04/01/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
Writes regularly for IPS News.
You can find all his IPS stuff at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Although, ooh, I bet now it's original.antiwar.com slash Porter or something along those lines.
Anyway, you can find his name right there on the right-hand front of the page there at Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Good, as always.
That's good to know.
All right.
So, a brand-new piece here.
Al Maliki draws U.S. troops into crackdown on Sunnis.
And, you know, I almost called you, and I thought, nah, I better just wait until the new piece comes out.
But I knew you'd write about this.
You did?
You had a sense that that would be the story?
Yeah.
Well, I don't know about exactly the headline here, but your analysis of what happened last weekend with the Shiite-dominated Dawah Party, Supreme Islamic Council, government of Nuri al-Maliki, and the Sons of Iraq, the conflict with the former insurgents, now known as Concerned Local Citizens.
I guess, why don't you, first of all, give us a background about who's who for the newbies, and then explain what happened last weekend, and then exactly all your Byzantine politics behind the scenes there.
Well, I mean, the background, of course, is that you have essentially a struggle for power, which has been going on now ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein regime, unleashing the Shia and Sunni forces, particularly, of course, the Shia who had not been in power, who had been subject of Sunni-dominated regimes for so many decades, were suddenly given the opportunity to come to power through elections in 2005, and again in 2000, well, early 2005, and then again at the end of 2005, early 2006, and forming a Shia-dominated government then, a permanent government in 2006.
At the same time, you had a Sunni insurgency, which during 2005-2006, increasingly became conflicted, divided between those who were willing to continue to ally themselves with Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and those Sunni insurgents who turned against Al-Qaeda.
And I think the latter undoubtedly represented the broader, the larger segment of Sunni society and the Sunni insurgency, and a very large proportion of those ultimately then decided to take advantage of an offer from the United States to come in from the cold, as it were, and form these, what were called Awakening Councils, in Arabic, but the Americans tended to call them Sons of Iraq, the local neighborhood security organizations, which were paid by the United States, $300 a month per person, per head, and which thus really represented a significant part of the Sunni community, in terms of potential military power there, potential manpower.
There's nearly 100,000, roughly 100,000 Sunnis who are armed, who are in neighborhoods, who are in organized units, and therefore, from the Shia point of view, they represent a significant threat to the regime, particularly those, of course, in the Baghdad, the greater Baghdad area.
That's really primarily what the Maliki regime was concerned about, and also in Diyala province, not too far away from Baghdad.
So those were the neuralgic areas, in terms of the potential Sunni military power, real military power, but potentially could be used against the regime, from the point of view of the Shia-dominated government.
So that sets up this conflict, which has existed, really, ever since the Americans set up the Awakening Councils, Al-Maliki has never made any secret of the fact that he does not like, did not like, and does not like the Awakening Councils, and he has made various moves over the past year and a half or so, the last two years, really, indicating that he's not going to really tolerate them, that he intends to deal with them in his own way.
What is really interesting here is that the United States, viewing the Awakening Councils as both, in a way, the success story in their counterinsurgency narrative, if you will, the Petraeus counterinsurgency narrative, and also, really, a kind of counterbalance to a pro-Iranian regime, a Shia regime, which clearly leans more towards Iran than towards the United States, in the broader geopolitical picture of the Middle East.
The United States, nevertheless, agreed, under pressure from Al-Maliki last October, to turn over control of this program to the Shia government of Iraq.
That's a major shift in US policy, to do that, a major concession to Al-Maliki and to the Iraqi government.
And he's barely paid any of them since.
That's right.
I mean, exactly when the payments stopped is not clear, but the reports clearly indicate that, at least for the last month or two, they have not been paid.
The Americans try to pass this off as just a bureaucratic glitch, but clearly there's more to it than that.
This represents part of a broader strategy to bring these people to heel.
And another part of it, the really sharp end of the lance, as it were, is a program or a campaign to pick off individual commanders of the Awakening Councils, particularly in Baghdad, as I say, and in Diyala province.
This has been going on, really, since last summer.
We don't have any figures, interestingly.
I've never seen any precise figures or estimates of how many of these Sunni commanders have in fact been detained so far, but clearly a number of them have been.
And it has now resumed, and for the first time, the last weekend, one of the popular Sunni commanders, having been detained, his loyal Sunni followers went into an uprising in a Baghdad neighborhood, Fadil, and they were then repressed by government troops going in with the active participation of U.S. ground forces and helicopters involved in the operation.
So this is a real turning point.
The United States, for the first time, actively involved in military action, suppressing essentially the very allies that the United States had counted on to sort of maintain peace and quiet in parts of Baghdad which were Sunni majority.
And this bespeaks a pretty big decision on the part of the U.S. military command in Baghdad, which I think has some very far-reaching implications.
Well, do you think that they know exactly what they're doing?
I mean, this seems sure to provoke further reactions and consequences down the line.
Is that why they did it?
I'm taking that as a rhetorical question, Scott.
Well, I mean, did they maybe buy Maliki's narrative that, listen, we're just going to get this one guy or we're just going to target this one group because they're bad guys?
Or is there real policy here to turn against the concerned local citizens?
This is really a complicated issue.
There's no single one factor that explains what's going on here.
I think like many other broad shifts in U.S. policy and U.S. strategy and in the war itself, you have a convergence of more than one factor that accounts for this shift.
But I would start with the point that the Bush administration, the White House, had decreed that the United States was going to support al-Maliki come hell or high water.
And Bush did that against the judgment of some people in the State Department and in the military who believed that al-Maliki was a bit too close to Iran for comfort and wanted a more nuanced policy that would really put al-Maliki's feet to the fire and try to wheedle and coax and pressure him to do things that he might not have wanted to do.
And the White House never bought that.
And U.S. policy then became essentially one of supporting the elected government.
And I think now that there is a certain sort of momentum that has been built up over the past couple of years behind that policy that the U.S. military has gotten behind.
And that it's difficult for them to then change course and really sort of separate itself openly from the Baghdad regime.
And of course the more immediate implication of that, or perhaps I should say more immediate element of that, is that the U.S. military role there is very closely tied up with partnering with the Iraqi military.
Which means also in effect that this whole awakening thing, this ceasefire with the Sunni insurgency, has just been temporary.
And it's going to start back up again.
You're absolutely right.
And the implication of this al-Maliki campaign to repress the Sunni neighborhood armed groups is clearly that he is prepared to have a number of those people go back underground.
And that then he can go after them and he feels confident.
And I think rightly so, as I've been saying.
And I think you'll recall over the months since the middle of last year that al-Maliki believes that within the Baghdad area particularly, he has sufficient power in terms of military and police power to really go after the Sunnis.
Of course the Shia essentially beat the pants off the al-Qaeda and other Sunni groups in Baghdad in 2006.
And that was a major turning point in the political dynamics within Iraq.
And I think that accounts from the Iraqi side, that accounts for the fact that he feels that he can proceed with this and take the risk that he's going to drive a large proportion of these Sunni ex-insurgents back into the insurgency.
So the coming battle is not the kind of thing where the Sunnis are going to anytime soon make an attempt to reoccupy Baghdad, their former city that they've been almost completely kicked out of.
It's basically going to be a contest to see whether al-Maliki can extend his control over the land that's now basically patrolled by these CLC types.
That's right.
He's going to make a move, I think, aimed at further consolidating Shia control over the remaining Sunni majority neighborhoods.
Of course that shrunk enormously from what it was in 2005, early 2006, to a very relatively small part of Baghdad now.
And of course the Sunni insurgents will still be active in Baghdad underground.
They will not, presumably, move out completely.
But I think more and more they will have to shift some of their operations out of Baghdad.
And perhaps Diyala province will be an area where they will be more active relative to Baghdad.
What this means is that we have to stay forever in order to prevent there from being further violence.
Well, I have to tell you the truth.
I really thought hard about whether there was any reason to suggest, in my piece, that the U.S. military command was not that unhappy to see this development, because it would, in fact, give them, of course, yet further argument as to why the United States must continue to maintain high troop levels in Iraq and do whatever is necessary to try to avoid having to pull them out even after 2011.
I did not say that, and I simply honestly don't know.
There's no hard evidence that that is the case.
It would be simply a supposition on my part.
But one does inevitably entertain that suspicion, that that might have been a thought in the minds of Odierno and his staff.
Well, there was something in the New York Times, I think, today that said, you know, the threat of violence with these Sunni militias as America withdraws puts our plan into jeopardy.
Yeah, they're taking advantage of this.
And, I mean, the article was really about the much broader array of situations where there's evidence of increased Sunni, as well as, well, particularly Sunni al-Qaeda and non-al-Qaeda activities in Baghdad and elsewhere.
And I suppose that may be true.
I mean, I have no information to contradict that.
But there's no question that the command that's putting out that line is interested in creating that impression because it does support the policy line that they've made it very clear they want to see carried out over the next three years, which is to maintain as high a level of U.S. combat troops in Iraq as they can bring about.
Right, that way they can cross the line in the so-called law, the status of forces agreement, and stay longer.
You know, I have no doubt that these military officers, high-level military officers in Iraq, have not given up by any means the idea that they may be able to bring this off.
For one thing, you know, tonight I heard David Kilcullen, the Australian advisor to Petraeus in Iraq, who has just published a new book, The Accidental Guerrilla, speak at this center right, I think is perhaps more accurate, think tank, the Center for New American Security, and he's a very provocative guy.
He's a very smart guy and very irreverent, and he often says things that are at odds with the current line.
But one of the things he said tonight, which was quite interesting, is that the factors, political, social, military factors, that support the prospect of a coup, or the possibility of a coup, are extremely favorable.
They are very well-aligned in Iraq today.
A coup in favor of whom?
For a military coup against the present Iraqi government.
Well, in favor of any political faction, did he say?
No.
Iraq's army itself?
It would be the army itself, yeah.
And so, I mean, this is something that Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institute, Brookings Institution, excuse me, who is still one of the strongest enthusiasts of the U.S. military presence in Iraq, very much aligned with the U.S. military brass in the command in Baghdad, brought back with him last fall from his trip.
Actually, it was late fall, early winter, when he came back from one of those trips sponsored by the U.S. command in Iraq, and was talking about the possibility of a coup d'etat.
And, of course, he was saying that this would not be favorable, not because it couldn't succeed, but because it would be seen as a sectarian move, and would create its own set of problems.
Just recalling, of course, Vietnam, 1963.
Yeah, Nouri al-Din.
But, so, does this imply, then, that the Iraqi army is basically the Baader Corps, and that it would be a Supreme Council coup against the Dawah party?
I don't think there's a question.
I'm so sectarian about it.
No, no, I'm not suggesting that at all.
And, you know, I think that remark by Ken Pollack was not clear as to what he meant by that it would be perceived as sectarian.
Yeah, it's not like he's saying the Baathists are going to take back over.
He's not saying Baathists, but certainly a possibility is that some of the military units that are closest to the United States would try to seize power.
And those would be, obviously, those units that are, you know, farthest from being the Baader Corps, and more Sunni or Sunni-Shia mixed, but definitely, you know, the units that have cooperated very closely with the U.S. military in the past to carry out some of the operations that the al-Maliki government did not approve of, particularly in Baghdad.
Well, it's just like Ryan Crocker said, this war is much closer to its beginning than its end.
And, you know, it's funny, George Bush would always put us off by six months.
Just give us six more months, we're going to figure this out, it's going to be great.
Just give us six more months.
Obama successfully bought three years.
Yep, we're going to get out, I promise, in three years.
And so now he's got, what, three years of not getting us out to get away with before it, you know, becomes a problem.
By then, everyone will have forgotten that he ever said so.
Well, I don't know if they'll forget.
I certainly hope they won't forget.
But certainly what we can predict is that the situation will go through more major changes over the next three years.
And what those changes will be, very, very hard to predict.
I mean, I was just thinking today that if one does a kind of structural timeline of the Iraq conflict since the United States' invasion, you see that every single year has major shifts, major structural changes in the nature of the conflict, new actors, new alignments, new strategies being adopted by major players.
And you have to assume that that trend, that pattern is going to continue.
Yeah, along with the occupation.
They will continue to fail upwards, like all bureaucrats.
That's a very good way to put it, yes.
They will continue to fail and they will continue to be rewarded, presumably, for their failures.
Absolutely.
All right, well, same story, different day.
Thanks very much for your time.
Really appreciate it, Gareth.
Pleasure as always, Scott.
Thanks.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter from InterPress Service.
You can find all he writes at original.antiwar.com slash porter.