09/29/09 – Scott Ritter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, TX, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm going to start with our first guest today right off the bat here, it's Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and now antiwar activist, he's the author of Iraq Confidential, Target Iran, Frontier Justice, Waging Peace, The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement.
You can find his articles often at Truthdig.com and he has one in the Guardian from Friday that you need to take a look at.
It's called Keeping Iran Honest.
Welcome back to the show Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, thanks.
Well I really appreciate you joining us today.
It's my pleasure.
Alright so basically let's get right to it.
Last week the IAEA, I believe on Monday, was notified by the Iranians that they have a facility that they're building that's going to be a uranium enrichment facility one day.
And then somehow this turned into Barack Obama and Nicholas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown busted the Iranians for hiding a secret nuclear weapons factory or something.
How are both of these things true?
What exactly is going on?
Well first of all there is no secret nuclear weapons factory.
Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
And so we have to deal with facts, not speculation, not fantasy, not Obama's faith-based analysis.
We need to deal with the facts as they present themselves today.
And as we speak, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is mandated by international law to carry out safeguards-based inspections in Iran, has said there is no evidence that Iran's nuclear program has anything to do with a nuclear weapons program.
There's no evidence of the existence of a nuclear weapons program.
The totality of Iran's nuclear materials stockpile is, under safeguards inspections, fully accounted for.
There's been no diversion of this material.
There's simply no nuclear weapons program.
Therefore, you can't have a secret nuclear weapons factory, which is of course what is being alluded to here by Obama, Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, and others out in the media and the blogosphere.
Well, I mean, but aren't they saying that, well, sure, everything you say is right up until we found out about their secret nuclear weapons factory last week, which makes all of what you just said moot.
Well, again, there's no secret nuclear weapons factory.
What we have right now in Iran is a reinforced concrete-based hole in the ground, which the Iranians contend will, in 6, 12, 18 months, house 3,000 centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium.
That's not a nuclear weapons factory.
That's a uranium enrichment plant, in this case a pilot plant, 3,000 centrifuges, smaller in scope and scale than the existing plant, which is under IAEA monitoring inspections in Natanz.
Most importantly, it's an empty facility.
You're saying it's going to be an enrichment facility one day.
Look, the Iranians have declared that they have a facility under construction and that they intend to use this facility to house 3,000 centrifuges for the purpose of enriching uranium.
Prior to this facility becoming operational, prior to the insertion of any nuclear material, IAEA inspectors will be on the ground in the facility doing a thorough investigation of what the facility will be used for, how it will be used, where the nuclear material will come, where the nuclear material will go.
There's nothing secret here.
This is a full disclosure on the part of Iran.
The question that is raised is, did Iran disclose this facility in a timely fashion?
And that's where the controversy is.
We're basically having a debate about a technicality as opposed to a legality, the issue of violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
There is no debate.
Iran has not violated its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The legal advisor to the IAEA has made this crystal clear.
This is not about a violation.
It's about a technicality.
Is Iran required to declare the construction of a facility 180 days in advance of any potential insertion of nuclear material?
Or at the time it declares its intent to produce this facility?
Right.
Okay, now stop.
Stop right there.
Everybody, if you just tune in, it's Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector.
We're talking about Iran and the hubbub, basically, last week and all the new accusations about their nuclear program.
And I'll ask you to forgive me, Scott, for playing so dumb at the beginning here.
I'm basically, I was just trying to draw out of you at the very beginning there, the very bottom line for people who are not familiar with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, who don't know anything about the International Atomic Energy Agency, what a safeguards agreement is or any of these things.
I just want to get the basic level, ground level thing out there.
The Iranians told the IAEA, not Obama busted them.
The building is empty, not it's making nuclear weapons, et cetera, et cetera.
Just to get the basic building blocks here so that we can get into the more technical aspects of the argument.
Because I think it's important.
There's a debate going on right now.
I guess you could say it's AWC versus ACW over there at the arms control wonk.
They're saying, oh yeah, they're in violation of their technicality.
And Gordon Prather's view, of course, is that that's not altogether clear and that kind of thing.
But I just want to make sure that the audience can basically get the basics of the story before we get into the hard part.
So now let's get into the hard part.
And please explain to the people Iran's signature to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, what that entails as far as the safeguards agreement with the IAEA, what the inspections have been up until this point.
And then we can get to this debate over the additional protocol and the subsidiary arrangements and so forth, please.
Well, I believe Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and entered into a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency sometime in 1976, back in the 70s.
At that time, when it signed the treaty, it entered a safeguards agreement.
And with that comes subsidiary agreements.
These are additional agreements between the IAEA and Iran concerning technical aspects of Iran's obligations.
One of the subsidiary agreements is Code 3.1, which deals with the issue of declaration of a facility so that the IAEA can do design, verification, inspections, etc., so they can basically monitor the facility prior to nuclear material being inserted, to the point where nuclear material is inserted, etc., so that they don't have any hiccup in their material balance.
What we're doing here for the IAEA, and this is what people need to understand, is full accounting of the nuclear material under the nation subjected to safeguard inspections.
That's the most important thing.
Everything else supports that, and we can't lose sight of that in this debate.
And so the IAEA wants to make sure that if a nation such as Iran, who is a signatory to the NPT, is going to build a facility that's going to manufacture or enhance or somehow make use, dispose of nuclear material, that this facility is fully understood prior to the nuclear material being inserted, so that it can fully account for what's occurring to the nuclear material.
In accordance with the original subsidiary agreement, Code 3.1, Iran was required to declare any facility under construction 180 days prior to nuclear material being inserted, so that Iran, together with the IAEA, could come up with a mechanism of verification and inspection once nuclear material was inserted, so that there could be a full accounting.
That's the basic concept there of the safeguards agreement and the subsidiary agreement, Code 3.1.
Go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, wasn't there a thing earlier this year where the United States was trying to get the IAEA to find that Iran had violated that 3.1, and the IAEA's own legal eagle, Gordon Prather, called them, their lawyer guy, said, well, this isn't really a violation, unless it makes the Director General unable to continue to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material.
That's right.
The bottom line for the IAEA, first of all, you need to understand that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of technical violations of subsidiary agreements and safeguard agreements around the world every year.
You know, the world isn't perfect, mistakes are made, some of the mistakes are intentional, but the safeguards inspectors who travel the world and do these safeguard inspections in accordance with the various safeguard agreements between the IAEA and member states, they come across technical violations.
Reports are submitted incorrectly, reports are submitted late, etc., etc.
And so, to prevent each technical violation from becoming the end-of-the-world scenario, we have to get back down to brass tacks here, and the bottom line is, is the technical violation of a nature which prevents the IAEA from doing its fundamental task, which is accounting for the totality of the nuclear material, you know, at play here?
And what the legal advisor to the Director General of the IAEA said is that this is not anything that changes our ability, the IAEA's ability, to carry this out, therefore we need to be careful about talking in terms of a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
We don't have a violation.
What we have is a legal debate between Iran and the IAEA about Code 3.1.
You see, in 1992, in the aftermath of the Iraq fiasco, and it was a fiasco for the IAEA which had given Iraq a relatively clean bill of health, and suddenly to find out that there's this nuclear program that was taking place under the nose of the safeguards inspectors, the IAEA determined that it needed to basically tighten up its procedures.
And so it came up with two things.
One, it came up with what we call the Additional Protocol of Inspections.
That's enhanced inspection activities by the IAEA safeguard inspectors in terms of no-notice inspections and what they can bring to bear and all this stuff.
And then they also tightened up the subsidiary agreements.
Code 3.1 in particular was redone to take away the 180-day lead time and say that the IAEA had to be informed at the time.
Now here's the thing people need to understand.
Simply because the IAEA has determined a need and indeed has defined new procedures, they are not legally binding until which time an agreement is entered into between the IAEA and the member state.
The IAEA cannot impose additional requirements, restrictions, whatever, on a signatory nation above and beyond the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty unless that nation says, yes, we want to do this.
And in 1992, Iran did not say, we want to do this.
Well, and this is easy to understand if we just put the United States in Iran's position.
If our government signs a treaty and then there are subsidiary agreements and additional protocols and whatever under that, that's up to our Senate to say whether that's the law of this land or not.
Not up to the United Nations or a combination of France and Russia or anyone else.
This is what the gentlemen and ladies at Arms Control Wonk or whatever they call themselves need to understand, that simply because you're a geek who sits at a computer screen and has some sort of a high level of IQ and you can talk in technical terms, that doesn't make you somebody who can rewrite international law.
Iran is a sovereign state, and I would like to introduce to these people the concept of a constitutional form of government.
Now, we allegedly have one here at home, and as you rightly point out, the Senate would go bonkers if the President, whether it be a Republican or a Democratic President, entered into a treaty obligation and made the United States accountable to that treaty without that treaty going through a ratification process into the Senate and that treaty being ratified but in fact, that would be an illegal agreement between the President and the State.
It would be unconstitutional.
Iran has a constitution, believe it or not.
I mean, a lot of people forget that Iran is a constitutional government.
It's an Islamic Republic, and the Republic form of government talks about checks and balances between the Executive, the President, and the Legislative, the Majlis, or the Parliament.
And in this case, the Parliament is mandated to basically ratify any international agreement between the Islamic Republic and another nation or international organization.
And so people make fun of it.
They say, well, the Majlis has no role in this.
Well, excuse me.
The Majlis has every role in this, and until the Iranian Parliament ratifies an agreement, it is not legally binding.
And as the legal advisor to the Director General of the IAEA has noted, the fact is, from 1976 to 2003, Iran was not found to be in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty simply because it operated under the old Code 3.1.
You know, the new Code 3.1 is a technical problem, a technical issue.
It's not about fundamental issues such as the diversion of nuclear material, et cetera.
This is really a strange debate to be having it.
You know, it's a wonkish debate.
It's the kind of debate that people have when they don't have facts, when they don't have figures, when they want to discuss an issue on the periphery.
Let's get back down to what we're talking about here, because the wonks who talk about Code 3.1 then spin it out to say that this is alarming, this is dangerous, this is exactly what we said was going to happen.
They predicted finding such a facility for years.
Nothing has happened.
This is a tempest in a teapot.
It's much ado about nothing.
It's a very wonkish debate we're having here.
Yeah.
Well, and it's important, though, because, you know, well, one of the top headlines, I don't know if it's still the top headline on antiwar.com today, is the Iran debate over.
And it's about how our news editor Jason Ditz was in the comment section over at Slashdot where people tend to have degrees and are pretty educated.
And he was looking at all their coverage of the Iran in the comment section there and their coverage of Iran.
And it was very split about whether we should have a war with Iran or not.
But the question of whether Iran is making nuclear weapons or not is apparently been decided out there in the general narrative.
And the fact that the CIA only, you know, according to Newsweek, only last week or week before last, the CIA is reaffirming their judgment in the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that says that the Iranians have not chosen politically to have a nuclear weapons program to pursue nuclear weapons.
And this is while they're they're saying they've known about this secret facility all this time.
So the CIA has known about this, this facility that has only recently been declared for years, apparently.
And they still said that we don't conclude that this means that they've made a decision to pursue nuclear weapons at all.
It's just, as you say, well, it's another facility for enriching uranium in.
Big deal.
Show me that it's more than that and then I'll start worrying.
Look, this I hope people have a, you know, when we're talking about this issue, I hope, you know, that the hair is rising on the back of necks and there's a sickening feeling of deja vu all over again to to quote Yogi Berra.
In 2002, the United States, both in terms of the government, the Senate, the executive office and indeed mainstream media, it found Iraq guilty of reconstituting a weapons of mass destruction capability and of of hiding weapons of mass destruction and of basically, you know, arming itself to the teeth.
They did guilty.
It was done.
We didn't we weren't debating.
If you go back and take a look at the test of testimonies before the Senate in the summer of 2002 and before the House, what you see is it's a foregone conclusion that Iraq had these programs, that Iraq was this was armed to the teeth, that inspections couldn't work.
And what was the end result?
We went to war.
You know, the same thing's happening today.
The debate, as you as you say, is pretty much over.
There's very few people up there jumping up and down saying, hey, time out, you know, show me the show me the beef.
This is a very dangerous development.
And we had better reflect on the fact that we went down this path once before and look where it got us.
Absolute disaster.
Well, this is me escaping to the end of the interview here, Scott, but I'm gonna go ahead and lay this on you.
You may be the only person in this society who can stop this.
I mean, I don't know what it would take if we all got to raise money so you can afford to camp out in front of the news stations, the TV stations all day in New York City there or what we got to do.
But you're basically the only person who can say, look, I'm a Marine.
I'm a weapons inspector.
I'm not asking you.
I'm telling you what they're saying is not right.
This is what is right.
Who else can do it?
Who else has your credentials and and and your grasp of detail to get up there and refute this?
I mean, if the debate is over, then the war is going to happen.
If it's decided, well, yes, they're obviously making nuclear weapons and they only understand one thing for us, then we already lost.
Well, you know, first of all, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I have to tell you, I mean, it's a sad state of affairs if it comes down to the shoulders of one person who's not even directly involved in this particular problem.
Well, but you can start off everything you say with, look, you should have listened to me last time.
You better listen to me now.
Well, what I'm hopeful of is that it's not just me, but it's it's other people saying, look, we all should have listened, not just to Ritter, but to to the facts.
I mean, if we turn this into a fact based debate as opposed to this, this, you know, fiction based, this faith based analysis that's taking place, I do believe the truth will out.
I mean, the bottom line is there's no evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
But sadly, you know, Secretary of State Clinton has said, you know, there's there's really nothing to discuss with the Iranians right now.
No, the truth is, there's everything to discuss with the Iranians.
We need to determine and this is an important issue.
You know, we have a president who says he wants nonproliferation to be at the center of his grand nuclear disarmament strategy.
For that to work, there has to be a viable nonproliferation treaty.
And for there to be a viable nonproliferation treaty, the United States has to be mature enough to accept an Iran operating within its full rights, including Article four, which gives them a right to enrich uranium.
We can't sit there and say, you know, we will turn a blind eye to Israel's refusal to even consider a nonproliferation treaty signature while we condemn Iran for doing that which it is legally allowed to do.
You know, we need to get serious about nonproliferation.
We need to get serious about disarmament.
And we also need to get serious about the fact that this is not 2003.
America simply cannot fight another war.
And I'm not saying that, you know, we're going to lose the war in terms of Iran, you know, suddenly invading the United States.
Iran's a threat to nobody.
But I can pretty much guarantee this.
We will not prevail against Iran.
And if we overextend ourselves, you know, then we run into a new world.
And the new world is a world that has been liberated, so to speak, from the tyranny of American deterrence policy.
Because right now, we have an entire East-West equilibrium that's based upon the ability of the United States to impose its will around the world through a combination of economic, political, and military power.
But the second we not just rattle the sword, but we pull the sword out and start slashing, and we don't achieve the result we want, that concept of deterrence-based policy is gone.
And that, you're going to see, is going to cause a huge ripple.
And we don't need to push that issue right now.
Our economies in tatters.
You know, we're in the basis of rebuilding relationships based on trust with the world.
We don't need to throw that all away on a misadventure based upon a lie.
You know, Iran is not a threat.
The Islamic Republic is not a threat.
And its nuclear program is not a threat.
And that's what we need to focus on, not some esoteric debate on whether or not, you know, Iran's provision of a letter in 2003 which talked about voluntary compliance with additional protocols in the new Code 3.1 is somehow legally binding if the Iranian parliament hasn't ratified it yet.
Well, now, back in 2005, you wrote a couple of articles for Al Jazeera about this, and we talked about this on the radio back then.
And you said basically what our government frames as plan A, plan B, and plan C for how to deal with Iran.
Plan A, get the E3, the British, French, Germans to negotiate on our behalf.
Plan B, threaten them with more sanctions, whatever it is.
Plan C, bomb them.
And you said this is not right.
What this really is is step one, two, and three.
Because we all know that Iran ain't making nuclear weapons, or, well, people who know know the general public's illusions notwithstanding.
This is simply an excuse for regime change.
And what they have to do is pretend to negotiate and pretend to say, look, we tried to deal with them, and they won't deal, just like they did with Saddam Hussein.
Hey, if he was disarming, we would see him, you know, in fact, George Bush said he would take his weapons to a parking lot and say, here you go, IAEA, and the fact that he hadn't done that means that he's still hiding them, right?
Same kind of thing here.
And basically, the thing is, they just want a war.
But here's my question for you.
Dick Cheney and John Hanna and David Wilmser are gone.
They're not running the vice president's office anymore.
How could it be that the craziest of right-wing lacunic policies still reigns in the Obama White House, Scott?
Well, because we have a president named Barack Obama, who doesn't have any experience in this area, who is running scared.
He's trying to do a lot.
He has health care reform.
He has a lot of domestic reform.
He has a collapsing economy that he's trying to manage.
He has a war in Iraq he's trying to get out of.
He has a fight in Afghanistan that he doesn't know what he wants to do.
Do we send more troops?
Do we send even more troops?
Do we pull troops back?
We've got missile defense.
I didn't like that, but it's there.
If I pull back, I'm going to be called weak.
At some point in time, the president is being advised that he has to be strong, and he's picked the easiest topic.
Iran is a throwaway politically for him, meaning that he doesn't have to put anything at risk by taking the stance that he does.
Yes, you and I and others know that what he's putting at risk is the survival of our nation, as we know it now, because we're not going to come out of a war with Iran smelling pretty.
It's going to be very ugly, and there will be a lot of detrimental impact on it.
But he's not seeing that.
He's seeing, how do I look presidential?
I mean, the absurdity of what he did last Friday, the embarrassment that should have been all over that.
Iran does what it's legally required to do.
It declares a facility that U.S. intelligence community was speculating might be related to nuclear.
Remember, no nuclear material has been inserted in this facility, so it's not a nuclear facility.
It's a hole in the ground.
And the U.S. intelligence community is monitoring this hole in the ground, and maybe they have some signals, intercepts, maybe they have some humans that at some point in time, centrifuges might be going there.
So they're going, aha, we caught them.
And then wham, they get the rug pulled out from them, and Iran suddenly does what it's legally obligated to do, declares the existence of a facility that at some point in the future may have nuclear material inserted.
And suddenly Obama's going, wait a minute, wait a minute, what do I do?
And his national security advisor pulls him in, you've got to look presidential, we've got to do something.
Dramatic news conference, and it's getting all the headlines.
But it's absurd in the extreme.
There's no story here except, and this is the real story, Obama is a weak president who's unable to stand up to the well-entrenched forces that are basically pursuing an Israeli-based policy of carrying down the theocracy.
It's not just Israel.
Saudi Arabia is involved in this as well.
The Saudi Arabians view the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran as a mortal threat to their own failed efforts to define themselves as the center of the Muslim world.
A lot of money went in, and this is the other story that seems to have been swept under the rug here.
A lot of money, Saudi money, American money, British money, went in to trying to shape an election, to engineer an election result last June in Iran.
Yeah, elaborate on that, please.
Under Bush in 2006, Condoleezza Rice and the CIA and the Department of Defense pour in about $60 million into this democratization effort.
They bring in a guy named Jared Cohen, who wrote an interesting book called Children of the Jihad.
He heads up an effort that he terms digital democracy, where you're going to use the tools of the modern age, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, to project Western values into these areas where democracy is not flourishing, because, as Jared Cohen says, all teenagers are the same and want the same things.
All we have to do is expose them to Western-style democracy through the miracle of modern technology, and they will rise up and take matters into their own hands.
We spent between $30 and $40 million trying to engineer an election result.
The Saudis poured in almost $100 million into confronting what they call the Iran Project, starting first with engineering an election in Lebanon to defeat Hezbollah, and then moving on to help engineer an election result in Iran to get a Rafsanjani-based Mousavi government in place to replace Ahmadinejad, and ultimately undermine the Supreme Leader in Khamenei.
It failed miserably, and now these guys, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and others are left with egg on their face.
The best they can do is get 10,000 rich young kids from northern Tehran to demonstrate in the street.of 70 million.
A recent poll came out, and it's a Western-based organization that did the poll.
They said that four out of five Iranians today support Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader.
Iran's survival in the aftermath of this election, the Islamic Republic's survival, is a huge embarrassment to the United States.
And so the United States, which has a policy of regime change that has been inherited by the Obama administration, and indeed captured by the Obama administration, is looking for a vehicle to facilitate continuation of that policy.
And this is what the nuclear issue is all about.
People need to understand that.
When we speak about Iran's nuclear program, we are not talking about real nuclear weapons, or we're not even talking about real nuclear issues.
We're using this as a vehicle to promote the termination of the theocracy in Tehran, just like we used WMD to promote the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
And now there's a separate IAEA investigation that's not about the safeguards agreement, but is mandated by the UN Security Council, I guess under Bonkers Bolton, that says that they must cease all enrichment, right?
Not just abide by their additional protocol, but they have to basically give up their nuclear program in general, right?
Look, when Iran admitted in 2003, and again, the admission was a compelled admission, let's not pretend that Iran just woke up one day and went, gosh, let's tell the world about batons, you know, that they were found out.
And so they said, yep, we got this facility, it's here, we want you to come in and inspect.
But what they told the IAEA is they said, you know, we're going to open ourselves up, and we're going to let you do everything.
And we didn't let you do it in the past, because, you know, we got the United States with the sanctions.
We got, you know, Israel opposing us, no one would let us have a nuclear program.
So we did it in secret.
But now we're coming forward, we're going to tell you what we got.
But we insist on retaining our right to enrich uranium.
We're not going to give that up.
And originally Europe, the United States stepped back and let Europe go in and do the negotiation.
The original agreement, the Tehran Agreement, signed by the EU and by Iran, said just that, that Iran will suspend its enrichment program while the IAEA puts in place its safeguard mechanisms, does a material balance, etc.
And then this program will be allowed to be restarted.
It was made clear.
This is why Iran agreed to the voluntary accession to the additional protocols in the new Code 3.1.
But notice what I said, voluntary.
What Iran said is, we will abide by the additional protocol inspections, we will abide by the new Code 3.1 on a voluntary basis, but it's not binding.
We're going to do this, Parliament's going to ratify, and then it becomes binding.
But Parliament will not ratify until you guys live up to your end of the agreement.
So this is sort of like a trial period.
In 2005, the EU, under pressure from the United States, withdrew from its commitment under the Tehran Agreement, and instead backed the American contention that Iran must permanently suspend, cease and desist, all enrichment operations that Iran will not be allowed to enrich.
And that was the unraveling of Iran's voluntary compliance.
Well, and that's completely illegal, and that means the United States of America is in violation of our signature to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, right?
Well, I don't think it means we're in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
I think what it means is the United States basically has no respect for the rule of law.
The United States feels that we can go around and dictate outcomes and mandate solutions that are extra-legal.
Iran is absolutely correct in terms of how it's behaving legally.
Would I do things differently if I were in the Iranian government?
Of course, I wouldn't be quite as in-your-face about it.
But that's Iran, and that's the atmosphere they live in, but they're doing nothing wrong.
They know what their treaty rights are, they know what their strategic objectives are.
Never forget that the strategic objective of nuclear energy is one that has been embraced by an American ally in the region.
The United Arab Emirates, who just last year said that we need to develop domestic nuclear energy to cut down on the level of domestic consumption of energy, to free up our energy resources for exportation so we can earn money.
It's the same argument that Iran's made.
They're going to build nuclear reactors, just like Iran is building nuclear reactors.
And yet, no one's sitting there going, well, the United Arab Emirates is awash in a sea of oil, and therefore the only excuse for their nuclear program could be a nuclear weapons program.
It's absurd in the extreme.
Well, and of course, the opportunity cost argument made perfect sense when it was the Shah's nuclear program, and he was our puppet dictator.
In fact, I saw on a website somewhere where someone had laser scanned advertisement from, I think, U.S. News & World Report from the 1970s from a nuclear company in America that was helping build the Iranian nuclear facilities back then.
And it was all on board, no big deal at all.
That's right.
Just remember in the lead-up to, you know, back in the Bush administration, the two loudest complainers about Iran were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Dick Cheney was a White House Chief of Staff under Ford, and Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense, and both thought it was a great idea to give nuclear technology to the Iranians under the Shah, inclusive of enrichment capability.
So, go by how the times have changed.
Yeah, indeed.
Dick Cheney even used to complain about the sanctions against Iran in the 1990s, because he wanted, as CEO of Halliburton, to do more business, make more money.
That was before he was the Vice President and pushed for regime change and more.
And speaking of that, you've alluded to this a couple of times, but I want to give you an opportunity to really talk about, you know, what you could foresee.
I mean, obviously, you know, no crystal ball, but just your experience off the top of your head.
What are the first few worst consequences that you think might flow from an actual American attack on Iran?
Well, you know, I think we already have a template there that demonstrates what will happen.
It'll be far worse, but one can just take a look at Israel's incursion into southern Lebanon and what Hezbollah did in response to understand that, you know, Israel, with its, you know, air supremacy and its ground forces and all this, were never able to defeat Hezbollah on the ground.
And Hezbollah was never shut down in terms of its ability to launch rockets against Israel.
The Iranian problem set is far greater.
It's a huge country.
Iran has been developing medium and long-range missiles in significant numbers.
I think that the first thing that will happen if an Iranian facility is struck is that Israel's cities will be immediately attacked by Iranian missiles, and Israel does not have a missile defense shield that will stop these missiles, and there will be significant damage and significant casualties.
The other thing that will happen is every American facility in Iraq, and indeed, facilities in Kuwait, facilities in Qatar, facilities in Bahrain, will likewise be the recipients of Iranian missiles.
These are conventional missiles with conventional warheads, but the Iranians will basically strike, you know, the American military presence in the region and any nation that facilitates the American military presence.
And then Iran will shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and while we have NATO naval commanders and American naval commanders saying how that won't be a big deal, we'll be able to, even if Iran does shut it down, we'll be able to reopen it.
With what forces?
The Iranians aren't stupid.
I think that's the other thing we have to realize from the war in Lebanon, because even though it was Hezbollah doing the fighting, it was Hezbollah ably assisted by Iranian advisors, and Hezbollah had shown that it had studied the Israeli target to an order of magnitude above and beyond that which anybody had anticipated.
If you talk to Israeli commandos and read their accounts, they talk about running into their Hezbollah counterparts who were wearing the same equipment with the same technology and the same level of training that they did.
Hezbollah working with Iran broke into Israeli communications and spoke fluent Hebrew and did, you know, diverted Israeli resources.
They hit an Israeli naval ship with a missile.
I mean, the bottom line is the Iranians aren't just sitting back right now on their thumbs waiting for something to happen.
They are studying us.
They are looking for our weaknesses, and when the time comes for them to do that which they need to do to defend themselves, they will do so with an efficiency and an effectiveness that will shock us all.
Again, they're not going to defeat us, but they are going to hurt us, and we have to ask the question, why?
It's one thing if we had Iranian divisions on the border threatening to come across Mexico and hit the United States.
That would be one thing altogether.
Iran is not threatening us at all.
There is no military threat.
There is no economic threat.
There is no threat whatsoever, and yet we're speaking about a war that we not only will not win, we cannot win.
Well, it even seems like the premise is that we'll just bomb them for a week or two until we're done, and then that'll be it, that they won't fight back.
I guess with the implied threat there is if you do fight back against our troops in Iraq or against Israel, for example, that we will just carpet bomb your country off the face of the earth, so don't you dare.
It's an absurdity.
We haven't demonstrated the ability to carpet bomb anything off the face of the earth.
First of all, the mere fact that we're talking about carpet bombing means that immediately we're going to lose the media war, and believe me, we're dealing with a president who is extremely media conscious here.
We start carpet bombing out of the blue.
We are the war criminals.
Does President Obama really want to go down in history as being one of the ultimate war criminals of all time?
Because that's what you become when you start carpet bombing.
We're no better than the Russians carpet bombing Grozny.
Plus we don't have the resources.
How many times is it ...
This isn't the Taliban.
We have free reign over Afghanistan.
This is not Iraq, which had no air force.
This is Iran, which is preparing for this very eventuality, and it's a huge country To reach Tehran, to reach Qom, to reach these targets, we have to penetrate deep into Iranian airspace where they have layer after layer after layer of air defense radars and missiles and airplanes that will be vectored in.
We're going to suffer significant casualties.
People need to wake up.
This will not be a cakewalk.
If any war is ever ...
I mean, Iraq wasn't a cakewalk, but in comparison to what we got, what we're going to find in taking on Iran, this is altogether ...
The lunacy of thinking we could carpet bomb Iran in the submission, I dare say that we will not achieve basically air superiority over Iran, let alone air supremacy, that it will be contested airspace throughout the conflict with Iran continuously hitting the military facilities in the region and continuously hitting Israel.
This is a war that people shouldn't even be contemplating.
I believe the Pentagon understands this.
There's people in the Pentagon, not the lunatic fringe, but the people in the Pentagon who actually do the planning, who sit there and take a look at the logistics, sustainability requirements, et cetera, and go, we don't want a piece of this.
If this was taking on Nazi Germany, so be it.
We pay the price.
If this was taking on Imperial Japan, same thing.
This is taking on an Iran who threatens nobody.
Why we're considering total war with this nation is beyond me.
Well, and are we?
I mean, that's really ...
We're kind of begging the question here.
How serious of a threat is this?
After all, you and I have been talking about why we should not bomb Iran, because they're not making nukes, and the whole thing is a lie for four or five years now, Scott.
Well, I mean, it turns out we just barely dodged a bullet under the Bush administration, that all of our discussion about Cheney and everything was dead on accurate.
These meetings took place, these discussions were had.
Well, and he brags about that now, that he was pushing for strikes, and he was disappointed that Bush didn't do it.
Correct.
And one of the reasons why he didn't do it is because the intelligence wasn't there.
I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, they couldn't put the data on the table to sustain the allegations that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons capability.
And ultimately, I hope that that'll be the same here.
I think what we're talking here is more about sanctions than the military action.
I don't see military action on the horizon, but I do see an effort by the Obama administration to pursue a harsh regime, a regimen of economic sanctions.
And again, we come down to the bottom line here.
Why?
Who are we sanctioning, and what are we sanctioning?
I don't think the United States is capable of putting forth enforceable sanctions of the scope and scale that would be needed to get Iran to change its behavior.
And so we're setting ourselves up for yet another diplomatic failure.
And my concern is that if Obama invests so much into sanctions, and the sanctions fail, as they will, the political pressure will be ratcheted up for him to do something presidential.
And you know, we have idiots who think they might get away with a surgical strike.
Well, what happens in a surgical strike when the Iranians shoot down 50% of the strike force?
Or what happens in a surgical strike when we hit and we don't achieve the result that we want to?
You know, now we're left with mud on our face.
The world isn't always perfect.
You don't always go in and out and the target is destroyed.
Iran has been preparing for this for some time now, all eventualities.
So now the president says, we're going to do a secret nighttime strike.
We're going to send in commandos and all this.
The next thing you know, you got 50 Americans held prisoner, you got 14 planes shot down, and you got helicopters crashed.
Now what, Mr. President?
Do we do we back down?
Or do we escalate?
This is the kind of situation we just don't need to be getting into here.
It's a ridiculous, it's ridiculous to even be discussing it.
We should be talking about a diplomatic solution.
And Iran's acknowledgement that it has this new facility opens the door for a diplomatic solution, one which would allow the IAEA, for instance, to say, we need to have in addition to this declaration, we must have total accountability for all centrifuges and so bring the centrifuge production capability under monitoring.
I mean, this is the direction we should be talking about not shutting down nuclear enrichment efforts, but rather, how do we bring this under control so that we don't have arms control wonk sitting back in their desks in Washington, DC and around the country, geeking it over another yet another hidden facility.
Let's bring the centrifuges under control.
Let's talk about a manufacturing accountability so that all centrifuges are known where they're at, etc.
So that there can't be another facility because we know, you know, how many centrifuges there are, we know what they're producing, we know where they're going.
This is the discussion that we should be having with Iran on Thursday.
Not this.
There's nothing to discuss.
We're going to you know, there's only sanctions unless Iran refuses, unless Iran fully submits to our will and ceases enrichment.
I just wanted to really quickly give you a chance and this is forgive me going back to the details of the recent accusations, but I wanted you to, I wanted to give you a chance to address the accusation that the only reason it's at the calm place near the Iranian Revolution Air Guard is obviously that's a military thing.
And they're also saying it's so small, this new facility, that it wouldn't be useful for helping with an energy program, but it could be useful in the future someday for cranking out weapons grade material, that kind of thing.
Can you address those two real quick before I let you go, Scott?
Well, again, I mean, ultimately, it's up to the Iranians to address it.
But I do believe that the Iranians have addressed it.
The initial site that's being discussed, the site that's being discussed apparently was an ammunition storage facility that the construction was begun sometime in the 1990s, deep earth boring, etc.
It wasn't until a few years ago that the Iranians taking a look at Israel's threat to bomb the United States threat to bomb said, you know, if you hit Natanz, and the bottom line is Natanz can be struck and collapsed and destroyed fairly easily, then they lose a significant investment.
So what the Iranians wanted was to maintain a pilot production plant, not only in terms of survivability of the centrifuge enrichment program, but also I believe that you're going to find out that it's probably a testbed for the next generation of Iranian centrifuges.
And so they're going to build something that allows the survivability of their enrichment program, the viability of their enrichment program, its strategic depth, when you know, this hole in the ground was not originally part of the military facility, I believe, is only when they decide to make it part of the enrichment, you know, part of the nuclear effort that you saw an expansion of.
And as the Iranian ambassador said, we did this because we understand the risk that our nuclear programs are under.
And we did not want to put in a completely new air defense system that basically, by placing this enrichment facility where it is, the the bottom line is, it will be protected by the existing air defense capabilities of the Iranian military site.
And the final thing is, you know, it's a technology testbed.
That's what a pilot plant is.
It's not meant for commercial scale production, and the Iranians aren't trying to disguise it as such.
It's about technology verification and technology continuation in case they lose the original site.
Can it be used for producing nuclear weapons?
No.
Because in order to do that, you would have to divert nuclear material.
I believe one of the wonks is talking about diverting, you know, uranium hexafluoride feedstocks that would constitute, you know, upwards of 16, maybe 20% of the total stocks available to Iran.
Do you think they're going to do that kind of diversion and not get detected?
No, of course, they would be detected.
So the bottom line is, it's absurd in the extreme to talk about this facility as a nuclear weapons facility, because at the end of the day, there is no diversion of nuclear material.
And that's ultimately what this debate should be about.
All right, Scott, I really appreciate your time.
We got to leave it there.
Everybody, Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector.
The Peace and the Guardian.
It's called Keeping Iran Honest.
And you can check out all his books at Amazon.com.
Frontier Justice, Iraq Confidential, Target Iran, and Waging Peace, The Art of War for the Anti-War Movement.
Thanks very much for your time.
And get out there and get them.
OK, thank you.
Thanks, Scott.