11/04/10 – Matthew Duss – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest today is Matthew Duss.
He is a national security researcher and blogger at the Center for American Progress.
The Wonk Room is the name of the blog there.
He's got his master's degree in Middle East studies from the University of Washington's Jackson School of International Studies, BA in political science from the University of Washington.
He's written for the LA Times, the Baltimore Sun, the American Prospect, The Guardian, and has appeared all over TV news.
Welcome to the show, Matthew, how are you doing?
Doing well, thanks very much.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And I'd like to say, although I don't always agree with the Center for American Progress on everything, I pretty much always do when it comes to foreign policy, and I've always found the various blogs over there at thinkprogress.org extremely valuable.
Like, for example, if people wanna find the clip of Norman Podhortz saying he hopes and prays that America will start a war with Iran, and he knows that it would make the current anti-Americanism around the world look like a picnic, he doesn't care, he wants to have a war anyway, that kind of thing.
There's nowhere else I don't think you can find that clip except at the ThinkProgress blog, and there's a million other stories like that on Chalabi, on the neocons, and especially on the push for a war with Iran, which is the topic today.
You guys have had a lot of great coverage there over the years, and I appreciate it.
Thanks very much.
Yeah, sure thing.
Okay, so this one is called Getting Ready for the Iran War Push.
And start off with this congresswoman from Florida whose name I can't pronounce, please.
Ileana Ross-Lehtinen.
She's a Republican congresswoman from Florida.
She is set to be the new chairperson of the House Foreign Affairs Committee taking over for Howard Berman.
She's, as I write in the post, she's been a leading Iran hawk in the House for a while.
She was one of the leading sponsors of the gas sanctions, and she's made very clear that she's going to push the administration to enforce these sanctions as closely and aggressively as possible.
And she's also made very clear that she sees no value in the engagement policy of the Obama administration, the desire to show a willingness to talk and demonstrate good faith, which I think has, whatever one says about that effort, whether it's been extensive enough, I think it's clear to me that that's had a number of very positive effects, both in the international arena and in Iran.
So that's very troubling that she completely discounts that out of hand.
Well, I have to tell you, from a completely opposite point of view from her, I kind of dismiss it out of hand too because it seems so contradictory.
The way you said it, like maybe it hadn't gone far enough or not is in dispute, but I'm not so sure that it was ever meant to be honest.
It seems like, on one hand, in the various deals that the Obama team has offered, they seem to be willing to accept the enrichment of uranium on Iranian soil, which is certainly a change from the Bush-Cheney line.
And yet they still seem to just pretend that it goes without saying that uranium enrichment on Iranian soil is tantamount to progress on a nuclear weapon and cannot be tolerated.
That's still the sticking point at the same time that it's not anymore.
Do I have that confused, you think?
I think, I mean, I would disagree a little bit.
I would think they have not come out and said, I think it's clear their language has been different from the Bush administration.
They've not come right out and said, you know, on that point about, you know, civilian enrichment on Iranian soil, because they understand that that is a very valuable negotiating point.
It's a very valuable currency, I think.
But they have, as far as I understand, the way they've spoken about it, they understand that this is something, they understand that under the, you know, the NPT, this is Iran's right.
But with that right also goes certain responsibilities in regard to inspections, which, you know, of which Iran is in violation right now.
Yeah, although even then, I think I could probably read this at y'all's website somewhere.
Even that is kind of a red herring because it's not their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty that are left wanting.
It's their obligations under a bunch of separate John Bolton, Condoleezza Rice, UN Security Council resolutions that mandate that they do this, that, and the other thing far beyond what they're obligated by in the NPT or their safeguards.
No, I think, yeah, there are, there is some dispute over what they actually agreed to in the annexes once it was revealed that they had a nuclear program, which again was itself a violation.
So, I mean, I think that's true to say, yeah, under John Bolton and Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration, these other additional requirements were leveled.
And so, yeah, Iran has kind of disputed and the U.S. has disputed over what exactly they are, you know, what they're required to do.
It wasn't a violation for them to have a nuclear program.
It's only a violation if they don't notify the IAEA within six months before introducing nuclear material to any particular facility.
So, building a uranium gas, I forgot what the other, conversion facility to make uranium hexafluoride gas or beginning to excavate a site at Natanz where one day they will have centrifuges, something like that, is not a violation of their safeguards agreement or their NPT obligations.
It's true that they were outed by the Israelis by way of the MEK, but they weren't breaking any international law at the time that they were outed.
It was secret, not illegal.
Right, I think that's fair.
I mean, I think that's their very strict and I would say probably reasonable interpretation.
But- Oh, that's because I know Doc Prather.
What's that?
I know Dr. Prather, Dr. Gordon Prather at antiwar.com wrote one million articles about all of this over the years and has taught me well.
Right, fair enough.
I'll be getting back to the Obama administration to attend to you, I think.
You know, personally, I would have liked to see him invest a bit more time and a bit more energy in this.
I do think, however, he, you know, and this is based on conversations I've had with Iranian dissidents with whom I've been able to meet, you know, especially since June 12th.
And they've, all of them across the board have stressed what an important difference Obama's willingness to talk is no ruse.
Greeting and this change in rhetoric, even if not in policy as much, did actually open up some space in Iran that I think is very important.
Now, that is a separate issue, I think, from, you know, the nuclear problem, or maybe it's not.
But I think where I come down is that, you know, the Iranian nuclear program is only gonna be dealt with in one way, and that's through inspections.
The question is, is it going to be IAEA inspections under UN auspices, or is it going to be inspections carried out by occupying US troops?
I think that's really what we have, the question we have to talk about.
Yeah, well, and that's certainly the way it's been framed.
And, you know, I think it's gotta go without saying that Obama, well, it should be said, I don't think that Obama wants to have a war with Iran.
It's just that it seems like the way the argument is set up is that he's got no choice, because ultimately what it comes down to is American insistence that there is no civilian nuclear program there, or I guess Hillary Clinton says they can have their Bruchere reactor, but they can't make the fuel for it, or something, which the Iranians are not going to back down on until after the regime change.
And, you know, Scott Ritter said years ago, it's just a pretext anyway.
Everybody knows there's no secret nuclear weapons program in Iran.
There's not a shred of evidence that there is.
And what they do have is safeguarded by the IAEA.
They're not producing weapons-grade material of any kind.
And it's just an excuse.
We've had this policy since the end of the Cold War of just containing Iran.
Come hell or high water, we can't figure out what else to do with them.
So we have these excuses.
Well, I don't know if I would put it quite like that.
I think there is, there's actually, you know, the intelligence communities, their position is still actually very much like it was in 2007, which is that, you know, there is evidence that there are plan, you know, there are developments.
I mean, they're preparing for certain contingencies.
What actually, you know, what actually constitutes a weapons development, I think is an open question.
But I think at the end of the day, the intelligence community has no evidence that Iran has taken a decision to get a nuclear weapon.
Now, I think that's very important because if you look at the history of nuclear weapons powers, it's countries that have decided from the outset to get a weapon have usually done it.
Whereas countries that have behaved as Iran has behaved, where they're kind of like, you know, we're gonna build nuclear power and maybe someday we'll have the option they have ended up in.
The vast majority of those countries have abstained from weaponization.
So I think it's important to know that.
Now, having said that, you do getting back to Ms. Ross-Layton and then the new Congress, it's clear that these people are acting on the assumption that Iran is crazy and they want a weapon.
And we got to stop them.
So I think that's kind of the debate we have to be aware of right now.
Worse, they're operating on the assumption, not necessarily that they believe it.
I don't know.
They're Republicans.
So how cynical can they be?
But at least they want people to believe that Obama just wants to appease the Iranians, that they have to be really tough against him and really put pressure on him to stop dealing with them at all, no matter how far short I think his dealings have been.
So that really is the worry.
And the new balance of power will be the subject we'll pick up on the other side of this break.
Talking with Matt Duss from thinkprogress.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Matt Duss from thinkprogress.org, the Center for American Progress.
We're talking about how now the Republicans are taking back the House of Representatives and what this means for Iran policy.
And there are some hardcore Republican hawks on the Iran issue in the House of Representatives.
And now tell me, Matt, what effect do you think this is going to have on Obama's approach?
In fact, before you answer that, let me say one thing, which was, and I kind of mentioned this a second ago.
I saw Hillary Clinton on TV kind of telling people not to worry about the Bushehr reactor going online.
She said, you know, I see all this stuff.
She was very dismissive.
She said, I see all this stuff in the media about, oh no, the Bushehr reactor is going online.
And then she said, get this.
No, listen, Iran has the right to peaceful use of nuclear energy.
They're just not allowed to build nuclear weapons, which sounded to me like, hey, all right.
She accepts the premise that they have a civilian nuclear program.
And that's pretty good coming from Hillary Clinton.
Now the Republicans are coming.
Right.
No, yeah, I think the, you know, obviously domestic issues are going to drive, you know, at least in the shorter term.
But I think that if you look back, I think it's very useful to look at, you know, the 90s under Clinton and the way that the neocons who are still very much, you know, they have been still very influential in the Republican foreign policy circles.
The kind of strategy that they used then, which was to, you know, press Clinton, fight Clinton at every turn, and then give him the opportunity to relieve the pressure by signing this, you know, this Iran, or sorry, this Iraq Liberation Act, which effectively made regime change or not effectively, it did literally make regime change the policy of the United States.
And I don't know if we'll see anything that drastic in terms of Iran, but I think we can expect to see at some point some comparable bill, you know, wherein, you know, the Republicans come in and say, listen, here's a chance for you to show some bipartisanship and show some leadership on the Middle East.
So let's sign this bill in support of, you know, Iranian dissidents, which, you know, then, you know, when the Republicans take back the White House, whenever that happens, they can then refer to this bill as evidence of bipartisan support for whatever crazy war or crazy Middle East scheme they want to carry off in regard to Iran.
So we just have to be careful and look for this sort of escalatory strategy, because that's clearly what they're up to.
Well, and now, when I talk with Gareth Porter and other experts, the consensus seems to be that the only people in the Pentagon who want war with Iran are the Air Force.
That's what Phil Giraldi said.
He goes, look, the truth is the Air Force doesn't fight.
They don't, they're not really in danger.
They want to go in there and bomb everything, let the Marines and the Army clean up the mess.
Right.
But it's nice when the Pentagon is as powerful as it is, you know, the standing Army as the core principle of American society, the basis of it all now, I guess.
It's nice to know that a lot of those guys are, you know, soberly against the policy of escalating this thing out of control.
Right, I think that's very important.
I mean, just quickly in regard to the Air Force, I mean, this goes to my friend, Rob Farley.
He's a professor at the University of Kentucky.
He wrote a great article a few years ago called Abolish the Air Force, where he argued that having the Air Force as a separate division, or a separate arm of the military was a bad idea, precisely because it's something like this, where they try to come up with all kinds of missions for themselves, such as bombing Iran, which would just be disastrous.
Unfortunately, I think, you know, the strong consensus within, you know, not only the military, but also the kind of national security community at large, I think is that an attack on Iran, either by the U.S. or Israel, would have all kinds of disastrous consequences.
So yeah, that is very important.
I mean, that is something that, I mean, I think, and it's worth understanding that even though the military feels that they have been, they've essentially been doing battle with Iran in Iraq.
Now, I think we can, I think WikiLeaks addressed this a little bit, and we need to, you know, have the caveat here that this is not this positive.
This just, the WikiLeaks just show us what the military thought was true.
But it's still, it is true that the military did believe that they were encountering Iran and doing battle with Iran at numerous times in Iraq.
And even recognizing that, they're still not interested in an Iran war.
Right, and, you know, it was Admiral Fallon of the Navy was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the scariest time for this in 2007, when Cheney was really pushing hard, and even Treyas on board with him, and Treyas' boss, Admiral Fallon, I guess, basically said, over my dead body, this is not happening now, and stopped it.
And although, you know, in the larger context, everybody knows that Ahmed Chalabi was working for the Iranians, that the Americans' second choice, Bush and Cheney's second choice for power in Iraq was the Supreme Islamic Council of the Hakeem clan that had been living in Iran for 20 years.
You know, 30 years now, they've been tied with Iran, those guys.
And it was the Bader Corps and the Wolf Brigade and everybody else in those Iraq war logs torturing people who were the Iranians working with America.
That's the government that Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney installed in power in that country.
So their little caveat about we fought the Mahdi army, and they had some help from the Iranians, too, is meaningless in that context.
So don't let them get away with it, Matt.
They always try to spin that.
Right.
This was a war for Iran.
We talked with the war nerd on the show.
There was the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s to keep Iran out of Iraq, basically.
And then there was the Iran-Iraq war of the 2000s where George Bush invaded Iraq on behalf of Iran and helped conquer Iraq for Iran.
No, that's hugely important to understand.
I mean, actually, I'll be writing something tomorrow.
I was able to talk to Shirin Abadi, the Iranian human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, and she spent a lot of time just talking about how horrible the Iraq war had been for Iran, I mean, for Iranian Democrats.
And she was saying for the regime in Iran, the Iraq war was excellent because we basically, you know, we've created a government made up of the Iranian government's former clients and current clients in some respects.
But just in terms of the whole freedom agenda, this whole idea that the Bush administration had that, you know, we're gonna invade Iraq, we'll turn it into a democracy and everything will be great, it just really didn't work out that way.
And so I think it's hugely important for critics, you know, on the left, progressives, to constantly remind people of this.
I mean, there's a tendency in the D.C. establishment to forget these kinds of things and we just really cannot let them.
Well, and I'd like to point out too, that even with Iran empowered in the way they've been inside Iraq, there's still no threat to us in a million years.
The idea that America has to feel, Americans have to be afraid of Iran, of the terrible thing that might happen if we don't do something, is absolutely ridiculous.
It's not even fit for a comic book.
Well, no, I mean, I don't know if I'd go that strong.
I would say yes, the truth is Iran, I mean, you look at how much Iran spends on the military.
Iran might be a threat to our Navy and the Persian Gulf, but it's the Persian Gulf.
The threat is so, it is minuscule compared to threats we've faced in the past.
But I mean, I wouldn't be entirely sanguine.
I think the fact is Iran is, you know, like most countries, Iran is interested in affecting its own interests.
And I think there are, you know, they're certainly engaged in activities with regard to Hezbollah and support for Hamas that we should be concerned about.
But having said that, I think it's clear that we need to try to engage Iran into some kind of, you know, regional architecture and see if we can possibly bridge certain gaps in regard to what we want and what they want.
It may eventually turn out that we cannot bridge those gaps.
I'm not convinced.
I don't know the answer to that right now.
Yeah, well, even then, Hamas and Hezbollah are really not America's enemies, are they?
Not yet, but they're the enemy of our ally.
And I think that does mean something.
I'm certainly, I have real issues with Israeli policy, especially in regard to the occupied territories.
But I think, you know, the fact is that we are engaged in the Middle East on a range, in a range of ways.
And one of those is our alliance with Israel.
But it also has to do with, you know, if you want to call it a Pax Americana that exists in the Middle East.
And I think we can definitely talk about what that, whether that is worth it, whether we want to see that changed.
I do, I definitely want to see, you know, the kind of context within which we tend to engage with people in the Middle East to change not to involve so many people with guns.
But I mean, the fact is Iran is challenging our influence in a number of ways, and that's worth considering.
Well, you make a very important point when you talk about bipartisanship or bipartisan agreement equaling truth.
And I remember thinking it was the funniest thing in the world to hear right-wing conservatives, Bush supporters in 2002 and 2003 saying, look, Bill Clinton and Al Gore say that he has weapons of mass destruction.
And so now all of a sudden, these two who were known among the right for being the worst liars ever, now because they agree with George Bush, that's what makes what George Bush says true.
And though none of us have any evidence in front of us, well, there must be secret information that they don't know.
And especially because where Bill Clinton and George Bush agree, we know that's where the truth is.
That's the same kind of thing with, hey, even Obama says that Iran is this terrible threat.
So I guess Bush and Cheney really had something there.
Yeah.
Kind of like even Obama admits that we gotta have Guantanamo Bay.
We gotta have military trials.
And we have to, we can't prosecute torturers because torture is really not illegal in America anymore anyway, as long as the government does it.
Right, yeah.
I mean, noting that strategy, and we've definitely seen it work on other issues, just making things so difficult for the president that he's willing to sell out on certain issues as I think he's unfortunately selling out on Guantanamo.
Yeah, well, and it's too bad too.
You know, I don't know exactly what good this guy ever wanted to do.
It seems like he always promises a really big change for the better on things and then immediately backs down.
I'm not sure, you know, who thought that that was a good political strategy, but I guess we saw how it worked out in the election the other day.
Not too well so far.
Anyway, sounds like we're out of time, but I appreciate your time on the show today, Matt.
All right, happy to do it, man.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Matt Duss from the Center for American Progress, wonkroom.thinkprogress.org.