As the May 12 deadline for the Iran Nuclear Agreement looms, Trump and his new foreign policy advisors, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, are determined to toe Netanyahu's line about cancelling the agreement, seeking regime change in Iran, says Col. Larry Wilkerson
April 2, 2018
Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy Lawrence Wilkerson's last positions in government were as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff (2002-05), Associate Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff under the directorship of Ambassador Richard N. Haass, and member of that staff responsible for East Asia and the Pacific, political-military and legislative affairs (2001-02). Before serving at the State Department, Wilkerson served 31 years in the U.S. Army. During that time, he was a member of the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College (1987 to 1989), Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-93), and Director and Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia (1993-97). Wilkerson retired from active service in 1997 as a colonel, and began work as an advisor to General Powell. He has also taught national security affairs in the Honors Program at the George Washington University. He is currently working on a book about the first George W. Bush administration.
SHARMINI PERIES: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries in conversation with Col. Larry Wilkerson, who is former chief of staff to the Secretary of State Colin Powell, now a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary. Thank you so much for joining us today, Larry.
LARRY WILKERSON: Thanks for having me back, Sharmini.
SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Larry, let's take a look at the Iran Nuclear Agreement, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the GCPOA. This is another example of Trump's closeness to Israel, supporting Israel's effort to terminate the agreement against the resistance and pushback from Europe's cosigners, the UK, France, and Germany. What is the largest strategic objective on the part of the U.S., the Trump administration, and Netanyahu in terms of undermining the agreement, and what are their greatest hopes in the region that they're trying to achieve?
LARRY WILKERSON: Let's look at it from the positive side, Sharmini. What we should do is adhere to the agreement, the nuclear agreement. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. We should adhere to it, just as the Germans and the French and the British and all the others, Russia, China, are doing. And just as Iran is doing. Iran is in full compliance. There is probably a 1 percent chance that any of this could be untrue. I'm willing to bet on the 99 percent that says it is true.
If that continues we can certainly arrive at a point where the great negotiating skills of the great TV star Donald Trump could be employed to go further and take care of some of the concerns, and in some respects they are genuine concerns, that people have over this agreement, such as the 15 year point, the 20 four point, 25 year point, and so forth. Those concerns could be talked about and dealt with, and in the meantime, too, you could talk about other issues, like ballistic missiles, like support for terrorism. Though you've got to open parentheses there and say the largest supporter for terrorism in the world is Saudi Arabia, close those parentheses. Need to do something about that, too, United States. And you could probably get to a point where the situation in the Persian Gulf was calmed down, manageable, settle Syria and some of the other problems at the same time. We might return to a modicum of stability and possibly prospects for this region's peace.
But here's what I think is happening. I think Mr. Netanyahu, and interest interestingly enough, much of his security establishment disagrees, some of them vehemently, with Netanyahu's policy. I think he's stuck on his own petard. He has to, one, have an enemy. He has to have an other, and Iran fills that role for him in order to stay in political power. And number two, he has to have someone whom the United States can bait in order to make it look like the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv is as solid as ever. And in order to make it look like the first policy that I've just enumerated is working. That is to say he needs an other and he needs a superpower around him to face that other. Doesn't matter that the other is not a real threat. It just matters that it is in the perception of Israelis and more or less a majority of Americans.
So what they're trying to do by that policy is not only eventually get to the point where they unseat the regime in Iran, but also keep perturbated and in turmoil and chaos the majority of the Arab world. And particularly that Arab world lives from roughly Beirut down through Damascus over to Aden. They want that world incapable of coalescing even as a single state, but certainly as a group of states, and threatening Israel. Meanwhile, while that chaos is going on, Israel will make hay. They will do all that they need to do to consolidate their brutal occupation of the West Bank, their now occupation of more territory in the Golan, and probably even extend their perimeters elsewhere to include, of course, as we've already seen, Jerusalem as their capital.
So that's the Netanyahu strategy. Now, you asked me if Donald Trump is aware of all this, and if I said yes I'd have to give him a lot more credit than I'm willing to do. What Donald Trump is aware of is he knows how to play the base he has in this country like Anne Sophie Mutter plays Mozart. And that's what he's doing. He has no comprehension, in my fullest expectation of his intelligence, he has no expectation, realization, even intuition of what's going on in Israel. He's just following the street map required for his domestic base to stay resilient and more or less in support of him.
So we're marching towards this denouement, whatever it might be, in the Middle East with him pulling troops out of Syria, putting new American bases in Israel, telling us Netanyahu can do whatever the hell he wants to do and so forth all simultaneously. It looks like a really broken dysfunctional foreign policy because it is.
SHARMINI PERIES: Larry, according to the New York Times report this weekend, the head of the Israeli military, Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, had reported that Iran is actually full compliance of the nuclear agreement. So there appears to be a rift between the Israeli military and Netanyahu. What do you make of this?
LARRY WILKERSON: Sharmini, I've always found, well, let me back up. I've not always found, but most of the time I have found that Israeli generals, and officers in particular in the IDF, and for that matter Shin Bet, Mossad, are pretty sharp. And when we were working on the nuclear agreement, we, a much larger group trying to help President Obama largely with the U.S. Congress in getting the nuclear agreement through the wickets it had to go through, we talked to former national security advisers, to generals, to admirals, to Air Force generals. We talked to the security establishment in Israel extensively. By and large we found that they were, some of them reluctantly, some of them less than reluctantly, in favor of the deal. And once it was looking as if it were going to go through they, many of them, dropped their reluctance and said, OK, this is not a bad deal. Let's face it, we've gone from maybe 30 to 45 days warning of a breakout to over a year's warning. We can live with that. And oh, by the way, we trust the IAEA and all of this very rigorous inspection regime to do what it says it can do. And so we're maybe a little worried at 15 years, we're maybe a little worried when 19000 or more centrifuges maybe start spinning again and so forth, but we can deal with that. We can deal with that. In the meantime we're kind of happy with this deal. It's probably the best thing. We knew also that some of these people, especially the ones on active duty, were telling this upward to Avigdor Lieberman, although it was a different defense minister at that time. But now Avigdor Lieberman, and to Bibi Netanyahu.
So this is a real disconnect, politically and militarily. I think there may be a real problem for this much-embattled prime minister. He's, after all, being hounded by the courts, and Israeli courts are usually pretty good hound dogs, and the military. So we should watch this very carefully. At any moment that kind of fracturing could cause them some problems. I don't expect it, but it could. And you put your finger on another element in this very, very difficult region, very, very difficult situation in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, that worries me. The most competent element in Israel in terms of its security is the IDF, and we're doing some things to the IDF that we probably shouldn't be doing.
Not least of which, Sharmini, is the clamp down. For example, I didn't know about this until Gideon Levy and some others told me about it a recent conference. You're familiar with the Breaking the Silence. That was about 650-700 Israeli Defense Force officers, NCOs, and others who had come out to just that, break the silence, and tell about some of the things the IDF was having to do in the West Bank and Gaza and so forth that truly revolted some of them, made them feel, disturbed their consciences, made made them feel lower than life. I mean, really badly. Well they clamped down on them now. Netanyahu's government now is so draconian and so authoritarian that none of those people dare speak up anymore. Not only their careers and maybe their livelihoods endangered, maybe even their lives are in danger. So that's how difficult it has become to be a dissenter, to be a true patriot, to be someone who wants to speak the truth to power in Israel.
This is a very dangerous situation for Israel as well as for the United States in its connection with that situation. So I don't, I'm not very optimistic about the situation.
SHARMINI PERIES: Thank you so much for joining us, Larry. There's so much more to explore here. But I think the point you made about the ways in which the U.S. could, if they would manage this situation in a way that is far more peace-oriented, resolution-oriented. and we should discuss that as a segment of its own. I think it would really help certain people in the international community to have somebody like you advising them about the ways in which they can go about demanding some justice to what's going on between Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. participation in it. Thank you so much.
LARRY WILKERSON: It's a very tough situation, a very complex situation. Yet if one examines it closely, it is subject to being bettered, being ameliorated, being fixed, if you will. But the key ingredient is the United States, and I just don't see any inclination to be that ingredient.
SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Larry. Thank you so much for joining us today.
LARRY WILKERSON: Thanks for having me, Sharmini.
SHARMINI PERIES: And thank you for joining us here on the Real News Network.
SHARMINI PERIES: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries in conversation with Col. Larry Wilkerson, who is former chief of staff to the Secretary of State Colin Powell, now a distinguished professor at the College of William and Mary. Thank you so much for joining us today, Larry.