04/21/11 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Alright, so, now to my main man, Gareth Porter.
This guy is an independent historian and journalist, and he's the author of the book, Perils of Dominance, about the Vietnam War and the strategery going on that got us into that madness.
And he's a reporter for Interpress Service.
That's IPSNews.net.
We run every bit of that at AntiWar.com/Porter.
It's actually original.
AntiWar.com/Porter, but it'll forward you on, so it's just fine.
Welcome to the show, Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm good, thanks, Scott.
Well, I really appreciate you joining me on the show today.
Some somewhat, I think, important news regarding Israel and Iran.
And this is going back a little bit, and then maybe we can bring it up to current context here.
But Haaretz.com is reporting that the WikiLeaks now are showing that Benjamin Netanyahu was urging Ehud Olmert to initiate an Israeli attack on Iran back in 2007.
And then this would coincide with Larissa's reporting at Raw Story when the State Department cables first broke about the cable from 2007, where Mayor Dagan, the head of the Mossad, was telling Nicholas Burns, the Undersecretary of State, that if you don't start the war, we will, and force you into it.
And so don't you want to just go ahead and start it yourself?
And so I was wondering if maybe you could give us some of the context there, and maybe tell us what this means for the fact that, you know, taking into account that Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Israel right now.
He doesn't have to urge anyone but his own self to start a war like this, it doesn't seem like to me.
Well, I think we've known for quite a while that Netanyahu is well to the right of the political, military, and intelligence establishments of Israel.
He is indeed an extremist on this issue, and that much has been clear.
And so it's not terribly surprising to find that he was urging Olmert to attack.
And I think this should be put in the context of what is now more clearly than ever before a deeply divided Israeli government and political elite on this issue.
There is no consensus on this question of, you know, obviously an aggressive military attack on Iran, which carries with it the most extreme kind of risk.
And for a payoff that I would have to say that most people in the intelligence establishment and a very large proportion of the military leadership of Israel has not at all been clear is worth it.
So, you know, I would simply emphasize that Netanyahu is, I think he represents a minority view within the Israeli government and political elite.
I'm not saying that it's an insignificant view, but I do think that it's important to recognize that there has been a lot of dissent from that extremist view.
And, you know, there have also been a number of interesting reports coming out from WikiLeaks, one of which was a 2005 report from a then Mossad official telling a U.S. diplomat that there's just no possibility of an attack on Iran.
It's been ruled out because it's simply not realistic.
That's kind of a surprise because WikiLeaks cables, as you well know, are not top secret.
They're very low secrecy rating.
And so to have a Mossad official talking to a diplomat and have that be in a WikiLeaks is a bit unusual.
But, you know, that's kind of out of context anyway because it sort of seems to me like all he was saying there was we're not going to just do it ourselves.
We need you to help us do it or we want to get you to do it for us.
Well, that, of course, I think is much closer to a consensus view that if the United States did it, a lot more of the elite then goes on board.
For Israel to do it by itself, I think that's very much a minority view.
I think that's correct.
Well, and, I mean, the fact of the matter is, isn't it, that if Israel were to launch some F-16s and just launch the very first salvos against, for example, the Natanz enrichment facility, something like that, that would immediately mean war between America and Iran in the Persian Gulf.
Well, it certainly would raise the likelihood of the United States becoming involved.
But, you know, I want to make the point here, which I'm sure I've made before, that this is not automatic.
And this allows me to mention something that I don't think that I have talked about if I haven't in a long time.
These war games that were highly publicized a year and a half or so ago by the New York Times and other newspapers, there was a war game sponsored by the Brookings Institution and one at Harvard University.
Particularly one at Brookings Institution was very, very interesting to me because it did assume that there was nothing the United States could do about an Israeli attack that A, wouldn't find out about it ahead of time and thus be able to intervene and say, no, you're not going to do that.
And B, even if the United States military or intelligence didn't find out ahead of time, that they would know before the attack reached, before the flight of F-16s reached their target, they would know well ahead of time and they'd be in a position to shoot down the Israeli war plane.
Now, you know, I think it's important to understand that there are a number of ways in which this, you know, an Israeli decision to attack could be stopped at various stages by the United States.
It would require specifically a decision by the White House to allow this to go forward once it had started because the U.S. Air Force would immediately warn the White House that there's an attack underway by airplanes that have not been given the friend or foe coordinates, code words, I should say.
And thus, according to the practice that has been in existence since 1991, the U.S. Air Force automatically shoots down those planes unless ordered otherwise by the White House.
So I just want to emphasize that, you know, the basic situation, basic reality is that not only is it not automatic that the U.S. would join the war against Iran, but there would have to be a very specific and obviously political decision made by the U.S. president not to prevent it, even though the interest of the United States clearly would be disturbed by an Israeli attack.
That is a standard position taken by both the Obama administration and the Bush administration.
Yeah, but, you know, the fact of the matter is at the same time, though, that Obama has done everything to make sure that diplomacy won't work.
You know, he comes out, he gives this big YouTube and says, oh, welcome, greetings to the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I want to work things out.
And then he does everything he can to not work things out.
They told him, we accept your offer.
And he told them, no, I refuse your acceptance of my offer.
Right.
I mean, this is a reflection of the irrationality of the policymaking process in Washington with regard to Iran.
I mean, Leverett and Mann say that this just means he's just paving the road, just like Bush, paving the road to war by saying, look, we try to deal with them and they can't be dealt with.
Like David Koresh, we have to burn them.
I would have a slightly more nuanced position here, that I don't think that it means that Obama has decided on war by any means, that he has decided that he will accept an Israeli attack by any means.
I think it means that he's unwilling to stand up publicly and say what I think he knows needs to be done, which is to accept in principle the Iranian right to enrich and say that we will reach an agreement on the basis of, you know, a new set of arrangements to monitor and have surveillance on the Iranian program.
An additional protocol, basically.
Well, it can be an additional protocol or it could be just an agreement outside the existing protocols.
Yeah, I mean, it would be.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
We got this heartbreak interrupted.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Gareth Porter from IPSnews.net after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
We're talking about the continuing threat of an Israeli-American-Iranian war, to whatever degree, percentage-wise, you want to put on it.
I don't know.
But, Gareth, any theory that has the American president allowing or ordering or refusing to unorder American planes to shoot down Israeli planes, to me, is far-fetched, especially when we're talking about Barack Obama.
I mean, Lyndon Johnson called the fighters back when they went to go defend the USS Liberty.
And here Barack Obama's done nothing but lay on his belly prone before Benjamin Netanyahu and takes everything Netanyahu dishes out and says nothing back.
And, hell, for that matter, announced before he ever became president that, you know, Jerusalem belongs to the Israelis and on and on.
I'll do whatever you say.
I'll nuke whoever you say.
So I don't know why to believe that if push came to shove, that Barack Obama wouldn't just back right down and let Netanyahu get us into a war.
Hell, he lets the rebels in Libya reject an East-East fire offer on his behalf.
Well, I'm certainly not going to defend the courage of Barack Obama with regard to Israel.
That's the last thing on earth I'm about to do.
No, I think the point, however, is that it is so well established in U.S. policy toward Israel over decades that the Israelis must get permission from the United States to do this.
That, you know, it is not by any means, my point is that it is not at all automatic that the president of the United States, even if his name happens to be Barack Obama, would allow this to go ahead without U.S. interference.
And let's just recall for a moment the very significant fact that it was under George W. Bush, who was, if anything, far more dramatically pro-Israeli than Barack Obama is, that the Israelis had to ask the Bush administration for precisely those funder focos, as well as other assistance, to be able to go ahead and attack Iran.
Well, I'm thinking they were a lot more worried about crossing him.
Pardon?
I'm thinking they were more worried about crossing Bush, because he'll do what he wants, whereas Obama will do what they want.
Well, I mean, you know, that's kind of putting it all on personality.
I'm not sure the Israelis, or any other government, are going to operate that way, that they're going to assume that because Barack Obama has shown himself to be pusillanimous in many ways, that they could count on him not taking any action.
And, you know, I think that the evidence, again, is to the contrary, that the Israelis take seriously the possibility that the United States is not going to go along with this, and that that is a deterrent.
It's a deterrent to the Israelis under this administration, as well as the Olmert administration.
All right.
Well, now, so let's go back to the – And, by the way, just one more point about this.
Going back to the war game that Kenneth Pollack mounted at the Brookings Institution, and that David Sanger covered copiously at the New York Times, it was clear to me that the reason that they left out all of the possible ways in which the United States could indeed interfere and stop such an attack was because of the interest of these people in Washington in legitimizing the idea of an Israeli attack, and suggesting, well, there's nothing to be done about it, let's just relax and get used to the idea that it's going to happen.
Right.
Well, and, you know, but here's the thing, too, okay?
Back to the premise of this entire thing.
It's the riddle of the Iranians ain't making nuclear weapons anyway, this is all nonsense, and what do the Israelis have to worry about other than their own propaganda?
Well, you're absolutely right.
I mean, this is the most outrageously irrational suggestion of an attack that I've ever heard of.
I mean, you know, there's absolutely no reason why the Israelis, if they have the slightest, you know, rationality surrounding them, would even think about this sort of an attack without any real evidence that Iran has decided to move to get a nuclear weapon or that they're anywhere close to doing so.
I mean, this is, you're absolutely right that this makes no sense whatsoever, and the fact that it is constantly being covered in the news media as though, you know, this somehow is a reasonable response to the objective situation is just, it's astounding.
Well, you know, I've read in the Israeli press, let's see, I think it was the politicians who said, now more than ever, because of the Arab Spring, we need to attack Iran.
For some reason, I'm not sure the non-sequitur there, but we're talking about the Israelis, so it doesn't really matter.
And then there was an opinion piece, I think, in Haaretz that said, now we can't because we don't have Egypt, you know, to count on on our southern flank.
Right.
I mean, one of the things, of course, that the Israelis have suggested in recent years through their usual sort of sly planting of stories in various news media in London and elsewhere is that the Saudis are actually secretly ready to collaborate with the Israelis in an attack on Iran.
And that, of course, that idea was fed further by the David Sanger stories in the New York Times a few months ago about how supposedly the Saudis were a gung-ho for an attack on Iran, whereas if you actually read the documents carefully, you know, what you find is that the evidence is very scant and very ambiguous on that score.
And I would just say that, again, Sanger plays the Israeli game.
I'm like, what can you say?
Well, for those people who are new and aren't familiar, David Sanger at the New York Times, he's their nuclear Iran guy, and he's a liar.
And the things that he says aren't true, and all you have to do is just look at even the open source material about whatever it is he's talking about, and it never says what he says it says.
Simple as that.
And he, of course, as I've said many times, is on a personal mission to force the Obama administration to go along with the kind of national intelligence estimate that he has demanded for the last three years, almost four years now, since late 2007.
Well, speaking of which, we're almost out of time here, but what gives with the new NIE?
It's late now, isn't it?
It has come out.
I mean, the NIE has come out.
The new one?
Yes, it did not get that much news media coverage, but there were stories in the Times and the Post.
When was that?
It would have been January of this year.
Oh, man, I'm the worst then.
No, no, you're not the worst.
I had no idea about that.
It did not make much of a splash.
Is there a declassified summary version or whatever?
No, no, nothing like that.
That's the main reason.
It has not made much of a splash because there was no publication of any summary at all.
And the news coverage suggested that the intelligence community basically punted on this and came out with a statement more or less saying that the Iranian leadership has not made up its mind.
It's debating whether or not to go for, you know, developing a nuclear weapon.
And so basically they did not, but certainly did not go along with David Sanger's demand that they completely renounce and recant on the 2007 estimate saying that Iran had given up working on nuclear weapons.
But, of course, they stopped short of anything clearly saying that Iran is not doing anything.
It was a politicized estimate in that regard.
So they maybe rhetorically were a little bit harsher than the 2007 one, but not factually.
Exactly.
All right, we've got to leave it there.
Thanks very much, everybody.
That's the great Gareth Porter, ipsnews.net, antiwar.com/Porter.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.