‘You can read it, it’s in the text: “We will go after Lebanon. We will find a pretext which will justify us going after Lebanon big time. Next, Iran. Next, Syria.” And of course Iraq came in the preceding paragraphs. The plan is laid out there.’
An Interview With Ray McGovern
By Dahr Jamail
August 28, 2006
During the Veterans for Peace National Convention in Seattle, I conducted an interview with Ray McGovern. McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
In this first installment of this short interview series for Truthout, I asked McGovern what he thought of the fact that Israel had been planning their attack on Lebanon for well over a year.
Ray McGovern: The most important thing, from our perspective, is to determine what role the US government played. It’s very clear that the US government not only gave the green light to the Israelis, but actively encouraged them to do what they are doing now, and then blocked diplomatic efforts to prevent them, to halt them, or to have an immediate cease-fire. That much is clear. You can even read Charles Krauthaumer, who says precisely that: that we are proud that we not only gave the permission, but we encouraged them to do precisely what they are doing.
Now, the question arises, why? What in God’s name would possess our so-called neo-con leadership to persuade this new fledgling Israeli government, which represents in my understanding a right-wing fringe of the Israeli people and not at all the Israeli people as a whole, just as our government represents the extremist right wing of the Republican Party? These so-called neo-conservatives who pretty much mounted and successfully waged a putsch of our government early in this administration, what in God’s name do they have in mind?
The tactics they used seem to be identical to the invasion of Iraq. We called it “shock and awe.” Well, a lot of the Lebanese, as well as the world populace, are shocked and awed quite enough, thank you very much, by what the Israelis are doing. It’s incredible that we would see that they would take out the infrastructure of a whole country as a way of “retaliating” against the capture of two Israeli prisoners of war, the capture of them, rather than the kidnapping of two Israelis. (….Part I), (Part II)
