All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Welcoming our first guest today, our regular guest, Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for IPS News, The Huffington Post, occasionally The American Prospect and The Nation also, I believe.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm good, thanks.
How are you, Scott?
Good to talk to you again.
Now, unfortunately, I haven't seen you write anything in the last couple of weeks, which is a bummer for everyone, because...
You're right, I've been preoccupied.
I haven't been able to write anything for a couple of weeks.
Well, that's all right.
Everybody's got to make a living.
But the thing is, when it comes to our government and their war propaganda, you seem to not only see right through their lies with the X-ray eyes, but you do it in such a timely manner.
And I really, oftentimes, look forward to seeing your work within just 24 or 48 hours or less, completely debunking the government's lies about foreign countries in real time.
It's just great.
Anyway, everybody's got to make a living and take some time off, but I still want to use your brilliant brain to help analyze some news going on recently in the Middle East, beginning with the situation in Iraq.
There was a peace deal, Gareth, between Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army, who are the nationalist leaning, although also tied to Iran, Shiite faction based out of Baghdad, and the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, formerly the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, led by Abdulaziz Hakeem and his militia, the Badr Corps.
These are the two major factions among Shiite Arabs in Iraq, the Supreme Islamic Council types closer to Iran, I guess.
But now, apparently, the ceasefire is broken, and Sadr has decided that he's going to renew hostility.
So I just wonder how severe you think the case is and what the ramifications might be.
Well, there's no doubt that this suggests there's going to be more fighting, and therefore we can look forward to more accusations from the United States about Iranian arms.
That's probably the thing that's going to impact on the American consciousness most clearly about this development.
In other words, the tensions have been there all along, they've never stopped, the situation fundamentally hadn't changed, and the ceasefire was, or the agreement to try to work things out was in line with Muqtada al-Sadr's decision this past, well, seven months now to have a ceasefire by the Mahdi army.
And so I think that there's been great strains within the Sadrist movement, tensions caused by the ceasefire itself, because I think most of his followers feel that they're put at a disadvantage by having a ceasefire, or have been put at a disadvantage, and he's been under a lot of pressure, according to a number of press reports.
It's interesting, the omission here doesn't seem like he mentioned the Sunni insurgency.
He says, I'm breaking the ceasefire, I'm renewing hostilities against the Badr Corps, not against the concerned local citizens, aka the Sunni terrorists.
Well, this is of course the interesting thing about Sadr, that we know that he has had this ongoing fight with the Abdulaziz al-Hakim group, which is, you know, close to the present Iraqi government, is really part of the Iraqi government, and, you know, works hand-in-glove with the United States.
At the same time, he has been trying to very quietly work with or, you know, get into the good graces of the folks who were, you know, in the Sunni insurgency in the past, not the al-Qaeda people, but the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents.
Now, there's been very little reporting, I haven't seen any reports on that since last spring, but presumably that has been continuing.
One of his continuing objectives, politically, is to try to reach some accommodation with the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents, and that of course is more complicated now that they're working with the United States, and they may be sort of holding off on reaching the agreement with Sadr because of that, I'm not sure.
But in any case, I mean, this certainly is consistent with his general orientation of putting more of a nationalist stance ahead of a, you know, sort of anti-Sunni, pro-Shiite stance.
You know, if the United States were interested in a settlement of the Sunni-Shiite split, Sunni-Shiite conflict, they would be much more friendly to Sadr, much more friendly than they have been up to now, even though they claim that they're trying to talk to the Sadrists.
And Sadr has been unwilling to talk directly to the United States in line with his nationalist stance.
Well, now, Robert Dreyfuss reported about that, I think back in October, I guess, and this is a theme that he's kind of been writing about for about, well, I guess a year, year and a few months now, about this government of national salvation, the attempt of the Sadrists and the Sunnis to work out a coalition in Parliament that would have greater numbers than the United Iraqi Alliance, which is the Maliki government.
Well, you know, I would say, you know, that's a slightly separate, it's related, but a separate issue, that is the work within the Parliament to set up a coalition.
That has been ongoing, no question about that.
But the Sunnis in Parliament are separate from the leaders of the Sunni insurgency.
Again, you know, there's a split, obviously, within the Sunni community between those people who represent a slightly more mainstream Sunni viewpoint and the leaders of the insurgency in the past.
So, I mean, he's trying to do both, no question about that.
He's working on both fronts, that is, Sadr is working on both fronts.
Now, every time the news wants to say that the Shiite Arabs in Iraq are using weapons that they must have gotten from Iran, they always say, rogue factions of the Mahdi army.
Now, I know that the Mahdi army is a whole lot of people and that Muqtada al-Sadr doesn't necessarily control every single one of them all the time.
But somehow, just, you know, intuition, speculation, it seems to me that that's what they say when they're talking about the Baata Brigade.
And the Baata Brigade does something that, against the United States, kills some American soldiers.
Because you never hear about the Baata Brigade doing anything.
They're the militia of our guys.
So we don't ever say...
Whenever they do something, they call it rogue factions of the Mahdi army.
You think I'm on to something there?
Well, you know, very often I think it's unclear, you know, who is responsible for some of the violence, particularly in Baghdad, where the Baata Brigade is very active, very powerful.
And where, you know, the Mahdi army and the Baata Brigade probably have most of their conflict.
And I don't know for sure if, in fact, the Baata Brigade is carrying out actions against the United States.
That would be quite a story, if we could uncover that, that's for sure.
I'm not sure what the motive would be, but as you say, you know, they undoubtedly have their elements that are not controlled very well by the central leadership, either.
So that's certainly possible.
But I think, you know, the story that just came out this past few days, a Reuters story, apparently they're the only one, the only news service, news outlet that covered this press briefing by Rear Admiral, what is his name, new Admiral Gregory Smith.
This is really a classic piece of Ministry of Truth propaganda.
I mean, it portrays the, it shows the news media, in this case Reuters, as essentially, you know, operating as part of the Ministry of Truth, because the story itself is the masterpiece of gobbledygook, of words that are used in ways that really subvert their true meaning.
And I took a close look at that, because I saw it published in the Washington Times, with the headline that said, Malicious Relying More on Iranian Arms, U.S. Says, which is slightly different from the Reuters story online.
Yeah, the Reuters story is called, Iran-backed groups using secret arms stores.
So in other words, the Washington Times, the right-wing newspaper, gives it even a more openly anti-Iranian plant.
But I count at least five ways in which this story is essentially a handmaiden of propaganda, and just a horrible piece of journalism.
The first one is that the whole premise, as you say, that any arms found in a weapons cache, must come from Iran, and therefore must come from the Iranian government.
And of course, this is without foundation in both senses.
First of all, the weapons caches are not necessarily Shiite weapons caches.
It mentions 212 weapons caches found across Iraq, two inside Baghdad.
But it doesn't say that all of these weapons caches were even Shiite weapons caches, let alone weapons caches that have Iranian arms.
So, I mean, again, it starts with that confusion, and then it goes on to quote Rear Admiral Smith as saying, and I quote, In just the past week, Iraqi coalition forces captured 212 weapons caches across Iraq, two of those inside Iraq, and then it has ellipses, or not ellipses, but in brackets, which have, and I looked at the original press briefing text, and he said actually, just with growing links, quote, growing links to Iranian-backed special groups.
Now, first of all, how can a weapons cache have a growing link to an Iranian-backed special group?
A weapons cache can't have a growing link.
That's gobbledygook.
It's meaningless.
And so instead of pointing this out, instead of saying, you know, asking questions, Admiral, how can a weapons cache have a growing link with an Iranian-backed special group, or a growing link with any special group, or any group?
Right.
You know, he reports it as though it makes any sense.
And slight correction there, it was two of those caches inside Baghdad.
Inside Baghdad.
I'm sorry, didn't I say that?
Well, you said inside Iraq.
Inside Baghdad.
That's what you meant.
Which have, with growing links.
Right.
So that's a meaningless piece of garbage.
Then the story fails to mention something in Admiral Smith's press briefing which, if reported, would tend to subvert the line being carried by the story, which is that there was a February 14th explosion, that is the day before, three days before the briefing, an explosion in an open-air market in Sadr City, which killed two Iraqis and wounded 24 others.
And according to Admiral Smith, further investigation revealed that it was caused by the accidental detonation of explosives that were being sold out of a car in Morady Market.
Now, it claims that the munitions were being sold by two special groups' criminals.
I suspect they, at this point, don't really know who these people are.
They're probably just people who got a hold of some explosives and were trying to sell them to whomever would buy them.
And it sort of points in the direction of a huge black market for explosives.
Which there has to be.
I mean, could anybody even imagine the Middle East without knowing for a fact that the whole place is awash in weapons of every description?
How many of these caches, or what percentage of these caches, are simply being bought on the black market within Iraq, and particularly, of course, in Baghdad?
And now, let me stop you for just a moment here, because I know, in fact, this is how I first met you.
This was our first discussion on this show just over a year ago, was the Bush administration was leveling all these accusations at Iran regarding their weapons in Iraq.
And I've interviewed you probably 25 times in the last year on this story over and over again.
I know that you've been watching it like a hawk.
And I know that you'll answer this question honestly, even if it goes against the case that you generally make.
Has there, to this day, Gareth Porter, been any evidence whatsoever that has been shown by our government to say that any weapons used against our guys in Iraq, whether by Sunnis or Shia, Mahdi Army or Bata Brigade or anybody else, come from the Iranians?
I think that they have shown some evidence that there have been weapons that came across the border from Iran.
I don't think that they have shown any evidence that the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, or the Iranian government per se, have sponsored exports of weapons to Iraq.
Well, I must have missed the part where they even proved that weapons were coming across the border.
Well, there have been caches in which the weapons themselves were presumably Iranian weapons.
They matched the description of Iranian weapons.
And I wouldn't challenge that, that they're Iranian weapons, weapons that were manufactured in Iran.
That is to say, some of the larger caliber rockets, for example.
But the idea that any weapon that was manufactured in Iran must therefore be a weapon that was sent deliberately by the Iranian government is simply not shown.
And, indeed, I continue to see bits and pieces of evidence, certainly over the past year, that support the thesis that, in fact, these have come through roundabout black market channels and were not part of an Iranian policy to support the Shiite militias.
And, in fact, I think, as we've talked about in the past, the logic of the situation is such that the Iranian government has no reason to want to have Muqtada al-Sadr be going to war against the al-Hakim folks who are close to the Iraqi government.
Their primary interest, and I'll say this again, as I've said in the past, the Iranian primary interest is to have a stable Shiite government.
So they want to have as little violence between Shiite factions as possible.
Well, and, in fact, General Petraeus credited the Iranian government with putting pressure on Muqtada al-Sadr to knock it off a few months back.
This, of course, is the final point that I want to make.
Well, there are two more points.
One point is that the story that we're referring to goes on to repeat the official U.S. line that accuses Tehran of, quote, destabilizing Iraq, unquote, by arming Shiite groups.
This ignores the fact that both the State Department and, at least at one point, the Pentagon conceded that Iran had been cooperating in trying to tamp down violence and to stabilize the situation.
And I think it's probably true that Iran has been trying to use its influence with Muqtada al-Sadr to have a ceasefire, to keep the ceasefire, and therefore to, you know, they have no interest in trying to do the opposite of, obviously, to encourage the Ahmadi army to go to war, certainly against the Shiites.
So I think the logic is that they would not be arming these folks, and in fact would be doing the opposite.
The second point, just to continue, just to finish this analysis of that story, is the whole idea of the special groups, as you yourself said, is a U.S. propaganda vehicle for portraying basically anyone who uses force against U.S. troops as rogue elements.
And this goes back to a story that I did last fall, which talked about how the United States military in Iraq knows that they can't defeat the Ahmadi army militarily, they don't have enough forces to do that, and they really can't afford to have a war against the Ahmadi army.
So they have chosen a very clever propaganda tactic, which is to try to divide the Ahmadi army, and to suggest that, you know, Muqtada is okay, you know, he's really being responsible, but it's all these people who are taking up arms, they're really the ones who are aligned with Iran.
So they're the real enemy, and therefore the Ahmadi army has really been riven down the middle by a split between the pro-Iranian element and the true Ahmadi army element.
And that just, you know, there's just no evidence to support that.
I mean, the folks that have been picking up arms are no more pro-Iranian than the folks who haven't.
I mean, there's just no evidence to support that idea.
Is there anyone in mainstream media that you've found, you know, CBS, NBC, CNN, major newspapers who question this stuff?
I mean, it's been a year straight of, if our guys are dying in Iraq, it's because Iran did it.
And they just say it over and over again.
And, of course, Sean Hannity just would say, well, we know this, that, the other thing, X, Y, Z.
And that seems to, basically, the meme seems to have been sold, whether it's really true or not.
The answer is no.
I mean, and worse than that, I mean, I have tried, personally, to try to get the Washington Post to take an interest in this story.
You know, without mentioning the reporter, I will say that efforts were made to get the Washington Post in Iraq to take an interest in this story, on the grounds that, you know, and I showed in my own articles that there was plenty of evidence that this line, this propaganda line, did not really, was not consistent with the facts.
And that failed.
I tried the op-ed page.
I tried at least one op-ed columnist for the Post, who actually agreed with me, you know, in an email, but said he didn't think it was his place to try to correct the record, and he referred me to the Outlook section.
I tried the Outlook section, tried to interest them in a piece, and they said, no, this is really a news story.
It's not really op-ed.
And then I tried the fact checker, and I got no answer.
So I've tried at least in four places in the Washington Post to get some interest in taking on this story, to try to correct what I thought was an egregious miscarriage of journalism.
And I've gotten absolutely nowhere.
And it's such a great story, just because the truth is so different than the conventional wisdom.
It seems like they could make a big splash.
I'd like to see Walter Pincus's name on this thing, on the front page.
I think you're right, that this is a major story.
It cries out for investigative journalism.
And the will to do investigative journalism on this kind of story simply is not there.
I mean, that's all I can conclude.
Yeah.
I mean, and you're right, too.
You think of all the different angles you could go.
Who in the Pentagon was pushing this line?
And, you know, which professionals resisted and got fired for it?
And I bet there's a million angles that could be followed here, you know?
Sure.
Absolutely.
I mean, if you were working for a major news organization and have the kind of contacts that they basically have by virtue of being a major news organization, you could definitely do a really good story on that, I believe.
Well, it's just 2002 all over again and in slow motion, I guess, this time.
By the way, Scott, I would also say that I think that there are working-level military people in Iraq who know that this is not true.
I mean, we've seen, and this is one of the things that I had in mind when I just said that I've seen stories that, you know, buried within a story that was at a different slant.
You will see a statement suggesting that, you know, military analysts in Iraq have begun to doubt that the propaganda line is accurate.
Well, that's progress a little bit.
Maybe they can get a story into the Washington Post somehow, or you can't.
Someday we'll see, I think, fuller truth about this being carried by the media, but not now.
Well, now, one worry about the Iran NIE that was put forward by the National Intelligence Council that said that Iran is not making nuclear weapons, it had this Achilles' heel built right into it that said they haven't had a nuclear weapons program since 2003.
And so, of course, the administration and the war parties spin on that, of course, is that, ah-ha, see, we told you they had a nuclear weapons program, even if it was they used to have a nuclear weapons program.
And now, here in the Associated Press, it says, U.S., Iran must confess to nuclear arms.
And basically, the point here is that they're obstructing Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA by saying that it's just like Saddam Hussein, and evidence of absence is not absence of evidence and all that.
They must come clean and admit every single thing we accuse them of doing, or else we know they're lying.
So, this to me is really a fascinating bit of, you know, revealing bit of U.S. propaganda, because it suggests that unless the Iranians are willing to cooperate with U.S. propaganda, that they will be held to be in bad faith.
In other words, the issue is now, you know, if we can show that they weren't telling the truth in the past, then we would be justified in saying that we can do whatever we want, and disregard whether or not there is any threat from Iran today.
And, you know, this is a very alarming piece of logic, obviously, because it means that there is simply no accounting for the way in which the U.S. government is going to behave on Iran.
I mean, it's capable of drawing the most illogical conclusion and acting on them.
I mean, obviously, Iran is not particularly interested in playing along with U.S. propaganda.
No government in the world is going to do that, confronted with a situation in which what the U.S. is trying to do is to put pressure on them to stop all enrichment, and will use any sort of evidence that it can to boost its campaign to do that.
So, I mean, it's just so transparent that I'm amazed that it's actually put forward in such a blatant form.
Now, you know, we talked about in the past what is meant by a weapons program, given the fact that no evidence had ever come to light except for the infamous laptop document.
Except for this document that was given to the Iranians by the AQ Khan network, which was the famous spherical diagram of a spherical form, which supposedly would only be for a nuclear weapon.
Now, the fact that they possessed that, which was something that was given to them as part of the deal in buying some parts for centrifuges, it is certainly not evidence of an intention to build a bomb.
I mean, it simply means that they said, yeah, okay, we'll take it.
You know, this is, it seems to me, this goes to the heart of this issue.
Is it true that Iran, that people in Iran thought about bombs?
Yeah, of course they thought about bombs.
Did they look at research about bombs?
Of course they looked at research about bombs.
Does that mean that they had a program that was based on a decision to build a bomb?
Not at all.
I think this is the fundamental distinction, that those people who are determined to convict Iran on the nuclear issue refuse to acknowledge.
Yeah, well, all details are things they refuse to challenge.
It all is just a blank statement.
Yeah, it's a statement that is not in vogue, obviously, in this crowd.
Yeah.
You know, Gordon Prather, our nuclear physicist at AntiWar.com, also talked about part of the smoking laptop evidence was a plan, basically, to hire some contractors to build a thing to do some laser enrichment of uranium to tetrafluoride.
Right.
And this is something that absolutely never happened.
The building was never bought.
The factory was never made.
The lasers were never fired.
Nothing ever happened.
And it wouldn't make any sense to enrich to tetra-whatever-the-hell, because they were already enriching it to hexafluoride, uranium hexafluoride gas, at the plant down the street, openly declared, and they're doing it in mass quantities.
And so, why would they build this whole facility and waste all this money just to enrich to a half-step, when they're enriching all the way to the point that they need to in order to enter it into their centrifuges down the street?
Right.
And, you know, I think the other thing is that things that were done up to 2003, things that were planned in secret, you know, not informing the IAEA or the world, which had to do with enrichment, were qualified as a secret weapons program, were part of the secret weapons program under the U.S. definition.
In 2003, Iran decided that they would no longer keep their enrichment program secret.
They would reveal everything about it.
So, you know, this is part of the problem of defining a weapons program, a secret weapons program, a covert weapons program.
Anything that had to do with enrichment that was covert before 2003 was qualified as a weapons program.
Now, you know, I think that's the point that Prather illustrates in that specific point.
But I think there's more than that as well.
I mean, there are other things that have to do with plans for enrichment that were covert up to 2003.
And they decided to make a clean breast of it for a variety of reasons.
Part of it, undoubtedly, being that they saw the United States preparing for war and then actually carrying out the invasion of Iraq.
And they were much more cautious than they would have otherwise been.
But that's not the only part of their decision in 2003.
That's not the only reason for the decision in 2003.
Well, you know, another detail that Prather points out is that they were not required by their safeguards agreement with the IAEA under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to reveal any of that stuff until they put the enriched uranium hexafluoride gas into the centrifuge to begin to enrich it.
At that point was when they were required to declare it, and that's when they did.
Even though they were outed by the Mossad front, the NCRI, the Mujahideen Al-Khalka pressure group in D.C. first.
But basically they hadn't been breaking the law.
What I would add to all that is, and this is a very complicated issue, I think it has a number of different elements.
The other thing is that there's no doubt that there are elements in the military who certainly wanted to have work being done on the nuclear weapons option as an option.
Not that a decision had been made yet, but that they wanted to study it.
And so I am convinced that what the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are referring to when they talk about evidence that a decision was made in 2003 to shut down covert weapons research is that some of the things that the military wanted to do, and had set up some researchers, some consultants to do work on it, was decided against that in 2003.
So again, this is so far from a government decision to go ahead with nuclear weapons, that I think all of this has been completely taken out of the right perspective.
And to add some more perspective to this, to just recall the last few years of accusations and propaganda against Iran, and even up until this point with the twisting of the results of the N.I.
E.
Of course John McCain famously said in one of the debates that maybe the N.I.
E. emboldened them, as though the CIA was putting America at risk by telling the truth that the Iranians weren't making nukes, that now they would be confident enough that they would start to make them, and so they're just as dangerous as before, and so forth.
Well, you know, I'm glad you've raised that point.
I mean, this is one of the most discouraging, depressing things that has come out of the issue of U.S.
-Iran policy over the past few months.
Since the N.I.
E. was released, you have basically all of the governments allied with the United States, of course particularly Israel, but also European governments on the Iran issue, basically saying that, oh gee, it's really unfortunate that this N.I.
E. was published and that this information has come out, because this weakens our ability to put pressure on Iran.
And therefore, I mean, it's more or less accepted now in the mainstream media and mainstream politics that even if it was true, it should never be said, because it weakens our policy toward Iran.
And this, of course, basically gives further justification to the fundamental problem with U.S. foreign policy, which is the use of lies to essentially carry out a policy toward a state which has been picked out as an enemy.
And if you have to rely on lies, then there's something wrong with the policy.
And, you know, I just haven't seen that point being made at all.
Yeah.
Well, at least it's nice when they admit it.
Now, one last thing before I let you go here, and I know you've got to go, but this morning, well, yesterday, Musharraf's team was handed a pretty resounding defeat in Pakistan.
And then, as Eric Gares put it to me this morning, the United States is celebrated today by bombing Pakistan, an unauthorized strike against the radicals, so-called.
Supposedly, I guess.
This is really a very fortunate development about the election, because I think it underlines the fundamental point about U.S. policy, which is that our hope has to be in the relatively secular and democratic force.
I say relatively because, you know, Nawaz Sharif, who is the head of one of the two parties which was victorious in this election, is certainly, by our standards, not very secular.
I mean, he was very, very pro-Islamist, and worked with some of the parties that were aligned, actually, with the Taliban-type jihadist forces when he was in power in the 1990s.
But relative to the folks who are carrying out bombings and suicide bombings and so forth, these two parties represent the best hope for dealing with the problem of Islamic extremism in Pakistan.
And U.S. policy is really going to be most successful if it stays out of use of military force in Pakistan.
The more it is involved militarily in Pakistan, the harder it's going to make it for these more or less secular democratic parties to be successful in their effort to beat back the challenge of Islamic extremism.
And that ought to be the fundamental principle here, and I hope that the democratic candidate for president is going to be very firm and clear on that.
Well, and, you know, the contrast in just having these two events take place back-to-back like this.
Here you have the people of Pakistan marginalizing not only the former military dictator, current president, but the guy that they want rid of, but also marginalizing the Islamist parties as retribution for the bombing campaign that you brought up there.
And then what do we do?
We go in there and start bombing the place.
How many more radicals did we recruit today, and how many people quit believing that maybe the democratic process is the right way to go about fixing this over there?
These bombings by cruise missiles or predators, these are very, very marginal in terms of any impact on the Islamic extremists, and as you suggest, they can have the opposite effect by raising the profile of the United States militarily.
And, you know, particularly since they're very prone to error and killing innocents in the process of trying to kill one or two bad guys.
So it's just not a very sound strategy, and unfortunately Barack Obama last year endorsed precisely that sort of bombing, saying that he would use force against the al-Qaeda types if we had operational intelligence.
And by that he didn't mean invading with ground forces, he meant using these missiles to try to kill individual al-Qaeda people.
But I hope Barack Obama will read the headlines and say, okay, it's time to reconsider that kind of military approach to the problem.
Well, Philip Giraldi, who I know has been a source for an article or two of yours and is a regular guest on this show and writes for Antiwar.com, he's a defense hawk, but a very reasonable one.
And he said, you know, using force inside Pakistan is really the wrong way to go.
What we want to do basically at this point, due to the fact that Osama escaped and made it to, you know, escaped from Tora Bora and made it into Pakistan and all that, and the situation where we are now in 2008, what we really need to do is try our best to contain Waziristan on the Afghan side with our soldiers and try to get the Pakistanis to contain that region on the other side, and try our best really just to wait them out.
Nobody's ever won by invading Waziristan in the history of the world, and nobody's about to either.
I would just add that, you know, the fundamental lesson that I think we are learning, we should have learned from the past year in particular, but even more broadly over the past few years, is that if the United States is smart enough to step back, even partly, and let the local people take care of the problem, the Al-Qaeda people will overplay their hand and, you know, basically piss off most of the people in which they are located, in the areas in which they are located, and the problem will take care of itself.
So basically the best policy is to stay away, to stay out of Islamic countries militarily.
Yeah, well, you'll get no argument from me there.
I would like to get out of Afghanistan.
I'm sure you saw the headline, 140 people killed in the last couple of days in Afghanistan and bombings there, where our policy is that half the population, the Pashtuns, aren't allowed to be part of the puppet government we've created there, and that's a policy for failure.
You know, we're not going to be any more successful there than the Russians over the long term.
Well, I agree with you, and I think it's really time for people, including myself, who have tended to be soft on the war in Afghanistan, to say, look, it's now time to start getting out.
You know, it's time to put pressure on to get out of Afghanistan, because in a larger picture that is just as damaging to the U.S. national security in terms of the attitudes of people in the Islamic world towards the United States as the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
And, of course, the same thing is true in Pakistan as well.
Right.
Well, and not only that, we have no right to occupy Afghanistan.
Well, you know, I think the only right that we would have had is if we were able to target specifically bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organization at a time when they were still there.
And we could argue, I think quite coherently, that we could respond reasonably to the 9-11 attacks.
That opportunity came and went, and for reasons which I won't go into now, the Bush administration did not take advantage of it.
And after that, I think it was basically too late.
I think that's what we should have learned over the last few years.
That's Gareth Porter from IPS News, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect.
He's an independent historian and journalist and regular expert guest on Antiwar.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, Gareth.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
