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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, guys, I've got the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
That's the book on Iran's nuclear program.
And hey, here we thought it was obsolete.
Who cares?
We got the deal now.
A great debunking of the subject that no longer needs debunking.
And yet now, all of a sudden, it's all important.
Gareth spoke Manufactured Crisis.
They never were making nukes dummy, I think is the new subtitle.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
And of course, yes, the issue of the Iranian nuclear policy is definitely back at the top of the agenda.
No question about it.
And at some point, I think I'm going to have to start, you know, making the same points that I made years ago in some pieces, but I haven't gotten to that yet.
Well, you're about to right now on this show, because I'm going to set you up by asking questions.
First of all, let's talk about your new article here in the American Conservative Magazine, or TAC, as us fans call it.
Trump trashes Iran deal to satisfy Netanyahu.
U.S.-Iran policy is closer to Israel than it has been in years, reads the title and subtitle here again, theamericanconservative.com.
And so, I guess, well, obviously, the news is Trump refused to certify that Iran is living up to their side of the deal.
He's kicking it to Congress.
And as you say in here, he's recommending that Congress go ahead and pass new sanctions against Iran.
Do you think that's going to happen?
And then if so, then what happens after that?
Well, you know, there my ability to prognosticate wears very thin and really vanishes.
I mean, I don't know exactly what the key figures in Congress have in mind at this point.
I mean, I can't really predict what's going to happen in Congress, because there are different points of view, ranging from Tom Cotton, who wants to trash the agreement completely, and people who are somewhat more sane, who don't really want to do that, who do still have some role to play, at least in this Congress.
But what I think is even more significant here is that Trump has said in his statement that you've referred to that if Congress doesn't roll over and play ball the way he wants them to, and go along with the scheme to essentially demand that Iran renegotiate parts of the agreement and add new parts, which Iran is simply not going to do, then the United States, he as president will pull the United States out of the agreement.
And it will be at that point, pretty much a dead letter, although, you know, you then have to ask yourself, will the Iranians immediately pull out or will they try to work something with the Europeans?
And that will then become, I think, the issue.
All right, now, so yeah, on that, here's the whole point of your book, to boil it down.
They never were making nukes.
That's what the book is about.
The Ayatollah said, no, no, no, we're not making nukes.
He died.
The new Ayatollah also said, no, we're not.
God says, no, it's haram.
We're not doing it.
Forget about it.
That's a standing order to the whole government.
The worst you could ever really accuse them of without lying is saying, well, they built up a latent weapons program, a civilian program that could be turned into a weapons program if all else fails, sort of a half mutually assured destruction type of a thing there.
But then they negotiated all that away.
And this is really what you showed.
We talked about this for years on the show, that the only reason they really built it up as big as they did is so they'd have something to negotiate away in return for the sanctions relief that they were promised here.
And so then, but the point being that if America did break the deal, would they really have an incentive to break their end of the deal with England, France, Germany, Russia, China, the EU and the rest of the signatories when really, I mean, what are they going to do?
Take jackhammers and get all the concrete out of the Iraq reactor and start it up?
I mean, no way, right?
It's already a done deal.
So it seems like they would do better to stay in the deal and just make America look extra the jackass.
No?
No, I think that there's some options in between the two extremes, if you will, the ones that you've just articulated that they very well might and I think are likely to undertake in the wake of a Trump move such as he has threatened.
And that would mean certainly starting to do some higher level, i.e. more than 20% enrichment of uranium, which, you know, was the single biggest issue as far as the Obama administration was concerned.
The thing that really mobilized Obama politically, I would argue, more than anything else was having to respond to the pressure that was created by the Iranian saying, we're going to start enriching uranium at 20% level of enrichment.
And, you know, that that was a signal, it was certainly it was viewed in American politics as moving much closer to having a nuclear weapons capability.
Even though, of course, as you've quite correctly said, I mean, that was not really what was going on.
This was a negotiating ploy.
And in fact, the Iranian said so at the time, they said so to me, they said so publicly that that this was a move they were making, because the United States was unwilling to negotiate with them on a reasonable basis.
So I mean, this is this is certainly one of the things that I would expect them to threaten to do and to go ahead and make moves towards, because it's one that can be easily moved back and forth.
All right, now, so I talked with Trita Parsi on the show yesterday.
And I says to Trita, I says, hey, man, you know, the accusations here are so thin.
It's, you know, second time as far as kind of thing, if we're repeating the Iraq tragedy, where it's so transparent, right, that Trump is saying, hey, CIA, go dig through your trash, just like Richard Perle did that one time.
You know what I mean?
It's just as blatant as could be.
And even, of course, the men who would know best and who, you know, we hate to rely on in a confirmation bias kind of way, but the military junta itself, McMaster, Mattis and Dunford have all three said on the record, Iran is within the deal.
The best they have is, well, they're in violation of the spirit of the deal because they keep working on missiles.
And because, as Trump tried out in his statement, what, last week, two weeks ago, that Iran backs al Qaeda.
Yeah, well, of course, yeah, there are statements that are made that you can't do anything except just sort of, you know, quick intake of breath and say, come on, guys.
So Treat is saying, Treat is going, look, man, you know, it's true that what Obama did with this deal is he just he did he took the nuclear issue almost entirely off the table.
It's just so safeguarded now that the bad guys basically have to shut up.
So now they're resorting back to al Qaeda type excuses.
Oh, they back Muqtada and give him EFPs.
What a Muqtada, Muqtada al-Assad, I want to say, and give him EFPs.
You know, this kind of nonsense, other propaganda to say they're in violation of the spirit of the deal.
But if that doesn't mean anything, does is the other side of that, then that that's sort of a blank check that anything that they do, even though it has nothing to do with the deal is a violation of the spirit of the deal.
And is that really something that would get Congress to upend this whole thing?
I mean, this administration has gone so much farther than any previous administration in simply making up a completely, you know, imaginary basis for its opposition to Iran.
You know, it is it makes no pretense that it really cares about the nuclear issue itself.
I mean, that's the bottom line, in my view.
I mean, if you read carefully between the lines, as well as within the lines of what Trump and his administration have been saying, they really aren't about anything that has to do with Iran's nuclear program anymore.
That's just not the point.
That's not the issue that they care about.
What they care about is pushing back against Iran in the Middle East.
And that means that they are far more aligned now with Israel on this issue than ever before, you know, in a way that goes back to essentially Cheney and Bolton and the period when, you know, those people were conspiring to try to figure out a way that they could actually start a war against Iran.
And I mean, they did try to do that.
We know that they were foiled, but that's that was the intention.
And they actually made moves in that direction.
But, you know, now we have an administration that is essentially, they're not, I don't believe, ready to go to war with Iran.
They're not thinking about that.
But everything short of that, they're trying to find ways, figure out ways that they can position themselves to say, yeah, we're pushing back against the Iranian in the Middle East.
And this is part of it, you know, rejection of the agreement is part of that, because that stands in the way that that was an agreement that caused the United States to be in a position of essentially constantly compromising with Iran so that we wouldn't so that so that we couldn't do anything against them elsewhere in the world.
And they are explicitly rejecting that.
And that's that's really what I find very disturbing, primarily about the Trump administration's policy now.
Mm hmm.
Well, you know, I hate to say, but I do think that Trump is just smart enough to know better than this.
I mean, I'm pretty sure I heard him say that.
Well, look, you know, at the end of the day, Assad, Iran and Russia, they're fighting against ISIS and Al Qaeda, right?
You know, things along those lines.
Far be it for me to say we should ally with them or anything like that.
But the I guess David Stockman, I'll quote David Stockman.
He has said in the past, hey, look, in the scheme of things in the Middle East right now, we ought to be allied with Russia, Iran and Syria against these Al Qaeda crazies.
Now, again, I'm not exactly saying that, but I'm saying it seems like that would be the more likely Donald Trump point of view on this.
We saw that his point of view was he sure preferred Assad to Al Nusra in western Syria right now.
And so I wonder, I mean, obviously, I know about the lobby and the neocons and what they want.
I know what John Bolton wants, for crying out loud.
But what do you think is Trump's motive for being so hung up on Iran?
It seems like he could just go to Tehran.
Well, yes, he could, of course, if he wanted to.
Two points.
One, of course, that Trump, the main one is that Trump is such a dysfunctional personality that, you know, he really cannot be viewed as somebody who has sort of a unitary, you know, rational view of things.
He changes his mind from day to day, changes his mind on the basis of who has gotten to him to some extent.
And he has proven himself, you know, able to change his mind on sort of really basic issues, such as Afghanistan, which he was dead set against when he became president.
And even, you know, in the first month of his presidency, he was making it clear that he didn't think we should be continuing to fight this war forever.
And then he finally gave in.
He allowed himself to be talked into it.
We don't know exactly how they did it, but they did succeed in that.
And, you know, there are other things we know have happened, that he was taken to the tank at the Pentagon in July, if I remember correctly, by his national security team.
And they filled him full of propaganda for globalism, meaning, you know, having U.S. military intelligence and diplomatic presence all over the world, and why it's so important, the argument they gave him, to protect American business interests.
And he bought it from everything we've read.
And so, you know, he's a guy who you just can't count on to hold on to an idea, even though it seemed to be fairly firmly held in the past.
Secondly, you know, you talk about the neocons, the neocons are less the problem than his son-in-law and his primary donor in the general election of 2016, Sheldon Adelson, who also, of course, happens to be Netanyahu's primary donor in the past.
He's got these connections, which are, you know, clearly sufficient to sway him in this matter.
And I think the timing of his change of heart right after he met Netanyahu, and after Bolton is talking directly with, meeting with Adelson in Las Vegas, and gives him a call in the White House and gets him to put in a key sentence in his, or maybe it was more than one sentence, in his speech, all this points to the conclusion that he has been swayed by, you know, very important connections with right-wing Zionist figures in his family as well as in his political career.
All right, now, especially for new listeners, why don't you tell us a little bit about Sheldon Adelson?
Yeah, Sheldon Adelson is, of course, the casino magnate, the longtime multi-billionaire.
Apparently he's got hundreds of billions of dollars that he's made from the casinos.
And his political interests revolve completely around Israel.
He said that publicly, that's all he cares about.
So he has, in fact, used much of his fortune, or much of it, but some of his fortune, to bankroll a newspaper in Israel that is a free newspaper, the only free newspaper available in Israel that touts Netanyahu and the Likud party's policies.
And has been a very important advantage politically for Netanyahu.
And he was, in fact, the biggest donor to Trump's campaign in the general election in 2016, $100 million.
So, you know, this is no small matter for a sitting president to consider what his options are.
When, you know, Adelson's position on Iran is that, and he's made this public in the past, we should drop a bomb in the Iranian desert, a bomb in the Iranian desert, and after it's gone off, we should tell the Iranian, we can do the same thing on Tehran.
So go ahead and be obstreperous if you want, but that's what's going to happen to you.
Now, you know, of course, that's just an off-the-cuff remark, which, you know, does not mean that he's in a position to dictate policy of the United States toward Iran, but it just indicates where he's coming from.
All right.
Now, you know what?
I think that maybe you and, I don't know, me, are both just apologists for Iran or something.
Hardly have a negative thing to say about this regime, which is hardly free.
I mean, if our republic is corrupt, think how far from a real free society theirs is.
And yet, in context, of course, it is truthful and it's important to point out that, compared to the United States of America, their economy is smaller than maybe our smallest state, or maybe equivalent to the smallest state in the Union.
They have no real navy.
I don't know, describe their navy.
They got one battleship and some speed boats.
They got some F-14s that Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon had given them back in the 1970s that probably don't fly anymore.
We dumped all ours in the ocean.
They're worthless.
It's just G.I. Joe toys.
But so, you know, what is so bad about Iran anyway?
Be fair to the war party here, Gareth.
They've made some major gains.
Just because it was George Bush who did it for them doesn't mean that they haven't really increased their power in the last few years over there.
What's up?
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, I'm glad to have the opportunity to say it.
Yes, Iran is much more powerful, much more influential in the Middle East than they were before the United States invaded Iraq.
No question about it.
And before the United States helped create the Islamic State to check their power, and then they gained by helping to defeat it again.
Yeah.
And of course, they overthrew the Taliban regime, which was a major opponent of the Iranian Islamic Republic.
And so there's a whole series of things, and we don't have to go through the entire litany.
My point would be quite simply, and you know, this is hardly, you know, saying something that's that's radical.
Everything that has all the power that has accrued to Iran and influence that have accrued to Iran over the past decade and a half or more has been the result of policies that the United States and its close allies in the Middle East have brought about through all the various military moves that have been made in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, and in Afghanistan, that have, in one way or another, strengthened the hand of Iran, primarily by bringing to power in one way or another, or giving greater influence, Shia or at least proto-Shia, you know, semi-Shia forces in the region, which are naturally going to be influenced by or, you know, looking toward Iran for inspiration and support.
And when I was in Tehran in 2009, December 2008, January 2009, I had a very interesting interview with the Middle East expert at their think tank, and the global affairs think tank in Tehran, and he was quite frank to say, you know, that the best thing that's happened to Iran strategically has been, in fact, the U.S. unseating of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and bringing to power a Shia regime.
They are our allies.
They are natural allies because they're Shia, and we realize that.
We're able to take advantage of that.
So this is explicitly part of their regional strategy, without any question.
But this is very different from a regime or a country or a state that is out to dominate the region through the use of force, through basically pressure on their neighbors or anything of the sort.
And this is not to defend everything the Iranians have done or to say that it was wise, but to make distinctions that have to be made if you're going to be objective in your analysis of regional politics.
All right, hang on just one second.
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All right.
Now, so this one kind of gets me in trouble.
People don't like nuance and Lord knows I probably ain't too good at getting to the heart of the nuance here, but I'd love to point out this great article.
It's by a Financial Times writer or, yeah, pretty sure, who wrote in Salon.com back when Salon.com used to publish good stuff a lifetime ago.
It's called How Chalabi Conned the Neocons.
And it's about how, hey, guess what?
The Iraqi National Congress exiles full of WMD myths.
They had their headquarters in Tehran and that might be a clue as to what their agenda is.
And what's funny here is that, and it's really good read, and people take that, when I point that out, they take it to be like a diffusion of responsibility somehow.
Like I'm saying, it's not the Likudnik's fault.
It's not the neocons fault because they were tricked by these dastardly Iranians or anything like that.
When that's not my point, I'm saying that David Wormser, who you cite in your article here, the author, the principal author of A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm and The Companion Piece, Coping with Crumbling States, that, and he cites Chalabi in both of those, I'm fairly certain.
And the point is that Chalabi really sold them a good one and it really helps to explain why they would embark on this policy, which did, after all, as you say, empower the Iranians to such a powerful degree.
And that is that they thought it wasn't going to be like that at all.
They thought they would get a Hashemite king.
That was the original plan.
And that the Iraqi Shiite majority, well, they just love being bossed around and they'll just do it our way and it'll be great and they'll give us some permanent bases and we'll give them such a great democracy that then all the pressure will be put by them on Iran, that Iran better than change and come under the sway of a new Shiite Iraq.
And eventually they've replaced the plot for a Hashemite king with, we'll just put Chalabi in there and it'll work.
When, of course, this was nonsense and Chalabi must have known all along that, no, it's going to be the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa party who inherit the power there.
And that was, you know, those were his friends and his plan all along.
But that was what he told Israel's fifth column in DC, was that this new Shiite government will be, they'll be the ones lording it over Iran, not the other way around.
And they'll be allies with Israel and build an oil and water pipeline to Haifa and all of this nonsense.
Correct?
Well, I think that's, I think that's correct.
I mean, there may be some degree of ambiguity that has not really been studied carefully about exactly what the relationship was between Chalabi and the Iranian intelligence and IRGC and so forth.
It's possible that, you know, his relationship to them came later rather than at the time originally when the contacts were made with Chalabi.
You know, I don't know the answer to that.
You know, I actually honestly have not looked into that question to try to ascertain, you know, exactly how much was really known about, you know, who he was and what sort of contacts he had all along with the Iranian regime and their intelligence people.
I'll just add real quick that what was reported then was he let the Iranians know that the Americans had broken their codes and were listening to them.
And the Americans found that out and did, then did a review and the DIA and the CIA had put out a report, and this was reported in the Guardian and the New York Times and the Jewish Daily Forward, that actually maybe he was on a mission to fool these Likudniks into supporting this war.
It's a reasonable supposition.
I just don't know the answer.
All I'm saying is that this came relatively later, you know, long after the original contact had been made between the neocons and Chalabi.
So there is a degree of uncertainty about exactly how that evolved over time.
That's all I'm saying.
It makes sense though, right, that Wormser thought that this was going to be what's best for Israel, that this isn't going to empower Iran, this is going to put them in a weaker position under the sway of the Iraqi Shia.
And I'm quite sure that Chalabi was playing some games with Wormser and those people.
He knew better than to think that that was possible.
That's just a ridiculous idea, basically, that a Shia Iraq was going to sort of make peace with Israel and found its foreign policy, organize its foreign policy around that.
Well, it's the companion piece, Coping with Crumbling States, where we find the phrase in regards to Syria, that what we want to do is expedite the chaotic collapse there, so that then we'll be in a better position to control the outcome.
So we've seen how well that worked out.
Very well.
I mean, no, horribly.
Yeah.
And again, Iran empowered, right?
And Netanyahu screaming that Iran is firmly ensconced in Syria.
Well, what are they doing there?
They're helping fight back against the American, Israeli, etc.
Saudi, Turkish, Qatari plot to support the jihadis against Iranian interests there, which is only what led to this blowback.
And all this just within the last few years, in the Obama years, right?
Right.
And just bear in mind that, you know, I mean, the Israelis, I point this out to some people who want to say the Israelis were behind the Obama administration move to start supporting the trio of Sunni regimes in the region to arm the opposition against Assad.
But that's not exactly true.
I mean, you know, in fact, the Israelis didn't make up their minds until the spring of 2012.
And by that time, a lot had already started to get underway.
And in a way, they were following the lead of their Sunni friends, if you will, on Syria.
And before that, the Israelis were really worried about the possibility that, you know, what was going to happen here was that the jihadis would take advantage of this and, you know, possibly seize power.
Or if they didn't, that, I mean, I think there was a realistic concern here that even if they didn't, the Iranians would probably intervene.
And then you'd have a whole new situation that was really not to their interest.
So I think that the Israelis were not the ones pushing this from the beginning.
I think they fell in the line later.
Was there any effort by them to rein in their neocons in this country?
Because they sure were the ones pushing this regime change policy here.
Well, they did push.
I mean, you're talking about Syria now.
You're talking about Syria rather than Iraq.
Yeah.
I mean, beginning in 2011, who's got it out for Assad's blood?
It's all the same guys who led us into war with Iraq.
That may be.
You know, I think that there is, there's a distinction here between, you know, the Likud government in Israel.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
There have been other times in history, too, where the, you know, AIPAC and WINEP and for that matter, you know, especially the particular neocons themselves were to the right of the Likud party or the Kadima party.
They were more militarily aggressive than the Likud government was willing to be, both under Netanyahu and under Ehud Olmert.
On the other hand, once the Israelis got started here, we know they've been given direct aid and comfort to al-Nusra fighters, where the Americans always try to keep it at least a little bit deniable and say, well, we're just backing Ahrar al-Sham or whatever.
Absolutely.
And then they've actually come out and said, you know, well, you know, we'd prefer to have the, not just al-Qaeda, but Daesh in power than to have the people that are fighting them, essentially.
Yeah, that was Michael Oren, who was Netanyahu's ambassador to the United States, said so twice, at least three times.
Yeah, the amazing things that the Israelis are willing to say publicly sometimes just are quite astonishing.
All right, now, so one more thing here.
A lot of people get paid a lot of good money to pretend to believe that the Mujahideen-y cult, communist terrorist cult, could somehow become the legitimate, democratically elected government of Iran in the event of a regime change there.
So, shades again, I guess, of Chalabi in the Iraqi National Congress.
Although I think it was quite a bit more plausible that you could have parachuted Chalabi in there, in Iraq, where his family at least had paid for the upkeep of an important Shiite shrine for a long time and this kind of thing.
He had a little bit of street cred in Najaf, for example, you know?
But here, the MEK, I mean, what is the deal?
Is this just the worst bit of nonsense you ever heard in your life, or what?
Well, I mean, not to prejudice your answer or anything.
Yeah, the MEK is nothing.
I mean, the idea that the MEK is a serious player on the issue of Iran is nothing more than lots of money changing hands, some of which may come from Israel and a lot of which clearly comes from wealthy businessmen in the L.A. area to bribe U.S. political figures to say stuff that they get paid very handsomely for.
I mean, we know that's very well documented, and I don't think there's anything more to it than that.
I mean, it's just a straight-out matter of political corruption.
All right, now, okay, so say you're pure evil and you're in charge of, say, I don't know, the Directorate of Operations at the CIA, and your job is not really caring too much about consequences, but really you have a job, and the job is to figure out some way to oust this regime from within.
We did it in 53.
We kind of, you know, according to good sources, the CIA and State Department wasn't too upset when the Ayatollah did it in 1979, at least at first, until the riots and the hostages.
So it can be done.
The government of Iran can be overthrown, Gareth.
How do you do it?
Is it impossible?
Is there a Kurdish group we could back?
How about some radical students down at the university?
What do you think?
Well, look, we know that the CIA and particularly the Bush administration worked very hard to try to come up with information about who potential allies would be for regime change.
You know, they studied the ethnic opposition groups, ethnic minorities in parts of Iran to try to come up with a formula.
And sure, you can find groups of people who would sign up.
You can find Kurds who would sign up.
Lots of Kurds have worked with Israelis for many years in Iran.
But to come up with a formula that would actually have some traction, that would have, you know, could mobilize large numbers of people, that's something else.
I really don't think that either the Israelis or the people who have been working on this within the Bush administration now, and Trump administration have a clue as to how they could do it.
I think they've come up pretty much with the answer that no, we really don't have that option in a practical sense.
It's good for sort of, you know, trying to rally their base, perhaps.
But as a practical policy matter, I don't think there's really an option there that they feel they have.
All right, well, listen, I mean, if I remember 2007, early 2008, correctly, Ehud Olmert had asked George Bush, Hey, is it all right if I kind of do this?
And Bush told him, No, it's not.
So don't.
That's right.
And he didn't.
And then during Obama, actually, at one point, he said, he sent, I believe it was Dennis Blair, over there, who at that time was that he was the, I forget if he was the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, or the Director of National Intelligence or something.
He went over.
No, it was it.
It was Mullen.
It was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Oh, God, it was Mullen.
It was Mullen.
I mean, yeah, tougher guy than Blair, I guess.
And Mullen said, We're not gonna have any USS Liberty type incidents over here.
Wow, we, that's pretty huge mungus, right?
I mean, that's a reference to when Israel attacked an American ship, a Navy ship, NSA ship in 1967.
And LBJ let him get away with it.
So what about Trump?
I mean, if they asked now if Netanyahu says, Hey, man, I got some F-16s and an itchy trigger finger, is Trump gonna let him go and start this thing, which would clearly drag America in?
Look, I don't feel comfortable talking about what Trump would do.
But I can I feel I feel comfortable saying that the military leadership of the United States would veto that in no uncertain terms, and would sit on him very, very hard.
I mean, I don't mean physically, but I mean, what they would push back very, very hard, and he would have a hard time getting anywhere with that.
He could he could have Kushner try to, you know, do something, but Kushner doesn't control the military forces.
And so I think I'm just as confident today as I was, you know, in the aftermath of the 2007 2008 stuff, that the United States military is not going to agree to any war against Iran.
Killer.
All right.
Well, look, I mean, I can put myself in their position, especially as we've spoken about for 10 years now, the army, the Marine Corps, they got to get a lot of quote, their guys killed for something like that.
And it better be good, or they don't want to do it.
I can totally accept the reasoning there.
But then, you know, as Thaddeus Russell said to me earlier, Hey, there were a lot of generals that didn't want to invade Europe, FDR just fired them and replaced them with men who would do what they're told.
And then, and I just wonder, you know, if it even came to that, wouldn't Mattis himself, he wouldn't resign, he would follow orders and order the Defense Department to carry out an attack on Iran, if that's what the president wanted, wouldn't he?
Well, I, you know, I don't think it's quite that simple.
I mean, you know, they have ways of bringing pressure to bear.
I don't mean pressure in the in the overt sense, but you know, ways of making it clear to Trump that this would be a non-starter.
So, you know, I think you have to see, you know, go back to the situation that existed in 2007, when Cheney really was pushing very hard to have the option of an attack on Iran.
He was looking for various ways, and he must have had three or four or five different schemes that we now know about.
And, you know, we know there are multiple sources that have said, and I wrote about Fox Fallon, who was then CENTCOM, he was named CENTCOM commander, and he told the source, who I did not name at the time, when he was about to be, to go before Congress for his, you know, to be officially designated, that there would be no war with Iran under his watch.
He would make sure it didn't happen.
Now, that could mean simply, you know, resigning, but he would resign in a way that would make it very, very difficult for a president to go ahead and do it.
So that's just one of the things that, I mean, I was just thinking about that too, Gareth, but I was thinking of it the other way, like, wow, we really came down to just a hair away, and it was only because we had a commander of CENTCOM who was willing to be insubordinate and stand up to his civilian leaders and announce that he would refuse to carry out their orders.
I don't know how often we can count on that kind of spirit.
But there was more to the story.
It was more of the story, Scott, because he told the source that, you know, it wasn't just him alone.
It was the entire military leadership, that they had been working to put the crazies back in the box.
That was the phrase he used.
Well, and then it was the National Intelligence Council debunked the whole Iran nuclear myth a couple of months later.
So that's true.
That's true.
But this is even before that happened.
This was late 2006, early 2007.
Although, actually, thinking back, they've been working on that NIE since the fall of 06, because I had a blog entry.
I think Giraldi had a piece in the American Conservative Deep Background that the NIE's ready, but Cheney's sitting on it.
It took him almost a year, maybe even more than a year, for it to finally come out.
Yeah, yeah.
Because I remember I had a blog entry called Release the NIE.
There was a pretty united front against any move toward war with Iran.
And, you know, it was expressed in various ways.
And, you know, the most important thing was what happened in the spring and summer.
I mean, there's a story that I haven't published yet, but I'll give you the gist of it, that the Israelis created this fiction of a nuclear reactor in Syria in the spring of 2007, and wanted the United States to bomb that so-called reactor in the desert of eastern Syria.
And Cheney was part of it.
He was in on the deal clearly, and he wanted to take advantage of it to go further and have more bombing in Syria in the hope that we could trap the Iranians or scare the Iranians somehow.
And the Pentagon basically said no, and so did everybody else in the administration, and it never went anywhere.
So, you know, there are multiple parts to the story of how the military and its allies have basically sat on the idea of war with Iran.
Yeah, my old lady, she helped debunk that story about the Syrian reactor back when, had the IAEA sources saying, yeah, there was nothing nuclear going on here, I promise.
And then some.
And of course, there was also Seymour Hersh talked about that Cheney had at least floated a plan.
I don't know that they ever actually planned this, but that Cheney had talked about, well, what if we just got some, I guess, JSOC guys or CIA special operator types to attack the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf in a false flag, like when Hitler pretended that Poland had attacked the German radio station the start of World War II.
Well, there's no doubt that he has the capability and the will to do something like that.
You know, I think that's pretty incredible, everything you know about him.
Man.
Yeah.
So, well, and this is something that is going to be a recurring theme here.
I don't know if you saw this piece by Martha, pardon me, Masha Gessen in The New Yorker about all of Trump's generals and, you know, their ethics as explained by John Kelly about whose opinion counts and whose doesn't.
And when the president does the right thing, that's to be measured by whether he did what they advised him to do or not.
I haven't seen that yet.
Yeah, it's really it's a smart piece about how, yeah, well, we've already had our coup.
I think I'm not sure if I talked about this with you, but I know, you know, surely more than a year ago, we talked about on the show how, you know, bankers, agribusiness, the arms dealers, even the Israel lobby and so forth, pretty much CIA, State Department, the whole deep state was more or less with Hillary, except the military.
And Trump had made a deal clearly with the Marines.
And I guess with the Army, too, that I'm with you guys, and you guys are with me.
And I'll let you do whatever you want, if you support me.
And that was where he had gotten what legitimacy he had from the state during the election season.
And so he sure owes them big, I guess he's delivering now for good and for ill, right?
He's doing what they want, it seems like.
I think that I think that's fair.
Yeah, yeah.
So far, at least, definitely.
Yeah.
Anyway, but yeah, check out that piece.
I'd like to hear what you think of that, because it's a pretty thoughtful thing from a lady who grew up in totalitarianism, you know, and she's not one of these Russia truth or kooks, either.
She's very skeptical.
She's more serious.
Yeah, definitely worth worth looking at.
All right.
Well, anyway, listen, thank you for coming back on the show and talking about this.
And hopefully there won't be any nuclear war soon.
Not for that for a few weeks.
Let's wait until we have a chance to stop the potential war with with North Korea.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let me know as soon as your articles ready.
We can talk about that, too.
All right.
All right.
Thanks, Gareth.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis.
You ought to read that.
You want to know the truth about Iran's nuclear program.
Read all about that in Manufactured Crisis.
The truth behind the Iran nuclear scare by Gareth Porter.
Check him out here at TAC, the American conservative.
Trump trashes Iran deal to satisfy Netanyahu.
I'm Scott Horton.
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