Man, you need some Liberty Stickers for the back of your truck.
At LibertyStickers.com, they've got great state hate, like Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Democrats want your guns.
U.S. Army, die for Israel.
Police brutality, not just for black people anymore.
And government school, why you and your kids are so stupid.
Check out these and a thousand other great ones at LibertyStickers.com.
And of course, they'll take care of all your custom printing for your band or your business at TheBumperSticker.com.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives, more than 2,700 interviews now going back 10 years at ScottHorton.org.
We're here live from 11 to 1 Texas time, Monday through Friday, less Thursday, on NoAgendaStream.com.
You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash Scott Horton Show.
And our guest today is Mohammad Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC.
And of course, he's an Iranian expat and expert on Iranian politics and American Iran policy.
He's got a gigantic archive at AntiWar.com and at PBS Frontline's Tehran Bureau, which he's now left because he's got his own new website, which I was trying to Google it, and I can't remember what it is anymore.
But welcome back to the show, Mohammad.
Good to see you again, or talk to you again.
Hi, Scott.
And it's good to be back in your program.
The website name is Iran News and Middle East Reports.
Right.
Iran News.
And then what's the address again?
It's imenews.com.
I-N-E News.
Like Iran and Middle East News.com.
All right.
Sorry about that.
No problem.
I'll get that right on the way out.
I promise.
No problem, Scott.
Well, thank you.
You're very kind.
All right.
First of all, before we get into your great article that you wrote for AntiWar.com about the long history of lies about Iran, which is great, I was hoping that you could give us your kind of brief appraisal of the last meeting on the at least so-called nuclear talks between the P5 plus one, that's the U.N. Security Council, I guess, plus Germany and Iran, the Almaty II Summit.
What do you think?
Well, personally, I didn't have high hopes for the negotiations.
And as it turned out, people like me were right.
The reason I didn't have high hopes was because I don't think American and Western diplomacy towards Iran's nuclear program is realistic and may not, in fact, be intended for finding a diplomatic solution to the problem over Iran's nuclear program.
The reason is that the expectations of the United States and its allies of Iran for the negotiations to progress is totally unrealistic and is not what one may call realistic diplomacy.
Every nation, when negotiating a major treaty with the outside world, has some winning cards.
And it is clear that that nation is not going to give up its winning cards in return for close to nothing.
Iran's winning card in its negotiations with the Western power are the Fordow enrichment facility south of Tehran, which is buried deep underground in the mountain, and its demonstrated ability to enrich uranium at 19.75 percent, which means that Iran can enrich uranium to a high level if it decides to.
Therefore, if the West wants Iran to limit, in some sense, its nuclear activity and nuclear program, and in particular, if the West wants Iran to either suspend enrichment facility at Fordow and end enrichment at 19.75 percent, it needs to make major concessions to Iran because these are the two winning cards that Iran has.
But the United States and its allies are offering practically nothing to Iran while demanding that Iran should suspend all enrichment activity at Fordow.
And so what you're saying is the Americans, we keep having these talks, the Iranians have put themselves in a situation where they have these two big cards to play, these two things that they could give up their ability to enrich up to medium enriched, whatever exactly you call it, but obviously less so far, less than weapons grade uranium, but the demonstrated ability to go that high if they wanted to, and just the extra number of centrifuges they now have spinning at their separate facility at Khan, the Fordow facility there, that the Americans are just kind of on the face of it.
They're not really serious because they're demanding you give up these two giant ace cards and we'll consider perhaps maybe lifting a little bit of some of the sanctions if we get around to it after your complete capitulation, which is not a serious position at all because they know going in that the Iranians couldn't possibly accept that.
And so they won't.
Exactly.
I mean, this is exactly my point.
And you put it greatly.
If they are serious when they say that we want to find a diplomatic solution for Iran's nuclear program and the standoff over the program, they must make a serious proposal that would convince the Iranian leaders that if they give up their part of their nuclear rights and part of the winning cards that they have, they are getting something major in return.
In the Moscow negotiations of last year, the United States demanded that Iran immediately closes the Fordow facility and stop enriching at 19.75%.
In return, they said that we will give you the spare parts for the old civilian aircraft that Iran bought in the 1970s and 1980s and some cooperation on nuclear safety.
But this is not a serious proposal.
First of all, the spare parts for the civilian aircraft, according to civil aviation laws, international civil aviation laws, it is the responsibility of the United States.
And it's European allies to provide their spare parts for the civilian aircraft that they sold to Iran, because these aviation laws tell us that so long as those aircrafts are flying, the seller of those aircraft is supposed to provide the spare parts for it to make sure that the planes are flying safely.
But the United States has refused to do that and has basically forced the Europeans to do the same and also not to sell Iran new aircraft.
And regarding nuclear safety, again, this is the responsibility of the International Atomic Energy Agency to cooperate with Iran regarding nuclear safety, because Iran is a signatory of NPT and also a member of the agency.
So these two so-called concessions were offered to Iran in return for Iran giving up the major two winning cars that it has, namely Fordow facility.
And it is interesting.
They don't, the United States and its allies, they are not making any statement or any demand on Natanz enrichment facility.
Why?
Because they think that they can bomb Natanz enrichment facility if they want to and destroy it.
But because they cannot do the same thing with the Fordow facility, they basically want Iran to do the job for them by closing it or by stop using it.
And obviously Iranian leaders may be anything, but they are not crazy and they are not going to give up these two major winning cars that they have in return for nothing.
The United States and its European allies are not willing to, for example, to lift some of the backbreaking sanctions that they have imposed against Iran.
They have sanctioned Iranian oil exports.
They have sanctioned Iranian petrochemical industry.
And most importantly, in my view, they have sanctioned Iran financial institutions and banks.
And they have tried to basically, as General James Mattis, the central commander, said recently, they have tried basically to bring Iran to its knees.
So sanctions, as they have imposed, is not actually a tool for diplomacy, but it is for bringing the Iranian people and the Iranian nation to their knees.
And that is not going to work.
We know that the sanctions are hurting millions of Iranian people, but these sanctions haven't changed the calculation of Iranian leaders and haven't changed the positions of Iranian leaders.
And if we want to be fair and objective about this, if I were in the position of decision making for Iran, I would perhaps do the same thing.
I would not give up what I have and what I have earned after two decades of trying to set up a nuclear program in return for nothing.
And so that's why this diplomacy, as it is being carried out by the United States and the allies, is not going to go anywhere.
At the same time, the U.S. needs to show that it is still involved in diplomacy, because apparently the Obama administration thinks that if diplomacy is stopped, then it has to bring up the subject of attacking Iran or the pressure by the Wall Party and Israel lobby will be too high to resist it.
And it also may provoke Israel to attack Iran, which would drag the United States into a war with Iran also.
So they also need to show that they are basically engaged with Iran diplomatically, but at the same time, they are not making any serious offer.
The most serious offer to Iran would be a step-by-step process, whereby for every step that Iran takes, there has to be a proportional and realistic reciprocal step by the United States and its allies.
But when they say that stop enriching uranium at Fordow and we lift sanctions on, for example, you know, the purchase of gold from outside world, that's not a serious offer.
If they are really serious about diplomacy, they must at least propose that in return for the suspension of enrichment for a fixed period of time at Fordow, we are going to lift sanctions on Iranian financial institutions or central bank, or at least develop new provisions where the regular commerce, the non-military commerce between Iran and outside world would not be sanctioned.
But they haven't done that, and therefore it was obvious to people like me that the negotiations in Almaty was not going to go anywhere, and it didn't go anywhere as predicted.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's too bad, too, because it's so obvious going into it.
But I guess, you know, the silver lining in what you say there, Mohamed, sounds to me is just the status quo, because the status quo is horrible.
I mean, hell, for the Iranians, it's absolutely horrible, but it's so much better than war.
And since Obama's not willing to really deal fairly, I mean, after all, the breakout capability, such as they have, you know, to relatively quickly make a nuclear weapon if they were to withdraw from the treaty and try to, that is their nuclear deterrent, right?
They don't need an actual nuclear bomb.
They just need the ability to make one, because that leads the American intelligence community types to conclude that, well, we could bomb them, but at most that would set them back a couple of years, but it would also highly motivate them to really make bombs now.
And so that's kind of a counterproductive thing.
They can really leave things as they are and keep us from bombing them.
But again, as long as, as you say, as long as Obama can at least pretend to sort of kind of keep negotiating with them, because that puts off the Israelis from starting the war for all of us.
Exactly.
I mean, that's, the Obama administration has put itself in basically a corner where it cannot make progress, diplomatic progress with Iran, simply because it is not willing to take the major steps that it needs to take in order to make progress.
And at the same time, apparently the Obama administration is also not willing to go to war.
But the situation is such that Israel may start attacking Iran, and then the pressure on the president would be too high to resist, and it would drag the United States and the rest of the Western world into a horrible war in Iran.
At the same time, the Iranian people are suffering.
The sanctions have had great effect on the Iranian economy, and the most vulnerable people in Iran have been paying the highest price for these sanctions, which, by the way, are totally illegal, because they are unilateral, they haven't been approved by Security Council, and so on.
I was listening to what Michael Mann, a spokesman for Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, was saying in a press conference after the Almaty negotiations.
He was saying that Iran must carry out its international obligation as specified by the United Nations Security Council.
Well, if what the United Nations Security Council says is the framework for what Iran should do, it should also be the framework for what the West must do regarding Iran.
And these back-breaking sanctions haven't been approved by United Nations Security Council, simply because the Americans and their European allies know that if they want to bring these sanctions up in the Security Council, China and Russia will veto them.
So they have gone their own separate way, have imposed these unilateral, illegal sanctions on Iranian people, not the Iranian government, because the Iranian government position hasn't changed, their calculation hasn't changed.
So the only people who are paying for these sanctions are Iranian people.
So nothing has changed.
But at the same time, you know, we can just pretend that diplomatic efforts are continuing without knowing what's going to happen the next step.
What the Iranians have been saying is that we are willing to make major concessions, provided that the end game is clarified at the beginning.
In other words, if we, for example, going to stop enriching uranium at Fordow, either for a fixed period of time or forever, what is going to happen if we do that?
But the West is not going to, is not willing to specify that.
The West is not even willing to recognize at this point that Iran does have a fundamental right to enrich uranium on its soil, as stipulated by the NPT.
So when they are not willing to recognize the fundamental rights that Iran does have under NPT, then obviously they are also not willing to stipulate what would happen, what would be the end game.
So for Americans, this is the beginning of the game, because they want Iran to take these preliminary steps.
But for Iranians, the most important thing is the end game.
What is going to happen if you make all these concessions?
And obviously, when the distance between the positions of the two sides is the beginning of the game and end of the game, then this diplomatic effort is not going to go anywhere.
And in my view, while the Iranian government does have some responsibility in the failure of negotiations, but the major portion, the lion's share of responsibility for these failing negotiations is with the United States and its European allies, simply because they want a lot of things in return for which they are willing to give Iran almost nothing.
All right, now we could go on about this, but in the last 10 minutes here, I want to give you at least a little bit of time to go through this list of lies, because I'm very familiar with this topic.
As you know, we talk about a lot of this stuff on the show on a pretty regular basis here, Mohamed, but your article starts out with a link to Stephen Walt very politely saying, here are the top 10 media failures, as opposed to just outright lies, about Iran.
And he's got 10 pretty big ones.
And then you say, oh, yeah, well, that's nothing because here's 15 more or something.
And by the time I'm done reading this list, I'm thinking, my God, you know, the Iran that the American people imagine based on what we learn in the media is so far different from anything that is real at all.
I don't even know what the real Iran is like, but I know when to go through a list of lies this comprehensive, this long, it really just goes to show how skewed Americans' views are.
Like, you know, maybe if they picture Iran, they picture just some angry young men burning a flag somewhere or something from a long time ago.
But boy, oh, boy, does the war party lie about this country all day, every day, not just their nuclear program, but everything.
Just go ahead and give us your favorites, I guess.
Well, first of all, my own list, as published by antiwar.com, is not even complete.
As I said at the end of the article, this list can go on and on and on.
And I just gave basically a flavor of it.
And in fact, my list started in 1981.
But I must say that the list should have started in 1980.
In September of 1980, Iraq attacked Iran, and the United States declared that it is neutral.
That was a lie.
Because first of all, the United States encouraged Iraq to attack Iran in revenge for the hostage crisis and in recognition of the fact that the United States actually never recognized the legitimacy of Iranian revolution.
And then, as we know, in 1983, Ronald Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein to tell Saddam that although the U.S. is still officially neutral, which is a lie, but it is tilting towards Iraq.
And that tilting had a lot of consequences for Iran and Iranian people.
Then in 1981, when the United States and Iran signed the agreement for the release of the hostages, the U.S. promised in the Algiers agreement, which is an internationally binding agreement, that it will never interfere in Iranian domestic affairs and it will never impose sanctions on Iran.
It has been doing exactly that over the past 30 years.
We all know the history of all the lies that have been said and have been propagated about Iran's nuclear program, so I don't get into that.
But for example, in 1988, that's one of my favorites, speaking of favorite lies, the U.S. Navy shot down Iranian passenger airliners.
And then in order to cover the crime, it claimed that, first of all, American Navy was international water, not Iranian territorial water, and also it took, mistakenly, the passenger airline with a jet fighter, both of which were so absorbed and so outrageous that provoked international outrage over killing 290 innocent people in a civilian passenger airline.
And in fact, even later on, Admiral William Crow, who was chairman of chief of staff, acknowledged that not only the U.S. was in Iranian territorial water, but also it would be very difficult to actually mistake a passenger airliner with a jet fighter, especially, supposedly, a F-14 fighter, which the United States had provided Iranian Air Force in the 1970s, so they knew exactly what type of fighters they were dealing with.
Then, for example, in 1996, the Khobar Tower in Saudi Arabia was bombed and 19 U.S. servicemembers killed.
Initially, it was claimed immediately that Iran had a hand in it, but, for example, the 9-11 Commission said that when the news of this bombing spread, Osama bin Laden rejoiced, and William Perry, who was Bill Clinton's defense secretary when the bombing occurred, said that he believed that al-Qaeda was actually involved, not Iran.
And in fact, Prince Nayef, who was at that time minister of interior in Saudi Arabia, said that this was something done internally and had nothing to do with Iran.
But even now, after something like 17 years, people still, some people in the war party, they still blame Iran for Khobar Tower bombing, which was, in fact, Iran's fault.
Then there have been a lot of speculation about, for example, Iran having a hand or at least having knowledge of the September 11 attacks, for which no evidence has been presented, whereas, for example, a lot of evidence has been presented that Israelis knew in advance that war was coming, but they never talked about it.
And, in fact, Iran offered to the U.S. to exchange members of al-Qaeda who had escaped to Iran in order not to be captured by U.S. forces, and Iran has imprisoned them for many, many years, Iran offered to the U.S. to exchange them with the leadership of Mojahedin Ghafi, MEK, but the U.S. refused to do it, simply because the U.S. wants to use MEK as its proxy in the war that it is secretly waging against Iran.
We all know that Seymour Hersh reported that U.S. special forces have trained MEK forces somewhere in Nevada.
So, obviously, they were not going to take Iran's offer.
Then, for example, Israel claimed that it had captured a cargo ship that was full of weapons and was going to give the weapons to Palestinians, and it had come from Iran.
But The Guardian published a very good article about it, showing a lot of holes in Israeli claims, and at the same time, Israeli claims were changing almost hourly about what had happened, what had really happened with that cargo ship, and eventually that faded away because it was just too ridiculous to believe it.
Then, for example, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected as president of Iran in 2005, there was immediately huge talk of him having a hand in the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in November of 1979.
I've forgotten about that one.
And that was so outrageously wrong and such a lie, and I wrote, in fact, a long article about it explaining who was behind the takeover of the American embassy.
And, in fact, Ahmadinejad himself, because of him being strongly anti-communist, he had opposed taking the American embassy in Tehran, and he had said that if we are going to take any embassy, he was opposed to taking any embassy, but he said if we are going to take any embassy, we should invade the embassy of the Soviet Union, which is a bigger threat to Iran than the United States.
That was, of course, his opinion.
All right, I'm sorry, we've got to leave it right there, Mohamed.
Thank you so much for your time.
Everybody, it's The Long History of Lies About Iran by Mohamed Sahimi at Antiwar.com.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, see you all tomorrow.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and, of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out YouTube.com/Scott Horton Show for some examples and email Scott at Scott Horton dot org for more details.
See you there.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org.
CNI stands against America's negative role in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war party's relentless push to bomb Iran, and the roles played by twisted Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in justifying it all.
The Council for the National Interest works tirelessly to expose and oppose our government's most destructive policies, but they can't do it without you.
Support CNI's push to straighten out America's crooked course.
Check out the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's Council for the National Interest dot org.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
Like I told you before, the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF dot org represents the best of the libertarian movement.
Led by the fearless Jacob Hornberger, FFF writers James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory, and many more.
Write the op-eds and the books, host the events, and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better.
Help support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom.
Or to contribute, just look for the big red Donate button at the top of FFF dot org.
Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here inviting you to check out WallStreetWindow dot com.
It's a financial blog written by former hedge fund manager Mike Swanson who's investing in commodities, mining stocks, and European markets.
WallStreetWindow is unique in that Mike shows people what he's really investing in and updates you when he buys or sells in his main account.
Mike thinks his positions are going to go up because of all the money the Federal Reserve is printing to finance the deficit.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow dot com.
And Mike's got a great new book coming out.
So also keep your eye on writermichaelswanson.com for more details.
