02/26/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio for Antiwar.com and for Chaos Radio in Austin, Texas.
Introducing Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for IPS News and regular guest on this show.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How are you?
Well, thank you for joining me on short notice today.
Obviously, there's important news that we have to go over.
Your last few articles have been about Barack Obama at kind of loggerheads with General Petraeus, the commander of Central Command, and as Jeff Huber calls him, his pet ox, Ray Adirno, the general in charge of Iraq.
And Obama wanted out in 16 months, and he seemed to be standing firm, according to your sources.
The guys in the Pentagon were pushing back hard the other way, and now he's announced that 16 months has become 19 months, and in fact, they're going to go ahead and leave tens of thousands of troops there until, did they even say, until the end of 2011, as is the law in the Status of Forces Agreement?
Well, I mean, what has happened is that unnamed sources have indeed announced that this is the apparent decision that there is going to be a withdrawal announced of 19 months and that there will be a large residual force.
No one knows for sure what size it's going to be.
The interesting thing about this, of course, is that all this information appears to be coming from the Pentagon.
Military sources are the ones most frequently being cited, although it's also referred to as a senior administration official, that we're not sure what that means.
But for the most part, we're hearing military sources, Pentagon sources are the ones who are spreading this story.
Now, I've been told that the decision had not actually been made, but I think that they probably do have indications that Obama is leaning towards the 19-month plan.
That in my mind, of course, is not the most important, the most significant question.
The real question is whether Obama is indeed going to leave tens of thousands of troops, and indeed that a large contingent of that are going to be combat troops.
I mean, he has been very explicit about saying that he's going to give the U.S. military a new mission to end the war.
If he is indeed going to leave combat troops as part of a residual force, then he's going to find himself in a direct contradiction to his own public statement, and he's really going to have to take some consequences.
Well, here's the thing.
On the 19 months, that's significant to me, if indeed, I mean, they say he's going to give a big speech if he indeed confirms that, yeah, he switched from 16 to 19 months.
I don't see any purpose behind that, other than telling us that the deal that I made with you people to give me this job is off.
Otherwise, what's the point of even leaking that, unless, I guess, you're implying that that's really the Pentagon talking, not the White House?
Well, I mean, I think that it is being leaked by the Pentagon.
I don't think it's being leaked by the White House.
But I think you're right, Scott.
I mean, the point is, three months difference by itself is really not enough to merit a cave-in by the President.
It can't be for any substantive reason.
It has to be for political reasons, that he simply is not ready to take on the military leadership or, more precisely, Petraeus and Odierno, and I think backed by Robert M. Gates.
I think Gates is behind this, really, ultimately, that he's been advising Obama, you know, why not just give them, you know, at least another three months?
But, you know, more dangerous, as I say, is the residual force, apparently, you know, certainly we know that the military commanders in the field, Odierno and Petraeus, have been scheming for months now to leave tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, not just up till the end of 2011, but beyond that as well, and that they intended all along that there would be explicitly combat forces as part of that residual force.
So this is really a scheme that has been aimed from the beginning at directly subverting the policy of ending U.S. combat role in Iraq and ending the war.
Well, here's the thing, and I think we talked about this last time.
A year ago, or, you know, at random, sometime right around there during the campaign, Barack Obama was saying, and I guess he wrote this essay for the New York Times, saying, here's how we're going to get out of Iraq, and what it said was, we're going to be real specific about what's a combat troop and what's not, and we're going to leave behind a residual force of anti-terrorism forces, and, of course, the embassy staff, and then all the force protection needed for them, and that this mission creep, as he defined it right there, was going to be 50,000 troops forever.
So I think you told me last time, well, he changed his mind about that, and now he's changed it back.
It seems to me, maybe that's...
I mean, this statement that you're citing was in July of last year, and it was before the Iraqi government had negotiated an agreement with the United States, which did in fact call for the end of all troops, a period to be out by the end of 2011.
Of course, that includes, you know, all those residual forces, including, you know, counterterrorist forces as well.
That was a major political development, a major political constraint, obviously, and after that, there was indeed a change of wording on the website of the Obama campaign, which made it...
It changed the wording to either in Iraq or in the region, so that, you know, the counterterrorist forces could be in Kuwait or someplace else, so that he could be consistent with the withdrawal agreement.
Right.
And he, again, as I say, he has explicitly stated that he was going to give the U.S. military a new mission, and that's where I think the contradiction between what he has said and this decision that is now being leaked to the media, you know, it's a very direct contradiction, and, you know, he's going to have to take the consequences of being accused of directly subverting his promise of essentially cheating the American people who elected him on the basis of that promise.
Well, and it is important, isn't it, that when they first started talking about the status of forces agreement, it had all these 58 bases forever and ever and all these things, and over the course of, I guess, the second half of last year, the Iraqi government ended up insisting on enough changes that it's now called, as you pointed out on the show last time, the withdrawal agreement.
It's not the status of forces agreement, it's the, you promise to get out by the end of December 2011, no matter what, agreement.
Right, and the key point here is that both the Iraqi government and the Bush administration were very strongly influenced in their negotiations by the political fact of the emergence of Barack Obama as a very powerful figure in American politics, and the likely next U.S. president.
The Iraqis were encouraged to agree to finish negotiating with the Bush administration in anticipation of the fact that Obama would be the president, and they expected him to actually carry out such an agreement.
The Bush administration, on the other hand, was discouraged from taking the hard line, because if they refused to go ahead with completing the agreement, they were afraid that Obama would negotiate an agreement that would involve even a quicker withdrawal than what the Bush administration was demanding.
This was reported by Lila Fidel of McClatchy newspapers last November.
Well let me ask you this, the stories that are coming out about the 50,000 troops, do they refer to the deadline of the end of December 2011?
Because after all, Barack Obama, 16 months, 19 months, 23 months, as Petraeus wanted, or any of these things, those are all still better than the end of December 2011, which I haven't done the math, but I know is many more months than that away.
So these stories about, oh yeah, and we're going to leave all these residual forces, are they taking into account at all that deadline, or the implication is, we'll have renegotiated by then?
Well look, there's two levels that are being really, two levels of politics really going on at the same time.
At the explicit level, yes, I mean the idea is that of course we are planning for full withdrawal in accordance with the U.S.
-Iraq withdrawal agreement.
But below the surface, there is absolutely no question that the commanders in the field, with the support of at least some people in the Pentagon, but not necessarily the Joint Chiefs of Staff, want to and hope to keep those troops there through the end of 2011 and through the next administration as well.
They have said that in the past, Odierno said that a few days before the election last November in an interview with the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks, that he wanted to have a force of 30-35,000 troops as late as 2014 or 2015.
This was clearly the strategy that Odierno and Petraeus were taking into the Obama administration, but this clearly is going to depend not just on Obama, but on the Iraqi people and on the Iraqi government as well.
They're going to have a vote in that matter, and it remains to be seen whether they can get away with that.
Well, and this goes back to the question, and people seem really divided about this, of just how strong the Maliki government is and how badly they need us.
This seems like...
Well, absolutely.
There are very, very much differing views on that question.
I mean, the basic viewpoint of both the U.S. government and, I think, of progressives up until relatively recently has been that al-Maliki was a puppet of the United States and that he was a reliable ally.
I think if you look into what was really being said privately by the U.S. military people who were following this most closely, they didn't really believe that at all.
They understood that al-Maliki was and is not just independent of the United States, but is very close to Iran and is very unlikely to reverse this policy because of not only the Iranian policy that would very strongly oppose it, but the Shiite clergy, the Shiite population, and just generally the Iraqi electorate.
So there are, I think, still a number of constraints on the ability and willingness of an Iraqi government to reverse the results of the U.S.
-Iraq negotiations last year.
Well, and the position that Maliki's in, the game he's playing, is that he still needs us, I guess, at least somewhat, but his legitimacy comes from whatever distance he can try to put between himself and the American occupation as far as the Iraqi people are concerned.
That's right.
This is a very strong part of the reason why al-Maliki is not likely to reverse this position on U.S. troop withdrawal.
That is to say that his legitimacy is tied up with that.
You know, one of the first indications that he was moving rapidly in that direction was last April of 2008 when he abruptly sort of canceled any plan for a U.S.
-Iraqi operation in Basra to eliminate the Sadrists from their power position there and launched his own operation with very little planning whatsoever and with no U.S. participation at all, at least at the outset, and was, you know, getting badly beaten by the Sadrists in the process.
But he later said, and I think there's some reason to believe that it played a role, that had he not done that, he could have been, he would have been vulnerable to the accusation by obviously the Sadrists primarily, but also, you know, more generally the Shiite population of being too close to the Americans.
Let me ask you about Muqtada al-Sadr.
He's supposedly still in Iran, but I guess the last I read, he's kind of working on reforging his alliance with Maliki at this point.
Is that your understanding?
I don't know exactly what's going on with the Sadrists.
I have to be honest.
I mean, I have not seen that specific report.
I think at this point, you know, it's going to be a very long term process for Sadr to rebuild his movement.
Because the degree to which Maliki is dependent on him is also a great way to measure how much he wants to stick by the agreement to kick us out.
If he doesn't really need Sadr, then that's much less pressure on him to stick by the agreement at that point.
That's one part of the equation, his relationship to Sadr.
But, of course, his relationship with Sadr had been broken well before he moved in the direction of the demand for a full U.S. withdrawal.
That had happened in early 2007, so it was more than a year later, a year and a half later, that he really moved decisively to demand U.S. withdrawal.
So I don't think there's a direct correlation there at all between his relationship with Sadr and the position he took on the withdrawal question.
Well, wouldn't he need the support of the Mahdi army if he was really going to insist on American withdrawal and try to be the government without the American occupation?
Wouldn't he need Sadr then?
I don't think he needs them in the sense that he needs to have the Mahdi army ready to fight on behalf of Maliki.
I mean, that's probably not going to be in the cards for quite a while.
I mean, there's very bad blood, obviously, between the two sides, between most of Sadr's followers and al-Maliki at this point.
So, I mean, I don't think that's really the issue.
You know, it's really a question of whether, you know, in an election he would, let's say, the next parliamentary elections in late 2009, he would need to go to Sadr and say, OK, I really need your help in getting my party to get enough votes in this election.
And I think the indications are that at this point he doesn't really feel the need for Sadr's support or feel that that would be the decisive factor in the election.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from IPS News.
You'll find what he writes at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Thanks again very much for your time on the show today.
My pleasure as always.
Thanks.