 Erlich is an award-winning freelance reporter. Some of his books that he's published already are right up here for you to purchase and get signed if you would like. He reports regularly for such organization as National Public Radio, CVC, and Marketplace Radio, and his articles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News. His television documentaries have aired on PBS stations nationwide, and his book Target Iran, What the News Media Didn't Tell You, co-authored with Norman Solomon, became a bestseller in 2003, and that's one of the books we have here. Among his many awards are a Peabody Award in 2006 and a Clarion Award in 2004. Today he's going to be talking about Events in Iran, something that UCI and International Studies Public Forum in particular have followed very closely this year. And so it will cap our interest in Iran and follow through on many of the events that we've had already. The title of its presentation is Obama, Nukes, and the Democratic Movement of Iran. And so I will turn it over to Lisa. Thank you. Thank you. Can you hear me in the back there? We are. I wanted to thank Deborah and Holly for hearing very much for bringing me here today. I spoke yesterday at USC and I'm taking off real quick to go to UC Riverside tonight. So it's a bit of a whirlwind schedule. In June of last year, on a Friday, the people of Iran went to the polls and voted for president. And I went to bed, I had been covering the elections on assignment for the Dallas Morning News and others. I went to sleep that night along with millions of Iranians fully expecting there to be a runoff between President Ahmadinejad the incumbent and Mr. Musavi, the main challenger of the reformist camp. I woke up Saturday morning. I got pretty early, went online and much to my amazement and to the amazement of people all over Iran, the president Ahmadinejad won the election by 62% allegedly according to the news reports. And every out on the streets, people I talked to at random were telling me that it was a coup d'etat. They could not conceive of giving the huge rallies that had been taking place in support of Mr. Musavi and the waning support for Ahmadinejad that they had for the first time had television debates and the consensus was that Ahmadinejad didn't do so well. They were just dumbfounded by the fact that he, not only that he had won, but that he had won by such a large margin. And under the Iranian system, because they have multiple candidates for president, if neither candidate wins an outright majority then you go into a runoff. So people expected at least there to be a runoff. The charge of course immediately was that there was vote fraud. And although immediately at the time I heard anecdotal explanations of what had happened, in the month subsequent a lot more detail has come out. And basically this is like dictatorships all around the world that want to pretend that they have the popular support. When you go to rig the vote in a decentralized way, it's a kind of an unmanageable process. And what the Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard, who are the main military force in Iran, and the Basij, which is a paramilitary militia of religious fanatics, young people under the control of the Revolutionary Guard, they were given the order to make sure Ahmadinejad wins. And so on a low individual or localized level, they did everything they could to boost the vote count. So they did things like take old people in to the booths and then make sure that they voted for Ahmadinejad. Whoever they wanted to vote for, they marked it for them. In precincts where Mousavi would have likely have gotten a lot of votes, those urns, those voting boxes never made it to the central county. They used a variety of ways, but as you can imagine in a decentralized way like that, you can't, it's not like you say, okay, you will end up with exactly 51%. They couldn't do that. So they aired on the side of making sure that he won, and that's how he ended up with 62%. And there have been various academic analyses, and I've referred to it in my articles that point to the fact that it would have been an incredible feat for Ahmadinejad to have won by that percentage. It was impossible based on the voting patterns of Iran in the recent period. Within two days of the elections, there was mass protests, the largest in Iran since the 1979 revolution. Hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps a million, marched in Tehran and the Briz and in Mashhad and various other cities of Iran, holding up signs, where is my vote? And they initially voted in complete silence. Can you imagine a march of perhaps a million people not saying a word, not chanting a slogan, just holding their signs and holding a peaceful protest against the outrage of the election? And the movement, instead of society, kept getting bigger and bigger. So it really got the regime worried. And within a week after the election, the government cracked down. The supreme leader, Kamini, basically said, that's it, no more protests. The gloves are off now. They started a process of brutal repression against the demonstrators, who were overwhelmingly peaceful and nonviolent. However, it didn't stop the movement. If anything, the movement got angrier and bigger. And that got the government even more worried. Meanwhile, I had to leave the country as did all the foreign reporters. They only allow you a 10-day visa as a journalist. And they can renew the visa if they want to for another 10 days. But of course, once all this trouble, as far as the government was concerned, erupted, they stopped granting journalist extensions. So I had to get out of the country really fast. It led to an unusual adventure. The American reporters, or any foreign reporters, are not allowed outside of Tehran without special permission. And you're definitely not allowed to go to the Kurdish region. For those of you who don't know, Iran is made up of nearly half the population of Iran, or ethnic minorities, Kurds, Mlujis, Azeris, as people from Azerbaijani, Oregon, and so on. And they have a lot of legitimate grievances against the central government, in terms of denial of their language rights and other cultural rights. There are, in some cases, pretty strong nationalist movements there. And the Kurds are among them. So they definitely don't want foreign reporters going there. But I was supposed to leave from Tehran and fly to Erbil, which is northern Iran. It's the Kurdish region of Iran. And my claim was canceled at the last minute. So if I did some checking, I would have had to fly to Istanbul and back again, or out to Dubai. It was really crazy. If you know the geography of the region, it's like going from here to San Francisco via Chicago or something. So I got permission from the Iranian government to fly inside Iran and then take a bus through Iran, through Iranian Kurdistan, to Iraqi Kurdistan. And that was the most fascinating, possibly the most fascinating trip I've taken in my many trips to Iran. Because Iran, despite the maybe perhaps the images that people have here, is a fairly developed third world country. If you're in Tehran itself or the other big cities, you have lots of high rises, you have long freeways, all the advantages of being a developed country. Lots of internet connections, big universities. But when you get out of Tehran, particularly into the Kurdish region, suddenly you're down two lane roads with lots of pop holes, poor buildings, one and two-story homes that are obviously quite old. And the bus was nothing but Kurds. Because that was, would be going from Iranian Kurdistan to Iraqi Kurdistan. And they couldn't figure out what I, as an American, was doing. Luckily, I look just like Ali Shaqiri here and I cast for Iranian. And so at the checkpoints, because they have internal checkpoints, they ask for this very rough, revolutionary garb with a three-day-old growth of beard says, passport. And so I go down to grab my passport and he goes behind me to hassle some Kurds, but he assumes that I must be Iranian. So he didn't even check my papers. And I said, I got through the checkpoint and went on. But in the conversations with the Kurds on the bus and from other interviews I've done, there's a great deal of anger at the Ahmadinejad government by Kurds and other minorities. But not necessarily support for the reformists. And that's a shortcoming that I think the movement there has to deal with. Because they didn't see, they saw at least the reformist leaders as being not all that different when it came to how the treatment occurs. Right or wrong, that's the perception there. And the movement, the green movement and the level of demonstrations, et cetera, was not as strong. And the vote for the reformist was not as strong in Balochistan and Kurdistan as it was in other parts of Iran. Eventually I got to the border. They finally did recognize I was an American when I had to show my American passport. And got delayed for a long, long time at the border because it's simply for being an American. Which is their way of retaliating to how Iranians are treated when they come to the United States. And I might add it's correct on neither end. Now in the process of the few days after the massive demonstrations after the June 12 elections, a phrase came into use of that Iran has become a Twitter revolution. I'm sure you've all heard that expression. And frankly it's not accurate. I personally never met a single person who used Twitter when all of my reporting went wrong. But let's say I traveled in the wrong circles. But clearly by any reasonable standard, a tiny, tiny minority of Iranians used Twitter or other, even the other Facebook or other social networking sites. It's largely used and accessible to the upper middle class, the upper class and young people. Now there is a lot of internet penetration in Iran. And there's a lot of cell phones. And there's a huge use of text messaging. But calling it a text messaging revolution doesn't have, it doesn't even flow off the tongue, you see? But Twitter revolution sounds like ooh it's new and innovative and so on. It's instructive to understand how that term came about and what's wrong with it. What misinformation it conveys. Within days after the uprising, more and more reporters were kicked out of the country. Those who remained were forced to stay inside their offices. They couldn't go out and do normal reporting. So BBC, CNN, Fox, everybody became more and more reliant on internet feeds from ordinary Iranians. YouTube for video, email messages, Twitter and etc. So for the reporters sitting in New York or London or Atlanta getting this stuff, oh my god, we're getting all this first hand reporting from so-called citizen journalists. Let's call it a Twitter revolution because for them it was. Not understanding that a relatively small number of people have access to that inside Iran. And it also subtly twisted what was a movement of independence in Iran. That is, they were not anxious to bring in the United States version of democracy. They were not interested in the U.S. bluster about nuclear weapons in Iran, etc. They were concerned about democracy inside Iran. Iran had a history of democracy and the United States had its chance to help promote democracy in Iran. And what did they do? In 1953, when there was a democratic government led by Prime Minister Rosendegh, when it had a viable civil society with legal trade unions and religious groups and political parties and a genuine free press, all the things that we say we want in the nuclear world, when Iran actually had that, they made the mistake of nationalizing British petroleum. Because British petroleum had ripped them off for decades by stealing the oil of Iran under phony contracts that they had forced to be signed. They wanted to recover their oil natural resources. And the British and the United States of CIA overthrew the government of Rosendegh and wiped out the democracy in Iran and the hope of democracy in much of the Middle East. So when the U.S. talks about supporting democracy in Iran, the people of Iran have a very different view of that. And they're not interested in the return of any pro-U.S. style phony democracy. And you don't have to go back to ancient history of 1953. You can look at the democracy the U.S. has brought to Iraq or the democracy the U.S. has brought to Afghanistan. And the people of Iran are very well aware of that and they have no interest in U.S. attacks or U.S.-sponsored insurgencies and so on. But by calling it a Twitter revolution and relying on people who largely speak English, there was a certain twist that was given to the U.S. media which made it sound like the movement in Iran was pro-U.S. Now there is a lot of pro-U.S. people sentiment in Iran. Of that there's no doubt. By opinion polls, by my personal experience and that of any others, the people of Iran are much more friendly to the people of the United States than probably anywhere else in the Middle East. That's true. But that doesn't mean they favor U.S. policies. That's the distinction that never got made. So this Twittering revolution stuff helped subtly promote the idea that somehow the revolution or the... I don't want to call it revolution. The mass movement in Iran was pro-U.S. or favorable to what the U.S. wants to do in Iran. Simply not true. How do you describe what the movement is in Iran? The core of supporters for Mousavi and Karabi, who was the other reformist candidate, were from the upper classes, the upper middle classes, students and young people. You could tell, I went to a lot of rallies before the election and I saw the Ahmadinejad supporters, I saw the Karabi and the Mousavi supporters. And particularly for Mousavi, the young people were wearing designer sunglasses. They had nice polo shirts, they were driving nice new cars. You could tell these were not kind of like poor peasants. Let's put it that way. That was the core of supporters. But as the demonstrations began after the election, more and more people from other classes came out. And you saw clerics dressed in their clerical robes. You saw women dressed conservatively in child wars. You saw people on motorbikes, a good rule of thumb. You can just kind of stick this away in your interesting facts file. If you see kids on motorcycles in Iran, there's a good chance they're from a working class because they don't drive the fancy cars but they get on motorbikes. More and more of those people and people from South Tehran were coming out. So it became a multi-class movement of opposition all united around the lack of fair vote and the lack of democracy. And soon it went beyond just the immediate demands of the vote count and having a fair election to wider complaints about the system itself. And you had developed kind of two camps. The people who wanted to maintain the current constitution and Iran as an Islamic Republic because they believed that religion does have a role in governance and the problem is that it's being distorted under the current leadership who are misinterpreting the constitution. And on the other hand you have people who want more radical change who wanted to see a getting rid of the current constitution and to return to some kind of parliamentary system like they had before perhaps in 1953, it's a little vague but in any case a much more radical stand to get rid of the Islamic system as it exists today. If I can make an analogy for Americans, imagine, remember back in 2000 when we had the election dispute in Florida and the Republicans of course were convinced that they won and there were a lot of Democrats who thought the election got stolen and it was ultimately decided by a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court Al Gore folded up the tent and that was done. Now imagine just for a moment, just speculate here, imagine if instead of saying, okay, I lost, Al Gore said, no, that Supreme Court decision was unconstitutional and illegal. It was a political decision done by right-wingers with the intention of undermining democracy. We should take to the streets in large peaceful demonstrations. You know something? A lot of people would have gone out in the street, hundreds of thousands probably. Now what if in the midst of those demonstrations some police had come out and shot people? Or what if some right-wing humans in Miami had gone out and acted as thugs and beat people up? You would have seen people fighting back and there would have been a huge outpouring and fighting in the streets of America over the legitimacy of the election and if the movement had continued for some time, for some weeks and months, you would have seen a number of views emerge. Some people would have said, what we need to do is restore the rule of law and democracy in America. This election fraud by Bush was illegal but we need to maintain the Constitution that we have in the United States because it's been distorted by the Bush supporters. And then other people would say, well, no, wait a minute. You know, the corporations are really the ones who run this country. There's no real democracy. The Constitution is a sham for those who are in power. We need more radical change than just having fair elections. And you would have both camps united in the popular movement but having different goals and aims. And that, in a very brief way, is what's going on in America today. The movement continued to grow despite massive repression. The government pulled out all the stops. They arrested every leader they could get their hands on whether they had anything to do with the movement or not. And anybody, half the people I've ever interviewed in Iran are in jail today or were admin in jail because anybody who was outspoken or critical of the government was thrown in jail and interrogated, maybe kept there or maybe thrown in jail and released. None of the repression work. It kind of hit a high point with the Ashura holiday, which is a very holy day in the Shia Muslim religion. Tens of thousands were out in the streets despite vicious repression. It was really shaking the core of the government. Within a couple of months, however, there was the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and there were very small turnouts. The government was successful that time in preventing large demonstrations by the Green Movement. So for the moment, we're not seeing a lot of large demonstrations. There's still the same sentiment in Iran. People are reassessing tactically what to do. It's a very difficult situation given the level of repression. You can't hold a meeting like this to discuss what your demand should be or what tactics you should go. They will periodically shut down the cell phone system or shut down text messaging. They'll shut down access to Facebook for a while. I think it's back on now. I have to go afterwards and check my Facebook account to see if it's back up online. But the all manner of subtle and not so subtle repression has taken a toll. But the sentiment there for a democratic change in Iran is very real. Now, how should we interpret or how is that movement being interpreted here? It's very interesting. Everybody from left to right in the United States wants to claim credit for the movement in Iran. I read a column by an ultra-right-winger, a guy named Larry Elder, who claims the people of Iran are rising up against Islamofascism. Funny, I've never heard that term used in Iran. You know, all my trips there. So, you know, he's trying to claim that the people of Iran are backing the U.S. interpretation, in fact, the right-wing American interpretation of the war on terror. Let's first talk to you. The Obama administration has, it's been in a difficult position because it knows if it comes out too strongly in support of the movement there, it would mean that the Iranian government would use it as a way to attack the movement. But after, I think, a period of time of waiting, the Obama administration made a tactical shift for roughly the first year of being in power, in which instead of thumping the war drama as the Bush administration had done and constantly threatening to invade, or sorry, to bomb Iran, the Obama administration offered to negotiate and to hold talks. And the problem was that they didn't change the substance of the U.S. demands on Iran, only the tactics of what they would do to make the change take place. So, for example, in all of my visits to Iran and all of the Iranians I've ever visited, they never once themselves started to talk about the issue of nuclear weapons in Iran. Yet if you went out and talked to Americans and said something to Iran, the first thing you'd hear would be about the nuclear weapons. The problem is, of course, there are no nuclear weapons in Iran. It's think of the weapons of mass destruction argument in the case of Iraq. The way, if you want to really deconstruct American foreign policy, first they make a decision of what they want to do and then they hunt around for the argument that will scare the hell out of people. And if they can find that argument, that then becomes the dominant theme of our relations. So, in the case of Iraq, it was the phoning weapons of mass destruction. It was the terrorist carrying suitcase, atomic weapons to the Chicago airport and they were carrying out devastating attacks. I mean, just making stuff up out of whole cloth. In the case of Iran, yes, Iran has a nuclear power program. I myself have opposed a nuclear power. I don't think it's a good idea here in the United States because we haven't solved the issue of what to do with the waste, among other things. Not to mention the cost and lots of other things. But if the United States has nuclear power and France has nuclear power, Iran has the right to have nuclear power. And they have not enriched their uranium to bomb grade level. They, even if somehow they manage to enrich the uranium, you have to know how the technology can actually build a bomb. You can't, like, stick a fuse in it and light it and then go running away with your ears covered. You know, it's very complicated about how to actually develop a bomb even once you have enriched uranium. And then once you have a bomb that will explode, you have to figure out how to fit it So Iran, even if today they were full tilt into making a nuclear bomb, they're years away from ever actually having something that they could use. And then what would they have? They'd have one or two or three or four atomic weapons, which the US and Israel don't take seriously because they could be wiped and they could be knocked out before they're ever fired. You know, they're not a serious threat certainly to the United States or even to Israel in terms of an offensive attack on Israel. Why? If Iran, you know, the argument in Israel put forward by the Israeli government is that Iran constitutes an existential threat to Israel. It means it threatens the very existence of Israel, therefore Israel would be perfectly justified in bombing the nuclear sites in Iran to take out that threat. If Iran was actually such an existential threat, why wouldn't the government of Iran already have launched missiles with conventional weapons? They have planes and missiles that have reached Israel. They could cause a lot of damage. Why don't they? Because they know it would mean an immediate retaliation by Israel and the United States, their total isolation worldwide and the total destruction of the entire country of Iran. And you know, it's interesting former Prime Minister Barak just last month finally admitted that Iran is not really an existential threat. He says, you know, the people in Iran are dangerous, but they're not Meshugan. That's a farsi word for Meshugan. That's a joke. Meshugan as Yiddish were crazy, right? So, you know, in other words, they're not mad molas running the country of Iran. They're rational, political people who make decisions, many of which I disagree with, but they're not going to launch a suicidal attack on Israel. What's really going on is that Iran supports Hezbollah in Lebanon. They support Hamas in the Palestinian Authority. And Israel thinks that if you get rid of the outside agitator, it will therefore collapse those movements. That's what it's really going on. But they can't justify bombing Iran because they're sending money and arms to other groups that have been doing arrears. They come up with their own let's scare the hell out of them argument, which is that the entire Jewish people are threatened by nuclear weapons that are practically developed in Iran. They're making it up, folks. It's not true. So, today, the Obama administration has changed policy from its advocacy of negotiations to a much more strident stand. We see now articles coming out leaked from the intelligence agencies about the possibility of bombing Iran. The possibility of what would the U.S. do if Israel bombed Iran independently of the U.S. and what would the reaction be. All of this is part of a conscious campaign to up the ante with Iran to get people to scare very, very scared about Iran. The administration simultaneously is trying to get crippling sanctions imposed on Iran. And what that means is everything from possibly banning exports of gasoline to Iran, which is dependent on foreign gasoline, it means other sanctions that would not only impact the leadership of Iran, but the people of Iran. And every interview I've ever done in Iran that not only do people not want to see new sanctions, they want to see elimination of the existing sanctions, which are already hurting the country and the ordinary people. So if you want to support the Green Movement, the movement for democracy in Iran, you don't apply more sanctions, which are going to hurt the very people that are demonstrating the streets. It seems like common sense. But that's not how the Obama administration is. It's part of what I would consider a whole series of very serious policy errors on foreign policy, including the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, the number of other things. We can go into more detail on that. By the way, over the last nine months, I've been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, and the West Bank. So any of those topics that you want to go over today during the questions I'm happy to address. Well, obviously I'm focusing on Iran. So what should U.S. policy be? I know this is hard to grasp, particularly if you're an academic or if you're involved at all in the discussions in Washington. The best thing the United States can do towards Iran is nothing. I'm absolutely serious. The best thing you can do is ratchet down the rhetoric, stop the threats of sanctions, get rid of, take the military option off the table, let the people of Iran proceed in their own way to develop a movement that will get rid of the government in Iran and bring democracy there. That is going to do more to make good relations, both with Israel and the United States, than any covert or over military action, any sanctions, cranking up any overblown rhetoric out of the United States just back off. And with that thought, I thank you very much and I want to go to the questions. Yes, sir? I understand there are about 25 Jews living in Tehran and that the Israeli government is kind of embarrassed because they haven't been able to entice them to move to Israel. I was wondering if you could compare the way Jews live in Tehran and fear now Christians and other gentiles are treated in Palestine. Oh, that's a good question, good comparison. Could everybody hear the question or shall I repeat it for the video? Are you mic'd back there? The question was, and I'm going to shorten the questions, the question was how are Jews in Iran treated compared to Christians in Israel? Right? Okay. There are in Palestine, sorry. The you're right, there's somewhere between 20 and 30,000 Iranian Jews still living in Iran, not just in the city of Tehran. And they are recognized as an official religion, a minority religion in Iran and they have their own representative to the parliament as under the constitution and by and large they get along fine. They don't suffer discrimination. They, like all Iranians suffer the same problems that all Iranians do, but there's no government sponsored anti-Semitism or a tax against Jews which is why they stay there. They could immigrate. It's down from roughly 80,000 I think in 79 and so some Jews did leave, but a lot of Iranians left for all kinds of reasons after the 79 revolution. And I've had a chance to visit Palestine both Gaza and West Bank and speak with the Palestinian Christians. We know that Palestinians are often characterized or thought of in this country as all Muslim but there is a sizable Christian minority of Palestinians and they face horrific oppression by the Israeli government. I was in Bethlehem and when the Israeli troops invaded the West Bank some years back they came in and destroyed ancient buildings, churches, etc. as part of their effort to bomb and go after the troops that they were fighting, the Palestinian Authority troops, etc. So, frankly, the Israelis treat the Palestinian Christians much worse than the Iranians treat the Iranian Jews. Yes. I heard Secretary Clinton said that Iran is slipping away from theocracy into a military dictatorship by the Revolutionary Guard. Do you believe that's a fair assessment? Secretary Clinton said Iran is becoming a military dictatorship under control of the Revolutionary Guards. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, I think what we're seeing there's been a process going on for some time. It's not just something in the last year where the power of the clerics is becoming diminished compared to the power of the Revolutionary Guards. There was always, from 1979 on, there was always both in control. And the clerics played a leading role particularly in the early years. Today, there's three pivots of the Iranian system, the judiciary, the parliament, and the executive branch. Two out of the three of those are run by former Revolutionary Guards. The judiciary is run by the cleric and that's because it's constitutionally mandated that it has to be a cleric. So yes, there's no question that the Revolutionary Guard has exerting more control. The elections are having less and less impact on what actually, who actually controls the country. And yeah, I would say that they and not only that, the Revolutionary Guard has increasingly control over important parts of the economy. They control the Tehran airport, and the airports in the country. They control a lot of the legal and illegal trade. I mean, I guess on the good side of my last trip to Iran, I was able to get a much better variety of vodka and wine. For example, which, you know, it's illegal. It's a dry country because supposedly under their interpretation of Islam. But I was told the reason I could get better quality liquor now is because the Revolutionary Guard had taken over the liquor importing trade and was doing the same thing. Yes? The Revolutionary Guard is also in charge of the energy sector completely in Iran and is most likely vertically integrated with Beijing and Moscow interests. That said, you suggest that we should do nothing. My question is, why doesn't the U.S. government offer to engage Iran economically? Not just live sanctions or prevent sanctions without outbreak. Engage it in Iran economically in order to compete with Russia and China both economically and strategically vis-a-vis Iran. And by doing so entice the Iranian populace to work for power firms like Microsoft, Chevron, Merck and Cargill of Halberd. What's preventing economic engagement? Is it a function of bodies? Okay. Let's see if I can correctly summarize it. Why doesn't the United States economically engage Iran and get Iranians working for American companies? Like we do with India. Okay. Actually, I think it would be a great step forward if the U.S. engaged Iran economically. It would require rolling back 30 years of sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on Iran. Right now, American companies cannot invest in Iran and in fact subsidiaries of American companies operating in Europe, for example, can't invest in Iran. The oil industry is completely frozen out. As you mentioned today, couldn't set up offices in Tehran. Not because of Iran but because of the United States. I think if suddenly the U.S. changed its policy and all of that and U.S. companies were able to invest, I suspect the Iranians would allow some in and some not. But I think it would be a tremendous step forward if the U.S. had simply normal economic relations. There's a lot of really smart people in Iran. There's a lot of talent there. There's a lot of highly educated folks and I think it would be great to engage them economically and stop the kind of sanctions that we have today, economic sanctions that we have today. What's preventing it from happening? What's preventing it from happening is the U.S. policy. It's really interesting because I've had a chance to interview corporate executives and so on. When Dick Cheney was out of office and heading to Halberden he was against sanctions against Iraq, he was against sanctions against Iran because he wanted Halberden to be able to go there and develop oil fields, right? The minute he got nominated for vice president there's 180 degree twist and he's in support of all the sanctions, etc. So depending on the company and depending on the leaders, etc. There's a fair number of American companies who would like to see those sanctions roll back because they're getting beat out in competition with European companies that can invest there. But there's a very strong conservative lobby politically as well as military intelligence that are dead set against that and so far they've been successful in the other, the corporate executives have not. Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you sir. The two-part question that I'm asking about Iran, particularly the other countries, particularly Iraq. First of all when the United States believes Iraq in some form or other if will Iran be the victor? And secondly, kind of related to it is if I kind of turn off the volume and I look around the world of countries who may need a deterrent Iran seems to be pretty prime. They have no, they're surrounded or at least they're in any side they can look, they're major nuclear powers. We worry about deterrents but the question to be is do they already have a form of deterrence? A preventive pact and I'm taking this off from an argument by law bidders that they have a, he calls it the changing policy of Iran is as revolution as he discussed in introduction to the machine gun that is used third parties and the claim would be is am I right? I think you could if we attack Iran perhaps the United States or Israel attack Iran that they may have a deterrence either by attacking the Gulf or perhaps just opening the borders in Iraq where we have long, vulnerable so I just wanted to I'm going to try and remember both questions but I forget what it's about it's about Iran. So as the US troops pull out of Iraq is Iran going to be the victor? Yeah it's really interesting I wrote a book called Target Iraq what the news media didn't tell you in which this is in 2003 of January it came out before the war started in which Norman Solomon and I predicted we didn't have a crystal wall that predicted everything that was going to happen with the Iraq war but on this one we were right which is that the main victors that would come out of this would be Iran. Why? Because the opposition groups that would come to power once Saddam Hussein was out had all their headquarters in Iran and sure enough that's exactly right so al-Maliki with his Dawah party the Sadr, the Iskiri, the Kurds all of them today have offices in Tehran none of them have offices in the United States when in the most recent problems with the election I'm sure you follow the election where Alawi the former Prime Minister won a plurality of the votes but he may not be able to actually form the government you know where that decision is being made in Tehran? All the Shia parties and the Kurds went to Iran for a conference with Iranians, Iranian leadership to figure out how they can form a Shia coalition or a Shia Kurd coalition and freeze out Alawi that's the result of the U.S. war in Iraq Saddam Hussein was Iran's worst enemy they had fought a brutal, vicious eight-year war the Taliban in Afghanistan were the second worst enemy for Alawi the U.S. went and got rid of both of them Iran didn't have to do anything they just sit back, work with their allies they're going to come out a lot stronger frankly out of this Iraq war than the United States once all the fighters calm down and if the U.S. troops pull out one of the, as you know the status of worst agreement requires and bases and mercenaries all to be out by the end of 2011 the U.S. I think is going to use the old I had my fingers crossed defense which is, oh yeah we signed the agreement but I had my fingers crossed so I didn't mean to leave troops there because that's the only way that the U.S. is going to be able to maintain control so watch in the months ahead all the rhetoric that's going to be oh the Iraqi army is not ready they're not stable enough we have to leave 50,000, oh they won't be combat troops don't worry, they won't be fighting the Iraqi army forever that's the only way the U.S. is going to be able to maintain control in Iraq the second question was did they have a deterrence? yeah they have a big deterrence actually and the Pentagon luckily and the CIA are smart enough I disagree with those folks but they ain't dumb and they've got some very smart people who figured out well what would happen if either Israel or the United States goes in and bombs the nuclear facilities it seems that it's a limited target targeting only of the facilities but in fact when you look at the war plans that were actually drawn up in 07 because they all got leaked the U.S. was going to actually send in troops because they couldn't guarantee that they had hit the sites that they wanted and they had destroyed the things they wanted they were going to take out revolutionary guard headquarters I mean it was a real serious war not necessarily an occupation but a real serious war even nuclear facilities for shirts and then so they kind of played out the war game of what would happen well first thing that would happen was on their own even without Iranian direction Hamas and Hezbollah would open warfare against Israel so Israel would be less secure in Afghanistan the people alive and the people inside Iraq aligned with Iran would immediately target U.S. troops based in Iraq so instead of having two wars in Iran you might have four or five wars going on for an indefinite period of time and the Iranians wouldn't have to necessarily fire a single missile or launch a single plane they can do it with political, military covert aid, political direction, etc and the Pentagon to their credit was smart enough to figure out yeah they weren't the risk because among other things they could close off the streets of Hormuz where 25% of the world's oil supply comes through the narrow streets between Iraq and Iran driving up the price of oil you think we have problems when oil hit four or five gallons of dollars a gallon a few years ago right imagine if it hit seven dollars a gallon what impact would it have it's not worth it particularly since they know Iran does not have a nuclear weapon I was wondering if you were a strategist for the reformist movement do you think there's any help? yes I'm going to turn it off how would you a scenario that is there any hope for the reformist movement in Iran I don't want to posit myself as a strategist because I really do respect the people of Iran making their own decisions and I would never as an outside observer tell them what process I would look at the following movements always have ups and downs and given the incredible repression by the government I'm not surprised that eventually the ability to hold these big mass demonstrations declined I think I would be looking for new ways to organize new ways to make links between workers for example who are constantly going on wildcat strikes but they're not political they're economic for example they don't get paid for several months how do you link up with those people with the students and the others who are demonstrating in the streets how do you deal legitimately with certain ethnic minorities who have not been so enthusiastic how do they become part of the reform part of the same movement and then there will be an incident somebody will get shot or somebody will get arrested or something will happen and you will come back out of the streets again I can't tell you it will happen in a month or six months or a year I don't know I don't have a crystal ball but the anger is too great for it to have simply subsided the Iranian government to other Islamic nations Saudi Arabia Syria what is the relationship between Iran and other Muslim nations okay we have to go case by case because it really depends the way to understand Ahmadinejad and what makes him different from previous presidents Iran is that he really sees himself as a leader not only of Iran but of the Muslim world and so when he makes statements like we have to question the holocaust and we need more study of the holocaust totally insane reactionary anti-Jewish statement why would somebody even if he believed that why would he say something like that because he's not stupid the guys who have a Ph.D. he's an engineer he's a very street smart he's leading to the most reactionary sentiments in the Muslim world the people who are not just anti-Zionist but anti-Jewish and he wants to play to them and he knows that that's going to get people riled up and so he wants to support he wants to be a leader not just of Iran but of the whole Muslim world Iran is closely allied with Syria politically, economically, militarily and it has support of the Hezbollah in Lebanon and speaking sympathy of the Shia population in Lebanon and that's about it the rest of the Arab world which is mostly Sunni is really ticked off in Iran and actually doesn't like them and while they don't the myth is that they'll join with Israel and the United States to oppose Iran or something like that that's so much spin coming out of Washington but these folks don't like Iran extending its influence in Afghanistan they don't want to see the United States bomb Iran they don't want to see crippling sanctions but they would like to see Iran's power reduced and there's a great deal of conflict and that's likely to go on for some time yes in the back what would be since the Iraqi army is now like a million strong it's a country of only 30 million what would be the likelihoods of a coup in the next few months in Iraq in the next few months anything is possible in Iraq you know the key thing to keep in mind is there ain't a democracy it isn't despite all the rhetoric coming out of Washington you can have elections and not have a democracy right and classic example is both Afghanistan and Iraq when the United States removed Saddam Hussein from power they unleashed contradictions that had been suppressed by Saddam he was an evil dictator I visited there prior to the election it was a horrible dictatorship but you know something Shia and Sunni lived peaceably they intermarried there was no divisions within the city of Baghdad for example Kurds from the north lived there and I'm not saying they didn't face discrimination or there weren't any problems because they clearly were but it was nothing like what you see today because when the US came in with that heavy hand the ethnic each of the ethnic groups not because they automatically hate each other but because the leaders of each of those groups said well I'll probably never make it as a leader of all of Iraq but I sure as hell can lead the Shia or I can lead the Sunni or I can lead the Kurds and you had this fractioning of these opportunistic leaders each trying to gain power by mobilizing their constituency and of course creating militias etc etc and so it's an inherently unstable situation and as a military coup with possible short I think the US is in a predicament because it has to have a pro-US government and it can't do it through elections so what's it going to do? It either has to negotiate with whoever does end up in power or just have a military coup and stick its person in yes in all of Iraq well I thank you very much could I say a few words about daylight I'd be very happy I have visited Cuba 11 times starting in 1968 and I wrote a book on the history of how I've changed and how Cuba has changed in those 40 years it came out last year so it's very current and looks at Obama's policies towards Cuba what's going on inside Cuba what's working what isn't the very real economic problems in Cuba but also what's wrong with US embargo why it should be changed and it's yours for the low low price I encourage you to do I'll be very happy to sign the books yes here to what I've said online and Facebook type websites health agreement well you heard what I said about the Twitter revolution having said that it's not quite a revolution there's no question that each generation of mass movements takes the technology that's available and makes it their own it's kind of hard to believe now unless you're an ancient like I am in 1979 it was really innovative because Ayatollah Khomeini shipped cassettes into Iran as a way of organizing so it was called the cassette revolution it's hard to think of that but that's really true because it undercut the repression of the Shah at the time by getting Khomeini's words out on cassette so today we have the internet Twitter and Facebook etc and the folks in Iran are making full use of it you can Iran is wired you can get internet connections to Iran in big cities but also in the countryside and there's this constant battle going I told you about Iranians are educated very clever folks so the government will ban a certain website you go on and you can't access it but again the word immediately goes out well if you go to this website it'll take you to that banned website and then there's this constant cat mouse game going on so the government is constantly trying to repress all manifestations on the internet of opposition and the opposition is constantly trying to improve it and get around it so it's an ongoing battle and they're going to embrace it as Khomeini embraced the cassette they have embraced the internet you mentioned that almost 50% of the people of Iran are ethnic minority groups and you also mentioned that the green revolution didn't really tap into those groups do they have their own political movements or are they just not involved with the whole system yeah and you have to what about the ethnic minorities and their relations with the green movement each movement I mean each ethnic minority you have to kind of go on its own but I would say particularly for the Kurds which I've talked about before and the Baloch are minorities who live in the southeast of Iran near the Pakistan border they very definitely have their own movements the Kurds are probably the most developed there's a number of Kurdish political parties who run in elections inside Iran and then there's three parties that are armed insurrectionist groups that are outside of Iran that do also carry out climate sign work and I think and I've written about this as a footnote I did a story for Mother Jones about the Iranian Kurds I went on to visit all three of those girls groups in Northern Iraq if you want to get more detail but basically what they're saying is yes all Iranians are oppressed by the government the economic problems affect all Iranians but we as Kurds or ethnic minorities are worse off because of language discrimination other kinds of discrimination and so you can't simply ignore that and say we should all unite as Iranians get rid of the government it's very similar to the issues of the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement here in the United States where Black people for example say yes we should all join together but what about the particular things that affect us that don't affect others to me it's very similar yes sir is there any significant modernist sentiment in Iran well there sure is if you go to Beverly Hills I've never run into it I'll tell you in all my years of traveling in Iran I've never had one person say to me gosh you know what we need is the return of the shaw now having said that I've talked to Iranian friends who say there are some folks in the upper economic brackets who would like to see a return of a constitutional monarchy nobody wants to see the old shaw back and his son who I interviewed in DC area calls for a constitutional monarchy but frankly the level of support for that I think is very low inside Iran it's much stronger in West LA and Beverly Hills I heard on the KFI radio show that when Obama ordered an insurgency of troops into Afghanistan that very few terrorists were actually left in the country and moved elsewhere such as Pakistan very few what terrorists were left in the country and is that true and if so what benefit is it to have more troops in the country when the terrorists have only left have the terrorists left Afghanistan and therefore why did Obama increase the troop search recently well you make a good point the reason the official reason for the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in October of 2001 was to stop the terrorists to go after the people who attacked us on 9-11 and indeed Al Qaeda who I think was responsible for the attack was taking shelter in Afghanistan the government of Afghanistan the Taliban at the time was not involved in the 9-11 attacks both the Taliban and Al Qaeda denied it and I've never seen any credible information indicating that they did but the Taliban was the government in charge they were harboring Al Qaeda and therefore they became a legitimate target in the ISIS Bush administration very quickly the Al Qaeda fled the line they've been living in Pakistan on the border or in some of the cities I've also been in Pakistan four times and I've been all over the Northwest province and all of the various towns along the border there and there's no question that Al Qaeda folks first of all they were dealt a very heavy blow after 9-11 in no small part it was a disaster for them they thought it would spark support around the Muslim world and in fact they got condemned by Muslim clerics and ordinary people and politicians throughout the world it was a tremendously backfire and it wasn't the US invasion of Afghanistan that helped put Al Qaeda into decline although obviously that helps but it was the complete unpopularity of what they had done in their isolation in Afghanistan and then two years later they reversed the popular support for America all over the world and managed to recruit more people to Al Qaeda or similar groups because of the hatred now of the foreign invader so all of these US military actions had the exact opposite effect of what the official intention was supposed to be so yes I think Obama made a disastrous decision to first send 12,000 more troops to Afghanistan then 30,000 more troops a little another little handy fact it cost about 1 million dollars a year per soldier to maintain a US soldier in Afghanistan when you count in the bases and the tanks and the supplies etc there are going to be 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan that's 100 billion dollars a year wasted in a war that the US is not going to win it can't win military think of what healthcare that's basically all of the healthcare plan for a year is being flushed down the toilet in Afghanistan and not like that Al Qaeda isn't even there the insurgents this is all coming out of my next book called Conversations with Terrorists by the way and it's not about them but it will be in September the detail of the fact that all of the insurgent groups say they will not allow the Afghanistan to be used as a territory for launching attacks like Al Qaeda or Sanctuary by Al Qaeda type groups and you can say oh well they're lying why should we believe them well because eventually the United States is going to have to get its troops out of Afghanistan there's going to have to be some kind of a government run by Afghans the US cannot permanently keep 100,000 troops or even 50,000 troops and even after the United States pulls out the people in Afghanistan understand they don't want to go through this again and no government is going to make itself available for Al Qaeda type of attacks again knowing that the US is right on the borders it couldn't attack at any time so the US actually could have an exit strategy from Afghanistan fairly rapidly if it stopped the notion that we have to have a military victory I just want to make sure other people haven't asked questions first yeah great no I just would like to add just a couple of minutes sure oh well wait a minute sorry I know there was another hand and I'm missing a hand so okay great yeah great I don't know it's sort of a footnote but he lost a bit of summary of the adventures of Ahmad Chalabi remember he was this wild and blizzard apparently he was born in Iraq but Iranian and persuaded elements of the Bush administration on the need to go after Iraq he's got thrown out of the country he's been in Iran and now he's coming back maybe he can help me fill it out tell us about the story of Ahmad Chalabi I wish there was a country in western Syria I know he was anyway Ahmad Chalabi was the leader of the Iraqi National Congress he had an interesting history he was indicted and tried and convicted in Jordan for bank fraud but that didn't stop the United States from considering him a major ally in the run up to the Iraq war he was so bad that the CIA didn't trust him but the Pentagon did that's how bad he was he was a blowhard he consistently provided false information he was one of the key guys providing the phony information about the weapons of mass destruction and the resurrection of nuclear weapons and so he provided it in the Bush administration accepted it, went with it and amplified it even more so but Chalabi had managed to convince at least some sectors in Washington that he had mass popular support he actually developed an army for him they flew him in at the time of the US invasion they landed him there and he was ready to take power and they figured out either people had never heard him or they hated him it was so bad that even with the US troops they couldn't put the guy in power so they had to come up with plan B Chalabi kind of went into eclipse he got elected to parliament he was actually a slave backed by Iran he then felt that he was strong enough that he broke with that slave the next elections he lost he couldn't even win a seat in parliament he then moved over towards the Iranian side so much so the US accused him of being an Iranian agent raided his house and roughed up his body guards issued an indictment which technically I think still exists he arrested and put on trial he escaped to Iran for a while now he's back again leading the pro-Iranian coalition and it was his he and his people who helped eliminate a number of the Sunni candidates because of alleged ties to the Ba'athist party that skewed the elections that made them so undemocratic and now even after the elections had taken place that same Chalabi body to disqualify people who already got elected because of the alleged Ba'athist ties so it's it's exactly what the Iranians do they have an authority that says you're not Islamic enough you're out of parliament and Chalabi is the guy behind that so he is this chameleon snake unprincipled power hungry have I said enough have I left out any adjectives is he ready for office here is he ready for office here maybe maybe at the tea party I don't know he's speaking often he's staying in Iraq I'm sorry in Iraq in Iran I just this is how they should hear you marginally and also just a footnote I had a couple of minutes so a few of you ask questions regarding ethnic minorities in Iran and what's the potential of relying on them as a movement because I'm referring to what happened almost a year ago congresswoman Herman from San Pedro she was trying to ask the United States of America to invest on them against Islamic Republic of Iran a few things you must know three big minorities in Iran that is the other one is cold and the third one is Arabs Arabs you are mainly in the south that area I was born they have a neighborhood and they've been provoked against the central government by the first days of revolution why they are not provoked anymore because the situation is erotic worse than the situation in Iran and they would like to enjoy being part of Iran and investing on them as a force that is wrong the second one is Azeris if you go to Iran capital of Iran to the market without exaggeration 90% of the big merchants running the jewelry system and financial system and also exchange system is Iran they are Azeris and also besides that I traveled all the way before I had that ordeal in Iran two and a half years ago to the Kurdistan I saw them by feeling and asking them what happened Azeris now used to be provoked to be joined with the Azerbaijan of the north now they see the situation in Azerbaijan north in Baku is worse than the situation of Azerbaijan inside of Iran why should they join that let's go with the third one because we are here to analyze everything scientifically not just signing with the bag the Kurdistan I travel all the way from Kurdistan to the south and going all the way to North Tarkut believe me leaving in Kurdistan north which is part of the Iran and leaving here look like leaving in Beverly Hills and Compton it's not comparable the house you want to buy in the north in the Kurdistan of Iran is a million dollar not a million to a month better situation than investing in this kind of situation and thinking that that kind of movement is going to overturn the government that's wrong and the second thing regarding the green movement the green movement mainly the core is illegal institutional changing situation toward a civil society in Iran the core movement of the green movement of overthrowing the government if somebody has an illusion that this kind of movement would like to change everything is wrong is exactly like democrat and republican the democrat is asking republican do not cut us do not kill us do not put us in prison let's have a protest and by the way the election was in June 22nd the protest civil protest which he referred to it was in June 25th according to the mayor of Tehran who is supporter of Ahmadinejad he announced more than 3 million people participating that was the time government decided to kill them to, excuse me suppress them that's the situation we are considering the last point is relation with the US and Iran general core of the leadership of green movement in Iran coordinated relationship and harmony of the ideas among them is they would like to have a better situation free to political prisoners free to speech civil society and election and go by the rule of law inside of the Iran and rule of law outside of the Iran that's the main core and they are trying and hoping to change they don't want to overthrow everything they don't want to let the sovereignty of Iran be questioned that's why in Iranian movement they are going non-violently and that's the hope among this generation in Iran this is the last point I'm saying which is very important for you to know Iranian 82% literacy rate all of the middle class by education but not middle class by pocket those middle class educated scientific youth they need job and government cannot answer to them emotionally culturally and financially that's why they are supporter of green movement that's the future of green movement in Iran thank you very much maybe one more question and then we're going to end so that we have time for public discussion and only okay back I just wanted to make a comment that I don't think western press for certain domestic press shares enough about how Washington and the Pentagon view Iran geostrategically namely that Iran has basically very independent energy deals with China, Russia, Pakistan, Central Asian states and certainly at this point states like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador it's just kind of doing its own thing untethered from London, Washington or really the EU and this irks Washington on an hourly basis but the logistics and the details of what Iran is doing in the energy space is completely excluded from even relatively sophisticated domestic press so that all we really get is the issues of the green movement the nuclear issues basically the things that have been re-summarized today why do you think that there's a lack of further sophisticated geostrategic analysis domestically needs to be our Iran policy do you think our public can handle it or are there core reasons why we should the question has to do with why don't we get an accurate picture from the major US media involving Iran's geostrategic energy issues the thing I understand I've been a reporter writing for major media for many years I know all the reporters coming around for time, CNN all of them the coverage of this applies generally but I'll make the point specifically about Iran coverage in the major US media for Iran it's not based on what's happening on the ground in Iran it's what's happening on the ground in Iran as seen through the prism of Washington and that's an important difference it's not news unless somebody in Washington is taking a stand one way or another on it what we constantly get this drum beat of reporting on the alleged nuclear bomb even though that's no concern to people in Iran but it's very much a concern in Washington conversely the fact that Iran is able to cut independent deals in the oil sector particularly it's got allies all over the world that runs counter to the message coming out of Washington the need to isolate Iran so you don't cover or it's irrelevant who cares if Ahmadinejad visits Venezuela and it's not news that's the official explanation where it's a paragraph down in the stage 22 so if you understand that then you understand why we don't get an accurate coverage of Iran because the job of the mainstream media is to convey to act as a conveyor belt from the people in power to what we get down here occasionally you'll get I try to get accurate I will not say that I write absolute truth but I get as much part as many fractions of it as I can and there are other reporters out there trying to do it and you can piece together what's going on by a careful reading of a whole wide variety of media including media outside the United States and with that I want to thank everybody for coming I'll be over the time