Once again, I'd like to welcome back to Antiwar Radio, the great investigative reporter, Gareth Porter.
He writes for IPS News and for the American Prospect.
You can find all his IPS News articles in his archive at antiwar.com/porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks, Scott.
Always glad to be here.
Yeah, it's beginning to turn into the Gareth and Scott show.
You do the reporting and then I'll ask you the dumb questions and you set me straight and then everybody listening will get to know what the hell is going on in the world.
It'll be great.
It's a pleasure.
Yeah, so you have this new article here about Iran and their nuclear program and the different politics that have been taking shape here.
Everybody who reads antiwar.com has the great benefit of reading Dr. Gordon Prather and his technical expertise and explanations of how the treaties apply and a lot of the different maneuvering in there, but it's very nice to get your additional perspective on this.
So Gareth, Iran has a nuclear program.
It must be for nuclear weapons, right?
You know, the old canard that has been used by the Bush administration from the very beginning about Iran's nuclear program is that, well, they don't need a nuclear program to support their energy system in Iran because they have so much oil.
Well, you know, this has now been, I think, conclusively disproven.
There's a paper that your listeners might be interested in checking out if they want to get more deeply into this by Roger Stern, who's the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
It was published January of this year in something called PNAS, I'm not familiar with the publication myself, but I do have a copy of it, and it's called The Iranian Petroleum Crisis and United States National Security, and it does get into the question of Iran's petroleum situation and suggests that, in fact, they do need to supplement petroleum with nuclear power.
And there have been other studies as well that have confirmed this.
So, I mean, this is a key question here, you know, whether it is true that Iran does have a serious desire for a civilian nuclear power.
Hey, listen, they've had a serious desire for civilian nuclear power since before the revolution, and it was Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld in the four years who were helping them build it.
That's exactly right.
And I should add that there have been efforts to suggest that the Shah was actually secretly moving to nuclear weapons, but I have not yet seen evidence to that effect.
There's a new book called The Nuclear Sinks of Tehran, which tries to make that case based on an interview with, essentially, the father of the Iranian nuclear program during the Shah's era.
And they actually, as far as I read the information that is provided in the interview, on the interview with this Iranian scientist, he does not say that the Shah told him that he wanted nuclear weapons.
He said, this is something that we might want to think about in the future.
But there's no indication that during the Shah's era there was any move to move towards a nuclear weapon production or a nuclear weapon technology.
And, you know, the wartime economist at antiwar.com, David Henderson, wrote a great article about opportunity cost.
And he didn't pretend in the article to know what the numbers were exactly.
He was just, you know, as an economics lesson and a thought experiment, he says, now listen, if you have oil and you have uranium, whether you want to sell the uranium and burn the oil for your electricity or whether you want to sell the oil and burn the uranium for your electricity is a matter of mathematics.
It's a simple matter of prices and opportunity cost.
And if it's cheaper for you to use your natural uranium that you have in your country and you can make more money by selling your oil on the world market rather than burning your oil for your electricity, then that's what you do.
And so he wasn't claiming to know all the numbers, but he's saying, you know, listen, as close as a government can get to making a capitalist market based decision, that's what's going on here.
They have uranium in Iran, they have oil in Iran, and at least he's saying it's plausible and extremely plausible that they would make this economic calculation and that they would decide they want to export their oil and use their uranium for their domestic electricity as much as they can.
Right.
And having said that, I mean, I would also want to be on the record as saying that there's no doubt in my mind that, you know, there have been Iranian national security officials who have been looking at the nuclear weapons option.
I don't doubt that a bit.
I mean, we know that during the Iran-Iraq war, after their cities were bombed, you know, they did consider, they did discuss that possibility.
And there were probably moves at various times to consider, you know, various options in that regard.
But that is not the same, however, as having a nuclear weapons program.
And I do believe that the issue is still open, that there has been no irrevocable decision made, and that their policy on that question will depend crucially on U.S. policy.
I think that is the fundamental point that the U.S. political system needs to take on board.
How big of a crisis would it be, or would it be one at all, if the Ayatollah Khomeini basically lied in a fatwa and said it is against Islam to build a nuclear bomb, while at the same time his government was secretly building one or working toward one?
Would that matter?
You know, this would be on balance.
The effect of that policy would, of course, depend on the total situation at that point.
In theory, it could have both either positive or on balance negative consequences.
If there was an imbalance of power in a region in which the absence of a nuclear weapon on the Iranian side would create an incentive of some sort for war, then in theory that could be a positive situation, a positive development.
On the other hand, you know, it could destabilize a military balance or a political situation.
So I think we have to look at it in terms of the total political-military situation in which it would occur.
But you know, I go back as a historian to the 1960s and to, you know, a similar situation.
I think there are some broad parallels here between the question of Iran having a nuclear weapon and China having a nuclear weapon in the 1960s.
And of course, prior to China actually testing a bomb and beginning to build nuclear weapons, the position of the United States was we must allow China to have nuclear weapons.
And then there's a great literature now about the policy discussions of the United States, about proposals for, you know, cooperating with the Soviet Union in trying to kill the baby in the cradle, I believe is the term that's been used, to destroy China's ability to produce nuclear weapons.
That was ultimately discarded as an option for various reasons, in part because Khrushchev, the wily Nikita Khrushchev, who had no love for Mao Zedong's regime at that point in the early 1960s, advised the United States, he had a conversation with Avril Harriman, Ambassador Avril Harriman, in, I believe, 1962, if my memory serves me correctly, in which he said, look, you know, the Chinese will not be more aggressive once they get nuclear weapons, they will become less aggressive.
They'll become more cautious if they have nuclear weapons.
And I think history shows that Khrushchev was absolutely correct, that Chinese foreign policy did in fact become, on balance, more conservative, more careful, more cautious, more carefully calculating, once they were in nuclear power than it had been before that.
And in fact, you know, that reminds me of what Ron Paul said in the debate the other night about, you know, yeah, there were interventions overseas in third world countries and so forth, but we face the Soviet Union down, and China down, without war, because, as you say, or as you're implying, the consequences of getting into a hot war when you're a nuclear power can be devastating.
The only reason our government's getting away with all this permanent war that they're doing now is because they're picking on third world countries that don't have nukes, and they can basically sell it and have the wars with only conventional weapons.
Well, and this is the crucial question here, is whether the Iranian political military leadership is a leadership of rational calculators or of crazies who are, you know, who have a bloodlust to kill Jews or Israelis or other categories of people.
And I think the record there is absolutely clear.
And you know, I wrote a story earlier this year in which I showed that, in fact, the Israeli intelligence people and Israeli strategists know very well that the Iranian leadership is a rational calculating leadership.
They have based their policy on that, in fact, despite the fact that Israel has had a very aggressive disinformation policy, which has thought to get Americans particularly on board with the idea that what we're dealing here with another Hitler, a group of Nazi-type Hitlerians who are after, you know, the possibility of a nuclear war against Israel.
In fact, I think it's very clear that Israel's security specialists know very well that the Iranians are quite rational.
I would say that, you know, as the national security elites go, what we know about the Iranian national security elite is that there's a lot of continuity, that they're very professional, that they're very intelligent, and that they study the situation very carefully and they're very objective.
And wait a minute, aren't these guys Elliott Abrams and Dick Cheney's friends anyway?
I mean, don't these guys have a history going back 30 years?
You hang on to the hostages till Reagan takes office and we'll all be friends and we'll sell you missiles through Israel and we'll spend the money on illegal death squads in Nicaragua, and it'll be great.
Well, there is that connection there between the extreme right...
I mean, Gourbanifar and Ledeen and these guys are all still pals.
I don't understand how they can call them crazy when these are the friends of the Republicans.
Well, you know, of course, there was that connection between the extreme right within the national security establishment and a certain group of Iranians.
But I would hesitate to say that the same people who are now in leadership positions would be identified with the ones who were dealing with the folks that you're referring to.
I see.
Well, and this is something we've discussed before, too, is that when Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, I remember him on TV giving speeches denouncing Bill Clinton's sanctions and saying, we ought to open up trade.
That's how you create peace.
He's spoken like a true businessman, trying to get his government to stop hassling their government so he could do some business and make some money.
Seems like he must have had some people in Iran he was talking to that he was trying to do business with.
Absolutely.
And that is a very fascinating element of this whole picture of Dick Cheney's profile.
He does have, you know, the usual sort of capitalist sense of, you know, let's figure out how to make a buck and the willingness to subordinate this sort of right wing political agenda to that, you know, very understandable and, in fact, laudable capitalist desire.
Yeah, just don't give him a government to run because he'll come and kill you.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
Right.
But, yeah, and it does speak to Cheney's understanding that Iranians are people, too, and that they're perfectly good at shaking hands and making deals just like anybody else.
They're not correct.
I mean, is there really anywhere in the world other than maybe the vice president's office where you literally have, I mean, and maybe Mugabe or whatever, are there are there many places in the world where the governments, besides being just tyrants, are, you know, out of their mind, willing to pick a fight with the United States, for example, deliberately or something?
I don't think so.
Well, this this comes back to my fundamental point of view as a not just a historian, but a student of international politics, a bit of a theorist, if you will, about international politics.
The United States plays a unique role in world politics because we have so much more power than anyone else.
There is a I almost I'm tempted to say natural tendency, although it has an unnatural element to it, a natural tendency to believe that we can get away with things that others can't.
And to some extent, it's true that we can get away with things that that no other state in the international system can because we have so much military power.
And that does give rise to all kinds of illusions of grandeur which translate into really irrational policies.
And so in a way, you know, I would argue that, yeah, there might be individuals in one country or another who who share, you know, or even go beyond the degree of irrationality we've seen in the vice president's office.
But there's something unique about the kind of irrationality that you see at the top of a government that has all of the not all the power, but but has far more power of military than anyone else in the world.
Yeah, well, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It's almost a professional deformation of those people, which, you know, admittedly, individual psyche can carry it to to an extreme.
But but I think it's a you know, I would argue that it's a more fundamental systemic problem in this in this society and this government.
Yeah, well, it's the Harry Brown maxim, it's not the abuse of power, it's the power to abuse.
Exactly.
And when you have unlimited power, well, you know, people are going to get hurt no matter who you are.
Basically, that is precisely my my viewpoint.
Well, and it's, you know, it's funny, it's as silly as it sounds, as, you know, Frodo Baggins tries to give the ring to Gandalf, well, I don't want you take it Gandalf.
And Gandalf says, No, boy, don't give that ring to me.
You don't want to know what the nicest wizard in all of Middle Earth would do with a ring like that, pal, keep it away, because I will become your worst enemy, believe it, you know, and you know, I wish I wish that in fact, the the many millions who have read that, that series of novels would would take to heart the real story of the real lesson, which was built into it.
Yeah, well, you know, George Washington resigned his commission and gave up his sword to the Continental Congress, okay, war's over, here's my sword, I'm going home.
And now, you know, we don't even have to go to, you know, fairies and elves land, that's real history in this country.
And, and, you know, I think all our heroes in our culture are people, even all the gold cowboy movies, and they're the people who, when they do use force, it's because they have absolutely no other choice but to finally pick up the gun and do the right thing, you know, they're heroes, and I'm afraid the the record shows lamentably that that they are a minority of the of the players in the in the policy situation.
All right, now, let's get back here to some specifics about the Iranian nuclear program.
My understanding Gareth Porter, is that Iran and the United States are both signatories to the nonproliferation treaty, and that that treaty guarantees them the unalienable right to produce nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and that the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no indication, that's their direct quote, and no evidence that any of their nuclear program has been diverted to a military purpose.
That is correct.
And Albert Dye, Mohammed Albert Dye, the Director General, General Director, I guess is the term of the International Atomic Energy Association, the IAEA, has made that clear.
That has been the basis of his of his position, however, you know, he is a political actor, he is, he is the director of an organization that has a board of directors that is dominated by the United States and its allies, and therefore, he has to tack in a certain direction, which in this case, is to essentially take the position that Iran is under suspicion.
And therefore, the burden of proof is on Iran to prove that it has no intention to have nuclear weapons.
Now, you know, that is, that is, of course, essentially creating a double standard.
And and that, you know, there's, there's no doubt about that.
Well, it's not even just a double standard in that we're holding a bunch of hydrogen bombs over their head.
It's impossible.
You can't prove a negative.
You can't.
This is what Donald Rumsfeld did to Saddam Hussein.
Okay, fine.
You turn over 12,000 page dossier.
That's the most complete history of all of your weapons programs, and chemical germs and things that I sold you back in the 80s, not good enough.
You have to prove that you have nothing and we know you have something so you can't prove that.
So we're going to war.
It's the same script.
That is correct.
I mean, that's the situation that's being created here with with Iran.
And you know, I think you have to give Mohamed ElBaradei credit for attempting to short circuit that attempt by the United States to create, you know, the burden of proof on Iran.
He has been trying to essentially play a role of being a go-between so that there is a buffer between Iran and the power of the United States in the IAEA.
He has been trying to work with Iran to convince them that if they do certain things, he could create a some political momentum toward taking the Iran nuclear file out of the Security Council, which where the United States basically used its power, you know, to get its allies on the board to to insist that it would be moved to the Security Council and back to the IAEA itself, which is what, you know, it's in Iran's interest and Iran knows that.
And that's why and that really brings me to the story that I've just published, which is about the deal which was struck in July and August between Mohamed ElBaradei and the Iranian government to resolve the remaining issues that really, in some cases, go back to the 1980s about the scope of the Iranian nuclear program and about certain experiments that they did about where they got centrifuges of both P1 and P2, P1 being the older, simpler version, P2 being more modern version of the centrifuges, where they got them, how many they got, and so on and so forth.
All of these historical issues, which I must say are of interest to anyone who wants to understand the history of the program, but are by no means dispositive, they don't prove anything really about what Iran's intentions are now.
And in a way, you know, they have been used simply for political purposes to try to prevent Iran from exercising its right to enrich uranium and to sort of try to make the case, which can't be made.
I mean, there's not going to be any smoking gun.
They're not going to find that.
They know they're not going to find it.
So in a way, this has been a political tool by the United States and its allies, which then, through Mohamed ElBaradei, have basically kept Iran in the hot seat, have used this to justify a Security Council resolution and so forth.
So now, you know, ElBaradei has succeeded in negotiating with the Iranian government, basically with Larijani, a new agreement in which the Iranians pledge to completely answer all of the questions that are posed by the IAEA specialists by the end of November.
And so, in theory, this is supposed to then clear the decks for ElBaradei to say that we have now completed this phase of the process and to say that the file should then come back to IAEA.
Now, you know, this doesn't end the issue by any means, but it would represent a major political move.
And, you know, some of the best coverage of this development so far has pointed out that the Bush administration is quite unhappy with this, because it will make it much more difficult to continue to sell the idea of increasing the pressure on Iran through sanctions at the Security Council.
So, what you're saying then is ElBaradei has the power by himself to make this decision and take it out of the Security Council, and Bush won't be able to stop him?
No, no, he can't make that decision.
It's simply that he, by issuing a statement, a report that says the Iranians have satisfied us, he will create a new political reality.
He'll make it too hard for Bush to keep it in the Security Council, then.
That's right.
In other words, it could create some serious problems for Bush's strategy.
Oh, that'd be nice.
Well, but then they're just going to find another excuse, right?
I mean, this is what Scott Ritter said to me, too, is like, you know, centrifuges this and centrifuges that.
This has nothing to do with the nuclear program.
This is about regime change, and they'll use the nuclear program, and if that's not a good enough excuse, they'll come up with something else.
If they completely suspend all uranium enrichment, send every bit of their enrichment capability off to Russia or something to be done there, then they'll just find another excuse.
This is about regime change, the nuclear program, the IEDs, whatever, is all just a pretext.
Well, that's absolutely right, but the question now is, can the Bush administration continue to get the other members of the IAEA board on board, and their partners in the Security Council as well?
And that is a question which is more interesting, although I have to say that in the end I would be more pessimistic and optimistic that this is going to sway, certainly, the EU to change its position.
It might, in fact, affect Russia and China, which is the thing to watch at this point.
But in any case, you're absolutely right, the Bush administration certainly is not going to change its policy because of any agreement between ElBaradei and Iran, or, you know, the answering of any question by the Iranians.
In fact, you know, I mean, the Iranians will undoubtedly have to turn over information which they find embarrassing because it will show that they were thinking about P-2 centrifuges at one point in the 1980s or 1990s, which they didn't wish to reveal.
That this was before they, you know, made some fundamental decisions about their compliance with the IAEA rules in 2003.
So, I mean, they have been reluctant to do that because they know they'll be hit over the head by the United States and its allies.
Which they were in 2003 for revealing things that they hadn't been mandated to reveal, things that had been kept secret because basically Clinton was already going beyond the treaty in trying to keep nuclear technology out of their hands from the Chinese and the Russians and so forth, who were trying to provide turnkey facilities and so forth.
And so he drove their program underground, but in 2003 it was, when they turned over all that stuff, it was because they had finally gotten to the point where they were ready to introduce the nuclear material into the machine.
And the treaty and the safeguards agreement with the IAEA said, now, once you're ready to put the nuclear material into the machine, then you have to tell us.
And so they did.
They had kept it secret, but it wasn't anything that was, you know, quote unquote illegal for them to keep secret.
That's a very astute analysis, you're absolutely correct.
Well, I'm completely cribbing from Dr. Gordon Frather, but yeah, that's what he's taught me, and I know he's right because I checked his footnotes and edited his articles.
That's right, and you're right that the entire history of the Iranian program is shaped by the fact that they were immediately put on the blacklist by the United States and its allies.
So, you know, this is, you know, this is really an explanation for a great deal of what has happened.
Okay, let's talk about this.
Is it Khatami, the moderate reformer guy?
Khatami, yes.
He got elected, now he's the guy who used to be in Amina Jad's position and then got forced out.
Right.
And now, he's on the council that nominally, I understand, has the authority over the Ayatollah, but not really.
I think you mean Russ and Johnny.
Okay.
Maybe that's who I'm talking about.
Russ and Johnny has just been elevated.
That is who I'm talking about.
I was confused.
Yes.
And there's a lot of speculation about it.
Now, what's his relationship to Khatami, the former so-called reformer president?
Between Russ and Johnny and Khatami?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they would share some interesting common ground on a lot of issues, I think.
Are they allies politically?
I think they would be more likely to be in favor of the negotiations with the United States than Khamenei himself, the supreme leader.
But of course, they are rivals as well.
Oh, I see.
So, it's more complicated.
Right.
Okay.
Now, so what is the import of, you say his name, Russ and Johnny, being elected to this new council?
Or this new position on this council?
Well, it's interesting.
Khatami has been so identified with trying to open up to the West for so long that even the extreme right in this country recognizes that he is somebody who they can't easily categorize as sort of a violent, you know, sort of anti-American type of person, leader.
And there have been some indications over the past year or so that at least in the State Department and perhaps even beyond that, the U.S. national security officials have been looking very carefully at Russ and Johnny and hoping that he would gain additional influence within the Iranian government in the belief that he would be willing to make concessions that the current government itself has not been willing to make.
Now, I'm not convinced that that's the case.
I think that there's a much greater degree of unanimity within the Iranian political elite on this issue of what to concede and what not to concede to the United States than has been assessed by some of the people in the U.S. government at this point.
I think that they are in agreement that they should be willing to negotiate a deal in which they absolutely agree to an intrusive system of inspection, which would essentially not allow them to increase the level of enrichment to the point which would allow them to manufacture nuclear weapons.
Which would be over 90-something percent pure or 235?
Well, even much lower.
In other words, they're willing to sign on to a regime which would keep them at five percent enrichment, which is less than one-fourth of what they would need.
So I think there's agreement that they should be willing to make that kind of a deal, but not to give up enrichment completely.
And that's what, of course, the whole Bush administration, including Condoleezza Rice, are committed to, and they have shown absolutely no degree of flexibility on that point, even though some of their European allies, I think, have been quietly saying, well, ultimately we're going to have to consider this as a fallback position.
And so, really, this is the issue that I raised in my piece this week, that the Iranians have formally proposed to the EU3 in 2005 a process in which they said, you, meaning the EU3, with the United States obviously in the background, can negotiate with us on the level of the number of centrifuges that we would be allowed to use, the degree of enrichment that they would be allowed to carry out, and an intrusive inspection system, and I'm simplifying this for time purposes, an intrusive inspection system by the IAEA, which would guarantee that there's no way that they could transfer anything from that system of enrichment to be used for nuclear weapons later on.
They call it an open-fuel cycle system, which would not allow any of the fuel to be recycled so that it could be used later on for nuclear weapons.
So what we're talking about basically here is them giving up everything but enrichment on their soil.
I think that is an accurate statement.
And at the same time, the administration will never accept this.
Well, that appears to be the case.
I mean, we have seen no willingness to consider anything other than an absolute zero regime as far as uranium enrichment is concerned in Iran.
Now, you know, technically that's not true in the June 2006 proposal of the P5-plus-1, that is, the Security Council members plus Germany, there was a slight long-term possibility, a theoretical possibility, that Iran would be allowed to do some enrichment after they had proven that they were sinless to not just the IAEA but to the United States, because the United States would hold a veto power over that.
And in fact, that was one of the reasons we know that Iran found that absolutely unacceptable.
I mean, that's just an impossible thing to ask them to agree to.
Yep, well, that is always how American policy works.
I remember the Rambouillet peace agreement that said, you let us occupy your entire country or we'll bomb you back in 1999.
I mean, this is how American policy works.
I forget if it was Kissinger, you're the historian, maybe you can help me out, which American imperialist it was, who talked about, yeah, I wouldn't want to be America's friend, you're a lot safer being our enemy.
If you're our friend, you're much more likely to just get the knife in the back, you know?
Yeah, I would rather be a friend than an enemy on balance, but I understand the point, yeah.
All right, now, can I keep you a few minutes here?
Sure.
All right, let's talk about these EFPs.
Gareth Porter from The Prospect, from Interpress Service, historian, investigative reporter, what is the evidence that the new, improved, explosively formed penetrators that are being used against our guys in Iraq are being sent there by the government of Iran?
Well, the evidence, unfortunately, for the Bush administration continues to develop in the wrong direction.
I mean, the more evidence we have, the less plausible that appears to be.
I'm referring particularly to the evidence over time that more and more factories in Iraq for the manufacture of those EFPs have been discovered.
The administration no longer claims, as it did on February 11, 2007, in that infamous Baghdad briefing, that all of these EFPs have to come from Iran.
Now they're saying, they're taking the position that, yes, we know that these are manufactured in Iraq, but the things that are manufactured in Iraq do not do very serious damage to U.S. vehicles.
Now, that is an outright lie, and the interesting thing, and I think I've mentioned this on a previous program, but it bears repeating.
Just a few days later, after that briefing, when in fact General Ray Odierno began to surface this fallback position, which was that, yes, there are EFPs manufactured in Iraq, but they're not as lethal, they're not as damaging as the ones that come from Iran, an unnamed senior military official told Jane Aroff of NBC News that, in fact, the ones that they had discovered in Iraq were capable of penetrating U.S. armor.
They were not as effective as the ones that had been found earlier to be carefully machined.
There were varying grades of these EFPs, but definitely the ones that they had discovered in Iraq can penetrate U.S. armor, they were lethal, and therefore this new fallback position is just an outright lie.
So then you go back to the broader question of what is Iran's role in this, and if you look carefully at the origins of this line about what I call the Iranian EFP narrative, what you find is that before February 2007, there were people within the administration who were saying, well, you know, we do know that there was some manufacturing of these things in Iran, although I'm not sure what they based that on.
I think what they meant was that we know that there are EFPs that are coming from outside the country, because we now know that there were well-machined EFPs that are being made elsewhere outside of Iran.
For one thing, this has never been published, but I will be publishing this in the future, but Hamas is known to be making extremely professional EFPs, which have been devastating to Israeli tanks in the Gaza Strip.
Well, part of the accusations, right, is that they had the DeafMute guy, they finally beat it out of him that Hezbollah had come with Iranian backing in, that they had trained the Iraqis how to make them, and so forth.
Right.
Now, you know, there's no doubt that the Shiites have been trained by Hezbollah.
I don't think that is that is deniable, it's not worth denying that Hezbollah, that the Shiite, the Mahdi army has close ties to Hezbollah, and of course, Sadr has given an interview which he then denounced as a fraud, but apparently it was a real interview in which he talked about the ties between the Mahdi army and Hezbollah.
What I'm coming to here is that all of the historical evidence, the circumstantial evidence, which is really all this issue is about, because there is no smoking gun, there is not going to be a smoking gun, all of the circumstantial evidence points to the likelihood that the technology was passed to the Mahdi army by Hezbollah, that they were the ones who the Mahdi army had the close ties with, and that has trained the Mahdi army, and in fact we know it's perfectly clear that it's Hezbollah which has perfected the use of these weapons.
Well, now, when you talk about the different grades of them and so forth, I guess, you know, if there was a war party guy here hogging my microphone, he would say, oh, well, see, it's the higher grade professional ones, those are the ones that come from Iran, that's the ones I was talking about, not the lower grade ones, whether they're just as lethal or not.
Well, you know, I'm not in a position to say that there are no EFPs manufactured in Iran and that no Iranian EFPs have made their way to Iraq.
What I am saying is that if that is the case, it is a relatively small part of a much larger picture, and with every passing month it's become clearer that if there were Iranian EFPs, they are less and less important in the overall picture.
And you're also basically saying, while you can't prove a negative, they haven't proved their positive at all.
Basically, they've just come out and said, look, we know it.
This is Iran, and it must be, and therefore, and ipso facto, and the rest like that, and write that down.
And that's basically it.
Well, you know, this was not proven or even substantiated with any evidence, with any forensic evidence at all.
And in fact, the real point that I want to make, Scott, is this, and this is something I'm still working on, I've mentioned before, I've been working on it.
But I have no secrets from your listeners, and here's what I have found out.
It's not a surprise.
In February 2007, what was really going on was that the Cheney faction wanted to enhance their line, policy, excuse me, propaganda line, to bolster what they were trying to do, which was to get to push the Bush administration towards war with Iran.
And the idea of proving, not proving, but simply, you know, arguing that, asserting that it was Iran which was manufacturing EFPs and giving them to the Shiites, that was to be the centerpiece of the new line against Iran.
Now, we know that this was not accepted by Condoleezza Rice, by Robert Gates, or by the CIA.
All three, State Department, Defense Department, and CIA, rejected that.
They did not accept that view.
Right.
It was reported in the LA Times, wasn't it, that, send it back to the cook, this isn't convincing enough for us to put our name on it.
That's correct.
And what finally happened was that this was not the briefing that the Cheney people had wanted to have.
They wanted to have a briefing in which all the agencies would buy into this.
First of all, they wanted the NIE, which was issued just about a week before that briefing, to say something that would be clearly, you know, bolstering their case that Iran was giving EFPs to the Shiites.
And in fact, what happened was that the CIA would not do that.
There was a carefully contrived sentence that talked about Iranian lethal support.
It did not mention EFPs, it did not say that Iran was providing these weapons to the Shiites.
And that was a kind of careful compromise that is often forged between the analysts, the head of the CIA, and the administration.
And then the military command clearly did not buy into it either.
And I am now working on the question as to whether General George Casey refused to have that briefing take place on his watch, and it had to wait until he was replaced by Petraeus.
The briefing took place the day after Petraeus replaced Casey as the top commander in Iraq.
Isn't that interesting?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm a commander guy.
In other words, this was a highly politicized process, a highly politicized briefing.
And I'm further informed, and I have not documented this yet, but I believe it's true, that of the three members of the briefing team, one of them came directly from Washington, D.C.
He was not even in Iraq.
He did not represent the CIA.
He did not represent the State Department.
He did not represent the Defense Department.
Was he from SIAC or what?
Well, it might have been a DIA man.
But clearly there were deep divisions within the intelligence community.
There was a minority position which was aligned with Cheney.
That's the minority position that Michael Gordon of the New York Times chose to side with when he wrote that famous article the day before the briefing, which suggested that the intelligence community was on board with what was in fact the Cheney position.
You know, pardon me for the long-term memory problem I have here, but I think it was a year before all this hoorah in February this year.
I think it was in the beginning of 2006 that I first debunked George Bush's lie.
It was the president himself who came out and blamed the Iranians for supplying bombs to the insurgency.
And he was basically making no bones about it.
He was referring to the Sunni insurgency, the ones who were using the roadside bombs at that point.
That was before the real debut of these EFPs and so forth, which I guess happened to play into their script pretty well.
But a year earlier the president was trying to push this lie, and I called him on it on the Antiwar.com blog back then.
This is another element of the narrative which of course makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
On one hand, they argue that it's prima facie evidence of Iranian decision that these are now going to the Shiites.
In other words, it's the Iranian relationship to the Mahdi army that proves that these EFPs must be coming from Iran.
Then they show up in the Sunni area, and what do they say?
Well, that simply means that Iran is supporting the Sunnis.
Right.
Yeah, they're trying to bog us down in the area.
And of course, and I always want to mention this because no one else ever seems to mention it, I accept, I know it's true, I'm not his defender or champion in any sense, but I have read over and over again, and I know that it's the case that Muqtada al-Sadr is friendly with the Iranians and has friendly relations with them and so forth, I also know that he has outright denounced them repeatedly for their intervention on behalf of the Supreme Islamic Council, formerly known as SCIRI, and the Dawah party, that they are the ones, the Badr Brigades, and the Dawah and SCIRI guys are the ones who are far closer to the Iranians.
If the Iranians are helping anybody, it's much more likely they're actually helping the same people America is helping, the Dawah and SCIRI government we've installed there, not the nationalist Sadrites who want them out.
Well, I mean, I would simply put it slightly differently.
I think you're right.
But the larger picture is that Iran, of course, feels, understandably, that they need to have contact with and close relations with, cooperative relations with, all of the major Shiite factions.
So of course, they're friendly with Sadr and they're friendly with al-Hakim.
But you're absolutely right that Sadr and al-Hakim are mortal enemies, their fathers were enemies, their fathers were rivals.
It's the kind of grudge match that's going to go on long after the Americans are out of there.
All right.
Well, geez, I could just go on and on asking you questions about Iraq, but we've got other stuff we've got to get to.
I really appreciate your time today.
Gareth Porter, everybody, he is a historian and an investigative reporter for the American Prospect and for Interpress Service.
You can find his archives at antiwar.com/porter.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
