All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Gareth Porter once again.
He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare and his latest with former CIA officer John Kiriakou is the CIA Insider's Guide to, I don't know, Trump's stupid Iran policy, something like that.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Gareth?
I'm okay.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Your titles are too long.
I can't remember what that second one is.
Well, nobody's expected to remember those titles word for word, so don't worry about that.
It's an excellent book.
It's an excellent book.
You got it virtually correct.
I think maybe there's one word that was different.
CIA Insider's Guide to America's Iran policy nowadays.
To the Iran crisis.
The Iran crisis.
There you go.
The perpetual crisis.
Now, so along those lines, of course, you have an article at the Gray Zone now explaining about what happened last Friday with the assassination of the Iranian scientist.
I'll let you go ahead and pronounce his name for us.
It's, well, I mean, the closest I can come to it without being, you know, an expert on Farsi, Persian language, is Fakhrizadeh, Fakhrizadeh.
Close enough.
Okay.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
So the Israelis, they killed him.
Probably with the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, some say with the remote control machine gun or something.
I don't think it matters, really.
But everybody knows the Israelis killed him and everybody knows that the Americans told him to go ahead and do it, the Trump administration.
But what else do we need to know?
I bet a bunch of stuff.
Well, I mean, I think the overall intention here, the larger strategic intention, if you will, to strike now and to strike Fakhrizadeh, you know, is to provoke the Iranians to do something that the Israelis hope will result in some kind of U.S. response before Trump leaves the office.
I mean, the Israelis have been signaling almost desperately for months now that they are very concerned that something be done before Trump leaves office because they do not regard Biden as tough enough, ready to do what is necessary with regard to Iran.
And so this is really their last chance to have a possibility of provoking some kind of military confrontation with Iran.
And I think this fits that picture very clearly.
And I think you're right that the meeting that was held before that with the MBS and with Pompeo certainly anticipated this move and that Pompeo either, I think undoubtedly on his own, gave the go ahead, you know, said, yeah, that sounds good to me.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, no reason to think that Donald Trump didn't give them permission before they left town that go ahead.
And I think the story on Antiwar.com today or yesterday was he told them, go ahead, do whatever you want.
Just don't get me into World War Three.
But anything short of that would be OK, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, as far as he's concerned, he doesn't expect to go to war.
He doesn't intend to go to war.
And therefore, since he his fingers on the trigger, he doesn't have any compunction about the Israelis doing something to Iran.
Of course, you know, Pompeo was undoubtedly hoping, as he has hoped for the last year and a half.
And we've talked about this more than once, I know.
He's been hoping that whatever the Iranians do, it might be enough to give him an argument with Trump that, you know, this is his legacy.
He can't afford to go out of office under these circumstances, et cetera, et cetera.
But I think you're right, as we've talked about before, that Trump is pretty firmly committed to avoiding going to war in the last days of his of his presidency.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it sure doesn't seem like he's.
But nevertheless, I think that's the case.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, there's a risk here, but it doesn't seem like they're trying to go that far.
But it's like you say, they're trying to sabotage Biden essentially.
Right.
And make it virtually impossible for Biden and the Ayatollah to work things out and get back in the nuclear deal.
I mean, once Biden's sworn in.
I mean, Netanyahu said two weeks ago that for America to rejoin the nuclear deal is unacceptable.
Yeah, of course, that's been that's been the objective for his administration for, you know, now, what is it, 10 years?
Yeah, roughly a little more than 10 years, if I remember correctly.
Yeah.
And therefore, that is a secondary strategic aim of this assassination.
But but I think, you know, the the initial the sort of the higher aim, the one that that they would like to achieve most, most of all, is is to have a some sort of confrontation before Trump leaves office.
And, you know, who knows what Pompeo told them during that meeting?
But you think it really is?
You think that it's a plot between Pompeo and Netanyahu to end run Trump into a real war?
Well, look, I mean, let's look at it this way, Scott.
I mean, Pompeo's political future depends on the Christian Zionist vote in the United States.
They are his base.
And he has has to listen to what the Israelis say in light of that and in light of the need for the backing of people who've backed Trump in his two elections and who, you know, he believes would be crucial to his own his own political future.
So so I think that really has to be seen as as part of the background of his meeting with with no doubt about that.
I mean, I'll tell you what, Gareth, you know, I might have expected this spin from you, but I think this was just the regular story in the papers was that Pompeo goes to Israel to debut his presidential campaign for four years from now.
This is where he's kicking off his campaign.
He's got to make sure that he's got the Likud party support first.
Absolutely.
Absolutely right.
He doesn't have any place else to go.
And that, of course, was his strategy from the beginning.
Which is hilarious because Mike Pompeo is never going to be the president.
I mean, give me a break.
You know, he could be a congressman, maybe even a senator, but he's never going to be the president of the United States.
I don't care what Israel says.
Absolutely.
He's he's on a flight that is is going to end in a tailspin and a crash.
I mean, he might as well be talking about Ted Cruz or something like, yes, he commands a lot of respect from a very narrow segment of the population.
And that's it.
And with no growth potential either.
Yeah.
A lot of these politicians are bad at politics.
You know, I look at Donald Trump, look at all the compromises he made and then lost anyway.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So here's the thing about it now.
Your article is about how this scientist that they killed.
I mean, first of all, I guess you're saying he's not who they say he was.
But second of all, and really, most importantly, he couldn't be the key to Iran's nuclear weapons program, Gareth, because Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program.
Yeah, there there are several levels of untruth here that we have to unpack, essentially, in order to complete the process of analyzing this.
As you've just said, I mean, at the bottom level, the fundamental point would be that the whole idea that Mossad has pushed for many years now, going all the way back to the early 2000s, that Fakhrizadeh is the leader of this Israeli, excuse me, this Iranian covert nuclear weapons program is completely false.
It was advanced by a series of sort of false, basically black propaganda operations that involved falsifying documents.
And we've talked about this on your show many times now, I think it's fair to say.
And I've written about it, of course, in my book, Manufactured Crisis, at some length and in great detail, documenting the ways in which the evidence for the claim, the assertion that this entire notion that Iran had a covert nuclear weapons program from 2001 to 2003 was manufactured by Mossad in order to lay the groundwork for a whole program of putting pressure on Iran, which they hoped would, in fact, result in the use of force by the United States.
That was the ultimate aim of that whole of that whole program.
So that's the bottom.
You know, that's the sort of substratum, if you will, of this structure of lies and deception that the Israelis have been working on now for roughly 20 years.
Well, now, doesn't Netanyahu really want a regime change there?
Or he just wants to see Netanyahu's carpet bombed and their nuclear program set back?
Because it seems like he likes having the Ayatollah for a foil.
Yeah, I think that's I think that's right, that that he has made hay on the argument that we have in Iran an extremist Islamic regime that is bent on destroying Israel.
And so when Ahmadinejad was in power, of course, that that was when the Israelis had their greatest moments of success in terms of propaganda, because he could be portrayed as as sort of more extreme.
It wasn't really true, but but that was easier for for the Israelis to get away with.
With Rouhani, of course, he has come from a sort of centrist background and and therefore it was much harder for them to make the argument.
And as we've said in the past, you know, the the neoconservatives in Washington, as well as the Israelis, wanted to see a move to the right in Iranian politics precisely so that they could push for a much harder line by the U.S. government.
And so they're they were disappointed when Rouhani was elected and they have done their best to try to make the case that he's no different from the the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is, of course, is the opposite of the truth, because they're attacking him right and left.
And they have gained enormously in terms of political power over the last two or three years because of the pressure that Trump has put on the Iranian economy because of his extreme measures.
Yeah, I mean, and this is so obvious for people who are keeping track of this stuff at the time when it's Khatami or Rafsanjani, they say Ayatollah, Ayatollah, Ayatollah.
But then when it's Ahmadinejad in there, forget the Ayatollah.
Everybody look at this lightning rod, Ahmadinejad, Ahmadinejad.
Then once he's gone and they get this new guy, Rafsanjani, to come in who wants nothing but to open up to the West to make peace and has it written all over his face, Ayatollah, Ayatollah, because at least Khamenei looks sort of like Khomeini.
And somehow we can take you back to that feeling of fear from 1981.
Yeah, right.
So yeah, I mean, this is a fundamental pattern, which has been one of the things that has caused U.S. policy, not the main thing by any means, but one of the factors that has caused U.S. policy to constantly shift to the right, to the more extreme end of the spectrum in terms of, you know, threats and pressure against and on Iran.
Yeah.
Oh, just one second.
Be right back.
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Okay, now, so let's go back to the beginning of the nuclear program here.
I just so happen to have been writing about this recently and it's all very fascinating to me about how the Americans decided to start demonizing the Iranians, really, even though Reagan was selling them weapons.
On the face of it, the American government has been, you know, totally at tension with them since the revolution, but the Israelis, they kept getting along with Iran all the way through the 1980s, even during the Iran-Iraq war.
They backed Iran and so even though Reagan mostly backed Saddam Hussein, sometimes he backed Iran and when he did, he went to the Israelis to do it because they already had the channel open and all this stuff.
It wasn't until, it wasn't Islamic fundamentalist extremism that the Israelis were worried about because it took them 13 years to start worrying about it.
So then what happened?
Tell a story about how in 1993-94 that Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, decided that things were going to be different now and all of a sudden, in Trita Parsi's book, it's funny about how surprised and humorous the Clintonites all thought this was at the time.
The Israelis just decided that Iran was the fount of all evil and their entire regional strategy changed.
Yeah, that is really a very interesting part of the whole narrative surrounding U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran because you're right, it was Rabin.
See, if I was clever, I would have said, is that because they discovered a nuclear weapons program going on there, Gareth?
Well, I actually know, I mean this line that Rabin started to put out was not because they had new information or reason to believe that Iran was starting to work on nuclear weapons by any means.
In fact, just weeks before he first came out with this, as I've pointed out in a separate article, I didn't have this in my book as I recall, Rabin had talked about the danger of proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, but he wasn't talking about Iran, he was talking about Arabs.
And so this came out of the blue.
And the fact is, it's very clear, and his supporters themselves are the ones who revealed this, have said that Rabin took this line because he had decided that the strategic need for the Israeli government was to have negotiations with the Palestinians, the PLO, and that was such an unpopular thing to do at that point, especially in Israeli public opinion, that he had to have a very strong argument to get sort of even toleration of it.
And that argument had to be, we have to unite the home front in order to be able to prepare for the real danger, the real threat of the future to Israel, and that's Iran.
And so that's what he did.
He started talking about this threat from an extremist Shiite regime that was bent on, you know, pushing its revolutions throughout the Middle East.
And this was just all made up for the purpose of covering his political ass to be able to negotiate with the PLO.
Yeah.
And, you know, I really should reread this book and I almost never do that.
But Trita Parsi's Treacherous Alliance is just fantastic about all this stuff.
One of the great points in there.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
One of the things he talks about in there is when this change really happened, and the Israelis and the Iranians really started ratcheting up their rhetoric and all that, that all the worst smack being talked always took place right when the Israelis were selling the Iranians a bunch of missiles or something like that.
And the Ayatollah would say, I'll get you, Zionist.
Thanks for the weapons, you know, because it was just cover for the covert relationship that they carried on still, you know.
We should also mention the fact that this was also consistent with the fundamental viewpoint of the Mossad, certainly, and other Israeli national security officials, that that Iran was not part of the inner circle of enemies of Israel.
Those were, of course, Iraq.
They started with Iraq and that was the overwhelming threat.
And they believed, as they had for a long, long time, that Iran ultimately would come around and that they could get along with them.
So this was part of an overall strategy, a peripheral strategy, if you will, that Israel had been following and had not given up on that, that the non-Arab states of the greater Middle East were potential allies, potential friends, and that they should not try to ruin relations with them.
So he was reversing that policy, that is, Rabin was reversing that policy for his own political purposes, his own political reasons.
All right now.
So if I got the story straight, the big wrinkle came when they held the Madrid conference on Israel-Palestine and they invited everybody except Iran and snubbed them and said, you're not part of the future of the Middle East, even though they're the Persians.
And so they said, oh, yeah, well, we'll just start funding Hamas so that Hamas can screw up Fatah and whatever progress they're trying to make.
And now I've read Jeremy Hammond's book about this obstacle to peace.
It's called Obstacle to Peace, being the United States of America, of course, here.
And he makes it very clear that Rabin was not about to really give up a Palestinian state in the way that people conceive of the two state solution, that mostly that's just public relations.
But still, of course, that's right.
And don't forget that the Israelis were feeling their oats.
They felt extremely powerful at that moment, because it was right after the Cold War.
And, you know, they felt that the Arab opposition to Israel was going to be much weaker.
Well, it was much weaker, obviously.
Iraq was on its knees because of the Iran-Iraq war.
And they felt that, generally speaking, Israel was in a much stronger position now to negotiate with the PLO because of the fact that the Soviet Union was gone.
The PLO had lost, you know, its main sort of political support.
And generally, the Arabs were no longer in a position to provide the support for the PLO.
So it all fit together as part of a new world view or view of the power situation in the world in Tel Aviv.
Yeah.
But that, I mean, that goes to show, though, why they talk themselves into saying, oh, see, the problem here isn't our stupid choices.
The problem here is the Ayatollah.
Now that he wants to go ahead and pump some money into Hamas in order to give us the middle finger for giving him the middle finger, then, you know, now that's...
We should get back to the assassination.
Well, OK, but I was going to tie this right into right at that era is when they found...
See, I was going somewhere with this.
If anybody's on my same train here, that this was right around the time that they intercepted these communications.
Was it the DIA that intercepted them?
That they, if I understand you right, they weren't lying.
This was actually an honest misinterpretation of these intercepts made them think that, oh, man, look, Iran, not just are they funding Hamas now, looks like they're starting to put together a nuclear weapons program here, huh?
Right.
I mean, this happened in the very early 90s, from 1990 to 1991 or 92.
And it was indeed, it was the CIA that was most involved in the intercepts of Telex's and they they had assistance or they were joined by the British, the Germans and the Israelis of Mossad or some element of Israeli intelligence.
I'm not exactly sure who would have been involved, all of whom were just sharing stuff that they'd intercepted from Sharif University Telex's.
And those Telex's, they all noted, had the Telex number of the Physics Research Center, which was an Iranian defense ministry outfit.
They were funded by and under the management of the Ministry of Defense.
And that was a signal to all of the folks that from the CIA to the Israelis, that something must be up, that, you know, this is evidence that the Iranian military has an interest in nuclear, which is separate from the civilian nuclear organization in Iran.
So that was the basis for the theory that the Israelis pushed very, very hard from then on and which the U.S. government itself picked up very quickly, that that indeed Iran was after a nuclear weapons program.
It was interested in having nuclear weapons and they couldn't prove it.
But this was a this this was evidence that was suggested.
And so that was where the U.S. government was during during the rest of the 1990s.
The CIA did not make a judgment during that period that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program.
They had no evidence of that and they weren't claiming that.
But but there was suspicions all the way through the 1990s.
And then you come.
Yeah.
Well, so let me just make sure to clarify here before we get to if you're about to say the smoking laptop, the Israeli forged smoking laptop.
No, before that, I guess something before that.
OK.
Yeah.
So that was my.
Yeah.
So what was coming in between the very early 90s and the time that the Israelis forged this laptop in the Bush years?
Well, what what was happening was, first of all, you know, you have the Bush administration coming into power, OK?
And that meant John Bolton running the the Iran policy.
But I mean, in the Clinton years, there was no more information that came in other than those telexes for the whole 1990s that.
Not that I can recall.
No.
OK.
No.
No.
I mean, fair enough.
I know how these guys are.
They're like, yeah, good enough.
Let's just pretend to keep believing it.
OK, go ahead.
Right.
So so Bolton comes in as the as the Iran policymaker committed to this extreme neoconservative policy of all out pressure on Iran.
And ultimately, you know, I mean, they they share the the Israeli view that the Iranians want to get nuclear weapons.
They they have a they believe that there's a covert nuclear weapons program of some sort, although they don't have the goods on them yet.
And so he begins to work on the CIA.
And I talk about this in my book.
He gets the CIA's primary group that that is involved in in analyzing military things to go along with the idea that that Iran does want does have a nuclear weapons program.
And in 2001, for the first time, under pressure from Bolton, they the CIA comes out with a national intelligence estimate saying, yes, Iran has a covert nuclear weapons program.
They didn't have any evidence of it at that point.
There was nothing that they had that was concrete.
Paul Pillar, the who was later the the Middle East chief of Middle East analysis for the CIA, has pointed out that this was simply an inference and it was not based on anything solid.
But that's what happened.
The CIA got committed to the idea.
And from and then the Israelis, you know, got the idea that, you know, they should start working on this this falsified set of documents that would show a an Iranian covert nuclear weapons program, a research program.
And this is the smoking laptop that they claim was smuggled out of Iran that had belonged to a scientist.
And look, has all these documents on it.
So now, look, here's where we link up the the past from the 1990s, that physics research center, which they found on the telex telexes from Sharif University, that they interpreted as meaning that the physics research center working on behalf of of the Iranian defense ministry was trying to get procurement of dual use items that could be used for a nuclear weapons program.
And and so so the Israelis decided that the physics research research center was somehow the lead in to the next phase of Iran's secret nuclear weapons program, which was this project that they claimed that started in 2001.
And this was in retrospect, of course, they claimed that it was 2001.
They didn't claim it at the time, but went from 2001 to 2003.
And this is the smoking laptop documents that suddenly appeared in 2004.
And I've documented, as I say, how these were falsified.
These are forged documents.
They had some documents that that could have been real, but there was one letter that was the real document.
We won't get into that, but it was used in a way that falsified it.
They put handwriting on it that they used to suggest that this was somehow tied in with nuclear weapons, which it was.
But so in 2004, these falsified documents that the Mossad had worked on were turned over to the Mujahedini calc, and they turned them over to the German intelligence agency, the BND, which turned them over to the CIA.
And that was the beginning, then, of the sort of releasing these, leaking these to the American press and to the world's press and creating this huge false idea about what was really going on in terms of Iranian policy.
And that's why, you know, you had the Iran crisis basically burgeoning during the Bush administration.
So now and the CIA basically being taken over by the by the Israelis, essentially through U.S. through U.S. power and and getting getting their point of view accepted ultimately not by al-Baradei, but by his successor in 2009, 2010.
You know, what they did was they needed somebody to name as the head of this program.
They didn't know who it was.
They didn't know who who they could, you know, potentially name because this was fake.
And so they went back and tried to figure out, OK, well, who could they link to the Physics Research Center most credibly?
And so they picked Fakhrizadeh as the guy who they would name.
And that's because he taught at the Imam Hussein University, had a course that he taught at the Imam Hussein University.
And so they they thought that was that was plausible enough.
He taught physics at Imam Hussein University.
So he was the guy that they named.
And and here's the payoff.
Here's the punchline.
OK, Scott, we now know that he had nothing to do with the Physics Research Center.
The guy who was running the Physics Research Center was another person who later on became the head of the the civilian Iranian nuclear program.
The guy who really was the head of it later on became head of the of the civilian nuclear nuclear program.
So now we have we have concrete evidence.
We know that they made this up deliberately to finger Fakhrizadeh.
And they it was spread to the IAEA.
They put his name in the document, in the in the documents that we've been talking about, the forged documents.
That's how they did it.
It's Zavari.
So the person who they named was not the real person who ran the Physics Research Center.
It was it was somebody else.
And so we know we know this from David Albright, who is the last person on earth you'd expect to tell the truth.
But in fact, later on, without really revealing that this was, you know, he was really a deception by Mossad and the Israelis.
He revealed that basically they they had named the wrong person as head of the Physics Research Center, that it was Shamirati.
Who was the guy that they killed?
What was his actual job?
Well, he was in the defense ministry.
He was a he was a senior defense ministry official during the the the period of all this happening.
And you know, he he was a physicist.
But that's as far as it goes.
I mean, there's there's nothing else that they can link him.
There's no there was no other evidence that they could use to link him to nuclear weapons.
It just doesn't exist.
And, you know, it's it's one of the major accomplishments of Mossad to have done this for sure.
And and by the way, you know, I don't know if I've talked talked about this on the show before, but the co-authors of the Israeli bestseller on Mossad's greatest covert operations state very guardedly in guarded terms because they have to be careful about violating Israeli strictures, Israeli law about revealing things.
They talk about how Mossad has actually prompted the MEK with personal information from about Fakhrizadeh that MEK couldn't possibly gotten itself and make it very clear that they don't believe that those documents came from the MEK at all, that they they know that it had to come from Mossad.
So so they are basically saying without explicitly saying so, that Mossad faked those documents.
Yeah, well, no big surprise.
But then so why didn't they kill somebody who's actually involved in the nuclear program?
Well, they have they have killed people who were involved in the nuclear program, as well as somebody who, as I've pointed out in an article that was published at the time of the assassination in 2011, was really quite innocent, right, involved in.
Yeah, I remember that.
So it was three scientists, a grad student and now a physicist, but who was not involved in the nuclear program.
You're saying.
Right, right.
But obviously, you know, they they had seen an opportunity.
They'd somehow followed him around enough to know exactly how they could do it.
And it fits their narrative anyway.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
It fits the narrative.
This was a big propaganda payoff.
And speaking of which.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know if this is exactly what you're referring to, but I've just seen a week worth of Iran's nuclear weapons program that every reporter now thinks is a thing without doing the slightest bit of thinking or remembering or research into the matter.
Hey, if David Sanger says, as Perry would put it, that it's a flat fact that there is such a thing, that he can just refer to it rather than even making a specific claim about it, then that's good enough for all the rest of them to pair it to.
This is another indication of just how completely successful the Israelis have been in propounding this deception about Iran and the fictional covert nuclear weapons program.
It has been accepted so completely that nobody feels the need to say anything more than simply refer to the Iranian nuclear weapons program and to the guy who they say, who the Israelis say was in charge and who everybody now believes in the corporate media was the case.
Yeah.
It's just amazing.
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All right now, so the Ayatollah for now is sort of playing it cool, right?
He knows that Biden is coming soon and that Biden has an obligation to Obama to at least sort of kind of look like he's trying to get back into the nuclear deal.
So maybe the Ayatollah will hold his fire for now.
Then again, Jake Sullivan, the designated incoming national security advisor, has already said that, oh yeah, we'll get back in the JCPOA as soon as they immediately return to all the limits in the deal that they've been breaking lately without withdrawing from the deal, but still, and as soon as they agree to start negotiating further on the rest of their activities.
Only then, in other words, he's taken Donald Trump's position.
He is, yeah.
There's not a dime's worth of difference at this point between what the Biden national security team intends to do and what Trump has done in terms of a fundamental policy line, except for being willing to get back into the agreement, which Trump, of course, was not willing to do.
But you know, it does, it does really put a...
I mean, at least officially, that was the Trump position, wasn't it?
Yeah, we'll get back in the deal as soon as you agree to all these other terms.
No, no, he wasn't willing to do that.
No, though he was, he was, he got out of the deal without any ifs, ands, or buts, and then added, you know, we're willing to talk to you, you know, about these other issues.
I guess I'm thinking of Pompeo's speech where he goes, these are all our demands.
I guess it was implicit in that.
We'll get back in the deal with you if you do all these things, you know.
That was to ease the terrible economic sanctions against Iran, specifically, you know, to deprive them of their fundamental, you know, major source of support for their economy by not being able to trade, you know, to sell their oil to all their customers.
So you know, that was the leverage that they were using to get the Iranians to sort of to kowtow to the United States.
But you know, their demands were so extreme that there was no possibility that the Iranians would even...
But that was just about sanctions.
That wasn't about getting back in the deal by hook or crook.
I got you.
That's right.
All right.
Now, so when it comes to, you know, I don't know, Pompeo and Netanyahu working to really gin up an actual conflict here, I'm reminded of the bad old days of 2007 or so, I guess would have been very late 06 or maybe January 07, when reportedly the chiefs took President George W. Bush into the tank at the Pentagon.
And they says to him, they says, we don't want to go to war with Iran.
They got too many and too good anti aircraft and we'd have to put too many special operations guys on the ground with laser pointers to try to destroy it all.
And yes, we could bomb them.
But yes, they could bomb us to at least, you know, America in the Middle East, if not America the place.
And so there'd be too much hell to pay and we don't want to pay it.
And I guess the Air Force was gung ho for it.
But even the Navy said we don't want to and the Marines and the Army definitely said count us out.
And so Bush said, OK, well, all right, then I guess forget it.
That's correct as far as it goes.
But of course, the the story did not end there, because then Vice President Dick Cheney had its own ideas.
And he pushed, first of all, for bombing the the the Iranians if they could.
Well, the first the first thing was was to use the occasion of the discovery of this alleged nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007, in April 2000 or March 2007, to to to take a shot at not just Syria, but Hezbollah as well, and even perhaps Iran.
That's what he was suggesting in those discussions in the White House.
And that was turned down by by Bush again.
And then at a later meeting or set of meetings, he was calling for taking advantage of any incident in Iraq where U.S. troops were killed or even injured, perhaps in numbers, and that could be blamed on Iran.
And of course, they would find a way to do that, that that would be the basis for retaliating by hitting an IRGC base inside Iran.
And that, of course, was squashed by the Pentagon.
And it was not just Bush, but the Pentagon said, you know, we want to know how this would play out.
And and then it just didn't go anywhere.
So so that was as far as it went.
But but there was discussion because of Cheney that went beyond, you know, that, hey, I'll do you worse.
He sent David Wormser around to say that they were talking with the Israelis and thinking about having the Israelis launch a cruise missile strike on Natanz that would force Iran to hit back against American interests in the Gulf.
And as they put it, as Wormser put it, do an end run around George W. Bush and force him into the war.
Yeah, that's right.
You're absolutely right.
And it's it's well documented that that Cheney, you know, did in fact favor that he was it was not just Wormser, but Cheney himself was ready to go in that direction.
But he, of course, was limited by his the fact that he ultimately he couldn't get away with it because of Bush.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The cool, patient wisdom of George W. Bush saves us again.
That happens from time to time.
There's the other time when when Shakashvili invaded South Ossetia and the Russians started coming across under the Caucasus Mountains and Dick Cheney wanted to bomb the tunnels or do, you know, cruise missile strikes on the tunnels under the mountains.
And George Bush reportedly said to the cabinet, simply agree with the vice president about this.
That's right.
That's what he does.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let's move on.
Thanks very much for your input, Vice.
But we're going to not start a war with the Russians today.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And by the way, we now know that, of course, the second term that Bush really didn't pay much attention to Cheney.
He was finished with him, basically.
Yeah.
Well, that was why they brought in Gates was somebody had to be strong enough to to Mars.
Although what did Gates do other than implement Cheney and Petraeus's surge and and, you know, double down anyway?
They didn't do the Baker plan.
They did the Fred Kagan plan.
So what the hell?
Sure.
You know.
Anyway.
But but they weren't the ones calling the shots.
They were just the ones who called the shots that were to be called by the other guys.
So that's different.
All right.
But now.
So I should have phrased that question better anyway.
What about the military now done the army and the Marines and the Special Operations Forces guys?
Don't they think that they don't really want to invade Persia because that would require a lot of dying on their part?
You know, the situation has changed remarkably since the 2000s, 2007, roughly, period, which we've been talking about.
Very true.
You know, there was there was at least, as you've suggested, the Air Force or parts of the Air Force that might have been interested in that sort of thing.
But but the rest of the military was not was not willing to to go along with any such thing.
But today it's much clearer that nobody in the Pentagon really is is willing to to do anything that would cause the United States to become involved in a war with Iran unless it you know, it was the result of some egregious attack on, you know, U.S. troops that that was impossible to avoid, you know, responding to.
They do not want a war with Iran, not only because they're now, you know, they've turned to China.
China is the the the big ticket item, the obsession at the Pentagon.
And they do not want to have anything that would distract them from that.
And and and also, even short of that, that big consideration of China, Iran has grown in terms of its military power, its capabilities so remark markedly over the last 10 years that now the United States would pay a much bigger price than it would have paid, you know, in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, when the U.S. really still felt that he could handle Iran relatively easily.
So so that's a very different picture.
And so there's just no no willingness at all to contemplate war with Iran today.
Well, and so back to the real point, then the Ayatollah knows that, too.
And he knows that he has to maybe take a few on the chin here, but that the knockouts not common.
So he's not going to do something stupid and blow everything right.
No, I mean, you know, the Iranians have always been extremely careful in retaliation to do things that are carefully measured to to be appropriate to what the provocation was.
And in this case, you know, they will lean over backwards to avoid anything that is not proportional to what the what was done in terms of the assassination of Fakhrizadeh.
And I'm not sure what that is, but my guess is that it would be short of an attack on a U.S. base.
It would be more likely to be a another sort of a shot into Saudi Arabia on, you know, they would use the grounds that the Saudis were complicit in this in that meeting and so forth.
I'm not I'm not sure at all that that's that that would be the choice, but it seems more likely that they would do something like that than hit a U.S. base.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I mean, the whole world got off lucky, what, 11 months ago when we went through this thing and Trump killed Soleimani, which would have been like if the Iranians had killed Petraeus at the height of his fame, although he never won a war.
Somalia won a couple.
But anyway, when they responded to that with those the missile strikes where they deliberately missed and hit the corner of the base where they knew that no G.I. s were.
And the worst that happened was it was quite a deliberate targeting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then Trump let them get the last word.
That was it.
He let the Ayatollah get the last word and said and I love the way the liberal Democrats criticized him for this, that he downplayed the injury of the soldiers and said, well, you know, they got some pretty bad headaches from it, but they'll be all right.
And they were saying, oh, how dare you play down their injuries when what's the opposite of that?
Playing them up, which means you have to respond.
You can't let it go at that.
He was diminishing the damage.
And you know, traumatic brain injury is traumatic, but he was diminishing the damage so he didn't have to hit back any more times.
And you know, they didn't care about that.
They just want to say something bad about the orange Cheeto man or whatever the stupid thing.
But that could have been much worse right then.
I mean, we're talking about Donald emotional Trump here.
He could have done anything.
Well, it's very interesting.
The corporate media were so hawkish in response to that situation.
It was like, oh, you know, how could you not respond with something much more, you know, much more militaristic than what you did to Trump?
And now I think it's it seems clear that there's a very, very sharp change of direction by the news media in regard to Iran policy.
I mean, I think that they're now pushing for finding some way or not pushing, but they're they're leaning towards, you know, the idea that it would be good to find some way to talk with the Iranians.
You know, to to ease off the extreme pressure.
So, you know, it's all it's all very dependent on domestic politics, clearly, as well as as their fealty to the national security state.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, any more big points on the assassination of this guy I miss here, Gareth, before I let you go?
No, I think that that's really the essence of it, that they were they were able to get away with this over many years of repeating it in various ways through various channels, but particularly through the IAEA and the and their reports and leaks to the to The New York Times and all the rest of the corporate media, which were very effective in just blanketing public opinion and leaving not the slightest room for any independent view of of this whole question.
Right.
And so, you know, we have found ourselves in a very when I say ourselves, I mean, people who wish to make a change in U.S. policy more generally, as well as on on on Iran.
We've found ourselves in a very, very deep hole because of this.
And, you know, it's it's a very hard, hard job to dig out of it.
And I you know, I think that this is a long term, a long term thing that I'm not sure how you do it.
But, you know, it's it's a necessary work.
That's for sure.
Well, yeah, it absolutely is.
And I speak for everybody listening to when I say how grateful I am that you're always on top of this stuff.
But at the end of the day, just like with the war on terrorism, too, it's the calendar that proves we're right.
How could it be that we're still trying to hunt down and kill 400 guys after 20 years?
How could it be that Iran has been working on atom bombs for 25 years and they haven't been able to scrape up a single one yet?
Yeah.
Well, there's so many.
How bad at metallurgy are these Persians anyway?
Either that or the Israelis have been lying to you, which is obviously the simpler Occam's razor explanation.
Yeah, I'm sorry to say we'll we'll be talking about this again someday.
I'm quite sure.
But anyway, it's it's all it's all part of the part of the game.
Yep.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for doing your part.
Thank you, Scott.
Thanks for keeping on it yourself.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
The book.
This is the one you really got to read.
It's Manufactured Crisis.
The truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
And, you know, go back through my archives, add the word stress to your search and you'll find the 10 part interview I did.
We did an hour per chapter of that whole book back in what, 2015, right before the nuclear crisis.
Yes.
Yep.
So you guys can find that and and read the book.
That's great.
And the CIA insider's guide to the Iran nuclear crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, not the Gareth, the CIA.
And and keep your eye out for everything he writes at the gray zone, including the latest, which we have reprinted at antiwar dot com as we are want to do.
It's called How Israel Deployed an Intelligence Deception to Justify Killing Scientist Motion.
Fuckers.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
