All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm happy to welcome Flint Leverett back to the show.
He's a professor of foreign affairs at Penn State University.
He's the director of the Iran Initiative and senior fellow, senior research fellow at the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.
And he and his wife Hillary Mann Leverett keep the blog Race for Iran at raceforiran.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you again.
And in case you missed it yesterday, Flint was on, and we did a good review of at least what we knew so far from the leaks and everything of the Iran report from the IAEA, what it means and what it doesn't, and trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And of course, as soon as you hung up the phone, I hit refresh at the end of the interview, and there was the PDF.
And I searched for the word verify, and there it was, just like we assumed at the beginning of the interview.
The agency has continued to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose.
And that really is the point.
If there's one major thing in there, that's their actual duty.
Is that not that verification of that non-diversion, right?
Yes, absolutely.
That is, that is their core responsibility to make sure that, that, that signatories are not diverting nuclear material, basically, you know, enriched uranium and, and plutonium from, from peaceful civil purposes to, to military purposes.
And as you note, once again, as it has for years, the agency has affirmed that there's no evidence Iran is, is diverting nuclear material.
What, what I would point out though, because I think it's, it's very telling, if you, if, you know, someone like me, who's very focused on these things and has been reading these reports for years, including when, when Mohamed ElBaradei was the head of the agency before Mr. Amano took over at the end of 2009.
I mean, one of the things that's really striking, if you've been reading these reports for years, is that the difference in, in tone between the reports that have been put out under Mr. Amano's tenure and those that were put out under, under Dr.
ElBaradei's tenure.
I mean, even the, the relevant passage that you cited from this report, that Iran has not diverted nuclear material, it's, it's put into this language where, because Iran has not, not ratified, fully signed up for, ratified the additional protocol to the NPT, which would permit the agency to do somewhat more intrusive inspections.
And no one's obliged to sign up for the AP.
It's something the state chooses to do, just like a state chooses to join the treaty.
But because Iran hasn't ratified the, the additional protocol, and even though at times it, it voluntarily acts as if it's in compliance with the additional protocol, I mean, they put this passage in while the agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.
It's basically because Iran is not implementing the additional protocol, which it is not signed up for.
The agency is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in, in Iran, and therefore to include that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.
I mean, that's extraordinarily inflammatory language for them to put in this report.
When Baradei was the head of the agency, they would say, you know, they're declared nuclear facilities that we inspect under the safeguards agreement we have with Iran, no diversion of nuclear material.
They might put in a sentence that, you know, we would encourage Iran to, you know, think about ratifying the additional protocol.
But, you know, the two issues are separate.
Well, and this is because of the UN Security Council resolutions that mandate that the IAEA go beyond their purview and do all these other things, but then it all ends up in the same report together, where the non-diversion, as you point out, becomes just one part of a sentence that goes on to accuse them of not having proven the negative themselves.
That's right.
And, and all because, and, and, and, like, they're doing something wrong.
You know, they're doing something of questionable legality by not abiding by the additional protocol, which is...
Mr. Leverett, you used to work on the National Security Council, the CIA, the State Department.
Yeah.
You write this blog all about these issues, and as far as we know, you're making nuclear weapons, and you have yet to prove that you're not making nuclear weapons.
How do we know that you don't have a secret centrifuge facility?
That's basically the logic of the accusations here.
That's, that's right.
And, and, and what the IAEA is saying in this passage is because, you know, you have not agreed.
It's as if, you know, you said to me that because I have not agreed to let you come into my house any time you want, day or night, and go anywhere in my house that you want at any time, so that you can feel confident I'm not running secret centrifuges in my house, that I'm a bad person.
That I'm criminally suspect.
Well, that's essentially what this passage is saying.
Now, listen, in the, in the broad theme of things, the narrative and the story on TV, and the way all those things work out, everyone agrees that Iran is a terrible nuclear threat, and you really are standing almost alone in opposition to that narrative, and so the question does come up in people's minds what your motivation is, and whether you're just a useful willing or unwilling dupe of the Iranians, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, and all of these questions come up.
So, what relationship have you ever had with the government of Iran?
Could you tell us briefly?
Well, I mean, none whatsoever.
I mean, I, in the course of my work, I have certainly talked to, you know, a number of Iranian government officials.
You mean while you were working for George W. Bush, that was your job?
But, but, but also since, you know, as someone who researches and writes on these issues, I consider it part of my, you know, part of my work to, to go to Iran, to, to talk to Iranian officials, to hear their views on, on these issues, so that I have an, as informed a picture as possible, just like I continue to talk to U.S. officials, even though I don't work for the, for the U.S. government anymore.
But I don't have any connection to the Iranian, Iranian government of, of any sort.
I mean, my motive is, I guess there are a couple of things.
One is, I think the truth matters, and that the first duty of any analyst who's writing on these kinds of issues is to get the story right, even if it's politically inconvenient for some people.
I have a motive in that I saw, while I was in government, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I saw a massive failure on the part of all kinds of institutions that we're supposed to be able to rely on, to ask hard questions of an administration that is preparing to take the nation to, to war.
And those institutions, Congress, the media, think tanks, large, you know, large percentages of public intellectuals who work on these issues, you know, almost categorically failed to ask those hard questions.
And we went to war under false pretenses, and that war, in my view, has proven really, really counterproductive, to say the least, for America's strategic position.
And I think before we go down that road again, it is incumbent on us to ask the kinds of hard questions that weren't asked in the run-up to the Iraq war.
And that is, I will readily admit, that is one of my motives, to ask those questions.
And then, you know, finally, I'd say I have a motive that I want my country, the United States, to have the best possible foreign policy, to have the smartest policy, to have a policy that's actually going to advance advance American interests in the world.
And I think that a war with Iran, whether over the nuclear issue or whether over some other, some other matter, I think would be catastrophic for America's strategic position in the Middle East and, and globally.
And I, you know, I, I don't back away from making that argument.
And now, it was you or your wife or both of you that worked with the Iranians on hunting down al-Qaeda guys at the dawn of the day?
That was, that was my wife, who was directly involved while we were both in government service at the, in the Bush administration at the White House.
She was directly involved in negotiations with the Iranians over Afghanistan and al-Qaeda, and they were incredibly helpful to, to the United States.
Right there and take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Flint Leverett right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Flint Leverett.
He's a professor of international affairs at Penn State.
He's senior something-something at the New America Foundation, former senior director of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East expert on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff, and senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.
He keeps the blog Race for Iran at raceforiran.com, and I'm sorry, Flint, but I'm asking another stupid question.
I, I see people all the time, you know, accusing you and people like you of somehow being on the side of our enemies, whatever.
I want to give you a chance to respond to that.
But the other thing is, those, pretty much those same people, the reason they have it so in for you is because they've been convinced that the Ayatollah is willing to have every Persian killed in a nuclear holocaust, as long as it will cause a nuclear holocaust and bring about the 12th imam and the end of the world, because that's their insane Shiite religion that they believe in.
And so any idea that you can send some State Department wonk to go over there and make a deal with these people is null and void.
They're religious crazies.
They're Pat Robertson to the 10th power, in power, and therefore they can't be reasoned with, they must be dealt with.
You know, I would, I would say that that, that image of the Islamic Republic is, is just completely belied by history and how they've actually conducted themselves.
I would point out that not long after the reigning revolution in 1979, the creation of the Islamic Republic, Saddam Hussein, with, I might add, American support, invaded the Islamic Republic with the idea of, you know, overthrowing, destroying this, this fledgling political order.
And during that war, for years, the Iraqis regularly used chemical weapons against both military and civilian targets on the Iranian side.
The Iranians complained about this to the UN Security Council for years, and the United States, among others, blocked Security Council action on, on that issue for several years.
During that time, while the Iranians are being subjected to chemical weapons attack, the Iranian military comes to Ayatollah Khomeini.
They say, look, we have chemical agents stockpiled.
We have more capability producing more.
We need to weaponize this so that we can respond in kind to these Iraqi attacks.
And Ayatollah Khomeini absolutely forbade that, because he said this was a violation of Islam.
It was a violation of religion and morality for Iran to use weapons of mass destruction, like chemical weapons.
And here you had Iran for several years being regularly victimized by chemical weapons attacks.
More than a hundred thousand Iranians died in those attacks.
And, you know, in, and the Islamic Republic, on religious and moral grounds, said, no, we are not going to respond in kind, even though we would have the capability of doing so.
Now, you know, you could say people change, things change, but I find that a very important historical precedent.
That here, you know, this might even be a case where, you know, people who are rightly horrified by the use of chemical weapons, but when a country is being attacked by chemical weapons, you know, if you thought that by using chemical weapons in return, you might be able to stop it.
You know, I think, you know, a lot of people might not just entirely dismiss that argument out of hand, but Ayatollah Khomeini said, no, this is, you know, this is not in keeping with what we're about.
And we're not going to do it.
Well, we're in year 32 of our Cold War with Iran, and they've remained within the Non-Proliferation Treaty this whole time.
That's right.
You'd think they would have made moves by now.
You know, I, I, people don't want to pay any attention to it in the West, but both Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khomeini, the current leader of the Islamic Republic, have said publicly many, many times, in very authoritative ways, that to, you know, use nuclear weapons, to acquire nuclear weapons, would be a violation of religion.
Now, for a political order that legitimates itself in explicitly Islamic terms, I think, you know, for Ayatollah Khomeini to just wake up tomorrow and have the idea, oh, we should go ahead and produce nuclear weapons, you know, he's got to explain to his followers, to his people, to people throughout the Shia world, to people throughout the Muslim world, why all these things that he and Khomeini have said for years about nuclear weapons being haram, being forbidden by God, you know, why all of a sudden just, okay, never mind about, about that.
Well, and can you address the thing about the radical Shiaism and the apocalyptic nature of the Twelfth Amman Prophecy and all that, and how much role, if any, that has to actually play in Iranian politics?
Yeah, you know, it's, it is a very, you know, it is an important element of Shia belief, I mean, in much the same way that, that it is, it is an element of mainstream Christian belief that, at some point, at the end of time, that Jesus is going to return.
This is a, you know, central part of Christianity, you know, all of the basic creedal statements that Catholics and Orthodox and Protestant Christians of various sorts say, you know, stipulate a belief that Jesus is going to come back.
And for Shia Muslims, there's a, you know, somewhat analogous belief that the Twelfth Imam, who is in the Shia belief, who is in a state of occultation or hiddenness, is going to return and usher in this, you know, this age of justice and peace and the fulfillment of God's will.
I would suppose it's probably, in some ways, analogous to Jewish belief in the coming of the Messiah, at some point, that God will send the Messiah.
And, you know, this is not, you know, if you want to say Shia are crazy for believing this, then you, you know, you basically need to say that, you know, a billion plus Christians in the world are crazy for believing, for saying they believe in the second coming of Jesus, or Jews are crazy for believing in the Messiah.
We can discriminate better than that, though.
I mean, if you look down in San Antonio at the Cornerstone Church, there are plenty of people who would be all in favor of America starting a nuclear war in order to force Jesus to hurry up and come back, because they're sick and tired of waiting.
They don't want to die alone.
They want to see the end of the world.
And so, the narrative is, even though those people in America are allies of the neoconservatives, their argument is that this is the people who actually run the state of Iran, or the same way.
They're trying to force the Almighty's hand and get this thing done on their time.
But look, you know, I think it's a, you know, mainstream Christian belief is that, you know, people, you know, really can't determine when Jesus is going to return.
And I think mainstream belief among Shia Muslims is that, you know, you can't, through human action, determine when the Mahdi is going to return.
It's going to be, you know, God will determine when that happens.
Well, but what about at the highest levels of the Iranian government?
Are they...
There's absolutely no...
There's no reason.
There's no evidence.
And there's no hint of any suggestion in anything that Ayatollah Khamenei has ever said, that, you know, he believes that by, you know, acting in this way that he has already said is haram, is forbidden by God, is a violation of Islam, that by doing this you're somehow going to hasten the Mahdi's return.
I mean, quite the contrary.
I feel like such an idiot asking these questions, Flint.
But you know what?
This is the narrative that rules American policy.
It is.
And this is what, you know, goes back to a point I made earlier, that I think the truth matters.
You know, people say all kinds of outrageous things about Iran and Iranians and Shia Islam and what this supposedly means for American foreign policy.
And I think just looking at facts, looking at on-the-ground reality, looking at what important Iranians like Ayatollah Khamenei have actually said, looking at what the Islamic Republic has actually done on these issues, is really important.
Indeed.
All right now, I'm sorry, can I ask you to do one more segment after the break?
Sure.
Okay, great.
I know you must be very busy, but I really do want to get back to the substance of this report and the recent accusations.
In the little bit of time left, I'll go ahead and point out, I think Justin Raimondo does a very good job today at anti-war.com/Justin, in pointing out that virtually all of the different accusations about Iran's nuclear program in this latest IAEA report are built around words like may have and could have been and we heard one time from the Israelis and funny things like that, rather than any real evidence provided.
I wonder, I guess, if you can just give me a quick yes, no, as the bumper music's playing here, whether that was your impression pretty much, is that this is the same old story?
Yes, absolutely.
All right.
Well, we'll get into the nitty-gritty here on the other side of this break with Flint Leverett.
He's sit on the National Security Council, top policy analyst at the State Department, senior analyst at the CIA.
He writes for raceforiran.com and he teaches at Penn State.
We'll be right back after this.
Finally, all right, break's over, show's on.
Anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Flint Leverett, formerly with the NSC and the CIA and the State Department, now a professor of foreign affairs at Penn State and keeper of the blog raceforiran at raceforiran.com with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, also a former high-level foreign policy person in the Bush administration.
And we're talking about Iran and state of things.
As long as I'm keeping you over time here, could I just ask you real quick about the shape of Iran's economy and military forces as it ranks up compared to the United States?
Is this a fourth world country or fifth or how do you how do you judge the threat of the Hitlerian-Iranian juggernaut headed this way?
You know, according to independent sources like the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the United States spends I think it's 70 times, seven zero times on its military defense what Iran does.
When the revolution happened in 1979, the new Islamic Republic inherited a very substantial military establishment that the Shah had built up, but you know, basically that military establishment fell into disrepair pretty quickly.
It was an American-supplied infrastructure, which America was no longer prepared to help keep up.
They then had to fight this long, bloody, very costly war defending themselves against Iraqi aggression for eight years.
And coming out of that, they actually you know, they cut their defense spending.
They knew they needed to spend money on on reconstruction, on human and physical infrastructure, on building schools and clinics and things like that.
And you know, at this point the reality is their conventional military establishment is really, you know, not capable of projecting power beyond Iran's borders.
I mean the idea that Iran is going to invade anybody is just ludicrous.
It's funny because, you know, the argument really is, of course, about Israel.
And Mayor Dagan, the former head of Mossad, and no Dennis Kucinich, best I could tell, he seemed to be making these very same kinds of threats in 2007, according to the WikiLeaks.
But he's saying, look, Iran is not an existential threat.
They're not a nuclear weapons threat.
But it seems like really, the only argument would be between Dagan and whatever the Netanyahu position is.
Rather than it's, you know, it sounds like you're saying, yes, in a comic book Iran could launch an attack against Israel.
But other than that, forget it.
Yeah, I think that's actually correct.
You know, if you actually talk to Israeli national security professionals or Israeli politicians who focus on national security issues, they will tell you that they understand that, you know, when they say Iran is an existential threat, they don't mean that, you know, some you know, crazy guy who wants to, you know, hasten the return of the Baathi is going to to nuke Israel and turn Iran into history's first suicide nation.
You know, you don't have to believe me.
Just, I mean, read things that Jeffrey Goldberg has written on this, where he has Netanyahu and others telling him that they understand that Iran is not going to do that.
You know, when these guys talk about Iran as an existential threat to Israel, they talk about it.
Well, you know, if Iran has some nuclear capability, maybe you know, young Jews in Europe or America who might otherwise think about making aliyah to Israel will think twice about it.
Or maybe young Israelis who have the possibility to go abroad and make their life there, they may not be as interested in staying in Israel.
It is not about, you know, they really think that Iran is going to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon.
It's, you know, it is not an existential threat in the way that I think most people actually understand that phrase.
Okay.
Now, back again, if we can get to the IAEA report and all the maybes and we heard somewheres aside, the headlines, the bullet points are they're working on implosion systems.
They're working on warheads and delivery systems, delivery vehicles for those warheads, etc.
Like that.
Are you worried?
No.
I'm not worried.
I don't, you know, there's still, even according to this report, if you read it, there is no hard evidence.
There's no even, there's not even a claim in this intelligence data that Iran is actually trying to fabricate nuclear weapons.
They don't have weapons-grade fissile material.
The IAEA tells us that.
They do not have the core material that you need to make a bomb.
And they're not, there's no evidence, no claim that they're actually trying to fabricate a bomb.
The claims that are in this report are that they're doing research.
They're doing experiments, maybe, on some of the engineering problems that they would need to have mastered if at some point in the future, after they somehow got weapons-grade fissile material, they decided that they wanted to build a nuclear bomb.
You know, it's basically a kind of advanced nuclear physics and engineering curriculum that people are getting exercised about.
Yeah, I read in McClatchy newspapers this morning that the IAEA feels that this could be a problem.
And I thought, I cannot believe that word is in this article anywhere.
Feels?
What are they talking about?
That's, that's, that is, you know, we let politicians, we let government agencies, we let journalistic outlets get away with a level of discourse about Iran that we would not accept on most other subjects of importance.
And, you know, that really needs to change because it's that kind of intellectual sloppiness, intellectual laziness, just giving in and going with the flow that got America into its misguided invasion of Iraq.
And if we don't want to go down that road again, we really need to get smarter in the way that we talk and think about Iran.
Well now, I don't know if you are a regular reader.
I'm not anymore.
It looks like I should be, of the blog Moon of Alabama, where barflies get together.
They were the first on this, I believe, and Gareth Porter's working on a story on it right now, I know.
And that's about this so-called former Soviet weapons scientist who helped the Iranians with their implosion system, actually is an expert in nanodiamonds, not nuclear weapons at all.
Yeah, and there's also, I've seen some indications that the former Soviet nuclear scientist who was involved, supposedly, that he even came to the United States and gave lectures on, you know, the same kinds of subjects that he was supposedly helping the Iranians with.
Can you say in your article today that all this stuff is the very same stuff that ElBaradei disregarded?
This is not that there's been this new investigation that has uncovered all this new evidence.
This is the same junk that people were trying to push into the IAEA's intelligence stream for years now that ElBaradei would not go along with.
And now this new guy, Amano, has just compiled it all together like the Office of Special Plans for us.
And given it his imprimatur, given it the credibility of the IAEA, that ElBaradei worked so hard to build up.
I mean, remember, ElBaradei is the guy who, in every one of these Western intelligence agencies that's saying that now Iran's working on nuclear weapons, they're the same ones who said that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program in 2002.
And ElBaradei was the one guy of prominence who said, I'm sorry, I don't see any evidence of that.
And ElBaradei would absolutely not go along with that.
And ElBaradei would not put that evidence, quote-unquote, out on an IAEA report because he had no way to verify it, there was no corroboration for it, and he could not vouch for the provenance or the integrity of the sources of the information.
And he was not going to do that.
But Amano, I mean, we know from the WikiLeaks cable, Amano tells U.S. diplomats, you know, I am with you.
I sometimes have to, you know, give something to the developing countries just to make them feel better.
But on the big strategic issues like Iran, I'm with the United States.
These are his words cited in U.S. embassy cables published by WikiLeaks.
All right, we got to leave it right there.
Thank you so much for your time.
Flint Levitt, everybody, raceforran.com, Penn State University.
