All right, my friends.
Welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and introducing Steve Clemons from the New American Foundation.
He directs the American Strategies Program there and he writes the extremely influential blog, The Washington Note.
Welcome back to the show, Steve.
Hey, Scott.
It's always a pleasure.
Good to talk to you again, and what a pleasant surprise I got in my email box.
If I could take your perspective, take your word for it, in your analysis of the situation with Iran, I'm very pleased to see what you have written here in Salon.com.
Well, I'm glad somebody liked it.
There's a lot of folks taking exception.
Well, yeah, there's a couple exceptions I have to take to it, probably, too.
But, A, I like the optimism.
There's not too much of it in the, I guess, circles of people paying attention to this seeming march to war with Iran.
But this thing is called, Why Bush Won't Attack Iran.
It's on Salon.com right now.
Steve, this article starts out with, you're at a dinner party and Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft are arguing about whether or not Bush will bomb Iran.
Can you set the stage for us there?
I can set the stage with the caveat that people should know that I wasn't at the dinner party.
I just know all about it.
There was a dinner party with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and it was really a dinner in honor of Benazir Bhutto, who was visiting Washington, D.C. at the time.
But one of the points of discussion during the dinner, it was attended by 18 people, was whether or not the policy course that the President had laid out on Iran would lead to bombing Iran or not.
And there was a hand vote, and 16 people voted along with Brzezinski, who said that the bombing along was highly likely and probable.
And two votes opposed, and one of those was Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor to Presidents Ford and George Bush's father.
So 16 to 2, but that was the vignette that I opened this discussion about whether or not George Bush would bomb Iran.
Well, and I think there's some important insight to be gained there, that here Scowcroft and Brzezinski, when they argue about it, they're not of one mind about what the President may or may not do.
They both seem to be pretty outside the loop here for a couple of extremely powerful establishment figures.
No, I mean, that's exactly right.
And this is a dicey area, because what I'm trying to do, which I wish more people were trying to do, is to look at the tea leaves and analyze carefully what the President is really posturing to do or not.
I not only told that story, I told the story of a meeting that I organized at the Aspen Institute last June, last year in 2006, that had people as diverse as George Soros and Joseph Nye, Mitchell Leese, Bob Blackwell, who was President Bush's former Deputy National Security Advisor, Doug Zachheim, Fareed Zakaria, Stephen Friedman.
It was a very diverse politically group of about 24 people.
And in that discussion, which I can't attribute any of the comments to anyone, there was a similar kind of diversity.
So I started with the point that even very smart analysts are of a different mind, even among close Republican supporters and members of the Bush administration about what the President might do.
So I wanted to affirm that.
But what I see happening in the climate today is something that's very different than that kind of analytical judgment on whether we would bomb Iran or not.
These are more assertions, an assertion by the neoconservative right that we ought to be bombing Iran and get right to it, and we are going to be bombing Iran, but their complaint is how quickly we're going to do it.
And then, to some degree, it's really growing in the left, the very deterministic certainty that Bush plans to bomb Iran that I think is less analytic and more based in fear and maybe more based on the hope of animating a lot of folks who are against Bush's Iraq policy, as I am, or Bush's foreign policy in general, to scare them into action.
And I think that's scary because it's forfeiting the third option possibility on Iran.
So sorry to go on, but I do think that this debate has a serious level and then one that's not, and I was trying to undo the one that's not.
Well, and that's very important, and I think I could probably be accused pretty fairly of falling into that second category.
Not you, Scott, no.
Well, I try very hard to stay on this case because I see the drumbeat of lies just steady every day.
They're trying to come up with all these excuses for doing it, and I know that, as you talk about in your article, there are people in the Vice President's office and over at the American Enterprise Institute and so forth who still really want to do this.
It's just a question of whether Bush wants to do it or not.
Right, and that's a key issue.
The last paragraph of my article raises what I truly am worried about, which is the efforts by Cheney on this side, or the efforts by Ahmadinejad and the IDRC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Al-Quds Force, in Iran to trigger what would be a quick escalation, almost a hair-trigger war, hair-trigger conflict, because that could circumvent the decision-making apparatus that would really keep the President from going down this track.
That is the scariest thing, and people need to think about it.
This accidental war scenario is something we should worry about, but we should not be asserting that Bush has already decided to go there unless he has, and I just see too much evidence, in fact, that he has not.
It's easy to see in many different dimensions that Bush's posture and what he's put into play would not be the case if he were going to do it.
Well, let's talk about this third option then, because I think the first two are Cheney's plan, which is kill them all, and then Rice's plan, which is somehow pressure them through negotiation to cease all uranium enrichment, and they have no choice in that, basically.
That's the bottom line.
No centrifuges may spin in Persia, period, is the American position, right?
It is right now, yes, and it's the position of the UN.
So what's the third way?
The real two options that are facing the President are whether he accepts Iran's nuclear program and intentions, which some people are calling appeasement, or he bombs them and tries to use a military strike to keep Iran from going down that road.
A third option is something that lies between them that's credible, that either creates incentives or disincentives to move Iran from that alternative, and that third option is what Rice, Gates, the Europeans, Mohammed ElBaradei, and others are really trying to work out.
I don't know if that third option, if it's achieved, is going to involve some concession to Iran on allowing a pilot program in enrichment that's smaller than what they're doing now, or what, but that's what folks are trying to hammer out, and to keep this high-end brinksmanship from taking us to a real hot war.
Well, let me ask you this, because Scott Ritter has said this, and I don't really see any evidence to the contrary, I don't think, that he says, look, the nuclear program is simply the excuse.
What we're talking about here is regime change is the policy, and if they can't get away with saying it's because of the nuclear program, then they'll say it's because of EFPs in Iraq, or they'll say it's, well, if they've turned over everything they have, well, then they must have a secret program that we don't know about, that the real goal here is regional transformation, and that that has not been put aside.
That's still the plan.
So I wonder how your perspective about the permanent establishment types, or the permanent government types, like the State Department professionals and the intelligence professionals stuff, trying to take away Cheney's excuse for war in terms of the nuclear program, how does that fit into the larger view that the nuclear program isn't really what this is about anyway?
Well, you're right, different parts of the administration have different objectives.
Vice President Cheney's national security team, most of the folks at the American Enterprise Institute that are focused on this kind of issue, but I shouldn't blame just AEI, but the general neoconservative wing of the establishment is focused clearly on regime change, not on the more finite and narrow issue of whether or not Iran has a nuclear program.
Almost everyone else in the national security bureaucracy of the administration, and most of what I would consider to be the same democratic foreign policy people, have abandoned regime change as their central objective.
And so you've got everybody basically lined up, but somewhat disorganized, on the end they're focused on how do you move Iran on a course that gets them on sort of a Libya-like track out of the international doghouse towards normalization.
They want WTO membership, they want technology and investment to develop their natural gas and oil reserves that they can't develop on their own.
They have real fundamental economic problems inside Iran that are often not reported.
And there's a lot of dissension inside Iran about the brinksmanship that Ahmadinejad has done.
So you've got all of that, but what you have is a very focused, very passionate, extremely well-organized and capable crowd with Vice President Cheney as their chief champion that's basically very focused on using whatever means and rationale can basically move us into war.
And so I do think, you know, it's not like I'm saying, hey, folks, go to sleep, don't worry about this.
There's a lot to worry about, because Cheney's team is brilliant, very focused, but they don't have the president, and we have good evidence that they don't have the president on their side that was expressed by one of the deputy national security advisors admitting in some sessions that I helped bring to light, but which the New York Times confirmed and actually mentioned the individual's name, which I hadn't, that they're frustrated with Bush and the other policy.
They wouldn't be expressing that frustration if the president was with them, and that, I think, is very, very important to know.
So that means we still have the ability to influence Bush.
And for those not familiar, you're referring to the story that you broke a few months back about Cheney's...
Right.
And we did a show on it.
...and sent his lackey around to AEI and then the Times confirming that that was David Wulmser, who he had sent.
Yeah.
And now...
And you and I think did a show on that at the time.
Right.
And yeah, that's true.
You can listen to that at antiwar.com in the antiwar radio section.
And now, I'm interested, you brought up the Libya example there.
The official narrative about Libya, of course, is that, well, we were going to have to bomb them, but they learned from the example of Iraq that they better not mess with us.
But I also read something by Gary Hart in, I think, the New York Times Magazine about how Muammar Qaddafi had been trying to kiss up to the United States since 1995 or something, and that the Americans just wouldn't listen to him or accept any of his offers.
And they finally decided they would let him try to have a rapprochement with the West, but not until after the Iraq War, so that they could say it was because of the Iraq War.
But so I just wonder, since you brought that up, whether you think that that's a pretty plausible model for dealing with Iran.
I know they did the great peace offer of 2003, where they put pretty much everything on the table, right?
Scott, you were right on target on that.
The efforts to bring Libya out of the cold and put them on a different course started far before the invasion of Iraq, and was really wrapped around not only Qaddafi's pretensions of doing this, but also the legal efforts around the victims of the Lockerbie airplane bombing that had been achieved in court, in which this multi-billion dollar deal had been charged.
This had to do with Libya's willingness, which was all basically being negotiated and orchestrated before the invasion, that if Libya was able to do something that would give financial relief to the victims of those bombings, that that would be seen as a confidence-building measure that would then take Libya on a different track.
Those negotiations preceded the Iraq invasion, and I know the attorneys that were involved in that preceded it.
But it's also important to recognize that in April and May of 2003, Iran was influenced by our invasion of Iraq.
The Iranians made a proposal to the United States to try to deal with all of our outstanding issues of concern with them and they with us, and to initiate a normalization strategy and offer everything from their support of Hezbollah and Hamas and their nuclear program, etc.
And at that time, we acted like we did in the way we did in the past with Qaddafi.
We walked away from it and said we can call our own shots and determine when we want to do something with Iran.
We're high in the saddle and we're victorious in Iraq.
So we basically flipped off the Iranians and said, no, later today, we're in a weaker position and our position has hardened and we're in a weaker position.
Iran's position is stronger and they have a better hand, but they're less willing to do the kind of deal that they were with us in April and May of 2003.
So our arrogance has undone us there.
And there's a third country, Syria.
After the Iraq invasion, there was an effort by Jack Straw, and I've been told Condi Rice was involved in this as well, to try and offer Syria a Libya-like track out of the doghouse.
And it was the fragility of these negotiations which allegedly, the American Prospect magazine said that John Bolton, when he was ambassador to the United Nations, outed these negotiations and wrecked that process with Syria.
So here are several countries we have real problems with, and we didn't use our political capital at the time in a way to move these relations in a different direction.
It's a real tragedy.
And let's not even go down the tangent of how they lied about North Korea enriching uranium so they could break the agreed framework with them.
That's right.
I don't have access to classified information, but one of the really disturbing things out there is to see how the success of Chris Hill, the one minor success in the foreign policy portfolio right now, how some are trying to undermine it with the allegations around this North Korean-Syrian potential collaboration and the Israeli strike against these facilities.
And in fact, we'll be talking about a serious nuclear program with Dr. Gordon Prather tomorrow, and I know Joe Cincerone at the Carnegie Endowment has already done it.
Yeah, Joe Cincerone is right.
I had lunch with Kim Dae-jung just by way of a left-field comment here, and I asked Kim yesterday, the former president of Korea, what he thought of this, and Kim Dae-jung said that as far as he's concerned, he talked with his foreign minister of the current government in South Korea, and so this is the South Korean view, is that there's no merit or veracity at all to the allegations that North Korea was operating in a nuclear capacity with Syria, and that this is an effort by neoconservatives to derail the six-party talks.
So whether that's true or not, I can't say, I can say that that's what Kim Dae-jung said yesterday in a meeting I had with him.
Oh, wow.
Well, I'm glad we did go down that tangent about Korea then.
That's news right there breaking on anti-war radio.
How do you like that, folks?
The former president of South Korea doesn't buy it.
Let me ask you this.
Over the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph came out, and they said, well, there's a lot of talk about bombing Iran, and there has been, only up until now, it's all been critics saying, oh, no, they're going to bomb Iran.
But now we're here to tell you it's the administration, and they're going to do it.
And this is pretty scary, but then I thought, hey, wait a minute, the Telegraph, I wonder if this is just a leak directly from the vice president's office rather than from people loyal to, say, Gates or Rice or Bush himself.
I can't really say who would be leaking that kind of information.
I can say, because I've read the Telegraph article, though I'm not sure I read the one you're mentioning, that there's a big difference between looking at war plans and targeting scenarios and basically having in hand and even seeing some merit and value of leaking some of this material so that you make the Iranian war planners guess what you might do.
Now, I know that many people think that that is tantamount to a war and tantamount to a decision.
There's a big difference between planning to do something or looking at what you might be able to do.
And remember, in my piece, I wrote that this is complicated because the president of the United States can't make it look like the military option is completely impossible.
It's just in this scenario, you have to make your best guess and look at the various positions and postures of the various actors to try to judge what's going on.
In my view, the Telegraph is reporting stuff probably quite credible about Air Force bombing scenarios and different levels, but that doesn't imply at all that this decision has been made.
In fact, I have counter evidence, and I'll admit that it's tougher to cite, of just conversations that people have had with the most senior levels of the Defense Department and the intelligence establishment about other kinds of scenarios in the region and how they see other possibilities.
I'll give you one idea, even to the point of looking at how you might achieve stability in the region.
Now, this will sound rather crude, and a lot of people will think it's crazy, but how do you establish stability with Iran?
You maybe cultivate a growing presence of Saudi Arabia in the region.
Suppose you cultivate something that looks like a mild cold war between the two powers in a way to help stabilize what's going on.
So there are lots of different scenarios that are being hatched to look at how you confront Iran with something other than what I think will be a very disastrous bombing campaign.
But those are plans that the telegraph hasn't gotten to.
But I don't want to knock them for hatching and releasing what they get.
I just think that people need to put it into context and think critically about what they're seeing part of the game, but they're not seeing all of it.
It's funny, you have all the rumor mill up there at the elite levels, and I'm down here on the lowest level of the rumor mill, and I get emails, and I get some going both ways, but I've heard from a couple of different people lately saying that their cousin or their brother-in-law or their neighbor across the street or whatever is a Navy guy, and he just got back and said that all that buildup was just to scare them, that they're not going to do it, etc. like that.
And I don't mean to put too much stock in it, but then again, the word of mouth inside the military tends to travel pretty fast.
Right.
I think the other thing about the military activity is if this thing were to go in a normal buildup, most of the assertions by those folks asserting that we're going to a war with Iran, it's been going on now for quite a while, but it's really picked up lately, you can sort of feel it in the air in Washington, is that those folks are asserting a kind of classic buildup, a predetermined decision to go to war, that the diplomatic activity is fake and it's just a veneer over the real intention to engage in regime change activity going on.
Now, I'm disputing that, and we'll see here before long whether the way I'm reading it is correct or others are incorrect, but I think in that, the military dimension of this is extremely important, and I think you're going to see resignations of generals and lots of others in a classic buildup strategy is why I don't buy it.
But if there is a hair trigger or some assault or U.S. servicemen or a diplomat or someone dies in some sort of purposely created spark, either by us or by them or by the Israelis or someone else, then it's a different game plan.
Right.
And I think if this is going to happen, I would agree with you that it's like that.
In fact, in the Downing Street memo, they had option A, massive rolled up invasion, premeditated murder kind of thing, option B, running start.
Let's paint up a U-2 spy plane in UN colors and get it shot down and use that as the excuse and claim Iraq started it, and then we'll just start the war and we'll get our guys over there as fast as we can, but we'll go ahead and get it going.
And that seems, well, and this is kind of what you alluded to in your big story from a couple of months back about the end run, that they were looking at either getting Israel to start it, now it looks like more and more leaks, the great McClatchy newspaper story by Nancy Yousef about Cheney advocating, well, let's hit some Quds Force targets in Iran, let's hit these or those training camps, supposedly, that kind of thing, just something, anything to get something blown up, and then once they get the war started, it's a matter of escalating from there.
Right.
And I think it's very important for people to hear about that, think about it, expose it, expose the players, because I think the moment, if that happens, we ought to hang with folks that are involved and expose it for what it is.
It's to get us in an insane course and to remove from ourselves, from both the Iranian public and the American public and European public and the regions in it, it could open up an unbelievable Pandora's box of human tragedy and a real reordering of global affairs that could be very, very harmful to us.
And so I think that that crisis almost needs to be anticipated or expected and then put in its place, demystify it, and then make the people who engineered it pay for it.
I think that's got to be the strategy at this point.
So we need to invest in exposing this accidental war scenario exactly for the cynical ploy it is, whether it's Akhmati Jha's people doing it or vice president Cheney's people.
Right.
And of course, you know, Bin Laden would be well served to go ahead and blow something up and try to make it look credibly enough that Iran was behind it for Cheney to seize on because, of course, an American war against Iran is exactly what Osama bin Laden and America's real enemies want.
That's right.
Or, you know, I have to say it or, you know, don't put it past bin Laden to make it look like Israel did something inside Iran.
Yeah.
For that matter, yeah.
Or vice versa, you know?
Yeah.
We shouldn't be living in such a fragile world and a fragile situation where one can light that kind of match.
Yeah.
Have no fingerprints on it and then have everybody begin scrambling.
You're seeing this kind of activity at a lower level.
You know, there was an anti-Syrian politician that was just assassinated in Lebanon.
Who knows who did that?
Maybe the Syrians did it.
Maybe other forces did it.
Maybe this gentleman's own faction.
We're at a point where minorities are trying to determine outcomes for the majorities in all these countries, whether it's Israel, the United States, Lebanon, and they are trying to use hair-trigger actions to pull things off.
And, you know, it is a scary time in that.
And so you can have majority opinion, you know, pulling one way or the other.
But ultimately, there are some very smart folks in these minority political movements that want to reorder things or engage in regime change.
And their tactics and what they're planning to do need to be exposed and thought about in serious ways.
So that's what I'm hoping the progressive left does a little bit more, rather than just assert that Bush will bomb Iran.
If that's the case, we all ought to go home and, you know, just wait for the nasty world that will ensue.
But there's still some work to do.
Well, the loudest voice that I've heard so far in front of the general public calling them out for this plan is Dr. Ron Paul in the Republican debates saying, you know, right now...
Isn't he doing a good job?
It's remarkable.
Isn't it great?
He said, look, they're looking for an excuse to bomb Iran.
We ought to be talking to them.
And Steve, you know, come on, Nixon went and shook hands with Mao Zedong, but the Republicans can't deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini?
I mean, this is ridiculous.
Right.
I think that Ron Paul has been doing a great service.
I wish he had a real chance to become president.
I heard that he was recently up in Pittsburgh, and there were more than 2,500 people up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh, you know, in really a suburb out there to meet him.
And his message is getting traction in a lot of quarters.
And I wish some of the Democrats would pick up some of this.
You know, Wes Clark, I have to say, I always give credit to Wes Clark.
You know, he's endorsing Hillary now, but, you know, separate from that, I think Wesley Clark was out among the first major Democratic presidential contenders.
I hosted him in September of 2005, and it was way earlier that we need direct, unfettered talks and negotiations with Iran, and I gave him a lot of credit for that.
But on the Republican side, I'm so happy to hear someone like Ron Paul making that same case.
Now, Gareth Porter was on the show yesterday, no, before yesterday, sorry.
And he repeated the story that he wrote in IPS News last week.
He has it, and he had written about this earlier in May, that Fallon had said that Iran were – No, to the Third Strike Force.
I'm sorry?
Was this on the Third Carrier Strike Force?
No, no, no.
Well, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was part of it, that that – Porter had written that Fallon had overruled the Third Carrier Strike Force, and that he had said that the war with Iran would not happen on his watch.
That's what he had reported back in May, and then now he's come out with a new one about the fight between Petraeus and Admiral Fallon, who's the – sorry, I guess I should have said for the audience – the head of CENTCOM, Petraeus' boss, that basically Fallon considers Petraeus one of these perfumed princes, like Colonel Hackworth used to call him, and is called him – well, this is Chaos Radio – called him a chicken shit little ass-kisser or something along those lines.
I wonder if you know any speculation or talk about that that you hear in D.C., the fight between Fallon and some of the more professional military guys versus the hacks who are just willing to do what the White House wants.
I can't comment on Fallon's comments vis-à-vis Petraeus.
I can comment that Fallon has been straight up in telling the President things as he sees them and not automatically signing off on things that the White House has informally asked him to do.
That is accurate.
I can confirm that other active duty generals and many retired generals, but this is not a sophisticated poll, have problems with the position that David Petraeus has put himself in and disliked significantly the willingness of Petraeus to carry George Bush's water on Iraq, that Petraeus is paying a price with his colleagues for what he's doing.
Now, there are always generals that play politics, they all play politics, but the political game inside the military establishment is that there's part jealousy, part disdain, part concern about what the precedent is that Petraeus is doing, in part because Bush has been so upfront about it.
In Bush's own comments to Robert Draper, his latest biographer at the New York Times, Bush actually said, �Hey, I know that when I go to Congress and I talk to the American public, people are now real skeptical of me, so I've decided Petraeus should be my communicator.
� Well, Bush is actually saying, �I'm using a military general and his reputation and the objectivity that the military has traditionally had and the general implied trust that many in America have in the military, not everyone, but most folks do,� and to use that as Bush's loudness.
So, he's admitting that politicization of Petraeus, and Petraeus has allowed himself to step into it.
So, I can confirm from my own experiences and discussions with active duty generals in discourse that there's real discomfort with that position.
I don't think it veers on the level of ad hominem, ad hominism that Fallon has allegedly made about Petraeus, and unless I knew something more about it, I really shouldn't comment on it.
Okay.
A few months back when you broke this big story, and I'm sorry, I keep saying a few months back.
When was it?
In June?
I think it came out in early June.
I have this story for a month.
It took me a month to develop it.
I have the information.
All you do is Google Clemens Cheney, and it'll come right up, no problem.
Yeah.
It was a pretty big story.
Yeah.
It was.
It'll be your top return.
I believe your next blog entry after that was, �Hey, I just heard from Joe Klein over Time magazine, and he wrote that he heard about Bush meeting with the Joint Chiefs, and that they had given him the facts of life.
One, don't do the surge.
Two, don't bomb Iran.
And it looks like he didn't listen to them as far as the surge goes, but is there reason to believe that they really got through to him about saying, �Mr. President, we're professional generals, and we're telling you that a war with Iran is not in the cards here?
� I think that what Joe Klein reports is accurate.
Bob Gates is really the new variable that came in.
When Gates came in and has begun to work more methodically, it does not mean that the military option doesn't exist, that you're not going to be pushed into position.
I heard the President of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Bush Administration official Richard Haass recently say that we haven't even begun to scratch the roster of diplomatic options before us.
I think that Bush began to take a different position, and he really empowered Condi Rice and Gates and others to begin synthesizing this.
Now, they may fail.
Now, there's another thing that they fail, and this is where this big Brzezinski, Carter's former National Security Advisor, someone I greatly respect, believes that they're laying a railroad track of brinksmanship and options that's getting our back up into a position that we lose great credibility if we don't eventually put some military punch at the end of this line.
I think we're going to change course somewhere along the way, and hopefully we'll not see that option coming about, but it's a possibility.
I think it's a low possibility and much lower, because I think there are a lot of options out there.
But again, this is really inside baseball and inside D.C. stuff.
Talking to folks, it's like the Brzezinski still across dinner.
Very well-informed, well-connected people see the situation differently.
I don't think they all saw the information at the time about how frustrated the Cheney crowd allegedly was when they saw Wormser's comments.
That tells us something that Bush...
If you're playing a good cop, bad cop strategy, and let's say the Cheney wing is the bad cop, you're bad cop because people think the President might be behind you, so you're not going to go out and invalidate and say, oh, by the way, we're angry at the President, we have to end running because he's not really with us.
That's essentially what happened.
So that's some of our best evidence that the President is serious.
But we also see the efforts on a number of fronts with the U.N. resolution process.
We're not talking a pacifist approach here.
We're talking about credible approaches to get Iran to make some alternative choices.
I actually think that there's a chance, without being naïve, that Iran will make some of these alternative choices.
But it would be a question of how far they go on what they might be willing to do on their enrichment program.
I actually think that you could push the Iranians to wind down from the 3,000-centrifuge threshold level to something that might look more like a pilot project that would take 20 years to generate the levels of plutonium for a warhead.
Now, people will debate that, think I'm naïve, and think it's not a verifiable prospect.
But we need smart people to play out those games.
I think there's a doable deal with Iran, if something like that might be counted.
Well, wouldn't Condoleezza Rice in the news just yesterday denouncing ElBaradei for striking this great new deal where they're going to come clean on every single thing?
Yeah, they're not too happy with ElBaradei, but they never are.
He was very smart of me, but you know what she's not getting.
So I don't know why Condi made the statement she said, because she thinks he's going beyond his brief of what the IAEA is supposed to be doing.
But to some degree, ElBaradei has set up a trap for Iran, which people aren't seeing.
Iran's got to come clean with a number of things about their current plutonium management.
And if they provide the information that ElBaradei is asking, then we're going to know a lot more, and they'll be able to verify it or not verify it, about what Iran's intentions, direction, the whole roster of things.
And if they don't, then I think it's an indication that Iran really is not there in good faith at all.
And then we have a different picture, and then all of us have to look at that and take another look, hmm, maybe I'm wrong on Iran's pliability and we're the supreme leader in what Iran is.
But Raf Sanjani's ascension recently and others gives us some hope that there are possible alternative scenarios that might involve a little bit less Ahmadinejad's saber rattling and a more sane view inside Iran.
It also could work the other way, too, couldn't it?
This is the kind of thing that it seems would really anger the Cheney crowd.
Gareth Porter explained that under this new deal, if I understand this correctly, under this deal that Alberti has made to come clean about all the plutonium management and everything else like you just said, that if they do that, the issue of Iran's nuclear program then reverts back to the International Atomic Energy Agency from the U.N.
Security Council.
That's really interesting.
This is the first time I've heard that kind of thing.
I haven't looked that deeply into it, so I have to plead ignorance here.
It's very interesting.
It's a hard time imagining that the Security Council, which doesn't have to abide by anything from the IAEA, would allow that to happen.
What you do open up, I'm assuming, I need to dig into this, is two tracks.
We may not like that second track being opened up, particularly given the fact that Russia and China right now are not supporting our effort to get a third round of economic sanctions against Iran.
Now, the thing is about their plutonium, and I'll have to ask Dr. Prather all about this tomorrow, but I think my understanding is that if they were to try to make nukes out of plutonium, they would have to shut down their reactors for a year and harvest all the plutonium out of their reactor in ways that everyone in the whole world would know about it.
There would be no way to do it secretly, and the plutonium bombs are much harder to detonate.
You need the most precise detonation high explosives in there and all this kind of thing.
If they're making a nuke out of plutonium, it would be one they bought from the black market somewhere or something, and if they're making it out of uranium, they'd have to kick out the IAEA before they enriched it to a high enough grade to even be able to make a nuke anyway.
Well, I mean, three quick points.
One, for Iran to move in that direction, the best thing for us to do would be to send thousands of inspectors and leave them, you know, change the letter of the law in Iran, which they said that they would be willing to do to embed those inspectors to prevent that kind of scenario from happening.
But, you know, honestly, it can happen because it happened in North Korea.
We have North Korean nuclear warheads that we didn't see develop, so there is an element there which the critics of this plan could raise legitimately so that they could do it.
But alternatively, I think that what you raise is far more important, is that there are many technical and logistical, very complicated hurdles for Iran to yet achieve.
What most of the bomb Iran now crowd is smart alleges is that running 3,000 centrifuges or more consistently over a long period of time and various other sort of technical thresholds that could be achieved are fundamentally an effort of achieving, you know, through a research and development process, knowledge.
That knowledge goes into people, not just into systems and things.
And this is something really overlooked.
It's about a technical expertise and the capability of an infrastructure of nuclear engineers who are human beings with families that would essentially, if you're going to bomb Iran, you're essentially trying to kill 5,000 or 6,000 very smart people, most of whom were educated in Europe or the United States for this experience, many of whom are our sources for what we do know about Iran's nuclear activities and program.
That's very complicated.
But what you laid out is Iran is not there yet, and so it is the question of, well, getting them there.
And even if they did develop that expertise, that's still a long way from actually warhead development, and it's smart to talk about it because that's true.
But I tell you, if we go bomb Iran and they develop the technical expertise, I can almost guarantee you they'll end up with warheads and be, even if they had a full-fledged and not a fake democracy, you might have a democratically elected, angry government that has warheads that is even more committed to becoming a declared nuclear power.
Uh-huh.
And see, right there you're getting to one of the main points here is that there is no regime change in Iran.
I don't know if anybody's ever regime changed Iran other than the coup in 53, but in terms of foreign force coming in and invading, if they do try it, you know, to really do this, all they're going to have is the same ayatollahs only with a much angrier population on their side.
Right.
Well, I think that it ends up consolidating power around those that we would rather not see empowered, but we have a habit sometimes of doing things to empower the bad guys abroad because that's what keeps our bad guys in power here.
Yeah.
Isn't that funny how George Bush and Dick Cheney's approval rating was at 90% when we got attacked, but we can't seem to imagine that that's how it works overseas.
I guess our politicians understand how it works, but the people don't, apparently.
Yeah, you're right on target, and so it is.
Now real quick here, Steve, you brought up Russia and China in your article and mentioned them here in the show today about the complications to a motivation to bomb Iran, that if you do bomb Iran, Russia and China are still going to exist, and where are they going to be at the end of this relative to our position?
Well, look, I mean, I think there are two things that are very clear.
China wants the global status quo so that it can continue to grow its economy and prosper.
It wants a lot of resources out there, but it is seeing the United States in a self-destructive spiral that's causing China some real heartache, some real stomachache.
Russia is trying to reassert its power in the stage.
It is much more a bubble of power, in my view, than real, but nonetheless, its behavior is one where it wants to be recognized as a great power.
It matters.
It's on the U.N.
Security Council.
What I really worry about is that, I think I don't have these numbers off, but between Russia and Iran tied together, if you had some deal between them, you have two of the countries with some of the second or third largest oil reserves, undeveloped oil reserves and undeveloped natural gas reserves, a big underscoring of undeveloped.
They both need technology and investment and whatnot, but you have between the two of them an enormous geo-energy superpower that dwarfs what is available in undeveloped sectors in other sections of the oil-producing and natural gas-producing world.
China needs that energy.
One of the consequences, which my colleague, Clint Leavitt, has written about, is that if you bomb Iran, you can all of a sudden end up with a new axis of oil.
And the axis of oil would be China, Iran, and Russia, and those most dependent upon that oil and natural gas are Europe and Japan.
So two of our closest strategic allies in the world would find themselves dependent upon this.
And that price may be worth paying something.
I don't want to say it's not.
I kind of feel it's not.
But boy, if the Cheney Gang isn't thinking that through, then I really think that they're just beyond irresponsible, because that is a scenario, not to say it will happen, but it is a scenario with a significant degree of chance of happening.
And that could really reorder power in the world.
And I think it's just crazy, the carelessness with which people talk about bombing Iran.
Well, what about a Ron Paul foreign policy that says, well, we're leaving the region.
Our government is no longer propping up governments in the region.
Our government is really no longer concerned who's pumping what petroleum, because we've studied Hayek and Mises, and we understand that mercantilism is not the way, and it doesn't really matter if it's China and Russia dominating the Middle East, they'll still sell us the oil anyway.
Would you be worried?
Part of me, yes.
Part of me, no.
Part of me really thinks that we need to move along that Ron Paul scenario and get a little bit of this.
But realistically, that's not going to happen.
There's too much fear about, somebody described, particularly the Gulf states, as rich, well-endowed banks surrounded by the worst poverty you could imagine.
And in that case, you'll have other states that move in.
Now, I just don't think it's in the American DNA at the national level to allow that to happen.
But there is a powerful logic to the notion that they've got to sell the oil to somewhere else.
And why are we worried about it?
It's a marketplace thing.
Maybe it would help us move to alternatives more quickly.
It would get us off of this narcotic of cheap energy that's really not cheap energy at all.
It's subsidized by lives and dollars and carrier strike force groups and the largest defense budget in the world.
But that might be a very healthy move.
But I tell you, until the Ron Paul type is president, I have a very hard time imagining that scenario from happening.
It is what the Japanese thought in the first Gulf war, though, I should say.
The Japanese, it's one of the reasons why they moved rather slowly in some ways, is they basically said, why do we really care about the Kuwait-Iraq situation?
Because eventually, our basic interest is just buying the oil, and they're all going to continue to sell the oil.
Yeah.
And I only use this because it is the argument from absurdity.
But according to Michael Shoyer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, bin Laden himself, the devil, has even said, hey, we can't drink it.
We'll sell you the oil.
So what's your problem?
Well, I hadn't seen that bin Laden quote yet.
And I like about half of what Michael Shoyer says, and the other half gives me a lot of heartburn.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I'm about the same way there, in a 64-year maybe.
But I think that there's some real truth to that.
So Washington in this political game is a free trade zone for people influencing, and I'm all for more serious debate, and folks that want to make that point, the Ron Paul point.
I just think the gambit is that we're not there yet.
But in the near term, we've got to worry about this accidental war scenario with Iran.
Right.
And I kind of think that the nuclear program at this point serves as sort of the useful kind of backdrop of fear, sort of everybody-picture-a-mushroom-cloud kind of scenario, the word nuclear thrown around here and there.
And people can't differentiate between this kind of nuclear plant and that kind of nuclear plant and so forth.
If it's a nuclear program, there's probably bombs around there, it sounds like.
But I think the real key...
I hope we play a lot of ads reminding people that's what the Bush administration did the first time around on Iraq.
Right, right.
Yeah, exactly.
And it really does seem now that it's going to be six guys got killed by a roadside bomb, and they say, that's it, we assert that Iran was behind this, and we're just not going to take this anymore.
And that's been the Joe Lieberman line, of course, in the Imperial Senate, is that they're already at war with us.
They're killing our guys in Iraq, and we're just sitting back taking it.
And I think that's going to be the pretext, don't you?
I mean, if they go through...
Regrettably, I think it's one of the ones that we should worry about, yeah.
All right, well, we just have to keep spending every day on anti-war radio debunking the whole assertion about the EFPs must be coming from Iran, because that isn't true anyway.
Keep up your good work, Scott.
All right, hey, you too.
Steve Clemons, everybody.
The blog is The Washington Note.
He's the director of the American Strategies Program at the New America Foundation.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
