By Ray McGovern and Robert Scheer / Original to ScheerPost
In this week’s episode of “Playing President,” Ray McGovern, 27-year CIA veteran and briefer of five presidents, continues to make sense of the world to “President” Scheer, who prepared for this role through his decades as a journalist, including in-depth interviews with five presidents from Nixon to Clinton. In the universe of “Playing President,” however, Scheer is not a journalist, but instead plays the President of the United States attempting to navigate the geopolitical landscape of governance and media with the help of his trusty daily briefer from the CIA, Ray McGovern.
This week, McGovern briefs the President in preparation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington.
Transcript
White House Intern: Mr. President, Ray McGovern is here to brief you.
POTUS: Hey, Ray, looks like we’re coming to the end of the journey, huh? You know, it’s a hell of a week, the week from hell. You know, we’ve been doing this a long time. You’re going to have to get another job. They’re not going to keep you over in the CIA, once I’m gone. They’ll get some more hawkish guy put up with your peacenik stuff, so you know… You know, and if it’s Kamala, you know, she’s good person. I backed her, but I think she might be a little more hawkish, you know her… What do you think?
McGovern: I know of her, Mr. President, one of my colleagues has briefed her regularly, as as you instructed. But we really don’t see any daylight between her situation or her views on foreign policy and yours. So it will be a it’ll be a time of trying to explore whether, whether she has a difference of view in any way or not. And that, of course, is what the American people be interested in too.
POTUS: Properly stated there, you know. But let’s get away from the bureaucracy here. You know, you got Trump there, and I don’t know, is he happy now or he’s unhappy? He’s going to give the Russians something- he says he can make peace quick. He’s… I don’t know, Israelis. They think they’re going to get a good deal. You got Netanyahu coming this week.
What is he going to do? What is he going to want? He’s going to gloat. Can’t gloat because I’m still president there for what is it? Six more months, by the way, Ray, you never saw any deterioration in my thinking or anything. Did you? I mean, I’ve known you a long time. Might be a little slower, but, you know, don’t you think this is a bad rap?
McGovern: We’ve been at it a long time, Mr. President, and as long as you don’t acknowledge seeing any deterioration, on my part, I’m the last one to see any on your part. On Netanyahu coming. He’s just arriving now, and he’s receiving a very warm welcome from hundreds of 1000s of people who don’t like the fact that Netanyahu, an accused war criminal, accused of genocide is being welcomed in the White House by you and others. He’ll see you tomorrow, and I think that he believes that you will be forced to acquiesce in supporting him if he goes after Hezbollah in the north there in Lebanon, and that is the big thing that’s concerning us.
You know, people say, well, Netanyahu would be crazy to go against Hezbollah. He lost to them last time around, not too long ago. Why would he do it again when they’re heavily armed? And the answer that my friends give, the analysts of this area of the world, is that Netanyahu wants the US to be involved directly, militarily.
And Netanyahu is being crazy, crazy like a fox, in thinking that once he gets engaged with Hezbollah and he’s not doing too well, you will be forced, you will be forced to come to his aid, particularly in the last couple of months before the presidential election. I don’t know if he’s counting on that or not, but that’s the only thing that makes sense, why he would take on Hezbollah. Now your representative, Hochstein, has sort of said, “Now, please don’t do that. Please don’t do that.” But it’s very questionable about, well, whether, whether Netanyahu and company take him seriously. I think when push comes to shove, they’re depending on you pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. We just want to make sure you know that?
POTUS: Yeah. Well, he’s got me between a rock and a hard place. He knows that Trump will give him everything he wants so he could wait it out. You know. Let me ask you, what’s this Yemen thing about? You know, here we, we’re fighting them now. And I never- I always heard that’s like the poorest country… What- do they have an army? What do they got? What’s going on? Isn’t that- they don’t have any oil, right? There’s this very poor area Yemen.
McGovern: Yes you’re talking about- oh, Yemen. Ah, yeah. Well, the Israelis attacked Yemen yesterday, as you know, and of course…
POTUS: Yeah, but what’s that about? What do they got? They They messing around with the shipping and everything, right?
McGovern:They’ve got a very, very experienced naval fleet of some kind, a very minimal kind of rudimentary but all you need is a couple of good missiles and rudimentary Watson. They can inflict serious damage, as has been demonstrated this past week when they hit one of those oil tankers. So the Yemenis have the upper hand of that part of the world, no matter how much the Israelis or the Saudis or the US bombed the hell at them. They’re already in… they’re already really dismembered by earlier conflicts, but they persist, and they’re not going to stop, as they have warned, they’re not going to stop until the attack on Gaza is over.
POTUS: But you know, I’ve be en around a long time, right? You know, maybe it’s my memory, okay, maybe it’s my memory. But how the hell did Yemen become a big threat? I mean, they got nothing there, right? Uh, what are they? They don’t have a navy. They… what are they? And they used to be, what- part of most with Saudi Arabia and part is against and what’s that got to do with Israel? What’s that got to do with us? What’s going on here? Hezbollah? I know that’s Lebanon. That’s always a nightmare.
McGovern: I’m going to sound like a real estate agent, Mr. President, but it’s location, location, location. The Yemenis are right at that strait that goes into the Red Sea. They can cause havoc with all the shipping that goes in there, and have been doing so for well, six, seven, eight months now. Despite the presence of a multilateral fleet, including the USS Eisenhower before it left. In short, that fleet, that multilateral fleet, was not able to stop the Houthis from inflicting damage.
And the Israeli economy has suffered very, very strong damage because of it. So that’s what the Houthis have, location, location, location. And you know, they also depend on support from Iran, although the continuation of that support, while assured, is not really going to change the outcome of these battles, they have this incentive to do it all by themselves.
And you know, they’re the only Arab state that has come up, and most people say unself-interestedly. They’re not out on the self interest. They’re supporting the Palestinians out of a feeling of solidarity with them, and as I say, they should be taken at their word when they say they’re not going to stop until the attack on Gaza is over.
POTUS: So can’t we just blast them out of there.
McGovern: Well, the Saudis tried to do that with US support. It didn’t work. They are very resilient. They’re sort of like the Vietnamese in a way. You know, you can bomb them back to the Stone Age, but they will persist, and that’s what they’re doing right now. They- matter of fact, they they grand eloquently said yesterday, “Look, we welcome now open war with Israel. Come forward.
We’ll give you the punches that we have been keeping in reserve.” So, that’s, that’s part of the woodwork. We got- the Israelis have to worry about that, as they have to worry about Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. There are other things going on here that I should mention and and that is that there’s an outbreak of polio. Now, you and I are of an age…
POTUS: Polio?! We haven’t had that for what, 70 years or so.
McGovern: You know, what a scourge that was. You know why our parents wouldn’t let us go swimming Tibbets Brook, right?
POTUS: Yeah.
McGovern: Couldn’t swim in there, oh its too dangerous, you know? Well, you know that had been banned the salt vaccine and and now the injections have banned polio.
POTUS: What’s this got to do with Israel and Arabs?
McGovern: Well polio has broken out in Gaza, and it’s…
POTUS: Polio?
McGovern: Yes, polio.
POTUS: Like what got FDR, polio? Yeah…
McGovern: The virus is in raw sewage. And it’s, it’s overflowing from these overflowing sewers. And the worst of it, of course, is that it affects babies, Gazan babies, including Hamas babies, who also have a right to live, I think. And it also affects Israeli children, infants who have not been inoculated yet. And when these Israeli troops go home, well, you know, they could get it.
This could be a kind of plague that is visited upon people in biblical terms. It could be polio breaking out, not only on Gaza, which few people care about, but in Israel, which everybody seems to care about. So just to let you know, polio- polio is pretty bad.
POTUS: Alright, let’s cut to the chase here. I told you, I’m in a bad mood. Obviously. You know, I got covid and I just gave up a second term and a whole damn thing. You know, so let’s just don’t try my patience today. What the hell does Netanyahu want? He’s going to denounce me. He knows. He knows he’s got Trump on his side. He could destroy Kamala’s chances.
She’s got to embrace him, right? She just can’t be lining up with a few crazies there in Congress who you know, care about, the Palestinians. And then you got this Arab vote in Michigan, all that’s going to affect the primaries. What the hell is going on here? What- I mean, what does he want from me? What do I say to him? What do we do?
McGovern: Mr. President, our best guess is what he wants from you is unconditional support, and what he expects from you is precisely that; unconditional, ironclad support. He sees you between a rock and a hard place. The rock being Trump and the hard place being the election.
He doesn’t see that you have any other alternative than to support him fully, to include military support. That’s where he’s going to go after Hezbollah. So forewarned is forearmed. I think that as difficult, politically as it may be, somebody’s got to tell Netanyahu that when you say “We will not support an attack at Hezbollah.” We mean what we say, and we’re not going to go back on it once they get engaged.
POTUS: And that guarantees that Trump’s president, right?
McGovern: I’m sorry?
POTUS: Well, I do that. I tell him, you know, that’s, just the end of my- well, it’s the end of Kamala’s election now, right?
McGovern: Well, if you do that, then the Israel lobby won’t come out against you very vociferously. Otherwise, if you, if you pay the political cost of tamping down war in the Middle East, then, as Netanyahu reads it, you are vulnerable, and that’s what he’s counting on, just just to lay the cards on the table. Hey, see how people say he’s crazy. Well, he’s crazy like a fox. He fully expects that you will cave in, and we’ll have to see. Well, you know, that’s what he expects. And you ask me, what he what he’s going to broach or what he wants from you, that’s the best guess we have.
POTUS: Well, we’re not putting any troops in there.
McGovern: Well, you know you have troops offshore, you have Marines and you have the Airforce.
POTUS: But they’re not going to get involved in fighting. Last time we had them there, we had to pull them out. It’s very embarrassing.
McGovern: Yeah, you know, Mr. President, you should know this that the Israelis traditionally have not been terribly respectful of the lives of US servicemen. We have not only the example of the US-
POTUS: If you’re going to bring up that liberty ship again. My god, I’ve been hearing that all my life. You know…
McGovern: We did refer in passing to the Liberty what I’m referring to now has more to do with Lebanon in Beirut.
POTUS: Yeah.
McGovern: 241 Marines killed in the barracks. Okay?
POTUS: Terrible. Terrible. Was terrible. But we didn’t retaliate, right? We pulled out.
McGovern: Did Israelis know about it beforehand? Yes, they knew about it beforehand, but later they confessed, “Well, we didn’t want to sacrifice sources and methods to warn the US about the bombing of the barracks.” So I think that Netanyahu predecessor felt that that way, they would suck Ronald Reagan into an open war in the Middle East. Reagan was too smart for that. He said, “All right, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. That was a stupid idea to have those guys in the barracks pull them out.” People said, “Whoa, you’re retreating.” And Ronald Regan said, “Yeah, this is a smart move. We’ll go, we’ll go conquer Grenada instead.” And that’s precisely what he did.
POTUS: You’re making light of it Ray, but you know, this is something that just drives me crazy. You got people telling me, I’ve been starting these wars. They’re endless wars and everything. How come the Democrats… we get- Vietnam got blamed on Johnson or, you know, Democrat war and everything. Nixon comes along increases the bombing, and then he says, “All right, now we’ll negotiate.”
And he gets out, and he’s even remembered as a guy who brought the peace with China and ended the- started and ended the whole Cold War and everything. Reagan! How the hell did Reagan, you know, managed to avoid war? The guy talked so tough about the monsters and Soviet Union, all that, you know, he was so hard. And then he just after those soldiers died there in Lebanon. He pulled out, pulled out, and he got away with it.
McGovern: He did. And sometimes you take immediate political costs, but over the long run, you you are shown to have done the wise thing. Let me get back to you talked about LBJ. Now it’s people are citing the similarities between what you decided yesterday and announced and what LBJ did on the 31st of March. 2000- 1968 Okay. What happened? He had been lied to by his generals. General Westmoreland told him, they were winning. All they needed was 206,000 more troops, and to go through Laos. They go through North Vietnam, they go right up to there. That will show these commies something, all right. He lied. Okay?
And what happened was it became obvious that he lied when the Communist troops in the south of Vietnam raided every hamlet, village, town and city in that country and its head offensive, January, February, 1968 it was a disastrous defeat, and it revealed that that Westmoreland had not only been lying about success, but had also been lying about how many communist troops he faced. He said, “A hundred-” he said, “299,000” and we knew it was 500,000. So when LBJ realized he had been conned, he called wisemen together. Now, in those days, they called these wisemen- there weren’t any wise women, in power you know. Okay.
So the old wise men come together, Clark Clifford and all those big, big Democrat, democratic politicos, and they say, “Look, Mr. President, you realize you’ve been lied to now.” And LBJ says, “Yeah, I’m not going to give Westmoreland those 206,000 troops anymore. Matter of fact, I’m going to relieve him, pull him back, make him some honorific thing. To hell with Westmoreland, and I’m going to go to negotiations, negotiations, and I’m going to stop the bombing.” He stopped the bombing. And a week later, on the 31st of March, 2000… 1000… 1968 LBJ went on the boob tube and said to the TV audience, “I’m not going to run for for reelection as president.” So there’s the parallel here. Now, Mr. President, I don’t say that we have lied to you, because you know we haven’t. But somebody has lied to you. The people who told you that we had already won, that Putin had already lost a month- a year ago in July of last year.
They should be held accountable. And the people who told you that Russia was running out of ammunition, that was the head of National Intelligence, she should be held to account. On what basis did she say the Russians were running out of ammunition and had no indigenous capability to produce what they’re missing, what there were their losses? Well, there- it was, plucked out of air. So the analogy may be incomplete, but I think it’s apt. You need to find people who are going to tell you what’s really going on, and especially in the next six months, and more particularly in next four months before the election. Because there’s the possibility of a deal on Ukraine. And Russians are making it increasingly and obviously, that those possibilities are diminishing with each, with each tranche of of territory they’re taking toward Kyiv.
So you don’t like them or hate them, but Viktor Orban has been trying to get negotiations started. Actually, we just have word that the Ukrainian foreign minister Kuleba is still in Beijing tomorrow. What’s that all about? Well, it could be that he’s not only going to tell the Russian to tell the Chinese, “Don’t help the Russians anymore,” but he might be saying, “What about this Chinese proposal? You’ve had that on the on the thing for two years now. Tell us more about that.” In other words, even the Ukrainians may be seeing the handwriting on the wall. It would be ironic indeed, if the last person to know what’s going on is the White House and you, Mr. President, before, before you leave.
POTUS: Well, Trump is cozy with Orbán, huh? I mentioned him at the convention, if anyone watched it, but he likes that guy, right?
McGovern: You remember Mr. President. I-
POTUS: He’s head of the- what is he now with the European Union? I saw something in the paper. He’s running it. He’s in charge now.
McGovern: Yeah, he’s president of the European Union for six months. It’s a revolving sort of thing. But he has, you know, he has that post. And he decided to use it. Now, he’s a pretty clever guy. I mean technically. Hate him or like him or hate him, what he does internally, but he has relationships with Russian leaders. He was actually a Hungarian patriot fighting the Russians before he kind of saw the handwriting on the wall and said, “Well, the Russians have now fallen apart. Now I can deal with them.”
And as I mentioned to you two times ago, I think, he visited Zelensky, he visited Putin, he visited Xi Jinping. He talked with Erdogan in New York, and he wanted to see you in Washington. Now I don’t know if your advisors told you about that, I did, but he never got the first base seeing you, so you were left, odd man out. And next thing he does is take a plane down to Florida to see- to Mar-a-Lago to see Trump. Now that was pretty ostentatious, but it was a missed opportunity in our can because we’re thinking that at least you need to appear receptive to peaceful overtures. And Orban had talked to all the main players except you and the question…
POTUS: Ray let me cut you off there. Just because this been a hard week, hard week. And you know, some people saying, I’ve had the best presidency anybodys had. I think it’s been very good, very good. And how am I going to be judged on this foreign policy stuff? You know, what are they going to say about me? You know, honest, be honest there. How am I going to look and what? And this all could even look a lot worse before I’m out of here, right?
I mean, if I lose, you know, in the Ukraine, they make some deal, you know, behind our back actually, you know, okay, make some deal there with the Russians. And if the stinging Netanyahu gets away with expanding the war, you know, and then Trump backs him, so he wins. What was I the- you know, here we’re giving them everything they want, both the Ukrainians and Israelis. What am I going to look like? The appeaser? I gave him everything, you know, the biggest bombs. We got everything, and it’s not working. What’s going on?
I’m a little drowsy. I take some medication, you know, and everything. But, you know, it just don’t seem fair to me. I mean, what the hell is going on? I give- gave the Pentagon everybody everything they want. And you know, when what’s, what happened to my legacy here, I’m going to be the guy who lost Ukraine, and, you know, didn’t help Israel. What?
McGovern: Well Mr. President, you expect candor from me. You don’t…
POTUS: That’s all I get for you is candor. You never tell me anything I want to hear. But go ahead…
McGovern: I ask you once again, don’t shoot the messenger for what I’m about to tell you.
POTUS: No, I know. I know. But you know, I’m getting out of here, whether I like it or not. I wasn’t ready to go. You know, by the way. I mean, don’t you think there was some sucker punches and everything. What the hell was that Nancy Pelosi and Schumer and all these they stabbed me in the back. Didn’t they, Ray? You know that you’re not a big political expert. What does it look like to you? You know, where was the support when I needed it? And you know, you’ve been briefing me. You know, I always could forget things. I always… So what? Everybody does. You know, you look it up. Somebody’s supposed to look it up. You know.
McGovern: Let me get back to your original question here, “What are they going to say?” Well, historians are going to say “President Biden took his book from, openly, from that wonderful Albright, Madeleine Albright, who is the UN representative. US representative at the UN and then Secretary of State, and she said that we should, we should realize that we are the “indispensable” — her word — country in the world, that we’re exceptional and that we can do things that others cannot do. Now that was true after World War Two. It may have been almost true when Albright was saying it now, Mr. President, when people look at you citing her as the paragon of foreign policy and saying, as you did in that interview, that it’s really, really tough to run out of campaign and to run the world at the same time?
Well, they look at that as a bit delusional in terms of you’re running the world, because the US hasn’t been able to run the world since before Madeleine Albright coined this expression. And the other thing she said, Of course, she looked at Colin Powell, who was chief of staff at that time, and she said, “Powell, General Powell, what do you get this great army, best army in the world for, and you don’t use it.” So that’s it will be a bum wrap on Madeleine Albright, more than on you, Mr. President, that you thought that she was the best guide. And that George Cannon and even Brzezinski, who warned about putting Russia and China together and warned also about trying to get Ukraine in NATO, that these realpolitik people were shoved aside and in favor of the likes of Madeleine Albright.
The last thing I’ll say about her, of course, is to remind you that when those sanctions, those brutal sanctions, were put on Iraq, okay? 500,000 children below the age of five died, okay? And when Leslie Stahl, the interviewer, asked Madeline Albright, “Madam Secretary, do you think was worth it.” And she said without blinking, “Yes, that was worth it. We think that was worth it.” Well, look at the children and Gaza now look at the children in Ukraine. That’s the result of these kinds of misguided policies. As for sanctions, they didn’t work about- they didn’t work with respect to Russia. You know, Janet Yellen may know a lot about currency and economic politics in this country, but she doesn’t know much about sanctions, how they work in the real world. Now, it will be said that you were misguided and that you were you were lied to and that-
POTUS: Ray, Ray, Ray, Ray, Ray, you’re going on here, and what the hell did I even have to do with Madeleine Albright? Tell me. I mean, let’s cut back here. You know, the people are saying even my enemies. I mean, I don’t even know who my enemies and friends are. I just, you know, boom! They just all deserted me here. You know, I don’t know where the hell the Clintons are and everybody else you know that Nancy Pelosi, she just, you know, was going after me. But they’re all sadly saying, I think they mean mostly domestic they think I’ll be remembered as a great president, but you’re here scaring a shit out of me because you’re telling me that this foreign policy stuff where I stood up for freedom, I stood up against the bad guys.
Putin’s what? An agent of Putin- Trump? I get them confused. Trump’s an agent of Putin, right? Or is Putin an agent of Trump? I keep forgetting. But the fact the matter is, you know, Netanyahu, he means to be a good guy, and he’s a bad guy, I don’t know what’s going on. Still feel little effects of the covid here and everything. But what the hell happened here?
I mean, wasn’t I on the side of freedom? And where were the Saudis? Why didn’t they cut the price of oil and punish the Russians? And how come India? India is buying all their oil from from Russia. What kind of support is that? I thought he was in our pocket there, that Modi supposed to be a right winger and everything, but no, he went off with Russia. What the hell is going on? The world’s turned against us. And I want to be remembered as a guy who didn’t what, didn’t see it coming, or should have done more, or what?
McGovern: Well, Mr. President, the reason I mentioned Madeleine Albright is because you seem intent on mentioning her. Well, you mentioned her in the debate you had.
POTUS: Yeah, I can’t remember why. Why did I mention her?
McGovern: Well, because you said she was right.
POTUS: About what? I mean, come on, I am getting a little confused here now. Who, who was she? She was in, what administration?
McGovern: She was in, the Clinton administration,
POTUS: Yeah, yeah, that’s their problem. Why doesn’t somebody asked them about it? Why are you blaming her on me?
McGovern: Well, you keep quoting her. That’s why, Mr. President.
POTUS: Oh, okay, I better stop quoting her then, can’t remember what I said. But the main thing here is, you know, for some reason, like, like, Nixon’s remembered as a guy who brought about some peace. He negotiated and got China, you know, and they… Now, that doesn’t look so good, but you know, how am I going to be remembered here? Like a guy who started another one bunch of these endless wars? You tell me we’re going to be fighting in Lebanon and maybe US troops have to go there? What’s going on here?
McGovern: Well, Mr. President, I draw the analogy again with Lyndon Johnson…
POTUS: Yeah.
McGovern: He did some very good things internally. I mean, I am a beneficiary of Medicare. My God, you know.
POTUS: Yeah.
McGovern: Had several, several operations and my wife too. My god, that was a major, major thing. Before that, old people were really mistreated and deprived of good medical aid. They did a lot of good stuff but he’s remembered…
POTUS: Tell me about it! They mistreat them right now! Look what they’re doing to me. Just because I’m a couple of years older than Trump, I’m the guys lost all his marbles. But go ahead, make your point. Yeah. Lyndon Johnson, yeah. He got a raw deal because he got…
McGovern: He did some good things that even President Kennedy couldn’t have done internally, Voting Rights Act and all that kind of stuff.
POTUS: Yeah, Kennedy did nothing.
McGovern: They remember him for the 58,000 US troops that were killed in Vietnam unnecessarily. And most people don’t know this, but I remember that 3 million Vietnamese perished, and that figure is from Secretary of Defense, McNamara…
POTUS: Yeah.
McGovern: In Vietnamese. So, so these things matter, and people look at the Foreign Relations part of your tenure as as much as they do, perhaps more, than the good things you have admittedly done, which I won’t comment on, because I don’t want to be in the situation of saying, attaboy, Mr. President, you know that we don’t do that kind of thing?
POTUS: So look Ray, Ray, let me be straight here. This is, you know, what a hell of a week I’ve been… I mean, come on, I don’t even know if I’ve done it what I did. I got the the virus, you know, when you get the virus and you’re older, it’s pretty scary, you know. I don’t care what the doctors say, you know, could be your time. And I’m getting tired and, you know. But this legacy thing does bother me, because, you know, everybody supports you on these wars when they were happening, at least in the government, they all got their contracts with the defense, military industrial complex.
It plays well there for jobs and everything. But then when it gets out of hand, which clearly, the reason I mentioned that UN court. They started that investigation. I was looking at that thing, still couldn’t sleep the other night looking at this thing, and it’s just it’s not some fringe peacenik the group, alright? This is the highest thing we got to a court, they’re saying I’m a war criminal if I back Netanyahu. They’re saying what the Israelis did, they say it’s apartheid. They grabbed. They even called Jerusalem in there. East Jerusalem they grabbed. Gaza. They grabbed the West Bank. They say all of it, right? There’s illegal, uh, it’s apartheid. It’s destroying. They don’t use the word genocide. I didn’t see that in there, but that’s going to feed into them when we bomb everybody.
Get more bombs to bomb everybody, then that, oh yeah, sounds like genocide. So, I mean, you know, I’m thinking about my legacy. A lot of good it does when you get kicked out of office like this. But you know, by your buddies, your friends, your allies. Well, what about a chicken shit crowd they are, you know… But all right, Kamala’s all right, I endorsed her and everything. I noticed, even Hillary endorsed her. So least it won’t have Hillary coming into my job. But you know, the whole thing is, you know, what can I do now?
Am I a war criminal? I mean, what’s going on? I mean, what does this court mean? If anything? I know they can’t come arrest you, but and what you keep telling me in these briefings… Well, people tell me, most of the world supports us. I see there was like 83 or 85 nations asked them to look in this and they came out. I just read the press release. Somebody read it to me, but it’s pretty damning. You know what I’m talking about?
McGovern: I do, Mr. President. And the supreme irony is, when Netanyahu is up in the air, literally on an aircraft coming to Washington, he has to be very, very careful that there’s enough fuel and that there are no mechanical difficulties. Because should he have to land in places like Germany or even France? He could be arrested, okay? The International Criminal Court has applied for a warrant for his arrest as a war criminal for genocide. That’s the pure, pure and simple of it. President Bush suffered the same possibility when he was prepared to make a speech in Geneva. Four years after he left office, he found out that they were just about to serve a warrant for his arrest as a war criminal, and he canceled his trip. So did Rumsfeld when he was Paris, hightailed it out to the airport, got the hell out of France.
Okay, so that’s the irony here. These people are about to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, and they’re arriving in the United States as we speak. Now on the other on the other, business about what, what you might do here with respect to Netanyahu when he does arrive. You have your legacy to think about. Is part of your legacy to be a wide regional war in the Middle East, you have an ally that probably nobody told you about, and that is the Israeli army, which is not totally subservient to the Israeli political authorities. Yeah, they usually take orders, but they may not, well, they don’t want to go up into Lebanon against Hezbollah.
So you and the Israeli army, in my view, and in the view of my friends in the agency, have the option of declaring openly and vociferously, the United States will not support a widening of the war to Lebanon against Hezbollah. Publicly. Then the US- then the Israeli military, will be able to say to Netanyahu and the other people there, “My God, suppose they don’t support us, we’re going to lose!”
And there’s a there’s a chance then that they can be dissuaded. That is the political authorities in Tel Aviv or East, West Jerusalem could be dissuaded from doing this heinous thing, which profits simply Netanyahu’s political future and endangers regional war in the Middle East. So as far as your legacy is concerned, that would be the scenario. I would point out you have an ally, the Israeli military, for God’s sake, who are potent force, give them a reason to oppose Netanyahu against broadening the war to Lebanon and then Iran, and God knows where else. That would be avoiding that kind of thing for your legacy.
POTUS: And what’s he going to tell the Congress Netanyahu? He’s going to tell the Congress, he’s going to tell him that Joe Biden sold him out, didn’t have the guts to go after these terrorists. Well, then that’s going to make Trump president. You always leave that part out.
McGovern: Well, Mr. President, with all due respect, this is an opportunity that’s unique. You are not running again. You know the equities? You know that you don’t want to be mousetrapped. And Netanyahu is the mouse trapper par excellence. So you have the ability here to combine with the other people who really want to avoid a wider war, who don’t want to lose, the Israeli military. The Israeli military is in open conflict with the political authorities on major issues, including this one.
So how would it be if the Israeli military could point to a definitive statement by the president United States, we will not support Israel if they go against Lebanon Hezbollah and create a wider regional war. Now most people think that you couldn’t do that because of the pressures politically in this country, but now you can, and there’s still four months or so before the election, and people can explain your Democratic Party people can explain that you didn’t want a wider war. And your legacy, instead of a white out war in the Middle East, would be one of having prevented that, and that’s the kind of legacy I would suggest you want, rather than the other.
POTUS: Yeah, well, thanks a lot for that advice. The old thing, who lost China, who lost this, who lost that, and you know, you’re not sitting where I’m sitting, but we’ve been pretty tough on this guy. Trump hearings. Allies of ours have brought charges. I don’t forget what he’s got, 44 felonies and everything.
I wasn’t in favor of all that New York they went pretty far down in Georgia now going after him, you know, and there’s going to be payback. And I know I’m hearing from a lot of people on a Democratic side. This guy didn’t call it, you know, he’s going to form a new kind of authoritarianism, fascism, whatever. What he’s really going to do is pay back, you know, pay back we held him responsible. I mean, like taking papers to his home there, like, God, who hasn’t done that? Wasn’t it Sandy Berger or what? His name is he? He did that. Remember him?
McGovern: He’s the one that put the classified documents in the stockings and walked out of the archives. Yeah.
POTUS: And then you had, you know, Petraeus, the general, his mistress, gets those documents. He got a little slap on the wrist, right? Yeah. She was writing a book and, you know, and he’s sleeping with the woman. He gives her the Black Books, the president… you never would do that. Would you, Ray? You got those books? You wouldn’t give them out.
McGovern: The title that book was all in, I hate the double entendre there. But yeah, he was getting very close to his biographer. Let’s put it that way.
POTUS: Yeah. But anyway, he didn’t get a bit. But the fact that matter is, there’s always payback, payback. And there’s no secret, we’ve been pretty rough on this Trump character. He deserves it, of course, but if he does have a kind of sweep here, and he get to Congress and he’s got the White House, oh, boy, they’re going to go after a lot of people. And you know, the Supreme Court’s trying to bail him out, but they’re going to bail us out.
And you know, the last thing I’m going to do is try to, you know, I got to help. I got to help her win. You know, what’s her name? You know, this time, she is a black Vice President, you know, whatever, Indian. But anyway, I got a larger responsibility here, because if this is the, you know, it’s like McCarthy, you know, becomes president, that’s what it would- Trump, and he actually uses the whole power and bring charges.
It’s going to be a nightmare world there for a lot of people who backed me. So anyway, I’m getting tired. It’s a virus. It’s just driving me crazy, and I hope I did the right thing and not running again. But, you know, I’m not sanguine, sanguine about it.
McGovern: Mr. President, it’s just a last word here. Your secret service director was testifying before Congress today. There are a lot of people who are spreading what are called conspiracy theories about people like, like the people who worked in your FBI and CIA, and that Trump may want to get back at them, and they may have had something to do with what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania. But there’s one thing that occurred to me, and this is a personal thing, during the…
POTUS: Ray, Ray, Ray, I didn’t hear you correctly, but please don’t go there. You’re not telling me that they people wanted him shot or something. We made a goddamn hero out of Trump, right? And if they want them shot, they wouldn’t have missed that. They’re pretty good at it, you know. Anyway, don’t go down there, just like the ratings of it. Yeah, no, yeah.
McGovern: Well, the point I try to make, Mr. President, is that Secret Service Director testified earlier today and it didn’t reveal very much, but the incident there was at at least the charitable explanation would be gross incompetence on the part of the Secret Service. Now…
POTUS: Yeah, that’s what they always say. They got Reagan, didn’t they? It wasn’t their gross incompetence. And, you know, somebody killed Kennedy and, yeah, Bobby and everybody, Martin Luther King, man, you know, they, you know, who knows more recently? But don’t sit there telling me that somebody in my administration gave the green light to this. That would be…
McGovern: Well that’s what I meant. In other words, since Trump accused you during the debate of never firing, anyone, never firing, including the generals that told you you had won in Ukraine. Including the Director of National Intelligence told you the Russians would run on ammunition.
You never fire anyone. Well, one suggestion, Mr. President, a personal one, because it’s really not an intelligence officer’s responsibility. But why don’t you fire everyone from the Secret Service, the elect director, down to the site was supposed to do that, and my orcas, who sits on top of…
POTUS: Yeah then they’ll say I fired him because they missed or something. Alright, that’s enough of this. You know, I got it. You know, you get to get me off into… Look, I’m depressed enough as it is. I hope I survived this damn thing.
And you know, there’s no thanks, you know. You know, it’s no thanks. There’s nobody giving me any thanks. It’s goddamn nightmare, all right. Anyway, if there’s an intern will have to have these dreary discussions with you some point, but, but I do appreciate you hanging there. Basically, a good guy, Ray? It’s okay. I’m not holding you responsible. But, uh. Somebody.
They gave me some bad advice. Now, anyway. nothing we could do. All right, where’s that office guy? Where is that? Let’s cut this out, Ray, if we’re still alive, there the next time, we’ll talk more. Hopefully there’ll be some more cheerful news. I don’t know what it is. All right, let it go.
Please share this story and help us grow our network!
Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27 years as a C.I.A. analyst included leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and conducting the morning briefings of the President’s Daily Brief. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, an independent ScheerPost podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.