08/16/12 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.scotthorton.org is the website.
I've got all my interview archives there.
And next up on the show today is Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
That's ipsnews.net.
And they reprint it all over at antiwar.com as well.
And so the latest is Israel's Iran war talk aims at deal for tougher U.S. policy.
Welcome back to the show.
What gives?
Glad to be back again, Scott.
Thanks.
What gives is, it seems to me, a critical clarification of what Bibi Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are about in their seemingly unending torrent of talk about a unilateral strike against Iran.
A lot of people, understandably, are very upset and anticipating a war with Iran because of this talk.
I, as you know well from discussing this on your show in the past, don't believe that.
I think that they have never been serious about an attack on Iran.
And that this war talk has always been, but now is much more clearly than ever before, identified with an effort to get the United States to take a tougher position on Iran.
If possible, you know, the maximum desire clearly would be for the United States to just outright threaten to destroy Iran's nuclear program if they don't cease and desist their enrichment of uranium.
And that is something obviously that Netanyahu and Barak have discussed between themselves, whether they could achieve that or not.
What the story that I've just done shows is that this discussion between the two has become more intensified in the last several days, in recent days.
And, you know, in conjunction with, I should say, the high point, if you will, of war talk, that is over the last 10 or 15 days, you know, there's been more and more stories pouring out of the Israeli press about a supposed decision-making on Iran showing that Netanyahu is closer than ever before to making a decision.
In fact, this is all about trying to position themselves to try to leverage the war talk, to leverage the option, I should say, of a military strike against Iran for a commitment by the Obama administration, by Obama himself, to embrace at least something closer to the Israeli red line.
That is to say, you know, not allowing Iran to have the capability for a breakout rather than merely responding if there's positive evidence that Iran has moved to a breakout by kicking out the IAEA.
And I cite two key interviews with unnamed senior Israeli officials but clearly were with Barak himself, Ehud Barak himself.
I think I mentioned in the story, unless I eliminated it because of space problems, that Netanyahu prefers to have Barak handle these details because he is much more self-assured and can toss around the arguments and, you know, make the points that need to be made from their point of view much more readily than Netanyahu himself can.
So, I mean, it's virtually certain that both of these interviews were with Ehud Barak but they are with unnamed officials.
And the most recent interview on the 15th, that is to say yesterday, was the key point in it was to say that if the Obama administration would be willing to make the same statements that were made by Obama at AIPAC, the AIPAC meeting in March, that is that the United States will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon and that Israel is entitled to self-defense, although those weren't exactly his words, plus embrace the Israeli red line that we just talked about, then the Israelis would, in a generous spirit, might abandon their unilateral military option against Iran.
Now, you know, they make it sound like they're in this very powerful and negotiating position, whereas in fact I think that their negotiating position in relation to the Obama administration is relatively weak.
But in any case, that is the deal that is on offer according to this interview published by YNF News yesterday.
And that's a new development.
And five days earlier, another interview which was even more clearly with Ehud Barak produced a statement that I found very, very significant, which was a quote, a direct quote from the so-called decision-maker who was put in quotes, the decision-maker, saying that if Israel were to give up and were clearly not in a position to do anything about Iran, meaning militarily, that would mean that the chances of a U.S. action against Iran would be reduced.
So, I mean, that gives away the whole game.
I mean, clearly that that's what they've been about all of these months and that this current high point of the campaign is clearly geared to positioning them to make this, to try to float this deal with the Obama administration.
Well, I think something you were saying there was alluding to this kind of being, you know, from their point of view, they think a strong negotiating position, but instead it's sort of overplayed and ham-handed looking.
Yeah, I think that's part of it.
That, you know, it is so obvious that they are really not in a position to carry out a unilateral strike successfully and that the consequences would be potentially catastrophic for Israel and that everybody in the IDF and in the intelligence community in Israel knows this perfectly well and they've been saying so with increasing boldness, even publicly.
And so, you know, as time goes by, their ability to make this unilateral option credible is eroding.
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
As more and more comes out about the opposition from the national security officials and former national security officials in Israel, this option just does not look at all credible and therefore the credibility of their threatening it, I think, wanes over time and I think the Obama administration, if in fact they ever took it seriously, I'm not absolutely sure that they have.
In fact, I have some doubts about that.
I think that they have become clearer over time and I think it's likely now that they don't really believe that that's a serious threat.
All right, so in essence what you're saying is all this hype about, oh, hold them back, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, they just might do it, that basically all they're trying to do is get Obama to harden his position from close down Fordo and no more enrichment up to 20% at all to completely, you must, you know, the old Bush position, you must halt all enrichment forever and, you know, basically undo what they've already achieved in terms of breakout capability.
That's right and let's be clear that the Israelis have in fact been taking that position all along from the beginning of the talks with Iran as I've written in my own stories and has been well documented.
They have demanded that the Obama administration take that position in the talks and the Obama administration, as far as I can see, has moved considerably in the direction toward that Israeli position although they have not explicitly announced it in any detail.
They have made statements that sort of suggest that that's where they are headed in the talks but what the Israelis now want is not simply that the United States takes that position in the talks but that's what the United States wants but that, you know, there will be consequences in terms of the US military action if the Iranians don't accept it.
Right.
All right.
Well, more like this when we get back.
We, of course, got to bring in the Romney campaign into this.
And, of course, Barak's leak, Ehud Barak's leak of the US Intel report last week.
We'll be right back.
Oh, and the backlash from that, too.
Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
ScottHorton.org is my website where I keep all my interview archives.
Right now I'm talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, IPSNews.net.
Israel's Iran war talk aims at deal for tougher US policy.
The point being, you know, play the little dialectic game thing.
Obama basically has, well, I mean, he sabotages all of his own negotiations.
They don't seem to be leading anywhere to me.
I guess I'll let you address that, Gareth.
But basically, you know, when he pretends that he's willing to negotiate, he says things like, you know, we'll accept your uranium enrichment.
He at least implies we'll accept your uranium enrichment up to 3.5 percent or 3.6.
We just don't want you enriching up to 20 percent.
We want you to export that.
But otherwise, stay inside your safeguards agreement and answer all your, you know, maybe sign up the additional protocol, something like that, and maybe we could make a deal.
Whereas the Israelis wanted to change the policy back to the Bush policy of no enrichment whatsoever, which, of course, never accomplished anything, never even led to a war, if that's what the Likud guys were really after.
In fact, Scott, it did accomplish something, which was that it gave the Iranians the incentive and the opportunity to continue to increase their enrichment capabilities.
Well, that's right, because they had frozen it for two years, 2003 through 2005, right?
Yeah, I mean, the great irony of all this, of course, is the Bush administration could have had a deal which would have sealed the Iranian or capped the Iranian uranium enrichment program at a level which would be no threat whatsoever of nuclear weapons.
We know from the memoirs of Hussein Mousavian, as well as other information that has come out, that the Iranian government did, in fact, embrace that proposal that he himself made, that Mousavian made in 2006, and which could have had that result.
At least that was the implication.
And instead, of course, the Bush administration was happily, you know, sort of pushing them along toward what they finally have had, which is a capability that is quite formidable and which, indeed, continues to build as time goes by.
So, I mean, that is the totally illogic of the hawk position on Iran, which defies the imagination unless you just understand that, as we've said before many times, the hawks always win.
I mean, the game that the neocons were playing in the Bush administration was not to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear.
It was to provide the excuse for an aggressive policy in the Middle East with the possibility, at least from the point of view of Vice President Dick Cheney's office, that the United States might, in fact, have an opportunity to attack Iran eventually.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like back then, when the Americans still had 50-something bases or a hundred or however many hundred bases in Iraq, that would have been the time, if they were ever going to do it, to bomb the hell out of Tehran and try to get a regime change out of it.
That way, it would make it okay that they just turned the south of the country over to the Iranians, because the Iranians would be our sock puppets again, too, anyway.
Well, that may indeed have been the fact that some of the people associated with this idea in the Vice President's office had in mind.
In fact, there is some evidence to that effect, that the hope was regime change.
If not ahead of a strike, more likely than it would come as a result of a strike, from the very crazed perspective of the extreme right-wing Israeli hawks who were pushing the Vice President in the direction of war with Iran.
Yeah, the problem was they couldn't do it, because all the Americans they'd put on the ground in Iraq ended up being the hostages of the Iranians.
I mean, the Pentagon and the U.S. military establishment said, no, absolutely not, we're not going to get involved in that.
And this, I think, underlines the reality that the U.S. military only picks on targets that are easy pickings.
They don't want to have a war that's going to be, that they know, at least in advance, is going to be really hard.
Hey, am I right that it's a big deal that Ehud Barak accidentally provoked the National Security Council at the White House, and then later Obama's official spokesman into pronouncing the lack of a nuclear weapons program in Iran?
I mean, that's the highest.
Bush said, well, I don't agree with that, when that came out in the NIE back in 2007, and now the National Intelligence Director had addressed it before, when testifying before the Senate, that kind of thing.
But isn't this the first time that basically Obama himself, the White House, has affirmed what you and I have been trying to explain to everybody all this time about Iran's nuclear program?
Well, I would say it's the most explicit confirmation or affirmation, yes, absolutely.
And I think that's a good point, that in the process of trying to, again, come up with the maximum data points or apparent data points in the press to support the effort that they've been making to pressure Obama or to press Obama toward their point of view, they've overreached.
And in the process, I think they have, in fact, stiffened the resistance by the Obama administration with regard to this issue of, you know, is Iran already, you know, indicating that they're going for a weapon?
The answer is clearly not.
All right.
Now, what about, well, what about Mitt Romney?
I think, is this just going to be Bush Jr.?
I mean, look, I think, and I've said for a long, long time here that Obama's a shoo-in.
He's not Jimmy Carter.
He's Bill Clinton.
God help us all.
But, so, I think there's a very small chance.
But then again, lots of things can change in politics in a very short time.
So, you know, how dangerous is Mitt Romney compared to our current warlords?
Yeah, let me just say, if the Iranians were to drop a few mines in the Strait of Hormuz and just create a crisis for a few days, the price of oil would skyrocket and, you know, would stay up for, you know, probably two to four weeks, which could be crucial two to four weeks in terms of the presidential election.
So, you're right.
It's too soon to say definitively that this election is a shoo-in by any means.
But, you know, I subscribe to the argument that in some ways a Republican president, no matter how right-wing, is subject to more political constraints with regard to issues of war and peace than a Democratic administration is, which is not to say that they can't do anything.
But, relatively speaking, the way the system works is that a Democrat is subject to certain freedoms that a Republican doesn't have.
I mean, he can get away with things that a Republican can't get away with.
And, you know, it's simply a matter of the willingness of the Democratic constituency to go along with a Democratic president on things that they wouldn't accept with a Republican president.
I think that's the simplest version of this.
So, I mean, that's at least part of the story that I think would pertain to a Romney presidency.
And, obviously, he would have some very bad people around him who would be urging on him some very bad policies.
But, you would still have the same military leadership and the same strictures that apply, that did apply during the Bush administration, would apply to a Romney administration.
So, I think there are a set of built-in constraints that are greater on a Romney presidency than would be the case with an Obama presidency.
That this is not taking into account the differences in the policies that they would pursue.
Well, you know, we learned, and I guess you must have already known this for a long, long time, it became very clear to a lot of us in the first Bush Jr. administration that, wow, it really does matter who's the deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy.
Yeah.
Those guys can change, they can move heaven and earth.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
I mean, it was Feith, wasn't it, who abolished the Iraqi army on his whim.
There's no doubt that the people that Romney would bring in would be dangerous, and I'm not trying to deny that or to minimize that at all.
Well, hey, Obama's people are horrible too.
I mean, Michelle Flournoy and that whole counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan, what's that other than what the KGB used to do to people, come and grab them in the night like that.
They're bad people with terrible ideas and no willingness to face the truth.
But I have no doubt that the people that Romney would bring in would be worse.
So, I mean, let's just posit that.
But I do think that if you're talking about the case of war with Iran, that the fundamental situation is that Romney would not be able to carry out a war against Iran.
All right, everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter, IPSnews.net.
Thanks, Gareth.
Thank you, Scott.