08/05/09 – Robert Dreyfuss – The Scott Horton Show

Alright everybody, you all know Bob Dreyfuss, he writes for The Nation Magazine, keeps a blog there called The Dreyfuss Report, and also he's the author of the book Devil's Game, How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
Welcome back to the show Bob, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, thanks.
Well it's very good to have you back here, I've been meaning to have you on for a while, I'm glad I finally got the chance.
Now, all this recent turmoil in Iran, you were there, at least during the beginning of it, right?
This contested election between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.
I was there for the first half of June, before the election and then for a few days afterwards, and I don't think the turmoil is quieting down any time soon, but they've managed to scare people off the streets with the crackdown, you know.
Well, yeah, it has been very interesting to watch, it seems like the momentum, as you say, has been driven off of the streets, but it does seem like it's still going on, this is the furthest thing from resolve.
I mean, Al Gore said, okay, fine, I lost, and then that was the end of that for four years, until the next election, but that's not going on here.
Well, yeah, I don't know if we can compare one to the other, but it isn't like this movement came out of nowhere.
There's been a great deal of disenchantment with the rulers in Iran for a long, long time.
There's a whole contingent of the population which has never adjusted to having clergy men rule the country, first of all, and then there's another whole contingent that for the last 20 years has been trying to at least reform or moderate the system to be a little more democratic and a little more accommodating, and certainly to have a lot more freedom of speech.
And then a third component of this is you have a lot of business people in Iran who are unhappy with the mismanagement of the economy by the government, and also unhappy about the sanctions, because the sanctions have put a real dent into several key sectors of Iran's economy, and that's caused a lot of members of the business community and the merchant class and so on to resent the way Ahmadinejad's nonsensical, bellicose belligerence has alienated Iran or isolated Iran from the rest of the world.
Wow, that's actually the first time I think I've ever heard, I'm not saying you're making for the sanctions, but that's the first time I've ever heard of sanctions quote-unquote working, doing what they're supposed to, turn the people against their own state for getting them into that mess.
Well, I'm not saying that they're turning the people against the state, I think it's more just among certain classes of the elite, among certain business people that I spoke to when I was there.
I don't know if it's gotten down to the level of popular opinion yet, although I did pick up some of that, but I talked to a lot of business types who say that the sanctions are having an effect, and it isn't just the sanctions per se, but it's also just the climate instability and impermanence that has caused some foreign investors and technology suppliers and so forth to shy away from making deals with Iran.
It's just not seen as a good place to do business.
So, for example, there have been a couple of plane crashes in Iran in the last few weeks.
Iran's whole civil aviation industry is in big trouble, in part because they can't get spare parts for the Boeing and other aircraft that they fly.
Their oil and gas industry is a mess.
They need urgently to build a bunch of refineries and chemical plants that can ease the energy crunch there.
Also, in computers and IT, there's a huge gap.
Iran is way behind many other countries, even in the region, in its high-tech sector.
So all of these things are really suffering because of Iran's diplomatic and political isolation.
Well, now, what do you think is going to happen, or at least what is happening?
I guess there was some articles about these show trials where they're accusing a lot of Mousavi supporters as being part of a plot to overthrow the government and all this stuff, and yet it seems like Mousavi is still commenting.
He's asking people to boycott the inauguration and complaining about the parliament ratifying the election of Ahmadinejad, that kind of thing.
What's going to happen to him?
Is he safe, but all his followers are in deep, deep trouble, or what?
Well, I wouldn't exactly say that he's safe.
I think that both the reformists, like former Prime Minister Mousavi or former President Hassani, and also the centrists, people like Ayatollah Rafsanjani and other former presidents, the three of them, I think, could be arrested at any point in the immediate future, because the groundwork is being laid by these show trials to make charges against the leaders of this whole opposition movement.
So far, they've held off from going after the leaders.
They've arrested everybody up to kind of a second tier.
Now, that doesn't mean that they're free.
They can't get up and give speeches too easily.
A lot of their media has been shut down.
Their offices have been closed.
They're very restricted in being able to communicate.
We did see a couple of weeks ago, Rafsanjani gave a big Friday prayer sermon in which he used the occasion to criticize the regime, although in somewhat guarded terms.
But you're right, they're not backing down.
They're talking about creating a political party.
They've said they want the election results annulled.
They've called for continued protests, and there were protests today, clashes and so on, because Ahmadinejad is being sworn in as president for his second term.
This could get really ugly, it sounds like.
No state can have a long-term challenge to its legitimacy.
It's either going to work out some sort of compromise until the next election, or it's going to have to start at least arresting people, if not killing them, in pretty large numbers here.
Well, they've certainly done quite a bit of arresting and a small but significant amount of killing already.
I'm not sure I agree with you that they can't survive without legitimacy.
They can survive with a narrower base and a more repressive apparatus, just like many regimes around the world do quite nicely, thank you.
Well, I guess I mean with the organized opposition continuing to demand that they're the legitimate government, not the ones who are holding the power.
Yeah, well, they're going to have to shut them up, there's no doubt.
I'm not recommending it, I'm just saying I'm looking at a pretty grim future, it looks like.
Yeah, it's not a pretty picture.
It doesn't mean that the battle is lost, but I do think they're going to have to deal with the current ruling powers in Iran for the foreseeable future.
What about this split between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei?
It seems like they've been fighting.
What's that about?
Well, that's really difficult to analyze, because we can't get inside that dispute.
I mean, there have been reports and analysis that show that they've been at loggerheads.
When I was in Iran, I certainly interviewed people who suggested that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that conventional wisdom being that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is the boss of all things, and that Ahmadinejad is kind of a puppet.
There were several people who told me that it's the exact opposite, or that that's at least been tilted, because Ahmadinejad, through his allies in the security forces and other security ministries, has kind of surrounded Khamenei and been able to eclipse him or intimidate him to some degree.
I don't know how we can tell whether that's true or not, but certainly, one thing for certain, Khamenei made a big mistake, or we should at least say he took a big risk, by endorsing Ahmadinejad so publicly the day after the election, when he is supposed to be above it all.
He's supposed to be the conciliator and the leader that has authority over all the different components and factions of Iran.
So when he threw his lot in with Ahmadinejad on June 13th, which was very early in the struggle, he made himself a target.
And that's when we started to see people making the remarkable chants in the streets about death to Khamenei, which is an extremely unusual and radical charge to make, at least in public, in Iran.
Before that they had targeted Ahmadinejad as their opponent, and now I think they've lumped Khamenei in with that.
So he seems to be irrevocably tied now to Ahmadinejad.
Now if there are disputes within that camp between them and their friends, that just makes it even harder for them to keep things under control.
It seems like it would introduce a lot of variables that, as you said, you can't even necessarily know what they are from a position here in North America, and yet at the same time we have this deadline that says, was it eight weeks?
Is it really some kind of deadline for Iran to come to the table to negotiate their nuclear program?
Or else more sanctions, Bob?
I mean, are they in a position to even do that right now?
Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, with all this controversy going on inside the country there?
Well, I think it's probably unlikely that they would be in a position over the next few months to carry out anything like productive talks over the nuclear program or anything else, even if we presume that they want to.
That doesn't mean, however, that it's entirely impossible, I think it's a bad idea for President Obama or leaders in Europe to start talking about deadlines.
I think as much as we may not like Khamenei and Ahmadinejad and their cronies, you have to deal with the government that you have, and we certainly did that this week with North Korea, which has the most creepy regime you could imagine, and yet Bill Clinton went there and had apparently a productive encounter with its dear leader and brought about the release of those two journalists that were held.
So it's not out of the question to deal with these people, and I certainly don't agree with the people who say that it's providing legitimacy to a regime that's in trouble.
I think the regime is in trouble because of internal problems and not because it doesn't have legitimacy or the approval of the West.
Not only that, but when I was in Iran I found a tremendous reservoir of optimism about Obama.
Everybody I talked to pretty much, almost I'd say without exception, and I'm talking about probably a couple hundred people that I spoke to, everybody had seen his speech in Cairo, had read or seen his videotaped message for Nowruz, the Nowruz greeting in I think it was March.
They'd seen all of the initiatives, the opening toward Iran from Obama, and they were very encouraged by it, and I think that confused the hardliners and it made life more difficult for them because they survived by thumping the great Satan, and it was a lot easier when President Bush was in the White House yapping about regime change and they could point to that and say, you know, see they're after us.
And it also encouraged the reformists and the liberals and the secular movement and everybody else who started to see Mousavi as somebody who, if he were president, might open the door a little bit to dealing with the United States and the West on a more productive basis.
So it was exactly Obama's offer to talk to Iran which I think helped unfreeze the deadlock inside the country.
Now, that's not the only reason, but because of that I think it would be a big mistake to go back to a posture of confrontation and setting deadlines and trying to impose tougher sanctions on Iran that would just allow the hardliners to say, look, they're after us again.
It's not going to cause them to give up power or change their position.
And, you know, again, I think North Korea is a good example.
They've been under every kind of sanction you can imagine, and the leaders simply cracked down and told the population that we have to endure this privation in order to maintain our independence.
And I think I could see the Iranian leadership doing exactly the same thing, that for the purity of Islam and for our national salvation, we'll eat dirt if that's what it takes.
So it isn't like the sanctions are going to cause them to change their policies.
And on top of that, it's going to be difficult to get more sanctions because various of Iran's partners, including the Russians and the Chinese, I think are kind of at the end of that road now.
They don't want more economic sanctions on Iran.
So in a way, I think some of the sanctions talk is just bluster.
Well, they're not going to have much of a problem in the U.S. Congress with them, doesn't look like.
No, no, but that's, you know, I mean, that's more politics than policy.
I mean, the Congress has a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to, you know, standing up and doing something on Iran.
But I'll tell you, until now, even the Congress has kind of held off from, you know, shaking the stick at Iran.
Howard Berman in the House has resisted pushing even his own bill for gasoline sanctions because he doesn't want to get in the way of Obama's diplomatic initiative.
Now, that was before the election.
You know, yes, things have gotten tougher now because it's a lot tougher for Obama to sell the idea of talking to Ahmadinejad and Khamenei now than it was before the election because there was such an enormous wave of sympathy for the political rebellion in Iran that it made them look like, you know, a lot much uglier, more radioactive in domestic political terms.
So I think that makes it, again, more difficult for Obama politically.
But I think he'll do it.
I think the West and the United States will talk to Iran if Iran says, yes, we'll come to these, you know, talks in the fall.
But that's really all up in the air now.
I think, you know, part of the problem here is you hear people talking about, well, you know, Iran is unsettled but the nuclear clock is still ticking and the centrifuges are spinning.
There's a lot of alarmism about that which isn't really justified.
Iran isn't about to build a nuclear bomb tomorrow or next month or even next year.
It's quite a ways away.
Even Israeli estimates now are coming out saying 2014 at the earliest.
Well, and you know, in fact, we had Antiwar.com's nuclear expert on the show yesterday, Dr. Gordon Prather, used to test nuclear bombs and was an advisor to Senators and has all the real credentials necessary about such things.
And he completely debunked and laughed at the Times of London article which had this description of the Iranians coming up with a new way to implode a uranium bomb and all this that Prather said was just laughable.
That's not how you do it.
And it's just another piece of propaganda.
Although, isn't that an important point in itself?
The governments of the West, particularly of the United States and Israel, and the media, they are completely willing, it seems like, to give us a narrative about Iranian nuclear weapons that, as you say, is entirely overblown.
Well, I wouldn't put all the media in that category.
Certainly there's reports that come up now and then about it.
But I haven't seen any articles in major newspapers in the United States that lay out, let's say, the way people did before the war in Iraq, making the case for Iraq's WMD programs.
I think there's a lot more skepticism in the media.
That doesn't mean, however, that you don't see the media often quoting various politicians or other prognosticators and analysts and op-eds by neoconservative people or John Bolton types and so forth.
But that's not the same thing as saying that the media is doing it because they quote some highfalutin senator who's making these charges.
I think the way it usually works is it's just sort of an unproven premise.
We just talk about the Iranian march toward nuclear weapons or something like that, their move to get them or whatever vague language, and then they don't ever have to get any more detail than that.
And it's sort of the thing that everybody knows is true, just like everybody knows Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.
We're talking TV news mostly here, I think.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, TV news is kind of an oxymoron.
The cable shows and the Bill O'Reilly's and Glenn Beck's of the world, first of all, I never watch any of those things, and I have no idea what they're talking about.
But they're only talking to a very small audience of a couple of million people.
And it sometimes gets way overblown in terms of the significance of what the cable news shows are doing or saying.
So I don't know.
That's pretty hopeful, actually.
I'm glad to hear you say that.
I hope that that's really right.
Actually, let me ask you one more thing here.
This will probably take about the last four or five minutes of the show we have here, Bob.
I heard you say something else that sounded pretty optimistic to my ears, pretty hopeful, on the Ian Masters show on KPFK on Sunday, where you said that you think that the Washington, D.C. establishment is basically over it.
They don't intend to keep Iraq anymore.
They have accepted the fact that they have to leave, if not according to the SOFA deadline, whenever it is.
But they no longer dream of occupying Iraq forever.
Is that really right?
Well, I don't think so.
Even in the last years of the Bush administration, you certainly didn't see any appetite for sweeping regional transformation of the Middle East anymore.
That was maybe a dream at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, when Afghanistan seemed to be going well, and we had knocked off Saddam, and everybody thought, now we can move on to Syria, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, and a whole bunch of other places.
That ended really by 2005, I would say.
Then in the last couple of years, even during the Bush administration, there was a realization that if we can get out of Iraq without losing, then that will be about the best we can get.
And that's what the Pentagon thinks too, mostly?
Or just the politicians?
You know, around Washington, you hear much more people talking about Afghanistan as the place where we need to make our stand, and that Iraq is a place that we need to hope we can get out of without it blowing up in our faces.
That doesn't mean that we don't want to have a long-term U.S. military relationship to Iraq, just like we do to Jordan or Saudi Arabia or other Arab countries.
We'd like Iraq to be part of the pro-American bloc over there.
But I think that itself is looking increasingly unlikely.
I think that you're seeing in Prime Minister Maliki a potential dictator in the making with a lot of ties to Iran, who isn't going to be necessarily amenable to what the United States wants, and who will probably be happy to continue to take our aid and support as long as we're willing to supply his armed forces and police with equipment and training and money, but who's not going to be our BFF there for the next 10 years.
I think the idea that Iraq is going to become a base for American presence in the Middle East is pretty laughable at this point.
Well, I guess I've always thought that, but I'm glad to know that people in Washington, D.C. finally get it, even if it's for more cynical reasons.
They just want to forget the whole thing ever happened and move on to somewhere else.
Well, it's not exactly good news that we went into Iraq and destroyed an entire nation and then left in power a regime which is allied to one of our biggest adversaries.
No, it's just better than staying and trying to do something different, that's all.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Bob.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Everybody, that's Robert Dreyfuss, of course, from The Nation.
TheNation.com for the Dreyfuss Report.
And read this book, Devil's Game, How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
And this show goes out to James C. Smooth.
It's been cool, man.
That's it for Anti-War Radio.
See you all tomorrow.