This is Alan Minsky sitting in for Susie Weissman on Beneath the Surface.
On today's jam-packed show, we're going to hear from Scott Horton from Antiwar.com, and he's going to be speaking with Gareth Porter about Iran and Michael Hastings about Afghanistan.
Then I'll be chiming back in, talking to Paul the Octopus, who has a special concert announcement you are going to want to hear about, folks.
And then I'll be talking with Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, about the financial regulation that was passed by the United States Senate yesterday.
At the end of the show, we'll talk a little health care.
All that and more tonight on Beneath the Surface.
Now I want to introduce to the folks here on Beneath the Surface myself again, I'm Alan Minsky sitting in for Susie Weissman, and a friend of us all here at KPFK Radio, Scott Horton from Antiwar.com.
Thanks Alan, appreciate it.
And now we go to Dr. Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist.
He writes for IPS News, that's Interpress Service, IPSNews.net, and you'll find all of his archives pretty much at Original.
Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back on the show.
Well, I'm happy to have you here.
And I want to talk about Iran, an extremely important issue, and I'll tell you, I thought that maybe we bought a little time because Barack Obama and his administration succeeding in getting the U.N.
Security Council to pass some sanctions, and I thought, oh, well good, at least they can't bomb them until they can credibly say they waited for the sanctions to work and they didn't work yet.
And then no sooner was I finished concluding that than William Kristol and his friends announced the creation of the Emergency Committee for Israel, which is apparently made for the purpose of attacking Democrats for not being hard enough on Iran.
It turns out we need to have a war there after all.
Well, there's both good news and bad news, obviously, about the creation of this committee.
On one hand, obviously, it does indicate that the pro-Israel lobby is ratcheting up the pressure and that they're going to throw a lot of resources into this cause of trying to put pressure on the White House to approve military action against Iran, either to support an Israeli attack or to have the United States, no, they would prefer to have the United States attack, of course, as their first choice.
But the good news is that what this signifies is that the Israeli lobby is concerned that unless they do turn up the pressure, they're not going to get any decision out of the White House that there's, at this point at least, the White House is not willing to move in that direction.
And I think they're acting out of a fear that the situation is getting away from them.
So I think that there's both positive and negative implications in this development.
Now at issue here is not the non-proliferation treaty in the Iranian safeguards agreement with the IAEA, but instead UN Security Council resolutions mandating that they cease all uranium enrichment.
Is that right?
Yes.
This is, of course, the primary thing that the pro-Israeli lobby has going for it is that the Iranians are now up against the so-called world community, and that, of course, means the United States and its allies, including Israel, who dominate through the U.S. the UN Security Council.
And that has given them sort of the legal high ground in terms of international law, if not in terms of world opinion, because we know for a fact that the countries which are represented in this coalition, in the Security Council, certainly do not represent most countries in the world, and that there's a very strong resistance to the ideas that have been put forward by that Security Council group on the part of certainly most Islamic countries, most developing countries, and the neutralist countries of the world, the neutral countries of the world.
The non-aligned movement.
The non-aligned movement, excuse me, yes, not neutral, but non-aligned is what I meant to say.
Well, and that is a specific name of a group that has time and again put forward resolutions supporting the Iranian position.
That's right, exactly.
And the Iranians have been quite successful, in fact, in getting support for their resistance to the demands of the Security Council majority that they cease all enrichment of uranium, because it does appear to certainly most countries in the world that this is an emanation of an unequal system, an unequal regime, if you will, for nuclear weapons, and basically for atomic power in general, because it means that certain countries that are favored by the United States can do essentially whatever they want, whereas if you are out of favor, then you're going to be subjected to this pressure.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Dr. Gareth Porter, original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
And now I happen to remember about two and a half years ago, the CIA and all the other intelligence agencies came out and said that the Iranians aren't making nuclear weapons, Gareth.
So what's the big deal?
Well, the big deal is that the pro-Israeli lobby, again, I mean, I hate to keep repeating that phrase, but it is impossible to talk about this issue without invoking it constantly.
They have been quite successful in continuing to push back the conclusion of the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that the Iranians had, in fact, ended any work in relation to nuclear weapons in 2003.
And in fact, what has happened is that the U.S. intelligence community has been under very, very strong pressure to do something to essentially re, not to confirm, but to disconfirm that conclusion and to come out with some kind of conclusion that suggests that the Iranians are guilty of moving towards some ill-defined sort of nuclear weapons program.
And so that is where we are at the present moment, that despite the fact that the present NIE, the one that still stands, says that there is no nuclear weapons program, there is very strong pressure for a conclusion that repeals that judgment and comes out with obviously what will be a highly politicized judgment that implicates the Iranians in some kind of nuclear weapons program.
And I do fully expect that there will be something in the next NIE, and we don't know when it's coming out yet, that will satisfy the Israelis, the French, the Germans, and the U.K., who are the ones who have, in terms of the states involved, who have been lobbying very heavily directly with the United States and indirectly through the American media, news media, and the world's press.
Well, have there been even rumors of any new intelligence that would, in your mind, alter the conclusion of the National Intelligence Estimate from November 2007?
Well, if you read the New York Times or the Washington Post, then the answer is yes.
And this is apart from, of course, the Murdoch-controlled news media in Europe and the United States, who have also been carrying stories which suggest that, indeed, the Iranians have been doing research related to a nuclear weapon.
You know, I would simply cite the single theme of a neutron initiator, which was debuted in 2009 and continued to reverberate in the news media in 2010, and I think this is sort of the cutting edge of this campaign, which, clearly, Israel is behind, to repeal the judgment of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.
Well, you know, William Crystal wrote a piece in the Weekly Standard about, I think, two or three weeks ago that said that we should go ahead and bomb Iran because, one, they're such a threat to us, if we don't take them out now, they'll kill us all, and two, they wouldn't dare fight back.
This is a very obvious contradiction, I agree, in the Israeli position and in the position of the neoconservatives, and I've done stories myself on this contradiction, pointing out that, on one hand, some of the people closely associated with Israel have argued that the Iranians are, indeed, interested in getting nuclear weapons and that they're somewhat irrational and can't be counted on to be deterred, but, at the same time, you know, they suggest that if they were attacked, they wouldn't dare to do anything in response that would be a serious threat to the interests of the United States and the international community.
You can judge for yourself just how logical that position is.
I think it's clear that there's nothing more than a rationalization of the political interests of Israel that is involved in this argument.
Well, it's clearly worth noting that there are hundreds of thousands of American soldiers stationed in the two countries to the east and the west of Iran, and we're way out of range here, but we've put our soldiers right within range of any retaliatory response that they might choose to take.
Well, that's right, of course.
I mean, part of the reason that there's been great sensitivity on the part of the U.S. military and the Pentagon to the idea of attacking Iran all along has been the vulnerability of U.S. forces in the region, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I've always thought that even more important than the ground troops in those countries is the fact that U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf are sitting ducks, very vulnerable to being hit by an Iranian anti-ship missile, which is going to be fired from very close with a very high-speed missile, which it would be very difficult for the Americans to detect in time.
So I think that that's really at the heart of the fact that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, and his compatriots in the military leadership, the uniform military leadership, have been pretty strongly opposed to any attack by the United States or Israel against Iran.
And do you think it's certain that if the Israelis went ahead and started the war that America would be dragged in?
I don't think it's certain at all.
In fact, I think the Israelis know at this point that that's not in the cards.
I think that they feel that they do not have a go-ahead from the United States and that they cannot proceed without that green light.
We saw, of course, the George Bush administration, George W. Bush administration, in 2008, put the red light on, flashed the red light very strongly when the Israelis indicated that they wanted to strike against Iran.
And it's very difficult to believe that an administration that was as pro-Israeli as the George W. Bush administration was would not be in a position that is quite similar to that of the present administration in terms of this question.
So I really think that the Israelis do not feel at all confident that they could go ahead with a strike under the present conditions.
All right.
Well, we're going to have to leave it there.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
Everybody, that's Dr. Gareth Porter from IPSNews.net.
And this is Alan Minsky, and I'm sitting in here for Susie Weissman on Beneath the Surface.
And I'm joined live in studio by Scott Horton of Antiwar.com.
We just heard his interview about Iran and Iranian issues with Gareth Porter.
And now Scott is going to take us on a dialogue with Michael Hastings about the situation in Afghanistan.
