12/28/14 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, December 28th, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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This morning's guest is Mohammad Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC, as well as an activist on Iran issues, Iran nuclear issues especially.
He's a writer at a great many places.
Too many to list here.
But you can find his work, of course, at AntiWar.com, at the Huffington Post, at the National Interest, formerly at the PBS Tehran Bureau.
He also has his own news service called IME.
That's M as in Mary.
IMEnews.com.
IMEnews.com.
His most recent piece is at the National Interest, and it's the spotlight this weekend at AntiWar.com.
It's called U.S.-Iran Hawks Try to Sabotage Nuclear Deal.
Welcome back to the show, Mohammad.
How are you doing?
I am good.
Thank you for having me in your program.
Very happy to speak with you again and very happy to see you, especially writing in the national interest.
I anticipate that a lot of these people read the national interest and could greatly benefit from your perspective as I have over many years now.
I thought if we could, for starters at least in this interview, Mohammad, maybe we could talk about a little bit of the positives and the negatives as far as the Iranian nuclear negotiations and the prospects of a nuclear deal.
There are a lot of things on the positive side to take note of.
Most of them I think you would agree, as I'm sure you'll explain, on the Iranian side.
But there seems to be some political goodwill on this side as well.
And it seems like everybody's been more or less negotiating in good faith for a little more than a year now.
It's taken longer than we would have hoped.
But the prospects for a final nuclear deal are not over yet, I don't think.
You talk in the article a lot about the concessions that Iran has made, which is a great way to illustrate, I think, their willingness to deal on their side of this negotiation, to keep their nuclear program but to come up with as many assurances as possible that the Western powers could need to be satisfied that it's intended to remain a civilian nuclear program.
I totally agree.
Iranians have made major concessions to go the extra mile in order to reach a comprehensive agreement.
And as I discussed in the article, they have even decided that they would give up on a temporary basis some fundamental rights that they have under nuclear non-proliferation treaty, such as, for example, limiting the number of centrifuges that they have and not enriching uranium above 3 to 5 percent and so on.
I also agree that the Obama administration has been negotiating with Iran in good faith.
I also agree that President Obama and his foreign policy team do want to reach a comprehensive agreement with Iran, and not only because such an agreement is in the national interest of the United States, but also this would be a great foreign policy legacy for the president.
But what I pointed out in the article was that in practical terms, although the U.S. has been negotiating in good faith, it has made very little concessions in return for major concessions that has been made.
Major concessions that has been made by Iran.
Namely, it has frozen a small amount of Iran foreign currency reserve that is estimated to be about $130 billion in European banks and lifting sanctions on a few minor items such as export of petrochemical products and Iran's, for example, fleet of oil tankers being able to buy insurance in Europe and so on.
But the main point of the article, as you pointed out, and I said at the beginning, is that there are factions, there are groups, Israeli lobby, Saudi Arabian lobby, neocons, war mongers, war party, whatever we call them, that don't want this agreement.
The only agreement that they want is for Iran to completely capitulate and give up all the rights that it has so that it will not have any uranium enrichment facility and program on its soil.
And, of course, that's not going to happen because Iranians are not going to give up what they have achieved over the years at great cost and effort by Iranian scientists, great sacrifice by Iranian people, and so on.
One can argue whether, economically at least, this has been in Iranian people's interest, but the fact of the matter is Iran has set up all these vast nuclear infrastructure in Iran.
The Iranian government has done that, and that has produced significant advances in technology for Iran.
If you look at, for example, things that Iran has done in order to manufacture more advanced centrifuges, that has helped Iran in the area of material science to advance greatly.
So, these are all beneficial aspects that Iran has had, and, of course, it has been at great economical cost, mostly because the United States and its allies have imposed on Iran sanctions that are illegal.
They are illegal in the sense that they have been done outside the United Nations Security Council, and even the sanctions that the U.N. Security Council has imposed on Iran are questionable because the very nature of sending Iran's nuclear dossier from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to the U.N. Security Council leaves a lot of space for debate, and a lot of people have debated that.
But even setting aside that issue, the sanctions that the U.S. and its allies have imposed on Iran are illegal, and, therefore, one can argue that this whole confrontation, as, for example, Gary Porter has pointed out in his excellent book, has been basically a manufactured crisis because Iran has lived up to its obligation under safeguard agreements that it has with the IAEA, and even the IAEA has acknowledged in its report that Iran is living up to its obligation, but the lobbies in the United States, the War Party and so on, they don't want any agreement.
They want Iran to give up its rights.
They want Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program.
They want Iran to be dependent on foreign powers for its light-water nuclear reactor that has operating, and at least two more are going to be built, and a fourth one is being built in Iran right now.
So they don't want any of these, and the point of my article on national interest was to counter arguments that have been made by Mark Dvobitz of Foundation for Defense of Democracy in this direction, that, you know, let's impose more economic sanctions on Iran so that Iran basically capitulates, because according to him, it was economic sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiation table, and it will be more economic sanctions that will force Iran to surrender its rights and do what Dvobitz wants Iran to do.
You know what, though, Mohammad?
I don't believe it.
I think that their real motive is to make an offer that they know the Iranians, or to force the administration to be confined in their side of the negotiation to an offer the Iranians can't accept so that they can just keep the Cold War going, so they can prevent rapprochement at all costs.
They know they can't really have a war of regime change, and they know they can't really negotiate away every last centrifuge in Iran.
That ship sailed a decade ago, and they know that, so they're kind of stuck, but what they want to make sure is that this last outstanding fake issue doesn't get put to bed, which would then obviously raise the question of why we still have a Cold War with Iran at all if we don't even have an outstanding nuclear issue anymore, and that's what they're most worried about.
They want regime change by hook or crook someday, but they don't know how they're going to get it now, maybe when Jeb comes, or Hillary, but it seems like that's what they really want, is to prevent peace from breaking out.
I totally agree.
I mean, this is another aspect of what they're trying to do.
When I say they want Iran to surrender, it is exactly...
You're talking about their argument on its face, is give up everything, which they know is not realistic.
Exactly, exactly.
And at the same time, obviously, if the Cold War between Iran and the United States ends, or at least lessens, then the strategic importance of Saudi Arabia and Israel may decrease in the view of many Americans, and the United States wants to pull out at least some of its forces, in my view, from the Middle East, because the president announced in April of 2011 that the U.S. wants to have a pivot to the Pacific Ocean and East Asia, and for that to happen, the U.S. needs to end its Cold War with Iran, resolve its differences with Iran over Iran's nuclear program, and at the same time, the U.S. needs Iran in order to confront the Islamic State in part of Iraq and Syria.
And to be honest, I think the only country that can actually confront the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is Iran.
It is Iran that has helped the Iraqi government to resist the Islamic State.
I believe if it were not for Iran's help, maybe even Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, would have fallen to the Islamic State.
And people like Durovic and what he represents don't want that.
They want this confrontation between the U.S. and Iran to continue.
They want to continue to vilify Iran because they don't want the other two important countries in the Middle East, namely Saudi Arabia and Israel, to lose some of their strategic importance in view of Iran rising as a major power in the Middle East.
So in that sense, I totally agree with you, Scott, that they don't want this Cold War to end.
And I certainly don't want to see the United States align with Iran in Iraq like they did from 2003 through 2011 when they helped the Iranian-backed militias take Baghdad and kick all the Sunnis out of it and really get us into this mess to a great degree with the Islamic State.
But I'd be more than happy to see America leave the Middle East entirely and let Iran fight the Islamic State if they feel like it, as long as it's none of my business anymore.
But I certainly don't want to see us go from Cold War to such close buddies that now we're fighting side by side because I think with the sectarian nature of the war over there, taking anyone's side only guarantees worse consequences down the line.
Oh, I don't support this either.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that you did.
I just was being careful about it.
Because people toss that around a lot, like, yeah, Iran is our natural ally in the Iraq War.
And I'm thinking, no, no, no, that's not the lesson of the last Iraq War is to do the same thing again, please.
I totally agree.
And the sectarian war that is going on in the Middle East is mostly a product of, in my view, Saudi Arabia and its allies, the policy that they have had in support of terrorist, Sunni terrorist groups to confront Iran.
I mean, we all remember, at least some of us remember what King Abdullah of Jordan said back in 2004 when he said that there is a Shiite crescent rising over the Middle East and we should confront it.
And ever since, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Arab countries of the Persian Gulf have been trying to incite and support a sectarian war in the Middle East, where on one side are these countries and the groups that they support, and on the other side are the Shiite nations of the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, and the Alawite government in Syria and the Shiite majority in Lebanon.
I don't support the U.S. and Iran fighting side by side in Iraq.
I think what is happening in Iraq is the result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
I mean, I've made it very clear that this is what people like me think.
So, again, I agree with you.
I don't want that type of thing to happen.
But the fact of the matter is, if you want to confront the Islamic State, and if at least you want to contain it, in my view, Iran is the country that can do it, can provide help.
Now, if that happens without Iran getting itself involved in internal Iraqi politics, Shiites versus Sunnis, Sunnis versus Kurds, Kurds versus Shiites, and so on, that would be great.
If it cannot happen, then I don't want anything to do with that, and I don't want Iran to get involved in that type of conflict.
All right, now, so let's change the subject back to Iran real quick, and the sanctions that you mentioned, quote-unquote illegal and not, I mean, U.N. authorization don't mean a thing to me, as far as legitimacy goes.
This is a war of collective punishment, an economic war against the people of Iran, and they say that, well, these are just targeted sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and like torture, they point to the supposed efficacy of it.
Look, two things happened, and I say one caused the other, and that sort of argument.
But tell us a little bit about the real sanctions regime against Iran and the level of economic war and what it's really meant to the people of Iran, especially over the last few years since Obama and Hillary's crippling sanctions.
Well, let me first point out one important point here.
When people like me emphasize that these sanctions are illegal, I agree with you that in practical terms, whether it's illegal or not, it doesn't matter.
But the point of emphasizing that these sanctions are illegal is that the U.S. and its allies have always claimed that Iran has not lived to its international obligation under NPT and other international agreements that it has signed, and have always argued that they are taking actions and they are doing what they are doing because Iran has not lived to its international obligation.
Fine.
If that's the case, then U.S. and its allies have also not lived up to their international obligation and in fact have been violating international agreements, including the fact that they have imposed illegal economic sanctions, sanctions that haven't been approved by the United Nations Security Council on Iran.
Now, in terms of the hardship that these economic sanctions have brought to Iranian people, this is the longest story.
Of course, in my view, the most important and the most crippling sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on Iran is sanctions of Iran's financial institutions.
The U.S. has basically cut off the relation between Iranian banks and outside world, which means that even when Iran exports its oil in international markets and to other countries, it cannot bring back the proceeds that it makes from those sales back to Iran unless the U.S. and its allies allow that to happen.
And of course, as I said, Iran has a very significant foreign currency reserve frozen in European banks and its Asian banks that is estimated to be about $130 billion and hasn't been allowed to bring at least part of it back to Iran unless the Geneva Accord allows it, which is a small monthly amount that Iran is receiving.
Internally, that led to tripling the rate of exchange between Iranian currency and U.S. dollar, and that affected everything else.
The rate of inflation went up, unemployment went up, import of a lot of very important items from things like medications for serious illness to raw material for Iran industry, to spare parts for, let's say, civilian aircraft, and so on and so forth.
They all stopped.
So these economic sanctions have affected every aspect of the lives of the ordinary Iranian people.
And at the same time, I argue that, in fact, these sanctions not only have not hurt Iran's revolutionary guard and the hardliners in Tehran, but in fact they have benefited from these sanctions because they control the black market in Iran's economy.
They control a significant part of Iran's official economy.
And because of that, they have made billions of dollars in black market and other aspects by taking advantage of the situation that has been created by U.S. and its allies.
In fact, as I have argued, and other people like me have also argued in their articles and interviews, one reason that Iran's hardliners, one important reason that Iran's hardliners don't want the negotiations to also succeed, because Tehran also has hardliners, is that they have benefited from these sanctions.
So while the lives of ordinary Iranians, millions of them, Iran's population is now 80 million, have been deeply affected and worsened by these sanctions, the hardliners that are supposedly the real target of these sanctions not only have not been hurt, but they have also gained economically and also politically.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the previous president, was one of the hardliners, and he gave access to revolutionary guards and companies that are connected to revolutionary guards to have a free hand in the Iranian economy.
They benefited greatly from the sanctions.
They controlled the black market.
They imported a lot of materials into Iran and sold it at high prices in the market and made billions of dollars.
And therefore, even though officially the real target of these sanctions and so-called selective sanctions have been Iran's hardliners, the real victims of these sanctions have been ordinary Iranians that go about their daily lives every day and struggle with making ends meet.
Right, and then on the margin, that means people are dying, people who already were weak or sick or old.
They can't get medicine quite as readily.
They can't get health care quite as readily.
They can't get food quite as readily.
And other factors, for example, if we look at Iranian websites that are based in Iran, we see, for example, that the number of young people who have had heart attack due to extreme stress and the struggle that they have had has been underwrite dramatically.
And most experts attribute this to the economic struggle that they have had.
We know that a large number of Iranian patients that are struggling with serious illnesses haven't had access to the necessary medication that Iran imported from outside world.
And all you have to do is just turn it around for a moment.
What if the world ganged up on America and put economic sanctions like this on the United States?
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
And in fact, some people have tried, for example, or some countries have tried to get away from using dollars, U.S. dollar, as the basic international currency that they use.
And just the move to do that has brought consequences for their country.
Saddam Hussein tried to do that.
Some countries in Latin America have supposedly tried to do that.
And other countries have also spoken about getting away from dollar.
And we know if that really happens at the international scale, then that would have great consequences for U.S. economy.
I totally agree.
If even minor sanctions that have some effect within the United States is imposed by outside world on the United States, the United States will react militarily.
I totally agree with that.
Yeah, it's unimaginable, right, that anyone would dare try that on the U.S.
Or that the U.S. government would take it as anything but an overt act of war.
I mean they cry that about a still anonymous hack of a Japanese electronics company.
They call that an act of war against the United States.
We think they'd call it if they tried to level sanctions against all our banks.
Anyway, the question answers itself.
All right, so to wrap up here at the very end, let me ask you, what's left outstanding or, you know, what is John Kerry pretending is still outstanding here?
He's demanding even further reductions in spinning centrifuges.
Is that it?
What else is left for the Iranians to agree to after all the concessions as you list the five major concessions in your article?
We don't have time to go down a list here, but what else is left to the American demands?
There are three major issues that have apparently remained unsolved.
The number of centrifuges that Iran can have operating in Iran.
The U.S. insists that it should be around 4,500.
Iran wants the current number of centrifuges, it's about a little over 9,000, to be operating.
Then the length of the comprehensive agreement, the U.S. insists that it should be 10 years or longer.
Iran wants at most a seven-year agreement.
And the mechanism by which the economic sanctions will be lifted.
Iran wants the economic sanctions be lifted within a year or two after signing the agreement.
The U.S. wants to only suspend them over a period of years.
So these are the main important issues that have remained unresolved.
All right, well, you know what, as long as we have time then, let me ask you about this recent scandal.
This is the big talking point.
Again, people want to go down the list of the five major concessions the Iranians have already made in the negotiations.
The article by Mohammad Sahimi is at the national interest.
But one of the big new talking points from the Warhawks comes from David Albright and the ISIS group, as it's called there, in Washington, D.C., where they come up with anti-Iranian propaganda.
The other ISIS would approve, I'm sure.
And so he came up with this big new talking point saying that the Iranians are breaking the deal.
The IAEA says that the Iranians have been completely compliant within the interim agreement framework so far.
And yet David Albright claimed to catch them cheating.
And now every Republican on C-SPAN says the same thing.
What do you say to that?
Oh, it was a total fabrication.
Because the Geneva accord that Iran signed, the 5 plus 1, explicitly stipulates that Iran can continue its research program on production of more advanced centrifuges.
But what Iran cannot do is to install these centrifuges to produce enriched uranium.
And according to IAEA reports, one after another, Iran has actually lived up to its obligation.
The IAEA reported that Iran has done some research tests with more advanced centrifuges.
So David Albright just jumped into this, as usual, and said that this is cheating by Iran.
Then a lot of people pointed out that this is within the Geneva accord and the Joint Plan of Action.
Iran is allowed to do it.
And what he did was he retreated and said, well, what I meant was Iran has violated the spirit of this agreement.
And, of course, I have put this in the article when National Interest removed it.
I said that the last person who should talk about the spirit of anything is David Albright.
But aside from that, this was supposedly the cheating that Iran had done.
To be fair to his argument, let's give his argument a fair hearing.
It's not in violation of the spirit of the agreement either.
The agreement directly stipulates, as you just said, that, yeah, you can go ahead and continue doing experiments.
Just don't go ahead and add them to the centrifuge cascade.
So the spirit of the thing is perfectly in line with the letter of the thing.
I totally agree.
And aside from that, that this was all a fabrication, that even Albright had to retreat from it because he usually does not.
He always comes up with one argument or another, I would say bogus argument, why he was right in the first place and so on.
But, you know, he has advocated a very hawkish approach to Iran nuclear program over the years.
And in my view, David Albright is basically obsessed with Iranian nuclear program.
And therefore he takes all these hawkish positions and makes a big deal out of practically nothing.
So, as you said, even if we want to talk about the spirit of the Geneva accord, what Iran has done is in total alignment with that spirit and the letter of that accord.
There was there was no cheating.
There was no violation whatsoever.
And this was all basically either a mistake or at worst a fabrication.
But which is the obvious conclusion anyway, when you look at who you're dealing with, with the current president and with his negotiators, these guys clearly, as you say in your article, have been committed since the last time around during the early Bush Jr.years in negotiating this deal.
They clearly want this deal.
And what purpose would they have in violating the agreement by spinning one little IR5 centrifuge off on a research facility on its own somewhere?
It's completely ridiculous on the face of it anyway.
I agree.
That's not going to stop Republican senators from beating us all over the head with it and saying it's proof of their treachery, though.
I mean, nothing is going to stop them.
But if you if you take a look at what Rouhani and his team have been pursuing for at least 10 years has been the fact that they want a compromise with the West so that they can resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear program and move on to developing the country.
Iran had proposed during the time when Rouhani was chief nuclear negotiator for the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami that to limit the number of centrifuges to 3,000, only 3,000.
This was when Iran didn't even have one centrifuge operating.
But the Bush administration rejected it, and therefore the three European countries that were negotiating with Iran on behalf of the United States also had to reject it.
But now Iran has over 9,000 centrifuges operating, another 10,000 that are ready to be installed.
And therefore, it's obvious that they won't go back to the original proposition that Iran would limit the number of centrifuges to 3,000.
And at the same time, when they made that suggestion for 3,000, the Bushehr reactor wasn't operating.
The Bushehr reactor is now has come online, is operating at full capacity.
And in a few years, Iran's agreement with Russia will end, whereby Russia supplies fuel for the Bushehr reactor.
So Iran either has to renew the agreement with Russia or produce its own fuel for Bushehr reactor and two other reactors that are going to be built.
So Iran does need an enrichment program in Iran to produce at least part of the fuel for these reactors.
So obviously, Iran is not going to back to a very low number of centrifuges.
But they have agreed to limit the number of centrifuges for the duration of the comprehensive agreement so that the IAEA and the United States and the Arabs and so on will not have any excuse to say that it's not clear what Iran is doing and so on.
Because everything will be transparent and completely clear.
And after that comprehensive agreement expires, then Iran's nuclear dosage would become a completely normal one, which means that Iran is free to install as many centrifuges as it needs to enrich uranium.
And of course, that would be under supervision and according to the safeguard agreements that Iran has with the IAEA.
But the people who want to, as you said, want to continue the cold war between Iran and the United States don't want that.
They want to force Iran into an agreement that it cannot accept and then use that non-acceptance as an excuse to continue what they have been doing to Iran over all these years.
Alright, that's Mohammad Sahimi, professor of chemical engineering at USC and writer on Iran nuclear issues.
He's at imenews.com and he's got the spotlight article today on this weekend at antiwar.com.
It's from the national interest at nationalinterest.org.
US-Iran hawks try to sabotage nuclear deal.
Thanks so much for coming back on the show, Mohammad.
Great to talk to you again.
Thank you for having me on your program, Scott.
Alright, Sean, that's it for Antiwar Radio 4 this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'll be back here next Sunday from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
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See you next week.