The President Ponders Nuclear War Over Iran

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 attempts to persuade the President to see the advantages of being a lame duck. Unfortunately, POTUS isn’t exactly receptive.

TRANSCRIPT:

Ray McGovern: Over to you, Max. 

Max Jones: Mr. President, Ray McGovern is here to brief you. 

POTUS: All right, what’s new? 

McGovern: Good morning, Mr. President. Actually, on the way in, I checked with my operations center. The news is that the former Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, who is now the equivalent of, well, Jacob Sullivan, secretary of the National Security Council of Russia, arrived in Tehran this morning for consultations with his opposite number and also the Chief of the General Staff in Tehran, and he’s appointed to meet with the new president, the president position who was just inaugurated last week. This is a big deal, Mr. President. This is the Russians identifying themselves with Iran prior to Iran taking extreme action against Israel, that’s a safe bet. They’ve threatened it. They’re going to do it. Why would Shoigu go? Well, number one, to express solidarity. But I think there are a couple other reasons. He wants to give Israel pause, lest they overreact to Iran’s reaction to their space of assassinations. In other words, I think Shoigu wants to make the Israelis think twice, and by extension, the United States and you, Mr. President, think twice about getting out of hand here when Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran react to those assassinations. The other thing is, nobody wants world war three. The Russians and the Chinese certainly don’t want it, and certainly don’t want that area which is so dependent, where they are so dependent on oil delivery.

POTUS: Russia got along well with Netanyahu, Israel? They get along with Israel and with Netanyahu, right?

McGovern: They used to. They used to be rather standard contacts, a degree of mutual respect. Lately, the Russians have been lambasting Netanyahu for the assassinations and for other things that he’s been doing with respect to Gaza, particularly the starvation, the deprivation of military or medical supplies in the whole business about cleansing the Palestinians from Gaza, so they used to be on respectful terms. No more. The Russians have thrown their weight behind Iran, and that is symbolized by Shoigu who was a big wheel. Now he was Minister of Defense, but everyone knew that he and Putin would go on vacation together. He and Putin were best buddies. So even though Shoigu presided over a lot of corruption in the Ministry of Defense in Russia, he escaped, and he was sort of promoted up now he is, as I say, the equivalent of your National Security Advisor, Jacob Sullivan. So what’s he doing there? Well, it’s a big deal. He’s showing his support, but he’s also trying to say, look, we don’t want to have oil prevented from going through the Persian Gulf or other places. China is worried about this dependent, as they are, on that oil. So let’s be discreet about this, and let’s, for God’s sake, not lead to World War III. 

POTUS: They haven’t been giving them any weapons or surveillance?

McGovern: Well these IO 76s and 96s are great big aircrafts that carry lots of stuff. They’re the big carriers for spare parts, for weapons systems. And there has been a whole bunch of them going from Russia down to Tehran over the last five days. I don’t know how many. We haven’t counted them, but there’s lots of equipment. There’s lots of probably countermeasures and all kinds of things to defeat Israel’s counter attack when it comes and Shoigu, of course, is the proof that the Russians are putting their eggs in this one basket. What I was about to say, and finally, is that everyone knows that Israel has nuclear weapons. Okay, that’s the fly in the ointment. Sy Hersh today said this, and I quoted because —

POTUS: I can’t believe my CIA briefing is quoting that guy. I mean, he’s, well, go ahead, that’s the intelligence I’m getting? Sy Hersh, isn’t he critical of us? He says that we blew up that pipeline going to Germany, that we knew about it or something.

McGovern: Yeah, well, they documented that. But I use him here just to get into the fact that —

POTUS: We deny it. I hope we deny it. We didn’t do it, didn’t we? We just knew about it.

McGovern: Mr. President, I don’t know what Jacob Sullivan told you about that, but I’ll just leave unsaid the fact that most of the world believes that only we had the capability and the intention and actually had made four warnings, including some by yourself, that this was going to happen. So most of the world believes that, yeah, we did it.

POTUS: So I blew up the pipeline?

McGovern: The CIA did. Whether Jacob Sullivan told you about it or not, is always a question.

POTUS: I’m not losing any of my mental ability, but you do forget some of these briefings and things and things like that, you know? But that was a good thing anyway that it got blown up so the Russian oil can’t go to Germany, right?

McGovern: Well, it was a good thing for any everybody but the Europeans, Mr. President. The German economy has suffered terribly. They’re at negative growth now, and a lot of the Europeans are also hurting because they have to pay 2,3,4, times as much money for fuel, for oil and other things. So getting back to just a word about Sy Hersh, because he happened to be the person to mention it today. He talked about the specter of nuclear arms, and he’s wrote a book about the Samson option. You recall the biblical story about Samson pulling down the temple, and pulling down everything around him. Well, the question is, would Israel do that? Would they do that? Okay, now he says Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons. Iran has zero. Now by coyly noting that America and Israel have, as Netanyahu has said, quote, “jointly developed, some of the most sophisticated weapons on Earth. I choose my words carefully,” says Netanyahu “that help protect both our countries, we also help keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.” A very thinly veiled hint that when push comes to shove, they would not be above using one of these nuclear weapons. So I think the Russians and the Chinese and you, Mr. President, share a joint wish that it not come to that. And what I’m saying here is that’s part of Shoigu’s mission to sound out the Iranians and to help the Iranians deter the Israelis, make the Israelis think twice and prevent the worst. And the worst, of course, would be if Netanyahu were put in a corner, whether he would order and whether the Israeli military would discharge in order to employ, perhaps low yield nuclear weapons to stave off complete defeat. That’s something we need to contend with.

POTUS: So what are you telling me? Is this like another one of those moments where, it all goes kaput?

McGovern: It’s about to go kaput in the sense that Iran is surely going to retaliate, and so will Hamas and Hezbollah for the assassination of these chief officials.

POTUS: Why don’t we get these Russians on? I mean, we don’t talk to them, but if we can, find out, tell them they can’t go in there. Because, the minute they come in there and then they got their nuclear weapons involved. And what’s going on here? How come I didn’t hear about this. How did this come out? Where is this?

McGovern: Well, Mr. President, it’s fresh news. It’s only about four hours old now. I saw it first in the Russian version of TASS. It’s now available in English and some of the Western reporting, but you don’t see it in the established media because they haven’t figured out yet how to play it. On the face of it, it’s a threat that Russia is going to support Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran when Israel counter attacks it.

POTUS: You threw a lot in there. You’re saying they’re giving Iran some ability to detect an attack, or the way that Hezbollah comes in and Hamas, they’re going to back them? I don’t get that. I mean, this is big news, so we gotta get my guys involved here. I can’t be hanging on your analysis. But what the hell is going on? This sounds like the biggest damn thing to happen. 

McGovern: Well, it is big news today, and we have informed  Secretary Blinken and Sullivan and all your advisors. I’m a little bit surprised that I’m the first to break this news to you. It is, after all, four hours old, but it’s something to reckon with. And I think your instincts, ‘get a hold of the Russians, talk to them for God’s sake.’ I think those instincts are very, very good, and so I wish no time getting in touch, whether, maybe you could use the same people that brokered that exchange of prisoners. That was a bright moment in a very bleak atmosphere. It shows that when talks are discrete, when they’re done through private channels, and there’s a little patience involved. Really good things can happen. I would suggest that you might want to consider that maybe Blinken and Sullivan are not the best people to try to get in touch with the Russians. Let’s try the people who are able to negotiate this prisoner deal. With respect to my head, Bill Burns, I’ll just remind you, Mr. President, that he is in the awkward position of wearing three hats. He’s the head of the CIA. He’s also in the cabinet, and he’s supposed to be chief negotiator for the hostage release. Now, Israelis have just assassinated his opposite number, that is the Hamas representative for those prisoner negotiations. So Bill Burns is sitting there talking to nobody in particular and how he feels about the Israelis, taking out his negotiating partner, I don’t know, but when he comes home, he’ll be in a very awkward position of trying to tell you what really happened. He’s on the cabinet, so he’ll be trying to justify the policy that has already been adopted. So I wouldn’t go that route either. Depend on these discrete contacts that are already already in existence, and so show some promise of being able to bring additional results beyond the exchange of prisoners.

POTUS: Is there something going on I’m not getting here, Ray? Is this the old neoconservative, Victoria, she’s not with us anymore, Nuland? We got all these neoconservatives now in my administration. They were supposed to be with the Republicans, but they like me better. But are they swindling me into some kind of destroying Iran and then destroying — we’ve got enough trouble, but Putin is supposed to be gone by now. We showed a strong resolve in Ukraine, and he seems to be stronger than ever. How come we don’t have the momentum here? Is this something that they’re bringing on? And why did Netanyahu have to go kill that guy? What? We didn’t do that, right? We didn’t, we didn’t kill the Hamas guy right? Does Kamala know about this, is she in on the briefings? 

I’m in this lame duck position now. Nobody listens to any goddamn thing I have to say. Are they tricking me into something? Is this a way to win the election, because we’re in a war with Iran and nobody’s going to replace it, or what?

McGovern: Mr. President, one of my colleagues is even now, as we speak, briefing Kamala. In answer to your general question about who’s doing all this stuff and how it started. Well, you may recall that what was her name, Madeleine Albright, under Clinton, decided that we could pretty much do whatever we wanted, because we’re the sole indispensable country in the world, that goes back to Clinton. And then, of course, George W. Bush came in. They brought these Neo conservatives in, and you may recall that when they decided to do Iraq, some of the wiser people there, among the neocon said, ‘Ah, come on, do Iraq. That’s a piece of cake. Real men, go to Tehran. Okay. Now, after 9/11, General Clark, found out that there was a list of countries that we were going to do. We’re going to do Iraq, we’re going to do Syria, we’re going to do Libya, we’re going to do Somalia, we’re going to do this Sudan, and last but not least, we’re going to do Iran. That was grandiosity to an extreme. You know what happened in Iraq. You know what happened in Syria. You know what happened in Libya. 

POTUS: Like that genius Hillary there, she said, ‘Yeah, we came. We saw him. He’s gone.’ He died with a bayonet up his ass.

McGovern: I was reminded of that when these prisoners that Israel had raped with broomsticks and other things. I was reminded of what happened to Gaddafi in that sewer in which they found him.

POTUS: Now Hillary, she was so happy about that. It’s an all screwed up country, right.

McGovern: Well it is, but Hillary doesn’t seem to bother much about that anymore. As a matter of fact, when push comes to shove, my recollection is that the person who was really recommending your vice president up and down was none other than Hillary Clinton. So you might talk to Kamala about that, and you might refresh her. I’m not sure my counterpart is going through chapter and verse about this long list of countries that we were going to do, like Iraq, Syria, Libya.

POTUS: Kamala is a hawk. A hawk, you say? What’s going on there?

Well, I don’t want to get off subject, but, I mean, she’s picking a vice president now. These guys are so pro Israel, right? What is Shapiro and what does her husband say? Kamala will always do whatever. What’s going on here?

I thought she was supposed to be going to help me, or help her now, in Michigan and up there, with the Arab vote, that’s gone.

McGovern: Qell, Mr. President, you know Kamala far better than I do.

POTUS: I don’t know anybody anymore. That’s why I’m a lame duck. You know, I’ve been screwed over by all of these people. I don’t trust anything. I only talk to you, Ray, because you’ve been with the CIA for 27 years. That’s a hell of a long time. You put up with a lot of assholes in your day. So in a weird way, I kind of trust you, because, actually, you never betrayed me or any of them, for Christ’s sake. You got along even with Reagan and everybody. So what’s going on here? Am I being set up? Are they going to do like a big war here? The Democrats can get elected and everything. And then bog down with what Iran or what do we do then? We get all the Shiites angry with us, and now they get along with Saudi Arabia. I mean, Saudi Arabia is causing us more trouble with Russia, right? They don’t lower the price of oil, and that’s how Putin was saved. So what do I want to get rid of Iran? That used to be the alternative to, I don’t know. I get so confused.

Maybe I’m too old for this job, God damn it, but tell me straight now. I mean, are we in a missile crisis Cuba cruise ship moment? I mean, am I supposed to do what Kennedy did? Get on the phone with Putin. I hate that son of a bitch, and when they ask him to back off, what the hell is he doing? What? What’s happening here? 

McGovern: Well, Mr. President, what’s going to happen here is that Iran is going to retaliate for these assassinations with super hypersonic and other weaponry that they haven’t used before. The April thing was just a dress rehearsal. They’re going to do real damage, probably to places in Israel itself, okay. Israel, in turn, will welcome the opportunity to threaten Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas and they will be depending completely on your support, Mr. President and on Kamala’s support. In other words, you still, lame duck if you say you are, still have credentials. You still have the power to tell Secretary Austin, for example, to keep those damn aircraft carriers out of the range of those damn Houthis who have these missiles that could not only sink it, but at least, at least eliminate the flight thing. The sending of these ships into this area is, in my estimation, kind of a weird move. What I believe is possible here is that, once again, you have a shared interest. You have a shared interest, not just immediately, with the Israeli army, who doesn’t want to do this, it doesn’t want to go against Hezbollah. They’re not sure that you will support Netanyahu to the hills. Not only that, but you had a shared interest with China and with Russia. Who doesn’t want a major war in the Persian Gulf area or in the Middle East. So I think your instincts were just right, and I would make sure that you have some contacts that were used during that prisoner exchange. But for God’s sake, when there’s a commonality of interest, namely, to prevent World War III, which seems to be what Netanyahu was willing to tolerate with nuclear weapons of his own, then I think there’s a chance with you, Chinese. Now, the Chinese, they are really ticked off at you, at the Israelis. The Chinese had brought all the significant Palestinian factions together. First time the Russians tried it, not so much, 14 of them in Beijing two weeks ago. What does Netanyahu do? He starts assassinating people. So the Chinese are ticked off too. So you have a commonality of interest here with the Chinese and the Russians. And you know, maybe being a lame duck, maybe not having to worry about a lot of the usual political considerations would be an advantage to you at this point. I don’t think Kamala would have this insight. I don’t think a briefest would feel free to share this speculation with her, but I feel free to share it with you because, as I say, we’ve seen this before. Now you’ll recall, Mr. President, that I briefed Reagan and his people when they were in the Middle East, when they had put World War II battleships for God’s sake, pounding the Bekaa Valley in Syria and Lebanon and so forth. What happened? 241 marine skills, lots of other hostages taken. And what did Reagan do? He got the hell out of there. Okay, did he take some chaff for getting out? Yeah, he did, but he did the right thing. And I’m not saying that you’re going to get out of this, but you need to tell Netanyahu, as I think I’ve mentioned before, you tell him, Look, if he gets involved in a major war which prevents the shipment of oil from the Middle East, which gets Russia and China involved on the behalf of Iran, that you’re not going to support that. And once you said that, and once you said that publicly, the Israeli military as well as everybody else, will breathe a sigh of relief, and there’s a chance that this thing can tamp down. Otherwise, God knows what’s going to happen. And what’s going to happen is going to happen within the next 10 days, I assure you.

POTUS: Ray, let me put this straight here. You’re a smart man. You know a lot. Maybe you know more about what’s going on with China or Russia or Syria, than you know what’s going on about the United States and Israel. I don’t think the Israel Defense Force or offense force, whatever they are, you know, but I don’t think they’re going to be, can be controlled by Netanyahu, because he’s got a cabinet. He’s got a cabinet where his key people are now saying, ‘No, Gaza is going to be turned into another part of Israel, and we’re going to get rid of all these Arabs, so forget negotiation.’ Forget any of that. Some people want to make it what, the president’s son in law wants to make it some kind of resort. Take advantage of its access to the sea. A Club Med in Gaza, make the whole thing one big whatever. They still got Club Meds here, so make one of them. But they don’t have any sense of what’s going on. You got a guy running now against Kamala. Kamala is a smart woman, and what she said about Gaza, even, she went a little far for me. She’s pretty damn critical of Israel, on what they’re doing in Gaza. She did it down there in that Selma Memorial, and she did it after Netanyahu talked. I gathered she didn’t say, from what I’m looking at, I talked to our people here. She didn’t tell Netanyahu, but when she came out, she criticized Israel, Gaza and so forth and you got a crazy situation. Is Trump still leading? They said, I get out of it, then he’ll collapse. But he’s still ahead in most of these polls and everything. And this guy’s going to eat Kamala for lunch if she’ll hang me around, I put pressure. President Netanyahu is not going for it. His survival means he’s got to be at war, his peace. And he’s finished. And maybe don’t throw him in jail, but he’s certainly finished in some of the fanatics and everything around him, they’re out of politics. They’ll be finished by the Israeli public, they don’t want to go for all this, we’re living in the time of the Old Testament, revenge and all that sort of stuff and so he welcomes a war. He wants a war. And nobody’s going to say, you don’t ever say to a leader, you can’t go to war when, no, nationalism and all that. I found that myself, but I had some doubts about the Iraq stuff and everything. Oh, well, shut up. My own advisors said, ‘No, you can’t go there.’ And then you got Trump just looking for that opening, right? Just talking, ‘Oh, Biden, lame duck.’ He just had to step in and sell out the Israelis. And so I’m not going to do any of that. Forget about a legacy. I wouldn’t even be able to visit the White House no matter who’s president. You know, disgraced. Remember Jimmy Carter. It took him a long time to get  back some favorability there. You know, he betrayed the hostages and everything in Iran and blah, blah, blah, they killed him. They followed Brzezinski’s advice. They got them all screwed up and everything. So I don’t know where you’re going there with but I can’t tell what am I going to do? I didn’t want it’s true. We didn’t, we didn’t back them, killing this Hamas. I can’t even remember his name. What we didn’t do was Daniel in his own right.

McGovern: Well, that was Hania. Well, there are people that think that some people in your administration knew about it beforehand. I don’t think the evidence is very clear.

POTUS: Did you guys do it?

McGovern: Mr. President, you often ask that, but I often have to say that often the right hand, the analysis, doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Okay. Suffice it to say that the Israelis are quite capable of doing these kinds of things all by themselves. They very regularly prefer to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Whether they told any of your people or not, really doesn’t matter at this point, the people out that way, Hamas has a boiler and Iran is convinced that you are completely in on that, that our administration was completely in on it. That’s what counts. Now what I’m saying again here is that this thing is going to spiral out of control. There was one person who has the ability to prevent that. That’s you, and you may be a lame duck, but I would suggest, once again, that there are advantages to being a lame duck like you’re not running again. You can do things without overly worrying about the lobby, okay? And so you could say to Netanyahu, look, if you get involved in a regional war, that could evolve into a nuclear war, I have said 100 times, I’m against World War III. We’re not going to support you if you said that publicly, loud and clear, not only would the Russians and the Chinese breathe a sigh of relief, but so would the Israeli army. For God’s sake. They don’t want it. They haven’t been able to beat Hamas for God’s sake. Now they’re going against Hezbollah as well. They can’t do that. They can’t do that without expecting US support. If you say you’re not going to support Netanyahu, the army will be strong enough to say, No, we’re not going to take a chance. Netanyahu, you say the President will support you no matter what. But the President is not running again. This is a different situation. He may not and so we’re not going to take that chance. And things would automatically tamp down there, and there would be back and forth missile strikes, but it would not evolve into the danger that Netanyahu would be so beaten back that he would resort to the nuclear weapons that everyone knows that he has. 

POTUS: And how do I do this? Who do I trust around here that wouldn’t leak word that I’m even thinking about doing? And by the way, he’s talking about guaranteeing Trump is president, and then if Trump is president, you know, we made his life a little bit miserable with these 45 indictments and courts and everything,  you’re talking about the rest of my life, and my family’s life too. You know my son Hunter and all that. You know you’re talking about Trump being president, and because, you know, we betrayed Israel, we collaborated. I can’t bring up russiagate. I can’t bring up that because here, wait a minute, you got intimidated by Russia. You got intimidated by them. So he wins in a landslide. And we lost the Congress. We lose everything. And we’ve got all these Supreme Court guys coming up with everything. What am I doing? Because, you know, I can’t even carry my own staff if I want to break with Netanyahu.

Look what happened in Congress. There was a guy, you would have thought that was a rally at some college for the football team. You know, what was that there? So you try to put some sense into this when Kennedy did it around the Bay of Pigs after and you guys in the CIA screwed them up, gave all that bad information. You know, what happened to Kennedy? You know, he got shot, killed. But I mean, even then he was going to be finished, you know, one way or another. So many enemies. So What world do you live in, Ray? You’re an analyst. Analyze America. Why am I a lame Duck? I ask you that. Why? I couldn’t remember all my life. Okay, so what? You know, I was a damn good president. I couldn’t remember. So, okay. Now they say it’s because I’m too old. This other guy. What is he three years younger than me, or something? Okay, he’s not too old. You know, it’s a lot of crap. They went in after me because I’m not playing ball in all the ways they want me to play ball. Alright, that’s what’s going on. And you telling me, right now, I’m supposed to tell Israel, they can’t defend themselves, or they can’t. I mean, come on.

McGovern: Mr. President, the supreme value here is to prevent a nuclear war starting in the Middle East. Now, I’m not an expert on domestic political —

POTUS: Ray, let me just interrupt you. One thing that’s always been the issue, how you prevent nuclear war. You got decent types that say you gotta negotiate, you have to have arms control. I’ve been sympathetic to that, okay, but you got the other camp that says we go with the fist, the madman theory. We show them mean business. You screw with us. We’ll use the bomb. We used it before. That’s why we’re building them. That’s why we modernize them. We’re not afraid of the bomb. We’re not afraid of it. We got small ones, we got big ones, we got tactical, we got a lot of ways of delivering and so forth that I’m just telling you, I don’t subscribe to that, but that’s a prevailing view  among a lot of these military experts. You gotta be willing to use them. And here’s a good example and Netanyahu is going to say. They  got about 200 of them, right? What are they building them for? They’re building them. Well, even Madeleine Albright, I think she said something like that. One of them said something like that. What are we making these weapons if you’re not going to use them, right?

McGovern: Yeah. Why do we have the best army in the world if we don’t use it, said Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell. Well, Mr. President, that’s a kind of myopic way of looking at things, if you don’t mind my saying. And the difference here is that you have the power, maybe even especially because you’re a lame duck, as you describe it, to change things. Now you are being, I’ll be blunt with you, you’re being ridiculed in the mainstream press. They are saying that you said to Bibi Netanyahu, okay, we’ll support you, Joe, but just this one, last time, next time we won’t support you. That’s how you’re being held up to ridicule. Mr. President, you have the option. All I’m trying to say is, you can prescind from these other political considerations. And if you do it now, there’s still what, three months before the election. If you do it now, there could be a peaceful settlement of some kind, at least tamping down attention in that part of the world. You could take credit for it. Kamala is not going to criticize that. And if your opponent criticizes, well, it’s not going to be very persuasive, it seems to me. So again, I would appeal to you to recognize your power as the president for the next almost six months, and the dangers are such as I have not seen before in many, many years, not since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And they’re not only in the Middle East. I have a word to say about Ukraine if you have another five minutes or so, but there are these two very big problems. 

POTUS: Ukraine’s going well, though we got the F 16s in there. They sunk that sub, right? It was already damaged. And then they sunk it twice. But, it looks like the tide is turning in Ukraine. You always believed they weren’t going to be able to turn that around, but they’re turning it around, right? 

McGovern: No, that’s not what we think, Mr. President. Matter of fact, if you go back to when you first said, let’s give him F 16, you were in Tokyo. You’ve one of these multilateral meetings, and Zelensky came and said, Mr. President, we lost Bakhmut, my God. We lost 100,000, 200,000 people there. And what are we going to do now? And you thought, Oh, I know we do, F 16s! Was Secretary Austin there then, or were the joint chiefs of staff that, you decided well we’ll do F 16s. The bottom line, Mr. President, is that as soon as F 16s take off from airfields in Ukraine, they’re going to be shot down by the Russians, easy prey the Russian technology far surpasses that four decade old technology in F 16, and indeed, they might even be shot on their airfields. Reuters was saying this week, oh, as soon as they fly up, they’ll be shot down. But that’s not what Putin’s spokesperson said, Peskov said, look, as soon as they appear in Ukraine, they’re going to be destroyed.

POTUS: We got six of those planes right now with the Ukrainian, the troops, with the pilots we trained?

McGovern: No one knows how many F 16s. Zelensky bragged yesterday that though there were a couple now that finally arrived, and there were two sort of under tarmac there, our best guess is maybe there are two more, maybe four. But you know the main point here is they’re not going to have any effect at all on the trajectory of the war. The war will be lost. And as I’ve said several times, it will be lost before November. And so the sooner we can tamp down things in the Middle East, the sooner we can deal with the Russians, as we did on the prisoner exchange, and tamp down things. Putin doesn’t want a big fracas in Ukraine. He certainly doesn’t want the use of nuclear weapons. But some of your military advisers have said, you know, this is quite possible to use below yield nuclear weapons. We think that’s crazy, because there’s no chance of delimiting their use. It will escalate out of anybody’s control, and that might be the end of all of us. So you have these opportunities even over the next six months, and the F 16s are not going to change anything. They’re just going to be destroyed, like most of the other Abrams tanks and other sophisticated weaponry that we’ve been happy to pay Raytheon and Lockheed to produce and produce more when the earlier ones get destroyed. It’s pretty apparent to a lot of Americans now, Mr. President, especially when everyone in the Senate that approved that supplemental, $110 or so billion dollars, every one of those senators said that money stays here. That goes to Lockheed, that goes to Raytheon, creates shops. This is what all this is about, the Military Industrial Complex is becoming more and more evident to more Americans, and now you have a chance as a statesman before you leave, to rise above that and say, look, let’s see if we can make a deal. And indeed, our indications are that the Russians, just as they were willing to deal in a very discreet, secret way on the prisoner exchange, might be able to deal on these other key issues, and but we won’t find that out unless we probe them, talk to them and see if they’re willing to do that.

POTUS: I’m gonna close this down because, you know, I gotta talk. I mean, you gotta be worried. I do think it’s the missile crisis time. It’s scary. I don’t even know who I could talk to that won’t leak this out in five minutes. And I will just give you a good example. You briefed Ronald Reagan, right? President Reagan. That was you, Ray? Okay, I know he was asleep, sometimes missing, sending somebody else and all that, but he met with Gorbachev, when Gorbachev was perish and all that, right? And they met in Reykjavík in Iceland. See they say, I don’t remember anything. I remember damn well. You miss people’s names or something, so what? But okay, so he met with him and Ronald Reagan, even though he talked about the Russians as those monsters, and that’s how we defended Star Wars, those monsters, they would blow us up, use them and everything. Well, he got met with Gorbachev, and they agreed they should get rid of all nuclear weapons, right? That’s when you started hearing all these stories about how Reagan was senile.

I remember thinking, look, Reagan was an older guy. He made mistakes and he slipped things up. But why suddenly are we hearing seeing these stories about Reagan, and then you have those neocons who were in his government, they’re in my government now, saying, well, they say two things, Ray. Two things. They say, okay, he’s being soft. Imagine Ronald Reagan’s being soft. The fact is, the only country he invaded was Grenada. It was not a country. It’s a resort or something, you know, and had no army or anything. But anyway, he didn’t really, at least Bush. He invaded countries, big countries. But anyway, Reagan, they said he doesn’t really have the spirit to take on the Russians, right? They  tried to challenge his patriotism, they challenged his sanity and everything, and they just ignored it. They got him to ignore, to forget about it. That’s why, instead of having peace with the old Soviet Union, they talked everybody into ‘No, we got to get rid of Gorbachev, right? Gotta get rid of him, and then back this guy, Yeltsin, and everything, and Gorbachev, he still wants to keep some kind of communism, like the Chinese have, as if you can’t be capitalist and communist at the same time. That’s bullshit.’ But anyway, they say we gotta go with this guy, Yeltsin. And then what does Yeltsin do? He’s a drunk so nobody can let he can’t function at some point. So they say, ‘Hey, get this guy, Putin. He’s one of the guys.’ They got a couple of guys, I remember that. And they say, Putin, he’s up in there now, with the St Petersburg crowd, they don’t like communists. They’re against it. Yeah, everybody used to be a communist, but now he’s one of the guys who’s against it all. He embraced the church and everything. So they get Yeltsin to hire Putin, put him in charge of the government, and then we back Putin to run for president. Defeats the communists, which he does, right? And that’s we got a bigger problem now with Putin than we got with any communists. We’ll get along with the communists of Vietnam that we were once fighting. We get, you know, we don’t get along with Cuba, because that’s the Florida vote, so we are still anti Cuban. But we know we get along with China. We do a lot of business with them and everything. We don’t want them to be superior to us and chipped or whatever the hell they’re going to make so I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going with this thing. But what I’m saying is they could destroy Reagan because he suddenly was the peacenik, and goddamn is looking for him that he wasn’t running, re running again, neither. But I mean, you are just going to tell you, I’m going to take seriously what you’re telling me, and I’m going to talk to our people here, but you just don’t have any idea what’s going to come down on my head. And, you know, I could just already hear Trump speech writers. You know, there’s the crazy senile president, he should be out of there right away. He doesn’t want to say that, because then Kamala would be able to be president. But people want to be demanding. They’re going to demand I step down. This is not wait until January. I come out and challenge Netanyahu. The Congress, they’re just cheerleaders for these guys, even the Democrats they’ll all cave, and you don’t know a damn thing about politics. But I respect that your concern here is real, and frankly, it concerns me. I’m not a fool. I know what these weapons do.

McGovern: Let me just say, Mr. President, that from my perspective, you remember, he is very apt and very relevant when it comes to Ronald Reagan in particular. Now he was the one that in 1983, said the Russians with the evil empire, when Kalinin K-7 was downed by the Russians flying over deep into Russian territory, said the Russians did it deliberately. Even though they didn’t do it deliberately, they thought it was an intelligence plane, not a passenger plane. So he was all geared up against Russia, and then Secretary Schultz. And with all due respect to the Secretary of State you have, he’s no Secretary Schultz. Secretary Schultz says, ‘Look, Gorbachev is the real deal. I’m going to go talk to the Kremlin people, see if he’s willing to deal.’ And Reykjavik happened. Now, what happened at Reykjavik, Gorbachev says to President Reagan, ‘Look, let’s get rid of all these nuclear weapons. What do you think now?’ Reagan says, ‘Wow, I’ll ask my people about that.’ I know this for a fact. He goes to his people, and they say, very cleverly, Mr. President, what will happen to your Star Wars? What will happen to the airtight ABM system that we have all devices? What would you prevent any Russian was a fairytale, okay, but Ronald Reagan didn’t know it was a fairy tale. He came back to Gorbachev and he said, ‘Well, we can’t do everything, but what we can do is what you suggested you Gorbachev, with respect to getting rid of these intermediate range ballistic missiles that nobody needs, since we have a strategic equivalency, let’s, let’s destroy this whole class of intermediate range of ballistic missiles, the SS 20s you have in Russia, the we have in Europe. What do you think about that?’ And Reagan said, ‘Well, maybe we’ll think about it.’ They did. They concluded that agreement. And Reagan went out in glory. He had tamped down this, this situation, he had formed this treaty. And it was Trump that got out of that treaty, 32 years later, namely, 2019 now those treaties, not only the ABM Treaty, which George W Bush got out of, but the one that Trump got out of, the intermediate range nuclear nuclear ballistic missiles. That treaty is defunct, and worse, you may not even know this, but your negotiators have persuaded the Germans to employ long range nuclear tipped missiles in Germany, starting in 2026. They announced that during the NATO Summit. I don’t know if you’re aware about that or not, but why? Why would they do that? Well, the Russians have told the Germans, you suckers, you’re going to be targets now. The US doesn’t care about you being targets. There’s no need for the US to have these missiles in there, and so the Germans are finally coming around, but very, very late. What I’m saying here is that there were precedents where presidents of the United States, despite an antipathy to the caricature of Putin and his predecessors, they roast the occasion. So let’s try it. Let’s see what we can get done. And the exigency of this situation, in my view, recommends an approach that’s different from all the others. You say you’ll consult with your advisors with all the respect and Soto voce, they’re going to tell you not to do it, just like Reagan’s advisors told him not to do. Can you imagine? Can you imagine if Ronald Reagan was not so hell bent on Star Wars, getting rid of all nuclear weapons that was possible at Reykjavik in the late 80s, that didn’t happen because Ronald Reagan had this notion that he could protect the whole country with an ABM system. He couldn’t. We can’t, and we need to deal with these people before it’s too late. I believe that you want no World War III. You have the power to prevent that within the next six months. 

POTUS: Ray, this is a moment of truth. Okay, I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve supported things I’m not proud of. I’ve done a lot of good stuff that I am proud of. But, one thing I do know sitting in this seat, is that we have lost our fear of nuclear war. And it’s funny because I watched that Oppenheimer movie, reminded me of why we worried about them. Of course, those bombs were child’s play compared to what we got now. I’m going to think about what you said. It’s meaningful. Don’t get carried away, but I appreciate you. I normally kid around, challenge you. But the reality is, the American public doesn’t give a shit about nuclear weapons. The reality is we don’t have adults watching the store. The reality is the movie Oppenheimer, they like the acting, or they liked the director, or it got good publicity, but you didn’t see anybody killed. 

McGovern: That’s it. You got it. Mr. President, there were no charred bodies. There were no photos.

POTUS: But that’s by design, because the public, they, whatever reason. I’m not going to get you know conspiratorial here about your military industrial, it’s real. It’s real. Nobody has to give me lectures about that. Eisenhower knew better than anyone, because he was on the receiving end of having to fight these wars and everything when he warned about that. But you know, we’re in a moment of truth here, because you know what, they want to bring it on. There’s people who want to bring it on. You can’t go on building these weapons without thinking they’re usable. You know, why are we modernizing nuclear weapons? Because people, I get briefed all the time. We got weapons that can be used. They’re not that different than regular weapons. They actually will cause less civilian damage, or they can be controlled, or their radiation is less or, I’ve been briefed on this stuff. It’s like a guy coming into your office and you’re a doctor, and he sells you this drug or that drug, you know, it’s the wonder drug. So the way they justify modernizing nuclear, and I’m sure this happens in China, happens in Russia, happens in Israel, and so forth. Nobody’s going to pay a lot of money to build weapons you can’t use, so when it’s happening all these years since you were working for Reagan, we have made nuclear war fighting plausible. Is that the right word I got? The right word? Reasonable? Is that a better word? Sane? Is that a better word?

Let me give you a bit of wisdom. There was a madman theory when Nixon was in there, but you pretended to be a madman. Because only a madman would use a nuclear weapon that destroys everything and ends the whole human experiment, makes the world safe for cockroaches. But maybe it’s not the madman theory anymore. Maybe we and a lot of other people, maybe people around Putin, maybe the people you know around Netanyahu, you know, oh, maybe around Xi maybe, I don’t know, but maybe they are the Mad Men now. It’s not that they’re faking it. Maybe they really are mad. Because, after all, how do you keep, it’s an important moment here, Ray, You know, just get straight, because I’ve been stressing why I can’t do this, but I heed your warning. There is no fear of nuclear war anymore. There’s no so-called Peace Movement. They wouldn’t have been cheering like crazy. And it wasn’t just Republicans. There were some Democrats there cheering for Netanyahu when he came there. And what he did there, by the way, Ray, just because you don’t know the politics. What he did there is he told him, he’s going after Iran. He told him, and they cheered so he could go back to his guys and say, ‘Hey, we got authorization. I was there at the US Congress, and there were enough people in that room to back me that were a majority Republicans, some Democrats and so forth. And I said in that room, I’m going after Iran. We’ve had enough. I’m going after them. You got to get rid of them and I got the backing.’ Now you are telling me I should go against that? They’re going to declare me insane. They’re going to make me resign now. I don’t even know who I call, who I talk to? I don’t know, because that’ll be on Fox News, or they’ll be in the New York Times in an hour, you know, 20 minutes. If I’m thinking even of that, you know that I’m going to betray Israel. And, no, I don’t even know how you do it. I don’t know how you do it. They’d put me in a jacket or something, haul me out of here.

Other guys at the CIA might be in on it, too. Because don’t talk about this Military Industrial Complex without talking about where you spent your whole life and when you had left the Air Force, Ray, you went right into the CIA. You spent 27 years there, and you said you didn’t go through that turnstile from analysis to the operatives, the killers, the murderers, the assassins there your buddies the assassins. But you know, they bring it on. They want to bring it on. The military industrial complex, as Eisenhower pointed out, is dangerous, not just because they’re wasting money, yeah, wasting everything. Can’t you can’t have anything decent go on. But no, they gotta have wars. That’s what justifies it.

McGovern: Mr. President, you still occupy the bully pulpit. And what Ike said in his farewell address, in warning about the military industrial complex, he said there was an antidote to this, and that is a well informed citizenry. Now, one possibility would be for you to use your bully pulpit to inform our citizenry that there’s no point in risking nuclear war in the Middle East, and that you’re willing to meet Xi Jinping, Putin or anybody else to talk about how to tamp down that situation. That would be redounding to your legacy and to your credit. It would be, I wager that Putin and Xi Jinping would jump at the chance to get this thing tamped down, because it’s in nobody’s interest to screw up the Middle East to the point where it becomes a third world war. So that’s just an bully pulpit is still there. You’re still there for six months. Do something. I would suggest that it’s possible to do something very extracurricular, and damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.

POTUS: I’m going to think about what you say. Let’s see how this develops. But, you know, I could write that speech, I could get you to write that speech for me, and I’ll get there with the teleprompter, I could pull it off. But I get one slip in there, I get some name wrong, I get something, that’s going to be the headline. Not that the world’s going to blow up. The headline is going to be, I made a goddamn grammatical error, which I could have made when I was 18, you know. You know that. And let me tell you something. Ray, it’s amazing to me, a guy who works in an agency for 27 years that has destroyed governments around the world and lied about stuff around the world and killed people that didn’t deserve to be killed or anything assassinated. All that you’re still naive about the strength of democracy. You really think that an American president can just go out and tell the truth and somehow survive, somehow stay in his position and not be destroyed with mass media and everything else you know. Why do you think Roosevelt held off so long before entering World War Two, right? The guy that you and I probably admire more than any other president, if we were telling the truth, would be Roosevelt, the guy who saved this country with his domestic programs and everything. He didn’t want to go to war. Now, he had a big enemy there. A lot of reasons to go to that war, but he held off right because he knew he would be attacked and that anything he tried to do, however, to go way back, could have stopped Hitler much earlier without going to war. That was all seen as appeasement and blah, blah, blah, because then the military guys don’t want to do that, so waging peace. But somehow I got this oddball CIA advisor here who believes still in peace and negotiation, never, never was going to have an easy way, or never was going to succeed. I don’t care whether you’re blowing up the people we have to call Native Americans now. Can’t call them the engines or anything anymore. So you know, we’re going way back. We’ve always been a militaristic country. 

McGovern: Well, that’s true, Mr. President. So here’s a chance to break that scheme. First, with all due respect, please don’t ever say I was in the Air Force, okay. I was an Army infantry intelligence officer. I took a solid oath, as you did, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Now the Constitution says ‘You and you alone have the power to declare war.’ That has been frittered away over the last four administrations. Why don’t you reassert that power and say you’re not going to let anybody start any new wars unless you try first to create peaceful conditions to avoid them. Yeah, you’d be running into all kinds of flack. But hey, six months, you become a hero at the end. I can’t assure you of that, but you will have done the right thing.

POTUS: Alright, Ray, but did I get that right —  I thought Congress has to declare war?

McGovern: You got that, right. That’s what I was trying to say. In other words, Congress has to pass a declaration of war.

POTUS: They don’t ever do that, though.

McGovern: Well, yeah, but you can insist on that.

POTUS: But we’ve had these wars, so you’re right. We could declare war. I just don’t say I’m doing it, right. Well, how does it work? That’s the interesting thing. I mean, I’ve been around a long time, but just say, explain that to me. Congress is supposed to declare war, right? But they haven’t done that. When’s the last time Congress declared war? 

McGovern: You’re right. Well, it was World War II. And all the undeclared wars we haven’t had much success in. 

POTUS: Well, we killed over three and a half, 4 million, whatever, people there in Indo China. That was a war, right?

McGovern: McNamara said 3 million.

POTUS: I looked it up, he said three, I think he said three and a half in that movie Fog of War. Anyway, remember Fog of War? Yeah, but, oh, it’s always Fog of War when it’s not going well. You can see clearly whenever you want to get into war, then you get into it, and it’s not going well, which it never does, then it’s a fog of war. But you know, thinking about your little slip there, the fact is, we assume the President does have the power to declare war, even though he doesn’t.

But here we’re not even talking about declaring war. We’re talking about not supporting a war. And some people should think, well, I’m worried. I’m going to get on and talk to people about what you’re saying, let’s see how it breaks in the next, you know, a few days, and see what happens? But if all these other people don’t want nuclear war, they better start speaking up like that, you know. And certainly around everywhere, I mean England, France and you know, to see what the hell is going on here. There used to be the Europeans. The Western Europeans used to have old towns. Remember the Germans without us. Now the Germans. I mean, what the hell are they? They put the F 16s, these other people, the Dutch, what happened? What happened to Sweden? We used to be able to rely on them to call this to some of our senses. Sweden and Finland, they don’t want to go to war. I think, you know what? I’m an old guy, and I don’t wish this on my grandchildren or anything else. But you know, I think it’s unstoppable. I never want you to ever quote me and I hope we’re not making any tapes anymore. Get that kid in here. But, you know, I just don’t get the sense anybody gives a shit. I don’t get the sense that they care about war. They think it’s like a video game, you know. They think it’s something they’ll watch. It’s like watching the Olympics, right, right? You know. And, you know, they get more medals. We get more medals as long as they’re good ratings, as long as their jobs, right? I mean, suddenly you watch the Olympics, it doesn’t matter whether the Chinese are getting bold today, they won three, four golds, and the Americans get more. Nobody gives a damn. Maybe war is like that.

McGovern: Well, that’s where the bully pulpit comes in, Mr. President. So I hope you will consider that. And you know, as far as Congress is concerned, what I should have said is that you can hold them to the fact that without them declaring war, you’re going to not resort to employing our aircraft carriers, putting them in danger of being sunk by people like the Houthis with the advanced missiles that they now have. So that’s one thing you could do is say, hey, Congress, here’s the Constitution. It says that you have to declare war before I authorize deployment of our military resources, that might be a bully sort of thing to remind people about, because, as you just mentioned, Americans are not used to what the Constitution says, and they’re all too used to the President doing this or that, or telling Austin to go, Yeah, put the Abraham Lincoln out there and and let’s see what happens. It could really be a big, big crisis if the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier or one of its accompanying ships is sunk. Okay, what are you going to do then? So that’s the kind of thing that I would hope you back with your mind here.

POTUS: That’s the showstopper, Ray, you hit. It took us a long time to get there. The showstopper is when the bad shit happens, then any restraint is off. Any restraint is off, and we’ll be ‘Look what we did. Everybody forgets. Nobody brings up the Korean War.’ Well, but Priya, we leveled everything. We leveled every structure there, everything, everything, you know, blasting, blasting. And the reason was, we didn’t give a about Korean, but we wanted to send a message to China, and that is what would happen here now, is Israel sending a message to that whole region. Don’t you ever mess with us in this way. Any of you, I don’t care what you call them, what your names are, and we’re willing to level the world, or at least level everybody else in the Middle East. Now, the problem is, if you get into any kind of nuclear stuff, there is no Israel, right? I mean the radiation, everything else, that’s the end, right? Tell me if I’m wrong, how the hell do they why aren’t the Israeli people more concerned? 

McGovern: They’re hoping, you Mr. President, will bail them out no matter what, and that they won’t have to resort to nuclear weapons if push comes to shove. You know, they could deceive themselves into thinking these very low yields, just these mini nukes, might come in handy to stave off complete defeat. That’s a real possibility. It’s not only Sy Hersh and others that have written about it. The Samson option. You remember what Samson did in the old Bible? Okay? That could happen again, and that would be the end of the peace in the Middle East for decades. 

POTUS: Tell me again the Samson option.

McGovern: Well, you know Samson, Delilah, I guess it was shaved off his hair, and he pulled down the temple around him and destroyed everything. In other words, the idea is that when you’re facing real emasculation or defeat, you destroy everything, including your own temple. That’s how I remember it. I haven’t read the Old Testament recently.

POTUS: You can read that Old Testament and come to all kinds of conclusions. People tell me there’s some concern, because they’re going to require them to read the 10 Commandments or have them posted in schools. And I don’t know in what four or five states, are you supposed to get upset about that, or I’m supposed to? I don’t know, but I’m thinking, what’s wrong with the 10 commandments? I mean even, nobody even talks about it, the 10 Commandments, but that’s got that one about war there, right? And you went to Catholic school, didn’t you? You guys respect the 10 Commandments, didn’t you? 

McGovern: Yeah, but, you know, one was about killing, another one was about lying so maybe or not, let it be installed in the White House or in the people that advise you. 

POTUS: Nobody ever brings that up. They say, ‘Oh, yeah, we gotta post it.’ What do you mean? You don’t think kids are going to read it? I mean, think about that, Ray. You went to Catholic school, and you went to religious school, right? What would they think if you posted it and some kid said, ‘Thou shalt not kill, right?’ What are you doing? Yeah, unless you, unless you’re the president, then you can kill.

McGovern: Well, apparently, that’s pretty much what it evolved into.

POTUS: Because I’m Caesar, they’re rendering unto Caesar. What? No, but that’s the Old Testament. The New Testament doesn’t have that, does it? I don’t know. It’s hard to go. I don’t know. I think at this time in my life I should think more about religion. But on another subject. Ray, all right, you got my attention. I’m scared. Yeah, I’ll think about it. 

McGovern: Thank you, Mr. President.

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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).

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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.

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