The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (36 page)

MDE:

Does this threaten Israel—our greatest allies in the fight against terrorism—or what we’re doing in the war against terrorism?

Capt. Nash:

I think Israel is definitely an ally in fighting terrorism. I don’t know whether the UK or Israel would rank as our top—personally I think it’s the UK because of the steps that the United Kingdom has taken in the war on terrorism and the support against the odds of world opinion. The rest of the world has pretty much cowered from this threat. They’re afraid of it. They have large, indigenous populations of immigrant Muslim communities. They have not acclimated them well—and because of that you wind up with these conclaves of an immigrant population that is not being assimilated. That’s a difference we’ve seen here in the United States. People who come to the United States are assimilated into the culture and they get along and we have tolerance.
In a lot of European countries are very homogenous societies—you know, France, Belgium, Germany. They’re trying to keep peace at home. They’re playing to domestic politics as well as international politics.
The Israelis are unallied because they’re personally threatened. They’re surrounded, and you’ve got the head of the Iranian government publicly stating on multiple occasions that we need to wipe Israel off the map. So they’re in the war on terrorism and have been in the war on terrorism because they’ve been at ground zero up until this point. Well that ground zero changed on 9/11, and it actually changed back in the 1980s when our embassies [in Africa] were being bombed, and when our embassy in Beirut was taken down. When we had U.S. people captured, held prisoner, and then executed by Iranian-backed terrorists organizations in Beirut. This has been going on for a long time. So, yes, we’re at war. The UK is our best ally, and the Israelis are in it [as well].

MDE:

Talk to me about Iran’s involvement in Iraq. Are they killing American soldiers?

Capt. Nash:

As U.S. forces swept north from Kuwait up the Mesopotamia and into Baghdad, Iranian intelligence was flooding operatives into southeastern Iraq. So right behind as our forces went up, their forces were coming in. They set themselves up like nongovernmental organizations providing food, medical supplies, blankets, [and medical] care when actually they were Iranian intelligence organizations. They fell right in on a lot of the Shia mosques. They had supporters in there undercover for some time, and they started taking over a lot of the communities in southern Iraq. What followed—and we have definite proof of this, because we have captured people in Iraq that have had Iranian training—the Iraqis have captured Iranian fighters, and we’ve captured a lot of Iranian weapons.
When I was in Baghdad, I actually held one of those explosive devices—IEDs—in my hand. At the time it was the latest threat—a brand-new generation. It actually forms a projectile when it blows up that pierces armor plate. You have to manufacture these things. It’s not rocket science, but somebody has to know how to do it to make them effective.
Iranians have been doing that. We know they’ve been doing that. The Iraqi defense minister has called Iran “the number one threat to Iraq,” because he can look down and see that is what’s happening.
On one side you had the Iraqi Shia, who are Arab, across a political border from the Iranian Shia, who are Persian. The difference—even though they are in a similar religion and ethnicity—was a barrier. It is not just the political border.
But [at the same time] there was family that was going back and forth. In fact, there were a lot of the Arab Shia who fled Iraq and went to Iran because they were being persecuted by Saddam Hussein—so these communities have some tie-ins.
On either side of the border you had disaffected Diaspora willing to go back and fight the government from which they came. You had Iranians in the MEK [People’s Mujahedin of Iran] willing to do that in Iran, and you had Iraqis in Iran willing to go back and fight in Iraq.
If Iran can get control of the southern oil fields in Iraq, this is more than just uniting the Shia. This is more than an Adolf Hitler view of reuniting the German people. Now that we’ve been in Iraq and we’ve done the mineral exploration, our forces are convinced that Iraq—not Saudi Arabia—has the largest oil resource on the planet. The vast majority of those oil reserves are in the Ramallah field, which is in the southeast part of Iraq. In other words, it’s right under the Shia territory. So the Iranians are looking at uniting Shia and becoming the world’s largest holder of oil. Then add being on the border of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia—that’s a powerful inducement for them.

MDE:

Syria obviously has an agreement now with Iran. They are saying that there’s even talk about the possibility of a future Syria having the Sunni area of Iraq.

Capt. Nash:

One of the biggest problems that we face right now is keeping Iraq together. There are three main divisions. The vast majority of the population—about 60 percent—is Shia, and they’re in the south. They’re sitting on all that oil—and they’re sitting on some of the most beautiful agricultural land in the world.
You have the Kurds up in the north, a smaller percentage of the population, we’ll say 5 to 10 percent—then you have to throw in a lot of other races, but a very small portion—they’re all up in the north. Plenty of rainfall, good land, and that’s where the rest of the oil is. So you have about 10 to 15 percent of Iraq’s known reserves up in the north. The key city there is the refining and drilling city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk is just outside the area that belongs to the Kurds, but the Kurds claim that city. The rest of the neighbors, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, loathe seeing the Kurds get control of Kirkuk, because if they do, they will then have the economic engine that could sustain and empower a free Kurdistan.
And if you look at the Kurdish minorities in Syria, Turkey, and Iran, they’re afraid that they would then, as they have in the past, claim a greater Kurdistan. The neighbors in that northern reach would not want to see an independent Kurdistan. The Shia in the south are not necessarily overjoyed with the fact that they too could fall under this religious monocracy in Tehran. They’re scared to death of that—they really are.
The Sunnis [are] the other 30 percent of the population. They don’t have oil, and they’re not sitting on great agricultural land. What have they got? Look at the courses of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. They flow through Sunni territory. They’ve got all the water. And it flows down into the southern part.
So when you look at this—and our people have—we’ve sent university agricultural experts over to Iraq to look at the soil samples, and they’re convinced that Iraq doesn’t need to pump a drop of oil to be a rich nation because they’ve got more water than anywhere else in the region. They could be the breadbasket [of the entire region]. So when the neighbors look at Iraq, they not only see chaos, they also see opportunity. The Iranians see the oil, the neighbors see keeping the Kurds down, and the Syrians see access to all that water in [and around] Baghdad. That’s why, to keep the neighbors from preying upon the carcass of Iraq, the Iraqis have to realize that their future lies in a sustainable political body called Iraq—as a unified country with defensible borders.

MDE:

Are we safer in America because of the war in Iraq?

Capt. Nash:

We are safer in America than we were before, but I think 9/11 should have disabused everyone of this notion of “Fortress America.” The bad guys came once. There are probably sleeper cells here in this country, right now, and they’re going to keep coming.
You see, that’s just it. That’s the thing we have to get in our heads. They are at war with us. They don’t want to negotiate. They’re trying to kill us. Pretty soon we’re going to wake up to that fact—and we’re going to realize that trying to get into the Middle East and set up shop, if you will, with a democracy—or at least a participatory government—to try to change that mind-set [and] change those basic conditions [is] an idea very far ahead of it’s time.

MDE:

Is this World War III?

Capt. Nash:

I think it is World War III, and it’s not World War III—not in the traditional sense that we think of with World War I and World War II, where you had uniformed armies fighting each other. We’re going to see more and more of these state-sponsored but stateless terrorists group. If you look at Hezbollah—it’s not just in Al Qaeda—when you look at Hezbollah, you see a terrorist group that has metastasized and actually taken on attributes of a fully trained army. Very properly provisioned, very well trained, and they also have a political arm that gives them the support of their local population who give them shelter. So they train, and they’re supported by Iran, but they operate in an area that’s their own, and they’re part of the host government—they hold seats in the Lebanese parliament.
Lebanon is very much like the other places where these terrorist groups spring up. They’re places where there’s a weak body politic—where these kinds of organizations can grow and intimidate the local government. In the case of Hezbollah, they were offering support. They were taking Iranian money and building houses and putting the population back to work in southern Lebanon, building schools, hospitals, and clinics. They were using Iranian money to do that to gain the allegiance of the people in the south.
This is very well thought out. The reason the Iranians wanted Hezbollah right on Israel’s northern border is because at the time Iran did not have weapons that could reach Israel. They knew that as soon as they started a nuclear weapons program and that got out, that Israel would not be able to tolerate that, so to protect themselves preemptively from an Israeli strike—knowing they couldn’t reach back—they put weapons and forces right on Israel’s northern border so they could operate them whenever they wanted to. They could use them to poke them in the ribs, or they could use them for a strategic retaliation or strike if they wanted to, anytime they wanted to.

MDE:

Knowing the risk that Israel took fighting this war, could it be that Israel had a phased plan for a preemptive strike on Iran attempting to break one of its proxies?

Capt. Nash:

That’s a good point. I think Israel reacted to the events of July 12 because they had to. And let’s go back to that July 12 period and look at what was going on. The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] was about to make the final determination of what they were going to do—whether they were going to refer Iran to the UN Security Council [or some other action in response to continued refinement of uranium]. The chief negotiator from Iran flew to meet with [an IAEA representative]. [The representative] told him that Iran was going to be sent to the

National Security Council for disposition. At that point,

Iran’s chief negotiator got back in the airplane and did not fly to Tehran—he flew to Damascus. That was the evening of [July] 11. He held meetings with Syrian military and political officials and Hezbollah officials. [The next morning the two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and Hezbollah launched the rocket attacks on northern Israel.]

MDE:

General, can you tell us on how Iran intends to defeat the West?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Western like-minded people should understand the Iranian ideology to impose new caliphate over all the world. They call it Nation of Islam. They perceive the West is a threat to their ideology, to their culture, and they believe that they’ll be able to defeat the West from the cultural point of view and to impose this new government by use of terrorism. Today the Iranian regime is determined to acquire military nuclear capability—first of all to use it as an umbrella for their terror activities. They prefer to use proxies to deal with the West and with Israel—to undermine our moderate regime, and then to dominate the Middle East. Of course to dominate the oil by undermining those regimes who are linked to the West and later on to try to export what they call the Iranian revolution—the Iranian ideology to Europe and to other Western countries using proxies with terrorism—exporting the ideology by force.

MDE:

What is the foundational theology that drives this?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

It is interesting what we are facing today—we are facing different Islamic ideologies. In the Iranian case it is a Shiite ideology, but today the Al Qaeda ideology, which is very different but shares the same agenda and the same strategy. This is the case of the Muslim Brotherhood coming from this different ideology, calling to impose the Nation of Islam all over the world. The Iranian ideology actually is to dominate the Islamic world and to dominate the world by imposing Islam. The ideology is [ultimately] to reach peace and tranquility all over the world.
All the people all over the world should be Muslims—this is the idea. They use this idea of what they call the Mahdi—like their messiah—in order to encourage [people] to be proactive—to [perform] terror activities. By acquiring nuclear military capabilities [they hope] to convince by force those infidels who do not believe in Islam to become Muslims in order to reach peace and tranquility all over the world.

MDE:

Do they believe that an apocalypse would usher him in?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

I’m not sure the idea is apocalypse—they are trying to convince people to convert themselves; like [when] President Ahmadinejad in his eighteen-page letter to President Bush actually recommended he be converted to Islam—not by force, but he tried try to convince him. He really believes in it. For westerners it might seem ridiculous, but he says what he means and he means what he says. In the letter—in calling to wipe Israel off the map and so forth—he means what he says. He really believes in it, so they prefer to convince the westerners.
This is the idea of Hamas. Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have it in a speech in Damascus. Last February, after they won the elections, he was talking about the Nation of Islam, and he recommended the westerners to be converted or not to support Israel, otherwise they will be full of remorse. They speak the same language although they do not share the same ideology—but the most tenuous force today regarding this kind of ideology is no doubt Iran.

MDE:

Talk to us about Iran’s nuclear program.

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

No doubt today there is not any dispute in the Western intelligence community that Iran is determined to acquire military nuclear capability. This is not just a civilian project. We have information in the last decade that there is a clandestine Iranian military nuclear project. They will try to overcome the problems in the enrichment process, but they’re on their way to overcoming it—they’re on their way to acquiring it. And according to the experts, it’s a question of a couple of months—I’m not sure how many months—to reach what they need to have—[that is] the indigenous know-how to be able to enrich the materials and to be able to produce a bomb. Then they will have a couple of years to build—to actually produce—the bomb, but no doubt they are determined to acquire the military nuclear capability. What we [have] faced in the last couple of years—especially since 2004 when the IAEA exposed their clandestine project—[is Iran] trying to gain time in order to go ahead with the process. Unfortunately, they feel like they are succeeding to manipulate—to deceive—the West and to go on with the project.

MDE:

How big is their project, and are the Russians involved?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

You know, I was the head of the intelligence of the Israeli Defense Force in the years ’95–’98, and actually I personally met Russian officials and introduced them to the information that we had about Russian experts involved in the missiles project—and of course a nuclear project at that time. Russian administration at the time denied it, but we had evidence of Russian involvement at the time. So no doubt when we are talking about the missile project it was even before the Shahab-6, which is already operational today. We had all evidence about Russian involvement in this project.

MDE:

How many sites are we talking about?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

This is not one site like it was in Iraq. We are talking about dozens of facilities dealing with this project.

MDE:

And what is the difference between their sites now and the Iraq site?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

In the Iraqi case, it was one reactor, Osirak, that was destroyed by the Israeli air strike in 1981. Today the Iranian regime has learned a lesson from the Iraqi case and they have many facilities—[they] know it’s a challenge for intelligence, but we can cope with it.

MDE:

Are they built underground?

MDE:

What kind of threats has the president of Iran made against the state of Israel?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

President Ahmadinejad declared that Israel should be wiped off the map. He referred to it at a conference with the title “The World Without Zionism.” They had another conference about “The World Without America.” So they see Israel as a spearhead of Western culture—Western civilization—and believe that on the way to defeat the West, Israel should be defeated, and this is the reason that he supports all the terror organizations that operate against the State of Israel—like the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Hamas, Fata activists—on an individual basis. He believes that this is a step on the way to defeating the West. In this stage, Israel should be wiped off the map—and he really believes in it—and he believes that he’s able to implement it.
Unfortunately, he’s encouraged from our decisions like the fighting in Lebanon and in the Gaza Strip. We did it especially because of Israeli internal considerations. It was perceived—and is still perceived—by the Iranian regime as weakness—and he is encouraged by Israel like he is encouraged by the U.S. difficulties of the coalition—the difficulties in Iraq. Of course he’s accountable for it as well because he does his best not to allow any political stability in Iraq behind the scene, and he provides the know-how—the terror know-how—he provides it to the insurgencies like the IEDs, improvised explosive devices, Iranian-made. And of course he does his best to undermine those moderate regimes who are linked to the West, like in Jordan, in Egypt, in Persian Gulf states, and unfortunately, he feels like he’s winning because he doesn’t face any determination from the West and he goes on with his policy using the proxies and acquiring the military nuclear capability for his benefit.

MDE:

You’re saying that many of our troops that are blown up are actually blown up by military devices that are coming from Iran?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

No doubt about it. The coalition troops—the Americans, the Brits, the Italians—who are blown up today in Iraq are blown up by Iranian-made improvised explosive devices. We faced the same devices in Lebanon used by the Hezbollah—Iranian-made devices—the same. We intercepted these kind of devices on the
Karine-A
—the ship that came from Iran—and we intercepted [it in the Red Sea] trying to smuggle these kind of devices to the Palestinian terrorists—so no doubt this is Iranian-made.

MDE:

When Iran uses the term “The Great Satan” referring to America, what do they mean?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Israel is perceived by this regime as a small Satan. The Great Satan is America—and actually the Iranian regime is challenging the United States as the leader of the Western culture. Israel is a marginal issue on the way to defeating the United States. Today the Iranian regime is concentrating on dealing with the American interest in the region—like in Iraq, in the Persian Gulf state, and in Israel. [They see America] as a spearhead of Western culture and religion. But the strategic goal is to defeat the United States—to defeat the Western culture—to defeat the Western values—and to impose the new caliphate and the Nation of Islam.
In the end, I believe that if they are successful in the Middle East, they will approach Europe, and of course the United States—and actually the Iranian regime has the terror infrastructure even today—a sleeping terror infrastructure everywhere. Like they did it in Argentina in ’92 and ’94 against the Jewish communities, like they did it in Europe against their opponents in Germany, and elsewhere—in Asher. Everywhere they have the sleeping terror infrastructure to be used on the day to come.

MDE:

If Iran gave the nod for those with the infrastructure to harm us that are living within our country, what are they capable of doing?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

You can look to what happened in Germany toward assassinations, and you can look back to what happened in Argentina, which was blowing up huge buildings—the Israeli embassy and the Jewish community center—so they have the capability to send a truck loaded with explosives to blow any building in the United States or anywhere in the world.

MDE:

Israel has dealt with—in the last six years—over twenty thousand attempted suicide attacks. Obviously it has worked for them to achieve their objectives with Israel. Crime has paid for them in many ways, from their perspective. Is there any possibility that they could try that in the United States?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Why not? Using homicide bombers—I don’t call them suicide bombers but homicide bombers—it becomes very effective from their perspective. From their perception, it becomes very effective. They believe that Israel retreated from Lebanon because of these kinds of terror attacks. Talking about the radical Islamists, they believe—all of them—Al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iranian regime—they believe that they defeated Russia as a superpower—why [would they not believe they are] able to defeat the second superpower, or the first one—the United States—by using their determination or their will?
Not all of the West has the power, but actually I’m not sure that the West has an understanding, the awareness, the will, and the determination, and [Islamofascists] have the will and the determination and believe that they will win by their advantage of will and determination and that we just have to listen to them—to Osama bin Laden, to Ahmadinejad, to Khaled Mashaal [leader of Hamas]—and of course to the main generator today for any terror activities all over the world: the Iranian regime.

MDE:

When you said that they believed they defeated the Russian Soviet Union, were you referring to the Afghan war?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Yes, of course. The radical Islamists today, they feel like they are winning. They feel like they are winning although they do not have the power—but they believe they have the will and the determination.
Why do they feel that they are winning? First of all, they believe [that if] they defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, then [they] will be able to defeat the United States. Secondly, they believe the Hezbollah defeated Israel in Lebanon. It was a victory for terror, according to their perception. They believe that they changed the Spanish policy because of the devastating attack in Madrid in 2004. They believe that Israelis withdrew from Gaza because of the Hamas terror attacks, and of course they are encouraged from the Hamas political victory in the [Palestinian] elections.
They’re encouraged by the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in Egypt. They’re encouraged today from what’s happening in Mogadishu in Somalia, and of course they’re encouraged from the coalition troops’ difficulties in Iraq, and from the political difficulties here in Washington for the president—for the administration. So they feel like they are winning and they are very self-confident today that they are on the way to defeating the West.