Excerpt from the interview (Generated by Youtube)

Glenn Diesen (GD): Welcome back. We are joined today by Colonel Douglas McGregor, a former adviser to the US Secretary of Defense, also an author and a combat veteran. So, thank you for coming back on the program.

Colonel Douglas McGregor (CDM): Happy to be here, Glenn.

GD: So, we see that the US military strategy against Iran has taken on some different forms. It began with a decapitation strike. There’s been focus on deterrence, some of complaints in terms of trying to open up the Strait of Hormuz. None of it seems to have been working though. I was wondering what do you see happening next? What the US, what the Trump administration might try to do next militarily because they don’t seem to have settled on peace yet.

CDM: No, I I think the rumors of any sort of agreement or deal, as the president likes to call it, are grossly exaggerated. There doesn’t appear to be any real willingness to reach an agreement unless it involves the unconditional capitulation of the Iranians to whatever Washington wants.

So, I I don’t think we’re going to see much change there.

In fact, yesterday I was talking to a colleague and he’s a very expert on matters particularly in Russia and he said to me the interesting thing is that Washington’s proxy in Ukraine has lost the war to Moscow to Russia but the Russians have yet to consolidate or secure their victory. In the same sense, I think we can argue that the US military, which is operating as a surrogate for the Israelis, seems to have lost the war with Iran over over any number of different issues, not the least of which is control of the Persian Gulf.

But the Iranians have yet to secure their own victory.

In other words, we’re in a limbo at this point. And what history teaches is if the Russians are going to be victorious in Ukraine and the Iranians are going to be victorious in the Middle East, they’ve got to secure their victories. They’ve got to take decisive action. Thus far, the Russians have seemed unwilling to do that. And it seems as though the Iranians at this stage are really willing to wait on the assumption, I think, that the pain inflicted on the global economy and also the United States by the closure of the Strait is going to work to their advantage. And they probably assume that we will never come back to the bases that are being destroyed, which is not a bad assumption. But I I think they are underestimating the determination of the Israelis to drag us back into the region. So this leads to some important questions for the Iranians. What are they going to do to ensure that we don’t come back in some other form? We may have largely left at this point, although I guess the drop dead date for our departure from Iraq, complete evacuation of the country is 30 September. I assume we’ll meet that deadline. I don’t know how many of us are still in Iraq.

But the point nevertheless remains, what is Iran going to do? We know that what we’re engaged in right now is a massive military buildup for another round of war with Iran. Anybody watching what’s happening in the United States Air Force knows that our forces are building up. We’re committing more and more airmen and and others to Great Britain and Germany to bases in those countries from which presumably we will fly bombers and large numbers of bombers can be quickly flown in, prepared, loaded with weapons and sent off to action. The question is, when does this happen? Well, it could happen before the elections or it could happen immediately after. It sounds as though there is a readiness to wait until after the elections. Presumably that’s because we’re trying to replenish a lot of stocks, missiles, precision guided munitions, and so forth.

Then we have the 40,000 2,000lb bombs that are being shipped to Israel. And even if Israel wanted to deliver all of those, they couldn’t. So my assumption is that a lot of those were are meant for US use. And we will use Israel as a launch pad for the next round of attacks. So, I think the best that we can say at this point is there’s been no real fundamental change in the situation between ourselves and Iran, and this is probably the last hurrah for the United States military in its attempt to bring Iran to heal.

Now, what does that mean? What condition other than total capitulation are we prepared to accept? I don’t know. And I don’t know how much destruction we can create. We certainly can create a great deal, but will it result in the disintegration of the Iranian state, which is obviously what Israel wants?

I don’t know what we want other than whatever Israel wants. So, it’s a very difficult situation right now, but I don’t see much sunshine on the horizon, let’s put it that way.

GD: I’m glad you compared it a bit to the Ukrainian case because you know in this instance as well we have European leaders who want to say they want to fight Russia but they don’t explain how they’re going to defeat Russia. They don’t they can’t point a military they can use and they don’t even explain what war means. Are they going to fight them in Ukraine and going to launch missiles?

But there’s not a convincing path to victory and I guess that’s a similarity to Iran. Did you see any convincing story here in terms of how the US can win this war? Because you know this combination of geography and the new weapons technologies puts Iran in a very favorable position. Do you think the US would go in with a land force like actually take over parts of Iran or Yemen for that matter or will it be bombing campaigned?

CDM: Well, the truth is we have almost no army at all by historical standards. We’re under 450,000 in the so-called standing army or regular army. We don’t even use those words of regular army much anymore. I don’t know what the plan is. It would be involving reservists and national guardsmen.

I think that would probably rub up against the Congress in ways that are not very popular. And I’m sure that President Trump doesn’t really want to bring in large numbers of reserves and national, I don’t see much happening on the ground. Now that doesn’t exclude some possibilities. Could we conceivably find a way using marines and soldiers to get into the Gulf,…  other than to make President Trump and his supporters happy and by that I mean the Israelis who are pushing him into war. Uh there’s Chabahar, you know, on the coast of the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea, whatever you want to call it.

I don’t know that that will be well-received because that’s a very important port for a lot of people outside of the region. So I just don’t know what you think you can accomplish with ground troops. Now can you do things with special operations forces? Probably. But that didn’t go very well the last time we tried it. And I think at that point we decided perhaps we should take another approach to deal with the supposed enriched uranium.

So right now I think this is largely an air and missile operation. The real question is when it becomes clear that Iran is not going to capitulate, do we turn to the use of nuclear weapons? And I don’t care if somebody wants to call it a tactical nuclear weapon or otherwise. A nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon. That ostensibly opens Pandora’s box. That can lead to all sorts of terrible outcomes, rapid escalation. It could even bring in the Russians and the Chinese. We seem to have assumed that we’ve pacified the Chinese on the basis of this last visit. I’m not sure why we think that. I don’t think the Chinese are stupid. And it turns out that there was very little discussion or if there was, we don’t know anything about it concerning Taiwan.

And unless we’re willing to stand by the Shanghai Communicate that occurred back in the 1970s where we absolutely renounced any further interest in making Taiwan an independent state, the Chinese aren’t going to take us very seriously.

Now, when it comes to the economic side of the house, our condition is very fragile. You know, we’re watching the 10-year bond, the yield continues to rise. It’s obvious to everyone that the so-called Federal Reserve is not exerting much control over anything. So, this whole economic structure in the United States could suddenly overnight go into code Blue, if you will, collapse in ways that we haven’t seen in a 100 years. But just because you haven’t had an earthquake in 100 years in a place like Naples doesn’t mean you’re not going to have an earthquake.

I think the same thing is true for us financially. So we could see something really awful quickly here in the United States. That would change the complexion of the entire operation. What do we do if we can afford nothing? If we have no more money to spend and we already have a problem with worn out equipment and tired people. You know, this business of abusing your standing force repeatedly month after month, year after year doesn’t work very well.

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