01/19/14 – Hillary Mann Leverett – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, January 19th, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
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Today's guest is Hilary Mann-Leverett.
She is Senior Professorial Lecturer at American University in Washington, D.C. and Visiting Scholar at Peking University in Beijing, China.
She's also taught at Yale and formerly worked in the State Department in the Clinton and Bush Jr.
White Houses.
Her new book is out in paperback now, co-authored with her husband, Flint Leverett, Going to Tehran, Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic.
Welcome back to the show, Hilary.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thank you for having me.
Well, very happy to have you on the show.
Lots to talk about.
First of all, it looks like, for now, the president has achieved a victory in the Senate and has, I guess, convinced the majority leader to postpone the vote on the new sanctions that were obviously meant by the war party to sabotage the interim nuclear deal Obama has reached with the Iranians.
And, in fact, it looked like Obama was actually pushing really hard and maybe called in some personal favors to get some of these congresspeople to back down, both in the House and the Senate.
And so I wonder, you know, exactly what you think of that, how big of a victory that is as far as avoiding those sanctions.
And then also, what exactly, what do you think that says about President Obama and how hard he's really trying to get this deal with Iran done?
I think it is a little bit premature to declare a victory as of yet.
I think the foes of the Iran nuclear deal, of any kind of peace and conflict resolution in the Middle East writ large, are still very strong and formidable.
For example, the annual AIPAC, that's the major pro-Israel lobby, they call it a policy conference, but it's a gathering here in Washington of over 10,000 people from all over the country where they come to lobby their congressmen and senators, especially on the Iran issue.
That will be taking place very early in March, I think March 4th and 5th.
So there's still a lot that really can be pushed and played here.
But that said, President Obama, and especially Secretary of State Kerry, have really put, I think, a lot of political capital on the line.
There's not another president who has threatened a piece of pro-Israel legislation since Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s over sending the AWACS defense system to Saudi Arabia.
There's just not, there's been nobody else who has even bothered to go up against their pro-Israel lobby.
So in that sense, it's an incredibly important move forward.
The problem is, of course, that even though it seems at this point that there are positive signals that the Senate may not move on this piece of pro-Israel, pro-war legislation, if they did, and they're able to sustain, to override the president's veto, that would be such a dramatic blow to President Obama, not just on his foreign policy agenda, but it would be devastating to his domestic agenda.
So not only has President Obama put political capital where his mouth is on this score, but he has a tremendous amount to lose, and by no means is the fight anywhere near over.
And now, do you think that if he's fighting this hard to keep them from ruining the deal now, is that really a strong indicator, necessarily, that he really wants to succeed at the final deal, or he just doesn't want them to ruin it now?
Because it seemed like when he went and gave his talk to the Sabin Center, he said, well, you know, it might work or it might not, and so who really knows, but come on, give me a chance, kind of thing, you know?
Yeah, I mean, you know, for President Obama, for better or for worse, for President Obama, this has been a lot of political capital put on the table.
But that's for President Obama.
I think for someone who was really trying to lead this country in a much more constructive, positive trajectory after these failed wars and invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, Libya entirely on President Obama's watch, if we had real leadership trying to put us on a much more positive and constructive trajectory, he would, President Obama, would be doing a lot more rather than just giving these kind of lukewarm talks, basically, you know, trying to continue to kiss up to major pro-Israel constituencies, and then, you know, having his, trying to bring in some of his favors.
Like I said, it is a lot of political capital he's put there, but in the, you know, scheme of things and in terms of looking at some other presidents, particularly President Nixon, when he had a similar opportunity, both challenging opportunity, in extricating the United States from its failed invasion of Vietnam and the economy going down the tubes, when Nixon was faced with that, he pulled the United States, you know, not in the best way, but pulled us out of Vietnam and got the economy back on some sort of track, and he did so by really taking the bull by its horns and going to Beijing, which he needed to do in order to really break the crockery of the pro-Taiwan lobby at the time.
Now, you compare that with Obama's inviting them over to the White House for tea and going to the Saban Center and, you know, saying some kind of middle-of-the-road things, it really just doesn't compare.
And it's one of the reasons why Flint Leverett and I wrote our book, Going to Tehran, is that we think it's absolutely essential for President Obama to do what Nixon did and go to Tehran as Nixon went to China, because the Middle East is the make-or-break point for the United States, not just in our foreign affairs, but in our global economic power and what we're able to do here at home.
If we can't get what we're doing in the Middle East on a much better, more positive trajectory, not only will we see the loss of our credibility, power, and prestige in the Middle East, but we will see it globally, and then our ability to continue spending out the wazoo in order to sustain ourselves here at home is gone.
So that's, you know, there's a tremendous amount at stake, and even though President Obama has, as I said, put some good political capital on the table, there is so much more that not only he could do, but really needs to be done.
You know, I kind of wonder whether he agrees with that and figures that if he can get this nuclear deal done, that at least we'll have that out of the way.
And so then you can call him terrorist or whatever, but at least you can't call him nuclear terrorist.
So it would be an easier argument for him to win to later go and try to, I mean, because after all, the nuclear deal, even though in a way it's a bogus issue and it's a safeguarded civilian nuclear program and everybody knows it, on the other hand, boy, is it a sticking point in our relationship with them.
So you think maybe he's going to try to get this taken care of and go to Tehran in the summer?
You know, one can only hope, and I really do hope.
I must say, I'm not sure that Obama has really strategically thought this through in terms of what needs to be done and why from our side.
But the really interesting thing is the developments that have happened on the Iranian side.
Even though Iran has for many, many years expressed its willingness to engage with the United States, whether it's been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Lebanon, they've repeatedly expressed a willingness to do so.
This administration in Tehran has even gone beyond that.
They see reaching a nuclear agreement with the United States as essential, even though they absolutely believe it's a show issue, that if they could get the United States to accept the Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear capability, that that is the essential step for the United States to accept Iran as an independent power, independent sovereign power.
That is not something that a Western government has been willing to do toward Iran, whether it's the Islamic Republic of Iran or even the Shah of Iran or Mufti of Iran, has not been willing to recognize its independence and sovereignty over Iran for several decades.
So that itself, on the Iranian side, they see that as the key, that if they can get the U.S. to recognize their independence and sovereignty through this nuclear deal, recognizing Iran's right to nuclear capability, that that's the way that you can open the way to go forward.
And so what happens to Rouhani if this doesn't work out?
Here there's this, I think, really misplaced idea that somehow Rouhani was brought into office because the sanctions have been so crippling and people are basically starving in the street and they have no other way, and so Rouhani has come to essentially surrender, get sanctions lifted, and everyone is going to be happy.
That has no connection to reality in terms of life in Iran and politics in Iran and where President Rouhani comes from.
President Rouhani is in a really unique position.
He is not a reformist.
He did not win the election in Iran with a majority of reformists voting for him.
There was actually a reformist candidate, a guy who has a Ph.
D. from Stanford, who was on the ballot.
He did not have a majority reformist.
He had a coalition of supporters, a core of them being conservatives, many conservatives from outside of Tehran that voted for him overwhelmingly.
Rouhani actually lost in the city of Tehran, the most basically liberal, pro-Western place in Iran that you can get.
He lost there.
That's not where he's going to live or die based on those votes.
He's a cleric, something that played very well for him.
He's very close to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
They have been very, very close friends for decades.
He was Khamenei's personal representative on the Supreme National Security Council in Iran.
He has deep connections, deep relationships with Iranian politicians, with institutions, areas of government, industry, culture, universities across the board.
He would take a hit if the negotiations with the United States fail, but it's not going to kill his career.
In fact, if negotiations with the United States fail, the thinking in Iran, and I was just there a couple of months ago, is that this will show both Iranians inside Iran and critically important in other countries like in China and other emerging markets where the Iranians want to sell not just their oil but all of their manufactured goods.
It will show those people, both Iranians and people outside, that Iran was the rational actor here.
Iran tried its best to work within a framework of international law, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it was the United States that has, as it has treated the Middle East, key countries in the Middle East for decades, was the country that was unwilling to work within the parameters of international law and to recognize Iran's basic sovereign and treaty rights.
So that's their plan B.
They don't take their marbles and just go into the back room and cry.
Their plan B is that if the United States can't do the deal, that they still come out ahead in terms of important actors both at home and abroad who will continue to help Iran progress.
So in other words, when people say that if this deal fails, then that will strengthen the hardliners, that's correct, but just Rouhani's one of those hardliners, and in a sense, he's kind of their Nixon who only a right-winger like him can do this deal with the U.S. in a way.
Is that right?
In some ways, and I wouldn't necessarily call him a hardliner, but he certainly is from one of the clerical groups that was established to be the antipode to the reformist clerical groups that brought us the last reformist president in Iran, President Khatami.
So I wouldn't necessarily characterize him as a hardcore hardliner, but he's certainly from the conservative, more pragmatic but still deeply conservative clerical sector of Iranian society.
And you're saying that he's not that far out on the limb for doing this.
He's not.
Yeah, I mean, it's a convenient narrative for us to have, but the Iranian government has been willing and has in fact engaged with the United States, when we've asked them to, over Lebanon, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
And they were the ones at the table with the Europeans for most of the past decade.
It was the United States that refused to go to those talks, and essentially it was the United States that even refused to engage in a serious bilateral way until Kerry became Secretary of State.
The Track 2 negotiations that we had with Iran basically over the past year would not have been possible under Secretary Clinton.
That took Secretary Kerry coming into office and allowing and encouraging those Track 2 talks to take place, which happened before the election of Rouhani.
Before the election of President Rouhani.
The Track 2 talks, that means Nicholas Burns going in secret to Oman and all that?
Bill Burns.
Bill Burns, who's our current Deputy Secretary of State.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I got my State Department wings mixed up.
It's an easy way to confuse it, because this is a point about the mainstream media that I find fascinating.
Nick Burns was the number three in the State Department and a great friend of Condi Rice under the Bush administration.
And he was the Bush administration's point person on Iran.
He was in charge of the Iran files.
During the Iraq talks.
He never met a single Iranian.
But the New York Times, PBS NewsHour, CNN, everybody goes to him as the Iran expert, even though the Bush administration never allowed him once to meet with a single Iranian.
So he's the name out there, so it's an easy way to confuse it.
But in fact, it was Bill Burns who was finally allowed, particularly under Secretary Kerry, to hold deeply substantive, regular, direct, respectful meetings with high-level Iranian representatives over the nuclear issue.
Now, I know that Netanyahu has his opinion, and there are a lot of representatives of the neoconservative movement and the Israel lobby in America who clearly have their marching orders and all that.
It seems like if I was in Obama's shoes, I would be arguing that this is by far the best thing for Israel, especially in their construct of the Shiite crescent, where Hezbollah is backed by Syria, is backed by Iran, and it's all this, you know, giant, dangerous, you know, dagger at their throat.
Well, why not have their big brother friends, the Americans, befriend the Iranians, you know, have a chance to weaken the biggest block in that three-piece, or I guess it's a four-piece chain now, because of the American invasion of Iraq, it's the big four-piece Shiite crescent there.
If that's their concern, is the power of Hezbollah, then having the Americans undermine Hezbollah's relationship with Iran or have an avenue to do so seems like a pretty good argument to make, no?
Absolutely.
And, you know, in the end, I mean, this is exactly what happened with China and Nixon.
When Nixon was preparing to go to Beijing, the Japanese and the Taiwanese and the South Koreans were kicking and screaming, literally flipping out, because their entire foreign policies were going to be turned on their heads, their entire foreign policies that were against recognizing at all reality in terms of the People's Republic of China.
But after Nixon went to Beijing, not only did those countries, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan adapt quickly, but they then went into the most successful economic and political developments of their history.
They were never richer and politically better off than when we basically removed the specter of war on their horizons by having the acceptance and the approach brought with China.
And I think a similar thing would happen with both Israel and with Saudi Arabia, even though those two countries are kicking and screaming.
I think, in the end, they would adapt, and they would be so much better off.
Well, now, there was, in Al Jazeera, a trial balloon of, I don't know what origin exactly, but saying that the Saudis decided to tell the Americans, you know what, you guys know what to do.
If you want to make a deal with the Iranians, then we're with you.
Is that not right?
The problem in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia is both one of America's most vital, and I don't say this in terms of my personal opinion, just my assessment in terms of U.S. foreign policy, is one of our most vital, quote-unquote, allies, but is also one of our most dangerous partners.
And what is even more particularly dangerous today in Saudi Arabia is that there is no coherent leadership.
They are going through a slow-motion, dramatic change in leadership, where they're having one king after the other die or become critically sick, all of them in their upper 80s or 90s with horrific health conditions, and not able to make basic, coherent foreign policy decisions.
Within that mix, you have a lot of kind of renegade princes who are doing their own thing with a tremendous amount of money.
And so there may have been one prince who is looking at reality straight in the face and thinks that the Saudis can, as I do, deal with very effectively an American acceptance and rapprochement with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But that one prince is going to have to deal with a constellation of 15,000 other princes all vying for power in this slow-motion transition in Saudi leadership.
And now, I just kind of, as part of a premise to one of my earlier questions, Hillary kind of flippantly said, and everybody knows that Iran's nuclear program is no big deal because it's safeguarded anyway.
Is that right?
Well, to me, I don't know whether it's funny or sad, but the U.S. Combined Intelligence Agencies, all 16 of them, have now come out every year from 2007, so nearly for seven years straight, to say, that's right.
In fact, Iran not only does not have a weapons program, but it hasn't even decided whether to have a nuclear weapons program.
Not only the Combined U.S. Intelligence Agencies have been saying this every year for seven years, but the Israeli Intelligence Agencies have been saying this too.
But notwithstanding those pronouncements from both the Israeli and American Intelligence Agencies, and by the way, most of the other Intelligence Agencies all over the world, there's not a single one, not a single Intelligence Agency anywhere in the world that has come out with any other facts to say that the Iranians have a nuclear weapons program.
Notwithstanding that, you still have very important political players here in Israel, in France, in England, who consistently come out and talk about Iran's march to nuclear weaponry.
Right.
And, you know, it's worth mentioning too, I think, that they say things like they're highly confident, they know that they're not making nukes.
It's not that there's a big black hole in their intelligence and they're just not sure, because there are a few boulders that they haven't been able to look under, or nothing like that.
They say, oh yeah, no, we know they don't have nukes.
We did the homework and we proved it.
Yeah, you know, I mean...
Or that they're not making them, etc.
Yeah, I mean, there certainly is always a theoretical possibility.
You know, no one can exclude that.
But Iran is one of the most thoroughly inspected, above board, overtly inspected countries by the IAEA, the international body charged with inspecting nuclear facilities.
They're in Iran 24-7.
People just don't talk about it here in the United States.
But the IAEA is there 24-7, has pretty good access, and in-place camera monitoring in Iran's nuclear facilities.
When I've talked to people in the IAEA, they say they have better access in Iran to Iran's nuclear facilities than they do in Japan or Canada.
And under this new nuclear deal, they're going to have even more intrusive access where they could have what's called snap inspections, where they don't even have to announce that they're at the door when they ring the doorbell.
So they're one of the most heavily, overtly, transparently inspected places on the planet.
And then on top of that, they have been the focal point for U.S. covert ops and listening in for over 10 years.
We have put literally hundreds of billions of dollars into that, both in terms of human intelligence for listening in and knowing what's going on, but our satellites are constantly on them.
We listen to every phone call, every email of anybody who's anybody in Iran.
So the idea that they've got this whole stash of nuclear weapons or they're just waiting to squirm together somewhere in the desert is someone's fantasy.
Yeah, Hirsch reported that the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA had men all over the place there, and they had replaced the street signs with fake street signs that are really secret radiation detectors, as well as put scales in the roads to measure the weight of the dump trucks going to and fro at different construction sites and everything else.
They were quite thorough.
And in fact, you mentioned the Israelis.
In Haaretz, there are quotes there, the Israelis adopted the exact language of the Americans in saying, we judge with high confidence that they have not yet made the political decision to begin to try, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
They just copied and pasted it, what the Americans said.
That's our position, too.
And that's not the Israeli politicians or the media people, but again, the official position of the intelligence professionals.
And it's something that has remarkably constrained Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel over the past few years, because he has clearly repeatedly come out and not only said that he wanted to bomb Iran, but he has begged both President Obama and President Bush for help to do that.
But remarkably, the security professionals in Israel came out in almost open revolt against Netanyahu in the last year, saying that there was not intelligence to corroborate his claims, and that regardless, this is something that dealing with Iran could be dealt with in much more effective ways, whatever threat may be emanating from there, rather than unleashing the chaos and retribution that an attack would.
And, you know, I'm curious, which al-Qaeda in Syria do you like best?
I have to admit that I have no favorites and no dog in that fight, honestly, which I think is even the more important thing.
It's become, I think, a focal point that al-Qaeda is still permeated within the rebel forces in Syria.
But even if they weren't, why the United States thinks it should have and why it would benefit from having a dog in that fight is beyond me.
This didn't work in Iraq.
Before al-Qaeda was there, of course now al-Qaeda is there, after we said we had a dog in that fight, it didn't work in Libya.
It didn't work in Afghanistan.
The idea that when we choose to become involved in a fight, it's going to turn out to help us is just not borne out by history.
But we continue to make the mistake.
Now this time, my hope is that maybe it will become easier for Obama to extricate himself from the self-inflicted debacle that he has made in Syria by recognizing the deep involvement of al-Qaeda across the rebel groups and finally realize that this is not something in America's interest to be involved in.
Well, you know, all this talk about the meeting in Geneva and whether the Iranians can come or not, it seems like it completely excludes the question of the mujahideen fighting there, whether it's the al-Nusra Group or ISIS or the New Islamic Front, which the State Department was talking nice about, but then they announced that they're al-Qaeda too yesterday, so oops.
But that's after they refused to meet with Bob Ford, our former ambassador.
Before that, maybe they would be okay.
The question was whether or not they would meet with us.
Yeah, but even Prince Bandar, who put them there, can't bring them to Geneva, right?
I mean, we're talking about al-Qaeda in Iraq, basically.
So there's no negotiating with them, and they're half the war.
So what's the point of having a meeting in Geneva at all?
Well, I think what would be useful for a meeting in Geneva is to put what we can in Syria.
And so when I talk about how bad it is for the United States to have a dog in a fight in each of these countries in the Middle East, I don't think that the United States should just turn around and go home and essentially be isolationist.
I believe very much in free trade, and I believe very much in diplomacy and conflict resolution.
And there does need to be real conflict resolution in Syria.
We've had over 100,000 people killed.
The situation is clearly untenable.
But we also have a real asset in Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy.
He has worked on exactly these kind of problems in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Somalia, in Haiti.
And in each of those, and in Afghanistan, where I worked with him personally for about two years, in each of those situations, he didn't come up with a fantastic Pollyanna government for each of these places.
But he has a core formula that is really important and would really help stop the destabilization and killing that we see in Syria, which is that you work with the sitting government, and you work with forces on the ground to gradually bring them into not a liberal democracy, but into a much more representative and inclusive power-sharing arrangement.
And that means you're not going to get great, good governance with no corruption and fantastic human rights treatment, but you will, over time, have a much more stable environment where far fewer people are killed and the opportunity for that country to politically reconstitute itself along its own lines, its own values, and its own position in the world.
And that's important for the United States, not because I'm a do-gooder, but because we do have a vested interest, I think, in stability there, because the continuing war in Syria is clearly inflaming Iraq.
It's started to really inflame Turkey with al-Qaeda attacks and bombings in Turkey, a longtime NATO ally and a critically important NATO ally.
It's also started to resume suicide bombings in Lebanon.
It's something that could really infect the entire region, even beyond the horrific killing that we've seen in Syria.
So I do think the U.S. has an interest there, and I think the United States could work with really competent professionals like Lakhdar Brahimi, like Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, who has been, before he was their foreign minister, he was their ambassador to the United Nations.
He is someone who has memorized every piece of international law and is extremely focused on international law.
Again, not because he's a do-gooder, but because he has come to see international law as critically important to constrain hyperpowers, which today is the United States, but it could be Russia tomorrow.
So he's a really important figure to have on this and would be really constructive.
The Iranian foreign minister is similar.
He has his Ph.
D. in international law from the University of Denver.
He studied under Madeleine Albright's father.
He's another person really focused on international law to constrain these abuses of power by overactive hyperpowers.
This is a really unique opportunity to bring them in and to put the United States on a different, more constructive footing, not just regarding the conflict in Syria, not just regarding the nuclear issue in Iran, but to really position the United States in this new era where we have a rising China, we have different challenges, to put us in a different position to confront these critically important challenges.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Hillary.
Thank you for having me.
All right, everybody.
That is Hillary Mann Leverett.
The website is goingtotehran.com.
That's also the title of the book now out in paperback, Going to Tehran, Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran, co-authored with her husband, Flint Leverett.
And that's Antiwar Radio for today.
Thanks, everybody, very much for listening.
We'll be back here next Sunday from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Thank you.