All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
And our first guest today is Mohammed Saheimi.
Very happy to welcome him back to the show.
Of course, you know, Mohammed, he's a professor of chemical engineering at USC in LA, and he also writes for Frontline's Tehran Bureau website at pbs.org.
He's got an archive at antiwar.com and we're featuring this Frontline Tehran Bureau piece, the IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program, alarming or hyped today at antiwar.com in the viewpoint section as well.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammed.
How are you doing?
I'm not too bad.
It's good talking to you again, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here, Mohammed.
I always can rely on you for great analysis.
And of course, no surprise that this piece at the Frontline pbs.org website is along those very same lines.
You've gone through the new International Atomic Energy Agency report and the quote-unquote new accusations against Iran, if they can be called that, and clearly, as you say in the article, we had two weeks worth of hype about how this was going to be a groundbreaking thing, proving the Iranians were making nuclear weapons, etc, etc.
And it seems pretty much to have been taken at face value like that, even after the thing came out.
But I really like how you went through piece by piece accusation by accusation and saying, all right, how does this measure up?
So I guess let's get to it.
I guess most important, as you say at the beginning, is the prominence of much of these allegations.
Am I right?
You're saying seem to come from the same old quote-unquote smoking laptop, the forged alleged studies documents?
Exactly.
In fact, when the laptop story came out several years ago, Ali Heinonen, who was at that time Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency for Safeguard, gave a presentation to the Board of Governors of the agency just two days after the agency had announced that all the disputing issues between Iran and the agency had been resolved.
During that presentation, Heinonen made references to several projects that were supposedly going on in Iran or had been going on in Iran.
One of them was called Project 5, which was about these green salt projects.
Two projects, Project 110 and Project 111, were about missiles and reentry vehicles, and then a fourth one about explosives.
And then if you look at the IAEA latest report that was published a couple days ago, it talks about exactly the same projects with exactly the same name in Attachment 1 center table.
So the allegations are not new at all.
These are basically a rehash of what Heinonen had presented to the Board of Governors back in 2008.
And I must also point out the fact that the laptop story had actually been around since 2004, when it was first reported that a laptop had supposedly been stolen from Iran and taken to Turkey and given to Western intelligence, but it was never actually brought up to the Board of Governors.
It was brought up to the Board of Governors in February of 2008, right after the agency announced that it had resolved all the outstanding issues between Iran and the agency.
So as a sort of, as a way of continuing the dispute with Iran and not making Iran's dossier with the Board of Governors a normal one, for which the agency does not have to convene the Board of Governors meeting on an emergency basis, Ali Heinonen brought them up and then talked about them.
And then since that, the dispute between Iran and IAEA have all been based, has all been based on this laptop, laptop and what it contains.
And a lot of people, including a great article by Garrett Porter, another article by myself that I published in Antiwar.com, and others actually basically demolished the basis for the laptop story.
Absolutely.
Well, now hold it right there for a second.
And I want to let the audience know that this is a subject we've covered many times on the show and especially with Gareth and gone through piece by piece why it is that he's so sure it's a forgery.
And most of it has to do with all the accusations and it seemed like great educated guesses for framing up the Iranians, but none of it is really damning and none of it is really conclusive at all.
And of course at one point, I think the government even admitted that, well, it was a CIA laptop.
There never really was a laptop.
It's our laptop and we assembled the documents on it and etc like that, undercutting the entire theory that there had been a stolen laptop smuggled out of Iran somehow, etc.
But now what I wanted to get to here, Mohammad, was that there was one slight loophole in what you said, at least in the way you said it.
You said this is basically the same old stuff from the smoking laptop and the bogus laptop, which would include delivery vehicle studies, tetrafluoride, uranium tetrafluoride, green salt experiments and this and that and the other thing.
But what's new in this report that we haven't heard before or at least is not from the smoking laptop, which has been so thoroughly debunked lo these many years?
Well, there are a couple of new elements.
One is a reference that the IAEA makes to a steel container that is supposedly built in Parchin.
Parchin is a plant southeast of Tehran that Iran has used since 1950s to produce conventional ammunition.
And in 2005-2006, the IAEA pressed Iran to allow to go there and check this site because they had suspected that Iran was experimenting with high explosives.
After some time Iran agreed for IAEA to visit it, even though Iran was not supposed to do it.
Iran didn't have any obligation to do it because Parchin is a conventional ammunition plant and therefore is not covered by any agreement, safeguard agreements, regarding Iran's nuclear program.
Ali Hinoon and other people actually visited there, not Hinoon himself, but his people, and they didn't find anything.
So after that, the Parchin issue was removed from any discussion until the latest report that just came out.
Now, IAEA alleges that it still believes that Iran has experimented with some high explosives and in order to do that, in order to do the high explosive experiment and contain the explosion, it has built a steel container, which is somewhere in Parchin.
But it doesn't give any evidence.
It doesn't say where the steel container may be.
It just alleges that there is some steel container to do experiments with high explosives and to contain it.
The container is somewhere there.
So this is one new element.
The other new element was that it said that a scientist from a foreign country, that we now know he's from Russia, has helped Iran with its nuclear program.
This has never been talked about.
And in this new report, the IAEA makes a reference to it.
Now, as it turns out, that Garrett Porter reported yesterday that, and I just saw a dispatch by Reuters from Moscow, that the guy is not actually a nuclear physicist or nuclear engineer.
The guy is an expert on making nanodiamonds, which are used in medicine and other applications.
He has not denied that he has been in Iran.
He has worked in Iran.
And I must say, for those listeners that don't know, Iran actually has a very good research program on nanotechnology that is recognized even internationally.
And the Russian scientists had worked with Iran on producing nanodiamonds and had never worked on nuclear weapons or nuclear weapon related research.
That was apparently what was conveyed to the media or the intelligence community a week ago by David Albright of the Institute for Science and National Security.
But now there are very credible reports, in fact, a dispatch from Moscow that says that the guy is not even a nuclear physicist or nuclear weapon expert and has never done anything.
And he himself has actually denied that he has done anything for Iran's nuclear program.
Right.
All right.
Now, hold it right there, Mohamed.
We got to go out and take this break.
It's Mohamed Sahimi, PBS Frontline, Antiwar.com.
He's referring to the debunking of the bogus lies about the Iranians' nuclear program.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Mohamed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC and a commentator on American-Iranian affairs at the PBS Frontline Tehran Bureau website, pbs.org and also at Antiwar.com.
You can find his most recent PBS article today there at Antiwar.com.
And now, so we got to review a couple of things here.
First of all, I was reminded recently how teeny-tiny the brains of the, not just the War Party, but the people who believe what the War Party say are and how they think.
And so I'm not going to waste Mohamed's time answering this, but I'm going to go ahead and assert, because I already know that Mohamed does not favor the Iranian regime.
He's pro-democracy and pro-reform and pro-Green Party over there, but he's anti-war.
He doesn't want America killing his former countrymen back there in Iran.
He's not some front man for the Ayatollah or some nonsense like your tiny little brain likes to come up with when you can't deal with the facts that the War Party's lies you believe are not in fact true when exposed to scrutiny.
Okay.
And let me add to what you said, Scott, by saying that my own 23-year-old brother and two cousins, one 22 years old and one 28 years old, all of them were executed by the Iranian regime that is in power in Iran.
So this is not about being pro-Ayatollah, I am in exile myself, but this is about being anti-war and trying to prevent a war that is totally unjustified on a nation that, despite whatever internal policy the regime has, is not a threat to Israel or the United States, has not attacked any country for at least 200 years, and is not trying to create security problems for the United States or Israel.
I'm sorry, Mohamed, if I had known I would not have even brought it up at all.
My apologies for that.
Oh, no problem.
Don't worry about it.
But I think people should know that just because people like me talk about such issues and seemingly take the side of the government of Iran does not mean that we are pro-government of Iran.
The fact is that war mongers in this country, neocons, pro-Israel lobby and so on, have been trying for several years to provoke a war against Iran.
But for pro-democracy people like myself who want to see a democratic government in Iran, the first task is to preserve Iran and then talk about democracy.
Democracy without a country doesn't mean anything.
If Iran is attacked, not only Iran will be destroyed, but the whole Middle East will go up in flames.
And in which case, pro-democracy people like me do not even have a cause to follow.
So that's why people like me read everything, legal documents, reports by IAEA and use their own expertise and judgment to criticize, analyze and present facts as they see it to the community here in the United States and international community.
Whoever reads these reports and analysis just to show that these are just attempts, fabrications, lies, exaggerations to start a war on a nation that is trying to set up a democratic government in their own land and prevent any war.
Yeah.
Well, as long as we're on the subject, could you please speak to blatant American and Western help for the dissenters in Iran?
How much does that help them when we're bankrolling them or trying to?
Oh, the actual Green Movement in Iran has made it clear that they don't want any help from the United States or any other country because any offer of help by the United States to the actual homegrown democratic movement in Iran will be used by the Iranian government against the Green Movement, the democratic movement, labeling them agents of the United States and foreign country.
And because of the fact that they are aware that Iranian people are highly nationalist due to their long history going back several thousand years, they actually dislike and despise anybody who may actually be a foreign agent.
And Iran, in fact, even over the past 60 years, has suffered at the hands of these foreign agents, such as the CIA coup of 1953, for example, and the very fact that, for example, Iraq was provoked and encouraged by the United States to attack Iran in the 1980s, during which a part of opposition to the Iranian government, the MEK, actually aided Iraq and spied on Iran, and reported a lot of information and intelligence to the Iraqi government.
So the Iranian regime uses this fact to discredit the homegrown, credible democratic movement in Iran.
And therefore, any offer of help or any sort of connection between the United States, Israel, and anything in Iran would be actually very detrimental to the true democratic movement in Iran.
We don't need it.
Iranians don't need any help like that, because they know, first of all, this help is not ready for setting up a democratic government in Iran.
And secondly, we have seen what has happened in Iran, as a result of some Iranian term codes and spies working with the United States government and Israel over the past several decades.
And the result is what we are seeing today.
All right.
Now, to get back to this IAEA report, I really want to tear through this thing piece by piece, if we can.
First of all, it was the Moon of Alabama blog that got this right first, as Gareth Porter gives some credit in his article today.
But Gareth Porter's article today, which is running the second from the top at antiwar.com right now, absolutely demolishes David Albright and the IAEA for trying to pretend that this Ukrainian, quote unquote, former Soviet explosive scientist was an expert on nuclear weapons, and that he somehow had been the secret help with the Iranians working on an implosion system for a nuclear bomb all along.
And I just wanted to add in here just a little bit, because I just think it's funny, that to me, if we took this claim at face value, Mohammed, it would mean that either one, Putin told him to do it, or Putin was somehow unable to assassinate this guy to death for having his own rogue foreign policy, helping the Iranians make nuclear bombs.
Yeah, right.
How could anybody believe this for even a minute, that either of those possibilities could be the case?
Then it turns out Moon of Alabama, Gareth Porter, and now Reuters are looking into this guy.
And yet it turns out he doesn't know anything about imploding nuclear bombs.
And there's no evidence that he taught the Iranians a thing about how to do any such thing.
Tell him the story.
In fact, he himself, according to Reuters, he himself denies ever being involved in anything close to nuclear research or nuclear weapons, and say that, you know, my whole research, and if you look at the open literature, you can see it, my whole research has been on producing nanodiamonds.
What are nanodiamonds?
What are they used for?
Well, they are used for, in medical applications, the most important use.
Nanodiamonds means diamonds, a particle that are at the scale of nano, if you're Angstrom or...
So it's like a buckyball or something, a particular form of carbon.
Okay, but now this has nothing to do with weapons whatsoever?
It has nothing to do with weapons whatsoever.
You cannot ever imagine anything relating nanodiamonds or even diamonds to any weapon.
So, and the guy, according to Reuters, dispatch from Moscow today, he said that I've never done anything like that.
I've never been involved in anything like that, even though he was presented previously as one of the, you know, scientists that was involved in the nuclear weapon making of the old Soviet Union.
So that part of it has completely been debunked.
Now, there are other aspects in the...
You know, I wonder whether David Albright will finally resign and close up shop and go park cars with Larry Franklin at the racetrack where he belongs now, after this final shame and disgrace of his career.
Oh, he will never, he will never do that.
I mean, remember that two, three years ago, I wrote, I published an article on Antiwar.com criticizing Albright for being silent about the most important burning issue between Iran and the IAEA, namely the laptop that you're talking about.
A credible source that had talked to Albright himself directly told me that Albright told him that he doesn't believe anything about the laptop, but he was completely silent about it, simply because he had a close relationship at that time with Ali Heinonen, who was at that time Deputy Director General of IAEA for Safeguard, and he didn't want to lose his source at IAEA.
And therefore, even though he knew that the laptop, or he believed that the laptop story was completely fake, he never said a word about it.
And then he, at the same time, he blew up all the proportions, the episode about Parchin that I mentioned before our break, and he insisted that there is something nefarious is going on at Parchin, and after the IAEA visited Parchin, and nothing turned up, he never backtracked, and he never apologized, or he never said, well, yeah, we were wrong.
But that's the type of man Albright is.
Yeah, he says he's anti-war.
He does all this to try to prevent a war.
All right, it's Muhammad Sahimi.
He knows what he's talking about.
He writes for PBS Frontline Bureau and Antiwar.com.
We'll be right back with him after this extended break.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm on the line with Muhammad Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC.
He writes for PBS Tehran's Iran Bureau, and we're featuring his latest piece in the Viewpoint section today at Antiwar.com.
It's destroying all the hype around the most recent IAEA report, the IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program.
Alarming or hype, he writes, and we were talking about the one part of it where, oh my goodness gracious, a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist all these many years has been helping the Iranians perfect their implosion systems to make nuclear bombs.
I knew it, except that no, it ain't true at all.
The guy's an expert in making diamonds.
I talked to Gareth on the phone the other day.
He said the same guy came to the United States and gave the very same lectures about how to make these nanodiamonds.
What a bunch of nonsense.
And this is really the crux of this whole thing, right?
Former Soviet.
That sounds like hydrogen atoms fusing together to me.
Exactly.
And of course, as soon as you mention the word former Soviet Union, you know, the competitor with the United States during the Cold War, then everybody can draw their own conclusion.
Oh, yeah, this must be, there must be something to it.
He was probably producing nuclear weapons or helping producing nuclear weapons for the Soviets that were targeted at us.
And now he's doing the same thing for Iran because he's probably still a communist and he hides it.
And therefore he wants to help Iran to do the same thing as the Soviets.
And as you said, and as the website Moon in Alabama and Gareth Portman and others said, there is just no basis that the claim that has been made.
But you know what?
It's so important here that people understand the context of this.
I mean, they're really just taking spaghetti and throwing it up against the wall.
Basically, just like the Office of Special Plans did in the run-up to the Iraq War, they went through the CIA's trash and they put together whatever they could about Saddam and Al-Qaeda and Saddam and weapons of mass destruction of all types, including nuclear weapons.
And it just wasn't true.
Well, in this case, the new head of the IAEA has gone through the IAEA's trash and taken everything Mohamed ElBaradei threw out and they've slapped it together.
And yet, and this is the best example, because if they were really working on perfecting their explosive lenses and the superconductive wires and all of the equipment necessary to implode an atom bomb, there would be evidence all over the place, especially if it was at this facility that you've talked about, that everybody's known about this whole time, because as Gordon Prather has told me, and he's a real nuclear expert who did this stuff for a living, and he told me, listen, you got to use like uranium-238 or some other comparable inert metal, and you've got to do a test like that 10,000 times.
You got to film it with the most high-quality, high-speed X-ray film, and you got to do years worth of computations to get it perfect.
You can't just slap together an implosion system like the Israelis try to push in the London Times, and you cannot do it in such a way where this is how much evidence they have that it's really going on.
I mean, please, this is absolutely insulting.
And related to that, the IAEA report says that in 2008, Iran informed the agency that it has fabricated a detonator for high explosives, but that is for conventional explosives, and it has applications in civilian matters.
For example, if you want to, let's say you want to build a road and you need to make a tunnel that goes through mountains, then you need these such high explosives and detonators for them in order to be able to do that.
It was Iran itself, by the IAEA's own admission in 2008, that reported it.
At the same time, Iranian scientists who had worked on this had published the result of their work, their scientific work, in papers published in open-access journals around the world.
So everything was out in the open, and yet the IAEA in its report says, well, the guilt of the Iranian government is that it has not explained to the agency its own need or application for such detonators.
In other words, Iran should explain everything from making a breakfast for its officials to everything else that it does, so that the IAEA can be sure that nothing is done in Iran that could remotely be linked to its nuclear program.
IAEA itself says that such detonators and high explosives have several applications, and IAEA itself acknowledges that it was Iran who reported it, and yet it makes a big deal about it in its report.
And it's just, it is this type of baseless accusations without a shred of evidence, particularly when the information itself came from Iran, not by IAEA or not by another member state, or not discovered accidentally during one of these inspections.
And by the way, let us mention that Iran's nuclear program, as we know it, is under 24-hour surveillance by IAEA inspectors, cameras, and everything.
So everything that we know about Iran's nuclear program, at least those that have been declared, and I don't think there is any undeclared facility, are under full and tight IAEA inspections.
And that's why there's no reason to believe there's any undeclared material, because they're inspecting it and monitoring every chain, from digging it out of the ground, or at least once it's yellow cake ore, and then they got to transfer it into uranium hexafluoride gas, and then introduce it into their centrifuges.
There's, you know, international cops with clipboards and pens, and they're keeping track of every bit of this, right?
Yes, exactly.
And, you know, when they go there, in addition to cameras and everything else, they take environmental samples and do tests on them.
And for those listeners who don't know, I should mention that these environmental samples and tests can indicate the presence of nuclear material, even in terms of particles per billion.
In other words, if in one billion particles, one is a nuclear material, let's say a highly enriched uranium particle, it can discover it, it can detect it.
So there is just no way that Iran can actually conceal anything in those facilities.
And, in fact, the IAEA itself, including the latest report, agrees that it has found no evidence of diversion from peaceful to non-peaceful purposes in Iran's nuclear program.
Let me also point out another important point, and that is, the IAEA itself, in the report, says everything that it says is completely consistent with the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007.
Because the IAEA claims that, based on the laptop that we discussed, that there was a nuclear weapon program.
But in 2003, due to the security situation in Iraq, meaning due to invasion of Iraq by the United States, Iranian official ordered a stop to the program.
And this is actually the most we found out about that thus far, I think.
And I think it was Flint Leverett on the show who said there actually was information, other than the bogus smoking laptop, that said that there was a nuclear weapons program up until 2003.
I guess this is it.
And yet it still is that it ended in 2003, is the information, correct?
Exactly, 2003, and the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 They say they even bulldozed the facilities where they were beginning the thing.
Exactly.
And then, of course, I'm sure you know that just in June, Seymour Hersh also reported that the updated National Intelligence Estimate of February of 2011, that hasn't been publicized, again says that the estimate believes that the conclusion that was reached in 2007 is still valid today.
Right.
And the Hersh article, which people, if you just put Hersh, Iran bomb, and PDF, it'll come right up for you, the whole thing in PDF format from Richard Silverstein's blog.
And you can read in there about how the military and the CIA are hunting all around Iran all the time, that they are putting sensors in the roads to measure the weight of the trucks going back and forth.
They put sophisticated sensors in dummy street signs that they went and swapped out for the street signs.
Hersh has all kinds of great reporting about the extensive efforts of the American intelligence agencies to keep track of what's going on there, far beyond sitting around waiting for the IAEA to tell them.
And they are still comfortable with their conclusion that there just isn't a nuclear weapons program going on.
It's all right there.
Exactly.
It is there.
And then the only thing that IAEA asks is that, well, some elements of that program might have restarted after 2003.
And then it talks about computer simulation, modeling, that type of thing, which, even if true, if completely true, doesn't indicate anything.
In my own scientific research, I also do computer simulation and modeling and computation.
And I do very sophisticated computation, in fact.
But it doesn't mean that I am solving hydrodynamic equations that the IAEA actually mentions it in its report.
Yes, I take fluid flow equations, hydrodynamic equations, and solve it.
But I'm not working on making any nuclear weapon.
And these are just basically baseless accusations, or at least, even if they're not baseless, there is no evidence.
There is nothing to back it up.
And for that matter, it's consistent, completely consistent with what the few critics of the Iran narrative have been saying, yourself, Phil Giraldi, the Leverets, Gareth Porter.
I think, I forget if Gordon Prather ever really concluded this or not.
But, you know, all you guys have basically said this whole time.
Yeah, of course, they want to be able to have that, quote, unquote, breakout capability, where everybody knows that they could make a nuke, if they began to try to make a nuke.
The point is that they're still within the NPT, and they're still within their safeguards agreement, and they're not trying to make a nuke.
And it's, and, you know, I played the clip of John Bolton on the show, I think twice this week already, where the agenda certainly admitted agenda back in the Bush administration was to beat them over their head with their so-called non-compliance with the non-proliferation regime, so much that they would finally throw up their hands and quit, that they would finally quit the NPT, kick the inspectors out, then they would have their costs dispelled.
Then they would say, now we know they're making nukes and go ahead and start the war.
Oh, I agree.
I agree.
And as you mentioned, people like me have always said that I don't believe the Iranian government wants to make a bomb, or even has made the decision to go ahead with it, but I believe that they want to do the work, the research, whatever is necessary, so that in case that Iran is threatened by military attack by the United States or Israel, then they can make a decision about whether they want to go ahead with it and quickly assemble some nuclear weapon or not.
That's my own belief.
And every indication, every report, every evidence that is credible indicates, points to that direction.
And as you pointed out, if push comes to shove, what Iran will do is expelling IAEA inspectors from Iran, exceeding NPT, and then start a crash program to make the bomb.
But why should we do anything that pushes Iran in that direction?
Why do we want to do that?
The only reason that some people want to do that is because they want to attack Iran, because they want to say, oh, yeah, these guys started making their preparation for making a nuclear weapon, and let's attack them now.
But we are not there.
We are far from it.
And even the latest IAEA report that was just hyped for two weeks, more than two weeks, that yes, this report will present irrefutable evidence that Iran is making the bomb doesn't even come close to it.
Even the report itself keeps using the words might, may, possibly, probably, could, allege.
We ask Iran to explain this.
We ask Iran to explain that.
Iran said this.
This is nonsense.
Well, you know, there was a piece in The Guardian, Mohammed, about the British basically getting prepared to jump in the fight on Israel's side if the Israelis were to start the war.
And I forget the exact language of the thing, but pretty much they made it clear that from the Israeli point of view, at least one of the things that they see is really important here is the new facility at Qom, and that for them, this even going into production of enriched uranium at all, going into operation, enriching uranium, for them is a red line because they're afraid they won't be able to bomb it.
It's too hardened.
And so if they get their uranium enrichment up and running at Qom, it might as well be cranking out weapons grade as far as they're concerned, basically.
Is that about your interpretation of that?
Yes, exactly.
And whereas, in fact...
And how far are we from the opening of Qom and it going into full scale or any real production of enriched uranium?
Do you know?
Well, they have started moving equipment into the facility, according to the latest report that I know.
And at the same time, we have to remember that the four-door facility near Qom that you're talking about is under full inspection of the IAEA.
The only thing that bothers Israelis is that it was built under a mountain so that they cannot attack it.
But thanks to the Obama administration, they have bunker buster bombs that even the George Bush administration didn't give Israelis, but the Obama administration has given them those bombs.
So they may want to use those bunker buster bombs, but the four-door facility hasn't started to enrich any uranium and it is under full inspection and tight control of the IAEA.
Okay.
Now, as long as I'm keeping you way over time here, and I really do appreciate it a lot, I'll beg your forgiveness first, and then I'm going to ask you a real stupid question.
There are a lot of people who have been convinced that the government in Iran, because it is a theocracy, is basically operating on entirely theological grounds, that ultimately they can't be reasoned with any more than Jim Jones can be reasoned with, because it's all an apocalyptic religion and they're trying to bring about the end of the world and the 12th Imam.
And so the argument that they can be reasoned with, negotiated with, is moot.
They would be more than happy to have all of Persia turned to glass by Israeli and American hydrogen bombs, as long as they could get off one shot at Israel and bring about the 12th Imam and whatever.
And since you're from there, it seems like you probably know a little bit about that.
I was wondering if you could just explain, is there any truth to that?
Because let me say one more thing about it.
Here in America, there is a certain brand of pre or post-millennialist, dispensationalist, Darbyite, Christian something or others, Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, where these people really do have this agenda that they're sick and tired of waiting and they would like to force Jesus to come back right now.
And so then it's easy to imagine, really, right, that there's a parallel on the other side in Iran, that the John Hagees of Iran actually run the place and really are willing to commit national suicide in a nuclear war.
Please say whatever you like in response to all that.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, this is just this is just nonsense.
Iranian leader, despite whatever they do to Iranian people inside, have proven to be very calculating and very pragmatic when it comes to foreign policy.
Iran, that is supposedly the greatest enemy of Israel, received weapons from Israel during the Iran-Iraq war by the Iran-Contra Affair.
Iran, that is supposedly the big enemy of the United States, helped the United States to invade Afghanistan.
And in fact, Iran's Afghan forces that were allied with Iran, the Norton Alliance, was the first force that entered Kabul in 2001 and overthrew the Taliban.
It wasn't the U.S. forces, it was Iran's allied forces.
In Iraq, Iran could create a hell for U.S. forces after the invasion of Iraq, yet Iran did not do that.
When Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait in 1990 and U.S. put together a coalition to expel Iraqis from Kuwait, Iran started out the war.
And in fact, what it did was basically tricking Saddam, believing that he can send his air force to Iranian airstrips and airports to be protected from bombing by the U.S. forces.
Saddam did send his fighters and bombers to Iran.
Iran kept them and never returned them to Saddam Hussein.
So, if you look at this pattern, you will see that they are very calculating and they are very pragmatic when it comes to foreign policy.
Because the most important issue for Iranian leaders, whether they are, whether they look at it geologically or from any angle that they look at it, is first and foremost, the survivor of the regime, and then expanding or protecting any influence that they have in that region.
So, all these talk about, oh, yeah, these people believe in the return of Mahdi, because, you know, you said that there are people here that are waiting for the return of Jesus.
In Iran, in Shiite thinking, there is also an Imam, Imam Mahdi, who is supposed to come back someday to save the world.
So, people have used, the anti-Iran forces have used that as saying, well, these guys believe in Mahdi, and in order to facilitate return of Mahdi, they may start, you know, a war.
They may attack Israel.
That's nonsense.
I mean, these are all nonsense.
Yes, people may talk about it, but that's basically for domestic consumption.
That's for gaining popularity and so on.
And, in fact, the vast majority of Iranian people don't even think about Imam Mahdi or return of Imam Mahdi, and Iranian leaders, some of the most senior clerics, have told people not to talk about return of Imam Mahdi, because it is a sin, and because nobody knows when Imam Mahdi may or may not come back.
So, these are all just propaganda that people use in this country, in order to say, as you said, that these people are irrational, you know, they look at things theologically, and they don't care if Iran is completely demolished, as long as they can attack Israel.
That's just nonsense.
Let me also add to this the fact that Ahmadinejad, chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashahi, has said many, many times, and for that he has been criticized by other hardliners in Iran, that Iranian people don't have any argument or any quarrel with Israeli people.
And he has said Israeli people should come and visit Iran.
When Mohammad Khatami was Iranian president in 1990s and early 2000s, he said that although we oppose Israel's policy towards Palestinians, but we cannot be more Palestinians than Palestinians.
So, if Palestinians want to reach an agreement with Israel, that's fine with us.
So, these are all types of statements that indicate that these people are actually very rational, very pragmatic, when it comes to foreign policy.
Now, I'm not talking about what they do inside Iran.
Yes, they repress Iran, the Iranian people, they have stolen elections, they have jailed journalists, and so on.
But these are all internal matters for Iranians.
When it comes to foreign policy, they have proven to be very pragmatic.
And in fact, the CIA analysts also believe that.
They have always said that Iranian leaders, they do a cost-benefit analysis when they want to make a decision when it comes to foreign policy.
So, there is no basis on, you know, these people look at everything theologically, and they are willing to see Iran completely demolished if they can attack Israel.
It's just nonsense that these people are propagated, and there is no basis to it, Scott.
All right, everybody.
This is Mohamed Sahimi.
He is a professor at USC, teaches chemical engineering there.
He has an archive at antiwar.com, and he's got a brand new piece at PBS.org, called the IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program.
Alarming or hyped?
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you for having me on your program, Scott.
And let me say that I love Antiwar Radio and Antiwar website, and I will contribute to Antiwar website as much as I can, and I'll be happy to come back anytime you want to talk about Iran.
Great.
Thank you so much.
Really appreciate that.
Thank you.
