All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And as you guys know by the name of the show, I'm Anti-War and I'm against the Iraq War, have been since, well, the fall of 2001 when the first leaks started coming out and Bill Sapphire started writing the big mo in the New York Times about why we need to invade that place.
But let me just tell you, I feel much better now because the Democrats in the House of Representatives and in the Imperial Senate have passed a new authorization bill that requires timelines and benchmarks and demands the removal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by this time next year.
And so I feel much better and I know of no reason why I shouldn't.
What do you think, Gareth Porter from IPS News?
Well, I think one should be encouraged, but at the same time, we have to be very, very cautious about the Democratic plan.
And I think I detected a slight note of irony or sarcasm in your statement there.
Just a little bit.
Not enough to be funny, really, but yeah, enough to make the point, hopefully.
Yeah.
Because if you look at it, it's not even a fine print, but a central feature of the Democratic plan is really a set of exceptions to their 180-day timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
And those exceptions include obviously training of, I shouldn't say obviously, but training of Iraqi security forces is one exception which would account for thousands of U.S. military personnel remaining in Iraq after the deadline for withdrawal has passed.
But in addition to that, they have an exception for protection of U.S. forces, which is not explained but presumably means that U.S. forces could be reintroduced from outside the country if any U.S. troops are in trouble, are under attack by any forces within Iraq.
But again, that's not spelled out.
The third exception, however, I think is the most important one by far, and that is the one that allows U.S. troops to remain in Iraq to be targeting al-Qaeda suspects.
Now, the language of it is very, it appears to be carefully drawn, it talks about limited duration and scope of such actions against al-Qaeda.
So it sounds like, well, once in a while, you know, if they have targeted, they have intelligence and a high-level al-Qaeda agent that they could go after them.
But in fact, as I reported this week in an article in Interpress Service- Which we ran on antiwar.com, it's in your archives now.
There is great evidence, there is reason to believe that democratic leadership, and particularly Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, knows full well that they intend to allow tens of thousands of U.S. troops to remain in the Sunni provinces to continue the war that is now going on there, which ostensibly is against al-Qaeda.
But in fact, you know, the intelligence being as poor as we know as it is, is against anyone who is known to be opposing the occupation.
And the vast majority of those who are opposing the occupation are simply non-Jihadist, non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents.
And of course, even al-Qaeda in Iraq is a pretty loose definition, because you'll have, I guess, foreign fighter jihadists from Saudi Arabia or Egypt or something who traveled there to fight.
But then there are also Iraqis who basically have come into their fold as well.
So if you really want, you can define that term as loosely or broadly as you want.
Well, that is a large part of the problem, precisely, that the understanding of al-Qaeda in Iraq is still very poor.
And perhaps, to be more precise, I think the policy is so poorly articulated that they do not, in fact, distinguish very sharply in actual operation between those who are formally part of an organization that is designated itself as belonging to al-Qaeda and those individuals and organizations which are, in some sense, on the same side as al-Qaeda because they're opposing the Americans and because they don't actively fight against al-Qaeda.
So that leaves, really, a very large population of activists in the Sunni provinces who could be targeted by U.S. military forces indefinitely in the future.
And that is really something that's, well, this entire war from beginning to end and to this very day, it's all defined in such vagaries, you know, victory, this and that, and multi-ethnic government and democracy and peace and freedom and whatever.
Look, what we're trying to do is install the Iranian parties in power, okay?
They never even admit what they're really up to.
But again, if I can just kind of sum up here what we're talking about, this is that the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have passed this much ballyhooed timetable.
They are now taking charge of this war from the president, and they're demanding that the troop withdrawal begin in October and be finished by this time next year.
And what you're telling me is there are at least these three major loopholes, the most important being that as long as Americans are there to fight al-Qaeda, then they can stay forever.
And then I guess after that is the force protection, which says as long as there's Americans there, there can be more Americans there to protect the Americans that are there.
That is precisely right.
And as I say, the al-Qaeda exception, what I call the al-Qaeda exception, is the one that is most disturbing because it really is very clearly intended by the Democratic leadership to allow, essentially, the war against Sunni to continue indefinitely.
And the apparent thought here is that it's bad for the U.S. troops to be in the middle of a civil war in Baghdad between Shiites and Sunnis, but that in the Sunni heartland in Al-Anbar and in Diwania and other provinces where the Sunnis are the majority, that we can continue to carry on the war without being in the middle of a civil war.
But of course the problem there is that that is a war that we can't possibly win, and all we can do is essentially to strengthen al-Qaeda by having U.S. occupation forces in a hostile environment, in a set of provinces where the Sunnis do not want foreign occupation forces, and for the most part will tend to be much more tolerant of or supportive of al-Qaeda in their provinces precisely because of foreign occupation troops in their midst.
Wasn't it just a year ago that, I forget his first name, a man named Biddle wrote in Foreign Affairs and Khalilzad, weren't they promoting switching back to the Sunnis and empowering the former insurgency?
Well, you see, this is the other side of the picture, which the Democrats are completely ignoring, and that is, and it's very important, I talked about this in my article at some length.
In fact, wait, wait, let me stop you right there, it's antiwar.com/porter, and you can read all about it, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Right.
The problem that the Democrats are completely ignoring is that it's not a problem, it's an opportunity in fact, the Sunni insurgents who have resisted the U.S. occupation for the last four years almost, for the most part, have turned against the al-Qaeda operatives in their provinces and have in fact begun to wage their own war against al-Qaeda.
And that war, arguably, is far more effective than American occupation troops could possibly hope to wage.
Uh-huh, and now you're cutting right to the heart of the matter there, that the only reason that the local Sunnis are cooperating with these jihadists is to fight us.
Well, that's part of the reason, certainly, the al-Qaeda presence in those provinces has been very troublesome, both because, you know, they have tried to impose their extreme form of Islam on local populations, which in many cases are not really interested in it, and secondly, because they have insisted on such a hardline position politically in those provinces that the mainline Sunni resistance regard them as really pushing them in the wrong direction, specifically in 2005, 2006, when Sunnis, well, specifically in 2005, when the Sunnis were trying to mobilize to oppose the constitution which was being foisted on them by the United States and its Iraqi puppets in Baghdad, the al-Qaeda people were saying, no, we don't want you to participate in this referendum and vote against the constitution.
We don't want you to go to the polls at all.
So they were, in effect, subjecting the Sunni population to the inevitable consequences of having that constitution passed when, in fact, the Sunnis had an opportunity to defeat it at the polls if they were allowed to mobilize fully to do so.
So, I mean, this was simply one of a number of major strategic differences between the Sunni resistance organizations, the non-Jihadist Sunni resistance organizations, and the essentially foreign-guided, up until 2005 or 2006, jihadists allied with al-Qaeda.
And as a result of those very fundamental differences, the main line of Sunni resistance organizations began to organize to oppose al-Qaeda, not just politically, but militarily.
And as a result of that, two things have happened.
One is that they began to sit down to negotiate with the United States in late 2005, early 2006, and those negotiations have been now detailed by articles in the Sunday Times of London and in an article in a London-based Arab-language newspaper.
And Khalilzad has basically confirmed them himself just before he left Baghdad to return to the United States.
And in those negotiations, there was serious discussion of a peace deal under which the United States would withdraw under a two-year timeline, and the Sunni insurgents would lay down their arms after a period of peace.
There would be a ceasefire for some period.
This would take place on a new government.
And this was a deal that was very seriously considered, apparently, by the Bush administration.
In the end, they cut off the negotiations.
Apparently, I'm told by Ali al-Awlawi, the former finance minister at that time in the Iraqi government, because of the demand for a new government, which was unacceptable to the Bush administration.
But the point is that this administration, despite its accusing the Democrats of being defeatist and surrendering to al-Qaeda and all the rest, was very, very serious about negotiating an agreement with the Sunni insurgents, clearly recognizing that they were the best bet they had for defeating al-Qaeda, that they could do it much better than U.S. forces.
They understood internally, I think it's fair to say, that the U.S. military itself was not going to be able to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And the president is implying that if we left, al-Qaeda in Iraq would defeat the rest of the Sunnis and use the whole Sunni triangle as their new Afghanistan failed state to launch attacks against us, etc.
Well, that's simply absurd.
That's laughable.
And it should be the basis, in my view, the reputation of that argument should be the basis for the Democrats taking the offensive and saying to the president, not only do we not need to have U.S. troops in Iraq for al-Qaeda ultimately to be defeated in the Sunni provinces, but we're better off without U.S. troops in those provinces, because then the Sunni insurgents can turn their full force against al-Qaeda.
And furthermore, they will be better able to round up al-Qaeda, because al-Qaeda will be deprived of its popular support within the Sunni community.
Because once the U.S. troops are gone, much of that support will melt away.
And now, let me ask you this, and I hate to ask you this, try to mind-read or make up what you believe people's motives might be, but it seems like this whole debate almost always takes place under the framework of accepting Bush at his word, that at least what he's trying to do is create a multi-ethnic, stable government there, etc.
And yet, the question has been raised numerous times in numerous places, I guess most credibly in terms of name recognition by former General Anthony Zinni in Andrew Coburn's new book about Donald Rumsfeld, that when they realized that they could not have their Ahmed Chalabi dictatorship or Hashemite family, kingdom, and alliance with Jordan or what have you, that plan B or C was to go ahead and destroy Iraq, fire all the government employees, fire the army, and basically do the best they could to start a permanent civil war and get all these people killed to destroy that Arab state forever.
Well, I don't think I would go that far.
I don't think that there was a vision of a long-term destruction of Iraq, by any means.
What I do think is that the people who made that war, the Wolfowitz's, the Fife, the Rumsfeld, had no clear notion of how that society worked, and that they were able to believe what Israeli specialists and Israeli officials were telling them, that they could radically reorganize that society to get rid of the Ba'athist party once and for all, and just completely clean house, and that they had that kind of control, that they could exercise that kind of control over that Arab society, that very strongly nationalist Arab society.
And that, of course, was just completely wrong.
They didn't have a clue.
I would really put the emphasis on not having a clue rather than having a clear vision of destruction of that society.
Well, I think this theory goes, and I should specify that Zinni says he doesn't have any actual evidence of this.
This is just his conclusion from watching them.
But I guess what he would say to that, if I can pretend, would be that, oh, no, they finally realized that they didn't have a clue.
And that's when they turned to option C, which was destroy the place.
Well, again, I mean, you know, if you go back and look at the succession of decisions that were made after the U.S. occupied Iraq, what happens is that, yeah, as you say, they realize, well, we can't have the Choladi option, that's not going to work.
We can't have sort of a secular Shiite in charge who's ready to make peace with Israel, as we had hoped, as we were told by Choladi would happen.
So then what happens?
Well, then they're stuck with, all of a sudden, they have this Sunni nationalist uprising on their hands, and they have to have Iraqi allies.
So what do they do?
They basically begin to go to work with these Shiite militias, which are, as we all know, allied with, trained by, allied with Iran.
They swallowed very, very hard.
A lot of people didn't like that in the administration, there's no doubt about it.
They had misgivings about it, but they really had no choice.
They needed Iraqi allies, and so that's what they did.
They exercised, essentially, the Shiite option in 2004 and 2005.
And under that option, of course, they held elections which they knew would bring the militant Shiite parties with their own militias trained by Iran, and virulently anti-Sunni, to power.
And they surely realized that there would be sectarian implications of that, no question about it.
Did they view it as destroying Iraq?
Certainly not, but they were, you know, as people in power always are, they were in denial.
They were in denial about the consequences of their own policies, and so that's the way I analyzed the sequence of events, of developments and decisions, in sort of response to the realization that things weren't going to work out the way they wanted.
Right.
Well, but now we have this situation where, as you say, the United States has empowered the Iran-backed Shiite militias, which is contrary to our policy of at least the last 30 years, and, you know, of course, there are the reports, particularly from the New Yorker magazine, about America backing Al Qaeda in Lebanon against Hezbollah, and of Prince Bandar, Bandar Bush, some call him, traveling around the Middle East getting the Sunni Arab states on board for an American war against Iran.
We at the end of Act I and ready to turn this thing back around the other way, try to, is George Bush going to try to undo his mistake by getting a regime change in Iran so that that makes it okay that they're the ones who rule the south of Iraq now?
Well, you know, it's very possible that you have people in the administration, certainly Cheney and people in his office, would be inclined in that direction, and there certainly have been moves in the region as a whole, which would be, you know, in the direction of sort of aligning the United States with anyone who is against Iran.
This, of course, is not new.
I mean, this was done not just in the Bush administration earlier on, but also even under the Clinton administration.
There was a great deal of this going on, that is, allying with forces that were anti-Iran, even though they were not very savory characters in terms of values and interests of the United States, including the interest in anti-terrorism.
That does not mean that this administration has decided that it can or will, you know, seriously attack Iran.
I think that question is still up in the air, and we don't know.
We don't know for sure what's going to happen.
I think we should assume the worst.
I think we should be working to prevent it in whatever way is possible.
But we just don't know what is in store.
I mean, what is interesting to me right now is the evidence that the administration, that those forces in the Bush administration, including the new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have apparently been able to get Bush to take more seriously the need to get into a diplomatic dialogue with Iran.
That is a change, and it certainly mitigates the danger of an attack on Iran, but does not certainly eliminate it for the following reasons.
That is that the forces, the pro-attack forces in the administration may still hope that even diplomatic contacts with Iran will run their course and will be unsuccessful because the hard line will still be in the way.
That is, the United States taking the hard line on issues at stake or in conflict with Iran will cause those diplomatic contacts to be unsuccessful, and that will clear the way ultimately for making the case for war against Iran.
But during the present phase, I think what we see is the trend away from the military option and toward trying some at least limited diplomatic contacts with Iran.
Well, that kind of just reminds me of my position as well.
I don't want to be the boy who cried wolf, but then again, there are new accusations against that country every day, and even if the heat feels a little bit cooler than it was now, I still fear that the cost of spelling is being built up in the mind of the American people.
Well, that has to be the central issue for those who are opposed to war in the Middle East.
That is to continue every day to deconstruct the arguments that are being made that could be the basis for justifying war.
Absolutely.
Good.
And now, by the way, if you're just tuning in, I'm talking with Gareth Porter from IPS News.
We rerun pretty much everything he writes at antiwar.com/porter, and we're talking about this new House and Senate-passed appropriations bill for tens or hundreds of billions of dollars for this war, but that also has these so-called timelines and benchmarks to force the government out.
And in Mr. Porter's latest article, he points out the massive loopholes in these timelines and benchmarks, which will basically allow the government to stay in Iraq basically forever.
And now, one of those that you mentioned that we've touched on the least here in this conversation, Gareth, is staying in Iraq to train the Iraqi army.
And I just wanted to refer you, I don't know if you saw this, this is from April the 19th, and I'll probably be bringing it up every day for the rest of the year.
Nancy A. Youssef from McClatchy Newspapers, the headline, Training Iraqi Troops No Longer Driving Force in US Policy.
And it's not an official statement, but it's basically off-the-record leaks from a good at least half-dozen sources saying that they're not even trying to do that whole they stand up, we stand down act anymore, that they've basically given it up.
Now the Americans are going to defeat the Sunni insurgency by themselves.
Well, that of course represents the new political line of the administration, which David Petraeus, the commanding general in Baghdad, represents personally, which is the line that we have to provide security so that Iraqi institutions have a breathing space.
I mean, this in my view is ultimately nothing more than a political cover for a policy that is essentially aimed at hanging on until Bush is out of office.
And I think it's associated with a domestic political strategy to try to blame the Democrats for the outcome.
I think if you analyze it from that point of view, if you look at it not as a strategy that is aimed at victory in Iraq or any other outcome, particularly in Iraq, but at a political outcome here at home, you will see that you can make some sense of it, whereas otherwise I don't think you can make any sense of it.
So they would rather than say, for example, working out a deal with the Sunni insurgency and trying to put an end to the sectarian violence and create that unity government they've been talking about all this time, they'd rather let it fall apart and make it the Democrats' fault for making them in the war.
That is precisely right.
And that's where you find an interesting fact that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was the most frequent visitor to the White House to talk to President Bush about Iraq during the month prior to the announcement of the new sort of hard line against Iran and the so-called surge of troops in Iraq, that is to say, in the late summer and fall of 2006.
Now, why on earth would Bush find that Henry Kissinger would have something to tell him about dealing with Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq?
Well, I think the answer is that it has nothing to do with Sunnis and Shiites.
It has everything to do with Democrats and Republicans, because what Kissinger was all about in the final phase of the Vietnam War was two things, one, manipulating the media and public opinion to convince them that the Nixon administration had succeeded in basically forcing the North Vietnamese into U.S. terms by its Christmas bombing of 1972, which was a complete fabrication and misrepresented what actually happened there.
And secondly, that Kissinger in the final week of the war, that is in the spring of 1975, basically arranged to have a vote in the Congress on an emergency supplemental of military assistance to South Vietnam at a time when everybody knew that the war was already over, that the South Vietnamese government was already defeated.
Why did he do that?
Because he was intending to use that as a device to charge the Democrats with being responsible for defeat in Vietnam.
And that is still at least one piece of the legacy of the stab in the back theory that remains a very strongly held view on the part of certain military people and right-wing advocates of the Vietnam War.
Right, yeah, I think that's a very important point to make, that there are vast segments of the American population who believe that since they changed the tactics in Vietnam from seek and destroy to clear and hold, that everything would have worked just fine if those damn Democrats hadn't thrown in the towel.
That's right.
I mean, there is a strong legacy on the right of we coulda, woulda, shoulda won in Vietnam.
And like the war in Iraq, never a question of whether we had any right to invade that country in the first place.
That's right, that question is of no interest to those people, of course.
Yeah, I mean, it's half a percentage of the American population who would even consider what happened in Vietnam to be an American invasion of that country.
Yes, hardly anyone really understands or has enough concern about the origins of the war to really examine that question.
And you know, there were two, count them, one, two, Democrats in the debate last night, the first Democratic primary season debate, who emphasized that the reason the Iraq War has been such a disaster, at least partially, stems from the fact that it was wrong to invade that country in the first place.
It wasn't because we didn't have enough troops, or we had too many troops, or because we should have backed the Sunni here, or the Shia there, or the Kurds there, it was because they lied us into war, we had no right to go into that country, and we had no further right to kill anybody else or spend one more tax dollar killing anybody else in that country.
Simple as that.
Yes, and of course, this is what has been gained by an overwhelming vote in the midterm congressional election against the war.
That's two out of what?
Yeah, congratulations to us.
Eight candidates who will say that.
Yeah.
Yep.
There's absolute travesty, and of course, I don't know if you saw the whole thing, did you see Barack Obama say, well, I'm not planning on using nukes on anyone right now.
My goodness gracious, boy, all options on the table indeed, Mr. Obama.
Yes.
Wow, oh wow.
Well, what about that?
Can you analyze any of these candidates for us, tell us what's a maybe hope for or expect or to demand for many of these candidates?
Well, I think the point that you just made about the debate last night is very important.
You had two candidates who were really prepared to take a very principled stand on the use of military force in Iraq and Iran.
The other candidates, I'm afraid, stand in that great middle politically in this country, which is ruled by a set of precepts that seem to be more or less along the lines of the crowd in Hans Christian Andersen's famous fable of the emperor's new clothes.
That is the crowd, which was under the impression that if they were able to see that the president – excuse me, that the emperor was not wearing any clothes, then that must mean that they were stupid or not fit for their job and that there's kind of an enforced compliance with certain precepts about the use of force, about the military, which in general amounts to – one can never say that we have lost or that we are losing or that we will inevitably lose because one must always believe in the efficacy of the use of American military force.
And so that's why Harry Reid, when he played the role of the boy who cried, who blurted out, but the emperor's not wearing any clothes, the wrath of the system came down on his head, as we have read in the last week or so, when he said that I believe this war is lost.
The problem is not that Harry Reid told the truth, but that he didn't go far enough in explaining exactly why and how it is that this war is not only lost, but was inevitably unwinnable from the beginning.
I think we may have made a little bit of progress toward that understanding in the debate last night, Joe Biden – not just the two real anti-war guys, but Joe Biden and Bill Richardson also kind of ran with the idea that there is no victory to be had here, the way you people define it, and so forget it.
Well, that's true.
There are nuances now that are being introduced by the Democrats.
I mean, they're saying that we cannot win militarily.
They're saying we have to win diplomatically and politically.
That's the gloss that's now being placed on Harry Reid's statement that the war is lost.
But of course, without further explanation, that really does not help very much, because the same people that you're referring to, certainly Biden himself, is instrumental, and perhaps most instrumental, in this al Qaeda exception, which would allow U.S. troops in tens of thousands to remain in the Sunni heartland to fight ostensibly against al Qaeda.
And now, I don't know if you watched any of the afterparty on MSNBC, but there was one part in the debate where this former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel – the question was specifically about states.
They were not talking about stateless terrorism.
The question was about states, and he made the statement that America has no enemies in the world.
He was quite struck by that.
And on MSNBC, they tore him apart after that.
You talk about everybody has to make sure they stay within the precepts of this martial spirit and the efficacy of force.
How dare he say America has no enemies?
Doesn't he remember September 11th, and they completely lost the context of the question that he was answering?
Right, absolutely.
I mean, this is the thought police at work.
The system operates to make sure that people stay within the limits that are allowed ideologically in the country, and we're seeing some very dramatic examples of how that works right now.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we have a little bit of time if you have any closing comments.
I guess I'm not as prepared as I should be, and I'm out of questions for you, Gareth.
Well, no, I think that you've hit really all of the key points that I regard as most important at this moment.
That is to say, the need to raise the issue of the loopholes in the democratic plan, which are not only egregiously wide in the sense that they allow for the war to go on indefinitely without any clear way of avoiding abuse by the administration, but they are unnecessary.
This al-Qaeda exception is so totally unnecessary because there is a better alternative to using U.S., to allow U.S. forces to remain in the Sunni provinces and continue to stir up opposition, to stir up hatred of Americans, to stir up resistance to the occupation and thus to really give unnecessarily more support politically to al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And that is the Sunni insurgents themselves who have popular support, who work actively and well with the Sunni tribal leadership, and who know the way the al-Qaeda works because they have collaborated with them in the past.
And in fact, I've published myself an article in which I document the fact that as early as mid-2005, al-Qaeda was very much afraid of a deal between the non-Jihadist Sunni insurgents and the Americans because they knew that these Sunni insurgents knew their way of organizing and the secret roots that they follow in their operation in the Sunni heartland.
So it's clear that they were the people who can effectively defeat al-Qaeda, not American troops.
Right.
And whether or not any of these letters found by the American military reporting to be from or to Zawahiri or Zarqawi, it's just obvious from the outside that the most important thing from al-Qaeda in Iraq's point of view is that the war lasts as long as possible because when the war is over, they're done.
Absolutely.
And so they want to keep American troops there.
That's exactly what they want.
And this is where I feel so frustrated with Democratic leaders who can't seem to muster the courage to say what is so obviously true and in their interest to say.
Right.
No, I'm absolutely with you.
I saw John Stewart talking with John McCain and John McCain said, oh, we're going to if we leave, then that'll be handing al-Qaeda victory.
And John Stewart kind of gave him the middle ground and said, well, you know, they also say that they want us to stay.
What we should have done is turn it right back around and said, no, John McCain, you're the one who's on the side of al-Qaeda here, buddy, not me.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, that the reason that that's not happening is is the the emperor's new clothes effect.
That's all I can say.
Absolutely.
And I have a question for you that I thought of, and I'm in a very uncomfortable position here, a very unfortunate position, I guess I should say, in that I basically with best information I have, accept the premise that if America were to begin a rapid pull out of the kind I would like to see within the next couple of months, that the civil war will get worse.
There'll be bloody fighting over who controls Baghdad, who controls, you know, whether the Sunnis are going to have any stake in the Kurds or the Shia Arabs oil, etc., like that.
And yet I want to go ahead and leave anyway.
And this is a response that I get from a lot of the expert guests that I have on such as yourself.
But I've been arguing a lot, particularly with some people on my blog, who say that that's just not true, that all this violence and the vast majority of it is caused by the American presence has been caused by the American presence, and that if we leave, it will not get worse, there will not be a violent civil war, things will probably get better if we were to just up and leave that country.
Your opinion, sir?
My opinion is that we don't know the truth.
We don't know what is going to happen because there's so many contradictory factors that work, one of which certainly is that the United States does provoke a higher level of sectarian violence, because it is structurally in the position of raising up especially Shiite security forces, particularly police, but also military security forces, which have sectarian interests, which are violently anti-Sunni, and which therefore add to the sectarian tension.
The United States, therefore, definitely is taking sides in the civil war.
There's no way around that, as long as it is in the process of training, equipping with arms, the Shiite forces that it considers to be what it calls the Iraqi security forces, then it is going to add to sectarian tension.
There's another way, though, in which the United States is doing that, and that is that it is providing a justification for al-Qaeda to continue to carry out its violence against Shiite.
If the United States pulls its troops out, inevitably the Sunnis themselves are going to do a better job of tracking down al-Qaeda, and eventually that will tend to burn out.
So I do come down very clearly on the side that the United States has to get out, that over a period of years, that there is no doubt that it will improve the situation as far as sectarian violence in Iraq is concerned.
You people have to admit that this is the best radio show in America, and that it's due in great part to people like Gareth Porter from IPS News.
Thank you so much for your time today, sir.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
