The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (35 page)

MDE:

OK. One could argue that you’re one of the most knowledgeable men on U.S. security right now. You know, rather than maybe the $50,000 question, you know, it’s the 50,000 lives question. How would you really say that we have to take action right now in creating the most robust plan possible to win the war on terror?

Gen. Shelton:

Well, I think, first and foremost, we have to recognize, as President Bush has, I believe, that this is a global war that we’re facing. It is a war that we’ve got to win. It is a war that we can win as we demonstrated back in the ’70s when we had an outfit known as the Abu Nidal Organization headed up by Abu Nidal—specifically threatening Americans all over the world and carrying out those plans of killing Americans—and we put our resources to it and we leaned into it and now that’s an extinct organization, and it was a few years after we went after it.
Today’s threat is very similar—except even greater—because of 9/11, because of the World Trade Center, we have a chance to build this international coalition and it doesn’t have to be all America’s resources that are going after it. It’s the world’s resources that we can turn against the terrorist threat, and I believe that’s what we have to do and devote whatever resources are necessary to make sure that our intelligence agencies—that our counterterrorism forces—are trained and ready and leaning into it, and that priority remains fixed, in spite of all the other challenges that we have around the world—and we have significant other challenges. We’ve talked about a few like North Korea, Iran, and potential developments with China, if that doesn’t turn out the way we’d all like for it to turn out.

MDE:

Can you address the danger or the impact of talking big but not following through?

Gen. Shelton:

Well, I think anyone has to be concerned that if you talk big, if you make it sound like you’re going to go after, for example, terrorists groups and after nation-states, and that you don’t follow through—whenever you don’t do that, you embolden the terrorists. It takes away from that threat that you gave them. A good example is if we knew that Iran attacked Khobar Towers—and we do—why did they not pay a big price for that? That emboldens terrorists.
If you know that Al Qaeda attacked the USS
Cole
, one of our warships, and almost sank it, why did we wait till 9/11 to go after the Taliban? You have to go after them, and you have to go after them the minute that you can have a definitive link and can show the rest of the world that you’ve got the smoking gun.
Now I think, for example, after 9/11, to have attacked Saddam because he was a bad guy and he was shooting at us all the time and we wanted him out of there—we didn’t have the smoking gun. There was nothing that linked Saddam to terrorism in the true sense of the word, nothing that said he was a part of the Al Qaeda organization or was supporting them. It just wasn’t there.
So not going after him under that pretext of the World Trade Center was also the right decision. So you have to make sure that you have that definitive proof, but once you get it, whether it’s the day after or whether it’s two years, three years later—the outfit that does it to you and that kills your citizens has got to pay a price—and it’s going to be a lot worse than what they did to you.

MDE:

Is America at war?

Capt. Nash:

I think the American military is at war. I don’t think the entirety of the American government [is at war], and the reason why I can say that is in my trip to Baghdad I spoke with U.S. military leadership over there. They could really use the help of the Treasury Department, the Agriculture Department, [and others] to help [create]…the ministries that they need to run a successful government. So by and large I would say the Department of Defense is at war, the Central Intelligence Agency and some of our other intelligence agencies are at war—supporting the military—but the vast majority of the American people are not at war. I don’t believe the vast majority of the federal government is even at war.

MDE:

Why?

Capt. Nash:

I think because when people think of the war they think of Iraq only, or Iraq and Afghanistan [at best]. What they don’t come to grips with is that those are battles in a real war—and the real war is against Islamic Fascism. The president was very clear on that matter. I think up until this point we’ve tended to see each individual battle as [a war]—the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq—but they’re not. We would more accurately say the current
battle
in Afghanistan, and the
battle
in Iraq.

MDE:

You use the term “Islamofascism.” Please explain.

Capt. Nash:

Islamofascism is a sliver of belief that is driven by a twisted version of religion where you cherry-pick certain parts of a religion, [then] you magnify those way out of proportion so that you have a tremendously unbalanced view. You then take people who, by and large, are disaffected from their society, have grievances against the government or the situation in their country, and then you tell them that it’s not really their fault that they live that way—it’s really the fault of the Jews and the Americans. Therefore, what you need to do to correct all these ills is not fix your own society; it’s to go kill them.
The hard part about dealing with this as we have up until this point is that many people think of a war as a war for land or war for wealth, when the fact of the matter is these people do not want what we have—they just don’t want us to have it. The option that they’re presenting is to either do it their way or they kill us.
In World War II, we negotiated from one point: unconditional surrender. Essentially that’s what they’re telling us. This is a war, and the only [acceptable] outcome is unconditional surrender. So we have to want our way of life more than they want us to live under theirs, and if we don’t, we’re in for a very long and painful trip.

MDE:

In 1979, Iran made the decision they were going to humiliate the United States with 444 days of hostage crisis that ended with President Carter losing his second term. That seems quite obvious because they released the hostages the day of the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. With the fall midterm elections coming up, do you think that Iran is looking at the polls? And do you think that they’re intending to use their insurgent activities and improvised explosive devices in Iraq to try to take Congress away from the president and the Republicans?

Capt. Nash:

I believe that the Iranians are a very politically aware group of folks—as are the folks that are running Al Qaeda, who are the Sunni extremists. All of these people at the top leadership of these countries and these organizations understand that the center of gravity in the war against them is the will of the American people to fight. Right now, you have a president in George W. Bush who is saying, “We are not going to back away from this fight. We’re staying in Afghanistan until we fix this. We’re staying in Iraq until we fix this.”
[These groups are] trying to shake the will of the American people to sustain that effort, because if we back away from Iraq and Afghanistan there will be such a vacuum that they will implode and our grandchildren will be fighting this war as we never have.

MDE:

So if, in fact, they’re trying to humiliate the president, they’re trying to prove that he was wrong in Iraq—if they achieve that objective, what condition is this country going to be in with the president?

Capt. Nash:

I’m concerned that if the House flips in November of 2006 that more of this short-term political gamesmanship will occur, and that we will have totally stalemate in Washington with the House locked down, the Senate not able to sway because of thin majority there, and everyone just kind of holding their breath until the 2008 elections. If we weren’t seeing such partisanship when the country is at war, I wouldn’t be concerned. But I am seeing a side of partisanship that works for itself and not in the best interest of the country, and it’s very troublesome.

MDE:

On
60 Minutes,
Ahmadinejad inferred that the president was in trouble. He said he had been noticing his dropping popularity in the polls. Do you believe that Iran is accelerating this war for the fall to try to intentionally affect the polls?

Capt. Nash:

I believe the Iranians, Al Qaeda, and a lot of the other terrorists groups have been significantly better in their information operations than we have. They are very good at their form of getting out the story, and the story that they’re getting out is trying to shake the will of the American people. It’s propaganda. Do I think it’s an orchestrated campaign working [toward] the fall elections? I think they are politically aware and astute enough to make such a move—yes.
It’s very much like a major coffee chain in this country. Before that major coffee chain took off and became a household word, designer coffee shops in this country really didn’t exist. They were few and far between. Everyone went to the doughnut shop, the little corner stores, or somewhere like that to get a cup of coffee. But once this nationally known chain became popular, all these mom-and-pop designer coffee shops starting popping up all over the place.
I liken that very much to the success of the 1979 Islamic revolution in spurring these groups [of] Islamic fundamentalists that have popped up all over the place—not necessarily with direct support, loistics, and guidance from Iran. It was the success of the big one that led the little ones to realize there was a market.
That’s why when I traced things back [and ask], “Where is that front of Islamic revolution? Where is the front for Islamic radicalism?” It is coming out of Shia, Iran, and it started in 1979 when they took our embassy down. They have been fighting us and have been at war with us ever since. We have yet to truly realize the magnitude of that.
We are at war. We have been at war. We’ve been denying it through several administrations. Now here we are. We are where we are, and if we don’t get serious about this soon, they’re going to have nukes, and when they have nuclear weapons, a lot of options that we have today are going to evaporate. It’s like we used to say in the navy: “Bad news does not get better with age.”

MDE:

If the United States goes to war, what exactly could the United States do militarily? What are the steps we would need to take to stop Iran’s nuclear program?

Capt. Nash:

The U.S. has an overwhelming military force. We are the strongest power on the planet right now. To stop the nuclear program in Iran would call for, in some cases, potentially a fairly significant loss of life because the Iranians—like their Hezbollah puppets—have built a lot of their nuclear research infrastructure underneath civilian neighborhoods. Now their reactor sites like Natanz and several of the other major nuclear installations are pretty much out in the open, but the research facilities are, unfortunately, literally under civilian neighborhoods. So to go out and blow up the reactors or take out the key elements, and to do what they call “nodal targeting”—take out the key points—that could be done very easily.
But that’s only [taking out] one part—the ability for the Iranians to produce their own nuclear warheads. There are some observers who believe that the Iranians already have nuclear warheads, that they got them from China, Pakistan, or some of the former Soviet Union.
You don’t take on Iranians directly with military force, but do it by air—that’s what the Israelis did in Lebanon, tried to do it by air. What we’re finding out is a lesson relearned, which is, if you’re going to take land and you’re going to try to win, that war is about people and you can’t do it neatly. It takes people on the ground going in and saying there’s a new sheriff in town. Until you’re willing to do that—until you have the political will to do that—all you do is poke and prod. A savvy enemy like the Iranians will be very quick to pick that up.

MDE:

Where’s the funding for terrorists coming from?

Capt. Nash:

It’s being funded through Iran mostly on the Shia side, and it’s coming from $75 a barrel for oil. Iran is a major oil producer, and their coffers are full right now. They’re taking that money and they’re using it to subsidize their political activities. They have, in fact, incorporated Hezbollah as part of their foreign policy. It’s actually run through the Islamic revolutionary Guard Corp.
[They are also] funding groups that they hope one day will rise to the status of Hezbollah. They’re at work in Africa and all over the rest of the world. In the Islamic world, they’re trying to create the funding and the nurturing for these groups so that they’ll grow.
Even the Arabs are starting to pay attention to this now, because the last time the Persian Empire stretched from modern-day Iran to modern-day Lebanon was in the seventh century. You have a lot of the existing regimes on the southern part of the Gulf starting all the way over in Pakistan and Indonesia and running west to Morocco [that are all Sunni]—that’s the Sunni belt. And if there’s only one thing that the Sunni extremists hate more than Jews and Christians, that’s Shia—because they consider them the ultimate blasphemers. When you get into the differences between Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, you see the difference between Sunni extremists and the Shia extremists. You would think they would be fighting each other when in fact what you’re seeing is Iran [Shia] supporting Hamas [Sunni] and supporting Al Qaeda [Sunni Wahabist] by giving them refuge from Afghanistan, as well as supporting [Hezbollah and other] Shia terrorists. This is more about winning a war, and they’ll sort their grievances out later. Right now they have a common enemy, and that’s Western civilization.

MDE:

If Iran went nuclear as a Shia state, would it precipitate a nuclear arms race among the Sunni states with Russia?

Capt. Nash:

I don’t know if the Russians would be the supplier, but if Iranians were to have nuclear weapons capability, the Saudis would want it. Everybody along that Sunni belt—especially those right around Iran and within missile range of Iran—would want nuclear weapons. When you think of the instability of that region, then arm people with nuclear weapons, then throw in one of the most troubling aspects of the current Iranian regime—which is this Shia Twelvers or apocalyptic vision of the return in the Twelfth Imam—it’s more than scary. It’s something that has to be dealt with before they get those nuclear weapons.

MDE:

How much time do we have?

Capt. Nash:

That depends on who you talk to. If you talk to our Central Intelligence Agency, I think they are on record as saying about ten years. If you talk to the Russians, there are reports in the press where the Russians say they are eight months to a year [away]—and the Russians should know because they’ve been supplying and working with the Iranians. The CIA has missed a couple of rather large things in our recent past, so I don’t know how good CIA intelligence is. I don’t know how good our “on-the-ground” intelligence in Iran is, even though we’ve been at war with Iran since 1979. I don’t know the status of our intelligence networks, but I’m afraid that it’s probably not as good as we would like.
The threat from a nuclear Iran is that their nuclear weapons [would be] insulated from conventional attack if they can reach interests of the United States with nuclear weapons. In other words, with nuclear weapons they can shield their current way of doing business. They could step up direct support for terrorism around the world—be much more blatant about it than they are now—knowing that if they were ever struck, they would launch nukes [against U.S. allies].
So now, all the options are off the table except doing a massive preemptive strike on Iran to try to avoid that. That’s the problem with this. Once they get nukes, the whole calculus changes—not just in the region—but they’re also working on their rocket programs, their missile programs, and they’re working on those harder almost than they are on their nuclear program, because they know once they get the range of those missiles [where they want it], then they can reach out and touch anybody once they put nuclear warheads on those missiles. [Then] they’re not going to be worried about people coming after them to stop them from flipping the world upside down with terrorism.