"That sounds extreme, but we're dealing with people who ...
well, in my days in government, were widely known as "the
crazies." I kid you not. This was the case from the very top
levels of government, and I can speak personally of that,
down to the lowest analysts in the CIA."
Iraq Dispatches: Interview With Ray McGovern, Part 1
by Dahr Jamail
Monday 21 August 2006 - During the Veterans for Peace
National Convention in Seattle, I conducted an interview
with Ray McGovern. McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years
and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS).
In this first installment of this short interview series
for Truthout, I asked McGovern what he thought of the fact
that Israel had been planning their attack on Lebanon for
well over a year.
Ray McGovern: The most important thing, from our
perspective, is to determine what role the US government
played. It's very clear that the US government not only gave
the green light to the Israelis, but actively encouraged
them to do what they are doing now, and then blocked
diplomatic efforts to prevent them, to halt them, or to have
an immediate cease-fire. That much is clear. You can even
read Charles Krauthaumer, who says precisely that: that we
are proud that we not only gave the permission, but we
encouraged them to do precisely what they are doing.
Now, the question arises, why? What in God's name would
possess our so-called neo-con leadership to persuade this
new fledgling Israeli government, which represents in my
understanding a right-wing fringe of the Israeli people and
not at all the Israeli people as a whole, just as our
government represents the extremist right wing of the
Republican Party? These so-called neo-conservatives who
pretty much mounted and successfully waged a putsch of our
government early in this administration, what in God's name
do they have in mind?
THE TACTICS THEY USED SEEM TO BE IDENTICAL TO THE INVASION
OF IRAQ.
We called it "shock and awe." Well, a lot of the Lebanese,
as well as the world populace, are shocked and awed quite
enough, thank you very much, by what the Israelis are doing.
It's incredible that we would see that they would take out
the infrastructure of a whole country as a way of
"retaliating" against the capture of two Israeli prisoners
of war, the capture of them, rather than the kidnapping of
two Israelis.
So, obviously this thing was planned well in advance,
and the timing really gives me great pause, because this was
a situation where there were glimmers of hope that the
neo-cons in our government were taking a back seat to more
enlightened and more flexible policy, specifically vis-à-vis
Iran. It looks very much to me, from what the president,
Condoleezza Rice and others have said, that this could be
used, and may be designed to be used intentionally, to go
after the Iranians and the Syrians on the pretext that they
were the ones who really put Hezbollah up to this, as well
as Hamas in Gaza. And now we really have to go to the source
and destroy the authors of this.
That sounds extreme, but we're dealing with people who
... well, in my days in government, were widely known as
"the crazies." I kid you not. This was the case from the
very top levels of government, and I can speak personally of
that, down to the lowest analysts in the CIA.
I'd come in on a Monday morning and somebody would say,
"Hey Ray, guess what the crazies did on Friday afternoon."
And I'd know exactly what the allusion was to. It would be
[Paul] Wolfowitz, it would be [Richard] Perle, it would be
that whole coterie of folks. Now, to his great credit the
first President Bush had the good sense to keep close to him
people with good sense. General Brent Scowcroft, his
National Security Advisor, Jim Baker, his Secretary of
State, and they told him, "Mr. President, you can't get rid
of the crazies because the right wing of our party would be
up in arms, so let Perle and Wolfowitz hang around at the
middle reaches of the Pentagon, but for God's sake don't let
them get this country into trouble." And he did. And he
listened. And when Wolfowitz came out with that crazy report
in 1992 that foreshadowed all this business, the Defense
Policy Review, and someone leaked that to the New York
Times, Baker and Scowcroft went right into the president's
office and said to the first President Bush, "You've got to
disavow this right away." Which he did.
Now, imagine our surprise, those of us who knew about
the crazies, when we found them in the key policy-making
positions. Not only they, but the likes of convicted felon
Elliot Abrams, who is running our policy toward the Middle
East right out of the White House as Deputy National
Security Advisor, right now as we speak.
"A CLEAN BREAK: A NEW STRATEGY FOR SECURING THE REALM."
So it seems to me what has happened here is that they have,
together with the infamous Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal, of which
Colonel Wilkerson, Colin Powell's Chief of Staff often
speaks, Cheney/Rumsfeld and this coterie of
neo-conservatives plus Elliot Abrams, who fits that
category, had decided, "Well, we're going to input the rest
of that famous study that several of them wrote back in
1996, called, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing
the Realm."*
Why do I mention that? I won my intelligence spurs as an
analyst of Soviet affairs. We used to take very seriously
reading Pravda and the ideological visionary statements that
came out of the Soviet Union. Karl Marx, Lenin and all of
the rest of them. They had to be taken seriously and often
we found very conclusive clues as to what they had in mind.
So, it's not a big effort to go and put PNAC in your URL
line and download some of the documents from the Project for
the New American Century and the "Clean Break" study, and
you will see that all of this was very well presented to
Netanyahu when he was elected Israeli premier. In the first
instance, it was too radical even for Netanyahu, and that's
saying something.
FIND A PRETEXT WHICH WILL JUSTIFY US GOING AFTER LEBANON BIG
TIME. NEXT, IRAN. NEXT, SYRIA.
Well, this is the policy that is being implemented now. You
can read it, it's in the text: "We will go after Lebanon. We
will find a pretext which will justify us going after
Lebanon big time. Next, Iran. Next, Syria." And of course
Iraq came in the preceding paragraphs. The plan is laid out
there. Anyone who doesn't take that seriously dismisses it
at their own peril.
I see this as the first step, having encouraged Israel,
and the supreme irony is that this young Israeli government
doesn't seem to realize that this is hardly in the long-term
interests of Israel. It's hardly even in the medium-term
interests of Israel. Israel cannot survive without making
peace with its neighbors. It cannot survive if it takes up
the sword every time it pleases, because the US is not going
to survive in that area either. Witness what's happening in
Iraq, to which very little attention is being paid.
The bottom line here, in my view, is that both the US
and the Israelis are in perilous circumstances now. That
they will be run out of the Middle East in the next couple
of years. That is exaggerating, but my point is that their
policies are failed policies. Unless Israel changes its
tune, and decides that shock and awe is not going to work
over the long term, I fear for Israel's future because I'm
concerned about that. And of course I'm concerned about the
US GIs we have in Iraq.
The whole situation seems terribly sad, terribly
unfixable, and terribly dangerous insofar as this: if the
plan is to use what's happening in Lebanon as a pretext, of
which these PNAC documents really speak, if that's what's
afoot here and we're going to say Iran is behind all of this
and we have to go to the source and prevent Iran from
supplying rockets to Hezbollah and so forth, then the
Israelis, whether with our without our permission this time,
take some shots at Iran from the air and our blue-suited
generals decide we can bomb the heck out of their suspected
nuclear sites and go ahead and do so, then we will have
WWIII. Then we will have Iran wrecking the economy of the
western world by hitting the oil heads in the Gulf or
blocking the Straight of Hormuz. The Iranians can retaliate,
and it seems idiocy, it seems just craziness for the US to
be thinking about going after Iran.
THESE POLICY-MAKERS ARE SO NAÏVE, they have no concept
of what this will do to the Chinese, or even the Russians.
The Chinese have long term oil deals with Iran. They're not
about to as they would put it, "sit idly by" and watch us do
this to Iran. They have all kinds of potential to hurt us
and to hurt us very badly. And they will, if we start to
attack Iran.
Not only that, but if you're worried about the price of
gasoline, you might want to invest in the company that's
building new meters for the pumps because they are going to
have to add another digit. It's not going to be nine dollars
a gallon anymore; it's going to be ten dollars a gallon. You
don't have to trust McGovern for that - listen to what the
Saudi ambassador is saying about that, listen to what the
Saudi foreign minister is saying. So, for Americans who
don't really care very much about what is happening in
Lebanon, even though they know what is happening, well they
ought to look to their pocketbooks at least and think that
if this is part of a long-term strategy to go after Iran,
and the economic consequences for our country are going to
be so severe that we're going to have to pay ten dollars a
gallon for our gasoline, maybe then the self-interested
Americans will wake up and say, "The morality of this
doesn't bother us much, but hey, please don't do it because
we don't want to have to pay $10 per gallon."
That's not cynical, I'm sorry to say, that's real.
Because Americans really haven't been affected by this war,
and Americans really haven't been informed about this war.
In Vietnam we had photos, we had journalists who were not
embedded or in bed with the government. That was a huge
difference between that situation and the one which exists
now.
I like to refer to what my four-year-old granddaughter
said when she saw me on TV. When it was all over she went to
my daughter and said, "Mommy, that was grandpa. That means
the other people are real too." Now, that's sort of cute on
the surface, but think about what that means. If you don't
know someone in the picture, the other people aren't real
too. And we're deprived even of the pictures of the carnage
that's going on in Iraq, and now in Lebanon.
And we have to fess up to that and realize that unless we
get our hearts involved in this, as well as our minds, we're
not going to be able to stand up and do our duty as American
patriots and face down this situation and say to our
government, "Enough. Enough. No more carnage. Bring our
troops home from Iraq. And reign in this Israeli government
that is using your helicopter gun ships, your
fighter-bombers, your tanks, etc."
Because if only for self-enlightened interest, you have
to remember, folks, that there are 1.3 billion Muslims out
there and they are watching this every night on Al Jazeera
and some of the other Middle Eastern outlets and they are
mightily, mightily disturbed at this.
And the actions of our government have put our position in
the Middle East and in other Muslim countries back to the
likes of when we did the crusades.
-0-
[ANDEND] - DAHR JAMAIL: Next week, McGovern discusses US
policy regarding Iran, a US/Israel "mutual defense treaty"
and the security ramifications for Israel. - Dahr Jamail is
an independent journalist who has reported for the Guardian,
the Independent, and the Sunday Herald. He now writes
regularly for Inter Press Service and Truthout. He maintains
a web site at dahrjamailiraq.com.
-0-
FPF - RELATED:
* DEFINITION OF SEMITES from the Collins English Dictionary
- [
http://tinyurl.com/zj9y4]
- "Semitic: a member of the group of Caucasoid people who
speak a Semitic language, including the Jews and Arabs as
well as the Ancient Babylonians (Iraqis), the Assyrians
(Syria), and the Phoenicians (the Lebanese of today).
Semitic: a branch or sub-family of languages that includes
Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew.” - Palestinians and Lebanese for
instance are semites. The JDL cliché: "anti semitism' has
always been a fake accusation, abused to kill debates too in
the past. Not anymore. What the US/Israeli war machine is
doing is anti semitism on a global scale.
* DEFENDING ISRAELI GENOCIDES: ''During time of war, enemy
has no innocents'' - the Israeli 'Yesha Rabbinical Council'
announced in response to an IDF war crime in Kfar Qanna that
killed 54 Lebanese civilians, including 37 children. - [
http://tinyurl.com/rsw33]
- "According to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war,
there is no such term as 'innocents' of the enemy. - All of
the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the
spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the
blood of our soldiers and civilians." the statement said.
(Efrat Weiss) - Url.:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3283720,00.html
* ISRAELI WRITER URI AVNERY - JUNKIES OF WAR - Israel is
conquering South Lebanon as flies conquer fly-paper -
Indymedia Beirut/Lebanon - Url.:
http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html
* NEWS FROM INDYMEDIA in LEBANON - BEIRUT - Url.:
http://beirut.indymedia.org/en/
* PREPARING THE GENOCIDE FOR 'ERETZ ISRAEL' - 'A Clean
Break: Strategy for Securing the Realm' - The new Israeli
''Pentagon Papers'' - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/zksqh
* US/ISRAELI GENOCIDE NEWS: ''MORE TIME TO BOMB'' -
ESSENTIAL 6 MINUTE VIDEO - We defy anyone to watch this 6
minute video, entitled MORE TIME TO BOMB, and not be enraged
at the scale of Israel's atrocities in Lebanon and Gaza
which 'they' are holocausting. - 6 minute video - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/k8mm5
* "THE ISRAELITE PEOPLE OF THE ENTIRE WORLD DECLARE ECONOMIC
AND FINANCIAL WAR ON GERMANY" - 24 March 1933 - On the front
page of the London Daily Express appeared the main
headlines: "Judaea declares war on Germany: Jews of all the
world unite" - Url.:
http://www.heretical.com/mkilliam/wwii.html
* REVENGE: THE MORGENTHAU HOLOCAUST PLAN - After the second
WW Germany was holocausted by the 'Allies'. One of the
'London War Lords' - Morgenthau - presented his 'plan'
together with US Gen. Eisenhower (Eisenhauer) and prescribed
a dismantling and starvation treatment for Germany ''that
would be good and hard." - There were protests against "this
addlepated (stupid and confused) ... brutal and vicious
Morgenthau Plan." which killed millions. Children, women and
men again. - Url.:
http://dc.indymedia.org/mod/comments/display/90027/index.php
* MARCH 1933 - by the way - also was the month this same
group in London knew about their 'Brethren in the jewish
Faith' which were holocausting up to ten million people in
Ukraine. Via the Sovjet Union, where they were in power too.
In their Sovjet 'Gulag system' around 40 million human
beings were killed. The New York Times Moscow
'correspondent' Walter Duranty even got a Pulitzer prize -
dispensed by the same people - for his slander and inhuman
silence, denying this holocaust. - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/eqkgq
* RELATED: BACKGROUND LINKS TO THOSE RESPONSIBLE - If after
checking a factual error is found, pls. send an email so it
can be corrected. - Url.:
http://tinyurl.com/fhln9
* The Dutch author this far has worked abroad for more than
4 decades for international media as an independent foreign
correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I -
in the Arab World and the Middle East. Having practical
experience of coups and the obscenity of war: seeing
worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more
terrorism!
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S.
C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is
distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use,
without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving
