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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
Thanks for bearing with me.
Now it's time to talk with Gareth Porter.
Gareth the Great.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes for Interpress Service at IPSnews.net.
IPSnews.net.
He also writes for truthout.org.
He's the author of Perils of Dominance and then the new one is Manufactured Crisis.
The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
And now this will be part four of our continuing interview series about Gareth.
I want to cover everything in this book to try to, well, one, make the whole world smarter and two, help Gareth get some books sold and all of that and get these things out there.
Get you guys interested enough that maybe you'll want to help spread them around at this extremely important time in the middle of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program and while the interim deal reigns successfully so far, but before the final deal is inked.
So we're at, what here, chapter five, a little bit of chapter six, something.
So we got to cover Rabin and Netanyahu and Barack, their 1990s administrations in Israel and how and why they used the Iran nuclear program as an issue for their own political purposes.
And then we can at least start to get into the history of the Bush administration.
And man, there's some hilarious stuff.
Just wait, guys, till you hear about some early Bush year stuff on the Iran nuclear program and the way they were handling that.
It's a riot.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks very much for joining us again.
Hello again, Scott.
Great to be here.
All right.
Good deal.
So hopefully that's most of all the talking I'm going to do during today's interview right there.
So let's start with, like you were saying yesterday, a couple of things.
First of all, Yitzhak Rabin, who is the prime minister who was assassinated by the right-wing zealot because he did want to give up the West Bank occupation and create a Palestinian state, at least to some degree.
I don't mean to say that categorically because I don't know everything about it.
But he was certainly the one leaning that way more than anyone else.
He helped drum up or he decided to drum up an Iran nuclear scare, in part, just to divert from the fact that he was going to do the right thing when it comes to Palestine.
And the Israeli people needed an enemy and they needed a distraction.
Otherwise, the right wing was going to eat him for lunch, basically, and screw up his plan.
So he decided he would help drum up a completely fake issue, almost out of a whole cloth, against Iran's nuclear program, which is really something else.
And then one more thing real quick is that we talked about how it was the Israelis' idea to do the Iran-Contra scam in the first place in the Reagan years, which just goes to show that well after the revolution and the rise of the Islamic extremist Shiite mullahs, the Israelis were perfectly happy to do business with this regime on at least some levels.
And so with that, I'll just turn it over to you.
Well, certainly, you know, the point here is that during the 1980s, even under Ayatollah Khomeini, you know, the hardline period, really, of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Israelis had this, particularly Mossad, I would say, was the center of this thinking.
Really believed that this was just a temporary blip on the screen and that Iran would again revert to really being more of their ally than their enemy, certainly compared with the Sunni Arab regimes.
I mean, the fundamental orientation of the Israeli intelligence and military elite is that their real enemies are the Sunni Arab regimes.
I mean, that's always been the case.
I think it will always be the case.
The idea of Iran that they have held, particularly Mossad, for decades now is that ultimately Iran will revert to its logical position in the geopolitical framework of the Middle East, which is that they will be at odds with their, primarily at odds with their Sunni Arab adversaries, and that they will necessarily have to cooperate in some fashion with Israel.
So that's the geopolitical logic that has really remained the centerpiece of the thinking of many in the intelligence setup of Israel for a long time.
And that's why they did indeed try to get the Reagan administration involved in some sort of negotiations with Iran in the hope that this would lead to something more.
In fact, the Israelis were supporting the Iranians against Saddam Hussein.
I mean, they were not on the same side as the United States during that war, a fact that most people don't realize.
Well, and America was on both sides, at least for a time there, switching back and forth.
But yeah.
Well, I mean, the Americans were, you're right.
The Americans were, of course, supporting Saddam Hussein at the same time, playing this Israeli game of trying to find this group that they thought would cooperate with the United States.
And of course, in the end, that proved to be a false hope.
All right.
Now, so you talk about in the book that when Rabin, and if you want to give the examples of what it was he was saying and who he was saying it to and these kinds of things, but I think you give a few different examples of him bringing up the supposed Iranian nuclear crisis at a time when his intelligence services, and including, I guess, the military, too, all had a completely different take.
More like the take you were just describing, that they can work with these guys, at least for now.
It's a key point in my book that this policy that was, as I mentioned yesterday, was adopted whole by the Clinton administration, coming from the Yitzhak Rabin government in Israel in the early 1990s, was essentially based on his own political interest in, as you've correctly put it, trying to justify or make it more palatable, I guess is a better way to put it, to negotiate with the PLO, which was not a popular position in Israeli politics at that point, to say the least.
And what he was doing was to create this Iranian bogeyman, which he argued, you know, unless we really protect ourselves, strengthen ourselves against the Iranian threat, then we will have much more of a problem with the internal threat from the Palestinians.
So we must all unite behind the anti-Iran policy here so that we can deal with our Palestinian issue.
That was the way he formulated it.
But really what he was doing was simply laying the groundwork politically for his policy of negotiating with the PLO.
And then, well, that didn't work out because he was assassinated.
And so he succeeded in making an enemy out of Iran, or at least a pseudo one, but they never did give up the West Bank.
He never quite got around to that before he dropped dead.
Well, look, I mean, you know, I think it's quite clear, and I think I may have mentioned this on the previous show, that what the consequence of the Rabin hard line sort of suddenly appearing, really, in the early 1990s, I think it was really 92 when Rabin began to talk like this, just out of the blue.
But the consequences of this for Iranian policy were that they had to begin to take seriously the threat from Israel.
I mean, before that, they were not viewing Israel as a threat to Iran.
That was not the Iranian policy or the Iranian perception at all.
But as a result of the Rabin policy, you know, there was talk in the early to mid-1990s of Israel, well, we might have to attack the Iranian nuclear program because it's such a threat.
And as a result of that, the Iranians then began to have to take into account the military threat from Israel.
And that certainly had a major impact on the speed with which they tried to develop a longer range ballistic missile in the 1990s and how much money they put into it.
So it definitely accelerated and made more urgent the whole idea of developing a ballistic missile deterrent.
And, you know, it's very clear, and I want to emphasize this, the evidence is absolutely clear that Iran's ballistic missile program was intended to be a conventional deterrent.
And I don't want to go into the details about this, but the evidence is that they intended to have conventional explosives on these.
And, of course, these missiles were not going to be accurate, so they were going to be sort of simply like a deterrent used by the Soviets and the Americans during the Cold War.
You know, it was a counter-city, counter-population deterrent, but without nuclear weapons.
So that is really the key point that I think people don't understand about the consequence of the Israeli policy of making Iran into an enemy, which was quite unnecessary.
Well, and then, of course, with the incoming Netanyahu government, and there's some variation here.
You talk about how he went with a dovish approach for a minute there before switching back to hawkish.
But when he switched back to hawkish, the development of these new missiles and the Russians are helping him, of course, becomes the big talking point of why it is that they have to escalate all their threats and all their insistence against the nuclear program on their end.
Right.
And just to go back to the initial point that you just referred to, I think it's really interesting to just go back and look at the starting point of Israeli policy under Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996, when he was elected to replace the interim government after Rabin was assassinated.
And what happened is really quite significant, because it, again, shows the dynamics of the Israeli security system.
And that is that he asked for, that is, Netanyahu asked for briefings from both Mossad and the military intelligence people.
And the military intelligence people at that point was represented by this hardliner who was presenting a kind of sort of threat assessment, not dissimilar from what was being said publicly, had been said publicly by Rabin.
But Mossad gave a completely different assessment, saying, no, no, Iran is not a threat.
Forget that.
You know, this whole policy of presenting Iran as a threat to Israel is a bad idea.
It's counterproductive, and we shouldn't be doing that.
And in the end, Netanyahu sided with Mossad, and he adopted a policy of trying to reduce tensions for the first year or so.
And OK, so as you said, I mean, then he changed his mind later.
We can explain why that happened.
Right.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Let's take this short break.
Damn hard breaks.
We'll be right back with Gareth the Great.
Manufacture Crisis is the book.
Go buy it right now.
Hey, I'll Scott here inviting you to check out Modern Times Magazine at Modern Times Magazine dot com.
It's a great little independent publication out of Phoenix, Arizona, featuring unique views on economics, politics, foreign policy, sports and music with great art scene coverage and fiction writing as well.
That's Modern Times Magazine at Modern Times Magazine dot com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, and I got Gareth Porter on the phone.
He's the author of Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
And it's so good.
I'm having so much fun reading it.
And I feel very lucky and fortunate that I know you well enough now, Gareth, that you'll tolerate me asking you to come on this show day after day, day to parse every bit of this because I just love it so much.
So thank you very much for joining us again.
This is part four of our interview series on Manufactured Crisis.
And up against the break there, you were talking about how Netanyahu sided with Mossad over the military, if I have that right, saying, let's not pick a fight with Iran right now.
We're talking old Netanyahu, 96.
He sided with Mossad for a little while, but then he flipped and flopped.
Why is that?
Well, you know, this is this is a bit of a mystery and I have an interpretation which is based on, admittedly, on the circumstantial evidence.
But what you see here is that it coincides, that is Netanyahu's return to the hard line policy of sort of raising the Iran nuclear bogeyman.
And I should also say the Iran ballistic missile bogeyman coincides with the rise in American politics of the missile defense lobby, which means the people who were lobbying the Congress to have a national missile defense program in the United States.
And they had a huge amount of money behind them.
And they were sort of mowing down opposition in Congress and prevailing in 1996 to early 97, to the point where the Clinton administration was feeling a bit really intimidated politically by the power that they were showing.
And it was over the next couple of years, that power was so great that I show in the book how the CIA essentially bowed down to the power of the missile missile defense lobby in Congress by reversing its position on this issue of what the Rumsfeld Commission had eventually come up with as the idea of a threat of an ICBM program that Iran and North Korea could mount over a period of 10 to 15 years.
And this Rumsfeld Commission, this was another Team B exercise, basically, outside of the Clinton administration.
Absolutely.
And it was, of course, completely dominated by and oriented towards the interests of the missile defense lobby.
It was a shabby piece of lobbying by the folks who were going to profit from it.
The four major defense lobbyists were well-placed within the staff, and they were allowed to basically do the work that was cited by the commission to justify their position that Iran and North Korea could, they didn't say would, but could come up with an ICBM in a few years.
So the point here is that there was this new major development in the politics of defense policy in the United States, which, you know, looked to the Netanyahu folks like a major opportunity for Israel to cash in here and make the argument that, look, the Iranian missile program is being pushed forward by assistance from Russia, from the Russian government.
And the United States should really clamp down on the Russians here and prevent the Iranian missile program from advancing any further, because otherwise the missile program will be able to threaten Israel, and ultimately they'll threaten the United States with their ICBM.
So that's exactly what happened.
Netanyahu switched his position and started beating the drum on the Iranian threat, both on missiles as well as on the nuclear program.
And from 1997 on, from late 1997 on, he took, you know, the old extreme position of the same one as Yitzhak Rabin, that Iran was a mortal threat, an existential threat to Israel.
So that was really the beginning of the Likud policy, which they've continued ever since.
All right.
Now, hold it right there for a second, because I want to get back to something that you wrote here about, again, about the position of the Israeli government as far as, you know, their accusations and threats, et cetera, et cetera, about Iran's nuclear program and their missile programs, et cetera, as it relates to the Palestinian issue.
We already talked about how Yitzhak Rabin needed to distract people from the fact that he wanted to do the right thing and make peace in Palestine.
But you write about Netanyahu, and you quote Keith Weitzman, the former indicted for espionage AIPAC official, Iran expert, talking about this as well.
And his point basically was that Netanyahu did not want to distract from the Palestinian issue.
He wanted the Palestinian issue up front and center.
And over his dead body, was he going to give up the West Bank or, you know, make any kind of peace deal with the Fatah or the PLO there or whatever?
And so he thought that his position on the West Bank would be firmer if he would stop distracting everybody with the Iran issue and focus on just what a mean SOB is when it comes to occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
That's right.
That was his initial take on the linkage or relationship between those two issues.
But then the missile defense money was just too good, I guess.
But what's interesting, though, and I'm not sure that I actually refer to this in the book.
I think I had an initial draft and I had to cut it out because of space problems.
But more recently, you see, and I mean by that 2012, 2013, if I remember correctly, you see Netanyahu making the argument that their Palestinian problem is really an Iranian problem.
Because, you know, what is the where does the threat come from to to Israel now?
It's coming from Gaza and Gaza is Iran.
Iran really controls, you know, Hamas and Hamas controls Gaza.
So that's where the threat really is.
So so he managed to find a way to link his position on the Palestinian issue with his position on Iran.
Right.
Well, and he'll link it to anything and then it's always the other issue first, then Palestine.
But it's never Palestine.
It's it's never Palestine in the sense that that there has to be some real serious effort to to make make confessions to Palestinians.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Well, and that that really has to do, of course, a lot with, you know, his his current government's policy always whenever anybody says Palestine, he yells Iran.
So it serves his ends all the way around.
He gets to implicate the Palestinians for receiving support from Iran.
But he also gets to distract the people from the Palestinian issue.
And and I don't know how it is in in Israeli popular opinion.
It sounds like in the 90s, he really wanted to rally everyone around the fact how wrong he is about the occupation.
It sounds like now he would just as soon distract the Israelis as the Americans.
Yeah, I mean, you could call it a distraction.
And at the same time, it's, you know, it's an effort to sort of build support for his policy, his hard line on the Palestinian issue by combining it with Iran at the same time, you know, trying to build support for his Iranian policy by combining it with with Palestine.
So it's kind of it's kind of a linkage, which he is at least hoping is going to strengthen his position on both sides in terms of Israeli public opinion.
All right.
Now, if you could, I think it would be instructive for people, as long as we have no real deadline on getting this book wrapped up here.
If you could get into some of the details, just give us some examples of the kind of hype that was coming out about Russia and Iran and the advances on their missile systems and whatever and how that was used.
Well, we already explained how that was used, you know, for the for the threatening policy.
But could you go through and explain just how wrong it all was?
Because you do a great job in the book of bringing up example after example.
They said this, but then the truth was really much different.
Well, the key, the single biggest piece of of alleged intelligence that the Israelis used to try to make the case that Russia was really the key to the Iranian missile program and that the Russians were deliberately helping the Iranians to increase the the range of their missiles and to to make it possible for those missiles to reach Israel was that they were arguing that the Israelis were asserting that they had a an actual contract that that a Russian technology firm had signed with the Iranians that would give the Iranians actually the technology that was used for the Iranian for for the Russian long-range missile that that had been used in the 1980s, as I recall, 1970s, 1980s, an older Russian missile.
And that this this technology was crucial to to to a new advanced missile that the Iranians were developing.
Well, it turned out that that that contract did nothing of the sort.
It did not involve this this special technology that that had to do with the advanced Russian missile.
And indeed, the the company that supposedly signed the contract was not even a contractor.
It was not even involved in the development of the Russian missile.
So it was it was all complete fiction.
It was it was the usual Israeli flim flam that was used to convince.
I mean, they leaked this stuff to the American press, of course, mostly to I mean, not mostly, but particularly to The Washington Times.
The right wing Washington Times was was their best was their favorite target.
But but they also leaked it to various other news outlets.
And the story basically took off.
And it was the it became the news media narrative around this question of of the Iranian missile program that the Russians were deliberately helping the Iranians to to reach reach Israel on their on their missile program.
And later it became I think it was pretty much proven that this was all complete hype, that that that the Russians that at best they were only marginal technology advances that that were due to Russian assistance or Russian engineers who were working with with the Iranians.
In fact, one of the people that was quoted in The Washington Post, a study of this that I have in the book shows that it's likely that the that the Iranians were actually trying to create the impression that they had these high level Russian engineers who were helping them on the missile program to as a deterrent to to try to convince the Israelis that they were much more advanced in their missile program than they really were.
In fact, these were very low level engineers who didn't have any insight, high level technology advances for them at all.
Well, and again, I guess, well, and all right, so we're over time.
Virtually, I guess this is really the theme of the whole book is that they never really were making nukes, but as bad as it ever got, and as good as their missiles ever got, and as many centrifuges as they've ever spun, it's all blowback from all the stupid mistakes of the American and Israeli chickens who started this chicken egg thing.
I mean, there's really no question you talk about, you kind of wrap up the 90s era with the Iranians deciding that, geez, I guess the Israelis really are enemies and we got to really change our strategy for dealing with them.
They're not going to let this go.
And, you know, you really do a pretty good job of showing in the book about how their decisions about, you know, how to go ahead and escalate their commitment to the nuclear path that they're on always come down to, you know, these kinds of, you know, basically provocations from the West, from the short handedness of the Western powers here, the countries of the West, you know what I mean?
To be specific, in 1998, late 1997-98, you had Netanyahu starting to talk, not to talk openly, but to use various indirect ways of getting out the message that Israel might have to attack Iran's nuclear program and missile program.
So this was, of course, a spur once again to Iran to speed up its development of a long range, a longer range missile to be able to deter Israel, that they were clearly responding to very direct threat from Israel, which, again, was completely unnecessary.
All right.
Now, I guess tomorrow we'll pick up, assuming you're available tomorrow afternoon to talk about this some more, we can really pick up with the incoming Bush Jr. administration and the neoconservatives and their approach.
And that's going to begin with a great punchline too.
I just love this part of the story.
But just to make sure...
We're getting to the heart of the book there.
Yeah, yeah.
Good times.
These neocons are just a riot, man.
I don't want to spoil it, but it's going to be hilarious.
Well, I don't want to build it up too much either.
It's worth the chuckle.
Here's my question to wrap up for today.
We're already over time here and I'll let you go.
But is there anything that we need to know specifically, you think, worth taking the time to mention about Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon and their policies after Netanyahu left power, any specific changes they made leading up to the era of George W. Bush, where we'll pick up tomorrow?
Well, if we're talking about Sharon specifically, there's no question.
He overlaps with, of course, the Bush administration.
He was still there in 2002, 2003.
And that's when some very crucial things were happening, 2003, 2004.
What about Barak?
He was in power for quite a while, right?
Yeah.
Barak represented the return to the initial labor policy, no question about it.
He was beating the drum, just as Rabin had beaten the drum for the threat from Iran, even though, as I point out in my book, Mossad gave a briefing to the foreign minister of Barak, I think it was in 1999, if I remember correctly, that emphasized that Iran was not an urgent threat, that there were still reasons to take a less urgent approach.
And that this was a briefing that, again, simply did not support the kind of policy that was being announced publicly, that was being taken publicly by Ehud Barak.
It was just a huge disparity between the public position and the actual intelligence underlying the government's policy.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like the one time in the book so far where the intelligence agencies are saying anything hawkish, it's just the IDF.
And when the Mossad contradicts them, Netanyahu sides with Mossad in contradicting them.
The rest of the time, the politicians are always way out ahead of the intelligence agencies on their accusations, and even the need to have a confrontational attitude toward Iran at all.
That's correct.
Absolutely.
I agree with that with that way of summarizing it.
Yep.
That sucks.
All right.
Your book is so great.
I love it.
I'm so glad that you wrote this thing, Gareth.
Thanks so much.
I really appreciate your plot.
That's really good to hear.
Thanks.
Well, yeah.
Believe me, I really am grateful that you're willing to spend this much time on the show answering my oftentimes half-baked questions.
No, no.
It's my pleasure, clearly.
I mean, I'm glad to have the opportunity to go into such detail.
Thanks.
Okay, great.
So 4.30 tomorrow?
Yep.
All right, great.
Talk to you then.
Thanks very much.
Bye-bye, Scott.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can fight back.
The Tenth Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is offnow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to offnow.org, print out that model legislation, and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snowden has risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it. offnow.org.
On March 7th, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first-ever national summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Geraldo McGovern, Kutowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's the national summit to reassess the U.S.-Israel special relationship, Friday, March the 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. natsummit.org.
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