So glad to talk to you, everybody.
Gareth Porter, one of my favorite reporters in the whole wide world.
Focus, like a laser beam, on the lies leading us to war with Iran.
And he writes for IPS News, for the American Prospect at the Huffington Post.
And you can find archives of, I guess, everything, pretty much everything, but his prospect articles at antiwar.com/porter.
And I'm so glad you could join me on the radio today, Gareth.
Welcome to the show.
I'm sorry to be late.
I forgot about the time difference.
I'm in Wisconsin now.
Yeah, well, you know, that happens with the time zones.
And of course, being in Texas, I'm right in the middle.
It would be easier if I was on one coast or the other myself, I guess.
But there you go.
Okay, no problem.
We still got 20 minutes here to go over some things.
Wow.
So you have this article here.
I don't know.
I just finished sharing with the folks this blog entry by Glenn Greenwald about the president's escalating war rhetoric on Iran.
And we are moving toward that point very rapidly, it appears.
And he made it clear absolutely in this blog entry, as well as you make clear in your most recent article running at antiwar.com, that it is the Israeli government and the Israel lobby and the neoconservatives in the United States who are behind this push for war with Iran, and that they have been behind a push for war with Iran since the beginning of 2002.
Is that right, sir?
That's absolutely right.
I mean, the Israeli government has wanted the United States to prepare for war and to go to war with Iran, certainly, you know, since the, you know, very early period, post 9-11 period, when they saw the opportunity presented by the new political situation in the United States.
And as I just wrote this week for IPS, you know, the Bush administration obviously targeted Iraq for regime change as its first priority, and that fit into its overall strategic scheme, but that was not what the Israelis wanted at all.
They regarded Iraq as a second-tier problem and Iran as the real enemy.
And as I write in this current story, the Israeli government urged the Bush administration to go to war against Iran, if they were going to go to war against anyone, not against Iraq, because they saw the balance of power in the Middle East very clearly tilted already toward Iran, not toward Iraq, which was getting weaker as time went by.
Well, so then there's a real split in opinion, or there was a real split in opinion, between Pearl and Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and the leading neoconservatives, and what the Israeli government wanted?
Exactly.
I mean, this is a very interesting point that I think has not really yet been appreciated in the United States politically.
The significance of that really is that, despite the fact that there was a great deal of agreement, obviously, between neoconservatives on one hand and the Israeli government, particularly the Likud government of Ariel Sharon, which was in power, in early 2002, throughout 2002, that the strategic interests of the two entities, the Likud government on one hand and the whatever popularly called Likud mix in the neoconservative movement on the other, were not the same in the case of Iraq.
And I try to, at least briefly, explain why that is the case, and I think it's important to understand this.
I mean, this really goes to the heart of what does motivate American imperialists, essentially, whether they are neoconservatives or, as in the case of Vietnam, really sort of liberal imperialists, democratic liberal imperialists, for the most part, than republican imperialists after the Nixon administration took power.
It really is empire for its own sake, and Israel second, America third.
Well, that's exactly right.
Exactly right.
I mean, the empire was the point of the attack on Iraq, and the reason the United States, the male conservatives in the United States were so eager to take down the Saddam regime was not because of the threat from Saddam, as the Israelis pointed out that he wasn't really a threat at all.
He was getting weaker, not stronger, but that made him a perfect target from the point of view of the neoconservatives because that meant that the cost of taking over Iraq, they thought, would be relatively small, and the payoff would be to use Iraq as the stepping stone then for leveraging much more ambitious changes elsewhere in the region.
The region, of course, Iran being a high priority in that regard, but a later stage once we had mopped up the situation in Iraq.
Well now, so my understanding is that when Richard Perle and David Womeser and Douglas Fyfe wrote A Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm for Benjamin Netanyahu, who was the incoming prime minister in 1996, which said basically what we need to do is get Saddam Hussein overthrown as a means of putting pressure on Iran and Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon and so forth.
And my understanding was that Netanyahu agreed and thought, yeah, this is a great idea, it's too bad I can't do it.
So I guess my question is, is this a disagreement between Netanyahu and Sharon?
I think there are obviously individual Likud members and leaders who would have been sympathetic to that argument, particularly in 1996.
I think as you get up to 2001, the situation had undoubtedly changed within Israel and I think some of the Likud leaders might have changed their view.
And I think equally important or more important, the permanent national security establishment of Israel, the military in Israel, was certainly not sympathetic to that argument.
I mean, they were definitely, you know, regarded Iran as the fundamental enemy of Israel, the enemy that they wanted to take down, you know, primarily, and so they were concerned that the obsession of the Bush administration with Iraq would really detract from that and would cause the United States to lose its focus on Iran.
So, you know, there is an important distinction here between, you know, individuals in the Likud who may have agreed with that and the larger strategic picture in Israel.
The other thing is that most of the national security people in Israel were certainly focused on Iran rather than Iraq, and that Sharon's government definitely went along with that dominant Israeli view.
Well, now, I got a problem here.
Help me out because Julian Borger, I don't know, Borger, I guess, in The Guardian, the great Robert Dreyfuss writing in The Nation magazine, intelligence reporter James Bamford, circumstantial evidence provided by Karen Katowski, etc.
I'm going to sort of conflate these things.
Also, I remember a great report in Heretz, I believe by a former Israeli government official, that said that basically, if I can kind of conflate all these stories together and summarize it, basically the Sharon government had the same problem with the Mossad that Dick Cheney had with the CIA, and that was they would lie, but not quite well enough to really get us into a war with Iraq.
And so they did an end run in the United States.
Of course, they created the Office of Special Plans in the policy shop at the Pentagon under Douglas Fythe and Abram Shulsky.
And at the same time, Sharon created the Office of Special Plans in his own prime minister's office because the Mossad was facing the same problem with the CIA, wouldn't lie well enough.
He created his own Office of Special Plans that created bogus intelligence in English to funnel through the stovepipe, through the Office of Special Plans to lie us into war with Iraq.
And of course, Karen Katowski adds to that, quote unquote, escorting Israeli generals to see Doug Fythe, but of course they're racing down the hallway and she can't even keep up with them as they're racing to Doug Fythe's office to tell him, or I guess she didn't overhear their conversation or whatever.
But it seems to me like the Sharon government was incredibly complicit in lying this country into war with Iraq, that they were in alliance with the neoconservatives.
They were after the Bush administration made it clear they were going to attack Iraq.
There's no question about that.
And I do say that in my story, that the Sharon government was publicly silent up to a point, and then there was eventually, you know, the Sharon government did support the administration.
Well, and secretly helped.
There was definitely, you know, I mean there's no doubt that the United States got the Sharon government to cooperate in various ways.
And I think the storyline here is essentially that the Sharon government ultimately was willing to lend itself to the Bush administration, despite the fact that it had earlier, you know, regarded that as not in Israel's best interest.
And that's because the relationship between the United States and Israel is ultimately an unequal relationship.
And it's, you know, the United States is a powerful nation, and Israel is a dependent nation on the United States.
And I think, you know, there's a certain mythology that has led in this country to forgetting that reality.
Yeah, well, and there are, there's circumstantial evidence here and there that, you know, the tail does wag the dog on some of these occasions.
I have, for example, here this UPI piece that Arnaud de Bourgrav wrote in, I guess, January or February.
I forget.
Let me see here.
It was January 2nd here in UPI, the editor-at-large, I guess, of UPI.
He wrote about a meeting that Netanyahu had with a bunch of former military and intelligence officials in Israel, and he said Netanyahu then said Israel, quote, must immediately launch an intense international public relations front, first and foremost, on the U.S., the goal being to encourage President Bush to live up to specific pledges.
He would not allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons.
We must make clear to the government, the Congress, and the American public that a nuclear Iran is a threat to the U.S. and the entire world, not only Israel, end quote.
So it does seem, and I mean, I can't think, Gareth, of any other interest in the United States that wants war with Iran other than Lockheed.
And I only tie them in because I saw where Jim Loeb reported that that guy Robert Jackson is still helping finance and work with these neocons at AEI.
So, okay, there's Lockheed, but what other interest in America wants war with Iran other than Dick Cheney, George Bush, and the Israel lobby?
Well, I think it's Dick Cheney, George Bush, and some key people who are followers of the neoconservative line.
You know, this is going back to, you know, the end of 2001, beginning of 2002, you know, they wanted definitely to have regime change in Iran.
And, you know, they were willing certainly to consider military action from the very beginning.
I mean, if you go back to 2002, they definitely were laying the groundwork for an eventual potential attack, possible attack on Iran from the very beginning.
You know, once Iraq was taken care of, that was definitely their intention.
You know, I have no doubt about that, that they had not made a specific decision on war, but they definitely were considering that as an option with regime change to be the initial policy.
You know, that was going to be the initial resort, and the possibility of using military force was definitely an option that they were keeping open and were creating the opportunity to carry out.
So, again, I would say that, you know, there is a confluence of interest there between the same people who, you know, wanted to go in and take over Iraq from the beginning, and the Israeli lobby and the Israeli government on Iran.
There's no question about that.
There's a confluence of interest.
But is it because Israel told the United States they wanted that done?
I don't think so.
I don't think that's the reason.
In other words, these people had their own notion of the empire, which did not come from Israel, it was not caused by an order coming from Israel or a request coming from Israel.
It was coming from their own notions of how to dominate the Middle East.
And that is the implication, it seems to me, of the fact that, you know, the initiative for the Iraq war did not come from Israel, it came from the United States, even though Israel then fell in line and lent itself to that design and was, you're right, was actively complicit in after the summer of 2002, and the administration was clearly, you know, had already made it clear that it was definitely going to invade Iraq.
Now, in the last few minutes here, Gareth, we've got to get to all the accusations against Iran that supposedly justify this war.
We certainly can't go through all of them, but I guess would you tell me I was right if I told you that it seems to me George Bush has blatantly admitted three times in the last two weeks that his fear is that Iran might someday acquire the technology that could maybe lead to them developing a nuclear weapons program, which then might be able to develop nuclear weapons?
And is that not an admission that his government has been lying to us this entire time in trying to claim that there must be some secret nuclear weapons program going on there?
I mean, is Bush himself not basically admitting they're a decade away when he says these things?
Well, I think that, in fact, the administration has admitted that previously.
I don't know if Bush himself has used the same wording, but certainly administration officials have repeatedly, you know, made it clear that they know that an actual nuclear weapon would not be possible for years to come.
Right.
Negroponte said that before.
That's right.
But you may be right that this is the first time that he's used that formulation.
In any case, you know, to me, the real story right now is that the indications of a administration plan to prepare for war with Iran becoming more and more numerous with every passing week.
And I just today read that a professor at New York University, Barnett Rubin, who's a specialist on Afghanistan but who has good contacts in Washington, has just been told by someone at a Washington right-wing think tank that they have been instructed, they've received instruction from the vice president's office that they are to prepare, along with the weekly standard, the Wall Street Journal, and other right-wing outlets.
They are to prepare for an all-out assault, an all-out offensive, a propaganda offensive, calling for war against Iran, to make the case for war against Iran.
This is to be all coordinated for the week after Labor Day.
That is about, you know, the first week after people come back from vacations, and it coincides with the anniversary of the major propaganda, the beginning of the major propaganda campaign that opened the way for, prepared the ground for the war in Iraq.
I take this to be the most serious sign yet in the context of what we know about the vice president calling for strikes against bases, specific bases in Iraq, limited strikes, which would then be used as a means of goading or provoking Iran into some retaliation, which would then be used to carry out an all-out attack, which was reported in the Apache newspapers.
And earlier this month, August 9th, this is the most serious sign yet that we may be on the verge of a major attack on Iran.
And now, this is Professor Rubin at NYU.
Where can we find this?
Is there documentation?
This is actually, I saw it on the website of Juan Cole, Informed Comment.
There is a website associated with Informed Comment, I believe it's called Global Comment or Global Affairs, but he refers to the report by Barnett Rubin on that website, which is associated with Informed Comment.
So you can find it on his website today.
You know, you're it, Gareth Porter.
You're the one.
They have a propaganda offensive coming and they're going to level every lie that they possibly can against that country.
We are all looking at you, pal.
You're the one who's got the scalpel to dissect their bull and set us straight.
Scott, I think it's terribly important in the next days for people to pay close attention to the way in which the administration has created this narrative about particularly Iranian EFPs, explosively formed penetrators, which remains the heart and soul of the administration's very high emotional content propaganda line on Iran with regard to Iraq, the Iranian role in Iraq.
This is, I think, along with, of course, the nuclear weapons issue.
These two issues will be the equivalent of the WMD issue in the case of the invasion of Iraq.
So we must pay close attention to the way in which that administration line was created, the way in which it's been fostered.
And I will be writing about that in the coming week, you know, trying to further develop the analysis of how that was perpetrated in the American public.
Because it is clearly a cynical ploy put forward in the knowledge that they did not have any evidence to support it.
In fact, they knew that those EFPs were being manufactured in Iraq when they went to the public February 11th with that briefing and began to pretend that they had that kind of information.
You can prove that they knew then.
They did know that they were already being manufactured, and within two weeks of that February 11th briefing in Baghdad, General Ray Odierno, the top ground commander, ground troop commander in Baghdad, basically backed away from the idea that all these EFPs must have been made in Iran because they require some special manufacturing technique that only the Iranians have.
And he admitted, yes, they are being manufactured in Iraq.
And then he made the argument that, well, they are being manufactured there, but the ones manufactured in Iraq really aren't that much of a problem, which also was a lie.
And there's a very important report by NBC correspondent Jane Araf, A-R-R-A-F, which was completely ignored by the media but which I'm going to write about, which quoted a senior U.S. military figure in Baghdad as telling her that, in fact, they knew that the homemade Iraqi EFPs were quite lethal, they were quite capable of penetrating the armor of U.S. vehicles.
And therefore, it was clear that Odierno was simply creating a new lie, a new fallback position, which was equally false.
This was the way in which they had to react to what they knew was information that was going to come out that U.S. troops were finding factories manufacturing EFPs in Iraq.
Gareth Porter, you're the best.
Everybody, please read what he writes.
It's antiwar.com/porter.
Thanks again so much for your time.
Maybe we'll talk again next week.
