Alright folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide at chaosradioaustin.org and antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'd like to welcome back my friend and regular guest, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He is an independent historian and journalist, writes regularly for IPS News.
You can also find him sometimes at salon.com, the Huffington Post, the American Prospect.
We run all of his IPS stuff at antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Good afternoon, Scott.
How are you doing today?
I'm good.
Good, because I need you.
The vice president is trying to make my neighbors believe that we need to have a war with Iran and he's been trying to push this thing.
And I think that one of the most instructive narratives about why not to have a war with Iran can be explained in the inter-government fighting.
This general versus this secretary versus this vice president and which side does this secretary come on and what happened over at the National Security Council.
These detailed little things that somehow you're able to figure out and explain in your articles shed so much light on exactly who's behind this and how truthful their statements and their motivations are, as they claim.
So let's just start with two articles ago at antiwar.com slash Porter, Fearing Escalation, Pentagon Fought Cheney, Iran Plan.
And this goes back through about a year and a half worth of intra-agency fighting.
Why don't you just say it how you like.
Well, you know, the significance of this article, from my point of view, is that there was a residue of doubt in my mind about whether this whole series of articles that have been really generated from within the administration, but particularly the article by McClatchy newspapers in August of 2007 saying that Cheney had advocated a series of strikes or a set of strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard bases in Iran a couple of, a few weeks earlier.
That's Cheney urging strikes on Iran, Thursday, August 9th, 2007 by Warren Strobel, John Wolcott and Nancy Youssef.
So I'm saying that there was a residue of doubt in my mind that that story and a few others might be really a psyop, psychological operation engineered by the Bush administration itself to intimidate Iran.
And that basically the anti-war movement, myself, yourself and others who oppose a U.S. war against Iran could be essentially used by the administration by spreading these stories about a U.S., possible U.S. attack against Iran, essentially using people who are opposed to a war as part of a apparatus to essentially intimidate Iran and that this might not actually be an actual plan.
Well, sure, that's occurred to me too.
I mean, let's get real.
We've been talking about, oh no, Cheney wants to start a war with Iran since 2004.
Of course.
I know many others have had the same question in their mind.
Is this real or not?
And so what I found in doing this article that you're referring to last week is that it's not really a psyop.
It's not something that is being manipulated by the Bush administration to scare Iran.
This was real.
This was a genuine effort by the vice president to push through a policy of strikes against bases in Iran.
Now, how can you be so sure?
Well, this is because someone finally has gone on the record publicly by name, been willing to be named in saying that indeed there was a fight within the Bush administration over a proposal by the vice president for strikes against bases in Iran.
And that's a former deputy assistant secretary of state, Jay Scott Carpenter.
He was in the administration during precisely during this period of struggle between the Pentagon and the vice president and was able to at least begin to shed some light on what actually happened during that period.
So what I'm trying to sort of set the context of this article by saying that what's really going on here is that there is a genuine struggle within the administration that involves Cheney trying to carry out strikes and the rest of the administration basically opposing him, but particularly the Pentagon and the military leadership.
So we're really dealing with a genuine threat.
The threat has not ended, and I'll try to explain why that's the case.
But what Scott Carpenter told me on the record was that when Cheney made his proposal, the military came back and said, look, we insist that this administration, instead of deciding after the Iranians have responded to such an attack by carrying out some attacks either against U.S. forces through their ties with Shiite militias in Iraq or in some other fashion in the Middle East, and the struggle between the United States and Iran begins to escalate.
Let's decide today, now, before any such process of escalation begins, how far is the United States going to go?
How far is this escalation going to go?
Now, we talked about this a few weeks ago.
You pointed to an article, or an op-ed, in the Washington Post where a former Bush insider wrote that there was a consideration, a fight over, the term was escalation dominance.
Not necessarily who will be able to win the war outright, but who will be able to dictate the terms of the battle, and that the worry was that the Iranians would be able to dictate the terms far more than the American military would like.
That, of course, was an indication that there was this kind of debate going on from somebody who had been a former advisor to Bush, a speechwriter for Bush, but who was no longer in the administration when this was taking place.
So I did cite that in one of the interviews with you as an indication that we knew that there was something going on there, or at least we had good reason to believe it.
This is the first time that somebody has actually emerged from the administration who was able to say, based on his own knowledge of the back and forth between the White House and the Defense Department and military leadership, what the nature of the debate was.
And he, in fact, does essentially confirm what this Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter, was saying in a Washington Post column, actually right at the time that it was going on, which was July of 2007.
So wait, let me make sure that I understand here.
Basically Cheney's saying, let's do this, let's do this.
And the military said, okay, but what we need to do is have a plan in advance for just how far we're willing to take this on paper.
Cheney wants to always go headlong into everything and let the results sort themselves out.
That's why Iran owns the south of Iraq now.
And so, but the generals have said, no, no, no, if we're going to do this, Mr. President, we need to really work out the game plan here.
And the problem is that game plan reveals that this is not a doable exercise.
I think that's exactly what their strategy was.
The Pentagon officials, supported by the military, according to Carpenter, were cleverly shifting the nature of the bureaucratic struggle from a terrain that was really favorable to the vice president, which was a terrain of the Iranians are supporting Shiites who are killing American troops in Iraq, to the less favorable terrain for the vice president of the broader implication, the broader results of beginning a process of escalation, which was clearly not going to be something that would be in the interest of the United States.
And once they were able to make that shift of the nature of the debate to the broader terrain of what are going to be the consequences of an escalatory process, that was really a way of inflicting a bureaucratic defeat on the vice president.
And Carpenter made it clear to me that this was exactly the intention of the Department of Defense officials, who were basically expecting that once they raised this issue of escalation, the interagency process would basically bog down the whole proposal by the vice president.
And apparently that's what happened.
Okay, now, well, let me make sure I understand the timeline, right?
Because last spring, when Stephen Clemens brought up David Wilmser going around talking about Cheney planning on having Israel start the war as an end run around Bush, and I guess perhaps around the military and so forth, and then that was later confirmed by the New York Times also, and by Joe Klein in Time Magazine also confirmed it.
And when he confirmed it, he talked about, and you bring this up, or I guess just brought this up, Bush's meeting with the Pentagon chiefs in December of 2006, where they told him, no, we don't want to do this.
And of course, there was Fallon's obstruction all through early 2007.
But then this was August when McClatchy came out with this story about striking the Quds Force bases after.
So at what point exactly did the chiefs begin, or whoever they were in the military, begin this strategy of saying, no, we have to trace the consequences and so forth in order to try to thwart this?
Well, my understanding is this came immediately after Vice President Cheney began to propose a strike against bases in Iran, which would have been in probably June of 2007.
Okay, so this is after his, let's have Israel start it and do our end run, was outed by Stephen Clemens and the New York Times, then he went this other tactic again.
Back to the bombs, the EFP bombs.
Right.
And of course, we don't know exactly what the timing is, but clearly it was in the early summer of 2007.
So this battle was raging during June, July, August of 2007.
And you wrote then about his, I believe at the Huffington Post, his conspiracy with Joseph Lieberman and the Imperial Senate.
Exactly.
That's when all that was happening.
And of course, the key problem here for the people who were opposing the Vice President on strikes against Iranian bases across the border from Iraq is that Cheney had the cooperation clearly of Petraeus and the U.S. command in Baghdad.
That was happening there, as we've talked about in the past, is that the spokesman was basically playing ball with the Vice President by having a briefing, which fit precisely into Cheney's plans.
He brought out this whole testimony by Doc Duke, the Hezbollah operative in Iraq, about the Iranian training of Shiite troops for the mighty army.
Which we covered in detail in our last interview at antiwar.com slash radio.
It's right there.
That's right.
But the point I want to make, Scott, is that it was very, very important at that moment that you had in Tampa, Florida, at the CENTCOM headquarters, Admiral Fallon, who we now know with great certainty, was opposing firmly and making it clear that he would not carry out a strike against Iran under any circumstances.
And that basically the Vice President was being hemmed in on both sides, both the bureaucracy in Washington and the CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, were opposing his plan.
And of course, now we know that basically Fallon was eased out of his position.
And the plan was all along to replace him with Petraeus, who would be somebody who they could hope to would play ball with them on this question of striking Iran.
And that's why this story, it seems to me, establishes even more clearly than we have been able to do before, that we have a potentially very, very dangerous situation in the final months of this administration.
Yeah, it is.
I guess there's a perspective, a narrative you're trying to get across here where Petraeus is almost Oliver North or something.
He's kind of, in a sense, outside of the chain of command working directly for the Vice President here.
Well, of course, he is outside the chain of command in the sense that he is supposed to report both to the CENTCOM commander and to the Secretary of Defense.
That's the way the command set up is supposed to work.
But in fact, what has been happening is that he's been reporting only to the White House.
And that means, in essence, he's reporting to Vice President Dick Cheney.
That's the way the system has, in fact, worked ever since Petraeus went out to Baghdad.
And as we discussed, I think last time, he went out there with the explicit plan already agreed to, to put out the narrative about EFPs as a, essentially, the major strategic communications line to justify a potential attack against Iran.
That was certainly the Vice President's intention.
And Petraeus has shown every indication that he is not going to do anything to block that, and in fact, is going to fully cooperate with it.
Okay, now, I'm sorry, I have to ask you to just use your imagination here or something.
I guess, unless you have sources who've reported to you information along these lines.
But what is the point of this?
How do you start a war with Iran?
I mean, I'm serious.
You can't have a regime change from the air.
We saw it happen at Doha farms.
They killed a bunch of women and children.
Gareth and Saddam Hussein got away.
And so, they're not going to kill the Ayatollah and have a regime change with a smart bomb.
And we're not going to invade and conquer Persia without completely destroying our economy and conscripting an entire generation of children to go and fight over there.
And as everyone has always told me on this subject, no one is talking about actually invading the place.
I mean, that's just insanity.
And so, what is the point of this, unless...
What is the point of this?
I don't understand it.
No, this is...
Let's be clear about this.
What we're dealing with here is a very dysfunctional, I think it's fair to say, sick individual in the White House who is not pursuing a policy based on any rational calculation so much as essentially the same kind of motivation that we encountered with Richard Nixon in the White House in 1972 in carrying out B-52 strikes against Hanoi, which was to do damage, to basically harm people who he didn't like, and to make a political point that I'm the tough guy, that you don't mess with me, I'm going to show you who's the boss.
It's really sort of reduced to reptilian brain kinds of thinking, or non-thinking as the case may be.
So, I think we should be very clear that what we're talking about here is ultimate irrationality, which I think there's a great deal of that that goes into any elective war that the United States carries out.
That's really the bottom line.
It's not ultimately rational calculation.
I think I've made this case before, that the idea that you fight these kinds of wars in Iraq or against Iran because of oil or because of economic interests is simply very wide of the mark, despite the superficial linkages that one can make between Cheney and the oil industry or Bush and the oil industry.
That's really not what these wars, or attempted wars, or planned wars, are about.
Well, you know, Ron Suskin had an interview with a senior Bush administration official.
I guess it was widely speculated that the subject was Karl Rove, who said, we're an empire now, and we make our own reality, and you reality-based people in the reality-based community can study what we do, and as you're studying what we do, we'll act again, and we'll create our own reality again, and then you can study that, too, as you will.
Blah, blah, blah, like that.
I think you've actually memorized that quote, haven't you?
Yeah, it's pretty close.
Yeah, I've used it as a footnote quite a few times, I admit.
But basically, we're talking about a very pathetic, sick puppy here.
What this guy, Scott Carpenter, Jay Scott Carpenter, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for killing people or whatever over there at the State Department, what he has told you seems, and I've been obviously studying your work in depth for the last year and a half now, and interviewing you about just about every article you've written, so it seems to me that everything he's telling you here fits in exactly with everything we've already known, makes perfect sense, but you're telling me that this guy's from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Why is he talking to you, and why is he telling you that, yeah, you're right, Gareth, this is a very neoconservative-heavy organization?
Yeah, I would say that part of the explanation here is that there are people at the Washington Institute who are not as rabidly neoconservative as basically the leadership of the organization.
I think he probably fits into that description as somebody who is not a loyal follower of the Cheney, Wolfowitz, neocon outfit that led us into war in Iraq and that is really now bent on trying to go to war against Iran.
So essentially I'm suggesting that there is a degree of pluralism in even that institution, which is clearly a strongly pro-Israeli think tank in Washington, that represents Israel's viewpoint and interests insofar as its right-wing leadership of Israel is involved in it, rather than taking an objective viewpoint towards Middle East policies.
But Scott Carpenter is somebody who may be conservative and generally oriented towards the support for Israel's viewpoint, but is not so completely committed that he was not able to see that striking against Iran under the present circumstances doesn't make much sense.
Well, and let it not be said that nobody could have predicted the terrible consequences of bombing Iran, because as we've tried to highlight on this show, you and I for a year and a half straight and you on your own terms and mine on my own terms long before that, the incredibly disastrous consequences, the obvious consequences of a war against Iran are just everywhere from setting off Hamas and Hezbollah to attacks against American soldiers, perhaps wide-scale fighting and uprising against American soldiers, cut supply lines and so forth inside Iraq, the ability of the Iranian government to instigate coup d'etats in God knows which countries, and who knows what kind of crises.
And this is the kind of thing, Gareth, where literally James Baker III, who I would think ought to be able to walk into Washington, D.C. and crown himself emperor or something, he's so powerful and influential, was reduced to going on this week and waving his arms around in the air and saying, we're not talking to Iran.
This is crazy.
This is crazy.
Zbigniew Brzezinski reduced to going on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and saying, this is just not right.
We've got to negotiate.
We've got to figure out a way to talk to these men.
We can't afford to have another war in the Middle East.
So there you go.
That's my take on it.
If you have any more obvious consequences, price of oil, domestic police state here, et cetera, that come to the top of your head, I'd like to hear them.
Let me just add one more point, though.
Having talked about this in terms of the ultimate irrationality of it and basically the function of sick minds, I also want to simply add the signal reality that the Air Force has the job of carrying out surgical strikes such as the one that Cheney has advocated against bases in Iran, as well as the nuclear program targets and all of the military and paramilitary targets in Iran.
There's no doubt in my mind, and I think I've said this before, that the U.S. Air Force has told the vice president that, yes, we could carry out surgical strikes against either the bases of the IRGC in Iran or against the much longer, much larger list of military targets and nuclear program targets that you have in mind, and that we could assure you, with a very high degree of confidence, that we could preempt the entire military force, the conventional forces of Iran, and prevent them from being able to strike back against the U.S. Navy in the Gulf, and basically that we could clean this up in a very short time, in just a few days.
This is, I think, a function of the overconfidence, the overweening self-confidence of the Air Force, which is by far the most self-confident of all of the military services.
I think that there's probably a relationship here between the willingness, the belief by the vice president that this is feasible, and this problem of the vast overconfidence of the Air Force in regard to being able to carry out this kind of air campaign against Iran very effectively.
In the reality of war, this kind of totally effective campaign just doesn't exist, and there's always frictions, there's always mistakes, there's always things that you didn't know about, there's things that you didn't predict.
But the Air Force, as a matter of its institutional, inherent institutional character, is prone to believing that it can somehow bring off the near-perfect or perfect campaign.
And this is part of the problem that I think we face, that is feeding into the megalomania of the White House, and the vice president's wing of the White House in particular.
Alright, now, I'm sorry because this is just a tangent, it's a side issue, but it's something extremely important, and you wrote the only article that I can find about it that, I don't know exactly what your sources were or what, I'm hoping you can explain.
The smoking laptop that supposedly proves Iran had this nuclear weapons program, and its origin with the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is the political wing of the Communist terror cult, the Mujahideen, Al-Khalq, and perhaps even further, its origins with the Israeli Mossad, Gareth?
Yes.
Well, I mean, this is something that was actually said on the record, but generally ignored by the media.
It was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, immediately after the Secretary of State Colin Powell, in November of 2004, announced to the American public the existence of this smoking laptop, if you will, of alleged documents purlined from someone in the Iranian nuclear program.
He was, of course, basically touting this, as Colin Powell was touting this, as a major cache of documentation that proved, to his satisfaction, that Iran was going for a nuclear weapon.
But it was stated by the German official who was in charge of relations with North America, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, saying at the time that these documents should not be the basis for an American policy decision about Iran, because they are coming from the Iranian resistance organization.
Meaning, of course, reference to the NCRI and the Mujahedin-e Khalq.
That, again, was ignored by the U.S. media, despite the spectacular nature of that charge by a responsible German foreign ministry official.
Now, I've just, just a few months ago, had confirmation of that statement by another German official who said, I can assure you that these documents came from the Iranian resistance organization.
So there's just no reason to doubt that the German government knows for a fact that these documents came from the resistance.
What is perhaps even more interesting about these documents is the close relationship that we know has existed between Israeli intelligence, Mossad, and the Mujahedin-e Khalq in the past.
The Israelis have apparently used the Mujahedin-e Khalq to essentially launder intelligence that Israel itself had gathered on the Iranian nuclear program, specifically the Natanz nuclear facility, which was discovered in 2002 by the world's press because the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the NCRI, had a press conference about it in August of 2002.
Well, the fact of the matter appears to be that Mujahedin-e Khalq, NCRI, did not have the ability to obtain that kind of intelligence on their own, and that Israel, in fact, had obtained that intelligence and had passed it to the MEK in order to make it public.
This is based on more than one source, but most recently there was a book co-authored by a specialist in Israeli intelligence, Yossi Melman, which quoted more than one Israeli intelligence source, high-level intelligence source, saying that we knew about the Natanz facility at least a year earlier, but did not want to reveal it ourselves, so the implication being very clearly that they passed it on to the MEK.
So that establishes, and there is other information, basically the New Yorker article of, I believe, 2003, if I remember correctly, which quoted various sources on the background of close cooperation between Israel and the MEK, stretching back several years before, indicates that there was this close cooperation over some period of years, and that there's every reason to believe that these so-called per-lined documents did in fact come from Israel, not from the MEK.
Now, the second layer, the higher layer of question about this set of documents, of course, is whether they are, in fact, genuine, or whether they could have been manufactured.
I don't know the answer to that.
I'm not claiming to know, but certainly there are serious questions to be asked about them, and they certainly should not be considered to be ipso facto reliable evidence of even very limited research on the nuclear weaponization aspect of Iran's nuclear program.
They are not certainly the smoking gun that they claim to be, and of course, they are now the basis for the current position of the IAEA that Iran is not to be given a clean bill of health, but in fact is still in the dock after having resolved all of the previous questions that had been posed over the past three years by the IAEA to Iran on its nuclear program.
Right.
Okay.
Now, a couple of things here.
One is that I thought that the Israeli-slash-NCRI intelligence about Natanz only showed that they had a big empty warehouse underground there, and they took the IAEA and the foreign diplomats and everybody in the press on a tour.
I saw the pictures in the BBC of a giant empty underground warehouse, and they were not in violation of any of their international agreements, and having a big empty warehouse is only when they actually introduce nuclear material or a few months before on a specific deadline or whatever that they are supposed to do that.
So I wanted to point that out.
Absolutely.
Now, you know, the point of this whole episode of the MEK-NCRI revealing the existence of the Natanz facility, which, as you say, was not something Iran was required by its commitments to the NPT to inform the IAEA about at that point, is that it helped the MEK and the NCRI to establish their credentials in terms of their supposed knowledge and information about the Iranian program.
But we know that in subsequent months, over the next year and a half to two years, they made a series of charges about the Iranian nuclear program, which the IAEA officials themselves later said were simply wrong.
Over and over again, they were simply wrong.
They did not have accurate information.
They checked it out, and they found out it was false.
Right.
And also, Scott Ritter, in his book, Target Iran, says as a statement of fact, as he said on this show, that the NCRI is a front for the Mossad for intents and purposes, that that's where they get their intelligence from.
I think there's every reason to believe that, yes.
And also, Gordon Prather has pointed out, and this is basically what you were saying too, that Iran's task is to endlessly disprove unsupported accusations.
In this case, you talked about how you really don't know, honestly, whether the documents, the information, the laptop itself is credible, whether it came from the Mossad or not.
But I would say one indication that it isn't would seem to be the fact that as Mohammed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, makes clear in his report that he has not even been able to have the documents and furnish the documents to the Iranians that they might be able to explain, you know, it's not true and here's why, sort of their own little writ of habeas corpus being denied.
They're not able to really confront the accusations against them.
They have to endlessly prove a negative.
This is an astonishing miscarriage of justice at the international level.
That is to say, the idea that you can hold Iran accountable for not being able to refute documents which you cannot even share with them.
This is an astonishing piece of nonsense, which, you know, if it were covered adequately in the news media of this country, would be revealed as a ludicrous way of approaching the entire subject of Iran's nuclear program.
But the fact is that this aspect of the IAEA's report is over and over again being ignored.
And I'm not saying that it's never mentioned, but it is only mentioned in passing and never examined in terms of its implications.
What it means.
Right, and in fact, you know, even yesterday, a McClatchy newspaper, Strike on Iran Nuclear Sites, under discussion again, and see, this isn't just me and Gareth crying wolf here.
Here's the headline again from yesterday, but in this article in McClatchy, even they say, well, you know, these serious questions that the IAEA still has unresolved have heightened concern again.
And all this, just taking all this at face value again, Gareth.
Yeah.
And it's time to talk about what needs to be done, what people can do about this.
We've talked about this before.
And I've perhaps sort of basically without any possible effect here, suggested that people write to their congressman.
I'm beginning to think that that's not the way to approach this problem, that it's not going to do any good to write to your congressman.
I think perhaps the most effective thing that people could do today, and here I'm sort of going out on a limb, I admit, is to start to protest the complete cooperation with the Bush administration of the news media of the United States.
If people in major cities could protest, could set up picket lines to protest their local newspapers failure to cover more fairly and more completely the threat of war against Iran and the propaganda lines that have been used by the Bush administration to justify that war, it probably would do more good than writing to a member of Congress.
So I'm really advocating now that people target their news media in order to draw attention to the fact that there is this basically a non-decision or decision to roll over and play dead on the part of the news media, particularly electronic, but of course also print media.
So if there's an opportunity to picket in front of the local CBS, NBC, Fox News office in your city, you should do that.
If it's a possibility of picketing the New York Times, the Washington Post, the local newspaper that has been carrying news, sort of AP clips that have failed to articulate the truth about what's going on in regard to U.S. policy toward Iran, these are things that might shake things up enough to create an impression that something's happening here.
Just an idea, a suggestion.
It sounds good to me, and you know, McClatchy really has led the way.
I mean, if we could all just try to hold, with this one slight exception, if we could all just hold the rest of the newspaper chains to their standard, we'd be all right, probably.
I think that's true.
If everybody else was at least as honest as McClatchy in terms of their effort to ferret out the truth, that would be very, very helpful.
It would be better if they would rise to the standard of you and your articles at AntiWar.com.
Well, that's something that I would hope at least people will, it'll be helpful to people to formulate their own thoughts and motivate them to do things.
Well, there's no better source in the world for debunking the case for war with Iran than the archives of Dr. Gareth Porter at AntiWar.com slash Porter.
Thank you again for coming on the show.
Thanks again, Scott.
Appreciate it.
