Talk Nation Radio Interview Produced in New England at WHUS Storrs.

Gareth Porter is author of the book “Perils of Dominance” “Imbalance of Power and the road to war in Vietnam,” California University Press in 2005.

How To Start The Negotiated Withdrawal of US Forces from Iraq

Gareth Porter is an expert on negotiated settlements to war. He has written about wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, in Philippines. Even as we spoke AP reported that the top commander in Iraq, General George Casey said there could be a substantial pull out of US forces starting this spring.

Gareth Porter’s research paper on what he called the Third Choice in Iraq, a Responsible Exit Strategy, appears in the September issue of Middle East Policy.

Smith: Gareth Porter, welcome to Talk Nation Radio.

Porter: Thank you Dori.

Smith: Let me ask you to begin with why you think it is possible to pursue peace talks and a withdrawal of US forces from Iraq at this time.

Gareth Porter: Well you know when I first wrote about this it was based on just the very first indications that there was some interest on the part of some leaders of the armed opposition, the armed resistance to the occupation in Iraq. Since then we have really much more evidence, much fuller, and more convincing evidence that indeed there is great interest on the part of a number of very major organizations, of the armed organizations in Iraq in negotiating with the United States for a peace agreement which would in fact end their resistance as well as have provisions for a withdrawal of U.S. troops on a time table.

So, really what’s happened now is that you have some of the intermediaries, Sunni intermediaries, including a former Iraqi minister of the interim Government, the US created interim government, basically, Aiham al-Sammarae who has a business in Chicago. He’s an engineer. He was the minister of electricity in the Iyad Allawi Government who is actually in business in the United States, and clearly a member of the democratic opposition. Not someone who is associated with the armed struggle at all, who has now told about his contacts with the insurgent leaders.

So it makes it much more convincing that there is a real opportunity there which it would be absolutely criminally negligent to simply avoid the opportunity to go ahead and test it. And he has given a rather detailed account on more than one occasion to the press of his contacts to resistance leaders. And he claims that there are four major organizations which account for a very large proportion. Of course, no one knows exactly what proportion. But he claims it’s a substantial proportion. He claims even a majority of the people in the resistance who have given him their conditions for basically surrendering and going into legal political life in Iraq. And of course, the major condition is the withdrawal of U.S. troops on a time table.

But what he has said, which is perhaps most surprising, is that these leaders have indicated that they are willing to allow the United States to stay for at least a year in order to provide for a transition understanding that it would be desirable not to have just a sudden disappearance of the troops but to have a process in which the two sides are going through fulfillment of the peace agreement rather than a sudden withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Smith: Standing in the way of the idea of peace talks, negotiations, and a U.S. pullout is this thought about an Iraqi civil war. Would you talk a little bit about what kinds of considerations you gave to that problem?

Gareth Porter: Well exactly, this is the great fear that I think many Americans have including most; I would say most of those who were opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place. I think this has become really an ethical, moral issue for many Americans. That if we withdrawal unilaterally there would be chaos and civil war in Iraq.

And I think that that’s a reasonable fear given the way we had an understanding of the situation in the previous period. But now we have a fundamental change that has taken place. The former Prime Minister of the interim government, Iyad Allawi has declared that the civil war has already begun in Iraq.

And what he is referring to is the violence of Shiites against Sunnis and Sunnis against Shiites. Very specifically targeting people because of where they live and knowing that they are Shiites or Sunnis.

The reason that this has spiraled out of control now is that until the Shiites gained power through the national election in January they had very carefully held their own hand. They restrained themselves in terms of Shiite violence against Sunnis. But once they had power they began to use the power that they had over the interior ministry and the paramilitary and police forces to target Sunni communities and Sunni political and military figures, and they are now carrying out operations which involve seizures of large numbers of people, torture, and in many cases killing, without any judicial process of any kind of Sunnis in these neighborhoods.

They have in fact taken over the function of targeting the Sunni neighborhoods to a great extent. This has turned this into a very explicit Sunni Shiite civil war and this is what of course many Americans as I say have been afraid of. But the problem is that it’s already happening, and it’s happening because of U.S. policy.

The Bush Administration has done nothing to discourage this kind of Sunni versus Shiite violence, in fact they accept that what is happening is that they are turning over a counterinsurgency war to the Shiites and basically continuing this war indefinitely.

And there’s where they have turned this argument on its head. The problem is that we already have the civil war, and the only way to avert, to stop this, is for the United States to begin a process of negotiating peace. Not just with the rebels, not just with the insurgents, but to bring both Sunni and Shiite leaders together to really begin a process of seriously reconciling the two communities because that hasn’t happened until now.

Smith: It sounds almost as if what you are saying is that the violence level could increase the longer US forces stay if what we are looking at is a sort of assumption of policy now by the Shiite controlled military. And there have been some stories too of how reporters on the scene there have been targeted. Some are even calling these forces a kind of new death squad operating in Iraq.

Gareth Porter: Well exactly. There is no question that the Shiites have these paramilitary groups, the Badr Corps and now the Wolf Corps, what is very ominously called the Wolf Corps, which are made up of predominantly Shiite people commanded by Shiite General. And which carry out, as I say, extra-judicial operations which involve really death squad type of activities.

Let’s be very clear about this. We know that the foreign terrorists in Iraq have in fact targeted Shiite mosques. They want to kill Shiites. There is no question about that. But they represent two to five percent as the best estimate of the forces arrayed against the government, against the Americans. The vast majority of Sunni resistance fighters in the past have had no interest in killing Shiites.

The fear now, realistically, is that because the Shiite Government now is clearly going into Sunni neighborhood and carrying out death squad operations is that there will be inevitably a response by the Sunni resistance to target Shiites per se rather than police, paramilitary units, and military units. The great fear that people have had about a civil war is understandable, but people need to understand that what is happening right now is the beginning of what they feared.

And the only way to stop it is really to negotiate peace. And the one chance to do that really is for the United States to step up and have a vision.

It’s really interesting that even the long time CIA collaborator, Iyad Allawi, made the statement that the United States has no vision and no policy to do anything about the civil war. That to me is the most devastating critique that could be made of the Bush Administration’s policy.

Smith: Let’s go back a little bit to the invasion itself and the fact that US forces had hit lists, literally, of members of the Ba’athist party close to Saddam Hussein. Now, we assumed, and I think this was cultivated, that the reason that the United States began then to attack more Iraqis and largely Sunni were targeted —That the reason for this was that they did not support the US occupation or what was coming out of it with the interim governments, the coalition provisional authority, etcetera.

Is it possible though that America in fact is more correctly described as having aligned itself with the wrong forces in Iraq?

Gareth Porter: Yes. I would say the problem fundamentally from the beginning was that the United States had decided to basically you know revolutionize, to carry out revolutionary change in Iraq. It was going to destroy the very root of this Sunni based regime, which meant not just the top leaders but people down to the second, third, and fourth Escalon’s who were associated with the Baath Party.

I mean the roots of that policy of course are in the idea that the Ba’athists were pan Arab nationalists and we have to destroy the whole idea of pan Arab nationalism in the Middle East, and of course Iraq is the place where it needs to start.

So as a result of that there was from the beginning the idea that we would install a completely new regime, and of course this was supposed to be Ahmed Chalabi and his group of exiles who had worked closely with the U.S. Government for years. The Neocon advisors to Bush had very clear ideas about what was going to happen after the US invaded: But that government was to take power in a setting where we were in fact eliminating the last vestiges of the previous regime down to the grass roots level. You know that was just an absolutely fundamental mistake, because it meant that inevitably we were taking sides in this very old rivalry between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq.

You know the Shiite majority versus the Sunni minority, and the Sunni having been in power for decades. It was a very dangerous proposition. It meant that sooner or later we were going to come up against a situation which was similar to Lebanon in 1983.

I don’t know if your listeners remember what that issue was about in Lebanon but the United States intervened in a secular civil war between a Christian minority and an Islamic majority in Lebanon. And the inevitable result of that was that US troops were targeted by terrorists.

They carried out a suicide bombing of a US Marine base killing 200 Marines. In a way that sort of symbolizes the dangers of US Military intervention in that kind of situation, which is really in its essence a struggle between two ethnic groups rather than a struggle between democracy and terrorism or democracy and totalitarianism or anything. It was some ideological alternative.

It’s really, as Colin Powell said in 1983 in opposing the Lebanese intervention. It’s like the United States putting its hand in a 1000 year old bee hive. And we are bound to create a disasterous situation in doing that.

Smith: We are talking with Gareth Porter. He is a historian and foreign policy expert writing often for foreign policy in focus, and Gareth Porter analyzed the problem of ending the Vietnam Cambodian, and Philippine wars. So he is something of an expert at negotiations and how one achieves peace talks with warring sides.

Let’s talk just briefly about Lebanon because many people have become aware that Lebanon is less than stable after political change there and we have just seen another bombing in Lebanon. Let’s just talk about the wider issue of the Bush Administration’s theory that if the United States leaves we will see a wider war process and sort of a terrorist home base consolidating in Iraq.

Gareth Porter: Well first of all let me talk about the problem of the terrorist haven because you know this really is the central legitimate security interest that the United States has in the Middle East. That is dealing with those bases that Al Queda has set up in Iraq in particular to train terrorists to go elsewhere in the Middle East and even North America if they can do that. That is a legitimate interest, but of course an invasion and occupation of Iraq is exactly the wrong way to go about that. But now that we know what do we do about it.

Well the present policy of trying to use military force to capture and to basically destroy the Al-Queda bases in Iraq has been a complete and total failure. The Military admits that it has made no headway Whatsoever. They have arrested a few terrorists but they have made no progress in reducing let alone eliminating the terrorist bases there. The only hope for ending the terrorist haven in Iraq, let’s be clear on this, is to withdraw US troops even unilaterally. Or, I would think that it’s going to be politically more feasible, and otherwise more favorable to end it through negotiation with the Sunni nationalist resistance to the occupation.

The reason is that once you end the resistance by the Sunnis to the occupation both people are going to have a natural inclination, a natural interest, in ending the presence of foreign terrorists on their soil. Why is that? –Because those foreign terrorists are Islamic extremists that have created chaos and conflict wherever they have gone within Iraq.

Now they have been able to continue their presence in Iraq because of this arrangement of convenience between the foreign terrorists and the Sunni resistance people, because the Al-Queda people have also been effective in carrying out car bombings against military targets, against US targets in Baghdad and elsewhere.

But the moment the Sunni resistance people know the Americans are on their way out of Iraq for good, I guarantee, those people are going to turn against the Al-Queda foreign fighters, and the reason is that they hate them, because the vast majority of the Sunni resistance people are secular Islamic who have no use whatsoever for the ideology that the Al-Quida people represent.

So our best route to ending the terrorist haven in Iraq is to make peace with the Sunni resistance, and we do that by beginning a peace process between the Shiite Government and the Sunnis.

Smith: Gareth Porter, you’ve been researching possible exit strategies for the US Military, getting out of Iraq. Now, it seems, the top American commander in Iraq is saying that he does believe there could be a fairly substantial pull out of U.S. troops next spring and summer.

Tell me your first reaction to this, and I know too that with Donald Rumsfeld over in Iraq on a surprise visit we may be seeing more coming out of Iraq about the war and Bush Administration policy in the coming week.

Gareth Porter: Well this clearly is a response to the perception in the Bush Administration that they have to respond to public unease about the war. I mean there is no question that there has been a build-up of frustration about the continued lack of any exit strategy, and the administration of course saying, “we don’t have an exit strategy we have a victory strategy,” is a little bit behind the eight ball. And I think they feel that they have to show that they are in a position to master the situation. And saying that there will be a withdrawal in the spring is the only thing that they can do. They have to show some withdrawal.

And of course this is reminiscent of the Nixon Administration policy in Vietnam of Vietnamization and of the gradual pull out, and there is no doubt that they will begin that process. How long it’s going to take is the question that ultimately there is no answer to at this point and we won’t know for some time.

Smith: Now do you think that after these negotiations for peace between Sunni and Shiite political factions in Iraq would take place that those two groups now could handle religious extremism. And I ask this particularly because I know there are new forces emerging representing religious extremism in Iraq and yet at the same time people are talking about how the government, as it can be described as a government in Iraq right now, may actually be more aligned with Iran than the United States and George Bush ever thought it would be.

Gareth Porter: Well you are quite right that the present Shiite Government is aligned ideologically and in terms of its Shiite religious bases with the Iranian clerical elite. You know, whatever differences there may be between their understanding of the kind of political regime they want to set up in Iraq and what the Iranian Mullahs have set up in Iran. Nevertheless, their political religious ideology is much closer to Iran than it is to American democracy. That’s very clear. And there is no doubt that that is a serious problem in terms of trying to bring about a settlement between the Sunnis and the Shiites.

One of the demands that the Sunnis are going to make, we know from the former electricity minister who I mentioned earlier, is that there must be a curb on Iraq’s relations with Iran. I mean the Sunnis are very concerned about religious extremism, the Shiite religious extremism of the present government.

So that’s going to be a serious problem to be negotiated. And let me say that I’m not trying to minimize the difficulty of trying to get the Shiites and Sunnis to sit down and really make peace.

This is a very difficult problem. It’s very deeply embedded in the history of particularly 20th Century Iraq. And no one should consider this to be an easy matter. But if the United States does not say to the Shiite Government: You must seriously negotiate peace or we are going to have to make our own separate agreement for a time table for withdrawal with the Sunni insurgents, the Shiite Government’s not going to do it. They have no interest in negotiating peace. And the reason for that is that they have state power, in theory, but they don’t have the military forces that they feel they need to overwhelm the Sunnis which is their desire. That’s their objective.

So they want several more years of U.S. occupation to be able to build up their military forces to the point where they will dominate the Sunnis militarily. And therefore they will not negotiate unless the United States really puts it to them as a choice between that and quick withdrawal by the United States.

So the United States must basically take that position we will either have a serious negotiation between the Shiites and the Sunnis, which is up to the Shiite Government to initiate, or the United States will have to withdraw on its own, you know in conjunction with whatever arrangement we can make with the Sunni insurgents. But we will have to make a quick time table for US withdrawal as an alternative.

Smith: Talk about the August 15th deadline for setting up a new constitution and how those kinds of deadlines have worked in the past in terms of these two sides, and also what the Bush White House has conveyed to Iraq and America.

Gareth Porter: Yes, this is a very strange deadline. To say that Iraq must have a new constitution by August 15th is really quite bizarre because you have issues there that go, as I say, very deeply into the history of violent conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, mainly because the minority Sunnis held complete state power and excluded the Shiites and basically used secret police repression against the Shiites to make sure that they could stay in power.

In order to have any real reconciliation between the two communities you have to have an extended period of negotiation and you have to deal with issues which are simply not on the table in the constitutional committee right now. So the idea that you are going to produce a meaningful constitution that will maintain peace or bring peace between Sunnis and Shiites is simply a fantastic idea.

The fact that we have Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq today telling the Iraqis that they must negotiate a constitution by August 15th simply tells me that the United States, the Bush Administration has no intention of trying to bring about any real reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. This is a fantastic idea. It’s simply a fiction that there can be a constitution that will have any meaning under those circumstances.

Smith: Let’s talk further about the problem of the administration’s view on Saddam loyalists and foreign Islamic terrorists, and try to take a look at who might lead negotiations in Iraq, who might take a role in representing the United States and other parties involved.

Gareth Porter: Well in order to have serious negotiations you obviously have to have someone who is a real peacemaker, and I have to say that this administration undoubtedly is very shorthanded in that regard. It’s very hard to think of who in the higher echelons of this administration has the capability to think about making peace between Sunnis and Shiites. It’s so far from their notions of US policy in that part of the world that it is almost impossible to imagine that anyone even at the second level of this administration could do that.

The present US Ambassador in Iraq is somebody who is a hard line neo-conservative advocate, and therefore is not going to be someone who is suited for this role. And that’s why I really believe that our only hope for turning this policy around is that we could get responsible leaders in Congress to take a direct role in working with the administration on fashioning a new policy in Iraq.

I think it’s terribly important that that happen. And that has to be based on a redefinition of the problem in Iraq. It is not a matter of protecting or defending a democracy against terror. It is a matter of making peace between two sectarian religious groups and therefore it requires a totally different set of skills a different perspective.

We need to reach people in Congress who are concerned about the failure of US policy in Iraq but may not understand why it’s failing. We need to get to them and get them to fashion, to craft a different policy and to really put some pressure on the administration to follow that policy. And I think it would be important to have congressional people involved in a negotiating process. To have them directly involved, as they have been in certain other international negotiations in the past.

Smith: Gareth Porter sum up for us this finding of yours and how it establishes for you that it would be in the interest of fighting terrorism; in the interest of reducing the force and power of Islamic extremists, of terrorists, to have the US pull out of Iraq.

Gareth Porter: We need to have a third alternative to the choices which we have been given of simply, unilateral withdrawal, which is not acceptable to the US congress and despite the overwhelming majority of the American people who want to get out somehow. And an indefinite stay in Iraq which the Administration still has as its policy. And the reason that we need that third alternative is it’s the only way that we are going to be able to deal with the two major problems of getting out: One being the terrorist haven problem and the other one being the civil war problem. The civil war has already begun. The only way that we can do anything to avert that is to use our present military presence as leverage on the Shiite Government to start negotiations. By telling then that we will withdraw on our own time table if they don’t negotiate. I believe that they will begin negotiations if we do that. This is also the only way that we are going to be able to essentially solve the terrorist haven problem. By making peace with the terrorist insurgents they will then themselves turn against the foreign terrorists in Iraq. And I believe that if peace negotiations actually begin the foreign terrorists will begin get out on their own because they will know that their time is coming to an end.

Smith: Gareth Porter is an independent historian and foreign policy analyst. He has published studies of negotiations to end wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines. His latest book is, “Perils of Dominance, Imbalance of Power and the road to war in Vietnam,” out by California University Press in 2005.

Gareth Porter thank you so much for joining us.

Gareth Porter: Thank you for having me Dori.

Smith: Gareth Porter’s research paper on what he calls, The Third Choice in Iraq, a Responsible Exit Strategy, will appear in the September issue of Middle East Policy.

I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in the studios of WHUS Storrs, radio for the people, at the University of Connecticut.