by mike Evans
MDE:
As nuclear plants, how serious would a nuclear Iran be to the Middle East and to the world?
Mr. Woolsey:
Well, it would be very serious, as serious as anything I can imagine. Precisely because of his crazed, ideological, totalitarian, fanatic, and anti-Semitic genocidal views. If this were a country with a set of beliefs that one could deal with the way we dealt with the Soviets, that would be different. We contained the Soviets for close to fifty years and deterred them for close to fifty years from using their nuclear weapons, and even from attacking conventionally in Europe.
And the reason we were able to do that is that the Soviet ideology was effectively dead by the 1950s. By the time of Khrushchev’s speech before the Twenty-second Party Congress in 1956, laying out all of Stalin’s crimes, there weren’t very many believing Communists as part of the Soviet system. They were cynics. These were an establishment, the nomenclature. They didn’t want to die. They wanted to keep their dachas and their limousines. So they could be deterred.
And also, one could negotiate with them. I did it five times. I used to, when we got into a real jam in the negotiations in Vienna in the late ’80s, I’d take my Soviet counterpart, the Soviet ambassador, out to dinner and buy him a nice bottle of Chablis and lobster thermidor, and we’d start telling Russian and American jokes, which are very similar and have a similar sense of irony—very funny. And we’d kind of laugh it up for a while and then we’d talk about some of the things that were dividing us and we would cut a bit of a deal. Maybe not everything, but we fixed this problem and that problem.
Could you imagine doing something like that with a representative of Ahmadinejad? It’s, I think, beyond belief, really.
MDE:
On 60 Minutes, the statement was asked about fifty-four thousand suicide bombers and martyrs that would be sent into the United States. And he agreed that that was highly possible. Is there any concern about the possibility of that type of thing happening in the United States, either directly through Iran or through their proxies?
Mr. Woolsey:
I think it’s unlikely that we in the U.S. would see a series of individual suicide bombers of the sort that came into Israel, say from the West Bank before the barrier was put up by the Israelis. Partially it’s because our law enforcement is very good. Partially it’s because immigrant groups, including Lebanese Shia, of whom there are a fair number, especially in Michigan, are loyal Americans. And they’re integrated into American society. Not absolutely everybody, but most.
We’ve had good tips from Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, with respect to terrorist groups, whether in Florida, or in New York, or wherever. We don’t have the same kind of situation that exists even in Britain, much less in some place like France, with our immigrant groups. So I think it would be difficult for any sustained terrorist set of actions—suicide bombers blowing themselves up in shopping centers—because I don’t think they really have a base of operations.
But for a single attack like 9/11 in which people are infiltrated in and then kill themselves while doing something devastating, that’s certainly possible. And we may be in a situation where we have to, as horrible as it sounds, look for children. Hezbollah has trained up something like two thousand ten-to fifteen-year-old children—boys—as suicide bombers. And Hezbollah basically does what Iran tells it to do.
So this is a very serious situation. But I don’t think it’s serious in the same way or with regard to the same type of threat that we’ve seen, say, in Israel. I think when Iran or Hezbollah or some combination chooses to attack in this country, they’ll try to make their first effort devastating.
MDE:
What does the United States need to do to hold Iran accountable so they do not go nuclear?
Mr. Woolsey:
Well, I think it’s been the case for some time, and we put this on our Web site at the Committee on the Present Danger that former secretary of state George Schultz and I cochaired many, many months ago. I think we needed a long time ago to bring a lot more pressure to bear on Iran than we have. I think there was no real chance after the year from the spring of ’97 to the spring of ’98 to see an expansion of the role and influence of Iranian reformers under President Khatami’s protection, in a sense.
By the spring of ’98, the mullahs were back fully in charge. They were killing the students. They were killing the brave newspaper editors and the brave reformers. So I don’t really think there’s been much of a chance since the spring of ’98. But there was a window of time there, I think, perhaps from May or so of ’97 to May or so of ’98 in which it was plausible to believe that we might find some way to work something out with Khatami and the reformers who were around him.
Since ’98 I don’t think that’s been the case, and it certainly hasn’t been the case since Ahmadinejad has become president. So as soon as that happened, if not before, but at least as soon as that happened, we should have been moving to do everything we could multilaterally, unilaterally, however, to stop travel with senior Iranian officials, to tie up their personal finances in the Iranian government’s finances, to sharply increase our broadcasting into Iran. And I think before now, but certainly by around now, we ought to have been working with the countries that export gasoline and refined petroleum products into Iran, because Iran doesn’t have nearly enough refineries to refine its own petroleum. So it imports 40 percent or more of its gasoline and diesel fuel.
And that gives us an opportunity to find some way to work with India or some of the other countries that ship refined petroleum products to Iran. And given now their clear violation of the mandate to stop the reprocessing of nuclear fuel, I think we might well be able to get some of these countries to agree with us that, “OK, we’ll buy your refined gasoline. We think it’s pretty reasonable for you to break this long-term contract with Iran given what they’re doing to stability in the Middle East by their nuclear weapons program.” It’s certainly at least worth a try.
It would be much better, since some of these countries are friends of the United States, like India, to try to do this as a business deal rather than as a blockade of imports for them. But I think that would be much more effective than trying to block their exports of oil, which the world rather needs in order to keep oil below one hundred dollars a barrel.
MDE:
Islamic Fascists. It’s a new word for President Bush. We just heard it recently. There seems to be almost a conflict in moralities in Americans and what we’re looking at regarding the war on terrorism—it’s almost being defined as our involvement in Iraq. What precisely is the war on terrorism, and what precisely is Islamic Fascism?
Mr. Woolsey:
Well, to call Ahmadinejad and the Wahabists of Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda Islamic Fascists is really quite an insult to Mussolini. Because the Italian Fascists were not explicitly genocidal. They were terrible dictators. They were extremely authoritarian. They helped the Germans with the Holocaust. But their doctrine and their beliefs were not genocidal. They were not in favor themselves, as a matter of doctrine, of, say, exterminating all the Jews the way the Nazis were.
So it would really be more accurate to call these three groups Islamic Nazis. I would say, for example, that Torquemada, in the late fifteenth, early sixteenth century, was a Christian Nazi. He was a totalitarian. I don’t see any reason not to call a spade a spade.
MDE:
Nuclear Iran. The American people don’t see that Iran could ever be a nuclear threat to the United States because they could never launch a missile at us. Are there other ways to get nuclear weapons—nuclear dirty bombs—into this country?
Mr. Woolsey:
Certainly. You could hide one, say, in a bale of marijuana. There are all sorts of ways to get across our borders with fairly large things—both our southern border and our northern border and our coasts. At least you have the Coast Guard patrolling in the mid-sea, but some parts of the Canadian border, the Mexican border, are very easy to get a
cross.
The amount of nuclear material you need for a bomb is twenty-five to thirty-five pounds—about the size of a volleyball or maybe a basketball. But getting an Iranian set of fissionable material, and then assembling a bomb once you’ve got it into the country, could well be done once they have that kind of material. And they don’t need to make it themselves in order to have it.
All these estimates that they won’t have a bomb for five or ten years depend upon their doing the reprocessing of the plutonium or their doing the enrichment of the uranium to bring about the existence of the fissionable material, which is the long pole in the tent of a nuclear weapon. The bomb itself is fairly easy to do, unfortunately. If Iranian intelligence working with Hezbollah got a bomb—or fissionable material enough to assemble into a bomb—into the United States across one of our borders, that would be one way they could attack. The other would be to utilize what’s sometimes colloquially called “a Scud in a bucket.” A Scud is a short-range ballistic missile—maybe a couple of hundred miles—thousands, tens of thousands of them all over the world. The Iranians have them. They have longer-range ones. They have their joint missile program, essentially, with North Korea, that creates a much longer-range missile than that.
So if you launch something like that from a tramp steamer the world doesn’t patrol—even the United States Navy doesn’t patrol the oceans and identify all the tramp steamers. And also, the Persians invented chess, so deception is certainly something that is part of their repertoire. I would expect that if they got to within one hundred miles of New York City and launched a Scud from an old tramp steamer, they’d do everything they could to make it look like Al Qaeda. Or if Al Qaeda did it, they’d probably try to make it look like it was Hezbollah.
Those are all plausible scenarios even before you get to the possibility of the Iranians buying or developing some nuclear weapon that they could put on one of their, say, diesel submarines. They have ship missiles on their diesel submarines that are launched from beneath the water. It’s considerably more difficult to launch a ballistic missile and to do so accurately. But that’s not impossible to think of, either.
And the number of years that would have to go by after one has an intermediate-range missile that can go many hundreds of miles, like the Shahab, before one can have an intercontinental ballistic missile that can go a few thousand miles is not that long. Look at the progress the North Koreans have made. Theirs blew up shortly after it was launched, but the design and overall capabilities are such that it could probably reach Hawaii or Alaska, possibly even the Pacific Northwest.
So anybody who takes that kind of attitude is just being irresponsible. I think one of the reasonable conclusions of this is that we do not have a nearly robust enough ballistic missile defense program. We should not just have a few ballistic missile defense missiles in Alaska and California focused exclusively on North Korea. We need to upgrade a lot of our Aegis cruisers and destroyers so they can protect our coasts. And we need to move promptly into space-based ballistic missile defense.
MDE:
What about the Katyusha missiles and other military supplies that Iran supplied against Israel? Iran seems to be completely obsessed with Israel and its destruction. Why?
Mr. Woolsey:
They’re anti-Semitic fanatics. I have long believed that anti-Semitism is the first refuge of the really nasty scoundrel—that whether you’re a Nazi, or you’re Ahmadinejad, or Hamas, or the Wahabites in Saudi Arabia—the Jews’ respect for law and the history of the law as part of their religion, and that being a demonstrable part of Jewish culture and life, is something that has drawn the ire of particularly totalitarians who don’t believe there can be any concept of the law other than what they say it is.
Now what Ahmadinejad would say is the law isn’t what he says it is; it’s what Allah says it is. But he’ll interpret it for you—he or his mentor. So the idea of the rule of law, what we think of the rule of law—justice—is completely alien to totalitarians. And much, I would have to admit not all, much of the history of the Jewish people has been centered around the sanctity of the notion of law. So I think the totalitarians probably hate them first and hate them the most.
MDE:
He sent a letter to the president of the United States—which was completely ignored fundamentally—in which he attempted to convert him, persuade him. And then he warned him. He used terms like, “I hear the glass shattering and the towers falling of your liberal democracy.”1 Was this a fluke, or was there more to this thing with that letter?
Mr. Woolsey:
Well, I think it echoes a warning Muhammad gave at one point to some enemy. And no, it’s not a fluke. All this is tied up within his crazed belief system. He is not a cynic. He’s not self-interested. He’s a true fanatic. And we have a hard time in the United States these days figuring out how to deal with religiously motivated fanatics. We haven’t had to do that in a long time.
If you look at the Cold War, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, the Soviets were not fanatics. They weren’t even believers in Communism. They were cynics. So we didn’t get into the idea of ideology all that much. Communist ideology was kind of, well, if you were really interested in them, you might take a course in undergraduate or graduate school on Marxist-Lenin theory or something. But generally speaking, nobody thought we had to get in there and refute, or undermine, or deal with Marxist-Leninist doctrine, at least in terms of dealing with the Soviets. They were cynics.
There’s nothing cynical about Ahmadinejad, or Mesbah Yazdi, or members of Al Qaeda. They really believe they are implementing Allah’s will in destroying the infidels, driving them out of the Middle East, and ultimately either bringing an end to the world or establishing a worldwide caliphate, depending on which set of views they have. And this makes it a lot harder for us to deal with.
Because in the United States, we’re used to letting everybody believe what he wants to believe, no matter how crazy it may be. And to say that Wahabites and followers of Mesbah Yazdi and the Shiite side of Islam are crazed fanatics, but most Sufi Muslims are quite easy to work with and reasonable—which I think is true—sounds to a lot of Americans as if we’re saying, “Well, the Episcopalians are nuts, but the Presbyterians are OK.” We have a really hard time getting into people’s religious belief if they say it’s based on religion.
The question I always ask them is: if Torquemada—who killed about three hundred thousand people by burning them at the stake and stealing their money in the late fifteenth to early sixteenth century in the Spanish Inquisition—were around doing that today in some country, would you say, “Well, he says he’s a representative of Christ on earth and there’s no way we can challenge that, I guess”? No. You take the guy out. We cannot let these fanatics drive the future of the Middle East, much less the world.
MDE:
Israel boldly confronted Iran’s proxy subcontractor in Lebanon. Then all of a sudden, something turned quickly. It almost looked as if they had strategically tested the numbers of bodies that America could tolerate before America was willing to be repulsed by the “innocent victims.” So the United States told Israel fundamentally that they were going to have to deal with the UN. Israel was in a crisis. The troops were moving toward the Litani River. All of a sudden, everything stops. The UN becomes the new partner for Israel. Why?
Mr. Woolsey:
Well, I think the reason we’ve partnered with Israel is because unless things go well in Iraq and turn around in Lebanon, it’s the Middle East’s only democracy—and it’s a religiously tolerant place. Muslims practice and live freely in Israel.
And Israel, on top of that, has very much gone the extra mile to try to make peace with the Palestinians by pulling out of Lebanon, pulling out of Gaza, preparing to pull out of the West Bank. They are perfectly willing to have a reasonable two-state solution. Indeed, one was proposed. A very generous offer was made by Ehud Barak in the closing days of the Clinton administration to Arafat.
But the Palestinians, whether they’re secular like Arafat or religious fanatics, have walked away from a two-state solution. And now Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t even remotely interested in a two-state solution. When they say “occupied Palestine,” they mean Tel Aviv. When they say that they are part of the resistance, they mean the resistance against the existence of Israel. So there’s no basis for compromise with Hamas or Hezbollah.
I think the Israelis have done everything they possibly could have to work with a reasonable subset of secular and decent Palestinians. And certainly some of the Palestinian leadership, I think, would fit that description. But Hamas certainly doesn’t. I don’t think it’s plausible for anybody to say, “If Israel just made some more concessions, they could work things out.” That’s not what Hamas wants. They want to destroy them.
MDE:
Then why didn’t America let Israel finish the job in Lebanon?
Mr. Woolsey:
I don’t know the answer to the diplomatic questions surrounding that. I do think that the Israelis uncharacteristically were quite hesitant and did not have a very good strategy. They tried to do this all with bombing, and then when that didn’t work, they had a hesitant offensive. And then they pulled back, and then they—two days before the deadline—they went in more heavily and called up their reserves and did what one would expect them to if they had decided to follow this course.
So I can’t fault too much the U.S. government becoming uncertain that Israel was going to get the job done and get it done in a sound way. But if they had gone in—with some air support, certainly—but if they had gone in heavily, they would have suffered some more casualties. But if they had gone in heavily right at the beginning after Hezbollah, there would have been some bitter fighting, but they would have been to the Litani, I think, far before this month or so of fighting that took place.