How should U.S. respond to Iran election?

Starting back in the Ford administration, you were on the National Security Council staff dealing with Iran and other issues. If you were on the National Security Council staff today, what advice would you offer the current administration about proceeding with its announcements that it wanted to have a direct dialogue with Iran.  Should this lead it to have second thoughts?
First of all, if I were on the NSC, my first piece of advice would be to do as little as possible. There is a battle going on inside Iran. This is an issue that is going to be fought out by Iranians — there's nothing to be gained by external forces coming into this or trying to influence the outcome.

That would be a terrible mistake, and no matter what was said or done by the administration, it would be interpreted as intervention and would actually undercut severely the position of the reformists as they would be tagged as "tools of the West." So basically "do nothing for now" is not a bad piece of advice.

As regards to where we come out on this in the end, it's clear that the task of starting some kind of discussion or negotiations with Iran is going to be infinitely more complicated than it was before. It wasn't easy from the beginning — and anybody who thought it would be an easy task didn't understand the problem.

But now after this internal coup and all the coverage it has received, those people in the United States and particularly in Israel who really opposed the idea of having negotiations with Iran — who favored a pressure strategy to build up more sanctions and so on — are now going to use their clout in Congress and elsewhere to slow down or stop the process.

So it's not that we can't talk to the Iranian government — obviously it's going to be harder to talk to an Ahmadinejad government after it's stolen the election — but the real problem is a domestic one. The administration is going to have to overcome a whole series of domestic hurdles which previously had been in abeyance.

And of course the administration is still committed, as are the Europeans, to getting Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program.
That problem has not changed. The problem has been and remains preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. The fact is we've tried a pressure strategy for more than ten years going all the way back to the Clinton administration. Now after more than ten years of putting pressure on Iran they have far greater capacity than they had when we started.

This has to tell us something about the policy. So the real question is what will work? What can you do that will actually have an effect? And the fact is that the only thing that's remaining for us to do is to actually talk to Iran about what we want, what they want, and look for common ground. It's not going to be easy. But it hasn't been tried, and the other things we've been doing haven't worked.

People who say we haven't been tough enough with our sanctions are completely missing the point. Every time we've imposed sanctions, at whatever level, however stringent, Iran has upped its program not reduced it. We need to be aware of that and think of what we can do. We probably will have to accept Iranian enrichment in one form or another.

The trick is how do you monitor that and control it and get Iran's cooperation in insuring that the low-enriched uranium they are producing is not transformed into high-enriched uranium, and into nuclear weapons. That's the objective and that's still something we can talk about with Iran. They have an interest in finding some kind of agreement with the international community and we have a strong interest in getting them to back off and basically agree to a form of surveillance or monitoring that we've not had thus far.

Do you think the events of June 12 and 13 will be remembered by Iranians as they still remember the events of August 1953 when Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup that was backed by the United States and Britain?
I really do see this as a kind of historic turning point. A commentator from Iran just today sent me a note saying that the Islamic republic is dead, that basically it was based on a concept of listening to the people and having the support of the people for Islamic programs. That was the nature of the Islamic constitution and it's what [Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi] Khomeini [Iran's first Supreme Leader] said he wanted to do.

In effect now they are saying "forget about the Iranian people — we don't care what they say or what they think. We're not going to listen to them." Basically it means that Iran is moving from what had been a decent experiment of being an Islamic Republic to being a totalitarian dictatorship.

Now it isn't at that point yet but it is a step in that direction which is going to be unmistakable to a lot of people in Iran and they will remember this. How will it resonate fifty years from now, I don't know.  But it clearly demonstrated to many, many people in Iran that they were simply ignored.

They had been asked to go out and vote; they had been allowed a certain amount of freedom to say what they thought. There were demonstrations, there was great excitement. Then the regime simply thumbs its nose at them and says, "OK, that was a mistake, now we're going to tell you what you need to do."

To me it would seem to be very important what happens to Moussavi. Right now he hasn't been heard since he issued his statement saying that the election is a farce and that it had been stolen from him. Do you think he will be put in a kind of exile in the country?
In answer to your question about how will this be remembered, a lot of whether this will be remembered or not depends on what happens next.

For instance, Mr. Mossadegh in 1967 died in internal exile. Will Moussavi be treated the same way?  People look at the events of 1953 and say "well that took away what was a potentially democratic process and imposed a dictatorship of the Shah." And that's what they remember.

Will that be what they remember about this, that it took away what little voice the people had in Iran and instead put in place a dictatorship? If that is the way it's perceived, then yes there's a real chance that many years from now this will be recalled as a turning point.

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