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 fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, guys, on the line, I've got the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote Manufactured Crisis, the truth about Iran's civilian nuclear program or whatever the subtitle is, and the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Nuclear Scare.
He's not the CIA guy, though.
It's co-authored with John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer.
Good old Gareth would never be CIA.
Come on.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Hey, remember how you were interviewed 5,000 about 500 interviews ago?
I do.
Well, you're interviewed 5,500 now.
I'm sorry to Danny Sherson, because I miscounted.
There were a couple of drafts in there, and it screwed up the count.
So yesterday, we were supposed to do this interview yesterday, was the 18th anniversary of the start of the interview show.
April 12, 2003 was the weekend interview show.
It doesn't matter.
Give or take a day.
It ain't a thing.
It's also the anniversary of the day I finished Fool's Errand, which is also the day that Will Grigg died.
So rip, Will.
But anyway, April 12.
What the hell?
But then, so now here we go.
This is interview 5,500 on the show.
Certainly more than 300 of them are of you.
In fact, as long as I'm babbling about this right now, Gareth, let me go ahead and check.
You just go to the archives page and control F for Gareth.
And there are 317 matches.
Oh, okay.
So there you go.
You're the man, man.
I interview you about everything you write, because it's all so important and good.
Well, I appreciate it.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mean, when I wrote my book, I was just thinking the whole time, I hope you don't sue me for plagiarism, because I learned so much of this stuff from you all the way through.
No way.
No way.
And sometimes I had to just say, look, I can't cite Gareth here, because it's just going to be a Gareth on every page.
So thank you for helping me write my book.
Yeah.
All right.
You're great.
Listen, let's talk about business here.
We got three big things.
We got Afghanistan.
We got Iran and Vietnam.
We'll get to that in a minute.
Let's start with Afghanistan.
Get this, Gareth.
The goddang Washington Post is reporting April 13th, 2021 here, brand new out.
Biden will withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by September 11th, 2021.
So he's canceling the withdrawal deal that said that we would be out by May 1st, which was signed on February the 29th, 2020 by Zalmay Khalilzad representing President Donald Trump at the time.
And I don't think it says anything about if they have an agreement with the Taliban to let them do this and fudge another six months here.
What do you think is going to happen?
Well, I was tempted to say that, you know, we'll see that deadline slip as well.
It's not a terribly bad bet that you could make on that, although, you know, I mean, who knows exactly what's going to happen by that time.
But in any case, I mean, you know, the headline here is Biden administration.
You know, it should be.
Excuse me.
It should be that the Biden administration, you know, is is sabotaging the peace agreement that the U.S. made during the Trump administration to withdraw U.S. troops by May 1st.
And, you know, this is another installment in that story.
I mean, that's the short the short version of it.
Yeah.
I mean, what's so special about September 11th that they would, you know, set that date?
If anything, it seems like that's bad politics to let bad to let all the hawks say, oh, this is how you honor the dead is by giving in to the enemy or what, you know, kind of thing.
But then you're saying, nah, never even mind, because they don't even mean it when they say September 11th.
They just mean we're breaking the deal and we're staying necessarily.
I mean, let's face it.
I mean, there is an infinite capability for this kind of administration to continue to find reasons why, well, we can't completely withdraw right now because and, you know, take your pick of a menu of reasons.
Yeah.
In other words, you simply cannot trust that that the Biden administration would actually meet that that date.
I don't even know.
You know, I haven't seen the story yet, so I don't know.
You even know exactly, you know, how it's couched.
But, you know, it's certainly a very strong bet.
I would think that that this is not set in stone.
Yeah.
You know.
I mean, I'm just kind of scanning through the Washington Post article here, and I don't even see them addressing.
If they had tried to tell the Taliban, look, we just want six more months, but we really mean it this time about the six months, but then we're going to go.
Because the Taliban have vowed that we're going back to war.
If you break the deal, you're our target.
Yeah, I am shocked, shocked that this administration would fail to make such a statement.
Really.
In other words, I'm not shocked at all.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like the Washington Post would at least address the fact that this is important, that you could really have.
I mean, who knows?
The outer limit would be a Tet Offensive type, you know, total catastrophe, but could be a lot less than that and still be dead Americans over there.
And and who knows who else to they get?
You know, they could ratchet up their war against the Afghan government in a way.
I think that was what you suggested before, that they'd be fools to start killing Americans now.
But they could crank up their war against America's men.
Right.
Well, I think that's right.
And of course, ultimately, there's no doubt that the Taliban would end up carrying out attacks that U.S. would present and could present as a danger to U.S. forces.
So I mean, you know, that that is just a matter of time.
I agree that ultimately the Taliban will see it as in their interest to make make it clear that the United States cannot get away with continuing to, you know, simply tear up this agreement and and delay indefinitely the withdrawal of U.S. troops without incurring some risk to those troops.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, I guess we'll see.
I mean, famously now, I hope people know this.
It's been more than a year since an American soldier was killed in Afghanistan.
And there's still, I guess, Green Berets and I don't know whatever other army or the Marines still there.
They pulled the Marines out of Helmand, right?
I believe so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, the post here says there's supposedly twenty five hundred men, which was Trump's final order.
But then they say, yeah, but there's really about a thousand more than that.
And plus about seven thousand NATO troops still in the country, too.
Right.
That could be very well could be because as we know, you know, the the U.S. national security state routinely has misled the president about the the actual number of troops, U.S. military personnel in Syria, certainly as well as elsewhere.
You know, I guess we didn't find out until a lot later, but, you know, hate to give the old guy credit, but that Bob Woodward book, Obama's Wars, we got a really in-depth story about how the military pressured Obama into doing the surge back in 09 from Woodward's.
I wonder, is anybody doing anything like that about the debate inside the White House about this issue this year?
Do you know?
Not as far as I know, and I was the only the only other person to write about that question of of how the military pressured Obama to to agree to go along with their demand for the forty five thousand, as I recall, additional troops in Afghanistan.
And and I've done so several times.
I've written several things about it, including covering Obama Woodward's book.
But but originally it was really clear that that the that the national security state, including people in the State Department, of course, at that point, as well as the CIA ganged up.
And there was a leak to McClatchy newspapers that unless Obama went along with this and he wasn't doing it, that he would be guilty of of serious risk to American security from Al-Qaeda coming back to to Afghanistan, despite the fact that in the meetings in the White House they had failed to make that case.
And indeed, the CIA person present admitted that there was no evidence that that was the case.
So I mean, that's the story that I wrote.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school, but should have.
Follow through from the link in the margin at Scott Horton dot org for Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Look here, you and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends, too, that say Libertarian Institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
So here's what you do.
Go to Libertas Bella dot com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right hand margin at Libertarian Institute dot org.
Libertas Bella dot com.
All right, so let's talk about Iran, then.
Yeah, Biden decided seemingly maybe to at least pretend to do the talks.
I don't know.
It seemed like he wanted to get back in the Iran deal.
Right.
They decided that this isn't working.
And so I guess we got to go ahead and get back in the Iran deal.
I don't know how seriously they're taking it, but then the Israelis have made their point, which is, no, we forbid it.
And they've made that point by blowing up something at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran, the power supply or something like that there.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, well, first of all, I wouldn't link those two things that closely, because first of all, the reality is very clear.
And I'm about to write something on this that the Biden administration was not intending to smooth the path to return to JCPOA.
On the contrary, if you read the fine print of the by that, I mean, read carefully the interview or the not the interview, but the statement that was presented to the press by the the anonymous senior administration official who was attending those talks in Vienna, you you have to come to the conclusion that this was a deception to to suggest that the administration was had already decided that it was going to go ahead and make a straight deal with Iran.
No, they are holding on to their leverage through at least one, if not more, major sanction undertaken by the Trump administration.
And in the guise that it was done for counterterrorism or some other purpose, but I'm sure it's going to be counterterrorism, because that was the reason given for the key sanction, which was used the the the sanction was used to take away Iran's right to sell oil internationally.
So I'm reasonably sure that that's what the administration strategy is here.
And I mean, this is this was hinted at by that anonymous senior official, but of course, not stated clearly.
And nobody in the press picked it up.
So I think that that what we're seeing with the Israelis was going to be done anyway.
It was not a consequence of the administration's making a decision on the return to the JCPOA on how they would do it.
And it is intended to prevent any possible or to to minimize the chance of any return to the JCPOA.
I agree with that.
But it was not a response to the decision by the administration to enter those talks in Vienna.
I think the sabotage is just part of the Israeli effort to to to generate as much damage to the program as possible to make it impossible for for Iran to continue to make progress.
And if possible, to put pressure on the United States to go along with this because of the alliance between the United States and Israel.
But but I think those are still two two very separate questions.
OK, and then so I haven't been following Rouhani closely on Twitter.
I assume in Iran, this has really helped to undermine his ability to continue negotiating for their part, right?
Well, I would think that it does put additional pressure on this administration, for sure.
I mean, there's no question about that.
I mean, I don't know how much additional pressure is required at this point.
However, I think that Iran has already responded to the pressure from public opinion and political elites in in Iran who are extremely dissatisfied with the way in which Iran was performing as part of the JCPOA or in relation to the issue of the JCPOA.
And so, you know, you can count on Iran responding very, very firmly to this.
And I would I would think that that their their line will will harden in some fashion.
Definitely.
Yeah, I guess it's amazing that these talks are going on while the Israelis are attacking Iranian ships trying to deliver oil to Syria and all these other things.
Well, that's why that's why Iran would would refuse to be part of any direct talks with the United States.
It is nevertheless a bit of a surprise that they even agreed to to this kind of arrangement, which which is kind of strange to say the least.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry to ask you to do this, but you know what?
It's not just liars.
It's also fools.
And I even mean that lightly.
Regular people here all the time.
The Ayatollah is the devil.
He's obviously trying to kill you and me and every Jew in Israel and every decent person in the world.
And of course, if he signs a deal, it's a deception and we can't trust him because, come on, you really trust Iran to live up to a deal and not make a nuke?
Why should somebody who's been subjected to nothing but that narrative for the last 25 years straight?
Break free and listen to you instead.
What's the point here?
There's there's no hope for anybody who's been following that for 25 years and has not read my book or continued to follow this closely, which is probably, you know, I think it's safe to say that very few people have have followed the propaganda for all those years.
And not done any work or have also done work to try to find out the truth.
I mean, those are they tend to be, you know, mutually, mutually not consistent stances.
So I'd be surprised if there are very many people who who fit that description.
I mean, that's the point, right, is, look, people got to work for a living and all they know is what they heard on the talk radio news at the top of the hour, which is Iran nuclear threat.
Right, right.
And that's and that's pretty much a description of the national security state of the U.S., which has bought into the the idea that Iran is a nuclear threat, a threat to, you know, Israel in particular, but to the rest of the world by its its use of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear threat, a threat to, you know, Israel in particular, but to the rest of the world by its its its desire, its intense desire to have nuclear weapons.
They bought into that as a result of Israeli propaganda and including black propaganda.
And and so there's a direct correlation here between the role that Israel has played and the fact that this has become such a firm narrative that it is has been politically unchallengeable in the United States for so long now, for many years.
But, you know, to begin with, I would just say, you know, to those people, you need to start with the reality that it was Israel that threatened Iran, although not with nuclear weapons.
They threatened conventional attack against the Iranian, first of all, their missile program, which was started in the early 1990s, early to mid 1990s, and then the nuclear program.
And that it was in response to that, that that Iran stepped up its both its missile program and its nuclear program as deterrence.
I mean, you know, that was the idea to have a deterrent.
And that that record is very clear, but virtually no one knows about it.
It's just been blacked out in the history of this issue.
So that's that's the problem that we're up against.
Yeah, well, I mean, one thing is just the calendar, right?
It's like the war on terrorism.
It's got to be time to end it now because it's the year 2021.
Same thing here with Iran's nukes.
This is 1945 technology here.
OK, if they were making nukes, they could have thrown together a few gun type nukes by now.
They could have set up a secret cascade of centrifuges under a mountain, even if they couldn't hide it.
They could have made it where you couldn't bomb it from the air and they could have made weapons grade uranium and thrown together a couple of simple uranium bombs by now.
And they haven't done that.
You're absolutely right.
It's 2021 and they still don't have a nuke, which means that whole time that people said that they were making nukes, it wasn't right.
It was a lie.
And I'm glad you've raised the point.
It's something that I should have written about and I have thought about writing about, but I've never gotten around to it, to to just document the point, the fact, the fact and and the important point to be gained from that fact, that Iran has had all that time to do something that other nuclear, now nuclear powers have been able to accomplish in a very few years in every case.
Now, it's not the case that that Iran is not capable of devising a nuclear device.
They have all the the capability in terms of their knowledge, their technical qualifications and so forth to do it.
Certainly for a gun type nuke, a Hiroshima type bomb, a Nagasaki type bomb is harder, but also probably within their possibilities.
The North Koreans are using implosion bombs or even something more sophisticated.
They could have done it.
And the fact that they have not done it is an extremely important fact in in this whole controversy surrounding the Iranian nuclear program.
And and it should have been raised many times.
And as I say, I blame myself for not having done it myself.
But it has been totally absent from the debate, such as it is.
There isn't really a political debate in the United States, but such as it is, it has simply not been talked about.
And so it is important to raise that.
I agree.
And it's a very it's a very key point.
It's it's a telling point which really nobody can.
Right.
And now, listen, here's something that is a point that you made back then.
I know we talked about this when Obama was signing this deal, is that on one hand, hey, it's good thing he's signing this deal, because then the lie that there's some secret parallel program or that the program that is safeguarded, they just kind of pretend that it's not like they've just never heard the word safeguarded before and they think it could be a nuclear weapons program.
All those narratives will be gone.
The JCPOA will expand inspections and lock down the program to such a degree.
Not even the Israelis will be able to pretend that there's a secret parallel program, et cetera.
But at the cost of.
Seeding to the propaganda point.
That this thing was even necessary at all, when, in fact, their program was already safeguarded, they were members of the nonproliferation treaty, they had, you know, their safeguards agreement with the IAEA and for a time, even the additional protocol while they were negotiating with the E3 there in the Bush years.
And we didn't need this thing at all.
And so now that it's not in effect, people talk as though, yes, now they're free to make nuclear weapons and this kind of thing.
The fear level comes back, even though we're just talking about the loss of a superfluous deal and the possible reinstallation of it when there's never been a question.
I don't think a serious question or a serious threat of Iran leaving the nonproliferation treaty.
Right.
Well, they are threatening that now.
I mean, that is part of their position.
No question about it.
And, you know, I would take it seriously because there are demands from the right, if you will, the nationalist, the nationalist political contingent in in Iran to do exactly that.
And so the pressure is growing on them.
Well, but has the Ayatollah threatened that or has has the president threatened that that they'd leave the NPT altogether?
Yes.
Well, the president hasn't himself, but but a spokesman of of the Iranian government has has done so.
Not just some loud mouth in the parliament or something.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
OK, so so it is it is a serious issue at this point and not not completely out of the question, not completely out of the question by any means.
Well, I mean, the thing is, they do know the Ayatollah does know that he can't pull off what Kim Jong Il pulled off and leave the treaty and make a nuke while Bush is distracted in Iraq.
Because that's right, of course.
Yeah.
No, this is.
And and and I you know, I still believe that the Iranian government under the Ayatollah, because of the doctrine that that the Ayatollah, who is the supreme leader, is the guardian of Islamic doctrine and Islamic law for for this state of Iran, that they cannot will not even consider having a nuclear weapon, creating a nuclear weapon.
It is out of the question for a Shia state, which is under that kind of government.
Now, if that government changes, then all bets are off.
But as long as it is that kind of Shia government, which is, of course, criticized and hated by critics all over the world, then then you have, of course, a very serious question of of Iran, you know, not not being bound by that doctrine anymore.
Well, and it seems like Khamenei could change his mind, too, and say, well, you know, now that I think about it, since our entire existence as a sovereign state is at risk, that maybe it is OK for, you know.
Well, if that were the conclusion, that might be.
But but I'm not convinced that they have reached that conclusion by any means.
You know, they have been arguing very carefully and very soberly for many years that they can use conventional means to deter an attack on them.
And and, you know, I think that they they have a case, very strong case to that effect.
You know what?
I think that's exactly right.
And people ask me this all the time when they interview me.
Are we going to have a war with Iran?
And I guess my history of the last 20 years, the last 25 years is, well, we can't have a war with Iran.
So what else can we do about it?
And then, of course, everything that they've done has only backfired.
But that's the whole basis of the clean break policy, right, is, well, obviously, we can't have a war with Iran.
So how else might we be able to try to undermine their power in the region?
That's the story of this whole thing is we can't attack them because they can hit us back too easily without nukes.
So so, yes, undermining their power to the maximum degree possible has been the centerpiece of of Israeli strategy, which has become, to some extent, at least U.S. strategy.
Man.
All right.
Well, so where are we at with the talks now?
Is there we're in between meetings or is there has any actual progress been made?
I would say, no, not really.
I mean, you know, the United States government and its allies would say, yes, progress has been made.
The Iranians deny that and they deny it for very good reason, which is what I said earlier, that they can see that that this idea of sorting through all of the Trump administration sanctions and trying to figure out which ones are are consistent with the JCPOA and which ones aren't.
Well, that's that's I'm sorry, that's B.S. that that's not really what's going on here at all.
And the Iranians can see that very clearly.
Yeah.
And so, you know, that's the next thing that I have to write.
Really, I have to write something about that.
It's funny, man.
Everybody spent four years going, I can't believe Donald Trump is the president.
Now, man, I can't believe Joe Biden is the president.
Didn't didn't he lose for president like three times before this or something?
And now we're stuck with him.
Sigh.
Vietnam.
I got a great plan.
Remember how we lost the Vietnam War?
Well, what we're going to do is we're going to get the government of the country that drove our guys out of there to do whatever we want, like let us build up military bases there to threaten China with.
Does that sound smart to you?
Yeah, that sounds like a brilliant idea.
It's I just got back from Georgetown University.
It makes perfect sense.
It's it's sort of like the United States saying, you know, that, of course, well, not that not the United States government, but but some prominent people in the national security state and the national security elite saying now, well, of course, we must be prepared to defend Taiwan, because we all know that Taiwan does not belong to China and that there's no reason for us to think that the Chinese would believe that they have any right to Taiwan and sort of forgetting the entire history of U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan from from 1949 on.
That is the problem with the United States government.
We have no real historical memory because that historical memory would be problematic for justifying what we want to do now.
And so that's one of the consistencies that we can attribute to the U.S. government, regardless of the the decade that we're discussing in U.S. policy.
But that is that is indeed what we're seeing here, which which is that the United States government now is is forgetting conveniently the way the United States has treated Vietnam in the past and just assumed that not only is Vietnam interested in having the United States be something of a counterweight in the region to to China, but is is ready to join up with the U.S. war plan against China by by providing whatever we ask and by way of access to to Vietnamese bases.
And that's what my story is about, of course.
Yeah.
All right.
The article is at the gray zone and at antiwar dot com.
Pentagon campaign to recruit Vietnam as military ally against China exposed delusions of U.S. war strategy.
And I really like that part where the Vietnamese government put out a statement saying, no way, no, how are we doing this?
And then some guy was the Rand Corporation or something said, aha, see how he said no, how that secret code for sure.
Just give me a minute or something like that.
I mean, this was this is the Rand Corporation at its most brilliant intellectually and politically telling the Pentagon, oh, don't worry about the three nose, which are now the four nose policy.
They don't really mean that they've given themselves a loophole, which is four nose.
I need one of those.
A four nose policy.
That sounds great.
What's the Vietnamese four nose policy?
Right.
They're saying if the Chinese attack them, then, well, we'll we'll reconsider.
And so he was he was citing this as a reason for the United States to press ahead with their effort to enlist the Vietnamese.
Well, OK, so the exception was if they attack us, then we'll think about inviting allies to come and help us.
But short of that, forget it.
And he says, aha, see, they want to let us put a new missile system in and et cetera.
Yeah, but in fact, the the I think it's clear that the Vietnamese Central Committee, Vietnamese Communist Party Central Committee, which had a plenum in early 2020.
So what they were saying was, you know, we we have now reconsidered.
In effect, they're saying we've now reconsidered and we don't want really any part of continuing negotiations with the United States.
How these all these close military cooperation agreements and really nothing new has happened since since 20 since 2019.
There have been no new military agreements since 2019 with the United States.
So they made it very clear that this is this is not going to happen.
And then because this is a big deal last year, where Mike Pompeo, the Trump secretary of state, had said, yeah, we're going to create this new Asian NATO to him in China.
And then everybody involved said, no, we're not joining.
It's true.
I mean, they have not been able to get anybody to really take seriously the idea of turning this into a military alliance against China.
And and, you know, basically being willing to have U.S. bases with missiles that are going to hit China, which is really the issue now for U.S. policy and for all of the allies of the United States.
None of them have said yes to that so far.
Yeah.
And I think you write in here to that about the Australians and their reluctance to allow Americans to have more than a minimal presence in their country.
Right.
That's right.
The Australians have been very, very queasy about the whole the whole matter for for some time now.
New Zealand, of course, has said no.
But Australia has you know, they've had their doubts about this.
They've been more forthcoming than New Zealand, but still know they don't they don't want to provide any basis for the United States in a war with China.
Absolutely not.
Well, and which really goes to show some it's just like Doug Bondo is always talking about why aren't the Germans arming up?
It's because they're not afraid the Russians are coming.
And if they thought the Russians were coming, they'd be building up their infantry and their armored divisions.
But they're not concerned about that.
And they're only concerned with trying to trade dollars for or, you know, euros for natural gas.
That's all.
And I think that there there's far more concern about economic relations than there is about military threat.
I mean, I don't I agree with you.
I don't think that they take the military threat that seriously.
And in the metaphor here, too, right between Australia and China, we're talking about.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because that's the whole thing of it.
Right.
If they thought, boy, we we're afraid of what the Chinese might do.
We want to get the Americans in here to protect us.
That'd be one thing.
Instead, they're saying, geez, bringing the Americans in in the name of protecting us seems like it's probably more likely to make matters worse than help, because, in other words, they don't feel like there's a threat that needs to be defended from and instead they'd be provoking one.
Right.
I just like to say something mildly encouraging or optimistic for a change, which is that I have a feeling that this whole notion that the Pentagon has cooked up of a war plan against China with all this stuff about, you know, having U.S. Marines or army or whatever occupy these little bases that they can move around in and have missiles that will hit Chinese ships.
I just think this is this is a goner.
It's a loser.
I think they're going to have to give it up because of both the questions that have been raised by our allies, as well as so many other people who recognize in this country specialists on China, as well as even some military specialists who say this doesn't make sense.
So, I mean, I think there's a chance here of shooting this down.
I hope people will take that to heart and and, you know, be encouraged to join in the fun and start to poke holes in it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there are people who say, oh, yeah, sure.
That's just what Wall Street wants, you know, progressive liberal types and right wing conservatives to that.
This is the corruption of Wall Street that wants us to have these good relations with China when what we really need to have, if we really care about our country, is this terrible Cold War.
That's the narrative they're building up.
But they don't seem to understand that.
That's essentially if it's a competition between different massive billion dollar multinational firms, then we want the people who trade in regular civilian goods and services with the Chinese to win out over the arms manufacturers who are just trying to get rid of some ships and some long range bombers.
And they have a lot of political influence.
But, well, I think about billions of dollars of trade between America and China every year between peaceful people doing civilian business.
That's what we want to accentuate and to limit the influence of those who sell the weapons and would rather have a Cold War.
We do.
But I have to warn you that the people who are the Wall Street types, the business interests who have always in the past been very interested and pushed for good relations with China, they have now gotten off the bus and they're sort of joining in the chorus of, yes, we should put pressure on China.
So, you know, it's a different situation than it was 10, 15 years ago.
Well, they have they have a zillion dollars at stake.
I mean, they'd be crazy to, you know, in that there's this great article.
I bet you may have seen it in The New York Times about how when Trump put all these tariffs on China and hurt big business so bad with that, that he or manufacturing specifically in the name of helping them.
But it didn't it didn't do what he claimed it would do, the tariffs that they figured, well, we got to do something to make manufacturing happy.
And then what happened was Raytheon got married to Pete Navarro, the trade representative guy.
And they said, here's a way that the national government can shovel hundreds of billions of dollars into industry in the name of militarism in order to make it up to you guys overall, somehow like the collective of American industry.
It's going to help some companies, the arms manufacturers at the expense of everybody else.
And that was the compromise as the Republicans saw it.
So it seems to me like there must be a lot of firms who are losing out big time because they don't sell to the Pentagon.
They don't have anything the Pentagon wants.
I agree with you, but business as as a broad based and powerful lobby for good relations with China, we no longer have that.
That's what I was trying to get at.
Now, that's not to say that they're 100 percent kind of strategy with China.
I think that they're balancing off against the Pentagon the way they did in the early 2000s.
And, you know, later.
Well, boy, is that too bad for us?
I'd say, yeah, I know.
You know, did you see the thing with Fareed Zachariah telling the truth the other day?
Do you see that clip?
I'm not sure which one you're talking about.
No.
Oh, you would be sure if you had seen it.
So it's it's a free Zachariah saying, listen, when Britain ruled the world, their strategy, their doctrine was that their military has to be as powerful or their navy has to be as powerful as the next two.
Well, ours, ours is as powerful as the next 10.
And the Chinese, you know, they might have more ships, but we got 11 carrier battle groups.
They got two carriers and we got they have 200 fighter jets.
We got fifteen hundred.
And he goes on down the list and he says they have we have 800 or wherever it is now overseas bases.
They have two.
And this is just crazy.
It's totally wrong.
You don't have to believe in it.
And coming from a hawk like him, which, you know, I know he's a liberal hawk, but he's a hawk.
Right.
It was that lady Stacey Herbert on Twitter said, is this a deep fake?
How could he tell such blatant truth like this?
You know, but but it cuts both ways because it also, you know, gives the Pentagon more credibility for their war plan because it minimizes the problems with it.
But I agree with you that, you know, it's it's a strange and interesting development, shall we say.
I mean, his point basically was it's absurd that we're treating China like a threat.
They are not.
That was really what he was getting at.
So.
Yeah.
But yeah.
So you know what?
Let me ask you this.
What is it that you read that's got you so down on the non arms industry, big business and their political position on all of this protectionism versus open relations and so forth?
Oh, there's not one single thing.
I mean, it's just a lot of a lot of indications that that that the business organizations and organizations that have been most pro good relations with China have been lobbying against the Pentagon, which has been consistently sort of, you know, treated China as a potential enemy for many years.
They have now been primarily pushing for a tough line against China because of its trade policies, because of its economic policies.
That's that's all that I was indicating.
That's all.
I got you.
All right, you guys.
That's Gareth Porter again on the show.
Episode five thousand five hundred.
Well, of the interviews, I've done a lot more shows than that.
But anyway, Gareth, you're great, man.
Thank you so much for doing the show again.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Always glad to be on.
Check out all of Gareth's writings at the gray zone dot com and at anti war dot com.
We reprint everything there in his archive and check out his great books, Manufactured Crisis, the untold story of the Iran nuclear scare and the CIA insiders guide to the Iran crisis from CIA coup to the brink of war.
And again, it's Kiriakou who's the CIA guy, not my man.
All right.
And thanks.
