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Ex-CIA Director: Iran looking to outlast Donald Trump

The Jerusalem Post:  Outlasting the Trump administration is Iran's strategy for overcoming the ongoing standoff over its nuclear program, former CIA director Michael Hayden told The Jerusalem Post in an interview.

“The Iranians are well-served by what they are doing now – steady as you go. You got MBS [Mohammed Bin Salman] doing everything they need him to do to distract, divert and divide. The US is pulling back from support for the war in Yemen. The Europeans are still unhappy with America for leaving the [2015 Iran nuclear] deal,” Hayden told The Post late Monday.

He added that “America is giving concessions to eight countries” from its secondary sanctions “to allow them more time to replace Iranian oil.”

To avoid the current situation in which “Iran is well-served [in] that it is not portrayed as the troublemaker,” Hayden would not have “ripped up the deal” as Trump did – though he also viewed the deal as having significant holes.

Overall though, he summed up that: “We are two years away from a presidential election… Iran can hold out until 2020 to see what happens.”

Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, was head of the NSA (National Security Agency) and then director of the CIA up until 2009.

Many experts on the Islamic Republic have said that even though Tehran is hurting badly, with the continued support that Iran has from Asian countries, the regime can survive the increased pressure.

In that light, Hayden was asked whether he believed that Iran would stay in the deal and endure the economic pain for an additional two years without direct retaliation or whether it might lose patience and start moving again more directly toward a nuclear weapon.

He said, “the real answer is I don’t know. There are a lot of variables. In the immediate future, they are advantaged by looking like the victim and not giving the US or Europe an excuse to pull away from issues which are already dividing us.”

Does that mean that he believes that Tehran’s end-game is to patiently leverage its image as “the victim” since the US left the deal, in order to make its move toward the nuclear threshold having nearly full global legitimacy around the end of the deal in 2025? He said that the West will actually be less cornered at that point.

Nearer to the end of the deal, “we will pick up cards to play. We will have some advantages because there are genuine shared concerns” from Europe and globally about “what happens as the deal expires.”

But then he brought the discussion back to the present standoff. “How hard and how long will it be for us to sustain these sanctions" without Iran more overtly violating the nuclear deal in a way that would get global public opinion to fully support a US sanctions push? Again, he returned to his argument that, “we destabilized an equilibrium” that “people like me” and former top Mossad and other Israeli defense officials believed should have been kept in place despite its imperfections.

Hayden next switched gears to the conflict between Israel and Iran in Syria, including Israeli criticism that the Trump administration has not sufficiently defended Jerusalem’s interests there.

Reviewing the issue, he said, “I am not in the government. I don’t get the detailed briefing. But in broad strokes, I don’t understand why we take apart relations” with allies over the nuclear deal while our “American intelligence guys are telling the government that Iran is not cheating.”

Being in the nuclear deal meant we “knew more about Iran’s program than we would otherwise know…To rip that up at the same time as seeming indifferent to Iranian expansion of the Shia arch in Syria” was bewildering to Hayden >>>