08/19/10 – Eli Clifton – The Scott Horton Show

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Antiwar Radio All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
This is the show where we anti-war.
Now, listen, one of my heroes is the great Jim Loeb.
And he has been hunting neocons with his pen for as long as I've been alive and is the best.
And he keeps, of course, he's the Washington bureau chief.
He's the boss.
He's the guy that runs, I think, IPS News.
And he's surrounded himself with some of the best reporters and analysts.
I can't list them all, but, of course, Gareth Porter, who we interview on this show pretty much every day or something.
And over at his blog, which is Loeb, just like your earlobe, log, loeblog.com, which we pretty much cross-post every bit of at Antiwar.com slash blog.
He has a great stable of writers there, including Daniel Lubon, who we've talked to on the show, and Ali Gharib, who I interviewed on the KPFK show a few weeks back.
And also Eli Clifton, who is our next guest on the show today.
And he and Ali Gharib especially have been, over the past two, three weeks, been putting together daily Iran talking points.
And they're very useful for keeping up on what's going on with the war on Iran question.
Welcome to the show, Eli.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
You guys do just incredible work.
And I have come to rely on you very heavily.
So I'd like to have the opportunity to point the audience your way, if I can.
Thank you.
So there's this war party, and they just want war with Iran so bad.
And they've got this echo chamber effect that you and me could never replicate with a billion dollars.
I don't know how they do it, but they just seem like they're right, don't they?
Oh, absolutely.
And what we've been trying to hit on with these talking points is that there's going to be – we predict, and so far we have seen, that there is a slow progression of right now a big push for sanctions, and a big push for, as I said, sort of sanctions with peace or whatever type of description you want to apply to them.
And now we're starting to see this pivot, if you will, where now it's being pointed to rather predictably that, oh, the sanctions aren't working as desired.
They aren't having the desired effect.
So the next step being a discussion of either a U.S. or Israeli bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities.
And as I'm sure many of your listeners have been watching, Jeffrey Goldberg's piece in The Atlantic – I think it was just last week, his cover story – we're starting to put that narrative together for us.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
Let me ask you about what Gareth was saying on the show yesterday and a couple of days ago, too.
His analysis of the – I think it was really something – I'm not exactly sure which paragraph it was in that Goldberg piece, but it really got him thinking and going back and re-researching.
And he was saying that he really thinks this is all just a big bluff, that Israel doesn't really want war with Iran, that really the goal here – because we all know that the nuclear issue is a red herring anyway, those of us who've actually looked at it.
But what it's really all about is just making sure that there is no rapprochement between America and Iran, that America stays 100 percent on the side of Israel no matter what.
And so if they can make Iran the devil, even if they're the devil we never do anything about, we'll never be like Ronald Reagan and just shake hands and sell them weapons.
I think there's definitely a lot of truth to that.
I think that Jeffrey Goldberg's piece was him going to Israel and doing interviews in Washington, D.C., and being told the things that the leaders in both places wanted to have people on the other capitals believe.
In the case of Goldberg, the Israelis wanted the U.S. to believe, and the Obama administration to believe that, yes, they really were crazy enough to launch a strike on Iranian facilities.
And from Washington, I think the sentiment from the Obama administration was to calm Israel down and to calm down Israeli leadership and let them know that the United States would do everything within its power, however you want to define that, to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear capabilities.
But, yeah, I think at the end of the day, Gareth is dead on that one of the biggest concerns is a form of rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.
And I think we've seen both Michael Rubin recently of the American Enterprise Institute as well as George Will writing op-eds which address that concern and saying that the real fear here is that there might be, they wouldn't say rapprochement, they'd say deterrence and containment I think are their greatest fears.
Well, you know, the real problem comes even when people are shaking their big stick and talking tough in order to, you know, they want to stop short of real war.
They can end up kind of getting us into a situation where they run out of options according to the way that they've laid the options out.
And so, like you said, well, the sanctions aren't working, and obviously that means they're just too religious and crazy to be reasoned with.
And so we all know what's the next step from that.
There are no more steps from that.
And, you know, I know that you kind of phrase it this way probably deliberately because of just how arbitrary and vague the designation is of nuclear capability.
I mean, the fact that there is not a Manhattan Project in Iran, you know, ought to mean that we can just, I guess, pretend that there's a problem for the long term without ever really coming to violent conflict.
But the narrative is so different from the truth that, well, it makes me nervous, you know, because the policy oftentimes, well, almost always, is based on the false narrative rather than what's the real facts of the situation, you know?
Oh, yeah.
And I think we've been seeing, I'm not going to say arbitrary, but there have been a number of points that have been picked by those who want to see the United States or possibly Israel attack Iran or at least prevent them, as you pointed out, from taking a different course of action, a diplomatic one, sort of creating these crisis points on a timeline.
And, I mean, some of these are very far in the distance.
I mean, I think some people have said, well, you know, okay, fine.
Israel probably would actually attack Iran under certain circumstances.
And those circumstances are pretty extreme.
But it's something that, hey, it's a possibility.
And I think there's a lot to be said for that argument that, you know, in a very extreme sense, if every other option had been explored and if Iran really did have a nuclear weapon and had shown a willingness to use it, this is way far down the line, yeah, there's a possibility of an Israeli attack.
But on the opposite end of that spectrum, we have, you know, John Bolton in the Washington Times, I think it was on August 17th or 16th, writing that really Israel has at that point, I think, must have been four or five days left to attack Iran before the Bushehr reactor with using Russian fuel rods went online.
And that got some echo.
So I think you see sort of a creation of these, I would say, arbitrary points in which to sort of indicate that there's a crisis of sorts.
And very limited time left to act is the message they want to get across.
Well, you know, my friend Gordon Prather, who used to write great numbers of articles, doing a wonderful job debunking all this propaganda about Iran and their nuclear program, he pointed out to me that, you know, when they say the breakout capability means having enough low enriched uranium 235, that if it was high enriched, it would be enough for one bomb or something.
He says, well, why not have the breakout capability is that they have enough uranium for 100 bombs in the ground right now.
If only they dig it up and refine it and make hexafluoride gas out of it and enrich it to weapons grade.
As long as we're making things up here, how come, you know, it is a completely arbitrary designation.
If there's a pile of low enriched uranium sitting there, it's not weapons fuel at all, any more than the ore in the ground is.
Yeah, I think that that's playing fast and loose with the definitions of A, what a nuclear program is, and B, what exactly is a red line in terms of another country developing a nuclear program.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
Hold it right there, Eli.
Everybody will be back with Eli Clifton.
Talk more about the neocons and Iran after this.
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All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott talking with Eli Clifton.
He writes over at Loblog.com, L-O-B-E-L-O-G dot com.
Jim Loeb and friends.
And we're talking about the neocons in America and the Likud party, I guess, in Israel and the push or seeming push for war with Iran, the propaganda about their nuclear program, et cetera.
And, you know, Eli, it seemed to me when I read that Jeffrey Goldberg piece in The Atlantic, that the most notable part of it to me was where he quotes Netanyahu and the prime minister and Ehud Barak, the defense minister of Israel, both saying that assuming an Iranian nuke, they're not scared.
What they're worried about is that maybe people won't want to move to Israel so much anymore.
And as it was Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett pointed out over at Race for Iran dot com, they said this is the weakest, coarsest belly in the history of mankind.
The neocons want to get America into a war with Iran, which obviously could be a disaster in so many ways, would be a disaster in so many ways over a potential brain drain from Israel one day.
Yeah, I mean, I think that a number of people who have read that have exhibited a reaction of surprise that he even repeated that.
Picture my eyebrows all arched and high on my forehead.
What?
And it's not just some professor in Israel.
It's Netanyahu saying it.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I don't think there's been any evidence to really suggest much of much, much evidence of this.
But it certainly does sound like hysteria.
If I can, if there's one thing I could say, it indicates besides just probably not being true.
Not being true, you mean that there even would be a brain drain?
It's hard to imagine.
I think even Goldberg possibly indicated that he didn't necessarily hear this from all of his contacts in Israel, and that he wasn't necessarily convinced of this either.
But the fact he repeated it at all is surprising, I'd say.
Well, and for me, it's never even mine.
The real thing is that it means that when the neocons tell the American people that if the Iranians were to ever have a nuke on the first day, they would use it to destroy Israel and kill all the Israelis immediately, and therefore we have to have a war.
That's not what Netanyahu says or believes.
That's not what the Likud Party right-wing nationalist lunatics that run Israel think.
They're not worried.
And yet we're supposed to be so scared that we're willing to send our kids to go and die in this thing.
No, I mean, I think really what we've been seeing is, and sort of to go back to the talking point that we've been putting up every day, there's a real effort to constrain the discussion and the debate over how the United States and Israel should be dealing with the possibility, because I'm not even going to say that they necessarily have a nuclear weapons program, but the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.
And putting out things like, you know, if there would be a brain drain from Israel, I mean, I suspect it kind of dovetails with some of the sort of media push to talk about Israel being a close ally of the West, Israel being an important contributor to science and technology in the West, and sort of saying, hey, all of that would disappear if Iran somehow got a nuclear weapon.
But all of this goes back to trying to constrain the argument to tell us that it is unacceptable for Iran to be pursuing a nuclear weapon.
It's unacceptable for Iran, in some cases, to have a nuclear program, and that these are just inconceivable situations for us to face, where literally everything that we value would fall apart.
That's what they're trying to tell us.
And, you know, the brain drain thing, I think, is probably even for Jeffrey Kohlberg, was pushing it a little bit too far.
Wow.
I mean, and that's really saying something.
And, again, just because I love this footnote so much, it was Ehud Barak, the war chief over there, and Benjamin Netanyahu themselves that he was quoting about that.
You know, it wasn't just some opinion that somebody gave him.
He may have been Netanyahu.
I think it may have been Efrem Sney also that was attributed with that.
Oh, one more person, you're saying?
Or instead of one of the ones I named?
I'm not sure if Netanyahu was in there.
I can't recall exactly.
He well may have been.
Okay.
Well, everyone needs to read it anyway, so check my footnote, y'all.
If I got it wrong, I apologize.
The way I remembered it was Barak and Netanyahu who were saying this, basically.
It's quite possible.
Yeah, I don't have it in front of me.
I'm sorry.
It was certainly one of the talking points they were hitting Goldberg with when he came.
Well, and, you know, that's the thing, too, is I spent a lot of time on this show debunking the propaganda about the supposed Iranian nuclear weapons effort, however you want to call it.
And oftentimes I never really we never really discuss on this show what you just brought up, which is whether it would even well, what they brought up in the article, whether it would even really be problematic for them to have nukes at all.
And maybe here's a question nobody ever asked.
What right does America have as a nation state in the world to tell any other nation state in the world whether they can have nuclear weapons or not?
I mean, at least in terms of the international law, all Iran has to do as a sovereign government is withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty and make nuclear weapons if they want to.
They have just as much right as any other nation state to do so.
And we certainly can ask about it, even if they were in violation of the NPT.
Does that justify even does that justify a military response?
Yeah.
But as I keep going back to, I think that there is a real effort to frame things in the context of being that an Iranian, Iran being in violation of the NPT is unacceptable, and that an Iranian nuclear weapon is unacceptable, and simply the West and Israel could not survive with a world in which Iran had a nuclear weapon.
The realities, though, are that, and when we take the ethical arguments off the table, the United States and Israel have militaries with much bigger budgets, with much larger capacities, and for that matter, with a much larger nuclear weapons capability.
Right.
So if Iran got one weapon, they'll still be up against a sizable arsenal.
Yeah, we got 5,000, and Israel has at least 600, including, of course, thermonuclear weapons, H-bombs.
Right, and Iran probably… And submarines, second strike capability, too.
That's what I was about to say.
I mean, Iran, in the best-case scenario for, I shouldn't say the best-case scenario, but in the scenario in which Iran really accomplishes everything that people fear it might be trying to do, they would really only have a first-strike capability.
Yeah, well, and even then, how are they supposed to get it there?
In the back of a truck or something?
Put the big Jordan and Iraq in the way?
And by the way, Iraq, we just finished the last interview, Eli, talking with Jason Ditz about how Obama's now begging the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to resolve matters in Iraq.
That's how contrary American and Iranian interests are right now in real life.
Yeah, absolutely, and that's an important thing to be looking at here, that as we go further and further down the road of repeating over and over again that we are in this hostile locking of horns with Iran and Israel also in a locking of horns, perhaps even more importantly Israel, we should take a step back and realize that an improvement in relations by both the U.S. and Israel would serve both countries very well in their strategic interests in the region.
Right on.
Everybody, that's Eli Clifton.
Check him out at lobelog.com and at antiwar.com slash blog.
You guys do great work, and I really appreciate it, and on behalf of a lot of other people, too, I do.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all, we'll be right back after this.