Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay guys, on the line I've got the great Gareth Porter.
His latest at antiwar.com is called The Right May Finally Get Its War on Iran.
And in fact that's republished from truthdig.com.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, how are you doing?
Hi Scott, I'm fine.
Thanks again for having me.
Hey man, well, yeah, you wrote an important thing like you usually do.
So, and you know, this is exactly what I didn't want to read by you.
The Right May Finally Get Its War on Iran.
Nah, who am I kidding?
I love this stuff because of how terrible and horrible it is.
And what a great job you do writing about this terrible horribleness.
Now here's the deal though.
Nobody in DC really wants war against Iran, except for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and some of the kooks at WINEPP and in Congress.
But like the vast majority of the foreign policy establishment, they're not really hawking it up for a fight with Iran right now.
And Donald Trump, you know, reputedly had told John Bolton, you got the job, but you're not allowed to start any wars, you understand?
Kind of thing.
So, and it just doesn't seem to me, well, we're going to talk about all the way, the thousand ways that Trump has been horrible on Iran, but it doesn't seem like he really wants a war with them.
That'd be crazy.
But then he has got us out of the nuclear deal.
And as you say in here, on the advice of John Bolton, partially, although he probably wanted to anyway, the other guys were holding them back for a minute there.
But he and Pompeo, both the Secretary of State, John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, and Pompeo, both, as you say here, are real Iran hawks and they just might get us embroiled in one of these things anyway, despite all those things I just said about why it shouldn't happen or why it doesn't seem like there's much momentum for one.
I think you're right in all those statements.
And, you know, I am the last one to be sort of yelling wolf about war with Iran because, you know, when most people on the left were most concerned about and felt that we're on the verge of having a war with Iran, I was saying, no, that's not going to happen.
Well, that's the famous story of the first time I interviewed you 12 years ago on the show in January of 2007.
The first article I read by you, I think, certainly the first time I interviewed you, was about an article that you wrote that said, there's a lot of hype about a war real soon here, but there's a State Department briefing that makes it clear that we're talking late spring, early summer, at the soonest.
And so everyone holds their horses and take that into account because this is the thing everyone else missed.
And you've been my favorite ever since.
So anyway, just a relevant anecdote to me anyway.
So go ahead.
Right.
And, you know, I have basically become convinced that the Pentagon and the military leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been resolutely opposed to a war against Iran for the simple reason, as I think I've said many times on your show, that the cost is too high.
Particularly the Navy, of course, is extremely vulnerable to Iranian anti-ship missiles, which are extremely fast, skim just above the water, and they cannot defend against them.
And they're going to lose multi-billion dollar assets there in a trice.
And they're just not up for that, or they're not down with that, as other people might put it.
So I've been convinced for a long time that war against Iran is extremely unlikely.
But there is this one time when, of course, we know now that during the Bush administration, Dick Cheney had a very specific plan for war with Iran, a specific proposal that he hoped he could get through.
It was quashed by the Pentagon in 2007, in the summer of 2007, which I've written about, and as far as I know, nobody else really has.
But what I see now in the Trump administration, and you're right that Trump doesn't want another war.
I don't think he would be, he's not planning one at this point.
But Bolton clearly does want a war.
He's never wavered in that regard.
And he has a plan, he has a gimmick here, which Pompeo appears to have bought into, that would under some circumstances make it more likely that we could find ourselves in an escalating situation with Iran.
And that is, as I document in this piece, the idea that Pompeo and Bolton came up with last September, October, was that they would use some kind of gimmicky claim that Iran was attacking a U.S. embassy or U.S. consular installation or facility somewhere.
In this case, it was in Iraq.
In September, there were a couple of small mortar attacks or mortars that landed in the vicinity, first of all, of the U.S.
It was in the green zone.
It wasn't close to the U.S. embassy, despite the claim that it was close to it.
We know from the original reporting on this at the time, that night, that it wasn't anywhere close to the U.S. embassy.
As I pointed out, it was a kilometer away at least, roughly a kilometer away.
But it was magnified, it was blown up into a kind of a casus belli against Iran by Pompeo publicly and, of course, by Bolton.
And there was another, that same night, later on, there was a couple of mortars that landed in the vicinity of the U.S. consulate in Basra, at the airport in Basra.
And again, it wasn't that close.
It was near the outer perimeter, security perimeter of the airport.
And it's clear in both cases that there was no intention to damage, let alone harm anyone at either of those facilities.
Well, in fact, the same militia that attacked the American facility in Basra attacked an Iranian facility that same day because they blamed Iranian intervention down there for some of their problems, whichever they were.
Well, I mean, I don't know exactly who did this.
It's not clear.
As far as I know, I have never seen evidence that there was a claim of responsibility.
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
Maybe there has been.
I should go back and check, but I think the reporting at the time, if I remember right from reading Jason at antiwar.com, was that it was pretty clear that the same group had done both attacks.
And so it really threw cold water all over the U.S. narrative that, see, it's this Iranian-backed group that's done this to us.
When it was, yeah, it was a Shiite group, it's Basra.
But that doesn't mean every Shiite is under the mind-control powers of the Ayatollah in Tehran.
And in this case, these same guys had attacked the Iranians that same day.
Or maybe they, you know, some of these people were doing this precisely in order to try to provoke a conflict between the United States and Iran.
Who knows?
I mean, that's possible as well.
Sure.
So at very worst, in terms of the intentions of the pro-Iran militias or Iran-linked militias in Iraq, it was a symbolic gesture at most.
And the kind of thing a responsible adult would play down, figure out how to work around, rather than drum it up and seize on it to try to precipitate a crisis.
Exactly.
And so my point here is simply that there is this very disquieting, at very least you can say, disquieting parallel between what Bolton and Pompeo ginned up in last September, October, and what Vice President Dick Cheney was trying to do in 2007, which was essentially to create a phony basis, excuse for an attack on Iran.
And, you know, we know that Pompeo was threatening to do something like that publicly.
Now, you know, it could be simply a political move on his part to position himself on this issue.
I can hope that that's the case.
But I still find that what this means is that – what I'm afraid of is that it means that there is this war party very high up in the Trump administration.
The two people who are working most closely with Trump on the Middle East are committed to, at the very least, a threat of war against Iran that has to do with coming up with a totally phony excuse.
And that means that there is certainly a possibility that they will try to take advantage of something in the future to create a crisis that, you know, has the possibility of getting out of control.
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You say in your article here, Gareth, that the key demands outlined by Pompeo in May of last year are clearly based on the policy agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
How so?
Yeah.
I mean, the whole idea that Pompeo was putting forward was, look, you know, we're not asking anything that's unreasonable.
We just have these demands that we want Iran to meet in order for us to negotiate with them a new deal, a new agreement.
And so that was the sort of political basis on which these demands were being put forward.
It was not supposedly, according to Pompeo, that they were setting up a situation where they could justify escalation of force against Iran or escalation of other pressures.
It was simply that we're finding a way to put pressure on Iran to meet our reasonable demands.
But if you look at the character of those demands, and particularly the ones that I talked about in my piece, what you find is that these are so clearly impossible for Iran to agree to without essentially sacrificing their very central security interests, their most important vital security interests, that it's utterly impossible for Iran to agree to those demands.
And I'm referring here to specifically, particularly the demand that Pompeo put forward that the Iranians agree to stop their development of ballistic missiles, stop all movement of weapons of mass destruction, as I think they put it, or certainly advanced weapons to Hezbollah going through Syria.
This is my wording, but this is the import of what he's demanding, what they're demanding.
And basically, in other words, allow the, in my analysis here, which I think is based on reality rather than on any just opinion, what it means is that Iran would have to allow the Israelis to gradually grind down, erode the ability of both Iran and the Hezbollah to deter an Israeli attack on both Hezbollah and Iran.
And that's because, first of all, the Iranian deterrent, which has improved significantly over the last 10 to 15 years, because 10 or 15 years ago the Iranian deterrent was extremely weak, and the Israelis knew it and the Iranians knew it, and therefore they were depending extremely heavily on the very large arsenal of tens of thousands, I don't know exactly what the figure is at this point, but it's upwards of 100,000, I think, at this point, weapons that can reach Israel in varying lengths, but certainly can reach major cities of Israel and impose a significant cost on Israel if the Israelis were to attack Iran.
And therefore what this is all about is Iran essentially making sure that it continues to have the Hezbollah deterrent to the Israelis while they're continuing to perfect the accuracy of their intermediate range missiles that can reach Israeli targets.
And those missiles are becoming more and more accurate all the time as they continue to test them.
But the United States is putting heavy, very heavy pressure, trying to get the Iranians to stop testing those missiles, and that would mean that they're going to stop short of the ability to really threaten, for example, to hit Israeli military bases with any accuracy.
And they don't have that many missiles, and so they have to be very accurate.
I mean, that's really what they're aiming for.
And this is something that, of course, the U.S. media absolutely do not discuss, will not discuss.
You're never going to see that in the media because that's not the way they want this to be viewed.
But this is the reality that we're facing with regard to these demands on Iran.
Well, you talk about in here, too, this report from Axios about a meeting in December 2017 where the Americans and the Israelis agreed on this plan of action before Pompeo debuted it.
I didn't address that part of your question, which was that I mentioned that this is- Yeah, I mean, you sort of made it sound like, well, it goes without saying because it's all about Hezbollah.
But yeah, please elaborate.
Absolutely.
The point you're appropriately pointing to is that these demands really come directly from the Netanyahu government.
These are things that Netanyahu has been pressing on the Trump administration since the beginning, and which in 2017 we know from the Israeli press were fully discussed as part of a high-level meeting between national security advisors of the United States and Israel, as well as other officials of both governments representing other key national security government offices.
And the purpose of that meeting was to arrive at a common strategy on Iran.
And it wasn't just a general, broad, notional strategy with some certain rhetorical flourishes.
It was very specific on all major points, including specifically this question of what to do about Iranian missiles, as well as what to do about Hezbollah's weapons going through Syria or Iranian weapons on their way to Hezbollah through Syria.
And the result of the meeting was that they did agree on a common strategy, and it's clear that that commitment was made to the Israelis at that meeting and was officially signed off by, at that point, it was H.R. McMaster, who was national security advisor.
But it was agreed to right then and there, and therefore it became part of the U.S. policy.
And that's why we have this commitment by the United States to make these demands.
And they are really Israeli commitments rather than commitments that have anything to do with, or demands, I should say, that have anything to do with genuine American interests.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, just as, you know, predicted, not that it was hard to, Trump is such a lightweight that he's a complete pushover for this stuff when the hawks come to him.
But he told the story himself about how they brought him into the tank.
Oh, it was the fanciest room, just like on TV, with all the big screens and all the flashing lights and stuff.
And they told him, Iran, Iran, Iran.
It's all about Iran.
And even just recently he said, well, that's why we have to stay in Iraq.
It's not for the fighting of Iraq War three and a half against what's left of the ISIS insurgency there from now on.
But no, it's that we got to be there so we can keep an eye on Iran, who are, of course, the closest allies of the government America installed in power in Baghdad.
And so he's fallen on this.
And the generals, I mean, they seem to just be obsessed.
And I guess, you know, from talking with Mark Perry and looking at things, I could see why I guess the Marines and somewhat the army kind of feel like they have this grudge against Iran or something like that.
But that can't be allowed to lead the policy.
And besides, why really does the military hate him so much?
I mean, I know you write in your book that Iran is a great excuse for the military to have, you know, a rogue state to have to hem in all the time and this sort of thing.
But it seems worse than that.
You know, like the generals ought to actually be sort of telling Trump, you know, a lot of that stuff is overhyped and we don't really need to worry about them.
You know what I mean?
But they're not telling him that at all.
Well, I'm not so sure about that.
I think that it's a bit more nuanced and more nuanced than what you've just suggested.
I think that on one hand, the Pentagon clearly does weigh in officially constantly on the threat from Iran.
It's, you know, malign influences and malign activities throughout the region and so forth.
This is it's not just an excuse.
It is the major basis for the justification for much of the military budget.
When I say much, I can't quantify it in terms of precise or even an approximate estimate of the total military budget.
That's that's something I wish I could do, but I don't have that kind of fine grained analysis at this point.
But definitely we know that the entire justification for the U.S. presence in the Middle East is essentially Iran.
And so that has to weigh very heavily on them in terms of their justification for the entire military budget.
And indeed, we know that they've made this shift from counterterrorism to the four major potential or actual adversaries, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
And then counterterrorism is sort of added on as as a fifth part of the rationale.
But the rationale shifted from counterterrorism to those adversaries.
And and so Iran does figure even more importantly now than it did when before January of 2018, when they made that official shift at the Pentagon.
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Well, and you know what?
At the rate we're going, Iran will have recreated the entire Persian Empire and dominate the entire Middle East by the year 2030.
And they'll use the United States to continue to do it for them.
Everything our government does to try to check their power, starting with Iraq, war two has done nothing but make them more and more powerful.
They've improved their position in Syria for sure, which is now the reason for the panic, as though the years 2011 through yesterday never happened.
Yeah, of course, you're right.
You know that I agree with you wholeheartedly in that in that overall assessment.
On the other hand, I would simply add, you know, a bit of a a cautionary note to, you know, sort of that that way of describing the situation, which is that while the situation ever since the invasion of Iraq has indeed added to the influence of of Iran, you know, throughout the Middle East.
At the same time, you know, there are very strict limits, very, very hard limits on the real ability of Iran to control any of those countries, whether it's Lebanon, Syria, Yemen.
So, you know, it's it's the situation is such that the Iranians do have influence of a sort.
In each case, it's different depending on the precise military situation.
But in no case do the Iranians have in any way, shape or form any control over the politics of the country.
I shouldn't be so sarcastic about it, because all their gains are at America's hands.
But it's true, as you say, that, you know, to get back to the reality of it, with or without American intervention, it's just not true that there's an Iranian empire that they're really seeking.
Well, I don't know.
So what's what's your worst interpretation of their goals in Lebanon then?
Well, I think the worst interpretation is also the best interpretation, which is that they they are going to continue to support Hezbollah, which which has a huge political, military influence in the country due to the fact that it is the most effective political and military force within Lebanon.
You know, it represents something like, I don't know, 30, 35 percent of the population.
And it is, you know, tightly organized and and, you know, uses its organization very effectively.
And it's in a country which is divided among different religious and political factions.
And so it's, you know, Hezbollah is going to continue to have a huge influence over the country.
But Hezbollah is going to exercise that in the interest of Hezbollah and Lebanon, not in the interest of Iran.
So, I mean, that's that's the that's the key point about about Lebanon.
And you look at Yemen, you look at Syria, the same kind of analysis, obviously, with different specifics is going to apply.
Yeah.
You know what's interesting?
I want to hear your take on this.
Israel has been bombing the hell out of Hezbollah and Iran in Syria for like eight years and they haven't done anything about it.
As far as I know.
You mean Iran has not done anything about it?
Yeah.
Iran and Hezbollah, they don't do anything to Israel, but they just sit there and take it.
Israel just airstrikes them over and over again on their, you know, hits their supposedly transversive weapons, as the Israelis always characterize it.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
You know, whether whether they're really hitting weapons that are in transit or not, maybe maybe they do once in a while.
I wouldn't count on that being the case most of the time.
It's such a strange dynamic, though, the way I mean, the Iranians, for all of their tough talk, they don't really say much about that, do they?
No, they don't.
And they can't prevent the the Israelis from taking shots at them.
And by the way, I mean.
That really goes to show the actual balance of power over there, where Iran is in Syria helping fend off Israel and the CIA and Turkey and whoever's al-Qaeda terrorists there.
And while they're there, they're within range of the Israelis who just, you know, hit them all the time.
And they really aren't in a position to hit back because then it might escalate.
And then they know they would lose so fast that they have nothing to gain from even defending themselves in that situation.
That's pretty stark, it seems, you know, if my interpretation is close to right.
I think your interpretation is right.
And I think what that tells us essentially is that the real sort of hegemonic regional country here is Israel, not Iran.
Israel has always been the military hegemon in the Middle East, the country that is both capable of hitting any other country in the region and which has frequently done so.
I mean, it's not the Iranians that have done that.
It's the Israelis.
If not always, at least since 67.
Right, right.
That's what I meant.
Yeah.
And so I think, you know, that is the fundamental problem with the sort of analysis or the lack of analysis that one gets from the mainstream media about the Middle East.
Now tell me about their missiles.
Because this is a big part of the objection.
This is what Trump, if Trump had a single substantive thing to say about why he didn't like the Iran deal, it was that it didn't address missiles.
I think he may have uttered that once as a reason.
And so, of course, it didn't.
It was a nuclear deal.
But anyway, maybe it really should have included missiles because Iranian missiles are a big, gigantic threat, Gareth.
Yeah, right.
I mean, you know, there are two aspects of this.
One, of course, is the real reason that this is an issue, and that is that the Israelis want to suppress as much as possible the Iranian missiles for the reason that I talked about earlier, because it is a deterrent to the freedom of action that Israel otherwise would have.
And so that's what it really is about.
But what the Israelis and the Americans are trying to claim—and Netanyahu has been talking about this for at least a decade now.
I would say I'd forgotten exactly when he first started talking about it, but more than a decade.
Netanyahu has been claiming that the Iranians have been trying to get an ICBM that could hit the United States for many years.
And by the way, the U.S. Air Force has kind of picked this up over the years and has been warning all along that the Iranians are trying to get an ICBM.
They've had their Sputnik moment, right?
They got to space before.
And so that means that at some point they could turn those rockets into nuclear delivery vehicles.
Exactly.
The whole argument has thus far been that, well, the Iranians have this space program, and that means that all they need to do is jigger it a little bit and they can get an ICBM.
Hey, listen, let me just say, the Ayatollah, he's a really sneaky guy.
And regardless of how bad the Americans and Israelis lie about Iran all the time, that could still be true.
Why not?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's...
No, I'm saying that to you for real.
Nobody elected him.
He's some weird theocrat dictator sort of pseudo dude, and I don't trust him.
And so what's the specifics?
Tell me about these rockets and what's the difference?
The specifics are, and here, you know, I rely on, I would say, the number one expert in the United States on Iranian ballistic missiles generally, and also an expert on, you know, what it takes to have an ICBM and how that's related to a space program.
And that is Mike Elliman of CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who wrote the most authoritative study on the Iranian missile program some years ago.
I've forgotten whether it was 2000...
And you link to it here in the article at antiwar.com and at Truthdig.
I link to a recent article that he's written about this, in which he points out that there's a fundamental difference here between a program for launching satellites into space and a program to develop an ICBM.
The engine that is necessary for a satellite launching program, to launch a satellite, is for a specific trajectory that is fundamentally different from the trajectory that's taken by an ICBM.
And so you have to have a completely different kind of engine, as well as other design changes in the missile in order to do that.
And so the fact that the Iranians have had a program to launch satellites does not in any way, shape, or form indicate that it's working on an ICBM.
That would require a totally different program.
And he's been very clear on this.
And I have to say that, again, the news media has utterly refused to pay attention to the single most important academic or expert figure who has written about this.
With one exception, I've seen one reference to Elliman, or not to Elliman specifically, but to the point that he's made in all of the coverage.
I've seen one reference to the fact that, well...
Me too.
And I don't remember what it was anymore.
But I've heard of him, or I don't know his name, but I've heard of that argument one time before this discussion.
I saw it.
I don't remember either.
But generally speaking, it's totally ignored.
And that has, of course, created this little mini sort of brouhaha about the possibility that the North Koreans will launch an ICBM, will test an ICBM again, because the space satellite launch facility was ginning up.
And therefore, there was a whole spate of stories that the entire news media indulged in that talked about that.
Well, it's just like with the nuclear program that, well, there's a kernel of truth to the story.
There's a nuclear program.
But those things are complicated.
The treaties and all the details surrounding them are all very complicated.
So if you just go with the surface headline, Iran and their nuclear program is a threat.
Iran and their rocket program is a threat.
There is a rocket program.
There is a nuclear program.
And so you have to go seek out and find Gareth Porter's articles at Truthdig somehow, in order to know better, essentially.
Because the rest of the media, you know, they won't go beyond the surface.
And the surface is always the narrative, not really the reality of trying to convey the facts to people.
It's always the narrative about why Iran is the enemy that something must be done about.
So just one more sort of historical note, which is more than just historical, and that is that the whole notion of Iran as a threat to have an ICBM program, in fact, it goes back to the 1990s, when Donald Rumsfeld was running this special study sponsored by Congress.
And of course, behind them, the anti-missile defense industry, which which ginned up this special study that proved, supposedly, that North Korea and Iran were threats to have ICBMs. And they were going to do so within 15 years.
And that was the rationale for starting the whole big time funding of the anti-missile defense program by the ICBM defense program by the George W. Bush administration in the hundreds of billions of dollars, or at least tens of billions of dollars.
And so that has been, you know, the threat of an ICBM program by Iran has been the heartbeat of this, the largest Pentagon development weapons development program in its history.
Yeah.
You know, the irony of all of this, of course, is that a President Gareth Porter or President Ron Paul of whoever, they could have, or Dennis Kucinich, or whoever you like, who has a conscience and is smart about this stuff, and who would have been willing to defy the interests that you describe here involved.
They could have just made peace.
Donald Trump, this week, he could make peace, complete, he could have a finished deal with Kim Jong-un, with the Ayatollah Khomeini, with Bashar al-Assad, with Maduro down there in Venezuela.
He could just call off the empire easy, call off all the threats against these rogue states and just say, whatever differences we have, we're not going to fight about them, so let's just talk a lot and have embassies and things, and just cool things off.
And then that's it.
It's such a small world that we're out of possible rogue states.
Who are you going to gin up a threat from next?
Sudan or something?
There's just nobody else to pick on.
If we just solve the last few of these, which we could do by just knocking it off, because they don't actually represent a real threat to us at all.
I mean, if you look at the era of Bush Sr. or at the era of Clinton or Bush Jr. or Obama, they could have called all this off at any time.
Well, you know, we've talked about this before, Scott, I know, and definitely the point is worth making again.
And keep the bubble top up, don't get me wrong.
I'm not driving through Dallas in a convertible or anything, but it could be done.
But I would just add that not only that, he doesn't have to look like a wimp doing it.
He could play the hard guy.
We're going to the table with them and we're going to put pressure on them to come to agreement with us to blah, blah, blah, but reach a reasonable agreement and it would be easy to do.
And with Donald Trump, too, he could lay on the soldier worship stuff so thick as he brings them home.
And I mean, that's his shtick anyway, right?
He's going to sit there and tell you the American fighting man is the bravest human who ever existed.
He's going to say that no matter what.
So he could say that while he's bringing him home.
And it would just ring so perfect that he's doing all this because he loves them and he's going to protect them and et cetera, et cetera.
He does talk like that before he contradicts himself, which actually I should ask you about this because I just thought of it.
Well, the last time we talked about Syria, you says that now when he says we're leaving, we're leaving.
Mark Perry wrote that, too.
But then they're saying, no, they're keeping troops in the north and the south east of Syria, meaning embedded with the Kurds and embedded down there at Al-Tanf base near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders in order to check that highway that runs through there.
The land bridge from Iran to Hezbollah and Beirut and all this.
So say something.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I think that what this shows me is that I have been too persuaded that that Trump had some independence of mind.
You know, I think that it turns out that he's too easily turned in a different direction by anybody who's clever enough to play into his weakness.
And that's what's happened clearly over the last several months.
You know, he's got somebody there now who's who's a fast talker and who understands how to manipulate him as his national security advisor.
And it seems pretty clear that he's been manipulated into doing service to the interests of people who are, you know, the hard guys and and who are who have a different vision from the one that he had when he was calling for an end to the U.S. military presence in Iraq, excuse me, in Syria.
Yeah.
Well, and so, I mean, is there anything really to fight with Iran?
Are they going to attack Iranian trucks coming through Iraq and into Syria?
And that's supposedly the plan.
But is that a thing?
And what are the Iranians even sending trucks through there to Hezbollah?
Well, I'm sure there are trucks that are, you know, going from Iran through Syria.
Yeah, I'm sure that happens.
There's no doubt that's that's a land bridge.
And so, you know, there are things that one can hit.
They still got to drive through jihadi stand there in Western Iraq, though.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
That's true.
It's true.
Again, Al Qaeda and America on the same side again.
How much there is, you know, that that's that's a question that I'm not I don't have the intelligence apparatus to answer.
Yeah.
Well, bad times there.
And that could really be a trip wire there, too.
Right.
It's just I mean, they're so frustrated.
Think about how frustrated the hawks themselves are that they have ensconced Iranian power in Baghdad.
And I know, like you said, they don't rule the place, but still, they're 10,000 times more powerful there than they ever were, you know, influential there than they ever were.
And and then the same thing in Syria, where the whole thing about supporting the jihadis blew up in their face and just ended up with, you know, worst Al Qaeda terrorism on one side and and more Iranian and Hezbollah influence in Syria on the other.
So right now they're sort of throwing a fit, right?
They they want to fight about something.
They can't kick the Iranians or the Shiites, their friends out of Baghdad.
So what can they do?
Well, look, you know, my my my understanding of the way this system works is that that they don't waste that much time sort of crying over spilled milk.
They don't waste time over their feelings.
They're always creating the next excuse or the next.
Right.
Right.
Well, I mean, that's what I'm getting at.
Yeah, exactly.
Like so here here's the situation they put themselves in.
But now what can they do about it?
I mean, there's not enough of an Iranian presence for them to really pick a fight with Iran in Syria.
And so far, even under the Trump government for, you know, two, two and a half years now, whatever, he hasn't, you know, made it seem like that's what he wants to do.
Right.
He hasn't done anything like that yet.
The issue the issue there clearly is not that they're going to pick a fight with Iran.
There's no doubt about that.
I think that it is simply a matter of justifying the continued military presence, which has multiple uses from their point of view, serves as the basis for future accretions of military force within the country and can be used for for various can be justified on the basis of various kinds of regional contingencies.
Right.
I mean, you know, that's that's the way these things operate.
Right.
Well, that's why you're Gareth Porter and I ask you these questions and sometimes just say things to you.
The right may finally get its war on Iran.
It's by Gareth Porter at Truthdig.com and .org too, I think, and at Antiwar.com as well.
Thanks again, Gareth.
Thank you, brother.
Good to talk to you again.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
