The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (37 page)

MDE:

How important is the support of Americans who have moral clarity in this battle?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

In order to win this kind of war, we need the awareness of westerners. Then we need moral clarity, and then a clear strategy. We sleep. We in the West are sleeping, and we need a wake-up call to understand this threat is imminent. It’s not a theoretical threat, and as long as [Islamofascists] feel like they are winning—as long as they do not witness Western determination to deal with this politically, economically and militarily, they will go on with it. They will use, first of all, the proxies against Western targets anywhere—not just Israel, but Western moderate regimes in the Middle East—and they will go on with it from the Middle East to Europe to the United States.

MDE:

If nothing is done, if the world continues to sleep—if the West continues to sleep—and we wake up a decade from now and nothing has been done, can you describe what America could be like in comparison to your nation when you were chief of staff as it relates to terrorism and the threat—what it could be like in the streets of America?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

It will be more difficult to any administration or government in the West to deal with nuclear Iran because of the nuclear umbrella. Cane said recently that the only worse option—rather than exercising the military option regarding the military nuclear project in Iran—is to have a nuclear Iran. I agree with him because to have a nuclear Iran with this kind of nonconventional regime—with these nonconventional capabilities—this is not even rational. We’re not talking about a Soviet Union–type of leadership. They were rational. This regime is not rational. They have a strong religious belief—and they are driving this strong religious belief to defeat the West.
So first of all, they will use terror like we faced in Lebanon from the Palestinian Authority. They will oppose other countries by undermining them, blackmailing them, by terror activities—a combination of terror activities under a nuclear umbrella—and they will approach Europe and the United States with the use of proxies—not to use missiles, [they will] use proxies—and they have many proxies: Hezbollah, Palestinian terror organizations, and of course [those] run by the Iranian intelligence who were responsible for the devastating attacks in Argentina—special Iranian intelligence used covertly to launch terror attacks against Western targets. So it might come to the United States as well.

MDE:

What part did Iran play in 9/11?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Al Qaeda elements used Iran as a safe haven. [We] can’t say that the Iranian regime was involved directly or in any other way with 9/11, but no doubt Al Qaeda elements used Iran for a certain period of time as a safe haven.

MDE:

I’d like to be able to describe to the American people a visual thing. What visually would they be seeing and hearing if homicide bombers began this strategy in the United States? What would it be like? What would be the particulars?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

There is a sleeping infrastructure—terror infrastructure—today all over the world like we have not seen—not simply in Canada—and this is the case everywhere because we are talking about ideology, which is spread by many radical Islamists. In many cases it’s the Iranian regime talking with Shia elements, and in other cases the Al Qaeda organization—which is an umbrella—an ideology to encourage radical Islamists. I’m not talking about all Muslims. I’m talking about radical Islamists who become terrorists and are ready to sacrifice their lives by becoming homicide bombers, killing infidels, as they call us—Christians, Jews, Buddhists, whatever other than Muslims are infidels—to kill them, and in this way to convince them to be converted to Islam. All over the world there are radical Islamists who are ready to be become homicide bombers. It might be Osama bin Laden or others. They are ready, so if the Iranian regime decided to implement it here in the United States, they will have the capabilities to do it.

MDE:

Explain what it would be like practically if it happened in New York or DC.

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

I think, practically, today in Israel we assume that any minute a homicide bomber might try to approach any public facility, so we have a guard in the entrance of any public facility, which is any mall, any restaurant, any café, any public transportation to defend the civilians from homicide bombers. So it might happen even here.

MDE:

But the American people have never really experienced that type of terror. I know that when they do this, sometimes they work in pairs of twos. They strategically plan it. Describe for us what it would be like if it actually happened here in Washington DC or New York. What would it be like?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Of course people will not feel secure because of the idea of being blown up in a public facility—in the Metro, or in the restaurant, or in the concert hall, or in the theater, or anywhere—to lose your personal feeling of security on a daily basis and to be aware of any suspicious movement—not to trust anyone who goes with a suitcase or with any other bag—which might be an explosive bag—it changes the whole way of life when you face it.

MDE:

You mentioned that this president had the audacity to write a letter to try to convert the president of the United States. If you would attempt to convert the president of the United States, obviously he would certainly want to attempt to convert the American people.

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Oh, of course.

MDE:

Could you talk about that for a minute? Start with the letter.

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Actually, President Ahmadinejad recommended that the president of the United States be converted to Islam. Of course, this recommendation is for all the American people to be [converted] to avoid the conflict—to avoid the war that he declares on the West. Actually, he declares war against Western culture, and yes, he recommends—like any other radical Islamist today, like Osama bin Laden and Khaled Mashaal, who also talks about not supporting Israel and adopting Islam, otherwise you will be full of remorse, you will regret it in the end. Yes, this is the proposal: to be converted.

MDE:

The American people have a tendency to think this is just one person who believes this.

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Actually, in Iran we should distinguish between the Iranian regime and the Iranian people, but when we are talking about the regime we should talk about the ayatollahs, the conservatives—the conservatives who do not allow any reforms and are trying to manage Iran using the Islamic law—who do not allow democracy or democratic values. So we should distinguish between the regime and the people. I believe that most of the Iranian people do not like the ayatollahs—but the problem is not with one man. The problem is with the system—with this ideology of the ayatollahs.

MDE:

How many are we approximately talking about, and how long has this ideology been fed to them?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

We are talking about the Iranian revolution that emerged in 1979 quite successfully in Iran. Although they are not able as a regime to convince all the Iranians to believe in this ideology, they have succeeded in running the country successfully, and actually they succeeded in strengthening their grip in governing—building the intelligence, intimidation, discrimination, pressure against the people—and they are quite successful in their way. So we have to talk about the Iranian regime, not just the Iranian people, like we have to talk about the radical Islamists—not all the Muslims—and the Iranian regime is radical Islamist regime.

MDE:

Most people think of nuclear bombs as missiles, fired through missiles—but could there be a period of time where a nuclear bomb could be put in a cargo container or even brought across a border?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

Actually, the bomb, according to my understanding, might be used by the Iranian regime as an umbrella, then by proxies—not by the regime itself, which means by aircraft or by missile—by proxies—the dirty bomb to be used by terror organizations as proxies. This is the best way to deny accountability and this is the way this regime is thinking about how to gain the benefits of these kinds of activities—like terror activities—and not to be considered accountable. That’s what they are doing now in Iraq, in Lebanon, in the Palestinian Authority, and all over the Middle East against moderate regimes—denying accountability but no doubt generating, financing, equipping, supporting, and encouraging these kinds of proxies. So the idea of using proxies is the most probable scenario, even when it comes to nuclear capability.

MDE:

Would you describe what a dirty bomb is and what kind of damage that could do in a high-population area?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

You can bring a dirty bomb to any city using maritime cargo or air cargo or ground cargo. It doesn’t matter. It might be brought by ship, by airplane, or by truck to be used in a very highly populated urban area like a city anywhere. It might be Tel Aviv, it might be Berlin, it might be New York. And, of course, to cause devastating collateral damage—to kill as many civilians as they can—but to contain it to a certain area like a big city.

MDE:

Our worst horror was 9/11—and we know the number of deaths. Just approximately what would be a rough number [of casualties] if a dirty bomb went off in a highly populated city?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

It might be dozens of thousands; it might be hundreds of thousands of casualties. It depends on the quantity of the materials in a dirty bomb.

MDE:

If Iran is not stopped and they go nuclear, then are you saying that they cannot be stopped—or, if they were stopped, what consequences would that take?

Lt.Gen.Ya’alon:

I believe that in one way or another they should be stopped. They shouldn’t have nuclear capability. I prefer that a military option would be the last resort. We haven’t experienced yet the political and economic option. It should be used early on—and I prefer that by not using the political and economic option—which means political isolation and economic sanctions—we will have to use the military option. I’m talking about the West—like my people—and no doubt Iran will respond to any option. They even might respond to economic sanctions, not talking about military option. They might respond using proxies, terror organizations—special Iranian apparatus—to execute terror attacks against certain targets.

MDE:

Israel is in a great crisis, and you’ve read many books that relate to this subject. One of them has to do with preemption. Talk to me about the Iran crisis—as Israel is faced with it—and the consequences of it as it relates to Israel and the United States.

Prof.Dershowitz:

Iran is the big winner of the most recent crisis in the Middle East. Israel lost many civilians and soldiers. The Lebanese lost civilians, and Hezbollah lost soldiers. Iran lost no one. They gained power, they gained influence, and I think they tried very hard to send a message to the United States and to Israel that their nuclear facilities are invulnerable to attack because they have figured out a strategy for how to fight moral democracies. You hide behind your own civilians. You build a nuclear facility and then you put a hospital on top of it. You build a nuclear facility and you build a school on top of it, and you challenge the democracies. Either kill our children, our weak, our elderly, and get condemned by the United Nations, or leave us alone. What Israel tried to do in Lebanon is get to the Hezbollah fighters without killing civilians, but inevitably some civilians die in the process. In every war civilians die.
Our greatest generation in the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Germany and in other parts of the world where we were fighting in Japan—but Israel is held to a very different standard. Every time Israel kills a single civilian it becomes a first page story, a UN issue, and the blame is not put on those who deserve the blame, namely Hezbollah or Hamas, who hide behind civilians and basically induce Israel to kill them. The blame falls on Israel. So this is the beginning essentially of a new one-hundred-year war that will go beyond my children and my grandchildren’s lives—a war between terrorist tyrannies and moral democracies.
This method of fighting couldn’t work with an immoral democracy. If anybody ever tried this with Russia, Russia would simply do what they’re doing in Chechnya. They would carpetbomb the cities and kill as many civilians as necessary to get at the one military target. It never would’ve worked with Stalin. It never would’ve worked with Hitler. It wouldn’t work with China today. It wouldn’t work with many of the nations in the world. It only works with a moral democracy like Israel and the United States.

MDE:

Now in light of that, how serious of a threat is Iran to the United States?

Prof.Dershowitz:

Iran is a major, major threat to the United States. Iran, if it’s not stopped, will get a nuclear bomb, and it will use that nuclear bomb to blackmail America and other countries. Imagine if Iraq had a nuclear bomb when they went into Kuwait. They’d be in Kuwait today and they’d still be in power—Saddam Hussein and his sons. A nuclear weapon, whether used or hung, is the sword of Damocles—it changes the entire structure and balance of power—and an Iran with a nuclear bomb—especially an Iran more than North Korea, because North Korea’s leaders don’t want to die; they are secularists, and you can deter people who don’t want to die—but many of Iran’s leaders welcome death. They are part of the culture of death. They see life on Earth as only a segue to paradise with their seventy-two virgins—or whatever the rewards are going to be—and it’s very hard to deter a culture that welcomes death. So Iran would be a great threat to the United States.
As Tom Friedman once said, “If terrorists are not stopped in the Middle East, they’re coming to a theater near you”—and they’re coming to the United States, to Europe, selectively in Europe. The French make their own deals, but most other Western European countries are vulnerable to an Iranian nuclear threat.

MDE:

In the latest crisis in Lebanon, it was obvious that they were subcontractors—Hezbollah were subcontractors, the right arm of Iran—but the media by and large exploited that to the advantage of Iran and did not have any sense of moral clarity and didn’t see Jews suffering. Why? Why is that propensity?

Prof.Dershowitz:

The president of Iran is a clever man. He recently had an interview with Mike Wallace where he in many respects bested Mike Wallace—came across as a reasonable, charming person. He is, of course, the new Adolf Hitler without the means currently to do what Adolf Hitler did, but he and his surrogates have basically said their goal is to destroy Israel.
The head of Hezbollah said a couple of years ago that he hopes that all the Jews come to Israel—that will make Hezbollah’s job easier in the sense that they can destroy all the Jews in Israel. They won’t have to chase them around the world the way Hitler had to do.
The goal of Hezbollah, the goal of Hamas, the goal of Iran is not a two-state solution. It’s not peace in the Middle East. It’s the end of Israel and the end of all Western influences in the Middle East—and indeed in the world. This is an apocalyptic war between reason and democracy on the one hand, and between Islamic extremism and tyranny on the other hand—and it’s a battle that will be fought to the death certainly by the Islamic extremists now headed by Iran.

MDE:

When the president of Iran says, “I see the world without Zionism and without America”—does he mean it?

Prof.Dershowitz:

He means it as much as Adolf Hitler meant it. The president of Iran would like to see a world without Zionism—without a crusader mentality—without Western values over which he is the dictator of a fourth Reich. That is what he would like to see. Can he accomplish it? Not without a nuclear weapon—but with a nuclear weapon there are almost no limits to what he could do because he will hide his nuclear weapons among civilians. We in the West, because of our moral code, will not bomb hospitals. We will not bomb day centers for children. We will not bomb schools. They will bomb anything, and it’s very hard to fight an asymmetrical battle. You always hear about asymmetrical battles between Western armies that are more powerful and terrorist armies that are less powerful. There’s a new form of asymmetry in warfare that is much more powerful, and that is the asymmetry of morality.
If you have an amoral and an immoral society willing to sacrifice their own children and their own hospital patients, their own aged people to the war, and you have another culture, Western democracy, that will not willfully kill children, will not willfully kill the elderly, will not willfully kill uninvolved civilians—that’s asymmetrical.
When Israel was threatened with an Iraqi nuclear reactor, they said very clearly, “We are not at war with the children of Baghdad. We will not bomb Baghdad. We will not destroy a nuclear reactor if it means killing the children of Baghdad.” And Golda Meir put it also very, very well when she said, “We can perhaps forgive the terrorists for killing our children but we can never forgive them for making us kill their children.” Countries like Israel and the United States will do anything to avoid killing children, whereas the tyrannical regimes of terrorism will do anything to kill children—they figured out this cruel arithmetic of death.
Every time the terrorists kill a civilian, they win. Every time the terrorists get the democracies to kill a child, they win. It’s a win/win for the terrorists, it’s a lose/lose for the democracies, and it’s all because of the asymmetry of morality.

MDE:

Who is winning the bigger battle in the media as far as Iraq?

Prof.Dershowitz:

Well, there’s no question that Iran and its terrorist surrogates are winning the media war. They’re winning the media war because today, unlike in the Second World War, every civilian casualty is featured on the evening news—the picture of the dead child, the picture of the weeping woman. Imagine if those media images had existed during the Second World War. Every time the United States bombed a facility, a nuclear facility as the British and United States did in Norway to prevent the development of nuclear bombs—every time we bombed a military facility anywhere in Germany, there would be pictures of dead German children and weeping German mothers. It would be almost impossible for the United States to carry out its military activities.
The Iranians, Hezbollah, and Hamas have learned how to use the media and how to use the United Nations—which is a democracy of tyrannies. Namely, every tyranny gets one vote at the General Assembly, and as Abba Eban once put it, “If the Algerians introduced a resolution to the General Assembly that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would win 124/22 with thirty-six abstentions,” and you could figure out which countries would be on which side. When the case involving the Israeli security fence went before the General Assembly, virtually every country that voted to send the matter to the International Court of Justice was a tyranny, and virtually every country that voted against the court having jurisdiction was a democracy—and yet the tyrannies outvoted the majorities.
And so the combination of the United Nations—the democracy of tyrannies—coupled with the media, which focuses always on the pictures of the civilian casualties, coupled with the fact that Israel is an open society and allows the media full reign, whereas Iran is a closed society, Hezbollah is a closed society, Hamas is a closed society. So the media images are always going to be more powerfully used against Israel than against its terrorist enemies.

MDE:

In your book
The Case for Israel
, you talk about why terrorism works and you use the analogy about how Arafat did it. There seems to be an enormous similarity between what’s happening now and what happened then.

Prof.Dershowitz:

Yasser Arafat is the godfather of modern terrorism. He figured out how to use terrorism to his advantage. I didn’t say to the advantage of the Palestinian people, because I don’t think in the end it worked to the advantage of the Palestinian people, but it certainly worked to Arafat’s personal advantage and allowed him to accumulate billions of dollars in payments, basically extortion payments, made by Europe into his own bank accounts—but Arafat figured out how to use terrorism to gain publicity.
The destruction of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich was not the first but perhaps the most publicized. The destruction of airplanes in flight—the blowing up of the Swiss airliner, the attempt to blow up El Al planes, the destruction of four planes on the tarmac in Jordan—all of that brought tremendous attention to the situation of the Palestinians—much more than, for example, to the situation of the Kurds who never use this kind of international terrorism, or the Tibetans who never use terrorism at all—and the Kurds and the Tibetans’ situation in the world today is ignored, whereas the Palestinian situation is highlighted because of their use of terrorism. So they figured out how to use terrorism, and they also figured out how to hide behind civilians and make it difficult for democracies with their high moral standards to get at the terrorists—and that paradigm continues to haunt Western democracies today.

MDE:

In your book
Preemption
, you talk about how the United States tends to look toward its experience. What are the American people thinking when they see the Iran crisis in its present form, as opposed to how you’ve explained how Iran is thinking?

Prof.Dershowitz:

For Iran, this has been a great victory. It’s been muscle flexing; it’s been thumbing a nose at the West—but for Americans, Iran is very far away. Most Americans don’t understand why Iran poses this great threat. After all, they’re so many thousands of miles away. We don’t have soldiers in Iran since the hostages were released twenty-five years ago. We’ve never really lost anybody to Iran, so it’s very hard to create an interest in a problem that’s so distant.
It reminds me again of what was going on in Nazi

Germany in the early 1930s, when Americans were not concerned and isolationist candidates were winning and it was very hard for President Roosevelt to energize the American people to get them concerned about what was going on in Europe at the time—and we better learn the lesson of having ignored Nazism.
The preventative war that was in the middle 1930s—before Hitler became the most powerful figure with the most powerful army in the world—he could’ve been prevented. Winston Churchill said he could’ve been prevented—and most interestingly, so did many of the Nazis themselves. They were shocked that the West, that France, that England, that the United States didn’t attack them when they violated the Versailles Treaty and when they threatened to kill the Jews of the world. We didn’t take them seriously. We didn’t take them at face value—and the potential need for a preventive strike against Iran if they were on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon is also, I think, today being widely ignored in the West.
One of the reasons I personally was against the war in Iraq—for me it was a very close question, but I came out against it—was because I thought it would divert attention away from Iran, which posed a much more serious threat because religious extremism is always more dangerous than secular extremism. I also worried about the rule of unintended consequences—that the tyranny of Saddam Hussein would be replaced by a tyranny of radical Islamists—and unfortunately those fears have come to fruition and the United States probably today does not have the resources—or the incentive—to take as seriously Iran as we would’ve been able to had we not been bogged down today in Iraq. So I think there is a real crisis ahead of us.