Welcome to the show.
Back to it.
I'm Scott Horton.
The website is scotthorton.org.
And our next guest on the show today is Flint Leverett.
He's a professor of international affairs at Penn State.
And he directs the Iran Project at the New America Foundation.
He and his wife, Hilary Mann Leverett, keep the blog raceforiran.com.
Welcome back to the show, Flint.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Good to be with you again.
Well, it's good to have you here.
Oh, and I meant to mention, too, that you used to work at the highest levels, too, apparently, of the State Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council.
Yes, I did.
Okay.
So, Race for Iran, that being a race to stave off war, I think, in the title there.
Yes.
Well, all credit to you.
It looks like you've done a good job so far.
Oh, the hard work may still lie ahead.
Yes, well, about that, the most recent piece is, how much will America's animus against Iran distort U.S. policy towards Syria?
Maybe the question could be, how much is it distorting U.S. policy right now?
I would argue a hell of a lot, no?
Yes, I think you're right about that.
The unrest in Syria started in, it seems a very long time ago, March of 2011.
And by April of 2011, just one month into this, the Obama administration was backgrounding David Sanger from the New York Times and other sympathetic reporters, that they were looking at the situation in Syria as a way of pushing back and undermining Iran.
That if you could bring about regime change in Iran, the argument was that this would really weaken Iran's regional position.
Regime change in Syria, you mean?
Reignite the Green Movement and produce regime change in Iran.
I think this is fantasy, and I'm being generous to call it that, but this has been very much the real strategic driver for American policy toward the Syrian situation.
That's why the United States has insisted from the beginning that any political process to try and resolve this thing had to stipulate up front President Assad's departure.
An Iranian diplomat described this to me as not just setting a precondition for negotiations or political process, but in effect defining pre-results for the process.
And so when Kofi Annan was trying to do his peace mission and he wanted to do a regional contact group on Syria and everyone knows you have to have Iran in to make that a serious process, the U.S. vetoed that.
And the U.S. continues to insist that any kind of process has to stipulate up front that Assad's got to go, which means you can't have a serious process.
And now we're also basically, we say we're still not providing lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, but we are working with Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and have CIA guys in camps in Turkey helping provide various types of assistance to the Syrian opposition.
So we are fueling one side in a civil war while we're undermining any serious possibilities for a political process that might possibly end the violence.
And all of this is being driven by this kind of strategic obsession with Iran.
And now it's sort of seeming more and more like these guys aren't going to win, that if Aleppo and Damascus were going to rise up and take their chance and now is our chance to overthrow this government and be done with them once and for all, if that was going to happen it would have already happened.
So the people of Syria apparently prefer the dictatorship they have to the chaos they fear coming next, I suppose, or something.
It can't be that they love Assad, and yet this rebel army doesn't seem to have the support of the whole population or even a majority of it.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I mean, Syria is obviously a very deeply divided society to say the least, and I certainly don't want to say that the opposition doesn't have any kind of social base, but I think you're right that particularly when the opposition was quote-unquote liberating neighborhoods in Damascus, whole areas of Aleppo, you didn't see mass crowds turning out to celebrate their liberation by the opposition.
Every objective measure that we've had, whether it's polls done by very, very good Western polling organizations or other indicators would suggest that Assad still at this point retains the support of at least 50% of the Syrian population, and I think you're right.
Probably a lot of that support comes from people who think that for them the alternative to the Assad regime is going to be much worse.
It's going to be a very, not just an Islamist regime, but a kind of Sunni Salafi regime which will persecute non-Sunni minorities, will impose a kind of government, a kind of political order which, as I said, I think at least half of Syrian society doesn't want.
And so in a situation like that, I mean the only real way to find a solution that's going to end violence in any sort of reasonable time frame is a political process where you try and broker some kind of power sharing arrangement, and that's what the United States is I think really, really undercutting or effectively blocking.
So then I guess I sort of latched on, I liked it, the phrase regime change buys civil war.
That's what Joshua Landis called the policy here.
I'm wondering if more and more, well I don't want to give the Democrats too much credit like they have any idea what the hell they're doing up there, but I guess is it possible that Obama and Hillary know that their sock puppet rebel army is not going to win, but that's all right, let's just bog them down and create as much chaos as we can and weaken the Syrian state as much as we can.
That's still good for weakening Iran's position anyway, even if they know that they're only helping these people eventually get bigger so that they can lose bigger in the end.
I have started to see that argument a little bit more and more in different places.
I think like you, I'm reluctant to give the Obama administration too much credit in that sort of very Machiavellian sense.
Or even thinking things through at all.
Well that's the main thing.
I think they have, as in a number of other areas, they've really made policy without serious reflection about all of the relevant players, what their interests are, what their assets and liabilities are, how this could actually play out on the ground.
I mean we know to this day, they'll even tell you they don't really know who the Syrian opposition is that they're betting so much on in this strategy.
I think they believed, without any real supporting analysis or evidence, but they seem to believe it all the same, that this would actually be over by now, that Assad would be gone.
I don't think they bothered to think about whether 18 months after this gets started, that Assad could still be in office, still be president of Syria, still have a pretty intact and substantial military apparatus at his disposal.
I think they didn't think through a lot of things.
Well there's a piece in the Washington Post right here saying, oh my goodness, it's from yesterday, in the Washington Post saying, hey, sanctions aimed at Syria and Iran are hindering the opposition there.
Who could imagine that it's bad for the opposition to be tagged with CIA sock puppet around their neck when it comes to their own domestic dissent in these two countries?
I mean not that I'm in favor of regime changing them one way or the other, but they really are that surprised that for every action there's a reaction, never mind any of this three-dimensional chess and all that.
That's exactly right.
Their capacity for surprise in that way seems infinite.
All right, well it's Flint Leverett from raceforiran.com, and Penn State University will be right back with more after this.
All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Flint Leverett, professor at Penn State, former CIA State Department and National Security Council staffer, officer guy, and keeper of Race for Iran, and we're talking about the conflict, the proxy war really going on in Syria right now.
And it's really, I think, kind of an extension of the proxy war that Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting in Iraq, and in that case America was fighting on the side of Iran and against our ally Saudi Arabia for seven or eight years there.
And now we've got the redirection, as Seymour Hersh called it, and tilting back toward the Sunnis, I guess everywhere but Iraq, where we've been kicked out by our allies, the Shiites.
But so now we're fighting on the side of Saudi Arabia and I guess the rest of all the Sunni Arab country potentates against Iranian power in the region.
And so is there any rhyme or reason to this?
Is it really all just blundering, or is this just old British divide and conquer strategy playing up the Sunni Shiite divide and trying to get them to war against each other so that we can dominate them in the end and all that kind of thing?
Or what all is going on here anyway?
Why mess around with a place like Syria when we clearly don't have to?
Well, I think, again, it comes back to, in some ways, the same kind of impulse that drove the invasion of Iraq.
I mean, ultimately it's a kind of bipartisan delusion in the United States that the United States both has to have and is capable of securing a kind of hegemonic status in the Middle East, where we can use our military power, other aspects of power, to shape political outcomes in this region, not just defend our interests in this region, but actually shape the region in our own image and according to our own preferences.
I think that this is a failed policy.
It's actually, in a paradoxical way, trying to achieve hegemony in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War has actually ended up making the United States weaker.
It certainly made the United States weaker in the Middle East, and I think you could argue it's made the United States weaker globally.
But both Democrats and Republicans buy into this.
I drove the invasion of Iraq after 9-11, which I think was on balance overwhelmingly a net strategic loser for the United States.
And now we're repeating it again, albeit at this point, without direct U.S. military involvement, but the basic impulse is the same behind what we're doing in Syria.
We think if we can kick Assad out, we're going to screw the Iranians and get a government that's going to tilt Syria into our column in the balance of power.
And that kind of delusion, I think, really makes it difficult for U.S. administrations to look soberly at situations on the ground.
You look at the misunderstandings, ignorance, delusions that drove decision-making about Iraq and that kept driving really bad decisions even after we'd gone into Iraq during the Bush administration.
And now this is happening with regard to Syria under the Obama administration.
And now when you say that they're betting that when Assad falls and that's going to put Syria into our column, does that mean they're betting on Saudi power in Syria?
Because how in the world can they bet on the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, for example?
Something like that.
Well, they...
I mean, right now they're in tears over the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt and threatening the power of their military puppets there.
That's right, but I think there are two fundamental misapprehensions of reality that are going on here.
One is that, and I think the United States regularly falls into this trap, we think that if we can undermine an established regime in a place like Syria, that the people who are going to come to power in its place are basically secular liberals and that we're going to have a kind of secular liberal democratic order emerge.
And whether it's in Iraq, whether it's in Syria, that's not reality.
That's not what happens in societies like these.
But we still keep believing somehow that that's what will happen because that's what we want.
And then when we get into these situations and it becomes apparent that that's not what we're going to get, we end up turning to the Saudis or to others who are supporting forces that are actually quite inimical to American interests.
We worked with the Saudis in Afghanistan to get the Soviets out, but then what we got in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal was the Taliban.
The Taliban would not exist without Saudi Arabia, without Saudi money, without Saudi support.
And the Taliban is a direct result of our collaboration with Saudi Arabia in Afghanistan.
And now we're doing it again in Syria.
We're cooperating with Saudi Arabia to get rid of the Assad regime while the Saudis are funding and arming and supporting in other ways Salafi jihadi elements in Syria that I think we would be quite unhappy with them if they were ever to take power in Syria.
But we are working with the Saudis anyway to do this.
Yeah, it says in the New York Times that there's a quote from one of these leaders saying, yeah, as soon as we're done with Assad, we're going to work on creating a new Islamic state between here and Baghdad.
And what's left of Sunni-controlled Iraq will be now joined across the old border with Syria.
And we have a threat of independent Kurdistan breaking off and maybe gaining adherence inside the borders of Iran and Iraq and Turkey.
And stirring all of that up seems like a real mess just to...
And, you know, you certainly got it right.
It was Barack Obama even said it in plain English to Jeffrey Goldberg that this is all about weakening Iran.
Neither of them in that interview even pretended to cite the grief of the poor Syrian victims of the police state there or anything like that.
They were just all global politics.
And this would be a way to weaken Iran.
But toward what end?
And in the last couple of minutes, I wanted to ask you, there's all this hype about, oh, Israel's going to start the war and Netanyahu crying, hold me back and that kind of thing doesn't really feel real to me.
Is he just blowing smoke?
And what's the point?
I don't know that he's entirely blowing smoke.
I think there probably are at least moments when Netanyahu and perhaps the defense minister, Mr. Barack, would really like to take a shot at Iran.
But I think that they keep running up against some very hard realities like Israel's very limited military capabilities to strike at Iranian nuclear targets, an international environment that is not very favorably disposed toward an Israeli action like that at this point.
And so I think they have been very clever, very adept at using the threat of an Israeli strike to get more on sanctions, on other ways of pressuring Iran to get more from the United States, to get more out of Europe, to get more out of others.
They have been very adroit at doing that.
But I don't know that I'd want to say it's entirely just an act on Netanyahu's part and that each night he's kind of sitting by himself in the privacy of his own bedroom or his own office and kind of laughing at how he pulled another good one on the international community today.
I think there probably is a part of his mind that really would like to take a shot, but he just keeps running up against these realities that constrain him.
But in the meantime, he can leverage this for other purposes.
Well, how much of our war in Syria is meeting him halfway?
Okay, we won't do a full-scale carpet bombing of Iran, but we will support a rebel militia regime change in Syria for you.
Well, I think that the Israeli attitude toward this, this is a case where I think the Israelis, by and large, are a little bit less enthusiastic about regime change in Syria than we are, precisely because they have, at least to some degree, tried to think about the consequences and they know that there are some very serious risks about what could happen if Assad is brought down.
Now, I think they have basically reached a point where, on balance, for a lot of reasons because the United States has now gone so far down this road, they'd rather see Assad go than see him stay, but they are pretty constantly exhorting the Obama administration, this time could you at least try to think through the consequences and try to manage at least some of the foreseeable downside risks of getting rid of Assad like you didn't manage downside risks of getting rid of Saddam in Iraq.
So, I don't think that Israeli animus toward Assad is really a driver in this case.
I mean, it could be a driver in the sense that Israeli animus toward Iran is pushing the Obama administration to want to find ways to undermine Iran, but even apart from the Israelis, I think the commitment to seeking hegemony in the Middle East is so deep-seated in our political culture that you don't really need the Israelis to drive it.
The Israelis certainly push us hard on these issues, but to a large extent they're pushing on a door that we've already opened for them.
All right, and now lastly here, are we basically on a course of escalation to the point where they're going to have to invade and call it a safe zone or institute a bombing campaign and call it a no-fly zone or whatever the way they have not very subtly creeped us into a full-scale war in Libya there?
I think the odds of that are going up pretty sharply.
I mean, if you look at the foreign policy debate on both sides, in both parties, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, the real balance of opinion has shifted in favor of doing something, doing more.
And at this point, most of those options are becoming increasingly military in nature.
And if you look at the history since the end of the Cold War, every time that the United States has imposed a no-fly zone, ostensibly for some humanitarian reason, to permit the delivery of relief supplies, to protect refugees, what have you, we did it in Somalia, we did it in Bosnia, we did it in Iraq, we did it in Libya.
And in each case when we've done this, it has led to a very, very highly militarized intervention in the name of coercive regime change.
Sometimes, as with the case of Iraq, it took years to get there from the time that the no-fly zone was first imposed.
Sometimes, in the case of Libya, the no-fly zone bled over into coercive regime change pretty rapidly.
But that is the record, that is the historical pattern since the end of the Cold War.
If we do get to a point where we're imposing no-fly zones, there's a very, very high risk that we're going to be looking at a very highly militarized intervention later on.
On the bright side, Anne-Marie Slaughter will have her 15 minutes of fame, finally.
People will pay attention to her.
Well, people pay a lot of attention to her anyway, on various subjects.
But yeah, I think actually her track record on these issues, the track record of other liberal interventionists like her, I think really their track record isn't measurably better than that of the neoconservatives.
I think that point, whether it's her or anyone else, it really needs to be emphasized, doesn't it, the individual nature of the human beings who make up our foreign policy establishment.
I'm not sure if you saw Michael Hastings' piece about the Libya War, where he apparently interviewed Samantha Power, and she apparently, the way I read it anyway, explained to him herself that she was resentful for being marginalized to the deputy assistant secretary of helping Iraqis paint schools or some kind of thing, and she wanted some attention.
And so arguing for the war in Libya would be a way to increase her standing in the White House.
And that was the name of the entire game to her.
Yes, and I'm sure she would tell you it was done with the best of intentions for the Libyan people.
But apparently she admitted otherwise to him.
It was really all about herself.
And I think that's really the case for all of these people, right?
It depends on what gets you approval, which thing you support most of the time.
I mean, not you, but one who is a member of this establishment.
Well, human nature is subject to a lot of temptations like that.
I think people sort of just imagine that.
Once you're a national security professional, you're just very professional or something, but people are people, that's the point.
That's right.
All right, well, listen, we're already over time.
I thank you so much for your time.
As always, it's great talking to you.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Good to talk with you.
Everybody, that's Flint Leverett.
He's a professor of international relations at Penn State, and he does the Iran Project at the New America Foundation and runs the blog raceforiran.com.
