With the May 17 Senate confirmation of Gina Haspel, President Trump’s pick to head the CIA, the administration’s installation of a new “War Cabinet” is complete. Haspel, who oversaw the torture of U.S.-held detainees after 9/11 and destroyed video evidence of that torture, was a disturbing choice to head the spy agency, given that Trump has aggressively advocated the re-establishment of torture, despite U.S. and international laws that classify torture as a war crime.
PAUL KAWIKA MARTIN: It’s the highest level of concern about war with Iran that I’ve had since the Bush administration. I started working on the issue of Iran a little bit after the Iraq war was sort of winding down. A lot of us was concerned because we were hearing rumblings, that Vice President Cheney was starting to organize similar types of intelligence, similar types of people that he had did on Iraq, on Iran. Since working on that, that kind of helped build some of the building blocks who, when the next president came, which was Obama who was, who was willing to try to figure out another way of engaging Iran. That sort of led into the Iran agreement, which was many, many years of negotiations and figuring out how to best move forward with Iran in an international way, not just between the U.S. and Iran, but with international community, the P5+1.
So you had, you know, Russia, China, France, Great Britain, the U.S. and Germany working together to find an agreement to take some steps that would make everyone safer. And the Iran agreement definitely did that. Didn’t take care of every issue, because you don’t usually do that, but it did block all the pathways that Iran had to any type of nuclear weapons. Some of those pathways were blocked permanently. They actually poured cement into one of their nuclear reactors that could have produced fissile material to build nuclear weapons. Cement was poured into that. You don’t reverse that. And then it had the largest, most intrusive verification and inspections regime that any country has ever been in. So we took this, which, you know, Iran, if it had so chose, could have had a crude nuclear device in maybe three or four months when the agreement happened to, it would take well over a year and we would know about it because we have all these monitoring systems. Now that’s been thrown out the window. As it stands, Iran is continuing to abide by the agreement. How long that’s gonna last, we don’t know. Now we’re facing these threats to Iran and how, how they will react. It’s very unclear. And anyone who was very concerned about the Iraq war, you know, Iran has a significantly more resources, significantly more military power. Any kind of military intervention that had to do with Iran is going to make a huge conflagration in the Middle East because now you’re going to bring in other countries, perhaps such as Saudi Arabia – and Israel. It’d be a horrific mess. There is no military solution to Iran. Any military planner will show you how challenging that would be, how many deaths would occur. How many, how much cost in blood and treasure that would happen. So I am concerned because now we do have people such as Bolton and such as Pompeo who both said they want to see a regime change in Iran and especially Bolton, who’s been paid by a terrorist group called the MEK, which was for a long, long period of time on the terror watch list in the United States and then was taken off by pressure from the Bush administration. He has been paid by them to foment intervention into Iran.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Given the threat of war that’s in the air now with recent moves by the Trump administration, what can be done to revive the peace movement that was very strong and in the streets by the hundreds of thousands and the millions in the lead up to the Iraq war in 2002, in 2003? The peace movement has faded in recent years. What is it that you’re doing at Peace Action to try to alert folks that the need to prevent a new war could be in the offing and that people have to be reactivated?
PAUL KAWIKA MARTIN: Yeah, I think some of the challenges, the people who were out in the streets for stopping the Iraq war, stopping Afghanistan war are now out in the streets about immigration. They’re out in the streets about saving healthcare care , they’re out in the streets about all these attacks that we have on various issues and some of them are just more visceral. You know, when you have a friend that’s being deported or when you can’t get health care or other issues. When those kind of take the front of your vision rather than, Oh yeah, wars abroad is kind of further away. And especially now when more war is being fought with drones or missiles rather than troops on the ground then it’s less visceral. So I think that people just need to realize that spending $1 trillion on the military, which is about to get voted on in the House of Representatives this week affect all these other issues that you care about. If we end up going to war, the costs, the $6 trillion that we’ve already spent on other wars, those costs affect all these other issues that we care about.
