10/03/13 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the thing here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
3,000 interviews at scotthorton.org, 1,000 of them with our next guest now, probably almost 200 of them now, more than 150 something.
My favorite reporter out of all of them.
And foreign policy analyst, too.
Independent historian and journalist, Gareth Porter from interpress service, IPSnews.net and truthout.org at truthout.org.
Welcome back to the show.
How the hell are you, Gareth?
I'm fine.
Thanks again, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
Tell me everything that you think about last week's developments in negotiations with Iran about their nuclear program.
Go.
Well, I think, first of all, you know, we don't know yet what the Obama administration is going to do, because I'm sure they don't know yet themselves.
This is one of those situations where we have to assume that the Obama administration is going to operate true to form, which means that decisions will be made at the last minute only when they're forced by the situation, and that we cannot tell from vague public pronouncements ahead of time what their intentions are.
And I would also just say that we have to keep in mind the whole history of the Obama administration policy toward Iran, which is not at all encouraging, to say the least, in terms of the very sharp contrast between the kind of atmospherics that the Obama administration, particularly the White House itself, has created about its intentions toward Iran versus the reality of what it was doing secretly in the White House at the time.
And, you know, I can sort of expand on that, but what I have in mind particularly is that the White House was saying in early 2009, spring of 2009, that it had every intention of engaging seriously diplomatically with Iran, whereas secretly what was really going on was that the president was approving plans for a cyber war against Iran, against the Natanz enrichment facility, which was being planned for, if I remember correctly, May of 2009.
And so at the very moment that the president was professing his goodwill and his readiness to engage really for the first time with Iran in decades, he was actually doing exactly the opposite.
He was planning war against Iran.
And unfortunately, the fact leaked out later on, and it should have been a major embarrassment for the White House.
It wasn't.
So I just, I want to put that in at the beginning of the conversation to mark my skepticism about just how much we can expect of the administration at this point.
I would like to think that there'll be a breakthrough, but I think that's the baseline that we're dealing with.
Well, you know, what's funny about that to me is it sort of sounds like what you're saying is that the White House, I guess the political advisor types, they figured out a way where they can have and eat their cake, right?
They can pretend that they are pushing for peace, but at the same time, they can always turn to the hawks and say, yeah, but look what we're doing with our cyber war and look at all the brutality of our sanctions, depriving cancer patients of medicine and stuff.
Aren't we, you know, tough right wing warmongers like you guys and please both sides.
But it seems like really what they're doing is they don't get to have their cake or eat it.
They're just blowing it with both sides.
They look like horrible warmongers to me and they look like commie, Marxist, Kenyan, Muslim traitors to anyone who's pro-Israel.
So what have they accomplished?
Well, I mean, as far as domestic politics is concerned, I mean, you put your finger on precisely the contradiction that still bedeviled the Obama administration.
I mean, it is a fundamental contradiction between its commitment, not just to, you know, Israeli interests, but that that, of course, is a major fundamental problem for the for the White House.
But also something that I've mentioned in the past, which is that the national security state of the United States also has its own autonomous bureaucratic interest in having Iran as a an enemy for all kinds of reasons, relations with the Saudis, the prospect of huge, I mean, huge profits for the U.S. armaments industry, which is closely, of course, related to the Pentagon, in the with the Saudis and other shakthams in the Gulf, and the overall ability to use Iran as a justification for military presence in the Middle East.
So, I mean, I think that that's not a part of the story that gets any attention.
It's much more difficult to identify and to show how it affects policy.
But, you know, the fact that that it does affect policy, I have no doubt about that.
Yeah.
All right.
Now.
And you're right that, you know, it's not a question of win-win, it's a question of lose-lose.
I mean, in the process of trying to have it both ways, they do, in fact, simply leave both sides, both people who want peace and people who want the Israelis' interest to be served unsatisfied.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know.
The counterfactual is so easy to imagine, though.
I mean, any one of us can just put ourself in his position.
If I was president, I would make peace and I would tell the war party in a big public speech to go to hell.
I'm Obama the Great.
I just made peace with Iran.
If you don't like it, tough.
Go jump in a lake and watch the entire American people rise up in applause.
Are you kidding me?
This is so stupid.
Well, you know, the problem with that position, Scott, of course, is that it requires some ethics and some gumption.
And those are qualities that are not found generally.
No, what ethics?
He could be the worst, most selfish imperial tyrant ever.
No, that's not the way it works.
He could be Richard Nixon.
And go shake hands with him.
That's not the way it works psychologically.
That's not the way it works psychologically.
Okay, you know, set Nixon aside for a moment.
I mean, think about JFK, LBJ, Clinton, and the whole cast of characters that we've seen in the White House, who are people who are not ready to sort of stand up and tell the truth, but rather who would be inclined to come up with some very Machiavellian, behind-the-scenes approach to a situation where they face conflicting interests, conflicting needs, if you will, between public opinion or the Israeli lobby on one side versus the interest of the United States on the other.
And I think particularly of JFK, you know, I've written about that in great detail in my book on Vietnam, and how he was not ready to tell the truth about what the United States needed to do in Vietnam to get out of the war, to get its troops out, and instead, you know, had this extremely complicated scheme that he tried to push through with Robert McNamara to get the Joint Chiefs to embrace a withdrawal scheme.
But, you know, my point here is simply that the psychological characteristics of the people who rise to the top in American politics simply do not lend themselves to the kind of posture that you're describing there.
I mean, the fundamental orientation is somebody who would bow to, you know, the powers that be, whether they're in the Pentagon or in the Israeli lobby.
Now, you know, last year we saw a very unusual set of events in which Obama actually did some pushback on the question of, you know, the red lines that Netanyahu was demanding that the United States embrace, and he said, no, we're not going to do that.
So, you know, in extremis on the question of war and peace, when it's clear that the Pentagon does not want to go to war, he's willing to stand up to the Israeli lobby and to the Israelis.
But when it comes to negotiating with Iran, it's not so clear.
All right, now, well, you live near D.C. anyway, if not in it, I don't know.
I'm way out here in Texas.
But it sort of seemed to me like even on TV, the idea was, yeah, yeah, yeah, Netanyahu, our president is our president, and he's pursuing this peace thing, and we're going to go ahead and give that a chance for a minute.
It seemed like his speech felt pretty flat, or at least nobody was really impressed by it or whatever.
I don't know.
How do you think it played in D.C. as far as, you know, Israel's pushback against Obama's, at least, pseudo opening here?
It's not playing well at all.
I mean, I think that even people who are in some sense, you know, pro-Israeli and, you know, support a, you know, tough line on Iran were felt that, you know, Netanyahu has lost his touch.
And, in fact, this goes back to the previous year's speech at the U.N. General Assembly.
I'm sure you'll remember, and your listeners will remember, the famous cartoon bomb that was his prop in that speech.
I think that was really the turning point, where Netanyahu somehow was no longer able to communicate a message that made any, you know, positive reverberations abroad.
I mean, you know, one of his leading supporters in the journalistic world, the guy who basically sold, tried to sell the idea that Netanyahu was going to, you know, make war against Iran, the former jail trustee in Israel, Goldberg, you know, he tweeted after the September 2012 speech by Netanyahu that Netanyahu had made a joke out of something that was serious.
And I saw John Giudice in The New Republic making extremely critical remarks about Netanyahu's speech.
I think he's left people feeling very deflated, people who are, you know, sort of in the Israeli camp.
Yeah, now, I'm just making this up, and I don't even really believe it, but back a few weeks ago, I was sort of speculating, I remember you and I had talked about it.
I thought I had got this part right, but no, I plagiarized this from you, that we'll see how hard Obama really pushes in Congress, and whether the leadership, the Democratic leadership in Congress really pushes for these Syria war of votes, or whether they let it be a conscience vote, how hard he's really trying.
And then I even got to speculating and conspiracy theorizing that maybe, just maybe, I don't know why I want to like this guy at all, but maybe, just maybe, Obama asked AIPAC to help him push us into war with Syria, because he already knew he wasn't going to be able to do it, and that Congress was going to vote it down, and that they were just going to make jackasses out of themselves, and he just wanted to help weaken them a little bit more before he moved forward with this Iran thing.
Well, I don't know about the AIPAC part of that.
I mean, that would be maybe a bridge too far in my estimation.
But definitely, it's not a conspiracy theory to see that Obama used Congress for his own purposes, I mean, in other words, used the idea of going to Congress with the Syria use of force resolution, you know, in the full knowledge that Congress was going to say no, and that that would give him an out.
Yeah, well, but you know, they say that he called AIPAC and asked specifically for help, or I know he did, but, you know, the White House called him and asked for help on that, and I just wondered whether he was going, excellent, or, I mean, that's what I would do, I can't imagine being the president, and I guess there's the one quote is all I'm going by, is the one quote where he's talking to the French guy on the open microphone accidentally, and he's saying, you think you hate Netanyahu, I got to deal with him every day.
And I was just thinking, you know, if I was the president, how frustrated I would be with Netanyahu compared to how frustrated with him I already am, you know what I mean?
And I would try to do stuff like that to him if I could.
I can certainly agree that Obama would be very much willing to say to AIPAC, yeah, please help me, you know, get this through, knowing that, you know, it wasn't going to happen and that this was a way of sort of keeping up his relations with AIPAC, while at the same time knowing that it was going to turn out his way, or, you know, it was not going to harm his plan.
And in the background of this, by the way, I mean, you know, there's a very good reason to believe that the United States, the Obama administration, and the Russians were talking about a deal on chemical weapons for months and months ahead of time.
This was not something that just came up at the last minute.
It was not a slip of the tongue, it was not an offhand remark, there's no question that this was something that they had been discussing, and that, therefore, there is a linkage here between US-Russian talks on chemical weapons and what transpired over the last several weeks.
Oh, okay, so yesterday I talked with Trita Parsi, and he wrote this new thing for Foreign Affairs saying, hey Israel, relax, in other words, Netanyahu, relax, if America makes a deal with Iran, you know, you're following five obvious fears, there are easy answers to them, and why you shouldn't be so afraid, and this will actually, no, really, you'd be better off to have a peaceful relationship with Iran, or at least for America to have one.
Well, you know, I mean, this, of course, as I said, first of all, the point that he was making about Rouhani being the man they should deal with is absolutely fundamental, as I was saying, you know, he is the strategist, has been the strategist for 20 years for the Rafsanjani faction in Iranian politics, which is the faction which was always primarily concerned with reaching an accommodation with the West, integrating the Iranian economy into the global economy, the global capitalist economy, so that they could get the investments, the foreign investments and foreign technology that Iran needed to become a major economic powerhouse in the region.
And that has been the leitmotif of the faction for all that time.
And Rouhani has been at the beating heart of its strategy.
So it's crazy, it's stupid, for the West to fail to take advantage of this by reaching an accommodation with Iran and strengthening the hand of Rouhani as president.
And by the way, the former French ambassador in Tehran in 2003-2005, Michel Nicolau, has just written a blog in Le Figaro in which he talks about this precise point, saying that, you know, it's time for the West to wake up and realize that it's in their interest to strengthen Rouhani's position by not playing tough, you know, not sort of denying the Iranians an agreement with the West, the United States, on a nuclear program, but being accommodating and getting this agreement so that he's in a stronger position to continue the kind of policy that he wants to carry out.
I think that's a primary point that bears a great deal of emphasis.
And so Trita's right, of course.
I would go even further and say that, you know, this general line that, you know, Israel should make peace with Iran, have a peaceful relationship, even cooperative relations with Iran, is basically the viewpoint that Mossad has taken for decades.
This is the old periphery doctrine.
I have not seen Trita's piece yet, but I'm quite sure that he probably refers to it in Foreign Affairs, because that has been the Israeli viewpoint, the one that has guided Mossad for decades, has been that basically the interests of Israel and the interests of Iran have always been fundamentally aligned, even after the Islamic Revolution, because, you know, the real common enemy here is Sunni regimes in the region which actually pose a more serious problem for Israel because of their ties with the Palestinian movement and the fact that they're all Arabs.
The Mossad view, the periphery doctrine, has been that sooner or later there will be a way for Israel and Iran to once again cooperate.
So, I mean, this is not something that's ahistorical at all.
It's very much part of Israel's own history.
But the Likud party under Netanyahu has really sort of kicked over the traces of that line and has, for its own political reasons, has taken this sort of threatening war with Iran line, which I've always said is simply a ruse.
It's always been a ruse, but it's one that serves their political objectives.
All right, so can you give me any kind of number of chances on these talks actually working out?
I mean, we've discussed before the outlines of the deal are pretty obvious if both sides want to be reasonable about it.
I don't know.
I know I don't have any numerical coefficient for this.
You know, I'm not saying it's impossible that events could play out, that there could be a deal, but the structural obstacles to me have not changed and, you know, on balance I would have to say less than 50 percent.
I mean, I hate to say that.
I mean, it's just the prospect of having to continue with this completely unnecessary and in many ways phony crisis with Iran is very depressing.
But you know, I can't see precisely how, you know, this White House, which has shown so little willingness in the past to use up the political capital necessary to make that deal would do so.
I think that's really the critical question, Scott, is whether this president is going to say, look, this is important enough to me to get the deal that I'm going to use up a huge amount of political capital with Congress and with the pro-Israeli people to make it happen.
Not impossible, but, you know, again, you go back to the psychological dimensions of this president and, you know, just it doesn't seem to be very likely.
All it would take is a little bit of courage, so much for that.
All right, and now this is just a technical thing, but I got a little bit of an argument about Ali Gharib last week about whether the U.N. Security Council can go to hell or not for demanding that Iran cease enriching uranium when that right is guaranteed in the NPT and every single member of the U.N. Security Council is a member of the NPT and are sworn to respect that right.
And then he was saying, no way, if the Security Council votes a thing, then it's the world law, and Iran is bound to respect that, even if it is in violation of the NPT.
Well, I mean, that, of course, is the official position of the United States and its allies, and it's a position that's based on might makes right.
In other words, well, damn it, we have the power to say this, and therefore we can make the Iranians toe the line.
That's what that amounts to, and, you know, I mean, so far that's been the case.
We can enforce it through essentially economic warfare, but I think you're absolutely right that the NPT should be the one that determines this question of Iran's right to enrich, and I'm glad you raised that issue of the right to enrich, because I think that is at the heart of this.
I mean, that's the first issue that this administration has to decide.
I think that's the lesser of the two problems, the right to enrich and the willingness to rescind, to back off the economic sanctions against Iran are the two issues that are at stake here, and I think the right to enrich is the one that's easier for this administration to make a concession on, but it needs to do that, I think, up front.
I think it needs to do that very soon, and so far there's no sign that they're ready to do it.
All right, we gotta go.
Thanks, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Gareth the Great, IPSnews.net and Truthout.org for Gareth Porter.
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