12/03/09 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And it's time to welcome back our regular guest, Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist, writes for IPS News.
That's IPSNews.net.
And also writes at Antiwar.com.
The address there is Original.
Antiwar.com slash Porter.
And I think if you just go to Antiwar.com slash Porter, it'll forward you on there.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Thanks as always, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Appreciate having you here.
Now, you know, people can tune in to pretty much any radio show and find out that, okay, Obama's ordered an escalation of troops.
And I guess if they're listening to right-wing radio, they can hear about how it should have been 80,000 like the Pentagon wanted, or something like that.
But it seems like people listening to chaos this afternoon are lucky to actually have some real analysis of what's going on here, especially the article I'm thinking of is how Obama himself and his political operatives have already debunked their own case for the escalation in Afghanistan.
Why don't you tell us about that?
It's a fascinating back story here that we have surrounding his speech because, you know, I've been tracking the decision-making process in the Obama administration for weeks and weeks in anticipation of this historic moment.
And, you know, basically what happened is pretty much what I expected, that Obama caved in to the senior national security advisors surrounding him, all of whom were lined up neatly by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Obama's choice to be held over from the Bush administration for political purposes, to get them lined up behind a compromise formula, which clearly was sold by Gates to the White House as the only possible way out of his dilemma, so that basically...
Which was not the Afghanistan war dilemma, which was his political dilemma in dealing with the generals.
Exactly.
His political dilemma, which is you can't afford to put yourself on the wrong side of the generals, to be absolutely at odds with them.
This was made clear, I'm sure, to Obama, as if he didn't already believe that.
But at the same time, Obama has to square himself somehow to keep his Democratic Party coalition together, so he can't appear to have been completely supine, and therefore Obama has to get something out of this.
And what Obama got was, you know, that clearly this is not a military mission, which is aimed at destroying or eliminating the Taliban movement.
He made that abundantly clear, it was quite explicit, and interestingly so, that it's a very limited military mission here of sort of denting the Taliban or weakening them.
On the other hand, basically McChrystal gets essentially all of the troops that he could have reasonably hoped for, given the realities of troop availability, and essentially is able to carry on his counterinsurgency war, as I think pretty much he wished.
So, you know, both sides get something, but nobody's going to be happy about this, and certainly not those people who want to have a rational foreign policy.
Yeah, well, certainly not them.
But what I was coming to essentially is that in the process of trying to establish a kind of sort of a defense against the anticipated troop request for 40,000 troops, basically Obama debunked the idea that the Taliban is somehow really dependent on Al-Qaeda or is bound to be stupine in the face of Al-Qaeda demands to provide a safe haven for Al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, or really is really interested in continuing a global jihad campaign in cooperation with Al-Qaeda once they would be able to gain power.
And he basically had the message go out through his operatives in the White House to the New York Times that the Taliban is now considered not to be a sworn enemy of the United States.
It is not a global jihadist outfit, but a group that's dedicated to its own Afghan interests, its political interests in Afghanistan.
You know, I know you have all kinds of great intelligence sources for a lot of your work.
Has anybody, I guess it's, Phil Giraldi has said, you know, that if you ask the CIA or the State Department, they'd tell you that maybe there's a thousand actual real terrorists in the whole world.
But I wondered, has anybody told you how many Arabs, which I guess we're supposed to believe that any Arab in the northwestern region of Pakistan or that kind of border region of Afghanistan is automatically, you know, the servant of Ayman al-Zawahiri, and I don't know if there's any reason that anyone should believe that at all, but how many Arab Afghan quote-unquote Mujahideen types are up there anywhere?
I mean, maximum number here.
What are we talking about?
Probably a couple of dozen.
A couple of dozen people.
This is what I thought.
I mean, the people that they're talking about, the hundred or two hundred that they talk about in all these reports are in fact not Arabs.
They're basically Pashtuns from across the border who are being trained, you know, in Pakistan and undoubtedly reflect more of a jihadist perspective on balance than the Afghan Taliban who are being recruited within the country.
But the actual Arab contingent is just tiny.
It's really just a few dozen.
So basically, this entire mission, it might as well be based on Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program at this point.
Well, I think that is precisely right.
I mean, the point really here is that Gates and Mullen, who testified yesterday and pronounced really a whole new set of bogus national security arguments for the war in Afghanistan, are essentially doing what the military and the Pentagon have done for foreign wars ever since the beginning of the Vietnam War, which is to make up their national security rationale out of whole cloth.
They're making up something that they have absolutely no evidence for, in which I think in fact the intelligence community has been passing on information which directly contradicts this in no uncertain terms.
And I can tell you exactly what's been passed on to officials that is completely inconsistent with those ideas, the idea being that the Taliban and al-Qaeda have a symbiotic relationship, that they are both basically dedicated to the same kind of jihadism, that the victory of one is going to redound to the success of the other, and so on and so forth.
The reality that I am quite sure that both Mullen and Gates have been informed about quite clearly is that over the last couple of years, the Taliban has been asserting quite clearly, quite explicitly, that it does not agree with, and in fact quite vociferously opposes, the al-Qaeda strategy of attacking the Pakistani government.
After all, the Pakistani government is the Taliban's main ally.
The Taliban have really depended, not on al-Qaeda, but on the Pakistani government for its support for the last several years.
It has been extremely important to the Taliban, particularly in allowing them to return with such strength since 2005.
And so the fundamental strategic difference between al-Qaeda, which is supporting an all-out attack against the Pakistani government and military, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, which is opposed to that, gives the lie to this entire new set of national security rationales for the war.
I wonder about that too.
I know that there have been some suicide attacks and things.
That's really the only argument that they have to support this notion of a symbiotic relationship, is the fact that there have been suicide attacks which are not characteristic of the Afghan Taliban in the past.
Absolutely true.
Part of the story then is that there's been all this blowback for any kind of Islamic militants, Taliban, al-Qaeda, or anybody else in Pakistan.
But I wonder if some of those are bogus.
I saw an interview with Jeremy Scahill after his recent article in The Nation magazine, or at least on their website, about the CIA using Blackwater inside Pakistan.
It was Amy Goodman interviewing him, and she ran a clip of one of the Pakistan Taliban guys saying, you know, we're not doing these suicide bombings, and nobody who we know is doing these suicide bombings.
We think it's the CIA and their mercenaries and whatever doing them in order to discredit us.
You know, that only seems, you know, it doesn't seem that kooky to me.
I mean, obviously I'm not saying you'd take that guy's word for it or anything like that.
But then again, you know, it does seem stupidly counterproductive from their point of view to do suicide bombings against civilians inside Pakistan.
But it does make sense if you were the CIA trying to discredit them inside Pakistan.
At the very least, we can say this much, that those sorts of bombings, particularly, for example, a bombing of a marketplace in Peshawar, Pakistan, is not the kind of thing that the disciplined, mainstream, even Pakistani Taliban movement has carried out.
This is a splinter of a splinter of a splinter, if you will.
It is at most a very, it's an offshoot, which is very outside the normal discipline of one of these organizations.
And certainly it is very suspicious.
What is interesting, clearly, is that none of the Pakistani Taliban organizations take credit for this, want to have anything to do with that sort of operation.
And it is characteristic, however, you have to recognize, of the Taliban itself.
Excuse me, of the Al-Qaeda itself.
That is the kind of thing, of course, that...
But then again, there's only a couple of dozen of them.
That's right.
I mean, what does that even mean?
A couple of dozen of them are doing suicide bombings like that?
Well, I mean, I think it is quite credible that you have only a very small, a tiny number of people who are carrying out suicide bombings.
They obviously create much greater mayhem per person than any other type of operation.
And so you don't have to have a large core of recruits to carry out suicide bombings.
Do you think that bin Laden and Zawahiri are both in Pakistan?
I mean, that's what everybody seems to just say or accept.
Obama certainly just asserted it.
I've always assumed that, but we don't know for sure.
It's possible that they are still in the eastern, southeastern part of Afghanistan or the eastern provinces of Afghanistan.
You know, it's certainly the case.
I mean, I've been studying the Pashtun provinces of Afghanistan.
And what's very striking to me is that you have a huge, I mean, really vast area of Pashtun Afghanistan that stretches all the way from the western border near Herat all the way to Kunar province on the Pakistani border.
And that there are some, I don't know, seven, eight million people, almost all.
I mean, you know, 90 to 95 percent of them are Pashtun in this area.
It's a contiguous area in which the Taliban and their allies have the ability to roam pretty much freely.
I mean, the number of troops that the United States and NATO countries have in this truly vast land area of southern Afghanistan all the way from west to east, that number is so small that it really does not impede the free movement of the Taliban from one end of the Taliban territory to the other.
So one has to be impressed at the wide area in which someone could hide in that part of Afghanistan.
No question about it.
I mean, that's a possibility.
Yeah, it's funny.
Here's this landlocked country with no state, 8,000 miles away or 7,000-something miles away or something like that.
And we're supposed to believe that these people are a threat to America when, you know, never mind the commission or whatever.
You've got James Bamford and Lawrence Wright, people like that, who've written this story.
And it turns out that the guys that did 9-11, the pilots who were the core of the Hamburg cell, these guys were Egyptian graduate students in engineering school, at least some of them, in Hamburg, Germany.
Right.
And I guess, you know, they went to Afghanistan, a few of them, Ramzi bin al-Shir, Muhammad al-Thawli, went to Afghanistan to say, hey, look, we want to do y'all's mission because we're that pissed off or whatever.
But it wasn't Afghanistan that was the key to anything.
And any idiot can hijack a fuel truck and crash it into something.
You don't have to be controlled by Pakistani tribesmen somehow to do a terrorist attack in America.
And everybody knows it.
It's really worse than Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program as an excuse.
It really is.
I agree with you, Scott.
It is the most cockamamie argument from national security ever made for a war.
And that needs to be the subject of loud and long protest.
Let me, if I may, just change the subject or sort of revert back to what I was just talking about.
Sure.
Sorry.
Yeah, I have my own chip on my shoulder, obviously.
Go ahead.
It's an important issue that I don't want to diminish.
But at the same time, we have another equally important issue that is raised by the fundamental geographic, geopolitical realities of Afghanistan.
And that is the ridiculous notion that the United States military is going to go in there and somehow gain control over this Taliban movement and over Pashtun nationalism or the Pashtun movement against the central government and its Tajik and Hazara allies.
The idea is absurd because, as I was just saying, of the size of the territory that is involved here.
If the United States should send another 10,000 or 20,000 troops to Helmand province, Helmand is a huge, huge province.
It is roughly, I'm not sure if I'm going to get this right, but it's certainly not that far from the size of the effective territory of South Vietnam in which the United States troops operated during the Vietnam War.
It's very comparable to the entire territory of South Vietnam, the effective territory of South Vietnam in which U.S. troops operated.
And Afghanistan as a whole is about the size of Texas, right?
That's correct.
My point here is that one of the interesting comparisons between Vietnam and Afghanistan that I've just been making in the last day or two is that when you actually look at it, most of the territory of South Vietnam was a thin strip of land about 25 to 40 miles wide from the northern tip of South Vietnam down to the Mekong Delta.
It was a tiny strip of land which U.S. troops and Air Force, even more so, could easily patrol.
And it was easy for the United States to essentially destroy the entire inhabited area that the Viet Cong controlled, which is exactly what they did.
They went in and simply bombed the entire Viet Cong area of Central Vietnam, the strongest area of Viet Cong political and military control.
And then, of course, you had the Mekong Delta, which was somewhat larger.
But, again, Afghanistan is so much larger than this.
And to think that U.S. troops are going to make a dent on this movement in the long run is sheer lunacy.
And to his credit, I have no use for the supine position that Obama has taken in relation to the military in sending these troops.
But to his credit, he did, in fact, force the military to agree that the military mission was not going to be to defeat the Taliban or to uproot them, but rather to put a dent in them.
And I'm quite sure that what Obama is doing here is laying the groundwork for future negotiated settlements.
Well, see, I wonder about all that.
I mean, I guess I saw this coming, too.
Well, I guess you saw it coming.
Explain to me on the show why I saw it coming.
The basically compromise where we send in more troops, but we try to define down the goals of the mission to something more limited.
And yet, I mean, I don't know, because the speech the other night was so full of contradictions.
On one hand, he said, you know, we're going to put 30,000 troops in, and then we're going to start pulling them out again in 18 months.
But then on the other hand, he said, you know, as they stand up, we'll stand down, and we're going to build up their military force, and we're going to make the Karzai government the legitimate government of the country and all this other nonsense.
Right, and as Jon Stewart pointed out, he was basically channeling George Bush in much of this speech, let's face it.
It was a Bush-like speech fundamentally.
Yeah, Glenn Greenwald had a great write-up of that, too, where he actually just took the announcement of the Bush surge in Iraq and transposed all the Bush administration answers with the Barack Obama administration ones in there.
Right, so it was really quite poisonous rhetoric.
I would say 98% of it or 99% of it was quite poisonous.
See, everybody wants to believe in the secret Obama where you take the best part, and it must be that he's trying to do good, but where's the good?
I think that he is wrongly under the impression that a Democratic president cannot stand up to the military, and that that defines his posture.
It defines sort of 80, 85% of his posture, and then he's got another 15 or 20% left in which he feels where he can maneuver, and that's what he's trying to do.
I don't think that leaves us with a very bright future at all, and I foresee years and years ahead.
I mean, of course, he's probably going to be a one-term president, but in the remainder of his term as president, I see one battle after another between him and the military in which he's going to, over and over again, have to experience this tension between what he knows to be true and what he feels that he must say and do because of his presumed position of not being able to go directly against the military, that he must make concessions to the military to keep them happy somehow.
Yeah, well, what foolishness.
I guess this goes along with what you say about the more powerful you get, the dumber you get, and the more narrow your vision is because, of course, how brave would it be for him to stand up to them and say, no, I'm the alpha male around here, and what I say goes, and I say we're getting out of there.
How do you like that?
People would rally to that if he's actually being a man about it and doing the right thing and staring down his opposition.
People with conservatives who are anti-war would say, yeah, see, there you go.
I absolutely agree with you, and I think that the real problem is… What would Ron Paul do?
How would Ron Paul vote?
That's what he ought to be asking himself.
What would Ron say?
Ron would say, you know what, generals?
You're wrong.
I'm the boss, not you.
If you don't like it, quit.
We're bringing the troops home now.
How do you like that?
And that would be the end of that.
Well, I don't think it would be the end of it, but I think that he would.
I think you're right.
He would rally much greater support, and in the end he would win.
And I think what we're seeing in this pattern of behavior is essentially that the Democratic Party has bred a couple of generations, more than a couple of generations, several generations of political leaders who share this common notion that in order to be a real president, they have to somehow be in line with the national security elite of the country.
In other words, they have internalized the values that lead them down that path.
It's not simply a matter of being under pressure, but they have a set of values that they have somehow internalized, which lead them to go along with it, and that's the real problem.
Tell me what you know about this guy Jim Jones.
I guess he was put there to help protect Obama, but whose side is he on?
I will tell you what I've heard about Jones.
It's something rather contradictory.
On one hand, I understand that he has in the past said that he had been offered the position before Obama of CENTCOM commander, but turned it down if it meant that there would be an ongoing U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan.
Now, I can't verify that, so that's sort of raw intelligence.
I haven't been able to confirm it.
On the other hand, I'm told that he's not the brightest bulb in the collection of Christmas bulbs, and that he does in fact tend to be the kind of personality who will go along rather than put up a strong intellectual argument in the sort of internal intra-administration fights that go on over something like Afghanistan.
The interesting question to me is what role he played in the final phase of decision-making on Afghanistan this time around.
He, of course, was supposed to be helping Obama defend against the McChrystal request for tens of thousands of troops by articulating an argument that precisely opposed the national security rationale for Afghanistan, by saying that the Taliban really is not like Al-Qaeda, just the message that was leaked by Obama to the New York Times.
And he did kind of do that in the interview with CNN in early October.
But then when we come down to late October, early November, it begins to look like Jim Jones was part of the cabal that Gates put together of Obama's key national security advisors who got together and basically united behind the Gates proposal.
And I think that had Jim Jones stood up at that point and said, no, I'm not going to abandon the president.
It might have been helpful because the president, you know, the last thing on earth the president wants is to have to face a united set of top national security advisors opposed to it.
And so I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that in the end, Jones was part of that cabal and went along with the Gates proposal for a 30,000 troop increase.
All right.
Well, let me change the subject to something even worse.
Iraq.
I did an interview with Scott Ritter yesterday.
It'll be up on the website.
You'll like it.
It's a revisionist history of going back and relearning the entire 1990s policy of weapons inspections and of pretending Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction of all different descriptions and the policy of keeping Scott Ritter and his colleagues from proving the negative in Iraq so that they would have the issue for regime change later, the lies that led to war and all kinds of great things.
But one of the things he said at the end, which unfortunately we didn't get a chance to get into too much, he said that the apparent failure of Maliki and the Iraqi parliament to work out an election law.
And I guess this is tied up with the dispute over who controls Kirkuk, that this means that the surge didn't work.
Just like we told you, the benchmarks weren't made, just like we told you.
And the temporary solution is now going to fall apart, and Iraq will very likely descend back into...
I mean, obviously there's terrible violence every single day there, as anyone who reads antiwar.com knows.
But this could turn back into a full-scale battle between different militias and all that kind of thing, like the worst of days of 2006 and 2007 again.
And that means that the whole game for the SOFA-slash-Obama plan for withdrawal from Iraq is basically off, as I guess could have been predicted by the cynics among us.
But do you think that that's really right?
What's going on there, Gary?
Well, I mean, I don't know in terms of inside information at all what's going to happen there.
But I mean, you know what my basic sort of analytical constructs have been, that I do in fact believe that al-Maliki has an interest in seeing the SOFA carried out, as of course does Iran, no question about that.
I mean, this is a fundamental point of common interest between Maliki as a Shia nationalist.
On one hand, Iraqi Shia nationalist on one hand, and Iran's Shia regime on the other, that they do not want to give the United States an excuse for sort of a semi-permanent occupation of the country by any means.
And so I don't assume that a sort of a hiccup, if you will, in the plan for carrying out the SOFA, which is a delay in this election, is in fact going to have that effect.
I could be wrong, but I mean that, you know, I'm basing this on sort of a deeper analysis of the interests of the key parties here.
Well, I know you're in agreement with Patrick Comer about this too, which is that Maliki succeeded in positioning himself to where basically he has to throw us out or he can't be prime minister anymore.
His allies made their deal to be his allies based on the promise that he really means it.
I think that's correct.
I think that's precisely right.
And that's how he got the status of forces agreement that he got that actually has a total withdrawal and not 58 bases in it.
That's true.
I mean, of course, that was never going to happen.
What about the guys in the Pentagon?
Do they remember, and I think you reported this at the time you covered this, and I went back and found the link, NBC, just before Obama gave his Camp Lejeune speech in February announcing the withdrawal from Iraq, Jim Michalczewski, NBC News said, well, you know, I don't know what the president's talking about, but I'm reporting live here from the Pentagon where it's official, we're staying for 50 years.
Yeah, of course, you know, that's what the Bush administration had in mind, no question about it.
That was their plan.
They were going to be staying there nicely ensconced with an official long term agreement with Iraq, sort of to give them legal cover.
Well, I mean, this was after Bush signed the agreement.
This was minutes before Obama went live to say, I am continuing the Bush policy.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I do not know.
I do not know who he was talking to at that at that moment.
But I mean, certainly it would reflect at that point, the ideas of the Odierno's and Petraeus's of the world who, who still, you know, they were they were upset with Bush's, with Bush's what they thought was a cave in to the to the Iranians.
And and to to Maliki, they thought Bush should have been tougher.
At least that's that's the message that came out of Nancy Youssef in October of 2007.
But but I was just I was thinking back to the time when when there was a lot of talk about not just from Miklosevsky, but from the Bush administration, from Gates and others in the administration, including Bush himself, talking, you know, citing South Korea as the model and all that sort of thing.
And, you know, see, I'm quite sure that Maliki mousetrapped the Bush administration into this process by letting them think that that's what would be the result.
They they I mean, Maliki clearly knew all along he was never going to give them that kind of a deal.
But he didn't say so until he was in a position to lock Bush in.
And that was that was when he had Obama as the Democratic Democratic candidate for president, who was taking a position that was even beyond what Maliki had called for and which, therefore, you know, Bush had had a reason for wanting to reach agreement with Maliki.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, looks like he really pulled it off.
With a reporter named Michael Hastings.
I don't know if you know him.
No.
But he was a reporter in Iraq for quite a while and wrote a book about it.
And he's, I guess, a freelance guy, writes for GQ, different things.
And I put that question to him and and he said he didn't want to say Maliki was a genius necessarily, but he sure pulled off a pretty magnificent political move here as far as, you know, the political game is played.
He really set the chessboard up just right for himself.
I think he did pretty well.
But, of course, it's in the context where, you know, he was dealing with a government, i.e., the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military, who were quite clueless about understanding the nuances and complexities of dealing with with a Shia Arab regime.
And they also saw me.
He he's just a minor cleric.
Don't worry about him.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the fact is that even the smartest of the of the lot, and I consider Petraeus to be smarter than than the average military type and smarter than most of the people in the Bush administration, was really over his head in the in in Iraq, in the context of the Maliki regime and the complexities of Shia politics in Iraq particularly.
All right.
Well, now let me ask you about Iran.
As we all know, as again, discussed with Scott Ritter on the show yesterday, the American people hear the word nuclear.
And if the government says that means weapons danger, then that's good enough for them, because after all, nuclear technology is complicated.
And who wants to bother, you know, being a citizen?
The bell rings and we all salivate, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, after all, I got to admit, you know, if I didn't just have Dr. Prather's articles at my fingertips to understand all these nuclear matters and this and that, and the difference between this and that, you know, it'd be pretty difficult for me to you know, I don't know whether I would have delved into trying to figure out all this stuff myself.
I mean, I would have had you.
But, you know, I've learned a lot from Dr. Prather.
And so I'm just lucky that way.
Most people aren't lucky that way to understand the differences between this and that.
And all that, you know, he was also an advisor to senators.
So he explains the ins and outs of the treaties and how they work so well with the safeguards agreements and all that stuff.
And and really takes a lot of the the, you know, kind of trust us, you know, out of the narrative.
You don't have to trust them at all.
Here's all the facts.
And they're playing his day and they completely contradict what the war party says.
Anybody who reads Prather knows that anybody who doesn't doesn't know that.
And this is a real problem.
And especially when TV's reporting, hey, they're going to make 10 new uranium sites.
It's a nuclear bomb.
We're going to die.
Does that mean that?
I mean, what are we really still on the path to war with Iran, Gareth, based on this ridiculous nonsense?
Possibly.
Yes.
Yes.
I think it's still a possibility.
You know, I would put the odds at, you know, not not far from 50 50 at this at this point.
I mean, you know, it's that's being that's being pessimistic.
But I think it's pessimism that is not not unwarranted because because of the politics in this country being stacked so strongly in favor of confrontation with Iran.
And again, you know, you have the same problem of a Democratic president who is afraid to stand up to those people who are urging that confrontation on him.
And I think that's why we had a really stupid diplomatic posture going into the talks with Iran of demanding something that, you know, I have to admit, in retrospect, I didn't look at carefully enough early enough in terms of its political implications for the Iranians.
But but as I finally pointed out in the latter stage of this, the Iranians recognized that what was going on was that Gary Seymour, the adviser to Obama on WMD, was was coming up with this idea of, oh, let's let's demand that the Iranians give up their entire basically their entire low enriched uranium stockpile for, like, most of the year so that we can crow to the Israelis.
Look what we did.
See, we were able to control the Iranians.
We don't need we don't need you.
And, you know, we can we can get we can get by because we're so clever that that ultimately did not pass the laugh test in Tehran.
And interestingly, despite the fact that supposedly diplomacy for the right wing was was supposed to have the purpose of of dividing the Iranian political elite, it had exactly the opposite effect, because everybody from Ali Larajani, the very conservative national security adviser and nuclear negotiator, under Qasemi and the early period of Ahmadinejad to Mousavi, the the Green Movement candidate against Ahmadinejad, were saying no to this to this so-called Alberti proposal.
And in the end, we managed to unite the Iranian elite behind the rejection of that proposal.
And it's quite interesting that in the end, Ahmadinejad comes out of this, I think, certainly less weakened than he was before and arguably stronger in terms of his relationship to the West.
OK, let me see if I understand this right.
And then you correct me where I'm wrong.
And then with my conclusions and all that stuff, too.
And thanks for your patience.
Basically, the the U.S. offer to the Iranians was let's work out a deal where you'll export your low enriched three point five percent uranium to Russia.
They'll enrich it up to 20 percent, which is technically high and highly enriched uranium, but is, again, way, way, way below weapons grade, which means above 90 percent uranium.
And then they would send it to France to turn it into fuel rods.
And then the French would send it back to Iran and they would use it in their medical reactor, which would be the only one in the world at the time since the Canadian one is closing down.
And the Iranians clearly need it and want it and have an entire medical facility ready to go for it.
Now, the Iranians are saying, look, man, you guys, if we do this, you could keep all our uranium in France and just tell us, ha ha, we got your uranium.
And so we're not going to let you do that.
But I'll tell you what we'll do.
And I believe this was the Turkish deal was put Turkey in there somewhere.
I forget exactly where in the chain.
But anyway, they would be one of the guarantors of the deal.
And the Iranians would actually go ahead and get the fuel rods from France at the same time that they were sending out what they had to the Russians.
That way they weren't losing anything.
And so so if if my understanding of this is right, it seems to me that this is a win for Barack Obama.
It's a win for the Iranians.
It's a win for the Europeans and the Russians.
And I'm not even certain why it would still be a problem for the Israelis.
Well, just just one just one other point, though, about the Iranian counter counter proposal, and that is that it was not to be done in one single transaction.
There were to be at least two or to be two transactions.
So so it was never going to be like 75 to 80.
I think it's 77 or 78 percent.
Maybe it was 80 percent.
I'm sorry, it was 80 percent, I guess, of the low enriched uranium supplies that they'd accumulated were going to go out all at once.
And so the Iranian counter proposal was going to, you know, be such that that would not be the case.
And I think that symbolically was important to Iran because they would not be in the position then of basically giving up their bargaining chips.
And that's that was explicitly the way it was presented by one of the one of the key political figures in Tehran.
When when he opposed the Alberta proposal, he was saying, look, I mean, we're really giving up our our bargaining chips in one fell swoop here.
That doesn't make sense.
And I think in the end, that's what made it impossible for Iran or not impossible, but made it just a bad bet for Iran to to agree to this.
They understood that the it was not going to have the effect of having everybody go lovey dovey in the West with regard to Iran and say, OK, now that you've proven yourself to be, you know, to be true to not being having the ambition to be a nuclear weapons power, we're going to we're going to now make a deal that will end the hostility toward Iran.
That wasn't going to happen.
They understood that it was simply giving it up and then facing the same kinds of pressures later on.
And it didn't make sense.
Well, you know, it seems to me and maybe I'm I have this wrong, but it seems like the Iranians could simply configure their centrifuges that they already have running at Natanz within their safeguards agreement and enrich their uranium up to 20 something percent.
Technically high grade, but again, way lower than the 90 percent required to make weapons.
But they're not doing that.
They're saying, look, we have no desire to configure our centrifuges to anything above three point five or six percent because we know that then you'll drop hydrogen bombs on us for crying out loud.
We want we're we got our hands up, y'all.
We're willing to work with you, but you won't work with us.
That's what it looks like to me.
That is correct.
I mean, they they do do, in fact, have the capacity to do that.
They have foregone that by, you know, basically either offering to buy it, you know, I mean, that's their first choice, of course, is to buy it on commercial terms.
And that was refused by the international community.
And then the second one was to do some sort of a deal which would leave them whole in the sense of not leaving them at the mercy of the of people who they do not particularly trust.
And they have they they have not gone ahead with with their, you know, doing it unilaterally.
But they've also made it clear that in the end, that's still an option.
These are these are very tough negotiators and they will use whatever leverage they can use.
And that's one of the things that they have as leverage, obviously, at least from their point of view.
And so it goes.
All right.
Well, just just one one more thing about the about the ten notional enrichment facilities that are in the news in the last week or so.
Right.
I interviewed the the Iranian ambassador a week or so ago, just for 20 minutes or so.
And he made the point that the Iranians, anytime something is absolutely demanded of them, as it was in the case of the IAEA resolution, saying no, no more enrichment.
And you must stop the construction of the now now they call it the Ford facility.
The Iranians response is going to be a loud no.
He said, anytime you use the language of must end quote, he said, the the answer is going to be a loud no.
And that's exactly what this statement about 10 new enrichment plants is.
It's simply a symbolic statement of resistance, a loud no to the demand of the IAEA.
Was that really smart or they just proven John Bolton right in that sense?
I think that they're perfectly capable of reacting with anger and not with more anger than good sense.
And I think this is this is a good, good illustration of that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's one of those things where what are you going to do?
You're going to bow to the empire or else.
So which do you choose?
Yeah.
I mean, one thing we can say about the Iranians is that they do not bow well.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, at least we haven't bombed them yet.
That's the good news.
Well, we have we still have some time.
But in my view, it's a matter of some months before we will face some sort of crisis on this.
All right.
Well, we'll keep having you back every week to keep us up to date on what's happening between now and then.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
Hey, thank you, everybody.
That's Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from IPS News, IPS News dot net and also antiwar dot com slash Porter.