[KEITH] OLBERMANN [HOST]: For more on what the president said about Iran particularly in Wednesday`s speech, and what he may have really meant, let us turn now to former CIA and Bush administration National Security Counsel senior official, Flynt Leverett. Thank you for your time tonight, sir.

FLYNT LEVERETT, FORMER BUSH NSC OFFICIAL: Thanks for having me.

OLBERMANN: Are we to conclude from the president`s speech Wednesday evening that the real escalation of this war may not be troop deployment in Iraq, but a wider conflict involving Iran?

LEVERETT: Certainly the president is laying both the rhetorical conditions and the operational conditions that would enable him in coming months to take military action against Iran, and I think, frankly, those were the most important parts of the speech on Wednesday night.

Rhetorically, he said that Iran is providing material support to attacks on U.S. forces. That is a casus belli. And, of course, he outlined a series of operational steps that really, in many ways, can only, or primarily, be justified or explained with reference to Iran.

OLBERMANN: There has been much use in the last 48 hours of the term "regional conflict." There was a senior Pentagon official who told NBC News that the U.S. military has changed its perspective about the war in Iraq, now looking at it as a, quote, "regional conflict with Baghdad as the center of gravity."
How significant is the terminology in this? This is -- this indicate an actual procedural shift, a policy shift, or just somebody coming up with some new terms?

LEVERETT: I -- well, it is new terminology. But I think it does have some real significance. The way that the president and his administration have presented what we`re doing in Iraq to the American people and to the rest of the world is that we are helping Iraqis create the conditions necessary for a stable and democratic future.

What we`re saying now is, rather than our efforts failing, what we`re saying is that it is other actors in the region, primarily Iran, perhaps to a lesser extent Syria, who are keeping that project from succeeding. And so the nature of the project is changing from helping Iraqis make their own future, to stopping these bad actors from contributing to the failure of the American project in Iraq.

OLBERMANN: For literally years, anybody who`d written that we would wind up someday in Iran -- Sy Hersh comes to mind, or just blogged about it -- was dismissed as an alarmist or something worse. Now, whatever it means, it`s been in a presidential speech. Has a showdown with Iran been part of the plan all along? Or was this something improvised lately as part of some last-chance strategy at the White House?

LEVERETT: I think it`s somewhere in between. Certainly there are powerful actors in the administration, such as the vice president, who have all along believed that Iran should be a major target in the war on terror, and that we were going to have to take on Iran at some point.

I think the president has been very, very reluctant, resistant, to doing anything by way of serious diplomacy with Iran because he thinks this regime is fundamentally illegitimate. But I think now the fact that his Iraq policy is failing, and the efforts that the U.S. has been pursuing through the Security Council to limit Iran`s nuclear development, those are also, I think, collapsing around them.

And I think that the president is now finding the idea of military force against Iran more and more attractive, as both his Iraq policy and his Iran policy are failing. And he himself doesn`t want to pursue serious diplomacy with Iran...

For the complete transcript, please visit the MSNBC website.