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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Next up is Yosef Butt, Ph.
D.
He's from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
He is research professor and scientist in residence at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation there.
Welcome back to the show, Yosef.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Absolutely.
And I really appreciate this piece that you wrote for the Reuters there.
Excellent work.
Reset on Iran now.
Many assertions of fact in here that are, well, not just hardly ever raised by anyone, but also are correct and extremely important.
And so I really value this thing.
There are so few people who really have their act together on the Iran issue like you do.
So let's go through this here.
What you're saying in the broad stroke is that it's time for Obama to give up on stalemate and to really try to work things out with the Iranians, and particularly, of course, on the nuclear issue.
Yeah, you know, there's obviously a number of facets to the issue.
But, you know, if we are talking about the nuclear issue and we are interested in resolving it, there are ways to do it.
And clearly, the policies that we have right now, the sanctions, ever increasing sanctions, and that don't seem to be working very well.
So my point in the piece was broadly that we've mishandled the Iran dossier from probably, I'd say, from the late 1980s through now.
And our response to the nuclear issue of applying sanctions doesn't seem to be working.
So this gives Obama some political breathing room to try a new policy.
Of course, I'm assuming here that we are interested in resolving it.
But, you know, some elements would say that it's bigger than the nuclear issue.
And then, you know, sanctions are just about trying to penalize Iran, you know, even outside of just nuclear concerns.
This is the problem going back to the Iraq War, too, or, you know, any of these issues.
You have to confront the real issues and you have to confront the pretext, too.
Like, actually killing a million Iraqis is not a very good way to liberate them, even though we all know the mission never had anything to do with liberating anyone.
But you still have to make that argument because that's the argument everybody else is making.
So you're kind of stuck there, sort of thing.
So you're right.
On one hand, oh, my God, the nuclear issue.
Let's see if we can find a way to solve it.
But on the other hand, we all know that they don't want to solve the nuclear issue because that's their perfect pretext for treating Iran like an outlaw nation and never forgiving them for declaring independence from the empire back in 1979.
Well, you know, I'll stick to the nuclear component of the dialogue.
But, you know, clearly what we are doing with sanctions and all that does not seem to be changing their nuclear calculus.
And just what we've seen now with the elections, we were, you know, we were saying the thinking was, you know, suddenly Iran will liberalize and people will rise up and see how badly they're doing because of the sanctions and we'll get more liberal politicians in power.
But the opposite seems to be happening.
The Guardian council just disqualified a couple of people that one of them could have could have liberalized the politics.
But he was disqualified.
Yeah, well, and of course, all the reports are out of Iran that only the innocent suffer from the sanctions.
The Revolutionary Guards are doing just fine, of course.
And the green movement sort of upper middle class leisure time type activist types no longer have any leisure time to participate is, you know, as frightened as they are to participate in politics anyway.
Now they're just struggling to get by under the sanctions.
So we've completely killed the reform movement, which, you know, I know you want to stick to the nuclear science and whatever.
But I think that is arguably part of the policy, too, is to marginalize the moderate so that we don't have anyone, quote unquote, reasonable to deal with.
We rather we the U.S. government would rather have an Ahmadinejad figure that they can point to and say, see, we can't deal with people like this.
You rather than something like a Rafsanjani or somebody else.
You know, I'm not sure how much of it is maliciousness and how much of it is just, you know, basically incompetence or inertia.
My feeling is most of it, you know, just as an observer on the political side, I think a lot of it is just inertia, especially from our Congress that, you know, there's no downside to demonizing Iran and, you know, voting for more sanctions and more policies.
Domestically, there's there's no problem with with that.
So, you know, the Congress is happy to go along with those policies.
But in the long term, that's not not to our benefit.
So, you know, you know, bottom line, you know, our policies don't seem to be working.
I think what this gives us or gives Obama is a chance to say, you know, let's let's recalibrate.
You know, let's try to find a solution.
Now, all indications are that until now, contrary to what's been propagated in the mainstream media, it's the U.S. and the so-called P5 plus one, the U.N. Security Council nations and Germany that are sort of dragging their feet and not eager to find a solution to sort of the concocted nuclear crisis.
And I say concocted because, you know, Iran was found in noncompliance with its safeguards obligations in 2005.
And that wasn't because it was making nuclear weapons or anything, but it had failed to declare some nuclear material.
It hadn't diverted it to weapons uses.
That wasn't the finding.
But in any case, noncompliance, this finding was found.
It's sort of a subjective finding to begin with, you know, somewhat politicized finding.
However, by 2008, Iran had resolved all of the legal issues as far as the safeguards agreement is concerned.
So, you know, it should have gotten off the hook in 2008.
But then because of the basically ad hoc way that the IAEA is administered, they said, well, we have these other concerns, too.
You know, besides the legally substantive issues, they just brought in a whole bunch of other things like, oh, we'd like to talk to this guy and we want to go into that military base, which wasn't a declared nuclear facility.
We want to look into your missile program.
Now, the IAEA, even if they were to look into Iran's missile program, they have no capacity and no capability in-house to judge that.
So, you know, why are they interested in looking at it?
If I was the Iranians, I'd be very suspicious of letting foreign inspectors look at my missile program, which they have no jurisdiction over.
So, you know, there's a lot of problems in the way that the IAEA has been handling the issue, likely at the behest of Western powers, which fund them for the most part.
Right.
Well, now, I think what you just said, it's actually very confusing.
And judging by what the so-called experts even in the media have to say about, they seem confused.
And I don't just mean like David Sanger, who I don't think is very honest about it, but even just kind of say the run-of-the-mill AP reporter covering this or whatever.
I don't think that they understand the difference between, as you say, what Iran is mandated legally to do in their cooperation with the IAEA under their safeguards agreement, under the nonproliferation treaty versus what they're mandated to do in terms of obeying the IAEA, the same enforcement agency, but this time acting under the auspices of resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council.
And so just because and in fact, the IAEA doesn't help either.
Right.
Because they put out a report every couple of months that combines it all into one.
So they'll say, oh, yeah, I mean, they're completely in compliance with their safeguards agreement and everything.
But also we have all these other outstanding questions that they won't cooperate on and whatever.
It makes it look like they're really in violation of their agreement when really they're only in violation of John Bolton and Barack Obama's diktats.
And so who cares about that?
That's different.
That's not anything they signed up for.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'll be the first to agree with you that the issue has been miscast by the media.
And in that regard, there was an independent study from the University of Maryland by Jonas Siegel and Serena's.
Yeah.
Talk with him last week or two weeks ago.
Siegel.
Yeah.
So, you know, and if you speak with if you raise these points with the people, the reporters, they'll they'll say, well, you know, it's not really our business to analyze this.
We're just we're just going to report what the U.S. government says or the IAEA says.
And, you know, even that maybe would be fine if they got if they really went out of their way to split some countervailing viewpoints to even within Western experts.
You know, there's a number of Western experts who are critical of the way the IAEA is handling the issue.
So, yeah, no, I agree that.
Yeah.
The substantive issues of the Iran's compliance with their IAEA safeguards obligations has been confused with extra random concerns that have been introduced through the U.N. Security Council agencies.
And it's in basically an extra judicial way.
The U.N. Security Council has inflated the legal authority of the IAEA, even though there's no basis in international law to do that.
So, yeah, you know, I'd encourage an investigative reporter to do a detailed study of that.
And, you know, people like Seymour Hersh had done some studies like that.
But more needs to be done to to uncover how this has been handling.
I'd especially like somebody to look into the funding of the IAEA.
And a lot of this is publicly available.
So from what I've done myself, you know, just the IAEA documents which are openly available, you'll see a quarter of the funding comes from the U.S.
If you put in the allies, you know, France, Germany, Japan, U.K., Spain, Netherlands, Korea, etc., you'll see that 65 percent of the funding of the IAEA comes from the U.S. and close allies.
So that's a problem in itself.
That's a conflict of interest.
So it's not a surprise that Amano, the director general, is is clearly biased in the way he writes his reports and, you know, generally act.
Well, and people can read the State Department cables leaked by the heroic Bradley Manning, where Amano describes himself to the Americans when he's first taking the job as extremely loyal and willing to go along with whatever the Americans agenda is, etc.
And that's in their words saying, oh, yeah, he came to us on bended knee.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, you know, I think a reform in the way that the IAEA is funded, perhaps if nations pool their money and gave it first to the U.N.
And then the U.N., as you know, one lump sum gave it out to the IAEA.
That was sort of would go a long way toward helping resolve this conflict of interest, because here you have a director general who's, you know, essentially for 65 percent of his funding beholden to essentially one viewpoint.
So it's not a surprise that you'd act that way.
You know, follow the money.
Right.
Right.
Now, I know it's it's your friend Joyner who's the real expert on the treaties and things like that.
But let me ask you this, because you do comment on the at least appearance that the U.N. Security Council are themselves in violation of the NPT for not sharing peaceful nuclear technology as much as they are sworn to do in that treaty to spread the peaceful use of nuclear technology.
But what I'm interested in is whether you think that the U.N. Security Council, because that's all the victors of World War Two and there are all members of the nonproliferation treaty as nuclear weapon states, in fact, right.
Russia, China, U.S., U.K., France, and then what?
Germany is the extra.
But they don't have nukes, right?
Are they all member, all those nuclear weapons state members of the NPT that are also the rulers of the U.N. Security Council, are they not in violation of their signature, their signatures to the nonproliferation treaty by all of these attempts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes?
Never mind helping them, but they're actively trying to prevent.
Yeah, well, you know, it goes back a long way.
So, you know, I think the response would be, well, you know, we think Iran is in noncompliance, so we don't want to help it right now.
But if you look back to back when Iran wasn't in noncompliance back in the 80s, you know, one of the first things that happened after the Iranian revolution was they shut down their nuclear program.
And then they started it up partly because it was very expensive because of the financial arrangements to simply shut it down.
Sometimes you get into these contracts and it's more expensive to shut it down than to keep it going.
So they had foreign contracts for a couple of their reactors from the time of the Shah.
And they first they shut down the program, then they restarted it partly because of these financial reasons.
And then then they went to the IAEA very openly, not in a covert way, very openly and said, you know, we'd like to start up a pilot uranium enrichment facility to make fuel for our reactors.
We want to learn about this process and want to train up our scientists.
And the IAEA was very happy to go along with that.
And they saw that as part of their duties.
But when the U.S. diplomats within the IAEA caught wind of this, they basically shut that down.
And this is this has all been documented by Mark Hibbs in an article for Nuclear Fuel, I believe, from 2003.
So I think that back in the 80s was sort of the time when this political influence over the IAEA began to increase and it began to shut down this technical cooperation with other nations.
Now, you know, there is an argument that, well, this is dual use stuff.
This is not the kind of stuff that you want to propagate to other countries, which is a legitimate argument.
But then don't sign the treaty that says you're going to do that.
Right.
You know, that that's the conflict.
And I've written about this, making a new NPT 2.0 in an article for Foreign Policy titled Radioactive Decay from last year, saying basically, if you want to come up with a new NPT because you clearly don't want to go along with the current one and you shouldn't, you shouldn't want to propagate this dual use nuclear technology everywhere anymore.
I mean, back in the 60s, it was the panacea and it was, you know, this magic technology that was going to solve all your problems.
That's not the case.
We know all the dangers.
And, you know, aside from the waste and proliferation and all that.
So it does seem kind of silly, doesn't it?
Using nuclear technology to heat water and make steam to turn a turbine.
There's got to be a better way to get energy out of fission than that.
You know, I mean, yeah, I mean, we can have another conversation.
Yes.
I bet that could be a long one.
Yeah.
But, you know, sure.
There's a lot of problems with the way that nuclear industries have been subsidized into propagating flawed technology just because they get subsidies from the government.
So they go along with flawed technologies because they're just getting free money.
So if you took that away and the free market came up with a new nuclear reactor design, that would probably be much smarter.
Anyway, coming back to that, I agree with you.
You know, the NPT says that we're going to help these nations and propagate nuclear power and help them out.
And now there's a nuclear suppliers group, which is basically a cartel that only does that very selectively and actually very politically.
So, you know, it's in tatters.
The NPT is in tatters and, you know, it's on its last legs.
And people better start thinking about what comes next, because, you know, what I fear and foresee is just people soon leaving in droves because there is an exit clause in the NPT.
And people will just say it's in our national security interest to leave and goodbye.
Well, you know, the Americans have just done so much to undermine it when it comes to, you know, beating Iran over the head with it all day when they're in compliance and then completely turning a blind eye when it comes to India and helping provide them with nuclear fuel.
And then, you know, when the North Koreans withdraw from the treaty and start making nukes, they don't do anything about that.
Not like I'm saying they should necessarily.
Right.
But just for the inconsistency of it all.
And then, of course, you know, Libya, they give up all of the junk that they bought at AQ Khan's garage sale that they had never even started putting together anyway.
But then they kill him, you know, for giving up his nuclear tech.
And so, you know, if there was a deliberate plot to undermine the nonproliferation treaty, I think we'd be seeing it unfold before our eyes.
Although I'm not necessarily saying that's the case.
But I think a plot would look a lot like what's going on here.
Yeah.
And, you know, the you know, there's a there's a lot of problems with the U.S. helping a non NPT state like India.
And in doing that, you know, just the day to day running of the IAEA is now very ad hoc and very political.
Even, you know, as I mentioned before, a finding of noncompliance.
There's no strict, you know, number of things or checklist that you go through to find a state in noncompliance.
It's, you know, what the board decides, what the director general decides and what they feel like about a certain country to find it in noncompliance.
You know, that's good enough, basically.
And then once you're found in noncompliance, whether it goes on to the U.N. Security Council or not is also not a clear cut.
You know, there's no clear protocol for that.
So, you know, all this all these protocols need to be tightened up and made and depoliticized, basically.
All right.
Now, so would it be right that the Ayatollah's position is that he just wants the breakout capability?
I mean, I'm trying to put myself in his position.
He can't make a nuke.
Even if he was obsessed with making a nuke, he would have to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty and kick the inspectors out and use the uranium that everybody knows he's already got to try to make that weapons grade and then put together a single gun type nuke.
The Americans and the Israelis have bombed him a thousand times over before he got away with that.
But so the reason it seems like they don't is because if they did bomb him and destroy the nuclear facilities he's got, he's just going to double down next time and now he's really going to try to make nukes and he'll bury him under the very deepest mountains in the place and and somehow then he'll be hell bent and he'll really get nukes.
And so it sort of seems like he's already got his breakout capability.
And it only makes sense that he would leave everything right where it's at or or make a deal.
But it doesn't seem to make sense at all to me that he would begin to try to make nukes at this point.
Yeah, well, you know, the director of national intelligence would basically agree with that, that there's no no decisions been made yet to make a nuclear weapon that's been repeated several times from the intelligence agencies, from Western intelligence agencies, even Israeli intelligence agencies.
So, you know, what's being propagated in the media is the capability to make nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, the nonproliferation treaty allows that capability.
You know, Japan has that capability.
Brazil has that capability.
Iran already has that capability.
So, you know, it's a bit odd.
It's basically like saying like the police saying, well, you have a red sports car that can go 200 miles per hour, which, you know, I can't allow that.
You know, you're only breaking the law once you exceed the speed limit, not because you have the capability to exceed the state.
Yeah.
Why do you need a magazine with that much capacity?
Yeah, exactly.
So so, you know, that that's I agree with.
I don't think they're definitely not racing to a nuclear weapon because they're actually converting some of their 20 percent enriched uranium gas into metal form, which is much harder to, you know, they'd have to then reconvert it to gas and then re enrich it, which is a pain.
Basically, they're taking it out of their centrifuges.
So they're not hell bent on racing towards a nuke.
Otherwise, we'd have seen it already.
And like you said, there's IAEA inspectors at the nuclear facilities.
And if we did bomb them, you know, it's not just hypothetical what you said.
That's actually documented by academic research.
That's exactly what happened in Iraq.
You know, the off Iraq civilian reactor was bombed by Israel to prevent them from having the capability to make nuclear weapons.
And what happened, you know, until then, Saddam Hussein was, you know, just thinking maybe in the future he might make a nuclear bomb.
Maybe he won't.
You know, who knows?
But once that happened, he made a crash program to make a nuclear weapon.
And, you know, by the time of the first Gulf War, he was pretty far along, much further than most people thought.
So that the bombing was.
Well, they had no idea.
Right.
The IAEA and the CIA had no idea that he had embarked on a crash program.
The Israelis either.
Exactly.
And it had gone on for years and years from what, 81 to 90 was for 10 years.
He was working hard on seeing if he could get one nuke and they had no idea about it.
That was, of course, the basis for Cheney's supposed skepticism about the CIA saying he wasn't making nukes in 2003, too.
Oh, yeah.
We heard that from you guys before.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
But, you know, by that time, they had much better, you know, much better inspectors on the ground and had learned a lesson.
So, you know, and they've been bombing them for a dozen years in a row, too.
So they pretty much knew whether he was making nukes or not.
Right.
All right.
But, yeah, you're right, though.
That should be at least the lesson from the Osirak attack when it comes to Iran.
And that's the whole thing here, too, is that nobody really has a plan for anything other than a stalemate, really.
Right.
Nobody wants a war.
Even the Israelis.
I mean, they might be mean enough, but they're not stupid enough to really want to start a war with Iran and all the consequences that will entail.
They don't seem to be able to get America to do it for them.
And so but the point of this is just more sanctions, more saber rattling and more status quo ad infinitum, basically.
And that's what you're arguing against here is Obama.
Please stop doing nothing and start doing something a little bit better here.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, one one problem is the problem of miscalculation and mistaken like stumbling into a war, because we do have a lot of firepower on on ships and drones, et cetera, flying around in the Gulf.
So, you know, what happens if one day, you know, something happens to one of our ships or we fire on one of their ships or, you know, some misunderstanding occurs and we stumble into into a conflict which spreads.
So, you know, I think just backing up from it.
What what would we be fighting over?
There's not even all the disagreement right now is just in getting access to some sites and some people that they want to talk to them about things that happened more than 10 years ago.
Right.
Not that Iran is making nuclear weapons.
You know, it's not even nobody's even accusing them of that.
Even our best intelligence agencies.
And that's a consensus view, like 16 or 17 intelligence agencies, is that they haven't even decided to make nuclear weapons yet.
So, you know, I don't even know what the conflict would be about.
But the problem is we might stumble into it, which is which is a problem, especially when the opportunity for a great exercise in American peacemaking is right here.
You know, Obama wants to go down in history is doing something right.
This could be one of them.
Anyway, thank you very much for your time again on the show, Yosef.
It's been great.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it.
All right.
That's Yosef Butt from what is it?
Monterey Institute of International Studies and read them in Reuters reset on Iran.
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