HUNTER: The committee will come to order. We'll get started quickly so let me make just a very brief comment here. We obviously are focusing on the war-fighting theaters as we come into this new year and a lot of us have been over the theater here recently to look at the requirements and progress, at the projections, but at the same time we need to keep our eyes on the horizon.

And part of that horizon involves a potentially nuclear system- armed Iran and that challenge and the events which are ongoing are of enormous importance to us and the prospects for that program and the efforts of the United States and our allies to slow the progress of such arming are of course of utmost importance to us even while we're continuing operations in the two war-fighting theaters.

So we've dedicated this hearing to this issue and we have three experts on the Middle East, Iran, and proliferation here today to help us review those options that we have with respect to that situation.

And they are: Mr. Michael Eisenstadt, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, thank you for being with us today;

Dr. George Perkovich, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, likewise, Dr. Perkovich we appreciate you being with us;

And tell me if I get this wrong, Ilan Berman, American Foreign Policy Council.

So thank you gentlemen.

And I want to turn to my colleague, Mr. Skelton, for any remarks he'd like to make and then we'll quickly get into your testimony.

 

OPENING STATEMENT OF

SENATOR IKE SKELTON
A Senator from Missouri, and
Ranking Member, House Armed Services Committee

 

SKELTON: Mr. Chairman, thank you, and a special thank you for holding this hearing. I suggested it and I think it's very, very timely and all of us I know are concerned. We're here to address the options for dealing with the Iranian nuclear crisis. It's a crisis that threatens the security of our nation, the future of non- proliferation regime, and stability in the Middle East.

Again, while the administration and Congress must act expeditiously to address the immediate crises, we must also act effectively. We need a comprehensive strategy that accounts for the complexity of this situation and broader, longer-term issues.

The agreement brokered by Secretary Rice this week to report Iran's nuclear program to the Security Council frankly is very encouraging. But direct American leadership to deal with the crisis I think's long overdue and, until recently, the administration has largely relied on our European allies. While cooperation with our allies and strategic partners is critical, the U.S. must also take the lead here.

Even if Iran is referred to the U.N. Security Council, action by the Council is uncertain and may not resolve the nuclear crisis or much else. This is particularly true given that Iran has resumed uranium enrichment and press reports link Iran's supposedly peaceful nuclear program to its military work on high explosives and missiles.

And our problems with Iran are not limited to this nuclear program. Iran has deeply insinuated itself in Iraq, has taken advantage of Iraq's porous borders and is supporting anti-American efforts in that country. It's also supported terrorists and undermines the Middle East peace process.

Amidst all this Iran's leaders have recklessly escalated their anti-Semitic rhetoric, threatening to wipe Israel off the map. So what do we do? We simply cannot allow Iran, a country that supports terrorism and opposes what we stand for, to emerge as the real winner in the war in Iraq. Too much is at stake.

Iran must not acquire a nuclear weapon and it must respect Iraq's sovereignty. It must become a responsible, constructive member of the international community. This should be a top bipartisan -- I'll say it again: bipartisan -- priority. And I'll deliver a special order tonight in the House chamber that sets forth my thoughts in more detail.

But there's no simple answers, no easy solutions. It does seem that there are more tools than the administration has used to date. We have expert witnesses here, and I thank each of you for coming.

Gentlemen, I hope you'll be able to address the various American options about the additional tools we might use but it is likely to be the outcome of referring this matter to the United Nations Security Council.

Are political and economic sanctions the answer? We've had limited success in possibly influencing Iran's actions with sanctions in the past and many say this approach could cause more harm than good. I don't know.

What about using smart sanctions, sanctions that will effectively target Iran's corrupt leaders and its cohorts? And what smart sanctions, if any, would you recommend? How important is it to cultivate U.S. support among the Iranian population, substantially increase democracy promotion with efforts that will encourage the population to demand more modern leadership?

Should we pursue more focus on vigorous diplomacy? What limits or obstacles exist to military force in Iran? How should our country address Iran's influence in Iraq? In what ways should the administration improve its strategy there?

Finally, if we cannot prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, what should our strategy be for maintaining our national security and achieving the goals we have in the Middle East?

And I know there are no easy answers or simple solutions.

Gentlemen, that's why we asked you to be here to give us your thoughts and your best advice.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

HUNTER: I thank the gentleman.

And again, gentlemen, thanks for being with us. The entirety of your prepared statements will be taken into the record.

And, Mr. Eisenstadt, the floor is yours, sir.

 

STATEMENT OF

MICHAEL EISENSTADT
Senior Fellow,
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

 

EISENSTADT: Chairman Hunter, Ranking Member Skelton, members of the committee and committee staff, I'm grateful for the opportunity to present to you my testimony considering the challenges of dealing with a nuclear Iran.

Crafting an effective strategy for dealing with a nuclear Iran, if or when Iran eventually acquires the bomb, is likely to be one of the most difficult defense and foreign policy challenges facing the United States in the coming decade.

Due to the volatility of Iranian politics, the clerical regime's involvement in terrorism, Tehran's troubled relations with several of its neighbors as well as the United States and its commitment to the destruction of Israel, a nuclear Iran would have a destabilizing impact on the Middle East and would pose unique danger to international peace.

U.S. efforts to operationalize deterrence against a hostile nuclear Iran must incorporate measures to deter by denial as well as by punishment. Raising doubts in the minds of Iranian decision-makers about the country's ability to reliably deliver its nuclear weapons and stoking fears that the attempted use of such weapons could threaten their personal survival and that of the regime could make the use of nuclear weapons prohibitively risky for Tehran in all but the most dire of circumstances and thereby undermine the utility of Iran's nuclear arsenal.

To bolster deterrence in war-fighting, Iran has created a deterrent/war-fighting triad that consists of the ability to disrupt oil exports in the Persian Gulf, launch terror attacks on several continents in conjunctions with the Lebanese Hezbollah and other groups and deliver non-conventional weapons against targets in the Middle East and beyond by aircraft, land-based ballistic missiles and perhaps by various non-traditional means such as small boats and terrorists.

As Iran stands up and expands its nuclear arsenal it might seek to provide a nuclear punch to all three legs of its triad.

Thus, to counter Iran's deterrent war-fighting triad, the U.S. and its allies will need to enhance their ability to, first, detect and interdict attempts to covertly deliver nuclear weapons by sea, air or land; two, identify and neutralize terrorist cells affiliated with Tehran; three, detect and intercept nuclear arms strike aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles; and, four, counter Iranian naval mine, small boat, and submarine warfare operations.

Much progress has been made in recent years in developing capabilities to deal with many of these potential threats in the context of ongoing DOD force modernization and theater engagement activities. In other areas, much remains to be done.

Iran's leaders must also understand that, should they brandish or use nuclear weapons, the U.S. and/or its regional allies could threaten their personal survival and the stability of the Islamic republic by conventional military strikes that, one, target the senior leadership of the Islamic republic; two, disrupt the functioning of the security organizations responsible for the survival of the regime; and, three, target key elements of the country's economic infrastructure.

There are however obstacles to operationalizing such an approach. The practical difficulties of striking leadership targets from the air demonstrated during recent wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq should not be underestimated.

Furthermore, the Islamic republic's principal security organizations are rather lightly armed and are garrisoned in or near population areas, making it difficult to strike these organizations in a way that would cripple their effectiveness.

And while Iran's economic infrastructure, particularly its oil and gas industry, is acutely vulnerable to attack from the air and the sea, the main challenge would be to limit the damage to the world economy and to the security of the U.S. and its allies as a result of Iranian retaliatory moves that could take the form of an attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz, attacks on oil and gas installations on the southern side of the Gulf, attacks on shipping in the Gulf, and/or a terror campaign spanning several continents.

Finally, needless to say, the U.S. also retains the option of a nuclear response should Iran use such weapons. I believe however, for now, the less said about this option, the better.

What are all the threats that a nuclear Iran might pose to Washington's allies in the region and how might the United States help them to confront these threats? Under the protection offered by its nuclear umbrella, Iran might renew support for opposition or terrorist groups in neighboring countries as it has done in the past.

Here, intelligence sharing and efforts to enhance internal security capabilities of U.S. allies will be key. Furthermore, Iran's force of naval mines, missiles, small boats and submarines could temporarily disrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz under the protection provided by Iran's nuclear umbrella.

For this reason it is critical that the U.S. help its Persian Gulf allies obtain the means to counter Iran's naval mine, special warfare, small boat, submarine and coastal anti-ship missile forces.

And to deal with the possible use of nuclear weapons by Iran, the U.S. will need to be able to detect the deployment of nuclear weapons and preempt their use or interdict them in route to their targets whether they are being delivered by air or by sea.

To do so, U.S. naval forces will need to be able to work with local Coast Guard and naval forces in the Gulf to identify and monitor suspicious vessels plying the waters of the Gulf and passing through the Strait of Hormuz and to interdict them if need be. And I should mention that some of this is already being done in the wake of 9/11 in order to disrupt illegal smuggling and terrorist movements in the Gulf.

The U.S. and its allies should likewise continue to encourage the networking, a regional air and missile defense early warning, and command, control, communications, and intelligence networks to enhance the capabilities of regional air and missile defenses, and again, much is already being done in this regard within the framework of the cooperative defense initiative with a number of our Gulf allies.

In conclusion, Tehran's nuclear activities might provide the impetus for the creation of a regional security architecture in the Persian Gulf and southwest Asia that is geared towards deterring and containing a nuclear Iran.

While it is in the long-term U.S. interest to create a freestanding balance of power in the Gulf that obviates the need for a permanent forward U.S. presence, for the foreseeable future, the stabilization of Iraq, the global war on terrorism, and concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions will draw the U.S. deeper into the affairs of the region.

Enhancing the military capabilities of military allies threatened by a nuclear Iran, deepening bilateral cooperation with these countries and encouraging multilateral cooperation in the areas of counter-terrorism, maritime security, and air and missile defense, may be the best way to deter and contain a nuclear Tehran and to lay the basis for a future regional collective security architecture for the Gulf region and southwest Asia.

For this reason, the U.S. will remain the indispensable nation when it comes to formulating a response to the possible emergence of nuclear Iran and to keeping the peace in a proliferated Middle East.

Thank you.

HUNTER: Thank you very much.

Dr. Perkovich, thank you for being with us, and please proceed?

 

STATEMENT OF

MR. GEORGE PERKOVICH
Vice President for Studies,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

 

PERKOVICH: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. It's an honor to be here before you.

I want to begin by saying that politics is the key to achieving an outcome that will enhance the security of the Iranian people and the rest of the world. Within Iran since August political bullies represented by President Ahmadinejad and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have been on a roll. These men believe that the Europeans and others with whom they are negotiating are like barking dogs. If you kick them, they will run away. This is a remark attributed to President Ahmadinejad.

And so Iran, since August, has kicked the dog repeatedly, breaking various aspects of the suspension it had put on its nuclear fuel cycle activities, and when the dogs merely barked and ran away with each Iranian kick, the tough guys further disparaged and humiliated the internationalists in Iran who had urged a more cautious approach to finding a modus vivendi with the international community.

The internationalists do not feel that the aspirations of Iran's talented young population can be met if the country is treated as an international pariah, so one reason why it's important that the Iran dossier be referred to the Security Council is to show that the dogs will bite and that the tough guys in Iran can get their country humiliated and bloodied if they're not careful.

If the political dynamic within Iran can be changed for example by having all the world's major powers, and I include here the U.S., the E.U., Russia, China, India, Japan, all of them agree that Iran's violations of its nuclear obligations are important enough to be addressed by the Security Council, then it's possible to alter the dynamic within Iran and give the internationalists there a chance to fight back regarding the country's nuclear policies.

My testimony is in part about how to make the Iranian political dynamic more positive and not more negative and also ideas on what happens if this prevention strategy fails and we move to the deterrence mode that Michael talked about.

The basic strategy toward Iran is of course simple to conceive even if we still have not been able to execute it. That is that Iran must perceive that severe international and domestic costs will attend the acquisition of the nuclear bomb. Iran must also perceive that major international and domestic benefits will attend decisions to produce nuclear energy while relying on international fuel services rather than domestic fuel production.

And remarkably the U.S. and the other leading powers have neither demonstrated plausibly high costs to Iran nor mind-changing benefits. The threats we pose are too implausible or weak as are the benefits that we've offered thus far.

My prepared testimony details some of the steps that I believe Russia, China, the E.U., and others must take to start changing this cost-benefit calculus that Iran faces.

Now an absolute bedrock fact here which I think the administration has appreciated and reflected in the president's remarks last night is that the U.S. cannot achieve the needed result without the firm cooperation at least of Europe, Russia, China, India, and Japan.

This leads me to some thoughts on sanctions, the topic that is bandied about more frequently these days. I believe that we in the think tank world, the press and in the government, need to think much harder about our approach to sanctions if our discussions about them are not going to be counter-productive.

First, American officials, and this is both the administration and Congress and especially people running for president seeking opportunities to score points, they undermine the national interests by talking publicly about sanctions or suggesting that an attempt to impose sanctions is imminent.

For sanctions on Iran to be effective, they would have to be applied by all important investors and traders with Iran and for that to happen, sanctions must be authorized by the U.N. Security Council under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter because it's only under that auspice that sanctions are mandatory on all members of the U.N.

My testimony details why I think talking about sanctions at this point actually lessens the possibility of getting you to the point where you would get U.N. sanctions. It's a tactical issue.

Second, I argue it makes little sense to threaten or to impose significant economic sanctions on Iran without having prepared the American people for potential consequences, and I don't believe this has been done at all.

Third, government should spend time now modeling at the classified level, what specific forms of sanctions would have the most direct impact on the most threatening Iranian actors while best sparing the Iranian public. Models should specific the costs that various sanctions alternatives would impose on the sanctioners.

I believe that France and the United Kingdom at the very least have been working on this for about the last six months and developing vary focused matrixes down to the point of which firms supply which machinery to Iran and what the value of those contracts are if you were to sanction them. I hope that our government is doing the same kind of modeling and that those should be coordinated and that this is something that the committee and others would be apprised of, again I would urge at the classified level.

Fourth, we should forget about an oil embargo and don't talk about one either. My testimony details why I think even speaking about an oil embargo actually plays into the hands of exactly the wrong people.

In sum, we don't know and cannot control how Iranian politics will be affected by the many steps that should be taken to change the cost-benefit calculus, but we are better off conveying that the international community has many such steps in mind and that they are being modeled and that we will be unified in taking them if Iran continues not to satisfy IAEA doubts about its past activities.

We should say that the steps we have in mind do not include an oil embargo, but rather, many more targeted measures which it is not to our advantage to discuss publicly.

Now beyond sanctions, of course, the ultimate proliferation prevention action will be to militarily destroy a country's nuclear infrastructure or even more problematically to eliminate a government and try to replace it with one that would not continue intolerable nuclear activities.

Leaving aside the enormous intelligence problems with such military operations and Mike talked about some of them, Congress and other overseers of U.S. policy should ensure that potential consequences of military action are fully modeled.

After an action or move is described, please ask, "And what happens next? What might they do next? And then what would we do after they take their move? And after we do that, what do they do next?"

And I think the more you go through this exercise in anticipation of a military attack on Iran, the more you lead to a conclusion that we're not sure how the game would end. This is regrettable. The strategy of prevention obviously would be much stronger if there was a credible threat that we could physically deny Iran the opportunity of producing nuclear weapons.

I think because that option is difficult, however, we then turn to a deterrence option if prevention fails, let me just say a few words about that.

The deterrence challenge I believe would not be to keep Iranian leaders from waking up one day and deciding to nuke the United States or Israel or to give the bomb to terrorists to do this. Rather, the challenge on which we should concentrate is how to disabuse Iranian actors of any illusion that they could use nuclear capability as a shield behind which to conduct terrorist operations or other low- intensity conflict.

Historically, this is the most difficult challenge in dealing with states that have newly acquired nuclear weapons. My testimony details it but Pakistan is a vivid example of a country that once it acquired nuclear capability greatly increased its reliance on terrorism and subversion of India.

Iran would be even more prone to this temptation, I believe. Its most militant and powerful security agency is the Revolutionary Guard, whose leadership remains animated by revolutionary ardor and contempt for important international norms.

The Revolutionary Guards are also believed to control the Iranian nuclear program. Iran lacks a well-structured linear decision-making apparatus unlike, say, China, when its still-revolutionary government acquired its first nuclear weapon.

More than any current possessor of nuclear weapons, the post- revolution government in Iran often turns to brinkmanship, sometimes seemingly irrational brinkmanship, in its negotiations.

All of this invites grave caution, then, in estimating the requirements in deterring Iran. My last point would be that the most important imperatives in a strategy to deter Iran would be intelligence and international cohesion.

In doing this, as Michael talked about, the U.S. and others would want to bolster our deployments of military and other assets surrounding Iran to improve the capacity to respond immediately to any act of Iranian or Iranian-sponsored aggression. These assets should probably include theater ballistic missile defenses, and for this threat to be strong the U.S. would need the cooperation of the neighboring states to allow these operations.

I close then where I began. Whether we are trying to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to make nuclear weapons or, if that fails, to deter them from acting aggressively under a shield that these weapons might provide, the absolute imperative is to have effective coalitions with the major global powers and Iran's neighbors. Without that, none of these strategies will work.

Thank you.

HUNTER: Dr. Perkovich, thank you.

And, Mr. Berman, I look forward to your statements.

 

STATEMENT OF

MR. ILAN BERMAN
Vice President for Policy,
American Foreign Policy Council

 

BERMAN: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And let me thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to talk about this topic. I think it's of the utmost importance.

HUNTER: Pull that mike a little closer there, Mr. Berman.

BERMAN: A little closer? Absolutely. Let me start by saying a few words about the scope of the threat that we're facing from a nuclear Iran. I think there's an emerging global consensus that Iran is a grave and growing threat to international peace and security.

But Iran is also a direct challenge to U.S. policy and American objectives in the greater Middle East and a nuclear Iran can be expected to dramatically reconfigure geopolitics in the region and to alter fundamentally the way the U.S. calculates strategy throughout the Middle Eastern theater of operations.

Concretely, the U.S. can expect to confront six trends in the future.

The first is growing Iranian influence as countries in the region attempt to establish some sort of modus vivendi with a nuclear or near nuclear Iran. More likely than not, these types of arrangements will include a drift away from cooperation with the West and that is going to make the already problematic Persian Gulf less and less hospitable to the United States and to U.S. coalition forces.

The second is a new arms race as regional countries attempt to create some sort of counterweight to the emerging Iranian bomb. Already both Saudi Arabia and Egypt are exhibiting precisely these types of clandestine nuclear development and/or procurement activities and other countries, such as Turkey and possibly even Iraq, might be tempted to follow suit.

The third is expanded proliferation as Iran's nuclear know-how becomes an export commodity of sorts. Iran is already what is known as a secondary proliferator to a very great degree and this activity can only be expected to increase since Iran's radical new president has publicly announced his government's willingness to provide nuclear assistance to other Muslim states. We should take him at his words when he makes these promises.

The fourth trend is increased terrorism as Tehran is emboldened to use radical groups as a strategic tool against Western interests both in the Middle East and globally to an even greater degree than it already does, and I think just as importantly is we should think about the fact that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is likely to feel that it has greater opportunity and leverage to export its radical revolutionary principles abroad.

The fifth trend is strategic blackmail as Iran begins exploiting its key location in the Persian Gulf to threaten not only the safety and security of U.S. forces operating in the region but also the stability of global energy flows. In fact, segments of the Iranian leadership have already threatened to do precisely that.

Finally, the sixth and perhaps the most important trend that we can expect would be greater longevity for Tehran's ruling regime. Today, all the empirical sociological and economic data suggests that the Iranian regime is far more fragile internally than it appears to be from the outside. But a nuclear capability will give the Iranian government much greater latitude to squelch internal defense, to repress opposition forces, without fear of international consequences. And this would dramatically increase its lifespan.

Because Iran is not likely to give us overt indicators of exactly when it goes nuclear, when it achieves nuclear status, we can expect to confront these trends sooner rather than later as countries in the region and forces in the region begin planning for a nuclear-ready Iran.

So this raises the question of what can be done. And here there are many options that are available but I think each of them has to be viewed through the prism of regime ideology in order to be accurately assessed on its merits.

And here the results are really not encouraging. Twenty-six years after its founding, the Islamic republic remains a radical revolutionary state. In fact, the Ayatollah Khomeini's vision for an exportation of the revolution has greater resonance at home and abroad at home today than it had since his death in 1989. And this is because of precisely what Dr. Perkovich talked about-the rise of a padre of radical politically empowered leaders of second-generation conservatives that believe in the exportation of Iran's revolution.

And, against this backdrop, it's not surprising that the Iranian regime has learned to love the bomb. They see it as a key element of regime stability and they also see it just as significantly as the key to, if you could use the term "preempting preemption" on the part of the United States.

So this means that diplomacy, including U.N. diplomacy, may delay and complicate Iran's path to the bomb, but it can't change it. The Iranian regime has made a clear and concerted decision in favor of nuclear possession and it's willing to obtain that goal by any means necessary.

Economic sanctions are similarly problematic because thanks to Iran's internal energy wealth and the types of energy partnerships that it's been building over the past several years with client states like China, Kazakhstan, and even India, Iran is far less vulnerable to fiscal pressure today than it was in the past.

Containment is possible, but it will be very demanding.

At a bare minimum, in order to be successful an American containment strategy has to include components that successfully reinforce the reigning regime's vulnerable regional neighbors so that they are less vulnerable to Iranian nuclear blackmail.

It will include a rollback of Tehran's military advances, including its sustained military armament and its ability to project power into the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and it will curb Iranian access to critical WMD technologies from external supplies.

But, and here I think this is an important point, if the U.S. contents itself with containment alone, it will be sending a clear message to everyone that's listening, not only Tehran, but throughout the region, the U.S. accepts a nuclear Iran.

That message is going to reverberate throughout the region and it's likely to be detrimental to our alliances there.

Similarly, relying on deterrence alone is not a viable option. Iran is not a monolith and there are segments of the regime that are indeed rational and deterable. But others, including the country's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his coterie of supporters, share an Apocalyptic religious world view that encourages, indeed it demands, a confrontation with the West.

Finally, military action against Iran by the United States or by allied nations, should be understood for precisely what it is, strictly a last resort. Because even though preemption is technically possible, it's likely to prove in the long run to be distinctly counterproductive.

The Iranian people and the Iranian regimes don't agree on much, but the right and the desire of their country to seek a nuclear capability and acquire nuclear capability happens to be a point of convergence and any external actor that appears likely to strip Iran of that capability is likely to generate a very counterproductive "rally around the flag" effect that, if anything, will substantially prolong the longevity of the current regime.

With this in mind, the goal of the United States should not simply be to try to contain and deter a nuclear Iran. It should also be to create the necessary conditions for a fundamental political transformation within its borders.

And this includes using steps such as forceful public diplomacy, economic assistance to opposition elements both within the country and outside the country, international pressure, and covert action.

With the proper political will, we can do this. We have the capacity to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions and to empower a post- theocratic transformation there. But, just as easily, we can acquiesce to a new hostile regional order that's dominated by a nuclear Iran.

At the end of the day, the choice is entirely ours to make. Thank you.

HUNTER: Thank you, Mr. Berman, and thanks to all of you for your opening statements.

Mr. Berman, are you saying that you walk down through various options that we have and what you thought would be the effect of having sanctions but the essence of what I got from your testimony was that you think that there is enough, that a nuclear-capable Iran is strongly supported by otherwise divergent elements and that they are going to work to achieve that regardless of sanctions.

So in trying to understand your conclusion that we should work for a regime change, are you saying that we work for a regime change so that we will have a nation which is nuclear capable but which has a more benign political makeup than the one that exists currently, or are you saying that we should work for a regime change because only a changed regime has a potential to change course and not develop nuclear weapons capability? Which one?

BERMAN: I think most closely the first. If you look at the historical breadth of the Iranian nuclear program, it is rather daunting. The Iranian nuclear program is not a new invention. It started in the late '60s and early '70s under the Shah.

But notably back then it was assisted by, among other countries, the United States, and that had a lot to do with the fact that we were comfortable with...

HUNTER: That was the Atoms for Peace program?

BERMAN: Yes, sir.

HUNTER: Yes, OK, go ahead.

BERMAN: We were comfortable with the regime of the Shah. We are not comfortable with...

HUNTER: Yes, but not for nuclear weapons...

BERMAN: Not for nuclear weapons...

HUNTER: The so-called Atoms for Peace basically enriched the fuel to a very low level that wouldn't come close to a weapons grade, right?

BERMAN: Absolutely. However, on paper, the nuclear plan of the Shah was as ambitious, if not more so, than the plan that the current regime in Tehran has mapped out. And therefore I think, in terms of thinking about what that program can be transformed into or used as, regime character is paramount.

We were willing to cooperate with the regime of the Shah on nuclear issues because, at the end of the day, we saw him as a relatively accountable, mature possessor and would be a mature nuclear possessor if Iran acquired a capability.

HUNTER: Now, you're certain of that? Because we had very strict limitations on Atoms for Peace and the transfers that were made were not made with the intent of developing nuclear weapons capability for any country that was a recipient and if you look at the technical levels of enrichment, they were far below anything that would allow them to have nuclear weapons.

So, are you saying that during the Shah's regime, there was some intent on the part of American policymakers to at some point deliver the Shah with nuclear weapons capability? Because I've never seen that.

BERMAN: No, no, sir...

HUNTER: Well when you stated his program was as ambitious as the present one, the present one is to have, we believe a nuclear weapon.

BERMAN: Absolutely, I...

HUNTER: So in that case -- in that sense, wasn't the same.

BERMAN: I said that on paper, his program was as ambitious because, if you remember, the current regime still adheres to the notion that their program is for civilian nuclear development, development of nuclear capabilities for civilian energy production.

At the end of the day, though, I think, if we are to think about whether or not the current regime in Tehran is going to be a mature nuclear possessor, the events and the facts mitigate strongly against such an eventuality. It makes them very difficult to deter, very difficult to contain and if the nuclear program in Iran is indeed as far along as we think it is, it would be very hard to dismantle piecemeal.

The Iranians have learned very well the lesson of Israel's raid on the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981. They've scattered their sites, they've hardened them, they've put them underground and they've fortified them, which means that military action, preemption if you will, will be very demanding and it's not assured and in fact the open-source intelligence makes clear that it's not assured that we would be able to get all of it.

And that means that at the end of the day we need to be thinking about the character of the regime that will have its finger on the trigger.

HUNTER: So you're really telling us to prepare for some sort of accommodation because we may have to accommodate a nuclear-armed Iran?

I think that transitions to a great question to our other two panelists, and that's very simply: Do you think that Iran is prepared to weather any level of sanctions that the West might emplace on them?

It's been pointed out that as you go into the sanctions process, that has the effect of allowing the targeted nation to continue work and it, to some degree, terminates, if you will, the political momentum in the West toward tough action; i.e., we are engaged in sanctions, we hope the sanctions are working, another talk is scheduled for next year, and the schedules of these sanctions and the time that it takes to implement the sanctions are utilized by the offending country to continue development.

So the threshold question might be for the United States is: In light of the statements and the position and the posture of the government, going in, do we believe, that there's not a chance that sanctions will work?

So the question, gentlemen, Dr. Perkovich and Mr. EISENSTADT: Do you think that there's a chance that sanctions would work?

PERKOVICH: Mr. Chairman, I think the only honest answer is we don't know but that the imperative has to be to put the onus of making tough decisions on the government in Iran and that happened in 2002 when they were first exposed and in 2003 and since 2003 they went on the offensive, we've been on the defensive.

We don't know how it'll equate. They say, "We can withstand sanctions." They don't know either. They couldn't predict the outcome of the election in Iran. Even the people who won had no idea that they could win. So it's very difficult to predict Iranian politics. We do know that they need to have the pressure put on them and we shouldn't assume automatically that it would work.

Let me add a couple points just on your scenario.

If the sanctions come through U.N. action, they wouldn't just be Western sanctions; they become mandated sanctions, first of all.

Secondly, it becomes very, very difficult for Russia and others to cooperate in a nuclear sphere with Iran once it's under those sanctions. There are obligations at that point.

My understanding from the open source is that Iran still has lots of technical problems with its uranium conversion capability, with its enrichment capability, with others. The heavy water plant isn't joined yet.

So, if they're under sanctions, that cooperation has to end.

Furthermore, you posit that even if they're under sanctions, they have a tough choice, do they kick the IAEA inspectors out or not? If they do, that's to admit in essence it's a military program which invites still more isolation. If they keep them, they're under more pressure and they're still being observed; all of which is to say we don't know what they would decide to do in that situation, but it's certainly a much better situation than the one that we have today or than the situation we think we can create if we leap forward to other strategies right now.

EISENSTADT: If I could just add on to that, I agree with George in that the proposition has to be tested and that we have to do everything possible in order to bring to bear the most robust sanctions that we can on the regime in Tehran, I'm just skeptical in observing developments in the past few years that sufficient pain could be brought to bear, the international community has the will required to accept the financial and economic pain that would be entailed on our part in order to bring to bear pain on the regime.

And there's also the issue of, you know, kind of, dealing with contradictions in our own policies that the most powerful sanctions we can bring to bear such as an embargo on Iran's oil industry which I don't think anybody really believes is on the table at this point also has potential negative impact on the Iranian people and we have an interest in maintaining the good will that the Iranian people feel towards the United States.

I would just say if I had to bet, my sense that if the descendent factions in Tehran right now, the traditional conservatives such as Ayatollah Khomeini, Hashemi Rafsanjani, and President Ahmadinejad, who is further right, if they had to choose between an Iran that was isolated but with nuclear weapons and an Iran that was integrated into the international community without nuclear weapons, they would choose the former. They would choose nuclear weapons in isolation.

And my feeling is that they may believe that they can have their cake and eat it too, that after watching how this has evolved in the last few years, you know, the dragging out of negotiations and the like, and they may believe that eventually they will be able to get nuclear weapons and dodge the potentially most lethal bullets in terms of sanctions.

So I think from their point of view is they're going to continue the cheat and retreat tactics that we've been seeing and seeing what they can do to push the envelope, continue resuming their program when possible, halting aspects of it when necessary or when they need -- in order to work out technological, you know, problems or snafus in their program, and in a way, if you want to see the future, I think of the relationship between Iran and the international community, in a way look at North Korea. Although I don't think Iran will have to pay the price of isolation that North Korea has paid.

But in terms of a protracted diplomatic process, I think that's the way the future, that awaits us.

HUNTER: Thank you.

Mr. Skelton?

SKELTON: Mr. Chairman, thank you.

The spotlight regarding Iran of course is on its potential nuclear capability and its intentions. I have a parallel concern I would like each of you to share your advice on and that is the concern of the Iranians who are Shiite on the Shiites in neighboring Iraq. Now tell me if I'm wrong but, as I understand, Iranians are of Persian background and Iraqis are of Arab background. Is that basically true?

(UNKNOWN): The Kurdish component -- yes.

SKELTON: That's basically true. Taking that into account what influence has been or potentially could be of the Shiite leadership in Iran toward shaping the Iraqi Shiite leadership which would cause harm to our efforts in Iraq?

Mr. Eisenstadt, I'll ask you first.

EISENSTADT: I think that there's no doubt that the regime in Tehran has a semblance of influence among some of the Shiite parties in Iraq. You know that there is, to a certain degree -- the fact that many of those parties spent 20 years or more in Tehran in political exile.

There are ongoing connections, there are intelligence connections which I think are really the most worrisome as far as I'm concerned because the political leadership of the Shia in Iraq ultimately has to function in an Iraqi political environment.

And already the perception that groups such as SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and Dawa are kind of stalking horses for the Iranians is a source of tension within Iraqi society.

And you hear many Sunni Arabs talking about the darned Iranians and, when they say that, they mean their Shiite brethren and the Arab brethren in the South.

Also, I have to say you find among many Shiites in Iraq a great deal of animosity toward Iran. Keep in mind that the Iraqi army in the Iran-Iraq war was largely consisted of Shiite conscripts.

The Shiite South took the brunt of the fighting in the war with Iraq. And, during the uprising in 1991, not only did we not intervene to save these Shiites when the army of Saddam Hussein was crushing the Shiite rebels in the south, but neither did Iran.

So there are a lot of Shiites in the South who are either secular or who maybe have a traditionalist approach to religion, but have no love lost for Iran. And there is among the leadership among some of the Shiite parties look to Iran as a potential source of external support in the rivalry with other parties but they also realize they probably have to walk a fine line in not being seen as being too beholden to Tehran.

In short, it's really a very, actually very, very complex situation.

And I would also say that the lines of influence go both ways. Because Tehran is also very concerned about the possibility of a successful Iranian state in which you have a dominant Shiite component which is not a theocracy like Tehran or Iran and that might provide a source of inspiration for many Iranians who'll say: You know, darn it, if the Iraqis can do it, they've got a multi-ethnic society, as is Iran, and they have a working democracy, and that religion is not shoved down the throat of the citizens, why can't we do that?

So I think the possible lines of influence flow both ways there.

PERKOVICH: I would just add briefly we will never understand all of the complexity and dynamics of these relationships. I just think it's incomprehensible especially for us but perhaps it may be essentially incomprehensible.

But we do know a few things. In talking to Iranian officials and others, they say: Look, we have a strategic deterrent in Iraq. You come after us, that's where our strategic deterrent is. It's in other places too, it's in Syria, it's in Lebanon and so on. But they view that the pre-positioning they've done, the intelligence networking they've established, that is a deterrent because they can make the lives of the United States very miserable in Iraq.

Secondly, they also say, privately, and we don't want you to leave. Because the United States armed forces are doing the work of Iran in Iraq. We're protecting Shiites from Sunnis. That's an insurgency that would be more of a problem for Iran if we weren't there.

We have brought to power Shiites for the first time in the history of Iraq having dispossessed a Sunni, then they look out and will tell you the place of Shia in the entire world have never been better than it has been as a result of the war in Iraq and then you promotion of democracy.

Because what's happened? In Bahrain, a Shiite majority that has always been repressed by a Sunni leadership is now getting political representation. In Saudi Arabia, the Shia are treated horribly, but now they're getting to vote in elections. And so, from an Iranian point of view or Shia point of view the last five years have been the golden age and they don't want to mess it up by being too provocative in Iraq.

So they like to bleed us a little bit but not so much to make us leave.

BERMAN: I would tend to concur with Dr. Perkovich. I think the situation is very complex and Iranian strategy in Iraq is very complex.

I think though that you can distill two major trends. Iran is not simply funding Shiite segments of the insurgency, although they are doing that, they are providing training and logistics to insurgents through their clerical army, the Pasdaran. But they're also working very deeply in the political sphere and attempting to change the terms of the political debate through their political influence on groups like SCIRI and through empowering these groups to maintain militias.

SCIRI has a militia called the Badr organization that has a lot of contacts with military Iranian intelligence officials. So here the question I think becomes: What does Iran want? And there's been a lot of talk about the fact that Iran wants an Islamic Republic of Iraq.

I tend to disagree. I think if you look at the Shiite theological track, the holy centers of Shia Islam, Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, actually supersede those in Iran, which is (inaudible).

So I don't think that the Islamic republic has any interest in creating something to which it will become a theological satellite.

What I think they're trying to do is actually something that's more ambitious. They're attempting to stop U.S. strategy in the region dead in its tracks. Iranian officials have actually gone on record to say that if U.S. strategy, that is democratization, fails in Iraq, it will stop. Whereas, if it succeeds in Iraq, it will continue, and it might migrate into our borders.

So I think the red lines here for Iran are very clear and what they're doing in Iraq is an example of that.

SKELTON: Mr. Chairman, thank you.

HUNTER: Thank the gentleman.

Gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon?

WELDON: Thank you Mr. Chairman.

And thank you all for being here.

Dr. Perkovich, you mention that the political situation in Iran is hard to understand and predict and I would somewhat disagree because I believe that the strong-arm leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini is in fact very predictable.

In fact, I'm reminded of a meeting I had with the chairman of our intelligence committee, Pete Hoekstra in the fourth floor of the Capitol Building, our secure room four days before the Iranian elections.

The conventional wisdom, I think you would agree, was that Rafsanjani was going to win the election. That's what pretty much everyone in this country was saying. I handed Chairman Hoekstra a document that had been faxed to me by a source in Europe that said that this unknown mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad, was going to win with 60 percent of the vote.

You saw the outcome four days later: He won with 62 percent of the vote.

I asked Chairman Hoekstra to do one more thing. I said, "Would you check the White House daily briefings for the president the day before the election and see what the CIA predicted?"

And he did. The CIA didn't make a prediction.

In my opinion our major problem with Iran has been our lack of human intelligence to understand what's going on. I think there's been a total failure of our intelligence community at the HUMINT level in helping us to understand the dynamics of what's occurring in that country.

It's very troubling to me that the CIA has now come out with a national intelligence estimate where they say publicly that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon probably for 10 years. It kind of reminds me of the national intelligence estimate of the CIA back in 1995 when they told us that no country, no rogue state, would have a long-range missile capable of hitting the U.S. for 15 years.

We challenged that in this committee. We were the first to challenge it. That led to the Rumsfeld commission. Thank goodness we did because three years later, in 1998, the North Koreans launched a Taepo Dong missile over Japan's territory that we've now determined if it would've gone to completion would have been able to hit the outer reaches of the U.S. So the CIA was off by 12 years.

I'm convinced the CIA's estimate of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon is totally off base. And I agree with the Israelis. I think it's a matter of months and years as opposed to anywhere near 10 years.

Now, let me just for the record throw out a document that I'd ask you, Mr. Chairman, to put in the record. This is a fatwa that was issued by a radical Wahhabi Mullah, very close to the Iranian leadership in 2003.

His name is Nasir Bin Hamid al-Fahd and this document has been talked about in the media. But this fatwa which I'm going to put in the congressional record, justifies the legal status of using weapons of mass destruction against infidels.

Well, guess what? The Iranian leadership, including Ayatollah Khomeini, as he so publicly pronounced his disdain for Israel, in this document justify the use of nuclear weapons against us, and I'll read the exact quote:

"If the infidels can be repelled from the Muslims only by using such weapons" -- nuclear -- "their use is permissible. Even if you kill them without exception and destroy their tillage and stook. All this has its foundation in the Prophet's biography. The Prophet's saying about Jihad and the pronouncement of scholars: May God have mercy on them. I shall mention the proofs of this in detail, in the treatise I have mentioned, God willing, and God is the most wise."

Now this document was produced, a 17-page document, in May of 2003. Now when this came out the Saudis went ballistic because they had a Wahhabi leader coming out and laying the justification for the use of nuclear weapons.

But this is the actual thinking of people like Ahmadinejad, and we have to understand Iran is a different nation than a nation like North Korea acquiring a nuclear capability or even a nation like Pakistan or India.

And my concern is that the estimate by the national intelligence estimate of 10 years is totally off base. So I would ask you the first question. I have many more I'll get in the other rounds. Do you agree with the national intelligence estimate of this 10-year optimistic figure, or are you concerned, especially knowing full well now as we do know, that Iran has actually sent teams up into North Korea on two occasions to try to acquire nuclear technology from the North Koreans? That's now been documented. It was first documented in a Japanese publication.

We know, for instance, now that the Iranians have tried to acquire other technology because they did not have total indigenous capability. So do you agree with the CIA's estimate or do you think that is an optimistic estimate?

And second, I remember very well the battle we had in this body when we saw the Israelis come out in 1997 and tell us, it was Benjamin Netanyahu who said that Israel had evidence that Russia was helping Iran with a missile program called the Shahab-3. hand we went, excuse my phrase, ballistic in the Congress.

I remember very well Democrat Jane Harman and I, and members of this committee, putting together a bill called the Iran Missile Sanctions Act, to hold the Russians accountable for what we and the Israelis had determined was a Russian attempt to assist Iran with a very capable theater missile system.

We passed that bill with 398 votes in the House, 98 votes in the Senate. President Clinton vetoed that bill, and we didn't have a chance to override the veto.

As we all saw last summer in Tehran, the Iranians paraded a Shahab-3 missile down the streets of Tehran. So they now have that system, that we could have stopped if we would have enforced the missile control technology regime in 1997, if we'd have taken those steps instead of trying to appease Yeltsin at the time.

But my question is this, we've seen the Iranian test missile launches from freighters and from ships at sea. If Iran does get a crude nuclear capability, what would be our response if they place that crude capability on a theater missile like the Shahab on a freighter off of our coast and launched above our atmosphere and detonated as electromagnetic pulse and fried the electronic systems of our eastern seaboard? Would that justify a nuclear response to Iran or be the plausible reaction of the U.S. if such a scenario ever unfolded?

EISENSTADT: I'll take stab at the one with regard to the nuclear timeline and I'll probably end up disappointing you but I'm not sure it's possible to come up with any kind of accurate timeline in the current proliferation environment.

Simply because we live in an era now in which we've seen that nearly almost every nuclear program, nevermind missiles and chemical weapons, nearly every nuclear program going back to World War II has benefited from foreign assistance. And when you benefit from foreign assistance there is the potential for dramatically leapfrogging over technological bottlenecks and the like in order to greatly compress the timeline.

I will say however, though, having watch the Iranian program for about 15 years, the one thing that I think is notable is that, by and large, the Iranians have generally taken longer than anybody I think would reasonably have expected to pass the various milestones of their program.

If you'd asked me 10 years ago, "Where do you think they'll be in 10 years from now?" I would say almost surely I would have said, you know, I think they'll probably have the bomb by now. And the bottom line is we really don't know first of all.

I mean, I think there's this whole issue of -- we've discovered about three years ago what was a clandestine program. The Iranians say well it was a clandestine civilian program. I think there's good reason to believe that's not the case; that it was a military program. The question is: Was there another component of it. Were there twin facilities elsewhere?

We know that Iraq for instance had built two calutron enrichment facilities, one at Sharqat, one at Tarmiya. They were identical but they were built so that if one was bombed the other one perhaps would not be compromised and could continue operation.

My concern, and right now there's no evidence that this is the case, at least at this point, but my concern is that there might be a parallel program out there and we have no idea as to where they may be in this regard.

If they were to get fissile material from the North Koreans next week, they might have a bomb in several months. If they're left to their own devices and the Russians and the Chinese feel -- you know, do not provide -- Russian and Chinese entities do not provide technical assistance and that, and the Abdul Qadeer Khan network is no longer at least providing -- or elements of it are no longer providing help to the Iranians, it might take them to the beginning or mid of the next decade as the CIA says.

We just don't know and I think we have to recognize we're in a gray zone in this area.

PERKOVICH: I think I'd agree with Michael and in talking with people in the intelligence community the 10-year headline that was put on the story about the estimate may also be a little bit misleading as to what the content was. I haven't seen it, I don't know.

Your point about the lack of human intelligence is extremely important and by that, it's not just a question of spies, it's we have no presence there. Now it's not that some of that was self-imposed and a lot of that has been invited but I think sometimes as a broader policy problem, we tend to think that pulling ourselves out of a country is a way to punish them and what it does is blind us and make us deaf to what's going on.

I read the fatwa you're talking about, I agree it's chilling, the only consolation is in talking to people in Iran and elsewhere about it, they say first of all, he's a Wahhabi and they think we're like less than human. And secondly, fatwas are like getting memos from lawyers. You go to the lawyer you want to get the memo you want.

Lastly, on the idea of an EMP weapon and what one would do about it, my sense is I think it's highly unlikely. But I think in any of our discourse about how we would respond to threats from Iran we should absolutely not invoke nuclear weapons or nuclear threats whatsoever.

I think President Chirac made a big mistake in France two weeks ago when he invoked French nuclear capacity against terrorism, he was doing it for domestic reasons as typically is what happens. But how that played in Iran, I can't tell you how many calls I got from Iranian press in Tehran saying, you know, "How is it possible that the French can have these weapons and make these threats but we can't?"

It just embroils the politics so we should not talk about nuclear threats.

BERMAN: I think, let me content myself with just speaking about the NIE, the national intelligence estimate, I couldn't agree more. I think the NIE should be understood for what it was, which was a stamp of approval from the intelligence community to the administration to continue nuclear diplomacy through the E.U.-3, through the United Nations, because empirically it doesn't make sense.

There are many unknown unknowns, as Secretary Rumsfeld says, with regard to the nuclear program. We don't have an accurate picture of their internal development efforts. We also don't have an accurate picture of their external procurement efforts.

We don't know what elements of the Abdul Khan network are still up and running and whether they're talking to Iran. We don't know how active Iran has been and how successful it's been on the nuclear black market in the former Soviet Union.

Therefore, we simply don't have an accurate picture. And, therefore, prudence dictates that we say sooner rather than later.

But here, again, I don't think what we say matters. I think when we're planning strategy towards Iran, we're not doing so in a vacuum. We have a coalition and we should go by the timeline of the most skittish member of our coalition and that member happens to be Israel.

And the Israelis think that a nuclear Iran is going to become a reality much sooner than we do. In fact, according to Israeli military intelligence, they will reach the point of no return next month, in March, and they will have a sustained capability to indigenously develop nuclear weapons by 2007 at the latest, and that obviously flies in the face of all of the estimates of the open source from the U.S. intelligence community.

HUNTER: I thank the gentlemen.

The gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Spratt?

SPRATT: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

We have put on the table a proposal that calls the bluff of the Iranians when they say that they're only developing nuclear power generation capacity.

Namely, we propose to allow the Russians to supply the fuel required for such a reactor and to extract it when it is spent and to close the so-called loophole in the nuclear fuel cycle that's now existent in the nuclear proliferation Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Iranians seem to acknowledge that we have to some extent called a bluff and they're temporizing this saying there are problems with this proposal that need to be worked out. Does this form the basis for an agreement and what are their objections at present to the language in the proposal that's been laid before them?

Anybody?

EISENSTADT: There are a couple of key things. Like I talked about in the beginning, we should be clear that what we're demanding is not that Iran give up nuclear power or development or otherwise but specifically that it does not need. And we have reason not to entrust it with the capacity to enrich uranium and separate plutonium on Iranian soil.

The Russian proposal picks up on that and says, yes, we will supply your nuclear energy needs with fuel and, moreover, we understand you want to learn how to do enrichment so you can come to Russia with your technicians and otherwise and we'll do it in Russia.

I think that's the beginning of an important proposal. There are two twists on it.

The Iranians by all indications are going to say, yes, that part's fine. But we have to also be able to allow to do pilot scale enrichment in Iran, on Iranian territory. And the key issue is whether the Russians are going to...

SPRATT: Well, that's a major exception. That kills the whole person.

EISENSTADT: Right, exactly, but this is -- I think no one doubts that this is what the Iranians are going to insist upon. So the question is: Will the Russians stand firm and say, "No deal whatsoever if there's pilot scale enrichment in Iran?" That's going to be the key issue.

There's another issue where the U.S. is implicated. Iran will still say, "Okay, fine, Russian supply is very important but what if there's a fire in the Russian plant or something happens in Russia and they deny us a supply? We crash. So we need a backup source to supply for this fuel." There's only one other factory in the world right now that can make that fuel, which is a Westinghouse subsidiary in Spain."

Then the question is with ILSA, the U.S. sanctions, would Westinghouse produce the backup fuel to supply the Iranians in the event of a failure in Russia? The expectation is no, that Westinghouse or other wouldn't risk being cut out of U.S. business and sanctioned by the U.S. to supply Iran.

So Iran says: You see, this isn't a reliable enough alternative because no nuclear industry would make contracts and big investments with only one monopoly supplier in the world. As a business proposition you have to have multiple suppliers.

PERKOVICH: Let me just follow up on that. I would say, I take a somewhat different tact on the Russian proposal and I'm talking about the Russian proposal...

SPRATT: It's almost what...

BERMAN: I'm sorry? I take a different tact on the Russian proposal. Even the Russian proposal as is, without the Iranians imposing new requirements, for essentially three reasons.

First of all, on a political level, there's a looming question out there, which is the proposal has the potential to do what the 1994 agreed framework did for North Korea which was to implicitly endorse some level of nuclear capability in Iran. Now the president's gone publicly and said that he will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, so I think there's a question there with regard to policy objectives.

The second is that because this program, this proposal, would effectively take uranium enrichment out of Iranian territory, it creates a capability for Iran to eject inspectors because after all, the development is going on abroad, and to ramp up a clandestine program into which we will have absolutely no insight, to essentially do what the North Koreans did when they took their nuclear program underground, did not test, and did not have any verifiable benchmarks until they had a nuclear breakout in October of 2002.

And the third is, on a macro level, this proposal does exactly the opposite of what we want to have happen in the Russian-Iranian strategic relationship.

We don't want to strengthen the strategic partnership that's been developed between Moscow and Tehran over the last decade, we want to sever it, and this will mean that Iran becomes a client state on the atomic scale for the Russian Federation. And it'll make our discussions with the Russians about how to curb them all the more difficult.

EISENSTADT: I would just add to that that in light of Iran's track record of obfuscation and deception, my preference at this point -- and especially in light of the report in today's New York Times about apparently in the current report to the Board of Governors the IAEA is now endorsing, it seems, the idea that there may have been some kind of, I think the term is used, administrative connection between the civilian side of the Iranian nuclear program and some of their warhead design effort and the like.

In light of all these questions I think it's just undesirable for Iran to have any components of the nuclear fuel cycle at this point. I realize the cat's out of the bag in that regard, but that's why I don't feel the Russian plan is undesirable simply because it allows them to keep the conversion facilities...

SPRATT: If I could just interrupt you...

EISENSTADT: Yes, sir?

SPRATT: That basic proposal not just to Iran but as to member states who are non-nuclear powers under the NPT was made by (inaudible) and Bill Perry and then later picked up by the president in a speech two years ago at the Moore College, so it's not just the IAEA, it's an idea that was floated as a generic change to an important loophole in the NPT.

EISENSTADT: Let me just say, if I could quote you from an interview by Mohamed ElBaradei with Newsweek, in I think it's in the current edition of Newsweek. He says that -- and this is ElBaradei talking -- he says what we're saying to Iran is, "You have a right under the treaty to enrich uranium, but because of the lack of confidence in your program and because the IAEA has not given you a clean bill of health, you should not exercise that right."

In a way you have to go through a probation period to build confidence again. And my feeling is, again, in light of the track record, I think it would be undesirable to sanction any kind of program where they're allowed to keep their UCF production capability and then have the products of that plant enriched in Russia.

There's also a number of issues I think with regard to the Russian proposal that haven't been clarified. Whether the Iranians are going to simply be business partners or they'll actually be able to participate and be partners on the technical aspects of the enrichment where they can then learn about how centrifuges work and the like. And that's not been clarified and that raises all kinds of concerns and questions as well.

PERKOVICH: Just one little amplification, because this is really important. You're going to be dealing with this more over the next weeks. I mean, in coming back to both the points, I mean, the reality is to have any leverage on Iran, any of the leverage we need, you ultimately have to have the Russians not opposing it, whether it's the U.N. or otherwise, their technical cooperation.

So as a matter of kind of real politic, yes, the idea that Iran gets to operate its conversion plant is very problematic. It was a red line. We erased it. I agree with Michael as a matter of principle.

But if the point is that you get established that Iran doesn't get to do enrichment on Iranian soil and the price you have to pay for that is the Russian proposal and, in that process, you get the Russians on board with the stick if Iran doesn't -- it seems to me that, in the world we're living in, that's pretty good. Because without the Russians, we don't get anything.

HUNTER: I thank the gentlemen.

The gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Saxton?

SAXTON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I actually have two questions and I'll try to ask them both very quickly to give you all an opportunity to respond.

First of all, very respectfully, I disagree with Dr. Perkovich with respect to the characterization that he made of the nature of the fatwa and it's meaning.

My understanding in order to carry on a good life, if you happen to be of a faith that is on the extreme side of this issue, you need to live your life in accordance with the Koran and if you have questions about the meaning of the Koran or something that comes along in life and you want to get a religious opinion, you get a religious opinion in the form of a fatwa which people look at as part of not perhaps the doctrine of the religion, but as part of the meaning of the religion, and people are expected to pay attention and understand that this is a religious pronouncement.

And to characterize it as a memo from a lawyer, I don't think is a good characterization. I say that very respectfully, and you do this full-time and we all do it part-time and so I may have a misunderstanding but I believe that I'm more correct than incorrect.

The second question has to do with this. We're talking about the question of the period of time during which Iran may acquire weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons. You have all agreed and most analysts have agreed that Iran is going to acquire nuclear weapons.

The question then comes: What will the nature of the possessor of the nuclear weapons be once they possess them? And I have read where some analysts believe that the nature of the Iranian regime may become more like the Soviet Union and we were able to deter the use of nuclear weapons while others believe that the nature of the Iranian regime is such that -- well, for example, Ilan Berman pointed out in his book, "Tehran Rising," that when the regime came into being in the 1979-1980 timeframe, their actual Constitution had a provision in it which stated that the mission of the government was to enhance the regime and spread the ideology, both inside of Iran and outside of Iran.

That's a different ingredient that we need to be very careful of when we try to determine what the nature of the regime is and what it will be once it acquires nuclear weapons.

So my question is: Could each of you discuss that aspect of where we're going because to me the big question is no longer whether they will have nuclear weapons? The big question is: What will the nature of the regime be and what will their objectives be once they have them?

EISENSTADT: If I could, just on two points, if I could take on the issue of the fatwa, and I have no pretensions to being an expert on Islamic theology, but my understanding is that a fatwa by a Wahhabi cleric would have no binding force on a Shiite Muslim. And if you look at the conduct of the clerical regime in Tehran and the tension between religion and religious doctrine and ideology and state interests, you'll see a very interesting thing.

And actually Ayatollah Khomeini legitimize the primacy of state interests over religious ideology. In fact, in a very famous correspondence he made in 1989 before he died which is still referred to all the time by Iranian clerics in the regime who follow his line, he said that basically the state could destroy a mosque or suspend the tenets of Islamic observance if the interests of the state required it.

And this has been really their policy. When it comes to export of the revolution, birth control, various in a range of issues, state interests has trumped ideology.

So, as a result, I think that when it comes to, at least since the death of Khomeini, the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the past decade and a half, in very many ways the state and the regime has acted in accordance with its national interests.

And, therefore, the idea that they would take a step that would lead potentially to the destruction of that state in society, let's just say would not be in accordance with the conduct or the way that they've conducted themselves in the last 15 years.

Now, the whole world view of President Ahmadinejad and the people around him, this kind of Apocalyptic, or I'd say Messianic, let's say, emphasis on Shiite Messianism waiting for the return of the 12th Imam, to be honest with you I think we need more clarification on exactly what this means.

I've talked to some friends of mine who actually, one in particular who is an Iranian who studied to be a cleric, never became one, but he said the doctrine is -- it's a very complex and complicated matter and it's not subject to -- we shouldn't assume necessarily that President Ahmadinejad will be inclined to bring that hold down the temple on his head to hasten the coming of the 12th Imam and that there is an impulse toward achieving justice in the world and righting the wrongs in the world in order to hasten his return. But it's not clear in the foreign policy arena how this might work out.

So I think we need to look more at this. I have certain concerns about Ahmadinejad and the people around him. Clearly, his rhetoric, the strong assertive nationalist line he toes, has led to tensions in our relationship with Iran and does not bode well for the future.

But how this impacts on potential for deterrence and the like I think needs to be studied more.

With regard to how acquiring nuclear weapons will alter Iranian behavior, I'm of the school that, while there is a certain line of reasoning that says nuclear weapons incline countries to greater caution and prudence, and they induce the Cold War as an example of this, I say: Well, the more we learn about the Cold War the less of a desirable model it looks especially now that we know how close to nuclear war that we came during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The other model I would induce is that I would say that there's a good chance that Iraq's growing aggressiveness after the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 and 1989 leading to the invasion of Kuwait was at least in small part, if not in large part due to their maturing WMD program. So it emboldened them to greater aggressive behavior.

I'd also say that Pakistan's testing of a nuclear bomb in 1998 probably led to the Kargil crisis in 1999 because they felt they could then pull off a quick one and snatch a piece of Kashmir and the Indians would be so afraid of nuclear escalation they wouldn't respond.

And they miscalculated it and you nearly had a conventional war which a lot of people believe could've quickly escalated to the nuclear level. And likewise the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001 by terrorists from the Jaish-e-Mohammed group, which at that time had a presence in Pakistan, led to also a crisis between India and Pakistan which both sides mobilized their forces for several months.

So this is my concern: that the acquisition of a nuclear capability by Iran might embolden them and lead to greater risk-taking and the potential for a crisis in which the nuclear dimension looms in the background and might even come to the foreground.

BERMAN: Let me add just a couple of words here. I appreciate Congressman's Saxton's comments and I think it reinforces my point which is that in general we're asking the wrong questions about Iran.

Nuclear technology is ultimately a neutral medium. What matters more than anything else is the character of the regime that's going to wield it. This is a question really about regime character. This isn't a question about nuclear technology.

And the United Nations, especially the United Nations Security Council, is not going to be the proper forum to debate whether or not regime change in Iran is a viable solution or is a desirable solution. They're going to discuss the intricacies of curbing just one aspect of the Iranian threat.

It's also not a European issue because the Europeans have demonstrated time and again that they have a higher threshold for discomfort when it comes to nuclear activities in Iran than we do.

So ultimately this becomes an American issue. And we should put the Iranian nuclear issue and the idea of a nuclear Iran firmly in the medium of what we want done in the Middle East, what we want to happen in the Middle East and think about how a nuclear Iran is going to affect it. And it's going to affect it overwhelmingly in a negative fashion.

And if that's the case we should be thinking about not just how to contain and deter and to live with the unthinkable, but also how to make this situation palatable for the United States. And I would humbly submit that I think that is really a discussion about a regime change.

HUNTER: I thank the gentlemen.

The gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Marshall? Oh, excuse me, Mr. Marshall? Dr. Snyder came back after we moved quickly to you.

So the gentleman from Arkansas, Dr. Snyder?

SNYDER: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and my apologies to Mr. Marshall.

I apologize -- you know how it goes around here -- for having had to leave and I'll just ask one question because I haven't heard the context of things today.

But would each of you do an analysis of, from the Iranian perspective, how do you see nuclear weapons, a small nuclear force, how does that contribute to enhanced or decreased security for Iran?

And the reason I ask that is my own feeling is I don't think we've had enough discussion about that. My own view is that it makes them less secure. But I'm not sure that that has been discussed enough.

Would you all each do that analysis as you think is appropriate?

PERKOVICH: It's a great question and one of the consequences of Iran insisting it's not building nuclear weapons is that there isn't a public discussion in Iran about what you would do with nuclear weapons if you had them. So you don't really get a full discussion at all of the security implications, the security benefits of nuclear weapons, the security costs because it's stipulated we don't want nuclear weapons.

And when you talk to Iranians who kind of know the strategic languages, you know go to conferences and so on, they pretty much stick with that view.

And they say, "No, this is about international status, it's about our rights to have a certain technology and so we just want a capability, a full fuel cycle capability so that we're not dependent on others," and they can give you all these reasons why they can't be dependent on others.

And then they say, "And, by the way, none of our neighbors have this capability," meaning none of the Sunnis have any nuclear fuel cycle capability, "So if we have a basic capability to enrich uranium, let's say, our neighbors will understand that they don't have it, that we have it, that first of all, civilizationally, we're advantaged, but it also means if they ever threaten us, we have the capacity then to build nuclear weapons, which they don't, and that's the deterrent we need."

If you try to drag the discussion farther out and say, "Well, let's say you get a couple of nuclear weapons, what do you think is going to happen vis-a-vis Israel or the United States; how are you going to be better off with that kind of force?," I haven't met anybody in Iran and maybe Michael has, who then says, "Yeah, here's how we'd be better off, here's how we would use that capability to deter U.S."

Everybody I talk to says, "You're right, it would be crazy for us to have two or three nuclear weapons, it wouldn't do us any good, it would make us worse off. That's why we don't want nuclear weapons but only enrichment capability." Now I don't...

SNYDER: Would you amplify that? Why would it be crazy, why would it make you worse off if you were an Iranian?

PERKOVICH: Because it's not a plausible threat to threaten either Israel or the United States with one or two nuclear weapons which would likely be the yield if it's based on a Pakistani-supplied design. It's a relatively small yield. It doesn't negate then their capacity to destroy you in return, and you don't have enough in reserve to stop them from doing that.

And what is it that you're prepared to trade? Because you will have unleashed all their dogs with your capacity being rather minimal, what's the trade-off that makes that worthwhile?

EISENSTADT: To add to that, just on the security component -- but I'll go into kind of bolster something that George just said about the self-sufficiency and the politics of identity -- but on the security level, I think they would say, "Well, look at Iraq, and look at North Korea. If we have nuclear weapons, you're not going to do to us what you did to Iraq."

Nevermind that we don't have the force structure, we don't have the ability to sustain operations. Iran is a much bigger country with a much bigger population, a lot of mountains, mountain passes, choke points. It's a much different proposition. Forget about that, just from their point of view, "If we have the bomb, you're not going to do to us what you did to Iraq."

And likewise they often point out: Well, nobody's talking about bombing North Korea or invading North Korea because North Korea has nuclear weapons. The counter to that is: Well, also North Korea has I don't know how many thousands of artillery pieces focused on Seoul.

That's often overlooked by Iranians and they focus on the aspect of the analysis that I think is most appealing to them. But I think we err if we only focus on the security dimension because, as George said, and I think Ilan also mentioned earlier, first of all this is very much I think about identify and self-image and that, if the Pakistanis who in their world view are kind of...

(UNKNOWN): Low caste.

EISENSTADT: Yes, low caste, and if the Jews and all these other people who are running around in cloth when they had a great civilization 3,000 years ago can have nuclear weapons, why can't they?

And likewise the whole ethos of self-sufficiency is so deeply ingrained in those who support the regime there, the idea that the Shah sold the country to the foreigners and that one of the great achievements of the revolution was to get rid of foreign dependence and one way to further sustain that and ensure that that achievement remains in place is to acquire nuclear weapons.

Nevermind that you're using foreign technologies and getting a lot of help from foreigners in doing so, but you build an Iranian bomb to ensure that you are self-sufficient in terms of being able to deal with threats and not needing to have a superpower patron or not needing to have a large conventional military I think is a very powerful argument just from the point of view of self-image and this drive for self-sufficiency.

So you have to look at those other factors as well I think.

BERMAN: Let me add just a couple of additional points.

I tend to agree completely with Michael about the Iranians pursuing the North Korean model. They have basically, in a strategic sense, looked at the other members of the axis of evil and realized that because not much has been found in Iraq by way of weapons of mass destruction and because North Korea has had a nuclear breakout, the North Koreans are obviously much more advantaged when it comes to dealing with the United States.

And so this is a pragmatic choice. They don't want to be another Iraq. They want to be a North Korea. This makes a lot of sense. But it also sheds light I think into the disparity about the views on the bomb between the Iranian regime and the people themselves.

There's a lot of plurality among the Iranian people, ordinary Iranians, when it comes to the bomb. You can make a very compelling case to them that having a nuclear bomb is going to have a net negative effect, but the regime is firmly planted on the path of acquiring nuclear capability because they see that as an element of regime stability.

So what I think this tells us is that our message has to be more nuanced. So far the United States has been talking in blanket terms about how we will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. And I can tell you, at least from personal experience, that many of the questions that I get from Iranians or from Iranian ex-patriots deal precisely with that: Why does the United States not want us to have a nuclear capability?

The real message I think should be that the United States cannot tolerate the current regime in Tehran having a nuclear capability, because that would provide a historical context that the ordinary Iranians could understand and agree to I think.

EISENSTADT: If I could just add very quickly to what Ilan said, I think to put it another way I think what we have to do is convert the nuclear issue from a rallying cry for the regime to a wedge issue between the regime and the people by defining the issue as the "Mullah's bomb."

We're not opposed to the Iranian bomb. I mean just in terms of our public diplomacy and how we deal with it. We're worried about the "Mullah's bomb" because it'll keep them in power and you guys will suffer the most because you're going to have to be saddled with this regime for the foreseeable future and who knows what they'll do to plunge your country into war.

So I think that's -- now whether that can be done is a tricky thing and I don't know, but we're not doing it so I agree with what Ilan said.

PERKOVICH: May I just make one important point, I think, on it. There has to be a further distinction because ask yourself: Do we want Saudi Arabia operating enrichment plants? Do we want Egypt operating uranium enrichment plants?

In other words the technology matters, too. And the issue isn't just the Mullah bomb it actually is, as the president has said, in his February 2004 speech, the issue is we don't want and the world shouldn't want, nuclear fuel cycle production capabilities in any country where they don't now exist. There's enough. And I think that's what gets lost when you say there's a problem with the Mullah bomb, you know, they can have the technology as long as there aren't the Mullahs there.

That isn't actually the president's policy or what should be the U.S. policy in my view.

SNYDER: Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing today. I meant to thank you. Good start for this year, thanks.

HUNTER: Sure. I appreciate the gentleman.

And the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Schwarz?

SCHWARZ: Two quick questions, observations.

Let's say you are Iran and you do not have a nuclear weapon that you can deliver but you probably will have one. We in the West know that you are just about to have that weapon that you can deliver, and we're leaning on your pretty hard.

How do you react, how do you let the West know, "Back off; we're going to go ahead and do this"? I'm thinking geopolitically now, obviously looking at the map, what do you do? As Iran, how do you react if the West really leans on you but you want to continue your nuclear program? First question.

Second question: Is our nuclear arsenal a credible deterrent threat to Iran? Do we have what we need if we have to do some sort of deterrent action that isn't going to cause a lot of collateral damage? And, therefore, would the development of bunker-busting earth- penetrating weapons be a deterrent if the Iranians, as we believe, have at least some of their nuclear facilities in hardened cells underground, should we be thinking about changing our reaction to an Iranian nuclear threat to something more tactical and with something that would cause less collateral damage?

Two questions.

BERMAN: Let me start. I'll try to provide you with brief answers. On the first, essentially the question was: How can we expect Tehran to respond as we sort of escalate pressure? And I think if you look at the history, the last 26 years of the Islamic republic I think the lesson is pretty clear. Iran is a radical revolutionary state that tends to generate external crises to take the pressure off at home.

And Iran is now extended in many places. It's in the caucuses of central Asia, it's active in Iraq, it's active in the Palestinian territories working through them like Hezbollah. It's active because its principal terrorist throughout the Hezbollah is now a quasi- legitimate political party in Southern Lebanon.

So Iran has a lot of triggers that it can activate and I think we can expect that, as this crisis moves forward, they might be tempted to do so.

On the second issue, whether or not our existing nuclear arsenal is a credible deterrent, I think the short answer, probably not. For the simple reason that the reason for technology like the Worldwide Nuclear Earth Penetrator is because the U.S. military and Congress have determined that there are new targeting requirements that need a response such as hardened Iranian nuclear facilities.

Now you might not choose to fund those programs, but the targeting requirement doesn't go away. It just means that obsolete weapons, inaccurate, largely destructive weapons will have to be used against those targets and personally I'm a little leery of punishing ordinary Iranians because they're having to live in a repressive regime.

PERKOVICH: I would disagree with that vehemently. I can't think of anything more counterproductive to the U.S. role in the world, to our effort on many issues around the world, and in particular all of our issues in the Middle East including Iraq, than to be expressing concern and therefore taking actions to, quote, "strengthen our nuclear capacity to strike targets in the region."

I travel all over the world. I don't find anybody who doubts our capacity to destroy any people, any place, anywhere in the world with nuclear weapons.

That ain't a problem that is one that I think should keep you up at night: Do people think we have military power? The problem we're facing is exactly the opposite, is people around the world especially in that part of the world, think that we have too much military power and we don't pick the right people, so on and so forth, and so they're trying to mobilize against us.

Seems to me that we have to maintain the capacity to destroy lots of different targets, that we largely do that, but that the less we talk about new nuclear weapons and so on, the better.

I have news for you. The entire rest of the world, including the people in Iran, say, "Wait a minute. They're trying to change the rules to keep us from getting basically nuclear power capability, but they're at the same time going to fund new generations of nuclear weapons?"

And you're trying to build a coalition to isolate a country and to allow you to put military forces, perhaps to encircle it and to put theater missile defenses around it and you're doing it in a political environment where the populations in those places are going to go -- this imbalance is outrageous to them.

So I just think it's counterproductive.

EISENSTADT: If I could just weigh in, I have no opinion on the whole issue of nuclear penetrators and the like. This is not my area of expertise, and I won't weigh in on that.

I will support what George said though, with regard to the whole issue of soft-peddling America's nuclear capability. Everybody knows that we have it. Everybody knows that it's ultimately there at the end of the day. And there's ways of conveying the message. You know, when Jim Baker met with Tariq Aziz in Geneva in July 1991 by using even vague and ambiguous language the message got through.

So I think that option always remains on the table. I would, however, urge you to consider the possibility that -- of course, everything is scenario-dependent and God forbid if anything like this was to happen, that we had to respond to the use of nuclear weapons by Iran, but my response is somewhat maybe counterintuitive that I think that maybe in certain circumstances we can deal a devastating blow by conventional military means.

Our global aerospace strike capability is such -- you know what we did in the Balkans, in Kosovo, in Iraq in 1991, and then again in 2003, while trying to minimize collateral damage, was really remarkable in many ways. And if we want to totally destroy Iran's oil production and export capability with conventional weapons we can do it, and we could do it in such a way that it'll take them many, many, many years to start pumping oil again.

And as I said in my testimony as well, we're not yet there where we can do high-value targeting in real time of individuals but we're getting there. We're doing stuff with Predators and Hellfires. Our human capability is such that we can't go after the supreme leader yet or Saddam Hussein (sic) yet. We tried and we didn't do it very well in 2003, but we might be there in a few years.

And, therefore, I urge that we think asymmetrically. That we don't necessarily have to rely on a nuclear response to a nuclear use; that we can respond perhaps depending on again the level of damage inflicted with a devastating conventional response. And I think that that might in some cases better serve our long-term national interests when we're trying to devalue nuclear weapons while still retaining the option than automatically thinking we have to do tit for tat and respond with a nuke for a nuke.

SCHWARZ: Thank you. I have a couple of other questions. I'll save them for another round or another day because I'm also interested in what the Iranians might do in the Strait of Hormuz.

But thank you, Mr. Chairman.

HUNTER: Thank the gentleman.

Now the gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Marshall?

MARSHALL: I thought my friend, Mr. Snyder, was going to yield to me.

(UNKNOWN): He's gone. Apparently he has.

MARSHALL: Mr. Chairman, this is a great hearing, the subject matter's timely, it's important. And I think we also need to have a closed hearing on the same subject where we can get a little more information than we're getting and also ask some questions. I've got some questions that I would ask that I'm just not going to ask in this setting.

HUNTER: Well, we will have and I think that this open setting is a good background or a good base from which to proceed but this is a very, very critical issue. We're going to follow it with lots of work.

MARSHALL: Dr. Perkovich, you've provided us with a chapter in I guess a book as your written materials. And this chapter says "Iran Gets the Bomb," which I hope is not your prediction of what is going to happen.

Listening to your testimony and responses to questions, you reject altogether even a discussion about nuclear deterrence as something that will enable us to discourage Iran from getting the bomb as your chapter says.

If I heard you correctly, and I glanced through this, you think it's a bad idea for us to embargo Iran's oil capacity, or keep oil from getting into Iran and keep them from selling Iran oil to others.

I guess my question is to you: In your opinion, what is appropriate for us to do in order to lessen or eliminate the likelihood that they will develop this capability and what will be its effectiveness? I mean, are we -- in your scheme of things -- left to strategic tactics that basically we got to start thinking about Chapter 8, that Iran's going to get the bomb?

PERKOVICH: Thank you, Congressman.

The title of the chapters were picked by the editors and not by me. And the gist of the argument is precisely that we have to focus much more on trying to prevent Iran from getting the bomb because the options after they do are very unattractive.

In the testimony I've prepared today I talked about ways to do that. And, again, it seems to me the most important thing is we absolutely will not succeed if we don't have common strategy with our European allies, with the Russians, with the Indians, with the Japanese, and then I think the Chinese would go along.

That the key both to prevention strategy, but then ultimately to a containment and deterrent strategy is that Iran gets that no major power in the world trusts it, supports it, or wants to have anything to do with it and in fact they all have it in essence on their watch list to act against if Iran acts aggressively. That's the key diplomatic stretch.

Now, within that...

MARSHALL: How is that going to keep Iran from moving forward with its nuclear capability, that everybody's upset with it?

PERKOVICH: No, the whole point is that you, that you work with them so that they're agreed -- how does that keep them from...

MARSHALL: Everybody else is upset, but they're moving forward.

PERKOVICH: Because that's how you get Chapter 7 sanctions to begin to put the pressure on.

MARSHALL: So the sanctions could include oil?

PERKOVICH: No, so then my arguing about oil -- the problem is you have to get to Chapter 7 sanctions to have a chance. I'm not saying -- a chance for sanctions to work because they have to be mandatory sanctions. It can't just be us. We've been sanctioning for 26 years. It doesn't seem to have done much good. You need everybody to do it. To do that, it has to be Chapter 7 in the security council.

But to get the security council to do that, you have to get the Russians and others not to be so scared that we're crazy and want to leap to do things that they don't think are sustainable, like an oil embargo. The American people aren't going to support an oil embargo. I bet more than half the people in this committee aren't going to support an oil embargo because your constituents are going to say, "What, are you crazy?"

So if we're not going to do it, then when we talk about it, it leads people to conclude -- well, they go, "Well, wait a minute. That's a hollow threat. If that's the most important threat you've got and it's a hollow threat because you're not going to...

MARSHALL: Actually, I've got that you don't think that an oil embargo is going to work.

PERKOVICH: Right. So what to do? Sanction investment into Iran. Money can go lots of different places. Iran needs investment into its country to develop its energy infrastructure. But that's not hurting very much the people who have the capitol because they can invest in other places. It's an opportunity cost, but it's not -- you're not pulling money out of their pockets. So that's a kind of sanction to focus on.

Similarly, Iran needs the imports of machine goods, mostly from Europe, again, to develop its manufacturing sector. That kind of sanction is much more realistic to sustain politically.

MARSHALL: And let's assume they're realistic to sustain, they're realistic to sustain because they are not going to be very effective?

PERKOVICH: No.

MARSHALL: How do you evaluate that?

PERKOVICH: It's because -- and this is what I called for earlier. In a sense, I think this is a discussion that ought to be held at a classified level and with our colleagues in Europe who are doing this modeling as well sector by sector, you know, machine tool by machine tool, to identify, for example, which businesses are run by revolutionary guards or the big foundations in Iran that are controlled by the people we want to punish and what do they import, what can you target that hits them but may not hit the more modern elements of the Iranian economy, which want to open up to the international system. There are ways that you can analyze this that begin to say -- that are both more credible because you're targeting the bad guys. But they're more sustainable on our end.

There's no guarantee that this would work. But again, the strategy is to change the political dynamic within Iran. We don't know how it'll turn out. But to put the current leaders on the defensive with their own population and alter the dynamics. But like I say, it may turn out that they still say at the end of the day, "The hell with it. We're going forward."

Well, so then we have to do the other things that we've been talking about. But right now, we haven't changed the dynamic. They're on the move.

MARSHALL: Thank you.

HUNTER: Thank the gentleman.

The gentleman from Nevada, Mr. Gibbons?

GIBBONS: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And again, like my colleagues, thank you for having this very important hearing.

You know, Iran, according to each of you, is a grave and growing threat. And when we talk about sanctions, I'm reminded of the sanctions imposed on Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, which were all covertly side-stepped by those countries willing to take advantage of the economic opportunities that could be had behind, you know, closed doors in those situations.

In a country where martyrdom is a style or cultural style of belief, how do you use deterrents to stop them, to deter them, to contain them from having or developing nuclear weapons?

PERKOVICH: Just two points. One, the Iran sanctions -- the Iraq experience is interesting in lots of ways. But as far as we know, they didn't have WMD. And if that was the predicate, then the UNSCOM process throughout the '90s worked along with the sanctions and Iraq was disarmed of its WMD. Now, there are all sorts of...

GIBBONS: Well, regardless, there were sanctions out there, yet countries were trying to take advantage behind the scenes.

PERKOVICH: Well, absolutely.

GIBBONS: You can't -- whether or not they had WMD or not is irrelevant. The problem that you missed when I said this was that there were sanctions imposed that were covertly side-stepped by other countries willing to have an economic advantage.

PERKOVICH: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

GIBBONS: It doesn't make a difference what the argument is over what's the purpose.

PERKOVICH: No, the issue...

GIBBONS: The sanctions under your program in Iran would be as simply covertly side-stepped just like they were before, regardless if there's a country willing to take economic advantage.

PERKOVICH: Right. But the issue is if there's 20 percent leakage and 80 percent effectiveness does it impose enough pain to change decision making. I don't know. It did in Iraq.

GIBBONS: Well, I'm just saying you can't put all your eggs in one basket.

PERKOVICH: I agree.

GIBBONS: If you're expecting that sanctions -- so my third question, when you get down to answering the first couple of what I've asked already because I'm running out of time is at what point, at what stage do you have enough information, enough belief, enough determination that military action is the only recourse? At what point is that?

PERKOVICH: When you calculate that the consequences are going to be better as a result, you're going to be in a better world after having acted militarily than you are today.

GIBBONS: All right. Does that view then balance the numbers of lives that would be taken in a military action if you do it early versus later? What do you -- at what point? Wait until they have a weapon or two? I mean, I fear, I fear a country that has one or two or three weapons far more than I fear a country that has 1,000.

PERKOVICH: A lot would depend on what your situation is in Iraq, how many -- how solidified that situation is, is it better or worse, what the situation is with Hezbollah in Lebanon, what's the nature of the government in Lebanon, is the regime in Syria still in power backed by Iran, is there a different regime there.

GIBBONS: Well, OK, let's -- you know, we're getting off what I really wanted to ask. How effective in a country that has a martyrdom-style culture can deterrents be for containment, for actually deterring them from obtaining a weapon which will enable them to achieve their stated goals?

PERKOVICH: I think my -- I mean, the gist of Michael's comments was they're relatively deterable.

(CROSSTALK)

EISENSTADT: I'd be glad to jump in on this. And if I could just take the two bulls by the horns. First, with regard to preventative military action, I don't believe that it's possible for us to really say whether this is viable or not without having access to the intelligence.

And to me, the sine qua nom for military action is a high degree of confidence that you can set back this program for several years. I don't know what the magic number is, two, four or five. And you just can't make that judgment without access to the classified information.

And then everything else from that derives from that because you're accepting a high degree of risk for an uncertain outcome. And again, it just depends on how good your intelligence is, unless you're thinking about invasion. And I think that's a whole different kettle of fish, especially in what, you know -- in light of what we learned about our military capabilities in Iraq. This is a country that's, you know, two times the population, at least three times as large and very mountainous, a much different military problem

With regard to the whole idea of deterrents, I've given a lot of thought to this. It doesn't mean I'm right, but this is my gloss on the issue, that they do talk a good game about, you know, being the martyrdom-loving -- you don't hear this rhetoric as much as you did a decade and-a-half ago about being a martyrdom-loving nation and the like.

But the bottom line is if you look at Iranian behavior, they're willing to send -- during the Iran-Iraq War, they were willing to send young men to the front and teenagers to die in human wave attacks and to commission suicide bombings in order to save the regime.

I think that, you know, they were willing to countenance those kind of actions in order to save the endeavor or the undertaking of the -- that is the Islamic Republic. So I don't think that the people who rule the country who really love the standard of living, for the most part -- you know, the Rafsanjanis and Khatamis and the like. They're not going to risk their necks. They're not going to send their own kids out, and they're not going to risk their own comfortable existence by engaging in brinkmanship.

The Ahmadinejads, I don't know. As I said before, as I alluded to before, I'm not sure we quite understand the totality of the world view of the people that would (inaudible) Ahmadinejad and his coterie.

And, therefore, I'm going to withhold judgment on this. Though I will say, just again based on some talks with some friends of mine who are much more knowledgeable on this issue than I am, let's not jump to conclusions.

I think I'm a little more worried about his assertive nationalism at this point than his, kind of, Messianic, you know, kind of, speculation about the return of the 12th Imam. But we need to do a little more studying of this topic before we jump to conclusions on this because for a lot of us, this came out of right field, even people who study Iran. And, you know, this is a part of Shiite theology that a lot of us are not very familiar with. And we need to study before we draw conclusions.

GIBBONS: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

HUNTER: I thank the gentleman.

The gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Cooper?

COOPER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I, too, would like to commend you on this hearing and look forward to the classified version.

HUNTER: Certainly.

COOPER: Three quick questions. I only have five minutes, so please forgive me. First, progress that Iran has made toward other types of WMD, non-nuclear. Second, what did you think of the president's remarks last night in the State of the Union when he directly addressed the Iranian people? Third, what public diplomacy steps could we take that might actually appeal to, intrigue, hopefully improve America's image in the eyes of the average Iranian?

BERMAN: If I may, let me start. With regard to progress on Iran's WMD, obviously any information that you get from us is likely to be less accurate than what you'll get in the closed briefing. I would say this though, that Iran is universally understood, both by the U.S. intelligence community and foreign intelligence services to be very mature in its ballistic missile program, the delivery system program and in certain ways in both its biological and its chemical weapons programs.

So the WMD threat from Iran, although we've been focusing on the nuclear aspect of it, is substantially broader than simply atomic capability.

With regard to the State of the Union, I think the president's words were certainly very welcome. I think they were welcome as a good first step. But I think it's one thing to support rhetorically Iran's urge for democracy. It's another thing entirely to show it, which brings us to the public diplomacy point.

Right now, we are frankly doing very little to nothing on the part of public diplomacy. The federal budget allocation for Radio Farda, which is the principal -- not just Radio Farda, but Radio Farda imports of America. Radio Farda is the principal radio conduit. The Voice of America is the principal television conduit -- cumulatively before additional appropriations was $16.4 million for a country of almost 70 million people. That's roughly 21.5 cents per Iranian per year. And we can argue about how much more that should be increased, but if a people have problems with our message not getting through, it might be because, frankly, we're not spending enough.

And the other issue is here. It's we have huge, vast untapped resources that we can exploit in the struggle for Iranian hearts and minds. I had the opportunity at the end of last year to go out to Los Angeles and spend a lot of time with the Iranian ex-patriate community there. And I learned a rather startling fact. There are over 22 or more medium and long-wave radio and television stations broadcasting by medium and long-wave or by satellite that are broadcasting into Iran at least three, maybe six, maybe 18, maybe 24 hours a day.

Now, it doesn't mean that all of these are our partners. But I would posit that at least certainly some of them are. And the fact that we have spent little to no time discussing what external capabilities other interest groups can bring to bear to support us in this, I think, is, frankly, a dereliction of duty.

COOPER: Thank you.

George?

PERKOVICH: I thought the president's remarks last night were exactly right on. I thought it was just in tone and everything about it, I thought, was just right. And by the way, I think the administration's diplomacy for almost the last year now has been very, very strong and wise in dealing with Iran.

COOPER: Including Zalmay Khalilzad being a de-facto emissary to Iran?

PERKOVICH: Yes, and I mean, look, there are problems with everything. To the extent that it was announced that he put a call in and the Iranian ambassador was welcomed and the Iranians get shy. But in general, I think, you know, Secretary Rice, Secretary Burns, the president -- they've been doing well.

I agree on the public diplomacy step. I mean, when you're in Iran -- I've had the fortune of being there three times. I mean, people do listen to Radio Farda. That is an important thing to encourage. I asked the Iranians what would help because the Iranians that you meet want to -- you know, they want a change of government, too. And they say, "Well, you know, a military attack will doom us all. In fact, I'll get a gun and shoot Americans if, you know, you attack us."

But make it easier to get visas to come to the United States. Education opportunities for Iranians, whether it's from American courses that can be done on a long-distance basis or American universities setting up opportunities in Iran, at least offering that and let the Iranians turn it down. The basic -- a lot of what we've tried to do in denying ourself access to them and them access to us undermines exactly the people who understand and want to be part of the world that we largely represent. Now, I think we could offer that and then the Iranian government will turn it down, but that's what we ought to do rather than being withholding it.

EISENSTADT: A lot of good ideas there. The only thing I would maybe just add is perhaps U.S. government or privately funded translation of the English language, political theory and literature classics into Farsi as well as -- and I don't know if this is being done, but online English language instruction for Farsi speakers so that, you know, they could learn English and then they could start, you know -- they could tap into the Internet and all the resources that are online in the English language and read all the greats in American literature that are not -- and American political theory that are not in Farsi and then maybe put some of those online as well. So just...

COOPER: You're endorsing reading Lolita in Tehran. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

HUNTER: Thank the gentleman.

The gentlelady from Virginia, Ms. Drake?

DRAKE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My first question is: Is there any truth to the statement that Russia is either considering or preparing to sell a nuclear submarine to Iran. Have you heard that?

(UNKNOWN): I haven't.

DRAKE: All right. So as far as we know, that's just something that somebody's made up. Next question -- if Iran does receive -- does achieve this nuclear capability, could they be deterred by the threat of mutually assured destruction, like when we were dealing with the Russians? And then I do have a last question. I'll give that to you, too, and then you can just answer.

And that is do you think that Israel would be either willing or capable of launching an independent strike against an Iranian nuclear facility like they did against Iraq in 1981. And what would be the repercussions of that? So those are my questions. Thank you.

BERMAN: Let me just say a couple of words. Certainly, with regard to mutually assured destruction, as I said in my statement, I don't think MAD would work with regard to Iran. Iran is not the Soviet Union. Iran is not a monolith, but it has factions in it that, you know, we've all heard here today. There is a lot of doubt regarding their rationality in a Western nuclear actor sense of the word.

And, therefore, predicating our relationship with Iran, with a nuclear Iran solely on mutually assured destruction seems to me to be more than a little bit of mere imaging in the sense that we expect them to react the way we would have expected the Soviet Union to react. That, after all, is what made nuclear deterrence during the Cold War stable. I suspect that for a variety of reasons we're not going to have those same sort of reactions and therefore, MAD would become SAD. It would become single assured destruction.

With regard to Israeli preemption, this is certainly on the agenda. I think more than anything else the recent political changes that have taken place in Israel suggest that the Israelis, whether or not they're to the left or to the right, understand that the next prime minister, whoever it is, is going to have to take the issue, the nuclear issue, by the horns. There's no longer any deferral or delay.

There is -- obviously you'll hear to a much greater degree in a closed session from people that know better regarding exact Israeli capabilities. What I think is really important to remember, though, is the degree of imminence that the Israelis sense.

The Israelis understand that there is going to be difficulties involved with the technical application of preemption the way they did in Iran. But if the Israelis are convinced that this is an existential threat to security -- and they are -- and they're convinced that no one is doing anything serious about it -- and as of right now, I suspect that they are -- they are likely to do something themselves. And we should be thinking about what that will do to our objectives and our priorities in the region.

PERKOVICH: The whole question about the deterrence and mutually destruction, you have to -- there's the myth of what happened in the Cold War. Look, we and the Soviet Union under the threat of nuclear weapons didn't go head to head in Europe, which was the big scenario everyone worried about. We had Vietnam. They had Afghanistan. We had lots of little -- well, not little wars, tens of thousands of each of our own service people died. And then millions of people on the ground in these placed died. And nuclear weapons couldn't deter that.

And that's the issue. The issue isn't do we deter Iran from waking up and, you know, attacking us. The issue is much like Pakistan. After 1987 when Pakistan had a rudimentary bomb, two years later it turns out an insurgency really turns up in Kashmir against India. And it's gone on for, you know, going into its second decade.

It's that kind of much more kind of aggressive but low intensity kind of conflict where you go across this border, things blow up here, things blow up there, all with the idea, in fact, that no one wants to raise the stakes so high that you bring nuclear weapons into the equation. So nuclear weapons allow you to do things at a lower level of conflict. That's the hard stuff to deter. That's the real threat, that if Iran gets nuclear weapons you'd see more of that. And it's a very complicated challenge to try to meet.

EISENSTADT: Just on these issues, I'll just add a little bit. On the whole issue of the possibility of Israeli preventative action, I mean, a lot in '81 depended on the personality of the prime minister, who at the time was Menachem Begin and his own life experiences. And I think, you know, to a great extent an Israeli decision will also be greatly influenced by whoever is prime minister at the time and their world view and their perception of the Iranian threat.

I would just note that acting prime minister Ehud Olmert just a couple of days ago had said that he laid down a red line that Israel would not permit Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. So, you know, it seems that he's laid down a marker as to where he stands on this issue. In terms of his political future, that remains to be determined.

But I would not -- you know, Osirak raid in 1981 strained Israel's capabilities in ways that a lot of people didn't realize. A raid into Iran to do the same nowadays would be a very -- a real reach for the Israelis with all their capability. It still may be doable because a lot of the nuclear facilities at least that we know about in the open sources are in the center and left and Western part of the country, you know, closer rather than further away from Israel. So it might be doable. It would be a real reach for them.

On the issue of mutually assured destruction and deterrence, again, we're kind of, you know, kind of moving into unknown territory now in terms of the political constellation in Iran and the rise of President Ahmadinejad. I would say this though, it seems that the real power in the country still very much is in the hands of the supreme leader and Rafsanjani, the head of the expediency council and that they've been maneuvering -- keep in mind these guys were, you know, really rivals for many years, Khatami and Rafsanjani. And yet they're working together in order to kind of box in Ahmadinejad and his people. So there is a power struggle going on.

And, you know, we have to consider the fact that Ahmadinejad is not a free actor to act on his own personal whims and inclinations, whatever they are. And I would again say again that we really -- I'm not sure we really understand the world view in which he functions in. And we need to study this more.

My main concern is, you know, that being said, for the future is not that necessarily that Iran is irrational or undeterable, but first of all, you know, the issue that Ilan brought up before, the whole issue of political factionalism and the impact this has on Iranian political behavior, that in the past consistently their policy has zigzagged and that different branches of government act in apparently contradictory ways. And this is an enduring feature of the Iranian body politic. And this makes it very difficult to establish a predictable relationship, which, you know, certainly would facilitate deterrence with Iran. That's the first problem.

The second is the possibility that a nuclear Iran will continue their involvement in terrorism. And this, again, is something that, you know, George and I have alluded to before with Pakistan, that if they continue with business as usual supporting Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and perhaps other groups elsewhere, they might stumble into a crisis with the United States, Israel, some other country in which the nuclear dimension very quickly comes to the fore in ways that perhaps nobody could predict.

And then finally, I think we have to consider the fact that, I think, in the long term, a lot of Iranians are very unhappy with the regime there. And there is the possibility -- although right now, you know, the conventional wisdom, which I subscribe to in this case, is that most Iranians are suffering from revolution fatigue as a result of the last revolution they went through. And they see what it was. It was a hell on Earth for many Iranians.

And as a result, they're not willing to go into the streets to make another revolution today. Maybe 10 to 15 or 20 years from now they might. And what would happen if you have a country that has, you know, five, 10, 15, 20 nuclear weapons, maybe many more and there's a revolution? And what happens to those weapons? And if the revolutionary guard or the custodian are the custodian of those weapons -- what do they do with them? Do they give them to their friends as the regime is going down the tubes? Do they give it to Hezbollah? Do they give it to other people?

So these are the concerns I have more so than the whole issue of rationality. Although again, like I said, we're in unknown terrain now with the rise of Ahmadinejad and his coterie. So...

DRAKE: Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

HUNTER: Thank the gentlelady.

And to finish off here, the gentleman from Rhode Island, Mr. Langevin?

LANGEVIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank all of our witnesses here today. And, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you along with many other colleagues for holding today's hearing. And I, too, look forward to the classified version that you plan to hold. And I hope we can do it at the earliest possible opportunity.

I'll just comment briefly, first of all, on, Dr. Perkovich, you had mentioned or posed the question of what value would just a few nuclear bombs have for Iran. And I would say my estimate is it would have tremendous value in a number of ways. But most especially if survival of the regime is the goal -- if, in fact, the leadership in Iran thought that the survival of the regime was, in fact, threatened, then it would leave them, you know, with the option of imposing great pain on its neighbors, whether it's an attack on Israel or giving nuclear weapons to a terrorist group that could potentially walk a nuclear bomb into a major U.S. city. And they said, well, if it's the regime is going under, that they would have the option to impose great pain so that an Iraq-type situation and a U.S. invasion -- it just wouldn't be possible without significant cost to whoever the aggressor was.

So it's not without significant value to Iran to have a nuclear device. That's just the -- and that's obviously -- I think I'm stating the obvious in many ways. But my question is this. You know, there were two points of view. And I just want to be clear. I guess we've explored this in several rounds of questions, but I want to make sure that I understand this.

There's one point of view that says that developing a -- that Iran developing a nuclear program both for energy and for the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon is negotiable, that there's some way of actually influencing them to develop one or the other or neither. The other is that -- the other point is that it could be non-negotiable, that for Iran at this point it's a matter of national pride, that in a sense the decision has already been made and that they're going to go ahead with developing a nuclear program at all costs. So I'd like to get your view as to what the panel believes is more likely the case, what point of view is more likely to be the reality.

The other question I have would be: To what degree is the pursuit of a nuclear program solely driven by the leadership in Iran, and to what degree is it supported by the Iranian people? And then along with that, my third and final question would be Iran has a growing moderate population, especially among the youth that has vocally opposed a conservative Islamic leadership. However, we've also seen the nation unite notably when it feels threatened.

So my question is: How can we best tailor a strategy and message to encourage continued opposition without inflaming anti-American sentiment?

PERKOVICH: Can I just try the whether it's negotiable or not question?

LANGEVIN: Sure.

PERKOVICH: My answer is: We don't know. But we do know or I believe one can show that we haven't put either enough of a kind of downside or coercive side out there and enough positive gain for Iran to fully test whether the leadership there would decide to limit its nuclear capability. And that's all we're talking about. We're not talking about you'll never turn on a light bulb as a result of a nuclear plant. We're talking about don't operate fuel cycle capabilities within Iran while you're exercising your right to nuclear power.

It's a limited objective is all we need to accomplish there, really. But we know we haven't presented them with enough potential pain or enough potential gain to make that an interesting fight within the Iranian government. So we don't know.

Now, if we did that, if we made the pain more credible and the gains more positive, then we'd test the proposition. And I think with each year that's gone by it's become less likely actually that they'll negotiate a way because they're digging themselves in. In which case, you know, then we move -- but we just don't know. But we do know we haven't tried anything sufficient on either account, in my view.

BERMAN: If I may, a quick response, an attempt to consolidate a response. I agree with Dr. Perkovich. I'm not sure we know whether they're negotiable. I think a lot of it depends on the internal correlation of forces between the regime and the people themselves. And that is why discussions about the nuclear issue should be more specific. Because the people as a whole tend to support nuclear energy. But a far fewer percentage of them support nuclear weapons. And since we're talking about a nuclear Iran without clarification, we tend to unnecessarily galvanize and create a monolith when it comes to this issue.

The final point that I would make is -- and this is, frankly, something that I would be more comfortable discussing in a closed session or you would have a brief or a discussion in a closed session. But there are mechanisms available to the United States, to the intelligence community to widen the rift between the people and the government regarding the nuclear issue. They're simply not being activated.

And obviously a discussion in open forum would sort of telegraph intention, even if there is none. But there are tools at our disposal to convince the Iranian people that the Iranian regime is, frankly, simply not thinking of their best interests when it's pursuing a nuclear weapons capability.

EISENSTADT: I've got really very little to add, except to just say, you know, we probably haven't done as good a job as we could have done or as we should be doing in terms of converting the whole nuclear issue from a rallying cry for the regime to a wedge issue. And probably more can be done in this area. And then I agree with George. I mean, I'm not a -- I'm a skeptic when it comes to sanctions.

But the proposition has to be tested, and we have to try because I think it's very important from the point of view of if we go down another route of military action, we have to be able to -- you know, our leaders have to be able to tell the American public and the international community that we really did make a good faith effort to try every other means at our disposal before, you know, going down the -- you know, whether it be preventative action or whatever or working with our allies to, you know, build a deterrent contained regime to deal with a nuclear Iran.

So again, I think we have to do more. We have to try to proposition. But I'm a skeptic that it'll work.

LANGEVIN: In a sense, this is solely driven by the Iranian leadership versus, you know, the populous?

EISENSTADT: Yes, I mean, as I think George or Ilan said before, I mean, this has been really an elite issue, and not just an elite issue. I mean, within the regime, there are layers upon layers. And I think on this one probably there's only a very small inner core who really knows what's going on.

I mean, one, that's the way the regime tends to work with very sensitive kind of national projects or some of their covert action kind of stuff that they do, you know, assassination of people overseas and stuff like that. But also because if you're engaging in a clandestine program, you know, you can't afford leaks. And as a result, it has to be highly compartmented.

So I assume, you know, that there are a very small number of people who really understand and know what's really going on. And the regime has been very effective in turning this issue into not a matter of nuclear weapons but access to nuclear civilian technology. And that's the way they speak to their own people about it. And, you know, again, most Iranians you talk to say, you know, why shouldn't we have it, you know, civilian nuclear technology. So in a way, the regime has been able to maneuver the debate in a way that's favorable from their point of view.

LANGEVIN: Gentlemen, thank you.

HUNTER: Thank the gentleman.

And the ranking member, the gentleman from Missouri, had some follow-ups.

SKELTON: You touched on this before, but let me ask your studied opinion. In your opinion, how much support is there among the Iranian population for the current regime? You will recall a few years ago there seemed to be the popularly elected president who sounded like he was pro-American. And the clerics did not. I think that was maybe an over-simplification. But where do we stand today?

BERMAN: Well, I think that really is the key question. And I think if you look at, sort of, the internal Iranian press, the way they talk to one another, you'll see that there's little to no support for the regime. The reason that the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected with a 62 percent majority was because he in the campaign articulated the populist platform that talked about economic reform and social reform. Because, frankly, in economic terms and in social terms Iranians are no better off now than they were at the start of the Islamic Republic.

And this, I think, is a moment of crisis and a moment of opportunity. It's a moment of opportunity because Ahmadinejad so far has not focused on domestic issues to any great degree. He's been focusing on things like calling for a debunking of the myth of the Holocaust or calling for nuclear weapons, calling for wiping Israel off the map. He's not spending a lot of time on the key issues that among ordinary Iranians got him elected.

But it's also a moment of crisis because if we do not engage the Iranians on these issues, someone else will. And it will take Iranian hearts and minds off the table for the United States. And I think this is a key issue. It's something that our public diplomacy should be working towards very robustly.

EISENSTADT: I'm not sure we have a really good handle in terms of, you know, precise, you know, figures. I mean, you know, until the recent election of the current president, I mean, you know, Khatami in his heyday got about 70 percent of the vote. A lot of the people who voted for him previously have become disaffected completely from the regime because they feel that, you know, Khatami failed them.

I mean, the numbers you generally hear in terms of people who kind of believe in the Islamic Republic in some form is around 15 to 20 percent of the population. I think that's probably a safe bet. It's somewhere in there. And, you know, a lot of the people who voted for Ahmadinejad did so simply because they were hoping that, you know, his reputation was he did a pretty good job as the mayor of Tehran and maybe he'll be able to deliver in the areas of, you know, kind of improving the economy. And at least if they can't hope for political reform and, you know, lifting of the social strictures, at least the economy maybe will improve. And that remains to be seen whether he'll succeed there.

To a great extent, it was a vote against Rafsanjani because Rafsanjani had the reputation of being, you know, kind of the quintessential insider, the guy who had kind of lined his pockets as a result of, you know, exploiting his office. You know, a wealthy cleric, hypocritical, you know, many of the masses who really didn't really care for the people.

So, you know, I would see the Ahmadinejad vote being a reaction against, you know, people holding their nose and voting against Rafsanjani rather than Ahmadinejad. So, you know, again, I think there can be little doubt that support for the regime is a very small part of the total population. But don't underestimate the ability of a minoritarian regime to hang on. We've seen it, you know, many times around the world and in history. The small, determined minority that really, you know, is able to -- has cohesion and realizes that their survival hangs in the balance is able to hold on to power for a very long time, unfortunately.

HUNTER: I thank the gentleman.

Well, gentlemen, thank you for really an outstanding briefing to the committee and a great dialogue with the committee. I think all the members were impressed with it and informed by it. And this is obviously the critical issue, I think, on the horizon for us. And we're going to follow-up with classified briefings and lots of sessions and analysis and listen to lots of folks. But you've laid an excellent base for us.

And I just want to let you know that you've added value to this discussion and to our understanding. And it's good for this country that we've got folks like you that have a chance to sit back and reflect and think and present these ideas because that helps us enormously when we try to translate all of the facts about a situation as complex as this into a coherent policy. We appreciate you.

And you may be called on in the near future to elaborate. But you've got a lot of members thinking. And you've, I think, done a good job in helping us direct our focus toward this important issue. Thanks a lot. And the hearing is adjourned.