SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT GATES
INTERVIEW WITH DAVID GREGORY OF MEET THE PRESS
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
March 1, 2009
Excerpts
. . .
MR. GREGORY: Let me turn to Iran. David Sanger from The New York Times in his book "The Inheritance" talks about the legacy of the Iraq war with regard to Iran, and he writes this: "It may turn out that one of the great post-Iraq paradoxes was that in crying wolf about Iraq, the American intelligence community found itself unable to raise the alarm about Iran."
And his point is there were no weapons of, of mass destruction in Iraq, and yet Iran has been able to progress with a nuclear capability short of, of a nuclear bomb but with kind of a virtual bomb, which is just being on the brink of having an actual weapons stockpile. The question is this: Is it possible to get Iran to abandon its weapons program short of some kind of grand bargain? In other words, bigger carrots and bigger sticks?
SECRETARY GATES: Well, first of all, I don't think that whatever one--however one might criticize the war in Iraq, I don't think that either the last administration or the current one have been distracted from the growing problem with Iran and its nuclear program in the least over the last number of years. We worried about it well before even the Bush administration. So I, I think that there has been a continuing focus on how do you get the Iranians to walk away from a nuclear weapons program?
They're not close to a stockpile, they're not close to a weapon at this point and so there is some time. And the question is whether you can increase the level of the sanctions and the cost to the Iranians of pursuing that program at the same time you show them an open door if they want to engage with the Europeans, with us and so on if they walk away from that program. Our chances of being successful, it seems to me, are a lot better at $35 or $40 oil than they were at $140 oil because there are economic costs to this program, they do have economic challenges at home.
MR. GREGORY: You do see the need, though, for a--some kind of strategic relationship between the U.S. and Iran?
SECRETARY GATES: Well, I think that--that's really up to the Iranians. I've been--as I like to say, I've been in this search for the elusive Iranian moderate for 30 years. I'm still looking.
. . .