For Pacifica Radio, February 3rd, 2012.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks for joining us.
This is Anti-War Radio here on Pacifica.
Again, I'm Scott Horton.
Our guest tonight is Flint Leverett.
He teaches foreign relations at Penn State University.
And is a fellow, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation.
He used to be Senior Director for Middle Eastern Affairs on the National Security Council.
Was Middle East expert on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff and Senior Analyst at the CIA.
He left the Bush Administration and government service in the spring of 2003 because of disagreements about Middle East policy and the conduct of the war on terror more generally.
And the same can be said for his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett.
And they both keep the blog together, Race for Iran.
At raceforiran.com Their brand new piece today is, Hype or Reality?
Will Israel attack Iran before the U.S. Presidential Election?
Welcome back to the show, Flint.
How are you doing?
Very good, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And again, that article is called, Hype or Reality?
Will Israel attack Iran before the U.S. Presidential Election?
At raceforiran.com And there's certainly been a lot of hype.
Articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times and all over the place.
About how perhaps Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, former Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, are left thinking that they'll have no choice but to go ahead and start a war with Iran over their nuclear program.
So, which is it?
What do you think?
Hype or Reality?
Well, you know, I've contended for some time that I thought it was unlikely Israel would strike Iran militarily on its own.
Primarily because, if you game it out, the options that Israel has for striking a few key targets inside Iran on its own are really not very strong, not very impressive.
They could go after a small number of targets they might think were of high priority to Iran's nuclear program.
But, a couple of those targets, Natanz, and in particular, the new facility, the new enrichment facility at a place called Fordow, outside Gom, those are hardened, especially Fordow.
And, you know, the people that I talk to who do this kind of planning for a living, they say it's really doubtful whether the Israelis could do that much damage to Fordow from the air.
That, if they really wanted to be confident of destroying Fordow, they would have to literally put commandos on the ground who would have to fight their way into the facility and destroy it.
And, to contemplate Israel doing that, you know, that far away, that deep inside Iran, with all the risks that commandos would be killed or captured, you know, I just have never seen it as a high probability outcome.
And, I've been more inclined to think that the Israelis are doing this to put pressure on the United States, to put pressure on Europe and others to do more on sanctions, putting pressure on Iran in other ways.
But, I have to say, you know, the hype, if it is just that, is getting to levels and taking forms that I haven't seen before.
And, I think that, you know, what you see reflected in the Washington Post reporting, some other reporting, is, I think, genuine concern on the part of the American military that the Israelis might really be gearing up for something.
Now, it could well be that, you know, just the hype is working, the spin is working, and now you've got the American military thinking that Israel is going to strike.
And, still, from any logical perspective, it doesn't make sense to me how an Israeli leader could get to this point of decision and think Israel really comes out ahead by doing this.
Well, I think it's really pretty much been the consensus for years, hasn't it, that any Israeli strike would simply be meant as a prelude to a full-scale American war with Iran.
This was part of, back when Steve Clemens broke the story about David Wombser shopping the idea around that maybe Dick Cheney should go around George W. Bush's back and make an agreement with Ehud Olmert to go ahead and start the war by some kind of pretext in the Persian Gulf back in 2007.
And then, of course, Mayor Dagan, when he was still the head of Mossad, is in the WikiLeaks basically threatening Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state in the Bush years there, that if you, our red line, we admit, our red line is closer than yours is.
I mean, you know, the place where we want to go ahead and start a war is sooner than you.
But wouldn't you rather go ahead and start it than have us drag you in, kicking and screaming?
Kind of a blackmail going on there.
So I think it's always really pretty much been the assumption that that would be the Israeli strategy.
If they were to start it without coordinating it with the United States, it would be that the United States would have to back them up, would have to finish the job.
And if that meant sending in paratroopers to blow up the Fordow facility up close and personal, then that's what it would mean.
Yes, but in the end, the Israelis have never actually pulled the trigger on that.
And just, you know, think about it, that to start a military operation, the success of which requires, you know, a decision by the United States to come in behind you, over which you have no direct control.
I mean, you have various ways to influence it, but you have no direct control.
And, you know, I don't give the Obama administration credit for much on its Iran policy, but I will say, as best I can make out, they have said pretty clearly that they do not want to go to war with Iran, at least not right now.
And so it would be difficult for me to imagine that an Israeli leader could have a high level of confidence that, oh, if I start this and I need the Americans to come in behind me, you know, they will be there.
That would be an extremely risky calculation for an Israeli leader to make.
Well, and Gareth Porter is reporting this week that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dempsey, when he went to Israel, he went there for the purpose and apparently did deliver a message that if you start this war without us, we will not back you up.
Although, I don't know how the Americans, I guess I should say, really think that they can dictate those terms.
Because if the Israelis were to strike, then the Iranians would be way more likely than not, anyway, to hit American targets in the Persian Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, etc., right?
Well, you know, a lot will depend on the Iranian response.
If the Israelis strike, you know, everything that I see being reported in the media, everything I hear from my own contacts, is that, you know, if the Iranian response doesn't inflict significant casualties on American military forces, I guess in the Gulf or elsewhere, that the American military, their plan at this point would be just to ride it out.
You know, the Israelis did what they did, and if the Iranian retaliation is focused on Israel and Israel-related targets, the American military, I don't think at this point, plans on doing very much.
And now, you know, if the Iranians retaliated in ways in which you had a number of American service people killed, that might be another story.
But even then, you know, I think we're probably a far cry from talking about, you know, a U.S. invasion of Iran or something of that scale.
So I have to say, I hate being in this position as an analyst, but while, you know, logically, all the things that have made me think the Israelis, in the end, weren't going to do it on their own, all those things are still operative.
And I guess my bottom line is still that, you know, it's more likely that they won't do it on their own than that they will.
But I have to say, you know, I see more people and more people that I consider serious spun up about this on our side than I've seen before.
I'm talking with Flint Levert, Professor of International Relations at Penn State, former State Department, CIA, and National Security Council.
And we're talking about the threat of an Israeli and or American aggressive war launched against Iran and their nuclear program.
And I hate to get bogged down just into the politics of it, but really, from out here in Texas, this is like trying to be a Kremlinologist reading tea leaves about this far away capital, where these decisions are being made.
And I wonder what you think about these stories.
I'm thinking particularly, I guess, this one in the Washington Post, where the President, Obama, and his Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, seem to be saying, Hmm, gee, yeah, you know, we're kind of concerned that the Israelis might start a war, but what are you going to do?
Am I right?
What kind of attitude?
They don't seem to be saying, and we have told Netanyahu in no uncertain terms, that he better not.
I think that those reports, they strike me as quite plausible.
Obama, during his presidency, has never shown himself willing to have what I would call a really unpleasant conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And it's not as if Netanyahu hasn't provided ample provocation for Obama to have that sort of conversation with him.
But Obama has been politically very cautious on it, and he's obviously running for re-election right now.
And I think he does not want to risk any kind of really public confrontation with Netanyahu while he's running for re-election.
And I think it's a not very well-considered position, but it does seem to be the administration's position.
You know, yeah, he may be gearing up for this.
We've told Netanyahu we don't think this would be a good idea.
You know, he's not asking us for permission.
We're not giving him permission.
But, you know, in the end, he might do it.
And it is not very well-considered.
It's in some ways a feckless position.
But I think that is the position Obama has taken.
He is not going to have the kind of conversation with Netanyahu or exert the kind of pressure on Netanyahu that, you know, if Netanyahu really wants to do this, might stop him.
All right.
And now, I guess a little bit of the background here.
Of course, the facts, they hardly ever have anything to do with the arguments.
And so far, even in this discussion, the facts are now basically conceded to by the hawks.
And that is by Israeli intelligence and American intelligence that they're not making nukes over there.
Clapper, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence testified just three days ago in front of the Senate that they have not yet taken the decision to begin to make nukes.
And apparently, the head of Israeli Mossad, for some reason, notified the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that that is the official position of the Israeli government, which is the first time we've heard that, I think, just this week, right?
Yeah.
And I interpreted that.
I saw those reports that when the chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff was in Israel, that he received this briefing from Mossad.
And the way I interpreted that was that this is Mossad's way of saying that if Bibi wants to attack Iran, we aren't going along with it.
We don't support it.
You know, to the extent that we're involved in the security cabinet process that ultimately produces the decision, you know, we're going to be saying that there's no need to do this.
That's how I interpreted that report, that this is Mossad telling the Americans that, you know, we're not on board for this.
I mean, they really do use almost the exact language of the American NIE.
Like, they're informing the Americans that we are exactly on board with you guys on this.
Yes.
And I think for the Mossad to do this and for them to do it right now in the context of a visit by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that, you know, this is not just, oh, you know, Mossad analysts just happened to have come to this, you know, conclusion at this particular point in time.
Mossad is sending a signal.
Well, and, you know, it originally appeared in Haaretz, buried, you know, six or eight paragraphs in, in a story about Ehud Barak saying that he and Netanyahu have not yet decided on whether to bomb.
But then they went ahead at Haaretz.
I found a second story where they make this the headline, Israel, Iran still mulling whether to build nuclear bomb.
So that leads me directly to a question I was going to say to later in the interview, but it's right there.
Why can't we just recognize Israel and America, the independence of Iran and just have a friendly relationship and deal with them with such honest and open handshakes that they don't feel the pressure to build a nuclear weapon?
I mean, for crying out loud, the only reason they opened up this facility, this Fordow facility near Qom is because the Americans and the Israelis have been threatening to bomb them for eight years in a row.
Nine.
I absolutely agree with you, but your question is, why don't Israel and the United States do this?
You know, I think the answer to that is that for either the United States or Israel to do what you just outlined, to kind of accept the Islamic Republic as an enduring, independent political entity that has legitimate national interests and that those interests include safeguarded enrichment of uranium inside Iran, would represent a major strategic revision for either Israel or the United States.
Israel's national security strategy, its military doctrine, rests on Israeli dominance.
Israel being the only country that has certain kinds of military capabilities, including nuclear weapons.
Israel being able to use force first, preemptively, basically for whatever purpose, whenever it wants and for whatever aim it deems necessary.
An Iranian independent nuclear capability, even if Iran hasn't weaponized, if it's mastered the fuel cycle, when Israel has gone through this and gamed it out for its own purposes, the military, the intelligence services, and so forth, they come to the conclusion that this might actually begin to inhibit, on the margin, Israeli freedom of military action.
And you can't have that.
So Iran can't have an independent nuclear capability, even if it is safeguarded, even if it is not weaponized.
And I think the Americans face kind of a version of the same problem.
We want to be kind of the ultimate guarantor, provider of security in the Persian Gulf.
And Iran is a challenge to that.
Iran has this message of strategic independence.
The United States is an outside power.
We shouldn't be subordinating ourselves to the outside power.
And their insistence on their right to enrich uranium is part of that campaign.
For the United States to accept that, to acquiesce to that, even though I would agree with you it's the only policy that really makes sense, but for the United States to do that would mean that the United States has to be willing to say that there are some of our ambitions in the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East, that we're going to have to back off of.
A little bit.
And American administrations have found it very, very hard to do that.
It took 20 years for the United States to come to a rational policy toward the People's Republic of China.
You know, from 1949 until 1969 when Nixon is inaugurated, our policy toward the People's Republic of China is about what our policy is toward the Islamic Republic of Iran.
We want to isolate it, we want to strangle it economically, and we basically want a different political order there.
And okay, it didn't work in Asia.
Finally Nixon and Kissinger came to terms with that reality and readjusted American policy in some very important ways.
We need to do that with our policy toward this very important country in the Persian Gulf, but we're not there yet.
All right, I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Flint Leverett.
He teaches foreign policy at Penn State University and is a fellow at the New America Foundation and keeps the great blog with his wife Hillary Mann Leverett at RaceForIran.com.
And their most recent piece is up there today, Hype or Reality?
Will Israel Attack Iran Before the U.S. Presidential Election?
And one of the things that you bring up here is for maybe one of the things leaning toward the idea that Netanyahu might just be crazy or wrong enough to do such a thing is the fallout from the Arab Spring and the general turmoil throughout the Middle East sort of seems to have put some of these Israeli thinkers anyway in the position of deciding, well, hey, why not go ahead now while everything is in turmoil and go ahead and create some more?
Rather than trying to cool everything off before we go starting more trouble, maybe now is the perfect opportunity to just go ahead and dive in, like throwing your hat over the fence.
Now you've got to climb it.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
I mean, I think there are plenty of national security professionals in Israel who are very worried about the Arab Spring, what it means for Israel's strategic position in a certain way.
I don't think they're wrong to be, you know, from their perspective, I don't think they're wrong to be worried about that.
And for many of them, it would lead to a certain kind of caution that when the region's already in turmoil, you don't know how bad things could get in Egypt or in other countries that this is not the time for Israel to be going around sort of shaking the regional pot in another direction.
Better just to hunker down, keep a sharp eye out, see how things shake out, and then evaluate the strategic situation and what it makes sense for Israel to do.
But I think that in that context, there's another camp within the Israeli security establishment that says, you know, this is the time when Israel has to reach out kind of affirmatively, offensively, and try to reshape the regional balance in a way that's going to be more favorable to Israel.
And for people who want to think like that, then the way to do that is you take out Iran's nuclear program.
Even if you take it out for only a relatively short, finite period of time, you at least send a signal that Israel is going to defend its interests, Israel is still going to be capable of acting first.
It's what Israelis like to call deterrence.
I think that's kind of a misleading use of the term, but that's another story.
But I think there is a camp within the establishment that would argue that yes, the region is unsettled, but this is precisely the time when Israel needs to reach out and by affirmative, proactive, offensive military action, try and shape it in a direction that's going to be more favorable to Israeli interests.
Again, I think that's a very, very high risk sort of approach to take, but I think there is a current within Israel's national security establishment that would argue that.
Now, again, everybody, Flint Leverett worked for the Secretary of State.
He was on the National Security Council as a former top-level CIA analyst and left the Bush administration basically in conflict over, I guess, the war on terrorism in general, but specifically Iran issues.
But I wonder whether, when you daydream about it, if they had just listened to you, Flint, back in the Colin Powell years or whatever, over there at the State Department, maybe if David Wilmser hadn't have been around, and you guys had the chance to work with the Iranians on your own terms.
Do you think that you could have worked out a deal where no one would even be worried about them obtaining nukes because we're all getting along by now or just no way or what?
I wouldn't want to say it would be kumbaya, but I think that, yes, if we had picked up on opportunities that we had during that period, the kind of cooperation that Iran extended to us in Afghanistan, I think if we had really worked with the Iranians beyond the initial period, kept working with them, I think, quite frankly, we probably wouldn't have to be involved.militarily in Afghanistan today.
And I think on the nuclear issue, this is at a time when Iranians weren't spinning centrifuges.
They weren't enriching uranium.
For two years, between 2003 and 2005, the Iranians suspended enrichment-related activities.
And I think if we had tried to strike a deal with them in that period, when the enrichment infrastructure was much smaller, much less developed, their capabilities were not as developed, I think we could have put arrangements in place that would have given us and the rest of the international community very high confidence that the program was peaceful.
But the administration wasn't inclined to do that.
And then there is this other issue that even if you can put those kinds of arrangements in place and have the IAEA there regularly certifying that nothing bad is going on, I mean, from a certain perspective, just knowing how to enrich uranium brings you sufficiently close to knowing how to build a nuclear weapon that a country like Iran shouldn't be allowed to go there.
And I think that's just an untenable position.
There's no legal basis for it.
There's no real political consensus internationally for it.
And the Iranians aren't going to accept it.
And so I think you really do need to come to terms with them on it, recognize that they have a right to do this.
But now we're talking about doing it under international safeguard.
So you can't move from there to a weapons program.
At the very least, you can't do it without the international community having an enormous amount of warning and lead time that that's what you're doing.
And I think that's the deal we should have struck back when I worked for the U.S. government.
And in the end, if there ever is going to be a deal on the Iranian nuclear program, that's going to be essentially the basis of the deal.
Well, and now, do I have it right that the so-called golden offer of 2003 where the Iranians, I guess, basically said, well, thanks for getting rid of Saddam Hussein instead of backing him against us.
Thanks for getting rid of him for us.
But now, so look, we're willing to negotiate.
We'll put pressure on Hamas and Hezbollah to disarm, become political parties.
We'll work with you in Iran so you don't have to do our dirty work without coordination.
We'll coordinate all our dirty work in putting the Baader Brigade in place as the Iraqi army.
And, you know, all this, this is the ultimate chance to make Iran not quite, you know, a sock puppet government, but a very compliant government in the region.
Am I right?
Am I overstating it?
Yeah, I mean, maybe overstating it a bit, but I mean, Iran was certainly on the basis of that, of the 2003 non-paper.
They were prepared to talk about all of those subjects.
You know, they wanted to talk about issues on a comprehensive basis, and they were prepared to include, you know, the issues that you raised.
They were prepared to include that.
And, you know, I think that really was a big opportunity to sit down with the Iranians and hammer out that kind of deal.
I mean, now I think that the kind of understanding deal that you could reach with the Iranians on those issues, you know, the terms would not be nearly as generous as they seem to be on offer in 2003.
This was before, you know, Hamas had won the Palestinian election.
This was before, you know, when Hezbollah's, you know, movement into the political arena in Lebanon was still at an early stage.
I mean, now these groups are enormously popular, enormously effective political players in their respective arenas.
They're not just, you know, paramilitary groups anymore.
And so, you know, I think that, you know, the deal that we might strike with Iran, you know, like I said, in 2003, they weren't spending any centrifuges.
Now they have thousands of centrifuges running.
You know, in a sense, the longer we wait, the more the terms of the deal have to be modified to accommodate greater Iranian capabilities, to accommodate, you know, greater standing on the part of Hamas and Hezbollah, things like this.
The longer we wait, the higher price we pay for whatever deal we ultimately get.
Well, thank you very much.
We're all out of time.
I really appreciate your time, as always, everybody.
That's the great Flint Leverett, former State Department, former CIA analyst, former National Security Council.
He and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, keep the blog Race4Iran at Race4Iran.com.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Good to talk with you.
All right, y'all.
And that's Antiwar Radio for this evening.
Thanks very much for listening.
We'll be back here next Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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