03/12/09 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our guest today is Ray McGovern.
Hey Ray, you were George Bush's CIA briefer in the 1980s, right?
Correct, when he was Vice President.
And I had the other muckety-mucks, the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, others as well.
So for four years in the early 80s.
Okay, and you guys ran the whole cocaine trade at that point, right?
Bringing all the cocaine in to pay for the secret war in Nicaragua?
I could tell you that, Scott, but then I'd have to have my boys take care of you.
Oh no.
Oh, come on though, that's true, right?
Say again?
Well, the cocaine, for example, that supplied the crack epidemic in Los Angeles was brought in by the Contras with the approval of George Bush and the CIA, Danilo Blandon and Erwin Meneses, Freeway Ricky Ross and all that.
Well, Scott, you've got the IG report from the CIA in the mid-90s.
That, of course, was long after George Bush was head of the CIA.
It was while he was vice president, but I'm not quite sure how much he knew about that, partly because I didn't know about it.
As you probably know, there are really two CIAs, the one I worked in, the job of which was to serve up unadulterated intelligence to the president, and the other one, which by a quirk of history was also put under the umbrella of the CIA.
These are the operational folks that, under the law, the president can use as his own little gestapo or drug runner or whatever, and that has happened in the past.
It certainly happened over the last eight years, but that's an aberration.
It's a quirk of history, the fact that the president can use the National Security Act of 1947 to use those words in that one sentence which says, the Director of Central Intelligence shall perform such other functions and duties as the president shall direct.
There's no check on that except in Congress, and as you probably know, the so-called oversight committees in Congress are more properly called the overlook committees.
So that's the story on that.
One that does the job, or did the job, mostly still does the job for which it was created, and the other that was told to pick up the duties of the old Office of Strategic Services, which actually performed miracles in World War II, but then was folded under the CIA and given to the director to use in any way that the president directed.
So you have a president with no integrity, and you have a director who is servile and has no integrity, as you did with George Bush and George Tenet.
You've got the makings of a gestapo.
I'm using that word advisedly.
Yeah, it's a pretty strong language.
Waterwarding.
Kidnapping.
People put in black holes without telling their wives or their children, much less the Red Cross.
Yeah, gestapo is the proper word if Congress, the only check on this kind of activity, does not do its job, and that's the case that we've had over the last ten years.
By the way, welcome to the show.
How are you, Ray?
I'm doing fine.
When do we go live?
Oh, we're on now.
Hey, listen, as far as the Iran-Contra thing, I'm sorry, because we've been talking about the drug war on the show leading up to this interview, and I thought, well, geez, I was just accusing George Bush of being a dope pusher, and then here's his CIA briefer who's on the line.
I've got to get into this.
And I guess this is really the thing that I know the least about, is what Vice President George Bush Sr.'s role was in Iran-Contra back then, because I guess there's sort of a mythology I've been exposed to at least that says that he was really up to his eyeballs and ran the whole thing and masterfully got away with making it seem as though he was out of the loop, when really he was the one.
Yeah.
Well, again, I don't speak from any first-hand knowledge, but if you want my opinion of a person who worked for him directly in the mid-'70s when he was director of CIA, and the person who briefed him for four straight years every other morning, from all I know and whatever it's since, is that he was more aware of what was going on than he admitted, that this is one reason indeed, and this is really unpunctuable, it's one reason why he pardoned those five fellows on Christmas Eve, right before he left office.
You know, if he pardoned Weinberger, then Weinberger wouldn't rat on how much George H.W. Bush knew.
So he knew a lot.
Well, and I need to read all of Robert Perry's books.
I've got no excuse at this point.
Yeah, you should.
The bottom line here is that Bush knew a lot, but that this was all being conducted by Casey, Ollie North, the crew of folks that were certainly not subject to direction from the vice president, who was rather working for the real operators who were orchestrating this whole thing.
So bottom line, he knew more than I thought he knew, certainly in those days.
Of course, he didn't know much until later.
But he was not in control.
He certainly was not the puppeteer here running the whole thing.
I see.
You told me years ago that George Bush Sr. hated the neoconservatives.
He understood who they were as a separate movement within the Republican Party that had come from the Scoop Jackson Democrats and all that, and that he had explicit instructions, I believe it was you told me, that he had given to Brent Scowcroft, his national security advisor, that these crazies are to be kept in the basement.
They are not allowed to make policy.
They're not allowed to do anything.
Don't let them do anything.
Isn't that right?
That's correct.
And that's how it was in the first, I guess, he probably worked to try to limit their influence in the Reagan years, but certainly when he was the president for four years there from 89 to 93, that was certainly the policy, right?
Sure.
The best evidence of that really comes when he was the director of the CIA.
This is, we're talking 1976, and he was under great pressure to allow the likes of Wolfowitz and Perl and all of those guys to insinuate themselves into the making of national intelligence estimates.
And, yeah, watch this unfold.
Here's George Bush, George H.W. Bush, who got the job immediately after he was head of the Republican National Committee, we were all up in arms because how can you have a politician run the CIA?
And he promised, promises usually aren't worth much, but he promised that he would not insinuate himself into the policymaking process, that he would not vote when important policy decisions were being made, and he kept that.
I watched him.
I was relieved and really astounded that I was able to speak truth to power whether it was Kissinger or anybody else, just as we did before.
The one fatal mistake he made, and this was really, really bad, was he did allow Wolfowitz, Perl, and all those fellows, these really rabid anti-Soviets at that point, anti-cognitivists at that point, now it's anti-terrorists, of course, but he did allow them to form Team B.
And he agonized over this.
We all told him, no, don't do that.
You can't do that.
He thought he could control it.
In any case, he succumbed to that kind of political pressure, not to skew the intelligence, but to allow the creation of this Team B.
And Team B was the Wolfowitzes of this world, and they got together and they got access to the same sensitive information we had.
Example, the Soviets have, let's say, 100 SS-9s.
These were the real blockbusters, which had nerves on them and so forth, multiple independently targetable retrieval vehicles and all that kind of stuff.
We'd say they had 100, and Team B would look at the same information.
Oh, no, they have 300.
So just then was when it became possible under some sort of administrative apparatus to second-guess the professionals, and you saw where that led.
We got to George Bush II during Iraq.
All that helped justify a lot of the Reagan era arms buildup against the Russians.
A lot of that was on the Team B kind of premises, right?
That's correct.
Just to finish up this thought, the proof was in the pudding when George Bush was president, and we won the glorious Gulf War I.
When I say glorious, your listeners, even your educated listeners, probably realize that one out of every three of those 690,000 service people in theater, one out of every three has petitioned the VA and been accepted for disability payments because they have these ill-described ailments called Gulf War illness, but it's real.
They're ill-described, but it's real.
So after that glorious win, and the Soviet sort of had already just imploded the Soviet system, Wolfowitz, who was number two in the – yeah, I guess he was number – well, he was down in the ranks about three or four of the Defense Department.
He drew up this incredible document.
It was the Defense Planning Guidance for 1992.
And what it said was, hey, we're the sole remaining superpower in the world.
We can do what we want.
Our major job is to prevent anybody from even approaching our superpower status, and so we have to really kind of throw our weight around in this world because that's what God gave us.
That's what we're ordained to do, and if we don't do that, we're derelict in our duty.
It was just an incredibly, incredibly obnoxious and imperialist document.
And what George Bush – and somebody leaked it to the New York Times, bless their soul.
It wasn't me, okay?
Somebody did, and the Times ran it.
And the first thing you know, Scowcroft, Baker, James Baker, who, whatever you think about him, at least has a good head on his shoulder, they came to the president and said, look, you know, there's no question here.
You have to disavow this document.
You have to say this is an imperial document that we will have no part of, and he did.
And, of course, his son did just the opposite and even worse.
Well, back in the 70s, clearly there was a change in there, but was the change – did George Bush resent what they had done with Team B, that it got out of control and he decided he didn't like the neocons way back then in the Ford years, or was this something that developed during the Reagan years?
He did his best to rein in Team B.
It was a Frankenstein, okay?
His big sin was that he let it be created.
He was an old director for 11 months, and he let it be created, like, in his memory serves, maybe his ninth month, and then it was off and running, and the people behind him did not have the clout, the political clout, that George H. W. Bush did.
And it was such a political football that Team B ended up having much more influence than anybody intended to, anybody except the Wolfowitzes of this world.
And so it was Frankenstein that lived up to that Frankenstein story.
All right, now, the importance here is that a lot has really changed since even the early 1990s, and apparently there is no one with the capability, even the President of the United States, which I guess I shouldn't assume that he really wants to, but I guess we do assume that Barack Obama would like to be his own man and make his own decisions.
He doesn't have the power, apparently, to tell Jim Jones, his National Security Advisor, to keep these crazies in the basement.
They're not in charge.
Instead, they are in charge, aren't they?
Well, you know, it's kind of early on.
He's made some really, really dangerous decisions, most recently in letting Chas Freeman be prevented from being the chief, and I mean the chief, substantive intelligence officer in the U.S. government.
He's shown himself under the influence of a lobby.
It's not the intelligence lobby.
It's the Israel lobby.
Most people know about it.
And his craven performance in not speaking out to defend Chas Freeman, better than whom you're not going to get as chief substantive intelligence officer.
How well do you know this guy, Freeman?
I don't know him at all.
He and I were in the same documentary film there early on.
Yeah, I actually just saw that the other day there.
Uncovered, right, yeah.
But I know like 18,000, that's an exaggeration, I was going to say 18,000.
I know about six or seven people who know Chas Freeman really, really well.
And Freeman is an honest, outspoken, imaginative.
He's all the things that his presumptive boss, Admiral Blair, said he was.
You know, the bizarre thing is, here's Blair on, let's see, Thursday, so this would have been Tuesday morning, testifying that this is going to be a great guy.
He will bring these kinds of qualities to national intelligence.
And then three hours later, for whatever reason, Freeman says, well, you know, really not a good idea.
I withdraw my name from consideration.
What happened in those three hours?
Well, what happened was the lobby.
And the lobby is very, very strong, not only in the administration, but of course in the Congress.
And then Freeman, who, you know, is not a quitter, just realized that not only he, but the intelligence apparatus, the National Intelligence Council that he was supposed to be heading, would really take a terrible hit, drain themselves from energy on political fights.
And besides, you know, he's what, 64, I think.
Who needs this at that age?
So he quit.
Well, tell me, Ray, why would the Israel lobby care who's the chair of the National Intelligence Council?
Well, there's a pregnant question.
They would care deeply, because if the truth were known, you know, if Barack Obama were told day in and day out what's happening in the West Bank, what's happening particularly in Gaza now, there would be no avoiding the conclusion that Israel has to be reined in.
And when you give Israel three billion, I repeat billion, three billion dollars a year in money that we could be using fixing our schools and so forth, you have a little leverage there.
And it's leverage that no president has been able to use, well, with some minor tries in the past.
And I would mention that George H.W. Bush did make some tries with the help of Jim Baker to rein them in, particularly on settlements and things like that.
But no president has been willing to face up to this and face it frontally.
And that, unfortunately, at least so far, we have how many days we have of this new administration, there has been the same fawning kind of craven attitude toward folk that can sabotage a very high level appointment like this, which does not require Senate confirmation, but they were able to sabotage it anyway.
And the leader of this group, Steve Rosen, talk about chutzpah, he's under indictment, folks.
I mean, he's being tried under the Espionage Act for spying for Israel.
Now, slow down there.
He's what now?
He's the ringleader, basically, of this guy Freeman didn't need Senate confirmation.
What he needed was new Republican weekly standard confirmation.
And this guy, Steve Rosen, who I'll ask you to go ahead and describe the case against him as well as you understand it, but he's the guy who started this fight.
He's the one who first wrote the blog entry saying, hey, this guy, Chas Freeman, is against Israel.
We need to stop him.
That's right.
And this is really kind of, I was going to say sinister, but it's the way things work in Washington.
Somebody on the inside, well before Admiral Blair.
Now, Dennis Blair is the head of the whole national intelligence apparatus.
He's the director of national intelligence, and he gets to pick his main deputies, among which are the head of all the substantive intelligence.
And that includes not only the national intelligence estimates, it includes the daily briefings, the president's daily brief that I used to work on and I used to produce and deliver.
So this is a guy who's really got purview over everything the president might ask or might need to know in the terms of what's going on in the world.
And so somebody calls up Rosen and says, hey, guess what?
This Freeman has this balanced attitude toward Palestinians and Israelis.
Now, balanced may sound to you and me, Scott, as kind of a good thing to be with the lobbyists because of death, because you can't have a balanced attitude and not restrain Israel from doing what it's doing.
So anyhow, Rosen gets this call and says, my God, okay.
So he goes on his blog, and ten days before Blair announces that he's picked, he has picked, it's not like he's nominating, he has picked Chas Freeman to be the director of the National Intelligence Council.
Rosen starts blogging away.
They all join in, and there's a chorus of invective.
There's a chorus of scurrilous accusations and slander against Chas Freeman.
There are senators and representatives like Chuck Schumer, who represents a heavily Israeli, a pro-Israeli district up in New York, well, New York State and New York State representative, New York representative and so forth.
They all chime in, and they beat real heavily.
And in the morning, knowing all this, Admiral Blair, and I have to say to his credit, brags about having picked Chas Freeman and looking forward to working with him.
And then what happens?
Well, three hours later, three hours later, Chas has given the word that, you know, we're going to pillory you for the rest of your life, and the National Intelligence Council, too, will have no credibility because we pretty much have a lot of influence in the so-called mainstream press, and anything you do on the Middle East, we're going to say it's prejudice because you're an Arabist, because you hate Israelis and so forth.
And, you know, he's given the word that he's got to quit.
Now, I wonder who is told first.
Is the fugitive boss, Dennis Blair, or Chas Freeman?
Because up to the very, very end, up to the very, very end, Blair thought that he was going to be able to prevail over the lobby and keep Chas Freeman, and it turned out to be not the case.
So who has more say over these things?
The director, who should be able to appoint his own deputies, or somebody like Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff in the White House, who's really running this kind of thing.
Well, and, you know, what a lynch mob, too.
It really is remarkable.
As you say, Steve Rosen, I want to ask you about his case, because I think it is extremely important, and I think it's not nearly as well-known or covered in media as it should be.
But then Jeffrey Goldberg, who lied us into war talking about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were all working together, he's one of the leaders of the lynch mob.
And the guys at the Weekly Standard, who've never been right about anything, and whose loyalty to Israel above America is, I mean, it's basically, here are a bunch of guys, this entire lynch mob, led by Rosen, who none of them, oh, and Martin Peretz and Jamie Kirchick at the New Republic, I mean, here are what ought to be the biggest laughingstocks in journalism in this entire country, and one traitor, all working to thwart the pick of the Director of National Intelligence, and it works?
Yeah, it's, you know, I would be aghast if I hadn't been aghast for the last eight years in particular, and you can only be aghast for so long, right?
I mean, it's just, well, what I tell people as I speak at colleges and universities is this, in the 45 years, Scott, that I've been here in the Washington area, there's been one sea change that dwarfs all the others in significance, and that is simply the fact that we no longer have, in any real sense, a free media anymore.
I call, what most people call the mainstream media, I call it the fawning corporate media, because that's what it is, and anybody who just remembers the prelude to the war in Iraq and all the stuff since, you can't escape the conclusion that if there aren't radio programs like yours, there aren't TV radio programs like Amy Goodman's, that if you don't know your way around the web, you don't know nothing, as we used to say in the Bronx, and how can you be an effective citizen if you don't know nothing?
Yeah, well, and it is like that too, where anyone can get on the internet and find out anything.
I mean, heck, I didn't even know your name, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, I'd never heard of you, but I read it on page 16 of the Washington Post, because it happened to be the top headline on antiwar.com, that all the scientists say these aluminum tubes are good for nothing but rockets, and that Saddam Hussein couldn't possibly use them for a nuclear program in September of 2002, before the Congress voted, before the UN vote, before any of this stuff, it was debunked right there, all the scientists say forget about it, and it was the internet that made that available, because the people who live in D.C. and read the Post, they didn't read that, it was in the back of the paper, and they missed it.
Yeah, that's right, and it's still largely that, Scott, but you know there was an interesting thing this morning, if I can find it here, the Washington Post, okay, now the Washington Post completely avoided this whole thing about Chas Freeman, the one we were just discussing, the one where Obama's head of intelligence, Admiral Blair, wanted Freeman to be the head of all substantive intelligence, there was nothing in there, but today, partly because of all the blogging, there are three items, one, Walter Pincus, the age-old specialist on intelligence, gets on the front page, and guess what, he's given the ability to pretty much write a story that is accurate, pointing out how this was sabotaged, and who among diplomats, intelligence analysts, and everybody else was supporting Freeman to the hilt, so that's a first page, sure, it crosses over, and most of it's in the inside, but there it is, page six is the rest of it.
Now, on the editorial, the op-ed page, Broder, of all people, Broder, the highly touted, really primarily Republican pundit, has a story, which talks about having had breakfast with Admiral Blair, you know, on this fateful day, Tuesday, and Admiral Blair's saying, you know, I'm really, really, really able to face down the lobby, and I'm really looking forward to having a first-rate, substantive guy charge my intelligence, that's the morning of, right?
And then he talks to the White House in the afternoon, after it's announced that Blair is out of contention, and the White House says, well, you know, we don't know much about this, we'll get back to you, and they never get back to Broder, so we have the story there in an op-ed, which really illustrates, as Broder says, that here you have this top talent that was sabotaged by the lobby, but then, the third one, the lead editorial, is a scurrilous attack on Freeman, saying that, you know, he's anti-Israel, he's getting paid by the Chinese and by the Saudis and all this stuff, all of it, just complete pap, and there it is.
So you still have the editorial page as what I call the Pravda of this administration.
You want to know what the government wants out there, you just read the editorial page of the Washington Post, but for the first time ever in the last ten years or so, you have a relatively objective article written by a guy who knows intelligence inside and out, Walter Pincus, on the front page, mind you, and then on the op-ed thing, the head op-ed, is by Broder, in which he tells the story based on inside information, like breakfast with Blair, if you will, Blair fully assuming Freeman's going to go through, and then at the end, Freeman outing himself or saying, I'm out of contention, and the White House, he calls the White House, he says, what does the president think about this?
Oh, we'll get back to you.
Well, they never got back to Broder, so this is really, really, really, well, there are a lot of adjectives I could use here, but if the president's going to be so obsequious, if he's going to be craven in front of the Israel lobby, we're not going to have peace in the Middle East for the next four or eight years.
Yeah, well, and that really is the bottom line of this whole story, is that Obama's plenty brave when it comes to doing the wrong thing, like trying to uphold Bush's state secrets privilege and adding signing statements and escalating the war in Afghanistan, and continuing to leave Bagram outside of any pretended rule of law, but when it comes to doing the right thing, he's a yellow-bellied coward.
Well, you know, Scott...
The most powerful man in the world, Ray.
He can't tell the Israel lobby that, forget you, I can have whoever I want as my intelligence guy.
I'm the president of the world, for crying out loud.
Yeah, I'm not going to defend, we've just been indicting ourselves here, the silence while all this stuff is going on.
But I will say that there's something to be said for giving the guy a little time here.
Others have come into Washington and thought that they had supreme power and didn't play ball with the establishment or the press or the military, for that matter, and one of those was John F. Kennedy, who I remember well, didn't come down to Washington because of what he said in his inaugural address.
And, you know, you've got to do these things gradually.
Now, Afghanistan, you know, I was appalled that he was going to send 17,000 more people there, but, you know, this is not just gilding the lily.
It ain't 30,000, okay?
30,000 with the military wanted, and besides, we're going to be talking to the Taliban.
We are already talking to the Taliban.
We're going to be out of there.
It's just that we're not going to – the president can't afford to be driven out of there like Saigon in 1975.
Those 17,000 were necessary to prevent complete chaos, and so he blessed those, and now we're going to be on a different path.
With Iran, we're going to be talking to Iran now, too.
Hang on one second, because we've got to talk about Iran here, and, in fact, here I'm making a little asterisk so I don't space out.
But I'm willing to go with you on this.
I want to make sure I understand you right.
You're trying to tell me that you think that they put in the 17,000 just to keep there from being a helicopter fleeing the roof of Saigon moment, but really the point is to get out of Afghanistan to what?
Within how long?
It's really, really hard to say how long.
You've got NATO involved there and everything.
But I think the president has heard enough from the likes of us and some real experts in the area to realize that no one can win in Afghanistan.
We can't win in Afghanistan.
Alexander the Great, for God's sake, couldn't win in Afghanistan.
Yeah, even Ann Coulter says now.
Yeah, does she admit that?
Yeah, well, of course, she was just saying that's why we ought to stay in Iraq, because it's easier to kill Arabs there than Muslims.
I guess it doesn't matter if they're Arabs or not to her.
Well, you know, and again, this is not just building a lily, but Admiral Blair was testifying there on Tuesday before the Senate.
And they asked him, you say, Admiral Blair, we're not winning in Afghanistan.
Is that correct?
He said, yes, we're not winning.
How about you, General Maples?
Maples is the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
How about you?
He said, yes, we're not winning.
That, of course, was the script.
Well, here's McCain.
Well, are we losing then?
Are we losing?
And I'm waiting for some mealy-mouthed statements.
Say, well, it's too premature to say.
And Blair says, yes, we're losing.
General Maples?
Yes, we're losing.
Oh.
Oh, I need to get that clip.
Yeah, so you got it.
John McCain learning something, and actually captured by a video camera.
That's impressive.
I'm not saying he learned anything, but that's what he was told.
Talk about Iran, you know.
Do you believe, Admiral Blair, that Iran has decided to make a nuclear weapon?
No, sir.
They haven't decided yet.
That's a decision that's pending.
Oh, General Maples, what do you think?
I think they're keeping it up, so options open, Senator McCain.
Oh.
So whether he learned anything, at least that's what he was told.
And why do I cite that?
I cite that because I was surprised, okay?
I was surprised that they're sticking to the judgment that was propounded in November 2007, NIE.
Right, this is where the story gets back around to the beginning.
Who's going to be the chairman of the National Intelligence Council?
Because aside from the President being briefed about what's happening in Gaza every day, which obviously the truth would be terribly detrimental to Israel's interests in that sense, what they want is someone to sit on that National Intelligence Council and come up with a lie that says, oh, yes, indeed, there is no distinction between a nuclear program and a nuclear weapons program, and a spinning centrifuge is a nuclear bomb, might as well be, same difference, let's have a war.
And what they don't want is somebody like this guy, Freeman, who would basically rewrite the same thing from 2007 and say, just like Blair said in front of the Senate, that they haven't decided whether to make a bomb yet.
What they've decided to do is have the ability to enrich uranium, but they're still within their safeguards agreement, and they're still enriching only to a low percentage that you can't make a weapon out of.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, if you look at that footage, look at what Senator Carl Levin was asking about.
And he says to Blair, he says, Admiral Blair, do you, or he calls him Director, Director Blair, do you believe that Iran has enough uranium now to make a nuclear weapon?
And Blair says, no.
Okay, well, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two weeks ago said that Iran has enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon within a year.
What do you think about that?
Don't you talk to each other?
Admiral Blair.
The General, I'm sorry, Admiral Mike Mullen has since issued a clarification on that.
We're talking about highly enriched uranium.
They don't have any now, and it's questionable whether they'll have any in a year.
Oh, okay.
So this is the real stuff.
And this is the guy that picked Chas Freeman to be his support, his go-to guy to make sure the Intelligence Committee is telling it like it is, like we used to in the old days.
And Chas Freeman, of course, has been rejected.
The only other thing I mentioned is you mentioned national intelligence estimates, and you got it right, Scott, because it was that national intelligence estimate on uranium nuclear in November of 2007, okay?
This was the one that Cheney fought against having done and fought against having publicized.
For more than a year he kept it suppressed.
Well, yeah, there's a little bit of wiggle room there because some of the evidence was still coming in that year.
But in any case, on November, in November of 2007, the Intelligence Committee unanimously, like all 16 agencies said that Iran had stopped making the warhead part of a nuclear weapon in the fall of 2003 and had not reinstituted that activity.
Now, was the president saying that?
Was Cheney saying that?
No, it was just the opposite.
They were saying that Iran was hell-bent on making a nuclear weapon, and my comment is simply, well, it's a heck of a way to be hell-bent on doing things if you stop the weaponization program.
And Blair, on Tuesday, to his great credit, in the morning, said that that estimate remains valid.
He said they have no new information to contravene those key judgments.
And that estimate is the first in my experience, and this goes back to 1963, Scott, is the first one in my experience that one could reasonably argue prevented a terrible war because if the neocons and others were able to fix that estimate the way they fixed others under George Tenet's rule, if they were able to fix it and say, yeah, Iran can get a weapon within a year or something like that, then the pressure from the lobby, the Israel lobby and from the Israelis themselves, would be almost irresistible to allow them to provoke a war against Iran, and that would have made the war in Iraq look like a volleyball game between Lady of Refuge and Mount Carmel, the girls' team at grammar school.
So estimates play an incredibly important role, and that's why it's right for us to be dissecting this and looking into the anatomy of how Admiral Blair, who apparently is an honest man, couldn't get a similarly honest man and more expert than he in place as chief of his substance of intelligence.
Well, and see, this is a really important point, too, and I know you have to go, and I guess we'll wrap it up after your comment about this, but I want to focus on just how disastrous a war with Iran would be and just how, in this case, just how stark the difference between at least what the Likud party perceives as the interests of Israel and what the interests of the United States of America are.
Correct me if I'm wrong, Ray, but the Iranians can shoot mid-range missiles at every American base in Afghanistan and Iraq and kill probably tens of thousands of American soldiers.
Is that right or wrong?
That's correct.
They can do simpler things.
They could simply cut our supply line between Kuwait and Baghdad and take hostage not 52 people in an embassy, but rather 52,000 troops that can't get resupplied except by air, and you can't do it by air.
So there are all kinds of things the Iranians can do.
Those are just two, and they certainly would do them were they to be attacked.
So this isn't an academic argument about who controls American foreign policy, Americans or Israelis?
Well, not at all, and we haven't even mentioned the option that the Iranians have of blockading the Gulf.
When Admiral Mullen was asked about this a year ago, he said, yeah, they do have the capability of blockading the Gulf, but we could end that blockade.
Well, how are you going to end that blockade?
By sending Marines into Iran, and that is really, really beyond the pale.
Right, yeah, and if we go back to early 2007, that's what Wayne White, a State Department employee, said the war plans that he had seen, everything included clearing a path to the target, and every bit of war that you have to apply to Iran requires another little bit of war to go along with it.
You can't bomb this until you take out the anti-aircraft that way, and you can't take out the anti-aircraft that way unless you take out these other assets over here first, and on like this, and all of a sudden an attack on Iran becomes this, you know, from an overnight strike or something, it becomes a giant war.
And it means the end of Israel, ironically, you know, because what has to be said here is that the policies advocated and implemented by the neocons are incredibly myopic.
Israel is not going to be able to exist by pitting off against Lebanon or Gaza or other neighbors.
It's just not going to work, and it's just a matter of years, and I'm not talking long term, I'm talking medium term, before Israel will suffer a calamity unless they get some common sense, unless the U.S. is willing to say, look, you have to work out things politically, you have to negotiate with your neighbors, and it's just really unconscionable that you, the State of Israel, have been occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jerusalem for more years, more years than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe.
It doesn't get any worse than that.
You have to go back, give up the occupied territory, work out an arrangement, and we, the United States, will be able to guarantee that arrangement.
You're going to have to trust, okay?
You're going to have to verify, but trust, and that's the only solution, and until we come to that, it's going to be a tinderbox always, and the Israelis are not going to persist for the longer term, and I can't believe that smart people like the people in Israel don't perceive that this is the case, that it's very myopic for them to be waging the kind of violent strategies that they have implemented, particularly over the last eight years when George Bush gave them carte blanche to do precisely that.
Well, and now here come the Likudniks and the guys even further right than that.
I'm sorry, we're all out of time here.
I know you've got to go, Ray.
I really appreciate your time on the show today, and I hope to have you back soon.
We can talk more about this stuff.
You're most welcome, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.
You can find him at antiwar.com slash McGovern, and also what you regularly write over at Consortium News, right?
That's correct.
Consortiumnews.com is, I think, the best because Bob Perry, the investigative reporter, runs it and writes for it very regularly.
All right, great.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
You're most welcome.
All right, folks, this is Antiwar Radio.
We'll be back after this.