Welcome back to Anti-War Radio and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and my next guest today is Wayne White.
He's the former Deputy Director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia and adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute.
Welcome back to the show, Wayne.
My pleasure.
Good to talk with you again, sir.
And there's been a lot of bad news coming out.
Over the last week, it looks like the propaganda campaign against Iran is really heating up.
And again, you're the most optimistic source I can find who's actually paying attention to the same facts I am.
And you're telling me, at least give me a little bit of breathing room, it feels like, that we're probably not talking about anything in the next few weeks because the Air Force likes to fight at night.
Yeah, I'd hardly consider that optimistic in view of my fears.
Very, very serious concerns that the administration has not passed up the military option.
I think it's very much on the table, just like they say.
And I think something else has been exaggerated even more generally in official Washington that relates to this, and that is that Condi Wright, you know, this premise that Condi Wright established a more pragmatic approach toward various problems out there, but particularly the Iranian nuclear enrichment issue, and that the Cheney people are fading in the face of this wave of pragmatism.
And frankly, I don't see that.
In fact, the negotiating track that's often cited to justify believing that this is something happening out there is really a very shaky read, you know, to base anything on, because these rather one-dimensional chats with the Iranians only about Iraq, when the Iranians clearly want to talk about a lot, are just doomed to failure.
And we've seen what they comprise, mainly our ambassador blaming the Iranians for various things, and then the Iranians denying it.
And so that doesn't get you very far.
Yeah, well, it seems like the Condi Rice angle is just really laying the groundwork for Cheney's solution, which is bomb them back to the Stone Age, and he gets to point at Condoleezza Rice and say, look, we gave her all the time in the world, we tried every diplomatic means we could to get them to bend to our will, and they won't, so now we're forced to do this.
Exactly.
This is why I think that far from being contradictory, one could play right into the other, despite the fact that there may very well be people who are alarmed by the potential consequences of all this, even maybe Condi Rice herself, but that doesn't mean that she's butting her head up against, you know, the vice president.
And you know, in fact, I think the last time we spoke was back in February, and what was going on there was they were just beginning to debut this completely false propaganda about Iran being behind all the new bombs killing our guys in Iraq, and if you remember, I forget, I think it was- I don't think it's completely false.
There's a lot of evidence out there, and there are a lot of bloody-minded characters in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard put forth, and I'm not sure it's not happening, but on the other hand, it doesn't warrant a war.
Okay, well hang on with the EFPs, because we've got time, but on the Rice issue, in terms of the diplomats versus the vice president's office, at that time, it was reported, I believe it was the LA Times, back then, you know, seven, eight months ago, that they had a plan that was drawn up, I think, in the Pentagon, or by the National Security Council, to come out and say this is all the evidence of the EFPs, and that Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates had balked, and said, no, take it back to the kitchen, and tighten up the accusations a little bit, because this is going too far, and I guess the perception at the time was that, as Gareth Porter has explained, Rice was trying to avert the war, but going along with the turn of the accusations of the EFPs, in order to try to force Iran to negotiate, so it was basically her interests and the vice president's interests converging there, but they had different purposes, and she was trying to avert the war, and he was trying to create an excuse for one.
Yeah, quite possibly, and the way the propaganda surrounding, or what should I say, the tensions surrounding the issue of the EFPs and other clandestine Iranian activities in Iraq is heating up, and I would suggest that, at the very least, we're entering a period in which some sort of retaliatory action along the border could very well occur, sort of like long lines of airstrikes, a few miles in against suspected Quds Force positions, or what have you, and some people actually fear that that would then become something that would engender then an Iranian retaliation, which would get us more and more of an excuse to go larger with respect to what's done in Iran.
I don't know whether that's true or not, but what I do worry about is the rising tension given to the Iranians, what they're doing, as if plans are being laid for some kind of retaliation along the border, which would be very easy to do.
Well, and McClatchy Newspapers reported not too long ago, and I guess The Guardian followed up, or maybe it was the other way around, that Cheney was advocating strikes against Revolutionary Guard targets in Iran, and that came relatively, I guess, on the heels of Steve Clemons' report that, I think it was Wumser had been sent, or The Times later fingered Wumser, but Clemons reported that one of Cheney's minions was going around and telling the guys at AEI that he was determined, if necessary, to do an end run around George Bush to get the war started, and then once the bombing starts, then it's just a matter of escalating to the full-scale bombing campaign that he really wants.
Yeah, well, it'd be even almost hard to talk about end running the president, which is pretty hard, because I think the president has pretty strong views on these issues himself.
The president takes extremely seriously this notion of the Iranian nuclear program posing an existential threat to Israel.
I happen to be one of these bizarre individuals who believe that Iran probably does have a nuclear weapons program, but that we should not engage in military action, because the monstrous crisis relating to military action would greatly overshadow what would happen if Iran, you know, 7, 8, 9, 10 years from now, enters the nuclear club, because what Iran really wants is a deterrent from the very thing that you and I are talking about today, and it would be supremely ironic if, in therefore trying to gain the deterrent, the Iranians trigger the attack that they're trying to prevent, but I really do not think they intend to do anything with what they acquire.
And unfortunately, a very weak president, but who has a bully pulpit, Ahmadinejad, has been feeding the international media the kind of grist that everyone wants, who is a hawk on this issue, even though again he has very little power and would never have his button on, you know, any nuclear device.
Well now, I think you're the most credible source I've ever heard say that they thought that there was a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
I'm interested to know what your best indications of that are.
George Bush himself just has said two or three times in the last couple of weeks that the fear is that the program that we all know they have might one day be used to develop a nuclear weapons program that then might be able to make a bomb.
So it sounds like you're more convinced that they have some sort of secret program than the president, Wayne.
I don't know about that, but Iran lives in a very dangerous neighborhood.
There have been evasions associated with her relationship with the IAEA, which are suspicious, and one of them actually has been resolved, and that was, I think, the issue of plutonium hemispheres, which seemed very suggestive before, but I have a relative actually who is a nuclear engineer and who knows very little about the Iranian issue, and I sent him several hundred pages of what I could send him, you know, now that I'm out of government on the program.
And in some cases, that's very detailed IAEA reports.
And it was funny, I asked him, I said, does this look like an unbalanced program, might have a weapons option, or does this look like sort of a standard, you know, initial program to produce a number of options for nuclear power?
And he has some experience in at least one developing world program, and he came back, spent weeks looking over this stuff, and he came back to me and he said, I think they're going for a bomb.
And I said, why?
And he said, the heavy water production, just to cite one thing that, you know, is being ramped up for here and planned, he said, is way out of balance with the amount of heavy water that would be needed to support a civilian reactor program.
And since then, I was in touch with a think tank that works with the UN on certain issues, and they said, we've picked up on the exact same thing.
Oh, that's interesting, I'll have to run that by Dr. Prather, our nuclear expert over at Antiwar.com, he spent his career making bombs.
Yeah, why not?
It's an interesting angle that hadn't occurred to me.
He said, he literally said it was vastly more than should be needed by this sort of a program.
Very interesting.
In other words, he was talking like in factors of like ten times more, this kind of stuff.
Well, now, the other thing, though, about the Iranian nuclear program, well, there's a couple of things here.
I mean, what we are talking about is the program that they do have above board that is monitored by the IAEA, so they would have to withdraw from the NPT and kick the IAEA out before they actually tried to really start making bombs.
And then, also, I keep reading that all they have is a bunch of junk that they got from AQ Khan's garage sale, that they've got, they were supposed to have thousands and thousands of centrifuges running by now, but they have 600 and something, and they can barely get the stuff to work right to enrich to 3.5%, and it seems to me like they're really not scared.
Actually, the report that just came out of the IAEA appeared to confirm that they have 2,000 currently functioning.
Oh, why?
And we're trying to bring 600 more online.
Oh, I could swear.
I just read in International Herald Tribune.
Well, yeah, we'll have to go back and check footnotes there, Wayne, but yeah, I don't know.
It just seems, well, like the plutonium issue, and again, I don't know, I've never worked for anybody's intelligence agency, and most of my best information comes from Scott Ritter's book, Target Iran, and from reading and talking with Dr. Gordon Prather.
I frankly would not have very much in the way of nuclear knowledge myself if I hadn't been a rock analyst for the apartment, between 1979 and 86, and had the following great detail, the Tawaiqah facility in Iran, Iraq, you know, weapons issues.
And then the thing that is amazing, that while people constantly use the analogy in order to argue what you're arguing, that Iran doesn't have a weapons program because it sort of falls in line with the exaggeration of the evidence before the 2003 war in Iraq on W1D.
But the analogy that's relevant is what they found in Iraq after 1991, in which Iraq had a relationship with the IAEA, and people were astounded, international inspectors as well as UNSCOM, at how far Iraq had gotten toward a nuclear device clandestinely.
In other words, the lack of intelligence has actually ended up being the opposite of what one would assume.
So there are some quirky cases out there that need to be watched.
But nonetheless, again, regardless of what's going on there, I'm sorry.
I do not think starting a massive crisis in the Persian Gulf, one that could overshadow Iraq, if that can be believed, which could also help further destabilize Iraq and which could send global energy markets into an incredible spiral at a time when the United States, by the way, is having some significant financial problems, is a very bad idea, all based on the assumption that Iran can't wait to hurl bombs at Israel, which I would think the rather comfortable mullahs ruling Iran with their great financial empires and everything would find very, very distressing, considering they would have to expect a massive return strike from an extremely sophisticated nuclear power.
Yeah, well, I guess there's a few different directions.
I want to get back to the EFPs as another not good enough excuse for war, even if it's true kind of thing.
But let's focus more on the consequences, possible consequences.
We talked before about sort of the premise is that they're going to sit there and let us bomb them for a couple of weeks, and then we're going to tell them the war is over and they're supposed to go along with that.
And that's not how wars work.
You're an expert on this region.
Do you have a domino theory?
Are you worried that if we start bombing Iran that this could lead to instability in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in countries, the other stands north of Iran, Russia, China's interests get involved here?
I want to hear the possible consequences other than oil is going to be more expensive than the one that we cover every day on this show, which is that our guys in Iraq are going to be subject to being shot in the back by the Shia militias.
They've been training and arming all this time.
One thing that we have to keep in mind is duration.
This is perhaps one of the most unnerving things for me about all this.
The last, ironically, the last person who decided to take a whack at the Iranians big time and also was deluded into thinking that such a whack might even bring regime change in Tehran was none other than Saddam Hussein, the man who occupied the same real estate we do out there right now.
And he ended up in an eight-year war that killed or maimed 200,000 Iraqis, not to mention the million Iranians who died in it.
But the million Iranians is very suggestive because it shows that the Iranians are willing to make vast sacrifices to pay you back for what you do in this context.
And so there are a lot of possibilities out there, all the way from activating Hezbollah in Lebanon to retaliate against the Israelis who would be presumed to have had something to do with this, even if it was just encouraging us, to say the least, through Iraq where there could be retaliation on the ground.
And by the way, during a conflict, because even if you are bombing the Iranians day after day after day after day and trying to take out their various anti-ship missiles in the Gulf, air assets and things like that, to make the Gulf retaliation less distressing, the Iranians are not stupid.
And they would be basically firing what they didn't lose the day before into the Gulf if they were in that use-or-lose situation.
And then for years afterward, you could have a simmering, low-level conflict going on with the Iranians poking out this way and that against us.
That's probably what I fear most about this, no endgame.
And there would be no regime change in Tehran after something like this.
If anything, the current regime would be strengthened.
Even probably a lot of reformists followed very hard and shouldered up to the current regime as the only thing representing Iran right now, and therefore we better support our government.
It's a very, very nightmarish scenario in terms of how do you put an end to it.
It almost mirrors the issue of the 2003 war against Iraq, which is, well, now that we're in Baghdad, what do we do?
And we know what happened as a result of that lack of planning.
Well, I hate to be this cynical or conspiratorial in my thinking and so forth, but maybe this is George Bush and Dick Cheney's last chance for national greatness.
After all, Woodrow Wilson got 100,000 killed.
Why not go ahead and start a full-scale war and an occupation and a draft and turn this thing into a big giant hullabaloo so that he can go down in history like Truman and Lincoln and all his heroes.
Theodore Roosevelt and so forth.
There have been at least two different reports I've seen from two different sources talking about contractors getting phone calls saying, hey, what do you think it would cost to set up shop in Iran as though they're planning for an actual ground invasion, occupation, regime change disaster a la Iraq only on a much larger scale.
Yeah, it's almost incredible to believe that people could delude themselves that vastly considering our ground forces are so utterly stretched they can barely maintain themselves in Iraq, let alone going somewhere else.
So you're telling me I'm crazy or Cheney's crazy?
I haven't a clue on that one.
All I know is anyone who thinks they're going to be setting up shop in Tehran, it better be ready for it to death penalty because I think the current regime will be still in charge.
And you won't make it ten clicks into the country before you lose your head after that kind of an attack.
It's strange.
I am hearing kind of two different versions coming from different angles about what's headed.
When we talked a few months back, you talked about the plans.
You've seen the war plans.
Again, I'm talking with Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia Division.
You've seen the war plans.
They called for 700 targets approximately, 1,500 sorties for redundancy to make sure to get those.
And then I guess you've seen this report by these British scholars that have come out.
Oh my God, yes.
And they're predicting an absolute full scale war.
They say 10,000 targets, which if it takes 1,500 sorties to get 700 targets, then somebody help me do the math.
How many sorties is that to get 10,000 targets?
They're basically, their statement is that the weaponry has become so advanced that, hold your tongue because you may want to laugh over this one, that those 10,000 targets can be taken out quite easily with not nearly the amount of combat sorties that you think.
People I know have considerable military expertise and have served in the military.
Pat Lang and others think this is absolute poppycock.
No, you would probably have, if you're going after 10,000 targets, you would have weeks in order to try to take out that kind of thing.
And then, of course, if you're thinking of regime change, you expand the target set beyond Iran's nuclear infrastructure and the possible ways in which Iran might retaliate to include her economic base, communications, and things like that.
Well, now you've just given even more reason for every Iranian to stand up and scream loyalty to the current regime and revenge against the United States one way or another, even if it has to come five years from now.
It's really very, very strange.
Well, let me ask you about this.
You're familiar with Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst?
Not as much as you might think, but I know of him.
Okay, well, he gave an interview to my colleague at Antiwar Radio the other day, Charles Goliad, and basically the tone of the entire interview was, God, I hope that the Joint Chiefs of Staff refuse to obey their orders because there is no other force in America organized to oppose this war with Iran.
The Democratic Party is completely owned, apparently, from top to bottom by the War Party.
They do nothing but try to outflank the Cheney regime on the right when it comes to bellicose threats against Iran.
And it seems like there's nobody to stop them.
I got this former CIA analyst saying, I hope the generals refuse to obey their orders.
Well, I hope he's wrong about nobody out there to stop it.
I have a feeling if the president wants to do this, and he wants congressional approval to go ahead, he's going to have some problems, because I do think there are people who will have some qualms about all of this.
But the problem is that the Joint Chiefs won't disobey their orders.
They will obey their orders, even though what was going on back in 2006 with respect to the contingency plan suggested very strongly that the military was very much opposed to a robust campaign against Iran.
The military was quite aware of the fact they've got their hands full and that this could be an open-ended scenario that continues on for quite some time.
I think the military, in this case, will play a good role in trying to sober up the president, and everyone else in the administration advocating this kind of a policy, but the only question is, will that be enough?
Because if they're going to issue their orders, they're going to do their duty as they did.
Right.
Unfortunately.
It has been reported that the chiefs, I forget the name of that guy in Time Magazine, oh, it's the guy that wrote Primary Colors, Klein, right?
I think so, yeah.
In his blog on Time Magazine's website, he talked about the Joint Chiefs taking the president into what they call the bathtub and the darkest dungeon of the Pentagon in the secure room and that they told the president the facts of life.
One, that they were opposed to the surge, and two, he better not bomb Iran.
So we see how closely he's followed their advice on the first one.
Correct.
But we'll see where that goes.
Now, okay, let's argue about EFPs for a minute.
You told me months and months ago that you have seen evidence, and Wayne, I believe you, that the Quds Force is inside Iraq.
Clearly the Iranian government has interests inside Iraq.
Oh, yeah.
It was clear they were there, just as they were in Afghanistan, and that doesn't tell you what they're doing exactly, but they're actually very secretive, and it's hard to know what they're up to if you're out of government.
If you're in government and you have certain clearances, you can have access to information about the Quds Force.
But, you know, obviously Iran is not advertising what it does.
It is basically the dirty trick squad, you know, for the regime, and in fact, to show you another limitation, or to show people who need to hear this, the kind of limitations that Ahmadinejad has, despite his anti-Israeli rant, the Quds Force is not in his chain of command.
They take their orders from the supreme leader via the commander of the Revolutionary Guard.
Ahmadinejad is not in that line of command.
Oh, in fact, and pardon me for going down this tangent when we get back to the EFPs in a second, but I'm so glad that you brought that up.
I hear wide and disparate descriptions of this man's actual job.
Now, Juan Cole told me that he's basically equivalent to our secretary of the interior, you know, only with a little bit more fanfare, and that he really is not all that powerful at all.
And then I hear other people say, you know, he's the one who's going to wipe Israel off the map and all this kind of stuff.
So I'm sure the truth is in there in between somewhere.
Help me out.
Yeah, sure.
It sort of is in between, although a lot closer to Juan than the other incredible...
I expected you would say that.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, we had the reformist take over the presidency when the Khotami took power as president through overwhelming election victories.
And then the reformists took over the parliament.
They took over the local councils, and they weren't able to change much of anything except some lifestyle issues inside of Iran, getting these people to back off from harassing people on the street for what they're wearing and what they're having.
As far as the basic fundamentals of this regime and how it conducts itself, such as free speech, transparency, et cetera, they got nowhere.
And you can see how limited the power of Ahmadinejad is now holding the exact same office.
He's got some contact from the Guard, probably among the senior leadership of the Guard.
So he probably has an idea of what the Qotb force has been up to, but he doesn't technically have to be told.
The interesting thing about the Guard, however, is that during the elections in which Khotami won with his reformist majorities, we received several pieces of information, and I know this also has become common knowledge on the outside, that an overwhelming majority of the Revolutionary Guard voted for the reformists, which shows that as the Guard sucks in more and more people, recruits from the same population that wants lifestyle loosened up, that wants more freedoms, et cetera, the Guard also begins to change away from what the Guard was back in the 1980s, when Khomeini was still alive.
And I remember it was unfortunately sad and phony at the same time, in July of 2005, after Ahmadinejad got elected, all of his campaign managers and aides and so forth came out and said, we want to give a direct thank you to George W. Bush for running his mouth in the past two weeks, warning the Iranian people that they better not vote for the right-winger.
You got us elected, pal, appreciate it.
And they laughed, and it was just verbal intervention in the internal affairs of that country is what helped Ahmadinejad get elected in the first place.
It may well have, but I think the manipulation of the vote that got him into the runoff probably has something to do with it as well.
This is a very interesting thing that you bring up, though, because so many times what this administration, which is so clueless on what makes Iranians tick, think will help the cause of the liberals inside the country or help the cause of reform or freedom.
It's just the opposite.
In other words, when the president, for example, made his axis of evil speech back in January 2002, which is probably one of the worst presidential addresses ever, the polls in Iran, where because of the weariness, because of the clerical regime they had to suffer under, the polls in Iran showed that Iranians on average were far more pro-American than anyone around them.
In the Arab world, the figures were in the basement.
The negatives were up around 90 percent in most Arab states.
In Iran, a majority of Iranians were responding positively to polls regarding the United States until the speech.
And then following that speech, downward, just the image of the United States among average Iranians, even reformers, had to nose-dive and continue to nose-dive.
And that's just the kind of foolishness that just is unappreciated by the administration.
Yeah, and those of us with C-SPAN remember that right after September 11th, they held a candlelight vigil.
A million people turned out in Tehran to cry for dead Americans.
Yeah.
Well, let's just take that and throw it in the garbage.
Why not?
It'll probably work.
Okay, now let's fight about EFPs.
I've read dozens of different times, Wayne, that American soldiers have found EFP factories in Iraq.
And I have no reason to believe whatsoever other than, you know, hearing it from you, if you believe it and can provide some kind of evidence for me, that these things are coming from Iran.
I'm the only person who ever produced any evidence linking this to Iran.
That I've ever seen.
Even the discovery of weapons caches that seem to be coming from Iran.
Well, that seemed to be the who?
In close proximity to the Iranian border, that kind of thing.
Well, you know, says Michael Gordon and General Odierno.
I mean, and in fact, Odierno has backed off of a lot of these claims.
At least in some circumstances.
And also, and correct me when I go off what's right here, but it's the only...
No, nobody knows what's right on this.
Everyone's guessing.
Everyone's basically sizing things up and making their own call.
There's no right or wrong.
Well, I mean, that, you know, ought to tell us all we need to know, right?
I mean, I've seen bombs laid out for pictures that look like the painting on them was done in Abe Shulski's office.
You know, it's all in English and with American-style dating.
And then I hear a lot of assertions.
But help me with this, though.
Is it not the case that the Shiite militias who are actually resisting the Americans and killing Americans are mostly those tied with Sadr, who is the more nationalist of the leaders of the Shiite factions, whereas the Iranians have really been putting their weight behind Abdulaziz Hakeem and the Supreme Islamic Council on the Dawa Party this whole time.
They're training our friends.
Well, I wouldn't say that's exactly accurate.
Is Sadr a nationalist?
Absolutely, in his own way.
But he has very close ties to the Iranians.
When I was in government, he took money from the Iranians.
The Iranians didn't like him at the beginning because he seemed so unpredictable and rash.
They were more drawn to his more predictable counterpart in the Supreme Council and militias and organizations like that.
But then when he became a huge phenomenon on the Iraqi scene, well, the Iranians decided to, you know, put some money on that number as well.
And the very fact that you had reports that he had fled into Iran at the time of the 3rd, which I never believed, I figured he went south, which is just as easy, suggested that there are a lot of people who think he has ties to Iran or else that's the last place you'd obviously flee to.
I think Sadr has ties to Iran and the Iranians want to make sure that they have some money on that horse in case he turns out to be a populist success, which is not something to be dismissed in the crazy politics of Iraq that we've ignited.
Yeah, I mean, and I never really doubted that, you know, he knows them, he's friends with them, that they have money and so forth.
But when I read, well, for six months straight, I've read all this propaganda about Sadr's guys are traveling by the tens of thousands to Iran for training.
Iran must be the ones who are arming and training the Mahdi army.
It must be where they're getting the bombs from, et cetera.
It seems like it's been the Hakim clan that's been much closer to the Iranians this whole time.
They were in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war where the Sadr's stayed.
And it seems like, you know, they're the guys, they're the Iraqi government.
And yet I'm reading in the newspaper that, oh, yeah, the American battle against the Shiite insurgency, you know, all of a sudden they just switch it.
And when they do the accusations, they never outright accuse the Mahdi army or the Badr corps.
They just say Iran is backing Shiite militias.
And the whole thing just seems like it's all being contrived by Wonser and Cheney, you know, locked up there at the naval air station.
You know, it's all being contrived, obviously.
But you can see that Iran is backing certain militias inside of Iraq.
Oh, sure.
Sure.
It just seems to me like they're backing the same ones as us.
In fact, that's the problem with the Iranians.
The Iranians make certain things happen that make it easy for people to vilify them.
You know, they have been involved in terrorism around the region for a long time.
People are afraid of them in the region.
And Americans ever since 44 hostages were taken back in 1979 have not exactly had the Iranians on the top of their, you know, we love you list.
So it's very easy to vilify Iran, even without Ahmadinejad there.
But the Iranians, you know, there are a lot of things around that you'd have to go back and review.
Like, for example, and when you read too much online, I mean, in other words, like I probably read about 80 or 90 things a day, you know what it's like.
There was an account which I thought was quite credible on the part of one of Badr's people.
He gave an interview to somebody, and I have to do a lot of next to searches to find it, in which he described going down to the border south of Baghdad, well south of Baghdad, and taking a delivery truckload of arms for the Mahdi Army from the Iranians.
And this sounded very credible to me because I did note that the Mahdi Army did have some ties to Tehran.
It's hard to know whether they're stronger than the ties that Tehran has to the Supreme Council.
I think they're less.
But it also made sense in the sense that you don't see too many Quds Force or other real Iranian troublemakers being arrested inside of Iraq.
You see other Iranians being harassed.
And that's because the Iranians are smart enough to keep their dirty Turkish people out of Iraq.
And in other words, if they're delivering arms or what have you into the border.
A friend of mine who was the CPA administrator in one of the southerly provinces knew all about Iranian gun running in those days, and it was pretty much the same then.
The Iranians would basically make it available on the border, and people had to come and pick up at the supermarket.
They didn't deliver in order to keep themselves out of harm's way.
So in your mind, does this make what Lieberman says true, Senator Lieberman, when he says the Iranians are already at war with us, they're killing our guys in Iraq?
At war.
I mean, you know, that's the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that's so unhelpful.
What's war?
I really do not think Iran is at war with the United States.
If it was, I think we'd know what war it was.
Iran was at war with Iraq for eight years, and that was a hell of a fight.
If we go after the Iranians, like after the nuclear targets, then we'll find out what a war with Iran means, a country of over 70 million people, three times the size of Iraq, and having a sprawling coastline on the Persian Gulf and even in the Indian Ocean.
Very, very serious problem there if you go to war against a country like that.
Now, what do you make of recent statements by presidential candidates and so forth about using American soldiers to pursue al-Qaeda in Pakistan?
Now, I know that the policy has been to do missile strikes in Pakistan, and the sheriff always says, oh, it was an explosion at a chemical plant or whatever to cover up for it, and that's part of the deal is at least using missiles to strike within Pakistan.
But there have been more bellicose statements by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for example, that suggest that they really would like some sort of invasion of Waziristan and so forth.
What do you make of that?
You know, well, it's an election season, and al-Qaeda is 100 percent bad, and if you step back from taking the toughest possible stance against al-Qaeda anywhere, you stand to get criticized as a presidential candidate, and so they're going to continue saying things like that.
Getting into Pakistan in pursuit of al-Qaeda is not only a way to get yourself in a whale of trouble with Musharraf, also if you go in with too big a footprint, a way to lose a few prisoners, maybe al-Qaeda will be putting out a video of the execution of a few American Delta Force types who attempted it.
You know what is worst of all?
A lot of people who cover Pakistan, which is risen with sectarian differences of its own, religious issues and nationality, problems related to various nationalities, fear that if the cards aren't played right, Pakistan could become a mega-Lebanon, and even worse than Lebanon, a mega-Lebanon with nukes.
And so, fooling around in Afghanistan in any way that discredits the current government, although I'm not going to say that I recommend Mr. Musharraf as particularly his president, I'm just saying that threatens central government authority and angers various sectors of the Pakistani population at a time when the government is trying to remain relatively pro-U.S., or at least cooperative with us, is a ticket to further instability in this huge, important country.
And that's just the kind of fumbling around, that's just the kind of silly kind of intervention, which probably would only have a pin-trick effect on al-Qaeda overall, even if you're sending a few hundred people against six or seven targets, that could devastate a very large country in the Middle East, South Asia region.
Very, very touchy there.
But you're not going to get people to back away from comments like that, because again, going after al-Qaeda, there's nobody who's going to step back from that.
You're supposed to be doing that all the time.
Right, and you speak of this instability and tying it back to a possible war with Iran, a very prominent establishment member, Jimmy Carter's former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, testified to the Senate about possible consequences of a war with Iran, and he ended up using language similar to, we're going to end up owning all the land between Israel and India, and we just can't do it.
And, you know, it seemed like he was, you know, sort of implicit in there that, you know, the regimes in Jordan and Pakistan are weak enough that, you know, we go ahead and move toward Iran, you might as well count those guys out too.
Yeah, in fact, some of the, unfortunately, some of the government, a friend of mine who has access to some senior officials and governments in the Gulf, some of those governments, unfortunately, have actually been, or some of their officials are favorably inclined to the United States going after Iran, because they fear this Shia, you know, this tremendous Shia power gaining from what's happening in Iraq.
But you're absolutely right.
This is, this is delusionary.
In other words, these people, anybody who supports going after Iran like this, could find themselves in very serious trouble with respect to the bulk of their population that would react very negatively to it, because what it does is it contributes to that image that's so damaging already out there of the United States as an anti-Muslim power, a country that no matter who it is, the Iraqis, the Iranians, Palestinians, whether they're Shia, Sunni, whatever, is anti-Muslim, mistreat Muslims in its own country, is a lie, the states that mistreat Muslims in Europe, and has an anti-Muslim agenda, and this is just another proof of it.
And, you know, that image itself is terribly destructive throughout the entire Muslim world, and there are a billion Muslims on the planet.
I'm always interested...
Many of whom would be, of course, encouraged to join al-Qaeda and other organizations and become radicalized by moves like the U.S. moving against Iraq.
So just like you did when you invaded Iraq.
Pakistan after the Taliban, or after al-Qaeda, you could actually, for every person you take out, have 20 or 30 volunteers coming forward.
Hey, you know, a former CIA guy I talk to sometimes named Phil Giraldi, I asked him what he thought the best way to fight al-Qaeda, because after all, it was bin Laden and Zawahiri and those guys who sent the guys from the Hamburg cell to come hijack our planes and kill 3,000 people, and somebody does have to do something about them.
And I asked Phil, because he's opposed to all this regime change and occupation and neo-conservative policy as well, and I asked him, well, how do you fight al-Qaeda?
And I believe the quote was, well, we've got to ramp this whole thing down.
We've got to do this with intelligence, with police, with cooperation with national governments around the world, and only in the most extreme circumstances use military.
And we've got to, you know, rather than the policy that, as you so accurately described, just brings more al-Qaeda guys in to replace the ones we kill, we've got to set about a policy where we're killing these guys, but they're not being replaced.
Absolutely.
No, you're right.
As long as certain aspects of our policy remain essentially militarized, you're going to have a lot of counterproductive development.
And, you know, it's the kind of thing that's very frustrating for Americans, because Americans like, you know, sort of solutions that appear dramatic and decisive.
And, of course, military action tends to take that form, but it can be just the worst possible thing to do in certain circumstances.
In other words, do I like the fact that hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban cadres are taking refuge in Waziristan and the northwestern provinces of Pakistan?
No, of course not.
But if going in after them in a very, very wild-ass military fashion brings about the destabilization of one of the largest countries between Morocco, you know, and India, just so we can knock off a few dozen of those people in that one area, I don't think that's a very good trade-off.
I really don't.
And nobody's really out there explaining it thoroughly to Americans what the stakes are of doing things like that.
It just sounds good.
Sounds like, good, we're getting them.
It just appeals to that decisive inclination on the part of so many people and the rage that still feeds in the wake of 9-11 about al-Qaeda and other things that's done since.
But that's a way to get yourself into a whale of trouble, a lot worse than things are now, and they're bad enough now.
Now, I don't even really have time to ask this question and get an answer, but I'll go ahead and push it anyway.
To what degree is your opinion, as expressed here today, indicative of a split, larger, factional splits within the American establishment?
I keep seeing, I believe the man's name is Edward Jegerian, the president or chairman or something?
Ed Jegerian.
Yeah, from the James Baker Institute.
Yeah, no, we used to work together.
When he was ambassador in Syria, I was the senior analyst for Syria in the department of intelligence.
And I keep seeing him arguing with Kagan and the kooks at AEI, and I just wonder, how could it really be that the Israel lobby and the American Enterprise Institute types have been able to control the policy over what seems to be the expressed wishes of Houston, Texas, and the regular professional foreign policy set that you presumably represent?
I can't answer that, except that, unfortunately, it goes a long way back.
They've cut a deep groove into American politics, and essentially, the premise that the country that matters most in the Middle East by far is Israel, despite the fact that it's rather small, and that we have vast interests, and particularly financial interests in other areas, has significantly warped policy.
How to get it back under control, I don't know.
It's been going on so long, the average American sort of accepts this generalization, even when they're thinking about Arab states with whom we have great relations.
I think the Israelis are the good guys, and the Arabs are the bad guys, or the Iranians are the bad guys, or the Muslims are the bad guys.
It's very simple.
It's sort of like cowboys in India, which also is another bad stereotype.
So I guess you didn't really correct my characterization that the Houston, Texas guys and the permanent establishment really are stuck out frustrated, and they're not going along with this policy.
They're just not able to stop it.
Is that right?
It's deeply rooted in American political culture, and it's just simply that you'll never get a presidential candidate to take on that issue, and because they know that so many Americans are essentially conditioned to believe Israel is the good guys, period.
So the neo-cons really are the establishment now?
Well, the neo-cons, because there are a lot of people who go well beyond the neo-con philosophy that support Israel, in fact, way beyond the neo-cons who support Israel.
That's the problem.
If they deeply embedded belief on the part of a vast majority of Americans, then you know that the neo-cons represent a rather small minority, influential, of course, but a rather small minority of their overall electorate.
That's the problem that we have never been able to get beyond.
That's why we have such a mess going on in Palestine, because the United States has never, just one reason, is that the United States has never been able to play the role of a truly honest broker between the Arab states and Israel or, right now, the Palestinians and the Israelis.
And you know, we could add to that that that's what got our towers knocked down, that those hijackers and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, and all of them have cited America's one-sided support for Israel as their motivation for blowing up the World Trade Center both times.
Exactly, which is why in our deliberations in the Iraq Study Group, up came the whole subject of trying to affect some kind of a fair settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian issue as rather significant.
And I can remember one individual who is very conservative, saying, well, why would that be relevant?
You mean if we had a solution to the situation over in Palestine that suddenly all the insurgents in Iraq would say, oh, well, now we don't have to fight?
Well, of course not.
That's silly.
But anyway, it does contribute to the seething rage that's out there within the Arab world.
And when we talk about anti-Americanism in Iraq, when we went in, it was because average Iraqis, aside from the propaganda that Saddam was disseminating, just in the normal radio and TV media of the region are fed a daily diet of anti-American propaganda or simply what we are doing related to Israel that pissed them off.
And it has contributed massively to anti-Americanism out there.
Norman Podhoretz recently said in an interview with Israeli television that he hopes and prays that Bush will bomb Iran, but that he recognizes fully that if Bush does follow through on his promise that it will unleash a wave of anti-Americanism around the world that will make our current situation look like a walk in the park.
Absolutely.
I think that's true.
Giuliani's senior foreign policy advisor there.
Yeah.
All right.
We're already way over time.
Thank you so much for yours today.
Wayne White, everybody.
He's the former deputy director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia.
Really appreciate it.
Take care.
