11/18/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show my friend Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
And you can find, I believe, everything that he writes at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back again.
Well, I really appreciate you joining me.
Now, I had this interview with Scott Ritter that was my pilot episode or part of my pilot episode on KPFK here in L.A.
And the problem was I did three interviews in an hour and just 20 minutes isn't enough to get to all the things that need getting to.
One of the things I really wanted to talk with Scott Ritter about and I didn't get a chance to ask him about was a particular part of the War Party's narrative about Iran's nuclear program that revolves around the newly revealed facility at Qom and particularly the story, Gareth, that this facility, you can tell by looking at it, I guess, is made to have a number of centrifuges that would be the perfect number of centrifuges for cranking out weapons-grade 90-plus percent pure uranium-235 to make bombs out of.
But you know, Gareth, it's just way too small for anyone to believe the story.
It's just not credible at all to think that this is actually for electricity, that the size of the place would allow for the proper number of centrifuges for this facility to be used simply to enrich to a measly 3.5 percent or 3.6 percent for industrial electricity-grade uranium.
And so I wonder if you know, what is the basis of that?
Is that simply a narrative kind of out of thin air or is there really something to that?
And true, false, otherwise, what do you say?
Well, the context of the Qom facility is the U.S. threat to bomb Iran.
I mean, this is the starting point.
You have to begin not with electricity versus nuclear weapons, but with Iran's determination to respond to the threat of U.S. and potentially Israeli as well, a bombing of not just the nuclear facilities, but obviously a very wide range of targets in Iran, which I think we now can see from the latest IAEA report that Iran's response to that did not begin in 2007, but began after the dual speeches by President George W. Bush in September 2001 and January 2002, the first one basically saying that any state which we perceive to be a sponsor of terrorism is going to be regarded from now on as an enemy or a hostile state, and the second one then linking Iran to Iraq and North Korea as the axis of evil with a very clear implication that these are three countries that we regard as having nuclear programs that we don't accept and which are in our scope if we are targeting them for action in the future.
And we now know, I think with reasonable certainty, that Iran did respond by beginning to prepare a whole set of what they called contingency centers, which were basically tunnel facilities dug into mountainsides where they could store various facilities and perhaps people as well in the event of a bombing attack by the United States.
And obviously some of these would be sort of an emergency facility to escape to, others would be facilities where they would actually store particularly sensitive things.
We now, I think, can put together the narrative, the account that the Iranians gave to the IAEA in their October 28 letter, which is in the latest report by the IAEA, and the satellite imagery which has been analyzed by Paul Brannan at ISIS, the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., which is alluded to also by the IAEA itself, although in a context that's very distorted.
I mean, the way they refer to it is very squirrelly, I have to say.
But we can put this evidence now together and begin to see that indeed there was a program from 2002 on to prepare for a U.S. bombing attack.
Okay, now that makes perfect sense, right?
Bush comes out, he declares him part of the Axis of Evil, all their cooperation in Afghanistan in the very beginning months of the Operation Enduring Justice or whatever they're notwithstanding.
And so they decide they want to build these, you say, contingency sites where, you know, if they bomb us here, we might be able to enrich there and whatever.
But now address the size of the actual facility, because now Natanz is pretty big.
Natanz has, I forget, what, 9,000-something centrifuges operating now.
It has a capacity to ultimately have as many as 50,000 centrifuges there.
And they say that now that's plausible, that you just want to make electricity, at least for the sake of this argument, that's plausible.
But the Qom facility is much smaller, so it must be for weapons, Gareth.
Okay, I mean, I'm getting there.
I need to have some connecting tissue, though, still, in order to put this in the proper context.
First of all, just remember that there's big changes that take place between the sort of the bow wave, if you will, the biggest expression of the Bush administration's threat to bomb Iran, which took place in late 2006, early 2007.
And then the discovery that construction was clearly taking place that suggested that this was an enrichment facility, which was really 2008, possibly, you know, I mean, 2007, but the most clear-cut construction is 2008.
What happened there?
What happened was that the threat began to recede.
I mean, it became clear by late 2007, by later 2007, that the administration was not on a path to really carry out that kind of aggressive attack against Iran.
There were various indicators that the high level of threat that appeared in early 2007 with the threat of three U.S. naval task forces with task groups converging in the Persian Gulf at the same time for the first time since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was the single biggest event that was a tip-off that the United States intended to carry out that kind of attack, then followed by this huge exercise with both naval and air forces at the same time in late March of 2007.
So then you get a decision to begin the construction apparently in early 2007 in response to that, it appears, but then the tide begins to recede, and what we can now perceive from the lack of any indication from U.S. intelligence, from U.S. officials and others that they have found evidence of any other sites is that they decided not to go ahead with the construction of any other sites.
Now, why should they go ahead with a single site?
What could be the theory behind that?
Let me suggest to you that the circumstances in which the Iranians decided to reveal this is a major clue as to the game that they're playing with the Qom site, and that is that they are hoping that the United States military and the Israeli military will be confounded by the inability to be sure that if they're planning an attack that they know exactly what all the targets are.
So this site, I am now more and more convinced, should be seen as a symbol, as a signal by the Iranians to the U.S. and Israeli militaries that they cannot be confident that they can carry out an attack and be sure that they can hit all of the sites that they want to to destroy the Iranian program completely.
So it's a way of deterring a U.S. attack.
It is neither for electricity nor for manufacturing a bomb.
It is for deterrence.
I understand that I'm the only person on the face of the earth outside of perhaps Iran who is viewing it this way, but I suggest that if you look at all the evidence that that's what it is.
Well, you know, Glenn Greenwald points out on his blog that, here's Wolf Blitzer on CNN talking about, wow, neat, the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever, and this is what we used to bomb the hell out of Iran when we bombed the hell out of Iran.
You know, can't let them have nuclear bombs.
Yeah, we might have to bomb them with these great new bombs, the earth penetrator.
Wow, that sounds neat, he says, and goes on and on.
And Greenwald says, yeah, well, you know, why in the world would the Iranians ever want to build a nuclear facility into the side of a mountain somewhere or want to keep one off the radar screen of the Americans?
And especially, it's all mixed with the hypocrisy of saying that Iran is some kind of threat because they keep threatening to bomb other countries and so forth, which they actually don't keep doing.
We're the ones who keep doing that, and everybody knows we got thousands of H-bombs, and that's not even a secret.
So, it's funny, you know, you have all the hypocrisy, the built-in proof of the lie is in the accusation, at the same time that they're still threatening war based on wild interpretations of facts that are much more plausibly explained by you.
That means, in fact, the exact opposite.
You are correct.
I really do believe that hypocrisy is the headline of this story.
I mean, it is at the center of this story in the way it has been spun by the U.S. government, now by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and, of course, by their willing collaborators or servants, particularly the U.S.
-based and European-based media.
But let me suggest that hypocrisy is one way of looking at something that is even much more serious.
I mean, hypocrisy is kind of the moral judgment, I mean, it's a fair moral judgment, agreed, of this phenomenon that we're talking about.
But behind that is a more serious problem, and that is that the U.S. government, the U.S. media, and political leadership in this country, and I must say in the rest of the industrialized world, do not appear to have the capacity to think in terms of what the Iranians would actually be doing and thinking.
From their perspective, given the objective situation that we've been talking about, that was really begun implicitly in 2001, 2002, and then ramped up in early 2007, late 2006, of bombing Iran.
A bombing campaign which, by the way, we know would not simply be pinpoint attacks on a few targets, but would be hundreds of targets and would cause tens of thousands of civilian casualties.
And so what we're really looking at here is the unwillingness and or inability of political leadership and elites across a number of countries and institutions, the inability and unwillingness to understand the perspective of the so-called enemy.
And that is precisely the kind of inability or unwillingness that leads to war.
And that's why this is so frightening.
It's not just morally outrageous, it's truly frightening.
Well, it's certainly frightening.
But it seems to me, you know, it's the same with the run-up to Iraq or even with the economic crisis, where the question is always, is this stupidity or the plan?
And, of course, the answer is it's always both, right?
Some people know they're liars.
Other people believe the lies and parrot them.
Some people read the New York Times and they see David Sanger and William J. Broad up there and they say, well, this must be right.
And so then they just internalize that.
Others figure out what they know from listening to the Michael Savage show or something like that.
People in and out of government come to their conclusions from all different ways.
And, of course, with this issue, probably more than any other, people are willing to defer to what they see as expertise because it's complicated nuclear stuff.
And are you really going to figure out how a supercritical chain fission explosion works or something?
You've got to go ahead and let somebody else tell you what's right and what's wrong.
That's something that's this specializing knowledge.
You've got to trust the experts, particularly on a nuclear issue.
I think you're right that this is an additional element of the problem that goes beyond the normal manipulation of opinion.
But behind all that, though, is that some of these people, they just know they're liars.
I mean, come on, John Bolton says, look, the whole reason that we're lying and beating them over the head with the NPT that they are following is because we're trying to force them to throw up their hands and quit the NPT.
Then we'll have a better excuse to kill them.
I mean, that's not a secret.
Yes, that's true that the neocons have their own sense of morality about the perfectly acceptable notion of lying.
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
So they are playing their game theory and they are figuring out, well, what would Iran's response be?
And they're trying to get Iran to do like the North Koreans and say, fine, we'll just quit the NPT then.
Unfortunately, it's not the neocons who are really propounding this narrative that we're talking about here.
It's sort of centrist liberal media and political leaders now who have inherited this problem and who are doing precisely the same thing, or if not precisely the same thing, then roughly the same thing that the previous administration did with regard to Iran, to basically suggest that the Iranians have no right to have any notion of self-defense or the right to decide for themselves what their defense policy would be, what their needs are, or whether they have the right to enrich uranium and have a nuclear industry that we regard as unnecessary and a problem because it will always mean that they have the ability to go nuclear if they decide to do it.
So I'm just pointing to the fact that we're facing a much more fundamental problem here than we thought we had, perhaps at least some of us thought we had a few years ago when the neocons were really riding high.
Well now, part of this new nuclear deal that Obama is trying to get the Iranians to go along with is that they'll ship their uranium at 3.6% U-235 to Russia.
That'll make it 20-something percent, which is the proper grade for their medical isotope reactor.
But then the Russians will ship it to France and make fuel rods out of it, and then they'll ship it back to Iran for them to use in their reactor.
And so it's, I guess, technically highly enriched uranium at 20-something percent, but still far, far from weapons-grade.
No, I don't think they would call it high-enriched.
It's in between, so you've got to have a different terminology for it.
Well, weapons-grade means 90-plus percent pure uranium-235 and nothing lower than that to get the kind of reaction that you need in order to actually detonate an atom bomb.
But so, you know, another thing that came up when I was talking with Scott Ritter, in fact I kind of ran out of time and didn't really get to go into this too far, but basically he said that it was a poison pill, that the idea that the stuff has got to get shipped to France to be made into fuel rods is the deal killer, because of course the Iranians will be paranoid that the French will just break the deal and not give the stuff back.
And so here's the New York Times from today.
Iran will not ship uranium abroad, minister says.
I guess this broke just before the show started today.
And it says that the foreign minister, Mattaki, told a student news agency called ISNA that Iran would consider a simultaneous swap of its nuclear fuel for other uranium.
But he told them definitely Iran will not send its 3.5% enriched fuel out.
So do you agree that it was a poison pill in the first place?
And do you think that this newspaper article rings right, that the deal is dead and it's not going to happen at all?
It depends on what you mean by poison pill.
If a poison pill is one that is known in advance to be a deal killer, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure of that.
Yeah, that is what I meant.
Like the Rambouillet Accord, where you let us occupy your entire country, including your presidential palace, otherwise we're bombing you.
And then they call it a peace accord.
That's what I'm talking about, a poison pill that's deliberately, like a bill in Congress, where somebody adds something horrible to deliberately kill it.
Let me come back to that question and why I'm not so sure that it's a poison pill.
I think that it is and was a deal killer all along, not so much because of the French connection, though.
I think it's essentially the primary reason is that this is a deal that the Iranians understood perfectly well, was not going to really get them anything in terms of being closer to being able to make a deal with the United States that would meet Iran's basic interests.
In fact, it would move it further away from that.
And the reason, of course, is quite clear, that the whole point of this proposal was to have Iran divest itself of its main bargaining chips, which are its low and rich uranium supplies.
And they would be out of the country for close to a year.
And during that year then, the United States would be in a position to push the Iranians to do things that the Iranians would not be in a strong bargaining position to resist.
I mean, they would simply have to wait for another year in order to be able to be in a stronger bargaining position with the United States and its allies.
So from that point of view, Iran was weakening its position at the bargaining table.
And if there's one thing that you can count absolutely on the Iranians not being willing to do, it's weakening their bargaining position.
Even if they wanted to have the fuel for their reactor in Tehran for medical isotopes.
And they were quite serious about that.
I think that was a significant interest that they had.
But it does not rise to the level of strategic importance such that they're willing to basically give up their bargaining position, their main bargaining chip.
To be frank, the bargaining position is breakout capability, right?
They do have enough, as Brodin Sanger liked to say, enough low-enriched uranium to make a bomb if they were to withdraw from the NPT, get out of the safeguards agreement, and enrich all of it to weapons grade.
It's a breakout capability or the ability to reach a breakout capability.
And of course, they still have the capability over time to do that.
But let's face it, I mean, the United States only becomes, its attention is really focused on Iran only to the extent that it really is afraid of a breakout capability.
That's correct.
And so the Iranians are extremely sensitive to that.
And they are not willing to just simply wait another year in order to be in a position to say to the United States, yeah, you've got to deal with us.
It's time to make a deal.
And believe me, I mean, there's no question in my mind that the primary purpose of the nuclear program over the past few years, the way in which the Iranians have moved up the ladder of enrichment since 2005, 2006, has been to position themselves to make a deal.
It's basically to get the United States, to force the United States to the table.
And you can see from their behavior, their statement, particularly Ahmadinejad's statement, that they now feel that they've gotten to that place.
Right.
Ahmadinejad has come out in favor of this thing and tried to push for it, right?
Well, be careful now.
Ahmadinejad has come out in favor of some kind of deal, an arrangement, under which Iran would get the 20% enriched uranium fuel rod for its medical isotope facility in Tehran.
But he was proposing it on a commercial basis.
Yeah, I guess I was just thinking, I was kind of oversimplifying.
I was just thinking more generally of, he was making positive statements about, yeah, we think we can work out a deal here.
He was a good cop to commend this bad cop on this.
You are correct.
I mean, he was making a big deal out of it precisely because...
I mean, we're the cops, don't get me wrong.
Because he understands that Iran is finally in a position, has been in that position for the last couple of years now, to make a deal with the United States.
They feel that finally, after all these years, after 30 years, or nearly 30 years of not being strong enough, from their point of view, to bargain with the United States, they are now there.
Well, I mean, wait, haven't they been there since 2002 and 2003?
They made your great article in the American Prospect, the burnt offering, that Hillary Mann and Flint Leverett told you all about.
And then there was the story of the golden offer, what Gordon Prather called the golden offer that I believe was in 2004, in their dealings with the E3, the French, Brits, Germans, on our behalf supposedly.
They made that offer about internationalizing their whole program, where basically the facilities would stay in Iran, but it would be European companies would own the things officially, and it would be an international consortium with the involvement of our closest NATO allies in their nuclear program, and then that ought to put everyone's mind at ease.
They've been trying to make deals the whole time.
They were our best friends, they still are our best friends in Iraq.
I mean, you're right that they believed that their bargaining position was much better in 2003 than it had been in 1998, no question about that.
But again, there's a nuance here of some importance.
First of all, the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, was somewhat lukewarm, was not totally enthusiastic about the 2003 initiative.
This was coming primarily from Khatami, from the President, and not so much from the Supreme Leader.
By 2006, on the other hand, once they actually had the uranium enrichment going, then Khamenei really felt, OK, now we're in position to be able to get the Americans' attention.
So it is a matter of degree, but certainly 2006, much stronger perception of bargaining position than 2003.
2003, much stronger than 1998.
And then you're saying 2009, strongest of all?
Yes, absolutely.
All right, well, jeez, I sort of wish you were on the National Security Council, but then you wouldn't be such a great journalist.
I do, and I probably would have sold my soul, so I wouldn't be the same person, would I?
This show would be all about the terrible things that Gareth Porter did today.
Instead of what great journalism that you continue to crank out there, everybody look at original.antiwar.com slash porter.
Thanks again very much for your time on the show today.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.