Alright, y'all, there's some poison idea, legalize freedom, that's some good bumper music right there and I don't care if y'all hate it either.
That shit rocks.
I'll leave Gareth on hold just to finish listening to that song.
And he's my favorite guest, you can tell because I interview him just about every week on this show.
Dr. Gareth Porter is an independent historian and journalist.
He writes regularly for IPS News, among other places, and we feature all of his stuff for IPS.
Well, pretty much everything he writes, other than maybe at the Huffington Post or whatever you can find, at least the reprint there, at antiwar.com slash porter.
And always the best analysis of America's Middle East and Central Asian policy.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Hi, Scott.
Good to have you here.
And well, I'll tell you this, we just spent the last hour with Andy Worthington talking about the so-called trial, I don't think it's fair for anyone to call it that without the ironic quotes around it, but anyway, of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Sheib and these guys who were in on the 9-11 attack and seemed like, you know, who ought to be in the dock, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and yet somehow they're still podcasting from safety in the Hindu Kush mountains, Gareth.
Why is that?
Well, I mean, I think there are a number of reasons why that is the case, you know, certainly not the least of which is that they are ensconced in a society there which is, you know, very sympathetic.
They have a very strong organization surrounding them, a lot of protection.
The American side of that story is the absence of any real concern as far as the Bush administration was concerned with that objective of catching bin Laden after 9-11.
And that's the new article, Bush had no plan to catch bin Laden after 9-11.
And now, before we get too far into that, let me ask you about this, because I've always heard conflicting reports, and I don't think I ever did nail down exactly what the hell it meant, but people who say that, and not just conspiracy coup stuff, but I think it was reported in, you know, mainstream news or whatever, that there was a plan on Bush's desk to invade Afghanistan before the war.
And then yet, all the rest of the mythology, at least, of the post-September 11th short period of time there was that only Tenet and the CIA were able to get on the ground and do anything.
They pointed their laser pointers and the Air Force bombed people.
But that the Army, under General Franks, could not get their act together for a month and a half or something.
Well, first of all, you're referring to, if I understand what you're referring to, it's the argument that there was an intention to carry out some sort of military operation in Afghanistan as early as the summer of 2001, is that right?
I don't know the date exactly.
The way I always hear it, at least in the urban myth form, is that it was on his desk the day before the attack or something like that.
Oh, well, that refers to a NSPD, National Security Presidential Directive, which was indeed approved by the principals on the 4th of September and ready for a signature.
But that was a very, very weak document, which all it did was call for, really, as far as the military side, was for contingency plans.
There was no clear policy of going after bin Laden militarily in that document at all.
So in essence, it basically implies the fact that they weren't ready to do anything at that point.
Well, exactly.
In fact, on September 10th, when the principals met to decide, well, what does this document really mean?
What are we going to do?
The only thing that they could decide that they could agree on was more diplomacy with the Taliban.
Believe it or not, that is a true fact.
I mean, this is documented by the 9-11 Commission.
You're saying after the attack?
No, September 10th.
Oh, September 10th.
Yeah.
Yes.
Well, I mean...
But after the attack, you know, the neoconservatives, led by Rumsfeld, but Vice President Cheney was also active in this movement, were still resisting an attack within Afghanistan on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
This was something that they wanted to avoid at all costs.
And the reason was that they did not want to interfere with their plan for the invasion of Iraq.
Well, to the degree even, I mean, I thought it was basically established that everybody said we know that you want to attack Iraq, Paul, but hold your horses.
We have to...
I promised Tony Blair even, right?
We have to attack Afghanistan first, make it at least look like that's our point before we do Iraq or else it'll just be too obvious.
Well, that is indeed the Bush White House position.
I mean, that is what he clearly said after a few days of discussions post 9-11.
But this was only after Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld in particular had put up very stiff resistance to the idea of going into Afghanistan militarily at all.
I mean, they were saying, you know, why don't we go after another target that is more convenient where there are better targets for a bomb than Afghanistan.
Right.
Well, and you know, I think everybody probably always wanted this.
Sorry if I'm putting words in everybody else's mouth or something, but I always thought, okay, you have no contingency plan.
You know, they say Rumsfeld was furious.
That's what some people say, that he was really furious with Franks that it was taking so long at least to get what little he wanted to do in Afghanistan out of the way as far as his light and fast transformation and then on to Iraq kind of thing.
But it always seemed to me that, like, all right, look, we have a bunch of C-130s.
Fill them with soldiers and have them bring snacks and then go.
Damn it.
What are you doing?
Drop some paratroopers in there.
Everybody knows where they are.
I'm talking September 2001.
I mean, there's got to be a way.
I mean, hell, this is the Army, and I know that for every Army bureaucrat who has a plan, he's got to include everybody else's plan, too, and you can't fly a C-130 without these hundred other things or whatever.
Seems like in an emergency, when the point is we've got to get soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan to get these few individuals before they get away kind of thing, that they would be able to do that if Rumsfeld simply had said, do it, damn it, or you're fired, and that would have been the end of that.
Or no.
I'm crazy.
I mean, you just have to start with the most fundamental point here, which is that the neocons did not care about Al-Qaeda.
I mean, Al-Qaeda simply was not important to them.
Bin Laden was not a factor that they cared about.
I mean, you know, this is clear both from the sequence of development during the summer of 2001, when George Tenet was, you know, starting to push very urgent bulletins on the White House saying, you know, we face a very high probability of an attack.
It's going to be a mass casualty attack.
And he began to talk about the real possibility that it would be the United States.
And the neocons tried to discredit what Tenet was saying.
I mean, they basically, I mean, Wolfowitz said, well, Al-Qaeda is probably just trying to divert us, that this is a diversion, that this is not really going to happen.
Cambon, who was operating on behalf of Rumsfeld also, went to Tenet and tried to discredit, or went to Stephen Hadley and tried to discredit that whole line.
This was seen as a diversion from what they really wanted to do, which was invade Iraq.
And what they cared about was state enemies, not non-state actors.
Al-Qaeda could not be a factor unless it had a powerful state enemy behind it, sponsoring it.
And since they saw no evidence of that, contrary to what they would later argue, you know, that Iraq was behind Al-Qaeda, it really did not enter into their calculus in any meaningful way.
As Larry Wilkerson put it, the Bush administration did not give a shit about Al-Qaeda.
So that's the fundamental fact.
And despite the fact that the draft of the NSPD, which was approved in June, called for contingency planning, military contingency planning in Afghanistan, and of course the primary contingency was what?
The primary contingency was to try to prevent the Al-Qaeda leadership, Bin Laden and the rest of them, from escaping to Pakistan.
But he didn't.
He refused.
He didn't do anything.
There was absolutely zip.
Zero.
All right, well, pardon me for my cynicism, but, you know, it's actually, from Wolfowitz's perspective, it would seem, or, you know, from a George Bush perspective, or anybody with power, really, it's actually pretty convenient to have Bin Laden on the loose.
He makes a great boogeyman, and they can even just say, like, look, here's some weird word you've never heard before, and it means an Al-Qaeda-linked group in Somalia.
That's why we're killing people there, okay?
Good enough.
And, you know, it's Goldstein.
We've all read 1984.
We all know how valuable it is for an empire to have an enemy to point his finger at.
And so should we discount the idea that they simply had a meeting and decided that let's just let him escape, maybe off the clock while they were driving somewhere?
Yes, I think we should discount that for the following reason.
I mean, A, in February of 2003, after Bin Laden had been allowed to escape, what does Bush do?
He does not push the threat from Bin Laden.
He does not say, oh, gee whiz, you know, now he's gotten away.
This is a very dangerous force in the world, and we have to do all kinds of things, you know, in response to that, which we wanted to do anyway, you know, in Paris.
Instead, he said that he didn't pay any attention to Bin Laden.
Bin Laden wasn't important.
The idea of the Bin Laden threat, the al-Qaeda threat, only came much later after it was necessary to justify the war in Iraq.
So that's why I say no, that doesn't work as an explanation for this policy.
And we have to come back to the fundamental fact that they really didn't care, they didn't think Bin Laden was important, and they acted accordingly, very overtly.
They didn't really make any pretense of saying, well, gee, you know, this is a threat, but we can't do anything about it, it's too difficult, or whatever.
Yeah, but here's the thing, though.
I mean, what about just the simple revenge factor?
I mean, let's go back a minute to 2001 and 2002.
Of all the blood in the world that the American people wanted spilled, it was those guys specifically, you know, more than anybody else.
I mean, we'd be willing to tolerate killing pretty much anybody in the world, I guess.
You know, bumper stickers around here said, Iraq first, then France, and stuff like that.
But these specific guys, how could it be that after that terrible, I mean, not just the tragedy, but the spectacle of the whole thing, the humiliation of the whole thing, that they didn't simply say, just for revenge's sake, like, we're going to get these guys on our way to Iraq, or anything, you know?
Well, I mean, this raises a very interesting question about the mindset of these people in the Pentagon, particularly, and Vice President Dick Cheney, secondarily, in terms of the degree of cynicism that they displayed there.
You know, I mean, supposedly, they're all wound up about national security and protecting the American people from all these threats.
But the one thing that was a real threat, they really didn't care about.
You know, my cynicism about these people is no less than those people who regard them as sort of secretly harboring, you know, the desire to keep bin Laden safe, so that they could use him.
And that, my cynicism, is based on the fact that these people really, you know, don't care about the national security of the United States at all.
What they care about is being able to push programs that are expensive, and that serve, you know, the interests of a big clientele of Air Force officers, you know, the industrial interest behind them, and the whole idea that the high-tech Air Force represented.
That's what they wanted.
That's what they cared about.
They really didn't care about anything else.
That's the bottom line, in my view.
Yeah, well, and you know, there's a lot of that.
Have you read Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld?
Yes.
Yeah, that's a great one, you know, because he really goes into the combination.
I think he even defines neoconservatism.
He says you hear a lot about Trotsky, and about Strauss, and, you know, the Rand Corporation, and Central American policy, and fear of blacks, and all these things to define neoconservatism.
Here's what it's about.
The neoconservatives are the cross between the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex.
That's how he defines the movement.
Yeah, I think there's a lot to that, and I would, you know, in this case, I think what we're talking about is not just the military-industrial complex, but a particular sliver of that, which the neocons were very close to.
Transformation, that's what they called it, right?
That's right, the military transformation people, which is a code word for high-tech Air Force toys.
You know, aerospace weapons, and sensors, and UAVs, and all those things that would give the United States the capacity for long-range strikes at a state enemy, shock and awe, and all the rest of that.
All right, now, if it's okay, I'd like to get into some of the details that you talk about in your article about, you know, the story of the Pakistanis offering to help.
If you could address, perhaps, the getaway by Seymour Hersh, and some of the other reporting on that, about how the Bush administration allowed the Pakistani Air Force to airlift out God knows who, I don't know, maybe you do know who.
Some say it was only Taliban, but I don't know how they know that.
Well, you know, yes, we can start with that.
In fact, I mean, you have the same information that I have, which was Seymour Hersh's account of this.
This happened roughly the 23rd of November, if I remember correctly, and it was an airlift that was from the northern front, where the Taliban had fallen back in disarray, and was essentially surrounded and defeated.
And the excuse for the Pakistani airlift was that they had all these Pakistani military advisors serving with the Taliban, which is no doubt true.
But it's also the case that there were a very large number of Pakistani military personnel, actual fighters, you know, who were really a key part of the Taliban army.
They were very close to al Qaeda.
I mean, I think you could consider them as al Qaeda, in effect.
The al Qaeda contingent was a very important part of the Taliban military at that point.
And furthermore, there's no question that the airlift involved a number of Taliban officials, senior or mid-level, maybe not senior in the sense of national level, but mid-level regional Taliban officials from the north.
And the question that that raises, of course, since the United States never bothered to demand to the Pakistanis that these people be made available for interrogation, you know, it suggests that they really, again, had no intention of making any serious effort to try to catch Bin Laden.
And I, you know, that's, that's, I think, a foregone conclusion.
By that time, it was far too late in the game to even begin to think about that.
Now, you know how on Google you can, after you search some terms, you can hit the button and it'll give you the highlighted page with, it'll highlight the terms you're looking for in yellow.
Well, one of my favorites for that, you got to use the quotes to make it all one big yellow thing, the general was turned down.
And that'll lead you to Lost at Tora Bora, the New York Times article about how the CIA and the Northern Alliance knew that they had Osama Bin Laden within a couple of square miles at the most at Tora Bora.
And now they got on the radio and I just looked it up before the interview to make sure my number was right.
And at least this is the New York Times number.
There were 4,000 Marines, like 10 miles away, something like that.
And they asked, the CIA asked the Marines to intervene.
And the Marines called Tampa, Florida and check with Tommy Franks.
And Tommy Franks said, no.
Right.
I mean, they were actually, I think it was more like 25, 20 or 25 miles away.
But in any case, you know, I think the problem there was that they would have had to have much more preparation to do something like that successfully.
I think there's wheels within wheels in this story.
I mean, this is, this is very late in the game now.
We're talking about December.
Okay.
It's already December here.
And there's no doubt that bin Laden at one point was in Tora Bora, but by early December, it's very late.
I mean, it's almost certain that he's already flown the coop.
And I'm not, you know, this is not to defend the people that at CENTCOM, by any means, Tommy Franks was part of the Bush administration's policy, lock, stock and barrel.
There's no doubt about that.
And to the extent that they had, they needed to cover up the basic policy, he was part of that cover up.
But what I'm suggesting is that, and I think, you know, the, the idea that you could have prevented bin Laden's exit with, with some Rangers or with the Marines at that point is probably unrealistic in the extreme.
I mean, first of all, I'm not sure they even had the means to get them, you know, to the, to the Tora Bora area.
Okay.
And I mean, can't March 30 miles, 25 miles.
Yeah.
But, but this is, this is now up into mountains.
Okay.
This is high mountain territory we're talking about.
This is not the valley.
Okay.
I'm an idealist.
I'm saying it's worth a shot.
The most Scott, this is the most difficult terrain in the entire world for the U S military to operate in.
And unless you have had a plan way ahead of time, it ain't going to work that I've, that's my fundamental point.
Okay.
The idea that you can, you know, can just go by the seat of your pants and operate in the Tora Bora mountains near the Afghan Pakistan border.
I don't think that's realistic.
And I think that the, the CIA people, you know, obviously badly wanted something to happen.
I mean, there's no doubt that they were sincere about that, but you know, they, they had not really thought about this either.
I mean, the first sign, I mean, if you read Gary Bernson's memoir about the coat called jawbreaker, the first mention of the idea of, you know, the CIA team calling for the Rangers to, to go into the Tora Bora area in his memoir is December 7th.
Now, I'm not saying that they hadn't thought about it before that.
I know they had, but you know, he doesn't really provide all the details of, you know, the very earliest thoughts about this, thinking about this, but, but I think we have to take a bit more seriously.
There's two sides to this.
One is, is the lack of any concern by the administration and the coverup of that.
No doubt about that.
The other side of this that I think people need to take more seriously is just how difficult it is for the U S military to operate in the Tora Bora mountains and in that Afghan Pakistan border area.
And this relates to the current situation.
I mean, you know, the idea that the U S can, can really control the situation with military force in that Afghan Pakistan border area is much more, it's much more difficult than it might seem at first glance.
And certainly without very careful advanced planning, I have my doubts that it would have done much good.
Well, we know, we know that, uh, you know, throughout history, no one has been able to conquer that land for more than just a little while since the people who conquered it the first time, there's the still, still the descendants of the people who conquered that land 5,000 years ago or whatever, because it's quite easily defendable, I guess, is the point.
The analogies often made here, when we talk about the war against the Pashtuns, the so-called Taliban types in Afghanistan that, uh, well, you know, what if it was like red Dawn and someone was trying to occupy Colorado and there were a bunch of Colorado, you know, men with guns hiding in those mountains.
No one could ever take Colorado from the people of America short of just carpeting the whole place with hydrogen bombs.
You got it.
Yeah, exactly.
The, the population of that, of that area were by all reports, uh, strongly pro Taliban, pro Al Qaeda.
You know, bin Laden had been paying them off at day basically recruited the people from that area.
And, um, you know, this was, uh, this was another factor that would make it pretty dicey to, to just sort of casually sort of throw people in there.
A few hundred troops, the U S troops might be a good way to have a sort of a big, a number of Americans taken, captured, taken captive by, uh, by local.
Yeah.
Well, and that's, that's part of their excuse is that we couldn't risk the casualties.
We didn't want to risk the casualties and yet, I mean, they're willing to throw 4,000 men away on Iraq so far more than that.
Well, I agree with that.
And of course, I mean, you're, you're absolutely right that if this was the ultimate national security threat, then, you know, it was worth taking casualties over.
And by the same token, even more importantly, it's worth, you know, having a plan for it's worth, you know, making some, some serious plans for which, you know, would have required, uh, you know, logistical planning that would have started at nine 11 and would have taken, you know, two to three months to complete, but, you know, to be able to, to finish the, the logistical preparations for it.
And that would have meant not trying to bring about a quick end to the Taliban regime in Kabul, but rather putting in place the troops within the border area to block the exits with great difficulty, uh, over a period of weeks and, and only then, uh, you know, trying to, uh, defeat the Taliban regime so that when bin Laden made his, his exit, there would be a greeting party there for him.
Okay.
So now we're back to the question of the neoconservatives and, and included in their alliance, right?
It's not the neoconservative cabal, it's the Cheney neocon cabal.
We have George Bush, Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, none of whom are neoconservatives who have made this pact with the neoconservatives to have a war with Iraq instead of doing what's got to be their only job in the world at that point.
And so why this obsession, okay, big ticket fighter planes and contracts and, and Halliburton gets to build military bases, uh, you know, and, and get big weapons contracts and that kind of thing.
But why the neoconservative obsession is it simply the same as, um, the same as Rumsfeld and Cheney's?
The bigger payoff beyond the, the military contracts, which, um, you know, certainly are, are fuel for this, for this passion, if you will, of the neoconservatives.
The bigger payoff I think is, is this idea.
I mean, in, in the end, you know, ideas sort of take over and become obsessions.
And in this case, the idea was that they could, that they had a new idea for how to fight wars.
The American way of war is what Max Boot eventually called it in foreign affairs in 2003 in the triumphalism that followed the apparent, uh, victory, uh, over Iraq that, that came that spring.
Uh, and, and what that meant was that, um, you know, you could have a quick, uh, and easy victory through air power and all these sensors and smart bombs and, and all the high tech weaponry, although not nearly as high tech as what they hoped would come later.
And that this then would allow them to basically exercise power through throughout the Middle East.
And if you, again, read Douglas Feith's account, I think it's, it's the best source so far as to how the Pentagon was thinking.
They wrote a, uh, a memo or a paper which was sent to the White House on September 30th, if I remember correctly, three weeks after 9 11, they were still pushing this line that Afghanistan is not, uh, is not the real point or the real point is to, uh, is to create a whole new Middle East and to change the balance of power in the world.
And, um, and they laid out a strategy for doing that by essentially using military force and the threat of force, uh, to basically change, uh, one regime after another.
Or if it didn't change, then it would be so intimidated that it would do the bidding of Washington.
And so this new American way of war, uh, particularly in Iraq, which was clearly what they had been planning for, for months, uh, from the spring and summer of 2001, they were meeting almost weekly in the deputies committee to talk about a strategy for taking over Iraq militarily.
And uh, so that was the, that was the centerpiece of it.
And by, by following that strategy, they expected, uh, really to, to be mastering the Middle East by the end of, uh, the Bush, uh, the Bush administration.
Yeah.
I mean, by the end of his first term, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, they had a, well, they had a four or five year plan.
I guess it wasn't quite just in one term, but it would be mostly, mostly to be completed by the end of the Bush first term.
That's right.
Well, so what's the role of the clean break?
Because of course the men who wrote it were all Americans.
I think, I think, uh, Dave Windsor was the primary author, but this is the policy paper written for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister incoming Israeli prime minister back in 1996.
And which said that all, all of our real problems come from Syria and Iran, Hezbollah by way of Syria and Iran.
And so our number one order of business should be on focusing on regime change in Iraq as a means of weakening those other regimes.
Well, of course, I mean, the immediate target of, of the clean break was going to be Syria.
I mean, Syria was always the, was always the low hanging fruit that they thought for the, for the neocons.
But then, you know, by, by the, by the late 1990s, I mean, that was, that was what, 1996 if I remember correctly.
But by the late 1990s, Iraq had, you know, their, their situation had deteriorated economically.
The military was in ruins.
Iraq had become low hanging fruit too, to the neocons.
And so, I mean, I think that the, the basic thinking behind the, the clean break, which was, you know, let's, let's go after the, the weakest link was then applied to Iraq.
I mean, it's always, you know, the imperialist mentality is to go after the weak link, to take the easiest targets.
And Iraq became an easy target and you have, you know, one piece of evidence after another attesting to the fact that the enthusiasts, you know, behind that war were all in unanimous agreement that, that that was the main reason for taking Iraq, that it was so weak and, and so brittle, a brittle regime, which could be broken.
That was the argument.
Well, now, yeah, in fact, they had pushed for, I think, one of the Wolfowitz plans, oh, we'll just put in like 5,000 troops down in the Shiite areas and then we'll like slowly build up this thing.
It was to take over the, it was to take over the oil fields of, of Shiite Iraq.
That was the, that was the brilliant Wolfowitz strategy, which, which was being discussed during the summer of 2001, being pushed by the Neocon.
Okay.
As you know, David Wilmser also wrote a different paper, I forget the title were, and this is in regards to Syria, but he talks about what we need to do is expedite the chaotic collapse that basically, rather than having a strong parentheses, secular Baathist state in Syria, what we would rather have, I guess, is the Muslim brotherhood and everybody else fighting for power there forever.
And I wonder if you think that, or what you make of some people's analysis, you know, sorry to be so vague, but enough people have posited this, that this is really the model that they're using for Iraq, that as they claim, they're trying to create this multi-ethnic central state, that what they're really trying to do is reduce Iraq to a bunch of warring factions and, and to do the same to the Middle East, to the rest of the Middle East in order to benefit Israel.
Well, of course, now the question is, at what stage are we, are we talking about?
Because there's a constant flux of, of events, which changes the strategic calculus among the Neoconservatives and then their, their successors in, in the Bush administration.
Well, we still have a few minutes.
I said, we still have a few minutes.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're talking about the, the calculus at, at the beginning of, of the Iraq conflict, I mean, you know, as far as I can tell, I mean, the degree of, of sophistication of their analysis was, it was so crude that, you know, one can hardly credit them with that degree of Machiavellianism.
Their Machiavellianism was to, to think that the Shiites were going to welcome us with open arms and, and that they would be secular somehow.
That was a, that was a brilliant analysis of the religious and political scene in, in Iraq.
So brilliant that, of course, it gave us the pro-Iranian regime that we now have.
Right.
Of course, Ayatollah Sistani pulled the rug out from under them, I think originally back in 2004, said, hey, everybody, you want one man, one vote, right?
Go outside and tell them.
But then I think later on, once they, once they see that they have spawned a Sunni resistance movement that is quite powerful, and that they were going to have a great deal of difficulty cracking, you know, then they, then they do, in fact, begin to think about how to practice divide and rule, which is, you know, sort of using Shiite militias against the Sunnis.
And that leads to, you know, one, one phase after another of sort of the United States playing both sides against one another.
Well, and even then, we've really debated all along, right?
How much of this is simply, well, what are we going to do?
I know we'll rename them the concerned citizens, and we'll give them some money, and everything is sort of ad hoc.
It's hard to tell whether they're really saying, you know, we'd be better if we can make sure to keep the armed Sunni factions separate from the government by arming and funding them separately, so that there will be a future war later.
I mean, it sort of seems like these guys are just BSing their way through the whole war.
Well, I think you're absolutely right to put the emphasis on, you know, complete ad hoc series of decisions, which emphasizes the reality that these people never had a grasp of reality until it was, you know, way too late.
In other words, as soon as they realize the reality, it's already changed to something else.
They're always two or three steps behind reality.
Yeah, well, now, so if John McCain wins, and he brings the American Enterprise Institute back into power, it starts looking like Bush's first term over there at the Pentagon and the rest of it, then can we expect them to target Syria?
Or have they kind of learned the lesson maybe of Iraq that, you know what, maybe we do prefer the Ba'athists to the Muslim Brotherhood in charge there or something like that?
Well, I mean, a McCain victory would imply a national security policy so far to the right that it almost defies the imagination.
I mean, it would be to the right of Israel, clearly.
It would be to the right of the Bush administration.
It would represent the most extreme component of the right wing in Israel and of the Bush administration sort of extracting them and giving them the power to make foreign policy national security policy decisions.
So I mean, it is almost unimaginably warlike and without any ability to discern reality from fantasy.
And of course, then you have the prospect that you would have a president who has something like a 66% chance of surviving, you know, over a six-year period, so that we would have roughly a 50% chance of someone becoming president who believes in the end times and who therefore arguably would be prey to those in the United States who believe that the United States should support a nuclear conflagration so that we can, so that those people who are the chosen ones can welcome the rapture.
Wait, where did you get the 66%?
Is that what McCain's doctor said?
Yes, not McCain's doctor, but the physician who examined the 1200 pages of medical records which were made available under circumstances which would have suggested that it was top secret national security information because they were not able to make copies or take anything out of the room.
They had three hours to examine 1200 pages, but if I remember correctly, it was the figure that was given by one of the doctors who commented on this was that McCain would have a 66% chance of survival over a period of six years.
Okay, now if he is elected and falls down dead and Palin becomes President Quayle only with a really high-pitched annoying voice, which neocons is she going to have left in her cabinet?
Who's lined up to be her national security advisor, her deputy secretary of defense for policy and like that?
I mean, I'm joking here, but only because it is such a joke, I mean, she's such a nightmare of a joke.
I mean, Pastor Hagee probably would be the secretary of defense because he has experience in dealing with the devil, you know?
Well, and we've got to make sure to keep all the witchcraft out of the Pentagon there.
But I am serious about the, I mean, there is some evidence that this is someone certainly who believes in end times and therefore, I mean, she's a follower of the Left Behind series.
This is somebody who arguably would be prey to those people who would tell her that it's time for the conflagration that would bring on the rapture.
And therefore, I mean, this would be the same thing that is being attributed to Ahmadinejad in Iran.
I mean, the argument supposedly from the extreme right in Israel is that Ahmadinejad believes in the coming of the 12th Imam and therefore, you know, he is likely to do something that would bring that about despite the fact that, you know, there's absolutely no evidence to support that and plenty of evidence to the contrary.
It's funny, you know, because McCain is really an establishment kind of figure.
His grandfather helped Theodore Roosevelt build America's Imperial Navy back in the day and all this.
And yet, boy, it seems like nobody must be running the show up there that they're going to let someone who's this much of a Pentecostal nutcase get this close to the power.
I mean, geez.
Well, I mean, this is a this is the measure of just how far the degradation of the Republican Party has proceeded.
And the Republic itself.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're all out of time, Gareth.
I got to let you go.
No problem.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, folks.
That's Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist in our press service.
You can find all your rights at antiwar.com slash Porter.
You can tell why I have him on the show all the time, because he's really good at cutting through the wheat and the chaff and those things, isn't he?
Don't you think?
Me, too.
All right.
See you all tomorrow.
