Rob Kall: Okay. Let ' s talk about Neoco ns and the Project for a New American Century .
In terms of today, what do you " you ' ve had some pretty close exposure with it. You brought it up.
What ' s your take on the N eoCcons in the Obama administration, and in the potential Romney, or as we ' re now calling him, " Bishop Romney, ' administration?
Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, the people around Mitt Romney scare me. They look like the same people, in many cases they are the same people, that marched us down the road to this war with Iraq, which I think was the most disastrous decision in post-World War II American history. A s trategic failure, a strategic mistake, of the very first order. The same people around Romney right now , not all of them, but many of them, are fast at work trying to work the same kind of magic, if you will, on the Romney A dministration with regard to war with Iran. It is eerie how similar their tactics are, how similar their ruthlessness in carrying out th ose tactics, i s. Some of the same characters. I mean the recent de- listing, for example, of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, t he so called " M.E.K. ' , the Iranian terrorist group. And that ' s exactly what they are, is terrorists. The recent de-listing by Secretary Clinton, while it might have been an understandable act prima fa cie , that is to say , you had to reward them for finally getting out of the camp they were in Iraq, or you ' d never get the m out of that camp. It was a completely idiotic and illogical move in every other respect. These people are terrorists, and they will likely become Ahmed Chalabi in the Iraqi National Congress for a march to war against Iran. So we ' ve set up the same kind of apparatus. They can feed us false intelligence, they can feed us all this Domesday information about Iran , as Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress fed us at the time about Iraq. So they ' re operating off the same sheet of music. It ' s eerie . T hey clearly consider the rest of us Luddites, idiots, morons, or whatever, because they haven ' t even changed their modus operandi . They ' re just pushing the same kind of music to get us to go to war with Iran. And it ' s essentially the same people, whether we ' re talking Michael Idione , or some of the more influential people, it appears, like John Bolton with Mitt Romney ' s camp aign staff .
Rob Kall: Yeah.
Bu t wait a second.
Now it was Hilary Clinton in the Obama administration, that did authorize the de-listing from the terrorist list , of M.E.K.
It wasn ' t Romney. So that ' s " so are you saying this is a N eocon move ?
Lawrence Wilkerson:
This is a N eo c on move. And the fact that Clinton went along with it, the President went along with it, ha d more to do with not showing any angle on any national security issue prior to the elections , than it did anything else, politically speaking. Practically
speaking, as I said, it had to do with the Secretary ' s frustration over not being able to get the M.E.K. to move in Iraq, and the only way she could get them to move was to promise them de-listing.
Rob Kall: Got it!
Lawrence Wilkerson: This is comparable with the move by Zbigniew Brzezinski under the advice of Henry Kissi nger and David Rock efeller in 1979, which Carter reluctantly took and reversed his own decision in his own mind to allow the Shah into the United States for medical treatment. We thought we were just doing something that was practical and expected of us, and in fact what we were doing was causing Americans to be taken hostage, remain hostages for 444 days, and essentially ruining the entire Presidency of Jimmy Carter. These are the kinds of things we do these days. We don ' t put ourselves in the other person ' s shoes , in this case, Iran ' s. And we don ' t think what our actions will have as a long term impact from their perspective. We do that constantly . This is another similar act.
Rob Kall: Now when you say " we ' , now it seems to me like the N eocons are thinking through exactly what the consequences and repercussions will be. And they push ; An d then others , leaders who aren ' t thinking it through, who don ' t have good advisors, are taking action s where they don ' t think about the consequences that the N eo c ons are actually looking to produce.
Lawrence Wilkerson: I agree. I agree with that, especially when assessing some of the more insidious of the N eocons. But I also give them credit for having a point of view! Their point of view is much like Israel ' s point of view. If you saw the recent piece in Harpers magazine by Colonel Andy Ba cevich at Boston University, you understand what I ' m talking about. We are becoming " Israelized " in terms of our national security. Israel believes that it has " 'P eace' for Israel is it ' s total and utter dominance over everyone and everything that might threaten them. Well, we ' ve taken on that same sort of strategic outlook. " Peace," for us, is our domination of everyone in the world who might conceivably ever throw a rock at us. This is the N eo c on point of view. And as I said before, I can understand that point of view; I don ' t sympathize with it, I don ' t share it, b ut it is an explicable point of view ( in their mind s), and from a rational point of view I can say "OK , that was Rome ' s purpose. [He what] comes at its most imperial stage , is going to feel that way ' . That it needs to keep everyone and anything down in the world that might even potentially threaten it. This is the neo - Conservative position. It is a very understandable position if you believe that we are in the final stages of empire. There are many people, historians and others, who will argue just that.
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