An interview with Scott Ritter
by Scott Horton

Interviewed February 20, 2007 – Listen to the interview.

Is Iran making nuclear weapons? Is the United States preparing to wage war against them to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons? Our guest is Scott Ritter. He is a former Marine, United Nations weapons inspector, and author of an armful of books: Endgame, War on Iraq, Frontier Justice, Iraq Confidential, and his latest is Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change.

Welcome to Antiwar Radio, Scott.

Scott Ritter: Thank you for having me.

Horton: It's great to have you on. The theme of your book, Target Iran, is that nuclear disarmament is the excuse – the policy is really regime change. Is that right?

Ritter: That's correct. The Bush administration has made it clear that when it comes to the Middle East, the policy is regional transformation. That's inclusive of regime change in nations that the Bush administration has identified as either being a rogue nation or a failed nation state, and the current theocracy that governs Iran has been deemed by the Bush administration as being rogue in character in part because, as the Bush administration articulated it in the March 2006 National Security Strategy document, Iran is the number one state sponsor of terror in the world today.

Text of Interview

-----

Scott Ritter has come to the same conclusion as Lakoff. Scott has made several assertions to that effect.

TEHRAN, March 1 —

NYT -Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is planning a trip to Saudi Arabia, an official said today, for talks expected to focus on regional stability and the sectarian fighting in Iraq and Lebanon.Mohammad Hosseini, Iran’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the Iranian news agency IrNA.

“The two heads of state will discuss issues of the Islamic world, bilateral ties and the situation in the Middle East,” but Other news agencies reported that it would take place this weekend.

“When the views of the two countries get closer, they can play an influential role in the chaotic situation of the Islamic world and the Middle East,” Mr. Hosseini said.

Iran sent its chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, to the kingdom and Saudi Arabia has sent envoys to Iran in recent months. Saudi Arabia has also increased its public involvement in Iraq and its support of the Sunni-led government in Lebanon in what appears to be an attempt to counter Iranian efforts to establish itself as the regional superpower, diplomats, analysts and officials said last month.

A collaboration between Iran and Saudi Arabia could complicate the regional policy of the United States, which is alarmed at rising Iranian influence in Iraq and Lebanon, and with Hamas.

_{"A bad treaty is better than a good missile" ~ Andrei Kislyakov}

believes the stage is being set for nuclear weapons, and Israel will be the trigger.

Similar to what happen with Iraq, no matter what Iran does, Iran will not be able to avoid the war. Proving a negative is literally impossible as it was for Iraq. Iraq was in full compliance with what the United States wanted, but regime change was what the United States was determined to have. In order to remake the Middle East into the dreamstate they have set for it, regime change in Iran is part of the nightmare.

to "Iranian nuclear threat" is the plethora of articles appearing today on the sudden "new doubts" on DPRK "uranium enrichment programs" that caused Junior to dump the Clinton-era "Agreed Framework" which halted NK's plutonium reprocessing, at the time its only source of weapons-grade nuclear material - and, seemingly, still the only source of nuclear material:
From Glenn Kessler in WaPo...

New Doubts On Nuclear Efforts by North Korea
U.S. Less Certain of Uranium Program

The Bush administration is backing away from its long-held assertions that North Korea has an active clandestine program to enrich uranium, leading some experts to believe that the original U.S. intelligence that started the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions may have been flawed.

The chief intelligence officer for North Korea, Joseph R. DeTrani, told Congress on Tuesday that while there is "high confidence" North Korea acquired materials that could be used in a "production-scale" uranium program, there is only "mid-confidence" such a program exists. Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the chief negotiator for disarmament talks, told a conference last week in Washington that it is unclear whether North Korea ever mastered the production techniques necessary for such a program.
...
The administration's stance today stands in sharp contrast to the certainty expressed by top officials in 2002, when the administration accused Pyongyang of running a secret uranium program -- and demanded it be dismantled at once. President Bush told a news conference that November: "We discovered that, contrary to an agreement they had with the United States, they're enriching uranium, with a desire of developing a weapon."
...
Administration officials insist they had valid suspicions at the time about North Korean purchases -- including 150 tons of aluminum tubes from Russia in June 2002 -- to halt any possible cooperative talks with Pyongyang. Officials also say that a senior North Korean official admitted to the program in October 2002, when Hill's predecessor, James Kelly, confronted North Korean officials over the U.S. intelligence findings at a meeting in Pyongyang. North Korea subsequently denied that any such admission took place.
...
LINK

"...aluminum tubes..."? Now, why is that so familiar?
Here, on the ISIS website, is David Albright, on those ubiquitous "aluminum tubes":
North Korea's Alleged Large-Scale Enrichment Plant: Yet Another Questionable Extrapolation Based Upon Aluminum Tubes

LINK

And, here is an excellent history of Junior and his administration's massive cockup on the entire issue of engaging DPRK and nuclear proliferation:

Rolling Blunder
How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes.

LINK

Popular myth holds that North Korean officials "admitted" or "conceded" that they were attempting uranium enrichment processes in 2002, yet now we are told that, well, perhaps it was more of a "tonal" thing? The upshot of all of this, including the US's own pullback on accusations, is that Junior's acute antipathy toward Kim Il-Sung, the "axis of evil" inanity, "don't talk to enemies" bollocks, and flawed intelligence interpretations gave DPRK a clear opportunity to quickly recover and reprocess plutonium into usable nuclear weaponry. Huge diplomatic blundering, criminal incompetence, utter lack of appreciation of real security issues, that is what played out vis-a-vis the North Koreans, and exactly the same game-plan is operating vs. Iran, setting aside even the complete irrelevancy of "Iranian IED/ETF" red herring...it's all about "nuclear weapons" and "nuclear weapons programs", or even "nuclear weapon-related program activities" - that wonderful bit of infelicitous phrase-mongering that served as the fallback position on failure of the Iraq Survey Group (David McKay, et al) to find actual "WMD" stocks in Iraq months after the invasion - that is driving the war talk with Iran.
Every assertion - I mean, every - assertion made by the Cheney administration about "WMD" threats from a panoply of "enemies" has proven either outright factitious or highly speculative at best, and here we are, seemingly at the cusp of even a more spectacular and all-consuming clusterfuck: a "preventive" assault upon Iran. Quite honestly, if we don't have a rerun of "Seven Days in May", with Junior and Cheney placed under military guard, and a temporary junta installed, I'll be surprised.

I suspect that a majority in the US would be for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Iran. I doubt it would take a lot of selling to pull this off. I hope I am overly cynical on this.

And I agree with Ian on the result. I'll shopping for different citizenship and a new passport if anyone will still take us. Wouldn't want to live here anymore.

There's some who hear you on this, Ian, but I just have a hard time believing those few who do can prevent this. After reading the recent revelations about the NorK's Uranium program (many people have commented on it in the past 24 hours, including Josh Marshall here), and then this article on by Sara Robinson at Orcinus, it's pretty hard to maintain positivity.

Robinson gives an overview of a study of authoritarians. There's a 3 strains: RWA, SDO, and worst of all RWA & SDO (double-highs) together. Our Admin seems to be full of double-highs, and the problem with them is that well, I'll quote her:

Altemeyer tested this theory by running a three-hour Risk-type global simulation game with various combinations of high and low RWAs, high and low SDOs and double highs. The results confirmed his earlier observations: double-highs will always put their own prestige and power over every other concern, even if the fate of the world is at stake. They're more interested in wheeling and dealing and driving the other guy to the wall -- fine if you're in business, but not so fine if you're trying to establish programs or institutions aimed at solving large-scale problems like overpopulation, pollution, or global warming. They're also far more interested in military might and bullying than they are in diplomacy or compromise (if you're a double high, you can't count it as a win until the other guy is writhing on the ground in front of you, begging for his life. Any other outcome is a loss.) In these simulations, their prejudices translated in a predictable ethocentrism that often blinded them to their own best interests. Predictably -- and chillingly -- putting double-highs in charge guaranteed ecological catastrophe, mass starvation, and global nuclear war.

I suspect that the hyper-competitve nature of running for office in the US made it inevitable that someone like this would ascend to the Presidency eventually.

How do you stop people like that? We know they don't listen. We know they don't give a damn, and they are increasingly backed into a corner and short on time. War with Iran seems a certainty given this mindset. The only real question is whether it will involve nukes or not...

God Damn it. How many times a day I say that to myself nowadays... I don't even know how to plan for the future.

In a couple of Sy Hersh's articles on (air)war preparation against Iran, he alluded to senior AF officers as being the most enthusiastic for launching massive "precision" air-strikes against Iranian targets. In this interview, former AF Lt Col. and NSA staffer Karen Kwiatkowski adds her insights:

Pentagon Whistle-Blower on the Coming War With Iran
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (ret.), a veteran of the Pentagon with firsthand experience of the administration’s cherry-picking of intelligence, reveals why Bush thinks he can win a war with Iran, why few politicians are serious about withdrawal and why “when they call Iraq a success, they mean it.”
...
KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: You know, I think the, one of the big reasons that Bush and Cheney think they can do Iran is that they believe, what they’re hearing from the Air Force and the Navy, two of the three main branches of our military, the two that have been left out of the glory of Iraq, you see. And those guys want a piece of the action, and so they’re advertising to the Administration and publicly, I mean you can read it for yourself, the Air Force and the Navy have targets they believe they can overwhelmingly hit their targets, deep penetration, weapons, possibly nuclear weapons, I mean, nothing is off the table as Dick Cheney is off the table, Dick Cheney says “nothing is off the table.” And the delivery of these weapons, whether they’re conventional or nuclear will be naval and Air Force. They’ll be Navy from the sea and Air Force form long range bombers and some of the bases that we have around the… so I don’t think, certainly, I don’t know, I’m not in the Army, wasn’t in the Army, I was in the Air Force, I don’t think the Army could support any type of invasion of Iran and they wouldn’t’ want to. I’m sure that they’ve, they’ve had enough with Iraq and our reserves are in terrible condition. We’ve got huge problems in the Army and in the Reserve system. So I don’t think there’s any intention to go into Iran, but simply to destroy it and to create havoc and disruption and humanitarian crisis and topple perhaps the government of [Ahmadinejad]. We want to topple that government. Yeah, we’ll do it with bombs from a distance. I don’t know if you call that shock and awe, we’ve been advertising it for a long, long time. It will not be a surprise to the Iranians if we do it.
...
LINK

She offers many other observations in this interview, from a libertarian perspective...worth the read in its entirely.

"Bush, Cheney, McCain, Edwards, Clinton, and Obama all say indirectly that they seriously consider starting a preventive nuclear war..."

One of just dozens, if not hundreds, of clear indications that Homo Sapiens are a failed species and have outlived their usefullness to the planet.

Let the talking monkeys ignite their thermonuclear devices upon themselves or do whatever it takes to bring about their own planet-wide extinction.
In time nature will produce another type of organism that will be more successful at residing on the planet then the current so-called dominant species with their insane never ending wars over their idiotic religions and energy resources.

Perhaps 2012 will be the year when peace finally comes to planet Earth with the elimination of these evolutionary dead-ends.

Here, read Ray McGovern's analysis, and play it back against the pre-invasion Iraq rubbish and the DPRK "enrichment" imbroglio:

Who the Hell Knows?
How Far is Iran from the Bomb?

By RAY McGOVERN
Former CIA analyst

hat was one of the key questions asked of newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing on Tuesday. Why had McConnell avoided this front-burner issue in his prepared remarks? Because an honest answer would have been: "Beats the hell out of us. Despite the billions that American taxpayers have sunk into improving U.S. intelligence, we can only guess."

But the question is certainly a fair, and urgent one. A mere three weeks into the job, McConnell can perhaps be forgiven for merely reciting the hazy forecast of his predecessor, John Negroponte, and the obscurantist jargon that has been introduced into key national intelligence estimates (NIEs) in recent years). McConnell had these two sentences committed to memory:

"We assess that Iran seeks to develop a nuclear weapon. The information is incomplete, but we assess that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon early-to-mid-next decade."

At that point McConnell received gratuitous reinforcement from Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. With something of a flourish, Maples emphasized that it was "with high confidence" that DIA "assesses that Iran remains determined to develop nuclear weapons."

After the judgments in the Oct. 1, 2002 estimate assessing weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq-judgments stated with "high confidence"-turned out to be wrong, National Intelligence Council officials apparently concluded that defining "assess" might help cover their asses. The council took the unprecedented step of including a short glossary in its recent NIE on Iraq:

"When we use words such as "we assess," we are trying to convey an analytical assessment or judgment. These assessments, which are based on incomplete or at times fragmentary information are not a fact, proof, or knowledge. Some analytical judgments are based directly on collected information; others rest on previous judgments, which serve as building blocks. In either type of judgment, we do not have "evidence" that shows something to be a fact."
...
[These sentiments dovetail with those offered by] Defense Secretary Gates at his confirmation hearing on December 5. Gates put it this way:

"While they [the Iranians] are certainly pressing, in my opinion, for a nuclear capability, I think they would see it in the first instance as a deterrent. They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons-Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west, and us in the Persian Gulf."

Deterrence? Both Sen. Levin and ranking member John Warner (R, VA) picked up on this, to the dismay of Sen. Graham, who sounded as if he had just come from a briefing by the Israeli extreme right who, with Cheney, are pushing hard for a U.S. strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Graham said he thought economic sanctions might work but that, in any case, they were "the only thing left short of military action."
...
Seldom have I heard an American senator so openly press the U.S. to mount an attack on a major country simply because it could be perceived as a threat to Israel. There was no mention of Israel's own arsenal of some 200-300 nuclear weapons and multiple delivery systems. Nor did anyone allude to French President Jacques Chirac's recent comment that, with one or two nuclear weapons Iran would pose no big danger, because launching a nuclear weapon against Israel would inevitably bring the destruction of Tehran.

Sen. Warner objected strongly to the notion that, if sanctions against Iran failed, the next step had to be military action. With support from Levin, Warner alluded time and time again to the effectiveness of mutual deterrence after WWII, stressing that deterrence is a far better course than to let slip the dogs of war. He referred to his own role in ensuring that the Soviet Union was deterred. It seemed as though he was about to cry out from exasperation, Why don't we talk to the Iranians!...like I talked to the Russians. But, typically for Warner, in the end he decided to hew to the party line and avoid any thought of negotiating with "bad guys."
...

http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern03012007.html

Read the whole article, and note well the rhetoric of Sen. Lindsay Graham, whose views, unfortunately, are representative of many in Congress, in influential so-called think tanks, and in the received wisdom of many in the MSM. I can't see any groundswell of opposition developing that could deter the Cheney administration from fulfilling its objectives vis-a-vis Iran...I'm still wagering on a military golpe.

Is this real? Or merely Wild surmise and poisoned wells? Or is this merely paranoia and nuke porn?

Or is it really time to bring out the men in white coats, bearing tranq darts and enough strait jackets to outfit the entire US administration?

Need the rest of the world now, making no sudden moves, talk slowly soothingly to Americans whilst groping for a nation size set of restraints?

Certainly the Americans have done some, umm, questionable things, but this goes way beyond a joke and crosses way over into utterly and entirely unacceptable territory.

Let no one be unclear on the matter. A single first strike nuke, no matter what the excuse, and America and Americans will be shunned and utterly despised by everyone on the planet until there has been a complete regime change from the top of congress all the way down to the private who guards the nukes.

There is only ever one enemy, and that is the military. It doesn't matter which side they purport to be on.

eom

_{"A bad treaty is better than a good missile" ~ Andrei Kislyakov}

This is partly a repost of something I posted here a couple of months ago. But I think it's still relevant. Canuck wrote above: 'The US has become a rogue superpower, answerable to no-one'. But being a power-crazed rogue government is a general condition, not a specific motivation. Why would nuking Iran be a choice that this rogue power might make?

Nuking Iran is essential from one point of view. Right now the US is losing fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but more than that its economic relationships with eg China among others are only tenable in their current form because they are ultimately guaranteed by US military power - by the idea that US power will continue to shape the world's political economy in a way that is favorable to the US, its interests and its allies above all others.

Once that idea finally breaks, it's downhill all the way for the empire in its current form. The US needs to nuke Iran now - to make the point that US military domination is real, not as hollow as it currently appears, and so to avoid surrendering economically to BRICS or some other similar alliance in ten years' time. Bush's cabal can see that clearly, and need to get the job done before the next election, after which the possibility will be definitively lost.

It's insane of course, and would almost certainly fail in many complex ways which cannot be clearly predicted but are not pleasant to contemplate. I admit it's also incredibly simplistic, but I'm sure in some powerful people's imagination it's the final battle that Iraq was meant to be: are you with us or are you against us, now you know that we're serious about nuking you if you get the answer wrong? Yes, there are several countries outside the immediate US orbit with atomic weapons, but can you imagine any one of them (even North Korea, whose nuclear capability appears by most assessments to be currently next to useless) mobilising that capability to align themselves directly against the US in defence of Iran? If the answer is negative, then it's all systems go.

The latest Russian threats to target European countries who host the infrastructure of the next-generation US missile defence network, even though this network is now being presented as a response to an imaginary Iranian threat, adds an interesting extra tension. But I'm sure that US planners don't believe that Putin would consider for a moment aligning himself with Iran in a situation of potential nuclear escalation.

Of course, the situation in Iraq more or less proves that rational calculation is not a predictive method that is being employed by the current US administration. The Iraq adventure was insane, and undertaken in the face of concerted global opposition which is perhaps still underestimated in the US - even in the UK, where I'm from (though working in the US right now), supposedly the US's strongest ally in Iraq, popular opposition to Bush and the US is the mainstream. British support for a US/Israeli strike on Iraq might be thinkable in government circles - ie by Blair and his immediate advisors - but would be categorically undeliverable in practice.

Still, I think the US govt is probably correct in predicting that Iran would be on its own when it came to any military response to a US attack. But the methods the Bush govt has so far used to measure its success fall far short of the methods needed to grasp the wider effects of a nuclear strike on Iran.

The consequences of a nuclear first strike will in no way be calculable in the conventional terms of international government or state support, military successes, coalitions of the willing etc. They would be experienced as a very powerful extra-political conflict - an initially non-military conflict within states and between extra-state forces that is manifest directly rather than through conventional political channels - that would remake the very grounds on which politics could be conducted in many states around the world - the US almost certainly included.

In the worst case scenario for the US, it might radically hasten, not delay, the end of US dominance. Certainly it would leave the US without any recourse to diplomacy or mutual agreement for future benefit in its international relations, would leave naked force - military or economic - as the terms under which any dialogue would held thereafter.

In some sense, these are the current conditions; at least many of the world's peoples understand those to be the conditions. But to expose them so fundamentally would be, in effect, to force the hand of US power, to demand that it either call or fold. And it's hard to see how either would be a winning option.