01/29/15 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org is the website.
Stop by there.
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Coming up, the heroic Marcy Wheeler.
But first, the great Mohammed Sahimi.
He teaches chemical engineering at USC.
He's an Iranian expat and an expert on their nuclear program, as well as all the American and international politics surrounding it.
You can find a great many of his articles at antiwar.com, including this one that'll be running tomorrow.
Washington's Iran hawks provide ammunition for Tehran's hawks.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thank you for having me in your program again, Scott.
Very good to talk to you again.
And happy to give you a chance to explain the points you're trying to get at here in this article to my audience.
I think they're very important.
I guess, first of all, it's worthwhile to let you go ahead and give a rundown on the Washington hawks and what exactly it is that they're doing that is providing ammunition for Iran's.
Well, the point I've been trying to make over the past year and a half is that it is not just Washington that has hawks that want to prevent any agreement between Iran and P5 plus one over Iran's nuclear program.
And the fact that Tehran itself also has hawks and hardliners who also don't want any agreement with Iran, with the US.
So when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was Iranian president, he had a hardline policy.
And that basically contributed, although it wasn't the prime contributor, but it contributed to the fact that nuclear negotiations didn't go too far.
Then Hassan Rouhani was elected as Iranian president.
And given his long experience in national security issues, and the fact that he was a former chief nuclear negotiator, and during his tenure as chief nuclear negotiator, he had pursued a totally moderate and reasonable approach to resolve the issue over Iran's nuclear program.
The hope was that he could do the same as president, and in fact, he has done the same thing.
He has used the same approach.
And his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is a very skilled and polished diplomat, has been negotiating with 5-plus-1, as everybody knows.
And of course, the negotiations have made some progress.
Iran has received a little bit of relief from sanctions.
In return, Iran has made major concessions, but I have discussed this in your past programs.
But now, as the approach, the deadline for reaching an agreement, and as the report indicates that some progress has been made, Washington hawks don't want any agreement with Iran.
So they have been trying to do their best to prevent it.
So not only they are trying to prevent that, but in my opinion, they are also providing justification for Tehran's hardliners to try to topple Rouhani administration and replace it with a hardline president, just like Ahmadinejad, which, if that happens, then the two countries may move on a path towards war.
So on the Iran side, when Zarif met with John Kerry, Secretary of State, they had several meetings over the past few weeks, and they also, as part of the negotiation in Geneva, they took a walk around the streets of Geneva, and that provided an excuse for Tehran's hardliners that while you did this, this indicates that you are very friendly towards the West, and things of that sort.
But this was basically their main problem with what Zarif had done.
Now, on the other side, of course, as I discussed in the article, there have been efforts on all sides to prevent an agreement with Iran.
If, for example, we know, first of all, that Robert Menendez and Mark Kirk introduced a resolution in the Senate to vote for new sanctions against Iran, although it seems like Menendez has backtracked, he and other senators yesterday sent a letter to President Obama saying that they are going to postpone it.
Then Republicans are also trying to pass another resolution demanding that if Iran and the United States reach any agreement, that agreement should be put up for a vote in both Congress and Senate, and given that Congress and Senate are completely pro-Israel, we know what might happen if that's done.
But of course, we all know that John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, invited Benjamin Netanyahu to come to Congress and give a speech to a joint session of Congress, basically to rebut what the president said in his State of Union address, saying that if they pass any resolution imposing new sanctions on Iran, he will veto it, and saying that Iran and the U.S. have an opportunity to resolve this difficult problem, and the Congress should not do anything that would impede the progress.
And of course, that has provoked wide reaction and wide criticism.
Some people called John Boehner an American traitor.
Justin Raimondo of Antioch called him basically Israel's fifth column.
I think all of them are fitting and appropriate.
Then we had Senator Lindsey Graham, who went to Israel and basically told Netanyahu that when it comes to Iran, Israel and Netanyahu should lead the way, and Congress will follow them.
Basically, he was telling that Mr. Netanyahu should decide for U.S. Congress what it should do regarding Iran.
He had also called for massive military attacks against Iran back in 2010.
So when you put all of this together, we will see, you know, how pro-Israel this guy is.
And of course, as I pointed out in my article, he's from South Carolina.
Most white voters in South Carolina are Christian Zionists, and Christian Zionists support Israel ardently.
And therefore, Graham, whether he believes it or not, he must pander to them, and that explains what he has done.
But the most interesting about this guy is that how out of touch the guy is, because after Islamic State took a lot of territory in Iraq several months ago, the same Senator Graham that has called for massive attack against Iran and asked Netanyahu to lead the way and tell Congress how to conduct U.S. policy regarding Iran, called for cooperation with Iran so that they can defeat the Islamic State.
So apparently, he believes that the U.S. can go and destroy Iran's military and nuclear infrastructure and the country's infrastructure.
He killed tens of thousands of Iranians.
But in return for quote-unquote favor, Iranians will spill their blood so that Mr. Graham and Senators like him, ambitions in Middle East, which are basically, in my opinion, imperialist ambitions, can advance.
Then we have the articles by Dennis Ross, Eric Edelman, and Ray Takieh, and these guys also testified in the Senate the other day, saying that negotiations with Iran have stalled.
I mean, nobody believes that the negotiations have stalled.
In fact, both sides say that negotiations have progressed.
If it has stalled, that means that, you know, there was a deadlock, there was nothing to talk about, there would have been no Geneva agreement, and so on and so forth.
But these guys say the negotiations have stalled, which means that the Obama administration should take a tougher line.
So they say that the administration should take it to Tehran, and they say that the president needs to have a tougher, coercive policy to force Iran to make concessions.
As I have explained in my articles in the past, including those that I have posted on Antwerp World, Iran has actually made all the necessary concessions.
Iran has limited its nuclear program, Iran has stopped enriching uranium at 20%, Iran has agreed to limit the number of centrifuges, Iran has agreed to transform the Fordow enrichment facility built under a mountain to a research facility, Iran has agreed to redesign the nuclear research reactor in Arab, so that it won't produce as much plutonium, and Iran has agreed not to enrich uranium at 5%.
These are all the concessions that one needs if they are really serious about reaching an agreement with Iran.
So saying that the negotiations have stalled is totally wrong, in my opinion.
All right, we've got to hold it right there, Mohamed.
Did I tell you all he was great, or what?
We'll be right back with more Mohamed Sahimi, antiwar.com, tomorrow we'll be running this latest piece on American hawks helping the Iranian hawks to try to sabotage the nuke deal.
The nuclear.
I didn't mean weapons.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with Mohamed Sahimi.
We're talking about Washington's hawks, interchangeable with Tel Aviv's, and what they are doing that is inadvertently or just advertently, is that a word, empowering the hawks in Iran.
So we got a good rap from you there about Netanyahu.
As you say, it's probably the first time in history that the Speaker of any Parliament ever brought a foreign leader to speak to denounce the policy of the executive.
I think you're probably right about that.
If anybody else knows any other examples, please let us know.
But then, of course, as you said, the sanctions that have now been delayed temporarily, the threat of an up or down vote, and, of course, all the propaganda about Iran unceasingly by the war party trying to end the negotiations, trying to pretend that Obama's selling out and weakness to Iran and letting them run roughshod all over him, when really what they're demanding is, as you say in the article, completely impossible, and no one is honest and says that, yeah, we expect to be able to negotiate Iran right out of their nuclear program entirely.
We liars pretend that that's even achievable at all, and what they mean is sabotage.
But now, OK, so you can comment on that if you want, but then please tell us all about the Iranian hawks.
I want to learn as much as I can about the position of the Majis, which is, I guess, the House of Lords over there, is that how it works?
The Revolutionary Guard Corps and all of these guys in their position, their stake in this matter.
Oh, they do have a big stake in this matter, and as I explained in the article, Iran's hardliners are basically of two groups.
One of the groups are old revolutionaries.
These people believe that no matter what Iran does, the U.S. will always find another excuse to come after Iran, because the U.S. has never been happy about the fact that the revolution toppled the U.S.'s staunch ally, Shah Mahmoud al-Baghdadi, in Iran in 1979, it never recognized the legitimacy of the revolution, and therefore, even if Iran and the U.S. reach an agreement over Iran's nuclear program, the U.S. will find another excuse, such as, for example, human rights or something like that.
So they oppose any agreement with the U.S. on ideological grounds and the fact that they are suspicious of the U.S.
And to be honest, even though I totally oppose these hardliners, I think they do have a point.
The U.S. has been trying to do all sorts of things to Iran over the past 35 years, but I don't agree with their approach that in order to handle the issue, we must lock a nuclear agreement with the U.S.
The biggest group of hardliners in Tehran that oppose a nuclear agreement with Tehran are those that are connected to intelligence security forces, a part of the Revolutionary Guards and supporters of the regime and hardline clerics.
These people have benefited tremendously from economic sanctions imposed on Iran.
In fact, when the economic sanctions began to be imposed on Iran a few years ago, people like me wrote many, many articles saying that these sanctions only hurt ordinary Iranians and benefit the hardliners.
So don't do this, don't impose economic sanctions, this is not the way to do it.
So these hardliners created a black market for all sorts of things because of the sanctions and enriched themselves tremendously and then used part of that wealth to also get more and more political power, to the point that the last four years of Ahmadinejad's presidency was probably one of the most politically repressive eras in Iran's contemporary history.
Now they feel that if Iran and five plus one, and in particular if Iran and the U.S. reach an agreement, first of all the economic sanctions will be lifted, or at least suspended, and that opens up the country to foreign investors, foreign technology and so on, there won't be any black market because Iran will be able to import what it needs freely and to the normal ways.
The oil industry that the Revolutionary Guard-related or link companies have been trying to run because of the economic sanctions will not be controlled by them anymore because foreign oil companies will come in and they have the modern technology and the Revolutionary Guard's companies cannot compete with them and therefore they have to get out of it, and all sorts of things.
And of course if the economic situation improves, that means that the political atmosphere should also open up because once people are not worried about their economic plight, they start talking about their rights as citizens and so on, so that opens up their political space also and that provides an opportunity for democratic groups in Iran to make their voice louder and also the fact that Iran and the U.S. reach an agreement means that the hardliners can no longer sell the United States as a threat to Iran's national security and therefore they cannot, for example, jail their opponents under the guise that there's a threat to national security.
So if you look at it from any direction, reaching an agreement with the moderate, pragmatic government of Hassan Rouhani is not only in the interest of Iranian people but also in the interest of the West and the United States because we have an important country like Iran with its strategic position, vast natural resources, very educated and young population, which is generally pro-West, and this country is improving economically, is opening up the political space and that becomes a model of stability and some sort of progress in the Middle East where the rest of the Middle East is up in the fire and war is going everywhere, bloodshed is going on everywhere.
So if we really are thinking about the true national interest of the United States, we should actually support an agreement with Iran rather than oppose it, but of course these hardliners don't want that because they have also their own vested interest.
And one of the points that I want to mention is, if we have time, and emphasize that, is that one of the worst aspects of this is that some of these people who oppose agreement with Iran also support the Mujahideen Ha'af organization, the MEK organization.
This is a terrorist organization that was even listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department up until September of 2012.
This is an organization that carried out many terrorist attacks in Iran in the 1980s.
According to their own leaders, they killed 57,000 Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war at the front between Iran and Iraq.
It collaborated with the Saddam Hussein regime during the Iran-Iraq war.
Very quickly here, they had no support in Iran is the point.
Absolutely no support.
And yet these people support MEK and oppose a nuclear agreement with Iran.
Right.
And now, so one thing, because I think you did a great job, well, everybody, live audience, will be interrupted here, but I'm going to keep recording him a minute into the break so you can catch the archive later, and on the other side of the break we'll have Marcy Wheeler for you here.
So yeah, on the MEK, everybody go back, check the archives, read up on MEK, read Mohammed Zahimi, listen to our previous interviews about it, et cetera.
Very important point there that you make.
But I wanted to get to sort of the opposite of what you're saying, or not really the opposite, but where you're describing all the benefits to the Hawks from the continuing of the Cold War.
I wonder what you think would happen to Rouhani and his more moderate faction if they were to fail in these talks.
Oh, if they fail, then obviously he will be replaced by a hardliner.
And the hardliner that would replace him would be even worse than Ahmadinejad.
In fact, both Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif have emphasized that Iran has important elections a year from now.
And if these negotiations fail, and if they cannot deliver the benefits of an agreement to Iranian people that would lift economic sanctions and so on, then in next year's election for Iranian parliament, the hardliner will take total control of it and will use that to impeach the president and remove him from office.
And if that happens, God forbid, then somebody much worse than Ahmadinejad will come to power.
And that will take Iran towards a total confrontation with the United States.
And that's not what we want.
At the time when the Middle East is on fire and bloodshed is everywhere, we don't want another war.
But to prevent that, and we can prevent it because the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has control over these hardliners, as long as he supports the negotiations with the hope that an agreement can be reached, those hardliners can be controlled.
But if he decides that these negotiations are not going anywhere, and the US and his allies are asking basically Iran to surrender, rather than reaching a reasonable agreement, then he will withdraw his support.
And if he does that, then what I described to you will most likely happen.
So in my view, even in that case, the responsible party would be Washington House, because Rouhani and his team are doing their best to make the necessary concessions to convince Khamenei that this is useful, and this is the path they should take.
And so far, they have had his support.
So if Washington House prevents an agreement, they'll be responsible for all the consequences of not reaching an agreement with Iran.
Yeah.
Well, and well, everybody read this piece.
It'll be at antiwar.com tomorrow, because there's so many great points in here that need to be elaborated on that we didn't get to talk about, especially the very conclusion there.
I'll leave them wanting.
It's Mohammed Sahimi's at antiwar.com.
Washington's Iran hawks are providing ammunition for Tehran's hawks.
Thanks very much for your time, Mohammed.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
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