For Pacifica Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, and our guest on tonight's show is the great Gareth Porter from Inter Press Service.
That's IPSNews.net, and he also writes for Truthout and other places like that.
It's true I interview him all the time, but it's only because he's the best.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you?
I'm good, thanks.
Glad to be back on the show again, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So, it's the end of the year.
Obviously, the most important story is the war that hasn't happened yet and could be very, very terrible, and that is, just like it has been for the last six years, the possible war against Iran by the United States and or Israel.
And the good news on that front is that a very top-level neoconservative at AEI, Daniel Pletka, is now on the record agreeing with Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak over there in Israel that they really don't believe that Iran would launch a nuclear attack against Israel if they did have a nuclear weapon.
And apparently the current Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, is on board with Meir Dagan and a couple of the other of the former Mossad chiefs, that's Israeli intelligence over there, saying that even if they did have a nuke, that would not necessarily be an existential threat to Israel, much less the United States, like Michelle Bachmann is claiming and Newt Gingrich.
And, of course, Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, recently made a few different statements saying that we really don't need to have a war over there and it probably wouldn't go so well and maybe we can find some other options.
So, that sounds good to my ears, but apparently, according to some of the news, it has been causing some problems in D.C.
So, that's the good news, and then the bad news is that Philip Giraldi, who also, like yourself, writes for antiwar.com and who also writes for the American Conservative Magazine, he has reported in the last couple of weeks that Barack Obama has signed two new findings and that is secret presidential orders commanding the CIA and, I guess, other intelligence agencies to step up covert action against Iran and Syria.
Which, of course, means support for the terrorist groups Jandala, PJAK, and the Mujahedin-e-Khalq.
And, according to Phil, some new Aziri groups as well there.
And, of course, we all know about the assassinations, sabotage, and cyber warfare, and piles upon piles of sanctions, including now, against their central bank.
So, where does this all leave us?
Let me just briefly comment on the two points that you referred to with regard to the political situation, the politics, if you will, inside Israeli society concerning the idea of threat from Iran.
You're right, of course, Daniel Pletka reflecting, I think, the Israeli government position has de-emphasized the idea of Iran using a nuclear weapon against Israel.
And the current Mossad head has, in fact, talked about the fact that there is not an existential threat.
So, these are very interesting developments, but I think we need to put them in context.
What is happening here is that there is a very lively debate in Israel, really for the first time over the last year or so, about the whole question of Iran and what to do about Iran's nuclear program.
And there's a lot of pushback from professionals in the intelligence and in the military, intelligence community in the military in Israel, which I've written about in the past, but now they are going public and being much more outspoken in essentially addressing two things.
One, the whole question of an existential threat.
And it's not just the current Mossad chief who said, look, there's not really an existential threat.
An existential threat would mean that Israel is going to have to go out of business, and that's not the case, so let's stop talking about that.
In fact, a political decision has been made by the Netanyahu administration and by Defense Minister Ehud Barak some time ago not to use the term existential threat, or at least to de-emphasize it.
I'm not saying that you'll never hear it from the lips of Netanyahu when he is in the United States or Europe, but in Israel they want to de-emphasize this precisely because it is a double-edged sword.
And to talk about an existential threat from Iran in Israel is to endanger the very support for a tough policy towards the Iranian nuclear program that Netanyahu obviously is trying to sell.
What they're trying to do now is to minimize the sense of danger from a war against Iran, and by doing so to push back against the criticisms that have been made now by the former head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, who stepped down September 2010, and in mid-2011 spoke out really for the first time in his first public appearance.
He made some very provocative statements, saying that an attack on Iran would be the stupidest idea he'd ever heard, and furthermore saying that Israel would be paralyzed.
He may have said this later, he may have said it with a different appearance, but he said that Israel would be paralyzed by the response to an Israeli attack from Iran as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
He was very explicit about the weight of the strikes that could be carried out by Iran through its missile program and by Hezbollah against Israeli society, and saying that it would be essentially a paralyzing response from Iran and its allies.
So I think what you're seeing here now is a political debate in which they're finding that the idea of an existential threat is something that they want to de-emphasize.
They want to talk about how Israel is capable of handling this threat, that there's not a problem that they can't handle, and therefore, Barack himself has said, we're not going to talk about an existential threat anymore.
He did that on the Charlie Rose show.
So that, I think, is partly comforting to know that there's a big political debate, and the country's narrowly, it's closely divided.
The public opinion poll that was published in November, in early November, showed 41% of those surveyed in Israel were saying they supported the idea of a strike if it was necessary, a strike against Iran.
39% said they opposed.
And even more interesting was the fact that 80% recognized or accepted the reality that the response by Iran would be very heavy, that there would be a very strong counterattack by Iran and Hezbollah.
So there's a sense of realism now in Israel, which I think was lacking before.
But I'm afraid this does not do what is necessary to contain or to deter the Netanyahu-Barack duo from carrying out a strike, if in fact they feel they can get away with it, in terms of actually carrying out an effective strike against the nuclear program in Iran, and also getting the United States to go along with it.
And that's, I think, where the real problem is.
That's where the rub is.
Well, those two things have to go together, you're saying.
They don't think that they could have a successful air war against Iran without America's help, do they?
They believe that they're going to need to have the United States go along with it, whether it's passively or actively.
They would like to have the United States join in, obviously, and that's what would make it a really effective strike.
But I think the Israelis would be happy if they could carry it out and have the United States be passive and go along with it, because then if the Iranians, as they almost certainly would, were to counterattack, somewhere along the way, unless the United States does something very dramatic to basically separate itself from Israel in advance, U.S. targets would be hit and the United States would be implicated in the war and would almost certainly join in in some fashion.
Well, I don't understand what's really changed then.
Just the politics in Israel, you're saying?
That's what I'm saying.
The politics in Israel have changed in that there is a debate, but the determination of Netanyahu and Barack seems to be unchanged.
If anything, they have become even more determined, according to one Israeli account, those people who have been in to talk to Barack and Netanyahu in 2011 were struck by what they called the messianic tone, in which privately Netanyahu talked about the Iranian nuclear program.
So we really can't derive any comfort from what we know at this point about the situation in Israel.
Well, and that sounds consistent with this new piece by Eli Lake in the Daily Beast, where he talks about just how uneasy the Israeli government is with the Obama administration.
They say that they will bomb Iran before they let Iran get a nuclear weapon, presuming they ever made the decision to go ahead and begin trying to make one.
But we don't really trust them.
And how can we really trust Obama to start a war with Iran like he promises?
And that makes a great premise going into the presidential campaign, with the likelihood that we'll have a hardcore anti-Iran hawk as the Republican nominee, who, no matter if Obama dropped hydrogen bombs on Tehran, Gingrich, Romney would still not be satisfied that he's tough enough on Iran, at least for their campaigning purposes, you know?
This has to be part of Netanyahu's calculus at this point, the fact that the U.S. political system has become virtually a handmaiden of Israel in terms of the issue of what to do about Iran.
The Republican Party has bought in almost completely, with Ron Paul being the signal exception to this generalization, has bought in completely to the idea that the United States should not only support Israel, but should actually join in and help Israel to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, and even change the regime, if we can do that.
So this is a dream come true for Netanyahu, because if the Republicans were to be elected, obviously he could then expect to achieve what the Israelis, what his government certainly, as well as preceding governments, had hoped for all along, which was to have the United States be a partner in a war against Iran.
And so that then clearly becomes a part of the strategy for Netanyahu going into 2012.
He will certainly wait until mid-summer or late summer to see if it looks like there's a tight race, or the Republicans appear to be in a position to prevail in the presidential campaign, presidential elections of 2012.
And if it does look positive in that regard, he will obviously withhold any attack against Iran, so that he can wait and see if he can't get the ideal situation in 2013.
If it does in fact seem that the Republicans cannot possibly win the election, then that would pose the question as to whether this would be the best time for Israel to attack.
There's always option B, the rolling start, like in the Downing Street memos about Iraq.
You just drum up a Persian Gulf of Tonkin incident, and you say that they started it.
Well, that has always, of course, been one of the things that not only the Israelis, but the allies of Israel in the Bush administration had in mind as a way of starting war with Iran.
We know, in fact, that Vice President Dick Cheney was counting on precisely that scenario in order to get into a war with Iran.
He proposed, in fact, quite formally in 2007, that the United States try to catch the Iranians in an incident that would involve the deaths of American troops, a number of American troops, and use that as a casus belli to attack Iran.
So this has been clearly on the table for the war hawks in both Israel and the United States, if they can come up with some kind of scenario that would do that.
And I have to say that I have a strong suspicion that the current round of negotiations for an embargo of Iranian oil on the part of the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia is intended not by the United States, but by the Israelis, who really came up with the idea and really pushed through Congress to get this enacted against the desire of the Obama administration.
But what they have in mind is that this will indeed lead to, or could lead to, the kinds of tensions in the Gulf that we've seen a hint of in recent days with the Israelis threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States saying, no you won't, we won't let you, or we will respond with appropriate force, and so forth.
I don't think that was, in fact, a serious rising of tensions.
I think the Iranians were simply saying this in order to dissuade people like the South Koreans and the Japanese from going ahead with any kind of agreement to reduce their purchase of Iranian oil.
And they would do so by having a spike in the price of oil, to convince those countries that any messing around with this would be a disaster economically, and I think they probably succeeded in doing that.
Well, you know, as FDR proved, I guess, at Pearl Harbor, you maneuver the other side into firing the first shot, and you can always tell the American people that yesterday was the first day in the history of the world, and that whatever it is that they did was the first move against us.
Well, right, and I think that there's a finite possibility that somehow or other, the United States, against its will, and the Europeans more, you know, quite consciously, will achieve enough of a reduction in Iran's oil exports to create some tension.
But I also think that the most likely result of this is exactly what the Obama administration warned when it first was given the proposal by the folks at AIPAC and their friends in Israel, which was to say that this is simply going to play into the hands of the Iranians.
It's going to give them more oil revenues, not less, simply because you're going to inevitably tighten supplies worldwide, and that is simply going to raise the price of oil for everybody.
So I think this is a failure.
It's going to be a failure.
But I think what the Israelis had in mind was that they would hope that the Iranians would become more desperate and that they would respond with threats of force, if not doing something in the Strait of Hormuz that would trigger some kind of crisis.
All right, now, you know, the question remains here, what in the hell is all this about anyway?
Because we know it's not about a nuclear weapons threat to Israel.
You know, they can't get a regime change.
No one believes that any army is going to march into Persia and overthrow the government in Tehran.
No one other than Bill Kristol believes that they could use the Mujahedin-e-Khalq to actually kill the Ayatollah and do a coup d'etat there.
So what is bombing them supposed to accomplish anyway?
What is even doing Mujahedin-e-Khalq, Jandala, PJAK terrorism against them supposed to even accomplish, Gareth?
As always in the case of Israel, the United States and Iran, you know, things are not at all what they seem.
And I think to go back to your initial point about Daniel Pletka and her remarks, I think that was really quite revealing because what she was saying was, look, this is not about nuclear weapons.
We shouldn't fixate on just the idea that Iran having nuclear weapons would mean that it's going to threaten Israel with nuclear war.
What we're really concerned about here is the balance of power.
It's the balance of power that counts.
And so this is really the Israeli interest.
But wait a minute.
This is where we get back to how any idiot could have told any other idiot for the last 10 years that if you get into a giant war with Iran, that chances are really good that Israel is going to be in a much worse position, at least in the medium term, and probably the long term future in having to deal with all the rest of their neighbors and everything else.
Setting back their nuclear program by maybe a couple of years, supposed to protect Israel's security when they're already in a rough neighborhood and everybody's already pissed off.
You're absolutely right that there is a degree of irrationality here in the Likud position and the position of all those allies of Likud in the United States as well about attacking Iran, because the result is inevitably going to be that Israel itself is going to suffer.
One of the points that Meyer Dagan has made, which I haven't cited, which goes even further than what I did talk about, is that this could in fact be the end of Israel.
He's saying that an attack on Iran could in fact be the death knell for the concept of Israel.
He feels that strongly about it.
And of course, if you have a war in which thousands of rockets are falling on Israeli cities and killing thousands and thousands of people, what does this mean about the future of Israel?
People are going to move out.
You're going to lose the cream of the crop.
And this is precisely why many people were saying that they were afraid of Iran having a nuclear weapon, because people would be afraid, regardless of the reality, they would be so fearful that people would start to leave Israel.
Well, if you have a war with Iran, of course, that magnifies itself by thousands of times.
So that's where you get the absolute irrationality.
Now, the other side of the picture, though, and the side of the picture that, again, simply never gets discussed, hardly ever gets discussed, is that what Netanyahu and Barack are really calculating here, is that this is not going to happen unless the United States is going to go along with it, and that means unless they can calculate that if they attack Iran, it will mean war between the United States and Iran.
So what they're calculating is not simply an attack on the nuclear program, but an all-out attack on all sources of power in Iran.
Well, they don't really doubt Obama, do they?
They don't really think he'd sit it out.
Why don't they launch the war right now and try him?
Well, I think they do doubt that.
I think they're afraid of that.
Well, first of all, let me be clear about this.
You're not really trying to double-dog Darrell.
They know that Obama does not want to do it.
But I think that the question is not whether he wants to do it, but whether his hand will be forced.
And that's where I happen to believe that, despite Netanyahu's hatred for Obama and his real doubt, his legitimate doubt, that Obama wants to defend Israel in a war with Iran, I think that he knows that the chances are that Obama will be forced to go along with it, that he does not have the political wherewithal, the political capital to say what needs to be said, which is that if Israel attacks Iran, the United States will be forced to divorce itself from Israel's security, because it will mean that Israel is a threat to the peace of the world, and we cannot afford to have this happen.
In other words, that there will be serious consequences for U.S.
-Israeli relations.
That's the only way that the United States can hope to seriously deter the Netanyahu government in regard to Iran.
And the fact that you've heard nothing of the sort from the White House suggests to me that this is really the bottom-line question that Netanyahu is weighing, alongside all the rest of the issues that we've talked about.
And I do suspect that in the middle of 2012, if the Republicans have not been able to make a go of it, if the Democrats are still in the lead, and it's not a close contest, that this is when you might see Netanyahu make his move.
And this, of course, again, assumes that you will have a continuation of the wishy-washy position of the White House with regard to an attack on Iran.
By wishy-washy, I mean, you know, having Panetta say, oh, this is a terrible idea, we think that this has serious consequences publicly, but nothing that is going to say that the United States will not countenance this.
And in fact, we know that Obama privately told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey, after Dempsey's trip to Israel, that the United States cannot control Israel.
Israel is an independent country, and therefore they're going to do what they're going to do.
Which is, to my mind at least, evidence that the president is kind of in la-la land.
I mean, he's imagining that somehow or other he can avoid the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran, thinking that somehow, if the United States has publicly said it's not in favor of an attack on Iran, that the Iranians are going to say, oh, I guess the Americans aren't really involved in this.
And I think that's a sign that the White House simply has not come to grips with this.
It does not have the sense of realism that's required by this really critical issue.
All right.
Now, very quickly, can you give me just a yes or no answer to the following question?
Is it or is it not true that if people go to original.antiwar.com/Porter, they could find articles debunking the so-called terror plot against the Saudi ambassador, debunking the recent IAEA report where they just went through Mohammed ElBaradei's garbage and put together a bunch of nonsense, debunking the recent claims that Iran now were the ones who launched the September 11th attacks against us.
Is it or is it not the case people can find all of these war party lies debunked in your archive at original.antiwar.com?
Well, I have every reason to believe that the answer is yes to that question.
And now can you tell me in a yes or no answer, I'm sure you saw Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy.
I'm sure you know all the news coming in from Syria.
Is it on in Syria, a Libya-style regime change from the air?
I don't know the answer to that.
I certainly hope not.
That would be a very, very serious mistake.
I do believe that the Obama administration is aware of the serious dangers of trying to do a Libya in Syria.
Well, that's what they said at the same time they said they're mulling over all their options and seeing what they could do.
Even talking about a Chalabi-style, remember 1996, we'll just invade with 5,000 guys and overthrow Saddam that way.
We'll just carve out a little safe zone and these kinds of things, which didn't work in 1996.
I'm certainly not going to say in advance that nothing of the sort can happen, but my God, this would be the craziest thing that this administration has done by far.
Ten times crazier than anything that they've done so far.
All right.
Well, we've got to leave it right there.
Thank you so much for your time as always, Gareth.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Everybody, that is the heroic Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for InterPress Service.
My brand new one is at truthout.org.
Crackpot anti-Islam activists, serial fabricators, and the tale of Iran and 9-11.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
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