07/15/15 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got the great Mohammad Sahimi.
He teaches chemical engineering at USC in L.A.
And he's great on the Iran nuclear issue.
That's what he is.
He's an Iranian expat, anti-Ayatollah, pro-peace between our two nations.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammad.
How are you doing?
It would be great to be back in your program.
I'm not doing too bad.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And you know what?
I think congratulations and some credit and applause should go to you, sir, because there's a very small handful of people who have made it their work over the past few years and more to debunk the lies and the myths and the war propaganda about Iran and their nuclear program and all that scaremongering.
And you are certainly prominent among that very small group of people and have done a lot of very important work in, I think, creating the atmosphere for this deal to take place and pulling the rug out from under the neocon narrative as hard as they push it.
So thank you for your part in this.
Oh, thank you very much.
Let me just say that all I did was the duty that I feel as a human being to oppose any effort to impose a bar on this country and innocent people of Iran.
But unfortunately the atmosphere in this country is such that all the so-called, or so to speak, loudest speakers are in the hands of bar mongers and only shows like yours and some websites are available to us to do our work.
But I'm very, very happy that an agreement was finally reached between Iran and P5-plus-1 and hopefully another criminal war in the Middle East is averted.
Yeah.
All right.
So now let's skip the deal for a second.
We'll go back to it, but let's skip straight to the Congress and what happens next here.
Now, I thought I understood this, but now I think maybe I'm actually confused about it.
They passed a bill already that said that Congress gets to have a say in this, right?
Now, that could go one of two ways.
That means either it's really up to them to say yes or no, or as I believe I understand it, they can try to say no, but if they don't say no or if they don't successfully override the president's veto and insist no, then it's a done deal.
It's basically a deal unless they can, you know, it's not dependent on their ratification, in other words, but they could kill it.
Is that your understanding?
My understanding is that, first of all, as you said, Congress has the right to vote on it.
Secondly, if they vote on it and turn it down, the president can veto it.
Third, after the president vetoes it, they can try to override it.
Now, if they cannot override it, then it's a done deal.
If they override it, then what will happen, in my opinion, is that European countries will go ahead with implementation of their part of the agreement.
Iran will also do so.
If the U.S. wants to choose to keep its functions against Iran, it's up to them.
But I don't believe the coalition that President Obama created between U.S. and European countries in order to impose all these sanctions, particularly on financial institutions, banks, and so on, I don't think that will last.
I think it will collapse because it will show to the world that Iran negotiated in good faith, Iran signed the agreement, Iran is ready to implement its part of the deal, and it is U.S. Congress that doesn't want to deliver the U.S. part of the deal.
And therefore, in that case, I think the Coalition for Economic Sanction against Iran will collapse, but that remains to be seen.
But now, on the very narrow question of the Congress, the president does not require a yes vote from both houses for this.
That's true, yes.
A no vote is what it would take to kill it, and one that overrides his veto.
But he's not dependent on them to say yes in order for it to be implemented.
That's true, and we have to also remember that the agreement is now going to go to U.N. Security Council, and it will be endorsed under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which means that implementation of provisions of the new U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing the deal will be obligatory for all member states, and therefore the United States will have to implement its part of the agreement also.
Of course, unless the president backs down, but I don't think he will, though.
All right, so let's see.
We've still got a couple of minutes to get into this thing.
First of all, is there anything in the deal that really surprised you as far as anything the Americans or Iranians were willing to agree to that you hadn't seen indicated previously?
Well, I must say that compared to public pronouncements of Iranian diplomats, Iran has made much important concessions that they had admitted publicly.
When I read the entire agreement, Iran has made many major concessions that at least Iranian diplomats had rejected them publicly, and they have said that they would never agree to it.
Now, whether that was political maneuvering to get some more leverage or not, is subject to debate.
But, for example, Iran had insisted that arms embargo should be lifted as part of the economic sanctions.
But now, according to the agreement, the arms embargo will be lifted after five years, and the embargo on ballistic missile technology will be lifted after eight years.
The other major concession that Iran made was regarding research and development for advanced centrifuges.
Iran will be allowed to do research on advanced centrifuges using only a single centrifuge for the first eight years, and for the ninth and tenth years, Iran will be allowed to do research and development with only 30 centrifuges.
And Iran will not be allowed to develop any centrifuges beyond what it already has developed and is testing, namely IR-4, IR-5, IR-6, and IR-8.
Of course, these are quite advanced according to the information that I have, so there may not be any need for more advanced centrifuges, but at least technically and legally, Iran will not be able to do that.
So these are basically the things that surprised me.
The other aspect of the agreement that surprised me was the great detail.
Everything is accounted for.
Every scenario is considered.
Every mechanism is brought up, and so on and so forth.
So that's why we have a document that is 158 pages, including the agreement itself and the annexes that it has that describes how this agreement is going to be implemented.
All right.
Now, so I guess we won't really have time to get into this here before the break, but the question when we get back from the break will be about what seems to be the only dispute that's based on actual facts at all that I've heard.
I mean there's plenty of crying by the war party in hyperbolic terms, but the only substantive criticism I've seen is about how much time the Iranians will have to delay before allowing inspectors into any military site where they might want to look and that the Iranians will be able to sneak all their incriminating evidence out the back door and that kind of thing.
So music's playing.
We've got to take this break.
When we get back, we'll get an answer to that and a lot more with Mohammad Sahimi, expert on Iran's nuclear program and these current and now finally successful negotiations over their nuclear program.
Back in just a minute.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
Boy, we must be living in the future if we got an Iran nuclear deal right now.
A little more than halfway through 2015 already.
We've been talking with Mohammad Sahimi about this manufactured crisis, as Gareth Porter calls it, for a long, long time now.
Real sigh of relief, I think, that we finally got this thing.
It's not over yet, of course.
All the crazies are just going crazy, so we still have that to deal with.
Although, as we're talking about, things in the Congress look pretty good for them being unable to thwart the president at this point on the deal.
But anyway, so I wanted to try to see if you think there's any credibility to the criticisms that the war party has found in there for the method by which the international community is to resolve with Iran any disputes over attempts to inspect their military sites.
Now, I think we could even take as the basis of the argument that only a lying cuckoo doesn't really mean it.
A disingenuous argument would be that there should be absolute snap anytime, anywhere inspections on all Iranian military bases.
But does it really have to take 25 days to finally get around to getting back and getting inspectors in there?
And, Mohammad, isn't that enough time for them to sneak all their guilty experiments and weapons production out the back door?
I don't think so.
Let's say that Iran did actually do something that was in violation of its obligation.
There is no way that they could, so to speak, clean up where they did anything in 25 days.
I would say even in 250 days, because if they did any experiment with any nuclear material or did anything with nuclear material, there would be a fingerprint of it no matter how hard they tried.
Everybody, every expert knows that.
The technology is so advanced that they can find particles, billions of nuclear material in any site where such experiments have been done.
Now, if they do, for example, let's say they did experiment with conventional explosives, high-power conventional explosives that Iran is banned to do, even that would be very difficult to get rid of in 24, 25 days.
So all this noise about Iran will be able to clean up its act or clean up the site and cover everything, it's just total nonsense to say that Iran will be able to clean any site, to clean up any site in which they did some experiments or did something that is in violation of their obligation.
We have to remember that such claims were also made about the Parchin site in the past, but when the IAEA went and visited Parchin in 2005, and they visited twice in February and November of 2005, and the second time that they visited in November of 2005, they also had one snap visit to a sixth building because it had been agreed that they would visit five buildings of their own choices.
But after they visited the five buildings that they had chosen, they suddenly asked for a visit to a sixth building, and Iran right there agreed to allow them to go into that sixth building.
And they went into the sixth building.
They still couldn't find anything.
So with all the technology that they had at that time, which is more or less the same as what they have now, they couldn't find anything.
They also made allegations about other sites in the past.
They didn't find anything.
At one time, they found a trace of enriched uranium at about 56% or something like that.
There was a lot of noise about it at that time, but Iran right away explained that this was probably brought into the country through the contaminated secondhand equipment that they had bought, and after they did tests on the type of contamination, Iran's contention was confirmed because these nuclear materials have basically a fingerprint.
The IAEA can recognize what the origin of these nuclear materials was, and this was traced to Ukraine.
Apparently they had bought it from Ukraine and brought it in.
So that assertion by Iran was also confirmed.
So this is all nonsense to claim that Iran will have enough time to clean up any suspected sites before IAEA visits.
Yeah, and of course, you know, the context, and you've got to give the war party their due, I guess.
They're the war party, and this is their position, and they're sticking to it.
But the reality is that the context here is not that they're trying to find a way to cheat and sneak out to a nuclear bomb in the midst of even this expanded new regime of inspections far beyond what they ever had to suffer before.
The context here is they've had their hands up all along.
Now they're holding them up even higher and saying, don't shoot, here, look through our books, look through our stuff, go ahead.
You have to be ideologically determined to believe that they're looking for an excuse to break this deal now.
Even Benjamin Netanyahu told the war cabinet in Israel that his concern is that Iran will abide by the deal with no violations, we won't catch them cheating because they won't cheat, he said, and then in 15 years they'll be treated like a normal country.
And he doesn't even really say things, then they'll try to make a bomb then.
He just kind of says, and then wouldn't that be terrible if we didn't have them as an enemy anymore?
I totally agree.
I mean, you put your finger on the right point.
They are afraid that Iran will actually carry out its application.
And if it does, which I believe it will, then after 15 years, Iran will be a normal nuclear state with access to peaceful nuclear technology and without any limitation on the amount of enriched uranium that it can have and the type of centrifuges that it can have after 15 years.
And therefore, they think that at that time, Iran will race to make a nuclear weapon, which I don't believe it will.
And there is no evidence that they will.
The time that Iran was in great danger of being attacked was during the Bush administration, especially in the heydays of mission accomplished after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in 2003.
And if Iran had any intention of making a nuclear bomb, and they needed to make the political decision to rush or to race to a nuclear bomb, it should have been there, especially after Iran made a comprehensive proposal to the Bush administration to address all the issues in the Middle East that were the source of dispute between Iran and the United States, including Iran's nuclear program, including Iran's aid to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine and so on.
But they rejected it.
So if Iran wanted to do anything, it should have been done then, but they didn't.
So that clearly demonstrates Iran's intention.
All right.
I'm sorry we're out of time.
We'll follow up again soon.
I'll be looking out for your writing.
Thanks very much, Mohamed.
Thank you, Scott.
That's Mohamed Sahimi, everybody.
He teaches at USC and writes about Iran and nuclear issues.
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