All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, appreciate y'all listening today.
I'm going to go ahead and go to our first guest now, it's the great Gareth Porter, he's an independent historian and journalist, writes for IPS News, that's IPSNews.net, and of course we feature every bit of it at www.antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com, slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth, how you doing man?
Hello again, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing great, very happy to have you here.
Iran, I'm scared, and so I brought you on to talk me down from my insane irrational fears.
First time I ever spoke with you was January 2007, when George Bush told virtually the whole establishment, screw you guys, I'm doubling down this war, and by the way, the only reason that everything's going wrong in Iraq is because it's all Iran's fault, and I've ordered General Petraeus to prove it, and we're going to threaten them more, and we might just have a war.
And I said, oh no, and then I interviewed you for the first time, and you said, well, you know, Connelisa Rice told Fox News people, yeah, that's right, we might have to have a war against Iran, but then she went and gave a State Department briefing, where she said, nah, nah, nah, don't worry about it, and that that's what we were supposed to pay attention to, was her State Department briefing, not her message to the rubes on Fox.
And so I breathed a sigh of relief, and now here we are, three and a half years later, two and a half, or whatever, I can't do math this early in the morning West Coast time, and we haven't bombed Iran yet, thank goodness, and yet all the headlines say that there's a bunch of warships on the way, we got John McCain talking madness about the Israelis and whether or not they might start a war, and of course as everyone who listens to this show knows, there has been no progress toward a nuclear weapon, they're not even making one, and yet, it seems like maybe there's progress toward creating the consensus for an attack regardless of that fact.
Well, there's no question that the pro-Israeli outfits in this country, in the media and in politics, are beating the drums continuously, and they have made progress, we've talked about this before, there's no doubt that the effort to portray Iran as on its way to getting a nuclear weapon has been wildly successful in terms of turning public opinion around in the United States.
I don't have the exact figures in front of me or in my head, and I should, but I do recall that three or four years ago, it was very clear public opinion did not regard Iran as a threat to the United States, and today that has been turned around, and two-thirds of the public, roughly speaking, does believe that, so this is a tribute to the machine that we're both familiar with, that grinds out on a weekly to monthly basis, stories that are terrifically frightening to people who cannot decipher what's really going on.
Yeah, well, and that includes me.
I mean, I'm not scared of Iran, but I'm scared of the U.S. Navy off the coast of Iran.
Is it true that the U.S. Navy is doubling down their forces there?
I mean, there's wars and rumors of wars, Gareth, straighten me out here, man.
There is a continuous rotation of U.S. naval task forces in the Gulf, and this is continuing.
I know of no evidence that there's anything new that's happened in that regard.
This really, I mean, this current regime, if you will, of U.S. naval power in the Gulf, the Persian Gulf, is something that really began in 2002.
In late 2002, there was an increase in U.S. naval presence, and I did a story in, I'm sorry, I said 2002, I meant late 2006, and I did a story in 2007 that talked about a plan to add a third naval task force, that is a carrier task force, in the Gulf, and that the new CENTCOM commander, William Fallon, said no, I don't see any military reason for this.
He had not actually taken over yet, but he was already named the new CENTCOM commander, and he said basically he did not want that, and it kind of disappeared, and that was the last, as far as I know, that there was any effort to put a third U.S. carrier task force in that area.
And you think unless there's three, they're not going to launch anything, huh?
Well, you know, this is all sort of cumulative indicators of intention.
This would be a major indicator, no question about it.
Right.
And in the absence of that, I think, you know, there's certainly much less likelihood that the United States is going to do anything.
Of course, that leaves open the question of Israel.
Well, and let's get to that in a second, but I'll tell you this.
I think the reason that Iran coverage on this show has kind of slackened off over the past few weeks is because once the United Nations passed the sanctions, and of course, Congress and the president have come up with more and more ever since then, but that made me think that, oh, OK, well, they bought us some time.
I mean, this is absolutely horrible.
I ought to be covering the sanctions.
If they're anything, anything like what they did to Iraq, then it's a war crime itself, you know, without a bombing raid.
But so I kind of felt like, you know, some we have some breathing room here.
I can sit back and take a rest.
If we do bomb Iran, it ain't going to be yet because they have to at least be able to plausibly say that they try to give sanctions time to work and they didn't work.
And so I was kind of shrugging and going, oh, good.
Well, I guess we're not going to bomb Iran anytime real soon then.
And then all of a sudden I hear all these rumors of wars.
Well, of course, I mean, the distinction that's worth bearing in mind and emphasizing is that these are all coming from sources that are unreliable and not from any official sources.
If we were hearing heavy breathing from anybody in the Obama administration, then yes, we need to perk up and say, OK, now it's time to roll out the guns and fire back.
I don't think that's what's happening at all.
In fact, I think it's quite the opposite.
It's people who are really not happy with the Obama administration's lack of resolve to move in the direction of threatening war at this point, that this is what is prompting the kinds of reporting, for example, from Debka, which is the Israeli intelligence related website that frequently puts out these sorts of rumors.
I mean, I think that that's the character of what we're talking about here.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
If it's really dead because the source of all this, then I guess I don't need to worry.
It's certainly one of the sources.
I can't say that it's the only thing going on by any means.
But I would say, I mean, I've seen it cited more than once in recent days.
Yeah.
Well, now, so it's still your studied opinion that, I don't know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, et cetera, don't want war with Iran?
Absolutely.
As we've talked about before, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and particularly Admiral Mullen, as the top naval officer, is very, very strongly committed to opposing any military action by the United States or Israel against Iran, because the Navy is going to be the first to suffer any retaliatory attack by Iran on U.S. military targets in the Middle East.
The U.S. Navy Task Force themselves will be sitting ducks for Iranian retaliation.
I mean, they are extremely vulnerable.
And I think that has to be regarded as a key factor in the thinking of Admiral Mullen and other top U.S. military officials.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what, I'm sure glad the American democracy doesn't get to decide these things.
American people think that the Iranians already have nuclear bombs, and they still want war, even though we got hundreds of thousands of troops in the countries next door to Iran.
They think they have atomic bombs.
Is that right?
I have not actually seen a report that...
Yeah, it was 71%.
It was 71% or something, think they already have nukes.
I feel terrible that I wasn't aware of that.
Yeah, this is what happens when people learn geography from their gym coach or something.
They don't even have any idea that, you know, in their own kind of false understanding of this, there are 100,000 plus, you know, on the order 200,000 American soldiers within atom bomb range of Iran, and they still want a war with Iran.
Well, you're absolutely right.
We do not have a system that we want the American people to decide on matters of war with Iran, that's for sure.
Yeah, not at this point.
Anyway, I'm glad we got Navy admirals up there saying no.
All right, hang tight, Gareth.
We'll be right back after this with Gareth Porter, y'all.
It's Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Werner.
I'm talking with my friend Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist.
He writes for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
And you can find virtually every one of them, I think, at original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
Now, Gareth, let me ask you this.
Is there anyone in America other than Israel who wants war with Iran?
Well, I mean, you know, we've just talked about the fact that the American people have really had their heads turned around on this.
Well, I mean, in terms of pressure groups, 51 percent will believe whatever the war party tells them, never mind them.
They don't make up their own minds.
Their minds are made up for them.
But as far as the people with power and influence, there are different factions of the establishment that have different interests, right?
Oil men here and and Lockheed, you know, plane makers there.
And and, of course, Westinghouse makes nuclear weapons.
And and then the people on TV want to sell ads and, you know, political parties in the Israel lobby.
Talking about political interest groups or bureaucratic interest groups, you're absolutely right that the only identifiable group that wants to have a war with Iran, an attack on Iran, is the the group that is associated directly or indirectly with Israel.
Yeah.
So that includes the standard in the extraordinary situation where the interests of foreign country have so completely overridden the obvious political and security interests of the United States on a matter of war and peace.
Well, I got to tell you that this brings up the thing that made me maddest last night when I saw this.
I just absolutely couldn't believe it.
I mean, I know the truth of the matter.
I can't believe they talk like this.
Israeli prime minister expresses concern over possible U.S. pullout from Iraq.
And here's Benjamin Netanyahu saying, no, don't leave Iraq.
Israel security requires that America occupy Iraq forever, he says in plain English, just like the time that he said he's glad 9-11 happened because it's been really good for him.
Well, I mean, this is the kind of strange sort of thinking that one finds in the Israeli government.
And I just said that it's an extraordinary thing that the interests of a foreign country, i.e.
Israel, have overridden the interests of the United States in regard to this issue of war with Iran.
But surely it is a very strange notion for any government to think that it is in its interest to attack another government which has no intention of attacking it.
I mean, you know, this is to carry out a major war against another state which has no interest in attacking it is absolute lunacy.
And yet this is what has been the sworn policy of Israel for a number of years now.
And I mean, at least to threaten to do that.
And this is what's passing for sort of national security thinking there.
It really makes you stop and think about what sort of regime it is that can come up with that sort of thinking.
I mean, this is a species of thinking that is a match for the Bush administration, of course.
The idea that you exploit whatever military superiority you have in order to carry out attacks against the government that you don't like, this is an idea that is peculiar to bullies, to states that are bullies.
And the United States and Israel at this point, at least the United States under Bush, and arguably the carryover from Bush to the president administration is substantial in terms of the strategic thinking.
These two countries have distinguished themselves in the world over recent decades as the premier bullies in terms of being ready to use force against other countries that do not threaten them.
Yeah, well, I guess it wouldn't be much different than if the British had said, oh, no, we're protecting ourselves from the Indians.
We have to invade them and take all their salt at gunpoint or whatever.
You know what I mean?
I mean, you can call it whatever you want, but it's just empire, right?
Aggressive warfare and conquest.
In this case, you can't say that Israel is thinking about empire and they're thinking about attacking Iran.
This is not an empire problem.
This is something else.
It's, I mean, and I'm going to be quite honest and say that I think that the issue needs to be much more seriously thought through and analyzed.
I mean, what is it about the United States and Israel that they have in common here that has to do with the exploitation of military superiority to carry out an attack, which results in your assuming that you're going to have military political dominance in an entire region?
And I think that is what is at stake here.
What they have in common is a military industrial complex, right?
And it's not, you know, empire in the traditional sense of interest in dominating resources or exploiting resources.
Certainly, that is what the European empires turned out to be in Asia and Africa.
But it does have to do with the kind of very backward strategic thinking, which assumes that if you have greater military power than another state, if you dominate that state militarily, that somehow it is in your interest.
It can be in your interest to have a war with it.
I think that, you know, there's a strain of militarism in both the United States and Israel, which is at the core of this.
And I think we need to really understand it much better than we do.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess the easiest thing, the reason I say the military industrial complex is I'm thinking back to, you know, NATO expansion in the 90s and the Iraq war, where Lockheed played such an important role in, you know, their ties to the policymakers.
But also, I mean, they went ahead and created a committee to come up with excuses to expand NATO and the committee to come up with excuses to invade Iraq.
And it was basically, you know, the economics of it is we all lose, but they gain big time.
Yeah, certain individuals do gain absolutely.
And then what it means, though, is that we have a very short sighted policy here.
We don't have people who are saying, all right, now, what's America going to be like in 200 years?
What kind of world do we want to live in and how do we make it that way?
Or even five or ten years.
Right.
Yeah.
We're becoming the Israelis where everything is thought through.
I know what we'll do.
We don't like Arafat, so we'll create Hamas.
And it's just it's idiocracy, isn't it?
It's just it's retarded.
It's like a dumb empire that's not not even trying hard to figure out what it's doing.
Well, and the point that you've just made really bears repeating over and over again an emphasis that is that the cost of of this kind of thinking are not being considered seriously by the policymakers themselves.
You know, I was just on the phone yesterday morning with a radio station in Portland, Oregon, and there was a call in show and I was on for an hour, actually.
I didn't realize it was going to be an hour.
But what I was hearing was that in Oregon, the infrastructure of physical and economic and social infrastructure of that state and of the Portland area are rapidly deteriorating and the process is accelerating.
And and there is really a crisis that is upon us and is coming at us with ever growing speed, which is in large part, obviously, the result of an allocation of resources in which at a national level, in which the military industrial complex and the national security state have absolute control or near absolute control over the allocation of resources in such a way as to ensure the the continuation of their of their dominance.
And and the result of that is that this economy and society is very rapidly crumbling.
And I think there's a growing sense of crisis in in Oregon.
And I see that as a as a warning signal for the rest of the country.
Yeah, well, this whole country is going to end up looking like Detroit or something before they're done and they'll give up the empire last.
They'll tax each and every one of us out of our last home before they give up the empire.
That's my theory.
We'll see how it goes.
Until there is a voter of basically an uprising by voters.
Yeah, well, like I said.
Anyway, all right.
Now, one last question really fast.
Do you have any indication, Gareth, that the Iranians ever had a nuclear weapons program before the year 2003?
I have no indication that they had a nuclear weapons program worthy of that term, even between 2001 and 2003.
OK, well, we're going to have to leave it right there.
But I know that's right.
I just wanted to hear from you.
All right.
Hang tight, everybody.
We'll be back.
Patrick Coburn after this.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Thank you.
