06/18/07 – Don Craven Jr., Ray Mcgovern – The Scott Horton Show

This is Antiwar Radio for Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And now, welcoming to the show, Ray McGovern, 27-year CIA analyst, and Don Craven, Jr., the director of the new movie World War IV, A Letter to the President.
Welcome to the show, gentlemen.
Thank you.
Is that you, Don?
That's me, yeah.
Okay.
And, Ray, are you there?
I am.
Okay.
Wow.
So, great new documentary that's been put out by you, Mr. Craven, and, of course, featuring, in part, Mr. Ray McGovern.
Let's start out with this picture of you on the back of the DVD, Mr. Craven.
Here you are standing with George and Laura Bush.
When was that picture taken?
That was probably circa 1998 or 1999, somewhere in that area, I would say.
And you worked for the governor then?
Is that right?
No, I didn't.
I was actually a businessman by trade and was talked into joining his governor's circle, which was really more just a fundraising organization.
Basically, it meant that I gave him some money and got to go to the mansion every month or so and eat a turkey sandwich around the round table during the governor's mansion.
That was pretty much it.
And what made you decide to, it seems like, to start a big project like this?
There must have been some tipping point where you said, that's it, I have to do something here.
What was it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was actually, it was one defining thing.
It was actually a cumulative process more than anything.
Pretty much for my entire adult life, I've been apolitical.
I didn't vote until I was 35 years old, and that was for Bush in 2000.
And then I suppose the axis of evil speech that was, oh, the State of the Union, 2002, and things didn't start fitting into place for me with regard to our response to 9-11 and the quote-unquote war on terror, of course, when we invaded Baghdad in 03.
I really started getting, I would say, somewhat obsessed with the whole war, to the point where it was occupying a lot of my time, spending a lot of time looking into it.
Why did we do it, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And then when the Shell game started being played about, well, it was about weapons of mass destruction, no, it was about 9-11, no, it was not about 9-11, it was about liberation, no, it's about spreading democracy, it all just didn't make sense to me.
And I think Fahrenheit 9-11, at some point around then, I thought it was good.
But again, I thought it was preaching to the choir, so to speak, and I just really started to think, well, you know, here I am, a libertarian-slash-conservative who doesn't fit into either camp, really.
And so I wanted to at least foment some debate right of center as to the wisdom of the war in Iraq.
Well, not necessarily from the right, but definitely involved in this debate from the very beginning is our other guest, Ray McGovern.
You used to brief George Bush when he was the vice president back in the 1980s and write the national intelligence estimates for this country, right, Mr. McGovern?
That's correct, Scott.
And I'm going to go ahead and play the soundbite of you from this movie here.
I love this clip, assuming I can get it to play right.
The week after 9-11, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, are saying Saddam Hussein poses an immediate threat to us with all those weapons of mass destruction he has.
And so those of us who watch this pretty closely are saying, well, I guess, you know, the slogan after 9-11, everything changed, you know.
I guess we're being asked to believe that whereas before 9-11, there were no weapons of mass destruction, right after 9-11, weapons of mass destruction descended for a soft landing on the sands of Iraq like manna from heaven.
Yeah, that's exactly what they did.
And so what you're talking about here, Ray, is that at the time of September 11, immediately after September 11, you and your friends in the Intelligence Community, the retired Intelligence Community, you guys already knew then the status of the weapons inspections and everything through the through the 1990s.
And you knew that they were lying right off the bat when they claimed that there was a threat from these weapons programs.
Yeah, Scott, I wish I could claim some special perspicaciousness here, but it was a no brainer.
I'm really astounded that the mainstream media missed it.
I was not really following things all that closely in those days, and so frankly, I missed the fact that as recently or as soon before 9-11 as the 29th of July, 2001, so we're talking six weeks before 9-11, Condoleezza Rice publicly stated that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction, we've been able to keep them from him, he's not even a threat to his immediate neighbors.
And so that's six weeks before 9-11, a week or two after you have Cheney and Rumsfeld saying, you know, we know they've said now, and you know, that doesn't parse.
And the way I came on to that was John Pilger interviewed me for a documentary which he called Breaking the Silence.
And he sent me an advance copy of it when it was finished, and in there he had a video of Powell, Colin Powell, in February of 2001, and then the scene with Condoleezza Rice, the 29th of July, 2001, both of them saying the same thing.
And I said, John, you know, how'd you come by that?
And he said, Ray, I'm a responsible journalist.
When I knew I was doing this documentary, I ordered up all the films from Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell for two years before 9-11.
I took them into a booth.
My friends were a little afraid for my sanity, but I spent two days watching them and I found them.
Now, what do I mention all that?
Well, because a responsible reporter in this country wouldn't have to take film into a booth.
All he had to do was a LexisNexis search, for Pete's sake, and he would have found out that all of a sudden, these weapons of mass destruction descended, as I suggested, like manna from heaven.
It was just atrocious that the American people were deprived of that kind of information.
And now, Don, in your previous answer, you talked about how as soon as the Axis of Evil speech came out, you thought, wait a minute, and, you know, Ray McGovern was hip to the idea that there was something nefarious going on.
So was I. I remember Dr. Ron Paul, a presidential candidate who's featured in your movie, said a reporter asked him, have you gone to read the secret intelligence briefings in the secret room at the Capitol?
And Ron Paul said, oh, I don't want to go and be confused by their propaganda.
I know better than that.
You know, I know that they're trying to lie me into war now.
I'm not going for that.
And yet, in your movie, Walter Jones says, you know, I had to believe them.
This is Freedom Fries Jones.
I've interviewed him on the show.
He's very much anti-war now and very honestly says if he'd known then what he knows now, he definitely would not have supported the war.
And yet, his statement that, well, I had to believe them, I had to trust them when they said Iraq was a threat, it rings a little hollow.
It seems to me that, you know, yourself, Ray McGovern obviously is an expert, but yourself and myself, we both knew when we heard the Axis of Evil speech that, wait a minute, this isn't about hunting Osama bin Laden anymore.
What the hell is going on here?
And yet, somehow, Congressmen are still to this day able to say, well, you know, I had to trust the intelligence they gave me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's just unfortunately the nature of politics, really.
Do you think that the Congressmen really are that ignorant, that they kind of say the background information, and I don't know how detailed the background information you had was, but apparently you understood that Iraq was no real threat when they started saying it was.
Do you think that the Congressmen really knew less than you about, you know, what the situation was over there?
You know, that's a good question.
And the answer is, I don't know, obviously, nobody can get into their minds, but just speaking broadly, I would just say, at a political convenience, it was much more politically convenient at the time to sort of stay in the herd, if you will, than to raise questions.
And of course, there was the whole group of cheerleaders on the other side ready to point fingers if anybody did question it.
So it was unfortunately, you know, with 20-20 hindsight, it wasn't debated enough, nobody, not enough people at any rate, stood up and asked the hard questions.
And now I go ahead, Ray.
No, I think Don, you're exactly right there.
You're right on.
You know, it was a it was pretty clear what was going on that we intelligence folks don't normally focus on domestic intelligence, but we had to in this case and what we saw was a rush to get a national intelligence estimate out to satisfy senators who are demanding it.
I mean, after all, you don't make a decision for war without asking intelligence what it thinks, namely about weapons of mass destruction.
And so after avoiding such an estimate for over a year, George Tenet finally was given permission by the White House to commission an estimate under two conditions.
One, that it had to come out exactly the way Dick Cheney said the situation was with respect to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
And Cheney had in his own preemptive mood made a big speech on that on August 26, 2002.
That's precondition one.
Precondition two was it had to be done in three weeks by three weeks because the midterms were coming up.
They wanted to force this vote in early October so that all those Democrats that remembered the Gulf War I experience, where many of them voted against the war, that glorious war that came out so well, and suffered drastically for that, that they would be pressured into saying, well, this time we better go along.
We can always blame it on the intelligence if it doesn't work.
So it was George Kennan, aged 100, before he died said it was the most shabby, you see his words, the shabby and shameless cave-in by Congress that he had ever witnessed.
One last word on this, Dick Durbin, a fairly good guy, you know, he's on the Senate Intelligence Committee and he's asked a month ago, well, didn't you know that these weapons of mass destruction were bogus?
And he said, yeah, I was reading the real intelligence and I was briefed by the CIA and others and I knew that what the administration was saying in public did not correspond with what we knew from the secret material and somebody said, well, Senator, why didn't you tell us?
You know what he said?
He said, well, it was secret.
It was secret.
Right, as though they would have locked him in prison for leaking the truth out or something like that.
Yeah, that's an amazing indication of what's happened to Congress, you know, the slavishly devoted to being told what to do by administration that had something quite else in mind than a war against weapons of mass destruction.
Well, I think this is a natural result of having a system where so much power is centered in the presidency, it makes it pretty much mandatory for anybody in Congress who wants to have influence to try to get their influence by being close to the presidency rather than asserting their own authority against it.
Let me mention this too, when I interviewed Walter Jones, Freedom Prize, he gave me silent body language and information that he personally thought that the WMD issue was phony, but that he, quote unquote, had to trust the experts.
In other words, the downside of being wrong on it was deep, I think, in his mind.
So I'm not so sure that he and others, he probably represents one of several, who probably knew the score, but either for political convenience didn't want to take that chance, reading my interpretation into the situation, of course.
I think that's exactly right, Don.
The other part of this, of course, is that people like Congressman Jones.
You have to understand that when the Director of Central Intelligence tells Congressman Jones that this is a terrible threat that we face, that the Iraqis are seeking uranium in Niger and they've got these aluminum tubes and they can fly these little planes and spread biological weapons in the United States, all of them outright lies.
The Congressman and the Senator have every right to think that he's being told or she's being told the truth on this, so it's not a black and white situation.
There was a lack of guts on the part of our lawmakers, but also there was unconscionable distortion of the real picture on the part of George Tenet and those who agreed with him.
And that's a real good point.
You know, down here in Austin, I expect George Tenet to lie to me, but I guess I also expect that he's telling the truth to the Congressman and that they're liars too.
I mean, if he's lying right to their face, I can see why they wouldn't expect that.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Don Craven Jr., who's the Director of World War IV, a letter to the President, new movie coming out, and Ray McGovern, former CIA intelligence analyst, who's featured in the movie.
And now, Don, you have the greatest soundbite of Michael Ledeen that has ever been recorded.
Let's everyone listen to Michael Ledeen, number two guru of the neoconservative movement.
It was the diplomatic fig leaf.
Basically what happened was that foreign leaders, above all, Blair, were told by their lawyers that if they went to war alongside us in Iraq without a United Nations resolution, they could later be prosecuted as war criminals.
So that's why we went to the UN, and that's why the WMDs became the central issue in the diplomatic run-up to the war.
So there you have it.
There's Michael Ledeen, who was at least a contract agent of some type for the Office of Special Plans, who was involved in the neocon cabal that led us into war, taking trips with Chalabi and Harold Rhodes and the boys, Larry Franklin, the Israeli spy, to go to Rome to meet with Gorbanifar and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and all this.
He's one of them, and he's saying, listen, the reason we focused on the weapons of mass destruction is because it's a war crime to start an aggressive war.
And at least Blair's lawyers would tell him that, whereas Alberto Gonzalez told Bush, of course, don't worry, we have all the guns, no law applies to us, but Tony Blair's lawyers said, hey, you can't start an aggressive war, Tony Blair, they could hang you from the neck for this.
And so then they decided they needed this pretext, and they drummed up this excuse of the weapons of mass destruction.
Am I reading too much into what I just heard, gentlemen, either of y'all?
Well, yeah, I was, I actually caught me off guard when he said that.
It was really a de facto admission that this was sort of conjured up, and I'm not sure literally if my jaw dropped, but figuratively it did when he said that, because, you know, gee, we're talking about matters of war and peace here, and it's almost sort of flippant about, yeah, we had to come up with something to sell it.
So yeah, I was a little bit caught off guard really when he said that.
It makes sense, I mean, from their worldview, it makes sense, but I did not expect him to say that.
But of course, making up all these lies to justify an aggressive war and pretend it's a defensive one, that's war crimes too.
It's not like he's gotten himself off the hook here, it doesn't sound like.
Yeah, exactly.
Don, let me ask you, when you had that interview with Ladin?
When, as in time?
What day, yeah?
Which year?
A hot summer day in Washington, about the first of August last year.
Oh, last year, okay.
Wolfowitz said something very much like that to Vanity Fair in the heyday of the mission accomplished business with Iraq, he said to the author of this article in Vanity Fair that, well, weapons of mass destruction was just the sort of bureaucratic reason that we could all agree on, in effect, don't take it too seriously.
That's when we were winning hands down, and people with extreme arrogance, hubris is what the Greeks call it, have a way of being overly honest when they think that they can't possibly be knocked off their high horse.
Richard Prost said much the same thing to the Guardian, or in front of the Guardian anyway, admitting that it was illegal, but saying, so what are you going to do about it?
Yeah, he said exactly these words that sometimes you have to violate international law to do the right thing.
And Lord Goldsmith, the British Attorney General, he issued at least two opinions.
One was dead set against any action, military action, without explicit UN approval.
And then right before the war, about three days before the war, NSC lawyers descended upon him and changed his mind, and he came up with a very short one-pager, which said, well, I suppose it'd be all right.
All right, now let me play this clip for you guys.
This is Jim Loeb, the great reporter for IPS News, expert who's been writing about the neoconservative clique for 35 years or something, and here's his description of the groups that came together to the coalition, I guess, that pushed us into this war in Iraq.
Those who were most enthusiastic about going to war in Iraq consisted essentially of three different forces, aggressive nationalists, who are people like the Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and whose view is that military power is kind of the most important kind of power, the Christian right, who are fundamentally Christian Zionists, people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and then neoconservatives, people like Richard Pearl, like Douglas Feith, who is Undersecretary for Defense, Michael Ledeen, who works with Pearl at the American Enterprise Institute, who have long been very, very concerned with the fate and security of Israel above all.
So you have this basically tripartite coalition, which seizes 9-11 and become the main cheerleaders for war in Iraq and for the idea of Middle East transformation.
Ray, you've summarized the motivation here as OIL, oil, Israel, and logistics, that is expanding the American footprint for further wars on down the line.
Do you agree or concur, I guess is the way smart people say it, with Jim Loeb's assessment of the groups that came together to push us into this war?
Well, I do.
I have great respect for Jim Loeb.
He didn't mention the oil companies there, you notice.
I'm sorry?
He did not mention the oil companies there, the oil lobby at all.
I think you don't really have to be very specific about oil.
All you need to do is say that the neo-convision of things is to be dominant factors in key parts of the world, and what's more key than the Middle East, where two-thirds of the oil in trade exists.
So I'm feeling rather affirmed by this OIL acronym, I mean the oil.
We know now that it's a benchmark even.
We're insisting that the Iraqis give their oil to us as a condition for achieving progress, so to speak.
It's unconscionable, but that's it, 70% of those proceeds will go to U.S. and British oil companies, so that's okay.
Now with respect to the permanent military bases, we have, lo and behold, the Korean analogy.
Well, the only thing that analogy means is that we had permanent military bases there, still do, and so that's what you expect in Iraq if this vision holds forth.
Now with respect to Israel, I mean, it was foolhardy in the extreme to think that we would be making Israel still more secure in that area by invading Iraq.
Now the proof is in the pudding.
Whereas before there were no terrorists in Iraq, now it's teeming with terrorists, and that is an incredible disincentive, an incredible disincentive to U.S. policymakers like Elliott Abrams and others to leave Iraq because Israel would be in a very powerless situation, much more powerless than before we invaded.
So OIL stands up pretty well, I'm afraid.
And now Don Craven, director of World War IV, a letter to the president.
Talk to me about the role of Christian Zionists in the war party.
Well, I think their interest is biblical, really.
More than anything, they stitch together certain passages with regards to holy war, this notion of holy war.
American jihadists.
Essentially, yeah, yeah.
And their vision of revelation is that, you know, this is the end times and not to resettle the Jewish people to their holy land, and of course, Jim, if you watch the film, Jim Loeb, the gentleman we just heard from talks about, then of course everybody is raptured up and it doesn't end well for the Jewish people unless they convert to Christianity.
So there's this, there's just this religious, it's nothing new, really, it's just going on for 2,000 years, or at least a thousand, back to the crusade with who should live where in the Middle East, and this notion of holy war.
It does seem kind of strange, Don, if you go back to history, I'm glad you kind of mentioned the crusades and a thousand years ago, because from a religious war point of view, it's pretty much always been the Christians against the Muslims and the Jews, but now it's the Christians and the Jews versus the Muslims.
That seems like a pretty major change.
What do you think is responsible for that?
Just this trying to force Jesus to come back faster?
You know, let me just chime in here a little bit, Scott.
Christopher Hedges has an incredibly astute book on this very subject.
The big question in my mind is, how it can possibly be that people like Jerry Falwell can build up such an incredible following, and it has to do with what people in this country who have lost economically, lost politically, are kind of at odds end, how they've sort of migrated toward this kind of philosophy as a way out of their dilemma, and how they are being exploited by the Christian Zionists, and how they see this way to power in this country, and this way to make an impact, and put that together with these bizarre theories of rapture and so forth, and a key element, the incredible, unconscionable silence of the mainstream churches and synagogues.
Where are the rabbis?
Where are the ministers and priests that speak out and say, this is cockamamie stuff.
This is not what's in the Bible, and it doesn't mean what these folks...
That is a key element here that allows this kind of stuff to proceed.
Let me go ahead and play this sound bite here of minister John Hagee from, I believe, the biggest church in San Antonio, and give the audience a taste of what we're talking about here.
There's an army of 200 million marching down the river Euphrates, coming toward the Persian Gulf.
There's going to be the meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion that is unplanned for on the charts of all of the dictators of the earth.
It's not an invasion from the north, or the south, or the east, or the west.
It's an invasion from heaven, and he will establish his kingdom, and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
I am telling you that makes this message one of the most thrilling prophetic messages you've ever heard in your life.
You could get raptured out of this building before I get through finished preaching.
We are that close.
John the Revelator says in Revelation the 19th, and I, John, saw the heavens open, and he that sat upon a white horse was called faithful and true, and in righteousness doth he judge and make war.
And out of his mouth shall go a two-edged sword with which he shall smite the nations of the earth.
All right, and apparently millions and millions of people look to people like John Hagee to explain foreign policy and the way the world works, and they vote as a bloc.
They vote Republican, and that's the real thing is, you know, this is America.
Anybody can believe whatever they want, and we should all celebrate that.
The problem is these people are asserting political power, and we're not talking about, you know, religious beliefs in, you know, what's your afterlife and, you know, let Jesus into your heart and stuff.
We're talking about this is the way we have to change things on earth, and as both of you pointed out, what a cynical partnership between the Israel lobby and these certain brands of evangelicals, the Israel lobby must know that these Christians expect that Jesus is going to come back and kill all of them, you know, that their love for Israel is not a love for the Jewish people who live there now.
It's a purely religious thing bent on the idea of total destruction headed their way and that that's supposed to happen.
The I don't know really what's in it for the religious types in their alliance with the Israel lobby other than the Israel lobby can get it done.
Yeah, it is an ironic marriage, and I think it's an alliance of convenience for AIPAC and the Jewish community or pro-Israel people as a whole.
There was a debate, I think it was probably years ago, within the pages of Commentary magazine about, you know, do we align ourselves with, this is a magazine for the Jewish community, do we align ourselves with a religious right with regard to Israel, it's kind of like holding a tiger by the tail, it's playing kind of a dangerous game, playing with fire.
And they concluded that yes, we should, because they're going to fight for us, they're going to fight for our Israel.
Right, it's their theology, it's our Israel, right?
That's right.
There's an Irving Kristol that wrote that.
That's right.
Yeah, in fact it was Jim Loeb that told me that story a couple of years back.
And yeah, what a cynical relationship, and one that, as you so thoroughly document throughout your book, is the furthest thing from the interests of the people of this country, most important or even, as Ray pointed out earlier, the interests of the people of Israel.
This clean break strategy, if that's what it is, is an absolute disaster for them.
Yeah.
There is also some difference between the American Jewish community and the Israeli citizens themselves.
There's a lot of people in Israel who think, wait a minute guys, you know, you send over your checks, we've got to live in the neighborhood, so there's a bit of a rub there as well.
No, I just think that's very, very important what Don just said.
What we're dealing with here is kind of an extremist fringe, really, the same as the extremist fringe that is running our country at this point.
And one of the salutary developments is that many of the Jewish people in this country, influential Jewish people, are divorcing themselves from AIPAC, saying, you know, AIPAC does not serve our interests nor the interests of the real Israeli people.
And we see that debate in Forward, the Jewish weekly up there in New York, and these are good developments because some people are coming forward and saying, hey, wait a second.
With respect to the marriage of convenience, it is bizarre, but it's of course not unprecedented to all kinds of political alliances of this kind have taken shape.
The cynical part comes in where we say, well, how can the Israelis, how can this right-wing fringe of Israelis go along with this group that says, well, the Israelis are going to be left behind, they won't be destroyed by fire?
Well, the answer is, the Israelis don't believe that for a minute.
If they believe that, well, it'd be my guess, but we know that's not going to happen.
And the last thing I'll say is that it's amazing how Hagee and these guys distort scripture, you know?
For all this stuff, the hellfire and all that stuff, there's something that Jesus said very explicitly, and I've got it pretty much committed to memory, and what he said was this, now, when people start warning you of the end times and say, well, look, here's what's going to happen, look over there, here's people going to save us here, don't believe them, don't believe them.
And so the selections of scripture that these folks are relying on are very, very selective indeed.
It's sort of just like the way they cherry-picked all the intelligence about the weapons of mass destruction, right?
You just go in and pick out the things that back up your case and ignore everything else.
I'm thinking the Bible is an old, old practice.
That's right.
One of the interviewees in the film, Reverend Bob Edgar, essentially said just that, and I will paraphrase, but he says, you know, these are the kind of people that only read the parts of the Bible that they like, that fits their world, you know?
They'll pluck things out and stitch them together and make it work.
Right.
And the next thing you know, Jesus is a warrior.
There's this whole brand of masculine Christianity where Jesus had a hairy chest and went around kicking ass, and we got to be like that, you know?
I didn't make that up, I mean, these people… Sorry, go ahead.
I was going to say, it's not a whole lot unlike astrology, where you look up in the sky and you see millions of stars and you say, well, gee, if I connect that one and that one and that one and that one, it kind of looks like a scorpion, you know?
That must be a scorpion up there.
Right.
You know, the sorrowful part of all this, from my point of view, is that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater here.
You know, I'm a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, I almost hesitate to call myself a Christian these days because of the connotation that it has acquired, but the Jesus of Nazareth that I try to follow, first and foremost, is concerned with justice and taking care of the marginalized of our society, and that's something you very seldom hear from these other people on the extreme right, and that's the major distortion in my view, is that society should be judged on how it treats, how it cares for, the least of these.
What about you, Don?
Are you a religious guy?
I'm not.
I was raised a Christian, I'm non-practicing, so I'm not religious.
I can't really resist, guys, so I'm just going to beg for your patience and play some more clips of Michael Ledeen.
Everybody, you've got to get this movie, World War IV.It's the best Michael Ledeen clip, set of Michael Ledeen clips you'll ever see.
This one begins with Karen Katowski saying, yeah, but what happens if you throw a democracy and all that happens is the majority Iran-leaning Shia come to power, and then his wonderful answer via the movie World War IV by Don Craven.
Listen to this, everybody.
What if democracy means majority rule in Iraq, and the majority is a bunch of Iran-leaning Shia clerics who advocate a form of fundamentalist Islam, which is incompatible not only with democracy, incompatible with American interest in the region?
What if that happened?
Well, that's bad.
Democracy is quite capable of committing suicide.
Oh, yeah.
That means a lot.
Well, when that happens, then we're going to have to go, we will end up at war with those countries, and there's no escape from that.
No escape.
When you're against the terror masters, the terror masters are states, because I don't believe that you can have a really dangerous terrorist organization without a base in a state that sponsors them.
Those terror masters are at war with us.
That's why we're fighting, because they attacked us.
As long as those tyrants exist in the Middle East, they will arm, aid, train, support terrorists who are going to come and kill us wherever they can, including Des Moines, or we should have started with Iran, because Iran is mother.
Iran, ever since the State Department's been keeping a list of state sponsors of international terrorism, Iran has always won the blue ribbon.
All right, guys.
So there you have it.
Iran is Ladin's mother, and that's why he hates it so much, and we have to attack that place.
But seriously, what he said in that clip there, the second one back, was they attacked us, and that's pretty loose language.
I wonder if he means Iran backs Al Qaeda and they attacked Israel, or what is he talking about?
Because Iran certainly hasn't attacked the United States of America.
He says that the terror masters are states, even though Al Qaeda is a stateless band of pirates, and even though Iran backs groups, which you may call them terrorists if you want, Hamas and Hezbollah, which do not attack the United States of America at all.
So, I mean, is this guy just, he's just completely full of it, right, is basically the bottom line.
I think he's just deliberately using they vaguely.
They, they is such an easy word to apply to, you know, lump a group of people who maybe look alike or sound alike, and they become they.
Now, Ray, you're a member of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
Tell me, honestly, does Iran back Al Qaeda?
No, it does not.
You know.
Sorry, I know it's a stupid question, but come on, I mean.
No, I think, I think Don is right.
You know, when you say they, you know, it's us or they, it's us or them.
And to look for a logical stream of reasoning here or a rational approach to this is to waste an awful lot of time with people like Latine, because not by chance were these folks referred to during the first Bush administration, George H.W. Bush as, quote, the crazies, end quote.
They are, they are not able to, to assess things rationally because of the predisposition they have to secure even more safely the state of Israel with its 200 nuclear weapons already.
And they're, they're, they're melagomania look at, outlook at the, at the world where it's us and them.
And we have the nuclear weapons, we have the military, and so we're going to prevail.
It's a very, very reminiscent of imperial Rome and what happened to imperial Rome.
Yeah.
Justin Logan calls it the fallacy of 39.
And everybody is Hitler and, and everybody else is Neville Chamberlain.
Well, that's why they use this Islamofascism label.
Now that was invented by Karl Rove.
And people say, you know, that sounds really bad, Islamofascists, but what does it mean?
All it means is that some of us were pointing out the parallels, the real parallels between fascism in Germany in the thirties and what's going on in this country right now.
And so they co-opted the word and they made them Islamofascists to just confuse everyone in.
Well, what do you think Don, a final judgment at the end of this movie, is this World War IV?
I hope not, I sure hope not.
It's hard to say where this, where this will go if you take it out.
Several iterations are, if you go down, if you go down one path, it certainly could get a lot worse.
I actually posed that question to Michael Ledeen and I'm not sure if his bike made it into the final cut.
He essentially said that the worst iteration is that Iran jumps into it and Russia and China jump on their side and then you've got World War IV.
Well, you know, there are crazies out there and some of them don't even go by that label.
Look at John McCain, for example.
What he said about Iran is, you know, the only thing worse than a war against Iran would be to let Iran get a nuclear weapon.
Well, you know, that is just really bizarre.
And the way I look at it, it really all depends on Dick Cheney.
He has this sort of hold on our president and if he is the last to brief the president on any given afternoon, that's how you could change the president's mind or influence him.
And he says, I think we ought to send those blue-suited fellows with their fancy planes and missiles into Iran, the president's going to yawn and say, oh, so it's all right to me, why don't you go ahead and do it?
And you know what?
The military will salute and do it.
And we will be in big, big war, call it World War IV, call it whatever.
Our kids are going to be sent over there in more numbers than at present.
And we will be in very, very deep trouble.
So what we have to do right now is impeach both Cheney and Bush.
That is the orderly procedure that our forefathers put into our constitution to handle a situation like this when our leaders start acting like kings.
Well, Ray, I think somebody in the audience might think that that's just hyperbole, that you're going too far.
Can you explain to people who don't know already why it is that an attack on Iran would be such a disaster, in your opinion?
Well, what happens and what has happened so far is that military leaders have been able to get to Bush so far after he talks to Cheney and say, okay, Mr. President, we have these great missiles and bombs, but let us tell you what happens the next day.
What happens the next day is the Iranians have choices of either A, sending their Revolutionary Guard divisions into Iraq, severing our line of communication between Kuwait and Baghdad, and taking in effect, not 52 hostages this time, but 52,000 hostages, and or they can take off the oil heads, take out the oil heads in the Persian Gulf with little PT boats.
They can strike Israel with the missiles they already have that have that kind of range.
They can do all these things, some of them or all of them, Mr. President, you really want to do this.
So far they have been able to prevail, but I give Cheney the final word in this, and unless we get rid of him right quick, there's every prospect that he will succeed in prison.
That's not over yet.
Should we run?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I thank you both very much for your time today.
Everybody, tell me, Don, when does World War IV come out officially?
Well, we don't have a release date yet, actually, we're doing the film festival circuit right now.
We did our world premiere at the Chicago International Documentary Festival in April, and we're going to screen a couple of big festivals in Europe in September, and it's now in the hands of an agent.
Okay, so it's not on Amazon.com yet, then?
Not yet, no.
One of the festivals in Europe doesn't allow any kind of distribution yet, but keep your eyes open, it will be available in one form or another probably around September 1st.
And it really is a very well put together documentary.
It features Karen Katowski, General Zinni, Ray McGovern on the line who you've just heard, Congressman Ron Paul running for president, a couple of soldiers, two or three soldiers talking about their experience, General Odom, Walter Jones, Robert A. Pape, author of Dying to Win, the great Jim Loeb, and also Sam Gardner, who has done so much to oppose the upcoming war with Iran.
So I'm going to go ahead and end this interview with clips of the soldiers talking about how betrayed they feel from the movie World War IV, and I want to, again, thank you very much for your time today, both of you.
Well, I want to thank Don for doing this wonderful documentary, Don.
It's exactly what's needed, and I wish you luck in getting wide audiences for it.
Oh, well, thanks, Ray.
I appreciate you agreeing to an interview, too.
All right, you guys have a good one.
Okay, thank you.
This is Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
These are the stories that I heard.
These are the things that demoralize troops.
What demoralizes troops are second, third, fourth tours.
That's demoralizing.
Finding out that you fought in a war for a lie, finding out that you killed for a lie, that's demoralizing.
I'd say about 90% or more of the troops question why they're there.
I've never met one who didn't question why we were there.
Even the ones who are for the war, well, they'll freely admit, well, we weren't there for weapons of mass destruction, and there's no real clear mission as to why we're there.
When your life is in constant danger, in a sense, that takes precedence, but survival is key one, and the stuff that happened in Haditha, which probably happened all around Iraq, just not really reported, well, what do you expect?
What do you expect?
You have these soldiers getting blown up by roadside bombs, invisible enemy, getting sniped at with RPGs.
The anger builds up, the frustration builds up, and you get soldiers that walk in houses and murder families.
It's war.
It's what America exists for.
We should be supporting people who want freedom against people who want tyranny.
We are a vast, if you like it, revolutionary, if you don't like it, destabilizing force in the world.
We destabilize the world every day, and our only real choice in foreign policy is how to change the world, not whether to change the world.
We're not very good at foreign policy, typically.
We are really good at war.
It's like war.
Right.
Why are people who advocate revolution called conservative?
Right.
I don't know.
Beats me.
They're not conservative.
As a matter of fact, most of those who came over to be called neoconservatives into the Republican Party came from the radical left, from the Democratic side.
The word was invented by Irving Kristol, who said a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality.
There are many of us, Richard Perle being the greatest example, and I think basically we still think of ourselves as Scoop Jackson Democrats.
We're back in the business of nation-building and policing the world, and it doesn't work, and there's no evidence that it has worked.
I think the only way we can get people in this country to rethink this is apply a political golden rule, and this would be do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and then they have to stop and think, how would we react if China became stronger than us, and they came over and put their navy in the Gulf of Mexico, and put a base in Texas, and started saying, well, we want you to follow Buddha, and we want you to live like the Chinese live because we are free and prosperous, and we are a great nation.
Can you imagine?