Episode 5 Ð Uprising in Iran Transcribed by YouTube CC, edited by Jared Cummings [SCOTT WALTER] Thanks for tuning in I'm Scott Walter [MIKE WATSON] and I'm Michael Watson [SCOTT WALTER] In this episode, courageous demonstrators in Iran lead us to look back on the Obama administration's Iran deal which strengthened the mullahs regime as well as the echo-chamberÐtheir term not oursÐthat propped up the deal. This is the Influence Watch Podcast. [SCOTT WALTER] Since last week demonstrators across Iran have called for the overthrow of the Shiite Islamic theocracy that has ruled the country since 1979. President Trump, Vice-president Pence and the US State Department have all expressed support for the demonstrators who have taken over 20 fatal casualties from the regime's security forces. Closer to home the demonstrations have reopened debates on the 2015 joint comprehensive plan of action, an Obama administration agreement better known as the Iran deal, that was supposed to get the Iranian regime to stop development of nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief and the release of the regime's seized financial assets. The Iran deal was backed by what Ben Rhodes a former Obama National Security Council aide called an echo chamber of nonprofit and advocacy groups many of them backed by the well-financed disarmament group, Ploughshares funds. Now as we speak Mike these demonstrations are occurring on the streets across Iran but tell us a bit about Iran the country. [MIKE WATSON] Sure, Iran is one of the larger countries in the Middle East population of a little over 80 million. What makes it distinct from much of the rest of the Middle East and North Africa region is that its religion is not Sunni Islam which is the majority sect but is Shiite law, which goes back into long long long ago Islamic theology on the succession of who's in charge of Islam. So the Shiites went one way this Sunnis went the other. Iran is majority Shiite; the majority ethnicity is also not Arab. They are Persian I mean the majority also there are minorities of Azhari Shiites there's a minority of Kurdish Sunnis, and then there are small minorities of non-muslims and of other Muslim ethnicities. Since 1979, when there was an Islamic Revolution the country has been ruled as an authoritarian theocracy under under Shiite clerics and it has been extraordinarily hostile to the United States and to the United States's allies specifically Israel and Saudi Arabia. The government is nominally run through a supposedly elected legislature and an ostensibly elected president. However those come with massive asterisks. The real power resides in the Supreme Leader who is a Shiite cleric and a guardian of the Council of Shiite clerics who can reject the candidacy of individuals running for offices throughout the Iranian ostensibly political system. The current Supreme Leader is a guy named Ali Khomeini who succeeded the leader of the Islamic Revolution Ruhollah Khomeini when Khomeini died in 1989. The president is Hassan Rouhani who is also a Shiite cleric who has held numerous positions in the Iranian government. Since the takeover in 1979, this system has not just now but also before the current cycle of dissent has seen multiple mass demonstrations against the government. In 2009 the nominal election was seen to be in the eyes of moderate opposition forces who although didn't want to overthrow the government did not believe that their election had been fair. They believed that the President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had stolen it. They were probably right. There were massive demonstrations. Those demonstrations are a little bit different from the current round of demonstrations. The current round of demonstrations have gone into the working classes. The 2009 demonstrations were largely the upper middle class, and the 2009 demonstrations were not explicitly for regime change. In the current demonstrations, the demonstrators have been open to and have explicitly; they've torn down propaganda posters of the second coming. They've chanted for the end of the Islamic Republic. Some have even called for the bringing back the Shah who was their leader. The Shahs dad or the current pretender's dad was the leader before 1979. This has become an issue in the United States because of the negotiations surrounding the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear program. The mullahs have for years and years sought nuclear weapons. They are widely suspected to be at least fairly close to getting them and in 2015 the United States through the Obama administration and also the Europeans negotiated this joint comprehensive plan of action the Iran deal by which the US and Europe agreed to lift most if not all of their sanctions against the Iranian regime for its nuclear activities in exchange for the regime agreeing to a limited regime of inspections and ostensibly rejecting its pursuit of nuclear weapons. [SCOTT WALTER] Now, you pointed out that the protests have gotten to the point that they're now even calling for regime change. The protestors seem to share some the concerns about Iran's military misadventures that are not nuclear. Can you tell us a bit about that? [MIKE WATSON] Sure, so the protests kind of broke out over the last couple of months, over the bad economy specifically food inflation in the price of eggs which in poorer countries tends to be an important source of animal protein. When the price of that goes up all of a sudden you're unable to afford protein, those calories and then there have also been protests about political corruption. By the end of December the last kind of the last week of December right before the new year they had spiraled into mass street demonstrations calling for the supreme leader to resign and one of the more interesting chants that some of the demonstrators were chanting was "not Gaza, not Lebanon my life only for Iran." Part of the of the Obama administration and the Europeans thinking behind the Iran deal was that okay we'll give her an all this money, and it'll give up its nuclear weapons program and then it will reinvest all its money into its domestic economy, and they'll care about their domestic economy and they won't go meddling in the affairs of other Middle Eastern countries and that did not happen. Which is part of why the demonstrators you know the New York Times and the media outlets that are more Pro or and deal and have pushed a less hostile view of the regime have tried to you know hand wave all this way as though it's just economic protests. Well the thing is the economic protests are the political protests it's the same the same germ. The regime is not focused on people and the improvement of life. The regime is not focused on the improvement of life the regime is not focused on ensuring that I can afford eggs. The regime is too busy meddling in Gaza and too busy meddling in Syria and too busy meddling in Iraq and and that has been I think a somewhat underreported facet of the protests because it is in addition to the nuclear issue the problem for the United States and for the United States's allies that Iran causes is that it is an expansionist revisionist power seeking to rewrite the rules of the game especially in the Middle East, but throughout Asia and if the people are saying no we must come home we must make Iran great again that could yield an a notable shift that would be in our interests without even necessarily us having to do anything to affect it. [SCOTT WALTER] Yes, and of course you mentioned the misadventures of the regime abroad in a way the Iranian regime operates somewhat like an impressive foundation itself you could say in a grim kind of way because they like to fund things. What are a few of the things that the Iranian regime mullahs like to fund? [MIKE WATSON] The most important one is probably the Lebanese Islamist militia, Hezbollah which now effectively runs Lebanon. They among the things that the Iranian government and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps the IRGC which is one of the sword and shield of the Iranian Revolution. Basically the secret police are a hybrid secret police cause to me they're kind of like a KGB era or an SS, very nasty guys. One of the one of the things that they have backed Hezbollah and doing is meddling in criminal activity in Latin America and the U.S. in 2014 was have a very aggressive operation to try to break up Hezbollah influence in Latin America using law enforcement and it was reported shortly before the protests broke out by Politico that as part of the Iran deal negotiation. So whereas the Iran deal negotiations are going on the Obama administration deprioritized and effectively shut down that operation which made Ben Rhodes very angry that people had pointed out that they had given these concessions to Iran and [SCOTT WALTER] That's Ben Rhodes the sort of lead propagandist within the Obama 'National Security Council [MIKE WATSON] Yes, he was he was deputy national security adviser for speech writing, and he was kind of the orchestrator of the echo chamber, and he named it the echo chamber in an interview with the New York Times Magazine [SCOTT WALTER] After it had succeeded [MIKE WATSON] After the Iran deal had been enacted. You know we had this operation it had been set aside, and that kind of speaks in a microcosm of the problem with the Iran deal itself. The concessions that the West made to Iran were made all up front; the most infamous concession was it [SCOTT WALTER] money again [MIKE WATSON] It involved quite a lot of money, quite a lot of cash in a jet [SCOTT WALTER] Pallets of cash on a jet [MIKE WATSON] The US agreed to release certain regime assets that had been frozen because of the regime's various crimes among them you know killing US servicemen in Iraq, pursuit of nuclear weapons; you know supporting terrorism abroad. Part of our concession was we were going to give them all a bunch of this money that we had frozen and four hundred million dollars of that money was literally flown to Iran on or was literally flown to the Iranians I believe the handover occurred probably in Switzerland, was flown to the Iranians on an airplane in cash so better than most any foundation could manage even so. [SCOTT WALTER] Well, let's now that we've gotten back to the Ben Rhodes in the echo chamber, the echo-chamber that Ben Rhodes successfully constructed was needed because of all kinds of opposition to the Iran deal as the negotiations were ending. So take us back to that time and tell us a bit about some of the folks who were arraigned against the deal. [MIKE WATSON] Sure, the Obama administration's Iran policy was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Iranian political system works. The Obama administration and its supporters operated under the assumption that there are reformist factions within the regime and that the current Iranian president Hassan Rouhani who has ordered a violent crackdown that has killed over 20 people was a reformist and that he was opposed to hardliners like the former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that if we empowered the Reformers that they would give up nuclear weapons and they would give up for an adventures. Just about everyone else was extremely skeptical of that assessment. [SCOTT WALTER] Even including some Democratic members of Congress. [MIKE WATSON] Including members of Congress among them if I recall correctly Senate Democratic leader now Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer [SCOTT WALTER] To say nothing of what allies Israel and the Saudi's [MIKE WATSON] The Israeli government was militantly opposed. Prime Minister Netanyahu was invited to the Congress by then I think Boehner was still speaker and Majority Leader McConnell and he gave us you know he gave a speech saying the Iran Deal will be bad. Obviously, Republicans were opposed because of the Republican of affinity for Israel and also the Republican assessment of how the regime operates and again a handful of Democratic members of Congress were skeptical enough to vote against it in the Senate. Now the problem was that the Obama administration realized they were not going to command even a majority to say nothing of 2/3 necessary to ratify a treaty so they concluded it as an executive agreement which Congress cannot do anything about. The Congress knew that the Obama administration was going to do this as an executive agreement so they created this Corker-Cardin law that would allow I think it was a two-thirds majority to override the executive agreement. They didn't get two thirds they got I think 58 in the Senate and a majority of the House, but what this shows in their words bipartisan opposition to this agreement, bipartisan opposition to the Obama administration's Iran policy in general. So, the Obama administration to prevent even more Democrats from defecting created this echo Chamber and then so Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser put forth this echo chamber using Ploughshares Fund, this long-standing disarmament nonprofit to fund all of these liberal national security foreign policy organizations who would then make, you know, would then bring forward what would later be called in the interview with Rhodes freshly-minted experts who could come out and say no no the Iran deal is fine you know the mullahs are going to give up their nuclear weapons. If we do this and the Obama administration does have a solid head on their shoulders. [SCOTT WALTER] Yes and of course as wise Washingtonians know and careful observers of the news, one of the scariest sentences is always "experts say" because you may discover that the experts, in fact, know very little or even if they actually have genuine expertise their wisdom may be somewhat lacking compared to less self-important folks, but of course the critical ally of the echo chambers freshly-minted experts was the media themselves. My favorite part of that New York Times magazine interview with Ben Rhodes and by the way we should at this point insertÐhis brother is also a profound influencer. His brother is the president of CBS News then and nowÐbut anyway this has been Rhodes opinion speaking of the New York Times of the media folks who were talking to him and his freshly minted experts "the average reporter we talked to is 27 years old they literally know nothing." [MIKE WATSON] Yeah, now that you know Rhoads and the coach and the echo chamber that he and Ploughshares built we're looking to take advantage of these fresh out of college sort of cub reporters who many of them sympathized with the Obama administration for ideological reasons, but all of them were young naive and maybe didn't have the background to know even who they should go to to get a sound alternative view. [SCOTT WALTER] Yep, now there also were folks who regularly pop up on our InfluenceWatch.org website, and that is the semi-governmental semi-straight media shops like NPR. So tell us a bit about the role that they played in this mess? [MIKE WATSON] So among the things that Ploughshares was funding during the debate over the Iran deal were on numerous media outlets some of them were openly partisan left-wing Mother Jones, the San Francisco based labor movement left-wing journal was one of them but also some ostensibly non-aligned media they gave $100,000 to NPR they gave substantial funds. [SCOTT WALTER] And we should add $100,000 not to NPR in general. [MIKE WATSON] To with explicit notation that it be for coverage of the Iran negotiations and then they also gave money to the Center for Public Integrity which publishes the website Pro Publica. NPR later, there was a little bit of controversy the Washington Free Beacon found out that congressional Iran deal critic might pop Mike Pompeo, who is now the director of the CIA had been essentially blackballed from giving from interviews on NPR. NPR tried to wriggle out of it by saying well they never contacted us and the Washington Free Beacon had emails that said otherwise. [SCOTT WALTER] And to say nothing to the fact that of course if you were NPR and you were legit you would be going to the most articulate spokesman on both sides. [MIKE WATSON] You would think. So there was some criticism there, and some suspicions that the involvement of Ploughshares money may have inclined them to disproportionately show voices who were in favor of the Iran deal as opposed to those who were opposed. [SCOTT WALTER] Now more recently, this is a sidelight to this, but there's an amusing additional financial incentive that has popped up for why a very prominent news outlet might like the idea of warming relations with Iran can you tell us about that? [MIKE WATSON] So the New York Times runs in addition to its newspaper a sideline business in travel package tours. One of them is a 13 day trip to Iran it will set you back seven thousand eight hundred and ninety-five dollars per person at least and obviously if the US and Iran are at loggerheads the odds of having of selling successful package tours goes down. [SCOTT WALTER] Yes, this is similar to the far left magazine The Nation does tours to Cuba, to the former Soviet Union, to Vietnam. I don't think they've made it to North Korea yet but though I'm sure somebody. [MIKE WATSON] For North Korea, you have to go through the regime. [SCOTT WALTER] That might be a little tricky but if you know if it sounds like a grim joke way it sounds a bit like selling tours to the favorite Nazi spots and Argentina to me but anyway Ploughshares, this big pass-through entity for funding, they didn't just fund all the types of folks that you're talking about here they also funded the ostensible expert think-tank right [MIKE WATSON] This is where the experts got freshly-minted. They were giving six-figure grants to groups like J Street and J Street Education Fund, which is the left-wing Jewish interest organization. They gave a six-figure grant to the Friends Committee on National Legislation which is the religious Society of Quakers; very pacifist religion gave money to their to their policy arm. [SCOTT WALTER] And we should add law that one of the national religious groups long active on the left side in foreign policy since at least the 60s. [MIKE WATSON] Yeah they gave money to live to liberal-leaning national security policy shops like Senator for New American Security, Atlantic Council of the United States they gave money to other arms control groups like the Arms Control Association and then perhaps most controversially they give money to the National Iranian American Council which has been credibly accused of having very uncomfortably close ties to the regime and to apologists for the regime and bringing it back tying a tongue it all up nicely together Ben Rhodes when he was still in the Obama White House spoke at the National Iranian American councils 2016 Leadership Conference. [MIKE WATSON] Yes, that's that's a little spooky they also gave money to have given money over the years and still are so because we should make clear this is not something that just happened back in 2015 right. [SCOTT WALTER] Right, it is a very live issue President Trump has decertified portions of the Iran deal. He will come up again. When in fact is I think as early as next week they have to decide whether sanctions are going to be put back in place on the Iranian central bank. Many conservative foreign policy people are saying that those sanctions should be put back into effect. The demonstrators have actually have protested against the Iranian banking system because they control you know, the flow of money for the regime for the regime to do all this foreign adventurism so the you know Ploughshares in the echo chamber are still trying to preserve this. The Iran deal and you know again why would you know above and beyond you know ideological reasons why would they care? Well the Obama administration guys see the Iran deal as the centerpiece of their second term that you know they had Obamacare in the in the first term as a domestic policy legacy and then in the second in the second term the policy legacy is supposed to be the Iran deal which we are in reorient some US policy in the Middle East. The Trump administration, however, has been elected and they favor a more traditional conventional American foreign policy in the Middle East aligned with Israel and Saudi Arabia and of course, the Trump administration's ideal would be to foster the great rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel to counter Iran certainly. [SCOTT WALTER] And I should add as somebody who spent a little time in the White House halls that legacy is a word that has great resonance during and after administrations and if our listeners and viewers want to have an idea of just how vigorously political Ploughshares and its many aligned groups are to this day if you go straight to the Ploughshares website one of the things that will hit you is an impassioned plea to support the group Vote Vets which is one of Ploughshares grantees and allies. [MIKE WATSON] And let's be clear about who Vote Vets are. Vote Vets are a 501 C4, social welfare advocacy group ostensibly of veteransÐI use ostensibly for a reasonÐthat backs Democrats and liberals. [SCOTT WALTER] Yes, and on the Ploughshares own site which by the way to repeat it's a c3 which has some ability to lobby, but it generally is not supposed to be. [MIKE WATSON] 501 C3s have limited lobbying ability, limited formal lobbying but that not only cannot be their primary activity it's in fact much tighter than that [SCOTT WALTER] Yes it's very limited but you wouldn't know that if you went to their Vote Vet, the page on the Ploughshares website pushing you to join Vote Vets lobbying to support the Iran deal and I will just give you a line or two from it: "Vote Vets knows pressure works when the year began many people assumed Obamacare wouldn't survive to the summer months, but Americans spoke up citizens called they wrote they demanded" etc. etc. So just as you should be lobbying hard to keep the Obamacare legacy for the Obama administration so you should be lobbying your congressman and the rest for the continued life of the Iran deal. Well, we've talked about what plowshares gives money to, but of course, plowshares itself has to raise money so talk about the let's connect some of the dots of the money going into Ploughshares. [MIKE WATSON] So Ploughshares has a lot of money of their own. They have about forty million dollars of assets, but they're also raising between six and ten million dollars a year and a lot of that money is coming from the left wing foundation world. The biggest contributors are Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Hewlett Foundation. Rockefeller Brothers fund gave them two million in 2015 alone, and I believe much of that was your mark for their work also get money from global school threats fund Proteus fund and the foundation to promote open society which is one of the George Soros philanthropies. [SCOTT WALTER] I also wanted to reinforce an earlier point you made about the how the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are active all over the place I realize some Americans may say well you know I'm sitting here in Iowa and the Middle East is a mess it's always been a mess oh it's gonna be a mess why do I really care it is shocking how much closer to home than you may realize these things are. When I was at the Special Ops headquarters for Latin America in the Caribbean, I was shocked at how many I believe that the exact number is classified but let's just say it is well into the double digits in the Caribbean and Latin America where there are outposts of the Iranian regime. [MIKE WATSON] And this is, and this is why the Department of Justice had a strong counter Hezbollah program until 2014 when the Iran deal was being negotiated. [SCOTT WALTER] Yes, exactly well let's step back for a second and think about the bigger picture here. If you had to make predictions about the poor folks struggling in the streets across Iran what do you think the outlook is? [MIKE WATSON] I regret to inform you that it's probably not very good the protests have been disorganized that's an advantage because the regime can't just decapitate the organizer but the Revolutionary Guards have been ordered to crackdown. People have already been killed. The regime has the ability and has exercised its ability to crack down on communications the telegram is which is an app that is popular in that part of the world was cracked down upon there was some question as to whether the American owners of telegram were improperly collaborating with the regime in its crackdown. There are laws out there laws governing that, and that may pop back up in the future but the regime is a brutal regime. It is a brutal authoritarian regime it has behaved in a brutal and authoritarian manner, and it can be reasonably expected to continue to do so. [SCOTT WALTER] And the Trump administration and folks like a UN Ambassador Nikki Haley they, on the other hand, have been pushing back. [MIKE WATSON] The US administration has done a commendable job unlike the Obama administration did in 2009 the Trump administration and its foreign policy side have done a commendable job in showing at least rhetorical support diplomatic support for the demonstrators and for their cause of regime change. Ambassador Haley called for a special session of the UN Security Council to discuss the expected crackdown whether that will be on you know whether that will be honored. The UN is not a good organization when it comes to protecting human rights. It you know we will see what happens but the administration and at least rhetorically at this point and you know many members of the administration have a pretty sensible view of the Iranian regime so potentially going forward and policy has done a reasonably commendable job [SCOTT WALTER] And sanctions could be reinstated despite the Iran deal of 2015 on perhaps the basis precisely of the vicious repression that is already starting and is likely only to get stronger to shut down. [MIKE WATSON] Yeah, absolutely even if the nuclear deal stays in place which is far from certain the the US could always reimpose sanctions on human rights grounds. [SCOTT WALTER] And yet despite all of this viciousness, and also likely the sadness that it's you know that this latest eruption of protests may, in fact, flicker out and the mullahs remained securely in power, Ploughshares and as we say they continue to beat the drums on this and they don't just beat the drums they even beat mainstream media folks up on this, so you want to give us one of the examples of that? [MIKE WATSON] Sure, so as we as we've kind of been discussing in tangent throughout this conversation right before the protests broke out I think it was like right before Christmas. Politico which is the sort of trade publication for political Washington DC [SCOTT WALTER] And not known as a right of center [MIKE WATSON] Not in any way considered right-wing you know very very mean very mainstream very sort of conventional establishment center left in its in its outlook published a very substantial investigative piece by Josh Meyer, one of its you know investigative reporters not, again not a right-wing guy not a conspiracist, you know straightforward you know conventional mainstream media center-left that called out this effort by the Obama administration to take the pressure off Hezbollah in Latin America and Hezbollah of course as we have discussed is one of the big allies of the Iranian regime in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. [SCOTT WALTER] And a grantee you could even say. [MIKE WATSON] You could say a grantee of the IRGC. So after this piece, this piece comes out the president of Ploughshares, Joe Cirincione ruthlessly attacked Meyer and ruthlessly attacked Politico for having the temerity to suggest that the Iran deal had bad consequences and that the Iran deal had been negotiated in a less than open manner. Again, one of the problems with the Iran deal is that we still, the general public in the United States, still aren't quite sure what we gave up what concessions were made was kept very tight-lipped by the Obama administration. [SCOTT WALTER] Not a triumph of transparency, which suggests the Ploughshares squealing these days is a case of they protest too much. [MIKE WATSON] You definitely can make a case they doth protest too much you know the Meyer piece has been called you know quote a shoddy neocon hit job. Meyer isn't a neoconservative you know. In Ploughshares you know I have to bring up with the you know the neocon issue that Ploughshares has been associated with some nasty anti-semitic people Valerie Plame, the former CIA officer who was a cause cŽlbre in the 2000s because she was against the Iraq war and then got revealed by Richard Armitage earlier this year she tweeted out a really conspiratorial anti-semitic article and two days later she had to resign from the Ploughshares Board because she had essentially endorsed the anti-semitic conspiracy theory that Jews are responsible for America's wars. [SCOTT WALTER] So Ploughshares has quite an interesting history. [MIKE WATSON] Quite an interesting history. [SCOTT WALTER] Well thank you so much for all this good information on it and all those in our audience who'd like to learn more about Ploughshares we want to encourage you to go to influence watch or search for Ploughshares, and you'll find even more than what Mike Watson here has provided for us. 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