07/03/08 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, and I want to welcome Gareth Porter back to the show.
He's an investigative and independent historian and journalist.
He writes for the American Prospect, Huffington Post, and Interpress Service.
You can find all of his IPS articles at Antiwar.com slash Porter, including today's top headline on the page, official Iran accepts talks proposal.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Hi, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
Yeah.
One day, I think I'm just going to have to make you my co-host, although I don't know if you'd ever really get any of the work done that I need to bring you on to ask you about all the time if we did that.
Yeah, and I wouldn't get the work done that I need to do either.
Yeah, yeah.
There you go.
All right.
Well, so anyway, we'll just keep it at once or twice a week, I guess.
So here's your story, and this broke yesterday during the show.
We talked about it just a little bit.
There's this P5 plus one, which is some fancy name for the U.N.
Security Council and Germany, and- Yeah.
It's the five permanent members.the U.S., Russia, and China, and plus Germany, the non-security council.
Yeah.
And this actually was floated, I think, this was in the New Yorker article that some German foreign minister said, well, we're going to make them an offer that they just stop expanding their program, backing off the Bush ultimatum that they must cease all uranium enrichment immediately, but that we could begin to have some talks toward the eventual creation of some talks or something like that, if they would only stop expanding the program.
This is a device to break the ice, basically, and as you say, to break through the U.S. ultimatum, or rather, simply an impossible or very difficult condition for Iran to agree to, which is that they suspend or end their uranium enrichment as a price to actually talk with the folks who want to negotiate with them, and at least it offers an opportunity to begin talks and basically see what happens.
I mean, this was tried last year by the P5, or rather, by Javier Solana, and unfortunately, it did not have any specific timeframes attached to it, and that's why, one of the reasons apparently it was not agreed to by Iran, but this time it does have a six-week timeframe for this preliminary talk.
Okay.
Now, did Connelly's rise say this was okay to go ahead and offer?
Well, apparently so, yes.
I mean, I'm sure this would not have been offered had not the State Department signed off on it.
So then your headline really should have been, Bush Loses and Backs Down Again.
It could be certainly viewed as a tentative or as a tactical loss for the Vice President's office as opposed to the U.S. government.
Not that it's a good idea to taunt these men.
Of course, yes, and I think that would have been accurate to say that, you know, within the U.S. bureaucracy, it's a small but meaningful victory for those who would like to see some negotiations.
Okay.
Now, last November, the CIA and 15 other American intelligence agencies came together and said, eh, don't worry about it.
They haven't had a nuclear weapons program since 2003.
That's when they abandoned it, and even at the progress they're going now, they would be technically capable of beginning to enrich weapons-grade uranium to make a bomb sometime late next year, maybe, but that's, quote, very unlikely, and so the whole world kind of went, phew, boy, it looks like the pressure's off here, and we don't have to have a war or suffer through Bush and Cheney thinking that they have to have a war after all, and yet it sort of turned out, Gareth, that that really didn't matter and that all the propaganda just has continued to roll right along that they're making nuclear weapons.
The Democratic presidential candidate this year agrees and everything like that.
So I wonder whether this is even going to make a difference, that the Iranians are saying, okay, fine, let's sit down at the table, then, if that's the way you'll make it.
Well, it's going to make a difference if the White House decides to let it make a difference, obviously, and that's the imponderable that we're all sort of faced with trying to ponder.
The question really is, you know, whether the White House believes that it can succeed in this sort of all-out pressure campaign, which is aimed at forcing Iran to bow, you know, sort of in an overt and symbolic way to the Bush administration and the P5-plus-1 as a whole demand that it cease the uranium enrichment.
The chances of that are, it seems to me, infinitesimally small.
And you know, in the final month, the choice really does present itself.
Are they going to bomb Iran?
Or are they going to try something different and see if they can't come up with some sort of at least sort of North Korea-like shorter-term framework agreement that looks toward the future to a final settlement of the issue?
And it's not inconceivable that that could happen.
You know, I think we should have at least on the table the possibility, we should entertain the possibility that there is this sort of framework agreement that could be reached, you know, in the final month of the administration.
Should the glimmer of realism alight in the brains of a couple of, or at least one person in the White House?
Yeah, well, you know, I saw a thing, Glenn Greenwald actually linked to a thing on the Mother Jones blog about, well, it was just a bunch of different experts talking about how they doubt that there's going to be a war.
And most of what they did was cite, you know, arguments, reality, and these terrible things might happen if we were to have a war and that kind of thing.
And that's sort of always been the debate, whether any of those questions are even relevant inside the White House when they talk about this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, that, of course, is the question, whether the degree of realism that prevails there is such that the realities of the military situation, that is that, you know, no one can guarantee that, you know, every bit of Iranian ability to retaliate is going to be hit, and that the Iranians can, in fact, make life very difficult for us, regardless of how good our military is.
And secondly, and perhaps even more important, is the economic reality that is associated with the whole threat to Iran.
And actually, any military move against Iran, you know, we know that's going to cause a spike in the price of oil that will make previous spikes look like child's play.
You know, this is really the single biggest factor, I'm guessing, that could restrain the White House.
You know, I'm no expert on the details of this kind of thing, but it seems to me that if you double the price of a barrel of oil or something like that, that you risk just shutting down the entire international division of labor and the global economy as it's grown.
Yeah, there is a breaking point here, and I think that they are perilously close to, you know, sort of going over that line.
And that, you know, even if these people are living in a kind of dream world as far as the military realities are concerned, and you know, as you well know, I'm prepared to accept that possibility, it's even more difficult to believe that they, you know, would not understand the economic perils associated with this, which are, you know, a dead finch certainty.
Right.
Now, when you talk about the oil spike that would happen in the event of war making the other ones pale by comparison, the other ones that you're talking about are the ones that we're suffering through right now.
And in fact, I think this was a comment that someone left on one of the blog entries at Antiwar Radio about one of your recent interviews, I forget which one, that said, don't fall for the scam.
And the Iranians and the Americans are basically just, you know, winking at each other and escalating all this rhetoric in order to drive up the price of oil so they can charge a lot more for the same amount of work.
Well, I mean, you know, this is one sort of take on it, which is more conspiratorially based.
I mean, I think that this administration, you know, simply is not able to control all the factors that go into this situation and particularly cannot control the economic side of this.
And I think, you know, the whole effort by the Saudis to try to edge the price downward is certainly one of the things in which the U.S. and the Saudis are working together.
The higher the price of oil is, and of course, this has been going up for the last two to three years, the better off Iran is, the stronger Iran is.
I mean, this is certainly one of the key determinants of Iran's power position in the world, is the price of oil, because, you know, back ten years ago, if we just roll the tape backward and look at the situation in Iran as of the late 1990s, they were looking very vulnerable to a lower price of oil, which prevailed at that point, because of their situation of potentially, you know, not just potential, but great likelihood of essentially being able to, not being able to maintain their level of oil export.
And their, you know, their exports of oil are, you know, something 75, 85 percent of their export earnings.
And that meant that they would be in serious financial difficulty.
But of course, with the serious spike in the price of oil now, they're sitting pretty.
They have all the export earnings they can, you know, really handle.
And that's a serious blow to any notion that the United States could sort of force the Iranians to the table on their terms.
You know, that's, I think, one of the most fundamental realities that is often neglected in looking at this whole picture of U.S.
-Iran relation.
Yeah, you know, I've got to wonder, though, I mean, they've been doing this, as you said, for years and years.
And I wonder whether, when they go over there to meet with the Saudis, whether they're really trying to get the price lawyered, or whether they're just saying that in the press releases, and really what they're doing is happily shaking hands on the status quo.
Well, I mean, of course, that's something that's conceivable, you know, that this entire scenario of the conflict with Iran is simply a sideshow or a show for the benefit of the television audience.
Well, what they're really concerned with is making money for the oil companies.
Well, you don't have to go that far, though.
I mean, you could just say that, you know, within the overall scheme of the war party to try to get us into the war, that, you know, this or that press release on any given day may very well be meant to influence the price, you know?
I suppose, you know, that they're perfectly aware that when they threaten Iran, that that has an impact on the price, yes.
We're getting into a territory here where it's very, very difficult to figure out, you know, what they understand and what they don't understand.
Yes, a particular press release that they leak, you know, they don't actually stand up and say, okay, you know, prepare for our bombing of Iran, because that's not in their interest to do that.
But clearly, when they talk to, particularly, you know, reporters from foreign countries, there is clearly this tendency to strike such a hard line that the message gets out very clearly that we're prepared to go all the way.
I was just reading a story in The Australian, which I think you may have carried yesterday.
Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, interviewed high-ranking Bush administration officials.
You know, they all took this very, very hard line.
And they didn't say specifically that, you know, we're prepared to go to war, nothing like that.
But the message that they conveyed to this guy was that the chances of a U.S. attack on Iran were like 30, I think he said 30 or 40 percent.
So that's the kind of calculus that, you know, we have to deal with.
In that situation, it's hard to know whether they, you know, knowingly calculate somehow that any particular move is going to have a given effect on the oil market.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems like when people like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are coming out publicly and really, very frankly, opposing the idea of a war, I don't know, it seems like he's taking the threat very seriously.
That Mike Mullen statement, the most recent one, strikes me as a very interesting indicator.
And I think it can be interpreted in two ways.
And perhaps those two ways are not inconsistent, one of them being that this is a suggestion of continued military opposition to a strike, which, of course, is comforting on one hand, in that, you know, they're not just sort of sitting on their hands.
But on the other hand, they wouldn't be doing that unless they are still very concerned that this administration has not given up the military option at all, that they see evidence that we've talked about, that the plan, if you will, quote unquote, in the Cheney wing of the White House is still intact and still very much of concern to them.
Do you know anything about military preparations for this?
I heard Seymour Hersh told Terry Gross on Fresh Air the other day that they'd been moving cruise missiles into the region for a long time now, and they've got a whole bunch of them, that kind of thing.
But then on that Mother Jones blog entry that I was referring to earlier, I think at least one or two of those people said that they're not ready to, you know, launch any kind of strike as it is right now at all.
You know, on the specifics of the military preparations, I'm certainly not in the league of Seymour Hersh in terms of the kinds of military contacts that he has maintained over the years, or at least, you know, people who are...
I think he's in touch with people who are in touch with people in the Pentagon rather than directly with Pentagon people based on a reading of his pieces.
But you know, he has a much better fix on the state of that side of things.
You know, I think that, as I've said before, the decision has not been made.
They are in a stage of certainly continuing and heightening the PSYOP, the psychological operation against Iran.
You know, the whole idea of sort of citing the danger of an Israeli attack, which has certainly been the dominant feature of the current phase of the administration's policy, is unquestionably of that nature.
And therefore, you know, we're not at the stage yet where they are on the verge of an attack.
For one thing, as I have repeated many times, I mean, the Petraeus factor has not been put into place yet.
I think we have to wait until Petraeus shows up at CENTCOM.
Yeah, well, wasn't he just sworn in the other day?
I thought he was just sworn in the other day.
Has he been sworn in already?
I thought so, but I don't know.
I mean, originally, it was not supposed to be until August, September, but...
Well, I'll have to Google it.
If I've missed that, then I apologize to you and your listeners.
No, you're probably right.
You're probably right.
I was just going off of, you know, scant memory here.
I mean, that would be certainly, I would think, would be a major story when he is sitting in place.
Oh, yeah.
They'll have pictures of him with all the shiny medals and everything over here.
All right.
Now, the Congressional Resolution, what day is this thing expected to pass, or has it already, or when will it?
Well, you know, the latest that I've heard about this is only slightly encouraging in the sense that it's not going to sail through as it looked like it would last week, you know, with scarcely any discussion whatsoever.
There will be a markup in the House Foreign Affairs Committee on this measure.
That's the good news.
The bad news, however, is that in the markup, there will apparently not be any opportunity to even amend the language of the resolution, which means that it is still on a very, very fast track.
On the other hand, there is the possibility, and I predict probably there will be some changes in the wording in the original language of the resolution in the House, which means that there will undoubtedly be in the Senate as well.
And that's because of sort of a relatively mild firestorm of criticism of AIPAC for what appears to be, obviously, an act of war being proposed here in the resolution.
Right.
AIPAC has been very much on the defensive, saying, oh, we're not proposing a blockade or an act of war, and citing the fact that the language was carefully chosen so that it wouldn't be, in fact, technically, legally, an act of war.
I think it's very possible that we'll see some changes in that language to make it even less sensibly a blockade or an act of war.
And exactly what that might be, I'm certainly not able to say.
But that's something to really watch.
They would have to really strike out a whole couple of paragraphs to take that out.
I mean, the way it reads is just farcical.
It says, nothing in here shall be construed to authorize military force.
And then the next paragraph says, prevent them somehow, Mr. President, from importing any refined petroleum products.
How are you going to do that without a Navy?
You know, it's certainly beyond my can.
I have no idea how they're going to do it.
But if there's going to be a change in language, it will happen this week before the markup in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs next week.
All right.
Now, did you see this one yesterday in, or, oh, geez, this was two days ago.
I'm sorry.
This was in the Washington Post by Joby Warrick.
Ex-agent says CIA ignored Iran facts.
Yes.
This is a wonderful story.
I mean, this is the same agent who had warned the CIA that, you know, that an important source, a scientist, if I remember correctly, had told them in Iraq that Iraq had given up its weapons of mass destruction.
And of course, they paid no attention to it.
They simply said they weren't interested.
And now the same CIA agent is said to have warned them that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons related work as well.
This obviously before the work on the NIE last year.
And that the CIA had not only not been interested, but they had basically tried to force this agent to stop providing any information along those lines.
I mean, it's quite an astonishing illustration of the basic dynamic that had operated within the CIA and the intelligence agencies more generally, you know, to ensure that the intelligence that was going into the White House and was being used as the basis for regular analysis and reporting would be consistent with what they knew was what the White House wanted, which was to say that Iran was hell-bent on nuclear weapons.
Yeah, here's a quote.
On five occasions, he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East or not to file his reports at all.
Hey, boss, guess what?
I got a great new source and I got this great bunch of new intelligence.
Turns out they abandoned their nuclear weapons program that barely ever even existed a hell of a long time ago.
And then he gets here's a 22 year veteran employee of the CIA.
They push him right out the door.
You know, once this case is actually settled, and it will almost certainly be settled out of court, I spoke with Phil Giroldi about this yesterday, and he said, you know, the typical way in which this is handled is that the agency settles out of court.
And in this case, that seems very, very, very likely.
And once that happens, this agent presumably will be in a position to, unless they, of course, they have a gag order, which hopefully will not be part of it, but he would certainly be in a position to shed some very interesting light on the whole background of the CIA's handling of the Iran file, the Iran nuclear file.
Yeah.
Well, I guess for now, the battles against the Mahdi army have subsided as he's ordered his guys to melt back into the population.
And so there's a lack of propaganda about Iran being behind the landmines, killing our guys in Iraq.
I guess we can expect that propaganda to get heated back up again sometime this summer, probably.
Well, you know, I'm sure this propaganda line has not died.
It's only asleep for the moment.
And I have to say that, you know, one of the pieces that I've been thinking about and just haven't been able to find the time to write yet is one that focuses on how the nature of the whole game in Iraq has fundamentally changed in 2008.
And it's a combination of the influence of Iran within the Shiite government in Baghdad on one hand, and the convergence of interest really between the pro-Iranian Shiite faction in Baghdad and the Sadrists in basically easing the United States out the door from Iraq through political diplomatic means rather than by using force.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one of the things that you provide a great insight on was when the Maliki government ordered the raid on the Sadrists in Basra, and you came on this show and reported to us that what really happened here was that Cheney and them had a plan to wage full scale war against the Mahdi army, and that what Maliki was doing was short-circuiting that plan by basically starting the war early and botching it.
And I read an article yesterday in the local paper actually talking about, I think it was an LA Times story, talking about how the Americans are now following the Iraqi army around with Predator drones, watching their every move and everything, because I guess, you know, that redirecting toward one group or another somewhere, they've now decided that Maliki and the Badr corps, Iraqi army there, are no longer trustworthy allies in Iraq.
Well, there's no doubt that there have been some fundamental shifts in the, I would say seismic shifts in the orientation of the al-Maliki government, and that implies, as you suggest, also some shifts within the Iraqi military as well, certainly the Shiite element of command in that army, which are quite substantial.
And I think that there's no doubt now that the Bush administration is becoming quite worried about its whole strategy in Iraq, and rightly so.
Now you said some pretty eloquent things before about how Americans need to, well, even ignore, at the expense of even ignoring Congress for the moment, they need to focus on the American media, and it just drives me up the wall when I see an article that says, basically just repeating verbatim, more or less out of this false, out of the false accusations in the congressional resolution, that the CIA says that they will have enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb out of it, maybe this year, and things like this.
Do the American people, do we need to find a way to go down and meet with these reporters and teach them about the difference between 3.6%, U-235, and 90-plus percent, and show them the IAEA reports, and basically take them on as our students here, or what do we have to do to get it through these people's heads?
I think that's an excellent way to describe exactly what needs to happen, Scott.
I think that there needs to be the kind of peer pressure, or popular pressure, or combination of the two things, in regard to the media.
We need to stop being buddy-buddy and chummy with people who are essentially screwing us over by their behavior, by the lack of responsible behavior within the media.
It starts, of course, with the stars of the television news world who earn gazillions of dollars, who are basically in a position to steer the public opinion one direction or another, and who invariably just follow the political line of those who are in power.
And then it goes directly down to the reporters who are in the field in Iraq, and in Washington even more so, the people who are covering the Pentagon and the State Department, who have long since abandoned the ethic of journalism, which certainly would have fought the thing that attracted people to the field, which is the opportunity and indeed the necessity to pursue the truth and to speak truth to power.
This simply is absent from the field of journalism in today's America, and it's part of this overall crisis in the institutions that we need to have healthy to keep the United States from continuing down the path of empire, which is a path that is going to bankrupt and continue to destroy the fabric of this society.
Dr. Gareth Porter from InterPress Service.
You can find all the rights for them at antiwar.com slash Porter.
Thank you very much for your time today, sir.
It's always great to be on your show.
Thanks, Doug.