Alright, y'all, welcome back to the Jayhawn Show here, man.
This is Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott.
Got my hero, Gareth Porter, on the phone here.
I'm on the second floor, but somebody's on my roof.
Jesus, I hope it's not feds with machine guns.
Uh, probably not.
There was a Cobra helicopter hovering overhead in Hollywood today.
Maybe just for a movie, I hope.
Okay, so listen, Gareth, welcome to the show, et cetera, et cetera.
Thanks, Scott, as always.
Thank you for joining us today.
Now listen, I gotta ask y'all about Afghanistan here, but I'm nervous, man, because I gotta do live Russia TV today, and I'm gonna debate Iran and their nuclear program, I think.
Do you think I'm up for it?
You are up for it as much as anybody in this country is.
Well, that kind of worries me.
There's you and me, and poor old Doc Braithers, retired now, and there's Mohammed Sahimi, the heroic Mohammed Sahimi, and Flint Leverett, and Hillary Mann Leverett, and Phil Giraldi.
Am I out of people who are good on Iran?
Is that my whole list?
Well, there are other people, but I think the people who really followed the nuclear issue very closely, you've covered most of them.
Well, there's only 300 million Americans, so it's not like, you know, that's a pretty big percentage, right?
That's okay.
It's good enough for what we need right now.
All right, well, we'll see what we can do.
You know me, I always interview my heroes like you on this show, instead of these kind of right-wing, talking-point, warmongered sorts.
And I thank you for that, Scott.
I'll just, yeah, whatever.
I'll do what I can if I fail, and that's okay, too.
But, you know, I want to stop a war before it starts.
I can't end any of the current ones, apparently, so if I can preemptively stop a war, I'd like to try.
Well worth trying.
All right, so now tell me all about Saint David Petraeus, the future military dictator of America, the greatest general who's ever lived in the history of mankind, who won the Iraq War in a great victory and is now saving Afghanistan.
Right, and let me start by giving my personal mea culpa here.
It's time for me to confess that as much as I have been a skeptic, to say the least, about Petraeus and have found his lying and deception to be egregious many, many times since he began to be the commander in Iraq in early 2007, I nevertheless believed that Petraeus was intelligent enough to see that when he took over as commander in Afghanistan, he was up against something very, very different, and that he would be clever enough to find a way to attack in Afghanistan so that he would not get tagged with what is certain to be a disaster.
I mean, it's clearly a disaster, not just in the making, already more or less made.
And so I thought that he would have some plans up his sleeve that would take advantage of any off-ramp, as it's called in the Washington talk.
I thought he would take advantage of them to basically find an exit strategy.
He is doing exactly the opposite, as far as I can see.
In fact, that is the headline of the past week or so, that Petraeus has indeed taken a position that puts him at odds with the Obama administration on the mid-2011 deadline by suggesting, first of all, that he might ask the administration to the president to forego or postpone any withdrawal of troops at that point on the grounds that the situation on the ground does not support or merit any withdrawal.
And secondly, a point that's, I think, less well understood, less well known, he has suggested that he would not even support a substantive or symbolic handover of security responsibility to the Afghan National Army, the ANA, by suggesting the way he characterized the handover that he would favor.
And he didn't even call it a handover.
He said, well, you know, the United States would do a little bit less and the Afghan army would do a little bit more.
That's not a handover of responsibility by any means.
And so he's putting himself in a position to, it appears, to fight for a prolongation of the war in a way that is directly at odds with the administration's policy.
And we know this, I think, from the book that was published earlier this year.
Well, hold it right there, because I was going to get to that presently here.
I've got to challenge your premise here that Barack Obama is anything but a blood-soaked monster who lives all day, every day, to murder people.
Well, I understand that that's a widespread view, and I disagree with it.
And there is some compelling evidence to the contrary here, in a sense.
This guy, Jonathan Alter, who's the David Frum of the Obama team, basically, they told him to tell us that Obama really meant it about this July 2011 beginning of the withdrawal from Afghanistan deadline, and he had this conversation with Petraeus where he said, I'm serious now.
You promised you're going to be able to get it done, and you're not going to come to me saying you need more time.
Now you're telling me you accept that premise of this whole thing.
Is that right?
And Petraeus says, yes, sir, I agree.
I think there are a couple of points to bear in mind about this account.
One is that this is obviously an emanation, a further example of Bob Woodward kind of journalism.
Woodward has been the pioneer in this in a whole series of books, including, of course, the series of books on Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And what Woodward has done in those books is quite interesting.
He has continued to obtain the actual documents of internal meetings within the White House, particularly, I mean, basically, White House meetings.
That is a new kind of journalism.
In many ways, I mean, I find Woodward's journalism reprehensible, but it is extremely valuable for a historian to have those documents.
These, in some cases, rather long excerpts from documents directly quoted from the meetings.
And I have a strong hunch that that's exactly what we have here in the case of the Alter book, because I think Woodward has, in fact, set a new standard, has provided a model for journalists to establish the credibility of the accounts that they're getting, and that's what we have here in the case of the Alter account.
All right, now, Bob Dreyfuss came out, geez, months and months and months back, I forget.
It's funny, I'm not able to place it on the timeline in my head.
Maybe it was a year ago, maybe a year and a half or something.
He asked General Petraeus, I think at an AEI conference, hey, man, so what about the July 2011 beginning of the drawdown date?
And Petraeus said, hey, hey, hey, let's not start moving the timeline to the left now, Dreyfuss.
It was August 2011.
And Dreyfuss says, no, man, it was July, the West Point speech.
Yeah, I didn't realize, I didn't know about that.
Yeah, it was on Bob Dreyfuss's blog in The Nation.
So this guy, you know, you talk about him saying, you mentioned him saying, you know, we'll do a little more or a little less and they'll do a little more.
And we have the Dreyfuss anecdote there.
And then now this is on top of your article, the Petraeus bait and switch at original.antiwar.com.
There's a brand new one today at news.antiwar.com by the heroic Jason Ditz.
And it's called Petraeus vows not to be rushed out of Afghanistan and etc., etc.
Bob Woodward's book comes out.
Not to worry, insists General David Petraeus.
He felt the need to come out today and again reiterate that he has absolutely no intention of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and that he will not be, quote, rushed out of the country.
Right.
And I want to real quick because we're going out to this break.
I just wanted to mention that there are other reasons to believe that there is a very real conflict between Obama and Petraeus.
So I'll take it up.
All right.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back, y'all, with Gareth Porter, Interpret Service, antiwar.com.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates.lrn.fm and join us on Facebook at facebook.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all.
We're back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
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All right.
Gareth Porter's on the line.
We're talking about General Petraeus undermining the civilian elected president of the United States' policy that this war will begin to come to an end, if you can believe that, in July of 2011.
Go ahead.
The other point that I wanted to make, just to bolster the thought or the point that we had talked about earlier, that Petraeus and Obama really do have a serious conflict here.
It's not just, as sometimes it's suggested, a kabuki play with Obama pretending to be somehow opposed to Petraeus' perspective or policy preference.
And we go back here, if you remember, to 2009, when there was a period of some months when Obama was considering weighing and analyzing his options in terms of the, essentially, demand from McChrystal for, we didn't know exactly how many tens of thousands of troops.
There's some reports that it went up to 80,000 as one option that McChrystal was identifying as basically what he would love to have.
And it was during that period, and I've written about this, that the White House had some of its minions, and I think Jim Jones was clearly one of the people working on this, leaked to the New York Times.
That's the National Security Advisor.
The National Security Advisor, Jim Jones, leaking to the New York Times that the administration, the White House, did not view the Taliban insurgents as terrorists, as part of the global al-Qaeda-oriented jihadist movement that would attack the United States, or be part of any effort to attack the United States.
And it had interests that were at odds with al-Qaeda, because the Taliban simply wanted to be able to bring Sharia law to Afghanistan.
This was a point that was not made idly.
There was a real purpose in that, and that was to provide an argument for turning down the request from McChrystal, or minimizing it as much as possible.
And so this was one reason why I was convinced last year that Obama wanted to find an alternative to what McChrystal was demanding.
And at the same time, we know that he is subjected to the advice of his handlers, his political advisors, telling him that, no, you can't do that, the right wing's too powerful, this is too conservative a country, you'll be crucified, and so forth.
And, you know, the news media, as you and I both know, are part of that movement, part of that right wing political force that puts pressure on a president who tries to do something that is the opposite of the interests of the military.
That's exactly what we saw in Iraq, that's what we're seeing in Afghanistan.
So I think we need a somewhat more nuanced picture here.
I mean, I'm not defending President Obama.
I think that in many ways he's shown himself to be a man without any political courage or principles by the way in which he's handled Iraq, and even on Afghanistan.
All he ever was was a product, man.
He's a tube of toothpaste.
He's an American Idol star.
He's not a president, he's not anything.
Well, you know, I don't disagree with any of that.
But at the same time, I think we have to have an understanding that there are bound to be contradictions and basically real conflicts between the interests of the White House and the interests of the military in terms of the military wanting things that are not in the interests of the President of the United States who has his own concerns, which are different from those of the military.
Isn't it funny, though, that it seems like all the time the civilians want to bomb Iran and it's the military.
It says, no, man, all our guys in Afghanistan and Iraq will get killed.
Our bases in Bahrain will get bombed.
We can't have that.
Well, on that one, you're right.
I mean, there's a military interest that in many ways overrides the right-wing civilian political views, some of them found somewhere in the bureaucracy, but mostly, of course, outside the U.S. government.
But when you're the military and you already have your war, your interests are to make that war go on as long as necessary to avoid any suggestion that you were defeated and, if possible, to make it possible to pin the blame for the ultimate failure on the civilians in the White House.
So, I mean, that's an overriding institutional prerogative.
Especially when it's Democrats in the White House.
It fits the Vietnam narrative perfectly.
That's right.
Exactly.
So I just want to underline that we need to depersonalize the analysis of this situation and set aside our feelings about Obama as a fake in some way, as not what he pretended to be or whatever.
And bear in mind, that all may be true, but in the end, he may indeed have interests and a policy preference that is very different from that of the military, and that is a fact that could be very important.
And I believe that we are going to see, over the next several months, a continued playing out of this conflict.
It's going to be a very, very interesting period.
Yeah.
Well, now, so all this hype about...
See, I kind of was on break there a little bit, and I got way behind in the news, and I've been just extremely busy with other things.
And I saw the headlines, but I didn't get to see.
What's all this about Rahm Emanuel and maybe others are leaving the administration over this conflict, Gareth?
I'll tell you the truth.
I've not seen the Rahm Emanuel story.
I've been focusing myself on...
Well, wasn't that part of the Woodward book?
Leave out Emanuel for the moment.
Wasn't part of the Woodward book that there's a real divide among the civilian political advisers and everybody else in the White House over this?
People are leaving over this or something?
I told you to just make that up.
I have not seen the story about people leaving.
I've only seen the story yesterday about the various comments that were attributed to people, including Petraeus, saying they're effing with the wrong person.
Excuse me?
Please.
Look, I don't know any of this.
Tell me the story, please.
Well, I mean, this is perhaps the single most interesting quote attributed to one of the principals in the Woodward book.
This is a comment made by Petraeus on a flight, if I remember correctly, but in any case, in the presence of his staff.
Over a glass of wine, believe it or not, Petraeus made the comment, and there's no context for this, so you have to kind of fill in the blanks, but he said they, meaning the White House, are effing with the wrong guy.
And so this clearly underlines the fact that this was last May.
This was May of 2010, and I have not tried to, at this point, try to figure out exactly what the issue was most likely to have been.
You know, the Washington Post says this morning or last night, I think it was the Post, maybe it was the Times, the White House doesn't dispute any of this characterization or whatever.
The Woodward book is fine with them.
That's their official comment.
And this man is still in charge of this war.
Well, and this, of course, is a reflection of the degree of power that Petraeus has amassed.
Yeah, but, you know, even a weasel like Truman told MacArthur, uh-uh, I'm the boss, not you, later's for you, and that was the end of that.
Of course, and that's what our current president ought to be doing.
There's no doubt about it.
But, I mean, the political reality in 2010 is not the same as the political reality in 1950.
I mean, that is the way, I think, Well, wait a minute, political reality means the Pentagon is stronger than the White House?
That a general of a war, he's not even the commander of CENTCOM anymore, he's the general in charge of one war, can directly, I mean, what you just said, say that about the president of the United States and continue in his job?
That's ten times worse than what McChrystal's men said.
Absolutely.
I agree.
That means that McChrystal was fired not because of what he said, but because for whatever reasons they felt McChrystal wasn't getting the job done.
You know, well, yeah, I mean, that's true.
Yeah, and the point is, Scott, that yes, the Pentagon is much, much more powerful than it was in 1950, and a field commander who has already been the hero of one war, who's sort of, you know, successfully made the case to the American public through a supine news media that he managed to patch a victory from the jaws of defeat and has become the biggest hero since MacArthur.
How long before he just crosses the river and takes Obama's chair in his general's uniform?
Right.
A matter of weeks now.
This is obviously one scenario that we can see ahead.
I'm sorry, we're out of time.
Can you stay ten more minutes?
I've got an open segment coming up after the news.
All right.
Ten minutes it is.
Awesome.
Thanks, Garrett.
All right.
Bye.
You're listening to the live edition of Anti-War Radio.
Hour number three is next after the news here on the Liberty Radio Network at LRN.
FM.
It's a long thing.
You know, Sharia taking over America.
I thought you were talking about the libertarian view of environmental.
Oh, wait, we're back on.
Hey, everybody, we're back on.
Me and Garrett, we're talking about things.
I was saying, what a parody of the Red Scare, this Green Scare.
And he goes, hey, I'm a green.
And I said, no, no, no, not like that, Garrett.
I know you're that kind of green.
I mean like the old birch maps of communists taking over the world and each country turning red.
Well, now there are those same kind of maps not put out by the birchers, by the way, who are good on this issue, about, you know, the map of the world turning green.
Got it.
And they're coming to take us over.
Newt Gingrich said apparently the other week, last week, that there's a conspiracy to use the federal court system to institute Sharia law across America.
And apparently this is a real danger in the mind of a significant portion of the American population.
And it is.
It's like a joke compared to the Red Scare.
There were communists in the State Department.
You know what I mean?
They loved Joe Stalin.
Those were just facts.
And it wasn't like, OK, they every there was a communist under every bed and Joe McCarthy was a hero or any of that stuff.
But still, at least there was a somewhat true premise to the big freak out.
In this case, we're talking about the least, you know, the most powerless, I should say, people in the whole society.
They have no voice.
Muslims.
I mean, come on.
They're going to take us all over.
Same thing with.
Come on.
Everybody knows General Petraeus is a hero and all that.
And which brings us back to the point as far as ridiculousness.
There's our Segway.
Ridiculousness.
You're a historian and not just a journalist.
You're both.
And I know you're good with the long term view and all that.
And you know me.
I'm the epitome of hyperbole over here.
Is it really a worry that we could have a military government as country when you can have something like General Petraeus defy Barack Obama in such a blatant manner?
I don't think, you know, I'm not worried about military dictatorship per se.
But I do think that, you know, what has already happened, as I suggested before the break, is that there has been such a an assumption of power by the military over the last few decades.
And it has accelerated enormously since 9-11.
I mean, this is something that I think people need to be more aware of, that this is a fundamental change that has taken place.
A redistribution of power has taken place.
And the uniform military leadership is more powerful.
And Petraeus occupies a unique position in modern military history.
And that is, as I said, in part because of the enormous buildup the news media has given him.
And he is in a position to put more pressure on the president than any previous field commander in history, I think.
Remember that New York Times article from, what, February or March or something, I think, where at the end of the article it's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the plane watching a movie seven days in May.
Right.
And it reminded me of – and, you know, look, this is the history of the world.
Republics become empires.
They become dictatorships.
They don't get to keep their limited constitutional separation of powers, for crying out loud.
We've centered all power in the executive.
And so, you know, it's just a fight over who gets to be the executive now.
But, you know, the modern way of accomplishing what was portrayed in Seven Days in May is not the sort of overt military takeover.
It's the velvet glove that has been used so effectively by manipulating the news media and getting their message to be the narrative that the vast majority of Americans believe and which then sort of shapes the political process in so many different ways.
And that's why I think it's very important to begin to think in terms of what has already been created here, the permanent war state.
I'm going to start talking about this on your show and everywhere else that I get a chance to do this, to call people's attention to the development of this new phenomenon over the past ten years, continuing to develop, which has several major characteristics.
We don't have time to go into them now, but, you know, it's things like the increasing use of secret, unaccountable military force, such as drone strikes and special operations forces.
And the fact that, you know, you have a commander in the case of both McChrystal and Petraeus who are really consciously putting primacy on manipulating public opinion as a way of continuing war.
Yeah, well, you know, Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute, the author of Crisis and Leviathan, he calls it participatory fascism.
You know, there's no point in having the generals, I mean, unless they just, you know, one individual really wants to or something.
There's no point in them crossing the Potomac and taking over the White House.
As long as everybody still thinks that the statue of Abraham Lincoln is running things up there or whatever, and it's we the people and all this crap, then we'll put up with anything.
As long as the emperor is not literally wearing a black cloak and shooting lightning out of his hands, we will not recognize him as such.
Yeah, so I think that's precisely the right point to make about this.
But the change that has taken place is so far reaching over the past 10 years that really I think it constitutes a new system, a new kind of state that we have never seen before.
And it threatens really to be a permanent war state.
It doesn't threaten, it already is, but it threatens permanent war is what I'm trying to say.
Well, my thing is, too, is I hate all this stuff about, well, you don't have to like Bill Clinton, but you have to respect the office and all this stuff.
I don't respect the office.
I don't respect any president at all.
Even Jefferson was a horrible president.
And so screw all of them.
But the thing is, I sure prefer a civilian presidency to military dictatorship.
And when we're at war and we have a president who's so weak and has just completely spent every last cent of his political capital, mostly with his ridiculous domestic things and then betraying his entire base by continuing every, almost every thing of the worst things that George Bush ever did.
Really, he's even still torturing people under Appendix M of the Army Field Manual.
The only improvement that I can think of is he no longer claims the unlimited authority of the King of England.
He now claims that the authorization to use military force from the Congress gives him, you know, the ultimate authority over the world.
Well, in some ways, I mean, I would even argue that Obama is worse than Bush.
And I would specifically refer to a case that I've just recently become aware of where Obama is actually going further than Bush ever did in terms of persecuting whistleblowers within the National Security Bureau.
Yeah, he's on prosecution number four now, which is a world record.
No president before has ever done more than one.
Yeah, using this outrageous sort of espionage statute from 1919.
Yeah, everybody's got to keep one tab open to salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
You'll never miss one of those again.
And now look at this, man.
Three thousand strong and growing.
The CIA's army of assassins in Afghanistan.
This never mind JSOC.
This is part of Bob Woodward's book to news dot antiwar dot com by Jason Ditz.
Three thousand strong.
The CIA's army of assassins.
Gareth.
Yes, this is this is something that I had not heard of.
I'd not seen before.
And I've not had an opportunity to try to track it down further.
But it obviously refers to a paramilitary group used by the CIA or the military or both to supplement the Special Operations Forces assassination teams, which, by the way, I mean, I just heard yesterday at the Institute for the Study of War that there are five thousand Special Operations Forces now in Afghanistan carrying out night raids and targeting people's homes.
And in the process, of course, killing hundreds of innocent civilians.
You wrote about that in your last piece, right?
Right.
Betrayers bait and switch where they raid a house and then every just like a bunch of Texans, people come out with rifles going without going on here.
And then they wax the entire neighborhood.
Just light them up, boys.
Anybody who steps out of their house to find out what's going on, because, of course, they make all this noise, all this racket.
And people think that there's the, you know, people coming into the village or the neighborhood with guns who are a threat.
And they come out with their guns and they're immediately shot, killed.
And, of course, many times the women behind them are also killed.
And every time that happens, we now know if they feel they can get away with it, the women as well as the men are included as Taliban in the report.
But that's not in the bait and switch.
That's in the previous article for IPF.
Oh, I'm sorry.
That would be doubling of night raids backfired in Kandahar.
Right.
Again, original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
And, hey, Michael Hastings talked with McChrystal's guys.
They told him themselves.
Oh, that's the music.
We create 10 new enemies every time we kill somebody.
Gareth, that's McChrystal's own ratio.
He's Mr. Delta Force, Mr. Targeted Assassination.
He says every time we kill even a fighter, I guess he's not even saying an innocent person.
Every time we kill someone, we create 10 new enemies.
Exactly.
Let's keep going.
And yet they still do it.
Why?
Because they really are not fighting for security of the American people.
They're doing it because it's an institutional interest.
That's what they do.
And, you know, they don't care.
Yeah.
Well, geez, I really wish people would snap out of it.
It's so simple, isn't it?
I mean, hey, the Pentagon is a giant interest group.
Come on, guys.
You really want your great grandson to die in the long war, turn in Central Asia into our old West or something?
North America has the right to rule the world forever.
You're going to give up your own blood for that?
I mean, come on.
Don't be a sucker.
It's ridiculous, man.
It's national suicide, too, man.
And never even mind the Afghans getting night-raided, because Americans don't care about that.
But look at what's happening to us with the economy.
You know, that's where I'm really going with the generals taking over thing, is that, you know, they just keep inflating and inflating and inflating to try to not let the correction really go as deep as it needs to go, and they're risking the breaking of the dollar and the end-of-the-world dollar standard.
It's already people are – nation states are diversifying out of American securities right now, and we could really be looking at hard, hard times, and then, you know, then we've got this David Petraeus guy who doesn't do anything but get everything right all day and night on TV.
Well, we've got to dismantle – The one institution people still believe in, the Pentagon.
We've got to dismantle the permanent war state to have even the slightest chance of survival of anything like an America that is going to be livable.
Gareth Porter, thank you for all the work you do and your time on my show.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Everybody, that's the hero, Gareth Porter, ipsnews.net, original.antiwar.com, slash Porter.
