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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, once again, introducing the great Ray McGovern.
Just talked to him last week.
A real quick, he's a former CIA analyst for 27 years.
He was actually the chief analyst of the Soviet division there for a while.
He used to brief vice-president H. W.
Bush back in the Reagan years.
He is the co-founder of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
You can find all of his stuff at raymcgovern.com and tons and tons of it at consortiumnews.com and of course at antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, my friend.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
How about yourself?
Well, I'm doing okay except, you know, the last time we spoke last week, you said to me, this is the most dangerous time since the Cuban missile crisis.
You know, by the time I was sending that MP3 off, Vladimir Putin, I guess it was the next night, Vladimir Putin, our time, Vladimir Putin gave this, I guess, you know, two hour, two and a half hour speech, something like that.
And a good half hour, 40 minutes of it was debuting an entire new generation of Russian nuclear weapons.
So can we first just list real quick, and you can go back and elaborate all you want, the floor is yours.
But can you just go down the list real quick here?
Or if you want me to, I have it right in front of me of just to summarize the, is it four or five new weapons systems that they are announcing here?
Yeah, Scott, let me just go back to half a step here.
I have a vignette, a personal one, about September, October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis.
I had been commissioned the US Army Intelligence and Infantry School.
I was on my way to Fort Benning.
And when I got there, which was the 3rd of November 1962, we found that there were no weapons there, which was sort of odd, since this was the primary weapons training program for the infantry.
So I made some discrete inquiries.
And I was told, oh, yeah, well, two divisions came through over the last three weeks, took all our weapons, and they're down in Key West right now.
Key West.
It was a Cuban missile crisis.
They were ready to go into Cuba.
Okay.
So all our fond, fond remembrances of being able to work out, to test these brand new grenade launchers that had just been invented and just been put into, into the hands of infantry, infantry folks, only evaporated because there were no weapons.
Now, through weeks later, as those divisions came back north, we got the weapons.
But that was, that was a tangible indicator, not only how close we came nuclear wise, but if there was an interim, and it would have been only interim, conventional, so to speak, attack.
Well, the weapons were not at Fort Benning.
They were in Key West.
Now, that's really important because what we're talking about is a situation where John Kennedy was president.
And the difference between John Kennedy and Donald Trump, I will leave to your imagination.
John Kennedy had the presence of mind in the face of these mad, mad generals like Curtis LeMay, who, as Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, when he was asked, well, how many people would, would die in, in Russia?
He said, well, 20, perhaps 30 million.
How many in Eastern Europe?
Probably another 20.
But how about US?
Well, probably only 10 million.
Give me a break.
These guys were mad.
And Kennedy said so.
So what did he do?
At every planning session during that crisis, he had Ambassador Tommy Thompson, who knew more about Russia and the Soviet Union than just about anybody but George Kennan.
Okay.
He had to participate.
And when these generals went off half-cocked, Tommy Thompson would say, well, you know, last month I had a lunch with Nikita Khrushchev and this is how he looks at it.
This kind of thing.
Okay.
He had Bobby Kennedy.
And when those famous two messages came from Khrushchev, one, a really fire-breathing, weapons-rattling one, and the other one, a conciliatory one saying, let's talk about this.
Guess what?
Tommy Thompson says, look, all you have to do is answer the conciliatory one.
The other one was written with his military breathing over his neck, the military, just like Curtis LeMay on our part.
So that's what JFK did adroitly through Bobby Kennedy and a guy, well, we know who the fellow was in Washington where they could do this discreetly.
And that was the way the crisis ended.
Now, picture today, picture today, where you have three Marine generals running the show.
You have Mattis at Defense.
You have that guy Kelly at the Chief of Staff White House.
And you got the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dunford.
They're all Marine generals.
Now, what do Marine generals know about nuclear warfare?
Well, I hope not.
They're not supposed to know a lot.
And clearly they don't.
So who?
Tillerson?
Come on.
Who is Trump going to turn to, to have some sage, some experience, some advice that comes of experience with Russia?
Nobody.
So that's what makes it even more labile, even more delicate, even more dangerous than it was during 1962, in my humble opinion.
Man.
Yeah.
And well, and what you say about, you could just, it goes without saying the differences in the cool between Jack Kennedy and Donald Trump for crying out loud.
All right.
So now let's talk about these missiles.
Scott, if you have the list before you, I don't have them committed to memory.
Why don't you just dash off a quick, a quick rendition of the ones that he displayed in those videos?
Yeah.
So he describes them all.
And I think I'm going to probably paste, I don't know what I'm going to do.
Cause it's about 40 minutes.
I'll have a link to it in the show notes of this interview at scottwharton.org and at the Libertarian Institute anyway.
And I'll have a blog entry about it at both of those sites as well, guys, so you can find it.
And he does, he shows these kinds of cartoons.
And so the first one is a new heavy ICBM that is capable of flying over the South pole and back around from which there's no missile defense that has even been attempted to be set up so far.
That's a brand new one.
Then he has the hypersonic glider that is, they say, maneuverable and completely controllable and, you know, can evade any missile defense system and go around and has an incredibly long range and this kind of thing.
Then there's the, the nuclear powered underwater drones, basically a submarine or remote control submarine that he says can deliver high yield nuclear explosives.
In other words, there goes San Francisco and we have apparently no defense against that.
And then this was the, as Lewis says here last, but certainly not least the global range, nuclear powered cruise missile unlimited range.
In other words, it can fly around the whole world, maybe twice, I don't know, however long it is with on nuclear fuel.
But in the cartoon Ray, they show it launch from Northern Russia, go around Northern Europe, down caddy corner across the Atlantic Ocean, around the southern tip of South America, and then up the Pacific coast where then it nukes Hawaii, but you could also, they cut it away where it could have been Hawaii or LA or San Francisco, or you guess.
And by the way, in the cartoon, when they showed the new heavy intercontinental ballistic missile that could go across the South Pole and up from the South, they show the target as being South Florida, as you know, it cuts away right before the detonation.
But man, so anyway.
Well, I think that President Trump needs to have the Chinese president there at Mar-a-Lago all the time, because I think that would be the only deterrent.
You guys want to stay the night?
Go ahead.
Yeah.
We'll go golfing again tomorrow.
Oh, how macabre.
Well, yeah, it's, well, these, these weapons, I don't know if they're all operational.
One, one system he claims is, and that he says is in the Southern district.
Now what's the Southern district of Russia?
That's the one right opposite the Middle East.
So what Putin is saying is, look, we tried to talk to you.
We tried to tell George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld that getting out of the ABM treaty, which was the bulwark, which was the guarantor of strategic stability, just so that all your readers know what I'm talking about.
The ABM treaty provided that there could be no more than two anti-ballistic missile installations in either country, the US or the USSR.
In three years, it was changed to one.
Why just one?
Well, then neither country could, could conceive of the notion that they could do a first strike and escape immediate retaliation and blow up their own country and most of the world.
So that was a, that was a balance.
That was a, that, they called it MAD, MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction.
Now that doesn't sound very good.
It sounds sort of mad, doesn't it?
But it was a hell of a lot better than what preceded it, which was the balance of terror when we never knew what MAD general might be tempted to shoot off at ICBM and perpetrate a nuclear war.
So that was concluded in 1972.
It's one of the proudest accomplishments that my branch, the Soviet foreign policy branch, ever had.
We had three people working on that, two with the delegation, either in Helsinki or Vienna, and one backstopping all this information and activity at headquarters in Langley.
I got to go to the signing of the, of the ABM treaty.
It was May 26th, 1972.
And when that thing was signed, my, my friend next to me says, you know, Ray, you, you breathed an audible sigh of relief as soon as Brezhnev assigned his John Hancock to that thing.
And it was true.
My God, that was an incredible factor for stability from 1972 until when?
Until 2002, when George Bush, having announced six months before that he was leaving the ABM treaty, got canceled, got out of it in 2002.
Now, you could imagine the Russian reaction when they saw that these little missile defense systems were being put in Romania, Poland, and Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea.
And, and as, as Putin himself has said, has told Western reporters and journalists, look, we know, we know that these capables can, can fly, well, 500 kilometers.
But we also know that you can put a different missile in the same holes, okay?
And it can fly 1,000 kilometers.
And we know when that will happen.
And the Pentagon knows that we know, okay?
Then it will fly even, even farther.
So what does this mean?
This means that our ACBM installations, most of them, are directly vulnerable to a strike, not from missile defense, but from cruise missiles and other kinds of missiles in these same holes that could be fired in, in a first strike if those generals at the Pentagon thought they could get away with it.
So they're not going to get away with it.
And he waited until, what, March 1st, what was that, Thursday or Friday, to, to say, look, you know, we tried to talk to you.
And indeed, they, they tried like hell to talk to us.
And nobody listened.
They tried to get into the U.S. press.
They couldn't.
And so here's Putin saying, well, listen now, okay?
Because this is what we have on the drawing board.
This is what one system we've already deployed.
And the big, as I understand, the big thing here is a lot of these are nuclear-powered, okay?
I mean, they're nuclear weapons or nuclear-capable.
But they're also nuclear-powered, which enables them in a completely new, new art form to fly around the South Pole, the North Pole, and fly around until they see a hole in the defenses, and then, then, then wreck our naval port in Norfolk, for example.
So what he's saying here is, look, it was a real bad idea to revoke the ABM Treaty.
We tried to talk to you to get some sort of amelioration of that.
You wouldn't listen.
Now you have to listen because the balance has been restored.
We have strategic parity, no matter what kind of rhetoric you use against us.
Well, boy, do I feel dumb because this whole time I've been saying, and I guess I already knew, like, this was part of it, too.
And I'd heard this argument made.
It's not that I dismissed it, I guess.
It just wasn't at the forefront of my mind.
I would always just say, listen, we keep building up these missile defenses, then that just means that they have to be more ready.
And they're, in other words, launch on warning, or if they're already on launch on warning, then that just means their trigger finger gets that much itchier, the time scales get shortened, and that kind of thing.
But of course, yeah, oh, yeah, maybe also, they'll develop a 50 megaton H-bomb that they can deliver by nuclear submarine that you're never going to find on its way there.
Or, you know, a hypersonic glider that goes Mach 20, he claims, and can take out our entire, you know, I read there was a great analysis of this at UNS.com.
I forget the guy who wrote it.
But he talked about how, well, this just makes our surface fleets obsolete.
That's it, that we can use them to threaten, you know, poor little brown countries that can't do anything.
But in terms of war with Russia, our Navy is useless.
Well, you know, that may be an overstatement, but not by much.
I mean, the way this guy was talking about it was almost like it was, you know, September 11th, or something like that, where this is a new day in history.
This is like a pivot in the history of the world now.
What you thought was happening, you know, that needle just scratched off the record.
And now this is whole new reality.
And what's it going to take for the Americans to even realize what just happened?
Their bluff has just been called big time.
Well, you know, if you read the New York Times, my favorite, this is a little sarcastic, my favorite journalist there is a fellow named, what's his name, David Sanger.
I've liked him since he started talking about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as flat fact, usually seven times in each article in the prelude to the war on Iraq.
Now he focuses mostly on Russian hacking as flat fact.
And more recently now, it belongs in his reputation here that he has been the single worst person on Iran's nuclear program for years saying Iran's nuclear weapons program as flat fact.
Their illicit nuclear weapons program is flat fact without ever proving it.
For years and years, he went on like that.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, you know, he shares that distinction with this sidekick of his, William Broad.
And there are other people, so it's kind of hard to single him out.
But he is, I agree.
He's mostly, well, anyway, what did he say right after Putin made his speech?
Well, you know, skepticism is in order here.
Do these, quote, do these weapons really exist?
Or is Putin bluffing?
Now, here's the proof here.
Catch this.
So Sanger and his fellow Farquhar, who's in Moscow now, what they next cite as evidence is this, quote, analysts writing on Facebook and elsewhere lean toward the bluff theory, period, end quote.
QED.
QED.
Analysts writing on Facebook and elsewhere lean toward the bluff.
So maybe he's bluffing.
Well, I think this is stage one.
He may be bluffing.
But stage two, which is really, really hard thing to envisage, and that's this.
Raytheon, Lockheed, the other arms developers and merchants, they have a lot at stake here.
And there's a question that Trump has to face.
Will he accept the invitation, given the new strategic parity relationship, the invitation to talk about this stuff?
Or will he not be powerful enough?
Will he not be strong enough to say, yeah, this is the time we talk, just as back in 72, we talked, we're going to do what Nixon did, what Reagan did.
We got to do something sensible.
Or is he going to salute, is he going to salute the Raytheons and the Lockheeds of this world and say, my God, my God, we not only have to build more anti-ballistic missile systems, but they have to be more sophisticated.
We have to test them more.
And then we have to build whole new generations.
Maybe we can do nuclear powered things like the Russians claim they have.
So in other words, all the defense expenditures that you and I pay in our tax money, more than half of our taxes go to these so-called defense expenditures.
What will happen to the people at the bottom of the scale who are already being kind of squeezed by all these tax measures and everything?
What's going to happen to that part of America?
I'd say maybe 40 percent who can't make a decent living without doing two jobs or sometimes even three.
What's going to happen?
Well, they're going to suffer and they're going to suffer badly.
And who's going to profit?
Well, the profiteers, the Raytheons, the Lockheeds, the General Dynamics, you know, all these guys line their pockets with proceeds from systems that engineers say and scientists say will never work because they can always be easily defeated at much less cost.
Now, the best guy on this, the fellow named Ted Postel, professor emeritus from MIT where he got his degrees.
He's in retirement now.
He's almost as old as I am.
And he's writing and he's analyzing and he's doing all this good stuff.
And he and his colleagues, the serious ones, say, look, the ABM system was always just a system to enrich war profiteers.
It never would have worked.
Edward Teller sold it to to Ronald Reagan.
He said, yeah, you can have like an umbrella and they can never get to the umbrella.
And Ronald Reagan bought it and went Gorbachev.
And this is interesting.
When Mikhail Gorbachev came to Reykjavik back in 86, I had a front seat front seat thing to watch this in from the Washington area for the Langley.
And he surprised everyone by by proposing a destruction of nuclear weapons over a period of 10 years.
Reagan said, my God, that sounds good to me.
What do you do?
Well, he went to his advisors.
Now, George Shultz, I happen to know, would have been been very, very optimistic about that so long as we could verify and not just trust.
But who are the other guys?
Well, long story short, Reagan was sabotaged by people like Bill Casey, Caspar Weinberger at defense, Bobby Gates, who was sort of the windsock that went with the prevailing winds.
And this fellow Fritz Ehrmarth, who was the national intelligence director for for the for for USSR in those days, they put the kibosh on this.
How did they do it?
They said, President Reagan, listen, you can't have your Star Wars if you agree to this.
They won't let you do anything but but but research.
You can't even test anti-ballistic.
You can't buy this.
And Reagan, Reagan said, oh, I can't buy this.
And there perished a unique chance in 1986 to to rectify the situation.
Now, Fritz Ehrmarth was asked later how he felt about that.
He said, you know, I should have been less pessimistic about what Gorbachev had in mind.
Well, that's very nice.
Where did Ehrmarth work?
Well, Northrop.
Where did he go to?
Some of these other main arms manufacturers.
The whole system is very, very corrupted.
This is the first time in my experience where the intelligence apparatus led by Casey, Gates and Ehrmarth was similarly corrupted for very, very political and economic or, you know, money, money making reasons.
It was a terrible thing to watch that that possibility was what's the word?
It was squandered, squandered.
You know, I read a story and I saw at least a still picture, I think, of Reagan getting in the car and Gorbachev says to him, Mr. President, wait, what if we walk back up those stairs and went in there and talked about this for like five more minutes and see, man, huh?
And Reagan's like, sorry, out and leaves.
Yeah.
Well, you know, he even had the one last extra bonus chance and he still didn't do it.
Damn.
Well, he wasn't the smartest knife in the drawer.
But, you know, look at Reagan.
You know, I tend to be a little bit more sympathetic to him.
I think his instincts were correct.
I think he was besieged by a White House and by the characters I just mentioned.
And, you know, he was attracted to this notion, but he was also extremely gullible.
Now, when Edward Teller, for God's sake, comes and he says, Mr. President, you must realize that this Star Wars can give you blanket, blanket protection against any form of the Soviet Union.
Well, you know, Teller is a big name.
He asks Weinberger, what do you think of this?
Oh, yeah, Teller is directly, correctly right.
So here he is, a victim of circumstance.
The big thing is the reality.
OK, these are facts.
OK, the reality that that golden opportunity was squandered just as just a few years later when the Berlin Wall fell and Gorbachev was deceived.
We know that.
We know that from the cables now that have been released, was deceived into thinking that if he was able to accept a reunited Germany, if if he would withdraw the 300,000 count them 300,000 Soviet troops from East Germany, then he was promised by James Baker, the secretary of state, and the other statesmen in Western Europe were also promised, namely the chancellor of West Germany at the time.
They were promised that NATO would not be moved one inch eastward, one inch eastward from East German territory or was then East Germany.
Now, to put that in context, OK, you have to realize, I mean, anybody who knows anything about Russian history realizes that after they got rid of two centuries of domination by Genghis Khan and his golden hordes, OK, that was 1200s to almost the 1500s, then they had to contend with people coming through from Western Europe.
Those were the Hanseatic lead.
Those were the Lithuanians and the Poles attacking Russia from the West.
Later, Napoleon, later Hitler.
Now, just mention Hitler.
OK, people say, well, Hitler, we won the war.
Well, give me a break.
As you know, Scott, but not many Americans know.
That was the Russians that won the war.
It was the Soviets.
It was the Soviets that turned Nazis back at Stalingrad.
And how many casualties, how many Russians perished in World War II?
Would you believe, well, Putin says 25 million.
Historians say 27 million.
Well, let's say it's only 25 million.
Give me a break.
Who was among them?
Putin's big brother.
That's who was among them.
OK, how did he die?
Well, he was in Leningrad during the 900-day siege.
OK, I don't know how he died.
I imagine like so many others, he hungered to death.
That's the experience that Putin comes out of.
That's the experience the Russians come out of.
We have no, I emphasize no, comparable experience.
So getting back to the fall of the Berlin Wall, they're asking, Gorbachev and Sheremetnadze, the foreign minister, they're asking for an awful lot.
But the promise, the promise was very attractive.
No NATO east of East Germany.
Now, what happened?
Well, Bill Clinton came in.
He said, screw that.
That's not written down on paper.
Now, we'll just do it.
And now, of course, we have NATO more than doubling in size as it was the size at the turn of the Berlin Wall.
So what does this mean?
Well, there's always been a dispute.
Well, why did James Baker really promise that?
Now, Bill Bradley, Senator Bill Bradley, former senator from New Jersey, he's a Rhodes Scholar.
He specialized in Russian history and Soviet history.
He went and asked Jim Baker.
He said, Jim, it's in some of the memorandums of conversation.
Did you promise not to move NATO one inch to the east?
And Baker's a lawyer, right?
So he said, well, I promise.
I didn't sign anything like that.
Okay.
Well, finally, we have Baker's signature.
And the codicil here is more important than anything else.
When those documents were released about a half year ago, nobody reported anything about them to the New York Times.
So you go to Baker, you go to Scowcroft, who knew about this at the time.
They said, well, we didn't promise it.
Well, I know what was promised because I talked to a fellow named Kuvaldin, who was with Gorbachev in Moscow when these things were worked out with Baker.
I said, Mr. Kuvaldin, he's a professor now at Moscow University.
So why is it that you didn't write that down?
He looked at me and he said, Mr. McGarren, this was February 1990.
The Warsaw Pact still existed.
We didn't talk to the Germans yet.
I mean, you shouldn't really talk to the Germans if you're talking about the German history and German future.
And so that's the main reason.
But the other main reason, Mr. McGarren, he looked me straight in the eye, Scott, and he says, we trusted you.
Oh, okay.
Trust is important in international relations.
The Russians had a very, very bad experience with the expansion of NATO and culminating all this was the Western orchestrated coup in Kiev on the 22nd of February, 2014.
And everything you've seen since then has been a Russian reaction to what they saw as even greater danger on their doorstep.
The very place, the very place where the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Hanseatic League, Napoleon and Hitler came through.
So, you know, you got to understand this stuff.
The Russians have a completely different history and a different outlook.
And yet they were willing to do what they did to let Germany be reunited.
I mean, my God, the whole post World War II era was, was informed by a joint wish, not only the Russians, but the West to keep Germany divided.
So it would never be a problem anymore.
I mean, so you're asking, German, Nazi to swallow a whole lot.
They swallowed it.
And now they're subjects of ridicule from, from just about everybody in Russia, including Putin for being so naive as to trust the Americans.
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Well, and then of course, the point being just to, to finish your point there, George W. Bush picked up where Bill Clinton left off and then Barack Obama did the same.
Trump has now continued, brought in Montenegro, finished that process there.
Certainly didn't stop it.
Not that he started it, but still.
You're on dangerous territory here because when Rand Paul asked pretty innocently, how does incorporating Montenegro enhance United States security?
John McCain immediately accused him on the Senate floor of being in Putin's puppet.
So if you don't have a far stronger case for John McCain's treason, so I'm not worried about that.
But now listen, I want to go back to what you were saying about this most inefficient welfare program for people who are already billionaires and, you know, executive vice presidents over at Raytheon and so forth.
And it's this really important thing.
I already knew a little bit about this.
I'd seen the clip, but I'd forgotten that it was Jack Matlock, the second to the last ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1990, 91, I guess he, he, he quit just a couple of months before the red flag came down permanently on Christmas day there.
But anyway, so this is a conversation that I saw a clip of you talk about this before, but at this presentation, but so it's Matlock who says to Trump that something like, you got to understand this is really just a welfare program for politically connected arms dealers in America.
And it's not really, we're not really trying to get a first strike capability against you to, to attack you and all this stuff, man.
It's just so, and then, but Putin, as you put it in your email this morning, refused to let him down easy from that.
So can you talk about that for a minute?
Yeah, this is quite amazing.
Um, there's a discussion club, the Russians call it, uh, the Valdai discussion club.
And here was Putin sitting on the dais with Jack Matlock for whom I have great respect, uh, who is actually helpful in getting me to Moscow for the SALT, uh, for the, uh, strategic arms limitation talks signing.
So Jack is a good friend and he's very bright.
I interviewed him one time, by the way, it's in the archives guys.
What was it?
I didn't hear what you said.
Oh, I said, I've interviewed him one time before too.
So that's in the archives, everybody.
So he's sitting there at Valdai and, uh, Putin says, well, no, this is a discussion club.
So for, for discussion, let me ask Mr. Ambassador, what do you think of the American unilateral withdrawal from the ABM treaty?
And I have the text here.
The Russians put out the text of what Matlock says.
So let me, it's very brief.
Matlock, I was personally opposed to that withdrawal and I take your point, but I would say, I don't think that any subsequent plans for the sort of deployments, uh, of ABM were, or could be a threat to Russian systems.
In general, I am not supporting ABM systems, but I would point out that I think the main source of that is, is not to threaten Russia, but to secure employment in the United States.
A lot comes from the military industrial complex and the number of people it employs.
When you watch the clip here, you see Putin sort of first shocked and then sort of, he says, oh my God, this is, I gotta, I gotta respond to this.
So he says, Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, um, uh, could not you create jobs with the result that would be different for all of humanity?
Uh, uh, new missile defense systems is creating jobs.
Why can't you create them in other areas?
Why can't you technology, biology, high tech industries?
So here's Putin saying, you know, uh, this is really, really quite a strange credulity that you're doing it.
And then the, the, the crasher here, bear in mind, this is June 17th, 2016.
Uh, so the, the, the treaty that prohibits Iran from, um, from developing nuclear weapons, at least for 10 years had already been signed.
So his, his Putin says, so there is no Iranian nuclear problem.
We have been saying that all along.
Uh, so why develop a missile defense system when there's no chance that Iran would be a threat?
In other words, this business about that Matlock apparently was persuaded about that.
No, no, these, these, uh, these emplacements in Romania and Poland and black sea and a ball, no, no, no, they're not against Russia.
No, no, no.
You just happen to be there in the periphery.
Uh, they're, they're against Iran or, Oh yeah.
Maybe North Korea.
Now if you have a globe, Scott, look at the globe.
Well, listen, I mean, just anecdotally, I don't, I don't have the footnotes and everything Ray, but at the time when George Bush at one point personally, uh, the president announced, Oh yeah, this is to protect Poland from a first strike from Iran.
All the people in the room, it was some international event.
I don't know.
They all laughed.
Everybody just laughed.
Nobody believed that it was true for a minute.
And the Russians, there was a clip I think of Putin and or mid vet ever, whoever saying, yeah, right.
You know, obviously we can see right through that.
And then when Obama came in and said the same thing, everyone was like, Oh yeah, that's really serious.
You got to protect Poland from Iran.
You know, the missiles they don't have to deliver the nukes they're not making.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Scott, uh, I was reviewing this last night and, uh, looking at, uh, Putin's protestations that look, you didn't listen.
You never listened.
And of course I'm saying, well, how could the American people know, uh, about all this?
If they just read the New York times, they wouldn't know.
They would have no way of knowing.
They would have no way of knowing that back in 2012 at a summit in Seoul, ABC microphone was on when, uh, Medvedev who was president at the time before, you know, he's president every other time that, uh, Putin isn't, he says, uh, Mr. Obama, uh, Vladimir asked me to, to ask you, when are you going to talk to us about ballistic missile defense?
And, uh, Obama says, Oh, well, uh, give me some space.
Uh, you know, wait, wait till after the election.
Just, just give me some space.
Uh, we tell Vlad that and, uh, Medvedev very politely said, Oh yeah, I'll tell him that.
Now guess what?
Uh, Obama apparently forgot to take this up after the election.
He got completely slammed.
Oh, look at what a two face backstabber this guy is when my God, is that not what we want is for him to back down and find ways to be able to get along with the Russians.
And people are saying, my goodness, that he would say one thing and do another, regardless of what exactly the lie is here.
It seems like a pretty white lie.
Yeah.
And then, you know, the next thing I came across was, uh, this hasn't been reported at all.
Uh, Putin holds these four hour, can you believe them?
Four hour press conferences, uh, hosted by press people from all over Russia.
And I, you know, it goes over what seven time zones or something like that.
Okay.
Four hours.
And during this, this was on March 17th, St. Patrick's day.
I always remember St. Patrick's day, uh, 2014, you know, right after the coup in Kiev and right before, like the day before, uh, the Crimea was, uh, rejoined to Russia.
Okay.
And next to Russia.
Okay.
So what does he say?
He says, you know, um, the encroachment eastward of NATO was a real problem, but the threat of a missile defense was quote, an even more important factor and quote, and keeping Crimea out of NATO hands.
Well, hello.
You know, they didn't want ABM system.
They didn't want missile defense systems, quote defense systems in Crimea or the more in the black sea or in Ukraine.
So what, what Putin is saying to, to all his people not picked up in the, in the press is that, look, you know, NATO, yeah, that was really bad.
But think about the, the national, the missile defense systems that will be put in.
And we couldn't let that happen in Crimea.
We mentioned the Valdai stuff where Jack McCluck made that, uh, faux pas grand, you know, it was really saying it was just a jobs program, but later, and this too was after the Iran deal was signed, sealed and delivered, uh, restraining Iran from having a nuclear weapons potential for many, many years.
Here's Putin on the 17th of June, 2016.
What does he do?
Uh, he recognizes that there's a whole group of Western journalists in St. Petersburg.
They're at an international economic forum.
So he says, Hey, I want to talk to these guys.
And he assembles about 20 of them and he's looking at them and he talks to them about what it means.
He repeats to them, look, these missile holes are capable of cruise missiles, but they're also capable of missiles that reach far into Russian territory.
Uh, we know the schedule for when they can knock out a lot of our ICBM force.
The Pentagon knows those schedule.
The Pentagon knows that we know, and then he looks at these reporters, you know, when I'm sort of falling asleep, you know, those, you know, and he loses it.
He says, how can I get through to you people?
How can I warn you the danger here?
It's worse than it was before.
And then he just kind of throws his hands in the air and he stops.
You ought to see that clip.
It's only about a minute and a half, but it's on my website.
And you get a sense of how this guy is saying to himself, they won't listen.
They won't listen.
And so we have to, we have to be involved in these very esoteric systems that will finally make them listen and hopefully get them to the negotiating table.
Well, and that's what he said in that speech today was you wouldn't listen to us before you'll listen now or something very close to that.
And you know, one, you know, I don't speak Russian or understand it or anything, but it just seems like this guy is always very calm and methodical and always means what he says.
Not that he's always honest or whatever, sure he's capable of misdirection and this and that, but he seems like the type to not make a bunch of inflated claims or, you know, he doesn't need to engage in a bunch of bombast like Trump's, you know, for political purposes or any of this kind of thing.
He doesn't have powerful enough opposition that he has to resort to this kind of thing.
I would take him at his word on this as far as these new developments in these nuclear missiles.
So back to, and when I compared it to 9-11 earlier, I didn't mean to say this is an attack on America or plan to some narrative like that.
But I just meant this is a new turning point, right?
Because it's not just that Russia has now restored the balance of terror when the Americans were, you know, had made it so lopsided that they were threatening to cancel mutually assured destruction and be able to threaten this first strike capability.
But now they've really tilted it back the other way.
Not that they necessarily have first strike capability on the US, we still have 7,000 H-bombs.
So not too big of a problem with that.
We can still kill all of them too.
But it seems like the overall balance of terror, if his claims are true, really has shifted toward them.
So looking forward, what do you think is going to be the reaction to that, Ray?
Well, my fear is that this will just feed the military, industrial, congressional media intelligence, security services complex.
More and more money will be diverted.
But, you know, I don't rule out the notion that somebody will get to Trump and say, look, you know, you thought you could deal with Putin.
He's now sort of claimed, if not proved, that he has strategic parity.
Now, what's the real danger?
How can you deal with this guy?
Well, number one, you can look at the flashpoints, the ones that exist now, the things that the US and others are doing that could end up in a real armed dust up with the Russians.
And I'm thinking, of course, not only of Syria.
Now, Bibi Netanyahu is in town in Washington this week.
And I'm sure that he's trying to persuade President Trump, look, we can't tolerate Iranians or, you know, Syrian government or Hezbollah people in Syria.
We have to keep that war going.
And so this business about, you know, just fighting ISIS and then getting out of there, that's for the birds, Mr. President.
Don't say that anymore.
We got to do more.
We have to ensure that chaos in Syria persists for a couple more years.
That's what he's saying.
Now, there are a lot of Russians, there are a lot of Iranians now in Syria.
They happen to be there at the invitation of the Syrian government.
There are a lot of Americans and a lot of Americans supported, moderate.
You can see these guys are moderate rebels, and they're not leaving, despite what Trump says.
I don't know if Trump wants them to leave.
There's some doubt in my mind as to whether the security services, CIA and the army and so forth would withdraw them.
So that's a flashpoint.
But even more pressing, and this is sort of dropped off the radar screen, the U.S. has decided to give lethal weapons to Ukraine, like Javelin missiles, like 210 of them that can, you know, demolish Russian or any other kind of tanks and this kind of thing.
So it's sort of like giving SAMs, surface-to-air missiles, to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to shoot down Russian helicopters and planes, which they did with great accuracy.
So what does this mean?
Well, this means that Trump has gone a lot farther than even Obama would go in giving lethal weaponry to those, well, there are a lot of fascists in that regime in Kiev, and the Russians know that, and they know what fascists do from history.
So the Russians are looking on at this, and they realize that there was some restraint on Obama, I think three years ago, when Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, was in Washington.
The subject of discussion was very live at that time in Washington.
Should we give weaponry to Ukraine?
And at a joint press conference at the end of her visit, one of the American journalists says, Mr. President, have you decided are you going to give lethal weaponry to Ukraine?
And he says, well, you know, we have that under discussion.
She interrupts, Angela Merkel interrupts and says, eine schlechte Idee, a lousy idea, okay?
Wow, I've never seen that happen before.
So then he goes on, you know, Obama says, well, we're discussing, and then, you know, two minutes later, she says, eine schlechte Idee, a really lousy idea.
So now, now what's Angela Merkel going to do?
She's got this very- Flashback to half an hour ago in this conversation.
The ultimate, I better be able to say it right, cataclysm of humanity, at least in the West, or in Europe, there, was between the Germans and the Russians.
They've been through this before, for real, in a way that Americans don't really remember, as you were saying.
All right, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, and you know, people don't remember.
My grandchildren aren't taught that the Russians and we were allies during World War II.
And in reality, the Russians won that war.
We came in in June of 2000, or June of 19- Wait, wait, no, no, no, go back to Merkel.
We know about World War II.
Go back to Merkel stopped Obama on- Yeah, well, you know, I think that Merkel did stand up to him then.
And I think Obama was also, he had been had, or almost had, by the neocons that wanted to blame that sarin attack on, in August of 2013, on Bashar al-Assad.
He had been told, no, it was, these were your moderate rebels that did that.
So, he was already chastened to disbelieve some of the stuff he was getting.
So, I think he was not very much gung-ho to do this.
So, Merkel solidified that.
Now, what's the situation now?
Well, there's been a grand coalition reintroduced in Germany, except, except what?
Except the Social Democrats have not yet officially voted to approve it.
Now, will they approve it?
Smart money says, of course, but, you know, that doesn't happen until they vote on Sunday, okay?
And what am I thinking?
I'm thinking that young Social Democrats, who are not enslaved to this alliance that's 73 years old now, that comes out of World War II, that says you have to do everything that the right, that the Americans say, they're going to vote against this thing.
I don't know if there'll be enough of them, but it may not be a grand coalition again.
Merkel may have to rule all by herself, and that's going to cause chaos in Germany and the rest of Europe as well.
Yeah.
All right.
So, I want to, man, there's too many different things I want to ask you at the same time.
I guess, let's stick with Ukraine for a minute.
So, there's still fighting going on in the East, and in the Donbass sort of breakaway region there in the East, they don't have tanks for shooting Javelin missiles at.
So, what is even the purpose of that, really?
They're just going to shoot them at buildings?
Or it's just to pretend that, to play along with the narrative that the Russians are coming when clearly, if they wanted to have absorbed Eastern Ukraine, they would have done so when the Eastern Ukrainians voted to ask the Russians to please absorb them into the Federation, right?
So, what do you think is the plan there?
That's the key thing.
You know, this has already been suggested by the Lugansk and the other major region there.
Donetsk.
I don't say it right.
Yeah.
And the Russians say, hey, look, you know, we annexed Crimea, but don't have any illusions.
You guys got to fight your own battles.
We will support you, but there's no chance we're going to incorporate you into Russia proper.
So, that's the key there.
Now, a very ominous sign has come just this week with this special envoy to the Ukraine crisis, Kurt Volker, who had been U.S. ambassador to NATO a decade or so ago.
He's a neocon par excellence.
What did he say yesterday or the day before?
He said, you know, we have to liquidate, we have to destroy Lugansk and Donetsk.
Okay.
Donetsk and Lugansk, those people have to be destroyed.
We need these new weapons and we need to have countrywide elections so that these provinces will be reincorporated into Ukraine.
What does that say?
That says that these so-called Minsk agreements worked out in Minsk, in Belarus, between France, between England, and between Russia, and the Ukrainians, ostensibly at least, that those accords which provided first and foremost for regional autonomy in these provinces, not for a breakaway, but to give under the new constitution of the United Republic, if you want to call it that, regional autonomy, so these people can manage their own affairs.
And the fascists, and I use that word advisedly, in Kiev, won't be able to work their diktat out there in Lugansk and those two provinces.
Okay.
So what is this?
This is Volker just saying, no, no, that, you know, Minsk, those accords don't matter.
We're going to do, we're going to proceed in a very different way and we're going to liquidate these people.
I mean, the guy sounds like he's part of the banderistas.
It sounds like he's part of the fascists.
And I, I've had a personal contact with Volker.
I was in Berlin just before the election, just before November of 2016.
And I asked him a question.
There was a fancy meeting of the NATO supported council.
I said, now, what about, you know, what Trump says about reaching out to Russia?
And he looked at me, he says, Trump, are you a Trump supporter?
He says, Trump doesn't have a chance of winning.
That was one day, one day, mind you, before the election.
Okay.
So here's a guy who somebody told Trump would be a good guy to implement his policies toward Ukraine.
Trump famously said, you know, this is on the campaign trail.
I'm not sure what really happened in Kiev.
I'm told there was a coup there, but I don't know.
Well, that's, that's no attitude to take.
If you're, if you're going to be a neocon, you got to make sure that these folks in Kiev who really want to become part of NATO and are being trained by NATO forces to use these weaponry, you know, this kind of thing is, is a flashpoint.
I don't know what the Russians are going to do if javelin missiles start destroying homes and to the degree there is armor in that part of the Eastern Ukraine.
I don't know what they're going to do, but the prospect for, for significant escalation exists all the more so since there are many quote American advisors and quote teaching these Ukrainian people how to shoot these things.
So, you know, what I, what I fear is that Putin will be, will feel a lot of pressure.
I mean, these are, these are Russian stock.
Okay.
These are people, Russian speaking people.
This is, this is a part of the Ukraine that had its manufacturing base and still does a lot of trade with Russia.
A lot of pressure to, to say, look, you know, the first javelin, the first javelin is fired.
It's going to be obliterated.
The whole battery is going to be obliterated right quick by one of these fancy missile systems we have and we'll see what happens next.
Well, what will happen next?
Chances are better than even that the McMaster's and the Dunford's and the Mattis's and the Kelly's of this world say, Mr. President, we're Marines, except for that three star McMaster.
We don't take that stuff.
We got to retaliate.
Then you get an upward spiral.
That's the kind of thing that is altogether possible when you sell lethal weaponry to these proto-fascists in Kiev.
Yeah.
Now, so here's the thing too.
Mark Perry wrote a big deal about how McMaster's whole speciality is planning for war with Russia and Eastern Europe.
This is his game.
And in fact, you know, part of it was the rivalry between him and Colonel McGregor over which was the best way to do it and the form and the size of the brigades and the teams and the resupply, what have you is in this kind of deal.
Should we do the McMaster plan and McGregor plan when it comes to this?
But it's sort of his whole focus is, you know, I hope I, I just had these flashes in my mind of Samantha Power.
Like, you know, I wrote a book about how we ought to start a war in Africa in the name of saving people.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, Mattis of course is a lot less, uh, uh, well delicate in his phrasing.
As you know, he, he bragged before he was selected to be defense secretary.
He said, you know, it's a lot of fun shooting people.
It's, you know, there's a real high.
Yeah.
It's a lot of fun.
Well, now if that's his attitude, well, then you have him kind of acquiescing when president Trump on the basis of zero intelligence decides to shoot 59 cruise missiles into Syria.
That's okay.
Because McMaster will cover up.
He'll do a government, not an intelligence, but a government assessment to show what the threat was.
And Mattis will hold his fire and not say anything.
Now there's a hopeful sign out there.
I think Mattis is aware, you know, he's aware of the danger of war with Iran.
And the last thing he wants to do is to stoke up fires in Syria and kill a lot of, have the Israelis or others kill a lot of Iranians or Syrians and say, well, you know, it's because they're using chemical weapons.
Well, that almost worked.
That almost worked in August, September of 2013.
When, when Obama pulled back with the help of Vladimir Putin, by the way, that's another story.
But what about now?
What about now?
Well, Mattis is being very cagey.
The press asked him, well, what about those chemical weapons that the bad guys are using in Syria?
He says, well, you know, um, a chlorine, uh, everybody, anybody could do sarin.
Sarin is what we're looking for.
And we haven't found it, you know, so I'm, I'm still looking.
And so then the spokesman from the Pentagon says the same thing.
We're looking for, if they're using any sarin.
So you have the Western press.
Well, and you also had where the, some Russian, I don't know if they were mercenaries or exactly who they were.
Uh, but some number of Russians were bombed by the Americans there in the conflict zone between the Kurds and the Turks and the SAA and God knows who, and the Russian foreign minister, or I'm not exactly sure who it was, but maybe it was the spokesman for the ministry of defense said, yes, well, you know, sometimes violent things happen in violent places or whatever it was trying his best to play it down.
I actually saw, uh, anti-Russia Hawks attacking him for that and saying, see, the Russians don't even care about their own people or whatever, when, what he was really trying to say was, you know what, let's not fight about these hundreds of dead men right now, which was exactly what I wanted to hear.
You know, sometimes you just have to let a couple of hundred dead men go, you know?
Well, yeah, that was Maria Zakharova, the, uh, foreign ministry spokesperson.
And, uh, she said, yeah, uh, some of these, uh, we have a lot of, uh, civilian technical support there and it wasn't hundreds.
I think she said there were eight or nine and it's very unfortunate, but you're right, Scott, she played it down.
Well, what's going to happen now?
Well, Mattis, according to the Washington post today, sometimes they have interesting little tidbits.
Mattis is in a, uh, kind of contest with McMaster.
McMaster wants to play up the, quote, sarin, end quote, uh, aspects of, of what the Syrian government is using, which it isn't, or it's just a proof of that's using it.
And, uh, Mattis is reluctant.
Why is he reluctant?
Well, I think he sees a powder cake in Syria.
He knows what the Israelis want.
We know what the Israelis want.
They told us now, this is something worth mentioning back in September of 2013, when Obama was saying, well, maybe I'll attack Syria.
Maybe I won't.
Before I went up to, to, uh, um, St. Petersburg and, uh, Putin reminded him, Hey, Obama, he says, Hey, Barack, don't you remember when we were in Ireland just in June?
Don't you remember?
We set up this working group to see if we could get the Syrians to destroy all their chemical weapons.
Don't you remember?
And Obama says, oh yeah, yeah.
Well, Putin says, well, we persuaded them.
Obama says, what?
Yeah.
Bashar al-Assad is willing to have all this very archaic chemical weapons destroyed under UN supervision on US ships, specifically configured to destroy chemical weapons.
And Obama says, really?
He says, yeah.
Putin says, watch TV tomorrow.
The Syrian foreign minister is going to announce that.
And indeed that happened.
Okay.
Now during this time, the new chief of the Jerusalem Bureau of the New York Times, uh, decided to her credit, her name was Jodi Ruderin.
She, to her credit, she said, well, maybe I ought to talk to the top Israeli officials.
They'll talk to me.
We'll find out how they look at the, you know, the preferred outcome in Syria.
So she goes to talk to several of them, among them, a former consul general in New York, Alon Pinchas.
And she says, gentlemen, then the world gentlemen, uh, or they were men anyway.
He said, what do you think?
What's your preferred outcome in Syria?
And Pinchas says, Jodi, um, this doesn't sound very humanitarian, but, but our preferred outcome is no outcome.
And she says, uh, no outcome?
He says, yes, as I said, it doesn't sound very good, but you see, we look at it as a playoff game where you don't want either side to win and you don't want either side to lose.
As long as the Shia and Sunni are at each other's throats in Syria, not only in Syria, but in the whole region, quote, Israel has nothing to fear from Syria, period, end quote.
Now, how do I know that?
I know that because it was the Labor Day weekend and the censors and all the muckety mucks from the New York Times were out in East Hampton, sipping martinis.
And Jodi Ruder had got that on page one, front page of the New York Times, September 6th.
Look it up.
It's right there.
That is what Israel wants in Syria.
Wait, this is the one with the quote, let them both sides hemorrhage to death.
That's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let them hemorrhage to death.
We're as long as they're doing that.
We, uh, we have nothing to fear from Israel now.
That's what the game is.
Part of it, of course, has to do with the way the Hezbollah and Lebanon, which is now part of the government, how they get resupplied.
It used to be that they'd have to come in by ship and then be transported through Syria to Lebanon.
Now, as long as there's chaos reigning in Syria, it's really, really hard to do that.
Now, of course they get it through, uh, from the East, just as easy.
So there was a logic to what the, what the Israelis wanted, whether we understood that or not, uh, who knows, but, uh, that was the preferred outcome.
Jodi Ruder found it out.
She reported it.
It's on the New York Times front page.
Nobody else has ever said, well, what are, who's, who's driving us policy towards Syria?
80% of that answer is Israel.
I mean, Colonel, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, good friend of mine, he was working for General Powell before Iraq.
He rues the day when he bought the business about weapons of mass destruction and ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda for that UN speech, which, which is disgrace.
Okay.
But he also points out that there was great, great pressure from Israel to do that.
They wanted us to do Iran first, right?
But no, no, uh, Wolfowitz and the other said, no, no, low hanging fruit first.
Uh, Iraq can't defend itself.
We'll do Iraq first.
Now, what, what do I, what do I say that?
I say that because I've always said since the invasion that there were three factors prompting us policy.
One was oil.
I mean, hello, it's always oil.
Second was Israel.
And the third were the permanent military bases that we coveted in that part of the world.
We're getting kicked out of Saudi Arabia.
We wanted them in Iraq and there's lots of evidence that it's true.
Well, the Israeli factor, they say, well, McGovern is an anti-Semite, anti-Semite, you know, this is terrible.
Well, here's Larry Wilkerson who was talking to these Israelis and he's saying it was Israel that have fundamental influence on George Bush and, uh, and Dick Cheney and, uh, what's his name?
Uh, the defense minister Rumsfeld and, and they're doing the same thing now that is the Israelis are with respect to Iran.
So, and in fact, you know, Wilkerson told me that out of the whole neocon network that was working for Cheney in the first Bush junior term there, that Feith and Wormser, he thought were outright agents of influence for Israel, that they worked for Sharon before they worked for Cheney even.
Well, they did.
And he singled those two out as compared to just Abram Shulsky and Eric Edelman and, and Richard Pearl and the rest who were acting and Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby and sorry.
Uh, and all of those who were really acting on Israel's behalf anyway, or what they saw as being in Israel's interest.
Yeah.
Well, I would defer to Larry on that, but, you know, my, the way I come at it, I look at it this way.
I was the national intelligence officer for Western Europe at one point in the mid seventies.
Okay.
And, uh, the flag went up, everything started to fall apart in Northern Ireland.
All right.
It was really serious.
The British were getting bombed and, you know, the conflict was flaring and I lived in deadly fear that Casey would come down and say, McGovern, you know a lot about Ireland.
We want you to be, uh, we want you to be the principal analyst on what's going on there in Northern Ireland.
And I would have had to say, Mr. Casey, no way can I do that?
No way.
Can I do that?
Because of all the things I heard from my grandmother about the British, about the British in Ireland, what they did.
So I couldn't possibly, even if I tried manfully, I couldn't be possibly objective.
Now translate that to people who are dual citizens, who are Israeli citizens, as well as us citizens, people who, you know, were brought up the same way I was to, to, uh, to have a very, very prejudiced view about the British in my case about Palestinians or anybody else.
Only no reluctance whatsoever to go ahead and act on those loyalties.
That's the thing.
You know, and, you know, it's not like Michael Ledeen or any of the axis of crystal here, any of these guys at PNAC or at AEI or GINSA or WINEP or whatever, not that they disguise their motives whatsoever.
It's all right there.
And, you know, Julian Borger in The Guardian and James Bamford in his book, A Pretext for War and Robert Dreyfus in The Nation have all shown that Ariel Sharon's office was outright in on ginning up the fake intelligence, the stove piping in into the vice president's office.
They had their own office of special plans in Israel at the same time Feith was creating the one in the policy shop at the Pentagon.
Yeah.
Even more important than that.
And it's hard to think of anything more important was how George Bush wanted to play with the big guys.
Right.
And he just really loved Ariel Sharon at the first cabinet meeting in January 2001.
Okay.
He says to the cabinet, anybody know Ariel Sharon?
Powell raises in.
Yeah, I've dealt with him.
Bush.
Well, I think he's a pretty good guy.
I think he's got a head screwed on.
Right.
I think we have to give him his head.
And Powell says, well, sir, that could cause immense damage to our impartiality in the Middle East and, and a lot of violence.
And Bush says that sometimes a little violence can do a lot of good.
Now, how do I know that?
I know that because the secretary treasury, Paul O'Neill was there and he wrote a book about it.
Okay.
So that's how that's the kind of stuff you follow.
Now, what was even more interesting, even more interesting was that in the spring of 2004, just before the election, the reelection of Bush, general Brent Scowcroft, you know, no wishy-washy guy, he national security advisor to Reagan and, and very principal statesman, actually George W. Bush appointed him head of the president's intelligence advisory board.
It's pretty prestigious thing.
Nothing more, more prestigious in Washington.
Now, what does, what does Scowcroft do?
Well, he's receiving all this information about what's going on in the Middle East.
And finally he says, you know, I got to speak out about this.
And so he goes to the London financial times.
Okay.
No right, no left wing organ that.
And he says, you know, I need to tell you that Ariel Sharon has our president wrapped around his little finger.
Sharon has our president mesmerized.
You need to know that.
Whoa.
Did that appear in, uh, in Western newspapers?
A brief mention.
Okay.
What was Scowcroft trying to do?
He was trying to say, look, people, if you can't believe me, you can't believe anybody about watch what's going on here.
And our policy toward that part of the Middle East is being dictated by a guy who has our president wrapped around his little finger.
Enough said.
And you know what, is it worth saying too, that Scowcroft as a Bush seniors, national security advisor, they also co-wrote a memoir of the administration together.
And he was publicly known as Bush seniors, best friend, and not necessarily every word out of his mouth was a message from the father, but certainly the understanding was that he would never say something that the father would have considered out of bounds in terms of criticizing the son.
Right.
So when he wrote, don't attack Saddam in the wall street journal in the fall of 2002, that was, you know, you know, uh, interpreted to mean at least that this was okay with the father if he hadn't commissioned the damn essay himself.
Yeah.
And James Baker, who had been, uh, elder Bush's secretary of state wrote a similar op-ed in the New York times.
So yeah, both of these people knew which end was up.
And I think, well, George H. W. Bush, I would say it was my friend.
Okay.
I briefed him for years.
I worked for him when he was out there in Langley.
We had a correspondence after, after he became president, after he left the presidency.
And at one point when I saw what was happening, when I was saw who his son was inviting to be, uh, key players in national security, Rumsfeld, my God, you know, Rumsfeld and Cheney.
I knew his influence.
I appealed to the elder Bush.
I said, look, would you just, would you just tell your son why it was that you referred to these same people as quote the crazies and quote, just tell him that, tell them why you kept them at one removed from, from places of real power.
You know, they could be deputy secretary or deputy assistant secretary, but, but you got Wolfowitz, you got Pearl, you got my God, please tell your son now his answer.
And I'm not revealing any secrets here.
His answer was, Oh, Ray, I too was concerned initially, but, uh, my son, he's very, very wise person.
I have complete trust in him.
I think he can keep the crazies at bay, the crazies in quotes at bay, George H.W. Bush.
Well, either he was too forgiving of his son or too trusting, or didn't know about George W. Bush and how, how impressionable he would be before people like tough guys, Ariel Sharon and so forth.
Uh, so that, you know, he's reduced to letting Scowcroft say these things or James Baker.
It was a terrible, terrible thing because we knew these guys, we knew what they were capable of.
And although Scowcroft and Baker, as you say, both did publicly what everyone should have been doing thing.
This is crazy to attack Iraq.
Uh, we did it privately, but we also published our, our memo saying this would lead to catastrophe unintended, but very real catastrophe.
Well, you know, we were right.
We're not, we're not happy.
We were right.
But at least people might want to listen to us now when we're talking about Iran.
Well, you know, there's a couple of important things I want to add here real quick.
First of all, in the book Rumsfeld, his rise, fall and catastrophic legacy by the great Andrew Coburn.
He talks about how Dan Coats was originally the first pick for secretary of defense, but in his job interview, he said, Oh, anti ballistic missile defense.
That's a boondoggle man.
We don't want to waste a bunch of money on a bunch of never worked technology like that.
And then they said, Oh, don't call us.
We'll call you.
And that was how he blew his job interview and didn't get the job was he didn't want to do the missile defense.
And so then Bush turned to Cheney and Cheney said, well, there's my old friend Rumsfeld, but your father hates him.
And junior said, all right, give him a call because he's such a little punk.
And that's kind of the whole thing to tie this all back together again, is that this man that ruined the 21st century for everyone with this invasion of Iraq, forcing the North Koreans out of the nonproliferation treaty, provoking the Russians into creating this new generation of hypersonic this and that.
I mean, it really is a whole new day here because you're not going to invent this technology.
Now, it's no longer the old three stage rockets.
Now we got this whole new thing, all these hypersonic gliders and all of this stuff.
And it absolutely none of this had to happen at all.
The whole sectarian war that's tearing the Middle East apart that's killed 2 million people so far.
And it's all because of the sniveling little brat.
Sorry, it kind of bothers me.
Didn't like his dad.
Yeah.
And then, so here's the other thing, though, along the lines of Colin Powell and on Israel-Palestine is, and I quote this in my book to bolster my case about the cause of terrorism being resentment over American support for Israel in great part, is that Colin Powell said that this was true.
And he told George Bush, listen, man, your approval rating is 90 something percent right now because of the greatest failure of all chief executives ever on your watch.
And so listen, now is your opportunity to ram this through and do a Palestinian state.
And Bush was convinced for a time.
And as Walt and Mearsheimer show in their essay and in their book, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy, it was AIPAC and the neocons, but also it was Tom DeLay and other right wing Christian Republicans who came and told George Bush, if you want to be a one term president, then do this.
But remember how Borning and Christians stayed home and didn't vote for your father over Israel-Palestine?
Well, that's going to happen to you.
And juniors said, OK, and back down.
And threw Powell under the bus.
And that and this is in his official memoirs by or a very official biography by The Washington Post lady.
And I have the footnotes in my book about it.
Yeah, your book is quite good.
As a matter of fact, I recommend everyone.
Yeah, there's a lot of detail in there.
And this kind of detail is what really makes an analysis of policy making possible.
And you don't get it.
You know what I get?
Getting back to what we talked about before, ABM, Soviet or Russian concerns in this case.
Well, why is it that everybody who thinks they're informed, who read The New York Times page after page every day, religiously, why is it that they say, wow, why didn't Putin warn us?
Well, as I think we've established, he tried like hell to warn us.
He did warn us in any way he could.
But the Western press and The New York Times never picked up on these things that we just mentioned.
The things going back to 2012, 2014, 2015, even after the Iran, quote, threat evaporated, we're still building these systems.
So The New York Times is not a good thing to rely on if you want to be informed.
And that's part of the message here.
If people don't wake up and realize that they're getting a very stilted view from people like Sanger and Broad and all these other guys who have this great record of being wrong on Iraq as well.
Well, if you don't wake up, you know, what's what's the hope?
What they need to do is listen to Scott Horton.
What they need to do is tune into ConsortiumNews.com or even RayMcGovern.com if they want at least the other side of the story.
Yeah.
And hey, we reprint everything that you write at antiwar.com as well.
Even the short VIPS memos go on the blog if not writing your article archive there.
So people want to search antiwar.com for Ray McGovern, you'll get a few thousand results.
I'm sure going back the whole terror war long at least.
All right, listen, we better let him go out an hour and a half here.
So until next time, if we don't all die in thermonuclear fusion explosions, it's great talking to you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Most welcome.
All right, you guys, that's the great Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, VIPS.
As I say, all that stuff is in antiwar.com going back.
And there's an entire VIPS archive at ConsortiumNews.com as well.
And everything Ray McGovern is at RayMcGovern.com.
And, you know, he sent me this thing this morning that had this previous back and forth with Jack Matlock and Vladimir Putin that we talked about there and some bullet points and stuff.
And he told me he's going to be posting that on his website, RayMcGovern.com.
So you can look at that as well.
It'll be right there at the top of the page.
And it'll all be in the show notes due to the great Damon.
So okay, thanks, everybody.
Check me out at ScottHorton.org.
I swear to God, the audio book is coming out any minute now.
I don't know what's taking so long, but really very soon.
And the audio book then, yeah, that's Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, foolserrand.us, amazon.com, etc.
Antiwar.com, LibertarianInstitute.org.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Okay, thanks.
