All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today is Hilary Mann Leverett.
She is CEO of Strategic Energy and Global Analysis and a political risk consultancy.
In September 2010, she became senior lecturer and senior research fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.
She has more than 20 years of academic, legal, business, diplomatic, and policy experience on Middle Eastern issues.
In the George W. Bush administration, she worked as director for Iran, Afghanistan, and Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East expert on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff, and political advisor for Middle East, Central Asian, and African issues at the US mission to the United Nations.
From 2001 to 2003, she was one of a small number of US diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, and Iraq.
And her very impressive biography goes on from there.
I'll just add for now that you can oftentimes see her on CNN and PBS NewsHour, shows like that, as well as, of course, the story that her husband, Flint Leverett, was also a very high-level advisor on the National Security Council and State Department in the George W. Bush years, and that they both left the Bush administration over Iran policy.
Now they are a married couple, and they run this incredible blog, RaceForIran.com.
Welcome back to the show, Hillary, how are you?
Good, thank you very much for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I wanted to start where I left off with your written bio here at RaceForIran.com, and that is your negotiations, your part in the negotiations between the United States and the Iranian government after September 11th.
And recently, it came up in a separate context that Michael Rubin, who was at one point, I believe, a contractor working for Douglas Fyfe in the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, the expanded Iraq desk in the run-up to that war, and a high-level neoconservative at the American Enterprise Institute and other organizations like that.
He challenged the story of the Iranian peace offer from 2003 and said that the claims by your husband Flint and others about how valuable this peace offer was was completely overblown, that it wasn't even written by the Iranians, but by the Swiss diplomat himself, proposed by him, and that really it amounted to nothing.
And really, I'm just lazy.
I should have just looked it up and see if you all had written an actual written response to that categorization by him, or characterization by him.
But I didn't get a chance.
But I'd like to give you a chance to address that, if you could, please.
Sure, yes.
I hadn't seen anything written by Michael Rubin about this subject for several years.
He has, for several years.
Yes, I am referring to something that's quite old, actually.
Yeah, he has, for several years, put this out there as one of those pieces of factless analysis that the neoconservatives put forward.
And this one is particularly bizarre, because high-level Iranian government officials, at the time, are not just on record, but on camera, talking about this offer and how important it is, and was, really, I should say.
One of them was President Khatami's then-vice president, Abtahi, who was on camera in a documentary that the BBC did.
Another one was the former Iranian deputy foreign minister and their ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
So you have at least two high-level Iranian officials, not just on record, but on camera, talking about this Iranian offer, how genuine and how important it was.
A few years later, when I began talking about it publicly, which I didn't right away, because I was still a government official, hadn't resigned at that point from the State Department.
But when I did, and I started talking about it publicly, I said, for me, this issue of who wrote it.
Did Zarif write it personally?
Did Vice President Abtahi write it personally?
Did someone else on the Iranian side write it personally?
I don't know.
I wasn't in the room.
But the point is, I think, for any US official who is looking at these issues soberly, it shouldn't matter who wrote it.
The issue is, is it a good idea?
Is it a productive way forward?
Is it something that could actually lead to a deal, a rapprochement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran?
Something that would be incredibly important to US interests.
So important, I analogize it to, and my husband does as well, to the Nixon and Kissinger opening to China.
If it's something like that, who cares whether somebody wrote it personally or not?
And again, we have at least two high-level Iranian officials on record, on camera, saying this was an Iranian document.
And now, this ties in directly to recent news, of course.
Because part of their peace offer, apparently, correct me if I'm wrong, was that they would give up some al-Qaeda guys that they had arrested, including one of Osama bin Laden's sons, and including this guy, I believe his name is Atef, both of whom ended up on house arrest for years and years before being recently let go.
But that the Iranians were prepared to give up some of these al-Qaeda guys that they had arrested in exchange for some members of the Mujahideen Ikhlaq, which now, even MSNBC News is reporting, has been carrying out assassinations, terrorist acts, inside Iran for the Israelis, probably, I would guess, and or the Americans this whole time as well.
But that was part of this thing in the first place, was here was a legitimate, you're saying, offer to cooperate with America on the war against the people who had actually attacked the United States that was denied so that we could use a terrorist group against them in the future, when they had nothing to do with the attack on us.
Yeah, and we actually have a record of doing that with Iraq and with others, unfortunately.
And that's an important issue in terms of the substance of what the Iranians put on the table in 2003 when this offer came in.
Actually, in the period right before that, in the period from the 9-11 attacks until the spring of 2003, when I negotiated as a U.S. government official, authorized by the U.S. government, with a handful of other Americans, with Iranian officials, the basis of that negotiation was over Afghanistan.
The Iranian interest and our interest were completely aligned in terms of anger and concern over the future of the Taliban, to overthrow the Taliban, and to get Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, because they had been a huge threat to Iran as well.
They had gone in and killed nine Iranian diplomats, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda did, in one of the, in Iran's consulate in Afghanistan, in Mazar Sharif, and had really, had persecuted and massacred many, many Shia inside of Afghanistan were threatening Iran pretty regularly.
So our interests were quite aligned, and we were negotiating with Iran and working with them to overthrow the Taliban and get Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan.
And one of the things we worked with the Iranians on was the issue of the very few relative, compared to how many went to Pakistan, the relatively few numbers of Al-Qaeda operatives who were trying to flee Afghanistan with the U.S. invasion in 2001 toward Iran.
Now, remember the vast overwhelming majority went to Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden, but the neoconservatives here in Washington said that they were all going to Iran, and there were even neoconservatives here, like Kenneth Timmerman, maybe Michael Rubin as well, who said that maybe Osama bin Laden is in fact in Iran when he was, of course, in Pakistan.
But there were some Al-Qaeda operatives who were managing to get to the border and through the border to Iran.
It is a huge and porous border, but in our talks with the Iranians, what was really important to me in terms of the Iranians' interests and ability to work with the United States, work in their national interests, work as we would kind of consider as a rational actor in American terms, was that the Iranians were working with us to prevent Al-Qaeda operatives from getting into their territory.
They came up with all sorts of ways to try to prevent Al-Qaeda's coming into their territory.
They tried to put more troops on the border to police the border, to impose much stricter visa restrictions for people coming in.
But some people did manage to get in, and what they did, the Iranians, was they made Xerox copies of the passports of those people who came in, but they said to us, there are some people who we can't deport, like people to Saudi Arabia, people to Egypt, with whom Iran did not have a good diplomatic relationship.
And they asked for our assistance, for there to be some sort of international mechanism with the UN.
We said, no, it's your job to come clean.
You're the dirty party here.
You have to just deport them.
Well, that put Iran in a very difficult situation.
And so what they later did was they said, well, we'll try to figure out something here, but now you need to do, you, the United States, need to do something that shows you're working with us in goodwill, and that would be to do something with the MEK, an organization that, by your own American words, is a terrorist organization, but that the Bush administration also refused to do.
And unfortunately, now we have under President Obama also not doing very much about the MEK.
The Obama administration may even delist the MEK from the terrorist, to make it not a terrorist organization.
And it seems to be not doing very much to stop the Israeli government's arming, equipping, and supplying of the MEK to carry out terrorist attacks on the streets of Iran.
Well, now, what do you think is behind all these stories saying that it's Israel that's backing the MEK, it's Israel that's backing Jindala, not the CIA, not the United States?
Is that really correct?
And then separately from that, why would the government be putting stories like that on Brian Williams' show?
You know what I mean?
This is, is it pushback, or is it sort of a, I mean, by the Americans against the Israelis that they need to slow it down here, or is it sort of just a kabuki dance where the Americans are trying to give themselves a little bit of deniability before the Israelis launch their attack, or what is it going on there?
I think it's both, and probably another element as well.
I think first that there is concern within the intelligence community here in Washington that they don't want to be associated with this Israeli operation.
They think it's bad for U.S., the U.S. intelligence community, that it's bad for U.S. interests, and they don't want to be associated with it.
I think they are also concerned that the Obama administration is not doing enough and will not do enough in an election year to disassociate the United States from these kind of operations.
And I think that there is pretty palpable concern, not just in the U.S. intelligence community, but in the military here, that the Israelis are looking to militarily attack Iran over the next few months.
And, you know, for the Israelis, you know, they, you know, to the extent that they, you know, what kind of casualties they care about, they care about their own.
But we are very seriously exposed with, we continue to have thousands of American servicemen and women in the Gulf, in Afghanistan, 100,000 troops still in Afghanistan.
All of these people are vulnerable, are sitting ducks, you know, to the consequence of an Israeli military attack on Iran.
And so I think you see concern coming out, not just from the CIA here, but from the military here, that the Israelis are right now pursuing a covert war against Iran, and that may turn into a hot war over the next few months.
Well, and now, how come it is, I mean, there was a piece in Haaretz today, I'm not sure.
It's the one where they're saying, oh yeah, U.S. concerned that Barack is pushing for Israeli attack on Iran.
And I'm not so sure about that.
They've got Netanyahu playing good cop to Ehud Barak's bad cop in this one.
But the part of it that was noteworthy to me really was this litany, this entire, this gigantic list of more than a dozen, I think, different visits by highest level American national security people going to Israel to stop them from doing it.
And I'm thinking, are they really trying that hard?
And if they're really trying that hard, why don't they just go ahead and try hard enough and make their point that you better not do this and then let that be the end of it instead of this continual rumor mongering about a war.
You could accidentally start a war with this kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is there seems to be an underlying assumption in your question, Scott, which is an important one, and I think reflective of a lot of our assumptions here in Washington, which is that all of these trips by this most senior level Obama administration officials, and they've now been going on for about two years, it's reaching a crescendo point now, but it's been pretty steady uptick for now about two years, that it's all about telling Israel not to do this.
Well, in fact, I think that that may be their desire, but what they do when they go to Israel is they talk about more arms sales to Israel, more aid to Israel, how we are increasingly aligned with Israel.
President Obama continues to uptick his rhetoric in how tied we are to Israel, so that his last statement in an interview about what we would do if Israel attacked Iran, he didn't respond directly this way, but in the context of that interview, he said we are, quote, unquote, in lockstep, in lockstep with Israel.
So even though there's been this crescendo of visits by highest level U.S. officials to Israel, it looks to me, and I think to the Israelis more importantly, as an exercise in hand-holding, not an exercise in trying to restrain an Israeli military attack against Iran.
Well, but even then, that kind of presumes that Barack or Netanyahu over there believe for a minute any of their own BS about Iran's nuclear weapons program that we all know doesn't exist, right?
I mean, what do they need their hand held for?
Yeah, I mean, to me, that's an interesting thing, and I think we see an increasing public display of this, is that there's real division in Israel.
I'm not so sure that there's real division between Barack and Netanyahu.
We've never seen evidence of that.
But I think there is real division among the kind of professional Israeli national security cadre and the more politicized personalities of someone like Netanyahu and Barack.
And I think the division is this, that there is, I think, consensus in Israel that Iran is not an existential threat by any means, but that Iran poses an important challenge to Israel's strategy of using unilateral force whenever, wherever, and in whatever degree Israel wants against its neighbors in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Gaza, if they had to, with Egypt or anybody else.
Now, Iran with not even a nuclear weapon, not even really even a nuclear capability, but in Iran as a strong, independent check on Israel's ability to carry out that kind of security strategy is a threat to Israel's preferred security strategy.
And that's the problem I think all Israeli national security strategists agree on.
What they disagree on is how to deal with that threat.
They, I think, all want to weaken Iran's challenge to them.
And the question is how to weaken it.
They all would like to see crippling sanctions imposed on Iran because they think that will weaken Iranian power.
But some think that, of course, will not be enough, that Iran, of course, lived on oil when it was $11 a barrel under President Khatami.
It lived, you know, without very much oil during the Iran-Iraq War, that this is an incredibly fiercely independent state, and it's not going away just because, you know, the price of some commodities goes up on the streets of Tehran.
So then I think you have some Israelis, both for politically crass purposes and because they think that this kind of independent power in the Middle East must be destroyed, are pushing this kind of attack.
I don't think that they've won the day in Israel, so I don't think that there's been a decision, but I think that's why you increasingly see the public nature of this debate in Israel because that is a genuine debate.
Well, and I guess it's kind of amazing to see a debate about the Iran War, you know, with more than one side, I wouldn't say both, but with more than one side taking place, you know, leaking over into the American media from the Israeli one.
Like here in the New York Times today, Iran raid seen as huge task for Israeli jets.
In other words, American jets are going to have to do this if anybody's going to, if their goal is in fact taking out Natanz, Bushehr, the Fordow facility, Ishafan, et cetera.
Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that that has been Israel's preference for some time that we take more of the lead.
But I think even among those Israelis who think that Iran's power needs to be destroyed, it, this is a tough issue.
It, there is a real question about reality.
What is reality?
Can Israel and or the United States even destroy Iranian power?
You may be able to bomb particular sites, but can you really destroy an independent Iranian power?
That is something I think would just go, would hit the wall of reality, just as it hit the wall of reality when we invaded Iraq and it didn't turn out to be the cakewalk, some, many of the neoconservatives, particularly here in Washington portrayed it to be.
All right, now, what do you see as the role of the conflict in Syria right now in all of this?
It sort of seems like, well, I don't know.
I don't want to make the question too specific actually.
What do you think is the most important thing to note maybe about the intervention in Syria and maybe what that has to do with a possible war with Iran?
I think it's very much about trying to realign a balance of power in the Middle East against Iran.
That the United States and our allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, are really trying to push Syria to weaken some of Iran's allies in I think what will be a futile attempt with huge consequences for us to somehow minimize Iran's friends in the neighborhood.
Again, I think this comes back to hitting the wall of reality, which is that Iran has more friends than Syria, number one.
Today, nobody talks about this, but that Iraq is now a genuine friend of Iran, a genuine ally of Iran.
So Iran has other allies.
I think they would like Assad to be able to see his way through to negotiate things internally, to have a better situation internally.
But even if something were to happen in Iran, the current Kool-Aid here in Washington is that if somehow Assad were overthrown, this would be the death knell for Iran.
I think that is just, again, hitting the wall against the wall of reality, which is that even if there were a post-Assad government in Syria, that government is not gonna be a secular pro-American, pro-Israeli bulwark against Iran.
That's not gonna happen.
If anything, it's gonna look a little bit more like the chaos and bloodshed and militia-dominated warfare we see in Libya today, or it's gonna be a more representative government that could even be more Islamist, which is not necessarily bad for the United States, but it's certainly not gonna be a pro-Israel, knee-jerk pro-American bastion that's gonna look to war with Iran.
Yeah, I think what they're betting there is that if they can get a full-scale civil war and regime change going on in Syria, that they can use that as another possible route to war with Iran and a real regime change in Iran.
I think that's part of the fantasy.
Not that the pressure would be on them, like Paul Wolfowitz and them believed after the Gulf War, that rather than benefiting, they would have to measure up to the wonderful democratic Iraq next door or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the fantasy, but the truly tragic part is that it probably will just lead to a lot of war and bloodshed in Syria, and not anything that's gonna benefit anybody at all.
And I think the other serious consequence is that it could lead to even more inter-Sunni, sectarian Sunni-Shia bloodshed across the region, something that I think we and the Saudis in particular are seriously stoking.
And it puts us astoundingly on the side of, there are now these recent press reports also that Al-Qaeda has infiltrated the Syrian opposition and that Ayman Zawahiri, the new head of Al-Qaeda, is praising the opposition in Syria to a polis Assad.
It puts us on the same side of Al-Qaeda, which is something that you would think 10 years after 9-11, we would be a little bit more sensitive to.
It seems to me like that's where we've been since they ran you and your husband, Flint Leverett, out of government there, Hilary, that the war in Afghanistan, the way they waged it, certainly was exactly what bin Laden had prescribed.
Maybe it hurt them a little more than he had anticipated at the very beginning.
But as the documents have come forward, right, where he wrote a letter back then saying, I know it looks bad now, but just give me 10 years to Mullah Omar.
Just give me 10 years and you'll see it's perfect.
And then what Michael Schur calls the hope for, but unexpected gift, the war against Saddam Hussein, which Osama bin Laden endorsed on the eve of it and said, rise up and fight against Saddam Hussein and America while you're at it there to the people of Iraq.
And then of course, Iran and Syria are next on Zawahiri's list.
They always have been from the beginning of this thing.
And of course, Egypt is in there as well.
Absolutely.
I think that's a critically important insight.
Both my husband, Flint, and I argued very, very clearly after 9-11 that the United States can and should deal with those responsible for attacking us, period, full stop.
But we had to fight a torrent of both people inside the U.S. government and the so-called intellectuals outside of the U.S. government who were calling essentially for it.
They called it a war on terror, but they really meant a war on Islam.
And you had Norman Podhoras call it a war against Islamo-fascism, and Islamo-fascism became the vernacular.
Santorum has picked up on it.
Our presidential candidate today, Santorum, has picked up on that as well.
But it is not a war against Islam.
It can never be a war against Islam that we will have any hope of ever coming out of, you know, both in terms of the right side morally, but in terms of our strategic position and standing in the world.
All right, well, I'm sorry we have to leave it there, but we have to leave it there.
Thank you so much for your time on the show, Hillary, again.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it, too.
Everybody, that's Hillary Mann-Leverett from raceforiran.com.
Hey, and it's fun drive time at antiwar.com, so chip in if you can.
Thanks.
