01/10/08 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Hi y'all, it's Antiwar Radio on KAS 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and my friend Gareth Porter is on the phone.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service, writes sometimes for the American Prospect, the Huffington Post, and we feature all his Interpress Service articles at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
He's also a historian, primarily on the Vietnam War and so forth like that.
Today we're here to talk about, well, as he's always here to talk about, the situation with relations between the United States and Iran, and particularly as they're heating up over this alleged incident with the speedboats in the Persian Gulf.
Gareth, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be on again.
It's good to have you here.
So, I guess the headline today is that the Iranians are claiming that this videotape is fake, that this isn't even what happened at all.
What do you think about that?
Well, I think it's very clear that the video that was put together, edited by the U.S.
Navy and the Pentagon, did not reflect fully what happened.
And I can tell you that even, it's interesting, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley made some remarks yesterday which are remarkably revealing in that he said, well, you know, this is not the whole story.
It never is.
And I think it's fair to say that what we got from the U.S.
Pentagon was very much an expurgated, not just expurgated, but distorted view of what happened.
All right, well, let's rewind.
What did happen, to the best of your understanding here?
To the best of my understanding, which is clearly incomplete, what happened was that there was a situation in which Iranian boats approached the U.S., there was communication clearly by both sides, and the Iranian boats then, at least one boat came close enough to the U.S. warships to be visible from the ships, at least one of the ships themselves.
But it's not clear that any other were close enough to be seen by the U.S. ships.
Certainly the video itself does not show that.
The, you know, I think it's undoubtedly true that the Iranian boats dropped something into the water, as was suggested by the commander of the Fifth Fleet.
And I take that to be probably a kind of symbolic gesture to show that they're capable of mining the area, if necessary, to respond to a U.S. attack.
But, you know, it's very clear to me, and was made clear, I think, by the briefing made by the commander of the Fifth Fleet, Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgrove, that none of the U.S. warships really ever felt seriously endangered by the presence of the Iranian boats.
They knew that they were not well-armed.
They were not armed with any weapons that could harm the U.S. ships.
They did not see anything that caused them to feel that they were in imminent danger in any sense.
So I think the main headline here is that the idea that there was a confrontation which was about to break out into a sea battle, a battle at sea, is a complete fiction.
And I have to add that I think that this is perhaps the nadir of the U.S. media's coverage of the issue of U.S.
-Iranian relations, because of the way they hyped this up.
Even after the admiral of the commander of the Fifth Fleet essentially punctured the original version of this as a major naval confrontation, a significant naval confrontation, they continued to ignore what he said in his briefing and to play this up as though it was a major crisis.
Well, maybe they're lazy like me and they just didn't bother reading the statement of the admiral.
Well, these were reporters who had either been at the briefing or who clearly were made aware of what he said at the briefing, so I'm afraid laziness does not cover it.
Oh, yeah, no.
Laziness doesn't sound like it does cover it there.
Well, so how often does this kind of thing happen where their boats approach our boats and say, hi, we're Iran, you're America, check one, check two, and then drive away?
Well, I think this has undoubtedly happened on a number of occasions, and this has been admitted by the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon.
And they have said that in the past, when there have been incidents where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy, that is the naval forces associated with the IRGC, have approached U.S. ships, there have been cases in the past where the U.S. ships have communicated with them, and usually when that has happened, according to past statements by the U.S. Navy, the IRGC has not responded to communications from the United States.
So, in other words, there have been occasions, I'm suggesting, where the IRGC have approached in the vicinity, obviously observing U.S. naval ships in the Gulf, and the U.S. has communicated with them, and according to the U.S., they have not responded in the past.
So, I do not know whether there are occasions where the IRGC has, in fact, initiated the communication and said, you know, give us your numbers, as was shown in the Iranian video released today.
Oh, no, I didn't realize that the Iranians had released their own video.
The Iranians have now released their own video.
I have not yet seen the video.
I've seen the reports on it.
Apparently, this happened relatively late this morning.
According to the reports, the video shows an Iranian officer in one of the small boats talking on a phone to a U.S. ship, purportedly talking to a U.S. ship, saying, coalition warship 773, give us your number, your serial number.
And the video reportedly shows that a voice at the other end with an American accent says, this is coalition warship 73, a region loud and clear.
So, it seems to establish that there was communication in this case, initially, at least by the IRGC, or at least an Iranian officer in a small boat, such as the ones that were apparently involved in the incident, communicating with U.S. warship and having a communication return.
Of course, none of this was suggested at all in the U.S. video, heavily edited and apparently rejiggered video in terms of audio being added after the video was shot, and apparently done so in a way that could have affected the apparent sequence of events.
Well, you know, the Iranians said that the Americans had just spliced together old footage of previous incidents.
I guess the same thing could be said about their tape.
It's obviously possible that the Iranians released a video that shows a different incident.
We have no way of knowing that at this moment.
And, you know, having watched the five-minute video released by the U.S. Pentagon, it's impossible to tell from that what actually transpired, apart from obviously just a very few minutes.
Yeah.
Well, now, the Iranians have claimed that they do this all the time, that every time their boats see our boats, that they call each other on the radio and say hi.
Is that not right, then?
Well, I think it's absolutely...
There's no question that the regular Iranian Navy does, in fact, communicate regularly with the U.S. Navy and the Gulf.
There's no doubt that the two navies have, I would say, a cooperative and possibly even cordial relation in the Gulf.
In other words, they know what to expect of each other, and there have been no incidents reported in which either side has acted in a way that has caused a problem for the other.
This is not necessarily true of the IRGC Navy forces, which operate in a less conventional way.
So, I mean, that adds another dimension to the picture.
And so, therefore, we have to say that it's not clear what might have transpired in terms of whether the IRGC did, in fact, communicate ahead of time with the U.S. Navy.
Mm-hmm.
Now, I think what is clear is that this was not a confrontation at sea, which came close to being a battle.
That is a matter of hype that the U.S. Pentagon deliberately put out and which the media swallowed with apparent glee on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Well, so does that mean that there's...that the policy remains that George Bush, as he stated after the NIE, about their nuclear non-weapons program came out, that this doesn't change a thing?
Is that... are we are where we were a year ago?
That we have, you know, navies in the Gulf on the verge of starting a war here?
No, we're not on the verge of war.
I don't think that's the case.
Quite the contrary.
I think this attempt to hype up this incident is precisely a response by the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and the White House to create an atmosphere in which they can make the argument in the Middle East that the United States is still taking a hard line, that Iran is still a threat, that there's still an atmosphere of crisis, even though other evidence strongly suggests that that's not really the case, that the two sides are not really closer to war, but rather much farther from war than they were in 2007.
So this incident was seized on as kind of a prop for George Bush's Middle East trip, basically?
Exactly.
I think that circumstantial evidence certainly points very strongly to that conclusion.
And so what's he doing over there?
Trying to shore up all the Sunni Arab states against Iran?
Exactly.
He's trying to keep together a very, very shaky coalition of states who the United States, through the Bush administration, has been trying to use as an instrument of an anti-Iranian policy.
And I must say that all of the evidence that I've seen suggests that the Gulf states in particular, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, are very reluctant now to stick their necks out on behalf of a strongly, openly anti-Iranian policy.
They do not see that that's the way to go in light of all that has transpired in recent months.
Right.
Gareth, isn't this Henry Kissinger's redirection here from Seymour Hersh's reporting, that we're trying to basically reorient our policy back to the old policy before George Bush reversed it, which was empower the Sunni Arabs instead of the Iranians?
Absolutely.
I think that has been the effort by the Bush administration.
But I think that this has run into some problems in recent months that have exacerbated the difficulties that they've had with pulling together that coalition.
I mean, I think, particularly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have become more skeptical about this, you know, in part because of the NIE showing that there is not the kind of imminent nuclear crisis that the Bush administration was pushing as a line in 2007.
And I think also because they just have the sense now that the Bush administration is kind of a loose cannon that cannot be trusted.
Well, and didn't I just read that all the different Gulf states, or at least a few of them, Saudi Arabia and I think Egypt, have recently received Mahdi Najjar or his aides and had kind of peace agreements and talks and visits and all this kind of friendly relations just in the last couple of months?
Yes.
I mean, the Iranians have certainly been cultivating them as best they can, as they have, I must say, for more than a decade now.
They have been very assiduous in trying to tamp down the Arab states' anti-Iranian feelings, and particularly those of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, who are obviously, you know, the most, if you will, neurotic of the Arab states in regard to the issue of Iran.
And I think the Iranians have made some progress in their persuading the Gulf states that they can talk among themselves and reach some modus vivendi despite the U.S. policy of trying to stir up enmity among them, or between them.
Well, but here's the thing I don't understand.
What's the point of redirecting everything against the Iranians while at the same time, I mean, literally yesterday, and I'm sorry, you and I, I force you to be a broken record on this subject every week on this show, Gareth, but damn it.
It's a pleasure to be a broken record for you.
Well, it says right here, a surge against Maliki, Washington Post, David Ignatius, Wednesday, January 9th, yesterday.
We're sick and tired of Maliki, so now we're going straight for Hakeem's man, Abdul Mahdi, which is the, you know, I guess I've always considered Al-Dawah and Skiri to be more or less the same difference anyway, but when it comes down to it, it's the Supreme Islamic Council who are the ones closest to Iran, and now we're going to, you know, in 2005, when they were preparing on who was going to be the prime minister, they tried to put this guy, Abdul Al-Mahdi, in there, and they had to work a deal and split the difference with Sauder and put the guy instead, Jafari, and then now Maliki.
Well, you know, I would say, Scott, that what you're pointing to underlines the utter incoherence and irrationality, the lack of any logic really underlying the national security policy of the United States.
You're pointing to the contradictory, the self-contradictory nature of different strands of the policy.
Here we are, as you say, using the most pro-Iranian political figures in Iraq, and at the same time, we're trying to stir up Arab states to oppose Iran.
And, you know, why do they do that?
Because they want to accomplish things that are contradictory.
On one hand, they want to use the pro-Iranian, you know, both in the government and in the Syri, what used to be called the Syri, to try to keep control of or get better control of the Sauder movement in the south.
And, of course, Sauder, as we've talked about in the past, Sauder and al-Hakim are bitter rivals because of their family background.
Their fathers were bitter rivals in Iraq.
And the real problem the U.S. faces for its occupation in Iraq, of course, is Sauder, and not the Iranians or the pro-Iranians at all.
And then in a larger sense, in the region, the United States wants to stir up anti-Iranian feeling.
So, you know, there's no real final, you know, bottom logic to the policy.
It's just that those are the objectives that they have chosen for a sort of political reason.
I've always meant to be...
Gareth, you still there?
All right, folks, looks like we lost Gareth Porter.
He was driving down the road.
NSA jammed his signal.