Lawrence Wilkerson Interviewed by Ralph Nader
https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/shooting-wars-and-trade-wars (Excerpts)
Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Over his 31 years of service, Col. Wilkerson served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, and Special Assistant to Gen. Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993.
Wilkerson also served as Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, VA. For 15 years, he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William & Mary. He is currently a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All-Volunteer Force Forum (AVF Forum).
Nader: Welcome back, Larry. We have all these retired military officials, many of them pushed out by Trump in the first term. John Kelly, the general who served as chief of staff called [Trump’s people], “fascists to the core.” Others think he’s an ultimate danger to our Republic. Where are they? They despise Trump. Why aren’t they pushing? They can get press. What’s your read on that? Where’s the top retired brass, who would command a lot of attention?
Wilkerson: Well, we stood down the Republic, Ralph. I’m sure you realize that. We don’t have a Republic. We don’t have a Congress. What we have is a body of people over there who are taking money, military contractors, insider training, you name it. They’re living off their jobs, in other words, and I don’t mean their salaries. And we have a supine Supreme Court, or at least the majority of them. And we have Trump. So we’ve destroyed the Republic.
There’s barely any vestige of the Republic left. We don’t have a Constitution. The Constitution lies in tatters on the floor. It lies on the floor of the Senate, principally, as James Madison would say. And so I don’t know what you’re talking about other than the fact that we’ve lost the Republic and we’ve lost our Constitution and we’re going to lose our country.
Two-thirds of the world now thinks that we are an enemy of their state. Two-thirds of the world, and it happens to be the two-thirds that have the greatest amount of gross domestic product in the world. And it is led by the most powerful economic entity in the world. We need to quit denying that and admit it, China is now allied with much of that world that despises us.
Tell me some secrets about how we’re going to get out of this and look remotely like what John Adams and Jefferson, Washington and others thought we should look like. Because we don’t. We lost it. We’ve discarded it. It’s on the trash heap.
Nader: Well, I’ve written five columns answering your question. Each column is a constituency. The retired military. They’ve got to speak up.
Wilkerson: Why do they have to speak up?
Nader: Because they took an oath to uphold the Constitution.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson: Do you think oaths mean anything in this country today? You think morality means anything in this country? You think there are ethics in this country? You think there’s law in this country? You think there’s anything like that in this country, remaining?
Nader: Yes, I do.
Wilkerson: Well, thank you.
Nader: Veterans for Peace is an example with 100 chapters. And listen, you may not know this, but…
Wilkerson: Where are their machine guns and their horses and their cannons and their ability to mount an attack on the Congress? And for that matter, where is Congress’s military? Where’s Congress’s army? Where’s anybody’s army but the chief executive? And he has several of them.
Ralph Nader: Well, this is a very pessimistic view, obviously…
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson: Hey, I’ve been pessimistic for a long time.
Nader: I want to say the corporate-dominated bar, in the City of New York, put two white papers out denouncing Trump and their conclusion was, impeach Trump now. Now, 90% of Democratic voters, and 2/3 of independent voters want to impeach Trump, according to Celinda Lake’s poll. That’s a huge majority ready to go. As you say, Congress is way behind. There’s no backbone; they’re dominated by the Republican Party with the complicity of the Democratic Party. So when the people want to fire him, and firing Trump is obviously what has to be done first and foremost. How can you be that totally pessimistic?
Wilkerson: Easy. I’ve lived for 81 years, almost 82, and I’ve watched my country go to hell, right in front of my face. And I’ve watched the man mostly responsible for that. But this time, it’s not just Trump. This time, he was smart. This time, he selected a team of people like himself, and in many respects, smarter than he–not many, but there’s enough, and they’re in key positions, and they’re going to make sure that they stay in those positions.
And the billionaires–this is far more important–behind them want all of this to happen. They do not want a democracy. A democracy is fallible. [They think] democracy can’t beat China. A democracy can’t beat Russia. A democracy can’t even beat Iran. They want a technocracy that is run by them, armed by them—a technical revolution by them. They want all of this, and oh, by the way they want to live to 150, while they’re doing it too.
Nader: Well, how do you view one of the most vulnerable members of Trump’s cabinet, Pete Hegseth. The headline in the New York Times recently, “Hegseth’s purge of top officers depletes army at critical time.” And he has fired a lot of generals and he’s pushing out chiefs of staff, etc. And inside the Pentagon, they must hate Hegseth–his personality, his background, his abuses, his contempt. How do you read that? Is that going to lead to any backlash at all?
Wilkerson: Well, I would hope so. I would hope what you’re saying is true, but I do not think it is, because Hegseth and his lackeys have been very meticulous in sorting out the flag officers, the admirals and generals, and sorting out the middle ranks and even sorting out the lower ranks, so that they have in place people whom they believe they can call upon when they need forces to support whatever Trump wants to do in order to maintain power.
Because they know that January the 6th failed, not because our system held, but because the coup plotters were incompetent. And the main incompetence was not having a significant portion of the lethal apparatus of the state at their beck and call, or at a minimum, standing on the sideline watching it all happen, while, say, ICE does all the hard work. But they are not going to make that mistake again. This time, they have the elements of the state that wield force to be on their side, at least in the majority, if not totally. And that’s what Hegseth has done.
He’s Christianized the Pentagon. He’s Christianized the ranks from the lowest to the highest. If they aren’t Christianized, they’re going to get fired, and they know that, and they’re chickens, so they’re not going to stand up to it. Those who are female or Black are speedily gotten rid of, too. This move against Dorie Miller being the person for whom the second carrier coming off the waves was going to be named and substituting Trump, it’s partly because Hegseth is a closet racist, and so is his wife. They don’t like Blacks.
Nader: Well, punctuating your point, Hegseth has called himself, “the warrior of God in the service of Jesus Christ.” So your point is well taken.
Wilkerson: His influence has been so significant that about a week or two ago, we got a message from a special forces team commander in Israel, getting ready for some exercise that they were going to do with the Israelis in Iran. And this chief of SEAL team sent Mikey Weinstein a note, at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and it said, the prayer this morning that the leader of our effort gave before the operational briefing, was ended with, “in Jesus Christ’s name we pray.” Now you can imagine who was sitting around in that room.
Nader: Well, you’re aware of the killings by Hegseth and Trump of fishermen in boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, accusing them of being drug dealers without any evidence whatsoever. And there has been evidence that these were fishermen, targeted by missiles. Bruce Fine, who knows quite a bit about international law, says this is first-degree murder. Even if they were drug dealers, the law requires them to be brought before due process, not summarily executed. Now, under the Uniform Military Code of Justice, this is a serious violation. Lieutenant Calley, in his massacre of My Lai, in Vietnam, he was convicted for that, although later his sentence was commuted. What’s your take? What would you do if you were asked, should there be a punishment for what’s going on? Because it continues week after week, blowing up these small vessels.
Wilkerson: Well, of course there should be punishment, and there should be accountability for what’s happening–all the way from the fact that they made the document authorizing it secret, and put it in the Justice Department, never to be read by Americans or by the Congress, to the fact that they’re doing it on the high seas and they’re doing it in the manner in which they’re doing it. All of that is illegal. It’s war crimes. But, Ralph, every friggin’ hour they create a series of war crimes in Iran. Every friggin’ hour they perpetrate war crimes in the Persian Gulf. Every friggin’ hour they perpetrate war crimes in Lebanon with Israel. So what’s new? We are a criminal state. There’s no other way to describe it. We pay no attention whatsoever to domestic or international law, except when it benefits the person who is doing the deed, do we pay any attention at all.
Nader: Do we have to worry about the Pentagon if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act? Or is the real problem the militias out there that we really don’t know anything about?
Lawrence Wilkerson: The real problem is in between that. The real problem is that Homeland Security, with ICE— those are the brown shirts, the group that will lead this if anything happens.
I don’t think we’re going to get to that point, because Trump’s now made a decision, and I have this on pretty good authority, that he is going to turn in the war in Southwest Asia to principally what appears to be economic warfare, which we all have heard all about through Scott Bessant, but also to negotiations, and he has the Pakistanis and the Omanis and others working on that right now. So there’s going to be very little kinetic activity between now and the elections, and that’s for a reason.
Once the elections occur, and if they’re successful for the Republicans and thus for Trump, then he’s going to go back full bore with everything that we’ve got, including possibly nuclear weapons, and throw them at Iran. That’s the plan.
What could really muck that plan up, is if they have some kind of domestic problem in consolidating Republican control of the legislature. [If they] have a real problem with the elections however, they can solve it behind the scenes, if you will, or maybe by intimidation on voting lines across the country, that sort of thing. They have a map, I’m told, of every precinct in America now. They finally understand that elections take place in the states and in the cities and the in towns, and the parishes and the counties. And it’s local boards and things like that. So that’s the people you have to get your hands on. That’s the people you have to intimidate. That’s the people you have to compel into doing what you want. This Voting Act is part of that process.
