Flynt Leverett Wants to Tell the Truth About U.S. - Iran Relations

Flynt Leverett, a former government official who worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, and on the National Security Council staff of the George W. Bush administration, is now a senior fellow and Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative at the New America Foundation.

He has written numerous books, manuscripts, working papers, and many dozens upon dozens of some of the most important public policy op-ed commentary on American engagement in the Middle East and has always dutifully submitted his materials to the CIA's review process. Never -- not even once -- has been a word or item changed in anything submitted.

Now he's being censored.

Our Diplomacy Toward Iran Is Afflicted with Theocratic Overtones

Now, even Hugo Chavez has picked up the theocratic tones of diplomatic discourse started by George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Juan Cole comments:

Hugo Chavez referred to US President George W. Bush as "the devil"in his speech before the UN general assembly on Wednesday, complaining that the stench of sulphur still hung in the air at the podium. Chavez crossed himself at the mention of Bush, a folk Catholic way of fending off Satan.

Bush himself opened the way for these sorts of comments with his 2002 State of the Union address, where he mysteriously allowed the Neoconservative lightweight David Frum to put into his mouth the phrase "the axis of evil" in referring to Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Critics at the time complained that they weren't an axis.

But the real problem is that "evil" is not a political term, it is a theological one. The president of a civil republic has no business trafficking in the rhetoric of evil. Besides, the best ethical theory sees evil as an attribute of acts, not of persons or countries. "Iran" is not "evil." Iran's governing officials may occasionally do evil things, but they are actions, not essences. If you call a person or a country "evil" you are demonizing them.

Having made Iran a demon, Bush refused to talk to it. At the time he put Iran in the axis of evil, reform President Mohammad Khatami had presided over candlelight vigils in Iran for the United States in the aftermath of the al-Qaeda attacks, and had called for people to people diplomacy and a "dialogue of civilizations." President Khatami has his flaws, but he was not and is not "evil."

So, having theologized international relations and turned them into moral absolutes, it is natural that Bush is subsequently paralyzed.

Bush started it. He started talking about other countries and leaders as "evil." He bears the responsibility for this importation of the absolute into our political discourse.

And having set up these theological absolutes, Bush became bound by them. He had to invade "evil" Iraq, because it was . . . evil. Bush keeps saying that Saddam Hussein was "dangerous" even if he did not have weapons of mass destruction. Apparently he was "dangerous" because he is "evil." His dangerousness was not related to actual capability to accomplish anything (which was low). He was intrinsically evil and dangerous.

Informed Comment

Fixing Inteligence - Again!

IAEA says Congress report on Iran's nuclear capacity is erroneous and misleading

· Claims about programme are 'unsubstantiated'
· Leak shows watchdog detected five major errors

In a letter to the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives' intelligence committee, a senior director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the report was "incorrect" in its assessment that Iran had made weapons-grade uranium at a site inspected by the agency. Instead, the letter said, the facility had produced only small amounts of uranium, which were below the level necessary for weapons.

The letter, leaked to the Washington Post, also criticised the report for making the "outrageous and dishonest" claim that a senior inspector was removed "for concluding that the purpose of Iran's nuclear programme is to construct weapons".

While the IAEA noted five major errors in the report, intelligence officials told the Washington Post that it contained a dozen assertions that were either wrong or impossible to substantiate.

The House report, under the chairmanship of the Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra, was released on August 23. It was not voted on or discussed by the full bipartisan committee but it was reviewed by the office of John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, before being released by Republican members of the committee.

Jane Harman, the Democrat vice-chairwoman of the committee, told colleagues in an email that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire - and the intelligence community's assessments as more certain - than they are."

The report, titled Recognising Iran as a Strategic Threat, was written by Fredrick Fleitz, a CIA operative on secondment to the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Mr Fleitz and Mr Bolton were involved in constructing the arguments in favour of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mr Fleitz is writing a report about North Korea for Mr Hoekstra's committee.

The row over the Iran report is reminiscent of the disputes between the IAEA, its chief Mohamed ElBaradei and the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. "This is like pre-war Iraq all over again," David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, told the Post.

Iranian Ex-President Mohammad Khatami in the U.S.!

David Ellwood, dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government defended the decision to invite former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to speak on the eve of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks:

Do we listen to those that we disagree with, and vigorously challenge them, or do we close our ears completely?

He also emphasized that Khatami would not be allowed to visit unless he was willing to take unscripted questions.

Jaw-Jaw, Better than War-War

If America Wanted to Talk, Iran Would ...

In the New York Times (3-Sep-06), Tom Slackman asked:

If America Wanted to Talk, Iran Would ...

Would reaching out to Iran, like agreeing to hold direct talks with Iran’s president, do much to persuade Iran’s leaders to give up their willingness to pursue a nuclear program at any cost?

In Iran’s case, though, political analysts and Western diplomats here say, that kind of dramatic effort would probably fall flat, at least at first.

Iran’s leaders are certain the West wants to remove them from power, and so their first response, many analysts here said, would be to charge that Washington was laying a trap. The second reaction would be to say that the change validated the hard-line approach toward the West — that belligerence had worked, and that more intransigence would get more such results. So, at least in the short term, the public posturing and bluster would continue.

But is Washington thinking only about the short term?

. . . . A gesture from Washington to Tehran, or more precisely a gesture that demonstrates some degree of respect and openness to Iran, might well be seen here as far more threatening to the leadership than the threat of economic or political sanctions.

....In Iran, the term hard-liner is part of the political lexicon, less a pejorative title than a label along the lines of liberal or conservative. In that vein, many Iranians refer to President Bush and his administration as hard-liners. And the conventional thinking here is that hard-liners help hard-liners, with their hard-line policies.

. . . . Iranian officials have cracked down on those who criticize the government, and they have effectively silenced any debate over their nuclear program. A political analyst with a prominent research institute in Tehran who insisted on anonymity out of fear of punishment, says:

The forces who advocate integration of Iran into the international system are in the minority today. The leadership is opposed to international integration. They are afraid the purity of their system would be broken, lost.

. . . . A European diplomat in Tehran said that many Iranian intellectuals were shocked, and felt undermined, when in 2002 President Bush lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea in an “axis of evil.”

. . . . Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani tried to build economic ties with foreign capitals and attract foreign investment. His successor, Mohammad Khatami, talked of a dialogue of civilizations and used the language of diplomacy.

. . . . Today, more than at any time in many years, Iran’s most powerful figures define themselves with the language of revolution.

. . . . President Ahmadinejad, in contrast, talks of returning to the values of the revolution. An engineer by training, he has nevertheless crafted a persona that seems to meld the combativeness of a cleric and the populism of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

. . . . President Ahmadinejad and his inner circle benefit from the isolation that comes from the argument over nuclear proliferation. It would be hard to maintain that posture while ushering Iran into the World Trade Organization, for example, or into a trade agreement with the United States.

Mohsen Kadivar, a senior reform-minded cleric, said of the hard-liners:

When the West threatens isolation, they welcome it. They cannot integrate. They feel if Iran integrated it would lose its Islamic identity.