09/29/13 – Nima Shirazi – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, September 29th, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright everybody, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Appreciate you tuning in.
My website is scotthorton.org.
You can find 3,000 interviews going back to 2003 there in the archive at scotthorton.org.
You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash scotthortonshow.
It's been a real good week for interviews on my other radio show, mostly concerning Iran.
I got a bunch of great ones.
Joe Loria of the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Waltz of Harvard and foreignpolicy.com, John Glazer from antiwar.com, Phil Giraldi from the American Conservative, Ali Gharib from the Daily Beast, all great critics of American-Iran policy.
We're going to continue along that vein on the show tonight.
But I wanted to mention also real quick before we move on to our guest, my new article that has just come out for the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org.
It's called US Government to Blame for Somalia's Misery.
And you can also find it linked there on the front page at scotthorton.org.
US Government to Blame for Somalia's Misery.
A little bit of context for the recent al-Shabaab attack on the mall in Nairobi, Kenya for you.
So go and check that out.
Again, scotthorton.org.
And now to our guest, it's Nima Shirazi.
He keeps a great blog called Why to Sleep in America.com, focusing on Iran issues mostly.
But he also writes for Mondoweiss and for mufta.org.
Welcome back to the show, Nima.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Good to be here, Scott.
Good deal.
Yeah, good to talk to you again.
And good to read you.
You got some good stuff here.
And obviously, it's just a huge week for developments in Iran policy.
It was the UN General Assembly with all the attendant speeches and whatever.
But behind the scenes, there's a real shift, it seems like, in the prevailing attitudes, maybe even on both sides, but certainly on the American side, with Barack Obama taking a phone call from the president of Iran.
So what do you think it all means?
Indeed.
Being someone who observes this stuff rather closely as I do, this was a really, really surprising week.
Maybe some observers saw this kind of stuff coming.
I certainly did not.
I would be the first to admit it.
I was very skeptical, very cynical about what we would see this time around at the UN General Assembly and this week with all the diplomats in town.
And it was really, really a surprising outcome, starting at the beginning of the week, obviously, with both Obama and Rouhani's speeches to the General Assembly, which both of them took a pretty moderate tone, especially Obama's considering what he has said in that forum in the past.
Granted, there are plenty of problems within his speech, as there always are, essentially saying that he would have no problem going to war for oil, mentioning that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, which his own intelligence agencies know that it doesn't and that that's not true.
But nevertheless, it was a far less bellicose, less aggressive speech than we hear from him often.
And I don't say that lightly.
I'm a big critic of that particular man.
But moving forward through the week, we then saw a speech by Rouhani in front of the UN Conference on Disarmament, which effectively reiterated the official Iranian position against nuclear weapons of all kinds, all weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, biological weapons.
And this is a consistent Iranian position, which we've heard for decades now, despite what we tend to hear in the press here in the West.
And beyond this, then there was a high level meeting between John Kerry, Secretary of State, and Javad Zarif, who is the foreign minister of Iran under Rouhani.
He used to be the UN ambassador from Iran back under the Khatami administration.
And so that was at that point on Thursday afternoon, the most senior meeting between Iranian and American officials in over 30 years, obviously, since since the revolution.
And so it looked like things were going very, very well, better than than usual.
There was more dialogue, more diplomacy.
There were thoughts about more meetings coming up in the future, vested with the full authority of both the American government and the Iranian government, which is very rare.
Everything seemed to be very positive from from all sides.
Obviously, there is room for skepticism.
Obviously, there's a tough road ahead.
Obviously, Iran's rights need to be fully recognized as they have not been by the United States specifically, namely their right to a domestic enrichment program, which would once that is affirmed by the United States, it is already part of international law that cannot be abrogated in any way.
But what needs to happen is the United States needs to acknowledge that.
And then I believe I think most people believe a nuclear deal, whatever that winds up being, will be inked very, very quickly.
It really just has to do about respecting Iran as an equal party to international law and international treaties, namely the NPT, as as any other country in the world.
It's that that's the real starting point.
But nevertheless, so Thursday evening, Iran watchers were, you know, rather optimistic.
I think I was about going into whatever happens next between these two countries, between Iran and the P5 plus one, which is the negotiating parties.
It's the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, all nuclear armed states, plus plus Germany.
And so things were looking up.
And then all of a sudden on Friday afternoon, there were reports that while en route to JFK airport, leaving the country after being here for a number of days to the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Rouhani received a call in his car from Barack Obama.
And this was absolutely stunning, a absolutely surprising and shocking move forward between the relationships of these two countries.
Obviously, there are plenty of naysayers and we can get into that.
But what began the week as the potential for a accidental on purpose run in the hallways of the UN, which wound up not happening between Rouhani and Obama, turned into something that was far better, far more substantive.
The two presidents got to speak one on one, effectively privately and off the record, about issues pertaining to ending the impasse between these two countries.
And I do believe that Rouhani is the kind of person who would never sacrifice Iranian rights and Iranian sovereignty and self-determination.
So that in his determination, obviously, with the full backing of Ali Khamenei, the leader of Iran, I think things are really looking positive.
Obviously, I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but this is a different ballgame now, a different ballgame altogether.
Now, I'm trying to figure out exactly what has changed on the Iranian side, other than the face of the president.
Because, well, are they really saying anything different than they had before?
You point out in one answer on your blog that what Rouhani is saying about the Holocaust isn't even really that much different than what Ahmadinejad said.
No, I mean, I think generally the Iranian talking points, the Iranian positions are unchanged.
They are effectively unchanged.
I think this all has to do with tone.
This all has to do with a political cult of personality, which for better or worse seems to be what really dictates the possibilities of diplomacy these days.
So because it's not Ahmadinejad, who for eight years was the number one international boogeyman of the United States and the West, obviously, and Israel too.
And so without him, even though much of what has been said by the new president of Iran has been virtually identical, saying, you know, as I mentioned before, Iran's sovereign inalienable rights need to be recognized, about the Holocaust being a tragic historical event, a genocide, obviously, which took the lives of millions of Jews as well as many, many non-Jews.
This has all been said before, but because it's being said by someone who has been deemed effectively by the Western establishment, whether it's in the press or in political corridors, it's being said by someone who is acceptable.
Ahmadinejad was not acceptable.
Rouhani is known here.
He studied in the West.
He speaks a little English.
He's far less of what the West perceives to be a threatening world leader.
And when you actually look at the substance of what these two people have been saying, it is very similar.
I would say that the tone is certainly different.
It is certainly different.
Ahmadinejad, while he said a number of things that I think most observers of Western foreign policy, U.S. foreign policy, U.S. imperialism, and hegemony and support for Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing and colonization, of course, these things are consistent throughout.
However, Ahmadinejad's tone was consistently perceived as being far more aggressive, far less diplomatic.
And so it was dismissed out of hand.
So for eight years, there was really a very small chance of real diplomacy happening.
And it just seems that because there's a new face, while the policies will certainly remain the same and the positions will remain the same and the insistence on being treated equally and with full respect in the international community, it's just Rouhani presents what people here perceive as a much different face, as a far less threatening face.
And if that's what they need to make them feel better about doing the same exact diplomacy that they would have done six years ago, they'll be it.
Right.
Well, what's funny is, you know, back when Rafsanjani and Khatami were the presidents of Iran, the war party would say, well, but of course, it's all about the Ayatollah.
And he's the evil, scary Ayatollah, supreme leader.
And in his religiosity makes him so irrational that he can't be dealt with because of, you know, he speaks a different language and has a different religion.
So it's a real scary.
That kind of thing.
And then when it was Ahmadinejad, they go, oh, my God, Ahmadinejad is going to wipe Israel off the map.
Ahmadinejad is Hitler of the Middle East.
Ahmadinejad, this, that, the other thing, because he was a lot more provocative character than the Ayatollah.
Because after all, Khomeini is just I mean, he may be just as torturous as Khomeini was, but he's just not as scary looking on TV.
I don't think Ahmadinejad was a much more provocative character.
But now the war party, just check your Twitter, they're all back to saying, oh, well, it's still all about the Ayatollah.
And Rohani might be a nice guy, but he's not really in charge.
Right, exactly.
And what all of these people, all of these war party people, whether they be Congress members here in the United States, whether they're obviously the Israeli establishment is terrified right now that they're losing their propaganda battle.
I think what we're really seeing is a panic mode kind of situation.
Netanyahu, for instance, told a number of his senior officials, as well as the U.S. ambassador to refrain from giving any interviews for the time being about Iran, about Rohani, about the phone call between Obama and Rohani, about Iran's nuclear program in general, until he can address the General Assembly on Tuesday, which he's going to do.
And I'm sure it'll be absurd and hilarious.
He probably won't bring out a cartoon bomb this time, but maybe he'll do something just as silly.
And so what we're really seeing is this circling of the wagons of the war party because they don't know what to do here.
Because in Rohani, even though the policies may not be the same, he has been vested with a certain level of authority and control over, especially the nuclear issue, to negotiate with the West and to negotiate over these matters that are obviously just as important to Iran as they are said to be important to Israel and the U.S.
And so in having that authority vested in him, the confidence vested in him by Khamenei, we are seeing something that really hasn't been seen in Iran for a very long time.
Khatami did not have the same kind of support that Rohani has.
Ahmadinejad did for a number of years for his first term, certainly.
However, the rest of the country, the citizenry of Iran did not back him as fully as I believe there's a popular support for Rohani.
So everything seems to be aligning.
Politics are aligning in a certain way in Iran that they really haven't before, or at least for a very long time.
And so there's this scrambling going on here in terms of continuing to bolster Israeli-driven propaganda about the existential threat and the backing of terrorist groups and the religiosity and being Shia zealots.
And so they are allowed to lie freely just to pursue their own programs.
I mean, this is all just bogus propaganda.
And it really is not having nearly as much traction as it usually does, as it always has in the past, simply because Rohani has presented this policy, this not sorry, policy, but this personality rather, that seems to be very acceptable, very charming and very amenable to dialogue here in the West.
And so as an acceptable leader, we're seeing something different.
And Israel and its backers here really just don't know what to do about it.
All right.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Nima Shirazi from Mondoweiss.net and a lot of other places, too.
And, you know, part of the thing here, of course, is it's almost gone unstated.
You mentioned it, but only briefly, that this is all a big tempest in a teapot.
Anyway, there is no nuclear weapons program there.
The Israeli Mossad and the CIA and all the other intelligence agencies agree about it, too, that they're not making nukes.
If anything, they're making a breakout capability.
That is the ability to make nukes.
But even that is clearly negotiable.
And so there's really everything to negotiate and nothing to panic about here at all.
You want to analyze the reality of the situation rather than just go with what Netanyahu is squawking about.
Exactly.
I mean, there were headlines plastered all over the media early this week after Rouhani gave his interview to both Ann Curry and then later to Christiane Amanpour on CNN.
There were all these headlines about all of a sudden the Iranian president has disavowed nuclear weapons, has condemned nuclear weapons, has said Iran will never pursue nuclear weapons, has never pursued nuclear weapons.
It's against their strategic plans.
It's against their defense doctrine.
It's against their own religious principles.
As if this was something new, as if this isn't something that has been consistently reaffirmed for at least the past two decades at the senior, the very senior levels of Iranian leadership.
This is nothing new by a long shot.
Iranians have always said that nuclear weapons are the worst kind of weapon.
Even the stockpiling of them is a criminal act, that they affirm their commitment to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
They abide by their safeguards with the IAEA, which monitors their nuclear program and has never once found any diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program whatsoever.
This is absolutely consistent, and yet because these words are now coming out of Rouhani's mouth, they get headlines plastered everywhere, even though it is literally nothing new.
Well, but that also goes to show that there should be no problem making a deal here then.
I mean, in fact, this was part of the so-called charm offensive.
I hate to use that term.
I know it was, you know, originally Israeli propaganda trying to be sarcastic about it or whatever.
But what they did was they went ahead and converted a bunch of their 20% enriched uranium to fuel plates.
That is, they took it out of the pile that was amounting to their breakout capability.
They're diminishing their own ability to take the uranium they've already enriched and enrich it further to weapons grade by actually putting it to use, just like they said they were going to, just like in the deal with the IAEA, etc.
And so, you know, that was a pretty big step, I thought, before Rouhani ever got on the plane to come to New York, was, hey, look, we're taking the 20% and we're diverting it, all right, to medical purposes, just like we said we were.
Exactly.
I mean, and that was happening under the Ahmadinejad administration.
That was said by the Iranian government that that was their plan all along.
They started enriching up to, you know, just under 20% enriched uranium, which is still a low level of enrichment.
Weapons grade is upwards of 90%.
Far from weapons capable is what they've been doing so far.
Well, and they've got all the 20% that they need for their medical isotope reactor at this point, too.
So they really, it seems like they could just go ahead and negotiate away Fordo.
It could be, you know, spun as a real big deal here, even though it's not a real big deal there anymore.
Right.
I mean, I don't I don't actually think that Iran is going to put on the table the shuttering of the Fordo facility.
I don't think that that's going to wind up happening.
I think that effectively, without a firm commitment from both the United States and possibly even Israel, that there will be absolutely no military strike on Iran.
That facility will certainly stay open because it is defensible to the point that Israel really can't can't touch it.
And it's even questionable about whether the U.S. could could destroy it.
So really, purely for purposes of maintaining their own sovereignty, their own domestic capability, not to produce weapons, but to continue their domestic enrichment program, which is affirmed, again, under the articles of the NPP, an inalienable right affirmed as such.
I don't think they're going to negotiate that away.
I mean, I think what we really are poised to to see is how the U.S. responds, namely to the Iranian starting points, which are the affirmation of their own rights.
I think after that, a number of things can be negotiable.
However, the the idea I mean, it sounds good in a vacuum.
But the idea that the United States has all of a sudden disavowed any interest in regime change, even though Obama said so on the floor of the U.N., which was no small deal, but disavowed regime change in Iran as as the purpose of as the focus of U.S. foreign policy.
That that more than anything, I think, needs to be really put to the test because a nuclear deal has always been possible.
Always.
That's what people don't often realize.
The deal that is being mapped out by even American think tankers in Washington, sitting in the halls of power from Ken Pollack at Brookings at the Sabin Center, the Israeli-owned Sabin Center.
The the deals that he is putting forward and many like him are virtually identical to Iranian deals that have been around since at least 2005.
And it's you know, so it's no small thing that that the U.S. is finally maybe coming around.
But it really does remain to be seen if they're interested in the nuclear deal or if this really has to do with maintaining their own hold of power over resources and over self-determination and national sovereignty in the Middle East itself.
Yeah, I mean, at least on the face of it, it seems like they've gotten over it there.
You know, like you're saying, the nuclear program could have been negotiated all the time.
It's their bludgeon to use against Iran.
But if they really want to negotiate the nuclear deal, that really could be at least the first step on really normalizing relations and recognizing and dealing with their independence.
And after all, you know, when Michael Oren, the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the United States, gave that interview last week where he said that, well, yeah, of course, we prefer al-Qaeda to Hezbollah because Hezbollah is backed by Iran.
And what he kind of, it's between the lines there.
That's why America prefers al-Qaeda in Syria, too, because that's what Israel wants.
And so we'll fight, our government will fight on the side of our only enemies in the world against Israel's enemies.
But if Obama can actually, and I know this is way overstating it, but why not?
If Obama can do like Richard Nixon and go and shake hands with Mao Zedong kind of thing and really make friends with the Iranians, and after all, why fight about it?
Then it doesn't matter about Hezbollah or Syria or even support for Hamas or whatever.
All of that would be negotiable, too, just like in the golden offer of 2003.
And so, you know, what an awkward position for Obama to be put in where all of the Israel lobby in D.C. is trying to get him to double down and triple down on his support for al-Qaeda in Syria, when really he could diffuse all of that by normalizing relations with Iran.
That's absolutely correct.
And I think we're really in for an interesting few weeks, few months.
The Iranian position is that a nuclear deal can and should be struck within three months, possibly extended to six months if there are problems on the Western side.
But Iran really sees this as being something that can and will happen.
So the real spoilers here wind up being the Israeli contingent and their acolytes in the U.S. Congress.
So really those are the roadblocks, and if Obama can be strong enough to disregard those very influential voices, I think we'll really see something.
I think what's really interesting is that for a Nixon-to-China moment to potentially come, and I don't want to get ahead of myself, obviously, we're all skeptics here.
We don't want to get too giddy with euphoria over a simple 15-minute phone call.
But for a Nixon-to-China moment happening by a Democratic president who is reviled by his opposing party, that would really be a strong move on Obama's part.
I think that his failure to be able to bomb Syria may have really started a ripple effect through his Middle East foreign policy.
At least I want to believe so.
I want to try and be optimistic right now.
With the British parliament voting that down and U.S. public opinion so firmly placed against a Syrian strike, that seemed to really change things.
U.S. foreign policy was on track as it always has been up until that point.
And just a few weeks ago, I think we really saw a shift, not always in the language that is used, but apparently now with this past week of real diplomacy, and I mean also Friday, not only was there the phone call between Rouhani and Obama, but there was also a unanimous Security Council resolution affirming that Syria would get rid of its chemical weapons stocks.
And as per the words of the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, there are no loopholes, he says, in that resolution, in that Security Council resolution, which passed, again, 15-0, with the U.S. backing it, China backing it, Russia backing it, there are no loopholes for a military strike.
So at this point, any military strike by the U.S. or really anyone else in Syria, and granted, we have no illusions that the U.S. is not already acting within Syria through rebel groups, obviously that's a given, but I'm saying an overt U.S.-led airstrike attack will not happen, so says Russia.
And this, again, is something we really haven't seen.
We haven't seen the Security Council come together like this in a long time, and for it to come together in a way that averts all-out war in the Middle East, and coupled with moving diplomacy forward for the first time really in over three decades with Iran, is really something.
It's been a really, really interesting week.
If you can't have a war, you might as well make peace.
The status quo is a disaster.
Anyway, all right, well, thank you very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Nima.
Thank you so much, Scott.
It's great to be here.
Appreciate it.
All right, y'all, that is Nima Shirazi.
He writes at whytosleepinamerica.com, at mondoweiss.net, the great Mondo Weiss, and at muftah.org, M-U-F-T-A-H dot org.
Thanks very much for listening, everybody.
That's been Anti-War Radio for this week.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
3,000 interviews now at scotthorton.org, going back to 2003.
And you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashscotthortonshow.
Thanks very much for listening.
See you next week.