06/17/09 – Jason Ditz – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I'd like to welcome our next guest on the show today.
It's Jason Ditz.
He's our managing news editor at Antiwar.com.
You can find all he writes at news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
So, Jason, you've been watching the news develop since the Iranian election was held last Friday.
And I guess probably reading every newspaper in the world and putting together these awesome news summaries that you do at news.antiwar.com.
So I guess I'd like to just sort of ask you in general, well, let's start with this.
What's happening in Iran today?
Are things calming down or is the revolution being televised or what the hell?
Well, things don't seem to be calming down any.
The rallies are still going on.
But it's awfully hard to get reliable information out of there.
The foreign ministries revoked all the foreign accreditations of journalists in the country.
So it's really only the state media that's covering anything.
Yeah, I read Press TV's version of it, and it was the triumphant, heroic Ahmadinejad is successful and his resoundingly defeated opponent has sour grapes.
Yeah.
Which, you know, I wonder, from what you can tell, is that pretty close to the truth or is there any way to know any of these answers or any of these questions yet, really?
I think it's really hard to tell.
There's certainly some unusual results in that election, but I don't know that him winning is one of them.
Right.
Well, tell us about some of the unusual things that have gone on there since last Friday.
Well, I mean, or actually, what happened unusual last Friday that supposedly was the reason for all this?
Well, there was an enormous voter turnout, of course, that was about 85% of the registered voters turned out, and everybody figured that would favor his challenger, Musabi.
But there was also a lot of question if any of them would get the 50% necessary or if it would have to go to a runoff election this week.
And after the vote, the Interior Ministry started releasing these results showing Ahmadinejad had just an enormous margin of victory.
But it wasn't so much that he won because most of the polls showed him winning by quite a bit.
It was the secondary candidates, Mehdi Karoubi and Mohsen Rassai, had such small numbers.
I mean, it was hard to imagine that they would only get...
I mean, Karoubi got 0.85% and he got 17% in 2005.
And now these two are candidates, the lesser-known candidates here, are more or less to the left and to the right of the two more centrist candidates that are Musabi and Ahmadinejad.
Is that basically right?
Pretty much.
I don't know an awful...
Karoubi's definitely sort of a socialist liberal sort of candidate.
I don't know too much about Mohsen Rassai except that he's an economist and he's a self-described conservative.
But he was also in the military.
So basically what happened is that these two more fringe candidates were expected to get 5 or 10 or something percent and they got barely anything at all, 0.85 or whatever.
Right.
They got virtually nothing.
And so I guess this is the theory that Matt Barganier put on the anti-war blog was maybe Ahmadinejad stole an election he was already going to win anyway.
That certainly seems plausible right now.
And you know, it kind of does make sense, and I don't know whether the CIA wrote this article or what, but at least it was out there somewhere that perhaps the Iranians were panicking because of the Cairo speech At least in the Western press, a lot of people tried to attribute the success of the more Western parties against Hezbollah in Lebanon's elections last week or the week before that to the new era of good feelings and whatever brought about by Barack Obama and that they were worried that this Mousavi guy might do too well And so perhaps the Iranian Ayatollah guys were panicking and moving this way.
But I guess that amounts to simply speculation, you know?
Yeah, there's really no way of knowing for sure right now what happened.
But it doesn't seem like Mousavi was a tremendously different candidate from Ahmadinejad.
So I don't really see where the Ayatollahs would care all that much which of the two won.
Well, why do you think the people care all that much?
Is there any indication what the people of Tehran, the young and protesting this week, see as this guy's superiority?
I mean, hell, he used to be the prime minister back during the days of the Ayatollah Khomeini, right?
This guy Mousavi?
Right, he was the prime minister in the mid-80s.
And he's actually a religious authority guy or not?
Not so much, I don't think.
His position's changed quite a bit from in the 80s, too.
In the 80s he was very much a command economy sort of advocate.
And now he's urging for a somewhat more open, regulated market.
What about this guy Rafsanjani?
He's the former president of Iran.
And apparently he came out and endorsed, in fact, I read someone who wrote an article that said, oh, Ahmadinejad won, get over it.
And he cited Rafsanjani's endorsement.
I think this may have been at the Moon of Alabama blog.
And he cited this guy Rafsanjani's endorsement of Mousavi as something that probably really hurt him.
You know, like having Dick Cheney endorse John McCain kind of thing.
I don't know if he's that unpopular that it would do him serious harm.
But yeah, he's definitely been one of the supporters.
And he actually wrote an open letter to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei right before the election calling for the Ayatollah to sort of crack down on Ahmadinejad for what he called distortions that he made during the presidential debate and saying that if he didn't do it, that people might take the law into their own hands.
Well, and to the point, and I guess this should have been said for people who haven't been paying much attention and they're just kind of tuning in and don't really know.
Basically what's happened in Iran over the last half a week or so is that it's the biggest political upheaval there since the revolution of 1979.
There were hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, as reported by Robert Fisk, at least hundreds of thousands of supporters of this at least quote-unquote defeated candidate Mossavi marching across Tehran.
There's been all kinds of violence, although I don't think I've heard that there have been real severe crackdowns like are feared, at least not yet.
But this is a huge deal.
One way or another, Iran has changed forever after this.
Oh, definitely, and I'm not sure how much of it has to do with the candidate himself as the government's reaction after the election when the protests first started.
I mean, banning the foreign media and cracking down on them and there were rumors that he was placed under house arrest, although whether that ever actually happened we don't really know because he ended up giving a public speech just a couple of days after he was reported arrested.
But so far the state media is reporting eight people were killed, so it's not a huge number of deaths yet.
But again, we don't really know.
Well, and one of the things I've been keeping my eye on actually has been Robert Fisk at The Independent.
I know that his most recent article is about how despite the ban on such things, he's out there in the middle of these protesters still reporting on this stuff.
Fear has gone in Iran is the title of his most recent one.
Fear has gone in a land that has tasted freedom.
So I guess we'll see.
You know, there's at least one Western reporter who's brave enough to get out there and find a way to smuggle his reports back to the papers.
Yeah, and I suspect it's easier for a print journalist to do that than a television journalist because it seems like anyone with a camera is getting roughed up by militias or police or whatever.
Well, now, a year ago or so, a little bit more than a year ago, Andrew Coburn in Counterpunch, followed by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine and Brian Ross at ABC News talked about covert funding for, well, vague definitions, I guess I can only paraphrase, but seemingly outright support for terrorist groups like Jandala.
And as well as interfering in their political system this way or that way or whatever, apparently $400 million at least.
Is there any indication from the reports you've seen over the last week that this has to do with that, that all these green protests are some kind of color-coded revolution and that the CIA is trying to pull off another 1953 here?
Well, the Iranian government has complained about what it called intolerable Western interference since the election, but I'm not really sure that there's any indication that it was sparked by that.
In fact, I would say, if anything, the Jandala attacks of the week or two ahead of the election probably helped Ahmadinejad more than anything because he's seen as tougher on the terrorist elements.
Yeah, I mean, I think, well, we talked about at the time whether that was the purpose of them, you know, was to shore up support for him because, as we've seen, Daniel Lubon wrote there on Jim Loeb's blog about Daniel Pipes and others outright endorsing Ahmadinejad, saying they would vote for him, they would rather have him there because he'll be easier to have a war with.
Well, yeah, it would be awfully hard to argue that there's a pressing need to have a war right away against a brand new, newly elected president, especially now after what's gone on there.
If he ended up somehow getting this election overturned and ended up in power, it would be awfully hard for the West to make a case that he needs to be attacked immediately.
Yes, certainly, it would be much harder to make that case.
And certainly that's why the neocons want the hardliners and not anybody that can be called a moderate in power there.
There's really no doubt about that.
It's really kind of incredible.
But, you know, it's funny, though, when you talk about these hundreds of thousands of protesters and maybe even a million protesters, this is far beyond what the CIA could pull off inside Iran right now.
It's not 1953.
Well, hopefully it's far beyond what they can pull off, but I guess we don't really know that for sure.
I mean, they've certainly done it in other countries.
Well, I guess I have enough faith in the Ayatollah's secret police to kill enough people to make sure that anything like that wouldn't really work.
I mean, that we're working for the Americans or whatever, you know what I mean?
They have a pretty tight fist, you know, tight control in their police state there, far tighter than, you know, Mosaddegh's government wasn't able to fend off such attacks, you know what I mean?
Yeah, that's true.
But, anyway, you know, that's only my speculation.
What the hell do I know?
I believe Andrew Coburn, and certainly, you know, when Hirsch got all mad at Andrew Coburn for scooping him, you know, that Bush certainly appropriated this money.
Of course, we saw the Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann piece just a couple of weeks ago where they said this is going to make it very difficult for Obama to deal with Iran.
On TV, he's pretending to be nice to them, and yet in the real world, in the diplomatic world, everybody knows that he has not rescinded that covert action policy.
Well, certainly, that's not going to make it any easier for him, but, you know, there have been quite a few people in the administration saying that the whole reason for the so-called negotiations with Iran are just to make the case to the rest of the world that Iran won't list a reason.
Well, very true.
Very good point.
In fact, that is the overarching theme, basically, of Dennis Ross's new book, but as we just discussed with Philip Weiss from the Mondo Weiss blog on the show, Dennis Ross has been kicked upstairs, and the Iran folder has been taken away from him.
He has maybe a more powerful post at the National Security Council, but it seems like he was removed for the right reasons rather than the wrong ones.
Maybe?
Well, maybe, but he's not really the only one that said that in the administration.
Hillary Clinton said pretty much the same thing in the past.
Well, in fact, tell us about that, because you wrote a couple of pieces about this.
Her appearance, it was on George Stephanopoulos, was it?
Yeah, yeah.
Where she actually invoked Iraq and the preemptive first strike.
Right.
She was saying basically that it's U.S. interest to keep Iran wondering if we're going to do the exact same thing we did with Iraq and attack them over their nuclear program.
Yeah, crazy.
Isn't that interesting, too?
She's the Secretary of State, and she's basically come off sounding like Condoleezza Rice, talking about, oh yeah, we'll negotiate with them, but not like it's going to go anywhere, and that kind of cynical talk before even sitting down with them for the first meeting.
Right.
It's not a very diplomatic stance to take.
The wife of the former president, whoever gave her any of this power anyway, that's my thing.
How in the hell is it that Hillary Clinton is the Secretary of State of the United States?
Thomas Jefferson, that was his job.
That's her job?
I don't know.
I'm throwing for a loop here.
I'm sorry.
I know that's a little bit outside your realm of expertise, my loops that I'm throwing for, but still.
All right.
Tell us one more thing about Ahmadi Najaf's visit to Russia.
He went to two different summits while he was visiting Russia yesterday, and he declared that the economic downturn that we're seeing right now is basically the end of the age of empire, and that the U.S. Western imperialist system is breaking down because it's just not economically sustainable anymore.
So in other words, he sounded like a libertarian talking about Russia in the 1980s.
Right.
And again, this is the guy who his election supposedly is in dispute or whatever, but there he goes traveling abroad as the head of state, and if nothing else, that basically makes his re-election the fait accompli there, doesn't it?
I mean, not that his term would be up tomorrow or whatever anyway, but there seems to be a little subtext in that.
Yes, and he kind of went out of his way not to address what was going on in Tehran while he was visiting Russia, but Russian officials welcomed him as the president, and nobody really said anything to contradict that position, that he'd won that election.
Well, everybody, that's Jason Ditz.
You can find all his excellent news summaries.
I think this is one of the real great innovations at Antiwar.com in the last year, is that rather than simply scouring every newspaper in the world for, what, I don't know, 20 hours a day or something, Jason also is writing up all these summaries where he's taken all the news stories about each topic, giving you all the links to all the original sources, but also giving you the shorthand summing up for you all the headlines of the day.
It's news.antiwar.com, and plenty of great analysis in there, too.
I don't mean to sell that short at all.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Jason.
It's been great.
Sure.
Thanks for having me, Scott.