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Whitehouse downplays iran threat to iraq { April 9 2008 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/9/as_petraeus_urges_delay_of_troophttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/9/as_petraeus_urges_delay_of_troop
April 09, 2008
As Petraeus Urges Delay of Troop Withdrawal, a Debate on Iraq and Iran’s Role in the War
Arun Gupta, an editor of The Indypendent, a bimonthly newspaper based in New York. He is currently writing a book on the Iraq War and the decline of American empire to be published by Haymarket Press. His most recent article is titled “How Bush Won Iraq and Lost the World”
Eli Lake, a senior reporter for the New York Sun.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. He writes regularly on Iran for the Inter Press Service. His most recent article is titled “Petraeus Testimony to Defend False ‘Proxy War’ Line”
Rush Transcript
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EXCERPT:
AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service, your response, and especially looking at the number of times Iran was brought up and how it’s being cast right now?
GARETH PORTER: Well, this whole narrative about the special groups that Eli Lake refers to and which has been referred to repeatedly over the past year and more by the US military in Iraq is essentially dodge. It’s never been true that the Iranians have been selecting out specific splinter groups from the Mahdi Army to support. That idea suggests that the Iranians have much less influence and power in Iraq than they actually do.
And I have to say that, parenthetically, that it seems to me that this has at least as one purpose trying to minimize the difficulty the United States faces in regard to the Shiites in Iraq. The reality is that the United States faces a Mahdi Army, which has perhaps 70,000, 80,000 full-time troops and hundreds of thousands of part-time supporters, military supporters, as well as millions of civilians who support them. And the whole idea that its special groups are the problem in Basra, as well as other cities in the south—Basra being the second-largest city in Iraq—now controlled by the Mahdi Army, it’s being obscured by the idea that there are these splinter group—special groups, they’re being called by the US military—that are being supported by Iran. And the reality is that the United States faces a much bigger adversary in the Mahdi Army, which is dedicated to getting the United States out of Iraq.
I was impressed by just how far both Crocker and Petraeus went in trying to obscure that reality. They’re trying to convey to the congressional committees and to the American people the idea that the United States is somehow really in control. And I’m afraid this line is primarily dedicated to trying to convey that very false idea.
AMY GOODMAN: Eli Lake, response?
ELI LAKE: Yeah, I don’t understand why anyone would believe what Mr. Porter just said, and I don’t understand what Mr. Porter is basing that on. You see—you’ve got a Muqtada al-Sadr, who’s the leader of the Mahdi Army from Qom, contradicting himself several times. During the fighting in Basra, at first he said he wanted a nonviolent response. Then he said his guys could defend themselves. And then, you know, and then there was—he said that they were going to be pulled off the street. He made a list of demands. I haven’t seen any evidence that he’s gotten any of them. He called a million-man march in Najaf. He changed it to Baghdad. He then is calling that off. He’s now basically in negotiations with the Hawza in Najaf, the sort of clerical elite in Najaf, where he’s not studying, I might add, asking sort of what’s going to happen to the status of his army, which strikes me as a sort of face-saving way to, in many ways, decommission the anti-government elements of it. And I mean, I just, frankly, don’t—I mean, it’s—I think what you just heard from Gareth Porter is an inversion of probably—I mean, of what is happening. It’s kind of astounding to listen to.
AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter?
GARETH PORTER: Well, if I may—yes, if I may respond to that—
ELI LAKE: Yeah.
GARETH PORTER: —this military and rightwing line about the idea that the Mahdi Army is split up and is weak and is no longer a problem is exactly the opposite of what the world’s media have reported from Basra over the past two weeks. The fact is that it was the Mahdi Army which resisted the—
ELI LAKE: Gareth Porter, who’s in Basra?
GARETH PORTER: —military operations. Pardon?
ELI LAKE: Who is in Basra? Basra, as I’ve seen it, at least in American papers and for the most part, we’ve seen very little coverage of Basra of note, and we’ve heard reports from the Iraqi army that they now control the port, and they’re exercising control over the city. I mean, I just think this is a fantasy that you’re putting out there.
GARETH PORTER: You’re making a very, very selective reading of the world’s media.
ELI LAKE: A selective reading, my foot.
GARETH PORTER: If you read the reports about what—
ELI LAKE: Yes.
GARETH PORTER: —the way in which the battle was left after the mediation that took place in Qom with the pro-government parties going to beseech the help of the Iranian IRGC—
ELI LAKE: Yes, I’ve read the McClatchy news report. I know exactly what you’re talking about.
GARETH PORTER: The fact is—the fact is that the Mahdi Army was left in control of most of that city. That’s still the case today. And the idea that they’re not really the problem, that it’s some selected splinter groups, is simply a fantasy. And let me just—
ELI LAKE: Well, I mean, I think—Amy, if I could say, you’re seeing a classic example. The left often conflates sort of, you know, a terrorism and cruelty with a sort of nationalist bona fides, and we see it all the time. And I think, Gareth Porter, you actually have some experience in this, having, you know, in the 1970s accused people who said that there was a genocide in Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge of touting CIA propaganda and a rightwing line at the time. I mean, so I don’t know, I think you’re 0-for-two on this one.
GARETH PORTER: Well, I think that you’re going to see that the reality is very different from the one that—
ELI LAKE: I don’t know. Is it going to be the reality, like what you told us in that book about the Phnom Penh?
GARETH PORTER: Let me just point out—let me just point out that the individual who was named as the head of this splinter group, the so-called special groups, Qais Khazali—
ELI LAKE: Yes.
GARETH PORTER: —is in fact the person who the head of the Mahdi Army, Muqtada al-Sadr, has said should be released by the US government. The fact is that he was never a part of a splinter group. He was always working with the Sadrists.
ELI LAKE: I’m saying Muqtada al-Sadr says a whole lot of things. I discount a lot of it as lies. The man, when his party controlled the hospitals of Baghdad, turned them into abitoires. My point here is that you seem to take the Sadr line and then say that that’s true and then accuse the people who are giving you different information of lying, when I think it’s a bit the other way around. And I’m just sick of it.
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EXCERPT:
ELI LAKE: I mean, listen, the Iranians have some connections with Sunni insurgents. The military has said that. They also have had, according to the 9/11 Commission, plenty of contacts with al-Qaeda. It’s not a hard concept, and I don’t understand why the left doesn’t understand this, that sometimes people who are competitors, like Sunni terrorists and Shia terrorists, will collaborate against a common enemy. In this case, it would be, I would say, you know, the prospects of an Iraqi democracy and, of course, the American military presence. And there is some degree of cooperation.
What he specifically said about Iran training members of al-Qaeda, there is really not much evidence of that kind of training relationship, but an organization that calls itself al-Qaeda in Kurdistan, or Ansar al-Suna, which is part of sort of larger Islamic state of Iraq, is based in the five towns on the border of Iraqi Kurdistan on the Iran side and receives political refugee cards, according to my own reporting from the ground talking to Kurdish security officials at the time who were on the record. And I might add that the Kurdish security officials who spoke with me have a fairly good relationship with the Iranian government, but they have made this clear so many times in their own diplomatic discussions with them and saying, “Hey, you’ve got to cut this out.” So listen, is it the exact relationship that McCain said, but hardly the gaffe that some people have sort of made it out to be.
AMY GOODMAN: Arun Gupta?
ARUN GUPTA: Yeah, I think this would make for great fiction, but there doesn’t seem to be any congress with reality in what Mr. Lake is saying. I want to pick up on some of the things he said initially. “Betray the Iraqi people” to al-Qaeda and the Baathists—well, that’s precisely who is in these Awakening groups, these concerned citizen councils, that General Petraeus has been setting up over the last years. It’s well known that these are former insurgents, that there was an excellent report by Nir Rosen, who was on the show last week, in Rolling Stone, who was even interviewing members of these Awakening groups who were al-Qaeda.
And then Mr. Lake talked about special groups targeting civilians. That’s really a remarkable assertion to make, when in the last two weeks we’ve seen US fighter jets and helicopter gunships strafing some of the densest urban areas in the world, such as Sadr City, killing hundreds of civilians.
And then he talks about Iranians playing all sides. Again, that’s a complete fiction compared to the fact that it’s the US who is playing all sides. We’re setting Sunni against Shia. We’re setting Sunni against Sunni. We’re setting Shia against Shia. What’s really going on in Basra is the fruition of a long-term policy that goes back all the way to 2004, when General Petraeus was in charge of all Iraqi police and military training and set up these forces that became death squads, the Special Police Commandos and all these various irregular forces that were used against the Sunni insurgency. And what’s gone on over the last year and a half is a strategy first to isolate the Sadrists in the parliament and then to use the Badr Brigade, which is with this—the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which is actually an Iranian-created organization from the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. So essentially what you have is the US is using this Badr Brigade militias, who were integrated throughout the Iraqi Security Forces in this attack in Basra. If you look closely at the reporting that came out, the Iraqi government was not really sending down army forces; they were sending down the Special Police Commandos, who have been renamed the National Police, they were sending down these SWAT teams that General Petraeus helped set up in the summer of 2004, and they were sending down Special Forces, which are believed to come largely from Kurdish Peshmurga, all militias. And so, really, this—it’s the US who’s doing all this. But Mr. Lake is basically trying to weave this fantasy of that, that Iran is doing this, when every single bit of evidence points to—he should just substitute “United States” for “Iran.”
AMY GOODMAN: We have to go to break, but we’ll be back with this debate. We are joined by Arun Gupta. He is the editor of The Indypendent based here in New York. We’re joined by Eli Lake—he’s with the New York Sun in Washington, D.C.—and Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is a day after General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have reported back to the Congress. They are testifying again today. Our guests, discussing what they have found and the questioning of them by, among others, the three leading presidential candidates—McCain, Clinton and Obama—Arun Gupta, he’s an editor at The Indypendent in New York; Inter Press Service’s Gareth Porter in Washington; and Eli Lake of the New York Sun, also in D.C.
Eli Lake, I wanted to ask you about a piece you had written, “Iran is Found to be a Lair of Al Qaeda,” and I’m reading now from the American Conservative, a piece by Justin Logan. He says “Lake published a claim purportedly leaked to him that the National Intelligence Estimate judged that one of two senior al-Qaeda leadership councils ‘meets regularly in eastern Iran.’”
And then he quotes your piece, saying “there is little disagreement that a branch of al Qaeda’s leadership operates in Iran, [but] the intelligence community diverges on the extent to which the hosting of the senior leaders represents a policy of the regime in Tehran or the rogue [actions] of Iran’s Quds Force, the terrorist support units that report directly to Iran’s supreme leader.”
Justin Logan then says, “Unfortunately for Mr. Lake, the story was tersely refuted by National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats Edward Gistaro. Asked at a National Press Club briefing whether the judgment Lake described was in the final draft report, Gistaro replied, ‘No, it is not. I don’t think it was ever in the draft. … I read [the Sun article] this morning, and I thought, I don’t know where this comes from.’”
Your response?
ELI LAKE: Well, I mean, first of all, I stand by the story. And Gistaro is essentially the official briefer, and if Justin Logan wants to believe the official briefer—but this is widely reported. You know, Fran Townsend has talked about these management councils in the past, and so have numerous people.
The truth of the matter is, is that if you go back to Richard Clarke’s book—you can read George Tenet’s account of this—after the Afghanistan invasion, you saw the al-Qaeda leadership, some of them—most of them fled to Pakistan, but some people, like Saif al-Adel and Saad bin Laden and others, fled to Iran. There was a period of negotiations between the US and Iran about trying to get these senior leaders. It never worked out. And while that was going on, they essentially sort of established a base, which most of the communication, at least with al-Qaeda in Iraq—and I want to stress this—this is fairly general guidance, is coming from Iran, and a lot of the transport and that. It’s not the same as saying that they’re harboring them or that, in fact, they’re sponsoring them, which is a sort of, as I said, you know, kind of a traditional way of describing it, but in fact it is—they are there.
I stand by it, and I’ve seen the reports. So, you know, I mean, I’m happy to have Justin Logan, you know, who I don’t particularly think that much of, to challenge it or whoever. I’m sure Gareth Porter, who says all kinds of crazy things, would like to challenge it, you know, so—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s hear what Gareth Porter has to say.
ELI LAKE: Sure.
GARETH PORTER: Yes, I would like to challenge it. You know, this is a, again, very highly selective reading of the intelligence on the situation regarding al-Qaeda operatives in Iran. Yes, they did go into Iran, as they did go into Pakistan. Most of them were, of course, in Pakistan and operated very freely in the Pakistan-Afganistan border area—have ever since then. There’s this kind of a double standard here with regard to people like Eli Lake, who would like to argue that in Pakistan, you know, the government is trying its best to track them down, whereas in Iran they’re deliberately harboring them. That was, of course, the Bush Administration official line for years, even though in the end Dick Cheney finally said he agreed there was no evidence of any real link between Iran and al-Qaeda.
ELI LAKE: When did Dick Cheney ever say that?
GARETH PORTER: He said it last year.
ELI LAKE: I don’t think so. Well, anyway—
GARETH PORTER: I’d be glad to share that with you.
ELI LAKE: It’s in the 9/11 Commission report.
GARETH PORTER: It’s on the record. There’s no question about it.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Arun Gupta. What is your assessment of General Petraeus’s strategy in Iraq?
ARUN GUPTA: Well, I think really what it is is a civil war. I think what happened in 2004—he was given this mission in June of 2004. That was less than two months after the Iraqi Security Forces completely collapsed in the twin Shiite and Sunni uprisings of April 2004. So he was given this mission to reconstitute all the Iraqi Security Forces. And it’s there at that point, when the US essentially installed Ayad Allawi as the interim prime minister, that began this strategy of setting up all these various militias that we know about.
And I don’t think initially the idea was, well, this is going to be sectarian-based. But if we fast-forward a year after the first round of the elections for a transitional government, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq—at that point that was known as SCIRI—got into power, and the government, the Iraqi government, was divided up essentially by fiefdoms, and SCIRI got the Interior Ministry portfolio. And one of its chief people, Bayan Jabr, was a commander in the Badr Brigades. And there is when we start to see a huge influx of Badr Brigade militiamen into these Special Police Commandos and other militias that were then used as death squads against the Sunni insurgency.
Now, if we fast-forward a couple years more, what we see now is a much more deliberate strategy, one to divide the Sunnis against each other with these Awakening councils, secondly to deliberately use the Badr Brigade—the US has been backing the Badr forces for about a couple years now in its fights with the Mahdi Army. They’ve been sending planes and helicopters to support these pitched battles throughout the south. And since Sadr issued his freeze last August, the US has been arresting and assassinating hundreds of Mahdi Army militiamen, while Badr has been going throughout the south and also arresting and killing all sorts of Mahdi Army commanders.
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