John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, discusses his new book Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam; how the Obama administration is “bribing Israel” with offers of bunker buster bombs and long range aircraft if Israel will wait until after the election to attack Iran; looking at the pros and cons – for Iran – in pursuing a nuclear weapon; and the lack of resolve in US policy on Syria.
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All right, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is John Pfeffer.
He's co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, fpif.org.
He's the author of several books and the latest one is Crusade 2.0, The West's Resurgent War on Islam.
Welcome back to the show, John, how are you?
All right, thanks for having me back on.
Well, I'm happy to have you here and I'm happy that the mailman brought me Crusade 2.0 the other day, but I haven't had a chance to crack it open yet.
Please be patient with me, but I very much want to read it and interview you about it.
That sounds good.
Maybe you can give us, I guess, the titles, a little bit of an overview there, a parallel that you're making between the Crusades of old and the 21st century version here.
Well, basically, the same stereotypes that existed during the Crusades, basically 11th and 12th, 13th centuries, are with us today, that Islam is inherently violent, that it is inherently treacherous, and that it is inherently bent to take over the world.
Those were the common stereotypes at that time, and you'll find them in pretty much a lot of political speeches today all over the internet.
From my point of view, that's extremely toxic.
It was toxic back then, and it's potentially even more toxic today.
Yeah, well, I'm sure you cover in there the, I guess, the clash of civilizations lobby that would like very much for us to believe that for some reason there's such a thing, even as the Muslim world, and that we are at war against it, whether we like it or not, we really don't.
That's correct.
I mean, there's some remarkable arguments out there about how, for instance, the Muslim lobby is in control of Washington, which is really an amazing argument, given the present U.S. policy toward the Muslim world.
In other words, if there were such a Muslim lobby, it would be extremely ineffective.
Yeah, or it just represents the princes of Saudi Arabia and nobody else.
Exactly.
That's what they must be talking about there.
All right, well, so anyway, let's talk about, well, and it's all part of the same story, your recent piece at Foreign Policy in Focus, bribing Israel, and I guess we could talk about bribing Saudi Arabia and bribing Egypt and bribing the rest of the Middle East to pretend to not hate Israel, but in this case we're talking about bribing Israel to not bomb Iran yet.
Is that basically what's been happening here?
Exactly.
And I'm sure your listeners remember that the head of Israel came to visit here in the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu, and according to the conventional story, he came here and tried to persuade the Obama administration to support an attack on Iran.
He failed to do so.
The president basically said, no, we're going to continue with sanctions and diplomacy.
He spoke at AIPAC.
He got a lot of support there, but then Netanyahu had to return home empty-handed.
But in fact, he didn't return home empty-handed, because the Obama administration essentially said, look, if you would pretty please not attack Iran during this election year, we'll send you some advanced military hardware on top of the military assistance we already provide you.
And suspiciously, that military hardware, bunker busters and long-range aircraft capable of refueling in air, are specifically the type of weapons that Israel would use in an attack on Iran.
But again, what the Obama administration was most concerned about was that such an event would take place during an election year and force the Obama administration into an extremely difficult political choice at a time when it basically wants to avoid any kind of controversy.
Well, I had missed it that they had actually, I saw the bunker busting bombs, which the Bush administration refused to give them.
But I had missed, even in your article, I guess I just read it too fast, that the long-range refueling planes.
Now this means the fuel tankers, or this means a new batch of F-16s that have the correct nozzle for being refueled by such a tanker, if they had one, or what exactly?
Well, they haven't released the information on what exactly this package would include.
My guess is it's still...
I guess it means a tanker.
Yeah, that would be my guess.
But I suspect that this is still subject to some negotiation.
And, you know, the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu, I think on a personal level is not particularly good.
However, formally speaking, the relationship between the United States and Israel is quite good, even with the Netanyahu government.
And in my piece I talk about the fact, of course, that we're talking about a variety of different Israels.
I mean, there's the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu, and then there's an Israel that's even further to the right, that's even more obnoxious in terms of treatment of women and non-Jews in Israel.
And then, of course, there's the opposition to Netanyahu, which is also considerable.
And a large majority of the population of Israel opposes an attack on Iran and supports Obama's position on this issue.
Well, you know, it's funny.
It's almost like the old Marxist dialectic or whatever.
They just come saying, oh, well, we demand that you move your red line to they've already crossed it and start the bombing today.
And then the Americans say, oh, no, no, we can't go that far.
Tell you what, we'll just promise to bomb the hell out of them at some point in the indetermined future.
And we'll give you a bunch of weapons that you never had access to before for free.
Well, the United States has always basically had the policy of giving Israel more or less the most advanced military weaponry.
Now, when I say more or less, I mean that the agreement is that Israel has to have the most advanced military weaponry in the region.
That doesn't mean it has the most advanced military weaponry in the world.
That's an important distinction.
In terms of attacking Iran, you know, as you've probably seen in the New York Times, there's a major ad that featured statements from leading U.S. military leaders, former and even still affiliated with the administration, that there's a considerable wariness and skepticism about attacking Iran.
I mean, the Pentagon is not really into the plan.
It knows two things, one, that it's extremely difficult to identify where the nuclear program is located.
It's a dispersed program.
And two, of course, that the consequences would be dire.
Now, there's the additional piece of information that so far as we know, Iran has not decided to weaponize its program.
So that there is speculation, for instance, that Iran is pursuing what's known as a recessed deterrence, which is something that Japan has.
Japan, of course, is not a nuclear power, it's not in the nuclear club, but it certainly has a considerable amount of weaponizable plutonium.
And it also has the technology to actually ramp up very quickly to become a nuclear power to have as many as 100 nuclear weapons within a six to 12 month period.
So the indications, or at least the best guess, it seems in the intelligence community, is that Iran has not made that decision to formally pursue a nuclear weapon, but that this recessed deterrence might be a kind of fallback option.
All right, now, do you think that absent all this pressure that the Iranians would go ahead and make nukes?
Or you think it's, I guess, the more obvious anti-war position would be that no, the more you threaten them, the more likely they are to make nukes, but maybe they're not so far because of how scared of the consequences they are.
Because they still, as Obama says to Jeffrey Goldberg in the recent piece, well, it would take them a while, if they decided to begin making nukes now, it would take them a while to get there, and we'd have plenty of time to bomb them then.
That's right.
My guess is that, of course, that there are several contending factions within Iran, some that kind of hold to the imam's latest fatwa, basically, that nuclear weapons are against the religion of Islam, and others that see nuclear weapons as a useful deterrent.
All right, I'm sorry, I've got to cut you off.
I shouldn't have asked you that right before the break, but I wasn't watching the clock, because I'm bad at this, after all these years.
Hold it right there, everybody.
We'll be right back with Jon Pfeffer after this, fpif.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Jon Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org.
They've got a great stable of writers over there, keep track of a lot of very important stuff for us all, fpif.org.
And this piece is called, Bribing Israel, and I guess to sort of rephrase the question, Jon, really what I'm wondering is, am I just naive?
Is the President of the United States right, that, oh my God, if we don't do what we're doing right now, Iran will make nuclear weapons, and then that'll start an arms race in the Middle East, and then all these nukes will go off, it'll be like our India-Pakistan situation times ten, I think is what he told Jeffrey Goldberg, something like that.
Maybe we need to be the hedgemen over there to prevent this kind of madness from happening.
Well, first I've got to say that I would not be enthusiastic about Iran joining the nuclear club, as I'm not enthusiastic about any country joining the nuclear club, or staying in the nuclear club, for that matter.
So is Iran about to enter the nuclear club?
I don't think so.
I think there are a lot of good reasons why Iran realizes that a nuclear weapon is not useful.
It's not useful because it will have significant consequences, not just the United States cutting off, and Israel cutting off Iran even more so than it has done so with the sanctions, but its current allies, the countries that have been working with Iran, either on its nuclear program or have been major recipients of its resources, oil primarily, those would be Russia, China, India, the major purchasers.
None of those countries are going to be happy about Iran becoming a nuclear power.
Now, on the other hand, if you're in Tehran and you're looking around at the world today, and you say, well, what countries have the United States intervened in over the last 20 years?
They're going to be countries, of course, that don't have nuclear weapons, and in some cases, countries that gave up nuclear weapons.
Libya, for example.
Iraq, of course, didn't have weapons of mass destruction, did not pursue, ultimately, a nuclear program.
Serbia.
What country has the United States not attacked militarily?
Well, North Korea.
North Korea, of course, went ahead and developed a nuclear program.
So from a very pragmatic point of view, the folks in Tehran might be saying, well, the consequences of getting a nuclear weapon are indeed dire, but the consequences of not having a nuclear deterrent are even worse.
So it's not a particularly good choice that they have to make right now.
Well, and now, one of the things that Obama talks about in his AIPAC speech, and especially in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, he's really trying to justify himself, I guess, in that interview, and saying that, you know, these sanctions have put the Iranians in a world of hurt.
But does that mean that they're working?
I mean, OK, so they've made a lot of progress.
I'm not sure exactly how much in destroying Iran's currency.
But is that stopping the centrifuges from spinning?
No, no, there's no evidence that the sanctions have really had much of an effect on North Korea's nuclear program.
They, of course, have had an effect on ordinary Iranians, because these sanctions are directed at banks and at the income that Iran gets from its oil sales.
And that has, generally speaking, kind of promoted a rally around the flag effect.
In other words, the folks in Iran who are affected by these sanctions, they might ordinarily be angry at the government, but the sanctions offer a much likelier target.
So they're, in fact, angry at the United States and the countries that are supporting the sanctions.
So in many cases, the sanctions have a kind of contrary effect.
They don't weaken the government, they strengthen it.
Is a lot of this just sour grapes by the Americans?
I mean, I know they've had a pretty tough Iran policy for a generation and a half or so now, but is part of this just sour grapes for accidentally empowering them in Iraq and in such a strong way?
I mean, I mean, they are the rising power in the Middle East, and it's because of the United States policy over the last decade.
Well, that's partly true.
I mean, the United States, of course, had supported, you know, the kind of governments in the region that were seen as a kind of bulwark against Shiite fundamentalism, especially after 1979 and the rise of the Islamic Republic in Iran.
With the deterioration of those governments, the collapse, of course, the war against Saddam Hussein and the collapse of that regime, what seems to be the deterioration of the regime in Syria, the uprisings against the Mubarak government in Egypt, the kind of erosion of power in Yemen, challenges that the government in Bahrain, all of this, you know, is potential for kind of a civil war that has been, or an increase in the civil war that has been going on in the region for decades.
And that's a war between Sunnis and Shiites, with Iran kind of representing one pole and Saudi Arabia representing the other.
And, you know, this is something that is not necessarily what the United States wants to see.
I mean, the kind of stability, however kind of specious that stability was in the region enabled the United States to have access to the resources it wanted in the region, oil particularly, and keep the price of gas relatively low.
Right now, the situation is far from stable.
And the United States is certainly not profiting from that.
But Iran potentially can.
But again, and Saudi Arabia potentially can as well.
And I think both of them are vying for influence in this region.
Hmm.
Well, which brings up Syria, of course, too.
As Jeffrey Goldberg and Obama framed it when they discussed, it was all about weakening Iran, had nothing to do with boo-hoo for the poor people of Syria, who John McCain said are now the victims of genocide going on over there or something.
But actually, no, just be a way to weaken Iran maybe would be to help get going that civil war that because this has taken so long, they've all talked about in public.
Over and over again, Hillary Clinton was saying, yeah, maybe we get a civil war going over there.
And then she said, you know what?
Hamas and Al Qaeda are taking the same side as us against Assad.
Maybe we should slow down a little bit.
And then, I guess, a week after that, they announced, at least at foreign policy dot com kind of leaked fashion that, yeah, we're going to go ahead and step up our support for the rebels there.
Yeah, there's obviously some disconnect in the Obama administration.
And, you know, there's, I think, a really sharp divide between different policy camps.
One policy camp is like, look, you know, Assad's got to go.
He's never been an ally of the United States.
And even though we kind of like him as a source of stability in the region to a certain extent, we've got to get rid of him.
And we will partner with whomever in order to get rid of him.
And that, of course, would be the Syrian opposition and, of course, Saudi Arabia and others that are also eager to see Assad go.
The other camp says, look, wait a second.
We don't like necessarily these forces that have emerged in the region.
A great deal of suspicion about Islamist forces.
Is there any question where Netanyahu comes down on this argument?
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, Netanyahu, like, you know, the United States, wants stability above all.
If he has a partner in the region that he can work with, and he has worked to a certain extent with Syria, not so much as a partner, but as a known quantity, I think they'd rather go with a known quantity.
They would not really like to see kind of an Islamist force emerge in Syria.
But I hasten to add that there's really not a lot of evidence that the opposition right now in Syria is Islamist in nature, certainly not jihadist, certainly not Salafist.
Now, many of the fighters in Syria right now are definitely religious.
Well, there's been a couple of suicide bombings, two or three at least, right?
That's correct.
But again, this is not an indication of a kind of a political notion of Islam, say, Muslim Brotherhood style or...
No, I mean, to me, that just seems like the tactic of the guys coming from Iraq, that kind of thing.
Exactly.
And again, I think the perception somehow that Islamism in the region is a force that is antithetical to democracy is incorrect, because, of course, we've seen the emergence of Islamist forces around the world, whether it's Islamist-influenced party in Turkey or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that have worked within the parliamentary democracy form that.
All right.
I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
I've got to cut you off there.
But everybody, please check out fpif.org, Foreign Policy in Focus.
The article is Bribing Israel, the author John Pfeffer.
Thanks again.
Thanks for having me.
