 was invested in the USRV to fight in the Vietnam War and serve for 30 years, 1997. This included time with the US specific demand. At the Australian New Zealand Development Committee, we should quite soon with a perspective on the history of threats or seen 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 a very powerful 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 very much for your work and Colin Powell. It's probably the most expected American competition at this time. It was 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 anyway, having purchased it, so that nevertheless he was soon to legitimise the war that destroyed our 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 Furnier 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? 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. But 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 Muqibarat, 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 a 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 Sheik Al-Libi 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 thought 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. Now, it's 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 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 what interventions has been the defense of democratic values. How have you described the law 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. 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 neo-conservatives who crafted much of this strategy will tell you that if they see someone in the world who it 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 U.S. 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'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 doesn't like 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 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 who 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 works for Mother Russia, he doesn't work for Vladimir Putin except that he happens to be there as the leader and Wang Yi is 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 24th 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 when 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 to 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 bayonets 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 people are putting into the public that all China is inevitable as opposed to China's threat to Taiwan's democracy on its larger invasion of Taiwan and its threat to the navigation of goods through freedom of the sea what's the real reason for the magical war between the nuclear power and the United States in 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 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 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 are frustrated by the fact that there is 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 is too strong a word people don't like to hear that word, condominium two superpowers doing something in the world together but if we are looking at the threats that we are 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 into the 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 and near peer power is what we call it, no it's a superpower and we are a superpower still we are fading but we are still a superpower with thousands of 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 recognized 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 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 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 any war that devolved into a real shooting war would be a nuclear war bye bye human race I thought that the President of the United States put the point that China would be a China where even China wouldn't want to be and I'd like to for a moment to talk about what we have done which has been extremely effective in this participation in that there's enormous distrust in the condemnation of the FSC or the KGB but despite the potential of many CIA some of which can 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 one of the views on the role of the 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 it's 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 full front page right side the next morning published 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 and the so-called yellow press and now you know 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 left in the world and we have nine nuclear weapons states we're abhorning even South Korea's new president is talking about having his own indigenous nuclear weapon capability so we're 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'd so carefully built up over the years of the Cold War on nuclear weapons and the media is complicit in all this Australia has made an enthusiastic participant in the big U.S. wars and our leaders have not resided by the problem using megaflight and diplomacy to review China it started occurring quite suddenly around five years ago I'd like to ask you to comment briefly on focus what's your assessment of focus at the start what developments that are being followed from our further integration into the U.S. war machine and what are the dangers to Australia under the agency of the 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 over a French conventionally powered submarine to sovereignty subordained to the whim and caprice of a U.S. administration that's where we are now that's exactly true and just think for a moment about the latter part of that remark the whim of a U.S. administration we just had from 2016 to 2020 an idiot in the White House an illegal operator and loan shark and bandit and mafioso calling him what you will but that's what we had in the White House the one of the first things he did was abrogate a treaty like enforce 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 that the U.S. 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 Zelinsky 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 the 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 do 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 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 floor workers get opinions 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 desicc 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 Australia 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 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 realize that when they tried to fish off some of those disputed reefs in the south China sea and 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 some place 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 what's good for the goose is good for the gander we want to look at it that way we 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 they're doing 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 U.S. 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 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 to set 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 dollars 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 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 coal is gone and thatcher and major and other leaders in Europe who's feeder 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 if dinosaurs died we're going to die because climate change is going to do us in that's an appropriate name thank you even with the audio problems thank you take care