RadixJournal - January 11, 2018


Bowden! - 5 - Iran, Israel, and The Bomb


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 2 minutes

Words per Minute

152.91148

Word Count

9,493

Sentence Count

469

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

81


Summary

Jonathan Bowden joins Richard to discuss the Iran question, and whether we will ever see a war between the United States and Iran in the foreseeable future. Richard and Jonathan also discuss the Israeli assassination of Iranian scientists, and the possibility that Mossad is behind them.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
00:00:24.620 Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
00:00:27.380 Hello, everyone. Today, it's a great pleasure to welcome back to the program, Jonathan Bowden.
00:00:34.180 Jonathan probably needs no introduction for our readers, but if you'd like one, I'd suggest that you go listen to our previous podcast on a variety of subjects, including libertarianism and Nietzsche and other things.
00:00:48.680 You can also visit his website at jonathanbowden.co.uk.
00:00:54.860 Jonathan, welcome back to the program.
00:00:58.900 Yes, nice to be here.
00:01:00.760 Well, Jonathan, today we're going to change things up a bit.
00:01:04.040 We've talked about deeper matters for the past month, and today we're going to talk about something that is both topical and pressing.
00:01:12.560 And that is the Iran question, and moreover, whether we're going to see a war with Iran between either the United States and Israel in the foreseeable future.
00:01:25.680 So let's just start out with this, and I'll mention before we start the conversation that this issue is not a new one.
00:01:34.440 Certainly, if you go back to 2003, Iran was part of the axis of evil, so-called, laid out by the George W. Bush administration.
00:01:43.800 And many people, including myself, assumed that there was going to be some kind of action taken at the tail end of the Bush administration.
00:01:53.200 And this issue seems to rear its head every, say, year or two.
00:02:00.340 People, there seems to be a lot of chatter on blogs, in mainstream publications, in the op-ed pages of major publications, that they're about to get the bomb.
00:02:11.540 We need to do something now.
00:02:12.940 Israel's going to do it.
00:02:14.040 America's going to do it, so on and so forth.
00:02:15.260 So this is an issue that won't go away, but I do have a feeling that we are going to see a climax in the foreseeable future, maybe even in the next six months to a year.
00:02:28.180 So let me throw out this question, Jonathan, just to get the whole conversation started.
00:02:33.300 And that is, maybe we shouldn't ask, will the United States go to war with Iran?
00:02:40.540 Maybe we should ask, are we already at war with Iran?
00:02:45.260 You know, these past few months, there's obviously been cyber attacks.
00:02:50.080 There have been assassinations of scientists.
00:02:53.460 There are talks of major sanctions.
00:02:55.640 So is this really a long-term war that's now just heating up?
00:03:02.280 Yes, I think that's the correct way of looking at it.
00:03:04.840 I mean, states have a medley of relationships with each other.
00:03:08.620 And there are all sorts of sort of distraught situations that states can get into with each other that stop short of armed conflict.
00:03:18.280 Most states spy on each other.
00:03:21.000 Even Western societies like France and America have set each other's spies on each other on occasions.
00:03:26.320 So all societies are spying on other national state societies, depending how proficient they are at that particular game.
00:03:34.740 And I think Israel has certainly had a tacit war with Iran going for the last three to five years through intelligence, through selective assassination, through the use of advanced computer viruses, these Trojan-like devices that attempt to disrupt computer networks that seem to be related to the Iranian nuclear program.
00:03:58.540 Again, you don't know, when you're on the outside of these things, what is here saying, what is not.
00:04:06.120 Certainly, it was reported in relatively reputable media on this side of the Atlantic that the Bush administration looked at the option of a targeted attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities and that it was vetoed by President George W. Bush.
00:04:21.560 The reason this was done, apparently, was because the sites were too many.
00:04:26.900 There were 56 of them, according to the London Times, and they were hidden in mountains and near sheer holy cities like Gom, and certain facilities were hidden near hospitals or under schools and so on.
00:04:41.280 And there's been a proliferation in these alleged facilities since then, apparently.
00:04:44.820 So, I think it's a tacit war already, whereby, although the threshold of actual nation-state-to-nation-state conflict hasn't been crossed, you're getting perilously close to all other forms of interstate action that fall short of it.
00:05:00.920 I think, if you look at it the other way around, these targeted assassinations of scientists, one doesn't know how high up these scientists are.
00:05:08.900 You don't know whether it's the second-string ones that they can get access to in order to assassinate.
00:05:13.600 But there's quite clearly a sort of Mossad death squad of a sort in Tehran that is carrying out these assassinations.
00:05:21.600 They're not that often, but they're often enough to make news.
00:05:25.300 There's little attempt to deny that Israel is doing it.
00:05:28.440 Now, this would be regarded as terrorism by most societies or state-assisted terrorism, but, of course, it's not seen in that way by the West.
00:05:38.140 And it's all against the background of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
00:05:43.340 I mean, I think Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
00:05:46.200 Every society that's ever gone for nuclear power has a nuclear weapons threshold and auction in the background.
00:05:54.240 Britain, for example, developed its own independent nuclear deterrent in the teeth of opposition from the United States that only ever wanted to be the one society that possessed the bomb initially.
00:06:04.560 So we had to go a convoluted route to get it ourselves, which we did, followed by the French, and with the Soviet Union, of course, and major competition for nuclear threshold with the United States.
00:06:17.700 So nobody wants other societies to have nuclear payload.
00:06:24.840 Even Western societies are leery about other Western societies having them.
00:06:30.200 It's noticeable that two vanquished nations in the Second World War, two principal vanquished nations anyway, Germany and Japan,
00:06:38.080 neither of them have gone the nuclear route, even though they could quite easily develop nuclear weapons tomorrow if either of them wanted to.
00:06:45.000 So I think basically there is a tacit low-level war, a sort of insurgent war going on.
00:06:53.100 It's also a black propaganda war as well, whereby pressure is mounted on the Iranian currency, the rial, and on the Iranian oil exports.
00:07:03.060 And there's an attempt to make it as uncomfortable as possible for Iran to do business with China, with Russia, with Japan, all of which are big oil importers from the Gulf.
00:07:14.280 And what they're trying to do is give Iran an option, whereby if they turn away from the development of nuclear weapons as a correlate to their civic nuclear power program, there are goodies in it for them.
00:07:29.500 In other words, all of these pains that are being inflicted on them at the moment would be taken off.
00:07:33.960 So it's a ratcheting process. It's quite clearly designed to put the maximum degree of discomfort upon the government in Tehran in the hope that they will, in the end, decide not to cross the nuclear threshold.
00:07:48.660 And one imagines that if they made a conscious decision not to do so, that this would be flagged up and that these pressures would cease or fall into abeyance.
00:07:58.140 Right. It might, of course, have the exact opposite effect, which is that if you create economic turmoil and so on and so forth and give the people of Iran a sense that they're entrenched against all these outside forces,
00:08:12.640 that it might have the exact opposite effect, that they would go forward even more swiftly.
00:08:17.660 But I do agree with you that I think Iran most likely is developing a nuclear weapon, whether that will lead to imminent holocaust or blowing Israel up, blowing it off the map is a lot of our kind of crazed Christian Zionists like to talk about.
00:08:38.740 I think that prospect is rather dubious. But at the same time, it certainly will, I guess, be a more dangerous world with another state with one of these weapons, particularly one in such a volatile area.
00:08:53.580 And so I have a couple of questions to ask you from what you just talked about.
00:08:57.220 But let me talk. Let's go with this first one of what do you think a war would be like in this case?
00:09:04.380 And I'll mention just a few things. I think whenever the publics hear about the publics of the Western world hear about, you know, we're going to war, probably images of World War Two into their head and, you know, maybe even trenches from the earlier conflict or bombing of cities, this big kind of stuff.
00:09:25.160 But, you know, one would think that Washington really want to want to want to get in a conflict like that.
00:09:32.120 In some ways, my view is that they probably want this kind of undeclared, unending war to go on, that they they want to kind of have their war and eat it, too.
00:09:43.500 They want to bomb a nuclear site, but then not have that escalate into a global conflict.
00:09:48.180 But so let's take up that a little bit about what what do you think this kind of war between Washington and Israel, perhaps, and Iran would look like?
00:10:02.140 Yes, I think there are inhibitions on the Western side, which is why you haven't seen strikes up until this time.
00:10:09.500 Syria was developing a low level nuclear weapon, but it was contained in one site and was relatively easy for the Israeli Air Force to bomb in one mission.
00:10:18.180 Right.
00:10:18.580 The Syrians always denied that they had that site and it was in their interest to say that.
00:10:24.160 Similar with Saddam Hussein.
00:10:26.440 This incident's been largely forgotten now.
00:10:28.920 Right.
00:10:30.580 The Iranian nuclear capability is much more complicated and is sort of spread over all sorts of sites within the country.
00:10:38.760 It's widely believed in Britain and Western Europe that Bush turned down the military option against Iran for all sorts of reasons,
00:10:48.520 but partly because the nuclear payload and the nuclear tonnage that Iran possesses is so diffuse.
00:10:55.760 And it is at a higher level of technical construction than regimes like Iraq and Syria were capable of or even Libya that bought a low level nuclear prospect from Pakistan in the way that North Korea has done, of course.
00:11:13.020 North Korea has the bomb, but it's an incredibly crude device.
00:11:16.580 Right.
00:11:16.760 It's cruder even than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, and they don't really have a means of delivering it.
00:11:23.320 But it has changed the diplomatic ballgame in relation to North Korea by virtue of the fact they possess this weapon.
00:11:30.920 I think it's the deficit with the contemporary West is that Iran is an unknown factor.
00:11:39.760 Iran's a far more powerful country than a country like Iraq, not crippled by sanctions to the way that Saddam's regime was over 12 to 13 years prior to the invasion.
00:11:50.980 This is the second Iraq war of the two that occurred in the middle of the second Bush presidency.
00:11:57.020 And Iran can hit back in various ways, some of which are relatively subtle.
00:12:06.200 One of the ways it can hit back, of course, is through oil exports.
00:12:10.320 Another is that it can hit back through, allegedly, blocking the Straits of Hormuz, which is an important gateway and sort of nexus of the world economy.
00:12:21.120 Obviously, American Navy and Air Force and Army have threatened that they will intervene to keep the Straits open should the Iranian Revolutionary Guard attempt to close them in any respects.
00:12:32.040 Then there's the prospect of missile strikes on Israel proper.
00:12:34.800 Iran has 150,000 missiles, apparently, of one sort or another, many of them quite low-level devices.
00:12:42.460 But it has some big rockets like the Shahab 1 or Shahab 2 and 3 that can hit Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem without any doubt.
00:12:52.440 It also has an army on Israel's border, of course.
00:12:55.120 And this is the Hezbollah militia in South Lebanon, which is their proxy force, which can force Israelis to live in bunkers for many months of the year with lots of missiles coming over from the Beqar Valley in South Lebanon.
00:13:12.480 So Iran has a way to reach Israel, but it doesn't really have a way to reach America or the Western world.
00:13:19.440 There's a danger that Iran might lash out at Saudi Arabia.
00:13:25.380 This is one of the paradoxes, of course.
00:13:27.220 Iran's not an Arab country.
00:13:29.400 It's an Indo-Aryan country.
00:13:32.140 It speaks Farsi.
00:13:34.060 It has quite an ancient civilization.
00:13:36.500 Persian civilization sees itself as the natural master of the Gulf, which intensely irritates the Arab societies around it.
00:13:44.100 America supported Iraq in the war against Iran.
00:13:50.680 And one thing to remember about Iran is Iran's defensive posture always seems to be retrospective.
00:13:58.260 It always seems to be retroactive.
00:14:00.360 Their military posture is defensive.
00:14:02.800 When Saddam attacked them, they fell back and fell back and drew his army in.
00:14:06.920 And in the end, broke it and pushed it back out of Iran and invaded Iraq.
00:14:13.560 But modern Iran's rarely attacked anyone else.
00:14:18.760 But all of their military thinking is how to respond to an attack upon themselves.
00:14:24.420 There's a danger that they could attack Western shipping in the Gulf with their missiles.
00:14:28.360 And how good their anti-ballistic strategy is, no one really knows.
00:14:35.760 They bought a lot of hardware from the Russians to take down incoming advanced jets that are attempting to attack their sights.
00:14:43.820 But how proficient they would be, how skilled the Revolutionary Guard and the elite of the Guard,
00:14:49.940 the elite that guards all these installations would be,
00:14:54.020 how close they would be to a Western army in their fighting abilities.
00:14:59.360 No one quite knows.
00:15:01.760 There are straws in the window, which is probably why there hasn't been an attack.
00:15:08.020 When Israel invaded Lebanon last time,
00:15:10.620 Hezbollah fought with considerable savagery and considerable acuity
00:15:15.020 and surprised a lot of Western analysts because they knocked out over 100 Israeli tanks on the border
00:15:22.220 using Russian weaponry, which they've been trained to fight with by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
00:15:30.020 And they lived in these tunnels underground built by North Korea.
00:15:35.480 All these enemy regimes collaborate with each other, of course,
00:15:38.960 on the principle that the enemy, my enemy is my friend.
00:15:42.440 And Hezbollah guerrillas, or terrorists, as they'd be recalled in Israeli and most North American media,
00:15:52.820 Europe's a bit different, hid underground and then came up with these quite sophisticated anti-tank devices.
00:16:00.480 And one of the reasons the Israeli army didn't penetrate further into Lebanon
00:16:03.560 and they relied on the Air Force to do most of their attacking
00:16:06.780 was because their tanks were destroyed on the border.
00:16:11.840 And to do that, you have to have special weapons to cut through the armor of Western tanks,
00:16:18.200 which is very sophisticated today.
00:16:20.560 And they had it.
00:16:22.220 And they had it because, of course, Iran can't buy anything from the United States
00:16:26.640 beyond staplers and pencil sharpeners.
00:16:28.960 Right.
00:16:29.300 But it gets all of its gear from China and Russia.
00:16:32.040 Right.
00:16:32.340 The problem for the West, of course, is that Russian armaments are very sophisticated,
00:16:37.200 but they've got a track of their own.
00:16:39.140 Russia's always had a separate technological track, separate from the rest of the West.
00:16:44.340 Hmm.
00:16:45.520 Indeed, it's its own civilization economically.
00:16:48.580 That's why they're able to put satellites into space and so on.
00:16:51.320 And their satellites look nothing like Western satellites, but they work in everything.
00:16:55.180 And the technology in its way is very advanced, but it's different and distinct.
00:17:02.320 And Iran's got quite a lot of it.
00:17:04.960 Yeltsin sold them a lot.
00:17:06.860 Putin's been less keen on selling them stuff, it appears,
00:17:11.560 because he is worried that they are after a nuclear device.
00:17:15.620 It's interesting to notice Iran's and Russia are quite close allies,
00:17:18.900 but Russia does not want a nuclear-armed Iran, because it's just another headache
00:17:25.000 and a proliferation into the Muslim world of nuclear weaponry,
00:17:30.280 even though Pakistan, a Muslim country, already possesses the bomb.
00:17:34.140 So there are all sorts of reasons why the West has been,
00:17:40.140 under the leadership of the United States, has been coy about an attack on Iran.
00:17:44.080 I also think the Obama administration has quite a lot to do with it.
00:17:47.340 I think they decided early on that they would not go for an attack.
00:17:51.320 They would go for every other weapon before they auctioned an attack.
00:17:56.080 Hence the economic embargo.
00:17:58.400 Hence the blind eye turn to Israeli assassinations.
00:18:02.280 Hence the computer viruses, which the Americans may well have assisted the Israelis in developing.
00:18:08.720 Hence the targeted sanctions and the attacks on the Iranian currency
00:18:14.140 and the possibility of all embargoes.
00:18:17.980 I think all of this is a stepping up of what may occur.
00:18:23.220 But it's all short of an outright attack.
00:18:25.740 So it's quite clear that the West believes Iran has some cards.
00:18:29.760 Otherwise an attack would have been launched before now.
00:18:32.160 I agree.
00:18:33.720 And I think one important point that I was hearing is that, you know, Iran is not just,
00:18:40.620 it's a civilization in itself.
00:18:42.420 It is a powerful state in its way.
00:18:45.460 It's not some, you know, banana republic or tin pot dictatorship.
00:18:51.440 And what that means for the U.S. is that if they were going to do anything,
00:18:55.820 they would really have to go the full Monty, so to speak.
00:18:59.520 I don't, I think in, you know, the intelligence community,
00:19:03.020 foreign policymaking community recognize that you're not going to be able to swoop in
00:19:09.260 and maybe bomb one facility here and there.
00:19:12.200 That A, they're quite diffuse and they're all over the place.
00:19:14.680 But also that would, that would create a major conflict in the region.
00:19:20.760 It might even be a world conflict.
00:19:22.720 And that if you're going to go to war, if you're going to do a major violent attack,
00:19:27.960 you're going to really end up going to war.
00:19:30.920 And that's something that I, as you point out, I think they're not quite ready to do.
00:19:35.900 You know, it's interesting just before we got on air here,
00:19:38.400 I was scanning the internet for some of the most recent headlines.
00:19:42.840 And I noticed that Leslie Gelp, who was a, you know,
00:19:47.020 if you want to look for someone who's representative of the establishment,
00:19:52.040 it might be this person who is part of the, you know,
00:19:56.540 Council on Foreign Relations and so on and so forth.
00:19:59.240 And he actually wrote a recent article in which he was warning against any kind of major attack with Iran.
00:20:06.080 And so it is interesting to see that establishmentarians really are on this.
00:20:13.380 And I'll just throw out a couple more things that I was thinking about while you were talking.
00:20:19.400 And the other one about the Obama question,
00:20:22.380 and that is that there's no doubt that one of the major reasons why he was elected
00:20:28.000 was just simply disgust and exhaustion with the Bush administration.
00:20:34.380 I think people were just tired of the wars.
00:20:37.040 They were tired of all the freedom is on the march talk and so on and so forth.
00:20:41.880 And he was elected as the peace president.
00:20:45.280 And obviously the world was kind of duped by this.
00:20:48.560 And they gave him the, you know,
00:20:50.080 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he'd actually done anything.
00:20:54.500 But I think most of our opinions really changed about Obama this past year.
00:21:02.200 And though he has engaged in kind of a slow pullback out of Iraq,
00:21:07.100 where the U.S. is effectively no longer at war in Iraq, exactly.
00:21:13.160 There's still a presence there.
00:21:14.340 But he also engaged in kind of mini versions of George Bush type wars,
00:21:21.180 where they kind of, you know, went in the back door against Gaddafi.
00:21:27.460 They claimed that they were enforcing a no-fly zone.
00:21:31.400 They never really declared war.
00:21:33.020 Certainly Congress did not constitutionally declare war.
00:21:36.800 And yet at the end of the day, it was regime change.
00:21:39.880 And, you know, I'm just going to throw this out about Obama himself,
00:21:44.080 is that I think Obama is obviously a mystery.
00:21:47.640 And I think of who he is and what he wants and so on and so forth.
00:21:51.740 And I think it's easy for a lot of conservatives to get, you know,
00:21:56.640 hot under the collar about him.
00:21:58.080 And they think he's a crypto Marxist or crypto Muslim or anything.
00:22:01.760 I don't think he's any of those things.
00:22:03.120 But he is a mystery.
00:22:04.060 And I don't understand him myself.
00:22:06.120 And I think, but my guess is that in his heart of hearts,
00:22:08.900 he is a true leftist.
00:22:11.640 And that is he supports the brown people against the white people in any situation.
00:22:16.860 I bet he ultimately supports the Palestinians and does not like Israel.
00:22:23.700 And I think that is his, those are his instincts.
00:22:27.840 At the same time, he's been one who plays ball, so to speak.
00:22:31.980 I mean, he played ball when he was in Chicago,
00:22:34.980 which is, you know, one of the most corrupt, you know, cities.
00:22:38.260 It's almost like a little country on its own.
00:22:40.200 It's utterly corrupt.
00:22:41.560 He was obviously willing to play ball with the powers that be.
00:22:44.820 And my guess is that he was willing to play ball with some of these powers within Washington.
00:22:52.260 And these include the Israel lobby.
00:22:54.180 And so I sometimes even wonder whether he wants to throw them a bone, so to speak,
00:23:01.440 do some military actions that will please them so long as that he can do what he really wants,
00:23:07.900 which is have his domestic agenda.
00:23:11.580 But anyway, those are kind of my responses to what you said.
00:23:15.700 And you can pick up on some of those if you'd like.
00:23:18.120 But I'd also like to ask you a question that really hits at all these issues, and that is the why.
00:23:28.180 You know, from a realpolitik, maybe even isolationist perspective,
00:23:35.200 there's no possible reason why we'd want to go to war,
00:23:39.040 why we as an American would want to go to war with Iran.
00:23:42.920 And it would result in – certainly it's going to result in some kind of economic turmoil,
00:23:50.100 i.e. higher gas prices, which means everything is going to become more expensive by inflation.
00:23:55.920 There's really no – I mean, the likelihood of Iran attacking North America is exceedingly unlikely.
00:24:03.660 You know, I don't know why they would want to do that.
00:24:05.880 And it's exceedingly unlikely they'd want to conquer Europe or something.
00:24:09.680 I mean, that's just really not in the realm of possibilities.
00:24:13.560 So it really is the Israel question.
00:24:16.840 And – but, you know, why is Israel – why do people like Bibi Netanyahu and others in the Israel lobby in the United States,
00:24:24.880 why are they so worried about Iran?
00:24:27.420 They've been willing to make deals with them in the past.
00:24:29.980 Obviously, you know, they're Jews who live in Iran.
00:24:33.940 And obviously, if, you know, Ahmadinejad were a – some kind of fanatic anti-Semite
00:24:41.580 and who just wanted to wipe them all off the face of the earth,
00:24:45.720 he would probably start with the Jews that are living in Iran.
00:24:49.560 It would be kind of easy to maybe round them up and kill them all.
00:24:52.540 But he hasn't done that.
00:24:53.800 So, you know, again, I just simply don't buy – I don't really have much sympathy with people who are Muslims
00:25:04.440 or anything, you know, much of anything Ahmadinejad says.
00:25:07.920 But I also don't think he is a, you know, irrational, suicidal maniac who wants, you know, Armageddon next weekend or something.
00:25:19.620 So why do you think there are major forces in Israel and in the Israel lobby that are so obsessed with Iran,
00:25:30.440 that they think that Iran, if it has a nuclear weapon, that it's over?
00:25:36.340 And we should – and I'll add in there, we should remember that India and Pakistan,
00:25:39.580 who are obviously in the region, both have nuclear weapons.
00:25:41.900 That's a very volatile situation.
00:25:43.580 But, you know, we're not talking about going to war with Pakistan or something.
00:25:48.780 Why is this Iran?
00:25:50.120 Is this just kind of the big kid on the block, so to speak, that could really challenge Israeli hegemony in the Middle East?
00:25:57.300 Or is it something else?
00:25:59.160 Yes, I think it's more the last thing you just said.
00:26:02.360 I think for a long time now, Israel has been a low-level superpower in its region.
00:26:07.160 None of the Arab states can stand against it, which is why these militias have been formed as parastatial entities to take Israel on.
00:26:16.720 Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip are Arab armies by proxy,
00:26:23.180 because there's not been a nation-state war between the Arabs and Israel since 1973, the Yom Kippur War.
00:26:29.400 And it's no accident that the rest of the world and the Arab world discovered that Israel had nuclear weapons during that phase of history,
00:26:39.020 which is a long time ago now, which is a better part of 40 years ago.
00:26:42.620 That's why there's not been several general Middle East wars over the Palestinian situation,
00:26:47.620 which rankles like anything in relation to the Arab and the Muslim world,
00:26:52.500 although they're often selective about that.
00:26:54.080 They take that cause up when they want to and put it on the back burner when they want to as well.
00:26:58.480 But the Palestinian issue is a very live one in the whole of the Middle East,
00:27:04.260 and to a lesser extent in Europe, where there's much less sympathy for Israel than there is in the United States.
00:27:13.760 I think it's basically the strategic game will change once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold line.
00:27:21.580 I think that the Israelis are used, in a sense, to having the whip hand over the societies around them,
00:27:28.520 even though there are major difficulties for the Israelis in having this enormous, restive Palestinian population,
00:27:33.720 which is disarmed and yet is difficult to control politically in various respects.
00:27:40.040 I think that the game will change as soon as Iran becomes a nuclear power.
00:27:46.060 Saudi Arabia will probably insist on having a nuclear device of its own
00:27:49.140 to counterbalance Persian power on the other side of the Gulf.
00:27:52.800 And then you may well see a new arms race to get nuclear weapons,
00:27:56.440 which is quite an old-fashioned technology now, 70 years old.
00:28:00.700 A lot of these countries are on the threshold of developing it.
00:28:03.640 Thirty-four states are interested in obtaining nuclear weapons according to the United Nations.
00:28:09.820 Most countries, like Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Brazil, they all have low-level nuclear programs.
00:28:17.780 They don't attract the notoriety of Iran because, of course, they're in a much less hot part of the world.
00:28:24.060 And the sensitivity that Iran might attack Israel with such a device
00:28:29.060 is such that it's got Israeli and some American policymakers in the lava.
00:28:33.640 The track record of Iran is extremely conservative and extremely cautious.
00:28:39.020 I personally would make the prediction there is absolutely no chance at all
00:28:42.460 that Iran would attack Israel with a low-level nuclear device.
00:28:47.860 It's the political and geopolitical changes that would result from the emboldening of Iran in other areas.
00:28:56.080 The fact that a second nuclear superpower would be added to Israel in the region,
00:29:01.240 Turkey might well consider its nuclear options as well if that was to come about.
00:29:07.280 I think it's much more likely if Iran does go nuclear that America would respond not with an armed attack
00:29:16.160 but by offering NATO membership to Israel,
00:29:19.020 which has been widely discussed in certain parts of the European media
00:29:23.220 because, of course, it would impact upon European societies very directly.
00:29:28.600 Quite a few members of the NATO alliance don't want Israel as a part of the alliance
00:29:32.120 because they don't want to be dragged into the politics of the Middle East at all.
00:29:35.760 Well, you'd have a tripwire in the Middle East if that's the case.
00:29:38.620 I mean, if they were really part of NATO in the sense of, you know,
00:29:42.240 attack on one is an attack on all, that could be, you know,
00:29:46.060 we would be involved in wars every couple of years.
00:29:49.560 Yes, and there's many electorates in Europe, the German electorate in particular,
00:29:54.760 and the French electorate, quite different electorates.
00:29:57.540 But for different reasons, they've got very little inclination to get involved in all that sort of thing.
00:30:05.400 The German electorate is extraordinarily isolationist
00:30:08.340 and doesn't even like peacekeeping in UN missions abroad,
00:30:12.620 hence the almost invisible profile of German arms in Afghanistan, for example.
00:30:17.240 And the French electorate is quite anti-Zionist and quite anti-Israeli,
00:30:22.600 whatever the government of the day may say.
00:30:26.160 Paradoxically, it's also quite anti-Turkish as well.
00:30:29.340 There's a lot of speculation that Turkey would leave the NATO alliance if Israel joined,
00:30:34.160 which would be, for many Western policymakers, a major headache.
00:30:38.920 Because Turkey is a more powerful country than it used to be,
00:30:43.600 and used to be an ally of Israel's, of course,
00:30:46.160 but the relations have soured immeasurably in the last five to ten years.
00:30:51.300 And it's quite possible that you could see an alliance of convenience
00:30:54.180 emerge between Turkey and Iran.
00:30:56.620 They'll also have quite a few interests in common
00:30:59.040 in relation to Kurdish minorities and other issues that get them to talk to each other.
00:31:05.840 So there are many problematical things here.
00:31:12.660 It is a game-changer.
00:31:14.060 That's why it's important.
00:31:15.660 That's why the ex-British Prime Minister Tony Baird goes around the world
00:31:19.000 talking about Iran with the obsessionality of some of these American neoconservatives.
00:31:25.240 It is an issue.
00:31:27.340 It's also probably an issue that quite a few Western policymakers don't want to face.
00:31:31.920 They just regard it as a sort of grad-grind Zionist issue,
00:31:36.440 that if it wasn't for Israel or squeamishness in this regard,
00:31:40.320 they could have an easy time over it.
00:31:42.200 Because Iran's development of these nuclear weapons doesn't threaten anyone
00:31:46.280 with the sole exception of Israel,
00:31:49.220 who already aren't at the teeth of nuclear weapons of their own,
00:31:53.200 which they can equip their F-16s with,
00:31:55.460 which are up in the air and would then respond to any attack upon Israel.
00:32:01.580 But Israel has had those weapons for a long time.
00:32:04.080 What these nuclear weapons tend to do is they stabilize the situation in a retrospective manner.
00:32:11.360 No one really wishes to use them because of the destructivity of these weapons.
00:32:16.620 Therefore, they are forced into edgy compromises
00:32:19.320 that they wouldn't really have been so keen on in the past.
00:32:24.700 Let's talk about that, Jonathan.
00:32:26.360 This is something I was thinking about while you were going through these things,
00:32:29.960 and that is that throughout the Cold War,
00:32:32.660 the bomb, nuclear weapons,
00:32:37.020 were an eminently important aspect of foreign policymaking.
00:32:41.880 They're also an important aspect of the public imagination.
00:32:46.000 I guess I'm a child of the Cold War.
00:32:49.000 I was born in 1978,
00:32:50.680 so I remember the tail end of it.
00:32:55.340 But the idea of nuclear winter,
00:32:59.500 or annihilation, or bombing of cities,
00:33:01.420 these kind of unbelievable, horrific notions were there in the back of people's minds.
00:33:10.000 And I guess there was a kind of mutually assured destruction idea
00:33:14.060 that between these two powers that kept people,
00:33:17.820 kept a lot of these aggressive tendencies at bay,
00:33:20.140 and they tend to fight proxy wars in, say, Vietnam, and so on and so forth.
00:33:24.740 But Washington and Moscow were not going to directly confront one another.
00:33:29.140 And in many ways, that was a good thing.
00:33:32.340 But do you think we're...
00:33:33.380 After that, we entered a time when people were talking about asymmetrical power.
00:33:38.660 You were fighting vague notions like terrorism.
00:33:42.620 You were fighting extremely diffuse networks like Al-Qaeda and so on and so forth.
00:33:49.980 We really had a different era.
00:33:52.480 And also, you had the whole kind of humanitarian peacekeeping aspect thrown into the mix.
00:33:57.880 But do you think we might be entering a new geopolitical realm
00:34:01.520 where the bomb rears its head again?
00:34:05.020 And as you mentioned, it's ironic or kind of a return of the repressed or something.
00:34:12.400 You have what is ultimately an old technology,
00:34:15.140 but one that is extremely powerful and devastating,
00:34:18.900 that we're going to have a new geopolitics that will emerge,
00:34:22.800 in which obviously Russia will have a renewed importance,
00:34:29.580 as someone who...
00:34:32.180 They might be skeptical of Iran getting a weapon.
00:34:35.840 But they certainly don't want to see a war.
00:34:40.840 That we might have a kind of new geopolitical arena if this happens.
00:34:45.700 So talk a little bit about that, about what a game change would look like.
00:34:50.720 Yes, I think...
00:34:52.580 I suppose, in a way, Israel's real nightmare
00:34:55.320 is that Iran would arm Hezbollah with low-level nuclear devices
00:35:00.960 who are right on Israel's border
00:35:03.360 and who have low-level missiles
00:35:06.500 that can target directly into Israeli cities.
00:35:11.260 And Hezbollah, although they're totally under Iranian control, really,
00:35:15.760 are believed to be fanatical enough
00:35:18.220 to want to carry out such attacks.
00:35:21.200 That's questionable, given that they've got a role in the Lebanese state,
00:35:27.040 that they're aligned with Christian militias now,
00:35:29.440 which never used to be the case,
00:35:31.160 and they have MPs in the parliament in Beirut.
00:35:34.320 So Hezbollah's become very much part of the society in Lebanon now.
00:35:37.880 But they do form this Shia block across the Middle East,
00:35:43.920 which is, of course, in Western terms,
00:35:47.120 we have to see it as the Protestant-Catholic split in Islam,
00:35:50.120 whereby if you go from the Iranian border through Iraq,
00:35:54.200 you have the large Shia majority in Iraq,
00:35:57.720 which, of course, Saddam Hussein kept out of power.
00:36:00.020 That was the purpose of his regime,
00:36:01.800 irrespective of the relationship with the Kurds in the north.
00:36:05.440 And then you go through Jordan into the Lebanese territory,
00:36:10.640 where there's a large Shia block there.
00:36:13.160 And the Shia are only 10% of Muslims worldwide,
00:36:16.120 but their proportion in the Middle East is much higher.
00:36:19.540 And the Shia have always felt themselves kept out of power unfairly in the Islamic world,
00:36:25.100 where the Sunni predominate,
00:36:27.640 as in Saudi Arabia, where the holy places are.
00:36:30.780 And it appears to me that one of the unforeseen consequences of George W. Bush's war in Iraq
00:36:39.260 is the coming to power of Iranian influence in Iraq,
00:36:43.520 which I also think plays into many of these areas.
00:36:47.380 America is well aware of the Iranian special relationship with the Maliki government in Baghdad,
00:36:55.360 because the Shia in the south of Iraq looked to Iran as their spiritual leaders.
00:37:02.740 During the Iran-Iraq war,
00:37:04.180 many Shia in the south wouldn't fight for Saddam Hussein
00:37:06.940 against their brother Shias in Iran,
00:37:09.460 even though there is an ethnic difference between Arabs and Persians.
00:37:15.080 So the interesting thing is that the Iranian influence has come to power in Iraq
00:37:21.800 under American guns.
00:37:24.800 As soon as you switch from the Sunnis to the Shia inside Iraq,
00:37:28.560 which were reasons of democratic legitimacy you had to do,
00:37:31.840 because the Shia are 60% of the Iraqi population
00:37:34.720 and can't be kept out of power in a government which it claims to be democratic,
00:37:40.020 America was facilitating Iranian influence throughout Iraq.
00:37:46.000 And that's one of the many, many ironies of this war,
00:37:50.800 that this enemy that's construed as fanatical and monomaniacal in a certain respect,
00:37:57.540 the Iranian one,
00:37:58.560 has actually had a license to come to power
00:38:02.580 or has considerable influence in the new Iraq
00:38:05.740 that was created by American weapons.
00:38:08.500 All these multi-party elections that the Americans insisted on,
00:38:12.160 all of them enshrined various forms of Islamic power that tended to be Shia.
00:38:19.460 And there's been two versions of Shia power
00:38:22.600 since the Americans went into Iraq.
00:38:25.600 But one was more secular,
00:38:27.500 and the one that's in power at the moment is slightly more religious.
00:38:30.140 And there's the Sadrists,
00:38:33.540 the power bloc of Mohammed al-Sadr,
00:38:36.260 the Shia who's believed to have quasi-divine power
00:38:40.460 by some of the poverty-stricken Shia in the slums of Baghdad,
00:38:44.520 such as in Sadr City.
00:38:45.620 And he has political movement that was always anti-American,
00:38:48.780 unlike the rest of the Shia who collaborated with the United States
00:38:51.640 when Bush went in,
00:38:52.980 because they wanted to see an end to Barthes' rule.
00:38:55.180 The point of Barthes' rule was to keep the Shia out of power
00:38:58.540 and to keep the oil wealth for the Sunni minority.
00:39:02.140 And Saddam did that quite successfully.
00:39:05.380 One of the great mysteries, of course,
00:39:06.920 is why the United States and Saddam fell out,
00:39:09.700 because Saddam was a keen client of the United States,
00:39:13.180 and for a long while was America's man in the Gulf.
00:39:15.800 Right.
00:39:17.540 And was backed against Iran
00:39:19.820 in the extraordinarily destructive war
00:39:22.360 that the two countries fought.
00:39:24.540 The Iran-Awai War.
00:39:26.520 I think there was...
00:39:27.320 When Saudi Arabia and the United States
00:39:28.780 armed Iraq to the teeth of the Saddam Hussein.
00:39:31.240 Right.
00:39:31.640 That's where he got his chemical weapons from,
00:39:33.960 to use against the Iranians.
00:39:36.620 Well, there's an infamous episode
00:39:39.320 in which a diplomat,
00:39:40.860 I believe her name is April Gillespie,
00:39:43.320 or something like that.
00:39:45.860 And she actually sent,
00:39:47.280 or she might have even told Saddam in person,
00:39:48.940 I think at least she sent him a message
00:39:51.800 that said the U.S. will look the other way
00:39:55.560 if you decide to take actions against Kuwait.
00:39:58.800 That was obviously a kind of...
00:40:01.000 Well, I guess it was in many ways...
00:40:02.180 Yeah, I mean, Saddam was always very aggrieved.
00:40:03.720 Saddam was always very aggrieved.
00:40:05.300 He believed the United States had given him the right
00:40:07.600 to retain Kuwait as an Iraqi province.
00:40:11.180 Historically, Kuwait has been an Iraqi province in the past.
00:40:14.500 All of these countries have got interchangeable borders
00:40:17.820 because there's the Arab notion of a caliphate.
00:40:20.780 Nationalism is a relatively new construct,
00:40:23.140 although national feeling has always existed.
00:40:25.760 There's always been something of an Iraq.
00:40:28.180 There's always been something of a Syria.
00:40:30.140 There's always been something of an Egypt.
00:40:32.340 But nationalism in the Western sense
00:40:34.180 is there to be new import into the Middle East.
00:40:36.740 That's why the most radical Islamists, of course,
00:40:38.560 don't believe in any of these state societies.
00:40:40.580 They want a caliphate of Islamic power
00:40:43.760 that crosses all boundaries
00:40:45.620 and links all Arabs and Muslims together
00:40:48.800 in one brotherhood.
00:40:50.680 And, of course, they have had that
00:40:52.620 at certain times in their past.
00:40:54.540 Yeah, it was actually Christians
00:40:55.580 who founded the Ba'ath Party, I believe.
00:40:58.440 So, in some ways, the kind of nationalism
00:41:00.760 that Saddam represented
00:41:02.780 was a bit of a Western import.
00:41:05.560 Yes, that's right.
00:41:06.280 It was modelled on his own personal fascination
00:41:09.520 with Joseph Stalin.
00:41:10.980 Georgia is not that far away from Iraq.
00:41:13.400 Socialism in one country, of course.
00:41:14.980 Right.
00:41:15.420 And the sort of Arab fascism.
00:41:17.760 Right.
00:41:18.780 Christian intellectuals and ideologues
00:41:21.360 attended the Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s
00:41:24.200 and baptism in Iraq, in Syria, in Jordan,
00:41:28.600 where it never really took off,
00:41:29.880 although it's influenced the Hashemite monarchy,
00:41:31.800 and in Egypt under Nasser in the 1950s.
00:41:37.460 All of those were influenced
00:41:39.340 by European types of fascism
00:41:42.360 that went into the Arab world
00:41:44.360 and were largely the product
00:41:48.240 of minority sensibilities,
00:41:50.560 the Syrian minority that rules in Syria,
00:41:54.080 which is under immense strain at the moment.
00:41:56.820 It's interesting to note
00:41:57.840 that the West is tacitly supporting
00:41:59.600 the opposition direction inside Syria.
00:42:02.740 5,000 are alleged to have been killed
00:42:04.880 by the United Nations
00:42:06.020 during the course of this fighting
00:42:07.480 as Assad's son clings on.
00:42:10.480 And yet that Ba'ath party in Syria
00:42:12.340 represents a tiny sliver
00:42:14.660 of the Syrian bourgeoisie
00:42:16.000 and excludes the Sunni from power,
00:42:20.260 which is the major complaint of his opponents.
00:42:22.500 It's not that it's not a democracy
00:42:23.660 or a functioning Western society.
00:42:26.020 It's that the Sunni,
00:42:26.880 if the natural majority, are excluded,
00:42:28.800 which in the end is untenable.
00:42:31.340 You can't really run a society
00:42:32.500 when a large ethnic and cultural majority
00:42:35.220 is excluded perpetually from power.
00:42:38.780 So this is why you have a shadow diplomacy
00:42:43.000 in the Middle East as well,
00:42:44.580 although all of the tension with Iran
00:42:46.940 is coming from Israel.
00:42:48.780 And the tension in Washington
00:42:50.140 is because Patrick J. Buchanan
00:42:52.380 once said that Middle Eastern policy
00:42:54.800 was a Zionist-occupied area.
00:42:58.860 That's largely true.
00:43:00.800 That's what that tension is.
00:43:02.320 That's what the gritting of teeth
00:43:03.420 is about this issue.
00:43:05.000 But there are also many other corollas as well,
00:43:07.620 because the Sunni power in the Middle East
00:43:10.360 doesn't view the Shia centered in Iran
00:43:13.140 with any great favor at all.
00:43:16.020 And Saudi Arabia is as keen as Israel
00:43:18.980 for Iran not to develop nuclear weapons.
00:43:21.360 But I think Iran will develop nuclear weapons
00:43:23.000 in the next two years.
00:43:23.980 I think they will test the device.
00:43:25.560 I'm going to put my head on the block now.
00:43:27.240 I'll test the device this time next year.
00:43:29.160 Well, I think you might very well be right about that.
00:43:34.540 Let me ask you to bring our conversation to a close.
00:43:38.400 Let me ask you an issue about the world order.
00:43:41.840 And I guess this gets back to the game change
00:43:43.780 that has been a theme throughout this discussion.
00:43:46.640 And since 1944,
00:43:49.900 one could say that we've had a U.S.-run world order
00:43:54.980 with the dollar as the king currency.
00:43:57.580 It's a universal reserve currency
00:44:00.420 that it's used in international transactions.
00:44:02.800 It's used, most importantly, perhaps,
00:44:04.800 in purchasing oil and so on and so forth.
00:44:08.000 And there was obviously a Cold War
00:44:11.600 that was a significant issue.
00:44:13.180 But it's generally emerged
00:44:15.220 that you've had either maybe one or two policemen,
00:44:18.160 but it's been a kind of American world order.
00:44:21.320 And certainly after the end of the Cold War,
00:44:23.300 when there was no more competition for this,
00:44:25.700 for the past 20 years,
00:44:28.540 the United States and Washington
00:44:30.640 has been a kind of unipolar power.
00:44:34.080 There's really not...
00:44:35.660 France might dislike a lot of things Washington does.
00:44:39.160 They might agree with France
00:44:40.540 and a lot of those things.
00:44:41.420 But there's no real challenger.
00:44:43.980 There's no one who could really take Washington to the mat.
00:44:47.100 However, do you think that maybe, you know,
00:44:50.340 all things come to an end at some point?
00:44:53.260 All empires die.
00:44:55.280 Do you think at some...
00:44:57.160 That we're witnessing the end to this world order
00:45:01.420 that really began with the Bretton Woods Accord,
00:45:04.480 at least in my opinion, in 1944,
00:45:07.060 that, you know,
00:45:09.620 that we're going to actually witness that
00:45:12.340 in the foreseeable future?
00:45:14.040 Maybe this will occur economically.
00:45:17.140 Maybe this will occur as a dumping of the dollar
00:45:19.900 or just a kind of withering away of the dollar
00:45:23.000 in terms of importance.
00:45:24.480 That's certainly happening in one way.
00:45:26.900 Maybe Europe will become a kind of superpower.
00:45:29.180 I might be a little more doubtful about that.
00:45:31.760 Maybe we're just entering a new paradigm
00:45:33.540 in which China is going to become a superpower
00:45:36.660 and not just to be a kind of isolationist Middle Kingdom,
00:45:40.400 but really want to have a major say
00:45:43.600 in the running of the world.
00:45:46.120 So what do you think about some of these issues
00:45:48.160 I've brought up here?
00:45:50.020 Do you think that,
00:45:52.040 particularly if they do,
00:45:54.720 if the United States and or Israel
00:45:56.080 goes to war with Iran
00:45:57.700 and it creates some kind of horrible world conflict
00:46:01.080 that I certainly don't want to see,
00:46:04.380 but that this might actually be
00:46:06.660 the kind of last hurrah of the American empire.
00:46:11.020 It might really express the fact
00:46:13.360 that the paradigm is changing
00:46:15.220 and the empire is crumbling.
00:46:16.540 Yes, I think so in many ways.
00:46:17.960 I think America,
00:46:18.740 I think the election of Obama himself
00:46:20.300 is a postscript to a period
00:46:22.600 of high American neo-imperialism.
00:46:25.480 I think the Obama presidency
00:46:27.600 is a signaling in complicated ways
00:46:30.760 that the American public wants to,
00:46:34.560 in a sense,
00:46:35.100 release itself from the chain mail
00:46:36.920 of the imperial legacy.
00:46:39.160 There's an important historian,
00:46:40.860 isn't there,
00:46:41.140 called Stephen E. Ambrose,
00:46:42.740 who wrote a book called
00:46:44.260 A Sense of Globalism
00:46:45.420 about America's emergence
00:46:47.000 from isolationism
00:46:48.320 to play a major role in the world
00:46:52.020 from the Second War.
00:46:53.740 Of course,
00:46:56.280 there was a desire to do it
00:46:57.380 after the First World War,
00:46:59.220 but the political forces
00:47:00.460 inside the United States
00:47:01.840 forced an end to the Wilson dream,
00:47:04.840 and America turned isolationist again
00:47:06.720 until the Roosevelt administration
00:47:08.740 of the 30s and 40s.
00:47:11.240 So I think you're seeing
00:47:13.480 a moderation of the American power base.
00:47:19.000 I think you're seeing
00:47:20.080 the ability of the United States
00:47:21.560 has to project power
00:47:22.820 being quite severely curtailed.
00:47:25.760 It may be that the Iraq adventure
00:47:27.680 was the last time
00:47:29.740 that America will fight
00:47:31.080 a major Vietnam-style war,
00:47:34.540 whereby you actually try
00:47:36.580 and occupy a country.
00:47:38.700 And even then, of course,
00:47:40.040 America seemed surprised
00:47:42.020 that they were faced
00:47:43.220 with an insurgency
00:47:44.240 during 2006,
00:47:46.780 when America lost
00:47:48.240 about 4,500 men
00:47:50.160 when they had to fight
00:47:51.840 guerrillas,
00:47:53.700 national liberationists,
00:47:55.500 Islamists, terrorists,
00:47:56.900 whatever word you want to use,
00:47:58.700 on the ground.
00:48:00.040 They were surprised
00:48:00.940 that they had to fight that
00:48:02.040 when it was obvious
00:48:02.800 that when you go
00:48:03.440 into these countries,
00:48:04.860 as soon as you get down
00:48:06.000 on their level
00:48:06.760 technologically,
00:48:08.120 you may have big Jeeps
00:48:09.300 and big armored personnel carriers
00:48:11.400 and Humbers
00:48:11.980 and this sort of thing,
00:48:12.720 that you're going
00:48:13.460 to be fighting men
00:48:14.540 who are technologically
00:48:16.180 on a level with you,
00:48:17.560 at least approximately so.
00:48:19.080 And you will take casualties.
00:48:21.300 There's just no way.
00:48:22.280 If they're armed with Chinese
00:48:23.580 and North Korean
00:48:24.480 and Indian
00:48:25.040 and Russian weaponry,
00:48:26.700 you're going to take casualties.
00:48:29.620 And there's no way
00:48:32.080 they would get involved,
00:48:33.260 in my opinion,
00:48:34.460 in an intervention in Iran
00:48:35.840 that led to an invasion
00:48:37.040 and occupation.
00:48:37.900 That could even lead
00:48:39.320 to the defeat
00:48:40.440 of the United States
00:48:41.220 militarily, actually,
00:48:42.720 if they were foolish enough
00:48:44.080 to go down that path.
00:48:45.280 Any war with Iran
00:48:46.360 would be conducted
00:48:47.280 by missiles
00:48:47.860 and by aircraft
00:48:48.820 and by taking down
00:48:51.020 their command
00:48:51.540 and control structures
00:48:52.480 and by bombing
00:48:54.460 their nuclear sites
00:48:55.680 and protecting Israel
00:48:57.660 from retaliatory revenge
00:48:59.220 by Hezbollah
00:49:00.020 and by Iranian missiles.
00:49:02.160 They might not have a choice.
00:49:03.560 They might not
00:49:04.240 if it got more
00:49:05.100 and more aggressive.
00:49:06.500 Right.
00:49:06.720 If the Saudis intervened,
00:49:09.000 if Iran blocked
00:49:11.280 the Straits of Hormuz
00:49:12.280 in a slightly desperate action
00:49:14.440 to sort of destabilize
00:49:18.040 the world economic situation,
00:49:19.820 which would immediately
00:49:21.100 impact upon countries
00:49:22.200 like Japan and China
00:49:24.040 that import a lot of their oil
00:49:25.400 through those trades,
00:49:27.500 you've got the risk
00:49:29.280 of escalation.
00:49:30.660 My mind is that
00:49:31.600 the Iranians are cautious
00:49:32.780 and will not go in for that.
00:49:35.540 And the problem is
00:49:38.840 that the Americans have
00:49:40.720 is that they will be involved
00:49:43.620 if Israel attacks Iran
00:49:44.700 on its own.
00:49:46.020 Israel can't do it
00:49:47.160 on its own.
00:49:47.820 It has to refuel its jets.
00:49:49.540 It's an enormous round trip
00:49:50.820 for them to get back
00:49:51.600 from Iran.
00:49:52.740 And they've got to be refueled
00:49:54.200 in the air
00:49:54.580 by American tankers.
00:49:55.900 And only the USAF
00:49:57.700 has the ability
00:49:58.600 and the structures
00:50:00.300 to make the Israeli operation work
00:50:02.980 if they're to really hurt
00:50:04.400 the Iranian nuclear effort
00:50:05.720 and to really put it back
00:50:06.860 many years,
00:50:07.820 which would be the object
00:50:09.300 of the exercise.
00:50:10.620 So America's involved
00:50:12.000 if Israel goes alone.
00:50:14.420 I don't think
00:50:15.520 it will happen personally.
00:50:16.720 I think the Obama administration
00:50:18.460 has said no
00:50:20.260 and will go up
00:50:22.500 to the line of war
00:50:23.540 but will not cross war.
00:50:25.520 If a Republican is elected
00:50:27.100 later this year,
00:50:29.720 I think that can change.
00:50:32.060 So I think that the option
00:50:34.120 of no war with Iran
00:50:35.720 unless it's an accidental one
00:50:37.780 that they all stagger into
00:50:38.980 because they don't want it
00:50:40.320 and it just happens
00:50:41.240 the way the World War
00:50:42.660 happened
00:50:43.380 through a concatenation
00:50:44.920 of unavoidable steps.
00:50:47.460 But at each point
00:50:48.300 in the step change,
00:50:50.060 people said
00:50:50.760 that they didn't want
00:50:51.460 the ultimate outcome.
00:50:52.940 The relationships
00:50:53.460 that Iran has
00:50:54.260 with the West
00:50:54.720 are very uneasy.
00:50:56.700 Western policymakers
00:50:57.280 don't understand
00:50:58.280 the Iranian mindset
00:50:59.640 and they certainly
00:51:00.680 don't understand
00:51:01.360 Western policymakers.
00:51:03.440 The Soviet Union
00:51:04.020 and the United States
00:51:04.700 understood each other
00:51:05.460 intimately
00:51:05.920 and that's why
00:51:07.500 they could finesse
00:51:08.720 their nuclear power relationship
00:51:10.140 whereas America
00:51:11.880 and Iran
00:51:13.080 could stumble
00:51:13.680 into a war
00:51:14.320 quite easily
00:51:15.100 just through
00:51:16.160 misunderstanding
00:51:16.700 what the other side wants.
00:51:19.000 That could happen.
00:51:21.120 But I think
00:51:21.700 if you have a Republican president
00:51:22.860 from the tail end
00:51:23.640 of next year
00:51:24.560 and Iran
00:51:26.520 is still a year away
00:51:27.720 from developing
00:51:28.360 a nuclear device,
00:51:29.540 I think you could see
00:51:30.300 attacks on Iran
00:51:31.140 in 2013.
00:51:32.500 So it's very much
00:51:33.120 dependent on whether
00:51:34.260 you have a regime change
00:51:36.400 inside the United States.
00:51:38.340 And it could become
00:51:39.140 a very big election
00:51:39.960 issue in the United States
00:51:41.780 if it becomes apparent
00:51:42.760 to the U.S. population
00:51:43.960 that if Obama
00:51:45.320 is defeated
00:51:45.960 it will basically mean
00:51:48.140 military action
00:51:49.160 against Iran.
00:51:50.200 Whereas if he continues
00:51:51.120 in office
00:51:51.620 there is a probability
00:51:53.440 that it will stop short
00:51:55.300 of all-out military action
00:51:56.700 unless there's some
00:51:57.920 precipitous shove
00:51:59.240 from either side
00:52:00.440 that gets people
00:52:01.140 involved in a conflict
00:52:02.100 that really isn't
00:52:02.920 in their interest.
00:52:04.020 And that can happen
00:52:04.820 quite easily
00:52:05.580 when people are heavily armed
00:52:06.840 and very propagandistically
00:52:08.920 militated
00:52:09.600 against each other
00:52:10.620 particularly as Israel
00:52:12.240 is extraordinarily twitchy
00:52:14.740 and paranoid
00:52:16.020 about any threat
00:52:17.120 to its security.
00:52:18.840 Well there isn't
00:52:19.400 a real threat
00:52:19.900 to its security.
00:52:20.800 The threat
00:52:21.060 to Israel's security
00:52:21.840 is the democratic
00:52:22.820 time bomb
00:52:23.560 in Israel itself.
00:52:24.780 The Arab birth rate
00:52:25.600 is the threat
00:52:26.020 to Israel.
00:52:27.700 Armed groups
00:52:28.800 no matter what
00:52:30.120 they postise
00:52:31.140 on the internet
00:52:31.800 no matter what
00:52:33.060 Ahmadinejad may say
00:52:34.180 in student speeches
00:52:35.220 at Tehran University
00:52:36.320 are really neither
00:52:38.600 here nor there.
00:52:39.740 Their threat
00:52:40.240 is much closer
00:52:40.920 to home.
00:52:41.960 It's the loss
00:52:42.540 of political capital
00:52:43.740 amongst the tender
00:52:45.320 hearted liberals
00:52:46.080 of the West
00:52:46.700 who no longer
00:52:47.360 look upon Israel
00:52:48.140 with favour.
00:52:49.480 It's the gradual
00:52:50.300 creeping
00:52:51.040 non-Zionism
00:52:52.600 of European
00:52:53.320 policy formation
00:52:54.500 and the reorientation
00:52:56.520 to moderate
00:52:57.420 Arabist viewpoints
00:52:58.460 across Europe
00:52:59.220 and the Arab birth rate
00:53:00.680 inside Israel
00:53:01.600 and in the territories
00:53:02.460 that could frustrate
00:53:04.900 Israel's core
00:53:05.620 60 to 70 years
00:53:06.740 from now.
00:53:08.560 Armed groups
00:53:09.120 like Hezbollah
00:53:09.700 and Hamas
00:53:10.200 are useful
00:53:10.880 poster boys
00:53:11.820 but they don't
00:53:12.580 threaten Israel's
00:53:13.200 existence at all.
00:53:14.520 Right.
00:53:14.780 But people can get
00:53:16.860 very irrational.
00:53:18.540 Well in some ways
00:53:19.740 to go to what
00:53:21.120 you're saying
00:53:21.680 in some ways
00:53:22.360 military action
00:53:23.560 is a kind of
00:53:24.820 irrational
00:53:25.580 angry response
00:53:27.520 towards something else
00:53:29.560 and that is
00:53:30.700 what you're saying
00:53:31.500 the real threat
00:53:32.820 to Israel
00:53:33.260 is the demographic one.
00:53:34.640 I noticed
00:53:35.780 that in a book
00:53:38.120 that I actually
00:53:38.820 was involved
00:53:39.580 in publishing
00:53:40.220 and editing
00:53:40.820 Richard Linn's
00:53:42.620 most recent study
00:53:44.420 of the Jewish people
00:53:45.480 and Jewish intelligence
00:53:46.480 which is hardly
00:53:49.920 any kind of
00:53:50.580 anti-Semitic volume
00:53:51.500 but at the same time
00:53:52.860 at the end
00:53:53.800 Richard is quite
00:53:55.340 gloomy
00:53:56.280 about any prospects
00:53:57.360 for the Jewish people.
00:53:58.760 He thinks
00:53:59.280 that Israel
00:53:59.800 is going to be
00:54:01.080 demographically overwhelmed
00:54:03.100 and that
00:54:04.080 intermarriage
00:54:05.900 within the West
00:54:06.840 is also going
00:54:07.900 to attenuate
00:54:08.680 any kind of
00:54:09.880 Jewish presence.
00:54:11.020 So in some ways
00:54:12.420 in that
00:54:13.120 getting back
00:54:14.140 to what I was
00:54:14.420 saying before
00:54:14.960 if the New World
00:54:16.440 Order of the U.S.
00:54:17.560 that's been with us
00:54:18.700 since the end
00:54:19.560 of the Second World War
00:54:20.880 comes to a close
00:54:22.180 it might really
00:54:23.380 bring to a close
00:54:24.940 Jewish power
00:54:26.200 and Israeli
00:54:27.620 Zionist power
00:54:28.560 as well.
00:54:29.560 Let me add
00:54:30.860 just one more
00:54:31.740 thought
00:54:32.220 that I think
00:54:32.980 is worth mentioning
00:54:33.820 and that is
00:54:35.240 that there was
00:54:36.340 a burst
00:54:37.900 of isolationist
00:54:39.420 sympathy
00:54:39.820 that came
00:54:41.160 after the
00:54:41.840 Wilson administration
00:54:43.200 in the
00:54:44.900 very late teens
00:54:46.720 and 1920s
00:54:47.820 and a lot
00:54:48.800 of people
00:54:49.120 might associate
00:54:50.140 America first
00:54:51.460 exclamation point
00:54:53.020 that movement
00:54:53.700 with the Tea Party
00:54:55.340 or you know
00:54:56.500 backwoods yahoos
00:54:57.820 or something like that
00:54:58.480 but it actually
00:54:58.960 wasn't like that
00:54:59.760 at all
00:55:00.060 it was actually
00:55:00.440 founded at Yale
00:55:01.320 University
00:55:01.900 it was in a way
00:55:03.300 a kind of
00:55:03.800 last gasp
00:55:05.180 of the old
00:55:05.960 WASP establishment
00:55:07.080 that didn't actually
00:55:08.680 want to be globalist
00:55:09.920 and wanted to have
00:55:12.520 wanted to stay home
00:55:14.500 and have a
00:55:15.200 you know
00:55:15.900 a prosperous
00:55:16.880 kind of laissez-faire
00:55:18.440 America
00:55:19.780 and it was in some ways
00:55:21.040 the last gasp
00:55:21.720 of that
00:55:22.200 and that whole
00:55:23.420 ruling order
00:55:23.960 has since gone
00:55:25.280 by the wayside
00:55:26.120 we've had something
00:55:27.160 quite different
00:55:27.900 in the United States
00:55:28.660 since the Second World War
00:55:30.360 but we
00:55:30.960 you know
00:55:31.240 if you think about
00:55:32.000 the demographic
00:55:32.600 aspect of that
00:55:33.840 of a WASP elite
00:55:36.300 was the core
00:55:38.040 of America first
00:55:38.980 in some ways
00:55:40.600 you've got to think
00:55:41.240 about a new issue
00:55:42.780 that America's facing
00:55:43.860 and that is
00:55:45.320 a very chaotic
00:55:47.920 demographic
00:55:48.860 that's emerging
00:55:50.680 if it's not
00:55:51.360 already here
00:55:52.140 and that is one
00:55:53.620 that is Latino
00:55:54.520 that is one
00:55:55.880 of which
00:55:56.240 the black population
00:55:57.700 is not growing
00:55:59.060 to any major degree
00:56:02.580 however it is
00:56:03.340 certainly empowered
00:56:04.300 and pandered to
00:56:06.340 and so
00:56:07.000 it's
00:56:07.840 it's kind of a
00:56:08.920 it's a question
00:56:09.800 and it's one
00:56:10.400 I certainly don't
00:56:11.060 have an answer for
00:56:11.920 of how
00:56:12.800 this demographic
00:56:13.800 situation
00:56:14.640 will alter
00:56:15.240 foreign policy
00:56:16.140 it might
00:56:17.020 well make
00:56:18.200 might totally
00:56:19.000 reorient it
00:56:19.880 it might
00:56:20.200 it might
00:56:21.160 eventually
00:56:21.700 make
00:56:22.260 America
00:56:23.040 isolationist
00:56:23.820 it might
00:56:24.080 reorient
00:56:24.860 America
00:56:25.640 towards
00:56:26.300 South America
00:56:27.400 I
00:56:28.520 you know
00:56:29.060 I have
00:56:29.460 I have no idea
00:56:30.760 and you know
00:56:31.420 and I think
00:56:31.780 demographics are key
00:56:33.120 certainly
00:56:33.760 foreign policy
00:56:34.840 is one of
00:56:35.380 it's
00:56:36.000 perhaps the most
00:56:37.160 elite
00:56:37.780 aspects
00:56:38.780 aspect of politics
00:56:40.060 it's
00:56:40.460 it's created
00:56:41.540 by
00:56:42.140 think tanks
00:56:43.380 like the
00:56:43.900 Council on Foreign
00:56:44.780 Relations
00:56:45.160 and so on
00:56:45.600 and so forth
00:56:46.100 it's
00:56:46.420 it's done
00:56:47.360 most average
00:56:48.640 Joe types
00:56:49.560 don't really
00:56:50.380 understand
00:56:50.960 what's going
00:56:51.440 on
00:56:51.860 or want
00:56:52.380 to know
00:56:52.940 they might
00:56:54.120 you know
00:56:54.700 get excited
00:56:55.520 about a war
00:56:56.280 but
00:56:56.580 but they're not
00:56:57.680 certainly involved
00:56:58.360 with the nitty gritty
00:56:59.020 but you know
00:56:59.700 if America
00:57:00.400 is going to
00:57:00.780 remain a
00:57:01.340 mass democracy
00:57:02.400 at some point
00:57:03.960 that demographic
00:57:04.900 element is going
00:57:06.360 to hold
00:57:07.680 sway
00:57:08.120 and
00:57:08.640 you know
00:57:09.880 we
00:57:10.060 we might
00:57:10.580 have a
00:57:11.260 in the
00:57:12.120 in the coming
00:57:12.560 25 years
00:57:13.440 we might
00:57:13.960 have a new
00:57:14.440 elite
00:57:14.780 we might
00:57:15.100 have a
00:57:15.380 totally
00:57:15.780 reoriented
00:57:17.920 foreign policy
00:57:18.680 that's something
00:57:19.280 that's hard
00:57:19.960 to imagine
00:57:20.460 now
00:57:20.960 when we
00:57:21.940 watch
00:57:22.340 you know
00:57:22.600 some of
00:57:22.880 these
00:57:23.100 horrible
00:57:24.100 presidential
00:57:25.800 so-called
00:57:26.580 debates
00:57:27.140 amongst
00:57:28.140 Republicans
00:57:28.720 in which
00:57:29.180 they each
00:57:29.740 you know
00:57:30.220 try to
00:57:30.540 outdo
00:57:31.020 one another
00:57:31.600 promises
00:57:32.640 of
00:57:33.140 of
00:57:33.740 start
00:57:34.220 you know
00:57:34.460 bombing
00:57:34.940 Iran
00:57:35.460 tomorrow
00:57:35.860 morning
00:57:36.300 so we
00:57:37.440 might have
00:57:37.720 something
00:57:38.040 quite new
00:57:39.200 you know
00:57:40.780 in
00:57:41.000 in the
00:57:41.520 foreseeable
00:57:41.940 future
00:57:42.320 well
00:57:42.560 well
00:57:42.940 anyway
00:57:43.200 Jonathan
00:57:43.520 as we
00:57:43.780 bring it
00:57:44.040 to a
00:57:44.180 close
00:57:44.380 do you
00:57:44.540 have any
00:57:44.900 parting
00:57:46.000 shots
00:57:46.440 on that
00:57:46.780 issue
00:57:47.040 yes
00:57:48.980 I think
00:57:49.460 I think
00:57:50.520 the Obama
00:57:51.000 presidency
00:57:51.500 is in
00:57:52.420 a strange
00:57:52.980 way
00:57:53.500 a default
00:57:54.800 position
00:57:55.260 for lots
00:57:55.660 of things
00:57:56.000 that are
00:57:56.240 coming
00:57:56.660 I think
00:57:58.080 Amos are
00:57:58.480 already
00:57:58.780 there
00:57:59.320 he's hedged
00:58:01.180 in by all
00:58:01.800 sorts of
00:58:02.160 forces
00:58:02.520 and he
00:58:02.900 took the
00:58:03.220 White House
00:58:03.740 with the
00:58:04.080 support of
00:58:04.800 traditional
00:58:05.780 center-left
00:58:06.880 democratic
00:58:07.420 power
00:58:07.780 structures
00:58:08.320 there's not
00:58:09.000 much he
00:58:09.300 can do
00:58:09.600 about that
00:58:10.320 however
00:58:11.100 his instincts
00:58:11.980 are to do
00:58:13.160 deals with
00:58:13.700 the Muslim
00:58:13.980 world
00:58:14.420 his instincts
00:58:15.400 are to do
00:58:15.820 deals with
00:58:16.300 Latin America
00:58:17.000 his instincts
00:58:18.600 are to do
00:58:19.580 a deal
00:58:20.160 with the
00:58:20.720 softest
00:58:21.220 of the
00:58:21.600 Palestinians
00:58:22.120 to attain
00:58:24.300 a sort
00:58:24.880 of two
00:58:25.260 state
00:58:25.520 solution
00:58:26.100 along
00:58:27.100 social
00:58:27.460 democratic
00:58:28.640 lines
00:58:29.280 in what
00:58:30.380 social
00:58:30.600 democrats
00:58:30.900 would like
00:58:31.220 in western
00:58:31.540 Europe
00:58:31.980 his instincts
00:58:34.100 are completely
00:58:35.100 against
00:58:36.460 the Christian
00:58:37.880 Zionist
00:58:38.600 warriors
00:58:39.200 amongst us
00:58:39.980 this is my
00:58:41.380 reading
00:58:41.720 anyway
00:58:42.160 his instincts
00:58:43.180 are not
00:58:45.020 particularly
00:58:45.700 hegemonic
00:58:46.860 in power
00:58:47.820 terms
00:58:48.320 as regards
00:58:48.800 to the
00:58:49.040 US
00:58:49.220 and the
00:58:49.580 rest of
00:58:49.860 the world
00:58:50.380 I think
00:58:51.460 his instinct
00:58:51.960 is to make
00:58:52.520 America
00:58:53.020 more like
00:58:53.800 the rest
00:58:54.120 of the world
00:58:54.820 and as the
00:58:55.960 world has
00:58:56.380 gone to live
00:58:56.840 in America
00:58:57.440 the one
00:58:59.320 meshes with
00:59:00.560 the other
00:59:00.980 I think
00:59:01.820 America
00:59:02.320 may well
00:59:03.280 emerge in
00:59:04.120 with the rest
00:59:04.660 of the world
00:59:05.140 and become more
00:59:05.780 like that in
00:59:06.260 America
00:59:06.620 and it
00:59:07.660 will have
00:59:07.980 a foreign
00:59:08.360 policy
00:59:08.820 which is
00:59:09.380 closer to
00:59:09.840 that of
00:59:10.060 the United
00:59:10.400 Nations
00:59:10.960 common
00:59:11.680 denominator
00:59:12.360 notice
00:59:13.580 the
00:59:14.080 globalist
00:59:15.640 American elite
00:59:16.640 of the
00:59:17.520 last phase
00:59:18.300 in American
00:59:18.780 history
00:59:19.280 has been
00:59:20.100 at war
00:59:20.600 with the
00:59:20.940 perceptions
00:59:21.340 of Latin
00:59:21.820 America
00:59:22.280 Latinos
00:59:23.540 always favor
00:59:24.480 countries
00:59:25.000 that the
00:59:25.360 United States
00:59:26.040 is against
00:59:26.740 there was
00:59:27.380 immense sympathy
00:59:28.060 even for
00:59:28.560 the Axis
00:59:29.040 powers
00:59:29.440 in the
00:59:29.700 second
00:59:29.880 world
00:59:30.120 war
00:59:30.480 throughout
00:59:31.000 Latin
00:59:31.300 America
00:59:31.740 why
00:59:32.580 because
00:59:33.100 they were
00:59:33.400 fighting
00:59:33.720 against
00:59:34.200 the
00:59:34.360 United
00:59:34.600 States
00:59:35.240 there
00:59:35.720 was
00:59:35.800 a certain
00:59:36.120 partiality
00:59:36.760 for
00:59:36.980 Japan
00:59:37.560 there's
00:59:38.280 been
00:59:38.440 a certain
00:59:38.820 partiality
00:59:39.580 for
00:59:39.920 the
00:59:40.120 Arab
00:59:40.400 cause
00:59:40.880 in
00:59:41.160 Latino
00:59:41.600 societies
00:59:42.260 that's
00:59:43.340 why
00:59:43.620 all of
00:59:43.940 these
00:59:44.100 countries
00:59:44.540 the whole
00:59:45.920 of Latin
00:59:46.240 America
00:59:46.580 recognized
00:59:47.380 this
00:59:48.080 sort of
00:59:48.440 de facto
00:59:48.980 Palestinian
00:59:49.720 state
00:59:50.320 that isn't
00:59:51.180 in these
00:59:51.580 recent
00:59:51.960 maneuverings
00:59:52.700 of the
00:59:52.940 United
00:59:53.200 Nations
00:59:53.720 something
00:59:54.340 that was
00:59:54.620 totally
00:59:54.960 opposed
00:59:55.440 by
00:59:56.120 America
00:59:56.960 by most
00:59:58.320 of Western
00:59:58.700 Europe
00:59:59.120 and by
00:59:59.760 the usual
01:00:00.280 suspects
01:00:00.700 and of
01:00:01.220 course
01:00:01.380 by the
01:00:01.740 Obama
01:00:02.040 administration
01:00:02.540 but we're
01:00:03.580 talking here
01:00:04.160 about
01:00:04.580 Obama's
01:00:05.160 instincts
01:00:05.700 rather than
01:00:07.400 what his
01:00:08.200 actual
01:00:08.480 policies
01:00:09.120 are
01:00:09.860 and what
01:00:10.440 his
01:00:10.600 administration
01:00:11.060 does
01:00:11.900 I think
01:00:12.700 you will
01:00:13.040 see the
01:00:13.340 Democratic
01:00:13.660 Party
01:00:14.240 become
01:00:14.980 crypto
01:00:16.720 isolationist
01:00:17.560 over time
01:00:18.340 and you
01:00:19.720 will see
01:00:20.140 a reversal
01:00:20.760 you've already
01:00:21.360 seen a reversal
01:00:22.240 throughout the
01:00:22.920 20th century
01:00:23.660 where the
01:00:24.360 Democrats and
01:00:24.900 Republicans
01:00:25.280 changed places
01:00:26.460 and the
01:00:27.220 Republicans
01:00:27.580 became the
01:00:28.300 party of the
01:00:28.900 white south
01:00:29.600 when of course
01:00:30.860 going back to the
01:00:32.000 Confederacy
01:00:32.420 they were
01:00:32.900 utterly hated
01:00:33.720 in the
01:00:34.300 white south
01:00:34.840 so you see
01:00:35.620 many reversals
01:00:36.480 in the
01:00:36.780 American
01:00:37.080 polity
01:00:37.520 and you
01:00:38.100 can well
01:00:38.400 see another
01:00:38.840 one
01:00:39.240 there's also
01:00:40.140 a degree
01:00:40.480 to which
01:00:40.700 from a
01:00:40.940 European
01:00:41.360 perspective
01:00:41.940 what Obama's
01:00:44.060 instance may
01:00:44.740 amount to
01:00:45.360 appears
01:00:45.780 saner
01:00:46.840 what worries
01:00:47.560 Europeans
01:00:48.140 are the
01:00:49.780 trigger happy
01:00:50.440 views
01:00:51.240 of the
01:00:52.720 Christian
01:00:53.860 Zionists
01:00:54.400 who want
01:00:54.700 to go to
01:00:55.080 war all the
01:00:55.640 time
01:00:55.920 in order to
01:00:56.880 impose their
01:00:57.480 values on the
01:00:58.080 Middle East
01:00:58.660 there's probably
01:00:59.880 not a viewpoint
01:01:00.540 in America
01:01:01.160 which is more
01:01:01.720 unpopular in
01:01:02.460 Europe than that
01:01:03.100 one
01:01:03.480 and yet
01:01:04.620 in the
01:01:04.880 American
01:01:05.160 heartlands
01:01:05.980 there's probably
01:01:07.480 not a viewpoint
01:01:08.140 which has as
01:01:08.940 much salience
01:01:09.800 as the view
01:01:11.500 that you're
01:01:11.860 protecting the
01:01:12.420 United States
01:01:12.940 of America
01:01:13.520 by intervening
01:01:14.940 in all these
01:01:15.400 countries that
01:01:16.120 most Americans
01:01:17.080 have little
01:01:18.140 knowledge of
01:01:18.900 or little
01:01:19.580 interest in
01:01:20.320 Jonathan
01:01:20.800 thank you for
01:01:21.720 being on the
01:01:22.180 program once
01:01:23.220 again
01:01:23.560 we'll talk to
01:01:24.240 you again
01:01:24.480 next week
01:01:24.920 thanks very
01:01:25.920 much
01:01:26.340 bye for now
01:01:33.100 for now
01:01:34.920 Transcription by CastingWords