Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of five books, the latest book, “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” was published in February 2014. He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.
Articles by this author
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Views Friday, May 12, 2017 Will Trump Agree to the Pentagon's Permanent War in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria? The two top national security officials in the Trump administration – Secretary of Defence James Mattis and national security adviser HR McMaster - are trying to secure long-term US ground and air combat roles in the three long-running wars in the greater Middle East – Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria... Read more |
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Views Saturday, April 22, 2017 US 'Deep State' Sold Out Counter-Terrorism to Keep Itself in Business New York Times columnist Tom Friedman outraged many readers when he wrote an opinion piece on 12 April calling on President Trump to "back off fighting territorial ISIS in Syria". The reason he gave for that recommendation was not that US wars in the Middle East are inevitably self-defeating and... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 27, 2016 Behind the Real US Strategic Blunder in Syria President Barack Obama has long been under fire from the US national security elite and the media for failing to intervene aggressively against the Assad regime. But the real strategic blunder was not that Barack Obama didn’t launch yet another war in Syria, but that he decided to go along with the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, November 15, 2016 The John Bolton Threat to Trump’s Middle East Policy Post-election comments on Middle East policy last week by President-elect Donald Trump and one his campaign advisers have provoked speculation about whether Trump will upend two main foreign policy lines of the Obama administration in the Middle East. But the more decisive question about the future... Read more |
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Views Friday, November 04, 2016 US Hypocrisy: Bombing of Aleppo Is No Worse Than What Happened in Gaza and Iraq The Russian-Syrian bombing campaign in eastern Aleppo, which has ended at least for the time being, has been described in press reports and op-eds as though it were unique in modern military history in its indiscriminateness. In an usual move for a senior US official, Secretary of State John Kerry... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, November 01, 2016 Justifying the Saudi Slaughter in Yemen The Obama administration has carried out a deliberately deceptive campaign accusing Iran of covertly sending arms to the Houthis by sea, a claim that Washington cites to help justify the Saudi massive air attack against the Houthis that began last year. By repeating the accusation over and over,... Read more |
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Views Sunday, October 09, 2016 Obama’s Syria Policy and the Illusion of US Power in the Middle East With the collapse of the US-Russian ceasefire agreement and the resumption and escalation of the massive Russian bombing campaign in Aleppo, the frustration of hawks in Washington over the failure of the Obama administration to use American military power in Syria has risen to new heights. But the... Read more |
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Views Friday, September 23, 2016 How the Pentagon Sank the US-Russia Deal in Syria – and the Ceasefire Another US-Russian Syria ceasefire deal has been blown up. Whether it could have survived even with a US-Russian accord is open to doubt, given the incentives for al-Qaeda and its allies to destroy it. But the politics of the US-Russian relationship played a central role in the denouement of the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, September 13, 2016 Al Qaeda’s Ties to US-Backed Syrian Rebels The new ceasefire agreement between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which went into effect at noon Monday, has a new central compromise absent from the earlier ceasefire agreement that the same two men negotiated last February. But it isn’t clear that it... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, August 31, 2016 The Real US Syria Scandal: Supporting Sectarian War The main criticism of US policy in Syria has long been that President Barack Obama should have used US military force or more aggressive arms aid to strengthen the armed opposition to Assad. The easy answer is that the whole idea that there was a viable non-extremist force to be strengthened is a... Read more |