All right, folks, we got Gary Porter, our regular guest on the line.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
You can find what he writes at the Huffington Post, oftentimes at the American Prospect.
A lot of great work for the American Prospect.
And of course, IPS News Service, which means we run all of his articles for them, news stories for them at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be on.
It's good to have you here.
And now your new one today on Antiwar.com.
It's in the middle of the headlines at the in the top news section at Antiwar.com, dissenting views made Fallon's fall inevitable.
And this is referring to the head of Central Command, Admiral Fox Fallon, who a little over a year ago was put in that position, who announced his retirement yesterday on the heels of an Esquire article by Thomas Barnett about him and focused, as you have been for the last year, on his dissent against Dick Cheney's Iran policy.
So I guess if you can just explain what you think happened.
Did he go ahead and step down for the embarrassment, or was he forced out, or what do you think was going on there?
I think you have two things going on, really.
One is that there's no doubt that the administration was glad to get rid of him, that they that they pressed him to resign.
That I think was clear from the sign language, from the body language coming from the Pentagon, really, over the last two days.
They made no bones about the fact that they were happy to see him go, that they did not want a continuation of a situation that involved a very high-ranking military official who was essentially not on the same page as the administration on the two most important, most sensitive politically, foreign policy issues before the administration, which were Iran and Iraq.
Well, last year you broke the story on May 16th that Admiral Fallon had basically intervened or was in the position to decline a third carrier task force to float off the shores of Iran, and that in that sense he was really thwarting the will of Dick Cheney and thwarting the possibility of airstrikes against Iran last spring.
Is that right?
Right.
That was the first indication that I had, that Fallon was really not on board with the administration's strategy toward Iran, which at that moment was really headed toward a kind of brinkmanship strategy, that is to say, going to the brink of war, trying to convince the Iranians that the United States was preparing for war against Iran by an even bigger buildup in the Persian Gulf, to be accompanied by various faint and diplomatic political moves, military and political and diplomatic moves, that suggested that.
And it became clear at that point I had a source which was feeding me information about Fallon's resistance to war, and that was when I also picked up the very important story that he had informed someone in a private conversation at the time of his confirmation hearing in early February last year that he would not, that there would not be a strike against Iran on his watch, and that he was prepared, I mean he implied very strongly he was prepared to step down rather than carry out such an order.
Now it's been revealed now in the Washington Post that Colonel Pat Lang, who was the former intelligence officer in the Middle East for the Defense Intelligence Agency, was the source of that information.
He told the Post last week that Fallon had told him that there would be no war on his watch.
And now when we talked about this last May, I think the interpretation was that Secretary Gates was on Fallon's side here, working against Cheney, with Rice, against Cheney.
Do you think that that's still the case?
He seems to be pretty on board for whatever the White House wants.
No, I think Gates definitely was trying to help restrain the White House on going to war against Iran in early 2007.
You'll remember this came right after a reported White House meeting, not a White House meeting, a meeting in the Pentagon between Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which Bush actually basically told him that he was thinking about a strike against Iran and asked their view.
And reportedly they unanimously opposed such a strike, and I think there's good reason to believe that they were alarmed by this, obviously they would be alarmed by this.
And they undoubtedly discussed this problem with Gates and said they wanted to make sure that the replacement for John P. Abizaid as CENTCOM commander, with responsibility for the entire Middle East, would be somebody who would be opposed to a strike against Iran.
And I think that's why Gates actually chose Fallon for that position.
But I think now Gates has become in the situation where a strike against Iran has become increasingly unlikely, Gates has now basically become a loyalist to the Bush administration, and he's not going to sacrifice his own career, he's not going to, I shouldn't say sacrifice his career, but he's not going to step down over an issue such as Fallon's resignation.
I think he would ease them now, you know, joined at the hip with the administration and with the White House on questions of maintaining a high level of tension with Iran, as we've talked about over the January 6th incident.
Right.
Well, so in a sense then, are you saying that it may not matter that Fallon is gone at this point because we really don't need him to stand in between Dick Cheney and a war because it's too late for them to do it anyway?
Well, I'm not saying that it doesn't matter, but I do still believe that it's unlikely that the administration can carry out a strike against Iran.
I mean, obviously, his leaving makes it easier, there's no doubt about that.
But he was not the only obstacle, I mean, I think you still have the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Right.
Well, and you have reality all over the world, and we've known this for years.
I mean, since they really started talking about striking Iran in 2004 and 2005, you know, any idiot can sit here and list 15 reasons why you really ought to not start a war with the Persians.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I mean, we now know that essentially the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the possible exception of the Air Force, but I think even the Air Force is very skeptical about this, is opposed to a strike.
The President knows it very well, he knows that even, you know, the right-wing think tanks are less than enthusiastic, to say the least, about a war with Iran.
And you know, I think that when you hear Israeli officials saying that the NIE has essentially removed any possibility of a U.S. strike against Iran, you get a sense that the possibility has been radically diminished.
But just let me complete my thought, which I failed to complete after your first question, which is that there are two things going on.
One is that the administration was happy to have his resignation, but I think that Fallon really pushed a confrontation with the administration deliberately by cooperating with the Esquire magazine article.
Oh, I was going to ask you that.
And I think he did so because he had basically given up on the administration.
I think that he felt that he had lost the fight on withdrawal from Iraq, and that, you know, he was constantly at odds with the White House and with Petraeus on a series of issues, and was not really effective in trying to shift the administration's policy toward essentially paying more attention to Afghanistan and withdrawing troops from Iraq.
I think that that became more of an issue as time went by.
And of course, you know, he faced sort of a continuing battle with the administration.
They wanted to continue to be able to keep the military option on the table.
And as not only the chief military strategist, but really the key diplomat of the administration in the Middle East in terms of personal relationships with Arab governments there, I think he found that it was increasingly difficult to do that job.
And as I say, I think he was really giving up on the administration.
Now, the question then becomes, if I'm correct, that he deliberately pushed a confrontation by cooperating with the Esquire magazine piece.
What does he have in mind now?
I think, I hope, and I believe, that he is not a Colin Powell.
He's not going to fade into the woodwork and be silent.
And I think that we will hear more from Fox Now.
What makes you say that?
Well, simply because of his personality.
I mean, he is a combative personality.
I mean, you know, he is, according, I mean, I've never met the man and probably never will.
But people who have met him say that personally, one-on-one, he can be very, you know, engaging and very personable.
But he's also, obviously, based on our knowledge of his quarrel with David Petraeus, he can be extremely combative.
And he has very strong, strong views, obviously.
He is a man who is not afraid of expressing his views.
So it's difficult for me to believe that in retirement he is going to be as shy and retiring as many retired officers.
But not all of them have been.
You know, I must say that John P. Abizade now has gone basically public to an extraordinary degree by saying that the United States should accept a nuclear Iran.
Right.
And he was actually, that's why he was run out of there was his dissent on the Iran policy.
That's how he got replaced by Fallon back then.
Well, Abizade, I mean, my sense of Abizade's position within the administration is a bit different.
I think that he did go along with the second carrier task force.
I'm not sure that, I'm not at all sure that Fallon would have gone along even with the second one.
I think he was very dubious even about that, but he was not asked about it.
Abizade was the one who approved it in December of 2006.
So Abizade was not nearly as strong in his opposition as Fallon was.
I think that he basically was not willing to, not willing to say no on the second one.
But I think he was opposed.
He was certainly opposed to going to war against Iran.
So anyway, my point is that I think that there will be more public dissent by Fallon in the coming months.
And the possibility, of course, of a Fallon testimony before Senate Foreign Relations is something that we can think about, we can dream of.
Oh, yeah.
Wouldn't that be nice for Congress to have him in?
I think this is obviously an opportunity for him to do that, and that would be an additional reason for his feeling that it was time to step down, that he could do more good outside than he could inside.
Now, of course, the administration must have thought about that possibility as well.
And so I think there must have been some very complex calculations going on on both sides over this question.
Right.
Well, the last time we spoke about Fallon, just last week, you made the point that we've got to make sure and keep our perspective.
I mean, we're talking about an administrator of the American empire here, a man responsible for an untold number of deaths all over the place.
Well, you didn't say that part, but the point was, you know, this guy isn't, you know, some hero of the anti-war movement, he's an admiral.
But the point is, he was obstructing Dick Cheney.
He was obstructing Cheney, and he was also on the side of withdrawal from Iraq.
And those are two very big, very important issues on which I think he was playing a very useful role from the point of view of drawing down, you know, the U.S. presence.
Well now, how different was his view of Iraq than, say, Petraeus?
I mean, did he want to withdraw everybody?
Well, it's hard to say exactly, you know, where he would have drawn the line.
But certainly, he was for a much faster and much larger withdrawal than Petraeus was willing to agree to.
That's what we do know.
And you know, the main reason was, I'm not suggesting that he is, as you say, I don't think he's an anti-war activist in Iraq so much as he is somebody who saw that the real problem was Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And he saw the United States basically very, you know, its deployment was simply not in line with its real interests, as he thought.
So I mean, I think he is a hawk on Afghanistan.
And I also think that he was ready to go along, clearly.
He did go along with the administration's line that Iran was the troublemaker in the region.
But he simply believed the United States had to deal with it in a different way.
Well, you know, I don't know if this is just a coincidence or not.
I somehow doubt it.
But in fact, today there's a headline that we're running on antiwar.com.
I think it was the New York Times about, oh, by the way, we haven't mentioned in a while, but yeah, all the foreign fighter jihadists in Iraq are all coming from Syria.
Right.
And Petraeus also himself has talked about, oh, no, we're not going to meet the Iranians and have any more talks with them until they stop backing these special groups.
So here we are again with this propaganda that all of America's problems in Iraq are ultimately Iran's fault.
Yes.
And I mean, this is a source of constant frustration for me that I am unable to get an opportunity to directly question the officials who continue to issue statements that seem to have no rhyme or reason to them.
I mean, you know, we have this theory, the sequence of events late last year and early this year where the State Department, a leading State Department official basically says Iran is playing a useful role, helping to tamp down violence.
The Pentagon, the command in Iraq originally refused to go along with that, but then ultimately seems to accept the general thrust of that policy line and then reverses it.
And you know, there seems to be no clear reason for, you know, one cannot understand why they go back and forth on this.
It seems to be totally arbitrary and no one seems to be holding them accountable to show some evidence for changes in their line.
Right.
And see, that is the intriguing thing about this.
It never seems to really have anything to do with what's happening on the ground in Iraq.
It's simply just...
That much is very clear, that there's no relationship between the declaratory propaganda line on one hand and events in Iraq and their direct relationship or indirect relationship even to Iran on the other hand.
And now there are exceptions, I'm sure, but generally speaking, is it not the case that the Shiite militias in Iraq who are close to the Iranians are also close to and supporters of the Maliki government that America protects in the Green Zone?
Yes.
We've talked about this in the past.
The most pro-Iranian of the Shiite groups are absolutely behind the Maliki government and they are the most pro-American.
Okay, I'm sorry to...
That is to say, they are the ones that the U.S. military has worked with most closely.
I mean, they are the source of the dreaded Wolf Brigade, for example.
Remember the Wolf Brigade?
This is now becoming an older story.
Sure.
The El Salvador option.
This is what started the Civil War.
Was America backing the Shiite militias to...
They were all coming from the Bader Group, which was close to the United States and collaborated openly with the United States.
So this is, again, the great irony which if the Democratic candidates had announced defense, they would bring up at every opportunity along the way.
Right.
Well, I'm sorry for being so redundant and asking you the same questions every week, but some of these things just have to be footnoted every time.
And I think, you know, you also touch on something there about the presidential candidates.
I'm not the biggest Barack Obama fan, but if I was Barack Obama and John McCain was telling the American people that I wanted to wave a white flag and surrender to Osama bin Laden in Iraq, I would have a decent answer, rather than just, oh yeah, well, al-Qaeda wasn't there before.
I mean...
Well, I think that that was a good starting point, just didn't carry it far enough.
We should have said al-Qaeda was not there before.
And the sooner the United States gets out of Iraq, the sooner the Iraqis themselves will be able to, and will have the incentive to deal with that problem themselves.
Because al-Qaeda has really never been popular, except insofar as people viewed al-Qaeda as a useful tool to fight the Americans.
Right.
And of course, even then, they were a very small percentage of the Sunni insurgency.
Well, that's right.
They were a small percentage.
But of course, they played an increasingly important role, in terms of their ability to cause trouble for the Americans.
But it does seem to me that...
That created, and still creates, a problem for many Sunni insurgents, some of whom continue to have either a ceasefire with al-Qaeda, or to collaborate with al-Qaeda.
And the reason they do it is not because they are sold on the politics and the ideology of al-Qaeda itself, its extreme form of Wahhabism, but that they share the same basic strategic goal with al-Qaeda, of getting rid of U.S. occupation, and of course, to some extent, the fear of Shiite domination.
Yeah, it's just...
I guess it's kind of appalling to me that Obama doesn't seem to have the wherewithal to say what you just said.
He doesn't know, he doesn't understand the situation in Iraq well enough to elaborate on the point.
Well, you know...
It doesn't seem like.
We do have a serious problem here, in terms of...
I think Barack Obama is smarter than his national security advisors.
Yes.
This is the difficulty that we face.
He has the right political instincts.
I believe that.
But I think he's surrounded by advisors who do not have the right political instincts, they have the wrong political instincts.
And just, I mean, the one example that I want to talk about, very quickly, is that when Obama said, publicly, last summer, that he would not threaten to use nuclear weapons against a terrorist target, his advisors clucked at him, oh, you can't say that.
You can't do that.
That violates the fundamental law of national security policy, that you never take an option off the table.
Now, you know, I mean, that is screwball and gangster logic.
It doesn't make any sense whatsoever that you have a threat that doesn't make any sense to carry out.
That is to say, you know, using a nuclear weapon, which is an area weapon, against a target which, by its very definition, is not an area target, but a very specific place, a home, or an encampment, against which a nuclear weapon makes no sense whatsoever.
So, in fact, Obama was correct, his advisors were wrong.
And this whole thing between, the tiff between Fallon and the Cheney-Bush White House, over his saying that there is not going to be a war against Iran, was obviously over the whole question of never taking an option off the table.
The White House was furious with him, because he was effectively taking the option off the table.
And he was doing so because it didn't make any sense.
It is not in the interest of the United States to threaten a war against Iran.
It's not credible, and it scares the bejesus out of the regimes in the Middle East.
And you know what?
I want to go ahead and pick up on something that you wrote in your article about, well, when they say all options, they really mean all options.
And I was reminded of the Downing Street memo that brought up a couple of different ways they might start a war with Iraq.
Option A was a massive buildup in Kuwait, and then an invasion, the option that they went with.
But option B was called running start.
We'll paint up a U-2 spy plane in UN colors and get it shot down, maybe shoot it down ourselves, I don't know, and blame it on Iraq.
And you report in your article here that in 1997, the Clinton administration tried to get General Zinni to create a pretext for war against Iraq.
That's right.
Exactly.
And this point to a much bigger problem, which is that the national security state is full of officials who are perfectly prepared to do exactly that, to basically fake or to provoke some kind of military incident that they can use to go to war.
It was planned by the national security state and the Johnson administration, of course.
After the Tonkin Gulf crisis, virtually all the advisors to Lyndon Johnson wanted to do exactly that.
They wanted to provoke a war with the North Vietnamese through a naval incident.
And now we know what happened, as I reported, in the Middle East in 1997.
It was a proposal from the White House, which Zinni himself basically shut down by saying, you put it in writing, and they wouldn't do that.
Ah, see, I love that part.
The White House said, hey, General Zinni, why don't you create a firefight in the skies over Iraq as an excuse for war?
And he said, fine, just get me a document with your signature on it, Mr. President, and I'd be happy to do that, and so they backed off.
And this is a fine point in the art of bureaucratic infighting, which, you know, believe me, Fallon was one of the best, and so he was very aware of the tricks that the White House had and that he knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way.
It's just amazing that the Clintons are this close, at least, to achieving that power again.
My God.
Yes, and, you know, I think it's well worth considering that it was the Clinton White House that made a series of decisions that really, you know, set up the situation that we now have in Iraq, as well as, you know, I mean, we haven't talked about this on your program, but it was the Clinton White House, really, not the Bush White House that was the first one to threaten to go to war against Iran, and they did so in 1996 over a bombing in Saudi Arabia, the Khobar Towers bombing, which they had no idea who had done it, but it was simply assumed by the key advisors to Bill Clinton, including Tony Lake and Richard Clark, that it was Iran.
They simply were ready to plan war against Iran, and they actually actively did so on the basis of absolutely no information, no intelligence whatsoever.
And in fact, we know more about that story now, that that was an al-Qaeda attack, that Osama bin Laden stayed at the farm of this guy al-Thani, who's a business associate of Rudy Giuliani, as reported in the Village Voice.
The explosives went through his farm, and Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed both stayed there as they planned the Khobar Towers attack.
Well, there is electronic evidence, as well as other evidence that certainly points toward al-Qaeda, I agree.
It was a very, very dubious proposition that Iran was behind it for a whole series of reasons.
And the fact that the Clinton White House was ready to go to war, but the CIA would not go along with the idea that Iran was behind it, they said, we don't have the evidence at hand.
And I think that helped to calm down the White House long enough so that the idea began to gradually fade.
And in fact, you know, that story is still in circulation.
People still use that in their list of bogus reasons why America ought to have a war against Iran.
Well, that's absolutely right.
And I can tell you that I am going to be doing my own sort of investigative piece on Khobar Towers one of these days.
I'm beginning to work on it, and I think that I can offer some new light on the whole issue.
I cannot wait to read it.
Everybody, Gareth Porter, there's no mystery why I have him on the show every week to share his insight.
Thank you so much for your time today, Gareth.
Thanks for having me, as always, Scott.
