Mike Gravel forecasts mutual assured destruction.

Question: What will a world in which the U.S. is not the only superpower look like?

Mike Gravel: Well we saw it is a mad world – mutual assured destruction. But now we’re the superpower and we still have a mad world. Because we’re about the . . . Cheney-Bush want to launch a war with Iran. And so what are they doing? All kinds of subterfuges to bring it . . . Iran is not a threat to us. If we would just leave Iran alone, they’ll wind up with their own form of democracy. It’s a republic. They have elections. We Americans forget that in 1953, there were only two democracies in the world. In the Middle East rather, not in the world. In the Middle East, one was Israel the other was Iran. Who destroyed their democracy? The United States of America through the CIA. What we see, we go out of our way to make enemies. That has to end. That has to end. And so we just have to . . . The people . . . And if you can get the leadership, it will end. I’ll have a very different foreign policy than what you see now. It will be a foreign policy based upon bringing people in. We love to point to other nations. “Oh it’s their problem. It’s the Chinese that are causing us problems in this country. Oh it’s the Latinos now. We’ve got an immigration problem.” Well maybe, just maybe the American people realize that we’re failing in education. We’re failing in healthcare. We’re failing as a . . . as a leader in the world. We’re just failing. And what do we do? What do you . . . What does human nature cause us to do, which is not a very good reaction? When you fail, you want to blame somebody else. So we blame . . . So now we’ve got an immigration problem. And you look at our borders. I mean we’re . . . it’s shameful – building a fence across the southern border of the United States has got to be the embarrassment of the world.

Recorded on: 10/23/07