11/14/13 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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My email address is scott at scotthorton.org Hi y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today was supposed to be our third guest yesterday, but...
Second or something, but...
We went over with Leopold about his great story on Abu Zubaydah's journals.
So here we got Gareth now.
He's writing at truthout.org as well as IPSnews.net And this one is about the failed Iran talks last weekend.
Why Iran nuclear talks failed and why they will get tougher.
Welcome back to the show Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, thanks Scott.
I appreciate you joining us on the show as always.
Why did the Iran nuclear talks fail?
Well I think the simple answer is that there was a change in signals.
Thursday night when the talks were supposed to go into high gear, there was a text that was presented to the Iranians.
The Iranians were happy with it.
And that was the understanding that was going to be the basis for the final push to get this through.
That they had basically a text that the United States and Iran were in agreement on.
Then of course the French came into the picture.
And the mystery here is exactly what the sequence of events was.
Exactly when did the French get the United States to make changes in the text.
We don't know exactly when that happened.
But what we do know, or at least I think we know, is that Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, has tweeted in the last 24 to 48 hours that there was a text that was gutted.
His quote, his term, was gutted sometime between Thursday night and Saturday night.
At least 50% of the text according to Zarif was gutted.
Meaning that they changed the wording so that it was really quite different.
And clearly he's referring to the issues of the Arak, A-R-A-K, heavy water reactor.
The disposition, as they say, of the 20% enriched uranium stockpile of Iran.
And I think clearly there was something there having to do with the right to enrich, that pertained to the right to enrich, that was affected by this, what has now been called moving the goalpost, but I think essentially was forcing the United States to make some changes in the text.
And I think that raised serious questions in the mind of the foreign minister of Iran and his team as to whether they could continue.
Obviously they were not ready to sign it and they said, we have to go home and we're going to have to regroup here.
But I think that's the short version, or as short as we can make it, of what happened.
All right, now, well, I guess I'll go ahead.
There's so much here, but let's get to why they'll get tougher then.
Well, I think they're going to get tougher because, first of all, the Iranians cannot come back to the table without demanding that the text be returned to what it was before the French, acting on behalf of the Israelis or reflecting the Israelis' concerns, quote-unquote, demanded change in text, which the United States obliged them.
That's what's important, of course, is not that the French made the demand, but the United States, from all that we understand that has come to light in the last couple of days, the Americans obliged them by changing the text.
And I think the Iranians must demand that the text be returned to where it was before that happened.
I don't see how they can do anything otherwise.
I mean, for one thing, they are under intense pressure at home from the nationalist right, so there's no question that there's a lot of criticism of the negotiating position of Iran.
There's sort of the exact opposite of what the right wing in the United States and Israel are saying is being levied against the Iranian negotiators at the table.
They think that they've gone too far in accommodating the United States, and I think that's just a reflection of the factional politics within Iran as well as a very powerful cast of nationalism that suspects the worst in these kinds of negotiations with the United States.
So I think that's one reason they have to do it.
And I think the second reason is that under these circumstances, the Iranians have to take seriously the problem of U.S. overconfidence, that they feel that they have their foot on the necks of the Iranians, or the neck of Iran, if you will, because of the sanctions, because Iran is hurting economically, and that this has contributed to a sense on the part of the Obama administration that they can, in fact, toughen their stance and get away with it.
I don't know if that's the case, but I think that is certainly a legitimate fear that must be under discussion right now in Tehran as far as preparing for the next round of talks.
Right.
Not that the Americans are really that far ahead, but that they think they are, and how problematic that is.
I think that it might well be the case that the Obama administration made that adjustment on behalf of the Israelis, in effect, in large part because they felt that, well, who knows, maybe we can get away with it.
Maybe the Iranians feel under such pressure that they will have to sign, despite the fact they don't like what we're doing here.
And now, when you say that the Iranians will have to insist on the previous version, are you talking about on all three big red herrings here, the Iraq facility, the 20% stock, and the future right to enrich?
Absolutely.
I mean, those are all issues on which they certainly...
I mean, we don't know exactly what the language is, of course, that the French were saying they wanted to be changed to, but one can bet, I think, with a great deal of confidence that the language that was agreed to on behalf of the French-Israeli view was something that would have been certainly unacceptable to Iran, that would have required a very major change in the situation from what the Iranians expected.
And look, the point here really is that Iran was prepared to stop 20% enrichment and to assure the United States that all the existing stockpiles were going to go into this stream that would result in the manufacture of fuel plates so that it wouldn't be available for a breakout.
And that is a very far-reaching assurance.
It's giving up part of the negotiating leverage that Iran had accumulated.
You know, they were carefully accumulating their negotiating chips for leverage over the last few years, and this 20% enrichment and the stockpile were a significant part of that negotiating leverage that they had acquired.
And they're giving that up in return, in large part, I think, not so much for the few billions of dollars that they're going to get from this rather offhand offer from the United States that they will have a very partial rescinding of the sanctions, but not the most important sanctions.
Clearly, the ones that really hurt them the most, they're not going to be affected by this.
So what the Iranians are getting in return really is, I think, the recognition of their right to enrich.
That's the one thing they can point to, or they thought they could point to, in this preliminary agreement as an end state that the United States had agreed they were working towards.
Now that that appears to be gone, I think that the deal certainly becomes clearly a bad deal for Iran.
They couldn't afford to agree to anything like that.
That's ridiculous.
So what about what a bad deal this supposedly is from the right-wingers?
Let's try to give them a fair hearing here.
The pro-Israeli war party says that, come on, this is any kind of deal that Kerry's trying to make here.
He's giving away the whole store.
It's not just letting them enrich uranium and keep the facilities that they could use to one day make a uranium nuke bomb, but also this Iraq facility.
They're sticking the can down the road on the Iraq facility, and if, I don't know, 10,000 or 15,000 impossible things happen, they can make a plutonium bomb out of that Iraq facility.
Well, I think you quite accurately capture the spirit, if not the letter, of the argument that's being made.
And I think that...
I'm not being fair to them at all, though.
Did I leave anything out?
Did I have any other argument than that?
No, you didn't leave anything out.
You didn't leave anything out.
I think that captures the essence of the argument that's being made.
The problem, of course, with that argument is that it is simply not reflective of any of the realities that surround these issues, certainly the issue of Iraq.
In the first place, of course, there is no capability in existence for the taking of the spent fuel and reprocessing it by Iran to use for a plutonium bomb.
I mean, they have nothing of that sort.
There's not a scintilla of evidence of that.
To build a plutonium reprocessing facility is a major undertaking.
You can't just hide it.
You can't do it in a little cave.
It doesn't work that way.
So, you know, there's no question that there's not, at the least, anything like a capability to actually reprocess and have the capability of doing a bomb.
And furthermore, I think even more importantly, we know that Javad Zarif, in his PowerPoint presentation of mid-October of this year to the United States and other diplomats, was saying that Iran is prepared to have arrangements by which the spent fuel will be immediately taken away and not be available, even if they change their mind and they somehow secretly try to have a, or openly try to have a reprocessing facility.
So, I mean, the basic premises of this complaint about Iraq are simply utterly out of, you know, there's no reality to them whatsoever.
Well, now, part of it, though, is they're saying that, okay, listen, worst case nightmare lacunic scenario, they decide that, aha, actually we are going to harvest plutonium out of that reactor and figure out how to reprocess it, build the facility to do it, even if they've got to withdraw from the treaty in order to go ahead, because there's no way in hell they could do it secretly.
They'd have to take the lid off the damn thing in front of all the satellites and everything to harvest the plutonium out of it, let it cool for half a year or something, and all this stuff would turn up.
But it would be too late to bomb them, Gareth.
We wouldn't be able to carpet bomb the Iraq facility at that point once they had declared that intention, because we'd spread dirty bomb stuff everywhere.
So we've got to stop them before they get to the point where we can't bomb them.
Yeah, hold on.
You know, that idea of bombing the Iraq facility is completely and utterly bogus.
I mean, there is no, there's absolutely no reasonable scenario under which Israel is going to bomb that facility.
You know, in the first place, within six months of this preliminary agreement, there's going to be, you know, there's supposed to be a final agreement.
And if the United States signs on to what I think the Iranians are demanding in the preliminary agreement, that agreement will certainly indicate that the Iraq facility will be covered in full.
There will be, you know, no way in which the Iraq facility will be used for a plutonium reprocessing and use for a bomb.
All those things will be provided for, will be anticipated in the final agreement.
And the United States still, of course, holds all of the, not all the negotiating cards, but they hold significant leverage in the form of these very biting, crippling, you know, sanctions against Iran.
So, you know, the United States still has the ability to say to Iran, I mean, you know, you have to do what you promised, you know, in this initial agreement, or we will continue to hold on to the leverage that we already have.
And that is, you know, that is the kind of negotiating dynamic that can create, in the end, an agreement that will serve the interests of both sides.
Now, what, of course, the Israelis want to do is to prevent that agreement, not because it's going to allow Iran to have the capability to make a bomb, but because it's going to Iran, to allow Iran to recover from the sanctions.
That's the reality.
That's what Israel wants.
They're going to continue to threaten to bomb, not because they intend to do so, as I've said many times on your show, but because this is part of the ruse that's aimed at keeping the United States and the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese from going ahead with an agreement that would be in everyone's interest.
Yeah.
You know what I don't get?
How come the Americans couldn't push back against the French and say, oh, no, you don't, man.
Hey, listen here.
You want to not be friends anymore?
We'll hold a grudge against you for this.
I think that's a very good question, and I think the answer is that this, I think there's a twofold answer.
One part of it is that the United States is still not ready to openly dissent from what the Israelis are trying to do to this negotiating process.
They don't want to tell the truth because it heightens the contradictions between the United States and Israel.
They're simply not ready to do that.
And the second part of it, as I suggested earlier, I think the Obama administration may be leaning more than a little bit in the direction of overconfidence with regard to what they perceive to be their negotiating leverage with the Iranians, the bargaining strength of the two sides, if you will.
So the American reaction to the French was, hey, yeah, you're right, we should stick it to them a little harder, huh?
Well, I don't think that they would have quite been that lacking in diplomatic...
Well, we're talking about John Kerry.
Yeah, right.
But I think the reality is, though, that when confronted with a choice between saying no, you can't do that, and the fact that you're doing it is an act of bad faith, which we resent, and is illegitimate, and we must put a stop to it, they decided to swallow what was going on, and that does reflect a political orientation, which is a very serious problem.
And I think that part of it is indeed that they felt they could get away with it.
If they didn't feel they could get away with it, they wouldn't have done it.
So I think that is a problem, a problem of U.S. perception of its relative power in the situation.
And let's face it, this is the end result of decades of U.S. dominance of the world system, U.S. military dominance, U.S. economic dominance.
It all adds up to a sense on the part of the U.S. national security elite that they can, in fact, carry out coercive diplomacy.
That's been a term that has been immensely popular and credible within the U.S. national security elite for so many years.
That even people like Tom Pickering, who are really, you know, pretty reasonable on the issue of negotiating an agreement with Iran, were not prepared to say, look, the United States has to take this threat to use military force off the table.
It is not only stupid, it's counterproductive, it's not going to do us any good, it can only do us harm, because of the idea that has become so deeply ingrained on the part of the national security elite that we have this advantage, and therefore we've got to keep using it.
Right.
Well, yeah, especially, you know, the headline this morning in Reuters I'm sure you saw is that the new IAEA report, which you've probably seen that.
I have not seen the new IAEA report, actually.
Well, it's coming out and Reuters is saying that they virtually halted any expansion of the program since Rouhani has taken power.
They seem to really be trying over there.
There was a story a couple of weeks ago where the Ayatollah made some statement like, hey, people criticizing the president and his administrators for trying to do this deal ought to pipe down.
I'm paraphrasing, but it was something like that.
And that, I'm sure, carried a lot of weight over there.
That was a big deal that he was coming out that strongly in favor of the negotiations.
And here's the thing.
And obviously, as you're saying, this is the big hang up is whether they have the right to enrich or not.
But as you and I've been talking about for five years on the show since Obama came into power, his very first indications of the swap deal that he ever wanted to do was an implicit, if not explicit, recognition of Iran's right to go ahead and keep enriching.
Just don't go up to 20, keep it at 3.6 percent or whatever, and then we'll go on from there.
And so they've understood, I think, that realistically they couldn't prevent Iran from having some low level.
So why not just say so?
I mean, Gareth, everyone on Earth knows that every non-nuclear weapon state with a nuclear program has something akin to a breakout capability, one degree or another, and that's not illegal.
So why can't they just say that?
It's ridiculous that that should be the hang up.
Right.
And I think there's an even more important and more serious issue here that needs to be brought out.
And of course, this brings me back to my book, which we'll be talking about over the next few months before it's actually published, I know.
But one of the things that I explore in this book in great detail is the myth that has become enormously widely believed in political circles in the United States, and basically among people who read newspapers and watch television, that what has happened here is that the Iranians began to fiddle around with experimenting or doing research that indicated that they wanted nuclear weapons way back in the 1980s, and that ultimately they were caught red-handed, they were found out, and that this is why they can't be trusted, and so on and so forth.
Now, the reality, historically, of course, which I'm going to detail in my book, is that the Iranians not only were not messing around with nuclear weapons in the 1980s or early 1990s, but in the early 1980s to the mid-1980s, they were actually not even anticipating, not expecting to, not demanding or wanting to do any enrichment on their own soil.
They were going to depend on the French, you know, to enrich uranium for them to be turned into fuel rods for Bushehr, which was, of course, already in existence when the Islamic Revolution took place in 1979.
So the reality is that they were prepared to live with, that is, the Islamic Republic was prepared to live with a situation where Iran wasn't even enriching its own uranium.
It was going to depend on people outside, in fact, in Europe, to provide it with fuel rods.
And that only changed after the United States began to put pressure on the French and the Germans not to cooperate, even with the very limited, modest, and totally non-proliferation-oriented nuclear program that Iran still had maintained after the revolution.
So that absolute inversion, the turning on its head of the history, the early history of the Iranian nuclear program, and the sequence of developments which resulted in where we finally got, which was the Iranians deciding that they had to have their own independent capability to enrich uranium, is really at the heart of this entire problem of the lie surrounding the Iran nuclear scare.
Well, you know, we need a good excuse to beat them over the head all day.
It's not like any of this has anything to do with the actual issue in question, right?
Well, that's another thing that I cover in the book, is that, you know, the CIA and the military, of course, needed an adversary that provided the rationale for them to continue to have to demand the level of appropriations from Congress that they got during the Cold War.
And when that was over now, the Soviets were gone, they had nothing to replace it unless they could come up with the myth that there were rising states that were going to pose the same kind of danger in terms of nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union posed in the Cold War period.
All right, so now, when I talked to Flint Leverett, I was explaining to him how I was more disappointed this time, because I really thought that, unlike in 2009, it seemed like they really meant it, right?
I mean, with the foreign ministers showing up and everything, and then, you know, the French came in.
But he also talked about all the reasons that the Americans blew it, not just the French and the Israelis as well.
And he just, he kind of argued with the point and said that he thought that this was just like 2009, where they're going through the motions, but they don't even mean in the first place to do what it takes to get this thing done.
It just seems to me such a schizophrenic thing.
I don't know exactly if you agree with that or not.
But Obama's saying things like, you know, Congress, if you pass these sanctions, the American people don't want a path to war.
I'm trying to solve this here, and you guys are screwing it up.
And that's pretty strong language for a president.
And then he goes in there, you know, all half-assed and doesn't get the job done.
Well, and this is, I'm suggesting that, I mean, I don't know if I disagree with Flint or not.
I'm not sure exactly, because I didn't hear exactly what he said.
Yeah, don't count on my interpretation.
Yeah, I mean, if you look at it in terms of those two problems of the United States, the Obama administration still fearing to confront as directly and energetically as it needs to confront the Israeli effort to sabotage these talks, and its sense of the temptation to feel overconfident about its bargaining position, I think that that explains the bargaining, the negotiating behavior of the United States in Geneva.
And whether that means that they never intended to do it just depends on how you define that.
You know, I think that they would like to have an agreement.
I think they hope that they can get an agreement.
I don't think that they are very clear about how they're going to do it.
And I think that there's a serious danger that they will fail in the end to do what they need to do in order to secure it.
I mean, I still have grave concerns about whether this administration has what it takes to do what's necessary.
And now, this is just a minor footnote kind of a point, but you mentioned money transfer as being part of the deal.
And, you know, that makes a great talking point for the right if it's just a welfare payment for America.
But my understanding was that that was Iranian money that the Americans had so-called frozen.
Otherwise, you know, other people call that stealing, but it would just be releasing that money back to them.
It's actually their money.
Is that right?
That's precisely so.
It is Iranian assets which are held in various countries that are obviously cooperating with the United States to maintain this as leverage.
And so, you know, it is Iranian assets, and it's part of the U.S.-Iranian conflict going back decades, but it's been updated.
And, you know, they're not even talking about it very much.
We're talking about a few billion dollars.
I mean, really, they're not talking about releasing tens of billions, which is what is at stake here.
As I understand it, $80 billion held in these countries which are not available at this point to Iran to be used for anything except buying products from those countries which the Iranians can't use.
So, you know, this is a serious – it's part of the serious problems being caused by the sanctions to Iran.
But what we're offering is not much, not very much.
All right, everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter, this time writing at truthout.org.
Thanks, Gareth.
Thank you very much, Scott.
The article is Why Iran Nuclear Talks Failed and Why They Will Get Worse – Tougher.
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