President Obama’s choice to succeed Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary said he lacked knowledge about Iran the same month he approved of a hawkish report on the country’s nuclear program.
Ashton Carter made the remarks in September 2008 while speaking on a panel at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. At the time, he was co-director for Harvard University’s Preventative Defense Project, and a member of a Bipartisan Policy Center task force on “US policy toward Iranian Nuclear Development.”
“I don’t tend to know much about Iran,” he said at the event, in reference to a point brought up about diplomatic engagement. “I don’t know that any of us knows. But that’s going to be something that will be learned if we embark on your path of interacting more with Iran. We will learn more than we now know and we’ll be able to make a better assessment a year from now than we can now.”
Despite expressing doubt, Carter was among other future Obama administration staffers that signed off on the controversial BPC report published the same month. The task force featured prominent Bush administration officials. It was led by Michael Makovsky, an aide to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “on Iraqi and Middle Eastern energy policy.” Michael Rubin, a Rumsfeld Pentagon advisor on Iran and Iraq served as consultant to the task force.
Like the Rumsfeld Pentagon, the panel took an extreme right-wing approach to analyzing evidence and formulating policy. The Institute for Policy Studies pointed out that the committee’s findings about Tehran’s alleged determination to develop nuclear weapons “contrasted sharply with the CIA’s November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.” Nonetheless, the panel said that even a peaceful uranium enrichment program in Iran could threaten the region due to the “Islamist Republic’s extremist ideology.” Panel members called on the next president to increase the US military presence in the region. It also said that the next administration should make bilateral nuclear agreements with Russia retroactively contingent on Moscow ceasing certain types of cooperation with Tehran, and said that any talks without preconditions should involve a deadline and goals subject to airstrikes in the event of non-compliance. The operations, the BPC said, would “have to target not only Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but also its conventional military infrastructure in order to suppress an Iranian response.”
“When confronted with the possibility that the Islamic Republic may transition into a nuclear weapons state,” the report said, “the next Administration might feel that the risks of a military strike are outweighed by the transformative dangers of living with a nuclear-armed Iran.”
Highlighting the task force’s popularity among hawks, Sen. Dan Coates (R-Ind.) on Thursday praised both Coates’ nomination and the pair’s collaboration “in co-authoring” the BPC report, while blasting President Obama for “pursuing negotiations that confirm our weakness.”
Jim Lobe, the Washington bureau chief of Inter Press Service, called the report “a roadmap to war.”
When asked for comment, the Department of Defense referred The Sentinel to the White House. The White House did not respond to The Sentinel’s inquiry before publication.
You can watch Carter’s comments below, via C-SPAN:
