08/05/15 – Justin Logan – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, all, Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darin's Coffee, a company at DarinsCoffee.com.
Darin Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darin's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darin gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
DarinsCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
DarinsCoffee.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, here live on Liberty Radio Network, noon to 2, Eastern Time, 11 and 1, Texas Time.
Our first guest today is Justin Logan.
Hi, Justin.
Welcome to the show.
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
How are you?
Great.
I'm a long-time reader, first-time interviewer.
I'm not sure why it's taking me so long to get you on the show.
I think I tried a couple times a few years back or something, I don't know.
But you write great stuff.
I read you all the time.
Hey, everybody.
Justin, he's the guy that coined the phrase the fallacy of 39.
All about, or was it, oh, sorry, 38.
See, I ruined it.
The fallacy of 1938 about the neocons and why everything is Munich all the time.
Anyway, so you got this very well-done piece here at the Washington Examiner and Cato.org.
We're running it today on Antiwar.com.
How Washington has inflated the Iran threat.
And this isn't exactly about the particulars of the centrifuges and the sanctions and all that part of the nuclear deal.
Well, the technical part of the nuclear deal, the sanctions, I guess, yeah.
But this is about another part of the narrative against the nuclear deal, namely that the deal itself will hand the Middle East over to Iran, basically.
They're on the march.
They're already taking over the Middle East.
And Obama's now just stepping out of their way.
Right, I mean, it's a peculiar thing that there has been very little debate about this deal among arms controllers on the sort of nonproliferation aspects of the deal because the administration has been fairly clear that Iran will still be Iran under this deal.
It will just happen to be an Iran that's not close to getting a nuclear weapon.
And so what we've had, you know, is sort of you start losing a war, and then you let the mission creep beyond the one that you're already not attaining.
They were sort of losing the argument, the opponents of the deal, and then they sort of let the argument creep beyond the one that they weren't winning into saying that Iran is going to dominate the Middle East.
Or if you prefer political science jargon, Iran is going to become a regional hegemon.
And so if you're a lazy writer like I am, the easy thing to do is to take up the very silliest arguments on the opposite side of the issue.
And so I spent probably more verbiage than was needed debunking this idea that Iran is about to be handed the keys to the Middle East.
Well, that's very kind of you to be so modest and self-deprecating and all that.
But the truth is that it's not laziness.
You took this on because it's a very important talking point for the right-wing war party here that Iran is the great Satan, and apparently our president is in league with them.
Yeah, well, that's a little even beyond the scope of what I dealt with.
But it's just, you know, the tendency toward threat inflation in Washington is great, right, and all of our various adversaries are 10 feet tall at one time or another.
But the practical matter is even if you grant, and I tried in the article to sort of grant all of the sort of worst-case scenarios, say Iran does get $100 or $150 billion of its own money back as a consequence of the agreement, which all the indications are that the number is between $29 and $50 billion.
But assume that the sort of hysterics are correct.
Assume even that Iran were to attain a nuclear weapons capability.
It will still remain a regional power, right?
North Korea has a nuclear weapons capability, and nobody says that North Korea dominates the Northeast Asia.
Israel has a nuclear weapons capability, and one might add, a very sophisticated military, conventional military that's capable of offensive operations, which the Iranian military is not, and nobody really says that Israel dominates the Middle East for the simple fact that it doesn't dominate the Middle East.
If you look through the modern era, starting at about 1500, depending on how you count, there's really only been one state in its region that has sort of agreed upon as being a regional hegemon, and that's the United States in the Western Hemisphere.
And for a variety of reasons, historical contingency and otherwise, it's really difficult to attain regional hegemony, right?
You can run a scenario where you could say, you know, Vilhelmine Germany might have had a shot at regional hegemony, or certainly Nazi Germany might have had a shot at regional hegemony.
No, the Soviets in Eastern Europe or in South Asia.
Sure.
But it's an exceptionally difficult thing to attain, and when you look at Iran's economic policy, when you look at Iran's neighbors, when you look at the politics of the region, it's just, I think, a really silly argument.
Well, I mean, right off the bat, I mean, you point out, of course, the weakness of their economy, you know, compared to any true regional hegemon, but it's also just a matter of population, right?
Like, the Iranians, thanks to the United States of America, have their friends in the Dawa Party ruling Iraq right now, but they don't even seem to desire to rule Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, and former Iraqi Sunnistan.
They always preferred what they called strong federalism, which is, right, the Biden plan, to split Iraq in three and to just keep Shiastan that George W. Bush gave them so that these same neocons who were arguing against the Iran deal argued us into that war and argued we had to stay and fight that civil war for the Shia, too, once they won the election, et cetera, et cetera.
But the Iranians haven't betrayed really any intention of wanting to dominate all of Sunnistan or dominate, you know, Kuwait or Saudi or whatever, where the population would never welcome them.
Well, I think your question sort of points at a fundamental reality, which is that influence is different than dominance.
And Iran certainly has increased influence in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, and it has sizable influence there, but it doesn't dominate Iraq.
Iraq regularly makes decisions from the central government that Iran doesn't like.
I don't think Iran is very happy having to fight ISIS.
And if you look across the region, from Syria to Yemen to elsewhere, not lending any moral or normative endorsement one way or the other, Iran is really counterpunching, right?
They're trying to defend the status quo in Syria, as grotesque as that status quo is, the regime of Bashar Assad.
And they're engaged in this sort of soft proxy war with the Gulf Arabs, or to be more specific, the Saudis, struggling for influence in some of the Gulf states.
But it makes you sound like a sort of 20th century person, but it also happens to be true that this sort of political noodling around and even engaging in terrorism has never before led a state in history to dominate the region.
It's sort of a struggle for influence.
So the idea that we would say Iran's poised to dominate the Middle East in a way like the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere is just, to my mind, flatly ridiculous.
Yeah, and again, I'm sorry, I can't help but be repetitive on this.
Especially when the biggest move they've made this whole time was to send Chalabi to tell the neocons that invading Iraq would be good for Israel.
Well, the Ahmed Chalabi story is a whole sordid one that we could maybe use as a separate sidebar.
I mean, we're talking about sitting at a table and playing chess.
They didn't invade Iraq.
They got America to do it for them.
So that's our own damn fault for being that level of fool.
We could have been a lot smarter in 2002, 2003.
I'd certainly concur with that point.
And I think you and I are both being generous with the term we here, too, since I know you knew better, and so did I, but anyway.
Yeah, no one asked me back then.
Yeah, no one asked me.
I told them anyway, but they didn't listen.
Right.
Yeah, okay, so that's the other thing.
So you quote the Tom Cotton thing where they dominate all these capitals, and they're referring to Beirut there, which I thought was funny because just yesterday I interviewed this analyst who talked about just how much influence Iran really does have with Hezbollah, but Hezbollah doesn't rule Beirut.
I mean, they're participants in the government in Beirut, but they don't own Lebanon.
They own southern Lebanon.
That's it.
Right, and even that case overlooks the fact that Hezbollah, thanks in no small part to its relationship with Iran, has had its attention and its resources both sort of diminished and diverted into Syria because Iran is trying to maintain its Syria and its enlisted elements of Hezbollah there.
So this idea that all of these actors from Yemen, Lebanon, to Iraq, are simply sort of puppets of Iran, oversimplifies things in a way that I think obscures more than it illuminates.
All right, we'll be right back with more Justin Logan in just a sec, y'all.
Cato.org.
And you don't just need to keep your skills up-to-date.
Samurai Tech Academy teaches it all.
And they'll also show you the business, how to own and run your own.
Take a free sample course to see how easily you can learn appliance repair from MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Use coupon code ScottHorton for 10% off any course or set of courses at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Justin Logan.
He is the Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.
Cato.org.
Good on everything as far as I can remember reading by him, which would be probably in the hundreds of articles at this point.
Certainly scores and scores and scores.
We're talking about propaganda against the Iran agreement, specifically that this agreement will just empower Iran beyond all measure, and they will end up dominating the entire Middle East, a favorite talking point of the American right right now and the Israeli right.
But now, so let me ask you this.
You mentioned before, and we'll go ahead for argument's sake and use the Israeli estimate of $100 billion that they're going to be given, which is, as you said, their money that we'll stop stealing and go ahead and let them have.
Is that it, or is there another argument that I'm missing somewhere, Justin, about how once Iran's nuclear program goes from a safeguarded electricity program to an additionally protocolled safeguarded nuclear program, civilian nuclear program, that that somehow, or the lifting of the sanctions from now on, is that it?
Is there anything else I'm missing that's supposed to add up to Iran's new expanded power in the region here?
Because $100 billion isn't a lot of money, really.
Well, it certainly wouldn't be to me, but if you're trying to convert it into military power to steamroll your neighbors, it really dries up quickly.
It's difficult to disentangle.
I mean, I would hope that you get a few beers into some of these people.
They'll concede that this isn't an argument that they really want to sustain.
I mean, you have people saying that they're a regional hegemon now, that they dominate five capitals.
You have people saying with this deal they'll become a regional hegemon without describing what, as you point out, which sort of causal mechanism on the other side of the deal will produce this Iranian regional hegemony.
So, you know, in a certain sense, I hope that this is just sort of a useful talking point.
I mean, look, I think it bears pointing out that the amount of misinformation that has been put out about this deal is eye-popping, and that is sort of something that's weird for me to utter because I think that there's misinformation as a sort of pandemic here in Washington, right?
We heard an argument that the deal obliges the United States to protect the Iranian nuclear program from Israeli cyber attack.
This is just a crazy argument that nobody who's ever read about arms control should have considered for a moment.
But we had Senator Rubio from Florida trying to sustain this argument.
We had an argument— Actually, stop at that one for a second, if you would.
And I'd like you to continue, so don't let me get you too far off track.
But there was some language that sounded sort of kind of something like that.
So why doesn't it say what they say it says?
Sure.
So if you think about—there are nuclear programs.
The United States would prefer information about nuclear technology to stay constrained.
And there are all sorts of actors across the globe who would prefer to have access themselves to information about nuclear infrastructure.
Iran has a reasonably well-developed nuclear infrastructure.
And so some sort of boilerplate language that always goes into these sorts of agreements says— I forget the exact phrasing, but it's, you know, parties shall be open to helping Iran secure its nuclear program.
And this is—so it's not a commitment, right?
We will do X or Y or Z, or the French will do X or Y or Z.
But all else equal, we would prefer, yes, that nuclear infrastructure stays secure, right, so that we don't replay the AQ Khan experience, et cetera.
And anybody who, again, has bothered to read for 20 minutes about this would know that.
But instead we had this little blip of hysteria that just, you know, assumes away reality that the United States is going to cooperate with Iran to insulate the Iranian nuclear infrastructure from cyberattacks not just that have been launched by Israel, but that have been launched by the United States in the recent past, including under the Obama administration.
I mean, it just—it is a bizarre idea.
And so, you know, we've had fact-checking on these sorts of things over and over.
But as anybody who's been in the news business knows, the correction never undoes the damage that's done by the story, right?
If the A1 story runs and says, you know, Scott Horton is known for, you know, marauding through his neighborhood and kicking dogs, and then a week later, you know, the little box at the bottom of the page says, you know, we mistakenly identified the person as Scott Horton.
In fact, it was Justin Logan.
You're still going to—people are going to be like, gosh, you're a terrible person.
You know, I mean, it never undoes.
So there's been, I think, a willingness to purvey this sort of just nonsense and misinformation about the deal.
And it's accumulated, right?
We've had the 24 days hysteria that doesn't bear at all on the breakout timeframe, right?
Nothing that—if everything went right for Iran, and Iran was acting with sublime malfeasance on all fronts, full spectrum, as well as it could, and it used the 24-day timeframe, which is complicated to explain, but there are a number of interlocking intervals that happen if any party to the agreement says that they want to inspect a particular site, that it could, in the worst-case scenario from the P5-plus-1 point of view, take 24 days to get access to one of those sites.
But what those sites could not be are anything that bears on the fuel cycle, because all other aspects of the fuel cycle are locked up and not subject to these restrictions.
So this sort of 24 days has been waved around as though they could sort of come up with a bomb in 24 days, which is just physically not possible.
Right, and they never differentiate between so-called suspicious military sites that they want to look at versus already declared and safeguarded nuclear facilities, which is, as you're implying there, their entire program.
We already know where all their uranium is.
It's already safeguarded, and it's all inspected 24 hours a day.
Right, and so you certainly could have, and there's been some information that's been correct about this from AIPAC and from other institutions that said they could do computer research, computer modeling on detonation cores for missile design.
That's true.
It's absolutely true that they could conceivably hide that sort of research.
It's also true that if they did successfully hide that sort of research, they still would need to meet the necessary condition for getting a bomb of either obtaining enough high-enriched uranium or plutonium to detonate a bomb.
So I think if the idea is that no such deal is good, unless it gives 100% certainty that Iran can never do anything to glean more information about the processes that could be used in combination to produce a nuclear bomb, then that, and maybe for some people by design, means that there can be no such thing as a good deal.
Because it's just 100% certainty across a number of interlocking processes is just infeasible.
We had this thing about anytime, anywhere inspections.
The idea that a sovereign state would give over to the IAEA the ability to go anywhere inside its borders at any time that organizations so chose is just eye-poppingly ridiculous.
The United States would never do that.
I mean that's the nature of sovereignty, right?
Is that you retain some control over what's done inside of your borders.
So these fanciful sort of unicorn ideas about how arms control could work under the best possible scenarios existing on the planet Earth in 2015 have really poisoned the discourse about how the world works, right?
What would be a good deal is if Iran gave up every aspect of its nuclear infrastructure and all the clerical leadership converted to Christianity.
Well that's just not going to happen.
I mean there's been a lot of talk about poison pills, and I think that when you look at what people are saying would be the aspect of a so-called good deal, there's really nothing other than a poison pill.
Yeah, I mean when they say good deal, they say there should be no nuclear program left in Iran whatsoever.
Even Rand Paul says, oh it leaves them way too much of their program.
Well really it leaves them the tiniest rump of a nuclear program.
And that's the Netanyahu line, and everybody knows that they're never going to negotiate that away in a million years if they're being honest.
The only way to get Iran to not have a nuclear program at all would be full-scale invasion and occupation.
Even the War Party admits, if we bombed them, that would just make them decide to build a nuke then.
Even Rand admits, that would just make them decide to build a nuke.
The only way to stop them from having a nuclear program whatsoever would be to occupy the place with the entire Army and Marine Corps forever.
And who wants to do that?
Who wants to even admit that that's what they really mean?
Well, I mean you've had a number of people.
You've had Norman Podhoretz in the Wall Street Journal.
You've had Joshua Muravchik say it.
You've had John Bolton say it.
So I mean I think that it's very telling that the sort of hawkish mainstream in Washington squirms when those articles get published.
Because people don't want to have the discussion that Obama's trying to have, which is it's this or war.
Because people know, you know, even people with really hawkish policy preferences know that, hey, let's fire up another big war in the Middle East is just not a great political selling point right now, right?
The Republicans are jockeying for position in the presidential primary.
And nobody wants to be, with the exception maybe of Lindsey Graham, the sort of more war in the Middle East candidate.
There's a lot of efforts to sort of finesse the issue.
Again, this mythical, chimerical, better deal that supposedly exists out there.
You know, that's what we're in favor of.
We're in favor of doing all of these things that would set the United States on an inexorable path toward war.
But it won't produce a war, right?
And so I think that's why you hear this sort of weird kabuki back and forth about, hey, hey, hey, I'm not for war.
I'm just for pounding the table harder and making a number of demands that anybody who's been paying attention know cannot, will not be met.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry I'm keeping you a little bit over time here, but I want to kind of get back to the balance of power thing here real quick with one more question, if I can figure out a good way to phrase it, which is that, you know, as we've talked about, their program isn't really changing.
It's just being scaled back more and all that.
So the Saudis, never mind the Israelis for a moment, the Saudis had said, you know, they're not really against it or suspicious.
They've officially endorsed it now.
I don't know how half hearted that is or what, but, you know, what they're they're not stupid.
They know that we're talking about an additional protocol and a shrug here that that if anything is going to change for them to worry about, it seems like it would be America's relationship with Iran in the future.
Since in America's Cold War with Iran, the nuclear program is the excuse for most of it.
And, you know, the last big fake excuse for most of it.
So once that issue is put to bed, it seems like that's what Israel and Saudi and Turkey and probably the rest of the Middle East are worried about is the GCC states and all that is that, you know, maybe this means an opening between America and Iran and changing their fortunes in terms of American welfare payments and support.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, I mean, it's the old, you know, American client state move of let's you and him go fight.
And it's certainly, you know, the Saudis would rather tensions between the United States and Iran stay very high.
But the United States continue to look askance at Saudi Arabia's depraved and remarkable governance of its own citizens.
And the fact that the Gulf Arab states are more precisely, I guess, Gulf Arab citizens with a certain amount of negligence on the part of the government have really funded and created the rise of ISIS.
So they would like, again, for their sort of geopolitical adversary Iran to stay at loggerheads with the United States, both because it, you know, convinces us to cozy up more closely with them and to view our interests as aligning more closely with theirs than certainly I would suggest.
All right.
Well, sorry for keeping you over time here, but thanks very much for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it, Justin.
Thank you.
All right.
So that's Justin Logan.
He is the director of foreign policy studies at Cato.org.
This article is running in the viewpoints today at Antiwar.com, how Washington has inflated the Iran threat.
We'll be right back.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the social network and community based publishing platform for the liberty minded.
Liberty.me combines the best of social media technology all in one place and features classes, discussions, guides, events, publishing, podcasts and so much more.
And Jeffrey Tucker and I are starting a new monthly show at Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire.
It's just four bucks a month if you use promo code Scott when you sign up.
And hey, once you do, add me as a friend on there at scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.