By: Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
Speaking with Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton earlier this week (listen to podcast here (lihat website: http://scotthorton.org/?powerpress_pinw=5890-podcast )) about our forthcoming book, see here (lihat website: raceforiran),
Flynt took on widespread stereotypes in American discourse about Shi’a
Islam as a martyrdom-obsessed, death-seeking, and “irrational” culture
that makes the Islamic Republic of Iran a threatening and dangerous
actor on par with Hitler’s Reich. He confessed that “I’m reaching a
stage where I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when [I hear that sort
of thing from] people who I don’t think know very much about Shi’a
Islam, don’t know very much about Iran, haven’t spent a lot of time, I
would suspect, talking about Shi’a Islam with people who believe it,
live it, think about it.” But, evoking a major theme in Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran, he rejoins,
“Just look at the historical record. The Islamic Republic has never used weapons of mass destruction. In its war with Iraq—when the United States, among others, was supporting Saddam Husayn in an eight-year war of aggression against the new Islamic Republic—Ayatollah Khomeini’s own military leaders came to him and said, ‘We inherited the ability to produce chemical weapons agent from the Shah. We need to do that and weaponize it so that we can respond in kind. We have tens of thousands of our people, soldiers and civilians, who are being killed in Iraqi chemical weapons attacks. We need to be able to respond in kind.” And Imam Khomeini said, ‘No, because this would violate Islamic morality, because it is haram—it is forbidden by God—to do this, and the Islamic Republic of Iran will not do this.’ Imam Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, have said repeatedly, over years, that the acquisition or use of nuclear weapons would also violate God’s law; Khamenei has said that to do it would be a ‘big sin.’ This is not the rhetoric of people who are out to bring the apocalypse down upon everyone else and themselves…
The most
detailed, data-rich extensive study of suicide terrorism, done by
scholars at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Air War College,
concluded that there has literally never been an Iranian suicide bomber…And
so people like to talk about the Islamic Republic as run by these ‘mad
mullahs,’ or even if the president is a layman, it’s this ‘crazy,’
‘millenarian’ Ahmadinejad who just is waiting to get his hands on a nuke
so he can turn the whole 70-plus million people in Iran into history’s
first ‘suicide nation.’ And there is just absolutely no historical or
even rhetorical support for that line of argument. This is a
country that, since its revolution, has basically been much, much more
concerned about defending itself, defending the Iranian people,
consolidating and maintaining its own independence in the face of
hostile regional powers and hostile outside powers including, most
notably, the United States.
Spurred by a reference to Hannah Arendt’s observation that “the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution,” Flynt notes,
“The first task of a revolutionary, once
he or she has overthrown the incumbent regime that he’s opposing, the
first task is to consolidate power. And that was certainly the case for
the Islamic Republic—and the Islamic Republic had to do this when, in
fairly short order as I said, Saddam
Husayn launches this eight-year-long war against it, supported by most
of his regional neighbors and supported by the United States. So they
were having to consolidate power while they were also having to defend
the Iranian people against this onslaught.
And then if you look at what they
did, after they came out of this war in in 1988—after it’s over and
their military has been very, very badly decimated in this war, as has
their economy as a whole—they actually diverted significant resources
away from military spending, so that they
can focus on postwar reconstruction, on building up a health care
system, on building up an education system for their people. And
if you look at the outcomes they have produced for Iranians in those
areas, considering the baseline they started from, it’s really
impressive what they have accomplished.
Today, the
United State spends 70 times more on defense than Iran. Saudi Arabia
spends more than four times what Iran spends on defense. Israel spends
twice as much on its military as Iran does. Iran today
has basically no capability to project large amounts of conventional
military force beyond its borders. The idea that Iran is going to come
across its borders and, to borrow a phrase from the U.S. Army, park it’s
tanks in somebody else’s front yard, is just fantasyland…
So they are no conventional military threat to their neighbors. They
do have a lot of ballistic missiles—conventionally-armed ballistic
missiles—which they have said they would use in response to attacks on
them. But they are certainly not the only country in the world
that makes that sort of deterrent, retaliatory threat as part of its
defense posture. And if you are concerned about those missiles not flying anywhere, I would suggest you don’t attack Iran, and those missiles aren’t going to go anywhere.”
Scott Horton raises the discomfiting
prospect that facts don’t really matter where Iran is concerned—that,
regardless of the facts, “there is this endless drumbeat of bad things
that Iran did, and it doesn’t matter that none of them are true…In the
popular narrative, Iran is a terrible danger that must at some point be
dealt with; I think the war party has won on that and that means it’s
just a matter of time.” Flynt responds,
“You may be correct; I hope you’re not. Hillary and I have written the book that Harper’s was
good enough to print an excerpt from in no small part because we want
to do everything we can, at least, to make sure that the war party
doesn’t win.
Now, it’s a very tall order. The war party, as you describe them—we saw what they are capable of doing, in terms of getting us to invade Iraq. They
can manufacture intelligence, they can create threats that aren’t
there, they can link a country that they don’t like to other threats
that Americans are afraid of, like Al-Qa’ida—even though there is no link between that country they don’t like and Al-Qa’ida. They
can manage to pull that off. They can tie into very powerful domestic
constituencies who can put lots of pressure on Congress, lots of
pressure on the mainstream media, and so on. We saw with Iraq what they are capable of doing, and you’re right—they are certainly trying to do it with Iran now.
Hillary and I saw that inside government during the run-up to the Iraq War. Basically,
all of the institutions Americans count on to provide a check on that
sort of thing—the Congress, the media, think tanks, public
intellectuals—with some few and extremely honorable and courageous
exceptions, for the most part those institutions tanked. They provided no independent check on the war party. And Hillary and I have written this book, Going to Tehran,
as I said, in no small part because, at least this time around, we want
someone to be asking the hard questions and making the kinds of
countervailing arguments that should have been asked, should have been
made before we invaded Iraq but, to a large extent, really weren’t put
forward.”
Scott and Flynt also discuss the
possibilities for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement. After reviewing the 2003
Iranian non-paper passed to the United States via Swiss intermediaries,
Flynt makes a broader point:
“This is also part of the ‘mad
mullah’ myth—that this is a regime, a government, that is either too
ideologically committed to anti-Americanism or too dependent on it for
its own domestic legitimacy ever to contemplate improved relations with
the United States. But,again, just look at the historical record.
The historical record is that whenever
the United States has reached out to Iran and said, ‘We need your help
with some problem—whether it’s American hostages in Lebanon, whether
it’s getting weapons to Bosnian Muslims when U.S. law prohibited the
United States from doing that, whether it’s help against Al-Qa’ida and
in Afghanistan after 9/11—whenever we have reached out like that to
Iran, they have tried to respond positively. They have done much—not
everything, but much—of what we’ve asked of them in those circumstances,
in the hope that this would lead to an improvement in relations. It’s
never worked out, but not because the Iranians didn’t respond. It
didn’t work out because we decided to pocket their cooperation, and then
cut it off. They’ve advanced any number of proposals over the years
for a more comprehensive improvement in relations, which we have pretty
consistently rebuffed.
Their stated position, from
Ayatollah Khamenei himself—and it’s been echoed by presidents, by
foreign ministers, and by other senior officials—is if the United States
is willing to accept the Iranian Revolution, to accept the Islamic
Republic (the product of that revolution) as a legitimate political
entity representing legitimate national interests and to deal with it on
that basis, there is no barrier to improved relations between Iran and
the United States—and in fact Iran would welcome improved relations on
that basis. From the Iranian perspective, it’s the United
States that’s never shown itself seriously willing to proceed on that
basis. We think relations can only improve only after Iran has
surrendered to every one of our demands, and then we’ll see if it’s
possible, we’ll think about it then…
That’s never going to work with this
political order…We tried that for twenty years after the Chinese
Revolution with the People’s Republic of China, and it was an utterly
stupid and counterproductive policy that, among other things, got us
bogged down in Vietnam. Fortunately, Richard Nixon [realized] that this
is stupid, it’s hurting the United States; the United States needs to
be able to deal with this large and important country in Asia. I am
going to accept the People’s Republic as a legitimate entity that has
national interests just like we do, and we are going to see if we can’t
align enough of those interests to make it possible these two countries
that have been estranged from one another since the Chinese Revolution
actually to have a productive relationship. And it worked; it worked
brilliantly.
That’s the kind of approach we need to
take toward Iran today, toward the Islamic Republic. It’s just like
China—for twenty years, Mao and Zhou Enlai had said, ‘We’re not
unremittingly and unreasonably hostile toward the United States. If the
United States is prepared to accept us, accept the revolution that we
came from, accept us and deal with us as a legitimate entity
representing legitimate national interests, there is no barrier to good
relations between the United States and China. We would welcome that.
But you’re not going to be able to bully us around, you’re not going to
be able just to make demands of us, and you’re not going to be able to
get us to compromise our sovereignty to accommodate your preferences.’
It took us twenty years, but we figured out how to do that” where China
was concerned.
As to the prospects for productive
American diplomacy toward Iran during President Obama’s second term,
Flynt noted that he was “not at all optimistic.” To be sure, the
outlines of a nuclear deal are clear:
“If you acknowledge Iran’s legal
right to enrich uranium under safeguards on its own territory if it
chooses to do so, then everything becomes possible…[But even in the
talks over a possible deal to refuel the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR)
in 2009-2019] the Obama administration was never prepared to acknowledge
Iran’s right to enrich…It was prepared to do a kind of narrow
deal that would buy it a certain amount of time to figure out maybe
what it wanted to do on these bigger issues. But it has never been
willing to say Iran has a right to enrich…
If you look at why the Obama
administration rejected the deal that Brazil and Turkey brokered with
Iran over this issue in May 2010, Obama administration officials, Dennis
Ross, people like that have said in public, ‘Oh, we had to reject it
because the first point in the deal that the Brazilians and the Turks
brokered was [an acknowledgment of] Iran’s right to enrich, and we
couldn’t have that’…[The administration] put terms on it, and
the Brazilians and the Turks took letters that Obama had sent to the
Brazilian president and the Turkish prime minister; they even showed
those letters to the Iranians while they were negotiating with them,
because the Iranians were saying, ‘Are you really sure the United States
is going to sign off on this?’ And [the Brazilians and the Turks said,
‘Oh, yes, we have letters from the President of the United States;
look.’
But it was really just a kind of cheap
trick on Obama’s part. [Administration officials] thought that if the
Brazilians and the Turks insisted on the conditions in Obama’s letter,
the Iranians would never agree; then, when the Brazilians and the Turks
failed, they were both members of the Security Council at that time and
they would both have to support a new sanctions resolution. It was just
a kind of cheap trick. They thought…the Iranians will never say
‘yes.’ But then the Iranians said ‘yes.’ And then it’s the Obama
administration that can’t take ‘yes’ for an answer.”
Looking ahead, Flynt notes that we’ve
“talked to senior administration officials just in the last couple of
weeks who tell me that there is no inclination to [recognize Iran’s
right to enrich]—the policy, the goal is still to get Iran to suspend
uranium enrichment.” Responding to a suggestion that Nixon was
uniquely able, as a Republican with strong Cold War anti-communist
credentials, to spearhead an opening to China in ways that Obama, as a
Democrat, is simply not able to replicate with respect to Iran, Flynt
argues,
“More important than Richard Nixon being a
Republican was that Richard Nixon actually had an accurate assessment
of America’s place in the world when he entered the White House, and he
had really thought through what that should mean for the United States
strategically. And he understood how important it was for the United
States—it was not a favor to the Chinese—how important it was to the
United States to open relations with China. And he put every ounce of
political skill, Machiavellian calculation, diplomatic acumen, capacity
for secrecy…all of the good and maybe not so good parts of political
persona, he put all of them into this and achieved this historic
breakthrough, because he knew it was strategically vital for his
country.
I don’t think the main problem with Obama
is that he is a Democrat. I think the main problem is that he doesn’t
really understand where the United States is in the world right now, he
doesn’t really have a strategic vision for the United States, and
whatever vision he does have doesn’t compel him enough, doesn’t matter
enough to him that he is actually to spend and risk political capital to
realize it.”
–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
(raceforiran/scotthorton/myartikel/ABNS)
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