Our Man Flynt

Flynt Leverett worked for the Kerry campaign after having left the NSC in 2003. He’s calling for the evil Bush administration to drop its opposition to ‘talks’ with Iran. I just don’t understand how these people think “talks” with Islamofascist crazies is going to do us any good. He, like Jean Francois Kerrie, just doesn’t get it.

“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.

He complains that the Bush administration is preventing him from printing a New York Times op ed, which apparently included information that the CIA has had second thoughts about.

He compares the Bush administration’s unwillingness to engage in ‘talks’ with Iran as the equivalent to ‘medical malpractice’, using as evidence the 6+2 talks on Afghanistan and an Iranian “overture” to the United States in early 2003 as diplomatic success stories. Both of these claims are stupid.

In October of 2001, Iran set up a rat line in western Afghanistan which took the terrorists from Afghanistan to Iran in convoys of Toyotas and Iranian Army helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. The reason that this worked was because the 6+2 talks on Afghanistan only helped them guage the situation, and helped them develop an exit strategy for the terrorists.

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.

WAR, to these people, is a dirty word.

The other claim obfuscates the facts. Iran made no ‘overture’ in 2003. The ‘talks’ that we engaged in ended up being a PR nightmare for the CIA.

Leverett, who had left the NSC just days before the meeting, tells Insight Daily he made clear to the Iranians that he no longer was in government, but apparently they took him as a U.S. government official anyway. “We were furious when we heard about this,” a White House official said. “Of course the Iranians were going to think Flynt was a White House emissary. We were totally blindsided. Flynt was absolutely not acting with our knowledge or our approval.” Leverett, a former CIA analyst who was on loan to the NSC, now works at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in Washington.

Leverett already was out of step with administration policy for his advocacy of a dialogue with the Islamic Republic government and because of what one official called his “intense animus” toward Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The Athens meeting took place on the sidelines of an academic forum organized by UCLA political-science professor Stephen Spiegel and which included academics from the United States, Iran and Israel. The forum was part of so-called “Track 2″ diplomacy among nongovernment experts and academics that grew out of the arms-control and regional-security talks established by the 1991 Middle East peace conference in Madrid.

Those freaking Academics should keep their noses in books and in the classroom guiding students through their studies instead of poking their noses into politics, and Leverett should put his pea shooter back in his pocket.

From Omar at Iraq the Model:

The External Approach; I basically do not think this can work especially when it comes to dealing with the main regional players; Syria and Iran and particularly Iran. I simply can’t see a chance for the US to find common grounds with the current regime in Iran whose main goal is to extend its “Islamic revolution” throughout the middle east.

And I have no doubt that Iran, with the mullahs in power, is not willing to accept a compromise that offers the US even a marginal level of benefit. The goals and visions of the two countries are so at odds that they can’t agree on anything, let alone work together.