GATES: Don’t expect the nuclear agreement to lead to a more moderate Iran
Reuters US Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2011.
In an interview with Business Insider, Gates, who spent nearly 27 years in the CIA and was the only cabinet secretary to have served under Barack Obama and George W. Bush, said that he didn’t believe the nuclear deal would have a moderating impact on Iranian behavior or lead Tehran to become a more responsible international actor.
“The notion that betting that this regime is going to temper its behavior in the region because of this nuclear deal I think is mistaken,” Gates told Business Insider. “I think that will not happen.”
In the six months since the nuclear deal was reached, Iran has tested two nuclear-capable ballistic missiles in violation of UN Security Council resolutions, fired live missiles within 1,500 yards of a US aircraft carrier, and continued its support for the Assad regime in Syria and for Shiite militia groups in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
At the same time, Iran agreed to a prisoner swap with the US that secured the freedom of five US citizens detained in Iran in exchange for the US dropping charges against seven Iranians accused of violating sanctions against the country and removing several regime-linked officials from Interpol’s “red notice” list.
Iran also quickly freed 10 US sailors detained in Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf on January 12 — although not before propaganda images of the captive troops were broadcast on Iranian state media.
Overall, Gates doesn’t think that Iran’s long-term behavior will change that much after the nuclear deal, or that the deal can overcome the now 36-year-old regime’s religiously motivated ideology or temper its regional ambitions.
“This is a country that has a long history under the revolutionary government,” says Gates.
He recalled his involvement in the “very first official US meeting” with members of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s government, when Zbigniew Brzezinski, then the US national-security adviser, met with high-ranking regime officials in Algiers, Algeria, just three days before the 1979 US embassy seizure.
“As I like to tell people, that began my now more than three-decades-long quest for the elusive Iranian moderate,” says Gates.
Gates also doesn’t expect Iran’s geopolitical objectives to change as the result of the nuclear deal. He told Business Insider that he believes Iran will still harbor ambitions of building a nuclear weapon even as the deal is implemented.
“My view is that the belief that Iran over time is going to evolve into a regular nation state and abandon its theological revolutionary underpinnings, its aspirations in the region, or even its aspirations for nuclear weapons is unrealistic,” Gates said.
Under the nuclear agreement, Iran agreed to never “seek, develop, or acquire any nuclear weapons.” On one of the agreement’s most important points, Gates isn’t quite willing to take Tehran as its word.
Gates actually urged members of Congress to vote to implement the deal during the runup to the September 2015 deadline for congressional review of the agreement, arguing that the consequences of canceling the accord after its completion outweighed the risks of implementing it.
But he still criticized the deal’s provisions, stating that the US had gotten “out-negotiated” and calling the deal “flawed.”
In an interview with Business Insider, Gates raised the possibility that US negotiators did not secure as strong a deal as possible.
“The administration told us through April of last year that they had to have anywhere, anytime inspections,” said Gates, in reference to the possible degree of access international inspectors would have to sensitive Iranian nuclear sites over the life of the agreement. “That was given up in the deal, so I worry about verification.”
“I’m not sure we couldn’t have gotten a better deal if we hadn’t been eager,” Gates added.
Gates’ suspicion of Iran’s long-term intentions stems in part from his experience overseeing the US campaign in Iraq as Pentagon chief. As secretary of defense, Gates was involved in a US war effort in which Iranian-backed militia groups were a consistent US military adversary.
If this is the case, Gates’ concerns might have been vindicated by last week’s kidnapping of three American contractors in Baghdad at the hands of an Iranian-linked Shiite militia group.
He also witnessed Iran’s attempts to meddle in Iraq’s internal politics during the closing years of the Iraq War, after the US troop “surge” and the “Sunni awakening” succeeded in defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq and pacifying much of the country.
In his interview with Business Insider, Gates identified the strong-arm sectarian policies of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as one of the contributing factors to the rise of ISIS.
Maliki was closely identified with Tehran and was reelected as prime minister in 2010 as the result of Iranian political maneuvering. Gates might have difficulty investing too much confidence in a regime whose strategies he experienced first-hand during his years at the Pentagon.
“It seems to me that agreement needs to be paralleled by a very aggressive American strategy of working with our allies, both Arab and Israeli in the region to counter Iranian meddling, support of terrorism, and other activities,” Gates said.
He continued: “We need the same kind of strong-minded strategy in dealing with Iran in its behavior in the region that other countries are looking for, and there’s no reason for that to be contradictory to the” nuclear agreement.
Pamela Engel contributed to this report.
