Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to
this week's edition of The Wilkerson Report with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who now joins
us in the studio in Baltimore.
Thanks for joining us, Larry.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Thanks for having me, Paul.
JAY: So I think everybody knows Larry's introduction, but just in case, Larry was chief of staff
for Colin Powell for many years and now teaches at William & Mary College and is regularly
on The Real News and other places.
So I wanted to ask you a question about where we're at in this debate that's taking place
in Washington and, I guess, in military, diplomatic circles. And we're starting to hear the debate
about Iran and about Syria and whether to intervene or not. We're hearing kind of these
things coming up through The New York Times and op-eds, The Washington Post. And on Syria
what's being said is it's time for the U.S. to find a way to intervene. They're not quite
defining what intervene means, but The Washington Post yesterday said find a way to intervene
to end the war as quickly as possible. It's not clear if that means shifting the balance
of power to give a lot more arms to the rebels or does it mean more than that. Then you're
also starting to hear talk about Iran, that Iran really couldn't hit back very strongly
if they were hit. There's--they make reference to the way--what was supposed to have been
a nuclear facility in Syria a few years ago, and the Israelis hit it, and the Syrians never
did much about it, and they're saying, oh, look, the Iranians after making all this noise
can't afford real counterattack, 'cause it would invite an onslaught against them, so
it's safe to attack Iran. It's--all sounds like pre-Iraq War. Even the people on both
sides seem very similar.
WILKERSON: I think you're right. I think it does sound like a lot of what I heard in 2002
and early 2003 before we invaded Iraq. And it's the same choir singing off essentially
the same sheet of music.
There are some nuances, though. Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of policy planning
for Hillary Clinton at the State Department, has put out a piece that is almost Samantha
Power like, that is to say, we must, we must, or we'll have another Rwanda on our hands,
we must intervene in Syria. Anne-Marie doesn't specify exactly how we should do that.
Robert Hunter, Ambassador Robert Hunter has a piece out saying we shouldn't. And I think
Ambassador Hunter has the better part of the argument, because there is simply nothing
the United States can do that will stop the killing in any meaningful way. Probably what
we'll do is exacerbate it.
This is a civil war. This isn't Rwanda. This is a civil war. And we've got Alawites, and
we've got Sunnis, and we've got the Saudis backing the Sunnis, and we've got others backing
the Shia Allawite. We've got Iran, of course, heavily involved inside Syria. We've got China
and Russia standing on the sidelines waiting to see what's going to happen with regard
to U.S. intervention or not.
This is a very different problem from Rwanda, a much more serious problem in its military
and strategic ramifications. Perhaps Rwanda shines a light on a lack of humanitarian action
when one group of people is committing genocide against another group of people, but that's
not what's happening here.
What's happening here is a lot of brutal death, but it's a civil war. It's a civil war with
lots of elements. And so it's extremely difficult to imagine how U.S. military power, which
is not the cure-all for every disease in the world, would intervene in a way that would
not make the situation worse than it already is.
JAY: Daniel Pipes, who is usually allied with the neocons and speaks for or echoes a lot
of what's said in the right-wing Israeli circles, right-wing Likud circles, he wrote a piece
the other day that says, let them all kill each other. In fact, right now he's saying
American policy should actually favor shoring up Assad 'cause he seems to be weakening,
and it's in Israel's--actually, I don't think he used the word Israel; he said America's
interest (excuse me, Mr. Pipes), America's interest to let them all kill each other.
WILKERSON: I think that's a fair approximation of what you might look at if you were looking
at it ruthlessly, brutally as a strategist and you were saying, what would be best in
order to terminate the killing swiftly and to put some kind of stability back in place.
And I could understand someone saying that in that event, if that's your objective, then
the best thing to do is to shore up Assad and let the stability he brought be restored
and see how long it'll last.
JAY: Well, Pipes wasn't quite arguing that. Pipes was: shore up Assad until Assad looks
too strong; then shore up the rebels and let them go strong.
WILKERSON: Yeah, let them all go ahead and kill each other.
JAY: In other words, let this civil war go on forever. And one can see, if one's looking
at this, certainly, from right-wing Israeli interest, that's not such a bad situation,
'cause now there's such chaos and disorder and Assad's so weak, any time you want to
blow something up on--a shipment on its way to Hezbollah--.
WILKERSON: Just the way the Israelis just did.
JAY: Yeah, and you get away with it.
WILKERSON: I would not want to be in Israel's position right now. I've said this before.
I'll say it again. I think Israel is in as dangerous a position strategically, geopolitically
as she's been since 1948. That's pretty bad. Look around Israel. Brutal civil war in Syria.
Egypt, no one knows. Big question mark over what was the bastion of Israeli-Arab peace,
Egypt. King of Jordan making public statements saying he might not want to be king any longer.
Lebanon's government walks in and out of a revolving door, and Nasrallah of Hezbollah
is gaining more and more political control. Iraq is in the hands of Iran. Nouri al-Maliki
might as well be Persian. The civil war in Iraq is heating up again as the Sunnis realize
Maliki's bent and our funding the Sunnis inside Iraq to reclaim their power in Baghdad. The
Kurds in the north are about to declare their own independent state and tell the rest of
Iraq to go to hell. This is a true mess, largely started by the United States invasion of Iraq
in 2003 and the incompetence of the occupation afterwards. This is a real mess.
And Israel is looking at the only ally it has on the face of the earth in Washington.
Everyone else in the region is against it.
JAY: So it seems to me the drumbeats for intervening in Syria can't be disconnected from the drumbeats
for an attack on Iran.
WILKERSON: No, it's a backdoor.
JAY: And if you go down that road, you've really got to go down that road. And are these
people serious?
WILKERSON: They're serious, but they don't understand what they're serious about. Some
of them do, but very few. Let's face it. None of them have ever been in war in their life.
So what we're looking at here is people who are neophytes at this sort of thing, just
as they were in 2003. And look what we got in 2004 and '05 and '06. What they're looking
at is bombing Iran.
I agree that the Iranians would probably not do very much in retaliation. What could they
do, after all? Unleash Hezbollah? Send it around the world? These can be some pretty
dire things in the long run, but they're not strategically game-changing things.
So what could Iran do? Well, I'll tell you what Iran'll do. They'll make a decision to
build a nuclear weapon as the bombs are dropping, and they'll build that nuclear weapon, and
then the only thing the United States will be able to do is invade, occupy, $2 trillion
to $3 trillion, ten years, and the results at the end of that decade will be just like
the results in Afghanistan and Iraq today. So sign up to that, baby, if you want to be
derelict in your duty again.
JAY: That bombing Iran leads to the decision that every intelligence agency so far has
said Iran hasn't made, which is to build a bomb. But you start bombing, then they make
the decision.
WILKERSON: Absolutely. And what Bob Menendez and John McCain and Lindsey Graham and others
like them are really after is regime change. And the only way you're going to change the
regime in Iran is to invade.
JAY: Now, the Obama administration does not seem to be on that page, both the appointment
of Hagel and the rhetoric from President Obama. They don't seem to want to do that.
WILKERSON: They don't, and I'm glad for that. I voted for President Obama, and I began to
wonder why. The Iran issue, as you just pointed out, may be the reason why. He doesn't seem
to have a predeliction, even a desire, to go to war yet again in Asia and squander American
blood and treasure on something that is unsolvable by American military power.
JAY: And does he stand up under this pressure? I guess we don't know the answer yet. But
how much is this pressure building? As I said, we saw op-ed in The New York Times, The Washington
Post. You're starting to really see these forces gathering in a way they weren't in
the last two, three years.
WILKERSON: You're right. As with Guantanamo Bay, the president has helped some of those
forces to gather beneath him. His use of the phrase red line, for example, with regard
to chemical weapons, was an inept use of that term. I would say presidents should never
use the term red line, myself.
But he also has a red line with regard to Iran. What is it? No option is off the table--repeated,
repeated, repeated. That means that when you get to the point where your diplomatic track
is not working--and the Republicans and others will be all over him to make sure they identify
that point really well--then you've got two options. You either step down from your rhetoric
and say, I didn't mean it, or you exercise the military option. So the president himself,
by his own rhetoric, as has been the case with him in other instances, has trapped--has
painted himself into a certain corner with regard to Iran. I can only think that he probably
hopes he can get out of the second term in office before this rhetoric comes home to
bite him.
JAY: And the people that want regime change, the people that are driving for, you know,
real--we hear calls for military intervention in Syria from these forces, Lindsey Graham
and those circles. And they've been, you know, bomb--John McCain's been bomb, bomb, bomb
Iran for many years ago. What drives them? They must see themselves the kind of chaos
that this is going to create. Do they want that? I mean, and how much? I've asked you
this question before, but I don't know how to discuss it without asking it again. How
is this also--how much of this is just about banal wars? A lot of people make a lot of
money out of this kind of war.
WILKERSON: A lot of it is about that, Paul. The military-industrial-congressional complex
is alive and thriving well, even in this age of sequestration.
The Greeks had a saying: old men send young men to die in war. That's John McCain. He's
an old man. He's over the hill. In many respects it's the same with Lindsey Graham and Bob
Menendez and others like them who are constantly calling for war. You don't see their children
going to these wars. You don't see anyone related to them going to these wars. I'm constantly
amazed at how many times I meet congressmen and others in the leadership who want to use
the military instrument, but their family is nowhere near that military instrument.
Sign up again, John. Get on over there and do your thing. I think old men ought to go
to war.
But it's bigger--as you intimated, it's bigger than that. Lots of people are invested in
this war machine now. Lots of people have heavy investments in it. Lots of people make
big, big money off this war machine.
It's not just that. It's other things too. It's American hegemony. It's we have been
defied. We have been shown that our superpowerdom now exclusive to us post Cold War can be challenged,
people can say they don't want to live under the kind of regime that we absolutely insist
they live under. That can't happen, that can't happen, because the smallest little crack
in that facade of American power would be delimiting. It would be utterly, utterly failure
for the United States.
That's the way these people think. They're strange people, in my mind. They don't understand
that there's a big world out there, and there are a lot of people in this world, and the
way to get along in this world is not with military power, it's with economic and financial
and diplomatic and political power. Military, keep it in your back pocket if you need to
use it, but don't use it all the time.
We've become a state, we have become a state that lives for war. We've been at war now
for over a decade, and I don't see an end to it. The authorization for the use of military
force, the AUMF, James Madison would've said that is the top rung on the ladder to tyranny.
That's what James Madison would have said, the father of our Constitution. We are on
the top rung of the ladder to tyranny.
JAY: Thanks for joining us, Larry.
WILKERSON: Thanks for having me.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.