10/31/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
Back to it.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
On to our next guest, it's our good friend Sheldon Richman.
He is the vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
And the editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Just $25 a year and print $15 to read it online.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine, and thanks for inviting me back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I'm very happy to have a chance to hear what you have to say, and to give other people a chance to hear what you have to say about America's developing relationship with Iran, what it all means, where you think we are, and on like that, of course, we're between meetings right now.
They still have scientific talks, or you know, wonky talks going on between the actual technical expert types, but the politicians are between meetings right now.
But you've written some really good articles lately at FFF.org and at Reason Magazine, etc.
Can Iran trust the US?
Does Obama have the courage to see this thing through, I forgot the rest of it, and stop demonizing Iran?
And of course, you know, all those titles, it could just be one long essay, I guess.
But I don't know, whichever you think is the most important idea to start with here, whatever it is you want to say, I want to hear what you think about where things are going, how optimistic or not, etc.
Yeah, well, the three articles which were, you know, op-ed length, size, could be right, could be easily knitted together into a longer essay.
It's three different angles on the same subject.
Namely, this opening with Iran, and because I tried to, what I tried to do in the first one was to remind people of the history of Iranian-American relations by turning the question around.
Most people, you know, are wondering, in the United States at least, wondering, you know, can the United States trust Iran?
And I turned that around to, can Iran trust the United States?
And I tried to go through very briefly the history of U.S.-Iranian relations since 1953, which most people don't know about.
Of course, it begins in 53 when the U.S. thwarts and helps overthrow a Democratic prime minister who had been elected by an elected parliament, and who, you know, was left of center, was no kind of, you know, raving Marxist or anything, but, you know, nationalized, talked about nationalizing the British oil interest, and the U.S. went to bat for Britain and for itself, ultimately, and sent the CIA in with, you know, bags of cash to foment resistance against Mohamed Mosaddegh, the prime minister, and by driving him out of power, restored the power of the Shah, the monarch, the Shah of Iran.
He then proceeded to, you know, institute a regime of brutality with secret police, you know, for the next 26 years.
Its close ally, by the way, his close ally, by the way, was Israel, who armed him and trained his Soboks, secret police, and it was not a very nice place to be.
That, as a result, stimulated the religious forces in Iran, and this culminates in a revolution in 1979, which was really an alliance of religious types and liberals to overthrow the Shah, the dictatorial monarch.
But, in the end, the religious factions take control, and we get, you know, what everybody, well, a lot of people might remember now, happened in 1979, including the hostage-taking of the people in the U.S. embassy for 444 days.
And, beginning on that date, of course, the U.S. then began a campaign of covert warfare, or proxy, and proxy war against Iran ever since, which continues up to the current day.
So, the question is, can Iran trust the United States?
The other pieces then talked about how...
Well, hold that thought for a second there, because I want to see if I can interject something here, which seems interesting to me.
Jimmy Carter famously, when the revolution happened in 79, they overthrew the American puppets and installed...or, and Khomeini seized power there.
Jimmy Carter referred to the coup of 53 as ancient history.
And, certainly, when it's 2013, almost the end of it now, and you and I are sitting here talking about 1953, I mean, even as you're speaking, I'm picturing Ike Eisenhower in black and white footage, and it does really feel like ancient history.
So, I just wanted to point out that, for the 26 years that the Shah was in power, so, what was 53 to the people in Iran of 79?
That would be like if the Iranians had overthrown George H.W. Bush back in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, and installed the Ayatollah here to rule over us in America.
Would we be over it by now?
Or, we would just be biding our time until, even if we had to put Pat Robertson in charge, anyone who's actually from here to get rid of the Iranian-installed Ayatollah sock puppet here in our country.
And then, I also wanted to point out that here we are, longer than that, longer than 26 years later, and the Americans still hold just as much of a grudge over them overthrowing our sock puppet that we had installed there, and won't forgive them for that an even longer time later, when it's their freaking country, Sheldon!
Well, that's right.
Ancient history was a, I don't know, I suppose a polite way of saying irrelevant history.
I wrote a paper, actually, based on that phrase by Carter.
And we should remember that a little more over a year before the Shah was finally driven from power, New Year's Eve, before 77, I believe, 77, 78, the Carters, Mr. and Mrs. Carter, President and Mrs. Carter, were celebrating New Year's Eve, ringing in the New Year, with the Shah in Tehran, and hosting him as this great man and great friend.
And so, you know, the U.S. was very clearly identified with the Shah in the eyes of the Iranian people, and you're right, it wasn't ancient history to them in 1979, and it's still not ancient history.
They know this, they're taught it, and who can blame them?
The U.S. is the hegemon, the great hegemon, you know, they call it the great Satan, or at least maybe that kind of language is being downplayed these days.
But it's not without cause, and you know, Americans are so innocent, you know, self-blinded about American foreign policy, and anything that goes back a couple of years, right?
They think history, because as you often point out, history begins the day that there's some outrage committed against, you know, the United States.
It's always that day, and there's nothing that ever happened the day before, or the year before, or maybe several years before.
So, I tried to point that out just to put, change the footing, change the whole way, perspective that people are looking at this, you know, this latest, you know, manifestation of the conflict with Iran, because it's not a question of, can we trust them?
Why should they trust, when I say us, I mean the U.S. government?
Well, now, in this specific case, do you think they can?
They have great reason to be skeptical.
That's why I turn Obama's words around, and Netanyahu's words around, and the Israel lobby's words around.
Actions have to be, words have to be matched by actions.
Now I'm talking about Obama and the American government.
Actions have to match the words.
If the words are sounding pro-peace, and there's, you know, there's a little more of that coming from the White House these days, that's not enough.
Real actions, and they should begin by taking off sanctions.
I mean, they should just do the opposite of anything that Netanyahu says do the opposite of.
Sort of like George Costanzo on the old Seinfeld show, right?
Whatever he calls for, do the opposite, because that'll be closer to the wise policy.
They need to begin, I mean, I think they shouldn't have the sanctions, they should remove them all, they shouldn't, for anything around those, they should remove the sanctions.
It's a monstrous policy directed at the Iranian people.
I love how the media like to talk about how, oh, the sanctions are really biting the Iranian economy, crippling the Iranian economy.
You can't bite or cripple an economy.
You bite and cripple people, you make life hard for them, you make life hell for them, you deny them medicine, you deny them food.
That's not an economy, that's people.
We need to talk about this in concrete, individualistic terms.
We are inflicting great hardship on innocent people, and you can't justify it by saying, well, we don't like their regime.
So that's the first thing I wanted to point out, that the trust issue really runs the other way.
The other thing I wanted to point out is the so-called charm offensive of Rouhani, the president, which was getting so much attention when he and Obama were appearing at the UN, New York, is nothing new.
It's a call to charm offensive, and it's shameful for the media to call the charm offensive.
One thing for an advocate to call it that, if you don't like Iran, yeah, you then stigmatize it as a charm offensive, but the media ought to strive for a little more detachment.
If they know a little bit of history, they'd realize this is not the first time the Iranians, Rouhani and people like him, have made these kinds of offers and overtures.
There have been concrete proposals by the Iranians going back to 2001, and I'm sure we can go back earlier than that if we look hard, where they were trying to cooperate with the U.S. government.
You know, after 9-11, with regard to Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda and, you know, bin Laden, and in other ways, they put forth a program to create transparency in their peaceful nuclear program.
I say peaceful because, you know, the intelligence agencies of both the United States and Israel don't say they're not making a bomb, they don't have an intention to make a bomb, they gave up any movement toward making, turning that into a weapon program in 2003, when Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
And, you know, so much we could mention here, the U.S. was Saddam Hussein's ally in his war against Iran.
They haven't forgotten that, you know, that ancient history.
So, this is not new for Iran.
They've tried to accommodate the United States.
They want to be on the good side.
They want trade.
They want to be taken seriously.
But, you know, the U.S. has always refused.
You know, when the Swiss passed along a proposal from the Iranians in, what, 2002, 2003, which was a comprehensive way to work everything out, including recognition of Israel and an embracing of the Arab League's 2002 package, which included all kinds of demands that Israel was calling for, did Obama, did Bush II accept it?
No.
He reprimanded the Swiss for even passing along the proposal.
And then, of course, then he put Iran in the axis of evil, which only built up the hardliners in Iran and discouraged the people like Rouhani, who back then was a negotiator and behind this peace package.
So, the U.S. record is horrendous on this.
You know, there's no way you can square it with the desire for peaceful coexistence with Iran.
So, the question now is, which is addressed in the third article, is whether Obama has the courage to pursue peace.
He may really—you know, I don't think he wants a war with Iran.
That would be horrendous.
He's got too many troubles as it is.
I don't think he wants to be distracted by that.
I really don't.
For whatever the reason, whether it's cynical political calculation or just, you know, good faith, I don't think he wants a war with Iran.
But there are a lot of other people that do want a war with Iran, including Netanyahu, including many people in his government, and including the advocates for his government in the U.S. Congress and among the lobbyists, which mainly means AIPAC and organizations like that.
They want to sabotage any move toward peaceful coexistence with Iran.
And they're in a position to do it, because for sanctions to come off, Congress would have to approve that, because as the Leverets like to point out, and I've been guest on your program, these sanctions are not just executive orders that could be rescinded by Obama any time.
A lot of them have been turned into legislation, and the conditions for removing them aren't just transparency in the nuclear program, but it includes other things, which basically means ceasing to be an Islamic republic.
In other words, a regime change.
Obviously, the Iranians are not going to agree to that.
Yeah, probably not for now, anyway.
So you've got people who do not want peace, who are ready to sabotage Obama, even if he were to try to go full board toward an arrangement with Iran that would end this ridiculous relationship that we've had since 1979, and earlier.
So that's the question.
I've got to tell you, Sheldon, I'm pretty good at this, if only because I've been doing it a long time, but I can't figure out this Obama guy sometimes.
Because, you know, all politicians are going to promise one thing and do another and all of that.
But he stakes out ground that is terribly politically unpopular among the powerful, but are the kinds of things that the American people might support.
You know, like his Cairo speech.
You know, little stuff like that.
Let's get rid of nuclear weapons one day.
Well, I'll never even mind that one.
But just how about his declarations of how far he's going to go on Palestine and on Iran or even Guantanamo Bay, and then it gets him in nothing but trouble in D.C., and then he just gives up.
But come on, he's got to be able to think more than a couple of weeks ahead that, hey, once people start objecting to this, am I going to back down then?
Or is that when I'm going to deploy argument B that's really effective or something?
You know what I mean?
What would you do?
Even if you were him, never mind if you were you in his position, but even if you were him, wouldn't you just not make a big deal about a nuclear deal with Iran and not make a big deal out of rolling back the settlements on the West Bank?
Because why bother if you don't really mean it?
Because in either case, he is still the emperor of the planet Earth, and if he wanted to tell Netanyahu, oh, no, you're not expanding the settlements, you're tearing them down, then Netanyahu would do it if he made him do it.
If he said, I'm not asking, I'm telling, that would be the end of that for the settlements in the West Bank.
And same thing for the nuclear thing.
If he told the Congress, even the Republican leaders, that shut up, I'm making foreign policy and I'm making peace with this country right now, and I'll not have you interfering with it.
And Americans, they're trying to stop me from making peace.
Get them.
If he did that, he would win in a day, and it would be easy.
And yet, what's he going to do?
He's set himself up for failure again.
He's going to blow himself up over this again.
But why?
I don't get it.
Is it just because he's a Democrat and that's what Democrats are?
Or what is his problem, man?
Sorry for the giant rant, but it kind of bothers me because I really want this thing seen through, but I don't see it being seen through at all.
Well, I think you've sized him up pretty well.
You're right.
He's all over the map.
And it's like he's trying to please many, many different constituencies, and he can't please them all.
So, you know, one day he's working on one, and then the next day he's working on another.
If you look at his record on Israel and the occupation of Palestine, it's pretty dismal.
I mean, look what they did.
Kerry, you know, claims this great achievement, this restarting of the peace process, and who do they appoint?
Martin Indyk to oversee it.
Martin Indyk is an Israel partisan.
He was at AIPAC, and then he was one of the heads of the think tank spun off by AIPAC.
The Washington Institute on Near East Affairs, I guess, nearest policy.
And, you know, why would you put him in charge of overseeing it?
So I don't know.
I mean, I can't get in the guy's head.
I can't psychoanalyze him and tell you why he's doing this.
You know, I don't think he's merely the sophisticated thinker that people generally believe he is.
He doesn't seem to be.
I mean, look, just like you said.
I mean, did he go to Cairo in the beginning because he was basically campaigning for a Nobel Prize?
I mean, that makes more sense, because then who cares what he says, you know, after he gets the prize or what he does after he gets the prize.
Well, maybe it's really just, you know, he's kicking the can down the road, only it's more of a punt.
He's kicking it really far down the road.
But that's still all it is, is he just wants to leave, like Bush did.
He wants to leave office with the status quo where it is and let it be somebody else's problem.
Perhaps.
And then you can say on his record that we tried to restart the peace process.
I put quotation marks around peace, because how do you have a peace process when Israel keeps gobbling up the land, which is the subject of the peace process?
Negotiations.
That's ridiculous.
They just announced they're going to build 5,000 more homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Well, I was actually talking about Iran.
I think he's just barely kicking the can down the road on Palestine.
On Iran, it seems like a pretty big opening to just make nothing of it.
Well, you may be right.
I mean, I don't know where it's going to go.
Iran is apparently taking it seriously.
And so, you know, from what we hear, and I learned this from guests you've had on, what's her name, Barbara Slavin, is it, who you had on recently?
Yeah.
Who pointed out, wrote an article based on a good source, on what Iran is offering in detail, which is enough, you know, that should make us optimistic about Iran's side of it.
The question is, is Obama serious about it, or is he just going through the motions?
Because, you know, he wants to be seen as a peace president without having to really take any steps in that direction.
Or he doesn't want to fight with Congress.
He doesn't want to fight with McCain and Graham and the other people who are doing the bidding of AIPAC on the question of sanctions.
But there could come a confrontation.
I mean, what if Netanyahu outright tries to sabotage all this?
It's been pointed out by good analysts on this, that if the U.S. should come up to some agreement with Iran, that would hurt, you know, Netanyahu would be out of luck at that point, because how do you attack Iran when Obama's putting a signature to an agreement?
You can't do it.
So he's got to act before that.
That's the clock that's ticking on him, right?
The possibility that Obama will sign an agreement with Iran.
Not that Iran will create a nuclear bomb.
And every day there's some report coming out of Israel about, oh, now we see that they're only a month away from a nuclear bomb.
I saw that headline just a couple of days ago.
They're getting really worried now.
Maybe they don't have anything to worry about.
Maybe Obama really is not going to sign an agreement.
I don't know how that's going to go.
Well, yeah, one of their most loyal frauds in American media, Eli Lake, put out a piece just like that, too, which John Glaser destroyed at the Anti-War blog, this gigantic headline about how close Iran is to the bomb, and then the actual substance of the article is they've taken the slightest defensive measures against American aggression, you know, trying to protect their scientists from being assassinated and trying to protect their codes from being broken.
That's all indication of an aggressive threat.
Oh, right.
Even in the past when, you know, Ahmadinejad or somebody would say, if you attack us, we will attack you, that was regarded as aggressive and threatening.
If you attack us, we will retaliate was regarded as an aggressive threat.
I mean, it was reported as if that was an aggressive threat.
And I would say, wait a second.
If we're conditional in there, if we attack them, it's like we have the right to attack anybody.
And should they dare retaliate or defend themselves, that's aggression against us.
I mean, that's how people looked at it.
Well, and, you know, you talk about outright sabotage of the thing.
I don't have any solid proof on this.
I guess maybe I need to ask Phil Giraldi if he knows anybody who knows or something like that.
But there have been some Jandala terrorists, some Bin Ladenite types there from Balochistan, the region that's bisected by Iran and Pakistan there, southeast Iran, southwest Pakistan.
And what, 14 or 16 of them were hanged recently after an attack on some border guards just last week.
So this very well could be either the CIA or Israeli intelligence, again, backing these Bin Ladenites against Iran.
I guess it'd be more likely that these are Netanyahu's Bin Ladenites this time rather than, you know, like Dick Cheney's.
Although I guess you don't want to count that guy out completely, but no.
Looks like this could very well be the Israelis trying to sabotage the talks.
This worked, remember, back in October 2009, Sheldon, when they killed a general in the Revolutionary Guards, something like that.
And that caused the domestic politics in Iran to completely turn against a deal.
And it was a dispute at the time between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei.
And apparently Ahmadinejad wanted to make the deal more than Khamenei did, at least at that point.
I might have it the other way around.
I think they switched positions.
But anyway.
But that Jandala attack of October 2009 killed it, and then the bogus comm revelations were the icing on the cake there.
So that could be this right now, you know?
Well, maybe.
I mean, what people don't understand, what Americans generally don't understand, is that in this covert and proxy war against Iran, it's really no holds barred.
I mean, anything is permissible, it seems like.
You've got cyber warfare.
You've got assassination of scientists.
You've got these groups that come in and commit terrorism.
You've got the delisting of the MEK as a terrorist group, which is merely a way to encourage them, which a lot of, of course, ex-American officials have been doing by speaking at their meetings and getting big honorarium for speaking, like Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania, and who's the guy from Vermont, Dean.
Not John Dean.
Howard Dean.
Yeah, Howard Dean.
That whole group.
There's a whole lot of them, yeah.
They've been encouraging those groups, and terrible things have gone on.
Here's one thing Obama could do just as a start, and it doesn't even involve sanctions, although I think the sanctions should be abolished.
Why didn't he just announce that military force is now off the table?
They love that phrase.
I once quipped that politicians ought to be barred from having tables.
That way they'd have no place to put all their options.
Why didn't he just announce that?
Military force is now off the table.
I now announce that.
They love to say all options, including military force, and that would include nuclear, are on the table.
They say all options.
Just do that rhetorically as a first step.
I would still say actions should be consistent with words, but what are those words?
Just do that.
Right.
That would be a great start.
The restrictions on the shipping and the central bank, that is at this point a de facto ban on any medicines that they can't make themselves, that's got to stop.
I don't care what the Iranian position on anything is.
If they start testing secret H-bombs tomorrow, you've still got to let them import medicine.
It was a great analysis.
I wish I could remember who it is now that wrote this not that long ago, but pointing out that Iran is a country that has a large middle class and a well-educated middle class.
These people are friendly to Americans.
They don't dislike Americans.
They don't dislike Jews.
There's a very old Jewish community in Tehran, and I think elsewhere in Iran, that do not get any special negative treatment by the government.
Ahmadinejad gave a subsidy to the hospital, which doesn't only treat Jews or only employ Jews in Tehran, and Ahmadinejad gave him a subsidy.
Now, as a libertarian, I'm against government subsidies, but that's indicative of something.
They're not anti-Semites.
They don't want to see Jews die, and the business about wiping Israel off the map was blasted, was debunked by lots of people.
So this is a country that there's no reason why we couldn't be perfectly friendly with.
That's what I'm saying, too.
Thanks, Sheldon.
I sure appreciate your time on the show as always.
Great talking to you.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
He's the vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
Read his articles.
Can Iran trust the U.S.?
Stop demonizing Iran, and does Obama have the courage to pursue peace with Iran?
FFF.org.
See you tomorrow.
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