04/02/07 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton for Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas.
That was William Norman Grigg.
Up next is Philip Giraldi.
He's a former CIA covert operative and a partner in Canestraro Associates.
He's a contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine and is our newest regular contributor to Antiwar, pardon me, regular columnist for Antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Phil.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to talk with you again, sir.
Obviously, Iran is the subject.
You're the guy who broke the story first back in the end of July 2005 that Cheney had ordered the Air Force to start drawing up plans for a full-scale air assault on Iran, perhaps even including nuclear weapons.
And I know you've been keeping track of this story.
There's so much in the news lately that would lead one to think that perhaps there's a way to make the war imminent.
And yet, on the other hand, I feel like the boy who cried wolf because I've been trying to stop the war against Iran that hasn't happened yet for a couple of years now.
What do you think's going on?
The Russians are saying they think it'll be by the end of this week.
Well, I'd rather that we just keep crying wolf and that we don't have a war, and even if it makes it look as if we were wrong.
I think that the fact that people like us are raising a fuss very early on in this process might be an inhibiting factor.
As to why the neocons and the administration have more or less backed off on this.
I don't know for sure about this business.
There have been numerous reports about a Good Friday attack.
The Russians are claiming that they have information suggesting this.
There were also a bunch of reports in the French media coming obviously from French intelligence saying sort of a similar story.
It might not be true, but it certainly is something to consider.
Well, you would think that, but there are other considerations here.
I've read some reports indicating that the planning for Iran is a kind of a quick strike capability that can be cranked up using available resources in the region in a matter of 48 hours or so.
So, if that is at all possible, then that would suggest that you don't need a whole lot of prior planning.
Because, after all, we're not talking about infantry divisions or armored divisions here.
We're talking about strikes from aircraft carriers that are already in place with armaments that are already on board and using B-52s and B-1 bombers out of Diego Garcia and Guam that are already in place and already have their armaments there.
So, it's just a question of targeting, last minute targeting, and giving them the go.
Yeah, and you know, I had hearsay rumors pass my way, I think, in the spring of 2005.
Someone whose friend was in the Air Force stationed in Qatar who said that they were already picking targets and planning for the airstrikes then.
Yeah, I believe that, absolutely.
I mean, in some ways, if you consider Iran to be an adversary, you would expect the Pentagon to be planning and targeting.
And I think that's precisely what we're seeing.
The question is, what are the intentions of this planning?
Is this the kind of planning that you do routinely?
Or is this planning that's very, very specific and that is geared to a timetable?
That's what everyone would like to know.
And you mentioned the aircraft carriers, and that's another piece of news recently.
I guess the Eisenhower and the Stennis carrier strike groups have been there for a little while and now the Nimitz is on its way.
The military is saying that the Nimitz is simply to replace, I believe, the Eisenhower, that they're not going to overlap and have three carriers in the region.
William Arkin said, oh, I can just hear the conspiracy theorists now on his blog at the Washington Post.
But I guess if you had three in the region, that would be a pretty opportune time.
Well, yes.
In fact, Seymour Hersh, I believe, was the first to report that the planning specifically hinged on having the extra carrier group or groups.
There are actually a lot more military assets in the region than one normally says.
There are the two carrier groups, but there are also some of the Marine Corps type aircraft carriers that are able to strike with Harriers and other aircraft.
They're in the region, too.
If you look at the region broadly as the whole Middle East, there are quite a few resources in the area.
And also, I guess we should note the promotion of Admiral Fallon to be the head of CENTCOM.
Yeah, that's right.
And this is a guy who obviously, his expertise is naval and air power, not fighting a ground war against insurgents in the Fallujah Ambar province.
That's right.
I mean, the appointment makes no sense whatsoever unless you assume that the objective of the appointment is either to rattle the saber at Iran or to actually carry out operations.
Now, also, when you mentioned the extra assets in the region that usually go unmentioned, I've read in foreign papers that there were American military assets, particularly Air Force type assets, being put in place in Belarus and in Azerbaijan.
Do you have any information about that?
Belarus would be very unlikely, I think, because politically that wouldn't work.
Oh, no, no.
I'm sorry.
It's not Belarus.
You're right.
That's one of the axes of evil countries.
Which one am I thinking of?
They quoted Sam Gardner in the article, if you remember.
Well, I think what he referred to were some of the bases in Central Asia, places like Tajikistan and some of the stands that had bases that basically were set up to support operations in Afghanistan, but are apparently being geared up to support operations now in the Middle East.
And, you know, since I brought up his name, I should mention that I sent him a few emails last week trying to arrange to get him on the show, which he was too busy to do, but he did say in the email that he thought we weren't likely to see military action anytime soon because the U.S. and the U.K. were going to give sanctions time to work.
But, you know, I think you've told me before you believe that Iran's nuclear program is simply a red herring anyway, and I know that Scott Ritter has told me that if they did completely stop enriching uranium, then we would just change the accusation to, well, you're enriching it somewhere we don't know about or whatever.
That the policy's regime changed and the nuclear program is kind of besides the point anyway.
So I wonder where you come down on that.
No, I agree with you on that.
Basically, I think a lot of this is pretext.
The intelligence agencies have all agreed that Iran is a long, long way from having nuclear weapons if it will ever have them.
And all of this is an adoption basically of an Israeli analysis which suggests that if Iran is doing anything, then it's basically a nuclear threat.
And that's kind of the elastic principle I think that we're observing too in this, that we assume Iran has a nuclear program that's hidden even though we have no proof of it, and that's enough for us to make the case.
You know, I guess I'm just so far outside of the common zeitgeist or whatever, not only do I read Gordon Prather every week, I edit his articles every week, and so I know this story, and yet I meet people and I hear from people in the general public who have successfully been led to believe that Iran will have a nuclear weapon any day now.
They have no doubt the capability to deliver it right to Israel and wipe out every Israeli, and that they must be stopped.
I believe the propaganda has worked, Phil.
Well, it certainly has.
I mean, the whole point is we're hearing just one side of the argument here, just like we're hearing basically one side of the argument on what happened to those 15 British sailors and marines, where they actually were.
We have some very reputable senior British diplomats who are highly experienced in water boundary issues and everything who are saying that the British forces were very much in Iranian waters.
So, yeah, these are the same stories that are being spun constantly.
The neocons and the people in the media who support them learned how to do this vis-a-vis Iraq, and they're using the same formula.
You would think that it's a bit of a discredited formula now, but it appears to work.
And, you know, the thing is, too, about the sailors, no matter where they were, which, you know, I tend to agree with you.
In fact, we're running on antiwar.com today.
One of the viewpoints is—I'm sorry, I forget the gentleman's name, but I believe the former ambassador you're referring to—called how I know that the British map of what happened and where is fake.
And I'd buy that, but regardless of all that, this happened just a few years ago, where the Iranians captured some British sailors, and they sent the diplomats over and they worked it out.
This is no cost to spell.
You can't have a war over a couple of soldiers on the other side of the line.
Send the guy in the pinstripe suit to go shake a hand and make a deal.
Yeah, well, I agree with you absolutely, but obviously the United States has—the command, CENTCOM, has said that the United States soldiers in a similar situation would have been ordered to resist, and that would have, of course, created a situation that the administration could exploit.
The British response, as far as I'm concerned, was the correct one.
They were carrying out, basically, police actions in that they were looking for stolen cars that were being smuggled in and that sort of thing.
Hardly the situation that would justify an exchange of gunfire that could lead to something much worse.
Now, are you a military guy before an intelligence guy?
Yeah, I was in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.
Okay, so now can you—do you know specifically whether orders like that that have been given to Americans, they say, to resist if they are captured or attempted to be captured by Iranians, is that new?
Is that set up to try to provoke a confrontation there, or would that always be the rules of engagement operating in the Persian Gulf?
Well, I think actually the rules of engagement vary from time to time and from theater to theater, and it's basically up to the local senior commanders to determine what those rules are.
In this case, obviously, this is basically the instructions or the rules of engagement that come from probably CENTCOM. It would seem to me that given the fact that there are no hostilities in that area with any other foreign government, you would want to avoid that kind of situation.
But I have no idea really what kind of detailed justification CENTCOM would have come up with to give those kinds of instructions.
And this is something that's been widely predicted really for over a couple of years now, that there would be some sort of Gulf of Tonkin-type incident that would happen that would serve as a pretext for war.
I know you wrote that not a few weeks ago.
Yeah, I'm afraid that this administration has proven that they're not to be trusted.
And given that standard, which is admittedly very low, I would not be surprised to see a situation contrived in some way or another to start a war against Iran, if that indeed is the White House intention.
Okay, now when you broke the story really in the August 1 issue of 2005, the American Conservative magazine, you talked about how the Air Force was being told by the White House to include plans for the use of nuclear weapons.
And Seymour Hersh, in the spring of 2006, in his article, the Iran plans, confirmed that.
And then in a later article, though, said that the Joint Chiefs had won the argument against the White House and that the option of using nuclear weapons had been taking off the table.
So please fill us in from there as best your understanding, sir.
Well, my understanding right now is that the debate is still going on, that the Joint Chiefs did indeed insist that they thought that the nuclear option was a very bad idea, but that the White House still kind of embraces it.
The whole issue about Iran is just how difficult it would be to take out their nuclear facilities, if that indeed is the intention of an attack.
And I think there is a fairly broad consensus that some of these facilities that you in particular would want to hit might be very, very difficult to take out without using a nuclear weapon.
So I think the issue is kind of still on the table.
It might be on the back corner of the table or something, but I would not rule out nuclear weapons.
I think a lot of the military brass very correctly views the escalation of using nuclear weapons in a situation where the other side doesn't have them and in a situation where there might be other options.
And I think we do it very negatively.
But as we've often mentioned, this White House doesn't necessarily have a very high level of scruples.
Well, and there is kind of a whole strategic school of thought that it's time to make nukes usable, that it's very unfortunate, in fact, that there's this terrible nuclear taboo.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, the suggestion is that there are battlefield nuclear weapons that basically have very limited fallout.
They're just essentially an enhanced explosive.
And I think that that kind of thinking is very dangerous in that there are a lot of people out there with nuclear weapons now, countries like Pakistan and India, to name only two.
And the opening the door to the use of nuclear weapons in a conventional way, I think, is a very, very dangerous thing to do.
Now, I talked to a guy named Sami Rasouli yesterday.
He's the head of a thing called the Muslim Peacemaker Team.
He's an American restaurateur from Minneapolis, a former Iraqi expat who's now gone back home.
And I asked him about, this is something you and I have discussed before as well, the possibility that the American army in Iraq could be in great danger if we commence a war against Iran.
Muhtar al-Sadr and Abdulaziz Hakeem, the two most powerful Shiite leaders in Iraq, have both said that if America bombs Iran, they will go to war.
And when I brought this up to Sami Rasouli, he brought up to me, and I guess it was kind of speculation, but he was saying, remember a few weeks back when a couple of black SUVs pulled up, and apparently Arabs or some kind of Middle Eastern people in American uniforms with American weapons killed a couple of soldiers, two or three, and abducted two more, and took them a few miles away, executed them, and left them in the black SUVs, and it was kind of a big mystery as to what had happened there.
He said his theory, and he was there at the time I believe in Karbala, that what they thought was that these were the Iranians, that this was right after America had arrested some Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq members up there in Arbil, I believe it was, and that this was the Iranians sending a message to George Bush, look what we can do to your guys.
Well, I haven't heard that theory, but there's no reason why the Iranians could not have used surrogates within the militias to carry out exactly what you just suggested, and it might indeed have been a signal, and there are a lot of theories going around that the abduction of the British Marines and sailors is also a message that's being sent.
I don't know, I mean, you could parse these situations in a lot of different directions.
It certainly would be plausible that if you've had five people abducted, you will take a step that will show that you have capabilities and you can get even if you want to, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that.
The Iranians and other hardball players in that region in the past have done similar things, so it doesn't surprise me, no.
Okay, now here's the fundamental contradiction really revealed in American Middle East policy.
For most of the, at least since, you know, 1980 or something, America has allied itself with the Sunni Arabs against the Shiites, and now we've reversed this policy.
George Bush has imported the Iranian Revolution into Iraq, and the government that has been created there by the United States is, you know, basically simply Iraqi expats who lived in Iran for 30 years waiting to take power back, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and the Dawa Party, and America is supporting Iran in Iraq at the same time we're preparing for war with Iran.
It seems like there would be some sort of coherence to this policy, even if it is, you know, one centered around the idea of mass slaughter as progress.
Well, the problem is that we haven't played our cards very well in all of this.
As you correctly point out, the major thrust of American policy has been to create a coalition of what are described as moderate Sunnis, although of course they're really not, to oppose Iran's ambitions.
But the real politic in Iraq has dictated that we basically have to deal with the Shiites because the Shiites control the situation.
So there's like a schizophrenia operating here.
Our friends, the Saudis, who are of course major players in all this, are also meddling in the entire region.
They're arming Sunnis inside Iraq, they're arming Sunnis inside Syria, dissidents, they're meddling also in Lebanon.
The whole situation is extremely complex and it's the kind of situation that probably the rather simplistic world view of the Bush administration is not really very well geared to deal with.
All right, now this is going to be an oversimplification and feel free to parse things and narrow them down as much as you like.
But it seems to me that in the run up to the Iraq war, this was clearly led, an effort led out of the vice president's office and by the White House, and every other Republican and, you know, centrist Democrat could either get on board or be ridiculed, and much of the establishment decided to get on board.
You know, there were some George Bush senior guys who wrote op-eds in the summer of 2002 opposing the war, but they had shut their mouth by the time that the actual war had happened.
But it seems like the war party this time around must be much smaller.
And when I see Zbigniew Brzezinski going on The Daily Show of all places and going on, you know, up in front of the US Senate and warning that America is about to start a regional war, and we're going to own all the real estate between Jordan and Pakistan, and maybe even including Pakistan, that this is a disaster, that this is going to destroy the American imperial project he's worked so hard to build.
Who makes up the war party at this point that they have the power to ignore people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who I believe has, you know, long been identified with representing Rockefeller interests?
Well, I think I would have to say that the epicenter of the war party right now is AIPAC, and it's this warped perception of what Israeli interests are in the region that I think are driving it.
That's the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.
Yes, right, yeah, which is the principal lobby for the state of Israel, and is the lobby that is most effective in terms of maintaining its direction of the US Congress and the White House.
I think that is probably the epicenter of this right now, that Israel perceives, if you read the Israeli media as I do, you see that Israel perceives Iran as, they keep using the phrase, existential threat.
Well, you know, there are a lot of ways to look at that which we probably don't have time to get into, but the fact is that this bill of goods is essentially being sold by AIPAC, and AIPAC has convinced a lot of people in Congress and in the administration that this threat to Israel is by some kind of synergy a threat to the United States.
Iran is not a threat to the United States, but anyway, this is the kind of game they're playing.
They're also playing the game now of insisting that, no, no, no, we're not looking for an armed conflict.
We're basically looking at putting lots of economic and other pressure on Iran to change its behavior.
I don't trust them for a minute.
I have a feeling that if they could turn the switch and get the administration to launch an attack, they would.
So I think that's where it's coming from.
All right.
And lastly here, Philip Giraldi, former CIA covert operative, contributing editor at the American Conservative, columnist for antiwar.com.
I'd like to get your comment.
I know you read antiwar.com every day.
In the Frontline section yesterday, we featured an article about local Sunnis in the so-called Sunni triangle in the Anbar province and such in Iraq, and how they have turned on the foreign fighter al-Qaeda types are fighting them and kicking them out of the country.
Your comment?
Yeah, you know, there's been a lot of reporting on that.
Again, the reporting is very focused.
It focuses on certain villages, on certain tribal leaders and things like that.
I suspect there is a lot of truth to it that essentially a lot of your average Sunnis who basically have a lot of issues at the same time are beginning to see that groups like al-Qaeda are just using them.
And I am not surprised, terribly surprised to see this.
The real question would be to what extent this is a widespread movement or to what extent this is just a localized issue.
That's not very clear.
I'm not very sure about that.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time, but I always appreciate your insight into these matters.
Everybody, Philip Giraldi, again, contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine, our newest columnist for antiwar.com, and we'll be featuring his newest article this Wednesday.
Thanks again, Phil.
OK, well, thank you very much.