10/16/09 – Daniel Luban – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio Chaos, 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I invite y'all to pull up loblog.com, that is Jim Loeb's blog, and an article by Daniel Lubon called Bolton Suggests Nuclear Attack on Iran, it's also, by the way, you can find it at The Faster Times, which is TheFasterTimes.com.
Welcome back to the show Daniel, how are you doing?
I'm good, how are you Scott?
I'm great, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today, especially on such short notice here.
Oh yeah, well thank you for having me.
Okay, so Bonkers Bolton, as Dr. Gordon Prather so lovingly refers to him, has gone and set something rather controversial, why don't you fill us in, you were there and saw this in person?
Yeah, I was, well it was a fairly little noticed speech that he gave at the University of Chicago this past Tuesday, really just what appeared to be a fairly standard, you know, campus farm burner type speech, but during the course of the speech he said something that didn't really get picked up by most people in the audience, which was discussing Iran and its nuclear program.
He said, negotiations have failed and so too have sanctions, so we're at a very unhappy point where unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran's program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.
And then he went on to make clear that he was not saying we should sit back and allow them to have nuclear weapons, he was saying that we must do whatever necessary to stop them.
So of course, Bolton and his allies have been saying for a long time that Israel should consider attacking Iran's nuclear facilities, but it was always referred to as a conventional attack, so this is the first time that we've really seen him come right out and say we need to nuke Iran, it needs to be a nuclear attack.
Well you know, if you go back to 2005, Philip Giraldi broke that story that Cheney was having the Air Force drop plans for an attack on Iran that would include the use of nuclear weapons, and in fact I guess it was a couple of years later, maybe even a year ago or so, that Phil said on this show that he still stood by that, and further his information was that basically the nukes were to basically be in our back pocket, and then the plan would be bomb the hell out of them with conventional weapons, but if they dare fight back, the threat is that we just nuke Tehran I guess, and so they better just sit there and take it as we bomb them for a couple of weeks, and of course I'm trying to remember over the last couple of years the different footnotes that verified that, I guess Seymour Hersh was it in the Iran plans also mentioned the possible use of nuclear weapons didn't it?
I believe so, I don't have it at my fingertips.
Yeah me neither, it's been a couple of years, but this has been, at least from the anti-war side leak in the news, this has been part of the story for a while, but this is I guess as you say the first time that the neocons have outright made sure to use the phrase nuclear attack, the Israelis should attack with nuclear weapons, Bolton said here.
Yeah, and I think generally the hawks on the Iran issue have been very coy, they say well we can't take any options off the table, we must do anything necessary, but they're very eager to prevent anyone from inquiring into what exactly this will involve, and all indications are that if we or Israel did end up attacking Iran it would be incredibly messy, it would endanger the American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you know it would not be this sort of very neat surgical strike that would have no further repercussions that the hawks are promising.
Alright, and now in the article you really go through here pretty meticulously I think and show that, I think, well I'll let you go ahead and describe it how you will, but it's something about, listen, if it comes to this, we'd have to use nukes, and then for the following five reasons it's obviously come to this, basically, he rules out all other options, right?
Yeah, he does, well one of the striking things about Bolton is, you know, most of the Iran hawks have been pushing sanctions very hard, we just got word actually in the last couple days that Howard Berman is planning to mark up in a couple weeks the big Iran petroleum sanctions bill that's been sitting on Capitol Hill for a while.
So that's what most of the hawks have been rallying behind, because it's much easier to get people on board with sanctions than it is to get them on board with military action.
But Bolton, as he wants to do, you know, he likes to push the arguments, he's been saying for a while that sanctions will not work, it's far too late, he said at the speech in Chicago that, you know, they would have worked five or six years ago, but the time for them has passed, so really the only options are sitting back and letting Iran have nuclear weapons or taking military action.
So in other words, yeah, I mean, his point was that negotiations won't work, sanctions won't work, deterrence won't work, because Iran is a, quote, theological regime, which can't be trusted to look out for its own self-interest like the Soviets, so therefore military action is the only option.
Well, you know, it's interesting that I learned from Jim Loeb, actually, way back in 2003 that, no, no, no, be careful, John Bolton actually is not a neoconservative, he was always a Goldwater guy, he's a right-wing nationalist, he's just best friends with the neoconservatives, he's not exactly one of them, though.
But it does seem to me, especially the way you write it here, again at IPS.org, IPS.org slash blog slash Jim Loeb, and also at thefastertimes.com, you really kind of describe him as playing the dialectic, right, that he's trying to stake out a position far to the right so as to move the debate that way.
Just like the Newsweek cover this week, dealing or living with a nuclear Iran, and it shows a big atomic bomb on the front, they're trying to narrow our choices between either they have nukes or we nuke them, even, and try to eliminate from the discussion the fact that they're not even making nukes, and we already know that.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, like I said in the article, I think that Bolton, you know, he, I would be very surprised if there were any plans underway for Israel to attack Iran, mostly because the Israelis themselves know that such a strike would be likely not to do anything more than just, you know, kick the can down the road, as it's been said.
So I don't think he was necessarily even trying to imply, well, he was trying to imply, but I don't think it was, it reflected an actual belief that Israel's planning to strike Iran with nuclear weapons.
There's more, yeah, he wants to shift the debate, he wants to legitimize points of view that would normally be considered, you know, far beyond the pale, and in that way just put more pressure on the moderates.
So for instance, next week there's going to be a very interesting discussion at the American Enterprise Institute on, should Israel attack Iran?
And the panelists are going to be Bolton, Michael Rubin, who is another super hawkish Iran analyst at AEI.
And veteran of the Office of Special Plans that lied us into war in Iraq.
Yeah, yeah, most definitely.
And the third panelist is going to be Martin Indyk, who, you know, a former Clinton administration peace processor, not really known for being terribly left-wing on any of these issues, and in fact considered to be, you know, very much a liberal hawk.
But on this panel, you know, compared to Bolton and Rubin, he's, you know, he's practically Noam Chomsky, and Michael Rubin is practically, you know, a Democrat.
Well listen, now, one of the most important parts of this is that sanctions just won't work, we're going to have to face the facts that, you know, again, we're just supposed to believe the false premise that we know they're making nuclear weapons and it's only a matter of time and so forth.
I want to add to this context just a very bit of a clip here I'd like you to hear, Daniel, and we may have done this the last time you were on the show, I forget.
This is John Bolton in a conference call with AIPAC, and he's discussing the purpose of the sanctions and what they were trying to accomplish with them, and I think I've queued it up toward the end here to write about the good part.
So I'll ask you to just hang with us a second, Daniel, and I want to play this for you and for the audience here.
Parliament, to re-evaluate their relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency, they have not rejected the sanctions resolution, they have not done anything more dramatic such as withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty or throwing out inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which I actually hope they would do, that that kind of reaction would produce a counter-reaction that actually would be more beneficial to them.
Alright, so I think what's going on there is he's saying the sanctions won't work because the purpose of the sanctions is not to get them to give up their nuclear program.
It's to get them to finally throw up their hands and say, you people are un-deal-withable and so we're fine, we're going to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and kick the inspectors out of the country and start making nukes, and that would be more beneficial to us, John Bolton says to AIPAC, because they want a war.
And how do you get away with bombing safeguarded facilities and pretending that there's nuclear bombs being made there?
We've got to un-safeguard them, hell or high water, and he was very disappointed that the Iranians refused to go along with his plan to give up on trying to cooperate with the International Inspections Regime, Daniel.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think, no question, I think there are very few people in Washington on any side of the debate who actually expect sanctions to do anything to change Iran's behavior positively.
I think, like you said, the only real reason anyone is pushing sanctions is because they believe it can be a step on the road to war.
I mean, that's the plan that, you know, the Bipartisan Policy Center report written by Michael Rubin, primarily, that also featured Dennis Ross, who's currently our top Iran coordinator in the Obama administration.
That report, which was written last year, the premise of it was basically that military action against Iran is going to be inevitable.
So what we have to do, we, you know, the West and its allies, the U.S. and its allies, is simply to put on a good show of attempting to resolve the issue.
So then when we actually do move to military force, we can garner a lot of international support.
I think diplomacy is a step on the road to military action.
Sanctions are a step, but military action is always the goal.
Let me ask you this.
As much attention as you pay to these neoconservatives and their movement as really the vanguard of the war party in this country, does anybody ever say, man, this could really cost the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan?
This could lead to Iranian intelligence doing God knows what in countries in their sphere of influence.
I don't know, Azerbaijan or something.
We have no idea how they might fight back.
We know it would have to be asymmetric warfare, but they're not just going to sit there and take this.
Clearly, their allies are the government that George Bush has installed in power in Iraq.
Are we just supposed to pretend that they are not going to fight for the Iranians against Americans if this happens?
Do they even ask each other these questions?
Are they just crazy out in la-la land or what here?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think certainly among the neoconservatives, there's a real disconnect here.
You know, the same people who are pushing us to escalate in Afghanistan are also pushing us to take a harder line against Iran.
And those goals, like you said, would clearly conflict if it comes to war with Iran, God forbid.
The American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are clearly going to be the ones who are in the line of fire.
But the interesting thing, something that Jim Loeb and I have been writing about a fair amount in the last few months, is that the Pentagon is much more aware of these factors, seemingly, than most of the pundits in Washington.
So people like Robert Gates, Michael Mullen, and it would appear Stan McChrystal, too, are all, they've all been warning against any rash escalation with Iran because they recognize that that's the worst possible thing you could do in terms of American interests in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So in some ways, the Pentagon has emerged as kind of an unlikely bulwark against war in Iran.
All right, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Daniel.
Oh, thank you for having me.
Always a pleasure.
Everybody, that's Daniel Lubin.
He's writing over there oftentimes.
You can find him at Jim Loeb's blog, ips.org slash blog slash Jim Loeb, and of course at antiwar.com, as well as, I believe it's his new website of his own, The Faster Times at thefastertimes.com.