All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, on the line is Gareth Porter from Interpret Service.
We run it all at Antiwar.com/Porter.
Welcome back, Gareth, how are you?
I'm fine, thanks again.
I'm very happy to have you.
All right.
So look here.
Yesterday, when the interview was ruined by the dang commercial break and we had to go, we left off right around the spot where Ahmed Chalabi was an Iranian spy sent to tell the Israeli fifth column in the United States that he was going to create a wonderful democracy that would be in alliance with Israel.
And because Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney are the stupidest men in the whole wide world, they fell for it.
And now here we are eight years later and the Dawa party and Muqtada al-Sadr and his guys rule Iraq from Baghdad to Basra.
And they're kicking the Americans out.
And you were going and we were right at the part where Nouri al-Maliki, you said, I believe your words were, played the Americans.
And this is my favorite part of the story, if I understand it right.
So I was going to very briefly outline the evidence that al-Maliki actually tricked the Bush administration into negotiating with the Iraqi government about the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
I mean, he did so, he started talking about this in the summer of 2007.
He sent his national security advisor, Arubyai, to, I'm probably not pronouncing it correctly, for which I apologize, but he sent him to Washington to talk with high-level officials.
And part of what he presented, what he pitched to the White House and others in Washington at that point, was the idea that they should negotiate a SOFA, status of forces agreement, so that the Americans could remain in Iraq so that the Iraqis would be certain that they would have an American military presence.
And of course, this was the come on, that they were soothing the Bush administration belief that, well, certainly their desire to have a long-term military presence in Iraq and suggesting that this was the way to do it.
There's absolute good reason to believe that the Iraqis had already had the idea that they wanted to get the U.S. to withdraw on a timetable.
For one thing, as early as 2006, one of the first things that al-Maliki did was to talk about a timetable for withdrawal.
And that was quickly knocked down by the Bush administration.
They said, absolutely not.
And it was then sort of there was no discussion about it.
But, you know, there's very good reason to believe that when he sent this envoy to Washington in 2007 to try to get them interested in negotiating a SOFA, that that's what he had in mind all along.
And as I said, I think in the first part of our discussion about this, the Bush administration was taken completely by surprise in 2008, when in July, for the first time, al-Maliki demanded the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.
And of course, in July and August, the Bush administration was sort of trying to dismiss that, saying that wasn't really the Iraqi position, that in fact, they were talking about notional timeframes, but that there was no hard and fast deadline for withdrawal that was being discussed.
All along, of course, they knew that, in fact, that was exactly what al-Maliki had demanded.
And we know the final result.
So I think that the evidence strongly supports the idea that al-Maliki, with obviously full support of Muqtada al-Sadr and of the Iranians, was planning to get the United States military out of there over a period of time.
I think that, you know, he was flexible about exactly what the timeframe would be.
But the important thing was to get the U.S. committed to a timetable for withdrawal, and he succeeded in doing that.
All right.
Now, kind of the background of this was that, and we talked about this a little bit yesterday, the Dawah party, about half of it, I guess, lived in Iran for 30 years before the invasion, from the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war all the way through the invasion in 2003.
And I guess al-Maliki had lived in Syria.
He was from the one branch.
But anyway, so the Dawah party didn't have an army.
The Supreme Islamic Council did, the Bata Brigade, and the Mahdi Army, which was the third wing of the Iraqi National Alliance that won the election of 2005, he had his army, the Mahdi Army.
And so I think the way it was back then, I remember Seymour Hersh telling me, actually, that Bush was pushing hard for al-Hakim's guy, the Supreme Islamic Council guy, al-Mahdi.
But what ended up happening was the Saudis and the Hakims basically compromised and decided to go with the Dawah party guy.
And that ended up being Ibrahim Jafari, who then Rice basically did a coup against him and deposed him and replaced him with Maliki in 2006, right?
Well, and there's a bit more to that story about the sudden appearance of al-Maliki, who really the Americans knew nothing about.
If you read Bob Woodward's book about that period in the Bush administration policy, what is really one of the things that's quite interesting is that the Americans admitted quite freely that they didn't know very much about this guy, al-Maliki, which sort of came out of nowhere.
And then we have a story that came out of McClatchy in 2007, sorry, 2008, I guess it was.
I don't remember exactly what the date was, in which the Iraqi sources revealed that in fact, al-Maliki was chosen in a meeting of Shia political forces in Iraq at which the commander of the Quds Force, General Qasem Soleimani, was the arbiter.
He was the guy who brought them together and sort of knocked heads together and said, look, we've got to come up with a choice here.
And I'm not suggesting that, in fact, al-Maliki was a hand-picked Iranian choice.
Far from it.
I think the point is that the Iranians were in such a position of influence within the Shia political community there that they were relied upon to sort of force the issue of very difficult compromise on somebody to replace Jafari.
So that's really apparently the inside story about how al-Maliki was chosen.
And the most interesting thing of all, of course, according to the McClatchy story, the Americans had no idea that Soleimani had been able to come in to Baghdad itself to preside over this meeting.
They were completely in the dark about it.
Yeah, that's funny.
I'd completely forgotten about that.
But I remember you've written about that and I've interviewed you about that before.
All right.
So now, basically, the politics of the situation is, especially with, as we talked about yesterday, with Hakeem gone, Muqtada al-Sadr rules the Iraqi National Alliance completely, I guess, in alliance with the Da'ba party.
But again, the Da'ba party doesn't have an army other than really, well, I don't know.
I mean, I guess the Badr Brigade became the Iraqi army mostly now, but apparently it still is the point that Sadr can remove Muqtada al-Sadr in a day if he wants to.
He can withdraw all of Muqtada al-Sadr's support in the parliament and no confidence him out of there.
Muqtada al-Sadr does depend very heavily on Muqtada al-Sadr, definitely.
And now, how close to Iran is Sadr now?
He's obviously been living there mostly for years, getting a higher religious ranking and all this.
Well, this is a very complicated relationship.
It can't be reduced to a simple, Muqtada al-Sadr is a nationalist, therefore he will never do business with Iran, or...
I mean, he used to outright denounce Iran and outright denounce the Supreme Islamic Council for supporting a strong federal system that would give Iran major influence in southern Iraq.
Well, and he was very sincere about that, without any question, because the Iranians had always supported the Syri people, the Supreme Islamic Council, and those were the enemies of his father, and those were the elitist people who looked down on the constituency that was his following.
Alright, well, we'll have to hold it right there and go out to this break.
It's Gareth Porter, everybody, ipsnews.net, antiwar.com, slash, Porter.
Alright, y'all, welcome back, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, antiwar.com, slash, Porter.
We're talking about the war in Iraq, kind of reviewing some things, the background to the getting kicked out that's going on now.
First of all, it's been eight years, a million people are dead, more than would have according to very credible studies, such as the one by Alan Hyde at Opinion Business Research in London.
There are four and a half million refugees, approximately a quarter of those in Jordan and Syria each, and the other half internally displaced, but forced from their homes, hundreds of thousands uncounted, millions probably wounded, trillions of dollars spent, the American economy wrecked, Iraqi society wrecked, the Yazidis and the Druze and the Jews and the Christians, the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, and all the different little minority sects of religious and ethnic groups in that country, many of which have lived there for two thousand years have been utterly obliterated.
Scott, if I can just cut in on that question of the cost of the war, quote-unquote, to Iraqi society and to the Iraqi people, let's not forget the historical fact that this war really began not in 2003, but in 1991-92, when the U.S. began patrolling the so-called no-fly zones over Iraq, and in effect were carrying out very low-level but real war over that entire period of the 1990s and into the next century, and at the same time, of course, and perhaps far more seriously in terms of the cost to the Iraqi people, were carrying out a policy of sanctions that, of course, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths that would not otherwise have occurred.
Well, and of course, Colin Powell bombed the sewage and the waterworks and the electricity and every major civilian target that he could in 1991, in Operation Yellow Ribbon.
Absolutely.
Let's not forget the turkey shoot of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who had given up, no longer combatants, who were killed from the air in a...
Thousands were buried alive in their trenches.
They had tanks with bulldozer blades on the front.
They just buried them alive by the thousands.
So this is...
There's a great article on that called, Where Are the Bodies?
I think it represents an enormous stain on the United States of the magnitude of the Vietnam War, and it has many parts to it that must be taken into account.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, alright, so now on the question of America was played by Chalabi, I kind of have my own narrative on this.
I've probably picked up a lot of it from you and whatever, but anyway, it goes more or less along the lines of, in 2008, Patrick Coburn breaks the story in early June, says George Bush is pushing for 56 permanent bases, and Nouri al-Maliki spent the next few months saying, Yeah, man, that sounds great.
You know what?
I'm going to do my best to convince everybody to let you do that.
And then by November, he said, Jeez, looks like your presidency's out of time, Mr. Bush.
You're just going to have to go ahead and sign this thing that says no bases, and completely out by the end of 2011.
Out of our cities by next spring, or late next spring, early next summer.
And Bush signed, because what is he going to do?
And then, my narrative goes that the same thing has happened this year.
Oh, yeah, you guys want to keep tens of thousands of troops?
Fives of thousands of troops?
Yeah, sure, that'll be fine.
Yeah, you know what?
Here, let me work on that.
I'm going to try to convince everybody to go along, and you know what?
I'm sorry.
It looks like we're just out of time, and they just won't go along.
Of course, the WikiLeaks really helped in this, with bringing back up the story of the execution of that family in the news over there, and riling up public opinion and political opinion on the subject even more.
But I read this incoming link, because I've expressed this idea that I hope this guy's just playing us, and really he's going to kick us out at the end of the year a few times.
And I read an incoming link to one of my interviews from a blog called The Common Ills, where they write a lot about Iraq there.
Absolutely.
And they were basically saying, nope, Scott Horton fell for it.
Actually, they knew at some point years ago that they weren't going to be able to keep a bunch of permanent bases there.
At this point, all that is just a MacGuffin.
The real point is the embassy, and Hillary Clinton's mercenary army, and the air power, and nobody ever really talks about whether there will be a base or two or ten in Kurdistan.
Well, I think I differ with you a little bit on that final point.
I agree with most of the rest.
I'm not even certain.
I'm paraphrasing them, right?
But I'm trying to bring in this criticism of my own point here.
I do think that there was very, very strong interest, to say the least, on the part of the powers that be in Washington in keeping a substantial number of troops.
That was not simply a MacGuffin from their point of view, certainly.
I think from the Iraqi point of view, you're right.
I think that the chances that any kind of agreement could actually be reached were minimal.
As I said before, the Iraqi military was strongly in favor of it, and I think definitely al-Maliki was trying to keep everybody happy and suggest to the Americans he was working on it, but he must have known that politically it would be impossible for him to ever put his name on any agreement that involved the stationing of American troops.
It would require everybody, including Muqtada al-Sadr, to sign off on it, and Sadr wasn't going to do that.
So I don't think that was ever a possibility.
And let me just also add that I have a slightly different, maybe a substantially different narrative about how the negotiations went down in 2008.
I think, in fact, I remember Patrick Coburn's piece.
I think what he was referring to in that piece was not a draft that had been submitted by the Iraqi side.
It was really the Americans' draft that called for that.
I don't think the Iraqis ever put forward a draft that had American bases allowed in it.
I think that their draft actually, when they finally put forward their counter-draft, it made it very clear that there wouldn't be any American bases.
And I think that that was the consistent position in the negotiations.
So that's a little bit different from, I think, there was a lot of suspicion there that in the early period of negotiations that the Iraqis were intending to allow the Americans to have bases.
And I think that was a whole, I mean, that was to some extent a reflection of the earlier phase when the Iraqis were basically putting the hook in the fish, if you will.
Well, and what about Kurdistan?
Because I seem to remember the current Secretary of State, when she was running for President a couple of years back, talking about, well, at least we'll be able to keep some air bases up in Kurdistan.
Yeah, I think it was, what's his name, the Ambassador Holbrook who was talking about that too, definitely.
I mean, he was always a big Kurdistan guy who thought, well, surely we will be able to make a deal that will have American bases in Kurdistan if nothing else works out.
So you're right that there was always a strong reliance on the U.S. ties with the Kurdish political powers that be to tie this over, even if nothing else worked out.
I think that was part of the reason that the military was so confident that they would be able to get what they aspired to, which was permanent U.S. bases in Iraq, and basically get the four big bases, which they had talked about from the very beginning.
From 2003, the first week, the first days of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, they were already telling the New York Times, we expect to get these four major air bases, base complexes in Iraq, that we will be in for many years.
Yeah, I remember a lady in my cab talking about, well, I say we go in there and get Saddam and get out.
And I said, yeah, but the people who are behind this war want to stay forever, getting Saddam is just how to get there.
Otherwise, what's the point?
It wasn't oil, believe me.
Yeah, and then she said, yeah, well, I still say we just go get Saddam and get out.
All right, well, whatever, lady, I guess we're going to do it your way.
Thanks for supporting the war.
I'm sure it'll be over in a week and a half.
Yeah, right.
But anyways, so, well, let me see, Iraq questions.
Let's go ahead and move to Afghanistan, because I wanted to ask you about this.
We're almost out of time already anyway.
Dealing with the Haqqanis, tell me the most important thing about the Haqqanis.
Who's the Haqqanis and why is it important that we're dealing with them?
The most important thing to understand about the Haqqanis at this point, Scott, is that there's a very good reason why the Pakistani government and military leadership of Pakistan have such good relations with Haqqani.
And that's because the Haqqani group and the Haqqani family are their allies against the people who are actually trying to attack and overthrow the military and the Pakistani government, which is al-Qaeda and their allies in the Pakistani Taliban, the TTP.
And that relationship, you know, that the Pakistani government has cultivated with the Haqqani network over the years, is a strategic asset to them, not just in Afghanistan, but it's true that it is an asset in Afghanistan, but also, more importantly, within Pakistan itself in terms of Pakistani security.
So what kind of talks is Clinton having with them?
Is she realizing that she's, are her negotiations a recognition of the fact that as long as Pakistan supports these guys, which they're going to continue to, we're not going to be able to do anything about them, so maybe we could work out a deal or not?
Well, let's bear in mind that as I reported a couple of times, the Obama administration had concluded in its December 2010 review of strategy that it was not going to be successful in putting pressure on Pakistan, particularly public pressure on Pakistan, to attack and try to weaken the Haqqani network militarily, and that they should not try to do that, at least not publicly pressure them.
And the implication was that they would need to make some sort of a deal, that that was the way to handle the Haqqani network problem.
Now, you know, fast forward to the present.
What we're now finding from the Pakistani newspaper coverage of the Clinton visit is that Clinton admits that the United States is no longer pressuring Pakistan to attack North Waziristan, the base area of the Haqqani group.
So obviously there has been a retreat from that rather outrageous public comment by Mullen calling the Haqqani group a veritable arm of the ISI, and the implication that the United States was going to do something drastic, which I don't think was ever a possibility.
Wow.
Thank goodness cooler heads prevailed on that one.
Yeah.
You know what?
I want to go back to Iraq for a second.
We'll just have to do the Pakistan thing another time, because there's so much there.
It's a whole other show.
But on the Iraq thing, what do you predict for the future of the embassy there?
Because, you know, even in the New York Times they're saying U.S. scales back diplomacy in Iraq amid security concerns.
They don't have the army that they thought they were going to have there to go along with the embassy.
Yeah, I suspect that the original plan, which you recall involved, what, 6,000 or more contractors who would be part of an army which would be equipped with tanks and, you know, all the accoutrements of a modern army.
I think that that's going to be scaled down considerably.
For one thing, I mean, they've still got this problem that the Iraqis are not going to allow any of these people to have immunity.
So I think that puts a big crimp on the whole idea of this private army that they were talking about.
So they're not even going to be able to have their mercs.
I don't think so.
Boy, Hillary's going to be mad.
I expect hydrogen bombs to go off if she doesn't get her army.
She's going to finally get to be the commander-in-chief of something.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, these people like Hillary Clinton and Panetta are pathetic in their, you know, sort of being puffed up by this, you know, being in charge of military power.
And it's really quite revealing that these people, you know, become such militarists as soon as they have the opportunity.
As soon as they have a little bit of power, it goes right to their head.
And they can't help but crow about it.
Yeah, well, I'm here to tell you I think Justin Raimondo's prediction is correct.
That thing's going to end up becoming the biggest embassy one country's ever built in another, so-called embassy.
It's going to end up becoming the Museum of American Atrocities, is what it's going to be.
Well, I mean, the bottom line is, as we talked about the previous time, is still that the United States is powerless, essentially, in Iraq.
It does not dispose of any real influence in that society, in that political system.
It is completely on the side.
It is not going to be able to have any real effect, I think, in steering Iraq in the direction the United States would like to have it go.
Iraq is a Shia-governed country, and it is going to have a foreign policy that is much closer to Iran for that reason.
And we already see that in the policy that is not well known, but I can tell you it is a real policy of Iraq having a very strong opposition to the Saudi policy position in Bahrain, and very strong support for the Shia majority in Bahrain.
Well, you know, there's so much violence in Iraq still.
We don't hear about it too much in the media because it's not directed at Americans so much anymore.
But I wonder whether Iraq is just going to heat up.
Maybe it already has been this, but it seems like it could be a ground for a pretty severe proxy war in the future between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Well, absolutely.
There's no doubt that there's more conflict in store.
It's not ended by any means.
Saudis will be there, not with troops, but with money support for the Sunnis, as they did.
You know, they already have been.
I mean, this is a proxy war that is not going to start in the future, but a continuation of one that had already been taking place over the last few years, the last several years.
I wonder if they'll just switch sides and start supporting the Sunni Mujahideen, you know, like they're doing in Libya, like they did in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Well, I'm not sure.
Switch sides again.
You're talking about the Sunni resistance forces who were the primary forces in Iraq, you mean?
Yeah, the guys who resisted the American occupation all that time.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I mean, that's what they were doing all along, and I think they upped the ante.
Well, and that was what Khalilzad recommended six years ago, right, was let's switch sides back to the Sunnis again.
Yes, indeed.
I said at the time they should call off the trial and push Saddam Hussein back in power, but then the whole thing never happened.
Khalilzad wanted to do a deal with them, and I think he was overruled by the military.
All right, well, anyway, we've got to go.
We're over time, but thank you very much for your time.
Thanks again, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter.
Sorry for talking all over him, but, you know, there's a lot to cover.
Whatever.
We'll be back in a minute.
