08/02/12 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Ray McGovern.
For 27 years, he was a CIA analyst.
Now he's a veteran intelligence professional for Sanity, co-founder of that group.
And they've got a new piece.
It's running at antiwar.com today, a memorandum for the president.
Let's hope he's reading antiwar.com.
Somehow, I kind of doubt it.
From veteran intelligence professionals for Sanity to the president of the United States.
Subject, avoiding spiraling violence in the Persian Gulf.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm doing well.
So what's your proposal here?
How to avoid spiraling violence?
I guess there's a deliberate plan to get us into a war, perhaps, but what nobody wants, including the worst war hawks, would be to stumble into a war unplanned, right?
That's exactly right.
And the more benign event, namely an accident, can be prevented if there is adequate communication between the Iranian and the United States Navy.
This is a problem that has existed before when I was working on Soviet foreign policy and Soviet military matters.
Our naval cowboys and their naval cowboys often went bump in the night.
Very close to territorial waters.
These incidents were frequent and they had a way of escalating and there was really no failsafe way to communicate between Moscow and Washington or even between the two navies.
Well, we fixed that.
Actually, that was something that was fixed.
And I was fortunate enough to be in Moscow in 1972 in May when that was one of the five agreements agreed to when President Nixon came to Moscow.
It was called the Incidents at Sea Agreement and it laid down methods of communication and methods of behavior that prevented, for the most part, any subsequent incidents between the two navies.
Now, there is no such agreement in the Persian Gulf and Persian Gulf, as most people know, is this sort of chock full of U.S., U.K., Iranian warships.
Well, now, how exactly does that work?
That says that, hey, if our boats ever get into a fight, let's not necessarily let that lead to anything else.
Let's stop and talk first, because you know how Navy guys are.
That's basically the thing, huh?
A means of communication is essential.
Right now, I was talking to someone who had a briefing from Admiral Cosgrave, who was one of the heads of the Fifth Fleet there in the Persian Gulf area.
And he was talking about that time when, do you remember when those five Iranian speedboats swarmed the three naval vessels that we had there going through the Strait of Hormuz?
Yeah, well, he was saying, you know, it was ridiculous that we had to go up the line to Washington to try to communicate with these people who are harassing us.
And the Iranians were trying to communicate as well.
And they went up to Tehran.
But it stopped there.
You know why?
Because we don't talk to the Iranians.
You're going to go through the Swiss embassy or something like that.
Give me a break.
So luckily, Cosgrave is a level-headed guy.
And he told them not to shoot these guys up because it didn't look like they were doing anything more than swarming, having fun and dropping little boxes that look like mines, you know, in effect saying, hey, watch.
You think we can't lay mines in the Strait?
Watch us, OK?
They weren't mines, of course, but Cosgrave kept his head.
When I talked about cowboys before, two weeks ago, there was an incident where an oil tanker, a U.S.
Navy oil replenishment ship, was approached by a pleasure craft.
It was a big one, by my standards anyway, 50 feet.
But it came close.
And what did they do?
They shot it up.
They shot it up and there were four people from India on that ship.
One was killed.
The other three were badly shot up.
And the other three swore on their Bible, I guess, that they were given no warning at all.
Of course, the Navy says they did give warning.
But that's an example of cowboys and Indians, if you will, OK?
You had Indians shot up by these cowboys on the on the U.S.
Navy oiler.
So the potential is great here.
We've known about this for a long time.
And Admiral Mullen, you know, one of the more solid naval officers we've had, and of course, he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before he left and even months before that.
Let me just quote to you what Mullen said, what he saw fit to say just before he retired.
He said this, you know, we don't have a connection with Iran, not since 1979.
We're not talking to Iran.
So we don't understand each other.
If something happens, it's virtually assured that we won't get it right.
And there will be a miscalculation which could be extremely dangerous in that part of the world.
Now, months before he said that, before retirement, he said, you know, military to military communications would be a real improvement in that area.
And for some reason or other, nobody picked up on that.
Now, we do have a proposal that the Pentagon has made recently.
They sent it over to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
It's an incident at sea sort of proposal, but it's languishing there.
And most people think it will never get out of committee this term.
Well, this is the term when we need it.
There's only three months before the election here.
And that is precisely the time where, in my view, Israel will be most sorely tempted to provoke an incident in the Persian Gulf in whatever manner possible and have to have the escalation spiraling up so that there's a real, real dust up in that area.
You think you're convinced that they want to do this before the election?
Well, yeah, not everybody agrees, of course, and this is speculative, but the way I diagnose it is this.
Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has had ample time to to assess Obama.
If you look at the record, Obama made a really nice speech reaching out toward the Muslim community in Cairo.
And shortly thereafter, he said, no, Netanyahu, it's not a really good idea to build settlements in occupied territories.
It's not only against international law.
It's against all matter of decent behavior.
So please stop building settlements.
Well, pretty please.
And Netanyahu said, all right, well, all right, I'll stop.
Maybe what?
For thirty four.
You give me, you know, three billion dollars more and yeah, I'll stop for 90 days.
How's that?
We did stop and they started again.
And when Biden came over there to talk with those folks, they thumbed their nose at him by announcing the building or the approval of the building of several thousand more units.
So that's one thing.
The settlements clearly illegal under international law.
Nobody thinks that those are legal things to do to build settlements, to occupy, to colonize areas taken by war, taken by a war that was deliberate, that was not defensive.
And we have the Israeli prime minister admitting that in 1982.
Well, now, but Netanyahu already beat Obama on that issue.
And Obama's already completely backed down on that issue.
Correct.
So my point is, you're you're Netanyahu, right?
And you're looking at that, you say, wow, this guy, this guy doesn't have a lot of backbone, OK?
And then you come in to the U.N. at a time when the U.S. has reiterated longstanding policy, saying, you know, we need to get moving on the Arab Israeli dispute there, the Palestinian issue.
And a good way to start is to go back to the principles we've all agreed to, that the borders of 1967, before the Israelis started that war.
And we'll make minor adjustments because of the things that have happened historically.
But we have to go back to those borders.
Now, what happened?
Netanyahu came to Washington.
He raised holy hell.
Obama felt himself on the defensive again.
Congress rose, what, 32 times in applause.
They sort of gouted each other in getting up and applauding.
And Obama is getting much less, much less play.
So so Netanyahu leaves with a smile on his face and he says, well, OK, it looks looks like I have more strength in Congress.
It looks like, well, frankly, the way I'd put it is Netanyahu is probably thinking that that Obama needs a backbone implant, OK?
And they're real hard to do and you can't do them before the election.
Oh, why does he take advantage of that?
Yeah, well, and of course, he never threatened him with withholding the funds or any kind of consequences for his defiance either.
So all he had to do was be defiant for a little while, which apparently comes pretty easy to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Anyway, hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for Santee.
RayMcGovern.com.
Or is it RaymondMcGovern.com?
I'll tell you when we get back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professional for Santee.
RayMcGovern.com is his website.
He also writes for ConsortiumNews.com, the great Robert Perry's website.
And so here he is with the veteran professional, veteran intelligence professionals for Santee, proposing the creation of the ability for the American and Iranian governments to communicate with each other.
I think a lot of people, including me, would be outraged to find out that.
What do you mean they don't already have the equivalent of red phone situation with the Iranians, with all these threats of war for all these years in a row now?
You know, it's good you mentioned that, because Admiral Cosgrave, who was one of the top naval officials in the Fifth Fleet there in the Persian Gulf, confided that they were reduced to hand signals, hand signals with their with the Iranian Navy.
Now, he's not talking about the Iranian National Guard, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
He's talking about what he calls the Iranian professional Navy folk, who they worked out this little arrangement with where little hand signals are enough to to convey mutual understanding.
So that's one thing.
That's how hair trigger it is.
Another thing that I want to point out is that, you know, we're not a bunch of like sophomores here.
I haven't added up the years of service here, but 11 people who signed this, including myself, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, include, for example, Ray Close, former chief of station, Saudi Arabia, Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East.
That's the highest you can go.
Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff.
And there are many other people here who have been around for a while, people on the operations side, people on the military side, on the nonproliferation side.
Kathleen Christensen knows more about the Near East issues and specifically the Palestinian issue than most other people.
So what I'm saying here is this is we worked this out over the weekend and and we wanted to to catch people's attention.
The good thing is that we know that we don't know that the president reads antiwar dot com.
But we do know that when we write a memo, the White House Situation Room and the National Security Council do get it.
They do read it.
And some of them, some by some reports, we we understand they do go up to the highest level.
Now, one other thing I want to say, Scott, and this is really important when we get together and we do this mostly virtually, we did it over the weekend.
It's just the two pager, but it took a lot of honing.
We learned things.
OK, now there is one woman who usually signs on to these things with us, but wouldn't.
And here's what she said.
You know, it's a good initiative, but the bus has left the station.
We're already way past the point of escalation.
Far advanced, in fact.
And it's being done with the full knowledge of the White House.
Now, there's a substantial amount of info already public about U.S. military moves in the Gulf, but there are other assets being deployed there that are not known publicly and have but one purpose, preparation for hostilities.
Now, I'm not optimistic, she says, about that, the future successes.
It's not I'm not optimistic about the success of avoiding a shooting war.
U.S. forces are on such hair trigger and the covert side of the house.
We are up to our necks, up to our necks and actions inside Iran that constitute acts of war under international conventions.
The odds of something shooting or someone shooting someone else is quite high and could rapidly spin out of control, compounding the danger is that our current posture in the Gulf is hostage to the frantic pandering of both Obama and Romney for the for the Jewish vote.
I'll say one more time, she says, that bus has left the station in my judgment.
End quote.
Wow.
Now, this is not a sophomore.
This is somebody who's been around for a really long time at appropriately high levels.
And my God, well, you know, the reference there to there's a lot going on in the Gulf that we don't know about.
Hey, there's a lot that we do know about, you know, like Wired.com, for example, has published all about the naval escalation there and a lot of minesweepers and additional.
I don't know if any, you know, who these days is keeping track of which exact battle groups or where, but as far as, you know, beefing up the defenses all up and down, you know, the left hand shore there, the western shore of the Persian Gulf, they've been going for it for a long time now or well, especially in the last few months.
Right.
Yeah.
And the Navy has actually hastened the arrival of yet another aircraft carrier support group, which puts two in the immediate area.
As I understand it, there's one up on the eastern Mediterranean as well.
Now, the way I interpret that and my friends as well, is that the Navy wants to be prepared.
You know, I mean, they're going to be following orders.
Right.
And nobody wants to be cited after a war or after a battle starts as having been negligent and being prepared.
So the Navy has to be looked at, seems to me, in the traditional sense of saluting sharply and following orders.
And that is that is sort of disquieting because you'll remember that just five, six years ago, Admiral Allen, commander, not only of the Navy, but the whole area troops there in the CENTCOM Central Central Asian area, he said to he said to one of our veteran intelligence professionals for Saturday, Pat Lang, he said, Pat, we're not going to do we're not going to do a war here on my watch against Iran.
And Pat looked at me, said, OK, if I OK, if I tell somebody that.
And Fallon didn't say no.
So Pat told The Washington Post it was in the next morning's newspaper.
Now, Fallon, Fallon got cashiered for that.
And Bush and Cheney were, you know, were lusting after war in that area.
The only good news this time is that the U.S. military at the highest levels knows what kind of what kind of a predicament they would get in if they attacked Iran.
And they're dead set against it.
Obama, he doesn't want any kind of practice before the election because the price of, you know, you want to pay you want to pay ten dollars a gallon at the gas station.
You're going to win an election on that basis.
So he doesn't want anything before the the election.
Now, what worries me is this.
Over the last two weeks, we've had the secretary of state, the national security advisor, the head of counterterrorism, Panetta, the secretary of defense, and whether one other very, very high U.S. official traveling to Israel.
Now, what are they saying?
Well, it's clear from what Panetta said publicly yesterday.
We still hope that sanctions might work.
Are we still working on this?
Please, please, please don't attack Iran or start a war with Iran.
OK, please.
Pretty please.
OK, now you're Netanyahu's guy, right?
And you're sitting back and you think, oh, you know, why did.
Hey, John, speak for yourself.
John being Barack Obama, you know, it's a little embarrassing.
Send all these high level.
You couldn't send any higher level emissaries.
Why don't you just call me on the phone and say, or better still, if you don't want me to do this thing, there's one way you can do that.
And that is simply by making a public statement saying, look, Israel, you start a war in the Persian Gulf.
We're not in automatically.
OK, and Obama won't do that.
I'm not suggesting that Netanyahu wants him to do that, but in the absence of a public statement where the United States of America says, look, we are not going to, as Obama said before the Super Bowl thing, march in lockstep with Israel.
We're not going to have your back, Israel, if you start a war with Iran.
Unless Obama says that publicly, I think that Netanyahu will be sorely tempted to start up some kind of dust up in the Gulf and indeed before the war, because I'm sorry, before the election, because if there's anything Netanyahu and his friends don't want, it's a second term for Obama, because as you know, U.S. presidents are traditionally freer to do things that follow their inclinations in a second term where they don't have to worry about being reelected.
And Netanyahu, his predecessors didn't want that with Jimmy Carter.
They don't want a second term president that's going to lean on the Israelis to do things that they don't want to do with respect to giving Palestinians anywhere near the rights that they deserve.
Yeah, well, I worry that Obama's going to take this opportunity to be a great president like Wilson or Roosevelt, reinstitute the draft and go ahead and occupy all the land between Israel and India.
Yeah, well, you know, ironically, in the mid 70s, right after the Arabs did attack Israel in 73, there was a memorandum prepared and circulated and actually printed in the Atlantic, okay, the Atlantic magazine.
And the State Department sent it out to all their ambassadors.
And what it said is, you know, we should send our military to take control of all the Arab oil.
That's the obvious solution here.
And then we're going to have this problem all the time.
They ask for comment.
And Ambassador Aiken from our ambassador in Saudi Arabia said, this guy's got to be an idiot to suggest something like this.
Guess who it was?
It was Henry Kissinger writing under a pseudonym.
And guess who got canned out of his ambassadorship?
Aiken, okay.
But that's that was the mentality there.
Now, there's a certain logic to that.
It wouldn't work.
But short of that, you have to devote some sort of different policy.
You can't be in the role of regime change, which is what Iran was all about in 53 and what Iran is all about now in 2012.
You can't be in that role because it doesn't work.
You got to talk to these people.
The Iranians are willing to come to compromise agreements with respect to their nuclear program.
But Israel doesn't want it.
And so if Israel doesn't want it, Obama doesn't want it.
Romney doesn't want it.
So we get into this very, very volatile situation in the Gulf.
And I'm scared stiff that something's going to happen before the election.
Yeah, well, what a great place to leave it.
Be afraid, everybody.
Be very afraid.
Go to Scott Horton dot org and buy my.
No, I don't have anything for sale there.
Scott Horton dot org for all the archives.
Ray McGovern dot com for all of his.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
It's great to talk to you.
Most welcome, Scott.
I tried to be a salesman there for a minute, but it didn't work.
All right.
That's the show.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We're over time.
Got to go.