All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Introducing our first guest today is Daniel Levy, he's Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation and a former negotiator in the Rabin and Barak governments in Israel.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Well, it's very good to have you back on the show.
It's been a while since we've talked, and coincidentally, it looks like you have a brand new article in Haaretz, Rethinking Israel's Approach to Iran, it's called in Haaretz.
There are better options.
I guess I should have mentioned Daniel's website is prospectsforpeace.com for his own personal blog there.
So why don't you take us through.
So you say in here that there are three reasons behind Israel's belligerence and threats toward a military or about a military action against Iran, and you list those three reasons, and then you explain why those three reasons no longer make any sense, as events have overtaken the policy at this point.
Well, I mean, the three reasons I list as the supposed, although I would argue anyway flawed logic to why one has heard such a bellicose, threatening rhetoric coming out of Israel would be one that theoretically means that the Iranians may increase leverage vis-a-vis Iran.
They may think, wow, you know, we've really got something to worry about.
Maybe we need to be more forthcoming in negotiations.
That would be one.
The world may look at that and say, hey, this would be a disaster if there's an attack.
We'd better get more serious, up the sanctions, push the Iranians further.
That would be two.
And the thing I speculate that could perhaps be a third reason is maybe Israel's trying to get the world, the international community used to the idea that there may actually be a military action.
And it's kind of, well, you know, we said all along, if the sanctions regime, if diplomacy, if other things don't work.
Like I said, Scott, I think that logic was probably flawed from the start.
But today, all the more so when you have a situation whereby, first of all, on the sanctions, with everything that's going on between the U.S. and some European powers and Russia, I think the idea that one can maintain and carry forward an ever more pressing U.N. sanctions regime against Iran, which was never very convincing anyway, I think really has had the final nail put in its coffin.
Secondly, rather than the international community using this as leverage, I think what you see and what you've seen coming out of the most senior elements of the defense establishment of the Pentagon in the U.S., from Gates to Mullins to McConnell and others, has been a vocal and public signal to the Israelis, don't do it.
This is not smart.
And thirdly, I'd argue that rather than having the effect on Iran, that it causes the Iranians to think twice, I think in many ways, it encourages the Iranians to move ahead with whatever kind of deterrent it is they are trying to achieve, because they look at their strategic environment and they say, not only do we have U.S. forces stationed in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, surrounded on all sides, but that also you have this threat coming out of Israel.
So I'm arguing, and as you mentioned, I'm arguing this in the Israeli newspaper, in Haaretz, that this is a very flawed policy from the Israelis, and I'm kind of talking to my fellow Israelis and saying, think again, rather than sounding unnerved, unhappy when the U.S. sends Undersecretary Bill Burns to Geneva to sit in on the talks, Israel should, I think, be saying not only should he be sitting there, he should be actively participating and the diplomatic channel should be used far more assertively, should be used with far more of an emphasis, and that Israel should stop playing the role of threatener-in-chief and should think about not only encouraging diplomacy, but also looking to the future.
Perhaps there needs to be a deterrence position, but a strike is the worst possible option.
And the one thing I wanted to share with you, because it's also in today's papers in Israel, Scott, is you actually have one of the candidates, he's trailing, he's unlikely to become the new leader of the Kadima party.
As people know, Israel's prime minister is in a position where he has to stand down as a primary leadership election to be head of the governing party of Kadima.
One of those candidates is the current Israeli interior minister, it's a very senior cabinet position in Israel, Meir Schuttrich.
And he actually comes out today and says, and I'm going to quote him here, attacking Iran on our own initiative is a megalomaniacal, reckless idea.
Israel is a small country, and its role is to make the world aware of the issues.
Israel should certainly not be the one to attack or talk about attacking.
Iran is not all that much of a threat, and there is no need to frighten us every morning.
I'm not sure that when Iran has nuclear weapons, this is him saying this, it will immediately use them against us.
And it goes on and on.
So I just think it's interesting that that is being said by a senior minister, and someone who, albeit, is very unlikely to win that leadership election, but who is running in that.
Well, we sure don't hear much of that kind of talk in America.
But I know that Mayor Dagan, I believe the head of the Mossad, and I don't know how to say her name, Zippy Livni, the foreign minister, have both said, at least in private, reported in Haaretz later on, that Iran is not really a threat.
And I think Livni even said, even if they had nuclear weapons, that doesn't mean we'd necessarily have to have a conflict with them.
Yeah, I mean, that was, as you mentioned, that was reported in an article in Haaretz some months back.
It was reported secondhand by people who claim to have been in the room when she said that.
There's no quote like that, I'd say, unfortunately, on record.
I think the gist is that there's a lot more, as is so often the case, there's a lot more to the debate that's going on here than one tends to be aware of following the mainstream media in the US.
Yeah, no doubt about that.
Now, one thing which, you know, I know you're limited for space and time and how much you can include in an article like this, but I hate to see an article like this that doesn't remind everybody, or perhaps even teach them for the first time, since so many people have never even learned this before, that there are IAEA inspectors on site, they have a current safeguards agreement they're operating under, and the IAEA verifies that they're only enriching uranium to 3.6%, and you can't make a nuke out of that.
Right, I mean, I think there are, but clearly not all of the IAEA concerns have been addressed by the Iranians.
It is an ongoing process.
I agree with you that a hell of a lot more recognition should be given of the role the IAEA can play, and a hell of a lot more emphasis should be placed on moving through that IAEA route in terms of addressing the Iranian issue.
Look, their assessments are not always that reliable, and I don't have the inside scoop to really come out in terms of where things exactly stand.
I think there are indications that there is more than a civil nuclear energy program going on, but I think the way to check on that is to get the IAEA safeguards in place.
The way isn't to continue to threaten, to continue just to go the sanctions route, and to be so under-emphasizing what one does diplomatically.
I think it is fair to point out that the combination of a uranium enrichment program, which my sense at least is that some of the Iranian leadership are trying to send signals that this is more than civilian.
The combination of that and some of the worst rhetoric that comes out of the Iranian president clearly cast a shadow on how this issue is dealt with, and how Israelis feel about this.
I just think the response to that has been the wrong one.
I think what it's done, and especially the threat, and especially the way it's been handled, what it's done is it's strengthened the most hard-line, ultra-conservative elements within the Iranian regime.
The president, Ahmadinejad, is not the ultimate arbiter.
There are certainly other centers of power, most notably around the supreme leader, Khamenei, in Tehran.
There's a serious struggle going on within the conservative camp between the more pragmatic element and the more hard-line element.
We are playing right into the hands, the most hard-line element, right into the hands of Ahmadinejad.
Well, now, you mentioned how the American military has made it pretty clear in public and apparently to the Israeli leadership as well that they do not want a third front here.
Around here, it seemed less and less likely over the past couple of months, I think, that Dick Cheney would be able to get away with getting us involved in a war there, maybe if there were an adequate pretext or something like that.
Is that your feeling in Israel, too, that this is becoming less likely, that the Israelis will launch a unilateral strike, or you think this is still a big enough danger of happening that that's why you felt you had to address it in Haaretz today?
Yeah, I wouldn't like to mislead the listeners.
I think it is still a real debate taking place within Israeli decision-making, security, military, and political circle.
I am strongly of the opinion that Israel does not do this without America having the opportunity to red-light it.
In other words, to veto such an action.
I don't think Israel does this as a rogue action, as a real unilateral action.
I think the extent to which there has been pushback from the Pentagon is causing a rethink.
When they do the scenario planning in Israel, it's making that ledger look different in terms of the benefits and costs.
My own sense, and it's a fluid situation, is that a decision has not been taken on the Israeli side one way or the other.
I agree with you that there is probably less cause for concern today than there was perhaps some months ago.
I would, though, say the following.
I think it's still incumbent upon all of us to be focused on this, to keep our eyes on this, to continue to warn again how absolutely crazy an Israeli or other military action would be.
And I think one should at least remain concerned that when you do still have this proximity of American and Iranian forces, given where we are in the Iraq situation, but I think given all of that, nonchalance or saying, ah, this isn't something to worry about anymore would be the wrong approach.
Well, I appreciate that.
And as far as that goes, I basically just spend all my time on this show debunking the case for war with Iran.
So if you'd like to discuss the nuclear program in greater depth later on sometime, I sure would like to talk with you about it.
But you talk in your article that's at HowRets today, again, it's called There Are Better Options, and you talk about some of the likely consequences for America, for Israel, for the entire Middle East.
And the thing that we most often harp on on this show is the threat to American soldiers in Iraq who are surrounded by Shiites and, in fact, the Badr Corps, which was created by the Iranian government back in the 1980s and is certainly loyal to them.
But beyond that, you talk about all different sorts of destabilizing effects that could happen throughout the region in the event of a strike.
Well, absolutely.
I think that there is already an ability of the Iranian leadership to speak above the heads of Arab and Muslim leaders, people who are leaders in Arab and Muslim states, directly to the street, directly to the public, because of how short America's credibility is, because of the Israeli-Palestinian situation, which, of course, is something that has such a huge ramification for how America is perceived in the region.
And I think that if there were a strike, the capacity for the Iranian leadership to go on a PR offensive, certainly within the Arab and Muslim worlds, but I think well beyond that against the U.S., against Israel, would be very significant.
There are Shia communities in the Gulf states, Bahrain is majority Shia, in Saudi, in other places there are American bases dotted throughout the Gulf.
Obviously, you've talked about it, we don't even, it goes without saying what that could mean to the American military presence in Iraq.
Don't forget that Afghanistan is on Iran's border.
Now Iran is no fan of the Taliban, but under these circumstances, as an ad hoc gesture to try and stir up more trouble in Afghanistan, I think is certainly a possibility.
And that's before one even mentions what that would do to, of course, the price of oil.
We saw throughout the world, actually, the destabilizing effects through the riots in many countries, in Africa, in Asia, elsewhere, when oil was going up in price.
One of the reasons, by the way, I think that the prices have gone down and have stabilized to some degree, is because people see the threat of a strike on Iran receding.
Plus, think about it, think about how worried people are today, and I think much of the response on the Russia-Georgia, Asia-South Ossetia, has been very misplaced.
I think it's the worst thing to do, to place this in a let's go back to the Cold War context.
But think about what it would do to Europe's dependence, for instance, on Russian oil and energy supplies, if you had a strike on Iran, with the likely effects that would have on oil supply, possibly on the conflict in the Straits of Hormuz.
So the implications are so massive that, obviously, in the article I'm cautioning fellow Israelis, but obviously much beyond that, I think that in the US, this notion that everyone repeats, that all options are still on the table, and that bigger power can only be deployed if they're deployed with bigger sticks, I think there needs to be a good faith effort.
And I don't think it will come across to the Iranians as being a good faith effort at negotiations, if it's combined with bigger sticks.
And that's what one of the people, whoever may be elected next year, might take this approach that we up the threat, in parallel to upping any willingness to show more diplomatic flexibility.
I think that would be a mistake.
I think one has to get in the room and see if one can thrash out a grand bargain with Iran.
I'm not saying it would be easy.
If it doesn't succeed, and I think there are lots of tools one could remove from the Iranian mischief-making arsenal, if the negotiations aren't going well.
We know that back in 2003, they offered a grand bargain.
They were willing to negotiate every problem that one could think of.
Sure, and that would include things that greatly trouble the Israelis, like the Iranian involvement in supporting violence against Israelis, whether that's deployed by Hezbollah or Palestine, I mean, Jihad or Hamas or whoever.
Man opposition to the peace process.
All those things were on the table, as well as, of course, which is vital for the US, Iranian cooperation, trying to stabilize the situation in Iraq.
It was an informal proposal.
I'm not sure that exactly what was written down there would be what the outcome of a bargaining process would look like, but it gives you the contours, and a colleague of mine at the New America Foundation, Trent Leverett, was very involved in this, and it's worth people looking that up, because it gives you the contours of how one could begin to address the broad range of issues on the table.
All right, everybody, we're talking with Daniel Levy, Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation, former negotiator in the Rabin and Barak governments, and you're on the phone from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem?
I am, Tel Aviv.
In Tel Aviv, too.
All right, now...
Sabbath is rapidly descending on us here.
I'm sorry, what did you say was rapidly descending?
Oh, the Sabbath, I said.
I thought you were in the Jerusalem references.
Yeah, sorry, I got you.
It's right here.
It's a bit spiritual on you there.
Yeah, yeah, I got you.
Okay, now, let me ask you about Netanyahu.
Is this guy coming back to power, and should I be worried?
Here's where we are in the political cycle in Israel.
On September the 17th, the current governing party, the Kadima Party, will hold a primary election to choose its new leader.
Whoever wins that election, and the leading candidates are the current foreign minister, Tippi Livni, deemed to be something of a pragmatist and moderate with some justification, although I still think we don't know enough about her and how she would be a prime minister.
But I think it's an interesting option.
Her main opponent is the current transportation minister, a former chief of staff and defense minister, Shaul Moffat, much more of a hardliner.
In fact, he often sounds more like Bibi Netanyahu than Bibi Netanyahu.
Those are the two lead candidates.
Whoever wins that primary then has a 42 to two-day period with the possibility of an extension to try and form a new government without going to elections.
Israel's political system is a parliamentary democracy.
The 120 seat Knesset is divided into changes.
It fluctuates, but it's about 13 different party factions.
It's very unruly, very difficult to manage.
But whoever wins that primary can try and form a government without going to elections.
If they succeed, Israel does not have to go to general elections until November 2010.
If they do not succeed, if Livni or Moffat do not succeed in forming a governing coalition, Israel within about 100 days will go to elections.
That means relatively early in 2009, February or March, and then a new government will be formed probably by whoever gets the largest number of seats in a new election.
What are the polls saying to us about what might happen if there are new elections?
And as to the chances of forming a coalition or not, we don't even know who's won the Kadima primary yet.
Some people who I've spoken to in the last days here will tell you, look, no one goes so quickly to elections.
Although it seems like it would be very difficult to form a new coalition, it's not impossible.
So it's more in the 50-50 realm rather than the 90% realm that we're going to elections.
There is a sense that Israel is edging much closer to elections.
In terms of what does the polling tell us at the moment about what would happen in those elections, Netanyahu and his Likud party are in the lead.
But if you have the Kadima party led by Livni, then that lead in today's poll shrinks to zero, actually.
They're tied.
Both parties get 28 seats.
So I think most people here today would, if you force them to place a bet, would say Netanyahu is likely to be Israel's next prime minister.
It's far from certain that that happens already in the next few months, and it's far from certain that that happens at all.
As to what that would mean, Netanyahu's rhetoric and his positions are quite chilling.
Certainly no prospect, at least in terms of declaratively speaking, for serious negotiations or withdrawals of Palestinian territories in terms of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, likewise in terms of Syria and the Golan Heights, and of course, he's pretty out there on Iran.
Netanyahu in power?
We've lived through a Netanyahu administration already.
It wasn't very pleasant.
It wasn't much fun, to say the least.
But he was containable.
That took quite a lot of American effort, by the way, to make sure that not too many matches were lying around in his vicinity.
But he was containable.
I would not get into too much of an oy vey space if one had again to deal with a Netanyahu administration with the caveat that it would depend on what the international climate was like at the time.
If you had a more belligerent, gung-ho, militarily assertive government in the US whose fingers weren't feeling as burnt as they are right now, then I think we'd have quite a lot to worry about.
Well, back when Netanyahu was the Prime Minister, before he did succeed in destroying the Oslo process, didn't he?
Yes.
Yeah, he very effectively did.
And I think the efforts to resuscitate Oslo were probably doomed, because once it was dead, it was dead.
And we had to look for a different way forward.
But anyway, yeah, he quite effectively killed it.
And now, this is something.
Netanyahu came to the United States right after September 11th.
And he came on TV, and he said, listen, your enemies are our enemies.
Al-Qaeda is the Taliban, is Iran, is the Al-Aqsa murderers brigade, is Islamic Jihad, is Hezbollah, is everybody.
And we have to conflate all Islamic radicalism together in one big group and together wage war against it.
And apparently, his buddies, the neocons in the administration, were pretty successful in convincing Bush that that was the model for the war on terrorism.
That's what we're suffering through now.
This is what you're talking about when you say that the Iranians hate the Taliban.
But then again, if they're really threatened by America and or Israel, they might just find that our false accusations against them are true and that they all have much more in common with each other in common defense against us.
Exactly.
And Hamas and Iran are not natural bedfellows.
You know, when we hear whether it's Israeli-American neocons or Israeli right-wingers saying Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, this is one smooth continuum.
Hamas and Al-Qaeda are absolutely at each other's throats.
Hamas and Iran are allied to the extent to which they're allied, largely because of our dumb policies, which have pushed Hamas into an Iranian embrace.
So, you know, Scott, I think it's like anything in life, personal life, in business life and also in political life.
If you see a problem and you don't disaggregate and you just see it as this one huge, threatening cloud, this one overwhelming thing, then there's very little you can do about it.
If you see nuance, if you do disaggregate, if you say, wait a minute, one can deal like this with Hamas, one can deal like this with the Iranians, one can deal like this with the Syrians, and then you begin to distill things.
Here are the Pashtuns in the northwest frontier province in the Federal Administrative Territory areas in Pakistan that we can deal with like this.
If you begin to disaggregate, you actually reduce most of these problems to more manageable dimensions.
But as long as you're trapped, whether you're Israeli or American or whoever, as long as you're trapped in a global war on terror mindset, advantage is always with the other side, because you've just magnified the other side to proportions and dimensions that actually you cannot effectively deal with and effectively contain.
That's been the huge tragedy of the last few years, and I'd argue it's been a tragedy for people in Israel as well, who spent much of the 1990s having, and sometimes winning the argument, and Rabin began to win this argument, having them winning the argument that actually it's not so much a war on terror that Israel was facing as the repercussions of an occupation that has to end.
And people in Israel in the 1990s were drawing the correct dots, were connecting the dots correctly in terms of if you want to get security and more effectively push back against terror, you have to address the occupation, the occupation, the occupation.
And suddenly the whole debate in Israel was pushed back light years when everyone said, oh, thankfully we don't, not everyone, of course, but certainly those on the right said, see, now we can have a whole different narrative.
It's the war on terror.
There's no grievances.
There's no causes.
There's no justifications.
They're all the same.
They're all Islamist, et cetera, et cetera.
And once we went down that path, it's taken us exactly where we see we are today with a much more destabilized Middle East, a much less manageable situation, a much stronger al-Qaeda because it's totally played into their hands.
And the challenge now is to reel as much of that back in.
First and foremost, that's going to depend on how Washington begins to recalibrate how it addresses these issues and how it moves beyond a war on terror.
I'd love to believe that that can happen come January or begin to happen come January 2009.
I'm not sure it can.
It will take a heck of a fight in terms of who's going to be in key positions in a new administration and what's the defining narrative.
Well, I'm sorry.
I know you're out of time.
I wanted to ask you real quickly if you could tell me what you think of J Street.
Are you part of that?
And do you think that that will be able to change the debate?
The new, more liberal Israel lobby in America will be able to change the debate.
We can at least have some honesty about this.
Well, I certainly emphatically hope so.
I'm on the advisory council.
I'm a very keen and enthusiastic supporter and I'm very close personally and emotionally to what J Street is trying to do, which is to make the case that you can be.
And in fact, you are far more effectively and practically pro-Israel if you're advocating American diplomatic leadership to finally get to a two-state solution, implement a two-state solution, help to end the occupation in ways that make sense for Israel's security, in ways that make sense for the Palestinians and the rest of the region.
If you're engaging with Syria, if you're using diplomacy first when it comes to Iran, if you're not going with the kind of unilateral, militaristic, destabilizing policies that took America into Iraq, all of those things are not only the J Street argument would be in the American interest, but they're also in the Israeli interest.
And what J Street is trying to do inside the Jewish community and well beyond the Jewish in the broader American public is to carry that argument to public elected officials and to show those officials that there's an alternative narrative and an alternative way of behaving on these issues, and to be blunt, to move money on this issue and to show that it's in the most reductive cost-benefit equation.
You're not going to take a financial blow if you speak out and take realistic, pragmatic, forward-thinking diplomacy first, get disresolved positions on Israel and the Middle East, because what J Street is trying to do is mobilize resources for public elected officials who are willing to stand up and take this line.
There are many people who fall into that category.
I think there are more people who would like to fall into that category.
And in addition to the political work, there's a hell of a lot of educational work to do.
You do that.
I do that.
Many of us do that.
And that's something else that we've got to continue to emphasize.
All right.
I want to thank you very much for your time today, everybody.
That's Daniel Levy, Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation, former negotiator in the Rabin and Barack governments.
His personal blog is prospectsforpeace.com.
What a great URL.
Thanks very much for your time today, Daniel.
Thank you so much.
Take care.
