All right, everybody, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Our first guest today is former, or retired, I should say, U.S. Army Lieutenant General Robert Gard.
He is the former president of the National Defense University and is a senior military fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
Welcome to the show, General Gard.
Happy to participate.
Well, it's very good to have you on here.
And I understand that the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation is doing a new push basically to educate the American public, primarily, I think, through newspaper editorial boards and such, about the dangers of a war with Iran.
And you know, it seemed to me that if this was taking place a year ago, which I'm sure you guys were doing this a year ago, too, but it seems like it would make a lot of sense then.
There's so much heated rhetoric.
But it seems now, at least the conventional wisdom, is that the possibility of an American war against Iran this year has really dropped since the release of the National Intelligence Estimate.
So I wonder why it is that you and your organization feel it's necessary to do this public campaign against war with Iran right now.
Well, I'm not certain exactly which public campaign you're talking about.
We do have a staff member, Cara Ong, who is our Iran action officer, so to speak.
And there is some sort of nationwide kind of floating crap game going around the country to talk about trying to resolve our problems with Iran.
And she's very much part of that.
Well, I read this article by Bruce Ramsey at the Seattle Times, and he said that Brigadier General John H. Johns and one other guy, I forget, came from your organization just to lecture their editorial board about why not to attack Iran.
Well, yes, and John Johns went out as a part of that particular campaign that Ms. Ong is connected with.
But I think another organization is sponsoring the trip, she's just working with them and helping them.
I see.
I did participate in a video that they're using as part of this trip that's going around the countryside.
I think it's more than just advocating against attacking Iran.
It's probably more comprehensive in that it's looking for ways to resolve the disagreements that we have with Iran, and in particular, to try to take a more sensible approach toward trying to get Iran to give up a possible nuclear weapons program.
So basically what you guys are advocating is that the Americans sit down at the table with the Iranians.
Condoleezza Rice says that she's offered to meet with them anytime, anywhere, anyplace.
What's wrong with that?
Well, she's offered to meet with them if they do ahead of time what the objective of her discussion with them would be.
In other words, we condition our willingness to talk with Iran on their suspending the enrichment of uranium.
Now we have agreed that our ambassador in Iraq may talk with Iranian officials, but only about security in Iraq and to admonish them for their interventions there.
But the Secretary of State's offer requires that the Iranians do ahead of time what we want them to do as a result of the negotiations.
That's hardly the way to approach diplomacy.
Yeah, it seems a bit dishonest.
But well, what about at least the implication in my original question about the pressure being much less than a year ago, that the national intelligence estimate really has made the difference in defusing the crisis?
Well, I think it certainly has had the effect that you describe, but perhaps not to the degree that some believe, because as you know, the president in effect has said he doesn't believe it.
It hasn't caused him to change his approach.
On the other hand, it'll make it far more difficult for us to get the support of any of our allies should we attack.
So it has had a dampening effect, but I am not fully confident that the administration might not launch a bombing campaign against Iran before it leaves office.
Well they say that Cheney believes that the Democrats just don't have the will to do it, that he believes that it must be done, and therefore he and Bush must be the ones to do it.
That has certainly received a good deal of publicity around town here in Washington, that precisely it's something that this administration must do, because his successor is unlikely to have the courage to do so when it becomes necessary.
The implication being that Iran will proceed with its nuclear weapons program, and that we will be then obligated to try to take it out by military force.
I'm certainly not subscribing to that point of view, I'm just explaining it.
Now we've been told by one informed source on this show that some of the word around Washington is that the National Intelligence Estimate actually angered Bush and pushed him closer to Cheney's position, that he took it as a slap in the face from the bureaucrats at the CIA and the State Department.
Well I think it certainly undermined the claims that he was making, even after he was informed that the NIE was going to question the Iranian nuclear program, he was still making statements that they were proceeding to develop one.
So he must have felt somewhat undermined by it, because it certainly reached a conclusion contrary to what the President and the Vice President were saying.
Now you're a former Army General, certainly you take American national security completely seriously, what do you think, if Iran, I don't know, bought ready-made nuclear bombs from Russia all of a sudden, and they had 50 of them, would that be a crisis?
Would we need to wage a pre-emptive war against a nuclear-armed Iran?
Absolutely not.
I think that the results of that would be far more damaging to U.S. security than a nuclear-armed Iran, which would be deterrable.
Well but we're told that the Ayatollahs are crazy, that these people cannot be reasoned with, unlike Khrushchev, who is eminently reasonable, I guess.
In fact, one of the NIE's principal and most meaningful conclusions was that the decisions of the Iranian government are in fact guided by a cost-benefit approach, meaning that they're rational.
I don't think that the Ayatollahs, by any means, are so irrational that they would want to launch an attack with the full knowledge that their country would be obliterated as a result.
We're talking with Lieutenant General Robert Gard, retired U.S. Army, Senior Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
Now some of the talk, General, has been about the idea of, during a possible pre-emptive air war against Iran, that America would use nuclear weapons in order to get at buried nuclear facilities such as the centrifuges at Natanz.
Is that what you hear?
Do you think that that's a real possibility, in the event of war, that they would actually use nuclear weapons in a first strike against a country that does not have them?
I would certainly hope not.
On the other hand, the Nuclear Posture Review and the National Strategy Document posited the pre-emptive use, even of nuclear weapons, against a country that was on the verge of obtaining them.
So it's in some of the administration's security documents as an option.
But I would hope that even this administration, even though it has tried to capitalize on the fact that we are the sole remaining superpower and has tried to bring about change through the use of military force, that even this administration, when it came to the decision, would hesitate to take that particular course of action, which would just poison the U.S. reputation around the world for decades to come.
I mean, it would be the height of irresponsibility to employ nuclear weapons.
There have been studies to show that even if we tried to use the nuclear earth penetrator, that is, the weapon would go into the ground before it exploded, there would still be a very high level of fallout.
There would be a million or so innocent civilian casualties.
It's just beyond my comprehension that any responsible government official would do something of that kind.
Well General, it bothers me that you seem to take the threat, or the possibility, very seriously rather than telling me, no son, that's silly, they're not going to do that.
Well, I take the possibility of a conventional attack seriously.
I think it's a huge leap beyond that to use nuclear weapons in the attack.
That's what I think that would just, I just cannot imagine that they would do that.
You know, back in 1981, the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nascent nuclear program, and that's usually hailed as a victory, but my understanding was that when they did that, what they really did was they drove the nuclear program underground, where they weren't really that close to making a nuclear bomb, but they were trying up until the first Gulf War in 1991, right?
Yes, that's correct.
They made, the Iraqis made use of the highly enriched uranium that had been supplied by the Russians and the French as part of what we call the Atoms for Peace program, and really were quite far along toward developing a nuclear weapon at the time of Gulf War in 1991.
We were surprised when we discovered how far advanced their program was.
So it is believed by many now that the effect of the Israeli bombing of the reactor accelerated the Iraqi program.
Well I think probably most Americans are under the impression that whatever nuclear program the Iranians have, maybe the CIA knows, or the National Reconnaissance guys know where this stuff is, but that otherwise it's all shrouded in secrecy.
But in fact, there are international atomic energy agencies on scene so-called safeguarding all of Iran's nuclear facilities day in and day out, right?
Well, that's been spotty.
The Iranians have been receptive to the presence of the IAEA, have even signed the additional protocol which permits IAEA more intrusive inspections.
Before the additional protocol, the IAEA simply monitored declared facilities and made no effort to uncover any that were undeclared.
On the other hand, the Iranians have been spotty in the degree to which they have allowed IAEA access, so there are those who believe that we really don't know where all their facilities might be, which makes the bombing campaign all the more problematic.
I guess one possibility there is they don't know where all the facilities are, they say that because they're talking about facilities that just aren't there.
Those are the ones they can't find.
Well, it could be both.
Well now, isn't Mohammed ElBaradei working on a final report that's supposed to be the Iranians concluding and giving final answers to all of the last outstanding questions?
Wasn't that supposed to be done back in December?
Yes, and I think it's projected to come out shortly.
The IAEA is presumably working on it, but I saw in the press a discussion of the fact that there is some internal disagreement within the IAEA, which has delayed the report.
So we'll just have to see what ElBaradei has to say when the report's published.
Going into this final round of negotiations between the Iranians and the IAEA, when the IAEA says, these are the last unanswered questions that we want final answers to, is that the same list of unanswered questions that you have?
Are they doing as good of a job as you would like them to do in resolving the last mysteries about Iran's nuclear program?
I just don't know.
We'll have to wait and see what the report says.
So you don't know necessarily what all the list of questions are going into the final negotiations here?
Well, we certainly know what some of them are.
There was some question about whether the Iranians already had highly enriched uranium.
You remember there were traces of it on some equipment.
I think the general conclusion was that there were traces on it because of where it came from, not for what the Iranians had done.
But again, we don't know what we don't know.
We do know that for 18 years, the Iranians were making at least some efforts to enrich uranium.
Their program was discovered, I believe it was in 2002 or 2003.
And since then, we've had this drama of back-and-forth negotiations and involvement of the IAEA.
But I was encouraged in the National Intelligence Estimate, the section on the cost-benefit approach, saying that there would not be just an irrational rush to develop a weapon regardless of the political, economic, and military costs.
So hopefully, if we could get this administration to deal with Iran in the way we're now trying to deal with the North Koreans, we can come to some sort of an agreement with the Iranians so that there's less likelihood of their proceeding on to develop a weapon.
Over the years, especially since the Iraq War, they've offered to negotiate all this kind of stuff.
Of course, there was the big peace offer of the spring of 2003, but I think there was another one that Dr. Gordon Prather called Iran's golden offer to move all of their enrichment facilities to Europe, or at least to invite European companies in to control and basically run all of their nuclear programs.
So it would be basically EU people operating Iran.
They've been willing to negotiate, it seems like.
Oh yes.
And there have been back-channel overtures to our government.
The 2003 offer was really quite comprehensive.
It covered all of our fundamental disagreements with Iran, their willingness to stop supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, to turn Hezbollah into a political organization, to subject themselves to highly intrusive IAEA inspections, and oh yes.
And finally, to sign on to the Arab League proposal for a two-state solution between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
I mean, to have spurned that offer was the height of folly, because it was made at a time before we had become bogged down in Iraq.
Our bargaining position was much stronger at that time than it is now.
And it was, in my view, a disastrous mistake to spurn that offer.
We not only spurned the offer, we upbraided the Swiss ambassador for having the temerity to forward it to us.
Sounds like not just a golden offer, but platinum.
Yeah, I mean, what they asked in return was that we stop trying to overthrow their government, which by the way, we had committed ourselves to at the time the hostages were released in 1981.
In the Algiers Accord, we promised that we would not directly or indirectly interfere in the internal affairs of Iran.
Which should go without saying anyway, but...
Yes, but we made a specific commitment not to do so.
Which of course we have been violating since the 1980s.
And that's all they wanted in return.
They were willing to put pressure on Hamas and Hezbollah to make peace, to go with the Saudi Arab League peace plan for the two-state solution, to open up all their nuclear program to negotiation, all this stuff.
And all they wanted in return was a promise that we wouldn't overthrow their government?
Well, that we would stop trying to overthrow the regime, that we would lift the sanctions that we had on them, and help them integrate into the international economy, which is of course very much in our interest.
Sure, and in fact, in the 1990s Dick Cheney, when he was the CEO of Halliburton, used to complain about the sanctions and how Clinton ought to make it easier for Halliburton to do business with the Iranians.
After all, the Persians are reasonable people, we can do business with them.
Absolutely.
Now the NCRI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is the political front for the Mujahedin al-Khalq, have come out and made accusations about secret nuclear program facilities in Iran, heretofore unknown by the IAEA and the CIA, supposedly.
Do you take what the NCRI says seriously, sir?
No.
No more than I took what Ahmed Chalabi, who was an emigre from Iraq, told our Defense Department about what was going on inside Iraq.
You have to be very suspicious of what these emigre groups tell you, particularly because they favor the overthrow of the regime.
Makes sense to me.
They have gotten a couple of things right in the past though, haven't they?
Who?
The NCRI, weren't they the ones who first identified Natanz?
Ah, that I don't know.
I do know that the al-Khalq group killed Americans working in Iran during the period of the Shah's regime and we declared them a terrorist group.
Now we claim we don't deal with terrorists.
We just deal with the terrorists that are promoting our policies.
And they are a weird group too, that M.E.K., sort of communist, sort of a leader cult.
Oh yeah, I mean they opposed not only the Shah's regime, but also the revolution.
And as I say, we declared them a terrorist group and now we're cooperating with them.
They even used to work for Saddam Hussein before they worked for us, right?
Well, they certainly did in the sense that during the eight year war, their opposition to the Iranian regime and the actions they took could be seen as supporting Iraq in that war and therefore cooperating with Saddam Hussein, yes.
Well, what about during the 1990s, during the era of the sanctions and the blockade?
Weren't they tied with Saddam then?
That I don't know.
Okay, well that will be worth doing a little bit further research on my part.
Now let me ask you about this.
In the event that Dick Cheney gets his way and due to some sort of provocation in the Gulf or on the border between Iraq and Iran, an air war is launched, a few thousand aimpoints hit and so forth.
What are to be the likely consequences of an air war against Iran?
Well, the Iranians have put us on notice about what some of those consequences will be.
They have said that they will start a regional war by launching clusters of munitions against our bases in the Gulf countries.
Clearly they will come after our troops, which will be hostages in Iraq.
They certainly will interrupt the supply line from Kuwait up to Baghdad on which our troops are totally dependent.
They will give free passage to jihadists who want to attack our interests.
It would be a disaster for the United States if we did that.
What about our guys in Afghanistan?
They're a bordering country, too.
Absolutely, you're right.
I'm certain they would support people who are fighting us there, the Taliban and perhaps Al-Qaeda, even though the Iranians cooperated with us in expelling the Taliban from Afghanistan.
They worked with us to set up the Afghan government.
All of this we rewarded them by making them charter members of the Axis of Evil.
It's gone downhill from there.
I'm talking with Lieutenant General Robert Gard, U.S. Army, retired.
He's the Senior Military Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
You're also an expert on missile defense, which is tied in with this because our government claims that they're putting defensive missiles, anti-missile missiles, in the Czech Republic and in Poland in order to protect Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles.
That's correct.
I'm sorry, I live way out here in Austin, Texas.
Does anybody inside Washington, D.C. actually believe that that's what the missile defense is for, Iran?
Well, that is the rationale that's used for emplacing it there.
I would suppose the officials in the Missile Defense Agency believe that this would enhance the defense of our interests in Europe and our personnel in Europe against a possible missile attack from Iran, the likelihood of which I believe to be near zero.
First, they don't have the capability at this time to reach into Europe.
They can hit Israel and some parts of Turkey.
That's about as far as it can go.
But what possible reason would the Iranians have for launching a missile against a European country?
None that I can think of other than they're crazy and can't be dealt with.
Yeah, and I think the NIE pretty well put that to rest.
Yeah, at this point I'm just making fun of them for that.
Are we to believe, then, really, that putting anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic has nothing to do with Russia, that it's a coincidence that Russia's right there?
Well, let me tell you my theory on why the Russians have reacted so negatively.
You rarely see in the press the fact that in 1990, Secretary of State James Baker met with Gorbachev in the presence of Jack Matloff, our ambassador to the then Soviet Union, and said to Gorbachev, if you will allow us to anchor a unified Germany in NATO, we promise that we will not move NATO east.
And that's been confirmed by public statements by Jack Matloff.
And look what we've done.
Well, we've brought in the entire eastern bloc.
We have integrated into NATO the Baltic states right on the Russian border.
I thought it was kind of funny when I read in the news last week, maybe two weeks ago, that a KGB-trained Hungarian intelligence official is now the head of intelligence for NATO.
And, well, I guess that's just part of the consequence of bringing in the Warsaw Pact.
Yeah, and I mean, after that assurance, we then proceeded to expand NATO eastward.
And to me, putting the missiles in Poland and the radar in the Czech Republic really has no meaningful impact on the Russian retaliatory capability, because our ground-based midcourse missile defense system is designed solely to counter one or a very few missiles launched by a rogue state.
It's very easily overwhelmed in the unlikely event that it even proves to work in the first place.
So it seems really pointless, then, to have these missiles on the border of Russia when the Russians could overwhelm the system in a moment if they really tried anyway.
Absolutely.
But you see, it isn't designed to counter the Russian system.
It is designed, I don't believe it's a sensible reason for putting it in, but it's designed against a possible attack from Iran.
Now, initially, we said that our system, which is deployed in Alaska with a few missiles at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, was designed to counter Korean missiles.
And there would be some holes in it when Iran developed the capability.
That was the first rationale for putting a system in Europe.
But since then, the Missile Defense Agency has said that by 2011, the entire United States will be protected against Iranian missiles.
So now we're saying it's to protect Europe, even though Europe made no request of us to deploy the system there to protect them.
That sounds like a giant government program in search of an excuse for existence.
Well, my own belief is that what used to be called National Missile Defense, and is now called the Ground-Based Midcourse System, which is designed to shoot incoming missiles down when they're above the atmosphere in space, is not going to work anyway.
Because any nation capable of deploying an intercontinental ballistic missile is also capable of designing countermeasures that can overwhelm that particular missile defense system.
And this is on the authority of the Defense Science Board, National Intelligence Estimates, the Office of Science and Technology, besides knowledgeable individual scientists.
So it not only is putting a system in where no one asked for it, but it's a system that isn't going to work.
And boy, does it cost a lot of money, doesn't it?
It indeed is the single most expensive weapons system in the entire defense budget.
Really?
It is.
I didn't realize that.
More than all the new fighter jets and all that.
Oh yeah.
We've spent, since Ronald Reagan's Star Wars speech, we've spent over $100 billion on missile defense.
Oh, is that all?
I would have thought it was more even than that.
Well, that's a lot of money.
Oh, it sure is, yeah.
Don't get me wrong.
We spend that in a year in Iraq, you know.
Yeah, we're running at about $12 billion a month there.
Geez.
All right.
Well, now, what about Congress?
Is there the slightest possibility that people in Congress will listen to reason, or maybe even exercise their power in accordance with reason on the issues of Iran or missile defense?
Well, the Congress has exercised its budgetary authority on certain elements of missile defense.
They didn't appropriate quite as much as the administration asked for in the Iran Sanctions Act.
So they've taken some but insufficient action, in my view.
Now, they did cut the funds for the so-called robust nuclear earth penetrator, which was proposed by the administration.
We have a nuclear earth penetrator, something on the order of 350 kilotons.
And hence the word robust.
They wanted to go up to 1,000 kilotons with the robust nuclear earth penetrator, and Congress did cut the funds for that.
And it's not being developed as a result.
Well, that's good news, at least.
So I guess just in the last couple of minutes here, if you could maybe plug the center.
It's the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
If you could maybe just tell our listeners about you guys and your work, and where they can find out more and so forth.
Well, it's a 501C3, so-called, which is that is a nonpartisan analytical organization.
It's not large.
We probably have 10, 12 total staff, and we work, as the name of the organization suggests, we emphasize nuclear threat reduction, but by no means are our interests limited to that.
We also consider other critical security issues, such as the one you and I discussed today.
We look at Iraq.
We look at the defense budget.
We look at missile defense, in particular this ground-based mid-course system that I mentioned, trying to rationalize and optimize how the public funds are spent to protect our security in genuine ways, rather than in wasting money on useless programs.
All right.
Well, I sure appreciate your time today.
Everybody, it's retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard from the U.S. Army.
He's the Senior Military Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
Thank you very much for your time today, sir.
I appreciate the opportunity to participate.
