All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Ali Ghareeb.
He's a New York-based journalist who blogs regularly about U.S.
-Iran relations at Loeb Log.
That's Jim Loeb's blog, a project of interpress service.
His work has appeared at Alternet, Mondoweiss, Right Web, and the Huffington Post.
And he's got his master's in philosophy and public policy from the London School of Economics.
I didn't know that.
Hey, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Scott.
Good to be back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I've told you before, and I'll say it again, I sure do like the Loeb Log, and I'm so happy that you guys are there, not just keeping tabs on policy concerning Israel, but especially keeping tabs on what the war party says.
I just don't have the stomach anymore to read the corner, you know, or to go hang out at the commentary blog and see what they're pushing over there.
And we're so lucky to have you guys working that beat for us.
I do love reading commentaries, contentious blog, I have to admit.
Good.
Well, that's good.
And, you know, one thing is that I'm so used to hearing a drumbeat for war about Iran and their so-called nuclear weapons program and all this madness, that I feel kind of disconcerted when I don't hear very much about it.
And of course, there's so much going on in the news right now, from nuclear meltdowns to revolutions in 10 countries, and God knows what wars all over the place, that the Iran issue, I know it's there.
I hear, you know, here and there, neocons like Elliott Abrams and Max Boot, I think, pushing for regime change in Syria, or maybe I'm thinking of Libya in the case of Boot.
Anyway, I know Elliott Abrams is out there pushing for war with Syria, which is just a euphemism for war with Iran.
I know that the Israelis are still just as concerned as they ever were about the nuclear program there, and I just wonder kind of what you think the temperature of the, I guess, the terrorist chatter, as the government would say about the al-Qaeda guys, is among the neocons there.
Well, I think it has very much, the hawks narrative on Iran has very much been overtaken by events in the Arab world.
It is just such an incredible and sweeping change we're seeing there, that there's just not much time to focus on Iran.
That said, people haven't forgotten about it, and also, you know, Iran plays a role in the Arab revolts, and we see constantly people talking about whether Iran will be a winner in these events or not.
There's lots of differing opinions, and of course, the hawks are urging that this is what we should be most cautious about, but you know, Iran is still out there.
I mean, you know, Jeff Goldberg put up a post yesterday called Remember Iran, which is like, yeah, of course we remember it, because you would never let us forget it, Jeff.
Right.
So yeah, it's still out there, and it especially pops up as a theme in Bahrain, and you had Hillary Clinton make some silly comment about Iran playing a role in the Yemen protests, which is totally, totally unfounded, and lots of real Yemen analysts who have spent time there on the ground have smacked it down.
And then in Bahrain, of course, we have the Saudis moving in troops, and you know, WikiLeaks really showed us just, I mean, even I was surprised at how, you know, I never thought that the Saudis and the Iranians were friends, but I was surprised at the level of hostility shown by WikiLeaks documents from a lot of Arab capitals, not just from Saudi Arabia, towards Iran, and I think there's undeniably a motive by the Saudis and the U.S. silence on this matter is also very much related to the fact that people see the Shia population in Bahrain as rising up as a potential win for Iran, and I'm not sure that it would necessarily shake out that way, but yeah, I think that there's something to those claims, and I think it plays into the Saudi policies there, as well as the American sort of complicity with them.
Well, you know, one of the things that WikiLeaks showed was that back in the Bush years, especially, and I guess this goes on from time to time now in the Obama years, but the Israelis, not just, you know, in public propaganda type things, but according to WikiLeaks, you know, Mayor Dagan, the head of Mossad then, told Nicholas Burns that, hey, look, if you don't bomb Iran, we will, and I wonder whether, you know, the Israelis, you think, have kind of extended their timetable for how, you know, how quickly they must have a regime change there, or at least a strike against the nuclear program.
Are they, you know, you think, willing to wait and see what happens, you know, with the revolution here?
Those two things, the strike against the nuclear program and the regime change, is really one of the great tensions of both, well, more so of American policy towards Iran, and it's also one of the great contradictions of the Hawks' argument, because they would obviously love to see a forced regime change in Iran, but at the same time, the idea of strikes against the nuclear program, whether by Israel or America, is completely predicated on the fact that they can be done with relatively little military effort.
That is, it's just a matter of putting a few bombers up in the sky and having good intel and refueling them and sending them in to hit Iranian nuclear sites.
But, you know, you have people like Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post and Raoul Mark direct, who writes a lot for the Weekly Standard, and is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, who have a completely disingenuous argument that even these so-called surgical nuclear strikes would immediately foment a popular uprising against the Iranian regime, and there's not much evidence to back that up.
They even say that, you know, specifically, if we use tactical nukes...
No, not tactical nukes, just the surgical...
Surgical strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, I just wanted to make sure we were straight about that.
Yeah, people love being nuked.
Okay, but no, we're talking about being bombed with conventional weapons, but you're saying they're still pushing the myth that this is what the Iranian people are waiting for, is for us to come in and bomb their government for them and give them a chance to overthrow it for us.
Yeah, that's the idea, and, you know, there's not much evidence to support that.
People generally don't like getting bombed, and most Iran analysts, as in not Raoul direct or Jen Rubin, suggest that such a strike would be devastating for the opposition.
It would give the regime every reason they have to escalate their incredibly brutal crackdown on the opposition, really.
And furthermore, it would unite a lot of Iranians under the regime, because there is a real nationalist instinct in Iran that has to be contended with.
But I haven't seen that Wikileaks you're talking about, Mehrdad Ghan, but there was a recent story in Haaretz where they, you know, got access to an exclusive trove of Wikileaks docs about Israel and emanating from Israel these cables, and basically it said that the Israelis ruled out a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities as early as 2005-2006, which is really quite incredible when you consider their public bluster, which seems all the more so now to just be a way to con the U.S. into doing the bombing for them.
And it's really quite remarkable, because what this does is cast incredible, incredible doubt on Jeffrey Goldberg's article of August last year that there was a consensus within people from the Israeli sort of security establishment that, you know, I don't know what this means, but he basically wrote about a consensus of that there was a 50-50 chance that Israel would bomb Iran in the next year.
And, you know, he explicitly says that I talked to these people and this wasn't part of a public relations campaign, but it seems from this Wikileaks that it very definitely was part of a public relations campaign, because they had actually ruled out the strike some five years ago.
And let's see, I sent you, Larissa Alexandrovna, my girlfriend's article from rawstory.com about exclusive leaked cable reveals U.S.
-Israeli strategy for regime change in Iran about that Mayor Dagan-Nicholas Burns exchange from August 2007.
And now you just sent me this Goldberg piece about whether or not Israel ruled out a strike on Iran.
And so, first of all, can you go back over the details of this supposedly Israel ruled out war in 2005, everything after that was just hype?
Yeah, I mean, that's what this cable says, that basically Israeli officials were telling American diplomats, that they're American diplomats, in fact, politicians, that there wasn't much of a chance of Israel to actually attack Iran.
And then...
Well, that is unilaterally without us, you mean?
Yeah, yeah, I guess that's the point, but that's what the entire...
It doesn't say that they gave up trying to get us to do it for them.
No, no, no, that's right.
But the thing is that their effort, much of their effort to do that has been, their effort to get the U.S. to bomb Iranian nuclear sites has been based on sort of the Israeli threat that they would have to carry out these these strikes unilaterally without a U.S. green light or coordination.
I mean, the U.S. green light is sort of meaningless in this context, because the U.S. green light would essentially, would almost definitely mean that the U.S. was doing the bombing itself.
I mean, it'd be geostrategic absolute, an absolute mess if Israel were to do the bombing and take the lead on it.
And really, the only reason for them to take the lead on it would be if the U.S. didn't agree with their desire to go on there.
The U.S. didn't give them the green light.
So the U.S. green light effectively means that the U.S. would carry out the bombing.
Right.
Well, and if Israel did start the war against a red light, that would mean that the U.S. would carry out the bombing, too.
That's the implied threat there in the conversation between Dagan and Burns there, is that if we start the war without you, you'll be in the war one way or the other.
So don't you want to just start it yourself instead of dealing with that?
Which, you know, I would expect, I was actually surprised to see that, you know, I would expect them to talk that way kind of in the media as a public relations kind of thing.
But that's pretty harsh language between Dagan and Burns, especially when Dagan is on the record as saying that there really is no nuclear weapons threat from Iran anyway.
Yeah.
Well, at least saying that it's been severely delayed.
Yeah.
I mean, that's really an incredible, an incredible thing for an Israeli official to be saying privately to a U.S. diplomat.
And yeah, the whole thing, I mean, really, really cast a lot of doubt on on the Israeli narrative.
I mean, there was a talk yesterday at this Israeli, not yesterday, but last month at this Israeli institute, where a bunch of Israeli, basically these kind of security establishment types, had a screening of the film Iranium by my old friends at the Clarion Fund, the sort of, the guys who even Jeff Goldberg calls Jewish extremists.
And these guys made their bomb Iran film.
And all these kind of eminent Israeli security analysts, one of them, this professor whose name I'm drawing a blank on, says, yeah, I agree with this film that these nuclear weapons sites in Iran have to be bombed as soon as possible.
And thankfully, there was an analyst there whose name is Mehr Javad Danfar, who's an excellent, excellent Iranian Israeli analyst.
And he's written what I haven't read, but I've read reviews and I've heard it's a good autobiography of Ahmadinejad.
And he's actually quite an astute analyst.
And he was there and he just, you know, you can watch the YouTube of the highlights from the speeches after the film screening.
And he just really, thankfully, smacked down a lot of the assertions of this film.
But you still get the feeling that the overwhelming tide in Israel doesn't really understand all the implications of what this attack would mean and how it would affect things.
And, you know, the allies of the Israeli right in the U.S., which centers around, but it's not limited to certainly neoconservatives, and which is not to say all neoconservatives, but many of them are still pressing hard on the Iran issue and want to see some sort of action taken.
But really, when don't they want to see some sort of military action taken?
I mean, it's always, we should have bombed those guys yesterday.
You know, it took about two hours into the Libyan revolution before Cliff May started calling for broad airstrikes and bombing the Libyan rebels.
Yeah, well, of course.
I mean, the fact that Paul Wolfowitz would even show his face and write in the Wall Street Journal that we ought to do it, you would think that he would know that that could just, that only discredits the cause.
But maybe it doesn't.
Maybe that's only my word.
Yeah, I mean, Wolfowitz is interesting.
At least Wolfowitz is honest about this.
You know, there's been this recent meme that the Iraq war was started, you know, just for the sake of democracy and freedom.
And that was it.
And I'm sure the neoconservatives who are peddling that would love to see all the articles from 2002 about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fed away.
And Paul Wolfowitz wrote a piece where he said, no, this is not right.
We attacked Iraq because we thought, rightly or wrongly, you know, of course he doesn't say wrongly because it was, but he says we attacked it because we thought it was a threat.
And that's the truth of the matter.
And that's what this Iran, attacking Iran business is about.
And it's laid bare by the sort of logical jujitsu and contortions that neocons like Jen Rubin and Raoul Gerecht make to justify a surgical strike as if that will foment regime change when it's far more likely to do the opposite.
Yeah.
Well, and it's, you know, probably not very likely to destroy their civilian nuclear program either.
I mean, after all, how hard is it really to manufacture centrifuges inside Persia?
Not very hard.
So bomb Natanz, even if they can cave in that 85 foot of granite that they have as a, as a ceiling there, as that, at that buried facility, they can just make another Natanz.
Right.
You know, in a, in a conference in BC in January hosted by the national security network, Paul Pilar, who's a Georgetown university professor.
He's a former CIA guy and he's an excellent, excellent commentator.
He blogs at the national interest website.
He said, you know, this is not the Iranian decision to build a nuclear bomb is certainly a possibility, but it's not a decision that has been made yet.
And every effort should be made to affect that decision and, and turn it the way that the U S wants it to go.
And, and that's the truth.
And I'll tell you, nothing will harden the resolve and amplify the case of those in Iran who want a nuclear bomb more than an attack on that country.
I mean, they see North Korea, they see Libya and Pilar said this in an interview with Rolling Stone this week, actually, he said, you know, the Iranians are looking at Libya and they're probably saying, these guys want us to cut a deal with them.
You must be kidding me.
Gaddafi cut a deal with these guys and look at him now.
And then look at North Korea.
They have a nuclear bomb.
They don't have to cut deals and they don't have to worry about having airstrikes on their territory.
Yeah.
Well, and that's what Kim Jong-un himself is saying, building nuclear bombs.
I don't know what it is.
Yeah.
Well, and, uh, you know, the thing of it is that, uh, you know, they're within their treaty obligations.
It's all just hype anyway.
They're not making nuclear bombs anyway.
It would take them forever once they started to make them.
And, you know, I was also thinking the precedent here is, uh, before Libya, which is an important one is the Osirak reactor in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein was inside the nonproliferation treaty and his safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
And then the Israelis in 1981 attacked his nuclear reactor and drove the whole program underground.
And it wasn't that far advanced, but at least at the time of desert storm, it was actually an underground secret from the IAEA and the CIA nuclear weapons program.
It was bombing them in the first place that turned a civilian program into a weapons program.
And I think that would be the most likely results of an attack, a preemptive attack on Iran like that.
And some of these people must know that.
Right.
And they do.
And, um, and, you know, the Iranians saw Osirak as well, and that's why they've dispersed their nuclear program to many, many different, well reinforced sites around Iran.
I mean, they understand that you can't just have a program built in one factory and, uh, and expect it to survive.
Well, you know, I saw one thing in Haaretz.
Go ahead.
I saw one thing in Haaretz that said that, well, now that Mubarak is gone, this kind of changes everything because it used to be, we wanted war with Iran at any time we could get one.
Uh, and we could always be confident that Mubarak is on our Southern flank, keeping everything chill down there.
And that that's not necessarily the case anymore.
Do you think that, uh, the Arab revolution is really, uh, changing the calculus of the Israelis?
Uh, if not the neoconservatives when it comes to this question, I think that in a lot of ways, I mean, I, like I said, I think this is one of the reasons for the dearth of stuff you're seeing about Iran these days, because nobody knows what's going to happen in the Arab world right now.
And I think that, you know, there are some legitimate potential threats lurking there for Israel as well as the U S and, uh, and both those countries' strategic interests.
Uh, but at the same time, I also see a potential for really positive and great changes in the Arab world.
And, um, and yeah, I think no one knows what's going to happen.
So the focus is understandably very much turned to places like Egypt now.
And, you know, we have, we've seen Egypt making overtures to the Iranians at this point, which was unheard of under Mubarak.
Mubarak was considered very much an enemy of Iran and I think considered himself that way as well.
And yeah, so things are just changing so rapidly and to such a great degree that, uh, that, yeah, I think a lot of the focus has been put on the Arab world, but, uh, it's, uh, it's drowning out the drum beat, but the drum beat is still there.
Yeah.
Well, uh, I appreciate the fact that you're still keeping your eye on those guys.
Cause, uh, you know, as long as the Ayatollahs rule Iran, I guess, um, the Israelis and their front men, the neocons in America will be pushing for this.
And it seems like of all the nightmare scenarios in the middle East, other than maybe some kind of full-scale war with Pakistan or something, a full-scale war with Iran, or, you know, even what they call a limited war with Iran, I think would just be the worst possible thing that these people could do for America, nevermind the poor people of Iran.
And, uh, yeah, I appreciate you helping me keep track of this stuff.
No problem, Scott.
It's my pleasure.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Ali Gharib.
And, uh, he's part of Jim Loeb's posse over there at lobelog.com, uh, interpress service.
A lot of other great writers there too.
They keep track of all the Iran stuff, a lot of Israel stuff.
And so I wanted to ask y'all about the West bank and, and the Israel lobby in America and things like that, but we didn't get a chance maybe next time.
Uh, that's it for the show today.
Thanks everybody for listening.
We'll see you guys tomorrow.
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