'Having Pakistan negotiate was nuts': Ex-CIA chief Leon Panetta on where Trump faltered in Iran war

Former US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has criticised Washington for relying on intermediaries such as Pakistan and Egypt in its efforts to negotiate with Iran. He called the approach "nuts" and said the US should have dealt directly with Tehran.

"My god, to have Pakistan or Egypt or others determining how we were going to try to resolve some of these issues was nuts," Panetta said in a conversation with Seth G Jones, the president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"You don't do that. You have to sit down. You've got to look at your opponents in the eye and determine the terms of a negotiation," he said.

Pakistan has been mediating between Iran and the US to end the war. An MoU was signed in June, but it collapsed after Tehran struck ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Islamabad is once again engaged in talks with Iranian leaders over a possible deal to reopen the waterway.

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'THE WAR HAS NOT GONE WELL'

When asked about his overall assessment of the war, Panetta said the US campaign against Iran had failed to achieve its main objective.

"I think without question that the war has not gone well," he said, blaming what he described as a series of "bad judgments" by the Trump administration.

The former secretary said the US decision to join Israel in the hope that eliminating Iran's leadership would quickly bring down the regime was flawed. He said US intelligence had already made clear that such an outcome was "farcical".

The Trump administration also should not have been surprised by Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Panetta said. "When I was Secretary of Defense, we spent a lot of time planning for eventualities of one kind or another...It (Hormuz) was absolutely at the center."

Panetta served as CIA director from 2009 to 2011 and US defence secretary from 2011 to 2013.

The veteran security leader said the US had military plans to keep Hormuz open, but they would require naval forces as well as troops on the ground.

He said the US would need to control an area stretching about 50 miles on each side of the strait and about 100 miles inland. Such an operation would involve risks and possible casualties.

But keeping the waterway open would have reduced Iran's leverage, Panetta argued. "Once Iran felt it had the leverage of closing the Strait of Hormuz, they had the leverage to impact on the US economy, to impact on our fuel supply."

The former defence secretary said the US should have worked with its allies to secure the waterway.

He also criticised the MoU, saying it was vague, difficult to enforce, and created a framework that ultimately collapsed. "You couldn't enforce it. It was vague on some terms. It was not clear," he said.

Panetta said any military action should have a clear objective, strategy, and endgame. "The key, as you know, is that if you're going to use your military capabilities, you need to have a clear objective. You need to have a strategy to achieve that objective, and you need to have an endgame," he said.

He argued that reopening Hormuz could have given Washington greater leverage and allowed it to focus again on the nuclear issue. "The objective of opening the straits of Hormuz would have been a clear objective," Panetta said. "It would have been critical to our ability to have leverage on Iran by virtue of keeping that (Hormuz) open."