Gareth Porter, historian and journalist for IPS News, discusses the recent/ongoing battle between “Iraqi government” forces and the Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad, how Maliki jumped the gun and thwarted Cheney, Hakim and Petraeus’s plan for a much larger effort against the Sadrists this summer, Maliki’s plain explanation that having his guys attack with Americans would have only weakened his position even more than happened anyway, Maliki’s desperate escape from Basra, Iran’s role in negotiating a cease fire in Basra, the retirement of the “special groups” talking point, the fact that the Iranian regime still supports the Da’wa/ISCI/Maliki regime over Sadr’s forces as the U.S. regime prefers, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s accusations that the U.S. is in cahoots with the Iranians even as the U.S. backs al Qaeda allied groups in Lebanon and Iraq, the continuing danger of war with Iran and full scale war against the Shi’ites of Iraq and ultimate defeat.

MP3 here. (38:03)

Dr. 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 four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

Dr. Porter was both a Vietnam specialist and an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and was Co-Director of Indochina Resource Center in Washington. Dr. Porter taught international studies at City College of New York and American University. He was the first Academic Director for Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Washington Semester program at American University.

Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for the Independent and author of Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the Struggle for Iraq, discusses the past, present, future and importance of the Sadrist movement in Iraq, America’s employment of “al Qaeda in Iraq,” and the disaster of the occupation.

MP3 here. (42:09)

Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent of The Independent, has been visiting Iraq since 1978. He was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting in recognition of his writing on Iraq. He is the author of, his memoir, The Broken Boy (Jonathan Cape, 2005), and with Andrew Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (Verso, 2000), The Occupation: War, Resistance and Daily Life in Iraq (Verso, 2006) and Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the Struggle for Iraq.