All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Of course, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And at the end of this second hour today, we will be switching over to the Liberty Radio Network.
That's LibertyRadioNetwork.com to do the third hour today.
And we'll be joined by the great Tom Woods, co-editor of the book, We Who Dared Say No to War with Murray Polner and a great many other books on top of that as well.
Now it is my honor and pleasure to introduce Flint Leverett.
He is the director of the Iran Project at the New America Foundation, where he's also a senior research fellow.
He teaches at Pennsylvania State University's School of International Affairs, was senior director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff and as a senior CIA analyst.
He left the Bush administration in 2003.
And also Gareth the Great, Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist from Interpress Service.
And we rerun everything that he writes at original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
And his most recent book is called Perils of Dominance.
And basically, first of all, I'd like to welcome you both to the show.
Thank you.
Thanks very much, Scott.
And now I'd like to turn this hour over to Dr. Porter to conduct this interview of Flint Leverett.
So Gareth, take it away.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Very happy to have the opportunity to do this interview.
It's really been something that I've wanted to do for a long time.
And so this is a great opportunity for me, as it is for your listeners, to have the advantage of the considerable insights that Flint Leverett can bring to this subject of U.S. relations, U.S. policy toward Iran.
And so welcome to the show, Flint, and thanks very much for giving us your time.
Well, thank you very much for the opportunity.
It's good to talk with you.
Well, let me start with the fact that you and your wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, have really taken on not just official U.S. policy toward Iran, but a lot of the sort of political elite, if you will, in Washington, particularly over the past year or so, by really becoming a very strong critic, not just of U.S. policy toward Iran in general, but towards the administration's policy of condemning the election in Iran and suggesting that the United States should in fact deal with the Ahmadinejad regime as a legitimate government because of that election.
And you've started your own website to get out your own analysis of development surrounding this whole set of issues of relations with Iran.
I'm wondering how you would describe what you're now trying to accomplish, particularly with your own website as well as the other work that you're doing on Iran.
Well, I think there's a near-term agenda and a longer-term agenda.
In the near term, and keep in mind that my wife and I both served at the White House on the National Security Council staff in the run-up to the Iraq War, we saw first-hand in that experience a set of what were essentially myths about Saddam Hussein, about the status of his WMD programs, about his alleged links to terrorist groups including al-Qaeda, how government and other power centers very effectively disseminated those myths, and the institutions that we would normally look to, to take a critical eye, exercise some independent evaluation of those claims, the press, think tanks, public intellectuals more generally, those institutions and individuals, for the most part, completely tanked in the run-up to the Iraq War.
I think the result was, first of all, a very, very serious mistake by the United States, but a mistake that has had really damaging consequences, clearly damaging human consequences, but also, I think, very damaging strategic consequences for the United States.
When we look at the Iran debate, we can, unfortunately, see some of the same tendencies, same trends starting to play out.
It's very, very easy to demonize Iran.
It's very, very easy to claim that the election last year was a fraud.
It's very, very easy to claim that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons.
Because it plays into a set of very strong political plants, a political belief that you have to sort of overcome, I take it?
Absolutely.
It plays to some already very well-established perceptions and stereotypes.
It's very easy for people to buy it, just as it was easy for people to buy the myths that were circulated about Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Iraq War.
In the near term, our agenda is, at least this time around, we want to feel like we at least have done everything that we could to try and look objectively at what Iran is doing in its nuclear program, what Iranian domestic politics is like, what Iran does in its foreign policy, and produce what we hope and certainly try to formulate as objective, reality-based analyses of these things and push back against the facile myth-making.
In the longer term, I'd like to think we have a more positive agenda, which is that we think Iran is a critically important country in one of the most important parts of the world.
At this point, given the relative decline in American standing and influence and the relative increase in Iranian standing and influence, my wife and I would argue that the United States at this point can't achieve its own objectives in this part of the world without a better, more productive relationship with Iran, and so we're trying to make the case for a strategic rapprochement with the Islamic Republic, a kind of Nixon-to-China opening, if you will, and that's kind of the long-term affirmative case that we're trying to make.
What's your take now on the present strategic situation, if you will, with regard to the administration and the Western coalition's effort to isolate Iran on the specifics of its record, not the specifics, but in general on the nuclear issue, and in light of the recent sort of breakthrough, if you will, of the Iran-Turkey-Brazil agreement on a fuel slot?
Well, I think at a minimum the Brazil-Turkey deal has complicated the Obama administration's efforts to get a new sanctions resolution passed.
I think that at this point we're in a competition between the United States and Iran, a competition essentially over who's going to get blamed if the joint declaration doesn't actually pan out.
Will the United States ram through a resolution through the Security Council, what will turn out to be a rather divided Security Council, I think, and just focus on getting the sanctions but do a lot of damage to its own longer-term credibility in multilateral settings?
Or is Iran going to be the state that ends up being blamed if the joint declaration doesn't play out?
And I think the administration is having to face up to some very, very difficult choices right now in figuring out how to respond to the Brazil-Turkey initiative, and we will, you know, the next few weeks are going to be an extremely interesting period to watch.
Do you see in the next few weeks a return to direct talks involving Iran and the P5-plus-1 with regard to the fuel swap issue before there is a final showdown on the sanctions?
I'm inclined to say no.
I don't want to be categorical in that.
But I think that for talks to advance, the administration is going to have to do something that it has been unable or unwilling to do up until this point, and that is accept the reality of uranium enrichment in Iran.
I mean, this was the Bush administration policy that, you know, Iran has to give up, it has to suspend enrichment as a condition for talks, and in the end, the only acceptable outcome from those talks would be, you know, an abandonment of enrichment by Iran.
Is that because you think that Iran is, in effect, saying that they will only talk to the United States if we agree that they don't have to discuss the issue of zero enrichment and the United States is taking exactly the opposite position?
At this point, yes, I think that's a fair summary.
And this is why the Brazil-Turkey declaration, when it actually came out, why it created such problems for the administration is because in the very, very first item, the very first paragraph of the declaration, it says very explicitly, Iran has a right to enrich uranium.
And the administration is internally divided on this.
You know, from the beginning, there are people in the administration who I think, like me, recognize that enrichment is a reality.
Iran knows how to enrich, it gets better at it the longer it does it, and at this point, it is not going to abandon that, it is not going to surrender that, and therefore, the realistic American approach is to say, okay, let's talk about the circumstances under which Iran enriches so that we can all be comfortable that proliferation risks are controlled.
There are some in the administration who see things that way, but there are also powerful people in the administration who aren't willing to make that leap, who think we have to hold out for zero enrichment.
I think those folks are in denial of reality, but they are there.
It's a division which has never been resolved, and this is part of why when Iran first raised the issue last year of buying new fuel for this medical research reactor in Tehran, a thoroughly safeguarded reactor, the administration came back with this idea of the fuel swap.
Iran sends some of its low-enriched uranium out in return for finished fuel, and the argument was that this would buy a year, a year in which Iran would not have enough LEU, low-enriched uranium, to have a theoretical possibility to produce a nuclear weapon, and we could negotiate and see if a bigger deal was possible during that year, but the negotiations, frankly, needed to take place not just between the United States and Iran, they needed to take place within the Obama administration about what the long-term position on uranium enrichment was going to be.
This division is still unresolved, and part of why the administration reacted initially so sharply, so negatively, against the Brazil-Turkey deal is because it puts that issue front and center.
Well, it's relatively easy to identify the figures who have been pretty hard-lined on this.
Obviously, Gary Seymour is publicly identified with the zero enrichment option, has embraced that publicly before he went into the administration.
You've got Dennis Ross, of course, also taking that position.
It's more difficult to identify somebody who's really the more realist.
Can you help us identify anyone who you think is really taking the realist position on this?
Well, I think some conversations I have are done in confidence, and I'm going to respect those confidences, particularly because these are people that I think are taking the right position in terms of what American policy should be, and I don't want to do anything that would undermine them.
But I can say there are people in the administration who, to my mind, take a more realistic and appropriate view of the issue.
They're in a minority, and they haven't been able to set policy.
They believe they're still in the game, that this is not a done deal by any means.
I think that's right.
Well, I think it's not a done deal, they're still in the game, but if the administration hasn't been able to resolve this in a year and a half, and when this is critical to the viability of their policy on this very high-profile issue, I think that there's something structural there that they can't come to closure on this.
Very good point.
All right, now let me break in here just for a second to say you're listening to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and my favorite interviewee, Gareth Porter from Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net and original.antiwar.com slash Porter, is interviewing Flint Leverett, former National Security Council staffer and CIA analyst and keeper of the blog with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett of RaceForIran.com.
So go ahead, Gareth.
Flint, you've just come back from a recent trip to Iran.
Did you learn anything about Iran's strategy that you think would be important for people to understand with regard to the future of this issue?
I think there are a couple of things that are important and I think aren't very well understood on the American side about Iranian positions and views and goals.
One is, I don't believe that the Iranians have taken a decision to take their nuclear program all the way to fabricating nuclear weapons.
This is certainly what every Iranian official who talks with us says, that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, does not want nuclear weapons.
But I think there is another important angle here, which is that not just the highest levels of political authority, but the highest levels of religious authority in Iran, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, say that it would be a violation of religion and ethics and Islam for Iran to fabricate nuclear weapons.
And I actually believe that in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state that legitimates itself in no small measure in terms of the priority and primacy it gives to religious and ethical considerations, that for the Supreme Leader and other religious authorities to have come out publicly on a sustained basis and to have said it would be immoral to do this, is a not trivial thing.
It is a real constraint.
I don't think that this leader or a future leader is going to find it easy to decide at some point, well, let's actually fabricate nuclear weapons and all that stuff we've said about it being immoral and against religion, never mind.
Do you understand, just by the way, on that point, do you understand that the more extreme right-wing elements in the clergy, such as Shariat Nadari, for example, the editor of Kahan, really embraces completely that viewpoint on nuclear weapons, as well as the more moderate people?
I would say it's a consensus view.
It's very easy to construct a serious religious and moral argument against nuclear weapons.
It's actually much harder to do it in favor of them.
As you say, my sense is that this is something which cuts across Iran's factional or ideological spectrum from the hardest of the hardliners to the most progressive reformists.
And that leads me, I think that the best way to understand the Iranian nuclear program, they do take it very seriously as something that stimulates their own internal scientific development, technological development, and they take it seriously over the long term as something that could begin to help them meet some of their own burgeoning demand for electricity and power generation.
But I think in a strategic perspective, frankly, what they're doing is they are developing what you could call a nuclear weapons option.
They, I think, ultimately want to be seen by the United States, by other countries in the region, as having the major capabilities you would need in order to fabricate nuclear weapons if at some point you took a decision to do that, but not to proceed to weaponization.
And in terms of their strategic situation, I understand why they would want to do that.
And the NPT is written in a way that, as even Mohammed al-Bardai himself said, and I quote, this is kosher under the NPT.
So I think you really need to look in sort of full 360 degrees at the Iranian nuclear program, what it means from an Iranian perspective, the kinds of domestic constraints that exist in Iran against overt weaponization, and realize that they are going to keep pushing ahead with developing these kinds of building blocks.
And from a nonproliferation point of view, what we, I think, should want to do is to get as many limits built into that and certainly as much transparency built into that as we possibly can to minimize the proliferation risks which are there.
And the idea that we're somehow going to browbeat them into giving all of this up is, I think, just a pipe dream.
I mean, that's one thing that I think I would want to get across.
Just on that point about the desirability of striving to build in a degree of, you know, a greater degree of monitoring and transparency as the objective of diplomacy with Iran, what was possible in 2005 or 2004, 2005 period as we're negotiating with the government before, the Qasemi government before...
Look, I think the basic trade-off is we, the United States, the international community, accepts, acknowledges Iran's right to all relevant civil nuclear technologies, including fuel cycle technologies and uranium enrichment.
In return for that, the Iranians agree to more intrusive inspections, monitoring, verification of what they are doing.
If we would agree that Iran has a right to enrich, then we could talk with the Iranians about numbers of centrifuges and numbers of sites and how those sites are going to be monitored.
I think that's essentially the trade-off that's always been there.
It's just the longer we wait to make that trade-off, the more Iran is going to have, the more centrifuges they're going to have, the more sophisticated they will be, the more they're going to have.
I think that's essentially the longer we wait to make that trade-off, the more centrifuges they're going to have, the more sophisticated they will be, the more capable they'll be.
Just to follow up on that issue of the negotiations that had taken place prior to Ahmadinejad's regime, were you aware of the fact that they were putting the low-enriched uranium that they produced into fuel rods for their, at that point, obviously not yet operational and not to be operational for some years, power plant.
To what extent do you think that was ever really thought about in terms of US or European policymakers?
I don't think it was at all in the US context because it would have meant, again, it would have gone back, you would have had to have accepted the reality of Iranian enrichment.
But how much better off would we be today if we had accepted this and it was clearly understood that uranium enriched to 3 or 4% of discarded reactors?
Yes, Iran gets to enrich uranium and gets to get better at the technology and capability, but they're going to do that anyway.
Wouldn't you like to have more controls or more safety mechanisms built into that so that the proliferation risks are controlled?
But the longer we wait to make this, the higher the price gets for us.
All right, gentlemen, let me break in here for just a second again to say this is anti-war radio on chaos in Austin and can you believe this is my job?
This is so cool.
I'm just sitting back listening to my good friend Gareth Porter, my favorite interviewee on this show, and I'm sorry, I don't mean to take you too far off your track here, Gareth, put a finger by your next note or something, but if it's okay, I'd like to ask Mr. Leverett a question here myself.
Late last October, Iran declared to the IAEA that they were building a facility at Qom that was going to be put into use to enrich uranium, an enrichment plant from the Natanz facility.
Four days later, Obama, Blair, pardon me, Gordon Brown, and Nicholas Sarkozy gave a giant press conference and said that we busted them, they had a secret facility.
And then the news said, well, it's true, even David Sanger said, yes, it's true that the Iranians did declare the facility a few days ago, but as repeated in the New York Times today, is the assertion that, well, the Iranians only confessed to it because they knew that they were about to get called on it, because apparently unstated, but it seems like, I don't understand other than they're saying that the Iranians somehow broke Obama's codes and they know it was going to be in his speech in four days.
Is there any credible evidence anywhere on the face that the Iranians did anything but what they claimed and that Obama just, you know, later took something that hadn't been very publicized and pretended to bust them on a secret program that in fact they had openly admitted to?
Well, I mean, if there is that evidence, I'm unaware of it.
I think what's really interesting here, I mean, you put your finger on part of it, and this is partially what I mean when I say, there's a lot of myth-making about how a certain thing gets asserted, it seems like, oh, we know the Iranians are bad, this must be true, and then even though there's not really evidence to back it up, and maybe at some point the New York Times has to say, well, at the very least there are two different sides of this story, but that pretty quickly drops by the wayside and as you say, more and more it becomes a social fact that Iran had this secret facility at Gom which it didn't declare like it was supposed to, to the IAEA, and this is just further proof of their nefarious intention.
I mean, I think what's really going on here is, you know, and it's part of, I think it reinforces my argument that you want more access, more cooperation from the Iranians rather than less, there is a kind of legal disagreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency as to which set of reporting requirements applies to Iranian nuclear facilities today.
The agency says that, and it is true, that at a certain point several years ago Iran agreed to a more stringent set of reporting requirements where you basically have to report a nuclear facility pretty much as soon as you start building it.
Iran then, as its relationship with the West deteriorated over nuclear issues, Iran withdrew from this more restrictive set of reporting requirements and said we'll just go by the set of reporting requirements that's in our standard safeguards agreement, which only requires that you inform the IAEA of a new facility six months before you introduce nuclear material into it.
The Iranians on this basis, they reported the facility to the IAEA.
According to them, they say it was more than a year before they had any intention of introducing nuclear material into what was at the time was basically a construction site and therefore they were in full compliance, you know, more than adequate compliance with their reporting requirements.
Some lawyers are asserting that this more stringent set of reporting requirements to which the Iranians had signed up several years ago but then withdrew, that that actually should still be considered as in effect and by that more stringent set of reporting requirements it's arguable that the Iranians should have told the IAEA about the facility sooner.
That is essentially the nature of the dispute, but no one really wants to take the time to spell all that out because it's not a really you know, sexy, the Iranians are you know, deceptive, evil people, you know, we all know and are just trying to fool us while they march steadily toward a nuclear weapon.
You know, a kind of objective, detailed, fact-based analysis like that just doesn't fit into the stereotyping project real well.
Clint, you've zeroed in on the importance of the U.S. threat of war against Iran remaining, quote, on the table, unquote and suggesting that that actually raises the risk of real war with Iran.
Could you just quickly explain why you argue that that threat is likely to lead to the threat being carried out and why you believe it should be taken off the table?
Well, I think that the biggest security concern for the Islamic Republic is from their perspective, comes from the United States and a sense built up over 30 years that the United States has never accepted the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic as, you know, the proper government of Iran and under those circumstances Iran takes steps that it believes are necessary to defend the Islamic Republic.
I think that laying the groundwork for what I describe as a nuclear weapons option may well be part of that sense of what they think they need to do.
As long as we are talking about how all options remain on the table, that's essentially saying the United States reserves unilaterally the option of initiating war against Iran even without a Security Council resolution, even without any other accepted legal justification, but that if we think we need to use force in order to keep Iran from doing something that we don't want it to do, that we have that right.
Under those circumstances, I think the Islamic Republic is going to continue to do things that we don't want them to do, whether it's advancing with their nuclear program, whether it's maintaining ties to various regional proxy groups, whether it's Iraq or Lebanon or wherever else.
They're going to keep maintaining those ties in ways that we will find problematic and the only way to make this relationship better is to do basically what we did with China under President Nixon, which is to say, look, we recognize that the People's Republic of China is the government of China.
We don't want to change your borders by force, we don't want to change your form of government by force.
We want to reach a strategic understanding with you and build a positive relationship with you.
I would say it's really going to work with Iran and as long as you still keep doing this, every option is on the table and we can always resort to unilateral attack on Iran whenever we want.
I think it is just going to keep ratcheting tensions up higher and higher and it's going to produce a dynamic where as Iran gets more capable with nuclear issues as its regional position gets stronger in Iraq and other places there are going to be more and more powerful constituencies in the United States and possibly from countries outside the United States which will be saying to the United States, you need to use force to deal with this and the power of that message is only going to grow as tensions ratchet up.
Am I correct that we've got a problem in this country that the national security elite and particularly especially those who really don't think that attacking Iran is a good idea, continue to be very much wedded to the idea that we cannot give up the threat of an attack because you never give up what is considered an advantage?
Do you see that as a fundamental problem here?
I think it is a problem because in a sense the United States never gives up the right to defend itself or its legitimate interests.
If Iran were ever foolish enough to attack American naval forces in the Persian Gulf or in international waters, there is no question that the United States would have the legal right and would be able to respond in very, very forceful ways.
The issue is using force unilaterally against Iran not because they have given you a cause's belly, but because you think that they've gotten too far down the road in learning how to enrich uranium.
That's essentially what it boils down to.
I think that is a real problem because unless we're prepared to give that up and say as a matter of policy that we commit not to using force to change the borders of the form of government of the Islamic Republic of Iran I think the Iranians are never going to be convinced that we have anything other than ultimately malign intentions towards them.
Let me steer the interview in a slightly different direction.
The first nine years of your government service were as an intelligence analyst.
I presume it was dealing on the Middle East and I was wondering if you would have any observations, particularly in retrospect, on the quality of U.S. intelligence analysis of Iran's foreign policy and its nuclear program in particular during the time that you were dealing with the intelligence.
Well, you know I think that there certainly are some very talented people in the intelligence community and working on the analytics side.
I have to say since I have gotten out of the U.S. government and now I'm actually free to meet with Iranians well Iranians of all sorts but including Iranian officials and I'm actually able to go to Iran I feel like I would be a much much better analyst of Iranian affairs than when I was working in the U.S. government and because of our lack of relations with Iran I couldn't have any contact with Iranian officials, couldn't travel to Iran couldn't go to conferences with Iranian academics who work on foreign policy issues and learn from them.
I think there is a real problem within the U.S. government, the intelligence community, the State Department, other places because the people that we give security clearances to and put them to work on Iran they don't go to Iran, they don't really know all that many Iranians except maybe for expatriates.
They don't really have their own first-hand sense of what the place is like, of how Iranians themselves think about their foreign policy and I think it's a real limitation and it does I think in the end hurt the quality of the analysis that would be available to policy makers.
One of the issues about analyzing the internal politics and policy of Iran during that period of course was was there in fact a kind of state within a state that is to say the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a separate entity that really was being presented as I understand it as not responsive to the nation's highest civilian leadership and therefore being able to carry out terrorist attacks and of course included in that were supposedly Buenos Aires 1994 and Kobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 do you have at this point a different understanding at all of that question?
Is that something that you've looked at in retrospect?
I think that the status of the Revolutionary Guard Corps is something that does lend itself to a lot of stereotyping on the basis of not a whole lot of information.
I mean keep in mind the Revolutionary Guard is created after the Iranian Revolution because of a kind of inherent distrust of a military establishment that the new political order had inherited from the Shah so they want to create their own military structure and then within a year after the Islamic Republic is created, Iraq invades and so the Revolutionary Guard becomes the vanguard for this defense of Iran in this terribly bloody eight-year war with Iraq.
I can tell you it is really remarkable if you get to go to Iran to this day how much that eight-year war still is manifested in Iranian society.
You find war veterans all over the place, you find people all over the place who lost a brother or a son or a friend or some other person that meant something to them in this struggle.
People want to make a big deal out of how the Revolutionary Guard is taking over politics and so many of the parliamentarians now have backgrounds in the Revolutionary Guard.
It's a little bit like asking in 1960 how many American congressmen had served in the military during the Second World War.
And in terms of the Revolutionary Guard and its relationship to various power centers, according to the Constitution the Revolutionary Guard reports directly to the Supreme Leader.
It does not report to the President.
In terms of Hobart Towers, I honestly don't really know what happened with Hobart Towers and who is responsible for it.
I know that the preferred explanation from the US government, based presumably on intelligence information, is that it was ultimately an Iranian-sponsored affair.
If you want to buy that story, Richard Clarke himself has said publicly that it was initiated as a response to the first time in 1994 that the Congress appropriated money and the Clinton administration signed it into law to promote regime change in Iran.
According to Richard Clarke, he said it publicly, Hobart Towers, which keep in mind was an attack on an American military facility, grows out of that decision.
I don't know if that is the case or not, but that is the explanation that Richard Clarke has given publicly for why the Iranians did Hobart Towers.
There's also a counter-explanation that it was actually done by Al-Qaeda, by Sunni extremist elements working in...
I did a very in-depth analysis and investigation of that, and I'd love to send you the specific stories that I did on it, because I think I pretty much exploded the Iranian origins of that operation.
Yeah, but I'm...
I mean, you may well be right.
I'm just saying, even if you accept the kind of official U.S. explanation that it was ultimately Iranian-inspired, you know, no less than Richard Clarke tells us that it was meant to push back against what the Iranians saw as a direct American threat that had been launched against them.
But let me turn to another aspect of the recent history of U.S.
-Iran relations, which you have been associated with, and that's the 2000...
Spring 2003 Iranian secret diplomatic proposal to the Bush administration, which were instrumental in helping to get more information out in later years.
There, of course, has been a push back by the neoconservatives on this, who have and some who are perhaps not directly neoconservative, but have disagreed with your perspective on it, who have argued that this was not really a legitimate diplomatic initiative, but a concoction by the Swiss ambassador to Iran and so forth, that it was at odds with other signals that were coming from Iranian officials.
I'm sure you can help lay to rest some of the pushback that has been made on that point.
And I can't wait to hear the answer to that, but unfortunately everybody's got to wait just a few seconds to hear it.
First of all, I've got to say real quick, I'm Scott this is Antiwar Radio.
You're listening to Gareth Porter interview Flint Leverett, and I need to mention that in regards to this question, there's an article by Gareth called Burnt Offering at the American Prospect about this subject and if you Google Gareth's name, Gareth Porter and probably with Flint Leverett's name and 2003 Iran peace offer somewhere you will find an IPS article at IPSnews.net and if you page down to the bottom, it's not a live link, but there is the text to the link to the PDF file of the actual paperwork of this Iran offering that's your ultimate footnote right there, it's at IPSnews.net somewhere, there's your search terms and now over to Leverett for your answer here sir.
Yeah, you know, the document in question that you can access in this PDF came in, it was passed through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran because since we have no diplomatic representation ourselves there, the Swiss function is, the technical term is our protecting power in Tehran.
So it was not at all inappropriate for the Swiss ambassador to have been passing these messages from Iranians or even to be talking with the Iranians about messages that they might want to pass.
The message from the Iranians was passed with a cover note from the Swiss ambassador in which he explains in great and I think quite plausible and persuasive detail how he came into possession of this document you know, who presented it to him, what were the representations that this Iranian official made when he presented it and they were that this had been vetted by all of the major power centers including both President Khatami and the Supreme Leader and you know, under those circumstances I think it should be taken very seriously as a genuine communication from the Iranian side.
You can then argue about the merits of what the Iranians are talking about, but I think to say that it didn't come from the Iranians is just delusional.
Since I've left government, I've been able to talk with a wide range of Iranian officials all of whom were in office at the time that this document would have been passed.
Some still hold office, some don't but I haven't found anybody who was really in an important position in terms of foreign policy, national security, decision making who hasn't said yeah, that offer came, they may well say but now the strategic situation has changed and we wouldn't be offering something as generous as that document seems in retrospect.
One of the points that you can shed further light on is this argument that I've seen made more than once that we were getting very different signals from Iranian officials in other parts of the world that did not really match up with the message that was passed here.
I don't really understand what that means Certainly, my wife was involved directly in almost two years of regular discussions with Iranian counterparts about Afghanistan and Al Qaeda after the 9-11 attacks and that dialogue went up until roughly the same time that this Iranian document came in through the Swiss and certainly her experience as she's recounted it, negotiating with the Iranians in that period was that the Iranians wanted to expand the dialogue they wanted to raise it to a bigger strategic kind of dialogue with the United States and it was the Bush administration which was resisting doing that they then tried this non-paper that came in through the Swiss and again the Bush administration that rejected or didn't follow up on on that particular offer you can always find some statement by an Iranian official somewhere expressing hostility or criticism of the United States and you could always take that statement and say see the Iranians don't want to deal with us but in terms of actual authoritative communications that we had with them either directly or through the official channel through the Swiss, they were given a different message.
There's another argument I'm sure you're familiar with as well, this is by Dennis Ross I believe it was early this year or perhaps late last year in which he said the reason that the Iranians were willing to or eager to make such a diplomatic approach to the United States is that they were so afraid that the United States having completely won in Iraq would then turn to Iran and that's why they were so pliable.
Would you have a response to that?
Well, I would say first of all that the Iranians had been trying to forge a strategic opening with the United States for a long time before we invaded Iraq but even if you accept that premise that the Iraq invasion affected their calculations in a way that they were prepared to make a more forthcoming or more generous offer to the United States than they might have made otherwise it still leaves open the question of why didn't we follow it up?
Absolutely, yes.
But there's another reason why I was wondering if you would respond to that in a much more specific way and that is the understanding that I understood had been reached in the weeks prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq between U.S. and Iranian officials that the Iranians would be allowed to send thousands of the Iranian trained anti-Saddam Iraqi Shia into Iraq in conjunction with the U.S. offensive which of course would give the Iranians a degree of political influence potentially at least in Iraq that particularly neocons would be quite unhappy with.
I was wondering if you can confirm that and how you think that it might have affected the Iranian analysis of what was happening with the Bush administration?
Well, I think you're right that there were while the Pentagon pushed very hard to have the Iraqi National Congress under Ahmed Chalabi be the only Iraqi opposition group that we dealt with, in fact because of pushback from the State Department we ended up dealing with a much wider group of Iraqi oppositionists including groups such as the Dawah party and the Supreme Islamic Council which did go back into Iraq after the invasion and quickly emerged as much, much more important political forces with much, much more popular credibility and support among Iraqis than Ahmed Chalabi and the INC ever had.
These groups, these Shia Islamist groups like Dawah, like the Supreme Council were groups which had been supported for years in exile by Iran and I think Iran correctly calculated that Saddam's removal, particularly if it ended up empowering Iraqi Shia and you had these Shia Islamist groups playing very important roles in Iraqi politics that this was going to be a good situation for them, but it would certainly create an incentive on their part to want to try and coordinate this, establish a kind of cooperative framework for post-Saddam Iraq with the United States, just as they wanted to cooperate with us on Afghanistan.
Let me ask you, we have to at least say a few words about the NIE of November 2007 and its fate, the controversy that swirls around it, the criticism of it and so forth, and what you think is likely to happen in the next iteration from the intelligence community about the Iranian program?
Well, you know, I have to say I don't have any inside information on that particularly.
I mean, it seems as if the next NIE, whenever it comes out, is going to place more of an emphasis than the 2007 document did on kind of the, let's call it the purely weapons-related aspects of the program.
I mean, there are things like enriching uranium, which, you know, yes, in theory it could ultimately be used to produce weapons-grade fissile material, but there are a whole lot of legitimate non-military uses for that capability.
If you're really working on shaped charges or various kinds of triggers for chain reactions, it's harder to identify potential non-military applications for some of those things.
I don't have any inside information, but I think I gather there's likely to be more of an emphasis on what the intelligence community sees as evidence that Iran may have done work on some of those kinds of capabilities as well as working on the fuel cycle.
Do you have any sense as to whether the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, absolutely accepted the so-called laptop documents, the alleged studies documents, as the IAEA has called them, as genuine and therefore built at least some of its analysis around that as opposed to being skeptical about them?
I think that there is a real possibility of that.
Now, I mean, eventually the laptop of death was I think more or less discredited, but now supposedly there's new intelligence.
What worries me is at least some of this is supposedly from defectors, and we all know what intelligence from defectors was like in the case of the Iraqi nuclear program.
I think there's just some, you know, what I've heard about some of the defector sources that they have, you know, they have this 32-year-old nuclear physicist that they claim he's been working for at high levels in the Iranian nuclear program for more than a decade, which if you just do the arithmetic it means he had to finish his PhD when he was about 19 and get access to what presumably would be the most sensitive parts of Iran's nuclear program when he was 20.
This is all sounding altogether too reminiscent of the kind of sloppy intelligence work that was done on WD issues in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Yeah, I wanted to come back to the elections of 2005 in Iran and the opposition movement that arose after that.
What do you think has been the impact of that on the Obama administration's policy, and do you think that some people in the administration, at least in high levels, have been in fact tempted to entertain some thought of the very end of the regime change posture or strategy?
Yes, I think there are people who've been tempted by the regime change idea, and I also think that the way the election was perceived and portrayed here has had a really negative impact on our own debate about Iran and how to deal with it.
It has become, again, pretty close to a social fact that the election was a fraud, that President Ahmadinejad's re-election was not in any way legitimate.
Certainly Ahmadinejad's administration and the whole power structure is portrayed as this very unpopular system, which most Iranians would love to get rid of given half chance.
I don't think that the reality is much more complicated than that.
I think most Iranians still like the idea of an Islamic republic even if they want it to evolve in certain ways, they don't want to get rid of it.
We're going to have to leave it there.
Everybody look at IPSnews.net and RaceforIran.com for more from Gareth Porter and Flint Leverett.
Thank you both very much for your time on the show today.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Gareth.
Thanks, Flint.
Great interview.
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