by mike Evans
The only thing they are hiding is their nuclear program, which is being exposed by the international community. Many think that what they’ve done in Lebanon was merely a decoy strategy to deflect attention to growing pressure to their nuclear program. So we have to have our eyes fixed on the two objectives: one, dispatch Iran’s proxy in Lebanon and give Lebanon a hope for the future, and give Israel security; but equally, deal with Iran’s nuclear and missile program while there is still time, while that regime has not armed itself with weapons of mass death.
MDE:
On 9/11 you spoke to the nation and you described 9/11 as a “wake-up call from hell.” What would America look like and what could happen to our nation if Iran goes nuclear?
Mr. Netanyahu:
Iran has said in unequivocal terms that, first of all, its target is Israel, and they do it with a particular brand of malevolence because they deny that the Holocaust took place—the murder of six million Jews—while they’re openly declaring their intention to create another holocaust to destroy the six million Jews of Israel. Number one, Israel could be in great jeopardy. Number two, so will everybody else. That is, in short order, the Western-oriented regimes of the Middle East would fall by the wayside. That is why you see the Arab countries are siding against Iran, against Hezbollah, because they understand what I am saying. So, the Middle East could be taken over, and that means the oil fields—the oil spigot of the world—would be in Iranian hands. If you are worried about oil prices today, and what that does to the Western economy, just think about tomorrow. And number three, of course, is the ability of Iran to use its nuclear arsenal and its missile arsenal to threaten Europe and the U.S. directly.
Make no mistake about it: their mad, apocalyptic vision would be perfectly possible for them to do. This is not the Soviet Union; this is not China. These are not rational forces. Whatever you could say about the Soviet Union, it acted fairly carefully on the world scene. Every time their ideology of world domination conflicted with their survival, they always backed off…in Cuba, in Berlin. They always backed off; they were very rational in that regard. But you can’t count on the ayatollahs of the world, armed with nuclear weapons, to back off. They often prefer their zeal over their survival. Have you ever heard of a Communist suicide bomber? No. But militant Islam produces battalions of them, and they smash into buildings in Manhattan, and they smash into the Pentagon, into U.S. warships, into buses, schools—you name it. So, this is a different ideology; it is a different threat. It must not be allowed to be armed. It is the new barbarians who are seeking the weapons of mass death, and we have all been forewarned. This is another wake-up call. That’s all it is.
MDE:
What was going through the minds of the nineteen who attacked America on 9/11, and what is in the minds of the Islamic Fascists in Iran? Is it any different?
Mr. Netanyahu:
It is a particular creed, and the creed that guides Iran is a particular brand of Shiism. Shiism dates back to the early years of Islam and the battle for the inheritance of Muhammad’s legacy. It was a splinter group that lost out from the main trajectory of Islam that went to the Sunnis. It had a kind of mystical leader, the Mahdi, who was a great religious leader that disappeared about a thousand years ago. This Mahdi will come back in a great apocalyptic war that will claim the lives of millions. It almost mandates this kind of conflagration, and you really don’t want the only country in the world with 90 percent Shiites, Iran among them, the most extreme part of this religious sect, to acquire the horrific weapons of atomic bombs and missiles to carry out their twisted ideology. It is very dangerous; people don’t realize.
MDE:
Do they think they can usher him in with an apocalypse?
Mr. Netanyahu:
That’s what they think.
MDE:
A Christian thinks of the coming of Jesus Christ as the blessed hope. So, you are saying there is an Islamic faction that would prefer a mushroom cloud in Israel and America, a world without Zionism and America, and that somehow they think we are all going to submit to Islam?
Mr. Netanyahu:
Prefer, no! That’s what they want; it’s not a preference. It’s like they are ordered to do it. This is the danger of this creed. It’s not a choice; it is almost like an order from Allah. That’s why these people are willing to commit suicide. The question is: do we have suicidal regimes? Do we have regimes that will actually go the distance for this mad apocalyptic vision, believing they will somehow inherit paradise while they sow hell for everybody else and for their people as well? The answer is that this is probably the first time that such a mad militancy on a global scale would seek to acquire weapons of mass death. There was, sixty years ago, another mad militancy, Hitlerism, that was racing to produce the bomb but happily was defeated before this happened. Imagine a world in which Hitler had atomic bombs. That’s pretty much the world you could have if the ayatollahs have atomic bombs.
MDE:
Having served as the prime minister of Israel and also the ambassador of Israel to the UN, this president of Iran spoke to the UN about the second coming of the Twelfth Mahdi, and he wrote an eighteen-page letter to the president of the United States, challenging him to convert to Islam. As a world leader, what in the world would cause a president of a country to write the president of the United States such a bizarre letter?
Mr. Netanyahu:
It is precisely this mad ideology that people underrate. They think that this is a normal country with a normal susceptibility to the calculation of cost and benefit—basically a country that operates on the world scene with a modicum of responsibility. That’s not the case. Iran is an outlaw state. It fans terrorism and militancy worldwide. It is now organizing the rocketing of civilians in Israel because Hezbollah without Iran collapses in two seconds. And it is preparing to be able to launch atomic warheads into an enormous radius. It’s not just targeting Israel. If they only wanted Israel, they would not build those long-range rockets that now can pretty much cover every European capital and soon will cover the U.S.
MDE:
Is it a coincidence that your soldiers were taken hostage, that Katyushas were fired at your nation during the same period of time that President Bush was going to the G8 to try to put pressure on Iran?
Mr. Netanyahu:
It has been said, not without reason, that Iran used this ploy of kidnapping and murdering our soldiers by two of its proxies, Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north of Israel, to deflect international attention from its nuclear program. I think this may work in the short-term, but I think it will backfire in the mid-term. I think right now people in America, not only the president of the U.S. and the American administration, but I think people in America and in other countries can start asking themselves, “Wait a minute; is this what is in store for us?”
If they are willing to do this to Israel, which they openly say is merely a surrogate for the U.S.—that’s the way they view it—then you know what they have in mind for America—and that’s what underlines everything we are talking about. This is undoubtedly in their view a skirmish in a larger war, and the larger war is not against Israel. It begins with Israel, but just as was the case with the Nazis, you begin with the Jews, then you proceed to everyone else.
MDE:
How important is Christian support for the State of Israel at this time?
Mr. Netanyahu:
I think it’s fundamentally important. But the fact is that we are very lucky that in the U.S. there is a great body of citizenry that understands that we have a common heritage. It is a heritage of freedom, of respecting individual rights, of respecting individual conscience, of allowing choice, of protecting freedom and democracy—and that comes from many quarters in the U.S., and most especially from many in the evangelical community and others across the political spectrum. The U.S. in this regard is different. It’s different from Europe because it has a core belief.
America, like Israel, was built as the
Promised Land, almost the new Promised Land. It is a carrier of so many universal values of freedom and justice that the Jewish people gave the world. I think that this is one of the great blessings of our time, that the world in the beginning of the twenty-first century is being led by the U.S. The first half of the twentieth century, the world was not led by the U.S., and the consequences were horrible indeed—World War II and the Holocaust. I think we are fortunate that the U.S. today is leading the world because it has its moral sights very, very clear.
MDE:
When you were prime minister, we had a president in office that did not respond to you with moral clarity. At this present moment, we have a president in office that is responding to the State of Israel with moral clarity. How important is that?
Mr. Netanyahu:
I think it’s all-important. I think in America everyone wanted to see, through a change in administration, peace for Israel and security for Israel. And that is not changing, but what is required is to identify the source of the threat. Leadership is charged with two great tasks: to identify the threat to a society or a country, or a civilization, and to see the opportunity to protect it and make it survive and thrive. And I think, right now, America has such leadership. I think the world right now has such leadership.
MDE:
How do you see the current Iranian nuclear situation?
Mr. Netanyahu:
Now, you have one regime, North Korea, that seeks to inspire a nuclear war. That’s what Iran could do: inspire three hundred million Shia to a religious war—first against other Arabs, then against the West. They don’t hate you because of us; they hate us because of you. They say we are the Small Satan; you are the Great Satan, America. It is important to understand that. They don’t hide the fact that they intend to take on the West. The only thing they are hiding is their nuclear program. They face growing pressure from their nuclear program. They are using a decoy strategy to deflect attention.
Many think that what they have done in Lebanon is merely a decoy strategy to deflect the growing pressure from their nuclear program. We have to have our eyes on the two objectives: one, to take care of Iran, especially Iran’s part in Lebanon; and two, deal with Iran’s nuclear missile program. Iran must not arm itself with weapons of mass destruction.
Appendix D
EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH
JAMES WOOLSEY
James Woolsey was director of the CIA from 1993–1995. During his career in Washington, he served as advisor (during his military service) on the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT 1), Helsinki and Vienna, 1969–1970; general counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 1970–1973; undersecretary of the Navy, 1977–1979; delegate-at-large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST), Geneva, 1983–1986; and ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), Vienna, 1989–1991.
He is currently a trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, advisor of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, founding member of the Set America Free Coalition, and vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton for Global Strategic Security.
MDE:
In 2000, you spoke before the Congress on terrorism. You gave an almost apocalyptic message concerning the growing design of the terrorists to kill the maximum number of people. Is this precisely what is on the agenda with Iran’s obsession?
Mr. Woolsey:
I think so. Around then we were reporting on our National Terrorism Commission Report. It may have been in that context. We had some twenty-five recommendations, some of which would have helped catch some of the 9/11 terrorists. They were completely ignored in the House of Representatives, completely ignored by the administration, and completely ignored in the Senate except for Senator Jon Kyl, who put in a bill to try to implement them and it went nowhere.
So that testimony was almost certainly in that context. And yes, I think 9/11—which came afterward—fits that model. And certainly some of the crazier things that Ahmadinejad has said would fit the model even more.
MDE:
Since 1979, an Islamic revolution has been going on, with America being in the crosshairs. And it appears that America has maintained silence. Fundamentally, at this present moment, we’re not seeing a whole lot of response to Iran. Is this in fact the case, or does the United States have a plan, a robust plan, to deal—to confront Iran in light of its threats?
Mr. Woolsey:
I haven’t seen any evidence of any robust plan. And although the Islamic revolution is over a quarter of a century old, we have only really seen it in recent years, since it was disclosed by one of the émigré opposition groups, that Iran has a substantial nuclear program. So it’s been over the course of the last four years, I think, that people in the United States have concentrated on and focused on Iran in a way that they really had not before.
Now certainly we have had serious attacks on the United States by Iran. Almost everybody who has looked at it says Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia was an Iranian-sponsored terrorist attack. And in 1983, our embassy and our marine barracks were blown up by Hezbollah, almost certainly at Iran’s guidance. So it’s not as if we have had no Americans die as a result of Iranian action.
But generally speaking, the administrations from Jimmy Carter through the first nine months of George W. Bush have treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem. They figured that if you could go catch some of the terrorists and put them in jail, then that would deter the others. Now, I think, there’s not much to that at all. Certainly some types of law enforcement actions are useful if you can use it to stop terrorist attacks.
But terrorists aren’t deterred by some of their number being arrested and imprisoned. These aren’t burglars or white-collar criminals. They’re fanatics. So I think that although there have probably been some steps undertaken in the last two or three or four years to take Iranian and Iranian-backed terrorism far more seriously than was the case before the nuclear program of Iran’s was discovered, it’s still probably not a very robust one.
MDE:
When Iran makes the threats that they’ve made such as “a world without Zionism or the West,” or threatening to exterminate the State of Israel—all these constant, irrational threats—are these threats just rhetoric or should they be taken serious?
Mr. Woolsey:
They should be taken seriously. The people who have the mentality that they’re just rhetoric are the same types of people who, sixty to seventy years ago, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, said that Hitler’s Mein Kampf was just rhetoric. Hitler laid out his program very clearly to establish a one-thousand-year Reich, and exterminate the Jews, and on and on in Mein Kampf.
With these crazy, highly ideological, totalitarian movements, whether they’re religiously rooted like Ahmadinejad and those around him in Iran or secular like Communism or Nazism, one’s best guide often to what they will really do if they get power is their statements that they issue in line with their ideology in order to rally their troops and to get them enthusiastic. It would be very foolish and really quite naïve, I think, for people to say that Ahmadinejad is just blowing smoke about wanting to destroy Israel, for example. I think he would certainly do it if he could.
MDE:
Ahmadinejad gave a speech at the United Nations in which he talked about a messianic figure coming on the scene—his belief that he was on some divine religious mission. How strongly do his religious beliefs play into his apocalyptic desires?
Mr. Woolsey:
I think his religious beliefs are at the heart of his fanaticism. He is a religious fanatic. He is not a Communist or a Nazi who also happens to be a religious man. He’s a religious fanatic in a Shiite Muslim world in somewhat the same way as, say, Torquemada, who was running the Spanish Inquisition in the Christian world five centuries or so ago.
I think that Ahmadinejad believes that the Twelfth Imam, the Hidden Imam, the Mah
di, went into occlusion, as he would put it—disappeared in the eighth century—and is waiting to come back. And he believes that, I think, along with a lot of others. Not all Shia, but many Shia, who hold that belief are people for whom it does not produce a crazed view. They believe it very much the way Jews believe the Messiah will come or Christians believe Christ will return. It’s not something that drives them to crazy behavior in daily undertakings.
But in Ahmadinejad’s case, he goes off every week or two to sort of commune with the Hidden Imam and get his instructions, from his point of view. His mentor is an ayatollah named Mesbah Yazdi, who runs a school in Qom, in the holy city in Iran. The reason Mesbah Yazdi was exiled there in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini was because Khomeini thought he was too radical. So Ahmadinejad’s mentor was too radical for Khomeini.
The beliefs that surround their worldview have to do with working hard to get a lot of people killed as quickly as possible. So the prize of pain will summon the Mahdi. And then they also believe once the Mahdi comes, the world will only exist for a brief period of time. So Ahmadinejad is effectively on a campaign to see if he can’t get the world to end. That’s why I somewhat tongue in cheek say that Al Qaeda and the Wahabists of Saudi Arabia are the moderates of the Islamists in the Middle East because they just want a worldwide caliphate in which we all are demi and subordinate citizens, and our wives and daughters have to dress in burqas, and so forth. But they at least want—are willing to have—people live, whereas Ahmadinejad is, I think, on the other side of that divide.
