GERECHT: ... let me state the obvious, which isn't often stated, and that is, American foreign policy toward the Islamic Republic since 1979 has largely been successful.

 

America certainly should not take a lot of credit for the failure of Iran's revolution. And let's be perfectly clear. For the vast majority of Iranians, including the clergy, the "inqilab," as the revolution is known in Persian, has been a bust.

Credit should go first and foremost, I think, to Ayatollah Khomeini, who established a theocracy at odds with Shiite history and the sensibilities of most Iranians, including those who are quite devout. Credit goes to the 1980-'88 Iran-Iraq war that eventually broke the back of Iran's legions of die-hard holy warriors.

But the United States, too, deserves credit for its consistent opposition to the regime. Although not all American administrations have been equally committed to countering the Islamic Republic and hammering it for its support of terrorism, both the first Bush administration and especially the Clinton administration wanted at one time to engage Iran's ruling clergy.

All American administrations since 1979 have overall realized that confrontation and containment were the only viable policies towards Teheran, because the clerical regime gave them no choice.

And like I said, this policy has been a success. We, not the Western Europeans -- who have often wanted to engage the Islamic Republic, even when Iran's assassins and contract bombers were striking Western Europe in the 1980s -- are the Westerners most admired inside of Iran. We are admired in great part because we have been seen by the people of Iran and by the mullahs that rule over them as the only serious antagonist to clerical power.

It's worthwhile to recall how badly the Clinton administration, and particularly President Clinton, wanted to give peace a chance with Iran during the first term of President Mohammad Khatami. Both the president and Secretary of State Albright tried to turn apologia into foreign policy.

Secretary of State Albright apologized for the CIA-sponsored 1953 coup d'etat, which, I might add, was an odd position, given how many clerics, including Khomeini, were quite pleased to see Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh fall from power. And President Clinton apologized for the supposedly bad behavior of the entire Western world towards Iran for the last 150 years in an effort to get Teheran to extend a friendly hand, and a former FBI director, Louis Freeh to believe President Clinton even tried to avoid confronting the Islamic Republic for its culpability in the attack on Khobar Towers in 1996.

Now, I don't mention the Clinton years to embarrass the president or Secretary Albright. I suspect both still firmly believe they did nothing embarrassing. I mention it to underscore how awful official analysis of clerical Iran has often been in the United States government.

American apologies in revolutionary clerical eyes means only one thing -- weakness. And showing weakness to power-politic-loving Iranian clerics is not astute. This is 101 in Iranian political culture.

Yet I'm willing to bet that most analysts dealing with Iran at the State Department and the CIA probably thought American soul- searching was a good thing, that the political elites in Teheran would respect us more.

The mirror imaging of Western, especially Western European, ethics under Iranians has been a constant problem in the E.U.-3 nuclear negotiations with Teheran. I'm not going to spend much time on this affair. I consider the whole process now damaging to the United States, since it should be obvious to all concerned -- and let us be frank -- it was obvious when this process first started that the British, the French and the Germans are not going to implement crippling sanctions against Iran.

Most Western Europeans simply cannot play power politics anymore. They have, as Robert Kagan has trenchantly written, evolved beyond such things.

The E.U.-3 negotiations with Iran remain as they started. For the Americans it is a vehicle for trans-Atlantic dialogue, and for the Europeans it's a means of controlling George W. Bush, the potentially mad bomber.

And it's by no means clear that the United States is willing to hit Iran with serious economic sanctions either when oil is around $60 per barrel. And there is little cultural reason to believe that even if the Americans and the Europeans could devise powerful sanctions, over the objections of the Russians and the Chinese -- and let us not deceive ourselves, the Russians, and now quite possibly the Chinese, view clerical Iran as a strategic asset, for the Russians it's now a Saddam substitute in the Middle East -- that the ruling clerics would relent.

Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, the father of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, from the Western Europeans and, I hate to say, more than a few U.S. officials and commentators, surreally viewed as our best bet for stopping the clerical regimes acquisition of the bomb, started this program with broad clerical support in the late 1980s. And it should be blatantly obvious by now, the ruling clergy intends to see this through to its completion.

The only conceivable force that could make the ruling clergy relent is the firm conviction that George W. Bush -- the mad bomber -- will bomb them if they don't. And the United States, by its firm embrace of the E.U. process and the pretty public signals senior U.S. officials have sent to the Europeans, that they really don't want to even conceive of preemptive military strikes against the clerical regime, have substantially undermined the image abroad that George W. Bush really means it when he says that the clerical bomb is unacceptable.

The situation, I think, looks so bad, that Patrick Lawson, who is, I think, a very insightful analyst at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy has quipped, that trying to ban Iran from international soccer is likely to be a more serious threat than Western economic sanctions -- in my mind actually seems like a serious foreign policy goal now.

But the nuclear -- beyond the nuclear question, Iranian troublemaking will continue and possibly grow. A viable democracy in Iraq, where the Shiite clergy is an instrumental force before a representative government, is an enormous nightmare in the making for Teheran. Contrary to so much bizarre commentary in the United States and Europe, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, an Iranian by birth and the spiritual leader of the Shiite community in Iraq, and other pro- democracy clerics, are probably the most serious threat to theocracy in Iran.

Iran can cause trouble in Iraq. And fortunately, I think the clerical regime's capacity to do so has been greatly exaggerated. Iran's allies inside of the Iraqi Shiite community are still limited in the political maneuvering by Sistani, the traditional clergy and the democratic process. It will certainly try to do so.

In Afghanistan, Iran again is no ally of the democratic process, but again, fortunately, its allies are not numerous outside the province of Herat, and even in Herat, among the Sunni Persian-speaking Tajiks, who in the past have sanctuaried in Iran, affections for Persians shouldn't be overstated. Compared to Pakistani troublemaking in Afghanistan, Iranian nefarious activity will likely remain second- rate.

In Lebanon and Syria, Iran will try to cause trouble if it can. Teheran will certainly keep supporting Bashar al-Assad, Syria's ruler, up until the moment it's wise to transfer allegiance to another member of the Alawite ruling clan. In Lebanon, Teheran will back the Shiite rejectionist camp and its influence with the Hezbollah, Iran's only true foreign child of the Islamic revolution. This backing should not be underestimated.

It will be fascinating, I have to say, to see how the Lebanese Shiite community breaks. It appears now that the majority of that community will move toward giving a new democratic Lebanon a chance towards a new power-sharing relationship with the Lebanese Christian Maronites. Iran has no interest in seeing this to succeed, and certainly will try to influence its friends among the Lebanese Shia against the democratic process.

In Israel and Palestine, you can count on Iran to support whomever bombs the Israelis more. Iran has long supported the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It accurately be called a creation, if not a tool, of the clerical regime. The more violence in Israel, the better. If Iran could get that violence to spill over into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which the clerical regime loathes, even better.

Now, concerning Islamic Sunni militants in general, expect a new ecumenical movement from Teheran. We should be especially sensitive to dealings between the clerical regime and Sunni groups allied with al-Fatah. There is much that Teheran need to explain about its contacts with al-Fatah, in particular with followers behind the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Al Qaida's number two, and a former Sunni militant poster boy for the clerical regime in the 1980s.

If the United States again intercepts transmissions from members of Al Qaida inside Iran to operationally active members of Al Qaida outside Iran, then the Bush administration would be well advised to hit the clerical regime with something sharper than verbal warnings from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The low point in discussing the clerical regime -- and I have not yet reached the low point -- is that the Bush administration hasn't yet developed a coherent strategy for confronting and dealing with the mullahs.

It could be worse, of course. All we have to do is remember the Clinton administration. It's unlikely George W. Bush will apologize to the clerical regime on behalf of the entire West, and in that, at least, we may have some hope.

I'll stop there. He'll now defend the Clinton administration.

SAXTON: I enjoyed your last paragraph or so.

Go ahead, Mr. Pollack.

 

STATEMENT OF

KENNETH POLLACK
Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution

 

POLLACK: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

And let me also say what a pleasure it is to be here, and also to be once again appearing with my friend and colleague, Reuel Gerecht. As he has pointed out, we have done this dog and pony show in a number of places around town, and I think that it actually is enjoyable for both of us, and I think also illuminating for our various audiences.

I would certainly agree with Reuel that Iran constitutes a very real set of threats to the United States of America. What I would say is that, I think that we need to conceive of Iran as mostly posing a series of latent threats, as opposed to active ones.

Iran is an anti-status quo regime. Since the 1978 revolution, the leaders of this regime have been displeased with the current arrangement of power in the Middle East and in the larger global scale, and have worked very actively to try to change the status quo. They've used any number of unsavory, even murderous, methods to change the status quo.

What is more, the regime since 1978 has defined its foreign policy in opposition to the interests of the United States. Its rhetoric about the U.S. being the great Satan has oftentimes been much more than rhetoric.

And even for those Iranians who do seem to see it as nothing more than rhetoric, they do still seem to conceive of the world as being an arena in which the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran vie for influence, power, wealth, et cetera, on the global stage.

Of course, over the course of time, Iran has been more and less aggressive in its pursuit of these anti-status quo and anti-American goals. At least up until the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I would say that Iran fell into the less aggressive category, and had been in that category since roughly 1996 and 1997.

However, it seems that the new regime in Teheran may be moving back toward a more aggressive version, along the lines of the policies that were pursued, in particular during the early 1990s.

Now, in terms of the specific threats, the two that leap immediately to mind that I think are most relevant to the hearings of this committee. The first, of course, is terrorism. With the demise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Iran is arguably now the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Iran's ties to terrorists groups are well known, and they are explicit and public.

As Reuel pointed out, Hezbollah is largely a creation of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps. Hezbollah has demonstrated both a remarkable military capability inside Lebanon, giving the Israelis all they could take for years upon end before the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, but has also demonstrated a global reach beyond Lebanon itself, including terrorist operations in the western hemisphere.

What's more, as Reuel alluded to, I think we need to be very careful about the Sunni-Shia split. We have often tended to ascribe a much greater degree of certainty in terms of that split, and a greater dichotomy than has often proven to be the case.

And in particular, with regard to the Iranians, what we have seen is, their M.O. has typically been to keep their hands in every pie. They maintain contacts with just about every group -- Sunni, Shia, et cetera. And we have seen them assisting a whole variety of groups, which a strict interpretation of the Shia-Sunni divide would simply have no explanation for.

Again, the best and most important example of this is Iran's harboring of Al Qaida leadership inside of Iran, and allowing them the freedom of maneuver to help organize the May 2002 Riyadh bombings.

In addition, Iran has used its terrorist capability and has used its intelligence capability, to help try to subvert friendly governments -- governments friendly to the United States -- throughout the Persian Gulf region, something that remains in the backs of the minds of many of our allies, even though they have been embarked on a rapprochement with the Iranians, basically since the early 1990s. But Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and other states have all at different times been threatened by Iranian subversion.

The second great threat that the United States faces from Iran is in Iraq. Here, there is, as is often the case with Iran, both good and bad. The bad news is that the Iranians have been very active in supporting a wide variety of groups inside of Iraq -- largely Shia, largely groups that it supported when those groups were in exile before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but since the overthrow of Saddam, spreading out and even providing some degree of support to some of the Sunni insurgents, as well.

Beyond that, the Iranians have established a very extensive intelligence and paramilitary network inside of Iraq. The best estimates I have seen indicate that thousands of members of the Iranian intelligence services, Revolutionary Guard Corps and other members of the Iranian regime, are inside of Iraq, building networks, establishing safe houses, providing weaponry, paying off proxies and doing everything else that they can to have a full range of operational capabilities inside of Iraq, should they be told to turn this network operational.

The good news is that, in the parlance of the American military, the Iranians have not yet gone kinetic. So far, the Iranians have not tried to directly kill any Americans. And while they do seem to be participating in some assassination operations, largely against Sunni leaders, we have not yet seen a major Iranian effort to intervene, either against the Sunni insurgency or in the civil war that is starting very slowly to bubble inside of Iraq.

What's more, there has been a tremendous amount of tacit Iranian cooperation with the U.S.-led reconstruction effort. It was extremely important to the United States early on, after the fall of Baghdad, that the Iranians effectively told their allies inside of Iraq that they had no problem with them going along with the process of reconstruction.

Again, I will echo a point that Reuel made which I think is very important, that we should not assume that even those Shia groups that have strong ties to Iran are proxies of the Iranians or clients of the Iranians. In fact, in many cases, they have done everything that they could to try to distance themselves from the Iranians.

However, all of those groups do have a certain degree of patronage from Iran, and all of them must constantly look over their shoulder. All are very fearful that reconstruction in Iraq will fail, that there will be civil war, and under those circumstances, that they will be wholly reliant on the Iranians for weapons and other assistance to wage such a civil war.

But the fact is, the point is, that things could be much worse in Iraq with Iran. And on balance, weighing the good with the bad, I would have to say that Iran has actually been more of a plus than a minus so far inside of Iraq.

Now, behind all of these issues, behind these two principal threats from Iraq, looms the nuclear issue. And while I don't want to dwell on this for too long, I think that it would be a mistake not to raise it in these hearings.

Because the fact of the matter is that much of Iran's restraint over the past 10 years has been out of fear -- fear of a U.S. or an Israeli conventional military retaliation for some egregious act of terrorism on their part, and also fear of European economic sanctions, which, as Reuel has pointed out, have never materialized, despite Iran's many bad acts over the years. But nevertheless, it has been a restraining force.

The problem with Iran's nuclear program is that, should Iran acquire a nuclear weapons capability, there are those in Teheran who seem to believe that at that point, it is the United States and Israel who will be deterred, not Iran. And under those circumstances, you could see an Iranian regime, particularly this Iranian regime, revert to a much more aggressive foreign policy, pursuing their anti-status quo and anti-American goals in the same kind of aggressive fashion that they did in the 1990s, as opposed to the much more restrained approach that they showed in the late 1990s and since September 11, 2001.

As a final point, to conclude, I will simply make a response to Reuel's, I think, very important points about U.S. policy toward Iran.

Here, I think, an important distinction, an important difference between the two of us, is that I believe that the best approach to handle Iran, the best way that we can exert pressure on Iran and move them in the right direction, is through economic sanctions. My own read of the last 10 to 15 years of history is that the Iranians have been most fearful and most responsive to the threat of multilateral, economic sanctions.

Although the Iranians like to say they don't care about Western economic sanctions, the fact is that, whenever they have felt the real prospect of having such multilateral sanctions imposed, we have seen them move directly in the opposite direction, rein in their bad behavior, and do everything they could to avoid it.

In 1997, after the Mykonos trial in Germany, when it looked as if the Europeans might finally impose economic sanctions, the Iranians immediately reined in their terrorist activities, stopped surveilling U.S. personnel in the Persian Gulf, did everything they could to back down and look as if they were non-threatening.

So, too, in 2003 when the Europeans first demanded that Iran sit down and begin to negotiate over their nuclear program. Initially, the Iranians utterly refused to do so until the Europeans began to threaten them with comprehensive, multilateral, economic sanctions. And only at that point did the Iranians agree to come to the table. And since that point, what we have seen is the Iranians consistently try to walk away from those talks, and only be pulled back whenever the Europeans did mount once again a credible threat to impose economic sanctions across the board against Iran.

Economic sanctions will be difficult to impose on Iran. And I think there is no question that this regime, particularly since the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will try everything in its power to resist them and to prevent the Europeans from coming along with us to actually impose them.

But the economy is Iran's Achilles heel. It is the economy that is killing this regime. It is the economy that is turning the Iranian people against this regime. And this is something that is not lost on the regime itself.

I have every expectation that, if we could convince our European allies -- and I will say that while I am skeptical of them, they have proven me wrong at every turn and have stuck with us so far -- if we can continue to keep them with us, if we can convince them to stick with us and actually impose those sanctions on Iran, I think there is every expectation that we will see Iran change its behavior.

Thank you.

SAXTON: Thank you very much, both of you, for what you've had to say. I would just like to remind my colleagues at the outset that we had a closed session earlier today, and that the information that we heard during that closed session should be divorced as much as -- totally from whatever we say in this session.

I find this subject interesting. I find this subject reminds me of a very dangerous situation. And I also find this subject very fascinating.

And I guess I say that, because, certainly, Iran is a major -- the major -- player, in my estimation, in the region. I find it fascinating, because, from various sources of information, it sounds like the people in Iran are very unhappy folks, both with their government and with their daily lives, probably fostered by their ability to look out of the window and look at the West and see what life can be like.

And I find it fascinating, because this very powerful country in the region seems to be relatively successful at leaving very few fingerprints anywhere. And we therefore ask ourselves -- and, of course, dangerous, because of their proclivity to carry out support for various terrorist groups, as well as their determination to develop weapons of mass destruction, particularly nukes.

So, I guess my question is a general one. Our approach to-date doesn't seem to have been particularly successful over the last couple of decades in dealing with the Iranian situation, the threat.

And what are your suggestions as to how we move forward?

GERECHT: Well, I mean, it's -- you have to sort of divide it up. On the nuclear issue, I'm afraid in all probability that we've already lost.

I don't -- I mean, I disagree with Ken here. I don't think the track record with Iran being detoured by economic sanctions is really all that good. I think the elasticity in the Iranian economy is such that things just keep going on by, if you were to look at a spreadsheet and apply Western standards, you would have assumed the regime would have been in a lot more trouble a lot sooner than it is now. And certainly, at $60 a barrel, the amount of maneuvering room there is substantial.

On -- I mean, I don't think we've really ever gotten all that serious about the clerical regime. I'm not one of those who believe that you can devise, for example, a covert action program, and the regime's going to collapse because of internal dissent. I find that highly unlikely.

However, I do think the U.S. government should have continued some type of programs to aid dissent in that country. We had something of that nature in the 1980s. It wasn't terribly profound, but at least it was there. It died by the end of the first Bush administration.

There's nothing wrong with trying to do that. There's certainly nothing wrong with the United States government aiming specifically at that which is, in fact, the Achilles heel of the regime, I would argue, and that's clerical dissent.

The most important institution, you always have to remember, inside of Iran is the clerical court. That court, which tries and reprimands refractory members of the clergy. It is what they fear most.

The U.S. government should have tried a long time ago -- and should still try, actually -- to reach out to support those individuals and to play politics the way the Iranians play politics.

I mean, I think you have to counter them. If they engage in nefarious action, you have to hit them.

I frankly do not understand -- and the apparent -- and it would be good to have someone in the administration deny it -- the apparent operational activity of Al Qaida inside of Iran. And we essentially didn't reprimand them in any way, shape or form.

It is a terrible, terrible signal to send to the Iranians, that in fact you can have members who are supposedly under house arrest, but are nevertheless engaging in conversations with members of Al Qaida outside of the country. And bombs even go off. And there is some suggestion that those two things are connected. And the Bush administration does nothing.

SAXTON: Sorry, bombs go off?

GERECHT: Saudi Arabia.

And that is a very, very bad signal to send. You cannot, you know, overestimate the extent to which both the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence in Iran have the networks and the contacts to really cause us serious trouble on the Sunni side of the house.

What you have to remember is Iran repeatedly has this ecumenical urge to reach out to Sunni militants. It's been there from the very first days of the revolution. You've seen it in cycles. I think we're in another cycle right now.

And they are going to play that card. That is part of their effort to bring the Sunni world into their greater anti-American cause.

And I think we should be very, very concerned about this. And I suspect it is something that will only grow.

POLLACK: Let me begin by agreeing with a few points that Reuel made, because I think they are very important.

In particular, I think that it is important for the United States to continue to support democracy, not only in Iran, but everywhere around the world. I think that it is one of the lessons that we should have learned -- I think we have learned -- since September 11, 2001, is that it was a mistake not to have been more consistent in our support of democracy all around the world prior to that point in time.

I would also say that I completely agree with Reuel about the point, the need to retaliate against the Iranians any time that we find them conducting a particularly nefarious act.

And what's more, I think that we need to do a much better job of publicizing some of Iran's bad behavior. I think his point about the May 2003 Riyadh bombings is extremely important. We simply let that pass, without any kind of a word.

I think that we could have done a much better job of bringing this to people's attention, pointing out this is a clear sign that Iran is on the wrong side of the global war on terrorism, and that this could, in and of itself, mobilize -- help mobilize -- global international opinion against the regime in Iran.

That said, where I disagree with Reuel in two or three other points that he made.

First, I have a very pessimistic view of the possibility that we can employ any form of covert action inside of Iran, or that we could, as he put it, play politics the Iranian way.

My own experience with our various covert action and diplomatic policies is that we're very bad at playing politics any way other than our own. And the Iranian political system is an utter mystery to us.

GERECHT: I would agree with that.

POLLACK: That being the case, I would not -- well, if there are interesting options out there, I would certainly think that the U.S. government should look at them. I don't think that we should expect that that is going to solve our problems with Iran.

I will also say that I think that at the end of the day -- and I suspect that Reuel so fears, as well -- we may have to adopt a new policy of containment toward Iran, perhaps even a policy of containment toward a nuclear Iran.

That said, I would much prefer not to run that social science experiment. I think that we have an overly sympathetic nostalgia for the Cold War with the Soviet Union. My memory of the Cold War with the Soviet Union is that it was actually a very dangerous period of time.

I'd prefer not to have another cold war, especially not with a country like Iran that does have some rather strange ideas about how the world works and has shown a willingness to act rather aggressively in the past.

I also do believe that there is a very real prospect that comprehensive, multilateral economic sanctions against Iran could make a major effort, could make a major change in Iran's behavior possible.

I would note that Iranians are already in their own papers noting that President Ahmadinejad's various speeches and interviews inside of Iran have backfired very badly against them. There is already dissent inside of Teheran about the hard-line policy, because Iranians, frankly, don't want additional economic sanctions imposed upon them.

I don't necessarily disagree with Reuel's analysis. Iran's economy has shown an ability to kind of limp along. The fact that their oil is over $60 a barrel provides an additional cushion, and what's more, we show is, remember that the regime leadership itself is so horribly corrupt that it is completely insulated from the impact of economic sanctions.

What we have seen is that the Iranian people do not like to be isolated at all.

What we have heard repeatedly is that Iran's technocrats understand that the structural problems in Iran's economy are so great, that the cushion from the high price of oil is not going to be sufficient to carry them through over the long term. And we have seen a great deal of sensitivity on the part of the regime's leadership, that its economic problems is creating the domestic dissent, which is the greatest threat to its continued role.

SAXTON: Let me ask you about oil.

It was brought to my attention -- I also chair the Joint Economic Committee. And we did a study of the situation involving the global petroleum market.

And first of all, we found out that 70 percent of the petroleum that we import is used for transportation. Second of all, we found out that Iran and the other OPEC countries have at their disposal 60 percent of the oil reserves in the world, and the non-OPEC countries have the rest, 40 percent.

Then we found out that the non-OPEC countries are by far out- producing the OPEC countries in oil production. I've forgotten the numbers. It's something like non-OPEC countries are producing something like 60 percent of the oil that's produced, that's consumed in the world, and the OPEC countries are producing only 40 percent, while the reserves are just the opposite, the existing reserves.

And so, one would conclude, based on our studies, that the OPEC countries have colluded to keep production low, in order to keep prices up.

So, if you take all that and say, OK, well, what do we do? We found out that we have existing technology that will permit us to use alternative sources of fuel for transportation -- 70 percent of what we import.

So, wouldn't it make sense for us to really get serious about finding other ways to fuel our transportation system? And wouldn't this be a major element in foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran and other OPEC countries?

GERECHT: Well, I mean, I think it's fair to say that America's foreign policy since World War II, if you were to remove the oil angle, wouldn't make sense at all in the Middle East.

I mean, for the life of me, I can't imagine that there would be that many Americans who would spend that much time with members of the Saudi family, if it were not for oil.

Now, I would agree with all of that. All I would say is that, I don't think the timeframe is terribly helpful. I mean, Jim Woolsey loves to talk about, you know, turning vegetables into oil. And certainly, when he describes it, it sounds most sensible to me.

However, I don't think any of this is going to transpire over time that will help us with any of the issues that we're really concerned about with Iran, and that the Iranians have -- they have a lot of advantages.

Their biggest disadvantage that they have is that they are a very unpopular regime and they know it. And they constantly fear the possibility of an internal spark that could somehow just overwhelm the security apparatus.

However, it must always be said that they have shown themselves enormously adept at maintaining themselves in power. And I don't think we're going to have any easy way out here. And that in some sense, you're either going to have to do containment, or you're going to have to do confrontation, or both. I perhaps would argue more for the latter. Ken would argue a little bit more for the former, I think.

POLLACK: Mr. Chairman, I can only agree with you. I think that it is an absolutely critical element of our long term foreign policy. I think that it has been notably absent in our foreign policy, going back, actually, to giving credit to the Carter administration. That was the last time that it really was a major component.

But I would, obviously, agree with Reuel. As I pointed out, it can only be a long term component of our foreign policy. It has to be a long term component. But unfortunately, the near term reality is that, unless overnight we abandon SUVs and insisted everyone start driving hybrids, I think it unlikely that we're going to be able to make that much of a difference to actually have an impact on what we can do with Iran in the next few years.

SAXTON: I like to talk about this every time I get a chance, because I think we're missing the boat on this subject.

Today the technology exists. You mentioned SUVs. Suburban is one of the biggest SUVs, that has the -- that is built, it is manufactured with the capability of burning 85 percent alcohol. And yet, we have not pursued that policy.

Chrysler makes cars that burn 85 percent alcohol. Ford makes cars that can burn 85 percent alcohol. Toyota makes cars that can do the same thing, probably more efficiently than the Americans. Some people tell me that.

And yet, we seem to concentrate our policy on continuing to run our fleet, our national fleet, on gasoline.

One of the ladies that works for me did some research recently just on her own and found out she could -- she drives 25 miles a day -- and she can buy a car that can drive on -- that will meet her transportation needs on electricity.

And yet, we don't pursue these issues -- not aggressively, anyway.

When I talk to industry they say, well, we've got to have the demand before we're going to produce these types of technologies. And it just confounds me that we are kind of still in the water on this subject.

I recently read a book -- change the subject -- I recently read a book entitled, "The Rose Garden of the Martyrs." It's written by an English chap who married an Iranian lady, and has lived in Iran for 10 years before he wrote the book. I'm not sure when the book was published. Maybe he's been there 15 years by now. I don't know.

But it was a depiction of life, of his experiences of life in Iran. And it was kind of an eye opener for me, because it depicted life in Iran as anything but pleasant for the Iranian people. Everything from the way -- his observation, at least -- anything from the way they're entertained to the subject of pollution and smog, to the subject of shortage of water, at least clean water, to the lack of freedom, to the -- just the economics of the country.

First, are you familiar with that book?

GERECHT: Yes. I know the gentleman fairly well.

SAXTON: Talk a little bit about life in Iran as it's depicted in the book, and whether you think that it's a fair assessment of life in Iran.

GERECHT: Yes. I think it's a pretty good book. And Chris has a pretty keen eye.

All I would say there is, I'm not sure, again. The cultural -- the enormous dissatisfaction that Iranians have. You know, it's often said that Iranians, if given their druthers, one of the words that best describes them is "aftabizadeh," (ph) that that's what they'd really like to be, which is, like, they want to bronze, they want to be suntanned. They want to enjoy themselves. They want to relax.

It is often said, not with some, without accuracy, that Iranians are fairly decadent people. Older cultures often do that to you. But the problem is, it isn't terribly helpful.

It's not a sophisticated theory of politics, but I think it's nevertheless accurate, in that -- Iran, because everybody does complain, because everybody is miserable -- a lot of people are miserable -- that it almost serves as a safety valve for the regime.

I mean, you can spend time with Iranians and hours and hours and hours will go by. And they will describe the regime in all its -- in a disgusting way, and they'll -- you would think that, in fact, they would be on the verge of sort of a revolution. And then you find out that, in fact, they're not at all.

That if you looked into the Iranian DNA, what you would come away with, I think, is the profound sense that they really are exhausted revolutionaries. And that's true for even the young men who are the, would have to be the catalytic element for change, who never knew the revolution, who, in fact, didn't know the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war.

They nevertheless carry with them somehow the memory of the dark days of the revolution, of the awfulness of the Iran-Iraq war, and that they don't want to actually engage themselves in those ways that would force change.

And I think that book actually goes in that direction, if you understand it and look at it. It describes a situation which you would think is potentially tumultuous, but in practice isn't.

And that's one of the many, many paradoxes about things Persian.

POLLACK: Let me just add a couple of points to the points that Reuel made, because I think that he actually did make some very important, very valuable points.

You know, what we have seen from the Iranians is that every time they have been able to express themselves politically, in every election since 1997, where the elections have had any degree of fairness and freedom, they have voted for that candidate who most stood for change. And that is true of the most recent presidential election as well.

It's a mistake -- I think many people see Ahmadinejad as somehow being part of the establishment. That's not how he appeared to Iranians. Iranians were deeply disillusioned by the failure of Mohammad Khatami and the reformists. That was the left's version of change.

What they embraced this time around is the right's version of change. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not an establishment figure, in the sense of he just wants to keep doing what they've been doing. In fact, he is a radical reformer.

Now, he is a radical reformer who is enamored of the supreme leader, and he is a radical reformer who believes that the revolution lost its way, that they need to go back to the original roots. But the reason that Iranians voted for him was because he stood for change.

And as Reuel pointed out earlier, you have many Western analysts who assumed -- and, in fact, prayed for the victory of Hashemi Rafsanjani, who we saw once again categorically rejected by Iranians, because he was the ultimate symbol of status in Iran, of all of the problems that they've had for 25, 26, 27 years.

But as Reuel has also pointed out, what we've also seen from the Iranians is that on every occasion, when they might have actually risen up against the regime, they've chosen not to.

Most importantly in the summers of 1999 and 2000, the students of Teheran University and other universities in the capital took to the streets to demand change. The source of the inspiration for those riots are actually incidental. They simply sparked a larger movement against the government.

But no one came to aid them. No one else showed up. You did not have, as you did in 1978, hordes of workers and intellectuals and professionals pouring into the streets to support the students.

Everyone stayed home, because as Reuel pointed out, Iranian society is tired of revolution. And what you hear time and again from Iranians is, we want a different government, but we don't want another revolution. We're sick and tired of revolutions. We've been living with one for 25 years.

SAXTON: Is it -- is hopelessness a word that would play to describe society in...

GERECHT: No, I wouldn't say that. I mean, you know, again, things can change rapidly in Iran. And I would argue that when change comes, and I'm sure it will, it will probably be quite rapid, and you won't see it coming.

And that's certainly the way the regime itself views that possibility, is that something, some spark could happen. I mean, when they -- they always talk about and they fear is soccer games, because that is a great, passionate sport in Iran. And that's where young men get together. And when young men get together they often do things that the regime doesn't approve of.

So, that is -- I wouldn't say things are hopeless. And I don't think the Iranians themselves necessarily think they're hopeless.

But at the same time, they realize how good the regime is, in the sense that it is not a totalitarian system. I actually think, if the Iranian clerical regime were trying to implement a totalitarian system, something that Khomeini stopped in 1983, that you would actually have more trouble in the country.

What the regime does, actually, is it pinpoints individuals who could conceivably become leaders, who could develop charisma. And they are either jailed, stabbed to death, hit with a car or otherwise neutralized.

And it has worked, unfortunately.

POLLACK: Again, just to take up some of Reuel's points, you know, academics have been trying desperately to explain revolutions for 100 years or more, at the very least, and have systematically failed to do so.

Now, that could be reflection on academia, but I choose to see it as simply being the inherent difficulty of understanding and predicting revolutions. In fact, academic studies have typically failed to predict revolutions, even retrospectively. They're just impossible to figure out.

And as Reuel pointed out, they seem to happen spontaneously for reasons that almost no one can tell. You can be in a situation that looks revolutionary for decades and nothing will happen. And in other cases, you can find yourself with a society that really doesn't look like it's ripe for one, only to have one explode in your face rather unexpectedly.

Where I might disagree with Reuel a little bit is, what I hear from Iranians is a certain sense of resignation -- resignation about the system, a certain sense of nihilism. My own sense is that one of the reasons for a real rise in hedonism and a bunch of social problems related to hedonism -- unwanted pregnancies, drug use, prostitution, all of which are becoming real problems in the cities of Iran -- has to do with a sense of resignation, even hopelessness on the part of many of Iran's young.

I would say, again, in partial agree with Reuel, but you also do hear this weird mix of optimism -- unjustified optimism in many cases -- that somehow things are going to change, although no Iranian can really explain how or why or let alone when.

And for me, that's the final point just to come back to, which is, I think that there is reason to believe that there may be change in Iran, perhaps radical change. And that as Reuel pointed out, it may be rather sudden.

But it would be, I think, a tremendous mistake for any U.S. government to base its policy on the expectation of change in the near term.

GERECHT: I would just say that I think Iranians have always been hedonistic, and that's one of the reasons I like them so much. But I'll just stop there.

SAXTON: On that note, let me change the subject.

With regard to the foreign policy of Iran, one of the observations that one can make is that prior to 9/11, we decided we had to do something different for our national security, so we went to Afghanistan. So there's a Western, U.S. coalition presence and a very meaningful one east of Iran.

Next we went to Iraq. And there's a very meaningful Western coalition present west of Iraq.

The relationship between Iran and one of its benefactors, the Soviet Union, no longer exists, although I suppose there's a relationship with Russia.

And the Central Asian countries that were at one time part of the Soviet Union are now in a much different situation than they were when they were a part of the Soviet Union.

And I'm wondering what that all means to Iran. How does that affect their -- how do those factors affect the behavior of the ayatollahs and their desire to be influential in the region? Can you talk to that a little bit?

GERECHT: Yes. If you draw a map, I'd actually -- the eastern part, and (inaudible) to Central Asia, I'd more or less take it away from the calculation now.

One thing about the clerical regime is that it has been, from its inception, enormously Western oriented. Actually, the Iranian regime isn't terribly good in Afghanistan, has never been since the revolution. They feel uncomfortable there. They don't really like it there.

The same is true in Central Asia. The Iranians had a great deal of anticipation and hope in Central Asia when the Soviets went down, that they'd make headway and all the rest. They threw themselves into places like Tajikistan.

If you go to Tajikistan, you go to the major department store in downtown Dushanbe, you'll go up to the luxury goods, and it will be full of Iranian furniture, which gives you some idea of how bad luxury items are in Tajikistan.

And the -- I think there has been a realization there that they don't really have that much -- they have as much influence as they thought they could, and that it is a different place. Where the Iranians, I think, the clerical regime is focused, is, again, they are focused on Iraq, and they are focused on Lebanon and Syria.

And that's where, I think, they see the future playing out. And that's where they see their future playing out.

And again, I would take what, unfortunately, I think, is somewhat of an unorthodox view in the States, and that is, the most important event for Iran's future was what I would call the liberation of Najaf.

This is not something that is going to happen overnight. But the Iranian clergy grew up -- the revolutionary clergy -- grew up with the understanding that they didn't have a competitor in Najaf, that it was essentially under the control of Saddam Hussein, and that you no longer had a free Iraqi clergy.

You now have a competitive Iraqi clergy. It's reverted back to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century. And I think it is there that you will see a great deal of indigestion for the Iranians. And that is where I'd focus some optimism.

Again, this is not going to happen overnight. But if you go to the holy cities in Iraq, and the Iranians you met -- and they are everywhere -- will tell you repeatedly the same thing. And that is, they have come to Iraq, because in Iraq they actually have the freedom to argue issues that in the religious schools of Qom and Mashhad, they no longer do. In Iraq, they do.

That's not a small point. It's a huge point. And over time, I think you'll see the ramifications of it.

POLLACK: I am cautious about ascribing a unitary view to the Iranian regime on pretty much anything, but specifically on the issue of foreign policy. And I think that the points that you made, Mr. Chairman, are very important ones.

I think that the Iranians have seen their world change in a rather fundamental way over the last 15 years. And I think the beginning, in the period 1989-1990, they had come up with a foreign policy that they thought was going to be able to allow them to deal with those changed circumstances. As I said, it was a rather aggressive foreign policy that was designed to drive the United States out of the region, unseat many of our friends, build coalitions with other likeminded radical states.

That hit a wall in 1996-1997, as a result of a whole variety of different events and missteps by the Iranians. And after it hit that wall, the Iranians did pull back, but I don't think they yet know what their new foreign policy ought to be.

Now, that's not to say that different policymakers within Teheran don't have a very clear sense of what they think the policy ought to be. It's just that I don't think that yet there has been a new consensus to emerge on what Iran's foreign policy might be. And as a result, I see Iranian foreign policy over the last 10 years as being rather peripatetic. In some cases, they've actually cooperated with us. In other cases, they've been rather problematic for us.

And I think that to a certain extent, this is the Iranians trying to feel their way in a very uncertain environment, as you've suggested.

The point I would close with is, I think that for the most important of Iran's leaders, and in particular the Rahbars, supreme leader Ali Khamenei, I think that he is mostly playing for time. I think that he and the people around him don't really know what exactly it is that Iran can do, ought to be doing.

And I think right now they're very much focused on two big issues: Iraq and their nuclear program. I think that they feel that they have to have a nuclear weapon, both for -- certainly for defensive purposes, to deter us and Iran's other enemies, but possibly also because, as I suggested, it would make possible a reversion to a much more consistent and aggressive, new foreign policy, along the lines of what they preferred to pursue in the 1990s.

But I think they're also very much fixated on Iraq, because Iraq is absolutely critical to their future. If Iraq turns out badly for them -- and badly could mean either a staging ground for U.S. action against them, or chaos -- either of those alternatives would be disastrous.

And I think to a certain extent they are very much focused on Iraq and on their nuclear program, because they need these two things to allow them to figure out what they're going to do in the future. And also, frankly, because I don't think they know what to do. And I think that focusing on them is allowing them simply to buy time to figure it out.

SAXTON: Well, thank you very much. We have pretty much exhausted the time that we have available. And I always believe that it's fairly basic, that when we've got a problem, we need to understand the problem before we can solve it. And you have shed a great deal of light here this morning on helping us to understand the situation vis-a-vis Iran, from many different angles.

So, thank you for being here. We will undoubtedly be calling on you again. This is a subject that, obviously, going forward is going to be an extremely important one.

So, thank you for being here this morning and we look forward to seeing you again in the future.

GERECHT: A pleasure.

POLLACK: Thank you.