For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, first guest on the show today is Dr. Gareth Porter.
He, of course, is an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net, and you can find all his stuff at original.antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm good, thanks very much.
I'm really happy to have you here.
I actually, I think we joked about this last time, Gareth, but I'm up past a thousand interviews now, and I went and looked, and the last one of you, the web address there automatically generates the number of entries with the same title, and this will make our 69th interview on the show, actually.
That's got to be some sort of a record.
Yeah, it certainly is.
You're approaching 10% of the interviews I've ever done in my life at this point.
Wow, that's a great honor.
And there's a good reason for it, as everybody who listens to this show knows, it's because you are right about everything, and you're interested in all the same stuff as me, and you provide such a valuable perspective.
I don't know what the hell I'd do without you.
So let's start with the status of Barack Obama's administration's negotiations with the Iranians about what they're going to do with their uranium.
Yeah, this situation is hanging fire as we speak, of course, but what I think we anticipated happening when we last spoke about this, which was that Iran still was not clear, had not made a final decision about the deal that the IAEA had proposed, has now sort of the other shoe has now dropped, and Iran has counterproposed a deal under which their interests are obviously much better served than the original IAEA proposal.
And so this appears to be endangering the whole deal from the point of view of the P5 plus one.
This appears to be unacceptable.
No real surprise there.
I suspected that they would never go along with what the Iranians ultimately would demand, which is that instead of turning over all of their low enriched uranium, or not all of it but 75 to 80 percent of it at one single draw, they would demand that there be a series of trenches and that there be a relationship between each of those trenches and the delivery to the reactor, the research reactor for medical purposes, which is the fundamental interest that they have in mind here in the deal, at least the most obvious one.
Okay, so now what we're talking about here, I think you're kind of hinting about the so-called breakout capability.
As Broad and Sanger like to say in the New York Times, the Iranians now have enough low enriched uranium to make a bomb.
And then way lower in the article, oh, by the way, they would have to spend a year or so continuing to enrich it to weapons grade and then they could make a bomb out of it.
You can't make a bomb even if you have a pile of low enriched uranium as big as the sun.
It doesn't matter how much you have.
It's quality, not quantity.
But basically we know that spin on something that ultimately is factually the case.
There is enough uranium that has already been enriched to 3.6 percent that it's conceivably enough for one bomb.
And if they export that uranium to France or Russia to be further enriched up to 20 percent for this medical isotope, this, that, the other thing, they're giving up the degree of breakout capability that they've already obtained.
Is that basically the deal and why they don't want to do it?
Well, I think that that is only part of it, but I think that certainly is a consideration here.
I think what we have to bear in mind is that the enriched uranium, the low enriched uranium that we're talking about here, has more than one significance for the Iranians in their relations with the West and the United States in particular.
It is indeed a, quote, breakout capability.
But, of course, what that also means is that it is both the basis for an existential deterrent, that is to say, you know, the knowledge of how to enrich uranium in a way that would give them the capability to make a bomb is also by itself, without going to the actual making of a nuclear weapon, an existential deterrent.
I mean, this is a well-established concept in the literature of nonproliferation, proliferation studies that many countries around the world have aspired to in the past.
It's more or less an acceptable or accepted notion that countries believe that, to their advantage, to be perceived as having that capability without necessarily using it.
In fact, in most cases, there's reason to believe that countries would be prepared to live with simply having the existential deterrent, the capability without going to nuclear weapons.
Well, now, that kind of confuses me because, I mean, what is a breakout capability when you know that America and Israel have their nukes pointed at you, they're threatening war at you all day long?
For the Iranians to do anything with this so-called breakout capability, Gareth, wouldn't they have to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty, kick the IAEA inspectors out of the country and put Ahmadinejad on TV to say, yeah, we're going to start building nuclear bombs, now what?
And then, in that case, the war would start the next day and they wouldn't be able to have a nuke by the time that they were all dead anyway.
Or even if we didn't go on television, I mean, the mere fact of leaving the NPT and kicking the IAEA out would be a clear signal of the intention to go for nuclear weapons.
And that would be the kind of thing that I would think the Iranians are simply too sophisticated to engage in.
I mean, that's simply not the way they're going to operate, because they understand that there is such a thing as an existential deterrent, and because you give up the advantages of that by sort of overtly going to a nuclear weapon.
I simply don't think that that's going to be happening, and I don't think very many real specialists on Iran's nuclear program believe that either.
So, that's the fundamental point.
Then there's another point that I think is equally important to understand about the low-enriched uranium supply that they have now, and that is that it is the basis of their bargaining position, more broadly speaking, in their relations with the P5-plus-1, and particularly with the United States.
It is, in fact, the only reason that we can really identify that the United States is willing to sit down and bargain with Iran, or at least go through the motions of doing so.
And therefore, they're not going to give that away lightly.
And I think it's reasonable to assume that, in fact, there has been a kind of kabuki theater going on here, that when the Iranians agreed in principle to this in the first place, it was with the knowledge that, in the end, of course, they would make a counterproposal, which would have much more stringent conditions, which would probably be unacceptable to the P5-plus-1.
And so, I think we have to understand that the Iranian negotiating position, the leverage that they have really depends on not giving this away in one fell swoop, but husbanding it and using it as leverage for a broader deal, which is what they've always wanted.
They have other things that they want from the United States.
They want an end to the hostility, an end to the extremely constraining economic pressures by the United States on Iran, and they want to be accepted into the power structure, the formal power structure globally and in the Middle East, which has to be part of the deal as well.
Well, you know what's interesting to me about living in a bizarro world?
We have this evil CIA plot to tell the truth and try to stop a war.
What the hell is that?
I'm sorry?
We have what?
There's this evil CIA plot to continue debunking what the war party says about Iran's nuclear weapons.
Isn't that strange?
You put things in such ironic ways that it took me a second there to identify which we're talking about.
Well, and this has been going on since Bush came to power.
I mean, I remember reading there's that article by Anonymous and Salon.com called The State Department's Extreme Makeover.
David Wumser and John Bolton came in and turned the place upside down, kicked out all the old detente style waspy wasps and put in the neocon clique.
And there's been that kind of fight going on inside the intelligence agencies and state and all that kind of thing for years now.
And it seems like, well, and we talked about this at the time, you had Thomas Fingar and the National Intelligence Council basically waging and winning a diplomatic war against Dick Cheney to say publicly in a national intelligence estimate the official intelligence position of the United States of America is that the Iranians are not making nuclear weapons.
Right, and let's be clear about this.
What we're talking about in the intelligence community are not a bunch of wimpy liberal, you know, limp-wristed liberal hand-wringers.
These are tough guys who made their way up through a Cold War bureaucracy and who are hardliners.
They're basically all hardliners.
There are no exceptions to that.
I mean, you know, there are individuals here and there who are not going to be quite up to that level of ideological, you know, corresponding to the Cold War hardline thinking.
But by and large, you have an intelligence community that is very, very conservative and does not by any means lean toward sort of peacemaking thinking.
And that's why I think we have to understand that this 2007 NIE was so extraordinary in its defiance of the hardline being taken by the Cheney-Bush administration because the evidence in that case was so clear and so convincing.
And this is, of course, what the neocons and the extreme right in this country, and abroad as well, simply refused to accept.
They refused to acknowledge.
Yeah, well, and here's the thing about it, too, is that...
I actually went back and looked at this.
I had written a blog entry back in almost a year, maybe even more than a year before.
I think it was three years ago, right around three years ago in the fall of 2006 called Release the Iran NIE.
And it was about how the CIA and the National Intelligence Council had come out with this national intelligence system.
I think Philip Giraldi was the guy who broke the story at the American Conservative Magazine and said that Dick Cheney is trying to cover this up.
And he continued to successfully cover it up for a year.
It took more than a year before the damn thing finally came out.
And then here's the real point.
Earlier this year, in March, Admiral Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, testified under cross-examination by John McCain and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under oath that they still stand by that NIE.
And, of course, Newsweek reported, Mark Hosenball at Newsweek reported just, what, three weeks ago now?
Maybe four weeks ago now that the CIA has put official paperwork on the desk of the President of the United States saying that they still stand by that.
It was even in the New York Times that the CIA was in a fight with the Israelis and the Germans who were telling the Israeli line that there really is a nuclear weapons program there.
And they have staked out their ground and they're fighting for it.
And they're saying, no, there is not a nuclear weapons program in Iran in the fall of 2009.
This is not old, outdated information.
Well, you know, let me just first of all point out one thing about the 2007 NIE.
I mean, you know, I think that it certainly had a very positive impact.
No question about that.
It was perhaps the most important national intelligence estimate ever put out by the intelligence community in the entire history of its existence.
But at the same time, you know, there was a fundamental problem with that estimate.
And it was not the problem that the right wing has put forward all these years, these two years since it came out.
But rather it was the opposite.
It was the fact that the intelligence community could not muster the consensus to be able to say that, you know, the evidence indicates that Iran does not really have the desire or the intention to go for a nuclear weapon.
Instead, it's certainly interested in having the capability which would give it a virtual, you know, a virtual nuclear weapons capability without going to the weapon itself.
This was, in fact, as we know from Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer who was the person in charge of Middle East during the preparation of the previous two or three national intelligence estimates on Iran and who personally believed that Iran was not interested in going for a nuclear weapon and took that position in 2000, 2003, 2005, but was basically blocked by the weapons specialist, the technical people who had no interest in really understanding the intention of Iran and took the position that, you know, we're not interested in trying to estimate their intentions because we can never know anyway and so therefore we're just going to assume the worst.
And so what happened in 2007, this was after Pillar had left the agency and someone else had taken his place, this was the same effect, what happened was that the weapons specialist prevented any clear statement about Iranian intentions and so what you've gotten instead was a very muddled estimate in terms of the question of intentions.
On the one hand, on the other hand, there were contradictory statements in there, which in a sense prevented the intelligence community from really giving a clear cut answer to the most important question and really giving that estimate much more power to help guide policy makers in the right direction.
So I just want to point out that even though I think the estimate did have a positive impact, it was very much less than it would have been had it not been for the structural problem that in the intelligence community it is the weapons specialist, the technical guys and gals, who really do not have any interest in or even faith in the analysis of intentions, who really have prevailed and prevented the clear cut statement of the analysis that most analysts really have held for quite a while about Iranian intentions.
Well, and of course we don't want to get completely distracted off into this laptop and the basis, the role that it played in all this, but of course anybody can Google the name Gareth Porter and then Iran laptop and learn all about that stuff.
So let's talk about Qom, this new facility, this so-called secret facility.
I think probably anybody listening to this show is aware of the fact that the Obama administration was basically just lying and getting away with bloody murder and claiming that they were the reason that somehow the Iranians were forced to admit this secret thing when in fact they just notified the IAEA, by the way we are building this thing, you did an article recently about how basically going back to 2007, measuring up the dates and basically you seem to have made the judgment that the Iranians decided to, I guess go back to the earlier version of their agreements with the IAEA.
They were legally okay to do so and they did that in the beginning of 2007, right when Bush was really threatening to start a war.
That was when they decided that they would start building this Qom facility.
And again, just so everybody is clear, it's still an empty building, they just inspected it, it's not a secret bomb factory, but it is a separate part of their nuclear program, which you say in your recent article that they created that basically as a hedge against the threats that the United States was making.
It's not proof of their guilt, it's proof simply that they're trying to have a way to make sure they can keep their nuclear program going even if the Americans bomb them, right?
That's right, and I think we should try to reconstruct as best we can what the calculations, the thinking of the Iranian leadership would have been at that turning point in 2007.
And then later on, I mean, if you're faced with the prospect of a U.S. or U.S.
-Israeli attack on your nuclear facilities, then you can't sort of practice business as usual.
You have to really start thinking about what your options are.
And clearly they did do that in 2007.
I think, as I suggested in my article, that they were preparing for that, certainly preparing seriously for that possibility that they would be attacked, and thinking in terms of a backup facility for enrichment, and I presume they must have been thinking about backup facilities for conversion and other functions as well.
But they had to then continue to reassess this question of whether the threat of an attack was imminent, how serious it was, and if the threat of attack was receding, then the whole question of the function of this kind of backup facility then would begin to shift.
And I think undoubtedly, given what we now know about the Bush administration and the Obama administration, they understand that the threat of a U.S. attack has receded.
Now, they may still be worried about an Israeli attack, I'm not sure.
That's a bit more ambiguous.
But certainly they understand that there's been a shift in the degree of danger, a very significant diminution in the degree of danger.
And I think that that explains why they could then decide really to go public with that facility last month.
I'm sorry, I guess, yeah, still last month.
We're still in October.
And basically take advantage of that fact that they could go public in order to position themselves advantageously in the negotiations that they were then anticipating.
Bear in mind that the decision or the actual information given to the IAEA, which was September 21st, came only one week after the Iranian government announced that it would in fact enter into those talks with the P5-plus-1.
So there's very good reason to believe that it was in fact tied directly to their strategy for those talks.
And again, I haven't written this story yet, but I'm intending to do so in the near future.
I think it's also tied in with the fact that they have been working furiously on a new generation, a much more efficient generation of centrifuges, which they expect to put into this second enrichment facility, which clearly is much smaller than Natanz.
And we don't know exactly how much more efficient, but they have said publicly, and there's no reason to doubt that, in fact, I've been told by some specialists, more than one specialist, in the centrifuges that Iran is using, has used, that this is probably right, that they are five to six times more efficient than the IR-1, the actual IR-1 model of centrifuges that have been put into Natanz.
So that should be basically kept in mind when we think about the purpose of the second enrichment facility.
If you're putting in centrifuges that, let's say, are six times more efficient than the ones in Natanz, and then if you think about this as being sort of a backup for a period of time, but not the permanent facility by any means, you begin to see that there are many more ways in which this facility can be interpreted than to see it as somehow having been intended to be a covert facility for making a nuclear weapon.
All right, well, you know, it seems like there's so much contradictory stuff going on.
You know, we talked about the Jandala terrorists with Mohammed Sahimi on the show the other day.
You have all these threats and lies, while at the same time the administration is reaching out, while at the same time Hillary Clinton is saying, oh, well, you don't expect any success in any of this.
You know, that's some pretty great diplomacy by the Secretary of State there.
And we got the Congress trying to pass more sanctions, trying to, I guess, basically put a blockade on Iran to prevent them from importing any gasoline.
They have a limited refining capacity there.
And, you know, Ron Paul said in the House Foreign Relations Committee the other day, this is just what we're doing to Iraq.
This is saying if you're willing to put a blockade on a country, if you're willing to put harsher and harsher sanctions on a country, you're saying you're ready for open hostilities.
Man, this is an act of war.
I mean, if you look up blockade in the American Heritage Dictionary online, the first thing is an act of war, which includes, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, there's a serious war party that is still on the move here.
I don't know if you would say that they are trying to undermine Barack Obama's diplomacy here or whether they are part and parcel of it or what, but I wonder, you know, what do you make of this push for sanctions and what could that really mean if that happens?
It's a very important question.
And, you know, it's sort of ambiguous at this moment to what extent the move for sort of hard line move in the Congress for sanctions is undermining versus really being an essential part of the Obama diplomacy.
You know, I think the White House is not that clear itself.
You know, it's still a work in progress, and that's part of the problem, that the White House is really winging it.
I mean, all the evidence indicates, to me at least, that President Obama is winging it.
He's trying something, seeing what happens, then making up his mind about what to do about it rather than having a clear vision of what needs to be done diplomatically.
Well, now, he could have Rahm Emanuel call Harry Reid and say, hey, would you knock it off for a couple of weeks, man?
We're in the middle of something here, and that would happen, right?
Well, of course he could do that, and I think the fact that that hasn't been done suggests that there's a mix here of lack of vision, on one hand, and the tendency to go along with what he clearly recognizes is the dominant view in Congress under the obvious pressure from AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, and reflecting the political power that they dispose over Congress, that that in a White House that tends to bend with the wind on issues relating to Israel becomes part and parcel of the diplomacy itself.
I don't see any way that you can fail to see that as part of the mix that goes into decision-making on Iran in the White House.
And so this, to me, means that we're very far from being out of the woods, and that the worst is yet to come in terms of a crisis in U.S.
-Iran relations.
We're still on a path to confrontation.
The White House has not yet done anything decisive to veer away from that path of confrontation.
All right, everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist.
You can find what he writes at ipsnews.net and at antiwar.com.
No, pardon me.
Well, it'll forward anyway, but it's original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Doc.
My pleasure, Scott, as always.
