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Alright, so next up on the show today is Gareth Porter.
This will be, I think it's part 10 now, Gareth, of our continuing series, and this won't be the last one, I think there'll be one more after this, on your brand new book, Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Again, that's Gareth Porter, Just World Books, and you can find it at amazon.com and all over the place, Manufactured Crisis, and, you know, thank you, this is kind of ridiculous, you giving me so much time and going over chapter by chapter by chapter through your book with me here on the show, Gareth, but I sure do appreciate all your journalism, and I love this book, you've done such a good job on it, and I'm interested in every little part of it, so I sure do appreciate you giving us so much time to go over this here.
Well, I'm happy to have the opportunity to talk about the book, and indeed, I think this is an unprecedented series of interviews on a single book, but I'm flattered, of course, and glad that you're so interested, and I hope that your listeners are getting enough information to make them want to come back for more.
I've gotten some pretty good comments by way of Twitter and whatever, saying, man, you ought to combine all these interviews into one big sort of audio book kind of a format for us, and this kind of thing, which I guess I will end up doing.
Anyway, some people like it, and that's good enough for me.
So, chapter, whatever it is, I guess 11, is The Fake War Crisis.
And now, in a way, you made me feel like an idiot when I read this, because what you said was, they never really were going to have a war, more or less, I'm overly simplifying, but...
No, not at all.
So all your worry about that they were ever going to have a war, nah, pretty much they were just psyching you out.
My only saving grace is that I think I kind of knew that they were just psyching me out all along anyway, and playing good cop, bad cop anyway, but I figured I had to do my best to debunk their bogus case anyway, just in case, and so they were only kind of half using me to drum up the fear that they were trying to drum up.
Well, Scott, if you had an inkling that this was a fake as long ago as 2008, for example, then you were ahead of me, because I fell for it completely.
I admit it quite freely that in 2008 I did, in fact, believe that Israel was...that there was a serious risk, a serious danger that Israel was going to attack Iran, and this was all very carefully laid out.
A New York Times article talking about a major Israeli Air Force exercise that was simulating essentially what they would have to do in order to attack Iran and bomb the nuclear sites, and sort of ending the New York Times piece with a...
I don't know if it ended, but included in the piece was a statement essentially quoting Pentagon officials, unnamed Pentagon officials, saying that indeed this was a preparation for a possible Israeli attack.
Very unusual, because here you've got U.S. Pentagon officials essentially becoming spokesmen for the Israeli government or the Israeli military.
I can't think of anything like that in my memory, at least.
And it certainly lent a degree of urgency in my view, but since then I have learned, and I document this in the book, that this was all part of a very clever ruse to frighten the world and to get people to do the bidding of the Israeli government, which means to get them to take very harsh measures toward Iran.
All right, now hold on a second.
You can prove that to me here in a minute.
But first of all, let's talk about some reasons to believe that maybe there really could have been a war at this time or the other.
And this is something that I guess you don't seem to bring up in the chapter, I don't think, is the possibility, as it was discussed then, you know, 07, 08, whenever, that the Israelis would go ahead and start the war and drag America into it.
In fact, when the State Department cables were first finally leaked, that was Larissa, the wife's first story out of there, was here was Mayor Dagan when he was the head of Mossad, meeting with Nicholas Burns, the American ambassador to whatever at the time, I don't know if he was the ambassador to Israel at the time or what.
Anyway, meeting with him.
The Secretary for the Middle East, yeah.
Yeah, and so meeting with him and basically saying, well, hey, wouldn't you prefer to start the war on your terms and do it your way and make sure you win rather than have us drag you into this damn thing?
Which seemed to be a not very subtle threat, that we're willing to do that.
And, of course, Hirsch talked about, you know, Cheney was willing to have a false flag attack of, you know, special forces attack the regular Navy and dress up somebody and fake an attack in the Persian Gulf.
And what was the other one I was just thinking of a second ago, too?
Oh, the threat of strikes over the pretension that Iran was behind all of our problems in Iraq in the spring of 2007.
Yes, I do, in fact, talk about that.
Oh, and David Wormser, that Stephen Clemens leak of David Wormser going around and saying that Cheney was insubordinate and Cheney was considering, had already even talked to Ehud Olmert about the possibility that they would get Israel to strike and they would drag Bush kicking and screaming into the thing because Cheney had lost confidence that Bush was going to do the right thing and start this damn war.
And so now what about all that all at once?
Well, I mean, first of all, I do mention the fact that Cheney did indeed propose within the Bush administration in 2007, according to multiple sources, including one who talked to me on the record, which I wrote about in 2008, that Cheney was proposing a policy to carry out a retaliatory strike against an incident that they expected might happen in Iraq where U.S. troops were killed that could be blamed on the Iranians through the usual magic of propaganda.
And that was, of course, quickly sat on by the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They essentially bottled it up and it never went anywhere because of the multiple reasons why the war system in this country, except for the neocons, really had no taste for a war against Iran because it would have cost the United States dearly in terms of its bases and particularly naval ships, and because of the extreme danger that it would really send the global economy into a tailspin because it would result in stopping oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz for some significant period of time.
Well, for the record, just in case anybody was at risk of getting it wrong or anything about how wrong you're admitting to being about this at any given time, the first time I ever interviewed you was at the height of the danger, really, if there ever was one, was January of 2007 when Bush was disregarding the James Baker report and instead was going with fat-necked Fred Kagan and General Petraeus on the surge into Iraq.
And a huge part, half or more of his speech announcing it in January of 2007 was, and by the way, the only reason we're having any problems over there is because Iran is supplying weapons to the bad guys, which was ridiculous because that was the same side America was fighting on, but anyway.
And my first interview of you, you had written a thing that was reprinted from IPS at Antiwar.com about how, nah, nah, nah, all this hype is just for the rubes because Connelly's Rice gave this small private briefing to a few State Department reporters that got on the back page that said, nah, don't worry about it, if anything, we're maybe going to bomb them this summer, but definitely not right now.
So you were always very careful in parsing and being skeptical about what they were bragging and what they were saying to Fox News, I think, as you put it at the time, and what they were telling people who really mattered.
Well, it's true that in an earlier period, in 2005, 2006, 2007, I was very cautious about some of the reports that were talking about a strike by the United States against Iran.
I think there were multiple reasons.
I thought there were multiple reasons for doubting that that was the case at that point, and obviously I was right about that.
But I'm referring specifically to the way in which the Israelis cleverly got the story out in 2008.
I did fall for that one.
It was not really until 2011 that I really caught on, or even 2012.
I'm sorry, it was early 2012.
But I caught on that there was this long-term Israeli policy of using the threat of an attack for their political diplomatic purposes, and it had been very successful.
I saw through it at the point where I realized that there was a good cop, bad cop routine being played between the Obama administration and Israel over this.
So all that came together, in my mind, in the late winter and early spring of 2012.
So really this is all just basically Netanyahu.
I guess Obama's playing the straight man in Netanyahu.
He's Kissinger and Netanyahu is Nixon, going, Tell him I'm drunk and angry and crazy.
But it's all just a joke.
I mean, he is drunk, but it's still just a joke.
Except for one thing, and that is that it actually started before Netanyahu.
As I point out in the chapter on the phony war crises, the first phony war crisis was actually that 2008 one, and that was actually Ehud Olmert's government.
But the key figure in that, of course, was Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
He was the one who masterminded the fake crisis, the fake threat of a war against Iran.
And, of course, he then became Defense Minister under Bibi Netanyahu's government.
So there was continuity there.
It was a combination of Netanyahu and Barak.
But in a sense, you have to say that Barak was the more important figure, because he'd already been through this.
He'd already started the ruse.
He knew the ins and outs of it.
And, in fact, whenever you saw a background interview, an unnamed high-level official in Israel talking about this subject, you know that it was Ehud Barak.
I mean, Netanyahu wasn't smart enough to be able to bring that off.
And so he always depended on Barak to do those interviews.
Well, one interesting footnote here to me is that in 2010, when Netanyahu and Barak both talked to Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, and this was the whole if-you-don't-do-it-I-will kind of thing, one of the versions of it anyway, but both of them in that interview admitted that their version of what amounted to an existential threat was a joke, that young, talented Israelis would go to grad school in America and stay there, and that would amount to some fatal brain drain.
And then the other one was, well, jeez, if Iran had nukes, no, it's not like we fear a nuke strike.
That's just what we tell the idiot American Republican voters, that we fear a first strike because of the 12th Imam and all this crap.
We're just worried that it would give Hezbollah a little bit more freedom of action.
In other words, it would limit their ability to do whatever they want to whoever they want with no accountability whatsoever in the Middle East.
That's not an existential threat.
They kind of tipped their hand there.
Damn break.
I'm sorry.
I walked all over your punchline there, Garrett.
God dang it.
I suck at this.
One second, y'all.
We'll be right back with Garrett Porter in just a moment.
Manufacture Crisis is the book.
Go buy it.
See, you had time.
You could have said it.
Too late now.
Hey, y'all.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I'm talking with Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis, about the fake Iran nuclear weapons threat.
And I'm sorry there, Gareth, about the hard break there.
Interrupting.
When we were going out to break, we were talking about how they admitted back in 2010, Barack and Netanyahu, both, that they ain't scared of Iran.
And they know that even if Iran did have a nuke or two or ten, what are they going to do?
Nothing.
And so then you were going to say?
Yeah, and I was just about to say that this is so typical of this whole genre of Israeli propaganda threats and other types of, other elements of the Israeli propaganda mechanism with regard to Iran, that so much of it is so threadbare.
It's really quite easy to see through, in part because there's so much that people like Ehud Barak and people, other people in the government and people in the Israeli media say, but give it away.
And so my book is really sprinkled, this chapter particularly, is sprinkled with giveaways that you can get from just following the Israeli press and the statements made by people like Ehud Barak.
I mean, Barak himself, in an interview at one point, at this moment I've forgotten which year it was but it doesn't matter, basically said that he would not say that Iran had a nuclear program because it was targeting Israel.
That in fact, Israel was probably not the main reason for Iran to think about nuclear weapons.
So I mean, there's a kind of casualness about the Israeli propaganda that is quite interesting.
And you know, to my mind, it bespeaks a degree of overconfidence and sort of braggadocio that should make it easily, I mean, easy to penetrate.
But I must say that they've gotten away with this scot-free, despite that.
All right, now I really want you to just have enough time to go over your version of the history of Obama's, you know, so-called diplomacy on this issue.
It's unique and it's important.
But I wonder if you can tell me when it is that they, or the Bush administration before them, finally just gave up on the possibility of regime change there?
Or have they given it up?
They just don't know how to get it yet?
Or they can't have a war, they know, but they still want to do a color revolution?
Or what's the deal?
It's a very good question, Scott.
And I don't have the inside dope on precisely the answer to that.
But, you know, what we do know is that, on one hand, the neocons pushed regime change as the official policy option for the Bush administration very, very hard, beginning in 2003.
But that that was never accepted officially by the Bush administration.
George W. Bush, perhaps because he listened to Colin Powell, maybe he had somebody else he spoke with as well, but he never officially agreed to that.
And that was a major frustration for the neocons in the Bush administration.
At the same time, even after, I shouldn't say even after, maybe especially after Condoleezza Rice became the Secretary of State in 2005, you know, she continued to hint that regime change was somehow the policy without ever coming out and saying it.
So there is this funny aspect of the Bush administration that, despite the fact that there was never a clear-cut decision when the neocons had their strongest basic basis in the Bush administration, that you still have a lot of talk that flirted with the idea of regime change after 2004.
And I think that, you know, it was still being discussed, it was still kind of, you know, in the background, either as an unofficial policy line without ever having been officially embraced, as far as we know, until the end of the Bush administration.
And when the Obama administration came in, and I would just add one more thing, and that is that what I think is the key turning point there is that the neoconservatives began to lose hope in regime change sufficiently by the end of 2005 that that was the signal for people like rule Mark Direct and the other sort of amen chorus people outside the government in the Israeli propaganda chorus to start calling explicitly for bombing Iran.
And so that's really the dead giveaway that there had been a loss of real optimism, and, you know, they basically decided, well, we're not going to be able to accomplish this, so we have to turn to trying to raise, you know, the flag of attacking Iran, regardless of the regime change issue.
And when Obama came in, I don't know of any evidence that the policy was based on the hope for regime change.
I think in 2009, when the major protest took place in Iran over the election of June 2009, that there certainly was some conversation within the administration over, you know, whether this would affect U.S. policy and whether this administration should, you know, base its policy in part on the calculation that maybe there could be very serious pressure on the government.
I think there was a discussion of that, but it never resulted in a decision to go for regime change.
So as far as I know, that has not been a serious part of the policy since the Obama administration came in.
All right, and then so what has been the policy?
Because it came in talking all this about how, hey, I recognize you're the Islamic Republic of Iran, first time an American president ever called them that and said, hey, let's make peace, and kind of talked about, you know, we could do this kind of swap deal.
But by the fall of 2009, his first year in power, it was so obvious, especially with the big fake outing of the comm facility there at the end of October, beginning of November 2009, and the Jandala attacks inside Iran as well at the same time, that really they were just kind of waiting out the self-imposed deadline of New Year's 2009 to say that the Iranians aren't coming to heel and now we've got to go the route of sanctions.
Well, I think that, in fact, the decision was already made well before that, I think it was made early in the Obama administration, that they would go through with sort of going through the motions of negotiating with Iran, but that the real policy was going to be sanctions, a serious effort at sanctions that would be used to pressure Iran to agree to come to heel with regard to their nuclear program.
And exactly how much they expected to get realistically from Iran is not clear, you know.
Well, I mean, they say Obama actually asked the Brazilians and the Turks to please do this for him and follow up on the second nuke swap deal at the end of 2009, beginning of 2010, right?
Yes, that's right.
They did do that, and that seems to be at odds.
I mean, there's a contradiction there in a sense between encouraging them to talk to the Iranians about the swap deal and the emphasis that I'm talking about with regard to going ahead with a much tougher set of sanctions.
And I happen to think that there was a kind of screw-up in the administration, that there was never any real intention to get a deal.
I think that the White House was encouraging Brazil and Turkey to do that without expecting that it was going to result in the Iranians agreeing.
I think what they thought was that the Turks and the Brazilians would try to get the Iranians on board, and the Iranians would say no, and then the United States could cite that in support of its effort to organize sanctions.
So, I mean, they miscalculated.
And then they had to do a quick switch in signals, which of course they did without even blinking an eye.
Yeah, it wasn't that hard.
And then you say in there that actually, when you get into the story, Mayor Dagan later complained publicly about Netanyahu trying to raise the alert level inside Israel, and it was the day that it came out, that the Brazilians and the Turks had worked out a nuclear swap.
Yeah, this is, I think, one of the most fascinating episodes in this whole story about the Israeli sort of phony war crises.
It was indeed in 2010.
I believe it was April, I've forgotten the exact date, April 8th or April 10th, something like that, 2010, when I think Netanyahu and his advisors really did believe that the United States was going to turn tail and in fact make a deal with Iran based on the agreement, the tripartite agreement between Brazil, Turkey, and Iran.
And so they were quite desperate to do something to head this off, and what they did was Netanyahu and Barack came up, I think, I'm sure it was Barack, his idea, because he was the one who knows how to manipulate the military in order to make political points.
The idea was that they would put the IDF on the highest state of alert, really a state of alert that is a prelude to war, in order to frighten the United States and other countries into backing off what they were afraid would be moving towards a diplomatic agreement with Iran.
And the result of that was that it was brought up at a meeting of the inner cabinet, the security cabinet of the Netanyahu government, which of course meant the head of the IDF, Gabi Ashkenazi, and Mardigan, the head of Mossad, were there.
And in fact, the way the story was presented, the account that was presented in a television program a couple years later, what happened was that at the end of the meeting, and apparently they had discussed various ways in which to respond, but as Ashkenazi and Mardigan were leaving the meeting, Netanyahu sort of casually says, I want you to put the IDF on this highest state of alert.
And Mardigan basically denounced this as illegal and refused to have anything to do with it.
And apparently Ashkenazi was ready to go along with that.
And so basically Netanyahu backed down from this.
And the fallout of it, the major significance of this politically, is that it was after that that Mardigan had it in for the prime minister, Netanyahu.
And after he was essentially fired by Netanyahu, he came out publicly calling Netanyahu irresponsible and unworthy of leadership of Israel.
And it was apparently because of his having been so irresponsible.
And what Dagan was arguing quite, I think, reasonably, is that it was not that they intended to actually go to war.
He didn't believe they intended to go to war against Iran.
But, you know, obviously the Iranians would see this, and there was a danger that this could somehow provoke a, you know, some warlike atmosphere that could be very dangerous, that it could be a tit-for-tat kind of situation.
And so after that he came out publicly against Netanyahu government's policy towards Iran.
And that really sort of opened up a new debate within Israel, which had not been taking place up to that time.
Well, then again, at least from their point of view, all this worked, right?
All this good cop, bad cop, whatever.
They got their crippling sanctions.
They got Russia.
Did Russia and China and the rest, the European members of the Security Council, they all bought into this bluff?
Everybody bought into this bluff, and that's why they did what they did?
Why else would they have got in on the sanctions?
But then again, I can't believe that they're that much of fools either, right?
I honestly don't know the answer to that.
I don't have sources within any of those governments.
I have not talked to anybody who really claims to know.
And, I mean, you know, so my answer has to be that I simply don't know to what extent there were suspicions of the Israeli claim, you know, the propaganda ruse of threatening war against Iran.
I suspect that certainly there were people within all those governments who had suspicions.
And I'm quite sure, as I argue in the book, that the Obama administration didn't really believe it.
I mean, there's multiple episodes where, you know, there are giveaways that Obama administration officials knew perfectly well that there was no plan to attack Iran.
And I talk about the case of the, I guess it was, let's see, the early spring, late winter of 2012 when the then Secretary of Defense of the Obama administration, what's his name, I've forgotten his name all of a sudden, the guy who was the former chief of staff at the White House, he comes out and says, you know, well, I'm really worried that Israel may want to attack Iran in the late spring, early summer of this year.
And, I mean, that was so clearly out of line with what they knew perfectly well, that Israel had no plans to do that, that I think it gave away the whole game about the Obama administration's role in this.
Bad acting on their part.
It was bad acting.
It was not even minimally credible.
But, again, I mean, the news media acted like, oh, yeah, this is the real thing.
I mean, no one questioned it, as far as I can see.
I didn't see any evidence of it.
All right.
And then, so I guess, is it right then, right around the time that Mayor Dagan was over it, that Obama's over it, too, that he's done playing good cop here?
He's used Netanyahu for his purposes, and never mind Netanyahu's purposes.
He's used Netanyahu as bad cop enough, and he's created a sanctions regime that apparently he wanted to enough to go ahead and move the deal forward in a way that Netanyahu objects to, which is an attempt to actually make a deal here.
Yeah, I mean, it's very clear that Obama's plan all along in 2011-2012 was that they would exploit the threat of, the alleged threat of an Israeli attack on Iran to put pressure diplomatically on Iran.
They wanted to have the sanctions start taking hold in 2012, and then they would bring Iran to the negotiating table, and there was this sense of, well, we really got them where we want them right now, because they felt the sanctions were going to be so devastating.
And so this is all tied up with the idea of getting really decisive leverage over the Iranians for the first time.
And this is kind of a, to me, it's a perfect illustration of the danger of, you know, American military dominance, you know, the dominant military power in the world dealing with a small power that's not even, you know, a tiny fraction of the military power of the United States, and the sort of sense of false confidence that that gives most, well, I shouldn't say most, I think every single U.S. administration in its policymaking with regard to an adversary.
And I think this is a perfect illustration of how that leads policy to go astray.
And, you know, this Obama administration is certainly one of the worst in that regard.
Well, you know, previously on the show today, I talked with Barbara Slavin about a trial balloon of the American position of what all concessions they want out of the Iranians, which she noted excluded, seemed to exclude kind of any summary of how much they'd be willing to give up in terms of sanctions relief.
And then I talked with a guy named Tyler Cullis from the National Iranian Council about those sanctions and how difficult it'll be, could be, for Obama to be able to promise the Iranians anything more than temporary waiver relief.
And therefore, he'll only be able to get so much concessions from them in any kind of final deal.
And so kind of, in other words, it's sort of like calling Saddam Hussein Hitler for all those years.
Well, now you can't ever negotiate with him again.
Now you've got to do something because he's Hitler.
You can't negotiate with Hitler, that kind of thing.
Well, now they've built up this manufactured crisis to such a big deal, and they've got so many layers of crippling sanctions, as they call them, that they've kind of put themselves in the position where they can't really back down, not in a way that is very obvious or easy to satisfy all sides in any meaningful kind of way.
For example, one specific example would be the level of change, I guess.
I don't know what it's called.
Yeah, the change at Fordow that they want.
They want to turn Fordow from a real centrifuge facility into just a research facility kind of thing.
In other words, a large permanent change in what's going on there.
So that's not the kind of temporary tit-for-tat kind of change that you can negotiate in exchange for a temporary six-month waiver that may or may not last after Jeb comes.
Well, I think, you know, standing aside for the moment, I mean, setting aside for the moment, the specifics of negotiating positions the United States is now taking toward various technical questions on the table in these negotiations, which, you know, in my view, it's going to be very difficult to predict at this moment how far the United States will backtrack from its opening gambits in those negotiations.
I think the bigger question is one that you did, in fact, just allude to a moment ago, and that is just how far the administration has gone in confirming and repeating and committing itself to this whole narrative of Iran as nuclear threat, as, you know, committed to wanting to get nuclear weapons, and therefore, you know, having to be forced into abandoning them.
All that is so, you know, one layer after another has been built up after so many years that I do believe, in fact, that it is extremely difficult to turn that propaganda ship, as it were, around.
And I think that's very worrisome.
I'm not saying it's impossible.
I mean, of course, I think it is possible to do so.
But, you know, does this administration have the wherewithal in terms of its intelligence, of its understanding, its consciousness to do it?
I don't know.
I have my doubts.
Yeah, well, it's John Kerry and them over there.
Although, did you see the film?
And I'm sorry, because I've kept you over time here, but it seems like we're more or less wrapping up the book here, Garry, so I just wanted to kind of see if we can wrap it up.
Phil Giraldi had a report in the American Conservative a few weeks back.
He's a source that you cite in here, a former CIA officer.
I know you know him well, a friend of the show here, of course.
And he said that whoever his sources were said that the CIA was there when they were having the secret kind of backroom talks in Oman with the Iranians, you know, that was taking place behind the scenes while John Kerry's doing the dance for the cameras and all of that, and that they pretty much worked it out.
And the CIA analysts were there, and they figured out, well, here's how much we're willing to give, and we figure if you're only enriching this many centrifuges up to this many percent, then it'll take that long for you to do that much better than that and threaten us with a nuclear bomb, and so et cetera, et cetera.
They worked out the actual calculus, not the horrible figure of speech that people use nowadays, but they worked out the algorithm for what they're willing to tolerate for an existing verified and safeguarded nuclear program inside Iran, and that they pretty much already reached a deal.
And now it's just up to the politicians to shut each other up enough to shake hands over the deal.
So what about that?
Well, it's possible.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, it's not a story that I'm familiar with.
That is specifically that incident that Phil's describing about sort of reaching an agreement well before the talks took place in October, which I assume is what you're referring to.
And maybe that's true.
I mean, I would be surprised that they were able to go that far.
Certainly everything that I have picked up over the last few months suggests that it's not a done deal.
That's far from saying that it's not possible to reach a deal, simply that, you know, the two sides are, you know, have negotiating positions which are still far apart.
But, you know, I mean, maybe so.
Maybe they have, in fact, gone much farther than either side is willing to indicate and that they're playing this in a way that is extremely clever, far more clever than I'm giving them credit for.
And if that's the case, then, you know, we'll be much better off than what I'm suggesting, you know, is my fear of how things are playing out at this point.
I mean, my sense is that there's still a great deal of uncertainty on the part of the Obama administration about how to play this, how far they're willing to go, how far they can go towards compromise with Iran.
I mean, I think everybody knows there has to be some degree of compromise, but that leaves a great deal still left unsettled, in my mind at least.
Well, you know, it would just be a tragedy if they couldn't work out the final details after bringing it this far, which is pretty damn far with the interim deal and being implemented.
I would also add, Scott, that I just wrote a piece published today at IPS in which I actually changed my view on one issue which I was very concerned about and I thought it was a potential deal breaker.
That is the, quote, possible military dimensions, unquote, issue.
That is the allusion to all this tainted intelligence, what I call the tainted intelligence underlying the manufactured crisis, the two big sets of documents, one being the alleged studies or laptop documents, the laptop of death, quote, unquote, and the other one being all those documents the Israelis turned over to the IAEA directly, 2002-2009, which then came out in the 2011 IAEA report.
So what I've now concluded, based on a careful review of what has been said publicly by the Israeli chorus in the United States, the people that went up and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, et cetera, and what has been said by U.S. officials on the same subject, is that the Israelis were quite upset that the U.S. government did not take their, did not respond to their pressure to demand that Iran actually make a confession that it had had a covert nuclear weapons program in the past and, in fact, that the Obama administration steered clear of that pitfall, what would have been, I think, a deal breaker had they gone along with it and they instead put forward language which they could cite that would not require essentially anything different from the Iranians.
I think that they intend, I now believe that they intend to finesse that in some way through the IAEA and that the deal probably can be made.
I think the IAEA agreement with Iran to discuss the exploding bridge wire issue, that is, the studies that were done, the experiments that were done, allegedly by Iran using exploding bridge wire technology to set up a system for detonating nuclear weapons, that that was a sign that perhaps they can settle this based on simply the acceptance of what the Iranians have said all along, that this was not for a nuclear application, it was for a non-nuclear application and they've been able to document that.
So I have some greater hope that that's now not going to be an issue that's going to cause the collapse of the talks.
So at least that's a limited one thing, but I think there's still some very formidable issues still to be worked out.
Well, you know, I sure want to be optimistic about this, if only because I'm so sick and tired of this manufacture crisis.
It's so obviously a fake crisis and to have this level of Cold War still, after basically my whole lifetime pretty much, Gareth, a Cold War with Iran where the biggest excuse and really the last excuse that they can come up with, because nobody cares about the hostages anymore, I mean, come on, that was 1979.
The excuse that they have is this nuclear program and oh my God, they're going to make nukes and they're going to kill all the Israelis with them and et cetera, and it seems like if in fact the American establishment and with or without Obama leading them, I don't know whose idea it is to really push this thing or what, but it seems like some major part of the American establishment has decided they really do want to pursue this thing and it seems like if the biggest outstanding issue is a big fake manufactured crisis over their nuclear program that's always been safeguarded and verified after all and that all they have to do is extra super verify it and open up to some further inspections and even more cameras and whatever kind of things, how could they not work it out if they really want to work it out now, you know, congressional sanctions be damned, they can do whatever they want to make sure and get this thing implemented if that's what they want to do, right?
Well, of course, the main myth at this point that could block an agreement is this business of breakout, I mean, you know, I don't want to get into detail about this, but you know, this whole notion that you have to have at least six months during which the United States would have the time, the leisure to sort of talk things over with its allies and friends and figure out, well, who's going to get on board to attack Iran, how are we going to do this, you know, what's going to be the sequence of events and work out the choreography, all of that stuff requires six months or more for the United States after the Iranians have given this mythical signal that they're now going to try to break out and get a nuclear weapon.
I mean, that's all, I mean, anybody who is really truly independent of the politics of this thing knows that that is ridiculous, it has nothing to do with reality, it's simply a kind of symbolic, you know, sort of victory for the United States, nothing more than that, it has no technical significance whatsoever, it's all political.
And so, you know, we have to see if the Obama administration has the political will to withstand what is this huge pressure coming from the pro-Israeli right and the fellow travelers and the people in between, the arms controllers who, you know, are somehow caught in between the two sides, and the news media.
I mean, the news media is so horrible about this.
They don't have the slightest clue about reality and they are constantly reporting the pro-Israeli viewpoint as though it's somehow an objective, impartial, non-political, technical approach to this problem.
And so, you know, all of this adds up to a huge dead weight hanging, you know, sort of, I should say, bringing the level of the discourse down to the point where it makes no sense whatsoever.
Yeah, well, that's for sure.
I mean, again, so that ought to make it easy for them to go ahead and get with reality and face down any, you know, nonsense-based argument to the contrary, but I guess we'll have to see.
Agreed.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, it should be easy to do, but, I mean, you know, the history of this administration is such that they have not shown themselves normally to have the will and the wit to do that very well.
So, you know, I just think it's hanging in the balance at this moment, is my sense.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time on the show today and for your work on this book and all your time on the show that you've given us, Gareth.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks so much for giving me all this time.
I really appreciate that very much, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Gareth Porter.
The book is Manufactured Crisis.
Hey, help support, huh?
Manufactured Crisis.
It's on sale down the street at your bookstore and Amazon.com and everywhere else.
It's published by Just World Books.
Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare by Dr. Gareth Porter.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
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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.
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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, Geraldi McGovern, Katowski, 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 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
That's summit.org.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager who provides his subscribers with a very real window into his investments, updating them on every move he makes in the markets.
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