A Survey of the Situation in the Middle East
W. Patrick Lang
Speaker: W. Patrick Lang
Date: November 1, 2010
Description:
COLONEL W. PATRICK LANG is a retired senior officer of the U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, who trained as a Middle East specialist and served there for many years. He was the first professor of Arabic at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served as the Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism. Colonel Lang is currently a television news analyst.
Moderator: Welcome to the Miller Center forum, I’m George Gilliam. Our guest today is Colonel Patrick Lang. Pat Lang was literally born into the Army. He entered the world in Ft. Devens, Massachusetts. He was educated at VMI with graduate work at the University of Utah, the Armed Forces Staff College and the U.S. Army War College. Col. Lang served in the regular Army as a commissioned officer until 1988. His postings included serving as the senior military officer in our embassy in North Yemen and then in Saudi Arabia. He taught at West Point, where he created all the instructional programs in the Arabic language and Middle East studies. Upon his retirement, Col. Lang joined the senior executive service of the U.S. Civil Service. His Civil Service jobs included serving in the Defense Intelligence Agency as the Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism, and as that agency’s Human Intelligence Officer for Collection. Col. Lang has also written three books and has contributed to many other books and journals. He’s a regular on all the network news programs, as well as those in Australia, Germany, Canada, and England. And he presently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation. Please welcome our friend, Pat Lang. [Applause] [Full house]
Lang: Thank you, George, I appreciate it. It’s always a pleasure to be back here. I’ve been here a number of times now. I’m sure it’s nothing like a record, but I’m going to work on that record in whatever remaining time I have.
We don’t have a lot of time here today, and George and I have talked about what I should talk about. The prospect I face is giving you yet another drink from a fire hose, in that no one would ever possibly expect that you would remember everything I am going to talk about. But at least you’ll have something to argue about when you go home. So what I’m going to try to do is give you my analytic opinion of what the future holds in several key areas of conflict and geographical areas across the Middle East, in one part of the area that I used to work on so much.
Now, analytic opinion is something that comes up from time to time as to what that is. As a matter of fact, I think that Mr. Juan Williams had a run in with that concept not too long ago. In my opinion, having been the boss of a whole lot of analysts … I think that analysis is really opinion applied to a given set of facts. So anybody who tries to separate opinion from those facts is not really doing anything other than just chronicling what went on. So I’m going to give you my opinion about all this. And I want you to remember that it is all my opinion and I certainly don’t expect you to agree with me.
I would like to start with the present situation that is ongoing with regard to the negotiations which are ongoing between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. I have contemplated thisa lot, in the hope that I have nurtured for many years, that this dispute could be settled, because I am almost a commuter to the Holy land, from various items of business, involvement in the Catholic church among other things. And, if people would stop hurting each other there, I might go live there for the remaining part of my life, actually, but it doesn’t seem very likely.
A couple of years ago when I was here, I remember telling the people that the problem of settling the peace between these two people s is that there really isn’t sufficient good will on either side to enable a peace to be reached in fact. If there was enough good will, the issues could be signed by taking one piece of paper and drawing an outline of the borders on it. Taking the other and drawing up a list of the conditions; everybody could sign and we’d be off to the races. But in fact that doesn’t happen because the two sides nurture a kind of bitterness against each other which seems to be almost impossible to overcome. And that’s a shame because I can remember times during my life, when things were much, much better between these people than they are now.
After the Oslo Accords, when Ehud Barak was Prime Minister, and the Palestinian Authority was doing its best to develop the West Bank, things were much, much better.I could get out to Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv in about 25 minutes, instead of the usual 2 ½ hours now under intensive questioning by Israeli security, which is an experience that if you have not had it, you should have it at least once to see what it’s like.
Things have broken down steadily ever since in this process. And I think that the problem is that the two sides are not reconciled to the idea of each other. There’s only one piece of territory there, and deep in their hearts, both groups want it altogether for themselves.And so on one side, you get a kind of slippery tactical maneuvering on the side of the Palestinians, which often takes place, hoping for better days and greater opportunities; on the other hand, you get a position on the side of the Israelis, especially in the present, in this existing government, which seems to be making clear, that what they really want, and have always really wanted, since the time of Begin’s signing at the White House, is really an autonomous area for the Palestinians within the Israeli state.
You can really see that, because – and they’re quite willing for us to call it a state if we like, and to have the Palestinians call it a state—so long as they understand that this is a completely demilitarized state, without a police force that has any significant amount of armaments; which does not control its own borders, and which has no real control over its economy. If those conditions are okay, well, then you can call it a state.If the Palestinians are willing to sign on that basis, they could probably have a state next week.
Now – they’re not willing to sign on those terms. In fact, deep in their hearts, they believe that someday they’re going to have a real country. So, I think that probably this situation is something to a real solution in the near future. But we can always hope for the best – what choice do we have?
Another significant problem in regard to this is that the present Israeligovernment, and indeed a lot of Israelis, is so focused on Iranian nuclear program right now, that they’re not terribly interested in the Palestinian issue. In fact, they have tried to negotiate with the U.S. government a couple of times so far, over what it is they might get in return for signing the some kind of piece of paper or another with the Palestinians, and a lot of it has to do with what our intentions are with regard to Iran. This is a big problem for the United States. The President does not really wish to see us go to war over Iran again. There’ve been enough wars for the last ten years – wars we really can’t afford—and he certainly doesn’t want to see any more wars of that kind in the near future.
But, the situation is quite plain, and I continue to have a lot of people insist on talking to me about these things—is that many, many Israelis, and a good many of them in the government, are quite convinced that Iranian government is made up entirely of a collection of madmen, who would, if given any sort of nuclear capability, would almost inevitably attack Israel with that.And from an Israeli point of view, this is a daunting prospect if you believe that. Because the Israelis only have only two counter-value targets that are of any real value. Now, I came from the part of the intelligence community that dealt with guys who carry rusty bolt action rifles that rode around on funny horses, but I still know a little something about this.And the fact of the matter is that if you can put one nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv and another one on Haifa, you’d break the back of Israel.There really would be no state. So it’s understandable that the Israelis would be extremely sensitive about such a thing. But at the same time, you hear this fear expressed in terms of the kind of thing that Dick Cheney used to say about terrorism: that if there was even a 1% chance, then that was intolerable. And on that basis you begin to wonder what’s really going to happen with regard to Iran.
Now, tomorrow we have an election. Has anybody noticed that (laughter). I’m looking forward to voting in the hope that they all just shut up! (laughter) (aside) It seems very likely that the Republican Party is going to hold at least one House of Congress, and according to the latest polls, maybe even both Houses. The Republican Party has made itself very clear that it has every intention of backing the more extreme types of postures towards Iran. And if you have President Obama having to deal with a Congress that leaning heavily in that direction, and he has many, many other problems—and we can go down a list of those problems—the Republicans are going to be pushing steadily for him to take a very hard line toward Iran. I feel sure that that’s the case. I don’t have any doubt about that at all. And, as I’ve discussed with a number of my friends in Israel and other places, the chance that the Israelis are going to wait forever for the United States to be able to assure –in a way that they would accept, would accept—that Iran is not really a danger to them, seems pretty remote. And the prospect becomes stronger that sometime in the next year or so that they will lose patience with us, and run some sort of strike package themselves, against what they consider to be the most key Iranian nuclear facilities, in Natanz or someplace like that.
There are a lot of very big problems for the United States in that. First or all, if you think that this will be anything like the strike against the Iraqi nuclear plant at Osirak many years ago, it would be NOTHING like that, in fact. The Iranian nuclear program is much much bigger. Unlike the one building they had at Osirak, this stuff is almost all underground, spread all over the place, target knowledge of this is extremely imperfect, and the Israeli air force, however admirable it is in capability and quality, is really not big enough for the job. I mean, they could mount a sizeable strike against Natanz, overfly Iraq probably—they know perfectly well that we’re not going to shoot them down. Instructions – this has already been discussed in command channels of the U.S. Armed Forces; everybody knows. The command in Iraq actually already asked, “what if the Israelis overfly us, what are we supposed to do?” Because, remember: the U.S. is, by treaty, responsible for the protection of Iraqi air space. Well, the answer was, “You know we’re not going to shoot them down.” The Israelis also know we’re not going to shoot them down either. So that means they’re going to have to go all the way deep into Iran, come all the way back out against Iranian opposition, and they’re steadily acquiring more and more anti-aircraft stuff from the Russians among other people. And to go that far, you’re going to have to have a lot of tanker aircraft, and they really don’t have enough tanker aircraft to do this well. What it amounts to is that they can do one large strike with conventional weapons against one or two Iranian – significant Iranian nuclear facilities.
And then what happens? And then the roof falls in, because what’ll happen is that everybody in the Middle East—actually in the world—will probably say that the United States is complicit in this effort, and in fact, would we not be?
Once that happens, I have a very hard time believing the United States would abandon Israel to its fate, because this action would have opened the doors to a really disastrous possibility, because there already is an existing nuclear power with a developed delivery capability in the Islamic world. There already is one, and it’s called Pakistan. And the Pakistanis have a large number of nuclear weapons, they’ve done a lot of work on their delivery means, mostly air breathing fighters; they’ve got a significant number of tankers, and anybody who thinks that the Pakistani Air Force and Armed Forces would not react to an attack on Iran because they’re Shia, and the Pakistanis are Sunni, just doesn’t know anything about what this is all really about.
Because under attack from an outside infidel, in this case a Zionist power, it doesn’t seem very likely to me that the Pakistanis would do anything but side with the Iranians. And all you need is a few dozen fanatics in the Pakistani Air Force to [inaudible] to do something like decide to deliver weapons on the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean so who knows in what direction such a developing combat situation could go? Right? In any event, we certainly would have to be the people cleaning this mess up.
Now, this raises the issue of our forces in Afghanistan. I presume that by next year, next summer, our forces in Iraq would be down to a very few. But, we’ll still be in danger and we’ll still have a lot of forces in Pakistan. Now we had a demonstration recently, in fact, that if the Pakistanis are displeased with us, the Pakistan army, the security services, and various groups of fanatics can lean all over our supply lines. They start down on the Indian Ocean, in the port of Karachi and other ports, and then are trucked up to the interior, to the Khyber Pass -- sounds romantic doesn’t it, the Khyber Pass-- or across Baluchistan to Quetta and then into Afghanistan. This makes our force extremely vulnerable.
The old saw in the military business is that amateurs talk about strategy and tactics, and professionals talk about logistics. I’m a professional, and I will always talk about logistics. I spent a lot of years in the Army as a Special Forces officer before I wandered off into the world of intelligence – actually I got too old to run up and down hills is what really happened (laughter). So, I’m very aware of how vulnerable a conventional force is to an interruption of its supply lines. Especially when they’re that long and extended, as in Afghanistan. I mean, Afghanistan has no sea coast, right? All these supply lines either run out through Pakistan, through all this potentially hostile territory or they run up through the former Soviet Union, through another mass of Muslims there north of the border in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, where it connects with the Russian railway system. So, you could supply the force in Afghanistan by air, at a very minimal starvation level, but anybody who knows military history, knows that an effort to supply a large ground force using air transportation has never worked very well over a long period of time. So the Pakistanis, in my opinion, have the capabilities to make us extremely uncomfortable in Afghanistan, and they probably would do so in this kind of situation.
You have to wonder. David Petraeus is an extremely intelligent man; I think we’ve all observed him enough to believe that to be true. He’s politically astute, he’s jammed into a corner there because in the great review of Afghanistan that followed Obama coming into office, Gen Petraeus and a number of other people coming from various think tanks in Washington prevailed in the argument that instead of having a small footprint in Afghanistan that concentrated on counter-terrorism stuff against people who are really our enemies, that we should instead go in for counterinsurgency or coin, for which Petraeus has become a main advocate. And this has become essentially armed nation building.
The problem with that is that there never really has been a nation in Afghanistan. This is a big place; it has a number of different nations in it, nations that speak mutually unintelligible languages, honest to God, and even inside the same ethnic groups, some of the dialects are mutually unintelligible. But they make lovely carpets, and the food is terrific. So these people have been through, for a long period of time, in which their country was created essentially as a way of drawing the lines around a blank spot in Central Asia, in the hope of isolating all the trouble makers there, really.