MDE:
| With our open borders and ports, we have all kinds of cargo packages arriving in our ports every month. How serious is the threat of a dirty bomb, and then what kind of space would even be required for the components needed to assemble a dirty bomb?
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Gen. Shelton:
| Well, when you look at, you know, the same rights, privileges, and freedoms that make America the envy of the world in terms of the freedoms we enjoy as individuals are also, in the eyes of the Al Qaedas of the world—the terrorists—our greatest threat, our greatest weakness. It is the porous borders that we have, and no matter how hard we try to protect them, if you look at the miles and miles of Canadian border or even our own abilities to try to stop the infiltration along the southwest border, it’s just—it’s hard.
And therefore, I say it’s not a matter of when we’re attacked—I mean not a matter of if—it’s a matter of when. And anyone that really puts their mind to it and has time on their side and has the resources can eventually get the stuff where they need it in the United States to carry out an attack. What’s our greatest defense? Our greatest defense is the intelligence community, and it has to be done on a worldwide basis. It is tips that you pick up that are coming out of Germany or just recently out of the United Kingdom, or coming out of Australia.
I mean, if you look down in Indonesia, the fourth largest nation in the world, the largest Muslim nation in the world, it’s in the process of disintegrating. It’s an ideal breeding ground for terrorism, and it could be the next training ground for Al Qaeda. Well, just because it’s in Indonesia doesn’t mean it can’t come here and attack New York City or Los Angeles or whatever. So intelligence is how we’re going to do it, and that’s going to have to be an international effort, not just a United States effort. And if we’re good at it, if we really devote the attention that we need to and the resources, I think that’s our best defense against terrorism….
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MDE:
| How do you think that the terrorists are using the media against us?
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Gen. Shelton:
| Well, in a war of ideas—in informational warfare—the media is a powerful tool, and I think that what we find here is the terrorists unfortunately are a lot more effective in some cases of using that to their advantage than we are using it to ours. A typical example is you have an
Al Jazeera
that is propagating their propaganda throughout the Middle East, and yet our ability to get in as an international community—not just the United States, but everyone—to show all the good things that are happening in a lot of these countries—whether it’s Iraq and the numerous schools we’ve rebuilt, or the number of hospitals that have been reopened.
You just got to bombard them with this stuff, and some people would call it propaganda. It’s not propaganda; it’s information. And it’s getting the right information back out to the people that need it, and those are people that are making the decision as to whether or not they’re going to believe what the radicals are saying or if they’re going to believe what their own eyes are telling them—that things are getting better. You know, things are better in their life today than they were under Saddam Hussein—or under whomever. We can do a lot better, and it needs to be a really focused effort for the United States to really win this war of ideas.
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MDE:
| What would you say are the basic triggers that could prompt military action against Iran?
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Gen. Shelton:
| Well, certainly, when it comes to Iran, I think any kind of an overt military action against America—whether it was shooting one of our warplanes or transport planes or shooting down, you know, sinking one of our warships, or just an overt action of any type against us. And I would like to think that any type of a terrorist attack that immediately had, you know, a smoking gun associated with it, that Iran would pay one heck of a price by our own national retaliatory policy against terrorists.
So that’s what should happen. I think everyone understands that. That’s a policy everyone understands. If you aid, support, help, or in any other way assist a terrorist outfit and your fingerprints are on it, you’re going to be treated just like a terrorist yourself—and I think the Iranians are smart enough to understand that as well.
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MDE:
| Iran seems to have succeeded in utilizing four thousand missiles in its recent attack from Lebanon into Israel. They have boasted that they’ve got fifty-two thousand suicide bombers ready to attack the West, to go into America. How realistic is a scenario like that?
Gen. Shelton:
Well, I would not put anything past Iran as the world’s largest supporter of terrorism, from having a large number of missiles, a large number of all types of chemical or biological weapons that they could have at their disposal. I mean, here’s an outfit that sends missile technology that is illegal by the UN standards to the North Koreans, another member of the axis of evil. They’ll do about anything where they think it’s in their best interest or against America or our closest allies.
And so, you know, that’s part of the war of ideas and, you know, it tends to make you fear someone. You think fifty-two thousand suicide bombers. You know, it’s a great psychological weapon. I’ll turn them loose on you if you—you know.
Well, you know, get ready. We got something even bigger than fifty-two suicide bombers. It’s like someone who backs away because the Chinese have got 1.3 billion in population. You know, we say, well, we won’t stand up to them because they’re so big. We have a lot going for us in terms of our will to fight and the technology that we have, and we’ve got a heck of a lot of good allies around the world that, when push comes to shove, will show up and be there by our side.
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MDE:
| But nevertheless, you do feel like the threat of those kinds of things being thrown out has to be taken seriously?
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Gen. Shelton:
| When the president of a nation stands up and boasts that he’s going to eliminate another nation from the face of the earth—when he boasts that he has large numbers of suicide bombers—when he talks about his missile technology or what he would plan to do to hurt other nations—I think that has to be taken very seriously, not only by America, but by the United Nations and our other allies and friends as well.
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MDE:
| Benjamin Netanyahu said that the issues with the Cold War, for example, are so much different than those today and the way we are having to deal with other countries like Iran. Can you compare the way that we were maybe able to deter the Soviets with the way that we’re having to address Iran? You know, I think essentially the ideology of the Soviets was pretty well dead by the mid-’50s, and so I think that our ability to negotiate with them was maybe a little bit different. Can you compare the two?
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Gen. Shelton:
| Well, I think that when you look at the Cold War versus the post–Cold War, the Cold War was considerably simpler. The reason I say that is because here you had two superpowers, the United States and Russia, which had the Soviet Union and all of its partners in the Warsaw Pact countries, et cetera, lined up against the United Nations and all of its partners. And no one stepped out of line without checking with the leader—and America being the leader of the free world; Russia being the leader—and when that wall came down and all those nations broke away from the Russians, it became a much more complicated world because you no longer had just the two superpowers talking.
You had independent actors now doing their thing and no one kind of a reign in power, and then you saw the outbreak of the ethnic, religious, and tribal wars around the world. And when you look at America, our commitment of forces went up over 300 percent in the ten years following the wall coming down than it had been in the previous twenty-five years. It’s just a phenomenal number of things that started to happen when this big coalition on each side went away, and suddenly hatred in all these tribes and, you know, it started breaking out.
And so it is more complicated in today’s world for sure, and we have to build new coalitions, and we have to build new partnerships, and in some cases they’re small groups that are united against specific threats. In others, they can be large like against the Iranian nuclear threat. There could be a rather large—like the United Nations coalition against the Iranians—but it is considerably more complicated, for sure.
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MDE:
| What would you consider our greatest obstacles in establishing the coalition that we need?
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Gen. Shelton:
| I think today the biggest obstacle that America has is the fact that we went into Iraq for the most part alone. Consequently, a lot of people are seeing the commitments that we’ve had to make for that—both in terms of troops as well as our national resources—and they’re starting to question whether or not they want to become a part of anything like that—and they, you know, start to drain their economy or start to deploy. A lot of these countries have really reduced the size of their militaries as a result of the Cold War going away, to where they have very little left and not a lot of forces to contribute to major war-fighting efforts.
And so I believe today that probably there’s a lot of resistance to joining any kind of a coalition that might get them involved in something like we’re involved in, in Iraq—and that’s something we’re going to have to overcome. We’re going to have to work hard at it to convince all of them again that, you know, you’ve got to stand for what’s right, and it may mean sacrifice by your people. It may mean using a military that’s relatively small and giving them some fatigue like our armed forces are experiencing right now. But in the end, it’s doing what’s right for peace and security throughout the world—not just worrying about their own little piece of it.
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MDE:
| Let’s talk about Israel for a moment. If Israel were to notify the United States that they were going to take a preemptive strike on Iran—first of all, do you think that they would be able to effectively accomplish that, and then, second, what do you think the U.S. response would be?
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Gen. Shelton:
| That’s a hypothetical question for which I don’t even have a good hypothetical answer. First of all, I’m not sure the Israelis would notify us if they were getting ready to take a preemptive strike, and I think there’s precedent for that—and, secondly, I’m not sure what they’d expect out of us if they elected to do that. That’s a pretty bold move and, you know, I would go back to my original point that any action taken against the Iranians right now should only be taken after every effort had been made to build an international coalition to go after the Iranians.
I don’t think there’s any nation out there that wants to see Iran running around with nuclear weapons, particularly given the importance of the Middle East region to the rest of the world, and if we can’t build a coalition to protect against or to provide for greater peace and stability in the Middle East now—particularly with a potential nuclear threat that could be used against any of the Middle East countries out there—we’ll never be able to build one. And so that should be the first attempt—and I think the Israelis understand that as well. I would think that would be a last resort. Only after all else had failed would they ever consider going in with a preemptive strike.
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MDE:
| In your opinion, if Iran was actually able to obtain a nuclear weapon, do you think that they’re insane enough to use it on us or on Israel?
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Gen. Shelton:
| I think with the Iranians, you know, you never know what to expect from a madman. I mean, who would have ever anticipated that Saddam Hussein, idiot that he was, would ever invade Kuwait and think he could get away with it when the United States already had fifty thousand troops in the area and had been pretty clear in its intention to make sure that that remained a peaceful and secure, stable environment?
So guys like the North Korean leader and the Iranian president—I don’t think you can ever take for granted anything with it. I don’t think you can assume they’re necessarily logical. I think in terms of using a nuclear weapon, they’d give that a lot of long and hard thought because they know what the consequences could turn out to be—and that could be that the nation of Iran was nothing more than a glass factory—and so they have to take that into consideration whether or not it’s worth it.
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MDE:
| In your opinion, which do you feel is the greater threat to the United States—Iran or North Korea?
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Gen. Shelton:
| Well, I don’t think you can treat it either/or. I think you’ve got to assume both of them are threats to the United States. You’ve got Kim Jong-il [chairman of the National Defense Committee of North Korea] sitting there with basically a quarter of a million Americans—our military service members, our foreign service people, our Americans that live in Korea—that if he decided he wanted to take over South Korea poses a significant threat to America and our ability to stop him.
On the other hand, the Iranians with their threats and their nuclear weapons potential capability—I think we got to deal with both of them almost as equal threats. One is more stable right now—although he’s far from having a stable mind, in my opinion: the North Korean.
But on the other hand, you’ve got the Iranian president who’s being almost confrontational today with America, and so I think both of them are threats and have to be treated accordingly. You have to make sure that you’ve got the military forces to deal with both of these threats, should the requirement be there.
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