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Hey everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well maybe you should.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Website is scotthorton.org.
You can find me on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter at slash scotthortonshow.
Of course, we're here live from noon to two Eastern time, Monday through Friday, less Thursday, here at noagendastream.com.
All right, now, our first guest today, maybe our only guest, but at least our first guest today is the great Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks very much again, Scott.
Good.
Glad to be back.
Well, you wrote a thing, so I have to interview you about it.
That's the rules.
Actually, you wrote a couple of things.
Let's start with how the U.S. quietly lost the IED war in Afghanistan.
Well, quietly, huh?
What do you mean?
Well, I mean, by that, that this is a what I think is a major story that has obviously not been covered by the news media.
I mean, what what the news media has done is occasionally they have talked to somebody in the D in D.O.
D. or the U.S. NATO command in Kabul and gotten a happy face story suggesting, well, things are looking better.
You know, we have a number of fatalities are down between such and such a time and such and such a time.
And so we're making progress.
But nobody has basically said, look, we've lost this war on the IED, the improvised explosive devices to the Taliban.
And so I think I thought it was time for someone to really call a spade a spade.
And that's what this story is about.
You have a Barack Obama killed three children blowing up a couple of guys planting a landmine on the side of the road yesterday.
That sounds like victory, right?
Isn't that progress to a Democrat?
Yeah, I'm afraid that that's what has to be sold as progress to the to the Democratic base and to the American people.
And that really is their best idea, right?
We'll fly around in our Apache helicopters.
And if we see a guy with a shovel near a road, we'll kill him.
And then that's it.
We'll just try to keep up that way.
You know, it does.
I mean, you know, we're making we're making a bit of a jest about this.
But I've noted, you know, last last night at the presidential debate that Obama made a major point of of saying that, you know, if we find whoever did the the the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, we will track them down and kill them.
And that has become, I think, the the present day, the present equivalent in the Obama administration of the kind of chest thumping warmongering that has traditionally been reserved for major wars.
I think that that it is this kind of, you know, tracking down individuals who are doing something to harm U.S. citizens.
Of course, that includes U.S. troops in put in harm's way by the policymakers.
That has become the way in which presidents claim that they are being muscular and exerting U.S. power.
Yeah, well, I mean, like in in nineteen seventy nine, they said we're going to hunt down the people that raided the embassy in Tehran.
Right.
But I guess they could take it out on the Ayatollah and not have to have just individuals to chase down.
Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a trend which has reached an absurd conclusion, in effect, where, you know, the United States is engaged in a counterterrorism, quote, unquote, conflict in which, you know, it's obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy and a circular, circular logic going on here that, you know, we are tracking down people who are attacking us abroad and that, you know, that U.S. policy is of the essence of why terrorism continues to grow as a problem rather than having subsided.
Yeah, well, and that's pretty much on purpose at this point, right?
I mean, how stupid can they be for this many years in a row?
Well, I think it's I think it is on purpose in terms of the planners of the U.S. military and the Pentagon, when they talk, when they think about, you know, projecting forward the next four years or beyond in terms of military budgets, they obviously regard the war on terrorism as a central element of their of their pitch, not the primary one, because the primary one is still, you know, to fight major wars.
And that that means China.
But but certainly they have to make as much as they can out of the, you know, war against al Qaeda and similar organizations to to justify a continued Cold War level military budget.
So I think that part of it is is deliberate.
Then I think that there is the usual sort of fuzzy thinking on the part of political people, you know, politicos, the political elite in this country, which supports that and, of course, creates a set of political, personal and political interests in the White House and elsewhere, which which complement it.
So, I mean, I think to some extent that that is it's a combination of conscious and subconscious, but still deliberate political strategies.
I forgot if you and I spoke about this, we may have, but where David Gregory asked Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, hey, man, you know, and I was surprised this was on a Sunday morning news show, but it made it all the way out of David Gregory's mouth.
Hey, lots of people are starting to sound like Gareth Porter and and say that the more we kill Yemenis, the more Yemeni enemies we have and that maybe this is counterproductive in the long run.
And Panetta, you know, he couldn't answer it.
He couldn't really confront the question.
Right.
Very interesting.
But he just said, interesting illustration.
Yeah.
He said, well, you know, these are the tools we have, the drones, etc.
And so this is what we have to do.
And, you know, that's it.
That, of course, was the explicit rationale which was given by Panetta when he was at the CIA for, you know, for the drone war in Pakistan.
And he's still talking exactly the same language now at DOD.
So, I mean, no, no surprise there.
All right.
Now, if the Afghans can make a bomb that's effective enough that it hurts an American soldier, then that bomb must have been made in Iran.
Right.
Right.
Of course, that would be the logic of some people who are inclined to to find whatever basis they can for blaming Iran for our troubles in that part of the world.
But we now I think are it's it's absolutely clear that the Taliban get their bombs.
They make their own bombs, of course.
And it's they're based on the simplest sort of materials, which are essentially fertilizer that comes from Pakistan.
And by the way, just in case people wonder if there's some possibility of shutting down that route from Pakistan, that fertilizer represents around less than one percent, if I remember correctly, of the total fertilizer that is manufactured in Pakistan.
The rest of it, of course, goes to farmers who need it for their production.
So this is a situation that makes it really clearly impossible for any counter strategy to have any hope of shutting down the pipeline of material for the improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan.
Well, if it wasn't fertilizer, it'd be something else.
Right.
MacGyver can teach you how to make a bomb from the other the other elements of very interesting.
I didn't get into this in my story because it's the usual twelve or thirteen hundred word limit.
You just can't do that.
But what has been very interesting about the Taliban evolution in terms of their IED strategies is that they have learned that by minimizing or eliminating the metal, the metallic element in their IEDs, they make it impossible for the U.S. military and NATO militaries to detect the bombs with their sophisticated detectors.
And that's become a huge problem for the U.S.
NATO forces in terms of the effort to to minimize the effect of the bombs.
And of course, the other thing that they've done is as the U.S. has upgraded the armor on their armored vehicles for U.S. troops and NATO troops, the Taliban simply make bigger and bigger bombs.
And the result has been that when they do have explosions, the the wounds and injuries, including traumatic brain injuries to U.S. and NATO troops are worse than they have been in the past.
Well, you know, I like to try to think like a right winger sometimes, you know, play devil's advocate on these kinds of issues.
And I guess one point of view would be, you know what?
Sometimes the job of a soldier is to get blown up.
We got a war to win and there's a certain percentage of guys that are going to get hurt.
But they volunteered and we have to have a victory here.
And it's working.
And so, you know, sorry about the guys who lose their legs and lose their genitals and, you know, come home maimed and stuck in a hospital bed for the rest of their short lives and whatever that kind of thing.
But what are you going to do?
You got to take the beaches at Normandy somehow, Gareth.
Well, of course, that is indeed the rationale that you will get from a U.S. official.
If you probe hard enough, you push hard enough.
That is precisely or roughly, I should say, the kind of argument that has to be made.
But I mean, the problem, the central problem with that argument, of course, is that it's not working.
It hasn't worked.
It is not a conventional war where they can justify the mangling and loss of limbs and brain, permanent brain injuries to American troops and, of course, the loss of lives.
But, you know, ten times more than ten times the number of lives lost are being ruined by the injuries to IEDs.
And the problem is that, you know, they cannot cite any real progress which makes a difference in terms of defeating the Taliban.
And indeed, what the IED war has symbolized is the reality that the Taliban have not weakened.
They have not been dwindled down by the attacks by special forces or the night raids by special forces against suspected Taliban.
In fact, they have continued to grow.
And that has been clearly indicated by the fact that they've been able to increase exponentially the number of bombs that they've planted over the last three years or from 2009 through 2011.
And that has resulted, of course, in an increase in the number of injuries to U.S. troops from about two hundred and seventy, if I remember correctly, in 2009 to more than one thousand two hundred in 2010 and then three thousand some in 2011.
So that has been the evidence that the Taliban have not been defeated, in fact, have continued to grow despite the pressure from the U.S. military.
So I think that is that that argument simply cannot hold up in the circumstances that we see we have seen in Afghanistan.
And in fact, you know, since 2009, the number of deaths have gone down, but the number of injuries has skyrocketed and the total cost, the human cost to the United States has certainly increased vastly from the IED war.
And even though they have continued to have been able to to reduce the number of deaths and to some extent, perhaps even the number of injuries slightly in 2012, it is still far above 2009 and far above the starting point when the U.S. surge took place.
OK, now, so let's go back to that.
Right.
Obama takes power January 2009.
First thing he does is send 30,000 troops.
And then I guess that was in the late spring and then another 30,000 in the summer.
And then finally, the 30,000 that everybody pays attention to that he announced in November at the big West Point speech that he was going with the surge after all this dithering and whatever.
So far, do I have my history correct there?
That's roughly correct.
OK, so then you came on the show, I don't know, the next day and we talked about the West Point speech and we while we were covering this thing the whole time and we were talking about David Petraeus's politics, the head of central command at the time who was really putting the screws to Obama in public and putting out all these leaks about how Obama's not man enough to give him all the troops that he needs to win the war and all of this stuff.
And then Obama gave in and I guess he wanted another 60,000, but he got another 30.
But he's still that's 90 in a year.
So fine.
So that was this big surge.
Well, you're talking about McChrystal specifically when we're talking about putting the screws to Obama.
Right.
And in 2009.
Well, yeah, I mean, he was he had he had Petraeus behind him, but it was McChrystal doing the doing the immediate.
Yeah, I guess that's right.
Yeah.
I forgot where the quote dithering came from and whatever.
But anyway, it was a pretty unprecedented.
Well, not too unprecedented, but it was a pretty strong push by the generals to get what they wanted against their civilian command.
Absolutely.
And there was there was a lot of resistance from Obama.
We've seen the documentation of that from from the histories that have come out since then.
But but he did give in.
He did give way to the combination of Petraeus, McChrystal and Robert Gates, who was critical, played a critical role in putting forward the so-called compromise, which gave the military most of what it wanted.
Hmm.
Well, and there's so many details, but I got to drop this one, too.
It seems so important to me.
This is equivalent to, you know, lying about what the Iraq and IE of 2002 said, really, when Barack Obama, according to The Washington Post, refused to read a CIA report.
It wasn't an IE, but it was a CIA report that he already knew said, don't bother searching because it's not going to work.
And he just refused to read the damn thing rather than know that it said that before he made this decision that was apparently all political.
He thought he would look tough if he capitulated.
Yeah, I think that that's that's just another indicator of the reality that that he was basically putting forward this surge, this troop surge, not because he believed that it was an effective policy, but because the domestic bureaucratic politics were such that he was not prepared to buck the pressure from the military industrial complex.
Right.
In other words, he did it anyway, even though he knew better, as I like to call it.
Yeah.
In other words, he knew better.
He did it anyway because he's a murderer.
Anyway, he did it.
He did it because he certainly has a set of values that did not give him the strength of character to say no, that's for sure.
You sure are a kind gentleman of a reporter there, Gareth.
Well, I think that's that much we know for sure.
You know, of course, you know, he he does, in fact, lend himself to the charge that he's a murderer for obvious reasons.
But the objective fact is that that he was unwilling and unable to stand up under circumstances where a stronger human being, a stronger leader should have and could have done so.
Which is so funny, because anybody who's actually the president ought to be able to, you know, summon that and just answer back.
No, I'm the president.
Therefore, I mean, my argument with everybody.
Right.
He's a commander in chief.
If it comes down to does he have the power to hire people to torture Somalis in a dungeon beneath Mogadishu, he has all the power in the world or to ignore Congress on the war in Libya, then he can do anything.
Right.
But stand up to his own generals on a war that they want.
Oh, no.
But look, I mean, to me, the worst the worst aspect of that situation, from the point of view of reflecting his on his character, is that he was smart enough to understand that this was not going to work.
He was also smart enough to know.
And Joe Biden, by the way, was making this argument very aggressively in White House discussions, as we now know.
Yeah, that publicly at the time, at the time that this was this surge, this policy was not going to help us in Pakistan.
And that indeed, this this was likely to have the opposite effect in Pakistan of further destabilizing that situation.
And of course, that was absolutely correct.
And and actually, Obama repeated that same argument in the White House discussions with the military.
He responded to portray us when Petraeus was saying, oh, well, you know, we should put primary emphasis here on our interest in Afghanistan, not our interest in Pakistan.
And Obama said, no, Pakistan is our primary interest.
But, you know, nevertheless, he finally gave in for political political reasons, not because of the substance of the issue.
All right.
Now, I think you're going to have to get into instructing us a bit about the role of Richard Holbrook and part of this, because the plan at the time when you and I talked about it was they know Petraeus.
If you ask Petraeus and McChrystal, they would tell you that they know that they're not going to just what the Taliban and beat them and win and create a Western nation state there.
Their plan is basically to beat on the Taliban for a year and a half and then say, you know, we're so strong and you are now so weak because we, you know, hit you so hard so many times that you're going to come to the table and accept our terms for peace with honor and we can leave and lose, but call it a victory kind of a situation.
So now and that was supposed to happen by three months ago.
Right.
July of 2012.
Correct.
That's that's roughly the view that I would have about what happened.
Yes.
OK, so where's the negotiations?
Well, I mean, the negotiations have not taken place, of course, because the Taliban have not given in, they've not cried uncle, they've not signaled that they can see the light now that that it's time for them to make peace with the U.S. supported regime and so forth.
And as a result of that, you know, the United States has lost interest in negotiations with the Taliban.
I mean, I think that's what the evidence now suggests.
So I think that neither side really is at this point pushing very, very aggressively for negotiations.
I think that that is still to come if it if it does come.
I mean, you know that there are certainly the more I look at the situation, the more I wonder if this is not going to be one of those issues that is decided not by or not with a negotiated settlement at all, but one side, either either one side, which I think is going to be the the Kabul government gradually disintegrates or there's simply going to be a continued civil war.
And I think that some combination of those two things is much more likely at this point than negotiated solution.
Stupid CIA, you know, the the most effort they ever put into negotiating was with an imposter, right, that they just gave a pallet full of cash and never saw him again.
That's right.
And of course, that illustrates your point.
It was, of course, Petraeus who was taken in by the imposter because Petraeus had convinced himself that he was being so successful in Afghanistan in in putting and beating up on the Taliban that they were ready now to to come to him and say, yes, we will accept your terms because that's what the imposter did.
So it was a lovely illustration of just how how much of a fantasy world the Petraeus was living in at that point.
This is the current head of the CIA.
That's correct.
And that, of course, is his reward for living in that fantasy world.
Well, it's his reward for for being being allowed to be taken off the battlefield and put in a position where I think Obama felt that he would do less harm than than he would being the commander.
You know, from a certain point of view, I don't know, like legal technicality wise or whatever, but this almost these men almost to me seem more culpable than George Bush in the Iraq war.
I mean, he's got a much higher body count and obviously deserves life in prison, like under prison, you know, but he, I think, sort of believed everything was going to go swimmingly and that it was going to be just fine and it'll be over soon.
And and just like the neocons promised him in their silly little briefings and all of that kind of thing.
Whereas here, Obama outright knows better.
He is on the record saying, I know this can't work, but I'm going to send these young men and women over there to die anyway.
And in fact, that was in the back of my mind when I was talking about Obama's knowledge that that this wasn't likely to work and that this really wasn't a great idea.
His skepticism about it, because I think you're right that George W.
Bush did not have that skepticism.
He he was simply not smart enough to have independent thoughts about these things and basically did what he was told by the national security bureaucracy and particularly, of course, by Vice President Dick Cheney on this sort of on Iraq and Cheney and Rumsfeld.
So I think that there is a very clear contrast between Bush and Obama in this regard.
And it does, in a way, make him more culpable, even though you're right that the result of the decisions that George W.
Bush made were far, far more criminal in terms of the immensity of the number of deaths and the the overall damage to that society than than even in the case of Afghanistan.
You know, I don't vote and I don't encourage people to take place in politics, but for people who are you know, they have to choose about things like this.
I think it's important that people recognize that, you know, Mitt Romney is a would be war criminal.
But Barack Obama has killed people every day, innocent people every day for years on end now.
And so I don't know how anybody could support him in any way.
I don't know how I don't know how he could be considered the lesser evil when Mitt Romney, the worst thing he's ever done to people is fire them en masse, whereas Barack Obama bleeds them to death.
Right, I mean, of course, if you're talking about a choice between two guys, then you have to try to project forward what what would Romney do given the reins of power in a permanent war state?
And that, of course, is not a pleasant thing to think about.
But it wouldn't be much different than this.
I mean, for all his rhetoric, there's been quite a few stories like this for all his rhetoric, trying to sound like Fred Kagan or Bill Kristol, all his policy prescriptions so far, what he says, he's really no different than Obama.
He's really more.
I think I think when you when you think about Romney, you have to think about somebody who's much more like George W.
Bush.
I don't think he's he's got much of an independent capability to analyze or or to understand these issues.
And therefore, he takes his cues either from Netanyahu on Iran or from the generals on on Afghanistan.
And so I think that that's the parallel that is much more relevant here for understanding what a Romney president would presidency would be like.
So you'd be OK with that if it was the other way around.
I don't know what Netanyahu thinks about Afghanistan, but listen to the generals on Iran.
They're the ones who don't want to do it.
It would be better if he took his cues from Netanyahu in Afghanistan, because I don't think the Israelis think this is a worthless war.
It doesn't do them any good.
Yeah, there you go, Romney, just switch them.
Yeah.
Anyway, so listen, let me ask you about Iran, by the way, because you got this other article here and it's really great and important.
And it's called Obama aides launch preemptive attack on new Iran plan.
So they're now between what, chapter three and four of these Iran talks?
Well, there have been three full fledged meetings between the P5 plus one and Iran this year.
That's right.
And then there was apparently another meeting, which was not not a full fledged meeting in August, but in any case, yeah, three three major three major meetings.
So we're now looking at certainly a fourth full fledged P5 plus one and Iran meeting sometime either late this year or early next year, at least according to some of the news reports.
OK, and then so the Iranians are there's been all kinds of few leaks in a row right of them saying that, you know, we'll halt our 20 percent enrichment if only we can import it from you.
Basically going back to Obama's offer from 2009.
Right.
They've gone as they have.
They have leaked, I think, two things.
One, they have sort of suggested, yeah, we will limit our enrichment to less than 20 percent if you provide the the wherewithal, the fuel that we need for the Tehran research reactor.
But then there's a second line of thinking, which, of course, I included in my article that not second line of thinking, but but a second requirement that the Iranians have made clear, which is that there has to be sanctions relief as part of the deal.
I mean, look, the key thing here is that the Iranians clearly understand that the one thing that they have going for them in these negotiations is the the sense of urgency that at least the Obama administration has voiced in the past that the 20 percent enrichment represents a problem in terms of giving Iran a breakout, potential breakout capability.
And the more they continue to do the 20 percent enrichment, the closer they get to this breakout or the bigger the breakout capability would be.
So the Iranians understand that that is their primary bargaining leverage with the United States and the P5 plus one.
And they're going to use that undoubtedly to make sure that they get sanctions relief, at least from the new oil sanctions, which have clearly made a big dent on their their oil revenues in 2012.
And that's why this next round very clearly is going to involve a deal, an offer from Iran that involves shutting down the 20 percent enrichment of the whole, not the Fordell plant necessarily, although I think that may be still part of the bargaining, but definitely turning off the spigot on 20 percent enrichment in return for getting the fuel that they need, an adequate supply and an assured supply of the fuel for a Tehran research reactor, but also the sanctions relief.
And I think that the Iranians put forward this proposal in some fashion in July, apparently, and then they've revised it and perhaps put more steps into it.
They've talked about at the United Nations General Assembly last month trying to get some support, particularly, I think, from neutral, non-aligned countries.
But they definitely want to have the the sanctions relief come before the they want to be assured of the sanctions relief before they agree to the final step of saying we will suspend.
That's the official word, suspend or suspension of the 20 percent enrichment.
So but the administration's position is, screw you, no matter what you do and you better do everything we say, we'll never lift the sanctions.
Well, they haven't, of course, said that publicly and explicitly, but but one has to discern in the pattern of communications that the administration has made both through official statements as well as through leaks to Sanger and others in the news media, that that is, in fact, the present political reality.
They have no intention of granting sanctions relief to the Iranians, particularly turning off the oil sanctions because they feel they now have the Iranians by the neck, that this is this is their real leverage and they're not going to give it up.
And that is because I think they feel that they have a shot at either getting the Iranians to agree to go beyond 20 percent enrichment, ending 20 percent enrichment to making concessions that would involve, you know, some kind of suspension of enrichment generally, which is not going to happen.
Or if they can't succeed in that, then maybe and this, of course, is some people in the administration, not necessarily everybody.
Maybe they can get the regime change because if they just hold on long enough, this is going to do such damage in Iranian society that there will be political ramifications.
So I think that that is the problem that we face now.
The you know, there there have been some reports suggesting the Europeans want to put on the table a new proposal that would, in fact, give some sanctions relief to the Iranians.
But I'm not not very hopeful that they would be able to actually offer an end to the oil sanctions completely.
OK, now, I guess there have been anti-Ahmadinejad riots and protests, I don't know, riots, but protests in Iran.
And they are taking the heat quite a bit for America's sanctions and the destruction of their currency there.
But so do you think that that's somewhere what what percent chance do you put on it that this could actually that these sanctions actually could lead to a regime change?
And and by that, I mean, end of the power of the Ayatollah and the mullah brigade at the top.
Very hard for me to to see that that's a possibility anytime in the foreseeable future.
I think the the green movement really had its best shot, you know, earlier back in 2009 and 2010, and that it is now clearly weaker than it was then.
And so the problem is, what is the alternative?
Where's the alternative going to come from at this point?
Well, that's that's you know, you chuckled and I chuckled, too, because that's a laugh.
But he really believes that that's well, I'm most of he was loyal to the Ayatollah and he's loyal to the nuclear program, too.
He was just opposed to Ahmadinejad because he wanted power for himself, sort of like Obama and Romney.
I mean, not even the neoconservatives believe in that.
I don't think, you know, there may be a few adults who are here and there who believe that.
But major figures in the neoconservative movement know they don't they don't take that seriously.
Well, I have seen them kind of heartened, though, and I wish I had a good footnote to mention here, but I have seen a couple of media pieces saying, well, look at these protests against Ahmadinejad.
It's working.
Yeah, of course, they're going to say that.
And that is the way in which they keep up their their spirits and, you know, sort of bolster their base, so to speak.
But that's quite different from really believing that this is going to result in bringing to power of people who are their their friends.
Can I ask you, did you read this?
I was late in reading it, I think a couple of weeks late, but there was this piece called the Entebbe option.
I'm probably pronouncing it wrong.
Yes.
In foreign policy.
Yes, of course.
I did see that.
And so for everybody, this is a was a real important piece by was it Mark Perry?
Mark Perry.
Exactly.
And what he talks about a lot is how the American military and intelligence establishments do not want a war with Iran, but that, you know, the Israelis might just do it, might just start one.
And if they did, it might look like this or it might look like that is a lot of what's in there.
And the part that surprised me the most and I wanted to ask you about and feel free to say whatever you want about anything else in that article, too, because it was a very long, compelling and interesting thing.
But the part I want to ask you about was Sam Gardner, who at least, you know, in past years has been a very anti war with Iran kind of guy.
And I don't think he was endorsing such an idea, but he was the one quoted as saying it's actually doable, much more doable than you would think for the Israelis to parachute in a few hundred special forces guys to seize the Fordo facility, kill anybody there, steal all the uranium, blow the place up as they leave.
And the nearest army detachment, it would take them three days to mount an effective defense and they'd be long gone by then.
And that kind of thing.
And I just wonder, is that because, you know, war doesn't seem so bad when Democrats are in power to some or is that a real thing that actual military strategists believe that they could do some Chuck Norris Delta Force to raid on the nuclear plan under the mountain there?
Well, first of all, I just want to say Mark Perry is a friend of mine and I respect him greatly.
I think he's a really great journalist.
But in this case, I mean, you know, he he's not suggesting, obviously, that that this is, in fact, likely or anything like that.
He's suggesting he's reporting that that the U.S. military in their basically contingency planning is trying to think through, OK, what are all the possible ways in which the Israelis would, you know, might try to do something against Iran and that this was perhaps the one that was most plausible of all the options that they could think of.
This was the most plausible.
That still does not mean that the Israelis are likely to do it, much less that they definitely will do it.
It simply means that this is the most plausible of all the options that they could come up with.
I know that was my question.
Is that actually plausible at all?
To me, it's completely ridiculous.
I don't think that it is plausible.
I don't think that it would be likely to work.
It would be a Hail Mary pass in a situation where the risks of doing that are enormous.
I mean, just think of the risks of Israeli commandos falling into the hands of of Iranians.
Now, you know, and I would say that trying to do an attack on a nuclear facility in Iran is clearly not the same as trying to do an attack on a facility in Syria or in in Iraq.
The there's no there's no surprise.
The Iranians are have been drilling against every contingency, including, of course, this contingency for years.
And even if the Iranians are not as good as I suspect they are at defending against this, the possibility of success is very, very low in my view.
So, you know, it's again, it's the most plausible of all the scenarios, but not very plausible.
I think that's the bottom line.
Yeah.
Well, and if nothing else, that's the bottom line that's going to keep Benjamin Netanyahu from really even thinking about trying it seriously.
Well, that's right.
And by the way, I think it's worth registering here that everything that I've been saying about the Netanyahu, Netanyahu bomb Iran ploy being being a bluff all along is now basically been validated by the fact that not only did Netanyahu in his U.N. speech fail to make any hint of a threat of an attack of a unilateral option even against Iran, but now the Israeli press is reporting that defense sources are saying that the the Iranians actually are serious about trying to do a confidence building measure by diverting a large portion of their stockpile of 20 percent enrichment to the Tehran research reactor, just like the Iranians said they were all along.
And so this is really this is big.
This is huge because this is the first time for the Israeli for the Israeli intelligence services to admit this truth in the Israeli paper.
That's not the intelligence services, Scott.
This is defense sources.
This is policymakers in defense, meaning Ehud Barak leaking this to the press.
This is this is the turning point that I mean, either Barack is completely now opposed to the policy of Netanyahu, of continuing any semblance of a threat of a unilateral attack, which is a possibility, or Netanyahu and Barack both have agreed that the game is over.
That's interesting.
All right.
Hey, I've already kept you away every time.
So let me go ahead and ask you one more.
Did you see the thing about well, there was another article by this other guy in foreign policy that had it where, oh, yeah, the Americans are really hip for this thing and they might just want to have a war.
And then there was a whole thing at Mondo Weiss about how this clearly was a leak from Benjamin Netanyahu's buddy at the American embassy and that his deputy then got canned for objecting to it.
Something like that.
Can you fill us in on that?
No question about it.
This was a leak.
This was a leak from the ambassador of Israel to the United States, who was David Rothkoff's college roommate, apparently, which and he's the writer of foreign policy, Rothkoff.
That's right.
And so this this is really a low point for foreign policy to have published this this piece, which makes it sound like somehow or other, you know, there is a there's some inclination within the U.S. government to have this kind of brief attack on on Iran, very short to hard attack on on a specific facility.
There's no such thing clearly in the U.S. government.
This all came from Israel and it's all it's all crap.
Well, you know, what was funny to me about it was just me.
I misunderstood the article when I was reading it.
Mondo Weiss.
I just assumed I just give reason the benefit of the doubt too damn much, Gareth.
And so I just assumed that what they were saying was that some deputy at the embassy got out of line and leaked the story that was just a bit too much and got fired for it.
But no, no, no, no.
It was the boss of the embassy that the story that was way too much.
And it was his Smithers who said, geez, boss, are you sure who got canned?
Yeah, that's right.
Exactly.
It's a very good story, a telling story about how the politics work on the Israeli side, about how they treat dissenters.
Crazy.
All right.
You know what?
Talking with you is fun.
Thanks for doing the show again, Gareth.
Thank you.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be on again.
All right.
I mean, that's the heroic Gareth Porter.
He's the author of Perils of Dominance and he writes for Interpret Service, IPS News dot net.
They reprint it all at antiwar dot com and a lot of other places, too.
Also, please check out his award winning work at Truthout dot org, especially on the civilian casualties from the night raids, et cetera, et cetera.
Like that.
I got 45 minutes worth of stuff coming up.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here.
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