To Avoid War, Russia and China Must Announce Their Red Lines Around Iran; Ron Paul Must Prove Bona Fides by Offering Articles of Impeachment Against Obama

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Following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: Let us look at the legality of this. How can the United States actually punish countries which decide to buy Iran’s oil and pay via Iran’s Central Bank? How do they make a domestic law and have it affect countries other than themselves and internationally?

Tarpley: Well, the rather novel theory of the Obama administration is that you can carry out what would normally be called the secondary boycott. In other words, The United States says that the United States won’t buy Iranian oil. Ok, but now the United States says that any country or Central Bank that buys Iranian oil will also be boycotted by the United States.

The bottom line is, if you deal with Iran, you cannot have a financial presence inside the United States so I would call this illegal, I would call it simply blackmail.

It is a secondary boycott and it’s of dubious success, too, because that’s the thing – We just had Secretary of the Treasury, Geithner, go on an arm-twisting tour of East Asia. And the big question is, will other countries go along with this?

If you go, for example, to China and say to them, either you stop buying Iranian oil or you cannot have any financial dealings with the Unites States, is that tenable. The general overview of the results of the Geithner’s tour is that China has said no and they are very angry, as you just mentioned about this – the case of this Zhuhai Zhenrong, where there has been a very angry response from Beijing. They may have reached their limit in terms of taking dictation from the US.

Also India, which buys a significant amount of Iranian oil, is also basically saying no. So China and India are saying no. Japan has been leaned on by Geithner and in this case the government is somewhat wishy-washy; it is a very weak government. However, since the atomic reactor incident of a year ago, Japan really needs to buy oil, so what will they do.

And then you have South Korea, they are ROK, what will they do? Those, too, are sort of up in the air. Certainly, if you tell people in Japan that you have got to choose between China and the United States there is a significant part of the Japanese economy that will say, well, we choose China. So, it is very difficult.

A country like Italy, Italy has been beaten up a lot lately by Standard and Poor’s and others; they lost their Libyan oil for quite a while; they get about twenty percent of their oil, this is a significant part of their oil from Iran. Are they are going to be able to say no to this?

So, this whole array of countries that are now being put on the spot by the US with this strong-arm, black mail, secondary boycott approach, which simply shows that the people leading US foreign policy, I would say, are imbeciles. They imagine that they have all of this power – when Geithner went to China, he basically had a whole series of nonnegotiable demands and I think they basically reacted with a great deal of rage.

Press TV: We have different officials in the American government and other governments saying different things: We have the US secretary of defense regarding these sanctions and regarding Iran’s nuclear program basically saying that no, Iran is not trying to make Nuclear Weapons, or they do not have a Nuclear Weapons program. Yet at the same time we have the British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond saying that Tehran is definitely working on a Nuclear Weapons program and this is why the sanctions – What is going on?

Tarpley: Well, what we have here is a buildup. I have been able to count nine aggressive war-like unfriendly acts that the United States is carrying out against Iran all on the pretext of an Iranian Nuclear Weapons program.

And remember, the US official opinion, the national intelligence estimate of the United States of about four years ago, says that there is no Iranian Nuclear weapons program. So, officially, the official doctrine of the United States government is that there is no such thing, but nevertheless we have got this hysteria that’s being built-up. So what do we have?

We have got the war in Iraq winding down or wound down; we have a war going on in Afghanistan, very close to Iraq; we have got an increase of the US naval presence in the [Persian] Gulf, right? A new carrier battle group is on its way to the region; there is all kinds of warships in the Persian Gulf and the other sides of the world; US of course has bases in Kuwait, bases in Saudi Arabia; we have got these economic sanctions with this new dimension of the secondary boycott.

We have got the US sending the spy drones over Iran; we have got Cyber attacks; we have got things like the Stuxnet that have reportedly been introduced into Iranian scientific facilities; we have got the US and the British and the Israelis backing terror groups – people like Jundallah, the Rigi organization; we have separatist groups among the people in Arabistan, Ahvaz or among the Kurds, among the Turkmen, among the Azeris and these other ethnic groups; you have got a policy obviously of assassination of scientists and we have got the most Republican presidential candidates are endorsing the idea that you should go around the world killing the scientists – not just of Iran but of Russia as well; and then we have got these mysterious explosions that take place at Iran’s nuclear facilities or research facilities, the ones that have to do with nuclear power reactors.

So, my count – nine points of aggression and this is unheard of, this is international anarchy and of course you would expect the peace movement here in the United States to be open arms, but unfortunately the foundations that control the US peace movement are all pro-Obama so they have cut off the fundings. So, there is very little awareness here in the United States that’s we are drifting into this tremendous strategic emergency.

Press TV: With all of this, it seems to be escalating. Now, of course Iran has said that if this continues and actually they try to not allow Iran to sell the oil, that they are able to block the Strait of Hormuz. Where we are going with all this do you think?

Tarpley: Well, the Strait of Hormuz of course is very, very vulnerable. I think from a sort of military technical point of view, people who say that the United States can keep that Tanker Traffic open, I think are whistling in the dark.

Suppose we go back to the 1988, there were some mines that were found in the Persian Gulf and a couple of tankers. That by itself was enough to drive up the insurance rates charged by people like Lloyds of London. The insurance rates on these tankers that were going through the Persian Gulf became so high, that it became economically impossible, at least at that price of oil that you had in 1988, to keep the tanker traffic going.

If you look at that long Iranian coast, because it is not just the Straits, it is the whole Persian Gulf; it is made-to-order for mines, for mine layouts, which is a very effective low-cost weapon.

Traditionally, the United States navy has not had a strong point in anti-mine warfare; it is not considered glamorous. Right now you have the US navy trying to tell the people that they are able to deal with the mines because they have specially trained dolphins that can go to the mines and somehow help blow them up.

Press TV: Mr. Tarpley, your take. I saw you, shaking you head with that. Your take on what our guest in New York just said?

Tarpley: Well, the problem with negotiating is that negotiation implies you have a rational partner and I am afraid, here in Washington, you do not. There was an attempt not so long ago to have some kind of negotiated solution and this was shut down by Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton has such a weak personality that she always has got to be the biggest warmonger in the room, otherwise she is afraid she will not be taken seriously.

I think there are a couple of ways this could be halted: The United States now says that Iran getting a nuclear weapon is a redline – Well, I do not know where the nuclear weapon is – but so the US has said what their redline is.

Maybe others should say what their redline is. We have the Russian representative goes into NATO who says that a US attack on Iran would be a threat to Russian security. Why doesn’t the Russian government state it’s redline? Maybe their redline is, do not attack Iran?

The Chinese government in the past has put out, at least, undercover backchannel messages to the United States saying do not attack Pakistan, we will treat that as an attack on China. Maybe the Chinese government should say to the United States, we have a redline too and that may be, do not attack Iran.

Another thing is we have a presidential campaign going; we have the candidate Ron Paul who claims to be a great enemy of War. He has gotten a lot of attention right now. Why doesn’t Congressman Paul submit articles of impeachment against Obama? That would get quite a bit attention given his votes in the recent primaries and maybe that would call attention of the American people to what is going on. I would hold my breath on that, but that is something Ron Paul could do.

Press TV: What will it take to resolve this issue?

Tarpley: Well, it would take either some growing awareness, an anti-war mass movement in the United States, which we do not seem to have at the present time; or it would take some rather decisive action by some of the other great powers in the world – by Russia, China, India perhaps, Japan.

If we could repudiate this policy of economic warfare, which does not succeed, I think that would be a step in the positive direction. Just in a technical point, if we had a pipeline from Iran through Pakistan into China that would deliver this oil that would also – I think, be a step in the right direction.

In other words, peaceful economic development is the way to avoid war, but unfortunately, this precisely the United States is determined to block peaceful economic development.