Jeremy Scahill: Prospects for avoiding US-Iran war ‘remain fragile’

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. We’re recording this podcast on Tuesday, February 24th, and I genuinely don’t know if the United States will be at war with Iran by the time that you hear it. In their latest report for DropSite News, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain write,

The U.S. and Iran are headed to a new round of talks in Geneva aimed at averting a conflict this week—as the U.S. continues to surge military forces to the region in its largest military buildup since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Although talks are scheduled for Thursday, the prospects for a deal that would halt the U.S. drive to war remain fragile. The U.S. has demanded sweeping concessions, including the cessation of all nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil, the end of Iranian support for regional armed resistance movements, and strict limits on the Iranian ballistic missile program—the only meaningful deterrent that Iran was able to employ during its conflict with Israel last year.

In a post on Truth Social on Monday, President Donald Trump wrote, “I am the one that makes the decision, I would rather have a Deal than not but, if we don’t make a Deal, it will be a very bad day for that Country and, very sadly, its people, because they are great and wonderful, and something like this should never have happened to them.”

An Iranian official told Drop Site that Tehran understands the erratic nature of the Trump administration, but believes the position its diplomats are outlining to U.S. negotiators represents an unprecedented effort by Iran aimed at preventing a regional war. The official said Iran is directly addressing U.S. concerns on the nuclear issue with concrete proposals, and asserting a willingness to expand talks to other issues once a deal to avert imminent conflict has been concluded.

So how close are we to stampeding our way into a military conflict or even a major war with Iran? What would a deal to avert imminent conflict mean for the United States, Iran, and for the rapidly changing geopolitical order to break this all down, I am really grateful to be joined today by Jeremy Scahill himself, renowned reporter, podcaster, book author and journalist at site. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News today. I really appreciate it, and I know you have a crazy schedule and we don’t have any time to waste. So I want to jump right in and ask if you can give our listeners your breakdown of where things stand right now between us and Iran. And I know this is a big question, but how the hell did we get to this point?

Jeremy Scahill:

Yeah, well, let’s just back up a little bit here and remember that when Donald Trump first won the presidency in 20 16, 1 of the first things that he did in office was to rip up the so-called Iran nuclear deal that was brokered in 2015 under the Obama administration. And that sort of kicked off a sustained hostility on the part of Trump toward Iran. Although in his first administration, he didn’t listen to some of the more hawkish neocons in his administration at the time, like John Bolton, who was advocating for a full-blown regime change war. That doesn’t mean that Trump didn’t attack Iran. They killed General QM Soleimani, the head of the most elite military and intelligence wing in Iran in a drone strike at the Baghdad airport. But Trump on a military level didn’t go all in toward Iran. What he did instead was to impose sweeping, punishing economic sanctions against the Iranians.

Joe Biden claimed that he ran on a pledge to renegotiate the 2015 Iran deal. He failed to do that. The US continued to maintain these economic sanctions. Trump wins the presidency again and tightens the sanctions on Iran even further. And in fact, recently, treasury secretary Scott Besson said that the whole point of the US sanctions was to essentially strangle the Iranian people into an uprising against their government. And so in late December, we started to see protests begin in Iran. They started a little bit before that actually in the oil sector. Then it moved in early January to the Biris essentially, and the way we would talk about it as Americans is small business owners started to protest. And at the beginning, there was no violence, met it out against those demonstrators. In fact, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini came out and said that the protestors should be listened to.

Well, then a couple days later, you started to see major clashes taking place in the streets and you had a battle of narratives. On the one hand, you have international human rights organizations, some of which are funded by the US government, others like Amnesty International, our independent organizations that said that the overwhelming majority of the violence was the Iranian State Security forces opening fire on peaceful protestors. The Iranian government has said that there were foreign influenced operations, that there were effectively Iranians that were working in the pay or service of the United States or other powers that started attacking police stations and attacking mosques and burning down clinics. And certainly a lot of that did happen. I don’t think any reasonable person denies it. But what I’m emphasizing here is that there was a battle of narratives. Clearly thousands of Iranians died. The question is what was the breakdown of who killed them, et cetera.

That’s still being investigated right now. But what happened when things got extraordinarily bloody inside of Iran is that both Donald Trump and the son of the ousted Shah of Iran, this was the context of the 1979 revolution, a US backed king was overthrown. They started calling on Iranians to seize institutions to take over areas of power and attack security forces. And Trump said, help is on the way. Well, that kicked into gear then the NeoCon wing of the Trump administration saying, oh my God, our moment has come. Let’s push to overthrow the regime. And so from that moment, we’ve been on the brink of potential US military action in parallel to the US amassing this unprecedented arsenal since 2003 in the Middle East, you’ve had diplomatic talks happening. February 6th, they began in the saltine of Oman. Then a few weeks later, there were talks in Geneva.

Trump moved away from talking about we’re doing something to save the Iranian people and is once again focused on nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. They need to give up their nuclear enrichment program, which is ironic, Maximilian, because remember that last June, the United States and Israel bombed Iran for 12 days, and Trump said that at the end of that, that they had completely and totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. So it’s a bit on the nose that they’re now saying the whole point of this is Iran can’t have a nuclear bomb. Steve Witkoff Trump’s special Envoy said in an interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law on Fox News on Sunday that the Iranians were a week away from having industrial grade bomb making material. The next day, Trump says again, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear program anymore because we blew it to Smithe. So there’s clearly a sort of series of lies and propaganda, and they’re attempting to find a justification to move toward war.

But the big story in Washington, one of them this week about Iran, is that the Washington Post Axios, the New York Times, a bunch of media outlets come out with this story that says, oh, general Dan Kain, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military official who briefs Donald Trump and the commander of the operation last June, that he somehow has been warning Trump against military action. And then Trump responds and says, no, that’s not true. Dan Kain would never do that. He’s a war hero, et cetera. And this is all fake news. And what I think is part of what’s happening here is that someone is managing a narrative. Either it’s that certain elements within the Pentagon want to kind of put out into the public domain that there should be more debate about this, or there are elements that are kind of trying to go Trump into moving forward with this NeoCon dream of a regime change war.

What I think is indisputable is that the military has sat down with Trump and has explained to him Iran has serious ballistic missile capability. If we try to launch a war that the Iranians believe is existential, a lot of Americans are going to get killed. Yes, the US is infinitely more powerful militarily than the Iranians. But the Iranians have very sophisticated, locally developed ballistic missiles with a long range, fairly sophisticated naval assets. They manufacture their own drones if they want to, and they exhibited this last summer. They can penetrate the Iron Dome system in Israel. I think they could kill a lot of Israelis if they wanted to. They can attack us military bases. They showed they had a capacity to penetrate them, even though it wasn’t in a large scale. The Iranians are saying Now, we’re not going to calibrate anymore. We’re going to go all in.

So to put it in short, you have this drive to war. People like Marco Rubio are getting high on their own supply. They think they can replicate their spectacular Venezuela success. Some people in the administration talking about, oh, we can do it like we did Kadafi and Libya. But the reality is Iran is a country of 90 million people. And as a sophisticated military, it’s a country of institutions that have been built up since 1979. And this is not going to be a cakewalk for the United States. The Iranians recognize they’re dealing with an erratic, dangerous transactional president, and it’s like, is he being the president or is he the head of the Trump organization without officially being that anymore? So the Iranians are saying, we’re trying to present him with some offerings that we think he might be interested in knowing. He’s kind of a gangster businessman, concessions on oil and gas for American companies purchasing American civilian airplanes.

They told me and Maz that they’re doing unprecedented flexibility on the nuclear enrichment issue. We don’t know the details of what that is yet. And I think most significantly, they told us that they’re willing to negotiate other issues if war is averted. They didn’t say what those are, but Netanyahu and Israel have said they want the ballistic missiles to be talked about. Would Iran do that? Doubtful that they would remove their only deterrence, but they may try to engage in a process with the United States as a way of getting sanctions lifted and buying time so that there can be another dialogue. But no doubt about it, we are on the brink of something potentially very bad happening, and the number of sane people in this administration is so tiny that it seems likely that the NeoCon Netanyahu wing of the Trump base is in the pole position right now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and this is definitely a subject for another podcast, but while we’re on that subject, just really quick for our listeners, I wanted to ask about that Netanyahu, US NeoCon sort of alignment of death here. I mean, I’ve been hearing this kind of drumbeat from that wing my entire life, and it feels like there has never been any other option, but invasion and regime change in their minds. And so I guess I just wanted to sort of ask if you could say a little more about Israel’s involvement here and what deal would actually stave off such a conflict. Is that even something that anyone believes Israel and the US want?

Jeremy Scahill:

Remember in the lead up to the 2003 invasion, an occupation of Iraq, Netanyahu had just left power as a prime minister in his sort of first era of running Israel. And he came in front of the US Congress and told all kinds of lies and fabrications about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but also about how easy it would be for the United States to sort of win in Iraq. He’s been spending his entire life trying to get the US engaged in wider wars under both President Biden and President Trump. Netanyahu has basically been given a blank check to wage wars across the Middle East. You had the genocide of Gaza, which may well result in the shrinking of Gaza territory as a part of Palestine. I think the Israelis are very intent on trying to mass deport all of the Palestinians, either kill them, turn them into plantation workers on Jared Kushner’s farm or kill them all.

So that’s very real. You had the pager bomb plot in Lebanon, the assassination of Nella. You had the overthrow of Assad in Syria that Trump the other day claimed responsibility for putting the former Al-Qaeda operative, who’s now the head of state in Syria in power. The Israelis have tried to imply that they were behind that regime change. But what we know as a fact is that when the Assad government fell, Israel’s first response was to go in and bomb the entire conventional military apparatus in Syria to ensure that no Arab government would take power there, that had a capability to defend itself against Israel. That happens at the time that Iran has been repeatedly militarily attacked by the United States. It’s the only official nation state that has militarily responded to the genocide in Gaza, Ansar, Allah, and Yemen did. But that’s not an official nation state.

And so what you have right now is Netanyahu at the apex of his career, he not only has someone like Trump who listens to everything, Mariam Adelson says his number one bankroller and probably one of the most influential Israelis in the world, but you had Joe Biden and Kamala Harris tee the entire thing up. This is a different subject itself. And we have this internal study that should be released from the Democrats, the autopsy of the 24 elections that showed that the Gaza genocide was a very influential part of Kamala Harris’ defeat to Donald Trump. I blame the Democrats in large part for giving the world Donald Trump again. But to the point is that Joe Biden was a dedicated Zionist his entire 50 year political career, and he should never be let off the hook for teeing this whole thing up. They could have gotten a ceasefire and ended the Gaza genocide.

They systematically refused to do it. So the direct answer to your question is Netanyahu has never had it better, and the region has never been in a greater state of flames since the invasion of Iraq. And possibly it’s worse in some way in a destabilizing way than that invasion. Now, Netanyahu’s talking about building his own axis. He’s talking in distinctly religious terms. Mike Huckabee, he’s supposedly the US ambassador to Israel, but he’s basically like a less intelligent version of Israel’s foreign minister talking about, oh, a greater Israel from the sea to the Tigris River. They’re talking about a much grander thing, and the US is trying to walk that back yet, but that’s the quiet part out loud. That is what Netanyahu and Israel, that’s been their entire project, is to seize more and more land, grow, grow, grow. So right now, the Iranians, they’re very sophisticated. It’s a highly intelligent, highly educated modern society. Their diplomats are trying to find a way to thread the Trump needle and will they be able to do it maybe temporarily. But there’s a lot of pressure on Donald Trump to try to go full blown regime change war, and it is not going to be a cakewalk for the US if they decide to go down that path.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s no surprise that the media and politicians here in the United States are doing what they always do and beating the drums of war and painting a very one-sided picture of this situation. And as you know, I mean folks here in the United States have virtually no understanding of what the hell is actually happening and what people are actually feeling inside Iran. And so with the last few minutes that I’ve got you, I wanted to ask, what is your assessment of the level and depth of support for the government in Iran, especially given the recent wave of mass protests and the brutal repression of those protests that we addressed earlier? Do you sense that the majority of Iranians will support their government and stand firm in opposition to us aggression?

Jeremy Scahill:

I wouldn’t pretend to speak for what the majority of Iranians believe, but here’s what I would say that history has shown repeatedly, and this is certainly true in very recent history with Iran, that regardless of the political perspective of people in countries that the United States or Israel attack, it has a unifying dynamic to it. And I think we’ve seen that in Iran. The ruling coalition within Iran itself also has different strands. You have a very militant strand that believes that this is a war of existentialism that has a religious component to it. You have the reformist strands of the Iranian government. You also have a pluralistic society that has not been allowed to fully express itself, that the spectrum of opinions in Iran are much wider and more diverse than US media often give credit to. And you have a very diverse Iranian diaspora around the world.

Certainly there is very strong support for the Iranian system. There’s gradations of it. It might not be that people love the particular power structure or the strand that’s in authority right now, but there is a substantial support for the state and its institutions. A lot of young Iranians, like many young people around the world, are disaffected with what they see in their life. We saw that in the protests. The economic situation is largely due to the American sanctions, but also I think some Iranians say our government didn’t do enough to ward this off or to try to make concessions. So what I would emphasize is that I think that we need to understand Iranians. It’s a much more diverse society with shades of gray at all levels. But the idea that the United States is this time, it’s going to be easy. We’re going to be flowers are going to be handed out to our soldiers as we go marching on Tehran, it doesn’t happen.

It didn’t happen in Iraq. It didn’t happen elsewhere. I don’t know what the outcome of it will be, but if you look at the states that the US has shattered, it doesn’t turn out the way that the US believes it’s going to Saddam Hussein. His popularity ratings are higher now than they ever were when he was alive. And this is what Iraqis able to actually freely say what they think about him. And it’s because the US is as a PhD in breaking things around the world. And I would end on this in saying that I sometimes like to watch boxing, and there’s a really interesting dynamic to boxing. When a fighter throws a kidney punch on another fighter, it doesn’t immediately knock him down. Sometimes you can have a fighter that he’s able to absorb it and he keeps on fighting, but the clock is ticking because that kidney punch, it’s going to flare up inside the body momentarily.

And before you know it, they’re just laid out flat. The United States, all these events, it looks like Netanyahu has gotten what he wanted. It looks like Trump has bullied the entire world that they’re all going to capitulate to him. I don’t think we know yet what kind of kidney punch has been delivered to the standing of Israel or the United States in the world. And the fire next time might not come for years or a generation, but it will come. And so even though we may see short term, it looks like Israel’s running the deck. History shows time and again that if an empire does receive a kidney blow, it can be a while before the impact of it is fully seen. But I think we may be witnessing one of those moments in history.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network podcast, and thank you to our guest, Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News. Go follow Jeremy’s work, go support Drop site. We need their work now more than ever. If you want to hear more important conversations and coverage just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Share this podcast with your people in your circles, your friends, your family, your coworkers. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story, and go to the news.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference for the Real News Network. This is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.