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All right, you guys, introducing our friend, Mohamed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Southern California there in Los Angeles.
And he writes for us pretty often at antiwar.com.
This one is called Deconstructing Neoconservatives Manifesto for War with Iran.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
I'm fine.
Thank you for having me on your program again, Scott.
Well, I'm honored to have you here.
I really appreciate your contribution to this show always to talk about these important articles that you write, bringing that engineering mind to this very complex issue.
You know, always really appreciate it.
And so this is really important.
I just talked with Julian Borger from The Guardian about, you know, he's reporting about CIA officers complaining, well, CIA analysts complaining that the White House is pressuring them, has pressured them to go back through all their trash looking for an excuse to, you know, cherry pick out in order to frame Iran for somehow violating the deal.
And he was happy to report that they don't seem to really be going along with that.
They were burned so bad back during Iraq.
I mean, and really the CIA has been telling the truth about Iran's nuclear program since 2007.
So that's, you know, doesn't look like they're going back on that.
So that's good news.
But at the same time, we do have some of the very same bad actors who got us into Iraq War II are pushing for the exact same sort of scheme in order to disrupt the peace.
And as you put it in here, to provoke a war with Iran and you're not letting them get away with it.
So we're gonna go through and I'm gonna give you an opportunity to really deconstruct it's, of course, who else?
It's John Bolton writing, wasn't it in the National Review that you're attacking here?
Yes.
All right, so, and now people should know John Bolton was in the State Department in the first George Bush Jr. administration.
And then in the second, or maybe sometime during then, he was promoted to unconfirmed ambassador to the United Nations for a time there.
All right, so go ahead and take us through here.
I'm sorry?
He was on a recessed appointment to the UN.
Okay, so, all right, go ahead and take us through.
Oh, you know what?
I'll go ahead and add one thing here too.
I have the audio somewhere, but nevermind.
But people can find it.
It's a clip of John Bolton on a conference call with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
And he's explaining that part of the new sanctions back in, I guess, circa 2004 or five he's talking about was he hoped in order to provoke Iran from withdrawing from the safeguards agreement and the nonproliferation treaty, which he said would put us in a more advantageous position, meaning to start a war.
Right now they're hiding behind their cooperation with international inspectors under the nonproliferation treaty.
So it's hard to pretend that they're making nukes to attack us with, and that that's our excuse to attack them.
So if we could force them out of the deal, then we could say, hey, look, they're making nukes.
Now we have to attack them, basically is what he's saying.
So now here we are, and it's 10 years later and the same thing again, I guess, huh?
Yes, yes, it is.
And we have to remember that in addition to the fact that Bolton contributed greatly to so-called rationale for invading Iraq, he's still unrepentant.
He only recently said that he still thinks that invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do.
And at the same time, this is the guy who has advocated bombing Iran, either by Israel or the United States or both.
He has also acted as a lobbyist for the MBK, Mujahedin Ha'il Organization, an opposition group in exile that is universally despised by Iranians inside Iran because it collaborated with Saddam Hussein regime.
During the Iran-Iraq war, it committed a lot of terrorist acts and it also collaborated with Israel in killing Iran's nuclear scientists and so on and so forth.
And Bolton has also had close connections with Islamophobes in this country, and in particular, Pamela Glare and Robert Spencer that have this so-called American Foundation, American Freedom Defense Initiative, or something like that, which is basically an Islamophobic organization spreading hatred against Muslims.
Now, Bolton, in his prescription for aggression against Iran that published on National Review, made several lies and exaggeration that I wanna go through them briefly.
One of the things that he repeats again and again is that we have to explain the threat that Iran poses to the US and particularly Israel.
Now, the question is, what is this threat?
Of course, he doesn't address the threat, but the fact is there is no threat because as far as, for example, Iran's nuclear program is concerned, Iran basically gave up 90% of its nuclear program in return for the nuclear agreement.
Iran, at the time of negotiations, had over 19,000 centrifuges and gave up 13,000 of them.
Iran stopped enriching uranium at 19.75% that it was using to feed Tehran Research Reactor that produces isotope for 800,000 Iranian patients every year, but Iran gave that up.
Iran shipped out 10 tons of enriched uranium that it had, shipped it out so that it won't stay in Iran.
Iran demolished a heavy water reactor in Iraq that it had been building, had spent millions, billions of dollars designing and building it.
Iran demolished it.
Iran put its heavy water plant, which is not even a nuclear material, but only makes sense if there is a heavy water reactor under the supervision of International Atomic Energy Organization.
So Iran did all of these, and more importantly, perhaps most importantly, Iran also converted an enrichment facility that had been built under a tall mountain in south of Tehran, which couldn't be bombed or destroyed.
Iran converted that to a research facility and removed the centrifuges there.
So Iran made all these concessions in return for lifting of sanctions and trying to normalize relation between Iran and European countries and hopefully the United States.
So this is basically a non-existent threat that Bolton is talking about.
Now, as far as conventional army or conventional armed forces is concerned, Iran is not a threat as far as I can see against anyone in that region.
Iran doesn't have any air force to speak of.
I mean, just look at Arab nations of the Persian Gulf.
These are tiny nations and they have the most modern air force.
Just look at Israel, just look at Saudi Arabia.
And Iran doesn't have any air force to speak of.
As I said in the article, it belongs to museum because whatever it has were built in 1960s and 1970s that are no match for what the Arab nations and Israel has.
The only thing that Iran has is a missile program.
And this missile program is purely defensive.
Iran has been trying to develop these missiles over the past 35 years to defend itself.
And the only time after the end of Iran-Iraq war, and during Iran-Iraq war, Iran didn't even have any missile production important or productive missile production line to speak of.
That's why Iraq could attack Iran so easily and so freely and inflict damage on Iranian towns and killing thousands of people.
So after the end of Iran-Iraq war, Iran decided that given that there's an arms embargo against Iran, which is not going to be lifted anytime soon, and it hasn't been lifted, Iran is going to develop its own domestic industry to defend itself.
And one of the programs that has been going through with it is the missile program.
So the only significant deterrent that Iran has is this missile program, and Iran hasn't used those missiles against anyone over the past 30, 35 years.
The only time Iran fired any of these missiles was a few months ago when Islamic State carried out terrorist attacks in Tehran, killing 20 people, both in Iranian parliament and the mausoleum of Iranian revolution funder, Ayatollah Rouhli Khomeini.
And Iran, in symbolic reaction, fired one of these missiles or a couple of these missiles at Deir al-Zour, a town in Syria, which is occupied by Syrian forces, but is surrounded by Islamic State forces.
That's the only time Iran did anything.
So the question is, when we talk about the threats that Iran poses against U.S. or Israel, what is its threat?
The threat doesn't exist.
Then, Bolton says that the language of nuclear agreement is vague and ambiguous.
There is no vagueness or ambiguity in this.
The document is 159 pages.
Every word of it, every letter of it, every comma, every semicolon, everything in that document was negotiated intensely and often brought the negotiations to the brink of collapse because everybody wanted to have everything absolutely clear.
So the obligations of both sides are clear, the U.S. obligations, the Europeans' obligations, and Iran's obligations.
And by all accounts, International Atomic Energy Agency and top experts, even CIA, even the U.S. military, they have agreed that Iran has abided by its obligation.
Just yesterday, General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of Joint Chief of Staff, in written testimony to the Senate in preparation for his oral testimony in the Senate, said that Iran, by all accounts, has lived up to its obligation under the nuclear agreement, and therefore we should keep it.
He warned against leaving the nuclear agreement, and the reason for it is obvious.
First of all, if one U.S. president is going to sign one agreement, and then the next president is going to say, I don't like it, so I'm going to leave it, then who is gonna trust this country regarding any international agreement?
Secondly, this is happening right at the moment that the United States is in confrontation with North Korea, and is trying to force North Korea to negotiate this nuclear program, nuclear weapon program, by the way.
Iran doesn't have any nuclear weapon program, and perhaps gets rid of it.
But if Iran gave up 90%, 95% of its nuclear program in return for the nuclear agreement and lifting of some sanction, and Trump is going to destroy it, then what incentive in the world would motivate North Korea to come to the negotiation table and does the same with the U.S.?
They don't have any incentive, because they see what's happening regarding Iran.
They saw what happened regarding Libya.
Remember, Libya also had started, it was in its infancy, a nuclear program.
But Muammar Gaddafi agreed to give up his nuclear program, and a few years after he gave up his nuclear program, Libya was attacked, Gaddafi was killed, and the country became basically a land for terrorists, and Libya hasn't recovered ever since.
So this is happening at the worst possible time, and even though all objective experts, International Atomic Energy Agency, United Nations Security Council, and even the U.S. military and intelligence community agree that this is a good agreement with Iran, and we should keep it, we should preserve it, and even James Mattis, Defense Secretary, who cannot be accused of being soft on Iran because he's one of the most anti-Iran generals in the Pentagon, has said repeatedly that this is an arms control agreement, we should respect it, and it's good for the next 10 to 15 years at least, and therefore we should not try to scuttle it.
So at this time, the people like Bolton and neoconservatives are trying to cook up some sort of excuse to motivate Trump, to convince Trump to leave the agreement.
So Bolton also talks about significant violations by Iran.
There is no such violation by Iran.
Only twice over the past two years, two and a half years, International Atomic Energy Agency told Iran that it had produced a little bit more heavy water than it was supposed to.
Now I emphasize again, heavy water makes sense only in the context of a heavy water reactor, and because Iran doesn't have any heavy water reactor, and it demolished what it had that was under construction, even exceeding the limit of heavy water production doesn't have any serious implication.
Despite that, as soon as the agency told Iran to correct it, it corrected that.
But aside from that, there has absolutely no violation by Iran whatsoever.
In addition to that, as Yukio Amano, the Director General of IAEA, said recently, he said that since signing the agreement with Iran in July of 2015, the number of IAEA inspectors in Iran has doubled, and Iran's nuclear program right now is under the most robust and most extensive inspection of any nuclear program in the entire world.
So this is the state of affairs while Bolton talks about violations by Iran or threat by Iran.
And Bolton also talks about increasingly unacceptable conduct at the strategic level internationally.
I don't know what he's talking about.
But presumably, he talks about Iran being involved in Iraq and Syria.
Now, of course, in the ideal world, nobody wants any country to intervene in the affairs of another country.
But we have to remember that in June 2014, when Islamic State suddenly appeared on the horizon and took a large part of territory in Iraq, if it weren't help that Iran provided to the government of Iraq, Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, would have fallen under control of Islamic State, which would have been a total disaster.
And Iran did this at the request of the Shiite government in Baghdad.
And we have to remember that the Shiite government came to power as a result of U.S. invading Iraq in 2003, and then having elections there.
So if Iran is there, it was at the request of the Iraqi government.
Iran is also involved in Syria.
I have said many, many times, I don't like that Iran is present in Syria.
I have said many, many times that Iran should not have intervened in Syria.
But again, there's a catch to this.
First of all, when the civil war in Syria started, which was, in my opinion, and according to many other analysts, provoked by foreign powers, the first countries that intervened in Syrian civil war were not Iran or Syria.
They were Saudi Arabia, they were Qatar, they were Turkey, the United States, and so on.
And this is not what I say, or what I claim, or people like me claim, but this is what, for example, Joe Biden said when he spoke at Harvard University in October of 2014, and in response to a question by one of the students, he said that when the civil war started, our allies, with whom we are very close, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, basically said that anybody who fights with the Assad government in Syria, they will arm, train, and fund.
And then he said, unfortunately, the only ones who wanted to fight with Assad were terrorists.
So our allies have been arming and supporting these terrorists.
Hillary Clinton, in her email to John Podesta that was leaked last year, said that we know Saudi Arabia and Qatar are helping Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.
John Kerry, in his own conversation with the supposedly leaders of opposition in Syria, said that the United States knew Islamic State was rising, could control it, but they didn't actually do anything because they wanted to become strong enough so that they could use it in negotiations with Syria.
And he also said that Iran and Russia intervene in Syria simply because if they didn't do it, Syria would have fallen to Islamic State, and they both consider this as a threat to their national security.
In addition to the fact that Russia was invited by, sorry, invited by the Syrian government, and Iran signed a mutual defense pact with Syria several years ago, and therefore Iran was obligated.
I'm not justifying this per se, but I'm saying that there are two sides to this.
One cannot condemn Russia intervention in Syria without condemning intervention by Saudi Arabia or Turkey and their allies and the United States and Western intelligence agency.
So this is what basically- And remember, on the other side of the border in Iraq, America is outright fighting on the same side as Iran still.
Exactly, Iran and- And the United States fought Islamic State in Iraq to take back Mosul.
And without Iran's help, that would not have happened.
Now, Bolton also says that this agreement is a shield for Iran's effort to develop a nuclear-deliverable nuclear weapon.
Well, what program?
I mean, there is no program to produce any nuclear weapon.
Iran doesn't have any program.
So what is it that he's talking about?
He's just fabricating things as he goes in order to find a justification.
There is no, there was never a nuclear weapon program in Iran.
Even if there were some research, it stopped in 2003 as the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that you mentioned at the beginning of your program certified.
And we know that at least since 2003, Iran stopped all research on issues related to this.
And the International Atomic Energy Agency has never found any evidence that indicate clearly that Iran in the distant past actually tried to make a nuclear weapon.
And I can tell you, we can dedicate a whole program to other countries, allies of the United States that have tried explicitly to make nuclear weapons, and they were not punished or sanctioned or anything like that.
I can name Taiwan, I can name South Korea, I can name Egypt, I can name Brazil, I can name Argentina.
These are all countries that have tried explicitly, we know it, their program existed, to produce nuclear weapons, and they were never sanctioned or brought to the United Nations Security Council and so on and so forth.
But because of Iran's position in the Middle East, an influential country in one of the most volatile and also one of the most important regions of the world, and because of the fact that the Iranian government, whatever it is internally, which I don't like, I mean, I have made it very clear that I don't like the democracy in Tehran, I don't like the fact that they don't allow free elections, although they do have competitive elections, but not free elections.
But the fact of the matter is, they are after Iran, and in particular, Bolton is after Iran, because Bolton sees Iran as an impediment to his imperial ambition.
John Bolton believes that international laws are good so long as they help or benefit what he considers as United States national interest.
And what he considers as United States national interest are not even true national interests of our country.
I mean, why is it that making wars in the Middle East, attacking Iran, attacking other countries, is in our national interest?
I mean, we have so many problems here in our own country, in the United States, and we should spend trillions of dollars overseas for useless wars that kill thousands of American soldiers, tens of thousands of them wounded, coming back, broken completely, and so on, and these are all in our national interest.
They are not in our national interest.
Neoconservatives and Bolton consider this as U.S. national interest, and therefore, because they see Iran as an impediment to their imperial ambition to dominate the Middle East, to basically disintegrate the Middle East so that they can rule and they can take advantage of its energy resources, they consider Iran as a threat.
This is the same guy that when he was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that if you destroy 10 floors of the United Nations building in New York with all of its staff and so on, nothing will change at the UN, and this is why he was an ambassador, U.S. ambassador to the UN.
So these are the type of guys that are making these ambitions, sorry, these prescriptions to how to go about forcing Iran to leave the nuclear agreement so that they can have an excuse to go after Iran, and because they know that there is no evidence, there is absolutely positively no evidence.
In the past, some people, before the nuclear agreement, some people would argue that, well, yes, we don't have strong evidence, but there is bits and pieces here and there.
For example, if you look at articles by David Sanger in New York Times, he repeatedly referred to this, and in a long article that I published on anti-war, I responded to all of his accusations.
But since nuclear agreement in July 2015, there has not been any shred of evidence that Iran is doing something in secret, or Iran has violated any of its obligations towards the nuclear agreement.
So everything that Bolton and people like Bolton say are just basically fabrication, they are lies, they are exaggeration.
They just want to, first of all, convince the people of the United States that Iran is a threat, secondly, convince the international community that Iran is a threat, and third, provide some sort of rationale or excuse that Iran should be attacked, or at least the most severe economic sanctions should be reimposed on Iran.
And I must also say that when the Iranian government, and in particular, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani say that it is the US that has not lived to its obligation, there's a lot of merit to what they say.
If you look at the track record of both Obama administration and Trump administration, it clearly shows that they are not living up to their obligations.
Even the Obama administration, the Treasury Department under Obama, drag its feet to approve various requests for doing business with Iran.
For example, Iran has been known for over 30 years that wants two things from the United States, a spare parts for old civilian aircraft that Iran had bought many, many years ago, and buying new civilian aircraft from the United States.
Every parameter of this deal was known for 25 years.
Yet, after the July 2015 agreement was signed, and Iran entered negotiations with American corporation Boeing to buy 100 civilian aircraft, the Treasury Department dragged its feet for almost a year to approve the transaction.
Even though this was explicitly part of the nuclear agreement, one of the items that was explicitly mentioned in the agreement is that the United States agrees to sell Iran civilian aircraft.
And yet, the Obama administration and its Treasury Department dragged their feet.
That's one.
And then, since Trump came to power in January, the Trump administration has been trying to discourage the European Union to do business with Iran.
A lot of large banks in Europe that Iran has used in the past for its commercial transactions are reluctant or not willing to deal with Iran because they're afraid that things will change.
And then, all of a sudden, Washington will impose a lot of harsh sanctions and penalties against them.
So, that has discouraged business with Iran.
And one of the promises of the nuclear agreement was that by resolving the issue regarding Iran's nuclear program and by expanding commercial relationship between Iran and Europe and the United States, gradually, an atmosphere of trust will be created so that other issues of concern and interest can be negotiated with Iran.
For example, the missile program.
Well, the Iranian government, if they see that the European Union and the United States have lived up to their obligations and promises and have delivered every bit of things that they were supposed to deliver, then Iranian reformists may be able to convince the hardliners within Iran that, well, maybe we should put some limits on our missile program, although this is a purely defensive weapon, but maybe we should negotiate and put some sort of limit on it.
But absent this type of delivering of promises and carrying out obligations, and given the fact that the Trump administration has been totally hostile towards Iran and whatever he does, there is no way that any Iranian, regardless of whether he or she is a reformist or a fundamentalist or a hardliner or whatever, find it in his or her right mind to do something that would indicate any sort of weakness towards the United States or being afraid of the United States.
They are going to be resolute, they are going to be firm, and they are going to insist on U.S. carrying out its part of the obligation.
So whatever lies that Bolton and people like him spread, and there is just so much of it, believe me, I am more agitated these days than I was agitated before the nuclear agreement before July 2015, because the amount of lies that I read, the amount of propaganda that I read, the amount of exaggerations that I read far exceed anything that I have ever known, not only about Iran, even about the Soviet Union, for example, or about Cuba or about any of these countries that this country had taken hostile postures towards.
It is just mind-boggling what I read.
And the only way to prevent another war with Iran is to make it, explain it to the public that these are all lies, these are all fabrications, these are all exaggerations.
And the side that has violated its obligation is not Iran, but it's the United States.
All right, sorry, hold on just one second.
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Well, after all, it's the government making claims.
It seems like it would be easy enough for anyone to just say to themselves, oh, they're lying about this too, huh?
Oh, okay, just like everything else.
I guess I should have known.
How hard can it be to change your mind, especially when, well, as you've been outlining here completely for everyone, there's no question of whether there's a nuclear threat from Iran whatsoever at this point.
It's 100% proven fact that their doctrine has been to not make nukes in order to not give the Americans an excuse.
So far, that's worked, and that's been their policy.
And as you said, and this is, you know, I think pretty importantly, and I can understand why you're outraged about all the lies and disinformation because, of course, the first premise of all of it is that you have to be an idiot to, you know, basically accept these lies, and that's really insulting, and I hate it too.
But on the other hand, as you pointed out, CIA, State Department, and the Defense Department, including yesterday the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of the officials, all the Europeans, and the United Nations, and the IAEA, and everyone, it's just, it's absolutely clear.
There is no, you know, somehow, I don't know how they pulled off the cloud of doubt about Iraq in 2002 and three, as though there was any question whether or not there was a Manhattan Project going on just north, south, east, or west of Baghdad, somewhat, as Donald Roosevelt put it, or he was talking about stores of chemical weapons, but still.
Back then, they just basically said, trust us, and we're in a hurry, and they just did it.
But this time, nobody's buying it, right?
I mean, the readers of National Review might be, but, you know, John Bolton, at least according to the papers, and at least for now, is forbidden from even coming to the White House to meet with the President.
The new Chief of Staff has banned him, so it's not exactly the old days.
It seems like, basically, they have to admit that Iran is not in violation of the deal.
In fact, let me ask you this.
You mentioned this in the article here about David Albright, the reliable tool of, you know, pretended expert, pretended nuclear physicist, who actually never was, who pretended UN weapons inspector, who never was, who's always making claims.
You say he's got new claims about the Parchin military site, and yet, I seem to remember in my brain, though, that they actually inspected, you know, just like in the deal, and they had warned, oh, they're never gonna let us inspect Parchin, they're gonna refuse us, and then we're gonna have to go to war anyway, and they said, come on in, and they inspected the place, and it was empty.
There was no reactor, there was no nuclear project that had been built in there and then dismantled and removed, or any evidence of any such thing, and so, that issue's already resolved, so tell me now, supposedly, the news here.
And he wants to revive it.
I mean, this is the guy who back in 2005, 12 years ago, insisted that IAEA should go into Parchin and inspect it.
Okay, so Iran allowed IAEA to inspect Parchin back in 2005 twice.
Each time, they visited five sites that IAEA had selected within the compound.
The second time that they visited, the IAEA surprised the Iranian officials by asking to visit a sixth site that wasn't in the list of the sites that they were supposed to visit within Parchin compound, and Iran agreed to it.
And they also visited that.
They took environmental samples, they took soil, air, everything that they usually do in order to find any trace of nuclear material.
They found nothing.
Then after they found nothing, Albright said, well, yes, Iran should have been cooperative more, and we suggest to Iran that be more cooperative in the future.
Okay, so the issue died.
Then Yukio Amano was appointed director general in December of 2009, and he revived the issue again.
As soon as he revived the issue again, a non-issue, Albright also jumped the bandwagon and started talking about the grave threat that Parchin has imposed, and all the secret things that has been done at Parchin, and so on and so forth.
And of course, other people like Albright also did the same.
Okay, so according to July 2015 agreement, IAEA got to inspect Parchin again.
They got to do environmental sampling again, and so on.
Again, they found nothing.
So that issue, again, apparently died.
But now, he has again issued with Ali Heinonen, who was at IAEA several years ago, reviving the issue again.
They again said, well, they should go back to Parchin and look at it, because the last time they did it, they couldn't do it, they couldn't do a thorough job or a good job, and so on.
They should back to it.
They should go back to it.
They also issued another analysis, so-called analysis, saying that, well, Iran was allowed to do research on advanced centrifuges, according to the agreement, but Iran was supposed to build like two of them, but Iran built three of them.
And out of the three or four, whatever it was, three of them failed.
So Iran was left with only one of them.
So that means Iran was put under the limit that the IAEA and the nuclear agreement had decided, but this should not be interpreted as Iran abiding by its obligation.
Iran had violated its obligation not to build too many of these centrifuges.
And this is something that even IAEA doesn't claim.
And Yukio Amano is not a friend of Iran.
I myself have written, at least have published at least two articles with your great website, antiwar.com, in which I enumerated everything that Amano has said that are basically not true.
Because for example, he has always talked about undeclared nuclear material.
There is no undeclared nuclear material in Iran.
If there is, what is the evidence for it?
They make a statement, particularly regarding this sensitive issue, and then not being able to back it up with any evidence.
So here is a guy who is no friend of Iran, who has been very tough with Iran over the years.
And yet he defends the work of his inspectors in Iran.
He says that we have an inspection program in Iran, which is the most robust, the most intrusive of any nuclear program currently existing on the world stage.
And we have doubled the number of inspectors that we have in Iran, permanently based.
We have put cameras there.
We are taking environmental samples all the time, and so on.
And he has defended it, and yet Albright, and Ali Heinonen, and people like him, jump onto the stage again, and try to provoke something.
I guess Albright is smelling some new funding from right-wing organizations in this country for Iran, because the funds have dried up, apparently, after nuclear agreement, and he wants new funding for his institute, and therefore he has jumped on this stage, and making allegations that he himself cannot back up with any credible evidence, neither he, nor International Atomic Energy Agency.
I mean, this is really outrageous, and I really get stressed out by reading these lies, exaggeration, fabrication, innuendos, everything that is going on in these.
And this is a really dangerous situation, particularly because Trump doesn't have any experience regarding foreign policy.
He doesn't have any experience regarding any of these, and he's determined to basically destroy President Obama's most important foreign policy legacy, which is nuclear agreement with Iran.
Has tried to kill the Obamacare, and he hasn't been able to do it.
That was the most important legacy of President Obama regarding domestic issues, and he's also determined to do the same with nuclear issues.
And in fact, Emmanuel Macron, the French President, told Trump last week, explicitly and bluntly, that the only reason you want to do this is because this is the most important foreign policy legacy of President Obama.
That's the only reason you want to do it.
I mean, here we have the President of a powerful country like France, one of our closest allies, tell our President that, look, what you're doing is silly, it's stupid, because the only reason you want to do it is because your predecessor did it, and you don't like him, and you hate him, for some reason, and you want to destroy that legacy.
So this is the situation we have in this country, and it's really very dangerous, in addition to being very stressful, it's very dangerous, because it puts this country on the path to another useless, another criminal war against a nation that not only poses no threat to the United States, but its population is totally pro-America.
They are pro-America, they love the United States, and they don't have any hostility or enmity towards the people of the United States.
All right, let me ask you one thing here, not that it's suspicious to me or anything, but it seems like an obvious objection would be, on the one thing where they are in supposed violation, technically, why are they still producing heavy water if they already filled the Arak reactor with concrete?
They export it, they export it, because heavy water is not something that a lot of countries can do.
Iran also produces enriched uranium, but it exports it.
But as part of the deal, they've agreed to never hold more than a certain amount at a time, and they've technically gone.
Exactly, they cannot hold more than 300 kilogram of enriched uranium at any given time in Iran.
Now, do the Hawks even have a counter-narrative about that, no, see, they're perfecting their heavy water capabilities for later or something, anything?
Look, the heavy water plant was built many, many years ago, and it was intended for supplying heavy water for the heavy water nuclear reactor.
But Iran demolished it according to the nuclear agreement, and therefore, they can, of course, close the plant, but now that they have invested on it and it produces heavy water, and as I said, this is not something that a lot of countries can do, Iran exports it, exports it, and therefore makes some money.
So basically, it is trying to recoup the investment it made on its nuclear, on heavy water plant.
And remember, again, I said- And now, tell me again, remind me, what exactly is heavy water used for?
It's not poison for our local supplies.
Well, the nuclear reactor needs water to extract the heat from the reactor, convert it to steam, and therefore generate electricity.
Now, heavy water reactor uses heavy water, which is basically an isotope of the normal water that we use, and heavy water nuclear reactor also uses natural uranium as opposed to enriched uranium.
Iranians tried to build that heavy water nuclear reactor because they were not sure that they can set up a uranium enrichment facility because the technological head is very huge, but building a heavy water nuclear reactor was much easier.
Now, the problem with nuclear, the heavy water nuclear reactor, it produces a lot of plutonium, and of course, plutonium has no use other than making a nuclear bomb.
So that was the problem, and therefore Iran agreed to demolish that nuclear reactor.
Now, here's another violation of the obligations of the West towards Iran regarding this issue.
In return for demolishing the heavy water nuclear reactor in Iraq, which was under construction, the West agreed that it would help Iran to design a light water nuclear reactor, the type that Iran has in Bushehr by the Persian Gulf and is producing about 1,000 megawatts of electricity.
But they haven't done it.
After two years, no significant action has taken place, and this is one of the points that within Iran, the hard-earners always make, that we spent a lot of money designing and basically constructing 80% of the reactor, and then we gave all of it up, we demolished it, and they had agreed to help us design a light water nuclear reactor that uses low-enriched uranium to produce electricity, but they haven't done it.
So there is no suspicious activity here, there is nothing.
As I said at the beginning of your program, heavy water makes sense for a nuclear program only if you have a heavy water reactor.
Otherwise, it's not even a nuclear material.
In the list of nuclear material that IAEA has, heavy water is not one of them.
Heavy water only makes sense when you have a heavy water nuclear reactor, and Iran gave that up.
Therefore, there is nothing.
They make a big deal out of nothing, that Iran was supposed to, for example, have two tons of heavy water at one time, but now it has produced it, and it has exceeded its limit by a few kilograms.
Okay, fine, so Iran got rid of it.
But this is a non-issue, basically.
So everything that they- Muhammad, I just spoke with Julian Borger, as I was saying, and he was talking about how they've taken a term out of the preface of the deal, and said, you know, that says, we expect that this will help bring peace in the region.
And they're saying, aha, Iran is in violation of this, because it says in the preface here that everything in the region was supposed to be perfect after this nuclear deal, which, of course, has gotta be the furthest moving of any goalposts ever.
I mean, I remember, actually, even the night that the deal was signed, David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy, the editor of Foreign Policy, was saying, oh, great, now they'll have more money to give to Hezbollah.
And it's like, jeez, man, weren't you guys, didn't you just spend a decade saying the single greatest emergency in the world is Iran's nuclear program?
And we solved that beyond any shadow of a doubt, including pouring concrete into their heavy water reactor, et cetera.
And now you wanna complain about they'll have a little bit more money freed up in their budget for Hezbollah?
You know, talk about moving goalposts.
But now they're saying, no, this deal, which was only about nukes, didn't solve every other issue.
Whereas, you know, we talked about, you mentioned in Syria, the only reason they're there in Syria is in reaction to America's policy back in jihadis that they went to solve.
And then in Iraq, we've actually agreed with them and taken their side in that very same fight against the Bin Ladenites there.
And of course, the only reason, you know, Iran's friends rule Baghdad is because George Bush invaded in 2003.
And of course, you know, I interviewed the guy on the show who wrote the thing for foreign policy, but there's a lot of things like this, but there's a great one called, the Houthis are not Hezbollah.
But there's just tons, even again, the agencies themselves, I believe the State Department, the CIA, et cetera, have admitted at least from time to time that, no, the Houthis don't really answer to Tehran.
They're not really supported.
You see what their man wrote in foreign policy.
I think you and I discussed it in one of your past programs.
He said, Houthis are not Iran's puppet.
And in fact, Iran wasn't even interested or having any strong connections to Houthis before Saudi Arabia start attacking Yemen.
The only reason that they connect Iran to the Houthis is because they want to have an excuse to do what they do.
And I'm just- In fact, even Obama himself, President Obama himself, when it was still his war, which he started there, he admitted that personally himself, not just his administration, but Obama himself admitted that Iran had warned the Houthis not to sack the capital city.
Exactly, yes.
Because they knew that that'd be a red line and start a war with the Saudis.
Yes.
And yet, Mattis, for example, Defense Secretary, has accused Iran many, many times of doing this or that in Yemen.
This is all lies.
There isn't anything.
Well, Iran may have, I'm not saying that Iran didn't do anything.
Iran may have trained some of these Houthis, or some small arms maybe may have been smuggled into Yemen.
But to make that as something like Iran controls everything from Tehran, and this is all Iran's fault, it's just sheer nonsense.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Security Council, they all say that Saudi Arabia is committing war crimes.
The UN Security Council wanted to issue a resolution regarding it.
Saudi Arabia threatened them that if you do that, we will hold back our financial support for UN.
The Human Rights Council of the United Nations was supposed to do that.
They did the same thing.
And UN Secretary General gave Saudi Arabia one year to correct what it has been doing in Yemen.
Nothing has happened.
And just a few weeks ago, the Secretary General said that they are going to publish the report about what Saudi Arabia has done in Yemen.
And even today, if you look at the news on anti-war, there is news about Saudi Arabia threatening other countries if they want to discuss what it has been doing in Yemen.
And who is supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen?
Us, we, the United States.
We are supporting them logistically.
We are supporting them by giving them weapons.
We are supporting them to blockade Yemen.
We send special forces into Yemen.
And we do all of this and help Saudi Arabia to commit war crimes in Yemen, and yet we accuse Iran.
I mean, this just doesn't make sense.
And we all do this simply because, as I said, these people, neocons, Bolton, and even at least part of the military, they have imperial ambition.
And they want to dominate the Middle East.
And they see Iran as impediment, as a barrier, or as last line of defense against what they want to do in the Middle East.
And that's why they talk about human rights violation in Iran.
I totally agree.
Human rights in Iran are violated.
They talk about Iran not having democratic elections.
Aside from the fact that whatever Iran has is much better than whatever the rest of the Middle East, with the exception of Israel, has, and aside from the fact that none of our Arab allies in that country even have any elections, I agree, Iranian elections are not democratic.
But let me just put it this way.
If tomorrow Iran becomes the most democratic nation on the face of the earth, and if they hold the freest elections in the world, and if every human rights abuse in Iran stops tomorrow, but yet Iran follows an independent foreign policy, they would still find another excuse to go after Iran, because they don't care about human rights.
They don't care about democracy.
They don't care about Iranian people.
Let me ask you this.
So there's this group, you mentioned them at the beginning of the interview.
Most people probably have not heard of them, although most people listening to this show maybe have.
It's the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or the M-E-K, or the M-K-O, they call it, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq organization.
And now, I just saw a photo of them marching with a dead man as their leader on their big banner.
I think everyone knows that the husband or brother, I don't know if it's clear exactly, maybe both, he died, and it's the wife, widow, is the one who's in charge, Mayrum Rajavi.
And they run this group, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq.
And now, obviously at this point, so much about this group is clear.
One thing that's clear is that you have politicians and military officers and all kinds of people, and from both parties, who get paid tons of money, probably, I don't know, Israeli, Saudi, or maybe directly CIA money, funneled through this group into paying off these prominent American politicians to support the M-E-K and to pretend, question mark, parentheses, I guess, that, oh yeah, no, once we have a regime change, what we're gonna do is, this lady, Mayrum Rajavi, she's gonna be the new democratically elected president, pro-American president of Iran, and everything's gonna be fine, and then I guess, supposedly, it goes without saying that the Iranian people are gonna love that and way better than their current form of government, especially after we launch a war to make it come true.
Now, I know these guys are getting paid $20,000 and $50,000 just to give a speech to represent this group, so it doesn't matter whether they really mean it or not, but I wonder, I'm trying to get to the point here, I wonder whether you think that this is actually their plan.
Is that, oh yeah, no, I talked about it with Mayrum Rajavi, and she assures me everything's gonna be fine.
We're gonna have a war, and then we're gonna parachute these kooks in, and it's gonna be just great.
Is that what they really think, or do they have anything else in mind other than we'll start the bombing and then hope it works out for the worst, or what?
That is their plan, because the only opposition group that has been willing to work with neocons and any enemy of Iran is MEK.
No opposition group with any sort of credibility, either outside Iran or inside Iran, is willing to do that.
Not only that, this organization, the MEK, as I said at the beginning of your program, is universally despised within Iran, because they collaborated with Saddam Hussein during eight years of war.
They gave all sorts of intelligence to Iraqi forces.
The Mujahideen forces attach Iranian soldiers at the front of Iran-Iraq war.
There are documented speeches by Massoud Rajavi, who was the leader of the group at that time, bragging about how Mujahideen killed 69,000 Iranian soldiers that were defending Iran against Iraq by attacking them at the front between Iran-Iraq, 69,000.
The total number of Iranians that were killed from the beginning of the war to June of 1982, when Iran basically liberated most of its occupied territories by Iraq, was 30,000.
And this guy, in his two speeches, brags about killing 69,000 of them.
I have written about this, it's well-documented.
And then when the war ended, and we had the war in Kuwait, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, after the war, after Saddam Hussein was defeated, the Mujahideen helped Saddam Hussein's army to put down Shiite uprising in the south and Kurdish uprising in the north.
Then for many, many years, there is a video of it.
There was a video of it that they removed from YouTube that after September 11th happened, and the news about September 11th spread, there was celebration in the MEK camp within Iraq.
And Rajavi, the leader, gave a speech and said that this is against imperialism.
But two years later, Iraq was invaded.
These are all well-documented and all well-known within the Iranian community and within Iran.
I'm sorry, I couldn't quite hear you.
You said in the video, she says what?
He says that this is a continuation of our war with imperialism.
This is what we showed, how we fight with imperialism.
This was when September 11th happened.
In other words, she was trying to take credit for the attack to her cult group there?
Yes, yes.
In other words, he was saying we are allied with Iraq and we are allied with anti-imperialist forces.
And what happened was basically as part of the war against imperialism.
One of their own former members wrote about this, the guy who is very well-known within Iranian community.
Then when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 and the leadership of MEK realized that Saddam Hussein was gone, but they may also attack other countries like Iran, for example, they made a strategic shift.
Suddenly, a group that prided itself on being anti-imperialist and leftist and so on and so forth suddenly they became the most liberal organization on the face of the earth.
Suddenly they presented Rajavi's wife, Maryam Rajavi as the president-elect of the Iranian resistance.
And there are all sorts of stories about the type of crimes that they committed in their camps in Iraq.
Now, so long as their camps were in Iraq, near Iranian border, they always claim that if the West helps them, they can overthrow the Iranian government, the Iranian regime in Tehran.
But since Iraq forced them to leave Iraq and 3,000 of them were sent to Albania, now they live in Albania in southern Europe, they no longer talk about being able to supposedly liberate Iran.
Now they want a regime change.
And of course, when talking about regime change, that means foreign military intervention attacking Iran, the type that occurred in Iraq or Libya and so on.
So now they want attack on Iran.
And this is why people like Bolton present these criminals as symbols of freedom and democracy and so on and so forth.
And they don't have the slightest social support within Iran.
They're despised in Iran, not only because of what they did during Iran-Iraq war, but also because of the fact that we know that they collaborated with Israel to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists.
We know that they gave a lot of information about Iran's nuclear program.
We know that they have collaborated every stage with neocons to make false claims, to make all sorts of claims about some sort of secret nuclear program that have never discovered, that have never existed, except the very first one.
And that wasn't even violation of NPT in August of 2002.
So we know all of these.
And Bolton and people like him get paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobby for this despised group, this hated group.
Well, and I mean, it's worth mentioning too that it's a cult, like out of that episode of King of the Hill.
Oh, it is absolutely a cult.
Yeah, I mean, where, you know, I interviewed a guy, Jeremiah Gulka, who worked for the Rand Corporation, who went and investigated them at Camp Liberty in Iraq back when they were still there.
I guess they've been moved now, but at that point, and he said that, yeah, no, listen, it's just like in the horror stories, and they don't really hide it within their camp, that marriage and sex is banned, and that all the children are basically kidnapped and taken away.
All the adults have to raise their hand for permission to speak, like it's first grade class.
And, you know, everybody is made to worship the hidden leader, right?
Like it's Mullah Omar, who's been dead for three years, and they're pretending he's alive.
The same kind of thing here with the husband, I'm sorry, I forgot his name.
And then the Saudi prince revealed that two years ago in Paris, that the hidden imam, or the hidden leader, was actually dead.
Masoud Rajavi was dead.
Right, Masoud, right.
He announced that he's dead.
Well, I mean, he's obviously dead.
Nobody's heard of him in 15 years or something, right?
Or 12 years or something, he's gone.
He's been gone.
And they have never said why he died.
And there are all sorts of rumors why he died.
And I can even talk about those rumors, but I don't want, because they're rumors, I don't want to talk about them.
But there are all sorts of rumors that even make sense that why he died, okay?
And not only marriage is banned, they force those couples within their organization, in the camps, that they were married, they force them to divorce each other.
Maryam Rajavi.
And when they do have children, they take them away, and so you better not ever betray the movement, because we've got your kid off somewhere, and you don't even know where.
Exactly, and Rajavi, Maryam Rajavi, the woman who is supposedly the leader now, she was married to a high-ranking member of the organization.
He divorced her so that she could marry the leader.
That was the state of the affair.
And they call it the ideological revolution.
That's what they call it at that time.
All right, listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Mohamed.
I know that we could go on, but we're right at an hour.
So we'll go ahead and call it here, but thank you so much for doing your great work and coming back on the show today.
Thank you for having me back, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Mohamed Sahimi.
He teaches chemical engineering at USC, and he's been writing for a good decade or more here.
Great articles debunking all the war party's lies against Iran.
This one is at antiwar.com.
It's called Deconstructing Neoconservatives Manifesto for War with Iran.
