All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And our next guest on the show today is Flint Leverett.
He teaches international relations at Penn State, and he and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, keep the blog Race for Iran dot com.
He's a fellow at the New America Foundation and previously worked in the U.S. government at a very high level, senior analyst at the CIA, senior director for Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council and Middle East expert on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff over at the State Department.
And he and his wife, Hillary, both left the Bush administration, I believe, primarily over disagreements on Iran policy.
Welcome back to the show, Flint.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
Good.
Good to be back with you.
And that's pretty much right, isn't it, that you guys were outside of the consensus that somehow the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein together formed an axis of anything that we were out of a lot of consensus in the administration.
That was certainly one of them.
Yeah, I can't figure out how anyone I mean, I could see how someone like David Frum could convince himself that because he doesn't really know anything about anything.
But how could anyone have even let that get into the speech?
How could that have been the basis for a policy that the two sides that Ronald Reagan had been financing their war on both sides against each other were somehow now an axis, an alliance against us or anyone else?
Well, I think that was one of many, many aspects of the of the planning and preparations for the war in Iraq that let's just say it wasn't really fully staffed in the in the way one one might have one might have hoped.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, so it's almost starting to feel like 2007 all over again over here.
I'm getting kind of nervous with some of the talk about war.
And of course, there's history always began yesterday.
If you leave it to The New York Times or TV news to explain it.
And so CNN International, for example, today is talking about, oh, my God, the Iranians are threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz.
And apparently for no reason or in no context that could possibly be relevant as far as they're willing to explain to us.
I was wondering if you could hopefully talk me down from I won't say panic, but my fear here that these things are these matters are getting worse and maybe give us some of the context for what's going on in the Straits of Hormuz there at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
Look, I think that I think that the Iranians do not want and will not start a war with the United States in the Gulf.
However, they have not just starting yesterday, but actually for for a number of years now, they have taken steps both in terms of their own military preparations and in terms of their rhetoric to make it clear to the United States to to others that if the United States and its partners were to try to stop the flow of Iranian oil or to to markets or were to attack Iran, do other things that would put Iran's security in serious jeopardy, that Iran is prepared to to take steps to to close the Straits of Hormuz.
So does that mean they might do this in in response to the sanctions on the central bank?
I don't think they would do this solely in response to sanctions imposed by a handful of Western countries on the central bank.
As long as they can get oil to market in China, in India, in Turkey, in Japan, in the other places where they sell oil, mostly in Asia, if they can get their oil to market there, the fact that that Europeans cut themselves off from Iranian supply and and probably raise their own energy prices in the in the process and raise the price at which Iran can sell its oil in in other markets in the process.
I don't think that in and of itself would prompt the Iranians to initiate a war with the United States.
As I said, I don't think Iran wants to do that.
But I think they are laying down a marker that and I think they are they are right to think that ultimately what the United States and its European partners want to do now is to cut off Iranian oil exports to international markets.
They think this is the way you can really put the stranglehold on Iran and get them to surrender to Western demands on the nuclear program.
That's not going to happen tomorrow.
But we are clearly started down a road where that has now become the ultimate objective of Western policy over the next several months, over the next year, perhaps perhaps longer than that.
But that is where the policy is headed.
And I think Iran is laying down some markers.
It's just reminding people that, you know, it has said before that if its own security is put at serious risk in this way by cutting off all Iranian exports to international energy markets, you know, Iran is not going to make it easy for other oil producers in the area who are who are allied to the United States to get their oil to market.
Well, I don't understand why if the Israelis and the Americans are really concerned that the Iranians are going to at some point withdraw from the treaty and break out and start making nuclear weapons, that the best way to handle this is to always threaten them and always make sure they go to bed at night thinking of all the reasons why they ought to go ahead and start making nuclear weapons.
It just doesn't seem.
I mean, and now I guess on the other side, you know, when Dr. Paul says, well, look, if we weren't threatening them all the time, maybe we could just come to an agreement with them and it would be less of a worry.
That sounds naive to a lot of people that these mad mullahs could ever be really reasoned with.
Apparently, Barack Obama just gave right up on the idea as soon as he became the president.
Yeah, I think that's I think that's right.
I mean, Obama would have you believe that he tried to engage Iran and failed because of their obstreperousness when the truth is he never really seriously tried on terms that might have had any chance of actually interesting the interested, interesting the Iranians.
Look, I think the real issue you talked about is really United States focusing on on Iran's nuclear program.
You know, I don't think that is the real issue or the fundamental point of this dispute.
The nuclear issue is a reflection of a bigger concern on the part of Israel and the United States.
From their perspective, what's wrong with the Islamic Republic is it is not prepared to accept and endorse their hegemony over the Middle East, their ability to dominate the Middle East, to micromanage political outcomes in various Middle Eastern countries and to organize the region into a political insecurity order that is run by the United States and policed in a highly militarized way by by U.S. armed forces.
The Islamic Republic, as a basic cardinal principle of its foreign policy, won't accept that.
That doesn't make it irrevocably hostile or antagonistic to the United States.
It is not.
It would be prepared for normal, productive relations with the United States in much the same way that the United States has normal and productive relations with the People's Republic of China.
But the People's Republic of China isn't prepared to endorse, you know, our assertion of hegemony in Asia any more than the Islamic Republic is prepared to accept our assertion of hegemonic dominance in their neighborhood.
Under Nixon and Kissinger, we managed to make that transition.
We managed to make the transition to say it we believe is in America's interest to accept, live with, come to terms with, develop productive relations with the People's Republic of China, and thank God that Nixon and Kissinger did that.
We have never been prepared to do that with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The nuclear issue is just one manifestation of this.
There's no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons.
They are enriching uranium, but they will not accept U.S. and Western dictates on this issue, because for them that is part of America's larger hegemonic agenda towards them.
All right, we've got to hold it right there.
Everybody, it's Flint Leverett.
He teaches international relations at Penn State, and he and his wife Hillary write the blog RaceForIran.com.
We'll be right back with more after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio, and I'm talking with Flint Leverett from Penn State University, RaceForIran.com, and the New America Foundation, formerly with the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council in the George Bush years.
And now, so where we left off, Flint, was you were explaining that, in your view, ultimately the nuclear program is at least more or less a red herring.
I mean, I guess their breakout capability, in a sense, helps them guarantee their independence.
It's not quite a nuclear deterrent, but it's sort of kind of one, and that that's really what the problem is, from the Americans' point of view, is that they want complete hegemony over the region, and Iran so far has been able to maintain their independence since 1979.
That's basically the problem, right?
Yes, I think that's right.
I mean, the U.S. model for how a problematic Middle Eastern state realigns with the United States is Egypt under Sadat.
You basically surrender all your ties to other powers.
You become a military partner of the United States.
You make friends with Israel, and you surrender big chunks of your foreign policy to the demands, requirements, and preferences of the United States.
If you do that, then you can be Washington's friend, you can get aid, you can get a strong military-to-military relationship.
Your own people may hate it, and it may take them 30 years, but they will eventually get rid of it, as people in Egypt got rid of Mubarak.
But that is the model for how the U.S. believes that Iran or any other problematic state in the region should be prepared to acquiesce to its demands.
The Islamic Republic will not do that.
It cannot do that and remain the Islamic Republic.
And the issue for the United States is, do we want another, I think what will turn out to be a very, very counterproductive, for our purposes, extremely damaging war in the Middle East, a war that will have no international legitimacy or backing?
There will be no Security Council resolution authorizing this.
Do we want that, or do we want basically to figure out how we can come to terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran in much the same way as I said earlier, that we finally, after 20 years of dysfunctional policy toward the People's Republic of China in a Cold War context, we finally decided we actually need to accept the People's Republic as China's government and come to terms with it?
Well, you know, one of the trial balloons about the war that surfaced in the last couple of months was in The Guardian.
I'm sure you saw it about the UK's plans for dealing with a war if Israel starts one.
And one of the things they said in there was that the opening or the turning on of the centrifuges at Qom was, to the Israelis, a red line because they can't bomb it.
It's way under a mountain.
They could conceivably, I guess in somebody's war plan, bomb Natanz and Bushehr and like that.
But that Qom is unreachable.
So if they decided that they were going to withdraw from the treaty and begin enriching uranium to weapons grade at Qom, then they would be able to.
So we got to bomb as much of their nuclear infrastructure as we can before that thing is turned on.
And I wonder whether you think that's a real danger that the Israelis are really considering that a red line and that we may be therefore close to war on that.
Look, I think that the Israelis are worried about that scenario.
But there's no reason to believe or think that the Iranians are on the verge of withdrawing from the treaty and kicking out the inspectors.
They have declared the facility at Qom, the IAEA.
The IAEA has been visiting it and, you know, at whatever point that facility becomes operational, it is going to be subject to IAEA safeguard.
And as long as that is the case, I don't believe that, you know, simply moving ahead with that plant is going to give the Israelis a cause of belay.
The other issue with the Israelis that people need to keep in mind is that for all of the Israelis, you know, talk a very tough game on Iran and say they won't, you know, tolerate nuclear development in Iran past whatever certain points are.
The reality is the Israelis, their unilateral options for going after nuclear targets in Iran are pretty limited.
The number of planes that they could have operating at those ranges, the amount of ordnance they could drop, the number of targets they could cover is really, really pretty limited.
The Israelis don't like to be in this position, but I think in terms of their professional military, the bulk of those guys have come to the conclusion that if this is going to happen, if somebody's going to attack Iran, go after the Iranian nuclear target, it's better if the United States does it than if Israel tries it alone.
I don't think that's an absolute constraint on the Israelis, but I think at this point, you know, they have had to recognize that they're in this position and their priority, you know, however long it takes them, their priority is going to be, I think, to get the United States to do it.
Well, you know, one of the worries that I guess used to come up on the show from time to time and I'd sort of had put it on the back burner and forgotten about it was, you know, the danger of if they start bombing these facilities, what kind of nuclear fallout could be expected?
I guess I'll be an optimist and just think even if they do bomb, they won't bomb Bushehr because that's just a light water reactor and the plutonium that it produces is way too polluted with other, you know, isotopes and whatever to be used for nuclear weapons.
So I don't know.
I mean, I guess you could work Bushehr into your answer if you want, but like if they bomb Natanz or if they bomb Ishafan where they make the, you know, transform the yellow cake uranium into hexafluoride gas, those kinds of facilities, would that lead to, you know, gamma poisoning for the people of Iran, for people downwind?
I'm not a technical expert on this, but my guess is that no, that there is a big difference between bombing an active nuclear reactor like the one at Natanz now and bombing a facility like the one at Natanz.
I mean, what produces gamma radiation and things like this are kind of ongoing chain reactions in a reactor.
And, you know, I think even for those who are arguing that we should have bombed Bushehr, those people recognize that there was a big watershed once that reactor became operational.
You know, the follow-on consequences from bombing it in terms of fallout, contamination, so forth, were really very serious.
If you were going to bomb it, you know, they would argue you probably needed to bomb it before it became operational.
So I think that they're, you know, I mean, I think bombing any of these sites would be a terrible idea in terms of U.S. interest.
But if you, you know, wanted to put it in terms of environmental fallout, I mean, the consequences of bombing an active reactor like the one at Bushehr are vastly more significant than those of bombing a facility like the one at Natanz.
Right.
Okay.
Well, you know, and again, I'm sorry.
I just the reason I'm so disjointed in my interviewing here is because I still don't get it.
If the nuke thing is just a pretext and it's really all just about Iran someday laying down on their bellies and saying, okay, great Satan, have your way with us or whatever, then what in the hell is the point of any of this?
We just fought a war to give them Iraq, just like you probably warned inside the government at the time, just like the WikiLeaks show, the king of Saudi Arabia complained.
You're going to hand Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
I don't know if he was trying to make the point that gold is more expensive than silver.
I just got the idiom wrong.
But he said, you and us and Saddam, we used to work together to contain Iran.
Now you're going to import the Iranian revolution to Baghdad.
Why?
So is this just a case of sore losership?
Do they even have a plan, smart or dumb or anything in between for how they're going to ever get a regime change or ever get the changes in policy they want?
I mean, don't tell me they believe that they're going to have a M.E.K. coup d'etat in Tehran.
Oh, some of them do believe that.
You know, I think that this whole this whole issue of America's I mean, we wanted to dominate the Middle East for some time.
It's just in the Cold War, there were there were some pretty serious limits on how far we could go toward toward trying to do it in the post Cold War period.
We have not felt ourselves so constrained.
And, you know, our our willingness to project and use military force in this part of the world has gone up dramatically since the end of the Cold War.
And, you know, I think that that it this kind of hegemonic ambition, it comes with a certain with a certain mindset.
It comes with a mindset that, you know, we can do anything we want and that, you know, various problems that people who spend their time actually studying these parts of the world and, you know, maybe even going there and learning a local language or getting to know people and their histories and so forth.
You know, the kinds of issues that that folks like that raise, you know, that that sort of thing doesn't really need to concern, you know, concern the superpower that emerged triumphant from from the Cold War.
And I think that mindset was very prevalent in the George W. Bush administration.
There were certainly plenty of people who were warning about the kinds of trouble that the military would run into in Iraq, warning that the military, the American military wasn't prepared for it, and warning that in the long run, you're not actually serving U.S. interests by doing this.
You're basically tilting the balance of power in the Middle East against the United States and its allies and in favor of the Islamic Republic and its allies.
That, of course, is exactly what has has happened, as you pointed out in your in your question.
That's exactly what has happened.
But, you know, the hegemonic mindset goes on.
People aren't, you know, learning from it and saying, oh, my God, that really didn't work out very well.
We shouldn't try to do something like that again.
You know, many of the same organizations, institutions, social constituencies and so forth that helped to push the idea of invading Iraq, you know, they're now pushing the idea of starting a war with Iran.
And do you have any kind of bet on how long a war with Iran might last?
I mean, I know Bill Kristol would have it that don't worry, they'll just sit there and take it and we'll bomb them for a week or two.
And then maybe the people of Iran will rise up and overthrow their government and put in the next Shah for us or whatever kind of fantasy.
But what would really happen?
I mean, are we talking about a long term asymmetric kind of thing for decades out?
And yeah, and I think I think we're talking about serious, severe political backlash against us in a part of the world where we are already pretty despised.
You know, I think the backlash would put our remaining allies in the region at serious risk, really reduce their ability to continue cooperating with us if they were going to have any chance of surviving.
It would weaken our position in the region, apart from whatever asymmetric responses Iran uncorked.
You know, I think that just that level of instability in the region would would jack up oil prices really high.
I mean, do Americans at this point in our so called economic recovery, do they really want to be paying, you know, five and $6 a gallon for for gasoline?
I don't really think so.
But I think that would be a likely consequence of this.
And I think it's important for Americans to keep in mind that this time around, if we start another war in the Middle East, this time around, we're going to be fighting it on borrowed money, we're going to be fighting it on money that we borrow from China, from other countries, which don't like this idea has indicated their opposition to it, and are very much afraid of the destabilizing consequences for them.
If we do something that then jacks up energy prices, as I described, and creates instability in this critical part of the world.
They'd stay out of the war, though, if there was one, wouldn't they?
Sorry?
Russia and China, they wouldn't get involved in the war, though, would they?
No, they would not get involved in a war.
But are the Chinese really going to, you know, pay for this one for?
Yeah, well, hopefully not.
But I guess we'll see.
They've been paying for us to establish an outpost empire right there on their western border, and to invade and create a new AFRICOM all over the dark continent there.
So I don't know what their limit is on how many US securities they'll buy, but they haven't hit it yet, apparently.
Yeah, I think we're getting closer and closer.
And I have a feeling a US-initiated war on Iran could bring us right up to that point.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, we're way over time.
And I got to let you go.
But one last question.
You and Hillary Mann, now Hillary Mann Leverett, both warned them not to do this Iraq war for one reason, because it would empower Iran before the war ever happened.
Am I right?
I'm just guessing.
But that was one big reason.
Yeah.
Of course.
All right.
I knew that, too, because I read a Tom Clancy book where an Iranian agent shoots Saddam in the back of the head and Iran takes over the south of Iraq in a day and a half.
And I read that in the summer of 2001.
Yeah.
I've seen this movie before.
I know how this goes already.
And I hadn't even read about the Supreme Islamic Council yet.
But anyway, all right.
Yeah, unfortunately, though, it would seem decision makers in the George Bush administration weren't reading Tom Clancy.
They were reading Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
And listening to the exiles talk about, we'll build a pipeline to Haifa and install a Hashemite king.
Wait, were they really, you were an insider, were they really telling Richard Perle, we'll install a Hashemite king and build a pipeline, a water and oil pipeline to Haifa for you?
Oh, they were saying whatever they thought they needed to say to advance their cause.
Oh, what fun.
All right.
Well, congratulations, Iran.
You won.
Thanks very much, Flint.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that is Flint Leverett, former CIA, former State Department, former National Security Council, professor of international relations at Penn State University and co-author with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett of the great blog RaceForIran.com.
