11/11/13 – John Glaser – The Scott Horton Show

Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
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Scott Horton.
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I sure do.
That's where John Glaser writes at antiwar.com slash blog, mostly.
And also at news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm pretty good.
Thank you very much for having me.
Well, very happy to have you here.
And he can also be found at the Washington Times and at the Huffington Post.
So how do you like that for a left, right, and libertarian and getting the work done there?
That's good.
Hey, listen.
So, God dang it.
I let myself get my hopes up that, I mean, who's going to stop the empire?
If the empire wants to make a peace deal, then you're going to make a peace deal thing.
And then they didn't.
What in the world?
Well, I wouldn't let your optimism go completely away.
I think that there's still a good chance.
And I think that the people who have seemed to foiled the talks with Iran and Geneva are really still kind of in their kicking and screaming mode, as opposed to their, you know, I don't think they've really turned the tide because the talks are supposed to, they're supposed to re-engage on the 20th of November.
So it's not too far away.
And they're probably going to leave off right with a, they start up right off with a left off, which was really on the cusp of a brand new first stage deal on Iran's nuclear program.
All right.
And then I'm sorry, because I'm obviously, you know, like a Star Wars movie, I'm starting in the middle of the story here.
The deal is that there's a big fake controversy over Iran's civilian nuclear program, because I guess the Israelis pee in their pants anytime anybody says the word nuclear around them or some corrupt, stupid reason like that.
And so the Americans have been trying to work this deal with the Iranians will, where they will just extra super verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.
Whereas now they're just plain old regular verifying it.
Is that about the sum of the thing?
Well, yeah.
You know, where we're at now is that the reformist president Hassan Rouhani in Iran initiated this whole diplomatic overture where he engaged the United States, the media likes to call it a charm offensive, whatever you think about that phrase.
And now because of that hard work that was done from Tehran, the P5 plus one and Iran are back at the negotiating table for the longest time, as you well know, going back to the 80s, even, you know, the US and Israel have complained about an Iranian nuclear weapon that is imminent, you know, next 30 days or next year or next five years kind of thing.
When, of course, that's anything but true right now, at least since 2007 and up till today, the US intelligence community says that there is no active nuclear weapons program in Iran, and they have not even made the political decision to go ahead and do such a thing.
What the, you know, what's interesting about US policy towards the Middle East is that a lot of it is sort of on behalf of people that are not even in Washington.
So our policy towards Iran, for example, is colored mostly by the views of the Israelis and of the Saudis, the two closest US allies in the region and the two other powerhouses other than Iran.
Both of them hate the Iranians for various different reasons, some ethnic with regard and religious with regard to the Saudis and probably more political and ideological with the Israelis.
But both of them are, you know, hyperventilated at the thought that Iran can, you know, domestically produce its own nuclear program, civilian nuclear program.
And so these fears are hyped and hyped and hyped, as you know.
What's interesting is that the deal was almost right there, and it ended on Saturday.
These talks ended on Saturday.
And the most unexpected thing happened, which is that, you know, the United States, which is typically the most hawkish of the P5 plus one, wasn't the one to foil or derail the negotiations.
And it wasn't Iran.
It was France, you know, the no, let's not go into Iraq, France, with the socialist president right now, Hollande, who has taken a very rightward turn in terms of his foreign policy.
And, you know, what's really interesting about what we found out today is that the deal apparently fell apart because France insisted on a couple of things.
One of the main ones was that during this six-month period before the final grand bargain, Iran would not agree to stopping construction on a nuclear plant, a heavy water reactor at Arak, A-R-A-K.
What's strange is that that's odd that that was the thing that seemed to have foiled it.
That was France's main objection, because today what we found out in the Washington Post is that today Iran signed a new accord with the IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog.
And one of the provisions of that accord is that they open up their Arak reactor site to greater inspection.
And so it's odd that the media is reporting that this, you know, this Arak reactor issue is what foiled the negotiations for France, when it seems like today Iran signed a new deal with the UN officials to have greater inspections there.
So, you know, I don't think that the Iranians...
I think the Iranians are very interested in the deal.
I think that even the U.S. is very interested in the deal.
It's just sort of handicapped by its supposed allies, like France and Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, isn't that strange, the way the French came and did that?
I think the first Reuters report had a quote from a Western diplomat, which I took to be an American or a Brit, but more likely I thought an American, saying, man, old Fabius, the French representative, why he just showed up at the last minute grandstanding, made it sound almost personal like his, you know, just his politics or a deal that he made with Netanyahu himself or something.
That, oh yeah, he just had to make this all about him.
And so everybody's trying to, you know, everybody's reeling and trying to figure out what to do to try to hold this thing together.
And in other words, it sounds to me, maybe I'm paraphrasing too loosely or something, it sounds to me like the American was complaining of French sabotage, that this was a red herring, even not from my point of view, but from the American diplomat's point of view.
Yeah, that's what it sounds like.
Which would have been Kerry's underling, or I guess, you know, whoever, possibly a Brit.
Yeah, what we should remind listeners is that the negotiations are totally secret.
So we only have two avenues for finding out about what happened.
One is the public statements of diplomats after the fact, when they explain what occurred.
And the other is, you know, anonymous leaks to what we can gather our reliable journalists that are in there in Geneva and talking to people.
Everything with regard to the leaks and, you know, the sort of covert details of what went down, everything described France as a spoiler, came in at the last minute, just like you said, and sort of sabotaged the whole deal.
Which, by the way, the United States clearly was expecting to have been settled, because Kerry canceled his travel plans, which I think he was going to Asia, and instead went to Geneva to, you know, bask in the sunlight of being able to announce this grand historic deal.
So it really was just like that.
And now, you know, Kerry in the media is saying, oh, you know, it was the Iranians who actually derailed the deal.
It was the Iranians who objected to a final deal.
He's probably doing that to be diplomatic.
But, you know, that's directly contrary to every leaked, you know, account and narrative of what went down.
Right.
Now, Julian Borger from The Guardian, who he's the author of a great piece from back in the Iraq war, the spies who pushed for war about the relationship, the direct relationship between the neocons in D.C. and Ariel Sharon's office in Israel.
But anyway, he wrote this thing, Iran nuclear program deal in danger of unraveling.
I believe it's on antiwar.com today.
And here he says that Obama called on Friday.
And I think he's implying this was reported elsewhere.
Obama called Netanyahu on Friday and asked him very politely, I suppose, to not oppose the Geneva deal.
Netanyahu then turned around and called everybody else.
Cameron, Putin, Merkel and Hollande, I guess you pronounce it.
And the French went for it.
Yeah, I don't know the details of that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
What you saw, I think, back on the 8th, so that it was Friday, right, but very early Friday morning, right before the deal was set.
And right before John Kerry sort of arrived to speak to the microphones in Geneva, what you had, you had Netanyahu making a public statement in front of a camera saying, this is a bad deal.
This is horrible.
You know, he was all irate.
He was, you know, flipping out.
And the deal, obviously, he didn't know the details of the deal.
He didn't know what was going down.
But he was flipping out.
And it was mainly to, you know, signal to the United States to say, oh, no, I'm fed up and I'm not going to cooperate with this.
And so, you know, much of this is, I think, Israeli objections.
What should also be, you know, I forgot to mention in my initial explanation of this that France might have its own, you know, interests at stake here.
I mean, I think it's pretty stupid for, like, a NATO member, a member of the P5 plus one, and someone who's been so long sort of obeying the dictates of United States foreign policy, it's stupid for them to do this.
But it seems like they're trying to step into a vacuum and gain some leverage in the geopolitical sphere that the United States has recently lost.
So, for example, the Saudis have been very upset with the United States recently for two main reasons.
Number one, they're upset that the United States has not more aggressively attacked Syria, either in a bombing campaign or in some sort of a, you know, more direct support for the Sunni rebels.
They've been very frustrated that Assad is one of their, you know, greatest regional rivals.
And so they've been disappointed with U.S. policy there.
They've also been disappointed with U.S. policy towards Iran.
You know, Obama has been relatively welcoming of the Iranian diplomatic overtures, and Iran is, you know, the Saudi regime's other primary regional rival.
And so they're very upset that this possible daycon could occur, which would, by the way, if a deal was actually set, and, you know, it included all of the details that have been reported, as well as a lifting of sanctions, and as well as, you know, a statement from the international community that Iran's nuclear program is legitimate, and they can produce civilian nuclear program, you know, legitimately.
And that would add a whole, you know, legitimacy to the Iranian program, and therefore, you know, Saudi Arabia and Israel would not have any legitimacy, or would have even less legitimacy, there wasn't any to begin with, to go ahead and bomb or try to sabotage the Iranian regime in some other way, which is they've long wanted to do.
And so Homs has actually signed, you know, weapons deals recently with Saudi Arabia, in August, they signed a $1.3 billion defense contract with Saudi Arabia, which is, you know, a significant increase from their usual.
And, you know, I think that France might be trying to capitalize on the dissatisfaction of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and sort of gain a foothold in the Middle East.
I think it's pretty stupid.
I think it's short-sighted.
But that's the only thing that I can really...
That's the hard stuff of what can kind of explain France's actions here.
Well, now, what about the possibility that John Kerry is not a liar, and that actually he coordinated the whole thing with the French and completely agrees with them that what they ought to do is object and be completely impossible here?
I mean, the obvious interpretation is, well, he's just being very diplomatic and saying that through gritted teeth.
But then again, why not?
He did go to the French and say, hey, guys, hold me back and throw a wrench in here so that I can't make this deal today.
Or maybe he didn't mind so much when they decided they wanted to throw a wrench.
Oh, good.
An opportunity to screw this up.
I mean, we are talking about John Kerry for crying out loud.
I find it highly doubtful that the United States policy would be to have someone else in the P5 plus one appear to take leadership on Iran, while they have for the past three months or so seemed to have given legitimacy to Iran's diplomatic overtures.
And I think the Obama administration has expended a certain amount of political capital with attacks from the right and even from their own fellow Democrats in Congress for welcoming, however skeptically, the Iranian overtures.
And so I doubt that they would put themselves out on that limb and then covertly suggest to the French that, hey, why don't you foil this whole deal that we've rested our diplomatic legitimacy on?
I think it takes a lot, especially for a warmongering state like the United States, to go ahead and say, OK, we're going to pursue diplomatic negotiations with a state that we have been basically in a quiet war with for 30 years.
It takes a lot for them to do that.
And I don't think they would have done that.
They probably, you know, if they intended to have France foil the deal at the very last second, they would have done it in a different way.
They would have, you know, Obama wouldn't have called Rouhani last month or they would have told Iran at the very beginning when Rouhani spoke at the U.N., you know, no, we don't we don't buy any of this and you're a wolf in sheep's clothing and all this kind of stuff.
You know, they would have been hardcore and hardlining from from the very beginning.
So I doubt that that's really possible.
Yeah, I kind of meant to build into my question.
You know, if they had reason to change their mind, if Netanyahu maybe had given them reason to have to change their mind at the last minute or something.
But anyway, you're probably right.
But it just goes to show, I think it's more likely, you know, that it just goes to show the typical situation that's not usually highlighted in this way.
And that is that, oh, there's a big difference between American interests and Israeli ones and how the Israelis won't hesitate one minute to sell America out for what they think is their separate best interests from ours.
And so we ought to no longer let anybody get away with the lie that whatever is good for them is good for us and no daylight and all of this stuff, because here's the perfect example of.
Yeah, the Israelis use U.S. support and play America like a fiddle, you know, whenever they get the chance.
I mean, the cost in terms of, like, if you just think about it in a cold, calculating, realist way in terms of American interest, the cost to U.S. interests that are borne by the Israeli alliance are immense.
And I can't really come up with a lot of benefits.
With regard to Iran, what Israel is really doing, one of the main reasons that, you know, Iran as a big, bad bogeyman is so important to Israel is because it totally distracts the world from the much more pressing issue of the Palestinian issue.
You know, Netanyahu gets to scream about his, you know, compromised security and poor Israel, we're surrounded by evil and so on and so forth.
And so a lot of the diplomatic negotiations with the United States and with their other allies and with, you know, the European Union and all this is centered on this big, bad bogeyman in Iran and this, you know, their impending nuclear capability and all this stuff, as if there's even the remotest possibility that Iran would ever use a nuclear weapon on a first strike against Israel or even attack it.
I mean, they're just too weak in military power to even consider that.
They'd have to be insane, which they aren't.
And so, you know, this issue of Iran is blown up into a big, fat balloon, and there's incredible threat inflation.
Meanwhile, you know, Netanyahu gets to quietly continue to annex the West Bank and, you know, blockade and starve the Gazans.
And nobody, you know, raises an eyebrow because everyone's so distracted by this terrible monster in Tehran, this fictional sort of caricature of an Iran that is, you know, committed to extremism and suicide, you know, national suicide and all of this stuff.
I mean, it's all just a big scare in order for Israel to continue its plans to have only one Jewish Israeli state east of the Jordan River, or west of the Jordan River.
It's John Glaser from Antiwar.com.
John, tell them about the sanctions.
Well, sanctions are some of the worst in history.
The most immediate corollary is, of course, Iraq.
But the difference there was that Iraq suffered under harsh economic sanctions right after the first Gulf War.
And so much of the infrastructure was damaged, and people were already suffering, and they weren't able to rebuild and all this kind of stuff.
So, you know, estimates go as high as a million people died as a direct result of the sanctions.
Child mortality rates skyrocketed.
500,000 children under the age of five were killed.
It was just a massive genocide of the Iraqi people during the 1990s.
Now, you know, I don't see another comparison that's equal to it.
Iran is suffering under incredibly harsh sanctions.
The banking and oil sectors, the sanctions on those industries have crippled the economy.
Unemployment is incredibly high.
Inflation is incredibly high.
Medicines for cancer patients and people suffering from chronic illnesses are being blocked from getting into Iran, and so they can't get their prescriptions and their medical treatment.
It's literally putting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives at risk.
And it's all being done based on a nuclear weapons program that Iran doesn't have, according to U.S. intelligence.
The consensus in the U.S. intelligence community is that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program, they have not made the decision to actually pursue a nuclear weapon.
And all of this suffering, all of this economic warfare, which, by the way, is an act of war, can't be conceived as anything other than that.
It was an act of war when Germany did it to Britain, and an act of war when, you know, we did it to the Japanese, and it's always an act of war, and it always leads to war.
And it's also incredibly ineffective.
But, yeah, the Iranians are suffering big time under this, and that's probably one of the reasons that they've come to the negotiating table, although that doesn't speak too well.
It's not like to praise the sanctions, because the Iranians also tried to come to a negotiating table back in 2001, and they did it in the 90s, and they've had all these proposals and these overtures that have failed, because the United States has had the power and the capability to ignore, you know, when a good deal is staring them right in the face.
So, you know, if these sanctions get lifted, and if there's a deal that actually occurs, and that adds legitimacy to Iran's peaceful nuclear program, that could be an enormous thing.
I mean, that would be absolutely enormous for U.S. relations with Iran and U.S. policy towards the Middle East in general.
But I think that the people who really want U.S. policy to stay the same and to continue to be belligerent, and to continue to be the way it has been since World War II, people in Israel and people in Saudi Arabia in particular, they want to foil this deal.
It's a giant threat to them, that in the same way that, you know, the U.S.-Russian deal to have the Assad regime take his chemical weapons and destroy them, in some sense that gave some legitimacy to the Assad regime, because they have to cooperate in this elimination of the chemical weapons, right?
So that gave legitimacy to them, and anything the U.S. did from that point on to try and deliberately and obviously topple the regime would have been seen as just, you know, beyond the pale.
In the same way, if Iran carries out these concessions that they're offering and reduces their nuclear program and reduces the enrichment limits and, you know, agrees to more inspections and all this kind of stuff, it adds legitimacy to the Iranian regime.
That is the last thing that Israel or Saudi Arabia wants, because any legitimacy given to the Iranian regime is a net loss in their view in terms of their political and geopolitical dominance over the region.
It's just going to show that they're not even really concerned about the nuclear program at all.
What they're really concerned about is the permanence of that particular regime.
Precisely.
They're worried about geopolitics.
They're worried about Iran's power in the region compared to theirs.
And that's about, you know, the nuclear weapons have something to do with that.
If Iran did have a nuclear weapon, you know, the balance of power would shift greatly.
But they don't.
And, you know, they want to be able to maintain this balance of power with the Israelis are the greatest military hegemon in the region, and the Saudis, you know, have prominence, thanks to a close relationship with the U.S. and the boogeyman in the Shiite regimes.
And so, you know, they want to maintain that and they want to foil this deal.
And I'm not sure whether it will be foiled or not.
We'll have to see the next negotiations come later this month.
And fingers crossed that they come before the Congress gets the chance to impose additional sanctions, which, by the way, will signal to Iran that the United States isn't serious about this, and they should abandon negotiations.
Well, and great, because this is the part where what we need here is some real presidential leadership that, hey, I'm determined to make a peace deal here, Congress, and I don't appreciate you holding me back, even if he's got to give a big speech or something.
But is the president willing to fight for it?
And for 10 whole days?
You know, I don't know, man.
Yeah, I don't have a lot of confidence in Obama.
He's always done things for the sake of his own political reputation and legacy.
And I think that if he's going to be seen by most of Congress, even his fellow Democrats, as an appeaser, I don't think that he's willing to take the risk.
And he's not willing to take the heat from a Israeli prime minister that, you know, has a quick tongue and likes to go out in front of the world, in front of the public, and scream about how America's throwing him under the bus.
I don't think he's going to have a lot of confidence that he's willing to take that sort of political damage.
But we just have to hope that maybe some behind-the-scenes stuff to quiet the hardliners like McCain and Graham and Robert Menendez and all of these people in the Senate that just want to foil the deal.
We have to hope that they're somehow staved off.
And we'll see what happens later on in November.
All right, everybody.
That's John Glaser from antiwar.com at antiwar.com slash blog mostly.
Why did France torpedo the Iran negotiations?
And you can also find them at the Washington Times.
Thanks very much for your time, John.
Appreciate it.
Thanks.
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