Alright y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I got a couple articles I want you to look at here.
At The Guardian, Syria and Iran, The Great Game by Alistair Crook.
And today at LewRockwell.com, Nuclear Pots Call Iranian Kettle Black.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
Thank you, Scott.
That's Eric Margulies, everybody, our favorite.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, and this is a real great one here.
But before we get, well and it's all the same story, the American/Israeli, or is that the other way around, war against Syria and Iran, both.
But Syria, I guess, I don't know about because it's really none of America's interest whatsoever, and I don't know too many Syrians or too much about it.
I know that, as we've talked about before, this Baathist party is basically run by this 10% Alawite minority, this break-off group of Shiites, and they rule over the Sunni majority there and all that.
Pepe Escobar and others have been on the show talking about Qatar and Saudi Arabia intervening there.
You and I have discussed Turkey and the little Free Syrian Army that they're building up to intervene, and of course, the American ambassador was running around encouraging people to rise up.
And this guy, Alistair Crook's article at The Guardian, Syria and Iran, The Great Game, he has it that this revolution is not really a big Arab Spring uprising of the people.
It's foreign armed groups, Qataris and Saudis, and I presume, and I think he says, working for the West and or with the West on this project are fomenting this revolution in Syria.
It's regime change and it's on, so what do you think of all of that?
Well, Scott, it's a hell of a mess, and it's a very dangerous one.
There's a lot of discontent, anger in Syria amongst the population against the Assad regime, which has been there as long as anybody can remember.
It is a very repressive dictatorship with 17 different secret police organizations, and it rules by fear, no doubt about it.
But on the other hand, Syria is such a fragile mosaic that a strong government in Damascus is really needed.
It's not just the Alawites or Alawi who are running the show.
Allied to them are Syria's 10% Christian population, Armenians who live there, some Kurdish groups, and some of the big business community, the Bazaaris, as they're called.
So it's complex.
What it is not is a genuine uprising of a people's revolution.
It is also armed groups, as you just mentioned, coming in from abroad, and a lot from Lebanon, and shooting up and trying to create a revolution, groups that are backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Lebanon's right-wing, neo-fascist, Falange parties, and of course, Israel.
Does this include that group Fatah al-Islam, the al-Qaeda-like dudes that Hirsch wrote about, that the US was backing a couple of years ago?
They've sort of vanished, yeah.
There was a little drop in the bucket.
There was an attempt to...
The first, interesting, because it was one of the first attempts of the US to use a very fundamentalist, narrow-minded Islamic group against the Syrians.
They had been using them against Libya, and now these fundamentalist groups have more or less taken over Libya.
There was the attempt in Syria, but on the other hand, under the Bush administration, the US was talking to the Israelis about jointly invading Syria, but they really couldn't come up with an acceptable puppet regime, so they backed off.
Now, I guess my first instinct would be that this is all about Israel, and yet, even putting myself in Netanyahu's right-wing, nationalist, imperialist, lunatic shoes, I can't imagine that he would prefer chaos, and civil war, and Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda, and God knows what in Syria, to the previously stable and reliable Ba'athist dictatorship there.
They wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein, which was also the stupidest thing they could have possibly done.
So, I don't know.
Is this more about the Saudis, and they want their allies ruling Syria instead?
Well, there are a lot of Israelis who are concerned about chaos in Syria, and rightfully so, but they feel that the threat of that is less than the opportunity of overthrowing the last together Arab state and consider rejection of states.
It's not under Washington's thumb.
Arab states and rogue states, if you want to call it that.
There's that issue, but there's an overwhelming desire in Israel and in Washington to knock Syria out now, while it's staggering and on the ropes, as a way of getting at Iran.
And there's such a dementia going on now about getting Iran.
You know, war has been declared.
We're really at war with Iran.
And Syria is seen as its weakest link, and so they're going after it to try and break that link, which the Americans and the Israelis believe will then leave Hezbollah in Lebanon stranded.
Well, you know, something about these guys, it's like their agenda is to turn me into a truther here.
It says in this article in the Guardian that they gave the job to Prince Bandar to round up some al-Qaeda type dudes to do this thing in Syria.
And I'm thinking, wait, isn't Prince Bandar the guy whose wife, well, first of all, wasn't he Bandar Bush?
And then wasn't it his wife that sent all the money to al-Bayoumi in San Diego, who was protecting the pilots of Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon?
And who are these people?
When did the Saudi kingdom ever break with al-Qaeda?
And when did they come back again?
Well, I've never understood that story about Bandar's wife sending money, or in fact, why Saudis were airlifted out of the U.S. the day after 9-11.
What is clear is the Saudis are totally in bed with the Americans.
Bandar's worked for the CIA for years.
He's a very corrupt figure.
The British Fraud Office went after him for billions of dollars of illicit bribes or kickbacks that were paid on British arms deals with Saudi Arabia.
And the investigation was squashed by the saintly Tony Blair in the interest of national security.
I've never heard anyone call him saintly before, but okay.
Well, I was being sarcastic in the extreme.
Oh, you meant the blood-soaked monster Tony Blair.
I got you.
The slimy, sanctimonious, hypocrite Tony Blair.
But I don't understand that whole Saudi story, but certainly the Saudis are also taking a risk by trying to overthrow the Syrians because it's unpredictable.
We just don't know what's going to happen in Syria.
They share a border with the Saudis.
And you know, nobody cared about Little Libya.
It was off in the middle of the desert.
But Syria is the very heart of the Middle East.
And if Syria implodes, it's going to shake up the whole region in a very dangerous way.
Well, we're almost up at the break, so I guess we'll try to save the majority of the Iranian part.
Well, we'll save the Iranian part for after the break.
But I just wanted to reference again this article by Alistair Crook of The Guardian.
He's talking about John Hanna, who's one of Cheney's neocons from the office of vice president, writing at Foreign Policy, noting that Bandar working without reference to U.S. interests is clearly cause for concern, but Bandar working as a partner against a common Iranian enemy is a major strategic asset.
Then Crook says Bandar got the job.
So it's not too hard to see how bad that would hurt Iran if they were to actually be able to overthrow the regime in Syria.
That's the last ally the Iranians have.
And Richard Silverstein's going to be on the show to talk about Israeli and MEK bombings inside Iran already going on.
Looks like we might really be creeping toward war here, huh?
Well, we are.
You know, British and U.S. Special Forces have been operating inside Iran.
They've been targeting.
We're overflying with all kinds of drone aircraft.
We're assassinating, or the Israelis are assassinating their officials.
You'll hear about that later.
We're sending in killer viruses that could hit other nations.
Computer viruses, all right.
I don't know what it is.
Yeah.
All right.
It's Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis and you'll get it right.
And look at LewRockwell.com.
He's got the top story today.
Nuclear pots call Iranian kettle black.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Eric Margulies.
And he's got a killer article at the top of LewRockwell.com today.
Nuclear pots call Iranian kettle black.
And when I was reading this thing, Eric, I was reminded of some that Gordon, that Dr.
Gordon Prather had written about numerous times years back about how when Bush gave the axis of evil speech, indicting Iraq, Iran, and North Korea for producing nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction, which they're trying to get you to think nuclear weapons anyway, even if they're just talking about chemicals that don't exist.
But anyway, they had a major problem.
And that was that all three were members in good standing of the nonproliferation regime.
They all had the IAEA safeguarding their nuclear materials, making sure none of them were diverted anywhere.
Saddam Hussein's were all on lockdown.
The North Koreans and the Iranians both are still inside the NPT and allowing IAEA inspections on a regular basis.
And so they had to find a way to try to force them out of the NPT.
And with basically with Iraq, they figured they just straight bulldoze us with propaganda and just go.
But then when it came to North Korea and Iran, they basically screwed it up really bad because the North Koreans, they beat him over the head so bad that they withdrew from the treaty.
You know, they beat him over the head with false accusations and they withdrew from the treaty and started making nukes.
Now they're safe from us.
And the Iranians this whole time took the stance after that axis of evil speech that look, our hands are up.
Don't shoot.
We got inspectors here.
Our uranium is non-diverted.
And yet we are.
The West still applies.
The Washington, D.C. still applies this Rumsfeld standard of evidence that you can't ultimately prove the negative of what you're not doing.
And they just ignore the fact that all the uranium is counted for, that there's no fissile material in the country for them to make a bomb out of.
And they just continue to beat them over the head with the nonproliferation regime going on for now eight years since the axis of evil speech or however many nine years.
It seems like I had a point in there somewhere.
Just I guess that the Iranians have taken the we're not doing nothing.
So stop threatening us stance.
And it hasn't really worked.
And that's basically the point you're making in your article today.
Yeah.
No, it hasn't worked.
I've been watching this story for 20 years now.
And it hasn't worked because we are being deluged by a torrent of accusations, probably lies against Iran, that they're secretly working on all kinds of nefarious weapons.
Same story we heard of Saddam Hussein, as you point out, to prove that you don't have nuclear weapons, you're guilty until proven innocent.
I go back during when U.N. inspectors were looking at Iraq's nuclear facilities, such as they were limited ones.
Half of them, according to press reports, were American or Israeli spies.
So no wonder that these countries are not so anxious to have foreign inspectors pouring through some of their most secret areas.
Anyway, be that as it may, the Iranians cannot escape these charges.
And fake information like this story from the famous laptop computer proving that they're developing nose cones and explosive technology to fuse a nuclear weapon.
You know, they're probably faked information.
We saw it before with Iraq.
But as soon as the Iranians deny it, something else pops up through one of these mysterious groups aligned with the neocons in Washington.
So they really are being accused to death.
And I don't think there's any way for Iran to get out of this thing.
I'm surprised they're still in the NPA, the IAEA.
And I don't know why they just don't kick out the foreign inspectors and tell everybody to go to hell.
Well, I sure hope they don't do that, because that'll get them nuked in an instant.
And I saw where the Iranian parliament was saying, well, let's start scaling back our cooperation with the IAEA.
But they ought to be smart enough to go to YouTube and look at that clip of John Bolton talking on a conference call with the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, saying that was always his agenda, was to try to beat them over the head, even with their hands up, with the international nonproliferation regime, until they finally gave up, withdrew from the treaty, kicked the inspectors out.
Then, you know, by their logic, we'd have enough time to start a war then, before they were able to actually put something together.
But we'd be able to say for sure that, well, now we can't verify, they must be making bombs.
Quite right.
And the Iranians are being clever and cautious in not doing this, even though they're very emotional about it.
But, you know, I must say, having watched this 20 years ago, the Director General of Pakistan's Intelligence Service, ISI, told me that Iran had offered to buy Pakistan's nuclear weapons technology and would pay Pakistan's entire defense budget for 10 years.
That's a lot of money.
Pakistan refused, apparently, or so he told me.
That's all I heard at the time.
But there's no doubt that Iran was looking at getting nuclear weapons.
And as I said in my article, why wouldn't they?
Why shouldn't they?
Who came down from Mount Sinai and said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, that France and Britain can, or Israel can, or India can, but not Iran, which is surrounded by enemies, surrounded by nuclear powers, the victim of two major invasions in 1941 by the British and the Russians, and then by Saddam Hussein, who was paid for by the United States.
Why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons to protect itself?
And the point is that these are not weapons designed to destroy Israel.
They're weapons designed to prevent, to protect Iran from an attack by outside powers.
Well, I can totally see that logic.
You know, I guess if I was a government, I would want nukes too, especially in the position that they're in.
However, there really just is no indication that I can see that they actually are doing anything other than perhaps, as somebody put it in the Christian Science Monitor, to the Christian Science Monitor, they're sort of, you know, in a half-assed way kind of meandering toward the capability to one day make bombs.
As Mohammed Sahimi, who's going to be on the show tomorrow again, was pointing out, the Supreme Leader, oh, and Flint Lever too, the Supreme Leader, the old Supreme Leader, Khomeini, banned nuclear weapons with the highest religious edict and said they were against Mohammed and whatever.
So, it's not like that couldn't be a deception or, you know, we should trust a politician's word or anything like that, but he would have to take that back on the religious level, that, oh, well, he didn't, Mohammed isn't really against nukes, I was just kidding you because we had to keep it secret that we were making them or something like that.
They really have kept their hands up.
Well, they have, Scott, and this is what I don't understand as a longtime Iran watcher.
Israel offered to sell the Shah's regime in Iran in the 1970s medium-range missiles with nuclear warheads in exchange for oil.
The deal fell through, obviously, with the Iranian Revolution, but Iran, since, has been puttering around with this nuclear issue for 80, 90, with only three decades.
Israel was trying to sell them nukes and missiles in the 1970s?
Yes, that's correct, to the Shah's regime.
Awesome.
They were going to trade them for oil.
Well, don't forget, Israel sold Islamic Iran $5 billion worth of arms and spare parts during its war with Iraq.
Remember the Ali North and all that imbroglio?
Well, that was that story.
But I'm amazed that the Iranians have not.
If they were going to get nuclear weapons, what is taking them so long?
There's no secret about it.
Give me some enriched uranium and some electricians and stuff and I could probably do it at home.
There's no secret.
Technology is over 40 years old.
For a Hiroshima-type nuke, it is pretty simple just to make a gun-type nuke and slam one piece of uranium into another.
The implosion systems, though, are much more difficult.
To read the Washington Post, they go, oh, well, all you need is a nanodiamond expert and you have the implosion system for a nuclear bomb.
Well, there are two elements that are really difficult.
One is getting the enriched uranium up to 97% or more.
By the way, Iran has mostly 3% uranium and a little bit of 20% for medical purposes.
Nothing higher right now.
The other thing is the fusing technology, which is like a bowl made up of explosive plates that all fire inward.
It has to be done at the same millisecond.
This is what fuses the nuclear weapon.
It's sophisticated, but the Americans figured this out in 1944, if I recall correctly, or 1945.
The other trick, of course, is getting this device into a warhead cone, nose cone.
That is difficult.
Well, you know, the Americans actually hired a Russian scientist at one point to give them completed plans for a nuclear implosion system with one major flaw in it, Operation Merlin.
Then, when the IAEA went searching through all their files, they never even found it.
Apparently, the Iranians saw it for what it was, entrapment, and threw it in the garbage.
Well, it's a crazy story.
It's very mysterious.
My own reading, Scott, is that Iran is still split.
Their leadership is bitterly split on this issue.
Some want it, and some don't want it.
There is that fatwa against nuclear weapons, and they're still arguing and debating.
Meanwhile, they're being threatened by a nuclear attack by Israel, conventional or nuclear attack.
Israel has three submarines off the coast of Iran, or probably one or two, at least on station with nuclear cruise missiles.
Israel's come out with a new intermediate-range missile to carry nuclear warheads.
They've got airborne nuclear weapons.
Israel's ready to wipe Iran literally off the map.
Israel's claiming that Iran is going to do it to Israel, but I think there's much more of a danger of it happening the other way.
Well, you know, in MJ Rosenberg's new piece at Al Jazeera, he quotes, and I had missed this one.
It's not Meir Dagan.
It's another former head of Mossad.
I forget the guy's name.
But he said that, you know, the likelihood or the possibility of an Iranian attack on Israel that would hurt Israel in any way is absolutely nil.
And yet, if we start a war with Iran, he said, it will cause ultimate turmoil and untold consequences for 100 years in the region.
Well, certainly for a hell of a long time.
Thoughtful Israelis, people who know, have been cautioning against any attack.
This attack Iran has become the mantra, the banner of Israel's extreme right wing and its neo-fascist allies in Israel.
And you can't talk sense to these people.
And they're screaming, holocaust, holocaust, holocaust in North America.
And every Jewish American now is up in a dither thinking Israel is about to be wiped off the map.
So, which is not the case.
Well, every American basically is convinced of that, apparently.
Well, and these low IQ Republicans who we saw last week debating, accepted for Dr. Ron Paul and Huntsman.
I was embarrassed to be an American watching these people, you know, calling for more war and more torture.
It was horrifying.
But the point is, it's very hard to tell people in the United States, listen, why would Iran commit nuclear suicide by firing a small number of missiles at Israel?
The minute those missiles launch off their pads, American spy satellites that are right overhead are going to pick them up, send the info to Israel and Washington, and the Israelis will launch their missiles at Iran.
Iran will be vaporized, the whole country.
Why would they want to commit suicide for the whole country?
Well, the neocons in the States and their low IQ Republican allies say, well, it's because they're madmen.
Hitler, Hitler and Tehran, they're crazy people.
Well, they're not crazy.
And that's no way to run foreign policy or to justify starting a nuclear war, which, by the way, if it did happen, would blow radioactive dust all over Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, the whole damn region, including the Gulf, where there were a lot of American soldiers.
And Afghanistan next door, too.
Afghanistan, yes.
All right.
Now, I got to ask you about this firsthand reporting here from your piece at LewRockwell.com today.
In Baghdad, I found British scientists who had been sent by Her Majesty's government to fabricate germ weapons for Iraq.
The germ feeder stocks originated from the United States.
No way.
Scott, that's one of the most horrifying things that I've come across in my long career of covering the Middle East.
I was in Baghdad just on the eve of the first Gulf War against Iraq.
I guess it's 1990.
And I found a group of four British technicians who had been working at the Salman Pak research plant south of Baghdad.
And their job, they told me and showed me documents, was they had been sent by British intelligence and the British Ministry of Defense, Condit, as the British say.
They had been sent there to make, to work on germ weapons for the Iraqis.
Now, this was right at the, you know, when Iraq and Iran had been fighting, the Iraqis had developed a range of chemical weapons, toxic choking gases, mustard burning gases, chlorine, that they were showering on the Iranians.
These gases had been developed with technology from Europe, particularly Germany.
And now they were developing germ weapons for use against the Iranians.
They had four kinds of germs, botulism, tularemia, Q fever, and anthrax.
And they were weaponizing these Germans.
The feeder stocks for these things, they told me, came from a U.S. laboratory in Maryland, near Baltimore, supplied by the U.S. government.
One of the things that made me fall in love with radio was I heard a caller to Rush Limbaugh say, the FBI could have stopped the World Trade Center bombing, read the October 27th, 1993 New York Times click, and they hung up on him.
And I thought, oh, well I can remember that date, that's easy.
So I went to the library and I found the New York Times from October 27th, 1993.
And there was an article all about the FBI informant on the inside of the plot who they called off, and then Ramzi Yousef came in and built the bomb anyway.
Almost succeeded in knocking one tower over into the other.
But it turned out on the microfiche there, that very same New York Times, first of all had an obituary for the head of the MKUltra studies, ha ha, and then also had a study all about the giant scandal of the farm loans that Reagan and Bush had arranged for Saddam Hussein, all of which were used to bankroll his germ weapons program, and that included, and this is even in the New York Times version, American germs.
That's correct, well I found these, scientists told me, and they came from Maryland.
The British supplied other technology, but the raw feeder, the raw germs that they used to build up their stocks were American.
And it was part of our total support for Saddam Hussein, which you mentioned those farm loans were one of the biggest items, where we're supporting to attack Iran.
500,000 Iranians were killed or wounded in that war that we promoted, and the Saudis promoted.
And no wonder the Iranians are angry at us.
Terrible damage was inflicted on Iran.
Iranian soldiers maimed horribly by mustard gas, like in World War I, and all of Iran's western cities were devastated.
Well I wonder why they have hard feelings, I can't understand.
Hey listen, so I guess just give me like a 1 to 10, we've been talking about this for years and years, it's not that I want them to hurry up and get it over with or anything, I want them to hurry up and just officially call it off, but are we really in danger of a war with Iran, which everyone in the Pentagon at the highest levels must know is stupid, as you and I know it's stupid.
Come on.
Yes we are.
You know, when I was at the Pentagon, I was told by person after person that we're not going to go to war, we can't right now.
But there's so much political pressure, and look, crazy things happen in election years.
They're blowing stuff up in Iran right now, they're using the communist terrorist cult, the MEK, to do it.
That's exactly right, and you know, Obama's thrown Israel under a bus, that's the accusations that are being made, and the media is beating the war drums, the so-called liberal leftist press like the New York Times is salivating for war, so it is probable, and it's only going to take an incident in the Gulf, an American plane shot down, maybe overflying Iran, a naval clash in the Gulf, something like that.
Yeah, plan B, rolling start from the Downing Street memo.
We'll just have them shoot down one of our planes and start the bombing right then.
Your memory is excellent.
Remember, the Germans were going to dress up some of their soldiers in Polish uniforms, and send them to the Danzig Corridor.
Is it right that the Japanese blew up their own train and blamed it on China for their invasion in World War II?
Oh, you know much for one so young!
Well, you probably taught me that, I don't remember where I learned that.
I was where it happened, in Shenyang, in northern China, it used to be called Mukden, and yeah, it was General, the old marshal, Chinese warlord, who was blown up, and to this day, we don't know who did it, well, the Chinese accused the Japanese, and some say the Japanese did it to provoke the war there, but the net result was the Japanese then expanded their control over Manchuria.
Hmm, I'm thinking maybe it was the Saudi Royal Family bankrolling.
The one thing they weren't involved in.
Check the FBI files.
Alright, listen, I've already kept you way over time, thanks so much for your time, Eric, you're the best, man.
Cheers, Scott, always a pleasure.
Everybody, that's the great Eric Margulies, his website is ericmargulies.com, spelt like Margolis, and you'll find it, and he's got the top story at lewrockwell.com today.
Nuclear pots call Iranian kettle black.
