For Pacifica Radio, June 23, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 interviews now at scotthorton.org.
All right, y'all.
Introducing the great Gareth Porter.
Again, not a rerun, but we've got important Iran news to talk about.
Of course, he is the author of Perils of Dominance about Vietnam and Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
You can find him regularly at Truthout, Truthdig, the American conservative magazine, and this one will be coming out in salon.com, but I got the early draft.
Trump burst a Pompeo Bolton war bubble, but crises will continue.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back, as always.
Very happy to have you here.
So, listen, other than Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, the thing that Trump is the worst on has got to be Iran, and he's taken relations with Iran back down a couple of pegs from where Barack Obama had improved things with the nuclear deal, and he seems to have picked this fight for really no reason but politics and to please Benjamin Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson and others, and so now we're in this position where we could have a war with Iran when we don't really have anything to fight about, except America's economic, mostly, war against them, picking this fight when really they haven't done anything to us at all.
And so it's kind of crazy.
We're stuck between emergency and absurdity.
How can we possibly have a war with this country right now when there's just no consensus for it whatsoever?
And yet, the way you paint the picture, we have a Secretary of State and a National Security Advisor who are working in concert and with the Israeli government to try to create a situation where the United States and President Trump essentially have no choice but to attack Iran.
Is that right?
Scott, you're absolutely right.
It's a war conspiracy.
I didn't use the word conspiracy in my piece, but I could have.
A war conspiracy that is in some ways unprecedented in American history because of the consequences that may very well ensue from such a conspiracy if they were to succeed.
That is to say, the United States getting into a war with Iran would be such catastrophic consequences that it is far beyond anything that we've seen in the major wars that the United States has stumbled or crawled into, not just by mistake, but by design on the part of people who were not considering the true interests of the United States in Vietnam and Iraq, particularly.
This is a whole different storyline.
This is a war conspiracy that involves such serious consequences that it demands action by people in Congress and by anyone in the country who still cares about the fate of not just the United States, but their own community and themselves.
Well, so here's the thing about it, though.
The way you portray the situation in this piece coincides with the way it sort of seems to me is that Trump is actually not leading this parade, for example, in the way that George W. Bush absolutely was in 2002 and 2003.
He doesn't want a war, really, Trump.
He wants a better deal, which is, of course, impossible.
He ruined a perfectly good deal for no reason, and his demands against the Iranians are completely crazy and so severe that they can't possibly accept them, and they must be designed that way.
And so he doesn't really want a war.
He doesn't want to be George W. Bush, but he put himself in this situation.
He doesn't have much of a way out of it.
And then, I guess, as you're saying, his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State surely like it that way.
His Secretary of Defense is a non-entity at this point and out of the debate.
Right.
This war conspiracy is different from the one that got us into Iraq because precisely at that point, at least George W. Bush was all in for the war.
I mean, he was convinced that it was the right thing to do.
Now, the present situation is that Trump did indeed, you know, he campaigned on an anti-Iran hardline policy that he had undertaken in large part, let's face it, because, you know, the big money that he got for his campaign from Sheldon Adelson was clearly premised on the idea that he would support the hardline right-wing Likudist line against Iran and for a war, at least going up to the edge of war, if not going beyond by the United States.
So he has continued to go along that line.
But now he's faced with the real potential consequences of it.
And as we saw in the most recent crisis, he pulled back in the end.
Now, you know, obviously, there's a much more important, bigger story of exactly how that happened, which has yet to be told, at least the full story.
But it appears that he had concerns about doing what he was being urged to do.
But there is always this logic in a war crisis where the president is surrounded by hawks who are pushing him that he tends to go along with them.
And I think that's what was happening in this most recent crisis, where they were trying to prevail on him to carry out a strike, a limited strike, as they always like to put it in quotation marks, against Iran, which certainly would have begun a process that could end in the kind of disastrous, calamitous war that I was referring to.
Not necessarily immediately because Iran would throw everything they had at us, but because it would begin a process that almost inevitably escalates very quickly unless the president steps in.
So I think, you know, Trump does have different instincts here from his advisers, from both Bolton and Pompeo, who are part of this conspiracy hatched with the cooperation and close cooperation with Israel.
As I document, I have documented in other cases and document in this piece that I've now just filed.
And I think that is the hope that we have, that Trump may still pull away and indeed might in the very near future.
It's not impossible that he will fire at least Bolton, if not both Bolton and Pompeo.
And that would be a huge benefit to the American people if that happened.
I'll tell you.
All right.
So now, in terms of the most recent crisis, Thursday night, reportedly, the U.S. almost bombed Iran.
And Trump called it off at the last minute.
And there's a few different points here I just want to lay out real quick before I let you comment.
One is something that you highlight from the New York Times here, extremely important, way buried down, two thirds of the way through this article in the New York Times, is a senior official from the administration said that actually there was concern inside the White House about whether the drone or this surveillance aircraft that was flying, I guess, behind it, actually did violate Iranian airspace at some point.
And that this was one of the reasons, this is the New York Times now, quoting Trump administration senior officials, this is one of the reasons they call it off.
It wasn't just as he said that 150 people might die.
It was that they thought, you know what, these planes might have crossed the line, and they don't talk about this in the article, but it's an obvious question for us, is whether the Navy did that deliberately in order to try to provoke this crisis, whether the commander of Central Command, General McKenzie, had deliberately ordered the drone and maybe even the plane full of American airmen, or Navy flyers, whatever they call them, to get them shot down in order to precipitate a crisis.
Well, that's one possibility, Scott, that certainly should be examined by a congressional investigation, by congressional hearing.
There's no question about that.
And Trump should be really suspicious about that, too.
If there's a question about whether it was really over the line, there's a question over whether that was deliberate or not.
Well, that's obviously the question that, first of all, needs to be examined, because it's the most serious possibility.
But there, of course, are other possible explanations.
That is human error by people at lower levels.
I mean, you know, we could go back to the 1988 shoot down of the Iran civilian airbus by the Vincennes, which did involve human error.
But at the same time, the Vincennes did, in fact, stray into Iranian territorial waters.
That's a fact that was established later on.
Did you see where General Jack Keane said that he had word, I don't know if he's just spinning for the White House on this, but he said that he had word that the Iranians were upset that somebody low down on the chain of command in the IRGC made this call and that they later backed it up and said, yeah, you're darn right, we did.
And this kind of thing.
But that they were sort of trying to Jack Keane was trying to blame it on a lower level officer on the Iranian side, which I thought the fact that Jack Keane said it, to my mind, is probably is a suggestion that it's probably not true.
Yeah, well, whatever.
I'll take it.
If he's lying us out of war, then good, because most of the time he's lying us into at least surgeon, if not attacking countries outright.
He always wants to escalate them to win them.
So that's the upside of that, for sure.
So and this was something that Trump said, too.
And it was obviously decided on right in the White House.
So what we're going to do is we're going to say, I don't know, this must have been a mistake.
Right.
They had to have had a conversation about that.
Maybe Keane was representing that same thing where Trump said, geez, I don't know that they would even do this.
That just sounds crazy.
Seems like it must have been a lower down level dude who must have done it.
And so maybe we need to be more patient, which, hey, I can't see Hillary Clinton talking like that.
True.
It does.
It does sound like a perfect Trump explanation for what happened.
I would find that credible for sure.
Yeah.
And of course, I mean, that's part of the beauty of Trump is he could say anything.
And that means for good or for ill.
He can just make up any excuse he wants to do the right thing if he has to, like back down when every hawk is trying to get him to do something horrible.
He can just say, geez, you know what?
I figure it was probably a private in their army who did it.
I don't know, because he you know, nothing he says ever has to be true.
So why not go ahead and let him bluff his way out of a conflict?
You know, I don't know.
But the fact that they're not sure that they were not sure whether this drone or the survey, the Navy surveillance plane that was following it straight into to Iranian airspace is obviously a very serious matter.
And that's a that's a huge story in itself.
And it should be either the lead or close to the lead in this in this piece about what happened in that crisis.
All right.
Now, I promise we're going to, you know, back up and, you know, zoom out and look at the broader context of the policy on the American side, like in your article here.
But as long as we're on what happened on Thursday, I want to bring up the reporting of Elijah Magnier, who I know you respect as well as I do, who claims to have sources very close to, you know, leadership inside Iran and explaining essentially their side of the story here.
And essentially what he says is they have a maximum pressure strategy to that the economic war against them being waged by Trump is so much more complete than even the crippling sanctions under Obama, with the lack of waivers for our Asian allies, and these other outs, and that really, their back is up against the wall.
And they're willing to begin acting now, in order to prove that they can hit back and that they have what our military calls escalation dominance, that is, to make it clear to our side that we're playing in their yard, and that they can set the tone.
And in fact, Elijah even thinks that they did, in fact, attack all of the tankers, six tankers in, you know, this time and six weeks ago, that they're trying to send the message that they in fact can hit American and allied interests for very low prices and cause, you know, very high costs of damage on the other side.
And to demonstrate in a deniable way, in a in a way that would not necessarily lead straight to war, that in a war, they can fight very creatively against the overwhelming power of the United States.
And that that's the kind of danger that we're playing with.
Which does make sense.
After all, this is how Franklin Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan into attacking us at Pearl Harbor was to put a full embargo on all of their oil and steel, and all of their ability to trade, and to put them in the position of feeling like they had no choice but to try to get off one good lucky strike.
Well, it's very clear that indeed, Iran is up against the wall, that they do have a strong motive to do something that would, you know, force the United States and its allies, and the leadership of the world economy to take note of the serious cost and risk that they're taking in pushing Iran to the wall the way they are economically.
This is an economic act of war.
Such as the US committed against Japan before World War Two, before the US war against Japan in World War Two, and needs to be viewed in that light.
And Magner is certainly right that that is central to the thinking of the government.
And that that means that there is going to be inevitably, a showdown that involves shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians can very easily engineer.
And so, you know, I think that his report needs to be taken seriously.
And it is quite credible that that is indeed what happened, that the Iranians did in fact carry out the quote, deniable, unquote, attacks on oil tankers and freighters in the vicinity, that is the Sea of Oman.
On the other hand, you know, the scenario that we've seen so perfectly fits the scenario of a false flag set of attacks by Israel, and serves Israeli interests, arguably, even more clearly than it serves Iranian interests, that it is not absolutely clear to me that that's the only explanation.
It's certainly not the only explanation.
And it's not clear to me that it is necessarily the best explanation for what happened.
I think there's still some ambiguities here about whether the sources that spoke with Magner were, in fact, saying that we definitely did this, or simply using this to broadcast a line which the IRGC definitely believes in, and making it look like this was indeed an Iranian move to make it more credible to the world that that's what they're going to do.
So, you know, I'm going to be writing a piece on this.
I promised to do this a couple of weeks ago.
And of course, a lot of water over the dam since then, which has caused me to not to get that done.
And so now I have a more complicated picture to reflect in my analysis.
Well, I mean, we'd be fools to not suspect the Israelis or the UAE.
I kind of, you know, it seems like in both cases, they would have had to have permission from the Pentagon, rather than feel so brave as to just shove this down Trump's throat.
I mean, why would they come at him like that when they could probably get his cooperation, right?
But so that part doesn't feel right to me that the whole thing was a put on that the Americans would have been on.
I don't think they had to have the permission of the Pentagon.
I think they had to have the permission of the UAE.
And that's because these boats that were sabotaged, if you will, were in close proximity to UAE ports.
Well, that's kind of why I suspected the UAE maybe had their own guys do it.
But it seems like still, they would have to worry that when Donald Trump gets his intelligence report, that the UAE bombed their own boat, or the Israelis did it in order to frame Iran, that he might not go along with that.
And I mean, unless they had an agreement to do that in the first place, hey, we're going to frame Iran for a thing, then that makes sense.
Although the way they reacted doesn't, you know, seem to play out at that level.
I don't want to get into the minutiae of this.
But believe me, I don't think the Israelis would have worried about US intelligence getting to Trump the message, the urgent message that, hey, you're being diddled by the Israelis.
That's just not going to happen.
You know, you make a good point.
All right.
Now, one more thing about this.
We also have Pompeo going around telling Congress that yes, Iran is tied to al Qaeda.
And so there to take that to mean that he thinks they can attack Iran based on the authorization to use force from 2001, which is just insane, and just goes to show how far we have come in the revolution within the form of, you know, supposedly the old Constitution of 1787, where the Congress might as well not even exist at all at this point.
Well, I think that's right, as of the moment that this present Congress took over, I have hopes that there's going to be some individuals like the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee who are going to be taking more active role at this point.
So I haven't given up totally on that.
And there are a few Republicans Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and maybe one or two others who are crossing the sides in the Senate to do the right thing on this stuff, too.
So absolutely, that's very important.
Of course.
And they did vote, they passed the 20 resolutions to try to stop the most recent arms sale or the upcoming arms sale to Saudi Arabia in the name of the war on Yemen, too.
So I shouldn't give up on them.
They're all we got the House of Representatives, really, when it comes to the American people trying to put any kind of break on this stuff.
Right.
And by the way, you know, that Trump has now acknowledged that he does not have the authority of Congress to do this.
He tweeted that in the aftermath of the crisis of bombing Iran.
Oh, really?
I did not see that.
Yes, yes.
And that, of course, very explicitly contradicts Pompeo, who said during the week in a meeting with members of the House Intelligence Committee that, yes, we do have the authority of Congress.
We believe we have the authority of Congress to go ahead and make war on Iran.
All right.
Now, so in the last little bit here, can you tell us about Barack Ravid and his reporting out of Israel about the coordination between the U.S. and the Israelis on this?
Well, it's very important because Barack Ravid is arguably the most outstanding national security reporter in Israel.
He has excellent sources within the Israeli intelligence and military community and as well as diplomats.
And he is he's on the major stories.
And he is the one who reported in December of 2017 that that the Israeli government and the Trump administration, that is, the Netanyahu government and the Trump administration had reached an agreement, secret agreement in the White House in December that same month to to organize a working group that would continue to meet for as long as apparently they felt it necessary to coordinate their policies and their strategies toward Iran.
And that was it was laid out in a four point agreement that he actually quoted from.
One of the points was that they would work together on scenarios for escalation with Iran, that is, scenarios that involved escalatory situations involving Iran, which is an astonishing thing to reach a secret agreement on between the United States and a foreign government.
Yeah.
And so Ravid established that in in December 2017.
And he has then since then reported, I think, three times talking about meetings that have been held by that working group, including one that was in April of this year, April 2019.
That is about two to three weeks before the fateful meeting that produced the the Bolton May 5th bolt out of the blue, saying we now have a crisis, announcing a crisis with Iran, saying we're going to send a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Middle East because we now believe that we are under more serious threat.
He also reported that a senior Israeli official and this was a separate report, a senior Israeli official told him that the Israelis had passed on important information, which formed a large part, a significant part of the Bolton announcement.
So this was essentially this announcement was essentially saying that any allied group with Iran, any action that they took is to be read as an action by the Iranian state itself.
So that's the Houthis or that could be Hamas or Hezbollah in Palestine or in Lebanon or essentially or any old Shiite militia in Iraq, whether it has any tie or whether it's acting on behalf of Iran or not.
As long as it's close enough, they're sitting there trying to throw their horseshoes at it and get it essentially come up with a pretext.
And yet, I mean, all the reporting and this was amazing really to see, right, was immediately the leaks in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, all of which represent the CIA essentially saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is all overblown.
If anything, what they're doing, say like in Iraq, as you mentioned in your article here, is they're preparing for defensive measures in the event of war.
They're not preparing to start a war with the USA, number one superpower, global hegemon.
They're preparing to get attacked by us.
Which raises a really important series of points about just how hard they could hit back in the event of a real war.
I mean, there's no question that America's military eventually could carpet bomb Iran off the face of the earth, even without nukes, that our infantry could invade and smash their armored divisions and what have you from somewhere, I guess, from Kuwait, that it would cost a lot, far greater than anything that we saw, that we've seen from, for example, the terrorism that's been the result of the blowback from George Bush, Sr.'s Iraq War One, which lasts to this day.
Well, I think it would exact a much more serious cost on the precious investments of the US military and the Pentagon than any war we've seen so far.
In other words, there would be in one sudden burst of Iranian missiles, you would have American bases throughout the Middle East, and it's warships in the Persian Gulf, subject to destruction or serious damage.
And so that's something that the US military and the Pentagon are both wary of, even though they are obviously playing with fire, or at least CENTCOM commander, Central Command, Commander Kenneth McKenzie, is playing with fire in the role that he is playing in helping to set up this crisis with Iran.
And that's part of the story that hasn't been told.
I'm going to talk about that in the near future.
Yeah, look, I mean, you got to start with our guys who are right now still embedded with the Shiite Iraqi army, and fighting Iraq War Three and a Half against what's left of the Islamic State in Western Iraq there, the ISIS fighters in Western Iraq.
And in the event of war with Iran, all those guys are dead like Order 66 in a day.
That's it.
Then you have, of course, the Bagram Air Base, and you have, you know, I don't know if people realize that America is the dominant power in this other region, far away from our homeland, where we have this massive naval base at Bahrain, where the Fifth Fleet is stationed, a massive air base at Qatar.
And then, of course, Lord knows how many bases we still have in Saudi Arabia.
And then, all the oil resources, oh, and there's bases in UAE and wherever else.
And then, all those oil resources up and down the western side of that Persian Gulf, all within missile range, and all fair game in a real war.
I mean, not fair game, according to me, but to be expected to be hit in a real war.
Right.
And so, we are, as I say, playing with fire.
And I think that, generally speaking, the civilian officials of the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are extremely wary of this.
They prevented the war that Dick Cheney wanted to start in 2007.
They sat on it and it didn't happen because of that.
I think that could happen again, but it's less certain at this point because of the change of leadership in the Pentagon.
We don't know what the position of the replacement for, or the permanent Secretary of Defense that Trump is now nominating, Esper, what his views are on this, whether he's ready to follow the extremists, or whether he's going to be responsive more to Trump's instincts on Iran.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, everybody.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
He is, of course, the author of Manufactured Crisis, the truth about the Iran nuclear scare underlying this entire conflict, of course.
And you can find him at Truthout, at Truthdig, at the American Conservative Magazine.
And this one is going up at Salon.com.
It's called Trump Burst a Pompeo-Bolton War Bubble, But Crises Will Continue.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Thanks, Scott, as always.
All right, you guys, and that is Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM, in LA.
See you next week.
