For Pacifica Radio, July 19th, 2020.
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 editorial director of Antiwar.com and the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Introducing today's guest, again, it's the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist and author of the great book, Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
And his latest book is The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, From CIA Coup to the Brink of War.
And that is co-authored with the former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, is how the book gets its title.
Gareth is not CIA, I promise.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, my friend?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back on your show.
Very happy to have you here.
And there's such important news.
Last time we had you on, we were dragging the New York Times and namely David Sanger and Eric Schmidt at the New York Times for this gigantic hoax of the Russian bounties in Afghanistan and the obviously false and debunked claim, or at least a million miles from proven claim, that the New York Times was pushing in the last couple of weeks.
And yet here we have David Sanger and Eric Schmidt back again at the New York Times, and this time I believe them.
Long planned and bigger than thought strike on Iran's nuclear program.
Some officials say that a joint American-Israeli strategy is evolving.
Some might argue regressing to a series of short of war clandestine strikes.
And so in this case, because this is more or less reads like a press release from the intelligence agencies rather than the kind of accusation that you usually get from the likes of Sanger and Schmidt against Iran or Russia seemed like much more credible.
Their claims that in fact this was the Israelis who attacked the Natanz nuclear facility and have been responsible for many other sabotage attacks.
In fact, had a story here including a power station, a port, a petrochemical factory, a cutting factory.
I'm not sure exactly what that is.
And military sites such as the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and the ballistic missile base at Parchin.
And so there is a major series of sabotage attacks and I don't know if you call them terrorist attacks.
I don't know if civilians have been killed in these things, but certainly strategic attacks by the Israelis and or their allies going on here.
And the New York Times says that it is the Israelis and that the Americans are in on it, too.
What do you know?
Well, first of all, I obviously agree with your overall assessment that this is indeed the work of the Israelis.
How many of the total number of incidents were instigated by the Israelis is not entirely clear, but certainly it's very clear that the Israelis were behind the explosions at Natanz that burned a center for manufacture of centrifuges, as well as the explosion very near or on the Parchin military reservation, which was a location where there was fabrication of missile parts, at least if not of missiles themselves, very nearby the place that experienced the explosion.
And I would say without any hesitation that what's going on here is precisely what I warned about in an article for the Gray Zone four months ago, was it?
That said, essentially, that the that we have to anticipate that the Israelis, that the Netanyahu government and its ally in the Trump administration, Mike Pompeo, will continue to plot to try to provoke Iran into a war before the end of the Trump administration.
And that is, I think, exactly what is going on here.
Now, it is a bit more complicated than that.
I mean, there's more than one calculation, I think, behind what the Israelis are doing.
I mean, they are, of course, continuing this long two decade effort to try to slow down the Iranian nuclear program as well as its missile program.
And ultimately, the Israelis had at one time had the aspiration to actually prevent Iran from having any missile capability to be able to hit Israel.
And of course, they have failed miserably to be able to do that.
But nevertheless, they are doggedly persisting in this strategy of trying to do whatever they can to slow down, to hinder both the nuclear program and their missile program.
But I think the larger picture here, the more immediate problem that we face is the notion that the Netanyahu government has had for a long time, that they need to try to provoke Iran into a war, if at all possible, while Trump is still in office.
For the obvious reason, their calculus is that Trump is much more likely to give the Israelis the support that they want and need in a war with Iran than the successor to a Trump administration would be.
And this is something that they've been quite explicit about in the past, that former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren had written in November of last year, quite explicitly stating that he had attended a series of meetings in which this was discussed very explicitly by senior Israeli officials, presumably including Netanyahu himself, that they could not take the chance of waiting until Trump would be defeated, that they had to act very energetically, very aggressively to try to provoke a war with Iran while Trump was still in office.
So I think that is really the fundamental story behind this series of incidents that you're talking about.
Yeah.
Now, one of the things that they mentioned in The New York Times story is that the Iranians aren't sure how to react right now because there's an American election coming up.
And I don't know if you saw the latest polls, and I'm not sure how meaningful they are at this point, but they have Biden up by 15 points, something like that.
Right.
So the supreme leader over there must be looking at that and thinking that, well, you know, that kind of wait and see here rather than fall for it and escalate in response before they know whether they're going to have a new president to deal with as soon as next January.
Well, this is one of the maybe the few times that I can agree wholeheartedly with a analytical statement by The Times, particularly Sanger and his and his allies.
I think it's true that the Iranians are undoubtedly looking at the polling data and believe that Trump is probably going to lose.
And even before that, there were indications that the Iranians were not going to act precipitously with regard to anything that the Israelis did.
And indeed, we're going to rein in their own IRGC people with regard to any provocative measures as long as there was a good chance that Trump could be defeated in the 2020 election.
And I think that makes perfect sense for them to hold off on any responses to what's happening here, as long as the chances are very good that Trump is going to be defeated, because the Biden government that replaced it would be clearly inclined to reach some kind of an accommodation over the JCPOA that would be in the interests of Iran.
I mean, they would probably be trying to demand some changes and the Iranians would be quite unwilling, at least initially, to agree to that and would definitely do their best to avoid making any further concessions than they did on the JCPOA for primarily domestic political reasons because it would be so unpopular.
But definitely, I think it's true that the Iranians are not interested in trying to carry out any major response to this initiative or set of initiatives by the Israelis at this point because of that primary calculation.
Well, there must be, you know, at Mossad headquarters, there must be a line graph of how many bombings does it take before they have to react kind of thing, right?
Yeah, I think they, you know, they're they're hoping that maybe they could still force the issue.
But I mean, I think they're up against, as you correctly pointed out, polling data that's very, you know, looks very grim for for Trump at this point and favorable to the Democrats.
I got to say, for a suicidal maniac, the Ayatollah sure is a pretty cool customer.
He's going to sit there and just keep taking these on the chin and right in the nose and dot in both eyes.
And he's going to be cool and patient and wait until November to see what happens.
Well, a couple of points about that.
Maybe he's not so fanatical.
He's he's not a fanatic at all.
I mean, he's a he's a very rational calculator in terms of foreign policy as well as as domestic politics.
I mean, he's he's not somebody who's rash.
He's shown over the years that he is carefully considered all of his major decisions.
And I must say, I have been rather impressed by his ability to judge what particularly the Obama administration was up to very early on at a time when I had still perhaps the illusion that that Obama was going to carry out a more enlightened policy toward Iran.
The the supreme leader in Iran was quite convinced that he was not somebody that he could do business with.
And partly, I mean, to his credit, he did allow the president to negotiate the deal, even though he made it clear that, hey, if this fails, it's the president's fault, not mine.
You know, at the time.
But he did.
I'm talking about the very beginning of the Obama administration.
Oh, OK.
You're going back.
A lot of people were quite optimistic about Obama's.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Wellingness, readiness to use diplomacy.
I mean, in fact, he was he was really quite, quite far from from that sort of willingness.
And I was one of those people who had the hope that that Obama would be ready for diplomacy based on his what he said during the campaign.
But it turns out that he had very different calculations, which which called for primarily pressure on Iran to force them to make very serious concessions, including dropping essentially their nuclear program, except for the most symbolic remaining bit of nuclear enrichment.
So isn't it right, Garrett, that even up until now, they have not withdrawn from the deal.
They have announced that they were going to stop abiding by certain aspects of the deal, but they have not officially abrogated it, correct?
Absolutely not.
They are they are still part of the deal and they're still keeping their options open.
So I think that's another another indication of the very careful, rational calculations that the Iranian regime has undertaken in the past and is still undertaking today.
Now, there's there's another factor here, though, that I do want to point out.
To be fair, it's also the case that Iran has fewer attractive options for a very tough response to what the Israelis have done than they did in response to what happened last January with regard to the assassination of General Soleimani.
I mean, they had their allies in Iraq and of course, they had the Americans who were ensconced in these bases.
They had military military personnel in these bases in Iraq, which were sitting docks for Iranian missiles.
And so they had a lot of options that they obviously could choose from.
And they did, in fact, choose an option that I think, as I've said on your show before, they they were able to show very convincingly that they had the power to carry out attacks that would create mass casualties on the part of the Americans there.
But they chose to do so in a very nuanced way that avoided that.
But in the case of of the Israelis, it's much more difficult to have that kind of set of options.
For one thing, the Israelis, you know, they have carried out attacks which were much more sort of pinprick attacks, although they they clearly symbolically attacked the very essence of their deterrent, the nuclear program and the particularly the missile, the missile sites.
But they have done so in a way that was clearly less than what they could have done.
And the Iranians know that.
And at the same time, they they know that in terms of many of the options that they could exercise against, it would presumably have to rely on Hezbollah and its missiles and rockets.
And that is something that the Hezbollah people would obviously be reluctant to indulge in under the circumstances.
So I think, you know, there are other considerations that would support or further strengthen their determination to wait at this point.
Yeah, well, and what kind of goes in brackets there unsaid but implied, I think, is that they cannot reach out and touch anyone.
They don't have a Navy.
They don't have an air force other than a few old F-14s that Richard Nixon gave them and Gerald Ford.
And they have no ability to project power to Israel.
They have no ability to march a land army even across eastern Iraq, where they'd probably be welcome, much less across western Iraq and Jordan and somehow to threaten Israel anyway.
Not in a million years, not in 500 years.
OK, so what they can do, of course, is is to use their missiles.
That's right.
They have medium range missiles.
That's what they've got.
And even even more, I think, more relevant would be to use their drones, their cruise missiles and drones, which which they have, in fact, used effectively, both in the case of the shoot down of the U.S.
And so it's not even really Israel that they're holding hostage.
It's America.
It's U.S. GIs who are at risk in Kuwait and Afghanistan and Iraq and the Gulf.
Yeah.
And the Saudis in particular, of course, are very vulnerable to that set of options.
Hey, guys, just real quick, if you listen to the interviews only feed at the Institute or at ScottHorton.org, I just want to make sure you know that I do a Q&A show from time to time at ScottHorton.org slash show the old whole show feed.
And so if you like that kind of thing, check that out there.
Hey, guys, here's how to support this show.
You can donate in various amounts at ScottHorton.org slash donate.
We've got some great kickbacks for you there.
Shop Amazon.com by way of my link at ScottHorton.org.
Leave a good review for the show at iTunes and Stitcher.
Tell a friend.
I don't know.
Oh, yeah.
And by my books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan and the Great Ron Paul.
The Scott Horton Show interviews 2004 through 2019.
And thanks.
Hey, guys, check out Listen and Think audiobooks.
They're listenandthink.com and of course on audible.com.
And they feature my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as Brand New Out Inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audiobooks.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks.
Just donate $100 to the Scott Horton Show at ScottHorton.org slash donate.
And do you think I mean, obviously, the Navy in Bahrain, they must have a plan that at where the Fifth Fleet is stationed, they must have some Patriot missile batteries or something.
Right.
I don't know.
Yeah, they do have they do have a big airbase in Qatar, too.
Right.
But but it's yeah, but it's not by any means a guarantee against the against the drones and cruise missiles that the Iranians can dispose there.
So I think the overall picture is that the United States military bases, as well as, of course, its allies, are very vulnerable to attacks from from Iran and that Iran does have the ability to deter attacks with missiles, but they don't have the ability to project offensive power, which is the whole fake threat in the first place.
That's exactly the right distinction.
Scott, I'm glad you've glad you posed it in that way.
It's very relevant to understanding the calculations of the Iranians in this whole series of events, of crises, if you will, over the past.
You know, they've said this before about nukes.
Who are we going to defeat in a nuclear war?
Give me a break.
Why would we even want to get onto that path?
And that's where that's where they have to pretend to believe, I guess, that, yeah, no, that's because the Ayatollah wants to commit mass civilizational suicide to force the 12th Imam to come back and all this stuff.
Well, it's the only way to explain why they would pick a fight with two powers that could absolutely decimate Persia in an afternoon.
Yeah, but you don't even hear that argument anymore from the Israelis.
I mean, certainly not at all from the intelligence people.
I was thinking of American neocon hawks mostly.
But yeah.
Yeah, even even those people generally, generally speaking, don't don't venture into that kind of extreme kind of rhetoric.
I think that the reality, of course, is that the Israelis want to eliminate any power that Iran has to challenge the military supremacy of the Israelis in the region.
I mean, that's what this is really all about.
That's what it's always been about.
And Netanyahu is talking about, you know, to the extent that he's ever talked about the imam, the coming of the of the 12th imam and so forth.
That was sheer propaganda not to be taken seriously.
Yeah, well, but it is really important because it's just the same as when they demonized David Koresh or Saddam Hussein or anybody else.
They have to pretend that guy's crazy.
You can't negotiate with a crazy person.
Crazy person only understands explosions.
What you're what you're talking about, Scott, gives me an opportunity to to come back to a point which many of your listeners may not have heard before.
And which is all important in this whole picture.
And that is that although I'm prepared to believe that the Israelis do believe that Iran wants nuclear weapons and has wanted nuclear weapons for a long time, the reality is that Iran has never coveted nuclear weapons, has never had a plan to get nuclear weapons, and in fact, has been forbidden by its two supreme leaders, Khomeini originally and then now Khomeini, they both have taken the position as the the supreme Islamic lawgivers for their country, for their government, that all weapons of mass destruction are illegal under Islam.
And I've proven that this is serious from looking at the experience of the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, when the Iraqis were killing tens of thousands of Iranians with chemical attacks and the Iranians never procured chemical weapons, let alone use them.
And that's because they were forbidden that the IRGC people who requested that they be allowed to do that, to have chemical weapons, were forbidden by Khomeini from doing so on the grounds that it was illegal.
And so so that's been forbidden.
But of course, the Americans, the Israelis and all the rest of the people involved in this issue have refused to accept that idea.
And so what are the Iranians going to do?
They're going to use the belief of of all those people as part of their deterrence.
And that's what they've been doing for many years now.
Yeah.
And people can read more about that at foreign policy dot com by Gareth Porter, of course, when the Ayatollah said no to nukes is the name of the story.
Very good to get all the details there.
I can remember things that happened a long time ago.
Well, and as you're saying there, Gareth, you know, what they have been intent on creating is a latent deterrent, one that let the Israelis believe that we might make nukes, let the Americans believe that we might make nukes.
We've proven we know how to enrich uranium.
And, you know, we've got mountains that we can bury a program under that you cannot get to if it comes down to it.
So let's not let it come down to it while at the same time staying within the treaty, keeping a safeguards agreement with the IAEA, keeping their hands up and their books wide open and proving that they're not making nukes now, just that they know how to.
That's all.
Well, that's absolutely right.
As I said, they have absolutely used the the false beliefs of the Americans and their Israeli allies and others about the the Iranian desire for nuclear weapons as part of their policy.
But but I would also add, and even more importantly, they have used that as a diplomatic ploy or as part of their diplomatic leverage with the Obama administration, particularly because they knew that Obama was worried when they would make a decision to to raise the level of enrichment to 20 percent, which was a big step towards having the capability to enrich quickly to to weapons grade level.
And and they were absolutely right that that was the case.
And when they did so and they were very much aware of of what the Obama administration was likely to do, that's exactly what happened.
The Obama administration then changed its diplomatic posture, which had been to refuse to negotiate on the basis of Iran's right to enrich uranium.
And they went ahead with that concession to the Iranians.
And on that basis, the Iranians then began to negotiate rapidly.
And that's that's how the the JCPOA came about.
So this is a very it's been always a very important part of the negotiating strategy of the Iranians to to use their capability for enriching uranium to get the United States and others to make concessions.
All right.
Now, so there's this article that says what you were saying earlier, reiterating that the purpose of these current attacks is to try to provoke a war.
And yet I wonder if that's certain.
It seems like they wanted to provoke a war.
They could just bomb a lot of stuff with F-16s.
And I think their F-16s with extra fuel tanks have the range to hit Natanz and then land in Saudi or something like that.
Probably right.
So they could really get one going.
If they wanted to.
And it seems like, well, according to Sanger in The Times, they have the permission from Trump here.
So I was thinking, is it maybe the case that he told them that they can't start a war, but they can do anything but start a war and went ahead and gave the CIA a blank check to do everything except get us into an overt war against them?
Yeah, as long as the Israelis are able to make the argument so that that Pompeo can present it to Trump convincingly that what they're doing here is merely to to respond to to what the Iranians are doing to advance their their nuclear weapons program and their missile program, then then it's OK.
And particularly if they do it in a pinprick manner.
But it would probably not pass muster to actually launch a major bombing attack which caused a lot of damage.
And I think, again, this comes back to the aim of of carrying out a provocation that would would allow a war to start that would have the support of Trump himself.
That's the prize that they need to have as part of this package.
And that means getting from Trump the the kinds of support that they need, which which would not be forthcoming or might not be forthcoming if it was too obvious that they were aggressors in in a war against Iran.
So, yeah, Mitchell Prothero, a business insider, our old friend from Iraq, were three days and who had published a terrible article on this Russia bounty scam a couple of weeks ago.
Got all the people we cite to account when they're bad.
He has one here where he's talking to an Israeli intelligence official saying a former one, saying that he's worried here that this thing is going to really essentially grow into a real war, even though it probably started as something less than.
Well, look, I think that there are a lot of former military people and former intelligence people and present military people and intelligence people who are not that supportive, shall we say, to say the least of the Netanyahu strategy here.
I think the military people are far more realistic, for one thing, about the consequences of getting into a war with Iran if there were to be one than Netanyahu has been.
He's the one who has and I talk about this in Manufactured Crisis at some length that that back in 2011, 2012, Netanyahu was putting forward a line along with Ehud Barak claiming that a war with Iran would at most cost more about 300 or very few hundred Israeli casualties, that the Iranians would be afraid to respond in full force.
They had limited capability to do so and they'd be afraid to respond in full force because of what the Israelis could do to them and what the Americans could do to them.
So he has been putting forward this extremely optimistic view of a war with Iran for a long time.
I don't think that was ever shared by senior military officials and senior intelligence officials in Israel.
So I think that's another factor in this situation that Netanyahu is really acting here, I would argue, in isolation from the majority view within his national security community.
You know, it's just a counterfactual kind of thing, but it seems pretty clear to me that if Trump had not been so in the pocket of the Israelis, he could have done much better for Israeli interests.
You know, he came in with the deal already made two years before.
He should have came in, respected the deal, maybe gone to Tehran, shaken the Ayatollah's hand, said, listen, the battle days are over.
But, you know, I'd really like to get rid of some of those sunset provisions and just and work on it in a positive and open and honest way.
I bet that they could have gotten what they claim to want here.
I think they could have gotten part of what they wanted.
I'm quite sure the Iranians would not give ground on their missile program as as both Obama administration and Trump administration have demanded in ways that are totally unacceptable that they curb their missile program.
But but I think it's also the case that Trump, when he came into office, was much more willing to have a more moderate posture toward Iran than he turned out to have adopted a little bit later on.
And there's no question that that's because of very heavy pressure from the Israelis through Sheldon Adelson and the other Zionist donors that he depended on in the previous presidential election.
So we are up against this problem of Trump's dependence on people who are extreme Zionists and who have this view of Iran, which demands an extremist position.
Right.
And that's why I think we're in the soup now here over this, you know, Netanyahu's plan.
Yeah.
So that's our show for today.
We're out of time.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Really appreciate it, Lockyer.
My pleasure as always.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
And that is The Great Gareth Porter.
The book is The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis, co-authored with John Kiriakou.
That's the CIA reference there.
And before that, Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
And he's writing regularly now for TheGreyZone.com.
And that's been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
And I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find all my interview archives, more than 5,000 of them now, at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
I'm here every Sunday morning, 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
