All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, writes for interpresserviceipsnews.net and we keep all of it at original.antiwar.com/porter.
And his brand new piece is in the top headlines today at antiwar.com.
Dempsey, that is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, told Israelis, U.S. won't join their war on Iran.
How do you know that, Gareth?
Welcome to the show.
Hi, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Happy to have you here.
What's the story?
Well, this is a story that I got through a contact, a military contact who is in direct touch with people close to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the level of a flag, a flag senior officer, a senior flag officer, excuse me.
These are people who work in the Pentagon who obviously are well briefed on the travels of Martin, General Martin Dempsey, and including his trip to Israel and what his conversations were about there.
This is, of course, a subject, as I mentioned in my article, that has been closely guarded by the U.S. and Israeli governments.
There's been no leaks up to my story.
This is not a leak.
There's no there was no intention by anyone here to leak this to the media.
I can guarantee you this is simply something that I happened to find out because of this string of connections.
But the Israeli and U.S. governments have had this on a very, very close hold because it is so politically sensitive for the Israelis, of course.
They don't want this to come out because this indicates just how serious their problem of relations is militarily with the United States.
And that's something that that they would prefer.
Certainly, the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli Defense Ministry are not at all eager to have this come out with regard to the United States.
The Obama administration certainly doesn't want this to come out because they you know, the president wants to project a kind of happy face as far as how things are going with regard to U.S.
-Israeli military cooperation.
And he doesn't want the the news to seep out that, in fact, he has taken a step toward distancing himself from the Israelis, from Netanyahu government's policy toward Iran, which is quite serious in the sense that he's saying, you know, if Israeli if the Israelis launch an attack on Iran, the United States is not going to come to its aid.
The United States is not going to be there to retaliate against Iran for any attack on on Israel.
Now, of course, that's that leaves aside the problem that obviously arises for Obama, that the United States is still so close to Israel that the Iranians are necessarily going to be convinced by this.
And the question is, are they going to retaliate against an Israeli attack against U.S. facilities?
The chances are very good that they will.
So what is what is going to be Obama's policy toward that?
And that's that's a wrinkle that I think that they're still working on.
But but in any case, my point here is that there's a good reason why this has been kept very quiet.
All right.
Well, now, so I guess can you give us a little bit more of the context of, you know, the open source material along these same lines that make this leak to you or however you want to characterize it, the way this information came to you.
Believable.
Why not my more cynical position that whatever is wrong is what Obama wants to do?
Well, first of all, of course, the the in the background of this move to have Dempsey tell the Israelis that we're not going to join your war if you launch this war, you know, in an unprovoked way without regard to the evidence that Iran has a bomb.
The defense secretary, Leon Panetta, had given a subtle, I would call it a subtle signal, a hint in early January, which was January 8th, when he was on Face the Nation and was asked by Bob Schieffer, what would you do if the Israelis launched an attack despite the U.S. opposition to doing so under present circumstances?
And the first answer that Panetta gave was, well, you know, we think we have common interests with Israel with regard to the problem of Iran.
And therefore, in so many words, he said we need to have cooperation, we need to have coordination of our policies, meaning, of course, that the Israelis need to give the United States a veto power.
In effect, he didn't say that, but that's clearly what was the import of what he was saying.
Then Schieffer persisted and said, well, what if the Israelis went ahead and did it anyway?
And then he said, well, in that case, we would be concerned about protecting our forces in the region.
And that answer, of course, without saying so explicitly, implied that we would not be concerned with defending Israel.
So so that was a signal, I think, before.
That's pretty tough for a Sunday morning news show, huh?
It is.
It is.
I mean, I think that's going pretty far, although, you know, obviously, I think that in the end, the Obama administration is going to have to be much more forthright, much more public about this in order to be convincing.
Because they have to convince Netanyahu, who will just push his luck if he doesn't make it that big of a public stand, is that what you're saying?
I think they have to convince the Iranians and the Israelis that we mean business about this because, first of all, let's talk about the Israeli side of it.
The the idea we've talked about this before, but it bears repeating over and over again because I think this is the fundamental problem that we face in this triangle.
The Israelis understand and even Netanyahu as as sort of extremist, as his thinking clearly is, understands that an Israeli attack on Iran is not going to be a deceptive blow.
It's not it's going to be a temporary setback to the Iranian program, but will not stop it.
And in fact, in some ways, you know, is likely to be a trigger for an acceleration of a program.
And probably, you know, let's face it, it would be a decisive factor in Iran's decision to go for a nuclear weapon if it were attacked by by Israel in an unprovoked way.
And so what what he really is after in launching an attack, should he do so, is to provoke a war which would involve the United States and get the United States to do the dirty work of really destroying Iran's military power.
And, you know, as well, I mean, if there's going to be an attack, a serious attack by the United States on Iran, it would have to hit economic targets as well.
This is, of course, what the Israelis, supporters and apologists in the United States have been talking about for years.
The neocon take on this was always that what we need is for the United States to really carry out very heavy bombing against the Iranian economy, economic and military targets, and not to worry about civilian casualties of this, of course, was the rule marked direct screed, what I call the rule marked direct screed a couple of years ago to regime change from the air.
But that doesn't work.
I mean, look, they couldn't do that in Serbia.
Exactly.
But but that is what that is what the hope has always been.
So so what Netanyahu is looking for is the opportunity to carry out an attack under circumstances where he would maximize the likelihood that he would get precisely that.
And the timing for that, of course, now looks increasingly like the period of the U.S. presidential campaign of 2012, where he has Republican a Republican candidate who is committed already publicly, rhetorically to the Israeli position, more or less, that what really needs to happen is the United States and Israel working together to take military action against against Iran.
So so I think that in the background of this and that's what the president is going to have to deal with publicly and give a very strong response to.
All right.
All right there, everybody is Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist in a press service, IPS News Dotnet.
We'll be back with more after this.
All right, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm on the line with Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist.
For interpress service, IPS News Dotnet, original dot antiwar.com/Porter.
And so I want to rewind a little bit here to well, let me check the date on this article, Gareth, it's from the 18th of January in Haaretz.
Barak, that is a former prime minister and now defense minister, leader of the Labor Party, Ehud Barak, Israel very far off from decision on Iran attack is the headline and most of the article.
But they really buried the lead, if you ask me, because down here it says, quote, the intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Dempsey, that is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his upcoming at this time visit, indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb.
The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon or more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted top a missile.
This is basically directly the language of the National Intelligence Council and the American intelligence community.
In fact, as testified by the current national intelligence director just two days ago in front of the U.S.
Senate, that they're basically, yes, they're as Gareth Porter has been saying this whole time, they're working on their breakout capability no more.
And now this is what Mossad is going to report to the U.S. once their chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gets here.
What does this mean?
I think this is a huge story, Scott, and you have spotted it because you're a very avid and careful reader of everything that comes across on this.
Very few people, I think at this point, understand the significance of this.
What's happening is that indeed, Mossad has changed its official position to bring it into line with the U.S. intelligence community with regard to Iran's present intentions regarding the question of a nuclear weapon.
The previous position, of course, was certainly from all accounts that the Iranians intended to try to get a nuclear weapon.
And it was only a question of how long it would take them.
Now they're saying, as you pointed out, precisely as the CIA's 2007 NIE suggested, that there's no evidence that the Iranians have made a decision.
They do not have any reason to believe that the Iranians have made a decision to do that yet.
And that, in fact, I think the political significance of this is that Mossad's new director, who replaced Meyer Dagan, who, of course, has become now famous for his public attack on the Netanyahu government's policy toward Iran, its threat to carry out a military attack on Iran, his successor, I think, is very much along the same lines and is using essentially a leak of their intelligence position to pull back, to rein in the Netanyahu government.
Now, there's more to this story.
Well, I just want to say real quick here, Hersh has told me on this show for, I think, at least the last couple of interviews in a row, that that's what the Israelis told him, at least off the record, when he talked to their intelligence people, mid-level and high-level intelligence people, that they know the truth about this, that the nuclear program the Iranians have is the same one that the IAEA inspects all the time and no more.
And I think, you know, there's no doubt that I was hearing the viewpoint of those people who are very worried about the Netanyahu position, the Netanyahu policy on Iran.
And what has changed now is that they have, in fact, officially now put this forward, and even though it's only been leaked to the media, what is very interesting to me is that Ehud Barak himself, in the speech that has been quoted, you know, basically reflects the position of Mossad on this, and that is a very interesting development.
And I think that there is now reason to believe that there is some distance opening up between Ehud Barak and Netanyahu.
I think that Barak is much more concerned, as I said in my article, about maintaining good relations militarily with the United States, but also in making sure that the IDF is really ready to carry out a bombing operation.
And he thinks that it really isn't.
I think he's making the argument to Netanyahu, we need more time, we can't do this yet, we're not ready.
And that that is why he called off, or at least postponed, if not really asking for the calling off of the military exercise.
All right, well now, I ain't no general or anything, but it seems to me if you really want to make sure you destroy Natanz and you destroy the Fordham facility there, as they call it, near Qom, that you've got to drop in a bunch of paratroopers who walk up to things and throw hand grenades at them, otherwise you can't be sure.
I would, you know, I would say Israelis sending in paratroopers into places like Natanz.
But I mean, that's why there's, you know, stomping their feet about the opening of the Fordham facility in the first place is that you can't bomb it from the air.
So how is bombing it from the air gonna fix that problem?
That's why I emphasized, Scott, that, you know, everybody, both Ehud Barak and Netanyahu understand that they're not going to be able to really succeed on their own in really destroying Iran's nuclear facilities.
It's not going to happen.
They're going to do some damage to it.
They're going to chip away at it, set it back somewhat, but it's not going to be decisive.
And there's no way they can get around that.
And that's why, you know, Netanyahu has to count.
And this comes back to the point we were just talking about before the break.
Netanyahu has to count on being able to draw the United States into the war.
That's the only way it's going to be worthwhile.
And that's why it is so important, as I was just saying earlier, that Obama make unmistakably clear that we will not retaliate against Iranian retaliation against Israel.
That's not going to be on.
And how realistic is that?
I mean, that's not but a big bluff anyway, especially if he's running again against Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney, which he will be.
Well, I mean, I'm obviously very worried about that.
I mean, I'm worried that he does not have the guts or the balls, however you want to put it, to really take the kind of position that's necessary to be taken.
I think that is the real problem here.
That's that's what, you know, I'm worried about the most, that that Obama will not carry this effort to distance himself from Israel, which obviously he he's thinking about to the necessary level to in order to make it convincing to either the Israelis or particularly the Iranians.
I think the Iranians have to see the United States take really decisive steps to separate itself militarily from from Israel.
And I think one of the meanwhile, I mean, what are they doing?
They're putting on all these crippling sanctions against their central bank and escalating things in the Persian Gulf and causing problems, causing the Europeans to provoke blowback against them when they're supposed to be kind of the third rational in-between negotiating partner here, although they never are allowed to play that role.
Really, this would have to be combined with some new flexibility on the US side with regard to negotiations.
No question about it.
This has to be a package of moves by by Obama in order to make it to have a real firebreak.
You know, Kate Gould at the Friends Committee, the Quaker group, she called it brown rice diplomacy.
They've given it 45 minutes of trying to talk with the Iranians since Obama took office.
Actually, brown rice diplomacy sounds too healthy for me.
I think we need a different term for it.
But yeah, it's it's been very, very weak need.
It's it's very without any any real force behind it.
I don't think there's been any real seriousness about engaging the Iranians diplomatically.
They have to go much farther toward an acceptance of Iranian enrichment combined with, you know, trying to get the Iranians to agree, which I think they would, to a much more much more intrusive system of monitoring and surveillance than is now existing.
And I don't think the Iranians have not had a problem with that in the past, as long as it was part of a package that was really moving towards some change in the overall relationship.
And that's that's what's been missing.
Well, what you need to, though, in this story, I think, Gareth, is a source at the State Department.
And what is Hillary Clinton's role in all this?
Yeah.
And, you know, at this point, I mean, that's something that I can't tell you that I have.
I don't have somebody in the State Department who's going to say here's what they're really they're really thinking, what they're going to do.
I really haven't had that.
So I'm sorry to say that I won't be able to unless unless there's an unexpected source that pops up.
I'm not going to be able to do that.
Thanks, Gareth.
All right.
Good to talk to you, Scott.
Original.antiwar.com/Porter.
