by mike Evans
MDE:
Why is the United Nations running to their rescue?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, you know, that’s a very sad story. There’s no doubt but that the United Nations has become a platform for them because the United Nations works—the General Assembly works—on the basis of one vote for one country. And there are literally dozens and dozens of countries like this, who either are part of the Muslim world or, alternatively, the world of Islam or, alternatively, do not want to incur their wrath. And so they, in a sense, tend to support this kind of view, or at least tolerate it if they don’t support it.
And it’s a huge issue. The UN has become a dysfunctional organization in terms of its abilities to service the kinds of values it was originally founded to represent. Secondly, the UN was an organization that was based on states, and what we are dealing with are not just states but networks of individuals who do not wear military uniforms, who, in a sense, are caught up in this credo of violence and extremism and who have at their beck and call weapons that have a destructive power once reserved for the States.
So we now face a lethal threat from these people, and, as you say, it’s not only the actual destruction that they can do, but it’s the way they can affect our whole way of life. Just think: 9/11 was the first time that the United States was attacked on its homeland since 1812. And how were we attacked? We were attacked by a group of people who lived in some mountain ranges in Afghanistan, thousands upon thousands of miles away, and they were able to literally change life in America.
We’re up against people who are willing to die, and therefore it’s very difficult to deter them rationally—people who are willing to die in the process of killing as many civilians as possible. And the reason they want to maximize the number of deaths is to have the greatest possible impact on the countries where they are carrying out these terrorist acts.
And so we are faced with an unprecedented threat and are working to figure out how to cope with it, and nobody has all the answers. But one thing we have to be appreciative of is that this threat is for real, and we are going to have to deal with it, and we can’t ignore it, and it’s not a question of one government or another government in power in this country. We are simply going to have to deal with it.
MDE:
How important is Israel in winning the war on terror?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, there is no doubt that Israel is the canary in the coal mine. This is where you have Israel as an island surrounded by a sea of Islam, some of which are of the most extreme nature. These extremist groups—I mean it’s Hamas, it’s Islamic Jihad, it’s Hezbollah—these are the main groups that are, in a sense, using terrorist attacks and using Israel as a practice ground, as a training ground in which to stage them.
Now, I’ll give you an example of something that I was directly involved in to indicate how intolerant they are. In the basilica in Nazareth, which is one of the great sites of Christianity, the mayor of Nazareth who was elected there was a much more extreme individual. This was six or seven years ago approximately.
He decided to build a mosque literally in the parking lot outside the basilica. The mosque would have been higher than the basilica, and they would have had these prayers five times a day, and, in effect, it would have, as a practical matter, intimidated and made impossible the visits of a lot of Christians who wished to go visit one of their great holy sites.
And it took an enormous effort working with the Israeli government, which I did, and working with the churches here. The Israeli government finally stopped it, but this was an attempt—a deliberate attempt, in a sense—to intimidate the Christian population as they did in Bethlehem. So they are not just against the Jewish world but against even the symbols of the Christian world that are seen as a threat to the return of the world of Islam. They believe that Muhammad, after all, was the successor to both Moses and Jesus, and therefore, why doesn’t the rest of the world follow Muhammad?
And so we are having a struggle, which is not just about the ascendancy of Muslims but against the ascendancy of Islam as a religious imperative—and that is something that we are just going to have. There’s no way of compromising with their gods.
MDE:
How is the media being exploited by the terrorists for recruitment, for fund-raising, for glorification of martyrs, for political concessions. How do they use the media?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, the principal media that they use is the Internet. There are thousands of Internet sites that are devoted to this attempt to proselytize and to attract young people and others into this world of religious extremism and violence, and they provide all kinds of training—not just religious instruction, but instruction in terrorism—on these various sites.
So, in effect, you have a new technology that has made it possible to spread this message and to spread the way to make this message operational, in terrorist terms, all around the world. And the people in England, for example, picked that up, or the people in France or the people in Spain. It is true some of them went back to Pakistan, where there were training camps, but not all of them did, and a lot of them get this through that form of media, and, of course, to the extent that they can, they also get it through the more conventional media, which is television, primarily, where they try and organize pictures of events.
The response to the cartoons in Denmark is an example of where they used the media as a vehicle and a platform to arouse a whole sector of the Muslim population. This wasn’t such a big issue until they literally showed these cartoons—some of which were never published—and they showed them all over the Muslim world, as if this represented something which was an attack on their religion.
And, of course, they’re using, in a sense, the alienation that they feel from the Western world—from Western values and from Western religions—as a way of provoking a people, who literally for three hundred or four hundred years have felt humiliated by the fact that they were at the apex of civilization in the sixteenth century and are now fallen so dramatically behind. Not only the Western world, but the world of the Far East, where countries like Taiwan and South Korea and even China have really done so well and developed themselves.
And it is the Muslim world that has had the greatest difficulty in making this adjustment.
MDE:
How serious is Iran’s nuclear program, and what does the United States need to do about it?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, there is no question that this is going to be an extraordinary danger to the Western world if Iran is able to develop nuclear weapons out of their own capabilities—that is, with their own technologies—as they are now able to develop the rocketry to deliver it.
And since you have a people there who believe that there has to be this great violent moment between the faithful and the unfaithful—between the believers and the infidels, that they literally believe—and Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, actually says this—that he is waiting for the return of the man whom they call the Twelfth Imam, the Twelfth. This is their messiah. But the return of this messiah can only happen after this cataclysmic struggle between the infidels and the believers.
And he wants to provoke it. He believes it’ll happen within a matter of years, and when I say a matter of years, I’m not talking ten years—less than ten years. In fact, he refurbished the well into which they believe the Twelfth Imam disappeared, in the hopes that he will rise again.
And this is what you have to cope with. This is a level of fanaticism that is willing to endure the murder and the assassination and the killing of all kinds of innocent people in order to find some way to bring back what they believe will be the symbol of their reascendancy in the world.
So it is deadly dangerous, and you will never know if they are willing, as they have been in the past, to use proxies—to use your phrase—to use the Hezbollah, or the Islamic Jihad, which are literally subsidiaries of Iran—to drop some kind of weapon of mass destruction.
As I say it won’t even take that, but if they had that, if they had the so-called suitcase bombs that they could bring into a country, where their fingerprints wouldn’t be as easily detected as they would if it were a missile.
That danger is overwhelming, and it is a threat. You know, there is an old principle in business: never take a risk with something that you can’t afford to lose. This, unfortunately, is something we can’t afford to lose, so we don’t know how high the risk is. But whatever the risk is, we can’t afford to lose it, so we have to find a way to deal with it.
MDE:
God forbid, if Iran goes nuclear, what is the world going to look like a decade from now?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, I’m going to remain an optimist. I cannot help but be an optimist. I have had a wonderful life in this country—and somebody once said the difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that an optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds and a pessimist fears he may be right.
But I do believe that we will find a way to cope with it, that there are enough countries in the world who understand how serious this threat is and that nobody escapes it. I mean, if there were an atomic weapon or a weapon of mass destruction, some kind of chemical or some kind of biological agent that was dropped anywhere—whether it was in a city in Europe, whether it was a city in the United States, whether it was in Israel, whether it was in Russia—it will affect everybody around the world. So I have to believe that, at some point, the parochial interest of individual countries and individual leaders will somehow or another be transcended by this understanding of this common threat, and we will find a way to cope with it.
MDE:
The president of Iran keeps talking about oil—the price of oil—and about the polls. There was something interesting that happened in the fall of the Reagan and Carter election at the polls. The [oil prices] kept dropping and dropping and dropping; then all of a sudden, the very day Ronald Reagan was elected, the hostages were released.
Mr. Zuckerman:
That was the first victory of Ronald Reagan because everybody knew that if he came into office, he would be much, much more tough-minded in dealing with the Iranians than Jimmy Carter.
MDE:
Do the Iranians look at the American polls, and are they tactical enough to try to affect American polls?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Without question. If you think about the fact that just before the last election, Osama bin Laden delivered another video four days before—on the Friday before—the Tuesday election. And that video really, once again, took over the whole political dialogue. That was not by accident. They didn’t do it by accident, and I can tell you that our intelligence services believe it was done deliberately to affect our election.
And so they understand what the polls are, and they follow them carefully. We’re a very open society. It’s not hard to figure out where they are. I’m sure they even do their own polling. So I think this is something they are quite well informed of.
I believe, by the way, that there are a lot of people in Iran who are opposed to this regime. There’s a huge unemployment rate. A lot of the younger people there are fairly well educated. It’s a great culture, the Persian culture, and they have superimposed upon this a religious extreme, which a lot of people are uncomfortable with and hostile to.
Nevertheless, because they are not a democracy in the real sense of that word, we have a disadvantage in the short run because they can find out much more easily what’s happening in our society. But in the long run, our freedoms basically provide the very strength that I hope will see us through to the other side.
MDE:
Israelis—many of the generals that I met with a few weeks ago—they talked to me about improvised explosive devices. They were using numbers like 85 percent of all of them in Iraq are coming from Iran. And they also talked about the number of terrorists that are killing the troops. They said the majority of the troops are being killed by Iranian terrorists. If, in fact, that’s so, why are we not hearing about that in the media in America?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, I don’t know what the answer to that is because it is difficult to get proof of that. What you have ongoing now, you had somebody like Zarqawi, who was perhaps the leading figure in that world of terrorism and violence—and he was a Sunni, not a Shiite—but the Iranians, in part, were responsible when he blew up the Golden Mosque of Samara. That really has triggered off a sectarian war there, and I think there is no question but that the Iranians have been feeding weapons, money, and all sorts of other things to the Shiites because they want to at least have some base of extension of their own security and their own control in Iraq.
Iraq, after all, was the great countervailing balance to Iran for many, many years. So there is no question but they are involved, but it is very difficult to get any real proof of that, and to the extent that we, the United States, have proof of that, we don’t want to release how we got that because sources and methods will then expose the very sources of intelligence that we need.
MDE:
In the letter the president of Iran brought to President Bush—most of it was a preaching letter—it seemed he was trying to convert him. Does he really have a goal or an intention of trying somehow to convert Christians to his beliefs?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, it’s hard for me to understand the way that man thinks, but there was an interview with him on 60 Minutes. I mean, I’m always amazed that we provide a platform for these people to preach their message; in a way that is kind of dismaying, but that’s the nature of our system.
And, basically, what he was clearly trying to do there—and considering where he was coming from and what his views are, he did, I thought, quite well—he was basically trying to say, “Oh, we’re not such bad guys. We just want the same things as you do, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But, in fact, they do wish to eject us from huge parts of the world, and they will use whatever weapons they have at their fingertips to do that.
And, as I have said, they have almost an unlimited supply of people who are willing to die as what they call martyrs in the service of whatever that vision is. They believe they will have a permanent life in heaven—in their version of heaven—and so will their families, if they do that, and they’re willing to do that—and, as I have said, it is not absolutely clear how we are going to cope with that. We certainly are going to have to do a lot more than we are doing today.
MDE:
How influential are the forces of bigotry and oil economics in this battle?
Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, you know, this is the thing that I have to say is one of the most upsetting issues that I think this country has to face. With oil prices going up the way they have, we are funding the very people who are our enemies. We are funding Iran. We are funding the Saudis. We are funding even the Russians, who are sort of very, very strange friends.
All of these countries who possess this oil are using it in one form or another—I mean, certainly Iran—in effect, to support exactly the kinds of activities. They’re funding all these terrorist groups, they give money to Hezbollah, they give weapons to Hezbollah, they buy weapons, training, whatever it takes—and where did it come from?
I can assure you that Russia would have been much more amenable supporting us when oil was at twenty dollars a barrel, and they had a huge international debt, than it is at seventy-five dollars a barrel, when they have one hundred billion in the bank. The same thing is true of Iran. Iran had a huge international debt. Saudi Arabia had a huge international debt. Now, they have—Iran has—who knows? Forty-five to fifty billion in the bank? Saudi Arabia has a couple of hundred billion dollars in the bank.
And, at this point, they think the world is their oyster and they don’t have to really accommodate the kinds of things that we need them to accommodate in terms of having a civil world in which people live and let live.
MDE:
This is the la
st question. With the Iran crisis, we appear to be heading for a showdown. If, God forbid, this country does not comply with economic and diplomatic concessions, do you think that the United States—exhausting all other remedies—would have to use the military option?
Mr. Zuckerman:
The military option could never be taken off the table because if it is taken off the table, we’re going to have to go in stages. The UN resolution, which has been passed by the Security Council, calls for economic sanctions, and that may be the first step to show them that we mean what we say.
But, ultimately, at some point, if they continue to threaten the civilized world and the Western world and they do not wish to take into account how critical it is that they not have this capacity for nuclear weapons, that is going to become a major decision that’s going to be on the table of some—on the desk of some president of the United States, either this one or the next one.
In my judgment, it’ll be this one because within the next two and a half years, there’s no doubt, they will deliver the capacity internally to develop nuclear weapons, as did, in fact, a country like North Korea, which doesn’t have nearly the population, the intellectual sophistication, or the education of a lot of people that you have in Iran.
It’s not impossible to do. We’ve seen North Korea do it. North Korea is a country that is much more easily containable. They are selling their nuclear technologies and their missile technology. They sold a lot of their missile technologies to Iran, and Iran then used that to develop their own domestic missile technologies. Now they’re using whatever they have been able to buy from A.Q. Khan of Pakistan—who is selling this all over the world—or North Korea. They’re using that to develop their own domestic nuclear capabilities. This is a disaster.
