It's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and now to our first guest, Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
And he's the author of the book, Perils of Dominance, about the strategy around the Vietnam War.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine, thanks.
Good to talk to you again, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Let's talk, first of all, about Afghanistan, please.
Army Officers Leaked Report Rips Afghan War a Success Story.
And now, in the previous segment, I was discussing with the audience a little bit about, you know, the media complicity in pushing the narrative that the surge is working, the surge worked.
And I was taking a little bit of credit for you and for me that anyone who was listening to this show was exempt from the brainwashing that Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis correctly identifies as otherwise pretty much uniform throughout the entire media and the Internet, too, as he put it.
But with you, I want to really focus here for this segment on the specifics of Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis's criticism of the, well, of what?
Go ahead and start with that.
Well, Danny Davis is a remarkable exception to the general problem that we have with U.S. military officers, which is that they are part of an institution or a set of institutions which are incapable of and have no incentive to really face the truth.
Danny Davis is somebody who is a truth seeker.
I know him, I've known him for about three or four years now because of an earlier episode in which he put out his own analysis of the war in Afghanistan.
This was in 2009, so it's really less than three years that I've known him, but more than two.
He put on the Internet his own personal essay, a very long essay, in which he called for the withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. troops from Afghanistan within 18 months.
So had we listened to him in 2009, we would be pretty much out of Afghanistan by now.
And he already recognized many of the problems which he has now addressed in both his armed forces journal article, which has been widely discussed, and now in this very long 84, I guess it was 86 pages in the final version, essay that he wrote to be posted on the Internet and which the Army had not released, had not approved for release to the public.
And Danny is playing by the book.
He's made it very clear he's not trying to break rules.
He's using the rights that he has as an Army officer and as a citizen to post his own views, but he has to get the approval of the Army to do so.
And they're obliged to clear it if there's nothing in it which is classified.
But they have not yet approved it, approved the essay for release to the public.
And so what happened was that basically Michael Hastings at Rolling Stone magazine got a copy from one of his sources in the U.S. government, and apparently it's been making the rounds of the U.S. government, including the White House.
So now it has been released, it has been posted, and that's why I wrote this story.
Now, you know, the thing to know about Danny is that he is a very smart guy in addition to a truth seeker, and he understood even over the last year or so, very early on, that what was happening in Afghanistan was something that was not succeeding, the U.S. war effort there was on the wrong track.
And he feels very strongly about the fact that people in the U.S. Army and other services, but particularly the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, are being sacrificed their lives, their limbs, their lives are being blighted and lost by being sacrificed in a war that is now meaningless.
Well now, Gareth, he does say in here, I think, that he believes that the president must have made the decision to escalate the war based on bad information.
He's listening to these generals who are spinning so hard that their war bears no relation to their narrative, but that the president, this former senator, current president of the United States, he's not George W. Bush, that he was just ignorant that the three-word, three-syllable slogan, surge, worked, worked on him, come on.
He had to have known better.
Well, you know, we're back to the basic fundamental problem here of trying to figure out how much of the escalation of the war that Obama decided on in November of 2009 was something that he wanted to do himself, and to what extent it was a matter of basically listening to political advisors, including Leon Panetta, who we know were telling Obama that he cannot afford politically to contradict the military leadership of the United States.
I mean, this is well documented on the record.
You know, I mean, this is a...
Yeah, but you know what, see, he's too smart for that too, because when people talk about they like Harry Truman, they say things like, yeah, he fired MacArthur, and said, if you don't like it, tough, I'm the one in the civilian suit, you're general, you work for me, period.
And everybody says, what a great thing that was that he faced down the Pentagon like that.
That's part of his legend.
Scott, this is precisely the point about Obama.
I mean, he is not a Truman.
Harry Truman was...
Well, and thank God for that, really, but still on this point...
...somebody who was willing to stand up to MacArthur.
This is a guy who does not have that kind of personality.
I mean, the personality profile on Obama is very clear.
He is an accommodator, and he goes for consensus, and he does not want to have conflict with his military.
Now, you know, part of that, of course, as I say, is that his political advisors reflecting the sort of weak, weak-kneed, you know, panty-waist, Democratic sort of idea about foreign policy, which is that you have to prove to the public that you're as tough as the Republicans, because we Democrats have this bad reputation for being weak on defense, and weak on terrorism, and weak on communism, and all the rest.
I mean, that is all bullshit, as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, of course.
Nevertheless, this is, you know, this is what has passed for political wisdom and conventional wisdom as far as the Clinton administration and the Obama administration is concerned.
These are the people that have surrounded the president.
Now, of course, he chose them, and that's a political decision that, in my view, reflects, again, his personality.
I think we're really facing here...
Now, when it comes to the Joint Chiefs themselves and all the top generals, what is exactly, I mean, their motive is what?
To just fight a long war, to lose forever to a group of guerrillas that they can never defeat, but that can never drive them out, and then they'll just play cowboys and Indians at, you know, $20 billion a week or whatever from now on, right?
I've talked to Danny Davis about this problem, you know, because in his essay, he basically says that the generals are deliberately misrepresenting the situation in Afghanistan, and basically spinning it in ways that they have reason to know are not true.
But I think that he has a little bit of doubt in his mind whether, to what extent this is deliberate lying, and to what extent there is a phenomenon here of at least some of the generals convincing themselves that it's the truth.
Well, and there's just simple CYA, too, right?
Well, absolutely, yeah.
I mean, and there's some shades here that I think we need to try to appreciate, some shades of meaning.
Yeah, sure.
All right.
Well, I'm not good at that, but that's why you're here.
It's Garrett Porter, everybody.
InterpretServiceIPSNews.net.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm on the phone with my friend Garrett Porter, independent historian and journalist for InterpretService.
That's IPSNews.net.
Jim Loeb's great outfit over there.
And of course, we keep every bit of what he writes at Original.
AntiWar.com/Porter.
So before I ask y'all about Iran, I wanted to, I kind of got the feeling you still had something more to say about Afghanistan to wrap up there.
I think we're on a very, very important point here that is, it's rather difficult to understand this phenomenon of the generals basically lying about what's going on in Afghanistan.
And I think, you know, I'd like to offer a way of trying to understand the psychological process that goes on here.
I think about these people as basically subject to a kind of iron law, which is that when you're involved in something that is really heinous, but you are trying to be, you know, you are occupying a sort of respectable position, quote unquote, in society, what you have to do is to lie to yourself.
And so, I mean, the people who are most powerful in this society and in many other societies as well are engaged in activities that they can't admit publicly and they can't admit to themselves for the most part.
And so they're really kind of a pathetic, you know, pathetic individuals in that sense who are living a lie.
But their whole career and their self-esteem and their prestige and everything depends on believing the lies.
And based on my conversation most recently with Danny, I mean, I think he's begun to think about it more in that way rather than to simply say, well, these people are, you know, sort of consciously telling lies.
They are engaged in a process that involves sort of systematically refusing to believe anything that conflicts with, you know, the positions that they have to take.
Yeah.
Well, in other words, they're just people and they have an inhuman amount of responsibility.
Who could centrally plan a war in Afghanistan and have it work out?
No one could.
The task that they've set themselves up against is like holding back the tides.
It's ridiculous.
So, of course, they're going to have a bad time with their self-esteem and whatever, admitting that they failed.
I mean, we have the tapes of Lyndon Johnson on the phone, right?
Say, I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war, which means as many people else got to burn.
Fine, you know?
Right.
No, I mean, this is essentially the point that I want to make, that these people are really, again, I would use the term pathetic, that they are not free.
They are caught up in a syndrome, in a system of acting and thinking that basically does not allow them to be authentic human beings.
All right.
And speaking of which, let's talk about a war with Iran.
Here's one where, at least according to one poll, I think that John Glazer had on the antiwar.com blog, they got a super majority of Americans are ready to start a war with Iran over them being a country that begins with IRA and supposedly they're making nuclear weapons, man.
Well, I mean, you know, it's certainly conceivable that that does reflect the nature of opinion at this moment in American history.
I wouldn't be that surprised, given the degree to which news media have bought into this idea, particularly in the last few weeks.
I mean, it really is reminiscent in many ways of Iraq, of the run up to the Iraq war in September, October, November, December 2002 and early 2003.
This is where we're glad that Obama's no Harry Truman, because what would Truman do?
He would send in the army on foot, you know?
Well, I think that's right.
I mean, Obama, again, does understand at least that it's not in the American interest to have any war with Iran.
I think he's determined to try to avoid that.
But at the same time, again, you know, the aspect of Obama's personality that is somebody who wants to accommodate or feels the need to accommodate, let me put it that way, is always has his finger to the wind in terms of whether the pressure from the Republican right and from the Israeli lobby is too powerful for him to really say so publicly.
And I think that's, you know, that's the contradiction that's built into the Obama policy toward Iran and toward Israel now that is really quite troublesome, quite troubling.
Well, now, I guess it was the Times last night that said the Fordow facility, the calm facility or however you say it.
I say it wrong.
I say it in Texan.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, it's calm and Fordow is the way I understand it.
And so what that means is the Iranians now have a facility open and declared no secret, no, no scam, no, no violation.
But they now have a uranium enrichment plant that can't be bombed, I guess, because it's buried under a whole lot of rock.
Yeah, this is a big deal, a so-called red line.
Everybody in the United States, as well as Israel, admits that that is pretty invulnerable to to anything except for the most lucky, the luckiest possible hit by a by a bunker buster bomb.
Well, so then if the red line then would be them starting to drive the trucks full of centrifuges up there or whatever, and it's already been crossed and it didn't happen.
And so if it's going to be operational, then.
Yeah, I mean, good, right?
We did it.
That the the red lines that the Israelis have have been offering over the past few years have all been somewhat artificial.
I mean, let's just call them artificial red lines.
They they were not based on any real logic that you could defend.
And I think the current red line is the least defensible of all, the one that the Israelis have been putting forward since last November, when Ehud Barak gave an interview to CNN.
What he was saying was that, well, we may have to make the decision to attack Iran because too much of their enriched uranium or or facilities for enriching uranium have been protected at the the Ford or come enrichment facility.
In other words, we will have to attack because we couldn't attack later.
I mean, that is that is clearly the most absurd rationale for a war that's ever been put forward in the history of humankind as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, well, but do you really think they'd do it?
Netanyahu wouldn't launch a war unless he knew he had the Americans lined up, right?
Well, OK, here's I think he's really mean, but I don't think he's like that unstable like John McCain or something.
We'll just get mad and pound his fist on the red button.
I've been analyzing it, Scott.
You're absolutely right that it is it would be totally irrational.
I see no evidence that the Israeli population has been prepared for a war with Iran in which thousands of Israeli civilians would be killed in Israeli cities by the likely Iranian retaliatory attack, according to Meyer Dagan, the former Mossad chief, as well as other key security officials in Israel, including IDF top IDF officials.
Apparently, you know, they they have not taken this idea of a war with Iran seriously yet.
That does suggest that that there could be, you know, that this could be a gigantic feint or bluff by Netanyahu.
But there's one thing that still, you know, there are two things that still bother me.
One is that Meyer Dagan himself, you know, who spoke out against Netanyahu's policy and said it was very dangerous and said that, you know, a war with Iran could mean the end of the state of Israel.
He would not have said that had he not believed that Netanyahu was serious about it.
So I don't think that he was part of of this of a bluff.
He really believes Netanyahu.
And why does he believe Netanyahu?
He believes Netanyahu because there are enough people surrounding Netanyahu who have who have convinced themselves that Netanyahu has a messianic complex, or as some of my Jewish friends put it, a Masada complex, meaning that he you know, there's a certain sort of glorification of dying and even having, you know, thousands of Israeli citizens die in a war with Iran because he believes that he is the salvation of the Jewish people.
I mean, again, it's a completely irrational stance, but not at all inconceivable.
And that's what really scares me.
Wow.
All right.
Well, and we got to leave it at that because the goddamn music's playing already.
Unfortunately.
All right.
Well, we'll talk to you again soon.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter.
IPSnews.net.
In a press service.
IPSnews.net.
Original.antiwar.com/Porter.
We'll be back here in a few.
