Alright, so welcome back to Anti-War Radio Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
The headlines today, I don't know what to make of them.
The Jerusalem Post headline before was White House is planning an attack on Iran.
It's now been updated to White House denies Iran attack report.
There's an article on AntiWar.com today, it's an open letter to the former commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Fallon.
It's by Ray McGovern, a veteran CIA analyst of 27 years, the man who used to brief Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the morning back in the 1980s.
He's a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and you can find at least some of what he writes at AntiWar.com slash McGovern.
Again, he's in the viewpoint section there today.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
Thanks, Scott.
Great to be with you.
It's good to talk to you again.
What's going on here?
Is there going to be a war, or is reason going to intervene, or what?
Reason has never been a strong point of policymaking here in Washington over the last seven years.
My betting is that unless something intervenes and quick, we're headed toward a bombing and missile attack on Iran, which would be the most reckless thing that Bush has done to date.
That's saying something.
Well, now, there have been many reports here and there that describe Robert Gates as the big stopping point, the Secretary of Defense, that he's the good cop in this, and he's the one who is basically standing between Cheney and war.
He used to work for you.
Isn't that right?
Yeah, he did.
In the early 70s, he was in the branch that I ran on Soviet foreign policy, and he was a very bright analyst, not as bright as some of the folks I had there, but bright enough.
His very thinly disguised ambition made him a kind of disruptive influence in the branch, and I took my responsibility seriously as a first-line supervisor, and so I braced him on that, and he didn't like it a bit.
Lo and behold, in ten years, he was the great guru of the analysis division because he found a patron in Bill Casey, who found that Bob would support Bill's views that the Soviet Union would never change, and indeed, there's a Soviet under every rock, including the rocks in Central America.
So, you know, in answer to people's question these days as to whether I give any credence to the notion, and it appears here again in the Jerusalem Post thing that Gates is acting as sort of a break on this.
I don't think anybody can take that seriously.
Gates has no influence compared to what Cheney has or what Elliott Abrams has, and indeed, although when Bush goes abroad, Gates will make a speech which will enhance his credentials as a more reasonable person.
When he's interviewed, when Bush comes to show up and he's asked, as he was just last month by a New York Times reporter, now, are you on the same page with the president?
What he said was, same sentence, same word.
Now, that's the Bobby Gates I know.
Yeah, and just a couple of weeks ago, he made this ridiculous statement that Iran was, quote, hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and this is something that you bring up in your article today.
I'm living in a parallel universe, apparently here, Ray, where the NIE of last November where all 16 intelligence agencies agreed that there's been no nuclear weapons program of any description in Iran since 2003, and even then, why do they have the Israeli laptop?
It just doesn't even exist.
Nobody ever heard of it.
Just write down the memory hole, forget about it.
We all know they're making nuclear weapons.
Isn't that it?
Well, that's it, Scott, and the way they can get away with this, of course, is because not enough people listen to your program and tune in to alternative media.
That's the real scary thing.
I've been saying now for several years that the biggest sea change I've witnessed in the body politic in the 45 years I've been around here in Washington is that we no longer have in any real sense a free media.
Now, it's worse than that.
Now I say, not only do we have a free media, we have a controlled media, and what does that mean?
That means that things like this, the NIE, the NIE which says definitively that Iran, we think, had some sort of work on nuclear-related activity before 2003, but has stopped.
That's all gone down, as you say, the memory hole, and the only way they can get away with that, of course, is if the mainstream press and Fox News and the others disregard it.
There are other things that are equally alarming, indicating, in my view, that the press is even more controlled and more subjugated than it was before the war in Iraq.
Even more than before the war in Iraq?
Yeah, yeah.
You see, before the war in Iraq, there was at least a stray story here and there which cast doubt on some of the things the Soviet, the White House was saying.
Same thing.
The Kremlin, the White House, whichever, it's, you know.
But now you have, for example, Phil Geraldi, a good friend of mine, a former colleague at the CIA, he's writing well-sourced pieces saying that the NSC has taken a definitive decision to get ready to zap some of the bases in Iran, and it goes around the web, 500 sites carry it, not a mention.
Not only not a mention, but no mainstream press person or media person calls Phil to say, well, what about this?
You know, what do you do?
Who are your sources here?
Right.
Well, they've been warned off this.
The other story that I do allude to in the piece is, here's Admiral Mike Mullen, okay?
He's the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he very proudly gets up before the press at the end of April and he says, well, General Petraeus has got chapter and verse on the Iranian arms that are being sent into southern Iraq and causing all kinds of havoc.
He's going to have a press conference on this and divulge, show all these weapons, and we'll destroy them before your eyes, okay?
So what happens?
Ten days later, Petraeus says, well, we're going to call off that press conference.
What happens?
There aren't any.
There aren't any.
They thought they had captured a bunch of weapons near Karbala, and it turned out that not one of those weapons could be credibly ascribed to Iranian origin.
And so, now, most of your listeners will probably be hearing that for the first time, and why?
Because even though the press was intimately involved in this, even though press people were warned that this was going to be, not warned, but advertised, pre-advertised, it's going to be a big media event where we're going to finally show you these Iranian arms, and even though that was cancelled in the most embarrassing way, not one word, not one word has appeared in the mainstream press.
The only person who's mentioned it, and to his credit, has been Matt Keith Olbermann.
Yeah, well, Keith Olbermann mentioned it, and it made the LA Times blog.
I guess Keith Olbermann was the only guy who talked about it on TV at all.
But first of all, I wanted to mention that Phil Giroldi has an article on Antiwar.com today next to yours called, Before the State Fails Again, which is in reference to this earth-shattering leak that he wrote on the American Conservative Magazine blog, and how nobody paid any attention to it in the mass media, like you're saying.
But there's this whole other script, and I guess I want to get back and ask you about the nuclear program in more detail later, but this whole script about Iran supplying the weapons that are killing our guys.
One of the things that Gareth Porter pointed out in his article that we ran, I guess, last Friday, about how they had set up this big press photo opportunity, and then that it all went flat, and they decided not to assert that these bombs came from Iran after all, that there were hundreds of those EFP roadside bombs there, 570 of them, I think it was, that Gareth said, and that, well, so here we go, we have 570-something EFPs that they're not even going to try to pretend came from Iran, and yet, what we've been told all along is that any EFP in Iraq must come from Iran because, I guess, I don't know, an Arab is too dumb to put a copper core in the middle of his roadside bomb or something, they must come from Iran, there's no other explanation, we're told, and yet, here was half a thousand of them, and they didn't even try to lie and say they were from Iran.
Yeah.
Well, I don't have to tell you this, Scott, that we've been lied to all along, these EFPs are producible in these little shops in southern Iraq as well as in Iran, and it's been just a real, real terrible throwback, flashback, I would say, to Vietnam, because that's what happened when things got rough in Vietnam, General Westmoreland lied through his teeth about the enemy, how many there were, what they were doing, and all this kind of thing, and so we have the reality here where highly respected officers like Petraeus are, let's say it right out, lying through their teeth, they're blaming the troubles in southern Iraq on quote, special groups, end quote, now, what's a special group, well, a special group is one that's trained and funded and armed by Iran, okay, well, this is all sort of imagined, invented terminologies, just as we had in Vietnam, and it was rather revealing on Sunday when Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor, was having his little pre-brief before the President's speech, and he was wondering how he was going to say it, because there were no weapons, and so he just said that it was Iranian-backed troubles, everything was Iranian-backed, without any more specificity, so again, the reason they're allowed to get away with this, or do get away with it, is because the press is not only not reporting this stuff, but deliberately suppressing things that are embarrassing to the administration, and that is the real sea change, it's worse, in my view, than before Iraq, and how can they get away with it, how can Michael Gordon, you know, Aluminum Tubes Gordon, I call him, from the New York Times, how can they let him put his stuff on the front page, unsourced, talking about officials here, officials there, you know, it's really reached a very troublesome path, and that's why I thought I needed to, all I could do to get Admiral Fallon to step forward and say, look, it is a crock, folks, you should know that, and not only that, but a lot of people are going to get killed if we go ahead and attack Iran.
All right, now, let's talk about Admiral Fallon here, for the people who aren't familiar.
Who's this guy, and why is he the subject of your open letter?
Well, he was the former CENTCOM commander, in other words, the commander of the all-U.S. forces in the Middle East area, and he resigned when the Esquire article was written, in which he's quoted freely and candidly saying, you know, attacking Iran is about the worst possible thing we could possibly do.
Now, I had been saying before his retirement that Admiral Fallon was about the only thing, he and some of the Joint Chiefs, were the only thing standing in the way of Cheney and the President launching an air attack on Iran, and, you know, some things are kind of simple, Scott, in other words, you don't have to be a kind of crackerjack intelligence panelist.
When Fallon comes out and says those things, and the writer in Esquire says, hold on to your hats, because Fallon has been the only thing standing in the way of this war, well, when you read the Esquire article and some of the other stuff out there, it's very easy to see that he has almost single-handedly prevented this thing, and now, as I said in my article, all that's left is a chain of command of kind of martinets, including Secretary Gates, who, if Cheney says, okay, send those blue-suited guys off there, and they're stealth bombers, and nobody's going to get killed or shot down, man, this will be just real precision stuff.
I'm sure it'll be a little collateral damage, but, you know, these are crazy people.
I mean, I saw it in Vietnam, these blue-suited generals, oh, yeah, sure we can close the Ho Chi Minh Trail, sure we can bomb them into submission, and I guess I'm showing my prejudice as an infantry officer, it's the infantry that always has to do the real slog, okay, and the blue-suited guys that kill people from 30,000 feet, they have no idea, no idea as to what war really involves.
Well, you know, that's interesting.
I think a lot of the reports over the last couple of years have said, I'm thinking specifically of Seymour Hersh's work in the New Yorker, where he said that it was really the Air Force were the only ones who were on board, that the rest of the Pentagon didn't want to do it, because, like you're saying, the infantry, the Army guys are saying, oh, yeah, right, we're going to have to clean up your mess, and that's going to be extremely costly, but Eric Margolis told me on the show just a week or so ago that his sources in D.C. say the Air Force especially is against it, because they feel like they're already operating at, you know, 100% capacity, that they don't have any room to expand either.
Gee, I guess I'd have to disagree.
The Air Force has been pretty much the arm of the service that has not been very much involved here.
Naval Air, of course, but, you know, we have these fancy stealth bombers.
They take off from Missouri.
They refuel in the air, and before you know it, the bombs are going off in Iraq or Iran.
So my impression is quite different.
Even Gates a month ago publicly said that the Air Force needs to do more of its share, and unless the Air Force generals have changed their spots over recent years, I can see them just lusting for a greater role in whatever war there might be, and that would have to be Iran, since they're really not doing much.
Well, they're not suitable for the counterinsurgency role that's prominent in Iraq.
So Eric may be quite right, but that's my clause on it.
Yeah, well, speaking of guys in blue suits who bomb from the air, this is a short clip I want to play for you of John McCain from the other day.
I'm told that we do have this video we've been waiting for of this event John McCain spoke at this morning, where he talked about Barack Obama, took some swipes at him.
This was the phrase that Barack Obama uttered, and this is what McCain's going to be responding to.
Barack Obama's talking about the Soviet Union and Iran, saying, Iran doesn't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a serious threat to us.
John McCain had something to say about that.
Let's take a listen.
Right now, Iran provides some of the deadliest explosive devices used in Iraq to kill our soldiers.
They're the chief sponsor of chi extremists in Iraq and terrorist organizations in the Middle East.
And their president, who has called Israel a stinking corpse, has repeatedly made clear his government's commitment to Israel's destruction.
Senator Obama has declared and repeatedly reaffirmed his intention to meet the president of Iran without any preconditions, like when they get to meetings between former American presidents and the leaders of the Soviet Union.
Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment.
These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess.
An unconditional summit meeting with the next American president could confer both international legitimacy on the Iranian president and could strengthen him domestically when he's very unpopular with the Iranian people.
All right, well, you heard it there, Ray McGovern.
Iran is responsible for our problems in Iraq, and so much as meeting with them would confer what John McCain calls international legitimacy on their government.
I didn't realize that, I don't know, for example, our government is dependent on the rest of the world saying it's okay for our government to be our government.
But apparently in Iran, it's up to America and Europe to decide whether their government is internationally legitimate.
Is he right?
Is Barack Obama appeasing Hitler?
Well, you know, if you want to look at the greatest teaser of the last couple of decades, his name is Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan found out that, well, among other things, that we in the intelligence community could monitor arms control agreements.
You know, doverai, but proverai, you know.
Trust but verify.
Yeah, trust but verify.
I forgot the English translation there.
Okay, well, we told them, you know, look, Mr. President, if the Soviets cheat here, we can tell you within 10 days for God's sake.
And on the basis of that, he went with, you know, direct head talks with, ending up with Gorbachev talking with a lot of the Soviets.
And out of that, in the early, well, during Reagan's term and even earlier during Nixon's visits there in 72, and I was in Moscow at the time, a whole host of very, very important arms control agreements were worked.
Now, it's a new sort of theory in international relations propounded by George W. Bush that you only talk with people that you like.
You don't talk with people who you have, you know, a beef with.
You don't talk with people like the Iranians who, although they wanted to talk to you and really made an amazing overture in 2003 to begin talks on all things, including their nuclear program, you don't talk to them because they're sort of evil or because our Israeli friends say, no, no, no, no, it's too dangerous to talk to them.
This is bizarre.
That's what diplomacy is all about.
That's why we have a State Department.
If we have a State Department and only talk to people that we like, what good is it?
So it's a bizarre notion.
And what we're hearing, of course, is demagoguery.
And what we hear McCain saying here about Iran providing the weapons to kill our soldiers and blow them up.
Well, we've just been through that routine, haven't we?
And there were 570 EFPs, explosively formed projectiles, and none of them, zero, came from Iran.
Otherwise, you can bet your bottom dollar, Petraeus and everybody else would be waving them before the press saying, look, they're killing our boys.
So McCain is saying, yeah, they're killing our boys, but he has no proof.
And somebody ought to say, well, what's your evidence for that, Mr. McCain?
Because we were going to have a big press conference about that, and the Army said, whoops, no, we don't really have any proof.
So where's your proof?
Yeah, nobody asked.
A couple of things there.
I guess, first of all, I wanted to point you to this Glenn Greenwald blog, which I'm sure you'll enjoy, called Ronald Reagan Chamberlainian Appeaser of the 1980s.
And it's about how Newt Gingrich and a bunch of other of these neocons and members of our current day war party actually denounced Ronald Reagan as appeasing the USSR by working out nuclear treaties with them.
And of course, they all hail him now as their great flawless hero and so forth.
And, well, we see the fruits of Ronald Reagan's appeasement of the Soviet Union.
They ended up taking over the whole world, right?
Oh, wait.
Yeah, just as Gingrich and the rest of them warned.
Yeah, there they are, sitting in the catbird seat.
That really is incredible.
And now, on McCain, I want to ask you whether you think he's a damned liar or is he really as dumb as George W. Bush?
He seems to me as though he really believes these ridiculous talking points and that he doesn't know, he doesn't have any further background knowledge that might shed light or contradict these talking points.
Yeah, you know, that's a real tough question to answer.
I mean, I know you can't read his mind, but I guess I'm just interested in your general impression.
Well, we intelligence types, you know, we avoid addressing the politics of these things.
On the face of it, the things that he says are rather stupid.
The things that he says are misguided and most of them are inaccurate.
So, you know, whether he believes them or not any more than George Bush believes them, it's really impossible to say, but which is worse, you know?
Yeah.
I think I mentioned in my article, you know, if Bush really believes that Iran is a threat to the state of Israel and this requires our country to bomb and missile attack Iran, if I said Iraq, I meant Iran, well, you know, that's pretty bad.
But if he doesn't believe that really and is still voicing that kind of rhetoric to enable himself to strike out in Iran, that's at least equally bad.
So it's sort of an academic question for me.
The rhetoric is out there.
The preparations are out there.
The media is in line, even more so than before.
That's why I thought maybe Admiral Fallon could step up and say, look, this is why I quit.
You know, I took over CENTCOM in 07 and I had a couple of months to watch what was going on.
And what did I see?
I saw a bunch of crazy people in the White House.
Elliott Abrams, for one, was running our policy toward that area.
And Cornelisa Rice is really just kind of a frequent flyer these days.
But the vice president and Abrams are doing all kinds of things like trying to start civil wars, civil wars in Gaza, which they tried to start and got really, really pinged.
And Hamas emerged much stronger than before.
That was the Gaza bombshell article, right?
The Vanity Fair article.
People haven't read that.
To get an insight into how feckless and how crazy our policy has been, I have it right here before me.
It's David Rose, April 2008.
Hopefully you can download it.
But it's called the Gaza bombshell.
And it's so revealing as to how our policy is being made.
And I could just watch Fallon.
Now, Fallon wasn't responsible for Israel.
It was the only part of the Middle East that he wasn't responsible for.
But everything else depends on what goes on there, or most things do.
So in those months he had before assuming command, he watched this charade, this crazy thing.
And he watched Lebanon.
And I guess he decided to talk to the press, taking a gamble, saying, look, I'm going to tell them what I think.
And if come early next year, 08, things don't get better, they're going to can me.
But I'd just as soon not be in the line of fire, I'd just as soon not be in the line of command, if people like Elliott Abrams and Dick Cheney are going to order me to endanger our troops in Iraq by attacking Iran.
Well, and your call to him in this letter today is that, hey, pal, your oath to the Constitution has not expired.
And just because you're not the general in charge anymore doesn't mean that you should have stopped talking to the Financial Times and Vanity Fair.
That's right.
And what most people get a little confused about is there are two things here.
The framers of our Constitution were really, really careful to reserve the power to make war to the Congress, the elected representatives of the people, and not to the president.
Now, Congress has sort of frittered away at that, right?
And now there's some ambiguities as to whether the law would permit the president to do this or that in the way of starting wars.
Now, there's no ambiguity, none at all, in the Constitution's provision that any treaty ratified by the Senate is the supreme law of the land.
Now, why do I mention that?
Because the U.N. treaty is such a treaty.
It was approved overwhelmingly by the Senate right after the war.
Pardon me, Ray.
I thought that the U.N. charter was simply passed as a law with simple majorities in both houses and wasn't officially a treaty.
No, it is.
As a matter of fact, the Senate voted on it.
I think it was something to two here.
I think I had that in my article here.
I should have Googled it before I contradicted you.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
So it's the law of the land.
So what does that mean?
That means that anybody who takes an oath, like we military officers did, to protect and defend the Constitution are duty-bound to defend the Constitution.
The Constitution says that's the law of the land.
Now, what does the U.N. treaty say?
Well, it just embodies what was clear before the war and all the more clear after, that you can't allow people to strike out in other countries unless there's an imminent danger to that first country.
And so it says, look, there is no possibility of an offense against another country without there being an imminent threat from that other country.
Otherwise, you have to come to the Security Council.
We will adjudicate it.
We'll give you permission or not.
But that's what has to happen now.
And even the Congress and the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, only Congress can declare war, not the U.N. or the President or anybody else.
Yeah, that's true.
And I feel that strongly.
And I think that the subsequent legislation that sort of gives the President war powers, so to speak, is unconstitutional.
But, you know, there we are with those ambiguities.
What I'm saying is that the clear-cut thing is that this treaty is the supreme law of the land.
It does not allow preemptive.
It does not allow preventive.
It doesn't allow any attack on another country unless that country poses an imminent threat to it.
Now, Iraq did not pose any manner of imminent threat to us, and neither does Iran.
And so any officer like Fallon or anybody else who's pledged to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States realizes that this, what Nuremberg called a war of aggression, is strictly verboten, and that cooperating with that is to participate in a war crime.
And that saying, I was only following orders, well, that doesn't work.
That doesn't work anymore, not after Nuremberg.
So, you know, Fallon knows all about this.
And, you know, I'll tell you something about Fallon, and maybe this shows my own little prejudices.
You know, Fallon never tried to be among the hoi-era story, you know, the big people in Washington.
He was always a commander, okay?
He never suffered from the Colin Powell syndrome, okay?
He was a working-class Irishman from Camden, New Jersey, okay?
He went to Naval ROTC, just like a lot of the rest of us went to Army ROTC at Villanova.
He was no sort of the golden spoon-in-the-mouth type of guy.
And still, you know, he's willing to speak his mind.
So he's a different breed of cat, and what I'm trying to encourage him to do is to stay that breed of cat and spring forward now, as he needs to, to do the kinds of things that his colleagues intimidated or his colleagues shell-shocked or his colleagues just too cowardly won't do.
And I have some reasonable expectation that he will.
You know, it would be nice, the way our government's supposed to work, if the Senate Armed Forces Committee under Senator Levin should subpoena, should order Fallon to come testify and ask him why he resigned.
That would make eminent good sense.
But Senator Levin, I'm sorry to say, has received more money from AIPAC than any other senator in the history of the U.S. Senate.
And he also, you know, to be a little bit more fair, I don't think it's the money.
I think that Senator Levin is one of those who genuinely feels that the interests of the state of Israel are synonymous with the interests of the United States, and so I don't accuse him of treason or anything like that.
I just think he's terribly misguided, because over the long run, or even over the intermediate run, even over the short run, if you look at what's happened to Israel over the length of the Bush administration, that world is much more dangerous for Israel now.
Take Lebanon.
Two years ago, there was a reasonable prospect that Lebanon would return to its rather pacified country, the one that used to be the commercial center of that part of the world, and they had a confessional kind of agreement.
They were getting on together.
And what happens?
The United States government encourages Israel to attack Lebanon, which they do, and they get their nose bloodied, and now what do they have?
Now what do they have on their border?
Not the prospect of a peaceful, power-sharing, multi-confessional government as was the case 25 years ago, but rather a government dominated by Hezbollah, and there's no way to get around there.
So these policies are incredibly short-sighted, incredibly myopic.
If you're looking at Israel's future, and I care deeply for Israel's future, and I think that this whole business about having to follow a policy of right makes right, but we still can, and, you know, delay this, or, you know, do this assassination here, or use helicopter gunships to wipe out these folks, that that's incredibly short-sighted, and that not only are the demographics, but the weaponry and everything else are against an Israel that will not come to terms and talk with people and try to work out an equitable solution to the question of the occupied territories.
You know, those territories now have been occupied for longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe.
It's more than 40 years now.
That should come to an end.
This government, our government, has not encouraged Israel to make any kinds of compromises, and that goes back to what I call George Bush's fixation.
Fixation with the notion that Israel needs to be first and foremost in its calculations, and that's what I think could well lead to an attack on Iran.
Well, I want to ask you, you know, you mentioned the comparison between the run-up to the Iraq War and the run-up to this one in terms of dissent.
It seems like they have the story wrapped up a little tighter, I guess.
At least Iran has a nuclear program, and so it's too confusing from there for the average reporter to try to differentiate or something.
I don't know.
But one major difference, though, between now and then, even though the lies are so very comparable, is the drumbeat then was so loud, and they basically demanded that all of the American people get on board for this thing and let's all cheer it.
Whereas the whole spin now is much more subtle.
They're laying the groundwork of all these lies to justify the war, but it doesn't seem like they're even bothering trying to get all the different power factions in this country on board for this thing.
I wonder, is there anybody in Washington or wherever in America that wants this war other than perhaps Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and their lobbyists and the Israel lobby?
It doesn't seem like the oil men want it.
It doesn't seem like the average establishment foreign policy geniuses want it.
Well, that's a good question.
Congress is not going to do anything to stop it.
That's one of the main problems.
You know, what really is ludicrous for people like John Conyers is, oh, if he bombs, if he starts a war with Iran, well then we might think of maybe beginning to consider maybe even moving toward slowly but surely impeachment.
Well, you know, I'm sure that has Cheney and Bush shaking in their boots.
Yeah, exactly.
So there's no opposition from Congress.
So what's afoot here?
It's really important to remember that unlike the situation before Iraq, there needs to be no prolonged disposition of troops, no prolonged deployment of troops to the area.
This is going to be surgical strike kind of thing.
This is going to be the Air Force and Navy missiles and Navy flyers.
So we're not likely to have much warning at all.
And I grant you that the drumbeat is not as intense as it was before Iraq.
But, you know, give them time.
The President is just home one day so far.
And what he said out there in the Middle East is troubling enough.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense, Scott.
But a lot of the things that Bush has decided to do haven't made a lot of sense.
And I think the major factor here is whoever, whoever in George W. Bush's life has held him accountable for his actions, no one.
Yeah, not ever.
Wow.
Yeah, that's a pretty good way to look at it.
A man always extremely removed from the consequences of his behavior.
Well, but so what about the question of who's behind this then?
I mean, it doesn't seem, and hell, I don't mean to acquit them because I don't know.
But my guess is that the oil lobbyists in Houston are not pushing for air war against Iran.
Who is pushing it?
Who wants this besides Junior and Dick?
Oh, Elliot Abrams, Arch Neocon, some of the others.
You know, if you look at the documents, at the project for a new American century, and even, you know, the clean break document prepared for then Prime Minister Netanyahu back in 1996, this is all part of a carefully laid strategic plan to, I think, incredibly foolishly dominate that part of the world.
Now, you would think that a bloody nose in Iraq would deter them or at least chasten them in their objectives here.
But there's no indication, there's no sign of contrition or even admitting that they were wrong.
And Bush, you know, he's really very, he's so protected, you know.
He is so much in his own little bubble that I doubt that he knows, for example.
Well, let me put it this way.
There was a week, it was a week after the whole fiasco about the so-called Iranian weapons that weren't found, that weren't there.
It was a week after that that Bush got up and started saying, you know, we're finding these things and we're tracking them down.
And when we, you know, when we get one of these Iranians themselves, we're going to, we're going to get them, you know.
So I'm sure that he's not being fully informed and his instincts are very, very dangerous.
And so you get a person like Cheney and Elliott Abrams and all they need is a little spark.
You know, how, one way this could all start.
And this guy, wait, wait, let me ask you real quick.
This guy, Elliott Abrams, this is Norman Podhoret's son-in-law, right?
Right.
Well, you know, he has quite a reputation.
You know, he was an Iran-contra guy and he lied through his teeth to Congress.
And, you know, he was just, had the poor luck to be in Washington.
John Negroponte, who also had trouble with the truth, was out there in Tegucigalpa.
So he got off free, but they had the goods on Elliott.
And so he had to plead guilty to two charges.
He was convicted.
And then George H.W. Bush appointed him on the Christmas Eve before he left office.
So you have, you know, convicted a guy who lied to Congress.
And, you know, if you look at his actions, look at that The House Affair article.
There's another little thing I learned from, actually from Jimmy Carter's son, who was over there with Jimmy about two months ago.
He learned that when Cornelisa Rice was in Israel and extracted a promise from Olnert to stop building new apartments there in the occupied territories, she breathed a sigh of relief, made the announcement, got on the plane.
And when she got home, she saw an announcement that Olnert had announced that 700 new housing units would be put up within the next couple of months.
So she asked Elliott Abrams about that.
He just smiled and he said, well, you know.
And what was the lesson?
The lesson is, Gandhi, I run things around here.
Don't forget that.
And don't think you can conclude these kinds of things without getting my chop on it.
So it's very, very clear that Elliott Abrams is running things.
He's a very dangerous person.
He's an arch neocon.
And he's got a lot of influence.
He's the Deputy National Security Advisor.
And Stephen Hedley, you know, if you watch Stephen, you know that he's not much of a threat to anybody.
And so Elliott is really running the NSC and Cheney is aiding and abetting him.
Bobby Gates is sitting on the sidelines smelling which way the winds are blowing.
And so, you know, this is the situation as I see it.
There's no longer any Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal, so-called, by Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff.
There's just a Cheney-Abrams cabal with Gates sort of playing it safe.
And so unless something happens here to intervene, it looks to me very much like Scott Ritter and other people are right, that there will be an attack on Iran.
And, God, you know, if people would have some small sense of what that means, you know, for John Conyers and the others, oh, that may be well-intentioned.
This would be, you know, this would make Iraq look like a volleyball game between Mount St. Ursula and St. Luke's, you know.
This would be big-time war.
Well, now, Ray, we're already over time, so let's just go for it.
Tell me what you think are some likely consequences of an air war against Iran.
Let's say they don't even start with the nuclear program.
Let's say, like Phil Giraldi's article on the blog there at the American Conservative, that they basically just start with targeted strikes on some Quds Force so-called training camps inside Iran.
What do you think is likely to happen after that?
I think the Iranians are too smart to be provoked by that.
I think they've got their forces dispersed.
They know what's coming.
They will suffer that without being provoked.
What I worry about is a different kind of provocation.
Let's say one of our ships is sunk in the Persian Gulf, okay, let's say a destroyer or maybe an intelligence ship, and Iran is automatically blamed for that.
Well, that would be judged by Abrams and others as a costless belly, and there could be, you know, quote, retaliation for that.
Now, would the Iranians sink one of our ships?
Not in your life would they sink one of our ships.
Well, who might have an interest in starting this war?
Well, could it be that some Iranian, some ship, some little boat painted with Iranian colors but really run by some other country would sink one of our ships, Israel, for example?
No.
But there's no precedent in history for anything like that.
Is there, Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst who was working at the CIA back in the day when this exact thing happened?
Well, you know, that's what people don't realize that the Israelis did precisely this.
Back on June 8, 1967, they tried to sink the USS Liberty and not only take no prisoners but make sure there were no survivors.
By a fluke, by them intercepting a message saying that the 6th Fleet was sending fighter bombers to do battle with them, that was the only reason why they ceased and desisted and the USS Liberty limped back to port with 34 Navy people killed, 174 injured, and the whole thing, Scott, the whole thing covered up.
Now, was that orchestrated with Lyndon Johnson's administration or they just did it?
Well, no.
In my view, it was not orchestrated with LBJ, but LBJ did get on the horn with the head of the 6th Fleet and tell them to recall the fighter bombers that had fallen off the carriers to do battle with whoever it was that was striking at the Liberty.
He did that personally?
He did that, yeah, and we know that because the adjutant to the commander of the 6th Fleet was sworn to secrecy about that until his boss died and he died two years ago, okay?
So we know that.
So what does that mean?
Well, that means, Scott, very simply, that on June 8, in the subsequent years, 1967, the Israeli government learned that it could literally get away with murder, murder, I mean 34 people killed on that ship, 174, okay, that they could get away with murder and the United States Congress, the United States administration, the United States Navy, for God's sake, would cover up for them, and they could have got away with it except some of those lawyers had a bad conscience, the Navy lawyers, and they've confessed that they were forced to do this.
Now, one of the things about this, of course, is that John McCain, Sr., was in charge of this investigation, so-called, and that's, you know, the sins of the father can't be visited on the son, but the son gratuitously endorsed a book written by a person that said, oh, the Israelis have done this terrible mistake.
Well, if you look at the NSA tapes, Scott, if you listen to the NSA tapes, isn't Israeli pilots saying, well, wait a second, wait a second, there's an American flag down, that's an American ship.
Control, control the pilot, fire, sink it, okay?
I mean, it's not really ambiguous.
Now, what is ambiguous is exactly what the Israelis had in mind, and there are a couple of good theories about that which we can't go into now, but it is not at all ambiguous that that ship was deliberately attacked with the idea of sinking it, and that the Israelis got off scot-free.
Well, and this was right in the middle of their war with Egypt, right?
Well, it was.
That's the context, right?
Yeah, and one of the best explanations I can give for it is that they were going up on the Golan Heights the next day.
They knew that this ship was an intelligence intercept ship.
They didn't want to give the U.S. prior notice about this, and yet they didn't have secure communications up that way, and so they just wanted to get rid of this possibility that Liberty would tell Washington what they intended to do, and they would have to contend with the ambassador storming in and saying, look, you promised not to go up against Syria.
The other equally possible explanation is the fact that this ship, the USS Liberty was just 13 miles off Al Arish in the Sinai, okay?
Egyptian prisoners, numbering about 1,000, had been taken in the Sinai.
They were a real burden.
They had to feed and water and all these kinds of things, prisoners.
Two Israeli journalists were there and watched the Israeli authorities line these folks up, have them dig their own graves, shot them, and buried them right there.
They looked up and said, my God, what is that ship right out there?
International waters, but just 13 miles out, and they found out that it was a U.S. ship.
Not only that, but these crazy antennae were covering and probably intercepting this whole thing.
We had to sink it, and it was then that the Israeli fighter bombers and torpedo boats did their damnedest to do that.
There are a lot of survivors from Liberty, and they can tell you a chapter or verse about how it went.
The point is that, as George Washington warned us, our very first military president, there is this danger of having a passionate attachment to the perceived needs of another country to identify those needs with those of our own country, and that just doesn't make any sense.
In this case, he gets involved in a much bigger war.
Wow.
All right.
Given the consequences, you think that if it's a bigger war, he said the limited strikes you don't think would be enough to provoke them, that they'll restrain themselves.
But if there's a provocation of the type you're describing, something major that escalates into full-scale air war, at least, against Iran, what do you think they'll do?
Or what do you think might happen regardless of what they want, even?
Well, the thing that bothers me most, Scott, and the thing that they could do most readily, is with their Shia supporters in southern Iraq, cut the supply line.
That is, our vital supply line between Kuwait and Baghdad.
It's easily cut.
And what would happen then?
Well, the way I put it is, instead of taking 52 hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, they would be taking 52,000 U.S. troops hostage because they would be cut off from their supply lines to Kuwait, and they are not able to be supplied by air.
There are just too many of them.
And so what would that mean?
Well, what really troubles me in this respect is that the folks running the White House and the Defense Department at this point, they don't really see much difference between nuclear weaponry, these mini-nukes, and high-explosive armament.
You know, that's what we have these mini-nukes for.
You know, 52,000 of our guys get cornered.
Well, we'll threaten them, and if they don't cease and desist, we'll use one of these things.
Well, that's how they look at these things.
It's crazy, and it's new in our military thinking.
But what we have is a bunch of marginets there at the highest level, including Admiral Mahmoud, and so that's what they're falling back on.
And if the Iranians try that, well, we'll warn them, just like we warned Saddam Hussein, you know, we've got these weapons, we're going to use them if you act in an untoward manner.
Well, that's not going to work.
That's one thing that really bothers me, and I'm sure that's one thing that really bothered Mullen.
Did he want to be put in the position of risking the lives of so many thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq?
The other things that the Iranians can do, you know, they have these little speedboats, like 500 of them, as I understand it, and they have missiles on them, and they can easily take out the oil heads in the Gulf, the oil heads to places where they want to take them out.
They can mount terrorists.
I mean, you talk about al-Qaeda.
Well, al-Qaeda, their capability for worldwide terrorism, compared to what the Iranian capability is, is like, you know, a high school football team going up against Ohio State.
The Iranians have been doing this for a long time.
They have an incredible array of facilities and capabilities to do this, and I'm not talking just about Israel, and I'm not talking about the Middle East.
They can do it here as well.
So, you know, to mess with the Iranians is quite a different kettle of fish than messing with an Iraqi regime on its back because of the sanctions and because of the war in 1991.
It's a whole different kettle of fish.
That's why the Iranians seem to be so confident.
I hope they're right, but it seems to me that they look at us and say, you know, you'd have to be really crazy to attack us because of what we can do.
Well, you know miscalculations and how they start wars.
I think the Iranians may be a little headstrong themselves and not realize how very crazy our policymakers can be.
You know, people say, well, the price of oil would go up.
Well, you know, so be it, I can see Bush saying.
We'll get it back down, but it's also conceivable, Scott, that they think that this could help John McCain.
If this happened before the election, well, you don't want to switch regimes in the middle of a war.
McCain is the kind of guy that can stand up to these terrorists and the Iranians and all that kind of stuff.
So it's conceivable to me that this would be another double downing by George Bush and Cheney.
What did they get to lose after all?
Maybe it would help McCain, maybe it wouldn't, but hey, it's the only thing we have.
So these are calculus things that I think are going through their heads.
And what I see from the propaganda point of view, what I see from the reality that they could do this tomorrow without much preparation and justify it by all these other things that the mainstream press would pick up on indiscriminately, that's really very worrisome.
But I hope that Admiral Fallon and perhaps some other folks will come forward and say, look, American people, you ought to be aware of this because this is really, really dangerous.
Well, I know I speak on behalf of millions when I thank you for all your efforts along these lines over the years, Ray.
You've been really great to all of us and really appreciate your time on the show today.
Well, thank you, Scott.
