All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I am your host, Scott Horton, and welcoming back to the show, a great investigative reporter for Interpress Service and for the American Prospect Magazine, Gareth Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Glad to be here.
It's good to have you here, and let's start with the breaking news.
I don't know if you saw Peter Pace has been replaced as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
What's going on there?
Do you know?
I have not seen that story yet, but that's certainly interesting and consistent with what we know about Peter Pace's reaction to the recent policy decisions of the Bush administration.
He has not been sympathetic with the surge at all.
He was clearly opposed to it, and, you know, he's been reported, he also definitely denied that Iran was behind the IEDs going into Iraq, so, you know, he apparently was not trusted by the Bush White House.
Okay, well, let's break that down right there.
First of all, the IEDs, you're telling me that the now former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was on the record denying that these were coming from Iran, or that there was evidence?
He said that he could not say that they were coming from Iran.
He was unwilling to support the propaganda line being taken by the U.S. military in Baghdad in February of this year.
And you say he was opposed to the surge.
I don't know if I've ever actually put this question to you this way before.
Do you believe, Gareth Porter, that the surge is really reinforcements for when the war against Iran starts, if Cheney has his way, so that our guys aren't left completely stranded, surrounded by angry Shiites?
It doesn't make sense to me, I guess, is what I'm getting at, that we've done this giant surge so that America can now attempt to control one third of Baghdad.
Well, it's been my interpretation that the surge decision was definitely made, at least in part, with the thought in mind that if the Bush administration decided to exercise the military option against Iran, or even if they decided to pursue a line of public declaratory policy that made it look like they were ready to go to war against Iran, which was certainly very much the case later on, that the surge would put enough troops into Iraq to make it somewhat more credible, because they would then be in a better position to defend against Shiite response to an attack on Iran.
In fact, I was told in February that there was a meeting at the Pentagon presided over by the new Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and involving top civilian officials there, which discussed, among other things, the surge of troops into Iraq within the context of a policy of at least feinting toward war with Iran, at least trying to persuade Iran that the United States was moving toward war, and that the additional troops in Iraq were seen in that discussion as part of the larger policy toward Iran, at least as much, if not more, than a policy for Iraq itself.
And now, so does this replacing of pace mean that I don't have to put up with it anymore when George Bush says, hey, I'm listening to the generals and doing what the generals say?
Well, it's been very clear for the last more than six months now that he is not listening to the generals.
He quit listening to the generals in November or December, we can't exactly pin down the precise moment when he made the decision to go ahead with an escalation of troop presence in Iraq.
But we know that the Joint Chiefs, as well as the commanders in Iraq, were opposed to that policy.
So he really began to turn his back, not just turn his back on the military advisors, but to countermand them and get rid of them when they would not support his preferred policy.
Right.
Casey and Abizaid, both of them thrown under the bus, right?
I'm sorry?
Okay.
So Casey and Abizaid, of course, were among those who made it very clear that they opposed the surge in Iraq.
And although Casey later on took that back partially and made it sound like he was willing to go along with the surge after he had been visited by Gates.
But that was clearly a political move by Abizaid.
What can you tell us about the new war czar?
He was opposed to the surge, right?
That's right.
I mean, the General Lute, Douglas Lute, certainly is on the record as saying he was skeptical about it, not surprisingly, because he was surrounded by military brass who clearly thought that it was a big mistake.
And whether he is consciously doing this simply to advance his career, as General Petraeus has chosen to do, the new commander in Iraq, or whether he has other reasons, whether he hopes to exert pressure from within that position to try to force a change in policy remains to be seen.
Now back in 2005, the end of July, the August 1st issue, actually, of the American Conservative magazine had a piece by Philip Giraldi that said that in the event of another 9-11 style terrorist attack on the United States, Iran would be blamed whether they did it or not, and that the Air Force was under orders to begin drawing up plans for airstrikes, and that those plans included the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iran in a first strike.
This is an idea that was endorsed by 9 out of 10 Republicans at the third presidential debate the other night.
Seymour Hersh reported, at least for a time, that the nuclear option had been taken off the table under pressure from the Joint Chiefs, and yet my latest information from Philip Giraldi, the author of that original piece in the American Conservative magazine, is that the nuclear option for Iran is indeed still part of the drawn-up plans for an air war against them.
And what he told me on this show a couple of weeks ago was that there were two reasons that America might use nuclear weapons against Iran.
The first would be to take out nuclear facilities at hardened locations, such as Natanz, which is under 85 feet of granite or something.
And the second would be to threaten the Iranians that they better not shoot back, and that if they try to fight back against America, that then we'll use nukes.
And Paul Craig Roberts has basically made a narrative out of this, that the plan is to nuke them first to get their nuclear facilities, which will force them to shoot back, and which will then provide the excuse to just go ahead and nuke Iran, which is what the crazies really want is to obliterate that society.
And this kind of thing sounds completely insane to me.
It sounds so unreal that it couldn't possibly be true, and yet, as I just indicated, nine out of ten Republicans running for president endorsed this at the debate just the other night, a first strike, starting a war against a non-nuclear third world country, and using nuclear weapons against them.
Well, you've laid out a situation which is truly frightening, and which ought to make every honest and well-informed citizen's blood boil.
And you're absolutely right about the fact that the Republican Party is now completely dominated by the people who have certainly drunk the Kool-Aid of the neo-conservative movement.
And for that matter, Hillary Obama and John Edwards have all said that the nuclear option remains on the table as well?
That is correct.
As far as I know, the three major Democratic candidates have not yet renounced their position earlier on that the, certainly the military option, I don't know that they've said the nuclear option, but the military option against Iran must remain, should remain on the table.
So definitely we are faced with a perilous situation in the following sense, that there are more than one way in which, there is more than one way in which the Bush administration could go to war against Iran.
And I think the fact that the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense clearly have now made it known within the administration that they would not support that, that means that the remaining figures supporting a war against Iran, particularly Vice President Cheney, cannot so easily follow a policy of sort of just openly taking the offensive against Iran in an obviously unprovoked attack, but must find another excuse for going to war against Iran.
And that's where the problem of a possible al-Qaeda attack on the United States, or even on American targets abroad, comes into play.
And I think that increasingly appears to be certainly one of the most dangerous possibilities for triggering a war by the Bush administration against Iran.
And that is the subject of your new article at IPS News.
I want to share with you real quick before really asking you to get into the depth of that, this article from June 15th, 2006, last year, one year ago, a blueprint for trying to start a war between the United States and Iran was among a huge treasure of documents found in the hideout of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said Thursday.
This is from the Associated Press by Samir N. Yaqub, the document purporting to reflect al-Qaeda policy and its cooperation with groups loyal to ousted President Saddam Hussein also appear to show that the insurgency in Iraq was weakening.
And it goes on to explain that it's basically the policy of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their group of murderers to attempt to get America into a war with Iran in order to bolster their position in Iraq.
Now, this was a year ago, and you have another year worth of information to add to that.
Why don't you help explain to the audience exactly what's going on and how much of a threat this really is, that al-Qaeda could create the excuse that Cheney wants to get us into a war with Iran, because that's what Osama bin Laden wants.
Yes, this is certainly one of the most interesting ironies of this ironic war that we're involved in in the Middle East, that, and in fact, of course, it's deeper than an irony, there are very important political realities behind what appears to be an irony, which is that the interests of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda on one hand, and Dick Cheney and the neocons on the other, appear to be aligned with regard to the problem of how to trigger a war between the United States and Iran, and they both, as you just said, would like that to happen.
Now of course, I'm not suggesting that the neocons and Cheney would deliberately try to bring about the attack on the United States, but certainly they are now prepared to take advantage of such an attack, and then to make the argument that this was planned on Iranian territory, and therefore that Iran was responsible, or they could even go further than that.
But at the very least, to say that it was planned on Iranian territory, and that therefore Iran must be targeted as the primary target in retaliation for the attack on the United States.
Now, in addition to the evidence that you just cited, that al-Qaeda has in fact had that thought very consciously, and they wanted to try to do something to encourage an attack by the United States against Iran.
We now know that the Bush administration has actually warned Iran in 2003 that if there were an attack which the United States could claim was planned from Iranian territory, that the United States would hold Iran responsible for that, with the implication, of course, that the United States would attack Iran in retaliation.
This warning was reported by the chief Washington correspondent of Fox News, Jim Angle, a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago now, after speaking with at least two present Bush administration officials and one former official, all of whom confirmed that such a warning had been given to Iran, and the former official saying that it was believed that the Iranians took that warning to heart and then tightened their control over al-Qaeda elements who had fled from Afghanistan into Iran after the U.S. military offensive there in late 2001.
So the key to this is the claim, the charge that the neocons have been making ever since early 2002, that Iran has, quote, harbored, unquote, al-Qaeda operatives who have been in that country.
In other words, that Iran has knowingly been complicit in the presence of al-Qaeda operatives in Iran and that they have allowed those operatives, basically, to continue to carry on planning for terrorist activity.
Now, this is a position for which I have seen absolutely no evidence, and indeed two sources that I cited in my article, Paul Pillar, the former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, and Ken Pollack, who was the CIA analyst on the Persian Gulf up to 2001 and who has maintained contacts with analysts, obviously, since then, they both said that this was not supported by the evidence.
Pillar told me in an interview that it was the overall impression of the intelligence analyst that Iran was not able to control the al-Qaeda operatives, that it did try to arrest them.
It did arrest them, that it was not knowingly allowing them to operate freely in Iran.
And Pollack, in his book, The Persian Puzzle, actually states outright that it's not as though these people were in an Iranian prison and were being allowed to make phone calls to plan their operation.
So this is a position which reflects the peculiar viewpoint of the neoconservatives, which is that if there is an al-Qaeda operative on the territory of a state which the United States would like to bomb or to attack, then that proves that that state was in cahoots with the al-Qaeda.
And of course, that's exactly what they did as a large part of their case for war against Saddam Hussein.
Mm-hmm.
Even though the closest they had to al-Qaeda was Zarqawi, who wasn't tied to bin Laden or Saddam and was living safely in Kurdistan, where the military had asked for permission to kill him four or five times and were refused repeatedly by the White House the permission to go and kill him before the war started in his Kurdistan safe haven.
But yeah, ultimately, your point is right.
If I remember the accusations even then were, yeah, and how did Zarqawi ever get from Afghanistan to Iraq?
Well, he must have crossed Iran, so Iran's responsible for that.
Yes, and this propaganda theme has been just constantly beat upon year after year since early 2002.
It's now been five years since the Bush administration, or at least elements within the Bush administration, to be more precise, have been putting this line out through leaks to the press as well as public statements by Cheney and Rumsfeld consistently charging that Iran has been harboring al-Qaeda operatives on its territory.
Without going into too much detail, I have amassed quite a thick file of media hits or media coverage in which the neocon line has been reflected, and so they've been very successful over the years.
There's been hardly any.
I would say there has been no media questioning of that line.
No one has really taken it upon themselves to ask the question, well, are we being fed a line of bull here and start asking questions about this line?
And as a result, you know, there has been sort of established in the minds of most people who read their newspapers or follow their television news the idea that Iran has indeed been basically cooperating, at least passively, with al-Qaeda to allow them to carry on their planning of terrorist attacks.
And there's absolutely no reason to believe that that's the case.
I mean, Iran simply does not have an interest in aligning with al-Qaeda.
It does not have an interest in allowing al-Qaeda to carry out attacks which are most likely to, of course, harm Iran in its interests.
Haven't they offered to turn over, was it five or six al-Qaeda guys that they had arrested two of the United States in the past?
Well, there are a number of things that Iran has actually done.
First of all, they have arrested a number of al-Qaeda agents in Iran.
They have put them under arrest and detained them.
And even though the neocons continue to say, well, we don't know whether they're under loose house arrest or what, the fact is that there's no evidence that it's anything but normal detention.
Secondly, they have, in fact, offered to turn over a number of the detainees that they have had to states in the Middle East, which were either the country of origin of the prisoner or another country that would have an interest in them.
They've offered to do that with Egypt, with Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, among others.
And there have been reports that seem to be reliable that they did, in fact, turn over some of the al-Qaeda detainees to Saudi Arabia.
And that Saudi Arabia recognized that and acknowledged that Iran was, in fact, cooperating in the war on terror with regard to al-Qaeda.
And this is the same thing with Syria, too, right?
Syria, they're crazy.
They can't be dealt with.
They're evil.
They support terrorists.
People torture terrorists for us when we ask them to.
Hell, they torture innocent people for us when we ask them to.
That doesn't count?
Yeah, exactly right.
They don't get a star on their report card for torturing people on request?
That doesn't count for anything?
Well, I think the key point here about Iraq is that the record does not suggest that Iran has refused to cooperate.
What they have refused to do is to turn over the al-Qaeda operatives that they have directly to the United States.
That's the one thing that they've refused to do.
And they've refused to do that because the United States has refused to cooperate in any way, shape, or form with Iran with regard to their concerns about terror.
Right, because we're using Saddam Hussein's old terrorist group, the Mujahideen al-Khalq, against them.
That's what they wanted to do, was trade five for five, right?
That was precisely the offer that they made, and which was rejected by the Bush administration, despite the fact that George Bush himself was quoted by more than one source as saying, well, you know, a terrorist is a terrorist, so we really shouldn't be in a position of supporting the MEK.
Well, we're supporting, or were at least, supporting al-Qaeda in Lebanon.
You know, Hezbollah, they're terrorists after all.
And you know, again, this goes back to what you're saying about your file full of news stories that kind of tie Iran and al-Qaeda together in the neocon perspective.
That's what we have, is a steady drumbeat of lies in the background that aren't really too loud.
It's basically the same scam as the run-up to the war in Iraq, but it's much quieter now, not as much flag-waving on TV.
But as you say, the lies have been repeated enough to serve as the basis for the argument now.
Last night, for example, I saw Brian Ross, the chief investigative news reporter for ABC News, who supposedly broke the story about this not-new CIA finding and so forth a couple weeks ago.
He was a guest on the Bill O'Reilly factor yesterday.
And the whole conversation was based on, well, we know that they're working on nuclear weapons.
We know that they're supplying the bombs that are killing Americans, and have been this whole time supplying the bombs that are killing Americans in Iraq.
And we know that they're the ones supplying the bombs that are killing Americans in Afghanistan.
And we know that they're tied with al-Qaeda.
And so, therefore, there's premise one, two, three, four, all of them lies.
And based on that, ah, gee, what are we waiting for?
What's the problem with that Condoleezza Rice standing in the way of the war?
Shouldn't it be a good enough excuse to bomb them right now, says Bill O'Reilly, that we know that they're the ones supplying all the bombs that are killing our guys in Iraq and Afghanistan?
What are we waiting for?
How dare that Condoleezza Rice stop the heroic Dick Cheney from saving the day?
Exactly.
You know, Scott, I think what we're seeing right now is the, is a fierce, the most fierce fight going on between Dick Cheney and his minions in the administration.
And the, for lack of a better term, the realists who are aware that it's crazy to try to go to war against Iran.
And this is heating up day by day, and we're going to see even more of this, and it's going to get much more ferocious before it is finally resolved.
And I would just, you know, in response to the point you raised about Iran and Afghanistan, and the story, of course, being a repeat, you know, sort of in perfect parallel with the story about Iran providing the explosive, the explosive to militia in Iraq.
They're now saying exactly the same thing about supporting the Taliban, which of course is the primary enemy of Iran.
I mean, if there is one state which Iran has declared an open enemy to be fought against, to be deposed, and to be prepared, to be prevented from possibly reemerging in power, it is the Taliban regime.
It is, it was not the United States that played the early role in trying to bring down the Taliban regime.
It is Iran, and of course, their hatred of the Taliban regime has not changed at all.
So the idea that Iran is behind arms going into Afghanistan for the Taliban is simply absurd.
I don't believe that for a moment, and of course, Gates himself has said, no, we have no evidence that in fact Iran is behind this.
And what about your sources that you talk to?
Does anybody say, well, Gareth, you know, there actually is a concern?
Well, I was trying to reach a source who I have talked with within the past month, precisely on this point.
And I can tell you that a month ago, this expert on Afghanistan who has been there many times most recently, early this year, that that person said that Iran was not, was definitely not supplying arms to the Taliban or to insurgents in Afghanistan.
I mean, that was simply not the case.
That was your article, you wrote about that, the blame game for the prospect, is that right?
Well, that's right.
But that was, that was, of course, about Iraq, right?
And now I'm specifically referring to Afghanistan, the same source, the person who is one of the most best, best informed people with regard to what's happening in Afghanistan, said no, no, Iran is still playing it on the up and up.
In contrast, of course, to Pakistan, which is in fact, openly, not openly, but everyone knows within the US government that Pakistan is supporting the Taliban.
I mean, there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
That's without any doubt.
Yeah, just as the Saudis are supporting the Sunni insurgency that's fighting the Americans in Iraq.
That's right.
So I mean, you know, the idea of focusing in on Iran, as the culprit in Afghanistan is, it's just beyond, you know, any reasonable standard of, it's simply madness, that's all.
Yeah, it's not even plausible.
It would seem to me, you know, particularly when I read, for example, Andrew Coburn's excellent book on Donald Rumsfeld, and now I know that they spend uncounted millions and millions and probably tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, just on lies, on what they call total information dominance.
It seems to me that they could come up with more plausible lies than Iran is arming all of their enemies, which include all of our enemies, and therefore that's why we ought to bomb them and have regime change there and help all of our and their enemies.
Yes, in the abstract, one would think that that would be a very poor lie, but it's been very, very successful, as you well know.
And let me give one more example, if I may, of how this campaign has been so spectacularly successful.
And I have not had an opportunity to write about this, but it's something that I will write about in the future because it was the single most spectacular success of the propaganda line about Iran and Al-Qaeda.
It was in the run-up to the release of the 9-11 Commission report in July of 2004, and not just in the week before that, but in the week following the release.
Really every major news outlet, electronic as well as print, published a story that had the headline, which with one variant or another, essentially said that the 9-11 Commission has uncovered more serious links between Iran and Al-Qaeda than existed between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.
Right, even Jon Stewart parroted that on The Daily Show.
Right.
And this was really for about 10 days.
This was the primary headline that had to do with the 9-11 Commission report.
And it was all based on one supposed fact, which was that Iran had allowed about nine or 10 of the 11 hijackers to transit through Iran, on their way, of course, to the United States.
And that meant that Iran must have known what was going on and cooperated with Al-Qaeda.
Now, you know, I mean, on its face, of course, it's absurd, because on the basis of that kind of argument, all of those hijackers were allowed into the United States and allowed to function by the U.S. government, and therefore it must have been complicit in 9-11.
And of course, there are people who believe that.
And apart from that, the argument is, it simply makes no sense whatsoever.
But beyond that, you know, the 9-11 Commission actually did make the statement that the hijackers were, the Al-Qaeda hijackers were taking advantage of the fact that the Iranian government did not stamp the passports of Al-Qaeda.
And this was what was being published over and over again in various media outlets, which made it sound like that the Iranian government was somehow being, that the border guards were being instructed to facilitate the transit of Al-Qaeda.
What it actually said in the 9-11 Commission report was that the Iranian government, as a matter of course, for everybody, does not stamp the visa in the passport.
They do it differently.
And it has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia, it has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, it's just their practice.
And Al-Qaeda was simply taking advantage of that fact to use Iran to go through without having their passports stamped in such a way as to show where they'd been.
So this was, this simple fact was used to link Iran with Al-Qaeda and with 9-11.
And you know, it was such a stupid media blunder that, you know, I think it's a major, it's a major scandal.
I'd agree with you, and this is the same kind of thing that continues, again, Brian Ross on the O'Reilly factor last night, both of them talking as though Iran controls some mystical force field at its borders that they ought to be able to prevent any kind of transaction or travel going across those borders if those, you know, probably make-believe travels that they're talking about in the first place are taking place, that the Iranian government bears 100% responsibility for that.
But completely ignoring the fact that in both circumstances, whether we're talking about the Iranian border with Afghanistan or the Iranian border with Iraq, America has the responsibility for controlling the other side of those very lines.
Of course.
I mean, that's not to mention, of course, that the Al-Qaeda hijackers came into the United States and played around for weeks and months and were undetected.
And on the same argument that is being used by the neoconservatives about Iran, they should be saying that, in fact, the Bush administration was complicit in the 9-11 hijacking and the hijacking and terrorist bombings.
Yeah, well, I guess Dick Cheney ought to invade D.C.
I hope he starts with the vice president's little mansion off the side there.
That would be the logical conclusion.
Yeah.
And I guess we can expect a full-scale invasion of Great Britain, too.
You know, they call London a stand over there now.
That sounds like a cause of spelling.
Well, you know, Scott, I think what we're up against here is that no fact is really a fact in the media unless it is declared by someone who has sufficient power.
And so we have to wait for somebody with sufficient power to take this on before there's going to be any change in the way these ridiculous arguments are being handled in the media.
Yeah, I'm really glad you said that, because just on this very kind of story, if there was one person in a very major paper who I would expect to be able to separate some of this wheat and chaff and tell the story straight at all, it would be perhaps Walter Pincus at the Washington Post.
He's written some pretty respectable things in the past about some of this kind of stuff.
And yet he is the very man in the recent Bill Moyers special about the complicity of the American media who told Bill Moyers, frankly, that we don't report anything or contradict anyone unless the other side politically does.
We got in so much trouble for picking on Ronald Reagan by trying to make him stick to the facts that we had to change our policy.
And now the only time we contradict Ronald Reagan is if the Democrats say it first and we can quote them.
And he's the only one who could possibly write the truth about this kind of thing in the Washington Post.
And he's not going to do it.
Scott, there is one other reporter at the Post who, in my view, has been even far superior to Walter Pincus, and that's Daphne Linzer.
She has written a series of reports that have, albeit cautiously, contradicted the propaganda line of the Bush administration on Iran.
And she deserves great credit for that.
I think she has been very conscientious and energetic in retracking down the truth of this matter.
But she has not been allowed to take on this question that we've been discussing right now, except for one piece that she did, which I cited in February, in which she pointed out that the CIA had sent a report to the White House, which reported that Iran had detained, I believe it was six Al-Qaeda operatives who had been trying to transit Iran on the way from Afghanistan to Iraq.
And that showed that, in fact, the implicit point of the report was that the propaganda line about Iran is really not accurate.
And of course, the White House ignored the report.
But she was on top of this in a way that the other major media have not been.
Well, and that's really, you know, I guess kind of the common theme of this interview is, it's all about the narrative.
It's all about what's the general impression.
Precisely.
And so you and I could even cite The Washington Post in some of these cases.
But at the end of the day, the larger drumbeat wins out, that Iran is behind everything wrong with what's happening to America and the Middle East.
That's precisely right.
I mean, there is so much that has to be done to straighten, to turn the narrative around.
It's like a huge ship that is going full steam ahead and which it's going to take a long time to turn it around and first to slow it down and then to turn it around.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I might not be as frustrated as I am about this if any of the accusations that they're using to justify war at this point were true.
But it seems to me that whether we're talking about IEDs in Iraq or IEDs in Afghanistan, whether we're talking about the state of their nuclear program or, you know, any of this stuff, it seems like it's purely bull.
Even the threat to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, the people who can actually speak Farsi report that he didn't even say that.
No, no, he said nothing of the sort, of course.
And you're right that, you know, what we're talking about here is a systematic distortion of everything that has to do with the issue, which, of course, you know, logically you have to respect.
I mean, that the way in which the administration operates, any administration which is going to carry out essentially an aggressive war is going to have to do that.
I mean, you know, as I've said many times in the past, that's exactly what happened on Vietnam.
It was not as necessary to be so energetic about it in the case of Vietnam because there was much less awareness and much less need to manipulate the media compared with the Middle East.
But today, you know, I mean, the fact is that you do have to have a very systematic policy, a program of manipulating information, of distorting intelligence, of essentially falsifying intelligence in relations with the media in order to be able to have the freedom of action that you want.
Yep.
Let me throw a curveball at you here.
Obviously, I guess most people listen to this show, if you missed it, go to the Washington Note blog.
There's the biggest news last week, two weeks ago, that Cheney is kind of openly talking, at least at the American Enterprise Institute, about doing an end run around George Bush's policy and Condoleezza Rice and the rest of them and trying to get Israel to start the war for him.
And now, I spoke with Larissa Alexandrovna, the national security correspondent from RawStory.com, who's broken a ton of great stories along these lines in the past, and she said her understanding was that the powers that be in Israel are not interested in having a war with Iran or helping Dick Cheney start one any more than they were in expanding last July's Lebanese war into Syria, and that even when I brought up Benjamin Netanyahu waiting in the wings, she said that her information was that even Netanyahu is talking about, hey, let's let sanctions work and things like that.
She said to me that if Cheney is going to figure out a way to basically force Iran's hand and get them to attack American interests in the Gulf, it won't be Israel that shoots tomahawk missiles at them, it'll be the Saudis.
What do you think about the possibility of Saudi Arabia helping Dick Cheney start a war with the Iranians?
I cannot imagine that, and I think you're absolutely correct about Israel.
Israel has no intention of fighting Iran by itself.
It would only participate if the United States was carrying out the war itself, primarily.
I mean, that's the only way it would make any sense, and this is very clear.
I did a story on that a few months ago, that the Israeli Air Force is not really prepared to do this by themselves.
They would have to have everything go precisely just exactly right without any accident, any friction in the plan, or it would be a complete failure.
And therefore, the Israeli military is very skeptical about that, and then they have privately admitted that they do not have the capability to do this.
It's really something that has to be done by the United States.
And in regards to the Saudis, you can't imagine them going along with Dick Cheney on a plan like that?
Absolutely not.
I mean, that would be the last thing on earth that the Saudis would do.
They know better than that.
They're too smart for that.
It's good to hear your opinion about the state of things in Israel.
I guess it's sort of like you said about the situation here in the United States.
The permanent government, you said, the State Department, the Defense Department, the intelligence agencies, the people who actually run the state for a living, they are against this thing.
It's only the ideologues who are for it.
And I guess it sounds like it's the same situation in Israel, if anybody's for it at all.
That's right.
In this case, it's such an extreme case.
The idea of an aggressive war against Iran, really without any provocation, is such an outrageous notion, so dangerous.
The consequences are so great that the national security bureaucracy, which normally is very open to aggressive war, provided that it's against an enemy that can be taken down relatively easily.
They simply balk when it's against a state that can actually do something to fight back, as is the case with Iran, where the cost-benefit analysis that they do without even thinking is just going to rule that out.
I think that points to a basic characteristic of the American military-industrial complex, if you will, which is that they do not favor aggressive war unless it's going to be a slam dunk.
A cakewalk.
A cakewalk.
They like cakewalks.
They like 1991 Gulf War type of wars, but they don't like wars that are not cakewalks.
Well, I guess this is as close as we're going to be able to get to optimism in this interview, but somebody at least, somebody powerful up there is opposed to this policy, and I guess we'll try to leave it on that optimistic note.
Right, but lest we get over optimistic, let me just add a caveat, which is that when you are part of the national security bureaucracy of the world's most powerful state, the danger of course is that when you start thinking about how easy it would be to knock off Saddam Hussein, in the abstract it looks good, and I believe that the army, the brass, would have been happy to go into Iraq with 350,000 ground troops.
That would have been their kind of war, and I think they would have felt, yeah, we can do that.
But Saddam Hussein was in fact a patsy in a military sense, and I think the military bureaucracy was perfectly ready to go to war against Iraq.
So what I'm trying to suggest is that that shouldn't be viewed in a very optimistic sense in an overall term, in overall terms.
Right, right, just in relative terms to the office of the vice president.
Exactly, only in relative terms.
Right, all right.
Well, you keep debunking him, Gareth Porter, we sure appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, everybody, Gareth Porter, he's an investigative reporter and a historian, writes for Interpress Service and the American Prospect.
Talk to you again soon, sir.
