I'm Scott Wharton and check it out, on the telephone is my main man, Gareth Porter.
He is an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for IPS News.
That's IPSNews.net.
You can find everything he writes at Original.
AntiWar.com.
He's my number one favorite most regular guest on this show because he knows everything about everything that I care about.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm fine, but I can't meet those expectations, I'm sure.
Well, you do a hell of a great job.
But thanks for having me back.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Well, I'm sorry I'm late.
I went over with Patrick Coburn a little bit on time there.
We have two extremely important separate wars to discuss here.
First, the upcoming war with Iran, and then we've got to get to the AFPAC thing.
But let's talk about this Iranian nuclear deal.
I know you have a new piece coming out any moment now.
Yes.
I'm actually, I've got it back from the editor and we'll send it shortly after we finish.
But I mean, the story that I'm writing is that the real news about the U.S. response to this Iranian agreement to the swap proposal brokered by Turkey and Brazil is that the State Department announced Monday, but it really hasn't been covered in the news media, that the United States will not talk with Iran about this proposal unless Iran agrees in advance that it will discuss its nuclear program.
And the further codicil, you know, explained by the State Department spokesman, is that Iran, you know, basically what this means is that Iran has to agree to discuss an end to its enrichment of uranium completely.
So this is a new position.
It was never announced before by the Obama administration that it would not talk to Iran unless it indicated that it was ready to discuss a complete suspension or end to its uranium enrichment.
Hilarious.
You know, I was just talking with Obama.
And that's what's up.
Let me just add very quickly that the other shoe which was dropped is, if anything, even more startling.
And that is that he revealed that the purpose of the swap proposal in the first place last fall was, in fact, to get Iran to agree to a permanent suspension, to a permanent end to its enrichment program.
So, I mean, that obviously is different from what was being brooded at the time, particularly by ElBaradei, which was that, hey, this is an opportunity for Iran to really have very broad diplomatic dialogue with the United States.
Obama's serious about this.
And this could lead to normalization of relations with Iran.
So, you know, this is a very different explanation for what was going on with the original swap proposal.
Yeah, it's too bad the Constitution doesn't ban ex post facto diplomacy, but I guess what the Constitution bans doesn't really matter anyway anymore.
So I was talking with Mohammed Sahimi yesterday and we're saying, well, look, I was saying to him and he was saying, yeah, I know what's going on here is Obama is saying on one hand that he stands by all of the Condi Rice UN resolutions that are quite illegitimate and illegal and in violation of America's signature to respect Iran's unalienable rights to peaceful pursuit of nuclear technology in the nonproliferation treaty, while at the same time he offered them a deal or went along with this ElBaradei type deal last fall that basically acknowledged implicitly that it's OK if you enrich up to 3.6 percent, but if you're going to go any higher than that for your medical isotope reactor fuel or anything else, come to us and we'll enrich it higher than that.
Well, that was one construction.
And now they resolve that by saying, no, we never meant to imply that you can enrich to anything.
Right.
Exactly right.
And that's a very important development.
I mean, it's really a very significant hardening of the line by the Obama administration.
And I think it portends, you know, a continued ratcheting up of tension between the United States and Iran in the future.
Well, yeah.
Speaking of which, I haven't seen the news this morning.
I guess I need to hit refresh on antiwar dot com.
Last I heard, Hillary Clinton claimed that Russia and China were on board for these sanctions.
But I never heard Russia and China say that that was true.
She pulled the same thing two weeks ago.
Is this right that Russia and China are going to vote yes on these new sanctions in the United Nations Security Council?
I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, it still remains to be seen.
I mean, of course, you know, the critical question is, is what is what is it that they agreed to in terms of the draft resolution?
What I saw was a much weaker version of what the United States is asking for.
And so it's very possible, as I've said all along, that the Chinese will would go along with some kind of sanctions package, but not what the United States was calling for.
Yeah.
Well, here we are, you know, holding out hope that the Politburo in Beijing will see the light of reason and prevent our government from what is an act of war.
Ron Paul gave a speech on the House floor a couple of weeks ago saying this is an act of war.
Blockade is an act of war.
That's what got us into World War Two.
Well, I don't think that's going to be included in this.
I don't think there's going to be anything approaching that.
I'm quite confident that that's not going to happen, not in this, not in the United Nations Security Council.
Well, that's good.
At least, you know, this may well be what the U.S. Congress is calling for.
I mean, you know, that there's there's no doubt that that's that's the direction that they're being herded, herded toward by the pro-Israeli lobby.
But I don't think the Chinese and the Russians are going to agree to anything of that sort.
Well, thank goodness for that.
You know, Hillary Clinton in her statement before the Senate yesterday morning, it was just incredible.
I watched the a little bit of it on TV and she basically told the Senate that Iran's agreement to this deal with Brazil and Turkey represents them trying to weasel their way out of the sanctions and we're not going to let it work.
And then she says all due respect to the Brazilians and the Turks, who, of course, initiated this and it was their attempt to try to avoid the sanctions mess that that led to this.
But, you know, she basically just said this whole time that we've been saying that the threat of sanctions is to get them to comply with our deal.
When they comply, that's now just them trying to weasel out of the sanctions that they deserve.
And we're not going to let them do it.
I mean, does this really work on anybody but Americans or what was the saying about us today?
I mean, this is a very serious sort of diplomatic mistake by Clinton.
And to the extent that she was allowed to do that by the White House, it's a mistake on their part, obviously, as well.
I mean, this is this is a situation where certainly the United States should have exercised a much more deft approach with regard to at least the Turks and the Brazilians.
And you're right, absolutely, that the Iranians clearly decided to make concessions to Turkey and Brazil on this on this issue that they would not have preferred to make precisely because they felt that it was so important to have the to to be aligned with Turkey and Brazil.
And I think they're right that in the longer run, that is indeed going to pay off for them because it's going to introduce a new major factor into the politics of this issue in the United Nations, obviously, in the Security Council.
But, you know, even more broadly, in terms of the discussion in in world politics on the Iranian nuclear program, I mean, I think that Turkey and Brazil are now going to be much more inclined, even than they were to defend Iran against undue pressure to to completely end its nuclear program, which is what the United States and its allies are proposing.
So, you know, I think that Iran wisely chose to make concessions for a broader diplomatic political purpose, which will arguably affect the the nature of the political game in the future.
Well, you know, Gordon Prather pointed out in his last article for Antiwar.com before he fell ill on the eve of World War Three, it's called.
And and I talked to him a little bit on the phone about this yesterday.
And he is just adamant about the most important point here, which is that Hillary Clinton is a damned liar.
And these people, the entire American regime knows as well as you and I know that the Iranians need fuel to make targets so that they can produce medical isotopes for cancer treatment and for radioactive dyes so that they can diagnose illness in people.
And we are threatening war, Gareth, over attempted medicine.
Well, I mean, that is that is certainly an implication of of the position they're taking about Iran's actually enriching to nearly 20 percent.
And you're right.
I mean, there's it's absolutely clear nobody nobody seriously denies that Iran is doing this for the purpose of the Tehran research reactor to produce medical isotopes.
And you know, this is this is being done under the careful watchful eye of the IAEA.
There's no question that this is within the IAEA system.
This is this is not something that can be portrayed credibly as contributing to a breakout capability.
You're right.
It's it's a it's a diplomatic lie, political lie.
You know, one of many, of course, that have have been told by the United States over the years about the Iranian program.
And so, you know, you just add it to the to the lengthening list.
I don't know if you saw this this morning, but our own Jason Ditz at Antiwar dot com news dot antiwar dot com wrote up a piece called Iran's uranium stockpile, a detailed analysis where he went through with I think he got out his old physics textbooks and did some functions and some mathematics and figured out, you know, you know, some of the the math as to their so-called breakout capability there in Iran.
That would be the so-called ability to take uranium that is not weapons grade and then make it weapons grade and how much they would have, how many bombs worth, et cetera.
And he really goes through the math there.
It's a great read.
If you haven't taken a look at it, I urge you to all of you.
But at the end, he goes, you know, if we just let them say, for example, if we encourage the Russians to go ahead and finish the reactor at Boucher, then the uranium wouldn't be sitting there.
It would be fuel at Boucher.
If we let them finish their reactor at Iraq, A-R-A-K, then the 20 percent, you know, wouldn't be a problem either, because all of this is meant to be fuel.
So let them put it to use and it won't be sitting there as breakout capability anymore.
That's an excellent point.
I mean, you know, why should we?
In fact, the point about Boucher, which you are making, is one that is widely recognized within the U.S. government.
There's no doubt about that.
I mean, even the Israelis, I can tell you, have gone on record in the past as saying, yeah, we were kind of mistaken about Boucher.
We shouldn't have made such a big deal out of it.
I mean, this is a point that is acknowledged in the book by the two Israeli authors about the Iranian nuclear program, but Ahmadinejad and the nuclear program, you know, they made a huge brouhaha for many years about Boucher, that this is such a dangerous thing.
And then in the end, they realized that's not really the problem.
You know, Boucher is obviously not going to be used to make bombs, so why make an issue of that?
Well, and here's the thing, too.
I mean, we can say with some confidence that it's not going to be used to make bombs, because even though Boucher would put out weapons-grade plutonium as a product, as its waste product, still they would have to shut down the whole reactor and let the plutonium cool off for like a year or something, and then harvest it all.
There's no way any of this could happen in the presence of the IAEA or without the whole world knowing about it.
And I can say this with confidence, because I know Doc Prather, and he told me so.
You don't just, you know, take a bunch of plutonium and throw it at somebody, and it explodes in a nuclear bomb.
And that's the other thing, is if you're going to make a bomb out of plutonium, it's a much more sophisticated implosion device, not the simple gun-type nuke that is the fear that they could, you know, not my fear, some bogus fear, that they could end up making with their uranium they're enriching at Natanz.
Well, not only that, I mean, as I recall, it's the case that the Iranians have already agreed with the Russians that they would allow the waste to be carried back to Russia.
The product would go back to Russia rather than be harvested for a potential nuclear weapon.
I mean, this is a non-issue.
Always was.
Yeah.
Well, details, details.
I heard Iran's a nuclear threat.
The question is, are we going to let them nuke us with hydrogen bombs, or are we going to attack them first?
I saw it on TV.
Wolf Blitzer said, and then he had a Republican and a Democrat on to agree.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe Iran isn't the next war.
Maybe Pakistan's the next war.
All of the war pigs in the Obama administration are all over TV trying to pin this attempted Times Square attack.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I still don't believe that there's going to be support within the U.S. military for that for one moment.
I just don't think that they are catering for a war or hankering after a war in Pakistan for all the reasons that you can spell out without my even having to mention them.
Well, why is Holder going on TV and trying to pin this attack on some Pakistanis?
Well, I mean, it's obviously a way of putting pressure on the Pakistani government.
It's the same way in which they have used drone attacks in part to put pressure on the Pakistani government to do more of what we want them to do and that they're for various reasons reluctant to do in terms of their use of force in Waziristan and in other ways.
So I mean, it is basically another form of pressure.
I mean, the big game, the Pakistan aspect of AfPak policy for the Obama administration has from the beginning has been let's find new ways to put pressure on the Pakistani government.
They're vulnerable.
They're weak.
They depend on us for, you know, to prevent a complete collapse of their economy, although, you know, it's arguable that the economy already is in freefall.
But turn it over to the Democrats.
They'll take good care of your economy.
That's right.
So the feeling has been that, you know, they could, in fact, make a lot of hay by various ways in which they could keep ratcheting up the pressure on Pakistan.
And it has worked to some extent.
There's no question about it.
I mean, the Pakistanis have been more responsive than they were when the Obama administration came in.
And that's, you know, encouraging the administration to do precisely the kinds of things that you're talking about with withholders statement.
Well, so I still don't get it, though.
I mean, what is it that they want for the Pakistani army to completely invade and put a boot on the ground?
Well, I mean, what they want at this point, I think, on top of everything else, is they want the Pakistanis to target, you know, the some of the organizations that the Pakistanis have used in the past, particularly in in Kashmir to, you know, basically represent the Pakistani interest against India to to target them, as well as the the Pakistani Taliban, which which they have taken on because they do recognize that it is a direct enemy of the Pakistani state.
But you know, I mean, these other organizations, they're still basically staying, understandably, as strategic weapons against India.
So that's going to be a hard sell for for the Obama administration.
Yeah.
Well, you know, if you go back to fat Nick, Fred Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon's essay in September of 2007, I remember it well.
Yeah.
They said, well, you know, we just can't let these crazy brown people with their crazy religion hold on to these nukes, man.
We're going to have to go in there and take their nukes.
Well, of course, I mean, the the scenario that they painted was one in which the Pakistani Taliban was threatening the the nuclear installations and and that the US would then send in, you know, its special forces and some other combat forces and they would be joined by the Pakistani army, maybe a hundred thousand, maybe a couple of hundred thousand US troops.
But that's all.
Oh, well, that's good.
You know, we got plenty.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, you know, this was this was the most fantastic of all of the scenarios that I've ever seen painted about a US occupation of a foreign country.
And and I would say that this this certainly qualifies as O'Hanlon and Kagan's finest hour.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, I got something about Frederick the Great in front of me here.
I think they're talking about somebody else.
It's funny, you know, it's sort of like the old literacy test to be able to vote.
It seems like in order to have political clout and foreign policy expertise inside the Washington, D.C. beltway, you have to completely flunk one of these psychological tests and be a madman, a barking lunatic.
Yeah.
I mean, we could go on and on about this, about this scenario.
I mean, it makes assumptions that clearly have been proven wrong by Pakistani government officials, as well as other specialists.
The idea that the United States indeed does know where the Pakistanis are keeping their nuclear weapons is is a fraudulent, fraudulent statement, for sure.
And I mean, you know, without that, the whole idea behind that scenario is is completely wrong.
Well, you know, Eric Margolis says the Pakistani nukes are not in danger.
Well, he said that, you know, at one point in time, that it's a safe bet that the Pakistani military is a is an extremely disciplined, organized, top down sort of structure and ain't nobody doing nothing with those nukes that they're not supposed to be doing.
However, if you keep pushing civil war in that society, which, frankly, is, you know, another one of these very recent artificial states, it's you know, I guess he says it's basically for kind of substates crammed together with a central government, you know, US federalism style or something, and that it's basically held together with this military.
But and that if we keep forcing them to wage civil war against their own people there, that someday we actually do risk some sort of major split inside the Pakistani army where these guys could actually start fighting over who controls the nukes.
Not that they'd end up in the hands of Katani or Mullah Omar, but they could end up in the hands of people who are willing to use them on India.
It is it is precisely the same story only with a different cast of characters that we see over and over again everywhere where the US military gets involved, which is that we have self filling prophecies going on constantly, you know, that we take actions based on completely stupid premises, which which tend over time to help to create the reality that we've claimed in the first place.
Right.
Well, and in fact, to go back to Iran real quick here, now they're saying that they have this, you know, technicality here, which Jason's addressing in that article I mentioned the detailed analysis of Iran's uranium stockpile.
But they're saying, well, now, you know, you're enriching up to 20 percent and you say that you're going to keep enriching up to 20 percent.
So that wasn't in the deal and all these things.
But the thing is, if we had only accepted their acceptance of our deal last fall, they would have never changed their centrifuge configuration at all.
It's sort of like we're supposed to forget that we are bombing Yemen for three weeks in the run up to the Christmas Day attack.
It's just, you know, everything that happens is a brand new day for some reason.
No actions have consequences for the American empire.
That is that is a very important point.
Scott, I couldn't agree more that that one of the most central failings of the discourse on national security in this country is the absolute unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences, the likely and possible consequences of really provocative U.S. policies and actions.
I mean, this is a problem that I've seen over and over again over the years, whether it's Iraq, Iran, Pakistan or elsewhere in the world.
I mean, it is a pattern that seems to be peculiarly American.
I think I mean, obviously, other countries may be prone to that under some circumstances, but it seems that this is particularly true of the United States, that we simply we've been inured to the idea for so long that we needn't take account of the consequences of our actions, that it has become so completely habitual that we can't help ourselves anymore.
Right.
It's it is it's a war addiction and it's all Woodrow Wilson's fault.
I mean, no Woodrow Wilson, no Nazi Germany, no USSR, no British and French domination of the former Ottoman Ottoman Empire.
And then no World War two, no saving Joe Stalin, no communist China, no Cold War, no support for the coup d'etat and the the dictatorship in Iran.
No support for Saddam Hussein to contain the revolution blow back from that.
No Mujahideen war in Afghanistan, no Al-Qaeda, no bombing, nothing.
It's all because of Woodrow Wilson, this chain of dominoes.
Every time we intervene, we end up creating a situation.
That's the excuse for our next intervention, I guess, until the whole world burns.
Right.
And of course, of that long litany that you've mentioned, I would just single out the the Mujahideen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan as a peculiarly important case study of how the United States refused to consider the consequences, the predictable consequences of its action, which lasted, by the way, for a decade.
I mean, it's not just that for a few weeks we were sort of off on a bender, you know, this is something that took place for a decade.
And at no time through that period did anyone in the United States government seemingly say, gee, do you suppose that maybe we ought to reconsider the policy here, because it's got the following really terrible consequences for us and for Afghanistan and for the region?
Right.
Well, and of course, we've had a decade long war in Afghanistan again now.
And of course, I'm sure you saw the thing in the London Times.
So who knows if it's true at all.
But claiming that they found all these white Taliban, these Chechens and other Mujahideen traveling from all over the world to Afghanistan to fight in the war against the American Soviet and on down the chain we go, Garrett, let's do it.
We'll nuke Iran, see where that goes.
And speaking of the predictable consequences of a stupid policy, you know, I'd like to just mention the immediate situation about Kandahar, because we've got an escalation of the war taking place on the other side in response to the escalation on the U.S. side.
This is a repeat in that very general sense of what happened in Vietnam.
And you've got a president who's basically saying, well, we can't negotiate now, we've got to do it from strength.
Well, you know, that was tried in Vietnam and we know what happened.
Right.
Yeah.
And with Pakistan as Cambodia, the country next door, we keep bombing until it falls and is taken over by butchers.
Correct.
Yeah.
All right.
Thanks, Garrett.
All right, everybody.
That's Garrett Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
You can find him at IPS news dot net and original dot antiwar dot com slash Porter.
And we'll be right back with the great Will Grigg.
It's all the great everybody's today on the show.
Right after this.
