Inter­view with “Robert Baer” (a for­mer case offi­cer in the CIA’s Direc­torate of Oper­a­tions served mostly in the Mid­dle East .…Beirut, Lebanon and Iraq Sudan and Morocco. Baer is the auther of the book “See No Evil” which the movie “Syr­i­ana” is based on).

Source: Chrono­gram

The first time I went to see Syr­i­ana, the friend who accom­pa­nied me left after the first half hour. We haven’t really talked about why.

Three years of watch­ing friends’ eyes glaze over while spew­ing the mul­ti­tudi­nous minu­tia of knowl­edge I have acquired work­ing in Iraq have silenced me.

Talk about tor­ture. I loved the film, went to see it a sec­ond time—alone—and want to see it again. It felt famil­iar, as one’s home does when return­ing to it after an absence. And it made me want to talk about Iraq with Robert Baer, a for­mer case offi­cer in the CIA’s Direc­torate of Oper­a­tions. It is Baer’s mem­oir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Sol­dier in the CIA’s War Against Ter­ror­ism (Crown Pub­lish­ers, 2002), that Syr­i­ana is based upon. Baer served mostly in the Mid­dle East—Beirut, Lebanon and Iraq—as well as in Sudan, Morocco, and one tour in Paris. His job was to “run agents or sources across the Mid­dle East gath­er­ing Intel­li­gence.” An Ara­bic speaker, he was con­sid­ered one of the best on-the-ground field offi­cers in the Mid­dle East. In See No Evil, Baer says that there is evi­dence link­ing Iran to attacks on Amer­i­can inter­ests, includ­ing the Kho­bar Tow­ers bomb­ing in Dhahran, Saudi Ara­bia, that killed 19 US sol­diers in 1996. He says that Iran has been mis­han­dled by US diplo­mats since the 1980s, and that Amer­i­can for­eign pol­icy regard­ing the Islamic Repub­lic is based on myths and misinformation.

I spoke with Baer by phone from his home in Col­orado.

Lorna Tychostup: In See No Evil, you talk about how you joined the CIA in 1976, received a Cold War-type of train­ing, and then after the Cold War ended, the CIA was slowly dis­man­tled. Your basic premise is that this dis­man­tling left the US vul­ner­a­ble to attacks such as 9/11.

Robert Baer: The CIA was set up to counter or fore­see state aggres­sion based on the attack on Pearl Har­bor; to fig­ure when the US was going to be attacked and to pen­e­trate the lead­er­ship of var­i­ous coun­tries. When the Soviet Union col­lapsed along with East­ern Europe in the late ‘80s, the CIA was left adrift. They didn’t really know what they were going to do. Were they going to sup­port the mil­i­tary in Bosnia? Were they going to col­lect [infor­ma­tion] on nar­cotics? Peo­ple started retir­ing quickly. The mis­sion was over. The polit­i­cal lead­er­ship of the CIA didn’t really know what the mis­sion was. There was no lead­er­ship and there was no sense that we were at war in the Mid­dle East against fun­da­men­tal­ists. These peo­ple never set foot in the Mid­dle East. Politi­cians, the only place they’d ever been to was Tel Aviv. They just didn’t real­ize there was this grow­ing hate. If you lived in the Mid­dle East, you knew about it. But no one in the CIA was ever asked, “Is this a prob­lem?” And all the warn­ing signs they missed.

LT: Such as?

RB: In 1994, when Alge­ri­ans were going to run a com­mer­cial air­plane into Paris. It was a very well-known case. The French took the air­plane back in Mar­seilles. But no one thought that could ever hap­pen here, and this is in spite of 1996, when they indicted Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mas­ter­mind. They stated flat-out, he was going to run—they knew about this from the Philip­pines investigation—airplanes into Amer­i­can land­marks. Bin Laden in 1994 said he was going to attack the United States, and it was incom­pre­hen­sion at a polit­i­cal level in Wash­ing­ton, that nobody would ever do this.

LT: It spread across many dif­fer­ent admin­is­tra­tions, not just the Clin­ton administration?

RB: Repub­li­cans. Democ­rats. Clin­ton could not care less. He’s just like Bush, com­pletely dis­missed the pos­si­bil­ity of an insur­gency in Iraq. Every­body who had a brain in their head knew that this was conceivable.

LT: In See No Evil you talk of a failed coup in ’95 in Iraq and your attempt to alert peo­ple to it. Ahmad Cha­l­abi was involved. Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan leader Jalal Tal­a­bani was involved. There was actual fight­ing going on, and they didn’t believe you.

RB: No, they just didn’t believe it because it was cloudy. They couldn’t see it with satel­lites. Essen­tially the ana­lysts and a lot of peo­ple at the desk level in Wash­ing­ton have grown up in shop­ping malls, and that’s their reality.

LT: You think it’s that simple?

RB: Sure it’s that sim­ple. They have no idea what an Arab is. There’s this guy that just resigned from the CIA, he ran Iraqi oper­a­tions, and he said out of the 40 peo­ple he had work­ing for him lead­ing up to the war, only two of them had ever met an Arab overseas.

LT: George Bush was in charge of the CIA—

RB: That was the father, but as far as I can tell, he and [Brent] Scow­croft [for­mer National Secu­rity Advi­sor to Pres­i­dents Ford and Bush] didn’t approve of this war.

LT: For exactly the rea­sons that we’re fac­ing now. You also talk about poli­ti­za­tion and polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness tak­ing root within the CIA. Why was that happening?

RB: It’s a reflec­tion of the Amer­i­can soci­ety. It’s bet­ter for the CIA to make peo­ple feel bet­ter about them­selves. For instance, minori­ties get­ting respect. They would have in the cafe­te­ria a Cinco de Mayo day with His­panic food. But were the peo­ple on the desk—the peo­ple that admin­is­tered cases overseas—getting the proper respect? If you stayed in Wash­ing­ton and never went over­seas, and you worked eight to five, you were put in the same pro­mo­tion cycle as the peo­ple who worked over­seas in lousy places like Afghanistan.

LT: The Amer­i­can pub­lic has a love/hate rela­tion­ship with the CIA.

RB: It’s more like a hate relationship.

LT: The CIA is looked upon as being med­dle­some in other coun­tries’ busi­ness, assas­si­nat­ing people—

RB: Well, it has since 2001. Who were the 16 peo­ple that died in that vil­lage? [On Jan­u­ary 13, US mis­siles struck a house in Damadola, Pak­istan, killing 18 peo­ple, includ­ing women and chil­dren. The intended tar­get of the attack was Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second-in-command. US offi­cials claim the attack may have killed four al Qaeda mem­bers, though Zawahiri was not in the house at the time.] This starts to eat away at the con­scious­ness of Amer­i­cans. I don’t know who actu­ally pulled the trig­ger. In that vil­lage in Pak­istan it’s like a black sus­pect in Wash­ing­ton, DC, mur­ders a white jour­nal­ist, and the DC police [go] into a black neigh­bor­hood and start machine-gunning peo­ple because they might be sus­pects. When these poli­cies are laid off on the CIA, peo­ple are mis­trust­ful. In Syr­i­ana, whether peo­ple liked it or didn’t, their reac­tion is, “This all hap­pened.” You say, “No, it didn’t hap­pen, this is a fic­tion­al­ized drama.”

LT: You’re say­ing the CIA isn’t involved in these things and was not allowed to be killing peo­ple, and yet the CIA in the movie is depicted as such.

RB: Yeah, but I didn’t write the script and it’s not a doc­u­men­tary. They had to get that feel­ing of dread across. They couldn’t do it by just sim­ply adapt­ing my book. But there are these instances, like the one in Pak­istan and the one in Yemen in Octo­ber in 2002, where you’re killing peo­ple on the slight­est or wrong information.

LT: We don’t have enough well-trained peo­ple on the ground. They don’t know Ara­bic or Farsi.

RB: It’s also dif­fi­cult to get in these groups. Remem­ber, they’re made up of true believ­ers. Peo­ple who are ready to die are not going to be good spies. You could recruit Amer­i­can Arabs, send them over there to work in a busi­ness, and then get them to infil­trate these groups. At least you’d know that they were recruit­ing for sui­cide oper­a­tions, and who is doing it now. It’s not rocket science.

LT: No, but the fear is, where is the fine line, then, between you find­ing out the infor­ma­tion and blow­ing up the house in Pakistan?

RB: We don’t attack the mosques in Saudi Ara­bia where these peo­ple are being recruited. We don’t even want to know. They’re the peo­ple who are killing us now. Not Zawahiri. Zawahiri is not in charge of Qaeda. And Qaeda is just an idea. Going after him we’re seek­ing ret­ri­bu­tion as opposed to stop­ping future attacks, which are com­ing out of Saudi Arabia.

LT: You raise a lot of ques­tions about the US rela­tion­ship with Saudi Ara­bia, that the US is locked in a “har­mony of inter­ests” that set the stage for 9/11. Give some eval­u­a­tion of Saudi Ara­bia, the US’s inter­ests, and why were there 15 Saudis on the planes. Why were Saudi fam­i­lies whisked out of the US? Why do we have this con­nec­tive tissue?

RB: What’s not men­tioned in my book, or in Syr­i­ana, is Israel. As far as those peo­ple are con­cerned, Israelis are Amer­i­cans. Look at the Israelis. They sound Amer­i­can. They’ve got the same sense of humor, the same sense of irony, they dress like Amer­i­cans; they are like effi­cient Amer­i­cans, espe­cially the military.

LT: They’re backed by lots of Amer­i­can dollars.

RB: And Amer­i­can dol­lars. It’s sort of like if you took a Ku Klux Klan colony and placed it in Detroit and you paid for it. Look at the 9/11 com­mis­sion. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mas­ter­mind, said it’s all about Israel. We have to pay attention.

LT: Osama Bin Laden, in a speech that was released in 2004, said that his soul directed him after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982—

RB: And flat­tened Beirut. This is an irri­tant. Not an irritant—this is the cause.

LT: In terms of US con­nec­tive tis­sue with Saudi Ara­bia, you talk about the money, oil, Saudi fun­da­men­tal­ism, and about how the Saudis fund these fun­da­men­tal­ist groups through char­i­ta­ble organizations—

RB: In the book my ideas become sim­pler and in some cases more refined. The point is that most Muslims—largely, you can’t put a per­cent­age on it—think that we, the US, are at war with Islam. The other fact is that they’ve got 70 per­cent of the world’s oil resources, so our eco­nomic wel­fare is in their hands, and yet we’re at war with them. That’s the con­tra­dic­tion, that’s [what] it comes down to.

LT: The LA Times pub­lished an arti­cle recently about how more than half of the Arab fight­ers in Iraq are Saudis, how mil­lions of dol­lars con­tinue to flow from wealthy Saudis through Saudi-based Islamic char­i­ta­ble and relief orga­ni­za­tions to Al Qaeda and other groups, and that the Saudi gov­ern­ment has not come through on any promises to mon­i­tor this or to really do anything—

RB: They haven’t done any­thing. Who are the cler­ics that recruited the 15 Saudis that were recruited in Saudi Ara­bia? Who ulti­mately paid for 9/11? They haven’t given us even the basics.

LT: What about the respon­si­bil­ity of our coun­try to extract those answers from the Saudis?

RB: Well, it’s like the administration’s approach to global warm­ing: Just deny it’s hap­pen­ing and get through the 2006 elections.

LT: A lot of peo­ple attached to pol­i­tics who are ignor­ing these sit­u­a­tions have some level of eco­nomic interest.

RB: Well, they do, and [in] get­ting elected. Any politi­cian that pro­poses putting 50 cents’ tax on a gal­lon of gaso­line or work­ing up to that will be defeated. We’re addicted to cheap oil—Democrat or Repub­li­can. The Amer­i­can peo­ple don’t want to know. They say, “What do you mean we have to pay five dol­lars for a gal­lon of gaso­line? It vio­lates our con­sti­tu­tional rights. You can lis­ten to our phones, but you can’t make us pay five dol­lars for gaso­line. It’s writ­ten right there in the Constitution.”

LT: We talk about want­ing to get Osama Bin Laden, we have oil lob­bies that are direct­ing our politi­cians away from doing any­thing about any of this.

RB: But it’s also in their inter­est. Obvi­ously, Syr­i­ana was over the top in terms of con­spir­a­cies, but they can get away with it because Amer­i­cans don’t want to pay the real price of oil—no Amer­i­can does.

LT: So you’re say­ing it’s ultimately—

RB: The peo­ple of America’s fault. The irony is, we’re dump­ing bil­lions and bil­lions of dol­lars every time we go to the gas pump into a jihad against us in Iraq that’s killing Amer­i­can sol­diers. I’ve read, “One kid is dying in Iraq so the father of the kid next door can drive his Hum­mer.” And what’s more, the money’s com­ing from Japan and China, and in a cer­tain sense from the Mid­dle East, and then it’s fil­ter­ing back. Black­wa­ter, SAIC, Custer Battle—all these com­pa­nies just basi­cally got the 20 bil­lion dol­lars that was sup­posed to go into con­struc­tion. Con­struc­tion was never going to hap­pen.

LT: Why?

RB: You can’t dump 20 mil­lion dol­lars in a coun­try in the Mid­dle East and have even a tiny frac­tion going into real projects. That’s not the way the place works. So when Con­gress voted for that money, it was out of stu­pid­ity. It was either going to go into the hands of the Amer­i­can con­trac­tors or into the hands of Iraqi crooks. Iraq is a cor­rupt sys­tem. The only way you can really get around this is sim­ply line the con­trac­tors up and shoot them if they stole the money, which of course is not accept­able to Amer­i­cans. It goes back to Ottoman cor­rup­tion, cor­rup­tion under Sad­dam, where his fam­ily was steal­ing vast amounts of money, tak­ing the oil prof­its. For us to go in and turn this around overnight was insan­ity, to think we could do it—nationbuilding.

LT: You opposed the war in Iraq. Why?

RB: I didn’t know about the weapons of mass destruc­tion, whether [Sad­dam] had them or not; I knew there was no evi­dence that he had them. The point is, you can’t have us going in and remov­ing the Arab leader. Peo­ple for­get his­tory. Sad­dam was the shield of the Arabs, which pro­tected them against the Per­sians. I knew that if we destroyed the Iraqi army, the only thing that’d hold that coun­try together were Amer­i­can forces, which would mean a life­time com­mit­ment. I don’t want to spend my retire­ment on build­ing a nation in Iraq. There’s one study that came out that said it would cost two tril­lion dol­lars if we stay there until 2010. I don’t think if Amer­i­cans had been told the truth—that we’d have to spend 10 years there and two tril­lion dollars—that they’d be really excited about this.

LT: Your lay­ing a lot of this at the feet of the Arab com­mu­nity and the cor­rup­tion. Most of the peo­ple I spoke to in Bagh­dad in Feb­ru­ary of 2004 loved George Bush and were very happy to be free of Sad­dam Hus­sein. They took me to task at times when I said I wasn’t going to vote for George Bush. I was shocked by that.

RB: That’s the ini­tial eupho­ria. Not to defend Sad­dam, but if we’re going to lib­er­ate the whole world, where are the resources going to come from? Who is going to lib­er­ate those tribal areas of Pak­istan we’re too afraid to even send a com­pany into? Who is going to lib­er­ate Rus­sia, which is going back into czarist times? I just don’t under­stand the terms of this argument.

LT: I know you talked about Qaddafi, how the US would have done any­thing to get rid of him. What would the result have been?

RB: The same way in Syria—the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. And you’ve got peo­ple at the [con­ser­v­a­tive] Amer­i­can Enter­prise Institute—this is the insan­ity of Washington—you’ve got AEI say­ing we’d be bet­ter off with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in Egypt rather than Mubarak. This is just insanity.

LT: Can you give a brief descrip­tion of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood?

RB: It’s basi­cally as much as you can unify Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism. Bin Laden is a Mus­lim Brother. His tutors were Mus­lim Broth­ers. Arafat was a Mus­lim Brother at one time. It’s a move­ment that was founded in the early part of the 20th cen­tury, say­ing that the only hope for the Islamic world is to go back to fun­da­men­tals, to the Koran, carry out the tenets of the Koran, and live accord­ing to the Koran—one of the tenets being jihad in forc­ing out for­eign influ­ence. It’s changed its name hun­dreds of times since it was founded by Has­san al-Banna. But essen­tially all these peo­ple, and Zawahiri cer­tainly, was a Mus­lim Brother. They’re very xeno­pho­bic, they think the Koran should be the con­sti­tu­tion, and [that] it’s per­mis­si­ble to shed blood. All their pro­nounce­ments are to the same effect. They’re a very vio­lent orga­ni­za­tion [with] a polit­i­cal wing and a mil­i­tary wing.

LT: It’s okay, accord­ing to the Koran, to assas­si­nate polit­i­cal oppo­nents?

RB: Absolutely. They tried to kill [Egypt­ian pres­i­dent Abdul] Nas­sar in Egypt.

LT: The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood is a very strong force that has a pres­ence in just about all the Mus­lim countries?

RB: Prob­a­bly not just a pres­ence, they prob­a­bly have a major­ity that sup­port them. It’s hard to say in a coun­try like Egypt, which doesn’t have legit­i­mate polls, but they did very well in the elec­tions this time.

LT: The Wahabis. In what way are related to the Brotherhood?

RB: They’re an off­shoot. They basi­cally say, “Go back to the lit­eral mean­ing of the Koran.” They think that the only sal­va­tion of Saudi Ara­bia and the Mus­lim peo­ple is to return to a reli­gious soci­ety, to a caliphate, and if there are any for­eign­ers liv­ing in this caliphate, they don’t get to vote—or, dur­ing Muhammad’s time, they didn’t get to ride horses. They can’t have reli­gious ser­vices, they can’t sell or import Bibles, no liquor. Women have an infe­rior sta­tus. The Wahabis took Najaf and Kar­bala in 1803 and flat­tened it. They believed that all Shia should be put to the sword because they’ve fallen away from the true Islam, they’re apos­tates. Who did we turn Iraq over to? The Shia. So we’re inflam­ing centuries-old animosities.

LT: You say [the Wahabis] serve as the inspi­ra­tion of the Tal­iban in Afghanistan, and other radicals.

RB: Gen­er­ally, at the risk of over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. The Saudis cer­tainly were happy the Tal­iban took over, even though they’re not exactly Wahabis. Because they were going back to an Islamic soci­ety and they thought this is the way to reform. The same cor­rup­tion we’re talk­ing about in Iraq. Whether it’s neo­com­mu­nism or sec­u­lar ideas, it’s going back to a reli­gious state.

LT: Do you feel that this rep­re­sents the majority?

RB: We don’t know. You see polls occa­sion­ally say­ing that more than 50 per­cent of Jor­da­ni­ans believe that Bin Laden is jus­ti­fied in com­mit­ting sui­cide oper­a­tions. The major­ity of Pak­ista­nis, Saudis cer­tainly, were happy about 9/11, because they feel like they’re under attack. I could be wrong, but there’s a strong anti-Western, anti-American sen­ti­ment. They think that we are try­ing to destroy them. And our out­post is Israel. I think it’s bizarre, in a very prag­matic sense, that Amer­ica would be so strongly behind Israel. Sim­ply in eco­nomic terms, it costs so much. I’m not just talk­ing about direct aid, the bil­lions we’ve given the military.

LT: So why are we sup­port­ing Israel so strongly?

RB: I just don’t know, I guess the Judeo-Christian idea. If it’s true that we have 60–90 mil­lion Evan­gel­i­cals that believe that Israel has to exist at the end-times, that’s prob­a­bly part of it. A part of it is guilt for the Holocaust.

LT: Jew­ish Israeli Zion­ists lobby in the US?

RB: Well, they play on courts that are already there. You’ve got Spiel­berg, Schindler’s List…you’ll never see a Hol­ly­wood movie that por­trays the fact that Gaza has been a prison since 1967. And it is a prison. All you have to do is go there and watch peo­ple lin­ing up try­ing to get into Israel—for heart oper­a­tions. They can’t. They don’t have med­ical care. There are no mod­ern hos­pi­tals. You can’t get a heart bypass in Gaza. And you also can’t get out. You’ve got 1.2 mil­lion peo­ple in prison, but you’d never see that reality—whether they’re ter­ror­ists or not—being por­trayed that way. It’s guilt by association.

LT: You said you opposed the attack on Iraq—

RB: I oppose not being able to pay my med­ical bills when I’m 70 years old because all my retire­ment has gone into the build­ing of the Iraqi nation. Iraq was held together by the mil­i­tary, the secu­rity ser­vices, which Bre­mer and com­pany elim­i­nated in April 2003. So what’s going to replace them after we’ve destroyed all those tanks?

LT: [Laugh­ing] A lot of those tanks were already destroyed. I saw them—

RB: We were destroy­ing them before, but they were all destroyed def­i­nitely after. There’s no armor to hold these three dif­fer­ent peo­ples together who don’t really make up a nation

LT: Would 500,000 troops on the ground in Iraq at the time we invaded have helped?

RB: Yeah, they would have helped in terms of hold­ing it together. If we had [had] an Amer­i­can sol­dier on every cor­ner, and daily raid­ing every house in Anbar province, yeah…the museum prob­a­bly wouldn’t have been looted. But we still would have been an occu­py­ing force of 500,000 indef­i­nitely. And the moment we leave they’re going to be killing each other. I think even the idiots under­stand this.

LT: This talk about build­ing an Iraqi secu­rity force—

RB: We’re sim­ply arm­ing the Shias and the Kurds, which doesn’t make for good rela­tions with the Sun­nis. They hate them. They’ve hated them since 680, since they killed the prophet’s grand­child. And we’ve just slammed that wedge back in there and made it worse.
[Dis­putes over who should lead Islam after the death of Mohammed led to the mur­der of both Mohammed’s son-in-law, Ali, and Hus­sein, Ali’s son and Mohammed’s grand­son, in 661 and 680 respec­tively. Sun­nis believe that Ali was the fourth and last of the “rightly guided caliphs.” Shi­ites reject the author­ity of the first three caliphs and believe that Ali should have been the first caliphate and that the caliphate should pass down only to direct descen­dants of Mohammed.]

LT: You talk of the CIA being dis­man­tled after the Cold War, about these wedges. Fear is being spread across the land, there are ter­ror­ists under the bed, they are every­where and com­ing to get us. We are fed talk of “for­ever wars.” This feeds the Cold War men­tal­ity. It feeds the anti-terrorism sys­tem: We need to have another Patriot Act, we need to pro­tect ourselves—like in the McCarthy era—against these peo­ple. We are lock­ing peo­ple up in jails for no rea­son. There is a case to be made for all this, but do Amer­i­cans really want to live like that again? Do you think we need to?

RB: No. You could solve it by chang­ing for­eign policy.

LT: And what would you envi­sion that to be?

RB: Get out of Iraq. Any time you’re bomb­ing Mus­lims around the world, it makes things worse, it’s not going to make them bet­ter. And the chances of solv­ing your prob­lems with Preda­tor and Hell­fire mis­siles are zero. Try that in a large Amer­i­can city. Have the police put up Preda­tors and say, “All right, we think there’s a sus­pect in this build­ing, we’re going to knock it down with a Hell­fire mis­sile,” and you’ll see what you get from that. Why should it be any dif­fer­ent for them? You’ve got to do your best to imple­ment [UN Res­o­lu­tion] 242 and bring along all the Arab coun­tries and all the Arab orga­ni­za­tions.
[UN Secu­rity Coun­cil Res­o­lu­tion 242 calls for Israel to with­draw from ter­ri­tory it cap­tured dur­ing the Six-Day War in 1967 (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Penin­sula, and the Golan Heights), areas mostly in Israeli con­trol today—in exchange for defen­si­ble bound­aries and an acknowl­edge­ment by its Arab neigh­bors of Israel’s right to exist.]

LT: Iraqis tell me they hate the occu­pa­tion, they hate the troops being there. I ask, “Do you want them to leave?” They say, “Well, not just yet…”

RB: Well, they know what’s going to happen.

LT: “…not until we have a secu­rity system.”

RB: Which they won’t ever have. Sad­dam tried to cre­ate a secu­rity sys­tem, and every time some­one tried to kill him or his sons, he’d take whole vil­lages and line them up and shoot them, which kept every­body quiet for a while.

LT: But that’s based on a dic­ta­tor­ship. Are you say­ing that it’s impos­si­ble for these peo­ple to live peacefully?

RB: Yeah. Because you just have to read the Koran. Apos­tates are not tol­er­ated and the Shia are apos­tates. They can’t join the mil­i­tary in Saudi Ara­bia, they can’t own prop­erty in a lot of cases, they’re not trusted, they’ve been removed from the oil indus­try, they’re not con­sid­ered as humans. These peo­ple can’t live with each other.

LT: That’s not my expe­ri­ence on the ground. Sunni live next to Shi­ite, they intermarry—

RB: I know all about the tribes. In Anbar province [Sun­nis] are mar­ried [to] Shia and they’ve got exten­sions. But the fact is, the vast major­ity of Shi­ites want the oil in Iraq, and they’re sit­ting on the major fields. In the [Iraqi] con­sti­tu­tion it says, “We get the oil, Sun­nis don’t.” And the more insta­bil­ity you get, the more these peo­ple are going to fall back on these pri­mal dif­fer­ences. I think it’s a won­der­ful, gen­er­ous exper­i­ment; a lot of peo­ple believe in it in this coun­try. They just don’t get it. It’s not going to hap­pen. We’re not going to make a democ­racy in Iraq unless we stayed there a hun­dred years and we trained 100,000 Amer­i­cans in Ara­bic every year to go over there and com­pletely dis­man­tle their soci­ety. If that’s the way peo­ple want to spend their money. Who is pay­ing for the war? The taxes haven’t been raised. We’re bor­row­ing money. The sup­ple­men­tal bud­get for Iraq is a hun­dred bil­lion dollars.

LT: Do we just pull out tomor­row? What now?

RB: I think peo­ple ought to start telling the truth, I think the pres­i­dent should get up and say, “All right, we’re going to be in this for the next 50 years. The peo­ple who were sup­posed to retire at 60 now get to retire at 75.” And then watch. And let the Amer­i­can peo­ple decide. I just don’t think any­one in Wash­ing­ton can tell the truth.

LT: Regard­ing the Iraqi peo­ple, do you think the troops should leave tomorrow?

RB: Prob­a­bly, and let it hap­pen. Let the divi­sions occur.

LT: Then what do you think would happen?

RB: There’d be a civil war.

LT: With how many dif­fer­ent fac­tions? I have heard that there are 20 dif­fer­ent mili­tias or brigades.

RB: It would make Soma­lia look civilized.

LT: You’re paint­ing a total end-time sce­nario in terms of we’re damned if we do or if we don’t at this point.

RB: I was in Iran last spring and talked to one of the aya­tol­lahs there. He said, “These peo­ple are wolves, are piti­less wolves”—this is the Sunni he’s refer­ring to—“and as soon as we get an oppor­tu­nity we’re going to go in and slaugh­ter them.” He said this on cam­era to me, an Amer­i­can, ex-CIA on top of it. There’s a great arti­cle by Chris Dickey [in Newsweek] about [how] the Ira­ni­ans all want nuclear bombs. All of them: lib­er­als, pro-American, every­body thinks Iran should have one. What both­ers me is, the peo­ple in Wash­ing­ton, in the think tanks, really don’t know what is going on and are mak­ing policy.

LT: You have such an intensely dis­mal view of people’s abil­ity to do any­thing other than what they’ve been doing.

RB: I think they have to do it on their own, at their own pace. I don’t recall any­body arriv­ing in the United States forc­ing democ­racy on Amer­i­cans, or the British, or any­body else. It’s a very racist atti­tude to think that it has to be done from outside.

LT: I agree, but there were plenty of peo­ple in Iraq who wanted to par­tic­i­pate in some form of democ­racy. They lined up to vote.

RB: Who knows what they’re doing it for? I worked for years with those peo­ple and it’s a dif­fer­ent soci­ety. It’s a for­eign coun­try, and if we decide to impose our val­ues at an enor­mous cost, it’s an exper­i­ment doomed to failure.

LT: What you’re say­ing runs against my expe­ri­ence. I went to Iraq look­ing for the peo­ple hat­ing Bush, and all I found were peo­ple who were very happy to be free, very happy to think about being able to vote. Cer­tainly not know­ing the ramifications—there wasn’t a lot of lit­er­a­ture, and they were following—

RB: What they’re say­ing is, “Fine. Now let us get down and reg­u­late things our­selves and [you] get out. You got rid of Sad­dam.” Every­body hated Sad­dam, prob­a­bly includ­ing his fam­ily. But to say they’re bet­ter off with car bombs going off, and no gaso­line, and mur­der—

LT: One Chris­t­ian woman—a min­is­ter in the Iraqi government—said to me, “What is wrong with your Amer­i­can peace-movement?” She’s 42 years old, she’s got two kids, takes them to work with her. I inter­viewed her both in Jor­dan and in the Green Zone. She had to leave Iraq in 1988 when Sad­dam gassed her vil­lage. She went back. She told me: “Go back and ask the peo­ple of your coun­try why they are try­ing to screw this up. Weren’t you will­ing to die in your coun­try for democracy?”

RB: We did it our­selves, we didn’t have a for­eign power come in and impose it.

LT: There are peo­ple in Iraq who do want it, but they’re fight­ing against thugs, out­side ter­ror­ists, for­mer Baathists, what­ever you want to call them—there are so many dif­fer­ent groups.

RB: You stand there in a hun­dred years and a hun­dred tril­lion dol­lars, or what­ever it’s going to cost—

LT: We opened up Pandora’s Box, and if we pull out—remember after the first Gulf War? We said to them, “Come. Show your faces. We’re here. And then we left. And [Sad­dam] mowed down 300,000. And then the left said, “Look what you did!”

RB: It’s another mis­take, but that’s a dif­fer­ent one. Morally there is no answer. If you cre­ated this prob­lem, it’s yours. Arm­ing the Shi­ite and the Kurds is not a par­tic­u­larly good solu­tion. And that’s what we’re doing now. But you really have to get peo­ple in Wash­ing­ton to start telling the truth.

LT: How can you do that?

RB: You can’t.

LT: They’re up to their ears in oil money, both the Democ­rats and the Repub­li­cans. There are lob­by­ists. It’s con­nected to Osama Bin Laden, the Saudis are involved—the big secrets nobody wants to talk about. The Amer­i­can pub­lic is so god­damn con­fused as to what is going on. How come the Saudis were in the planes? How come we’re friends with them? And all of this just acts as some kind of a smoke screen that allows this to con­tinue while peo­ple are lin­ing their pock­ets with gold.

RB: Well, what they’re see­ing is that it’s hopeless—“We might as well move off to a gated com­mu­nity. I’m going to have a sep­a­rate truce here. I’m going to get enough money that I can drive around my com­mu­nity with my elec­tric golf cart.“

LT: Gated com­mu­ni­ties. We have pri­vate busi­ness­men now who want to have their own space shut­tles. It’s like they’re already think­ing about what they can do to pro­tect them­selves against the masses that might hur­tle them­selves at them. Is that part of your think­ing?

RB: They don’t want to sit in traf­fic, either. Grab what you can, and send your kids to pri­vate schools. They say, “It’s very log­i­cal, this is the best I can do.” They don’t want to get involved in politics.

LT: What about solar energy, what about other alter­na­tive sources of run­ning the world?

RB: I don’t know. The Roman Empire fell. They couldn’t deal with prob­lems that were quite appar­ent to them.

LT: They had a 500-year run, too, huh?

RB: Yeah. We’re not going to have 500 years, though.