Scott Horton Debunks Iran War Propaganda
Scott Horton Debunks Iran War Propaganda
The antiwar, libertarian author sat down with The American Conservative to discuss Tehran’s nuclear program and the misinformation surrounding it.
Scott Horton sat down with The American Conservative’s Harrison Berger to discuss the forces driving U.S. confrontation with Iran, focusing on the legal status of Iran’s nuclear program, the intelligence record on weaponization claims, and the collapse of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement. Horton explains how successive U.S. administrations, under constant Israeli pressure, have framed Iran’s uranium enrichment itself as a casus belli, despite the nation’s continued membership in the Non-Proliferation Treaty and repeated U.S. intelligence assessments finding no active nuclear weapons program.
It was reported that Trump has given the Iranian authorities an ultimatum. They have to not only end their nuclear program, but must also stop producing missiles that can reach Israel, and end support for what are called these “Iranian proxy groups,” like Hezbollah and the Houthis. We’re always told that Iran or Russia—or whichever country that the hawks want to send us into war with at the moment—that they’re always the most intractable enemy, they just can’t be negotiated with. But it seems like the side that is impossible to negotiate with, at least in this case, is the United States, who keeps shifting these terms at Israel’s behest and demanding that Iran accept terms that we already know are unacceptable to that country. Is that incorrect?
No, that’s the way I look at that. A close parallel from history would be the Rambouillet Accord, Madeleine Albright’s ultimatum to Slobodan Milosevic to prevent the Kosovo War of 1999. It was a deal that was made to be rejected. And I think this is the same kind of thing where they’re essentially laying down demands that are, certainly in the case of the missiles, just impossible. Demanding that they stop supporting Hezbollah and the Houthis and then entirely abandoning their nuclear program, not just enrichment, I mean this has been an absolute hardline position of the Ayatollah since 2006, that once they mastered the nuclear fuel cycle that they’re never going back and they’re never going to stop enrichment. It’s a matter of national independence and national pride.
And then the missiles, I mean, what good is a missile deterrent if it has to be short of the range that can hit the country that’s threatening you? And it’s just such an unreasonable demand on its face. If you compare this to 2003, that was all lies. But at least Colin Powell built a whole sandcastle for you there. But here, all they’ve got is conventional missiles. It’s hard to even call that a pretext.
I want to ask you and redirect back to the Iran nuclear program because there has been this propaganda campaign around it for many years, going back at least three decades, to try to convince Americans that Iran’s civilian nuclear program is actually a very dangerous weapon and that it’s a threat not just to Israel but to us here in the United States. You are probably one of the only people who has this kind of encyclopedic knowledge about that topic, not just the politics but also some of the nuclear science involved. Can you take some time to explain how that propaganda campaign has evolved and why it makes no sense?
Yes, huge topic. So let’s start with the fact that Iran has been a member of the non-proliferation treaty since 1968. And as part of their agreement under that treaty, they have a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has the authority under their safeguards agreement to inspect any facilities where nuclear material is being introduced into any machines of any kind, are used in any way. In order, in their terminology, to verify the non-diversion of this declared nuclear material to any military or other special purpose. And so that’s the same deal that all non-nuclear weapon states who joined the NPT promised to do.
They began to try to start building nuclear reactors in the Shah’s time in the ’70s, but all that got put on the shelf after the revolution of 1979, until this century. The thing is they had no source of their own fuel for the reactors until they built their Natanz enrichment facility in 2005 and 2006. They had their own domestic supplies of uranium and they bought the equipment on the black market from the Pakistanis, from A.Q. Khan.
In the 1990s, they tried to buy a light water reactor from China. But a light water reactor cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium. Its waste is so polluted with other isotopes that it is impossible to process for fuel for a weapon. But Bill Clinton stopped China and interfered in that. And so they ended up building heavy water reactors instead that can produce plutonium that can be reprocessed potentially into weapons fuel. So just a hint of the beginnings of the counterproductivity of American intervention on this question in the first place there.
But then, in 2006, they opened Natanz. What happens there is you take partially refined uranium ore and convert it into uranium hexafluoride gas, which you introduce into centrifuge cascades. Those centrifuges spin the gas at super high speeds and separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. At 3.6 percent, you would use that enriched uranium for your electricity program. At 20 percent, you use that for medical isotopes; for radioactive dye and radiation for cancer treatment. At closer to 90 percent, now you’re talking weapons grade uranium. The 60 percent enriched uranium was just a bargaining chip in the first place.
They got a loophole in the non-proliferation treaty which allowed them to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. But that includes mastering the fuel cycle. From the point of view of the American hawks, particularly those inspired by Likud, that has to be unacceptable. That’s obviously a policy made in Tel Aviv, not Washington.
What the Ayatollah seems to have done was create a bluff, a latent nuclear deterrent, not an atom bomb, but the ability to make one. This is essentially the same position that Brazil, Germany, and Japan are in. They are all nuclear threshold states. Although nobody is threatening them.
From the Israeli point of view, enrichment at all is unacceptable. They’ll sabotage facilities, murder scientists, and pressure the United States. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden all swore they would go to war before allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
In 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate said Iran had stopped studying how to make a bomb. The claims of a secret parallel weapons program could never be proven because it didn’t exist. The so-called smoking laptop was an Israeli forgery smuggled through the MEK. The IAEA and CIA confirmed that. The warhead nose cone story fell apart. The green salt story fell apart.
Obama pursued the JCPOA to prevent a war. Iran poured concrete into the heavy water reactor, they scaled back centrifuge cascades at Natanz, they converted Fordow into a research facility rather than a production facility, and they expanded inspections far above and beyond any safeguards any other country had with the IAEA. In exchange, sanctions were supposed to be lifted, but they largely were not.
Trump tore up the deal in 2018 at Netanyahu’s insistence and imposed maximum pressure sanctions. Biden kept the same policy. Last June, Trump accepted the idea that enrichment equals a weapons program and bombed Fordow and Natanz. From what I’ve seen, Fordow and Natanz have been taken offline, and the conversion facility at Isfahan was destroyed.
Iran agreed again not to build nuclear weapons. They’ve agreed to that since 1968. Whether they give up enrichment now, I don’t know. Face and sovereignty matter to leaders of sovereign governments.
What do you think we should expect from the new talks between the U.S. and Iran?
I don’t know whether Trump is trying to build an escape hatch or if he means to give them an offer they can’t possibly accept. My money’d be on that, but I really don’t know.
Trump talked about Operation Eagle Claw, when Jimmy Carter tried to rescue the hostages and it ended in a debacle. Trump went on about how when he sent the Delta Force guys in to get Maduro, he was risking that kind of disaster. That goes to show he does have some fear about consequences.
Starting a war in an unprovoked, aggressive fashion, a war of regime change that leads to unlimited and unpredictable commitments, he’d be out of his mind to do it. That’s the best argument against it. He has no real reason to do it and a hell of a lot of reasons not to risk it.
Editor’s note: This transcript is an excerpt from a longer conversation and has been lightly edited for readability.
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