The establishment’s anti-Russian sentiment goes beyond allegations of election hacking, with leading US intelligence officials labeling Russia as the number-one existential threat to the United States. One of the foremost experts on US-Russia relations is sounding the alarm, that the potential for nuclear confrontation is greater than ever before, fueled with virtually no debate by the mass media.

Dr. Stephen Cohen is one of the leading scholars on Russia. He is professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton and New York University, and is the author of many books on the subject, including Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: from Stalinism to the New Cold War, and the forthcoming book Why Cold War Again? How America Lost Post-Soviet Russia.

Dr. Stephen Cohen: US-Russia Relations in Most Dangerous Moment

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ABBY MARTIN: The Department of Defense has just declared Russia is the number-one existential threat facing this country. Professor, it seems so interesting that we just came from a war on terror to now a war on Russia, despite the rise of Isis.

STEPHEN COHEN: Right, well they didn’t just do this. I mean this business that Russia is the number-one existential threat has been unfolding—this drama, this false drama—at the expense of our national security maybe for a decade, but it certainly intensified under the Obama administration because you had the American commander of NATO, the joint chiefs of staff here all saying “number-one existential threat.” Meanwhile Russia was, of course, in the person of Putin, repeatedly almost begging the United States to join it in an alliance against terrorism, not only in Syria but in a kind of global… I don’t know if a global war against terrorism is possible. That’s a separate issue. Russia wanted to partner with the United States. Obama was inclined very briefly in September 2016, but that was killed by our Department of Defense when they attacked those Syrian troops, and so Russia has been made the number-one existential threat. …Certainly, it’s not even on the list of the top five or ten, in my judgment, of what really threatens us, [and it] has become linked inextricably with his wild demonization of Putin personally because it’s the demonization of Putin as a man who assassinates his enemies, who invades countries… [and now] only in 2017 we’re being told that his alleged hacking of the American election was only part of his plan to destroy democracies around the world. And now he’s going for Europe. I mean it has really become right up there with the former Soviet threat, but now it’s personified in Putin. It’s this loathing for, or demonizing, or vilifying of Putin as a leader, as a person which shades occasionally into russophobia, transferring this, but not that often, into vilification of Russia. I think that’s really behind this notion that this is our number-one threat. And by the way it’s not only to the United States. They’re now talking about the 2017 elections in Europe, and Putin will probably hack those too [allegedly]. I mean it’s just… there’s no facts or logic to any of this. It has taken on a life of its own, so we’ve got senate hearings and Obama’s threatened some covert action against Russia, which is very dangerous because the Kremlin regards this is a declaration of war. We don’t know whether he is he going to attack banks or nuclear command and control. You just don’t do things like this when both sides have got bad nerves and nuclear weapons.

AM: But the military intelligence community certainly understands. Why this deflection, why this misdirection in this potentially dangerous tinderbox?

SC:  I’ve been around long enough to observe, and I’ve had enough former students go to work for intelligence communities, and I can remember what happened involving the intelligence communities regarding the Bay of Pigs when Kennedy was so angry at the bad information they gave him. He said he’d like to break them up. I can remember the bogus information they gave Johnson about the so-called Tonkin resolution which dragged us deeper into Vietnam. I can remember the Iran-gate scandal which the CIA was behind under Reagan. We all mentioned the bad information intelligence gave about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. There’s a long history of wrong intelligence, so let’s deconstruct that. It’s politicized intelligence, so there is no, so far as I know, no “the” intelligence community. There’s not even “the” CIA. There are groups with different political impulses, different vested interests in these organizations, and often they’ve been at war among themselves within, say, the CIA. We know this. It’s a fact. I think we’re seeing that now with the hacking allegations, and in all likelihood, later we will discover this was a war within the CIA itself. I mean the FBI tried not to get involved. It said “we don’t know” but it got dragged in. So now your question. What do they really know? I know, as close as I can say for a fact–and since we don’t seem to do facts in America anymore when it comes to Russia, we should be careful–that there are very different views about Washington’s policy toward Russia inside the intelligence community. I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but to me this may be the single most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations. The Cuban Missile Crisis is always said to have been the turning point in our awareness of how dangerous the Cold War was, and that after we avoided nuclear Armageddon over Khrushchev having put missiles, or at least the silos, in Cuba, and then backed down in light of Kennedy’s leadership, that both sides became wise and the Cold War continued, but there was a code of conduct. Everybody understood where the danger lines were, and that never again did we advertently, at least, [create a crisis]. There were some near misses, accidentally, when radars indicated a nuclear attack when there was none. It was a large seagull or something. We were all are at the mercy of this technology. That was true, though, until Gorbachev and Reagan thought they had ended—thought they had ended–the Cold War. There was a code of conduct between the Soviet Union and the United States. That doesn’t exist today.

AM: There’s barely any communication…

SC:  It’s even worse than that. After the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the two sides began to develop interactive cooperation, student exchanges, scientific exchanges, hotlines, constant talks about nuclear weapons, nuclear reductions, trade agreements, cultural… All this has come to an end, along with communication, and yet against this backdrop I’ve been saying we are in a new Cold War, moving there with Russia for more than 10 years. We are certainly there today, but here’s what’s also different. There are now three fronts in the new Cold War that are fraught with the possibility of actual war. There’s the Baltic region and Poland where NATO is unwisely building up its military presence. There is, of course, Ukraine which could exploded at any moment, and, of course, there is Syria where you’ve got Russian and American aircraft and others all flying, so you’ve got a multi-front potential Cuban Missile Crisis, and meanwhile here in the United States this hysterical reaction to alleged–because there’s no proof that’s been produced–that somehow Putin put Trump in the White House. This combination of demented public discourse and grave danger abroad puts us in a danger that’s at least comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and yet nobody protests. Nobody notices, and people march on.

AM: You’ve compared it to the Cuban Missile Crisis saying then we at least knew what was happening. Here this is all based on classified intelligence. We’ll never have an investigation. We will never see the evidence, and 52% of Democratic voters don’t just believe that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta’s emails. They think that Russia actually altered the vote, and that’s a whole other level.

SC: Times have changed. When I entered public life, such as it was, as a kind of commentator on public affairs as a young professor at Princeton, there was a debate in the late 70s and even in the 80s after Gorbachev came to power. Should we pursue more Cold War with Russia, or should we have what’s called detente? Nobody imagined you could actually end the Cold War at that time, but detente meant introducing more elements of cooperation in the relationship so we’d be safer. There was a lot of space, political space, media space, for both sides in the 70s and 80s, and it was a fair fight. Now it’s not. It’s one hand clapping. The Cold Warriors dominate the media. Now how did that happen? The journalism schools, who are supposed to say something about media malpractice, seem silent. They’re too busy deploring RT [Russia Today].

AM: That’s why it’s so scary because you look… People can mock RT and state media, but when you have a corporate media apparatus that essentially mimics what state media would do, where The New York Times and The Washington Post just paint the narrative for war time and again, whether it’s Libya, Syria or Russia, it seems like this acquiescence and unquestioning stenography… You’ve said these false narratives that dominate the discourse today are more dangerous, of course, than the so-called fake news hysteria. One is that Putin is responsible for the build-up of the new Cold War. One senior military official recently admitted that there are US special operations forces in every single country surrounding Russia. The build-up of NATO forces, of course, at Russia’s border is a huge source of tension. Professor, tell us about the agreement between Gorbachev and Reagan, what NATO was initially supposed to be, and how that promise has been broken today.

SC: The history is well-known. The issue in 1990 was whether or not Germany would be reunited, but the issue became then [this]: once Germany is reunited, where does it sit geopolitically, strategically? And it was proposed to Gorbachev that Germany be put in NATO. England and France, which feared Germany, thought this wasn’t a bad idea because they could keep control and stop Germany’s military aspirations from arising, but for Gorbachev it was really a hard sell at home. After all, 27.5 million, as best we know, Soviet citizens died in the war. For Gorbachev this was a hard sell at home. Then the issue became NATO itself, which already was in West Germany. Where would it go? And Baker was later quoted as having promised–he was secretary of state–that NATO would not move one-inch east. George Kennan, whom I knew well when I was at Princeton, and once was thought to be the wisest American about Russia (I’m not sure he was), but he was thought to be an iconic figure. He warned repeatedly when Clinton was considering NATO expansion that this would be the most grievous mistake, and it would lead to a new Cold War, but it didn’t take a profound mind to understand this.

NATO was a military alliance that had been created in the late 40s to deter or fight Soviet Russia. Russia was no longer Soviet but was still Russia. When you begin to move it slowly, creep like pac-man gobbling all the way to Russia’s border where it sits now, worse trouble is going to ensue, and the way it ramified of course is it was the driving force behind the Georgian war of 2008. We created a proxy army in Georgia. People say it [NATO] had nothing to do with the Ukrainian crisis, but it had everything to do with it. People say, well, the European Union offered Ukraine a very benign economic relationship. That wasn’t a benign agreement. It was about a thousand pages long, and I reported this in one of my first articles on the crisis, and everybody got very angry at me. There’s a section called “military security issues” and it’s very clear that any country that signs the so-called Eastern Partnership Agreement with the EU is obliged to adhere to NATO security policies. By signing that you become a de facto member of NATO, and this was just more of the attempt by Washington to get Ukraine in NATO, if not openly, through the back door, and they’re still at it. So what can we say? That the decision to expand NATO all the way, including Ukraine and Georgia, has created a situation in which none of us is safe, and they call that national security?

AM: Professor, I wanted to talk briefly about Syria because, of course, the US has been screaming about Russia’s intervention in Syria, not really speaking much about their long-standing intervention as well with the funding and arming of Islamic extremists on the ground. Objectively, what has Russia’s interference been like? Why did they intervene? What was their purpose, and what has the outcome been?

SC: Let’s start with the outcome: the fall of Aleppo. There are two narratives, probably a third, but there are two competing around the world–that the Russian-Syrian-Iranian taking of Aleppo was an act of great liberation. The city was liberated from terrorists and there’s plenty of footage (though footage can be faked) of people rejoicing when the Syrian army entered on the ground and the Russians sent in the humanitarian trucks. The other is it was a war crime committed by Russia and Syria against people called rebels and their kids. I believe (though I know why we call war hell–that the innocent suffer above all) that the truth is closer to the liberation scenario than to the war crime scenario. Isis retook Palmyra, the city that the Russians had liberated–had held concerts in months before–clearly abetted by the United States which is allowing, as the United States seeks to “liberate Mosul.” The US allows the jihadists to go from Iraq unfettered into Syria, probably to help retain Palmyra.

AM: They held that back door open.

SC: Right, I mean they see them. They could bomb if they wanted to, but they’re “moderate jihadists,” I guess, but why did Russia go in? I think that really is the best question, in some ways, we could discuss today because left out of all the scenarios demonizing Russia, you get the opinion, because it’s left with you, that Russia has no legitimate national interests abroad. Russia should be OK with NATO military bases in several places, from Ukraine up to the Baltics, right on its border. You know, “we’re good guys, why would you care?” You can do the usual analogy. What if it was a Chinese or Russian base in Canada or Mexico? This is just preposterous. We don’t ask. Syria seems remote, but it isn’t. Russia has a very serious problem with domestic terrorism at home in the Caucasus. It has had it for a long time. Somebody did the numbers. I can’t vouchsafe for them, but the number of people lost to terrorism on 9-11 here and in other terrorist acts involving Americans, and those lost to terrorism inside Russia are about the same—somewhere approaching 4,000, but Russia’s number continues to grow because it has this terrorism. Putin was very clear from the beginning, but the number-one reason for sending the Russian air force to fight in Syria Putin put like this: “It’s either Assad in Damascus or the Islamic State in Damascus, and if the Islamic State is in Damascus, our national security is gravely threatened.” For Putin, and not just Putin, but the Russian security elite, the fall of Damascus to the Islamic State would have been a national security disaster as they saw it. They counted on the American promise for two years that they were going to destroy the Islamic State and they said, “Good. Let Americans do it. We don’t need this.” What happened during those two years?

AM: The Islamic State grew…

SC: …took more and more territory in Syria, leave aside Iraq, until we had something new we had never had before: we had a terrorist organization that actually had become a state. They were running it in their own way, while they weren’t chopping off heads. They had municipal government, they were collecting taxes, issuing currency, running schools, and the rest. We had never had this kind of phenomenon before, and the Russians were deeply worried, and the Americans said, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it,” but they didn’t. They were too busy trying to get rid of Assad, so when people say Putin’s a liar–we see this almost every day in The New York Times–they have to add that he didn’t go to Syria to fight terrorism. He went “to bolster Assad.” You have to connect the dots. In Putin’s mind, bolstering Assad, which meant what was left of the Syrian state, and the Syrian army, was essential to stopping Isis or the Islamic State. You couldn’t separate the two. Not only was Putin candid about this but he came to the UN a couple years ago and in his speech said this is what we’re confronting. Join us. Russia’s never said, “Assad forever in Damascus.” That’s the so-called political process, but the Obama White House sent our Secretary of State Kerry forth to negotiate this with Lavrov, and he seems to have constantly, repeatedly, or at least once, reached an agreement for this alliance [but it] was sabotaged in Washington. It was more important for the forces in Washington to be rid of Assad or to prevent Putin from any kind of “victory” than it was to fight this terrorism in Syria, but you could go on. I mean is there any major issue that we say we care about? Climate change, energy reserves, trafficking in women, trafficking in drugs–anything where Russia is not either complicit enough to help out or central enough to help out? There is nothing that can be solved of this magnitude without Russia, so the gravest danger today is not ending this American-fostered new Cold War and turning Russia even more into an opponent of our mutual interest. That’s the gravest danger. The other grave danger, of course, is that no sensible person should trust the so-called nuclear safeguards. We’re on the razor’s edge of accidental nuclear war launch. Weapons on both sides are still on high alert. High alert means that the leader of the other country has somewhere between 13 and 25 minutes to know whether that’s a large seagull coming in or a nuclear weapon, and to retaliate because the whole system is based on “you won’t attack me because I’ll attack you [if you do].” Russia could be an immense threat to us by our continuing to treat it the way we are, but you could turn this around in important ways very, very quickly, and of course the mainstream will resist. It will fight, but politics is about fighting, so the handful of us, or maybe there are more, who think we have to do this for our own security, will have to fight.

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Lawrence Wilkerson, retired US Army Colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has some surprising things to say about the US government.

Wilkerson doesn’t hold back when he explains how US foreign policy has always been about the expansion of sheer power. After WWII, the US expanded “imperial dots”, or military impressions in order to generate a financial apparatus that would expand Empire, allowing for the rich to continue to grow their capital.

While many parts of the world are forced to live in abject poverty, there are generations of families that have a concentration of wealth that surpasses the GDP of most countries. According to the latest Oxfam study, only 62 people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity.

Wilkerson decided to come forward and blow the whistle about US crimes after learning about how torture had been authorized and encouraged by the highest levels, violating the Geneva Conventions, the law of war, and the manuals that they operated under. “I can’t stay silent anymore. I’m going to speak out.”

Wilkerson joins Abby Martin for a must-watch interview exposing the dark underbelly of DC bribery, intelligence hoaxes as war pretexts and the ruthless nature of US corporate Empire.

Former Bush Official: “The Ship Is Sinking”

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ABBY MARTIN: I’m sitting here in Washington, D.C. with the rare opportunity to speak with someone who served in the innermost circles of the US war machine. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is a former US Army Airborne Ranger who flew over 1,000 combat missions in Vietnam. He was national security adviser to the Reagan administration and later served as chief of staff to Colin Powell during the Bush administration. You’re a retired Army officer. You’re a Republican. Given your inside experience in the government and military, how would you explain the purpose of US foreign policy?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Today? Today the purpose of US foreign policy is to support the complex that we’ve created in the national security state that is fueled, funded and powered by interminable war, and the ramifications thereof. That’s a sad commentary on what America has become, but it’s a realistic and I think honest appraisal of what America has become.

AM: Has it ever been about altruism?

LW: You could say there were even altruistic aspects to the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast by Phil Sheridan’s Army of the West. If you wanted to really dip into the bag and find something, but I don’t think overall and comprehensively it’s been altruistic. It’s been about sheer power, and lately it’s not even been about realistic application of that sheer power, or realistic attempts to expand it. It’s been more or less so failed in its overall general aspects that it has diminished our real power in the world. And this is what concerns me most seriously because history demonstrates, I think, that this is what empires do when they’re getting ready to collapse. They began to be so zealous of their own power and its expansion that they actually decrease their power until it becomes inevitable that they cease to exist, or they don’t exist in the same form they did when they were an empire.

AM: And you’ve talked about the capital interests that are behind pretty much every US military intervention in the last decade if not century. What sort of economy are we waging war in today and what capital interest would you say are behind the war on terror?

LW: After WWII, the United States engaged in a monstrous twilight conflict, if you will, that it calls the Cold War. It’s probably a pretty apt term. In that process it built up what are the appurtenances now of a national security state: the military-industrial-congressional complex, all the armaments industry that goes into that, the far-flung basing structure we have all over the world which now is eight or nine hundred places that we have little colonial dots, if you will, imperial dots, and to the wars there we’re fighting now almost interminably.

All of this is the leftover of what we did during that Cold War, which could include physical expenditures beyond the scope even of human imagination. We’ve spent so much money on maintenance of our empire that is becoming a critical part of it too. Our debt now is something like eighteen trillion dollars, unparalleled debt in my mind in the in the history of empire, in constant dollars or in current dollars. So this is a situation that’s unsustainable, but it has come to a point where the power structure, which I would define as both the financial apparatus that this empire has generated, and the economic aspects of it which are less and less industrialized and productive, therefor [less] a real economy, in other words, and more and more playing with money and the interest on money and capital in general, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out in his book Capitalism in the 21st Century so eloquently. We now have more capital awash in the world than we have earned income. Earned income is a very second place in the world. Capital is the real driving force in the world and this capital is passed on from family to family, from generation to generation and therefore corruptive and poisonous.

We’re in real trouble right now because of what this empire has generated, because of the incentives and motivations of it, and because it’s basically run by about 1 percent of the people, if not fewer, in this country constituting essentially a plutocracy. There are 400 families, 400 wealth centers, private wealth centers in the United States constituted around a family structure that equal the gross domestic product of Brazil. Today I read a percentage which I can’t even recall—it had so many zeros in front of it—but it was much less than one percent of the country that has the approximate wealth of the GDP of India. So we’re talking about a concentration of wealth, and a concentration of capital, which is not productive wealth unless it is actually going back into the real economy to generate industry that produces something. It’s unconscionable. It’s reprehensible in many ways because what you’ve got is the rest of the country, and in many respects the rest of the world, living off the rest of the scraps.

AM: And it’s totally unsustainable, as you were mentioning, this is not a trajectory that is going to last. Behind the belligerents waging a war there are certain industries that are in play that continue to garner interest, extract resources.

LW: Look at what’s happening in Syria right now, for example, just a microcosmic example. The Air Force is about to run out of ordnance. It has dropped so many bombs and shot so many cruise missiles that it’s about to run out of ordnance. Well, I will guarantee you that companies like Raytheon and Lockheed and others who make these armaments are salivating because they are going to be making another round of these are armaments, and into the interminable unknown future they’re going to be making these armaments. It’s incredible what we are doing.

AM: And in fact they are salivating at that. At Lockheed, Boeing, all these different institutions, defense institutions, are openly talking about what a great benefit this is to them—this Syria war, all of these escalations. I wanted to read you a quick fact. In 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that over 2,400 former generals were employed at 52 of the biggest defense contractors as senior executives and acquisition officers. A high percentage of retired general officers retire, go straight into jobs in the defense industry making well over six figures, often with the corporations they dealt with while serving. How does this revolving door function? I mean, how close is this relationship in terms of actual foreign policy creation.

LW: It’s so close that you actually had during the Iraq war, and as far as my history lessons go, it’s the first time it’s occurred this way and now is going on continuously, general officers who not only go out into the armaments industry and its associated paraphernalia and make money based on their influence gained while in service, you actually have them going out and joining the media and making the media more conversant with and attuned to and want war. So you actually have general officers who will go to CNN, go to MSNBC, go to Fox News, and they will get again your six-figure salaries for being the security experts on those news shows, and they will report to the American people the dire need for this continued conflict, the dire need for soldiers on the ground in Syria, the dire need for more war. It’s incredible what has happened in that respect. That’s not a direct contribution to the armaments industry, but it’s certainly a very vivid contribution to the war mongering and to the interminable state of war.

AM: Is it the interlocking board of directors in these companies, or is it just advertising injected straight into the corporate media?

LW: I wish it were something that you could put your finger on like that. It’s so many different things, including what you just said, but not necessarily consciously or coherently except in some cases, I think. It’s all of these things contributing and it’s not any one of them. As Eisenhower said in his farewell address, it’s not something you put your finger on and say, “Aha! That’s malicious. That’s intent. It’s not only complicit. It’s intent.” It’s not that. It’s this accumulation of vast power that’s oriented towards what first increases its power, and second what makes it rich that comes together and causes this. If it were something that you could root out and you could hand over to the FBI or to the Supreme Court or someone to adjudicate, it would be a different matter, I think, not that it would get done very easily, but it would be a different matter. It’s not something like that. It’s pernicious. As Eisenhower said, it’s in every state house in every federal office building. It’s even in every home in America. It is this unconscious sometimes power-driven aspect of it that makes it so difficult to combat. In fact, I’ll sit here and be a pessimist, a cynic, and I’ll say we aren’t going to correct this until something truly serious happens to right the ship of state, which might also sink the ship of state. Now we have every other general officer, admiral, walking out and signing up with glee to work for armaments.

AM: Well, other than the egregious unethical nature of how this functions… I mean, what is the legal caveat to how this is actually working? Is it just a machine that’s working on its own and just continues to become more pernicious as time goes on?

LW: They’re not the most competent people in the world. They’re not the most capable people in the world, and they’re not the most, shall we say, professional people in the world. That’s a part of it, but a second part of it is it’s become the thing to do. It’s become de rigueur. I mean, it’s what you do if you serve 30-35 years. You expect to have a six-figure salary with someone like Raytheon or Halliburton or Booz Allen Hamilton. We haven’t talked about the Beltway bandits that do more intelligence than the CIA. Now I use that term very loosely there—intelligence, but it is a corporate complex that is growing, and its surrounds everything else, including what I call fateful decision making, which is the decision-making to send young men and women to die for state purposes.

AM: And speaking of the young men and women who go to die, you know there seems to be a huge class stratification between the people who are making the policy and the people who are actually giving their lives on the battlefield. I mean, if you join the military in today’s age, whose interests are you serving when you do put your life on the line?

LW: You’re serving what one veteran in my seminar at William and Mary [University] said to me not too long ago, about three weeks ago, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan: You’re serving the ulterior purposes of the leadership of the country, and I said, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “You’re serving corporate and commercial interests. You’re serving the interests of people who bureaucratically are seeking power within the structure, and you’re serving the interest of what is basically an incompetent governing process.” Wow. That was a pretty powerful statement, I told him, and he said, “Yep, and I’ll never go back again. I guarantee you that because I didn’t realize that until I was about halfway through my last tour in Afghanistan.”

AM: Let’s talk about the draft. It hasn’t been in place for some time. On one hand, you have the military so desperate that they’re paying NFL and sports stadiums for pro-military propaganda. On the other hand, you have women that are now being pushed to enlist. What do these measures of desperation mean and what do you think about the draft?

LW: It really isn’t an all-volunteer force. It’s an all recruited force because we’re spending billions of dollars to entice these people, who feel that they don’t have many other prospects, into the armed forces. We’re bringing them into a service that is supposed to be professional, disciplined and altruistic. We’re bringing them in with the most heinous of selfish, greedy purpose. We’re paying them what they couldn’t make otherwise. We’re giving them bonuses. It is so bad now that the cost for personnel in my army and to certain extent in the marine corps is coming close to being fifty percent of the cost of that service on an annual basis. If for no other reason the all-volunteer force is going to bankrupt the defense department, so they’re going to have to look at some other options.

AM: Let’s talk about your role in the Bush administration during the lead-up to one of the most devastating wars ever perpetrated by the empire—the Iraq war. You not only served as Colin Powell’s chief of staff, but you prepared his infamous speech to the UN about Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. How did you miss the faulty nature of the intelligence, given your weeks-long analysis, given the stakes?

LW: I’ve looked at it from a much more, shall we say, soul-piercing way. Not only was the intelligence picture a failure on the part of the intelligence agencies for various reasons, it was also cherry-picked by the vice president. It was put together to a certain extent by the Office of Special Plans, in Doug Feith’s shop in the Pentagon, and it was largely orchestrated, as the MI6, the British memo said, it was orchestrated, shaped around the policy or the policy was essentially fed with intelligence that would shape it, that would feed it. So there were a number of reasons for the failure. There were a number of reasons for my own personal failure. I lament those reasons. I will never forget the occasion. I’ll go to my grave remembering it, but I can certainly, from an academic point of view, see how this this is sad, and it frightens me to a certain extent how this happened in the past, has happened in the past or whether it’s something in the future.

For example, let me give you a vivid example. I’ll tell you how I looked at the immediate reports that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons in Syria a year or so ago. I said bullshit. I’ll believe it when I see evidence that it actually happened. And I went to every person I knew in the intelligence community, and every person outside the United States I knew to include two people who were in Syria at the time, and I knew what was going on and I respected their vision and their knowledge. None of them could confirm for me, not a single one, that Bashar al-Assad used those chemical weapons. Instead there were possibilities they were used by other parties in Syria as well as by Assad, and frankly, the evidence looked more strongly for other parties than the president. So I still think there is high potential for this kind of manipulation of intelligence, this kind of fabrication of intelligence, and this kind of refusal to take dissent in the leadership in this country right now today. And I’ll tell you very seriously I’m very skeptical of the intelligence establishment and what it says.

AM: Right, I mean, I always thought it was weird that the UN weapons inspectors were there on the ground and that’s when Assad decided to use the chemical weapons—when he already knew that was the red line. This whole red line mantra is really interesting because why should weapons of mass destruction of any sort of be that red line to actually legitimize the invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation? I wanted to say one more thing about the case. One of the biggest resonating factors, I think, in the speech was Saddam’s anthrax stockpiles and bio-weapons labs. Considering the fact that America had just been traumatized by its own anthrax attacks where five people tragically lost their lives, why did you choose to hinge so much on anthrax in the speech?

LW: No, as a matter of fact, we winnowed that thing to death. We threw tons of stuff out that we simply looked at and said, “All this is is an extrapolation from 1991 or 92. In other words, we looked at it and said the CIA has no evidence that Saddam has done what they’re saying he’s done. All they’ve done is made a linear projection. If he was producing six ounces in 1991, and we knew that positively from the inspectors after the war, then he’s now got 46 ounces because he could do two a year, or whatever. That’s what they’ve done.

AM: Of course, it came out that the anthrax came from our own bio-weapons lab. The final report from the FBI found no hard evidence linking Bruce Ivins to the attack.

LW: Well, I don’t know that, and I can’t tell you why don’t know that, but I don’t know that. I don’t know it with the clarity with which you just expressed it.

AM: That’s what the FBI said.

LW: Well, the FBI is as incompetent as any other bureaucratic entity within the federal structure.

AM: Right, but I think it is pretty much conclusive that it came from within… I mean, the bio-grade of the anthrax came from within the US establishment.

LW: It wouldn’t surprise me.

AM: Well, let’s talk about what was your kind of deciding factor to speak out and be so vocal…

LW: Torture. When Powell came through my door in May, I guess it was, of 2004, and told me about some photographs that we’re going to come out, may be made public, about a place called Abu Ghraib in Iraq… By the time I walked out of the State Department, I was ready to go find somebody and cut his throat because I knew that the United States had been involved in heinous activities in Vietnam. I knew they’d been involved in heinous activities in the Philippines. Indeed, a brigadier general, as I recall it, machine-gunned a thousand people in a ditch in the Philippines, and Teddy Roosevelt had sent him a telegram congratulating him. When people found out what he’d really done, Teddy had to kind of withdraw that approval, but I knew we had done some really bad things in the past, particularly in war, but I never, never knew any time in our history where those bad things had not only been authorized at the highest levels in the land but encouraged by the highest levels in the land. And I mean the president and the vice president of the United States and some of the cabinet officers. They were complicit in this. They gave instructions that they damn well knew we’re going to cause the Armed Forces of the United States to involve themselves in violations of the Geneva Conventions, the law of war and the manuals that they operated under. That just threw me. I said I can’t stay silent anymore. I’m going to speak out.

AM: And looking back at the horrors of the administration, as you mentioned, the torture, wanton detention, and of course, the illegal war that was based on false pretenses that cost the lives of a million Iraqis. Do you think that any members of the Bush administration should be charged with war crimes?

LW: I’ve said so in the past. I do think they should be charged. I think six lawyers in particular ought to be disbarred immediately. They should have been disbarred immediately. I think they should probably also be tried.

AM: Soldiers have been continuously dying in Afghanistan in America’s longest war. Today they’re still facing death, horrific injuries, for essentially no purpose it seems. I mean…

LW: Be careful.

AM: How do you think they should understand the war in Afghanistan?

LW: Be careful.

AM: What do you think their purpose should be?

LW: The war in Afghanistan has morphed. It’s not about Al-Qaida anymore, and it’s not about the Taliban anymore. It’s about China, Russia, the soft underbelly of Russia, which is mostly Muslim, about Pakistan, about Iran, about Syria, about Iraq, about whether Kurdistan is stood up or not, and ultimately about oil, water and energy in general. And the US presence in Afghanistan, I’ll predict right now, will not go away for another half century.

AM: My God. That’s a horrible thought.

LW: And it will grow. It will not decrease. It will grow.

AM: And let’s talk about strategic influence especially. We see this Cold War resurrection going on right now. As someone who lived throughout the Cold War… the schism within the establishment when it comes to Russia and this new posturing with Russia… After the reunification of Germany there was a promise on behalf of NATO that it would not continue to build up.

LW: Not one inch further east is what Jim Baker, Secretary of State, said to Edward Shevardnadze.

AM: What interests are behind the build-up?

LW: Why do we want more countries in NATO? Because then Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing and others can sell to them. Then the Soviets, now the Russians, won’t be selling to them. Why did we want Ukraine?

AM: Don’t we have enough?

LW: Empire never has enough. That’s the nature of imperial power. It never has enough. Have you ever watched Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars, or Game of Thrones? Empire never has enough power. It never has enough wealth. It never has a more stable status quo. It has an increasingly unstable status quo, and so its efforts are ever more frenetic to protect that status quo, its power and its wealth, and even expand them. That’s the nature of Empire, and that’s what we are now. That’s what we are. Everyone’s protestations to the contrary, that’s what we are. Depending on whose reports you read, about a third, 20% I’ll say, to 30 percent of Russia’s heavy armaments industry is in Ukraine. What do they do for tanks? What do they do for their heavy armaments in their military if Ukraine goes? The idea that we could do something in Ukraine, covert or otherwise, and have Putin not respond is just laughable.

AM: I feel like a lot of people of course feel helpless, especially those of us living within the Empire, paying and sponsoring all these atrocities with our tax dollars. What can we do to prevent this government, the military industrial complex from crushing us?

LW: The people, the American people, or at least a substantial powerful minority of them, hopefully a powerful majority of them, are going to have to get sick and tired of this. They’re going to have to get angry about it, and they’re going to have to take action. That’s the only thing that I see as a way to salvage this republic before it sinks completely. We are going to have to have a very powerful minority, or hopefully, as I said a majority, 51%, 52%, who actually stand up on their hind legs and say, “I’ve had it. This isn’t going to happen anymore. You’re not getting…” Does that mean revolution? It might. It might indeed.

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Transcript by Dennis Riches