03/17/14 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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It's Gareth Port of the Great.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back again.
Good deal.
Appreciate you joining us.
Everybody, you know Gareth.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
Writes primarily for Interpress Service at IPSNews.net, IPSNews.net.
And also for Truthout.org.
He's the author of Perils of Dominance about Vietnam.
And then the brand new book.
Come on, go out and get the book or go to Amazon or whichever website you like best and get Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare by Gareth Porter.
Manufactured Crisis by Gareth Porter.
And so this will be part two in a series.
Part one was for the KPFK show on Sunday.
This is part two.
I want to go through this book piece by piece.
And today we're just talking chapter three.
All about the politics inside Iran in determining their policies.
You know, all from their point of view as best as Gareth has been able to uncover it.
So chapter three is Iran's unknown nuclear politics.
And the first real subject that you focus in on here is the revolutionary Islamic government post-1979 in Iran and their official position, or in fact, the highest levels of their government, the supreme leader and his mullahs, their position on the making and use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.
Doesn't it go without saying that everybody knows that even if they're not making nukes, that the Iranians have chemical weapons, right, Gareth?
Well, it was certainly accepted as a fact for many, many years by virtually everybody who wrote about Iran and the weapons of mass destruction issue.
Yeah, that definitely Iran had chemical weapons.
We all know that.
And, you know, there were various strands to that.
But the main thing was the idea that the Iranians were guilty of having used chemical weapons in Halabja, which was the biggest, the most serious use of chemical weapons in contemporary history, basically.
That is a Kurdish city, small Kurdish city in Iraq, in the Kurdish sector of Iraq.
In 1988, 1988.
And the reason that everyone thought that that was the case is that the Washington Post, excuse me, yeah, Washington Post.
Washington Post had a story in which the defense intelligence agency officials of report on Halabja and the use of chemical weapons was covered.
And the story related that there was, in fact, a DIA report that showed that Iran had, in fact, used chemical weapons at Halabja, as well as the Iraqis using chemical weapons there.
So that sort of entered into the literature and into the narrative, if you will, about Iran's WMD policy until it turned out that that DIA report was, in fact, disinformation planted by the very people in the DIA who were working hand in hand, hand in glove, if you will, with the Iraqi Air Force to target the military targets of Iran for bombing.
So they had a certain axe to grind, shall we say, with regard to the situation in Halabja.
They wanted to cast doubt on the Iranian use of weapons, that is to say, to suggest the Iranians did use weapons so that Iraq wouldn't be singled out as the bad guy in regard to chemical weapons during that Iran-Iraq war.
But in fact, there is no evidence that Iran ever used chemical weapons at all in the war.
In fact, a book that was written many years later about this subject by the primary...
Well, he's now in...
I think he's in charge of the crisis group, if I'm not mistaken, the International Crisis Group, shows that, in fact, there's, you know, the evidence is very clear that Iran did not use chemical weapons during that war at all.
And so this initial indication turns out to be a major disinformation campaign, which has had a huge impact on the opinion in this country and throughout the world about this subject.
But there's more to the story.
I mean, we don't want to go into too much detail, but, you know, there are other ways in which this story has been completely obscured, the truth has been obscured.
And the truth is that Iran not only did not use chemical weapons, they did not produce chemical weapons.
And the reason is that Ayatollah Khomeini...
Wait, wait, hold that.
We do want to get into all that, and into all that detail.
But I want to talk a little bit more about Halabja just for a second here.
Sure.
Wasn't it a clue when the DIA said, the DIA spin on this was that both Iran and Iraq had both attacked this village full of Kurdish civilians?
What the hell purpose would they have done that?
It wasn't like the Hitler-Stalin agreeing to carve up Poland or something here.
They're saying these two groups were at war with each other, but they both took a detour in time to go and massacre a bunch of Kurdish civilians.
Yeah, there was, you know, some complicated explanation, of course, for how that could have happened, which didn't make any sense.
But don't expect that to be picked up.
I mean, that's too much of a point.
And then one little ironic footnote here is that Every Piece Nick's good friend, the late, great Jude Wineski, back when he was trying to stop the Iraq war, he bought the whole DIA narrative here.
He was saying, Colin Powell, you're wrong in accusing Saddam Hussein of doing this, because we have this DIA report from friends in the Reagan administration who said it was the Iranians.
I thought that was kind of funny.
And of course, the irony of the Reaganites back in power under George W. Bush being the ones to, you know, Colin Powell giving a big speech about Halabja and invoking this as a giant reason, one of their excuses for invading Iraq in 2003, when they were the ones who had helped Saddam, if not do that attack, at least helped him up to that attack.
And then afterwards, again, as you write in your book, correct?
Yes, that's correct.
I mean, you know, you're right that there's no specific evidence that the American officials in the DIA who were helping the targeting for the Iraqi Air Force were aware that Halabja was going to be attacked.
On the other hand, of Patrick Lange, Colonel Patrick Lange has been quoted as saying that they knew that it was, you know, that they were using chemical weapons, and that they were not in favor of that.
But on the other hand, they were not going to stop helping the Iraqi Air Force because of their use of chemical weapons.
I mean, I know you used Patrick Lange as a source before, we're just talking about Admiral Fallon and, and his famous, well, we weren't talking about this, but he's known for his famous quote about General Petraeus, which I think you got that story from Patrick Lange.
So did you, if I remember right, so did you talk to him for this book about this event?
No, I didn't.
Because I mean, you know, he is on the record of basically confirming everything.
This is not a, at this point, there's no real controversy about this.
I mean, you know, Other than just nobody's written it up this well before is all.
Well, I mean, in fact, I should have mentioned that Patrick Tyler, who wrote the original story, based on the DIA memorandum later on, recognized that he'd been taken.
I mean, he'd been deceived.
And he wrote another book later on, in which he did talk about the fact that that DIA memo was, was a falsehood.
And that, in fact, the people who wrote it were, had a self interest in casting a blame on Iran, along with Iraq, for the Halabja use of chemical weapons.
And so, And you do include that quote in the book?
I do.
That's right.
Just so people know, of the Washington Post reporter saying it turns out that wasn't really right.
Yeah, he's disowned his own story, saying that he was really taken in.
Okay, but so the importance of this reason we're getting all into this isn't because we're just trying to, you know, remind everybody what a bad guy Saddam was.
The point is, this was a major, you know, so called data point, or whatever I think is how you would put it, as a fake piece of evidence of just what the Iranians were up to in their intent and their capability.
Right.
And I'll just add very quickly, so people know that there's another major data point, which is also a falsehood.
And that is that a lot of sources, journalistic and otherwise published sources have suggested that, that Iran's representative to the chemical weapons convention, later on after the war, admitted that they had in fact produced chemical weapons.
Well, in fact, if you read the statement, it's very clear, he says the opposite.
He says, we did not produce chemical weapons.
He said, we tried to have a deterrent by having the capability by announcing that we had the capability to produce chemical weapons, but we didn't do it.
And instead of reporting that accurately, what has happened is that it's gone into the literature again, that Iran admitted having produced chemical weapons.
So, I mean, it's just an astonishing falsification of history.
When you trace that to a dissident group, right, that had been banished by the Ayatollah.
In that case, no, that was a different one.
That was a different bit of disinformation.
Well, there's a few, it's hard to keep track for the latest.
But this specific piece of disinformation, I believe actually may have been primarily caused by an Israeli journalistic report on the speech made by the Iranian official to the chemical weapons convention.
And I think it was picked up by other sources who didn't carefully check what actually was said.
And as a result, I think we've just had this snowballing effect of everybody jumping on board and saying, yeah, well, this is what happened.
And most recently, of course, the Washington Post fact checker fell for that one.
And I caught him at it and I corrected it.
And he actually admitted to his credit that, yes, he'd been wrong about that.
All right.
And now in 45 seconds, can you just tell us about, I mean, you say that there was a fatwa by the old Ayatollah from the revolution, Khomeini, but that it was secret, that they had it inside the government, but they didn't publicize it to the world.
Why not?
That's correct.
They had a fatwa against chemical weapons.
The Ayatollah Khomeini basically forbade the production or use of chemical weapons.
And that was dispositive of the Iranian policy during the war.
They were never able to produce them or use them.
But, you know, they did not want to publicize this because they were still hoping to have some kind of deterrent effect by talking about having the capability.
Gotcha.
All right.
Well, now, hold it right there.
We got to take this break.
Always interrupting.
Gareth Porter, he's the author of the new book, Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
And man, is it good.
You ought to go and buy it and read it.
And we'll be right back after this.
Hey, I'll sky here.
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All right.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
My guest is the great Gareth Porter.
This will be part two of our series about his brand new book, Manufactured Crisis, the untold history of the Iran nuclear program.
And so we're talking about the fatwa against the production of chemical weapons.
And you're saying they never did produce chemical weapons at all, the Iranians.
And they didn't because the supreme leader said not only don't do it, but he claimed it was a religious edict, this fatwa, that it would be un-Islamic to do so.
And that's the law.
Simple as that.
Yeah.
And it's interesting.
I mean, even some of the statements that were made by senior Iranian officials during the Iran-Iraq war that were an effort to deter Iraq from continuing the constant barrage of chemical weapons attacks against Iranians, that those statements actually, in some cases, did concede that there were Islamic prohibitions against the use of the weapons, or at least that there was a problem with Islam being a contradiction to chemical weapons.
So clearly, you know, they were trying to balance some, you know, some kind of deterrent effect with the effort to, I'm sorry, with the prohibition against the weapons.
But they were always hampered in that regard by the fact that they knew that they couldn't use them, and apparently they couldn't completely hide that fact either.
So it was alluded to without really highlighting it, is the way I would put it.
Right.
Okay.
Now here's my thing.
I don't really take much interest in what holy men have to say most of the time.
And I hate politicians.
I hate all of them, especially.
And they're all liars.
I condemn them all.
They're all guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And there's really no way for them, any of them, to prove their innocence to me.
They're the most horrible people in the world, each and every politician in the world.
And so a holy man politician comes out and says, well, I say it's against the law, the Islamic law, religious law, to make nuclear weapons.
That just screams to me, that guy's making nuclear weapons, or else why would he say such a thing?
So why should I believe that these people mean what they say at all, Gareth?
Even if they're not Americans?
You know, I think the point here is that you've got a situation where you have to, you have to account for the evidence.
And the evidence in this case is very clear, that no one has been able to come up with any real evidence that Iran used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.
And the fact is that Iran had a chemical sector that was, if anything, far more advanced than that of Iraq during the 1980s.
So you can't argue really credibly that Iran simply was incapable of doing it.
I mean, that just doesn't make sense.
Nobody, nobody is going to be able to make the argument that Iran was prevented from having chemical weapons by its inability to create them.
They had the scientific knowledge, they had the technical capability.
There's no question about that.
So you're left with a, the necessity to explain this failure to use chemical weapons.
And there is an explanation that is consistent, that that is credible, and which no one has thus far been able to effectively rebut.
And that is that it was indeed a Shia jurisprudence reason.
That is that chemical weapons were regarded as illicit in Islam.
And obviously, you know, Western intelligence and Western political elites and intelligence officials have been reluctant to accept that.
And I can tell you that I've never found anybody in the, among the intelligence people that I've talked to who would say that they, that they credited that idea of their universal skepticism towards that, towards the idea that, that religion could have actually affected the military policy of Iran on such an issue.
I mean, it's just so foreign to Western analysts that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible to believe.
But I do in fact think that that is the, that that is what one is forced to accept if you actually deal honestly with the evidence.
And then the same thing for both Ayatollahs and for all nuclear weapons, too, that you're saying, you even say in there, whatever nuclear weapons research may have taken place in the late 1990s, or early 2000s, before Rouhani got the file and started dealing with the E3, that those were rogue, unauthorized operations.
Are you so certain that that wasn't the Ayatollah, you know, had some guys working on a thing on the side there?
Well, I mean, I think, I do think that the government of Iran had a clear policy, which was based on the idea that nuclear weapons were both illicit and unwise for Iran.
I mean, I think that going back to Rafsanjani, and particularly to Khatami, the president, President Khatami, with, of course, Ali Khamenei, president in between, that there was a consistent policy that Iran is not interested in nuclear weapons, that this is forbidden because weapons of mass destruction.
There's plenty of statements to that effect, and arguments that were made that are quite credible, talking about how, you know, it would be crazy for us to, not crazy, but it would be unwise for us to think that nuclear weapons would assist our country in being more more secure, in fact, would have the opposite effect.
So a lot of different kinds of evidence converge to suggest that there was a policy in line with the idea that weapons of mass destruction are illicit under Islam, but also consistent with the sort of strategic viewpoint of the Iranian nuclear and foreign policy elite, not the nuclear elite, I take that back, I meant the strategic and foreign policy elite.
And of course, the number one theorist in that elite, the number one specialist in that elite was one Hassan Rouhani, who was the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council under Rafsanjani and under Khamenei, both, after, after, I'm sorry, under, he was, he was under President Rafsanjani, but under the Supreme Leader Khamenei from 1989 on.
And I think that it's, it's not only credible, it is difficult not to, to believe that Hassan Rouhani was fully in line with that, with that policy that, that nuclear weapons are illegal, as well as unwise for Iran.
Now, I mean, I think that there was a debate going on, and I talk about this in the book, that there was a debate going on, which was about whether having a capability, a nuclear capability, meant that they should know how to make nuclear weapons, or whether it simply meant that they should have the capability to enrich uranium.
And I think some of the people in the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and in the military research organizations, which had a self-interest in, you know, basically advancing their knowledge of nuclear weapons, wanted to go ahead and start studying, you know, this whole subject.
So, so there's, there's no doubt that there was that conflict going on.
But, you know, I don't see the evidence here that there was a, there was ever a change in policy.
I think the policy never changed, that Iran is not going to have a nuclear, nuclear weapons.
And so, so I think that, that whatever, whatever research was going on in the late 1990s, and 2000 to 2003, was research that could not be considered a nuclear weapons program.
I think that it was something that was being done, which was not expected to result in a nuclear weapon.
All right, now, so be forgiving of the Hawks for a minute here.
They're so suspicious, Gareth.
And it sure does seem like the Iranian government has been absolutely hell-bent on overcoming, call it American paranoia.
Even if we can see, hey, the Americans are paranoid in the first place.
The Iranians, boy, they seem hell-bent on pursuing nuclear technology no matter what.
And why, if it's just to produce electricity?
Don't you know they're sitting on a seal oil over there?
Right, right.
This is, this is, of course, the single biggest argument most widely shared, I would say, argument for believing that Iran must essentially be pursuing nuclear weapons, must have been pursuing weapons from the beginning.
That is to say, using the civilian nuclear program as a cover for a nuclear weapons program.
And I think there are a couple of points that have to be considered in response to that very popular, very widespread argument.
The first is that, in fact, it is not the fact, it is not factual to say that Iran has no interest in a non-petroleum-based power program, because there is a very strong economic argument, which was made explicit during the Shah's regime, that ultimately the oil is going to run out.
The, that, at that point, you know, Iran would have to have nuclear power.
And in the meantime, Iran needs to be able to sell as much of its petroleum resources as possible on the international market, which means that it needs to reduce its domestic consumption.
And in order to do that, it, it needs to have a nuclear, a nuclear power program.
So, so there is an economic, an economic rationale for that.
Yeah, just basic opportunity costs.
After all, there's not much of an international market for uranium, but you can sell the hell out of oil if you want some money.
Well, yeah.
And, and I think that, that, you know, the idea is often the, the argument is often made that, that Iran flares off, you know, more, more power in, in their oil fields every year than they could possibly make up for with, with investment in nuclear power.
I don't know if that's really true, but, but even if it is true, that does not dispose of the issue at all, because there are structural reasons why Iran is, is, has a very inefficient oil and gas industry, set of industries.
And, and that is because they have been unable to modernize those.
They've been unable to get the technology and capital to invest in the necessary modernization of their, of their oil and gas industries.
And, and that's why it's so inefficient.
That's, that's one reason why it's inefficient.
The other reason why it's inefficient is that, that Iran is in fact a statist economy.
It's fundamentally a statist economy by its ideology.
And therefore it is, it's going to be inefficient.
It's going to have widespread subsidies and they've recognized the subsidies are damaging to their economic prospects.
And so they're trying to do something about it.
But the fact is that, that they run their economy in a way that makes it very difficult to pursue the kind of strategy that is being suggested would be rational for them to pursue by their critics.
All right.
Now I'm keeping you a little bit over time here, Gareth, just to wrap up chapter three here, if we can.
Can you talk to us a little bit here about this latent deterrence and the, it's sort of like a lower case, mutually assured destruction, right?
Well, I mean, the idea of latent deterrence, you know, it can have different meanings, but in this case, I think the, the notion that the Iranian theorists had from the beginning of, of their intention to enrich uranium was that the knowledge of how to enrich uranium and the, the demonstrated capability to do it by itself would have a deterrent effect.
It was not necessary for Iran to have a nuclear weapon or to have a nuclear weapons program in order to have a certain, as they put it, latent deterrent effect from a nuclear program.
And I think they're right.
And I point out in the book that the former head of the CIA under Bush had publicly stated that the, that there were discussions with the Bush administration about the possibility of using military force against Iran.
And they decided that they'd better not do that because it would have the effect of causing Iran to actually speed up the, the nuclear program that they already had and, and make it more likely that they would have nuclear weapons.
And that's exactly the kind of latent deterrent effect that the Iranians had in mind.
Yeah.
You know, Gordon Prager used to joke about how they would say, you know, even if we bomb them, we're not sure if we know where all the sites are.
And he would snicker and say, yeah, that's because there are none, you big dummy.
But the point being that as long as they're diluting themselves in that way, it works.
The fact that they know how to make a centrifuge and spin it in a sense is enough to put off invasion indefinitely.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think that that's, I think that that's true.
It's certainly one of the factors.
I'm not saying it's the only factor that deters or discourages, shall we say, US and Israeli attack on Iran, but I think it is perhaps the single most important one.
Yeah.
Yeah, it could be.
And of course, what's funny here is that, and I don't know if we want to get too far into this part of it in this part of the interview, but might as well a little bit here about to bring up the golden offer, which was a story that you broke about the attempt of the Iranians in 2003 to make a grand bargain type offer to the Bush administration.
And by and, of course, the story told by Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, especially.
But your article was a burnt offering in the American Prospect, if anybody wants to look at that.
And this was their offer to negotiate on just about everything, including every aspect of their nuclear program, they said.
And this is when they hadn't done a thing but bench level tests yet.
Right.
I think you say in the book that they had installed a few centrifuges at Natanz, but I don't think they were even spinning until 2005.
Right.
Because that was when they took the BBC on a tour of the place.
And it was just a big underground, big, empty underground warehouse.
Right.
That's right.
I mean, they were they were not actually doing any enrichment.
They did not do anything until they started preparing for enrichment in 2005, late 2005.
So if they have a latent deterrent now, it was a shadow of a latent deterrent back when they offered to give up everything if we would only respect their sovereignty, the slightest bit, basically.
Well, right.
But of course, I mean, they were interested in in, you know, once they began to accumulate enriched uranium, low enriched uranium, I think they viewed that as a very strong symbolic indication that Iran had achieved, you know, the status of a nuclear power.
I mean, in fact, Ahmadinejad in 2005, 2006, I guess I should say, publicly declared that Iran had joined the nuclear club.
Iran was now a nuclear power because they had the ability to enrich uranium.
And, you know, the untold or the unspoken, I should say, the unspoken message in that way of talking about it, I think, was latent deterrent.
Right.
All right.
Now, well, you do talk a little bit about the attempted uranium swap deal in 2009 there at the end of Chapter three.
But I got to admit, I was just scanning that during the break.
And I'm not sure if I really caught the gist of your point that you were making there.
You were just you were citing that as an example of their willingness or or they're using 20 percent enrichment as a bargaining chip.
There was a lot of talk in 2010 about the fact that that Iran was now threatening now to to enrich 20 percent uranium, that that it was saying that I mean, some people argued that that Iran was was wanting to enrich 20 percent uranium and that it wouldn't do any good to have the fuel swap because it didn't settle the 20 percent uranium enrichment issue.
But in fact, I mean, you know, I quote, I believe it's Salehi at that point saying that that Iran was prepared to stop the 20 percent enriched enrichment of uranium if the United States was prepared to go ahead with the fuel swap and to provide the fuel that it would need for the Tehran research reactor.
So, you know, I think that's a that's a very weak, unsubstantiated argument that was being made against going ahead on terms that involved some compromise with Iran, which which was a compromise that was really simply more than anything else, recognizing their Iran's need to be able to say, you know, that they weren't just totally caving in to the American demand, that they wanted they wanted to have assurances that they would get something back in return quickly rather than having to wait a year or more.
Well, and as you talk about in what chapter one and or chapter two, the French had already ripped the Iranians off on some uranium from a deal left over back from the 1970s.
So they had a very specific reason to doubt the French.
It's not inconceivable that they really did distrust the French after that episode, and that it was not simply sort of a strategic use of that argument, although it was obviously, you know, it could be used as an argument to try to exclude the French, who at that point, by the way, were taking a very pro-Israeli position on the on the whole nuclear issue.
So they had very good reason not to want the French to be involved anyway.
Yeah.
And then don't I have a right and we're getting out of chapter three here now, but don't I have a right that Obama has specifically asked the Brazilians and the Turks starting in 2010 or the very end of 2009 to basically try again on the deal that had fallen apart in October of 09.
And and then they worked it out.
And then he told them, thanks, but no, thanks.
Yes.
And this is a very interesting and still quite not not quite explained episode in the annals of U.S. diplomacy toward Iran.
It appears to me that the Obama administration's senior officials, including the president himself, were so convinced that Iran was not and was not going to negotiate something with them that that they were prepared to encourage the Brazilians and the Turks to go ahead and try to get the Iranians to go along with this with this proposal.
And, of course, they were wrong about that.
The the Iranians were willing to to do so with some degree of compromise.
And so so I think what the Obama administration was was planning on was that this would sort of nail down the case that they were planning to make, that Iran was not interested in diplomacy and that there was no time for sanctions.
And I think that they were a bit nonplussed when when the Iranians went along.
I mean, they were more than a bit nonplussed when the Iranians did agree.
And then they had to quickly change signals.
Right.
We will not accept your acceptance of our demands.
Right.
All right.
Well, I guess that's a good place to stop this interview, too, before everybody gets bored and change the channel anyway.
So we'll be back tomorrow, I hope, you pick three thirty four or four thirty Eastern Time, Gareth, for chapter four and or five.
We can do the same thing.
All right.
Good deal.
It'll be part three of our continuing series with Gareth Porter about his brand new book, Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare.
Thanks so much for your time, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
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It's just a harmless stainless steel business card size copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA is a bunch of liberty destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights security edition from securityedition.com.
It's the size of a business card so it fits right in your wallet and it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's securityedition.com.
And don't forget their great fourth amendment socks.
Hey guys, I got his laptop.
So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at scotthorton.org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.