08/16/10 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and my friend Gareth Porter is on the line.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He's the author of the book Perils of Dominance.
He writes for Interpress Service.
That's ipsnews.net and of course you can find all of it at antiwar.com slash porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm good.
Hello again.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
It's good to talk to you and you know what, I'm sorry I got to flip from my Afghanistan section to my Iran section here.
The article says Israeli generals and intel officials oppose attack on Iran.
This is your analysis of Jeffrey Goldberg's article in The Atlantic, which everyone should read, although you shouldn't accept as a fact any assertion in it because many of them aren't actually correct, but it's at The Atlantic and it's called The Point of No Return.
And so this is your analysis of that article.
Again, it's at antiwar.com slash porter, Israeli generals and intel officials oppose attack on Iran.
Go ahead and make your point.
Yeah, you know, this is a situation where the title doesn't really very well convey the real story that I uncovered.
And what happened here is that I read Jeffrey Goldberg's piece with the intention of either writing yet another, you know, neocon pro-Israeli figures try to gin up war against Iran, try to get the United States to attack Iran.
But then I, as I really got into the piece, I realized that there was something more here.
And as I did more research, I found that the real story, which has not been covered at all, is it's not just that the military leadership and the intelligence community in Israel is very skeptical, to say the least, about an attack on Iran.
The deeper story here, which goes back really to the beginning of the anti-Iran position, a posture taken by Israel in the early 1990s, is that this whole pose about an existential threat, comparing Ahmadinejad to Hitler and, you know, the Islamic regime in Iran to the Third Reich somehow, is really, was never serious.
This was always something put out for strategic purpose.
And it started long before Netanyahu.
And it started really under the labor government of Israel in the early 1990s.
What I found, thanks in large part to going back to Trita Parsi's book, Treacherous Alliance, which is a wonderful book, a superbly researched book, which has really uncovered very, very valuable analytical points about the history of U.S.
- Israel-Iran relationships.
And what that book unearthed was that when the labor government was in power in the early 1990s, they began to talk about an existential threat to Israel from Iran, not so much because they were convinced that that Iran had suddenly turned into the Third Reich, but because they were basically interested in heading off any possible U.S. rapprochement with Iran, which was a real possibility because of the post-Khomeini regime, the post-Khomeini government under President Rafsanjani, which was then in power.
And so the Israelis ginned up this notion that Iran was this serious threat to Israel and insisted that the United States take a hard line.
Of course, it was at that point in the early 1990s, it was the Clinton administration.
Clinton turned out to be quite pliable and to go along with that Israeli demand for a policy of heightened hostility toward Iran.
Then we come to, and here's where things get really interesting, and I must say ironic, the regime, the next government in Israel was none other than Bibi Netanyahu, who was elected in 1996.
And there had been an internal labor government panel or committee formed to recommend ways of dealing with the problem of Iran.
And it was divided.
There were different viewpoints, but the dominant viewpoint, apparently, according to Trita Parsi's book, was that they had been making a mistake, that the idea of hyping the Iranian threat was not doing Israel any good.
In fact, it was making Israel less secure, and that Israel should back away from that.
This was basically from the intelligence community, primarily, but from others who were who were dealing with the Iranian problem.
Now, Netanyahu basically took on board the advice of that internal committee, which had preceded his entering office.
And he actually named a senior foreign policy advisor, Uzi Arad, who agreed completely with that point of view.
And Arad convinced the new prime minister, Netanyahu, to fundamentally change Israeli policy.
And they dropped the whole hype about existential threat to Israel from Iran for about nine months, and essentially went completely the opposite direction and tried to find a way for rapprochement between Israel and Iran.
They tried to use the Russians and the Kazakhstan government as mediators to try to get to improve relations with Iran.
And then suddenly, it occurred to them, it became clear that what Iran really wanted was to improve relations with the United States.
And so with that threat in mind, again, Netanyahu completely reversed the policy and reverted to the existential threat line.
And that, of course, has remained the Israeli foreign policy line toward Iran ever since.
But what this really means is, I think, quite significant.
I think it's very important to understand.
And that is that this whole business of, you know, Netanyahu's extreme position toward Iran, the idea that they have no choice but to take matters into their own hands, if the international community can't deal with the problem of stopping the Iranian nuclear program, then Israel will have to do it themselves by attacking Iran.
That is all complete strategic disinformation in the sense that it is aimed precisely at getting world opinion, particularly American opinion, to shift in the direction that Israel wants.
And particularly, of course, what they would like to have happen is the United States to take on the problem of attacking Iran itself.
But if they can't get that, then at least they want to heighten the tension between the United States and the West, on one hand, and Iran on the other, to the maximum degree possible.
So again, this is not a matter of Netanyahu's being a crazy man, just not understanding reality.
Quite the opposite.
This is a very clever strategy that Israel has now adopted to advance interests that it has had as the supreme interest of Israel all along, which is to make sure that the United States is going to be primarily supporting Israel, fully supporting Israel, I should say, and opposing Iran so that there's no fundamental shift in the power balance in the region.
In other words, so none of this has anything to do with war.
It's all just, so that means that every radio show that I've done for the last five years, debunking all the war party lies about the Iranian nuclear program and everything, is really all for nothing, because it was all Israeli propaganda anyway.
Just remember that this is in a broader context in which the Israeli military and political elite understand that they cannot afford to fight a war with Iran on their own.
They could not do it unless the United States was completely behind them.
And so I think that if you understand that Netanyahu has been taking this line on the premise that Obama is not going to be strong enough against Iran, then it becomes clear that Israel really is not aiming at attacking Iran.
Hold it right there, Garrett Porter.
We'll be right back, everybody, after this.
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All right, y'all, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
All right, Garrett Porter's on the line here.
Now, so Garrett, one of the things that's become very apparent here is nobody's pretended that there's a secret nuclear weapons program in Iran for a long time.
Hillary Clinton talked the other day in her interview with the New York Times when David Sanger was browbeating her, trying to get her to say something provocative.
She was kind of defending herself and said, well, look, the question is whether they decide to ever try to make atom bombs.
And so therefore, the path that we're on is good enough.
And of course, in the Jeffrey Goldberg article, there are no assertions that they must have a secret program somewhere at all.
They're talking about the breakout capability that, in fact, that's what Hayden said the other day was breakout capability, meaning a stockpile of low enriched uranium enough that if it wasn't low but was instead high, it would be enough to make a single bomb out of that.
That itself is the threat.
No, you're right.
But hang on, because I got a point, though.
You can say whatever you want when I'm done.
So so nobody's even saying that there's a secret nuclear weapons program here.
They say in the Goldberg article here, Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, right, isn't some professor at some Israeli university, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak both say, well, if they had nukes, they wouldn't use them on us.
But it would make Israelis who can get a scholarship to another country maybe stay there once they leave or something.
That is the so-called existential threat.
So what I'm getting at is you're saying that not even Netanyahu really believes that that bogus nonsense is Acosta's belly here, that none of this really has anything to do with trying to start a war or, you know, by themselves or getting America into one.
It's simply keeping all the rhetoric on the worst part of the right side in America so that no matter what, on on any smaller question, we take Israel's side and we don't end up cozying up to the Iranians like Ronald Reagan did.
I think that's a very good way to put it, Scott.
Now, you know, I'm not asking people to to relax their vigilance and to not oppose, you know, the the rhetoric and the for example, the House Resolution 1553 that, you know, approved an Israeli strike against Iran or anything of the sort.
I think that it's a positive thing for people to continue to be actively opposed to anyone attacking Iran.
I think that's really a necessary activity.
So I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to suggest that anyone should relax the opposition to that.
But what I think is important to understand here is that governments, you know, are inevitably going to adopt public stances that coincide with their institutional and strategic interests.
Those are not necessarily the same thing as what they actually believe.
And this actually reminds me a good deal of the public stance that the U.S. bureaucracy adopted during the Vietnam era, which was the domino theory.
And that idea was talked about so much that it's still regarded as the real reason the United States went to war in Vietnam, when in fact, it had nothing to do with fear of a rising tide of communism in Southeast Asia, it was that they were afraid they were going to lose their Cold War programs.
And they were quite explicit about it in private, but in public.
And and even in terms of bureaucratic, I'm sorry, you say, I'm sorry, you say they're afraid they were going to lose their Cold War program.
That's right.
Yeah.
In other words, the entire project that that's right.
In particular, they were afraid of losing the, the, the military bases and all the covert operations and their allies in East Asia, because, you know, if there was peace in Southeast Asia, particularly peace with China, there was no basis for justifying all those programs.
So I'm just drawing a sort of interesting analogy here.
I think that we do tend and I've been guilty of this myself.
I mean, I was still really under the impression that Netanyahu was was really kind of a right wing, Israeli crazy guy, who was supremely dangerous in that regard.
And I now think that I was wrong about that.
Yeah, but you know, in 96, in 96, when he was willing to change, you know, and maybe try to warm back up to the Iranians, and then back again, that was, you know, the year of the clean break policy.
And the clean break policy said Iraq first, we need to focus on regime change in Baghdad.
That's, you know, the road to Tehran, the road to Damascus run through Baghdad.
And of course, it of course, it only empowered the Iranians, it didn't weaken them, because these people are idiots.
But then so it is it possible that all the calculus as these jerks like to call their stupid thought processes has has changed that that maybe they really are, you know, thinking about using H bombs on Iran?
Well, I think that you're right.
And so far as the calculus is, or was at that point that Iraq was, you know, a target that needed to be dealt with first, I think that continued to be the case.
But But I'm not, I'm not convinced that, that this means that therefore, they are intent on war with, with Iran.
Well, I mean, after all, in 96, they didn't have anything like a breakout capability, right at all.
There was no Natanz, there was no nothing.
I mean, times have changed.
Right.
But But of course, the idea that they would like to nip the, the Iranian nuclear program in the bud, you know, has been a consistent notion in Israeli policy.
I mean, they were certainly taking this position long before they had one scintilla of uranium enriched, you know, going back to 2001 2002 2003.
So, I mean, there's a continuity here that I think is worth considering in terms of Israeli policy.
The logic of which, again, I think you quite accurately summarize.
And again, just sort of an interesting little tidbit, which adds to the irony here of the national head of the National Security Council in Israel today under Netanyahu is none other than Uzi Arad, the man who helped to convince Netanyahu in 1996 to get off that existential threat business.
Well, of course, Meyer Dagan, or Mayor Dagan, the former head of Mossad told Haaretz, Oh, come on, Iran, they're no threat.
They don't even have they're not even working on making nukes.
And even if they had nukes, what am I frightened of them?
Give me a break, dude, they're not going to do anything.
Absolutely.
I mean, he really said it kind of like that.
I'm roughly paraphrasing, but he was very dismissive.
That was the head of Mossad, the former head.
Yeah.
And he's not the only former head of Mossad who said something similar.
I mean, Alavi is another former head of Mossad who who made the same sort of argument in the past.
I think it's very consistent that Mossad has, in fact, acknowledged and advised successive Israeli government that Iran is not the kind of existential threat, but certainly not a threat to attack Israel by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, so if this whole propaganda campaign about their nuclear program and then even bombing is really just about, you know, making sure which way the power is balanced around there, doesn't I mean, if that's really right, then doesn't that kind of show that the Israelis at least are concerned that they have every reason to believe that America oughta, coulda, woulda, shoulda, can get along with the Iranians just fine?
Absolutely.
And that they have to do this in order for us to not just go ahead and, you know, live up to our end of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, for example?
There's no question that the Israelis have taken that threat very seriously.
And, you know, it reared its head to some extent back in 2003 when the Iranians made that secret negotiating offer to the Bush administration.
And there were people in the Bush administration who would have, you know, been sympathetic to that.
But because of the neocon influence within the Bush administration, it was fended off.
No question about that.
But I do think that there's no doubt that the Israelis, you know, have taken that possibility seriously.
And, you know, I think they've been fabulously successful in their propaganda campaign, which, which, by the way, has certainly turned very much on the idea of getting the idea into the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other news media that Iran has indeed been working continuously on nuclear weapons.
That is a theme that you can find in any given month in the quality media of the United States.
And that all comes from Israel.
I mean, I'm writing a piece right now that documents the way in which Israel has been able to manipulate the narrative in the news media, in the international community, in the IAEA, in the way that supports its interest in that regard.
Well, and that includes you and me, doesn't it?
Being manipulated as part of Israel's propaganda campaign, when we spend years going over and over and over this, aren't we just an echo chamber for the same point that they're making, which is that Iran is even a concern or whatever?
Well, I mean, I think that to the extent that we have been sort of scurrying around, following parts of the narrative that were not the most important, that that's true.
On the other hand, I would like to think that we have picked up on the largely false parts of the narrative that really were important, too.
Man, I wish we didn't have to go, because now I want to ask you all about Admiral Fallon and Dick Cheney and all kinds of things.
You want to do some revisionist shit, do you think?
Yeah.
We could do that again.
Let's talk tomorrow.
All right.
All right, everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter, ipsnews.net, original.antiwar.com, slash Porter.
We'll be back.
We've got some good stuff coming up.