what else?
Basically approve a long-term U.S. military presence.
Because that was, I would argue, and I think the facts on this speak for themselves, that was overwhelmingly the dominant interest that propelled the United States to invade Iraq.
It was the idea that we could use Iraq as a massive military base to project U.S. military power into the rest of the Middle East, so that we could change the political map, as they like to talk about in the neocon circles in 2003, 2004, 2005.
That was the animating aspiration.
And again, they had such overconfidence about this that they were completely taken aback.
It's very clear they were totally taken aback in 2008, when al-Maliki demanded in the negotiation that the United States withdraw all of its troops.
They couldn't believe it.
They simply could not believe it, that a guy that they put into power, and who they'd been working with, could actually go that far.
Well, you know, a friend of mine, back before the war, we did a show on Chaos Radio where my friend Shauna was co-hosting the show with me.
The show was called The Way Is The Best I Can Tell, and we were talking about the upcoming Iraq war, and she said, well, look, if you want to be a colonialist imperialist and take over the world, what you've got to do is, wherever you go, you prop up the minority over the majority, like the Tutsis over the Hutus, I forget if that was the Belgians or the Dutch down there in Rwanda, or for that matter, Saddam Hussein over the Kurds and the Shia, because then they need you.
But if you go and you topple the minority dictatorship in favor of the majority, well, what are you going to get?
You're going to get a civil war, where they take the capital city, and then, by the end of the thing, they say sayonara, because they don't need you to stay.
Well, and another way to look at that same point, the same point you're making...
That was in the fall of 2002.
She deserves a lot of credit for that.
And even in a broader perspective, Scott, the general point here is that throughout the Cold War and since, the general principle of U.S. foreign policy in areas of the world where it wanted to project its power was never to support democracy, always to support dictatorship, because of the strong suspicion that in a democracy, people would exert a preference, would express a preference, to not have a U.S. military presence in their country.
Sure, like Bahrain right now.
Yeah, exactly.
And during the Cold War, this was an unvarying pattern, that wherever you look...
Of course, Japan was a sort of partial exception, because the United States could construct a democratic system and put so much money into the dominant party, that they could manage that situation.
But elsewhere, in Korea, in Thailand, in Indonesia, throughout Southeast Asia, and East Asia generally, the United States consciously supported dictatorships on the very sound notion that that's the way you can get away with keeping U.S. military presence and military bases in the country.
Well, and speaking of which, Leon Panetta gave a statement, I guess yesterday, saying, oh yeah, we're strengthening our presence in the Pacific.
Like, how pathetic.
You just got kicked out of Iraq.
Why don't you just be quiet for a week?
Well, I do.
I think I like to use the same term.
I think it's pathetic, the way in which the national security state, and our friend Panetta is the perfect poster child for this phenomenon.
They are now so eager to deny that the U.S. empire is rapidly declining to zero in the Middle East, that the U.S. does not have the kind of power, the kind of influence that it pretends to have in that part of the world, never really did, but the massive military presence disguised the reality.
And so, you're right.
I mean, they're now saying, oh, we're going to continue to be the big power in the Pacific as a way of trying to cover up the reality that this is a huge failure for the empire in the Middle East.
Yeah, it's a catastrophe.
I always like to say, because I think it's funny, all these truthers are so sure that Osama Bin Laden is a CIA agent and works for Dick Cheney and all this stuff, but it always seemed to me the other way around, like these guys were actually double agents for Al-Qaeda, George Bush and the neocons.
I guess in the case of Richard Perle, they were unwitting double agents for the Ayatollah Khomeini who used his spy Ahmed Chalabi to promise the pro-Israeli faction in D.C. that they'd have a Hashemite kingdom and an oil and water pipeline to Haifa and a democracy that'll put a lot of pressure on the Iranian regime.
Never mind the INC headquarters was in Tehran.
We're just going to ignore that cognitive dissonance, I guess.
All right, hang tight, everybody.
This is Gareth Porter.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with my hero, Gareth Porter.
From Interpress Service, ipsnews.net, antiwar.com/Porter.
And, you know, Gareth, after Barack Obama became the president, about two weeks later he gave a speech at Camp Lejeune saying he was going to get us out of Iraq.
And I wrote an article that was originally titled, Who Does This Obama Guy Think He's Kidding?
But Matt Barganier, thankfully, better taste prevailed and he titled it, Finding Ways to Stay in Iraq.
And it got picked up in Iraq and then got picked up by Army Intelligence for being picked up in Iraq.
Although the other Scott Horton got the blame instead of me, rats.
But anyway, so my point in there was, wow, that's funny because that's a great speech there, Mr. President, and everything, but you didn't mention air power and you didn't mention the biggest embassy that one empire has ever built in a satellite in the history of all of mankind.
And you didn't mention the force protection for any of them.
So you're a liar and you're going to stay and you're leaving these loopholes because that's what you're going to do.
And you mentioned air power, it was just in the news two weeks ago or something, they're selling them a bunch of F-16s, billions of dollars worth of F-16s.
Now who's going to teach them how to fly them?
Who's going to build the air traffic control system for them, etc., etc.?
But the U.S. Air Force.
Are they going to hire the Russians to come in and teach them how to use all our weapons or what?
Well, I mean, of course...
And what about the embassy?
Six thousand armed men, tens of thousands of State Department employees?
Right.
I mean, they do have this notion that they're going to have an army of consultants, of mercenaries to replace the U.S. troops.
And I think that's kind of a desperate effort to try to spell the missing ingredient that the national security state so badly wanted to keep in Iraq.
And I'm not trying to deny that this is a serious matter, that they're going to have several thousands of people there who will be armed and in fact will have many of the accoutrements of a modern army, including tanks and all the rest.
And, you know, you're right, of course.
The Americans are going to continue to train Iraqi pilots.
And bear in mind that this was one of the arguments the military was making about why we must keep troops in Iraq.
We have to have people there to train the Iraqis.
But, of course, that did not take into account the fact that Iraqis can come to the United States to be trained to fly planes, which is exactly what's going to happen.
But, you know, that's certainly an option, and I think that that's likely to be the more advanced training that's likely to take place in the United States.
So, basically, I think the only point that I would add to what you just said is that it's actually even worse than that, because what Obama had in mind was to keep the full U.S. combat brigades in Iraq well beyond, of course, the date where he was going to pull them out in mid-2010.
He was going to keep them there until well into 2011, you know, towards the end of 2011, when he promised that all troops would be out.
But, I mean, it was a ruse, and it was a very, you know...
So you're saying now they're stuck with their embassy, but without their army?
That's right, and I mean, you know, I don't think that anybody believes that this, whatever it's really going to look like, whatever it's really going to do, is going to be the same thing as having the U.S. military 20,000 or 15,000, or, you know, much less the 35,000 that, of course, the former commander, Ray Odierno, publicly was saying he wanted the United States to have there in perpetuity, basically.
I mean, this is, again, this is a huge defeat for the imperialists in the United States.
But let's just, you know, put it as sharply as that.
All right.
Well, now, the thing is, look, I got special access for whatever reason.
I get people like you and Robert Dreyfuss and Patrick Coburn and all these geniuses to talk to me.
And so I've just had this all down pat for so many years in a row now about who's winning what.
And, I mean, Robert Dreyfuss was writing about the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and their ties to the Iranians and what interests were being met and who was the coalition of this and that, who wrote the Constitution, and everything this whole time.
So it was, OK, I'll take it that it was apparent to me before it was apparent to people in D.C. that you really did lose.
I remember the old blogger Bill Mahn, I don't know who that ever turned out to be, wrote, Ayatollah, you so, as soon as they had the election of 2005, which even Jon Stewart said, wow, maybe it is a democracy after all.
No, you just elected Abdulaziz Al-Hakim and his barter brigade, dude, is all you did.
And now that was apparent to me and it was apparent to you.
And, OK, fine, so it wasn't quite apparent in the Pentagon until at some point later or something.
But still, at some point, they realized that they were checkmated here.
I mean, hell, I'm looking at an article right now, I mentioned this, here's my footnote, Julian Borger in The Guardian, U.S. intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war.
It's a CIA and D.I.A. report saying Chalabi didn't just tell the Iranians that we had broken all their codes.
I'm sure it was Doug Feith's treason is how he knew that in the first place.
But anyway, it wasn't just that.
We think that the Iranians actually used Chalabi to lie the neocons into war in Iraq on behalf of Israel, they thought.
Sure, this is very clear.
I mean, there's no, there's very little doubt about that, I think.
That there was a, you know, obviously they were duped by Chalabi.
They thought they were going to be using him for their purposes.
But do they think they'll be able to keep their embassy?
Or not?
I mean, I'm picturing like a roof of Saigon fleeing, hanging on to the skids of the Huey kind of thing going on here.
Well, first of all, with regard to what they knew and when they knew it, I think when the full history of this escapade is written, it will become very clear that there were deep fissures within the Bush administration between those in the Bush White House who were, you know, whispering in Bush's ear, we're doing just fine, you know, don't worry.
You know, the Shia there are really on our side.
They're really people who we can work with.
This is not something to worry about.
Whereas I think there were plenty of other people in the administration who understood perfectly well that that was not the case, that these were not people who were going to be pro-American, who were not going to cooperate with the United States in its design for Iraq and for the region, quite far from it.
So Rita, I think you had, you know, some very interesting internal political dynamics within the Bush administration.
Well, part of it too is that Hakeem died, right?
And so the Supreme Islamic Council, which was friendlier to the Americans, even though they were actually working for a stronger Iranian position in Iraq than, say, for example, the Saudis were.
But when he died, the whole thing got turned over to Saud or the Arab nationalists.
Yeah, and part of it is because the Supreme Islamic Council was so heavy-handed and so elitist, that it lost any semblance of public support.
I mean, you know, they just had no support whatsoever.
I mean, really, it became the case that Saud was the only game in town in Shia politics.
And that was a huge change, a huge shift from the very beginning of this process.
So, you know, I mean, that's one of the reasons that there was such a big change in the dynamics of the situation.in terms of U.S. policy.
But certainly in 2007, you had a very interesting situation where, you know, the State Department was gung-ho in favor of working very closely with the Syri folks.
And, in effect, really trying to bring about reconciliation between Iran and the United States on the idea that the Syri people, were really working closely with the United States against Sauder.
And Sauder was the bad guy.
And therefore, we need to support the Syri people.
And that's the way to get our interests carried out.
Which was always a bad ploy, a dumb ploy.
Because they were the traitors.
They fought on the side of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war.
They'd been gone for 30 years.
Sauder was the one who had any street credibility.
And then I think what happened was that Petraeus stepped in and put a stop to all that and reversed the policy, basically, in early 2008.
But then, I mean, there's another chapter here which I've written about, I don't think anybody else has, which is how the al-Maliki regime tricked the Bush administration into negotiating an agreement on U.S. troop presence.
All right, well, can I get another segment or two out of you?
Because, you know what, I want to talk about that, too.
Okay, well, I can't do that.
Okay, well, I can't do it right now, but I could do it later this week.
Okay, great, yeah, let's follow up later in the week.
All right, thanks, Scott.
All right, thank you, Gareth.
Everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter, Interpress Service, antiwar.com/Porter.
