For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm pleased to welcome to the show Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist.
He writes regularly for IPS News, and you can read all of his IPS stories at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
You can also find him in the American Prospect, at the Huffington Post, and other places online.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be back.
I'm glad to have you here, and it's a new year and a new government in charge here in the United States.
And I guess before we get too far into what we expect or what we can observe so far from the new Barack Obama administration, we need to backtrack just a little bit and cover this war in Gaza that took place over the last three, four weeks.
I see that you've written this article for Antiwar.com about Bush's strategy in terms of how to deal with the fact that Hamas won the elections that he demanded be held in Palestine, and how they somehow deliberately sabotaged the coalition government in order to provoke Hamas into seizing all the power in Gaza, because in that way it makes it easier to target Gaza.
Something along those lines.
Please explain what's going on.
This is a story that really needs to be very well understood, I think, by everyone who is concerned about the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the rights of the Palestinian people, because you have to start with the reality that the George W. Bush administration is without doubt the most cravenly pro-Israeli administration the United States has ever had.
This is a very low low, because we've had administrations that were certainly very pro-Israeli, including the Clinton administration, which was very openly pro-Israeli.
For example, if you compare George W. Bush with Ronald Reagan, Reagan was infinitely more independent in his policy than Bush was, independent of Israel.
There's one scene in the memoirs of McFarlane, the National Security Advisor to Ronald Reagan, that I remember vividly, which is when the Israelis committed a particularly atrocious attack right in Beirut in the early 80s.
Reagan called up the Prime Minister, I think it was Chuck Schumer, if I remember correctly, I could be wrong, at that point and really reamed him out, as McFarlane put it.
He was absolutely spared nothing and was very upset about a policy which was clearly a violation of the laws of war and of everything moral and ethical.
I just want to preface this discussion with that sort of historical perspective on the Bush administration.
It was particularly outrageous in its refusal to do anything to not only stand in the way of the Israeli war machine, to restrain the Israeli war machine, it actually egged the Israelis on over and over again.
Well, you know, Brent Scowcroft, who I guess is a prominent symbol of the American establishment, complained in the New Yorker magazine, or in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, that Ariel Sharon had George Bush wrapped around his little finger and he just couldn't understand it.
That's right.
He has been quoted as being sort of starstruck with Ariel Sharon from the very beginning of his administration.
He certainly acted that way from the beginning to the very end, of course, even after Sharon was incapacitated.
To get to the specific story here, it does begin with the Palestinian popular election in 2006, which the Hamas won with getting 56% of the seats in the new Palestinian legislative council.
The Bush administration was completely flabbergasted, had no idea this was coming, and when they did find out that Hamas was victorious, they immediately set out to sabotage the new government.
The Hamas-led government was formed very quickly after that, and what the Bush administration then tried to do was to muscle the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, to essentially refuse to cooperate with Hamas.
Instead, what happened was that Abbas actually forged a new agreement with Hamas to form a unity government between the two factions, Hamas and the Fatah factions.
That, of course, upset the Bush administration very much, and then they embarked on a new strategy to really put pressure on Abbas to break off.
They actually sent a note, a non-paper, but a very detailed note to Abbas, which called on him to essentially violate the Palestinian basic law, which basically did not provide for any renaming of a new prime minister in the Palestinian government by the president.
He could get rid of an existing government, but he could not name a new prime minister if he wasn't representing the majority party.
So what the United States wanted him to do was to essentially violate the charter and create an emergency government, essentially suspend the constitution of the Palestinian Authority and create an entirely new government without Hamas.
They offered then to give him military assistance to essentially try to carry out a coup in Gaza against the Hamas authority there.
That was the Vanity Fair article, right?
That's right.
The Vanity Fair provides a lot of details about particularly the U.S. understanding with Egypt and Jordan and the Palestinian Authority to build up essentially a paramilitary force under the leadership of the sort of Palestinian strongman, the guy who had clearly been identified by the Bush administration as their guy in the Palestinian Authority for several years since at least 2002, Dallon.
What's the guy's name?
Dallon.
And he works for Abbas?
He was in the Abbas government, yes.
But what the United States was trying to do was really to promote him as really an independent political military strongman.
So he would be Fatah of the Gaza Strip?
That's right, yes, exactly.
But at one point what the Bush administration did was to threaten Abbas with essentially shifting political support from him to Dallon and essentially making Dallon the real head of the Palestinian Authority.
Essentially it was a threat to create a coup d'etat within the Palestinian Authority itself.
Of course this would have been on the West Bank.
So that was part of the strategy that was used to pressure Abbas to get him to go along with this.
Essentially what the United States was trying to carry out in Gaza was a military coup, a use of force to suppress Hamas.
Now the problem with that of course is that it was completely unrealistic.
It was simply not in the cards for Dallon and his rather ragtag army of paramilitary followers to try to destroy Hamas, which was too well entrenched politically in Gaza, had too many people, had too much support to be able to overthrow them.
Well and didn't all the weapons that they were funneling in to this Balad character, they all ended up in the hands of Hamas, right?
Well I think many of them did, absolutely, because the Fatah people were simply too few and too ill-trained and didn't have enough popular support.
Basically I suspect, and I suggest this in the piece, that what was really going on here was that they knew they couldn't overthrow the Hamas Authority in Gaza, but what they were hoping to do was provoke Hamas to essentially overtly seize power in Gaza by essentially threatening a longer term build-up militarily, a build-up of the Fatah forces to overthrow them in the long run.
That's exactly what happened.
In June of 2007, after a period of provocative attacks covering several months by the Fatah forces in Gaza, the Hamas forces essentially, over just a few days, rolled up the Fatah forces completely, and therefore had the complete run of Gaza from that time on.
And of course that then allowed the Bush administration to charge that it was Hamas which had carried out a coup d'etat.
And that was of course part of the rationale for supporting the Israeli offensive, the Israeli basically aggressive attack in Gaza.
And that reminds me of Iran policy and articles you've written in the past and discussions we've had in the past about how the American War Party's view is that anybody who's a so-called moderate in Iran is really the enemy.
What they want to do is to marginalize the so-called moderates as much as they can, so that only the worst poster boy for Islamic insanity or whatever is left to deal with, so that they don't have to deal, they can have a war instead.
Well I think there is a rough parallelism here in the sense that the Bush administration was always trying to provoke the right wing, if you will, the most extreme people in Tehran to take actions which they could then cite as the basis for aggression by the United States or by Israel.
No doubt that is essentially the Bush administration's approach to dealing with a whole series of problems in the Middle East.
And so you think that is a pretty good parallel then to the policy in Gaza that we don't want to have to deal with the people there, so let's go ahead and push Hamas into a position where they have no choice but to seize total power and then we can say, ha, they seized total power, the evil terrorists, and now we can do what we want with them all.
Exactly, of course, I don't think it's obviously not a perfect parallel in the sense that the Hamas is not really the same as the most conservative Iranian political figures, the most conservative mullahs by any chance, by any means.
In fact, I would argue exactly the opposite, although there might be individuals in Hamas who represent that tendency.
I think they are not the dominant ones at all.
I think that's been borne out by the behavior of Hamas over the last year or two.
And by that behavior, you mean they're attempting to try to be a government and maintain a ceasefire with Israel?
Exactly.
I think that there certainly are some figures in Tehran, some of the most conservative mullahs, who represent a very sort of backward-looking extremist religious viewpoint, political religious viewpoint, and who are extremely anti-Western, have no desire, in fact, want to sabotage any effort to improve relations with the West generally.
I don't think that Hamas fits that description at all.
Okay, so now let's get to the circumstances under which the ceasefire was agreed to between Hamas.
How long after the seizure of power there did they enter?
It was just last summer, early last summer that they started the ceasefire?
It was last June.
It was in mid-June.
Actually, it was June 19th that the ceasefire went into effect.
Well, so this was still, what, a couple of years after they had taken power there?
That's right.
It was a year and a half.
I'm sorry, it was two and a half years after the election.
It was the result of an interesting process in which the Egyptian Minister of Intelligence was the go-between, was the fixer, the person who negotiated on one hand with Hamas and on the other hand with Israel.
They never sat down together.
The Israelis never would agree to, of course, acknowledge the existence of Hamas as a legitimate interlocutor for any sort of diplomatic or political talks.
So the Egyptian minister had to essentially engage in shuttle diplomacy between the two sides.
As a result of his being the intermediary, what happened was that he got agreement that, A, there would be no more rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel, B, the Israelis would stop all of their military actions within Gaza, and C, and really absolutely most important or at least of equal importance with the other two, the border posts, the border openings between Israel and Gaza would be opened up.
Now, there was a very specific provision which required that Israel had to open up or to increase the flow of goods by 30% within the first day or two.
I can't remember if it was 24 or 48 hours.
And then within a few days, the border posts were to be opened up completely.
That is, no restrictions on goods were to be imposed by the Israelis.
Now, the problem with this agreement is that the Israelis had no intention whatsoever of carrying it out.
One of the things that I guess really shocked me, even if it didn't surprise me in researching this story, is finding out that the Israelis freely admitted to the International Crisis Group in interviews that were carried out shortly after the agreement was reached that they had no intention of opening up these border openings, the channels in and out of Gaza.
This, of course, represents Israel's chokehold on the economy and society of Gaza.
If you just put in the Google search engine the word blockade, the first thing that comes up is the American Heritage Dictionary.
It says, an act of war, which etc., etc.
So it's hard to imagine how the war party and the propagandists in this country can sit around talking about how Hamas broke the ceasefire by shooting all these rockets when the Israelis never abided by it for a day.
Well, this is, of course, absolutely one of the most egregious lies that has been propounded by the Bush administration and by its supine, compliant media friends since the beginning of the Bush administration.
It's really just one of the most black and white cases of essentially turning black into white and vice versa.
The evidence that Hamas strictly abided by this to the best of their ability and that Israel had no intention of abiding by it from the beginning is absolutely crystal clear.
What I found on the internet available to anyone who wishes to look into it is a document prepared by a think tank in Tel Aviv associated with an NGO that is very close to the Israeli intelligence community.
It clearly reflects and explicitly uses data given to it by the Israeli Defense Forces on Gaza and what this study published by the think tank shows very explicitly is that Hamas not only essentially stopped the rocket fire from Gaza after the first few days, the first couple of weeks when some of the other groups continued to fire rockets because they were not as enthusiastic about the ceasefire as Hamas was.
Hamas, according to this Israeli think tank, actually not only arrested people or detained people for their violation of the ceasefire but confiscated their weapons.
Again, this is not a Hamas source.
This is not a pro-Hamas source.
This is not even an objective source in the sense that it is in between the two sides.
It is an Israeli source close to the Israeli intelligence and military IDF community.
Now, I'm pulling up your archives here.
This is Israel rejected Hamas ceasefire offer in December is the article that you're talking about, right?
I want to get the name of the think tank here.
I'm coming to the denouement of the story.
Well, I want people to have the footnote, Gareth, of the names of these think tanks that you're talking about here that are associated with the Israeli government so that they can see the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.
That's right.
Exactly.
The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center in Tel Aviv.
It's associated with an NGO there which has another long name.
It's the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center.
That's exactly right.
Yes, thanks.
Okay, and we'll make sure to put a link up to the article in the archive of this interview as well.
It's an extremely valuable documentary source precisely because it is closely associated with the Israeli government.
But in this case, for whatever reason, it is clearly telling it as it was and as it is with regard to the effort of Hamas to keep the ceasefire.
One wonders whether there are those within the Israeli intelligence community who perhaps thought that the policy being followed there was an extreme policy by Israel, that perhaps it was not a good idea to be so reckless in paying no attention to keeping the ceasefire in Hamas.
Now, I'll try to play somewhat devil's advocate here and say, well, look, Hamas basically accepted the Israeli version of abiding by the ceasefire, even including the blockade, as you say, up through November 4th.
And then, I guess, for no reason whatsoever at that point, Hamas broke the ceasefire and started firing rockets, right?
Right.
Of course, that is the way it's been presented by the Bush administration and Israel that suddenly Hamas, for no reason whatsoever, starts trying to kill as many Israelis as possible with rockets.
What actually happened was that the IDF suddenly, out of the blue, launched an operation into Gaza from across the ceasefire line, across the dividing line between Gaza and Israel, claiming that they had intelligence that a group of Hamas military wing operatives were tunneling under the surface and were planning to emerge on the Israeli side to grab one or more Israeli soldiers and take them back to Gaza.
And, of course, they cited the case of one Israeli soldier who was detained, who was captured and taken back to Gaza in, I think, it was 2006 or 2007.
I've forgotten exactly when.
So, that was the excuse for sending an Israeli commando team into Gaza, which, it is admitted, actually went two-tenths of a mile into Gaza, attacked a house, and there was an explosion, and killing five or six Hamas military wing personnel, including two commanders.
Two commanders out of six.
Well, that's an extremely lucky strike, isn't it?
It suggests that, in fact, the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing, what they were targeting.
They decided to target commanders of the Hamas military wing, and that this was not really about a tunnel or intelligence about a plan to capture Israeli soldiers at all, but was simply an action that they carried out to essentially disrupt the ceasefire and provoke a Hamas response.
Or at least take a target of opportunity, not caring about the consequences, one or the other.
Well, of course, I mean, they knew what the consequences were, and this was done without any question, in my mind, because of those consequences.
I mean, in other words, the consequences overwhelm the tactical issue of who these people were, without any question.
Now, the kicker on this story is that Dr. Robert Pastor, who is a professor at American University, was in Israel shortly after that, and talked with an Israeli defense forces officer, a high-ranking officer, who, of course, he did not name.
And the officer told him, admitted that the account that was given about this tunnel, this alleged tunnel, was not really accurate.
And, of course, Hamas denied vociferously that there was any tunnel intended to carry out an operation to capture an Israeli soldier.
He said that this was a tunnel, like most of the others, just for survival for people potentially under Israeli bombs.
So there is very strong reason to believe that this was, in fact, an effort by the IDF to provoke an end to the ceasefire, because, from the beginning, the IDF command had not supported the ceasefire agreement with Hamas, had opposed it vociferously, and agreed, in the end, apparently only because it was understood that six months later, the Israeli military would be allowed to go in and carry out a major offensive against Gaza.
Here's the thing, too, is that, well, like, for example, in all the analysis, people are quick to say, even me, people are quick to say that, ah, see, the Israelis really don't know what they're doing.
What a terrible strategy, because all Hamas has to do is not lose, and they're more powerful than ever.
Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger kind of thing.
And William S. Lynn, the expert on fourth-generation warfare, says, you know, the Israelis don't understand it, and they're only making their enemies more powerful, and so forth.
And yet, in the context of, you know, deliberately doing airstrikes in order to provoke a response, deliberately pushing Hamas to seize power in Gaza, brings up the larger question of not the tactics, but the real strategy, you know, on the bigger picture level.
And I wonder if you have had a chance to read the article by John Mearsheimer in the American Conservative magazine about this, where he talks about what's called the Iron Wall strategy, which is basically to keep Palestine in such a situation that they can never have a state, to always keep them, you know, a beaten, divided, fighting, angry, helpless populace over, you know, indefinitely.
I have seen that, and I think there is a great deal of evidence to support that view, that, in fact, Israel's right-wing leadership has no intention of allowing a genuine Palestinian state to emerge.
Well, so would it make sense then, Garrett, that whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger, that they understand that, and that they actually want Hamas to go ahead and be the only power representing anyone in Gaza, so that they can continue doing the things that they've been doing there?
I'm not so sure that it follows from that general strategy that they are in favor of Hamas emerging as the leader of the Palestinians.
I think, on the contrary, they would regard Hamas as a much more formidable foe than Fatah ever was, and for good reasons, because Fatah not only never had the degree of dedication, the degree of discipline, and other qualities which have marked the Hamas movement, but more to the point, I think, over the last several years, the Fatah faction, which became essentially the leadership of the Palestinian Authority during the Bush administration, essentially became a tool of the United States.
It became so dependent on the United States' support politically, and ultimately then militarily, that it essentially lost what legitimacy it had had previously.
I think the Israelis understood that the Fatah was becoming essentially hollowed out politically, and that it was no longer in a very strong position to lead a Palestinian resistance, and that's why, of course, the Israelis want Fatah to be the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian movement.
They want Hamas to be denied any legitimacy.
I think, contrary to the idea that they would prefer Hamas to emerge as the more important part of the movement, I think that they're desperately trying to head that off.
But, of course, I think that it's a hopeless proposition for them to do that.
It sort of seems like way too little too late to try to insist that Fatah should be the legitimate government of the Palestinian Authority, when they spent years and years and years saying that you don't have to deal with the PLO.
They're all a bunch of terrorists and communists, and they're radicals and all these things.
You don't have to deal with them.
They never would deal with them, and now they're stuck with Hamas, and they're saying, oh, these guys are religious crazies.
You don't have to deal with them.
That's right.
They're caught up in this fundamental contradiction in their own position, which is, on one hand, that, as you say, they always want to tell the world that you can't trust the Palestinian Authority.
They have the hearts of terrorists, and therefore we should be very careful about giving them any authority whatsoever.
As you may know, the Israeli position is that even after a settlement, quote-unquote, the final settlement, the Palestinian Authority should not be allowed to have, and from their point of view will not be allowed to have, control over security.
Israel will maintain control over the security of the Palestinian Territory, and that is directly connected with their position that you just can't trust the Palestinians.
So on one hand, no authority for the Palestinian Authority for Fatah.
On the other hand, they're saying, well, we will only talk to the Palestinian Authority.
We won't talk to Hamas because they're the real terrorists.
They're the real dangerous terrorists.
Well, now you have statements coming out of the Israeli government that seem to be contradictory.
On one hand, they say, hey, civilian casualties, which I guess was about 1,300 killed, and at least half of them civilians, probably more than that we'll find by the time they're done counting.
And they say, hey, listen, that's just – that's life.
That's what happens when you're near bombs going off, but this was a war against Hamas, and sorry about that.
But then on the other hand, there's kind of been statements.
Livni made at least one statement saying, hey, they don't differentiate between civilians and government, so neither should we, seeming to reveal – and I think there have been other statements too – revealing that the real strategy here is to terrorize the civilians of Gaza, sort of the same way they talked about Lebanon in 2006, that the goal was to make the people of Lebanon hate Hezbollah for getting them bombed, and that's supposedly their strategy in Gaza, to make the people of Gaza hate Hamas for getting them bombed, rather than hate the Israelis who are doing the bombing.
Yes, I mean, this is of the essence of the Israeli strategy.
So that's terrorism, right?
I mean, that's killing civilians in order to – I mean, that's right out of the thing, to change their politics and force them to force their government to do something different, et cetera.
That's in the definition in the dictionary there.
Right.
If the term terrorism means that you punish civilians, you aim weapons at civilians in order to achieve a political aim, then the Israelis are just as much terrorists as those who have been designated as terrorists by the United States and other countries over the years for carrying out suicide attacks or for aiming rockets at Israeli population centers or whatever.
The only difference here is, of course, the Israelis are far more efficient about their terrorism.
They kill and maim and terrorize far more people than Israel's opponents who have been termed terrorists.
Now, what did you think of Olmert's statement, that he was able to yank Bush out of whatever he was doing and get him on the phone and say, hey, that U.N. resolution that you told Rice to go ahead and write, I want you to not vote for it, and was able to get his way and then get off the phone and turn around and brag to a room full of people about how he had shamed the Secretary of State and had forced Bush to force her to not do her job that he had told her to do in the first place?
Outrageous political posturing for the purpose of trying to maintain some status politically in Israel, despite the fact that he's widely discredited, I think.
Well, does that mean you don't think it's true?
I don't know that it's literally true in the same way that he presented it.
I doubt that he was so clearly able to order Bush around.
Well, I mean, wait a minute.
We know that Bush sent Rice and told her, okay, go ahead and help write up the new resolution and vote for it, and then she didn't, and everybody at the U.N. was shocked because she was the one who had written the thing.
Well, I mean, I'm not suggesting that the sequence of events wasn't as he presented it.
I'm sure that Bush ordered her to change the policy.
I do think that just the way he presented it was self-serving, that's all.
Oh, sure.
Well, yeah, he was bragging.
Do you think there will be consequences from that?
I think that's the kind of thing that might even shock somebody who gets all their news from TV or something.
Wow, they really talk about our president that way, like he's Tony Blair or something?
I think it's one of a legion of events and images that are eroding support in this country for Israel bit by bit.
It hasn't slid as fast and as far as I would have thought.
I was saying a few weeks ago that I was convinced that we're in a profound transition politically in this country with regard to Israel and that this outrageous Israeli military operation against civilians, clearly civilian targets, must inevitably cause support for Israel to slip well below 50%.
I'm not sure that we're there yet, but I think we're approaching that point.
Okay, now, in her confirmation hearing, Hillary Clinton gave a little bit of a shout-out to the Palestinians and their suffering, and Barack Obama has gone ahead and appointed former Senator George Mitchell to be the Middle East envoy.
I think there was a lot of fear going around that Dennis Ross was going to get the job, but I don't know anything about this guy Mitchell, really, or where he stands on these things.
I know that he was the guy, really, that negotiated the peace in Northern Ireland, right?
He was, and he is from a Lebanese family.
He has, as I recall, a Lebanese mother.
Call him a realist, not a neocon?
Definitely, definitely a realist with a profound tendency for conflict resolution rather than promoting war as a solution.
So I think he is perhaps as close to an ideal pick for this job as one could expect in this present United States of America.
All right, now, tell me about Hillary Clinton.
I swear, I'm trying to keep an open mind here, Gareth.
Do you think she prefers her legacy that she made peace over there rather than help start another war?
Because we know she likes those, too.
I am not in a position to pronounce on Hillary Clinton's intentions.
I have to believe that she is more sympathetic to Israel at this point than President Obama himself.
And I think, you know, I do anticipate that there are likely to be some tensions there between her approach, where she will be a repository for Israeli pressure.
She will be a channel, I should say, for Israeli pressure on the President not to press Israel too hard and to stand aside and to let Israel do its own thing.
I think that my sense is that Obama is likely to try to go far beyond certainly what the Bush administration did in terms of pressure on Israel to put forward solutions which the Israelis will not like, to support solutions that they won't like, and that he is really seized with the necessity for a profound shift in the politics of that part of the world, specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and perhaps more than any previous administration that we've seen.
There is one straw in the wind that I do want to mention, and that is that his choice of General James Jones as his National Security Advisor does have some potential importance, significance for his policy toward Israel.
Well, now, I don't know enough about that guy, but isn't he the guy that said we ought to put NATO on the ground over there?
That's exactly right.
He was the one who said that NATO should be in charge of the overall security of the West Bank, and the Israelis should pull out, and that they should essentially allow the Palestinians freedoms which the Israelis refuse to allow them now.
Yeah, but that's insanity though, right?
You're not in favor of that, are you?
Well, of course it depends on what that means, but if Israeli forces were to be withdrawn and no longer had the kind of military role or oversight role in the West Bank that they've had, and the NATO troops were basically charged with maintaining security but allowing Palestinians to have their rights, this could be a breakthrough.
And the Israelis don't like it at all, believe me.
I mean, you know that.
The Israelis hate the idea.
They won't agree to that idea.
Well, yeah, and I can see how, depending on whose security force is occupying your land, you might be a little bit better or worse off, but I don't know, on this side of the microphone, there's only a will to see NATO abolished, not assign new missions anywhere.
Well, I mean, I'm sympathetic with that too.
I would like to see NATO abolished as well.
All I'm saying here is that what has been proposed by Jones, and he proposed that at a time when he was in charge of writing a report, which, according to, it has never been published, but this was when he was in charge of security in relations with the Palestinian Authority for the Bush administration.
And his report was apparently sharply critical of Israel to the point where it was suppressed.
He was not allowed to publish it.
So I see your point.
The only thing is that his position represents a very sharp contradiction with that of Israel.
Yeah, well, and yeah, that makes him not Eric Edelman and Stephen Hadley.
I can appreciate that.
I just, you know, I wonder whether the opposite of whatever these guys are doing is necessarily the right thing.
You know, when we talk about NATO owning the West Bank forever and things like that.
Anyway, okay.
Well, I mean, I think that there are ways that it could be done that would not be permanent, but would ease Israel out of the picture.
And, you know, for a period of time, show that the Palestinians are perfectly capable of maintaining their own security and that this would sort of be a very good way to put the Israeli policy of never allowing the Palestinians freedom that they need to actually create a state, to basically put that to rest.
And now how much more difficult do you think it's going to be for Obama to deal with this situation, assuming the best intentions on his part with this recent war happening?
You know, it was launched, I don't think by coincidence, right during the transition period, you know, and finished up right before he took office.
You know, whether or not that was deliberately an attempt to influence politics here or not, I don't know if we could really show that or prove that one way or another, but it sure seems to have changed circumstances for his first week in office here.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, I would see it without question as one of a number of moves by various forces, both international and domestic American forces, to essentially box in the new administration in so far as that's possible.
In other words, the Israelis undoubtedly did this during Bush's watch so that they would be in a stronger position from their point of view, you know, a stronger bargaining position than they would have been if the operation had not been carried out before Obama came into power.
So from that point of view, they undoubtedly felt that they were, you know, putting themselves in a stronger position to deal with a rather uncertain situation with Obama coming into office.
And by the same token, you know, I would say that the U.S. military has done a bunch of things in the period between Obama's election and his inauguration to try to limit Obama's freedom of action on Iraq, for example.
Well, and so that leads me to my next question, which is, do you have another 45 minutes or what are we going to do here?
Not really 45 minutes.
Maybe 15.
Another 15.
All right.
So let's talk about the SOFA.
The U.N. mandate for America to continue occupying Iraq expired on New Year's.
And now the law, quote unquote, which governs the American occupation of that country is the status of forces agreement.
That's it.
No treaty.
Nothing's, you know, beyond just the basic SOFA that America has with, you know, the basically all of our satellites around the world where our troops are stationed.
And as this thing is taking effect, supposedly, there have been numerous statements by the generals in charge, as reported particularly by the Washington Post, I think, where they say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where the SOFA says we have to get out of the cities by, you know, this spring or this summer, whichever the deadline was, yeah, that's not going to happen.
And where they say that we have to withdraw to these and those bases by this particular time and stop patrolling here and there.
I'll tell you what, all this is conditions based as to be determined by us.
So how do you like that?
And I wonder whether that's a tenable situation.
How is the occupation supposed to last without we're in just direct contravention of the law which governs the occupation?
Is it going to fall apart?
Or are they going to be able to just by will and firepower maintain and occupy however they feel like regardless of what the SOFA says?
Well, I mean, this obviously sets up a difficult relationship inevitably between Obama and the military, particularly the command in Iraq.
I mean, they made it very clear, as you say, in the period of November, December, and early January, that they intended, insofar as possible, to maintain combat troops, to maintain them in the city's populated areas despite the specific provision of the SOFA, or I think more accurately now it should be called the withdrawal agreement because that's how it was renamed, to get out of the populated areas by mid-2009.
They were to be moved out within six months of the time that the agreement went into effect.
What I think is happening now is that Obama is clearly still committed to his 16-month complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.
He just wants to rename them all from combat forces to something else, though.
Well, I don't think he wants to do that, but that is what the military has basically announced to the world and to Obama that they're doing.
The question then becomes, is Robert Gates really committed so completely to Obama's policy that he will, in fact, ride herd on the military and force them to change their position?
Or will he play games with the military to frustrate Obama's policy?
As I'm sure I've said on your show in the past, I have to liken this in some sense to the analogous situation historically of John F. Kennedy trying to get the military to agree to his withdrawal plan, which called for getting all U.S. military personnel out of South Vietnam by the end of 1965.
The military was adamantly opposed.
They dragged their heels.
They made other proposals.
The Joint Chiefs wouldn't support it.
JFK had to resort to a kind of subterfuge and get the entire National Security Council to support that policy of getting out within two years, between late 1963 and late 1965.
Automatic President Lyndon Johnson immediately rescinded all efforts to head that direction.
Well, it did happen.
Obviously, the reversal did happen under Johnson, yes.
And it was Robert S. McNamara who, I think, was instrumental in making that reversal.
But in any case, the lesson for me is that you have to have your Secretary of Defense completely on your side.
You have to have a Secretary of Defense who's completely loyal to your policy in order to be able to carry it out.
And that's the big question mark in my mind is whether Robert Gates is really that loyal to Obama's policy here.
Remember that Gates was asked to stay on and the reason that he was chosen, as I reported in Le Monde Diplomatique last month, according to a source that was in touch with somebody close to the Obama group of advisors, the reason was that it was believed that a Democratic president does not have enough credibility in national security to be able to carry out policies without the protection of having a center-right Republican in charge of the Pentagon.
And so that's why they had to have Robert M. Gates.
Well, and that's the favorable view, which is it's for cover, not because Obama really is just an imperialist at heart.
Well, that's exactly right.
I mean, the worst interpretation or a worse interpretation is that Obama never was serious at all about this and was simply saying this to get elected and had no intention of doing it.
I don't go along with that.
I think that Obama really does believe that we should get out of Iraq.
And I think that there are some reasons for that because not only did he see it as a stupid war, he also believes that it's a massive distraction.
It's too expensive, that it's costing us in terms of relations with the Islamic world, and it's not strategically important.
And therefore, I think that he is interested in trying to get out, certainly to get the combat troops out by mid-2010 and get all the troops out by the end of 2011, it's called for in the withdrawal agreement.
But I do think he faces inevitable frictions with the military over this, and it's too soon to say how it's going to turn out.
And I hope that he can prevail.
Have you been paying much attention to the internal politics in Iraq lately?
I know there's parliamentary elections coming up and so forth.
Is it expected among people you know and talk to or among yourself that the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawah Party are going to continue to dominate the government there?
I have not followed the question of specific groups and how they stand in terms of popularity at this point.
I have to say that I would expect there's going to be some erosion of their support, but I don't think that that's going to affect the question of continued opposition to foreign presence in Iraq.
Quite the contrary, I think that anyone campaigning during this period who is not strongly opposed to the foreign presence is not going to get elected, particularly in the Shiite provinces of Iraq.
And as you know, of course, there still is this popular referendum on the withdrawal agreement, which I have no reason to believe.
Schedule for July.
That's right, for July.
And I have no reason to believe that that's not going to strongly reinforce the withdrawal agreement itself and say, you know, everybody, all U.S. troops must be out by 2011.
If it doesn't say the whole thing is illegitimate and that the troops must be withdrawn immediately, I'm not exactly sure how that's going to work.
And do you think, I guess regardless of Maliki himself, do you think that the Iraqi state, such as it is created by the U.S. and the green zone there, that they're really confident that they can maintain any sort of monopoly on force there without America to back them up?
I think there is a degree of confidence there.
How well supported that is by the reality is another question.
But bear in mind that you're talking about a Shiite government, which has no trust at all in the Sunni armed militias that the United States has been supporting and which they are now beginning to pay the individual Sunni members of these militias to keep them on.
I think that that is the fundamental contradiction here between the interests of the Shiite-dominated regime on one hand and the Sunnis on the other hand, which could still blow up.
But from the point of view of the Dawah party, the Syri, what we used to call the Syri people and their armed wing, the Badr group, the Badr organization, this is not something that can be solved simply by making nice with the Sunnis.
From their point of view, they have to take a hard line.
That's the only way to defend their interests.
Well, and I guess the relative, and it must be emphasized, it is only a relative piece compared to the 3,000 dead a month butchery murder of the past couple of years.
But in the relative piece, really the question of whether it can be maintained between the sons of Iraq, they call them the bought-off Sunni insurgency, former Sunni insurgency, and the Badr brigades and other Shiite militias like that.
I mean, I guess Patrick Coburn says that it's not realistic at all that the Sunni factions would think that they're going to have a chance anytime soon to try to retake their areas of Baghdad.
However, he also said that it's probably not too likely that the Badr Corps, a.k.a. the Iraqi government, would really try to exercise monopoly power over the predominantly Sunni areas.
And so I guess if that changes, that would be the biggest danger of pushback in a renewed civil war would be if the central government really tried to move too deep into Fallujah and Anbar, etc.
Yes, I agree completely.
I think that is why all of this talk by the military about renegotiating the agreement and that the government is not really prepared to get control over security completely in the areas of Iraq.
That they still have not gained control over.
All of this is really irrelevant in my mind to the fundamental question of whether the government is determined to have the troops be removed.
I think that that's still going to happen.
Well, you think that if the civil war was to start back up, I mean I'm trying to think like an American general who wants to stay.
Get them fighting again, then we don't have to leave kind of thing.
Well, I think there would be a tendency towards liking to have a provocation that would help to make the case that you need American troops.
I don't doubt that.
Whether they are capable of bringing that off is another question.
Do the Sunnis really want to provoke war in the area around Baghdad?
I'm not so sure about that.
I'm not sure that would be in their interest.
Well, it seems like the general population is sick and tired of fighting at least for now.
Right.
In other words, I think that there are some constraints on the ability of the United States.
Let's assume that they have some allies within the Iraqi military, as I'm sure they do.
People who sympathize with and are ready to work with the United States in an effort to keep US troops there, who would agree that, well, we're not really ready and it would be good if the Americans could stay longer and we need more military assistance and the American presence here will help us get that and so forth.
I still think that there are some strong constraints on whether they could bring about a situation that would justify keeping American troops there, either justified in the United States or justified in Iraq.
All right, Gareth.
I sure appreciate your time on the show today.
I hope that I can have you back maybe in just a day or two and we can do another interview on Iran policy in the new Obama years and also the Afghan surge, which he's promised, which actually there's a way to get Iran on board, I'm already thinking.
I'd be glad to do that and that would obviously be the other piece of this that we haven't talked about.
All right.
Well, thank you very much, everybody.
That's Dr. Gareth Porter.
You can read all his archives of his articles for the Interpress Service at antiwar.com slash Porter.
Thanks again.
My pleasure.
