All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Gareth Porter.
Of course, he wrote Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare, and co-authored with John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer.
The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Nuclear Scare, or the Iran Crisis, whatever the hell.
Anyway, welcome back to the show, Gareth, how are you doing, man?
I'm fine, thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
Happy to have you here.
Also, did I mention, you write for thegrayzone.com, Max Blumenthal and the great guys over there, and then also here you are again at consortiumnews.com.
Oh, man, always with the bad news, you.
Jake exposes fissures in a reigning establishment and power shift to hardliners.
All right, go ahead, spill your guts.
Well, you're right, I'm always going to give you the bad news.
There's no point in my writing about good news.
It's not very interesting.
Tell you what, you keep me interested, no doubt about that.
Yeah, if there was only good news, I'm afraid I'd be out of a job.
This article is really about how the leak story, the story about the leaks of Foreign Minister of Iran, Mohammad Javad Zarif's interviews for a historical archive of some sort, were quite a big story for a while last month.
The revelations that Zarif made, which were leaked, were really quite important in the sense that they reveal the degree to which the Revolutionary Guards, the IRGC, Quds Force, and Qasem Soleimani, the now martyred U.S.-killed chief of that force in the region, how much power they had been able to accumulate because of the feats, of course, the daring of the Revolutionary Guard forces under Soleimani's command in particularly, you know, in Iraq, I would say, and also in Syria.
In both cases, these were extremely popular.
And so what happened was, and we'll come back to that if we have time, of course, but what happened was that the Revolutionary Guards and Soleimani increasingly were making foreign policy decisions of major importance for Iran.
And Zarif, understandably, was quite miffed about this.
He was quite upset because he was essentially being kept in the dark about important issues.
For example, you know, when Assad of Syria, President Assad of Syria, was visiting Tehran, certainly Zarif was never even told about it.
And that, of course, is extremely humiliating for a foreign minister.
And he actually publicly complained about that particular incident more than two years ago in 2019.
But there were other revelations here about how he was really not consulted about things that Soleimani was doing.
For example, Soleimani, after the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran, was actually completed and approved and everybody had agreed in the UN Security Council, Soleimani used the national airline of Iran to ferry military personnel into Syria and to deliver military goods to Syria.
And so he was taking advantage of a situation without the foreign ministry even knowing about it.
And of course, there are consequences that the foreign ministry needs to be aware of.
And of course, he was kept out of the issue.
So that was one case.
And there are other examples as well of how Soleimani was wheeling and dealing, understandably, because he was the person in charge of Iranian forces in two countries that are of extreme importance to Iran's national security, and of course, dealing with threats to Iran's national security, which were, again, very obvious and very extreme in both cases, in both Iran and Syria.
In the case of Iran, it was ISIS having, essentially in 2015, being able to capture a third of the country before there was any response at all.
And when the Iraqi National Army was called upon to do something about it, they completely failed.
And essentially, Soleimani had to step in and take command.
And they created a force of militias, of both Shiite and Sunni militias, it was mixed in terms of the religious character, and commanded this large coalition of these militias to actually effectively resist and turn back this offensive by ISIS.
And so it made Soleimani and Iran extremely popular in Iraq because of that basically saving the country from potentially being taken over by ISIS.
And then, of course, there was the problem of ISIS and al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda becoming even greater threat in Syria in 2015, when al-Qaeda was actually in a position to begin to threaten to capture the capital after having captured a provincial seat.
So in both cases, as I say, Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force were extremely popular, and this represented a major shift in politics in Iran.
And so my article really is about how the media have missed the significance of this in covering that.
And more generally, I would say that that has been a development that is of great importance for the future of Iran's role and policy in the region and the world.
And I think we've basically missed that story.
Yeah.
So now, when is the Iranian election again?
The election is on June 18th, my birthday, actually, so I'm not going to forget it easily.
Yeah, you know, I remember back in 2005, George W.
Bush gave a speech.
The election was in July that year.
And he said, you Iranians better not elect the right winger.
I'll tell you what.
And then so they made sure to, which I don't know if that was deliberate or not.
Maybe John Bolton said, that's what you ought to do, boss, or something.
I really don't know.
But that was how Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the president in the first place, which, of course, you know, from the American side, made negotiations with his government, or at least not that it was truly unacceptable to negotiate with him, but it became a great excuse to hide behind that this guy's such a maniac.
You're absolutely right about that.
It wasn't a good excuse to hide behind.
And they did it.
They did it very well.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah.
Well, so, I mean, I don't know.
They're working on trying to redo the deal now, seemingly, sort of.
Are they going to be able to get it done in time before the election?
And then do you think the election is just going to, assuming the next Ahmadinejad, if not him, I heard that he was running, I don't know.
But assuming the right, assuming the rightist wins over there, is that going to really undermine the deal?
Or you think maybe we can get it done under the line and it'll hold?
You know what?
I have taken the position in print in the past, in the past couple of months, that that this is not going to happen, that this is a dead duck as far as Iran's concerned.
But, of course, the present government under Hassan Rouhani, President Rouhani, would like very much to get a deal, although Rouhani himself cannot run because he's he's already had two terms.
But but they would like to have a deal very badly because they're afraid that it will, in fact, if there isn't a deal, it will help the very, you know, extreme conservative candidates to to have a very strong showing and to win the election.
Have you seen the polls?
I mean, is it close right now or do you know?
I have not seen a poll yet of exactly what's happening currently.
But if Rouhani has a chance, he's got to get this deal signed again before Election Day.
Right.
Well, I would say, look, the bottom line here, what I was going to conclude, certainly that's OK.
What I was going to conclude is that the chances of a extreme conservative winning the election are extremely high because of public opinion polling that has been done over the last year that shows that public opinion has shifted very strongly behind the the conservative position, the revolutionary guard position about the JCPOA, that they disapprove very strongly the position of Rouhani because they believe that essentially the JCPOA is not going to prevent the United States from doing whatever it's doing because that's what's happened.
They have no faith with that whatever in the United States.
And so public opinion has not really is not poised to wait for the result of this in the hope that the United States is going to actually save them.
I mean, of course, there are many in Iran who believe that.
But there's a there's apparently a much larger majority now, as much as two thirds of the public in opinion polling that's been done by the University of Maryland shows that that two thirds of the Iranian public does not does not support the JCPOA anymore, does not believe in any further negotiations with the United States.
I mean, these negotiations that Rouhani has undertaken are in the face of that very strong majority of Iranians who don't believe in that anymore.
So I think that, you know, it's it's a it's a very it's not a very good chance that this is going to help the the column, the pragmatists in holding off a challenge from the right wing, if you will, in Iran in this presidential election.
That would be very surprising to me.
So but then if they do get the deal signed and then the right winger wins.
Are they going to repudiate it on their own side or they'll go ahead and stick with it?
Well, I suppose that depends on what the United States is willing to give.
I personally, I mean, I'll be delighted if the Biden administration does make, you know, the concession that the Iranians are demanding.
And if they do that, it will be a surprise.
And, you know, that will that will help.
I mean, but I don't think that that's going to happen.
And of course, it hasn't happened yet.
We'll have to wait and see.
I mean, I'm a pessimist on this, I admit it, because this Biden administration has shown that is so committed to a pro-Israeli position.
I mean, it's as I tweeted the other day yesterday, I guess it was, you know, Trump may have been more pro-Israeli, but Biden has to be the second most pro-Israeli president we've ever had in this country.
Now, again, maybe maybe he has a surprise up his sleeve, but boy, it'll be a big surprise to me, I'll tell you.
Hey, I'll check it out.
The Libertarian Institute, that's me and my friends, have published three great books this year.
First is No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
He was the best one of us.
Now he's gone.
But this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom.
I know you'll love it.
Then there's Coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richman.
It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is The Great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show interviews 2004 through 2019.
Interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
Find them all at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
Hey, guys, here's how to support this show.
You can donate in various amounts at Scott Horton dot org slash donate.
We've got some great kickbacks for you there.
Shop Amazon dot com by way of my link at Scott Horton dot org.
Leave a good review for the show at iTunes and Stitcher.
Tell a friend.
Oh, yeah.
And buy my books.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan and the Great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show interviews 2004 through 2019.
And thanks.
And now, look, I mean, here's the whole thing.
This JCPOA thing is all stupid anyway, because we never need it anyway, because they're still members of the nonproliferation treaty, the NPT.
The NPT, that's what they're a part of.
And they still have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And they already poured concrete into the Bushehr reactor.
And they already have a fatwa, as you reported, from Tehran.
They have religious edicts from their supreme leaders, the old Ayatollah and the current one, who actually has been the Ayatollah since 89.
And that they say that we're not making nukes.
We can't make nukes.
And anybody in the country who would like to try is forbidden from doing so.
And so this is really a non-issue.
It's always been a non-issue.
It's just propaganda by the Israel lobby in the United States, essentially, that they like to pretend to believe Iran is going to make a nuke and attack them.
When, in fact, even Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak told Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic back 10 years ago or so that they're not afraid of an Iranian first strike.
They know Iran would never mess with them.
Well, yeah, and that's why it should never have been an issue under a government of the United States that had any contact with reality.
It should not have been an issue.
But the reality in this country is that for generations now, there has been a strong tendency, an overpowering tendency for the national security state to embrace those notions that are necessary to justify what they want to do.
And that, of course, is precisely why the idea that Iran wanted nuclear weapons was begun under the Clinton administration and has continued ever since in response to every event to build on that rather than to observe, you know, any reality that conflicts with with what you want to believe that that's in a nutshell the problem we're up against.
Yeah.
And that's why, you know, I mean, the Biden administration still believes in all that stuff because it's necessary.
It's one of the necessary beliefs that they cannot give up.
And that's why for them to to concede to to Iran's demand that they will stop, they will take back all of the sanctions against Iran completely that and the one that they were holding out on, you know, this is what I've said in the past, but it's now been confirmed, was the Trump sanction that was going to basically use a totally trumped up, so to speak, charge against the central bank of Iran that it was somehow, you know, involved in supporting terrorism because they decided in their wisdom to to call the revolutionary guards could force a terrorist organization.
That was that was exactly what the United States was refusing to give up, which Iran was demanding.
So and the and for Biden administration to give that up is a big deal.
Again, maybe they'll do it, but I'll be very surprised.
Yeah, I see what you mean that, you know, Trump climbed up the ladder so high binding and climbed down that far.
And then but it's not going to be enough.
Makes sense to me.
Then again, you know, I don't know.
It does also seem like there really is a political imperative to get the thing signed rather than just go through the motions.
Right.
But what if what if the the people, the intelligence people are telling them, you know, all polling, all the polling shows that the right wing is likely to win in any case.
And, you know, they're not going to be willing to sell out to their allies, sell out the interests of their allies, the Israelis under the circumstances.
But again, I mean, I just my main my main thought is that that they are so so convinced of their belief because it has been passed down from one administration to another and is believed by all of the agencies, including the intelligence agency, that that Iran wanted nuclear weapons, wants nuclear weapons, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, until the end of time.
That's that's why I suspect that it's it's not going to happen.
Yeah.
Although you're right that it's a minimum of intelligent thing to do under the circumstances.
Absolutely minimum.
You know, I really need to get Mohammed Sahimi on and see if he can talk about all the different candidates and who they are, because you could have a guy who's a pretty hard line right winger, but is also not kind of bloviating dumbass the way Ahmadinejad was.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah, you could you could have one.
You could have one who is not who is not devoted to the Revolutionary Guard position on the JCPOA.
And by the way, another part of my article, which we haven't talked about, which is worth just a very brief mention here, is that that the JCPOA have not come out saying that Iran should have nuclear weapons.
They can't say that that's that's a violation of the fatwa and they would be attacked by the Supreme Leader and they cannot do that.
But they can make it clear that they disapprove of negotiating with the United States.
And and there is a history, as I write in my piece, of the Revolutionary Guard having a position that is urging the Supreme Leader to to have nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction during the Iran-Iraq war.
And then after that, in the 19 the late 1970s, I'm sorry, late 1980s and early 1990s, to to urge the Supreme Leader to reconsider and, you know, at least have preparations for knowing how to do to work on a bomb.
Just just having the knowledge of how to do it, not to actually produce a bomb by any means.
Right.
But to have the knowledge.
And the Supreme Leader said absolutely not to that in in 2003.
So we have that in the background of this, a suggestion that the Revolutionary Guards, generally speaking, have been much more in favor of keeping the option open of nuclear weapons.
And so how that plays out, possible possibility that if a conservative wins, the they could certainly threaten more seriously to leave the NPT.
That's been talked about in the past.
That would become much more of a serious option, I would guess, under those circumstances.
You know what?
I kind of can't wait to hear the American media say they're threatening to leave the NPT, you know, to report that to us.
The NPT, what's that?
You know, what difference would that make?
Oh, you're saying they forswore nuclear weapons 50 years ago.
Oh, I understand now.
You guys have been lying for the last 30.
Oh, OK.
Now it's all clear.
Yeah, well, they always have their out.
They always have their excuse.
And one can always safely assume that they will they will have within minutes they will be armed with an excuse for how they got that wrong.
Well, you know, here's another talking point from them coming soon.
The Ayatollah is dead, right?
Like, isn't he 82 or something?
I mean, people live to their 90s.
I don't know.
He might be fine.
But I remember hearing a few years ago he had cancer.
And seems pretty healthy for an Ayatollah, I don't know.
I think that was a bit over that was a bit overstressed, perhaps.
Well, you know, colon cancer can be a very slow growing cancer for a lot of people.
So thank goodness for everybody that I like that hasn't.
But I mean, that is a danger, right, is that the next Ayatollah might have something to prove, might come directly from the IRGC.
I don't know how it works, but that's a theoretical possibility.
But the reality is that the Shiite clergy in Iran are very strongly unified behind this position that weapons of mass destruction are illicit under Islam.
And so I'm really I don't think that that is very likely that a future supreme leader of Iran, assuming that this system continues with a supreme leader for the foreseeable future, that that that person is very likely to have a different position.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Very, very unlikely.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I mean, the reality is, as we've discussed for years now, Garrett, that they don't need a nuclear deterrent.
They have a conventional deterrent that's been enough to deter George W.
Bush and Dick Cheney.
Well, maybe not Cheney, but it deterred W.
Bush.
Cheney wanted strikes and the military told Bush to tell Cheney no.
Right.
That's right.
And I do think that that is a point that is well worth repeating and emphasizing because it is so dismissed by the national security state and its supporters in this country.
They simply refuse to focus on it or to to accept it.
But the fact is that it has been effective.
And, you know, who has been the person more than anybody else in Iran who has made that argument for many, many years?
Javad Zarif.
He has been the main theorist, the foreign minister, arguing from the beginning that Iran did not need nuclear weapons.
And here's why.
We can deter.
Hey, look, I got the quotes in my book and they're out of date in terms of overall troop numbers, but still relevant where back in 2007, Muqtada al-Sadr made it clear that if America went to war with Iran, that his group would go to war with the United States in Iraq.
And that, in fact, Abdulaziz al-Hakim, the leader who's now dead, but he was then the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Skiri, and then also de facto then leader of their border brigade militia, was asked what he would do.
And he said, we would do our duty.
And that means that for people who've seen Star Wars 3, it'd be like Order 66, where our guys are embedded with the Shiite Iraqi army that would immediately execute them all and they would not stand a chance.
I guess they'd have to hightail it to Kurdistan, but they would pretty much be screwed because it would be America switching sides in the Iraq war.
And never mind all our assets up and down the western side of the Persian Gulf there in Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and UAE, right?
And Afghanistan, for that matter.
We still got guys in Afghanistan, Gareth.
Well, we do, but they're getting out.
The point being that U.S. occupation of other countries, you know, in a Shiite, predominant Shiite country, is an asset for Iran to deter the United States.
There's no question about it, has been from the beginning.
Yeah.
You know what?
We have no time, but say one more thing about we really are leaving Afghanistan.
Well, I, you know, the.
Except for the CIA.
Yeah, I mean, the CIA, there was just a statement by the head of SOCOM, the Special Operations Command, saying CIA was, you know, well, say he said special operations were first in, first out, along with CIA.
And, you know, obviously there's going to be some stay behinds, but their main their main forces, you know, all of the obvious people are special forces are going to be leaving.
There's no doubt about that.
Yeah.
It looks like they're giving up the Bagram Air Base.
I can hardly believe it.
But I saw where they're just turning over all their bookshelves and everyone is everyone, including me, is very surprised that it's gone this far.
But but let's face it, you you face some pretty steep obstacles in keeping your personnel that are not absolute secret in in Afghanistan circumstances, extremely vulnerable.
Yeah, that's right.
In other words, they really break the deal.
They're going to need a lot more men for force protection.
So it's one or the other.
Right.
Yep.
Yep.
OK, hit it or get off the pot.
You see what I did there?
OK, that's about it.
Yeah.
Hey, thanks very much, Gareth.
You're the very best.
You're the reason my show is so damn good.
Thank you so much, Scott.
My appreciate it.
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.
