04/09/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing my friend, our friend, Dr. Gareth Porter, our regular guest, and when examining the American Empire, a lot of times you need an expert Kremlinologist to examine what's going on in Washington, D.C.
Maybe we can call Dr. Porter a Pentagonologist.
Well, he's got a new piece with Jim Loeb, both of them from IPS News.
It's at original.antiwar.com slash porter, and it's Obama Team Debate Stance on Israeli Attack Threat.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Porter.
How are you today?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining us on the show.
So, here we have hope and change and peace and goodness elected to the White House, it says on TV.
At the same time, we have the Likudniks and people even further to the right than that.
Well, and I guess the labor is included as well.
But substantially, a right-wing coalition has come to power in Israel.
And the question of Iran policy, of course, looms large.
So, why don't you go ahead and, I guess, give us the background of what you and Jim have written about in this article, the different statements by the different actors in the two governments, and then how you read those tea leaves.
What does all this mean for us?
Yes.
The story that we published yesterday is about how the Obama administration has essentially adjusted, or is beginning to adjust, I think, is perhaps the better way to put it, to the coming to power of the Netanyahu government in Israel, which arguably is more warlike, if it's possible to imagine that, than its predecessor, the Olmert government.
The difference appears to be, if we can sort of base this on both the rhetoric of Netanyahu himself and the kinds of people that he's brought in with him to power, the difference between Netanyahu and its predecessor, the predecessor government, is that Netanyahu is much less likely to bow to American wishes on a whole series of issues than Olmert was, and in particular on the question of policy towards Iran.
There are reports that Netanyahu is more likely to go ahead with an attack on Iran.
Of course, one can never be sure exactly what is behind such reports, but in any case, he is generally regarded as more likely to unilaterally carry out a strike against Iran than Olmert was.
And against that background, then you also have pressures from the Israeli government, which started even before Netanyahu ascended to be prime minister, on the Obama administration to limit the time period that it would take for diplomacy with Iran.
Although we're not exactly sure what sort of time frame, if any, the Israeli government has insisted on with the Obama administration, at least one report suggests that 2009 has been identified as kind of a maximum time frame.
Well, and this is something that, pardon me for interrupting here, I'll let you get back to it, but this is something that stands out in the article, in the language of Secretary of Defense Gates, that there's a red line in terms of the Iranian nuclear program, where it's, I guess, considered might as well be a ready-made nuclear bomb, and go ahead and bomb them then.
And yet, people with power in both governments, America and Israel, seem to always throw around terms like this without ever defining what they are.
Well, that's generally the case, that's true.
Although, if you read very carefully, both between the lines and in some cases in the lines, there is a difference between Israel and the U.S. government, with regard to whether the time frame that should be regarded as relevant to a nuclear weapon capability in Tehran, should take into account the fact that they're going to have to take low-enriched uranium, and go through an entirely new process to enrich it at higher level, at high level, than to have weapons-grade uranium.
And the Israeli position is that doesn't matter, because they assume that Iran has secret sites which are already up and running.
It's a kind of a strange position, which I happen to believe is phony, but that is what they do indeed argue, that Iran can go ahead directly into using high-enriched uranium very quickly, rather than having to go through a lengthy process, and in the process, kick out the inspectors and the IAEA presence in general, and signal that they're going for nuclear weapons.
The United States position, on the other hand, is that it would take a period of time, as well as a public signal by Iran to go to the next stage.
And so that's a very significant difference between the two, which has not been highlighted, but it is there.
And even then, the whole thing about the secret program or not, that's something that both governments, well, I don't know about the Obama government, but the Bush government certainly liked to use vague enough language that we could be talking about their openly declared IAEA safeguarded enrichment program at Natanz, that everyone in the whole world knows about, and that is a safeguarded facility.
Or we could be talking about some secret facility under a mountain somewhere that nobody knows anything about, nobody knows anything about, and if A.M. Assad or anybody else knows, it's just sort of an assumed thing that there must be some secret program.
And it's interesting the way that they trade off which premise that they're operating on and making all these different arguments.
I have trouble keeping track myself.
That's a very good point, Scott.
And this, if I may, sort of take us into another level of specificity on this.
If you go back to the National Intelligence Estimate of late 2007, you find the reporting of the New York Times, David Sanger, repeatedly going back to this story and ultimately claiming the Iranians are suspected in the NIE of actually running these secret sites.
And so is he saying that he's seen the classified version?
He doesn't claim that.
He's obviously been told that.
Or at least he interpreted something that he was told.
But that was not in the unclassified summary that was released to us.
No, it was not in the unclassified summary.
And furthermore, I can tell you, and eventually I'll write a story about this, waiting for the right opportunity to do it, I have been told by somebody who has read the entire NIE and who I interviewed that there is nothing that states that there are secret sites.
All they say is we don't know.
We don't know whether Iran has secret sites.
Well, obviously you don't know if Iran has secret sites.
You can't prove a negative.
That's a meaningless conclusion, in fact.
It's sort of a political bow to the conservatives, to the extremists.
It's the Rumsfeld standard of evidence used against Iraq.
They have to prove that they don't have anything.
That's right.
So what I'm suggesting is that Sanger has been pushing this line, which is clearly a political line and is unfounded.
There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever, and certainly no evidence provided in the NIE to that effect.
Nor do they, in fact, say that we have reason to believe that there are secret sites.
It only says that we have no idea.
Well, Gordon Prather doesn't call Sanger a neo-crazy media sycophant for nothing.
Absolutely.
I mean, he is among the worst.
He really is.
I mean, he ascends to the level of the Michael Gordons of the world.
All right.
Now, Joe Biden is kind of outside of the chain of command.
He's just the vice president.
But he goes on TV, and it seems like, in a certain sense at least, he has a higher rank than these generals in a way, in terms of announcing what official policy is.
And you write in this article that he went on Wolf Blitzer's show on CNN and said, no, the Israelis would be very well advised against bombing Iran, taking not just the American bombing Iran option, but even the Israeli bombing Iran option off the table.
And yet, apparently, General Petraeus and the rest of these guys, even including Gates, they figure they know better, and they're indicating otherwise.
What exactly is going on between the White House and the Pentagon on this?
Well, this is where the story gets very interesting.
And, indeed, you use the word pentagonology, and I think both pentagonology and Obama-ology, perhaps Obama administration-ology, is really called for now.
What we're going to find in the future, Scott, there's no doubt about this, is that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, is going to be deeply divided on the issue of policy toward Iran.
We've already seen the first signs of this in the divergent statements, as you've suggested, within the administration, among top officials in the administration, on this question of the Israeli threat to attack Iran, an air attack against Iranian nuclear sites.
The person who started it, of course, was General Petraeus, and he did this a week ago in his testimony, prepared statement, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The interesting thing is that that prepared testimony normally would go to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for clearance or approval before it is made public.
And I did, in fact, call both the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM, the Central Command, to get verification that, in fact, this was cleared before Petraeus went before the committee.
The interesting thing is that CENTCOM's spokesperson told me that, yes, it was cleared by Defense Department.
When I tried to get verification or confirmation from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, they wouldn't do it.
In fact, I got back an email suggesting that I needed to go to CENTCOM because the OSD, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, did not believe that it would be appropriate for them to comment on what they called the general view on this, meaning the question of a possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran.
So that is the first suggestion here, that Defense Department, meaning Gates and his minions, are beginning to back away from the suggestion which Petraeus presented, that it's very, very possible, likely, that Israel would eventually attack Iran, suggesting, of course, without any further comment by Petraeus, that the United States would not oppose or could not prevent Israel from doing so.
And that, of course, is a highly political, very sensitive matter.
Now, you know, it's just not exactly clear what happened, but what is clear now is that there is some space opening up here between Petraeus and some other people in the administration.
My feeling is that Gates intended to sort of see this as a trial balloon with Petraeus, said, go ahead and say it, and then, when I started nosing around, and after Mullen, the following day, on Thursday of last week, told the Wall Street Journal that this would not be a good idea for Israel to do, and, in fact, basically saying the same thing that he had said last year, publicly as well as privately.
And, you know, apparently the word had gotten out within the administration that this is something we don't want to be taking that sort of public position on.
Then I think Gates backed away, and that was followed then by Biden's statement, very clearly stating that we don't think this is a good idea, and implying that the United States wouldn't go along with it.
So, you know, there's a very interesting indication that sort of an internal debate has begun here with some people trying to suggest that, well, why don't we take advantage of Netanyahu's coming to power in order to do a good cop, bad cop routine with the Iranians when we finally get to the table with them, suggesting that unless they, you know, can reach an agreement with us that is acceptable, then they have to face the likelihood that they're going to get attacked by Israel.
The problem with that, of course, is that the United States doesn't really want Israel to do that, and by taking that position publicly in order to create the sort of pressure, the supposed pressure on Iran, you increase the risk that Netanyahu would be encouraged to plan to go ahead and do it on his own, and not even consult with the United States and ask for cooperation, but simply go ahead and fly over Iraqi airspace and dare us to shoot down Israeli planes.
And so part of the story that we wrote is an interesting presentation by the present advisor in the National Security Council staff, Gary Samor, on WMD matters.
He presented last September at the Kennedy School an argument that the United States should indeed use the threat of an Israeli attack for diplomatic advantage with regard to Iran, suggesting that that would give us some leverage over Iran.
But he also admitted that it's a risky policy, because it would, on balance, encourage the Israelis to act unilaterally and possibly just go ahead without even consulting us in the belief that the United States would not dare to do anything against them.
Well, I mean, but that part of it goes without saying, that they could defy us and not get shot down over Iraq, probably, but I guess the question is whether Obama is telling Gates to tell Mullen to tell them that, no, you're not going to do this.
The answer is no.
I mean, despite all the public rhetoric, public rhetoric has nothing to do with the real dialogue between the two governments in Israel and the United States, right?
Well, I think you're essentially right, that there's nothing to keep the United States from continuing to suggest to Israel, we don't think this is a good idea, while publicly touting the threat.
On the other hand, the fact that the United States is known to be trying to use the threat against Iran does tend to make it less credible that the United States would actually take action privately.
I mean, I think there is a certain psychological truth to what Seymour is saying, that it does raise the risk.
It should be said here somewhere that for America to encourage or to in any way tacitly allow or put Israel in a situation where they think it's okay to go ahead and do this, is ultimately treason, because it will call immediately retaliation against American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan that are within reach of Iranian missiles.
Well, I agree with you.
I think that it's crazy, it's madness.
And in fact, it's interesting that in the presentation at the Kennedy Institute last September, when Seymour made that argument, Gideon Rose, who's the editor, I guess, of the Foreign Affairs magazine, who was the moderator, ended up saying, you know, this is madness.
I mean, I don't remember the exact word he used, but he suggested that any idea that we could play this sort of a game with the threat of an Israeli attack is simply insane.
And I think that that simply corresponds to common sense, that it's simply too risky, both in terms, as you suggest, of retaliation against U.S. forces and indeed sort of destabilizing the region, because the threat of a sort of region-wide conflagration is one of the possibilities, as you have an escalating conflict between the United States and Iran.
And that's exactly why the Bush administration, in its wisdom, decided quite clearly last year that they didn't want to have anything to do with an Israeli attack, and they told the Israelis that in no uncertain terms, and the Israelis then backed off, or at least they did go ahead with an attack.
Now, you know, whether they intended to do it originally or not is a matter of speculation.
But in any case, it's very clear that Chief of Staff Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, feels very strongly about this.
And there is some evidence that I began to pick up in doing this story, that the Israeli government is not at all happy with Mike Mullen, and would like to see him ousted, and may be trying to very subtly use their influence in Washington to get that done.
And what about Admiral Blair?
Because, of course, he testified under cross-examination by John McCain just a few weeks ago that he stands by the NIE, and as interpreted by you and me, not David Sanger.
Right.
And I think Blair does understand the essence of this situation, which is that the Iranians are very far from being ready to make a decision to go for nuclear weapons, but that's another entire decision, which is still very far away, and would depend on circumstances which the United States has a lot of control over.
I mean, I think that his testimony does suggest that there is, within the intelligence community today, you have people who do grasp the notion that we're not looking here at an Iran that's hell-bent on going for nuclear weapons.
I mean, he sticks very closely to the text that was released with the, at the time of the NIE, the published summary text.
He hasn't gone into a lot of detail on it, but I think it's fair to say that he does understand that Iran's enriching uranium and mastering the fuel cycle, and having the capability to make that decision eventually, is not the same thing as a decision to go for nuclear weapons, and that there is a considerable number of steps that they would have to go through, which involve political decisions that they're simply not ready for at all.
Did you see Trita Parsi's piece at Huffington Post today?
Yes.
Well, I saw one a couple of days ago.
Well, I guess that's probably the one.
Yeah, okay.
And, you know, what he says in there is that basically this is all a bluff, and I guess, I don't know if he says explicitly, it always has been since Cheney first started leaking, that he was plotting to nuke Iran back in 2005, or what exactly, but that he says the point of this, or at least the point it serves, I don't know if he's saying that this is what the Israelis are trying to do exactly, I think maybe he does, is that the purpose of this is to poison the atmosphere, because if the Iranians believe that the talks are really not meant to go anywhere, then they would recognize the only other real explanation, which would be that the talks' only purpose would be to say, see, we tried to talk to them and they're completely unreasonable, now we can bomb them, and get that last step out of the way, the last excuse that at least they tried.
And so the more belligerent the Israelis are about maybe striking, and in fact the more belligerent Petraeus and people like that are in talking that way, the harder it is for the Iranians to come to the table to make an actual deal.
But so here's my question, if the Israelis are worried, then why don't they want America to negotiate the deal?
They would rather have a war, or what?
I don't understand.
I think that you're making one assumption there that is not necessarily war.
Help me out here.
But that is the Israelis and Petraeus and those people who want to play the good cop, bad cop game, with an Israeli threat of an attack.
I understand that that does indeed reinforce already existing suspicions.
I mean, they don't really need that in addition.
The Iranians don't need that as an additional factor in tipping their decision against sort of entering into negotiations with the United States, absent a clearer indication that the United States is ready to make a fairly big step in friendly relations with Iran, and that they're not going to demand what the Bush administration demanded, the end of the Iranian enrichment, except under international control rather than Iranian control.
Yeah, I mean, I see no indication that the Obama administration is backing off of those demands.
No, absolutely not.
There is no indication of that yet.
That is an option, obviously, that they understand is probably more realistic, and that they're ready to put in their back pocket, but they certainly are not ready to go to that right away.
They're playing a hard ball, and I think that's the only way that you negotiate with the Iranians, and I think they're wrong about that.
But in any case, my point here is that I don't think either the Israelis or the officials that are making decisions or advising Obama on decisions regarding negotiating with Iran understand the fact that by taking a hard line, they are simply diminishing the chances that the Iranians are going to say yes to sitting down with the United States seriously, to attending an international conference with a low-level, mid-level official.
That simply seems to be beyond the ability of the kinds of people who are in policy-making positions to grasp.
I mean, unfortunately, this is a terrible thing to have to recognize, that we don't have people who are capable of sort of making the simplest sort of deduction or even induction based on masses of evidence, which have been available to everybody in the published media, that Iran has been saying, is saying, is very consistent about saying, that, you know, what's in it for us to negotiate with you unless we have a good reason to believe that you've changed your policy substantively?
Well, and particularly when the facts are as Admiral Blair, the Director of National Intelligence says they are, and, you know, I mean, hell, to have the Director of National Intelligence in America reporting intelligence that actually coincides with the truth, that means that all the rest of them know it's true too, and so it seems like if we could at least get all these arguments based on the actual set of facts rather than a bunch of propaganda, then, you know, at least we could make a little bit of headway.
Well, here's the problem, as I see it, Scott, and I think I'm probably repeating something I've said in the past.
I haven't said in the past that there's something wrong with me.
I think the problem that U.S. officials have is that being in a dominant, in the world's dominant state militarily, even though, let's face it, I mean, the military dominance that we have doesn't get us much of anything, doesn't really accomplish anything positive for us, all it does is piss people off and cause problems.
But they believe, or they assume, without even being conscious of it, that somehow that U.S. military dominance over Iran means that the Iranians have to ultimately sit down and talk with us, because they don't really have any choice, because after all, we are the dominant power.
I think that is almost an unconscious assumption that basically distorts the reasoning, or lack of reasoning, perhaps is a better way to put it, of policymakers, that has ever since the end of the Cold War, that the United States is regarded as being so powerful that they don't have to follow sort of rational rules of negotiating behavior, which this, of course, would be a very clear illustration of that.
Well, you know, and the question remains, and pardon me for being too rational, I don't live in Washington, D.C., thank God, I don't really understand.
Yeah, I don't really know how it is these people really think, but what is the big deal with Iran anyway?
So there's one country in Asia where we don't have bases, so what?
It's the convenient enemy, obviously.
I mean, clearly there are Israeli interests, but what about the American empire?
I mean, Noam Chomsky came on the show and said, you know, I pointed out how Dick Cheney used to make trips to the Gulf region in the 1990s to denounce Bill Clinton for the sanctions regime against Iran.
He was representing Halliburton, wanted to do business, and, you know, Noam Chomsky came on here and said, yeah, see, you know, sometimes the interests of the imperial state trump even the business interests of the people who run it, and you see that we just have to make an example out of Iran, like Cuba.
You may not defy us, no matter who you are.
Yeah, I think that there's a certain amount of truth to the example notion, but also, I mean, Iran, you know, does in effect constitute a regional power.
It is able to influence countries in Lebanon, to some extent in Afghanistan, of course in Iraq, and in the Palestinian territories it has a certain degree of influence, although I don't want to, you know, oversell that at all.
I mean, I think it's very limited.
It's not at all a matter of that they're calling shots or anything like that, but, you know, that Iran, you know, is a kind of presence in the region which is a counter to U.S. influence, and to some degree it's effective.
It's an effective political influence in the region.
That's something that a dominant power cannot abide, you know, without sort of ceasing to be a dominant, you know, the dominant power in the sense of behaving like a dominant power.
So I, you know, as a kind of institutional realist, I've begun to call myself, you know, I think that that exercise is a very powerful shaping influence on the thinking of particularly the military, because they are on the front line, you know, they want to push their bases out there, they want to keep bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Central Asia, and they, as much as anybody or more than anybody in the U.S. government, sees Iran as a rival and an obstacle.
So there's a degree of real sort of power striving and competition there, even though it has nothing to do with real interest of you and me and the rest of the American people.
It's only the interest of those people in the empire.
It's interesting, man.
Back in 1996 or 97, something like that, Farid Zakaria wrote in Newsweek that if Saddam Hussein did not exist in the Middle East, we would have to invent him.
He is the linchpin of our policy.
Aha, a rare moment of insight and honesty.
Yeah, well, and so now that's what Iran is, right?
Without the Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, what's the excuse to have bases in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, unless they're going to come right out and admit it's all about Russia?
No, I mean, this is absolutely central.
It's absolutely central that we have a regime that we can consider an enemy and point to as a threat, as Obama put it, a serious threat to the United States and to the region, even though it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the real fact, to the reality of Iranian policy in the region.
I mean, I've been following this very closely, and I will be writing something pretty soon about this, that the way in which the Iranian policies are described in the region, of course, systematically misrepresents everything that they do as an aggressive-slash-offensive policy, when in fact we know that the Iranians do everything that they do in light of the knowledge that the United States and Israel have threatened it militarily, and basically taking the position that Iran may not be a regional power in the sense that it has missiles, that it has the defense capabilities that are capable of deterring external attack, and all the rest.
You know, this is an objective reality that basically has to be covered up.
It's time that the American people got a little bit of a glimpse of the truth about the difference between the propaganda about Iran and the reality.
Well, we saw the same thing in North Korea, where I guess the American people last week, 57% supported war.
I guess they thought that the North Korean juggernaut was going to come and invade, starting in Washington State, and conquer the U.S. if we didn't stop them.
I don't know which reality they were referencing, I guess cable TV news.
Yeah, I mean, this is the automatic bump that you get whenever you say, you know, country X, Y, or Z is a threat.
You know, if you keep saying it for a few days, then you get a bump in the polls supporting that.
I mean, it's just an automatic response, almost a Pavlovian response.
Well, I have a Pavlovian response.
I get a new Gareth Porter essay in my email, and I pick up the telephone.
Let's do this on the radio.
Thanks very much for joining us again on Anti-War Radio.
Thank you, Scott, as always.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter from Interpret Service.
You can find all he writes at antiwar.com slash porter and original.antiwar.com slash porter.