Say what you want about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but “he knows how to work a room.” So claims Flynt Leverett, the contrarian Iran analyst who, with his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, paid a visit to the Iranian president in New York City last fall. During the sit-down at Manhattan’s InterContinental Barclay hotel with a group of invited academics, foreign policy professionals, and other Iranophiles, the Leveretts marveled at Ahmadinejad’s attention to detail as the Iranian took copious notes and strove to pronounce their unfamiliar names correctly. “He addresses every person by name. He made a serious effort to address everyone’s issue,” Flynt says. “It was really striking, the retail politics aspect.”
As former Bush White House officials, the Leveretts might seem unlikely company for the diminutive tyrant. But Ahmadinejad has reason to admire the married Middle East analysts. They are, after all, the most prominent voices in the U.S. media arguing that he was legitimately reelected last June, and that the opposition Green Movement is a flash in the pan. “There is no revolution afoot in Iran, and the social base of this movement is not growing; it is, in fact, shrinking,” Flynt recently said on PBS’s “NewsHour.” He has made his case everywhere from msnbc to NPR to The New York Times op-ed page, where he and his wife have made three shared appearances since late May.
To the Leveretts, Ahmadinejad’s Bill Clinton-like personal touch underscores their argument that, far from a thug repressing his people, he is, in fact, a charming leader with broad Iranian support--and one whose true nature the United States fails to understand. And, in any case, they say, moral indignation over his regime’s character distracts us from clear strategic thinking. Both economic sanctions and the Green Movement will fail to contain Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions. America’s only choice is to engage Iran, nuclear bomb or no. For that, they have earned the enmity of former friends and colleagues--and even drawn death threats. “We are portrayed as un-American, stooges of the regime,” complains Hillary.
But it’s not the Leveretts’ ultra-realist policy views that are so discomfiting. It is the sense that they cross a line into making apologies for the loathsome Ahmadinejad. And that makes for one of Washington’s most intriguing mysteries: How did two ex-Bush aides become the Iranian regime’s biggest intellectual defenders?
In the fall of 2001, Hillary Mann saw Flynt deliver a speech on the Arab-Israeli peace process and fell for him. Flynt was then a CIA officer with a Princeton Ph.D., on assignment to the State Department’s policy planning staff. Hillary, nearly ten years his junior at 33, was a Brandeis and Harvard law graduate working at the United Nations. When Flynt asked Hillary to lunch, he told the Times’ “Vows” column, “there was no plausible deniability” it was a date. By the time the two married in February 2003, they were both working on Bush’s National Security Council (he as director for the Middle East, she as director for Iran and Afghanistan), planning their wedding during breaks from planning the Iraq war. “I find it a bit hard to think of the Bush White House as the Love Boat,” cracked their best man, Richard Haass, then a senior State Department official, in his toast.
The Bush White House may have brought them together, but the couple soon turned against it. Flynt says he left his job the month after his wedding out of disillusionment with Bush’s hawkish Middle East policies. Hillary departed soon after, spending several months at the State Department before leaving government. (One former White House official says that Flynt didn’t quit but was fired for bureaucratic incompetence, including an office so unkempt that Condoleezza Rice herself was appalled. While admitting that he keeps “a messy desk,” Flynt denies this account.) Flynt went on to advise John Kerry’s presidential campaign and worked a stint at the Brookings Institution. In 2006, Hillary formed the consulting firm Stratega, which advises corporate clients on Middle Eastern politics.
By then, the Leveretts had begun publicly bashing Bush’s Iran policy--specifically his rejection of a May 2003 memo from a mid-level Iranian diplomat offering comprehensive talks with the United States that would include Iran’s nuclear program. Cheneyite hawks certainly had no interest in such a deal, but even former Secretary of State Colin Powell has cast doubt on whether the offer represented the regime’s true thinking. Still, the media thrilled to the idea that a bellicose Bush had rejected talks. When the Leveretts sought to publish a New York Times op-ed on the subject in December 2006, the White House insisted on censoring it, and the Times theatrically published the heavily redacted version anyway. An Esquire profile soon cast the Leveretts as heroic dissidents standing athwart another blind march to war. The couple’s new cachet drew influential Washingtonians to salon dinners they began holding at their home in suburban McLean, Virginia.
The Leveretts voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but, despite his efforts to broker a dialogue with Tehran, they found his attempts lacking and soon turned on him as well. By last spring, they were warning that Obama had already “lost” Iran, complaining that he had not halted Bush-era covert programs against Iran’s nuclear program. They also complained that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and White House Iran point man Dennis Ross were too hawkish. “The administration’s approach to Iran degenerates into an only slightly prettified version of George W. Bush’s approach,” they wrote in a May 24 piece for the Times, one that noticeably echoed Tehran’s position. And then came the June 12 Iranian election.
Hitler was a fabulous politician as well. He was able to invigorate a despondent nation with his great rhetoric abilities, and interpersonal skills.
The Leverett's would have liked him as well.
Hitler was a fabulous politician as well. He was able to invigorate a despondent nation with his great rhetoric abilities, and interpersonal skills.
The Leverett's would have liked him as well.
Maybe Hilary thinks that our concluding question is silly - is that possible? I'm not sure what's ultimately gained by fixating on the wretchedness of Ahmadinejad. He's scum to be sure, but it seems like the these two are saying that we shouldn't let this fact get in the way of noting that he's actually pretty popular in Iran. That, to me, seems to be the more salient issue in relation to whether or not to support uprisings against the regime there.
Maybe Hilary thinks that our concluding question is silly - is that possible? I'm not sure what's ultimately gained by fixating on the wretchedness of Ahmadinejad. He's scum to be sure, but it seems like the these two are saying that we shouldn't let this fact get in the way of noting that he's actually pretty popular in Iran. That, to me, seems to be the more salient issue in relation to whether or not to support uprisings against the regime there.
Hillary Leverett is surely correct "this government hasn't even begun to deploy the force it's capable of using." Does that mean that, if the Iranian government started to deploy its full force capability against its domestic political opponents (i.e., like Saddam Hussein used against his own opponents), would it give her pause? Somehow I doubt it.
Hillary Leverett is surely correct "this government hasn't even begun to deploy the force it's capable of using." Does that mean that, if the Iranian government started to deploy its full force capability against its domestic political opponents (i.e., like Saddam Hussein used against his own opponents), would it give her pause? Somehow I doubt it.
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