All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Starting our three here, anti-war radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
We got Gareth Porter on the phone as we often do.
He's got a new piece at interpress service.
That's IPS news.net.
And of course it's a republished at antiwar.com/Porter.
Uh, cables, but why Gulf States backing for strikes on Iran?
It's by Gareth Porter and co-written with Jim Lowe, Washington bureau chief at interpress service.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you, man?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me on as always.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us.
And, uh, this is one of the major headlines to come out of the WikiLeaks state department cable dump.
Uh, first of all, well, the, the two top headlines really in the New York times, uh, became the two top narratives of, uh, the press other than Assange bad guy, um, and those are the North Koreans are selling the, the, uh, Iranians, uh, some missiles.
And we debunked a lot.
We debunked that last time you were on the show at the end of last week.
And then, uh, the other one is see the King Abdullah wants us to bomb Iran to all the Arab leaders want us to, and that proves how right Israel is that we, the United States of America ought to get in a war with Iran.
And now you've got this piece to say, nah, exactly.
Yeah, this is, this is the way the media system works.
Obviously the New York times, even though it does not have the direct access to the WikiLeaks documents, because WikiLeaks cut them out, this time was getting all the documents from the guardian and therefore they become the outlet for the main narrative having to do with the WikiLeaks document for not just the United States, but a large part of the world.
And that's exactly what's happened.
As soon as the times comes out with their story saying that the Gulf Arab regimes, uh, essentially are united with Israel on the question of what needs to be done about Iran.
The Washington post comes out with the same story.
Uh, they, they quote the, that narrative in their lead story on the WikiLeaks.
And then, uh, more recently, uh, in their, uh, set up for the latest round of talks, um, in Geneva with, with Iran, uh, repeat this line that, uh, that the Arab, uh, the Gulf Arab states, uh, of course agree with Israel that the Iranian nuclear sites need to be taken out.
So this has indeed, uh, become, uh, the dominant, uh, overwhelmingly dominant narrative because of the times.
And, uh, again, as, as, uh, your readers, uh, your, your, uh, uh, listeners, I should say by now will have expected this turns out to be a complete, uh, no misreporting and indeed a complete distortion of what the WikiLeaks, uh, diplomatic cables actually say.
Well, of course it's got David Sanger's name right at the top.
That means whatever you're about to read is not true.
Precisely.
I mean, this is, uh, David Sanger is the guy who does the equivalent of the aluminum tube story on Iran.
I mean, this is, this is precisely, uh, what has happened repeatedly, as we've talked about so many times on your show.
Um, and in this case, what they did was to cherry pick, uh, two or three, uh, rather sensational sounding, uh, quotes from King Abdullah of supposedly from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia from Wait, which King Abdullah?
There's so many King Abdullahs on the American payroll.
Well, this is, there's only one King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
This is, this is the guy that they're saying at the times is quoting as saying we must cut off the head of the snake.
Um, and then there are a couple of other quotes from, uh, from leaders in the United Arab Emirates and, um, uh, from, uh, Bahrain who, who have also sort of filled out the narrative, but then what we find when you really look into the, the, uh, the WikiLeaks cables in detail is that it's a very different storyline.
First of all, you know, you have to have some context for the, uh, for the Abdullah alleged quote.
We, we don't know that Abdullah has actually said anything like that.
By the way, what happened was that the, uh, Saudi ambassador to the United States said that that's what, uh, Abdullah had been saying to the United States repeatedly.
Uh, this was in a conversation with the charge d'affaires of the United States two days after the meeting between King Abdullah and Petraeus.
And, and I have to tell you something that I did not put in the story, but if there had been more space, uh, I would have done.
So, uh, Ray clothes, a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia who has continued to have very good contacts with Saudis says that that language about cutting off the head of the snake used by the Saudi ambassador is very, very suspicious.
He does not believe for a moment that that is language that King Abdullah would have used in a meeting with Petraeus.
It's more like the kind of language that Petraeus himself uses to talk about what we're doing, uh, to the insurgents in Afghanistan or what he did to the insurgents, uh, in, uh, in Iraq.
Uh, so he's very suspicious that that is anything like an accurate quote from Abdullah, but in any case, even if Abdullah was saying, yeah, we support you on your, uh, a military option on, uh, on Iran, this was happening precisely in 2008, spring of 2008, when the Bush administration was sending one delegation after another out, uh, to solicit Saudi support for the hard line, for a renewed hard line on Iran.
And so as, uh, Chas Freeman, the, uh, former U S ambassador in Saudi Arabia has said to us this kind of language or this kind of statement privately, if it was said by King Abdullah or other Saudi leaders was simply another case of the Saudis ingratiating themselves, as he puts it with their protectors, because they, they America, they, they want to tell the Americans what they wanted to hear.
And so it doesn't really mean it's not the Americans listening as the Saudis say, please bomb Iran for us.
It's the American saying, we'd like you to ask us to bomb Iran.
And they say, all right, exact.
That's exactly what was going on in the Saudis.
Uh, you know, did not have their own policy.
They, they simply wanted to, uh, for, for the Americans to believe that the Saudis were supporting them and, uh, they wanted to make sure that the Americans were still going to protect them.
But as time went by, and this is a key part of the story that the times completely, uh, omitted from their account, uh, all of the Gulf shake them really began, began to realize by 2008, 2009, that a military option was simply not viable.
It wasn't going to work.
And they, they began to reflect this in their conversations with us diplomats saying, look, you've got to do something about the Israelis.
The Israelis are going to attack unless you do something.
And then it's going to come back on us.
I mean, they, they understood of course, that if there was an attack on Iran, that the Iranian response was going to be, uh, you know, at their expense, they were going to be attacking all those military bases in Kuwait and, and, uh, Bahrain and elsewhere and, and Saudi Arabia itself, um, and the United Arab Emirates.
And of course they were going to attack other targets in those, uh, in those Gulf shake them as well.
So they were not at all pleased with what they saw coming, uh, from, uh, from a military attack on Iran.
And they were letting the Americans know that now, none of that of course appears New York times.
And this is really where it becomes so clear that the times was deliberately falsifying the record on this, on this issue.
Well, you know, I think the first day the guardian had a piece, um, following the, uh, New York times lead, Oh, Saudi King says, uh, you know, uh, cut the head off the snake, et cetera.
And then the next headline down was Saudi foreign minister warns against any military action against Iran.
That was on the first day over at the guardian.co.uk.
Right.
And there, there is, there's clearly some distinctions, uh, between the way the times handled it and the way some of the other, uh, press outlets did.
Although I think the guardian is probably the best of the lot in that regard.
Yeah.
Well, and I think people, if they even took ninth grade geography and they think of how thin that Persian Gulf really is, we have our fifth fleet, our fifth fleet stationed at Bahrain there.
And, uh, the Iranians, they don't have the missiles to hit Israel or Europe, but they could shoot across the Persian Gulf.
No problem.
I think it's Garrett Porter from interpress service.
He's got a piece here, uh, with Jim Loeb cables, belie Gulf States backing for strikes on Iran.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton coming up on the show.
Robert Stinnett on the day of deceit, the truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor.
Also wanted to point you over to the history news network, a blog, liberty and power.
Uh, David Beto, my good friend, professor of history at the university of Alabama has a piece called Rose Wilder Lane as champion of laws, I fair anti-racism.
It's an article written, uh, coauthored with his wife, Linda Royce Beto.
And, um, it's about a Rose Wilder Lane who really wrote the little house on the prairie books, uh, and who was, uh, it was featured in just Raimondo's book, reclaiming the American right.
Um, uh, proto libertarian and a very important one in our anti-imperialist and a pro individual liberty heritage here in this country.
So, uh, I'll again, I recommend you go check out HNN.us and look for the liberty and power group blog run by my friend, David T Beto, you'll be able to find the link from there.
And by the way, for those of you listening to this in podcast form, you do know that this show is live nine to noon, Monday through Friday at LRN.fm.
Right.
Okay.
Now back to my friend, Gareth Porter.
He's on the line from over there in Virginia somewhere.
And, uh, he writes for IPS news.
He's got this piece, uh, with Washington, uh, bureau chief, Jim Loeb at, uh, IPS news.net and at anti-war.com/Porter.
It's called cables belie Gulf States backing for strikes on Iran.
Now, Gareth, tell me some more about what the, uh, sheikdoms and the various Emirates on the Arabian peninsula really think about any American/Israeli assault on Iran.
Well, what I was going to say, just as we were going into the break, uh, was that the, we, you know, one of the considerations that was expressed in, uh, by 2009 in some of these conversations, certainly, uh, in the case of the United Arab Emirates, uh, with us diplomats is that, you know, if there were a confrontation, military confrontation with Iran over the nuclear program, one of the consequences would be a worldwide, uh, oil, uh, problem.
I think a supply problem.
Um, it was not elaborated on, but, uh, it was very clear that the, the Gulf, uh, Arab Gulf officials were concerned that, that one of the consequences here would not just be a military one, uh, that they would be targeted, but that's serious enough, but that there would also be consequences for the entire oil market worldwide that they could stand up to, to lose in that proposition as well.
So, I mean, that was just another way for them to say to the Americans who they were dealing with, Hey, you've got to take seriously the problem of what would happen if there were a military confrontation.
And what, what I have not said, uh, explicitly, but what needs to be added here is that by 2009, what the, uh, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the, uh, UAE officials were talking about was increasingly and almost exclusively the danger that the Israelis would strike, uh, the, the Iranian nuclear facilities.
And they were warning the Americans if the Israeli strike, this is really, you know, this is, this is a worst case scenario.
That, that was the precise, uh, terminology that was used, uh, in one of the cables, uh, if I recall correctly, the UAE, uh, exchange of views with, with American diplomats, uh, was calling an Israeli preemptive strike, a worst case scenario.
And there was a lot of discussion about the dangers of the so-called preemptive strike.
That's what increasingly was on the minds of, of the Arab regimes, uh, in, in the Gulf in 2009 and into 2010.
Well, I'm sure you saw, uh, Larissa Alexandrovna's piece at raw story, uh, last week.
And I'm sure you read the cable of, uh, mayor Dagan, the head of the Mossad, uh, speaking with our Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for killing people or conspiring to start another war or whatever his official title is.
And, and basically, uh, Dagan is telling Burns, look, if you don't start a war with Iran, we will.
And, uh, you know, which obviously I think, uh, everyone understands if Israel attacks Iran and a war breaks out between Israel and Iran, the United States will be involved immediately.
And, uh, that amounted to, uh, what Phil Giraldi was a former CIA officer.
Phil Giraldi was quoting the article saying is blackmail.
Well, of course, and then here's one of those places where of course the, uh, the WikiLeaks documents are not saying anything that we didn't already know.
I mean, this is, this is obviously common knowledge, uh, that the Israelis think that way.
What, what is perhaps more interesting, uh, from my point of view in terms of revelations by the WikiLeaks documents is, uh, one particular one, which did involve, uh, Dagan again, the Mossad chief of Israel.
Uh, really importuning his, his American colleagues trying to get them on board with a cockamamie scheme, uh, to overthrow the regime, uh, through, you know, internal stirring things up internally in Iran.
The idea of, of what they called forcing regime change was, is actually shown to be one of the five pillars of Israeli strategy toward Iran, uh, in, in one of the WikiLeaks, uh, document.
Um, uh, if I remember correctly, it was spring, it was 2009.
In any case, I don't remember the exact date, which is really quite interesting because one would have thought, uh, and even, I have to admit that I thought the Israelis had really gone beyond the, uh, the naive belief by that time that it was even conceivable that they could have any chance of overthrowing the regime in, in Tehran.
But nevertheless, they were still regarding that as a central part of their strategy, that they could, if they could get the Americans to spend more money on subverting the regime in, in Tehran, that they could somehow succeed in overthrowing the regime.
And I think that underlines the degree of sort of, uh, la la land, you know, uh, that, that prevailed, uh, within the, uh, the national security apparatus of Israel at that point.
This is, this is being pushed by, uh, a guy who had been in Tehran, uh, as their sort of, uh, the Israeli unofficial ambassador going all the way back to the time of the Shah.
Really?
And ever since the overthrow of the Shah, the guy had been trying to convince everybody and apparently succeeded in getting successive, uh, Israeli governments to, uh, to go along and to fund his shop devoted fully to, uh, to the idea that they could overthrow the regime in Tehran.
And they, uh, and they were working, you know, year after year trying to get, uh, various us government to, to, uh, administrations to go along with this idea.
And we're never quite successful in that.
All right, well now we're almost out of time, but just tell me quickly, is there any reason to believe that these new talks are going to go anywhere, especially with all these new, you know, new and bogus accusations against the Iranians on the eve of the whole thing going down?
Not unless there is a surprising turn within the Obama administration toward a real commitment to, uh, to engagement diplomatically with Iran, which, uh, you know, I think the chances of that are vanishingly small at this point.
I mean, the problem is, and I think I've said before, the Obama administration has never really, uh, resolved the differences among various people who have input into the policy.
And at this point, uh, I'm pretty clear that the people who refuse to allow even the slightest, uh, right to enrichment of uranium, uh, by your, by Iran still have a veto power.
Yep.
All right.
Well, same story, different day, only worse.
Thanks, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's my favorite.
Dr.
Gareth Porter, interpress service.
That's IPS news.org and anti-war.com/Porter.
We'll be right back with Roberts to net about the greatest treason in the history of all of mankind after this.
