03/05/07 – Craig Unger – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
But that the consequences of it would be absolutely disastrous.
Joining me to discuss this is Craig Unger.
He's the author of House of Bush, House of Saud.
And was deputy editor of the New York Observer, editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine.
And has written investigative reports for the New Yorker, Esquire, and Vanity Fair.
Where you're currently writing at Vanity Fair, is that right?
That's right, I'm a contributing editor there.
Right, and well yeah, officially welcome to the show now.
And your last article for Vanity Fair is from the wonderful folks who brought you Iraq.
That's right, and I think the big fear of course is that the neo-conservatives who were behind the war in Iraq.
If you look at the policy papers they started writing more than ten years ago, and you can see that ultimately they had Iran as the goal for overhauling the Middle East.
And there have been a lot of actions in the last six months or so that suggest that they're not finished yet.
They call them the terror masters, right?
Right, that's Michael Ledeen's phrase.
He's one of the neo-conservative policymakers at the American Enterprise Institute.
And this is home to a lot of the people who have been behind this policy.
Now if I was concerned about the security of Israel as I think Michael Ledeen must be, I would probably consider Iran to be the terror masters too.
But Iran doesn't back Al-Qaeda, they're the ones who knocked our buildings down and killed the 3,000 Americans back in 2001.
And Iran isn't behind Osama Bin Laden.
They're not our enemy, are they?
Right, I think this policy has been filled with so many extraordinary contradictions.
In many ways I think no one has put Israel in greater danger than the policies of the neo-conservative.
And now we are in a position where I think the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq has been that it's empowered Iran enormously, our biggest adversary in the region.
And it's really endangered Israel and Saudi Arabia, which of course is an ally that we need because of its oil.
So right now I think you see a new realignment taking shape where the United States has realized that this policy has given so much power to the Shiites.
And you see this Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq which is starting to spread throughout the region.
And suddenly we're tilting in favor of the Sunnis when in fact the vast majority of American deaths in Iraq have been in the Sunni controlled areas.
Right, and in fact I guess it was Seymour Hersh talking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now last week.
He said the neo-cons really believed that the ethnic differences between the Iraqi and Iranian Shia and the hard feelings left over from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s would be enough to make sure that the Iraqi Shia would stay loyal to the Sunni and the Kurds and the Iraqi state rather than their co-religionists in Iran.
And now they've really screwed up and they've got to figure out a way to undo the damage they've caused.
They figure they've got to bomb Iran now and have a regime change there now.
Then it's okay we turned Iraq over to them.
Right, I went back and I read some of these neo-con books, I'm thinking of one in particular called tyranny's ally by David Wormser who is not that well known to the general public but he is Dick Cheney's Middle East policy maker.
And he and his wife Mayra Wormser and Richard Pearl drafted a paper in 1996 called the Queen Break and in it you start to see this policy of overhauling and democratizing the entire Middle East.
And it was written for Benjamin Netanyahu who really went on and said that ultimately we have to take Iran.
And Hirsch I think is absolutely right.
In this book you see they make the case that if we take down Iraq the Shiites will rise up and help overthrow the Shiites in Iran.
And of course nothing of the kind has taken place and it's on assumptions like that that this policy was made and there's just absolutely no facts on the ground to support them.
Right, and now you brought up a clean break in your article actually that was the most descriptive account actually of the birth of a clean break that I have ever read.
That Netanyahu came to Washington DC and asked Pearl to write it for him, is that right?
Well it was written by Pearl and Wormser worked for an Israeli American think tank that was working for Netanyahu at the time.
Netanyahu had just been elected prime minister of Israel and so when he came to Washington they presented this to him.
And two days later he made a speech before a joint session of Congress and I think at the time people really didn't understand the importance of this policy he was articulating.
But in many ways it's the first time that policy was put forth before an important American body, both houses of Congress.
And now we're starting to see the disastrous consequences.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Craig Unger, he's the author of House of Saud and an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair magazine.
And in your last article for Vanity Fair this month, the March issue, you quote Uzi Arad as talking about, he was I think you say a foreign policy advisor to Netanyahu who said look Iran is the problem not Iraq from the Israeli point of view.
And the neo-cons would tell him, no first things first we got to do Iraq first and then we'll do Iran from there.
Is that right?
Yes it is right and it's interesting because in a lot of ways you see the neo-cons being much more aggressive than even the Israeli right.
And when I've talked to various Israelis like Uzi Arad, they seem to be very ambivalent about actually going into Iraq.
And this was initially proposed by American neo-conservatives, some of whom worked for Israel at various times.
Right and well Netanyahu is giving speeches saying it's 1938 and Ahmadinejad is Hitler and we have to stop him now or it's just like Munich all over again and there will be a Holocaust etc.
Well you see the analogy with Munich and Neville Chamberlain and the Holocaust again and again used by the neo-cons and by Netanyahu as well of course.
And I think the problem with it of course is even though Saddam was a very very horrible and brutal dictator, he was very different than Hitler and it requires a very different strategy.
Yeah and this is the one right that they used against Saddam Hussein, they're now using it on Ahmadinejad and basically anybody that they want to invade they just call him Hitler and that's good enough apparently.
Well you see this demonization of Ahmadinejad and for one thing though he is president of Iran, it's important to remember of course that the presidency in Iran is not, the president is not the key official there.
They have no control over their foreign policy, over their national security policy and again and again it's hard to see exactly how advanced Iran's nuclear program is and this seems very much like we've been through all this before with regard to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction which is proved to be non-existent.
I'm glad you emphasized the point about Ahmadinejad being the face on TV but not the real power, in fact it was reported anyway, I don't read Farsi but it was reported that the most conservative newspaper in Iran that is most closely associated with the Ayatollah Khomeini that they rebuked Ahmadinejad, told him to shut his mouth and quit picking a fight with the United States.
Right and just a month or so ago in local elections Ahmadinejad was lost overwhelmingly so his power is very much on the way in there.
Okay now let's get back to the clean break here, this clean break paper said basically, well I'll tell you what, I'll sum it up and then you correct me where I'm wrong and then that kind of thing, say it your own way, basically they said in order to make Israel the regional, the dominant power in the region, they needed to put all the pressure on Syria and Iran to stop backing their enemies, Hezbollah and Lebanon, that was their major concern.
And the first step in order to get this done is focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and that will reorder the Middle Eastern dynamic so that all the pressure is now on Syria and Iran.
That was the genesis of this policy, is that right?
Yeah that's pretty much it, you know I think they really assumed that once they got rid of Saddam that Iraq would become an ally of the West and that it would become a power almost like Turkey which is an American ally and is a Muslim country.
And a lot of the policy makers, I'm thinking of Bernard Lewis who is an academic from Princeton, they were trained in Turkey and they began to think of that as a model but Iraq is a very very different country and of course we've seen what has unfolded.
Right, and now traditionally America has always backed the Sunnis in the Middle East, under the Shah Iran was not really a Shiite power in that sense, right?
Well, right, though the majority of people were Shiite, but essentially we installed a monarchy, the United States overthrew the elected premier, Mossadegh in 1954 and installed the Shah of Iran and at that time, from 54 to 79 roughly, Iran was our most powerful ally in the region.
We always had a policy of having twin pillars of support in the Middle East, Israel being one and Iran was the other until the Shah was overthrown in the Islamic revolution at the end of the 70s.
At that point we switched to Saudi Arabia, which of course had even more oil and they became our most important ally along with Israel.
Now the way Greg Palast puts it, I interviewed him a few weeks back and he says what's going on in Iraq right now is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran and they're not fighting so much over religious and ethnic differences as they're fighting over who's going to control the price of oil, who's going to be the king of OPEC, the Saudis or the Iranians?
Well, I think you do see, there's certainly a battle going on for regional supremacy and you've seen the Saudis are starting to get into play right now.
So that not too long ago, Prince Turkey who was the Saudi ambassador of the United States resigned and this appears to have been part of a power struggle with Prince Bandar who had been his predecessor, the Saudi ambassador of the United States for more than 20 years.
Prince Bandar has been extremely close to the Bush family.
He was especially close to our current president's father.
They would go on hunting trips together, Prince Bandar would drop by Kennebunkport, just pop up in the kitchen and whip up a meal unannounced for the Bush family and when they were on vacation in Maine.
And now he was an active player in Iran Contra back in the mid 80s, he's always been there behind the scenes and now he's getting into play once again and he's been having secret meetings with high level Israeli officials which is quite extraordinary for, you can just imagine how this would play if it were found out by the public at large within Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia of course being heavily Sunni, Wahhabi Islam, one of the most puritanical forms of Islam and Osama bin Laden grew out of that.
If they knew that here you have Prince Bandar, now the national security advisor of Saudi Arabia meeting with Israel, making secret deals with Israel, that would not play well at all.
Well and in Hirsch's new article, The Redirection for the New Yorker magazine, he says this is also going on in Lebanon and the very same players, America backing radical Sunni factions in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
Which again, backing bin Laden types against Hezbollah who are Israel's enemies, not America's enemies.
Right, well that all makes sense in terms of this shift towards the Sunnis and I mean of course the horrifying notion of course is it brings to mind 9-11 all over again.
Remember, 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, they were Sunni, they were, and this grew out of, I mean you have to go back really to the late 70s and early 80s when we secretly backed the people who became Al Qaeda eventually in battle in Afghanistan against the Soviets.
And this was a way of luring the Soviets into Afghanistan, it was a secret policy done by the CIA that played a key role in the demise of the Soviet Union.
But the only problem is now we're playing the role of the Soviets.
Yeah, and you know it's funny, a guy who does comments on my blog occasionally mentioned that really there's only one group of people in Iraq who will suit America's stated goals.
A multi-ethnic single state that fights Iran's influence and Al Qaeda at the same time.
And those are the Baathists, those are the people that we went in there and overthrew.
Now, I'm a non-interventionist and I'm not saying these are even necessarily legitimate aims for America to remake somebody else's society, et cetera, et cetera, but that's what Bush says he wants and those are the people that he overthrew.
So now he's got, he's thrown the Baathists, the secularists out in the middle and he's backing the religionist Shiites versus the religionist Sunnis.
Right, well it's one reason we sort of helped install and back, remember we supported Saddam years ago and it was during the Reagan-Bush administration and the administration of Bush Sr.
And that's one reason we helped support a brutal dictator in that region was that it did provide stability.
Again, I'm Scott Horton and this is Anti-War Radio and on the phone is Craig Unger, he's the author of House of Bush, House of Saud and he wrote this great article in the Current Vanity Fair called From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq.
And you say in here that we're following basically the same script stumbling into war with Iran that we did with Iraq.
It's not as loud that the American flags on TV don't wave quite as strongly as they did before but the scheme is basically the same, is that right?
Well it is in a lot of ways and I mean I think this time around people are more alert to it because you remember 90% of Americans believed the reports that Saddam had WMDs.
And I think by now they've sort of woken up to the fact that that wasn't the case.
So there's a considerable more opposition, now there's a Democratic Congress and if you go back to November it seemed as if there was no way this was going to happen.
The Democrats had just won both houses of Congress, James Baker's Iraq study group report was coming out and it seemed to give a bipartisan way, a cover for, political cover for Bush to get out of Iraq.
And now two-thirds of the country of course is against the war in Iraq so it looked like that was not, you know, that there was no possibility of another war coming forward with Iran.
In the meantime, however, we now have two aircraft carrier groups that have gone to the Persian Gulf.
Most significantly, I think we've also sent minesweepers there.
That's really important because if we were to bomb Iran almost everyone believes their first response would be to blockade the Persian Gulf.
The Straits of Hormuz are where the Persian Gulf narrows and about 40% of all the oil in the world goes through the Persian Gulf so that means the price of oil would go through the roof.
And this is the kind of thing we have to look forward to.
I mean you have the potential for a catastrophic global oil war coming out of this.
Yeah, and this is the kind of thing also that could just shut down global trade and economies all over the world that are at least the ones that are dependent on each other when you're talking about that kind of spike in oil prices.
Right, I mean I think if there's anything that will create political change in the United States it's if gas goes to $8 or $10 a gallon.
That's funny, I'm reminded of Gary Hart one time writing in the New York Times magazine about how Americans just don't love government enough anymore.
He said, sometimes it takes a great depression I guess.
So maybe we're headed that way.
We'll get a brand new deal again in America.
Well this is a very high stakes game of chicken that the Bush administration is playing with Iran.
And another part of this too is the exiles, right?
Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress who sold us all these bills of goods about Saddam's secret nuclear weapons program and the rest of this.
There are Iranian and Syrian Chalabis in waiting.
I guess we haven't even really mentioned Syria all that much here.
I guess it was part of the clean break but doesn't it go without saying Craig that basically if we bomb Iran and start a war with Iran that oh yeah and that means Syria too at the same time?
Yeah, both of them are on this list and there's Shah of Iran's son, Reza Pahlavi has been put forth by various neo-cons as a possible person to take over Iran.
There's a man in Washington named Fareed Ghadri who is a Syrian and he has been put forth as the sort of Syrian version of Ahmed Chalabi.
He even sent out a mass email once.
He's been compared to Chalabi so many times and of course Chalabi has been kind of disgraced and was convicted of embezzling money from a bank in Jordan.
So he sent out a mass email telling people he was not the Syrian Ahmed Chalabi which I thought was kind of funny.
Yeah, it sounds exactly like something Ahmed Chalabi would say and you know when you talk about the neo-cons floating the idea of installing the son of the former Shah Pahlavi, I mean are these people smoking crack?
This is crazy.
This is how we got the Iranian revolution in the first place was people didn't like having a western-backed fascist dictator.
Right, well I think as you say there's no sense of how the people of Iran might feel about having us impose their leer upon them and if they wonder why, I mean that is one of the reasons fundamentalism gained such a foothold there.
That it's really in response to this imposition by the United States in terms of who's running the country there.
Yeah, and now another part of this same script that's coming back, the same thing from Iraq and again with Iran is the weapons of mass destruction.
And it's funny we look at Iraq now the idea that they had some kind of advanced nuclear weapons program when you compare them to Iran who actually has a nuclear program but not an advanced nuclear weapons program.
The idea that Iraq had anything like even what Iran has just seems so silly but in any case they got away with it once before and now they're accusing Iran of developing nuclear weapons.
And it's stated pretty much everywhere but on anti-war radio that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, they're building nuclear weapons, we got to stop them before they get nuclear weapons.
And it's just the accepted premise of basically every face on TV that Iran will have a nuke any day now if we don't stop them.
Right, the International Atomic Energy Agency has said there's no, so far at least unless this has changed in the last few weeks, has said that they don't know that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program.
Yes, they have a nuclear program but it's for nuclear energy and they are doing nuclear enrichment.
There is potential that this could become a real threat but I think there hasn't been a very clear assessment in terms of exactly how dangerous it is.
And in the case of Iraq as you've so well documented in your articles for Vanity Fair, this wasn't bad intelligence, these were as you titled one of your articles the lies they needed.
And something that we see often from the administration about Iran when somebody says hey come on they're only enriching to 3.6% and right in the presence of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors they say oh well yeah but there's a secret program and that's the one that we're worried about.
Well this is a factor that I'm not sure every American is aware of is the extent to which the neo-conservatives have taken over intelligence in the United States.
And if you go back to the beginnings of the Iraq war, one of the key things that President Bush cited in his State of the Union address in 2003, and this became a cause for war, were these famous 16 word sentences in which he said Iraq was getting yellow cake uranium from the Republic of Niger.
This turned out to be a complete fabrication, the documents in which it was based were forged and what I did in another article in Vanity Fair is I traced those documents and how they went through the government and they went through the CIA and I found that they had been rejected as forgeries at least 14 different occasions.
Yet they kept resurfacing, resurfacing again and again, they ultimately got in Bush's State of the Union address and were used as a cause for war.
And you see that again with Iran, that is the Republican Congressman named Peter Hoekstra late last year when the Republicans still controlled Congress put out a report saying about Iran's nuclear program and it was full of exaggerations and the International Atomic Energy Agency found many errors in it.
Well, Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, testified to the Knesset in December that Iran was 10 years away and Seymour Hersh has reported and Scott Ritter, who I interviewed just a couple of weeks ago, who says he knows Israeli Mossad guys, say that they have nothing.
The CIA and the Israeli intelligence have no evidence at all that there's a secret nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Right, well I think that's the case.
We don't know for sure and it's also worth remembering that if you look at other countries that have developed nuclear weapons, it's generally taken them from three to five years or so.
And that includes South Africa and Pakistan, which of course is a nuclear power and is hardly the most sophisticated country in the world technologically.
So if they can do it in three to five years, this means effectively that Iran is starting from scratch and this whole propaganda campaign has been going on for several years.
And tied in with the weapons of mass destruction laws is the use of the United Nations so-called authority because we all know aggressive war is bad unless France and Russia agree to it.
In that case, it's wholly legitimate and wrapped in baby blue flags and flowers and wonderfulness.
And they use this script against Iraq where everyone in the world agrees that Saddam Hussein is a threat.
Look, the Security Council agrees with us that they have these banned weapons and that something's got to be done about it.
And if they're not willing to do something about it, then we will.
That very same script is also being laid out against Iran as well, isn't it?
Yeah, I think it is.
I think it's important to understand that Iran is a major problem in the region and potentially it can be a threat.
And I think in some level on national security you have to assume the worst and be prepared for it.
But that doesn't mean rushing to conclusions and jumping out to war and we really don't have the goods on Iran.
That's for sure at this stage.
Okay, now something that's confusing here that maybe you can help shed a little light for me.
I haven't read the book.
I'm sorry, I really should.
It's on my list somewhere.
House of Bush, House of Saud.
But your articles kind of reflect your knowledge of this kind of thing too.
I'm looking at Zbigniew Brzezinski and James Baker.
Zbigniew Brzezinski basically represents David Rockefeller.
In fact, John Rockefeller IV is taking the same stand in the Senate.
James Baker represents Houston and Baker Botts represents the Saudis and these guys don't want war with Iran.
House of Bush, House of Saud, Baker ought to be the guy telling Bush what to do and yet it seems like Bush is telling Baker to go to hell.
He's going to do what the neo-cons want.
Why?
Well, I do think you have a real generational split between Bush Sr. and his son and it's almost like an Oedipal conflict.
The elder George Bush and James Baker were multilateralists.
They were realists.
When they went to war in the Gulf War in 1991, they put together a real coalition that actually had eight Arab allies who were really our allies.
The current coalition in Iraq is basically non-existent.
Even the Brits are leaving and I think we have over 96% of the troops are American now.
It's not a real coalition and we have virtually no real Arab allies except in so far as we've helped empower the Sunnis.
Now the Saudis in Egypt and Jordan say, gee, aren't we going to do anything about that?
So, I think James Baker understands from a point of view of just, I mean, this is in the interest of the whole Western economy, if we go to war with Iran, this can be devastating.
The price of oil can go through the roof.
No one really wants this and I think the current Bush administration is very, very isolated in that regard.
Hirsch, again, this is in his article and also I guess in his discussion with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now last week talked about how close Prince Bandar is to Dick Cheney and I admit I'm throwing for a loop.
What do you mean you're throwing for a loop?
Well, I'm throwing for a loop because the Saudis and, well, I guess if James Baker doesn't want war, I would assume that he's coming from the same position as Prince Bandar and George Bush Sr.
I know how close Bandar is with George Bush Sr. and yet Dick Cheney, again, is siding with the Israel lobby and it seems like a conflict.
You know, George Bush and his edible complex, I agree with all that.
It makes perfect sense, but what about Dick Cheney?
Well, I think what you're seeing is that the Saudis and Israel are coming together on this in a certain way and that's because we've empowered Iran so much that Iran is a threat both to Israel and to the Saudis.
And so that's why I think you have that alliance and the person who's been most aggressive in this regard has been Cheney, so that's why I think Bandar has been talking to Cheney.
I think you have people like Elliott Abrams who's on the National Security Council and he has been meeting with Bandar.
I mean, it's extremely odd in a lot of ways.
Elliott Abrams is one of the most aggressive right-wing neoconservatives with regard to Israel, so to have him working with Bandar may sound extraordinary, but in the end, they both see Iran as a threat.
Right.
Now, if I can ask you about Syria, you mentioned this guy from AIPAC, Fareed Ghadri, who's the new Chalabi who's supposed to take Assad's place, I guess, but judging by the failure to install Chalabi and get things their way in Iraq, do they really think it'll be that easy to make sure it's their guy in Syria?
It seems to me if there's regime change in Syria, you know, Assad's going to end up being replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, if anybody.
Well, that's possible.
I'm not an expert on Syria, but I think you're right in the sense that these people like Fareed Ghadri and then with regard to Iran, Reza Pahlavi, I don't think it's at all easy to install them in their respective countries.
But they become figures around whom the neocons can coalesce and to advertise this as this is a war for democracy, we need reformists like these people.
I think the truth of the matter is, if you look at the Bush administration's current policy now, they've really thrown away almost every attempt to call this democratization of the Middle East.
But the fact of the matter is now, when you see them backing Saudi Arabia, bringing them back into play, the Saudis, of course, are a monarchy.
They're anything but democratic.
The same with, you know, these are not great democracies that are our allies in the Middle East now.
Yeah.
And, you know, how are you supposed to do regime change from the air anyway?
I mean, when people are talking about, you know, all these war plans that have been leaked and discussed, it's all about bombing.
Now, I know that people say that the neocons entertain this fantasy that when they bomb Iran, that the people will take the opportunity to overthrow their government and that kind of thing.
Is there no plan B at all?
They really think that it's as simple as that to get a regime change, to just use planes?
Well, I think there are covert operations underway in Iran.
But you're absolutely right.
When people are bombed, they tend not to love bombers.
And certainly when England was bombed by the Nazis during World War II, they didn't certainly rise up and support Hitler.
Vietnamese didn't embrace us when we bombed them.
You know, I think that's just a fantasy.
And I mean, it's quite disturbing, really.
Yeah, it's funny.
That's right out of the Declaration of Independence, the complaints against the king.
He's, you know, bombed our cities and ravaged our coasts and burnt our towns, waged war against us.
And that's why we're declaring independence.
A little something from our own history there.
It's not often we get bombed, really.
And OK, I'm going to get back to this because I forgot to bring it up when we were talking about it before with this redirection and the switch back to the Sunnis, basically.
This is what Osama bin Laden wants, right?
The mullahs in Tehran are, what, four or five on his hit list?
And we're just taking care of all of Osama's enemies for him, aren't we?
It seems that way.
I mean, you know, it's really quite extraordinary how well al-Qaeda has done.
I mean, they're reconstituting themselves in Afghanistan now.
You know, you have to worry about what's really going to happen within Saudi Arabia as well.
Things seem to quiet down there.
For a while there, until 2003, it seemed like al-Qaeda was about to — that the House of Saud really seemed in danger.
Things seem to have stabilized over the last few years.
But right now, what we're doing is we seem to be inadvertently aiding al-Qaeda.
I mean, it's really astonishing the way things have flip-flopped.
Well, Michael Scheuer, the former head analyst at the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alex Station, says America is Osama bin Laden's indispensable ally.
We got rid of Saddam Hussein for him.
Now we're moving on Iran.
Right.
And we've also done the same for Iran.
We got rid of their biggest enemies.
We attacked the Taliban right after 9-11, and then we removed Saddam, which was their biggest enemy of all.
Right.
We're backing the Sunnis everywhere, but Iraq, where we're backing the Iranians.
Well, it seems that there's no coherent policy in the Bush administration in terms of the geostrategic terms in the entire region.
It's as if the United States doesn't know what it's doing.
Now, when we speak about the antipathy between the Shiite theocracy in Iran and al-Qaeda, it reminds me that Iran tried to cooperate with America in the war on terrorism, didn't they?
Well, they absolutely.
In Afghanistan, they were quite helpful, really, and James Dobbins in the State Department spoke about that on several occasions, and when it came to actually writing a constitution for Afghanistan after 9-11, it was Iranians who said, well, gee, shouldn't you put in something about democracy?
And to have Iran say that and the United States kind of forget about it was sort of amazing.
So there was certainly a strong point there, and this goes back to 2003.
We had worked together with them in Afghanistan, and in 2003, of course, the war with Iraq began.
At that point, Iran came to the United States and said, with an opening for negotiations on a broad scale, this was known as the Grand Bargain, and essentially what it meant was that virtually all the issues in the region would be put on the table.
That meant the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, getting stability in Iraq, a whole range of issues were there, getting the Iranian nuclear program off the table so that it would no longer be a threat.
And they came to the United States with that in the spring of 2003, and the Bush administration did not respond at all, and I think that was a great, great missed opportunity.
Now, in your article, you talk about the offer of Iran to trade some captured Al Qaeda guys for some captured members of the Mujahideen al-Khalq, which we could discuss them in a second, but I wanted to ask you if you could clarify for me.
I was not aware that that was part of the same giant Grand Bargain that you just talked about, but in your article, I believe you say it was.
Is that right?
Yes, it was.
It was the very same offer?
Yeah.
Okay.
And now, well, let's talk about that part of it then.
Iran had captured five Al Qaeda guys and wanted to trade them for the Mujahideen al-Khalq, or some members of them that America had, and America turned them down.
So, who are the Mujahideen al-Khalq that we value their alliance more than the capture of these Al Qaeda guys?
Well, they were terrorists, really.
They were working for Saddam, who had, during the Iran-Iraq war, they were Saddam's guys who would go into Iran and sort of be undercover terrorists, and they were defined as terrorists by the United States State Department.
But once we'd captured actually several thousand of them and had them in a camp in Iraq, and rather than make a trade with Iran for the Al Qaeda operatives that Iran had captured, we wanted to use them, we began to use them for covert operations within Iran.
And these people actually were involved in the hostage-taking at the American Embassy in 1979, weren't they?
Back before they worked for Saddam Hussein?
You know, I am not sure about that, actually.
Oh, well, I just read that, but now I can't remember my footnote.
I read too many things now.
Yeah.
Okay, and now, oh, you know, we shouldn't let this interview go, Craig, without bringing up Elizabeth Cheney.
What's her job?
Well, she's been in the State Department, and she had a special role in planning these operations.
She has been in a long-extended maternity leave.
I'm not sure if she's back working in the State Department again now.
But she, of course, is one of the daughters of the vice president, and for a while, she has had a role in this.
The question is, when is she coming back from maternity leave, in terms of how big a role she's had in this?
But she would take people like Fareed Godry, for example, the Syria guy around, and try to help him gain credibility.
You know, when I look at this administration, try to get a big picture on it, I kind of get the feeling that this entire administration has really operated just like the Iran-Contra scandal.
That really, none of it is really law or official policy.
Everything is kind of this secret, shadowy operation run out of the vice president's office.
Well, I think it is worth going back, I mean, to really understand what's happened with this administration, you have to go back even farther than Iran-Contra, and Iran-Contra is part of it.
But if you go back, say, to 1975, when Gerald Ford was president, you had a group of neo-conservatives who questioned the CIA intelligence, and they were known as Team B.
And they went in there to re-evaluate intelligence and essentially come up with their own version of reality.
This is back during the Cold War.
So they kept saying that the CIA was being too soft on the Soviet Union.
The CIA spoke to come up with data, just what really goes on, and not to formulate policy, it's to come up with data that's reliable so that we can make an intelligent policy.
And they questioned that, and it became sort of a fiasco in terms of our Cold War policy back then.
You saw that again with some of the same people involved with the Iran-Contra, and once again with the Iraq War, and now with Iran.
In the Iraq War, of course, we had the Office of Special Plans, which was an intelligence unit within the Pentagon that challenged the CIA and sort of waged war against their analyses.
And as we now know, they vastly exaggerated the reports of Saddam's WMDs.
Do you think there's a possibility that all this hype about a build-up for war is just hype, and that maybe they're trying to scare Iran into capitulating but don't really intend to do this?
I'm trying to be an optimist here.
Right.
Well, there's some measure in which that may be the case.
It may also be that Cheney and some of the people who support this won't get an opportunity to pull off a war.
But I think—and this is how I conclude the article—that they built the fire.
The question is, will someone light the match?
And I think the great danger is, whatever their intentions, is that there's so many possibilities for something to go wrong.
For example, not long—a week or so ago, Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf and in the Straits of Hormuz were sort of playing—they didn't—no shots were fired, but they were within range of U.S. vessels.
And if either one of them had fired a shot, that could trigger something disastrous.
Likewise, there's the potential for a replay of Israel's war against Hezbollah, and that's the kind of thing that could escalate and trigger bombing of Iran.
Very good point.
The other route, besides the—remember the main Gulf of Tonkin-type incident in the Persian Gulf?
You could have Israel's war against Lebanon heat back up and then spread into Syria and Iran from there.
Right.
And part of the danger there, of course, is that a lot of people ask, well, can't Congress stop this?
Doesn't Congress have any authority?
Well, if it were triggered by Israel, chances are the United States would follow right away.
And right now—and Seymour Hersh had reported this—we're in a position where, within 24 hours, we could attack.
And that would be much too quickly for Congress to intervene.
Right.
Yeah, the War Powers Resolution basically gives all of Congress's power away to the president, doesn't it?
Yes.
And even if, you know, he might do something that could later be seen as exceeding his authority, but it still would be too late to do anything about it.
Right.
OK.
And now, I guess let's just, to sum up here, you talked about that fire being built.
And obviously, over the whole hour, we've talked about the weapons of mass destruction and the UN and the fake intelligence and the exiles and all that kind of buildup.
And you mentioned before the minesweepers and the ships.
But you said two carrier battle groups, and that's the Eisenhower and the Stennis.
But I'm hearing rumors about the Ronald Reagan, which I think is somewhere in the Western Pacific, might be headed that way, and that the Nimitz might be headed that way as well.
Do you know about that?
Well, I had heard reports of that.
The question is if they would be going there to replace them, these other two carrier groups, or would they be going there in addition to?
And I don't know the answer to that question.
Right.
And although, I mean, if they're saying replacement, having four strike groups in the same area at once is pretty convenient.
You know, I guess we'll keep our eyes open and see if that's when the Gulf of Tonkin incident happens or the war in Lebanon breaks out again, right when we have enough carriers in place for this thing.
Right.
Another factor in all this that hasn't gotten much attention is that until recently, Iran was under the command control, military command control of Central Command.
Not too long ago, that was shifted, and now it's Strategic Command, which is based in Nebraska.
And that essentially gives the United States the capability to wage naval and air battles.
We've also had, Admiral Fallon has now taken over Central Command.
What all this suggests is that, you know, what's going on in Iraq now, of course, is land operations.
If we were to engage Iran, it would be naval and air operations, and now we have more of that capability there.
Yep.
That's bad news.
So, I hate to ask you to just speculate, but do you feel like this thing is coming soon, or I know some people have said it has to happen before Tony Blair leaves office sometime this spring.
Well, I don't know about that.
I think if it happens, it will be within a year that as time runs out, Bush's options are going to narrow.
Again, as I said, it seems to me that they've built the fire.
Will someone light the match?
And what I would look towards is some episode, like the ones we've discussed, whether it's a Gulf of Tonkin kind of episode, Israeli Hezbollah, something going on in the – remember, we found those weapons and tried to attribute them to Iran.
One of those episodes could explode.
But it's very hard to predict these things.
Yeah.
Well, if it's okay if I just take up your interview, predicting a few things myself, I think that if America does bomb Iran, that there's going to be massive violence all across Europe, Israel, and possibly the United States as enraged people grab rifles and decide to make mayhem wherever they can.
I think the chances of a coup in Pakistan are greatly increased and nuclear weapons ending up in the hands of these Wahhabi crazies.
And really, who knows what countries might have all kinds of unrest and turmoil.
America, again, attacking a Muslim nation that didn't attack us.
This could have – we look at Iraq and talk about whether Bush is the worst president in American history, and we don't really know yet.
But we all imagine that the long-term consequences of Iraq are going to be horrific.
Add to that another unprovoked war and what the consequences could be.
And I think, as you said before, you talked about how much of the world's oil supply comes through the straits.
We could be looking at severe economic meltdown as the result of the planned airstrikes, et cetera.
Right.
It also brings in many, many other countries.
The Saudis are certain to be involved one way or another.
Saudi Arabia is close enough that Iran could strike Saudi oil fields.
You also have – China has very close relations with Iran and with Saudi Arabia.
So, this brings in a whole range of potential problems.
And here we are talking about it, and we all sort of just accept as our premise that there's nothing we can do to stop it.
Right.
And people watch Anna Nicoleson on CNN all the time.
Is that still on?
Well, actually, I think they've twitched.
There was a bus crash in Georgia.
That's a big story.
Oh, bus crash.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, investigative reporter of your caliber, I'm sure you'll be on your way down there to take good care of that for us.
All right, everybody.
That's Craig Unger.
He's the author of House of Bush, House of Saud, and he's an investigative reporter for Vanity Fair magazine.
He's got one in the current issue, the March issue 2007, from the wonderful folks who brought you Iraq.
Thanks very much for your time today, Craig.
Thanks for having me.