Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council who has long advocated engaging Iran, notes that President Nixon opened relations with China under Mao Zedong, who is held responsible for more peacetime deaths of his own people than Hitler in Germany and Stalin in the Soviet Union.
"Foreign policy is not about making you feel good," he says. "It's about serving interests." Original article
This week, Barack Obama's Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell met in New York with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to begin discussing a potential "compromise" regarding the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. Israel's continued settlement expansion has been at the top of America's Middle East agenda since Obama's Cairo speech in June, when he declared that "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."
Although bloody images continue to be replayed on American
television, the protests that broke out in Tehran following Iran's
presidential election on June 12 are, predictably, dwindling. They are
fading because further demonstrations would no longer be about alleged
election irregularities but, rather, would be a challenge to the
Islamic Republic itself --something only a small minority of the
initial protesters support.
Flynt Leverett, a senior CIA analyst for eight years, and his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, a former US National Security Council official who participated in closed-door negotiations with Iran, both threw their weight behind the poll and made some ...
Despite strong warnings from Iran's Revolutionary Guard that
protests would not be tolerated, a thousand protestors gathered in central Tehran today to
rally against purported voter fraud.
On June 22, 2009 Ken Ballen, Steve Clemons, Flynt Leverett, Afshin Molavi, and Nader Mousavizadeh came together with Nicholas Schmidle at the New America Foundation to share their varied views on the current events in Iran, and how they will impact future U.S. policy toward Iran. This discussion among some of the world’s most prominent experts on the region ranged from how to interpret the riots in the streets of Tehran to the forceful debates that continue in the… more
Flynt Leverett comments on the results of the recent Iranian presidential election and discusses the current political landscape in Iran. Link to video
Flynt Leverett from the think tank New America Foundation, who is considered one of the foremost Iran experts in Washington, told SPIEGEL ONLINE immediately after the election that support for Ahmadinejad's main challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi had been ...
"You could get more of an impression of a horse race in Tehran," said Flynt Leverett of the New America Foundation, who said Ahmadinejad is a "really good campaigner" who blunted Mousavi's momentum in their final debate. "There are suspicious elements ...
