11/08/13 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
We're on Liberty Express Radio, No Agenda Radio, my website, also Anomaly Radio, and replayed all over the place on LRN and on the Ron Paul movement guys and everybody.
Oh, by the way, thanks again to Alison Bricker for having me on her radio show last night and letting me go on and on so long.
All right, first guest up today is Gareth the Great, independent historian and journalist Gareth Porter.
He writes primarily for Interpress Service, IPSnews.net, but you can also find his award-winning work at truthout.org.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How are you doing?
You make me blush, Scott.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, you're the very best one.
In fact, people, if you go back and look through my archives, you'll see I've interviewed Gareth more than 150 times.
Maybe almost 200 times now.
Although we kind of took a hiatus there while you were writing your book, but now you're back again, so good.
Yep, I'm back.
All right, listen, I want to talk to you all about your article about the drone strikes in Pakistan.
It's extremely important, but first things first, the Iran deal.
According to Trita, anyway, he says, from Geneva, he says, hey, he thinks, Trita Parsi, the head of NIAC, that he thinks there is a deal, that the hold-up right now is they're just waiting for the Chinese and the Russians to show up to do the photo opportunity and sign on the dotted line.
What do you say?
I think he's right this time.
Oh, man, really?
Yes, I do, and I think that, you know, otherwise you wouldn't have the foreign ministers converging on Geneva.
It is a prized piece of evidence for a real deal in the making.
Including Kerry?
Or those foreign ministers, you mean?
Well, Kerry plus the other four.
So Kerry didn't come to make sure it happened.
He came because it was already basically a done deal, and he wanted to be there for the photo, too.
I don't think that it had happened in the sense that all the I's were dotted and the T's crossed, but I think that they did have a sense of confidence that, yes, this time we do have a deal.
Sweet.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I am surprised that they've been able to get that far as fast as they have.
But on the other hand, it is clearly a tribute to the diplomatic craftsmanship of Rouhani himself and his team, headed by Mohammad Javad Zarif, who clearly, you know, they have a track record of being able to do this.
You've done it before, as I think I've indicated on your show, actually.
And indeed, I mean, I see this proposal, and clearly this is an Iranian proposal.
It's a framework.
It started as a framework that the Iranians put forward and had a great deal of specificity to it.
And the United States took a very hard look at it and said, OK, yeah, I think we'd better do a deal on this basis.
But this is very reminiscent of what the Rouhani team did in 2003 to 2005.
And I would just point to a couple of similarities.
One is that the Iranians did a tradeoff here, just as they did when they were dealing with the three European foreign ministers in 2003-2004, that is, the U.K., Germany, and France, where the Iranians agreed to the demand of the Europeans for a cessation, for a temporary cessation, a suspension, if you will, of their enrichment activities.
And the question then became how long the suspension would last in return for the Iranians getting a recognition of their right to enrichment.
That was the big tradeoff that was involved in that early deal with the Europeans.
And initially, of course, the Europeans wanted it to be a suspension without any endpoint, which meant that it was really much more than a suspension.
It was a termination of the program.
But the Iranians never bought that, they never agreed to that, and insisted that it had to be tied to the length of time that the negotiations were going on.
And so that was what was finally agreed to.
The second point, which, and that, of course, I think is part of the deal in this case, a suspension of nuclear enrichment activities, although not entirely, not all the activities.
And we'll come back to that in return for recognition of the right to enrich.
The second point is that in 2005, in March 2005, the Iranians put forward a very interesting proposal, a proposal that I've talked about a lot, which, you know, basically guaranteed that they would not be able to accumulate enriched uranium that could be used for weapons purposes.
In other words, what they did was they guaranteed that any low-enriched uranium would immediately, as soon as it was finished with the enrichment to 3.5 percent, it would go into a stream that went to, it would go into a stream that would be used for making fuel rods.
And they weren't specific about how it would be done, but in the context of that time, they didn't have the ability to do it themselves, so it meant that they were prepared to send it abroad if the Europeans agreed to that, to send it to France or Russia for being converted to fuel rods.
So it was a very far-reaching concession at the time.
And now they are clearly ready to agree to this sort of arrangement again in the context of the negotiations with the United States and the European Union.
So, you know, this is a very interesting sort of throwback to the diplomacy of 10 years ago, in effect.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's funny.
I mean, what have the Americans gotten for all their obstinance and refusal to deal in good faith basically this whole time is they've just given the Iranians that much more to bargain with, I guess.
Well, that's right.
And, of course, Zarif is very fond of making that point, and I'm sure you've seen him do that, say that more than one time.
He's pointed out that, you know, the refusal of the Europeans and the United States to agree earlier on to a deal that they were offering meant that the Iranians have accumulated something like 19,000 centrifuges.
And, you know, so he's making the argument, well, what good has it done you to put off making a deal?
Right.
Well, and so, you know, what's funny here is it's not just 2003 and 2005.
They've basically been open to this kind of thing this whole time, really, right?
I hear all this chest-beating about how...
There is a question whether the Ahmadinejad government had the wherewithal, had the, I don't know, the political intellectual will and...
Oh, hell yeah.
Back in 2009, I mean, hey, they wanted to do the Brazilian-Turk deal.
Well, that was a bit different.
I mean, that was a much narrower deal.
I'm not saying that they weren't capable of making a deal.
What I'm saying is that the very ambitious, far-reaching kind of deal that Rouhani did in 2003, 2005, the constituency that Ahmadinejad was tied to, certainly earlier on in his administration, at least, was very critical of that.
I mean, that was a very deep, there was a deep rift in Iranian politics over how far Rouhani was willing to go.
And so, I mean, there was a certain reluctance to have such an ambitious nuclear proposal.
I think Ahmadinejad would have liked to have had something narrower.
I'm not sure.
I can't say this with confidence, but I have the impression that there was some reluctance to go as far as the Iranian team is going now and as far as they did in 2003.
Right.
Well, I guess, yes.
Still, you know, going from Ahmadinejad to Rouhani still isn't quite the same as, like, the Hawks try to claim that, well, we starved them into it.
Even if they are willing to deal now and we have to concede that, it's only because we denied their little children dying of leukemia the chemo that they needed.
Well, that's absolutely, that's absolutely right.
And the point that people refuse to acknowledge is that this was the kind of deal that they were willing to make 10 years ago.
I mean, that that's really the bottom line is that, you know, before the United States essentially set up a situation where the more sort of hawkish part of the political spectrum in Iran gained power.
And that was in part, let's face it, it was in part a reaction to the fact that the Iranians had gone very far out of their way to offer a deal.
And they got the back of the hand from the United States and the Europeans.
And so there's no question that that had an impact on both the internal politics within the political elite and on the electoral politics of Iran.
So, you know, the United States bears responsibility for the fact that Ahmadinejad was elected and did take a much more nationalistic line on the nuclear issue than the Khatami regime took and, you know, with Rouhani as the main strategist in 2003-2005.
Right.
All right.
Well, so assuming we find out any minute now that they actually did sign this thing, it's still just an interim something or other.
That's right.
It's going to be an interim deal.
And the main problem is still going to remain, as we've talked about on your show in the past, which is, of course, the removal of the extremely far-reaching sanctions of, you know, basically economic warfare.
I mean, let's be honest.
It's nothing less than economic warfare against Iran.
And in an earlier time and in an earlier situation or another situation, this would be a casus belli.
It may have been the kind of thing that caused the Japanese to consider carrying out the attack against Pearl Harbor, because there was economic warfare against them, albeit in a very different context.
So, you know, this is we're talking about very far-reaching sanctions, which what remains to be done, of course, is to remove all of the sanctions, not just the sanctions that are most convenient to be removed, which is what, you know, Washington would like to do, but all the sanctions.
I mean, there's no question in my mind that before the Iranians agree to a very, you know, intrusive inspection mechanism and a whole set of limitations on their enrichment, which is what would have to be in the final agreement, what will be in the final agreement if they ever do that, the United States is going to have to remove all of the sanctions.
There has to be a clean sweep and in its place an agreement which essentially declares that the United States will have friendly relations with Iran, you know, whatever the language is.
I mean, it's going to be an end to the extraordinary hostility that is structurally built into U.S. policy and has been for two decades, more than two decades.
So, I mean, that's what is going to have to happen.
And that means that the president of the United States is going to have to be willing to use up an enormous amount of political capital in order to essentially reach an agreement with Iran which says, I will, I promise you, Iran, that I will essentially cancel or, you know, use the national security waiver every time Congress comes back, what's already in the legislation, every time the legislation demands that the sanctions be renewed, I will exercise the national security waiver and will prevent them from going into effect.
That is, that's an extremely hard political move for a president of the United States to make.
It's possible to make it, but he's going to have to have a real fight with Israel over this.
And that's where I've suggested in the past, I'm not confident, I'm not sure he's willing to do it, that he can do it, but that's what's going to be required.
Well, I don't know, I mean, it seems like once this is, once this part of it is done, it's downhill from here if he was willing to push this hard, right?
It should be, absolutely.
I mean, you know, one would think so, but then, you know, we're getting, I mean, this is the easy part.
This is the easy part.
So, I mean, in a sense, he's on a glide path from the point of view of sort of PR and, you know, getting credit for it and, you know, sort of the media is going to be generally favorable, it'll be a generally favorable sort of atmosphere created.
But the harsh reality of American politics is that, you know, the vast majority of the Senate and the House are in the pocket of Israel, the Israeli lobby.
So, I mean, that means that you're going to have an entirely different ballgame in the next round.
Hmm.
Well, Obama should just call them traitors.
Well, I think that's right, I mean, you know, it is very true, it's simply unconscionable for a member of Congress to sell out the vital interests of the United States because he's getting money from a lobbying group that is demanding that he, you know, legislate and maintain legislation that prevents the United States from doing what is so clearly in the vital interest of the United States.
I mean, you know...
And on behalf of a foreign country.
On behalf of a foreign country, yeah.
You know, on behalf of the interests of a foreign country, I mean, you know, it's, you know, they got an indirect cutout of domestic citizens of the United States, but still, I mean, that's the bottom line, that's the reality.
Yeah, that's something else.
And, you know, well, I don't know, my feeling is that this is really bad PR for the Israelis.
I mean, Netanyahu, I guess, said, well, don't worry about the American...
In another context, he said, stealing Palestine, he said, don't worry about the Americans, they're easily moved.
It's absurd.
Yes, indeed.
And, of course, that's true, I guess, but it seems to me like there's got to be a limit, and if the American people, who, according to CNN polls, 75% of the American people support these talks and want this deal or want a deal, want to end to the threat of a violent conflict over this nuclear program, is it really smart for the Israelis to be the only thing standing in the way of peace?
Well, I mean, this has been the case for quite a while, of course.
I mean, they've been the main...
But not this, obviously, because Bush and Obama so far haven't been willing to go against them.
In this case, Obama's gone this far.
You're right, this is going to highlight the issue in a way that it's never been highlighted before, and I do think that it's possible that if President Obama is willing to stand up and fight hard, this could be the end of the Israeli lobby.
It could be so discredited.
It could be such a discredit in the eyes of too many voters that not enough members of the House of Representatives and the Senate would continue to sign up to do this, to do their dirty work.
So, I mean, it is a possibility.
I don't want to rule it out, but boy, it would be a huge turning point in the politics of the United States.
Yeah, you know, there was a thing in the Washington Post, and I don't even remember what it was ostensibly about anymore, but it was...
Oh, it was critiquing Greenwald in the new media venture and whatever, and how knowledge is dispersed through society and when things become, quote unquote, known.
Like, right now it's known that there's an Iranian nuclear threat, but what we need to be known among pretty much everybody, right, 100th Monkey or whatever the syndrome is where people finally get things is that, oh no, actually Israel is the albatross, and all this stuff about poor little Israel is all lies, every bit of it, and you don't have to believe it anymore.
We've all decided together that we're not going to believe this crap anymore because none of it's true.
Right, and this, of course, is the purpose of my book, if I can put in a little plug here.
My book is finished and will be published on Valentine's Day of 2014, and so, you know, I look forward to being able to talk about it in more detail in the future, but, you know, that's just an advance notice.
Well, it's saved in a folder on my desktop right now, and I swear I'm going to get to it as soon as I'm done with Goliath, and in fact, I may even just push aside Goliath and plow through it.
Well, I wouldn't want you to do that, but...
I really want to.
I can't wait to read it, Garrett.
I can't wait.
Now, listen, we've got ten minutes left, and you've got this really important story about the drone strikes in Pakistan, and this particular drone strike.
Did they deliberately...
Well, whatever.
What happened?
Tell me.
Well, what happened was that, first of all, you've got two separate contexts here, or two sides of the context, one side being the Pakistani side of the context, which is that they have a really serious terrorism problem, and they've got this domestic group of terrorists, the Tariki Taliban, or TTP, the Pakistani Taliban militant organization, which was formed in 2007 out of a conjuries of commanders and their followers, as many as 50 of these local commanders sort of came together to form the Taliban organizational movement, and the context there was, of course, the war in Afghanistan and the fact that the Pakistani government under Sharif, sorry, not Sharif, President Musharraf, was basically attacking the militants in the tribal northwest who were supporting the Afghanistan Taliban, and this was at the behest of the United States that the Pakistani military was attacking these folks.
And so the result was that there were suicide attacks that arose enormously, dozens and dozens of suicide attacks every year, plus many other terrorist attacks, and thousands of people...
I mean, they use the figure of 49,000 I've seen bandied about.
I don't know what that really represents.
I think it involves everybody who's died in fighting over the past decade or so.
But in any case, they clearly have a very serious problem, and the Sharif government, Nawaz Sharif's prime minister elected in May of this year, came to power with a mandate to do something about this, and all the parties have agreed in Pakistan as of September that the government should carry out a peace probe, a sort of a political dialogue with the Taliban to try something different, because drone strikes clearly don't work, and the military pressure from the Pakistani army is worse than...
Even worse than the drones, if anything could be, in terms of actually stimulating the terrorists to carry out their terrorist actions.
So basically, there was a very broad consensus that they should try to talk peace with the Taliban, and the Taliban leadership agreed to go ahead with this, although it is reported by folks in Pakistan who have contacts within the Taliban, sort of rank-and-file militants, tell them that there are a lot of differences within the Taliban among commanders.
Some are against the talk, some are in favor of it, and that's precisely why...
That's the main reason why the government feels that it's worthwhile to do this, because the Taliban is not united, it's divided, and the politics of this do matter.
And if they can appeal to people within the Taliban to lay off the terrorism, they come to some sort of an understanding, then that's certainly to their benefit.
Now, on the American side, the context is, you know, first of all, you've got the Obama administration actually reconsidering the drone war in Pakistan very seriously over the past year or so, and Obama coming to the conclusion that, well, you know, we're really running out of targets here, the high-value targets hardly exist anymore, there's only, you know, maybe two or three left, and the need to hit the folks in Pakistan who are fighting us in Afghanistan is going to be phasing out as our troops come out of Afghanistan.
And so, you know, there was talk earlier this year of Obama himself giving a speech at the National Defense University that, you know, that this is not going to last forever, and he was thinking that maybe it could be phased out within a matter of, you know, implicitly within a matter of months.
So, on the other hand, the CIA, they don't want this to be phased out.
I mean, this is their bread and butter.
And they, you know, were obviously wanting to keep the drone war in Pakistan going, if at all possible.
So, you know, I wrote an earlier piece that I think we talked about, which I point out that the leak to the Washington Post was from those people in the CIA who ran the drone war, and who were trying to discredit Sharif coming into Washington saying, we want you to end the drone strikes.
So that's where we get the CIA then calling for a strike to kill Massoud, November 1st.
Hey, by the way, on the withdrawal of the American troops that you mentioned there, are they really doing that?
Because, of course, the surge didn't work.
And it seems like the Afghan Taliban, I don't know if they're in the catbird seat, but, you know, if Mullah Omar ain't died in natural causes, he's still just waiting to come back to power there somewhere, right?
Sure.
And, you know, I'm not suggesting that all U.S. troops are going to be withdrawn, or that there will be no combat.
But I think that, you know, comparatively speaking, we're talking about a relatively small number of troops who will be carrying out combat, and some who are simply there doing training.
But, you know, that seems to be what Obama has in mind, at least.
That's what he was saying publicly.
I mean, it's quite interesting that he was putting that forward as a rationale for phasing out the drone strikes in Pakistan.
So then, you know, you have the Sharif meeting with Obama on October 23rd, and Obama sort of saying, yeah, we're sympathetic.
In so many words, saying we're sympathetic to the need for Pakistan to carry out a policy to deal with their terrorism problem.
And then after that, you've got apparently either Sharif or somebody close to him and his national security advisor, both giving interviews in which they suggest that Obama was actually suggesting to them that he was seriously considering their plea to suspend the drone strikes so that they could carry out a peace probe with the Taliban.
I don't think that it, I mean, it's clear that it was not an assurance that we're going to do that, but he was sort of leaning in that direction.
And then I think what happened was that either because the Pakistani military turned over some intelligence that they had to the CIA, or because the CIA had captured a second in command to Hakeem Olamisoud in Afghanistan, and they had gotten some lead on where Hakeem Olamisoud was, the CIA said, okay, we've got him in our sights, we want to take him out.
And this probably happened, you know, 24 to 48 hours before the strike itself.
And the U.S. ambassador is supposed to have a veto if he thinks that it's not a good idea, not a veto, but the right to raise the question and have the secretary of state either support him or not support him.
Um, we don't know exactly what happened, but in any case, the CIA director has the final say in this, unless the president is going to himself countermand him.
And that's why the strike was carried out.
And what that means is that the Pakistani interest in their counterterrorism strategy was in that last analysis, not given very much weight by Obama.
All right, well, I'm sorry, we got to go because I was going to ask you a bunch of stuff, but now I got to play commercials.
I talked too long.
I'm sorry.
I apologize.
Next time next week.
All right.
Thanks, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.
That's Gareth Porter, everybody.
IPSnews.net, antiwar.com slash Porter.
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