Interview with Robert Dreyfuss, Investigative Reporter, Nation, American Prospect, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone

July 22nd, 2004
Transcription by Ben Tupper

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and what type of freelance work that you do.
ROBERT DREYFUSS: My name is Bob Dreyfuss. I live in Alexandria, Virginia. I've been a freelance journalist in the Washington area for about 12 or 13 years. And I write for really 4 or 5 regular magazines, and then some others. I'm a contributing editor or writer at Mother Jones and The Nation, The American Prospect, and also I write a lot for Rolling Stone. Those are my basic magazines. I really cover everything. I've been doing Washington politics and features and profiles for all that time. But actually for the last 2 years I've been focusing pretty heavily on Iraq and the Middle East since it became the main story of the day. So I've done a number of investigative reports on the run up to the war, and the whole sort of post-war quagmire, and who's to blame and how we got there.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And so when you look at some of the investigative reports that you've done, can you -- Were you doing a lot of stuff that other people weren't looking at? Just speak kind of in general terms, where you saw holes and why you decided to?
DREYFUSS: I think, I did -- I can point to several different things. I did -- back in the, let's see --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: -- Hold on. I'm also going to be eliminating my questions --
DREYFUSS: Yeah, sure whatever. Don't worry about it.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So if you have a pronoun or something that doesn't stand on it's own, then I may ask you to --
DREYFUSS: Right. Okay that's fine. No problem. No problem. Back in the Fall in 2002, I did probably the first extensive profile of Ahmed Chalabi [background noise], the head of the Iraqi National Congress --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Hold on. Hold on. Yeah, because I think that got picked up. Okay, yeah. Go ahead.
DREYFUSS: Back in 2002 in the Fall, I did really I think the first extensive profile of Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress. And I had really, I guess, was surprised that no one had really dug into Chalabi's past before. Partly I just started by doing a Nexus search, and all of this interesting stuff started turning up about his conviction in Jordan, and his general record as a charlatan. And at the time not many people were looking at him although he had been a key figure in Washington for a least a decade -- organizing with the neoconservatives on behalf of various movements and resolutions, and even the Iraq Liberation Act in the 1990s that funded the Iraqi National Congress among other groups. And so what happened is I did an extensive profile of him and documented some of his connections to Richard Perle, and to some of the early pioneers of the neoconservative worldview like Albert Wohlstetter and others. And I found that that article got tremendous reaction, although I never saw a subsequent article until probably a year later that was as detailed as that. Exactly why, I can't say. I think to a large degree there were a lot of people who relied on Chalabi for information because he was providing people in the press as well as the intelligence agencies with a huge amount of material. And so nobody wanted to directly attack him because he'd cut them off, which was of course exactly what happened to me. They wouldn't talk to me after my story came out. And not only that, but he had a lot of friends among the people who were the organizers of the war -- not just outside the administration, the think tanks and so forth, but also the people inside the administration, the neoconservatives who were sprinkled through 15 or 20 different positions in the Defense Department and other agencies. And so -- I think that's one thing I could point to in terms of something people weren't looking at -- amazingly so. And people were treating Chalabi with a lot of respect, and I found as I started calling around and talking to people that people were laughing at him, and calling him "a clown" and "a buffoon" and "a liar." And these people were not -- I'm not talking about left-wing sources. I'm talking about CIA people and ambassadors, and people who were in senior positions or had been in the past. And so that made me think there's more to this story than just a wayward exile trying to organize his return to his homeland.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When you look after the war there seems to be this turning point with Chalabi is -- you know, his house is raided and a few weeks later the New York Times finally has their mea culpa after their source is kind of officially discredited. When you look back at the article is seems to be very prophetic in a way. So can you speak to, just kind of encapsulate that change, and then after that point it seems like people were catching up in a way.
DREYFUSS: Well at the beginning, Chalabi was kind of seen as a hero and -- Let me start again -- At the beginning, Chalabi was kind of seen as a hero and the leader of a noble cause. And nobody wanted to attack him because he was playing such a central role in the run up to the war. Gradually, there began to creep in some naysayers, partly because the American National Security establishment was attacking him so strongly. And what really did him in is when he finally got back to Baghdad in the Spring of 2003. It turned out he exactly zero support. That he had no supporters, no followers, no organization, no credibility among Iraqis. And so that combined with the fact that all of his information was wrong, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There were no ties to terrorism that were uncovered. And especially that we weren't welcomed with open arms. I like to say just arms, but not open arms. As a result of all of this, Chalabi lost all of his credibility. And he started quickly falling in the esteem of even the Pentagon because he couldn't deliver. And it kind of culminated in this almost farcical controversy over him blabbing to the Iranian intelligence office in Baghdad and telling them American secrets, which is really what eventually tripped him up.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When you look in the context of the New York Times, evaluating -- Can you kind of evaluate the New York Times coverage before the war -- Chalabi's influence? And then like how Chalabi was a trigger point, in a way?
DREYFUSS: Well, I think Chalabi was kind of a pied piper for most of the media. The New York Times, of course, leads the way. And some its writers, Judy Miller, of course, and many others, were constantly going to the Chalabi well and not realizing it was a poisoned one. And were getting information and secrets, and defectors, and people like that to talk to. And it all turned out to be bogus information, but it was so good -- it was so exciting that they just went with it. And I -- You know, I wonder about Judy Miller. You know she is, I think, has an ideological edge to her writing too. She coauthored a book a few years ago with Laurie Mylroie a few years ago. Laurie Mylroie is an almost deranged advocate of attacking Iraq. She blames Iraq for the Oklahoma City bombing that Tim McVeigh was executed for, and of course he had no Iraqi connections. But she still -- to this day -- says that he did, and that Iraq was behind the bombing in Oklahoma City. So I mean, she is conspiracy theorist nut. And for her to have authored a book with Laurie -- With Laurie Mylroie to have authored a book with Judy Miller makes me wonder about her predilection for listening to someone like Chalabi, who had this axe to grind against Saddam from the beginning.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And wasn't Judy Miller also a member of the Benador Associates, which is kind of like --?
DREYFUSS: Yes she was -- Eleana Benador promoted Judy Miller's work. I think not anymore, but in the early 90s she was one of their list. The Benador Group is basically the public relations shop for the whole neoconservative movement. And everybody from Michael Ledeen to Richard Pearle to James Woolsey is on her list. So again for her to be associated with them and Laurie Mylroie and Benador and so forth indicates to me that she had some ideological predilection for supporting and entertaining Chalabi and his crew of liars and phonies.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When you were in Baltimore you were speaking in terms of looking at the New York Times and Washington Post that if you read it carefully that you can still figure out everything that's going on. Can you speak to that? And also does still hold up during the build-up to the war?
DREYFUSS: You know, I think that if you look at the major newspapers in the United States most of the information is there. Sometimes it's buried in the 19th paragraph. Sometimes it's a small article in an inside page. And certainly it doesn't penetrate into the consciousness of most people, except for people who read it very carefully. And then of course, if you live in the Hinterlands -- and you're reading the St. Louis Dispatch or the Albuquerque paper or the Boise, Idaho paper -- you're only getting the skimmed-off-the-surface news, you know, on Page 2 of your paper. And so most Americans don't really get an accurate picture of what was happening in Iraq. Although, if you're following things carefully you can get a lot from the New York Times. It's an amazingly good newspaper. It throws everything in the kitchen sink into its coverage, but you have to read it pretty carefully to get the information some of the times.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So even during the build-up to the war, do you feel that the performance of the New York Times was accurate?
DREYFUSS: Well, I don't know about adequate. If I were the editor of the New York Times, I would have done things radically differently. So no. I mean, I'm not a supporter of the way the New York Times or other newspapers covered the run-up to the war. They should have been far more skeptical about the claims of WMD, of all the charges that the Bush administration was making against Iraq, even some of the basic ones, like that Bush said he gassed his own people and he's killed 300,000 Iraqis. I mean, these charges all came from Iraqi exiles. I think there's an element of truth to almost all of them, even the WMD issue. But they're all so wildly exaggerated and inflated that there's no skepticism on the part of the media. Now the media was reflecting the fact that the politicians didn't exactly clamor to raise objections to these things either, from the far Right wing of the Republican party all the way through to the Democratic party almost to the far Left, there was unanimity that Saddam was an evil mastermind of terrorism and WMD. We now know that's pretty much nonsense. But there was a consensus view in the political establishment that then got, in turn, reflected in the media. I don't think that the media ought to be reflecting the consensus. I think the media ought to be disrupt and tear apart the consensus if the evidence goes in that direction. New York Times did not do it. In fact, they apologized in an editorial after the war saying we should have been more skeptical. Of course that came after several big commissions started to tear apart all the arguments and throw them in the wastebasket too. So the media is coming to its apologies kind of late I think.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When you say it's exaggerated to say he gassed his own people, hasn't that been established that Halabja did occur? And what do you mean by that exactly?
DREYFUSS: Well I don't know, I haven't been there to investigate. There's several people from CIA and Army Intelligence who said that at least some if not all of the gassing that was done up in the Kurdish areas was done by Iran. Second there's a question about the numbers. In other words you see from the Kurds and others figures: 10, 20, 30,000 people died in those attacks. I think the actual number is far, far less. Maybe it was a thousand or 2,000 people. I've seen a lot of conflicting information. But I don't necessarily take what either the Iraqi exiles or the US government says at face value until we really investigate that. So I think there's questions about all of those issues concerning Iraq, and most of them are just sort of assumed like they came in Biblical verse without anybody digging into it. There's a guy named Stephen Pelletiere whose written about the Halabja case, who said that the gas that was used there was a gas that Iran had and not Iraq. And he wrote a report about that for Army Intelligence back in the, I think around 1990. All of this stuff kind of gets discarded, and the rush to demonize Saddam was so intense that everything that could be said bad about the guy was just -- funneled up the pipeline into the speech writers at the White House. And all of the stuff that might have been exculpatory or might have disparaged some of his accusers was just thrown in the trash. And I think that's the media's fault above all because a lot of this information was available.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When I look at the State Department's report on human rights and I trace back the dossier, all the footnotes go back to these documents and most of the information is actually coming from the UN and non-government organizations. I mean, these human rights violations are actually being directly reported by the government. They're being sourced from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN Special Rapator for Human Rights.
DREYFUSS: Well there's no question that Saddam -- There's no question -- There's no question that Saddam Hussein was a significant violator of human rights. But he was a significant violator of human rights in the 1970s when he was considered to be a Soviet pawn. He was in the 1980s when he was supported by the United States during the Iran/Iraq war. And he was in the 1990s when again he was being demonized by the United States. So our policy toward Saddam Hussein changed for geostrategic reasons and not because of Saddam's actions. I think he was consistent and we weren't. Now in terms of the sources of all this stuff, I don't know where all these human rights groups got their information. I think a lot of their information, from what I know, came from defectors. It came from people who fled Iraq. It came from people who were released form prison and came and told their stories. And I think there's a strong probability that many of the human rights groups themselves were influenced by the same people who influenced US Intelligence agencies, who were trying to build an outcry against Saddam and who were prone to exaggerate or inflate their claims and their stories. I think Kanan Makiya's book, which is one of the Bibles of the anti-Saddam crusaders is filled with that kind of stuff. He threw in there every possible wild accusation coming from defectors and people who had been in prison, and none of it, as far as I'm concerned is believable, because Kanan Makiya was one of Ahmed Chalabi's partners in the Iraqi National Congress, yet he's now revered by a lot of people as a human rights crusader. He's now busily over in Baghdad putting together blackmail dossiers. He got all of the Saddam intelligence agency documents and he has squirreled them away in his own little documentation foundation outside the purview of either the outside authorities or the Iraqi government. And I don't know what's happening to those documents, but they're invaluable for blackmail because they're intelligence files. And so he can use those against his and Chalabi's political enemies. And he can destroy documents that can incriminate Chalabi or his allies and no one's going to be the wiser. So, I mean, the way information is used and the way Saddam was demonized in the first Gulf war as a monster when just a few years before he was our ally, and then again demonized in the run up to the last Gulf war is ridiculous. I mean, we now know that Al Qaeda had far closer ties to Iran and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, all 3 of those countries, than it did to Iraq where Saddam exterminated Islamic fundamentalists and certainly prevented Al Qaeda from getting a foot hold. So the attack on Iraq was completely misdirected and based on lies and distortions and a demonization of Saddam Hussein.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: If you take a step back and you look at principles of journalism, it seems like a principle is, you should independently verify as much information as you can before you report it. Can you speak to that and how the press did in terms of WMD and human rights?
DREYFUSS: Well, I mean, it's hard to talk about how the press did in relationship to this because it's a mixed picture and some people did better than others and some people did better on one day and terrible on another day, so I don't know if I can generalize too much. I would say that I think the press catastrophically missed the story. In other words, it never collectively created the impression among the American people that either: 1. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, that's now almost an act of faith among Americans, even today, even despite all the investigations. Yet there was no evidence for that and the press didn't really forcefully try to debunk that. 2nd, in terms of the WMD, there were lots of people available before the war who were willing to say, and I'm talking about experts, who were willing to say that the UN was right, that many of these weapons were probably destroyed many years ago, and that we should let the UN inspections continue. That was a theme that has been submerged now as if there were no people saying that. But those people were denied the opportunity to get front page hearing for the most part, with the exception of people speaking in a foreign accent, with the exception of officials of various countries in Europe or the Arab world or the United Nations who Americans immediately turn off. That's especially true on television where Americans tend to lump anybody with a black moustache into the Osama bin Laden category. And so all the Arabs, whether it was the King of Saudi Arabia or Saddam had to have been al Qaeda supporters, which is patently ridiculous. Even today people think that somehow the Saudi royal family is behind al Qaeda even though Al Qaeda is constantly trying to blow up the Saudi royal family. So I can't excuse the way the media treated this whole WMD and terrorism issue. It's a shameful episode. Yes there are many heroes, what we learn about it is mostly through the media. But for the most part the impression that was created among the public today, most of the public believes we found WMD in Iraq. Most of the public believes that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda. So there's no way they could get that impression from just watching Fox News. Almost nobody watches Fox News it's a few hundred thousand people or maybe a million or 2 on a good day. But among the 100s of millions of people who watch TV and read newspapers a wrong impression has been created. And they didn't get it from watching George Bush speeches either because nobody watches those. They got it from the media.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: SO when you take a step back -- how is the media supposed to prove a negative, like there are no connections with al Qaeda. Or are they merely to say the Bush administration provides no evidence, they're just insinuating?
DREYFUSS: Well, I wrote about the Iraq / al Qaeda connection in my stories at the end of 2002. And I found lots of officials who were willing to say to me even on the record that there was no connection. I mean, this was not a mysterious issue. There were people who'd studied this for years, who'd spent their lives studying Osama bin Laden, who'd spent their lives studying terrorism, people following Iraq. And I talked to them and they said, "This is nonsense". Now I don't know what else you can say about it. There were studies done at the National Security Council under the Clinton administration where they sifted every possible bit of information and came up with nothing. Daniel Benjamin who was on the NSC at that time told me on the record that they had studied the ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda and came up with zero. Also, there'd been on terrorism from Iraq or by Iraq from the record as far as I know going back to the first Gulf war. I don't think from 1990 onwards, there was a single incidence of Iraq being linked or sponsoring even a minor terrorism act, somebody pulling out a gun and shooting someone in Beirut. There are lots of those linked to many other countries, but none linked to Iraq in the last 14 years. So if Iraq was such a terrorist mastermind, why weren't they masterminding a New York Times hing? Well, these were the basic questions that nobody was asking.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: If you look at people on the Right, people like Steven Hayes or Cliff May, they'll say stuff like "What about Abu Hamas [sic]? Iraq was providing refuge for him -- or Abu Nidal?" They list all these incidents where terrorists had some sort of a tangential connection. Can you speak to any of these specifics?
DREYFUSS: Well all I know is that all of the experts said that Iraq was not behind terrorism in the last 14 years. Whatever the Right wing lunatics want to say, I'm not going to address it. I mean, they're wrong and I'm right. They have to show proof that something happened. Abu Nidal was a terrorist in the 1970s and by the time he got to Baghdad recently he was a sick, decrepit old guy in a house somewhere who was just living in a house in Baghdad and wasn't connected to a New York Times hing. I mean -- There's an overlap between the resistance among the Palestinians and terrorism and some Palestinians are terrorists. And some terrorists are Palestinians. And so it's easy to take the word terrorism and mush it up and then somehow connect it to all the Arab countries because basically all the Arab countries support the PLO. So if you're going to make those kinds of connections to the Left wing or the Radical wing of the Palestinian movement and find some connections to some Arab countries, anybody can do that. But we're talking about specific organizations and specific terrorist actions. And if you minus out the resistance fighting in the occupied territories in Palestine, there's simply no Iraqi terrorism to speak of at all. Yes, Saddam provided some support to suicide bombers families in Palestine. But that's not unique in the Arab world and that has kind of a general general support among many Arab countries who consider that a war. You can argue that that's a dumb strategy. I would. I don't support suicide bombing. But it's not the same as supporting al Qaeda, it's not the same as supporting Islamic terrorism. And in fact, Islamist considered Saddam to be one of their worst enemies.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So what you're saying is that other Arab countries also give money to families? Or is it just Iraq?
DREYFUSS: Many Arab countries do. Of course -- There are a lot of Arab countries that support the Palestinian movement in all it's shapes and forms and formats through charities, through money directly to the PLO, Hezzbolah. There's a lot of money that funnels into the Palestinian movement from many Arab countries. From Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries to Syria to Iraq to Egypt to Libya. Obviously a lot of this money goes into supporting the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. I don't think that has a New York Times hing to do with Osama bin Laden, who has never been much concerned with the Palestine issue during his career. He's a Jihadist who's concerned about establishing a calephit, and re-establishing a central nervous system for the Islamic movement and then conquering the West for Islam or some deluded plan he has. I don't know what it is. But whatever it is, it has nothing to do with the Palestinians.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: If you take step back and look at a principle of investigative journalism and "follow the money". And if you follow the money in the case of Iraq, what do you find? And speak to the motivations as to why -- in other words --
DREYFUSS: What money are we talking about?
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: If you would have looked at why the -- Let me ask this, why did the United States go to war in Iraq from you -- that's a different question but then I'll follow up.
DREYFUSS: Ok. The Unites States went to war in Iraq for reasons that had nothing to do with terrorism or WMD. It had everything to do with global strategy. They wanted to demonstrate American might first of all, to show that, now that the Cold War is over, the preeminent power in the world and to show everybody from Europe to the Arabs to the Russians to the Chinese that we're going to throw our muscle around. These are people who promoted the war are people who thank that American military might is the key to projecting democracy overseas. Second, there are 2 other issues: oil and Israel. Nobody can believe that we didn't have oil on our mind when we were invading and occupying the country that has the 2nd largest oil reserves in the world. And third, by eliminating Saddam we --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Hold on [Background noise]
DREYFUSS: Third, by eliminating Saddam, we cleared the Middle East out of a major strategic opponent of the Israelis. The Israelis must have loved the fact that we expended hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of American lives, not to mention dead Iraqis, to eliminate Saddam, because he was one of the major bulwarks of the Arab world's opposition to Israel. So now that we've done that Israel has a free hand or a much freer hand in dealing with the other Arab countries and the Palestinians. So all those reasons, I think, for going into Iraq was nothing to do with terrorism or the stated reasons of the Bush administration. In fact, the people who had been arguing for invading Iraq had been doing it for many years, long before 9/11. And their arguments didn't change only the president's rationale for accepting those arguments. The president's feeble mind was captured after 9/11 by the neoconservatives, who told him that he could rebuild his presidency by becoming a war president and fighting a global war on terrorism. And they gave him the map of how to do that. First Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then Syria and Iran, and after that maybe the Gulf states. But we're going to fight this war globally and it's going to rescue your presidency, which had pretty much been collapsing by August of 2001. So the president got on board for his own political reasons. I don't think he knows the difference between Iraq and Iran. And the real supporters of the war had much deeper strategic reasons for planning the conflict in the first place.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And so when you look at the press performance it seemed like they weren't really asking that "why" question or if they were they were just taking boilerplate answers from the government and not digging deeper. Can you speak to that? And what could -- how could they have changed their paradigm to dig into why we're actually going to war.
DREYFUSS: Well you know even today a year after the war, nobody's asking the question why we went to war. I mean, they're asking the question "why couldn't we find the WMD?" And they're asking the question "how come there's no connection to terrorism?" But still no one's asking "why did we fight this war in the first place?" They say "oh yes there were a bunch of hardliners", they call them, "who wanted to go to war even from the first days of the Bush administration". That's in Richard Clarke's book, it's in many other books. Paul O'Neal talks about it in his book. Ok, we know they're all yapping about this a year before 9/11 and more. But no one's asking why! I find that amazing that even today, that no one is saying, "Why did you want to go to war against Iraq?" "Why single out Iraq as the most dangerous place in the world where the United States has to launch a unilateral pre-emptive war. Remember this was before 9/11 that they were arguing this. And so, I think that the same failure that we can identify before the war we can still identify, and I bet the history books don't go into it. It's just one of those things that will be treated as a political question as, these people were for the war, these people were against the war. The UN had this position, the Europeans had that position. And this is who won the big struggle and we went to war. But the answer to the question "why?" is going to come out unless things change pretty drastically about how people think about history.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: From all of the journalist that I've talked to, they give the same reason, because of the neocons, or because he could. There seems to be this just taking things at face value. Do you see that it's economics of the situation? That it's structured? Or is it that hard to cover complex ideas?
DREYFUSS: If you're asking the "why didn't we ask why?", that's too complex for me to figure out. I think there's a hundred different reasons. They should have done it and they didn't. That's what I'm concerned about. Now -- I don't know. I'm not sure I can answer that question. It's a mystery. Journalists should ask that unsettle people. And in this case they didn't. They went along with the conventional wisdom and I'm disgusted by it.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I spoke to Jim Lobe who said that actual producers on the nightly news magazine, whether 60 Minutes, Nightline he didn't specify. But he said that they came to him and said let's do a little segment on this neoconservative movement and their ties on why we're going to war. And it was passed up and it was killed! So can you speak to this issue of Israel seems to be this really taboo subject as to having A NEW YORK TIMES HING to do with Iraq?
DREYFUSS: Well, Israel's a very hot topic politically because the Democrats are unwilling to confront the Israeli question and the Republicans because of the Christian conservatives, the Evangelicals who are the so-called Christian-Zionists, are completely now in bed with Sharon and company. So the 2 big parties in the United States are completely in bed with the pro-Israeli perspective. And that makes it, I think, an extremely difficult question to raise because as soon as you do raise it you're accused of anti-Semitism. And the neoconservatives are very good at saying "Oh anybody who calls us a conspiracy of a cabal, that's like the Nazis calling the Jews a cabal" or I don't know, they bring up these historical references and pretty much you're supporting the Holocaust or something. I don't know. I don't think that they have the courage to face their own convictions. Most of the neoconservatives, including the non-Jewish ones, like Gene Kirkpatrick and Jim Woolsey and Newt Gingrich are fanatical supporters of Israel. And they have to support that in the public discourse. I think there is an extreme unwillingness to identify Israel as one of the problems that the United States has in Middle East. It was clear in Michael Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, where he had no problem showing Bush and Cheney and other Republicans chumming it up with Saudi officials in their robes and their moustaches and their nefarious looking scowls and greedy looking smiles on their faces. It was a fairly racist portrayal, as far as I'm concerned, that Moore did. Never once did he mention Israel in his movie. And in fact, the Saudis were against the war in Iraq. They tried to stop the United States from going to war in Iraq. And so if Bush was so in the Saudi pocket, why did he go to war? That makes no sense, does it? But in Moore's movie, and in the general public perception I think, Bush = oil = Saudi Arabia. And therefore he went to war. Well, that's completely wrong. Most of the Arabs and in fact most of the oil companies were against attacking Iraq. Because they were pretty happy with the status quo of dealing with the Gulf states and having good relations with Saudi Arabia. And even being able to buy oil from Iraq which, after all, produces it and sells it. It doesn't dump into the Persian Gulf. SO the oil interests, the oil industry, and the Saudis were all uniformly against the war in Iraq. And even some of the Republicans who are most closely connected to the oil industry, like Brent Scowcroft or Jim Baker or Larry Eagleburger were also all against the war in 2002 and 2003 against the war. And those are the people who were denouncing the neocons in the conservative party. So my argument is that if Saudi Arabia was against the war and Israel was supporting it? Who won? It wasn't the Saudis.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Earlier you said it is about oil and now you say it's not. So can you make the distinction, when you say it's about oil, what do you mean by that?
DREYFUSS: Well the war in Iraq was about oil, but it wasn't about the oil companies and it wasn't about Saudi Arabia. The issue of oil in Iraq was a strategic question. Whoever controls the Persian Guild is going to control the next hundred years of world history, because every country in the world from China and Japan to the Europeans to all the developed countries like India, not to mention the Americas, are going to be increasingly dependent over the next 30 to 40 years on 2 countries: Saudi Arabia and Iraq. 2 countries that have sufficient oil reserves to be able to double and triple and quadruple their production and everybody else, the North Sea, Alaska, Venezuela, parts of Africa, are running out of oil. The production is declining and there's no more to be found, or little to be found. So Saudi Arabia and Iraq, as important as they are now, are going to be 10 times more important in 20 years. So by controlling Iraq we already control all the rest of the Gulf countries. We virtually occupy Kuwait now. We have our main headquarters in Qatar. We control Saudi Arabia by default, basically, with having surrounded it and propping up the royal family there. And now we own Iraq. So now we control all of the sources of oil in the world for the next 50 years. And that's going to be a major factor in the strategic development in future world history.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: If people on the Right heard you say "we own Iraq", they'd say, "no we don't. It's a free country now." On what basis do you say we own Iraq?
DREYFUSS: Well we own Iraq. We're occupying it with 140,000 troops. We're not letting in anybody else where we can to get business contracts. The entire Iraqi government was appointed by the United States. A number of them, including the Prime Minister, were CIA agents for 20 years. -- I call it Iraqistan. I mean, it's a quisling government of CIA stooges and tribal sheiks and other corrupted individuals. Just because Chalabi isn't a part of it doesn't mean the rest of them aren't corrupt as well. And what eventually emerges in Iraq, it's a country that's catastrophically plagued by violence. It's on the brink of civil war. There's no order. Major cities are under the control of privately owned militias. The Kurds control their little fiefdom. The Shiites control the south. In the center of Iraq most of the cities from Fallujah to Ramadi to Samara are being controlled by various coalitions of resistance groups. The Iraqi government, the so-called government controls a few neighborhoods of Baghdad. It's just like Afghanistan where Karzai this well-dressed stooge we put in power there controls Kabul, and the entire rest of the country is controlled by pro-al Qaeda militia and warlords and tribal leaders and so forth. There's no Afghan government to speak of and now there's no Iraqi government to speak of. It's more likely that Iraq will break up into pieces than it will have a New York Times hing resembling a government next year.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: If we go back to Israel and look at the media's treatment of Israel, do they not cover Israel as a part of Iraq because either the Democrats and Republicans agree or because they would receive too much flack or -- can you speak to some of the reasons why you think the media doesn't?
DREYFUSS: I think the media is just afraid to get accused of anti-Semitism. So they ignore the Israeli question. The fact is that all the leading advocates of -- I shouldn't say all -- Many of the leading advocates -- Let me start that again I guess. The fact that many of the leading advocates of war on Iraq signed documents and papers and advisory position papers to the Israeli government in the 1990s, went on record saying that they were basically working as advisors to the Israelis. Doug Fife and his law firm have offices in Israel. They're extremely close to the right-wing Zionists. They're extremely close to Ariel Sharon. I mean, this is known information. And it certainly needs to be put in the debate about "why did we go to war?" "Was there an ulterior objective among some of these people to eliminate Israel's main opponents?" And I think the answer is clearly yes. That's treated as if it's an illegitimate subject to raise. And that's why I think the media is afraid to go into this, because as soon as you start to raise the Israeli question, the neoconservatives start attacking you as anti-Semitic. -- The whole Israeli question is very complex. There are a lot of Israelis who didn't see Iraq as a threat. There are a lot of moderate Israelis and people in the Israeli army who think that the main threat to Israel came from Iran and Hamas and the fundamentalist movement, and thought that Saddam was contained. So even in Israel there was a debate. And the current leadership around Sharon was militantly in favor the Iraq crusade. And I think, even in Israel, there's a more robust debate than there is here because at least the Israelis who criticize Sharon can't be accused of anti-Semitism. Here it's considered bad for to attack Sharon. Ariel Sharon is a man whose career 50 years ago started as a terrorist. He was the commander of a thing called Brigade 101, which in 1953-54, conducted raids against Palestinians. In one case they attacked a village and massacred something like 60 or 70 men, women, and children in broad daylight as a deliberate Israeli terrorist attack. This was when Israel was a state now, not during the 1948 war. And Sharon was the commander of that Brigade 101. He's a thug. He worked with Palestinian Nazis -- I'm sorry -- He's a thug. He worked with Lebanese Nazis, the Phelanges movement to massacre Palestinians in refugee camps in Beirut in the 1982 war when he gave the green light for the massacre of those hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians by these blood thirst Phelangist warlords who swept down on those camps while they were allied to the Israeli forces occupying Lebanon. So this is not a man who 20 years ago, even Israelis would be shocked if you'd said that he was going to become Prime Minister. It would be like, I don't know, if some member of the American Nazi party would become President of the United States people would be shocked. Sharon was considered anathema by a vast majority of the Israelis. But the battering of Israel by terrorism has driven Israelis to reach out for a strong man, and they voted for Sharon. And that's what they've gotten now, somebody who is -- doesn't hesitate to send jets and tanks and helicopters against refugee camps.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When we talked to John H Brown who retired from the State Department leading up to the war in Iraq, the Foreign Service officer, his point was, don't count out the chaos of government. He doesn't believe in the grand strategy that there was a grand strategy to this. Can you speak to the bureaucracy of trying to implement a huge strategy to go to war in Iraq and where do you stand on that?
DREYFUSS: I don't think it's a question of a grand strategy or a conspiracy. There were a lot of constituencies who supported the war in Iraq, and they all did it for their own reasons. Some of them were the arms control people who felt like we have to go to war because Saddam is a major violator of the proliferation rules. And so we've got to put a stop to that. And then there were the anti-terrorism people who, many of whom, were recruited to support the war because they believed wrongly that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism. And then there are the neoconservative militarists who felt like we had to go to war to demonstrate our muscle and might and to plant the flag for the new American empire. The Project for a New American Century people. And then there were people who wanted to go to war because Saddam was a major supporter of the Palestinians, had an army that could threaten Israel. There were many factions that came together and rallied around the president or he wouldn't have been able to pull the war off. Any war has many people who support it for many reasons. I think you have to look at the underlying organizing force behind the war. And that's the people who consistently from the early 1990s until 2003 were hammering away at the need for invading Iraq. And that's why I'm focusing on the neoconservatives.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When you -- Speak to going to the American Enterprise Institute -- immersing yourself around the neoconservative thoughts and some of your insights maybe.
DREYFUSS: Well -- I don't know. I'm not sure what you're asking.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Well I mean -- from your -- have you gained any insights beyond the planning documents or the difference between a lot of people outside of DC is that they just read this stuff on the internet. When you read stuff on the internet, what kind of nuggets or insights to you read as far as being inevitable at any point?
DREYFUSS: Well, I said to my friends that the day Bush was elected when the Supreme Court finally ruled that he was the President, that we were going to go to war in Iraq. I thought it was inevitable from December 2000 because I was convinced that the combination of the neoconservatives who wanted the war and a president who wanted to avenge his father's bungling of the first war, and as the president said, "this guy who tried to kill my daddy", even though by the way in The New Yorker that there wasn't any Iraqi plot to kill the first president Bush. There was another myth that's been recycled a thousand times by this administration. That terrorist plot didn't exist. Anyway, I was convinced right from the beginning that this was not inevitable, that it could be stopped, but that it was inexorable in that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld team was going to push for it, and was probably powerful enough to get it. And when I started following the neoconservatives and going to the American Enterprise Institute and reading their magazines and interviewing them and talking to them, I guess what I was really struck by is how fraternal they are; if you're a part of their circle then you're on their team, and if you're not part of their circle then they regarding you with deep and abiding suspicion. And that's not just true of people who are determined to criticize them. But even people who are not allies, you're with us or against us kind of thing. And so The American Enterprise Institute, with people like Richard Pearle and Newt Gingrich and Gene Kirkpatrick, became the command central, I call it the other CENTCOM for the war, because they staff the administration, sent key people into it, brought the people out there to speak, organized the papers, researched the position papers, sort of drummed up the support, and were far more important than any other think tank or organizing force.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And when you look at what we're at now --this America -- and fighting this war on terrorism. What is your vision of what we need to do to achieve world peace from this point?
DREYFUSS: Well I'm a contrarian on the war on terrorism. I don't believe there's a great terrorist threat out there. I mean, I make the argument that the same people who told us there were WMD in Iraq are exactly the same people who are telling us now that al Qaeda is about to strike us. I think the president is deliberately lying about the terrorist threat, just the way he lied about the WMD. Yes there are terrorists who want to hurt us, but do we need a global war on terrorism? I think it's bunk. Think of it this way, if al Qaeda was so vast and powerful a force, why is it in the 2.5 years since 9/11 not one American has even been punched in the face by an al Qaeda representative? Where are these al Qaeda people? John Ashcroft said after 9/11 that there are 5,000 al Qaeda sleepers in the United States. Where are they? All of the people detained after 9/11, not one was charged with involvement in Al Qaeda plot hundreds and hundreds of people who were picked up. They're lying to us about this threat. It wouldn't take much for Al Qaeda people to get a few machine guns and shoot up a few malls in the United States to cause chaos in this country for months and years. Why don't they do it? Where are they? I believe they don't exist. Yes there are some terrorists who might want to blow up a building, or they might want to shoot some people, or they might want to hijack and airplane. We've been dealing with that for 30 years. That's why we have police, that's why we have FBI, that's why we have courts. But we don't need to go around invading other countries and bombing people and mobilizing billions of dollars and forming a Department of Homeland Security and everything else to fight a threat that small and I believe it's very small.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Ok. When people say it's all CIA's fault, it's bad intelligence. How do you reply to "it's all just the CIA's fault?"
DREYFUSS: Well I think it's pretty obvious by now that the CIA gave Bush what he wanted to hear and that's George Tenet's fault. Many of the people in the CIA didn't agree with the idea that either Iraq had ties to terrorism or that Iraq had massive stockpiles of WMD. But from the lower reaches of the CIA, by the time it got up to the top, and then through Tenet's hands it became much more in tune with what the president wanted to hear. And so the president is trying to blame the CIA and George Tenet like a good boy quit and took the blame, but I don't buy it.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When you look at -- they say there's no political pressure at all, do you see the Office of Special Plans as form of pressure or have you heard of any repetitive tasking or any other forms of pressure applied to --
DREYFUSS: Well I wrote lots of articles about how there was pressure on the intelligence agencies. I think -- it's the job of investigative reporters to go out and find out the truth. And I think a lot of articles since the war that show that there were pressure on intelligence agencies, that Cheney went over to the CIA repeatedly and made it clear what he wanted to hear. And Rumsfeld created his own little mini-CIA at the Pentagon to challenge the CIA and come up with these radical and wrong conclusions about Iraq. And the president gave speeches, which were broadcast on television saying what he wanted to hear. So to say there was no pressure on the CIA is silly beyond belief. And lots of people have said to me and other reporters that there was lots of pressure. Now when they get called by a congressional committee and they say, "were you pressured particularly?" they say "no." That doesn't -- that means that Dick Cheney didn't go down to the basement of the CIA and start -- pressuring individual analysts. But from the top and through the network and through his people and through the chain of command, that's exactly what happened. And it's not the first time it's ever happened with the CIA. It's just the first time we ever went to war because of it.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay -- Room tone -- If you look at the amount of foreign policy aid that we give to Israel, why do we give Israel so much money?
DREYFUSS: Well I don't know, that's another -- we give lots of money to Israel, we give a lot of money to Egypt, we have a big interest in the Middle East. We have interest in the Middle East because there's a lot of oil there.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay
DREYFUSS: It's not complicated.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: You mentioned in one of your articles the Carter Doctrine, to basically identify this region as our national interest, can you just speak to that?
DREYFUSS: For -- something like 50 years the United States has gradually encroached on the Persian Gulf and it can be easily documented in terms of alliances first, like NATO and CENTO, individual treaties with the countries over there, vast military support, not only to Saudi Arabia but to many other countries that were the oil producing nations, building up bases, building up a navy, building up a doctrine. Beginning in the 1970s it became much more explicit. In the 1980s even more explicit. With the first Gulf War we had a ground presence there and many of the countries. And now it's like the Persian Gulf is an extension of the US military. So there's a secular trend of American occupation of the Gulf. Not a new thing. There's been talk about that for decades. And I believe it will even be more explicit. We're not going to -- if the current trends continue, the United States is not going to let the Persian Gulf be an independent place because it's just too important.