For Pacifica Radio, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Anti-War Radio.
Our guest tonight is Hilary Mann Leverett.
She is a senior fellow and senior lecturer at Yale University, and she and her husband, Flint Leverett, published the blog RaceForIran.com.
Welcome to the show, Hilary.
How are you?
Very good.
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us tonight, and I really appreciate RaceForIran.com.
I read you guys all the time, and I always learn a lot.
I'd like to direct everyone's attention tonight to WikiLeaks and Iran.
Take one, Obama's legacy will be changed you can't rely on, and the other is also co-authored with your husband, Flint.
Why should Iran trust President Obama?
And that's up at the Huffington Post.
And so I guess really that should be my first question right there, shouldn't it?
Why should Iran trust President Obama?
After all, he did give a YouTube speech where he said he liked them, and unlike the Bushes, he was willing to sit down and talk with them about outstanding issues between our two countries, right?
Well, that's true as far as it goes.
I should also say the post will be up later on today on Race for Iran as well, so people can look at it and read it there.
But unfortunately, it documents a lot of the to and fro in the past year and a half in the Obama administration, but those documents linking directly to cables are down right now.
So hopefully those will come back up and your audience can read them for themselves.
But the question why should Iran trust President Obama is a really profound one, especially since we are supposed to restart talks with the Iranians next week on the nuclear issue, which is of significant importance.
What we document in our piece is that even though President Obama came to office with what I would call a strategic impulse to engage Iran, to engage all sorts of international players who we don't necessarily agree with, and he famously said during the campaign, it's not a reward to engage with even your enemies.
You do that to come to agreement.
You don't negotiate with your friends.
You negotiate with your enemies or people that you have a problem with.
So he came to office with this very important strategic impulse that was very different than we experienced under the Bush administration.
But unfortunately, Obama surrounded himself from the very beginning with advisors at the highest level who did not share his strategic vision for engagement with the so-called rogue states like Iran.
Their language would be rogue states like Iran.
His advisors didn't share that vision at all, and in fact, from the beginning, many of them were completely opposed.
Many of them had worked for Secretary of State Clinton when she was a candidate for president, and she had a very different view.
Some of them were supporters in the Bush administration of our prior misadventure in the Middle East, the lead-up to the war and support for the actual war in Iraq.
These are the type of advisors that are there.
They didn't support his vision for engagement from the beginning.
So instead of serving the president and implementing his vision, they tried to set up a situation for the president that if he needed to deal with Iran militarily down the road, he could.
He would have that option.
In other words, he would be able to say, we tried to deal with them and that didn't work, but he didn't really try to deal with them.
No, he never seriously tried to deal with them, and that's documented from the beginning.
You mentioned his YouTube video, the celebrated video that President Obama did for the Iranian New Year back in March 2009.
The WikiLeaks documents, the cables, show us in detail, concretely, that just as President Obama himself was appearing on video to wish the Iranian people and the leaders and the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran, using their term, their name for their own country for the first time in U.S. history, just as he was making that historic video, senior U.S. officials were out there briefing other governments about the pressure track, how we were going to increase pressure, increase consequences, increase threats to Iran.
Just when President Obama was saying in his video, quote-unquote, a new relationship with Iran will not be advanced by threats, quote-unquote, will not be advanced by threats, at the exact same time, his senior officials were in briefings that are now recorded in these cables, saying that we would be doing just the opposite.
We would be keeping the pressure up, we would be keeping the threats up, and this is completely contrary to a policy of engagement.
Engagement means doing the very, very hard thing, which is to, it requires a self-conscious effort on our part to actually put the sticks aside, to assure the other side, to assure the Iranians, that we are serious about realigning relations.
That's what Nixon did with China, that's what needed to be done, but instead Obama bought into this double game that he could play, where he could show the international community that we were open to engagement, and that that would allow the international community to then support us, if we needed to take more coercive actions later, which is of course exactly what we've done.
Alright, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm talking with Hilary Mann-Leverett from RaceForIran.com, and she was the Director for Iran, Afghanistan, and Middle Eastern Affairs at the National Security Council, under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
And now it seems to me, Hilary, that if Obama had his one big chance to make a deal about the biggest, supposed outstanding issue anyway, and that is the enrichment of uranium in Iraq, and Tehran, he had it.
Just over a year ago, it seemed to me like the Iranians more or less accepted his offer, that he would implicitly recognize the enrichment of uranium, and accept the enrichment of uranium on Iranian soil, unlike the Bush crew, as long as, if they ever got up above 3.6%, like say to do the 20% enriched uranium-235 for the targets for their medical isotope reactor in Tehran, that they would have that enriched by the Russians, turned into fuel rods by the French, and then they would swap it, and everything would be good.
And as far as I could tell, the Iranians basically said, fine, except, why don't we swap quantity for quantity?
You go ahead and give us the fuel rods, as we're giving you our 3.6% enriched uranium.
That way we know that you're not going to rip us off, and have the French later say sorry Charlie, and take our uranium from us.
Which seemed to me like a pretty reasonable counter-offer.
And at that point, Obama said, oh no, you have a secret weapons factory at com, and all this, and forget it.
Was that Dennis Ross, or was that the President himself, that refused to accept their acceptance of his offer to them?
At this point, I was a supporter of President Obama, I not only voted for him, I gave what little money I have, I gave to the campaign to support the election.
I have a serious question now, whether it is just the advisors, or this is a strategy that President Obama himself bought into.
And if he bought into it, perhaps because he thought if he were able to get more sanctions, and could appear more tough, that somehow he could hold off other naysayers coming from maybe Prime Minister Netanyahu's office in Israel, other sectors in various American domestic constituencies.
If perhaps he thought he could do that, he was wrong.
And I'm pretty prone to hyperbole, so would you necessarily even agree with my narrative there about their acceptance of his offer, and his refusal to go along with that?
They were very open to working with us to find some sort of resolution.
It starts off actually in June, a couple of days before the notorious elections in Iran that became such a problem for us here in the United States.
They sent a letter to the IAEA saying, hey, we have this reactor in Tehran, it's actually a reactor that the United States bought and built for us before the Islamic Republic was even established under the Shah's time.
And at the time, it was even erected to handle highly enriched uranium, weapons-grade uranium.
But the Iranians had the reactor changed to take low-enriched uranium after the revolution, and nothing else was open to them, and they wanted to produce enriched uranium for the production of isotopes, medical isotopes in particular.
They initially bought fuel for that 20 years ago from the Argentinians when they reconfigured the reactor.
In June 2009, before the Iranian elections that became so difficult for us, they sent a letter to the IAEA that said, look, our fuel supply from the Argentinians is running out, we would like your help to purchase more fuel abroad.
Well, if they purchased the fuel abroad, they wouldn't have to do anything to produce it at home.
That itself was a confidence-building measure from the Iranian side.
Here in Washington, they took it as an aha moment.
They could put the Iranians in a corner.
They could configure this swap deal where the Iranians could send out some of their already low-enriched uranium in exchange for these fuel rods that would be finished fuel that they could put into the reactor and use for their isotopes.
The Iranians were a little bit dubious about the proposition, but they said they would work with us to try to make this deal.
They met with the U.S. and other delegations in October and November of 2009.
They had some issues, just as you said, how much of their low-enriched uranium they would have to send out of the country, when, and to whom.
They didn't want to send it to France.
They had been burned by the French in the 1970s and 1980s over a similar fuel issue.
They weren't so comfortable to send it to the Russians.
The Russians will give them something when the political pressure isn't on, but when the political pressure is on, they renege.
So the Iranians wanted to work with Turkey in particular.
They had much more trust in Turkey and potentially other third countries.
One of the cables that's released in the Wikipedia leak shows in November 2009, just as we're having the discussion, and here in Washington, President Obama's advisors were saying, the Iranians are too divided to take the deal, they can't take the deal, they're rejecting the deal.
Just as those advisors were leaking that to the press here in Washington, the cables now show the Turkish foreign minister essentially pleading with U.S. government officials that the Iranians would take the deal, they just needed to have assurances on some particular aspects of the deal.
And the U.S. told the Turks, you're not being helpful.
You're not going along with what the plan is.
And the plan was that by the end of December, a month later, December 2009, we needed to have this finished, because we, the U.S. administration, had promised the government of Israel, had promised Prime Minister Netanyahu, that we would give engagement a chance until the end of the year.
President Obama even talked about that as the deadline publicly at the end of the year.
So if we didn't have a done deal from the Iranians, where it's signed, sealed, and delivered by December, we weren't interested.
We needed to move on to sanctions to satisfy the requirement that we had, this requirement that the Israelis had put to us and we had agreed to.
So we weren't interested in the deal.
And when the Turks and the Brazilians later, a couple months later, tried to salvage this, because they saw the sanctions train coming at the U.N., and they thought this would really hurt chances for reconciliation between Iran and the international community, and avert an armed conflict later on, and they desperately fly to Tehran in the spring of 2010, the spring of this year, to try to rescue this swap deal, to come up with something, they're able to do it.
And here in Washington, they're horrified, horrified.
It's really an amazing story.
I'm talking with Hilary Mann Leverett from RaceForIran.com, and it reminds me of your story, the burnt offering, as Gareth Porter, who broke it, titled it, with, I believe, you and your now-husband, Flint Leverett, as the sources for it, where the Iranians came in 2003 with the golden offer, I think is what Gordon Prather called it, and the Swiss ambassador was actually given a dressing down for daring to deliver this peace message from the Ayatollah Khamenei.
That's right, that's right.
It was rejected.
They will not take yes for an answer, not the Bush team or the Obama team.
And this is what's so disturbing.
It shows, really, the structural problem in our foreign policy and national security infrastructure here that keeps us on a trajectory toward war, where even a candidate, a president, like Barack Hussein Obama, is having a very hard time averting it.
You know, he came into office, he said he didn't want to just change the mindset.
I mean, he didn't want to just pull U.S. troops out of Iraq.
He wanted to change the mindset that got us into Iraq.
But now, instead of changing the mindset, he's appeasing it.
And this is really the most disturbing bottom line to me, is that even a candidate and now a president like Barack Obama, instead of being able to change the serious problems in our foreign policy and national security structure, he's bought into it.
All right, it's Anti-War Radio on KPFK in L.A.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Hillary Mann-Leverett, formerly of the State Department and the National Security Council, and I guess held the Iran brief there.
And now, I wanted to ask you about something I saw on TV just, let's see, two, three weeks ago.
It was a short clip on maybe MSNBC of Hillary Clinton saying she was actually diminishing the hype about the beginning, the activation of the Bushehr reactor.
And she was saying, oh, look, that's a light water reactor, and it's not a weapons threat.
And of course, there's a lot of tough talk about that and scary talk about that.
But you don't need to worry about that.
That's part of a civilian nuclear program.
And we've said all along, the Secretary of State said, we've said all along Iran has the right to nuclear technology, just not the right to nuclear weapons.
Well, everybody knows that.
That's right there in the Non-Proliferation Treaty and so forth.
But she didn't say whether she included the enrichment of uranium and Natanz at that.
But after all, they're only enriching uranium, almost all of it to 3.6 percent, and a little bit more, up to 20 percent, for their medical reactor that we've talked about here.
And I just wonder, what is she talking about?
If we accept Iran's civilian nuclear program, then I wonder which part of it is objectionable.
Do you know?
This is just a very sad, very, very sad situation.
I mean, even five years ago, she had a different story to say about Bushehr.
Ten years ago, both her and her husband had a very different story to say about Bushehr.
The problem is that the Iranians...
And what was that?
They said it was a huge threat.
They were in intense negotiations with the Russians at the time to implore the Russians not to transfer the technology that would be necessary to open the Bushehr reactor.
Right, which is why they had to turn to the black market in the first place, because we wouldn't let the Russians or the Chinese sell them anything back in the 90s.
Exactly.
I mean, we were sanctioning them.
That's, you know, where the only sanctions that we've ever imposed, really, on companies dealing with Iran have to do with those kind of transactions.
We were completely against, the U.S. administration was completely against the Bushehr reactor.
The problem is that the Iranians, and this is another fundamental piece that is really so disturbing.
The U.S. administration, President Obama and President Bush before him, just can't come to grips with the rise of Iran, just like they're failing to come to grips with the rise of Turkey.
And so here you have with the Bushehr reactor and the enrichment story and all pieces of this nuclear story, the Iranians continue to go forward.
They continue to master the technology.
They're smart people.
They have resources.
They're not dependent on U.S. imports or consumer goods.
It's a huge population with a huge infrastructure, industrial infrastructure and economy.
They continue to go forward, and so we have to continue to move the goalposts.
They master one part of the technology, and we have to say, oh, well, we never had a problem with that.
But what we really have a problem with is this, and we keep doing that year after year after year.
I mean, one of the other things that came out in the WikiLeaks cables was you see this dramatically playing out on the Israeli side.
The Israelis have been saying since 1993 that the Iranians would have a nuclear weapon in two to five years.
And you have the Israelis saying to American officials, don't take our assessments that seriously, because we've been saying since 1993 that the Iranians would have a nuclear weapon in three to five years.
But we here, our senior officials, whether it's in the Obama administration or the Bush administration before that, continue to take the most hyped public rhetoric of senior officials, and we take that, and we then peddle it to other officials around the world to increase a more coercive, more conflictual atmosphere for Iran.
It's not about the nuclear program.
It's really about checking Iran's rise, thinking that we can prevent them from becoming a major player in the Middle East.
That's really just fantasy.
And as we continue to do that, we continue to get closer and closer to conflict.
So in this sense, even if we can't have regime change, we can use the sanctions based on the nuclear program simply to hurt their economy and try to bind them just as revenge.
It sounds like what you call their rise just sounds like their ability to maintain their independence.
That's what we can't stand, huh?
That's certainly how they see it.
They see it absolutely as...
So the nuclear issue is really just a pretext for that, if not for full regime change?
That's how it seems.
That is really how it seems.
It's not a question of development of nuclear weapons.
It is, I think, much more about how are we going to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran as it is, both internally and its regional and even more broad international reach.
The fact is today, the United States cannot address successfully any of its most high-profile foreign policy objectives in the Middle East, whether it's in Iraq, in Afghanistan, regarding energy security in the Arab-Israeli arena.
We cannot address any of those issues successfully without a constructive relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We cannot do it.
And that's really the crux.
The U.S. administration, whether it's under Obama or Bush before it, cannot come to terms with that fact, that Iran is really that important.
Well, now, I'm glad that you mentioned Iraq, because it seems like if there is such a thing as the rise of Iran, I mean, they've had pretty bad economic problems and high inflation and all kinds of things holding them back.
They have a very small GDP compared to ours, even in a Great Depression like this.
But it seems like if there's one big thing that has benefited Iran and empowered the mullahs that rule that country, it's our invasion of Iraq.
And that was something in the WikiLeaks I thought was notable to the point of being hilarious, in fact, was King Abdullah, our ally in Saudi Arabia, complaining that you and we and Saddam Hussein used to all be allies, and we agreed that we needed to contain the Iranian revolution.
And then he said, you have handed Iraq to Iran on a golden platter, not even a silver one.
And I don't know if that's a bad translation or if he really meant to make that distinction.
It would be funny if it weren't so tragic and if there weren't so many American and Iraqi lives that have already been killed and are at stake.
It really is a tragedy, it's a catastrophe in terms of our foreign policy.
We not only initiated this horrible war in Iraq that devastated the country so much, but we have probably irreparably changed the balance of power in the Middle East, so that you will see, I think increasingly, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, they are going to align together and balance against the United States and our traditional allies, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel.
Our traditional allies, particularly a country like Saudi Arabia that is going under some severe leadership challenges with a very elderly and sick leadership cadre, Egypt also on the brink of some real leadership changes, and yet we have no idea where it's going.
Those are our traditional allies.
Our traditional allies in the Middle East are in trouble.
They're on the way down.
Iran is aligning successfully with other countries, and they're on the rise.
A lot of this is completely self-generated from what we did with the invasion of Iraq and our failure to address other underlying conflicts in the Middle East, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Well, and they didn't just invade Iraq and overthrow the minority Sunni dictatorship, which was, after all, pretty secular and fascistic in nature, rather than bin Ladenite or something like that, but they fought a years-long civil war on behalf of the Bata Brigade and the Mahdi Army to ethnically, well, not really ethnically, but I guess religiously cleanse Baghdad of the Sunni Arabs that's now 85% Shiite city, and it's ruled by those factions closest to Iran, which now, as per my understanding, and perhaps you can help clear me up on this, but now that includes Muqtad al-Sadr, even though he was always the nationalist opposed to empowering Iran inside Iraq, we basically kept attacking him and attacking him for opposing the Supreme Islamic Council's plan to divide Iraq up and favor Iran, and bullied him so much that we drove him straight, literally, into Iran, if nothing else, so he could be safe there.
And it seems like these are the men who now not just rule Iraq, but as you say, permanently now.
The balance of power has shifted.
Baghdad, from Baghdad to Basra, is now controlled by these Shiite factions, Dawa, the Supreme Islamic Council, and the Mahdi Army, those closest to the Iranian government.
And the Kurds, and the Kurds, the Iranians also have a very good relationship with Kurdish political figures.
I mean, two things happened at the same time that have had a tragic consequence for the United States.
First, we had serious, we implemented seriously bad policy.
We made huge, huge mistakes in Iraq, at the same time that the Iranians actually implemented constructive policy.
They implemented policies that were in their own interest.
They built relationships with a wide variety of Iraqi political parties and religious figures.
They did the same thing in Afghanistan.
That's one of the reasons why they're so important to both of those conflicts.
This happened, unfortunately, for us, at the same time that we took such bad decisions that were so clearly not in the American interest.
And they were able to, which is astonishing for a lot of Americans, they were actually able to act consistently in Iran's national interest.
We constantly think of them as this kind of religiously motivated ideological polity that couldn't possibly act in its own national interest.
But it does.
And it has shown that pretty dramatically in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and really handed our lunch to us.
All right.
Now, very quickly, we're right near the time wall here, but Larissa Alexandrovna and Muriel Cain at Raw Story pointed to a memo from August of 2007, where, one, the head of Mossad, Mayor Dagan, is telling Nicholas R. Burns, the Undersecretary of State, that if you don't bomb Iran, we will.
But secondly, and the point I would like you to address, if you could, they talk about covert action and support for, they say, democracy movements in Iran.
But they also refer to Balouki, Aziri, and Kurdish dissident groups.
And that seemed to, as they indicated in this story at Raw Story, confirm the reporting of Seymour Hersh, and Brian Ross, and Andrew Cockburn, and others who have reported that the CIA and or the Joint Special Operations Command are actually backing the Jandala terrorists, and perhaps Mujaheddin al-Khalq still, and including PJAK communist terrorists up in Kurdistan against the Iranians.
And of course there's assassinations of scientists going on, and attempted ones, and all kinds of things, bombings periodically in Iran.
And I wonder if you think that Obama is continuing, or do you agree that that document seems to confirm Hersh's reporting?
And do you think that the Obama team is still continuing this covert action of terrorism inside Iran?
Well, you know, back in May 2009, when President Obama had just been in office a few months, that's when Flint, my husband and I, wrote our first piece in the New York Times.
We had written a few before that, criticizing the Bush administration's policies that would bring us closer to war.
But this is the first one we wrote that criticized President Obama.
It was May 2009, and we said in there that the most important thing Obama has been faced with dealing with Iran, that he has refused to do, is this covert action program that President Bush initiated.
President Bush initiated a $400 million covert action program to undermine the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We said that Obama faced this choice, coming into office, what to do about that program.
And he needed to turn it off.
He needed to stand down that program, just like President Nixon did when he came to office and he was faced with CIA covert operations in Tibet against China.
He knew, President Nixon knew, he wanted to turn the relationship with China around.
He wanted to discard 25 years of dysfunctional U.S. policy towards the People's Republic of China.
And the first thing he did was to call off covert operations in Tibet.
We called on President Obama then, in May 2009, to do the same thing.
And now, at the end of 2010, you have no indication that he has.
Well, two weeks ago, two weeks ago, this is a year and a half into office, two weeks ago, his administration decides to list the Jandala terrorist organization as a terrorist organization.
Now, it may seem silly to actually list it as a terrorist organization, since it's clear that it is.
But the importance in doing so is that once the U.S. does it, and it's really a scandal that President Obama didn't do it for a year and a half, the reason why it's important to do it is if we do it, the CIA can't fund them.
Now, maybe the Israelis or others can fund them.
The JSOC still can, probably.
Yeah, but the issue is, why did we wait until two weeks ago?
What were we doing for a year and a half?
I'm sorry, Hillary, we have to leave it here.
We are all out of time.
I thank you so much for your time on the show tonight.
It's been great.
Thank you.
Thank you for all your work.
Everyone, that's Hillary Mann Leverett.
She is a senior lecturer at Yale University and co-publisher of RaceForIran.com.
