For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
All right, my friends, this is Antiwar Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and introducing Steve Clemons.
He is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and director of their American Strategy Program.
He writes the very influential blog, thewashingtonnote.com.
Welcome to the show, Steve.
Hey, great to be with you, Scott.
Well, my partner in crime at Antiwar Radio, Charles Goyette, does some pretty interesting interviews of you every once in a while and I always get a kick out of your blog.
So I'm glad I have the opportunity to get to know you myself here.
Well, I'm a big fan of yours.
Oh, well, wow, I appreciate that.
I saw you wrote that in the email.
I thought you must be talking about the other Scott Horton, but okay.
If you insist.
Okay, now, so let's talk about doubts in our chief's ability here.
I'm certain you share my doubts in the ability of George W. Bush to, well, not get us all killed or not start another war or two before his time is up, and yet apparently Dick Cheney is having his doubts about George Bush as well.
Is that right?
Yeah, I mean, what's really fascinating right now is that some material has come to light where one of Dick Cheney's senior national security aides was talking in a private consulting shop here in Washington, and he also had some meetings over at the American Enterprise Institute, and basically said that Cheney believes that Bush is tacking in a policy direction that would really be bad for the country, which is, in his view, negotiating with Iran and thinking that there can be some diplomatic resolution if there are problems with Iran is, in Cheney's mind, really dangerous, and so that they are, according to this aide, concerned that they're going to lose the policy argument with Bush himself, and that they need to end-run the president.
This is really remarkable news, because while there's always been a kind of good cop, bad cop character to Bush's deployment of power and the way he engages the world, you know, you've got Condi Rice and some folks looking more diplomatically tuned in, and you've got Cheney on aircraft carriers, you know, all but declaring war, that is very different than Dick Cheney's staff, who also carries the title Special Assistant to the President of the United States, denigrating the president and saying that they need to tie the president's hands, and that's what's come to light.
Right, if they're playing good cop, bad cop, we like to believe that Cheney and Bush have agreed on that strategy when they're doing that, not that Cheney is trying to undermine the president.
Yeah, it's really remarkable.
It's called insubordination.
It might be criminal.
Right, in fact, in your blog entry about this last week, you quote an anonymous source who you describe as a top national intelligence official.
That's right.
I'm not exactly certain what that means, but potentially criminal insubordination is what he called this.
Yeah, well, when I mean a top national intelligence official, it means one of the top two personnel at one of the nation's intelligence bureaucracies.
That's like CIA, DIA, you know, Directorate of National Intelligence or the National Intelligence Council, so any one of those.
I don't want to identify the person, but that'll give you, you know, rank and profile.
But when I shared this with this individual, because I don't know the law on this, I said, is this kind of activity, this freelancing by a senior Cheney national security aide potentially criminally actionable?
And this person said he believes so.
Now, I don't believe the Bush administration will do that, because by going after this person or Cheney's team publicly, they admit disarray in the ranks.
That's why I wrote as well in the Post.
I didn't think they would do that.
But I do think that steps are being taken as we speak to create some penalties for this individual and potentially to begin rolling back Cheney somewhat.
But we just don't know what will happen.
But there's been a lot of other digging into this individual, and frankly, I don't want to get in a pissing contest with the White House on who it is.
Everyone on the inside knows who it is.
The State Department knows who it is.
Steve Hadley at the National Security Council knows who it is.
And so, if anything, this person has a lot of influence.
And the question is, how much does this individual really reflect what Cheney believes and thinks?
And I think there's a pretty strong correlation between what this individual thinks and what Cheney thinks.
And that's something that is a bit dangerous.
It's very dangerous if you've got Cheney thinking he can operate through foreign sovereign governments and try to constrain the actions of the President of the United States.
Now, this individual that we're talking about is definitely someone from the Vice President's office, is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
And in fact, in your article, and we'll get to the foreign state and all that, how the end run is supposed to work in a second.
But I was just floored, honestly, by the first or second paragraph, I forget which it was, where you say, these are the people who are working for diplomacy and against war.
Rice, Negroponte and Burns, her deputies.
Gates, the Secretary of Defense.
McConnell, the National Intelligence Director.
Hayden, the head of the CIA.
Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The actual chiefs on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And Admiral Fallon, the head of CENTcom.
These are the people on the let's not bomb Iran side.
And on the other side is Cheney, Wormser, Hannah, Hadley, Addington, Edelman, Shulski, Abrams.
And that's about it, right?
You've got the list.
I mean, that's really impressive to me to think that, I guess, the way Gareth Porter described it on the show a couple of weeks ago.
Oh, Gareth had a big scoop on Fallon.
Right, right.
Yeah, about Fallon saying that he didn't want to do this and that he would resign over it instead.
Fallon, for people, just to clarify, Fallon blocked a third carrier strike force group going into the Persian Gulf.
This is very, very important and more important than people may understand because with that buildup of power, you can easily, easily trip into a war because there's so much firepower, accidents happen.
And when we see kidnappings, I mean, basically imprisonment of American intellectuals in Iran, what you're dealing with in Iran is not a monolithic centralized operation.
You've got various forces inside Iran that are competing with each other for legitimacy and power inside that state.
And that kind of factionalization is also clear in the U.S. government.
And as I wrote, the two people who most want conflict because of their declining political circumstances are Dick Cheney in the United States and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran and the al-Quds force behind him because but there are many other parts of Iran that absolutely do not.
In my view, it doesn't mean that all of our problems with Iran will just go away.
But you do have some sensible people finally working together.
But we're not in an age where being majorities or even having a considerable alliance as I think there is, and some progressives disagree with me, but between Gates and the intelligence establishment and Condi Rice, that doesn't necessarily stop the military option.
It just broadens the set of possibilities.
But this isn't a time when the majority necessarily wins.
This is when a minority like a Cheney or like an Ahmadinejad in his own case in Iran can really disrupt things so enormously that they restrict the options for the majority.
Yeah, that really is astounding.
That's kind of where I was going with that list was, wow, here's really the entire permanent establishment as opposed.
And the guys in Cheney's office are for it.
It seems to me I'd give them 60-40 that they'll be able to get this thing going if they want it.
Well, yeah, and there's another element to it, too, which people continue to forget, because we want to know the gladiators in the ring.
We want to know their names.
We know who Bob Gates is and Condi Rice is.
Even if you're kind of a junkie on all of this, some people will know who David Addington is, who's the pro-torture guy and now chief of staff who succeeded Libby in Cheney's office.
You know the personalities.
What people don't know are the layer of personalities just beneath that, that operate throughout the national security and foreign policy bureaucracy in this government, in the interagency process, from the assistant secretary level on up.
And these people are very, very important.
And what no one has paid attention to over the last few years is that Vice President Cheney and his team have been absolutely brilliant and very capable at getting their followers in these positions.
Today, I remember hanging out with Katrina Vanden Heuvel at a party recently, and we were sharing ideas, because I'm essentially an involved realist, and she says, Steve, realism is the new liberal ideology.
So in this administration, realists have not been held in high regard either.
And what you have is very few followers for Condi Rice.
Very few people really understand what's in George Bush's mind or how he makes his decisions.
Lots of people carry around a mental template of Dick Cheney's decision-making.
And he could have a heart attack and leave tomorrow or resign tomorrow, and that wouldn't change the fundamental equation that you've got stacked in lots and lots of positions in government, people who are Cheney followers.
And that's a real problem, even with this change of climate and change of direction, that there's still this kind of subterranean massive tension over these issues, that we can't think that just because the president is not tacking in Cheney's direction right now that that solves the Cheney problem.
Right.
And really, this has been the problem throughout the administration, right, that Bush came to town with all these amateurs and Dick Cheney came to town with master operators in Washington, D.C., people who absolutely knew how to get things done versus Condi Rice and Karen Hughes for Crinola.
Absolutely.
So now, on the three carrier strike groups, when Fallon stood up and said, no, I don't want a third one, we're going to stick with two, basically the policy has gone that way, there's not going to be the overlap.
I guess last I heard, the third strike group was due to show up right around now.
Does that mean that the Eisenhower is now on its way home?
I do not know.
My knowledge is that the third carrier strike force may be in the region, but it's not deployed with the other two.
So don't ask that of me definitively.
Gareth Porter, who broke this news, has been following it.
But I know that Admiral Fallon does not want to create a circumstance where an unstoppable military escalation can be easily tripwired.
And it doesn't mean we're drawing down our forces, but there's been a lot, constant, constant, like these ship watchers out there saying, here's the third strike force sailing in and going in.
I honestly don't know, but I do sense in Gates and in Fallon and some of the, particularly the intel guys, Mike Hayden and Mike McConnell, CIA is where Hayden is, and Mike McConnell is the director of national intelligence now, a sense that they can't step back on the military dimension.
But they do know that the costs and consequences of attacking Iran and taking on Iran are so costly to us and so potentially disastrous to American interests in the world that that is an option that I think is far, far down the road.
Now, they may not want to be telegraphing that to the Supreme Leader in Iran, but I actually don't think the Supreme Leader in Iran is motivated anymore on the military question and being confronted by military issues.
I think there are other dynamics inside Iran at play that require a more nuanced approach.
And I think that the team of people involved are aware of that.
I'm a big fan of Nick Burns at the State Department who's been involved with this, and while a lot of folks in the progressive circles don't like Negroponte, he's showing some skill at being able to influence Iran's calculus without bombing them.
But that doesn't mean that Dick Cheney and Wormser and John Hannah aren't going to somehow be able to succeed at some point and get in the early part of 2008, particularly if there's a change in the Israeli government, with Netanyahu perhaps leading it of not getting some kind of low-level strike against the Natanz reactor that might actually blow all of our diplomatic options out of the water.
Right.
And now, well, to recap for the people just tuning in, this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Steve Clemons from the Washington Note blog.
And the story from last week, Cheney's flunkies are going around D.C. shopping around the idea that, well, that Bush isn't up to the challenge of what to do about Iran, and that Cheney's going to end-run the president's policy and get Israel to start a war with Iran for him, and then thereby forcing Bush into the position of having to fight that war.
Is that a pretty accurate summation there?
I could probably correct just one element of it.
I think now, in retrospect, particularly as this story has become more full and I've learned more about it, that I wouldn't say this person is out shopping the notion that Cheney is denigrating Bush.
I think they are out shopping the notion that Cheney is dissatisfied with Condi Rice, dissatisfied with the other pieces.
I think that the revelations about Cheney's own frustration with Bush and the notion that Bush's hands need to be tied or his options constrained, that wasn't being shopped.
That was being said in what this individual thought were completely safe circumstances.
In other words, they're talking to people who they think completely agree with them and didn't realize that this might leak out.
That would be a different thing than going out to shop something, because I don't think the vice president would allow his staff to come out and to shop broadly the fact that Cheney was trying to lead some intellectual insurrection against the president.
So I think that this has backfired on them, but I just wanted to clarify that.
Beyond the question of the leaks to AEI and all that, the actual substance, if I understand correctly, is that Cheney would like to get Israel to shoot some cruise missiles at Iran to start the war.
Then that would necessitate retaliation against American assets in the Persian Gulf and the war would be on.
The thinking is that most of our thinking about a hot action, a bombing run on Iran, would be designed to cripple badly Iran's nuclear program and facilities.
What allegedly this individual has suggested is that Vice President Cheney has the ability to nudge Israel forward to commit not a comprehensive bombing run on Iran, but a single low-level cruise missile rather than a ballistic missile attack against the Natanz reactor.
That would precipitate potential Iranian counter-response aimed at U.S. forces in the region.
The thinking would be that the world would not hold Israel in disdain or disregard for protecting its own interests.
This would look a lot like its attack on an Iraqi reactor in the past, in the 80s, and that the counter-response against U.S. forces would outrage Americans and thus prevent George Bush from being able to pursue the diplomatic option.and responding in some military way to Iran, probably a more comprehensive bombing run at that time.
I think there are a lot of problems with these assumptions from Vice President Cheney's staff because we know from the Vinograd report, this investigation into Prime Minister Olmert and Defense Minister Peretz's response in Israel to the Lebanon crisis, that Elliott Abrams of the White House National Security Council staff directly encouraged the Israelis to consider expanding the theater of their war operations to include Syria.
In this report, it says very clearly that Foreign Minister Livni and Prime Minister Olmert said no.
So here's a case where the Israelis resisted American pressure to broaden the war.
So I think that we also ought to be careful that just because Cheney's people think that they can push Israel to launch a cruise missile attack doesn't mean that Israel will.
I think it could be suicidal in many ways for Israel to do such a thing like this.
But what's important is that if Cheney and his team think it's doable, then we need to take it seriously.
And I think the best remedy for this kind of thing is to publicize this in the United States and publicize it in Israel.
And somehow limit the scope of action that Cheney's team has.
I mean, it's really outrageous what these people are doing.
How soon will it be before there's an election and Netanyahu has the chance to be Prime Minister again?
I have a colleague here at New America Foundation that I work with, Daniel Levy, who's just an incredible commentator on Israeli affairs.
He was a guy who wrote the Israeli draft of the Geneva Initiative and was an advisor to Barak and Peretz and other folks.
So he has probably commented on this.
But I think that right now, as I understand from Daniel, is that the Israeli government is semi-stable, but that elections are coming.
I don't know when the date is, but a lot of people, and I don't know if I put it in the blog or not, but the individual working for Cheney thought that this possibility with Israel and Iran could take place in the very first couple of months of 2008.
That could correspond with a change in government in Israel.
That gives you enough time to have either a vote of nonconfidence or a call for elections, which everybody in Israel is trying to avoid right now.
But Netanyahu is, according to many, the best position to succeed this government.
And the Labor Party, of course, is still going through its own struggle about who it will head the Labor Party right now.
So we'll see how it will come out.
But I don't know whether an election is possible in a month or four or five months, but a lot of people see a change coming.
Now, a couple of weeks ago, when Brian Ross broke the story at ABC News about a new finding for the CIA to destroy Iran's economy and intervene, Gareth Porter said that he suspected, I don't know if he had any information, but he suspected that this leak actually came from Cheney, hence the lack of outrage from the White House, that this was the Cheney cabal trying to undermine Rice by giving her one more obstacle to have to try to deal with in her negotiations with Iran.
Well, frankly, I mean, that may be true.
I have kind of a problem with the ABC News report.
Brian's piece was great, but I believe that it was old news that when the president gave his State of the Union address and his address to the nation in response to the Iraq Study Group in January of this year, the president all but said in his speech that he was essentially authorizing action against Syria and Iran.
I mean, the speeches were allegedly about the surge, but what those speeches were really about was Iran and Syria and messages to Iran and Syria that we were going to do what was needed to cut down their operations inside in Iraq or wherever they would go.
And I wrote a big blog post about this, asking the question of whether the president just declared secret war against Iran and Syria.
The Wall Street Journal at the time wrote an editorial applauding the president's declaration that he had done this.
And Joe Biden, really the next day in a hearing with Condi Rice, was asking her in a public forum if the president thought that he had authorization from Congress to go to war against Iran.
So to some degree, the issue of the president giving this finding, and essentially what funding does, it's an authorization for covert action that makes it possible for people in responsible positions in government to go to Congress and lie to them about it happening.
So that's how secret this is supposed to be.
So I really think this was done in January and just basically got revealed.
I don't think it was a new deal.
So part of the minimal reaction had to do with the fact that it seemed old news.
Well, haven't we known since 2005 that the military is running special operations guys and supporting foreign terrorist groups and so forth inside Iran?
This CIA thing seems like the very least of it.
Right, right.
I mean, that's been the allegation, but it wasn't until the president's speeches in which he telegraphed this very publicly, and I think he was telegraphing it to the leadership in Syria and Iran to basically let them know.
Because normally, you know, if you'd had a Nixonian president or even Bill Clinton as president of the United States, what they would have done in that case is talked about surge and talked about the diplomatic importance of working with Syria and Iran.
And if you needed to do covert stuff, keep it secret.
If you need to kill people or if you need to bomb or disrupt their operations, you know, normally that means you deny it.
And to some degree, the president telegraphing it so publicly indicated that the president was saying something to communicate to that leadership about how serious he was, and those covert findings had to be in place by then.
It sounds to me like the message is don't bother negotiating with us.
Our policy is to kill you no matter what our excuse is.
Well, I think it's more complex than that because I think that the president, you know, I'm not a great fan of President Bush by any means, but I think that something happened where the president began putting on the table other kinds of issues.
One, opening up the diplomatic door.
Two, China and Russia clicked into place with us both on North Korea and Iran.
I think the two carrier strike force groups going out there did matter.
But there was also a kind of easing up of the rhetoric.
We haven't heard Bush talk a lot about acts of evil in Iran lately.
He's changed his profile, his wording and language.
And this is a function, I think, now Cheney hasn't.
Cheney's just exactly the same as he always has been.
But I think that there's been a slight change.
To me, it's a little bit too little too late because I actually think Iran thinks that we're weak, that we're stuck in the mud in Iraq, and that this is the time to rush as much of their ambitions as they can before they have to negotiate away some of the capacity and some of what they would like to do.
And the American ego is going to have a hard time with that.
So this is a very, very fragile time, in my view, and we could trip into war no matter all of the positive things that are going on right now.
But it also means at the same time that America has to decide what its highest diplomatic and national security objectives are.
If they are basically trying to get Iran on a new and different track, then the kind of bluster that Cheney offers really only makes it worse.
He's Ahmadinejad's best friend in pushing all the buttons that Ahmadinejad needs pushed.
And we beat up on China on an economic summit recently.
We're having a tough time with Russia.
And there may be reasons to have a tough time with Russia and beat up on China.
But when you need their support to show a solid face to Iran in the UN resolution process, then you need to make some hard choices.
And this administration so far hasn't been making those hard choices.
Do you think the turning point may have been this meeting that Joe Klein reported on the Time magazine blog in response to your post?
Which was that Bush had this meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in December and they told him, Look, we cannot guarantee the safety of American soldiers in Iraq if we bomb Iran.
Was that it?
They finally got through to this guy?
I think Joe Klein is right.
I think that there was a critical meeting in what he calls the tank or what is called the tank, this situation room, highly secret, in which the president became convinced on a number of fronts that not only were we in a position where our 160 some odd thousand troops would be cut off from supplies that we would basically lose them, but that could wipe out a huge portion of our military capacity because we would not be able to maintain the supply lines to them.
That combined with the broader responsibilities of creating what would look like a terrorist superhighway that would run right from Iran through Iraq into Syria and Jordan to the edge of Israel.
Because for all of the criticism and some of it appropriate of Iran for funding terrorist activity in other countries, it is remarkable how worse it could be if Iran weren't controlling that.
If you blow that gasket off, you basically are dealing with a nightmare situation in which no one has the ability to control the rage and the empowerment of some very, very dangerous groups in Iran that would basically try and create pain very, very quickly for us.
I think a combination of these factors led Bush to consider a broadened set of policy options with Iran.
And we were very lucky that that meeting had, or I feel we would be at war right now with Iran.
So I think Joe Klein of Time magazine gets that right.
Wow, who would have thought that George Bush could be made to listen to reason, huh?
I guess if you have enough shiny medals on your olive green uniform, maybe he'll pay attention.
Maybe, and I think that we have to be careful too because this is speculating where George Bush is.
I don't have the greatest confidence in his mastery.
I'm still angry at Bob Woodward for his book Bush at War, which made it look like this guy somehow in his very genes and his DNA knew how from his gut to make better national security decisions than a lot of other people in this.
I don't believe that about President Bush.
I think the guy has been knocked into a corner and hopefully he's listening to some sense right now.
But I think we ought to be very careful of thinking that this is all solved.
I don't.
I think every day we've got to be basically worried that whoever talked to the President last has more influence over his decision-making than anyone else.
So we need to temper our views.
Yeah, I keep hearing that.
That's what Ray McGovern said last week too.
Well, it's five o'clock.
Sounds good to me.
It's basically the best you can do.
So what does this say about the state of the presidency itself and the state of our supposedly limited constitutional republic that a Vice President can get this far out of line?
I think we're in trouble as a country in a number of ways that we don't foresee.
And we need to get the threats out there that every vested interest wants to use to define why it should be bigger or get more money, whether it's the Pentagon or the nuclear labs or whatever it is.
The world's become much more complex and we desperately need a framework to prioritize between the kinds of threats that matter and the kinds that don't and how our resources are being wrongly deployed and how they need to be deployed for the 21st century.
That will help create, hopefully, a better management structure in what you do with your Vice President and what you don't do with your Vice President.
But we've not only seen a massive expansion of executive authority under this president, we've seen a massive expansion of a vice presidential authority.
I mean formal vice presidential authority.
We've had a lot of changes in executive orders, orders on secrecy, orders on the ways in which documents are classified and declassified.
I've looked at a few of these and what's fascinating about them is the number of times the office of Vice President hardly appears in most of these documents.
And what Cheney and with Bush's support has done is formally written in the office of Vice President into statute after statute of executive orders changing the national security apparatus of the country.
And this is remarkable and very few people have paid attention to it.
And this is a man who, according to the Constitution, has no power but to keep a chair warm in case the president keels over or break a tie in the Senate.
And that's it.
That's no longer true.
The office of Vice President now has more statutory power than at any point in its history.
All right.
Well, we've got to go because Jim Loeb's next on Antiwar Radio.
Hey, Jim, fantastic.
Steve Clemons, he is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, director of their American Strategy Program.
And you're missing out if you don't read his blog, The Washington Note.
Thanks very much for your time today, Steve.
Thanks, John.
