All right, welcome back to the show, Antiwar Radio.
I'm your fill-in guest host, Zoe Greif.
Scott Horton is off doing wonderful, wonderful things, and it's fallen in my lap today.
So anyway, I want to welcome the next guest to the show, Mr. Gareth Porter, contributing writer with Antiwar.com, and a guy who basically, as far as I can tell, knows just about everything.
Welcome to the show, Mr. Gareth Porter.
Well, thanks very much, Zoe.
Okay, thank you very much.
So, let's talk about Iran.
My only question to you, Gareth Porter, is where do you want to begin?
I'm looking at your archives here at Antiwar.com.
Who was behind the Delhi bombing is one article.
How the media got the Iran IAEA access story wrong is another one.
And then there's Iran holds up access to Parchin for better IAEA deal.
Do you want to talk about any of those or something else with regard to Iran?
I think you can touch on those, but we have to really begin with the meetings between Obama and Netanyahu, which has been the frame for just about everything that has happened on Iran for the last few days, and I would say the last week.
And my take on the Obama, Netanyahu encounter, and I was actually physically present in the convention center in Washington, D.C. for Obama's speech to AIPAC, and I have to tell all your listeners that it was a very almost creepy experience.
It was, it reminded me to some extent of a major U.S. political party convention, in the sense that there was sort of a size, the scope of the meeting, the glitz surrounding it, the number of people involved, obviously.
But then there was another element here of a kind of major rally by a state, a regime, if you will, rallying its faithful to a very militant meeting.
You know, I mean, I hate to say it, but it made me think of the Nuremberg rallies during Hitler's Germany.
Wow.
You know, I mean, I don't want to stretch the point, but just the tension, the drama, the music, the dark hall, the bright lights, all of these things were in play, and so that was the setting for Obama's speech to the AIPAC.
And, you know, in that speech he made the best case he could that he was the most pro-Israeli president in the history of the United States, and he can make a case for that, definitely, in terms of the degree to which he has ramped up military cooperation with Israel.
It's gone very, very far.
And then, of course, you have the Netanyahu position, which is what have you done for me lately, by which he means, you know, why don't you support an Israeli strike against Iran and not only support it but be prepared to join the battle once the inevitable Iranian retaliation takes place.
And in my view, the standoff between Netanyahu and Obama this past week has really not resulted in any surprises.
It's really precisely where it was before they met, which is that Obama, on one side, publicly is trying to convey the idea that we are fully behind Israel, that we will not stand for an Iranian bomb, that we're ready to use force.
And then privately he is making it clear that the United States does not, only does not want, not only does not want Israel to attack Iran, but is very determined not to be drawn into such a war by which one can infer that what Obama is thinking is if the Israelis go ahead and strike Iran, we're going to stay out of the war.
Now, I mean, those two positions are very much in conflict, because to the extent that the president, you know, has to feel that he has to make obeisance to Israel's security and use rhetoric that is quite militant to AIPAC, it suggests that he may not have the ability to stand up to very intense pressures during a political campaign, which is precisely when he will be tested if he's going to be tested by Netanyahu.
So that's why I think, you know, the outcome here remains to be seen.
It remains to be seen whether Obama is going to take the step that he has to take in order to be assured that the Israelis will not strike Iran, which is to say publicly that this is not an acceptable policy.
The United States will not accept an Israeli strike against Iran because it would be a disaster, not just for Israel, but for the United States as well.
Well, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that, but it would be nice, wouldn't it?
I'm not holding my breath either, and in fact, I'm quite worried about that.
But at the same time, I don't think that we have to assume at this point that the outcome is predetermined.
I think it remains to be seen.
Okay, yeah, that's kind of what I was wanting to ask you is, you know, obviously the big conference at AIPAC, all the speeches, all the doves are saying, you know, Obama face down Israel, pardon me, and all the war hawks are saying, yeah, Obama face down Iran, and it sounds to me like you're saying it's just a whole bunch of, like, you know, sort of, I don't know, double talk or it doesn't really mean anything or, you know, all the chess pieces are right back where they used to be after all the dust settles kind of thing.
Is that true?
To put it, yeah, the chess pieces have not really moved.
The Israelis, by the way, a member of Netanyahu's delegation was trying to make the case back in Israel when they returned that Obama had blinked and that they got really what they needed or didn't get as much as they would have liked, but that Obama did not insist unequivocally, that's the word that was used, that Israel must not strike Iran.
And then, of course, that's a spin that one cannot trust at all coming from the Israeli side.
I'm not at all certain, not only am I not certain, but I don't believe that that accurately reflects the private discussions that were held.
All right, Mr. Gareth Porter here.
I kind of blew your introduction.
Let me try to make up for it a little bit.
Gareth Porter is an American historian, investigative journalist, and policy analyst.
He's written all kinds of books, including The Perils of Dominance, Imbalance of Power, and The Road to War in Vietnam.
I could go on and on about that, but the point is, listeners, this guy knows what's going on.
And that leads me to another question I have.
Gareth, everyone talks about these sanctions, and I guess Obama's saying that we'll just stick with sanctions instead of bombs.
But what specifically do these sanctions mean?
Which goods or services do not end up in the hands of ordinary Iranians?
How specifically, as you can get, Mr. Gareth, how does this work, these sanctions specifically?
Well, the sanctions that have been enacted previously were essentially sanctions on the people involved, supposedly in one way or another, in the nuclear program of Iran, either missiles or nuclear program of Iran.
So in theory, at least, they were not aimed at trying to reduce the standard of living of the ordinary Iranian individual.
And in fact, I think that it was generally the case that those sanctions did not have a very deep impact on Iranian society.
I think what we're really talking about here in terms of sanctions that have a deeper bite are those that are related to the crude oil export sector of Iran, which, of course, is its overwhelmingly dominant source of national income and the source of financing for its national budget.
And so to the degree that the Iranians can be deprived of a major proportion of their budgetary resources and financial resources more generally, this is obviously going to cut into the standard of living of Iran.
Well, look at me.
I'm making the same mistakes Scott makes occasionally, asking you a complicated question and then you get interrupted by the break.
More with Gareth Porter on Iran and specifics on sanctions when we come back.
Antiwar Radio.
Okay.
Welcome back to the show.
Antiwar Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, filling in for Scott Horton, the real host.
But I'm lucky enough to be talking with Gareth Porter, who's a historian, journalist, author and knows so many things.
Now, before we were interrupted, Gareth, you were talking about the sanctions on Iran's ability to sell oil on the international market.
And I'm wondering, how does the United States, way over here in North America, get to dictate whether Iran, way over in the Middle East, sells its oil to China or Japan or Australia or anybody else?
How does that work?
That's a good question, of course.
In some ways, the idea of depriving a country of its trade benefits by essentially organizing a boycott of its products, as is happening in the case of crude oil exports from Iran, is akin to economic warfare.
You know, in some ways, it's an act of war against Iran.
And, you know, you could, to stretch a point here, you could compare it with the effort made by the United States before World War II to deprive Japan of actual oil resources from Southeast Asia.
I mean, it's sort of the reverse of cutting off trade benefits to an exporting country rather than cutting off the benefits of the importing country.
But nevertheless, it was a disruption of trade, which affected the vital interest of Japan, as does, potentially, the effort to cut off the exports of, or to curtail, seriously, the exports of crude oil by Iran.
And so they would have a legitimate right to charge that the United States was carrying out the equivalent of an act of war against Iran in this case.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
I was just going to say, it strikes me as kind of a low blow, dirty pool, so to speak, for the U.S. to go after Iran's ability to export oil, because that's all they got, hardly, right?
I mean, they can't refine their own oil very easily, so they sell it to get money.
And that's just really like an act of war, like you say.
They are potentially very vulnerable to this tactic.
You know, should not only the Europeans but other countries follow suit, there's no doubt that this would cut very deeply into Iran's income and have a serious impact.
Now, on the other side of this, one has to realize a very fundamental economic fact, and that is that if you actually reduce the amount of oil on the market, the oil that remains on the market, then the price goes up very sharply.
And we've already seen that even without these potential sanctions or planned sanctions, I guess I should say, having taken effect yet, and they're not supposed to take effect until midyear, you've already seen a price effect, a price spike worldwide because of the...for two reasons.
One, that there's an anticipation that there's going to be less oil on the market, so that's going to drive prices up.
And secondly, and I think more importantly, this tactic, as we've just talked about, is raising international tensions to a marked degree, particularly around the Persian Gulf.
The Iranians have talked about the threat to close the trade of hormones, to shipping generally to the export of oil by other countries.
And that is, of course, going to cause another effect of raising prices worldwide, and we've already seen a very significant effect of raising oil prices by as much as 20 percent in the last few months, since this issue first began to surface back in November.
And so, I mean, it's quite interesting that President Obama made up a very sharp point in his news conference of saying that those Republicans who are talking about war, you know, they thought about the fact that what they're planning to do is to raise prices at the pump to an extreme degree in the United States.
So, basically, what we're talking about here is playing with fire that could burn the United States, it could burn the Obama administration politically, as they are quite well aware, by causing a spike in prices during a presidential election campaign, and giving the Republicans, at least potentially, an issue that they could exploit, even though it would be dishonest to do so.
That wouldn't stop them, I don't think.
It wouldn't stop them at all.
But, look, there's another aspect of this, and that is that if, in fact, prices spike worldwide, as has already started to happen, what happens is that the Iranians take advantage of that like everybody else.
So if they've already lost 15 to 20, let's say they've lost 15 to 20 percent or about to lose 15 to 20 percent of their worldwide crude oil exports to lose the receipts from those exports, well, they're going to gain it back to a large extent, if not completely, because of the spike in the oil prices.
And that's another point that the Obama administration has made very, very clear to the Republicans and the critics of its policy toward Iran.
And let's not forget that when this project for sanctioning the crude oil sector of Iran and the central bank, which was another aspect of those sanctions, the Obama administration was completely against it.
They were totally opposed.
And the Secretary of Treasury, Tim Geithner, wrote a letter to the Congress saying this would be a huge mistake, that it's going to cause a spike in world oil prices, which is going to come back and bite us just when we're vulnerable as an economy.
And so the only reason that this was adopted by the Obama administration is that the Congress was ordered by the Israel lobby to pass it.
The Senate passed it 100 to 0.
The House then followed suit.
And this was passed despite the fact that the Obama administration had warned about what was going to happen.
And one has to believe that the Netanyahu government, which was behind this idea of sanctioning the crude oil sector, was not at all unaware of the danger that this posed to the U.S. economy and to the world economy, and that it could have an impact on the fall election, and that that is indeed exactly what it had in mind.
Wow.
Well, you certainly mentioned gas prices and oil prices.
But I want to ask you, Gareth, what are some other potential consequences, negative consequences, of attacking Iran?
I mean, I'm not a military strategist, but I'm sure they can fight back in unconventional ways.
Can you pick up that ball and run with it for a minute or two?
Well, we have talked a lot, when I say we, I mean even the news media have talked a lot over the last few years about the fact that Iran has this unconventional, asymmetrical strategy of responding to any attack on Iran.
And, of course, it's true that the Iranians themselves have emphasized that they have the ability to strike in a number of ways at U.S. interests in the Middle East in particular.
They've obviously talked about the vulnerability of U.S. military bases to being attacked in various ways.
The implication is always that they would rely on friendly forces in various Middle Eastern countries.
In Saudi Arabia, obviously, there's a Shia minority in Saudi Arabia that has been in some fashion aligned with Iran because of the Shia sympathy, commonality of Shia faith.
The same is true in some other countries in the Middle East.
Of course, Iraq is one case where, you know, in the past when the United States was still occupying the country, that was seen as a vulnerability for the United States, but now that is really no longer a major issue.
So I don't want to dismiss the idea of the asymmetrical response at all.
I think that it's still in the toolbox, if you will, that the Iranians can draw on, and they would look to Hezbollah, they would look to Hamas, they would look to the Shia throughout the region as potential allies in that regard.
But I think we should focus primarily at this point on the conventional response that the Iranians are certain to make to an attack by Israel.
And that means that the Iranians have hundreds, literally hundreds, of rockets or missiles, intermediate-range missiles that are capable of hitting Israel, targeting every square inch, effectively, of Israeli territory.
They also have, of course, Hezbollah, which has not hundreds, but thousands, and in fact tens of thousands of rockets and missiles which are capable of hitting virtually every part of Israel.
And they have the Syrians, who also have hundreds of missiles and rockets which are capable of hitting Israel.
The best estimate that we have of Hezbollah's capability is that they have about 45,000 to 50,000 rockets that can hit Israel.
The result is that you're talking about thousands, if not tens of thousands of civilian casualties in a war as a result of the Iranian retaliation.
And who knows what might happen after that?
It strikes me as like a sword with no hilt, man.
No one can grab a hold of it without getting cut.
Well, that's precisely the point, I think, that the United States military has been making, not only to the United States government, to the Israeli government as well.
Thank you so much for letting me interview you, Gareth Porter.
It was a pleasure.
I learned so much.
All right.
Thanks, Larry.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
