Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, our next guest is Ray McGovern, 27 years, he was an analyst at the CIA, or CIA as they call it, and now he's a peacenik and an opinion piece writer, he writes at consortiumnews.com, home of the journalism of the great Robert Perry, and he also keeps an archive at antiwar.com/McGovern.
The most recent piece that's running today is called Israel's Window to Bomb Iran.
Welcome back to the show, Ray, how are you doing?
Thank you Scott, doing well.
Good, glad to hear that and happy to have you here.
So I'm not sure if it's you and me who are the boy who cried wolf here or if it's just the Israelis who are the boy who cried wolf and we can't help but keep track every time and I just don't want to be like the villagers and let my guard down, I guess.
It seems like they always want to bomb Iran and they never do, so what makes now different than any other time, Ray?
Well, the last time, back in 05, 06, and early 07, we had them actually preparing to do it.
We have none other than Vice President Cheney admitting that, saying he was very disappointed with the President, when the President wouldn't follow through.
Now, why wouldn't the President follow through?
Well, because for once an honest intelligence estimate was prepared and the conclusion was, as Bush put it in his memoir, quote, eye-popping, end quote.
You have to realize that all throughout 2007, Bush and Cheney were warning about how close Iran was to getting a nuclear weapon and the estimate, unanimously agreed upon by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and expressed with what they call, quote, high confidence, end quote, said, and I ask you to listen to this carefully, Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in late 2003 and has not resumed work.
Okay, late 2003, now that's eight years ago, Scott, and in 2007, it was four years earlier.
That was a bombshell, and to their great credit, our top military officers, who wanted not to get involved in a feckless war with Iran, insisted that those conclusions be published and they were.
And that stopped that juggernaut that time.
Bush complains bitterly in his book, he must have written this himself, because he says, and I quote, how could I authorize a military strike on the nuclear facilities of a country that the intelligence community says has no active nuclear weapons program?
Well, bummer.
So, you know, you could tell what was going on here, rather than the reaction that one might expect.
And if they really thought that Iran was a danger, and they get this unanimous estimate, whoops, wait a second, they stopped working on a bomb four years ago, now, what do you listeners think would be the appropriate reaction?
Like maybe, phew, wow, and some follow-up questions, maybe?
No, no, no.
Bush's reaction was, bummer, this destroys my military option, and the first thing he does is trot off to Israel to apologize for the estimate and to say, I, Bush, don't agree with the estimate.
So that's what happened last time.
The juggernaut was stopped, the military were the main fly in the ointment because they insisted, that is our military, they insisted that this judgment be published, and that put the spike in the thing.
Two years later, unabashed and unapologetic, in 2009, Cheney told an interviewer, yeah, we should have done it, I was isolated, and Bush chickened out.
So, what do we have now?
Well, now we have a constellation of stars, as they would put it, that is very, very new to Israel.
I would suggest, at least in my opinion, Israel is more isolated than ever before in its existence, except for the very early times.
It's lost Egypt on its southern flank.
Now, Egypt has 71 million people.
Israel, I forget, maybe 6 million.
It's lost Turkey to the north.
Now, Turkey is a very, very powerful country, okay?
It used to be a very close ally militarily of Israel.
It's lost Turkey.
And the Arab Spring is very much in train, and on the anniversary of the 1948 driving out of Palestinians from their ancestral lands, this year, this past spring, all manner of folks congregated on all of Israel's borders, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Gaza, and some of them, at least in Syria, got over the border.
Just peacefully demonstrated.
This is a new phenomenon, where the Palestinians, at least most of them, have chosen nonviolent resistance.
So, what you have, and of course, at the UN, you have the application for membership on part of the State of Palestine.
So, you have the Israelis in a very defensive posture.
What do they have?
Well, what came through to me clearly, when David Gregory interviewed Netanyahu two Sundays ago, was that Netanyahu knows, and the only thing he could really say was, we only got one country.
It happens to be, as Netanyahu knows, it happens to be the most powerful country in the world, and he's right about that, us, okay?
That's all he's got.
And all he could do is to say that all these folks that met me in Central Park, they all said, stay strong, BB, stay strong.
And that fellow that met me in Jersey City, in the restaurant, he was a veteran, and he said, stay strong.
Well, give me a break.
If that's all Netanyahu can point to in terms of support, then it's very revealing.
Now, what does that leave us?
Well, it leaves us with a president here, Barack Obama, who has shown himself hypersensitive to Israeli concerns.
Every now and then, during his past three years, he said, well, we would like to see the Israelis stop illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Would you please do that, Prime Minister Netanyahu?
And he would just stub his nose at Barack Obama.
He came in and spoke before Congress, our Congress, and received more standing ovations than anyone in history.
So he's got Congress in his camp, and he's got a president who is running for re-election and who is very afraid, very afraid of alienating the powerful Jewish lobby, what I call a Likud lobby, because it's really the far-right Jewish lobby.
It does not represent most Jews in this country.
He's got them at his throat.
He's advised by people like Dennis Ross and other male conservatives who, quite frankly, in my view, have difficulty distinguishing between the strategic interests of Israel on the one hand and the strategic interests of the United States on the other.
So what's the bottom line here?
The bottom line here is, in my view, the most important factor has to do with how Netanyahu and his entourage, and some, mind you, are even more hard-right than he, how they look at President Barack Obama, his record, his acquiescence in just about everything that the Israelis do, including now 1,100 more settlement apartments or houses in that part of Jerusalem.
So how do they look at the president?
Well, I think they find a very weak person there, a person who is even more malleable than most presidents before him.
He's a president who's running for re-election.
He's got real political equities here.
And, you know, let's try to mousetrap him.
Let's contrive some sort of incident where we can blame the Iranians for doing something untoward.
Or let's say, whoops, we discovered that the Iranians do have the bomb, and so we're going to have to obliterate them, as Hillary Clinton would say.
So, Ray, what you're saying is, because the Israelis have isolated themselves from everybody else, and they only have us, might as well cause some serious confrontation to just bind us to them even more, us against the whole rest of the Middle East at that point, is what you're saying.
And so that doesn't sound too wild and crazy.
Apparently Panetta just went over there to ask them to please not do it.
We'll be right back with Ray McGovern right after this, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, peace activist, human rights activist, and writer for ConsortiumNews.com and Antiwar.com.
And we're talking about the threat that Netanyahu might put Barack Obama in the position of shooting down F-16s over Iraq, which he isn't going to do, and might just go ahead and start a war with Iran, get us into a war with Iran.
And it's interesting to me, Ray, that Leon Panetta is apparently concerned about this very same thing that you're concerned about here.
I guess that's part of what indicated to you that now's the time to be concerned about this.
And, of course, Mayor Dagan, the former head of Mossad and the man who, in the WikiLeaks, threatened Nicholas Burns that we might just drag you into this war.
Our red line is closer than yours, and we don't care.
We'll go ahead and do it.
And wouldn't you prefer to just start the war yourself instead of having us get it started for you the hard way?
And that kind of thing.
He's now the one saying he's really worried about Netanyahu up there.
And I can't remember for the life of me who wrote this piece just a couple of months ago about how it wasn't just Dagan.
It was three or four other heads of Mossad were all agreeing that they do not trust Netanyahu and Ehud Barak with the power to start a war with Iran.
They think they might do it.
And Dagan is even in the press today saying they're not close enough to nuclear weapons.
It's not an immediate concern.
There are other ways to deal with it.
So it's not just you, Ray.
Apparently, you know, everybody from Leon Panetta to the former head of Mossad are really concerned that Netanyahu might just be crazy enough to start a war with Iran.
That America, of course, would have to finish or try to.
That's right, Scott.
You know, it's not a figment of our imagination or, you know, overanalyzing things.
When the head of the previous head of Mossad, Dagan, when he says, as he did last May, that attacking Iran was, quote, the stupidest thing I've ever heard, end quote.
Well, one has to agree, number one.
And then one has to ask, well, why would he think it necessary to say that kind of thing?
And he said it again yesterday or today, depending on which time schedule you're on here.
So why is this?
This is a big, big article of contention among Israeli leaders.
And the far right is seeing this golden opportunity that I tried to portray before as a situation where the Iranians have been discredited, they've been maligned, they've been accused of doing this, that, and the other thing, which people like the Mossad chief, the previous chief, this is not a problem in terms of nuclear weapon.
And then they have all these other things going on with the president really, really appearing very weak in anything having to do with Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman or any of the Israeli leaders.
Now, okay, so here's Panetta.
Now, he saw his counterpart within the past week at the UN, all right?
Now he goes back to Israel to see him again.
Well, I wonder what he's trying to do.
And the fact that Panetta, who described himself at his confirmation hearings as an instrument of Congress, as a creature of Congress.
Well, we know where Congress stands on Israel.
Here's Panetta saying, well, you know, we should work together.
Pretty mealy-mouthed.
He said together a lot of times, they say.
We should work together.
And the best approach for dealing with the Iranian threat is for all of us to make clear to them that they cannot proceed.
Well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know?
This is going to convince the Israeli leaders.
I mean, didn't the president himself say, you know, I really don't think it's a good idea for you to build more settlements, which the whole world knows are illegal in the occupied territories?
And what did Netanyahu do?
Well, he built 1,100 more, or he's building 1,100 more.
So the fact that we are warning the Israelis in a kind of mild manner like this by a mild mannered guy like Panetta, that counts for nothing.
And if I were Netanyahu, I would be looking at my colleagues and saying, see, I told you, you know, the president himself won't say this stuff.
And, you know, we really need to think about whether this is our last best chance for destroying what already exists in terms of a nuclear program in Iran, even though we all know that they're not working on a nuclear weapon.
So there are lies.
You know, there are people that say, oh, come on, McGovern, the Israelis will certainly listen to Panetta.
Well, give me a break.
If they won't listen to Obama, how are they going to listen to Panetta?
Panetta doesn't even have the panache, so to speak, as Obama does.
Well, so what's the percent chance you put on it?
How do you guys do this?
High confidence is what you CIA analysts type say, right?
How high is your confidence?
What do you think is the real danger that Netanyahu is going to get us into a war with the Persians?
Well, as in the short term?
Yeah, I think the temptation is greater for the Israelis than ever before.
It really will depend on whether our military will be able to be persuasive enough, as happened last time, to say, look, this is crazy.
Don't count on us.
We won't do it.
Now, Mike Mullen, whatever you might think about Mike Mullen, he and Admiral Fallon, back when this came up in 07, they were very strong.
They went over to Israel, and I remember Mike Mullen coming back to the press conference and somebody said, well, couldn't the Iranians seal off the Strait of Hormuz?
And Mullen gulped, and he said, yeah, yeah, they could.
Oh, but we could recapture it.
Well, if you looked at those cliffs on the Strait of Hormuz, you could have sent Marines up those cliffs, and what about all those boats with the torpedoes and those cruise missiles?
I mean, where are the Marines going to come from?
Where's the Navy going to come from?
It's a fool's errand, and our senior military know that.
So if this new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military folks have the strength of their conviction and are not just subservient to people as their former colleagues were to Rumsfeld, if they speak to the president and say, Mr. President, this is really strange.
The former Mossad guy has it right.
It's the stupidest thing we've ever heard, and if you give us an instruction to attack Iran or to abet an Israeli attack on Iran, we quit.
That's what it's going to take.
And unless the military can face up to this kind of situation where we have a naive president beholden not only to the financial wizards from Wall Street who will defy his instructions as Tim Geithner did with respect to Citibank, well, there are some people in the military that would easily defy instructions from Obama not to help Israel.
We did help Israel when they took out the reactor.
I'd like to see that.
What are the chances that the Israelis could start bombing Bushehr and Natanz and that American targets in Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf, and in Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't immediately be targets for retaliation by the Iranians?
How could they see that as something separate from an American strike?
Well, they wouldn't see it as separate from an American strike, and it would all depend on what form this thing took.
The Iranians are not crazy.
They don't want to be obliterated, despite what the Secretary of State has said.
And their response would likely to be more measured, but they have all kinds of capabilities.
Their terrorism capability makes Al-Qaeda look like the volleyball team from Mount Sinai.
I mean, they could cause all kinds of trouble, not only for us, but for the Lebanese, the Israelis there, with Hamas.
Well, and all the unknown unknowns.
Who has any real idea about the successful or the degree of success that the Iranian spy services have had in infiltrating the way things work in Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan or Pakistan or whatever things that these guys aren't even asking?
Or Afghanistan, where they have a pretty heavy footprint in Afghanistan.
So instead of all this business about destroying a non-nuclear weapons program, we should be reaching out.
We should be taking advantage of the various overtures that the Iranians have made.
The ones that people like Dennis Ross and other neoconservatives in our government have shot down.
They've been willing to talk about this stuff, and there are some overtures still out there.
So it's not hopeless.
It's only hopeless if Netanyahu gets the idea that he can mousetrap our president.
Once hostilities start with Iran, no matter who starts them, that Obama will have no option but to jump in with both feet because Israel is such a political reality in our country that it's not feasible for a president running for re-election to appear anything less than 100 percent behind Israel.
As MJ Rosenberger's point, now he's sending out mailers to the Israel lobby and their email lists full of quotes of Netanyahu praising him as his legitimacy for his re-election campaign right now.
That's where he's coming from on this.
All right.
I'm sorry we're out of time, Ray.
Thanks very much for your time, and thanks very much for this great article.
Antiwar.com/McGovern, everybody.
Consortiumnews.com.
Thanks again.
You're most welcome.
