Hey, Al Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government-generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at wallstreetwindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
And chances are, I'm interviewing Gareth Porter.
Yep, I got Gareth Porter on the line.
He wrote Manufactured Crisis, the book on the Iranian nuclear program.
The truth about it, that it never was a weapons program at all.
Don't be ridiculous.
Manufactured Crisis by Gareth Porter at Amazon.com for you.
And also, he writes for Middle East Eye and for Truthout and some other things.
We rerun all of it at libertarianinstitute.org and at antiwar.com as well.
The latest is called Ignore the Tough Talk.
Trump's Iran policy will be much like Obama's.
OK, that's interesting.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how the hell are you?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Good, good.
I appreciate you joining us here.
Yeah, hey, Obama's Iran policy was, boy, drag things out and take frigging forever, but then finally make a nuclear deal and take the single biggest fake issue of conflict between America and Iran off the table.
The greatest excuse for war that a hawk could ever come up with, the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Obama took that pretended threat even away now, right?
So you're saying that you think that Trump's going to basically run with that?
I would say that's a part of the truth in the sense that he took it off the table as an issue of immediate threat of war and so on and so forth, in the sense that they did defeat the neoconservative challenge, which we were worried about legitimately, and that's a considerable plus.
But, of course, at the same time, as I often pointed out, he was still upholding the official narrative about Iran, which not just about nuclear weapons, but about everything else, which was a narrative of unremitting hostility toward Iran with some very minor tweaks, I would say, by Obama himself.
But the permanent war state bureaucracy of the United States is so steeped in that unremitting hostility toward Iran that it very much shaped the Obama administration's overall policy.
And that's really the underlying point that I'm making, along with the fact that the continued existence of the same bureaucracies and, in many cases, the same bureaucrats in the Trump administration that we had with the Obama administration, means that the differences between the two are not going to be as stark and dramatic as many people, I would say, expected.
In other words, it's the headline that's off here.
Ignore the tough talk.
Could be steal yourselves.
Trump's Iran policy will be much like Obama's.
Yeah, that's right, exactly.
I mean, it's not to say that this is going to be an enlightened policy.
Quite the opposite, that it's going to be a continuation of all of the bad things about the Obama administration's policy, including, and I would say especially, the Obama administration's sort of catering to the interests of Saudi Arabia in the region, and particularly and most egregiously in Yemen.
I mean, that's where I think, and as I say in my article, the rubber hits the road in the most serious way, because it means that this administration, the new administration, is going to continue the policy of the Obama administration of basically enabling and giving diplomatic political cover to the Saudis for this awful, horrible, anti-human war in Yemen.
I mean, it's creating the potential for such a humanitarian disaster that it makes anything that we've talked about in Syria, in East Aleppo, and so forth, seem like child's play.
Yeah, well, believe me, it really is as horrible as you could possibly portray it over there, I think.
But now, so, I mean, are we to understand, Gareth, you think that Rex Tillerson being an oil man, where even though we're saying, well, thank goodness, maybe that means he'll be a little bit more reasonable on Russia than a neoconservative or something like that, maybe he'll even be a little bit better on Palestine, like James Baker, but then that means that he just absolutely is a ramco on all issues, Saudi Arabia.
They want Yemeni blood, let them have it.
You know, I don't know that Tillerson would necessarily be more pro-Saudi than other people in the administration.
I tend to think that he probably would not have the same degree of commitment, personally, to the idea that we must give total fealty to the Saudi interests in the region and support whatever they're doing there.
I would suspect, you know, that he would be less enthusiastic or less, shall we say, less extreme on that score than, you know, the military and intelligence bureaucracies.
After all, you know, those are the ones who have the vested interest in their close ties with the Saudis.
And, you know, that, I've always argued, that's what really propels, drives U.S. policy in the region primarily.
That's the big ticket item, the big ship that can't be turned around very easily, if at all.
I mean, that's really our biggest problem.
Well, you know, so speaking of the war in Yemen here, I mean, the goals are basically, first and foremost, to reinstall Hadi on the throne in Sana'a, and now we're two years in, and that's not going to happen.
And those goals cannot be achieved.
And so what are we doing at this point?
It does certainly appear that the Saudis are, you know, have not succeeded, clearly, in accomplishing that.
And what they have accomplished, as I said a few moments ago, is to create this really terrible human disaster, which could very well, in the coming weeks, not just, you know, three or four or five months from now, but just very few weeks from now, any time, could create a huge story about hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dying of starvation.
That's just how serious this is.
And what the implications of that are for the political diplomatic situation, I really don't have a clear notion about.
I mean, you know, this starvation that we're talking about is, of course, the result of a very deliberate Saudi policy.
And this has not really been well understood at all up to now, but, you know, the military side of the war has been a failure, an utter failure on the part of the Saudis and their coalition.
But what they have done in light or, you know, in terms of trying to get around the fact that it was a military failure, has been a military failure, is that they have used the weapon of essentially starvation and disease that goes with malnutrition as an alternative route to trying to achieve what they have failed to do militarily.
And they've done that, of course, by preventing food, fuel, and medicine from getting into the country by their naval blockade, by bombing the main port at Hodeidah, the main port through which international shipping had previously been bringing those items into Yemen.
And basically, and then finally, what they've done is to take the central bank completely out of the zone, the Houthi-controlled zone of Yemen, so that there is no system for currency use in that part, in the largest part of Yemen.
I mean, the central bank has been completely relocated to Aden and the Saudi-controlled part of Yemen.
So that has added enormously to the danger, because people can't really spend the money they have, they can't get cash at all to spend on food and on medicine, what little there is left.
So this is why there is such a disaster in the making, and this is a real big story that hasn't really been told yet.
So in terms of overall diplomatic support in the United Nations and elsewhere, arms, mid-air refueling, intelligence support, naval support, the rest, to what degree, how do you assign the level of responsibility of the American state for this war?
It sure seems to me that the Saudis would like to have this war, but they can only have this war because America is holding their hand the whole time.
Well, this is elementary logic.
I mean, this is a yes-no proposition.
The United States can flip a switch in a political sense and refuse the mid-air refueling, in which case the Saudis can't continue the air war as they have.
I mean, that doesn't mean they couldn't do anything, but they would only be able to reach part of Yemen.
And it wouldn't be effective.
So, I mean, I think it's fair to say, in effect, that the United States can end this war simply by making the decision that they will not support it anymore.
And that's been the case, of course, from the very beginning.
It was clearly the case that the Obama administration knew from day one of this war that this was something that the Saudis could only do because the United States had made the decision to give it their both military, logistical, and political diplomatic support.
Yeah, but Gareth, Iran, Iran, Iran, the world's greatest sponsors of terrorism.
Everybody knows, because everybody knows, that they back the Houthis.
And this is the expansion of the new Persian Empire in the Middle East.
You want to let them dominate southwest Arabian Peninsula there and the Bob al-Mandeb straits at the gates of the Red Sea there?
You want to let them and Hezbollah and Russia run wild in Syria?
Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg that, yes, taking down Assad in Syria would be a great way to bring Iran down a peg by depriving them of their last Arab-allied state.
And they told the New York Times in a very official leak story, it wasn't a big scoop by anonymous officials.
It was all a very top-down, White House-sourced story in the New York Times that, well, we've got to do this thing in Yemen to placate the Saudis because we've made this nuclear deal with Iran.
Yeah, and you just answered your own question very, very capably, Scott.
I couldn't have done better.
You know, I would only add this, and I think the point that you've made just really underlines the fact, the reality, that Obama, as much as he has been associated in the public mind, or let's put it this way, with the attentive foreign policy elite in this country's mind with the idea of sort of being soft on Iran and not really pushing as hard as he should have or could have, he was, as you've just indicated, very much committed to the whole notion that the United States must participate in blocking Iranian influence and countering the malign activities, quote-unquote, of the Iranians in the region.
So that's just to go back to the beginning point that I was making, the point at the beginning of the interview, that there is really no basis for the notion that there's a contrast between sort of a soft policy toward Iran in the Obama administration and the hard-line policy of the Trump administration.
And just one more little detail that I'll add to your answer, because it suggests that there is some space here, there's some gap between the public rhetoric of the Obama administration and the private understanding.
That has to do with the whole notion that the Houthis are Iranian proxy, basically just dependent on the Iranians and ready to do their bidding in Yemen, which tends to be the propaganda line in its crudest form.
I spoke with a former Obama administration official the week before, and he admitted very freely that the Houthis are by no means proxies of Iran, that they don't depend on Iranian advice or follow Iranian advice in their basic decision-making on strategy.
Is it even true that the Iranians have been caught funneling them weapons at all?
I keep hearing that, and I know you've debunked at least a couple of cases.
No, they have not been caught shipping weapons to the Houthis, which is not to say that the Houthis have not gotten any weapons from Iran.
But my analysis, for what it's worth, is that it hasn't been through the Strait or through the Arabian Sea by sea to a Houthi-controlled port, but over land through Oman.
So all of these stories about intercepting weapons at sea, that is all crap.
The fact is that those interceptions were shipments of arms that were not heading towards Yemen.
They were heading towards Somalia, and there's another whole storyline behind that.
Let's talk about Iraq, where America is still fighting for Iran, and we're backing their guys, their friends in the Baghdad government and their friends in the Shiite militias in their war against the Islamic State in Mosul right now.
Right.
And is the Trump administration making noises as though this is a terrible thing, that we shouldn't be working with Iranians?
Or they seem to be talking about supplanting them, replacing them with Marines or Army soldiers.
Well, I hadn't actually seen the specific mention of replacing them.
Maybe you're wrong.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's kind of my terminology for it.
But they're saying the leaks are that Mattis has a new report coming to Trump, and that report is going to say that we need to put soldiers on the ground in Syria.
And then I guess I'm presuming on the eastern front of the same war against the Islamic State there, too.
I mean, they already have all kinds of JSOC guys are on the ground there and have been for a couple of years.
Right.
But, you know, look, Scott, I'm not going to say that I'm following Iraq closely.
So, you know, I could be wrong about this.
But I have always had the impression that even with the continued increase in U.S. personnel there, that they are not prepared to just say that, you know, we're going to refuse the help of Shia militias in Iraq.
I don't believe that.
Yeah, no, I guess I meant more the Iranians themselves in a political sense that, you know, that's the bargain that we're demanding of the Iraqi government.
Right.
It's less influence for Iran and we'll give you more military.
We have better military to offer than the Iranians do.
Yeah.
Ultimately.
Well, I mean, this is and this is not, again, a departure from the Obama administration, I would say.
I mean, I think that that's always Bush for that matter.
Right.
Or Bush.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah.
Well, so now.
Well, what do you think about I mean, there's a story yesterday.
I don't know.
Again, you said you're not following it that close, but you must have probably saw the headline where they're saying they're considering now a long term commitment to Iraq.
Right.
And they're recommending, you know, infantry, apparently, you know, not just top tier special forces, but at least rangers and maybe just army infantry to go and back up the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the Syrian Kurdish forces almost entirely.
Right.
Fighting against the Islamic State in Syria.
That kind of surprised me a little bit.
I mean, it seems like as Daniel Davis has written in The National Interest that, you know, ISIS is pretty much licked anyway.
I mean, America didn't even really need to do this.
They're surrounded by enemies anyway, and they're on the verge of losing Mosul and Raqqa before the end of the summer, maybe the end of the year anyway.
And so why would we go in and get ourselves even deeper into this quagmire that we finally were able to extricate ourselves from just a few years ago?
I think that's a very good question.
And, you know, I don't have a fine grained answer to that.
I mean, sort of analysis that, you know, that relates it to a specific plan, a specific tactical strategic plan for Syria.
I mean, I would relate it and I'm more and more inclined as time goes by to try to look at these kinds of issues, not so much with the fine grained analysis, but looking at it in the larger picture.
Hello, permanent war is the bigger picture here.
I mean, this is this is just another little storyline that that is part of a larger narrative of, you know, the United States is committed to war in in multiple countries in the Middle East for for a period that is going to be indefinite.
And which, as you know better than hardly anybody else, the the people behind this in the Pentagon are talking about decades, not a single decade.
This is this is their expectation.
We are going to be at war in this part of the world for decades.
That's that's exactly what they're planning.
Hey, I'll start here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State and The War State.
Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War Two.
This nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone.
We are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon dot com and Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin.
It's Scott Horton.
Dot org or the war state dot com.
So Afghanistan.
I mean, there must be a review going on right now and a new proposal in the works.
I don't guess that they're going to say let's do counterinsurgency there.
But.
You know, I don't know, man.
The thing is, too, I think it's actually even overstated, although don't anybody quote me saying that.
But the media consensus seems to be that the American people are sick and tired of war even better than the polls show.
And the polls are getting better and better on these questions.
But it seems like the military, I hope rightly, that the establishment is afraid of pissing off the American people with another one of these big things.
You know, Obama was able to get away with an Afghan surge, but Trump's a Republican and it's going to, you know.
He's hired all the people who lost the Afghan war.
So I can see why they're going to not be racing to cut and run and take responsibility for the Taliban controlling at least half the country from here on out.
Obviously, they're going to they're going to do their best to to suggest or to to avoid having to take responsibility for failure, which, which, which is fine.
No, honestly, if they want to call it a victory and quit, then I'm cool with that.
You know, but the thing is, I mean, I mean, they're not going to do that.
Right.
They're going to say we have to stay.
We've got a double or triple or quadruple.
They can't they can't claim victory.
Nobody thinks they can do that.
That's that's clearly not on the table.
So, I mean, I think they claim good enough.
Can they accept defeat?
Can they say, look, the Taliban whooped our ass and we're leaving at the beginning of the Trump administration?
I mean, no, no, they're not going to do that.
Of course not.
So how big is the surge going to be?
I don't know.
I don't know how big the surge is going to be.
I just know that it fits into the larger picture of hello, permanent war.
Yeah.
And and, you know, as Doug McGregor, who who should have become the national security advisor when they dumped Flynn, a brilliant military thinker who who was suggested by some people, but it didn't get into he didn't get into the finals.
What he recently said was, look, the Pentagon will never be able to reform itself.
It's incapable of doing that.
So, you know, the Pentagon, the armed services, Joint Chiefs of Staff will always be uncapable, incapable of making a decision to get out on their own.
It has to be done from outside.
And in the present situation, that outside is not going to be, in my view, President Trump.
It's going to have to come from the American people.
I mean, that's that's the problem we're up against.
Right.
Well, I don't know if you saw this headline today.
Trump promises, quote, one of the greatest military buildups in American history.
I know about our darling.
He called it our darling military or something like that.
Our beloved military, our beloved military.
You know, I don't know what to make of this, how how seriously to take it, to what extent it represents a considered view that has been staffed at all.
You know, they have they put on an envelope what that could mean.
I have no idea.
But I tend to think that that this is one of the many things on which Trump just shoots off his mouth and then they're left trying to figure out, OK, well, what are we going to do about that?
You know, what does it mean?
Well, he knows that the whole rest of the establishment doesn't like him, but the generals do.
And they're all directly on his dole.
So he can make them happy pretty easy.
And then what's anybody else going to do about it?
The generals like him, you know.
Right.
Right.
I mean, and he he appears to want to have more military spending, more nuclear weapons.
That's the implication, although, again, I mean, that's one of those issues where, I mean, he hasn't he hasn't thought about it.
I don't even think he knows what it means to say, you know, we should be the top.
You know, we should have the top nuclear nuclear capability.
Here there's so many dimensions of that, so many complications that, you know, I just don't know what it means and how significant it is.
At this point, it's very difficult to say.
All right.
So back to Iran.
Let's talk about the nuclear deal for a minute here, because there's a big gap between the narrative and the reality here.
In fact, I just saw this morning.
I'm looking at it right now.
Tyler Cullis has a link to a news story about Iran's nuclear enrichment.
And it says their stockpile of enriched uranium is roughly a third of the amount that is allowed under the deal.
According to the latest report from the IAEA, in other words, everything is going along swimmingly.
And all the dangerous, terrible threats about how Iran is going to stiff army inspectors and they're going to get away with murder and they're going to build nuclear weapons anyway.
Nobody even pretends to claim that kind of nonsense right now because the IAEA has nothing to do except sing Iran's praises for the degree to which they scaled back their program and expanded their inspections.
The David Albright's of the world are in complete and utter retreat.
I think it's fair to say.
I'm not saying that David Albright won't publish something, but nobody's going to pay attention to it.
Except that, who's the current war cabinet?
It's Trump and Bannon and Mattis.
And I don't know what McMaster's point of view on the Iranian nuclear program is, but Mattis is the guy that got fired partially because he kept challenging Obama.
And I actually like the way this works is everybody goes, Mattis is a brave truth teller because he kept saying to Obama.
And then what?
And then what?
Which sounds out of context like he's warning if we got into a conflict with Iran, then what?
Then what?
But it's not.
It's him saying, what if you make peace with Iran?
Then what?
Then what?
What if you do a nuclear deal?
But then they attack our boats.
And he makes up any number of terrible things that might happen if we try to make peace with them.
And that's what got him fired.
And we also know that the president doesn't know the first thing about this nuclear deal.
And I'm not confident that any single person on his staff can tell him the truth.
That like, hey, you know how there's the comic book nuclear deal like in your political talks, Mr. President.
Here's actual the facts of the matter and why it's a good deal and why we want to keep it.
Is there a single person on his staff who has that point of view?
But Scott, that's not really an acute problem at this point.
I mean, the administration has already decided they're going to go with this agreement.
They're going to stick with it.
They're not going to try to change it.
That's not the problem we face.
I think the problem we face with Trump administration on Iran is going to be that he he will feel the necessity to do something to follow up on this.
We put you on notice business.
And, you know, they hadn't figured out what they were going to do when they uttered those words.
When when both Flynn and then Trump himself said we've put the Iranians on notice, they had yet to staff it out.
OK, what are our options here?
It was just rhetorical, which is, you know, that's that's my sense of the way the Trump administration has made foreign policy to a great extent thus far.
But, you know, they they have accepted the the the deal, but they also have not accepted the idea that Iran has the right to have a ballistic missile program.
And what are they going to do about it?
I mean, there's there's nothing that they can do, you know, in terms of of sanctions that that they haven't already done.
They've already they've already said we're going to sanction people for contributing to the ballistic missile program or having some tie tie in with it.
And so so there's going to they're going to be caught up in that sort of contradiction that they're that they're they've got this rhetorical position that this is not acceptable.
We're not going to accept it, but but they're they don't have any options that are obvious to to do anything about it.
And so I don't know where that.
But, you know, I, I do think that that this is not an administration that's going to be any more tempted to to do things that risk that have an obvious risk of potential military conflict with Iran than the Obama administration did.
Because, again, the permanent government, the permanent war state is still there, still intact, the same historical memory, the same understanding of the strategic situation exists there.
And they know that if they start something in the Strait of Hormuz against Iran, the Iranians can destroy some very, very expensive U.S. military hardware.
They can destroy a U.S. ship that has a lot of airplanes on it and so on and so forth.
So, you know, this is no longer a an era where the United States can make war with impunity on Iran.
And that's the underlying reality that's not changed since the Iranians acquired the the anti-ship missiles that the U.S. have to take very seriously.
Well, you know, I mean, I think he told me 10 years ago that, look, the Air Force likes to talk as though the world is a Lockheed commercial or whatever.
And don't worry, boss, we can take care of it.
No problem.
But the Marines in the Army are the ones who got to do all the dying, trying to take out all the anti-aircraft so those planes can do their bombing and that they kind of have a different way of looking at it.
And especially after the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq already where.
Right.
But I think I think the Navy was even far more opposed to any any possible move toward war against Iran than the Army.
You know, I had read that.
Those red blue exercises were the Iranian on the tabletop exercise where the Iranians sink all our battleships.
You know, there were reports that came out later that said, yeah, but they took care of that problem, you know, because.
The Yeti ship missiles, you mean?
Yeah, like they did.
They did later red blue exercises where things worked out and they just, I guess, use their Gatlin guns and their Aegis radars and whatever and whatever.
It was OK.
And yes, they learned their lessons from those from those red team things and that now they're not worried about it anymore.
I wasn't aware that I wasn't aware that there was there was a result that was that had credibility that that showed the U.S. came out very well in one of those things.
It's been quite a few years since I read about this, but I'll see if I can find it and remember where it was that I read about this, where they were claiming that they had learned the lessons of that terrible red team exercise where they all got sunk.
Well, they may have learned the lessons, but I don't think they they learned a lesson that that we can get away with sort of picking a fight with Iran.
I think it's the opposite.
I do.
Well, I think that's what they were claiming is that now they're not worried about it because they've they've got countermeasures to Iranian countermeasures, that kind of argument.
But anyway, I'll find it for you.
Well, you know, I mean, this is this is a huge this is a huge issue in the military sort of planning for the for the future, because they've made a great deal of this, both on Iran and on China, that they have to acquire new hardware, new technology to precisely deal with this problem.
Oh, you know what it was?
It was it was that the big Achilles heel in the red team exercises were the swarming speedboats.
And they said, well, we solve that problem with we just have a couple of new machine gun emplacements and no speedboats.
Yeah, I think you're right about that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's what I'm thinking of.
That's what I'm thinking of.
I don't know that they I mean, I know that they have, in theory, with their mini guns and their Aegis radar, they think that they can shoot down sea skimming supersonic missiles.
But that's a hell of a gamble with a machine gun and a radar, I think.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't I don't.
My reading is that those those missiles are faster than anything, anything else at this point.
And of course, they can try to take them out in the first strike.
That would be the that would be the ultimate strategy.
You see that that's what they're after is to acquire the ability for both Iran and China to be able to take out those missiles in the first strike.
But they don't have it at this point.
They're years, years away from that.
And who knows how many years?
And, you know, I mean, I think the real danger in the future of war is going to be if they succeed, if the if the US military succeeds in getting that kind of technology, then, you know, we're back.
We're back to a much more dangerous situation.
Yeah.
Well, you know, yeah, I think the real problem here, Gareth, is I was talking with Mark Perry about this.
This is a common theme when I interview Mark Perry, because the first time in a while, anyway, the first time I interviewed him about McMaster and McGregor and America's posture in Eastern Europe.
My big question to him was, did these liars know they're lying?
I mean, you and I and the whole damn world knows that America overthrew the government in Kiev twice in 10 years and threatened the Russian status of their naval base at Sevastopol.
And that was what preceded their taking of Crimea without killing anyone, by the way, in the process and this kind of thing.
But and so the generals, when they say, oh, no, expansionist Russia, I mean, they know they're bluffing and that they're just trying to sell some tanks and some planes and getting some stars on their shirt.
But but they know they're lying.
Right.
Please assure me that they know they're lying.
And this is the same thing that Mark Perry said on the show yesterday was, no, they don't know they're lying.
They're completely full of it and they all believe it.
They're every single person in D.C. is convinced about the danger of the rise of raunchiness, Russia and evil mastermind, brilliant, terrible genius, Vladimir Putin, who stole the election from Hillary Clinton.
And they are all just as certain, I guess, that Iran is the world's greatest sponsor of terrorism and that all day long, morning, noon and night, breakfast, lunch and dinner, Iran, Iran, Iran.
What are we going to do about Iran?
And if everybody believes that doesn't matter if it's true or not at all.
You know, I think that's I think that's right up to a point that that both on Russia and on Iran that they believe the basic lines of their propaganda, certainly on the on the idea of Iran as the world's greatest state sponsor of terrorism.
No, no question that that that they have never allowed any alternative fact to to challenge the the can't that has been held by every administration since 1979, basically.
But but I do think that there is a level of analysis, that there's a level of specificity within the Pentagon and within the CIA on some of those issues, particularly on Russia, where they are aware of a more complex situation.
That that is not really, really accurately represented by the by the narrative on the threat, quote, unquote.
And I and I can't I can't document that with chapter and verse, but it's based on, you know, just just an overall reading of the literature that that there there is knowledge that, you know, the facts are more complicated than than what what has been put forward in the last few years since the since the Ukraine crisis.
I mean, you know, they know, for example, that the history of of the U.S. relations with Russia over NATO, the background of that, that's well known.
They may choose not to talk about it.
They may choose not to not not to think about it very much, but it's definitely there in the historical memory bank of these institutions, I would say.
Yeah, well, I mean, it seems to me, you know, just like, yeah, they know that really the terrorism problem is all H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton's fault.
But since no one will ever, ever, ever say that, and history began on September 11th and then it began all over again in March of 2014, when the Russians took the Crimean Peninsula and we don't ever, ever.
It's what Robert Higgs calls truncating the antecedents.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess what I'm thinking that can be the basis of a real problem.
Right.
I mean, if we if we're going to be totally in denial of what we did before the thing that happened happened, then, you know, that that makes very wrong premises for the formulation of future policies.
That's that's an extremely fundamental point.
And, of course, as you know, that's that's really a big part of the of what I was arguing in my book on Iran, that that precisely the the truncating of the antecedent, the refusal to really go back and and look at the actual history of what happened beginning in the 19 in the 1980s.
When the Reagan administration first intervened to prevent Iran from having a civilian nuclear program, you know, they're just absolute refusal to take a look at what the actual history was is is absolutely crucial, crucial to understanding the degree to which they get it all wrong.
I mean, they're just so totally in a in this make believe world.
So so that is indeed the most important problem that we face.
But but I think it's it's it's worthwhile to to distinguish between, you know, a lot of a lot of these issues, which, as in the case of the history of the Iranian nuclear program, the background of it, that there's absolute utter refusal to to be acquainted with the facts and some issues where necessarily in the Pentagon, you know, they they're aware of certain facts, certain complications.
That that aren't talked about, but but are, in fact, I think, understood.
So, I mean, I think, you know, the more important one is is precisely the refusal to look at the historical background.
But but there are some facts that they are denying publicly, but I think they they do understand privately.
What a relief, you know, thank goodness that they're just not really that stupid.
We can all breathe, breathe easily, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I remember when I was a little kid being told that, you know, the whole Cold War with the Soviet Union, don't worry, they're just selling weapons.
There's not going to be nuclear war, man.
They're just the whole thing is a big bluff on both sides, because war is the health of the people in power kind of a thing.
And, you know, like, hey, Abel Archer still almost got everybody killed anyway.
But I guess if if I have to choose, I prefer that everybody in charge knows that they're lying their ass off versus really being so caught up in their own nonsense that they truly believe that they're being forced to defend themselves because God knows what they would do, you know, if they really thought that, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Man.
Well, you've kept your focus on a very, very important problem of trying to figure out what these people actually believe.
And that that puzzle will remain with us until we finally wrap this problem up.
Exactly.
Stupidity or the plan or, you know, more more at whose stupid plan.
Why do they think this is the thing to do?
Anyway, listen, man, I love it when you do journalism.
Thank you very much for coming on the show again.
Thank you, as always, Scott.
Great to be back and look forward to talk to you again.
Good deal.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis.
The truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
It's the book on the Iran nuclear program.
Forget it.
Nobody else is even in competition.
Manufactured Crisis.
And then find him at Middle East Eye and at Truthout.
This one is also reprinted at the Libertarian Institute and at Antiwar.com.
It's called Ignore the Tough Talk.
Trump's Iran policy will be much like Obama's.
And that's Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, y'all.
Check out all the stuff at Scott Horton dot org and at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton Show.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
If you've got a band, a business, a cause or campaign and you need stickers to help promote, check out the bumper sticker dot com at the bumper sticker dot com.
They digitally print with solvent ink.
So you get the photo quality results of digital with the strength and durability of old style screen printing.
I'm sure glad I sold the bumper sticker dot com to Rick back when he's made a hell of a great company out of it.
There are thousands of satisfied customers who agree with me to let the bumper sticker dot com help you get the word out.
That's the bumper sticker dot com at the bumper sticker dot com.
I love Bitcoin, but there's just something incredibly satisfying about having real fine silver in your pocket.
That's why commodity disks are so neat.
They're one ounce rounds of fine silver with a QR code on the back.
Just grab your smartphone's QR reader, scan the coin and you'll instantly get the silver spot price in Federal Reserve notes and Bitcoin.
And if you donate 100 bucks to the Scott Horton Show, he'll send you one.
Learn more at Facebook dot com slash commodity disks commodity disks dot com.
Thank you for watching.
