10/22/07 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
It's Chaos Radio 95992.7 FM in Austin, Texas, and welcoming back to the show the great investigative journalist and independent historian Gareth Porter.
He writes for The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, IPS News.
You can find all his IPS articles at antiwar.com/porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Hi, Scott.
As always, thanks for having me.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
That's good to know.
Been a few weeks since we talked.
It's been a couple, yeah.
And I'm wondering, I know you were writing a new article for The American Prospect.
Is that up yet, or when will that be up?
I'm not sure yet.
Have not finished it, and don't know whether we'll make the November edition or not, the November issue of the magazine, so I can't answer that question yet.
Okay, well, I'll be looking forward to that.
But you have this new one here that you wrote for IPS.
It's on antiwar.com.
If you just hit antiwar.com/porter, it'll take you right to it.
Military resistance forced shift on Iran strike.
Just take us through this.
What's going on here?
Well, what I did in this piece was to link two events, which at least one has become known through press coverage.
The other one, I think, has not really been known.
The first event was the fact that Joint Chiefs of Staff met with Bush on December 13th of last year, partly for Bush to present the Joint Chiefs with the idea of the surge in U.S. troops in Iraq, and to get their response to that idea.
The Joint Chiefs apparently unanimously rejected that.
But then the other part of the, and that was widely reported, at least the substance of the Joint Chiefs position was widely reported at the time.
What was not reported until June or mid-year of 2007 is that the Joint Chiefs were also presented with the idea of a strike against nuclear sites in Iran by Bush, and that they also unanimously rejected that as well.
Now, that was reported first by Time Magazine's Joe Klein in mid-year.
I actually have been able to get at least a partial confirmation of that from Hillary Mann, who was MSC director for Persian Gulf and Afghanistan for the Bush administration in 2003, and then was in the State Department in 2004.
She has had that same report given to her from sources in the Pentagon.
Okay.
Now, Hillary Mann, I know her name because there was an article, I believe, at the end of January or the beginning of February in Newsweek called Rumors of War that quoted her, again, a former National Security Council staffer as saying, or I don't know if she's a staffer, I don't know what you call it, former member of the National Security Council on one level or another, who said that there is a deliberate plan here to provoke Iran into doing something that then we might cite self-defense as a reason to start bombing them.
That's exactly right.
I mean, she was definitely the source.
You know, I can tell you that she, having been through the run-up to the war in Iraq and having dealt with White House officials, including White House lawyers who were representing the neoconservative viewpoint, was very keenly aware of this argument that had been made in the case of Iraq, that the United States has an inherent right of self-defense and therefore can strike at another country, you know, if it decides that it is being threatened by that country.
You know, obviously, this is the idea of preemption.
Now, the same argument then could be turned, she believed the same argument could be turned into use by the Bush administration in the case of Iran by arguing that there were bases in Iran that were being used to threaten U.S. troops in Iraq.
And, of course, this then brings us back to this whole proxy war line that we've been discussing on your show for weeks and weeks.
And now let me stop you right there, just real quick, Gareth, to point out to the audience that if you guys look at the front page of antiwar.com right now, you'll see the spotlight article today is the secret history of the impending war with Iran in Esquire magazine by John H. Richardson.
And this is a profile of Hillary Mann and her husband, Flint Leverett, and their fears about the march to war with Iran and so forth, and very well worth the read.
But now, so help me explain, Gareth, because in your article here, basically you're saying the military resistance that was reported by Joe Klein, I believe in response to Steve Clemons' blog about Cheney's attempt at Enron and trying to get Israel to start the war for us, or for him, I should say, that Hillary Mann has basically confirmed this, or at least partially confirmed that story to you.
Now, why does this...
So then the second part of the linkage here is the January 10th speech by President Bush, which was mostly about the surge, but which also brought in the theme of Iran's alleged meddling in Iraq.
And specifically, and this was language which was really not noticed at the time, and I have to admit that I did not pick it up either.
This is one of the many things that I failed at the time to see, but which now, you know, become clear in retrospect.
She noticed in that speech specific language in which Iran and Syria are accused of having allowed terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to go in and out of Iraq, and also accusing Iraq of having provided weapons to the insurgents, Shiite insurgents in Iraq.
And so she said, this looks to me like a repeat of 2003, where, you know, she says that the president chose his words very carefully in order to lay down a legal predicate for later use of force against Iran.
So what I'm suggesting here is that, you know, although Bush had gone to the Joint Chiefs a proposal to strike the nuclear site, that he then began to shift the focus of the concept of using force against Iran to the issue of Iran's alleged help for Shiite guerrillas fighting American troops in Iraq.
And that, in fact, he laid down that first legal and political basis for war against Iran based on the alleged role of Iran in Iraq in that January 10th speech.
Now, what I'm working on now is really sort of showing that there was a debate between the Cheney faction and the Rice-Gates faction in the run-up to that speech, in the days before the speech, where Cheney wanted to make sure that the speech would, in fact, lay down that legal and political predicate for war, whereas Rice wanted specifically Rice and Gates wanted to limit the language so that it would be clear that the U.S. response to the problem of arms going to the Shiites would be confined to Iraq itself.
So they wanted it to say something short of a direct accusation against Iran.
And the funny thing is, of course, that Bush, instead of choosing between the language submitted by the two sides, put in both.
He has language there that clearly states that the problem is the networks within Iraq which are to be attacked by U.S. forces, including, in that case, Iranian nationals who get caught in Iraq.
But so basically, I'm arguing here that, not in my piece, but in something that I'm writing now, I'm arguing that essentially the hawks, the neocons, not just the hawks, but the neocon hawks, won the argument with Bush by getting their language into that speech, and that what happened after that was that Bush began to make plans for an attack on Iraq that would be justified by the alleged involvement of Iran in Iraq, which would imply a different set of targets, that is to say, bases in Iran that are related somehow to Iraq.
Yeah, but then that's just to get it started, because then they retaliate, and then we retaliate further, and eventually it means strikes on all their nuclear capability, right?
Well, that's exactly right.
There's no doubt that what the neocons, Cheney and David Wormster, his Middle East advisor, and Elliott Abrams, who headed the whole NSP shop, directed the whole shop on the Middle East at that point, what they wanted was an excuse to start a process of escalation which would then allow them later on to strike at nuclear sites and military targets.
And now when you say that the neocons won the argument, is that who you're referring to, Elliott Abrams?
That's right.
Who else?
Stephen Hadley?
Well, Hadley, it turns out, plays an interesting role in this period of early 2007.
You know, I think in the past that he was more or less playing Cheney's game, but when Gates and Rice formed at least an apparent alliance to try to block war against Iran, I think Hadley then came down on their side, because what I point out, again, not in the piece that I've done for IPS, but something I'm working on now, is that one of the things that Gates and Rice did after that speech was to try to force the administration to walk that line back, the line directly accusing Iran.
And the issue at that point was what would be said in a military briefing about Iran's role in relation to the weapons, the EFPs, the explosively formed penetrators, and other armor-penetrating weapons.
And the Cheney faction wanted the briefing to say outright that this is Iran's policy, to support the attacks on U.S. troops by giving them weapons, training, and other things.
The Rice and Gates alliance, on the other hand, wanted to prevent that direct accusation from going into the briefing, and they wanted something much more ambiguous to be said about it.
And they rightly, you know, argued that there wasn't any evidence to support the idea that the Iranian government was knowledgeable or was directly involved in any way in the arms that were being used by the Shiite.
Well, and really, this is a replay of Iraq again, too, isn't it, where it's just an accusation looking for something to make it seem true.
They start with their conclusion here.
They start with a conclusion, and what's interesting now, and I know I keep coming back, as I always have on your show, to this line about Iranian provision of arms, what's interesting is that if you look at the military briefing, and I keep going back to that briefing and the press coverage of it, and of course there's no transcript of the briefing.
There was no recording that could be done.
They were not allowed to record the briefing.
It was one of the very strangest briefings ever given by the U.S. government.
They couldn't name the people.
They couldn't record it.
They couldn't take photographs or anything.
So if you go back to the coverage of the briefing, the briefers did not say that Iran was behind the provision of these weapons.
They simply stated that these weapons, we believe these weapons come from Iran.
They were manufactured in Iran.
Well, it turns out that that wasn't true either, as I've argued over and over again.
The evidence is to the contrary.
But in fact, all they said was that these weapons come from Iran, and they left that implication that that must mean that the Iranian government was behind it, although there were other comments made by at least one of the briefers suggesting, well, there's not much freelancing done in the Iranian government.
So they dropped all kinds of hints that the reporters were supposed to pick up, that the Iranian government was actually behind this, that it was Iranian policy, although they didn't say it.
But they never stated flatly outright, they never accused Iran of being behind this.
So in effect, you know, the Gates-Rice alliance did in fact force, officially at least, the briefers to step back from what was said by the president himself on January 10th.
Well, good luck for the war party.
There's Fox News where they can just, you know, paraphrase it however they like.
Everybody knows the Iranian government is waging a full scale war against Americans in Iraq with by way of their landmines.
Well, you're absolutely right.
I mean, the Fox News and other news outlets are not strictly by what was said by officials.
They they make statements which go well beyond the letter of the statements themselves, and particularly looking at headlines and leads over and over again.
You know, the reports simply say that, you know, Iran is providing its weapons.
So, you know, in effect, I would argue, yes, the neocons did in fact prevail in the end because, you know, that that was the way it got covered.
And that's the way it's still being covered.
OK, now, something in this Esquire article where they talk with Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann is and this is something I hadn't heard before that the Russians were about to install some new equipment at the Bushehr reactor and that if they had done so, it basically would have made an American attack on Bushehr impossible because it would have been a Chernobyl type disaster and spread nuclear material all over the place and so forth.
And so apparently the United States convinced Putin to back off.
And so he claimed temporarily that the Iranians hadn't paid all the money they owed yet.
And so he was delaying this for a few months but that now the Iranians have announced that they've paid Russia everything they owe and the Russians are now due to install this material at Bushehr.
And the way this Esquire article had Hillary Mann and Flint Leverett saying it sounded like this was a line that a wall maybe that Dick Cheney and George Bush are up against here.
If they want to bomb Iran, they have to do it before the Russians install this new material at Bushehr.
Do you know?
Well, you know, that's a very interesting subject.
I have discussed that with Hillary Mann.
I got a slightly different version from her, from the one that you've recounted, which is that there's some, there's strong suspicion on the part of some people in the State Department that in fact Putin and the foreign minister, Lavrov, really put one over, you know, in effect were very clever about blocking the intended war against Iran by the Bush administration when they eventually said, well, you know, this contract that we had with Iran to provide fuel rods, we're not going to be able to deliver the fuel rods because of this financial problem.
And of course, that clearly was not the real reason.
I think that it probably is true that the Russians, what the Russians were doing was delaying, you know, the completion of this until after the Bush administration was out of office.
And in effect, depriving, hoping to deprive the Bush administration of a pretext for war.
Oh, now that's interesting because that's basically the complete opposite thing.
It would seem like if he's trying to stop them, he'd go ahead and install those fuel rods and make it impossible for Bush to bomb it without completely blowing, you know, all the people around there to gamma ray hell.
Well, you know, in fact, don't, I don't think that Bush itself would be the main target.
I mean, you know, it could be a target, of course, but the main target would be Natanz and the centrifuges and so forth.
But you're right.
I mean, of course, there is that apparent contradiction here.
At least there's, let's put it this way, there are two different ways in which there could be a linkage between this contract and the bombing.
One being that it would raise issues of radioactivity on one hand, but on the other hand, that, you know, by failing to deliver the rod while the Bush administration was in office, that the Russians could deprive the Bush administration, the president and the vice president of an opportunity or an excuse for bombing Iran.
And I think what we've seen more recently is certainly circumstantial evidence that the Russians do not intend to maintain the prohibition on sending the fuel rods forever, that's for sure.
So I think that there is some reason, I've been contemplating writing something about this, but haven't gotten there yet, that there is some reason to think that the Russians have played a fairly clever game here.
Yeah.
Well, it also sounds more and more like I need to go ahead and get Hillary Mann and Flint Leavitt on the show if I can.
If you could, that would be really good.
I think they have a lot to say.
Yeah, in fact, that article in Esquire ends with Hillary Mann lamenting, nobody listens, here they are trying to stop a war.
Here's some people, here's Rice's former right hand man and his wife, the lady from the National Security Council saying, hey, everybody, they're trying to start a war with Iran, look out.
And nobody even cares.
Nobody even pays any attention.
That was how the article ended, too.
Well, I think she and Flint Leavitt obviously do feel very frustrated because they would like to see Condoleezza Rice have some backbone, have some spine, and some integrity, and tell the truth, and really speak out what she knows to be true.
And she obviously does not have that backbone, and she does not have that integrity, and she has essentially become complicit in this policy.
And I want to write about that.
I'm now analyzing that aspect of it because Rice and Gates both, but Rice even more so because she's been in there longer, have gradually become more and more complicit with the policy toward Iran, which moves closer and closer.
You know, I keep thinking of 2002, where Colin Powell, it was all on him.
Is he going to salute smartly and do what he's told, or is he going to do the right thing and resign his position, something like that?
He followed his orders?
Absolutely.
She is the new Colin Powell in both in the sense that she occupies his chair, and that she is complicit in many ways with the policy that she knows is disastrous.
Yeah, well, and Gates, too.
In the following sense, that she has gone along with a whole series of steps to ratchet up the pressure on Iran.
And she's done so, I think, in the belief, the self-serving belief that this is the way to get an agreement with Iran.
And of course, the assumption there is, A, that there's a justifiable reason for coercive policy against Iran, and B, that it will work, that Iran can be coerced into essentially bowing to U.S. demand that it stop completely any enrichment of uranium before there's even any negotiation.
This thing's made to fail.
It's been made to fail.
And this is, again, what it says in that Esquire article, is that the line is, well, we've given you a year, Ms. Rice, to come up with something, and you've come up with nothing.
But how could she possibly have come up with anything when the negotiation, as you just said, must begin with Iran ceasing enrichment?
And this is from Jim Loeb's article today on antiwar.com for IPS News, talking about Dick Cheney at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is just a spinoff of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.
Dick Cheney said yesterday, Sunday, Iran will face serious consequences if they do not freeze their nuclear program, and he accused them of, quote, direct involvement of the killing of Americans.
Further, given the nature of Iran's rulers, the declarations of the Iranian president, and the trouble the regime is causing throughout the region, including the direct involvement in the killing of Americans, our country and the entire international community cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions.
The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.
The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message, we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
And it went on like this for half an hour yesterday at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and it sounds to me like, Condoleezza Rice is all out of cards, you're right, it was a self-serving thing, and she blew it, didn't she?
She blew it, and now what you have is an effort by the non-neo-con, or only partially neo-con officials of the administration, to block a policy while at the same time remaining, in effect, silent, while the major proponent of war against Iran speaks out publicly, vociferously, at great length, as you point out, without being contradicted or basically pulled back by anyone in the administration.
So that's a very discouraging prospect that we face under those circumstances.
What does it mean when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is announced by way of Jeff Gerth in the Washington Times that the U.S. is prepared to strike, we have all our planes and weapons and everything in place that we need to attack Iran right now?
Well, you know, this is very interesting.
I mean, I don't know what to make of that, whether to read that as his true, whether it suggests that he is in fact going in the opposite direction from Admiral Fallon, who has made it clear that he is opposed to a war strike against Iran, and has in fact given his assent as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to that policy.
I'm not sure.
But what I do know is that the previous incumbent, Peter Pace, and the previous Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Dijon Bastiani, the Naval Admiral who was in that position, you know, did in fact make it clear to Bush that they would not support it.
And we know that Peter Pace himself, at least he was reported to have been ready to resign if there was an order to carry out a strike against Iran.
There was a report in the London Sunday Times that four or five generals and admirals were prepared to resign if that were the case.
And I think that becomes very credible in knowing what we now know about the December 13th meeting about Fallon's reference to others who were joining him in trying to put the crazies back in the box, and the fact that Bush then began almost immediately to refer to Iraq's role in Iran as the justification rather than talking about a strike against the nuclear facility.
So I mean, I think that there's been a change in the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Interestingly enough, all of those Joint Chiefs who rejected the strike against Iran are gone now.
They've actually been replaced.
Now, you know, how that happened is an interesting story that I, you know, I don't know that it's been fully told.
You know, supposedly, you remember Pace and Dzemba Stiani?
Well, Pace was to be reconfirmed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs last summer.
And instead, the confirmation was taken off the docket, supposedly because the Democrats on the committee were, wanted to make a political point about, you know, the fact that the Joint Chief, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should have given better advice to the president about Iraq.
And unfortunately, they decided that they would take this out on pace over the Iraq issue.
Was that genuine, or were they just using that as an excuse to get him out of there?
Well, that's an interesting question, and I don't know the answer to it.
I'm curious to know whether Levin understood, whether he'd read the report by Joe Klein about Pace and the Joint Chiefs having refused to go along with a strike against Iran.
And if he did know that, whether he was unwilling to do anything to keep the people who were opposed to the president on a strike against Iran in office, whether he was responding to AIPAC pressure to get rid of Pace and Dijon Bastiani, that's a question.
That's all I can say at this point.
Wow, very interesting.
Well, we can always count on those Democrats to intervene and check the power of the president, can't we?
And you know, this is the guy who says, the president who says, hey, I'm the commander guy.
I follow the advice of the generals, and that's what proves what a great president I am, unlike the evil Democrats who want to micromanage events on the battlefield, which is actually partially true.
I'm a commander guy.
I go along with what the commanders say, and yet we find that every time there's a commander, whether it's Abizaid or Casey or Pace or any of these people who opposes surge or opposes war with Iran, off with their heads, bring in the new guy.
This is an unprecedented degree of manipulation of the political manipulation of the personnel who make up the Joint Chiefs by the president.
And I'm suggesting at least that there was, in fact, a degree of politics in the fact that Pace and Dijon Bastiani were not reconfirmed as chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
You know, I do think that along with the retirement of Abizaid, which I'm suspicious about, and Casey's basically being moved to the Army chief of staff position after having obviously made a deal with the White House, I think that this is an unprecedented manipulation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by the president in order to carry out a war policy.
All right.
Now, there were accusations over the weekend, and it's hard for me to keep track of which of these NATO commanders in Afghanistan are which, but apparently they claim at least they seized a shipment of arms coming into Afghanistan from Iran, and now the Afghanistan so-called government today is saying, oh, no, the Iranians are our friends, and maybe they found some weapons, but there's no proof tying the weapons to Iran.
So I wonder who's telling the truth.
Obviously, the Afghanistan government could have plenty of reason to play down the Iranian government influence if they're trying their best to get along and so forth.
Who's telling the truth there, do you know?
Well, I think the point about weapons coming across the border, presumably coming from Iran into Afghanistan, is that there are many players who have an interest in getting weapons to the Taliban, and it's not Iran.
What we're talking about here are Al Qaeda-type anti-Iranian forces working between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It's basically the anti-Iranian government forces who are supporting the Taliban.
We know that there are links between the extreme Wahhabist or extreme Sunni jihadists operating out of Pakistan, the Taliban forces and the Al Qaeda forces working inside Afghanistan, and the extreme Sunni forces opposing the Iranian government from within Iran and from outside Iran.
So if I were a betting man and someone asked me to bet who was behind the supply of arms going to the Taliban from the Iranian side of the border, I would suggest that it was the dissidents, the anti-Iranian government forces operating out of Iran, who undoubtedly have contacts with people within the military who have contacts within the security forces in Iran, and in this area of Iran which is abutting Afghanistan, it's sort of a wild territory.
It's a territory the Iranian government does not exercise very good political control over.
There's a huge story there that's simply not being told at all.
It's being ignored.
Well, and it sounds like the guys who you're saying are most likely to be delivering arms to the Taliban are the same kinds of guys who are our friends.
For example, the terrorist group Jundala out of Pakistan, they're basically Taliban-type guys, and we're supporting their dissent and acts of terrorism inside Iran right now, right?
Well, I think that's probably true, although I haven't seen any solid evidence yet.
It's going to probably be impossible to ever get a smoking gun.
But there have been reports along those lines, at least.
There have been reports, and one of the people who's been writing about this is Selig Harrison, a veteran journalist who has covered that part of Asia for 35 or 40 years, and who is a very solid analyst, a solid journalist.
I do trust his judgment.
I think he's probably right on in regard to his analysis here.
And what's his name again?
Selig Harrison.
This is another person you should have on your show, Scott.
He's at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., a liberal think tank, and has visited the region repeatedly.
He's been in Iran, he's been in Afghanistan, he's been in Pakistan, and has come back with his own reports and analysis.
Well, you know, I saw this article in the Baltimore Sun.
Report says that the buildup in Iraq gained little.
The surge was basically a failure.
And I thought, oh, well, this headline writer certainly just doesn't understand the score here.
The surge was a wonderful success.
They just bought an extra year.
I mean, that's what the surge was about, really, was just dragging this thing out, coming up with one more excuse to say that, you know, a big change is right around the corner.
Everybody hang tight and take this thing for a whole other year now.
One of the other issues, Scott, that I think we have to keep our eye on is the degree to which, you know, I think this is undoubtedly true to some extent.
The question is to what extent it's true that the surge policy was always intended to provide a potential additional force that could be used to cross the border and go into Iran.
One of the things that...
There's force protection in Iraq when the Iranians fight back.
Well, exactly.
And that, of course, means that the main point would be to provoke a wider conflict, an escalatory process.
Okay.
Now, listen, we're up against the time.
We have one or two minutes here.
And this is something that we've been going over this for months and months.
I think I wrote my first article about war with Iran more than two years ago and the neocons pushing for it and so forth.
There seems to be kind of a whole level of unreality to this, no matter who I talk to, all of you experts and journalists and think tankers and all you people I have on this show to talk about war with Iran, go down the laundry list, the closing of the gates of Hormuz, attacks on our guys in Iraq, possible coup d'etat and unrest in Pakistan, the spreading of the war region-wide, conflagration, you know, slippery slopes that could lead to all kinds of hell.
And everyone has agreed, the people who fear war and the people who say, nah, don't worry, it's probably not going to happen, all agree that the consequences of a war with Iran will be so vast and unpredictable beyond, you know, the laundry list of the, you know, ten most obvious consequences and the unpredictability of what could happen after that once a war with Iran starts.
It sort of seems like, yeah, maybe Dick Cheney and his group of crazies want this or something, but it must be that truth and wisdom and reality and the real limitations of power as they exist here in reality have got to be able to prevent these guys from going to war, right?
I mean, the president's at 24% right now.
Can he start another war?
He can, he can, of course.
You know, there's a kind of perverse logic here by which a president who has lost all semblance of legitimacy through, you know, in terms of public support is, you know, is really uninterested in what the polls say and uninterested in what sort of political support there is for war.
And I think that that is probably something that needs to be taken very seriously.
But I would just say that, in closing, really, that, you know, the point about the possible conflagration in the region, I think that Gates and Rice both understand that very well.
I think that they're very much afraid of that.
I think that, and I come back to Rice in particular, I think that she is so compromised by her having gone down the road of relying on coercion on Iran month after month, year after year, and that she is now so compromised by that that she cannot speak out, I think that her opposition has been almost fatally weakened by that fact.
All right, everybody.
Gareth Porter, The American Prospect, Huffington Post, IPS News, Antiwar.com.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, as always.
All right, y'all.
See you tomorrow.
11 to 1, Texas time.
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