All right, everybody, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Streaming live worldwide on the Internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest is our show's good friend, Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and co-founder of Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
You can find much of what he writes at, I believe, Common Dreams, some at Consortium News.
He's got a new one on the blog at Antiwar.com called Candidates Punt on Iraq-Israel, and actually the latest version of what's mostly the same article is available right now at ConsortiumNews.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
Thank you.
It's very good to have you here, and a typically brave article that you've got here on the Antiwar blog and here at Consortium News, Ray's stray thoughts.
I like that.
They don't seem that stray.
They're pretty much right on point.
And I think what you've done here is you've proffered an explanation for why the war party is so intent on starting a war with Iran that has eluded me this whole time, because, Ray, we know that they haven't been sending EFP bombs to Saudis' guys to kill our troops with.
That's all lies.
And we know that they're not making atomic bombs.
All American intelligence agencies agreed about that last November.
And so all this hype about possible strikes on Iran and all the known, easily predictable, terrible consequences that have been talked about in the media lately, the question has remained, well, what's it all for?
Why?
And you have an explanation, I think.
It's one I hadn't heard yet.
So why don't you go ahead and share your insight with the good people here.
Well, Scott, it's always been an amalgam of motivations driving the people who are running our policy toward the Middle East.
Ever since World War II, there have been two main motives.
One is to ensure the safe delivery or access to oil and gas.
And the second is to secure the State of Israel within safe and, to the extent possible, internationally recognized borders.
So the only real difference here with respect to George W. Bush is that he decided that these twin objectives could be pursued by starting a war with Iraq.
It wasn't enough to deal with the oil as most people do in a commercial way.
We needed to control the oil, number one.
And, of course, the people who were behind the deal here, the invasion of Iraq, the so-called neoconservatives, many of them, and I don't say this disrespectfully, Scott, many of them have great difficulty distinguishing between what they see as the strategic needs of Israel on the one hand and the strategic needs of our country on the other.
Now, this is not to say they're traitors or they're trying to dip us in.
It's an honest sort of thing.
But it's a pernicious thing and unrecognized.
It can get us into really, really deep kimchi here because the people, as I say, running this policy, Elliott Abrams first and foremost, now the people like Cheney who see a connection here with dominance by Israel and us in the Middle East and oil, they're all sort of speaking from the same script.
And, you know, if they still have the influence they have traditionally had over the last seven years with our president, the decider, well, then I think that the Israelis will have additional incentive now.
You know, they've always had lots of incentive.
I've been saying for a while that the odds are greater than even that Israel will somehow cause a war with Iran before Bush and Cheney leave.
Now they have real powerful additional incentive.
Why?
Well, because Iraq, the premier of Iraq has said that he's going to insist on a timetable for withdrawal of all U.S. troops before he'll renew permission for us to stay past New Year's Eve or New Year's Day.
And this has to, you know, this has to really have the Israelis scratching their heads and wondering, wow, this wasn't such a good idea at all, persuading the so-called neocons to start a war in Iraq and the thought that that would make this region safer for us.
It certainly made it a lot less safe.
And if indeed the Iraqi leaders are able to prevail here and the United States doesn't replace Maliki or the United States just doesn't thumb its nose at what the Iraqi leaders are saying, then Israel will be in a more, a more really dangerous situation from their point of view, much more so than before the war in Iraq.
So it's a sea change.
It's a change in the political landscape.
And, you know, I'm no expert on these areas, but I'm really amazed that no one has pointed this out or no one has debunked this notion.
Maybe with my piece out there in the ether, perhaps people will come and say, well, you've not got this right.
But I'm definitely afraid that I do have it right.
And if I do, we're going to have hostilities with Iran before this administration takes office.
The Israelis see that the war in Iraq was actually a very bad deal for them, and they want the American occupation in Iraq to last.
Meanwhile, Nouri al-Maliki and the Dawa Party Supreme Islamic Council types apparently are playing their get the hell out of here card because they don't really need us.
They are the majority after all, or represent the majority after all.
And so this could be part of a ploy by the Israelis to just keep America in Iraq by hook or by crook.
Well, that's correct.
This is not to say that there aren't a great many Israelis who are deathly afraid of the possibility that Iran could get a nuclear weapon.
But no one, not even the Israeli generals, are predicting that Iran is anywhere near that, nor could it get one before January of next year.
So the timeline driving all this, of course, is the fact that our president and vice president have only six months left in office.
They have pretty much undertaken, as Olmert himself has said, to take care of Iran before they leave office.
He said that publicly, by the way, missed in U.S. media, surprise, surprise.
And so if he has made that undertaking, and if Cheney, as seems to me to be the case, is still calling the shots, that's why you have people like the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen sort of plaintively saying, you know, a third front is really not what we need right now.
Besides everything else, we don't have enough troops for the second front in Afghanistan.
And this would really be, you know, they could seal the straits.
Who is he talking to?
Is he warning the Israelis?
Give me a break.
He's trying to wake up our congresspeople.
He's trying to wake up the people in this country to realize what a catastrophe it would be to get involved in a shooting war with Iran.
And so I don't see him shaking his finger at the Israelis.
I see him as trying to build up some public momentum so that people can see what the game really is, if Cheney prevails.
Pardon my naivete, but it would seem to me that if the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is saying, Mr. President, we really, really don't want to do this, that that's a qualitative difference between the situation with Richard Myers before the war in Iraq, where he hung his head and said, whatever you say, sir.
Well, there is a qualitative difference between Richard Myers and Mike Mullen.
I mean, that much is clear.
We know Myers proved of all the torture and everything else now.
No, Mullen is doing his level best.
But Scott, we have to realize that we're talking about uniformed officers in the United States Navy in this case, armed forces.
And, you know, they're trained to discharge orders.
And, you know, the president we have here is Admiral Fallon.
Now, Fallon was head of CENTCOM, the command that has purview of that part of the world.
And he watched how policy was being made even before he took official command.
You know, he watched the debacle in Gaza as Abrams and Cheney tried to start a civil war and displace the Hamas there.
And he watched the way policymaking is done.
And he just said to himself, look, I'm going to speak out about this.
I'm going to make sure everyone knows what a really dumb idea would be to attack Iran.
If they remove me, well, you know, I'll be just as happy.
Because what I really don't want, what I really, really don't want as a commanding officer of CENTCOM is to be on the receiving end of an order from someone like Cheney and or Elliott Abrams saying, okay, implement Plan A.
After which half of my troops in Iraq are in severe jeopardy of losing their lives.
I care too much about my troops.
So if they don't listen to me, I'm just as well out of there.
And that's the way it happened.
That's why he left.
I'm convinced.
And so will Mullen leave?
I don't know.
Would Gates interfere?
Gates's reputation for standing up for principles is not very good.
You know, what we have here is a situation which is very dangerous.
And to their credit, the uniformed officers, the senior ones, have been the ones responsible for preventing this so far.
But, you know, with Congress beating the drums and what we really need, Scott, and I've said this before, I think, on your program, what we really need is the real initiation of impeachment proceedings where these senior military people would say, well, wait a second now.
That's what this is about, huh?
The President and Cheney are trying to save their political skins.
And that might be enough to swing the balance and say, look, Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, we think this is suicide for our troops.
And we would very much like you to put our names right under Admiral Fallon at the top of the retirement list.
And we're announcing that this afternoon.
That's what it would take.
And I don't know if they're up to that.
But most people tell me no.
The order given, they'll discharge it.
Yeah, it seems like the Congress is willing to go along with whatever Bush says, as long as that's also what AIPAC wants.
You know, the amount of money and the massaging that's gone into this, I mean, AIPAC actually drafted those two resolutions in the Senate and House, which are equivalent to declarations of war, recommending, as they do, blockades.
Even the language in those things is meretricious.
It's a fancy way of saying deceitful.
In one place, for example, one of these whereas clauses, whereas Iran could get a nuclear weapon in 2009, according to the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, comma, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, well, what did the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 say?
It said, quote, Iran could conceivably get a nuclear weapon as early as late 2009, but we all consider that to be very unlikely.
Well, it actually didn't even say that, Ray.
It said they could be technically capable of producing highly enriched uranium enough to make a bomb by the end of 2009, but we deem that very unlikely.
Right.
You're right.
And, of course, the operative thing here is that they forgot to include the clause that says, we deem that extremely unlikely.
So there's a lot of playing fast and furious with the truth here.
The media in this country is, as you know better than I, is, well, I call it the fawning corporate media.
We won't get much help from them, so it's really up to folks like us to try to spread the word around and let Americans know that if we go to war with Iran, it's not because of any perceived U.S. interests.
It's pure and simple, a rather passionate attachment that our president and vice president have to the state of Israel, and it's overblown fears of what would happen if Iran's nuclear facilities are not destroyed to the extent they can be at present before Cheney and Bush leave.
Well, now, I've always been confused about this.
What do Bush and Cheney care about the Jews in Israel?
I mean, Bush is the grandson of a Nazi, basically.
Dick Cheney is a redneck from Wyoming.
I've seen no real indications that he's a holy roller who's trying to force Jesus to come back faster or any of this John Hagee stuff.
What do you suppose is the motivation of those two?
Elliott Abrams, okay, I guess that makes sense.
But why Cheney and Bush?
Well, Bush is a very strange character, Scott.
I don't need to tell you that, I suppose.
I've perceived something along those lines in his character before you.
And he has this incredible identification with the Israeli leaders.
Now, you can see this in many things.
One of the most poignant, I think, was when Ehud Olmert saw fit to give him fulsome praise before the press on his penultimate visit out that way.
And you can watch, you see the cameras on Bush, he's sort of turning into Buddy, you know.
He's just saying, oh, these guys really like me.
They call him a saint over there in Israel, okay?
Now, that's sort of anecdotal.
What's important?
What's important is what important people who know what's going on say.
And I think I've mentioned this before, but Brent Scowcroft, the general who used to run the National Security Council for the first President Bush, saw fit to say in late 2004, when he, that is, Scowcroft, was still chair of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Scowcroft, the quintessential bureaucrat who would never say anything to the press that he didn't fully intend to say, went to the Financial Times in London and said, and I quote, Now, Scowcroft lost his job the next Monday, was told never to darken the White House doorstep again.
But the question is, why would he say something like that?
Why in the world?
Why in the world would Scowcroft, so close to the President's father, and so much in the train of things, so much in the flow of information as head of this very prestigious panel, why would he see fit to go to the press and warn about this?
Well, I think he just wanted us to know that there's something a little screwy about our President, that he has this identification with swashbuckling people like Ariel Sharon and Omar, and it's a very dangerous situation, and God knows what he has promised them.
But as I speculated in my piece, the way that hostilities are likely to start would be with a wink and a nod from Cheney and Abrams.
The Israelis would do something that would cause them to be attacked by Iran one way or another.
And then, as Cheney and Bush have both promised, publicly, mind you, publicly, the U.S. would be in with both feet and certainly would initiate Plan A, that Mike Mullen and the rest of the Joint Chiefs are definitely afraid they're going to be given the order to do.
Do you think they would even bother manufacturing a pretext?
I mean, why not just start the war?
They've been saying they're going to for years now.
Well, that's not the way you do things.
You know, it's a little embarrassing to be sending U.S. troops into a situation like that, having them shot down or having them cut off from their main supply lines in Iraq.
You have to have some sort of manufactured pretext for this.
Well, they have the nuclear program.
I'm just saying, here's what I'm saying.
If they had done the running start for the Iraq War and gotten a U.N. plane shot down or whatever, I think most of us would have saw right through it.
And certainly with all this hype leading up to this attack, if all of a sudden there's some terrorist attack in Israel and they try to blame it on Iran or something, wouldn't everybody just be suspicious?
It would seem kind of unnecessary and too risky.
Well, Scott, I think the answer to that is you would be suspicious.
I would be suspicious.
But, you know, not too many people listen to what you and I say.
They turn on Fox News, and that's what they're counting on.
I mean, as I say in most of my speeches, Scott, the sea change, the most important sea change that I've seen in this country in the 45 years I've been here in Washington, is the fact that we no longer have in any real sense a free media.
And that is big.
That is really big.
So these folks pretty much feel that they can do what they want and fall from being chastened by the Iraqi experience, the so-called mainstream media.
I call them the fawning corporate media, are playing this the same way with people like Michael Gordon.
I call them Aluminum Tubes Gordon, you know?
Totally discredited by his performance in Before You Rock.
He's taking stenographic notes of what the White House wants him to say and put it on the front page of the Times.
So, yeah, am I worried?
I sure am worried.
What's going to stop it?
Well, if we get the word out to enough Americans, if we get to our congresspeople and our senators and say, look, this has more to do with simply defending Israel.
This is a real cauldron.
This would be a regional, if not a world war.
Mini-nukes have been even mentioned.
This is very disturbing.
I mean, mini-nukes.
What are mini-nukes?
Well, you know, the folks running our policy toward that area, they see no real difference between a mini-nuke, so-called, and a high-explosive weapon.
And, you know, with that kind of attitude, we are in real danger of getting involved in a situation where we're going to lose a lot of people, we're going to kill a lot of people, and we will not be able to extract ourselves, you know, for as long as, well, for years.
Well, and the thing is, too, is this is horrible for Israel.
Assuming they do this, this isn't going to be any better for them than having the U.S. invade Iraq has been.
Well, you know, that's the conundrum here.
Most Israelis, as I think most Americans, if they were better informed, would be against this kind of thing.
It's an incredibly myopic policy that Israel has adopted where you apply force in any and all circumstances.
The thing that really sticks in my mind, the best example recently of this, was the invasion, the attack on Lebanon exactly two years ago.
Now, Lebanon had just come through a whole year of reconstruction, of renewal, of the political parties working out the kind of multi-confessional government that they used to have way back before the 70s, you know, and it was the commercial capital of the Middle East.
It looked like Lebanon finally was getting back on its feet.
And what do the Israelis do?
They attack it.
They kill a thousand Lebanese.
They destroy the infrastructure.
And what's the result?
Right now, they have a Lebanon that is dominated by a party that's extremely hostile to the Israelis.
In effect, whereas they had a realistic prospect of having a relatively peaceful situation at one of their borders, now, by virtue of the violence, they've virtually ensured that they'll have a hostile neighbor on that border and their solution for that is more and more violence, more and more war.
It's not going to work out, and that's the problem, because I care about the Israelis.
And for them to have this kind of myopia where they can't even, you know, long-range interests, forget it, middle-range, forget that too, even short-range interests, they're just not going to be able to do what they have been able to do with our help over the years.
They're going to have to become more sensible, start working things out in an honest way with the people that feel grievances against them.
Well, you know, what's funny is it was just, well, it's not that funny, but I guess it's ironic, it was just a year before that, the war in Lebanon, that the Israelis and the Americans insisted, based on the, I guess, still unsolved assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafah Kariri, that the Syrians had to get their army out of southern Lebanon, where they'd been invited by Henry Kissinger before the first Gulf War, and it was the forcing of the Syrian troops out of southern Lebanon, where they were mostly welcome, that created the giant power vacuum that Hezbollah began to fill anyway, and then, as you say, bombing them only strengthened Hezbollah even further after that.
Yeah, and so, in answer to your question, I don't know how it can be that an extremist group of folks can dominate the Israeli government to the point where they're very enlightened, more enlightened than our citizenry, will just acquiesce in the notion that an attack on Iran will serve them well.
You know, you can look back in history and say, well, okay, you know, if you were of Jewish extraction and your grandparents or your parents knew the Holocaust and all, you'd darn well want to make sure that you wouldn't have to rely on anybody to defend your interests.
Our own country's experience there in neglecting the plight of Jews for far too long into the war is a case in point.
But there comes a point where you have to sort of face up to the weaponry of the new age, the fact that there are people with legitimate grievances, and that Israel, in just another decade, will become a minority, that is, the Jewish people in that area will become a minority from the West Bank to the Mediterranean, and something has to be done besides building walls, besides shooting people, besides, you know, helicopter gunships and bulldozers built in the United States wreaking havoc among the Palestinians.
There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world.
They watch this on television every evening, and you tell me that that has nothing to do with the upsurge, seven-fold upsurge in international terrorism since we attacked Iraq.
Well, and this goes right back to the question at the beginning of the difference between Israeli interests and American interests, and the problem of the war party in America not being able to distinguish between the two, I guess I tend to suspect it's a less honest confusion than you characterize it as.
But either way, the fact remains that our interests not only are not one and the same with Israel exactly on the same page, but in fact are quite opposite.
I mean, when Osama bin Laden put out his declaration of war against the United States, it was about a month after the first Kwana massacre, and he went on and on all about it.
That was, according to James Bamford, the thing that pushed him over the edge.
Yeah.
For people to neglect the root causes of things like Al-Qaeda and their popular appeal, you know, it's just counterproductive.
Because, you know, I guess I've used this analogy before, but going against terrorism is very much like fighting malaria.
What you do with malaria, of course, is you find the swamp where the mosquitoes breed, and then you set up the three platoons of sharpshooters, and you try to shoot all the mosquitoes as they leave the swamp, right?
Sure, yeah, with howitzers.
Well, that doesn't work, does it?
What do you do?
You drain the swamp.
That's what you do.
You drain the swamp, and the swamp of grievances.
That four million Palestinians and countless millions of others, Arabs suffering under repressive regimes that we have propped up, those are a lot of mosquitoes.
Unless we start addressing those grievances, and unless we start recapturing the old biblical notion, the Judeo-Christian and Muslim notion of justice, you know, the peace in the biblical sense is really just the experience of justice.
It's no more nor less than that.
Without justice, there'll be no peace.
Well, you know, there are people in America, apparently, you know, all this truth notwithstanding, there are people who have been convinced that there's some sort of imminent threat, and I hear tell in the neighborhood and things like that of people saying, yeah, why don't we just nuke the Iranians?
And I don't think anybody can point to any sort of actual crisis or something that needs to be preempted here, but basically the message has gotten through.
Our government really, really, really wants to start a war with these people.
Can we, please?
Can we?
And the answer basically is, eh, go ahead.
Yeah, I think what would be good would be for people like Admiral Fallon, General Zinni, who was one of his predecessors as head of CENTCOM, if they would throw off this self-imposed and unnecessary discipline of not criticizing the commander-in-chief even well after they've retired, if they could go before the American people or the American Congress, if Congress would have them, and tell them what a disaster this would be, I think people might listen.
But then, of course, you'd have to have Fox News and the others pick it up, and so there you have the conundrum again.
How do we get the word out?
I think, Scott, the time has come, as Martin Luther King once said, This is important enough for us to go occupy our Congress peoples' or our senators' offices and say, look, you haven't been well informed about this.
This is what Admiral Fallon says.
This is what Admiral Mullen says.
How can you so blithely dismiss their expertise and start a regional, if not world war for what?
Because Israel is afraid that if Iran gets one nuclear weapon some years hence, that it will not be deterred by the 200 that Israel already has.
It doesn't make any sense once the facts get out, and that's our challenge, it seems to me, to spread some truth around, get it out there, and get the equivalence of common sense, around in the space of six months there in 1776.
Fortunately, for those times, there was no television.
They used to read things, and that pamphlet, as you know, got around and about within the space of three or four months and turned the whole spirit of the country around, saying we need to assert our rights here.
We need to prevent worse from happening from the hands of this dictator.
So how do we do that?
I don't know.
Maybe a one-page flyer in all the supermarkets.
Something that's got to break through here and get beyond what they hear from Fox News.
All right, now let's say that you actually inspired somebody who's going to, right after this show, run down and attempt to debrief their congressman about this kind of thing.
How about listing some easily foreseeable consequences of a war with Iran?
Because I know there's a list of probably ten of them, just right at the top of your head there.
And then maybe if you could expand on the idea of the unintended consequences of starting aggressive wars.
How much time do I have, Scott?
You've got eight minutes, Ray.
It's Ray McGovern, everybody.
Former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern.
Veteran intelligence professional for sanity.
I'm sort of kidding, Scott, because the first time I was asked to speak at a public forum, right after the war started in Iraq, somebody asked me to talk about the lies of the Bush administration leading to the war, and I instinctively said, well, how much time do I have?
Okay, your question again is what people will do?
Well, the obvious consequences in terms of the Iranian shooting at targets in the Middle East, the body army in the Badr Corps in Iraq.
Okay, well, let me make a really good suggestion.
The best person on this is Scott Ritter.
He's been on your show.
He's been on anti-war, this and that.
He was, of course, right before Iraq, as were we veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
We take no solace in that.
Nobody listened.
But, you know, it's nice to have a record of having been right on an important issue such as this.
Now, Scott has written a very good piece.
I'm not sure you all picked it up, but it was on Truthdig two days ago.
Yeah, actually, we linked to it yesterday.
Okay.
And, actually, I interviewed him, and my interview is at the top of the page of Antiwar.com right now.
It's from last Friday, and we discussed all the very same things in his Truthdig article there.
Yeah.
Well, that would be your best ammunition, because Scott knows what he's talking about, and he's been saying this for some time.
Suffice it for my end to point out that our lines of communication, that is the lines of communication and resupply that the U.S. military uses for its troops in Iraq, it goes to Kuwait, up to Baghdad, and elsewhere.
Those lines are incredibly vulnerable to interdiction.
So what happens?
What happens if the balloon goes up?
Well, you know, we have these Revolutionary Guards troops there just across the border in Iran.
I don't think for a moment that they wouldn't be sent en masse into that part of Iraq, cooperating with the Shia in the area to obliterate those lines of communication.
What will happen?
Well, there's no way to resupply our troops.
There's no way to get food or ammunition, water, anything else.
There's no way.
You can't do it by air, okay?
And the result will be we have 150,000 troops in there now, roughly.
So half of those, the ones above the line that we've cut off, the others could retreat to Kuwait, half of those would be taken hostage.
So we're talking about not 52 hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran anymore.
You're talking about 60,000, 70,000 U.S. troops taken hostage.
And so what does the United States military do?
Well, you know, without any troops, it's really, really hard to do anything.
As an infantry officer, you know, I think I know a little bit about that.
You can't fix this with the Air Force, okay?
So what do you do?
Well, back here in Washington, we know what to do.
We have these mini-nukes.
So we threaten the Iranians.
We say, you know, if you don't stop, you don't withdraw, we're going to use these mini-nukes.
And the Iranians say, sorry, we're not going to withdraw.
Then what happens, Scott?
Then what happens?
This is an incredibly volatile situation.
I can't believe that people like the leaders in Congress don't recognize it to be so.
John Conyers saying, for example, oh, just let Bush attack Iran, then we'll impeach him.
That betrays an incredible ignorance with respect to what that would really mean if we or the Israelis kind of forced it upon us to attack Iran.
So this is big stuff.
I've been involved in a good bit of big stuff since Vietnam, and I've never seen a situation where our country has gotten into the kind of situation it is now, all because of a misguided notion that what George Washington himself warned about, namely entangling alliances, what he called passionate attachments by one country to the perceived needs of another, where that could get us into such trouble that we'd have a major war, a third front on our hands within the next couple of months.
Well, it seems like a lot of things are coming together, too.
Tell me, how seriously do you take Maliki's statements that really he wants the U.S. out?
I know I talked with Patrick Coburn, and he said, well, you've got to understand, the Supreme Islamic Council dollar party types still need America.
And so they'll talk a big game, but ultimately they're going to go along with the permanent basing program.
On the other hand, it's been a few weeks since I talked to him, and it sort of seems like they mean it, in that they've decided that the Baader Corps is strong enough with the support of Iran that they don't need us anymore, and that they want us out.
What do you say to that?
Is that part of what's going on here, is America might actually have to get out of there or face war against the Shia?
You're quoting Patrick Coburn there?
Yeah, well, it was Coburn who told me that he thinks they'll eventually go along, because they still need our guys.
Yeah, well, that's what I've always thought, and I have great respect for Patrick.
But as you point out, this statement has been out there for two weeks now.
Maliki clearly is under great domestic pressure, and the Iranians, the Iranians and the Shiites that they're close to are exerting great pressure on him.
So I see it as a very important development.
Whether or not we gauge that Maliki is going to follow through on this, my concern is the Israelis don't have any choice.
They have to assume that he's going to.
That means very few U.S. troops in Iraq next year.
That means we Israelis, while Bush and Cheney are still around, have to do something now to get the United States more embedded, pardon the expression, more embedded, more deeply involved in this area of the world, so that we can count on them to be around for the next couple of years, no matter who wins the election.
Now, I heard Seymour Hersh tell Terry Gross on NPR that his understanding is that Cheney is opposed to Israel starting it.
Cheney wants the U.S. to just go ahead and do it because it will be all our fault anyway, and we'd have to finish the job anyway and that kind of thing.
Then, of course, there's the report in the Sunday Times from last weekend that Bush has given the Israelis an amber light to go ahead and get prepared to start the war.
Do you think that's how it's going to play out?
I guess in your blog entry at AntiWar.com, you say that you expect something to start in September or October before the election.
Yeah.
What I say in this latest version is that I think it's a feckless exercise to debate whether the Israelis or Cheney Abrams would start this thing.
They should be looked upon as hand in glove.
I think the Israelis, whether or not they get an explicit little email from Cheney saying, okay, amber really means green, whether they have it or not, they have every reasonable expectation, Congress and the media in our country being what they are, that if they start it, Cheney and Bush will have to come in and end it.
So it's a hand in glove sort of thing.
I don't think disputing or arguing about who's going to actually fire the first shot is really meaningless because both will be in.
I think Israel is almost certainly going to be involved unless Cheney has his way, unless they're right about Cheney.
Because I could see some merit in Israel trying to keep their hands off this kind of thing rather than suffer immediate retaliation from Iran.
But do read Scott Ritter's piece and his interview with you, Scott, because there's a lot of information there and it shows how perilous the situation is.
It's not the only place you can find this kind of thing.
Yeah, truthdig.com is where that was.
And you just have to imagine the Persian Gulf there.
They call it the Persian Gulf for a reason there, that one half of it is Iran and on the other side is all oil interests, Qatar and Bahrain and all these places that seem to be within range of Iranian missiles where they could cause severe economic damage in the Gulf there, in American allied states.
Yeah, and if you remember when Mullen got up for his press conference, he kind of swallowed hard when he was asked about the Iranian threat to close the straits.
Could they do that?
Well, he swallowed hard and he said, well, we could reopen them.
Okay, well, that is very, very revealing because it indicates that our top military official acknowledges that Iran has the capability to close the straits.
And to reopen them, well, read Scott Ritter's piece to see the incredible investment of men and equipment and weaponry that would be necessary to, quote, reopen the straits, end quote.
Well, and I'm sorry, if I can just keep you another minute here, Ray.
I'm already over time, so I figure I might as well push it.
No problem.
One of the themes that's happened here lately in the last year or so, and I'm thinking specifically of the reporting of the great Gareth Porter from IPS News, is that the reasons why the military doesn't want to do it become Cheney's arguments for doing it.
And I'm thinking about there was the article by Nancy Youssef in McClatchy newspapers last August where Cheney wanted to do strikes against the Quds Force because he was accusing them of backing Sadr's Mahdi Army and was trying to use that as an excuse.
And according to Gareth Porter, the military came back and had a study that said, well, the problem with that is the theory of escalation dominance, and the Iranians will have too much of a capability to control the level of escalation.
That's not like they could ever conquer America, but they could control the situation on the battlefield to too great an extent.
The Americans want to be able to dictate every move on the chessboard and they're worried that this could get out of control.
And Cheney said, aha, see, the Iranians are running things in Iraq, and the Iranians are a giant threat, and that's why we have to bomb them.
And I wonder if Cheney looks at even arguments in the White House about the kinds of things in Scott Ritter's article that says, in terms of escalation dominance, we would have to escalate and escalate and escalate and escalate in order to do this thing even kind of successfully, however you might even define that.
And yet, at the same time, Scott Ritter is only proving what a dangerous threat the Iranian regime is.
And in a sense, this is the kind of thing that the War Party likes to play off on and say, see, we do have to attack them.
It's now or never.
It's Hitler in 1939.
Well, Scott, you really put your finger on a very, very important factor here.
This so-called, quote, escalation dominance, end quote, is key.
None other than Gerson, one of the President's closest advisors and speechwriters, has put that in the Washington Post, that the American military are deathly afraid of getting involved in a tit-for-tat in the Persian Gulf because we don't have, quote, escalation dominance.
What does that mean?
That means that if the die is cast and things get out of hand, the Iranians have the upper hand.
Simple.
Simple as that.
The only thing we have going for us then are these mini-nukes, and that scares me to death.
But that may be one of the things that these crazy people are falling back on.
So what do we have here?
We have a situation where the President's going to be the decider.
He's not going to be listening to the likes of Admiral Mullen or even Gerson anymore because he's out of the White House.
Who's he going to listen to?
Elliot Abrams?
You know, Ron Susskind had that wonderful book, One Percent Doctrine.
He talks about how the White House was run.
And there was an email circulated that if you wanted to influence the President, the best way to do that is to be the last person to see him on any given day.
Now, we see that all the time.
We notice now that Bill Burns is going out to talk with the Iranian folks on the nuclear aspect of this thing.
Well, what happened?
No doubt.
Condoleezza Rice got to see the President last thing one evening, and the announcement was made before Cheney could put his chop on it.
We know that's what happened with the North Korean softening there, was that Cheney was in the Middle East threatening Iran.
And while he was out of town, they went to the White House and said, you know, now's our chance.
We can make a deal with North Korea.
And Bush said, whatever, it's $4.50.
Let's go.
I've got to do my exercise.
Well, you know, it's not really funny because I think that's the way the thing does work.
I think Cheney and his people do control the flow of information to the President.
I don't think that.
I mean, that is well supported by now.
If people don't realize who's been running this country for the last seven years, after all the revelations with respect to illegal wiretapping, with respect to torture, with respect to all manner of indignities that we've suffered, if they don't realize that Cheney is the one that the President is listening to, well, there's no hope for us at all.
And so what does this mean?
This means that we're facing a very, very difficult situation.
So just to say once again that our founders, you know, the people who came from this great Commonwealth of Virginia where I now live, I mean, they foresaw that something like this was going to happen.
And these were really wise men, really wise people.
And, you know, they saw that a president might start acting like a king.
And so they put into our Constitution no less than four times the provision, what you do, you know.
They didn't want another revolution.
I mean, one revolution is quite enough, thank you very much.
They didn't want, you know, a military coup like we had in Latin America.
What they wanted was an orderly political procedure to take care of what would happen if a president started abusing his office.
And that's called impeachment.
And that percentage has got the ball rolling.
There's a ray of hope that that could happen now.
And so one of the fruitful avenues to pursue here is to get people to contact their congresspeople, their senators, particularly those on judiciary in the House, and say, look, you know, what more do you need?
What more do you need than a president deliberately lying to our representatives in Congress to deceive them out of their constitutional prerogative to declare or otherwise authorize war?
It doesn't get any worse than that.
Why don't we remove this president, or at least move against him?
What would that achieve?
Well, I think the most hopeful thing it would achieve would be to change the sentiment in this country.
The media would have to take acknowledgment of all this, and our uniformed military would be strengthened in their resolve not to commit what would amount to war crimes because Iran has not threatened us and does pose no threat to us.
Iran has actually posed no threat to anybody in that whole area.
So impeachment is the key here.
Our founders laid it all down.
And I live just about a mile from where George Mason is buried.
He was the one that pretty much wrote.
He and Madison wrote half the Constitution each.
And in the end, he wouldn't sign it because there was no Bill of Rights yet.
And on a clear evening, I can hear Mason moaning, saying, My God, you know, we hung around in Philadelphia that hot summer.
We put an impeachment.
What's wrong with these people?
And instead of real patriots, what we get are the likes of John Warner, the senior distinguished senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, who would not even conduct an inquiry as to what happened in Abu Ghraib because it was a couple of months before the election.
That is unconscionable.
We need to hold the feet of those distinguished gentlemen to the fire.
And that really shows how far we've come, even just since the few years, you know, right before I was born there.
I was raised on the story of how Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator, took a trip to the White House and said, You lied to me, you son of a bitch, and you better resign now because I'm going to vote to convict and remove you from office.
And that Nixon was gone by noon the next day.
And that's the kind of patriot that, not that he wasn't a lunatic, don't get me wrong, but that's the kind of character that you would expect or hope for in someone like John Warner.
But, boy, we sure seem to be falling short these days.
We've come a long way.
A long way.
All right, hey, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today and the insight you provide everybody.
It's Ray McGovern, ConsortiumNews.com.
You can find a new one on the blog at AntiWar.com.
I'll try to get that updated for you, Ray.
And where else do you write?
Common Dreams?
Yeah, I write first and foremost for Bob Perry's excellent website, ConsortiumNews.com.
And then very often I take another look the next day and add to it and sort of embellish it to fix up what needs to be fixed and send it around to others.
But, yeah, you can just Google me the easiest way, Ray McGovern.
And if you do the Google News thing, then you're assured of getting what I write.
Now, by the way, is Consortium News still doing their fundraiser?
They are, yeah.
And I don't know how many of you know about Robert Perry, but he is, in my view, one of the very few, he and Jane Mayer, are the very few top flight investigative reporters in this country.
Mayer was able to hang on in the system.
Bob just didn't want to submit himself to the indignities that he was suffering at Newsweek and AP and even at some of these TV stations.
They wouldn't let him write what the truth was.
And so, to his credit, he quit.
He cashed in his retirement stuff and started his website over a decade ago.
And I'm very privileged, I feel very privileged to be joining with him and lending whatever expertise or analysis I can to the effort that we're all involved in and trying to spread some truth around.
Yeah, well, we're all very big fans of Bob Perry over at Antiwar.com.
He's great and a friend of this show as well.
All right, thank you very much for your time today on the show, Ray.
You're most welcome.
I appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
