 was invested in the USRV to fight in the Vietnam War and serve for 30 years. 1997, this included a time with the US specific demand. At the Australian New Zealand Development Committee, there's a sponsor, which I've quite seen with a perspective on the history of threats or the same threats in our region. Having worked closely with him for many years, in 2003, he became Chief of Staff of the Secretary of State Colin Powell and was responsible for airing power's speech to the UN where he made up the claim to be evidence of weapons of press destruction in Iraq. Colonel Ferguson subsequently became critic of the Iraq War, the lies that launched it and the US foreign policy move broadly. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Sam Adams Board for Integrity and Intelligence. He has for some years now been a Defence and National Security Analyst, Academic and, more recently, a Senior Fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Thank you for your time, Colonel Ferguson, particularly as it's the middle of the night in Virginia. Good to be with you. Thank you all for your work and all your powers. Probably the most expected American competition at this time. It's a moment of great disappointment to hear him present what many believe to be fabricated evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You said that the war would have gone ahead any way having purchased it, so that nevertheless he was used to legitimise the war that destroyed the nation. You were both men who had risen through the ranks of the establishment. How is it that you were both unable to get to the truth, particularly when others like Scott Ritter and Eric Funier were providing advice contradicting the CIA's conclusion, and so many CIA whistleblowers had revealed its history of lying, and what would you have done differently now? Well, first of all, Scott Ritter and people like him had no entree into the US administration, certainly not into George W. Bush's administration, guarded zealously by its vice president Richard Cheney. So we didn't even hear those voices. They were not offered to us. And a lot of people don't understand how cloistered a Secretary of State or a Secretary of Defense or indeed a president is, and surrounded by their lackeys as it were, who keep them informed in a way that they wish them to be informed. And breaking out of that is difficult. Now, Powell had an extensive network of people on the outside as it were, and he consulted that network a lot of times. So we knew there was controversy over whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction, but even someone like Hans Blitz admitted that there might be, and so did the entire apparatus surrounding 16 then US intelligence entities and France and Israel and Germany, whom we didn't find out until late in the summer of that year that they had been cherry picked, so to speak, by George Tenet, the director of central intelligence. People don't understand sometimes that other countries, in order to get our national technical means, mostly satellites and NSA intercepts, in order to get access to that, they have to be pretty much willing to give us whatever we want when we want it, and so they sometimes go beyond that and give us more than we want, and sometimes it's not the most valid intelligence in the world they're trying to maintain the relationship. That might be thought about with Australia in terms of the submarine deal as it were too, but it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to get to the truth, and people also forget, particularly in my country, and I'm not making excuses here, but they forget that all the members of the United States Congress had accepted the October 2002 national intelligence estimate, which was pretty firm on weapons of mass destruction. They all accepted it with one or two who let us know that they were doubtful about it. Of course, many of them became doubtful about it after they were approved no WMD, but that didn't do any good at that particular time. They all accepted that national intelligence estimate, and Powell's presentation at the United Nations was based principally and primarily on that NIE. So it was a difficult time for us, a difficult time to sort things out. Powell tried, and I'll give you one concrete example. He grabbed me one day, the first time he'd ever done that. He physically grabbed me and pushed me into a room off the spaces where we were working, closed the door, and he said, we're alone in here, right? And I said, well, it is the CIA boss, and he didn't even smile. He just began to talk to me in a very strong way, saying he wanted to pull all the business about torture, his phrase, out of his presentation. And what he meant was essentially the most powerful element for a domestic audience, the Saddam Hussein's connections with Al Qaeda right after 9-11. I said, good, let's do it. He looked rather surprised. I think he thought I was going to object. I didn't. I thought it stunk. I thought it was terrible stuff. It didn't have any concreteness to it. It was all circumstantial. So we took it all out. Well, George Tenet and John McLaughlin, the two primary intelligence people there, discovered we'd done that, and we went back into rehearsal that afternoon, and Tenet tells Powell, we've just learned. This is almost a direct quote. I was sitting to Powell's left. We've just learned from an interrogation of a high-level Al Qaeda operative of significant contacts between the Muqabarat, the Iraqi secret police, and Al Qaeda to include training Al Qaeda operatives in how to use chemical and biological weapons. Powell turned to me and said to LW, put it back in. And we put arguably the most powerful element with the domestic audience, at least, back into the presentation about Sodom's connections with Al Qaeda. It was totally false. We later learned four or five months later that it was Shekel Libby that he was tortured in Egypt when he revealed this information and that within weeks of the torture ceasing, he recanted and said he would have done anything to stop the torture. The DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, actually put a burn notice out on that intelligence, but we were not told that. Not making excuses, but we were surrounded by the U.S. intelligence community and they made sure that Powell fought that Sodom is saying very likely did have weapons of mass destruction. As to his resigning, it would have made no difference. Condi Rice would have become Secretary of State. There would have been a week in the press and that would have been it and Powell would have been a footnote to history and we would have gone on to war. It would have been a lot more comfortable for me because I would have rather been a footnote to history than complicit the way I was. Talk about the U.S. foreign policy more generally and the way that it's executed. You said that when we want to go to war with someone, we invent the reason. The general justification presented for interventions has been the defense of democratic values. How have you described the whole of the United States in the world since the end of World War II? What's been its motivation in the Middle East and in Europe with respect to Russia? The United States has always been an imperial power whether it was domestically against its own indigenous peoples, something Australia will understand, or later really starting very vividly with the incursion into Mexico you could say, which U.S. grant our major general during our own civil war called a travesty. But starting prominently overseas with the Spanish American War and from that time on we have been an imperial power par excellence across the globe and at the end of the Cold War all checks on that imperial interregnum if you will were released. There was no one in the world who could check the United States of America anymore and therefore both political parties with some differences which we can get into I think that's significant today especially for Australia have been embarked on that imperial writ. Our security and foreign policy today is to secure the imperial writ. It's to make sure the United States has no challengers in the world. If you read the national security strategy we put out in George W. Bush's administration you will see that we say no one will challenge us and we're perfectly prepared to use military power to stop that challenge from coming and many of the neoconservatives who crafted much of this strategy will tell you that if they see someone in the world who even looks like, even vaguely looks like they might challenge US power locally, regionally or internationally we're going to take them out and usually we're going to use military power to do that. Now that imperium is coming to some screeching halt in some ways right now because we can't feel the forces that we need to enforce it and by that I mean the all volunteer force concept is falling apart. We can't find young people to serve in the military. That's the end of it. Very difficult times right now for the army in particular but for the other services too. So what do we do? We look for surrogates in the world to help us and the latest surrogate of course is Zelinsky at Ukraine where we're bleeding Ukrainians in order to maintain American hegemony over Europe in part in order to make our defense contractors incredibly wealthy. They already were but they're getting even more obscenely wealthy and to keep the war going and to build a new Cold War environment not just with Russia which is quite adequately done now. Thank you very much to the elimination of the last vestige of nuclear arms control in the world a very dangerous situation but also with China and in the process forcing an axis to develop between China and Russia. This is extremely dangerous and it makes you think that the US leadership has lost its mind from time to time and I'm one of those who would contend that but it is extremely dangerous and the imperial writ is not being enhanced by it. It's being put in great jeopardy by it. Whether or not anyone will realize that at time is a huge question. Can I just ask you to comment briefly on several world leaders because the current theme has been the demonization of leaders that the United States started by. Sometimes not entirely unbounded but always very specifically targeted. What's your assessment of Putin and Xi, Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi? Well I have in a way known Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi even more directly since with the one Wang Yi Richard Haas and I had policy planning talks with him in China in Beijing in 2000 the summer of 2001 before 9-11 and I knew Sergey Lavrov if you will through Colin Powell who would tell me many times what a fine diplomat he was and I know Wang Yi was a fine diplomat too, still is of course been promoted to state council rank which is sort of between the foreign ministry and the Politburo very powerful position. Americans need to listen to Sergey Lavrov more often sometimes he gets a little bit outside of himself as a diplomat if you will but I don't blame him in these times when no one's listening to him particularly in Washington. He tells the truth most of the time, he works for Mother Russia he doesn't work for Vladimir Putin except that he happens to be there as the leader and Wang Yi's the same with regard to China. They are very accomplished diplomats, two of the most accomplished diplomats in the world and they often tell things that Americans need to hear such as what the real motivation behind Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February was. We had as much to do with that, we were as responsible for that as anyone with complicity from other people in Europe and the Minsk Accords were as I think it was Angela Merkel recently said we didn't intend to follow those accords we were just building time for Ukraine to arm so it could stand off if Russia did anything or perhaps contemplating doing something itself. So to disregard two of the best diplomats in the world and not listen to them is another indicator that the imperial realm of America now does not wish to do diplomacy at all. All it wishes to do is exert its writ through its military power I call it bombs bullets and bad heads rather than words in the world. That's become the way the empire operates and the rest of the world just suffers from that. And so that almost arrived at the point where the senior figures and the figure are putting into the public that all China is inevitable as far as the China's threat to Taiwan's democracy and it's largely invasion of Taiwan and its threat to the navigation routes to freedom of the sea. What's the real reason for the mutual war between the nuclear power and the United States and China? I think the United States and China are on a course as many people my friend John Mirshimer at the University of Chicago most prominently have pointed out toward war because of the United States. I don't think Xi Jinping, I don't think China in general I'm fairly confident the strategic party school the central party school where some of the best thought in China takes place particularly on strategy, won't war. China has already replaced the United States of America the empire economically. It is no longer waiting to replace us it has replaced us in purchasing power parity it is the number one economy in the world you won't hear Washington saying that admitting it and in terms of its manufacturing base it dwarfs us. Now remember in 1945 the United States had 51% of the world's gross domestic product, yes 51%. We made 54,000 airplanes in a single year we had more ships than you could count in the heavens stars it was incredible what we were in 1945 we no longer are that. We have shrunk our manufacturing base we have exported it to China for example and so China is the number one economy in the world and they have already established their hegemony over their region they are contested sometimes economically and financially by Japan a little by South Korea but both of those powers are trading with China as is most of the rest of the world. So US hegemony is gone from Northeast Asia and from that realm of the Pacific and we just won't admit it the Chinese know that and they're frustrated by the fact that there's no recognition of that would they if we played it right if we really were diplomatic geniuses and our foreign and security policies sought some sort of condominium with China maybe that's too strong a word people don't like to hear that word condominium two superpowers doing something in the world together but if we're looking at the threats that we're confronting climate change being the prominent one and nuclear weapons being as deadly and right in our face maybe condominium is what we need maybe what we need is sharing of power with China in that region in particular trying to reestablish our hegemony over that region of the world which is what the deal with AUKUS is all about is trying to get back in an area that China has more or less usurped and that's the way we look at it China looks at it as her natural actions as a fellow superpower if you will a near peer power is what we call it no it's a superpower and we're a superpower still we're fading but we're still a superpower particularly as long as we have 6,000 or so nuclear warheads at hand so this is a business of the United States not understanding the changes in the world not wanting to understand the changes not wanting those changes and therefore fighting it and it's going to bring all of its allies that it can into that fight and Taiwan is the battleground in many respects the fact that we have taken what was strategic ambiguity and had worked for more than 40 years that is to say we recognize there was only one China and China agreed that because we did that they would not use force to reunify with Taiwan that's the simplicity of that agreement and we have now put it out as strategic clarity we will defend Taiwan and by the way we'll bring the Kiwis and the Aussies and the Japanese and the Koreans and anybody else that wants into that fight in it kicking and screaming if necessary that's our strategy now it is ultimately a disaster in the making because any war with China whether it be over Taiwan a fracas in the South China Sea over the Philippines whatever it might be that devolved into a real shooting war would be a nuclear war bye bye human race I'm trying to look at the point that China that the Kiwis is going to make China where even China is going to be and I'd like to for a moment to talk about more and again just being extremely effective and being this participation in that is in all this distrust condemnation of the FSC or the KGB but despite the tendency of many CIA followers some of which could still readily be found on YouTube though that may not be the case in the future with respect to assassinations, lies, planting false narratives and trust in the media there's little recognition of how we are doomed what about years on the roll of a fourth estate whose responsibility is to hold power to account in more recent times the media in the United States I call it the mainstream media and by that I mean the New York Times the Washington Post similar newspapers across the country Los Angeles Times for example has joined the war mongering I frankly don't pay a whole lot of attention to them anymore I get most of my news from what are called social media in general and I have sources other than that still in the government and elsewhere and across the globe I get as much of my intelligence from Germany for example as I do from the United States probably more from Germany and other countries in Europe that's a shame because the media is supposed to be as you well know that which speaks truth to power and that which informs a democratic public what its government is doing in their name well our media does not do that anymore the New York Times is a disgrace for example during the Iraq war you're probably aware of this we had an actual situation where Dick Cheney the vice president would call the New York Times and give them quote raw intelligence unquote on Saddam Hussein and other issues too and then the New York Times would above the full front page right side the next morning publish that as if it were sacrosanct intelligence and then Dick Cheney would go out and give a speech and quote the New York Times as the source of his intelligence incredible complicity between one of the best papers supposedly in the United States and the vice president of the United States and why for war it's almost like William Randolph Hearst in the so-called yellow press you let me know where you want to war and I'll get it for you that's the way the press operates today and no place is that more vivid than Ukraine it's a shame as I said because we have no really qualified voice that is in the mainstream media telling the American people the truth the truth about their own government the truth about the situation in Ukraine most prominently and the truth that they don't even understand how to report on about nuclear weapons we have dismantled we, the empire have dismantled the ABM treaty, the INF treaty the conventional forces in Europe treaty the open skies treaty and now because of our acrimony with Moscow the new start treaty we have no nuclear weapons arm control were left in the world and we have nine nuclear weapons states and more aborning even South Korea as new president is talking about having his own indigenous nuclear weapon capability so we are embarked on an extremely dangerous course right now not only with this courting of China and Russia, its major enemies but also by divesting ourselves of all the controls we so carefully built up of the Cold War on nuclear weapons. And the media is complicit in all this. Australia is an enthusiastic participant in the US war. So now, leaders have not resourced by the problem using big-file and diplomacy to review China. It started appearing quite suddenly around five years ago. I'd like to ask you to comment briefly on your assessment of the war and the submarine deal. How well did we do for a start? What developments did I learn from our further integration into the US war machine? And what are the dangers to Australia and the Asia's region? I think I would sum it up much the way your former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, did recently. And if I can, I'm going to quote from him. He said, from a clear sovereignty capable of execution by Australia over a French conventionally powered submarine to sovereignty subordained to the whim and caprice of the US administration. That's where we are now, unquote. That's exactly true. And just think for a moment about the latter part of that remark, the whim of the US administration. We just had from 2016 to 2020 an idiot in the White House, a very accomplished political operator and loan shark and bandit and mafioso, call him what you will. But that's what we had in the White House. Then one of the first things he did was abrogate a treaty-like enforced agreement that the previous administration had negotiated, painstakingly negotiated. I'm talking about, of course, the nuclear agreement with Iran, the joint comprehensive plan of action. He abrogated it overnight. What foreign government would want to deal with this country now when that sort of thing happens? The whim, as Paul Keating said, of an American administration. Well, you saw it from 2016 to 2020 and there's no guarantee at all that you're not going to see it again. In fact, I suspect the Republicans and a candidate not unlike Trump, except he's smarter, might be in the White House after that. That might be some really hard times for a person like Zelinski, for example, because I know there's a strain in my party that wants that over with and done with because it's such a drain on the coffers of the United States. So Paul Keating is right. And let's look at the agreement from another perspective, too. Right now, many of the experts in the United States, like Evan Feigenbaum at the Carnegie Endowment and others whom he had on the panel the other day representing everything from AEI to the State Department to the Defense Department say it's all about, AUKUS is really all about technology sharing because we have such a hard time largely because of ITAR, the International Trade and Arms Agreement, regulations. We want to loosen some of these things, and particularly with our friends like Australia, understandable, and Japan, Korea, others ultimately, especially in Northeast Asia, so that technology can be shared without all the problems associated. What that means is people make more money in the merchants of war, merchants of death complex. But, you know, no one cares about that anymore. Lockheed Martin's one of the richest companies in the world now and the largest defense contractor in the world, and their executives get billions and billions of dollars while their flow workers get a pittance, typical American predatory capitalism. But that's what it's all about in many respects. And then the other huge aspect of it, which I hope Australia will take very much into consideration, is bringing more and more people into this ambit, into the place where, for example, in this case, you can make ships for us or Japan or Britain can make ships for us because we can't convince our Congress to make ships for us themselves. And so we get others to do it for us and to become our surrogates in region. Now, I was the Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea desks officer back in 1984 for US Pacific Command. And I watched how Australia, New Zealand in particular, Papua New Guinea to a certain extent, but Australia and New Zealand operated in terms of maintaining as much of a position of distance from America as they could while still being a competent and reliable ally. And I was amazed at how well they did that. And I thought that would probably be the way Australian and New Zealand always operated, whether it was David Lange or in New Zealand, you know, no nuclear weapons will call on a port in New Zealand, or whether it was something like the Australian capacity to be our ally in places like Vietnam, for example, or in places like Iraq. Hold your nose and go do what the, I won't say master, but what the superpower says. I had a lot of respect for Australia and New Zealand. Now it looks as if it's more like being a lackey. And so I think Keating is right when he says this is not a position Australia should be in. And let's just face it for a moment. China, as I understand it, and as the statistics show me, is the number one trading partner for Australia. China is the number one trading partner for a lot of other countries in the world, too. Why would one want to alienate the number one trading partner? And why would Australia think that China was intent on coming down and wreaking havoc in its country? It isn't. China might exercise, because of the strength and power of its economy, some inordinate pressure from time to time. But I think Australia can deal with that. I think all the countries can deal with that, including my own, if it would just wake up and smell the roses. But that's not what we want to do. We want a new Cold War and we want to reestablish our hegemony over that portion of Asia, which, as I said, China has made clear. It is the hegemon now. If you've seen its fishing fleet, most of the boats armed arrayed in the South China Sea as they do from time to time. And it's not the whole fleet. It's just a portion of it. And you look at it and you think they have that many ships and they're all armed. Let me tell you, the Filipinos realized that when they tried to fish off some of those disputed reefs in the South China Sea. Those boats showed up. That's intimidation a bit, but we can handle that. If we stay together, we can handle that. And we can confront that when it happens. It's not going to happen very far afield, though, in my estimation, because China has no reason to sail a battle group, for example, in the Gulf of Mexico. I sometimes wish they would, just to see what Washington would say. Let's say Corpus Christi or Galveston or someplace like that suddenly wakes up one morning and there's a Chinese battle fleet 15 miles offshore and it lingers and stays. Whoa, what would the empire do about that? And yet China would be in its perfect right under international law to do that. We do it all the time to them. Why not a little, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. But we don't want to look at it that way. We don't want to look at it from the top of our mountain upon which no challenger must show his feet at the bottom. Otherwise we'll smack them with military power and now we want Australia to help us smack them. Well, for Australia, that's stupid. Basically what Australia should do is operate on its own self interest like every other country in the world. We're cooperating where cooperation helps like climate change and nuclear weapons and getting them back under control again. Economically and financially, perhaps, maybe corporate wise, market wise. But in terms of sealing off the Pacific as a US fiefdom with its slaves coming along beside it, that's not the way we should be operating. And I would help. I would think Australia would want to help get the United States as much as possible out of this stature. Out of this security and foreign policy that demands bombs, bullets and bayonets rather than words and diplomacy. We need our allies to help us with that. I think we are going to see some major help in that regard coming from countries like Germany and France and other continental European powers who are fed up with the United States through Ukraine and other means trying to reestablish its economic and other hegemony over Europe. Because that's a lot of what Ukraine is about. We feel we're losing that hegemony. Look at the EU. 740 million people. And it should include the Russians with a GDP roughly the equivalent of our own, some $22-23 trillion. If they could get their political act together, there's the key. If they could get their political and security act together, they'd probably throw us out. And we'd have to operate on our own in our own realm. That's one reason we're in Ukraine to try and stop that, to reestablish significant U.S. hegemony, security, foreign policy, economic over the EU. They're going to figure that out. Germany's going to figure that out. I think the Bundestag is figuring that out right now. They don't know what to do about it yet and they can't get their political act together, the EU as a whole. But if they do, then the transatlantic link as we know it is gone. In 1989, Colin Powell looked at me at U.S. Forces Command in Atlanta, Georgia. I was a fresh caught Lieutenant Colonel by him. And he said, Larry, do you know what's going to happen when Cole and Mita are on and Thatcher and Major and other leaders in Europe whose feet are in World War II are gone? We're going to separate. He's right. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe everybody should be operating on the basis of condominium, collaboration, cooperation, comedy. If we don't, we're all going to get thrust off of this planet just like the dinosaurs died. We're going to die because climate change is going to do us in. That's an appropriate name for that. Thank you. Even with the audio problems. Thank you. Take care.