08/25/15 – Reese Erlich – 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, and I'm stalling for time because I'm trying to pull up Reese Ehrlich's Amazon page so I can tell you about all the things that he wrote.
Inside Syria, the backstory of their civil war and what the world can expect, conversations with terrorists, Middle East leaders on politics, violence, and empire, the Iran agenda, the real story of U.S. policy and the Middle East crisis, Target Iraq, what the news media didn't tell you, Dateline Havana.
Are you catching on here?
Yeah, he does good journalism, man.
Here he is at the Global Post and at USA Today, Iran's Jewish community gets behind nuclear deal with U.S.
Welcome back to the show, Reese.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show and a very interesting read here.
Don't get too much journalism by Americans out of Iran.
So tell us all about it.
What do you know?
Well, I was there roughly two weeks ago.
I was able to stay for 10 days, which is unusual because they usually limit foreign reporters to seven days.
I got to, among other things, talk with leaders and ordinary people in the Jewish community, most of whom support the nuclear deal with the U.S. and oppose Netanyahu's stand on that issue.
And apparently that got some folks' knickers in a twist and there's been some controversy ever since.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I did read your companion piece here at Global Post and I hope USA Today ran this too or some version of it or something.
Well, the L.A. Daily News ran it and I haven't seen it in USA Today yet.
All right.
So, yeah, here at the Global Post, it's right-wing American bloggers have a problem with facts about Iran's Jews and I wasn't sure if you even wanted to dignify these idiots with their ridiculous criticisms.
Well, we can just talk about it.
But it does.
You know what?
It's an opportunity to explain, you know, actually the truth wherever, you know, they pretend that there's something to accuse.
So go ahead.
Well, basically the criticism is that the Jews of Iran are so oppressed you can't possibly get an idea of what they really believe because they'd be afraid to talk to an American reporter.
So that casts doubt on my central thesis that most Jews there support the accord.
Well, it's just stupid logic.
It's just people who have never actually been reporters have never been on the ground.
Yes, Iran is a very repressive place for Muslims, Christians and Jews.
Yes, there's lots of repression, but people will also speak honestly to reporters, particularly since Ahmadinejad was voted out of office and the new president is in, there's a more moderate atmosphere.
And you know, I did a good job of talking to over 24 Muslims and Jews in my reporting and got a pretty good feel for how people were thinking.
I went to poor neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods and a Jewish hospital and a Jewish kosher restaurant.
So I stand by my reporting.
Well, and so when you talk to these people, I mean, I don't know what the hell, I've never been to Iran.
Is it an absolute totalitarian North Korean nightmare where they really are terrified to say what they mean to each other, to you?
No, it's not.
And I've been in countries where it's that kind of totalitarian atmosphere.
And basically people won't talk to foreign reporters at all.
I must have gotten at least a dozen person in the street type interviews while I was there.
And I do this on every trip.
And I've been reporting there since 2001.
There are red lines, that is, people will talk to you, but you don't criticize Ali Khamenei, for example, the Supreme Leader.
You always, if you disagree with him, you say it's his advisors who are giving him bad advice.
But you definitely don't criticize the Supreme Leader.
So it's not like there's freedom of speech or freedom to organize.
Certainly we saw in 2009 how the government brutally repressed people protesting what they saw as fraudulent elections.
But when it comes to the economy, to the accord, it's signed in Vienna and a whole bunch of other issues.
People speak freely.
Which is believable enough, as long as you actually want to know the truth about the situation, rather than just you have a right wing agenda and you're sticking to it, which is a different kind of category of thought.
I mean, there's a sector of the right wing in this country that would never doesn't want any deal with Iran under any circumstances.
And then you work backwards from there.
So if you don't want a deal, you can't trust them.
Therefore, anything that indicates you might be able to trust them is ignored.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so tell us more about the Jews of Iran, or at least the ones that you met.
Well, it's a small community.
There's somewhere between 8000 and 30000.
Estimates vary depending on who you talk to and what figures you use.
It's the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel.
It's way down.
There were over somewhere around 100,000 in 1979 at the time of the revolution.
Most left.
Many came to Los Angeles and other parts of the U.S. and to Europe.
But those who stayed are allowed to practice their religion as other Christians.
By the way, there's no guards in front of the Jewish temples.
They have six functioning temples in Tehran and six kosher restaurants.
There's Hebrew schools.
When it comes to the practice of their religion, they're free to do so.
And politically, they're subject to all the same restraints that all Iranians are.
But that's a whole different question.
Well, and they have representation in the parliament, correct?
Yes.
Yeah.
Even before 1979, there's a tradition of having Christian, Armenian, and Jewish representatives in the modulus or in the parliament.
And that continues.
And it's a way to get kind of affirmative action, if you will.
It's a way that they think they're protecting the rights of minorities.
Now, the problem, of course, is that the modulus is a body that is severely constrained.
The clerics control who gets to run for it.
There are elections, but who you get to choose is severely restrained.
So it's not really democratic.
But within the confines of the Islamic system in Iran, Jews do receive parliamentary representation.
And now, when you talk to the people that you talked to, did any of them say that, listen, you know, you're dealing with evil here, man, you can't.
You have to.
Netanyahu is right.
We should have full scale economic or maybe even real war until regime change, because it's just intolerable.
The system that these people are forced to live under race.
Nobody said that to you.
No.
Somehow that that topic never came up.
I have over the years.
You know what?
Let me let me interject one thing here to try to play devil's advocate a little bit.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
But, you know, I remember seeing I was a documentary about the city of BAM, I think, something like that.
Anyway.
And you said, yeah, when Bush comes, yeah, things would be great once Bush comes or something.
That was kind of a figure of speech there for a while that there's going to be a regime change and maybe things will look brighter after that.
Is that just total nonsense?
Well, I'm sure there are people in Iran and indeed I've met some that they weren't Jewish or they were Muslim.
But yeah, the argument went something like if the U.S. comes in, it bombs Iran and takes out the leadership, that will be good for the people of Iran and they'll be able to have a democratic government without the clerics that I did hear that are not not a lot.
But there have been some.
The problem, of course, is that the U.S. can't replace the government in Iran by bombing alone.
We've seen that now in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.
You have to have troops on the ground.
And if the U.S. tries to occupy Iran, let alone try to bomb it, it's going to cause a huge nationalist upsurge.
The people of Iran ain't going to go for it.
And no matter how much they hate their current government, they will rally around it to support them against an outside invasion.
So it's as plausible as the Occupy movement calling for French airstrikes against George Bush because everything will be great once the foreigners help us get rid of the Republicans.
Right.
And then the French occupy Washington, D.C.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It ain't going to work.
Sounds about right.
All right.
So what were you going to say before I interrupted you?
Well, I was just saying that, you know, it makes perfect sense if you're Iranian to support the deal because it will hopefully lift sanctions, which are hurting the economy.
It will lessen the chance of your country being attacked.
And neither Jews nor Muslims are interested in having their capital or their country bombed by Israel or the United States.
Now, there are opponents of the agreement, for sure, and I interviewed some.
And they tend to be ultra conservative.
It's like the mirror image of the conservatives in the U.S. Senate.
They think the deal is a sellout of Iran's national interest.
All right.
Hold it right there, Reese.
Yeah.
It's like everything the right wing says here, flip flops on its back.
So the U.S. is going to use the inspectors to insert spy devices.
Wait, hold it.
Right back with Reese Ehrlich in just a second.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
That's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Reese Ehrlich.
He was recently running around Tehran asking people what they think of the nuclear deal, including went to a restaurant where Jews like to hang out and ask them what they thought they were all for.
They don't want to be bombed.
Can you believe that?
They're very selfish, you know, looking out for not being exploded.
No, I'm just kidding.
And then, Reese, you're saying the only people who you found—are you really being serious?
The only people you found, no exceptions, the only people you found who opposed the deal were people who were right-wing hawks in Iran.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
There's nothing that parallels the U.S. objections, the conservatives here.
The people who—and I went to Friday prayers, I went to restaurants, I just stopped people at random on the street.
I went to student—outside the university, so I really went to a wide variety of different places.
And the conservative argument in Iran is that the U.S. will, as harnswaggled Iran, they've gotten too much.
You know, it's not mentioned here, but it's true that Iran is giving up so much uranium enrichment that they won't even have enough uranium to power their one existing nuclear reactor.
They're going to have to import nuclear fuel from Russia or somewhere just to keep their current reactor running.
And that's considered a sellout by the conservatives in Iran.
Which it is, but, you know, hey, what are you going to do when you're up against Hitler?
But hey, try to appease him.
I mean, it's not like you can field an army in Czechoslovakia, right?
How are you going to guarantee the freedom of Czechoslovakia?
So no, I mean, that's their position that they're in.
They have to appease us.
And you know, I've been seeing all this propaganda.
Oh, the Iranians, they're dancing in the streets, like to a man, all the civilian population of Iran, they're all just a bunch of devils out to get us.
And the fact that they're celebrating can only mean one thing, our impending doom.
And it's not at all, it couldn't be that, hey, maybe now the crippling sanctions will be lifted and trade will be legalized again.
Wouldn't that be nice if we didn't have to starve to death or, you know, watch our loved ones die of easily treatable diseases because we can't import any medicine?
Yeah.
And, you know, we get a lot of propaganda in the U.S. about the sanctions, that they're targeted against the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard and they don't affect medicine or food.
That's just hokum.
I went to pharmacies, I went to hospitals, and until fairly recently, they couldn't import medicines because the U.S. sanctions basically blocked all banking transfers.
So they had the money, but they couldn't get it to the Europeans, for example.
And you went to the hospitals and the pharmacies yourself and talked to these people?
Oh, absolutely.
And this was two years ago, in 2013, when it was the most intense.
The good news is that that's eased up in the last year, year and a half.
As the talks began in earnest, the U.S. basically told the banks, it's OK, you don't have to keep prohibiting all transfers of money.
And the medical crisis eased somewhat.
There were still problems with students stuck abroad.
Imagine if you're studying in Germany, for example, and your parents can't send you any money.
How are you supposed to survive?
You're a student, you know, on a student visa.
And that happened to thousands of Iranian students stuck in various countries around the world.
They had to go to various illegal means to get money simply to survive.
So the sanctions hurt ordinary Iranians much more than it hurt the elite, who actually make a lot of money off of the corrupt dealings to get around the sanctions.
Well, and you know what?
That's a very important point that I wish you'd elaborate.
Could you talk a bit about the Revolutionary Guards and the oil black markets and that kind of thing?
Sure.
Well, the Revolutionary Guards, which, of course, were the military operations set up after 1979, because they couldn't trust the regular army, they fund themselves by setting up various companies, mineral extraction companies, oil in some cases, they control all the seaports and the airports.
I might note as a sideline that once the Revolutionary Guard took over the airports, the quality of the smuggled wine got much better in Iran because they were interested in making money and they increased the varietals and the availability.
So they're heavily involved in smuggling.
And so it's a very corrupt system that people of Iran know it and they resent it.
And however, because of the sanctions, the U.S. was, I mean, the Iranian government was able to point to the U.S., British and others and say, look, the problem is not with us your leaders, the problem is with these outside foreigners who are imposing these sanctions on you.
And of course, that argument had some validity and they were able to, as one economist pointed out to me, they called it, they were able to fog the situation up, they were able to make it seem like somebody else was at fault.
Whereas when the sanctions are lifted, it will actually make it clearer that the problems in Iran, to the extent they continue, are because of government policies.
Yeah, which is just the same as always, right?
That's always the Ayatollah's line, is that anybody who opposes them is CIA, or at least that's kind of the implication.
Student protesters in the street, we know who's paying your bills, the NED.
It's not the implication, it's the direct charge.
Yeah.
You know, if you're on social media criticizing the government, you must be a CIA agent.
And sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not.
So they have that going for them.
That's right.
That does make things more complicated.
Yeah, we intervene just enough to discredit the opposition to these guys, and we put sanctions enough on to destroy their competition and leave the entire oil mafia to the IRGC, instead of anybody else in the country.
Yep.
All right.
So now, I mean, that explains why they would be attacking the deal from the right in Iran for their own selfish interests.
But it looks like, I guess, if the Ayatollah's on board, then we're just waiting on the Congress.
Otherwise, you know, there's nobody in Iran could stop it now, right?
Well, not quite.
The most likely scenario is that the Supreme Leader, who has not yet taken a stand on this, will come out in favor of it once the U.S. resolves the issue and supports it.
However, if somehow the conservatives in the Senate, for example, get enough votes and in the House to override a presidential veto, then all hell breaks loose.
And the Supreme Leader will also come out against it and denounce the U.S. and we're back to potential war and all those previous problems.
Well, that does not seem to be likely at this time.
At that point, though, if the deal breaks down, all the worst case scenario, do you think at that point they would withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty or they would just keep their hands up and say, look, the whole world knows that we have a safeguards agreement anyway, and that all this parchment and PMD is nonsense anyway.
And so, fine, the old deal was good enough anyway, or are they going to go ahead and withdraw from the NPT?
I don't think they would withdraw from the NPT right away because that would be counterproductive.
If the U.S. rejects it, that makes the U.S. the problem.
And they're going to go to the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese and say, look, we signed the deal that you all agreed to.
You guys lift the sanctions.
And the whole sanctions regime becomes unilateral by the United States and everybody else starts trading to one degree or another with Iran.
So it will have the opposite impact of what conservatives in the U.S. charge.
I think what the Iranians would do regarding the nuclear program is that, you know, there's something called the additional protocol.
I don't know if you're familiar with that, but basically, it was something that Iran agreed to, extra inspections beyond what's required of all members of the NPT.
That they would probably withdraw from.
They would keep the current level of...
I'm sorry, I'm losing your audio a little bit there.
I got most of it.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
All right.
Yeah.
They would continue their level of enrichment.
They keep all their centrifuges running.
They keep their research facilities.
Anything that the U.S. has managed to negotiate for them to give up, they would keep while not having any sanctions against them or not having any meaningful sanctions.
Right.
So...
I'm sorry, on the additional protocol, you're saying they would not adopt it or they would go ahead and stay with that?
Yeah.
See, in fact, they haven't adopted it yet.
It's pending the approval of the Congress and...
On the other hand, they could adopt the additional protocol without any of the rest of this deal.
I mean, I don't guess that they would at this point.
They could, but it requires...
That's the things about the SNAP inspections and all that that they have a lot of problems with.
Right.
And they're willing to go along with it as part of a wider deal.
But if the U.S. pulls out, why go...
Why allow that?
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the reason they were under it before was because they were under the impression, at least they were pretending, they were believing that they were negotiating with the E3 in good faith back in 2003 through 5.
And then when it was clear that Bush had instructed the Europeans were not allowed to get anywhere on this, the Iranians went ahead and withdrew from the additional protocol, which they'd never ratified in the first place.
So...
That's exactly right.
And remember, the Iranians had made a deal with Brazil and Russia.
They had a three...
Oh, no.
Brazil, Turkey, and Iran.
That would have solved this issue years ago.
Yeah.
In early 2010.
That was announced by Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in fact, at least the way Ray McGovern tells that is that, well, I think it's official that Obama asked them to do it.
But when they came out with the, hey, we did it, we came up with the nuclear swap, and it wasn't this all-encompassing kind of deal, but it was a good swap deal to get rid of the 20 percent, a good start, that kind of deal.
And as soon as they did that, Hillary denounced it.
And the way Ray tells it, at least he believes that she sandbagged the president on it, and laughed it out of court before he even got a chance to say, actually, I asked them to do that, and I appreciate it.
And so by the time it was his turn, he could only go along with her on that or something.
Although I don't know.
Well, I'm not sure of that version.
Because he did ask them to do it, and then they did it, and he went ahead and let them twist it into the wind.
Yeah.
The president of Brazil released the formal letter that he had received from Obama.
So there's no question that the U.S. had asked them to do it.
I think they had a change in policy.
I think they thought they could get away with doing more, and they sandbagged Brazil and Turkey.
Right.
And it worked out for them overall, I guess, in the long term, because they did get a lot more concessions than just that nuclear swap in the end.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
No, no.
I was just going to say, I like your theme music, man.
It sounds like Super Scott.
Oh, cool.
Yeah.
You know what that was?
Yeah.
The Spaceballs theme song.
Yeah.
Oh, is that what it was?
It sounded like Superman or something.
Yeah.
Spaceballs.
It's a little bit of a play on that.
All right.
Yeah, man.
So, hey, I'm sorry we're over time, and I've got to let you go, but thanks again for doing the show.
I appreciate it, Reece.
Good talking to you.
Always a pleasure.
All right.
That is Reece Ehrlich.
He's at USA Today.
That's good news, man.
Regularly writing there, and at GlobalPost.com.
We'll be right back in a sec.
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