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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We don't see anything like that.
I ain't been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Peter Van Buren.
He used to be a State Department weenie, but now he's an anti-war hero.
He wrote the book, We Meant Well, about his time in Iraq War II and The Ghosts of Tom Jode about the big crash and the aftermath here.
And then his latest is called Hooper's War, a novel of World War II Japan, but it's really about you and me.
He keeps the blog, We Meant Well, and we run pretty much everything he writes also at antiwar.com.
Oh, I should say writes pretty regularly for the American Conservative as well.
Peter Van Buren, welcome back to the show.
Thank you very much.
And thank you for running all my stuff on antiwar.com.
We like it.
It's been a great relationship.
I was just looking back and realized that I've been talking to you and or antiwar.com on and off for about six or seven years now.
Good times.
Hey, I've learned a lot.
Check this out.
As have I.
Welcome back to the United States of America.
You've been gone.
I have.
I've just come back from Iran.
No.
I knew it.
You're a sock puppet agent of a foreign power sent here to deceive me.
Basically, yeah, I think so.
Unfortunately, I have a lot to say as a sock puppet.
If I'm bought off this easy, I should have really entered the being bought off business years ago when my value would have been a lot higher.
Yeah, and you could have stayed working at the State Department, man.
I know.
I know.
Opportunities just flip past me.
Clocking those Tillerson dollars.
All right.
So tell me, you went to Iran.
Why did you go to Iran?
And tell me everything that happened to you there and everything that you learned and thought while you were there.
Go ahead.
Whoa.
I was invited to Iran by an Iranian non-governmental organization for an academic conference.
And the ostensible purpose of the conference was to talk about Israel and Jerusalem and of course, U.S. foreign policy.
And having written a book called We Meant Well about the U.S.-Iraq war that predicted Iran's victory there, I guess they thought I'd have something useful to say to them.
However, the conference was essentially hijacked by the news out of the United States, which both big stories broke while I was there.
One was that the United States, Trump pulled the United States unilaterally out of the 2015 nuclear accords and said he was going to reimpose sanctions on Iran.
And the United States moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Both of these bits of news hit Iran like a ton of bricks.
And I hesitate to mention that they both took place just before the beginning of Ramadan, which, while I doubt the United States is thoughtful enough to kind of plan these things that way.
In fact, both events were planned for a long time.
From the Iranian perspective, from the Middle Eastern perspective, the timing was not seen as an accident.
What I learned in Iran, and I've got an article up today on Reuters.com on the commentary section.
And they tend to get grumpy if you reprint them at antiwar.com.
So proceed with caution.
What I learned is that the United States actions are empowering exactly all the wrong people and are likely to have exactly all the wrong effects.
I had an amazing opportunity.
I spoke, I was able to speak unfettered, uncontrolled with students from four different universities in Iran.
I was able to speak with members of their foreign ministry, with academics and with clerics.
We were able to listen to a hell of a speech by a senior cleric.
And I was also able to talk with people anywhere that I encountered them.
And some of the conversations were translated by my Iranian host.
But some of the conversations, particularly with students, were in English.
And so I feel that the number of people I spoke with and the conditions that I spoke with them under are enough that I'm confident that I'm not being played.
For what it's worth, this is something that I did when I was in the State Department, go around and talk to people and figure out what's going on.
And so for what it's worth, I have some experience and training at it.
The bottom line is that we are empowering the wrong people.
Students in Iran are afraid of the United States.
They have a hard time understanding how their images of America, which are on a personal level, are largely positive.
Based on the cultural infiltration, based on their relatives in the United States, how those positive images contrast with the actions of our government.
Basically, the threats to punish them with poverty because of alleged nuclear activity.
They, as a man and woman, were kind of shocked to hear that they are supposed to rise up and overthrow their government.
That's clearly not where their heads are at.
They are, in fact, shocked that the United States is still questioning the stability and legitimacy of their government after 40 years.
The Iranian revolution in 1979 created the system that they have here, which is a complex theocracy-slash-democracy.
The Iranians, and they took pains to explain this to me, vote for everyone under the supreme leader status, and they have a version of democracy running there.
They were shocked to think that they were supposed to abandon their books and take up regime change simply because Trump has pulled out of this agreement and announced that they should.
If they don't, they're going to raise the price of food to the point where they're going to be hungry.
I spoke with people at the foreign ministry who were pulling out their hair at the inability to find anyone on the American side to talk to.
They asked me, have the Americans given up, was the phrase that was put out so often.
Another explained to me that at this point, exactly who do they think is going to be able to renegotiate anything with the United States?
All of the so-called moderates who were in favor of the 2015 nuclear accords have now been proved wrong.
All of the hardliners who said you can't trust the United States, the United States won't stick with the deal, are now basically running around saying whatever I told you so translates into Farsi.
There is a severe lack of credibility on the part of moderates now inside of Iran because the United States, Donald Trump, pulled the rug out from under them.
The only people that were remotely happy, and they're not happy folks as people, are the clerics, the hardliners, the people that represent the most extreme positions, the ones who chant death to this and death to that.
These are the folks who have been shown that they're right, that the United States can't be trusted, that Iran, which according to the International Atomic Energy Association through the UN, that Iran did what it was supposed to do under the 2015 accords, and still is being accused of lying and cheating by the United States, and the United States is punishing Iran for following those accords.
They think that's just spiffy.
That is exactly what they warned, and they are back in the driver's seat, and they are in a position to negate the moderates who might say, look, maybe we can still talk to America, maybe there's a way around some of these problems.
They're in a position to say, hell no, we should have done what we needed to do all along, which was to continue our march towards threshold nuclear status.
There is a fear among people at all levels that the United States and or Israel will be attacking, militarily attacking Iran at some point in the near future, and that what was supposed to be a period of transition between our two countries has now flip-flopped back to status quo, fill-in-the-blank time when we're back to being – we're not even talking to each other.
I don't want to say enemies because we don't have to be friends to have negotiations, and we don't have to be friends to make treaties that lower the risk of violence.
But basically moved us out of a transition period back into a period of isolation from one another and antagonism toward one another.
It was a hell of a period of time in Iran, and I came home with a sense of the place that I don't think many people have, at the risk of sounding arrogant.
And I certainly know that no one in Washington seems to have this perspective based on the comments that Mike Pompeo made this morning at the Heritage Foundation and what's been coming out of the White House.
Man, so many things here.
Let's start with the last thing.
What did Pompeo say at the Heritage Institute today?
This morning he listed – and I haven't dug into the details – but he essentially said that the United States plans to cripple the Iranian economy with sanctions and that he is recoupling a whole broad range of issues that were purposely left out of the nuclear accords.
Specifically – just back up a second here – what people imagine diplomacy to be is stuff they see on TV where you sign a treaty that ends World War II and the Germans concede unconditionally or whatever.
In reality, diplomacy – especially difficult diplomacy where you've got countries that have opposing interests like the US and Iran – is done in small steps.
You try to identify a discrete problem – in this case, nuclear development in Iran – and you try to work on that.
Because if you try to solve every single issue in one document, you're never going to achieve that.
You have to pick a discrete issue.
You have to decouple other things from that.
I mean the JCPOA is a pretty big step for a first step.
It is.
But if what you're getting at is Pompeo and Trump and the administration aren't satisfied because they want support for Hezbollah and they want medium-range missiles and everything else in there, then… That's correct.
So talk about that.
I mean would it really – if that's what they really wanted to do rather than try to sabotage the negotiations altogether by invoking these issues, could they not have just gone and said, hey, now that we're getting along, let's go ahead and start talking about missiles?
You don't need such missiles.
There's a lot to unpack there.
So first of all, the answer can be all of the above.
Trump and Pompeo – and don't forget John Bolton on the sidelines.
I'm sure he's whispering in people's ears.
Trump and Pompeo both wanted to include this broader range of issues, which includes Iranian support for groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and Iranian ballistic missiles, which of course today are armed with conventional weapons and theoretically could carry any other kind of weapon.
They want to both include those in any agreement and, knowing the Iranian position on these issues, purposely I think put forward those conditions as a way of torpedoing the whole thing.
In other words, one way to make – to force negotiations to fail is to put conditions that are not achievable on the table and make it look like the other guy isn't cooperating.
So looking at this, the ballistic missiles, for example, first of all, Iran has had these missiles for quite some time now.
I don't know how many years, but a lot of years.
And they are part of Iran's defense, and they are an outgrowth of the 1980s missile wars where Saddam Hussein – oh, yeah, backed by the United States – launched missiles indiscriminately into Iranian cities.
And Iran has developed its ballistic missiles so that it can defend against this and act as its deterrent against anyone else doing something similar to this.
Imagine a 9-11 level of fear and paranoia driving the Iranians.
Now, you don't have to like that.
You don't have to think it's a good thing.
But you damn well better understand it because it remains something that is essentially non-negotiable for the Iranians.
You simply can't tell them, please disarm yourselves of your only effective deterrent, and then we'll talk some more about other issues.
That simply is unrealistic.
The support for Hezbollah – Look, I'm not going to play the clip because it would take too long, but I have the clip – people have heard it – of John Bolton on an AIPAC conference call a decade ago saying, Well, you know, unfortunately, our new sanctions and other maneuvers did not have the effect that we were hoping, which was we wanted the Iranians to leave the nonproliferation treaty, to be so fed up by our intransigence that they give us a fake excuse for war is basically what he's saying.
And so that's what this looks like to me, is they're just invoking these missiles as sabotage.
I think that's what that looks like.
As far as supporting Hamas and Hezbollah and the other groups in Yemen and things like that, again, no one here – and I am certainly not saying Hezbollah and Hamas and those folks are good people or anything along those lines.
I'm looking at it from a third-party position and trying to see it in geopolitical terms.
Well, it was made clear to me actually by a guy from the Iranian foreign ministry who said, you know, so you're asking us to withdraw our support for fighters in places where the United States has boots on the ground.
In other words, you can militarize these locations, but we can't.
Yeah, and shut your mouth about the fact that we're on Iran's side in Iraq and sort of kind of even in Syria, maybe not against al-Qaeda, but against ISIS there.
You know, it's funny, though I said earlier in our conversation that I felt that I spoke openly and everyone spoke to me openly.
There were just two subjects that weren't allowed to really blossom.
One is you are not allowed to criticize the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
It simply isn't done.
You can kind of snip at the edges by talking about the nation or social problems or things like that, but you can't.
No one was going to be interested in that.
But the other subject that was very off limits was U.S.-Iranian cooperation in Iraq.
People deflected those.
I often tried to start those discussions and they were deflected by many, many people.
They just didn't really want to get into that, which was interesting.
Nonetheless, and that's something to explore in a future interview about why that might be, but since the United States doesn't talk about it either, maybe there's a gentleman's agreement.
Nonetheless, the idea of saying that, well, the United States is allowed to militarize, invade, slash put boots on the ground in any country we want, but if anyone else does it, well, that's bad.
Again, you have to look at it from somebody else's perspective and realize that you look like a complete fool demanding those things from the Iranians.
Now, the point of the nuclear accords was not to resolve every U.S.-Iranian issue or to eliminate Iran's place in the power structure of the Middle East.
That's not what it was about.
What it was about was changing Iran's threshold nuclear status from a couple of months to a couple of years.
Now, threshold status, it means how long, if I said go right now, how long would it be until you had a working nuclear weapon?
And the longer that is, the safer everybody is, the more time it gives us in between to find a solution.
So, Iran is never going to not have some form of a nuclear program.
Many countries do.
The Saudis do.
The Israelis, well, yeah, the Israelis do.
Japan does.
Lots of countries have some form of nuclear program.
But Iran will also never have a nuclear weapon time of war because that would be the red line.
Israel would simply throw every rock and stone in the country at them at whatever cost because nuclear weapons for Iran would change everything, and that's too big a red line.
So, the question, the JCPO, the nuclear accords simply were designed to delay the threshold from a couple of months, which is theoretically where Iran was approaching in 2015, to a couple of years, which is what the treaty, the accords really are aiming at.
Slowing this down, giving us more time between the initiation of a crisis and the mushroom cloud.
And that's it.
And so, by walking away from this treaty, the United States thinks, Bolton thinks he's taunting Iran into stepping too close to that red line and giving us the justification for war and or Israel the justification for war.
But it's stupid.
The Iranians are not idiots.
They're not going to step on that red line.
They know where it is.
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Yeah, that's kind of been my thing all along.
I think we have plenty of reason for optimism that they're going to stay within the deal as best they can.
Even if the Europeans end up saying, Well, we can't deal with the U.S. Treasury Department at this point.
We have to end up leaving the deal, too.
The Americans are making us.
They're still in the NPT.
So this gets back to the real question about Iranian politics.
Just how humiliated is the President Rouhani for signing this deal with Obama?
Just how badly is he and his faction to suffer for this?
And just how much benefit is this going to provide to the Ahmadinejads out there?
The guy's cucked, I mean, to use the young people's term.
I had a person from the foreign ministry say to me in a moment of too much candor, he says, you know, Rouhani doesn't have the power to negotiate anymore with the United States.
And one of his colleagues jumped right in in Farsi.
And there was a very sharp exchange between them.
And then my interlocutor corrected himself and said, Well, I meant he probably doesn't have the power under the Constitution.
You know that's what I meant.
But it was pretty clear what they were saying.
Think about it just in human terms.
The guy who was wrong is not the guy who's going to be leading the next round.
Yeah, we're not talking about the United States here.
We're talking about over there and other countries where there's accountability under their form of republic.
Go ahead.
Context is important.
And so the bottom line is that it was clear to me that the United States has empowered the wrong people, that if there is any shred of legitimate strategy on America's part, that backing out of these sanctions and attacking the Iranian economy is going to provoke more democracy, more regime change or bring them to the negotiating table.
If there's anything other than just trying to torpedo this, if that is, in fact, anyone's actual strategy, it will not work.
I saw nothing that would suggest that's going to work.
I saw nothing to suggest that there is widespread dissatisfaction with with the government.
It's a country, by the way, it's a country that is perfectly functioning.
You know, everything works.
The stores are full of products.
You know, it's been all these reports about water shortages.
It certainly was not anything I saw anywhere.
Well, and let's say, I mean, the point about just how stable the regime is, is sort of all important here, because it's a huge part of the Bolton narrative is that if we push them, they'll fall over.
And I mean, the thing of it is like you look at, for example, and this is just a metaphor.
It's I'm getting to the question at the end.
Right now, Trump is incredibly unpopular.
I mean, his unpopularity rating is right up there with George W. Bush at the end of his two terms.
And, you know, he came in as a very uncredible president.
Look who was up against him is the only reason he won.
But so does anybody think that that means that the national government of the United States grip on power here is tenuous and is ready to fall apart at any time?
That our 50 state legislatures and governors and state police forces are all at the brink of disillusion?
You know, because of this, that the American regime is threatened in any way by this.
And then so my question then is, so you talk about Rouhani is so unpopular now after his humiliation here is is I mean, how would you compare it in terms of how unpopular maybe even Khamenei is versus how unpopular the regime itself is and whether it is really threatened?
You know, I that's a very broad question, and my experience was nowhere at that level of broadness.
But but I can say what what I experienced, which is that there was nothing in my time there in any conversation that suggests that people are questioning the validity of their government, that these are people who are interested in taking to the streets or anything like that.
And I say that having been in countries where the government has been teetering, I've seen what that looks like when people are getting ready to demand change, perhaps even even violently, where the streets are flooded with protests and things like that.
That was not what I was picking up in any sense of that word.
The Iranian system has been in place for 40 years.
It has survived everything the U.S. has thrown at it over those 40 years.
The students who generally are the ones you think are going to lead all this, you know, are young kids with aspirations.
They have interests in the world.
They they they want to travel.
They want to see things.
They're not saying, gee, you know, I'm going to take sophomore year off and become and try to blow up a train station or something.
That that isn't the sense in any sense of the word.
And then the country, as I said, the country is functioning.
There are airplanes and trains that run all over.
And the roads are there and people have cars and the stores are full of stuff.
And the markets are vibrant and people talk about their travel around the country.
I mean, international travel is difficult for them for all sorts of reasons.
But this sense that you would get from listening to Bolton and Pompeo and the people who echo them that this is a country teetering is is I hate to say it.
It's a joke.
That's not what's going on there.
As best I can tell.
And to expect that that trying to force poverty onto Iran is going to do anything but like it's done everywhere else.
The United States has tried to force regime change through poverty.
Look at Cuba.
Look at North Korea.
You know, we've tried in sanctions to basically punish the people to the point where they're going to give up and change their government.
Well, it just hasn't happened.
There's kind of a historical record to look at here, both in Iran and at other parts of U.S. foreign policy.
That coupled with my my on the ground observations for what they're worth adds up in one direction, which is that what Pompeo and Trump are proposing will not work and will actually be counterproductive to what they claim are American interests.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I know you got to go.
I hope you're going to write a few more articles about your time over there.
And we can maybe do a part two of this interview because I ain't done with you yet.
Absolutely.
I'm hoping that the piece is running on Reuters today on the commentary.
And I've got another piece that's in editing at the American Conservative that should come out this week.
That's basically similar ideas, but a little more cheeky in style.
So perhaps a more entertaining read.
So stay tuned for that.
OK, thank you.
Peter Van Buren.
I appreciate it.
Bye bye.
All right.
And his piece is I just visited Iran.
Here's what I heard about the U.S. in Reuters.
All right.
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