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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Scott Horton Show.
I'm here.
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All right.
Our next guests are Flint and Hillary Mann Leverett.
Hillary is senior professorial lecturer at the American University in Washington, D.C., and a visiting scholar at Peking University in Beijing, China.
She, in the Bush administration, worked as director for Iran, Afghanistan, and Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council, was Middle East expert on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff, and policy advisor for Middle East, Central Asian, and African issues at the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
Her husband, Flint, is a professor at Penn State of International Affairs and is a visiting scholar at Peking University's School of International Studies.
He's a leading authority on the Middle East and Persian Gulf.
And from 1992 to 2003, he worked in the U.S. government as senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff, and as a CIA senior analyst.
They both left the George W. Bush administration over disagreements on their Iraq and Iran policies.
They have kept the blog Race for Iran, which is still there at raceforiran.com.
But the brand new blog is named for the brand new book.
It's Going to Tehran, Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic.
Welcome back to the show, both of you.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
Very good.
We're great.
Thanks for having us on, Scott.
Well, I really appreciate your time and I really appreciate the work that you put into this book.
It's quite a thing.
And so today, of course, is the first day of the new round of talks with the Iranians, the P5 plus one, which is basically the U.N.
Security Council, right, in Kazakhstan.
Is there any news out of Kazakhstan?
Do we know if there's any real progress or can you guys take the temperature of the current talks for us?
Well, I think, you know, barring some really extraordinary, almost, you know, the second coming level of surprise, you know, I think the stage has been set for, you know, virtually nothing to be accomplished in Kazakhstan.
The Obama administration is still unwilling to let the P5 plus one put a serious offer on the table for Iran.
If you put a serious offer on the table, which would include recognition of Iran's right to enrich under safeguards, and you were serious about negotiating, I think you could get a nuclear deal in relatively short order.
But the Obama administration is still determined to insist on an outcome that it can't legitimately insist on.
And part of the problem is the administration here is repeating a past practice that has led to failure in each round of negotiations and then led to increased sanctions afterwards, which is they say, the Obama administration says, it's putting a serious and substantive, they often call it generous, offer on the table.
And then, of course, they characterize the talks proceeding from there as a failure because Iran refused to accept it.
But they don't tell the public what that offer is, even though to resolve the nuclear issue with Iran would actually be quite simple.
It would be a public declaration, like we had in May 2010, when Turkey and Brazil negotiated with Iran, a public declaration of a recognition of Iran's right to enrich uranium.
It's right that they have a sovereign right and a treaty right as a member of the NPT.
But the administration won't do that because they can't get agreement, can't get consensus here in Washington.
Even if there are potentially more forward-leaning members of this cabinet, like Secretary of State Kerry or potentially a Secretary of Defense Hagel, there is no consensus within the administration or certainly between the administration and Congress for this basic recognition of Iran's rights.
And without that, there can't be progress.
And that's why we will continue to hear the Obama administration say they're putting something substantive and generous on the table and then to punish Iran after the fact for not accepting this supposedly generous offer that they won't even disclose to the public.
And now, Flint, when you say that, well, we could have a nuclear deal in short order if they really meant it, what would that look like?
They would have to go to Tehran and give them the whole Nixon goes to China treatment?
Or could they just cut a deal and say, for example, well, you know, like in the deal they originally offered back in 2009 or something very close to it, keep enriching up to 3.6 percent, but not up to 20.
We'll have that done in France or somewhere else.
I think, you know, the outlines of the deal would be would be recognition of Iran's rights, including safeguarding enrichment.
In return, Iran would ratify and implement the additional protocol to the NPT, would accept some other additional verification instruments that would give the IAEA more extensive and somewhat more proactive access to Iranian facilities.
And you could probably also include in that, you know, some understandings about levels of enrichment, 20 percent enrichment, this kind of thing.
I don't think you're going to be able to get the Iranians to shut down whole facilities like the demand that they shut down Fordow.
I don't think you're going to be able to get the Iranians to, in effect, agree to some sort of international committee with which the United States is going to get some de facto veto over how many centrifuges they install in particular facilities.
But I think you would have you would have Iranian commitments to greater transparency.
You would have understandings about 20 percent enrichment.
And I think the Iranians would also want substantial sanctions relief as part of that.
That gets to your question about could you do the nuclear deal in isolation or do you need to deal do the whole kind of Nixon to China realignment?
I think our view is that you really end up needing to do the whole package, that while in theory you could sketch out how the nuclear deal would be resolved on its own terms, you know, I don't think that the Obama administration is going to find it politically, you know, politically doable to provide substantial sanctions relief, lift, you know, most, if not all of the sanctions that have been put on Iran just with a deal on the nuclear issue as important as that could be.
They're going to need, you know, a kind of broader realignment of relations between Iran and the United States, like what Nixon achieved with China.
And the reason for that is something I think deep in our political culture, which is that even if we were even though the deal on the nuclear issue is actually quite simple and straightforward, it's impossible for the Obama administration or any administration, this is not just a critique of them, it crosses the partisan divide, no administration could put that simple deal on the table because it doesn't resolve the issues of our perception of Iran being an irrational foreign policy player and illegitimate domestic political order.
So as long as we continue to caricature Iran as the leading state sponsor of terrorism and a massive abuser of human rights, we can't make this basic concession to recognize their right to enrich uranium because we can't trust them.
The issues are very much intertwined.
It's not, we don't have a problem necessarily with states per se having nuclear capability or even nuclear weapons, Israel, India, Pakistan.
The problem is with a country that we can't and don't accept.
And that's why we make the argument that even though the nuclear issue is quite simple to resolve, recognizing Iran's rights, we can't do it politically as a political culture, regardless if you're Democrat or Republican, until there's an acceptance of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Well, and the ability of any president, Republican or Democrat, to be able to explain to the Congress, I've got that covered, I've got that covered, and I've got that covered too.
So enough of your objections.
We were already thinking ahead, that kind of thing, that consensus that you talked about that is not there now.
And it would have to be, as you guys say in the book, it would have to be led by the president the way that Richard Nixon opened up to Mao Zedong.
Yeah, this is one where Obama is going to have to lead public discourse.
He is going to have, you know, what Nixon did with China, you know, you consider the way that China had been demonized, the People's Republic's been demonized for 20 years after the Chinese Revolution, and Nixon and Kissinger, in effect, create a new reality for Americans with regard to China.
It's not just that they resolved this particular grievance with China, or reached an understanding with China over that particular problem.
It's that they accepted the People's Republic as a legitimate order, representing legitimate national interests, and brought their country along to view China in that way.
That's what made rapprochement possible.
And within that framework, then it was possible to deal with all kinds of issues that had really tortured this relationship for 20 years.
But it was a top-down macro thing.
You accept the People's Republic, and both sides commit to realigning their relations with one another.
And within that framework, all of the other issues, even the very difficult issues like Taiwan, you know, you're able to find ways to manage them, if not to resolve all of them.
And you know, we do it not as a favor at all to China.
It's really, it's something very much to save our own skin in Asia, because by accepting the People's Republic of China, and taking the boogeyman of Red China, of the march of communism, off the table, we were able to withdraw from Vietnam.
It meant we didn't have to continue the endless cycles of invading to push back and contain communism in Asia, because we accepted a communist political order, the biggest, most important, durable communist political order there.
We didn't have to continue to fight it, and invade various countries on China's periphery in order to push it back.
That's what we're arguing here, too, that it's not a favor to Iran, it's something that will help extricate the United States from constant rounds of military intervention and other coercive interventions in the Middle East, that we argue do such serious damage to American standing and credibility, strategically in the Middle East, and even globally.
Well, and I think, Hillary, the way you guys put it in the book is that really the nuclear issue, which of course gets all the headlines, is really just, actually almost like Paul Wolfowitz said about Iraq.
Well, that's the one thing that people can agree about for bureaucratic reasons, to beat them over the head with, to use as the excuse.
But really, the problem is independence, and the American empire refuses the hegemon, however you want to term it vocabulary-wise, refuses to accept the independence of Iran no matter what, even if they didn't have a single spinning centrifuge.
Yeah, and I think we've had this conversation, Hillary and I have had this conversation with any number of Iranian officials, including very senior officials, over the last several years, and sometimes we've had Iranian officials ask us, what is the real problem that the United States has with us, has with the Islamic Republic?
We haven't invaded anybody, we haven't tested a nuclear weapon, we haven't done any of the things that would seem to bring, in other cases, would seem to have brought American animosity.
What is it that we have done?
I mean, they know there's the Argo narrative about the revolution and the hostage crisis, but they just can't imagine that that solely accounts for it this many years later.
And we've ended up just telling them, the real problem is, the Farsi word is estiklal, independence, that you guys insist on being an independent power.
You aren't inherently anti-American, you would welcome better relations with the United States on terms of equality, mutual respect, but you're not going to subordinate your foreign policy to the United States the way that Egypt under Sadat and Mubarak did, the way that the Saudis do to some degree.
You're not going to do that.
And you want to present this indigenous model in the Middle East of a political order that combines Islamist governance with participatory politics and elections.
And we, just as a political culture, we can't accept that.
And as a hegemonic power in the region wants to dominate the Middle East, we can't accept the idea that you are going to be an independent power in the region.
Now, these are precisely the kinds of things that Nixon and Kissinger got the United States to accept vis-a-vis the People's Republic of China.
We weren't going to try and remake China domestically, and we weren't going to try and dominate it as a hegemonic power.
That's what enabled Rav Proshma in the Chinese case.
We are not there with Iran.
And I think it really is this issue of independence that keeps us from getting there.
Well, now, so, Hillary, does that mean that if, in a sense, to paraphrase it, I think that the nuclear issue is sort of a red herring, does that mean that they never will seek a deal, the Americans, that, for example, the Obama administration, we're just going to have another four years of status quo and more threats that don't really go anywhere except more sanctions, but no hot war either, and no deal?
Well, I think we are on a trajectory for war, because I do not think that the Obama administration has consensus either within the administration or certainly with other branches of government, particularly the Congress.
But the Obama administration has not at all tried to work with Congress, which would be necessary, to roll back any of the sanctions, and the Obama administration has just continuously increased the covert operations budget to undermine the government there and for cyber attacks, which have now been widely documented even in the New York Times.
So I think we will continue to see the Obama administration pursue these aspects of, in a sense, covert war, undermining the Islamic Republic, sending drones over its territory, cyber attacks, and have this fig leaf of what it calls diplomacy, maybe better characterized as just talking to buy time, the very thing that they actually accuse the Iranians of, but to buy time, because for the Obama administration, there isn't a particular urgency to it.
I think they would be happy with containment.
The only problem with containment is that the Israelis have told the Obama administration that's unacceptable to them.
But for this administration, I think containment is really where they'd like to go.
They don't want to call it that because it angers the Israelis, but that's where they'd like to be.
The problem with it is that unlike with the Soviet Union, containment with the Islamic Republic of Iran is inherently unstable for several reasons, but most importantly, something that is vastly underappreciated, if not dismissed and scoffed at here in Washington, which is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a rising power in the Middle East, that by pursuing an independent foreign policy and building a domestic political order that is far from perfect, has lots of warts and problems, far from perfect, but by building a domestic political order based on a participatory Islamist framework, that is attractive to huge swaths of people in the Muslim world.
And that is something that is enabling Iran's rise.
The nuclear issue comes into this, too, because Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology and scientific advancement in defiance of the United States and Israel helps it even more with this huge swath of humanity.
So it's the Islamic Republic of Iran and its ideas that today is having much more sway when people are given the chance to have a say in places from Egypt to Bahrain to Tunisia to Indonesia to Malaysia than the U.S. narrative is having.
That's something that will make containment very, very difficult because Iran will continue to rise, it will continue to pursue a nuclear program.
When I first worked in the White House on this issue back in 2001 to 2003, Iran was spinning zero centrifuges, zero, when President Bush labeled them as part of the Axis of Evil.
Today, they have more than 12,000 centrifuges installed.
Iran will continue its scientific and technological march, and it will continue basically a soft power strategy that is gradually but decisively changing the balance of power in the Middle East in a way that is far more to their advantage and has the United States really on the defense in a way that we will find increasingly unacceptable.
So even though the Obama administration, I think, would prefer containment, it is something that is just not stable and will, I think, have us continuing on a trajectory for war.
That's a really important point because the whole containment language, you know, it sort of assumes that what the Islamic Republic wants is a nuclear weapon, but okay, if they got a nuclear weapon, we can contain them like we contain the Soviet Union.
Our argument is that we don't believe the Islamic Republic is trying to get a nuclear weapon, that they are continuing to develop their nuclear infrastructure, but they are not taking that in the direction of a weapons program.
And what this provides them, along with other things that they do, this is they are pursuing what most of the rest of the world sees as their legitimate rights, their sovereign and treaty rights.
They are doing this in defiance of the United States and Israel.
Every new centrifuge they put in, every nuclear advance they make, most of the Arab world, maybe not Arab leaders, but Arab publics are applauding that.
Non-Western populations are applauding that.
They are seeing Iran do this in defiance of the United States and Israel, and they say, right on.
And this is part of how, as Hillary said, Tehran is changing the balance of power, not just the distribution of power, but the nature of power in the Middle East.
It's less and less about hard power, about carrier battle groups and armor divisions and all of this.
It is more and more about influence.
Who can influence other populations?
We are doing lousy at that.
And the Islamic Republic, the more that they pursue this soft power strategy, we can say we'd be willing to contain them, but we have no answer to that soft power strategy.
Well, and then, let's see, as far as the trajectory toward war, I definitely understand why, as you were saying, Hillary, that the containment policy as it stands, containing their non-nuclear weapons program, containing their power as it is, is not sustainable for the long term.
But on the other hand, it doesn't seem like Obama wants a war.
It seems like he would really prefer not having one.
Is it just this conflict is going to come to a head in the Persian Gulf?
We'll have a Persian Gulf of Tonkin type crisis or that kind of thing?
Or how is this actually going to break out into airstrikes?
Well, you know, one of the things that's happening is somewhat of a similar and very dangerous reprise of what happened in the 1990s.
And I don't think that the Clinton administration was trying to egg al Qaeda on for 9-11, but certainly put in and amplified a series of steps that infuriated al Qaeda and set it on its trajectory toward Washington, New York and Pennsylvania.
We are doing a similar thing today.
The analogy would be that we are supporting Saudi-backed Salafis, militant jihadists in Syria.
We supported them in Libya.
We are supporting them particularly in Syria and in Libya.
It, in large part, to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran.
That was the rationale for nearly two years of the strategy here in Washington about why we needed to support this opposition in Syria, which was if you overthrow the Assad government, it's the Achilles heel.
We'll finally get the Islamic Republic of Iran deprived of its one Arab ally, or as candidate Romney said at the time, and its only outlet to the ocean or to the sea, not withstanding the fact that, of course, Iran borders the Caspian and is in the Persian Gulf itself.
But it's this idea that to do anything to arm and support anyone to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran has had in the past and will have in the future very serious repercussions for the United States.
The attack on our consulate in Benghazi was not an accident.
Ambassador Stevens was killed by people who could very seriously have been trained, armed, and funded either directly or indirectly by our own government with the Saudis.
That's a very serious problem that people in Washington refuse to even deal with.
They're talking about who sent what email, what was the response time.
There's no sense of, was it a mistake to align with the Saudis to arm, train, and fund jihadists?
And we do that because we think that by fighting with the Saudis and pushing the Sunni sectarian divide that we will be able to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This is not only a fool's errand, but it's very dangerous.
Well, what about Jandala inside Iran?
Yes, it's the same thing.
We are funding, training, arming either directly or indirectly groups that have no common interest with the United States and in fact are very seriously related to or part of al-Qaeda as part of this effort to undermine Iran from a variety of its borders and entry points.
It's something where early on in the Obama administration, people really criticized Clinton and me for making this argument.
There was so much hope that Obama, with coming into the presidency, having run on a campaign for engagement back in 2008, that he would really change our policy.
It went large in the Middle East, but particularly with Iran.
And we said, well, he has had the chance.
The decision was put before him to designate Jandala and some of these other groups as terrorist organizations, which has the important purpose of preventing the U.S. government from arming, training, and funding them.
And Obama decided not to.
And there's a direct analog to a similar decision that Nixon and Kissinger took with China.
Nixon, very quickly upon coming into office, understood that we couldn't negotiate seriously, have a real rapprochement with China if we were having covert operations, CIA operations in Tibet, to undermine China.
So he told the CIA there was a moratorium to stand down from those operations.
Obama took the opposite decision.
He refused to designate Jandala until after Iran had captured its leader and it was basically neutered.
And Obama decided early on not only to not stand down from covert operations, but to dramatically increase them and the cyber attacks, the killing of Iranian scientists.
Again, I'm not saying necessarily that these were done all or in part directly by the United States, but directly or indirectly, this president had a decision to make, just as Nixon and Kissinger did, and he didn't take it.
This really gets at the heart of your question about what ultimately gets us to war.
I mean, Hillary's describing all of these various aspects of what you might call blowback from the way that we go about trying to contain and undermine Iran.
It not only doesn't work, it not only undercuts our perceived legitimacy in the region, but it creates all of this potential for blowback from Salafi jihadists and other elements.
And I think this gets to how we can actually end up going to war over this.
If you don't have a nuclear deal because you haven't had this broader rapprochement, as the Islamic Republic continues to develop its nuclear infrastructure, as it continues to gain ground with public opinion in the region, the United States is going to be really, really challenged, increasingly challenged to hold onto its own strategic position in the region, which is getting more and more tenuous.
And in that sort of environment, you know, the only thing we will have left to try and reassert our dominance in the region is going to be military force.
I mean, we tried for 12 years after the first Gulf War to get Saddam Hussein out of power, and it didn't work.
Sanctions didn't work.
No fly zones.
All of that stuff, supporting and opposition, didn't work.
Finally, after 9-11, even though Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11, the Bush administration goes to war in Iraq because it thinks this is the only way America can reassert its dominance in the region.
And if Obama doesn't deal with Iran diplomatically, doesn't come to terms with the Islamic Republic, there is a very, very high chance, we think, that before he leaves office, he is going to be faced with that kind of moment at which, you know, the way it's going to be structured here, he either acts by ordering attacks on Iran, or he basically surrenders American strategic leadership in the Middle East.
And under those circumstances, I think even Barack Hussein Obama could end up pulling the trigger.
Well, now, what could he hope to accomplish, though?
I mean, when it comes down to actually sending the Air Force to, say, you know, drop as many bombs as they can on Natanz and Fordow and say the...
I think it would be disastrous for the American position in the region.
But I mean, at this point, after all these years, Flint, don't the Joint Chiefs agree with you about that?
I think that the bulk of the leadership of the uniformed military doesn't want to go to war with Iran.
Are they really prepared to fall on their swords over this?
We'll see.
You know, the bulk of the military leadership, I don't think, wanted to go to war in Iraq, either, the uniformed military.
And that's why, you know, Rumsfeld at the end had to handpick Tommy Franks.
He wasn't the most senior general there.
He wasn't, you know, he wasn't the person who had naturally risen to a position of power.
At the end of the day, Rumsfeld, Terry picked within the Pentagon to make sure that he had a team that could do...to at least carry out the basic invasion.
At the end of the day, he didn't even have Tommy Franks fully on his side.
You know, after the fact, in Tommy Franks' book, he describes some of the senior civilian advisors and officials to Rumsfeld, like Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith as the biggest idiot he'd ever seen.
There was, I think, very little love and affection between the uniformed military and the civilian leadership at the Pentagon.
So I think even today, if you had the uniformed military opposed, and I think many of them are very, very hesitant and see a lot of significant risk, it's, you know, it's not part of our civilian military culture for them to really defy that.
You know, there are good reasons for that, but there are also some consequences, which is that that normal, what you may think of as a normal restraint, isn't really the restraint it could be.
This is one of the most important reasons we wrote this book, Scott, is because we think that when we talk about the need for the United States to accept the Islamic Republic, to come to terms with it like we came to terms with the People's Republic of China, we're not saying this just because this is the only way that diplomacy with Iran can work.
That's sort of in the nice to have category.
The reason we need to do this, why we have to do it, is because if we don't, if we don't come to terms with this rising revolutionary power, we are going to end up in starting another grossly counterproductive war in the Middle East.
And it will do damage to our strategic position in the region and in the world that will make all of the damage done by the 2003 Iraq invasion.
It will make that look almost trivial by comparison.
And it would, again, be to disarm yet another Middle Eastern state of weapons of mass destruction it does not have.
That may have been something that we could have gotten away with 10 years ago, barely.
But today, as the world is changing and the nature of power, not just in the Middle East is shifting, but worldwide, this is something that if there were an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, it would have to be done in defiance of the Security Council, in defiance of the vast majority of states in the world.
Not only China and Russia would veto any such resolution in the Security Council, but the Non-Aligned Movement, which Washington didn't have to take seriously up until the past maybe couple of years when it was our unipolar sole superpower moment.
But today, we now have to take it seriously.
And the 190-some-odd members of the Non-Aligned Movement are on record, in writing, supporting Iran's legal rights, sovereign and treaty rights, to enrichment.
So if the United States decided unilaterally, outside of any international legal justification to attack those sites, it's something that would not only imperil our position in the Middle East, but around the world, I think would hasten, accelerate the shift in the worldwide global power dynamics, particularly on the economic front, much more toward Asia and away from the United States and our Western European allies.
Well, and you know, I think it kind of goes without saying, maybe just on this show, because we've talked about this for so long, but the ways that Iran would be likely to hit back, not just as you're talking about long-term consequences and the shift in power and opinion in the world and that kind of thing, but say, for example, how many missiles could they drop on top of Bahrain?
Or how many of our guys in Afghanistan are right within their range?
Or what degree have their intelligence services infiltrated governments in the region that are friendly to us, but could be overthrown or severely wounded from within these countries?
They would have a lot of those options.
I mean, they have a ballistic missile force that's capable of hitting targets all over the Gulf.
You know, all of the things you identify are there.
But at this point, their biggest weapon, their biggest response is going to be political.
It's that they will have been the victims of an act of wanton aggression by the United States that, as Hillary said, most of the region, most of the rest of the world will see as illegitimate.
Their response is going to come when increasingly mobilized publics in the Middle East demand that their governments, if they were still cooperating with the United States strategically, that they stop that.
When the United States has to close its naval base in Bahrain because the public outcry is so great against what the United States did that the Bahraini government can't let the United States stay there.
When you have protests all over the region against the United States and governments increasingly have to respond to that.
That's going to be the most effective Iranian response.
All right.
Now, as long as I have you all on the phone, Hillary, can you tell us about that time that the Iranians wanted to trade some al-Qaeda captives that they had for some Mujahedini communist terrorist cultists that the Americans were keeping in Iraq?
Yes, it was a pretty unfortunate episode, I would say, in our inability to actually conduct diplomacy or real negotiations.
We had been engaging with Iran over Afghanistan, actually from right before 9-11, which is why it was even possible, as part of the 6-plus-2 multilateral working group of Afghanistan's six neighbors, the United States and Russia.
After 9-11, the Iranians realized very quickly the enormity, potentially strategically, of what had happened on 9-11 was an opportunity to work with the United States not only to defeat our common foe, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but potentially even to put a fissure between the U.S.
-Saudi partnership and have the United States have a much more realistic approach to the region.
So we started negotiating more with the Iranians bilaterally on Afghanistan, on al-Qaeda, after 9-11.
And the Iranians were very open to doing so and were very constructive in those negotiations.
One issue, in particular, was that as the United States was bombing Afghanistan and the Northern Alliance, which the Iranians supported, was on the march to take over Kabul and oust the Taliban, al-Qaeda was on the run and, of course, has been on the run out of Afghanistan ever since.
They've never gone back and established a stronghold in Afghanistan.
The vast majority of al-Qaeda operative fighters went to Pakistan, but some of them were seeking to go through Iran, either to basically their home countries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, or to try to gain refuge, particularly in Iran's Sunni-majority province in its southeastern corner of Balochistan.
It has a part of Balochistan within Iran.
The Iranians made us aware that this was a difficult area for them.
That border area that basically is a kind of tri-border area between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran is very porous.
It's Sunni-majority on the Iranian side, which means it's not always fully supportive of the Shia Islamist government in Tehran.
And it's a hub also for massive narcotics smuggling from Afghanistan to Europe.
It goes through Iran.
This is a chronic problem that Iran has, and Iran has actually worked very closely with the UN to try to combat this problem.
The Iranians made us very much aware of all these issues and essentially asked us for help to make sure that al-Qaeda didn't come into the country and what to do with al-Qaeda operatives that they captured.
The Bush administration was not at all interested in helping Iran.
Essentially, we were instructed to put it to the Iranians that this was a test, that if you're not really, you Iran are not really a state sponsor of terrorism, you will just block al-Qaeda from coming into your country and anyone, any that you capture, you will turn over to us.
This was a pretty difficult issue for the Iranians.
They wanted some sort of more of a UN cover, an international cover.
But even so, they tried.
They gave us the passport copies of over 200 al-Qaeda operatives that they had detained at the border and were able to deport.
They actually gave the passport copies to the United Nations, to the Secretary General, to keep as evidence, basically, of what they had done in this regard.
Then they told us that there were a few that had managed to come into Iran and they had put them under arrest, but they had kept them basically near where they had come in, near their points of entry.
They had basically put them under arrest and they wanted to work with us for some sort of mechanism for them to be deported.
Now, largely, these were, there weren't that many, but they were mostly Saudi and Egyptians.
The Iranians couldn't deport Egyptians back to Egypt under Mubarak because there were no diplomatic relations and the Mubarak government wouldn't take them.
The Saudis would take some Saudis, but nobody who was associated with the bin Laden family.
Oddly enough, the Iranians ended up with some bin Laden children.
I don't mean little children, but teenage to young adult children of bin Laden in Iran.
Then there were a couple of other operatives that had come through the border that they had basically under a version of arrest.
They had tried to get us to have a mechanism to deal with the deportation, how to deal with these people.
We weren't interested.
Finally, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and we had told the Iranians with our invasion of Iraq that we would treat the MEK in Iraq as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Iraqi Saddam Hussein's military because that's how we thought they had fought with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.
They were armed and trained by the government of Iraq, Saddam Hussein's government, and we would treat them as such.
We told this to the Iranians.
That's what we were allowed to say to the Iranians.
After the war, basically the neoconservatives within the Bush administration decided that, no, we shouldn't really treat the MEK as any kind of hostile group.
They could be useful for us vis-a-vis Iran in the future.
Why treat them as a hostile entity?
So not only did we not destroy them with the Iraqi military, we actually extended protected person status to them, which meant that even the new Iraqi government couldn't hand them over to the Iranians.
Well, with that, in particular, the Iranians tried to offer, essentially, these al-Qaeda people that they had captured in Iran to us in exchange for these MEK operatives that were in Iraq.
And they offered to do so under the guise of the International Committee of the Red Cross, to not have the death penalty as an option for any punishment of them, and that for the MEK, they would only try senior members, that they understood the MEK was a cult, and for lower-level people, they would be given some sort of amnesty.
That's what Iran formally put on the table.
And at the time, President Bush was interested in it.
President Bush said to a meeting of his principals that, you know, there's no such thing as a good terrorist.
We want access to these al-Qaeda people.
You know, the MEK is a terrorist organization.
It's on our list of designated terrorist organizations, at least it was during the Bush administration.
And he was, President Bush was interested in this kind of exchange.
But others within the administration disagreed, and the Iranians were left.
Yeah, interesting, ironic kind of footnote here, that people can still go to the George W. Bush White House website and find the position papers on why we need to invade Iraq and Saddam Hussein's support of the Mujahedin-e-Khalqas, one of the biggest proofs of his support for international terrorism, which is why we have to have a war against.
And nothing has changed.
I mean, if you don't think the MEK, people listening, don't think the MEK are a terrorist organization today, then there's nothing that changed in their behavior from 2001, 2002 to today, except that potentially they're involved in even more terrorism, for example, the assassination of Iranian scientists.
Well, in fact, one year ago, it was the Obama government was putting it in the news by way of NBC News that the Israelis were using them to assassinate scientists inside Iran.
That's right.
And he was trying to tell Netanyahu to pipe down a little bit a year ago.
Yeah, or at least the CIA was here.
You know, it's unclear to me whether the White House ever really...
Oh, yeah, I guess I just assumed that the White House said it was OK for NBC to do that big report, but maybe not.
Maybe they had a lower level source.
Well, I think there is some tension because the CIA doesn't want to be implicated in really this kind of, you know, certainly illegal activity for the CIA to be involved in.
But because of our very close cooperation with the Israelis, it's something that we end up getting tied into anyway.
So I think you see there are some points where the CIA, I think, tries to distance itself from Obama administration policy and some of their close alliances with the Saudis, getting weapons to the Syrians or to the Libyans or with the Israelis, getting armed support to the MEK.
But now that we've taken MEK off the list, they don't have the need to make that, to try to hide that, essentially.
All right.
Now, to get back to the book a little bit here, again, it's Flint and Hilary Mann Leverett, and the book is going to Tehran.
One of the things that undermines all this policy really is that, well, their regime is going to fall any minute now anyway because of how illegitimate it is.
The people of Iran hate it as much as we do.
And if only we'd give them a chance, I think Bill Kristol is probably the only person who said this out loud on TV, that if we just start bombing them, the people will rise up and help us overthrow them kind of thing.
But that's basically the plan for regime change, right, is that this regime will crumble any minute now, I guess once the next Ayatollah kicks off.
That's right.
And we've been holding our breath for that to happen for more than 30 years.
And, you know, if you go back, American policymakers, congressmen, pundits, commentators.
Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, they've been forecasting the imminent demise of the Islamic Republic for more than 30 years.
And it's just wrong.
You know, we may not like it.
But the basic reality is that this model of participatory Islamist governance and a strong commitment to foreign policy independence, this is what a majority of Iranians living inside their country want.
You know, there may be some who want that system to evolve in some significant ways.
But even most of them, at the end of the day, they still want it to be the Islamic Republic of Iran.
They don't want, you know, a secular Republic of Iran grounded in Western style secular liberalism.
This is their system.
They created it.
No one imposed it on them.
No one, no outside power invaded and dumped it on them.
This is what they have created for themselves, warts and all.
And, you know, they are responsible for it.
It's theirs.
And they are not about to roll over for some outside force coming in to change it.
And the constituency inside Iran for overthrowing it and putting in place some Western style secular republic is really small.
Now, I forget if you make that.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Pardon me.
Just one second, Hillary.
I'll turn it over to you.
I forget if you guys make this exact parallel in the book, but it seems this way to me.
Kind of.
It's sort of like you're saying when you talk about the election of 2009 and all the controversy there, regardless of which polls you trust and who you think really won or whatever.
It seems to me the parallel would be Bush Gore in Florida in 2000.
No matter which way that worked out and no matter how mad one side or the other was, it hardly meant that that was the end of the Constitution, the end of congressional elections, the fall of the government of Washington, D.C.
Either way, we're just going to go on from here and maybe we'll, you know, better luck next time kind of thing.
Gore conceded that was it.
That's basically what happened in your chance.
It will get another bite at the apple.
Even though in Bush v.
Gore, it's very interesting, too.
I mean, the judge, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just gave a speech at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she talked about that case.
She was asked about it and she said she really didn't want to talk about that case.
That case was just for that one very strange incident.
It shouldn't be taken as precedent.
It doesn't mean anything.
It was just to make a decision so that the election would be final.
And we accept that.
Whereas when Khamenei does something similar, where he allows the Iranians to protest hundreds of thousands of people in the street for over a week, tells the candidates that any complaints they have they need to bring to the Guarding Council, but that after that, after the Guarding Council reviews it, a final decision must be made and the decision is made there, not on the street.
We take that as fundamentally illegitimate, even though we have a very similar situation here with Bush v.
Gore.
But it's something that is particularly pernicious here because it unites both essentially the right and the left to stay on this trajectory toward war with the Islamic Republic.
The people on the right, the neoconservatives, they never thought that the Islamic Republic of Iran was legitimate.
They've always supported military force.
It didn't matter who could be a reformist within the Islamic Republic.
It needed to be a secular place anyway, pro-American, and they were always in favor of using force.
But this issue of the domestic legitimacy or illegitimacy is something that really grabs hold on the left.
And I think the problem with the 2009 election wasn't so much a question of fraud.
It was that their perceived leader, who was going to lead Iran through a process of soft regime change without the tanks, without the artillery, but soft regime change, that it could be changed from within at the ballot boxes, what they called the Obama effect, change would just come, that Iranians and all cultures are naturally on this trajectory toward secular, liberal democracy.
And it was a disbelief among, I think, particularly liberals here and many on the left, that Iran wasn't going to do that.
Iranians weren't voting for that.
A disbelief and an inability to accept it, which actually makes the election, the 2009 election in Iran, a bit more like the Kerry-Bush election in 2004, where, you know, I even try to borrow an example from my own family.
Of course, my own family thinks that Bush shouldn't have won the election in 2000 against Kerry, and there was probably fraud.
Buchanan took their votes, especially my elder Jewish relatives.
They must have taken the votes.
But 2004, they just cannot understand.
Because after living for four years under the Bush administration, having the invasion of Iraq, having the damage done to the economy, nobody in their right mind would have reelected Bush.
Certainly no one they know voted for Bush.
Yes, no one they know.
No one they know on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in Brooklyn would have reelected Bush.
And it's a similar dynamic, that this refusal, this inability to understand that Iranians, that a segment of the population, though Ahmadinejad is polarizing, but a significant segment of the population does like, not necessarily him personally, but what he represents, this fierce foreign policy independence and this dedication to a political order that the Iranians are creating that is close to their culture, to their religion, and to their history.
All right.
Now, so everybody invokes Ronald Reagan for everything.
And I was raised to not really like Ronald Reagan very much, and I still kind of feel that way.
But since he apparently is the benchmark for, well, everything that's good and true about American politics, he sold weapons to the Ayatollah, got along with him just fine.
Maybe you guys helped with that back in the 80s.
I don't know.
You know, if you can be friends with the Ayatollahs.
I'm sorry.
That was a little before our talk.
Oh, okay.
There you go.
Well, I don't know.
But anyway, some of the people you worked with were involved, that's for sure, based on the National Security Council.
It's a really important point, Scott, because in the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic of Iran was at its most vitriolic against the United States, and its rhetoric especially against the United States, and its rhetoric especially against Israel, to the height of the Islamic revolution, at that time, not only do we try to sell them weapons to curry favor with so-called moderates, but so do the Israelis.
In fact, after the bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 Marines in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration thought about imposing some sanctions on Iran, but the Israelis were adamant in their refusal against sanctioning Iran.
Both the United States and Israel were concerned that to completely weaken Iran would allow Soviet-aligned Iraq to be a formidable power.
You don't see this change in Israeli or American policy until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the Iraqi military in 1991.
I started working for the State Department in 1990.
I never heard a word from the Israelis about Iran's nuclear threat.
It wasn't until 1992 that the Israelis start coming to Washington, and their talking points literally change overnight.
Because all of a sudden, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the Iraqi military, the only challenger to American dominance and Israeli dominance in the Middle East was the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that's when they and then we set our sights on Iran.
Not before.
That really is the point, too.
That dishonesty underpins the entire policy here.
Does that mean that there really is a chance to go to Tehran, Obama, or maybe the next President, Jeb Bush, or one of these goons, to go and finally work things out?
What do you think?
The alternative is strategic disaster.
Well, there you go.
Now, wait a minute, though.
In fact, this is kind of, I forgot to say, I kind of have a problem with the premise of your book, which is that America needs to have any power and influence in the Middle East whatsoever anyway.
I mean, why do we need to?
Why shore up our strategic position in their Persian Gulf?
It's a very important issue, and this is where I really think the debate should be, because this is the real honest debate that needs to be had.
Does the United States need to be a power in the Middle East?
Do we need that?
Now, we certainly decided we need to do that in the Southern Hemisphere.
In Latin America, we decided we need to do that.
In Asia, we decided we need to do that.
In Europe, do we really need to do that in the Middle East with all of the blowback that it entails for the United States?
I don't think there's necessarily an easy answer to it, but it is the critical debate that needs to be had.
But because we're involved in the dishonest debate, we never get there.
Right.
Well, you know, there was a Cato Institute study back in the late 90s that said we spend way more securing, quote unquote, all of our interests in the Middle East than we actually spend on Middle Eastern oil by a long shot, too.
But yeah, but this gets into a distinction that we draw.
I mean, we certainly don't think that the United States should try to be a hegemonic power in the Middle East, that this is ultimately it's not going to work.
It is not just not going to work.
It is counterproductive.
Trying to be a hegemon in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War has made the United States weaker.
It's not just that we didn't succeed.
It's that we are dramatically weaker as a result of having tried.
I'm not so sure that the alternative to that is a kind of more isolationist posture where we don't really think we need to care about what happens in the Middle East.
The Middle East does matter very, very much to the workings of the world economy, to the global balance of power.
And I think the United States has legitimate and real interests in the Middle East, but it cannot pursue those interests in a responsible, sustainable, legitimate way by trying to be a hegemonic power.
It has to be, it has to do what Nixon did with China.
You know, the United States didn't withdraw from Asia after the opening to China, but the United States basically said our interests here are economic.
They're best served by a stable environment in which economic growth can flourish.
And in fact, the opening to China ushered in this real flowering of regional economic dynamism in East Asia.
And, you know, the United States actually ended up in a better position in Asia, you know, and I think Asia for Asians was in a better position because of the opening to China.
And that's what we think could happen if we had an American president who was really prepared, as we say, to go to Tehran.
All right, everybody, that is Flint and Hilary Mann Leverett.
The book is Going to Tehran, Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Thanks very much for y'all's time today.
Thank you so much, Scott.
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