ONE-ON-ONE
Nevada’s political activist takes on the infamous Oliver North
BY GEORGE HARRIS

Liberal Democrats turn apoplectic at the mere mention of his name. But in the almost 20 years since the Iran Contra story broke, Oliver North has taken on almost rock-star status among those many Americans who have a healthy disdain for Congressional windbags.

And this is certainly true among young soldiers who were barely born when the words Iran and Contra became forever hyphenated in our lexicon.

It would appear in retrospect that had North not chosen to be such a good Marine, it is possible that instead of being a well-respected Fox News commentator, he might have become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The current Chairman, Marine General Peter Pace, is only a few years younger than North and North’s military-political skills would have certainly made him a contender.

“I was a good Marine,” said North. “I followed orders from Admiral (John) Poindexter that we perceived were lawful and I did what a good Marine does. I accomplished the mission.

“Now we knew,” said North, in what may be one of the understatements of the last century, “that there may be some political vulnerability in following those orders, but that was a chance we took.”

That “political vulnerability” cost North his military career, the better part of $5 million in legal fees and earned him the title of felon until a Federal Appeals Court reversed his convictions. North says that had he not been cashiered, he would have gone wherever the Corps would have sent him, although he would not speculate on how high he might have risen.

Today, North is Fox News’ marquee war correspondent, making regular trips to the Middle East and embedding with those 20-year-old Marines to report the story with the experience of an Annapolis graduate, a field officer in Vietnam, an assistant to the National Security Adviser in the White House and an only slightly unsuccessful Senatorial candidate. He also anchors a Sunday show called War Stories, which tells the unvarnished history of the U.S. Military without the interpretation of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

 North sat down recently with Liberty Watch, prior to speaking to the Nevada Policy Research Institute.

What is your opinion of the national Republican party? Do you think it is out of step with mainstream thought or do you think that it’s doing OK?
Well, to be honest, my beat is soldiers, sailors, marines, guardsmen; that’s what I do for Fox News, that’s why I spend a lot of time out of the country. But in general, I’m a Republican, I don’t hide that fact. I think that the national Republican party, which has now been in power in both houses of Congress and had the White House, except for Clinton, for most of the last 25 years, may well be straying from its intended course. I mean the Republican party is supposed to be the party of smaller government, less government intrusion in our lives and that means less federal spending. If you look at what both houses of Congress have done, if you look at the Republican legislature in my Commonwealth of Virginia, they’ve become addicted to the same thing that the Democrats have become addicted to, for now, the better part of a century, and that is federal spending, state spending and government spending. So I’m concerned that the Republican party needs to return to its roots and the kind of value system that a lot of us believed in and I think still do. There needs to be a wake-up call.

We’re not leaving Iraq or Afghanistan anytime soon, are we? 
No. But we’ve still got troops in Germany, and we’ve got troops in Italy, and most of the opponents of WWII – that was 60 years ago.

Was Afghanistan a good idea? And what about Afghanistan vs. Iraq?
Afghanistan was absolutely essential and so was Iraq. The fact is you’ve got to, it’s a much bigger problem than either Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Osama bin Laden, it is a jihad that is being waged against us. And, I hold this interview on the anniversary of the capture of the hijackers of the Achille Lauro. President Reagan said, “you can run but you can’t hide.” I think the other Reagan line was “we bagged the bums” – comments that he made to the press 20 years ago yesterday. All true, but we didn’t realize at the time the spread of this jihad. It really began in the late 1970s and has now taken on a life of its own in ways that we could never have forecast. In large part because it is funded by petro dollars from Iran and from Saudi Arabia, and without that money, this thing would never have taken off as it did. It all started to explode after the ’73 oil price hike.

That’s something a lot of these guys don’t talk about; everybody sort of glosses over Saudi Arabia. I know they’re allegedly an ally, but there’s a concern. 
Here’s the silly question you’ve got to ask – how many visitors a year do you want to come to Las Vegas and how much do you want to be paying for the cost of a gallon of gas? I mean that’s ultimately where you’ve got to fish or cut bait. And at some point, some genius is going to invent a fuel cell that really works and oil money for terrorism will dry up because our consumption of it will drop dramatically and at that point, at least that part of the problem will have gone away, because without the money, they don’t exist. The most recent letter from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi proves that and what we’ve seen is of course the explosive growth in this jihad as a consequence of the excess in petro dollars that are floating around. So if you look at the war that’s being fought today, it’s not just over Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s over whether the next generation of young folks growing up in the Muslim faith are going to be educated with math and science and physics and chemistry and biology or whether they are going to simply learn to hate, to kill, to kill themselves, to try to kill you and me. 

We touched on Afghanistan a little bit, let’s go back to Iraq – and talk about putting an airbase in Iraq.
I’ve been there six times, and every time I go in we fly into an airbase in Iraq. There are U.S. airbases and two great big marine airbases, and you’ve got a British airbase, so there are plenty of airbases. What you’re going to end up with 10, 15 years from now is probably an armor division and a division using that place for training just like we use Germany today. 

What a lot of our readers want to know in Las Vegas is where are we at with homeland security? 
Homeland security today is a lot better than it was on 9/11. On 9/11, there were 33 U.S. government air marshals in existence, 11 of them were on duty. Today you’ve got curbside to cockpit security, you’ve got armed flight deck officers, and not withstanding all of the jokes that people make about the TSA equals Thousands Standing Around, and all that, and not withstanding the face that McCarran Airport is one of the more difficult security situations in our country and I think I’ve been to most of them, it’s a lot better than it was. The proof of that is, as the president said in his speech last month, 9/11 and nothing since. That’s not because they haven’t tried, they’ve tried at least 13 different attacks, which are failing, and we’ve seen them in Madrid, we’ve seen them in London, we’ve seen them in Russia, we’ve seen them in Bali, we’ve seen them all around the rest of the world, and not here for one reason, which is they can’t quite figure out how to pull it off. 

We have a border on Mexico, that’s non-existent. And we have a large tourism base here, and it seems that Las Vegas especially would be on that list of targets.
Well, I have no doubt. I wouldn’t tell you that we’re not going to have another attack. I don’t think it will be the same kind of attack because I think it’s much more difficult to pull it off now, but, in fact, I’m willing to predict that you’re never going to see another successful hijacking as long as you have an American male on the airplane. If we didn’t learn anything from Flight 93 that went down in Pennsylvania, we learned that much. I know there’s a lot of concern over the border. I’m a little bit surprised that we don’t have similar concerns over the northern border which is much more open than the southern border. We have 4-to-1 in terms of border patrol agents, guys from Immigration, Customs and Enforcement on the Mexican border than we do on the Canadian border. The Canadian border’s longer, the Canadian border’s more open, and quite frankly, it is an easier place to get in and out of. The question you’ve got to ask yourself is do you want to try to mobilize another three or four divisions of the National Guard to go guard it? Because what you really need is the cooperation of the neighboring governments. Just like Iraq needs the same thing from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran in order to protect their borders. We need the same thing from the Mexican and Canadian governments. Thankfully we’ve got a little bit more cooperation from the Canadians than we do from the Mexicans, thus the ratio of border control that we’ve got in the south versus the north. I’m disappointed that the Mexicans haven’t been more helpful, but I also understand why they haven’t been, and that’s because you get paid a hell of a lot more to sweep floors in the United States than you get to sweep floors in Mexico. And so, as long as you’ve got businesses that are willing to hire illegal immigrants, you’re going to have illegal immigrants trying to get to America to get jobs. Controlling that border from illegal immigrants trying to get work, or drug runners, or terrorists, is a very difficult thing without the cooperation of the neighboring governments. 

Is our military being stretched? Are we going to find ourselves in a situation where we don’t have enough young men joining the forces?
Well, these are two different problems. The military is stretched today. I mean there are roughly 1.4 million men and women in the Armed Forces of the United States, and over a million have already rotated through Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army’s now on a 13-month rotation, the U.S. Marine Corps is on a seven-month rotation, the U.S. Air Force is on a 90-120 day rotation and the Navy’s out there for six or seven months a shot. So you’ve got some guys who have been stretched a lot. Interestingly enough the re-enlistment rate, which is the best barometer of true morale and retention is way up; it’s well over what’s authorized. They have to go in and get permission to extend those guys. What’s hurting is the new enlistments, the new recruits, and that’s largely because the media has been so negative. It’s to a point that when a kid comes home and is about to graduate from high school, and says, “hey mom and dad, I’m thinking about going in the military,” the parents discourage him, or he himself has been discouraged or she herself has been discouraged by what they’ve seen on the news. Quite frankly I think it’s much more negative than it should be. The casualty rates are being compared to Vietnam. When I got to Vietnam in 1968, we were losing 39 a day, dead, plus another 80-90 wounded. Today, we lose 1.7 a day. The bullets are still real, the blood is still red, but the anti-military, anti-American movement that has taken root around Cindy Sheehan and some of these other characters — basically the old ’60s crowd. The bottom line is, retention is good, new enlistment is hurting, and in large part, that is the consequence of the negative news. LW

George Harris is publisher of Liberty Watch: The Magazine. He is also a political activist and successful Southern Nevadan businessman. Reach him at gopgeorge@earthlink.net.