All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Hilary Mann Leverett.
She teaches at American university in DC and is CEO of strategic energy and global analysis, Stratega, a political risk consultancy.
And, um, she used to work in the Bush administration.
She was director for Iran, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf affairs at the national security council under Condoleezza Rice in the first, uh, Bush administration, uh, was Middle East expert on sec on the secretary of state's policy planning staff under Colin Powell and political advisor for Middle East, Central Asian, and African issues at the U S mission to the United nations.
It goes on like that.
Welcome back to the show, Hilary.
How are you?
Good.
Thank you for having me back.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And I did, did I get that right about who was your boss when you were in those different positions there?
Yeah.
So I also worked in the first term of, uh, president Clinton's administration in the 1990s.
So I was a, I was a career foreign service officer and, uh, made my way to, to different national security councils.
Right.
And, uh, of course, uh, Hillary and her husband Flint Leverett run the blog, the race for Iran at raceforiran.com.
And, uh, you have a very thorough analysis here of, uh, I guess your latest entry is very thorough analysis of Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic, uh, where a lot of ground was broken.
And then of course, uh, after this, Obama gave a speech to APAC.
I'm sure you've seen or read that by now.
I wonder if you can just give us your breakdown and I'll try to get in there with some follow-up questions if I can.
Well, I think actually the most substantive and important pronouncement of U S policy under president Obama was telegraphed to, um, you know, as I described Jeffrey Goldberg, uh, prime minister Netanyahu's scribe.
Um, I think he's commonly thought of that way.
I think that really was the, the most pointed reference to where Obama is in terms of U S policy on Iran and the prospect of military, um, any kind of military attack on Iran.
I think it, it really is the sharpest presentation and there were, what I think is critically important to note is that president Obama lays out that for now, our policy is successful and that the Israelis should, um, should stay with us for this, uh, in this period while our policy is successful.
And he defined success, not by any change in something that Iranian decision-makers have done, not in any change in Iranian policy on the nuclear issue, but president Obama defined success in terms of how Iranians are being hurt by sanctions.
That Iranians being hurt by sanctions, the Iranian economy being hurt.
That is successful, notwithstanding the fact that Iran is actually spinning thousands of more centrifuges today than when president Obama came into office.
But that's his definition of success.
And then he says that if you're on doesn't change course and keep in mind, Obama says that Iran has not decided to make a nuclear weapon, but he then lays out, if Iran doesn't change course, which is not to make a nuclear weapon, but just to have a program for enrichment that could trigger us military action, um, in support of Israel.
That's a very significant, subtle, and I think hard for many people to see, but really important shift for us policy.
Because up until now, president Obama has laid out that the United States would do whatever's necessary.
Keep all options on the table, essentially use the U S military.
If Iran acquired or was very close to acquiring a nuclear weapon here, he's saying, if Iran doesn't change course, we could be, uh, we could be looking at us military action and that course that they're on is not to get a nuclear weapon.
The course that Iran is on that the United States is now insisting it change is the enrichment of uranium.
Now Iran's not going to give that up.
They're not going to surrender on that issue.
And so at the end of the day, I think the bottom line here is that what Obama has laid out and given to prime minister Netanyahu is essentially a commitment from the United States to very seriously consider, if not all out declare, we would use military force when it, when everybody agrees, when there's consensus that sanctions have not, um, have not changed Iran's policy.
And I think that buys president Obama time until November when prime minister Netanyahu could come back and either cash in on this commitment from a reelected president Obama or whoever the incumbent, uh, would be at the white house at the time.
All right.
Well now, geez, uh, I never thought I'd be in a position of, uh, playing devil's advocate for Obama on this one.
I thought I was always, uh, well, I hate him more than everyone.
I thought, uh, but on this one and it look, obviously the entire administration is full of contradictions.
The war party has all in Israel and America is full of contradictions and glittering generalities and vagaries here for, after all, they've been pretending that there's a nuclear weapons program in Iran all this time.
Now they're coming right up against it.
And, um, here's at least one quote of, of what he told Jeffrey Goldberg that our assessment, which is shared by the Israelis, is that Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain one without us having a pretty long lead time in which we will know that they're making that attempt, which to me sounds like he's saying, unless they withdraw from the NPT and kick the inspectors out of their country and turn what's now an obvious civilian safeguarded nuclear program, electricity program, uh, into a nuclear weapons program, then no, we're not going to have a war.
Whereas Netanyahu told Haaretz that, um, he wanted the line moved all the way to if they have a breakout capability, which they arguably already have.
So what am I missing?
And this is precisely what Netanyahu has boxed Obama into.
And what Obama, I think has, has really conceded to, to prime minister Netanyahu, which is that the Israeli concern is not about some, some red line that Iran has yet to cross for Israel.
The problem is now is the program that Iran has today, the currently existing and operating program for only this enrichment of uranium for civilian purposes, Israel has a problem with that program as it currently exists.
And what he's gotten Obama to do is Obama says, you know, they haven't decided to make a weapon and that Netanyahu agrees, the Israelis don't say that Iran has decided to make a weapon or has a weapon.
The Israelis agree with that, but notwithstanding that Netanyahu has extracted a commitment from Obama that notwithstanding the fact that they don't have a weapons program, not that they don't, they're not making weapons.
That if Iran doesn't change course, sanctions don't work to force Iran to change course.
The U S will use military action.
It's a really serious and significant, but I think very, um, in a bit, you know, kind of too, too high in the sky shift to really, um, to get an accurate focus on, but it is critically important because everybody knows that sanctions are not going to work to change Iran's behavior, to, to, to surrender its enrichment program, it's internationally protected and monitored enrichment program, Iran's not going to surrender that.
So the question that what Netanyahu has Netanyahu has done is he has shifted the debate from not where Iran is going to be on the spectrum, whether they're they're enriching uranium at 3%, 4%, 19%, 93%, that doesn't matter for Netanyahu, the issue is going to be when, when, you know, when it is decent and polite company for the, for the United States and Israel to declare that sanctions haven't worked to force Iran to feed this existing enrichment program.
Yep.
Well, and, um, like you say, in, in your latest piece here at race for iran.com, he never meant, and now this is doubly, triply confirmed, I guess, the way you quote it here, uh, that Obama never meant to have diplomacy with Iran at all.
That was just for show for the rubes for the first year until the big bogus, uh, calm, uh, exposure of the declared facility that they pretended they were busting them with.
And that was the excuse to sabotage the whole thing.
And of course, democratic voters didn't care anymore about foreign policy, uh, being bad as long as it was Obama's policy.
So, uh, he didn't have any reason to not, uh, you know, go ahead and be as bad as Netanyahu wants him to be.
And, you know, it's, it's, it's really an important thing that he is admitting here on the record, because we have had, you know, we initially had the piece that Flint and I wrote back in May, 2009, really questioning Obama's commitment, but we also questioned Obama's, the, the, what the advisors were saying, people like Dennis Ross, right.
In the interim, everyone has blamed this policy fiasco on people like Dennis Ross.
Those who don't want war with Iran have basically said it was the president after all.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Hilary Mann.
Leverett from race for Iran.com used to be on the NSC.
Now she's on anti-war radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Hilary Mann Leverett, who keeps the website race for Iran.com with her husband, Flint Leverett, and also teaches at American university.
We're talking about Iran and Israel and all the non-nuclear weapons going on and all these kinds of things, of course.
And we were interrupted by the break, Hilary, when you were explaining how, well, it used to be, we thought old Dennis Ross got in there and sabotaged Obama's effort somehow or something, but it's more and more clear.
I don't know if I ever thought that.
It's more and more clear that Barack Obama himself was, I think you were starting to say, was basically just pretending that he ever meant to negotiate a solution to the so-called nuclear problem in Iran.
Yeah.
I mean, that's pretty disturbing.
We, you know, there was this concern that Dennis Ross and others, even Hillary Clinton, who took such a different campaign attack than Obama did during their 2008 campaign, you know, her view was she was going to totally obliterate Iran if they attacked Israel, whereas Obama was putting out this much more, you know, thoughtful, in my view, perspective that we should, we should be engaging with the Islamic Republic to resolve differences.
But pretty soon after his election, despite, you know, these kinds of rhetorical gestures, we quickly saw, you know, actions of his that were going against engagement and WikiLeaks cables revealed that some of his other senior advisors were telling Europeans and other U.S. allies that the United States was really focused on sanctions, not so much on engagement, but really on sanctions.
And now we have this week, Obama coming out for the first time saying that immediately upon coming into office, that his strategy was to mobilize the international community to isolate Iran.
And I think he's coming out clearly disavowing his entire campaign posture in this regard, his rhetorical references in his first few months in office, not just to eat crow, but to make clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that there's no danger, there's no threat that the United States is really thinking about contemplating any kind of Nixon to Kissinger type rapprochement with the Islamic Republic, either in the next few months or in a second term if Obama were reelected.
I think that's the reason, you know, he would he would actually disavow his own policy.
Well, don't they talk on the telephone all day, every day, these two?
I mean, they know where each other stand on all this stuff, right?
Well, that's interesting.
I mean, Obama is actually specifically asked about that really by Goldberg, you know, whether whether they do talk, what kind of relationship they have.
And Obama has to admit that it isn't it isn't such a friendly relationship.
But I think the reason why Obama has to put this out publicly in print is that the Israelis are insisting on having this kind of bankable leverage, not just over President Obama in a second term that they get from him privately, but for any person who is elected, that it is something that the Israelis can come back with, come back to the United States with in December 2012 or anytime in 2013.
And and say this, you know, this is U.S. policy that President Obama committed you to, which is not to accept an Iranian enrichment program fully monitored by the IEA, not to accept that, that, you know, we the Israelis are going to give sanctions time to work.
But after a decent interval, they're going to come back and they want this commitment in writing.
And I think that's what Jeffrey Goldberg has produced.
Well, and then I guess the Israelis are just counting on if they have to if they have to absolutely push it and just do it themselves, that America will be dragged into it one way or another.
We'll finish the fight if they start it.
Because otherwise, I mean, they got to know that there's a risk that their planes are going to get shot down, that the whole thing isn't even going to work.
Well, and that's the other thing that Obama has coined now this this phrase that he's got Israel's back, you know, and he has his defense secretary go to the AIPAC policy conference to make that argument as well, so that even if the United States isn't going to take isn't goaded into taking direct action, that the United States, quote unquote, has Israel's back if they pursue, you know, this kind of policy, which certainly could have, I think, dire consequences for the Israelis and may require, in their view, the United States to come to their rescue at the end of the day.
So that's another commitment that that Obama has put forward that there are two other somewhat subtle points that Obama made that haven't really been a big focus, but I think are important.
Obama has also referenced that he thinks that dealing with dealing with Iran, Iran needs to be dealt with permanently, rather than temporarily.
And permanently, I think for many here, has been construed in terms of what permanently means you can't really use military strikes, that's the temporary solution.
But permanently, Obama outlines Jeffrey Goldberg, he compares the permanent solution of dealing with Iran's nuclear issue with how apartheid South Africa and Gaddafi's Libya were dealt with, to rid them of nuclear weapons.
Now, in apartheid South Africa, of course, the United States didn't use force, but apartheid South Africa, disarmed, got rid of its nuclear program, nuclear program through regime change.
And the same thing happens in Libya with the support of US force.
So he's holding those two out as the permanent solution.
Those are not going to be attractive to anybody.
Yeah, Libya is the worst example.
That's where they gave up what centrifuges they had, which I thought were all just still in boxes left over from AQ Khan's garage sale of old first generation junk, but then they got invaded and regime changed a few years later after being so called brought in from the cold, they're stabbed in the back over there.
Exactly.
And so that's what you know, Obama lays out to Goldberg is that not only is there, you know, not only is there the very real strategy for the use of the military at the end of the day here when sanctions don't work, but that the US goal is regime change, pure and simple.
So he's put out smoking because what are they going to do get the Shah's grandson or something?
Put the MEK in power?
Well, that's another you know, that's another another interesting thing, too.
I mean, the MEK may in the next six months, be taken off the the terrorist list here.
And then I guess the model, they'll just turn it into a warring, you know, bunch of factions and expedite the chaotic collapse and will try to prevent a single central government from coming to power, maybe chaos there from now on.
But the you know, the both the combination of, I think, bad policy and incoherent policy on Obama's watch could lead this president here having sown the seeds for military action, sown the seeds for regime change.
He may also have to deal with a situation where the MEK is delisted and open for funding, training, arming and equipping by by the US, Saudis and others, all on his watch so that even if he is not reelected, and we have a President Romney or Santorum or Gingrich, they will certainly be in a position to take advantage of all of these bad policy missteps from President Obama.
Right.
It's sort of like the Bush administration coming into power with the Regime Change Act of 1998, the Iraq Liberation Act, already on the books where they could just say, I guess we already talked about this, right, a couple weeks ago or something.
They just say all day, it's already the bipartisan policy of this country that Saddam Hussein has got to go that kind of thing.
It's really important, because too many people, I think, give the Clinton administration a bye that they were kind of the do gooders of American foreign policy, when they really did sow the seeds for the policy that President Bush was able to pick up on, particularly after 9-11, when he came into office.
And similarly, you have the Obama administration is just taking a page out of that playbook and sowing the seeds for a really disastrous policy for the United States, that either President Obama himself carries out, or, you know, certainly much more, you know, a Republican incumbent can do as well.
Now, do you and should people take it seriously when the Ayatollah says that Allah forbids nuclear weapons?
Because they've been saying that over there.
And they've said it for a very long time.
This is actually, this is a policy that they've had under this Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, but they also had under the founding father of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.
And it goes back to the time in the Iran-Iraq war, where people here all, you know, just kind of dismiss out of hand.
But at the time, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had not only invaded Iran, but used chemical weapons against Iranians.
And at that time, even though nearly 300,000 Iranians died, some of whom were killed in these chemical weapons attacks, then Ayatollah Khomeini decided, said that Iran could not, should not weaponize its existing chemical stockpiles into chemical weapons to retaliate in kind, because it was un-Islamic.
At that time, he said that they couldn't use a weapon of mass destruction, chemical weapons, because it was un-Islamic, even though they were under attack by chemical weapons.
So Ayatollah Khomeini, the current Supreme Leader, picked up on that, and for years has been making this point.
And here it's just dismissed out of hand.
Well, you know, they can't be serious, or Islam isn't serious.
The whole thing is just an edifice to glorify some totalitarian regime.
But even if you believe that, it still is incumbent, I think, on any American looking at these issues soberly to say, this person, the Supreme Leader of this country, of this religious establishment, would at least, at minimum, have to explain how the strategic context had changed so dramatically, that he was willing to go back on years of issuing a religious edict.
He'd have to go back on years of that, and explain it, at minimum, to his own people.
Well, he'd have a pretty good excuse.
He would have a pretty good excuse that he had to bluff the Americans and the Israelis for a little while, or they'd have been attacked, that kind of thing.
We're giving him the excuse for that kind of thing, if it ever was to happen.
But if I can ask you one more thing here.
Seymour Hersh reported, last June, in his piece, Iran and the bomb, and I talked with him about it on the show, and he said in there that, and on the show, that the American intelligence community really did believe, and it wasn't, I think, just based on the smoking laptop, so-called smoking laptop, but for other reasons, and in fact, maybe Flint told me that he agreed with this before, I forget, that there really were looking at a nuclear weapons program, maybe just bench level experiment, something, up until 2003.
But that once America got rid of Saddam Hussein for them, then they gave it all up, because that was the only reason they were even thinking about it, was to, you know, dissuade him from ever attacking again.
But that, they never considered that they would try to arm up in some sort of arms race with America and Israel.
They could never get to a bomb fast enough to stop us.
So they then took the hands up point of view.
But so I wonder if you agree with that, first of all, that they even had a nuclear weapons program between X and 2003.
And then, secondly, if that's indeed when they gave it up, they did.
I have never seen any evidence of that.
And I think that even even though the language is sometimes used, is used a little bit loosely, because the charge that people have is essentially from these laptops, that is essentially the core from the chart of the charge.
And that relates to the to looking at various design design issues and problems that would need to be worked out.
If one were pursuing a nuclear weapon, which is different from pursuing a nuclear weapon, if you're looking at the various research and design aspects, Sweden has done that.
So it's, you know, we don't think of Sweden as pursuing a nuclear weapons program, even if they could, even if they have looked at various problems that deal with the design of a nuclear.
More than half of what you need is probably on Wikipedia right now, right?
Yeah, I mean, and it comes back to the issue that the concern isn't that Iran is going to have a weapon, right?
The concern is that having this capacity gives them this kind of independent power in the United States, to constrain the United States to constrain Israel, and to give support to various to protect in Obama's words to protect various Islamist groups from, you know, from from from Israeli or US actions and to protect these populations, even from invasion of an abuse like the Saudis going into Bahrain or the Israelis going into Lebanon.
I mean, that's the real concern is that will constrain our ability to deploy unilaterally force whenever, wherever, and in whatever degree we want.
Were you still in the government when the laptop came out, though?
I'm sorry, as long as we're on this, I want to try to nail down as much of these details as I can.
I think you know, Gareth Porter has pretty convincingly written that this thing is obviously a very well educated guess at what a stolen Iranian scientist laptop might look like, but that it's all big forgery.
Yeah, I mean, the stolen laptop happens after I've left government.
But the claim is that the the designs and the information on the laptop are from earlier, from, you know, from the 2000 to 2003 period when I was in government.
So it you know, it is it is a little bit hard to say I never saw any evidence of it.
The laptop is the supposed laptop was supposedly stolen.
You know, you're a couple of years after that.
But that goes back to this time.
The other piece that's interesting is that from 2003 to 2005, the Iranians not only were voluntarily adhering to this higher standard of inspection called the additional protocol to the MPT, but they also were voluntarily allowing IEA inspectors, they call them officials, and it wasn't a nuclear site, allowing IAEA officials to go into some of their military, non nuclear sites, because of questions or concerns that people said that they had.
So remember, the including parchment, right, including parchment, which is not covered under the MPT, because it's not a nuclear site, right.
So nobody has any right to even ask to go into a military site.
It's not a nuclear site.
But the Iranians allowed that from 2003 to 2005, which would have been after the time of the material that is supposedly on these laptops.
And when they went in from 2003 to 2005, they didn't find anything.
Now, the IAEA has come back and said, Well, we're not we're not sure we looked in all the right places.
But they did look in this place in parchment, where the laptop, you know, allegedly this design, and these other testing accusations would have occurred.
And the IAEA didn't find anything and they did soil sampling and other sampling and they didn't find anything.
I've never seen the evidence, maybe it's there, but I've never seen it.
Okay.
And now, you know, back to the main point, it really is your conclusion, then that we are on the path to war, basically, the only thing that could stop it would be if the Iranians gave up their civilian nuclear program, which we all know they're not going to do.
Well, there are there are other very coercive measures that I think the Israelis are going to try to push the United States to take short of war, because I think also for the Israelis, they're not very interested in immediate war, they want to extract other things, they'd like to see a naval, they'd like to see an all out naval blockade of the Islamic Republic, they'd like to see an Iran Liberation Act, a la the Iraq Liberation Act that was that was laid in the 1990s.
There's, there are a lot more severe sanctions that can be done to completely destroy or significantly weaken Iran as a power.
I think they'd like to see all of that first to get Iran as weak as possible before, before there's any actual military overt conventional military action taken.
And then how worried would you be, a former government official expert in this region that the Iranians could fight back in ways we haven't even thought of, like, say, I don't know, a coup d'etat in Azerbaijan, or some kind of crazy intelligence plot on the Arabian Peninsula that, you know, does severe damage to American interests.
Obviously, they can't do anything to us here safe in North America.
So they have to fight back cleverly, asymmetrically.
Yeah, and they and they have been doing so.
I mean, I think Iran has a pretty robust conventional, conventional military defense in the Straits of Hormuz and throughout the Persian Gulf, all the way to Iraq, that really could significantly impact the flow of oil to the West.
But in addition to that, Iran does have a long term strategy.
And here, it's really based more in soft power, where they are essentially aligning themselves with the grievances of publics throughout the region, to constrain governments from allowing those countries to be used to attack Iran, and eventually to overthrow those governments.
And so what's happened in Egypt is a really important manifestation of that.
You've taken a government that was really hostile towards the Islamic Republic, was allowing its country Egypt to be used for basing of US troops for the supply and transit of US troops.
That country now is not in the in the US, in the US column in terms of supporting an attack on Iran.
If that could happen to other states in the region, that each one of them as they fall that way is a win for Iran.
And of course, the big prize, which I don't think the Iranians are counting on at all in the near term.
But the big prize would be if some of these Persian Gulf monarchies fell, that would be, you know, that would, that would be a huge strategic win for them.
Well, yeah, and they don't even have to do anything, but just sit there and watch as you know, we destroy our own empire, basically.
And they continue to push the, you know, to push the policy line, which is so effective and so resonant, that the United States and Israel are pursuing militaristic policies that kill Muslims.
And it's basically the Islamic Republic and other like minded independent countries that can emerge to stop them.
That's a really powerful, soft, soft power strategy.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, I've already kept you away over time here.
I'll let you go.
But I really appreciate your time on the show as always, Hillary.
Thank you very much, everybody.
That's Hillary Mann Leverett.
She keeps the blog Race for Iran at raceforiran.com keeps it there with her husband, Flint Leverett, both of them, veterans of the American intelligence community and diplomatic community and the National Security Council and such like that.
She teaches at American University in Washington, D.C., and we're done.
See you tomorrow.
