08/27/10 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all welcome back to the show, this is Anti-War Radio, we got Gareth Porter on the phone, his new article is the top of my RAND section today, Obama resists pressure for red line on Iran's nuclear capability.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Hey, thanks for having me again, Scott.
Alright, well I think I'm taking the side of all the what's his or her name in the comment section there, although I'll be a bit more hyperbolic.
You are an evil paid CIA agent of the Obama administration spreading pro-Obama propaganda defending this madman killer murderer who's trying to get us into war with Iran, what's your problem?
Yeah, my problem is that there are certain facts that don't totally fit the model of Iran, of Obama as an Iran war madman.
I think this is a situation where it is worth paying attention to some differences within the administration, and this does not fit the model, admittedly, of the Obama administration more generally in terms of Obama's relatively supine posture toward what the Pentagon demands.
That is to say, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, clearly Obama has been more than cooperative with the military.
But on Iran, I think I make the case in my piece that there is an important difference of view between Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, and Obama on whether the United States should in fact take a harder line, a much harder line in fact, toward the Iranian nuclear capability, the breakout capability that Iran theoretically has in terms of the amount of low enriched uranium that it now holds.
Alright, now I guess we've got to give a quick definition here.
So this is really an arbitrary designation, you could just as easy count the uranium that's sitting in the ground that hasn't even been mined yet, but it's a term that's been invented by the war party really, or maybe by the international anti-proliferation people or something.
But they call it the breakout capability, that is, that means to them, when the Iranians have enough low enriched uranium, that if they withdrew from the non-proliferation treaty and kicked the inspectors out of the country and began to enrich it to weapons grade, that it would be enough to do so and have one bomb.
That's the so-called breakout capability.
Yeah, that's it.
And of course, you are correct that the term is very much undefined in many contexts where it's used in the media, and particularly when it's used by one Robert Gates.
You know, he has gone on television and talked about this issue in a way that is completely confusing and misleading, by suggesting that the real problem we have here is that Iran could move from having a breakout capability to having a nuclear weapon, and we wouldn't be able to verify that they did not go to a nuclear weapon, whether they did or did not go to a nuclear weapon.
I mean, this was on Meet the Press back in April, when Gates made that statement.
In response to a question which was clearly planted by somebody in the Pentagon with David Gregory, he was tipped off ahead of time, hey, you should ask Bob Gates whether he thinks that having a nuclear capability, having a nuclear capable Iran, which is the way David Gregory put the question, is just as bad or just as dangerous as Iran with a nuclear weapon.
And so he did ask that question.
And Gates then proceeded to say, well, only in the sense that we can't verify whether Iran actually would go from just having everything except for manufacturing a bomb to going ahead and assembling it.
It was a masterful performance in misleading the public because it suggested that, in fact, as you indicated, that Iran could any time go from its low enriched uranium that it already has to a high enriched uranium with the ability to assemble a bomb, and that we would never know when they would go ahead and do it, when, of course, as you've suggested, the reality is that Iran would have to make an overt move, which would telegraph its intention to go for a nuclear weapon.
And it's very clear they have no intention of doing that.
As I point out in the article, the Iranians have said privately, but to, you know, on the record, Hassan Rouhani, then the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, told George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this was in 2005, he told him that we don't need a bomb as long as we have mastery of the fuel cycle, and our neighbors or adversaries, potential adversaries know that, then they'll be able to get the message, not to mess with it.
So that's really what this is about.
And my point in the article, Scott, is that Obama has clearly been under pressure to embrace this Bob Gates line, and say, it's unacceptable for the United States, we're going to draw a red line, that Iran has enough low enriched uranium to be able to do this.
And therefore, we're going to continue to raise tensions, implicitly, we're going to raise tensions, we're going to put more emphasis on the military option, until Iran agrees to bow to our demand to basically divest itself of its low enriched uranium.
All right, well, but I think what you've shown me so far is that Bob Gates is willing to talk in nonsense terms about some mythical ability of Iran to take the low enriched uranium they have, make it weapons grade, make a nuke out of it, under the watchful eye of the IAEA safeguards regime, which is nonsense.
So okay, that makes him a liar on this issue, which makes him par for the course with himself going all the way back in history to the Bush years, and with every other politician in all of Washington, DC.
So what makes you think that Obama is special or any different than these guys, or in fact, that Barack Obama has a position on anything?
Right.
I mean, the evidence is that he was interviewed by David Sanger of the New York Times, who is, by the way, not just by the way, but very importantly, clearly a partisan of the Bob Gates position.
He and Bob Gates clearly have talked about this.
They agree that this is what needs to be done.
And Sanger tried to get Obama in this April 1st, if I remember correctly, interview, maybe it was April 5th, excuse me, April 5th interview with the New York Times, he tried to get Obama to commit himself to drawing the red line at an Iranian nuclear capability.
And Obama refused to do that.
And instead, his answer to the question, would you draw a red line there, was to say, look, North Korea was considered to be a nuclear capable state until they kicked out the IAEA and defined themselves as a nuclear state, you know, decided to go public and say, we're going to be a nuclear state.
That answer clearly indicated that Obama was saying this idea that a nuclear capability of having the low enriched uranium that theoretically could be turned into a bomb is not the same as the ability to make a bomb.
There's a huge step in between.
And, you know, should Iran take that step, then it's a new situation, and then we would be in a position to make further decisions.
But we're not going to do that under present circumstances.
So that's why it seems very clear to me that there's a there's a clear conflict here between the Gates position and the Obama position, and that there has been for some months.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
We'll get back and argue about this some more.
It's Gareth Porter from Interpret Service, original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
Obama resists pressure for red lines on Iran's nuclear capability.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
That's our radio.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter.
The subject matter is a bit inside baseball.
If you really want to be thoroughly versed, which I, you know, it's great fun.
If you've been in the nonproliferation regime and American relations with Iran over the past few years, you can't do better than the archives of Dr. Porter and those of Dr. Prather as well.
Just look for their names on the right side margin there at antiwar.com.
And there are articles and articles and articles and articles explaining all this stuff.
Read a bunch of them and then you'll find that you've got your head wrapped right around it.
So, Gareth, you're telling me that Obama is better than Gates on the Iran nuke issue because when he was cornered by David Sanger, he said, hey, look, there's a difference between Iran having a so-called breakout capability within the safeguards agreement and at their safeguarded facility and Kim Jong Il saying, get the hell out of my country, taking down the cameras, breaking the seals, restarting his nuclear reactor and making nuclear bombs out of it.
And so where Gates is basically obfuscating and trying to combine these ideas together with lies, Obama is differentiating.
However, this is the same guy who offered them a deal on the 20 percent enrichment for use as targets in their medical isotope reactor that America built for him back in the 70s there.
And they accepted the deal.
And then he told them no.
And then the Brazilians and the Turks went and renegotiated the same deal again, only better.
And Obama still said no.
And he has not been negotiating in good faith.
He's still just going through the motions of saying, see, they won't deal with us reasonably when in fact he's the one who's acting like George Bush here.
Well, you've said an awful lot there and I agree with most of it.
But on the specifics of the present situation when negotiations, it's a bit more complex than that.
I think both sides are still maneuvering to try to get talks on terms which would be more favorable to their political interests.
And I'm just not sure exactly what's going to happen.
But it's not at all clear that there aren't going to be talks.
And again, I'm not clear on, you know, what we haven't talked about yet is that on August 4th, Obama had this briefing with journalists, which became a bit like the tale of the elephant where all these people who experienced different parts of the elephant in different ways, you know, described the elephant in completely different ways.
And so that's exactly what the various journalists did in describing what Obama said.
But I think it's very important that one of the things that he said was, first of all, I'm not ready to declare any red line, meaning that he's not going to do what Gates wanted him to do.
And then he said, you know, it's important to give Iran a way of being able to to demonstrate that they're not interested in nuclear weapons.
And that that that obviously is ambiguous.
I agree.
It's not clear exactly what he means by that.
But it was in the context of further negotiations rather than obviously the expecting the Iranians to simply capitulate to give up their enrichment.
And, you know, I think we have to be open to the possibility here that that there still could be a slight room for maneuver.
And, you know, I think that that's that's the at least the suggestion that he made in that in that meeting with with the journalists.
But at the very least, what he's doing here is holding off the real hardline hawks in his administration who who want to raise the the level of tension with Iran.
Why is Gates taking that position?
We have to ask that question.
What is Gates doing this for?
The reason is that he is the man in both the Bush and Obama administrations who has been trying in whatever way he could to try to create, quote, leverage, unquote, with regard to Iran.
And he hopes to be able to create leverage by getting Obama to embrace this idea of declaring a red line on the low enriched uranium stock that that Iran already has so that he can then make the argument that the military option is relevant, because if the Iranians are not heeding the U.S. position, then implicitly the military option begins to take on more importance.
Right now, the military option is not connected with anything in terms of a demand the United States can make on Iran.
So what what Gates is trying to do here is make the connection between a demand on Iran and the military option.
That's what he that's what he wanted to do under George Bush.
It was vetoed by Fox Fallon, at least that's the indication that I had.
And I have no reason to change my mind.
I think Gates wants to do the same thing now, and I think he's been frustrated.
Well, so why doesn't Obama just, you know, that the 20 percent deal, the Brazil-Turkey deal there that I referred to would have undone this so-called breakout capability?
It would have meant the export of enough uranium for them to no longer have enough that if somehow it was magically weapons-grade, it would be a bomb.
So why didn't Obama take it?
Why doesn't Obama just take the deal?
Because he knows, as well as you and I do, that the Iranians are not going to turn off Natanz for the indefinite future.
Of course.
They're not going to.
And I'm not convinced that this is a dead issue at all.
I don't think it is a dead issue.
Now, just remember that when Obama wrote to the president of Turkey, Prime Minister of Turkey, and President of Brazil, he was encouraging them to engage Iran and to try to get back to that deal.
This was not the position of the State Department.
This is not what Hillary Clinton wanted.
And she criticized it openly.
But I am convinced that that is indeed what Obama was thinking at that point.
Well, you know, it's notable that when David Sanger started badgering Hillary Clinton, she kind of, you know, defensively said, well, look, the question isn't how long, the question is whether.
And so give us, we have plenty of room to work with here.
And she would have never said that, except for the fact that Sanger was pointing his finger at her.
Well, yeah, I mean, the other thing about Hillary Clinton, which is interesting, is that she was on the same program as Gates on the Meet the Press back in April, when she was asked the same question, you know, is a nuclear capability or a nuclear-capable Iran as bad as an Iran with a weapon?
She said, well, no, you know, they're two different things.
Having a weapon is more dangerous.
She did not embrace the position that Gates was embracing.
And I think she did that because she knew that that was the official position of the administration.
I think it's important to understand Gates has more than once contradicted the president on national security issues.
And, of course, he's gotten away with it because of his peculiar status.
I think that he's an outlier.
I think that on this position, on this issue, I think that he's failed to accomplish what he wants.
And it's also his fault the CIA didn't know that the Soviet Union was falling.
What a disgrace.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much for your time, Gareth.
Sorry, I always got to get in the last word on Bob Gates, if I can.
He seems so reasonable and I don't like him.
All right.
Hang tight, everybody.
We're on Paul next.