All right, my first welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And welcoming back to the show, Gareth Porter.
He's a historian and journalist, writes for IPS News.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks.
Good to be here.
Yes, yes.
Good to have you on the show again.
And I guess you and I just need to make a deal that every time you write something, you come on the show to talk about it, because I always want to talk about it.
Whatever it is you've written.
Well, thanks very much.
I'd love to do it more often.
Yeah, well, and the first time I ever interviewed you, you came on and said, Oh, don't worry, Scott, they're not really going to bomb Iran.
That's just what they're telling the rubes while behind the scenes.
They're actually working on a diplomatic solution.
That's what you told me in January, right?
Well, I think what I would have said, I hope I would have said anyway, is that they're they're really interested in, you know, stimulating as much as possible the intention to have a bombing of Iran as a last resort in order to put more pressure on Iran.
I don't think the decision has been made at any time, you know, to actually go ahead and make war against Iran.
And I'll be glad to explain why I think that.
Well, please go right ahead.
At the same time, in this case, we're talking about the most extreme neoconservatives, the Richard Perle and perhaps even Wolfowitz people who were, you know, were so extremely ideological that they preferred to try to beat down the CIA's warnings about al Qaeda in summer of 2001 and actually tried to discredit it in order to preserve their option of taking down Saddam.
The distinction between those ideologues and the permanent government of the United States, the State Department, the CIA, and the military, the distinction is that the ideologues may well have this idée fixe about making war against Iran, because it suits their visceral notions about the use of US power.
But the permanent government is much more into making calculations of cost and benefit.
And the permanent government doesn't make war unless they think it's a surefire victory.
You know, that's what they thought in Vietnam, that's what they thought in Iraq, to the extent that they went along with the war.
But when it comes to a country like Iran, which is three times larger than Iraq, and is known to be able to fight back in a number of ways that would exact a cost on the United States, the permanent government becomes very wary about that.
Which is not to say that each individual in the permanent government agrees is an agreement on that, but I think generally speaking, there's much more caution on the part of the permanent government than on the part of these ideologues.
And I think what we're seeing in recent months is, in fact, the permanent government tending to fight back, to push back against the ideologues.
Well now, before we get into the specifics of your last article about Admiral Fallon and the pushback that's going on there, I should tell you that this story about Admiral Fallon pushing back came up in the last interview, last hour, with Chalmers Johnson as an example of the military out of control.
Here's this head of CENTCOM talking about how he will disobey Bush, that civilian supremacy over the military no longer counts.
As you say, it's the permanent government that at this point are cooler heads, but do we really want our military guys telling the President of the United States no?
Well, first of all, I agree with the general statement that the U.S. military as an institution is out of control.
But I think that the meaning of that is different from, you know, that they are in a position now to somehow take real power away from the executive branch.
I don't think that's the case.
What we're talking about here, let's bear in mind, just remember that what happened, my sources tell me, that Fallon was asked essentially to be part of a plan to put a third carrier strike group into the Persian Gulf for the purpose of at least stimulating a run-up to war similar to the attack on Iraq in 2003.
To make it look like this was a repeat of the 2003 process.
And Fallon said he saw no military requirement for a third carrier strike group and didn't think it was warranted and was opposed to it.
He also implied, according to a source who spoke directly to him and who is an extremely reliable and knowledgeable source, that there would be no war against Iran on his watch.
In other words, he intended to quit rather than to go along with a policy that involved war against Iran.
Now, for an admiral and a commander of a regional command to threaten to quit and to actually quit if asked to carry out an order that he disagreed with is virtually unprecedented.
But it is certainly not an example or an illustration of a military out of control.
On the contrary, it is a matter of personal conscience for a military commander not to carry out an order which he knows to be wrong or not in the national interest.
And that, of course, is perfectly compatible with a civilian control over the military.
It's by no means a problem of the military being out of control.
And I think I've seen some of the comment along those lines in response to my article and I think that's simply a misunderstanding of what we're talking about here.
Right, yeah.
We're not talking about the admiral saying, not only am I not going to do it, but I'm going to put myself in a position to not allow anyone else to do it.
He's just saying he'll quit first, basically.
Of course not.
I mean, this is a political issue, not a legal issue, because a commander who would quit rather than carry out the order would raise an issue for the administration, which would be very, very difficult to say the least.
And that's why I speculate, although we don't know for sure, I think it's a reasonable speculation that his clear statement that he disagreed with the deployment of a third carrier task force, which was specifically for a political purpose to signal to Iran that we were serious about the military option, was simply a matter of conscience which actually made a political difference to the administration.
It was a threat to make this a political issue by quitting.
And unfortunately, there has not been very much of that on the part of either civilians or military men, certainly given the nature of the policies that we have seen followed over the past several years.
Not nearly enough of that, and that's why this stands out as an example of personal conscience.
Yeah, you're right.
There's been very few, well, I guess there were quite a few who resigned in the run-up to the first war, but they certainly didn't make leaks like this.
Well, that's right.
And although we know that General Shinseki of the Army stated that it would take 350,000 or so U.S. troops to carry out a military operation to control Iraq, he certainly did not do anything to protest the war.
He certainly did not threaten to quit or quit over that issue.
Quite the contrary.
And so, I think this is in fact something new in terms of actually putting one's career on the line over a major issue of war and peace.
Now, a lot of people thought that the reason that this admiral got the job in the first place was because he's Mr. Airpower.
Well, exactly.
He was associated with naval aviation throughout his entire career.
And in fact, you know, when the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, the newly appointed Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, recommended Fallon for the position of Commander of the Central Command, he did so publicly by saying that he was thinking about the option of using airpower in the region, which obviously was a reference to going to war against Iran, which I would say was in January when he was nominated and had his confirmation hearing.
And that was a point where the administration appeared to be on course to try to carry out a strategy of intimidating Iran by putting in a third carrier task force and making other moves that would make it look like we were on the verge of going to war.
Now, there are two carrier strike groups there, and then the third one is supposed to arrive at the end of this month, is my understanding.
And then the question has been whether when the Nimitz arrives, the Eisenhower is going to leave or whether the three will be there overlapping, which would seem to indicate the war.
And what you're saying is that this Admiral Fallon has said no deal.
We'll only have two at a time.
There's no good excuse.
That is correct.
And if the reports that I heard from two very reliable sources, as well as from Newsweek, were correct, there was, in fact, the intention to have them overlap for a period of months and during that time to carry out this strategy of intimidation through that and other military moves, including, for example, sending air refueling assets to Diego Garcia.
And so this was really part and parcel of this larger strategy, and that was called off.
Almost immediately after I first heard the report that Fallon had sent messages back to the Pentagon opposing it quite firmly.
And you have a quote in your article of Admiral Fallon saying, several of us are trying to put the crazies back in the box.
Does that mean the vice president's office?
Well, I think it's, you know, there was no name mentioned to me, certainly, by the source, and I assumed that there wasn't in the conversation.
But I don't think it was necessary.
Everybody knows that Vice President Dick Cheney is at the epicenter of the faction within the U.S. government that wants to, at the very least, go to the brink of war, if not go over it.
Now, none of us are in a position to know what is in the mind of Dick Cheney, whether he, in fact, has always intended to try to attack Iran, or whether he has always intended to simulate that intention for the purpose of coercing Iran diplomatically.
But in any case, he has been the primary advocate, he's been a consistent advocate of putting the military option out there, of carrying out the deployments necessary, making those deployments as credible as possible, and in other words, going to the brink of war, whether it is for the purpose of actually carrying out war or for intimidation.
And in his speech from, I don't know which aircraft carrier, in the Persian Gulf last week, he warned Iran not to even consider closing the sea lanes or whatever, so we will fight to keep the Straits of Hormuz open and that kind of thing.
And the only time I've ever heard anybody refer to the possibility of Iran doing anything untoward in the Persian Gulf would be as retaliation for an American strike.
Nobody's ever talked about, you know, Iran's just going to start mining the Straits of Hormuz for fun.
Of course not, and that is part of the, uh, the, uh, the stimulation, the dishonesty of the, uh, of the Bush-Cheney administration, with regard to the issue of Iran, that they constantly try to drum up new issues of alleged Iranian aggressiveness in the region, that being only one of them, that is, that the Iranians, you know, have some ambition to try to shut the Straits of Hormuz.
You're absolutely right that that has only been mentioned seriously in the context of, only been mentioned by Iran in the context of retaliation against a U.S. aggressive war against them.
So this, I guess, brings us back to the real question as to whether the, um, all the bellicose rhetoric and threats of war are really just that, threats, in order to try to force them to negotiate, or whether the negotiations are really just cover for the run-up to war.
As Scott Ritter has said, I think the negotiations that are going on now are negotiations that Cheney would rather not be happen, but once the realists, the so-called realists in the administration, meaning particularly the State Department people under Condoleezza Rice, and probably the new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, once they succeeded in getting Bush's approval for diplomatic contacts with Iran, at least to talk about Iraq, then I think Cheney, as he has done in the past, simply used his ability to put very narrow constraints on the U.S. position in those talks to make sure that they would not in fact produce any progress toward even a limited understanding between the United States and Iran.
What he wants to do is to maintain the highest level of tension possible between the two countries.
And he succeeded in doing that in the past.
He has, on at least three occasions, he has ensured that U.S. diplomats would not be able to offer anything of substance in return for the demands that they make on the Iranians in direct talks that either were planned or actually took place with Iran.
On three different occasions, he's intervened in that way.
That's right.
In other words, he has either prevented talks from taking place or he has limited them by attaching such extreme conditions to them that it was very clear that they could not possibly succeed.
And I'll give you the most important example, when Rice was carrying out multilateral diplomacy with the three European allies of the United States, Britain, Germany, and France, and Russia and China in order to arrive at a package of what they called carrots and sticks to persuade Iran to call off its Iranian enrichment program, at least temporarily.
And in the process of discussing those multilateral negotiations in the administration, Cheney, according to his own aides, attached the condition that, first of all, if those talks failed, the Europeans would have to agree to take Iran to the U.N.
Security Council in order to impose some kind of punitive settlement on the Iranians, which he hoped, of course, would be the basis for the military option.
And then secondly, when the Europeans, Russia, China, and the United States were actually negotiating on the package, Cheney actually managed to veto even the most innocent, the most limited reference to security arrangements that could possibly be read as involving a potential U.S. security guarantee to Iran.
He would simply not allow any reference to anything that might be perceived as a security guarantee to be involved in those negotiations.
So that meant that there was an absolute guarantee against any success by the multilateral diplomacy with Iran.
Now, I'm not asking you to read minds or anything, but just to give me your best impression from available evidence, what is the problem?
We know that their nuclear program is years and years from the ability to produce highly enriched uranium at amounts needed to make nuclear weapons.
We know that all the dissembling about Americans dying in Iraq is all because of Iran is false.
What is the big deal that requires a regime change in Iran if all the accusations against them are as hollow as the tree out back?
Well, that is a major question of interpretation, and there's no simple answer to it, but I think you have to go back to the power ambition of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration from the very beginning of that administration, which were to, first of all, take down the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, use the military bases that we would then acquire in Iraq to muscle all of the other Arab regimes as well as Iran, and establish a degree of U.S. hegemony over the Middle East, which it had never known in the past, not even remotely, like the one that was envisioned by the Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz hawks.
Exactly what the motivations were for that degree of power ambition is another whole level of analysis, which I would not try to begin to address in this short time.
But I think it is essential to understand that it begins with a plan by these neoconservatives to establish U.S. political military power over the Middle East to a degree that had never been even remotely contemplated by a previous administration.
And Iran was an obstacle to that plan to the degree that they maintained policies that were in opposition to what the United States wanted to do.
Regime change can be viewed certainly at one level as a response to that simple fact that we wanted out of the way, a regime which was not only not responsive to U.S. interests as defined by the neoconservatives themselves, but was in stark opposition and in some ways effective opposition to those policies.
In other words, Iran was already a regional power of some significance, and the only way that this administration could address that, apart from actual military air attack on Iran, which by the way was never intended to be by the neocons to the extent that they had war plans against Iran, was never intended to be simply to take out nuclear weapons.
It was always to deal a major blow to the major sources of Iranian power.
And so that was the essence of the policy toward Iran.
They either wanted to be able to attack Iran militarily or to use other means to try to change the regime to get a regime which would be more in line with U.S. interests.
Very similar, in fact, in that sense to the 1953 overthrow of the nationalist regime of Mossadegh.
And now this internal kind of subversion is going on right now, isn't it?
Brian Ross and Seymour Hersh and Larissa Alexandrovna and others have reported that American special forces and intelligence people are in Iran and supporting terrorists in Iran.
Well, that's exactly right, and this highlights, in a way, the superficiality of taking the move to direct talks between U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and an Iranian official too seriously, because the administration has not made any move to change the underlying policies of hostility and of aggressiveness toward Iran.
And that includes, as you say, the support for dissident elements, violent terrorists, in fact, who have been based in Pakistan, who have gone into Iran and killed Iranian officials.
And it does not include the continued economic financial sanctions against Iran that have been in place for many years.
These have not only been strengthened by continued reiteration by Congress, they are now considered to be semi-permanent.
There's no sense in which they're subject to negotiation.
There's nothing, in other words, that Iran could possibly do to change that, according to the present administration's policy.
Yeah, and that's what the way Scott Ritter puts it, is that regime changes, the ultimate goal of disarmament, or whatever else they call it, is merely the excuse, but that they're determined to change this regime one way or another.
And it seems to me that if they somehow were able to launch airstrikes, that it would be, or at least the plan, seem to be coming together, that what they want to do is some kind of Bay of Pigs-type operation where America provides air cover for extremists on the inside to attempt to overthrow the government.
Well, absolutely.
If there was, in fact, ever an attempt to attack Iran from the air, there's no doubt that they would try to bring about some kind of regime change through support for dissident elements within.
In fact, I mentioned the Mossadegh parallel, the 1953 CIA overthrow of Mossadegh by basically hiring thugs to go through the streets and raise up a crowd to support the Shah, a crowd which, by the way, included the strongly anti-communist Islamic Ayatollahs, who later would be central to the Islamic regime of Iran.
And the parallel that I want to draw there is that Israel has had a former ambassador in charge of a planning group which has been advocating that the United States and Israel together try to duplicate the CIA overthrow of Mossadegh in the present circumstance, arguing that there is the material at hand in terms of opposition to the Islamic regime within Tehran, particularly to merit a serious planning on that sort of an operation.
I don't know how seriously one should take that, but there's no doubt that the Israelis were advocating it strongly, and that they would have gotten a serious hearing on the part of the neocons in the Bush administration.
Well, it worked out so well last time.
And the way the people of Cuba rose up to help the exiles in the Bay of Pigs was just a perfect model for how the Iranians will react, I'm sure.
Well, that's right, and there have been so many authors in Iran, including dissident figures themselves, who have warned that attacking Iran would be the worst thing possible if we're serious about supporting democratic dissidents within the political system of Iran, that they would be discredited, that it would bring discredit to everybody who has been against the regime, and it would help the current more conservative regime, particularly those people around Ahmadinejad, to consolidate power for a much longer period of time, whereas without that, the chances of his remaining in power and being replaced by a more moderate figure are obviously very great, much greater.
Now, we have a writer for us, one of our regular columnists, Prathil Bidwai, who writes from India about Kashmir primarily.
He took a trip to Iran recently and wrote his last article for us at Antiwar.com from Iran, and talked about how much trouble it has been for the dissident movements in that country, that the U.S. Congress passed a bill to give them a bunch of money.
Now, every time a dissident says anything that draws attention in Iran, the government's response is, oh, you must be one of the ones who got all those millions of dollars from the American CIA, why should anybody listen to you?
And that it's just destroyed their dissident movements.
Well, it's so obvious that the dynamic there between the relationship between a potential U.S. military strike, the general U.S. aggressive policy toward Iran, and the problem of democracy is such that we're simply going down the wrong track in terms of any support for democracy in Iran.
And in fact, it's so obvious that it's difficult not to conclude that this has never been at all a serious consideration on the part of the neoconservatives.
And I believe quite firmly that any talk about supporting democracy in Iran or anywhere else is simply a cover for the real motivation, which is the desire, the motivation, the ambition to enlarge U.S. power by the use of military force.
And now that dream come true is, as you say, the permanent government or the permanent establishment's nightmare.
Zbigniew Brzezinski testified before the Imperial Senate just a couple of months ago that if we attacked Iran, we would end up owning all the real estate from Jordan to India, and that was far too much for us to handle.
Don't do it, he said.
Yeah, I mean, it's obvious that that is such an extreme position in terms of anybody who has even the slightest realism about them that it is bound to bring about a backlash within the national security elite of this country.
And I think we've seen that in recent months begin to emerge much more clearly.
And so Fallon's dissent on the third carrier and on any possible war against Iran is certainly emblematic of a much broader pattern here, which I think we can expect to continue in the final months of the Bush administration.
Well, I certainly hope that's true.
I know that Richard Perle agrees with you about that, that Bush is not getting his way, and it's all because of those rats in the State Department, the military, and the CIA who refuse to kill as many people as Bush wants killed.
Well, that's right.
The extreme right, led most vociferously by Perle and John Bolton, have been merciless in their criticism of those who are standing in the way.
And in fact, implicitly, they've been criticizing Bush as well.
Some of the right-wingers have even explicitly targeted Bush for criticism.
Yeah, Perle called him an appeaser.
To be more aggressive about Iran.
Yeah, Perle called him an appeaser in the New York Sun.
That's right, and this is a sign that they have come up against an obstacle here that they're very unhappy with.
Oh, it's about time something bad happened to the neocons.
But we're very far from being out of the woods on this.
I mean, you know, the fact is that Cheney still has the president ear.
He still has a position above the other members of the national security team of the Bush administration.
He cannot be counted out by any means.
And I think with 18, 19 months left of the Bush administration, we have to be very concerned that once the current talks clearly do not bring about any results that make any difference, the Cheney faction that remains in the administration will once again be on the offensive and will be pushing for some kind of simulated activity to persuade the Iranians that we're serious about the military option.
And of course, the real danger in my view is much more likely to be war by miscalculation or accident than by the actual intention to carry out an aggressive war against Iran.
I think that's much more likely to be the entree into war.
In fact, Cheney gets his way.
And as long as we remain in Iraq, where simply one border incident away could happen any day.
That's right.
Well, I guess if Cheney is still going to be around until January 20, 2009, then we still have to keep the heat on him and try to undercut his various excuses for war as best we can.
And I'd like to point out that David Sanger, for perhaps the first time ever, got it right in the New York Times the other day when he reported that were Iran to decide that they wanted to begin enriching uranium to above 90 percent, which would be required to actually make a bomb out of it, that they would have to kick the IAEA out of the country and then begin the process of attempting to enrich highly enriched uranium and enough of it to make a bomb out of it.
So what that tells me is that there is no cost of spelling in regards to Iran's nuclear program whatsoever.
Well, absolutely not.
I mean, there's no way that one can make the argument that we are thinking about war against Iran because of the nuclear issue.
That simply does not add up.
And you're right in suggesting that that would be the first time that Sanger has gotten it right, because, as you well know, in the past he has been talking about a secret parallel program that reports about or suspicions of a secret parallel program that would allow the Iranians to enrich uranium without the IAEA knowing about it and thus sort of raising the level of threat with regard to the present Iranian program, which I think now is much clearer that that was simply more administration propaganda that is discredited.
Darn liberal media just won't stop at anything to destroy George Bush and debunk everything he says, right?
Well, and of course you have the case of the Times scandalous coverage of the arguments of the administration about the alleged Iranian armor-piercing weapons that were showing up in Shiite militias, as well, of course, as in the Sunni militias, which the New York Times basically became the stenographer for the administration about and refused to even exercise the slightest investigative journalism in order to look more deeply into the issue and see what the evidence really was.
And that one was David R. Gordon, the guy that was the co-author with Judy Miller of so many bogus stories in the run-up to the Iraq War.
That's right.
He was one of the people who was writing about that.
Exactly.
Maybe it was Michael Gordon, not David Gordon.
Michael Gordon, yeah.
Yeah, the New York Times.
And now, so what about that?
Let's talk about these explosively formed penetrators, if we might, for a minute.
In, I believe, well, maybe halfway through April or so, Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor both quoted Lieutenant Colonel Scott Blykwell as describing a battle against the Mahdi army in the city of Diwania, I think it was, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, and that they found a factory that made explosively formed penetrators.
And now, this was something that the Washington Post censored from their reprint of the Reuters article, and although leaving in the accusation that these bombs must come from Iran, but that would seem to me to completely undercut the idea that if there are some new fancy kind of improvised explosive device being used as roadside bombs, that they must be coming from Iran, it turns out that Lieutenant Colonel Scott Blykwell found a factory, at least one factory in Iraq, where they make these things.
Well, you're absolutely right to highlight that as a case of sort of scandalous mainstream media trying to keep in line with the official line, rather than publishing the whole truth.
But in a way, it's worse than that, because the New York Times had earlier repeated the administration's assertion that they could find no evidence that these IEDs, the armor-piercing IEDs, were actually manufactured in Iraq, whereas I had published a story in February saying that a researcher, a private security firm researcher, who knew this issue perhaps better than anyone else and who did not have his own political axe to grind over it, had written in the Jane's Intelligence Review that there was evidence that in fact these weapons were being manufactured in Iraq that he had seen, and which he was sure that the evidence was available to the U.S. military.
He said it just didn't seem quite right, that the military said it couldn't find any evidence that they were being manufactured there.
And so I think, you know, one has to conclude that this is just another case of many, just innumerable cases, where the military had in fact decided to simply go along with a bogus political line for the political purposes of the administration.
And now they're telling us that these bombs are showing up in Afghanistan, too.
Turns out that's why all our guys are dying in Afghanistan, because of Iran.
Right, and of course there's more of this effort to blame everything on Iran, including problems in Afghanistan, and also now saying that the Iranians are supplying the enemies of the Shiite militias who are supposedly aligned with them, that is to say the Sunni insurgents in Iraq.
I have not seen yet a single sentence suggesting what the specific evidence for that might be, but that's the further extension of that obvious lie.
And basically what they're counting on here is that even though you and I might see through it, and maybe even compile evidence that indicates otherwise and what have you, the average American doesn't know the difference between the Iranian factions that we've installed in power and the Sunni insurgency that we're fighting against.
And so if Bush says that Iran is financing and arming the Sunni insurgency that's killing our guys, that's pretty much good enough for the American public.
Yes, and of course the administration people know what they're talking about.
They understand the system of communications in this country, and they pretty much got it right.
That's in fact, the vast majority of the American people are never going to hear anything that contradicts the propaganda line.
Right, as George Bush said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.
Yeah, he did say that.
In fact, he could have said you can fool most of the people all the time, and that's been pretty much correct, as the system now stands.
Of course, over time, if you try to tell a lie that is too obvious, such as the one that we're winning in Iraq, that will come back to bite you.
Well, I'd like to think so, but it seems like, well, as Patrick Foy pointed out on the show earlier this week, we've been over this and over this and over this, Gareth Porter.
The anti-war movement in this country and decent reporters like yourself have brought the truth to the front over and over and over again.
There's no excuse for anyone in America to not know who the war party is, what their motives are, why they've done this to us, and at least have an idea of what direction to go to save us from going over this cliff.
We've got no excuse at all.
The truth has all already been published.
Well, I agree with you in principle that there's no excuse for someone in Congress today not understanding enough to say it's time.
On the other hand, I have to say that you're not taking into account in that statement that the kinds of stories that are published by IPS and which antiwar.com then reprints reach only an infinitesimally small proportion of the American people.
And that's a structural problem that we have to acknowledge and take seriously and try to address.
If there's ever going to be real change in the country, it has to involve a pushback on the front of the communication system.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you're right.
As much as IPS and antiwar.com do, 100,000 unique visitors a day is a lot for a website, but out of 300 million Americans, it's hardly a drop in the bucket.
Exactly.
And the vast majority of Americans get their news either from Fox or from other networks that are simply not going to challenge the people in power.
It's just not going to happen.
In the last minute and a half or so here, I wonder if I could get you really quick to comment on a story that people will know if they read antiwar.com and will not have heard of if they get their news from Fox News.
And that is Iran's offer shortly after the war in 2003 to basically put everything in dispute on the table and have peace with the United States of America.
Well, this is a story that was first published in 2004 by Financial Times.
It's just a very brief reference to it, not an in-depth coverage of it.
And then I came out with a story in the spring of 2006 in American Prospect magazine and did a very long piece laying out the details of the Iranian offer based on the first available copy of the Iranian negotiating document itself.
And then more months passed and really nothing much happened to get that story out into the mainstream.
But more recently, I think, once the Democrats came into control of the Congress, there have been more references to it.
And I think more people in Washington are becoming acquainted with it.
It is now, I think, just beginning to become part of the political discourse on policy toward Iran and this country.
By no means sufficiently, but now I think you begin to see some people in Congress who are aware of it and who are asking questions about it.
But it has taken a very long time for that story to even begin to have any light.
Well, folks, you can read all about it in Gareth Porter's archives at antiwar.com/porter.
And he's a historian and a journalist for IPS News.
Thanks very much for your time today, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Glad to be on your show, Scott.
Thanks.
All right, folks, this has been Antiwar Radio.
See you back here at 11 a.m. tomorrow.
