All right, y'all.
Welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, writes for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net.
And of course we keep it all at original.antiwar.com/Porter.
You can also find them at Al Jazeera and other places from time to time.
Truth out.
Uh, welcome back to the show.
How are you doing Gareth?
Hi, Scott.
I'm fine.
Thanks.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Uh, the piece at antiwar.com today is called, uh, it's up there in the top news headlines.
US Afghan pact won't end war or night raids.
Um, so, uh, this is the new pact that, uh, Barack Obama, they call it a surprise, but they mean he had to sneak into Afghanistan in the middle of the night or else he would have been killed.
Um, but anyway, uh, so he snuck into Afghanistan in the middle of the night and signed this agreement with Hamid Karzai.
Um, the, uh, Afghan president, I guess as they call him anyway.
Um, enduring strategic partnership.
That sounds great.
Uh, and it means the war will be over in 2014, just like he promised us back in 2009, right?
Well, of course he didn't exactly promise that in 2009 or 2010 or 2011 either.
Uh, but look, uh, basically Barack Obama has a big problem here.
Uh, he's, he's in a tight presidential election race, uh, just about to begin.
He's got an unpopular war, which in the past has been a, uh, shall we say a problem for sitting president, uh, as we all know, and so that's, that's one side of the problem on the other side.
He, uh, has committed himself to this war and committed himself to the interests of the national security state, the Pentagon and the military services primarily, but the CIA as well.
And, uh, that is to say the CIA's, uh, operations wing, which is really the controlling part of that agency.
And, uh, he's, he's really compromised himself very deeply by his, uh, acceptance of their policy advice and his willingness to serve their interests.
Uh, and so he's constantly, you know, shuffling and trying to find ways to serve both his own, uh, political interests in being reelected and the, uh, and continuing to serve the interests of the national security state.
And, and the way he's done that in this particular set of circumstances, of course, is to, uh, not just sign this agreement, but to really build up the notion, uh, by assiduously courting the press or, or I should say, manipulating the press, uh, and, you know, giving a primetime address from Kabul, Afghanistan on this, uh, pact.
Uh, he's, he's basically presenting this as, uh, winding down the war and, uh, turning it over to the Afghans.
So that's of course, the Vietnamization pardon?
Vietnamization, right?
In this case, of course, it's Afghanization.
And indeed, uh, the, the fascinating thing now is that the, um, memorandum of understanding between the U S military and the Afghan, uh, ministry of defense is actually called the, the, uh, MOU on the Afghanization of what they call special operations.
They don't use the term night raid.
So, yeah, this is very, very explicitly being followed as a, uh, a strategy for, uh, winning public opinion or, or perhaps more accurately calming public opinion with regard to the war in Afghanistan, he's not going to persuade people to support the war.
And so he's trying to persuade people that, well, we're getting out, don't worry about it.
Right now, here's the thing though.
They sort of said from 2004 on in Iraq that this is what they were doing.
And I don't know, I'd have to go back, I guess, and I won't, but, uh, I'd have to go back and see when it was, I finally got it through my thick skull that even though it's taking a long time, this actually is going to work.
Cause when they mean Iraqiization, all they really mean is Bata brigade and Mahdi armyization.
And once they're done taking Baghdad, they will be the government of Iraq, whether the Sunni triangle types like it or not.
Um, and that, okay, that'll take a while.
And it did take a while, uh, for that to get completely accomplished, but at least it became, uh, an attainable goal of the U S military.
Uh, you know, at some point in 2006 or seven or something, something became an attainable goal, but it was not exactly what the, uh, the Bush administration had in mind.
And, and this is the, the, the point at which to recall, uh, the, the fact that what, uh, president Bush and his entourage and the neoconservatives had in mind was that they would in fact, uh, keep, of course, the Shia government in power, uh, but they would push for, you know, sharing of power with, with the Sunnis and try to calm things down, but more importantly, what they really wanted out of the deal was several tens of thousands of U S conventional forces to be remaining in their big bases in, in Iraq.
And, uh, that was the, the controlling purpose of that war.
It was to give the United States basis from which to project power, uh, in the middle East.
And of course that's the, uh, precisely what didn't happen.
And that represents the fundamental defeat of, of the Bush administration and, and the neoconservative strategy.
Um, and, and then to come back to, to Afghanistan and Obama's situation, uh, first of all, he, there's no way that he can, uh, hope to do what the Bush administration did in fact do, which was to, uh, put in power a government representing, uh, the, the Shia majority that had a reasonable shot at maintaining power.
Uh, once the Shias basically defeated the, the Sunni, uh, the basically Al Qaeda and the, the Sunni, uh, what was left of the Sunni, uh, resistance.
And then there was a good deal left of it, uh, in 2006, 2007, uh, the, the problem in Afghanistan is that you don't have, uh, no, any force there that is going to be willing to play ball with the United States at all.
And the Taliban are going to be remaining the strongest political military force in the country.
They're not going to play ball with the United States.
Um, and, and, uh, they're going to insist that U S troops be completely withdrawn from the country.
And so, so in other words, in Iraq, if you were to try to take the metaphor from Afghanistan over to Iraq, in Iraq, we were fighting for the Taliban that was going to win all along anyway, and here we're fighting against them.
That's partly true.
I mean, in the sense that if you're, if you're talking about the Taliban in Iraq, meaning both Sunni and Shia, because, uh, I know you referred, uh, earlier to the, the Shia forces who, uh, who would in fact, uh, get into power under the United States.
And, and I, so I think that's correct.
But of course, uh, the, the Sunni resistance, uh, never did, uh, cash in on the U S military's presence.
In fact, they were the ones who were the losers in the, in the proposition.
So, I mean, the Taliban, I would say represent in this case, uh, something of a combination of the two rather than obviously just the Shia, uh, uh, they, they do represent, uh, you know, something close to a majority, but not quite a majority of the population in the sense that their natural constituency is the ethnic, uh, push tune population of, of Afghanistan.
And so it gets a little bit complicated to make that, to make that a parallel.
Yeah.
Well, but I mean, at the time that America invaded in 2001, the people that are the government now were just about licked, right?
They were the Northern Alliance and the Taliban was, you know, they were on defeat store.
That's right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
The Northern Alliance was, was, uh, not really able to make much, uh, much of a gain without the, uh, uh, the intervention directly to the United States.
And then, you know, the Taliban regime, uh, quickly collapsed because they had not been prepared, uh, really for, uh, for that U.S. onslaught.
Um, and they had not prepared really a guerrilla resistance at all.
That took them a few years to really make the transition to that.
Well, I'm sorry, this is too big of a question with the music playing, but when we get back, I want to ask you about whether anybody in DC really thinks that they're going to win this thing or succeed in building up an army that's going to stay the army of the government that we want in that country for the longterm, or this is all just a Raytheon plot to sell some drones or what the hell, we'll be right back.
Gareth Porter on anti-war radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter.
And, um, interesting conversation.
I'm probably not holding up my end of it very well, but it's a, it's kind of a interesting sort of conundrum where, uh, Nouri al-Maliki, the puppet we put in power in Iraq, in order for him to stay the prime minister of Iraq, all the political pressure was on him that he had to get rid of us or he was going to be gotten rid of.
Um, in, uh, the case of Afghanistan, Karzai, the president, he needs us.
He needs us bad.
He can't kick us out.
But, uh, apparently we can't build him up an army that can even do, I don't know what percentage of the fighting to keep them in power versus the Taliban, which is much more powerful in the country, it seems like.
Um, and I think with a problem for the United States government, the national security state and Obama on one hand and Karzai on the other is that, uh, that that, uh, government has absolutely zero legitimacy, uh, in the country.
I mean, you know, he's a, he's a push tune, uh, who doesn't really have the support of the Northern Alliance types.
They still suspect him as being covertly kind of aligned, uh, too much with the Taliban.
And of course the Taliban totally reject him for obvious reasons that he's, uh, basically allowed himself to be used by the United States, uh, to, uh, hold influence and, and to, uh, use Afghanistan as a, as a, another jumping off point for the U S military in the, in the region.
So basically, uh, well, in the army, they're training up as a giant joke, right?
It's a laughing stock of all armies everywhere on the planet.
Well, I think that it's, uh, I would say less a laughing stock than it is a, a, an army that really doesn't have a very clear cut notion of what it's doing.
Um, basically, you know, what's happened with that army, as, as I think, you know, but very few people in this country know is that it was supposed to be ethnically balanced so that, uh, posh tunes would represent roughly 40% to 45% of the troops in the ANA and, and the non-question population would represent the rest of that is to say that they would represent 65% of the, of the troops in the ANA.
But what's happening and what has been happening since 2007 is that the ANA couldn't do any real recruiting in the posh tune South.
And therefore, uh, it's, uh, sources of, of posh tune recruits has dried up.
And, uh, we don't know exactly what the percentages, but it's certainly below 25% continued to go down as, uh, as each progressive year has gone by.
And, uh, so now it's really a, uh, not just an army that's supporting the foreigners, but it's also an army that in the South that represents the, uh, the non-question population, or in some cases, posh tunes who come from the North, who aren't really, uh, the same as the posh tunes in the South.
So, uh, again, there's a, there's a layering of illegitimacy here on the part of the army.
And, and I think they are, they really are, uh, they're, they're, they're really are not very clear on what they, what they're doing.
And, and as, as you know, uh, the incidents of, uh, what they call green on blue, uh, uh, killings have, uh, not only multiplied, but it's becoming a very, very serious threat to us troops there.
That is the, the killing and wounding by, uh, Afghan troops and police of, uh, NATO and U S troops in Afghanistan.
And that means that they share, uh, many of the same, uh, sources of, uh, uh, dislike and hatred of the foreign presence as the rest of the population.
And now how many people are there in the Afghan army?
Uh, the Afghan army at this point is roughly 100 official.
This is the official count that this doesn't mean that there are really that many troops out there actually in the field.
It's about 190 some thousand troops, 195,000, I believe.
That's the official count, but they have some incredibly high turnover rate where a lot of guys just go to get some boots and a rifle and then leave again.
It's a very high turnover rate.
And that, that is not, uh, contrary to the hopes and dreams of the Obama administration.
That problem is not being settled.
It's not being solved.
In fact, uh, it is a real crisis that is being openly admitted in the most recent Pentagon report on, uh, the war in Afghanistan.
It's it's quite interesting that for once they're not trying to hide this.
They're, they're admitting that, uh, well, the turnover, the, uh, the, uh, number of troops who just disappeared from the role, uh, has continued to remain too high.
They've not been able to meet their, their goals to reduce that below the level of, I believe it's, uh, 2000, uh, sorry, 2% by 2002% of the total each month.
And therefore, uh, they're very much afraid that, uh, the cost of trying to train, uh, the number of new recruits that they have to bring in is going to be so high that the government won't be able to afford it.
Um, and that again, is being openly admitted by the Pentagon.
But, but before I forget it, Scott, I just want to make sure that we cover the point that I should have added to my opening statement.
And that is that the mechanism that the Obama administration has used specifically the U S military has used, uh, to basically cover up the fact that this memorandum of understanding between the military U S military and the Afghan ministry of defense to allow night raids to U S special forces, the night raids to continue is that they slipped into this agreement, a paragraph, uh, which defines the scope of the, uh, of the agreement that defines what are special operations, quote unquote, and defines it as those operations that are basically brought to the attention of this Afghan entity.
That's going to be making decisions by the United States.
In other words, only those raids that we decide to turn over to them are going to be covered by this agreement.
I wonder why they even put that in there at all.
Why not just violate the agreement and who cares?
Well, because, uh, you know, we're, we're litigious country.
We believe that you hire lawyers in order to protect your interests and that's always what they do.
They cover themselves legally as best they can.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I mean, come on, Hamid Karzai for years and years has pretended to be outraged every time, not every time, but many times when civilians are killed and who knows, maybe he means it a little bit, but he certainly doesn't mean or else he's really going to join the Taliban now or turn against us.
Or it's certainly not going to join the Taliban.
And there's, he knows absolutely that there's nothing he can do about it.
So I mean, his name is Quisling.
What can he do?
It's a be a Quisling.
He's just, he's not a president.
I mean, he's in a, he's in a situation where he can't really, uh, do anything but posture.
And I'm sure he's, he's sincerely upset with the United States, but, uh, you know, but wait a minute, what's the mission though?
If the mission is the mission, build up a government under Karzai that lasts and is stable in a Western nation state there, or what is the mission?
I think it depends on who you talk to.
I mean, the military would like to, uh, do two things.
One give a good account of themselves.
That's 90% of it.
And then 10% of it is, uh, to actually accomplish, uh, uh, you know, the mission that they set out to accomplish, which is to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan.
But if they can't do that, then they'll settle for a result that they can pass off to the American people through the magic of manipulation of the news media.
And, and, you know, the usual, usual, uh, methods of manipulation that we are all familiar with by now, uh, to, to convince the American public that, uh, we really won.
And that, uh, if it hadn't been for, uh, the news media or president Obama, um, that, that they would in fact be, uh, you know, be able to claim a genuine victory over the, over the Taliban.
I think that's probably the thinking of, uh, of the people from Jack Keane, the guy who gave us Petraeus and, and who, uh, uh, basically, uh, was ready to blame the loss of Iraq on Obama, uh, to the, to the current, uh, heads of the military services and the commanders in, in Afghanistan.
I think that's, that's what their thinking is.
And as for Obama, I think that he just hopes to escape, uh, without having this, uh, cost him too many votes in, in, uh, in the, uh, next presidential election.
And, uh, and I think he hopes to do that by, uh, emphasizing constantly that we are fighting Al Qaeda, that we have defeated Al Qaeda.
Uh, don't, don't worry about these Taliban people.
Well, we're not even going to talk about them just move on.
Um, and, and he's going to, uh, withdraw more troops and he's going to make it sound like that, you know, this is the end of us combat, just like he did in Iraq.
He's going to hope that nobody understands that once, uh, the, the deadline for the end of us combat in Iraq passed, which was August 1st, 2010, there were still another 50, 58 us troops who were killed in combat.
And so the fighting didn't end.
It was simply a lower level of fighting.
Um, and, and we're going to have the same thing in Afghanistan as well, that, uh, you may have fewer Americans dying because there are fewer Americans there.
Um, on the other hand, the, the, the war is not going to end.
It's going to continue, uh, right through 2014.
And, and he fully expects to have special forces troops remaining in the country.
Uh, thousands of them.
We don't know how many he has in mind, or the military has in mind at this point hasn't been decided yet, I'm sure.
Uh, but, but they do plan to continue these night raids indefinitely.
Um, and, and don't ask me to explain how the military and Obama and his advisors believe that that somehow, uh, can be reconciled with their oath, uh, under the constitution to protect, uh, the, the, uh, safety of the, the, this country.
Uh, come on.
None of that ever had anything to do with it.
Well, I agree.
I agree.
And I, you know, I just wonder how they sleep at night.
That's all.
Well, you know, more immediately on that question, it seems like, uh, this is what conservatives talk about.
You know, they like to bring up Lyndon Johnson and talk about, um, you know, liberal democratic presidents putting our guys out there in the field, but tying one hand behind their back and not letting them do their job here.
They want to pull all the masses of troops out, leave special forces there forever.
Well what happens during the fall of Saigon moment other than those guys get blasted, you know, like, and this is what Reagan did in Beirut too, right?
Put the Marines there and then didn't let them have armed guards at their own damn barracks.
Even even apart from the Saigon moment, which, you know, I think is going to happen.
I don't think it's going to look like Saigon.
It's not gonna, it's not going to be, you know, tanks rolling into Kabul.
You're not going to have anything that visually resembles that, but there is going to be a moment of truth.
But, but even short of that, even apart from that, I mean, the problem that I'm talking about here, of course, is that, that what the United States military and the national security state are doing day in and day out as they carry out these raids in people's homes, knocking down people's doors, taking away men in the, in the front of their, of their women and their children is, uh, building up over a period of years, year after year, the enduring hatred of the Afghan people, uh, certainly the Pashtun people who are the people who inhabit these, these regions where it's being carried out, uh, for the United States and, you know, for the NATO allies for that matter.
Um, and, uh, so, I mean, but some of these people are undoubtedly going to be attempted to join some radical Islamist group that is, uh, uh, take, you know, is still following a jihadist course.
Uh, I have no doubt that there's still going to be people like that.
They may, you know, leave Afghanistan to go somewhere else to work against the United States.
But, um, you know, this is the way it works.
I mean, this is, this is how the law of karma works in the real world.
And, uh, so, I mean, this is why I'm saying, I don't know how they can sleep at night because they have to know that they're exposing Americans, uh, in the future, future generations, if you will, of Americans to, uh, the, the consequences of this enduring hatred that they're, that they're provoking.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, that's certainly the truth.
They've been doing that playing this same thing, doubling down on blowback ever since September 11th as best they can.
Um, but you know, all I was saying about the fall of Saigon moment thing there was if they're really talking about withdrawing the army and the Marine Corps and just leaving the joint special operations command, even a couple of few thousand of them, a couple of few thousand troops probably isn't enough to keep Kabul from the Taliban.
Is it?
No, no, it's not going to do that by any means.
It's not going to be enough.
There's no question in my mind about that.
Um, so that's really what I was getting to about the mission is do they plan on staying to 2024 and fighting forever?
Cause, and whatever, if they say special forces, we'll assume that they're going to, you know, that they mean force protection and a giant base for them and everything else too.
But, well, I, I think it's safe to say, uh, Scott, that, that nobody in the national security state, uh, has any notion of what might happen in 2024 or, or any outlying year, uh, you know, beyond 2013, 2014, I think that they are completely unable to think in terms of anything that long term for obvious reasons.
I mean, you know, they're worried about whether they're going to get enough money, uh, to avoid having to dismantle the national security state as they've known it up in the coming, in the next year or two.
I mean, you know, they're facing budgetary Armageddon as my friend, uh, Doug McGregor, uh, says in the, uh, in the military budget, it's very likely that it's going to be cut dramatically.
I mean, drastically.
So did Ron Paul win something?
No, no.
I think that this is, this is regardless of who wins.
It's regardless of which party is in power.
Uh, they just, they're not going to be able to continue this.
Um, yeah, yeah.
Nah, they got this great bookkeeping trick.
They just create debt and then sell it to the federal reserve that buys it with new money.
I don't think, I don't think even that's going to work anymore.
I mean, and I agree.
I mean, I admit that I'm, I'm relying heavily on my friend, uh, Doug McGregor's judgment about this, but he is, um, talking to people, uh, in the, uh, in the major defense industry companies.
And, and that is, um, that is the very strong impression that he gets, uh, from, from the industry that is, that they believe that this is going to happen.
So my, my point is that, I mean, we're, we're talking about, um, a group of, of, uh, decision makers who are by their very political and bureaucratic nature tied to very short-term thinking.
Uh, they're worried about what they're going to be able to scrape up, uh, in the next 12 months.
They don't have any vision of the future, uh, that, that has any power to, to, uh, govern decisions about Afghanistan.
I can guarantee you that.
Yeah.
Well, you know how the Pentagon is though.
They always, uh, you know, rewrite the language and shorten everything to acronyms, but they also, uh, I mean, and so in this case, 2024 just means, you know, they're stamping their feet and saying, no, we're not going.
Yes.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
I mean, you know, they do have these 10 year projections of various things in the Pentagon, but they're, but they're all simply, yep.
Uh, used to achieve a short-term goal, which is to get more of the budget.
I mean, that's, that's the fundamental reality.
Yeah.
Well, and then, uh, all right.
Anyway, we, we can sit here and belabor the point about Afghanistan forever.
Uh, let me ask you one more thing real quick before I let you go here, Gareth.
Um, uh, and this has come up numerous times and I know it's besides the point, but, uh, people get in arguments and they need footnotes and you're, you're the walking footnotes.
So the question is hypothetically, if Iran were so provoked by Israel and the United States by say, you know, a carpet bombing campaign that lasted a few weeks or whatever, that they decided that they would withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty and, um, and take their breakout capability and turn it into an actual atom bomber to, how long would that take?
Because of course, everybody says once your uranium two 35 is enriched up to 20% pure, why at that point it's all downhill and real easy to get it up to above 90% purity for a weapons grade.
Uh, and so then it's sort of like dot, dot, dot, and fill in the blank yourself that makes it sound like it's a matter of turning on the light switch or something.
And all of a sudden, within, I don't know, a weekend or a few weeks or something, the Iranians could go from what they have now, which is wink wink legal to all of a sudden an atom bomb, um, you know, breaking out from the end.
Yeah.
I mean, my answer to that is, of course I don't know.
Uh, but, but that I just trust the, uh, the method, the methodology that is supposedly used to come to those, uh, estimates of whether it's a few weeks, a few months, a year or whatever.
Uh, I just don't trust that at all.
I don't trust the people that are using it.
I don't think that they are motivated by a truth.
I think they're motivated, uh, by the necessity to come up with a line that is useful, you know, to support the policy that, uh, that the United States and Israel have had.
Uh, so, so my answer is that I don't know.
And I think it's relatively irrelevant.
Uh, I mean, you know, we don't know, for example, nobody really knows how far along the Iranians are in terms of designing a bomb.
I mean, the assumption is that they know how to do it, but nobody really knows.
Um, and, and furthermore, I mean, you know, there's, there's a whole series of steps.
They'd have to put a bomb on a missile for it to have any significance to be able to deter anybody.
And my conversation with Uzi Rubin, the father of the Israeli anti-missile program, missile defense program, uh, was very revealing in this regard, because he said, look, uh, you know, he happens to think the Iranians probably will get a bomb someday.
But the point that he makes to me is that, that they have a conventional deterrent strategy with their ballistic missile program.
They've designed their major ballistic missiles to reach Israel for conventional weapons and their deterrent strategy is fully based on non nuclear payload.
So, I mean, that's, that's to me, the real, the real point here that needs to be emphasized.
All right.
Well, um, that's all very relevant, but I guess, uh, I'll, uh, see if Doc Prather knows.
All right.
Because, you know, people get bogged down in the minutiae sometimes, you know, the better, the more complete an argument, the better, you know, and even the way I put it is, it seems like, you know, Warhawk types like David Albright, if he says it would take at least months and months and months and you know, their centrifuges are kind of junkie and their knowledge about how to do all of this right is absolutely necessarily incomplete and it would take them a while, probably half a year or worse kind of thing.
And that's meaningful, right?
That's why I say my, my, the key judgment that I have is that I don't trust people like David Albright and, uh, for, for reasons which, you know, quite well.
Yeah.
Well, all the things that gets wrong.
I understand that.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, I, I don't have the technical knowledge myself.
Uh, I don't know who does have the technical knowledge and the, uh, the, the strict approach to trying to get at the truth that would be necessary to make that judgment.
But, but I think that it, it needs to be put in a much larger perspective.
Right.
Well, and you know, probably the most important point of all of that is in the hypothetical itself that they would have to withdraw from the treaty and tell the whole world, Oh, yeah, screw you guys.
I'm going home and I'm making nuclear bombs.
Because there's no way for them to do it as is nevermind all these additional protocols.
They say they're about to agree to, et cetera.
Let me just say, uh, Scott, that I think the real headline in the current situation is that the whole, uh, Israeli, uh, threat to, to attack Iran is really collapsing.
The notion of a, of a, uh, the, the, uh, uh, existential threat to Israel is, is no longer credible that nobody really believes that the Israeli government genuinely, uh, believes that that, that is a threat, uh, that most of the people, uh, in the national security, uh, apparatus of Israel, uh, who, who have any, uh, significant authority there have come out and said, uh, that, uh, they're opposed to this.
Uh, it looks to me like Netanyahu was bluffing all along.
As I've said, on your program.
And I think that, uh, what we've, uh, what we've been looking at for the last, what, five months now, since last November is really a, uh, a bluff by Netanyahu that the Obama administration decided to, uh, make into a way of, of putting diplomatic pressure on Iran.
So you've had a good cop, bad cop routine going on now for the last, uh, five, uh, five to six months.
Um, and I think that it's clear that that is not going to work, that the Iranians are not impressed that they're not going to, uh, be influenced by the threat of an attack.
That's just simply, it's a non-starter.
It's not a, it's not a significant factor.
Yeah.
You know what?
There's been a few trial balloons like that where, Oh, you know, the rains, they're starting to feel the pressure.
They're going to bend to it.
That is clearly not how this is going to work.
If it's going to work at all, it's going to be that the Americans are finally honest for a change and cut the Ukrainians a break and simply say, look, accept the additional protocol with a few bells and whistles and we'll lift some sanctions and stop threatening to kill you.
That's it.
That's the deal.
It's as obvious as can be.
That's the big question.
Will they agree to lift sanctions?
I think that's at this moment, the thing that is the deal breaker, the biggest potential deal breaker is the refusal of the United States, uh, to go along with, uh, significant lifting of sanctions, uh, from, from Iran.
Uh, I mean, you know, that's the dangerous, dangerous, uh, point of, in this situation.
Yeah.
Well, you know, if only there was a faction in domestic American politics that cared about this, that would help a lot.
Yes.
If we have any, uh, political force of mouth, a magnitude that could make a difference.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, we got the Paulians.
We do anyway for what it's worth.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Gareth, uh, I've already kept you away over time.
I appreciate your time as always.
Thanks for having me on the show again, Scott.
All right.
Talk to you soon.
Bye the great Gareth Porter, everybody.
Ipsnews.net and original.antiwar.com/Porter.
