All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale.
He's written on politics and culture for the New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.
He's the editor of Edmund Burke's Selected Writings on Empire, Liberty, and Reform, and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of On Liberty.
He has an extensive archive of articles at the Huffington Post, at huffingtonpost.com.
The latest is Obama's drift toward war with Iran, and quite an education it is.
Welcome back, David.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you, Scott.
Good.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and this really is something else, this article.
It's part review of Trita Parsi's new book, A Single Roll of the Dice, and a few other articles, but it's really a broader retelling of the supposed attempted diplomacy with Iran, perhaps you'd put it differently, something like that.
But you begin, and I think we should begin, with a little bit of debunking about the nuclear program, about the assassination plot by the used car salesmen in Corpus Christi, and some of the other things that have, you know, vast majority of the mainstream media on this narrative that Iran is an offensive terrorist threat to the people of the United States, Israel, and everybody else, and something must be done about them.
Yeah, well, that's the most troubling element of the propaganda we're hearing now, because it's so reminiscent of what came in the eight or nine months leading up to the attack on Iraq.
There has been caution and wariness and a certain amount of fear of Iran in the US ever since Khomeini's revolution in 1979.
But, you know, it's been not sort of front page subject recently, because we've been busy in that part of the world and have had our own obstructions to work through if we've even halfway done that.
But now there are forces in Israel, in the United States, and in the European capitals too, and in the Arab world that favor an attack on Iran, whether by the United States or by Israel, backed by the United States.
So to work up the proper emotion suitable to an attack, you know, a lot of fears are being stoked.
The arrest of the supposed plotter, the assassination in the US of an Israeli embassy personage by an Iranian agent, which looked very improbable and came off the front pages almost as soon as it came on.
This is one example, as you say.
You know, recently, there have been Israeli defense authorities warning the United States that Iran had missiles that could travel 6000 miles and could hurt the United States, very reminiscent of Tony Blair, saying that there might be a nuclear bomb, you know, very close to ready in Saddam Hussein's laboratories.
And, you know, any number of stories of this sort, we're going to be getting more of it, I'm sure that the point is to make Iran not a distant but an imminent danger for the United States.
As the ruling coalition in Israel has made Israeli citizens believe that Iran is an imminent danger for Israel, what Iran certainly is, for Israel is a limit on Israeli power in the region, if Iran itself should become more powerful.
And realistically, that is what the Israelis fear.
Suppose, you want a homely analogy in our own hemisphere, you know, suppose that Venezuela, under Chavez, you know, acquired considerable naval and armed forces capabilities, the United States wouldn't worry that Chavez could conquer the United States or obliterate us, that's a total fantasy.
But we would feel our scope of action was cramped.
And we want the Monroe Doctrine still to be enforced, well, the same way for Israel closer to home for them.
They want to operate in that region, unhindered and Iran, to the extent that it acquires military capability, even a military threat becomes a hindrance to them.
So that's what it's really about.
But the cover under which all of this goes is that Iran may be about to get a nuclear weapon and part two.
And if they get a nuclear weapon, since they're insane theocrats, they will commit national suicide by attacking Israel at any point, thus assuring their own annihilation.
But that's something these crazy Iranians just might do.
So I mean, that's the Israeli line made for very gullible people.
Well, now the way things have seemed from here for most of the time lately, is that Obama really doesn't want a war with Iran.
And you seem to think that he doesn't, but he's just slouching toward one.
Anyway, we got tripwires laid all over the place.
We're ready for Persian Gulf of Tonkin at any hour, it seems like.
I agree with that assessment.
And that's a fair summary of what I was saying.
In the article, I chose the title with care, Obama's drift toward war, whether it's a drift he intends or a drift he allows doesn't really matter, I think the effect is the same.
But he has been sending signals himself and through his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and his Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, he has been getting coverage for the messages he sends to Israel that the United States does not want to attack Israel and does not want Israel to attack.
At the same time, Iran does not want Israel to attack Iran.
And he will always add, we have no control.
Israel is a sovereign state.
Israel does what it pleases.
But the United States doesn't want to do it.
Right.
And then Panetta tells David Ignatius at the post that and if Israel does start a war and the Iranians dare to fight back, then we'll have to jump in on Israel's side, even though we're telling them don't do it.
Yeah.
There's a lot of complex, who knows what matador like faking and covert signaling going on under the obvious signals that may be, you know, indicating to Iran that we really will back up Israel.
So they should watch out that the United States is raring to go for war.
But under that it may be saying now's the time for diplomacy, please come through for diplomacy now.
But we don't know what if any diplomatic exertions are going forward.
And Obama in his characteristic style, says nothing in public about matters that the public has a great concern with, and where it might be possible to rally popular opinion on his side if he chose to participate.
I mean, this goes for many of his other policies, both domestic and foreign.
I mean, the idea of negotiating with Iran, that we should negotiate with Iran, that that had not been done seriously yet, was the one real newness.
It was the one unexpected and exceptional thing.
In Obama's campaign in 2008, it was this thing that differentiated him from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain, they both denounced it.
They both said you can't negotiate with an enemy that dark and dire.
And Obama quoted the various people through history who have said you can negotiate with your enemies, that's just who you do negotiate with, you don't need to negotiate with your friends.
But the book that I sort of review or survey the findings of in part of the article, you mentioned the book by Trita Parsi called A Single Roll of the Dice, Obama's diplomacy with Iran, which came out last month, from the University Press.
That book discusses the extent of the negotiations that were done by the Obama administration in 2009, over a period of about two months.
And two months is what Benjamin Netanyahu was willing to permit the Americans as a window for negotiating.
And in one of the most interesting senses, the book, we hear that Israel was willing to have the Americans negotiating so long as, I'll stop for now.
No, go ahead and you can finish.
I'm reasonably sure that the negotiations would fail.
Right?
Yeah, you can negotiate as long as it's all for show.
And that's a great place to pick it up.
On the other side of this break.
It's David Bromwich from Yale University and the Huffington Post, HuffingtonPost.com.
We're talking Iran.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with David Bromwich, literature professor at Yale University and political columnist at the Huffington Post, HuffingtonPost.com/David dash Bromwich, or just Google his latest piece, Obama's Drift Toward War with Iran.
A very comprehensive retelling, not very, but pretty darn comprehensive retelling, not quite the book itself, of Obama's supposed diplomacy with the Iranians on their nuclear program and supposed attempts to stave off war.
And it's true, as you say, that he really talked a big game during the campaign and why he was better than Hillary and then why he was better than John McCain was because they're more likely to get you into war with Iran.
And I would rather not go down that same dumb road that we just went down with George Bush in Iraq.
And so wouldn't you prefer me?
And the people said yes.
And then he came in.
He gave a big New Year's Day speech on YouTube and all this.
And he said he was going to work this thing out.
And then did he really even try or what happened?
There was, I am summarizing Trita Parsi's presentation of it in his book on Obama's diplomacy with Iran.
But I, I take it that there was a real, but very limited, unimaginative and not fully competent effort at diplomacy.
It was stalled first, because of the deliberateness of Obama's ways on every subject.
The health care bill, whatever you think of it took a whole year, largely because of Obama, he would have gotten the same result, i.e. no Republican votes in three months, and he pushed it through.
And the same on Iranian diplomacy.
He studied the matter, the Iranian election is coming up just a few months into Obama's presidency.
And the decision is made not to engage with Ahmadinejad, because it might, if there were a good negotiated settlement, it might equip him to win the election and playing very close chess.
Now the Americans discussing it with Obama advised him, you know, don't do that.
Wait till after the election.
Well, the election is a major catastrophe, both for Iran and for the idea of negotiating with them.
Because first of all, it turns out that neither side, Mousavi nor Ahmadinejad would be willing to budge very much from Iran's position, that they want to go on manufacturing low enrichment uranium, and that they have their own peaceful purposes for it.
And they don't want international interference.
But they do want to resume normal trade relations and so on.
And they're willing to go in for monitoring of how they pursue their nuclear activity, closer monitoring than the IAEA now does, and so on.
But Obama really began his negotiation around September 2009, after the election and its bloody aftermath of, you know, killings in the streets and kangaroo trials of the dissidents and so on, which left a very bad taste in everyone's mouth.
He was only negotiating with the powers that be in Iran, but it was a very unstable country.
And at a certain point when the Europeans and American negotiators, in late October, believe they had arrived at a settlement, the Iranians came back, factionalized and split as they were and said, we want one more try for consultation at home.
And at that point, the negotiating team from the State Department said no, take it or leave it.
This is it.
That's one of the suggestions that though we wanted to be seen to make an effort about diplomacy, we weren't serious about wanting it to work.
So then the matter fell into the hands of the usual forces pushing towards wars in the Middle East, that is the Israel lobby, the Republican Party, which is trying to move Jewish donors in America over to the Republican side and are even further to the right from the Democratic Party on Middle East policy.
And the European capitals, which like the old empire they are, are eager for cheap oil in the region.
And, you know, if somebody will fight a proxy war for them, we'll be glad to topple another regime that is defiant.
So from all sides, the pressure is on the American president to move towards sanctions, then towards crippling sanctions, and then to threaten attack as the only way to make Iran submit.
And yet in the background, everyone knows that Iran is a country of 70 million people.
It is militarily formidable, though we have them surrounded with our dozens of bases in Afghanistan, and Arabia.
And you can't attack them, you can't put what we call boots on the ground, ultimately.
So it looks as if, you know, just letting the facts stare at you and what rises up from the facts, it looks as if the policy in force is regime change, regime change, preferably without war.
But of course, it's a fantasy that the Americans or Israelis can sow the seeds of genuine native descent in Iran that will make the popular sentiment of Iranians overthrow their own government, however, tyrannical and disliked.
So, but Obama seems drifting with the policy of regime change, but trying to discourage Israel from an overt attack.
And of course, working into all this to confuse things is the election going on in both countries is an election coming up in Israel, an election in the US, every single Republican candidate has placed himself to the bellicose, you know, pro war side of Obama, to prove that they are better friends of Israel and better enemies of Iran than he is.
And the Israelis seem to have their own people pretty effectively scared so that they are collecting supplies for bomb shelters, and so on.
And with that kind of, you know, ginning up a war, it's hard to stop it, unless you make definite, clear public announcements that you intend not to have a war and you intend to do something else.
You know, I don't think I've ever seen David, a piece in foreign affairs or anywhere that says, yeah, once we do this next round of sanctions, it's gonna work.
And they're gonna now, you know, from then on bow to our demands or whatever.
It's always just a checklist of things we got to do in order to say that war is inevitable.
Basically, we tried to reason with them, we threaten them with annihilation, and they still won't give in.
So now we have to annihilate them.
Right, the movement is all in one direction.
A sort of break in this, and it was surprising to me, I admit, was an editorial in the New York Times that appeared yesterday by Dennis Ross, entitled, Iran is ready to talk.
And that's a much more definitive title than my title, Obama's drift to war.
Well, now tell us a little bit about Dennis Ross, because I would have thought that he was the one who was making sure that Obama wasn't following up with his pledge to negotiate a settlement.
That's right.
Dennis, Dennis Ross was the preferred Israel player within the Obama administration policy on the Middle East.
And he's the one who would seem to have secured a hard line to enforce sanctions, and not just diplomacy and to make sure that the sanctions bit faster than they might have otherwise.
And Trita Parsi recounts the history to confirm that.
But, you know, where you have people now, like Neil Ferguson, and writers in the New Republic, and the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal, actually pitching for war, wanting the attack, wanting Israel to be able to do it, or the US to do it.
There have been people on the so called liberal hawk side stepping back.
Kenneth Pollack is one who favored the Iraq war, but wrote an article in the New Republic, opposing an attack on Iran.
Leslie Gelb is another.
So it's a rather confused situation.
And into this steps Dennis Ross, the unimpeachable, trusted person as far as Israel is concerned, and says, now is the time to talk.
And I have to see that as a message sent probably to Israel in coordination with Obama, because Ross is still in touch with President Obama, though he's not in government anymore.
And also a message sent to Obama's State Department and the President himself, go public with this now, if you want to avert a war.
Now, it could be far more diabolical than that.
It could be that, you know, there are wheels within wheels, and Dennis Ross, too, is working to achieve a war by saying, try diplomacy now, knowing that it will fail.
But nevertheless, that article is a bit of a surprise.
And a president who didn't want to drift, would start quoting that article, because you can quote Dennis Ross's name up and down, and no member of the Israel lobby will denounce you for it.
But he is a rather passive leader, as we've seen on many occasions.
And instead of do anything like this, we hear him saying before the Super Bowl, that America is marching in lockstep with Israel, which is a degrading metaphor for its superpower to have to use about itself.
Well, you know, it really is, in a sense, I mean, especially we talked before about the quote of Leon Panetta, saying, well, you know, even if Israel starts it, and Iran, you know, fights back in a way, you know, with their unguided missiles, and a single Israeli civilian gets killed, I guess, then we'll go to war to protect Israel at that point.
I mean, that really is the empire outsourcing the decision of the war to the leaders of a foreign power, if only to David Ignatius, I mean, but then again, he really is known as the insider's insider when it comes to things he writes in the Washington Post.
Yeah, there never has been a relationship like this in history, I don't think, like the relationship between the United States and Israel right now.
And the fantasy that we sometimes see evidence of, besides the one of regime change, that somehow popular forces in Iran, if we just give them enough clues and hints and help, will overthrow their own government.
The other fantasy is Israel's fantasy of a six day war, a very nice, limited engagement, which sets Iran five years back, and there can be another attack in five years and whatnot.
And there will be no repercussions for Israel or the United States of any major sort.
That I think is more dangerous.
And that is the sort of convenient, passive notion of how things might fall out that Obama would be very, you know, easy prey for.
I think the idea of a short, of a short, very limited war that the United States somehow doesn't get drawn into.
Yeah, all you need in that situation, instead of Iran as your adversary is pretend Iran like in your imagination, where they just sit back and take it and we don't have any problems in Azerbaijan, or Pakistan, or Bahrain or anything important.
And it's just great, because why?
Because Bill Kristol says so how about that'll be good enough with it'll work great.
Well, the disappointment in all this, in this drift is that we are putting off and putting off forever, it seems a realistic engagement of the world of nations, not all of which agree with us, but the ones that disagree with us may not be hostile toward us.
And we can stop the spread of nuclear weapons without exerting complete hegemony over the countries of a region.
But I think the the idea of military backed hegemony is still very strong in US policy.
And there I see no other evidence of a break with it.
In Obama, he certainly hasn't tried to educate Americans up to the point of realizing we can't afford to do this anymore.
So the evidence is is equivocal.
It's on both sides.
But I suppose the single most pessimistic fact, as I look at it, is that you've got elections coming in both countries.
And, and the the military fever has been built up in both countries.
And once you get that going, it takes enormous purpose and resolve to stop it.
And look around and ask who has that.
And hard to say.
All right, well, that's it.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
As always, David.
Sorry to have ended on a downer.
Yeah, well, hey, that's the way it's been going.
Let's see.
We've been talking the same story about Iran.
I don't think we're the ones crying wolf.
I think it's the war party in Israel and in the United States that's been crying wolf about Iran really loudly since, you know, 2005.
And there is no new and we have to cover it.
I mean, what are you going to do except debunk their lies and try to explain why, you know, America's attempts to get them to do the right thing or nothing but or, you know, are not that if they're not, which they're not.
And, you know, it's just like we talked with Gareth Porter yesterday, actually, about the lieutenant colonel Daniel, I forget his name, who wrote the giant thing about Afghanistan and how the American media went along and told the American people just because Petraeus said so, that the surge worked in Iraq and therefore we got to do it again in Afghanistan and that the surge is working in Afghanistan and that we just need to give them more time to do the same thing when none of that really is true.
And what it really is, is just a big media narrative.
And, you know, it is incumbent upon you at the Huffington Post and me on this show and the two of us together actually on this show to, you know, undo that the best we can give people a place to go to find out that no, actually, that narrative is a bunch of lies.
That's why it's the narrative, you know, come on.
And it's still a free country to the extent that you can find the truth.
The director of national intelligence has not said that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon.
And the conclusion still stands from 2003.
They have not been working on a weapon, but they can say lots of things between the lines that imply there's dangers untold.
And I'm afraid that's what we're seeing.
All right, everybody, that is David Bromwich from Yale University and the Huffington Post, HuffingtonPost.com.
The latest article is called Obama's Drift Toward War with Iran.
It's a great retelling of the brown rice diplomacy, as they call it over at the Quaker Group.
With the Condoleezza Rice diplomacy, because this is the same policy we would have had under Condoleezza Rice.
Anyway, good nightmare.
All right.
Thanks, David.
Bye bye.
