Secure Freedom Radio is with Amb. Eric Edelman

Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and the former U.S. Ambassador to both Turkey and Finland is one of the very special guests today on Secure Freedom Radio. Amb. Edelman’s years of experience in government as well as his expertise garnered from his work at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, couldn’t be more timely. Here is Amb. Edelman on Iran and the “ObamaBomb”. Click here for the audio version.

FG: Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio, this is your host Frank Gaffney, for what I think is an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. A major front in that war at the moment is what I like to call the Obama Bomb Deal. The effort by the president he tells us to prevent Iran from getting the bomb, but an awful lot of folks myself included think it will have the exact opposite effect. One of those who has been quite vocal in his criticism as well as quite thoughtful is our first guest. He is former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Eric Edelman. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to Finland and Turkey. Today he is a distinguished Fellow at the Center for Security and Budgetary Assessments. Also, teaches at my alma mater, John Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies. Mr. Ambassador welcome back to Secure Freedom Radio, great to have you with us. I would like to get your overview on the deal. You have been testifying, you have been writing, you have been commenting elsewhere in the public domain, but give us in the shortest of short terms what you major critique is of President Obama’s deal with Iran.

EE: Frank I think this unfortunately has conceded to the Iranians an enrichment capacity that is way too large. It has sunset provisions for various limitations that have been negotiated on the Iranian nuclear program that are way too short. It’s got a verification regime, which is at best leaky. It has enforcement mechanisms, which won’t have much effect on Iran. Overall I think it leaves us with Iran that is a nuclear threshold state, and I fear that will spark a competition in the Middle East for nuclear latency that puts us on the road to the kind of proliferated region many of us have been afraid of for some years.

FG: A nuclear threshold state is a fancy term for saying as I understand it, a nation that has the option to become a nation capable of having a nuclear weapons enterprise essentially at will. Are you persuaded that is something the Iranians not today or not going to become in short order under this deal, not just at the end of ten years but in the very near term?

EE: And not withstanding the incredible servitude that the president and some of his supporters project about what we know about Iran and its nuclear program, I in my time in government and certainly since have been impressed by how little we know, and how bad our track record is from the point of view on intelligence with regard to other nation’s nuclear programs. We are consistently surprised by the scale and scope of these programs, how far they have advanced, and the ability of countries to set up nuclear tests. I think it is an open question, we known something about the program but there is lots we don’t know, and I don’t think anyone can rule out given how much progress we have seen Iran make in their overt activities, that is to say those activities monitored by the IAEA. There is also the potential they have covert activities we know nothing about.

FG: I am really convinced that is the case, not withstanding John Kerry’s announcement that we know everything about the Iranian program. Ambassador Edelman let me ask you about some other projections of confidence of this administration. The world supports this deal other than Israel and similarly all the experts agree about it. In your experience and it is extensive in government at the highest levels of course in your capacity as a close observer of these scenes from the Center for Security and Budgetary Assessments. Are either of those representations accurate?

EE: Well look, the United States is the most important state in the international system, and when an administration makes an effort to get international support, it will get it no matter how grudgingly. Look there is some support around the world for it, but I think the administration has grossly overstated it. Israel there is bipartisan or across the board opposition to the deal, but among our punitive allies there is a great anxiety about the deal. You can see it in Egypt, certainly the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf States there is enormous anxiety about this. There is lip service being paid to support the deal but for Congress to reject it, it would be met with glee in the chanceries of most in the Middle East. As for our European allies some of them are quite supportive of this in part because they don’t see any alternative and the administration has created a reality in which all the alternatives are bad.

FG: Right, and as to experts, obviously you are among those experts that disagree. There seem to be quite a number of them in my canvasing on our broadcasting, why would the president insist that is not so?

EE: Well I think that is just politics. There are a certain number of people who make up the Arms Control Industrial Complex, and they would support any arms control agreement no matter what its deficiencies. The really telling thing is how many of them have been on the record remnants of the deal over the past several years that are x and y, yet we still support this deal when it does not manifestly meet those criteria.

FG: It raises a question to their ulterior motive here. It seems to me it is rather disarming the United States rather than any of its adversaries. Your absolutely right when the obvious knock off effect of this deal whether it is in Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or perhaps Turkey, in which you have served Mr. Ambassador, perhaps beyond is going to be a proliferation of nuclear weapons. It seems their support is misplaced to say the least. Let me ask you about one other aspect of the president politicizing this deal and that is to isolate Israel and to impugn personally or through his surrogates people with duel loyalties, particularly Jewish folks who are critical of it. Could you speak to what is going on there and what the implications might be for U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond going forward.

EE: This is one of the most repugnant and disreputable aspects of what the president and his allies are doing. There is clearly an effort to buy innuendo and insinuation suggesting anyone who is a critic of this deal is either doing it for a political reason as they have alleged in the case of Senator Schumer, or are doing it because they are put of some nefarious unnamed lobby and we all I think know what that means, or because they have misplaced loyalty to another country i.e. Israel. This is really scurrilous and totally unfair. I mean I have my differences with Senator Schumer on many political issues, but I thought his statement was a model of carefully weighing the pluses and minuses of this agreement and for someone who is the putative leader to be the presumed leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate after January. This could not have been an easy thing for Senator Schumer to do and yet he has been greeted with the sort of violent attacks by leaders of his own party and the White House, it’s really unbelievable.

FG: It is unbelievable, and I am afraid it is going to further aggravate the situation rather than alleviate it. Particularly with respect to one of our most important regional allies as you know so well from your time at the Pentagon. Not least the relationship to Israel and the possibility we have stood on our head and have an alliance for sorts forged with Iran of all places, at the expense of the long relationship we have enjoyed and need to continue to enjoy with Israel. Ambassador Eric Edelman we have to leave it at that. I had hoped to talk to you about Turkey about which you know a great deal and the latest developments on that front. But I hope you will allow us to ask you back in the near future. In the meantime keep up the great work you do at Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and also John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.