Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, Sansat War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and next up is Bob Perry.
The great Bob Perry from ConsortiumNews.com, it's because of him you know all about Iran Contra and a lot of other good stuff, well terrible stuff, that he reports on.
He's got a new one about Israeli dissent against Benjamin Netanyahu and his war plans.
And I'm looking for something to be thankful for, I am thankful that Netanyahu was not the Prime Minister when Dick Cheney was ours back then.
Now it's Ehud Olmert who's in the dissent, who wanted war back in 07, who's now in the dissent trying to stop Netanyahu from getting it done.
So those stars failed to align, thank goodness back then.
But anyway, welcome back to the show Bob, how are you doing?
Good Scott, how are you?
I'm doing great, appreciate you joining us here.
And I had googled up new sanctions because that's one of the things I have to ask you about during the show here.
But first of all, can we please talk a little bit about who exactly in Israeli political life has been lately coming forward to dissent from plans to attack Iran and their nuclear program?
Well, there have been of course over the past year, there were some former senior intelligence people who have spoken out.
They were dismissed as sour grapes, people who may be disgruntled.
But they were also saying that the situation with Iran was not as dire as Netanyahu was trying to present it.
In the past week however, there's been a new group that, including people who were both senior and powerful within the Israeli society.
There was Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, for instance, who's the military chief, who indicated in an interview with Haaretz that the Iranians are not the crazy extremists that they're being painted as, but instead are, he said, very rational people who have their own agenda in terms of trying to achieve things for Iran.
And he believes that they will not move ahead on getting a nuclear bomb, as they say they don't want to, because they're making these calculations that it's not worth it to them.
So that was an important step in terms of having someone who's currently a senior person in the Israeli government not joining in some of the alarmist, existential kind of messianic rhetoric that we've heard from Netanyahu and even from Ehud Barak, who is of course the defense minister.
Then that was followed up by additional comments from the former chief of the Shin Bet, the internal security force in Israel, Yuval Diskin.
He's just recently left that post.
He basically accused Netanyahu of having these messianic feelings and saying he doesn't believe that those kinds of extreme views should be used as the basis for leading Israel in this regard.
He also, Diskin also, was critical of how Netanyahu has approached the Palestinian issue in terms of not being serious about trying to reach some kind of peace settlement.
Of course, Shin Bet being the internal security arm of the Israeli government has a great deal of involvement there in terms of cracking down on Palestinians who are seen as threats to Israeli security.
So it was interesting to see someone from that perspective saying that more has to be done in terms of trying to resolve those differences.
And then just over the weekend at a conference sponsored by the Jerusalem Post in New York, the former prime minister Ehud Omer came in and was quite critical of the way Netanyahu has been handling this build-up to a possible war with Iran.
And interestingly, Omer was booed and heckled by Americans who were in the audience who were pretty much Netanyahu loyalists, I guess.
They called him Neville Chamberlain, and they booed when he praised President Obama as a friend of Israel.
And so you had this Omer getting upset, really, with some of these war-hungry Americans.
And he reminded them that unlike them, living 10,000 miles away, he and his family and his children, his grandchildren, actually live in Israel and would have to face a possible war situation much more directly than some of them.
So it was sort of interesting to see these new voices being raised, saying that Netanyahu has been stoking this war fever in ways that are not even helpful to the views of what's going on in Israel in terms of the people there.
But we do have the neocons in the United States who still remain very eager to see a new conflict break out over there.
All right.
Well, now, lots of interesting stuff to go over there.
First of all, just by my count, that's the former head of Mossad, Mayor Dagan, and the current head of Mossad, the former army chief, the former head of Shin Bet, which is their Homeland Security or FBI, I guess, right?
And their former prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
And was I wrong when I asserted in the long, stumbling introduction there that Ehud Olmert had begged George Bush to start this war back in the spring of 2007 and was told no?
Right.
Well, he would have been...
There was, of course, this idea of getting the Bush-Cheney crowd to support Israel in some kind of strike against Iran at that time.
And that was when Bush later complained in his memoir, Decision Point, that it was the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community coming out and saying that Iran had ceased its military nuclear program, and it ceased it in 2003 and had not resumed it, that cut the legs out from under that effort.
But because the U.S. intelligence community was saying in a unified way that Iran was not working on a nuclear bomb, that it made it impossible for Bush to go ahead and follow the course that Cheney also wanted, Vice President Cheney was eager for, which was to start a new war with Iran then.
So it's probably accurate that Olmert was more hawkish back at that point than he seems to be now.
All right, now, I guess my best reading of Obama is nothing's decided with this guy.
If he wants to start something and then change his mind or lose badly but not fight for the position that he'd staked out or whatever, he might just do that on any given day.
Who knows?
But seems like he sort of wanted to hold some talks.
They made an agreement.
Everybody came out with all this positive spin about how what a great time we all had meeting and agreeing to meet again the third week of May and then maybe we can get started on some kind of agreement about Iran's nuclear program and maybe something along the lines of they'll accept the additional protocol and we'll lift some of the sanctions and whatever.
And then here comes Obama expanding more sanctions.
And it seems to me like, well, I wonder what it seems to you.
Are they trying to sabotage their best chance that they've had since at least 2009 to make a deal with the Iranians and put an end to all of this endless warmongering and scaremongering about it?
Well, I think Obama really actually does want to see some kind of resolution here.
I think he's also politically afraid of being called weak and accommodationist, which is what he gets attacked for whenever he tries to do anything along the lines of getting pulling back from conflicts.
And I think he's sensitive to that.
And you're right on that point that he tends sometimes to blow with the wind when he's facing that kind of political pressure.
Right.
He's weak on that.
However, however, I do think he doesn't he doesn't he does not want to have a conflict with Iran.
Everyone I talk to who's been involved in this says they really he really doesn't.
And for a lot of reasons, I think he doesn't think it would be that effective.
It was not the way to go.
I think he also believes that this that the intelligence community is correct, that Iran is not working on a nuclear bomb and has not decided it wants to work on a nuclear bomb.
And he has to look at the at the economic consequences before.
We've already seen how in the past couple of weeks, if you've been noticing that the gasoline pumps, the price for gasoline is going down in many places.
And the reason it went up so much was largely because Netanyahu had stoked these war fears about the Middle East.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We got to leave it right there.
We'll be right back with Bob Perry from Consortium News dot com after this.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Robert Perry is the author of Trick or Treason, Lost History, Secrecy and Privilege and Neck Deep.
He keeps the website Consortium News dot com.
His most recent piece, I think, is Some Israelis Resist Netanyahu.
It really is quite a spectacle, the one that you recount here for us, where Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister and no dove, comes to the United States and says, hey, Barack Obama is doing a great job in trying to resolve this nuclear issue in a way that we don't have to have a war.
Isn't that great, everybody?
And they all jeer him and call him naive and Neville Chamberlain, which no one even knows what that means, which is funny.
But anyway, that's that's really something else.
And it's the prime minister, the former prime minister, who says America.
He lectures the crowd.
America is not a client state of Israel.
Why should we want America to be put in a situation where whatever they do will be interpreted as if they obeyed orders from Jerusalem?
Yeah, that might be a little bit counterproductive for the future of Israel's security, mightn't it?
But no, try telling that to a mob, huh?
Something else.
All right.
Obama seems to be trying to actually work out a deal here.
As you said, the gas price went way up on speculation that Netanyahu was serious and this thing might actually happen.
Panetta said it just might this spring, that kind of thing.
But then Obama made it agreement to have some talks in the near future and the gas prices started to fall.
Well, this is good for his reelection.
Well, it's also good for the U.S. economy and it's good for it's good to keep people from having to put money into the pockets of the oil companies and speculators because there was basically money being made by oil speculators who were counting on this crisis escalating.
And when this crisis started de-escalating, then they were sort of stuck having to eat some of their speculation.
But the American public and the public around the world does benefit when these prices go down.
But it was one of the prices we've had to pay.
Some people estimate that about 25 cents of that increase per gallon was a direct result of this warmongering around Iran, which Netanyahu stoked when he came to the United States last.
And it reached a fever peak.
And basically Obama and most of the world community, the so-called P5 plus 1, they're now moving into a direction that was available really a couple of years ago, which was sort of this idea of swapping out some of the Iranian enriched uranium for what they need, which are these isotopes for use for medical research.
So it's something that could have been done earlier, but the decision was made to be for the U.S. government to be tougher and to push for these sanctions.
And the crisis got worse.
But we've all had to pay a price for this, because when the gas prices go up, a lot of Americans have to dig into their savings, what they've got left, or pay what they've got to keep their cars on the road.
Now what do you make of these leaks about, yeah, we're sending all our F-22 fighters and fleets of F-15s?
Is that just hype to try to pressure the Iranians?
Are they actually really building up for some kind of double-digit likelihood of a war over there?
Well, I think Obama has been willing to give a great deal to Israel in terms of beefing up its military, so it would have a greater chance to strike Iran if that became necessary.
Part of this, there's an element of this which is somewhat bluffing, and even from Netanyahu probably, there's a certain amount of bluffing that if Iran feels that there's a real risk that they're going to be attacked, they're more likely to be more accommodating.
And that's another factor with the sanctions, to sort of create incentive for the Iranians to be more accommodating.
This is why I should be an oil speculator, because that's what I thought was going on here.
I could have invested right into the peak and then sold at the top and been just fine.
But I do think that sometimes these things get out of hand, and that's always the risk.
And as I say, there was this opportunity really in late 2009 and early 2010 for a similar plan of swapping out the low-enriched uranium to have gone forward, and in fact the Turks and Brazilians had struck a deal with Iran to do just that in spring of 2010, and the United States essentially blocked the deal because the decision was to move toward ratcheting up sanctions.
Now, we'll see now if that course toward conflict can be derailed.
Iranians have made it pretty clear they don't want to build a nuclear bomb, and they've said it at the highest levels.
In fact, if you remember there, there was an interview that Obama gave before the Super Bowl in which he called on the Iranian leadership to declare they do not want a nuclear bomb, which is interesting because they've always been saying they don't want a nuclear bomb, but they said it again.
The Supreme Leader, Khamenei, said that it would be a, quote, grave sin, unquote, to go ahead with building a nuclear bomb.
Right, the big news out of the talks was the Americans quit pretending like they hadn't heard that.
Well, I think basically, right, there's been a pulling back.
As I say, I think Obama really doesn't want to go there, but he feels politically pressured to be much tougher and to therefore keep some of the political pressure from the neo-communists and the republicans from becoming too oppressive against his reelection effort.
He wants to be seen as a fairly tough, aggressive, effective president in that sense, even if it means putting certain risks in play, and one of those risks is that the rhetoric becomes too extreme, and that's one point that Omer made as well over the weekend.
He said in an interview that if you keep comparing Iran to the Nazis and comparing the situation to the Holocaust, by using that kind of hyperbole, the risk that Netanyahu runs is that it takes on a life of its own.
People really believe the extreme rhetoric and therefore act in ways that aren't rational and move more toward war and more toward a destructive situation, and one of the points that some of the intelligence folks in Israel say is that probably the way to get Iran actually to build a bomb is to attack them.
If you attack them and you're not that effective in terms of destroying all their facilities, which people doubt the Israelis could do, that could push the Iranians in the direction of building a nuclear bomb in the next several years.
Do you think domestic politics in the U.S. could possibly tolerate Obama making a deal that includes the keeping open of the Qom facility there?
Well I think the American public would be very happy to see this thing resolved.
Now that's a different thing from the various pressure points you get in Washington from the politicians, from the major news media, and so forth.
Because that's the thing is, the Iranians are not going to say, okay, enclose Qom.
Like they might accept snap inspections at Qom whenever you want, that kind of thing.
They're not going to close that thing.
If they insist on that, then they're going to scotch the deal, right?
Well I think that's a good point.
I think probably the Iranians will agree to more inspections, but they're going to maintain their right to, under international law really, under the counterproliferation treaties that they've signed, that they have a right to refine uranium for peaceful purposes.
Well, I mean, really the debate this whole time, it's always been a question of whether the U.S. will finally start going along with reason instead of being unreasonable.
And so, I guess we'll see.
But there are reasons to think positively about it.
So thank goodness for that, and for your time on the show today, Bob, appreciate it as always.
Thank you, Scott.
That's Bob Perry, everybody, ConsortiumNews.com, we'll be right back.
