I'm Scott Horton, and as promised, Mohammad Sahimi is on the line.
He's a professor of chemical engineering and materials science and the NIOC chair in petroleum engineering at USC here in Los Angeles, and he's been writing about Iran's political developments and nuclear program for Antiwar.com and for PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau, which is definitely worth checking out.
Of course, Antiwar.com/Sahimi, I think, is how you get to his Antiwar.com archive, and his articles, of course, have also been published in the L.A. Times, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, even the Wall Street Journal, the Progressive, and others.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammad.
How are you?
I'm not too bad.
Thank you for having me on your program again.
Well, I really appreciate having you here.
Always do, and always read your articles for Antiwar.com and over there at the PBS Frontline website, the Tehran Bureau there.
But this most recent piece that ran at Antiwar.com just a couple of days ago, High Stakes for Upcoming Nuclear Negotiations with Iran, very interesting.
In fact, there's so much here about domestic Iranian politics in and out of the context of the nuclear negotiations.
I was hoping we could really spend the first part of this interview talking about the different power factions in Iran, and of course, in the context of the disputed elections of 2009, and how this all plays into Ahmadinejad's political capital, as they call it, I guess, and his position on the nuclear issue, and his ability to carry out his position on the nuclear issue there.
I guess, first of all, tell us about the relationship between the President Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Well, first of all, unlike what many people think in the West, that Ayatollah Khamenei is the ultimate authority and controls everything, that actually hasn't been true in Iran for the past several years, particularly since last year, when Ahmadinejad was re-elected in an election that was hotly disputed.
Ahmadinejad actually believes that he received 24 million votes last year, as was claimed, and therefore he doesn't need to take orders from anybody, including Ayatollah Khamenei.
And because of that, since he was re-elected, he has been defying the Ayatollah on many fronts, including the foreign policy.
The foreign policy in Iran has always been controlled by the Supreme Leader, but Ahmadinejad has shown an increasingly independent path from Ayatollah Khamenei.
For example, he and his team have been willing to reach a compromise with the United States, and in fact it was his close aide and friend, Saeed Jalili, who is Secretary General of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, and chief nuclear negotiator, who made the preliminary agreement in October of 2009 with the IAEA and the United States and France about swapping Iran's low-energy uranium for fuel for Tehran's research reactor.
But then when the agreement was taken back to Tehran to be approved by all the important political figures, Ayatollah Khamenei blocked it at that time.
But after several months of pushing and shoving by Ahmadinejad, the same type of agreement were eventually signed between Iran, Turkey, and Brazil in May of 2010, which was rejected by the United States as being inadequate.
But that went to show that Ahmadinejad is actually taking an increasingly independent path from what Ayatollah Khamenei wants.
He also fired Iran's former foreign minister, Manoucheh Mohtaki, just about a month and a half ago.
And Manoucheh Mohtaki was actually the person that had been imposed on him by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
And then he appointed, in a surprise move, a very moderate, highly educated person, Dr.
Ali Akbar Salehi, who is the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and Iran's interim foreign minister.
And the talk in Tehran is that he will be actually the permanent foreign minister after Ahmadinejad introduces him to the Iranian parliament, the majlis, to get a vote of confidence for his appointment.
Now, Salehi is a very moderate man.
He has never been aligned with extremist factions in Iran.
He's a highly educated person.
He got his PhD in nuclear engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in early 1980s.
And he has been a professor and chancellor of Sharif University in Iran, which is the most important science and technology university in Iran.
And I talked to several colleagues of his in Tehran, with whom I have had academic relations and research collaboration, and they all told me that Salehi has said that although he doesn't feel any affinity with the hardliners in Tehran, he has accepted to become Iran's interim foreign minister, and eventually foreign minister, with the hope that he can get Iran out of the impasse that it has with the West, and in particular the United States, over Iran's nuclear program.
And we have to remember that because Salehi is the chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, he knows every detail, every nooks and crannies about Iran's program and where the program is headed.
And therefore, if he goes to negotiations with the West, which are supposed to start tomorrow in Istanbul, Turkey, he knows everything, and he can talk from a position of authority and position of knowledge.
So that, to me, was a signal that Ahmadinejad actually wants to reach compromise with the United States.
Now, why does he want to do that?
Because his position internally, what has happened in Iran, has been weakened.
The economy's in a very bad shape.
The unemployment has been rising.
Ahmadinejad government eliminated subsidies for many essential stuff, like gasoline and bread and rice and things of that sort that are essential to Iranian nutrition, as well as things like electricity, natural gas for burning water, and so on.
And that has increased the prices of everything dramatically and has angered a lot of people.
So at the same time, the political repression has also continued.
The government has continued to arrest university students, attorneys that defend political prisoners, human rights activists, and so on.
So in terms of the political situation, the system has been very repressive, and in terms of the economic performance, the system is not functioning well.
So on one hand, and because of that, Ahmadinejad has been attacked by all factions, even within his own camp, the conservative hardline camp, he has been criticized.
So what he wants is, first of all, to reach a compromise with the West over Iran's nuclear program so that it would lessen the foreign pressure on Iran, and hopefully it will eliminate or at least reduce the sanctions that have been imposed by the United States and Western allies on Iran, with the hope that that would help him to improve the economy and therefore recover some credibility with at least part of the population that he has lost over the fraudulent election by which he was re-elected last year.
Okay, I think I dig it.
So there's this disputed election, which really weakened him, the economy is really bad, which is of course, he has to take the brunt of the public responsibility for that, he's sort of the public face on the bad economy as well.
So Ahmadinejad's political solution to these problems as president of Iran is to seize more power over foreign policy, crack down on his police state as well, of course, but in seizing more control over the foreign policy of the country, he's trying to make a deal so that he can have at least one success.
And he's willing, it seems, to give up even the breakout capability, so-called breakout capability where they have enough low-enriched uranium that if somehow I Dream of Jeannie turned it into weapons-grade uranium, it would be enough for one bomb.
And he was willing to export all that without even getting the uranium from the French at the same time.
It was, we're finding out now, I guess, from the WikiLeaks that it was the hardliners inside Iran to his right that wouldn't let him do that, but he was willing to give up even the so-called breakout capability, it looks like, right?
Yes, as I said, he has been willing for quite some time to reach some sort of compromise.
All right, now hold it, I'm sorry, right there, I'm sorry, I gotta hold you, I gotta go out to this break.
It's Mohamed Sahimi from Antiwar.com and PBS's Tehran Bureau at their front-line website and a professor at USC.
We'll be right back, y'all, Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we're talking with Mohamed Sahimi from USC.
He also writes, well, he's a professor of chemical engineering there.
He writes for Antiwar.com, the Huffington Post, and the PBS front-line Tehran Bureau website.
And we're talking about Iranian politics and what it means for the nuclear deal, and apparently what it means is Ahmadinejad's willing to give away the store just so he can win at something as far as domestic politics.
Well, I mean, I don't know how far he's willing to go, but he recently said that if we exchange our low-enriched uranium with fuel for our reactor, then every problem should be solved.
If that's true, and if he's willing to do that, and if the agreement is reached about it, then, as you said, the breakout capability will disappear, because once the low-enriched uranium is shipped out of the country, they will be converted to fuel rods, and we will return to Iran, but those fuel rods can never be used in any, you know, making any nuclear weapons, and therefore the breakout capability will go away.
And yes, Ahmadinejad wants to reach some sort of compromise, because, you know, even in this country, in the United States, when a president is not doing very well domestically, he tries to score some sort of victory in the international arena in order to gain some credibility with the population, and in Ahmadinejad's case, the economy is in bad shape, the system is very repressive, and his re-election was heavily disputed, so he has tried to act independently.
He has done other things that have attracted a lot of attention within Iran and in the Iranian community.
For example, while the clerics have always talked about Islamic culture in Iran, he and his aides have started talking about Iranian culture and Iranian history, and he recently had this historical document that went back to 2,500 years ago and is kept in a museum in London, which is supposed to be the first declaration of human rights by Cyrus the Great, the great Iranian king of 2,500 years ago.
He loaned it from the museum in London and took it to Tehran and put it in an exhibition so that Iranian people can see it, and therefore he and his aides are trying to, you know, to provoke Iranian nationalism, and because he realizes that the Iranian people are not happy with what the clerics have done over the past three decades, so he's surely trying to take advantage of it, and by trying to take control of foreign policy, he's trying to reach some sort of compromise with the West so that it would lessen the pressure on Iran.
He also recognizes that re-establishing relationships with the United States is very popular with Iranian people, so that would also help him, and if the two go together and at least reduce the sanctions that have been imposed on Iran, that would also help, and today Russia actually said that the subject of reducing the sanctions that have been imposed on Iran can be a subject of negotiations in the upcoming negotiations in Istanbul, so these are all signs that Ahmadinejad actually wants to reach a compromise, to reach some sort of agreement, and also gain some credibility with some segments of the Iranian population.
Which brings us to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, because, of course, that's what they said is they want a deal, and Hillary Clinton, as you note in your piece, well, I saw her talk about the Bushehr reactor, and how, oh no, the Bushehr reactor?
Yeah, that's not a big deal, there's no weapons production there, we don't have a problem with their civilian nuclear program, it's just nuclear weapons they can't make, which I thought was, she was implying that enriching uranium at Natanz at all meant pursuing nuclear weapons or whatever to her, but then you note in your piece that in an interview with the BBC recently, she basically conceded the legitimacy of even enrichment at Natanz, but says, yeah, but it still has to be safeguarded, as though it's not safeguarded already, so it seems like, you know, I never know what's going on with her, but obviously there's a basis for compromise here, you know, ready and waiting, she's rhetorically backed off quite a bit from the initial stance, which is that any civilian nuclear program there is tantamount to a nuclear weapons program and must be given up.
She has backtracked, and one reason for it is that U.S. allies, such as Germany and France and Britain, have been quietly talking about the fact that Iran should be able to enrich uranium on its soil, provided that it is safeguarded and monitored by international inspectors, and as you said, everything that we know about Iran's nuclear program is already safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
We know that the IAEA inspectors are present in Natanz and take samples and measure everything, and they have cameras there and so on and so forth, and at the same time, despite the rhetoric that the United States has had over the past several years, that Iran's nuclear program is intended mostly for making nuclear weapons, there has never been any evidence of it.
They have never discovered the so-called smoking gun.
And just the other day, Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director general of IAEA, said that Iran's nuclear program has been greatly exaggerated and hyped up because, you know, it suits the interests of certain countries in the region, by which he meant Israel.
So there hasn't been any evidence.
At the same time, U.S. allies have been quietly talking about the possibility of allowing Iran or agreeing with Iran to enrich uranium on its soil, provided that it is safeguarded, which by which I and my understanding is that they want Iran to go back to implementing the additional protocol that Iran signed in October of 2003 and implemented on a volunteer basis until February of 2006.
I say volunteer basis because the additional protocol was never ratified by Iranian parliament, and, you know, according to international law, as long as an international agreement has not been ratified by parliament, that country has no obligation.
But because at that time the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, was in power and he wanted to create trust between Iran and the West, he agreed that Iran would implement the additional protocol.
And, in fact, it was Iran's implementation of additional protocol that allowed the IAEA to go into Iran and look at everything, and, in fact, because of that, the IAEA came back and said, we find no evidence that Iran has had any nuclear weapon program in the past.
And that, you know, that allowed the sort of artificial fear that had been created by certain circles in this country and other countries about the danger of Iran's nuclear program to be dissipated.
So now we know much more about Iran's nuclear program than at any time.
And, as I said, there has never been any shred of evidence that there is a nuclear weapon program in Iran.
I guess I can go ahead and mention one of them that I'd like you to address is the Stuxnet virus, which apparently, according to Broad and Sanger over at the New York Times, was invented by the Israelis and the Americans and caused, I guess I'll have you address, some degree of damage to the enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz facility.
And I guess I want to know more about that.
Well, the computer virus, apparently what it does is to give instruction to Iran's centrifuges in Natanz to spin at a much faster rate than they are supposed to.
These centrifuges in Iran, they spin about 60,000 rounds per minute, 330 meters per second, which is basically the speed of sound.
So they spin very fast.
But if they spin much faster than that, then they start to break up and disintegrate.
So what the virus has done, apparently, is to give instruction to these centrifuges, because the cascade of centrifuges, the collection clusters of these centrifuges, are all controlled by computers.
And this virus gave the instruction to these centrifuges to spin much faster and therefore to start breaking up.
At the same time, apparently, what the virus does is to pretend to the operator of these computers, create an environment that the operator thinks that everything is operating smoothly and according to the way they are supposed to.
In other words, the operator does not recognize for at least some time that these centrifuges are spinning much faster than they should, and therefore he cannot prevent them from doing so before he knows that they start disintegrating.
And that has damaged the operation in Iran.
It is estimated that up to 2,000 centrifuges have gone out of commission.
And if you remember that Iran has close to 7,000 centrifuges in Natanz, that represents 30% of the total number of centrifuges that Iran has in Natanz.
At the same time, the reports indicate that the virus has not been removed completely from the computer system that Iran has in Natanz, which means that the operation of the rest of the centrifuges has also been slowed down, which means that the production of low-energy uranium that Iran has had in Natanz has also slowed down.
So these are all due to viruses that, as David Sanger and William Broad and their co-authors pointed out in the New York Times article, was created by a worm, a computer worm, Stuxnet, that has apparently been created by the United States and Israel in a collaboration.
And I should point out that the idea for this type of operation is actually quite old.
Back in 2003-2004, for example, Patrick Clawson and Stuart Eisenstadt from the Washington Institute for Near East Research suggested exactly the same thing.
They suggested that the United States should do something to enter the computer system and create an industrial accident in Iran's nuclear facility in order to prevent them from operating.
Now, there is another aspect of this that hasn't been talked about so much, and that is the fact that the computer system at Bushehr reactor has also been apparently infected by Stuxnet.
Now, that is dangerous, because if the reactor was online and was operating, and the computer system was infected by Stuxnet, then the reactor could malfunction and create an industrial accident on the scale of Chernobyl that we had in the old Soviet Union in the mid-1980s.
So that is very dangerous, and in fact, that's the reason that the startup, full operation of Bushehr reactor, has been postponed in order to make sure that the computer system has been totally cleaned up and there is no worm in the computer system.
So, of course, another aspect to all of this is that this type of attack on the industrial operation of a country by this type of operation is, of course, illegal from the viewpoint of international laws and international relations, but that's the subject of another discussion.
Well, nobody cares about that, according to the entire empire, it's one big crime.
Yeah, so, well, that's very interesting, I guess, you know, the way Brod and Sanger put it in the piece is that, well, the Israelis were saying, hey, give us your newest, hopefully non-nuclear bunker buster bombs, so that we can take out Natanz, and the Americans said, no, how about we'll do it this way instead, and I guess no wonder Hillary Clinton's willing to say, no, they can spin centrifuges at Natanz if they want, if this really has been as successful as they say.
Yes, and there is another aspect of this story, and that is the fact that Meir Dagan, who was until recently the head of Israel's most intelligent agency, declared to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, that Iran is in no position to make a nuclear bomb before 2015.
That was the earliest time that he predicted Iran might be able to do it, even though there is no, I should emphasize that there is no evidence that Iran actually wants to do it, but he made that comment, and that angered a lot of right-wing politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, because they all want to create this impression that, you know, Iran's danger, any danger that Iran imposes is imminent, and Iran may break out at any minute and create or manufacture a nuclear warhead.
Well, political spin is really funny like that, because if Meir Dagan had said, they could have a nuclear bomb by 2015, then we're all supposed to be really alarmed and support a war or something, right?
But instead he says, don't worry, it won't be until at least 2015, and everybody gets mad at him for saying that.
Exactly, and in fact, in another piece that I published on antiwar.com a couple months ago, I gave the whole history of all of these dire predictions for how close Iran is to making a nuclear weapon.
In fact, I think I talked to you on your radio about it.
Israelis have been making these predictions since 1984.
Since 1984, they have been saying that Iran is only a year or two away from making a nuclear bomb.
And this is 2011, and there is still no evidence that Iran is any closer to making a nuclear bomb, if it wants to, than in 1984.
Yeah, in fact, I just interviewed a guy with this great blog that I had not seen before, now his name is Escape Moon.
Well, anyway, I'm sorry, go on.
Because he did a great piece like that too, just cataloging every assertion that they're about to have nukes from the early 80s on.
Yes, there was a great piece on, I believe what you're talking about, the piece on Salam.com.
No, this is Nima Shirazi.
Oh, Nima Shirazi, okay.
Yeah, whytosleepinamerica.com, and I interviewed him, and he absolutely had it right.
He did great.
Yeah, so the point I'm trying to make is that Israelis have been making these dire predictions about how close Iran is to making a nuclear weapon for the past 26, 27 years.
And there's still no evidence that Iran is any closer to making a nuclear weapon, even if it wants to, than it was in 1984.
So these are all, like you said, the political spin.
And as I said, what Dorgan said actually angered a lot of people.
And in fact, the other interesting thing is that what Dorgan said wasn't really reported widely and extensively in this country, given that, you know, the mainstream media in this country always talks about the danger of Iran's nuclear program and Iran's nuclear weapon program, which at least so far hasn't existed.
But then they don't reflect on the fact or they don't report on the fact that the very head of Mossad, which is the intelligence agency that has made those warns and has made all those propaganda about Iran and so on, in his farewell speech says, Iran is not close to making a nuclear weapon.
And the closest time that they can make it is 2015, which means four years, almost five years from now.
So, but that wasn't reported extensively here in this country.
Yeah, well, as an all propaganda, I was just resort to glittering generalities.
Nuclear is nuclear weapons program.
Simple as that.
And that's how they'll continue to do it.
But anyway, the antidote to that is that antiwar.com original.antiwar.com/Sahimi and at the frontline Tehran bureau site.
Thank you, Mohammed.
Thank you for having me in your program.
