Allison Speaks on George Bush with Iranian Diplomacy

Graham T. Allison is Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. From 1977 to 1989 Allison served as Dean of the Kennedy School. In the first term of the Clinton administration, he served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans, where he coordinated Department of Defense strategy and policy toward Russia, Ukraine, and the other states of the former Soviet Union. Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy, with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism.

 

Last month he traveled to Iran and met some of Iranian political intellectuals. This is an excerpt of his interview on NIE report and US future policy towards Iran, which took place in Iranian Diplomacy’s office in Tehran.

 

 

First the report was a big surprise for President Bush and was bad news for him. Second the way the report was written – not the content but the form – by putting as the headline ‘Iran halted nuclear weapon program in the fall of 2003’ significantly undermined the case that some people in the Bush administration, especially Cheney, were making for the possibility of a military strike on Iran before Bush left office. Whereas before the NIE smart men in Washington, including I, were betting may be there is 30 percent chance that before Bush left office he may attack Iran, today that possibility is reduced to maybe 3 percent. So it undercut the elements within the Bush administration that was thinking of a military attack

 

It also undermined the strategy of trade and economic sanctions, because as one sees now in the struggle about next round of sanctions under the UN Security Council resolution, it is quit understandable that if the headline is ‘Iran nuclear weapons program halted’ why should I be making even tougher sanctions? So if you ask who benefits from NIE? [The answer is] Iran.

 

Furthermore, if you look at the content of NIE and you could take every important point in it and rewrite it and again with me I could write the whole thing so that every important point is the same, the message could be a hundred and eighty degrees different.

 

So if I were reading and writing it, I would say massage number 1, as the main massage is: Iran nuclear program steady on course. The enrichment activity is preceding precisely the way we predicted it in 2005. So there are now 3000 centrifuges at Natanz, they are working intermittently producing low enriched uranium and this therefore is creating the only major precondition for nuclear weapons. So that would be the main news.

 

Secondly, the new news would be Iran’s nuclear weaponization program that related to warhead designs and the fashioning of a bomb, halted in fall of 2003. Either because they finished or they were cut and whatever – we don’t know – any case, it halted. But they have a program; they worked on it very hard. They did not throw away what they learned.

Third, headline would be the main insight. The main insight in the NIE was people in the Bush administration who think that Iranian government is just crazy or is run by men who are determined to do something irrespective of the cost, are not correct.

 

The Iranian government’s behavior look like calculating very carefully costs and benefits, risks and rewards and when the international community has engaged in scrutiny and sanctions, Iran has changed its behavior.

 

So if that had been the NIE, the political situation would be a hundred and eighty degrees different. Why they write it in this fashion is a question I will answer it in my lecture tomorrow.

 

You have to be able to analyze the American government in terms of models other than my model 1 which imagines that the American government is a coherent rational actor, like a person. If a person did this, they would never have done it. If you would take a model 2, which is an organizational behavior model, and apply those lenses to these events, you can see some other factors that led to this. And even more importantly if you take a model 3 lenses you will notice that a government is not a single unified actor, but many different actors who have different interests. May be even the Iranian government is sometimes like this, but all governments are. Bush administration in particular has been very chaotic. So if the government tried to suppress the NIE draft form or even to get it revised, there was fear that the original draft would leak and Bush would be accused of manipulating intelligence.

 

By the way there is no question that Bush and Cheney were furious and confused and if you look at Bush’s first press conference after the NIE he looks like a deer in the headlands.

 

 

I think there is clear good news for Iran even than for Americans. Namely that 1 year from the day, precisely Bush is gone. Bush administration is a radical tension off the mainstream of both Republican and Democratic administrations before Bush. So the next president whether Republican or Democrat will almost certainly come back to the mainstream. The mainstream is not always been great for Iran either, but in any case it is not this extreme tension.

 

Attacking other countries for the purpose of changing their regime; no American president had this view before Bush and after Bush no American president is likely to have such a view. This will be gone to the trash bin of history with Bush.

 

I think that in the same way that the US is a very radioactive topic in the politics of Iran, Iran is also a radioactive topic in the politics of America because of all the grievances of Americans when they think about Iran.

 

Well I think there are 2 different questions. With respect to a new war in the region, the likelihood that the Bush administration attacks Iran, before it lives office, is quit low. The reason is that it would be difficult to make the case that Iran is just about to go cross some goal lines of nuclear weapons if the intelligence community is said that they are not even working on their last phase even though the last phase does not require more than a year or something.

 

With respect to the sanctions, I think what Iran has to think about is, how is it possible that the country has been the subject of three Security Council resolutions including unanimous resolutions demanding suspension of uranium enrichment and the beginning of negotiation and imposing sanctions and why did Mr. Putin or President Hu in China, or the Indians or the South Africans agree with this?

 

The answer is not because Mr. Bush persuaded them. The reason is that they are watching Iran’s actions and words and they may think Iran is probably serious about nuclear weapons program. And they are trying to signal to Iran that it is a bad idea.

So if I where Iranian I would ask myself how we have found ourselves the object of this unanimous sanction. I think it is partly because of Iran’s actions and it is partly because of the government of Iran including president Ahmadinejhad. His words and diplomacy has allowed Iran to be so isolated.