03/15/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, March 15th, 2015.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
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Our guest again this morning is our good friend and my favorite reporter, Gareth Porter.
He's the author of the book, Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
He writes primarily for Middle East Eye.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm fine, thanks, Scott.
I'm good, how are you doing?
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So, what do you think?
I mean, overall, it's good news, right?
The nuclear deal is going to be done now.
The political stakes are so high in D.C. that the Democrats must succeed, or else they'll be the world's worst laughingstock.
Am I right?
Well, you may be right about the world's laughingstock, but I'm not ready to call that game yet.
I think it's not at all clear that that's going to happen.
I mean, I hope that it will, but again, you know, there's some still issues that are still very much in doubt, very much unresolved, and, you know, I just don't have the sense of confidence that the Obama administration is ready to make the necessary changes.
So, you know, we just have to wait and see.
I mean, I just can't call that one.
I've gone back and forth as to whether the chances are better or worse than 50 percent, and at the moment, I mean, it's kind of, you know, it's wavering around that 50 percent level.
Well, it seems like one of the big obstacles was going to be possibly even a veto-proof majority in the Congress supporting new sanctions against Iran or, you know, obstructing Obama's ability to lift them and this kind of thing.
But then it seems like a lot of analysis has it that Netanyahu's big stunt with the speech and then on top of that, the Tom Cotton letter has really backfired and has turned, you know, Israel issues, which are always bipartisan, into a partisan issue.
And now, so you either side with the Republicans in Israel or you side with the president.
And so for the Democratic congressmen, they side with their president mostly, and the votes are getting peeled away from the war party.
And that seems like, you know, a little bit of good news for us there, right?
Huh?
Come on, say something positive.
You're absolutely right that the Netanyahu maneuver to spite the Obama administration and to present his case to the joint session of Congress without any approval or consultation with the White House has backfired.
It's no doubt that he has lost some votes or at the very least weakened his hold on some of the Democratic votes that he's going to need in order to accomplish what he wants and has wanted to do for a long time, which is to essentially blow up the nuclear negotiations completely by having Congress pass legislation that will make it impossible to carry out any agreement.
And I think that is indeed the test of whether an agreement, if it should be completed, will in fact be viable.
I mean, I think it's increasingly likely that if they do make the concessions that are necessary to get that agreement, that they will be able to succeed in making it happen.
And, you know, we can thank Netanyahu, at least in part, for that hopeful prospect, because he was so impudent, so overconfident, so full of himself, that he believed that he could somehow, you know, carry this off without harming the prospects for what he's trying to accomplish.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, something that's come up in our conversations before is Obama himself and also, you know, his partisans have gotten in the habit of saying that, hey, the only other alternative is war and all this kind of thing.
But I wonder whether you think that's true, because if the deal falls apart and we go back to the status quo, the status quo is a bunch of nothing.
It's a civilian nuclear program.
Of course, I totally reject the idea that war is the only alternative to an agreement.
But if the negotiations break down, then we are obviously obliged to go to war with Iran.
That's ridiculous.
But what I do believe, and as I've said before on your show, is that the consequences of refusing or failing to come to an agreement with Iran in these negotiations will be certainly some clear-cut rejection by the Iranians of their present restrictions on the enrichment of uranium.
They've adopted, they've accepted a number of restrictions which they will rescind if these negotiations break down.
I think we can absolutely count on that.
And that will be the very least of the consequences, you know, should the Congress go ahead and then respond as we can count on them responding by passing some new sanctions legislation.
I think the Iranians will respond in some way to remind the United States that, in fact, it can do things that will make it more difficult for the United States to continue that sort of posture.
You know, I would recall the period of roughly 2012 when tensions were much higher and when the price of oil was spiking, in part because Iran, in large part because Iran was carrying out some actions which reminded the entire world that they have the capability, they have the capability to block for some weeks, if not months, the transportation of oil through the strait that they control.
They essentially have the ability to do that at will.
And, of course, it can be reversed by military force, by U.S. forces, but it will take some time, and in the meantime, you know, it will affect the price of oil and the world economy.
Now, you know, it's not going to have the same effect as it would have a couple of years ago, two or three years ago, but nevertheless, you know, what I'm suggesting is that, you know, we should expect that there would be rising tensions and that the Iranians would have ways of certainly adding to those tensions and doing things that would have a cost.
Right.
Yeah, because well enough alone isn't good enough for the Americans, so it wouldn't be the status quo.
It would be a whole new level of crisis.
Ah, I told you, you just can't deal with them.
Yeah, the status quo is going to be eroded.
It's going to change if the talks break down.
There's absolutely no question about that.
But then again, I mean, when you talk about they would, you know, in your specific example there, or one of your examples, they could lift the restrictions on their uranium production.
You're still, I know, you're still only, but I want to be clear for the audience, that you're still only talking about 3.6 percent electricity grade, industrial grade uranium enrichment, and maybe some 19.75 percent for the medical isotope reactors.
I know you didn't mean to imply they were going to go ahead and go to weapons grade then if the talks fail, but I just wanted to be clear about that.
I mean, I think that they would certainly begin to increase the level of enrichment at 5 percent, the amount of enrichment at 3.5 percent.
They would certainly do some, they would certainly threaten to resume 20 percent enrichment.
Whether they would do so immediately is another question.
I think that's a less urgent measure, and I think that they would probably put that off, but that would be something they would be talking about.
And it doesn't have to be a real danger, 19.5 percent enriched uranium.
It only just has to sound like, oh, goodness, a higher number than a lower number for TV purposes, for propaganda purposes.
Just to remind your listeners that during the Shah's regime, the United States turned over uranium that was enriched to weapons grade, essentially, to Iran for their Tehran research reactor.
Without blinking an eye, no one even thought twice about it at that point.
Yeah.
Well, back then their government was our government's private property, so they weren't too worried about it.
Well, they were very, very close, that's for sure.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so let me ask you about the United Nations.
I mean, well, the European Union, our allies, the U.N. Security Council, and for that matter, the non-aligned countries and whoever are under all these mandates to abide by all these sanctions against Iran.
If the talks fail, everyone in the world is going to know.
I mean, come on.
I don't even think it's really debatable whether the Iranians or the Americans are the intransigent ones on this.
And I just wonder whether the sanctions are really going to have much bite if the talks fail anyway, because isn't the rest of the world going to say, all right, America, we gave you a chance to boycott Iran until they do what you say, and then you blew it, and so now we're going back to business?
Well, I mean, I think that that's going to be, you know, if the talks fail, obviously that is going to be a contested question in the sense that the United States is going to be making the strongest case it can possibly make that, oh, this is because the Iranians were intransigent.
The Supreme Leader must have just pulled the plug on the negotiations, said that the Zarif and the negotiating team cannot do what is necessary to reach an agreement, and that's the way it will be presented.
That's, of course, the way they've been portraying the dynamics of the negotiations for months, and they will obviously make that case to the Indians, the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Europeans that they should continue the sanctions.
You know, I think that how that is going to play is going to depend in each case on a number of factors, domestic politics within those countries, the pull of the economic interest within each of those countries in resuming purchase of Iranian oil as well as doing other trade with Iran to the extent that you have interests that are powerful enough to kind of balance the United States.
In each case, I think that's going to make a difference.
So what I'm suggesting is that it's not easy to predict how each country is going to respond to this, but I do think that there is going to be definitely a falling off, a beginning of the erosion of the regime of sanctions against Iran.
They're not going to have everybody on board when these negotiations break down because there will be cases, there will be some countries which will say, okay, we've had enough.
All right, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with the great Gareth Porter from Middle East Eye and author of the book Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
And now I want to get back to the current politics and the Republicans' letter to the Ayatollah and all this nonsense in a minute, Gareth.
But we sort of started this conversation in the middle like a Star Wars movie or something, and it always sort of goes without saying because we've discussed this at such length.
But I think probably in the broader culture, it does not go without saying that this is just some harmless, little old civilian nuclear program that nobody needs to worry about, and it's just a question of politics.
Can they finally begin to put the Cold War with Iran to bed here by signing this kind of a deal?
So let me give you a chance to make that case a little bit.
And if you'd like, you could start with your blockbuster story that was one of the stories of the year over at Foreign Policy magazine about when the Ayatollah said no to nukes.
And maybe first of all, if the Ayatollah, the meaner old one or the newer nicer one or both, if they ever said no to nukes, why should we care about that anyway?
I mean, they're just politicians, right, and theocratic ones, and politicians say lots of things.
So tell us what they said and why you even take it seriously.
Well, you know, this is interesting because, you know, indeed Iran is in a sense a theocracy.
It's a theocracy in the sense that the Iranian political system has a supreme leader who has the authority under the constitution of the country to make political judgments that are based on Shia jurisprudence, Shia jurisprudence in the sense of the interpretation of the Koran, what the Koran means for Iran's political and governmental decision-making.
And so the supreme leader can say that Iran can or cannot do certain things, and one of the things that the supreme leader has full authority over is weapons of mass destruction.
And what the supreme leader does when that issue arises in the political life of the Islamic Republic is, it's a fatwa, what the Iranians call a fatwa, which is a judgment by a qualified scholar of Islam on an issue which relates to policy, or it can be a personal issue.
But when it is a government policy that relates to, you know, issues such as nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, this is clearly something that is within the sole authority of the supreme leader.
So Ayatollah Khomeini, during the Iran-Iraq war, did indeed issue a fatwa against all weapons of mass destruction.
And I interviewed the wartime minister who was in charge of military logistics for Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, and we met with Ayatollah Khomeini twice during that war.
And what's so interesting is that, you know, he was working very closely with the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which, you know, had an interest in, you know, they wanted to produce weapons of mass destruction.
They wanted to produce chemical weapons, and they wanted to work on nuclear weapons.
And this minister told me that he presented that proposal to Khomeini, hoping that Khomeini would say yes.
And Khomeini told him, no, this is impossible, we cannot do that, it's illegal under Islam.
And then later in the war, after the Iraqis were actually bombing cities and killing civilians, rather than just killing Iranian troops, he went back and had another talk with Khomeini, and again, this time he told Khomeini that we actually have the ability now to produce chemical weapons.
We've purchased the precursor chemicals, and we have the facility.
So can we do it?
And Khomeini again said, no, this is not possible, it's not feasible.
You have to stop this.
And indeed, we know, the record is very clear that Iran did indeed close it down and did not produce chemical weapons, never used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war.
So I make the very strong argument, I believe this very firmly, that this is very strong evidence that fatwas do in fact make a difference, that this is the reason, the only reason that Iran did not use weapons of mass destruction during the Iran-Iraq war.
So it's very strong evidence as well that the fatwa against nuclear weapons is effective, that it is the law, that it prevails regardless of the other interests in that society, which may well exist, people who would like to have nuclear weapons.
I don't doubt that there are people who believe that, at the very least, that Iran should be prepared to be able to manufacture nuclear weapons, should know how to do it.
But the fatwa does prevail, that's clear.
All right, but the CIA and the Mossad oftentimes, when quoted to debunk the war party's propaganda, agree, they say that Iran stopped working on nuclear weapons back in 2003.
So how is it consistent with the fatwa that they were still working on them up until 2003, Gareth?
Well, what I explain in my book is that the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, on which your statement is based, that is where it was concluded that Iran did in fact have a nuclear weapons program from 2001 to 2003.
I regard that as an extremely flawed intelligence assessment.
And I explain why in the book and try to reduce it to the most basic elements.
This team that had carried out this assessment for the 2007 NIE had also, not necessarily all the same people, but at least some of the same people and definitely the same institutions within the CIA and the intelligence community, had previously reached the assessment or the conclusion in 2001 and again in 2005, and in 2007 that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
And those judgments were based not on evidence, but on inference.
This is what Paul Pillar, who was the National Intelligence Officer from 2001 to 2005, told me in an interview, and it's consistent with everything else that I've found in my research.
They never had any evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
Nevertheless, they reached a firm conclusion that they did have a nuclear weapons program, and that is why one cannot trust the judgment that they reached in 2007 based on snippets of conversation, which we have no idea what those snippets actually said, and I have no doubt that they were interpreted in ways that fit the preconceived notions of that team.
And that's why I think that that is not a reliable estimate, a reliable analysis of the existing evidence in 2007.
Yeah, but wouldn't the War Party just turn that around on you and say, Aha, yeah, exactly, you can't trust the CIA with this.
Remember that time that we invaded Iraq in 1991 and then found that we had bombed their nuclear weapons program, that Israel's attack on their reactor in 1981 had driven underground, and that Saddam was working on nukes and the IAEA didn't know it and the CIA didn't know it, and that was what Dick Cheney said was the reason why we could believe anything they said positively about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, but any skepticism we could push aside because they failed us before.
We're just going to have to invade to find out for sure.
Well, that, of course, represents the political interests of those who want to go to war with Iran, and that's the logical argument for them to make.
I mean, the problem is that there's simply no evidence to support it, and what I'm saying is that the CIA, yeah, the CIA is a very flawed instrument in making these kinds of judgments because they do, in fact, tend very strongly to lean in the direction of the policy that they are working within, the policy framework within which they are working.
That has been the case from the very beginning of U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic, that U.S. intelligence has been very flawed because the people doing the assessments are expected, they know they're expected to find evidence that Iran is interested in and, in fact, working on nuclear weapons, and so they interpret non-evidence or extremely ambiguous evidence in ways that fit that predilection, and so I think the bottom line is that we cannot trust the CIA's judgment in 2007 just as we could not trust their judgments in 2005 and 2001.
Right.
All right, now, so let me ask you about this other article that you wrote.
Whoops, I don't know if we even started about an article at all here.
So let me ask you about this article that you wrote about the Tom Cotton letter for Middle East Eye and what the true lessons of that episode really are for American politics that seem to be overlooked in most places.
Well, I mean, I think the bottom line about that article is that Tom Cotton and the Republicans were put up to this not by people who have the interests of the United States at heart, but who are motivated by the interests of the Likud government in Israel.
I mean, you know, I document the fact based on the folks at the Loblog, people writing for Loblog, as well as some other journalists who I link to in the article, who have shown that Tom Cotton is essentially a protege of Bill Kristol, and Bill Kristol was the guy who steered Cotton to the big billionaire funders, including Sheldon Adelson, for the Likud party, you know, Netanyahu's major moneybags.
So, you know, Cotton has tied his political career to the people who are the kingmakers in the Republican party, who are also the main supporters of the Likud party and of Netanyahu in Israel.
So, I mean, it's impossible to view this letter as anything other than a move by the Israel lobby to try to sabotage the talks.
And therefore, I mean, what one needs to say about the Tom Cotton letter is that this is prima facie evidence of the way in which the Israel lobby, and particularly its funders, the major funders who are behind it, have continued to, and are present, manipulating the U.S. Congress, one of the three bodies, parts of the U.S. government, they've been manipulating it in order to favor the interests of Israel, not the interests of the United States.
And now, tell me this, Gareth.
Why are the Israelis so desperate to ruin this deal?
This deal will ensure that the safeguards agreement will be even extra-double-plus-lucky-happy-wish-enforced beyond any dream that they could have ever gotten.
Why isn't that good enough?
Well, that's a good question, Scott.
It's a fundamental question, and it really has not been addressed sufficiently in the news media or by various analysts.
And I think the answer is quite clear, that the real issue that Netanyahu and the Israeli, certainly the Likudist government in Israel, has with the Iranian nuclear program is not that it's going to actually result in nuclear weapons.
Forget about the whole idea that Iran is going to nuke Israel.
Nobody takes that seriously.
That's never been the issue.
It's not even nuclear weapons.
It's the fact that Iran could be, and in fact is, a threshold state, what is called a threshold state in the literature on proliferation, which means that they have the capability to have a nuclear weapon.
And that's unacceptable to the Israelis.
Why?
Because the whole Israeli foreign policy and national security policy, military policy, is based on the premise that Israel must be the unchallengeable dominant power in the Middle East.
That's always been the Israeli policy.
And remains so today.
And the only way for them to continue to maintain the policy is to deprive Iran of all enrichment capability.
So that's been the target, that's been the objective of their policy since the beginning of the Iranian nuclear program, essentially, or at least since the early 1990s.
And so it doesn't matter whether in fact this agreement would be successful in the limitation of Iran to a certain level of Iranian enrichment, or having access to all the nuclear facilities and transparency and so forth.
That doesn't make any difference to the Israelis.
They want no capability to enrich Iran.
That's the only thing that will satisfy.
And otherwise, I mean, they want the United States to make war on Iran to weaken it.
That's the ideal scenario for the Likud government.
And indeed, all Israeli governments have really wanted the United States to take care of the problem for them, if at all possible.
And they have not succeeded in that, thank God.
And with that, I'm sorry, but we're just all out of time.
Thank you so much for your time again, Gareth.
My pleasure as always, Scott.
All right, Sheldon.
That's the heroic Gareth Porter.
He's at Middle East Eye now, and you can also find his full archive at antiwar.com.
The book is Manufactured Crisis, the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, and the complete debunking of it, in fact.
And I'm Scott Wharton.
That's it for the show.
It's Antiwar Radio here every Sunday morning, except during fun drive, on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
The full interview archive is at scottwharton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter, at scottwhartonshow.
We'll see you next week.