11/12/15 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, so welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Up next, it's our friend, Mohamed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
And, well, he's a peace activist on America and Iran issues, an Iranian expat, and loves Iran, hates its government, and always writes interesting stuff.
Every single thing is great.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mohamed?
It's good to be back in your program, Scott.
I'm not too bad.
Good, good.
All right, so a very interesting article that you wrote here.
You know, it's kind of nice to see just because finally we're past the nuclear deal actually being signed.
I do believe it, and it's begun being implemented.
It's under no significant challenge at this moment anyway.
And so, hey, we can take a breath and stop and write about something at least, you know, tangentially related, but other Iran issues besides just the fake nuclear scare for the first time in years here.
It's kind of nice.
So anyway, this is related, a related issue, of course.
Iran's deep state has the most to lose from opening to the West.
And you really get into the nuts and bolts of Iranian politics here.
I guess let's start with the Supreme Leader and the President and their relative positions in the battle between, I don't know how you label them, left, right, moderate, center, old, new, less or more religious, or however you want to break it down.
Please, sir, go right ahead.
Well, Iran is going to have two important nationwide elections in February.
The two elections, one of them is for Iranian parliament.
The other one is for what we call the Assembly of Experts, which is a constitutional body that appoints the Supreme Leader and can theoretically even fire him if he's not performing well.
Now, these two elections are very important for a variety of reasons.
First of all, in the present Iranian parliament, the hardliners make an important faction and they oppose the nuclear deal with 5 plus 1.
And they made a lot of noise, they made a lot of accusations, and so on.
The Assembly of Experts is important because, as I said, it has the authority to appoint the Supreme Leader, and there is a lot of credible reports, as well as rumors, that Khamenei is not going to last much longer.
He has been ill for quite some time, last year he was hospitalized, and even he himself in a speech a few weeks ago alluded to the fact that he won't be around in 5 to 10 years.
So that means that the new Assembly of Experts that will be elected in February will most likely choose the next Supreme Leader.
So that means that conservatives and hardliners led by Khamenei want to prevent the moderates and reformists to get into the Assembly so that if the time came for electing and appointing these successors, they can have influence.
And that has worried Khamenei and the hardliners.
Now the hardliners, what I call the Deep State in my article, are basically Revolutionary Guards, intelligence forces, and their supporters in Basij militia, and so on.
They use Khamenei in order to advance their goals by using Khamenei as the Supreme Leader of Iran in the framework of the Iranian constitution.
And they gave some sort of legitimacy to what they want to do.
They were hoping that Iran and 5 plus 1 will not reach the nuclear agreement because Khamenei had set some red lines and had declared that these red lines cannot be crossed.
But the Rouhani administration and the foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, actually crossed some of those red lines and reached the agreement.
Now Khamenei did want and still does want the agreement, but he's afraid of its consequences.
One consequence is that Rouhani and Zarif and moderates and reformists are now highly popular.
In the election in February, they will take control of the Majlis, the parliament, and also will send at least several younger moderate clerics to the Assembly of Experts.
And that has them very concerned.
At the same time, the IRGC, which is the main military force in Iran, also has an economic empire.
During the Ahmadinejad administration, the IRGC-linked companies and IRGC engineering arms, which is called Khatam-ul-Anbiya headquarters, got contracts from the Ahmadinejad administration worth tens of billions of dollars.
The Rouhani administration hasn't done the same.
In fact, it has called for military to move out of politics and economy, go back to Barak, and just does what it's supposed to do, namely protecting Iran's national security, territorial integrity.
This is not what the hardliners want.
They are afraid that if the trend continues in Iran, they will lose their economic power, and therefore they will lose their political power.
Or looking at it another way, if they lose the elections, the hardliners lose the elections, the upcoming elections in February, they will lose their political influence, and with it will come loss of economic power.
So they have been attacking Rouhani, Zarif, and other moderates, and in order to do that, they basically hide behind what Khamenei has been saying.
Since July 14, when Iran and 5-plus-1 signed the nuclear agreement, Khamenei has been basically lashing out at the United States, and in speech after speech, he has attacked the United States, he has warned about the United States trying to, he says that the United States wants to infiltrate Iran again, and gain undue influence.
He has claimed that the United States wants to have its agent to be in the Majlis, the parliament, and important organs of the government, so that the decision for them can be made by the United States.
You know, all sorts of imaginary things that he has been talking about.
Now, what happens is that the deepest state, the IRGC, intelligence forces, and so on, use Khamenei's speeches to advance their program.
And at the same time, the judiciary, which is also controlled by the Hardliners, has been going after journalists, human rights advocates, and so on and so forth.
People like me always said that criticism of Iranian government and the Iranian regime is a completely separate issue from being a peace activist, and being against sanctions, and military threats, and so on.
The sanctions are going to be lifted gradually, and the threat of war has been lifted from Iran again.
So, people like me, who are opposed to the Iranian regime, also have started writing about these issues, because these issues are important.
At the same time, when Rouhani was running for election in 2013, he promised the nation that he will do his utmost to free Iranian political prisoners and open up the political system.
So far, he hasn't done that.
But up to now, it was understandable, because he was busy trying to reach an agreement with 5 plus 1 to get the economic sanctions lifted, to get the shadow of war lifted over Iran, and so on.
But now that that has been achieved, people like me expect him, and you know, I am one of millions, expect him to either deliver on his promises, or if he cannot, and the reason that he cannot is that the deep state prevents him, he should explain it clearly and transparently to the nation, so that people know what's going on in Iran, who holds the power, who prevents, you know, moderate reformists to open up the system, make the system more humane, you know, bring investments from outside, and so on.
Alright, so we're talking with Mohammad Sahimi, he teaches chemical engineering, because he's a professor of chemical engineering at USC, and here he is writing in the National Interest, nationalinterest.org, and we're running it on antiwar.com as well.
Iran's deep state has the most to lose from opening to the West, very interesting discussion of Iranian politics, and we'll have more of it right after this.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Mohammad Sahimi.
If you click on more viewpoints on the front page of antiwar.com, you can find this link.
It's at nationalinterest.org.
Iran's deep state has the most to lose from opening to the West.
So Mohammad, I noticed that whole time in the first segment there where you're describing the state of Iranian politics there.
It seems so obvious.
And I guess, come on, it's not just hindsight.
We've said this all along.
You certainly said this all along.
But it's just so obvious and clear now that the Israelis and the right in America and everyone who has demonized Iran over their nuclear program and has tried to prevent any reconciliation of our two countries have been the useful idiots of the IRGC and the Ayatollah and the hardline Iranian right that they claim to hate so much and have been undermining the position of moderates and reformers like the current president, Khatami, for example.
And now that he's been able to successfully reach this peace deal with the Americans, de facto peace deal, basically putting the biggest fake issue outstanding to bed finally, he's benefited so much that now you're already skipping ahead to the possible backlash from the right as to just how successful he is in terms of popular opinion, in terms of moving the entire country toward a more reformist and moderate direction.
Oh, I totally agree.
I've always said, you said, and people like you and I have said many times that the neocons in this country and Israeli right and Netanyahu and so on, all they do is basically support the position and what the hardliners in Iran want to do one way or another, directly or indirectly.
When Ahmadinejad, for example, was running for a second term in 2009, many Israeli officials made it very clear that their preferred candidate in Iranian election was Ahmadinejad because Ahmadinejad was doing everything that he could to provoke the Israelis and neocons in this country.
And they also wanted him to come back for a second term so that they can use him and what he and his supporters were doing as an excuse to justify what they were saying about Iran's nuclear program.
So in fact, I wrote an article and published an anti-war just a while ago in which I said that Western media and neocons and so on, basically, they give excuses to IRGC in Iran and hardliners to persist in what they say, in what they claim and so on.
And now, you know, we see the effect of it.
The hardliners didn't want any nuclear agreement with Five Plus One, just as Israel and neocons didn't want any nuclear agreement.
The hardliners want to prevent implementation of the agreement.
In fact, just a couple of days ago, there was a report according to which Iran's Atomic Energy Organization president, Ali Akbar Saleh, who played a very important role in the nuclear negotiation, said that Iran has stopped, you know, setting aside some of the centrifuges because there was political pressure by hardliners.
And they were complaining that Iran was doing this too fast.
So they want also to slow down if they cannot stop implementation of the agreement.
And of course, that provides some, again, excuses for Israel and neocons on this side in our country, in the United States, to again make claims against Iran.
So the two sides basically need each other.
And in this battle, what we have is a moderate administration led by Rouhani and Iran's Foreign Minister Zarif, which is also supported by a very large extent by Iranian people, because they want to advance the country, to open up the political system, to get rid of the vast corruption and their Ahmadi Nejad.
There is hardly a day in Iran that goes by without any new revelation about the vast corruption that we had in Iran under Ahmadinejad.
Right now, this guy is on trial in Tehran.
Everybody believes that he has deep links to IRGC, the Deep State, as I call it.
And you know, he amassed about $17 billion over a period of five or six years.
And he could not have done this without his connections to the security intelligence organizations and people who do a lot of things behind the scenes.
So you know, by continuing to make accusations against Iran, by making, you know, by continuing to target Iran, just like Netanyahu did these past couple of days when he went to Center for American Progress and said that Iran and, you know, Islamic radicals want to take over the world, but Saddam Hussein was just a local bully.
And he's the same guy, when they wanted to invade Iraq, said that Saddam Hussein is a threat for the peace of the entire world.
So now he still is ranting against Iran.
And this, of course, provides the excuse and the background for the hardliners in Iran saying that, you see, we made all these concessions, we reached the agreement, we are trying to implement it, but they don't leave us alone, and they are again after us.
Which, of course, to them is an excuse, because they didn't want this agreement in the first place.
So they have been attacking Rouhani, they have been attacking Madras, they have been arresting journalists, they have been arresting human rights advocates, and they have not been releasing political prisoners whose terms of incarceration have ended.
So here we are in this situation, and, of course, President Obama himself has also a role here, I must say, because President Obama keeps saying that, yes, we reached this agreement in Iran, but we are still concerned about Iran doing this, or concerned about doing that, whereas in reality, if they actually want to end the war in Syria, and end Iran's involvement and Russia's involvement in Syria, and leave Syria alone, they actually need to work with Rouhani administration, because Rouhani also wants the war in Syria to end, because it is a big drag on Iran's economy, it is the casualty of Iranian military personnel in Syria has been going on rapidly.
And Zarif and Rouhani both want to end, help end the war in Syria, so that they can concentrate on Iranian affairs and reviving Iran's economy and hopefully opening up Iran's political system.
Yeah, it's really a great microcosm of the last decade.
And that's why you and I both seem so prescient on this is just because we've been talking about it, we've been covering it for a decade now.
And it's the same thing year in year out.
But that example, or that that series of a couple examples there, really just illustrates the whole larger narrative in a microcosm, where the Americans say, stop dismantling your centrifuges so fast, because we can't repeal our sanctions in a way to keep pace with you.
So slow down.
So then the right wingers in Iran say, fine, we will slow down then.
And then the war party in Israel slash America say, look, they're slowing down the centrifuges.
And then the right wingers in Iran go, oh, look at them demonizing us.
Well, we're going to go ahead and act out by clamping down on political dissenters and this and that.
And still, even after the damn deal is signed, you still have the same back and forth, back and forth.
And and it's so plain to see right in front of all of our eyes how it works.
And and and of course, oh, and then I left the last step out, which is the the American and Israeli side pretending that they don't know that Khatami, the president Khatami, the president is basically incapable of doing anything about these political prisoners and whatever that it's his political opponents who are behind this backlash.
And they just demonize Iran in general, ignoring the role, covering up their own role in inciting the Iranians and the Iranian right and making things the way they are in the first place, of course.
I totally agree.
It's just incredible, really, to think that they can get away with this.
Nobody ever calls them out.
Yes, I totally get it.
In fact, I'm glad you brought it up.
We both know that a couple of weeks ago, the Obama administration official was saying that Iran is removing its centrifuges too fast.
And this is of concern to us because we cannot lift the sanctions as fast.
So the rising is in Iran pressures and, you know, said, don't remove these centrifuges as fast.
And then this is, again, used by New York Times and Israel and so on and say, oh, yeah, they're backtracking.
Right.
It's incredible.
It really is incredible how these two sides, the two sides that didn't want a nuclear agreement and didn't want peace, feed each other constantly.
Well, and they only got to get it past Wolf Blitzer, right?
He's the only goalie we got to say, well, wait a minute, that kind of doesn't make sense.
But he's never going to be confused enough to even ask the question because he doesn't get it in the first place.
So precisely, I totally agree.
In the case of Wolf Blitzer in particular, I totally agree, he just doesn't get it.
He just doesn't get it.
Yeah.
Well, and he's just the he's the perfect stand in, too.
He's like the the brand name Kleenex stands for all tissues.
Wolf Blitzer is all news anchors.
They don't they don't ever understand it enough to even ask the hard question.
But anyway, so that's why we've got you.
And good thing about that, too.
Thank you very much, Scott.
And as I said, we will people like me are now we not only be right about, you know, the impediments to implement implementation of nuclear agreement and try to to, you know, educate as much as we can.
And what we know, we will also write about Iranian politics, because these Iranian politics is in, you know, direct connections with implementation of nuclear agreement, what's happening in the Middle East, where Rouhani administration stands, where the reformists stand and so on.
So this is not a story that has ended by by by any means or any chance.
This is going this saga is going to continue.
As I said, Netanyahu at Center for American Progress against targeted Iran again said that Iran is a is a threat to world peace and downgraded Saddam Hussein from a threat to the world peace to the neighborhood bully.
And of course, conflated the Islamic State with Iran as though that's the same thing.
Oh, yes.
Get it?
Islamic.
Exactly.
This is another thing that he has done.
He has always said that Iran and the Islamic State are one and the same, whereas Islamic State is is an archenemy of Iran.
I mean, they hate Shiites.
They hate Iran.
And they are fed by some of the wealthiest Arabs in the Arab world in the Middle East.
Not to mention the fact that they have been doing a lot of dealing behind the scene with Turkey because they are producing like 50,000 barrels of oil a day and they they sell it in markets in Turkey and elsewhere.
And without at least tacit support of some elements in Turkey, the Islamic State would not be able to sell 50,000 barrels of oil per day.
So these are these are basically against Iran, against the Shiites, against Shiite influence.
And of course, they, you know, they blow it all out of proportion.
But for example, Iran has been doing in Syria against Iran intervention in Syria, just as I am opposed to any foreign intervention in the Middle East.
I'm also against Iran's intervention in Syria.
But Iran is not the only country that has intervened in Syria.
Saudi Arabia and its allies in that region have been involved in Syrian civil war from the beginning.
They have supported these terrorist groups in Syria.
Joe Biden said at Harvard University in October of 2014 that, you know, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and their allies in the Persian Gulf area wanted to get rid of Bashar al-Assad so badly that they were willing to arm and provide funds to anybody who was willing to fight with Bashar al-Assad.
And then he said, but unfortunately, the only ones who are fighting Bashar al-Assad are these terrorist groups, al-Qaeda in Syria, Islamic State and so on.
So Saudi Arabia and their allies have been supporting these groups in Syria.
At the same time, I don't see a lot of discussions in this country about Saudi Arabia bloody intervention in Yemen.
I mean, this country, Saudi Arabia, has been attacking Yemen since March.
Thousands of civilians have been killed.
The country has been destroyed.
And that has provided an opportunity for not only al-Qaeda, for Islamic State to go back to Yemen and have bases there.
And at the same time, they have been accusing Iran of intervening in Yemen, whereas if you, for example, read analysis by objective experts, such as people in International Crisis Group and so on, they say that Iran does not consider Yemen as strategically important to its interests, and Iran was not actually involved in Yemen before the attack on Yemen started.
But in order to bloody Saudi Arabia's nose that has intervened in Yemen, Iran may have been trying to give some support to Shiites, Houthi Shiites in Yemen, since the war started.
But even then, we still don't have any firm evidence for it.
Iran sent some aircraft there to give them some humanitarian aid.
But Saudi Arabia prevented those aircraft from landing in Yemen, and therefore they will return.
So we really don't know what's going on.
Let me add here real quick, just to help bolster your argument a little bit.
The President of the United States himself, Barack Obama, has admitted that the Iranians warned the Houthis not to take the capital city of Sanaa, which became the excuse for the war by the Saudis in the first place, which is quite counter to the, oh, Iranian-backed Houthi movement.
Yes, I totally agree.
I mean, I'm not saying Iran was not or is not involved in some way in Yemen, but what I'm saying is that it isn't what they say.
And in fact, as the New York Times put it a while ago, this has become a sort of self-fulfillment or self-prophecy, or however the New York Times put it, in the sense that before Saudi Arabia attacked Yemen, Iran really wasn't involved in Yemen.
But since Saudi Arabia started attacking Yemen, and in particular the Shiites, okay, Iran started raising its voice, rhetoric started coming out of Tehran.
They sent some of their Navy vessels to the waters around Yemen without actually doing anything.
They sent some, you know, cargo planes to give them humanitarian aid.
But Saudi Arabia, you know, accused them that they were not humanitarian aid, they were actually weapons, and therefore they did not allow them to land, and so on.
But at the same time, we don't see any, you know, meaningful discussion of what Saudi Arabia and its allies have been doing in Yemen.
And the Obama administration has been playing it both ways.
On one hand, they say that we are worried about the human consequences of what's happening in Yemen.
They have been saying that they are worried about al-Qaeda and Islamic State going back to Yemen.
But at the same time, according to all reports, and by the admission of the administration itself, they have been helping Saudi Arabia logistically, and resupplying its weapons that it has lost in Yemen, and basically having a very major, important role in what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen.
And while at the same time, all sorts of accusations have been pointed towards Iran.
So this is just a continuation of demonizing Iran, demonizing what Iran is about, in order to advance their agenda, which is basically continuing the war in the Middle East, spreading the bloodshed in the Middle East, and, you know, the design that some at least have in this country, namely, disintegrating these countries, partitioning these countries into a small, weak state, so that, you know, they can control it, so that Israel can advance its agenda.
Netanyahu, New York Times reported just today that Netanyahu hinted to the president when he met with him in the Oval Office, that given what's happening in the Middle East, the United States must recognize the fact that Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981.
I mean, what does that have to do with that?
Golan Heights is part of Syria's territory.
So eventually, hopefully, a good government will take over in Syria, and it would still want its territory back.
So, opportunistically, he wants the United States to recognize annexation of part of another country to Israel, because Israel is, because the Middle East is in bloodshed.
But who created the bloodshed?
The same people.
Who started this war?
The same people.
Who started all of this invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush administration?
Who attacked Libya, the United States, and NATO?
And all of these have come together, but we don't see really a good discussion of this, and at the same time, everything we hear about it is, Iran did this, Iran did that, Iran did this, Iran did that.
I mean, this is just not, this is not just Pentagon.
It's not that Iranian hardliners and Iranian political system is without fault.
They have their own fault.
They shouldn't have intervened in Syria, but they have done it because they consider supporting Syrian government to be in their strategic interest.
But Iran is just one player in that region.
There are many, many other players, both in the Middle East and from outside.
So just talking about one player out of many, just doesn't make sense.
Yep.
Well, and, you know, it could be added to there that, well, a couple of things.
First of all, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal have both done extensive reports about American support.
Basically, they're coordinating the whole air war and providing the aerial refueling for the Saudis.
Of course, American contractors do all the maintenance on the planes.
The Saudis don't do manual labor, of course.
They put in, the Americans put in the GPS coordinates.
The Saudis fly there, drop the bomb and come home.
That kind of thing.
Otherwise, it's Obama's war.
The whole damn war is America's war over there.
You could even look at it where the Saudis in a way are just flying as part of our air force and yet all report.
Oh, and of course, this is all to the benefit of al-Qaeda on the ground while the drone strikes against al-Qaeda continue against selected assassination targets.
They're actually helping accomplish al-Qaeda goals against the Houthis and helping them expand their territory.
They've taken an airport and a seaport and a weapons depot that used to belong to the army there.
Weapons that America gave to the dictator Saleh to fight al-Qaeda with in the first place probably that had also been used against the Houthis and provoked them into being the problem that they are at this point.
You actually have America fighting for and against al-Qaeda at the exact same time in Yemen right now in the middle of this war over there.
I've seen this reported over and over again.
I guess it's almost always anonymous sources, Mohamed, but the conventional wisdom in D.C., the understanding apparently is that the reason the Americans are happily doing this for the Saudis is it's a sop to them over the Iran deal.
If you'll pipe down about the Iran nuclear deal, which could have been said to have been done for Saudi interests in the first place, taking a safeguarded nuclear program and making it ever more safeguarded than before, instead, oh, sorry, boo-hoo, we're so apologetic for doing the nuclear deal which benefited you, Saudi, we'll go ahead and help you have a war against the Yemenis, the poorest country in the entire Middle East.
In fact, I said the same thing in an article that was published by Huffington Post.
I said, well, it ain't just you.
I mean, this is the consensus I've seen over and over again that, well, why are they doing this?
Well, it's because of the nuclear deal.
We've got it.
It's our apology to them, just like giving Netanyahu a raise from three billion to five billion a year.
Yes, I totally agree.
I totally agree.
And you see, the Obama administration justified, first of all, it supported the ridiculous development that Saudi Arabia became the head of Human Rights Council at the United Nations.
I mean, this is a country that is basically a religious dictatorship of the worst kind at home and has been waging a war of aggression against Yemen, against Syria, its citizens.
If not, its government has been supporting all sorts of terrorist groups, 15 of its citizens were involved in 9-11 terrorist attacks and so on.
But the U.S. applauded the fact that Saudi Arabia, I don't know how, but it was basically appointed to lead the Human Rights Council or at least one of its committees.
This is one thing.
The other thing is the U.S. tries to justify what Saudi Arabia has been doing in Yemen, repeating what the Saudi government is saying, that, you know, we are doing this at the invitation of the legitimate government and legitimate presence of Yemen.
Well, if that's acceptable, which is not, then why isn't it acceptable for Iran to intervene in Syria after Iran and Syria have a mutual defense pact signed in 2006 and registered at the United Nations that if any one of the two countries was attacked by foreign forces, the other country must support the other side?
Again, I want to make clear that I am against Iran's intervention in Syria, but what I'm trying to say is that because of the nuclear agreement with Iran and because of the fact that this nuclear agreement with Iran made a lot of actors in the Middle East unhappy, just like you said, the Obama administration has been doing a lot of things to appease them, including helping Saudi Arabia in Yemen, including increasing military aid to Israel, including closing its eyes on what Turkey has been doing in Syria, and including continuing the threats against Iran that if you guys don't do this and if you guys don't do that, then everything's on table again and so on and so forth.
So this is really, just like you said, this is really a war, an America war, an Obama administration war with all these actors.
And in the Middle, we have defenseless people of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran and so on being victimized by these policies.
All right, Shah, that is the great Mohammed Sahimi.
He is a professor of chemical engineering at USC.
And here he is writing in The National Interest.
Oh, I should say he's got a great archive going back for years at Antiwar dot com.
And here he is at The National Interest.
Iran's deep state has the most to lose from opening to the West.
Really appreciate your time again.
Thank you very much, Scott.
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