For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our guest on the show today is Bill Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA guy, contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine, at the American Conservative Defense Alliance, the Campaign for Liberty, and of course Antiwar.com, where his latest article is called Many Voices Calling for War with Iran.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you showing up on the show today.
So, who's pushing for war with Iran?
Well, it's kind of the same players who pushed for war with Iraq.
Essentially, this is a continuation of the Iraq war in terms of remaking the Middle East.
The neoconservatives and their allies in the media are basically pushing the same agenda.
So, permanent revolution, just the same as Bush's first term?
Well, I guess it's more Trotskyite thing, isn't it?
Permanent revolution.
So, whether it's a Democrat who believes in their own form of democracy, promotion, or nation building, or Republicans who have their own version of it, it's kind of the same thing.
Essentially, they believe that the world can be changed using force by the United States to make it a better place for everyone.
But, of course, one would have thought that's a philosophy that was a bit discredited over the last eight or nine years, but it still seems to have a lot of people pushing it in Washington.
Yeah, well, I guess that's the thing about being a true believer is you can just change the facts all around to, oh, well, this is what we predicted all along, or something.
Or, I guess, even if you're maybe a really tough guy, realist sort, like, I don't know, John Bolton, then you recognize that your war in Iraq has only empowered the Iranians.
So, now there's only one solution to that problem, which is regime change there.
That's right.
It's like a domino theory during the Cold War, during the Vietnam War, where basically the idea was that all these things are interrelated, and that if you just keep pushing hard enough, you're eventually going to get where you want to be.
But it hasn't quite worked out that way.
Well, you know, something that, well, you know, I discuss with various guests, and I have with you before the nuclear program in all kinds of different degrees here, and come on, everybody who's not a TV presenter knows that this whole case about Iranian nuclear weapons is bogus.
So let's skip that, and let me ask you about this, or at least for now.
What would a war with Iran look like, Phil, do you think?
Well, this is the scary thing.
Even some of the people who are pushing for a war with Iran recognize the fact that there are going to be very serious consequences.
Daniel Pipes, a couple weeks ago, was urging Obama to start a war with Iran to salvage his presidency, but even he was warning that there would be serious consequences.
And we've seen that from other hawks advocating a war with Iran, that they're quite aware of the fact that Iran is not Iraq, and Iran is not Afghanistan, and Iran would really strike back in some very serious ways.
There was, as I'm sure you've noted, there was a summit conference back about, I think it was the week before last, between President Assad of Syria, the head of Hezbollah, and an Iranian delegation, and they clearly were discussing a defensive strategy if they were attacked.
Yeah.
Well, that's a whole other thing.
I want to get to that, actually, the Iran-Syria alliance.
I want to get back to that.
But let me rewind to, say, right around this time, 2007.
Bush announced the surge, and he announced that everything wrong in Iraq is Iran's fault, and we might just have strikes against them.
And we were on pretty high orange alert around here throughout that spring and summer there, with Cheney sending David Wilmser around to talk about how he was going to try to get Israel to go ahead and start the war to force George Bush into a corner where he would have to have the war, etc.
And I talked with a guy named Wayne White on this show, who you may know him.
He was a State Department guy from the State Department, CIA, I guess, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
And he said he'd seen the plans, and the plans were for, I think, 1,200-something aim points, and then clearing the strike zones leading up to those targets, and this would mean ground troops, special forces at least, to try to take out anti-air capabilities.
And it was a pretty big deal.
In fact, I guess Scott Ritter even said at one point that he was getting word that this was why the thing was being called off, because they were realizing that rather than having a night of strikes or two nights of strikes or a week, that this thing was going to turn into a month-long or maybe more giant war that was going to get out of hand.
Is that your understanding?
This is still the kind of strike plan they're talking about?
And how far do you think it would escalate?
Well, I don't know what the plan is, but I would assume it's based on that plan, that the current plan would be based on the old plan.
And really they were identifying 1,200 targets because they were the sites that they had identified through aerial photography as being possible sites that had military or nuclear program use.
So I would imagine if anything the target list is bigger now and probably requires more preparation, requires more special forces to help with the targeting, this plan has not gone away.
I think the thing that actually killed it was the fact that they realized they didn't have the resources to undertake this kind of thing at the same time as they were cranking things up even then in Afghanistan and still at a very high level in Iraq.
And, of course, those two conditions still prevail, except that Afghanistan, of course, is even hotter.
So I think basically if we look at reality or if our policymakers were looking at reality, they were looking at a reality of limited resources.
And I think that's what kind of stymied them.
I think we would have been at war with Iran already if it had merely been a political decision.
People talk about bombing Iran like it would be the same sort of thing when Bill Clinton bombed Serbia or something like Homer Simpson says.
Oh, fighting a war these days is just like turning off a light.
But, in fact, you can't bomb Iran's nuclear facilities unless you're going to bomb all their planes on the runways and all their anti-aircraft missiles and all their naval whatever at the Straits of Hormuz and everything else.
Once you start bombing them, now your list of targets gets bigger and bigger and bigger, way out of control.
Yeah, and that's absolutely true.
I mean, they obviously feel they can hit all these targets or at least hit most of them.
But the thing is I keep reminding people when I talk to them that, you know, the old Yogi Berra line, it's not over until it's over.
The Iranians might just decide that it's not over after they've been hammered for a few days, and they might be quite willing to let this thing drag on for five years, hitting us where we're vulnerable in various places like Iraq and like Afghanistan.
They have great capabilities to do that.
All right, well, now, it sounds like Admiral Mullen and, hell, even Michael O'Hanlon, the guy who's single-handedly responsible for the war in Iraq, well, for today anyway, and Pillar, the CIA guy who I believe was in charge of writing up the bogus national intelligence estimate on Iraq in 2002, these people are all coming out publicly saying, do not do this.
They seem to be taking the threat as seriously as you are, and they seem to think that the consequences will be as bad as you seem to think they'd be.
Yeah, I think they've had kind of a reality check on this stuff, and, you know, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that when your model is what you've been doing in Iraq and what you've been doing in Afghanistan, that they haven't worked out very well.
And this is a real leap in the dark to go after Iran, which is a much bigger country, a much more populous country, has much better resources, and has been preparing for six years for this eventuality.
That's one thing that people forget.
They've known it's been coming.
They've obviously hardened a lot of their military and industrial sites, and they've moved a lot of their other material into cities where they believe that the United States would not necessarily attack them because of the civilian casualty levels that were resolved.
So, you know, this is not going to be, you know, what was the expression, the cakewalk like Iraq.
Yeah, Richard Perl and, what's that guy, Adelman.
Yeah, Adelman, that's right.
It was Kenneth Adelman.
Yeah, yeah, cakewalk, yeah, tell that to the million dead people.
Yep.
Well, so now, on one hand, I want to go, well, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says, boy, let's not do this, and so, end of argument, great, sigh of relief, everything's fine.
And yet, TV keeps telling me, Iran nuclear threat, in all capital letters, and that doesn't seem to be going away.
And more and more of the talk is, as you cite this Ann Applebaum column in your recent article here, the idea is, I guess, the whole chain plan from 07, which is, well, maybe the Israelis will just start a war with Iran, and then we'll have to have one.
Yeah, I think that's the thinking.
Well, wait a minute, isn't that crazy?
I mean, come on, who's the empire, and who's the satellite here?
Well, I think we know who the satellite is, and who's the empire.
I think the idea is that Israel will trigger the war, and that we will have to fight it.
Because if we allow them to have overflight over Iraq, where we control the airspace to attack Iran, that means we're complicit in it, and we're part of the war, whether we want to be or not.
So that's the danger in this.
And, of course, there's always considerable danger that some other small incident, almost anywhere in the Persian Gulf or in Iraq or in Afghanistan, could escalate into a shooting war.
Why do you think that the, I don't know if it's just the Likud party or the entire government of Israel, it seems like there have been statements from time to time.
I remember Mayor Dagan, the guy from, the head of Mossad, said, oh, come on, they're years and years away from a nuclear weapon.
Recently, Ehud Barak said, oh, come on, the Palestine issue is a much greater threat to Israel's survival than any Iranian nuclear program.
So we hear these kinds of voices of reason when we read Haaretz regularly, but it seems like there's this, that the policy is still based on this overriding paranoia, where any nuclear program in Iran at all is tantamount to they are loading the warheads on the rockets.
Well, you know, the problem is when you start telling a story about things and you keep repeating it, eventually you convince a lot of people it's true.
And that's happened in Israel, and it's also happened in the United States, where I think there was the opinion poll published on anti-war that 71% of Americans already think that Iran has a nuclear weapon.
And the majority of Americans think that we have to go to war with them to disarm them.
So, you know, again, you keep repeating the story, you keep repeating the narrative over and over again, and people get convinced.
And it happens in Israel, and it happens in the United States.
Yeah.
It's really amazing.
Just to me, it's extra amazing, because it's the very same lie, right?
I mean, if they recycled the Gulf of Tonkin incident, at least that's an old lie from before a lot of Americans who are around today were born or whatever.
But, I mean, really, they're going to go through the exact same, you know, hey, look, aluminum tubes and a bunch of crap to lie us into a war with the country next door?
From the last one?
I mean, it's incredible.
Well, people's memories are short, and, you know, if it comes from someone in the government or someone in the media that they consider to be trustworthy, then they believe it.
And, you know, there's not a whole lot you can do about that except to establish narratives that are opposed to what is being said, and hopefully convince some people, or at least enough people, to slow the march towards war.
That's the only way to do it.
Now, when you talk about the Iranians could just choose to drag the thing on for five years if they wanted to, I guess you're sort of referring there to, you know, unconventional warfare, asymmetric things, right?
Use their intelligence agencies to screw up American interests in Azerbaijan or in Kazakhstan or activate Hamas to do some bombings in Tel Aviv or something like that, basically, right?
Sure.
The kind of battles that we can't really use our army to get out on a field and shoot somebody.
Yeah, I mean, or sink an American warship, you know, as they've tried to do a couple times.
You know, not the Iranians, but various terrorist groups.
I mean, sure, all these things are doable, and if your country has been attacked, you're going to do them.
So what kind of damage could this do to Israel if they or the Obama government started this war?
I guess there's a degree of support.
I don't know if it equals outright control, but you just pointed out that Nasrallah was there.
Is that what you said, that Nasrallah was there with Assad and the Iranians at the big summit?
Yeah.
That's the head of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon there.
Do you think that that's how that could work, like some kind of outright coordinated response in northern Israel from Lebanon?
Well, I think there absolutely would be a coordinated response.
I don't think Hezbollah can take on the Israeli army in any sense.
But the fact is that this would be a very uncomfortable time for both the Israelis and the United States as Iran cranks up its capabilities to make trouble in various places.
And, you know, why would anyone expect anything different?
Yeah, I don't know.
That's always kind of been part of this, though, right?
I mean, I've been talking to you about this since 2005 on various radio shows here, and the story's always kind of been that, well, we'll bomb them until we're done, and they'll sit there and take it, and then everything will be great after that, and it may or may not lead to a regime change, some fuzzy thing about the aftermath, but don't worry about that.
And that's kind of always been.
It's like nobody really wants to look beyond that kind of narrative of how it would be.
Well, that's because they want to see the narrative in finite terms that this is something that can be accomplished and that we'll kind of walk away and we won't get hurt too badly by it, and we'll make the bad guys regret that they ever crossed the United States of America.
You know, it's that kind of narrative that we're seeing, and it's unfortunately a narrative that's being sold quite widely and bought quite widely, and I'm really disappointed to see the teabag protesters basically, for all their fears of large government and that sort of thing, embracing this war policy, which is what's driving large government.
I want a limited constitutional world empire, and I want it now.
That's right.
All right.
Everybody, this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer from the American Conservative and Antiwar.com and a lot of great places where you ought to go read him, Campaign for Liberty.
Let me ask you this.
What's Jundala?
Well, Jundala is a separatist movement, a Sunni separatist movement inside Iran that operates inside Iran.
Basically, it's a group that's been supported by the United States for some time now, at least for the last four or five years, to my knowledge, and it carries out various sabotage and terrorist acts inside Iran and basically is one of a number of groups that the United States and Britain and Israel have been supporting in an effort to destabilize Iran.
Well, that's certainly been the accusation the last couple of weeks by the Iranians, that they arrested one of the leaders, and he says, yeah, I work for the Americans, but you're saying that that's right?
Yeah, I think that's basically accepted.
That's what's been going on.
It's never been publicly acknowledged by the United States, but I think that let's face it.
I mean, the United States has been kind of in a state of war with Iran for some time now, and this is obviously something you would get your intelligence agencies to do or your special ops people to have people from groups that are dissident within that country on your payroll to do things for you, and the things they would do for you are sabotage, assassinations, that kind of thing.
Well, of course, I'm sure the American government has outsourced violence all over the world like that, but here's the rub for me, okay?
Bear with me here, Phil.
This is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's group, and we just spent the first part of last hour talking about how they're backing down from the civilian trial, and they're going to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in front of a military commission for being responsible for the September 11th attacks on the United States, and this is his group, Jundal, isn't it?
That's right.
I had not mentioned that, but of course that's where he comes out of.
It's your classic kind of Sunni insurgency against Shiite rule, and that's exactly where he comes out of.
Huh.
Well, is that, I don't know, a problem or something or a felony?
Does that amount to treason?
I mean, I guess if he left Jundal to go and join up with Islamic Jihad and Al-Qaeda, then it's not treason to be using Jundal against Iran right now.
Well, I guess it depends on how you define treason.
I mean, basically, you know, we have bad guys that are our friends, and we have bad guys that are our enemies, and if the bad guy is our friend, or even if it's temporary, then it's a different situation.
I find the whole Obama administration posturing and changing, of course, on what to do about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed kind of ridiculous, as if our civil courts can't handle it.
But, you know, let's face it.
We're dealing with hypocrisy at a level in Washington that's so high that any stupid or ridiculous comment or position or tying in with any groups is to be expected.
All right, now back to these bogus negotiations we skipped over there in figuring out whether the West can convince the Iranians to abandon all uranium enrichment forever and so forth.
Do you think that these semi-recent and recent Jundala attacks are actually for the purpose of undermining any negotiations, or do you think maybe perhaps the negotiations are so bogus on their face that that's not even necessary?
What is the purpose of using these guys to round up cops and shoot them in the back of the head over there?
I don't think they're related.
I think the Jundala attacks are just a way of making trouble for the Iranians.
I don't think there's any grand strategy in terms of using them, and I don't think that anybody sees beyond the immediate objective of just creating problems.
I think that you can see the same thing with the use of Kurdish dissidents in the Kurdish region, the border region between Iraq and Iran.
You see the same thing with some of the Arabs that the British were running down near Basra.
Well, and speaking of Basra, I saw while watching General Electric, Alan Greenspan's wife TV this morning, MSNBC, I saw a commercial put on by VoteVets, which weren't they an anti-war group, I thought, maybe, saying we must support a policy of energy independence, because every time we buy oil, then Iran gets money.
And everybody knows, Phil, that Iran was responsible for the improved, explosively formed penetrators, designed specifically to cut through American armor in Iraq back in the days, just like the guy in the ad was victim of.
And so, therefore, whatever energy independent policy, we can talk about that.
But the point is, here as a backdrop, as an excuse for wanting to have less ties with Iran, I guess some kind of protectionist trade scheme to keep us from trading with the Iranians in the name of the EFP bombs that killed all those guys in Iraq.
What do you say about that?
Well, it's the usual kind of ridiculous stitching of everything together to make an argument to make the Iranians seem worse.
As we've discussed before, and as you know, the case for Iran being behind the IEDs is kind of flimsy.
This is not advanced technology.
And lots of people have come up with these devices in a lot of different places.
And insofar as buying Iranian oil, I mean, oil is a fungible product.
I mean, you drill it out of the ground, you can sell it internationally.
And sure, I guess one-tenth of one cent of every oil hundred dollars in the United States maybe goes into an Iranian coffer somewhere.
But this is kind of a ridiculous argument.
Well, so let me ask you for the ridiculous counterfactual.
How about America and Iran just be friends?
And how about there's, as far as I can tell, I don't know, what do you think?
I don't see any real reason for them being our enemies or adversaries in any sense.
Why bother?
I don't think they necessarily have to be our friends.
But I think the point is, why don't we just leave them alone?
I mean, why don't we just leave everybody alone?
It's reached the point where we seem to feel we have some constitutional right to be intruding all over the world, as I guess John Adams put it, looking for dragons to slay.
And this has become a pathology for the United States, certainly in the last ten years, but you could argue it's been that way since the Second World War, or even before.
And, you know, just leave people alone.
And where we don't have a vital interest, where we don't have a critical reason for being there that involves our national survival, I think we should just leave everyone alone.
Well, you know, the polls say that the American people put a very high priority on Israel.
So taking that into account, is Iran a military threat to Israel?
Or to what degree is it, maybe?
Well, Iran certainly is a military threat to Israel in that it's a neighbor, and it's politically hostile to it, and has its own armed forces, and has connections with groups that the Israelis regard as terrorists.
So yeah, I mean, sure, it's in a sense a threat to Israel.
It's not an existential threat.
I mean, the Iranian military and everything is a midget compared to what Israel has.
So that argument doesn't make any sense.
And then I would argue, hey, that's Israel's problem, isn't it?
I mean, you know, this is why we have nation-states.
They sort out their problems with other nations, and they hopefully do it in a rational way to avoid war as often as possible.
And if the United States were not the gorilla in the room in the Middle East, perhaps these countries would be able to sort out their problems.
Yeah, well, what a novel approach that might be, huh?
Well, so we don't have America to back us anymore.
Maybe we need to sit down and cut a deal.
Yeah, maybe.
Well, let me change gears back to Iraq a little bit there.
All the news is I guess CBS had the worst one.
It said that Plan B is already Plan A, Phil, and that means forget leaving Iraq.
Is that really right?
Well, that seems to be a line that's coming out.
I think it was originally kind of suggested by General Oderno that the United States might have to stay a lot longer than anticipated because Iraq was not as stable as they had hoped.
You know, it's kind of a funny argument, isn't it?
I mean, it's like do we stay there forever until they become what we want them to become?
Are they sovereign?
If they're sovereign, can't they make up their own decisions or worry about their own security or do what they want to make their government what they want it to be?
I don't quite get it, but yeah, apparently there is a sense in Washington that the sojourn in Iraq is going to last a lot longer than anticipated.
Well, you know, we have been bombing them for 19 years.
That's a hell of an investment to just give up.
Yeah, we have all that ordnance on the ground there and all that depleted uranium.
I think we obviously own a considerable part of the real estate.
Yeah.
In fact, I'm looking at the BBC News had a story from yesterday here.
Fallujah doctors report rise in birth defects about all the depleted uranium and these children being born tortured.
How do you like that?
Yeah, one child born with two heads.
Yeah, I mean, this whole thing is a disgrace.
It's a tragedy for our country.
It's a tragedy for Iraq.
It's a tragedy wherever we put our foot down.
I think that we're not very good at this kind of thing except for bringing mayhem, and I think it's time for the American people to rise up and say, we don't need this anymore.
But as long as they're being fed a steady diet of propaganda by the media and by the political class, things are not going to change, I'm afraid.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I wonder why with all the innocent dead bodies lying around there aren't more terrorist attacks against this country, and I think that perhaps, this is my new theory, maybe one of the things that we have going for us is satellite TV, and so around the world people watch American television, and they must tell themselves, oh, well, no wonder these people are killing us all day, if this is what they believe, you know?
Well, I guess they get the conclusion that anybody that can watch that stuff is essentially brain dead, so I'm not too surprised at that.
Well, we'll see what happens with the Oscars next week.
We'll see which ridiculous movies are going to win.
I'm putting my money on Inglorious Bastards because it's a Holocaust movie, and Holocaust movies never lose.
Yeah, good bet there.
Well, and, you know, I was watching, as I mentioned there, General Electric, which is by some measures the single most intertwined with the national government sort of corporation that there is in our society.
I don't remember the definition of fascism there.
A high-level arms manufacturer and then tied in as contractors in who knows what kind of ways with the defense establishment, the national security state, and they have a TV host there on MSNBC all day, every day.
Of course, everybody knows her.
She's been with NBC for years, Andrea Mitchell, who goes by her previous husband's name or her maiden name because her husband is Alan Greenspan, and her job is to do the news every day to tell us about the unemployment figures without ever having to explain why it is all the fault of the guy whose job it is for her to pleasure at night.
And this is the propaganda that we get in the United States, and literally they're covered today.
I just jotted down a couple here.
And Tom Hanks and his position that both parties ought to just join into one so we can get something done around here, and some quarterback may or may not be getting married today was the top news as I'm watching MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell Greenspan.
I don't watch her.
I find her totally offensive because of her relationship with Greenspan, who probably is more to blame for the disaster of the American economy than any other single person.
In fact, I've banned major network news in my house.
My wife tries to turn it on, and I immediately start screaming.
Yeah, well, you know what's just as bad, only even worse, is the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, because that's for people like you, Phil, who already got a pretty good understanding of the way things are around here, and it's for very sophisticated, educated folk, and yet no more factual really at all.
That's right.
PBS has completely sold out because the Board of Governors basically was taken over by neocons under Bush, and as a result they are very careful about how they report and what they report.
I wouldn't watch PBS any more than I would watch any of the major networks.
Make me miss Jim McNeil.
Well, thanks very much again for your time on the show today, Phil.
Okay, Scott, it's always a pleasure.
All right, y'all, that's Philip Giraldi.
He's from the American Conservative Defense Alliance and the American Conservative Magazine and the Campaign for Liberty and AntiWar.com.
