All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Our first guest is Rhys Ehrlich.
He is a bestselling author and freelance journalist.
You can regularly read him in the Dallas Morning News, and also you can listen to him on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio and National Public Radio.
He's won a Peabody Award.
He's the author of Conversations with Terrorists, Dateline, Havana, The Iran Agenda, The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis, and Target Iraq, What the News Media Didn't Tell You.
Now, if anybody in the audience is familiar with that YouTube of that debate conference thing that we did down there at UC Riverside last April, which is available on YouTube, Rhys Ehrlich was the featured speaker there that day and, you know, gave a great speech and surely shot down a lot of the neocons' talking points that day.
It's well worth the watch.
Two and a half hours take you a Sunday afternoon or something to sit and watch the whole thing, but well worth your time.
That's where you might know him from, if you know me.
Anyway, and, you know, one of the things that you proved in that speech, Rhys, was that you knew a lot about the dissent in Iran, the people who do not want to spend their days bending to the will of the Ayatollah Khamenei and his henchmen, and you were in fact even there during the disputed election and the short-lived and not successful Green Revolution there.
So I was just wondering if you could sort of start us out today with a portrait of the opposition, the dissent inside Iran.
Yeah, I think there's a big misunderstanding in Washington that the Green Movement there was somehow favorable to the U.S. and nothing could be further from the truth.
The massive and spontaneous movement that broke out in Iran after the elections last year was for Iranian sovereignty, for democracy, for an end to repression, but was not particularly or in any way, shape, or form favorable to the policies the U.S. has been pushing in Iran.
So I'll get to that in just a moment.
But basically, I was there, I've traveled to Iran four times, I've traveled throughout the country.
I was there in the days after the fraudulent elections when Ahmadinejad claimed 62% of the vote.
People were outraged.
They went out into the streets for peaceful demonstrations for a week.
They were allowed to peacefully demonstrate until so many people were out that the government became angry and began to attack peaceful demonstrators and jailed, tortured, and beat people.
There were continued demonstrations for many months, more than probably anybody thought.
It was the biggest mass movement in Iran since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah.
To this day, the sentiment against the government there is still very strong, but it is suppressed.
And for the moment, the government appears to be stable.
Any kind of spark could set things off again, but there are not demonstrations in the streets as there were previously.
The key thing is that the demands of the movement were for democracy, for an end to repression, for free and fair elections, but they were not, and I stress not.
And they had nothing to do with the demands that the U.S. is making on Iran, which is to stop its nuclear program, overwhelming support in Iran for peaceful nuclear power.
Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, despite all the propaganda you hear in the United States.
And the source of that is both the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has inspectors in Iran, and the U.S. CIA, which as of today continues to support a report it made indicating that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.
And the people in Iran are not interested in having so-called U.S.
-style democracy come back to Iran.
They had their taste of that in 1953, when they actually had civil society with free press and free unions and freedom of religion and a democratic parliamentary system, which was then overthrown by the United States and the British to restore the power of British petroleum, which had been nationalized at the time.
So the Iranians have a great deal of first-hand experience with so-called democracy.
They are not interested in having the U.S. reimpose its will on Iran.
When you mention the nuclear program and how the Greens are all about keeping the nuclear program, too, there are no dissenters in Iran who say, yeah, let's bend to the will of the American empire and do what they want.
I wonder whether, as Scott Ritter said years ago, that the nuclear program, we all know they're not making nukes.
The policy's regime change and the nukes are the excuse.
That's basically it.
But I wonder what good that could do if there's nobody to replace the regime with who would disagree about the new program, which seems to be a concern.
Well, hold it right there.
I'm sorry.
The music's in here, Reese.
So I'm sorry.
We're going to have to get your answer when we get back from this break.
Everybody, it's Reese Ehrlich.
He wrote The Iran Agenda, the real story of U.S. policy in the Middle East crisis.
You can put the Liberty Radio Network on the air in your area.
Visit broadcast.lrn.fm to learn how.
Broadcast.lrn.fm All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Reese Ehrlich.
You can check out him at, where'd it go, iranproject.org, The Struggle for Iran.
Go to www.reeseerlich.com.
Reeseerlich.com.
That's an old link, yeah.
Oh, is it Ehrlich or Ehrlich?
I'm sorry.
I've been saying it wrong.
It's Ehrlich.
Ehrlich.
Apologies.
All right.
And now, okay, so everybody in this audience at least knows that 1953 through 1979, Iran was ruled by the brutal police state dictatorship of the Shah Reza Pahlavi.
And no wonder they don't want an American regime change in their country.
And even if the people that the War Party in America pretends to favor, the Greens there were in power, they would not adopt a pro-America policy or a pro-Israel policy the way that the War Party wants.
So what is the point here?
Are we just pushing for another Shah eventually?
Yeah, the U.S. doesn't really care about democracy or civil institutions.
What they want is a pro-U.S. regime, friendly to U.S. business, that will allow the U.S. in general to control the oil markets of Iran, the strategic straits of Hormuz where 25% of the world's oil goes through, reestablish military bases or basing rights.
That's what it's all about.
And the fig leaf is democracy.
Look at what happened in Iraq.
The U.S. overthrew the Iraqi government, installed its own client regime, and they're not any friendlier to Israel.
And they're certainly not democratic.
That's the model.
That or Afghanistan is the model for what the U.S. really wants in Iran.
So what you do is you search around for the issue that you think will get people the most angry, get them the most scared.
In the case of Iraq, it was the phony weapons of mass destruction.
In the case of Iran, it's, oh, my God, they're going to have a nuclear bomb and they're going to drop it on Israel or they're going to give it to terrorists to bring into Chicago Airport or whatever.
You get people very, very scared.
And then that justifies whatever policies you want to carry out.
Right.
Now, it seems to me like the war party is stupid.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe they know what they're doing.
And, I mean, it's clear that from some of the war party's point of view, they would rather marginalize any kind of moderate face in Iran.
Rafsanjani and I'm sorry, I forget the other guy's name off the top of my head right now, but it used to be that the guys who were the presidents were the more moderate seeming guys.
So the war party always focused on the Ayatollah.
But now, then in 2005, George Bush came out in July 2005 and said, don't you vote for the right winger.
So everybody came out and voted for Ahmadinejad.
And since the Ayatollah Khamenei seems like a calm and moderate, reasonable guy compared to Ahmadinejad, now the war party always focuses on the president instead.
But they really don't want a face that seems like, eh, we can probably deal with this guy.
Yeah, there's been lots of flip-flops both by the Democrats and the Republicans because they don't really know quite what to do with Iran.
They put all these sanctions, they threaten war, and it doesn't seem to do any good.
So they've tried various tactics over the years.
At one point, you're right.
Let's go back to the Iran-Contra controversy in the 80s.
That was premised on the idea that Rafsanjani, then the president, was a moderate and that you could deal with him and you could give him weapons and he would pay you money to support the Contras in Nicaragua.
And that fell apart, as we all know.
Later, under the elections in 2005, which I was there to cover, John Penn and Norman Solomon were covering those elections, and the U.S. said it didn't make any difference because the president doesn't really have any power.
And then when you get this really bad guy get elected, well, then you focus all your energy on him.
Again, it's all about discrediting what's going on in Iran in order to bring in a pro-U.S. regime.
It has nothing to do with the actual facts on the ground.
All right, now what about using the communist cultists of the Mujahedin Al-Khalq, using the communist rebels in Kurdistan, PJAK, and using the Bin Ladenite Salafist jihadist types of Jandala against Iran?
What is the purpose of that?
It couldn't possibly help...
Well, you ally with anybody.
Drug dealers, ex-Marxists, whatever.
As long as you think they can help you with your goals.
So let's go through those because I suspect your listeners may not know some of those groups.
The Mujahedin Al-Khalq, or MEK, were a Marxist-Muslim hybrid, let's call them that, in the 70s.
Real briefly now here, we are coming up on the time, so try to be quick through this.
They've gone through all manner of changes.
They're actually quite conservative today.
They certainly are not Marxist anymore.
They gave that up a long time ago.
And they're courting conservative politicians in Washington and London and elsewhere to be an alternative.
They are hated in Iran, mainly because they sided with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.
The PJAK, the Kurdish group of which I've met with their leadership in the Kandil Mountains, are more of a cult.
I would certainly not call them Marxist.
They're a cult who are Kurdish nationalists who are engaged in armed activity.
At one time, the Bush administration was giving them training on the theory that even though we hated the PKK, their sister organization in Turkey, and called them terrorists, it was okay to use them against the Iranians.
And the third group, Jandala, is a Baluch nationalist group fighting near the Pakistan border in the eastern part of Iran.
Again, they've used terrorist tactics to blow up people, civilians, and again, backed by the United States at times because the U.S. was willing to work with anybody to...
But Reece, I mean, how could this weaken the Ayatollahs?
I mean, unless they get a direct hit on Khamenei, then this can only strengthen the regime.
It's like saying September 11th would weaken George Bush.
It's the classic terrorist thinking, which is that if you can cause enough disruption among civilians that it will cause, it will weaken the government, the central government, and split off ethnic groups or...
Iran is made up of a number of ethnic groups, some of whom have separatist tendencies.
And if you can't win the whole country, well, then you split off part of it and take what you can.
That's what happened with the old Soviet Union.
The old Soviet Union is no more.
The U.S. doesn't have particularly a lot of influence in Russia, but has a lot of influence in places like Georgia and some of the...
All of Eastern Europe is part of NATO now, yeah.
Exactly.
So that strategy of breaking up the old Soviet Union worked, and there were some in Washington who advocated the same thing for Iran.
Yeah, in fact, that actually kind of reminds me of some of the plans, like when they were planned for 1996 for, you know, we'll do kind of a half invasion of Iraq with a few thousand troops and it was like one of these Chalabi games and that was the thing, that was like a neocon plan.
It's like, we'll split off part of Iraq and then everything will just, you know, work out like butter from there.
It has spectacularly not worked in the case of Iran.
It didn't work in the case of Iraq either.
It took a full-scale U.S. invasion to do that.
And, you know, the Iranian people see themselves as one nation and the ethnic minorities certainly face a lot of discrimination and problems and language discrimination and many other things, but the sentiment for splitting off Alright, everybody, it's Rhys Ehrlich and, Ehrlich, I'm sorry, I keep saying it wrong, I got it wrong the first time and it's going to stick now, I'm sorry, man.
And that's it.
We're out.
Thank you very much for your time.
I hope we can do this again soon, Rhys.
Alright, really appreciate you.
Alright, everybody, that was Rhys Ehrlich.
Please check out the website iranproject.org and check out his book, Target.
The Iran Agenda, The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis.
We'll be back with Will Grigg after this.
