04/05/15 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, April 5th, 2015.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
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Our guest today is our good friend Mohamed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC and writes regularly for antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mohamed?
Good morning, Scott.
It's good to be back in your program.
Thank you very much.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Can we celebrate a little bit here?
Dear leader, Barack Obama has worked out the nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs in Iran.
It's not the final deal yet, but it's pretty good, don't you think?
I definitely think so.
I think celebration is in order.
I was talking to some of my colleagues and was telling them that I have been mad at President Obama for so long for many things that I think he did wrong, but with diplomacy that he pursued with Iran and finally reached an interim agreement, as you said, this is not the final agreement, a lot of my anger is evaporating.
I hope this leads to the final comprehensive agreement by the end of June, which means that the danger of another war in the Middle East will be averted and hopefully Iran and the United States relationship will be on a path of reconciliation and less tension.
I sure hope so.
Our friend Gordon Prather, the nuclear weapons physicist, who used to write for antiwar.com as well, he said when Obama first came into power, he wrote an article called Obama the Great, where he said all Obama has to do is give a speech where he says, I promise to not bomb any IAEA safeguarded facilities for the entire time I'm president.
And that will be the end of that.
That will be America's unilateral peace action toward Iran, that all threats are hereby repealed as long as you guys remain within your safeguards agreement.
And of course they have remained within their safeguards agreement all along.
So I guess in that sense, he really could have gotten this done back six years ago.
But certainly this is a lot better deal, I think, even than most of us hopeful types were expecting.
Is that right?
I definitely think so.
I think, in fact, Iran made a lot of concessions, which I didn't believe they would make concessions, to be honest.
But Iran has always said that they are ready to negotiate and they are ready to sign any reasonable agreement that would preserve the right to nuclear technology for peaceful uses, and at the same time addresses any legitimate concerns that the Australia board, and in particular Western powers, have.
And this agreement seems to be in that direction.
Iran has agreed to constrain its nuclear program for at least 10 years, and in return Iran, of course, expects the economic sanctions will be lifted.
I predict very difficult negotiations over the next three months because it's not still clear to me how the United States and its allies are going to lift their sanctions that have been imposed on Iran and over what period.
They are talking about first Iran carrying out its obligations and verified by the IAEA, which may take quite a while, and then start lifting the sanctions.
If that's the case, then that could create problems in Tehran, particularly with hardliners.
But if the United States and its allies are willing to make some preliminary move in order to lift a significant portion of the sanctions imposed on Iran, a short time after signing the agreement and Iran starting carrying out its obligations, then that would pave the way for Iran putting into effect all of its obligations and also satisfy the hardliners in Tehran that are angry at the Rouhani administration for making some major concessions.
All right.
Now, so I read a piece in McClatchy about how Obama was really hands-on on this thing all along, working with Kerry, doing secure video briefings with the entire staff and the National Security Council and going over this.
Do you know, are there reports, I guess we have to assume, that certainly the president of Iran was working very closely with his people on this?
But what about the supreme leader?
Has he been kind of standoffish, or do you think, you know, that they wouldn't have agreed to these terms that they've agreed to so far unless they really knew that they had his blessing?
I don't believe that this agreement would have been produced without the consent of the supreme leader.
Let me remind you, first of all, that one very important person that was part of Iran delegation was the brother of Iranian president, Hossein Frey Rouhani, who is not only close to his brother, of course, he's also very close to the supreme leader.
At the same time, Rouhani has always been a security, national security man.
Ever since the Iranian revolution, he has been part of the security establishment.
And therefore, he knows all the details and all the nooks and crannies of what the supreme leader wants.
The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also trusts Rouhani, which is why he gave him basically a free hand to negotiate the agreement.
So long as Iran's negotiation team will not cross certain red lines that he has set.
I also know that through some of my contacts that Iran's delegation to the discussion was in steady contact with Tehran, receiving instructions on any new issues that would come up.
At the same time, we have to remember that Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is also highly trusted by the supreme leader.
Khamenei has declared publicly, repeatedly, that he trusts Zarif.
He has called him a son of Iranian revolution and has said that Iran's diplomatic team worked very hard and preserved the nation's rights.
Therefore, I don't believe that the agreement that was announced will be opposed by Khamenei.
Khamenei has been briefed fully on this.
But as I said, what I foresee to be difficult is how the United States is going to lift sanctions that has imposed on Iran and how the U.S. allies will do this.
If they want to drag this on for a long time, then there could be trouble.
But at least for now, the supreme leader is certainly backing the results.
I mean, after all, politics is politics.
But when he gives these statements like he supports Zarif and he supports Rouhani and their efforts here, that's a very diplomatic way of him telling the right wing to shut their mouths because this is something that he has decided is very important for the country, right?
Oh, I totally agree because just a while ago, I think about two weeks ago, he said that some hardliners in Washington claim that Iranians don't want to negotiate and that the Tehran hawks that support Khamenei don't also want to reach any agreement with the U.S.
And then he said that's not true.
In Iran, everybody wants to negotiate.
That was his way of telling the hardliners in Tehran to shut up, as you said.
And they actually shut up.
They haven't been saying anything.
They have been completely silent over the past several weeks, at least, as the negotiations move towards an agreement.
And after the agreement was announced, although some hardline websites criticized the agreement, but the major figures within Tehran's hawks haven't said anything.
And if they have, it has been the support of the agreement.
In fact, Khamenei's senior foreign policy advisor, former foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, publicly said that the Iranian diplomatic team has done a great job of negotiating the agreement with the United States.
So I am very confident that there would be no problem, at least at this stage, created by Khamenei and his supporters.
All right, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio, talking with Mohammad Sahimi about the Iran nuclear deal.
And now, about those sanctions, other than the Republicans passing new sanctions and possibly even overriding the president's veto on them, is there, you think, a problem with how the sanctions relief will come once the Iranians start to abide by their side of the deal?
If the final agreement that is supposed to be reached by end of June actually stipulates that once Iran starts implementing its obligation under the agreement, namely, for example, reduce the number of active centrifuges and start to remove centrifuges for those sites, then the United States and its allies will also lift the sanctions, then that would be a good omen.
But let me also add this.
From Iran's perspective, the most important part of the sanctions to be lifted are the sanctions that European countries have imposed on Iran.
Because before these sanctions, the European Union was Iran's most important commercial partner, and Iran had always had a very good commercial relationship with the European Union.
The United States, on the other hand, has imposed sanctions on Iran ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Sometimes they were stronger, sometimes they were complete as they are now, and sometimes they were weaker, but there have always been U.S. sanctions against Iran.
And Iran has actually adopted life to the existence of U.S. sanctions.
So if the final agreement stipulates the way you and I are reading it, and in particular European countries go along with it, and I know that European countries are very eager to lift these sanctions because a lot of European companies have been gearing up to go to Tehran and start business with Tehran, then it would be good.
But if, again, if the U.S. drags its feet somehow and does not lift sanctions so that Rouhani can show to the nation and to the hardliners in Tehran that there are immediate benefits for Iran making all these major sanctions, then there could be problems.
I hope there won't be, and I'm hopeful that there won't be, but we will have to wait and see what happens.
It's worth mentioning here that, as we all know, there is no such thing as the rule of law in the United States of America, and government employees can do whatever they want with any of us at any time.
And so as far as I could tell, Mohammed, there's no other way to interpret the Justice Department's indictment of Senator Menendez other than Barack Obama politically assassinating his leading enemy in the Democratic Party in the Senate on this issue, and so three cheers for that.
I mean, every single senator is corrupt and belongs in prison anyway, so the fact that he's picking on Menendez is just fine to me if that's the way it's going to be.
But I wonder if you think that that'll really help, because this guy Menendez was a real problem, wasn't he?
Actually, that's the way I read it when they announced indictment of Robert Menendez.
First of all, I had a big sigh of relief.
And secondly, I thought they were going after this guy to shut him up.
Yes, Menendez has been a menace toward an agreement between Iran and the United States, and Iran and the West, and he has tried several times to scuttle these negotiations and prevent an agreement.
And at the same time, he has been a major recipient of AIPAC campaign contribution, and at the same time, he has been a supporter of MEK, Mujahideen Khawr Organization, an Iranian opposition group.
So to shut him up through an indictment is a very good sign that the Obama administration has apparently taken a step to silencing him and not having any, at least, democratic senator in the Senate to throw impediment towards the agreement between Iran and the U.S.
But as you know, there are many, many other Democrats that may not be happy with the agreement.
And of course, Republicans are almost completely unified against the agreement.
Kirk said yesterday, I believe, that Neville Chamberlain got a better deal from Hitler than Obama got from Iran, which is totally outrageous.
I don't even think that he has even read the political statement that was read in Lausanne in Switzerland outlining the principles of the agreement or what the State Department posted on his site that I read completely.
So these guys are against it no matter what, but President Obama now has a major selling job to do to prevent them from, you know, escorting this agreement and forcing it to fail.
All right.
Now, so maybe we're taking it for granted for the sake of this discussion that everybody in the audience wants peace or, you know, that they all understand, as you and I obviously understand, that Iran never was making nuclear weapons.
It's always been a safeguarded civilian electricity program.
But maybe there are people who do put Israel first even before knowledge and are running on emotions right now.
Could you assuage their fears a little bit?
Could you explain what it is that the Iranians have agreed to give up here and why it is that it makes you so confident that they should be confident that everything's going to be just fine?
Well, Iran has agreed to limit the number of its active centrifuges to about 6,000, which is one-third of the total number of centrifuges that it now has.
Iran has right now 9,500 centrifuges running and another 10,000 in a store that were supposed to be installed.
But Iran has agreed to limit the number of active centrifuges to 6,000, about 6,000, and put the rest in a storage supervised by the IAEA.
That was one main concession.
Iran has also agreed not to enrich it.
Wait, wait, wait.
Even on that point, they were arguing, the Iranians were saying, well, we just want to disconnect the hoses that connect the different centrifuges together but leave them in place.
And then they ended up agreeing, okay, fine, we will go ahead and basically dismantle the cascades and put them in storage.
So that's a pretty big concession, it seems like.
It is a very big concession because they didn't want to actually reduce the number of centrifuges at the beginning.
And then, as you said, they didn't want to dismantle them.
They wanted just to not use them for enrichment.
So that is a major concession.
Then the other concessions that they made was that they agreed not to enrich uranium above 3.67%, which is the average enrichment level for fuel for a civilian reactor, in particular Iran's nuclear reactor in Bushehr.
So that was another major concession because Iran had enriched uranium at 19.75% for Tehran's medical research reactor but stopped it after the interim agreement of November 2013.
Then another major concession that Iran made, but of course here both were compromised, I believe, was regarding a four-door site south of Tehran.
At the beginning of the negotiations, the United States and its allies wanted Iran to completely close the site and get rid of it.
But Iran had always said that they will never close any nuclear site.
So the compromise that they had reached, and Iran here made a major concession, was that they removed two-thirds of the centrifuges from Fordow, which is about – Iran has about 3,000 centrifuges there.
So they removed about 2,000 of them.
And the other 1,000 will be used not for uranium enrichment, but for other research activity related to separation of gaseous compounds that are used in nuclear research.
And this will be under strict supervision of IAEA.
So that was another major concession that Iran made.
The fourth concession that Iran made was regarding the heavy water nuclear reactor in Araf, which is under construction.
Iran has agreed to redesign the core of the reactor so that it will produce about 1 kilogram of plutonium per year, rather than 10 kilogram of plutonium per year.
And 10 kilogram was enough to make one nuclear bomb per year, but 1 kilogram is not enough.
So it would take 10 years to produce as much plutonium under the redesigned core than the current design.
Iran also agreed to ship out the spent nuclear fuel produced by the Araf reactor to Russia.
That means that Iran will not even have a chance to reprocess the spent fuel and separate plutonium from it.
At the same time, Iran also agreed to produce enough heavy water for the Araf reactor, and then ship out to the international market and sell the heavy water in the international market and not store it in Iran.
Let me also point out that this is also a major concession, because heavy water is not covered by safeguard agreement.
In fact, heavy water is not even considered nuclear material.
It only makes sense in a nuclear agreement if heavy water is used for a heavy water nuclear reactor.
So even though it was within Iran's right to refuse this part of the agreement, Iran went along and agreed to export, basically, its excess heavy water so that it will not be used as an excuse by anybody.
So these are all major concessions.
In addition, Iran agreed to not install any new centrifuges for 10 years.
Iran agreed not to install any advanced centrifuges that it has designed over the past several years for at least 10 years.
And Iran has agreed to limit its research and development of advanced centrifuges to a significantly lower fraction of what it is doing now.
So these are all very major concessions.
There are other concessions that Iran made, but these are the most important ones.
And really, all that's going on here, you can tell in context, for people, if you just want to be objective and honest about it, what's really happening here is they're not giving up a weapons program at all.
What they're doing is they're expanding the evidence and the ability for the international community to verify the evidence that, no, really, they're not.
So even though they've never been found in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and they've never been found to have violated their safeguards agreement by introducing nuclear material without notifying the IAEA or anything like that, this is the extra, super, double verified, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt, that they simply are using this nuclear material to make electricity so they can sell their oil.
And that's basically the end of that.
I totally agree.
As you said, Iran has never been found to be actively working on any nuclear program.
They never had any nuclear program to make...
What I mean is they have never been found to have any nuclear program for nuclear weapons.
And in fact, the concessions that they have made is basically giving up some major rights that they have under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in order to satisfy the concerns of the international community.
I believe a lot of these concerns were bogus.
They were based on fake intelligence and so on.
But now, with the new agreement in place, and with Iran allowing a much stricter inspection, the whole world will see that these intelligences were actually bogus.
And there is no evidence that Iran has been trying to make nuclear weapons, obviously not now, but even in the past.
You and I know that there have been lots of allegations about this, but none of them has ever been proven, and there has never been a shred of evidence for all those allegations.
But as you said, with a very tight and intrusive inspection regime in place, now everybody will be able to see that those allegations were fake, and Iran was always in compliance with its obligations.
And in fact, even the totally politicized IAEA under Yukio Amano has been saying consistently in its reports on Iran's nuclear program that it can certify that there has been no diversion of Iran's nuclear program for non-principal purposes.
Although Amano has raised and continues to raise what I consider baseless allegations about Iran's past activity, but at least to the extent that we know about Iran's nuclear sites and nuclear activity, there has never been any evidence that Iran had or has a program for producing nuclear weapons.
And the new agreement will allow the whole world to see that that's indeed the case.
All right.
Now finally, Mohammad, the president of Iran gave a speech on Thursday where he said, Don't worry, we're going to abide by this deal, our end of it, we promise, and all of that.
But then he also said that he would like to end the animosity.
I don't know the exact translation here, but he seemed to be saying, we want real rapprochement with the United States, with Saudi Arabia, with Israel.
Enough of the Cold War against Iran and Iran's Cold War against the rest of the world too, that now we can go back to being a normal country in a normal time, to paraphrase Gene Kirkpatrick here.
What do you think of that?
He did indeed say that.
The word that he used was enmity.
He said we want to end tension and enmity between us and the United States and the rest of the world.
He said this agreement is the first step towards achieving that goal.
He said that we want to work with other countries in the Middle East to end wars in the Middle East.
He said we want to work with the United States and improve our relations with the United States.
And we want to go back to international arena and have peaceful, friendly relationship with the rest of the world.
Now, whether Iran and the United States will actually have, let's say, diplomatic relationship over the next few years, is probably questionable, but there is no question that this agreement will reduce tension between the two countries.
Now, President Obama said in his statement that he's still concerned about Iran's other activities in the region.
But at least as I see it, whatever activities that Iran has in the Middle East is in the direction of confronting radical Sunni groups in Iraq and in Syria and other places.
And in fact, it is the major ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia in that region, that is contributing much to the tension in the Middle East by not only attacking Yemen, but also supporting, at least through its wealthy citizens, radical Sunni groups that have been spreading terror throughout the Middle East.
It was Saudi Arabia that transformed a struggle for democracy in Syria to a sectarian war between Shiite and Sunni.
And it is Saudi Arabia, or at least its citizens, that have provided the major funding for all the radical Sunni groups in the Middle East.
Joe Biden said at Harvard University last October that he was allies of the United States that provided funds and arms for all these terrorist groups in Syria to fight the central government.
And General Wesley Clark, former NATO commander, said that the United States allies created the Islamic State to confront Hezbollah, the Shiite groups in Lebanon.
So there are all these evidence that it is the United States allies that have been contributing much to the chaos and bloodshed in the Middle East.
And of course, we all know that all of this started after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
But Rouhani, in his speech to the nation on Thursday night, said that Iran wants to take concrete steps towards making peace and friendship, not only with countries in the Middle East, and in fact his administration has made several overtures towards Saudi Arabia.
Zarif was supposed to visit Saudi Arabia, but he was cancelled after Saudi Arabia started attacking Yemen.
So Rouhani said and promised the nation that Iran will walk around a path of reconciliation and friendship and peace with the rest of the countries in the Middle East, if they want the same thing, and also with the West and particularly in the United States.
Well, and the Americans have no room to complain since they've been fighting for Iran in Iraq for the last 12 years, whether they've been willing to talk to them about it or not.
So it seems like maybe we really do have a good chance to put the enmity behind us.
Thanks so much for your time, Mohamed.
It sure is great to talk to you again.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, Shaul, that is the great Mohamed Sahimi.
You can find all his articles at original.antiwar.com.
The latest is Iran's nuclear program in the New York Times, a great one.
And that's it for Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.