10/31/07 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Back to Iran.
Top story today on Antiwar.com.
For Neocons, Iran aim is still regime change.
Independent historian and investigative reporter Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Thanks again, Scott, as always.
Good to have you on here, and this is interesting.
More reporting based on your discussions with former NSC staffer Hillary Mann.
Is that right?
That's right.
She is the key sort of link between some history which is known and some which is not known and coming up with a slightly different perspective on what has been happening, at least in the neoconservative wing of the Bush administration over the past five years with regard to Iran.
Okay, and now for those not familiar, Hillary Mann is former staffer on the National Security Council, and she and her husband Flint Leverett basically are now doing a full-scale media push as best they can to try to avert another aggressive war in the Middle East by the United States.
Is that right?
That's right, and I think that they both have some very valuable experience to offer the American public and the media in terms of their perspective, their knowledge of both the inner workings of the administration and their insights into Iranian policy as well.
Now, I have to tell you, Gareth, I should be used to these things, but still, no, I was, I admit, at least mildly surprised when I read in your article that within the administration, they refused to accept the reality that the Iranian-backed Shiites had come to power in Iraq due to American policy until the end of 2005.
That can't be right.
And I'm not in a position, of course, and I'm not in a position to guarantee that every single person who considered himself or herself neoconservative within the administration shared that view.
But I think that this is based on Hillary Mann's acquaintances with neoconservatives, who she had known when she had been associated with the Washington Institute on Near East Policy twice in the 1990s, and was able to follow their thinking while she was in the administration and then both within the NSC and later when she was in the State Department.
And I quote her as saying that she was astonished, I think that's the word I used, who are astounded to find out that the neoconservatives that she spoke with privately in 2004, 2003, 2004, and even 2005 were still assuring her that things were on track to have the strategic effect that the neoconservatives had predicted from the beginning, which was that a major military victory by the United States to liberate the Shiites in Iraq would then turn them into allies against Iran and that that would be part of the overall effect of the takedown of the Saddam regime in Iraq, which would shake the regime in Iran for its foundation.
Now, there's more to the story, of course.
There are other parts of this neoconservative view on Iran, which gave them the feeling, obviously quite false, that the regime in Iran was very shaky, very vulnerable to being shaken from outside by the exhibit of U.S. power in Iraq.
The other important factor in the viewpoint of these neoconservatives was Syria, the Ba'athist regime in Syria, which they regarded as an important prop of the Iranian regime because Syria was such an important ally.
And if the United States could take down the Ba'athist regime there in Syria, that this would further discombobulate the Iranian regime and leave it shorn of its prestige, legitimacy, and therefore would encourage the opposition folk in Tehran to take to the streets and so forth.
What stopped them from going into Syria right after the invasion of Iraq?
Well, that story certainly has not been fully told, but clearly this was opposed by Colin Powell in particular, and he definitely still had some clout, had some credibility with Bush on these matters.
When Wolfowitz tried to argue for going into Syria, immediately after the Saddam regime disappeared, this ran into Colin Powell's opposition, and that didn't fly.
And which way it was leaning and so forth.
Would you include Dick Cheney with that?
Well, I do in the following sense.
I mean, you know, we don't have anything directly from his own mouth to rely on, but the key point is that he hired David Wormster, who is one of the most prominent neoconservative theorists, you might say, and the architect of both the Shiite strategy in Iraq, which he argued in the 1999 book, would, as I say, would help shake the Tehran regime by showing that Iraqi Shiite are not only different from their brethren in Iran, but also get along better in this democratic system that would be set up, and therefore that they would hold up a model for Iranian Shiite to emulate.
And Wormster is very much on the record and very clear in his views on both the effect of the takedown of the Saddam regime and the takedown of the perspective, the prospective takedown, I should say, of the Syrian Baathist regime and their effect on the hoped for change of regime in Iran.
So that is on the record very clear.
The sort of regime change by the exhibit of U.S. power and the impotence of Iran to do anything about it in an interview that he gave to The Telegraph in the U.K. after he left Dick Cheney's office last September.
So I think we have fairly good documentation on Wormster's viewpoint.
And the fact that Cheney chose not only to hire him in the first place, but to stay with him as his Middle Eastern advisor all this time certainly suggests that Cheney was satisfied with his views.
The point, basically, in this article, what you're telling me is that they believed in this ridiculous religion all the way up until, when, the end of 2005, the beginning of 2006, and only then did they say, well, I guess we are going to have to bomb Iran after all when they had planned not to?
That is the picture that emerges from the insights that Hillary Mann gives us with regard to neoconservative thinking.
She cites the fact that she was still hearing this as late as early and mid-2005, and she says that a critical factor was, in addition to the dawning on these people, that it just really wasn't working in Iraq, that it was a mess, an unholy mess of strife between Sunnis and Shiites, but also that the election, oddly enough, of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran was a kind of breaking point for the neoconservative view that there was still very bright hope for regime change without the United States being the primary force by going in militarily.
That is because the neoconservatives had a view of Iranian politics, which is really rather unique.
They believed that the real enemy in Iran was not the extreme right, was not the extreme conservative, it was the reformist.
Those were the people who stood in the way of a revolutionary change in the regime because they were pretending that you could have reform without revolution.
The important thing was to basically get rid of the reformists.
What they were seeing in 2003, 2004, in both local and national legislative elections, was that the reformists were in trouble.
They were being pushed back by the conservatives.
For the neoconservatives, that was good news because that would remove what they regarded as the single biggest obstacle to violent revolutionary upheaval from below in Iran.
So when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected, on the basis of really putting together a constituency that was not simply a MOA, but also sort of nationalism and populism, this, according to Hilary Mann, was viewed as really a kind of death knell for the view that now we have the way clear for regime change from below in Iran.
And interesting that all the guys around Ahmadinejad, when he got elected, came out and personally thanked George Bush and the media for helping him win by threatening the Iranians that they better not elect a hardliner.
So they all turned out to vote for the hardliner.
This was July 2005.
Well, and this is really one of the little examined linkages between domestic Iranian politics and the policy of the United States.
I mean, it is true that the phenomenon of Iranian nationalism and in the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a relatively new phenomenon.
And, you know, you still hear Noram Todorov, in his now famous debate with Fareed Zakaria, quoting Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomeini, back in the early 80s, as saying, you know, he doesn't believe in patriotism or nationalism.
He says, let Iran burn.
That was not the viewpoint that was being voiced during the election campaign of 2005.
Quite the contrary, nationalism and patriotism had become really central to Iranian electoral politics.
And I think that was somehow beginning to dawn on the neoconservatives that they had a new problem there.
Now, it's interesting, over and over again with this administration, the separation between the facts and their talking points.
You know, I understand that politicians lie.
That's how they operate.
That's okay.
But it seems like the lies that they tell are really the same things they tell each other in their private meetings, and they believe their own garbage.
Well, this is absolutely right, Scott.
And that's why I think when you're talking about the neoconservatives, and let's face it now, there's a dwindling number of these in the administration, and we have to be clear on that, that most of the major voices, including David Wormster, have left the administration.
John Bolton, of course, has left.
Wolfowitz left much earlier.
Fife has left.
You know, all of these people who represented a very tight-knit team, who shared some of the basic premises, are gone now.
And that leaves, basically, Elliott Abrams and a few stragglers left behind.
But Abrams, as Deputy National Security Advisor, still has a good deal of clout, and is able to maneuver bureaucratically, I think, to affect policy in a way that certainly is far beyond the numbers of neoconservatives within the administration.
But I think we should be clear that this article is just about the neoconservative, the neocon element of the administration.
And like everything else that you write in 1200 words or so, it is only part of the picture, and I want to be clear on that.
And now, back to the Reformers.
I remember in the late 90s, and I guess the early part of this century, the President was this guy, Khatami, and he was allied with this other politician, I think, Ross and Johnny, maybe their rivals.
Khatami and Ross and Johnny first were rivals, but both of them were also rivals of Ahmadinejad.
And Khatami was certainly the one who the neoconservatives targeted as their main enemy.
Well, if the neocons considered the Iranian Reformers to be the enemy, rather than the right-wingers, was it, you're saying, well, I'm confused, because then when Ahmadinejad got elected, which seems like would be what they wanted, then that was then that reality came crashing down around them, and they realized how much more difficult it was going to be than they thought.
Well, I think that's right.
They did realize that, and as I say, I think it's because, and I have to admit that this does suggest a degree of sophistication that one would not expect from the neocon.
On the left, according to Hilary Mann, they did acknowledge that there was something new going on with Ahmadinejad's election.
That is to say, he did represent something more than simply the narrow set of very right-wing mullahs who one has associated with the extremist views of Ahmadinejad on certain issues, such as Israel.
And so they did recognize that something else was going on here, in addition to the fact that he was aligned with one faction of the clerical establishment in Iran.
According to Hilary Mann, one does have to say that the extreme right in this country was beginning to pay closer attention to what was really going on there, and was saying, uh-oh, we've got a problem with our theory.
Oh, sure.
I mean, the idea that it took any longer than any point at the beginning of 2004 to understand that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had inherited the place.
I mean, don't these guys read Robert Dreyfus?
Don't they know?
Don't they know what the hell on the ground it is?
I take that as a rhetorical question.
Yeah, I guess so.
I remember reading an anecdote one time about Paul Bremer said to the 23-year-old daughter of a Republican donor who was his aide on the ground in Iraq, who's this guy Sistani?
Referring to the pope of the Shia, the highest-ranking religious cleric in all of Shi'idim, and she said, oh, he's some minor cleric, it doesn't matter.
And I can understand that going on in 2003 or whatever, these know-nothings, but it took them until the summer, the fall of 2005 to understand that, hey, we just gave the south of Iraq over to the Iranians?
I think you're pointing to a phenomenon that can only be understood in the context of bureaucratic politics in which people who are very, shall we say, have a higher estimate of their own intelligence than is warranted, have committed themselves, not only privately but in the case of Wormser and others in the administration and outside the administration, like a direct at the AEI, to this idea which had nothing to do with reality.
And so the logical thing to do, not logical, but the human thing to do in that situation, particularly when you have a lot of power, is to cling to your own views and continue to interpret away those pieces of evidence that conflict with it.
And that's the way you get into war.
I mean, you simply explain away everything that conflicts with your interpretation of reality, and that interpretation continues to guide you right down the path to destruction, to disaster.
And that's exactly how they got into Iraq.
And I must say, in a slightly different context, with a different set of players, I do think that that's the path that we're taking into war with Iran as well.
People who have a particular view of reality, who have a particular assumption that they refuse to give up, partly because they have already committed themselves to it.
And as time goes by, and the cost of admitting that you're wrong gets higher, they become more and more reluctant to admit that they were wrong and therefore take steps that end in disaster.
And this brings me to a theme that I'm going to start hammering away at from now on, which is the direct, I think, amazing parallel between the path that we took to war in Vietnam and the path that we're taking to war in Iran.
Because I think that those two situations merit very, very close attention because they're so similar.
You know, Daniel Ellsberg told me, and it's in his book Secrets, a Memoir of Vietnam, that he went as a civilian advisor to the Pentagon, I think it was, or maybe he was actually in the Marine Corps at the time still, and was some kind of special advisor who went around South Vietnam taking measure of things.
And he said not only he knew, but everyone knew in 1961 that this thing was going nowhere.
I think that's certainly true of those people who were at the rice roots level who were not bucking for a promotion and who didn't depend on buttering up their superior by telling them something that wasn't true.
I think that's true, but of course the way the bureaucracy, the bureaucratic structure works is that there are built-in incentives for not telling the truth, for telling a lie, because that is what conforms with the line which is politically useful to those who have power.
Right.
Now, when you talk about reality finally getting through to these people in the summer, I guess, apparently, of 2005 with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or however you say it, I'm reminded of Philip Giraldi's article for the American Conservative August 1st issue.
It was right then that his sources at the Strategic Air Command leaked to him that Cheney had ordered them to draw up plans for a full-scale air war against Iran, including the use of nuclear weapons.
And this is in 2005?
Right.
The summer of 2005 was when that story first broke.
And it was August 6th?
August 1st issue.
It actually came out in the middle of July.
Well, of course, the Iranian presidential election was June of 2005, and I'm not in a position to try to draw that link, but that's an interesting couple of dates to conjure with.
I'm sure you're familiar with Scott Ritter's articles in Al Jazeera from 2005, sleepwalking to war with Iran, and the war with Iran has already begun, right?
Right, yeah, and this, of course, represents another side of the policy, which I think, of course, is on a different track.
I mean, you know, they were always ready to send in special operations people.
That was, of course, a covert policy which is on a different track from the one we're talking about here.
Sure, and actually, what I was going to refer to in one of those articles was Plan A, B, and C.
This is how we're going to get Iran to stop making nuclear weapons.
Plan A is we'll have the EU3 talk to them.
Plan B is we'll have the UN do sanctions, and then Plan C is we'll bomb them if absolutely necessary.
And Ritter said that's not Plan A, B, and C. That's step one, two, and three in the run-up to this war.
These are the excuses that they have to lay down in terms of international diplomacy so that they can say that they've tried everything, and now they are left with the only option, which is to start a war.
Do you agree with that analysis?
It would be interesting to know who the sources were for that or who the source was and how they fit into the spectrum of people within the administration, to what extent they represented the hardcore neoconservative line.
You know, it could certainly be consistent with what this story suggests.
What I'm suggesting in the overall take-home lesson from this is that the neoconservatives were never interested primarily in the nuclear weapons issue.
That was never their concern.
The concern was always regime change.
That was the primary overweening interest that they were trying to accomplish, trying to achieve.
The nuclear weapons issue was strictly, or I should say, primarily instrumental in achieving the regime change objective.
They were interested in regime change before the nuclear issue was really even on the agenda.
You have to recall that in the Bush administration, the Iranian nuclear program was not even discussed publicly as an issue until 2002, when the opposition, National Council of Resistance in Iran, supposedly discovered the new secret facility in Iran, which, as we know, is not really secret in the sense that Iran was not obliged to report it to the IAEA until nuclear material actually was put in it.
This was at a very early stage.
And we now know that, of course, the information about that came from Israeli intelligence.
It was passed on through the MEK.
But in any case, it was only after mid-2002, after that report surfaced, that the Bush administration began to even talk about that issue.
So that was well after the neocons had set the target for regime change in Iran, albeit a longer-term target.
They didn't expect it to happen right away, following the expected invasion and occupation of Iraq.
So the main thing I'm trying to say is that the neocons have been consistent from the beginning, that they were interested in regime change all the way.
They hoped to do it with a minimum of U.S. force.
They never said there would be no U.S. force required or involved.
I think they saw it as sort of topping it off at the end, bringing it down sort of a coup de grace.
But they always argued that this would not be another Iraq, that this would require much less U.S. military force.
It would be mainly done by the Iranians themselves.
And then when that became clearly impossible, they then turned to the idea of the military option.
And they're now prepared to essentially destroy large parts of Iran in whatever degree is necessary in order to advance their regime change agenda.
Okay, now, I know I've got to let you go, but I have to ask you, how is it that they think that's going to work?
Because they've accepted now this reality that, in fact, there is some kind of Iranian nationalism.
If they bomb the place, okay, they can set back Iran's nuclear program for a few years.
But how is that going to affect regime change?
We would need a full-scale invasion, just like in Iraq, wouldn't we?
Well, you know, I think that you've got me stumped there.
My only answer is that the remaining neo-cons in the administration have to be seen as really very, very extreme, extremist people who do not think very rationally, who are capable of making leaps of faith which are impossible for the ordinary mortals like you and I to make.
And I can't even begin to tell you what those leaps might be.
But, you know, presumably, these are people who would listen to the Air Force briefers and say, uh-huh, yeah, they can basically make sure that the Iranians can't respond, or they can threaten the Iranians with such devastation that they'd better not respond, and therefore we're safe in going ahead with the kind of strikes that would help us bring about regime change.
So that would be the kind of extreme thinking that would have to be behind this.
But beyond that, I'm really sort of stumped as to how they would square their concept of regime change, of using force for regime change with the obvious reality that a U.S. military attack would have the opposite effect on the political situation within Iran.
You're absolutely right.
All right, everybody, Gareth Porter, he writes for the Huffington Post, for the American Prospect, for Interpress Service, and you can find all his IPS articles at antiwar.com/porter.
Thanks very much for your answers today, Gareth, appreciate it.
Thank you very much.