Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at 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 hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, introducing Mohammad Sahini.
He is a professor of chemical engineering at USC and an Iranian expat and an expert on American and Iranian foreign policy.
And a very good writer on nuclear issues and all kinds of issues regarding America and Iran's relationship going back many years now.
And here he is again at Antiwar.com, Pompeo's Ridiculous Crocodile Tears for the Iranian People.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammad.
How are you doing, sir?
I am fine.
Thank you for having me to return to your great program, Scott.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
It's been way too long since we've spoken, and this is such a great article.
Mike Pompeo went and gave a speech in Southern California last week, where, well, what'd he say?
Well, first of all, it is important to notice who his audience was.
Half of his audience, who were Iranian, were basically old Iranian monarchies that are typically very rich and a sick dream of going back to power after 40 years of the revolution.
The other part were basically rich Iranian Zionists that support Israel.
From the reports that my friends gave me, they were also supporters of MEK, the opposition organization that was listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization up until 2011.
But now, because of John Bolton being national security advisor and Rudy Giuliani being an attorney for the president, both of whom have been basically lobbying for MEK, it has sort of become the darling of Trump administration, apparently, and it is being promoted directly or indirectly.
Pompeo basically wanted to express the support of the administration for Iranian people, or supposedly.
But when you look at the history of who Pompeo is and what they want to do, it is totally laughable to think that these people are supportive of Iranian people.
And God knows Iranian people do need help, but not the type of help that they want to offer.
So if you want to look at what he said one by one, first of all, let's start with the fact that both Pompeo and Bolton are very well-known Islamophobes.
For example, Pompeo, before becoming secretary of state or CIA director, had very close relationship with Center for Security Policy, and we know Center for Security Policy is led by Frank Gaffney.
And Frank Gaffney is one of the worst, or probably worst, Islamophobes in the United States.
Bolton was previously the chairman of Gatestone Institute, and Gatestone Institute is a far-right organization that, for example, claimed that Muslim immigrants in Europe heralded a great white death in Britain.
It also claimed that they have turned Britain into an Islamist colony.
Bolton was also supportive of baseless allegation against Huma Abedin, the Muslim lady that was an aide to former President Hillary Clinton.
So both of them have been very well-known Islamophobes, and in fact, they have made Islamophobia sort of mainstream so that other people also speak about it more freely.
Now, given this history, Pompeo sheds tears for Iranian people.
From a nation of 83 million people, 98 percent of them are Muslim.
And in fact, even though the government in Iran has used religion in political ways that is opposed by a vast majority of people, Iranian people are still very much religious, observant, and practicing Muslim.
So it is totally ridiculous that a guy who has a whole history of being against Muslim and Islam, and in fact, he himself is sort of a fundamentalist Christian.
When he was CIA director, they said that he started having prayer sessions every day at the CIA headquarters.
So a guy with this background now sheds tears for Iranians.
So that's one aspect of it.
The other aspect is we both know that Pompeo and Bolton in the past have called for bombing Iran.
Bolton wrote that infamous article, published op-ed in the New York Times, in which he called for bombing Iran.
And he said, to prevent Iran bomb, which has never existed, bombing has repeatedly called for the U.S. attacking Iran, or Israel attacking Iran, or both of them.
Pompeo, when he was a congressman, talked about bombing Iran, and he said explicitly that he thinks that 2,000 sorties over Iran, bombing Iran, will get rid of all of Iran's nuclear program.
And of course, we know that if that happens, Iran will respond, and that will start a huge war that will engulf the entire Middle East.
Yeah, 2,000 sorties, is that all?
Yeah, he talks as if 2,000 sorties is nothing.
So this is another aspect of this guy.
Now, we also know that ever since Trump began his presidency, he had wanted to ban Iranians as people of one of the seven Muslim countries to enter the United States.
And we have hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in the United States, probably even more, around 1.5 million, who have relatives, parents, loved ones, and so on, living in Iran.
And now they cannot visit, they cannot get visa.
And not only them, a lot of educated, a lot of talented young Iranian men and women who want to come to this country to continue their studies cannot get visa also.
As a professor at USC, I have admitted several highly talented Iranian students to come to the United States and do their doctoral thesis with me.
None of them received visa, even though these people, these young people, are highly talented, and they were so good that my university, University of Southern California, gave them, you know, Ph.
D. scholarships.
But they never got a visa.
And that's such an important point, too, because we always hear, well, if you look in the right place anyway, or listen in the right place, you always hear that the Iranian people love Americans, and they love America.
It's just our government that they hate, just like me, right?
Just like all of us.
Exactly.
I love the American Republic myself.
I mean, I have lived in this country for 40 years.
I am an American citizen, and I don't want this country to get into a useless war that would… I'm just talking about the Muslim ban here, where, you know, the reason why they love us is because so many of them have been able to come here and get educations and then go home and tell everybody, you know, America's not too bad.
It's just their government, you know?
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that's another aspect.
They banned Iranians from coming to this country, especially young people who were great ambassadors for the United States when they returned to Iran, saying that we lived there, we got a great education, and so on.
And yet they claim to be friends of Iranian people.
Now, they also talked about how the nuclear agreement with Iran and JCPOA didn't address other aspects of what they're concerned about, from Iran's presence in Iraq and Syria to violation of human rights in Iran.
But these are all bogus, in my view, not only in my view, in the view of many other people and experts and analysts and so on.
So take, for example, the issue of human rights violations.
Okay, all Iranians know that the government in Tehran has violated human rights of Iranian citizens.
I mean, this is very clear, and in fact, I have published articles about these violations myself, many, many articles.
But the point is, that's not concern of Pompeo or Trump or Bolton, because if they really care about human rights and its violation, then the United States should not have any relation with Saudi Arabia, which is one of the worst dictatorships in all of the world, not just the Middle East.
It is a dictatorship in which people don't vote.
There is no parliament.
There is supposedly a consultative assembly, but it has no power.
And there is basically a quiet war going on, waging by the Saudi government against its Shiite citizens that constitutes about 15 percent of the population.
If the United States really cared about human rights, it would not help Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates to bomb Yemen for three years, committing what many human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, consider as war crimes in Yemen, and not helping it to put Yemen, which is a very poor country that before the war imported 90 percent of its food from other countries, to go hungry and to have cholera become an epidemic where at least one million people have been inflicted by it.
And Yemen has been basically destroyed.
Saudi Arabia intentionally bombs farms and factories and schools and so on.
So this is the type of regime that this administration is supporting, and yet it claims to care about violation of human rights in Iran by the Iranian government, which of course, as I said, is very much true.
But Iran at the same time also has a very strong social movement against these violations.
And there is always a struggle between human rights advocates and defenders in Iran and the government.
And in fact, they have had some major success against it also.
One example that I can mention, for example, is in the elections last year for city council around Iran, from a very important city, a non-Muslim was elected by people to represent him in the city council.
But the guardian council that basically monitors these elections disqualified him from taking his seat in the city council.
And that created a huge uproar, and eventually he went to Iranian parliament and to another constitutional assembly that mediates between the guardian council and the parliament.
And just a few days ago, they voted that the non-Muslim elected person should take his seat in the city council of Yazd, a major city in central Iran.
So this is the type of struggle that Iranian people have had in the Islamic Republic of Iran over there.
And while I totally support giving Iranian people inside Iran moral support in their struggle for human rights, but this support should come from credible people, credible government, credible organization, not from an administration that has been supporting a criminal war in Yemen, has invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, bombed Libya, provided support for terrorists in Syria.
President Trump is infatuated with a dictator in the Philippines who has stated clearly that he has killed people himself, and so on and so forth.
So this is all bogus, bogus claims.
Well, let me ask you this, Mohammed.
They say, and as you're saying, the current regime there, it is a tyranny.
They do violate human rights.
And Phil Giraldi and Peter Van Buren and some of our other friendly anti-war guys went to Iran recently for a conference, and Giraldi told me on the phone the other day, there's a lot of discontent against the regime there.
So what about the possibility that, motives aside, obviously, you've made a strong case, and I agree with you wholeheartedly, that John Bolton and Mike Pompeo don't give a damn about the Iranian people.
However, is it possible, there's this Landay story in Reuters, of course, about their efforts to sow instability and dissent there, and there's this new working group that they've set up to try to figure out how to destabilize Iran again.
Maybe that could work.
Maybe the Ayatollahs really are on their last legs.
Maybe the Iranian people are sick and tired, and all they need is a little bit of a push from the USA.
Well, according to what I understand, their plan is to completely ruin Iranian economy.
That would lead to people revolting, and then they hope that when they revolt, if they do revolt, then the states, military forces, the IRGC, and so on, will be used to put down the revolt.
And then that would provide an excuse, like Libya, for example, for so-called humanitarian intervention.
They also believe that if that happens, MEK can actually take over Iran.
Now, there is no question that there is discontent in Iran, and this discontent is, at least right now, is mostly about the economic situation.
Now, that economic situation was also created in part by the United States, because the sanctions that they're imposing on Iran not only deprived Iran of many commercial relationships that Iran had with the outside world, but it also gave rise to, or contributed at least, to the deep corruption that Iran had during the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration.
Because in order to get around the sanctions, they had to resort to all sorts of things.
And most of these was what people like me call Iran's deep state, the network of intelligence and military officers behind the scenes that pulled a lot of strings, and they only report to Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader.
So there was black market from which they benefited.
There were illegal jetties that they had created and imported a lot of cheap stuff from China and other places, and made themselves fabulous to reach, and they stole a lot of money.
Now, the Rouhani administration came to power and started rooting out this corruption, and every day we hear revelation about a new case of corruption that took place a few years ago.
Now, the other important thing is that we had, last January, we had demonstrations in several Iranian cities against bad economic situation.
But these demonstrations were not actually supported by Iran's middle class.
If you look at the composition of demonstrators, which were in many, many cities, but their numbers were very small, it's estimated that overall, on average, in every city, about 2,000 people have demonstrated.
If you look at that, it was mostly from poor people, but the middle class and the upper class did not support the demonstration.
Not because they are happy with what's happening in Iran, in terms of economic conditions and so on, but because they despise President Trump and his administration, and think that the Trump administration is trying to incite chaos in Iran, which may lead to Iran becoming involved in a war with the United States, which would mean that Iran becomes another Syria or another Libya or another Iraq.
The Trump administration has also been talking to some small groups, Kurdish groups, Baloch groups, Iranian Arab groups, and so on, with the hope that they would create problems on provinces of Iran that are on border.
Sistan and Balochistan on the southeastern part of Iran, next to Pakistan, and Kurdistan next, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan, which is Iran's old provinces.
So they want to basically disintegrate Iran.
They want to destroy Iran's economy and perhaps get it involved in a destructive war in order to save Iranian people.
I mean, that's also totally ridiculous.
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Well, and it sounds like a fool's errand anyway.
I remember Seymour Hersh back a few years ago said, look, what if the Iranians came and started backing like Southern pro-Confederate type groups or whatever and said, here, let's turn you against the USA without the understanding that actually these Confederate flag-waving Southerners are the most patriotic Americans of all.
They're not going to overthrow the government, even under Barack Obama.
No matter how much discontent there is about any particular leader or any set of leaders in Washington, D.C., the center will hold.
The U.S. Republic is not about to disintegrate, despite my best wishes.
You know, we could have three presidents impeached in a row.
That wouldn't lead to the end of the Constitution and the disintegration of the 50 states.
And it's the same in Iran.
If the Islamic Republic is to be replaced, it has to be replaced through a process taken by Iranian people inside Iran.
What the Trump administration doesn't understand is that Iranian people reject both their intervention and also a lot of policies by their government.
It's not either or.
They can reject both of them.
But their mentality is that you are either with us or against us.
What they really want, in my view, and this is the view that is shared by a lot of Iranians, at least within Iran, and I have a lot of contacts within Iran that I talk to all the time, what they really want is total capitulation by Iran.
Pompeo gave this speech last May in which he listed 12 demands.
Now, aside from the fact that all of these 12 demands, at least 9 or 10 of them were basically baseless, but any self-respecting political system or government or nation that would look at these 12 demands would see immediately that what they want is total capitulation by Iran and Iranian people.
What they want, the Trump administration wants, in my view, and this is the view that is shared again by a lot of Iranians, is that the Trump administration, together with Saudi Arabia, Israel, and United Arab Emirates, want to dictate what's happening in the Middle East and want to dictate who can do what and who cannot do whatever.
So basically they want to bring Iran into the fold and say that you do what we tell you.
And as I said, Iranian people can reject both.
They can reject a lot of policies that the government in Tehran has, including the corruption and including the violation of human rights and so on, and at the same time reject the policy of the Trump administration.
Let us also remember that despite all the problems that the political system in Iran has, Iran is still a far more open society than any other ally that the United States has in that region, with the possible exception of Israel.
But even Israel is moving in a very, what I consider to be a wrong direction.
They just passed law about Israel being the nation-state of Jewish people, which has been condemned by a lot of people, including supporters of Israel in this country.
Just this morning I was reading that even Alan Dershowitz, who is an ardent supporter of Israel, thought that this is the wrong law.
Really?
Yes, yes.
That's amazing.
Even Alan Dershowitz has condemned it.
So you can see how bad this law has been.
So even Israel is going in the wrong direction, taken over by extremists and destroying any possibility of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The people of both, of course, deserve peace, and they should have their own state and so on.
And Iran regularly holds elections.
These elections are not completely democratic, of course.
They're restricted, but these elections are competitive.
They are meaningful.
They have meaning.
They have implications.
They have consequences.
And Iranian people, as I said, are in a struggle to basically improve the system, move it towards being more democratic, moving towards being less… It's worth mentioning, too, here, that as we've covered on the show, as you've done such great writing over the years, Iran never had a nuclear weapons program at all.
And since 2015, their civilian safeguarded nuclear program has been double extra, super locked down beyond any reason, beyond any historical precedent by the international inspectors.
And the Americans say they want a better deal.
In fact, Trump said the other day, after threatening war, even nuclear war, it seemed like, on Twitter, he then gave a speech to the American Legion, I think it was, where he said, no, I want to talk with them.
We could talk, and I just want a better deal than the one we had before, which seems ridiculous.
We had a great deal, and there's no way the Iranian… In fact, I think Rouhani even said, I'm not giving in.
I'm not even going to talk to you under these kind of threats right now.
Forget it.
So, it seems like a pretty big mistake they're making there, when, as we know, the nuclear program has always just been a pretext.
I have the audio here somewhere of John Bolton on a conference call from 2007 with the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, saying that, unfortunately, all our new sanctions and threats have failed to provoke the Iranians to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and their safeguards agreement, which is what we were trying to get them to do, which would put us in a more advantageous position, meaning, would give him a better pretext for war.
Exactly.
That's what Bolton had actually prescribed.
They wanted to provoke the Islamic Republic to exit from the nuclear agreement, and that didn't happen, simply because the Rouhani administration, and in fact the entire Iranian political establishment, reached the conclusion that it is in Iran's national interest to follow the nuclear agreement.
And let me tell you that this nuclear agreement that was signed in 2015 not only has put Iran's nuclear program, as you pointed out, under the most restrictive conditions, and it's being monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week by the agency, but it has also opened other places in Iran that the International Atomic Energy Agency wanted to visit in the past, and the Iranian government used to do it.
Iran has signed the additional protocol in the past that would allow the agency to visit any place in Iran that it wants, if it has a reasonable reason to suspect something.
But during the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration, Iran suspended its membership in the additional protocol.
But as a result of the nuclear agreement in July of 2015, Iran agreed to restart implementing the provisions of additional protocol.
One result of that, for example, was that the agency quietly inspected two major Iranian universities over the past few months.
One is Sharif University, which is the best science and technology university in Iran, and had long been suspected of being involved in nuclear research and nuclear activities, and they visited, but they didn't find anything.
The other one was Iran University of Science and Technology, where the IRGC supposedly had Institute of Applied Physics many, many years ago that had been accused of purchasing dual-use equipment, importing it from Europe, and then pass it on to IRGC or Iran Atomic Energy Organization for nuclear research, which was, of course, baseless.
But the additional implementation of additional protocol allowed the agency to go and inspect very carefully Institute of Applied Physics at that university.
Again, they didn't find anything.
So as you pointed out completely correctly, Iran has abided by every word, every letter of the nuclear agreement delivered on it.
And this is something that even officials of Trump administration, from former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to James Mattis, the President, Defense Secretary, and so on, admit.
But they cannot find, because they cannot find any excuse to bomb Iran, they couldn't, as you said, provoke Iran to exceed the nuclear agreement.
So what they do is they find other excuses, like Iran's missile program, which in my view is a totally defensive program, because Iran doesn't have an air force to speak of.
Iran doesn't have modern weapons.
Yeah, just all the F-14s Richard Nixon gave them.
Exactly.
These are all weapons that Iran bought in the 1970s.
And since then, Iran has been under an armed embargo.
And nobody sells them modern weapons.
Even Russia, that has very close relationship with Iran, doesn't sell modern weapons, modern fighters and so on.
So the only defensive deterrent that they have is their missile program, which is basically homegrown.
And they want Iran to strip that deterrent also.
Whereas this is completely defensive.
Even Pentagon, in its annual report on a state of military effort in the Middle East that submits to Congress every June, has always said that Iran's military doctrine is completely defensive.
I'm sorry, Mohammed, I have to cut you off and leave them wanting more right now, because I'm so late for my next interview.
No problem.
I'm really sorry about that, but I hope people will go and check out your great article.
It's Pompeo's Ridiculous Crocodile Tears for the Iranian People.
It's at antiwar.com.
Thank you very much again, Mohammed.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, the great Mohammed Sahimi.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at libertarianinstitute.org, scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, twitter.com, slash scotthortonshow.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
