So, Jim Loeb says, Realists win again!
Justin Raimondo, of course, today at antiwar.com slash Justin says, not so fast.
Well, I got the brand new Gareth Porter here from IPS News.
Seismic shift or non-decision by Bush on Iran and it will soon be available, if it's not already, at antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Hello, Scott.
How are you?
It's great to have you here.
I'm doing good.
Listen, so what's the deal?
Is it Jim Loeb or Justin on this Iran thing?
I guess I should say background.
They're sending the number three State Department weenie to Switzerland to meet with the Iranian nuclear negotiator this Saturday and the hope is that, hey, Bush has finally turned over a new leaf, a la North Korea, and is going to negotiate with these people rather than just further create pretexts for bombing.
What do you say?
What do you know?
Well, I've come down on the side of being a little bit more skeptical, but I have to say that this story of the U.S. sending William Burns, the third-ranking State Department official, to Geneva for this Saturday meeting is an illustration for me of just how difficult it is to read the signals coming out of the Bush administration.
This is particularly a problem because this administration is so dysfunctional.
I keep using this term over and over again, but I think it's appropriate.
It's extremely dysfunctional in that you have a sort of permanent bureaucracy, you know, which is under the control of the likes of Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, which is clearly interested in trying to engage Iran diplomatically and is scared to death really of the military option being exercised by the Cheney White House.
So you have that permanent bureaucracy really conspiring, in some cases rather effectively, to try to mousetrap Bush into taking certain steps.
But on the other hand, you have Dick Cheney in the White House who has the inside track and who is able to, in many cases, and has in many cases, essentially talk Bush out of taking steps that Bush was inclined to take after hearing from Rice and or Gates.
And, you know, this is a perfect example, it seems to me, this current development of the Bush decision to approve the Burns trip to Geneva, but with some caveats which strike me as so constraining that it really reduces the significance of the decision to, very close to, diplomatic insignificance.
Okay, so it's not a matter of they decided, okay, well, we'll do this so that we'll have further example to say, see, we tried to negotiate with these people, but they're just too crazy.
It's more like Rice got a deal where she gets to send her number three guy, but in the same meeting it was decided by her competition in the vice president's office or the vice president himself that the meat would be so dumbed down and the constraints so tight that it would basically be meaningless.
That's what you mean by dysfunctional family.
That's the story that has now come out.
You know, I think we have to be very careful about accounts that are very vague and very general of specific meetings.
Bear in mind that this has been going on, this issue has been since certainly late June, early July.
In other words, it's been well over two weeks.
It was about two weeks during which time Rice was really pushing very hard to get a decision from Bush clearly to allow Burns to participate in something like a freeze-for-freeze six-week informal talks process.
This is what the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana clearly wanted.
This is what wasn't really necessary in order to basically get around the obstacles that the United States in particular, but other powers as well, were opposing, which was that Iran had to stop its enrichment entirely in order to have real negotiations on the nuclear program.
So the idea was that you'd have this six-week window in which they could meet informally and that would allow the Iranians to really present a proposal that could then be a substantial topic of negotiation.
And I think just having one meeting is really inadequate for that purpose, particularly given the stricture that supposedly is now imposed on Burns that he cannot actually negotiate or supposedly even talk.
He's there to listen, supposedly.
Now that's so extreme that it's difficult to even believe.
But in any case there is obviously a one-off or one-time-only constraint on the State Department with regard to his participation.
And I suspect that Bush was inclined initially to go along, to go much farther along with the proposal from Rice, but as has been the case in the past, and I recount several instances of this in my story, that Cheney has then weighed in and basically turned Bush around because he has the inside track.
He's able to get Bush after he's listened to Gates or Rice and is inclined to go along, and then Cheney comes in and says, you can't do that, Mr. President.
Here's why.
All this talk about the freeze-for-freeze deal is the same deal that she tried to get going last spring and they've been thwarting it ever since?
Well, there are different versions of this idea and, you know, I don't know exactly what Rice was proposing earlier, but certainly Solana has raised this possibility in the past of a freeze-for-freeze.
The United States, I don't think, has ever gone along with this.
Certainly the Bush administration has never embraced this at any time, but I'm sure that Rice has been interested in that in the past, for sure.
Well, so what do you think about all the recent hype since the last time we talked about, oh, I don't know, a week ago or so, about war with Iran?
There was the thing that came out in the Sunday Times about...
The amber light.
The amber light, that's right.
Go ahead and get ready to bomb them and we'll let you know.
Yeah, this is, you know, I mean, it's unfortunate that we have really the British press weighing in with stories that are far more confusing than they are clarifying.
And again, you know, this is in the context of this dysfunctional administration and I think the Sunday Times story, perhaps, is written in good faith.
Let's give them credit for trying to see through the smoke.
That is produced by this deeply divided administration.
But the result is, I think, an over-hyping of the idea that Bush is closer to basically agreeing to an Israeli strike on some unstated condition.
I don't think that he's anywhere close to that at this point.
And I think what has happened is that Gates, clearly the story came out of the Pentagon.
It's explicitly stated that it came out of the Pentagon.
And I think Gates, or someone close to Gates, is using the idea that Bush would be willing to support an Israeli strike under some circumstances to try to get some leverage with the Iranians in the upcoming talks.
And that, I mean, in the talks that they were hoping that they would get, let's put it that way.
And, of course, it may have the virtue, if you will, of reflecting the fact that Bush may well be inclined in that direction, may be sympathetic to an Israeli strike.
But again, you know, the White House is...
But Bush himself is a non-decider.
I mean, I believe that the basic storyline here, both on the diplomatic and military front, is that Bush is somebody on the issue of Iran who has been unable and unwilling to make clear-cut decisions time and again.
He has tacked one way on the issue and then pulled back.
When he has been inclined towards a diplomatic initiative or, you know, moving forward on the diplomatic front, Cheney has always pulled him back in one way or another.
And on the other hand, when Cheney has been trying to get him to take a very hard line to sort of put forward a casus belli on Iran, specifically in early 2007, I point out in my story that Rice then weighed in, Rice and Gates weighed in with language which was on the other side, which said, you know, we should basically view the problem as one of networks within Iraq, thus sort of confining any U.S. response to Iraq rather than to raise the issue of a U.S. strike within Iran.
And what did Bush do when he was confronted with two completely different lines?
He just chose to use both of them.
And to me, that's a very interesting indication of the inability of Bush to really make a choice on the issue of Iran.
And I think he really is a non-decider in the sense that he would prefer to allow the two sides to duke it out themselves, he would prefer to put off the decision, and he would prefer to make decisions that are non-decision.
And I think that's been the pattern over and over again.
He is going to let this go down to the wire, and that is the suggestion that, I mean, as time goes by, as we get closer to the end, my sense is that he is unlikely to be able to muster the courage to strike Iran or to agree to support actively an Israeli strike against Iran.
So Bush, the non-decider, I'm beginning to feel in the end, is a plus for world peace because it means that he's less likely to go along with his bad conscience, with the devil on his left shoulder, if you will, in the end.
And of course, there's no guarantee of that.
I'm just suggesting that in the end, I think the chances are less than 50-50.
That's good to hear.
I've got to tell you, I resent the idea that all my alarming, debunking, and hair-on-fire freaking out about these lunatics and their plans for turning the entire Middle East into one giant fireball of death and pain is actually just me amplifying propaganda that's meant to scare the Iranians on the eve of so-called talks, or talks that were going to be held but never turned out that way or whatever.
But that's not my role in the world, is to amplify bullshit for this administration, I hope.
No, of course not, and I think you're perhaps overstating intentionally, I hope you're overstating intentionally, your fear of that because as we have talked about many times on your show, despite the fact that certainly the Bush administration is interested in having, you know, sort of fear-mongering be amplified for their own reasons, at the same time we know that there has been serious debate within the administration over a proposal, or proposal, to attack Iran, so that it is not simply a matter, has not been, and is not simply a matter of sort of amplifying fear-mongering for the interests of the Bush administration itself.
There is a substantial danger of the Cheney side of the administration prevailing in the end.
The game is not over and Bush is an unpredictable character.
There's another side of Bush, which is that the last person who gets his ear tends to be able to persuade Bush.
And so, you know, if, when the chips fall, Vice President Cheney is the last person who talks to him, but there's always a danger that he will somehow prevail.
Yeah, it does seem kind of strange that we would really be on the eve of a war where the case is just as thin, maybe even not as credible as the case against Saddam Hussein.
I mean, you can't even say that the Ayatollahs murdered hundreds of thousands of their own people, or any kind of thing like that.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you know, the fact is that the intelligence community was bamboozled, or certain individuals in the intelligence community were bamboozled on the Iraq issue, and went along with the right-wing ploy on the non-existent Saddam Hussein nuclear weapons program.
So, you know, the present situation is completely different.
I mean, the intelligence community is very clear that Iran is not, at this point, in a nuclear weapons mode, and as even said, we can no longer state that we are that we are certain that Iran even wants to have nuclear weapons.
It's a very, very different situation.
There's really no case to be made on an objective basis, or even, you know, to be able to cite the subjective views of the intelligence community on behalf of a war policy in the case of Iran.
Well, it seems like the American people are so tuned out that if they just hear Iran danger, and it looks like we might have to have a war against them, or something, they might just go with that, and not really look into it, or try to get into it the way they did in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Well, I think that statement certainly seems to apply to Congress, which appears to be brain-dead on this issue, and with very few individual exceptions, unable and unwilling to stand up and say, you know, this is unacceptable.
And the American people, unfortunately, are a passive spectator to this issue, as they are in all cases of war and peace.
Only a small minority is ready to actively oppose war, and the vast majority of Americans may have, you know, sort of doubts, fears, but are incapable, for, you know, understandable reasons, in a way, of really taking a stand which is going to prevent a war.
So, you know, you simply cannot count on the people to be able to prevent this from happening.
Could you give us your comments?
You're a historian, as well as a journalist on these detailed issues.
Can you kind of give us your take on the relative role of the Israel lobby in America in determining our Middle East policy, versus just greedy white men who've always run this place?
Yes, I mean, and I will be repeating myself, but that's okay.
I mean, my point of view is that the Israeli lobby is extremely effective in, and I would say, even having a control to a meaningful degree over the congressional role in policymaking on Iran, which has been considerable, because at crucial points, Congress has preempted the administration's role, in a way, in making policy on Iran by passing sanctions legislation, which took away the freedom of action of the administration, both under Clinton and under Bush.
Clinton in 1996 and beyond, and then 2001, in the first six months of the Bush administration, when the thinkers in the State Department policy planning staff were trying to come up with a concept of a policy that would at least give them some leverage in negotiations with Iran by reducing the level of US sanctions, economic sanctions, and financial sanctions against Iran, the AIPAC came in and essentially went over the heads of the administration and passed, very quickly, a sanctions legislation which preempted the issue.
And that's obviously a huge change in the situation.
And then, of course, we have, more recently, the cases under the Bush administration, where they have been able to pass non-binding resolutions which preempted the case, created a kind of semi-Cossus Belli against Iran, at the very least.
And now they're in the process of doing that again with the non-binding resolutions that would call for, basically, what I have called a blockade of Iran, even though they deny that.
So, anyway, the AIPAC has been extremely effective and, I would say, in a way controls the Iran policy of Congress.
On the other hand, I do not argue, I believe, that Iran does not control the administration policy toward Iran.
Israel, you mean?
Excuse me, Israel does not control the administration policy toward Iran at any point.
I mean, I think that the closest they came to that was during the early period of the Clinton administration, when Clinton was interested in having the negotiations, the Arab-Palestinian Israeli negotiations, go forward and paid the price, essentially, of buying into an Israeli strategy of pressure on Iran, diplomatically, of isolation of Iran.
And the Clinton administration did a number of things to basically support Israel and isolate Iran, which I don't think it would have done otherwise.
So that is, in a way, a counter-example.
But under the Bush administration, I'm firmly convinced that the neocons made decisions on Iraq, which reflected its own priorities, not Israel's interests, and certainly not Israel's strategy, even though the policymakers that were most influential were quite sympathetic, not just quite sympathetic, but were extremely sympathetic to Israel and shared many of the beliefs of the Israelis about Iran.
But I think there was an important difference between the two, and as I've pointed out in the past, it had to do with who was the primary enemy.
Was it Iraq or Iran?
And the Bush administration chose Iraq in 2002-2003, and Israel, for the most part, although not entirely, still believed that Iran, at that point, was the primary enemy.
Now they sure helped anyway, once they saw that, okay, Iraq is first, they said, okay, but you have to promise, and this goes back to the fall of 2002, Ariel Sharon said, you have to promise that Iran and Syria and Libya are next.
That's right, and Bush was, as my friend Ray McGovern pointed out often, was enthralled to Ariel Sharon.
He believed that Sharon was such a great man.
He worshipped him almost, it seems.
And, you know, he was inclined to take Sharon's word very seriously, and I think, you know, he was quite sympathetic to Israel's case, but, again, Bush, the non-decider, was never ready to commit to an Israeli position, to what the Israelis wanted the United States to do.
I think he was keeping his options open at every stage.
Well, so what's the George Bush-Dick Cheney motive for even contemplating war with Iran, other than protecting Israel from the nuclear weapons program that Iran doesn't have?
I think that it's a very interesting question to try to analyze what Cheney's motive here.
I've just been recently going back over the history of Cheney's thinking about Iran over the last few years, since 9-11 particularly, and one of the striking things is how he came under the sway of the historian Bernard Lewis, the Middle East historian Bernard Lewis at Princeton University.
Apparently, he had not really had contact with him before 9-11, but after that, the month following 9-11, he met with him frequently, and apparently fell under his sway in the sense that he accepted this notion that, well, he accepted two notions.
One, that there was this millennial struggle between Islam and the Christian world, the Islamic world and the Christian world.
Bernard Lewis has this bee in his bonnet, if you will, about this notion that there is this centuries-long war between Islamic civilization and Christian civilization, which is a complete sort of falsehood, if you really look back at what happened at crucial points in this history.
This is what they call in advertising, glittering generalities.
Yes, it's a vast oversimplification, and obviously one that seriously skews understanding in the direction of an anti-Islam policy, but that is what I think one of the things that happened to Cheney.
And the other thing is that Lewis apparently played into an existing Cheney, very strong, very powerful Cheney notion, which was that we have to assert ourselves, we have to show how powerful we are, we have to impress the Arab world, or the Arab and Islamic world, if you will, with our power in the Middle East.
So he rang that bell in Cheney's head, and after this series of meetings, apparently Cheney was sufficiently different in his thinking that Brent Scowcroft told Jeffrey Goldberg, in an interview that was published in the New Yorker, that Cheney had changed so much that he now no longer recognized, he no longer knew the Cheney he'd known before.
So something did happen.
Cheney went over a line and became an extremist, not just on Iran, but more, I think, more generally became an extremist on the whole notion that the United States had to be a militarily, a more aggressive power to impress the Arab world and the Islamic world, meaning Iran.
So that was a very powerful change in his whole demeanor, and I think that's why he then hired David Wormster as his Middle East, his advisor.
And Wormster, of course, was an avowed advocate of using military force against regimes who the United States felt were not in line with our interests, and particularly, of course, Syria, primarily Syria, and secondarily Iran.
So those two things, I think, helped to at least give some clue as to Cheney's motivation.
Of course, Israel, Israel's part of this.
He's inclined to believe the notion that Iran is a threat, an existential threat to Israel.
He listens to the Israelis and to Bernard Lewis, who tell him that Ahmadinejad believes in the appearance of the 12th Imam, and he's ready to sacrifice Iran in order to destroy the Jews in Israel, which is a complete fabrication and absolutely no evidence to support that.
But that's the kind of thinking that I think he's now prone to embrace.
Well, and so there's always kind of been the question, I'm sorry, I asked you for 15 minutes, let me ask you one more thing, is that alright?
Sure.
Always in the background of the idea of bombing the hell out of Iran from the sky has also been regime change.
But the question has always kind of been, how could anybody ever get a regime change in Iran?
It ain't 53 anymore, and it's not like the Mujahideen al-Khalq are going to be able to assassinate the Ayatollahs and take over the place from within, or something like that.
What are they even talking about when they talk about regime change in Iran?
I must not get something.
This is a very interesting question, too, and here you come back to David Wormser as the only indication that we have of how Cheney might think about this, because Wormser has gone on the record talking about the relationship between US military attack against Iran and regime change, and his position was that you use force, you continue to use force, you continue to escalate the use of force against Iran until the regime falls.
And that is, of course, such a wild-eyed extremist notion, such a notion so completely removed from reality that it can't be taken seriously except in the circles that are sort of in a bubble, apart from the rest of the universe of information.
But I think that's the kind of thing that Cheney was exposed to, and he seems to have been prone to accepting that idea on its face, despite the fact that it makes no sense, that it's a completely illogical idea, because everybody else in the world understands that attacking Iran will simply solidify the right-wing forces and the existing Ahmadinejad regime.
In other words, Ahmadinejad would be advantaged politically by that, rather than disadvantaged.
Well, but you know, that sounds to me like just sort of, you know, what Wormser said just sounds like newspeak anyway.
I mean, what he's saying is once we start the war, we'll just keep it going until we occupy the place, and if we have to draft everybody, escalate to the nth degree Woodrow Wilson style, then that's just what we'll do.
Yeah, and that, of course, there's no possibility that that's going to happen.
I mean, just no, even Cheney does not believe the United States is going to occupy Iran.
If you listen to Liz Cheney, who is really kind of a, you know, somebody who only talks her father's line, I mean, you know, the only thing she ever says is what her father tells her, even she does not suggest that ground forces in Iran is the possibility.
So they're just talking about escalating the air war until the regime falls, is what he means.
That's the Wormser line.
Now, you know, that becomes, you know, increasingly difficult to believe that this is a real option.
For one thing, this administration is not even going to be around, and Cheney's not going to be in the White House, and he knows that, surely, that it's very unlikely that a future administration is going to continue to bomb Iran over and over again until the regime changes.
That's simply not going to happen.
So, you know, the basic linkage between the idea of striking Iran and regime change just begins to disintegrate as you get closer and closer to it, and I have to believe that Cheney doesn't really care whether the regime is going to change or not, that his notion is you're just going to weaken Iran as much as possible.
Okay, so he's sort of, he's at least abandoned that much of the plan.
Yeah, that's my suspicion, that, I mean, Wormser's gone now, he's left the administration.
Wormser, by the way, he's the guy that wrote The Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm for Benjamin Netanyahu in 96 that promoted all this regime change stuff.
That's right, and I think a lot of that begins to fall away during 2007 and into 2008, and what's left is a desperate effort to just do something to hit Iran.
Yeah, well, let's hope, I don't know, that somebody can stop him.
Well, yeah, we have some hope, but certainly not as much as we had last year when Admiral Fallon was still in place in CENTCOM, and of course, you know, the danger is that Petraeus, when he takes over at CENTCOM around September 1st, is in a position to collude with Israel to carry out a strike, but that's the thing that I'm most worried about at this point.
All right, everybody, that's independent historian and investigative reporter Gareth Porter.
You can find what he writes at antiwar.com slash porter, including, probably not yet, but very soon anyway by the time you hear this later in mp3 archive form, probably Seismic Shift or Non-Decision by Bush on Iran.
It's at ipsnews.net.
All right, thanks very much for your time today, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Good to talk to you, as always.
