ROSENBERG: Last question. Do you see any way to stop Iran from going nuclear?
YA’ALON: I thought in the past that political isolation and economic sanctions to be imposed on this regime in Iran might be helpful to trigger or to generate the inevitable internal change in Iran. I believe that in the end, we will face internal change in Iran. Today, those who actually avoid political isolation or economic sanction promote the military ops. The confrontation with this regime is inevitable, and it is going to be a military one, rather than political one, because of the lack of determination when it comes to [the] international community to deal with it by political or economic means. And we can’t avoid it. Unless we are going to give up our way of life, our values, our culture. And I don’t believe that the West is going to give up.
DORE GOLD
Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations
JOEL ROSENBERG: Describe the threat that [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad poses to Israel, the United States, and the West. I’m talking about the apocalyptic thinking that’s driving Iranian foreign policy.
DORE GOLD: In 1979, it was Ayatollah Khomeini who launched at the time an Islamic revolution in Iran that basically chased out the old shah of Iran and set up an Islamic government. There was tremendous momentum at the time, in the late seventies and early eighties, for this Islamic revolution. It was exported into Bahrain, into Kuwait, into the Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia. But then it lost steam. It continued to support terrorism quietly, but it put up in the front people like [Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani and [Mohammad] Khatami, who were the presidents of Iran. With the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the end of 2005, the old Islamic revolution gained new steam. But in fact, it became much worse. Ahmadinejad comes out of a cult in the Shiite Islamic world, which was actually illegal in Khomeini’s time. And this cult believes in the impending return of the Twelfth or Hidden Imam, a kind of messianic savior for the Shiites, who is supposed to come to power in the aftermath of tremendous wars, an Armageddon-type scenario. The danger of Ahmadinejad is that he believes that this apocalyptic scenario can be accelerated by men. And he believes that the destruction of Israel is part of the key first steps to realizing this apocalyptic scenario that will lead to Islamic rule over the whole world.
ROSENBERG: Ahmadinejad, in your view, is inciting genocide. Talk to me about the case for that.
GOLD: Well, back in 1948, the international community was concerned with creating new international laws that would prevent another replay of the Holocaust that had just occurred. And it adopted the [Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide]. In the convention, there was an article, known as Article 3, which specifically states that incitement to genocide is a crime under international law. Now this convention has been adopted by most of the countries of the world, including Iran and Israel and, of course, the United States. What Ahmadinejad has been doing, he has been calling to erase Israel off the map of the earth. You cannot erase a country off a map without erasing its people. A number of years ago, right after the genocide in Rwanda, it was discovered that there was a Hutu radio station which was broadcasting genocidal messages to the Hutu population of Rwanda, to kill off the Tutsi population. Once the United Nations set up an international tribunal for trying of various Hutu leaders of Rwanda for war crimes, they also tried individuals for inciting genocide under the genocide convention, so that this convention has been actually used in legal cases against those inciting genocide. The group that I put together here at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs firmly believes that Ahmadinejad is violating this article of the genocide convention and ought to be tried by the United Nations or any of its organs as a result.
ROSENBERG: Talk then about Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust yet calling for another, essentially.
GOLD: Well, one of the ironies of the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad is [that] on the one hand, he denies the Holocaust, and yet he seems to be calling for yet another holocaust in order to trigger the return of the lost Imam. It’s as though he thinks that if he can get away with Holocaust denial, which is such a patently false assertion, he believes that he can also get away with another holocaust. And so the two seem to be linked.
There’s a third aspect, of course, to the whole thing: Ahmadinejad understands that Shiites only make up 15 percent of the Islamic world and he has to reach over the heads of Arab governments to the Arab street. And so he’s hoping to use these messages of destroying Israel, of Holocaust denial, to arouse the support of Shiite Iran among the Sunni Arab masses. And therefore, he’s engaging in a very dangerous game.
ROSENBERG: Can’t we just say, Ahmadinejad has got hot rhetoric but who really cares; he can’t possibly accomplish these objectives of wiping Israel out? Actually, let me back up and ask you, does Ahmadinejad represent a threat only to Israel?
GOLD: Well, first of all, the best way to look at whether Ahmadinejad is only a threat to Israel is to look at both his intentions and his capabilities. He speaks about a war of Iran against the world of arrogance. Now Persian experts understand that the “world of arrogance” is the West. So his declared intentions seem to be directed at a much larger target than just Israel. But second of all, you have to look at his capabilities. If Ahmadinejad just wanted to wipe out Israel, he would develop a Shahab-3 missile, which they now have operational, that has a 1,300-kilometer range, and he would stop there. Why waste defense budget resources on longer-range missiles? But alas, we see that Ahmadinejad and the Iranian establishment is developing extended-range Shahab-3 missiles that have [a] 2,000-kilometer range, well beyond Israel. They have bought a missile called the BM-25 from North Korea, which comes in two varieties: a 2,700-kilometer missile and a 3,700-kilometer-range missile. It’s also known that Iran is determined to achieve space-lift capability—putting a Sputnik in orbit. Now once you have a multistage missile that can put a payload into orbit from some Iranian testing ground, you have the capability of reaching intercontinental-range targets.
Back in 1998, the U.S. Congress, both the Democrats and the Republicans, put together a commission analyzing the vulnerability of the United States to ballistic missile attack from third world countries. This commission, which received material from American intelligence sources and which had bipartisan backing—it was called the Rumsfeld Commission, he headed it at the time—concluded that the Iranians could build an intercontinental-range missile that could strike the eastern seaboard of the United States within five years of making the decision of doing so. And it wouldn’t be clear to American intelligence and military leaders that, in fact, the Iranians had [made] that decision. So when you look at the whole development of the Iranian missile program, their procurement of cruise missiles from the Ukraine, their development of multistage missiles down the road, it is clear that Iran is looking far beyond Israel and far beyond Tel Aviv. Their aim is the West as a whole.
ROSENBERG: What’s the furthest city, let’s say, in Europe right now, that can be hit by an Iranian missile?
GOLD: Well, if we are looking at the 2,700-kilometer-range missile or 3,700-kilometer-range missile, I would assert that they could probably strike in the very near future Central Europe, certainly Germany, Italy, Austria.
ROSENBERG: Talk to me just for a moment, in terms also of capability, about Iran testing, firing SCUD missiles, or missiles off the back of commercial container ships, and the threat that could pose.
GOLD: There are thousands of container ships moving around the world today as part of international trade. And certainly one of the scenarios that defense officials in the West have considered is the placement of shorter-range missiles, which the Iranians already have, on a container ship near the coastline of the United States or of another Western country, which it might seek to threaten. Just imagine the announcement that there is a container ship afloat, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, containing either weapons of mass destruction or containing even short-range missiles. It would certainly set off a panic among many people. And if the United States
was considering military action against [Iran at] some point in the future, and the Iranians could boast that they had container ships with missiles, this might forestall action by the U.S. or any of its allies.
ROSENBERG: Or you could have a first strike.
GOLD: Certainly a first strike is a physical possibility. The question is how that would fit into the Iranian strategy at that particular period.
ROSENBERG: Let’s go back to Ahmadinejad’s Shiite Islamic eschatology. Is that his alone? How widespread is this view that the end of the world is near and that the way to hasten the coming of the Islamic messiah is to launch this annihilating war against Israel?
GOLD: There is, in fact, a well-developed eschatological literature that exists not only on the Shiite side of Islam but [also] on the Sunni side of Islam. And one can affect the other. One of the noticeable developments over the last ten years has been the proliferation of sort of cheap books that do not have any accreditation or support from Islamic religious authorities that call for action against the antichrist, in Arabic known as the dajal. And we’re seeing the proliferation of these books in Jordan, in Egypt, in the Palestinian Authority. They envision sometimes the end of the world, they envision the end of Israel. And what’s troubling is that many of these apocalyptic books are runaway best sellers in many Arab countries. And therefore, those who speak about end of times scenarios in Islamic terms have a certain popularity today.
One of the most important individuals in spreading radical Islamic thinking is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who might be described as the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood. He’s Egyptian in origin but now he lives in Qatar. And he has a regular television program on Aljazeera. And there he speaks about everything from U.S. forces in Iraq to how women should be treated in Islam. In my book The Fight for Jerusalem, I disclose a talk that al-Qaradawi gave on Aljazeera in which he spoke about a group called, in Arabic, al-Ta’ifa al-Mansura, and this group is a kind of Mahdist group that is supposed to be in Jerusalem for the fight between the Sunni Islamic Mahdi and the antichrist, known as the dajal. The problem for me, and I convey it in my analysis, is that al-Qaradawi believes that this worldwide group, al-Ta’ifa al-Mansura, is already in Jerusalem today. And therefore, they are not seeing these scenarios of the end of days as something that’ll occur in one thousand years, but as something that might occur tomorrow, and is something that could be triggered tomorrow.
A second theme that I raise in The Fight for Jerusalem is that in Islamic apocalyptic thought, Jerusalem has a special role as triggering global jihad. Back in the times of Saladin, when the crusaders were in control of Jerusalem, there was an Islamic thinker in Damascus who put forward the thesis that if Saladin will retake Jerusalem, Constantinople—now today called Istanbul—the capital of Eastern Christendom, will fall into the hands of Islam. So there is a kind of causality created in Islamic thought between the fall of Jerusalem, the retaking of Jerusalem, and the fall of other centers of Christendom around the West. In fact, much of the apocalyptic thought of al-Qaradawi includes somehow recovering Istanbul yet again, but specifically, the fall of Rome. And, you know, how this exactly physically works, I don’t know. But it’s certainly expressing itself in the apocalyptic literature, that, again I repeat, is extremely popular today in much of the Islamic world.
ROSENBERG: And your case is that this is surging—this interest in apocalyptic thinking—in the Islamic world?
GOLD: If you speak to many Arab intellectuals and you mention these things about apocalyptic thought, they may not know what you’re talking about. But if you check book sales in bookstores, or in various countries—in Egypt, in Jordan, in the Palestinian Authority—you’ll find much of this literature to be very popular. Again, even though it does not have the backing of Islamic religious authorities.
ROSENBERG: Talk to me about why Russia, under Vladimir Putin, is selling nuclear technology to Iran. Walk me through the series of actions that Russia is taking to strengthen Iran.
GOLD: When I served under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we were aware at the time that Iran was receiving missile technology from the Russians. We thought this was insane policy. And in fact, many in the Israeli government and in the Clinton administration warned the Russians that this activity was going on. Today you also have the issue of nuclear technology. There’s the Bushehr reactor along the Persian Gulf, where the Russians have been very active in selling technology. Now one thesis, of course, put forward to understand the Russian policy, is that the Russians need money and nuclear reactors are one of the best export items in their sort of arsenal of exports.
I have my own personal feeling, or personal view, that I can’t prove, but it’s one of those intuitions. The Russians understand that they are increasingly at war with radical Sunni Islam. And it is perhaps their hope that they can divide the Islamic world between the Shiites and the Sunnis; they can help a Shiite radical government, and somehow that will serve their interests, while they fight in Chechnya against Sunni radicals that are funded by wealthy businessmen in Saudi Arabia and in the Gulf. But I think it’s a mistake in policy, because frequently, when you start feeding one part of radical Islam, the other part gets fed as well.
ROSENBERG: List for me some of the types of weapon systems that Russia has been selling. It’s my understanding we’re talking about anti-missile systems, submarines, obviously nuclear technology.
GOLD: One of the surprising Russian sales to Iran back in the 1990s were Kilo class submarines, which the Iranian navy has now deployed. It’s clear that the Iranians have generally invested in two areas of their military capability. Number one, their naval forces. And number two, their missile and potential nuclear forces. If you look at the Iranian air force, the Iranian ground forces, they’ve actually suffered a number of setbacks and are not as equipped as they were in the past. Now the Iranian interest at this point is to make sure that the Persian Gulf becomes a Persian lake—one where they will have naval dominance. And even though the U.S. Navy puts carriers and battleship groups into the Gulf, the Iranians have experience using small speed boats with revolutionary guards, who are willing to shoot anti-ship missiles, either bought from China or from other sources, against the U.S. Navy. That’s one scenario.
The second scenario has to do with the Russian contribution to the Iranian missile program. The Iranian missile program certainly has been built around North Korean technology, but there is a kind of movement with missile technology that begins in Russia, reaches North Korea, and comes back to Iran. And that is the sort of loop that we are suffering from today. If the Russians would cut back their assistance to the missile programs of Iran and to the nuclear program of Iran, I think the world would be in much better shape.
ROSENBERG: One of the cases that I make in Epicenter is that Russia, by selling arms and nuclear technology to Iran, has joined the axis of evil. Is it a fair assessment to make at this point, that Russia—under Putin—has joined the axis of evil?
GOLD: Well, what has happened is that Russian policy may have gone further than the Russians intended or were prepared to go. For example, when Russian antitank missiles . . . were sold to Syria or sold to Iran and ended up in the hands of Hezbollah, we saw advanced weapons now in the hands of an international terrorist organization. And what is likely is that if Russia continues its policy, it will in effect be supplying organizations which are viewed as terrorist organizations by most of the international community. That would be a sad development for Russia; it would make it very difficult to develop an international standard for fighting terrorist organizations, which ultimately hurt Russia itself.
ROSENBERG: Is it your assessment that Putin is building a military alliance with Iran?
GOLD: I think Russian policy is torn today. On the one hand, the Russians are concerned with the rise of radical Islam, which is spreading beyond Chechnya and Pakistan to much of the upper Volga regions of Russia. And the threat is a real threat to the future existence of the Russian Federation. That shoul
d put Putin alongside of President George W. Bush as an ally on the war on terrorism. But on the other hand, there is an old establishment in Russian military circles and in Russian intelligence circles that would like to see Russia assume the great power status of the Soviet Union. The Russians no longer have a strong position in Eastern Europe. Eastern European countries are now joining the EU or joining NATO, and therefore the only area for Russian expansion to recover its great power status is Iran and the Middle East. But if Russia attempts to recover the great power status of the Soviet Union by means of expansion into the central Middle East and towards Iran, it will ultimately be hurting itself as well as linking up with the axis of evil.
ROSENBERG: Last question for you. Given the threat of radical Islamic eschatology, Ahmadinejad—take just the last few moments here to talk about how evangelicals and Israel can and should be working together—if your view is that they should be. . . . It seems like we have a common enemy, so how do we deal with it by uniting?
GOLD: You know back in the second century, the Jewish people were facing a terrible threat from the Roman Empire. And in fact at the time, according to Dio Cassius, the Roman historian, the Jews and early Christians may have worked together to defeat the oppression of imperial Rome, which was threatening both Christianity—early Christianity—and threatening the future of Judaism. What’s necessary in international relations is a capacity to draw [a] distinction between good and evil, between those who support security and peace and those who wish to undermine it. And what Jewish values and Christian values provide is an ability to make that distinction. And therefore, the alliance that we once had back in the second century is an alliance which should be restored again today. . . .
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