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 fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, 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, you guys on the line.
I got the great Gareth Porter.
He is an investigative historian and journalist writing this time for the American conservative magazine.com.
Did John Bolton light the fuse of the UK Iranian tanker crisis?
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Happy to have you here.
Thanks for writing this because I wanted to understand everything that I needed to know about this.
And so now there's a Gareth Porter article for me to read.
And so that's about that.
We'll get to John Bolton in a second.
But first of all, when and where did the British and the Iranians seize each other's ships and why?
And what's going to happen?
They are still holding them.
And in fact, I guess the news headline on antiwar.com today was the Iranians offered to trade.
And the British said, no, you first is where this thing stands right now.
Yeah.
All in one breath.
I'll give you the complete scenario.
No, I'm just joking.
Go for it.
What started it was the British seizure of the Iranian tanker in the Strait of Gibraltar on July 4th.
And that's the primary subject of my piece.
And why it happened, how it happened and how it was illegal are the essence of the storyline that I'm discussing in my piece.
And so just a little over two weeks later, the Iranians retaliated by seizing a British flagged ship in or near the Strait of Hormuz, right in that area.
And the Iranians clearly were doing this in a way that was intended to draw attention to the parallels between the way the two ships were seized, because they actually had a video of their commandos being dropped from a helicopter onto the ship.
And the fact that they actually circulated that was pretty clear evidence that they wanted to be clear that they were replicating very closely what happened to their own ship.
And I think, you know, they definitely wanted to set themselves up for a trade to get their ship back.
No question about that.
Yeah, sure.
It looks like it.
But oh, well, you know, if you heard the top of the hour news, it's just Iranian seized British ship.
What are we going to do about it?
But anyway, that's okay.
Well, yeah, exactly.
That's the nature of the beast.
Of course, the news media are going to refer only in the last paragraph, if at all, and in passing to the idea that the British may have snagged up an Iranian ship weeks earlier, and treating this as somehow a one-off outrage that is unconnected with anything that the British had done.
All right.
Well, you know, it's kind of an apocryphal thing, right?
That FBI agent will say that, just point out a stranger on the sidewalk, and they can figure out how to give that person 20 years, because they have that much power.
And there are that many laws.
You know, there's even a book, three felonies a day, everybody commits three federal crimes a day, everybody, there's nothing you can do to not do it.
So in other words, though, there's always a legal pretext for a political prosecution, if one is necessary.
And I wonder if the same thing applies here, that the Iranian boat was in the violation of, as the UK says, some sanctions against Syria, and that then gave the UK the authority to do what they did.
You have a pretty severe treatment of that argument in this article.
Exactly, yes, because indeed, that is the UK argument.
And it has been reported without the slightest degree of skepticism or inquiry by the corporate news media.
But as I point out in my piece, the global law that governs this situation that occurred in the Strait of Gibraltar, is the result of the UN Commission, sorry, the UN meeting on the Law of the Sea, which produced the Law of the Sea Treaty.
That treaty has been ratified by, if I remember correctly, 168 or 169 countries, including the UK.
And that is a law, an international law, which establishes, without any ambiguity, that merchant ships passing through an international strait, which the Strait of Gibraltar clearly is, no one denies that, is entitled to free passage, unhindered passage, and that the country is free to do what it wants to do.
Coastal states who abut the straits, the international straits, must allow those merchant ships to pass freely through the straits, with the only exceptions being if the ship has violated a customs or local environmental law as polluting the strait within the territorial waters of the coastal state.
But otherwise, there is no excuse, there is no legal basis for carrying out a seizure of a ship, regardless of what sort of policy that might have evolved involving some sanctions against a third party.
That has nothing to do with it.
That doesn't apply here.
In fact, as I point out, the EU sanctions law, the regulations, I should say, governing the EU sanctions against the Assad government in Syria, or at least personalities of that government, does not expect or does not allow for extraterritorial, extraterritoriality, as far as carrying it out is concerned.
So that means that there is no expectation, there's no legal basis for the UK to claim that they are merely carrying out EU sanctions or enforcing EU sanctions by seizing the Iranian ship.
That simply doesn't apply here.
Oh, yeah, and don't forget Fool's Errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan, by me.
So what about the Iranians?
Are they invoking the UN too?
Well, that's interesting.
I mean, of course, the Iranians have not invoked the Law of the Sea Treaty.
And unless the Iranians can show that there is indeed a local violation within their territorial waters, they would be in violation of the treaty as well.
And now are they holding a bunch of prisoners then?
And are they British prisoners?
Well, they have detained the crew.
I don't recall that they're actually, there may be a very small number, two or three or four British, but most of them are Indian, as I understand it.
In any case, they have been detained, clearly with the intention, as I said earlier, of setting up a situation to negotiate an exchange in which the two ships would be returned to the rightful owners.
And the crew, of course, freed as well.
There's no doubt that that's simply awaiting the agreement with the British.
All right, now talk about John Bolton and the British and how he got them to do this for him.
Right.
Now, this is the real punchline of my piece, I think.
In fact, I could be blamed as a journalist for not having led, not just in the headline, which I did do, but in the lead, starting out with the angle that Bolton is really the mastermind behind the British seizure of the Iranian ship.
Because, in fact, it's clear that he was maneuvering for weeks ahead of time to set up a situation where the Iranian ship, which was being tracked by U.S. intelligence, as soon as it left the port in, presumably it was at the UAE, I'm not sure, maybe, I guess it was leaving, it was leaving an Iranian port.
I don't think it stopped anywhere else.
But as soon as it left on its voyage, the United States government, which had been already putting pressure on the Panamanian government to strip all or as many Iranian ships as they could try to get the Panamanians to strip of their right to fly the Panamanian flag.
To be Panamanian flagged vessels, which allows them to take advantage of insurance and reinsurance on their voyages, as well as other legal advantages.
And this would put the Iranians in the position then of not being able to easily at least go to a port and stay there to be resupplied because the port would object to a vessel that was not flagged, which is in questionable status under international practices.
And so the U.S. had already done that.
And of course, this was an operation that we know Bolton was personally involved in because the coverage of this story points out that it was the Panamanian National Security Council that carried out this policy of stripping the Iranian vessels of their flag status.
It instructed the appropriate agency of the Panamanian government, which was involved in flagging ships, to do so.
But the key point here is that the specific vessel in question, the Grace One, was singled out for special treatment.
The U.S. government, i.e.
John Bolton, got the Panamanian government specifically to strip that vessel of its Panamanian flag status after it had started on its voyage.
And I mean, this is an extremely unusual situation, I must say.
I haven't been able to research further on any precedent for it, but I don't know how you do that.
But clearly, this was deliberately done so that it would be in a position of not having Panamanian flag status when it was on its way toward what they figured was a Syrian port.
And so that's how we know that Bolton was behind all this.
And multiple sources now have confirmed that, in fact, Bolton and the United States were tipping off the British, that the Grace One was on its way, going through the Strait of Gibraltar, and that the British should detain it, and that would make it impossible for the U.S. government to do so.
It would make it impossible for the for the ship to continue.
And in my view, the purpose of this was clearly to set up a situation where the Iranians would be more likely to provoke some kind of crisis by seizing a British ship, because that's the only reason that Bolton would go to the trouble, all that trouble, to get the British to seize the Iranian ship.
So the thing of it is, though, is that this isn't much of a costus belli or anything.
I can see it sort of kind of leading to a crisis, you know, conceivably.
But what's Trump's position now?
I saw that he was tweeting out some hawkish things that I'm not sure made too much sense yesterday, but it seems like he was angry or something.
Well, I mean, he's always blowing hot and cold, mostly hot, on Iran.
And, you know, this is sort of standard Trump rhetoric of talking about how dangerous it is for Iran to stand up for their rights.
And that is not to be taken, you know, with more than a grain of salt, as far as I'm concerned.
The tanker crisis, which is really, it's really not a crisis, but it has the capability, it has the potential for, or it did have the potential, it might have appeared to Bolton that it had the potential for adding to the tensions and potentially leading to something more than that.
I think he's probably disappointed with the way it's played out, that the British have not been more aggressive in their pursuit of the Iranians on this.
But I think that would best explain the motivation behind what Bolton did.
I know you're writing some pieces about Iran and the current crisis coming up here.
Not just, obviously, about this, you know, built up, you know, thing about the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the ships here, but overall, where we're going with American and Israeli policy toward Iran right now.
And you want to tell us a little bit about where you're going with that?
Sure, I'd be glad to give your listeners a bit of a heads up on, on the work that I'm doing right now.
I mean, I'm convinced that the situation is, is very dangerous, indeed, because of the firm intention and the ability of the Trump administration to make good on the threat of reducing Iranian exports, not just of oil, but of other major exports that the Iranians have, including gas and metals.
But also, the whole, the array of sanctions on Iranian business and exports in general, reduce that to a very, very bare minimum.
And that would clearly endanger the ability of Iran to maintain a minimum of of availability of goods for its population, and threaten the political future of the regime, of the stability of the regime.
And that is clearly unacceptable.
And Iran has the ability, as it sees it, to resist this, both through its military forces, its military power, not sort of just a conventional military defense.
But an array of deterrent forces that include both missiles, and its allies throughout the Middle East.
But also, specifically, its geopolitical position in relation to the Strait of Hormuz.
Because Iran has such a long coastline, abutting the Strait of Hormuz, it is in a very, very strong position to use that as a means of forcing the issue, by various means, to threaten and actually hinder, potentially, the traffic of other ships going through the Strait of Hormuz.
As the various officials of the Iranian government have put it, over the last year or so, on more than one occasion, if Iran is not allowed to export its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, then nobody else will be allowed to either.
And I think that that is more than simply an idle boast.
I think that they do, in fact, very likely have a strategy, which is constantly being refined, of escalating tensions, not escalating just tensions, but escalating their own threats to the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, in various ways, in a very carefully graduated way, so that there's no sudden cause for a casus belli, but which continues to challenge the policy of the United States to take seriously the possibility, the real possibility, if not probability, that Iran will indeed risk war to prevent the United States from being able to carry through its strategy.
And I think that that is what we're going to be looking at over the next few months, a graduated set of moves by Iran, constantly increasing the pressure, and the United States trying to figure out how to respond without going to war, increasing its own threats.
And the situation is going to get more and more tense.
And, you know, so I'm going to be looking very closely at the military capabilities of Iran to do something within the area of the Strait of Hormuz and beyond, because, you know, the United States military already understands that it will not be able to operate freely within the Strait.
And therefore, its strategy has shifted to a strategy of using the waters of the Arabian Sea outside the Strait, south of there, where they think that they are safer from Iranian retaliatory measures, retaliatory capabilities.
And so the question is, what are the capabilities that Iran will have to get at the United States in order to deter the United States from using the waters of the Arabian Sea for a strike against Iran, for strikes against Iran?
And so I'm just beginning that work right now.
I have not arrived at any conclusion by any means, but that's that's what I'm going to be working on.
Well, a couple of things there.
You know, Jason Ditz pointed out that, you know, everyone knows they wouldn't have to attach a mine to a Japanese freighter or any of these things.
It's clear to every intelligence agency and military in the world that Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz with a couple of artillery tubes.
It's not that wide at all.
And they could, with the most minimal effort, they could close that strait.
Now, when it comes to the U.S. Navy and how far away they have to be in order to fight, that's an interesting point.
And I had a guy who was, I guess, a friend of the show years ago, who I'm pretty sure was a former Russian military guy.
And he talked about how, you know, in the Cold War, and I guess even to this day, the American Navy policy is to kill the Russians from way over the horizon, to never actually engage them in a surface battle, because they have the range, they have the reach.
That the Soviets could never match.
And so the same thing here, that the Americans are never going to sail an aircraft carrier within range of Iran's sea skimming missiles, which they do have.
But that still just raises the question, though, that just means you're picking a fight that then you're not going to be able to defend all your weaker allies in the fight, such as all of the powers up and down the west side of the Arabian Peninsula.
The American bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, first and foremost, but all of the oil facilities in Saudi Arabia and UAE and God knows what.
Well, yeah, that's right.
And the other point that bears watching very closely is that, you know, if the Iranians were to make a decision to close the strait through mining one way or another, and there are many ways they can do it, a number of different strategies they could use, of course, then the question is, how long would it take the United States you know, mine clearing operations to actually clear a path for ship traffic to go through the strait?
And there are various ways to measure that that have been, you know, estimated.
But now, if indeed the United States is reluctant to, you know, go into the strait because of the ability of the Iranians to carry out you know, to hit American ships that would be clearing the mines, then that complicates the strategy immediately.
And then it puts the onus on the United States to retaliate directly against the Iranian mainland from the Arabian Sea.
And again, raises the question of whether Iran will, in fact, have capabilities to hit US ships in the Arabian Sea at all.
I'm not at this point prepared to say one way or another.
I'm assuming for the moment that it is not the case today that they do, but I could be wrong about that.
For one thing, they are developing drones.
And the question of the range of those drones remains unclear at this moment.
So that's one of the things I'm looking at.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And one of those can be small enough to possibly be impossible to defend from, even with all your Aegis radar and Vulcan cannons and whatever.
It's very complicated in terms of, you know, countermeasures and ability to detect and so forth.
And all that is relatively new.
And I'm going to try to wade into it to become as well versed as possible about it.
Cool.
Well, I can't wait to sit here and not do the work, but just read your article when it's done.
That sounds awesome.
I hope I'll have something of substance to offer, Scott, but at this point.
This is sort of just a tangent, but it's somewhat related.
It's Persian Gulf politics.
I saw this in the morning email from Ali Soufan, the former FBI agents group this morning.
And it was about how the government of Bahrain has just finished murdering, executing for terrorism, a bunch of Shiite dissidents who actually were, according to Ali Soufan, just peaceful protesters.
But they had to be made an example of.
So, they've been called terrorists and murdered by the Sunni monarchy that America supports there.
And America will continue to support that monarchy no matter what, because we get a base out of it.
We've got an air base in Qatar, and the Navy's Fifth Fleet is based there in Bahrain, as featured in the Transformers movie, where, you know, we're there protecting our good friends, or whatever it is.
These are our good friends.
Another sad fact of the war system.
I'm sorry to say, yes.
And it reminds me, it brings to mind an article that I've been meaning to write for years, but have not gotten around to, which is the story of how the Obama administration intended—let me put it this way.
Let me start again.
The Obama administration sort of unintentionally criticized the Saudi government for the—or criticized the Bahrain government for its treatment of the democracy movement there in 2011.
And the Saudis reacted with rage to the point where the Saudis let it be known to the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, when he visited Saudi Arabia, that if the Obama administration didn't straighten up and fly right, the Saudis would walk away and find other friends.
And lo and behold, the Obama administration folded immediately and never again criticized the government, that oppressive government of Bahrain, for its treatment of the Shia majority.
And then within a week or so, right around that exact time, then the Saudis sent their military across the causeway there into Bahrain to help suppress the uprising violently.
And including, they were shooting all the protesters with birdshot so that they could be identified as protesters.
They're torturing the doctors who treated the victims.
Yeah, you got it.
It's a sad story and one that has not been covered nearly enough.
It's hardly known at all, I must say.
Here's a fun anecdote to spoil my book that's coming out someday, eventually, that—well, we talked about it at the time—was Admiral Mullen.
I'm almost certain—now, this is from memory, but I'm 99 percent it was Admiral Mullen was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time.
Yes.
Yes, he was.
And went on Meet the Press, and I'm almost certain it was Chuck Todd doing the questioning there on Meet the Press in the morning.
I might have that footnote wrong, but I'm 99 percent on that.
And anyway, and then the question was, well, how come we're taking the side of the rebels, meaning al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Libya, but we're supporting the monarchy in Bahrain?
And Mullen says, Bahrain is our ally.
Yeah, no question about it.
Gaddafi, yeah, Bush might have brought him in from the cold in 2003, but it's not like he's reliable or anything.
He's expendable.
We can make an example out of him and pretend like we're on the side of the plucky civilians, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Iraq, versus their evil dictator while supporting all of our actual evil dictators, the ones that matter to us throughout the region.
Yeah, this is the basic facts of the matter.
And it absolutely demands much more open discussion of the high moral cost of being a power in the Middle East.
And, you know, that's certainly something I would like to write about again.
I mean, if I could somehow find the time to do it now, I would, but I can't.
So I've got to put it off.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, great talking to you as always, and great work as always, Gareth.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Glad to be back.
I appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that's the great Gareth Porter.
This time he's at the American Conservative Magazine.
The article is called, Did John Bolton Light the Fuse of the UK-Iranian Tanker Crisis?
And he also wrote the book, Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
