Hi y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're on chaos radio, Austin and Liberty radio network.
And as you well know, Jim Loeb has a posse.
He's the Washington bureau chief at interpress service.
And he keeps a group of guys working for him that are among my very favorite journalists, of course, Gareth Porter, who I've interviewed more than a hundred times now, and also Eli Clifton and Marsha Cohen has written a lot of great stuff there, uh, Daniel Luban, of course, and our next guest, Ali Garib.
Welcome back to the show, Ali.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
It's a pleasure to be here with you.
And you, you, you, uh, you flatter us a little too much here.
Oh, no way.
Listen, for those who don't know, Jim Loeb has been hunting neocons for 35 years.
Uh, Richard Pearl and Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz and, and these most horrible, uh, lying warmongers and, and the war party that you guys covered day to day, uh, at the Loeb blog and at interpress service, um, uh, the very same group of people, uh, trying now to lie us into war with Iran since they were already successful in lying us into war with Iraq, which ended up benefiting Iran, but I guess that's neither here nor there.
Maybe that's just a better excuse to invade, uh, Iran or, or to bomb them is that, uh, somehow they won the Iraq war, uh, right out from under us.
But, um, I was wondering about, you know, there's so many wars going on.
Uh, it seems like the danger of a war with Iran for now has kind of diminished and yet when I read the Loeb blog, I see that the war party has not missed a single beat here.
They are keeping up doing everything they can to lay the groundwork for war with Iran.
Is that pretty much right?
Yeah, well, um, excuse me, I'm, uh, I'm working on a post now about, you know, in the past few days, so there's been a bunch of, uh, Israeli pronouncements that they think that the Iranian nuclear bomb has been delayed by, uh, by sabotage, namely the Stuxnet virus and, uh, assassinations of, of Iranian nuclear scientists.
But it doesn't seem that the U S neoconservatives have gotten the memo.
You know, the, these, these pronouncements came from, from, uh, uh, no less is no less of credible Israeli sources than Mayor Dagan, the head, the outgoing head of the Mossad.
Um, uh, Ehud Barak said something about it recently.
And, uh, and so did, uh, Morshi Alon, who's, uh, Stevie Netanyahu's deputy prime minister, and these guys are coming out saying, you know, 2014, 2015 is the new date for when Iranians have a bomb.
Of course, they still want to keep the pressure on, but, uh, but there, you know, even Barack said, you know, that there's still a chance that diplomacy can work yet, you know, Jennifer Rubin is in the post today saying sanctions and diplomacy can't work.
It's time to start thinking about other measures.
Mm.
Uh, so, you know, Mayor Dagan, it's been reported before, I guess, back in 2005, uh, said that, you know, he was, uh, well aware that the Iranians weren't working on a bomb and that it would be years and years before they could have a bomb if they wanted one.
And that, uh, I think he wasn't even afraid of a first strike, um, back then.
And yet, uh, it sounds like now this time, this is a much more official pronouncement that was, you know, an interview with Haaretz or something, but you're saying that the Netanyahu government now is saying, well, they want to take credit and say, well, we assassinated enough people, uh, that, uh, now we don't have to worry about an Iranian bomb as an imminent threat.
Well, to some extent, yeah, actually, uh, Dagan's, uh, Dagan's comments were delivered in a briefing that he gave and Haaretz got a copy of the, of a summary of the meeting, but then Reuters got a transcript.
So we have his actual comments now, but, um, but the Barack comments were public and, uh, and, uh, Yolanda's comments are public as well.
But yeah, I think, um, I think that they do want to take credit and I don't know if it's deserved.
I don't know who's, who's, uh, well, no, that's fine with me.
As long as they're admitting that there is no secret nuclear weapons program and that the one that is a nuclear program in Iran is not a weapons program and, and all that, if they want to recognize these facts in their, in their arguments about what policy should be, I think that's a great step forward.
No, not, not yet.
No one, no one from Israel has recognized that.
Um, I think the speculation is still, I mean, it's not even speculation.
It's almost taken as a, as a, as a fact in Israel and the U S I mean, I think that there are strong signs that Iran is pushing for a breakout capability, which I think as far as hardliners in the U S and Israel concern is, uh, is no distinction from a bomb.
But, uh, but you know, I, I don't think that that hypothesis is totally screwy.
Oh yeah, no, I agree with that too.
I don't think there's any doubt about that, but it's still not a matter of flipping a switch, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and the way that it's presented as a fact that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and is actively trying to build to the completion of a nuclear weapon is, um, yeah, that's, I'd say that's a questionable assertion because there hasn't been any hard evidence of it yet.
You know, as, as we learned from the, uh, lead up to the Iraq war, hard evidence actually matters.
Yeah, you'd think, but, uh, maybe not.
Well, so now when, uh, Jennifer Rubin and these kooks at commentary and the weekly standard and so forth, right about this, don't forget Jennifer Rubin's at the Washington post now.
Oh God.
Are you kidding me?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't know why that's surprising.
It's Fred Hyatt's editorial page, right?
So yeah.
Um, but I didn't realize that I don't read the editorial page of the post.
I don't have a stomach for it.
That's why I turned to the low blog.
You guys keep track for me.
It does a blog, but occasionally her pieces end up in the print edition.
But yeah, she's at the post now.
I wrote an article about her, uh, her rise there in, uh, the Columbia journalism review.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's terrible.
So wait a minute now, is she denouncing it?
Who'd Barack?
Or is she just ignoring him and, and she ignored those altogether.
She, she ignored those altogether.
It's funny, you know, uh, Elliot Abrams and Jonathan Tobin writing in, in commentary, Elliot Abrams has a new blog at CFR and, uh, and the council on foreign relations and Jonathan Tobin writing a commentary, both acknowledged the comments and said, you know, we still got to push full steam ahead.
But, uh, but Jennifer Rubin doesn't even acknowledge it.
She's got sort of a, uh, she's, she's got a kind of a inclination that seems to leave out critical context that just may cast doubt on her story.
Right.
Well, yeah.
And that's how it goes.
I forget if it was, uh, you or something Daniel Lubon wrote at the low blog about, uh, I think it was one of yours where wall street journal editorial just begins with Iran has warned us that they're making nukes or whatever, where they just outright lie.
I did write that day.
The wall street journal let off an editorial that ever since Iran announced that it's building a nuclear bomb, which I mean, it's just, it's just a lie.
That's how you do it though.
Right.
You know, that's how you do it.
You don't make it the point of the Senate.
So you just make that the, because of this, therefore that changed the subject move on, but you just lay it as the false premise for the rest of the debate.
It works perfect every time.
But the logical fallacy that's called begging the question, which is often, uh, uh, misappropriated to meaning that like that suggests that we should ask about, that's not what it actually means.
Begging the question of the logical fallacy where the conclusion is breathlessly stated in the given part of the, uh, the logical construction.
Right.
I got, I have a philosophy master's, you know, so.
Well, you know, I was terrible at geometry in high school, but still, I understand what a proof is and, you know, assertion a, B, and C actually have to have something to them or else it doesn't matter what you say in your conclusion, you know?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Oh man.
All right.
Well, and, uh, so here's the other thing I want to ask you about.
I don't know if we'll have time to get too far into this, but we can start anyway.
Um, uh, you had a piece here, uh, on the fifth, uh, domestic political pressure spiked Amadine Jod's fuel swap push.
And this was about how, uh, Amadine Jod wanted to take Obama up on the, uh, the swap deal, but was thwarted by hardliners inside Iran.
Is that right?
Yeah, that was, um, that was from the 2009 swap deal.
And so things were still, uh, things were still a mess politically in Iran then.
And, and that came via a WikiLeaks cable from Turkey, I believe.
Where, uh, where, yeah, Turkish representatives had told Americans that they were under the impression that Amadine Jod had wanted to push it, but had been thwarted by the hardliners, which, um, you know, I wrote a piece recently in Tehran bureau that Amadine Jod came out a few weeks ago and said that these thoughts coming up at the end of this month in Istanbul are historic opportunities.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're going to have to hold it right there.
It's Ali Gharib from lobe log.com in a press service.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Ali Gharib from lobe log.com.
Also anti-war.com/blog.
We reprint a lot of this stuff, the daily Iran talking points and more.
And that's the war parties talking points and their coverage of them.
Um, we anti-war people are, are too honest to, uh, center around talking points to each other.
Those are for liars.
And, um, anyway, uh, so we were talking about how, uh, Ehud Barak and, uh, Mayor Dagan and, uh, officialdom in Israel is admitting that, uh, they're not in danger of any, uh, nuclear weapons threat from Iran for years and years to come, although I guess 2014 isn't that far, but they're always three or four years away, according to the Israelis.
So that I think buys us a little time in terms of political pressure, but I wanted to, to ask you a little bit more about this piece, uh, that you did here, um, about the internal pressure inside Iran that spiked Ahmadinejad's, uh, push to make the deal with Obama.
And I was just wondering, uh, you say that this is the 2009 push, but what month are we talking about here, or, or roughly speaking, um, I'm trying to remember the timeline of when Obama actually made the offer and the back and forth between, uh, him and the Iranians, such as it was before the deal was announced kaput.
Uh, I'm not, I'm not sure exactly about the back and forth.
I just pulled that from a, uh, from a, from a WikiLeaks cable that was from November 09.
So we're talking, uh, you know, uh, a good solid four months after the elections, but things were still in total disarray then in Iran.
Right.
And this of course was right at the point when, when Obama was ramping up his engagement push, it just turned out to be bad timing, I guess.
Right.
Well, you know, it seemed like, oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
No, no.
I was just going to say that, uh, that, that John Lindbergh, who was, uh, a foreign service officer who was taken hostage in Iran in 79.
But, you know, it's, it's incredibly reasonable commenting on Iran.
And, you know, this guy's a professor at the Naval War College and he's, he was in the, he led the Iran desk at the state department for Obama for about the first year of Obama's presidency.
And, you know, he, he always says that whenever we dig, they zag.
And that's, uh, that's kind of been the case.
And sometimes it's been the various governments doing those digging and zagging, and sometimes, uh, it's just circumstances are overtaken by events.
And I think that's what happened in, in, uh, in late summer and fall and winter of 09, and it just turns out that I guess Ahmadinejad couldn't get the political support from hardliners to push the fuel swap deal.
Well, I guess, uh, I don't know enough about the internal politics in Iran and, and how hard he was pushing and all that.
But I thought that the Iranians came back with a counteroffer that was basically the exact same deal.
Only they said, you give us the finished fuel rods from the French.
At the same time, we're giving up our uranium to the Russians to be enriched to a higher place that way, a higher grade that way we know you are not going to rip us off.
And that seemed like a pretty reasonable alternative position.
And then it was just after that, that Obama pretended to bust Iran breaking their safeguards agreement by building the new facility at calm, which it turned out they had declared four days before he pretended to bust them.
And I just wondered, you know, whether there was really any honest brokering going on on the side of the Americans.
And I mean, did they even consider the counteroffer, which seemed pretty reasonable at the time?
I thought, I don't, I don't know.
This is a, it's been a point of great debate kind of in the, uh, the Mideast analyst community over whether Obama's engagement offers were serious, and there's been a lot of pushback from people in the administration and people close to the administration, which indicates to me that they take the allegations seriously.
I don't know if that means whether there's a grain of truth to them or not, but I think that there certainly has been some, uh, disarray in Iran's policy, you know, they're just like any other bureaucracy, the administration as a whole, and even within the state department, there's various factions who have different views on how things should go down.
So, you know, it's difficult to paint the whole thing.
I mean, Obama is ultimately responsible for setting policy, right?
But, uh, but it's difficult to say exactly what went down.
Um, there have been people that have alleged that Iran wasn't totally serious about engagement.
Among them was a Columbia professor, Gary sick, a former state department official named Reza Amarashi, who's at the national Iranian American council.
Uh, Flint and Hillary Leverett were great proponents of this view.
Um, but you know, I, I, I don't think that, uh, that this has been a historically settled question yet.
Yeah, well, you know, it's always bothered me the way, um, you know, even if you thought that, okay, a breakout capability is a dangerous thing or whatever, at least, um, that could be a conversation based on relevant facts instead of just propaganda and fear mongering and that kind of thing.
And it seems like the Obama administration at the very least caved in and rather than, uh, trying to actually accomplish their goal of working this out by December 31st, 2009, they wanted to show that the Iranians wouldn't come to the table or wouldn't bow to our wishes by that deadline, and then he could be seen as tough and putting on all the sanctions and all those things.
And, uh, rather than just working the thing out, I mean, I don't know what the hardliners there want other than what all Iranian factions insist on, which is their right to enrich uranium on their own soil.
Yeah, I'm, I'm not sure what they want either.
For the meantime, the official stated position of the Obama administration is still that the, the, the goal, their goal for negotiations is compliance with the UN security council resolution that whether you like it or not, says that Iran has to suspend their domestic, uh, enrichment.
So if, if, so that, that's the starting point.
However, there have been signs from the administration recently.
Uh, Hillary Clinton said in Bahrain a few months ago that Iran could maybe in the future be permitted to have domestic enrichment as long as it was under proper safeguards and inspections.
Gary Samor speaking at a neoconservative conference that I covered at the beginning of, uh, of December and the Gary Samor is the, uh, is the Obama nonproliferations are said that while the goal is to get suspended, you're on Iranian enrichment.
There's still a possibility of incremental or interim deals that would allow Iran to continue arrangement enrichment.
I, I either should be some kind of confidence building measure that would be allowed to strike some kind of limited deal while at the same time saying, okay, we just want to get one part of this deal done and we're willing to talk about the rest of our goals later.
Um, you can see, you can see all that stuff in my Tehran bureau piece.
Well, and I wonder, I mean, are they really, it seems like they must just be walking it back because at the end of the day, as we all know, these facilities are already safeguarded by the IAEA, which continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose.
And they have a million times in a row.
So what extra is there to be done?
That's true.
That's true.
But you have to remember that, uh, that, that, that there are some legitimate complaints about the levels of inspections.
Iran has withdrawn from the additional protocols, which the Western negotiators in this scenario have put a great emphasis on.
And, uh, while, you know, I, I, I reserve, I, you know, I'm not in any position, I'm not a non-proliferation expert.
I don't know all the ins and outs of the IAEA.
I don't know what's going on either in these, in these facilities in Iran, nor do I know what's going on in the halls of power in Washington, uh, except for what, you know, the little pieces that I can glean from reading the same stuff everybody else can and maybe one or two other conversations.
But beyond knowing that, uh, I think that, I think that there are some legitimate concerns about the level of, of inspections on Iran.
And yeah, I don't think, uh, I don't think it's totally unreasonable to ask for these things, but at the same time, I think it is totally unreasonable to not take into account any of Iran's needs in negotiations.
Right.
Well, I wonder, you know what I'm saying, Scott, it's a nuanced position, I know, which is sort of a mealy mouth explanation, but, um, no, no, the only thing about it is that it seems to me like the nuclear issues are red herring all along.
It's not like a who Barack and Mayor Dagan and Benjamin Netanyahu are just figuring these things out though.
It's always just been an excuse for regime change, just like Saddam's warehouse is full of sarin gas, right?
Well, uh, I think that that's certainly true when these criticisms come from some quarters of the Israeli right, as well as the U S neoconservative, right?
I think that's certainly true that they're, they're not there.
You know, I don't think that they, uh, I don't know that all those people legitimately believe that Iran is some mess, Ionic apocalyptic call.
Um, you know, maybe there's some among them who do, but I think for the most part, a lot of these people are smart enough to know that that's a well exaggerated picture, but, uh, but yeah, I think, I think you're right that from some quarters, the, the, the nuclear issue is a red herring that's meant to, to, uh, yeah, I mean, to squelch Iran's regional ambitions that have nothing to do with nuclear and non-nuclear state.
They just have to do with a regional power struggles.
Yeah.
Well, we'll see what happens.
We got that lady.
Uh, I never can pronounce her name.
The new head of the foreign relations committee in the house of representatives, uh, I think, I think it's Eliana Ross Latham.
I'll hand it to you there.
She's going to be a leading foreign policy in the house of representatives and pushing Obama from the right from here on, not like he needed much help.
So Elliot Abrams is already giving her advice on his CFR blog.
Oh, nice.
Well, I'm not even going to bother looking there, but I will keep my eye on lowblog.com and antiwar.com/blog.
Uh, for all the Jim Lowe's policy.
Thanks Ellie.
Oh yeah.
Appreciate that.
