RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Bowden! - 5 - Iran, Israel, and The Bomb

Jan. 11, 2018 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:01:26

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

Richard and Jonathan discuss the prospect of Iran attaining a nuclear weapon and the new geopolitical reality that would unfold as a result. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
	Music.
	Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
	Hello, everyone.
	Today it's a great pleasure to welcome back to the program Jonathan Bowden.
	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.
	You can also visit his website at JonathanBowden.co.uk.
	www.savsco.uk Jonathan, welcome back to the program.
	Yes, nice to be here.
	Well, Jonathan, today we're going to change things up a bit.
	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 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.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	And this issue seems to rear its head every, say, year or two.
	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, we need to do something now, Israel's going to do it, America's going to do it, so on and so forth.
	So this is an issue that won't go away.
	But I do have a feeling that we are going to see a climax.
	So let me throw out this question, Jonathan, just to get the whole conversation started, and that is...
	Maybe we shouldn't ask, will the United States go to war with Iran?
	Maybe we should ask, are we already at war with Iran?
	You know, these past few months, there's obviously been cyber attacks.
	There have been assassinations of scientists.
	There are talks of major sanctions.
	So is this really a long-term war that's now just heating up?
	That's the correct way of looking at it.
	I mean, states have a medley of relationships with each other, and there are all sorts of sort of distraught situations that states can get into with each other that stop short of armed conflict.
	Most states spy on each other.
	Even Western societies like France and America have set each other's spies on each other on occasions.
	So all societies are spying on other national state societies, depending how proficient they are at that particular game.
	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 seemed to be related to the Iranian nuclear program.
	Again, you don't know when you're on the outside of these things what is here saying what is not.
	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.
	The reasons this was done, apparently, Was because the sites were too many.
	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.
	And there's been a proliferation in these alleged facilities since then, apparently.
	So I think to pass it 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.
	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.
	You don't know whether it's the second string ones that they can get access to in order to assassinate.
	But there's quite clearly a sort of Mossad death squad of a sort in Tehran that is carrying out these assassinations.
	They're not that often, but they're often enough to make news.
	There's little attempt to deny that Israel is doing it.
	Now, this will be regarded as terrorism by most societies or state-assisted terrorism.
	But of course, it's not seen in that way by the West.
	I mean, I think Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
	Every society that's ever gone for nuclear power has a nuclear weapons threshold and option in the background.
	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.
	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.
	So nobody wants other societies to have nuclear payload.
	Even Western societies are leery about other Western societies having them.
	It's noticeable that two vanquished nations in the Second World War, two principal vanquished nations anyway, Germany and Japan, neither of them have gone the nuclear route, even though they could quite easily develop nuclear weapons tomorrow if either of them wanted to.
	I think there is a tacit low level war, a sort of insurgent war going on.
	It's also a black propaganda war as well, whereby pressure is mounted on the Iranian currency, the real, and on the Iranian oil exports.
	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.
	And what they're trying to do is give Iran an option whereby 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.
	In other words, all of these pains that are being inflicted on them at the moment would be taken off.
	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.
	And one imagines that if they'd made a conscious decision not to do so, that this would be flagged up.
	And that these pressures would cease or fall into abounds.
	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, that it might have the exact opposite effect, that they would go forward even more swiftly.
	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...
	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...
	in such a volatile area.
	And so I have a couple of questions to ask you from what you just talked about, but let me talk, let's go with this first one of, what do you think a war would be like in this case?
	And I'll mention just a few things.
	I think whenever...
	The publics of the Western world hear about, you know, we're going to war.
	Probably images of World War II into their head and, you know, maybe even trenches from the earlier conflict or bombing of cities, this big kind of stuff.
	But, you know, one would think that Washington really wouldn't want to get in a conflict like that.
	In some ways, my view is that they probably want this kind of undeclared, unending war to go on, that they want to kind of have their war and eat it too.
	They want to bomb a nuclear site but then not have that escalate into a global conflict.
	What do you think this kind of war between Washington and Israel, perhaps, and Iran would look like?
	Yes, I think there are inhibitions on the western side, which is why you haven't seen strikes up until this time.
	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.
	The Syrians always denied that they had that site, and it was in their interest to say that.
	Similar with Saddam Hussein.
	This incident's been largely forgotten now.
	The Iranian nuclear capability is much more complicated and is sort of spread over all sorts of sites within the country.
	It's widely believed in Britain and Western Europe that Bush turned down a military option against Iran for all sorts of reasons, but partly because the nuclear payload and the nuclear...
	The tonnage that Iran possesses is so diffuse, 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.
	North Korea has the bomb, but it's an incredibly crude device, cruder even than Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, and they don't really have a means of delivering it.
	But it has changed the diplomatic ballgame in relation to North Korea by virtue of the fact that they possess this weapon.
	I think it's the deficit with the contemporary West is that Iran is an unknown factor.
	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.
	This is the second Iraq war of the two that occurred in the middle of the second Bush presidency.
	And Iran can take it back in various ways, some of which are relatively subtle.
	One of the ways it can hit back, of course, is through oil exports.
	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.
	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.
	Then there's the prospect of missile strikes on Israel proper.
	Iran has 150,000 missiles, apparently, of one sort or another, many of them quite low-level devices, 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.
	It also has an army on Israel's border, of course, and this is the Hezbollah militia in South Lebanon, which is their proxy force, which can force Israelis to live in There's a danger
	that Iran might lash out at Saudi Arabia.
	This is one of the paradoxes, of course.
	Iran's not an Arab country.
	It's an Indo-Aryan country.
	It speaks Farsi.
	It has quite an ancient civilization.
	Persian civilization sees itself as the natural master of the Gulf, which intensely irritates the Arab societies around it.
	America supported Iraq in the war against Iran.
	And one thing to remember about Iran is Iran's defensive posture always seems to be retrospective.
	It always seems to be retroactive.
	Their military posture is defensive.
	When Saddam attacked them, they fell back and fell back and drew his army in and in the end broke it and pushed it back out of Iran and invaded Iraq.
	But modern Irans rarely attacked anyone else.
	But all of their military thinking is how to respond to an attack upon themselves.
	There's a danger that they could attack Western shipping in the Gulf with their missiles.
	How good their anti-ballistic strategy is, no one really knows.
	They bought a lot of hardware from the Russians to take down incoming advanced jets that are attempting to attack their sights.
	But how proficient they would be, how skilled the Revolutionary Guard and the elite of the Guard, the elite that guards all these installations would be.
	How close they would be to a Western army in their fighting abilities, no one quite knows.
	There are straws in the window, which is probably why there hasn't been an attack.
	When Israel invaded Lebanon last time, Hezbollah fought with considerable savagery and considerable acuity and surprised a lot of Western analysts because they knocked out over 100 Israeli tanks on the border.
	using Russian weaponry, which they'd been trained to fight with by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
	And they lived in these tunnels underground built by North Korea, all these enemy regimes collaborate with each other, of course, on the principle that my enemy is my friend.
	Right.
	And Hezbollah guerrillas, or terrorists, as they be called in Israeli and most North American media.
	Europe's a bit different.
	They hid underground and then came up with these quite sophisticated anti-tank devices.
	And one of the reasons the Israeli army didn't penetrate further into Lebanon and they relied on the Air Force to do most of their attacking was because their tanks were destroyed on the border.
	And to do that, you have to have special weapons to cut through the armour of Western tanks, which is very sophisticated today.
	And they had it.
	And they had it because, of course, Iran can't buy anything from the United States beyond staplers and pencil sharpeners, but it gets all of its gear from China and Russia.
	The problem for the West, of course, is that Russian armaments are very sophisticated, but they've got a track of their own.
	Russia's always had a separate technological track, separate from the rest of the West.
	Indeed, it's its own civilization economically.
	That's why they're able to put satellites into space and so on.
	And their satellites look nothing like Western satellites.
	But they work in everything.
	And the technology in its way is very advanced.
	But it's different and distinct.
	And Iran's got quite a lot of it.
	Yeltsin sold them a lot.
	Putin's been less keen on selling them stuff, it appears, because he is worried that they are after a nuclear device.
	It's interesting to notice Iran's and Russia are quite close allies, but Russia does not want a nuclear-armed Iran because it's just another headache and a proliferation into the Muslim world of nuclear weaponry, even though Pakistan, a Muslim country, already possesses the bomb.
	So there are all sorts of reasons why The West has been, under the leadership of the United States, has been coy about an attack on Iran.
	I also think the Obama administration has quite a lot to do with it.
	I think they decided early on that they would not go for an attack.
	They would go for every other weapon before the action of an attack.
	Hence the economic embargo.
	Hence the blind eye turn to Israeli assassinations.
	Hence the computer viruses, which the Americans may well have assisted the Israelis in developing.
	Hence the targeted sanctions and the attacks on the Iranian currency and the possibility of all embargoes.
	I think all of this is a stepping up of what may occur.
	But it's all short of an outright attack.
	So it's quite clear that the West believes Iran has some cards.
	Otherwise, an attack would have been launched before now.
	I agree.
	And I think one important point that I was hearing...
	Is that, you know, Iran is not just, it's a civilization in itself.
	It is a powerful state in its way.
	It's not some, you know, banana republic or tin pot dictatorship.
	And what that means for the U.S. is that if they were going to do anything, they would really have to go the full monty, so to speak.
	I don't, I think, you know, the intelligence community, foreign policy making community.
	Recognize that you're not going to be able to swoop in and maybe bomb one facility here and there.
	That A, they're quite diffuse and they're all over the place, but also that would create a major conflict in the region.
	It might even be a world conflict.
	And that if you're going to go to war, if you're going to do a major violent attack, you're going to really end up going to war.
	And that's something that, as you point out, I think they're not quite ready to do.
	You know, it's interesting, just before we got on air here, I was scanning the internet for some of the most recent.
	And I noticed that Leslie Gelp, who was a, you know, if you want to look for someone who's representative of the establishment, it might be this person who is part of the Council on Foreign Relations and so on and so forth.
	And he actually wrote a recent article in which he was warning against any kind of major attack with Iran.
	And so it is interesting to see that establishmentarians really are on this.
	And I'll just throw out a couple more things that I was thinking about while you were talking.
	And the other one about the Obama question.
	And that is that there's no doubt that one of the major reasons why he was elected was just simply discussed.
	And exhaustion with the Bush administration.
	I think people were just tired of the wars.
	They were tired of all the freedom is on the march talk and so on and so forth.
	And he was elected as the peace president.
	And obviously the world was kind of duped by this.
	And they gave him the...
	Peace Prize before he'd actually done anything.
	But I think most of our opinions really changed about Obama this past year.
	And though he has engaged in kind of a slow pullback out of Iraq, where the U.S. is effectively no longer at war in Iraq, exactly.
	There's still a presence there.
	But he also engaged in kind of mini versions of George Bush type wars.
	And they kind of...
	You know, went in the back door against Gaddafi.
	They claimed that they were enforcing a no-fly zone.
	They never really declared war.
	Certainly Congress did not constitutionally declare war.
	Yet at the end of the day, it was regime change.
	And, you know, I'm just going to throw this out about Obama himself, is that I think Obama is obviously a mystery, and I think of who he is and what he wants and so on and so forth.
	I think it's easy for a lot of conservatives to get hot under the collar about him, and they think he's a crypto-Marxist or crypto-Muslim or anything.
	I don't think he's any of those things.
	But he is a mystery, and I don't understand him myself.
	But my guess is that in his heart of hearts, he is a true leftist.
	And that is, he supports the brown people against the white people in any situation.
	I bet he ultimately supports the Palestinians and does not like Israel.
	At the same time, he's been one who plays ball, so to speak.
	I mean, he played ball when he was in Chicago, which is one of the most corrupt cities.
	It's almost like a little country on its own.
	It's utterly corrupt.
	He was obviously willing to play ball with the powers that be.
	And my guess is that he was willing to play ball with some of these powers within Washington, and these include the Israel lobby.
	And so I sometimes even wonder whether he wants to throw them a bone, so to speak, do some military actions that will please them, so long as that he can do what he really wants, which is have his domestic agenda.
	And you can pick up on some of those if you'd like.
	But I'd also like to ask you a question that really hits at all these issues, and that is the why.
	From a realpolitik, maybe even isolationist perspective, there's no possible reason why.
	We'd want to go to war.
	We, as an American, would want to go to war with Iran.
	It would result in...
	Certainly, it's going to result in some kind of economic turmoil, i.e.
	higher gas prices, which means everything is going to become more expensive by inflation.
	There's really no...
	I mean, the likelihood of Iran...
	I don't know why they would want to do that.
	And it's exceedingly unlikely they'd want to conquer Europe or something.
	I mean, that's just really not in the realm of possibilities.
	So it really is the Israel question.
	But, you know, why is Israel, why do people like Bibi Netanyahu and others in the Israel lobby in the United States, why are they so worried about Iran?
	They've been willing to make deals with them in the past.
	Obviously, you know, they're Jews who live in Iran, and obviously if, you know, Ahmadinejad were some kind of fanatic anti-Semite and who just wanted to wipe them all off the face of the earth.
	He would probably start with the Jews that are living in Iran.
	It would be kind of easy to maybe round them up and kill them all.
	But he hasn't done that.
	So, you know, again, I just simply don't buy...
	I don't really have much sympathy with people who are Muslims or anything, you know, much of anything Ahmadinejad says.
	But I also don't think he is a, you know, irrational, suicidal maniac who wants, you know, Armageddon next weekend or something.
	So, Why do you think there are major forces in Israel and in the Israel lobby that are so obsessed with Iran?
	wrong if it has a nuclear weapon that that it's over and and we should and i'll add in there we should remember that india and pakistan are obviously in the region both have nuclear weapons that's a very volatile situation uh but you know We're not talking about going to war with Pakistan.
	Why is this Iran?
	Is this just kind of the big kid on the block, so to speak, that could really challenge Israeli hegemony in the Middle East?
	Or is it something else?
	Yes, I think it's more the last thing you just said.
	I think for a long time now, Israel's been a low-level superpower in its region.
	None of the Arab states can stand against it, which is why these militias have been formed as parastatial entities to take Israel on.
	Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip are Arab armies by proxy, because there's not been a nation-state war between the Arabs and Israel since 1973, the Yom Kippur War.
	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, which is a long time ago now, which is a better part of 40 years ago, that's why there has not been several general Middle East wars over the Palestinian situation, which rankles like anything in relation to the Arab and the Muslim world, although they're often selective about that.
	They take that cause up when they want to and put it on the back burner when they want to as well.
	But the Palestinian issue is a very live one in the whole of the Middle East, and to a lesser extent in Europe.
	Where there's much less sympathy for Israel than there is in the United States.
	I think it's basically the strategic game will change once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold line.
	I think that the Israelis are used, in a sense, to having the whip hand over the societies around them, even though there are major difficulties for the Israelis in having this enormous restive Palestinian population.
	Which is disarmed and yet is difficult to control politically in various respects.
	I think that the game will change as soon as Iran becomes a nuclear power.
	Saudi Arabia will probably insist on having a nuclear device of its own to counterbalance Persian power on the other side of the Gulf.
	And then you may well see a new arms race to get nuclear weapons, which is quite an old-fashioned technology now, 70 years old.
	A lot of these countries are on the threshold of developing it.
	Thirty-four states are interested in obtaining nuclear weapons according to the United Nations.
	Most countries, like Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Brazil, they all have low-level nuclear programs.
	They don't attract the notoriety of Iran because, of course, they're in a much less hot part of the world.
	And the sensitivity...
	That Iran might attack Israel with such a device is such that it's got Israeli and some American policymakers in the lava.
	The track record of Iran is extremely conservative and extremely cautious.
	I personally would make the prediction there is absolutely no chance at all that Iran would attack Israel with a low-level nuclear device.
	It's the political and geopolitical changes that would result.
	From the emboldening of Iran in other areas, the fact that a second nuclear superpower would be added to Israel in the region, Turkey might well consider its nuclear options as well if that was to come about.
	I think it's much more likely, if Iran does go nuclear, that America would respond not with an armed attack but by offering NATO membership to Israel.
	which has been widely discussed in certain parts of the European media because, of course, it would impact upon European societies very directly.
	Quite a few members of the NATO on.
	Well, you'd have a tripwire in the Middle East, if that's the case.
	I mean, if they were really part of NATO in the sense of, you know, attack on one is an attack on all.
	That could be, you know, we would be involved in wars every couple of years.
	Yes, and there's many electorates in Europe, the German electorate in particular, and the French electorate, quite different electorates.
	But for different reasons, they've got very little inclination to get involved in all that sort of thing.
	The German electorate is extraordinarily isolationist and doesn't even like peacekeeping in UN missions abroad.
	Hence the almost invisible profile of German arms in Afghanistan, for example.
	And the French electorate is quite anti-Zionist and quite anti-Israeli, whatever the government of the day may say.
	Paradoxically, it's also quite anti-Turkish as well.
	There's a lot of speculation that Turkey would leave the NATO alliance if Israel joined, which would be, for many Western policymakers, a major headache, because Turkey's...
	a more powerful country than it used to be, and used to be an ally of Israel's of course, but relations have soured immeasurably in the last 5 to 10 years.
	And it's quite possible that you could see an alliance of convenience emerge between Turkey and Iran.
	Yeah.
	and other issues that get them to talk to each other.
	So there are many problematic issues Problematical things here.
	It is a game-changer.
	That's why it's important.
	That's why the ex-British Prime Minister Tony Bair goes around the world talking about Iran with the obsessionality of some of these American neoconservatives.
	It is an issue.
	It's also probably an issue that quite a few Western policymakers don't want to face.
	They're just regarded as a sort of grad-grind, Zionist issue.
	But if it wasn't for Israel or squeamishness in this regard, they could have an easy time over it.
	Because Iran's development of these detail weapons doesn't threaten anyone, with the sole exception of Israel, who already aren't to the teeth of detail weapons of their own, which they can equip their F-16s with, which are up in the air and would then respond to any attack upon Israel.
	But Israel's had those weapons for a long time.
	What nuclear weapons tend to do is they stabilize the situation in a retrospective manner.
	No one really wishes to use them because of the destructivity of these weapons.
	Therefore, they are forced into edgy compromises that they wouldn't really have been so keen on in the past.
	Let's talk about that, Jonathan.
	This is something I was thinking about while you were going through these things, and that is that throughout the Cold War, The bomb, nuclear weapons, were an eminently important aspect of foreign policymaking.
	They're also an important aspect of the public imagination.
	I guess I'm a child of the Cold War.
	I was born in 1978, so I remember the tail end of it.
	But the idea of nuclear winter or annihilation or bombing of cities, these kind of Unbelievable, horrific notions were there in the back of people's minds.
	And I guess there was a kind of mutually assured destruction idea that between these two powers that kept people, kept a lot of these aggressive tendencies at bay.
	And they tend to tend to fight proxy wars and say Vietnam and so on and so forth.
	But, you know, Washington and Moscow were not going to directly confront one another.
	And in many ways, that was a good thing.
	But do you think we're, you know, after that, we entered a time when people were talking about asymmetrical power.
	You were fighting vague notions like terrorism.
	You're fighting extremely diffuse networks like Al-Qaeda and so on and so forth.
	We really had a different era.
	And also you had the whole kind of humanitarian peacekeeping aspect thrown into the mix.
	But do you think we might be entering a new geopolitical realm where the bomb rears its head again?
	And as you mentioned, it's almost – there's almost – it's ironic or kind of a, you know, return of the repressed or something.
	You have a – what is ultimately an old technology but one that is extremely powerful and devastating that we're going to have a new geopolitics that will emerge that will – in which obviously Russia will play a – have a renewed importance as someone who – they might be skeptical of Iran getting a weapon.
	They – That we might have a kind of new geopolitical arena if this happens.
	So talk a little bit about that, about what a game change would look like.
	Yes, I think I suppose in a way Israel's real nightmare is that Iran would arm Hezbollah with low-level nuclear devices who are right on Israel's border and who have low-level missiles.
	That can target directly into Israeli cities.
	And Hezbollah, although they're totally under Iranian control, really, are believed to be fanatical enough to want to carry out such attacks.
	That's questionable, given that they've got a role in the Lebanese state, that they're aligned with Christian militias now, which never used to be the case, and they have MPs in the parliament in Beirut.
	So Hezbollah has become very much part of the society in Lebanon now.
	But they do form this Shia block across the Middle East, which is, of course, in Western terms, we have to see it as the Protestant-Catholic split in Islam, whereby if you go from the Iranian border through Iraq, you have the large Shia majority in Iraq.
	Which, of course, Saddam Hussein kept out of power.
	That was the purpose of his regime, irrespective of the relationship with the Kurds in the north.
	And then you go through Jordan into the Lebanese territory, where there's a large Shia block there.
	And the Shia are only 10% of Muslims worldwide, but their proportion in the Middle East is much higher.
	And the Shia have always felt themselves kept out of power unfairly in the Islamic world, where the Sunni predominate.
	As in Saudi Arabia, where the holy places are.
	And it appears to me that one of the unforeseen consequences of George W. Bush's war in Iraq is the coming to power of Iranian influence in Iraq, which I also think plays into many of these areas.
	America is well aware of the Iranian special relationship with the Maliki government in Baghdad.
	Because the Shia in the south of Iraq looked to Iran as their spiritual leaders.
	During the Iran-Iraq war, many Shia in the south wouldn't fight for Saddam Hussein against their brother Shias in Iran, even though there is an ethnic difference between Arabs and Persians.
	So, the interesting thing is that Iranian influence has come to power in Iraq under American guns.
	As soon as you switch from the Sunnis to the Shia inside Iraq, which were reasons of democratic legitimacy you had to do, because the Shia are 60% of the Iraqi population and can't be kept out of power in a government which claims to be democratic, America was facilitating Iranian influence throughout Iraq.
	And that's one of the many, many ironies of this war.
	This enemy that's construed as fanatical and monomanical in a certain respect, the Iranian one, has actually had a license to come to power or has considerable influence in the new Iraq that was created by American weapons.
	All these multi-party elections that the Americans insisted on, all of them enshrined various forms of Islamic power that tended to be Shia.
	And there's been two versions of Shia power since the Americans went into Iraq.
	But one was more secular, and the one that's in power at the moment is slightly more religious.
	And there's the Sadrists, the power bloc of Mohammed al-Sadr, a Shia who's believed to have quasi-divine power by some of the poverty-stricken Shia in the slums of Baghdad, such as in Sadr City.
	And he has a political movement that was always anti-American.
	Unlike the rest of Bashir, who collaborated with the United States when Bush went in because they wanted to see an end to Barthes' rule.
	The point of Barthes' rule was to keep Bashir out of power and to keep the oil wealth for the Sunni minority.
	And Saddam did that quite successfully.
	One of the great mysteries, of course, is why the United States and Saddam fell out.
	Because Saddam was a keen client of the United States and for a long while was America's man in the Gulf.
	And is back against Iran in the extraordinarily destructive war that the two countries fought.
	The Iran-Awak War.
	When Saudi Arabia and the United States armed Iraq to the teeth of the Saddam Hussein.
	That's where he got his chemical weapons from, to use against the Iranians.
	There's an infamous episode in which a diplomat, I believe her name is April Gillespie or...
	Yes, that's right.
	Or she might have even told Saddam in person.
	I think at least she sent him a message that said, the U.S. will look the other way if you decide to take actions against Kuwait.
	That was obviously a kind of...
	Well, I guess it was anyway...
	Saddam was always very agreed.
	He believed the United States had given him the right to retain Kuwait as an Iraqi province.
	Historically, Kuwait has been an Iraqi province in the past.
	All of these countries have got interchangeable borders because of the Arab notion of the Caliphate.
	Nationalism is a relatively new construct, although national feeling has always existed.
	There's always been something of an Iraq.
	There's always been something of a Syria.
	There's always been something of an Egypt.
	But nationalism in the Western sense is a relatively new import into the Middle East.
	That's why the most radical Islamists, of course, don't believe in any of these state societies.
	They want a caliphate of Islamic power that crosses all boundaries and links all Arabs and Muslims together in one brotherhood.
	And of course they have had that at certain times in their past.
	Yeah, it was actually Christians who founded the Ba 'ath Party, I believe.
	So in some ways the kind of nationalism that Saddam represented was a bit of a Western import.
	Yes, that's right.
	It was modelled on his own personal fascination with Joseph Stalin, Georgia's not that far away from Iraq, socialism in one country, of course, and the sort of Arab fascism.
	Christian intellectuals and ideologues attended the Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s, and baptism in Iraq, in Syria, in Jordan, where it never really took off, although it's influenced the Hashemite monarchy, and in Egypt under Nasser.
	In the 1950s, all of those were influenced by European types of fascism that went into the Arab world and were largely the product of minority sensibilities, the Syrian minority that rules in Syria, which is under immense strain at the moment.
	It's interesting to note that the West is tacitly supporting the opposition in direction inside Syria.
	5,000 are alleged to have been killed by the United Nations during the course of this fighting as Assad's son clings on.
	And yet that Ba 'ath party in Syria represents a tiny sliver of the Syrian bourgeoisie and excludes the Sunni from power.
	Which is the major complaint of his opponents.
	It's not that it's not a democracy or a functioning Western society.
	It's that the Sunni, if the natural majority, are excluded, which in the end is untenable.
	You can't really run a society when a large ethnic and cultural majority is excluded perpetually from power.
	So this is why you have a shadow diplomacy in the Middle East as well, although all of the tension with Iran is coming from Israel.
	And the tension in Washington is because Patrick J. Buchanan once said that Middle Eastern policy was a Zionist-occupied area.
	That's largely true.
	That's what that tension is.
	That's what the gritting of teeth is about this issue.
	But there are also many other corollas as well, because the Sunni power in the Middle East doesn't view the Shia centered in Iran with any great favor at all.
	And Saudi Arabia is as keen as Israel for Iran not to develop nuclear weapons.
	But I think Iran will develop nuclear weapons in the next two years.
	I think they will test the device.
	I'm going to put my head on the block.
	Well, I think you might.
	And the world will change.
	I think you might very well be right about that.
	Let me ask you to bring our conversation to a close.
	Let me ask you an issue about the world order.
	And I guess this gets back to the game change that has been a theme throughout this discussion.
	And since 1944, one could say that we've had a...
	A U.S.-run world order with the dollar as the king currency.
	It's a universal reserve currency that's used in international transactions.
	It's used, most importantly, perhaps, in purchasing oil and so on and so forth.
	And there was obviously a Cold War.
	That was a significant issue.
	But it's generally emerged that you've had either maybe one or two policemen, but it's been a kind of American world order.
	And certainly after the end of the Cold War, when there was no more competition for this, for the past 20 years, the United States and Washington has been a kind of unipolar power.
	France might dislike a lot of things Washington does, might agree with France and a lot of those things, but there's no real challenger.
	There's no one who could really take Washington to the mat.
	However, do you think that maybe...
	All things come to an end at some point.
	All empires die.
	Do you think that we're witnessing the end to this world order that really began with the Bretton Woods Accord, at least in my opinion, in 1944?
	That we're going to actually witness that in the foreseeable future.
	Maybe this will occur economically.
	Maybe this will occur as a dumping of the dollar or just a kind of withering away of the dollar in terms of importance.
	That's certainly happening in one way.
	Maybe Europe will become a kind of superpower.
	I might be a little more doubtful about that.
	Maybe we're just entering a new paradigm in which China is going to become a superpower and not just a Do you think that particularly if the United States and or Israel goes to war with Iran and it creates some kind of horrible world conflict that
	I certainly don't want to see?
	That this might actually be the kind of last hurrah of the American empire.
	It might really express the fact that the paradigm is changing, the empire is crumbling.
	Yes, I think so in many ways.
	I think America, I think the election of Obama himself is a postscript to a period of high American neo-imperialism.
	I think the Obama presidency is a signaling in complicated ways.
	That the American public wants to, in a sense, release itself from the chain mail of the imperial legacy.
	There's an important historian, isn't there, called Stephen E. Ambrose, who wrote a book called Ascent to Globalism, about America's emergence from isolationism to play a major role in the world from the Second War.
	There was a desire to do it after the First World War, but the political forces inside the United States forced an end to the Wilson dream, and America turned isolationist again until the Roosevelt administration of the 30s and 40s.
	So I think you're seeing a moderation of the American power base.
	I think you're seeing the ability of the United States has to project power being quite severely curtailed.
	It may be that the Iraq adventure was the last time that America will fight a major Vietnam-style war, whereby you actually try and occupy a country.
	And even then, of course, America seemed surprised that they were faced with an insurgency during 2006, when America lost about 4,500 men, when they had to fight guerrillas.
	National liberationists, Islamists, terrorists, whatever word you want to use, on the ground.
	They were surprised that they had to fight that.
	Well, it was obvious that when you go into these countries, as soon as you get down on their level technologically, you may have big Jeeps and big armored personnel carriers and Humbers and this sort of thing, but you're going to be fighting men who are technologically on a level with you, at least approximately so, and you will take casualties.
	There's just no way.
	If they're armed with Chinese and North Korean and Indian and Russian weaponry, you're going to take casualties.
	And there's no way they would get involved, in my opinion, in an intervention in Iran that led to an invasion and occupation.
	That could even lead to defeat the United States militarily, actually, if they were foolish enough to go down that path.
	Any war with Iran would be conducted by missiles and by aircraft.
	And by taking down their command and control structures and by bombing their nuclear sites and protecting Israel from retaliatory revenge by Hezbollah and by Iranian missiles.
	They might not have a choice.
	They might not if it got more and more aggressive if the Saudis intervened.
	If Iran blocked the Straits of Hormuz in a slightly desperate action to sort of destabilize the world economic situation, which would immediately impact upon countries like Japan and China that import a lot of their oil through those straits, you've got the risk of escalation.
	My mind is that the Iranians are cautious and will not go in for that.
	The problem is that the Americans have is that they will be involved if Israel attacks Iran on its own.
	Israel can't do it on its own.
	It has to refuel its jets.
	It's an enormous round trip for them to get back from Iran.
	And they've got to be refueled in the air by American tankers.
	And only the USAF has the ability and the structures to make the Israeli operation work.
	If they're to really hurt the Iranian nuclear effort and to really put it back many years, which would be the object of the exercise.
	So America's involved if Israel goes alone.
	I don't think it will happen personally.
	I think the Obama administration has said no and will go up to the line of war but will not cross war.
	If a Republican is elected later this year, I think that can change.
	Yes.
	So I think that the option of no war with Iran, unless it's an accidental one that they all stagger into because they don't want it, and it just happens, the way the World War happened, through a concatenation of unavoidable steps.
	But at each point in the step change, people said that they didn't want the ultimate outcome.
	The relationships that Iran has with the West are very uneasy.
	Western policymakers don't understand the Iranian mindset, and they certainly don't understand Western policymakers.
	The Soviet Union and the United States understood each other intimately, and that's why they could finesse their nuclear power relationship, whereas America and Iran could stumble into a war quite easily just through misunderstanding what the other side wants.
	That could happen.
	But I think if you have a Republican president from the tail end of next year, And Iran is still a year away from developing a nuclear device.
	I think you could see attacks on Iran in 2013.
	So it's very much dependent on whether you have a regime change inside the United States.
	And it could become a very big election issue in the United States if it becomes apparent to the US population that if Obama is defeated, it will basically mean military action against Iran.
	Whereas if he continues in office...
	There is a probability that it will stop short of all-out military action unless there's some precipitous shove from either side that gets people involved in a conflict that really isn't in their interest.
	And that can happen quite easily when people are heavily armed and very propagandistically militated against each other, particularly as Israel is extraordinarily twitchy and paranoid about any threat to its security.
	Well, there isn't a real threat to its security.
	The threat to Israel's security is the democratic time bomb in Israel itself.
	The Arab Arab Emirates is the threat to Israel.
	Armed groups, no matter what they prioritize on the internet, no matter what Ahmadinejad may say in student speeches at Tehran University, are really neither here nor there.
	Their threat is much closer to home.
	It's the loss of political capital amongst the tender-hearted liberals of the West who no longer look upon Israel with favor.
	It's the gradual creeping non-Zionism of European policy formation and the reorientation to moderate Arabist viewpoints across Europe and the Arab birth rate inside Israel and in the territories.
	It could frustrate Israel's core 60 to 70 years from now.
	Armed groups like Hezbollah and Hamas are useful poster boys, but they don't threaten Israel's existence at all.
	But people can get very irrational.
	Well, in some ways, to go to what you're saying, in some ways, military action is a kind of irrational, angry response towards something else.
	And that is, you know, what you're saying, the real threat to Israel is the demographic one.
	I noticed that in a book that I actually was involved in publishing and editing, Richard Lynn's...
	Most recent study of the Jewish people and Jewish intelligence, which is hardly any kind of anti-Semitic volume.
	But at the same time, at the end, Richard is quite gloomy about any prospects for the Jewish people.
	He thinks that Israel is going to be demographically overwhelmed and that intermarriage within the West is also going to attenuate any kind of Jewish presence.
	So in some ways, getting back to what I was saying before, if the New World Order of the U.S. that's been with us since the end of the Second World War comes to a close, it might really bring to a close Jewish power.
	and Israeli Zionist power as well.
	Let me add just one more thought that I think is worth mentioning.
	And that is that there was a burst of isolationist sympathy that came after the Wilson administration in the very late teens and 1920s.
	And a lot of people might associate America first, exclamation point, that movement with the Tea Party or You know, backwoods yahoos or something like that.
	But it actually wasn't like that at all.
	It was actually founded at Yale University.
	It was, in a way, a kind of last gasp of the old WASP establishment that didn't actually want to be globalist and wanted to stay home and have a prosperous, kind of laissez-faire America.
	And it was, in some ways, the last gasp of that.
	And that whole ruling order has since gone by.
	We've had something quite different in the United States since the Second World War.
	But if you think about the demographic aspect of that, of a WASP elite was the core of America First, in some ways you've got to think about a new issue that America's facing.
	And that is a very chaotic demographic that's emerging if it's not already here.
	And that is one that is Latino.
	That is one of which the black population is not growing.
	And so it's a question, and it's one I certainly don't have an answer for, of how this demographic situation will alter foreign policy.
	It might totally reorient it.
	It might eventually make America isolationist.
	It might reorient America towards South America.
	I think demographics are key.
	Certainly, foreign policy is perhaps the most elite aspect of politics.
	It's created by think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations and so on and so forth.
	Most average Joe types don't really understand what's going on or want to know.
	You know, get excited about a war, but they're not certainly involved in the nitty gritty.
	But, you know, if America is going to remain a mass democracy, at some point that demographic element is going to...
	And, you know, we might have a—in the coming 25 years, we might have a new elite.
	We might have a totally reoriented foreign policy that's something that's hard to imagine now when we watch, you know, some of these horrible— Yes,
	I think the Obama presidency is, in a strange way, A default position for lots of things that are coming.
	I think Amateur already there.
	He's hedged in by all sorts of forces and he took the White House with the support of traditional centre-left democratic power structures.
	There's not much he can do about that.
	However, his instincts are to do deals with the Muslim world.
	His instincts are to do deals with Latin America.
	His instincts are to do a deal with the softest of the Palestinians.
	To attain a sort of two-state solution along social democratic lines in what social democrats would like in Western Europe.
	His instincts are completely against the Christian Zionist warriors amongst us.
	This is my reading anyway.
	His instincts are not particularly hegemonic in power terms as regards to the US and the rest of the world.
	I think his instinct is to make America more like the rest of the world.
	And as the world has gone to live in America, the one meshes with the other.
	I think America may well emerge in with the rest of the world.
	It will become more like Latin America.
	And it will have a foreign policy, which is closer to that of the United Nations, common denominator.
	Notice the globalist American elite of the last phase in American history has been at war with the perceptions of Latin America.
	countries that the United States is against.
	There was immense sympathy even for the Axis powers in the Second World War throughout Latin America.
	Why?
	Because they were fighting against the United States.
	There was a certain partiality for Japan.
	There's been a certain partiality for the Arab cause in Latino societies.
	That's why all of these countries, the whole of Latin America, recognized this sort of de facto Palestinian state that isn't in these recent maneuverings of the United Nations, something that was totally opposed by America, by most of Western Europe, and by the usual suspects, and of course by the Obama administration.
	But we're talking here about Obama's instincts rather than what his actual policies are and what his administration does.
	I think you will see the Democratic Party become crypto-isolationist over time, and you will see a reversal.
	You've already seen a reversal throughout the 20th century, where the Democrats and Republicans changed places, and the Republicans became the party of the White South.
	to the Confederacy, they were utterly hated in the White South.
	So you see many reversals in the American polity, and you can well see another one.
	There's also a degree to which from a European perspective, what Obama's instance may amount to appears saner.
	What worries Europeans are the trigger-happy views of the Christian Zionists who want to go to war all the time in order to impose their values on the Middle East.
	There's probably not a viewpoint in America, which is more unpopular in Europe than that one.
	Jonathan, thank you for being on the program once again.
	We'll talk to you again next week.
	Thanks very much.

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