I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Dr. Gareth Porter.
Of course, you all know him well, independent historian and journalist for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.org, and we feature pretty much everything he writes for them, in fact everything he writes for them, at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
Welcome back to the show Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm good, thanks Scott, glad to be back as always.
Well I really appreciate you joining me here.
Your latest article on antiwar.com is called, Shia Unity Deal Explodes U.S. Proxy War Myth.
And now, I guess, just sort of as an introduction to this, it's a complicated, I've got to tell people it's a complicated mess.
We're talking about basically the whole story when you would come on this show over and over again in 2007, to debunk all the lies about Iranian intervention inside Iraq.
You're going back over this now with some real in-depth news analysis about these different Shiite factions, the Dawah Party, which is the party of Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, the Sadrists, the Mahdi Army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, and then the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is the Hakeem clan, Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem and his son, and all those guys.
And I figure probably most people don't even know much of the background of all this, so I wonder if maybe you can kind of, you know, sketch it out a little bit, the broader story here before you get into the real nuts and bolts of, you know, which factions are loyal to who, and what news story proves what now, and all that.
Well, I knew you'd love this story, in fact, I wrote this especially for you, Scott.
I mean, this was just right down your alley, I knew it as soon as I was working on it.
But you'd be interested in this more than anybody.
The story about this agreement between the Maliki regime and the so-called League of the Righteous was really a news peg for me to go back over, as you suggest, familiar ground in a sense that is the US notion, the US sort of political line that Iran was using to break away factions from the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr to be a cat's paws for Iranian policy in Iraq, giving them arms training and direction to attack both US and British forces and also the Al-Maliki regime as well.
And as you suggest, I was always skeptical about that and wrote a number of pieces, several pieces on the theme that this was indeed a propaganda line which didn't correspond with reality.
And a large part of the reason why one could confidently say that is that the Iranian policy in Iraq was one of having friendly relations with all of the Shiite factions, including the Dawah party of Nouri al-Maliki, but particularly the Al-Hakim faction, the Supreme Council people, who were indeed Iraqi exiles who had lived in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and then came back only after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and represented most clearly the Iranian point of view and were known to be on the Iranian payroll, in fact.
And this was the faction among the Shiite majority that George Bush favored, of course, the whole time too.
Maliki and the Dawah party only took power as some sort of compromise between the Supreme Islamic Council and the Muqtada al-Sadr guys, right?
That is correct, and indeed Sadr was really quite antagonistic toward Iranian influence and the Sadrists generally, the Mahdi army generally, were antagonistic toward Iran because of their support, because of the Iranian support traditionally for the rivals of Muqtada al-Sadr and his father, which as you say were the Al-Hakim clan.
And really it's only after 2005 that Sadr began to, or I should say during 2005, that Sadr began to warm up to Iran very quietly and clearly had his own relationship with Iran in which they did provide some training and no doubt some financial assistance as well.
I'm much more skeptical today as I was two years ago, have been for two years, about provision of arms given the fact that it's so easy for the Iraqis to procure arms with financing on the arms market, which is operating everywhere in Iraq and all the major cities.
What you're saying is the fact that the Muqtada al-Sadr faction was fighting, I don't know necessarily alongside, but at least in tandem with the Sunni based insurgency against the American occupation, was not because they were working for Iran, it's because they weren't?
Despite the fact that they had antagonism toward Iran, that they were fighting the Americans, they were certainly, the Iranians were glad to have resistance to the United States for all kinds of strategic reasons, but the Sadrists were anti-American despite the fact that they were also quite antagonistic to Iranian influence, particularly in the southern part of Iraq because that meant the Iranians were building up their rivals for power in that part of the country.
But the fact is that the Sadrists needed help in beefing up their army, the Mahdi army.
Starting in 2005, they actually had Hezbollah help in building the Mahdi army to begin with after 2003, but after their defeat in 2004 in big battles in Najaf with the United States, and here's where I come back to the story that I've just published, the Sadrists essentially had an underground arm which was not acknowledged publicly by Muqtada al-Sadr or his lieutenants, which was involved in dealing with Hezbollah and with Iran in procuring weapons and also carrying out secret commando or guerrilla operations against the United States and British forces.
This was a period in 2004, 2005, 2006 and into 2007 when Sadr was playing the internal game, the inside baseball political game in Iraqi politics of running his candidates for office and actually becoming a big part of the bloc of members of parliament who were supporting the Shiite regime.
Originally the regime was run by al-Jafri and then in 2006 the regime of al-Maliki.
So at that point, and particularly when the United States sent its surge of troops in early 2007, the Sadrists were eager to avoid having to take responsibility for the secret military operations of their underground arm, and so they were happy to have the idea brooded about that the people who were resisting the American troops coming in were not the Mahdi army, they were these breakaway factions which were being supported by Iran.
And so strangely you had a convergence of U.S. propaganda and the interests of the Sadrists in early 2007, which is why I think the media picked up on the idea of special groups and thought it was so credible.
But in fact what I'm saying is that there was evidence all along that the people who were being called special groups, the Sadrists who were being called special groups, were simply the unacknowledged underground arm of the Mahdi army, which were known to and approved by Muqtada al-Sadr himself.
And so this agreement that is the peg for this story, which is a unity agreement between the al-Maliki regime and this league of the righteous, which are precisely the personalities who were associated by the Americans with the so-called special groups, shows that in fact these people who would be called the league of the righteous were in fact associated with al-Sadr all along, because what we find out is that the people negotiating on behalf of the league of the righteous in this unity agreement were people who were very close to al-Sadr, who never broke with him at all.
One was the leader of the Sadrist bloc in the parliament, and the other one was arrested in 2007, only in January 2007.
And when he was arrested by the American forces, or by Iraqi forces working closely with the Americans, al-Sadr protested to al-Maliki, and al-Maliki's regime promised that they would spring the guy, although they couldn't do it.
The Americans refused to let him go.
So this is very strong confirmation that there was never really a distinction between the Mahdi army, the Sadrists, and the so-called special groups.
That special groups, of course, was a term that the U.S. military itself invented.
Isn't it worth recalling that at the time, in the spring, and then in the late winter, the beginning of 2007, really, the end of the winter before there, and then again in the spring and early summer of 2007, there was a lot of pressure, at least Cheney was deliberately, wink wink, I don't know, leaking things, or it was being leaked, that he really wanted to have a war.
They wanted to strike inside, at Quds Force targets, inside Iran, because it's their fault that they're training all these bad guys against us, etc., etc.
And, you know, I guess Admiral Fallon, or even George W. Bush himself, or whoever, somehow stopped them.
But they were really pushing for this in 2007, right?
Absolutely.
This was supposed to be the year of the war against Iran.
And it was, of course, not going to happen, in large part, because the U.S. military leadership wanted to have nothing to do with it.
The Pentagon basically put the kibosh on that.
It never really went anywhere, because of military and Pentagon opposition.
But that is very relevant to this story, because there's no doubt that the Iranians felt that the Mahdi Army was its most important asset in Iraq, as a deterrent to U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities.
And the reason was because, as the U.S. military pointed out in the spring and summer of 2007, if the United States attacks Iran, the allies of Iran inside Iraq will certainly retaliate against U.S. forces.
Well, and that wasn't confined to just Sadr.
Absolutely.
Of course, William S. Linde in the American Conservative Magazine, in his article, How to Lose an Army, quotes Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, saying that if America went to war with Iran, quote, we would do our duty, which would be kill Americans, fight for Iraq.
Right.
We're definitely part of that.
But the Mahdi Army was, by all accounts, much bigger, much more potent in its ability to inflict damage on U.S. forces throughout the Shiite South, but particularly in Baghdad as well.
So in any case, that was part of the background of this very complicated political situation.
And if I can just sort of sum it up in one paragraph, I would say that you had al-Maliki, on one hand, pretending to be an ally of the United States, depending on U.S. military forces to keep his regime in power, while at the same time cooperating with the Sadrists secretly to oppose the United States and Britain, and at the same time, of course, cooperating with Iran in that regard.
And you had, as evidence of that cooperation with the Sadrists, two very important events that took place in 2007, which I recall in my article.
The first one was the attack, the kidnapping of five Americans from a joint U.S.
-Iraqi security center in Karbala province in January 2007, in which the Americans were taken away by Iraqis wearing what appeared to be Iraqi police uniforms, and able to get into the security complex without any difficulty whatsoever, suggesting an inside job.
The Americans, of course, the U.S. military, at the behest of Dick Cheney's office, tried to blame this on Iran.
They wanted very badly to blame it on Iran, and in fact, on July 2nd, 2007, the military spokesman in Baghdad, General Kevin Bergner, under prompting, or with prompting by the New York Times, Michael Gordon, said, yeah, we were told by the prisoners that we had, or the particular detainee that we had interrogated, the Iraqi detainee we had interrogated, from the special groups, that Iran actually was behind this Karbala hit, and actually helped plan the operation.
So that was the high point of this blame Iran line.
But what's interesting, what I pointed out in the article, is that we now know that there was an internal investigation done by the U.S. Army about that Karbala hit, and what they discovered was that it was absolutely an inside job, and that the governor of the province and the police chief in the province were certainly in on it.
So that was what the U.S. Army concluded after their investigation, and that investigation was known, obviously, to Kevin Bergner when he made that statement on July 2nd, 2007.
So it adds another layer to the story of U.S. lies about special groups.
Then the second event that took place was at the end of May in 2007, when five British citizens were kidnapped again in broad daylight in downtown Baghdad from a facility owned by the Ministry of Finance.
This was again discovered to be an inside job.
In this case there were 20 white Land Rovers who drove up to the facility, entered again without opposition, and basically took away the five Britons without a shot being fired.
Four of them are now known to be dead or believed to be dead.
One may still be alive, and there is a hostage who was figuring in this deal that was forged between the Al-Maliki regime and the League of the Righteous.
The League of the Righteous later had a video that they released, more than one video, in which one or more of the British hostages at that point were appearing.
The League of the Righteous then eventually began to offer a deal to release their hostages in return for the release of Shia detainees, including the head of the League of the Righteous, who the Americans had of course identified as the head of the special groups.
The story which has now come out is because the Guardian did a ten month investigation of that May 2007 kidnapping of the British.
It turns out that that was very definitely an inside job.
In fact, it was undoubtedly carried out not by Shia insurgents, but by people in the Ministry of Interior.
That's because the 20 Land Rovers involved in it were identified by eyewitnesses who happened to be intelligence agents of the Iraqi government as belonging to the Ministry of Interior.
But now, so what was the purpose of those attacks if it wasn't a message from the Iranians that, listen, if you bomb us, we have this kind of capability to get at you, even in Baghdad.
How do you like that?
Well, it's possible...
That's what I thought it was at the time, although I understand what you're saying.
It was Maliki's guys, not Sauder's guys, doing it, right?
Maliki's guys, and they did it presumably with the intention of turning them over to the League of the Righteous, or to the underground arm of the Saudis, so that somebody else could be taking responsibility for it.
Obviously, the Ministry of Interior itself couldn't take responsibility for this hit job.
But there's another reason here that has come out that the Guardian uncovered, and that the British guy, who may still be alive, was a computer specialist who was in the process of setting up a special computer system which was to track the billions of dollars flowing through the Iraqi system in oil money as well as foreign assistance.
And, of course, we know that billions have been siphoned off and sort of disappeared into the hands of Iraqi officials, and the purpose of this system was to put an end to that.
And certainly it's very plausible, as the Guardian has suggested, that high-level officials in the Ministry of Interior and people in the Iraqi, in the al-Maliki regime, did not want this system to go forward, and this was a way of trying to discourage the British from doing that.
Well, in a way, if I understand the situation right, you really have to hand it to al-Maliki.
If he's been able to play off the Saudis and all the different scary factions and the Iranians and the Americans, he's got George Bush and Barack Obama built an army for him, and then now he gets to flip-flop from being a pro-Iranian, secessionist type, you know, for quote-unquote strong federalism or whatever, to now being a nationalist hell-bent on kicking America out, might as well be Saud or now or whatever.
He's a pretty wily politician, this guy's been able to stay in power and successfully manipulate all these people the way he has, huh?
He's a very able politician, and of course he's been assisted in his ability to carry out this extremely complicated and devious, I must say Machiavellian scheme, which was unfolded over the last couple of years by the fact that the U.S. government, particularly under George Bush, was so totally clueless as to what was going on.
I mean, I think the bottom line about this whole story is that it underlines just the underlying reality is that the U.S. government was in over its head in Iraq, never understood the forces that it had unleashed by overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime.
Well, and part of that, too, is they didn't care what the truth was.
They thought they could make their own reality and do things the way they want, and if this happens, we'll blame it on Iran.
It was like, in fact, the first story that, one of the first stories that was leaked about a plot to bomb Iran was Philip Giraldi in the American Conservative magazine said that the plan was, if there was a terrorist attack, they would use it as an excuse to bomb Iran.
The only question was whether they'd use nukes or not.
I mean, so they don't care what the truth is.
If something blows up and they want to pick a fight with the Iranians, then, you know, who cares about the consequences?
We're America.
We can set up whatever we want there and have it however we want.
Well, I think there was a certain attitude that we don't really have to have good intelligence on what's going on because, after all, we're the United States and we have all these occupation troops there and we've got military superiority in the region.
So, absolutely, that's true.
And at the same time, you know, they were, nevertheless, victims of their own ignorance.
The Americans never even knew that al-Maliki had been chosen in a secret session of Shiite politicians, which was presided over by the commanding general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, the Quds Force commander, General Soleimani, who snuck into Baghdad, unbeknownst to the United States intelligence, and essentially presided over the picking of al-Maliki as the new prime minister.
I forget if I've ever asked you this.
I forget if we've discussed this or not, but, you know, there was that CIA, and I think the DIA, too, said that they thought that Chalabi not only leaked to the Iranians the fact that the Americans had broken all their codes and they needed to change them, but that, in fact, you know, he had at least, you know, a villa, and I think INC headquarters, the Iraqi National Congress headquarters, was in Tehran.
Is it your opinion that the Iranians kind of used Chalabi to off Saddam Hussein for them?
Because they knew they had the most organized majority-type factions to take power in his stead?
Well, I don't doubt that Chalabi had his close relationships with Iran.
That part of it I have no doubt about.
I would not try to suggest that it was because of Chalabi that we went to war in Iraq.
I mean, Chalabi was simply, you know, one of the cogs in a much bigger machine, which was being run by the neocons, and, you know, he provided sort of convenient intelligence for the political purposes that they had in mind.
He was not the reason for it.
He was simply, he provided the excuse.
Yeah, but I wonder, like, to what extent could you say that the Iranians had decided, yeah, we want to encourage Chalabi to do this?
I mean, that's quite plausible, of course, yes.
No doubt that that would have been part of a strategy that they would have found quite compatible with their interests.
Can I keep you another couple of minutes and ask you about a couple of articles ago?
Same story, different side of Iran.
U.S. uses false Taliban aid charge to pressure Iran.
What's going on there?
They're responsible for everything going bad in Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Is that it?
Well, I mean, I think the new element of my story, I mean, apart from simply documenting the reality that the whole EFP notion, that the notion that Iran was now exporting EFPs to Afghanistan was completely shot down by the joint IED organization of the Pentagon, which is responsible for tracking IEDs in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
And what they told me, point blank, based on all the intelligence that they have available, is that there had been, I believe, 13 or 14 EFPs found in Afghanistan, and this was as of last July or August.
And all of them, without exception, had been found to be very crude, unsophisticated, and not something that could be in any way linked to Iran.
In other words, the usual indicator, which was sophisticated manufacturing technique, was simply absent there.
So that's sort of an interesting piece of documentation to shoot down the myth.
But what I think is new about the story now is that you have the Obama administration really reviving a propaganda line that had kind of faded out in the last month of the Bush administration.
And the reason behind that, clearly, is that they're looking desperately for any sort of leverage against the Iranians.
And as Gilles D'Olonzo of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said to me, he finds a very interesting divergence, if you will, between those in the Obama administration who care about Afghanistan, who are not at all eager to push this line that Iran is intervening there, and those who care about primarily negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program to try to put pressure on Iran to cave in on the nuclear program.
And those are the people who appear to be pushing this line.
I mean, you're talking here about Mullen.
You're talking about Petraeus and those people.
So I think that this definitely represents a way of telling the Iranians, we are building a case against you.
This is part of the case that we're building.
And so this is to underline our determination to put pressure on you over this issue.
Well, do you think that there's really a credible threat that Netanyahu would start a war against Iran over Obama's wishes, or do you think Obama would actually let him do it?
Well, I think that there are two questions here, as you very nicely put it.
One is whether Netanyahu would do it.
The other one is if he would do it, would Obama let him get away with it, or would he take action against an Israeli flight of F-16s going through U.S. controlled airspace in Iraq?
I think the answer to the second question, unfortunately, at this point, looks like a negative.
That is to say, I'm sorry, it's a positive that Obama would let him get away with it if he were to decide to do it.
I've just seen no evidence that suggests that there is a political will on the part of the Obama administration to stand up to Israel on this issue.
And on the contrary, I see evidence that the United States would be unwilling to take action directly against an Israeli attack.
Now, on the other hand, I think at this point, on balance, it's unlikely that the Israelis would take action unilaterally.
And the reason for that is that they do need the United States really to be part of the plan, because everybody knows that as soon as an attack took place, the Iranians would retaliate not just by attacking U.S. military installations, but more importantly, and perhaps by trying to hit a U.S. ship in the Strait of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf, but more importantly, by basically mining the shipping channels through the Strait of Hormuz, a rather narrow channel, which is very vulnerable to the threat of mining by the Iranians.
And then it's a question of how long they could do it for and how effective U.S. military operations would be against that.
It would simply be a mess.
I mean, the global economy would suffer a huge downturn, and the Israelis arguably would be blamed for it.
So I think there are some constraints on the Israelis at this point.
On balance, I would say it's not likely.
But on the other hand, I still can't rule it out completely.
Here's the thing, though.
We've talked all along about how the nuclear program, the so-called nuclear threat to Israel, is just a bogus sham of an excuse for a regime change policy.
Anyway, the State Department, INR, right here in the Washington Post today, is saying that, nah, they're years away from the technical capability to really even crank out weapons-grade uranium.
So why do the Israelis want to bomb Iran so bad anyway?
I mean, this is ridiculous, isn't it?
It is not a rational policy.
This is an irrational policy on the part of Israel to even consider the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities.
I have an analysis of it, which is a systemic analysis, looking at the Israeli national security state as a parallel to the U.S. national security state, with all of the same, or at least many of the same mechanisms, the same dynamics at work.
This is a hyper-militarized state, which believes in the efficacy of military force, believes rightly that Israel is the dominant military force in that area, except for the United States, and therefore has a strong tendency to believe that somehow that is the answer to all of their problems.
Now, do they actually believe the myth that the Iranians are trying to commit genocide against Jews and against the Israelis?
I don't think so.
I don't think that's the case.
I think they have secretly a more realistic understanding of the Iranian calculus and policies.
But I also think that the Israelis, particularly the right-wing Israelis, but even more broadly, they believe that the status quo in Israel is not a stable one and that the longer it goes on, particularly with Iran behind the scenes as a protector or as an ally, the more Israeli Jews are going to leave the country and the population balance between Israelis and Palestinians will continue to grow more unfavorable to the Israeli side.
Their peace movement will flee, you're saying?
Well, it's partly the peace movement.
It's partly people who are getting tired of the stresses and strains of living in that kind of situation, absolutely.
It's primarily, definitely, the war against the Palestinians.
That is causing this, not Iran.
But nevertheless, it is part of the rationale for hyper-militarism in the Israeli state that we must do something to somehow quiet down the disquiet which is growing in Israel.
And one way to do that is to attack Iran.
So I think my view is that this is really a function of the kind of state that has arisen in Israel over the last few decades.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, writes for IPSnews at IPSnews.org and you can find him at original.antiwar.com.
Thanks again very much for your time on the show today, Gareth.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
