Alright, folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, and welcoming back to the show Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist who writes for Interpress Service.
We keep all of his IPS stuff at antiwar.com slash porter.
You can also find him from time to time at the Huffington Post, the American Prospect, the Nation, I think, and anyway, a lot of great publications like that, and he's got a new one today.
It's at the top of antiwar.com.
It's called Anti-Iran Arguments, The Lie, Fear-Mongering, and basically looks, Gareth, looks here, by the way, hi.
Hi.
How are you?
I'm good.
Good to have you back on the show.
It looks here like you found some study written by the WINEP, which is the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a neocon think tank, and somehow all their arguments about why we need to attack Iran seem to explain why we don't need to attack Iran at all.
Well, that's exactly right.
I mean, that's the delicious irony of this new development in the U.S.
-Iran conflict where you have pro-Israeli strategists, and I include in that both the WINEP authors, Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt, and a former national or deputy national security advisor of Israel, Chuck Freilich, who's at the Harvard Belfer Center, making the argument for an American attack on Iran, and by the way, it's very clear they're not arguing for Israeli attack on Iran.
It's only a U.S. attack that they're arguing for, and in so doing, they're essentially contradicting the most basic thrust of Israel's case with regard to Iran, that Iran presents an existential threat, that Iran is not deterrable, that it, first of all, it intends to obtain nuclear weapons specifically against Israel, that that's the main purpose of such weapons, and that Iran could not be deterrable because they're a bunch of Islamic radicals, Islamic extremists who, you know, I think the argument would go that they believe in the coming of the Twelfth Imam, and that, you know, that they're basically immune to the normal deterrent that has worked throughout the Cold War for the United States in regard to the Soviet Union, and, you know, is obviously based on sort of elementary logic.
Right, I mean, that is the... they're the mad mullahs, they're crazy, and they want the apocalypse more than John Hagee wants it, and they're willing to take a hydrogen bomb right on the head, they don't mind at all, as long as they can kill all the Israelis.
Right, right.
So, so what we're seeing here is the very interesting development of a series of arguments that suggest exactly the opposite.
They're now portraying Iran as a very cautious, reasonable, carefully calculating state, which, in fact, is really on the short end of the stick in terms of power relations in the region.
And they're doing so simply to argue that, don't worry, we can bomb them and they won't be able to do anything effective back at us, the consequences won't be that severe.
Is that basically the point?
That is, in essence, the argument that Klassen and Eisenstadt have been making in their WINEP article, and in fact, Klassen gave an interview with Haaretz last week which goes even further.
I mean, it presents it in a starker fashion, rather than in the more careful wording of the WINEP article, which, you know, I think comes to the same conclusion, but words it in a more cautious fashion.
What Klassen is saying here is that, yes, in fact, Iran's bark is worse than its bite, that it's, as he puts it, the Iranian options for responding to an attack by the United States are limited and weak.
That's the quote, limited and weak.
Oh, well, we'd better stop them before they wipe Israel off the map, I guess.
Well, I guess that's what they're basically saying, if you read between the lines, and I think this is the real point of all this WINEP and Chuck Freilich argumentation, is that basically Israel is in a great position in terms of its power relationship with Iran.
It has Iran where it wants it, and it wants to keep things that way.
Right.
And really, that is what this is all about, is making sure not that Israel isn't threatened, but that Israel can continue to have hegemony in the region, threaten everybody, and say, ah, we have nukes, and you don't, and you have to bow to all of our wishes, and you're in no position to bargain with us, and that kind of thing.
Well, exactly.
And, you know, it's not just that Israel is the only nuclear power in the region.
Of course, I'm excluding Pakistan here as being a little bit farther away from the relevant region that Iran and Israel are contesting in.
But it's not just Israel's nuclear capabilities.
It's also the fact that they have, really, air power, which it gives them the capability for using force outside Israel's border throughout the region.
As long as they don't attack Iran, they appear to be perfectly free to essentially fly and drop bombs virtually anywhere they want to in the region.
And that's exactly what they've done.
They've, of course, bombed at will in Lebanon.
They carried out a very extensive bombing campaign in Lebanon in 2006.
Of course, they used ground troops as well as in Lebanon.
They bombed this mysterious target in Syria last September, apparently for the purpose of intimidating Iran.
And I tell the story in my piece published today in antiwar.com that is told by Ray Close, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.
And this goes back to the 1970s.
But it's certainly relevant to the situation today because it hasn't changed that much or, in fact, gotten even worse from the point of view of Israeli military hegemony.
But he tells the story of Israeli jets basically flying low over Saudi Arabia, northern Saudi Arabia, over a Saudi airbase and dropping crates on the runway simply to remind the Saudis that they could be bombing the entire Saudi air force at will, and there was nothing the Saudis could do about it.
It was simply a way of communicating to the Saudis the Israeli complete military dominance.
And I think this idea that Israel is militarily dominant in the region is so deep in the mentality of the Israeli leadership that this goes very far in explaining their behavior in many ways across the board in relation to rivals and other states in the region.
Well, and it seems like with all these arguments, there's this whole process of Orwellian double-thinking here.
I mean, we're still supposed to believe, I guess, that it's what, 1951 or something, and Israel is this besieged, little, helpless group of people surrounded by belligerent powers.
No, wait a minute.
That's not true.
It's 2008, and things have changed a hell of a lot.
They're the dominant power in the region, and yet they're on the brink of total crisis at all times if they don't act this way.
Well, I think that encapsulates it very well, and I think my perspective on this, of course, is that it fits right into the dominant power syndrome that the United States also shares, and which I think is a very strong bond.
Not the only one, by any means, but a very strong bond between the United States and Israel over the years, one that has reached its apotheosis, certainly in the Bush administration.
Well, you know, Garrett Garrett, the old right thinker in his essay, Rise of Empire, talked about the complex of fear and vaunting.
So we spend half of our time saying, we're the best, we're number one, we can do whatever we want, we're the world's greatest.
And then we spend the other half of our time saying, oh no, what's going to happen to us?
Oh, we're helpless unless we turn total power over to our government to wage total war all the time.
Yes, I mean, this, of course, is the pattern that every dominant power is going to display.
And, you know, my own point of view is that the United States has certainly done that consistently over the years.
I would refer to this as sort of strategic badmouthing.
In other words, badmouthing your strategic position.
It's a way of essentially basically diverting attention from the fact that you do have such dominance and are using that dominance for the purpose of projecting your power and increasing your power over others.
By badmouthing your strategic position, by saying that others are threatening you, you of course, that's the only way that you can divert attention from your position and from your intentions in a way that basically takes the heat off you, particularly for domestic consumption, of course.
That's the main purpose.
And this was very much evident in the case of Vietnam.
I mean, the United States constantly talked about its position in Southeast Asia publicly as though it were, you know, besieged and in danger of being swept away by communism and so on and so forth, when in fact they know perfectly well that that wasn't true.
And I document that in Perils of Dominance.
And that's something that, you know, I hope some of your listeners will take advantage of, because I think it helps to understand that is in my book, something that I think they can take advantage of in understanding the current situation, the current crisis of the United States, which is in large part a function of the degree to which the U.S. constantly badmouthed its strategic position, hides the fact that it is using its military dominance to constantly try to increase its power abroad, get more and more bases in more and more places, and increase its intervention in more and more places around the world.
So strategic badmouthing is simply a fundamental pattern of behavior for dominant powers.
Israel does it.
The United States does it.
And I haven't studied previous empires, but I'm quite sure that they did the same thing.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the American media goes along with it to such a great extent.
We can read in Haaretz that the foreign minister of Israel, Livni, has said, even if Iran has nuclear weapons, there's still no threat to us.
We can read in Israeli media that Mayor Dagan, who's the head of Mossad, the chief of Israeli intelligence, has said, ah, we got plenty of time to deal with this, it's not as much of an emergency as you say, et cetera.
And yet, I'm looking at ABC News today, and it says here that everyone agrees that they're likely to have enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon sometime next year, and maybe even this year, even though that's exactly the opposite of what the National Intelligence Estimate says.
Yeah, but of course, you're coming back to our favorite topic of conversation on your program, which is essentially the media whores.
Right, yes, exactly.
And in fact, there's this point I was trying to get to here with that long-winded whole thing that I just said, which was that my friend Shauna pointed out that, you know, with the propaganda machine, it really only matters that we believe the lie that day, maybe the next day.
And when we find out that they were lying, you know, on Friday or Thursday or whatever, it doesn't matter because it worked.
They got us to believe the lie long enough that they were able to get done whatever it was they were trying to get done.
And I was just thinking that we could add to that, that it's not just for this day, it's for this population.
I'm reminded of some footage that I saw from, it wasn't Al Jazeera, but it was some overseas network where they were talking about Bush's quotes about Iran's nuclear program.
They showed Bush talking about Iran's nuclear program.
And then the newscaster said, you know, what is this?
And he was just so frustrated.
And as he just went through, I don't know if he was the newscaster or whoever he was, he just went through and debunked this thing step by step by step by step by step and was basically beside himself with disbelief that this is actually what passes for the conversation about current events in the United States of America.
Is this what the American people really believe?
That there's no such thing as the IAEA?
That there's no difference between 3.6% U-235 and 90 plus percent U-235 or what?
Yes, and of course, as you well know, and I'm sure you probably have already talked about this in the last few days, the current House H. Conres 362 and the Senate version of that, I think it's Senate Resolution 5, are both guilty of the most egregious lies in regard to the Iranian nuclear program.
One of the whereas clauses takes a different tack from the one that you've referred to instead of sort of erasing the distinction between low-enriched uranium and high-enriched uranium and basically neglecting the fact that IAEA inspectors and cameras are at work 24 hours a day watching the nuclear material in the Iranian facilities.
That the H. Conres and Senate Res.
Whereas Clause basically says that Iran has been guilty of, quote, covert, illicit, unquote, nuclear measures over the years, and then lists such things as manufacturing centrifuges as though, you know, this were somehow ruled out or prohibited by the Non-Proliferation Treaty or any of Iran's agreements with the IAEA.
Whereas, of course, we know perfectly well that Iran's agreements and the NPT do nothing to forbid the use of centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear power purposes.
Well, right, and there's nothing anywhere in the U.N.
Charter or in the U.S. Constitution or anything anywhere that says that America or the U.N.
Security Council or anyone else has the right to tell the Iranians that they may or may not have a nuclear program.
Well, in fact, I would go even further and say that the U.S. behavior within the IAEA is arguably a violation, certainly of the spirit, of the IAEA's Charter, which began with the purpose of fostering cooperation between nuclear countries like the United States, those which have mastered the nuclear fuel cycle, and those countries which have not.
The whole idea was to help countries to be able to have civilian nuclear power plants, and to help them with technical assistance in order to do that.
The United States did exactly the opposite.
It actually put pressure on not only the IAEA itself, but also other members of the IAEA to prevent them from having nuclear agreements with Iran.
And even after Iran had reached nuclear agreements for cooperation with other countries, this happened at least four or five times, the United States, through its political pressure on those countries, either caused them to stop performing or stop implementing these agreements with Iran for nuclear technological cooperation, or to simply cancel the agreement altogether.
Right.
Hey, you know, that's something that Gordon Prather has pointed out in his articles over and over, too, is that all through the 1990s, the policy always was arm-twisting against the Chinese, the Russians, anyone who was trying to help the Iranians with their nuclear program.
So we basically drove it underground.
They had to go to the black market to get any kind of nuclear technology.
And even then, as per the accusations in these House and Senate resolutions, even then, the stuff that they kept, quote-unquote, secret or covert or however you want to spin it, the things that they had as far as nuclear technology that they had not reported or declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency, they weren't required to.
They weren't required to until, I guess it's six months before they introduce nuclear fuel into the machinery or so forth, then they have to declare it.
You're exactly correct.
Although, you know, I am now going to depart from the narrative that we've been spinning here, which is the narrative of U.S. pressure in the IAEA to prevent perfectly legitimate cooperation between Iran and other countries for the purpose of building nuclear power and point out that there is little doubt that there were elements within the Iranian regime.
I would say no doubt that there are elements within the Iranian regime who did want to keep open the option of a nuclear weapon and who did pursue that option through research and, you know, through various programs that I think the leadership, the mainstream leadership of the people who have been, as I put it, running the national security policy of Iran for the last two decades really were quite unsympathetic to because I think the Supreme Leader and the Supreme National Security Council staff were generally speaking opposed to any sort of weapons-related research.
But there were some powerful interests within the government who I think were determined to keep that option open and there was a kind of compromise that took place in the Iranian nuclear program over the years, which the former Secretary General of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, revealed in an interview that he did for Kehan newspaper in 2005.
And I think the real drama here that has really not been told and which really needs to be understood by people who are concerned about this issue is that in 2003, the leadership of the Iranian regime essentially put their foot down and said, no more of this.
We're going to clearly eliminate all of this stuff and we're going to have a very clear line from now on of cooperation and with IAEA, we're going to have complete openness and transparency about our program.
And this is to convince the world community that we do not intend to have a nuclear weapon.
Right, they opened their books wide open.
That was their response to the accusations about the axis of evil and all that.
They said, no way we'll even sign an additional protocol to our safeguards agreement and prove it to you.
That's exactly right.
And I think that this is a political struggle that took place within the Iranian regime and the Iranian political system, which is not over completely.
I mean, you know, basically the people who are supporting the nuclear option, the nuclear weapons option, were the extreme right in Iranian politics.
These are the same people who supported Ahmadinejad.
They're the same people who, in many cases, targeted the dissenters, favored the death penalty for dissenters.
They basically favored attacking them when there was the high point of dissent in Iran.
It's the extreme, the most extreme right within the Iranian system.
And there were some bureaucratic elements who were aligned with them.
I think there's some evidence the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran had some elements in it which were aligned with the extreme right.
In any case, there's evidence that some of these people tried to sabotage the regime's policy beginning in 2003 to show the West that they were in good faith with regard to the nuclear program.
So the war parties in both countries are kind of playing off each other.
John Bolton was trying to get them to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
I don't know if you heard that.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, you know, in fact, the neocons would have been happy with an Iranian policy that removed Iran from the NPT.
There's a YouTube, Gareth, I don't know if you've heard it, of John Bolton on a conference call with AIPAC.
And he's explaining that he was very disappointed that he was unable to provoke the Iranians from withdrawing from the NPT and kicking out the IAEA.
I've not seen it, but I have heard about it.
And I would add further on that point that Bolton, in testimony in 2004, and this is something that I'm hoping someday to be able to work into a story, but I haven't yet.
In his testimony in June 2004 before a House committee, he testified that the Bush administration did not give one whit about whether the government in power was an extreme right government or a reformist government or a moderate government.
It didn't matter to them, because from the Bush administration's point of view, the nuclear program of Iran was a nationalist Iranian program.
And he referred to it as the Persian bomb.
In other words, they were not arguing that the nuclear program of Iran had anything to do with Islamic extremism, or that it was aimed at Israel or anything like that.
They were arguing that this was a nationalist bomb project.
And therefore, the Bush administration was opposed to it, regardless of the political stripe of the regime in power.
And this, of course, is just another indicator that when Ahmadinejad came into power, both the neocons and the Israelis just jumped on that as a gift from heaven, and exploited it, despite the fact that they knew perfectly well that Iran's nuclear program had nothing to do with the program that had been pursued from 2003 on.
It had nothing to do with the extreme right.
It had nothing to do with Ahmadinejad.
It had nothing to do with any anti-Israeli policy or anything like that.
I got the soundbite here.
I think that many of the things that we want to try and do to prevent the Iranians from continuing to make progress on their nuclear ballistic missile programs, I think the Iranian reaction to the sanctions resolution has been very telling in that respect, although they've passed the resolution in parliament to re-evaluate their relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
They have not rejected the sanctions resolution.
They have not done anything more dramatic, such as withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty or throwing out sectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which I actually hope they would do, that that kind of reaction would produce a counter-reaction that actually would be more beneficial to us.
Well there you go, Dr. Porter.
Yes, this is exactly on target in terms of documenting the real political dynamic at work here, both within the Bush administration, of course, and of course the pro-Israeli lobby in this country.
They're doing everything they can to try to provoke Iran into some kind of reaction that they can then use to push things a step higher in terms of tension and a step towards war.
And of course that is the entire purpose of the Israeli lobby's resolutions, which they've now succeeded in getting, I understand, about 270 co-sponsors for in the House.
I don't know what the co-sponsorship is in the Senate.
I've heard it was in the 30s, perhaps high 30s, the last time I checked.
Their purpose is precisely to provoke Iran and to try to get us into a situation of actual full-scale war with Iran.
Right, I mean that's what this thing says, is that the President would be ordered to halt anyone trying to travel out of Iran, anyone, government officials or anyone there to be seized.
Is that right?
And to prevent the importation of any refined petroleum products?
I mean, that's a declaration of war right there.
That is a declaration of war and, you know, it's the perfect parallel with what the United States did to provoke World War II with Japan.
I mean, that was precisely the circumstance in which the United States started the ball rolling towards war with Japan.
It was the cut-off of all oil exports to Japan from Southeast Asia.
Yep, right out of the McCulloch Memo.
And it was done, of course, in the knowledge that that would be the almost certain result.
Right, by the way, in the Senate it's 32 co-sponsors and in the House of Representatives it's, I think this might be expired, this says 220, but that was the same the other day.
Yes, I just heard yesterday, last night, that it was 270.
So this is a done deal.
I mean, that's more than half the House of Representatives right there.
Yes, this is already a foregone conclusion that that's going to pass.
And it's simply another indicator that the U.S. Congress is uniquely in the hands of the Israeli lobby.
It is responsive to Israeli interests and not to the interests of the American people.
I mean, it's an extraordinary situation, which is a serious crisis of legitimacy in the U.S. political system.
I think that this sows the seeds of something, you know, in the future, which is going to be very, very ugly indeed.
Well, and see, this is going back to where we started this, with the guys from WINEP saying, come on, we can take them, it'll be no big deal.
It will be a big deal, won't it, the consequences of this war.
I'm thinking we could just start with the likely backlash against our soldiers in Iraq, who are surrounded by who?
Now, of course, in Shiite areas, far more than they were a year, year and a half ago, the U.S. has gotten into a war with the Shiites.
Fortunately, the Iranians have been able to persuade Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces.
Well, he's persuaded Sadr, and Sadr has been able to get his forces to stand down and to basically allow the Maliki government to take over what were Mali army strong points in Sadr city, in Basra, and in Amara.
This, I think, and I'm kind of getting off message here a little bit, but I think it's important to make this point.
This is really because the Iranians and Sadr, as well as al-Maliki, now understand that the nature of the game in Iraq has changed or is changing very dramatically, that the name of the game is not military confrontation with the United States, but basically using political power to oust the United States over a period of time.
So, you're right.
I mean, they are surrounded by Shiites, both the Mahdi army and also the Badr Corps, as I think you've pointed out yourself.
There's still very much a factor if Iran is attacked.
The United States could face the very paramilitary and military forces that were collaborating with the United States in the past, but which, if Iran were attacked, could very easily turn on the United States in Iraq.
And now, they also talk about problems with the price of oil, perhaps Iran's clandestine services in other countries fomenting instability, like we're trying to do in their country now?
Well, there are so many different kinds of options that could be used by the Iranians to retaliate, and they've kind of given us clues as to the various types of options they have.
They're not going to use all of them at once.
They're going to use some of them in retaliation at first, and they're going to hold back on some others.
As I think the top Iranian specialist in Israel, Efrem Kam, who is at the leading Strategic Studies Institute there in Tel Aviv University, has pointed out, Iran is not likely to retaliate all at once.
It's going to open up a long-term campaign that would give it the option of retaliating at times and places of its own choosing, without any warning, of course.
And this is a point that has been repeated by other analysts, and I think it's quite correct.
I mean, Iran is going to, if there is an attack, Iran will retaliate immediately, but it also has the option of continuing to retaliate at its own pace, and it's places where it's most open to opportunities.
Yeah, you know, this is really depressing to me, and I guess this is the kind of thing that we could predict by ourselves, but I really don't like hearing it from the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.
He's quoted, he denies it now, but we all know it's true.
He's quoted by a Democrat senator who talked to Seymour Hersh in the new article preparing the battlefield, and he says, we'll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America if we attack Iran.
This is another of the many cases in which high-ranking U.S. officials say one thing in private, one thing in public, another thing in public.
Gates, of course, in public talks about what a serious threat Iran is to the United States, and at some level perhaps he believes that, but what he doesn't tell the American people is that the United States must avoid an open conflict with Iran.
In so doing, of course, he's playing the Washington game, keeping his bona fides with the White House as much as possible while trying to avoid that conflict.
And as I've pointed out more than once on your program, the real danger, of course, lies in the fact that David Petraeus is going to be going to CENTCOM command very shortly, just a few weeks, and in that position he will be in command of the resources that are necessary to carry out an attack against Iran, and he can do so regardless of the chain of command that technically runs through the Pentagon to the White House, because Petraeus, as we know and have discussed many times, has a direct line to the White House, specifically to Dick Cheney's wing of the White House.
He has received his orders from Dick Cheney in the past.
He's carried them out.
He's a general who is completely politicized, who has given up his military independence of the White House, and therefore there's every reason to fear that he will carry out the orders that are given to him if they should be given to attack Iran.
Well, wouldn't that be something, too, to cut out the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and go straight to the head of CENTCOM and tell him to start it?
Well, this, of course, is exactly what has been happening on Iraq policy.
Petraeus deals directly with the White House.
He doesn't go through the Pentagon except for formal purposes and for the purpose of planning where he needs Pentagon support.
But in terms of working out policy, this is done directly between Petraeus and the president.
We know that Petraeus and Fallon had a now-famous debate in front of George Bush in Iraq, in Baghdad in Iraq, in I believe it was April of 2003.
I can't remember the exact date now.
It's slipped my mind.
In April of 2003, right at the beginning of the war?
Beginning of the war?
No, this was, sorry, not 2003, 2007, excuse me.
In 2007, there was a debate over the question of withdrawal from Iraq, how soon the United States should begin withdrawal from Iraq and how fast it should withdraw from Iraq.
This was a debate that was really the decision-making process for President Bush.
It cut out the Pentagon completely.
The Pentagon and State Department had nothing to say about it.
It was really between Petraeus, Fallon, and Bush.
And I think that's just an indicator of the way in which fundamental policy in the Middle East is being made without regard to the Pentagon and how dangerous it would be for Petraeus to be the Pentagon commander.
Now, I want to talk about the role of the Israel lobby in this.
You mentioned that and then we got diverted off in another direction.
How can it really be, and I'm not saying I disbelieve it because it sure does seem like it to me, but doesn't it seem strange, at least, that a foreign country has this much control over the U.S. Congress, this much influence in the halls of power in D.C. that the, I guess, am I supposed to understand that the old, what we used to call the old eastern establishment or whatever are basically outwitted and outmaneuvered on this and that Cheney and Olmert are going to go ahead and have their war despite what the main core of the American establishment wants?
Well, I think that's a pretty fair reading of the situation that the neocons and Israel have been able to do what I call an end run around the establishment, around the permanent bureaucracy in many ways.
But they have done so, of course, because they have in the White House a man who is uniquely a stooge.
You know, I'm being particularly harsh here, but...
Well, no, I mean, everybody knows this, that George Bush is a completely empty vessel as long as you tell him that he'll look tough or whatever if he does what you say, then he will, clearly.
Well, you know, Bush likes to call himself the decider.
But from my point of view, as I look over his record, from the episodes that I've been able to document, from my own knowledge from interviewing and so forth, and from basically reading the media, he has been uniquely a non-decider in the sense that he, for the most part, he's willing to listen to the last person who spoke with him.
And he changes his mind frequently.
He's extremely indecisive.
He's very much the president who is unable to take a clear-cut stand and who is malleable in that sense on the part of the national security bureaucracy in general, but particularly the man who is closest to him, who has his ear the most, and that's Vice President Dick Cheney.
That's what is so frightening.
Yeah, and you know, I think there's the great anecdote about whoever talked to him last was...
And there are a few like this, but my favorite one was when Dick Cheney was in the Middle East threatening nuclear holocaust, and while he was out of town, Rice and Gates, I guess, and whoever it was, got Bush's ear and said, Now's the time.
We can make a deal with the North Koreans.
And it was a Friday afternoon.
And he went, Well, I guess so.
All right.
You know, I'm getting off work.
All right, so that's a very good one.
I mean, think about what a gigantic piece of this administration's policy has been centered around how we treat North Korea and the entire relationship with North Korea this whole time.
And that's what it comes down to is like, Hey, George, I got a pretty good idea, and nobody's around to contradict me this afternoon.
I've got another one.
My personal favorite is the way in which Bush apparently decided to go ahead with negotiations with the Sunni insurgents in late 2005 and early 2006.
Apparently, Khalilzad, the then ambassador to Iraq, had his ear.
I mean, because he was sort of a neocon veteran with lots of contacts, he had gotten into the White House and managed to establish a personal relationship with Bush.
And so he was able to go in and convince Bush, both through personal contacts within the White House and by calling long distance and having conversations with him.
He convinced Bush to go along with his team to negotiate seriously with the Sunni insurgents with the thought that they might be able to reach a peace agreement.
Right, and this was at the same time.
This is when we always talk about this in the other context.
This was when Bush came out and first accused Iran of being behind the bombs, killing our guys in Iraq, was in March of 2006.
And there was an article by Francis Biddle in Foreign Affairs, who is now the right-hand man to Petraeus, right-hand civilian man to Petraeus.
And there was an article in Time Magazine all about it.
And this is when I wrote America's Switching Sides in the Iraq War on the Antiwar.com blog.
And it was about exactly that.
Khalilzad saying, look, we ought to team up with the Baathists here.
We all used to be such good friends.
Yes, and then I think, you know, Brumsfeld, the people in the Pentagon got to Bush and got him to change his mind.
It's very clear that the negotiations were dropped.
Per year, and then they went back again.
Well, that's right.
Somebody else got us here on a Friday afternoon, I guess.
Under different circumstances and with somewhat different players, I would say.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there's no question that Bush had made a decision to seriously explore this, and then, you know, others got to him and said, no, you can't do that.
And he said, OK, well, we'll drop it.
All right, now, we don't have time to really get into it too much, but just in the last couple of minutes here, your article before last at Antiwar.com slash Porter says, fear of U.S.
-Sunni ties undercut security talks.
And what you say in here is that the basing agreement for the 58 permanent bases and so forth, that one of the main sticking points was that the U.S. refused to provide assurances that we will forever protect their territorial integrity and their government from within or without as long as we're there.
And the Bush administration's excuse was, this is because then we'd have to submit it to the Senate as a treaty and get two thirds.
But you say that it looks to you more like the Americans really don't want to give this assurance in writing to the United Iraqi Alliance, the Dala Party, the Supreme Islamic Council.
Well, that's an interesting question, Scott.
I mean, what is the actual motive behind the disappearance of that provision?
Originally, you know, not provision, but the principle.
Originally, Bush had agreed to that principle as one of the major principles in the November 2007 principles agreement with Al-Maliki.
And then it disappeared.
And you're right, the reason given by Bush is that this would force the administration then to give the Senate the opportunity to veto the agreement.
And it may well be that that was a large part or perhaps the main part of the reason that the Bush administration did not want that to be in the final agreement with Iraq.
But this is why Maliki doesn't want it, because he thinks that what this means, and this sounds probable to me, that what this really means is they're actually finally going to adopt that Khalilzad policy in full strength, try to switch back to minority Sunni rule right in time for war with Iran.
There's no doubt that the Al-Maliki regime and the Iranians certainly suspect that there's a lingering strain of Sunni, you know, aligning with the Sunnis, not just within Iraq, but in the region, against both the Shiite regime in Iraq and against Iran.
And they were particularly exercised about the fact that in May of 2007 there was an international conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, which was ostensibly to promote the cooperation with Iraq, but which suddenly they found who showed up there but a former prime minister, Alawi, who is a secular Shiite.
He's not a Sunni.
But he was the favorite of the United States, not just when he was prime minister, but after that, when the Bush administration was trying to head off a government that would basically dominate the police and security services of Iraq with Shiites, which would have Shiites dominating those most sensitive positions of the government.
And they wanted Alawi to play a sort of kingmaker role to be in a position to be able to influence the choice of ministers in the new government that would take power in 2005 and again in 2006.
So this was a sign for the Shiite parties supporting al-Maliki as well as the Iranians that the United States must be still playing games with Alawi.
By the way, Alawi was also the guy who Khalilzad used to broker the meetings with the Sunni insurgents.
So he has played a very varied and deep game with U.S. officials since the mid-2004 when he became prime minister of Iraq.
And that was part of the reason why the Shiites, I think, were very anxious to get the U.S. signed up on the dotted line to defend Iraq against foreign aggression.
And by that, of course, they're not talking about Iran's aggression.
They're talking about Sunni aggression and particularly the Saudis.
They're worried mostly about the Saudis who are much more aggressive now than ever before about supporting the Sunnis inside Iraq.
Well, and this is the disaster of Bush administration policy in the Middle East is our entire policy basically is centered around supporting the Sunni Muslims in order to contain Iran and all that kind of stuff.
Well, this whole time, we've been supporting the Iranians and the Shiite factions loyal to Iran in Iraq.
And it's a contradiction that's going to have to be worked out one way or another.
You know me.
I just want complete withdrawal and leave them all alone.
But it seems to me like they're going to have to go ahead and switch back.
You're absolutely right.
The fundamental contradiction of U.S. policy in Iraq ever since we went in there is that we have on one hand we needed the Shiite to fight against the Sunnis, but we needed the Sunnis to balance off against the Shiite.
And that meant that in effect the Bush administration was, you know, regardless of its desires, it was locked into a situation of supporting both sides against each other.
We were, in effect, supporting sectarian violence by the two sides against one another from the very beginning.
And some of that was deliberate probably and some of it just a product of...
It was deliberate in the sense that we actually, of course, used the Bader Brigade as shock troops against the Sunni insurgents.
Yeah, everybody says that the civil war started at the Samarra bombing, but the Sunni war against the Shiites was retaliation for America using the Shiite death squads against them for two and a half years before that.
Well, that's a very murky background to try to sort out exactly why the Sunnis did certain things and which Sunnis were doing them.
I don't know the answer to that.
I'm sort of an agnostic on that point.
But the fact that there were interactions between the violence of the two sides is without any doubt.
But the United States contributed to that is without any doubt either.
Yep.
All right, we're all out of time.
Everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter.
You can read all your rights for interpress service at AntiWar.com slash Porter.
You can also find him at the Huffington Post, the American Prospect, and so forth.
Thanks very much for your time.
Pleasure to talk to you as always, Scott.
