The case against Iran exposed

Scott Ritter debunks the White House war lies

March 2, 2007

A NEW report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) criticizing Iran’s efforts to develop enriched uranium has become the focus of the latest effort to isolate the country--while the U.S. continues its war threats with bellicose statements by politicians and a buildup of U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf.

SCOTT RITTER, the former Marine intelligence officer and United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq who opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion, last year published a book Target Iran: The Truth about the White House's Plans for Regime Change. Currently on a speaking tour with antiwar groups, Ritter spoke with Socialist Worker’s LEE SUSTAR about the threat of a U.S. war on Iran.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THERE’S A now infamous quote from an anonymous neoconservative back before the invasion of Iraq--“Everybody wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” Even though Iraq didn’t turn out to be the cakewalk that Bush imagined, the U.S. is threatening Iran anyway. Why?

BECAUSE THE policy that is being implemented here is not a policy that is focused on Iraq. It is a policy of regional transformation across the entire Middle East.

The ideal progression would have been Iraq, Syria, Iran. If you remember the end of the war after 2003, after Saddam fled Baghdad, we had American forces aggressively carrying out operations along the Iraq-Syria border. There were plans being developed to punch deep into Syria, because the policy of the Bush administration is to eliminate what it defines as rogue states or failed states in the Middle East. And the ultimate target is Tehran.

The easiest nut to crack was arguably Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a nation weakened by a decade of sanctions and defeated militarily in the 1991 Gulf War, which never had a chance to rebuild.

That was a popular target, one the American people had been preprogrammed to accept.

But it was not the toughest nut. That’s why they were saying, “Real men go to Tehran.” Iraq was supposed to be the low-hanging fruit. Well, they were wrong, but it doesn’t matter. They still want to implement the policy.

THE BUSH administration’s case against Iran rests on three arguments: one, that it’s an expansionist Islamist regime; two, that it’s developing a nuclear weapon; and three, that Iran’s Quds Force is supplying advanced improvised explosive devices to Iraqi insurgents. Should we give credence to any of these claims?

NO. THE Bush administration is wrong on all three counts.

First of all, the Bush administration is judging Iran today based on behavior exhibited back in the early 1980s.

There’s no doubt that in the early 1980s, Iran was pursuing a very aggressive and expansionist Islamic fundamentalist policy. It had the Quds Force, an organization within the Revolutionary Guard command, whose job was to project the Islamic revolution outside the borders of Iran.

But this was 20 years ago. A couple things have occurred since--first of all, an eight-year war with Iraq, which devastated Iran economically and physically. An entire generation of Iranian men disappeared into the ground.

The Quds Force that was sent abroad went out and became businessmen and diplomats. When they came back to an Iran devastated by war, the conclusion they reached was that Iran doesn’t need to be searching for enemies, and that there was a lot that Iran could gain by normalized relations with the West. And so the Quds Force actually became a force of moderation.

The Bush administration today talks about the secretive Quds Force exporting revolution. No, the Quds Force is leading the integration of Iran with the West.

The nuclear weapons program? I think it’s quite clear there isn’t one. No one can back up the speculative rhetoric that the Bush administration has placed out there. We hear, “There can be no doubt.” But there is nothing but doubt.

Even the IAEA, when it publishes its reports on Iranian behavior, says that the concern is derived from Iran’s unwillingness to comply with the demands of the international community, and that leads to speculation it might be up to something.

But the facts point to Iran pursuing a program that appears to be related solely to nuclear energy. The Iranian uranium enrichment technology that they’re developing has the potential to be used as part of a nuclear weapons program, but there’s no evidence that one exists.
Lastly, about this notion that the Iranians are behind the export of various technologies into Iraq, which are responsible for the deaths of Americans.

The United States itself invited pro-Iranian elements--who had been trained, equipped and were operating inside Iran--to come into Iraq and participate in the formation of a new government. This is mainly the Dawa Party. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is a product of the Dawa Party--as was, prior to that, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. The largest element, of course, is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose military arm, the Badr Brigade, is now the largest Shia militia operating in Iraq today.

The technology the U.S. is focusing on--these explosively formed projectiles (EFPs)--is not a new technology. It’s actually very rudimentary technology. It’s basic physics regarding the dynamic of explosions--how to direct the explosive force using dampers. I learned this stuff back in the 1980s when I went to an explosives course.

The first EFP was used against the United States in 2003. They were used in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and now suddenly, the Bush administration is saying, “Aha, we found something new.”

There’s nothing new here. And the technology isn’t something derived from Iran. It was perfected in the 1980s by the Irish Republican Army.

So the Bush administration has not been honest or accurate about any aspect of how it has defined Iran and the threat coming from Iran.

BUSH’S HANDLING of the war in Iraq is criticized by Democrats and some Republicans, but there’s a bipartisan consensus that Iran can’t be allowed to emerge as the major power in the Persian Gulf.

THAT’S A self-serving argument. Prior to 2003, Iran was a nation that had an economy devastated by eight years of war with Iraq. It had economic issues--massive unemployment--and it was reeling under the impact of economic sanctions. It was contained by Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist nation on its western borders, and a Sunni radical Wahabist government on its eastern border with Afghanistan.

Thanks to the United States, the secular dictatorship of Saddam was toppled, and the Sunni fundamentalist element in Afghanistan was toppled--liberating Iran.

This wasn’t Iran going out and searching for enemies. The United States did this all on its own. And then it carried out policies inside Iraq that not only got rid of Saddam, but facilitated the rise of a pro-Iranian government. The Iranians didn’t have to do anything.

So this notion that somehow Iran has been plotting to expand its influence in the region is absurd.

GIVEN THE lack of credibility of the Bush administration over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, how is it possible for them to get traction by threatening Iran?

THE BOTTOM line is that the American public is extremely ignorant about the world we live in.
The mainstream media, in contrast to what any of them want to claim, is not in the business of presenting informed, objective fact to the American public. They are in the business of making money by delivering a product the majority of the listenership or viewership will consume. This is why Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears tend to be lead stories over the reality of the combat situation in Iraq, or the potential of war in Iran.

WHAT ABOUT the dissent over U.S. policy among the military brass and figures like Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), who is seen as a mouthpiece for the Pentagon?

LET’S TAKE the “generals’ revolt.” These are retired generals, and many of their observations lack credibility when you compare and contrast the statements they make once they retire with the actions and statements they took and made when they were on active duty.

What is Murtha complaining about? Is he upset that we invaded Iraq to begin with? Has he acknowledged that this is a war that never should have been fought? Has he come out and said, “We never should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, that that was a mistake?” No, he’s saying that this is a poorly executed war, but he continues to believe that we were right to get rid of Saddam Hussein--which means he’s embracing the notion of pre-emptive war and a violation of international law.

Murtha’s dissent isn’t that America committed an illegal act of aggression, but that America got beat--that America isn’t winning.

WOULD AN attack on Iran advance the Bush administration’s goals?

ABSOLUTELY. AND they are going to get away with initiating the attack.

The day we bomb Iran, you will see a lot of dissent. But you will also see a brief reversal of the president’s negative popularity ratings. Many Americans have bought into the notion that Iran constitutes a threat worthy of military intervention.

Now, this war will go bad, and go bad very quickly. Whatever bubble the president gets will be quickly washed away. I think the awful reality of the terrific wrongness of the decision to take on Iran will become apparent to all--but it will be too late.

We will have initiated contact with an enemy, and the old adage is that the enemy has a vote. No plan survives initial contact with the enemy, and the Iranians are going to become a player.
Right now, we have the media shaping the reality of Iran in an inaccurate way. Once we engage with the Iranians, the media can’t spin away a defeat.

And I do believe that at the end of the day, we will be defeated by Iran. That doesn’t mean Iranian divisions sweep across American soil. Remember, we’re the ones searching for enemies. And we will find an enemy that will be more than up to the task of standing up to us.

WOULD THAT be true in the case of U.S. air strikes, without a major incursion by U.S. ground troops?

THE THING about an air war is that the enemy has a vote. We don’t get to sit there once we drop a bomb on Iran, and predict exactly how things will play out.

The Iranians know what our capabilities are, and they are developing counters to those capabilities. They’re not going to just sit there and allow themselves to be compliant targets of an American aerial bombardment without taking measures that seek to nullify that bombardment--for instance, firing missiles on Israel and oil-producing regions in neighboring nations; shutting down the Straits of Hormuz; and increasing the level of attacks against Americans in Iraq.

The Iranian response may overwhelm the ability of an air-only plan to deal with it, and prompt the United States into having to commit a certain amount of boots on the ground. Don’t think for a second that the Iranians aren’t capable of surrounding and destroying American troops on the ground. They are more than capable of doing that.

WOULD THERE be any difference if an attack on Iran was carried out by Israel instead of the U.S.?

THE ISRAELIS are incapable of initiating and sustaining a large-scale military operation against Iran.

Also, the United States has been very successful in cobbling together an Arab front against Iran. They have successfully promoted the notion of a Shia Crescent that stretches from Lebanon, through Iraq and into Iran. The second you get Israel involved through the bombardment of a Muslim country, this Arab coalition disappears.

It’s counterproductive for Israel to get involved militarily. So I don’t see Israel getting involved in the initial stages.

The problem comes if the United States attacks Iran--as it appears we’re going to do, with a limited bombing campaign. If the Iranians fire missiles into Israel, the Israeli government is going to be placed under considerable pressure to be seen as retaliating. Once Israel does retaliate, it’s going to drive a wedge between the United States and the Arab world.

So the Israeli dynamic is a very counterproductive one. It boggles my mind that certain political elements in Israel are pushing for conflict with Iran.

HOW SHOULD the antiwar movement respond?

I’VE ALWAYS said that the antiwar movement needs to study the art of war. The antiwar movement needs to recognize that it’s engaged in ideological warfare with a prowar movement here in America.

The antiwar movement needs to become much more focused, much more unified, and much more effective in marshaling its resources for a given cause. It’s a tough thing to do, because the antiwar movement comes from the more progressive liberal elements of American society that are not so prone to carrying out this kind of centralized organizational structure.

We perhaps need to take a look at the work of unions in the 1930s, when American labor mobilized against management--very effectively, by the way. That kind of organization and focus of effort needs to be incorporated into the antiwar movement.

The Health Care Crisis in America

An Interview Dr. David Himmelstein

Originally Published: October 30 / 31, 2004

By NANCY WELCH

Dr. David Himmelstein teaches at Harvard Medical School and is a cofounder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

THE MEDIA often claim that health care is so expensive in the U.S. because Americans overuse their benefits or insist on the best when it comes to care. Is it true that U.S. consumers are the ones driving up the cost of health care?

AMERICANS DON'T actually get very much care by world standards. We don't stay in the hospital more often or longer. In fact, on average, we have shorter stays than people in most other developed countries. We don't visit the doctor more often than people in most other countries to which we compare ourselves.

We don't even get more of most kinds of high technology care. The Japanese get many more MRI scans and CT scans, and the same is true for many European nations as well. I'm not sure if more scans are a good thing or a bad thing, but it's clear that you can't explain our extraordinarily high health costs based on the amount of care that Americans get.

The fundamental cause of the high cost of health care in the U.S. is the deranged structure of the health care system.

There's something like $50 billion a year in profit extracted from the health care system, and that's only about one-sixth as much as the bureaucratic costs of actually extracting that profit. In fact, we spend each year about $320 billion or $340 billion on useless bureaucratic work in order to apportion the right to health care according to ability to pay, enforce inequality in care, and enforce the collection of profit by insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, the drug industry--a whole panoply of players.

It's the bureaucracy to enforce inequality and extract profits that drives up the cost, and then, to a lesser extent, the profits themselves.

IN THE early 1990s, Bill Clinton promised health care reform that would expand care and lower cost. We wound up with rationed care and skyrocketing costs. What happened?

CLINTON ACTUALLY rejected a straightforward national health insurance system in favor of a system that would have virtually required every American, except for very upper-class people, to enroll in corporate-dominated HMOs. He didn't think he could take on the HMO industry.

I say that not only on speculation, but based on meeting with Hillary Rodham Clinton. When I presented the case for national health insurance to her, she said to me, "Can you name any force capable of taking on the $300 billion dollar-a-year HMO and insurance industry? You make a convincing case, but where's the power to do that?" When I said, "How about the president of the United States leading a crusade of the American people?" she asked me for something real.

So I think it was clear that Clinton made a political calculation in not championing national health insurance and in trying to strike a deal with the private insurance industry. And the end result of the deal was two things. One is that the Democrats abandoned their four-decades-long commitment to national health insurance, so that by the time Al Gore ran for president, national health insurance was struck from the Democratic Party platform for the first time since the 1940s.

The second is that the Democrats endorsed managed care as a strategy for health care, which said to investors that investment in managed care was safe, stimulating an enormous growth of the power of the HMOs and a reconfiguring of the health care system to one dominated by corporate giants.

Clinton, maybe inadvertently, gave the go-ahead for the corporate transformation of the health care system.

THERE WAS a lot of controversy surrounding the Bush administration's Medicare "reform" legislation, with the limited prescription drug benefit. Who wound up benefiting?

THE DRUG industry is a huge beneficiary. They won big in getting through a structure that forbids the government from negotiating prices with them, minimizing price pressure. They also won big because there's a huge infusion of new money for drugs under the program.

The insurance industry won big because the new benefits will virtually all flow through the insurance companies. For them, this is a huge new revenue source that's collected by the government, but out of which they'll get their cut. HMOs got some $45 billion or $50 billion in new subsidies outside of the drug benefit, just to sweeten the pot for them.

So those are the winners. The program provides a tiny bit for seniors with very high drug costs, though it's designed so that they could really get screwed as well. You have to choose a plan, and if you sign up with a plan in large part because it's covering a particular drug you need, the plan at its discretion can stop covering that drug.

For most seniors, the plan does little or nothing. Also, drug prices are going up at such a rate that if you say the program would cover roughly 25 percent of seniors' drug costs, that 25 percent will already be eaten up by drug cost inflation by the time the program is implemented.

JOHN KERRY seems to be promising even less when it comes to health care than Bill Clinton did. What's your assessment?

CLINTON PROMISED universal coverage. He obviously didn't deliver it. Kerry has promised to cover two-thirds of the uninsured--that leaves 17 million uninsured and tens of millions more with inadequate coverage--so the promise is clearly less than what Clinton ran on.
Kerry is also offering little or nothing for those who currently have insurance--nothing to slow premium increases, nothing to address rising drug prices.

The biggest piece of the Kerry plan is a partial subsidy for low-income individuals to help them buy private insurance. What he's saying is we will use federal money to dump into the private insurance industry to pay part of your premium. So it's a direct subsidy to the private insurance industry and an indirect subsidy to individuals.

Kerry's plan would actually boost bureaucracy, funneling hundreds of billions of additional public dollars into wasteful private plans--wasteful because for every dollar you spend on private insurance, you get 85 cents of care, while for every dollar spent on Medicare, you get 97 cents of care.

But it's also speculative if the federal money would even be available for his plan, given his war budget, and how many people could actually afford to take up the offer.

Look at the subsidy plan that's already in place for workers who lose their job because of foreign imports. Of half a million workers eligible for the program, only 8,000 or 9,000 have signed on, because with private coverage costing around $10,000 for a family, the government subsidy still doesn't make coverage affordable if you're low income or out of work.

YOUR RESEARCH with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler consistently shows that a government-administered, single-payer universal health plan would provide care for everyone in the U.S. for much less money than is being spent now. And opinion polls show that about two-thirds of people in the U.S. want to see such a plan. But with for-profit hospitals, drug companies, and HMOs organized to block such a plan, what can happen to make national health insurance a reality?

WE NEED a real uprising of the American people. Going up against a $300 billion-a-year industry is no easy matter.

Corporate interests themselves may play a role. For employers, rising health care costs are a cost of production. Hence, some may be motivated to support national health insurance even against their interest in being able to deny health care to striking workers, low-wage workers and so on.

But that's only one small piece of what's needed. It's also possible that a politician will discover the populist appeal of the health care issue and lead that national crusade. Or that we'll have a breakthrough in one state, showing the others that it can be done, and then [begin] spreading universal coverage state by state.

But as Henry Sigerist, known as America's greatest medical historian, put it when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine back in the 1940s, only when the U.S. has a party of labor will we have a national health program. A party representing the interests of the working class was the precondition for universal health care in Germany, in Britain, in Canada.

Maybe we can win national health insurance even before we get such a third party, but it's going to take a broad strengthening of the left.

Nancy Welch writes for the Socialist Worker.