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: Bush Line Distorts Iran&#39s Real Interest in Iraq

By Gareth Porter
As U.S. and Iranian diplomats met in Baghdad Tuesday for a second round of talks on Iraq, the domestic U.S. political climate appears decidedly more supportive of an aggressive U.S. posture toward Iran than just a few months ago, reflecting the apparent triumph the George W. Bush administration's narrative on Iran's role in Iraq.

POLITICS-US: Bush Shielding of Musharraf Policy at Risk

By Gareth Porter
The growing crisis over Islamic extremism in Pakistan is drawing attention to the complicity of that country's military government in the rise of the biggest haven for Islamic terrorism in the world.

U.S.-IRAN: New Arms Claim Reveals Cheney-Military Rift

By Gareth Porter
In a development that underlines the tensions between the anti-Iran agenda of the George W. Bush administration and the preoccupation of its military command in Afghanistan with militant Sunni activism, a State Department official publicly accused Iran for the first time of arming the Taliban forces last week, but the U.S. commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan rejected that charge for the second time in less than two weeks.

POLITICS-US: Cheney’s Iran-Arms-to-Taliban Gambit Rebuffed

By Gareth Porter
A media campaign portraying Iran as supplying arms to the Taliban guerrillas fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, orchestrated by advocates of a more confrontational stance toward Iran in the George W. Bush administration, appears to have backfired last week when Defence Secretary Robert Gates and the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeil, issued unusually strong denials.

POLITICS-US: Cheney&#39s Iran-Arms-to-Taliban Gambit Rebuffed

By Gareth Porter
A media campaign portraying Iran as supplying arms to the Taliban guerrillas fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, orchestrated by advocates of a more confrontational stance toward Iran in the George W. Bush administration, appears to have backfired last week when Defence Secretary Robert Gates and the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeil, issued unusually strong denials.

POLITICS-US: Could al Qaeda Attack Trigger War With Iran?

By Gareth Porter
Following revelations of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

IRAQ: Sunni Resistance Receptive to Sadr Alliance

By Gareth Porter
Nationalist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's bid to unite Sunnis and Shiites on the basis of a common demand for withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces, reported last weekend by the Washington Post's Sudarsan Raghavan, seems likely to get a positive response from Sunni armed resistance.

IRAQ: Sunni Resistance Receptive to Sadr Alliance

By Gareth Porter
Nationalist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's bid to unite Sunnis and Shiites on the basis of a common demand for withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces, reported last weekend by the Washington Post's Sudarsan Raghavan, seems likely to get a positive response from Sunni armed resistance.

POLITICS-US: Commander’s Veto Sank Threatening Gulf Buildup

By Gareth Porter
Admiral William Fallon, then President George W. Bush's nominee to head the Central Command (CENTCOM), expressed strong opposition in February to an administration plan to increase the number of carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf from two to three and vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM, according to sources with access to his thinking.

U.S./IRAQ: Bush Holds Iranian Officials as Bargaining Chips

By Gareth Porter
When the George W. Bush administration announced in January that it was targeting Iranian officials in Iraq, it justified the policy as necessary to protect U.S. troops because of their alleged involvement in attacks on U.S. forces.

IRAQ: Democrats’ Timetable Allows U.S. War in Sunni Region to Go On

By Gareth Porter
The language on a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq voted out of the House-Senate conference committee this week contains large loopholes that would apparently allow U.S. troops to continue carrying out military operations in Iraq's Sunni heartland indefinitely.

POLITICS: Bush’s Bluster on Iran Was Cover for Direct Talks

By Gareth Porter
When the George W. Bush administration launched a high-profile campaign in January and February accusing Iran of exporting armour-piercing bombs to Shiite militias in Iraq, seizing Iranian officials in Iraq, threatening cross-border raids against Iran and sending a second carrier battle group into the Gulf, it seemed that it was entering a much more aggressive phase of Middle East policy.

POLITICS: Pentagon Meet Discussed Escalating Pressure on Iran

By Gareth Porter
Two weeks ago, Pentagon officials discussed a strategy to escalate U.S. pressure on Iran with the intention of creating the impression that the U.S. is ready to go to war, according to an account by one of the participants.

POLITICS-US: Rove Said to Have Received 2003 Iranian Proposal

By Gareth Porter
Karl Rove, then White House senior political advisor for President George W. Bush, received a copy of the secret Iranian proposal for negotiations with the United States from former Republican Congressman Bob Ney in early May 2003, according to an Iranian-American scholar who was then on his Congressional staff.

POLITICS-US: Rove Said to Have Received 2003 Iranian Proposal

By Gareth Porter
Karl Rove, then White House senior political advisor for President George W. Bush, received a copy of the secret Iranian proposal for negotiations with the United States from former Republican Congressman Bob Ney in early May 2003, according to an Iranian-American scholar who was then on his Congressional staff.

POLITICS: U.S. Briefing on Iran Discredits the Official Line

By Gareth Porter
The first major effort by the George W. Bush administration to substantiate its case that the Iranian government has been providing weapons to Iraqi Shiites who oppose the occupation undermines the administration's political line by showing that it has been unable to find any real evidence of an Iranian government role.

POLITICS-US: How Neocon Shiite Strategy Led to Sectarian War

By Gareth Porter
The supreme irony of President George W. Bush's campaign to blame Iran for the sectarian civil war in Iraq, as well as attacks on U.S. forces, is that the Shiite militias who started to drive the Sunnis out of the Baghdad area in 2004 and thus precipitated the present sectarian crisis did so with the support of both Iran and the neoconservative U.S. war planners.

POLITICS-US: How Neocon Shiite Strategy Led to Sectarian War

By Gareth Porter
The supreme irony of President George W. Bush's campaign to blame Iran for the sectarian civil war in Iraq, as well as attacks on U.S. forces, is that the Shiite militias who started to drive the Sunnis out of the Baghdad area in 2004 and thus precipitated the present sectarian crisis did so with the support of both Iran and the neoconservative U.S. war planners.

POLITICS: Israeli Realism on Iran Belies Threat Rhetoric

By Gareth Porter
When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared last week at the Herzliya conference that Israel could not risk another "existential threat" such as the Nazi holocaust, he was repeating what has become the dominant theme in Israel's campaign against Iran - that it cannot tolerate an Iran with the technology that could be used to make nuclear weapons, because Iran is fanatically committed to the physical destruction of Israel.

POLITICS-US/IRAQ: Bush’s Three-Front War Blunder

By Gareth Porter
George W. Bush's State of the Union address appears to confirm other indications in recent weeks that the president is not merely sending more troops to Iraq to do more of the same, but has adopted a new strategy of fighting all three major Iraqi Arab political-military forces simultaneously.

POLITICS: Bush’s New Iran Policy – No Evidence for IED Charge

By Gareth Porter
For 18 months now, the George W. Bush administration has periodically raised the charge that Iran is supplying anti-coalition forces in Iraq with arms.
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