For Pacifica Radio, December the 26th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, Merry, yesterday was Christmas.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the new audio book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,650 something interviews now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
And, uh, and as I said on the show a few weeks ago, I'm proudly celebrating 11 years here on the radio at KPFK.
And, uh, so happy to bring back to the air, my friend and my very favorite reporter, the great Gareth Porter.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks so much.
And, uh, and happy, uh, Christmas, new year, uh, greetings.
And I celebrate your, uh, 11 years on the radio as well.
Yeah, I love radio.
I'll tell you that.
All right.
So listen, Gareth.
I wanted to talk about Biden's first year in power here.
There's so much to talk to in so little time, but obviously your speciality is Iran and Biden's positioning on Iran, uh, has been so important.
Of course, the background being that Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015, uh, to expand inspections and restrict Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, which they never really got.
And then of course, Donald Trump famously in 2018 at Israeli behest withdrew America from the deal.
And the question was, will Biden's people get us back in the deal?
And on one hand, you have the fact that Biden's people are Obama's people who signed the deal in the first place.
You'd think they'd want to vindicate their own effort previously, but as we discussed before Biden was even sworn in, Jake Sullivan and others on Biden's staff were talking about, well, the Iranians are going to have to agree to discuss these other additional measures and all these other things.
And so now here we are almost a year later and we've made essentially no progress, but the talks are ongoing.
So that's where I'll leave it for you to pick up where you think we are with the possible revival or not of Obama's Iran deal and the consequences for our future here.
Well, you're, you're absolutely right to sort of begin the discussion with the point that the present administration inherited a situation where they clearly could have easily made a deal to restore the JCPOA and then try to use, you know, some new, uh, new credit with Iran to negotiate on a range of issues, really not just on the nuclear deal itself.
Uh, I mean, clearly they wanted to extend it further and, and they wanted other changes or they wanted other things that they couldn't get from the existing deal.
But having signed it clearly, you know, the idea of, of forcing, trying to force Iran to agree, uh, to bow down and say, okay, we'll agree that even though you're responsible, the United States is responsible for having the breakdown of this agreement completely, you, you have all the responsibility, we'll bear the cost and start all over again and, and go back and withdraw all of our actions, which were taken, uh, reverse the actions that were taken in response to American violations of the JCPOA.
Uh, obviously the, the Iranians were not going to do that.
That was silly to expect that they could get away with that.
It's hard to believe that they thought they could.
Um, and yet, um, you know, they passed up for, uh, many months, uh, every opportunity to reach agreement with Iran.
And so it's clear that they, uh, that they were not willing to do it.
Now, I think there are two sides to this story.
One is that this is part of a broader history of the American negotiators with Iran on the Iran deal on, on the nuclear deal, uh, basically feeling that somehow they could get away with, uh, uh, twisting the arms of the Iranians to make further concessions.
There, there is a whole history of that, um, that goes back to the time when the JCPOA itself was being negotiated.
But even after the signing, there was, uh, obviously a period of many months where the Obama administration was hoping that they could use their economic, uh, leverage with the Iranians to get more out of, of Iran.
And so in a way, I think, you know, the, uh, Biden administration is inheriting that tendency toward, uh, trying to exploit what they regarded as their economic leverage on Iran.
And as time went by and as the Iranian economy, uh, became more, uh, you know, the situation became more difficult in the Iranian economy.
That tendency, I think, was, uh, was exacerbated.
But the second side of that picture, I think, also needs to be understood.
And that is that the Biden administration has an additional factor here that was not present in the Obama administration.
And that is that they were ready, uh, to lean far more toward the Israeli interests on this question of Iran and the nuclear deal than the Obama administration ever was.
Um, frankly, I mean, you know, they are much more influenced by Zionist thinking than certainly the Obama administration was, um, and from the very top of this administration.
Um, you know, this is a, uh, unfortunately, uh, an administration that is, that, that tends toward, um, sort of very close knit relations with the Israelis and, um, being influenced much more by them than, than Obama was.
So I think that the combination of those two things helps to, um, explain why they let this, uh, opportunity fritter away.
And now, of course, Iran has a new government having had a major, uh, election of the Majlis and producing a new government, which is, uh, uh, much more tough on, on negotiating with the United States than the previous government ever was.
I mean, this is, this is something, by the way, as you probably remember, that I predicted was going to happen because of, of the policy, the hardline policy that the Biden administration was pursuing.
Um, it was quite predictable that, that this would happen because public opinion in Iran was systematically shifting away from support for the JCPOA over the months of seeing the United States refuse to make any concession, uh, refuse to, uh, effectively bring back the JCPOA.
And, uh, and they began to say, okay, we're finished with JCPOA.
We want a government that's going to be much tougher on the United States.
And that's exactly what's happened now.
So I don't think that there's much, um, chance that, uh, that this situation can be reversed, even though the negotiations go on.
Um, I'm very doubtful as, as you know, I've been doubtful for many months that anything's going to come out of this because of the politics surrounding them on both sides, essentially.
Yeah.
All right.
Now here's the thing of it.
There's a guy you're familiar with, the arms control wonk.
And I've always been a Gordon Prather guy myself, but I saw where he said something.
I kind of liked it.
He said the American foreign policy establishment, they don't seem to believe there's such a thing as consequences, but there is.
And in this case, you should have listened to me and my buddies who told you not to withdraw from the deal, that this is going to be a bad thing.
And then we also told you, I think this was part of his tweet thread here was to not add all these conditions and make it impossible to get back into the deal.
Now that it's essentially too late, he's calling it quits on the talks and saying it's definitely not going to happen.
And he says, and then Iran is going to make a nuclear weapon.
And then he says, he doesn't say we should invade them or anything.
He just says, that's life.
Those are the consequences from you guys being so pigheaded and doing this.
And my thing is, I really don't think the Ayatollah wants an atom bomb.
I think he thinks that they're more trouble than they're worth.
And I've always said that, you know what, if the JCPOA falls apart, I don't care because Iran is still within, they still have the nonproliferation treaty.
They've never really betrayed any intent to violate it, as far as I can tell.
All the hype to the contrary, notwithstanding, which is a lot.
And, you know, I don't know.
But then I've been cautioned by quite a few people who are, you know, a lot wiser even than Jeffrey Lewis, who say that, listen, the Ayatollah, at some point you push him too far, he is going to withdraw not just from the JCPOA, but he's going to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty of 1967, too, or 68 and well, and make a nuke and then we're going to have a war.
So what do you think about that?
As you know, I think better than anyone else that I've spoken with about this, I have documented the fact that not having a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program is absolutely essential to the self-regard of the Ayatollah's regime.
That is to say, this is at the center of their belief system that Shia Islam is different from any other religion because the absolute word of the interpreter of Shia religion, of what it means, must make decisions about how Shia principles relate to actual political decision making.
And that is what is unique about the Iranian political system, that you have this figure, the supreme leader, since the beginning of the Iranian government, has in fact, been the one who has made decisions about what Shia Islam demands in terms of governing principles and policies.
And from the very beginning of that regime, the principal spokesman for Shia Islam has been saying that Shia Iran, Islamic Iran, cannot have weapons of mass destruction.
It's not just nuclear weapons, but chemical weapons.
And biological weapons are strictly forbidden by Islam.
And listen, I'll encourage everybody listening to please go to foreignpolicy.com if you have to lift the URL and put it in archive.is to get around the paywall.
But read that great article.
It's called When the Ayatollah Said No to Nukes.
And it's based on Gareth's great reporting from inside Iran on this.
But so here's the thing, though.
Saddam Hussein is one thing and the USA is something else.
And if you're the Ayatollah and the Israelis and the Americans especially are that unreasonable and are threatening aggressive war in a way that's a credible threat.
I mean, Saddam Hussein could never get more than a few miles inside Iranian territory, right?
Your lobster missile.
Well, America could devastate Iran.
So maybe they need an atom bomb.
And maybe that's an inescapable conclusion that the Americans are putting the Ayatollah in the position of coming to.
Well, two points about that.
One is that it's not quite true to say that Saddam Hussein could never get beyond a few miles into Iran with with the use of chemical weapons.
The fact is that he was dropping them on Iranian cities at one point later in the war.
I mean, earlier in the war, it's true what you're saying.
But later in the war, he was, in fact, using chemical weapons on Iranian cities and with devastating consequences, human consequences for the Iranian populations in those cities.
And so that's the first point.
The second point is that I would not deny that there are people in the Iranian government and military who would be perfectly willing to overthrow the past precedents that I've been talking about, that the supreme leader has cited over and over again, that that say that that Islamic Iran may not possess weapons of mass destruction for for them.
There can be overriding circumstances.
And indeed, as I point out in that article that you referred to, based on the wartime, meaning the Iran-Iraq war time, minister of SEPA, meaning minister of military supply.
He told me personally from based on his meeting with the Ayatollah in the Iran-Iraq war early in the 1980s and again in the late 1980s, he told me that that he was informed that that there could not be a weapon of mass destruction produced, even though at that point the Saddam Hussein regime was dropping chemical weapons on the cities of of Iran.
Right.
So this this guy was was extremely surprised because he's the mean old Ayatollah to that's not the new, more moderate guy that was Khomeini.
He was he was a hard liner in many ways.
That's true.
But but in any case, the basic principles were the basic principle is exactly the same.
And look, I'm just testing you anyway.
I think, of course, you're absolutely right about this.
And the fact that the Israelis and their American partisans have been crying for something on the order of 25 to 30 years, I think the first instance of Netanyahu saying Iran is making a nuke that Nima Shirazi from the blog Why to Sleep in America has of Netanyahu claiming that Iran is making nukes is in 1991.
So 30 years ago.
And certainly they really started pushing that line by 95.
And it's never been true this whole time.
Even when America had, you know, 200000 men in Iraq next door.
And, you know, in 2007, when Bush was credibly threatening war, they've made it clear that they don't want nukes.
So anyway, I don't want to get too far off onto that red herring.
I just want to give you a chance to demonstrate that this just still is a bunch of hype.
It always has been.
One more point along the same lines, which I've often thought about, but really haven't written about in the past, is that given the amount of time that's passed, obviously Iran could have made a nuclear weapon at any time over the last 10, 15, 20 years.
I mean, there is no other state.
Historically, that has desired nuclear weapons, that was not able to go into a serious program to manufacture or to to design nuclear weapons within a matter of a few years.
And of course, in every case, the United States was able to find out about it very quickly.
So, I mean, this is all by way of saying that the whole idea that Iran has wanted to have nuclear weapons, let alone has decided to go ahead with some secret nuclear weapons program is simply ridiculous on the face of it.
It just doesn't add up.
It does.
It's not consistent with everything we know about the history.
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I mean, the problem is right that with the narrative is that Obama didn't really need to do this JCPOA at all.
He could have just pounded the table and said they're within the nonproliferation treaty.
So all your hype is just hype.
And that's how we know they have a safeguards agreement.
And that's good enough.
In fact, all we really achieved here with, you know, you can embellish a little.
But essentially, all we did was get an additional protocol to our safeguards agreement is all the JCPOA accomplished.
All this hype to to reassure us about a civilian nuclear program that always was one.
And so now if we lose the JCPOA, we go back to the narrative that they might make nukes, even though they're still in the deal.
It was just the MPT.
It's just they always pretended before the JCPOA.
They just ignored that.
They just acted as though Iran was not a member of the MPT or that IAEA inspections verifying the non-diversion of their nuclear material were just unimportant or didn't really exist.
They were never part of the narrative that, OK, well, we know it's OK for now.
But or anything, you know, you're forgetting one thing.
You're forgetting one thing, Scott.
You're saying that that the Obama administration didn't gain anything from their from their policy.
But but in fact, what what they were really after, all these officials in the Pentagon, in the State Department, in the CIA.
Did I miss anybody in the national security state?
They all got nice recognition for their work in tracking down and posing the Iranian supposedly Iranian interest in nuclear weapons.
Right.
And all they had to do was launch a genocide against the people of Yemen to bribe the Saudis into not crying too much about it.
Yeah, so so my point here is that that the real goodies for the U.S. administration, whether it's Obama or previous or present ones, are really bureaucratic goodies.
They did get them.
And of course, the other side of this that we haven't talked about is what has the United States really lost?
What they've really lost is that Iran has joined the Chinese and indeed the Russians.
And there's there's a there's a real alignment here that didn't exist before.
I mean, Iran never got along with the Russians at all and was very cool toward the Chinese.
But now they're part of that bloc, in effect.
Yep.
And so this is what the Israelis have gained is they have prevented America from bringing Iran into America's order in the Middle East.
Let them go east.
Just don't let America make friends with them at all costs.
Right.
That's that's about the size of it.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, let's talk about Afghanistan.
Let's talk a bit about how Joe Biden did, after kicking the can down the road a few months, did live up to the Donald Trump, Zalmay Khalilzad deal with the Taliban to withdraw.
I never thought I'd see the day they hand that Bagram airbase over to anybody.
Only problem is they handed over to the Afghan National Army who had handed it over to the Taliban within about, what, four weeks?
So, yeah, the whole thing looked really bad for withdrawal, Gareth, but I keep objecting that.
What was it supposed to look like?
What do you think?
That that is indeed a very interesting question.
I mean, what they expected to be able to accomplish.
I you know, I think the easy answer to that one is that that these people didn't give a serious thought to that question at all.
I mean, it wasn't in their minds.
OK, how would this really work out?
It was simply that this was an expression of existential angst and sort of worry that that the people who are so firmly fixed to dedicated to the well-being of the national security state of the United States just had to express themselves.
I mean, that's the way I interpret it.
I can't make any sense out of it otherwise.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I appreciate your focus on that, that a lot of this does have to do.
And if you turn on the TV during that time, there's H.R. McMaster just pounding the table and saying, no, we got to stay.
We got to stay.
It's like, come on.
How transparent is that?
He helped lose that war.
He was in charge of abolishing corruption under the McChrystal-Petraeus surge.
Well, how did he do it?
That, you know, the president fled with a couple of hundred million stolen dollars when he ran away.
Right.
You know, this was the government that McChrystal, I mean, that McMaster demanded that we stay to prop up and said that this is that withdrawal is equivalent to turning Europe over to Hitler.
Right.
But it's but it's also, of course, The Washington Post, New York Times, you know, and the usual suspects who rallied to support the or not not so much to support, but to criticize Biden and his administration for having not done the right thing to not end the war in the right way.
And so it's really kind of the mainstream media who I'm I'm really directing my comments toward who who showed, you know, where their loyalties really lay.
Right.
And listen, I think it's really important to point out, too, that as predicted, it was obvious, right, that once this project ended, that this country will be facing a great depression, that essentially we've had a giant economic bubble propped up by this massive infusion of American taxpayer and inflated dollars and and the power of certain factions propped up by the American military and CIA in that country and that and including certain businesses, important ones.
And that once all that is withdrawn, well, what do you think's going to happen?
Right.
They've they face a total economic calamity where all of their prices have to be readjusted severely downward and people are sure to go hungry.
I mean, I mean, just from the chaos.
And plus, they were dependent on foreign food aid, you know, to a great degree anyway.
And all the same people who said we have to keep killing these Afghans for 20 years because we love them so much and we're here to care for them and protect them all.
Now, they don't give a damn, Gareth, about the people of Afghanistan, women and children, little girls even going hungry.
You know, their favorite little pretended idols.
They don't care one whit about that.
Now they're on off on some other topic.
You know, we should never again hear the idea that the United States stands for humanitarianism somehow in the world.
Never again.
I don't want to ever hear that idea put forward by anybody in the media or or politics.
It's it's it's it's a it's a total lie.
And it makes one really feel ashamed to be an American.
That's all I can say.
Well, but to be specific here, the American government is withholding all of the sovereign Afghan government's funds because, oh, it's the bad guy Taliban.
That was the premise, right?
That was the premise of my statement.
I mean, sure.
Yeah, I didn't set that up.
I didn't set that up perfectly there.
But that's that's the point is that not only have we withdrawn all that aid, but we won't even give them their own money.
We got new sanctions on them and all of these things, which is just it's the worst kind of sore loser ism with, of course, you know, the most helpless people on the receiving end of, you know, the brunt force of it.
But it's unimaginably evil is all I can say.
I can't say anything more about about what happened in Afghanistan.
Yeah, I guess it sounds corny.
Some people get mad at me when I say this, but I think about how, you know, in the future, somebody is going to write the history of this.
And that this is what we do, like the genocide in Yemen.
That, you know, we've continued to inflict on these people for seven years, and Biden said he was going to end it and he hasn't.
He's continued to give full support to the Saudis this whole time and including, most importantly, protection and all the international institutions and so forth.
And and including, you know, putting our Navy at their service, you know, this whole time.
You've reminded me that that it seems to me that this ending that we're talking about here of of the United States having enunciated these human humanitarian concerns about Afghanistan for so long and then suddenly just throwing them overboard without a thought.
This is a trope that it seems to me was set up by essentially 20 years or so, two decades of U.S. warfare in which the the American people and their elected officials were unwilling to express or to to act on any real humanitarian impulses with regard to those wars.
There was never any discussion, serious discussion in the political system of the human cost of of America's wars on on on Iraqis or on Afghans.
This is just the way we've been become accustomed to operating, I'm afraid.
Yeah, it really is sick.
And and by the way, just here to wrap up the very last point I'll throw in, people really should look at The New York Times again.
If you need to get around the paywall, just dump the URL in archive.is and you can read The New York Times news series on the army papers, the investigation papers that they got their hands on about civilian deaths in Iraq war three.
That is the anti-ISIS war 2014 through 17, 18, and including, of course, in eastern Syria there.
And it's just one small taste of this.
And we're supposed to just not think about it and move on.
I don't know, but I can't see how they'll ever get over it.
These officials, these officials who are responsible for this have never been held accountable, really, in any serious manner.
And so therefore, they just continue to basically just avoid having to take responsibility and and they go on their merry way.
And that's that's the situation that we continue to face for the foreseeable future.
Nothing.
Nothing's changing.
Yeah, great.
So, all right.
Well, listen, since January of 2007, I have relied so heavily on you and all of your great journalism, Gareth, and all of your insight into Iraq war two and Afghanistan and, of course, Syria and your great debunking Russiagate all along, of course, and just every last thing.
You're so good and wrote the book Manufactured Crisis on Iran's nuclear program and the rest.
And so I can't tell you.
Well, and I should say, I think, you know, I've interviewed Gareth, everybody, more than 300 times, far more than any other guest over the years and for very good reason, as you can hear, because you're the best.
So thank you.
Merry Christmas, my friend.
I'm always going to be grateful for your interest in my work and your support.
That's that's been really important for me.
Thanks.
Right on.
OK, everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter.
You can find his archives of everything he writes.
He's right now at the Gray Zone, but we also keep all of his archives at Antiwar dot com as well.
And that is Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Find my full interview archive at Scott Horton dot org, more than five thousand six hundred of them now.
You find them all also at YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
