10/15/13 – Flynt Leverett – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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And you can find my full interview archive, more than 3,000 interviews now, going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org.
Next up is Flint Leverett, he's formerly of the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council.
Now he is a professor of international affairs at Penn State, and is co-author, with his wife Hilary Mann Leverett, of Going to Tehran, Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Welcome back to the show Flint, how are you doing?
Very good Scott, good to be back with you.
Good times, happy to have you here.
You just got back from Iran, correct?
Going to Tehran and everything, huh?
That's right.
We were basically there the first week of October.
So how'd it go?
Did you make a nuclear deal?
You know, I think there really is a nuclear deal to be made.
I think that both President Rouhani and his new foreign minister, Javad Zarif, are being very proactive about that.
We've had a number of conversations with Iranian officials, and I think they're outlining their approach to a deal in Geneva today and tomorrow.
And it's very, very straightforward.
Iran is prepared to do any number of things proactively to address any concerns that the United States or anyone else in the international community might have that the Iranian nuclear program is somehow meant to give Iran nuclear weapons.
At the end of the day, they will abide by, they will ratify and implement the Additional Protocol, except more intrusive verification and notification instruments with the IAEA.
I think they might be prepared to put some limits on the scope of their uranium enrichment activity.
But, you know, they're going to increase transparency, but in return they are going to want their nuclear rights recognized.
They have a right as a sovereign state, they have a right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under international safeguards.
And they are going to want the United States and its British and French partners to recognize that legal, political, and physical reality.
And they are going to want this issue resolved, and they are going to want sanctions lifted as part of the resolution.
That is the straightforward way of doing this, greater transparency in exchange for recognition of Iran's rights.
That's the deal that could be had today.
Well, and they're already saying, what percentage of that is already their position going into this thing?
Yeah, I mean, I'm just outlining there.
Yeah, this is what they already said.
Yeah, and I think that at Geneva today, I think that Dr. Zarif and his colleagues are outlining here are the things Iran is prepared to do to make sure that...
Honestly, at first I was pretty sure that's what you're doing, you're just summing up what they said.
But then you went on and on and on like that, and I thought, maybe I kind of missed it.
And what you were saying was, here are the outlines of the deal that one could imagine or something, and that I had misunderstood you.
But no, really, that's as much as the Iranians have said already, the additional protocol and all the rest of it.
I think that's right.
I think that's basically the outline of the package that Dr. Zarif and his colleagues have put on the table at Geneva today.
And which, by the way, not that it's that big of a deal or anything, but is exactly the outlines of the deal that we've been talking about is the obvious outlines of the deal on this show for years and years now, and of course, in your writings and everywhere else.
It's the deal that everybody knows.
Yeah, that's one of the strengths of the Iranian proposal.
It actually is congruent with reality.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Well, let's see.
You know, we know Netanyahu's going to have a fit if you keep going up to 20%.
So how about you just keep it at 3.6 and we'll, you know, additional protocol so that we can inspect some non-nuclear facilities like where you make the centrifuges because that'll make somebody happy.
Yeah.
And in fact, more proactively.
Yeah.
So it's funny to hear, you know, in the TV news media, the way they sum these things up all the time, you would think that they have some secret facilities that have never been seen by the IAEA before that perhaps, I'm paraphrasing CNN International from this morning, that, you know, perhaps now we'll finally have access to these, but they don't have anything like that, do they?
No.
You know, it's been kind of a fantasy of Israeli intelligence, some Western intelligence agencies for years that there's like this parallel program somewhere that there are these publicly declared facilities that the IAEA inspects, monitors, has cameras in 24-7, all this stuff.
But then somewhere, you know, there's this whole other infrastructure that, you know, no one other than, you know, a handful of Iranians know about.
And this is where Iran's really working on the bomb.
It's just, you know, for no lack of effort on the part of these intelligence agencies, there's not one single shred of actual evidence anyone's been able to put forward that this parallel infrastructure exists.
It's just it's just, you know, I think basically a fantasy.
But everything that we do know they have, Natanz and Fordow and Issafan, however you say that, and the Iraq heavy water reactor, all of this infrastructure, every bit of it is regularly inspected and safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency already.
Absolutely.
All of it is regularly inspected.
I mean, there are some non-nuclear facilities which the IAEA does not normally have the authorization to inspect.
The facility that some people get exercised about now is a military facility called Parchin.
And you know, the IAEA says it wants to come into Parchin and inspect it because they, you know, some intelligence agency, probably either, probably the Israelis, have told the IAEA that this is where the Iranians are working on, you know, the high explosives you need configured in a certain way in a nuclear bomb to crush the core of fissile material, start the chain reaction that leads to a nuclear explosion.
And the Iranian position on that, and you see lots of press reports, the Iranians refuse to let the IAEA come to Parchin.
And you know, the Iranian response says, first of all, the IAEA has no right to come to Parchin.
It's not a nuclear facility, it's part of our safeguards agreement.
Secondly, we've already let the IAEA into Parchin twice.
And each time, and you know, it was done on a basis where, and Parchin's a huge facility, and until the IAEA inspectors arrived, the Iranians didn't have any idea where the inspectors wanted to go.
So the idea that they could somehow, you know, clean up something so the IAEA couldn't find it is pretty fanciful.
They've let the IAEA do this twice, and each time the IAEA came back and said they found absolutely no evidence that anything nuclear-related was going on at Parchin.
But now, you know, the Israelis or somebody had, you know, kind of said, oh no, now this time we really do have evidence that they're doing it.
And so the IAEA has come back and said, we want to go to Parchin again.
And the Iranians are saying, if we're going to let you come to Parchin again, you know, we want to have this issue closed.
We want, you know, basically, we want it kind of certified, sealed, that Parchin's not a nuclear facility, and, you know, you guys aren't just going to keep coming back and saying every six months, you know, something's going on at Parchin.
We have to inspect it.
We have to have some kind of closure on this.
And you know, that's the current dispute.
But this is over a facility that the IAEA has already visited twice and said both times there's no evidence of any nuclear-related activity.
Now, are you saying that Parchin is on the table of discussions right now in Geneva?
I doubt if it's on the table in Geneva.
I suspect that that's going to be something where, that's something the Iranians wouldn't negotiate with the P5-plus-1 directly.
That's something that they would work out with the IAEA.
And then if, you know, they worked out something satisfactory with the IAEA, the IAEA would tell the P5-plus-1, you know, this is being taken care of.
But I doubt it's, I mean, you know, the nature of the inspections and so forth is very technical.
And I, you know, I think it'd probably be something that actually ends up getting resolved between Iran and the IAEA.
All right.
So now I'd like for you to help explain to me this discrepancy here between what all powers would, at least typically, I guess they could customize it in any given case, but what all powers would typically be granted to the IAEA above and beyond the safeguards agreement if they sign the additional protocol, compared to the powers granted to the IAEA, and I guess that's granted in quotation marks by the UN Security Council, which has mandated that the IAEA inspect all these other non-nuclear facilities and ask all these endless questions based on the alleged studies and all these other mandates to the IAEA that are separate from what's already in the safeguards agreement.
And then I guess secondarily to that, is it legal at all for the UN Security Council to mandate all that extra stuff when the UN Security Council are all members of the NPT and are already sworn to respect Iran's right to peaceful nuclear technology in the first place?
Yeah, that's a really, really good point.
You know, you could make an argument that the Security Council is essentially entitled or empowered to, you know, to do whatever it wants, to do whatever it can get the five permanent members to agree to.
But I think if you actually look at the UN Charter, you know, the UN Charter empowers the Security Council to act, to deal with threats to international peace and security up to and including authorizing the use of military force to deal with those threats.
But it says that the Council has to act in accordance with, you know, the principles of the UN Charter.
And the principles include respect for national sovereignty, respect for international law, respect for treaty obligations and commitments that states undertake, you know, aside from the Charter.
And I think you're exactly right.
There's a very powerful argument that could be made that by, you know, essentially requiring the Iranians to give up or to suspend a right, namely the right to enrich uranium under safeguards, which it has both as a sovereign state and as a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty, that the Security Council itself is acting in an, you know, extra legal or you could almost say unconstitutional way.
And that is the Iranian position that those parts of the Security Council resolutions saying that Iran has to suspend its enrichment activities, that those are actually illegal.
They are inconsistent with the Charter and therefore they're not binding.
Now of course, as I said, there is a school of thought that says basically whatever the Security Council says, you have to do.
But I think there is a powerful argument the other way.
Well, all you have to do is the golden rule thing.
If somehow we lost our veto for a week and they said the United States has to do this, that and the other thing, the United States would say, yeah, you and what army?
Yeah, yeah, that's that's true, too.
I think in terms of the additional protocol, I think that what the additional protocol would let the IAEA do beyond the standard safeguards agreement is it first of all, lets IAEA inspectors come and inspect facilities on a much, you know, basically a kind of snap or surprise basis.
They can.
It's much more feasible for them under the additional protocol, you know, simply to come and say, all right, we're here.
We want to inspect this facility.
We want to inspect it now.
And they have an authorization to have a legal basis for doing that in the standard safeguards agreement.
It's a little more, you know, sort of procedural.
The IAEA comes at regular intervals.
If it wants to do something outside of the kind of regularly scheduled stuff, it has to request it well in advance, all of this, this would basically allow the IAEA to inspect much more.
I guess you could say in a way much more aggressively.
It also gives them more of a basis for coming in and saying, you know, aside from your declared nuclear facilities, we think we have some concerns about other facilities and we want to be able to go there in order to make sure there's no undeclared nuclear activity or make sure that there's no other, you know, activity of concern there.
And the advance notice for doing that is shorter than it would be under the comprehensive safeguards agreement.
So, you know, it just lets the IAEA be more proactive and be more kind of assertive, operate on much shorter timeframes for some of their inspections activity.
Assuming this all works, which I hope it does, not that I even see any controversy over Iran's nuclear program, but whatever, put the pretended controversy to bed if you can.
But then now this is a giant arrow in the quiver of the war party or at least the sanctions party that look how well this worked, that all we had to do was deprive their hemophiliac children and their old ladies with cancer of the medicine that they need to stay alive and they had to give in all our demands.
Why we could put sanctions on all kinds of countries that we hadn't thought of yet.
Yeah, well, the sanctions bit is a really two edged sword.
And I think, you know, the war party, as you as you, I think, quite appropriately put it, you know, the people who want tighter and tighter sanctions, you know, who want children not able to get medicine that they need, you know, they will not be pleased if Obama were to make a deal, more or less along the lines we've been talking about.
You know, their view is that Iran should have no right to enrich, should have no centrifuges operating inside Iran.
The only piece that would be acceptable for this camp is basically a piece based on Iranian surrender.
And, you know, I don't think that that's really in the in the cards.
Can they stop this from happening, Flint?
I think that for Obama to make the deal that he should make on this issue, he's going to have to spend political capital, you know, confronting and marginalizing those those forces who basically don't think there should be any enrichment of uranium allowed in in Iran.
You know, he's going to have to deal with pro-Israel constituencies.
He's going to have to deal with, you know, all of the constituencies that buy into an essentially neoconservative vision for American foreign policy.
He's going to have to spend political capital to to do that.
And I'm I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not particularly confident that he's going to be willing to spend that kind of political capital on on this.
I also want to say about about sanctions, it's a really important question you raised that, you know, even if if you look at it, most of the sanctions that the U.S. applies against Iran have at this point been written into law.
Many of them started out over the years as what you'd call executive order sanctions.
The president cites some general authorities that he has under U.S. law and issues executive orders that impose various types of sanctions on Iran.
What the Congress has done basically while Obama has been president, and he has, in my view, very foolishly signed all of these bills, is they've taken these executive order sanctions.
They've made them law so that the president can't just unilaterally modify or take back an executive order.
They've made them law and they've spelled out conditions that Iran would have to meet before the sanctions can be lifted.
And the sanctions, the conditions don't just deal with the nuclear issue.
You know, under current law, Iran could do what what Libya did back in 2002, 2003, basically let the CIA and the Department of Energy come in, dismantle every centrifuge they've got, put them in crates, send them back to the nuclear lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
You know, Iran could do that.
And under current U.S. law, the administration, President Obama still could not lift sanctions on Iran, because now the law says Iran has to give up ties to groups that the U.S. government considers terrorist organizations, like Hezbollah.
It has to reform its internal political order, basically turn itself into a sort of secular liberal republic of Iran.
And I think this is going to be a real problem, even if the administration manages to get itself into a position where it wants to do the right thing in terms of the diplomacy, you know, they're not going to be able to offer on their own very much in terms of sanctions relief to Iran, not without getting some significant changes in U.S. law through Congress.
And I think this could this could turn out to be a big problem.
Yeah, it sounds a lot like what happened to Iraq in the 1990s on the U.N. Security Council, where the sanctions were permanent, you had to pass a new law to repeal them, instead of having to, you know, reauthorize them every once in a while or anything.
So Bill Clinton didn't have a let it sunset type of a thing, even as an option, not that that's what he wanted or anything.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's right.
I mean, there is a case where you had both bad law and bad policy.
I mean, the Clinton administration said, even if Saddam complied with all of the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, the Clinton administration would not allow a lifting of U.N. sanctions until Saddam was removed from power.
But then, you know, you're right, because of U.S. law, at least after 1998, it would have been it would have been very difficult for for Clinton to lift Iraq related sanctions.
All right.
You talked about political capital, and I don't know what difference it makes.
Maybe I'm wasting time.
I should be asking a better question.
But doesn't it seem to you, Flint, that this is great politics, making a peace deal?
This is the best thing ever.
And also defeating those loud mouth, hateful Republicans that everybody already hates anyway and saying the Republicans tried to stop me from making peace, but I made peace anyway.
How could he possibly go wrong with that?
Well, I think because this is an issue where the Democrats in Congress don't really present very much of an alternative to the Republicans in Congress.
I know that there are people who could say with some reason that that's the case on, you know, sadly, too many issues.
But this is this is a case where I think it's really true.
You know, you look at the sanctions bills that have been passed by Congress.
They're passed overwhelmingly by huge bipartisan majority.
You know, they're Repub, sorry, Democratic senators who are, you know, at least as enthusiastic proponents of Iran sanctions as what you would think of as the hardest line, you know, neoconservative Republican voices in in the Senate.
There isn't really a Democratic Party constituency of any real size, but they can't fight that hard on this.
Can they?
I mean, he's their president, the Democrats and he is their president.
But, you know, I think that Obama has found out before on other issues.
And this will be one where he ends up basically having to go against the Israeli government, go against the pro-Israel lobby here.
And the Israel lobby makes you can make life very hard for Democratic congressmen, including Democrat Democratic congressmen who want to get reelected next year.
And even if they want these congressmen want to support the president, it's going to make it very, very hard for them.
It's going to reduce their willingness to cooperate with Obama to take politically risky votes that Obama might ask them to take on various domestic issues.
Their willingness to run those risks is going to be reduced if they're getting flack from the pro-Israel lobby over what the president's trying to do on on Iran.
And I don't really think Obama is going to get a lot of Democratic support for really significant change in U.S. policy toward Iran.
All right.
Well, good luck to all of us.
That's Flint Leverett, everybody.
Thanks very much.
Thank you, Scott.
Flint Leverett writes at going to Tehran dot com.
That's also the name of the book.
He teaches foreign policy at Penn State.
We'll be right back with more news after this.
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