It's like MK-Ultra controlling your brain, suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
It's me, Austin IGT7 in Austin, Texas.
It's me, Scott Horton.
And introducing Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist.
He writes for IPS News.
Most often you can find him at the Huffington Post, sometimes in the American Prospect and other places.
All of his interpress service archives are available at antiwar.com slash porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks very much, Scott, as always.
Well, it's very good to have you here, sir, and I'm sorry for leaving you on hold so long.
I wanted to review these articles.
Lucky for me, it turns out that the ones on the Huffington Post were the same ones on antiwar.com.
Exactly.
But I guess then I failed to find a couple because I thought you told me there were five articles, and I've only found three here.
That is explainable by the fact that the last two were delayed until today and tomorrow.
The fourth one will go up today, and the fifth one goes up tomorrow.
So the decision was made that there's greater readership on the weekdays than weekends.
So that was why you didn't find anything on the weekends.
Okay, good.
Well, so I read the three that have come out already, and I don't know what the hell's going on with my mic volume today.
I'm going to turn my gain up a little bit on this thing.
Yeah, so you've been to Iran.
I've been in Iran, yes.
I spent 12 days there.
You spent 12 days, and you interviewed a bunch of Iranian government officials about what now?
Well, I basically was focusing, as much as I could, on the prospects for some kind of negotiations between Iran and the United States.
That was my primary interest in going there, the timing, of course, being that you have a new administration coming into office in Washington, and the witch is dead.
The last administration, which was clearly not going to engage with Iran in any serious way diplomatically, is out of office and is being replaced by an administration that, in principle at least, is prepared to negotiate with Iran.
The question being on what terms, and what does Iran think of the possibility of now reaching some sort of an agreement.
So that was what I tried to pursue as much as possible in Tehran.
And so what did you find out about what they think?
I suppose they're probably as divided in their optimism as we are around here.
Well, it's very interesting.
There really was a very similar debate, I think, in Tehran among Iranian officials and political analysts, as we find here in the United States, among people who had hopes for the Obama administration, at least to some degree, that it would be different or could be different from the Bush administration.
And just as we find here in the United States, with a lot of people saying that Obama is not going to be much different from Bush, the same sort of argument has been made at high levels in the Iranian government as well, that Obama is really not free of the interests that constrain the United States, have constrained the United States from engaging with Iran or having a policy of trying to reach an accord with Iran, particularly the pro-Israeli interests that have been so powerful in the Bush administration and even before that in the Clinton administration.
And that is really the main argument that one finds for what I call the pessimistic viewpoint, interpretation, if you will, on the Obama administration, that Obama might want to do something different on Iran, but in fact he's constrained by the fact that what they call the Zionist lobby is too powerful and that he really is not going to have control over the policy.
And then there is a different point of view within the leadership circles in Tehran, which is that Obama was elected because the American people have a demand for change, the American electorate demanded change, part of that change being a change in Middle East policy, and that therefore there is some reason to hope that Obama will pursue a different policy towards Iran, that it's a historic opportunity.
Now the problem is, as I found in my interviews, once Obama had announced his new national security cabinet, his national security team, the optimists really were disarmed and weakened significantly by the fact that Hillary Clinton in particular was named as Secretary of State and she symbolizes for Iranian political circles, whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, the anti-Iranian, pro-Israeli point of view in U.S. national security policy and her choice, the Obama choice of Hillary Clinton, really suggested to most analysts that the chances for change in the Obama administration had really plummeted seriously.
So even the person in the foreign ministry who I interviewed, who clearly had represented the more optimistic side of that debate, made it very clear that he was very pessimistic now, he didn't think there was much chance for a change in U.S. policy.
And I think that's really sort of the dominant viewpoint at this point in Tehran.
Well, and so what kind of implications are there for their willingness to, well, we've seen in the past what Gordon Prather called Iran's golden offer, not just the giant catch-all peace offer of 2003, but at other times during their negotiations with the European Union, back during the days when they were abiding by the additional protocol, even though their parliament hadn't ratified it and all that, they had proposed that, well, how about we bring in French and German and other Western European companies and we'll make a big international consortium and so we'll still be enriching uranium on our territory, but it'll be in cooperation with Western European powers and it'll be perfectly fine.
Those kinds of things, it seems like if...
Well, they've always, as Gordon Prather has correctly pointed out, I mean, they've always been very flexible on the modality of some sort of arrangement or a very complex set of arrangements for having Western involvement in the enrichment process, not just in terms of IAEA inspection and all that, but also in terms of an actual consortium for enrichment.
The bottom line, the red line, if you will, is the unwillingness to suspend or to end the enrichment itself.
And I think that's clearly not going to change, but it's certainly not going to change as long as Ahmadinejad is in office, and even if, let's say, a reformist or a centrist conservative, a moderate conservative, were to be elected next June, it's really an open question whether that president could make the ultimate concession of saying, yes, we will agree to stop enrichment in the context of a grand bargain.
Now, having said that, I should add also that I did have an interview with one of the people closest to former president Khatami, his vice president Mohamed Ali Abtahi.
He did say that it would be – well, I had two interviews, one with Abtahi and another one with a senior advisor to former president Rastanjani, Mohamed Atri Abtahi.
Abtahi was – Rastanjani is known as a reformer type among Iraqis, not a harliner.
He's a reformist, along with Khatami.
And he said that it would be – that a demand for a complete end of uranium enrichment by the Obama administration would not help the reformists in any campaign against Ahmadinejad.
It would help Ahmadinejad, and he explained that by referring to the recent history of Ahmadinejad's political strategy of trying to discredit the reformists by associating them with the hardline policies of the United States and the West, by saying that the reformists have consorted with the Europeans and basically encouraged them to put pressure on Iran by increasing economic sanctions.
Now, economic sanctions, of course, hurt all Iranians.
We know that.
This is how Ahmadinejad got elected in the first place in July of 2005.
The day after the election, his staffers came out and laughed and made sure, I guess, that the reporters quoted them as laughing and said thank you to George W. Bush for coming out and warning the Iranian population that you better not elect the right-winger, which is exactly what they did in reaction.
Well, I'm sure that was helpful to Ahmadinejad.
I think that since the 2005 election, that dynamic has gotten even more acute.
And Abtahi pointed out to me, and I quoted this in my third article on the prospects for the June 2009 presidential election, he said that in the parliamentary election of March 2008, just before that, Bush had been touring and then Vice President Cheney toured the Middle East trying to rally the Sunni Arab regimes against Iran, and that the headlines, the stories about that in the world's press had helped Ahmadinejad's followers to rally their base and helped the pro-Ahmadinejad party to get the highest number of seats of any identifiable political group in the parliament.
So he said, look, the lesson of this is that this sort of line, these demands, and a hard line against Iran, do not help reformists, they help the extreme conservatives.
And do you have any reason to believe at all that Barack Obama would back down from George Bush and Dick Cheney's demand and Israel's demand that Iran cease enriching uranium at all?
Is there any possibility that he would go for that golden offer, you think?
The early signals that he sent are not encouraging that he's going to be flexible on that point.
To say the least.
No, I'm not very optimistic, but the process of dealing with Iran is an iterative process.
There are going to be many rounds.
And I have no doubt the Obama administration will start out with a hard line.
And I think over time, as it learns what doesn't work and what in fact backfires, there will be some degree of possibility.
Not only a possibility, but a possibility of learning.
You know, a learning process.
Well, there's a whole optimistic view, Garrett, that says that the reason that he's picking Gates and Jones and Hillary Clinton and all these terrible people is so that he can really take a peace position and they'll be covering his flank on the right.
I can dispel that myth, I think, in a fairly authoritative manner.
Since I've been back, I've had an interview with a source who was an advisor to Obama during the campaign, a foreign policy advisor to Obama.
Not one of the inside people, not one of the circle closest to Obama, but somebody who was involved in advising on foreign policy.
And this person has had a conversation in recent days since the naming of nomination of Gates as Secretary of Defense with somebody who is part of the inner circle.
And was told very, very clearly that there was only one reason for the Gates nomination and for the rest of the conventional, if you will, to say the least, national security team that he named.
And that is the same old democratic problem of worrying about their manhood in the eyes of the Republicans, the media, and the national security elite.
And so what Obama was advised, and what he apparently acted on, was that he had to have a Gates and a Hillary Clinton and a James Jones to convince the national security people and the other constituencies that these people felt mattered, that the Democrats are just as tough as the Republicans.
It's the same old narrative that the center-right people in the Democratic Party have been peddling for many years that Obama has now apparently bought on the basis of this inner circle of advisors.
Well, and I'm sure you saw where Robert Gates told George F. Will at the Washington Post that we're going to be in Iraq for decades.
All that stuff about combat forces, this and that, is simply, as you and I, I think, have identified over the past year or so on this show, as weasel words designed to give Obama the opportunity to leave as many forces in Iraq as he possibly can, as long as he calls them something else.
I did see that, and definitely regard Gates as, you know, at the epicenter of the policy of the military and its political allies to reverse the verdict of history, if you will, on Iraq, the verdict of the Iraqi people and of the Iraqi political system, that the United States should be out of there completely by the end of 2011.
There's no question that we face, over the next few years, a massive struggle between the national security state of the United States...
Well, this really cuts right to the heart of Barack Obama.
...over this issue.
I'm sorry?
We face a massive struggle between the national security state of the United States and the Iraqi state and political system over this issue of the U.S. trying to reverse that decision by Iraq.
Well, and between the American people and the national security state as well.
And this cuts right to Barack Obama as liar, as no different than George Bush when it comes to his willingness to tell the people whatever he feels like telling them, whether it's that he's going to get our troops out of Iraq or that he sincerely believes that the Iranians are making nuclear weapons or whatever it is.
Well, I mean, I'm a little bit more of an agnostic about, you know, how Obama fought during the campaign.
I'm inclined to think that, like Lyndon Johnson in 1964, he spoke from the heart when he said he wanted to get out of Iraq in 16 months.
I think he regarded that as a very strategic idea, which was in the interest of the United States as well as his own interest for a variety of reasons, economic, military, sort of regional geopolitics.
All of those reasons drove him to believe that it was a very important thing to do.
And I think that, you know, again, I find these historical parallels somewhat convincing.
Like LBJ, after the election, he was subjected to intense pressure from the national security state.
He did resist for some weeks this pressure to start the bombing of North Vietnam, but finally caved in.
I think that Obama has caved in much more easily than LBJ did to the pressure of this current national security state on the issue of withdrawal from Iraq, simply because, you know, he was sold a bill of goods politically about his national security policy and apparently bought into it.
But, you know, this is inherently unknowable, just exactly what he was thinking on the campaign trail versus what he thinks now.
All we know is what the outcome is, and that's something we can be certain of.
Well, and we've talked before about, you know, what it is exactly that he knows or doesn't know about Iran's nuclear program.
And I told the phony story about Denis Kucinich correcting him in a debate in the fall of 2007 and explaining that there's such a thing on Earth as the CIA, and it's determined that there is no nuclear weapons program.
And you might have heard of this guy Mohamed ElBaradei.
You can Google him and read all about it.
And how, you know, you and I pretty much agreed.
I think it was pretty clear just, you know, watching the guy's face on the screen.
He didn't really have any idea what Kucinich was talking about.
Denis Kucinich really knew much more about the Iranian nuclear program than Obama at that point, that he could make that correction.
And yet now this guy's the president-elect.
Now he's been briefed by the CIA repeatedly.
He's got, you know, Thomas Fingar.
He must have met him at least one time or something.
And this man has no excuse whatsoever, this president-elect of ours, to pretend that there's a nuclear weapons program in Iran when Thomas Fingar, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, just told the press last week, Gareth, that he has no reason whatsoever to conclude that they decided wrong in the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, which said there was no nuclear weapons program, and nothing has changed in the meantime to make him think that it started back up again.
Absolutely.
And, you know, frankly, I do regard the role that Fingar is apparently playing now.
I mean, he's now out of the government and apparently is going to be an advisor to Obama.
And I do believe that that bodes well.
Oh, he is going to be an advisor to Obama.
Yes.
I hadn't seen that.
Yes, that's right.
And I do regard that as a source of some hope for learning, if nothing else, by the president himself.
Again, I have to say that I think that Obama is far more capable of learning on the job than any of the more recent presidents have been.
I think he's somewhat like JFK in that regard.
Again, he's going to posture for the national security state.
He's going to take a hard line.
But after he finds that that's not going to work, that it blows up in his face, that it's counterproductive, I think there's a decent chance that he will, in fact, be listening to Thomas Fingar and say, okay, we are going to try the position that we don't really know.
At best, at the most we can say is that we don't know, or the least we can say, is that we don't know what Iran's intentions are and we're going to start with that premise rather than indicting them ahead of time without having any evidence to base it on.
And that would be at least a step in the right direction.
And one of the things that I found in my interviews in Tehran is that what the Iranian government, what the Iranian regime really wants from Obama is change in the symbolism that is used to communicate with Iran.
What I think they are looking for is two essential ingredients.
And this is what I talked about in my very first article.
The first one is using the language of mutual respect, which has been missing thus far from U.S. official rhetoric in communications with Iran.
Simply recognizing the legitimacy of the Iranian Islamic Republic, recognizing that it is a legitimate state, and simply saying that we recognize that they deserve to be respected as an equal in international negotiations like any other state.
That's the first point.
The second point is to acknowledge that Iran has its own interests and concerns that we are prepared to listen to and to talk about, to negotiate on, not just to focus on the issue of their nuclear program, which is what has been the overwhelming, the overweening issue in the American discourse on Iran.
So if Obama could see to basically adopting those two parts of public communication with Iran, then we would see, I think, a willingness of Iran then to make some gestures to sort of help to facilitate the beginning of contact of real talks between the two countries.
And that could start a process which would make it easier for Obama to portray his talks with Iran as being productive, and Iran as beginning to be responsive and so forth.
And you could have a process of sort of mutual support politically for opening up negotiations.
Well, and if for no other reason than we've already leveled so many sanctions against them, we, our government, has already leveled so many sanctions against them and through the UN, that there's plenty of things to negotiate right there on the table.
It's like, hey, here's some stuff that we can negotiate about.
For example, another example is their role in Iraq.
And our government and their government's joint partnership in creating the Vichy regime of Nouri al-Maliki, the Dawa Party, and Supreme Islamic Council there in the Green Zone.
Well, this is one of the things that Iraqi, excuse me, Iranian officials and their advisors, think tank people that I spoke with, emphasized to me, that any negotiations between the United States and Iran would have to have both Iraq and Afghanistan as central parts of the deal.
And that's because, as the guy who's in charge of the Persian Gulf and Middle East center of the foreign ministries think tank said to me, look, we are in a situation where every move the United States makes in the Middle East, we have to be concerned about because of the state of hostility between the United States and Iraq, the hostility of the United States toward, excuse me, Iran.
And therefore, what has to happen in U.S.
-Iran negotiations, is that the entire fundamental relationship between the United States and Iran has to be transformed.
In other words, an agreement has to be a holistic agreement.
It has to represent, you know, the end of the hostilities between the United States and Iran.
Otherwise, it can't work.
There can't be a sort of, you know, they didn't use this simile, but it can't be like a salami loaf where you just slice off an issue and deal with that and leave the rest of it.
It's got to be the entire web of interrelated issues between the two countries because of the importance to Iran of being assured that the United States is no longer the enemy.
Here's one thing I don't understand.
I guess the closest thing I can get to understanding it is reading Scott Ritter's book, Target Iran.
But that is the point of view of Israeli intelligence and the Israeli prime minister's office and the establishment and the executive branch and whatever you have over there in Israel, the military establishment, that why are they so paranoid about Iran?
Scott Ritter says that in the Israeli conception, the Iranians are spinning a single centrifuge that is tantamount to having nuclear weapons, even though they have hundreds of them.
And it's not tantamount to it.
And so why is it that the Israelis are so paranoid?
And then I guess in America, on the American side, you have generals who all want to cash their million-dollar welfare checks and you have military-industrial complex and the Israel lobby working together.
But it seems pretty strange, and I know they got away with it in Iraq, but still it seems pretty strange to have a foreign policy that's based completely in debunkable myth that anyone like Mohamed ElBaradei himself with three minutes and Google can prove is forged.
Well, you know, in my sort of analytical framework, I begin by assessing whether it's Israeli officials or American national security officials.
I think the same sort of test or analytical framework applies.
You know, what is in it for the people who are adopting this point of view?
And it seems to me that, in principle, there is no central difference between the reasons for the national security state of the United States to adopt Iran as the enemy and to demonize it, and Israel's adoption of the demonization of the Iran framework.
I think the interests that are at stake here are essentially the same, although obviously there are differences of all kinds in terms of scale and the exact geopolitical interests that the Israelis have at stake versus those that the United States national security state has at stake.
But I begin with the fact that Israel is the single strongest military power in the Middle East, just as the United States is the strongest.
Of course, the United States is the global power and therefore towers over Israel, but nevertheless, Israel is stronger than any other Middle Eastern country militarily.
And therefore, it has the dominant power viewpoint on the region.
It wants to nip in the bud any rise of an alternative, of a rival power, as they view Iran as being.
And therefore, they're going to take advantage of any opportunity that they have as a national security state with that interest to go after Iran.
And they've been doing that for decades now, ever since the end of the Cold War, when it became clear that Iran was now the primary enemy of Israel.
They've adopted that point of view, that if they had any opportunity to attack Iran, they would.
If they could prevent Iran from having a nuclear program, they would.
They would use whatever methods and means they had available.
So, I mean, I go back to sort of that analysis of whose interests are being served by this.
And it's a combination of sort of a state interest, and within that state, of specific bureaucracies who clearly have an interest in maintaining the enmity toward Iran.
And it's no different in principle from how the United States works, in my view.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess it's really no different than the Spanish are a giant threat, or Germany's going to invade us, and we'll all be speaking German, or any of the myths.
Japan is prepared to conquer California at any day now, if we don't stop them.
Yeah, there's some kind of parallel there between any situation where a stronger power, which is not really threatened genuinely by another country, when it adopts a demonization and sort of a threat analysis that's completely out of line with reality, then you know something else is going on there.
And, you know, the exact circumstances and the exact interests vary from one case to another, but I think there is something in common there across the board.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so let's talk about terrorist groups backed by the United States.
And by terrorist groups, I don't mean dictatorships, Islamo-fascist dictatorships in the region like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the military dictatorship in Egypt or anything like that.
I mean stateless groups that would like to be a state one day and have the same morals as states.
That is, they go around murdering people.
Like, for example, Jandala, which is in Reuters from two days ago.
Iran has proof U.S. and U.K. back police killer group.
And hell, Brian Ross reported this at ABC News a year and a half ago or something.
We've covered this over the years.
Did you find out while you were in Iran anything about the group Jandala?
This was, of course, something that I would have loved to have been able to pursue.
I mean, I would have loved to have pursued that angle.
I would have loved to have gotten together with people who were involved directly in the Iranian nuclear program, people at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
But unfortunately, I was not able to make contact with any officials who had a portfolio that related to those things.
And this is, of course, the problem that Western journalists have had for years and years, that Iranian officials involved in national security things with the most sensitive issues in national security, the atomic energy program or the domestic security issues, or for that matter, I mean, military people are simply not available to Western journalists.
I did try, but I didn't succeed in that regard.
So, no, I don't have anything new to report at all, really, on either the nuclear issue or the question of Jandala and other ethnic insurgent groups apparently supported by the United States.
I did, however, just as an aside, when I was in Tehran, I appeared on Press TV, the Iranian officially financed and sponsored English language television service, and Ambassador Soltaniyeh, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, was on the same program, on the Iranian nuclear program, and I actually was able to ask him a question.
I did a proto-interview, the beginning of an interview, with the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, so that's the closest that I've ever come to being able to have a contact with an Iranian official on the issue of Iran's nuclear program.
I asked him why, no, I didn't ask why, I asked whether he had any reason to believe, or had he been given any assurance that the IAEA would ever respond to the Iranian 117-page document which represented their refutation, their response to the alleged studies document.
And, frankly, he really didn't answer it very well, he didn't answer it very directly.
Oh, he didn't?
What did he say?
I can't even remember what he said, but he sort of wandered off the topic, so it was not a very effective interview.
But I do hope, frankly, that I will be able, through contact with some people at Press TV who have Soltaniyeh on regularly, that they can put me in touch with either Soltaniyeh or one of his staff people, and finally that maybe I'll be able to make some contact with people involved in the atomic energy program there.
Well, it's your fault for bringing it up, so I've got to ask you, what's the progress on your story about the, I think, probable, or is there a stronger word I can safely use, Israeli origins of the forged Iranian laptop which purported to reveal missile development toward the end of delivering nuclear weapons and a green salt laser enrichment program and the rest of this garbage on it?
You know, I'm sorry to say, I'm really disappointed to have to disappoint the listeners and yourself on this, but I don't have anything new to report yet.
This is something that I'm going to have to spend some more time working on, and just haven't been able to work to focus on it yet.
All right, so do I need to leave it at probable Israeli origins, or do we know more specifically than that?
I think that it's fair at this point to say circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that they have Israeli origins, and that's as far as we can go at this point.
Well, and I'll go ahead and tell everybody in the audience, ask you please, if you go to your search engine and type in Gareth Porter's name and Iranian laptop, you can hear my interviews with him all about it and read all his great articles, and it's a very important story.
It's basically the linchpin of all of America's accusations about Iran's nuclear program.
Virtually all of it hangs on this forged laptop, which has nothing to do with anything they've ever done.
I mean, it's true that that is the only thing that one can find that anyone will refer to in support of the idea that there is an intention on the part of Iran to procure a nuclear weapon.
I mean, that really is the thing, right?
Other than that, all they have is that they were secretly digging a tunnel or digging a warehouse to put the Natanz facility, which as of at least 2005 was still completely empty.
There's pictures of it in the BBC.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's not a very serious piece of evidence, obviously.
And again, as you've rightly pointed out, I mean, the NIE reaches the judgment that there was a decision that there will be no nuclear weapons made in 2003.
I think that the subject of the politics of Iranian policy toward the subject of nuclear weapons is one that has received very, very little, if any, treatment in the discourse on this issue in the United States.
And it's one that, it seems to me, would repay a great deal of understanding that would lead to much greater certitude that Iran is not interested in nuclear weapons.
If you think about the context of what happened in 2003, one of the things that I'm writing about today for the fifth and final piece of my five-part series is the importance in Iranian national security policy of the Shia relationships that have now become really important, particularly since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for obvious reasons.
For the first time in modern history, Iran now has a friendly Shia-dominated government in Baghdad.
And that is, of course, because the U.S. got rid of Saddam Hussein.
But having said that, I mean, the Iranians now are able to cultivate a Shia elite, political elite, in Baghdad and in Iraq, which gives them an assurance that they will not face a repetition of the attack against Iran by Saddam Hussein, which resulted in hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, Iranians dying in that war.
Which is a strong argument against the idea that they would think that they even really need nuclear weapons.
Well, I mean, there are a couple of different angles on this, which I think are important, and I agree with that point.
One of the things that was said to me, which caused me to really scratch my head and say, you know, I hadn't really thought sufficiently about the significance of this, is that during the Iran-Iraq war, despite the fact that Iraq was using weapons of mass destruction against Iran, that is, dropping a chemical weapon, which were killing, you know, certainly thousands of Iranians, the Iranians never retaliated with weapons of mass destruction.
They never used biological or chemical weapons against Iraq.
And I'm told, and I think this is a credible statement, that the reason that that was not done is because it was regarded as forbidden by Islam, by the Shia view of Islam.
Well, see, that was one of the things I was going to ask you, and I was going to frame it all cool as one of the things that the media never talks about.
You were mentioning how there's really no discussion of any of the details of this in the media, and so the unsaid or unproven premise that, well, everybody knows they're building nuclear weapons or whatever, still continues on.
But I've read before that the Ayatollah Khomeini has issued an Islamic fatwa, holy order writ or something, saying that it's forbidden by Islam to develop nuclear weapons.
I've got to say, on the other hand, though, I don't really, you know, I've got a giant handful of salt to take that, forget even a grain, you know.
I'm not sure how seriously to take that.
Do you think that he really, I don't know, because I think we've agreed in the past that they're trying to get their enrichment to the point where, if it's perfected enough, where if it really came down to it, they could withdraw from the NPT, kick out the inspectors, and actually go ahead and make highly enriched uranium.
Well, I mean, obviously that theoretical possibility exists.
But I do think that it's true that there was a fatwa issued.
Well, and that they were working toward that, that's what they were working toward, right?
It was like the ability to not necessarily make weapons-grade uranium, but be able to.
That's right.
Which I don't care, don't get me wrong, I was trying to be clear.
It's a matter of a combination of status, prestige, and the existential deterrent that goes with the knowledge of how to do it.
And, you know, one hears from people who are outside the Iranian government, but who have contacts in the government, that, you know, there are different viewpoints on the question of nuclear weapons, that, you know, some people may have made the argument at some point over the past several years that we should keep the option open of having nuclear weapons, but that that is not the dominant view.
The dominant view is either no nuclear weapons under any circumstances, or at most we would leave ourselves the capability, the knowledge of how to do it, but without the intention of going ahead with that.
And the point that I want to make is that once you have a transformation of the region's politics, and, you know, thereby a transformation of the national security situation for Iran, so fundamental as what has happened since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of a Shia-dominated government in Iraq, you have a very powerful support for those who have been saying, you know, nuclear weapons are not only wrong under the precepts of Shia Islam, but are not going to be needed or helpful to Iran for its national security.
But I think that there's a powerful argument to be made, and this is the fifth and final article that I've just been working on, a powerful argument to be made that Iran now views its power and its national security in the region primarily overwhelmingly in terms of its ties with other Shia in the region, that is, primarily in Iraq and in Lebanon and in the Gulf states which have Shia populations, and that it regards those ties which are permanent and fundamental as far more of a, not a guarantee, but a strong support for Iran's national security, and more valuable than the questionable possession of a nuclear weapon.
All right, everybody, Gareth Porter is an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for Interpress Service.
All his IPS articles can be found at antiwar.com slash Porter.
You can also find him at the Huffington Post.
And where else have you been writing lately, Gareth?
Well, I mean, I had something on the Ross story, of course.
Oh, right, yeah, the Ross story.
Listen, everybody, you have to Google Gareth Porter, Iranian laptop.
There's a couple for IPS that you can find at antiwar.com, but most especially the one at Ross story, that's the real goods right there.
And hopefully, again, I will be able to come up with the ultimate story, but that still remains to be captured.
And, of course, the fourth of the five pieces will be out today on IPS and Huffington Post and then the fifth one tomorrow.
Great.
All right, everybody, that's Gareth Porter.
Thanks a lot for your time today, Gareth.
It was great to talk to you, Scott.
Thanks.
