Exclusive: Retired Marine general, Obama security advisor calls for U.S. to be much tougher on Iran

Retired U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, who also served as U.S. national security advisor from 2009 to 2010, has left the life of public and military service but continues through his private sector work of help sovereign partners with national defense and security matters.

The 80-year-old Jones is the founder and president of Jones Group International, whose mission statement includes "an unwavering commitment to freedom and respect for human rights throughout all our work."

Most recently, the former four-star general was in France for the 21st edition of the Free Iran Summit hosted by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), which is part of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a long-standing dissident group. 

The groups are headquartered in Paris, and its biggest community of supporters live at the Ashraf-3 base in Albania (previous incarnations of the base, Ashraf-1 and Ashraf-2, were based in Iraq).

The groups are focused on weakening and eventually overthrow the Iranian government led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and replacing it with a government based on a 10-point blueprint authored by Maryam Rajavi, the NCRI’s president-elect.

That plan includes commitments to freedom of speech and of the press, individual freedom, the separation of church and state, and the creation of an independent judiciary. 

Jones spoke to Eric J. Lyman from "Just the News" in an exclusive and wide-ranging interview that touched on an array of topics ranging from the international role he believes MEK and the NCRI should play and U.S. policy toward Iran, as well as the war in Ukraine and even lessons learned from Vietnam.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

Just the News: When did you first become aware of the MEK and the NCRI? 

Gen. Jones: I was President Barack Obama’s first national security advisor for two years, until 2010, and after I left the White House, I was invited to be on a panel to talk about the administration’s program for policy with regard to Iran. That was in early 2011. It was a large panel with a lot of distinguished people on it, and it was sponsored by MEK. That’s the first time I’d ever heard anything about them. For me it was a learning experience. 

Later that year, I got a call from someone in Camp Ashraf in Iraq, who said that the base had been attacked by Iraqi uniformed forces using American Humvees and weapons and ammunition we had provided them. They attacked mostly unarmed women and children. That was my first real indoctrination to them and what I discovered was something morally indefensible. 

JTN: The group has a controversial past. We know from 1997 to 2013 the U.S. government classified MEK as a terrorist organization, so they were taken off the list not too long after you became aware of them. Did you have a role in changing that designation?

Gen. Jones: Yes, after I departed from the Obama administration, I continued to press various people including [current U.S. secretary of state] Tony Blinken, who at the time was the national security advisor for Joe Biden, who was the vice-president. I told them about what I considered to be the clear and present danger to innocent people, and I pressed them to consider taking MEK off the terrorist watch list. I can’t say it started with me because there was a court case already making it through the judicial system. But as soon as I found out about it I did everything I could to make it happen.

JTN: MEK and the NCRI see themselves as a kind of government in exile. But from a U.S. perspective, are they more valuable in that role, as a potential successor state in Iran, or as a source of intelligence about what’s happening in the country? 

Gen. Jones: Both, actually. One of the things I learned over the years is that they have provided invaluable intelligence about Iranian nuclear power programs, and everything that was going on inside the country. That information hasn’t always been used as it should have been, but they are a source of valuable intelligence.

JTN: How would it work for a group like MEK to step into a governing role? How can anyone know what’ll happen when the mullahs fall? MEK has also been out of the country for a long time. Do young Iranians even know the group?

Gen. Jones: That’s where the international community comes in. Remember that the 10-point manifesto Mrs. Rajavi advocates is very democratic. I use the term “Jeffersonian democratic” because it is everything that we could want. Look at it this way: We live in a world where the battle between autocracies and democracies is ongoing. It's not just it's not just MEK or the NCRI. It's in Africa, it's in South America. It's certainly in the Middle East, it certainly involves China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. 

There’s a real struggle going on. And for us, it's very, very important that the democratic side of the issue prevail otherwise, you know, the way we live in the future will be dramatically affected if, to give you one example, if [Russian President] Vladimir Putin prevails in Ukraine.

JTN: You bring up Ukraine. Where do you think the current situation in Iran ranks among the world’s largest crisis situations? Obviously, most things are connected in some way. But taking that into consideration, where do you think the risks from Iran compared to those, say, between Russia and Ukraine, or China and Taiwan, or the problems in Africa, or what is happening in Gaza. Where does Iran fit in? 

Gen. Jones: It's an important piece. It's something that’s been ongoing for a long time and I think it’s made worse because the U.S. government position on Iran and on MEK and the NCRI has been misguided for a long time.

JTN: Can you elaborate on that? 

Gen. Jones: The policy of appeasement where Iran is concerned is deeply flawed. I mean, fatally flawed. But you can trace it back several administrations. President Clinton, for example, it was under his watch that the MEK was listed as a terrorist organization. And why was that? Well, it was probably because the politics of appeasement had begun. Basically, the idea is that if we do this for Iran, maybe there'll be good guys and they'll stop their nuclear program. At its core, that's what the policy of appeasement is about. We need to recognize that this Iranian regime is never going to change. 

JTN: So, what is the alternative?

Gen. Jones: I think we should be much tougher on Iran. Not just sanctions, I think we should retaliate with overwhelming force for anything they do that we don’t like. You know, regarding attacks on commercial shipping or sponsoring terrorists, like Hamas or Hezbollah. I think there are many ways where you can convince dictatorships that you're serious and to convince them to modify their behavior. Anything else is a waste of time.

JTN: When you mean overwhelming force, are you talking about sending U.S. soldiers into battle? 

Gen. Jones: There are a number of responses we could consider in order to change the behavior of a country like Iran. I'll have to leave it at that.

JTN: There were widespread protests in 2022 when Mahsa Amini died in police custody for not wearing her headscarf correctly. Why didn’t that have a larger ripple effect internationally? 

Gen. Jones: Who knows? To me, this is also emblematic of an appeasement policy that says, “Well, you know, they won't do it again.” We need to do more. We must be resolute. We must be stronger, more forceful in the face of adversity."

JTN: I’d like to change topics and discuss Ukraine in a bit more detail. I know you have made strong calls for the west to prove more help for Ukraine. 

Gen. Jones: Not just more help, but more help on a timely basis. If we had done that from the start the war would be over by now. 

JTN: The two big arguments against giving Ukraine the most advanced military technologies are that, one, it could lead to escalation, that Russia could respond with tactical nuclear arms or that other countries could get involved and, two, that those technologies could fall into Russian hands. What is your take on those two reservations? 

Gen. Jones: At the start of the war, we thought Russia had the second best military in the world, and we quickly found out they only had the second best military in Ukraine. That was when the West should have stepped in. A lot of people saw Ukraine’s early success and thought they'd do fine when they switched to offense. But from a military standpoint, it takes three times the amount of force to fight an offensive war than for a defensive war. But when Ukraine went on the offensive, they had to do it without an air force. That’s like fighting with one hand tied behind their back. That's what I mean by indicating that we were too slow and too limited in providing them with the means they needed to succeed with an offensive campaign

JTN: I’m going to be provocative for a moment. I know your military career began in Vietnam. Weren’t the North Vietnamese successful without an air force?

Gen. Jones: That was a complicated situation, a different kind of war. I remember hearing about a journalist who interviewed the North Vietnamese General [Võ Nguyên] Giáp after the war was over. The journalist said, “You know, you never defeated any U.S. force in Vietnam.” And the general took a puff on his cigarette and said, “Yes, that is true. But it’s also irrelevant.”

JTN: Is there a lesson in that for the Ukrainians? 

Gen. Jones: No, I think there’s a lesson in that for the U.S. The lesson is: if you're going to support the Ukrainians, you cannot restrict them too much in terms of what they can do. You know, taking the fight to the Russians inside of Russia is not a bad is not necessarily a bad thing. The risk associated with the tactical nuclear weapons that Putin raises every now and then is talk. 

The worst thing that could happen in Ukraine is that somehow Putin emerges from this with a victory, and we hear, “Welcome back into the family of nations as the leader of the Russian Federation” and “Oh, let's let bygones be bygones.” That would be catastrophic for the fight between autocracy and democracy that's going on elsewhere in the world, because other leaders like President Xi in China with the Taiwan issue will learn. Opposition groups feel that the west is in decline, and that it doesn’t have the fortitude to fight a long fight. In fact, that's what Putin thinks today. He thinks the time is on his side, and that the European countries and the U.S. don’t have the capacity to persevere. We must prove him wrong.