The Chris Hedges Report: The World According to Trump

Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, provides insight into what a Trump presidency may look like outside of the borders of America.

By Chris Hedges
The Chris Hedges Report

Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States and given the host of global debacles the U.S. has its hands in —ranging from the genocide in Gaza, to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Iran to the Ukraine war — nobody is quite certain what direction the country will take with the former president at the helm again.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. With his extensive insights and expertise into the Middle East and American foreign policy, Wilkerson provides a valuable understanding into what a Trump presidency may look like outside of the borders of America.

Wilkerson predicts Trump will stay true to “his disdain for war,” emphasizing “it’s genuine. I don’t think he likes war. I don’t think he likes starting wars.” Regarding Ukraine, Wilkerson thinks Trump will shut down the war effort. But when it comes to the Middle East, that commitment clashes with one of Trump’s long standing loyalties: unwavering support for Israel.

War with Iran seems increasingly likely by the day despite, according to Wilkerson, resistance from the Pentagon and prior administrations. In the case of Trump, however, “you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president of the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel,” Wilkerson notes. He adds, “Trump has made it quite clear that that’s his policy, that’s his belief, and I think he’s being honest about it.”

Host: Chris Hedges

Producer: Max Jones

Intro: Diego Ramos

Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript: Diego Ramos

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris Hedges: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, retired and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is a Vietnam War veteran, who attended Airborne School, Ranger School and the Naval War College, and who, as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, logged over 1,000 hours on combat missions. He went on to serve as deputy director of the Marine Corps War College at Quantico and was executive assistant to Admiral Stewart A. Ring, United States Navy Pacific Command and Director of the United States Marine Corps War College.

His disillusionment with the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East followed the revelations of detainee abuse, the ineptitude of post-invasion planning for Iraq and the secretive decision-making by the Bush administration that led to the invasion of Iraq.

At a congressional hearing recorded on C-SPAN in June 2005, he gave his analysis of the Iraq war’s motivation:

“‘I use the acronym OIL,’ he said, ‘O for oil, I for Israel and L for the logistical base necessary or deemed necessary by the so-called neocons – and it reeks through all their documents – the logistical base whereby the United States and Israel could dominate that area of the world.’”

Wilkerson has said that the speech Powell made before the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003 — which laid out a case for war with Iraq —included falsehoods of which he and Powell had never been made aware. “My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life,” he has said. “I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council.” He called the U.N. presentation “probably the biggest mistake of my life.”

He has taught at the College of William & Mary and George Washington University. He is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military, intelligence and civilian national security officials who describe themselves as offering “alternative analyses untainted by Pentagon or defense industry ties” and countering “Washington’s establishment narrative on most national security issues of the day.”

Joining me to discuss U.S. foreign policy, the conflicts raging in the Middle East, including the genocide in Gaza, and the fate of the American empire is Lawrence Wilkerson. 

Let’s begin with the election and its effect. I mean, you saw the intelligence community, [retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark] Milley, all sorts of figures essentially joined the Democratic campaign in support of Kamala Harris. Let’s talk about why Trump triggers such deep animus within the Pentagon and the intelligence community, and what you see happening during a second Trump administration.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think the animus was created — within my community anyway, I still call it that, the Pentagon, the military in general — because they don’t see any concerted effort on his part to express a strategic appraisal that agrees with theirs. Theirs being the one most parroted by The New York Times, for example, and others of their ilk, who are simply spokespersons for the military industrial complex and for the national security state, which we have most assuredly become.

And so they’re worried about anyone who would come in and threaten to break the china. And that’s what Trump, that’s what his forte is, starting to break the china. And they’re very protective of their china, just as are the national security agencies in general and the 16, I guess it’s 16 now, entities that we have that are supposed to be our intelligence eyes and ears, led by the C.I.A. Not led by the DNI, because he still has no real power over the C.I.A., but led by the C.I.A.

I would say [C.I.A. Director] Bill Burns is the most powerful guy in the United States with regard to intelligence and what goes to the White House and what doesn’t go to the White House. So that’s part of the reason they just don’t know this guy, except from the first term. And the first term would not, through Kelly and Milley and other people’s eyes, give you much hope if you were a Pentagon member of the bureaucracy, if you will.

The second reason, I think, is because he’s so mercurial. He’s all over the map, and the military doesn’t like that at all. They like constancy, even if it’s incorrect constancy. They prefer constancy to change and mercurial nature. And I think that’s a problem with them. And there’s a third reason too, and that is that they’re worried about what I call Christian nationalism, some of them anyway, others are aiding and abetting it. And what that means, in essence, is not just this far flung, but very ripe and alive effort by certain Christian groups in America to make Christianity the national religion, to change the Constitution in that effect, or to discard the Constitution with regard to religion, but they’re worried that they have flag officers in the military who are very much Christian nationalists.

We have an occasion right now that we’re looking at it, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein’s group out in New Mexico, where the [inaudible], the three star general who is the chief of personnel, the personnel man for the chief of staff of the Army is married to a woman who rolls in the aisle and speaks in tongues. And Mikey’s obtained a video of this general in uniform being at one of her gatherings with this group.

That’s just the surface, if you will. There are people like General Flynn, for example, who are still in the military. So that’s disconcerting for the bulk of the military that doesn’t subscribe to this theory or this desire to do away with the Constitution when it comes to freedom of religion. Those things are bothering them, and Trump has shown a propensity to use the Christian movement in this country for political gain and to not have much in the way of regard for what that might mean otherwise. So that’s disturbing.

Chris Hedges:   Yeah, I graduated from Harvard Divinity School and wrote a book on the Christian right a little over a decade ago, called American Fascist: The Christian Right and the War on America. And of course, I know Mikey’s work well. Let’s just unpack that. Why do they see Christian nationalism — it’s interesting that you raise that as an issue — why do they see that as such an important issue? Just explain, in their vision, and perhaps yours, how that could roll out in a really negative way. You’re

Lawrence Wilkerson: You’re talking about the way the military looks at it, yeah, at least those who aren’t… Yeah, I think they’re most concerned about it in terms of what it might mean for the tyranny that would have to come along with it, and they’re having to enforce that tyranny, because if you make Christianity the national religion, and that’s their ultimate goal, is to not just put Bibles in classrooms and stop abortions completely, not those social issues that always loom up, and paint them with their brush. The secret that they want no one to know until it happens is they do want Christianity to be the national religion.

In that regard, we even have a branch of American Catholics who are working on this. If you look closely at what’s happened in the last 50 years, in particular, with the Catholic Church. My wife was Catholic, so I’m aware of some of the things in the Catholic Church that I wouldn’t have been aware of had she not been. She’s passed away now. But if you look closely at it, there is this behind-the-scenes movement in America to create an American Catholic Church. We don’t like it being in Rome, its head being in Rome. We don’t like Francis in particular. We despise Francis. And when I say, “we” I’m using a rhetorical device to describe these people. We’d like to have our own pope and our own Catholic Church. And there are people, some would say, one or two on the Supreme Court right now, are of that mind too, and would work for that, or might be working for that, were they given the occasion to do so.

You put that together, that Roman Catholicism, Opus Dei like Roman Catholicism, and the other people who are, for example, like John Hagee funding millions of dollars to West Bank settlers in Israel, even now. And you’ve got a real fear on the part of rational military people, this might get out of hand. … If you make Christianity the national religion, and you do all the things that you would have to do, constitutionally and otherwise, or just totally disregard the Constitution in that process. What you get, as we have just seen probably enough Americans behind you to do it, then you have a whole different ball game for the military.

Because the military then is called on, domestically and otherwise, and most Americans don’t understand the domestic missions that the Army in particular, but the military in general, has to defend that, and they don’t want to. They think that’s fractious, they think that’s unconstitutional. They think that’s something that would cause more harm than good. And I’m glad to say that there are still some people like that left in my military.

Chris Hedges: Well I mean, Trump has an ideological void, of course, but we saw in his first term that he filled it with these Christian nationalists or Christian fascists, Betsy DeVos, Mike Pence, Bill Barr and others. Certainly it appears that they will fill that void again. I want to talk about Ukraine.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Let me add one other thing. This is not just Trump. Remember, I served in the George W. Bush administration. I cannot tell you how many times I had to deal with the White House personnel office over such things as this man can’t go to Iraq. Why can’t he go to Iraq? Why can’t he serve in Iraq? He’s not a Christian. Talk about counterintuitive.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about Ukraine. I mean, Trump has deviated from the establishment consensus on Ukraine, I never understood, perhaps you can unpack it for me, the whole Ukraine policy, other than as a kind of proxy war to degrade the Russian military and isolate Putin. I was in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down as a reporter. I was there when the promises were made to [the last Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. And of course, as you know, the Soviet Union had to acquiesce to the reunification of Germany. And that was the promise made. And I’m not defending the invasion, obviously, of Ukraine, but we certainly baited the Russians and Putin.

But let’s talk about Ukraine. I don’t see how any military strategist seriously could think that in a war of attrition, the Ukrainians could dominate, but explain what’s happening and then how you see if there isn’t going to be a difference, how you see a difference in a Trump administration’s policy towards Ukraine and Russia.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Let me say, first I was there too. I was special assistant to Chairman Powell, and the change that took place with the advent of Bill Clinton was absolutely disastrous, and I attribute to William Jefferson Clinton a lot of the problems we’re living with today, including the violation, major violation of that promise not to expand NATO. That’s a longer story, better enough for another time.

I think what we’re looking at in Ukraine vis a vis Trump, or Trump vis a vis Ukraine, is his — and I think Doug McGregor, for example, is right about this, I just watched him on Judge Napolitano’s show — is his disdain for war. I think it’s genuine. I don’t think he likes war. I don’t think he likes starting wars. I don’t think he would be a president who… He’ll go off and kill someone like the Iranian IRGC member or other people whom he’s told are terrorists or whatever. But I don’t think he wants war. [inaudible] war, and so he’s willing to shut down Ukraine.

Now there’s another reason too. I think he detests NATO for different reasons than I. I don’t like NATO much either. I think it’s well beyond its sell-by date. And he sees NATO as being — and he’s right in this —as being an aider and abettor — Brussels is — of the war in Ukraine, as Washington is, led by that perfidious [inaudible]. And so he wants to shut that down.

And I think his ultimate goal is to not abandon NATO per force, but he wants to get the United States out of its relationship with NATO, which he thinks we pay for everything we do, all the heavy lifting they do very little.

Come back to the United States, as it were, and say you’ve got our nuclear envelope, but everything else you do because we’re not with you anymore, and of course, save the money that that saves too. I think it was part of his first term, and he just didn’t get to do it the way he wanted to do it. So those, I think, are the major reasons that he will be positive with regard to Ukraine.

Because you’re right, Ukraine is a disaster right now. Yeah, and most apparently, for Ukraine, they’re dying by the dozens every day now, and they have no people left. They’re having difficulty, they’re having to impress young people, bring them into the military to get them to fight. And they’re lucky if they don’t desert within the first week, because either going over to the Russians or running away wherever they can go. It’s a disaster. And we don’t have generals in the Pentagon saying this.

Now we have Lloyd Austin, he’s right there with Joe Biden. But we don’t have generals in the Pentagon, in my view, anyway, who are expressing these kinds of views that generals on the outside are expressing like David Petraeus and Barnes and other generals, who are saying, well, Russia is losing. They’re lying through their teeth. They’re lying through their teeth, either that or they’re just stupid and incredibly dumb, really, not just stupid. So I think Trump would shut that down. And I’m looking forward to that. I hope he does. I hope he shuts it down forth with,

Chris Hedges: Well, they should have read the history of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin would send out a million men who would either get captured or die, and then he’d just send out another million, kind of the Putin strategy.

Lawrence Wilkerson: And people don’t realize that the Wehrmacht— right after it invaded, really, the first 14 months — began to lose almost immediately, partly because of its rapine as it moved along, it made enemies of everyone in its path, even Napoleon wasn’t that stupid. And partly because they overextended and partly because the rule of thumb that Hitler thought would work — his food minister told him it would work — that all that food coming from Ukraine and the steppes of Russia would feed, not only the Wehrmacht forces going that way, but Germany too, didn’t come true.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, that’s because the Russians destroyed everything, scorched-earth policy, we can do another show on World War II, which I have an obsession with, but he also split his forces because of Stalingrad.

Let’s talk about the Middle East. What will be the difference between a Biden administration and a Trump administration vis a vis the genocide in Gaza, in Lebanon, the attacks in Lebanon, which I want you to talk about, because they’re not going particularly well for Israel. And then this knife’s edge we’re sitting on between Israel and Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I could get very complicated and complex here and try to describe what I think is going on over there, and I’ve made as much of an effort as probably anyone in this country to keep up with it. But let me just say right now what I’m concerned about with Trump coming in. I’m concerned about something happening between the time that this is all consolidated, which won’t be long, apparently, and the inauguration and what the Biden administration does. 

Chris Hedges: Let me just interrupt you, Larry, what do you mean by consolidated?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, there’s going to be some court cases and other things, I’m sure, but it’s going to be pretty quick. I think, because the margin of victory is so great. May look razor thin, but it’s pretty great, from what I’ve seen, popular vote and electoral college. So all those things that the election task force I was a member of, for example, were worried about with a razor-thin margin aren’t going to happen. So we’re going to get satisfied, and the votes to the Electoral College, and the process complete pretty quickly. I don’t think the Democrats will be like the Republicans would be had it been the other way around. And I’m a Republican, so I can get away with saying that.

I’m worried about what’s going to happen because I think Bibi [Netanyahu] is still intent (and firing [Israeli Defense Minister] Yoav Gallant was indicative of this par excellence); he’s still intent on going after Iran, but he’s intent on the United States going with him.

And the force deployments that we’ve made, the force deployments we’re making right now, the number of troops we’re sending actually to Israel right now, indicates to me that we are cognizant of this fact. We might not be yet ready to go along with it, but we are cognizant of it to the point where we’re putting the forces in place that we think will be necessary.

I think we’re wrong. I think we’re going to get our rear ends handed to us if we do what Netanyahu wants to do with regard to Iran, which is full-bore war. We’re going to find out how weak we are when we do it. If Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t sufficient, this will certainly seal the deal.

But I’m worried about this interim period, and what the Biden administration might actually do in this interim period, not just to do what Bibi wants them to do, and what I think Joe Biden is inclined to do, but to mess Trump up. I mean, what better way than for the inauguration takes place while we’re involved in a huge war in the Middle East, and it would be a huge war if we go at it big time the way Bibi wants, and we discover immediately that we can’t do what we think we’re going to do in a short period of time.

It’s the old bugaboo again. You know, air power, air power, air power, air power is not going to defeat Iran. It is not going to stop their nuclear program, it’s not going to defeat them. So you wind up with a choice, you either invade or you stop. And that’s not much of a choice, very bad choice, as a matter of fact.

Chris Hedges: So my understanding is the Pentagon was always reticent. They did not want, they blocked, I mean, there was a huge push in the interim between [the presidencies of George  W. Bush and Barack] Obama to go to war with Iran and you know more about it than I do, my understanding is the Pentagon just said absolutely not.

Lawrence Wilkerson: They are saying that now, but you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president the United States is intent on — and this is the one place where Trump really worries me— doing everything in his power for Israel. And Trump has made it quite clear that that’s his policy, that’s his belief, and I think he’s being honest about it. Of course, there’s the AIPAC business and the money involved, and Trump is, if anything, a transactional, “I want the money” man, but I think he’s committed to it in a way that Miriam Adelson, for example, indicates in the amount of money that she gave.

Chris Hedges: She’s his largest donor, I think, $100 million, right? Well, what would be the difference, then, between a Trump administration vis a vis Israel and a Biden administration? Can’t get any worse for the Palestinians in Gaza. What would be the difference?

Lawrence Wilkerson:  I agree with you, although there was, I think, and perhaps this is applicable on the other side too, but there was some political space opening up for Harris. I think she was made aware, vividly aware, of how much the Gaza policy, if you will, with regard to the Biden administration, had harmed them. I would say it probably lost them almost a quarter of the progressives that would have voted for them otherwise, particularly in some of the battleground states, key states.

And that political space opening up, might have changed policy with her somewhat. I’m not saying it would be a [inaudible] but I am saying it might have been a more mellow policy with regard to Israel, and a harder policy on Netanyahu and a complicit policy — and we could do this if we wanted to — to get him out of there. We have the power to get him out of there if we wanted to use it. He’s his own worst enemy in that regard. But we’re not. We’re not doing that. We’re leaving him in there, partly because we know that those around him who might replace him would be just as bad as he, but with maybe a little bit better record and a little bit better outlook on things, especially getting the hostages back.

And we’ve got some hostages that are left alive there too, so that political space would have given her room, I think to change policy somewhat, to meddle our policy a little bit. I don’t think Trump will do that. I think Trump is in for a penny, in for a pound for Israel. And that’s dangerous. I just was looking this morning at the meeting between the Saudi national security advisor, [U.S. Secretary of State Antony] Blinken and [U.S. National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan and others, and very indicative of what’s happening right now.

The Saudis were very forceful about not making a deal until there was a Palestinian state deal that looked like it might have some viability politically, if not in reality. Now they are here, and he just inked the deal, so to speak, making a bilateral relationship go. Israel’s not even in it, a security relationship.

And this adds to the one we just did with the UAE, we just did with Bahrain. All of them are different deals, but they all amount to almost non-NATO major ally status. We just did one with Qatar, where Al Udeid is, the biggest Air Force base in the world, and it looks as if the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, is sort of being wedged aside and we’re doing all these bilateral treaties, if you will, with these countries.

They don’t have the force of treaties, but they’re executive agreements for defense cooperation and so forth, and so that means Mohammed bin Salman is now playing the typical Saudi game of “I like Russia, I like China, but the United States is my old haven, and I need the United States,” so I’m gonna make a bilateral deal with them. If that’s happening, they’re worried about Iran, even though they’re talking more with Tehran than they’ve done in the past, as are all the states, they’re worried.

They’re worried about what might happen. They’re worried about what Iran might do if Israel doesn’t attack Iran’s oil facilities, because Iran will wipe out all the oil facilities it can in the Gulf region, 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. It won’t make any difference that we’re 22 million barrels a day now if they do that, because the price of oil will go to $300 a barrel, insurers won’t insure and shippers want ship, then we’ll have a real problem.

And the Saudis know that, that’s their nest egg, that’s their future. They don’t want to put that in jeopardy, so they’re back with the United States. Now this is a very strange meeting, in my view, because the words were not there to support it, and then suddenly he’s here doing this. I’m worried. I’m worried that we might be walking into a war that we cannot walk away from because of Netanyahu.

Chris Hedges:  But the Saudis, Qatar, they’ve all made it very clear that the U.S. is not allowed to use these bases if there are strikes against Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, the prime minister in Baghdad did too, but we went ahead and let the Israelis fly over Iraq. And I’m told that the king of Jordan said no. Then we did it anyway, and rather than looking like a fool, he said he had grudgingly given permission, so we don’t seem to care about what they think. And if it comes down to it, as this visit has just testified to, I think, if it comes down to it, and they have to choose, they’re going to do what we want to do.

Chris Hedges: I want to talk about what a war with Iran would look like. The Iranian Air Force, as I understand, is pretty decrepit, not very effective, outdated fighters, many going all the way back to the shah. I don’t know what their air defenses are like. Certainly it would start out as an aerial bombing campaign. Would it look like the bombing campaign that we carried out under the Clinton administration against Iraq during the sanctions? Well, what’s it going to look like?

Lawrence Wilkerson: It’s not going to look anything like that. In fact, it’s going to look quite different. And it’s principally because of China, but more so Russia. I think the Israelis, in this last attempt, they’re lying about it now, and I have that from very good sources, they’re lying about it. They’re propagandizing it. They didn’t do any damage at all to speak of to Iran, and the reason they didn’t was because they ran into a buzz saw of Russian-provided air defense systems.

They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to read the radars. They didn’t know how to jam the radars. Their Suppression of Enemy Air Defense, SEAD, did not work. They took a few out, but it didn’t work enough to where the pilots thought they could go any further. So they launched all their missiles, as I think was the plan originally, for the first echelon.

After the SEAD got through from outside Iran, they were deterred from going inside, and they would be deterred again. And there’s every reason to believe that there might be some S400s [Russian air defense system], as well as S300s on the ground and the S400 — sorry Lockheed Martin, sorry, Raytheon consumed by Lockheed Martin — is the best air defense system in the world.

That’s another thing that’s happening right now that’s disturbing our defense contractors: Chinese and Russian equipment is outdoing in Ukraine and in the Middle East, American equipment, which is three or four times as expensive. One of the reasons India is back with Russia again for its armaments and such, despite what our protests are.

So we’re looking at a situation where we will think that aerial will be all we’ll have to do, that is to say bombing. Israel is going to think that, Israel really can’t do anything other than bomb Iran, ballistic missiles and bombing, air-launched cruise missiles and such as that. It’s not going to do it. It’s not going to work. It’s simply not going to work. There’ll be some damage done. There will be some toll in Tehran and elsewhere, in the outlying territories where the nuclear facilities are and such. But it’s not going to work.

So what do you do then? I’ve war-gamed this. I war-gamed it with the lieutenant general in the Marine Corps who took great censure from his own buddies in the Pentagon. He was retired at the time, but he used to be my boss when I was down at Quantico War College, and he said we would lose.

He ran the war game two times just to prove that the computers were not wrong. I think he’s right. I think one of the things the Iranians will do is take out an  aircraft carrier, that’s 5,000 souls on the bottom of the sea or in the water. And incidentally, we now have so few escorts for our CVs, our aircraft carriers, that let’s say there are 2,000 sailors in the water, we couldn’t rescue them all because we don’t have berth space on the escort ships.

Interesting development there. We can’t even man some of our ships because we’re so short in terms of recruiting. I think it would be a disaster. And what do we do when we get into a disaster like that? It’s America. We don’t back away. We don’t retrench. We don’t check ourselves and look around and say, maybe we made an error. We double down. That’s what we’ll do, and then it will be a full-fledged war. And if you like Iraq, and you like Afghanistan, Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it’s even moderately pacified and cost a fortune in blood and treasure. 

Chris Hedges: You’re talking about ground forces going in?  

Lawrence Wilkerson: That’s the only way you rid the country… 

Chris Hedges: Yeah, that’s true. But where do they go in from? Iraq?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, you’d have to sit down and do what we did in the Pacific when we were… I actually had the war plan for taking on the Soviets in Iran. You recall, we were very worried about them, looking for a warm-water port around [inaudible] a typical Russian Empire thing to do, go back and check the history of the Russian Empire. We thought that was the case. So out in the Pacific, the force provider for all of this, we were war planning for fighting the Russians, the Soviets, inside Iran, in the Zagros Mountains and elsewhere. I know that terrain really well. It’s not Iraq, very different country. Great strategic depth, 53 percent Persian. Great homogeneity amongst that 53 percent, lot of problems around the periphery, but basically a homogeneous population, 10 years, $10 trillion and you still haven’t solved what you wanted to solve, which was to defeat the nation anymore than…

Chris Hedges: I’m just curious, where would the ground troops go in from? I have a hard time believing the Iraqi government, which is…

Lawrence Wilkerson: We are illegal, illegal under international law and under our own domestic law. We are illegally present in Syria right now.

Chris Hedges: That’s true.

Lawrence Wilkerson: We’re there protecting oil going to Israel.

Chris Hedges: Which Trump said, got him in a lot of trouble, but was an honest statement.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yeah, and we would go through Syria without batting an eye.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, let’s talk about how it might start…

Lawrence Wilkerson: Incidentally, when we were doing the war gaming out in the Pacific, our major invasion was amphibious. That’d be a little difficult today, we had a lot of amphibious bottoms. The ones we have today are broken. Ask the [inaudible] Marine Corps, and we don’t have many.

Chris Hedges: How would it start? So there would be an Iranian strike on Israel with significant Israeli casualties. What do you see as the trigger?

Lawrence Wilkerson: The debate in Tehran is heated right now, I’m told. This is about 48 hours old, but Doug Macgregor sort of confirmed it this morning. The debate is between the different groups of security personnel in Tehran, the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], The Guardian Council, the Ayatollah, the new president, so forth. Do we continue with our previous plan? And the previous plan was we’re going to smack them and we’re going to smack them really hard. Israel has seen nothing like what’s coming. Much in the way they’re seeing real casualties, significant casualties in Lebanon right now. The debate as to whether to go ahead and do that or not, because they don’t want the new president in particular, doesn’t want war with the United States. They got enough problems. They don’t want war with the United States.

I don’t know how that debate is going to fall out, but if they decide, and Netanyahu wants them to decide this, I’m quite confident of that, to go back whole hog at Israel and do some really significant damage that his [ Netanyahu’s] propaganda machine cannot hide, which he has done a lot of up to this point, like, for example, hiding the casualties in Lebanon. The casualties are enormous in Lebanon right now, for the IDF, they’re enormous.

Chris Hedges: Have you heard a figure? I have not. Have you heard a number?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I’ve heard 4,000. And here’s the kicker, modern armies do not show loss or win by KIA [killed in action], battle, tactical, operational, whatever. They show it by WIA [wounded in action] because they have such sophisticated battlefield surgery and such sophisticated hospitals that … look at our casualties in Afghanistan, what you have is high rates of WIA, the WIA is over 4,000. That’s missing arms, missing legs, you know, whatever. So when you’re looking at a modern army fighting on interior lines in Israel, it’s very interior lines. No evacuation route, hardly at all. You look at the WIA, not the KIA and the WIA in Lebanon are screamingly high right now, particularly for the IDF. I think you’ll see them leaving very shortly, you’ll see them leaving or moving.

Chris Hedges: They haven’t moved very far. 

Lawrence Wilkerson:  No, not at all. 

Chris Hedges:  In terms of interior lines, they haven’t gone very far into Lebanon.

Lawrence Wilkerson: What they’re doing is precisely what they do almost every time they encounter this kind of resistance, though they’ve never encountered this stiff resistance, they bomb the hell out of the cities and the infrastructure, right? They kill Lebanese.

Chris Hedges: They got driven out in ’82 and of course, that’s the invasion that created Hezbollah. I remember Sy Hersh telling me a little while ago that the reason that Netanyahu wants the United States to engage Iran is because he needs the U.S. to take out Iran’s air defense systems, which seems to be in agreement with what you said. Would that be correct?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think so. But I think we are going to get a rude surprise too, when we lose F-35s, extended range F-15s, F-16s and other flights that will come out of Al Udeid and off carriers, F-18s and such. We’re going to lose a lot too. The war game said 30 percent attrition.

Chris Hedges: And is Israel’s motive the same as pushing us to invade Iraq, which is Iran is a powerful center within the region that it wants to essentially cripple the way it crippled Iraq, is that the motive behind the Israeli push for a war with Iran?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think that’s the major motive behind it. They see Iran as the last impediment to their hegemony in the region.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about Israel from a military perspective because you know so much more about this than I do. How do you look at Israel in the Middle East from a strategic point of view, as a  ally?

Lawrence Wilkerson: As a total liability. A strategic liability of the first order. And right now, at this moment, right now, I would say, Ukraine notwithstanding, they’re the greatest strategic liability we have.

Chris Hedges: Explain why. Why?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Because there’s no positivity to it. Everything is us, nothing is them.

Chris Hedges: But we took out a lot of those missiles coming in from Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson: We did. We depleted our supplies to the point now where I’m not sure even if we decided we were going to do a major aerial attack on Iran, we wouldn’t run out of munitions very shortly.

Chris Hedges: And the genocide. I mean, I think we supply 68 percent at this point of munitions to sustain the genocide in Gaza. Is that correct?

Lawrence Wilkerson: At least that much. If you look at the entire panoply of things we’ve given Israel, I’d say, Gideon Levy at Haaretz is right when he says, you share 50/50 responsibility for every death in Gaza and, for that matter, in Lebanon too.

Chris Hedges: How do you see it playing out in Gaza? I’ve actually been in the Middle East quite a bit in the last year, in Egypt twice, spent much the summer in Jordan, was in Qatar, was in the West Bank. And everything I can glean, Israel, of course, wants to push them into the Sinai. And the Egyptian military, I was told by Egyptian journalists in Cairo, has just been adamant, has told [Egyptian President  Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi that there’s no way. A Palestinian is, in fact, according to them, if Israel attempts to push the Palestinians into the Sinai and Sisi accepts them, he’s finished. That’s what they said.

But how do you see it playing out? We know what Israel’s intent is, which is, of course, depopulating, annexing northern Gaza. They’re largely towards that goal, creating a humanitarian crisis in the south, but eventually ethnic cleansing, these genocidal tactics are now increasingly being used in the West Bank. How do you see it going? They must be completely aware of what Israel’s intent is. But where do you see that developing?

Lawrence Wilkerson: There are two sets of thoughts, I think, or beliefs, strategic goals in the — and it depends on what body of people you’re talking about. Are you talking about Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and a host of others, Lindsey Graham? Or are you talking about saner people, I would say, on the other side of the aisle, or even in the Republican Party? They think that Israel is doing our job for us, as Bibi Netanyahu is want to say if Israel was not killing or ridding the region of these Arabs, Palestinian or otherwise, and think about how MbS must think about this, we’d have to be doing it. And so he’s doing us a great favor. He’s doing our dirty work for us. He even has said that publicly.

The other side says, No, Israel is our ally and our friend, and we have to stand by them no matter how heinous Bibi is. We’d like to get rid of Bibi. We’d like to put a different picture on Israel, but he’s there, and he’s in charge, and he’s doing what he needs to do.

And then there’s the group that I belong to, I think, that says this is horrible, what we’re doing. And we all warned about this in the military, we warned about this. David Petraeus even testified to Congress one day and let it slip that Israel was a greater liability than a strategic asset, and maybe we ought to think about rearranging the relationship. After that got out, of course, he walked those remarks back, as David is wont to do, but the military understands how much a strategic liability Israel truly is, especially down in the ranks, where people have actually had a chance to look at it, to study it, to look at the history and to understand what’s happened and understand the real history of it, which is often propagandized by the Israelis and the U.S. for consumption by the public. But the military understands that history. The military understands the USS Liberty, for example, they understand that those sailors were machine gunned.

Chris Hedges: Now we should explain. That was the [U.S.] ship that the Israelis attacked and killed, was it 36 or something? I can’t remember.  31 [U.S.]sailors were killed.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yeah, and a bunch wounded, and I don’t think there’s any question, having looked at some of the investigation and some of the obscuration of that investigation, there’s any doubt in my mind that Israel did it intentional.

Chris Hedges: That was the 1967 war.

Lawrence Wilkerson:  Yeah, I don’t know whether it was because they thought we were picking up information that they were uploading an atomic weapon, or they thought we were sharing some of the information we were picking up with a very sophisticated spy ship, which Liberty was, with Moscow in an attempt to bring pressure on Israel. I don’t know what the reason was, because they wouldn’t let the investigators get into the real nitty gritty. President cut it off. But I do know that Israel knew what they were doing.

Chris Hedges: Israel had carried out a series of massacres of captured Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai. That was one of the theories. And the ship obviously would have known about that.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, you remember in the London Times, I think it was reported. And then, when The Times was a good newspaper, and it was reported by the BBC, on Panorama, by the — I can’t remember his name now, terrible short term memory. I was just reading his piece last night where he’s having the conversation with Golda Meir. He sent her a dozen or two or three red roses every time before he went to Israel. And she really appreciated that. So she’d give him the first interview whenever he was there. This time, she wouldn’t give it to him. She said, I have to give it to the Americans, I’m sorry. And he just sent her the roses and everything. Anyway, he did talk to her on the telephone, and he reported this in that article in The  Times and on Panorama. He asked her, point blank, would you use the Samson option? I don’t think he used that phrase. He said, would you use a nuclear weapon if Israel’s existence were in question? Without batting an eye she said, of course. And he said, you understand what that means? And she said, Yes. Now was that for public consumption so that people would understand that Israel was serious about winning this conflict, a conflict they started? The Egyptians didn’t start the ’73 war.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, I know. That’s another myth they peddled.

Lawrence Wilkerson: But I do think that Netanyahu, if his back was to the wall and he were forced to do so, the big question, of course, that was being asked was, even if you knew you would be taking the world into a nuclear holocaust, would you still do it? Yes.

Chris Hedges: I mean, how much damage do you think Iran can inflict on Israel? Israel’s a small country. I think it has a population of 6 million. What does Iran have, 90 million? I mean, I can’t remember.

Lawrence Wilkerson: If you’re talking about between the river and the sea, about 14 million Israeli citizens; 7 million plus are Palestinian and 7 million, not quite as much, are Jews. Very small, not as small as Gaza, no bigger than Greater London, or smaller than Greater London. Gaza is where they’re dropping all that ordinance, just putting the military template on it and saying, how many casualties, how many casualties have been… that ordinance, that concrete, that rebar, those streets, those buildings, the template puts down on the terrain and says, with great accuracy, how many casualties? It’s 200,000. Guarantee it’s not 40-or-50,000. The template says it’s well north of 100,000 and we’ll not know, because you won’t find some of these people, they’re buried so deeply under rubble.

If Israel were to really be attacked by the full weight of Iran, it would be a nightmare for Israel. It’s becoming that way just with Hezbollah. You’re never going to get those Israelis to go back to their homes. They’re going to evacuate Israel eventually. I was told the other day by a friend in Tel Aviv that already, by his count, a million Jewish Israelis have departed.

Chris Hedges: Since Oct. 7, yeah, that’s numbers they’ve hidden. But I’ve heard 500,000 but certainly a significant number have just left the country. And these are often the best educated, they tend to be the secular part of society.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Putin was exercising his prudence and strategic verve by offering any of the Russians who had immigrated to Israel: come back, we need you, you’re our brain trust.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. I mean, one of the things, just to talk about the Israel- relationship, is that [Jonathan] Pollard who gave Israel all sorts of intelligence information, he gave them information on C.I.A. and Russian assets, which allowed the Soviets to roll it all up but he gave it to Israel, and then Israel was giving it to the Soviet Union in exchange for the release of Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. But it destroyed the, obliterated the intelligence operation of the U.S. in the Soviet Union.

Lawrence Wilkerson: And Pollard is now, I’m told, I learned this 24 hours ago, Pollard is now instrumental in and very important to Bibi’s propaganda effort with regard to Gaza and Lebanon. A traitor, and we let him go, and Bill Clinton did almost as much damage as Trump in that regard with Pollard. Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich as his last ignominious act in office. I think it was David Rothkopf, or someone, said that was the most ignominious use of the pardon power by the president in the history of the country. I think they were right.

Chris Hedges: You should explain who he was.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Marc Rich really ran a company that, a huge company that sold, amongst other products, discounted price oil to Israel, and was responsible, in large measure, for Israel’s economic success under the finance minister named Bibi Netanyahu, and then later, as he became prime minister, interrupted only by his fellow mate, Arial Sharon.

Marc Rich made sure that Saddam Hussein’s oil in the U.N. Oil-for-Food Programme was stolen and shipped to Israel. He also made sure that the pipeline in Syria, the one we were just talking about, was pumping to Israel. And he made sure that, eventually, the pipeline out of Kirkuk, out of northern Iraq, which has always had a problem with Baghdad, was shipping to Israel. So one of the reasons Israel’s neo… what do you call their system of capitalism? It’s not quite what ours is, but they have more billionaires per capita than we do.

He made that happen with that discounted oil and now look at what Netanyahu has done. He had inked an agreement with Lebanon for the richest gas field in the Mediterranean thus far. That’s abrogated, it’s all belonging to Israel. Now there was a deal that Gaza had the second richest gas field in the Mediterranean for its own. That’s gone, he’s got that too.

Thirty years of the future needs of Israeli energy are contained in those two gas fields. He’s got them both. Yeah, they’re off the coast of Lebanon and Israel. That’s an important point that’s often missed in terms of the occupation of Northern Gaza, because they need the coastline.

Chris Hedges: Let’s just close by talking about the institutions themselves, the C.I.A., the Pentagon, which, and I mean, I’ll characterize it, but you can correct me if I’m wrong, these institutions appear hostile to a Trump presidency, especially the intelligence community. How much can they damage, constrain, control Trump?

Lawrence Wilkerson: That’s an excellent question. First of all, the intent has to be there, and it has to be at some of the higher levels in order to do that. I’m not sure it’s going to be particularly because he can take care of those levels if he wants to. But if it is there at the second echelon, so to speak, or the second, third echelons, it can be disturbing of anything that he wants to do as it could any president. It can falsify intelligence. It can lead the president astray with regard to serious national security issues.

Right now, one of the most serious issues Trump’s going to face, I think, I’m no economist, but I know a lot of economists, and they’re telling me, the bond market right now is what we should be looking at, not the stock market. In fact, the stock market is euphoric and for the rich. The bond market is saying Trump is going to have one of the worst economic situations by midterm in our history. Our aggregate debt is also saying that. CBO [Congressional Budget Office] released a report saying it’s $50.2 trillion in a decade, decade and a half.

The interest payments on that debt are already the defense budget equivalent, almost a trillion dollars, this year, almost a trillion dollars. By the end of that period, the CBO looked at about 10 to 12 years, and they think they’re being optimistic, it’s going to be 2 trillion. It’s going to be the equivalent of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the defense budget combined.

We cannot sustain that under anybody’s rules of gerrymandering the financial system in the world or whatever, we just can’t stand that. And when the American people understand some of this intuitively, and the crisis of confidence comes with that understanding, and many are saying it’s going to happen on Trump’s watch, he’s going to have a real problem, and he’s going to have to retrench majorly. I don’t know what they’re going to do. I don’t know what we’re going to do as a country when this comes to bear with full force.

Chris Hedges: All right. Well, that was Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. I want to thank Diego [Ramos] Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones] who produced the show. You can find me at Chris Hedges.Substack.com.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

This article is from Scheerpost. 

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