Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights, and the environment. I’m Dori Smith

Political and national security policy analyst Gareth Porter joins us this time to talk about two recent stories. A December 15th piece on US politics in Iraq. He says the U.S. No Longer seeks the Defeat of Sunni Insurgents, and a December 26th piece warning that the U.S. Shiite Struggle Could Spin out of Control. You can read his analysis in Inter Press News Service

Dori Smith: Gareth Porter welcome to Talk Nation Radio. You’ve been writing some interesting stories lately. Here’s one, U.S.no longer seeks defeat of Sunni insurgents. Explain?

Gareth Porter: Yes what’s been happening here is very interesting. Since roughly mid to late November the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Command in Iraq have both sent signals publicly indicating that their attitude towards the Sunni Insurgents has changed dramatically and that they now are ready to talk with them as not just, the implication is, not just people to be basically discouraged and defeated but rather as forces who could be useful allies in effect against the real enemy by implication that is the Al Queda forces in Iraq.

And one of the signals, perhaps the most interesting signal was on December 8th when the spokesman for the U.S. Command, Major General Rick Lynch, essentially said that we are trying to defeat the Al Queda forces militarily and trying to disrupt the Sunni Insurgent forces and that the major way that we disrupt their forces is through “political engagement”. (That is in quotes because it is Lynch’s term.)

And if you put that along side a statement from Ambassador Khalizad that he was prepared to talk with insurgents the previous week then you begin to see if you put those side by side or one on top of the other rather you see that what is happening here is the Administration is in fact positioning itself in Iraq to actually have serious talks with the insurgents.

Now the other signal that Khalizad gave which again indicates that these talks are not just talks with an enemy but talks with a group that has potential actually to be on our side, is that Khalizad refers to the Sunni insurgents as “nationalists” whereas previously the Administration has always referred to the Sunni insurgents as “anti-Iraq forces” or “anti-Iraqi forces”. So this is like a 180 degree change in the rhetoric, in the terminology being used for the Sunni insurgents. And you know that simply can’t be without extremely important political significance.

Dori Smith: Now Iraq has always been a difficult place to cover with the US presence there anyway. How does this make that even more complicated?

Gareth Porter: Well I think it makes it more complicated in the following sense. The administration clearly is playing a double game, a two sided or two level game. On one hand it is continuing to talk about victory as its primary theme in relation to Iraq although you know the definition of victory is increasingly vague and left to the imagination I think of the audience.

But on the other hand the Administration is now pursuing a second line of strategies which you know admittedly it’s unclear exactly how far and how fast this is going to go. And one person I spoke with in the Pentagon suggested that nothing was going to happen on this diplomatic front or this political negotiations front with the Sunni Insurgents until after a new government was formed. And that may well be, it may not be something that’s going to develop very rapidly. So I think it could be more complicated because this second line of strategy I think is going to take a while to develop it’s going to be in the background and it’s going to be difficult to cover it because very little if anything will be evident on the record to mark the progress or the development of that line of strategy. So from the point of view of media coverage you’re not going to get much if any coverage at all on this but it is going to be there in the background.

Dori Smith: Now I would imagine that the Sunni leaders that are in some way negotiating with the White House might want to make it public right?

Gareth Porter: Well that’s correct. That is if there is a break of any kind. If there is an agreement to actually sit down between the Ambassador, Khalizad, and Sunni Insurgent Leaders that they will certainly want to make sure that that becomes public. It is in their interest to do so. On the other hand the administration is going to be much more worried about that and that is going to be one of the factors that probably is going to slow this down and make it more difficult to begin the actual process of formal talks between them but yes, it will be impossible to keep these secret I would suggest. Simply because it shows from the point of view of the insurgents that they are being recognized by the Administration as interlocutors and that boosts their prestige within Iraq and gives them more bargaining power more generally.

Dori Smith: Now didn’t the Kurds ultimately capture Saddam Hussein? I thought I read a story that that faction really was responsible for finding him. If that’s the case, now we are going to see the Sunnis possibly turning over Abu Musab Al Zarqawi?

Gareth Porter: Well that would certainly be a logical end point of any agreement that might be reached between the Bush Administration and the Sunni Insurgents because this is obviously what the big pay off is for the United States. I mean there are two pay offs. One is obviously an end to the insurgency. The insurgency laying their arms down, and the other one is that it would, it could result in not just the turning over of Zarqawi as a person, an individual, but in fact the cooperation of the leaders of the insurgency in finding hide outs and actually rounding up whole networks. So going much further beyond simply Zarqawi himself, and for the Administration I mean that is really the more important pay off because they can in a sense, I think they believe that they can live with an insurgency going on for quite a while except for one thing and that is that it doesn’t help to solve the Zarqawi Al Queda network problem in Iraq, the terrorist haven problem.

It’s arguable that they need the assistance of the Sunni Insurgents to accomplish that goal and in fact, in terms of most Americans, that is the real legitimate interest the United States has in Iraq. If they have any at all it is to try to end that terrorist haven in Iraq.

Dori Smith: So that leaves America again in a different position with the Iraqi people overall where it comes to the U.S. presence remaining to protect oil fields, remaining to do reconstruction, and to maybe continue on with the privatization of Iraq.

Gareth Porter: Well I think that if the United States did in fact reach an agreement here it would almost certainly have to be the involvement of the Shiites in some way in that agreement because here’s the problem. The Sunnis are not going to be willing to lay down their arms if the Shiites are continuing to send in death squads and Shiite commandos and Kurdish commandos into their cities and into the surrounding countryside to round up insurgents, or suspected insurgents, and put them in prison and torture them in many cases to death. I mean that simply isn’t going to happen. That much is clear. So if there is to be an agreement under which the insurgents do in fact lay down their arms it is going to have to also involve some serious discussions by the Shiite Government.

And that’s why we now come to the second story which is that the Administration now has been increasingly becoming desperate to do something about the Shiites being willing to share some power with the Sunnis and with secular Shiites. That is if the Shiite militants are willing to share power with Sunnis and with secular Shiites as well. And particularly to get the Shiite militants to give up their control over internal security; that is those militia men who are carrying out death squad activities and torture houses and commandos who are using questionable tactics albeit in many cases the same tactics that the U.S. troops have used themselves in Iraq.

So in the desperation to actually get some traction in getting agreement between the Shiites and Sunnis the United States is now beginning to put pressure on the Shiites that they have not previously. And interestingly enough this turning point in U.S. policy to put much greater, heavier pressure on the Shiites, coincides roughly with the turning point in the declaratory policy, the rhetorical policy toward the Sunnis. It happened roughly in mid November, just about a week or so, about ten days or so before the first kind of a shift in US policy toward the Sunnis. So I find that to be a very interesting coincidence, I don’t think it is a coincidence I think in fact that this reflects a much broader shift in Administration policy which is the result of a lot of jawboning of the White House by both Zalmay Khalizad and by the U.S. Military Command who understand that the strategy was not working as it was being pursued prior to that; that something new had to be tried.

Dori Smith: We’re talking with Gareth Porter and he’s an independent historian and a foreign policy analyst. Now Gareth when you wrote you piece, the Third Option in Iraq, a responsible exit strategy, for the Fall Issue of Middle East Policy, did you foresee this next story of yours which is U.S. no longer seeks defeat of Sunni insurgents? (Listeners that is in the December 15th Inter Press News Service.)

Gareth Porter: No I did not actually anticipate anything this soon. My assumption was that the route out of Iraq would have to involve Congressional activism on the issue, that there would have to be a shift in Congressional viewpoints which would result in an alternative policy being put on the table and that that would be then a way of putting pressure on the White House to shift its policy. Instead the initiative appears to have come from the Embassy, from Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad primarily, and perhaps the U.S. Command secondarily.

So I think that’s a very interesting development which I certainly did not anticipate and I think it shows, it reflects the fact that there is much greater what I would call desperation, a sense of desperation in Baghdad on the part of the U.S. presence there about the way things have been going. And that they are in turn putting some pressure on the White House to be more responsive to reality and in fact to get the White House to join the reality based community.

Dori Smith: In that respect let’s turn to a few of the headlines about Iraq. We did hear recently that the Finance Minister of Iraq Ali Allawi, (The former Finance Minister as of June 2004 was Adel Abdul Mahdi ) –a different Allawi; was on the air in America talking about changes that might mean paying back some of the debt that was incurred during the early 1990s with the Iran/Iraq war and there was discussion by him of an increase in oil prices. Which brings us to the real deep part of our discussion which is who will control the oil negotiations with America if America is now talking with so many different factions?

Gareth Porter: Yes, I’m sorry, and I didn’t address that in my previous rather long winded answer. But what I was going to say, what I eventually would have gotten to, is that should there be an agreement under which the United States would withdraw it’s forces, and my feeling is still very strongly that any agreement between the Sunni Insurgents–and the United States would indeed require a commitment by the United States for a time table for withdrawal–But should an agreement be reached the United States is not going to be calling the shots on oil or much of anything else.

And indeed I would argue that we already have gotten to the point now where the United States is no longer calling the shots with regard to any significant issues in Iraq. I mean they are in a position to obstruct on specific issues. They still have the ability to exert some pressure but there are limits to how much pressure they can exert. And they can no longer simply tell the Shiite dominated Iraqi government what to do and I think we are going to see that on this issue of control over the Ministry of Interior which is the crux of the struggle now going on between the United States and the militant Shiite leadership those Shiite leaders are going to resist this pressure because they regard control over the Interior Ministry, which means control over the police and control over the militia units which are carrying out these counter insurgency activities, the death squads and the torture houses and so forth, as necessary to insure that the Shiite regime remains in power. They are very defensive about that.

They believe that control over the means of violence, state organs of violence, is in fact the way that you stay in power. They learned that lesson from Saddam Hussein himself. So it’s going to be very difficult, and I would say really impossible for the United States to force the Shiite leaders to agree to give up power over the means of violence in their own government. And that means really that if the United States wants to push that issue to its limits they are going to have to put the U.S. troop presence on the table and I think if they do that there is a very good chance that the Shiites will then say fine take your troops out and they will say we will ask the Iranians for assistance, and they will be happy to give us assistance, and I think that is in fact the case.

So I think the United States has in fact lost the leverage that it may have thought it had and many of us thought it had, myself included, in the past year or so. But the situation has changed now to the point where the United States’ influence, United States’ ability to pressure, has declined quite precipitously. So that means that on issues of oil pricing, the future is not very bright for those who had hoped for the ability to control that kind of issue.

Dori Smith: Now Gareth Porter about your piece December 26th in Inter Press News Service we’ve been touching on the first portion of that story but let me just turn to the portion of it that does have to do with the torture houses you say are being run by Shiite officials in the Ministry of Interior at various locations in Baghdad. To what extent could the international community now apply pressure under the circumstances of the change in the U.S. status in Iraq, to stop torture in Iraq and to bring about some implementation of human rights standards?

Gareth Porter: Absolutely. I think now the situation has shifted so that that issue is very much front and center in the politics of Iraq as well as the politics of U.S. policy toward Iraq and this makes international pressure all that much more effective in comparison with the situation before the United States came forward. And as I point out in my article the United States knew about these torture houses for months and I would say beginning in early 2005 they began to get reports, not just from the media or from human rights groups, inside and outside Iraq, but from their own military personnel who were actually visiting these torture houses. This has been documented by a U.S. Army doctor who was in Baghdad and surrounding areas until June of this year and who said that he and military police visited the torture houses and actually reported this evidence of torture and other mistreatment in those detention facilities up the US chain of command. So there is no doubt that the information was available and it was only when as I say there was a high level decision made to shift the policy that this issue was raised publicly. But now that its happened I think this makes it incumbent on human rights activists as well as anti war activists to really make a great deal out of this issue of torture and the death squads as well, because they are controlled by the Ministry of Interior, and because that is now a central issue in the politics of Iraq.

Dori Smith: Now I do want to mention U.S. politics, but before we talk about that, you describe the situation between Ayad Allawi, the former PM of an interim government in Iraq, as being in a state of conflict with other Shiite Party leaders. They were not necessarily for radical de-Bathification you say or secret Iranian financing of SCIRI and Dawa candidates.

Gareth Porter: Yes, Ayad Allawi was very much in line with U.S. policy when he was interim Prime Minister from June of 2004 until May of 2005 and he was in fact–his Defense Minister was publicly accusing the militant Shiite parties of being essentially, those people who were running for election in the January 2005 election, as being what he called “the Iranian list”. So the conflict over their Iranian ties was particularly acute during that period of the interim government. And of course the Shiite militants on their side regarded Ayad Allawi as essentially their enemy. More aligned with the Sunnis because Allawi himself was an ex-Baathist although he is a secular Shiite, he was part of Saddam’s Baathist structure and then when he left he became aligned with the CIA and was trying to overthrow Saddam but he does have a Baathist background and he is very much considered as part of the Baathist enemy by the militant Shiites. So it’s not just the Sunni insurgents and the Sunni politicians who are aligned with the insurgents but the Shiite secularists as well like Allawi, particularly Allawi, who are regarded as enemies by the current ruling parties in Iraq.

Dori Smith: I’d like to know what could develop politically between some of the major political figures in Iraq, those who lean towards supporting the Kurds, those who lean towards including the Sunni parties in a more consensus government. I’d like to ask you about the Kurds because at this point we are starting to see commercials for “the other Iraq” and these are requests for investment into the “other Iraq” which is Iraqi Kurdistan.

Gareth Porter: Well this is very interesting. I mean you are right the Kurds are going to play a very important swing role in the politics in the next few months as the parties maneuver around formation of a new government in Baghdad. The Shiite list, the UIA, you know has a majority but it does not have enough to form a government presumably without, certainly, the Kurds on their side, without aligning the Kurdish members of Parliament with the UIA, the militant Shiite Party. So they do need the Kurds in order to form a government.

Now the Kurds are very close to the United States. The United States is essential to the Kurdish strategy for maintaining at least its autonomy if not defacto independence and the autonomy that they want and that they have achieved is in fact defacto independence. So the United States will undoubtedly try to use the Kurds to put pressure on the Shiites to get them to give up their control over internal security. And that is going to be where the rubber hits the road in the coming weeks and months, that struggle where the Kurds will be under pressure from the United States to go along with this demand, to make that demand as a condition for forming a government.

The Sunnis will be trying to resist that and essentially warning the Kurds that if they insist on this that there will be a political crisis and there is no guarantee about how it will be resolved and so you can see as I said you know the title for my article is that the, “U.S. Shiite Struggle Could Spin Out of Control,” and there is a degree of uncertainty here about how that is going to play out. But the Kurds are definitely going to be inclined to go along with the U.S. in trying to pressure the Shiites but I see a real possibility for a show down here without a predictable outcome.

Dori Smith: Well President Bush’s approval rating tanked and then the President came out with several speeches and a big propaganda war really in America and the Media cooperated nicely. Now he has a slight increase in support. But what will happen if he now has to explain that perhaps the head of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, was right and the Iraq war is not winnable. Now you mentioned that in your article. What are your thoughts?

Gareth Porter: Yes, I mean this is of course the White House’s problem. They can never admit that the war is not winnable. George Bush has gone out so far on this limb that there is no way that he can crawl back. Therefore any talks with the Sunni Insurgents will be presented as part of a strategy of defeating. And no matter how odd that may seem to the reality based community that is indeed the way the White House will play it. I can guarantee you that. They are totally committed as we now know, to a political strategy that is based on continuing to repeat as often as the President has an opportunity to repeat, the big lie that we are winning and that we will win.

And so whatever he does including those moves that are the very opposite of that in fact, in substance, will be presented within the context of that propaganda theme that we are winning and that we will win. And when he finally reaches an agreement with the Sunni Insurgents which I think ultimately he will have to do, he will present it as a victory. And I would suggest that there is in fact a historical precedent for this and that is Richard Nixon negotiating a peace agreement with Hanoi with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1973. A peace agreement which Nixon presented to the American people as a “victory” and in fact it was not a “victory” at all it was a compromise which ultimately could not result in the U.S. supported regime in Saigon prevailing but was most likely to result in something other than that, either a mixed result, a sort of coalition government or a Communist victory.

So I mean this is the way these wars are ended. They are ended with a compromise which is presented to the American people as victory.

Dori Smith: A lot to think about. Gareth Porter, thanks so much for joining us on Talk Nation Radio.

Gareth Porter: Thank you, I enjoyed it very much.

Gareth Porter is author of “Perils of Dominance, Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,” published by California University Press in June. You can read more of Gareth Porter’s work online at IPS News or Foreign Policy in Focus

For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in the studios of listener supported WHUS Radio