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 |

Image from Iranian video depicting the Jan. 7 encounter with U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz. Credit: Press-TV

POLITICS-US: Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel

By Gareth Porter
Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea", new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats.

POLITICS-US: Rice and Gates Divided over Iran’s Role in Iraq

By Gareth Porter
A State Department official's assertion in late December that Iran had exerted a restraining influence on Iraqi Shiite militia violence signaled a major divergence of views between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence Robert Gates over how to portray Iran's role in Iraq.

POLITICS-US: Did Bush Get New Iran Intel Last Winter?

By Gareth Porter
White House officials have now admitted that George W. Bush was told that the intelligence assessment on a covert Iranian nuclear programme might change last August, but they have avoided answering the question of when the president was first informed about the new intelligence that led to that revised assessment.

POLITICS: White House Fought NIE Over an Old Charge

By Gareth Porter
The reported White House resistance to the National Intelligence Estimate's conclusion that Iran had abandoned a nuclear weapons programme in 2003 was an effort to save a political tactic the George W. Bush administration had been using since early 2004, despite the absence of an intelligence analysis to support it.

POLITICS: Iran NIE Validates 2003 European Diplomacy

By Gareth Porter
Despite the White House spin that the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) supports its policy of increasing pressure on Iran, the estimate not only directly contradicts the George W. Bush administration's line on Iranian intentions regarding nuclear weapons, but points to a link between Tehran's 2003 decision to halt research on weaponisation and its decision to negotiate with European foreign ministers on both nuclear and Iranian security concerns.

POLITICS-US: Petraeus Sought to Prevent Release of Iranians

By Gareth Porter
Recent statements by the U.S. military that Iran had pledged to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq and that this alleged flow of arms may have stopped in August were part of a behind-the-scenes struggle over whether the George W. Bush administration should make a gesture to Iran by releasing five Iranian prisoners held since January.

POLITICS: Israel’s Syrian Airstrike Was Aimed at Iran

By Gareth Porter
Until late October, the accepted explanation about the Sep. 6 Israeli airstrike in Syria, constructed in a series of press leaks from U.S. officials, was that it was prompted by dramatic satellite intelligence that Syria was building a nuclear facility with help from North Korea.

POLITICS-US: Seizure of Iranians Failed to Validate Bush Line

By Gareth Porter
The George W. Bush administration's campaign to seize and detain Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officials in Iraq, presented by Bush himself last January as a move to break up an alleged Iranian arms smuggling operation in Iraq, appears to have run its course without having been able to link a single Iranian to any such operation.

POLITICS-US: Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE

By Gareth Porter
A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

POLITICS-US: For Neocons, Iran War Aim Is Still Regime Change

By Gareth Porter
Vice President Dick Cheney and his neoconservative allies in the George W. Bush administration only began agitating for the use of military force against Iran once they had finally given up the illusion that regime change in Iran would happen without it.

POLITICS: U.S. Military Ignored Evidence of Iraqi-Made EFPs

By Gareth Porter
When the U.S. military command accused the Iranian Quds Force last January of providing the armour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) that were killing U.S. troops, it knew that Iraqi machine shops had been producing their own EFPs for years, a review of the historical record of evidence on EFPs in Iraq shows.

POLITICS-US: Military Resistance Forced Shift on Iran Strike

By Gareth Porter
The George W. Bush administration's shift from the military option of a massive strategic attack against Iran to a surgical strike against selected targets associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker earlier this month, appears to have been prompted not by new alarm at Iran's role in Iraq but by the explicit opposition of the nation's top military leaders to an unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

US-IRAQ: Unable to Defeat Mahdi Army, U.S. Hopes to Divide It

By Gareth Porter
Although the U.S. military command's frequent assertions that the primary threat to U.S. forces in Iraq comes from Iranian meddling, its real problem is that Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr's Mahdi army is determined to end the occupation and is simply too big and too well entrenched to be weakened by military force.

POLITICS-US: Have Hawks Won a Round on Iraq Escalation?

By Gareth Porter
The George W. Bush administration recently concluded that the increase in rocket attacks on coalition targets by Shiite forces over the summer was a deliberate move by Iran to escalate the war in order to put pressure on the United States to accept Iranian influence in Iraq, according to a senior U.S. government official.

POLITICS-US: Petraeus Helps Destroy Bush&#39s "Proxy War" Claim

By Gareth Porter
In his prepared statement to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last week, Gen. David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds Force to turn Shiite militias into a "Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq".

U.S.-IRAQ: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge

By Gareth Porter
In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

POLITICS: Iran Nuke Moves Hint at Interest in Deal

By Gareth Porter
Iran's unexpected agreement with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Mohamed Elbaradei to resolve old issues surrounding its nuclear programme in less than two months, and the fact that it has installed only two-thirds of the centrifuges previously announced, indicate that Tehran may be positioning itself for another bid for a diplomatic solution.

POLITICS: Israel Warned US Not to Invade Iraq after 9/11

By Gareth Porter
Israeli officials warned the George W. Bush administration that an invasion of Iraq would be destabilising to the region and urged the United States to instead target Iran as the primary enemy, according to former administration official Lawrence Wilkerson.
Lt. General Raymond Odierno Credit: U.S. Dept. of Defence

IRAQ: U.S. Tags Iran for Casualties from Its Own Attacks

By Gareth Porter
When a top U.S. commander in Iraq reported last week that attacks by Shiite militias with links to Iran had risen to 73 percent of all July attacks that had killed or wounded U.S. forces in Baghdad, he claimed it was because of an effort by Iran to oust the United States from Iraq, referring to "intelligence reports" of a "surge" in Iranian assistance.

POLITICS-US: Anbar "Turnaround" Undercuts War Rationale

By Gareth Porter
In hailing what he has called an "almost breathtaking" turnaround in Anbar Province that has weakened al Qaeda as a triumph for his new military strategy in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus has put a favourable spin on a development which actually challenges the central rationale for continued U.S. military occupation of Iraq.

POLITICS: U.S. Demanding Iran Restrain Shiite Groups

By Gareth Porter
A little-noticed statement by U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker after last week's U.S.-Iran meeting revealed that the main demand of the George W. Bush administration to Iran is not to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militias but to use its influence with Shiites in Iraq to reduce their attacks on occupation forces.
« Previous Page — Next Page »
*#*