by mike Evans
MDE:
If Iran went nuclear as a Shia state, would it precipitate a nuclear arms race among the Sunni states with Russia?
Capt. Nash:
I don’t know if the Russians would be the supplier, but if Iranians were to have nuclear weapons capability, the Saudis would want it. Everybody along that Sunni belt—especially those right around Iran and within missile range of Iran—would want nuclear weapons. When you think of the instability of that region, then arm people with nuclear weapons, then throw in one of the most troubling aspects of the current Iranian regime—which is this Shia Twelvers or apocalyptic vision of the return in the Twelfth Imam—it’s more than scary. It’s something that has to be dealt with before they get those nuclear weapons.
MDE:
How much time do we have?
Capt. Nash:
That depends on who you talk to. If you talk to our Central Intelligence Agency, I think they are on record as saying about ten years. If you talk to the Russians, there are reports in the press where the Russians say they are eight months to a year [away]—and the Russians should know because they’ve been supplying and working with the Iranians. The CIA has missed a couple of rather large things in our recent past, so I don’t know how good CIA intelligence is. I don’t know how good our “on-the-ground” intelligence in Iran is, even though we’ve been at war with Iran since 1979. I don’t know the status of our intelligence networks, but I’m afraid that it’s probably not as good as we would like.
The threat from a nuclear Iran is that their nuclear weapons [would be] insulated from conventional attack if they can reach interests of the United States with nuclear weapons. In other words, with nuclear weapons they can shield their current way of doing business. They could step up direct support for terrorism around the world—be much more blatant about it than they are now—knowing that if they were ever struck, they would launch nukes [against U.S. allies].
So now, all the options are off the table except doing a massive preemptive strike on Iran to try to avoid that. That’s the problem with this. Once they get nukes, the whole calculus changes—not just in the region—but they’re also working on their rocket programs, their missile programs, and they’re working on those harder almost than they are on their nuclear program, because they know once they get the range of those missiles [where they want it], then they can reach out and touch anybody once they put nuclear warheads on those missiles. [Then] they’re not going to be worried about people coming after them to stop them from flipping the world upside down with terrorism.
MDE:
Does this threaten Israel—our greatest allies in the fight against terrorism—or what we’re doing in the war against terrorism?
Capt. Nash:
I think Israel is definitely an ally in fighting terrorism. I don’t know whether the UK or Israel would rank as our top—personally I think it’s the UK because of the steps that the United Kingdom has taken in the war on terrorism and the support against the odds of world opinion. The rest of the world has pretty much cowered from this threat. They’re afraid of it. They have large, indigenous populations of immigrant Muslim communities. They have not acclimated them well—and because of that you wind up with these conclaves of an immigrant population that is not being assimilated. That’s a difference we’ve seen here in the United States. People who come to the United States are assimilated into the culture and they get along and we have tolerance.
In a lot of European countries are very homogenous societies—you know, France, Belgium, Germany. They’re trying to keep peace at home. They’re playing to domestic politics as well as international politics.
The Israelis are unallied because they’re personally threatened. They’re surrounded, and you’ve got the head of the Iranian government publicly stating on multiple occasions that we need to wipe Israel off the map. So they’re in the war on terrorism and have been in the war on terrorism because they’ve been at ground zero up until this point. Well that ground zero changed on 9/11, and it actually changed back in the 1980s when our embassies [in Africa] were being bombed, and when our embassy in Beirut was taken down. When we had U.S. people captured, held prisoner, and then executed by Iranian-backed terrorists organizations in Beirut. This has been going on for a long time. So, yes, we’re at war. The UK is our best ally, and the Israelis are in it [as well].
MDE:
Talk to me about Iran’s involvement in Iraq. Are they killing American soldiers?
Capt. Nash:
As U.S. forces swept north from Kuwait up the Mesopotamia and into Baghdad, Iranian intelligence was flooding operatives into southeastern Iraq. So right behind as our forces went up, their forces were coming in. They set themselves up like nongovernmental organizations providing food, medical supplies, blankets, [and medical] care when actually they were Iranian intelligence organizations. They fell right in on a lot of the Shia mosques. They had supporters in there undercover for some time, and they started taking over a lot of the communities in southern Iraq. What followed—and we have definite proof of this, because we have captured people in Iraq that have had Iranian training—the Iraqis have captured Iranian fighters, and we’ve captured a lot of Iranian weapons.
When I was in Baghdad, I actually held one of those explosive devices—IEDs—in my hand. At the time it was the latest threat—a brand-new generation. It actually forms a projectile when it blows up that pierces armor plate. You have to manufacture these things. It’s not rocket science, but somebody has to know how to do it to make them effective.
Iranians have been doing that. We know they’ve been doing that. The Iraqi defense minister has called Iran “the number one threat to Iraq,” because he can look down and see that is what’s happening.
On one side you had the Iraqi Shia, who are Arab, across a political border from the Iranian Shia, who are Persian. The difference—even though they are in a similar religion and ethnicity—was a barrier. It is not just the political border.
But [at the same time] there was family that was going back and forth. In fact, there were a lot of the Arab Shia who fled Iraq and went to Iran because they were being persecuted by Saddam Hussein—so these communities have some tie-ins.
On either side of the border you had disaffected Diaspora willing to go back and fight the government from which they came. You had Iranians in the MEK [People’s Mujahedin of Iran] willing to do that in Iran, and you had Iraqis in Iran willing to go back and fight in Iraq.
If Iran can get control of the southern oil fields in Iraq, this is more than just uniting the Shia. This is more than an Adolf Hitler view of reuniting the German people. Now that we’ve been in Iraq and we’ve done the mineral exploration, our forces are convinced that Iraq—not Saudi Arabia—has the largest oil resource on the planet. The vast majority of those oil reserves are in the Ramallah field, which is in the southeast part of Iraq. In other words, it’s right under the Shia territory. So the Iranians are looking at uniting Shia and becoming the world’s largest holder of oil. Then add being on the border of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia—that’s a powerful inducement for them.
MDE:
Syria obviously has an agreement now with Iran. They are saying that there’s even talk about the possibility of a future Syria having the Sunni area of Iraq.
Capt. Nash:
One of the biggest problems that we face right now is keeping Iraq together. There are three main divisions. The vast majority of the population—about 60 percent—is Shia, and they’re in the south. They’re sitting on all that oil—and they’re sitting on some of the most beautiful agricultural land in the world.
You have the Kurds up in the north, a smaller percentage of the population, we’ll say 5 to 10 percent—then you have to throw in a lot of other races, but a very small portion—they’re all up in the north. Plenty of rainfall, good land, and that’s where the rest of the oil is. So you have about 10 to 15 percent of Iraq’s known reserves up in the north. The key city there is the refining
and drilling city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk is just outside the area that belongs to the Kurds, but the Kurds claim that city. The rest of the neighbors, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, loathe seeing the Kurds get control of Kirkuk, because if they do, they will then have the economic engine that could sustain and empower a free Kurdistan.
And if you look at the Kurdish minorities in Syria, Turkey, and Iran, they’re afraid that they would then, as they have in the past, claim a greater Kurdistan. The neighbors in that northern reach would not want to see an independent Kurdistan. The Shia in the south are not necessarily overjoyed with the fact that they too could fall under this religious monocracy in Tehran. They’re scared to death of that—they really are.
The Sunnis [are] the other 30 percent of the population. They don’t have oil, and they’re not sitting on great agricultural land. What have they got? Look at the courses of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. They flow through Sunni territory. They’ve got all the water. And it flows down into the southern part.
So when you look at this—and our people have—we’ve sent university agricultural experts over to Iraq to look at the soil samples, and they’re convinced that Iraq doesn’t need to pump a drop of oil to be a rich nation because they’ve got more water than anywhere else in the region. They could be the breadbasket [of the entire region]. So when the neighbors look at Iraq, they not only see chaos, they also see opportunity. The Iranians see the oil, the neighbors see keeping the Kurds down, and the Syrians see access to all that water in [and around] Baghdad. That’s why, to keep the neighbors from preying upon the carcass of Iraq, the Iraqis have to realize that their future lies in a sustainable political body called Iraq—as a unified country with defensible borders.
MDE:
Are we safer in America because of the war in Iraq?
Capt. Nash:
We are safer in America than we were before, but I think 9/11 should have disabused everyone of this notion of “Fortress America.” The bad guys came once. There are probably sleeper cells here in this country, right now, and they’re going to keep coming.
You see, that’s just it. That’s the thing we have to get in our heads. They are at war with us. They don’t want to negotiate. They’re trying to kill us. Pretty soon we’re going to wake up to that fact—and we’re going to realize that trying to get into the Middle East and set up shop, if you will, with a democracy—or at least a participatory government—to try to change that mind-set [and] change those basic conditions [is] an idea very far ahead of it’s time.
MDE:
Is this World War III?
Capt. Nash:
I think it is World War III, and it’s not World War III—not in the traditional sense that we think of with World War I and World War II, where you had uniformed armies fighting each other. We’re going to see more and more of these state-sponsored but stateless terrorists group. If you look at Hezbollah—it’s not just in Al Qaeda—when you look at Hezbollah, you see a terrorist group that has metastasized and actually taken on attributes of a fully trained army. Very properly provisioned, very well trained, and they also have a political arm that gives them the support of their local population who give them shelter. So they train, and they’re supported by Iran, but they operate in an area that’s their own, and they’re part of the host government—they hold seats in the Lebanese parliament.
Lebanon is very much like the other places where these terrorist groups spring up. They’re places where there’s a weak body politic—where these kinds of organizations can grow and intimidate the local government. In the case of Hezbollah, they were offering support. They were taking Iranian money and building houses and putting the population back to work in southern Lebanon, building schools, hospitals, and clinics. They were using Iranian money to do that to gain the allegiance of the people in the south.
This is very well thought out. The reason the Iranians wanted Hezbollah right on Israel’s northern border is because at the time Iran did not have weapons that could reach Israel. They knew that as soon as they started a nuclear weapons program and that got out, that Israel would not be able to tolerate that, so to protect themselves preemptively from an Israeli strike—knowing they couldn’t reach back—they put weapons and forces right on Israel’s northern border so they could operate them whenever they wanted to. They could use them to poke them in the ribs, or they could use them for a strategic retaliation or strike if they wanted to, anytime they wanted to.
MDE:
Knowing the risk that Israel took fighting this war, could it be that Israel had a phased plan for a preemptive strike on Iran attempting to break one of its proxies?
Capt. Nash:
That’s a good point. I think Israel reacted to the events of July 12 because they had to. And let’s go back to that July 12 period and look at what was going on. The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] was about to make the final determination of what they were going to do—whether they were going to refer Iran to the UN Security Council [or some other action in response to continued refinement of uranium]. The chief negotiator from Iran flew to meet with [an IAEA representative]. [The representative] told him that Iran was going to be sent to the
National Security Council for disposition. At that point,
Iran’s chief negotiator got back in the airplane and did not fly to Tehran—he flew to Damascus. That was the evening of [July] 11. He held meetings with Syrian military and political officials and Hezbollah officials. [The next morning the two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and Hezbollah launched the rocket attacks on northern Israel.]
Appendix G
EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH
RETIRED ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES
LIEUTENANT GENERAL MOSHE YA’ALON
Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon served as the chief of staff for the Israeli Defense Forces from 2002 until 2005. He is currently a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center Institute for International and Middle East Studies.
MDE:
General, can you tell us on how Iran intends to defeat the West?
Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:
Western like-minded people should understand the Iranian ideology to impose new caliphate over all the world. They call it Nation of Islam. They perceive the West is a threat to their ideology, to their culture, and they believe that they’ll be able to defeat the West from the cultural point of view and to impose this new government by use of terrorism. Today the Iranian regime is determined to acquire military nuclear capability—first of all to use it as an umbrella for their terror activities. They prefer to use proxies to deal with the West and with Israel—to undermine our moderate regime, and then to dominate the Middle East. Of course to dominate the oil by undermining those regimes who are linked to the West and later on to try to export what they call the Iranian revolution—the Iranian ideology to Europe and to other Western countries using proxies with terrorism—exporting the ideology by force.
MDE:
What is the foundational theology that drives this?
Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:
It is interesting what we are facing today—we are facing different Islamic ideologies. In the Iranian case it is a Shiite ideology, but today the Al Qaeda ideology, which is very different but shares the same agenda and the same strategy. This is the case of the Muslim Brotherhood coming from this different ideology, calling to impose the Nation of Islam all over the world. The Iranian ideology actually is to dominate the Islamic world and to dominate the world by imposing Islam. The ideology is [ultimately] to reach peace and tranquility all over the world.
All the people all over the world should be Muslims—this is the idea. They use this idea of what they call the Mahdi—like their messiah—in order to encourage [people] to be proactive—to [perform] terror activities. By acquiring nuclear military capabilities [they hope] to convince by force those infidels who do not believe in Islam to become Muslims in order to reach peace and tranquility all over the world.
MDE:
Do they believe
that an apocalypse would usher him in?
Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:
I’m not sure the idea is apocalypse—they are trying to convince people to convert themselves; like [when] President Ahmadinejad in his eighteen-page letter to President Bush actually recommended he be converted to Islam—not by force, but he tried try to convince him. He really believes in it. For westerners it might seem ridiculous, but he says what he means and he means what he says. In the letter—in calling to wipe Israel off the map and so forth—he means what he says. He really believes in it, so they prefer to convince the westerners.
This is the idea of Hamas. Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have it in a speech in Damascus. Last February, after they won the elections, he was talking about the Nation of Islam, and he recommended the westerners to be converted or not to support Israel, otherwise they will be full of remorse. They speak the same language although they do not share the same ideology—but the most tenuous force today regarding this kind of ideology is no doubt Iran.
