Stories written by Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who specialises in U.S. national security policy. He is the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published by Just World Books in February 2014. He writes regularly for IPS and has also published investigative articles on Salon.com, the Nation, the American Prospect, Truthout and The Raw Story. His blogs have been published on Huffington Post, Firedoglake, Counterpunch and many other websites. Porter was Saigon bureau chief of Dispatch News Service International in 1971 and later reported on trips to Southeast Asia for The Guardian, Asian Wall Street Journal and Pacific News Service. He is also the author of four books on the Vietnam War and the political system of Vietnam. Historian Andrew Bacevich called his latest book, ‘Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War’, published by University of California Press in 2005, "without a doubt, the most important contribution to the history of U.S. national security policy to appear in the past decade." He has taught Southeast Asian politics and international studies at American University, City College of New York and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. | Twitter |

POLITICS-US: Coercive Diplomacy Disputed at Centrist Meet

The assumption that the U.S. should exploit its military dominance to exert pressure on adversaries has long dominated the thinking of the U.S. national security and political elite in the past. But this central tenet of conventional security doctrine was sharply rejected this week by a senior practitioner of crisis diplomacy at the debut of a major new centrist foreign policy think tank.

POLITICS-US: Bush Pledges on Iraq Bases Pact Were a Ruse

Two key pledges made by the George W. Bush administration on military bases in its negotiations with the government of Iraq have now been revealed as carefully-worded ruses aimed at concealing U.S. negotiating aims from both U.S. citizens and Iraqis who would object to them if they were made clear.

US/IRAN: Fearing Escalation, Pentagon Fought Cheney Plan

Pentagon officials firmly opposed a proposal by Vice President Dick Cheney last summer for airstrikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) bases by insisting that the administration would have to make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former George W. Bush administration official.

POLITICS-US: How Cheney Outfoxed His Foes on Iran and EFPs

For many months, the propaganda line that explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) that could penetrate U.S. armoured vehicles were coming straight from Iran has been embraced publicly by the entire George W. Bush administration. But when that argument was proposed internally by military officials in January 2007, it was attacked by key administration officials as unsupported by the facts.

POLITICS: Where Are Those Iranian Weapons in Iraq?

The U.S. military command in Iraq continues to talk about an alleged pipeline of Iranian weapons to Iraqi Shiites opposing the U.S. occupation, implying that they have become dependent on Iran for indirect-fire weapons and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).

POLITICS: Bogus Claim, al-Maliki Stall U.S. Plan on Iran Arms

Early this month, the George W. Bush administration's plan to create a new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms to Shiite militias in Iraq encountered not just one but two setbacks.

POLITICS-US: Pentagon Targeted Iran for Regime Change after 9/11

Three weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

POLITICS-US: Petraeus Promotion Frees Cheney to Threaten Iran

The nomination of Gen. David Petraeus to be the new head of the Central Command not only ensures that he will be available to defend the George W. Bush administration's policies toward Iran and Iraq at least through the end of Bush's term and possibly even beyond.

POLITICS: Petraeus Hid Maliki Resistance to US Troops in Basra

In testimony before Congressional committees last week, Gen. David Petraeus portrayed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's late March offensive in Basra as a poorly planned effort that departed from what U.S. officials had expected.

US/IRAQ: Petraeus Testimony to Defend False "Proxy War" Line

A key objective of the Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus this week will be to defend the George W. Bush administration's strategic political line that it is fighting an Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq.

POLITICS: Embarrassed U.S. Starts to Disown Basra Operation

As it became clear last week that the "Operation Knights Assault" in Basra was in serious trouble, the George W. Bush administration began to claim in off-the-record statements to journalists that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had launched the operation without consulting Washington.

US/IRAQ: Sadr Offensive Shows Failure of Petraeus Strategy

The escalation of fighting between Mahdi Army militiamen and their Shiite rivals, which could mark the end of Moqtada al-Sadr's self-imposed ceasefire, also exposes Gen. David Petraeus's strategy for controlling Sadr's forces as a failure.

POLITICS-US: McCain’s Gaffes Reflect Bush’s Iran-Qaeda Myth

Sen. John McCain's confusion in recent allegations of Iranian training of al Qaeda fighters in Iraq is the result of a drumbeat of official propaganda about close Iran-al Qaeda ties that the George W. Bush administration and neoconservatives have promoted ever since early 2002.

POLITICS-US: My Lai Probe Hid Policy that Led to Massacre

For decades, it has been generally accepted that the My Lai massacre of as many as 400 Vietnamese civilians by U.S. Army troops on Mar. 16, 1968 was a violation of official policy directives on the treatment of civilians in South Vietnam.

Admiral William J. Fallon Credit: U.S. Navy

POLITICS-US: Dissenting Views Made Fallon’s Fall Inevitable

Admiral William Fallon's request to quit his position as head of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and to retire from the military was apparently the result of a George W. Bush administration decision to pressure him to resign.

POLITICS-US: Fallon’s “No Iran War” Line Angered White House

A new article on CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon confirms that his public statements last fall ruling out war against Iran last fall were not coordinated with the White House and landed him in trouble more than once with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

POLITICS: Sunni Insurgents Exploit U.S.-Sponsored Militias

For months, U.S. President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus have been touting the programme of recruiting tens of thousands of Sunnis into U.S.-financed "Awakening Councils" as a master stroke of Iraq strategy which has weakened al Qaeda in Iraq and helps reduce sectarian conflict through "bottom up reconciliation".

POLITICS: Iran Nuke Laptop Data Came from Terror Group

The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" - 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop - as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear programme.

POLITICS: Accept Iran’s Regional Role, Says French Envoy

In a sharp departure from U.S. policy, a leading French diplomat has called on the international coalition sponsoring U.N. sanctions against Iran to support a larger Iranian role in the Middle East.

POLITICS: U.S. Officials Rejected Key Source on ’94 Bombing

The Iranian defector who was the source of Argentina's allegation that Iranian officials began planning the Jul. 18, 1994 terror bombing of a Jewish community centre at a meeting nearly a year earlier had been dismissed as unreliable by U.S. officials, according to the FBI agent who led the U.S. team assisting the investigation in 1997-98.

POLITICS-US: How the Pentagon Planted a False Hormuz Story

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.

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