All right, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your fill-in guest host, Zoe Greif.
Privileged to be here.
And we got an interview coming up with the great Sheldon Richman.
Sheldon is a senior fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation, and a very knowledgeable guy.
And let's talk about your latest article, Obama, AIPAC, Iran, Israel.
You know, there was a big conference over the weekend.
Everyone saw it.
What's your take on that, Sheldon Richman?
Well, it was all totally predictable.
AIPAC, which is the Israel-Jewish lobby in the United States, has been spoiling for an attack on Iran for some time.
And they've been pushing the people in Congress who are beholden to them, who will pretty much do whatever they say, pushing those members of Congress to introduce resolutions and legislation which would forbid diplomacy, which would draw the line in the sand to a point where, in effect, Iran has already crossed it.
All kinds of ways of inciting a war fever in the United States.
And so we weren't surprised to see Republican candidates speaking at AIPAC and slobbering all over themselves to assure them that if one of them got into office, except, of course, Ron Paul, if any of them got into office, they would use all means to keep around from getting a nuclear weapon.
Obama himself appeared, and while it's being spun as being a conciliatory talk and giving diplomacy a chance and putting Netanyahu on something of a short leash, I think if you read it closely and look at the full context of what Obama's been doing since he came into office, it was really nothing of the kind.
He said everything was on the table, and he even said himself, all aspects, all elements of American power, all elements of American power.
That's a direct quote.
Well, nuclear weapons are one of the elements of American powers.
In other words, all of this is on the table.
And he said he's not bluffing, as he said in an interview just a couple days before to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic.
He's not bluffing when he says he'll use military force.
I don't see how that is supposed to look like a conciliatory, let's give diplomacy a chance speech.
And then Netanyahu, of course, spoke before AIPAC and then also met with Obama afterwards and said that, you know, as the head of a sovereign country, he reserves the right to attack Iran basically anytime he wants, but that he hasn't made the decision to do that.
Well, I don't see any progress in the direction of peace.
The whole thing is ridiculous because Iran doesn't pose any threat to Israel or anybody else.
And so the whole thing is just a horrible spectacle.
Wow, so many directions we could possibly go with this.
But you mentioned Ron Paul.
And, you know, Ron Paul likes to make the point that back in the Cold War, the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear missiles, and we talked to them.
And there was diplomacy.
And thereby, you know, everybody worked it out in secret deals, moving their missiles back or whatever.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, was averted, as Ron Paul likes to point out.
Why don't we talk to Iran?
What is this push to cut off diplomacy?
That just seems like madness to me, Sheldon.
Well, look, this idea, which is pushed overtly and in implicit ways, that somehow Iran is this historically unique threat to the world, is the most ridiculous thing that you can imagine.
Iran has a, what, fifth, tenth-rate military?
They have no air force to speak of.
So to even get to Israel, what are they going to do?
They're going to send missiles?
Well, Israel and the U.S. intelligence agencies both say that Iran has not even made a decision to make a nuclear weapon.
American intelligence agencies twice have said that in 2003, Iran scrapped what might have been the beginning of a nuclear weapons program.
So they're not building a weapon.
And the Supreme Leader there, Ayatollah Khamenei, says that such weapons of mass destruction are contrary to Islam, that they would be sinful to have, so they basically issued a fatwa against them.
Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons, including weapons on submarines.
The U.S., of course, has, what is it, 8, 8,500 or something like that.
This idea that Iran is a threat to anybody except its own population, as all governments are, it leaves you speechless, because there's nothing, there's nothing that you could say to make that case.
It's pure fear-mongering.
And they think the American people are just going to take it.
And unfortunately, they may be right.
The American people may just swallow it.
Well, that leads me to my next question, Sheldon, which is Benjamin Netanyahu, what does he want out of all this?
He has to know, as well as anyone, that even if the United States were to strike Iran, it would only temporarily set back their peaceful civilian, non-proliferation treaty-guaranteed nuclear activity.
So what's the point of all this?
I just don't even get what his fantasy mind even wants as his goal.
You know, I can't exactly read his mind, but I can talk about the logic of his position and also Obama's, which is not as different as people want to make it out to be, like people like Tom Friedman and others want to make it out to be.
The logic of this is the only thing that would satisfy the conditions they've laid down is regime change, meaning the end of the Islamic Republic and its replacement with a puppet regime that does the bidding of Israel and the United States.
Nothing else can satisfy the conditions they've talked about.
Iran and the Iranian people believe that they have the right to enrich uranium for medical and energy purposes, electric power purposes.
And they do under the non-proliferation treaty, which they're members of, but Israel's not.
It's really funny to hear Netanyahu go on and on about how Iran, it's unacceptable that Iran has even one nuclear weapon, when it has 200 to 400 of them, which it won't acknowledge.
Everybody knows they have them, but they won't acknowledge it.
They're not in the NPT.
They don't submit to any inspections.
And anytime it has been suggested that there be talks about a nuclear-free Middle East, the Israelis have no interest whatsoever.
So, you know, it takes real quick to stand up there and condemn Iran for its non-existent weapons program when you're Israel.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
And yet I've come to expect the unbelievable in this funny, fuzzy world that we live in.
We're talking with Sheldon Richman.
He's a senior fellow at the Future of Freedom Foundation.
And we're talking about Iran and Israel and the latest AIPAC conference.
And, you know, I was talking to Eric Margulies, actually, or listening to him.
And he was talking about, he was actually at the conference.
And he said that the whole thing had the trappings of just this weird propaganda, you know, nightmare, all this weird music and all this stuff.
I don't know.
I should ask him more about that.
I've never been to an AIPAC speech.
But you mentioned that all these Republican candidates were just drooling all over themselves to be more hawkish on Iran.
Can you follow up on that a little bit and give me a few examples, maybe?
Or just give me a sense of what's going on here?
It sounds like a two-minute hate fest from George Orwell.
Well, yeah, I don't have any particular phrases, but it's very similar to what happened at the last meeting, the last AIPAC meeting.
And Jon Stewart appropriately called it a tuchus kissing contest.
You have to go up there and show that nobody loves Israel more than you do, and no one's willing to launch a war and perhaps destroy the world, you know, than you do, in order to have Israel's back, as Obama likes to put it.
You know, if we're really so concerned, if people are reading the intentions of the Iranians, Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, they might want to look at what's going on in the Jewish community, which is 25,000 strong in Iran.
That's a very good point.
Which is an ancient community, 2,500 years old.
It's been around.
It's been there a while.
And, you know, you can go on YouTube and find many documentaries about that community.
They thrive.
They practice their religion.
There are synagogues.
There's a very prominent Jewish hospital, which Ahmadinejad just, I don't know, a few years ago, gave the equivalent of $35,000 to as a sign of encouragement.
If they were out to kill Jews, it seems like they would have started the closest to home.
That's a very good point.
On the other side, let's try to talk about the sanctions, maybe, or whatever else you want to talk about with regard to Iran.
I'd like to find out more about oil sanctions.
We're talking with Sheldon Richman, a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation.
More on the other side.
All right.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif.
And we're talking with the ever insightful Sheldon Richman.
And we're talking about Iran and AIPAC and all the sanctions and madness and drone beating for war that's going on.
But I don't want to, or excuse me, I want to emphasize the last point you were making, Sheldon, about Iran's Jewish community before the break so rudely interrupted us.
Maybe you could reiterate that a little bit for the benefit of our listeners.
Well, that's right.
I mean, look, Netanyahu is trying to say something has to be done because this is like 1938.
And we are on the verge of a second Holocaust.
And he claims to be speaking not just for the citizens of Israel or even just the Jewish citizens of Israel.
He claims to be speaking for the Jewish people, not the whole world, because that's the nature of the Israeli, of Israel, which is they define it as a Jewish state.
It represents all Jewish people, they claim to at least.
Not everybody.
Not all Jews around the world except that.
But so this is the picture he's trying to paint in order to panic people.
And he tells, he says, are people going to stand by again like they did in 1938?
Well, if this regime in Iran, which I'm not, you know, I'm not a theocrat, so I don't want to live under an Ayatollah or any religious authority.
You know, I believe in freedom, full individual freedom.
So I'm not on the side of the regime.
But if we wanted to see what their attitude was toward Jews, as opposed to Israel, which is a different issue, we might want to see how they treat the 25,000 strong community that's been in that country for two and a half thousand years.
Now, we know Ahmadinejad, we're told repeatedly that Ahmadinejad has given, has held said statements denying the Holocaust.
And little, it's never mentioned that when he did that, by the way, not all officials in Iran agreed with that state.
But a Jewish member of parliament, there are members of parliament who are non-Muslims.
I was about to say, Sheldon, wait a minute, the anti-Semitic Iranian juggernaut of power has Jewish people in their parliament?
Yeah, they have designated slots for the other religions.
So there is a Jewish member of parliament.
I'm not saying Jews have total political freedom.
Nobody in Iran has total political freedom.
It's not a free society.
But in terms of being able to practice one's religion, there is a Jewish representative.
He made a worldwide statement.
He issued a worldwide statement in disagreement with Ahmadinejad.
Now, was he taken away in the middle of the night and never heard from again?
No, I saw him online talking about the statement he made against Ahmadinejad.
In other words, his right to speak up was respected.
And Ahmadinejad, whatever you think of his statement, was apparently just speaking for himself, and it has no bearing on policy.
Ahmadinejad, by the way, according to a foreign policy expert at the Hoover Institution, which is a conservative institution, he's called Ahmadinejad the 18th most powerful politician in Iran.
You know, you would think he's Hitler, the way Netanyahu and others talk about him, that he's the total autocrat who can do whatever he wants.
Not only is he the 18th most powerful person, politician, he has no jurisdiction over the military whatsoever.
That's under the jurisdiction of the Ayatollah, and this is whom they call the Supreme Leader.
And in the elections last week, last Saturday, Ahmadinejad's party, his faction, lost out to Ayatollah Khamenei's faction.
They took hits on him in the parliamentary elections.
His own sister couldn't get elected to the parliament.
So this is the guy, this is the new Hitler.
This is the new Hitler.
And we're supposed to be afraid, shaking in our boots, unable to sleep at night, because after he knocks out Israel, he's going to be sending missiles our way.
Come on, you can't believe how profoundly this insults the intelligence of people around the world.
After they take the non-existent nuclear weapon with the non-existent delivery system and magically deliver it, and then what, Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are going to do a dance?
I mean, really, this is ridiculous.
Yeah, and without there being a second strike capability by the U.S. and Israel.
So look, the Israeli officials themselves contradict themselves.
In the New York Times magazine interview with a bunch of them a couple of weeks ago, I think it was Ehud Barak, the defense minister, who said, look, there's two things they want to do.
They want to attack us, but they also want to preserve the regime.
Now, those are two contradictory things, right?
Because if you attack Israel with nukes, you're going to get at least nuked.
You're going to get wiped out, which means your regime is over.
So how can you have as your second objective, preservation of the regime?
They admit that by their own contradictory statements, they are telling us their case is bankrupt, and it deserves no serious attention whatsoever.
And yet, what does the U.S. news media do?
Have you ever seen an Iranian on any of these shows, MSNBC or Fox, to talk about them as if they were, you know, to let them talk like they're normal human beings to tell us what's going on?
No, never.
Did they interview the people in the Jewish community?
No, they never do that because they're demonizing and dehumanizing the Iranians.
So when it comes time for the war, they'll be less than human, and Americans won't feel too bad about it because they're just, who knows what they are over there, but they're not human beings like us.
Meanwhile, the sanctions, which are very tight, and which Obama brags are biting, are inflicting a terrible hardship on the middle class and other people there because food prices are skyrocketing, money is in great demand, so you have prices, like I say, skyrocketing, and we put tough sanctions on their central bank, on their ability to export oil, on their ability to import gasoline.
We're putting the screws, not to the Ayatollah, for all I know he's living the way he always lives, but to the regular people.
The guy on the street in Tehran, right?
Yeah, and do they think they're going to love Americans or Israelis or Jewish people as a result of this?
Heck no.
Well, I'm glad you brought up sanctions because I, personally, am just very curious.
Like, exactly, do you know, Sheldon Richman, is it cooking oil that has sanctions on it that is banned from being exported to Iran?
Is it flour?
Is it rice?
You mentioned gasoline.
I don't know that they name particular goods, but the point is they're crippling their ability because of the central bank restrictions, very tough ones that were passed 100 to zero in the U.S. Senate.
And Obama said he didn't like it, but then signed it, of course, when the bill was sent to him.
And, of course, they're working on other countries to get them to not do business with them.
So it's economic warfare, which under international law is warfare.
It's the kind of thing that goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the Secretary of War, Stimson, around that time said, we're looking for a way to maneuver them into firing the first shot.
In other words, it was intended to get Japan to fire the first shot.
So they came up with an eight-point plan to do that, and apparently it worked, right?
Apparently it worked.
And, you know, maybe they didn't know exactly where it was going to be, but shifting to our current situation, how do we know they're not hoping that Iran will get goaded into firing the first shot somehow?
And that way, in the thinking of the Israeli officials and the American officials, then everything's okay.
See, if they hit it first, then we're just retaliating.
And they figure the public will say, okay, well, we didn't want to do it, but we have to defend ourselves.
And, of course, it'll all be a scam.
I mean, look at the things they're coming up with, this ridiculous plot that some used car salesman was going to make a deal with a drug warlord from Mexico to kill the Iranian, the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
And a restaurant?
It's a joke.
Yeah, in a restaurant.
And what, two days later, they drop the story?
You hardly hear about it anymore?
It's ridiculous.
Nobody believes that crap.
It's just we are being stampeded, we're being set up in case they decide they want to go to war.
But it seems to me the logic of their position is they'll have to be war, because the only, like I say, the only thing that would objectively satisfy their conditions is regime change and a puppet government, a pro-US pro-Israeli public government, because they're not going to give up the right to enrich.
So what are they even talking about?
What are the diplomatic contacts even discussing?
And that's what I want to know, Sheldon.
That's a good question.
There's nothing to talk about, because if Iran says we have a right to enrich for medical purposes and energy purposes, then what's there to discuss?
You know, a couple years ago, Iran struck a deal with Turkey and with Brazil to actually give up enrichment.
They said, look, we'll give you uranium and you send to us already enriched uranium.
They actually struck a deal with that, and that was something Obama was kind of earlier saying would be a way to settle this issue.
So then they come to the tentative agreement with Brazil and Turkey, and Obama says, uh-uh, I veto that.
And it never happened.
And that was actually going the extra mile by Iran, because Iran's concerned that if they ever cut a deal like that, they'll send uranium out and no one will send back the enriched uranium.
Didn't they get burned on a deal like that with the French before, something like that?
They'll get screwed.
Yeah, I think it has happened before.
And they're afraid to get screwed again, but it looked like they were going the extra mile to say, okay, look, we'll diffuse this.
Let's do this, we'll do this swap deal.
And Obama then couldn't take yes for an answer.
It was something he was earlier demanding.
So once he got it, he said, I don't want that.
So they keep drawing the line, and again, they have to keep proving a negative, right, that they don't have a military program.
Just like Saddam Hussein had to prove a negative.
You can't prove a negative.
Thank you so much for that interview, Sheldon Richman.
It was really great to talk to you.
I learned a lot.
Okay, thanks a lot.
