All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got the great Reese Ehrlich, foreign correspondent, author of Inside Syria, and most recently, The Iran Agenda Today.
And here he is with a very important article we're running at antiwar.com today, US Beats War Drums in Middle East.
You know, global pandemic notwithstanding, USA hates Iran, and we're going to find a way to fight them one way or the other, huh, Reese?
Yep.
So, catch us up on the latest doings in Iraq, and who's pointing fingers at who for what here?
Well, in the midst of all this concern about the global pandemic, the US really has been heating things up in Iraq specifically, although in the region in general.
And there's been these tit for tat strikes where it's hard to sort out in the daily news because the US comes under attack because some missiles are fired at a base or near the US embassy in Baghdad.
And then the US retaliates with a missile strike against US-backed, I mean, Iranian-backed militias, and you hear this kind of back and forth.
And if you don't pay close attention to it, or if you're not familiar with it, it may be hard to follow.
What's going on is the result of the US pulling out of the nuclear accord and trying to overthrow the government in Iran.
That's basically what it comes down to.
Pompeo and others in the White House have made it clear that there's nothing that the Iranians can do other than give up power, pack up their bags and go home, or give up and allow some kind of pro-US regime to take power in Tehran.
And of course, that's not going to happen.
That hasn't happened since 1979, and despite all the very real problems in Iran, it's not happening now.
So that's the background to what's been going on.
And I can get into the specifics of more of what's going on in there right now if you'd like.
Yeah.
Well, hold that thought for just a sec.
On the overall policy here, when you say overthrow the government of Iran, are we talking about a real 1953-type job where we're going to try to use the MEK to murder the Ayatollah or do some kind of thing and really overthrow the thing in a very literal sense, or they're just trying to weaken the government through sanctions and drum up public opposition and hope to see some kind of riot or somewhere in between, or what?
Well, I think there's different factions in the US intelligence agencies and the White House and the State Department who have different visions of how it might happen.
What they agreed upon, which by the way is a sign that things aren't going very well if they can't even agree what it is they want to do, in 1953, the CIA and everybody else in Washington agreed they wanted to replace the elected democratic government with the Shah and his dictatorship.
There was no question about that.
Now there's different plans in Washington.
But basically, what they agreed on today is weaken the government through massive and unremitting sanctions, encourage and, if possible, instigate popular demonstrations against the government, continue to fund groups like the MEK, which is the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a right-wing, ultra-right-wing group now based in Albania, of all places, that's been funded largely by the United States, and claims to have a massive popular base in Iran, which is not true, and somehow bring them to power.
There's also Monarchist, the son of the former Shah, is also making himself available to become the new Shah in Tehran, another, shall we say, highly unlikely scenario.
The other thing that the U.S. is doing is it uses Iran's minority groups, the Kurds, the Baluchis, which are folks living in the western, sorry, the far eastern part of Iran near the Pakistan border, the Iranian Arabs who live in Khuzestan, which is in the far west of Iran near the Iraqi border.
These are all ethnic minorities with very real and legitimate grievances against the central government, and the U.S. tries to use those sentiments to foster terrorist attacks.
And there's been numerous examples over the past years of U.S. backing terrorist groups in those areas in an effort to either split off those ethnic groups from the central government, or at least to cause great difficulties for Tehran.
And now this group, the MEK, the Mujahideen Ikhlaq, on a scale of, say, the Charles Manson family on one end and the Heaven's Gate cult on the other, where would you put them on that scale?
That's what I like.
I like your neutral questions there, Scott.
Well put.
Somewhere below the Manson family.
I mean, these folks, to give you some background, they were a group in the 1970s who tried to combine Islam and Marxism, and kind of a radical trend within the religious-based opposition to the Shah at that time.
And they had killed a couple of American diplomats as part of their armed activity.
When the Shah was overthrown, they supported the government initially.
They came to oppose the religious leaders, the Ayatollahs, and they started engaging in terrorist attacks inside Iran.
Ultimately, when the Iraqis attacked Iran in 1981, no, 1980, beginning the Iran-Iraq War, the Mujahideen went to Iraq and fought with Saddam Hussein against Iran.
So that would be a little bit like a group in the United States going to fight with the Nazis during World War II, and then coming back after the war and saying, oh, we should come to power.
What kind of credibility would they have?
That's pretty much how the Iranian public looks at the MEK, as traitors, as people who stabbed them in the back when they were at war with a neighboring country.
So the MEK, meanwhile, after the U.S. invaded Iraq, they cozied up to the United States and said, basically, look, we've got this network.
We can help the U.S. pursue its goals in Iran.
And they long ago gave up any pretense of nationalism or Marxism or anything like that.
They just became a straight up front right wing cult.
And today they're backed by people like Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton.
And what exactly is right wing about them?
Well, they want to impose a secular dictatorship under their rule, under the cult rule of their leadership.
Well, but I mean, like Bo and T, they weren't really right wingers.
They're just nuts.
Right.
What's the difference here?
Well, I think the key thing is to look at who it is that's supporting them around the world, and particularly in the U.S.
The kind of veneer of liberal support has melted away.
And their strongest supporters, indeed, their only supporters, are people like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani.
Yeah.
And what about Howard Dean and Ed Rendell?
Yeah.
They've faded away.
They were played up in the years past, but you don't hear much about them supporting the M.E.K. these days.
It's true.
The M.E.K. tried to build an alliance of different both liberals and conservatives in the U.S., but it's pretty much melted away to the right wing.
I'm still blocked by Howard Dean for criticizing his felonious material support to a terrorist group.
I make no excuses and criticize Bolton and Dean and Giuliani equally for their actions around this.
There was no excuse for it.
And there was enough known about M.E.K. at the time when they were giving their support, and there's enough known about them today.
There's no justification for supporting a group like that.
And now, in the Obama years—well, first of all, I want to mention real quick here, my wife, Larissa Alexandrovna Horton, she wrote back in the Bush years about Cheney and Rumsfeld using these guys to collect intelligence inside Iran.
There were other journalists who said that they were doing bombings and so forth at that time.
And certainly in the Obama years, there was a point—I'm almost certain it would have been in 2012—at the height of Netanyahu's threats, where there was a very officially leaked story in NBC News about how the Israelis were using the M.E.K. to murder the Iranian nuclear scientists.
Yeah.
I wrote about that myself and interviewed the families of the scientists.
So do they work more for the U.S. or for the Israelis now?
Well, I think there is a coalition, like a number of groups around the world.
They have support from both.
I think the Israelis have made more use of them, particularly Netanyahu, but the Israeli governments in general.
Not only in murdering the nuclear scientists in Iran, as you mentioned, but in planting terrorist bombing attacks, in possibly blowing up a Revolutionary Guard parade in Khuzestan in the Arab area.
And the Israelis leak their intelligence about what was going on with the nuclear program in Iran to the M.E.K., who then claims credit that they had all these sources inside the country when, in fact, it was based on Israeli intelligence.
Such as their exposure of Natanz in 2005, which— Yeah, exactly.
That one was the most well-known, but there's been others.
And then when we call them a cult, too, I mean, this is really Bo and T, Heaven's Gate, forced virginity, and you have to raise your hand to speak, and they kidnap your children away to blackmail you, and just to the nth degree, not-so-cult-like behavior here, too, right?
Yeah, those are the nicer things they do.
And their patriarch has been dead for 20 years, but they still pretend that he's just hidden somewhere or something, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's really bizarre.
The woman who runs it is a real cult, Rojabi, is just a real cult leader.
They literally do not allow people to leave, and if they do, they threaten their family members.
So that is really a cult.
And that's known in Iran, all the content, what the MEK stands for.
I'll give you an example of another recent likely MEK attack, was in November, you may have read about these protests that broke out spontaneously in Iran when the government raised the gas prices.
They tripled the cost of gasoline overnight, and there were huge protests in Iran, and legitimately so.
Even though gasoline remains incredibly cheap by world standards, it was a big burden on the Iranians at the time.
And people sat in on streets, and they blocked highways spontaneously.
But after a couple days, all of a sudden, people were being murdered with weapons that are not legally available in Iran.
Attacks were attacked, government buildings were attacked, in a very concerted, organized way.
And it doesn't have the hallmarks of a spontaneous movement like we've seen in Lebanon or other parts of the world.
And the suspicion in Iran is that it was after the initial popular participation and anger came the MEK in particular, or possibly others, who had plans in advance to attack banks, to attack government buildings, and to engage in violent terrorist activity against the government in an effort to promote their own cause.
And I think there's some credibility when you look at the details of what happened in November.
And again, the protests were legitimate, people were angry at the government decision, but it was taken over after a certain point by these violent elements.
Well, and also it just sounds like completely stupid cult-like behavior, too, where these guys convince themselves that this will weaken the Iranian government, when of course it doesn't.
They just say, look, the CIA's MEK sock puppets are the ones behind all this chaos, which only leads to the rally around the flag effect, as they call it.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
It helps bolster the hardliners in the mainstream of the Iranian politics.
It helps make the case that it's outside powers who are manipulating the demonstrations.
I interviewed a woman who stopped participating precisely when things got violent.
She had been sitting down in the street in her neighborhood with hundreds of other people, and that all ended when the violence started.
And same thing in Iraq.
At the very same time, there were massive protests against the Iranian and U.S.-backed government there, and with a particular eye toward resentment against Iran, if only because they're closer, right?
Yeah, there was a great deal of anger.
That's actually in my current column that we're discussing.
The Iranians, you know, we've talked a lot about the U.S. and the legitimate anger that people have against the U.S., but there's also very legitimate anger against Iran.
Iran sent its troops into Iraq in 2014, around the same time the U.S. did, for the same reason, to stop the advance of ISIS.
And in fact, the Iranian troops and their militia allies were the first ones to confront the ISIS, even before the U.S. came in with its bombing raids.
And people of Iraq remember that.
But that was 2014.
This is six years later.
Why are the Iranian troops still there?
Oh, we're there to fight ISIS.
Well, we've heard that argument before.
And in reality, Iran wants to have significant influence in Iraq.
They have a veto power over who the prime minister and top leadership of the country is.
They cut deals with various, particularly Shia groups, but also Kurdish and others.
And there's a great deal of resentment of that.
So in these popular demonstrations, two different Iranian consulates were burned, for example, burned to the ground.
There was a great deal of anger.
And that lasted right up to the point when what happened, Trump assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guard leader, which was hailed as a great victory here.
It turned things around immediately in Iraq.
And the people who have been protesting Iran are suddenly protesting the U.S. and demonstrating in front of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
And the results were exactly that.
Politically, I mean, militarily, it seemed like a victory because, oh, we killed this terrible terrorist leader, guy who killed American troops and blah, blah, blah.
Politically, it was a complete disaster and predictable that it would be a disaster.
Well, now the parliament has voted to kick us out.
Have they voted to kick the Iranians out?
They voted to expel all foreign forces.
That would be the U.S., Britain, all the NATO troops, the Iranians, everybody.
And do they mean it about the Iranians as much as they mean it about us?
Well, you're now looking at how many mullahs can sit on the head of a pen.
Yeah.
Well, look, I mean, for people who missed it, Iraq War II was fought on behalf of the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawah Party, both of whom had major support, if not primary allegiance to Iran and their power.
They'd lived in Iran for 30 years since Carter hired Saddam to invade them back in 1980.
Yeah.
So the answer to your question is some do, some don't.
That is, there's a pop, as one source explained to me, there are people who are opposed to Iranian presence, who tend to favor the U.S.
There's people who support, oppose Iran, U.S. presence, who tend to support Iran.
And then there's a significant majority of people who want them both out.
But the government, the politicians, the military leaders tend to line up on one side or another.
And that's what, every time there's an anti-war, anti-U.S. demonstration, the Iranians take credit for it.
And vice versa, when there's an anti-Iran demonstration, then the pro-U.S. folks take credit for that.
And the analogy is pretty simple, right?
If there was some crazy battle going on in Canada and America was supporting the indigenous Canadian forces against the occupation and all those kinds of things, they'd appreciate our help.
And they would also be very happy to see us leave as soon as possible and retain their independence from our government, right?
Absolutely.
Particularly if we were trying to seize the oil fields on our way out.
Yeah.
That's Scott Horton.org.
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All right.
So now, can you talk to me about the new proposed prime minister?
Yeah.
Yeah.
A guy named al-Zarfi.
He lived in the United States for many years and during Saddam's rule.
He came back in 2003 during the U.S. invasion, and Paul Bremer, the U.S. guy in charge of Iraq at that time, installed him as the governor of Najaf.
So he was considered a trustee, a trustworthy U.S. ally.
He stayed active in politics, he's in, I believe, in the Al-Dawah party, if I remember.
And he was appointed by the president as the new prime minister.
But it doesn't take effect until parliament approves that in mid-April.
And the sources I talked to said that the Iranians, who generally don't like him and did not want to see him nominated, are now doing some backroom wheeling and dealing to see if they can get some compromises that would allow him to, that they could throw their support behind him.
That's happened before, because the Iranians really do have a, they can't necessarily determine who gets appointed, but they do have a veto power.
And if they and their allies oppose him, then there's going to be more struggle and possibly a new nominee.
But the key thing to keep in mind is that it really, ultimately, it doesn't really matter what happens, because the forces involved are not going away.
And whoever the prime minister is, is still going to have to face the 5,000 U.S. troops that are there and the hundreds of Iranian troops and trainers and the ongoing battle, regardless of who's prime minister.
Right.
Well, now, and so here's a problem, too, Bright, is that all of the prime ministers up until the very last guy, Ahmadi, were all from Dawa, and Ahmadi was from the Supreme Islamic Council, and they have all just been absolute catastrophes, right, from Jafari through Maliki and all of these guys.
You know, I asked Patrick Coburn recently, I said, you know, these guys are, we talk a lot about, you know, the real strict Sunni Islamists of the Islamic State and that kind of thing, but these Ayatollah types that now rule Iraqi Shiastan and including the capital city here, they're pretty hardcore, you know, religious extremists, too, right?
And Patrick just kind of laughed and said, you know what, they're all way too busy stealing to boss anybody around in any real authoritarian way.
It's the most corrupt government in the world outside of Washington, D.C., and that's all they do.
They just steal.
It's purely a kleptocracy.
That's what everybody's in the street protesting about, is they're not even trying to govern, right?
They're just getting theirs and running.
Yeah, I think that's the, you've hit the nail on the head, which is that everybody is in it for themselves.
There's members of parliament who live abroad and never show up in the parliament, but they still collect their salaries and the perks that go with it.
And you run for office or you get appointed to as a military officer, not to carry out your duty, but to make some money.
And the higher up you are, the more there's the intersection of government contracts and the private sector, military contracts and et cetera.
And you get your 10 percent or whatever percentage of the deal is.
You have your ghost workers.
You have all the corrupt means that governments have, government officials have, and you sock it away in a bank outside the country somewhere for your future well-being.
Or use it to fund a militia that's favorable to your group.
So one of the things that's so laughable about how the U.S. portrays what's going on is they always talk about these Iranian-backed militias.
They've never mentioned that all of these Iranian-backed militias happen to be part of the irregular Iraqi army.
And when they hit these bases, they're hitting Iraqi military bases, not just where the militias are, although they might be the majority of people there.
They inevitably kill Iraqi regular army soldiers and civilians nearby.
And of course, the U.S. does exactly the same thing.
I personally witnessed how the U.S. trains the Kurdish Peshmerga, which technically is part of the Iraqi army.
They wear Iraqi army uniforms.
But in reality, they have a completely separate training, command structure, political leadership.
It's run, one faction of the Peshmerga is run by the Talabani family, another one is run by the Barzani family.
And they have very little to do with anything that goes on in Baghdad.
So the armed forces in Iraq are beholden to one outside power or another, or in some cases to some warlord or politician in the country.
It has nothing to do, and that's the source of a lot of the corruption.
Yeah.
Now, so again, just to make sure for people who are sort of new at this, that the irony is not lost.
These are the same factions, these Shiite militias and Shiite parties that we're talking about that are backed by Iran to various degrees.
These are the same people that we fought Iraq War II and Iraq War III on behalf of against their Sunni enemies.
And now I'm reminded of an article by William S. Lind, the military strategist, that he wrote in the American Conservative back in 2007, when Dick Cheney was pushing so hard for strikes on IRGC bases in Iran.
The article was called How to Lose an Army, and it was about how, yeah, every general who ever lost an army thought he wasn't about to, and then did anyway.
And if you want to lose one, here's what you do.
Dig into Iraq real deep and then attack Iran, and you're going to find out that the people that you fought this whole war for are going to turn around and stab your guys in the back.
The obvious analogy for people familiar with the Star Wars prequels, there is Order 66, where all the clones stab the Jedi in the back.
But that's who our troops are embedded with, essentially, is this Shiite Iraqi army.
And it's reported that just last week that Pompeo and his subordinate Grinnell were pushing Donald Trump to attack Iran at a time where we only have 6,000 guys in Iraq who are more or less embedded with these Shiite forces, still fighting against their common enemy, ISIS, the radical Sunni groups.
And these guys are risking turning our guys into the enemies, the real enemies, in effect, on the ground, in practice, of the super-majority population and their army that we put in power and 6,000 men is not enough to provide for their own force protection if they're really up against the Iraqi army and militias, which they very well could be if we started bombing Iran.
Is that what you think about this, too?
By the way, I think, based on your earlier analogy, who is Darth Vader?
It could be Mike Pompeo.
These days, it could have been Bush back in the old days.
Yeah.
But think about it just for a moment.
The U.S. Embassy is located in the Green Zone, which is a secure zone with a lot of guards on the outside.
It's very difficult to get in or out, and it protects the U.S. Embassy and a number of other embassies, Iraqi military headquarters, and so on.
But it's on a piece of land in the middle of Baghdad.
So, once a week or once every other week, somebody fires rockets into the Green Zone very near the U.S. Embassy, and all you have to do is have one direct hit and a bunch of Americans killed in the embassy, and you've got another conflagration on its way because Trump seems to think it's okay for anybody else to die or get wounded, but if American soldiers are killed, he has to retaliate.
But it's a setup because they not only have the Green Zone there, but you have U.S. bases north of Baghdad and in Erbil, which is in the Kurdish region, which are sitting ducks for anybody with missiles or rockets to fire.
So, the Trump administration could end this tomorrow if they wanted to by simply stopping the antagonism and the attacks on Iran, and it would, at least for the moment, provide some kind of security for the U.S. troops that are there.
I mean, they have no business being there in the first place.
The best security for them is to pull them out, as they were at one time.
But even in the short run, he could stop the attacks by stopping all the hostility towards Iran.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so let me be Pollyanna for a second here.
I'm the president, you're my Secretary of State, and I say, you know what?
We're just going to kill them with kindness.
We're going to lift all sanctions.
We're going to go back to our side of the Iran deal.
And not only that, we're going to send as much medical aid as they can possibly refuse.
We're going to do everything we can to bury hard feelings.
Hell, if Ronald Reagan can sell these guys missiles within a year or so of the revolution, we can get along with them now.
But maybe I'm crazy and that won't work.
What do you think?
No, I think it would work.
I think it would surprise the hell out of everybody when you did that, Darth.
But it would be a good step forward.
I'm pretty good for a Sith Lord.
Yes.
Now, what would happen?
The argument on the other side is, oh, well, then you create a vacuum and all these other evil people will step in and it will give a green light to Iran to continue its evil activities in Iraq and Lebanon and Syria.
And oh, woe is us.
The reality is, if the U.S. were to change its policies, it would expose the emptiness of what Iran is doing in the rest of the region, because there would be no more excuses about why would Iran need this resistance front of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, possibly Yemen, that it currently says is needed to fight U.S. imperialism.
And what would be the justification for Iran keeping its troops in Iraq if the U.S. had changed its policies?
It would expose all the contradictions that are covered over by the U.S. aggressive activities in the region.
And frankly, it would not open the door for other foreign powers.
It would actually open the door to the people of those countries to want to get rid of all the foreign troops, as we've seen attempts to do in Iraq.
Yeah.
And stop making the IRGC heroes and instead make them the burden on the Iranian people that they truly are in any other circumstances.
Indeed.
I'm so sorry that we got to go because I could continue talking to you all day.
I know you know it too.
I just love learning from you and I love reading your books and I appreciate your time on the show so much, Rhys.
I appreciate you having me on and hopefully people can read my foreign correspondent column, which runs every two weeks on your antiwar.com.
Absolutely.
Including the latest U.S. beats war drums in the Middle East.
Thank you again, Rhys.
Thank you.
