Our Man Flynt
By
Kenneth
R.
Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com |
December 22, 2006
Former CIA and National Security
Council staffer Flynt Leverett is on the loose, and the
Bushies had
better watch out. He is armed and loaded for bear, even if
he can
only manage a pea-shooter.
Leverett, who left the NSC
in
2003 to work for the presidential campaign of Monsieur
Jean-Francois
Kerry, believes the Bush White House is full of Evil
Creatures such
as Elliot Abrams, who “don’t take the Constitution
seriously.”
Now the Evil Ones are preventing Our Man Flynt from
publishing an
op-ed in the New York Times, because it calls on the
administration
to drop its opposition to talks with the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
“The administration has threatened me with criminal
prosecution,” Leverett whined to an audience of MSM lefties
in
Washington on Monday, “to prevent the dissemination of the
view
of someone who is very critical of their approach to Iran
policy.”
I suppose Flynt didn’t have time to read the Baker-Hamilton
report, which makes the
same (mistaken) recommendation
that the U.S. negotiate with Iran. If the administration
were truly
interested in silencing its critics, it would have to shut
down the
entire U.S. media establishment.
The Washington Posties took Flynt’s childish rant seriously,
and ran a
puff
piece the next day.
Reporter
Glenn Kessler took pains to repeat Leverett’s unverifiable
claim that he “voted for George W. Bush in 2000,” to
suggest that he was a real live administration dissident.
But Kessler
neglected to mention that Leverett more recently worked for
the Kerry
campaign. Minor detail.
Leverett’s tirade was hosted by urbane Bush-basher Steven
Clemons at the New America Foundation. In
his blog, Clemons hyped
Leverett
and made available a longer version of his censored
anti-Bush screed,
which Leverett claims was passed by the CIA’s
pre-publication
review board without a single cut. The Agency has since said
that was
an oversight, and that Leverett’s published article
contained
classified material and should not have been approved.
The CIA’s position is interesting, because if Leverett has
been
spilling classified information – and Leverett has helpfully
identified those areas the Agency cut from his NY Times
op-ed –
then the CIA ought to be abolished for incompetence, because
most of
the “information” is false.
Leverett’s main claim is that dialogue with the Islamic
Republic of Iran works, and that the Bush administration’s
refusal to talk to the Tehran regime today “is the strategic
equivalent of medical malpractice.”
He bases that extravagant (and demonstrably false) claim on
two cases
where he says dialogue brought tangible results.
During the months following the 9/11 attacks, Iran joined
the “6+2”
talks on Afghanistan that ultimately led up to the Bonn
conference
and the creation of a post-Taliban government. Leverett
claims that
the Bush administration “used the cover of the “6+2”
process to stand up what was effectively a freestanding
bilateral
channel with Iran, with regular (for the most part, monthly)
meetings
between U.S. and Iranian diplomats.”
While meetings did indeed take place in Geneva between U.S.
ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Iranian government
officials, it is
simply false to assert that these meetings “provided
significant and tangible benefits for the American position
during
the early stages of the war on terror,” as Leverett claims.
Instead, those meetings allowed the Iranians to gauge U.S.
intentions
in Afghanistan and the level of U.S. anger over Iran’s
evacuation of al Qaeda operatives from Bin Laden training
camps. And
they gauged – correctly – that the U.S. was too
preoccupied with securing Kabul and plugging the Pakistani
border
with Afghanistan to do much about Iranian shenanigans on the
other
side of the country.
As I and others have reported, Iran
set up a “rat line”
in Western Afghanistan in October 2001, with convoys of
Toyotas
carrying top al Qaeda officials and their families who were
fleeing
Afghanistan for Iran. Some of the al Qaeda terror-masters
were flown
out on Iranian Army helicopters and fixed wing aircraft,
according to
U.S. intelligence reports at the time.
But if you believe Leverett, Iran gave the United States
“crucial
diplomatic cooperation,” because they could have actively
attacked U.S. troops during Operation enduring Freedom,
“either
by Afghan proxies or by Iranian intelligence and
paramilitary assets.”
Frankly, I would have preferred we skipped the jaw-jaw and
go
directly to war-war. Had we hit Iranian Revolutionary Guards
units
hard in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 as they were
evacuating the
eldest son of Osama Bin Laden, or al Qaeda military chief
Saef
al-Adil, we might not be facing the Iranians (or al Qaeda)
today in
Iraq. But Our Man Flynt believes we should have bowed down
and
thanked the Iranians for not killing more of us.
The second example Leverett uses involves an Iranian
“overture”
to the United States in early 2003. According to Leverett,
this was
Iran’s offer of a “grand bargain” with the United
States that would have resolved all outstanding differences
between
the two countries.
With Iran, any discussion must be “all or nothing,”
Leverett said this week, and must include U.S. “security
guarantees” not to use force to overthrow the regime.
“If the US had taken the Iranian offer to negotiate in 2003
when Iran was not spinning centrifuges, was not enriching
uranium& the world would be looking better,” he said.
But of course, the Evil Ones in the White House turned down
the
Iranian offer, which according to Our Man Flynt was made in
good
faith out of a desire by Iran’s clerical leaders to put
aside
their terrorist ways.
Sometimes when Leverett mentions the 2003 Iranian overture,
he adds a
telling detail: that he himself was involved in those talks,
and
personally met with a top Iranian official on the sidelines
of an
international conference in Athens.
I wrote about Leverett’s encounter with a senior Iranian
official at
the
time. The meeting
was intended to
be a “discrete back-channel discussion& intended as a
forum
to allow for quiet communication between the two governments
without
rhetoric or politics.”
But thanks to Leverett, it turned into a public relations
fiasco.
While Leverett claimed that he told the Iranian he was no
longer
working at the White House (he had recently resigned from
the Bush
White House and was preparing to join the Kerry campaign),
the
official’s translator spooked and reported the meeting back
to
Tehran, where it was promptly shut down.
The CIA must be relieved that Our Man Flynt is no longer on
the
roles. While his policy recommendations are just as insane
as those
proposed by the Baker-Hamilton duo, his adolescent pomposity
shows
him off for what he really is.
A loser.
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