12/29/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show, y'all.
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All right, next up is the great Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He's the author of The Perils of Dominance about Vietnam, which they all say is a game-changing history of the motivations behind the American role in the Vietnam War.
I have the book, but I admit I haven't read it yet.
But it's a game-changing game-changer because I've heard that a lot of times.
And then this one I just love.
It's Manufactured Crisis.
And in there, he debunks every rumor, pretty much, that you ever heard about Iran's nuclear program, painting it as some illicit nuclear weapons program.
He just shows why none of it is true at all.
And the book, again, is Manufactured Crisis.
And then, so of course, that's the topic of the show today, is efforts.
Is it safe to still call them efforts on the part of the U.S. government to put this nuclear issue to bed?
And they have these negotiations that have been going on for more than a year now.
The IAEA has said that the Iranians are within all the parameters of the interim deal.
They were not able to finalize a deal last month, and they instead extended the deadline to next summer, July, I believe it is.
And yet, Gareth, your most recent piece here, Why Obama Won't Reach an Agreement with Iran, well, it explains just that, why you think that the game was up.
Oh, I should explain to the people, you're a very keen observer of the politics in D.C., of how these things play out, as well as you are of the nuclear program and the Iranian government and the relations between the two, et cetera.
So I guess go ahead and break the bad news to us.
Your optimism on this issue, the possibility of a resolution of this issue has now abated.
Is that right?
That's right.
And by the way, Happy New Year, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Oh, yeah.
Welcome back to the show.
Yeah, this article really crystallizes my thinking more than ever in the past several months about the question of whether the Obama administration is in fact determined to get an agreement or not.
And I've been going back and forth in the degree of optimism versus pessimism on this question repeatedly.
I felt more pessimistic when I was in Iran than I was before on my last trip, in part because I saw that the Iranians seemed to be taking a bit of a harder line on one of the key issues relating to the negotiations.
And then, you know, I felt a little bit more positive when the agreement was announced.
But it's always been touch and go in my view as to whether these negotiations would in fact result in a comprehensive agreement.
And what really, I think, convinced me in the end when I wrote this piece, that the chances now are very dim of reaching an agreement under the Obama administration, barring a very decisive move by Iran to walk away from the talks and to force the hand of the Obama administration.
And then we just don't know what would happen.
What convinced me of that is sort of reviewing the record of statements that were made, not on the record by Obama administration officials, but on background to various people in Washington, in the news media, as well as a couple of former administration officials who worked on this issue for the Obama administration until 2013.
Gary Seymour and Robert Einhorn, all of which seems to me very clearly to add up to a strategy that appears to inform the Obama administration's policy, which is that the Obama administration believes that it can roll over these negotiations indefinitely.
They've already succeeded in rolling them over twice in effect, once in November 2013 and then again in November 2014.
Actually, you could say they've done it three times, but they got the original JPOA, and then they rolled that over once and they rolled it over again in November 2014.
So I think now the administration is accustomed to the idea that as long as they dangle the possibility of an agreement in front of the Iranians, that they can keep these negotiations going.
And if the Iranians do not want to really walk away from the talks completely, that they can continue to demand that the Iranians cave in on the enrichment issue, as well as give up the ambition of basically getting at least most of the sanctions lifted against Iran in the short run.
And so the Obama administration believes it can win a diplomatic victory and have it both ways, that it can either claim that the Iranians have caved in in an agreement, or it can say that it has maintained the bargaining leverage and has kept the Iranian nuclear program under control, capped and frozen, even though that's not strictly speaking true.
It is a position that certainly politically is quite viable in my view.
So that is, it seems to me, based on the quotations that I cite in my article, the basis for the present policy of the Obama administration on this issue.
Well, does it matter that they've lost Harry Reid and now the Republicans are the majority in both houses of Congress and Lindsey Graham is swearing to do the bidding of Benjamin Netanyahu and frustrate this deal at his first and every opportunity?
I think that's a serious problem.
I don't think it guarantees the Republicans the ability to override a veto, and so that's not a decisive problem as I've suggested in the past.
I don't think that's going to be necessarily a critical factor in the politics of this.
I do think that the administration is still in a position to prevent the Republicans from passing new legislation, if in fact they're willing to go to bat for the argument that this is trying to push the United States into a war with Iran.
This is what they did last time and it worked.
And I still believe that that's likely to be the case if they try it again this time, if the Republicans try to do it again.
Right.
And then of course this is exactly the argument that Obama wants to make to the Republicans and on TV for politics' sake, which is, hey, look at me, I'm not giving in to them.
I'm biding my time until I can successfully screw them.
Otherwise, don't worry, I'm not going to do the deal.
Well, right, and there is obviously some ambiguity here in everything that not only is said publicly by the Obama administration, but also off the record.
When they make off-the-record statements to Politico, for example, as I quote in my article, or to other journalists, they're always keeping in mind what works for them politically in terms of warding off the attacks by the pro-Israeli right wing in this country.
Always Obama.
He could just win, but no, he's going to figure out the very best way to lose and then keep losing.
Hang on, we'll be right back with more of the great Gareth Porter right after this, y'all.
Manufactured Crisis is the book.
IPSnews.net is where he usually writes.
This one is at MiddleEastEye.net.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking with the great Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
This one is at MiddleEastEye.net.
Why Obama won't reach an agreement with Iran.
And so I guess let me ask you, Gareth, if you think that Obama's right, that this calculation is correct, that they can, well, I guess in two ways.
You could choose either or both or neither or what.
But are they right that they can keep the Iranians in negotiations through the end of Obama's presidency so he doesn't have to decide one way or the other?
Or are they possibly even right that they can string them along long enough where they really get their way?
And the way you phrased it was the enrichment issue a little bit vague.
You're saying they believe that they can get their way, that they can get the Iranians to agree to suspend all uranium enrichment?
No, no.
I want to make it clear that, and you're right, that there is ambiguity in the article.
I didn't go into greater detail to explain a few of the terms that I used.
In that case, what I meant was simply that the Obama administration certainly hopes at this point to be able to get the Iranians to agree that they would cut a very substantial amount, percentage of the operational centrifuges from roughly 9,400 to maybe 5,000 or something like that, maybe 6,000.
And for the Iranians, this is a matter of principle, it's a matter of pride.
They have said, they've told their own people that they will not dismantle their centrifuges, their enrichment capability.
And so that is a red line.
It has been pronounced a red line by the Supreme Leader of Iran.
And so to answer your question, no, I don't think the Obama administration can get away with it.
I think that this is a fundamental miscalculation.
I tried to suggest that at least at the end of my article, but certainly didn't spend much space on it.
But I think this goes back to a fundamental flaw in the whole way of thinking of this administration and indeed of the U.S. national security state in general.
And that is sort of the perspective of the dominant power, always assuming that the United States is going to have and does have, in fact, the whip hand in any negotiations with a weaker state.
And that has been the constant problem in U.S. relations with Iran all along.
The United States has always assumed that it has such a superiority of power over Iran that it doesn't really have to worry about the downside risk of its aggressive policies toward Iran.
But now, I mean, the Democrats are a little bit smarter than that because of just the completely blatant example right in front of our face here where we have the same team.
This president, this negotiator were the same ones 10 years ago trying to deal with the E3, the European 3, on behalf of the United States and the U.N. Security Council, etc., etc.
And they said, look, you guys aren't dealing in good faith with us.
We're done dealing with you.
And they quit abiding by the additional protocol and they broke off the talks.
And that's how we got to where we are today where they have so many more centrifuges now than they ever had in the first place back then when Bush could have had a deal back then.
Obama knows that and Kerry knows that, right?
Well, you're right.
You are correct that they understand that it was a mistake that was made in 2005.
As you suggest, I mean, Kerry's actually said that publicly.
So, you know, why isn't the administration actually applying that lesson in this case?
Well, I mean, I do think that it's a matter of incentives that, you know, the administration sees that it has an opportunity here.
It's pressing the opportunity to the maximum.
And it's basically saying it's not saying openly, obviously, that the implication, if you carefully read between the lines of what is said and what is not said, it seems to me that the administration is essentially thinking, it's not saying, but it is thinking that, you know, we are going to just wait and see if the Iranians are really ready to walk away from the table, because we believe that we are in the commanding position in these talks because they are under such, they're assumed to be under such terrific pressure economically from these sanctions.
And I think that's the heart of the problem at this point, that the administration, you know, it used to be that the United States believed in its military supremacy and its threat to attack Iran or any other country by conventional means as the final arbiter in the power relationship.
And now that has been replaced by the belief that the United States has this tool of economic sanctions that is so effective that, you know, it's in effect the replacement for that now lost ability to threaten militarily a smaller, less powerful country.
And I think that's at the heart of this problem in terms of the confidence, the overconfidence that I believe the Obama administration has in these negotiations.
Well, especially as you explain, they're trying to get the Iranians to accept a situation where not much of the sanctions get relieved anyway.
And so they're kind of, it's not much of a bargain that they're driving.
Well, I think you're right.
I think it is correct, excuse me, it's correct to say that it is at least as much the present ambiguity at best or refusal of the United States to say we will remove all the sanctions against Iran.
We will use all the power of the administration to remove all the sanctions against Iran as part of this deal.
They have not said that.
And I regard that as a very serious problem for the Iranians.
And I think that that is at least as difficult, if not more difficult for the Iranians to swallow as, you know, the demand for Iran to give up its red line that it will not dismantle its existing centrifuge numbers.
And now just real quick here at the end, Gareth, if you could, this whole thing, as you referenced earlier, the way Obama played this a year ago when they were going to pass the new sanctions, he said in the State of the Union, hey, Congress, back down, I'll veto it.
Don't make me veto it.
I'm in the middle of negotiations here.
Don't screw it up.
And they did back down on it, but that it took the threat that this could lead to war.
And he said, well, they'll just use that again.
And that'll probably keep it at, you know, vetoable numbers rather than above veto proof numbers in the Senate and that kind of thing.
But that's a pretty dangerous shtick to use.
Right.
Because, of course, the alternative isn't war because they're not making nukes anyway.
And that's a false ultimatum to level anyway.
And all this unconditional surrender and the rest of it.
And so the alternative is more crappy Cold War.
But if threatening war is the only thing he can do to get Congress to shut up, that seems like he's painting himself into a pretty bad corner there.
And I asked a really long question.
Sorry.
Well, you're absolutely right.
And of course, I make this point.
I have made the point in a number of ways to to suggest that the alternative should be to that for the alternative for the Obama administration should be to tell the truth about the history of the Iranian nuclear program.
We're not ready or willing to do that.
That's the problem.
All right.
That's a great point.
Is this what you, I think, quite accurately call a very crappy argument.
But the only thing that they've got remaining when they reject the alternative, telling the truth.
All right.
That's Gareth Porter.
Thanks so much, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
The article is Why Obama Won't Reach an Agreement with Iran.
It's at Middle East Eye.
And, you know, you can find most of what he writes at IPS News dot net.
For Gareth Porter.
And the book is Manufactured Crisis.
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