10/02/12 – Ray McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Check out my website, scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,500 of them, going back to 2003.
And our next guest on the show is Ray McGovern, former CIA intelligence analyst for 27 years, co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
He writes for the great Robert Perry over at consortiumnews.com, and he also has a website of his own at raymcgovern.com.
You can find virtually, I don't know of any exceptions that I've ever heard of, everything he writes reprinted at original.antiwar.com/McGovern as well.
The latest is music to my ears.
Netanyahu backs off on Iran.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Good, good.
Very happy to hear it.
Okay, so all year long, you and Phil Giraldi, actually, my two former CIA guys I talk to all the time on the show, well, and I guess Flint Leverett too, but anyway, you two, you and Giraldi both are the most pessimistic about Benjamin Netanyahu and the possibility of a war with Iran this election season.
And the way you had put it on this show, if I may crudely paraphrase you, was if you were Benjamin Netanyahu and you looked at Barack Obama, what would you see other than a complete, pathetic, prone coward who will do whatever he's told or will back off or shut up or whatever in order to get by in the world, and he has to, and so what's he going to do about it, basically?
And it seemed to you that he was really on a path to war, a path to dragging the United States of America into a war with Iran, and now you say, well, that's off.
Well, Scott, you know, one has to be flexible, and one has to look at the evidence on a daily basis or a monthly basis at least.
Now, were you wrong or something changed?
Well, you know, you never know for sure.
Folks like my good friend Gareth Porter have always argued that Netanyahu was just bluffing.
It just never parched for me why he would think this would get him anywhere, this kind of bluffing, to get some sort of undertaking that Obama would do after the election if he got reelected.
It just didn't make too much sense.
So my position, as you described it, was always that Obama's experience with Netanyahu has always been to back down, whether it was on settlement activities in the West Bank or whether it was on going back to the 1967 borders for negotiating purposes.
Obama always backed down.
Now, this issue, war, war with Iran, dwarfs the other's insignificance.
The big factor here is that U.S. military, especially General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was hell-bent and determined to tell Israelis, you better not do this.
Please don't do this.
And for a period there in August, we had over a two-week period, we had the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, we had the National Security Advisor, the Counterterrorism Advisor, and the Deputy Secretary of Defense all visiting Tel Aviv saying, please, please don't do this.
We really don't like you doing this.
And what I saw missing, and what I still see missing overtly, is the President, you know, the old Longfellow thing, Miles Standish, speak for yourself, John, you know.
I thought that Netanyahu would interpret this endless pilgrimage of lower-level officials as a pussycat way of trying to get Netanyahu to stop his plans without actually telling them in public.
Now, on the 30th of August, I happened to be on vacation, and I saw an email, General Morton Dempsey at a press conference said, you know, quote, I don't want to be complicit if they attack Iran, but they, of course, were the Israelis.
I said to myself, whoa, now that's, Chairman George's death is the next best thing for the President saying that.
And then, of course, Netanyahu overplayed his hand, demanding that the President at the U.N. draw a red line according to Netanyahu's description.
The second sign I saw of a change was when the White House said, thank you very much, but the President is not going to meet with Netanyahu at the U.N.
That was mid-September, or, yeah, mid-September.
And so, you know, when you look at the new evidence, you say, whoa, whoa, here's the President refusing to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister, that's unheard of, and here's the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying, look, I don't want to be complicit in an Israeli attack on Iran.
All right, so does that mean that the President actually grew a spine, or it means that he and Netanyahu decided two years ago, three years ago, that they would just play good cop, bad cop and settle for sanctions?
Well, I think the reaction to Netanyahu's overplaying his hand, even among American Jewry or such, that he realized that, you know, this is dangerous playing with the relationship with the United States.
And then the other thing, the major thing, Because of the election, you mean, especially, right?
Yeah, with the election, it just looks so patently absurd.
Every time he got on Face the Nation or meet the President, he'd say, oh, no, I'm not going to get, I'm not going to let you draw me into the U.S. election.
Of course, that's exactly what he was doing.
But what I'm trying to make, the other point that I should have made earlier, is that Romney is really bombed, okay?
And I don't think Netanyahu, when he looked at how Romney was bombing over the last few weeks, I don't think he could come to any other conclusion that, wow, I don't know, if we tried to embarrass the President of the United States by starting a dust-up with Iran, I don't know if that would really help Netanyahu, if it would really help Romney or not.
And, you know, it looks very much like I, Netanyahu, is going to have to deal with this guy Obama for the next four years.
And, you know, there's a limit to what anyone will take.
So maybe, I think all things considered, plus all the opposition within Israel, maybe I'll back off.
And so that's how I interpreted his speech.
That was the last straw, the thing that convinced me.
The cartoon, you know, all that kind of stuff, well, that's what made all the news.
What didn't make the news is the thing that I made in my article, The Point.
And that was simply that he pushed back the threat of attacking Iran for a whole year.
You're talking about, well, next spring and summer and maybe a couple of months after that, by the time they get the enrichment.
Well, this whole business was quite a different urgency than he had tried to stoke in the long weeks of June, July, and August.
So that did it for me.
I saw the cartoon as a diversion of attention, which it succeeded.
Actually, you don't see any of the mainstream media making the point that I'm making, namely that he backed off.
Now, not completely doubt.
He really weakened himself on the way out the door, too, with that thing.
Yeah.
It's just a laughing stock.
You know, I saw my favorite one.
There's so many different JPEGs that people have photoshopped about that.
But my favorite one that I saw today, I think it was Rye from Anti-Neocons made it.
And it's Netanyahu holding up a picture of Colin Powell holding up a picture, a cartoon of Saddam's mobile biological weapons labs.
There's a million of them.
They're all hilarious.
Dr. Strangelove up there.
Well, you know, Scott, the next day I saw a piece in the Washington Post, and it was a sort of reporting piece on how Romney had called Netanyahu, you know, right after his speech.
And what Romney commented to the press that was attending him was, you know, it looks like we have to still worry about the Iranian nuclear weapon, but, you know, we'll just try to keep the policy we're doing.
There's nothing terribly urgent about things.
The Washington Post said that?
That Romney said that to Netanyahu?
No.
Well, no, that after a speech with Netanyahu, and not a speech, but a telephone call that Romney put into Netanyahu, he came and he told the attending press people that were with Romney, oh, it looks like, you know, it looks like we can kind of deal with this in a normal way, this Iranian threat, and there's nothing terribly.
He didn't say it exactly this way, but the sense of his remarks were, it's not as urgent as I've been saying, and Netanyahu is going to handle this, but no time soon.
So in answer to your basic question, yeah, I changed my mind.
But, you know, who is it, one of the writers or philosophers says that, you know, only very dumb people are the ones that never change their mind.
When you see new evidence, you go with it.
And I have no embarrassment at all at thinking that, not me, but all the people, all the very distinguished diplomats and military people and the on-duty military people, the Joint Chiefs, those people certainly had an impact on the White House and helped the president to get his back.
Who knows what private exchanges he did with Netanyahu, but certainly it's very clear to me that he authorized General Dempsey to say, I don't want to be complicit with an Israeli attack on Iran.
And that was enough to make me think very strongly that maybe despite my fears that Obama had grown a little spine under the impact of all these other things, and that Netanyahu, for his point, had said, well, Harney's not going to win, I'm going to have to deal with this guy, and I'm already yelling at the Americans pretty much, so let's tuck tail and do a little cartoon to divert attention from what I'm really saying.
I'm backing off, although I'm saying things very urgently still.
The dates that I adduce indicate that it is far from that.
I've had some really welcome confirmation or affirmation, I guess you'd call it, from the people that I consider the best experts on the Middle East.
They haven't published on it yet, but they assure me that they think I'm on the right track, so I am, to be very candid, I am breathing a lot easier now.
Well, good.
That was kind of my feeling.
And if I don't know, I usually just go along with what Gareth thinks, because he's pretty much right all the time.
But my gut feeling this whole year has been that Netanyahu talks big, but also that Obama was beginning to stand up to him, really, right?
Because remember all the stories about the – they were clearly top-down White House-leaked stories to The Times, where Reisen wrote that they're not making nukes, shut up.
And then they wrote all about the MEK are the sock puppets of the Israelis killing scientists inside Iran, and all of these things.
And then they went back to Baghdad and Moscow, and they're kind of phony talks that don't really go anywhere, but certainly you can't bomb them right in the middle of having talks with them or whatever.
So it's always kind of seemed to me that Obama was resisting.
And now that doesn't mean that Netanyahu isn't crazy enough to go ahead and try it anyway, but then that's where I think Dempsey comes in and says, hey, really, I advise you against that.
Thank you.
You see, if Dempsey was telling his Israeli counterparts, look, you Israelis know a little bit about war, and you know what you can do, and you know what you can accomplish if you strike out in Iran.
Now, I can tell you, you Israelis, that if you start this thing, it is not automatic.
We don't want to be in this thing.
And so if you're thinking that our president is going to be automatically in with both feet, well, he's going to have us to contend with.
And we're his military.
We're his senior military.
And we've got real problems with that.
So you better not try it.
Now, if that gets to Netanyahu by the senior Israeli military, I mean, that's a very powerful inducement for him to say, well, you know, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but maybe I better not.
You know, I haven't been reading Israeli media in the last week or two, but it seems like what he's done, what Netanyahu has done by pushing it too far, the way you described, is to really jeopardize Israel's position.
I mean, who's going to pay their way in the world and protect them from all the enemies they create for themselves, if not us?
And they're starting to piss us off, us being even the U.S. establishment.
So I wonder whether public opinion in Israel is threatening Netanyahu and his coalition and his leadership, his prime ministership there.
I mean, can they afford to be run by a clown that the whole world regards as a laughingstock who's never to be taken seriously again?
Well, that's a good point, Scott.
And I have to say that the polls in Israel, in my experience, are notoriously unreliable.
My bottom line was that if Netanyahu started a war with Iran, the polls would be 99.9% in favor of giving Iran as bloody a nose as possible, including the military.
But now that he's kind of gone way out on a limb and then sort of uncharacteristically and tail between legs, come back, he is vulnerable.
And more important than that, I think that the tone is changing a little bit.
AIPAC?
Well, AIPAC is not as strong as everybody thought it was.
They were really, really strong for Romney.
I think even AIPAC and some of Romney's most wealthy supporters are thinking, whoa, this guy's a loser.
Why don't we give whatever money we end up with to Senate candidates and that kind of thing?
So what I'm saying here is that if Obama gets reelected, I would not rule out the possibility.
They put the screws to Netanyahu and say, look, no more of this foolishness.
It's about time we got negotiations underway with the Palestinians.
It's about time that you stopped diverting attention by this notional threat from Iran.
Let's get down to brass tacks.
And I indeed think that a big portion of American Jewry would go along with that, and AIPAC would be out to lunch in trying to reverse that very simple kind of approach.
So things may be changing.
It's a little too early to say that, but certainly Netanyahu has done himself no favors in the way he's tried to play the system and in the way he's tried to bully, really, very clearly bully our president into drawing red lines, whatever they mean, exactly where Netanyahu wants them drawn.
Yeah, red line means fake casus belli, right?
The line at the arbitrary point at which point you're supposed to get into a war for someone else.
Yeah, and your caution there that everything's possible.
Well, that's still true.
We had this guy Clausen at the Washington Institute.
Yeah, did you see that?
You know what?
There's so many of these outrages going by, I almost forgot.
Why don't you summarize that for your listeners?
Well, he just gets right up there, and we played the audio on the show last week.
It's Patrick Clausen.
He's at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is AIPAC's think tank created by AIPAC, specifically even on paper.
And Patrick Clausen is saying, we go to war when it's in our interest to go to war, our interest meaning whoever's at the winning think tank this week, I guess, that gets to set the policy.
And then he said, and sometimes you can't get the people that you want to start a war with to cooperate and making it look like they're the ones who started it, so you need an excuse.
And then he goes through the whole litany.
I'm surprised he didn't bring up invading northern Mexico and James K. Polk, but he went back as far as deliberately provoking the South into fire in the first shot at Fort Sumter, and then he talks about the Lusitania for World War I and Pearl Harbor before World War II, and then the Gulf of Tonkin, and how this is what we need is an excuse to start a war, something that looks like the Iranians started it, basically, and without any pretension.
I mean, it just comes right out.
Give me a Gulf of Tonkin so we can do this thing because I feel like it.
Yeah, and he got stormy applause for saying all that.
Yeah, unfortunately, they're not a threat, or they would attack us, and then we could defend ourselves and get that war we want so bad, but they're not a threat.
They're doing everything they can to not get bombed by us.
So, unfortunately, we're just going to have to pull teeth here.
You have a great memory.
Your list was flawless, except you also said, remember the main.
Oh, the main, right.
You're right.
You're right.
Now, you know, I have to tell you something you don't know, perhaps, but I had dinner with Ahmadinejad.
Oh, when was that?
And about 84 other people.
That was on the 25th.
He, over the last four years, has arranged to have dinner and then a long discussion.
We went from 8 until 10, 15, with people who want to ask him questions.
They're described, myself included, as, quote, activists, end quote, which I have no problem with at all these days.
And our president of Veterans for Peace, that's who we were representing, Leah Boldrick, got up there and she had five minutes to just share with him.
And he talked for almost an hour after we were all finished.
I was amazed.
He sat through everything for the two hours.
Now, what he projected was almost a serenity.
You know, this is sort of valedictory.
He's not going to be doing this again.
And he said, you know, we're not really concerned too much about the Israelis.
We wish they'd stop.
But there are ways that we're going to get through this.
And, you know, what we really should be doing, and this he sounded like, you know, Isaiah or Martin Luther King or Gandhi, he said, yeah, first of all, we should pursue justice.
And if we pursue justice with honesty, you know, and with fairness and with peace, then peace would be the result of that.
And so I don't know why these people are doing these things to us, but we're going to get through this.
And on the other side of this, we're going to come out with a community of nations very unlike what the situation is today.
And that's my hope.
Thank you very much.
Well, you know, who could take issue with those things?
Now, okay, he's not going to say some of the things that the Revolutionary Guards or the others say in Iran.
But I have to tell you that the contrast between him that day and Netanyahu the next day and even Obama the day before, you know, it was very striking.
Well, you know, he can afford to be as sarcastic as hell because he's sitting in the catbird seat because Bush and Clinton and Biden put him in it.
Well, yeah.
So he's right, you know, when he gets to, I mean, that's what he's doing, right?
That's what you're describing.
His serenity is him being snarky, right, and just kind of that British humor.
Well, it comes across snarky, but, you know, that's the way the media play it.
It's really kind of almost whether it's artificial or whether it's genuine, there's a sort of a serenity there, sort of a feeling that, look, you know, I know what's going on here.
We're not going to be baited by this kind of thing.
We are worried, but not that much.
And maybe he knows some stuff.
You know, I would not rule out, and this may be a little far-fetched, but I would not rule out the U.S., Dempsey, or whomever, having gone privately to the Iranians and said, look, you know, if our friends the Israelis start something with you, just realize that they do that against our very strong advice, and they were not in automatically.
And so if you're going to retaliate, don't start it with us, okay?
Well, there was a leak like that, right, which they denied, but it seemed like it was the White House that put it out, that they had sent word through Turkey.
Is that right?
Yeah, if I were the White House, I would have done that, spieling as strongly as our military does, and every sensible person does, about those threats from Netanyahu.
Let me tell you a little vignette, you know.
When I've been speaking around on Iran, things have been so dismal that I try to think of a lighthearted way to cheer people up.
And so you're probably too young, Scott, but other people, your listeners might remember the song, It Ain't Necessarily So, from Porgy and Bess.
So I added a verse here, and it goes like this.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to say he is bad is a fad.
He threatened to zap Israel right off the map, but that ain't necessarily so.
The devil in me suggested maybe I ought to go up to the mic there and sing that song to him.
Sing that song to him, didn't you, to make sure that he knew, at least some of us here, knew that it ain't necessarily so, that he ever threatened to zap Israel right off the map, because that ain't necessarily so.
Yeah, well, you know, Netanyahu's cartoon bomb up there really, to me, stood for the entire debate up here.
It's always been a cartoon.
And I think people are starting to pick up on the fact that those who are trying to start a war are always peddling a bunch of glittering generalities.
None of them actually speak in specifics.
While the people who are doing the debunking have this litany they're counting off on their fingers of all these actual facts that make what the war parties say not true.
And I think people are finally starting to catch on to that.
And there's just not enough continents on the planet Earth for us to have any more enemies.
He conquered and befriended them all.
That's a good point.
I do think that another indication, if you look at the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I follow the Post closer than the Times, the usual editorials, you know, in full support of Netanyahu's warnings, they're absent.
The commentators, George Will and Krauthammer, they don't know what to say.
And so since Netanyahu spoke, that's, what, almost a week ago now, there has been none of the traditional 110% support for what he said.
Because this time around the neocons are scratching their head and saying, well, next spring, next summer, maybe a couple months after that, well, you know, that sort of deflates the trial balloon that he's been trying to fly for the last three months.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we've got to leave it there.
Over time, thanks very much for your time.
It's great talking to you as always, Ray.
You're most welcome, Scott.
Everybody, that's the great Ray McGovern, former intelligence professional for sanity.
Find him at raymcgovern.com and at consortiumnews.com and at antiwar.com and at all kinds of truth dig and truth out and truth everything.
It's Ray McGovern.
See you all tomorrow.
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