All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org.
Our next guest is Philip Giraldi.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer and is now a partner in Canestrara Associates.
He's a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
You can also find what he writes at the Huffington Post.
Every two weeks, he writes Smoke and Mirrors for us at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Philip.
Hi, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Okay.
All right.
So General Petraeus, the top general in Iraq, is set to testify before the Congress this week.
And all the word is that he's prepared to accuse Iran of everything under the sun.
And I think we probably have a pretty good idea of the lines along which those accusations are going to run.
Well, Muqtada al-Sadr and his special groups, they say that Muqtada al-Sadr, who I've always understood to be the much more nationalist-leaning Shiite leader in Iraq, not necessarily that he works for Iran, but that large parts of his Mahdi army have broken off and have gone to Iran for training and are now under the control of Iran and are at war with American forces and Iraqi government forces in Iraq.
Does that sound basically like what you think he's going to say?
And then does that sound anything like the truth to you?
Well, it's certainly the story he's going to be selling.
The thing is that what he, I think what the main thrust of what he's trying to, what he's going to try to do is say that he's going to be pushing this idea that Iran is waging a proxy war against us already.
And so the conclusion, and this is something that Lieberman and others came out with last year also, that Iran is already at war with the United States.
It essentially creates another level of thinking about what's going on in Iraq, and it elevates the possibility of hostilities.
As for who is what and everything in Iraq, well, I mean, Iran has an interest in supporting every party there, and there's a lot of evidence that they are.
The real question becomes when do you cross the line from support and having contacts with people that basically you've had contacts with in many cases for 30 years, and when do you cross the line over to fomenting an insurrection against the government?
And there's no evidence for that.
Petraeus can say what he wants, and he's certainly more than once said that the Iranians have been behind all these attacks and been behind all the unrest.
He now has upped that by saying that Iran is behind most of the violence in Iraq, which I think is an absurd comment.
But there's been no evidence for it.
Occasionally they will produce a fragment of a weapon or something like that that was produced in Iran, in most cases for export.
But there has not really been any effort to lay out a definitive case to support what these people are saying.
So the Iranian government, they know what's what in Iraq.
They see that, relatively speaking, in terms of grassroots support and everything, the Mahdi army is going to last, and the Badr Corps very well might not, so they're doing their best to hedge their bets and back both sides, but there's nothing saying that they've decided to have the Mahdi army overthrow the government or attack the government.
Well, there are a lot of complications in terms of the loyalties and everything here.
For example, Muqtada al-Sadr is currently in Iran.
He's studying in Qom, the religious center of Iran, to more or less enhance his religious credentials.
There was news today that he's discussing with the religious leadership inside Iraq the possibility of disbanding the Mahdi army.
But basically Iran has loyalties to individual leaders and to individuals at many levels in the Iraqi government, and these connections go back 30 and 40 years, when these people were in exile under Saddam Hussein.
And so there are a lot of connections, and the idea that necessarily because these connections exist that Iran is playing some kind of pernicious role is a bit of a leap.
If any group in Iraq is closely allied to the Iranian political and religious leadership, it would be the prime minister's supporters, the group Skiri and Dawah, his own party, which traditionally have had very, very close ties to Iran.
And the evidence suggests they still do.
Yeah.
See, I can't figure out why the Iranians, you know, if I pretend to be an evil Ayatollah for a minute, why would they be trying to undermine the Maliki government?
It doesn't make any sense.
Even if they have to, you know, deal with American occupation for the next few years or something, at some point the Americans are going to have to leave.
And don't they want their guys to be the ones in control?
Yeah, I think that's the obvious way to look at this.
They do want their guys, or the guys that are most friendly to them, to be in control, and that would be the current leadership.
And that is essentially the way they would go.
And if you look at the fighting that took place two weeks ago, the Iranians were the ones that engineered the ceasefire, and a lot of people believe they engineered the ceasefire because they knew that their guys were about to get whipped.
Yeah, their guys, the bottom brigades, the Iraqi army.
That's right.
That's right.
So, all right, now tell me insider Washington things about Dick Cheney and his relative level of influence compared to Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice at this point.
Well, you know, these things go back and forth to a certain extent, and it seems that the president is the kind of decision maker who more or less agrees with the last person he's spoken to.
And it appears right now that Cheney seems to be calling the shots on the foreign policy again.
You probably noticed yourself that in the media, Gates and Rice have been very quiet.
And I think this is a sign that the policy has shifted back to Cheney, who tends to operate behind the scenes.
And there are, of course, stories that the fighting that took place in Iraq two weeks ago was preceded by a Cheney visit.
And I have heard that the Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki, in the aftermath of this, was complaining bitterly to his close aides that Cheney had been the one who pushed him into it.
So, there's another kind of story which we'll never be able to confirm, I suppose.
But it seems to indicate that the activist role that Cheney pursues is, again, becoming dominant.
And, of course, that raises issues about what's going to happen with Iran.
Well, see, I actually was taking a deep breath and relaxing a little bit, because when they fired Admiral Fallon, Gareth Porter, you, and Stephen Clemens, all three sources on this particular issue that I trust very highly, said, all right, everybody, cool it.
Just because they fired Fallon doesn't mean that they're about to have a war any day now.
They just fired him because he was being loud and making a fool out of them and so forth.
They had to get him out of the way.
That doesn't mean that we're definitely having a war now, so relax a little bit.
I thought with that NIE that came out that said, man, they haven't had anything like a nuclear weapons program since 2003, et cetera, that the pressure, the justifications, as phony as they ever were for this, might be diminished enough.
But it sounds like you're telling me we're pretty much, just as much in danger of having this war as we were a year ago.
Well, I think you have to look at it this way.
I think that if Petraeus and Crocker come before the Congress and go to the White House later this week and they push this idea that Iran is already at war with us, that kind of tells you that the intensity of this whole issue is again going up.
But that said, and I think where Steve Clemons and Gareth Porter and myself, we're looking at this.
We're looking at it in terms of the viability of a military option against Iran.
And that still is kind of low.
The U.S. military, apart from a strategic bombing campaign, which would in many ways open up a Pandora's box and not really solve any problems, it still remains I think a less probable scenario than what we were looking at maybe even a year ago.
Well, that's funny.
We've been talking about this since 2005.
And the story has always been that reason and logic are on the side of not bombing Iran.
I mean, I can see where Cheney would think, well, geez, I didn't mean to turn over the south of the country to them.
Maybe I can get a regime change there and that'll make it all right, what I've done in Iraq, something like that.
But you can't have a regime change from the air.
All you can do is just set the whole region on fire like throwing craps.
Yeah, well, you and I know that.
The problem is that you have to kind of, I think to get a handle on this stuff, you have to read the neocon arguments that are being made about this.
And there's been stuff in the Wall Street Journal and there's been stuff certainly in the Weekly Standard and in commentary.
And the thrust there is that any time that we waste by not going war to Iran is just going to be that much worse down the road.
So they very firmly and solidly believe that the military option is the only option when it comes to Iran.
They concede that diplomacy has to play itself out, but they also argue that diplomacy has already played itself out.
So this is the way they look at it.
And assuming that they have convinced Cheney, or Cheney has probably convinced them to a certain extent that this is the way to go, then, you know, this suddenly, as irrational as it is, appears to be an option that actually might be played out.
And it also all depends on what happens on the ground.
We're always just one border incident away or one provocation in the Persian Gulf that can be used as an excuse, as they were talking about last year.
Yeah, well, you know, Fallon, one of the things that Fallon was probably fired for was the fact that he wanted to set up some kind of hotline type mechanism with the Iranians to keep incidents from escalating into something worse.
So that was one of the strikes against him.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
He wanted to set up instant communication with the Iranian government so that if anything happened, he could diffuse the situation rather than escalate it.
And that was one of the things that cost him his job, Phil Giraldi.
Yeah, that was a sign that he was soft on Iran.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry to backtrack, but back to the the Badr-Sadr split and all that in Iraq.
Is it I guess it sounds like you're saying that Sadr is getting closer to the Iranians at this point.
But it almost seemed like last week that if he'd wanted to, he could have just overthrown the Iraqi army completely, could have just decimated the Iraqi army in the south there.
And that would have been the end of the Maliki government.
He would have been the guy in power.
Right.
You know, I don't know how that would have played out in political terms, but certainly he it the reports from the ground on the ground seem to indicate that he had definitely the upper hand and that the Iraqi army threw everything it had at him, accompanied with airstrikes from the United States and from Britain.
And they were more than holding their own in in Basra.
And they were also, of course, more than holding their own in Baghdad.
So, yeah, the implication would seem to be that Maliki was on who had flown down to Basra and was there personally leading the attack, as it were, put his prestige on the line and very much took a whack.
Yeah.
Bush did, too.
Bush said this is a defining moment in the history of Iraq right here.
Everybody watch.
Yeah.
Well, I showed you how I showed you how poorly informed Bush was.
And also, of course, the comments that were coming out of the embassy and from Petraeus were very gung ho, too.
And then what happened was a few days later, when this whole thing backfired, they're suddenly saying that, oh, no, we had nothing to do with it.
It was all just it was all just Maliki who did it.
And of course, that's nonsense.
Petraeus knew all about this operation, even admitted, more or less, that he did.
And the U.S. Army has people embedded all over the place with these Iraqi units.
So the whole concept that he didn't know about it and the ambassador didn't know about it is it's just more of the of the, shall we say, the the twisting of the truth that we've seen too much of in the last seven years.
Do you know much about the terms of the deal that the Iranians worked out?
Well, I just I just read what's been in the media and I found that there was a lot more on this in the European media than in the U.S.
Basically, the Iranians provided their good offices for a group of parliamentarians that had come out of Iraq to meet with Muqtada al-Sadr, who was studying in Qom.
And they they mediated the issue.
My understanding is that they did not force a solution on this, although it was clearly in their interest to to have the fighting stop because their surrogates looked like they were about to lose.
But there's no I've seen no implication that the Iranians in any way were able to force this or were or were dominating and were able to dictate a solution.
I've seen no evidence of that.
Now what do you think might happen if America does attack Iran?
There's an excuse in the Persian Gulf or something like that.
Do we then do our soldiers in Iraq have to then take on the Mahdi army and the Badr Corps at the same time?
Well, they would have to take on everybody, I suspect.
One of the reasons that has been cited for going into Basra two weeks ago was that there was concern by the U.S. and again, this goes back to the argument that Cheney might have been behind this, was concerned on the part of the U.S. that Basra was becoming a stronghold for Iranian supporters and that Basra is well placed to cut the supply line coming up from Kuwait.
So they were concerned in terms of an Iranian war scenario and what impact that this presence there would have.
So that kind of all fits together, but it's until Cheney comes clean when he writes his memoirs in about six years, I guess there will be speculation.
Yeah, well, unless he has the war before the end of this term, then we'll know for sure, I guess.
Right.
Well, yeah, so that seems like a real danger, though, if not only, as we've known all along, the Badr Corps lived in exile and Iran has been loyal to the Iranian ayatollahs all these years.
If not only do our guys have to fight the Iraqi army that they're embedded with and so forth, but if Sadr is leaning more and more toward Iran, seems like if they start bombing Persia, we're going to have a full uprising among the people who've more or less tolerated our our occupation this whole time.
You know, neocon talking points aside.
Yeah, I think so.
So Sadr is, in fact, I think last year said, pledged that he and the Medi army, Amadi army would would would resist any attempt to attack Iran.
And he said very specifically that that would that would include anything done by it.
Well, obviously, the United States is the only one who would do it.
But he he was very specifically making a threat to intervene in Iraq on behalf of Iran if Iran were attacked.
Yeah.
William S. Lennon, the American conservative, says that a British journalist he knows asked Abdul Aziz Hakeem from the Bader Corps and the Supreme Islamic Council the same question.
And he said, we will do our duty, which meant kill Americans, you know, you know, take the side of Iran.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole the whole the whole idea of of a military option against Iran is so ridiculous that it's even hard to imagine what kind of moron in the U.S. government would come up with such an idea.
But we know we know full well from experience.
I mean, Doug Fyfe's not there anymore, but there are he's been succeeded by Eric Adelman, who is who is another intellectual heavyweight.
And these people come up with this kind of thing and they think that somehow it's all going to work out.
But it doesn't.
And it's it's really scary because the consequences for U.S. forces and for the U.S. prestige in the world, apart from anything else.
And let's not forget our dollar and oil prices and a lot of other things would be so damaged by this kind of action that it's ridiculous to think that Petraeus will be going before Congress this Thursday and and raising the intensity against Iran.
I can't understand it.
Well, do you have any hope that the Congress is going to take him on about it and they'll have their follow up questions prepared and so forth?
Well, I think there's certainly be some people in Congress that will.
But Congress basically has been, you know, look at what all of the presidential candidates have been saying about Iran.
Iran is is a very popular whipping boy for Congress.
And if Petraeus makes this case, I really would hope that there will be some people that will be challenging him on the facts and challenging him on the lack of any kind of corroborative details for what he's saying.
But I suspect that no one will.
Yeah, it's like James Bovard says, watching Congress is like watching drunks fight in a bar.
They swing and they miss or watching a glacier melt, you know, in terms of anything actually happening.
Well, McClatchy Newspapers is reporting here that there is a massive protest planned for the 9th that Muqtada al-Sadr is going to call out.
That's, I guess, the anniversary of the fall of the Saddam Hussein statue and all that.
The American entry into Baghdad.
He's called for a million people to converge in Najaf.
Do you think that's going to remain peaceful?
Are you looking?
Are you hopeful?
Well, it's an interesting question because there are obviously a number of parties who would want to ensure that it doesn't remain peaceful, including al-Qaeda, who might try to stage some attacks against it in hopes of provoking a reaction.
I hope it will be quiet and peaceful, but I rather suspect that there's just too many cooks stirring this pot right now, and I suspect that this will be seen as an opportunity to create an increasingly unsettled situation, and I would be awfully surprised if it does remain peaceful.
Well, I'm glad you brought that up, the al-Qaeda angle.
You know, Ayman al-Zawahiri just put out that thing last week saying that he would like to see a war between America and Iran, that getting rid of the regime in Iran is one of their top priorities, and that if they can make us fight each other, that would be great.
Yeah, well, that's absolutely right.
I mean, it's just like, you know, all of the claims about what Iran is or isn't doing in Iraq, basically we're going back to national interest issues here, and here's Iran.
Iran is not a nice place, I think we'd all agree on that, and there are a lot of problems with the leadership and what they've been saying and what they've been doing, but at the same time, for the Iranians, I mean, they've been on the receiving end of threats from the Bush administration for, oh, going on four years now, since 2004, and also they have 160,000 American troops right next door, and a huge naval flotilla right in the Persian Gulf in front of them.
And if you were Iranian, or if you were an Iranian politician or a leader, you would be doing everything you can to make the United States, shall we say, a little bit destabilized in terms of what it's doing, and so on and so forth.
You might not want to go so far as to support armed groups, which may or may not be taking place, but you know, you certainly would be stirring the pot as much as you can, and I think if we as Americans, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the Iranians and say, well, what position have we put them in, and to what extent is the reaction that we're seeing from them illogical, irrational, crazy, and I think that's the way you have to look at it.
They really have tried to work with us from the very beginning of the terror war, because they were enemies of the Taliban, they were enemies of Saddam Hussein, they said, hey, listen, let's turn over a new leaf and try to get along here, and apparently, from everything I can tell, Dick Cheney just told them, no, you're next.
Yeah, well, that's the interesting thing, because the Iranians were extremely cooperative back after the fall of the Taliban in terms of helping stabilize the situation in Afghanistan.
It was in their national interest to do it, and it was in our national interest to do it, and the situation is actually analogous in Iraq, where the Iranians really need a stable Iraq.
They don't want a powerful Iraq that's going to threaten them militarily, but they want a stable Iraq, and so do we, and somehow the United States, by refusing to talk to them about these issues of common concern, has only made the situation worse.
You know, of course, about the 19-page letter that Ahmadinejad sent to President Bush, which I mean, Bush didn't even read it, and ridiculed it.
This was, for what it was worth, this was an initiative from Iran to try to settle issues.
Yeah, and it seems like America could, I mean, not just should we negotiate with them, I can even imagine what the negotiation would be, you know, look, we'll get out of here if you will put all your pressure on your guys to compromise with the Sunnis and create some sort of coalition government, put pressure on Saudi Arabia to put pressure on the Sunnis to do the same thing, and then pack up our stuff and go.
Well, I would certainly like to see us pack up our stuff and go.
I don't see where our staying there, in spite of what the politicians are saying, is actually salvaging the situation.
I think this is a fool's errand.
It's very much like, I keep having visions of, you know, I'm a Vietnam-era vet, and I keep having visions of the last Americans getting pulled by helicopter off the roof of the embassy.
You know, I see this coming again.
It really does look that bad to you, huh, the green zone falling, and just like the fall of Saigon.
Yeah, you know, I can't see in the long run how this is going to go any other way.
I mean, we're basically, we're empowering all the wrong people in Iraq, and I just don't see where this solution, or there will be a solution.
What does the White House want here?
The White House wants a stable and democratic and pluralistic Iraq, which ain't going to happen, and they want it to be friendly to Israel, which ain't going to happen.
So, you know, where do we wind up at the end of the day?
We wind up with a mess, with a commitment, as John McCain would see it for the next hundred years, and I think as American patriots, apart from anything else, we should see that this is not good for our country, and this is, in fact, destroying our country.
This has been a huge contributing factor in the decline of the dollar, and in America's reduced role and reduced capability to address serious issues anywhere in the world.
All right, everybody, that's Philip Giraldi, he's a former DIA and CIA officer.
He's a partner in Canistrar Associates, a contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine, writes at the Huffington Post, and antiwar.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, Phil.
Thank you, Scott.
