Historian and author Gareth Porter discusses with Pepe Escobar the positioning of Senator Barack Obama relative to the power of the national security establishment in the US; the legacy of JFK; the feasibility of the US refusing to occupy Muslim lands; and what it takes to be elected president of the United States.Bio

Gareth Porter is a historian and investigative journalist on US foreign and military policy analyst. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service on US policy towards Iraq and Iran. Author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.Transcript

PEPE ESCOBAR, SENIOR ANALYST: I'm here in Washington with Gareth Porter, historian and author, and we're going to talk about Iran, Iraq, Obama, McCain, and the ramifications of Obama and McCain's foreign policy. Gareth, let's start with the war in Iraq. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran emerges as the big regional power in Southwest Asia. The US gets rid of the Taliban in east of Iran and gets rid of Saddam Hussein west of Iran. Basically what Bush and McCain have been saying and preaching all along is that they will never accept it, the emergence of Iran as a big regional power. Obama, on the other hand, maybe we could say that he's a following a tradition that starts with Truman, goes through Ronald Reagan, and gets to George Bush I. It's basically a Cold War mentality. It's American hegemony in the end. But at the same time, Obama wants to get rid of all US troops in Iraq, bring them back home. What are we facing here? Isn't this an enormous contradiction, like Cold War mentality, being progressive and antiwar in the case of Iraq?

GARETH PORTER, INVESTIGATIVE HISTORIAN, MILITARY POLICY ANALYST: And the answer is both. And that's because he is a contradictory figure in a political system which is profoundly dysfunctional in terms of what it produces on many fronts, but particularly on national security policy. I mean, this is a society that has long since lost--and arguably never had in the first place--the capacity to really have a serious debate about any national security issue, for the simple reason that the terms of any public discourse on national security are so heavily weighted in favor of the national security bureaucracy's point of view that, you know, the media, news media, essentially carry only one side, and therefore only a small minority of people in the United States are going to have the opportunity to access a point of view that is different from the point of view of those people who've been making the wars of the past and still making the wars of the present. And therefore there's no surprise here that someone who is as intelligent and in many ways as progressive as Obama is, you know, remarkably so within the context of the Democratic Party, let alone the political system in general, is a captive of what you call--and I think correctly so--Cold War mentality, that is to say, a mentality that begins with a whole set of assumptions that have very little to do with reality, particularly in the case of Iran, to suggest that, you know, Iran is a threat because of the allegations that have to do with Iraq or with the nuclear program that are not based on, you know, reality at all. You know, this is simply a function, for the most part, of where he gets his information, who advises him, and where they get their information. The whole system is completely tilted, so extremely tilted towards the warlike point of view, that even somebody who does have a great deal of intelligence, relatively speaking, and a desire to make change, relatively speaking, is hogtied, in a way, to try to do anything about it.