All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is our regular guest, Gareth Porter.
There's over 100 interviews now with Gareth Porter, going back to January 2007, if memory serves me correct.
And the reason for that is because Gareth knows what he's talking about, and also he's interested in exactly what I want to know.
And he writes for ipsnews.net and antiwar.com.
You can find him at original.antiwar.com/porter.
He's also the author of Perils of Dominance about American military strategy and what have you during Vietnam.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
Hey, thanks as always, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Well, you know, people kept emailing me, hey, man, so what's all the deal about these death squads and whatever?
And I said, well, go listen to my most recent interview with Gareth Porter.
That would be the one from last week.
But now you have an updated piece here, and you're pointing fingers in directions that I would like people to overhear.
So go ahead and tell us about your new piece.
It's on antiwar.com right now in the top news headlines.
Torture orders were part of U.S. sectarian war strategy.
Well, Scott, this is a story that is obviously more complex than most because it starts with the WikiLeaks revelation about the FRAGO, the so-called FRAGO or fragmentary order that told U.S. troops that they should not investigate cases of torture by Iraqis of Iraqis.
The first order apparently in June of 2004 and then a follow-up or a revised order in July, I'm sorry, in April, late April of 2005.
And these revelations about or this revelation about the two FRAGOs, I put in a broader context of what was happening at the time that these orders were issued by the U.S. military command in Iraq.
And what was happening was that the U.S. was suffering a huge setback in the war, which was hardly covered in the U.S. media at all at the time, which was that the Sunni troops that had been put together as a, I think they called it the civil defense troops in the Sunni part of the country in western Iraq, had completely gone over, 80% of them had gone over to the insurgents in that part of the country in April of 2004.
And it was in that context that you had the issuing of this order, the first order, to telling the troops, you know, if you see torture by the Iraqis, you know, you're supposed to report it to us and then forget it.
No investigation.
And of course, I began to take a look at what the linkage was between these two things.
And what I found was, I think, very interesting.
The order coincides with the appearance on the scene in Iraq for the third time of General David Petraeus.
Of course, the first time he was a commander of the 101st Airborne on the way into Baghdad.
The second time he took over as commander of the unit that occupied Mosul in late 2003, early 2004.
And the third time was in June 2004, when he took over the command that was in charge of training and equipping and organizing, basically, the Iraqi security forces, both the army and the police.
So this order, the circumstantial evidence, certainly supports the idea that this order was put out in the anticipation that there was going to be a lot of torture being carried out by the security forces of Iraq, and by militias that were close to and being used by the U.S. military.
In particular, of course, that meant our old friends, the Badr Corps, the Iranian-trained Shia militiamen who were associated with the al-Hakim faction, the old Siri, S-C-I-R-I, which was a really hardline sectarian Shia group.
And so much of the story here, the storyline that I spell out in my article, is about how the United States used militiamen who were involved with Siri, the Badr Corps, the military arm of the Siri, to carry out operations against the Sunni.
And, of course, part of that meant that they turned over prisoners, detainees, to the Badr Corps and other units which eventually developed from the Badr Corps to be interrogated, and that meant that they knew that they were going to be tortured by these troops under the Badr Corps.
And this was documented, of course, by the WikiLeaks reports as well.
So that, in essence, is the storyline.
There's more to it.
That is the El Salvador option?
Well, this is interesting.
The El Salvador option stories that came out in 2004-2005 were essentially, at least the ones that I read, were about a unit that Petraeus obviously helped to put together in 2004, which was based on the old Muqbarat, the secret police of the Saddam regime.
And these were not sectarian Shia at all.
They were either Sunnis, Sunni Arabs, or they were Shia but non-sectarian, and they were more professionals in sort of suppressing dissidents.
And that was the first order of business for Petraeus, was to set up this unit which was supposed to be used to go after the Sunnis.
My broader argument here is that he understood that he was going to have to use sectarian Shia and Peshmerga, that is Kurdish militiamen, in order to get the job done.
There were simply not enough of these leftovers from the Saddam regime to be able to do it.
And so in a larger perspective, he understood that for the next two years he was going to have to set up units that were sectarian in character, and mainly it was going to be the Shia who were going to be doing the job, while they were working on putting together a professional Iraqi army.
Now, it was in this article where I read you're quoting the Washington Post, where someone told them, yeah, you know, this is going to increase.
Yeah, here it is.
Absolutely, yes.
Your quote, aggravates the underlying fault lines in Iraqi society, heightening the prospects of civil strife.
That's right.
I mean, this was an acknowledgment by one of the Post sources in the military that they understood that there was a high risk that they were going to promote sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shia.
And as time went by, it became clearer and clearer to, I think, everybody in the U.S. military that that was happening.
And there's a quote in my article, which I do not identify directly as General Petraeus, but it's very clear to me that that's who it was.
An interview that he gave to John Byrne for the New York Times in, I believe it was July of 2005, in which Byrne asked the, quote, senior military officer at this MinStiki, the multinational command for setting up the Iraqi security forces and training them and arming them.
He asked the senior officer, is it possible that the U.S. is going to be arming both sides or arming one side in the sectarian civil war in Iraq?
And the officer paused for a moment and then said, maybe.
Now, there's no doubt that that was Petraeus himself, because when John Byrne goes to that command, he's not going to talk to anybody except Petraeus.
And we know that Petraeus, of course, was always available to people from the Times.
All right.
Now, I did interrupt you a little bit earlier if there was one more thing you wanted to say.
Therefore, I go on to my next question.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Well, here's my thing.
I guess this is more kind of a statement or just assertion here as we go out to this break.
When we come back from the break, I want to talk about stupidity or the plan.
But, you know, there's a chain of events.
I think Darja Mail on this show really went through about, you know, the best about how the El Salvador option led to the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Samarmas bombing and then the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad.
And then of Anbar province of Shia and how that increased everything, a million, four million refugees, a million dead people.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter after this.
All right.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter, and he knows all kinds of things.
The new article is Torture Orders Were Part of U.S. Sectarian War Strategy by Gareth Porter.
And now I need wisdom.
Here's something we talked about before, stupidity or the plan, Gareth.
And the thing is I want to hit you with a couple of things.
Here's George Bush.
Remember George Bush?
Everyone remembers.
On the eve of the Iraq War, he did a big bogus press conference where one reporter actually said, one reporter actually tried to just ask him a question.
John King from CNN tried to ask him a question and Bush interrupted him and said, we'll be there in a minute.
King, John King.
This is a scripted.
Remember that this is a scripted and it was obvious it was the most ridiculous, you know, Pravda-esque kind of deal you could have in America.
But anyway, so now everybody remembers the press conference I'm talking about.
So here's what he said.
I think Iraq is going to be great after we liberate it.
That's paraphrase it.
But here's the quote.
Iraq will provide a place where people can see that the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds can get along in a federation.
Iraq will serve as a catalyst for change.
So he somebody told him to say a federation there, Gareth, and he said that.
OK, and now there's, you know, this is a little bit off topic, but not quite.
David Wumser for the Institute for Advanced Strategic Studies, I think it's called in Israel.
The same people that produced A Clean Break, which was also primarily written by David Wumser and is signed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith as well, along with quite a few other prominent neocons.
But this one is called Coping with Crumbling States, a Western and Israeli balance of power strategy for the Levant.
One of the things that Wumser talks about here is that in context of Syria and the fall of the Baath regime in Syria, that our project is how to expedite the chaotic collapse and contain it.
And so you look at who disbanded the Iraqi army.
It wasn't George Bush.
He doesn't know anything about anything.
It was Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith that did that, wasn't it?
Exactly.
Because they're stupid, because Feith is the stupidest guy on the face of the planet, like Tommy Frank said, or because their interests are Israeli interests and they wanted to break Iraq into three pieces.
And if a million people died in a civil war, who cares?
Yeah, unfortunately, those two explanations are not mutually exclusive, Scott.
I mean, what we're talking about is very stupid people who also were very, very close to Israeli interests and who thought in terms that the Israelis, the same terms that the Israelis thought.
They wanted a Hashemite king.
That's what Shalabi promised.
And indeed, I have written along the same lines.
Before the first time you ever interviewed me, I had a piece in which I mentioned that very background of the U.S. policy in Iraq and the fact that this did in fact lead to the United States, to at least the neocons, being much more open to the idea that they would support a Shiite government to suppress the civil war.
To suppress the Sunnis.
There's no doubt that people like Wolfowitz and Feith were very sympathetic to that.
They believed that that would work, because these Shiites would be our Shiites rather than the Iranian Shiites.
So, the pro-Iranian Shiites, they didn't understand the Badr gang at all.
They didn't understand who they were.
So, basically...
Although, you know, the Skiri guys were at the secret meetings in Rome.
That had been sponsored with Michael Ledeen and Larry Franklin, etc.
Oh, okay.
Sorry, sorry.
So, yeah, the Skiri people were full participants, of course, in the...
Well, hell, the INC, the Iraqi National Congress, had headquarters in Tehran.
I guess you're right.
They really are that stupid.
They are that stupid.
And, you know, what I would emphasize, though, is that once you get into late 2003, early 2004, you know, you're already in a war that the neocons had not anticipated.
So, you've already gone beyond their combination of conspiracy and stupidity with regard to Iraq.
And you're in a whole new ballgame here.
Which, you know, by then, Petraeus...
By mid-2004, Petraeus was a key figure in the strategizing that the U.S. military was engaged in in terms of how do we get ourselves out of here without a complete bloody nose, without looking like we're fools.
And so, by that time, they were improvising like mad.
Particularly, as I point out, after the collapse of their Sunni military units in western Iraq.
They were completely bereft.
They had no strategy, and they had to come up with some.
And that's where you get the idea, well, we're just going to have to use what we've got, which is Shia and Kurdish militiamen.
And what I didn't quote in my article, but I had quoted in an earlier article, is that the guy who was the real designer of the whole war, Wolfowitz, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May of 2004, saying, well, we're not going to try to dismantle the militias.
Since it's going to take a while to have a military set up, we're going to have to allow them to exist as long as they are on our side, and it's not necessary to dismantle them.
Did they name the Wolf Brigade after him?
No, but they should have.
All right, now, wait a minute.
Maybe I was taken.
Maybe I didn't understand.
I can't remember if I really, you know, it's been a while, so I don't remember if I checked my opinion against what Wong Cole thought and what Robert Dreyfuss thought, and where all I understood this.
But I remember headlines where the Sunnis, some of the leaders of the Sunni factions, were saying, you know, look, we'll deal with the American troops, but just please keep the militia guys away.
And there was Barzani, or Talabani, I forget which, one of the Kurdish leaders, and one of the guys from the Supreme Islamic Council said, let us go in there, we'll use our militias, and we'll clean this mess up for you.
And the Americans were saying, and I think Wong Cole reported about this, the Americans were saying, hey, thanks, but no thanks, that's too much.
And I got the impression that in a way the Americans were standing between these guys and their civil war, but I guess you're saying that, no, I was completely duped by that altogether.
That duped it all.
That was my story that you probably remember.
Because I was reporting in early 2007, sorry, early 2006, excuse me, about the effort by Khalilzad to negotiate with the Sunnis.
And he got the White House approval to do that in early 2006.
The Sunnis did, in fact, offer to go in and clean up the Shia militias, particularly in Baghdad.
At that point, then, the White House shut them down, shut down the talks.
Well, I was talking about the Americans telling the Peshmerga and the Shiite militias, you guys hold back, because they wanted to do a full-scale invasion of Anbar province or something like that.
Oh, okay.
Well, there was a story.
There was a story in late 2005 that the Sunnis were asking the United States to allow the Sunnis to man the local security, to put together a local security unit based on Sunnis, instead of having the U.S. occupation, which was already there.
Right, which was there really all along.
And the U.S. military said, absolutely not.
You guys just are trying to get rid of the U.S. military so you can take over for al-Qaeda, or for the Sunni insurgents, not for al-Qaeda.
So anyway, I think those are all true.
Wait a minute.
I'm not sure that still answers my question about whether I'm an idiot or not.
Because my question is, at any point, obviously, you know, the Shia militias, with the help of the Americans, won the civil war, quote-unquote, cleansed Baghdad of the Sunni Arabs and took over the thing and whatever.
Was there any point in there where the Peshmergas and the Shiite militias wanted to go further and faster and harder in invading the Anbar province, et cetera, and the Americans were really standing between, and in a way protecting the same Sunnis that they were helping the Shiites have the war against by at least putting the kibosh on full-scale war at one point or another at all?
The only version of that story that I know about is much later, that is, 2007, when Petraeus...
Yeah, see, I'm thinking of earlier on, like 2004, I think.
There was a big press conference where it was, I think, Talibani.
No, I think, I don't know, maybe it was Barzani.
I'm not aware of that.
I'm not aware of that.
I'd be somewhat surprised, because without the U.S. military alongside them, I think that those Peshmerga and Shia militiamen would not be able to do the job, and I think it was always in conjunction with the U.S. military that they operated in Sunni cities.
So the civil war and the breakup of Iraq and all this was stupidity and the plan?
Absolutely.
And it was General Petraeus who put much of it together?
At least as of mid-2004, he was the key to beginning to talk about how we're going to make up for the loss of these Sunni...
All right, everybody, that's Gareth Porter.
Again, soon.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Bye.
