A: “I don’t know that there’s an epiphany. I like to define myself more as pro-integrity and pro-America, and I don’t think the two should be inherently separate. I think that anybody who has spent time in the military or who has been into war has an appreciation for the reality that war is. Anybody even who has spent time in the military and hasn’t been to war understands through the preparations for war what is entailed by going into war, and I think it would be a sick individual indeed who would embrace this and cherish this. War is about the killing of people and the destroying of property. So, I don’t see any inherent contradiction between being a professional Marine, sworn to uphold and defend the constitution, trained to do that which is necessary in its defense, being against war.

“I’m not antiwar in the Quaker sense. I recognize at least in terms of my own understanding … that I can envision circumstances under which a nation may be called upon to defend itself, and that defense will incorporate use of the military which will engage in acts of violence. I don’t celebrate this. I don’t worship this. I don’t say this is fantastic. I actually mourn this. I believe that when we go into war, we should lower the flag to half-mast and have a national day of mourning, because obviously, something wrong is about to happen.

“Rather than say antiwar, though, I prefer the term ‘war preventionist.’ That’s more accurately what I’m about. Just like, being a firefighter, I don’t celebrate fire. I embrace fire prevention. I want to ensure fires never occur. It’s a failure of society every time we get called out to fight a fire, because something went wrong, and I’d say, as a Marine, I’m a war preventionist. I’m trained to fight wars, and I will fight them when they occur, but I believe it’s my responsibility and society’s responsibility to try to prevent war. … I think it’s the natural direction a principled individual who embraces the Constitution takes. I don’t see any inherent contradiction between being a Marine and being a war preventionist. In fact, I think the best Marines are those who embrace war prevention, because they understand what war is all about.”

Q: Also in the book, you mention Ms. vanden Heuvel and the other folks at The Nation who made a conservative Republican comfortable. Do you still consider yourself a Republican? Or do you have a party affiliation?

A: “Well, I’m an American first and foremost. I think anybody who defines themselves by their political party affiliations has serious issues, because it tells me they put partisan politics ahead of the constitution. The constitution is not a Democratic document, it’s not a Republican document, it’s not a Whig document or a Federalist document. It’s an American document.

“But, our society today has organized itself politically, and I’m a product of the Cold War. My father was a career Air Force officer, and I’m somebody who was raised with the belief — and mistaken it may be — that the Republican Party was the party of national defense, and so I turned 18 years of age, I registered as a member of the Republican Party. I can say that I’ve probably voted Republican 60 percent of the time in elections and Democrat 40 percent of the time, because I’ve tried to vote for the best candidate, regardless of party affiliation, but I do not in any way, shape or form identify with the Republican Party of today, as it’s currently manifested. It’s a party that embraces an ideology that’s inconsistent with what I believe in, and there’s a temptation to, maybe say I don’t want to be a part of this any more.

“Now, we come down to two issues, how can a party or organization reform itself if everybody quits? If you disagree with something and you walk away, you basically have condemned that organization which at one time you apparently felt strongly enough about to join, to continue down a path you disagree with. So, maybe the best course of action is to stay there and fight and try to get it to change from within.

“The second one is if you’re going to go around the country and around the world and articulate a stance that lends itself to misinterpretation — for instance, getting labeled antiwar, getting labeled peace activist. By speaking out against what I deem to be bad policy, there’s a lot of labels that get thrown at you, and to be able to stand up in front of an audience and remind them that I am and continue to be a card-carrying member of the Republican Party, and I’m more conservative than half these neoconservatives out there.

“But again, I define myself as American and then as a conservative Republican. I’ll say my vision of conservative Republican definitely clashes with those who walk around carrying that label today.”

Q: So, you’re a lieutenant in the Delmar (N.Y.) Fire Department? What specifically do you do? Do you run a unit or head of public relations?

A: “I’m a line officer, run Engine 22, a fire suppression engine. We had 498 calls last year, 2,500 EMS calls. Not bad.

Flowers: “And still write books.”

Q: And still write books, yeah.

A: “Since Jan. 1, we’ve had nine … fully involved structure fires, so we rock and roll. We’re not as busy as Memphis, but then again, we’re a little suburban neighborhood. We’re not quite the big city.”

Q: How old are you now?

A: “Now you’re getting personal. I’m 46 years old.”

Q: Well, you’re younger than me.

A: “And feeling older every minute. Your body just doesn’t recover the way it used to.”

Q: Why did you want to come down here and speak on this topic?

A: “Well, I was asked. I mean, let’s just make it that simple. Anybody who knows me understands that I’m probably the world’s worst public relations person. I don’t have a Web site. I’m not calling around asking people to ask me to come down and talk. I’m in purely a reactive mode at this point, which isn’t really a good thing. … I’m just not comfortable being an activist. It’s not what I was programmed to do. I can take a hill. I can go into Iraq and do an inspection, I can fight a fire, but to be a proactive peace activist, it’s just not there. I’ve taken the easy way out by defining myself as piece of ammunition for the activist movement to be able to use. When they see a situation where they view what I bring to the table as appropriate, to invite me, and I will allow myself to participate within the boundaries of what I’m capable of doing.

“So, I received an invitation. I’d spoken at West Hartford, Conn., and Mr. Davila was there, and he reached out. He asked me if I would consider coming down to Memphis.”

Davila: “I used to work at Trinity College until last year, so that’s where I met him.”

Flowers: “I actually heard him speak in 2002, when I was still an undergraduate at Clark University, and that was in many ways for me in my activist career, hearing him speak and hearing some of the things he said before the invasion, actually magnified it a lot for me and got me involved on my college campus.”

A: “So, after exchanging e-mails and double-checking on who they were and what they were — I have to be careful, because I get invitations to speak from a wide variety of sources, and I won’t give the name of an organization, but somebody sent me an e-mail once that said, ‘Hey, we’d like you to come out to Santa Monica, Calif.’ I go, ‘OK, that’s a good place to go.’ They’ll fly you out. OK, that’s step one. They’ll pay for accommodations. That’s step two. They’ll pay you an honorarium. That’s step three. So we’ve got all three. You’ve hit the trifecta. All right, we’re rockin’ and rollin’ right now, because you don’t always hit the trifecta. But something in the back of my head said, ‘You might want to do a quick check.’ And I Googled them, and it turned out to be, because I had written something that been deemed critical of Israel, and this was a very Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic group, and I went, ‘Uh-oh. Ruh-roh, Astro.’ And I was up front. I said, ‘Look, I apologize. I said I’d do this for you, but on further research, I find that what you’re seeking to do and what I stand for are incompatible, and I’m withdrawing. They accused me of falling under the umbrella of the Zionists. They sent me an e-mail that said, ‘They obviously put pressure on you. We understand.’ I didn’t respond, but I thought to myself, ‘No one put pressure on me. I put pressure on myself, because you’re a hate group.’

“What makes Memphis doubly attractive is that I haven’t spoken down here. I think … I’ve bracketed Memphis. I’ve spoken in Knoxville and I’ve spoken in Little Rock, but I’ve not spoken in the Memphis area, and I just think it’s important, if someone’s going to invite you, especially in an area you haven’t spoken before, you need to say yes. You need to do what you can to get there. So, it’s just a perfect fit.

“Plus, this is the birthplace of Elvis. My kids love Elvis. Maybe not the birthplace, but …”

Q: Where he lived and died. You talk about the antiwar movement as collapsing. You think it still is?

A: “I don’t know. At what point does it stop collapsing and becomes collapsed. I would just say that I don’t see the antiwar movement trending in the right direction right now. Every criticism I put forward about the antiwar movement remains valid, indeed, there’s much that I can say that could show that it’s even gotten worse.

“This is not in any way, shape or form meant to denigrate any individual groups. I don’t, and I have nothing but the highest respect for any citizen activist who makes the commitment to fight for what they believe in. That’s not the problem here. The problem is that it would be the same if you were a civil rights group, and you lived in the days of segregation, and it only got worse. … So, you have to be honest and say, whatever you’re doing isn’t working. …

“We’re going to go to war with Iran. We’re already in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we’re trending toward war with Iran. Where’s the antiwar movement? Obviously, there’s people with antiwar sentiment, but to call them a movement implies a level of organization and cooperation and interaction that simply doesn’t exist. There’s more trouble between United for Peace and Justice and ANSWER, two major antiwar groups in America today, than there is between the antiwar movement and those who want to go to war. The antiwar movement’s fighting itself.

“I travel around the country talking to antiwar organizations everywhere, and there’s a handful that are getting their act together, and I have to reserve judgment, because I don’t know enough about what you (Flowers) are doing right now to be able to say anything. I was in St. Louis, Mo. Great people there. They’re activists doing a job. They brought in all their activists, and I think they had 12 hard-core activists, and I said, just in the way of general introduction said, ‘What’s your No. 1 objective.’ They said, ‘The purpose of our organization is to get the troops out of Iraq now.’ Wow, all 12 of you are going to accomplish this? They just bit off more than they could chew.

“This is what I find, that there’s a lot of grassroots organizations, and you’re pretty much attracting the choir, and it’s not very effective at reaching outside of the choir, because it’s a very insular group. … I’m just saying that we’re dealing with a situation where we want to motivate the majority of the American population, and the bottom line is that, in order to be politically viable, you have to have the power of the people behind you.

“I was very critical of the antiwar movement in 2006 when many of their representatives were proclaiming victory at the top of their voice by noting that the number of Americans against the war, I think, was at that time in the high 60s or low 70s. We’ve got an even higher number today. I said, ‘I don’t think you’ve really got a good cause-and-effect relationship here. Are they really against the war? Or is there something else motivating them?’ I would like to say they’re against losing, that if America was winning this war, that if we’d gone in an instilled democracy and everything was functioning on all cylinders and all that, no one would be questioning — only a handful would be questioning the motives, that we lied to go into war, that there were no WMDs, that there was no link to al-Qaida, etc. But today, the people who even articulate an antiwar stance, their frustration isn’t that we went to war in violation of international law and we short-changed the constitution, etc., it’s that we’re losing.

“That’s not an antiwar movement. That’s just basically like football fans in a stadium frustrated that their team went down to yet another defeat. The problem is that they’re not demanding that there’s not another football game. They’re just saying that we need to win one. And I am very fearful that there’s a trend towards redeeming America’s reputation, and we may be seeking a new football match in a stadium called Iran. And I don’t see people, all 88 or 90 percent of them against the war in Iraq saying they’re against the war in Iran. They might be after the fact, but before, I don’t know.

“We’re falling into the same trap. We’ve allowed Iran, a nation of 70 or 80 million people, to be personified by a figure of one, Ahmadinejad, a little, beady-eyed, scrawny, bearded man.”

Q: You’re going to make me spell Ahmadinejad.

A: “You can Google it. The president of Iran, how’s that? We’ve taken a religion that is — It’s like talking about Christianity. What is the Christian religion. There is not Christian religion. There’s Baptists, there’s Methodists, there’s Catholics, there’s Presbyterian — but you can’t speak of a unified Christian faith. It’s been fractured.

“It’s the same thing. You take a religion as diverse as the Shi’a faith, as it’s applied in Iran, where you have a wide spectrum of the way people apply it themselves, and you use the term Shi’a fundamentalism as if all of Iran is captured by this.

“I just think that the American people is wading in a sea of ignorance, and from this ignorance comes fear that is manipulated by politicians for certain purposes, and we fell for it in Iraq, and we’re going to fall for it again in Iran. But we are falling for it.

“A WMD threat where none exists. There’s no WMD threat from Iran. Zero. But suddenly, we’re living in fear that we’re going to face a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud. That’s only strike two. Giving the American people the benefit of the doubt, they swung and they missed on Iraq, and they’re going to swing and miss on Iran, so they’ve got one more coming.”

Q: Interestingly enough, the last time I got to do an interview with somebody it was David Brooks. And he said when he was here, speaking at Rhodes, that the United States was never going to invade Iran, was never going to attack Iran. Obviously, you don’t agree with that position.

A: “I wouldn’t say that I disagree with the statement that the United States isn’t going to invade Iran. Yeah, I agree with that. We’re not going to invade Iran. Attack Iran? We’ve already attacked Iran. I’d like to know what Mr. Brooks take is on the CIA’s admission that we funded a Beluchi group out of Pakistan to launch a cross-border operation into Zidon to do direct action operations responsible for the deaths of 12 to 15 Iranian Revolutionary Guard commands. I mean, if we had Cubans operating in Mexico who funded a group that came across and used Mexican-Americans to attack Houston, Texas, and killed 12 soldiers, and found out that the Cubans had funded it, would we not say that Cuba attacked us? I think we would.

“If the Cubans ran missions out of Cuba running drones over Miami, photographing it for the purpose of future bombing attack or potential targets, would we not say it’s a violation of our sovereignty? If Cuba was funding and underwriting groups in the United States to rise up and overthrow the constitutional government of America, would we not say that constitutes an act of war?

“The answer is, of course, on all of these, ‘Yes.’

“Yet, the United States does all of these in Iran today, and yet we’re not at war with Iran? No, I beg to differ. It’s just a different kind of war.

“But I don’t think we’re going to invade Iran. I don’t see us putting 500,000 troops on the ground and all that, but the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, himself, said that, in his opinion, Iran is responsible for the majority of the attacks on American troops that result in American deaths, and this must stop. The Senate has said, in the Kyl-Lieberman resolution that the Revolutionary Guard Command in Iran is a terrorist organization. The president has called the Iranians criminals that must be crushed. The rhetoric is there, backed up by active targeting and available resources. Gates has said the military’s not broke, we can go to war, we can use the Navy and the Air Force.

“I would disagree with Mr. Brooks 100 percent. I would say there’s a high likelihood that the United States will be bombing Iran in the very near future. The conditions have been defined and, of course, they are being met. And, the one thing you can say about the Bush administration is that the do not have a track record of backing down. When they issue a threat, they sorta mean it, and when they’ve promised retaliation, they will retaliate, when the conditions have met their benchmark. And, if Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader in Iraq does as he has claimed to do, if America continues to pursue the Mahdi Army and takes the gloves off and says, ‘War exists,’ I think we’ve met the benchmark, and war is inevitable. We’re planning it right now. We’re targeting. We’re there. We have the troops. All we need is that trigger. And we’ve defined it. And there’s a very good chance that trigger will be met.

“So, I would disagree with Mr. Brooks. I hope I’m wrong. I would love nothing more than to come back here in six months and have you tell me, ‘You were wrong.’ And you know what? I’d drink a beer, and I’d be happy. I want to be wrong on this one. I want nothing more than to be wrong on this one. But I always said, my job as an intelligence officer was not to tell my boss what he or she wanted to hear, but tell what the facts were, and right now, the facts are trending toward war between the United States and Iran.”

Flowers: (Heard about Ritter’s predictions from 2002 about the invasion and the lack of WMDs that turned out right.)

A: “I don’t want to toot my own horn, but as an intelligence analyst, I have as near to a perfect track record as you can get, dating well before the Iraq war. I was involved with calling shots on Russia. I was involved in the Gulf War. The bottom line is, the facts take you where the facts take you, and I’m also a big believer that when you assess a problem and you seek a solution a solution, that it’s imperative that you define the problem properly, and that we have a very difficult problem here in the United States with our Congress and our leadership who define problems in any way other than trying to appease public opinion. We take a way at the way the wind’s blowing. We craft words that please the public, and that’s what we present, without dealing with the reality on the ground. I think one of the reasons there’s such a disconnect between, for instance, how I’m assessing the problem and how it’s being presented elsewhere is that Mr. Brooks and others might be actually examining the problem based on domestic political imperatives here in the United States, as opposed to the reality on the ground.”

Q: As an aside, I’m very curious. Do you ever talk to Schwarzkopf … within the last two years?

A: “Not directly. I talk to Schwarzkopf’s sister, who lives in Vermont. We pass messages through here. I think he’s out west somewhere.”

Q: Do you have anything interesting to share with our readers through you?

A: “I’ll let him speak for himself. He’s in a tough position, because he’s been lionized, yet I would say, I think he feels that this war is a huge mistake, but he doesn’t want to wade into the public debate, so to speak.

“I don’t think you’ll find too many retired officers who aren’t drawing a paycheck from CNN or have been corrupted by mainstream media, retired officers who’ve retained some semblance of independence … there’s not too many retired professional officers who’ll praise what’s going on in this war today.”

Q: Realizing that you are a card-carrying Republican, do you have a favorite candidate?

A: “My guy didn’t run. Chuck Hegel. … Chuck Hegel was my first hope. Bill Richardson was my second hope. Barack Obama is my third hope. If Barack drops out or doesn’t make it, I’m in a very difficult situation, because neither one of the two remaining candidates does anything for me. I think neoliberalism is as evil as neoconservatism, and Hillary is about as neoliberal as they come. She would surround herself with people who would carry out foreign policy that would be virtually mirror images of what the Bush administration has done.

“Worse, she’s in a difficult situation, being a woman, where she has to be perceived as being strong, so I think in many cases, it could be even worse, because given a choice between action or inaction, she won’t have the courage or the resumé to choose inaction, because she will have to prove herself. Very dangerous situation.

“For a woman who has never served in the military to so glibly speak of annihilation, she hasn’t earned that right. … She has no clue.

“And she is a woman who is openly disdainful for the military. So, I have a lot of problems with Hillary Rodham Clinton. I hope Barack Obama can withstand this current nonsense.”

Q: So, here we are, five guys, sitting in a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee. How do we keep this country from getting involved in another war, and how do we get our troops out of Iraq?

A: “Ummm.”

Q: We don’t do it, obviously, but as a country? What’s our best option?

A: “I think it’s important to realize that Iraq is a political war, not a war of national security, and the decision to be made about Iraq is only going to be made when the political conditions in this country allow that decision to be made. So long as Congress continues to be populated by people who voted in favor of that war and expended political capital on that vote, we’re not getting out.

“Everybody’s focusing on the president this time around. I keep telling people, ‘Focus on Congress. Elect a new Congress. I don’t care what their voting record is on anything. If you voted for that war and you haven’t repudiated that vote, you’re gone.’

“So, if everybody continues to stay in place, the policy’s not changed, so I’m not optimistic about getting out of Iraq any time soon. When the greatest thing Congress can do right now is to pass a funding bill that takes Iraq off the map in the presidential election, because they’re going to fund the war the rest of President Bush’s term and six months into the next president’s term, they’ve basically said, ‘We don’t want Iraq to be an issue in this election.’

“It’s the most cowardly thing in the world. If I was a parent or loved one of a soldier overseas, you’d need to recognize that our politicians have collectively dipped their hands in the blood of dead Americans, those who have died and those who are going to die in order to preserve their political viability. … It’s just disgusting.

“Now, how do we get out of the next war, that’s even more difficult. Congress isn’t going to do anything. Congress could stop this next war tomorrow, by A. Refuse to fund it and put down an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that says, ‘You will not spend U.S. taxpayers’ money (on it).’ B. (Rewrite) the war powers resolution, meaning … these were initiating acts that were viable back in 2001-2002, but the global war on terror has progressed in a manner which is totally different from the original authorization to use military force, and rather have the president make it up as he goes along, Congress needs to redefine the use of military force, and in Afghanistan, too. The original congressional resolution was about compelling Saddam Hussein to cooperate with weapons inspectors. Well, that’s water under the bridge now, so why don’t we talk about what we’re doing in Iraq? Why don’t we redefine what our national goals and objectives are?

“That’s sort of a constitutional mandate given to Congress. They’ve abrogated that. They won’t do it. That would be the easy way out. Now it would be to impact public opinion in a way that has pressure brought to bear on Congress. I don’t know what the answer is on that. Something dramatic’s going to have to be done, and that’s the problem set. We need a Nixon-goes-to-China moment. We need someone to go to Iran and actually break through this diplomatic impasse that we’re currently in. Whether the five of us around the table can accomplish that or not is another question.”

Flowers: “I’m all up for going to Iran.”

Q: One of the things that I think Americans learned from the civil rights movement was the effect of actions by a substantial number of people and reactions from the American people to those actions — and I’m thinking in particular of the Selma march and Bull Connor’s use of fire hoses and dogs on civil rights workers — kind of changed the way the wind was blowing. You talk about a Nixon-goes-to-China moment. Is there something you could envision that would not necessarily — I mean, you don’t want people to be martyrs for this movement, but …

A: “You don’t want violence. I know what you’re saying. It’s like Gandhi breaking the back of British control of India in a strike, sending the workers forward. They never attacked the British, but basically they made the British exhaust themselves breaking the shoulders of these demonstrators.

“I’ve always believed that if we could find a way to educate the average American on accepting and endorsing as their core value defense of the Constitution — the preamble, ‘We the People’ gives ownership of that constitution to the people. I’ve always said, look, let’s not have a million-man march. I want a 30 million-man march. I want a million people a day bringing siege to the White House, the purpose of which is to toss a copy of the Constitution over the fence for the president to read, and go to Congress and lay a copy of the Constitution on the steps. Don’t do nothing else. Just say, you got a copy of the Constitution, and you want to give one to the president and one to Congress, and then we’re leaving. Then, tomorrow, a million more people come. There’s no violence here. And you leave 30 million copies of the Constitution with the president and Congress, and the media can’t ignore it.

“You know what? It’s not unreasonable. We’re not asking anything other than to get a copy of the Constitution to the president. We’re not making a statement. We’re just telling the Congress to do its job and telling the president to stop doing more than what he’s constitutionally permitted to do. And if you defend the Constitution and use it as your core value, the rest comes from it.

“It’s very hard to get that number of people motivated … for a highly politicized concept, like withdraw troops now. That’s tough. Because you’re always going to have an argument and counter-argument. But if you stand up for the Constitution, and then you see the government crack down hard, the government has lost that battle.

“I was educated by a colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King, and I was in Washington, D.C., and I wish could remember the guy’s name. We were in a discussion, and I talked about defense of the Constitution, and he said, ‘Excuse me, Dr. King made the Constitution the center of the civil rights movement. Everything he did was about the rule of law and standing up for the Constitution. All he asked is that the Constitution be applied to black people.’ That was a great education on my part. You always thought that it was more radical, but basically, the civil rights movement came down to defense of the constitution. …

“You’ll get a lot more people, and you’ll be able to pull off a lot more things, that if the government cracked down on them. … The average redneck in Tennessee is going to chuckle when he sees a cop smack a peacenik’s head. ‘Hell, yeah, he deserved that.’ But if you’ve got your average American in defense of the Constitution, and a cop smacks him on the head, the average American would say, ‘Wait, there’s something wrong. … They’re making a simple request. It’s their Constitution. They want the president to read it.’ Here’s 30 million of them saying, ‘We’re going to make this happen.’”

Q: That’s an interesting idea. We’ll move onto the questions from our sources. This one’s from a … Lee Buchsacher, and he’s with the American Legion, and he said the U.S. has put down two despotic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now they have two democratically elected governments. Is this not the best way to secure peace?

A: “As a fellow member of the American Legion, as I am … I would take umbrage at my fellow Legionnaire’s, A, description of what’s going on, and, B, his blanket endorsement of the action. I would ask him a counter-question, if I could. Does he believe that the ends justify the means? Because I would imagine as a member of the American Legion, he’d have to, A, serve in the military, and, B, serve in the military overseas in war. So, it’s not just a theoretical ‘uphold and defend the Constitution,’ for him, ‘cause he did so.

“So, I would assume that before he actually put his life on the line, he actually read the Constitution. That’s what I’m hoping. And if he does that, he understands that what America’s about is due process, the concept of the rule of law, and you can’t have the rule of law without due process. We are not a nation who endorses frontier justice, nor do we have a lynch mob mentality, nor should we. We’re against that. We’re a civilized nation. He knows that. He’s read the Constitution. He took an oath to uphold and defend it.

“I’d also ask him to be a little bit careful about using certain definitions for certain processes. No student of democracy, democratic institutions would label the election process in Iraq in January 2005 as being democratic. It doesn’t even meet the United States’ definition of what a democratic election is. We know it wasn’t. So I’d advise him to go back and re-address that.

“The same could be said for the process that brought Karzai into Afghanistan. The closest institution that can fit the label democratic would be a loya jirga, a gathering of tribes, tribal elders, that selected Karzai. I would advise my esteemed colleague in the American Legion to go and he studies, A, what the true composition of that loya jirga was and the behind-the-scene manipulation of what was happening. If he is trying to insinuate that buying off officials before an election so that you know the results of an election is representative of a free and democratic society, I’d say that he and I disagree. We don’t approve that in the United States.

“So, I’d say that he’s probably misinformed. So, rather than rallying around the false flag of democracy, why don’t we rally around the Constitution, and understand that the Constitution speaks of a number of things. I’d like to point him towards Article VI, the one that says when the United States enters into an international agreement and has gone through the ratification process, with two-thirds vote in the Senate, that it’s the law of the land — the supreme law of the land, I think is the phrase that’s used. We are therefore signatories to the United Nations charter, and while this individual may not be appreciative of the United Nations, he might even speak ill of the United Nations, I would certainly hope that he is not going to speak ill of the Constitution of the United States, the one he swore to uphold and defend.

“The Charter of the U.N. sets down two conditions under which a nation can go to war. Article 51, legitimate self defense. You’ve been attacked, you get to summons the United Nations in your defense, and a Chapter 7 resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council, finding that a situation exists that warrants collective military response.

“Neither of those conditions exist with regard to either what we’re doing in Iraq or Afghanistan. I would say that you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that what we’re doing is, A, in support of a free and democratic society, and, B, constitutional.

“So, to answer his question, nah, I don’t agree. But I’ll buy him a beer any time, because he’s a fellow Legionnaire, and I respect him.”

Q: If Iran’s leadership changed from what it is now to an organization that is, as he described it, would be more moderate, and some of the organizations that Iran supports — particularly I guess Hezbollah and Hamas — would basically lose their financial support, anyway, wouldn’t that make the Middle East a better place? And isn’t that worth whatever we might be pursuing there?

A: “You say, ‘worth.’ What price do you put on that? How many American lives? How much blood. I’m not quite sure what that word means.”

Q: Well, that (worth) was my question.

A: “We’re going to spend financial capital. We’re going to spend human blood. I always find it curious that someone who espouses defense of democracy — I believe it is the same questioner.”

Q: Yes.

A: “— is so ready to reject Hamas and Hezbollah, because the last time I checked, both those organizations have achieved their current political status through a free and democratic election process, so I’m a little concerned that there might be mixed signals being sent.

“Would I like to see Iran operate as a force of moderation? Absolutely. I don’t think anybody wouldn’t. Would I like to (dispense with) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Absolutely. Am I supportive of the theocracy in Iran? No, but I think a society has a right to choose its own form of election, and I think we need to recognize that Iran is just 28 years into a post-Peacock Throne era. We can never forget that there was a Shah who brutally oppressed his people  — an ally of the United States, by the way, who possessed a police force … who were among the most brutal of modern times, and that we saw a reaction from the Iranians to this.

“You know, it’s taken the United States 232 years to get to where we are right now, and we’re still evolving. We’re still trying to get it right. I’d like to cut the Iranians a little bit of slack, because on a historical timeline, they’re still a relatively immature in the process.

“That doesn’t mean that I condone irresponsible action, and I won’t. I’m an … opponent of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, but none exists; therefore, I don’t know what there is to oppose. I’m a big believer in the rule of law, Iran’s a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and I want to hold Iran to account, and if Iran is supporting international terrorism, that needs to stop. The world community needs to come together on that.

“But, you know, I find it difficult to have the United States imposing a singular definition on the global community. You tell me what the international community’s definition of Hezbollah is, or Hamas. But that’s not what we’re operating here. We’re dealing with an American interpretation that’s heavily influenced by the state of Israel, and Israel’s own animosity toward both Hamas and Hezbollah, so I would say it’s a far more complicated situation than what the questioner leads us to believe.

“What I would say is the best course of action would be one that seeks to normalize relations between the United States and Iran. That’s where I as an American want a focus, between American and Iranian relations. And if we can normalize these relations, we can then delve out to try to solve other problems. To speak of an Israeli problem with Hezbollah and an Israeli problem with Hamas, and state that the only solution that can be derived is American pressure on Iran is absurd, because it all at once forgives Israel for any wrongdoing it may have participated in. I’m not saying it’s all Israel’s fault, but I think there’s two sides to each coin. You’ve got to examine both.”

Q: One of the neocon arguments has been that for our actions in Iraq and Iran was that it would create kind of a reverse domino theory. Do you buy that? As a realistic expectation?

A: “The domino theory never worked going the one way, so why it would work if you reversed it is beyond me. I understand what you’re saying, and if they had their way, the perfect scenario would be, getting rid of Saddam, we set in motion events that get rid of Assad in Syria, we get rid of theocracy in Tehran, and we might even be able to expand that further to modify behavior in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt, to bring this wonderful thing called democracy. The problem with that is that democracies are never imposed. They only come from within, and there’s nothing about the processes that we set in place that lend themselves to democracies being developed from within.

“Never forget that the trigger for all of this was never that Iraq had attacked against the United States. It was an American attack against Iraq. It was a violation of international law. We were not invited into Iraq by the Iraqi people. We were not invited into Iraq by the international community. There was a unilateral decision made by a president, and basically it’s acknowledged that it’s a pre-emptive war of aggression. Anybody that believes that democracy will grow and thrive with that as its trigger is sadly mistaken. I don’t buy into this reverse domino theory at all. It was a pipe dream, but just that.”

Q: Well, I don’t know that you could say that Germany, at the end of World War II, invited the United States and Russia to invade, and, in effect, we did sort of impose a democratic institution there.

A: “But the trigger wasn’t a unilateral pre-emptive war of aggression on the part of the United States. The trigger was actually the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, triggering Germany to declare war against the United States, prompting Americans’ response, which was encapsulated with the notion of total war, in which we set out for the fascist regime in Germany, and it wasn’t just us. It was the international community determining that it was incompatible with modern civil society. So we terminated that regime, and then we occupied Germany, and we basically rebuilt Germany from the ground up, but the German people were a defeated people. They recognized that they had lost a war, a war that they were responsible for, so there was a moral argument, a moral imperative to be brought to bear.

“I have a hard time understanding how an American soldier kicking down the door of a family at 12:30 at night in downtown Baghdad represents a moral imperative for anything other than the Iraqi people wanting to resist an illegal and illegitimate occupation. To compare what we’re doing in Iraq with what we did in Germany, it’s not even comparing apples and oranges. It’s comparing whale manure with a cloud. One thing’s good, the other one stinks.”

Q: This question comes from an international studies professor at Rhodes. His name is David Romano, and he’s actually spent some time in Iraq. Given the the sanctions were crumbling in 2003, was there a risk of Saddam Hussein, in effect, pulling a victory out of defeat — the 1991 defeat — sort of similar to what Gamal Abdal Nasser did after the Suez Crisis, that he forced the Israeli, British and French out of Suez, and that reinforced Nasser’s power in Egypt? Was there a risk of Saddam Hussein achieving something similar?

A: “Gee, Nasser stood up for Egyptian sovereignty on Egyptian soil, and faced two colonialist powers. Yeah, I’m glad Nasser emerged with (enhanced power). You know, Eisenhower supported him, too. It’s a bad analogy, because I think Eisenhower was a big fan of getting the British and the French out of Suez.

“But, the thing is, in 1991, economic sanctions were sustained by linking them to Saddam’s disarmament obligation, Resolution 687. By 2003, an argument could be made that the disarmament regime had been corrupted to the extent that maybe the sanctions should have collapsed. You see, Saddam was disarmed. Saddam had been disarmed for some time. The CIA acknowledges that Saddam destroyed all of his weapons of mass destruction in 1991. The U.N. weapons inspectors will tell you today that the last vestiges of his program were wrapped up by 1996. So, by 2003, if we’re talking about continuing an economic sanctions regime that no longer is justified, maybe that regime should crumble. You have to ask yourself, why is that sanctions regime being continued? Was it about disarmament, or was it linked to something it was never intended to be linked to, which is an American policy of regime change? So, if you want to say that by letting sanctions crumble, Saddam could declare victory by saying, ‘I have not fallen,’ yeah, if you’re an American who has bought into regime change, you don’t want that to happen. That’s why we didn’t let it happen, but if you’re somebody who is a proponent of international law, you need to recognize the extent to which the U.S. had corrupted the sanctions process, and the sanctions were no longer an extension of the will of the international community that existed in 1991. They had become a policy held hostage to the unilateral objectives of the United States concerning regime change.

“So, unless you’re a proponent of regime change, I would say that’s a flawed argument. And if you are a proponent of regime change, I would say that it’s a morally flawed argument.”

Q: The next question is pretty close to verbatim. Might things be better now in Iraq if not for Bremer’s policy of disbanding the army, and not allowing the Iraqis to govern through the interim council? Would the situation have been considerably better? Hypothetically?

A: “I can respond with a counter. Might not the situation today be better if we had never invaded? I would like to believe that the answer to that one is yes, because I can guarantee that the institutions that would govern Iraq were Iraqi institutions, not institutions brought on by an illegitimate invasion. There is no other way to cut this up. The United States was not invited in. The United Nations did not sanction this. This was a unilateral act of pre-emptive war, carried out by the United States and Great Britain.

“Now, could we have done this better? I think the answer is yes, but I would say that under no circumstances — let’s say Bremer didn’t fumble, Bremer did everything right. It would still be worse today than it would have been if we had just left Saddam in, because I always remind people that there was no ‘Missouri moment.’ That of course is a reference to the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. We didn’t line all the Iraqis up and get the great surrender. The Iraqi government just went underground, and they had a plan to resist us, so it didn’t matter what Bremer did. It was always going to be this. Take a look at what the United States’ policy was up front. We spoke of the need for democracy in Iraq, but Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bremer, everybody else rejected the possibility of a Shi’a dominated government, so we would still have that fundamental incompatibility with the direction the United States wanted to take in a post-Saddam Iraq, from the direction the majority of the population of Iraq would like to take. So, I just think that’s a cop-out. We should never have invaded from the get-go.”