All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is the great Bob Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
Welcome back, Bob.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us on the show.
No problem.
So, the big news is, first of all, that you're doing a spring fundraising drive.
Help us get to the halfway point is the top headline at ConsortiumNews.com right now.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Well, we are dependent on reader support to continue to do the investigative and independent journalism we've done.
And we've added some new writers, including Mark Ames, who has an excellent piece we just put up this morning relating to the kind of financial problems that many people in the U.S. military suffered under and essentially how the 1% contributed to things like the murders in Afghanistan that occurred a month or so ago.
So, to do that kind of independent journalism, which is well-researched and a lot of references to other articles for people to get the support that the stories are based on, that takes time and it takes some money.
And so, we operate on a very tight budget, but we do need to raise some money.
And we've been trying to raise about $25,000 for the spring fundraiser, and we've been struggling at that.
So, we're trying to get to the halfway point.
Maybe we can call it quits at that point.
Well, I don't know if this is any good.
I'd like to get all the way to the end, but we'll settle right down for halfway.
Yeah.
Well, I hope this helps a little bit.
Anyway, I don't know.
I certainly value your work and your website, and especially Ray McGovern and his work.
So, speaking of which, let's talk about negotiations with Iran.
But let's not talk about – well, I mean, we can talk a little bit about what's going on over the weekend there in Istanbul.
But really, I want to talk about your article, how neocons sank Iran nuke deal the last time.
And in fact, you could have elaborated in the time before that.
I don't know if you wanted to fit that in your headline or not.
But anyway, how neocons sank Iran nuke deal is at ConsortiumNews.com.
And you're talking here about the one with Turkey and Brazil after the failure of the fall of 2009, correct?
Right.
There was an effort in 2009 that President Obama pushed, which was to basically have the Iranians trade roughly half of their low-enriched uranium, which was then at around the 3.5 percent level, basically a very low level of refinement, in exchange for these isotopes that they wanted for a medical reactor for research.
And because of a lot of political turmoil in Iran in the fall of 2009, that plan initially sort of failed or stumbled and never was quite brought to completion.
However, behind the scenes in early 2010… Actually, let me stop you right there.
I just want to add, it's kind of a parenthesis, but it's important.
Your colleague Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst there from ConsortiumNews.com as well, he pointed out on the show about a week and a half ago, I guess, that Jandala was killing Iranian army officers in Iran in October of 2009.
And I don't know how in the world, if I never knew this in the first place, or how I had forgotten it, because it seems like a great talking point for my narrative of how all that fell apart when it didn't have to back then.
But lo and behold, I went and did some googling, and there it is.
Jandala was killing Iranian army officers.
That's what scuttled the deal.
Right.
What happened was there were these essentially terrorist attacks that were being conducted inside Iran, which added to the ferment that was going on and led to Iran becoming very suspicious of what the real intent of the West was at a time when there could have been this deal.
Oh, and you know what?
It always goes without saying, but it shouldn't, that Jandala was just a front for the Israelis.
It was the Israelis using this terrorist group to kill people, to scuttle the deal that our president was trying to make.
And Ray McGovern has reported extensively on this.
I think it's a very interesting analysis.
The kind of thing he used to do when he was at the CIA, trying to do honest analysis there, which he's now sort of doing for ConsortiumNews.com and other places.
It is interesting that we have found a number of these former CIA analysts who were honest brokers, many of whom were sort of pushed out of the agency during the 80s and 90s, have now sort of returned to try to do their work in another way.
But the point I was trying to make was that, yes, there was a point when that was revived in early 2010, again, with Obama's secret or behind-the-scenes support.
In this case, the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, and the prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan, were involved in brokering a very similar deal.
At this point, the Iranians, of course, were producing more of their stockpile of low-enriched uranium, but still about the same amount would go to Turkey, be held there in exchange for these isotopes, which also would have saved the Iranians from having to start refining the uranium to 20%, which is a much higher, more difficult accomplishment, and puts you very much en route to getting to the 90%, which is required for a nuclear weapon.
In other words, if we could have kept them at 3.5%, there would have been a lot less danger, assuming they might want to at some point, build a nuclear bomb.
Anyway, this proposal was accepted, and in the spring of 2010, there was a meeting between the leaders of Brazil, Turkey, and Iran, and then this proposal ran into this firestorm from the neocons, especially in the news media.
The Washington Post, which is pretty much now a neocon flagship, went after, attacked, announced the plan.
The New York Times joined in this attack.
Tom Friedman of the New York Times called it as ugly as it gets.
At that point, there was a desire among not just the neocons and the press corps, but also some of the harder liners in the Obama administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to sink this plan and move toward confrontation, and move toward nasty sanctions, and basically ratcheting up the pressure on Iran.
Once Obama had taken office and said, look, we're going to do these talks, he also had agreed, I guess in the spring of 2009, that there was this deadline, this arbitrary deadline of December 31st, 2009, which really meant that fall, and that if they hadn't completely capitulated by the end of the year, then we're going the sanctions route, and we don't want a deal, and the Brazilians are, when you quote Tom Friedman saying it's as ugly as it gets, it's because he's saying that these are like these rogue government leaders trying to make us look bad or scuttle our great plan to punish the Iranians further, and that'll make them give in.
Right, but basically behind the scenes, President Obama was still supporting this effort, and in fact, after the U.S. government and the U.S. news media joined forces in scuttling this deal, President Lula da Silva released a letter in Brazil from President Obama saying that he was basically encouraging the leaders of Brazil and Turkey to go forward.
So there was this bafflement on the part of the leaders of these two fairly significant countries, they're now regional powers, both of them, as to what was going on in Washington and why the President was privately urging them to take one direction while his administration and the Washington press corps were in up in arms when they did.
Well, was it just that Hillary Clinton beat him to the microphone and announced a different policy than he intended?
Well, I think there's always been this tendency in President Obama not to battle these things out.
He tends to want to find consensus, and frankly, his administration, certainly in its first couple of years where he still had Robert Gates, a Bush holdover at defense, and he put in Hillary Clinton, who was essentially a neocon light at State, he was often more on the dovish side of his own administration, but trying to get consensus within those ranks.
So it's his own fault, he picked these people or allowed them to stay in, but that was sort of the reality we faced at that point.
All right, now we've got to hold it right there and go out to this break.
Everybody, it's the great Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com, and we'll be back after this.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Bob Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
He's the author of Neck Deep and a lot of other great books.
You can find them all on Amazon.
Like we said before, he's running a fundraiser there at Consortium News, so you might help out.
I feel like good journalism, I got some.
So we're talking about the fuel swap offer of 2009, and then again in 2010, that was brokered by Brazil and Turkey, and I guess where we left off, we were talking about how Hillary Clinton, as you say here, treated the leaders of Brazil and Turkey as unwelcome interlopers, intruding on America's diplomatic turf when they had already decided on a policy of escalating sanctions and not trying to go ahead and work out this deal then.
But you say it still seems to you that there was disagreement or at least a lack of cohesive policy or agreement between the President and the Secretary of State at that point, that he had really wanted to do this, but it just got taken away?
Well, that's what it seems to be.
He sent a letter to the Brazilians saying, go ahead, try to do this if you can.
But then when they did, he was part of the backing away from it.
He certainly didn't stand up for them when all hell broke loose, right?
No, and of course there was also a great deal of pressure at this point from Israel, which wanted to move toward a sharper escalation, and there was this dream among some of the neocons in Washington that there could still be regime change.
This was also after the 2009 election, which was really, according to all responsible studies, was indeed won by Ahmadinejad because he had brought support out among the poorer sections of the country, the more conservative sections.
But there was this dreamy view that by supporting the green movement, there could be regime change, which was unrealistic, but it was also sort of the en vogue attitude at the New York Times and the Washington Post and other influential news organizations.
So that was sort of the frame of the reference then.
So Obama basically bought into this idea of escalating the sanctions, ratcheting them up.
The irony of all this, the bitter irony one might say, is that then the Iranians proceeded to continue to increase the percentage of refinement for the uranium because they were trying to get to that 20% level to create their own isotopes for their medical research.
So instead of keeping them at the 3.5% level, which is okay for nuclear energy production but not for much else, the Iranians progressed.
They stumbled in many cases but did progress ultimately to master the technological requirements to get the uranium up to the 20% level, which gets you much closer than the numbers might suggest to the 90% level needed for a nuclear weapon.
So in other words, one of the results of all this gnashing of teeth and confrontation that we've seen for two years has been putting the Iranians closer to the capacity to actually build a nuclear bomb than they were at the beginning.
Neocons really are stupid, right?
I mean, they really have no idea what they're doing.
I mean, what you just told me about this dreamy idea that the Green Revolution was going to go their way.
I mean, what other explanation for that is there than they just believe their own lies?
I mean, they're so stupid.
Well, it's also interesting because many of the people behind the Green Revolution...
I mean, even if they had stolen the election, they still were going to...
If it came down to it, they were going to clamp down.
This was not going to be Ukraine 2005 or whatever.
Well, the other interesting point, though, is that many of the leaders of the Green Revolution were really part of actually a more repressive element of the Iranian government back in the day.
When I was covering Iran-Contra scandal time in the 1980s, people like Mousavi, who was, of course, the presidential candidate, and Karoubi and other of the presidential candidates tied to the Green Movement, these were some of the worst players back then.
They were involved in some of the worst human rights violations.
When Ali Nour sent his famous Bible and cake or carried it to Tehran, he was bringing it to Mousavi.
So it wasn't like these guys who were being promoted as great Democrats were actually great Democrats.
And they were all united on the nuclear program anyway, right?
They also were very hard-line in terms of the nuclear program, right?
They did not want to go along with the original plan in 2009 to make the swap.
Ironically, Ahmadinejad was more in support of that than the people in the Green Revolution.
But the problem with the neocons is I think they...
And this is historic, I think, going back to the 1980s when I was dealing with them a great deal.
They live with their ideology.
They have their ideological fixations.
And then they want to bend the reality to them.
And what often happens when that occurs is a lot of people get killed.
A lot of people who should not be killed get killed.
And so you have, whether it was the slaughter in Central America, which was what I saw, because the neocons under Reagan were mostly given purview over Central America.
They were the guys who were making justifications or excuses for much of that repression and also in support of the Contras who were spreading violence into Nicaragua.
So a lot of people died because the neocons had this idea that the only way you could have reform in leftist countries was through violence, that so-called communist or Marxist leftist countries could not evolve into democracies, which of course turned out not to be true, but it was what they were thinking and believing at that time.
And then later, of course, when it came to situations like Iraq, they again bent the facts to fit their ideological desires, and a lot more people died.
So this is a common pattern with the neocons to impose their ideological fixations over the empirical reality and then end up wreaking a great deal of havoc.
Well, and in the case of Iraq, they gave two-thirds of the country to the best friends of Iran.
I mean, you can't say they really just gave it to Iran, but it's basically Arab-Shia-stan there in a permanent alliance with the Ayatollah's regime.
It's the best thing anybody ever did for them.
Another ironic result was when, and they should have, they often don't, they're often very smart, but they don't think anything through.
So yes, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, they might have felt that was a way to sort of help out Israel or do something to sort of change the Middle East.
But what it really did was remove one of the linchpins of Sunni defense against Iran from the equation.
Saddam Hussein had still a fairly strong army to hold back the Iranians, which is what he was doing through the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq war.
And when he was gone, the Shiite majority basically took over.
Now we have almost a Shiite dictatorship under Maliki, but it's allied with Iran.
So the neocons, it's almost like the sorcerer's apprentice.
They think they know what they're doing, and they just create havoc.
And it often ends up being much worse than anything they started off with.
Well, and now their leader, the Prime Minister of Israel, is over meeting with Senator Lieberman, or is Lieberman there?
I forget.
But he's just blatantly condemning the President of the United States for trying to negotiate with Iran at all, accuses him of giving them a freebie of just the few weeks between now and the next talks in May.
Five weeks, oh, they're going to have a nuclear bomb in five weeks, the Israelis claimed a thousand times.
But that's all he could come up with to accuse Obama of, is giving them five weeks of more free enrichment time, when what, he should have started bombing yesterday?
Well, there is this continuing drumbeat, which we have seen, and not just from Lieberman and not just from the Israelis, but also from much of the American press corps.
The Washington Post even today had a major op-ed by their deputy editorial page editor making similar points, basically attacking Obama for any efforts to not go to war, attacking him for not immediately jumping into the middle of the Syrian conflict, for instance.
So there's this tremendous pressure within the Beltway community for always a violent response, always the harshest, most macho kind of reaction.
And of course, none of these people go to actually fight the wars, and probably they don't even know anybody who actually does go fight these wars, but they are always eager to have these wars be fought.
And we're seeing a replay of that.
And I know one can certainly criticize President Obama for a lot of things, but he really doesn't want a war with Iran, and he is trying to see what he can do, perhaps belatedly, to head it off, but he's under enormous pressure from the places like the Washington Post and some of the New York Times and other parts of the intellectual community, if you will, the pundit world of Washington, as well as Congress, to take harsher and harsher actions.
And he seems to be really painting himself into the corner, especially with the word that he's going to demand the closing of Fordo and the halting of all enrichment and basically just go in there with Netanyahu's demands.
I was interviewing the former U.K. ambassador to the IAEA the other day, actually, and his point was, well, if that's just a starting point and they make it very clear that they're willing to bend on both of those immediately, then that might be okay.
And if they don't agree with that, then that'll just be, you know, that'll blow the whole thing out of the water.
He said there's not a hope in hell that they would acquiesce to either of those two demands.
Well, you have a fair point, and I think it's a question of whether or not Obama is using them as a starting point or as a bottom line.
And I guess, so far at least, there seems to be enough flexibility on both sides to get this to a next stage, or as you say, even that is becoming controversial in some quarters.
All right, well, we've got to go.
Thank you very much for your time, as always.
Bob, appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Everybody, that's Robert Perry.
He runs the site ConsortiumNews.com, and he's got a lot of great articles there, including How Neocons Sank Iran Nuke Deal.
Read it and weep.
